God of Small Things
Chapter 1.
Paradise Pickles & Preserves
May in Ayemenem is a
hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black
crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen.
Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then
they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the
sun.
The nights are clear,
but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the
southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with
short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to
play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca
fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn moss green. Pepper vines snake up
electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across
flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles
that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when
Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth,
plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled
roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had
grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground.
The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives.
In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone.
Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose
flashed across the leaf‑strewn driveway.
The house itself
looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare.
Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked
outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.
She was Rahel’s baby
grandaunt, her grandfather’s younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi
Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old
enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn’t come to see her, though. Neither niece nor
baby grandaunt labored under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to
see her brother, Estha. They were two‑egg twins. “Dizygotic” doctors called
them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha–Esthappen
was the older by eighteen minutes.
They never did look
much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin‑armed
children, flat‑chested, wormridden and Elvis Presley‑puffed, there was none of
the usual “Who is who?” and “Which is which?” from oversmiling relatives or the
Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem House for
donations.
The confusion lay in a
deeper, more secret place.
In those early
amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of
Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought
of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As
though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with
joint identities.
Now, these years
later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny
dream.
She has other memories
too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for
instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man
did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies . She remembers the taste of the tomato
sandwiches–Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate–on the Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the
small things.
Anyway, now she thinks
of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer
what They were or ever thought They would be.
Ever.
Their lives have a
size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders,
Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their
separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry
End. Gentle half‑moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as
Ammu was when she died. Thirty‑one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die‑able
age.
They were nearly born
on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking
Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the
winding tea‑estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a
crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the
comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant
Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the
journey Estha and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them
in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu
came back to live in Kerala.
According to Estha, if
they’d been born on the bus, they’d have got free bus rides for the rest of
their lives. It wasn’t clear where he’d got this information from, or how he
knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against
their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.
They also believed
that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for
their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra
crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra
crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam,
which was the nearest town, but they’d seen some from the car window when they
went to Cochin, which was a two‑hour drive away.
The Government never
paid for Sophie Mol’s funeral because she wasn’t killed on a zebra crossing.
She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha
and Rahel’s cousin, their uncle Chacko’s daughter. She was visiting from
England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was
almost nine. She had a special child‑sized coffin.
Satin lined.
Brass handle shined.
She lay in it in her
yellow Crimplene bell‑bottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her Made‑in‑England
go‑go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi’s thumb
from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the coffin,
and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The
priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled
at babies the way they did on usual Sundays.
The long candles on
the altar were bent. The short ones weren’t. An old lady masquerading as a
distant relative (whom nobody recognized, but who often surfaced next to bodies
at funerals‑a funeral junkie? A latent necrophiliac?) put cologne on a wad of
cotton wool and with a devout and gently challenging air, dabbed it on Sophie
Mol’s forehead. Sophie Mol smelled of cologne and coffinwood.
Margaret Kochamma,
Sophie Mol’s English mother, wouldn’t let Chacko, Sophie Mol’s biological
father, put his arm around her to comfort her.
The family stood
huddled together. Margaret Kochamma, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, and next to her,
her sister‑in‑law, Mammachi–Estha and Rahel’s (and Sophie Mol’s) grandmother.
Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses when she went out of the
house. Her tears trickled down from behind them and trembled along her jaw like
raindrops on the edge of a roof. She looked small and ill in her crisp off‑white
sari. Chacko was Mammachi’s only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated
her.
Though Ammu, Estha and
Rahel were allowed to attend the funeral, they were made to stand separately,
not with the rest of the family. Nobody would look at them.
It was hot in the
church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died
in a coffin flower. Ammu’s hands shook and her hymnbook with it Her skin was
cold. Estha stood close to her, barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like
glass, his burning cheek against the bare skin of Ammu’s trembling, hymnbook‑holding
arm.
Rahel, on the other
hand, was wide awake, fiercely vigilant and brittle with exhaustion from her
battle against Real Life.
She noticed that
Sophie Mol was awake for her funeral. She showed Rahel Two Things.
Thing One was the
newly painted high dome of the yellow church that Rahel hadn’t ever looked at
from the inside. It was painted blue like the sky, with drifting clouds and
tiny whizzing jet planes with white trails that crisscrossed in the clouds.
It’s true (and must be said) that it would have been easier to notice these
things lying in a coffin looking up than standing in the pews, hemmed in by sad
hips and hymnbooks.
Rahel thought of the
someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for
the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner.
She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, barebodied and shining,
sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the
church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky.
She thought of what
would happen if the rope snapped. She imagined him dropping like a dark star
out of the sky that he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark
blood spilling from his skull like a secret
By then Esthappen and
Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were
already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Thing Two that Sophie
Mol showed Rahel was the bat baby.
During the funeral
service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive
funeral san with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place
between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby
Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a
“Whatisit? Whathappened?” and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.
The sad priests dusted
out their curly beards with gold‑ringed fingers as though hidden spiders had
spun sudden cobwebs in them.
The baby bat flew up
into the sky and turned into a jet plane without a crisscrossed trail.
Only Rahel noticed
Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin.
The sad singing
started again and they sang the same sad verse twice. And once more the yellow
church swelled like a throat with voices.
When they lowered
Sophie Mol’s coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church,
Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf) the
soft sounds of the red mud and the hard sounds of the orange laterite that
spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dull thudding through the
polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priests’ voices
muffled by mud and wood.
We entrust into thy bands, most merciful Father,
The soul of this our child departed.
And we commit her body to the ground,
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Inside the earth
Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear
screams through earth and stone.
Sophie Mol died
because she couldn’t breathe.
Her funeral killed
her. Dus to dat to dat to i/us to i/us. On her tombstone it said
A Sunbeam Lent to Us Too Briefly
Ammu explained later
that Too Briefly meant For Too Short a While.
After the funeral Ammu
took the twins back to the Kottayam police station. They were familiar with the
place. They had spent a good part of the previous day there. Anticipating the
sharp, smoky stink of old urine that permeated the walls and furniture, they
clamped their nostrils shut well before the smell began.
Ammu asked for the
Station House Officer, and when she was shown into his office she told him that
there had been a terrible mistake and that she wanted to make a statement. She
asked to see Velutha.
Inspector Thomas
Mathew’s mustaches bustled like the friendly Air India Maharajah’s, but his
eyes were sly and greedy.
“It’s a little too
late for all this, don’t you think?” he said. He spoke the coarse Kottayam
dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Ammu’s breasts as he spoke. He said the
police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn’t take
statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children. Ammu said she’d see
about that. Inspector Thomas Mathew came around his desk and approached Ammu
with his baton.
“If I were you,” he
said, “I’d go home quietly.” Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently.
Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones
that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know
whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t. Policemen have that instinct.
Behind him a red and
blue board said:
Politeness.
Obedience.
Loyalty.
Intelligence.
Courtesy.
Efficiency.
When they left the
police station Ammu was crying, so Estha and Rahel didn’t ask her what veshya
meant. Or, for that matter, illegitimate. It was the first time they’d seen
their mother cry. She wasn’t sobbing. Her face was set like stone, but the
tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her rigid cheeks. It made the twins
sick with feat Ammu’s tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal,
real. They went back to Ayemenem by bus. The conductor, a narrow man in khaki,
slid towards them on the bus rails. He balanced his bony hips against the back
of a seat and clicked his ticket‑puncher at Ammu. Where to? the click was meant
to mean. Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the
steel bus rails on the conductor’s hands.
“He’s dead,” Ammu
whispered to him. “I’ve killed him.”
“Ayemenem,” Estha said
quickly, before the conductor lost his temper.
He took the money out
of Ammu’s purse. The conductor gave him the tickets. Estha folded them
carefully and put them in his pocket. Then he put his little arms around his
rigid, weeping mother.
Two weeks later, Estha
was Returned. Ammu was made to send him back to their father, who had by then
resigned his lonely tea estate job in Assam and moved to Calcutta to work for a
company that made carbon black. He had remarried, stopped drinking (more or
less) and suffered only occasional relapses.
Estha and Rahel hadn’t
seen each other since.
And now, twenty‑three
years later, their father had re‑Returned Estha. He had sent him back to
Ayemenem with a suitcase and a letter. The suitcase was full of smart new
clothes. Baby Kochamma showed Rahel the letter. It was written in a slanting,
feminine, convent‑school hand, but the signature underneath was their father’s.
Or at least the name was. Rahel wouldn’t have recognized the signature. The
letter said that he, their father, had retired from his carbon‑black job and
was emigrating to Australia, where he had got a job as Chief of Security at a
ceramics factory, and that he couldn’t take Estha with him. He wished everybody
in Ayemenem the very best and said that he would look in on Estha if he ever
came back to India, which, he went on to say, was a bit unlikely.
Baby Kochamma told
Rahel that she could keep the letter if she wanted to. Rahel put it back into
its envelope. The paper had grown soft, and folded like cloth.
She had forgotten just
how damp the monsoon air in Ayemenem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked.
Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers.
Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on
Baby Kochamma’s dim forty‑watt bulbs. In the daytime their crisp, incinerated
corpses littered the floor and windowsills, and until Kochu Maria swept them
away in her plastic dustpan, the air smelled of Something Burning.
It hadn’t changed, the
June Rain.
