Monsoon Summer (27 page)

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CHAPTER 37
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A
nd then my mother arrived. Predictably unpredictable as usual, a day early—blaming a telegram that hadn't arrived—and full of complaints about the appalling service aboard her liner, the
Strathdene.
The food was awful, the staff were rude, her cabin on F deck was next door to a couple who had rowed constantly. She'd hardly slept a wink the whole voyage.

When she showed the bags under her eyes to me, almost as a mark of honor, I thought, Yes . . . yes, once again it all goes wrong for you, and was distressed by my instant meanness.

Her first highly perfumed tentative hug reminded me of a nervous mother burping a new baby, and I can honestly say I felt a big blank nothing.

“Darling, this is perfectly sweet,” she said, when she first stepped into our house.

“We like it a lot. You look well, Mummy,” I said, the safest thing I could say and the most dishonest. She was as carefully dressed as ever: blue silk suit, feathered hat, stockings, even though the heat was 105 degrees, crocodile shoes polished to a high shine, but I was shocked by how much older she looked and somehow shrunken. Her voice was higher than I remembered it too and lighter, as if it was an effort to talk.

I'd looked forward to showing her Raffie, and when he woke, Anto appeared with him tousled and blinking in his arms.

“Your perakutty,” he said. “Mr. Raffael Thekkeden.”

My mother, in the middle of telling me about the horrors of the ship, stopped. “My grandson,” she agreed. She closed her eyes and held Raffie apart from her as if he were a wet cat. Raffie, who was teething, let out a thin wail and flung his arms towards me.

“Oh! oh! oh!” My mother practically threw him back. “I'm no good with babies,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. We exchanged a look. Anto rescued us.

“He's always a crotchety old devil after his sleep.” He took Raff in his arms and gave him one of the smacking kisses on the tummy that made him laugh. “Give him time.”

* * *

Because my mother loathed any kind of muddle, we'd had a major spring clean before she arrived. We'd made an anxious inventory of what Anto called Mummy food: prunes and oatmeal for the digestion, which had Babu, who owned the general store, scratching his head; lemons for the early-morning hot water and lemon juice regime she followed strictly; bread from the roaring oven of the old-fashioned baker up the street who had once supplied the Raj. English breakfast tea from a supplier Amma knew in Fort Cochin.

We'd moved from our bedroom into the guest room so she could have the larger bedroom at the front of the house. It was a lovely room now, whitewashed and spare, with the large carved rosewood bed given to us by Amma and a rosewood easy chair with long arms and dainty mother-of-pearl inlays on the headrest that had been in the shed at Mangalath before Amma had had it cleaned up and recaned.

* * *

She slept for twelve hours on arrival. I crept around the house, relieved already for the break from her, and for the next two or three days, we danced around each other—polite self-conscious strang
ers. We carefully avoided bringing up the rows we'd had about Anto and made no mention of the dead-to-me decree or Daisy or my work at the Moonstone.

In the early mornings I fed and played with Raffie, often taking him to the park, where he could be noisy and not annoy my mother. She got up around eleven and sat looking dazed on the chair facing the window, saying gentle, admiring things about the house, the street, the sky, the trees. As I accepted compliments and made bland conversation back, I thought about those nuns who, at mealtimes, must only talk about birds or trees or flowers, to avoid anything controversial.

During the day, she sipped, very daintily, on a lime juice and soda and ate very little. At nighttime, after I'd bathed Raffie and told him a story, she and I drank weak whisky and soda, or a “gin and it” for her, and waited for Anto to come home. This, normally, was the time of day I most looked forward to with him: catching up on each other's day, hearing the gossip from the hospital, telling him about the Moonstone, and hearing about his research. But on those first nights with my mother, I observed him like a stranger. He always washed when he got home and changed his clothes, and I would look at him, shaved, oiled, handsome in his linen trousers and white shirt. His good looks still had the power to take my breath away, but now it was his kindness I marveled at. He angled his chair towards her, he listened to her with sympathy and respect, as if it were a privilege for him to be talking to her, while she chattered to him gaily, as if she'd never said any of the terrible things she had said about him.

