Amballore House (5 page)

“Rita here,” she declared.

Rita brought with her boiled tapioca and toddy. This used to make Thoma immensely happy, and he instantly forgot all the bitterness he had against the world. Toddy was his heart and soul, and he used to relish the holy liquid even more than the wine that the Catholic priests in the neighboring Saint Joseph’s Church drank during their Mass.

Thoma was usually so happy after toddy consumption that he would even care to look at his wife! He would be over the moon, desperately convincing himself that he was riding a white horse and not drinking the white liquid.

“Yum, Rita brought tapioca,” Subashini announced.

This was how the bird gave a hint to the humans that she wanted a piece of pie too—boiled tapioca. Rita promptly served boiled tapioca to Subashini and apologized for ignoring her. The parrot loved boiled tapioca.

Rita would often visit her parents during their retirement years. Her conversation with her parents usually led to the topic of her marriage and the promise of a dowry that Thoma made to Tim, her husband. This promise was never fulfilled. Immediately following the marriage, Thoma used to get letters from Rita reminding him of his obligation to fulfill the promise. That promise was as sacrosanct as the wedding vows that she took, she declared. Her letters used to seethe with rage for what was done to a helpless bride.

She accused him of abandoning her at the altar to a strange man (theirs was an arranged marriage, and Tim was practically a
stranger to her on her wedding day) and never looking back. “How could you do this to me?” She demanded an answer from her father in those letters. Toward the end of the letter, she would be crying, as evidenced by the frequent smudges in the ink-written words at the end.

“If you cannot read my letter, it is because my tears smeared my words,” she wrote.

Ann thought those letters were almost poetic and full of passion, and she secured them. She kept them long after they were written and long after the wedding events faded in people’s memories and became just some footnotes in the family’s history. Ann was secretly happy that her daughter never blamed her mother for her tragedies. The mother got reassurance of her innocence through those letters and so was happy to keep them to wash her hands off any sin that she might have committed, just like Pontius Pilate did to clear his name.

Just like clockwork, every time Rita left, Ann confronted her husband and sought an explanation for the promise he made that was never kept. To her surprise, these questions and accusations were met with total silence by Thoma, a man eager to defend anything and everything he did in his life. Was it a silent acknowledgement of his guilt that he did not answer the question? Ann believed so.

Ann remembered that Thoma defended his action of a broken promise once. And just once in his lifetime did he defend his action. He told his wife that Rita did not need a dowry; she was a dowry in herself. Her long, curly, dark hair against a fair skin and almost flawless face made her look like Sheela, the erstwhile heroine of many Malayalam movies.

“Rita herself was the dowry,” Thoma declared. “Tim should consider himself lucky to have got a Malayalee heroine as his wife,” he told Ann. “Pairing up with a real-life heroine like Rita gave Tim reflected glory that placed him on a pedestal similar to that of a matinee idol of the Malayalam movie world. The bondage that tied the pair led Tim to a magical world of stardom that is far
more covetable than a dowry. Not all the gold in Kerala can deliver such a presentable wife. She is more valuable than a dowry of one lakh rupees,” Thoma declared with undisputed finality.

Thoma and Ann were always happy to see Rita. They loved her immensely. Their love for her stemmed out of concern for the lot they pushed her into. They had deep sympathy for her because she was childless. All the rest of their children, ten altogether, were blessed with children, and Thoma felt that God misplayed his hands in the case of Rita by offering her no offspring.

They were aware what merciless future Rita and Tim would be thrown into because of childlessness, the offspring of infertility.

They knew that there would be no torchbearer of their bloodline and of their memories. They knew that there would be no one to remember the couple when they would bid their final farewell to Kerala and this world. They knew that there would be no one to tell their stories to in the long, lazy monsoon evenings soaked by heavy rain.

