WHILE MARI HAS BEEN WORKING at Sivakami’s house and still living at her mother’s, she has passed her fourteenth, then fifteenth, then sixteenth birthday, but she has not yet gotten her period. It does happen, sometimes, everyone knows of such cases. It doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with her, but Muchami’s mother has spent these years glaring at her brother and sister-in-law and making comments: She should have had several grandsons from her son by now. Maybe there’s something really wrong with the girl. Maybe her brother has known all along. She might be within her rights to demand another dowry.
But neither Mari nor Muchami has shown any impatience or desire for the situation to alter. Mari works right alongside her husband at times, serves his meals, hears his problems and goes home each evening to her own mother’s house.
“How can Mari not be frustrated?” Angamma frequently demands of him. He shrugs and sucks his teeth; she jabs her hand at him. “How can you not be frustrated?”
Finally, when Mari is well past her seventeenth birthday, the miracle occurs. All are surprised, though her parents would never admit that. She’s been obediently taking herbal doses and douches for years. They throw a big celebration. Mari herself insists on staying away not only from the temple, but, Brahminically, from all of the guests. Her family finds these pretensions insufferable. But that’s Angamma’s problem now!
No one has worries like Muchami, though. For most young men, a bride’s coming of age announces imminent delights. For Muchami, it represents terror sheer as a veil or a cliff. Most young men would be thrilled to receive a wife after so long, even a thin one like Mari. Muchami gets tenser and tenser.
On the day of Mari’s procession from the house of her childhood to the new phase of her life, Muchami disappears again. No one is alarmed, really. All understand this cannot be easy for him, so let him live out his fears alone for a day. Though it would be nice for him to welcome his bride, he has to come home at some point and needn’t be present for the ceremonies.
Just as the procession is concluding in a great swirling of vermilion water and tossing of flowers, a naked panic of five young boys come running from the eucalyptus woods, shouting and crying, “Muchami! Muchami!” Out of deference to Muchami’s mother and his uncles, no one answers them. They yank the adults’ arms, wailing, “Muchami! Muchami!” and are ignored, until one child’s mother notices her son’s hair is wet. She clamps his shoulder, shakes him and yells, “You’ve been swimming, haven’t you? Huh?” He puts his thumb in his mouth and refuses to look at her, but the other boys are still weeping and shouting. Muchami’s youngest uncle has a dreadful premonition. He tears away from the crowd and runs toward the river. One by one, the uncles are swept by dread and peel from the crowd, running.
Angamma stops swirling the arathi and watches them go. The lip of the brass plate droops until she looks down and sees the vermilion water has all spilled and is running along the ground toward the river. She cries out and drops to her knees, but the water has soaked into the earth. She wipes her hands across the red-veined dust and whimpers. She hurries after her brothers.
The youngest uncle wades out into the Kaveri. Muchami, whose body moves like a river weed in the current, is anchored by an arm stuck in a crevice of rock creeping out from the opposite bank. Red radiates from his head in a pump and slap that could be caused by the water or his heart. His eyelids are purple and swollen shut.
The uncle is up to his shoulders in the deadly water, unconscious of risk, when an undertow sweeps him down and away. He fights, as he did as a boy, when the river was forbidden to him as it is to his sons now. He wrestles the river and finds the opposite bank. His brothers, one by one, do the same, except the eldest, who runs puffing to the bridge and crosses there. He arrives as his brothers are climbing out upon the stones, their hearts in their mouths. They free their nephew from the clutch of rocks, lift him from his pale ruby halo, press him to their chests and lay him on the riverbank.
But he is breathing. He coughs and some water runs from his nose and mouth. They start to laugh, in small, tense bursts, like eager dogs, barking and panting. How can this be? Muchami is unconscious, bruised and badly cut, but he is alive. The five little boys had swum the river and now climb the bank to stand beside the uncles. The eldest asks them, “What did you see?”
“He came around the bend-”
“He wasn’t moving. His face was in the water.”
“Suddenly there was a big swell-”
“Like a big wave-”
“It pushed him at the rocks-”
“It hit his head and flipped him over-”
“And then we saw his face!”
“It was Muchami Ayya!”
“And then we came running-”
“We ran! We were scared!”
The uncles, too, are still scared, since Muchami, though he is breathing, has not yet opened his eyes.
Angamma arrives, out of breath, and wails, “Does he live?” She is so relieved at the answer that she attacks him and must be pulled off, berating her unconscious son for all his rebellion, all his life. “When you were small, I forbade you to go to the river, but you defied me, you went, and went, until you became an expert swimmer, don’t deny it, I know, the proof was when you rescued Gopi Ayya’s daughter. So what’s the meaning of this? You went to take your bath this morning and forgot to stand up?”
The uncles carry Muchami to his mother’s hut, as she trots alongside, still lecturing him. They lay him down in his mother’s hut, and as Angamma argues with her brothers about whom to call to treat her son, Muchami’s eyes open to bright slits. His bride catches his glance, but he closes his eyes again. She thinks no one else has noticed, and this is proven correct when one self-appointed healer pushes through the crowd, flips Muchami over and begins pounding on his back. Muchami recovers quickly enough to escape much bruising.
Only a few days behind schedule, Muchami and Mari are installed in their hut, adjacent to his mother’s. They make their first physical acquaintance as patient and nurse.
One afternoon, while Angamma naps in her own hut, Mari speaks up. “Do you know I don’t care if I have children? Of the womb, I mean. I want you to know. Your sisters are having plenty, we can adopt one of theirs.”
Muchami laces his arms into a pillow and regards her calmly. He hasn’t gone to the fields in days; Sivakami forbade it. Nothing is expected of him as long as he is infirm. He has never taken his ease like this. Mari has just made it easier.
Beyond their thick mud walls, a chanted chorus arises, an obscene ditty with the names “Muchami” and “Mari” filling in the blanks, childish voices that then disperse in foot patter and laughter amazed at its own audacity.
“How can you not want children?” Muchami inquires wryly and Mari laughs, covering her mouth.
“I want respect. I want my husband to be clean and not shame me and not drink. My father is a good man, but I could not cope with the drinking.”
“I don’t drink.”
“I know.”
Another burst of children’s laughter comes through the window on a heat wave, from far away. Muchami knows he should be silent and grateful and never mention the subject again, but something in Mari’s manner makes him persist.
“Doesn’t everyone want children?”
“I am a religious person, I don’t fight fate. God has reasons. If I am meant not to bear children, I can be content with this.”
For the first time since his mishap, Muchami attempts to rise, but the room tilts and he wobbles down onto his knees before his wife. He casts his eyes down. “I am thankful.”
She nods.