Heaven opened and the
water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless
pigsty carpet bombing still, tea‑colored puddles the way memory bombs still,
tea‑colored minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms
frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent.
Further away, in the
wind and rain, on the banks of the river, in the sudden thunderdarkness of the
day, Estha was walking. He was wearing a crushed‑strawberry‑pink T‑shirt,
drenched darker now, and he knew that Rahel had come.
Estha had always been
a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly
when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped
talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an “exactly when.”
It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable
quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing
left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never
noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of
estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get
themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha’s case the dry season
looked as though it would last forever.
Over time he had
acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was–into
bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets–to appear inanimate, almost
invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him
even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to
notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very
little space in the world.
After Sophie Mol’s
funeral, when Estha was Returned, their father sent him to a boys’ school in
Calcutta. He was not an exceptional student, but neither was he backward, nor
particularly bad at anything. An average student , or Satisfactory work were the usual comments that his teachers
wrote in his Annual Progress Reports. Does not participate in Group
Activities was another recurring
complaint. Though what exactly they meant by `Group Activities’ they never
said.
Estha finished school
with mediocre results, but refused to go to college. Instead, much to the
initial embarrassment of his father and stepmother, he began to do the
housework. As though in his own way he was trying to earn his keep. He did the
sweeping, swabbing and all the laundry. He learned to cook and shop for
vegetables. Vendors in the bazaar, sitting behind pyramids of oiled, shining
vegetables, grew to recognize him and would attend to him amidst the clamoring
of their other customers. They gave him rusted film cans in which to put the
vegetables he picked. He never bargained. They never cheated him. When the
vegetables had been weighed and paid for, they would transfer them to his red
plastic shopping basket (onions at the bottom, brinjal and tomatoes on the top)
and always a sprig of coriander and a fistful of green chilies for free. Estha
carried them home in the crowded tram. A quiet bubble floating on a sea of
noise.
At mealtimes, when he
wanted something, he got up and helped himself.
Once the quietness
arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded
him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal
heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides
of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old
sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of
the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb.
And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years,
Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that
lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the
reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing
folds of the fact of it.
When Khubchand, his
beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen‑year‑old mongrel, decided to stage
a miserable, long drawn‑out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as
though his own life somehow depended on it. In the last months of his life,
Khubchand, who had the best of intentions but the most unreliable of bladders,
would drag himself to the top‑hinged dog‑flap built into the bottom of the door
that led out into the back garden, push his head through it and urinate unsteadily,
bright yellowly, inside. Then, with bladder empty and conscience clear, he
would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his grizzled skull
like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leaving wet
footprints on the floor. As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see
the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond.
And once a bird that flew across. To Estha–steeped in the smell of old roses,
blooded on memories of a broken man–the fact that something so fragile, so
unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A
bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s balls. It made him smile out loud.
After Khubchand died,
Estha started his walking. He walked for hours on end. Initially he patrolled
only the neighborhood, but gradually went farther and farther afield.
People got used to
seeing him on the road. A well‑dressed man with a quiet walk. His face grew
dark and outdoorsy. Rugged. Wrinkled by the sun. He began to look wiser than he
really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea‑secrets in him.
Now that he’d been re‑Returned,
Estha walked all over Ayemenem.
Some days he walked
along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with
World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered
from fin‑rot and had broken out in boils.
Other days he walked
down the road. Past the new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf‑money houses built by
nurses, masons, wire‑benders and bank clerks, who worked hard and unhappily in
faraway places. Past the resentful older houses tinged green with envy,
cowering in their private driveways among their private rubber trees. Each a
tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own.
He walked past the
village school that his great‑grandfather built for Untouchable children.
Past Sophie Mol’s
yellow church. Past the Ayemenem Youth Kung Fu Club. Past the Tender Buds
Nursery School (for Touchables), past the ration shop that sold rice, sugar and
bananas that hung in yellow bunches from the roof. Cheap soft‑porn magazines
about fictitious South Indian sex‑fiends were clipped with clothes pegs to
ropes that hung from the ceiling. They spun lazily in the warm breeze, tempting
honest ration‑buyers with glimpses of ripe, naked women lying in pools of fake
blood.
Sometimes Estha walked
past Lucky Press –old Comrade K.
N. M. Pillai’s printing press, once the Ayemenem office of the Communist Party,
where midnight study meetings were held, and pamphlets with rousing lyrics of
Marxist Party songs were printed and distributed. The flag that fluttered on
the roof had grown limp and old. The red had bled away.
Comrade Pillai himself
came out in the mornings in a graying Aertex vest, his balls silhouetted
against his soft white mundu. He oiled himself with warm, peppered coconut oil,
kneading his old, loose flesh that stretched willingly off his bones like
chewing gum. He lived alone now. His wife, Kalyani, had died of ovarian cancer.
His son, Lenin, had moved to Delhi, where he worked as a services contractor
for foreign embassies.
If Comrade Pillai was
outside his house oiling himself when Estha walked past, he made it a point to
greet him.
`Estha Mon!” he would
call out, in his high, piping voice, frayed and fibrous now, like sugarcane
stripped of its bark. `Good morning! Your daily constitutional?”
Estha would walk past,
not rude, not polite. Just quiet
Comrade Pillai would
slap himself all over to get his circulation going. He couldn’t tell whether
Estha recognized him after all those years or not. Not that he particularly
cared. Though his part in the whole thing had by no means been a small one,
Comrade Pillai didn’t hold himself in any way personally responsible for what
had happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of
Necessary Politics. The old omelette‑and‑eggs thing. But then, Comrade K. N. M.
Pillai was essentially a political man. A professional omeletteer. He walked
through the world like a chameleon. Never revealing himself, never appearing
not to. Emerging through chaos unscathed.
He was the first
person in Ayemenem to hear of Rahel’s return. The news didn’t perturb him as
much as excite his curiosity. Estha was almost a complete stranger to Comrade
Pillai. His expulsion from Ayemenem had been so sudden and unceremonious, and
so very long ago. But Rahel Comrade Pillai knew well. He had watched her grow
up. He wondered what had brought her back. After all these years.
It had been quiet in
Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of
passing trains, and the light and shade and light and shade that falls on you
if you have a window seat. The world, locked out for years, suddenly flooded
in, and now Estha couldn’t hear himself for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music.
The stock market. A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in a
swirling. Comets, violins, parades, loneliness, clouds, beards, bigots, lists,
flags, earthquakes, despair were all swept up in a scrambled swirling.
And Estha, walking on
the riverbank, couldn’t feel the wetness of the rain, or the sudden shudder of
the cold puppy that had temporarily adopted him and squelched at his side. He
walked past the old mangosteen tree and up to the edge of a laterite spur that
jutted out into the river. He squatted on his haunches and rocked himself in
the rain. The wet mud under his shoes made rude, sucking sounds. The cold puppy
shivered–and watched.
Baby Kochamma and
Kochu Maria, the vinegar‑hearted, short‑tempered, midget cook, were the only
people left in the Ayemenem House when Estha was re‑Returned. Mammachi, their
grandmother, was dead. Chacko lived in Canada now, and ran an unsuccessful
antiques business.
As for Rahel…
After Ammu died (after
the last time she came back to Ayemenem, swollen with cortisone and a rattle in
her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting), Rahel drifted. From school
to school. She spent her holidays in Ayemenem, largely ignored by Chacko and
Mammachi (grown soft with sorrow, slumped in their bereavement like a pair of
drunks in a toddy bar) and largely ignoring Baby Kochamma. In matters related
to the raising of Rahel, Chacko and Mammachi tried, but couldn’t. They provided
the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.
The Loss of Sophie Mol
stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in
books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case. In the scabs of the sores on
Chacko’s shins that he constantly worried. In his slack, womanish legs.
It is curious how
sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of
the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the
seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones
fall like stones from the sky? The
harbinger of harsh reality: You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one. The guru of gore: I’ve seen a man in an
accident with his eyeball twinging on the end of a nerve, like a yo‑yo )
slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always
there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.
It ushered Rahel through childhood (from school to school to school) into
womanhood.
Rahel was first
blacklisted in Nazareth Convent at the age of eleven, when she was caught
outside her Housemistress’s garden gate decorating a knob of fresh cow dung
with small flowers. At Assembly the next morning she was made to look up
depravity in the Oxford Dictionary and read aloud its meaning. “The quality or
condition of being depraved or corrupt,” Rahel read, with a row of sternmouthed
nuns seated behind her and a sea of sniggering schoolgirl faces in front.
“Perverted quality; Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due
to original sin; Both the elect and the non‑elect come into the world in a
state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing
but sin. J. H. Blunt.”
Six months later she
was expelled after repeated complaints from senior girls. She was accused
(quite rightly) of hiding behind doors and deliberately colliding with her
seniors. When she was questioned by the Principal about her behavior (cajoled,
caned, starved), she eventually admitted that she had done it to find out
whether breasts hurt. In that Christian institution, breasts were not
acknowledged. They weren’t supposed to exist (and if they didn’t could they
hurt?).
That was the first of
three expulsions. The second for smoking. The third for setting fire to her
Housemistress’s false‑hair bun, which, under duress, Rahel confessed to having
stolen.
In each of the schools
she went to, the teachers noted that she:
(a) Was an
extremely polite child.
(b) Had no
friends.
