loved their ayahs more than their parents and cared nothing about long separations. Overnight, Sebestie blossomed into a surrogate mother, but Thomas was wary of giving her his love. For then she, too, might disappear.
Before school Thomas visited St. Mary's and recited fifty Our-Father-Hail-Marys and did the same on his way back. He was on his knees so often that boggy sacs formed under his kneecaps. Around his neck he fastened with twine the heavy crucifix that had been on her wall, hiding it under his school uniform, where it gouged the skin over his breastbone and the twine cut into his neck. Not having a firstborn or a ram or ewe, he sacrificed his Don Bradman signature cricket bat, smashed it on the washing stone. He fasted till he was dizzy. He cut his forearm with a razor, spilling blood onto the shrine for the Virgin Mary that he built in his room. Sebestie took him to the Mambalam Temple and even to the tiny pavement temple behind their house. If it was up to God, He did not seem to listen.
Meanwhile his father never missed a stop on his circuit: Vellore, Madurai, Tuticorin, and parts in between. When Justifus Stone was home, he barely had time to remove his pith helmet or unpack his bags before he was off again. Justifus called his son the Archbishop of Canterbury, and if these were words of reassurance, they did nothing for Thomas. He spoke to his son as if he were addressing multitudes. At night Thomas could hear his uneven footsteps like those of a giant in a bedroom of Lilliputian dimensions who could not help knocking over furniture. It was a relief when Justifus went out on tour again.
A YEAR PASSED with Thomas living all but parentless in the big house, along with Sebestie, Durai (the cook), the
On Christmas Day, son and backslapping father came together for dinner; his father's clerk, Andrew Fothergill, was their sole guest. “Well, what a feast! Good to have you all. Fine repast, just fine. Eat, do eat”—this when it was just the three of them at the table, with Durai waiting behind the kitchen door. “We can't let them get away with it all. There is money to be made in coir. Rope, you know, or matting. We deserve, we earned it, I'll say, and by golly we are going to have it,” and on he went, barely stopping to swallow, the crumbs spraying from his lips. Fothergill tried valiantly to connect Justifus's thoughts, to give his superior's scattered remarks a spine, a thread of meaning. Justifus began to rub one thigh, then the other, fidgeting, glancing down with irritation as if the dog were underfoot, but of course she never came into the house when Justifus was around. By the time pudding was served the leg rubbing was so furious that Thomas had to ask, Please, sir, what is wrong.
“I have fur on me legs, son. Keeps me from feeling, it does. Ruddy nuisance.” His father struggled to rise, almost upsetting the table in the process. He stumbled out, grabbing sideboard and wall, his feet sticking like magnets to the floor. Thomas remembered Fothergill's look of consolation as the boy saw the guest to the door.
She had circled a splotch on the page and captioned it with “My tears, as I cry for you, my darling boy.” In each letter Hilda told him that he must be brave, and be patient.
TIME FOR THOMAS was no longer divided by days and nights or seasons. Time was a seamless yearning for his mother.
He went through the motions at school. She exhorted him to pray, told him that she prayed every hour and that God listened and prayer never failed. He prayed constantly, convinced that at the very least the prayers kept her alive.
ONE DAY, Thomas woke to find his pillow moist. When Sebestie lit the lamp, there was the mark of the beast: a fine red spray on his pillow, a strangely beautiful pattern. Sebestie wept, but he was overjoyed. He knew this meant he would see his mother again. Why didn't he think of this sooner?
Two barefoot stretcher bearers in crisp white drill met his train in Ooty. They took him directly to Hilda's cottage. He climbed into her narrow cot, into her arms. He was eleven years old. “Your coming is the best and worst present I could ever have,” she said.
Gray and shrunk to her bones, she was a shadow of the mother he once knew. Her playfulness was gone, but then so was the reciprocity it might have found in this gangly son of hers whose eyes were haunted and ringed by worry lines. They sat side by side on the porch of their cottage, their fingers intertwined like dried roots. In the early morning they watched the tea pickers float by on the footpath, their feet hidden in the mist, their lunch pails creaking with every step. During the day only the nurses interrupted their solitude to take their temperatures and to bring tiffin and medications. By dusk, when they saw the tea pickers head home, it was time for sleep.
Since Hilda had no wind, he read to her. She wept with pride at his precocious fluency. The cane-bottomed lounge chairs had large armrests and a writing palette made of the same teak. Here they penned letters to each other, put them into envelopes, and sealed them; after lunch they exchanged envelopes, tore them open, and read their letters. They prayed at least three times a day. In the most bitter cold they remained outside, bundled up.
At first Thomas was light-headed from the altitude. He grew stronger. His cough lessened. But nothing—not fresh air, or milk, meat, or eggs or the tonics that were forced on her—helped Hilda. Her cough was different. It was a honking, bleating sound. He noticed that she had an exquisitely painful swelling at her breastbone, pushing up under her blouse. He was embarrassed to ask about it, and careful not to let his head rest there. Once, when she was undressing, he caught a glimpse. It was as big as a robin's egg but of a darker color. He assumed it was the consumption, the phthisis, the tubercle bacillus, the Koch's agent, TB, the mycobacterium—whatever name it had, it was a treacherous enemy ripening within her.
ONE EVENING as they lay next to each other, their beds pulled together, and as he read to her from the daily worship book, she exclaimed in surprise. He looked back at the sentence to see if he had missed a word. He looked up to see blood staining her white nightgown and spreading out as if she had been shot.
As long as he lived he would remember that in the awful moment when she realized she was dying, and when her eyes sought his, her first thought, her only thought, was about abandoning her son.
For a second Thomas was paralyzed. Then he jumped up and pulled aside the soggy blouse. A red geyser shot up from her chest and arced to the ceiling, then fell to earth. In the next instant it did it again. And again. A pulsing obscene blood fountain, timed to every beat of her heart, kept striking the ceiling, showering him, the bed, and her face with blood, soaking the pages of the open book.
He recoiled from the monstrous sight, this eruption from his mother's chest which painted everything around it red. When it occurred to him to try to staunch it with the bedsheet, the jet was already dropping in height, as if the tank were empty. Hilda lay soaked in her blood, her face white as porcelain and flecked with scarlet. She was gone.
Thomas cradled her soggy head, his tears falling on her face. When Dr. Ross arrived, a white coat thrown over his pajamas, he said to Thomas, “It was inevitable. That aneurysm has been ticking in her chest for over a year. It was just a matter of time.” He reassured Thomas that the blood was not infective—the thought had not crossed the boy's mind.
ALONE, TRULY ALONE, Thomas developed fever, and a cough. He refused to be moved from the cottage to the infirmary; the cottage was the last thing on earth to connect him to his mother. He let them take him for an X- ray. Later he watched Muthukrishnan, the compounder, arrive with a pushcart carrying the bulky pneumothorax apparatus in its polished wooden case. Muthu squatted on the balcony and, after wiping his face with a towel, he
