A Perfectly Good Yes

Vikram Iyer woke over the Maldives with a crick in his neck, a mouthful of aeroplane air, and his wife asleep against the window, and discovered that he had no idea what to do with his hands.

This was not a new problem, precisely. It was an old problem with a new weight to it. He had spent most of his adult life knowing where his hands went — on a phone, on a keyboard, around a paper cup of airport tea, folded on a table while someone talked about freight — and the knowledge had deserted him somewhere over the Arabian Sea, at roughly the moment the cabin lights had gone down and the woman beside him had tilted, slowly and by degrees, until her head rested against the window frame with the little pillow wedged between her ear and the plastic, and he had been left sitting upright in his very good suit with the sudden, absurd conviction that he was expected to do something.

She slept the way she did everything, as far as he had been able to establish in four meetings and one wedding: completely, and beautifully, and as though it had been arranged in advance. Her hair had come half loose from whatever she had done to it at Heathrow, a long dark weight of it over one shoulder, and in the blue cabin light her skin against the pale airline blanket was a deep warm brown, several shades darker than his own, and he found he could look at the difference the way you look at light on water — without needing anything from it, without being able to stop. Her hands lay in her lap, one open over the other, soft and unhurried, gold at the wrist. There was mehndi still on them, faded now to the colour of weak tea. Three hundred people had watched him put a ring over that henna on Sunday, and he had managed it without dropping anything, and he counted that among the more improbable achievements of his life.

He could have pulled the blanket up over her shoulder. That was the thing his hands were for, presumably. The blanket had slipped, and the cabin was cold, and the distance between his hand and the blanket was perhaps fourteen inches, and he sat there calculating the fourteen inches as though it were a negotiation with a shipping line. If he touched the blanket he might wake her. If he woke her she would smile at him, because she always smiled at him, warmly and promptly and completely, and then he would have woken his sleeping wife on her wedding trip in order to receive a smile he had not earned.

He left the blanket. He unwrapped the little pair of headphones instead, put them back down, and looked out past her at the dark.

Somewhere below them the islands began, and the sea went from black to a grey with light underneath it, and the wing of the aircraft sat against the paling sky with its red light winking, steady as a pulse. They had met five times, he reminded himself, if you counted the wedding, which he did not, because at the wedding neither of them had said anything that was not in a book. Four meetings, then. Chaperoned, all of them, in a sitting room in Wimbledon that smelled of polish and strong tea, with his mother and her mother conducting the occasion like two senior partners at a merger, and Nithya across from him in a different sari each time, answering every question with such warmth and such completeness that it had taken him until the third meeting to notice he could not have repeated a single thing she'd said. She had told him about the London office, and about Galle, and about the house she grew up in, and he had spent all four chaperoned afternoons being extremely careful about where he looked. She was a great deal to look at: long blue-black hair pinned up in a way that promised weight, a full bust the sari did nothing to disguise and was not meant to, a waist the pleats were tied in at, and hips the silk went round and then went round again. She carried it the way she carried everything — as a fact long ago accepted and beautifully managed. None of which was a thing one said to one's mother; and afterwards, in the car, Lakshmi had said, she talks so beautifully, and he had agreed, because it was true, and because agreeing was what he did.

Is this what you want? he had asked her, the fourth time, when the mothers had stepped out to admire something in the garden, and it had been the only unchaperoned ninety seconds of their acquaintance.

She had looked at him directly, which she rarely did, and said, Yes. Is it what you want? and he had said yes, and meant it, and she had smiled like something settling into place, and the mothers had come back in with the garden behind them, and that had been that.

She stirred, and the grey light came up another notch, and she opened her eyes and found him watching her.

"Oh," she said, unembarrassed, sitting up and putting a hand to her hair and assessing the damage in one motion, the way other people checked a watch. "How long was I — did I snore? Tell me honestly. I can take it."

"You didn't," he said. "You were extremely dignified."

"What a waste of a flight," she said, and smiled at him, warm and complete and informative, and he smiled back, and thought: I have been married for three days and I do not know if she is tired.

The captain came on to announce the descent into Colombo, and she translated the Sinhala that followed for him before he could ask, her Tamil-inflected rendering quick and fond — "he's saying the sea is calm, which it always is, but it's a good sign, my grandmother would approve" — and then the aircraft leaned and the sea rose up to meet them, a flat sheet of hammered silver with the dawn coming up behind the coastline, and Vikram, who had crossed Europe in every weather by every means, felt the ground come up toward him like a question he had agreed to before hearing.

Bandaranaike arrivals was bright and loud and warm in a way that Heathrow never was, warm through the glass, warm in the air that came in under the doors, and it was here that Vikram Iyer, six foot one in a suit that had cost more than the average monthly wage of everyone in the hall, was gently and expertly steered through his own arrival like a piece of valuable cargo.

