The Cardamom Mist

"Wind's dead calm tonight, chettayi. Good hours for it."

Eapen tied his cloth mask over his nose and hoisted the sprayer onto his back, the way he had every week for eleven years, since the day Avarachan first trusted him, and no other man on his cardamom estate, with the terraces that had to be sprayed after dark, when the Idukki mist sat still enough to keep the deadly pesticide from drifting down onto the workers' lines below.

"Careful hands only, this job," Avarachan said, same as always, half warning, half blessing. "One wrong wind and it isn't only you who pays."

"Which is why you pay me what you pay me," Eapen said, and Avarachan's laugh carried down the row of cardamom and into the dark.

By morning he was home, the mist that had followed him off the terraces still sitting low over the mud path, when a small voice cut clean through it.

"Apachaaaaa!"

Anna Mol came running, one sock already sliding into her shoe, and hit him at full speed the way she always did, as though a whole night apart was more than a seven-year-old heart could bear.

"Easy, molu." He swung her once, caught the smell of Rosamma's coconut oil in her hair. "You'll break your apachan's back."

"Rosamma valyammachi says I've grown two inches since Christmas."

"Rosamma valyammachi also says the cardamom will fail every year. And every year it doesn't." She giggled, and he walked her to the bend where the estate children waited for school, and stood there longer than he needed to, because he could never make himself look away a moment before he had to.

Everyone on the estate knew how he'd grown up an orphan on the Kurishinkal family's cardamom plot in the high range of Idukki, fed and sheltered only because their son Mathew, eight years old and stubborn as a mule, had refused to let the estate send him away.

How the two had grown up brothers in everything but blood, with Mathew's younger sister Sophie growing up right alongside them, until the year the hillside above Manjumala let go in the tragic floods and took Mathew with it, still holding a rope tied to a goat that hadn't survived either.

How Mathew, more times than anyone could count, half in jest, had made him promise, "Don't let my Sophie marry some fool from the lines. If I'm not there to see it done right, you do it yourself."

He had married her within the year.

Sophie, nineteen, orphaned twice over now, dreaming of a life that looked nothing like the rows of estate housing where workers like her own family had always lived, had said yes, the way a person boards a ferry when the bridge is gone. It would get her across.

It was not the crossing she'd wanted.

With Manjumala's lower lines declared unfit to rebuild on, the two of them came down together to Peermedu, to two rented rooms on the Panchalimedu road, far enough from the mountain that the mist here, at least, did not carry its smell.

It was Rosamma, in the room next door, who came by that first week with a plate of something hot before either of them had thought to ask for it. A widow herself, her own husband long dead on the estate lines and her only son already gone to drive an autorickshaw in Kochi, she asked them nothing about the flood, or the brother whose name Sophie still could not say aloud.

She only set the plate down and said, "Eat first. Grief keeps better on a full stomach," and came back the next evening with another, until coming back had quietly become a habit none of them could any longer imagine living without.

Anna Mol arrived eighteen months later, and Eapen wept at the sight of her the way grown men are not supposed to weep, saying only, "Ende kochu vattusi, ende ponnu molu," my darling, my darling, over and over, as though he had personally argued her into existence.

Sophie, recovering in the next bed, watched him and did not entirely understand what she was watching. She loved the child, and would have said so, and meant it, had anyone asked directly. But love, for Sophie, had always arrived with a second feeling close behind it, a small cold shadow that whispered, this was not the life you were meant to have, and at twenty-one she did not yet own the words to separate the two feelings enough to examine either one honestly.

Anna Mol was barely two when Sophie said it plainly one evening. " There is a seat at St. John's in Kattappana. B.Sc. Nursing. If I don't go now, I'll be past the age anyone wants a fresher."

Eapen did not tell her what it would cost.

He broke the chit fund he'd been keeping for Anna Mol's own schooling, took the quarry work at Elappara and the masonry work in town, sold blood twice at the district hospital and told no one.

