***
Two years went by where Elisa went from one relationship to the next like she was trying on a pair
of jeans, slipping it on, twirling around and then leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor.
She eventually found one that came close to her idea of perfection – a Rajasthani man called Ajay
Shekhawat. But his family, inclined towards politics, had already arranged his marriage to a girl
that could strengthen their political clout. Afraid that Elisa would end up with a bullet in her head,
Jincy decided to take matters into her own hands. She bought the thirty-one-year-old Elisa a
conservative salwar kameez and took her to Trivandrum.
Chacko was the son of the local district collector Abraham Kurien, and at forty he had never been
married. He was tall, had the ubiquitous moustache that all South Indian men sport as a sign of
virility, a receding hairline and was wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt with blue jeans. He sat next
to his father quietly watching Elisa.
Jincy began, ‘Elisa, you know Chacko’s uncle is a bishop and his grandfather was also a bishop.
Such distinguished people in your family, Mr Kurien.’
Over a meal of appams and some chakkakuru manga curry made with jackfruit seeds, coconut and
mango, Elisa discovered that Mr Kurien was an engaging man.
They sighed about the dwindling Jewish community in Kerala, the handful of Malabari Jews and
even fewer Paradesi Jews that were now left, making the Paradesi the smallest Jewish community
in the world. Mr Kurien regaled them with a ghost story about the Lakkidi gateway haunted by a
tribal leader called Karinthandan who during the Raj helped a British engineer find the shortest
route to Thamarassery and was murdered.
Elisa thought she could live in this large, rambling house with Mr Kurien and his son, on old-time
stories and funny anecdotes. At least here she wouldn’t have to continually bump into her parents
and their reproachful faces. But first she needed to exchange a few words with her prospective
husband who had barely opened his mouth.
‘So, Chacko,’ said Elisa, after Mr Kurien led them to the first-floor study, ‘what do you do?’
Chacko pulled out a joint from the pocket of his jeans and asked her, ‘You smoke ganja?’ When she
nodded tentatively, he lit the joint and offered it to Elisa. After she had a long drag, he said, ‘I
studied management, we bought a seat in some college in America, but I didn’t finish. I watch
television and drink beer.’
Though most women would have jumped out of their chair, screeching, ‘Amma, save me!’ Elisa
who had always looked at her life as if it were an episode of Star Trek – adhering faithfully to its
slogan ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’ – immediately decided to explore this
uncharted, idle planet to a resounding round of applause by her elated parents. It wouldn’t be just
an adventure, she thought to herself, but she’d actually please her parents for the first time in her
adult life.
The weather forecast in Kerala’s leading newspaper, Deepika, stated that it would be a week
filled with clear skies and, unlike the much more widely circulated Indian Express, it was
accurate on both the days Elisa got married.
For the civil ceremony she had picked a white-and-red dress with daffodils and for the church
wedding she wore the same delicate white sari she had for her last wedding as she felt it would be
a waste to buy yet another one.
Elisa stood in front of Father James Chandy at St Rita’s Malankara Church in Trivandrum with
Chacko. Her entire family had gathered to watch her getting married for the fifth time except her
sister, Rahel, who refused to fly down saying, ‘Elisa, if you just want the excitement of jumping
without quite knowing where you are going to land, try skydiving. But I am not interested in
witnessing this holding the nose, ignoring the stinky water and taking a dip, just to see how it
makes you feel. If I were you, I would tell Amma and Achan to call off this farce.’
Elisa lashed out at her sister, ‘And do what? Watch Achan watch me every day, wondering what
he’s supposed to do with me now, when he can pass this ticking time bomb on to some other
unsuspecting Malayali victim? No thanks!’
Two days later, Elisa and Chacko left for their honeymoon in a white Maruti Gypsy with a boot
them from Trivandrum all the way to Cochin.
Elisa drove for the first hour, Chacko looking out of the window, smoking a joint and passing it to
Elisa intermittently. When they switched places, Elisa grabbed a beer and, despite the heavy metal
music playing on the car stereo, soon fell asleep.
Elisa was dreaming, she was in a garden, in the coils of a labyrinth, the green hedge high above
her head. She was leaving a trail of teeth behind her as she walked on. There was a cat somewhere
though she could not see it.
The cat kept mewling and whimpering, her cries ringing in her ears. Elisa frowned, she was half
awake now. Her eyes shut but she could still hear the cat. She opened her eyes. The music was off
and Chacko, tears rolling down his cheeks, was bawling that he wanted to kill himself.
Elisa’s first thought was, ‘Crap! What are the chances of this happening all over again!’ Followed
by, ‘I need to take control of this vehicle before this crazy bugger rams it somewhere.’ Elisa leaned
over, swerved the steering wheel towards the side of the road and made Chacko stop the car.
She tried talking to Chacko but he had withdrawn into silence. He kept snivelling and refused to
speak. She wondered what to do, contemplated heading back but decided that it was a nice road
trip to Brunton Boatyard in Cochin. She might as well see it all now. Everything was booked and
God knows when she would get the chance again.