It appeared to be a
civil, solitary form of corruption. Arid for this very reason, they all agreed
(savoring their teacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking
it like a sweet) all the more serious.
It was, they whispered
to each other, as though she didn’t know how to be a girl.
They weren’t far off
the mark.
Oddly, neglect seemed
to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.
Rahel grew up without
a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who
would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on
her horizon.
So as long as she
wasn’t noisy about it, she remained free to make her own enquiries: into
breasts and how much they hurt. Into falsehair buns and how well they burned. Into
life and how it ought to be lived.
When she finished
school, she won admission into a mediocre college of architecture in Delhi. It
wasn’t the outcome of any serious interest in architecture. Nor even, in fact,
of a superficial one. She just happened to take the entrance exam, and happened
to get through. The staff were impressed by the size (enormous), rather than
the skill, of her charcoal still‑life sketches. The careless, reckless lines
were mistaken for artistic confidence, though in truth, their creator was no
artist.
She spent eight years
in college without finishing the five‑year undergraduate course and taking her
degree. The fees were low and it wasn’t hard to scratch out a living, staying
in the hostel, eating in the subsidized student mess, rarely going to class,
working instead as a draftsman in gloomy architectural firms that exploited
cheap student labor to render their presentation drawings and to blame when
things went wrong. The other students, particularly the boys, were intimidated
by Rahel’s waywardness and almost fierce lack of ambition. They left her alone.
She was never invited to their nice homes or noisy parties. Even her professors
were a little wary of her–her bizarre, impractical building plans, presented on
cheap brown paper, her indifference to their passionate critiques.
She occasionally wrote
to Chacko and Mammachi, but never returned to Ayemenem. Not when Mammachi died.
Not when Chacko emigrated to Canada.
It was while she was
at the college of architecture that she met Larry McCaslin, who was in Delhi
collecting material for his doctoral thesis on `Energy Efficiency in Vernacular
Architecture.’ He first noticed Rahel in the school library and then again, a
few days later in Khan Market. She was in jeans and a white T‑shirt. Part of an
old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her
like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight, though it wasn’t. A
tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and
a nice athletic run.
There goes a jazz
tune , Larry McCaslin thought
to himself, and followed her into a bookshop, where neither of them looked at
books.
Rahel drifted into
marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport
lounge. With a Sitting Down sense. She returned with him to Boston.
When Larry held his
wife in his arms, her cheek against his heart, he was tall enough to see the
top of her head, the dark tumble of her hair. When he put his finger near the
corner of her mouth he could feel a tiny pulse. He loved its location. And that
faint, uncertain jumping, just under her skin. He would touch it, listening
with his eyes, like an expectant father feeling his unborn baby kick inside its
mother’s womb.
He held her as though
she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably
precious.
But when they made
love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to
someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat
in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.
He was exasperated
because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between
indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country
that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that
personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when
personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent,
circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.
That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God
(cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly
at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he
became resilient and truly indifferent Nothing mattered much. Nothing much
mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never
important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she
came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace,
Worse Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a
hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He
whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative
smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an
exasperating expression.
What Larry McCaslin
saw in Rahel’s eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism.
And a hollow where Estha’s words had been. He couldn’t be expected to
understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the
quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked
spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies. –
After they were
divorced, Rahel worked for a few months as a waitress in an Indian restaurant
in New York. And then for several years as a night clerk in a bullet‑proof
cabin at a gas station outside Washington, where drunks occasionally vomited
into the till, and pimps propositioned her with more lucrative job offers.
Twice she saw men being shot through their car windows. And once a man who had
been stabbed, ejected from a moving car with a knife in his back.
Then Baby Kochamma
wrote to say that Estha had been reReturned. Rahel gave up her job at the gas
station and left America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain.
In the old house on
the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the dining table rubbing the thick, frothy
bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. She was wearing a limp checked
seersucker nightgown with puffed sleeves and yellow turmeric stains. Under the
table she swung her tiny, manicured feet, like a small child on a high chair.
They were puffy with edema, like little foot‑shaped air cushions. In the old
days, whenever anybody visited Ayemenem, Baby Kochamma made it a point to call
attention to their large feet. She would ask to try on their slippers and say,
“Look how big for me they are”. Then she would walk around the house in them,
lifting her sari a little so that everybody could marvel at her tiny feet.
She worked on the
cucumber with an air of barely concealed triumph. She was delighted that Estha
had not spoken to Rahel. That he had looked at her and walked straight past.
Into the rain. As he did with everyone else.
She was eighty‑three.
Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses.
“I told you, didn’t
I?” she said to Rahel. “What did you expect?’ Special treatment? He’s lost his
mind, I’m telling you! He doesn’t recognize people anymore! What did you
think?”
Rahel said nothing.
She could feel the
rhythm of Estha’s rocking, and the wetness of rain on his skin. She could hear
the raucous, scrambled world inside his head.
Baby Kochamma looked
up at Rahel uneasily. Already she regretted having written to her about Estha’s
return. But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the
rest of her life? Why should she? He wasn’t her responsibility.
Or was he?
The silence sat
between grandniece and baby grandaunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen.
Noxious. Baby Kochamma reminded herself to lock her bedroom door at night. She
tried to think of something to say.
“How d’you like my
bob?”
With her cucumber hand
she touched her new haircut. She left a riveting bitter blob of cucumber froth
behind.
Rahel could think of
nothing to say. She watched Baby Kochamma peel her cucumber. Yellow slivers of
cucumber skin flecked her bosom. Her hair, dyed jetbiack, was arranged across
her scalp like unspooled thread. The dye had stained the skin on her forehead a
pale gray, giving her a shadowy second hairline. Rahel noticed that she had
started wearing makeup. Lipstick. Kohl. A sly touch of rouge. And because the
house was locked and dark, and because she only believed in forty‑watt bulbs,
her lipstick mouth had shifted slightly off her real mouth.
She had lost weight on
her face and shoulders, which had turned her from being a round person into a
conical person. But sitting at the dining table, with her enormous hips
concealed, she managed to look almost fragile. The dim, dining‑room light had
rubbed, the wrinkles off her face, leaving it looking‑in a strange, sunken way‑younger.
She was wearing a lot of jewelry. Rahel’s dead grandmother’s jewelry. All of
it. Winking rings. Diamond earrings. Gold bangles and a beautifully crafted
flat gold chain that she touched from time to time, reassuring herself that it
was there and that it was hers. Like a young bride who couldn’t believe her
good fortune.
She’s living her life
backwards, Rahel thought.
It was a curiously apt
observation. Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards. As a young woman she
had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace
it. She hugged it and it hugged her back.
When she was eighteen,
Baby Kochamma fell in love with a handsome young Irish monk, Father Mulligan,
who was in Kerala for a year on deputation from his seminary in Madras. He was
studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.
Every Thursday morning
Father Mulligan came to Ayemenem to visit Baby Kochamma’s father, Reverend E.
John Ipe, who was a priest of the Mar Thoma church. Reverend Ipe was well known
in the Christian community as the man who had been blessed personally by the
Patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of the Syrian Christian Church–an
episode that had become a part of Ayemenem’s folklore.
In 1876, when Baby
Kochamma’s father was seven years old, his father had taken him to see the
Patriarch, who was visiting the Syrian Christians of Kerala. They found
themselves right in front of a group of people whom the Patriarch was
addressing in the westernmost verandah of the Kalleny house, in Cochin. Seizing
his opportunity, his father whispered in his young son’s ear and propelled the
little fellow forward. The future Reverend, skidding on his heels, rigid with
fear, applied his terrified lips to the ring on the Patriarch’s middle finger,
leaving it wet with spit The Patriarch wiped his ring on his sleeve, and
blessed the little boy. Long after he grew up and became a priest, Reverend Ipe
continued to be known as Punnyan Kanj–Little Blessed One–and people came down
the river in boats all the way from Alleppey and Ernakulam, with children to be
blessed by him.
Though there was a
considerable age difference between Father Mulligan and Reverend Ipe, and
though they belonged to different denominations of the Church (whose only
common sentiment was their mutual disaffection), both men enjoyed each other’s
company, and more often than not, Father Mulligan, would be invited to stay for
lunch. Of the two men, only one recognized the sexual excitement that rose like
a tide in the slender girl who hovered around the table long after lunch had
been cleared away.
At first Baby Kochamma
tried to seduce Father Mulligan with weekly exhibitions of staged charity. Every
Thursday morning, just when Father Mulligan was due to arrive, Baby Kochamma
forcebathed a poor village child at the well with hard red soap that hurt its
protruding ribs.
“Morning, Father!”
Baby Kochamma would call out when she saw him, with a smile on her lips that
completely belied the viselike grip that she had on the thin child’s
soapslippery arm.
`Morning to you,
Baby!” Father Mulligan would say, stopping and folding his umbrella.
“There’s something I
wanted to ask you, Father,” Baby Kochamma would say. “In First Corinthians,
chapter ten, verse twenty‑three, it says `All things are lawful unto me, but
all things are not expedient,’ Father, how can all things be lawful unto Him? I
mean I can understand if some things are lawful unto Him, but–”
Father Mulligan was
more than merely flattered by the emotion he aroused in the attractive young
girl who stood before him with a trembling, kissable mouth and blazing, coal‑black
eyes. For he was young too, and perhaps not wholly unaware that the solemn explanations
with which he dispelled her bogus biblical doubts were completely at odds with
the thrilling promise he held out in his effulgent emerald eyes.