Nithya had stepped off the aircraft and become, instantly and without any visible transition, the most competent person in the building. The immigration hall had a queue and she had read it before they'd joined it, steering him by the elbow — her hand small and warm and authoritative on his arm, the first time she had touched him since the wedding, and he was aware of it out of all proportion to the event — to the correct line. To the officer at the desk she spoke in quick, easy Tamil, something about the fortnight and Galle and the hotel, and the man grinned and stamped and said something that made her laugh, and Vikram stood beside her being smiled around, rather than at. To the woman at the next counter it was English, faultless and faintly amused; a form was produced that he had not known was needed, filled in with a pen from Nithya's own handbag, and returned. The luggage appeared. He reached for the larger case and she let him take it, which he registered as a kindness, and she took the small one herself and said, "Priyan will be outside, he always is, he's driven us since I was about nine and he will have opinions about the state of me," and sailed ahead of him through the sliding doors into the wet, green, breathing heat of his first morning in her country.

Priyan Kandasamy was lean and grey-moustached and leaned against a silver Toyota with his arms folded, and he unfolded them for Nithya and for no one else, taking her case and looking her over with the frankness of a man who had known her before she had any say in the matter.

"Thin," he said, in Tamil. "London."

"Nobody is thin," Nithya said. "You're thinking of my mother. This is Vikram."

"Mr. Iyer." Priyan shook his hand, once, with a grip that had opinions in it. "Twenty years in Galle," he said, switching to English for Vikram's benefit with the air of a man conferring a document. "I tell them, the Tamil works better here than in half of Tamil Nadu. The road is good this week. We go the coast way. The expressway is faster and you see nothing, and on a first trip you should see something." He said it to Vikram, not to Nithya, which Vikram understood — correctly, he thought — to be the man's assessment of who in this car needed the explanation.

"The coast way," Nithya agreed, settling into the back seat. "He'll sulk otherwise."

"I have never sulked in my life," said Priyan, and started the engine.

They went south through a green so dense it did not seem to have been planted so much as to have agreed to make room for the road. The sea appeared and vanished and appeared again on the right, brown sand and grey water brightening by the minute, outrigger boats drawn up above the tideline like enormous coloured insects. Towns unspooled past the window — a fish market already going at full shout, a temple gopuram, a boy on a bicycle with a bunch of plantains twice the size of the boy. Priyan drove the way he spoke, without haste and without doubt, and pointed out a railway line that ran closer to the sea than any railway had a right to, and the bend where a bus had gone in before he was born and where people still left flowers, and Vikram listened and looked and tried to put away the feeling of being freight and mostly succeeded, because it was impossible to feel like freight in a country that kept leaning into the car window to be looked at.

Nithya sat beside him with the small case at her feet and narrated, delightfully. That was the word that came to him, and it came to him with increasing frequency. She told him the name of every river they crossed and which one flooded. She told him that the trees with the red flowers were called — a name he immediately lost, and felt bad about losing, because she had clearly loved saying it. She told him about coming down this road at six years old, carsick, with her grandmother telling her the sea would be cross with her if she was sick into it, and it was a good story, well told, and it had her grandmother in it and her mother in it and her six-year-old self in it, and at the end of it Vikram realised he knew no more about her than he had at Heathrow.

"Are you comfortable?" he asked, because the sun had come round onto her side and she had put a hand up to the glass.

"Perfectly," she said, warmly. "The car's lovely and Priyan drives like a bishop. Are you? You must be cramped, you're about a foot too tall for any vehicle made in Asia."

"I'm fine," he said, which was true, his knees having been through worse. "Would you like to stop for tea? Priyan must know somewhere."

"Oh, always," said Nithya. "But we'll be at the hotel by ten and Sumana will have made hoppers, and Sumana's hoppers are worth being a little hungry for, I promise you. She's been there since my grandmother's time. She'll feed you until you can't move and then she'll tell you you're too thin, it's the family business."

"Is the air too cold?" he asked, a little later, because the vent was aimed at her and her arms were bare.

"No, it's perfect, thank you," she said, and smiled at him, and the smile was full and genuine and told him nothing at all, and she turned back to the window and told him about the lighthouse at Galle, and the ramparts, and the ice-cream shop her cousins had been forbidden to go to and had gone to daily.

Four times, all told, he asked her something — comfortable, stop, cold, and once, toward the end, whether she was tired, to which she had said, not a bit, I slept beautifully, you were a very restful person to sleep next to, which was so precisely the sort of thing one said to a colleague after a conference that he laughed, and she laughed too, pleased with herself, not knowing why he had laughed, or possibly knowing perfectly well.

And Vikram sat in the back of the silver Toyota going south along the coast of a country he had never seen, next to a woman of twenty-nine years whose ring was on her hand and whose hand he had held twice, who had answered his every question promptly and warmly and completely, in a voice like someone handing you a beautifully wrapped parcel with nothing in it, and he thought, in the grey-gold morning light, with the sea coming up on the right and the red flowers going past:

This is going extremely well.

And he could not have said, then or later, why the thought arrived in his mind with the exact weight and temperature of a warning.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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