As Sweet as Honey (6 page)

I wondered if Meterling had even wanted a baby. How would they have traveled? Her belly was growing. Her body began to perceptibly change, and things became heavier. She felt as if water sloshed under her skin. Everything seemed puffy. There was nausea. Some mornings, she heard birds cry out and her eyes began to fill with tears. Her arms trembled. They were the part of her body that hurt the most. Not her legs, not her back, but her arms. So much was held in, held up.

Archer had given up the gin business, but he still held the title of VP of Distribution. As heir, he could not give it up, although in reality a legion of assistant VPs and sub-VPs did most of the work. His family’s company made its fortune on Black Cat O’Malley
gin, named for a real cat back in 1670, when patrons at High Tom Spirits on Holburn Street in London lined up for a shot of medicinal gin. The chief attraction at the pub was a mechanical cat that held a spout from which the publican poured a shot of gin straight into the customer’s mouth. The Forster family’s dram shop grew to a gin palace, and the original, highly guarded recipe stayed the same until Archer’s great-great-grandfather decided to open a distillery in Madhupur. He added cardamom and coriander to ten other still-secret plant oils, as well as asafetida to his gin, calling it Mulligatawny Black Cat. “Add Spice to the Kick!” was the advertising slogan, and the British colonials drank it up to ward off malaria. It was local, it was cheap, and it was British.

There was an old house on a hill station nearby to the distillery where Uncle Archer’s father stayed with his family when he became president of the company. As babies, Uncle Archer and his sister had an ayah, and then they were sent to boarding school in England. Susan loved England, and begged her father to let her stay with relatives in London instead of coming back to Pi. Archer was different. On holidays, he’d return to Pi, getting tanned and following his father to the plant. He was fascinated by the way the stillman, Mr. Peaks, ran the liquor through again and again, until he deemed it perfect. In another room, the rich smell of cardamom and the other plant oils wafted to the ceiling. Archer’s father hired about twenty local people in his plant, and as in the old days, the island workers were overseen by the Anglo-English, except for Mr. Prakash, who kept the books. On his holidays, Archer would often visit the Prakash family at their home, and plump Mrs. Prakash fed him sweets and savories. “Archie,” she would chide, “you’re much too thin. Do they not feed you at that school of yours?” In his hamper back to school, there would be lovingly made chutneys and snacks packed expertly by Mrs. Prakash.

Adolescence found him hiking in the hills, often with just a rucksack and a friend or two. After university, after a brief stretch with the idea of becoming a barrister, he settled into a job at the family business. It was an easy jump to VP—who was there to compete with him? Evenings found him and his father nursing their tonicky gins, as the shouts of night cricket were heard outside their home. Archer’s father was rail thin, and liked to emphasize his points with sharp blows with a cane on any nearby object. The object had often been the back of Archer’s knees for misdemeanors and backtalk. Boarding-school masters were equally fond of the cane, but Archer swore he would never use one on any child of his. What was unnerving to Archer was to imagine his father voicing those same promises when he was a young man.

His father did not die on his beloved island. He died in London, on the floor of a bank, where an epileptic seizure led to his heart stopping altogether. Susan identified the body. Somehow, she blamed the island, even though it was irrational, but when is grief rational?—and at the same time, when is grief ever irrational? Grief for her needed a focus, something to blame. She was twenty-two. When Archer reached her, she was cold, withdrawn, because she knew Archer loved the island. After the funeral, Susan poured herself into her new job in advertising. Archer poured himself a drink.

Was this why he never dated much, in love with the bottle more than with any woman? A cadre of school friends dined with him regularly until one by one, they married. Then he became a guest, the needed fourth in bridge, the possible date for Anne or Lesley. At thirty-five, he went back for Mrs. Prakash’s funeral, and wondered why he ever left Pi. He moved to Madhupur permanently. His father’s house was too empty, so he sold it, and took a small bungalow. Without his drinking
companions, he felt less inclined to drink. Mr. Prakash, eighty, took him along to ayurvedic steams and massage, made him consider yoga. Archer thought about it, but decided he found more pleasure in rasagullas than in chaturanga dandasana, sweets winning easily over yoga postures.

8

M
eterling picked up the phone. It was an old-fashioned one, black, with a heft that, if it was hurled, could hurt someone. The cradle was heavy, too. She put the receiver back. She hesitated but did not pick up the phone again. The slip of paper was in her hand with the cousin’s number written in scrawled letters, haphazardly spaced, in black fountain-pen ink. She gazed out the window and saw that the goat was no longer in the garden. The sun lit up the coral jasmine tree, making the orange tongues of its flowers fire points. Momentarily dazzled by the sight, she looked away. She smoothed down her light cardigan. It was too large for her, and a thread was fraying near one of the buttons. She absently pulled at it, and then bent down her neck in an odd angle to bite it off with her teeth. She became ashamed of her own ferocity, and smoothed the sweater down again. She got up and walked to the door, but changed her mind. She began to pace. There was something on the floor. It was one of our marbles. She picked it up and held it up to the light. It had a pale green tint, with a brown cat’s eye inside. Meterling wiped the marble in the paloo of her sari, and placed it in her mouth. She let it roll around against her teeth, bit down softly, and then spat it out again.