Every Thursday,
undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would stand there by the well. The
young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion.
Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.
Invariably, in the
middle of their conversation, the unfortunate soapy child that was being force‑bathed
would manage to slip away, and Father Mulligan would snap back to his senses
and say, `Oops! We’d better catch him before a cold does.”
Then he would reopen
his umbrella and walk away in chocolate robes and comfortable sandals, like a
high‑stepping camel with an appointment to keep. He had young Baby Kochamma’s
aching heart on a leash, bumping behind him, lurching over leaves and small
stones. Bruised and almost broken.
A whole year of
Thursdays went by. Eventually the time came for Father Mulligan to return to
Madras. Since charity had not produced any tangible results, the distraught
young Baby Kochamma invested all her hope in faith.
Displaying a stubborn
single‑mindedness (which in a young girl in those days was considered as bad as
a physical deformity– harelip perhaps, or a clubfoot), Baby Kochamma defied her
father’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic. With special dispensation from the
Vatican, she took her vows and entered a convent in Madras as a trainee novice.
She hoped somehow that this would provide her with legitimate occasion to be
with Father Mulligan. She pictured them together, in dark sepulchral rooms with
heavy velvet drapes, discussing theology. That was all she wanted. All she ever
dared to hope for. Just to be near him. Close enough to smell his beard. To see
the coarse weave of his cassock. To love him just by looking at him.
Very quickly she
realized the futility of this endeavor. She found that the senior sisters
monopolized the priests and bishops with biblical doubts more sophisticated
than hers would ever be, and that it might be years before she got anywhere
near Father Mulligan. She grew restless and unhappy in the convent. She
developed a stubborn allergic rash on her scalp from the constant chafing of
her wimple. She felt she spoke much better English than everybody else. This
made her lonelier than ever.
Within a year of her
joining the convent, her father began to receive puzzling letters from her in
the mail.
My
dearest Papa, I am well and happy in the service of Our Lady. But Koh‑i‑noor
appears to be unhappy and homesick. My dearest Papa, Today Koh‑i‑noor vomited
after lunch and is running a temperature. My dearest Papa, Convent food does
not seem to suit Koh‑i‑noor though I like it well enough. My dearest Papa, Koh‑i‑noor
is upset because her family seems to neither understand nor care about her
wellbeing…
Other than the fact
that it was (at the time) the name of the world’s biggest diamond, Reverend E.
John Ipe knew of no other Koh‑i‑noor. He wondered how a girl with a Muslim name
had ended up in a Catholic convent.
It was Baby Kochamma’s
mother who eventually realized that Koh‑i‑noor was none other than Baby
Kochamma herself. She remembered that long ago she had shown Baby Kochamma a
copy of her father’s (Baby Kochamma’s grandfather’s) will, in which, describing
his grandchildren, he had written: I have seven jewels, one of which is my Koh‑i‑noor.
He went on to bequeath little bits of money and jewelry to each of them, never
clarifying which one he considered his Koh‑i‑noor. Baby Kochamma’s mother
realized that Baby Kochamma, for no reason that she could think of, had assumed
that he had meant her–and all those years later at the convent, knowing that
all her letters were read by the Mother Superior before they were posted, had
resurrected Koh‑i‑noor to communicate her troubles to her family.
Reverend Ipe went to
Madras and withdrew his daughter from the convent. She was glad to leave, but
insisted that she would not reconvert, and for the rest of her days remained a
Roman Catholic. Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had by now developed a
“reputation” and was unlikely to find a husband. He decided that since she
couldn’t have a husband there was no harm in her having an education. So he
made arrangements for her to attend a course of study at the University of
Rochester in America.
Two years later, Baby
Kochamma returned from Rochester with a diploma in Ornamental Gardening, but
more in love with Father Mulligan than ever. There was no trace of the slim,
attractive girl that she had been. In her years at Rochester, Baby Kochamma had
grown extremely large. In fact, let it be said, obese. Even timid little
Chellappen Tailor at Chungam Bridge insisted on charging bush‑shirt rates for
her sari blouses.
To keep her from
brooding, her father gave Baby Kochamma charge of the front garden of the
Ayemenem House, where she raised a fierce, bitter garden that people came all
the way from Kottayam to see.
It was a circular,
sloping patch of ground, with a steep gravel driveway – looping around it. Baby
Kochamma turned it into a lush maze of dwarf hedges, rocks and gargoyles. The
flower she loved the most was the anthurium. Anthurium andraeanum. She had a
collection of them, the “Rubrum,” the “Honeymoon,” and a host of Japanese
varieties. Their single succulent spathes ranged from shades of mottled black
to blood red and glistening orange. Their prominent, stippled spadices always
yellow. In the center of Baby Kochamma’s garden, surrounded by beds of cannae
and phlox, a marble cherub peed an endless silver arc into a shallow pool in
which a single blue lotus bloomed. At each corner of the pool lolled a pink
plaster‑of‑Paris gnome with rosy cheeks and a peaked red cap.
Baby Kochamma spent
her afternoons in her garden. In sari and gum boots. She wielded an enormous
pair of hedge shears in her bright‑orange gardening gloves. Like a lion tamer
she tamed twisting vines and nurtured bristling cacti. She limited bonsai
plants and pampered rare orchids. She waged war on the weather. She tried to
grow edelweiss and Chinese guava.
Every night she
creamed her feet with real cream and pushed back the cuticles on her toe‑nails.
Recently, after
enduring more than half a century of relentless, pernickety attention, the
ornamental garden had been abandoned. Left to its own devices, it had grown
knotted and wild, like a circus whose animals had forgotten their tricks. The
weed that people call Communist Patcha (because it flourished in Kerala like
Communism) smothered the more exotic plants. Only the vines kept growing, like
toe‑nails on a corpse. They reached through the nostrils of the pink plaster
gnomes and blossomed in their hollow heads, giving them an expression half
surprised, half sneeze‑coming.
The reason for this
sudden, unceremonious dumping was a new love. Baby Kochamma had installed a
dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in
her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this
engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that
happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football,
sex, music, coups d’etat–they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked
together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the
loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque
massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so, while
her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed American NBA
league games, one‑day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, On
weekdays she watched The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara , where brittle
blondes with lipstick and hairstyles rigid with spray seduced androids and
defended their sexual empires. Baby Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the
smart, bitchy repartee. During the day, disconnected snatches of it came back
to her and made her chuckle.
Kochu Maria, the cook,
still wore the thick gold earrings that had disfigured her earlobes forever.
She enjoyed the WWF Wrestling Mania shows, where Hulk Hogan and Mr. Perfect,
whose necks were wider than their heads, wore spangled Lycra leggings and beat
each other up brutally. Kochu Maria’s laugh had that slightly cruel ring to it
that young children’s sometimes, have.
All day they sat in
the drawing room, Baby Kochamma on the long‑armed planter’s chair or the chaise
longue (depending on the condition of her feet), Kochu Maria next to her on the
floor (channel surfing when she could), locked together in a noisy television
silence. One’s hair snow white, the other’s dyed coal black. They entered all
the contests, availed themselves of all the discounts that were advertised and
had, on two occasions, won a T‑shirt and a thermos flask that Baby Kochamma
kept locked away in her cupboard.
Baby Kochamma loved
the Ayemenem house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by
outliving everybody else. Mammachi’s violin and violin stand, the Ooty
cupboards, the plastic basket chairs, the Delhi beds, the dressing table from
Vienna with cracked ivory knobs. The rosewood dining table that Velutha made.
She was frightened by
the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel
surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist‑Leninist menace had
been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate
and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as
direct threats to her furniture.
She kept her doors and
windows locked, unless she was using them. She used her windows for specific
purposes. For a Breath of Fresh Air. To Pay for the Milk. To Let Out a Trapped
Wasp (which Kochu Maria was made to chase around the house with a towel).
She even locked her
sad, paint‑flaking fridge, where she kept her week’s supply of cream buns that Kochu
Maria brought her from Bestbakery in Kottayam. And the two bottles of rice
water that she drank instead of ordinary water. On the shelf below the baffle
tray, she kept what was left of Mammachi’s willow‑pattern dinner service.
She put the dozen or
so bottles of insulin that Rahel brought her in the cheese and butter
compartment. She suspected that these days, even the innocent and the round‑eyed
could be crockery crooks, or cream‑bun cravers, or thieving diabetics cruising
Ayemenem for imported insulin.
She didn’t even trust
the twins. She deemed them Capable of Anything. Anything at all. They might
even steal their present back she thought,–and realized with a pang how quickly
she had reverted to thinking of them as though they were a single unit once
again. After all those years. Determined not to let the past creep up on her,
she altered her thought at once. She. She might steal her present back.
She looked at Rahel
standing at the dining table and noticed the same eerie stealth, the ability to
keep very still and very quiet that Estha seemed to have mastered. Baby
Kochamma was a little intimidated by Rahel’s quietness.
“So!” she said, her
voice shrill, faltering. `What are your plans? How long will you be staying?
Have you decided?”
Rahel tried to say
something. It came our jaded. Like a piece of tin. She walked to the window and
opened it. For a Breath of Fresh Air.
“Shut it when you’ve
finished with it,” Baby Kochamma said, and closed her face like a cupboard.