They knew there would be no songs written about them. They knew their funeral hymn would be forgotten as soon as their dead bodies were commended to six feet of mud and their spirits entrusted to God. They knew there would be no reminiscences about them that future moms would sing as bedtime lullabies to their little babies. They knew there would be no tears shed if anyone would care to recount the sad story of their lives.

They knew that none, including the closest relatives, would visit their tombstones to lay fragrant flowers. They knew that weeds and spider-woven webs would overrun their graves to render the couple invisible to generations to come. They knew that their wedding and death anniversaries would neither be celebrated nor remembered. They knew that their birthdays would remain uncommemorated. They knew that they would fade away from memories forever.

Like a candlestick extinguished and forgotten forever

Like the receding sounds of a trumpet no longer audible

Like a cascade of effervescent waves boisterously joyous in
the mid-sea and yet destined to come to shore to die a silent death

Like a story recited for the last time in a classroom

Like a day that dies in the lap of the night, leaving no trace of sunshine

Like yesterday gone forever, never to come back

Like a movie screened before the last curtain drop in a theater now obscure, abandoned, and forgotten in the canyons of time

Like faded and fallen petals of jasmine that used to instill the still night with their heavenly fragrance, once upon a time.

3
FROM KAREENA, WITH LOVE

Kareena was Thoma’s third child and second daughter. She was born during the glorious days of Thoma’s family history. She was the product of the affluent days of Thoma’s past during the forties. Those were the days when he was able to support his wife and their children. Those were the days when he was proud and strong. Those were the days when he did not have to drag his family through a quagmire of rental houses.

The affluence did not last long, however. Misery followed affluence and seemed to last forever in Thoma’s household, just like seven famine years followed seven affluent years in the Old Testament. The difference here was that just a few years of affluence were followed by an inordinately long period of famine. Poverty and misery were so indispensably linked to the childhood through youth through adult years of Thoma’s children that all they could do was to dream of happiness while other children in the neighborhood were happy, content, loved, and getting on in life.

When Kareena reached the tender age of seven, Thoma lost all his money, property, and power. He no longer owned a home. He was forced to seek a rental to accommodate his family. He sent five of his children, all the way from the third to the seventh to foster care to escape starvation, to ward off being drafted to the underground life of the local Church’s cemetery. By abandoning five of his children, he effectively shifted 50 percent of his responsibility of bringing up his ten children to the world outside his home. He pretty much cast them to wolves, sent them to streets crowded by wandering dogs and meowing cats. Kareena led the pack of the abandoned children.

The only good thing about the foster family run by Catholic nuns was that Kareena could get away from her so-called home in Mannuthy. Kareena bravely told the nuns of the convent that though the foster home was nothing but a piss pot, yet it was far better than her deplorable rental home in Mannuthy.

As for Ann, she tried to convince her children that being thrown to
the wolves was not as bad as living with her and Thoma, with their clockwork regularity of moving from rental to rental like some migratory birds. Ann finally lost count of the rentals Thoma dragged her and her children through. She gave up counting and became a female Buddha getting the ultimate enlightenment of life; that is, Mother Earth was her home, and the big sky above was her roof.

Years later when she turned seventeen, just when she got over the shock of being born, Kareena was happy to get out of Thoma’s family for good. The year was 1967. She got job in the Central Reserve Police of the government of India soon after she finished high school. “I am going to heaven,” Kareena told everyone. She meant that she was going away from hell.

There was celebration in Thoma’s family. It was soon followed by a long train trip to Rajasthan. Everybody in the family even today remembers the name of the train, the platform it took off from in Trichur, and the time of departure. That day was August 15 for Kareena, not literally but symbolically, because she gained independence from her miserable life in Mannuthy, just as India gained independence on that day.

Even though she was freed, she would realize that she was going to be incarcerated in another prison of obligation to support a large family. She was the first in the family who supported them through a salary from a regular job. And that too—a girl supporting a family that hardly did anything to bring her up, a girl who should have saved every rupee she earned to meet her own dowry obligation, a girl and not a boy! Mind you, a girl, not a boy. This was unheard of in those times. When all was said and done, she should be remembered for that supreme sacrifice alone.