“I must be going crazy,” she thought. She looked out the window once again and began to cry. She placed her hands on her ever-bigger belly and shuddered with tears.

I saw her from the doorway and ran to her to hug her. My arms couldn’t reach around, but I had forgotten that. I wanted to take away her pain, moor her somehow, make it better.

Gin is made with juniper berries and a careful blend of other herbs. If Meterling was to inherit any of Archer’s wealth, she hoped it would be a field of coriander, a field of cardamom, and a field of turmeric. This was all she could handle, she thought, wanting no part of the great monstrosity of a house his father owned in England, with its dark, damp walls and sweep of staircase, its foyer so crowded with photographs of unsmiling relatives and white nawabs, a house that Archer said suffered from a lack of breath. There was no money, except in gin, but Archer’s family was going to see to it she got very little. Certainly there was no will; there had been no time for a will. But if there had been a will, she might have gotten three fields. That’s what she had wanted, after all. For Archer did talk of his death once, a night they took a boat around the lake as the sun burnt the water with crimson. He worried aloud that he might very likely go before her, leaving her a widow. She had laughed her twinkly laugh then and told him, looking straight into his eyes, “Then leave me three fields. One of rye, two of spice.”

“You are like Isak Dinesen,” he said, taking her into his arms.

“Who?”

“A woman who was brave beyond her times.”

And then he began to kiss her, and there really was no further talk on the subject.

Meterling found the story from Isak Dinesen that Archer had mentioned. A woman pleads for the life of her son, who is accused of arson, and the overlord asks her to plow a field of rye in one day to spare his life. She plows with the village and the overlord and his guest watching, until she finishes, her son walking beside her all along, and collapses in his arms to her death. For the freedom of one, the death of another. Sorrow-Acre. An inheritance of sorrow. A haunting tale. Isak Dinesen, who had had a philanderer for a husband, whom she still loved, some say, after their divorce. And now Archer was gone, and she had no wish for rye.

And here was his cousin, wanting her to phone, leaving a message hurriedly scribbled by Pa. She had no wish to phone. She wanted Archer.

Archer had told her about the seasons in Surrey, his old home. In March, everything became mud, as the weather shifted from ice to less ice. Then a brief, pale-lemony sun that melted the ice and softened the soil, painting the backs of rubber boots with squishy dirt.

“Once I was walking and came across violets, half-hidden in all that mud,” he told her. “The trees hadn’t greened yet—everything was still bare branches and gray. But the burst of violet was sudden, a gift.

“Finding you, Meterling, is like coming across those violets—a gift.”

And Meterling blushed. For even though the idea of an absence of flowers was alien to her, she knew what he meant from the emotion in his voice. And again, there was nothing else to do but fall swiftly into his arms.

Later, they wondered about children.

“Yes, a good idea,” she murmured, her face pressed to his neck.

“Yes,” he replied, “a wonderful idea.”

9

L
ook at the way our neighbor conducts himself late at night,” said Aunt Pa. “Who is to say he is not at war with his whole life, all of the time like that? My uncle Das was his classmate, after all,” she told us, “arm in arm back in those days, one wiping his nose, the other scratching. Two peas in a pod, you know, the pair of them: and how often did my own grandmother take a broom to their shenanigans? My grandmother, who was so severe,” she said—and here we looked at each other, listening to Aunt Pa’s tale, astonished.

But Aunt Pa was looking off into the distance.

“You never expect your uncle to be killed so young, of course. This was your great-uncle from your grandfather’s side of the family. And it was our neighbor himself who went to the stationmaster’s office to demand reparation. Of course, it wasn’t that poor man’s fault—a train is bound to fail once or twice for all the times it runs properly. And your great-uncle, eighteen, he was fond of crossing the tracks to get home for tiffin. The train came at a quarter past, that was the schedule, and usually your uncle crossed while the roar of the departing train
could still be heard and seen in the distance, receding. He liked to touch the rails, too, to feel their heat. And whose fault was it except that of the glass he struck his foot on, and later the stone he hit his head on before he passed out? No one saw him, that was the trouble, or in a wink they would have pulled him off the tracks. And that was the day the train chose to come late, too late that day.

And even though Auntie Pa was relating a story she must have related a hundred times before, and even though we had heard it before, there was something in her voice that told us that she would have given anything to have been there that day, to pull him away from the tracks, so even now her grandmother, were she too alive, could shake a broom at him still, to spare our neighbor who drinks late into the night and smashes bottles from his second-storey window onto the street below.

It wasn’t only for her uncle that our neighbor got drunk, but it was the start of his downward spiral, as Aunt Pa tells it—Aunt Pa, who often rises early and carefully sweeps up the glass before most of us are up the next day.