You couldn’t see the
river from the window anymore.
You could, until
Mammachi had had the back verandah closed in with Ayemenem’s first sliding‑folding
door. The oil portraits of Reverend E. John Ipe and Aleyooty Ammachi (Estha and
Rahel’s great‑grandparents) were taken down from the back verandah and put up
in the front one.
They hung there now,
the Little Blessed One and his wife, on either side of the stuffed, mounted
bison head.
Reverend Ipe smiled
his confident‑ancestor smile out across the road instead of the river.
Aleyooty Ammachi
looked more hesitant. As though she would have liked to turn around but
couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t as easy for her to abandon the river. With her eyes
she looked in the direction that her husband looked. With her heart she looked
away. Her heavy, dull gold kunukku earrings (tokens of the Little Blessed One’s
Goodness) had stretched her earlobes and hung all the way down to her
shoulders. Through the holes in her ears you could see the hot river and the
dark trees that bent into it. And the fishermen in their boats. And the fish.
Though you couldn’t
see the river from the house anymore, like a seashell always has a sea‑sense,
the Ayemenem House still had a river‑sense.
A rushing, rolling,
fishswimming sense.
From the dining‑room
window where she stood, with the wind in her hair, Rahel could see the rain
drum down on the rusted tin roof of what used to be their grandmother’s pickle
factory
Paradise Pickles &
Preserves.
It lay between the
house and the river.
They used to make
pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam
(illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because
according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for
jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they
said.
As per their books.
Looking back now, to
Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with
classification ran much deeper than the jam‑jelly question.
Perhaps Ammu, Estha
and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It was the
others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden
territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved
and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles
uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
It was a time when
uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the
unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
Even before Sophie
Mol’s funeral, the police found Velutha.
His arms had
goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin. Cold handcuffs with a
sourmetal smell. Like steel bus rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s
hands from holding them.
After it was all over,
Baby Kochamma said, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” As though she had had
nothing to do with the Sowing and the Reaping. She returned on her small feet
to her cross‑stitch embroidery. Her little toes never touched the floor. It was
her idea that Estha be Returned.
Margaret Kochamma’s
grief and bitterness at her daughter’s death coiled inside her like an angry
spring. She said nothing, but slapped Estha whenever she could in the days she
was there before she returned to England.
Rahel watched Ammu
pack Estha’s little trunk.
“Maybe they’re right,”
Ammu’s whisper said. “Maybe a boy does need a Baba.” Rahel saw that her eyes
were a redly dead.
They consulted a Twin
Expert in Hyderabad. She wrote back to say that it was not advisable to separate
monozygotic twins, but that two‑egg twins were no different from ordinary
siblings and that while they would certainly suffer the natural distress that
children from broken homes underwent, it would be nothing more than that.
Nothing out of the
ordinary.
And so Estha was
Returned in a train with his tin trunk and his beige and pointy shoes rolled
into his khaki holdall. First class, overnight on the Madras Mail to Madras and
then with a friend of their father’s from Madras to Calcutta.
He had a tiffin carrier
with tomato sandwiches. And an Eagle flask with an eagle. He had terrible
pictures in his head.
Rain. Rushing, inky
water. And a smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
But worst of all, he
carried inside him the memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The
memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside‑down smile. Of a spreading pool
of clear liquid with a bare bulb reflected in it. Of a bloodshot eye that had
opened, wandered and then fixed its gaze on him. Estha. And what had Estha
done? He had looked into that beloved face and said: Yes.
Yes, it was him.
The word Estha’s
octopus couldn’t get at: Yes. Hoovering didn’t seem to help. It was lodged
there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars. That
couldn’t be worried loose.
In a purely practical
sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol
came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few
dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do,
those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house‑the charred
clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture– must be resurrected from
the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
Little events,
ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly
they become the bleached bones of a story.
Still, to say that it
all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.
Equally, it could be
argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists
came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency before Vasco
da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple‑robed
Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with
coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled
beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a
boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began
in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be
loved, and how.
And how much.
However, for practical
purposes, in a hopelessly practical world…
Chapter 2.
Pappachi’s Moth
…it was a skyblue day
in December sixty‑nine (the nineteen silent). It was the kind of time in the
life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its
resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear
view. For everyone to see.
A skyblue Plymouth,
with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice fields and old rubber trees
on its way to Cochin. Further east, in a small country with similar landscape
(jungles, rivers, rice fields, Communists), enough bombs were being dropped to
cover all of it in six inches of steel. Here however it was peacetime and the
family in the Plymouth traveled without fear or foreboding.
The Plymouth used to
belong to Pappachi, Rahel and Estha’s grandfather. Now that he was dead, it
belonged to Mammachi, their grandmother, and Rahel and Estha were on their way
to Cochin to see The Sound of Music
for the third time. They knew all the songs.
After that they were
all going to stay at Hotel Sea Queen with the oldfood smell. Bookings had been
made. Early next morning they would go to Cochin Airport to pick up Chacko’s ex‑wife‑their
English aunt, Margaret Kochamma‑and their cousin, Sophie Mol, who were coming
from London to spend Christmas at Ayemenem. Earlier that year, Margaret
Kochamma’s second husband, Joe, had been killed in a car accident. When Chacko
heard about the accident he invited them to Ayemenem. He said that he couldn’t
bear to think of them spending a lonely, desolate Christmas in England. In a
house full of memories.
Ammu said that Chacko
had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to
believe that he had never loved her in the first place.
Rahel and Estha had
never met Sophie Mol. They’d heard a lot about her though, that last week. From
Baby Kochamma, from Kochu Maria, and even Mammachi. None of them had met her
either, but they all behaved as though they already knew her. It had been the
What Will Sophie Mol Think week.
That whole week Baby
Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations, and
whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which
was deducted at source. From their pocket money. She made them write lines–
“impositions” she called them–I will always speak in English, I will always
speak in English. A hundred times each. When they were done, she scored them
out with her red pen to make sure that old lines were not recycled for new
punishments.
She had made them
practice an English car song for the way back. They had to form the words
properly, and be particularly careful about their pronunciation. Prer NUN sea
ayshun.
ReJ‑Oice in the Lo‑Ord Or‑Orhvays
And again I say rej‑Oice,
RejOice,
RejOice,
And again I say rej‑Oice.
Estha’s full name was
Esthappen Yako. Rahel’s was Rahel. For the Time Being they had no surname
because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that
choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman
much of a choice.
Estha was wearing his
beige and pointy shoes and his Elvis puff. His Special Outing Puff. His
favorite Elvis song was “Party.” “Some people like to rock, some people like to
roll,” he would croon, when nobody was watching, strumming a badminton racquet,
curling his lip like Elvis. “Bat moonin’ an’ a groonin’ gonna satisfy mah soul,
less have apardy…”
Estha had slanting,
sleepy eyes and his new front teeth were still uneven on the ends. Rahel’s new
teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen. It puzzled everybody
that an eighteenminute age difference could cause such a discrepancy in
fronttooth timing.
Most of Rahel’s hair
sat on top of her head like a fountain. It was held together by a Love‑in‑Tokyo–two
beads on a rubber band, nothing to do with Love or Tokyo. In Kerala, Love‑in‑Tokyos
have withstood the test of time, and even today if you were to ask for one at
any respectable All Ladies’ Store, that’s what you’d get. Two beads on a rubber
band.
Rahel’s toy wristwatch
had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch
on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to
her was what Time was meant for in the first place). Her yellow‑rimmed red
plastic sunglasses made the world look red. Ammu said that they were bad for
her eyes and had advised her to wear them as seldom as possible.
Her Airport Frock was
in Ammu’s suitcase. It had special matching knickers.
Chacko was driving. He
was four years older than Ammu. Rahel and Estha couldn’t call him Chachen
because when they did, he called them Chetan and Cheduthi. If they called him
Ammaven, he called them Appoi and Ammai. If they called him Uncle, he called
them Aunty–which was embarrassing in Public. So they called him Chacko.
Chacko’s room was
stacked from floor to ceiling with books. He had read them all and quoted long
passages from them for no apparent reason. Or at least none that anyone else
could fathom. For instance, that morning, as they drove out through the gate,
shouting their good‑byes to Mammachi in the verandah, Chacko suddenly said:
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul
dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows and short‑winded elations of men.”
Everyone was so used
to it that they didn’t bother to nudge each other or exchange glances. Chacko
had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and
eccentricities nobody else was.
He claimed to be
writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to
publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit
candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.
Of course that was
then. Before the Terror.
In the Plymouth, Ammu
was sitting in front, next to Chacko. She was twenty‑seven that year, and in
the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that, for her, life had
been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong
man.
Ammu finished her
schooling the same year that her father retired from his job in Delhi and moved
to Ayemenem. Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary
expense for a girl, so Ammu had no choice but to leave Delhi and move with
them. There was very little for a young girl to do in Ayemenem other than to
wait for marriage proposals while she helped her mother with the housework.
Since her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry, no
proposals came Ammu’s way. Two years went by. Her eighteenth birthday came and
went. Unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon by her parents. Ammu grew
desperate. All day she dreamed of escaping from Ayemenem and the clutches of
her ill‑tempered father and bitter, long‑suffering mother. She hatched several
wretched little plans. Eventually, one worked. Pappachi agreed to let her spend
the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta.
