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Translated from the original Tamil short story oru vimarcanam (ஒரு விமர்சனம்) from the 1992 collection of short stories titled makkattuc cālvai (மக்கத்துச் சால்வை) by S.L.M. Hanifa. Translated by eḻuttukkiṉiyavaṉ and Fasmila Raviraj. The original collection is available at noolaham.org. If you have any questions, please contact ez.iniyavan@gmail.com.

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It was not just today or yesterday. He had not shown up for six whole months.

She recalled what the jeweler, newly arrived in the village, told her yesterday.

“Your husband Mohideen has another family in Putūr, with three children to boot.”

Any woman, let alone a mother of two, would have been completely taken aback by such news. But she betrayed no consternation. She responded as if she was giving the jeweler a resounding slap on his cheek:

“So what? I don’t care how many families he has, as long as he provides for me and my children. Her voice trembled as she uttered those words dripping with a supernatural devotion to her husband.

The village was waking up slowly from the stupor induced by the embrace of the night. The river flowed gently around the western side of the village, glittering as if molten glass was flowing through it, tracing an elegant straight line through the village.

Poets and pilgrims have doubtless visited this village, having been taken up by its breathtaking beauty. But their stories have been lost in the mists of obscurity.

But scores of people did move to the village to make a living and eventually put down roots there. The jeweler Mohideen was one of them. When he first arrived, he set the whole village abuzz. The way he dressed and carried himself transcended what the villagers were used to.

He wore shiny ‘pumps’ shoes without laces, the glittering silver border of his paḷayakāt sarong gently kissing the tips of his shoes. His carefully pressed nylon shirt retained its straight creases. Together they conspired to invoke friendly feelings towards him in everyone who looked at him.

Gold, silver, gold jewelry.

As his voice blended with the wind and wafted into nothingness, curious pairs of eyes along the way patiently waited to catch his.

Mariam stood tending to a clay flower bed in the garden. Her innate desire to find a pendant for her chandelier earring made her pause when she heard the jeweler’s voice. She dropped what she was doing and scampered to the roadside.

“What do you have?”

“Everything!” he said mockingly.

“What is everything?”

“Everything that someone like you needs,” he said without hesitation.

“Mariam, bring the jeweler inside my child,” her mother shouted, announcing the jeweler Mohideen’s arrival to the entire neighborhood.

Women and children swamped around him. He took his wares out of his leather bag and displayed them one by one.

Once the crowd had dispersed, Mariam’s mother called out, “Thampi, let’s see if you have a pendant for this girl.”

As if he was waiting for that, he placed a pendant in her palm.

The two rolled silver pendants glittered like dew drops in the gentle morning light.

Mariam stood leaning on the door frame, regarding them from a distance.

“Come here, child,” her mother beckoned Mariam to come over. She tried to hold the pendants up to Mariam’s ear. But it didn’t quite work.

Again… again…

Mohideen noticed Mariam blushing with embarrassment and said, “Give it to me, let me try.”

Mariam sat on her haunches by her mother, next to him.

With one deft, practiced movement, he hooked the pendants on her chandelier earrings so that they glistened as they swayed gently.

As she savored the silent joy of getting what she had longed for, his mind could not help wandering beyond his self-restraint, yearning to see the exquisite beauty of her naked form.

Mariam’s mother, whose immediate goal was to find a husband for her daughter, pretended that she didn’t notice where his gaze was, as if in silent approval.

Mariam’s mother was a widow who had been struggling to fend for her family of three daughters and a young son. Work became her entire life. But the dark shadows of poverty gradually engulfed her, as she tried to pay off her small debts by going into bigger ones. The only riches that life bequeathed on her were Mariam, like a flower in full bloom, and Razna at the cusp of womanhood, and Jemila like a fresh bud, and the baby of the family, Ahmad.

“Make some tea for the visitor, my child,” she said. Mariam extricated herself from his piercing gaze and started making a fire to brew tea.

“Thampi! I can’t pay right now. I have to wait until I can fire some more clay pots and pans,” she besought him.

“That is ok, you can pay up later,” he said, his gaze, once again, darting over to Mariam who was battling with the smoky hearth.

That day, he had lunch with them.

That evening, he brought a bag of fish and sundry other items, among them the fancy soap with a pungent fragrance. He handed them over to Mariam’s sister Razna and made his way towards the three-way junction.

The next morning, as dawn broke, the happy news spread like wildfire: Mariam and jeweler Mohideen were wed last night.

Thereafter, no one referred to her with a child’s diminutives. Instead, Mohideen started appending ‘bibi’ to her name and that stuck.

After a while, the thatched hut turned into a stone house.

There wasn’t anyone who didn’t marvel at the wonder of god’s grace that made it possible for the little leather bag to generously provide for everything that everyone in that household needed.

As time went by, even those who ignored him in the early days became familiar enough to ask him for the time of day, and to take the liberty of having a smoke with him.

He deserves credit for introducing the capital city of Colombo to so many villagers. But sometimes, when he returned home from business elsewhere, he would close the little front gate of that big house behind him as he went inside. The gang of tots who always followed him, bunched up against the closed gate and dispersed. This very act planted doubts tinged with a little fear in the minds of his neighbors.

Before long,

“Is it true that Mariam’s husband traffics opium?”

“Come on, take one look at his face. How could you say such a thing?”

“It seems she has a soft spot for him. These days, you can’t even trust your own friends.”

The gossip fest of the village’s womenfolk turned into pin drop silence when Mariam bibi’s mother arrived.

The news brought by the new jeweler hung heavily in the air.

For the last six or seven months, she and the little ones were consumed with worry, waiting for him.

The baby started to whimper. She opened the can of baby formula only to find it empty. She didn’t have a cent. She managed to survive to this day by selling off the jewelry he had lovingly bought for her.

The thought of his lovely gifts was swift, only to be replaced by the bitterness of reality in her throat.

‘I have to ask the boy to buy a cartload of clay and start making clay pots again,” she resolved to herself.

She wrapped her baby’s tiny legs around her waist and started walking.

As she crossed the co-operative store, its manager—the self-proclaimed learned man in the village—was reading the day’s newspaper aloud.

“Masked robber apprehended. A man named A. Mohideen, who broke into a house at midnight robbing jewelry worth thousands, and stabbing the residents in the process, was caught in the act by the public. He is also implicated in many previous robberies around the country.”

“Who is that? Is he our Mariam’s husband?” Pāthumā asked gingerly.

When she tries to express a teenager’s emotions in her forty-something body, it sometimes comes across as a little obscene. Before the manager could keep time with her emotions, his eyes darted away to ogle at the approaching figure of Mariam bibi.

Pāthumā didn’t fail to notice how the manager’s gaze turned, or the lust bubbling within him. Like a parched land that fumes at an inconsiderate dark cloud passing overhead without pausing, her restraint gave way with an explosion.

“Look how she walks so innocently, after having had the gall to consort with a robber, right here in the middle of the village!” she said derisively, with the satisfaction of sprinkling fragrance on to her own claimed virtue.

But the manager was a mere mortal with the hunger of a man with the taste for carnal pleasures.

His response seared Pāthumā’s ears, “Nevertheless, the jeweler’s bird is a good looking one indeed.” Immediately he bit his tongue, realizing that he had crossed a boundary.

“It takes a thief to know a thief,” mumbled Pāthumā as she left.

Oblivious to the crude display of carnal emotions unfolding within the co-operative store, Mariam bibi walks on—her heart brimming with tender memories of her husband, missing these past six months—suffused with the quiet satisfaction of having surrendered herself wholly into that narrow, confined bliss.

1970