It was years later that Josh, her younger brother, would step into the cauldron of despair and save the family from total devastation and obliteration. Josh prevented a total shipwreck by buying a home for the family, the one and the only home that Thoma ever owned after his expulsion from his ancestral home. The new home came with a land of two acres, or two hundred cents. To say that this was a welcome change from the rental house in Mannuthy or the other
rental property prior to that would be a gross understatement. Getting a home of their own was too good to be true; it was a long-cherished dream built over a ladder of time and it was the merciful end to the eternal dragging through rattraps of rentals. It beat the wildest expectations everyone in the family had dreamed up and it became an astonishing reality at last.

It was Josh who brought salvation to the family, rescuing it from claws of death and decay. He brought Thoma, Ann, and their children freedom, peace, and dignity and a place to rest in peace at the end of the day. He extended to his siblings shade while they were simmering in the scorching sun, while they were dying to live. He built a sanctuary for his parents so that they could be alive to provide a home to their own children with a dignity which they never had known before. This welcome change in family’s fortune drove out the gloom of damnation that Thoma’s family was condemned to endure.

Out of the land that Josh bought for the family, a portion would be sold later to raise money to provide education to the younger siblings all the way from the sixth child through the tenth, with the exception of Number-Seven.

Be that as it may, it was Kareena who supported the family in its earlier stages of misery. Then there was George, the eldest son who sacrificed his education to support his siblings. The sacrifices from the three members of the family would be returned with ingratitude of unimaginable proportions. That is a story people in Amballore knew very well.

After her departure from Mannuthy, Kareena sent letters home regularly. In those old days of the sixties, a phone was a luxury that only the very rich could afford. Therefore, letters remained a massively popular way of communication. There was no instant messaging, unlike today. There was no Facebook. The term ‘social media’ was unknown at that time.

Every letter from her was read and savored by her siblings and parents, and every word was analyzed and critiqued. The letter then went from hand to hand, and everyone read it individually once
more. It probably took a week for this process to finish. It was a joyous week of letter reading. When the week was over, Ann quietly smuggled the letter to Bhavani, a good neighbor. Bhavani read the letter as if it was from her own daughter. She never received letter from her relatives and therefore cherished getting a letter even from a stranger.

Thoma and Ann assembled all the children to read the first letter from Kareena. They would do this for every letter that Kareena sent. Reading a letter in Thoma’s household was a memorable ritual. Thoma and Ann used the same reading glasses. They first belonged to Thoma, and as time went on, Ann started using them. Ann wiped the glasses clean and handed them over to her husband. The importance of the occasion built an anticipation that was unbearable.

“My dearest father, mother, brothers, and sisters.” the letter addressed all in the family. The word
dearest
was ubiquitous in letters of those old times and addressed everybody except one’s archenemy.

Thoma repeated this sentence two to three times as a dramatic attempt to captivate the audience. Ann adjusted the flame of the kerosene lamp. It was nighttime.

“It is with indescribable happiness that I am writing this letter. Writing this letter is like talking to each and every one of you. My heart aches when I think of you all and I yearn to be with you in our home, even though it is not much of a home. Isn’t it strange that while living in Mannuthy in our miserable home, I was praying to get out of there, but now that I am far away from there in the desert sands of Rajasthan, I am missing the place? I spend nights with tears washing my eyes and flowing to my pillow, because I am missing you all.”

Ann borrowed Thoma’s reading glasses and read the sentence herself, just to be sure. She resumed rolling the rosary beads that she always held in her hands, even while frying popadam.

“It was with indescribable joy that I boarded the train to take up my job with CRP. Even I myself cannot explain the roaring wildness of
sheer happiness that overpowered every limb of my teenage body when the train left the Trichur station. I remember every one of you was standing on the platform with teary eyes.”