Where the Rain is Born by Anita Nair

Author:Anita Nair [Nair, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351183501
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2002-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

When the boys came at her she attacked them with a ferocity that easily overcame their theoretical advantages of strength and size. Her gifts of war came down to her from some unknown ancestor; and though her adversaries grabbed her hair and called her jewess they never vanquished her. Sometimes she literally rubbed their noses in the dirt. On other occasions she stood back, scrawny arms folded in triumph across her chest, and allowed her stunned victims to back unsteadily away. ‘Next time, pick on someone your own size,’ Flory added insult to injury by inverting the meaning of the phrase: ‘Us pint-size jewinas are too hot for you to handle.’ Yes, she was rubbing it in, but even this attempt to make metaphors of her victories, to represent herself as the champion of the small, of the Minority, of girls, failed to make her popular. Fast Flory, Flory-the-Roary: she acquired a Reputation.

The time came when nobody would cross the lines she went on drawing, with fearsome precision, across the gullies and open spaces of her childhood years. She grew moody and inward and sat on behind her dust-lines, besieged within her own fortifications. By her eighteenth birthday she had stopped fighting, having learned something about winning battles and losing wars.

The point I’m leading up to is that Christians had in Flory’s view stolen more from her than ancestral spice fields. What they took was even then getting to be in short supply, and for a girl with a Reputation the supply was even shorter … in her twenty-fourth year Solomon Castile the synagogue caretaker had stepped across Miss Flory’s lines to ask for her hand in marriage. The act was generally thought to be one of great charity, or stupidity, or both. Even in those days the numbers of the community were decreasing. Maybe four thousand persons living in the Mattancherri Jewtown, and by the time you excluded family members and the very young and the very old and the crazy and infirm, the youngsters of marriageable age were not spoiled for choice of partners. Old bachelors fanned themselves by the clocktower and walked by the harbour’s edge hand in hand; toothless spinsters sat in doorways sewing clothes for non-existent babies. Matrimony inspired as much spiteful envy as celebration, and Flory’s marriage to the caretaker was attributed by gossip to the ugliness of both parties. ‘As sin,’ the sharp tongues said. ‘Pity the kids, my God.’

(Old enough to be her father, Flory scolded Abraham; but Solomon Castile, born in the year of the Indian Uprising, had been twenty years her senior, poor man probably wanted to get married while he was still capable, the wagging tongues surmized … and there is one more fact about their wedding. It took place on the same day in 1900 as a much grander affair; no newspapers recorded the Castile-Zogoiby nuptials in their social-register columns, but there were many photographs of Mr Francisco da Gama and his smiling Mangalorean bride.)

The vengefulness of the

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