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learned not to display anger.
    Thoma finished a cup of coffee that Ann had prepared in the clay oven. He then lit up a beedi and started smoking. Beedi is the ancestor of the cigarette, or its poor cousin, poisoning lungs through unfiltered smoke, used even to this day in Kerala. He puffed out a ring of black smoke. He then swung his arm to catch a mosquito. Now, Thoma had a habit of beating his wife with his powerful, swinging arms on the pretext of catching a fly. He blamed Ann for everything bad in this world, including flies, mosquitos, and moths, and concluded she deserved a beating once in a while.
    Subashini, always vigilant and never missing a beat saw the beating was coming. She shouted, “Look out! Thoma hit.”
    Ann moved fast. She narrowly escaped the assault.
    The parrot was closely guarding Ann.
    ***
    The front gate of Thoma’s home in Amballore opened, and in came a visitor. It was Rita. Rita’s arrival was announced by Subashini.
    “Rita here,” she declared.
    Rita brought with her boiled tapioca and toddy. This used to make Thoma immensely happy, and he instantly forgot all the bitterness he had against the world. Toddy was his heart and soul, and he used to relish the holy liquid even more than the wine that the Catholic priests in the neighboring Saint Joseph’s Church drank during their Mass.
    Thoma was usually so happy after toddy consumption that he would even care to look at his wife! He would be over the moon, desperately convincing himself that he was riding a white horse and not drinking the white liquid.
    “Yum, Rita brought tapioca,” Subashini announced.
    This was how the bird gave a hint to the humans that she wanted a piece of pie too—boiled tapioca. Rita promptly served boiled tapioca to Subashini and apologized for ignoring her. The parrot loved boiled tapioca.
    Rita would often visit her parents during their retirement years. Her conversation with her parents usually led to the topic of her marriage and the promise of a dowry that Thoma made to Tim, her husband. This promise was never fulfilled. Immediately following the marriage, Thoma used to get letters from Rita reminding him of his obligation to fulfill the promise. That promise was as sacrosanct as the wedding vows that she took, she declared. Her letters used to seethe with rage for what was done to a helpless bride.
    She accused him of abandoning her at the altar to a strange man (theirs was an arranged marriage, and Tim was practically astranger to her on her wedding day) and never looking back. “How could you do this to me?” She demanded an answer from her father in those letters. Toward the end of the letter, she would be crying, as evidenced by the frequent smudges in the ink-written words at the end.
    “If you cannot read my letter, it is because my tears smeared my words,” she wrote.
    Ann thought those letters were almost poetic and full of passion, and she secured them. She kept them long after they were written and long after the wedding events faded in people’s memories and became just some footnotes in the family’s history. Ann was secretly happy that her daughter never blamed her mother for her tragedies. The mother got reassurance of her innocence through those letters and so was happy to keep them to wash her hands off any sin that she might have committed, just like Pontius Pilate did to clear his name.
    Just like clockwork, every time Rita left, Ann confronted her husband and sought an explanation for the promise he made that was never kept. To her surprise, these questions and accusations were met with total silence by Thoma, a man eager to defend anything and everything he did in his life. Was it a silent acknowledgement of his guilt that he did not answer the question? Ann believed so.
    Ann remembered that Thoma defended his action of a broken promise once. And just once in his lifetime did he defend his action. He told his wife that Rita did not need a dowry; she was a dowry in herself. Her long,