Impeded I was not. I washed my feet at the pump before entering the house. Leela emerged from her room, greeting me in a voice gentle as dewfall—“You’ve come?”—and I thought surely she had forgiven me. “Where is Jayan?”
“Coming,” I said, my lips feeling unnaturally thick. “He is coming. Later.”
“You left him?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
She folded her arms. “Now you care what I want?”
I began to protest, but she shushed me and glanced toward my mother’s room. “I need something to drink. Come sit with me.”
I thought she meant to have a cup of warm milk, not my mother’s gooseberry wine. She poured two glasses and placed the bottle on the kitchen table between us. My mother was very proud of her home brews and refused to listen when we begged her to experiment with a milder fruit. One whiff and this one would pucker the whole throat.
Leela seemed to have no qualms. She downed a glass at once and closed her eyes as the wine stole through her like an old song. In this shut-eyed state, chin in her hand, she began to tap a pattern on the surface of the table, and I looked on her as I had never looked before, with an open kind of ardor.
Her eyes met mine; I held her gaze. Who knew gooseberry wine could be the very elixir of audacity? If she wanted to ask me why I was staring so, if she was keen to know the true nature of my deep-down feeling, so be it: I was ready to confess.
“He is planning something, isn’t he?”
Of course I was crestfallen by her question. And surprised too by the ease in her tone, given her earlier hoopla. “He will stop after this one.”
“He will stop when teeth grow out my nose.” She burped impressively and patted her chest. “When are you planning to go?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Why do you think? When Madame comes round again, how will I lie to her without knowing the truth?” Leela sat back, much offended by my hesitation. “Do you think I will blabber to the next fishmonger that comes along?”
“We do not get many fishmongers.”
“You know my meaning.”
“You may blabber to Ma, which would be worse.”
“I did not blabber about your girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend? Which …”
Her mouth went stern. “Never mind which. Do you trust me or not?”
“Yes. No.” At that hour she could have convinced me to eat mulch, such were my powers of reasoning. “We leave Wednesday. Tomorrow. At dawn.”
She poured me more. “You and who else?”
“Fellow named Alias.”
She blinked at the name, three times fast.
“You know him?”
She shook her head.
Leela was keen to know every particular, from where we would enter to what we would eat, which I suspected were merely symptoms of a wife’s busybody curiosity. “You know the dead banyan on the edge of Old Raman’s farm, the one split by lightning? From there we will enter.” Time to time she nodded dimly as if only half attached to my words.
When the bottle was empty, she turned it around in her hands. She murmured something about tiny ships being raised within bottles like this. I was not listening in full. My eyes were on her belly, gently insisting against the front of her nightdress.
“Does it kick?” I asked.
The question took her by surprise. “Just once,” she said softly. “Never since.”
“Give it time.”
She contemplated me with those heart-gripping eyes. For once they were free of reproach, only hopeful, as if my words held the power of premonition.
I should have stopped there. I should not have scooted forward in my seat, should not have asked, “Can I?”
Her brow furrowed. Shame arrived, belated yet crushing. I willed her to raise the bottle and crack me unconscious.
But then she clasped her hands below her belly as if cradling a gift.
Slight as it was, her nod was an invitation.
I sat on the edge of my chair and placed both palms on the firmness of her middle. She held very straight and still and I could feel the boy, I could feel him stirring and turning as if to greet me. Maybe such fetal motions would be deemed medically impossible by higher minds, but what is the language of science where the mysteries of life are concerned? I was captivated by the finger-length boy. I was captivated by his mother too: the smell, the velvet feel of her. So many years of want plus whiskey and wine will make a beast of any man, though I have no excuse for what I did then. There is some I do not remember, but I remember her hair, her smell, something sodden and wild around her neck, and a sourness to her cheek, and though I knew her face, the salty angle of her throat lay bare and new to me. This close, she was nothing like I had imagined and yet perfect. She was everything, everything.
She whispered a few words I did not catch. I withdrew my face mere inches from hers.
“Make him stay,” she said.
I leaned back to look clearly upon her features. Her eyes, so dreamy a moment ago, had turned dark and desperate. I withdrew, but she clutched my arm. “Talk him out of it. You are the only one who can.”
I recoiled from her brittle fingers, sought support from the edge of the table. Her face was a miserable plea. She would do anything. Anything.
I stumbled out into the night. I heaved my innards onto dirt, my stomach in revolt, expelling everything but the memory of her eyes when I backed away, how they turned tired and resigned in the way of old widows.
Soon afterward I surrendered to sleep. I suspect Leela stayed awake for some time. I did not see her remove Samina Madame’s business card, which she had kept in the tin beneath Jayan’s prison letters. I did not hear her pick up the phone with trembling hands, the dial spinning like the cylinder of a gun.
I am sure that Leela wanted only to scare my brother. She did not want her baby to inherit her own sufferings, and there was not a thing between heaven and hell she would not do for its sake. Her actions would cause many to call her a snake and a traitor, but they did not hear what awoke me later in the night, her weeping and weeping without knowing this was only the prologue to her sorrows.
The Elephant
On the boy’s birthday, Old Man bought him a Choco-bar. Mani-Mathai lapped at it so slowly and carefully the ice cream began to melt in sticky ribbons down his wrist. He saved the stick and set it on the ledge above his cot, which had so recently belonged to his uncle.
Aside from this, the day resumed its routine. Feeding, resting, mucking, bathing. With Romeo gone, replaced by one of Parthasarathi’s pappans, the very air seemed to loosen. Why he had left, no one could say, but Old Man noticed that the departure gave way to a fresh affection between Mani-Mathai and the elephant, whose trunk arched in question whenever the boy came near. Once, Old Man watched the boy reach up and place his hand on the side of the elephant’s face, as if in reassurance. From this gesture, Old Man saw there was something Mani-Mathai was not saying, perhaps to do with his uncle’s sudden exit.
§
That afternoon, the wind blew so strong, Mani-Mathai felt he could sit on it and sail away. This remark drew a smile from Old Man, who told him to sail off to the kitchen and get some coconut husks for the bath.
Mani-Mathai was trotting across the yard when Romeo’s voice, sudden as gunshot, stopped him.
Boy!
Mani-Mathai turned slowly, uncertain. His uncle was ambling down the drive, grinning with his too-perfect teeth. A blue plastic bag swung from his hand.
It’s your birthday, isn’t it? Look — I remembered.