Rosamma became the second mother nobody had appointed her, walking Anna Mol to school, sitting with her through his night shifts, teaching her, without either of them noticing, that love could arrive from more than one direction and still be enough.

Sophie qualified with marks that surprised her own lecturers. Within months a hospital in Kuwait wanted her, arranged through seniors from her batch.

"It's only for some time," she told Eapen the night before she left, Anna Mol asleep between them on the mat. "Then we build something. Not this."

He sold the second chit fund for her ticket and stood at the bus stand before dawn to see her onto the bus to Kochi. She did not look back through the window.

The calls came weekly, then monthly, then hardly at all. A nurse named Binoy, senior to her by two years, the one who had found her the job, began to feature in more of her sentences than anyone else did.

By the time Anna Mol turned seven, there was rarely a call left to wait for.

"Apachaa, does Ammachi not love us anymore?" Anna Mol asked once, and Eapen knelt to her height the way he always did for the questions that mattered.

"Your Ammachi loves you the only way she's learned how, molu. Some love has to travel further than others. It only means it gets tired on the way."

He had other plans for his Anna mol, plans he told no one, not even Rosamma.

There was a convent school in Kattappana, English medium, with a proper library and girls there went on to medical and engineering colleges on their own steam and build a life on their own.

He had gone once, on a pretext, and stood outside the gate only to watch the children come out in their blue uniforms, and walked home already counting.

He kept a small tin after that, separate from any chit fund, dropping in whatever coins the day's odd work left over, telling Anna Mol only that it was for "something good, mole. Wait and see."

"Is it a bicycle?"

"Better."

"Better than a bicycle?"

"Much better." In the evenings he pulled her onto his lap and made her read to him from her school books, once for her teacher and once, he told her, for him, since her Apachan had never studied past the seventh standard and liked hearing the words in her voice better than he would ever have liked reading them in his own.

When she stumbled over a word, he told her stumbling was allowed. Even the mist took its time finding its way down the mountain, and no one held it against the mist.

Once, when the school held its annual day, he came straight off the night shift without sleeping, sat at the back among fathers who owned shops and drove their own autos, and did not care, because when Anna Mol came out in white and gold to recite her four lines about the rain, he was the only father in the hall crying before she had said a single word.

By the time she turned seven, the tin held enough for a term's fees, and Eapen had begun asking, quietly, at the parish, whether anyone knew someone who knew someone at that convent.

The envelope came on an ordinary Tuesday, delivered by the postman on his usual round, sealed, official, addressed to Eapen Jose, Panchalimedu Road, Peermedu, Idukki. He stood in the doorway reading it twice before the words agreed to arrange themselves into meaning.

Petition for Dissolution of Marriage. Family Court, Kattappana.

Sophie was seeking divorce, on grounds of prolonged separation, a fact true in the way facts are sometimes true and still manage to say almost nothing about what actually happened.

And she was asking, in a paragraph that made Eapen sit down hard on the doorstep, the tin roof already ticking overhead in the morning heat, for custody of Anna Mol, now seven, citing her own ability to provide the child a stable home, quality schooling, and the healthcare a plantation labourer's income never could.

He did not go to work that day. Rosamma sat with him on the step, saying nothing useful, because there was nothing useful to say, until it was she who finally spoke the name that mattered: Advocate Thommachan, who practiced out of a small office above a stationery shop on Thottapura Road.

"I have no money for a lawyer," Eapen told Rosamma.

"I broke two chit funds for her."

"Take this," Rosamma said, giving him a bunch of notes she saved from her widow pension and small work she used to do under the Kudumashree scheme "You're not fighting for money now, Eapen. You're fighting for the only thing you have ever actually owned."

Advocate Thommachan did not soften it. "The court will weigh two things, The child's welfare, and, whatever we wish weren't true, who can afford to provide it. Your wife brings a Gulf salary and a partner. You bring a love the court won't doubt for a moment, and a daily wage it will weigh against that love anyway."

Eapen broke the third fund, the one meant for the convent school he had already started asking about, and handed over every rupee without one word of complaint.

