IT IS THE EVE OF VAIRUM and Vani’s trip to Pandiyoor, where Vani will stay a month with her parents. Vairum slips in from work as Vani practises music in their salon. He reclines on a divan and closes his eyes, opening them again as she finishes playing just a few minutes later.
“Oh, my dear, is that all?”
She smiles and nods, flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulders. It was a long piece.
“I must have been later than I thought.” He pats the divan next to him as she rises from the Kashmiri silk rug where the veena rests on two small ringed bolsters. “Come and sit.” She settles herself and he absently strokes a tendril of hair from her forehead. “So tomorrow we go.” He pats his legs. “I’m interested to see how my niece is faring. Your protégée!”
Vani is silent, but she talks only under rare circumstances. When they go in to dinner, she will tell one of her stories, and Vairum will listen as happily as a little boy.
“Poor, motherless, fatherless girl,” he goes on, playing with his wife’s hand. Vani looks at him sharply and his face darkens. “She is fatherless! None of those children has seen my brother-in-law in years. And he never showed them a father’s love,” he says, his mottled face now forming into an expression he recognizes by feel from a time before memory, the look of a child whose father doesn’t see him. Now Vani takes his face in her hands, looking worried, murmuring consolations. “I need a child to raise, my love,” he tells her, in tears.
She wags her head, her forehead to his. She knows this.
“We have so much to give,” he says.
She continues rubbing her forehead against his, an obsessive, desperate gesture, as though trying to graft his dappled skin to hers, cell by burning cell.
“Please, Vani.” He tries to pull away, but she won’t let him. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He succeeds in moving away a little, but she grips his hands and rocks back and forth, moaning quietly. He has seen her get like this, very occasionally, when she feels her own terrific need meet his. Her grief at their son’s death frightened him: for a week, she made this same low keening, a sound he felt he recognized from her music. Although he felt close to madness himself, he knew that losing her would have done him in and found the strength to coax her back, as he has several times since, as he does now.
“It will happen, my love. I know it will still happen.” He puts his shoulders against hers to absorb her motion. “Look at us. God will not deny us.”