Hundred and sixty kilometres later they reached Alleppey. Elisa parked the car, picked up their
bags and, followed by a silent Chacko, checked into the houseboat. She lay down on the bed,
looking at the sprawling backwaters from the wooden window as the houseboat cruised along the
narrow canals with paddy fields and coconut groves along the sides. Chacko sat outside, near the
prow of the houseboat, his eyes shut, head drooping to one side, chewing on a piece of stale gum.
She ate rice with spicy prawn curry that burned the back of her throat and made her nose drip but a
silent Chacko refused to eat anything at all. His was not an aggressive silence. He would smile,
nod, and sit by the carrom board in the room fiddling with the wooden playing discs. It seemed to
be a congenial stupor.
The next morning they drove for a couple of hours to stay at a cardamom plantation in Thekkady.
Chacko seemed better. He even drove for an hour or so and they talked – about the best route to
take, the weather, an old aunt who believed in voodoo. Elisa decided to leave yesterday where she
felt it belonged, a hundred kilometres behind her.
The new bride consummated her marriage that night, reluctantly. Chacko reached out to her in the
dark. Though she tried telling him that it wasn’t the right time, making excuses about menstruating,
Chacko went ahead.
Later, lying in the creaky, warm bed, she wondered if he had even noticed the spotless white bed
s
heet that showed up her white lie but Chacko was snoring, sleeping in a fetal position, facing
away from her.
Elisa tried comforting herself with the fact that though the sex had been just about adequate, with a
little tutoring it had the potential to become pretty darn good.
But lying in a strange bed with an even stranger man, the brazen carefreeness that she usually
armed herself with failed her.
In the darkness, she sensed the empty space that lurked inside her, which she kept away with
laughter and company; the vast loneliness that had brought her to this point, where she was now
married to a man whom she not only hardly knew but had no interest in knowing better. Elisa spent
half the night staring at the ceiling fan as it turned round and round endlessly, moving continuously
but not going anywhere.
The drive to Brunton Boatyard was a long one and around midday Chacko started muttering about
meeting angels. This was interspersed with smiles and comments like ‘It’s better not to wake up a
hungry man than not to give him food.’ And ‘Nice line depth!’
Luckily he fell asleep, only to wake up just as they were pulling into the driveway of Brunton
Boatyard. He opened the door of the moving car and rushed inside, babbling feverishly, ‘My angel
is waiting for me!’
Elisa sat in the car debating whether to simply turn the car around and drive all the way back to
Trivandrum, pack her bags and fly back to Bombay. Her reverie was broken when a security guard
and what seemed to be two men from the hotel management frantically requested her to come
inside.
She saw Chacko in the lobby, trying to grab a gym bag that was dangling from the shoulder of an
overweight, red-faced Russian man while hollering, ‘I have found my angel! Come with me!’
Elisa managed to calm Chacko down and bundle him into their room. Back in the lobby, the
Russian asked her, ‘Are you the wife? What is the problem with him?’ As she tried to apologize to
him, Elisa explained, ‘I don’t know anything about him. You see, we have only been married for
five days.’
A few days later Elisa was back at the house that always smelled of meen moilee. Pothen Thomas
opened the door, looked at his daughter, then looked at the three suitcases next to her and called out
to his wife, ‘Jincy, come here! Again she has come back home!’ So Elisa decided to go and live
with Rahel instead.
Elisa was sitting at her desk at the office when she saw Chacko walking in with her father. It had
been two months since she had last seen him. Chacko gave Elisa one of his vacant smiles as he sat
in the reception area, while Pothen pulled his disgruntled daughter into his cabin.
Elisa said, ‘Acha, did you ask him to come here? I don’t want to have anything to do with him. He
is totally mad, you know!’ Pothen Thomas was livid. ‘Always everyone is mad, Elisa, everyone
but you! A woman who does not have a man’s name behind her is the mad one. People will trouble
her non-stop. Deaf and dumb but a man is a man is a man.’
So Elisa was made to leave Rahel’s house and move back into the house with Achan, Amma and
their house guests, Chacko and Mr Kurien.
If Elisa’s parents noticed anything strange about Chacko’s penchant for suddenly saying things like
‘There is a lock on my icebox!’ or staring silently at a dot on the wall for hours on end, they did not
comment.
One evening, over a dinner of – what else? – meen moilee, potatoes, dosas and steamed rice, Mr
Kurien said, ‘Elisa, give Chacko a chance. He has been through a lot. When he was hospitalized
the doctor said that he suffers from a minor mental illness like depression but he got better and they
released him. He is doing well now. His cousin Joseph Idiculas also had some problems like this,
but now he has three children. Elisa, have a child with Chacko and he will become all right, I
guarantee it.’