There, at someone
else’s wedding reception, Ammu met her future husband.
He was on vacation
from his job in Assam, where he worked as an assistant manager of a tea estate.
His family were once‑wealthy zamindars who had migrated to Calcutta from East
Bengal after Partition.
He was a small man,
but well built. Pleasant‑looking. He wore old‑fashioned spectacles that made
him look earnest and completely belied his easygoing charm and juvenile but
totally disarming sense of humor. He was twenty‑five and had already been
working on the tea estates for six years. He hadn’t been to college, which
accounted for his schoolboy humor. He proposed to Ammu five days after they
first met Ammu didn’t pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds
and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than
returning to Ayemenem. She wrote to her parents informing them of her decision.
They didn’t reply.
Ammu had an elaborate
Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the
slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had not been love, or even
excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs
of whiskey. Straight. Neat.
Ammu’s father‑in‑law
was Chairman of the Railway Board and had a Boxing Blue from Cambridge. He was
the Secretary of the BABA–the Bengal Amateur Boxing Association. He gave the
young couple a custom‑painted, powder‑pink Fiat as a present which after the
wedding he drove off in himself, with all the jewelry and most of the other
presents that they had been given. He died before the twins were born–on the
operating table, while his gallbladder was being removed. His cremation was
attended by all the boxers in Bengal. A congregation of mourners with lantern
jaws and broken noses.
When Ammu and her
husband moved to Assam, Ammu, beautiful, young and cheeky, became the toast of
the Planters’ Club. She wore backless blouses with her saris and carried a
silver lam‚ purse on a chain. She smoked long cigarettes in a silver cigarette
holder and learned to blow perfect smoke rings. Her husband turned out to be
not just a heavy drinker but a full‑blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic’s
deviousness and tragic charm. There were things about him that Ammu never
understood. Long after she left him, she never stopped wondering why he lied so
outrageously when he didn’t need to. Particularly when he didn’t need to. In a
conversation with friends he would talk about how much he loved smoked salmon
when Ammu knew he hated it. Or he would come home from the club and tell Ammu
that he saw Meet Me in St. Louis
when they’d actually screened The Bronze Buckaroo . When she confronted
him about these things, he never explained or apologized. He just giggled,
exasperating Ammu to a degree she never thought herself capable of.
Ammu was eight months
pregnant when war broke out with China. It was October of 1962. Planters’ wives
and children were evacuated from Assam. Ammu, too pregnant to travel, remained
on the estate. In November, after a hair‑raising, bumpy bus ride to Shillong,
amidst rumors of Chinese occupation and India’s impending defeat, Estha and
Rahel were born. By candlelight. In a hospital with the windows blacked out.
They emerged without much fuss, within eighteen minutes of each other. Two
little ones, instead of one big one. Twin seals, slick with their mother’s
juices. Wrinkled with the effort of being born. Ammu checked them for
deformities before she closed her eyes and slept. She counted four eyes, four
ears, two mouths, two noses, twenty fingers and twenty perfect toe‑nails.
She didn’t notice the
single Siamese soul. She was glad to have them. Their father, stretched out on
a hard bench in the hospital corridor, was drunk.
By the time the twins
were two years old their father’s drinking, aggravated by the loneliness of tea
estate life, had driven him into an alcoholic stupor. Whole days went by during
which he just lay in bed and didn’t go to work. Eventually, his English
manager, Mr. Hollick, summoned him to his bungalow for a “serious chat.”
Ammu sat in the
verandah of her home waiting anxiously for her husband to return. She was sure
the only reason that Hollick wanted to see him was to sack him. She was
surprised when he returned looking despondent but not devastated. Mr. Hollick
had proposed something, he told Ammu, that he needed to discuss with her. He
began a little diffidently, avoiding her gaze, but he gathered courage as he
went along. Viewed practically, in the long run it was a proposition that would
benefit both of them, he said. In fact all of them, if they considered the
children’s education.
Mr. Hollick had been
frank with his young assistant. He informed him of the complaints he had
received from the labor as well as from the other assistant managers.
“I’m afraid I have no
option,” he said, “but to ask for your resignation.”
He allowed the silence
to take its toll. He allowed the pitiful man sitting across the table to begin
to shake. To weep. Then Hollick spoke again.
“Well, actually there
may be an option… perhaps we could work something out. Think positive, is what
I always say. Count your blessings.” Hollick paused to order a pot of black
coffee.
“You’re a very lucky
man, you know, wonderful family, beautiful children, such an attractive wife…”
He lit a cigarette and allowed the match to burn until he couldn’t hold it
anymore. “An extremely attractive wife…”
The weeping stopped.
Puzzled brown eyes looked into lurid, red‑veined, green ones. Over coffee Mr.
Hollick proposed that Baba go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic
perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the
period of time that he was away, Mr. Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his
bungalow to be “looked after.”
Already there were a
number of ragged, lightskinned children on the estate that Hollick had
bequeathed on tea‑pickers whom he fancied. This was his first incursion into
management circles.
Ammu watched her
husband’s mouth move as it formed words. She said nothing. He grew
uncomfortable and then infuriated by her silence. Suddenly he lunged at her,
grabbed her hair, punched her and then passed out from the effort. Ammu took
down the heaviest book she could find in the bookshelf–The Reader’s Digest
World Atlas ,–and hit him with it as hard as she could. On his head. His
legs. His back and shoulders. When he regained consciousness, he was puzzled by
his bruises. He apologized abjectly for the violence, but immediately began to
badger her about helping with his transfer. This fell into a pattern. Drunken
violence followed by postdrunken badgering. Ammu was repelled by the medicinal
smell of stale alcohol that seeped through his skin, and the dry, caked vomit
that encrusted his mouth like a pie every morning. When his bouts of violence
began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her
husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem. To everything
that she had fled from only a few years ago. Except that now she had two young
children. And no more dreams.
Pappachi would not
believe her story–not because he thought well of her husband, but simply
because he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet
another man’s wife.
Ammu loved her
children (of course), but their wide‑eyed vulnerability and their willingness
to love people who didn’t really love them exasperated her and sometimes made
her want to hurt them–just as an education, a protection.
It was as though the
window through which their father disappeared had been kept open for anyone to
walk in and be welcomed.
To Ammu, her twins
seemed like a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other’s company,
lolloping arm in arm down a highway full of hurtling traffic. Entirely
oblivious of what trucks can do to frogs. Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her
watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand
her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.
For herself–she knew
that there would be no more chances. There was only Ayemenem now. A front
verandah and a back verandah. A hot river and a pickle factory.
And in the background,
the constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval.
Within the first few
months of her return to her parents’ home, Ammu quickly learned to recognize
and despise the ugly face of sympathy. Old female relations with incipient
beards and several wobbling chins made overnight trips to Ayemenem to
commiserate with her about her divorce. They squeezed her knee and gloated. She
fought off the urge to slap them. Or twiddle their nipples. With a spanner.
Like Chaplin in Modern Times .
When she looked at
herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her
was someone else. A foolish jeweled bride. Her silk sunset‑colored sari shot
with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her
arched eyebrows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist
into a small, bitter smile at the memory‑not of the wedding itself so much as
the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before
being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing
firewood.
She went to the
village goldsmith and had her heavy wedding ring melted down and made into a
thin bangle with snake heads that she put away for Rahel.
Ammu knew that
weddings were not something that could be avoided altogether. At least not practically
speaking. But for the rest of her life she advocated small weddings in ordinary clothes. It made them less ghoulish, she
thought
Occasionally, when
Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside
her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like
a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something
restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the
morality of motherhood and divorcehood. Even her walk changed from a safe
mother‑walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and
carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the
riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She
smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
What was it that gave
Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had
battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood
and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her,
and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. To
use by night the boat that her children used by day. The boat that Estha sat
on, and Rahel found.
On the days that the
radio played Ammu’s songs, everyone was a little wary of her. They sensed
somehow that she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond
the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had
little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the
radio played Ammu’s songs, people avoided her, made little loops around her,
because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.
On other days she had
deep dimples when she smiled.
She had a delicate,
chiseled face, black eyebrows angled like a soaring seagull’s wings, a small
straight nose and luminous, nutbrown skin. On that skyblue December day, her
wild, curly hair had escaped in wisps in the car wind. Her shoulders in her
sleeveless sari blouse shone as though they had been polished with a high‑wax
shoulder polish. Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and
Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn’t
On the backseat of the
Plymouth, between Estha and Rahel, sat Baby Kochamma. Ex‑nun, and incumbent
baby grandaunt. In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co‑unfortunate,
Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered them doomed, fatherless
wail. Worse still, they were Half‑Hindu Hybrids whom no self‑respecting Syrian
Christian would ever marry. She was keen for them to realize that they (like
herself) lived on sufferance in the Ayemenem House, their maternal
grandmother’s house, where they really had no right to be. Baby Kochamma
resented Ammu, because she saw her quarreling with a fate that she, Baby
Kochamma herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched
Man‑less woman. The sad, Father Mulligan‑less Baby Kochamma. She had managed to
persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan
had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right
thing.
She subscribed
wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no
position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter‑according to Baby Kochamma,
she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love
marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a
divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage–Baby Kochamma chose to
remain quiveringly silent on the subject.
The twins were too
young to understand all this, so Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of
high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their
palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they
found an egg hot from a hen. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they
drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the
very least.