Some nights Kamalam would appear, smiling, proud, to present “the perakutty” for a good-night kiss. Often my mother's glance would flicker over Raffie and she'd carry on talking, and I would feel I hated her.

After such a night, lying in bed in the spare room, Anto repeated his instruction to me. “Give her time. This is very shocking to her,
being back in India again, and don't forget, you're speaking to her from the grave.” He meant it as a joke, but that's how I felt with her—frozen and cold.

My next terror came in the form of an invitation from Amma. She wanted the family to get together for a special celebration lunch to welcome my mother.

When Anto told my mother this, she said, in a small, trapped voice, “How lovely,” and then, turning to me as if he weren't there, complained, “But I'd rather hoped to have a few days to lie low. I've been talking to strangers for weeks.” And again, I felt that prickle of dislike rising like a thorn in me and I wanted it to go away, but I knew it wouldn't, unless we had it out.

Anto, who had taken a week off from work to welcome her, said there was no rush, whenever she felt like it. The man was behaving like a saint, but it wouldn't last: he had his limits too.

On the morning we left for the Mangalath party, Glory, in spite of another twelve-hour sleep, still looked tired and seemed to have shrunk to half her normal size. For the first time I felt truly sorry for her and a little alarmed. Dressed in a new and very smart black-and-white silk polka dot dress and small hat, she winced in the blinding sunlight as she left our house. Her arm felt twig-like and breakable as I helped her into the car, and she sat gasping for a few moments.

I was enough of an Indian wife by now for a ride in a car—loaned to us by Appan for the day's outing—to be something of a treat for me, and I'd grown to love the drive from Fort Cochin to Mangalath: the rowdy markets, the green paddy fields, the huge sky, the sunlit lakes, on which houses and bridges seem to float. But today I felt carsick and tense about the day ahead.

My mother sat in the back with her eyes closed. I sat beside her with Raffie on my knee. Anto broke the silence.

“I don't think you've been to this part of India before, have you, Mother?” She would like him to call her Glory, but he can't. In his
family to call an older person by their Christian name would be unspeakably rude.

“No,” she said, in the echoey voice I recognized as a No Trespassing sign. “Further north.” When Anto's eyes swam into the rearview mirror, I shook my head slightly.

“It's awfully pretty though.” She opened her eyes briefly, the perfect guest again. “Lots of lovely water and birds,” as a line of herons flew in a straggling ribbon across the lake, leaving a ruffle of water behind them. Raffie, who watched everything, let out a shriek but turned back quickly to the pattern on my mother's dress. He moved one podgy finger from dot to dot, examining each forensically as if it were a complicated logarithm he must solve.

“Do you mind that?” I asked.

“No.” She put her hand on his head and let it stay there for a while.

“This must be strange for you, Mummy,” I said.

Less than three miles from the house, I saw her lips moving, her hands grasping the car's leather safety strap.

“It's not very strange,” she said. “I'm fine.” Then in the silence that followed: “I don't want you to worry about me.”

* * *

When Mangalath appeared from the red dust of the road, my mother immediately perked up and became someone sociable and fun. I must say it did look lovely. It had rained briefly on our way over and left big fat diamonds winking on the leaves of the flame of the forest trees that lined the drive. There were glints of silver on the lake beyond.

At the house, Amma stood between the gold lions, waiting to greet us.

“It's so good to finally meet you,” she said, as she took Glory's hand in hers, and added with her sweetest smile, “I can see where your daughter gets her good looks from.”

I saw her cast a shrewd and appraising eye over my mother's clothes and jewelry: that was the way her mind worked, it was the dowry obsession most mothers had here. At the sight of Amma, Raffie let out a longing cry and flung his arms towards her. He buried his face in her shoulder.

“So, what do you think of this rascal?” Amma asked, as we walked towards the house. “Your very first grandchild, Kit tells me.”

“Yes,” my mother agreed, her heels click-clacking on the path, her voice breathless with the effort to keep up. “My first . . . he's awfully sweet.”