Elisa glanced at Chacko, who was now smiling softly at the rava dosa on his plate. She looked at
Jincy and Pothen, who were nodding agreeably, and said, ‘Mr Kurien, if you think having sex will
make your son better, then I am happy to arrange dozens of girls for him. But if you tell me to have
intercourse with him and have a baby, then I am not volunteering. I have no desire for my
gravestone to bear an epitaph stating “Here lies buxom Mother Teresa who sacrificed her life by
curing mental disabilities through her vagina.”’
And as Pothen Thomas started thinking about all the paperwork he would have to do all over
again, Chacko looked up from his plate and in a strange moment of perfect lucidity said, ‘Elisa,
you have a kind vagina.’
***
A year later, Elisa sat with Rahel, knitting a white woollen blanket for her newborn niece. Rahel,
who still looked vaguely pregnant, despite the baby being three months old, sat in the rocking chair
putting her baby to sleep.
Pothen Thomas walked briskly into the room, holding a newspaper, and said, ‘Elisa, see this
newspaper! It says that Makhija Builders’ daughter, she is a Manglik. I know this fellow, I have
gone to his office also one or two times. She is having to marry a tree before she is getting married
to some diamond merchant chap.
‘This article tells that according to astrological texts, Mangliks can never have happy marriage till
they perform this tree wedding first, otherwise harm falls on the husband, he goes mental or even
dies. Your horoscope also says that you are a Manglik. I don’t know why we never thought of this,
maybe we should also try. And then after that, get you married to a nice Malayali boy...’
Rahel interrupted her father, ‘Acha, you are already talking about getting her remarried when that
mad Chacko is refusing to sign the divorce papers!’
Pothen ignored his daughter and continued, ‘I know George Mathai is looking for his son. After all,
a man is a man is a man.’
Elisa, looking away from her father, her head towards the window, murmured, ‘Yes Acha, deaf and
dumb, a man is everything, I have heard this before; but the day I want to settle down with a stable,
deeply rooted member of the community, I will marry the tree.’
Later that month, Elisa left her Achan and Amma and the house that always smelled of meen moilee
for the last time. She told Pothen that she knew she could not change her parents or change her own
mindset, so she was going to change the only thing she could, her postal address.
She was going to move to the small house her grandmother had left Rahel and her in their ancestral
home town of Oyoor located on the banks of the Ithikkara river.
Rahel had asked her, ‘Won’t you get lonely there, Eli?’ and she replied, ‘It will be far less lonely
than sharing a name and a bed with yet another stranger. Been there done that, have two marriage
certificates, not just the proverbial T-shirt.’
Elisa paused for a moment and then she said, ‘Achan and Amma have always been so proud of
you, Rahel. “Our daughter is a senior director in the HR department of Microsoft,” they go around
telling everyone. But I am just a thorn in their side, one that pricks them every day when they see
my face; the daughter who can get nothing right including the simple task that even fools seem to
manage perfectly well, marriage.
‘To tell y
ou the truth, I am looking forward to going, I will paint, read, maybe even open a school
for primary students, learn to like myself all over again.’
Looking at her sister getting all teary-eyed, Elisa exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, don’t start crying
now, I am not going away forever, I’ll be back for a visit around Christmas.’
Elisa never reached Oyoor. On National Highway 66, close to Kayamkulam, a truck carrying
timber overturned and crashed into her small Maruti Suzuki.
***
On a postcard-perfect day with clear blue skies, Elisa Thomas was buried in the presence of her
distraught family. Pothen and Jincy had wanted to engrave Elisa’s gravestone with ‘Elisa Thomas:
Beloved daughter, sister and wife.’
But Rahel, half-crazed with grief, had screamed at her father, ‘Elisa would not even have been on
that road if it were not for you. Deaf and dumb but a man is a man is a man is not only the most
idiotic thing I have ever heard, but it is fucking grammatically fucking incorrect!’
The Christian cemetery at Sewri has a simple white arched gate. Tall, wide-branched trees dapple
sunlight over tombstones with marble cherubs and cast their shade over lonely, unmarked graves as
well. Far on the left side, next to a bush filled with tiny blue flowers, lies a simple tombstone with
an epitaph that says: Here lies Elisa, she briefly belonged to many, but truly to herself.
4 The Sanitary Man From a sacred Land
1
On a sweltering afternoon in a small town near Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, Bablu Kewat was
carefully cycling on a bumpy road. He took out a checked handkerchief from the breast pocket of
his maroon shirt and was about to wipe his sweaty forehead when he spotted two of his childhood
friends, Naamdev and Hariprasad, standing under the shade of a banyan tree, chewing tobacco.
Bablu raised his arm and called out to them. They looked at him and instead of returning his
greeting began to walk away from him, down the slope towards the paddy field. The smile on
Bablu’s broad face faded. Looking weary, even his thin moustache seeming to droop in
disappointment, he hunched his shoulders and quickly pedalled on.
The dusty road began to narrow. Houses appeared on either side – bright-coloured structures,