The Family Court at Kattappana sat forty-five kilometres off, through Elappara, a road he now knew by heart. Eapen made the journey in Advocate Thommachan's borrowed van three times before the final hearing, each time in his one good shirt, ironed by Rosamma's careful hand the night before, each time rehearsing what he would say if the judge asked him, directly, what he could offer his daughter, and never arriving at an answer he thought a court would accept.

Eapen brought Anna Mol himself, her hand held tight in the whole bus ride, and it was Sophie who was waiting in the corridor when they arrived, Binoy a step behind her.

Anna Mol went quiet at the sight of them, the wary quiet of a child greeting a face she half remembered from photographs more than from life, and pressed herself into her father's side more tightly.

The judge did not take long. "This court does not weigh a father's love as less," she said, closing the file. "It weighs only what circumstance permits him to offer beside it."

Custody to the mother. Visitation to the father.

Sophie crouched in the corridor afterward and held out a hand to her daughter, and Anna Mol would not yet take it, only gripped tighter to the leg she actually knew.

"NO…NO….." She screamed, wound both arms around Eapen and would not loosen them. "I want to stay with my Apachaa."

Eapen had his world crumbling before him, he knelt in the corridor and held his daughter's face in both hands. "You're my ponnu molu," he told her. "Always. Wherever the sea takes you. A paper doesn't change that."

"Apachaa, I don’t want to go…," a bawling Anna Mol said, not understanding, only that every face around her was wrong, only that her father's hands were shaking in a way she had never felt them shake.

Sophie put her in Binoy's car. Eapen stood on the courthouse steps and watched it pull away, and then his legs decided something his mind had not yet agreed to, and he ran. 

Past the tea stall, past the auto stand, calling her name into the exhaust and the noise of the highway.

"Anna mole! Anna mole!"

The car slowed once, at the junction. Through the rear glass he saw her small palm flatten against it, saw Sophie's hand half rise, not quite reaching the window, not quite stopping the car either.

Then the signal changed, and it was gone, and Eapen stood in the middle of the Kattappana road with nothing left in front of him to run toward, and for the first time since the mountain took Mathew and left him only a promise to keep, he put both hands over his face, in the open road, in front of everyone, and wept like the orphaned boy he had never once stopped being.

Rosamma was waiting when he reached the two rooms on Panchalimedu road, and said nothing useful, because there was nothing useful left to say. When he finally spoke, hours later, it was only to say that Avarachan needed the spraying done before the week's rain.

"Not tonight, Eapa." She used Mathew's old name for him without noticing she'd done it. "Any man would understand, tonight of all nights."

"If I sit in this room tonight, ammachi, I will not get up again. Let something still need me."

"The cardamom doesn't wait for any man's sorrow," Eapen said, and picked up the sprayer himself, and walked up into the terraces as the light went from grey to the deeper grey of a high range evening closing in.

It was Ouseph, tapping rubber on the next slope, who found him before the estate woke, in the early dawn when the mist still lay thick and the first birds hadn't yet found their courage.

Eapen lay where he had knelt to check the last drum, very still, the sprayer silent beside him. No struggle in the wet earth. Nothing at all, Ouseph would say later, except a stillness so complete his old friend looked like a man who had simply decided, at last, that he was tired, and lain down to rest exactly where he stood.

In his shirt pocket, folded soft as cloth, they found a letter.

Ente Ponnu Anna molu,

Apachaa doesn't write nicely, like the books you'll read one day. But some things I want you to always know, in case my mouth cant say them when it matters most.

You are the best thing that ever happened to me. Better than any dream I had for myself, back when I was young enough to still have dreams of my own.

Whatever anyone tells you, when you're old enough to ask, remember only this: your Apachan tried. If I'm not there to braid your hair before church, it will not be because I stopped trying. Trying was the one thing I always had to give you...now I have no one to try anything for.

I will be always with you, my sweetheart.

Dad loves you. Will love you forever.

Your Apachaaa....