Only nine of us for lunch, so Glory would not be swamped, Amma explained as we took our places in the dining room. Appan sat at the head of the table, next to Anto, Mariamma and the rest in their usual places, and there were a couple of elderly aunts whose names I'd forgotten and Ponnamma. I sat next to my mother, who was at her most delightful, exclaiming and smiling at everything. Feeling her sharp bones beside me, I hoped she could cope with all the food, her appetite had been so poor.

In her honor, a magnificent meal was served on very fine bone china plates. The pearly spotted karimeen fish that was a delicacy of the area, a tender mutton stew, soft, fluffy boiled rice with chicken curry, and the usual thoran and sautéed okra, crisp fried pappadams, lime pickle. I'd forgotten to have breakfast and my mouth watered at the sight of it.

Glory had been given a knife and fork, just as I had been given on my first day here. I could feel her stiffen beside me as I ate with my fingers. Below the general bubble of conversation she said, “Don't you find that frightfully messy?”

“I like it now.” I added some buttermilk to the rice, crushed a pappadam into it, and popped it into my mouth to demonstrate how elegantly I could do it, and then I laughed at myself. Do we ever stop showing off to our mothers?

Appan pulled up a chair beside us and peered at Glory through
his glasses. “We're so happy you're here,” he told her with apparent sincerity. “It's like a dream come true.”

She gave an embarrassed laugh. “How very kind,” she said, very much the Colonel's lady as she began to scatter compliments like cake sprinkles.

“Goodness me, Kit was right, so clever,” she murmured in shock when he told her he'd been in Delhi, drafting new government legislation. Appan, an essentially modest man, deflected the compliment.

“It's my son I'm most proud of, working his socks off at the hospital. It's a great joy to have him home again.”

This courtly dance continued for a while: the passing of dishes, the tentative questions, the answers, the knitting together of a holey blanket that must, for now, be my mother's vision of her new family. While my mother charmed Appan, Ponnamma swapped places with Mariamma so she could follow their exchange more easily.

She patted my mother on the arm. “Come on,” she said, “eat up.” She put some of the mutton curry on my mother's plate, spooned a little dhal on the side. “You need feeding up.”

As I watched my mother take a little forkful, I felt a piercing sadness. For the first time I could ever recall, she was the center of attention. And maybe she felt it too, because when Ponnamma suddenly blurted out, “Why did you delay your trip here?” she launched into a surprising story.

“Well.” She pushed her chair back, took a delicate sip of water. “It's rather a wonderful story, actually: I have a great and dear friend in Oxford. Her name is Daisy. She lives in a very grand but rather run-down house—the war, you know—which she is hopeless at doing up, so I help her sometimes.”

That's it, Mother, I thought, still a dab hand at biting the hand that feeds you.

“It's where Anto met Kit,” my mother continued. “Anyway . . .”
She wiped the side of her mouth with the napkin, to make sure no stray piece of spinach thoran interfered with her look. “I must tell you what happened there . . .” The thread of excitement in her voice, the long, deliberately held pause reminded me what a good storyteller she had been when I was little. Every eye at the table was now trained on her. Ponnamma's mouth was agape.

“It was shortly before Christmas, dark that night and very rainy—the kind of rain that seems to be poured in buckets not in drops. I was sitting in the sewing room, helping Daisy fix some new curtains for the main room. I love sewing,”—she flung a smile at a mesmerized Appan—“and I was listening to the rain on the window, and suddenly I dropped a pin, and when I kneeled down to pick it up, I saw, through the floorboards, a light shining up at me. A shaft of light.” Glory sketched it out delicately in the air.

“From the room below?” Appan was applying his legal brain. “Which room?”

“Ah, well, you see, aren't you on the ball? That's the exact point,” said Glory. “There was no room below. Only what we had always assumed was a solid staircase.”

She quelled any more questions with her hand. “I called to Daisy,” Glory continued in the same thrilling voice. “We got a torch. We went downstairs together.”

“Oh my God.” Ponnamma clutched her throat. “You were very brave.”

Glory ignored this. “Downstairs, on the side of this staircase, we found a small door. When we opened it, there was”—her eyes swept the table—“a room in the house that we didn't know existed. A whole new room.”