‘Came home to die, didn’t I tell you that. You never reply to any of my letters.’
She said nothing but took him into the large dark rooms of their ancient home. The taravat, as his mother called it, always reminded him of the long Biblical genealogies his father had made him read by candlelight. How tedious it had seemed, this preoccupation with ancestry, with sonhood, with naming. He was glad he had no property to congeal in inheritance, no child to take over the preoccupation of being an ‘old line’. Under this roof Ivan begat Yohan and Yohan begat John, and John begat Yohan and Yohan begat Yohanan, century after century with deliberate certainty. He thought of his sister, and the silence that followed her birth. At that very moment, when no bells clanged, and no sweets were made with jaggery and rice, he had resolved to end this torment of patrilineality once and for all. He would not marry.
At work his friends used to ask him, ‘How can you have such a name, “Ivan”?’
‘Ivan is my father’s name, Malayalam for John – may be Syrian, or Greek, who knows? – our ancestors were baptised by St Thomas, the disciple of Christ, and so we have the names of Jesus’ friends and followers.’
‘What is the unpronounceable name you hide in the initial V?’
He would say, ‘Vazhayil – the name of our house,’ and his terseness always surprised them.
He never wanted to share Vazhayil with anyone. The dark cool interiors filled often enough the labyrinths of his own memory. He remembered, too, with a certain detachment his father’s hands with their three fingers missing – chopped off by a neighbour’s kitchen knife in a mango orchard. The neighbour was his father’s brother’s son, Thoma. They still talked to one another, now that his father was dead, and curiously Ivan bore no grudge.
He put his bags on the bed, and listened for a moment to the creaking – a circular creaking – and asked what it was.
‘It’s the fan,’ said his sister from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you remember? Father had it put in in 1937.’
He looked up and saw it dangerously veering in a circular motion. Its flat blades were painted cream and black wires threaded across a wooden ceiling. A naked light bulb hung dangerously close, swinging in vicarious motion. Outside the crows were calling out near the kitchen. It was still morning.
‘How was the journey?’
‘It was hot, but it rained once. I couldn’t eat anything.’
At the table, as she put out the food for him, he looked at her closely. Her face was deeply lined, and on her hands the veins stood out, deep and thick and blue, like the outlines of bare trees. She poured out his tea. Why was it so thick, he wondered, like some viscous soup.
‘I made it just the way you like it,’ she said, stirring the tea leaves continuously.
He did not reply.
‘It’s Lent, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at what she had cooked, for there was no meat or fish.
‘For me, it’s always Lent.’
‘Oh God, no.’
‘I’ll cook for you if you like, but you will have to pay. You know my finances, I can hardly manage.’
‘Is that why you don’t eat, then?’
‘No, I like to keep the fasts. Now for me, every day is holy and every day I take the Eucharist.’
‘You must be the only one in the village then.’
‘The churches are always crowded. You left the faith. Joined the Communists? Father said you even had a membership card. Here things are the same. It’s you who changed … Eat now, I will ask Pappenchettan to buy fish from tomorrow.’
‘I can’t eat much, but it’s something I remember of our childhood. With tamarind?’
‘Yes.’
He slept the whole afternoon, and is body rested against the golden reed mat preserved from his mother’s time. The edges were frayed, but the softness was wonderful. He felt as if he were sleeping on fresh-smelling hay, and when he awoke it was dark and raining outside. Annama had lit the lamps, for the lights had gone, snapped by the storm. The fat brown beetles he remembered from his childhood were buzzing around the flames.
He went out onto the porch. His feet were bare and he could feel the gravel brought in from some ancient riverbed. Each stone was small and round, smooth, and yet harsh at the same time under his feet.
He walked down to the canal where the tributaries of rivers moved around the town like silver coiled snakes.
The lights of the street shone on the water and he stopped to light a beedi.
‘Ah! Ivan, is it you?’ It was his cousin.
‘Yes, I came this morning. How is Eliyamma?’
‘In good health. Let us walk together. I heard you were sick. Cancer. Is it true? You look much the same.’
‘Three months, they said.’
‘Well, we all have to go. When they put the earth on you, how will you care?’
‘Is there any room in the cemetery? I heard you could not buy land anymore.’
‘Oh, be buried with your father.’
‘No, we never got on. You know I hated him.’
‘That’s why you still talk to me. Those three fingers I took off him. I still dream about it. They lay in the corner of the field for quite some time. And it was all about a square of land smaller than a kerchief.’
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘Will I see you in church tomorrow?’
‘No, I hate the old priest. Why can’t he throw off his long beard, those black robes. Is he closer to Christ because of them?’
‘Still the same Ivan. Drink from the holy cup. Your disease will go.’
‘My father drank from it every Sunday and his fingers never grew.’
‘All right then. Tell Annama that I will send the man to fell the coconuts tomorrow.’
Ivan watched Thomas as he moved away into the darkness of the narrow lane. He was still burly at sixty-five, his legs showed the clear blue network of veins as he strode with his mundu hitched above his knees. His teeth, though betel-stained, were strong. There was something coarse about him, a little brutal, and yet his features, typical of all of them – hooked nose and broad brow – still had the old grace. Thoma had wanted to marry Ivan’s sister, but the old man their father, had thrashed him with a walking stick. Thoma was seventeen years old then – not likely to forget that thrashing.
Annama had told Ivan about it, many years later. She too had not married. Their father had died, and their mother wanted Anna at home with her. Ivan had tried to persuade Anna that she should allow him to arrange a marriage for her – some widower perhaps who would not object to her age. It was then that she told him the story of Father’s anger.
‘He shouted all day and all night. He ate nothing. He flung food off the table. Poured buckets of water on our beds so that we could not sleep. He would say again and again, ‘Filthy, filthy! Seven generations must pass before blood can be shared again. If he looks at you once more. I will finish him.’ I can’t forget Father saying all this. It was a sin to love Thoma. I could not commit it. But I cannot marry anyone, then.’
So the thrashing had taken place, and its retaliation. Annama never spoke to Thoma, but nevertheless he showed his love in many small ways. She never refused him, but it was understood that Jesus would judge them, and the silence between them was understood by their larger family. Ivan was sick of all that.
He would bang his fists on the table and shout.
‘Not Jesus.