On the way back from
the airport, Margaret Kochamma would sit in front with Chacko because she used
to be his wife. Sophie Mol would sit between them. Ammu would move to the back.
There would be two
flasks of water. Boiled water for Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol, tap water
for everybody else.
The luggage would be
in the boot.
Rahel thought that boot was a lovely word. A much better word, at any
rate, than sturdy . Sturdy
was a terrible word. Like a dwarf’s name. Sturdy Kosby Oommen–a
pleasant, middle‑class, God‑fearing dwarf with low knees and a side parting.
On the Plymouth roof
rack there was a four‑sided, tin‑lined, plywood billboard that said, on all
four sides, in elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves .
Below the writing there were painted bottles of mixed‑fruit jam and hot‑lime
pickle in edible oil, with labels that said, in elaborate writing, Paradise
Pickles & Preserves .
Next to the bottles
there was a list of all the Paradise products and a kathakali dancer with his
face green and skirts swirling. Along the bottom of the S‑shaped swirl of his
billowing skirt, it said, in an S‑shaped swirl, Emperors of the Realm of
Taste– which was Comrade K. N. M.
Pillai’s unsolicited contribution. It was a literal translation of Ruchi
lokatbinde Rayivu , which sounded a little less ludicrous than Emperors
of the Realm of Taste . But since Comrade Pillai had already printed them,
no one had the heart to ask him to redo the whole print order. So, unhappily, Emperors
of the Realm of Taste became a
permanent feature on the Paradise Pickle labels.
Ammu said that the
kathakali dancer was a Red Herring and had nothing to do with anything. Chacko
said that it gave the products a Regional Flavor and would stand them in good
stead–when they entered the Overseas Market.
Ammu said that the
billboard made them look ridiculous. Like a traveling circus. With tailfins.
Mammachi had started
making pickles commercially soon after Pappachi retired from Government service
in Delhi and came to live in Ayemenem. The Kottayam Bible Society was having a
fair and asked Mammachi to make some of her famous banana jam and tender mango
pickle. It sold quickly, and Mammachi found that she had more orders than she
could cope with. Thrilled with her success, she decided to persist with the
pickles and jam, and soon found herself busy all year round. Pappachi, for his
part, was having trouble coping with the ignominy of retirement. He was
seventeen years older than Mammachi, and realized with a shock that he was an
old man when his wife was still in her prime.
Though Mammachi had
conical corneas and was already practically blind, Pappachi would not help her
with the pickle‑making because he did not consider pickle‑making a suitable job
for a highranking ex‑Government official. He had always been a jealous man, so
he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting. He slouched
about the compound in his immaculately tailored suits, weaving sullen circles
around mounds of red chilies and freshly powdered yellow turmeric, watching
Mammachi supervise the buying, the weighing, the salting and drying, of limes
and tender mangoes. Every night he beat her with a brass flower vase. The
beatings weren’t new. What was new was only the frequency with which they took
place. One night Pappachi broke the bow of Mammachi’s violin and threw it in
the river.
Then Chacko came home
for a summer vacation from Oxford. He had grown to be a big man, and was, in
those days, strong from rowing for Balliol. A week after he arrived he found
Pappachi beating Mammachi in the study. Chacko strode into the room, caught
Pappachi’s vase‑hand and twisted it around his back.
“I never want this to
happen again,” he told his father. “Ever.”
For the rest of that
day Pappachi sat in the verandah and stared stonily out at the ornamental
garden, ignoring the plates of food that Kochu Maria brought him. Late at night
he went into his study and brought out his favorite mahogany rocking chair. He
put it down in the middle of the driveway and smashed it into little bits with
a plumber’s monkey wrench. He left it there in the moonlight, a heap of
varnished wicker and splintered wood. He never touched Mammachi again. But he
never spoke to her either as long as he lived. When he needed anything he used
Kochu Maria or Baby Kochamma as intermediaries.
In the evenings, when
he knew visitors were expected, he would sit on the verandah and sew buttons
that weren’t missing onto his shirts, to create the impression that Mammachi
neglected him. To some small degree he did succeed in further corroding
Ayemenem’s view of working wives.
He bought the skyblue
Plymouth from an old Englishman in Munnar. He became a familiar sight in
Ayemenem, coasting importantly down the narrow road in his wide car looking
outwardly elegant but sweating freely inside his woolen suits. He wouldn’t allow
Mammachi or anyone else in the family to use it, or even to sit in it. The
Plymouth was Pappachi’s revenge.
Pappachi had been an
Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute. After Independence, when the
British left, his designation was changed from Imperial Entomologist to Joint
Director, Entomology The year he retired, he had risen to a rank equivalent to
Director.
His life’s greatest
setback was not having had the moth that be had discovered named after him.
It fell into his drink
one evening while he was sitting in the verandah of a rest house after a long
day in the field. As he picked it out he noticed its unusually dense dorsal
tufts. He took a closer look. With growing excitement he mounted it, measured
it and the next morning placed it in the sun for a few hours for the alcohol to
evaporate. Then he caught the first train back to Delhi. To taxonomic attention
and, he hoped, fame. After six unbearable months of anxiety, to Pappachi’s
intense disappointment he was told that his moth had finally been identified as
a slightly unusual race of a well‑known species that belonged to the tropical
family Lymantriidae.
The real blow came
twelve years later, when, as a consequence of a radical taxonomic reshuffle,
lepidopterists decided that Pappachi’s moth was in fact a separate species and genus hitherto
unknown to science. By then, of course, Pappachi had retired and moved to
Ayemenem. It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His
moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a
junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.
In the years to come,
even though he had been ill‑humored long before he discovered the moth,
Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of
temper. Its pernicious ghost–gray, furry and with unusually dense dorsal
tufts–haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his
children and his children’s children.
Until the day he died,
even in the stifling Ayemenem heat, every single day Pappachi wore a well‑pressed
three‑piece suit and his gold pocket watch. On his dressing table, next to his
cologne and silver hairbrush, he kept a picture–of himself as a young man, with
his hair slicked down, taken in a photographer’s studio in Vienna, where he had
done the six‑month diploma course that had qualified him to apply for the post
of Imperial Entomologist. It was during those few months they spent in Vienna
that Mammachi took her first lessons on the violin. The lessons were abruptly
discontinued when Mammachi’s teacher Launsky‑Tieffenthal made the mistake of
telling Pappachi that his wife was exceptionally talented and in his opinion,
potentially concert class.
Mammachi pasted, in
the family photograph album, the clipping from the Indian Express that reported Pappachi’s death. It said:
Noted entomologist
Shri Benaan John Ipe, son of late Rev. E. John Ipe of Ayemenem (popularly known
as Punnyan Kunju ), suffered a massive heart attack and passed away at
the Kottayam General Hospital last night. He developed chest pains around 1:05
AM, and was rushed to hospital. The end came at 2:45 A.M. Shri Ipe had been
keeping indifferent health since last six months. He is survived by his wife
Soshamma and two children.
At Pappachi’s funeral,
Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the
twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because
she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory,
and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings
were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get
used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with
brass vases were the least of them.
After the funeral
Mammachi asked Rahel to help her to locate and remove her contact lenses with
the little orange pipette that came in its own case. Rahel asked Mammachi
whether, after Mammachi died, she could inherit the pipette. Ammu took her out
of the room and smacked her.
“I never want to hear
you discussing people’s deaths with them again,” she said.
Estha said Rahel
deserved it for being so insensitive.
The photograph of
Pappachi in Vienna, with his hair slicked down, was reframed and put up in the
drawing room.
He was a photogenic
man, dapper and carefully groomed, with a little man’s largish head. He had an
incipient second chin that would have been emphasized had he looked down or
nodded. In the photograph he had taken care to hold his head high enough to hide
his double chin, yet not so high as to appear haughty. His lightbrown eyes were
polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the
photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on
the center of his upper lip that drooped down over his lower lip in a sort of
effeminate pout–the kind that children who suck their thumbs develop. He had an
elongated dimple on his chin, which only served to underline the threat of a
lurking manic violence. A sort of contained cruelty. He wore khaki jodhpurs
though he had never ridden a horse in his life. His riding boots reflected the
photographer’s studio lights. An ivory‑handled riding crop lay neatly across
his lap.
There was a watchful
stillness to the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in
which it hung.
When he died, Pappachi
left trunks full of expensive suits and a chocolate box full of cuff‑links that
Chacko distributed among the taxi drivers in Kottayam. They were separated and
made into rings and pendants for unmarried daughters’ dowries.
When the twins asked
what cuff‑links were for–”To link cuffs together,” Ammu told them–they were
thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical
language. Cuff + link = cuff‑link . This, to them, rivaled the precision
and logic of mathematics. Cuff‑links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated)
satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
Ammu said that
Pappachi was an incurable British‑CCP, which was short for chhi‑chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit‑wiper. Chacko said
that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel
and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic
Dictionary . It said: Person well disposed to the English . Then
Estha and Rahel had to look up dispose.
It said:
(1) Place
suitably in particular order.
(2) Bring
mind into certain state.
(3) Do what
one will with, get off one’s bands, stow away, demolish, finish, r~ settle,
consume (food), kill, sell.
Chacko said that in
Pappachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said,
meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a state which made him like
the English.
Chacko told the twins
that, though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a
family of Anglophiles. Pointed in
the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace
their steps–because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them
that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And
ancestors whispering inside.
“To understand
history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying.
And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”
Estha and Rahel had no
doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river,
in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari
Saibu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had “gone native.” Who spoke
Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of
Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago, when his young
lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school. After
the suicide, the property had become the subject of extensive litigation
between Kari Saibu’s cook and his secretary. The house had lain empty for
years. Very few people had seen it. But the twins could picture it
The History House.
With cool stone floors
and dim walls and billowing ship‑shaped shadows. Plump, translucent lizards
lived behind old pictures, and waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe‑nails
and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers.
“But we can’t go in,”
Chacko explained, “because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through
the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is
a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have
been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of
war. A war that captures dreams and re‑dreams them. A war that has made us
adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
“Marry our conquerors, is more like it,” Ammu said
dryly, referring to Margaret Kochamma. Chacko ignored her. He made the twins
look up Despise . It said: To look down upon; to view with contempt,
to scorn or disdain.
Chacko said that in
the context of the war he was talking about–the War of Dreams–Despise meant all those things.
“We’re Prisoners of
War,” Chacko said. “Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail
unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will
never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough.
Our lives never important enough. To matter.”
Then, to give Estha
and Rahel a sense of Historical Perspective (though Perspective was something
which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them
about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth‑four thousand six
hundred million years old‑was a forty‑six‑year‑old woman‑as old, say, as
Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of
the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to
part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko
said, when the first single‑celled organisms appeared. The first animals,
creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was
over forty‑five‑just eight months ago‑when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
“The whole of human
civilization as we know it,” Chacko told the twins, “began only two hours ago
in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to
Cochin.”
It was an awe‑inspiring
and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling
along without a care in the world ), that the whole of contemporary history
the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature,
philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge‑was no more than a blink of the Earth
Woman’s eye.
“And we, my dears,
everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,” Chacko said
grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
When he was in this
sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church‑feeling.
He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he
didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called
them his Oxford Moods.
Later, in the light of
all that happened, twinkle seemed completely the wrong word to describe the
expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy
edges.
Though the Earth Woman
made a lasting impression on the twins, it was the History House–so much closer
at hand–that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on
the other side of the river.
Looming in the Heart
of Darkness.
A house they couldn’t
enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand.
They didn’t know then
that soon they would go in. That they would cross the river and be where they
weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they
would watch with dinner‑plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the
back verandah.
While other children
of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history
negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They
heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.
Like old roses on a
breeze.
It would lurk forever
in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain
colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the
emptiness in eyes.
They would grow up
grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell
themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just
a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse
Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.
Chacko said that going
to see The Sound of Music was an
extended exercise in Anglophilia.
Ammu said, “Oh come
on, the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music . It’s a World Hit.”
“Nevertheless, my
dear,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice, `Never. The. Less.”
Mammachi often said
that Chacko was easily one of the cleverest men in India. “According to whom?”
Ammu would say. “On what basis?” Mammachi loved to tell the story (Chacko’s
story) of how one of the dons at Oxford had said that in his opinion, Chacko
was brilliant, and made of prime ministerial material.
To this, Ammu always
said “Hal Ha! Ha!” like people in the comics. She said:
(a)Going to Oxford
didn’t necessarily make a person clever.
(b)Cleverness didn’t
necessarily make a good prime minister.
(c)If a person
couldn’t even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run
a whole country?
And, most important of
all:
(d)All Indian mothers
are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
Chacko said:
(a)You don’t go to
Oxford. You read at Oxford.
And
(b)After reading at Oxford you come down .
“Down to earth, d’you
mean?” Ammu would ask. “That you definitely do. Like your famous airplanes.”
Ammu said that the sad
but entirely predictable fate of Chacko’s airplanes was an impartial measure of
his abilities.
Once a month (except
during the monsoons), a parcel would arrive for Chacko by VPP. It always
contained a balsa aeromodeling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and
ten days to assemble the aircraft, with its tiny fuel tank and motorized
propeller. When it was ready, he would rake Estha and Rahel to the rice fields
in Nattakom to help him fly it. It never flew for more than a minute. Month
after month, Chacko’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen
paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained retrievers,
to salvage the remains.
A tail, a tank, a
wing.
A wounded machine.
Chacko’s room was
cluttered with broken wooden planes. And every month, another kit would arrive.
Chacko never blamed the crashes on the kit.
It was only after
Pappachi died that Chacko resigned his job as lecturer at the Madras Christian
College, and came to Ayemenem with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron dreams.
He commuted his pension and provident fund to buy a Bharat bottle‑sealing
machine. His oar (with his team‑mates’ names inscribed in gold) hung from iron
hoops on the factory wall.
Up to the time Chacko
arrived, the factory had been a small but profitable enterprise. Mammachi just
ran it like a large kitchen. Chacko had it registered as a partnership and
informed Mammachi that she was the Sleeping Partner. He invested in equipment
(can fling machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labor force. Almost
immediately, the financial slide began, but was artificially buoyed by
extravagant bank loans that Chacko raised by mortgaging the family’s rice
fields around the Ayemenem House. Though Ammu did as much work in the factory
as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers,
he always referred to it as my Factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally this
was the case, because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property.
Chacko told Rahel and
Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I. “Thanks to our wonderful male
chauvinist society,” Ammu said. Chacko said, “What’s yours is mine and what’s
mine is also mine.’ He had a surprisingly high laugh for a man of his size and
fatness. And when he laughed, he shook all over without appearing to move.
Until Chacko arrived
in Ayemenem, Mammachi’s factory had no name. Everybody just referred to her
pickles and jams as Sosha’s Tender Mango, or Sosha’s Bananajam. Sosha was
Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.
It was Chacko who
christened the factory Paradise Pickles & Preserves and had labels designed
and printed at Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s press. At first he had wanted to call
it Zeus Pickles & Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody
said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise
did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion–Parashuram Pickles–was vetoed for the
opposite reason: too much local relevance.)
It was Chacko’s idea
to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.
Now, on the way to
Cochin, it rattled and made fallingoff noises. Near Vaikom they had to stop and
buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty
minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for The Sound of Music.
Then, as they
approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level‑crossing
gate went down. Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping
that it wouldn’t.
She hadn’t learned to
control her Hopes yet. Estha said that was a Bad Sign.
So now they were going
to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck
on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts onto the screen with her
voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.
The red sign on the
red and white arm said STOP in white.
“POTS,” Rahel said.
A yellow hoarding said
BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN in red.
“NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI
EB,” Estha said.
The twins were
precocious with their reading. They had raced through Old Dog Tom , Janet
and John and their Ronald Ridout
Workbooks . At night Ammu read to them from Kipling’s Jungle Book .
Now Chil the Kite
brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets
free–
The down on their arms
would stand on end, golden in the light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu
could make her voice gravelly, like Shere Khan’s. Or whining, like Tabaqui’s.
“‘Ye choose and ye
do not choose.’ What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I
to stand nosing into your dog’s den till my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who
speak! ”
“And it is I,
Raksha, who answer! ” the twins
would shout in high voices. Not together, but almost. “The man’s cub is
mine, Lungri–mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the
pack and to bunt with the pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little
naked cubs–frogeater–fish‑killer–he shall bunt thee! ”
Baby Kochamma, who had
been put in charge of their formal education, had read them an abridged version
of The Tempest by Charles and
Mary Lamb. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” Estha and Rahel would go about
saying, “In a cowslip’s bell I lie.”
So when Baby
Kochamma’s Australian missionary friend, Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a
baby book–The Adventures of Susie Squirrel– as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they
were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten, who belonged to
a sect of Born‑Again Christians, said that she was a Little Disappointed in
them when they read it aloud to her, backwards.
“ehT sertanrvdA fo
eisuS lerriuqS.
enO gnirps gninrom
eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.”
They showed Miss
Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and Madam I’m Adam backwards as well as forwards. She wasn’t
amused and it turned out that she didn’t even know what Malayalam was. They
told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She said she had been
under the impression that it was called Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken
an active dislike to Miss Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it
was a Highly Stupid Impression.
Miss Mitten complained
to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She
told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS ni rieht seye.
They were made to
write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read
backwards”. A hundred times.
Forwards.
A few months later
Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket
oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had
been reversing .
More buses and cars
had stopped on either side of the level crossing. An ambulance that said SACRED
HEART HOSPITAL was full of a party of people on their way to a wedding. The
bride was staring out of the back window, her face partially obscured by the
flaking paint of the huge red cross.
The buses all had
girls’ names. Lucykutty, Mollykutty, Beena Mol. In Malayalam, Mol is Little
Girl and Mon is Little Boy. Beena Mol was full of pilgrims who’d had their
heads shaved at Tirupan. Rahel could see a row of bald heads at the bus window,
above evenly spaced vomit streaks. She was more than a little curious about
vomiting. She had never vomited. Not once. Estha had, and when he did, his skin
grew hot and shiny, and his eyes helpless and beautiful, and Ammu loved him
more than usual. Chacko said that Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy. And
so was Sophie Mol. He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding
like most Syrian Christians. And Parsis.
Mammachi said that
what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding. She meant
having parents who were divorced. As though these were the only choices
available to people:
Inbreeding or Divorce.
Rahel wasn’t sure what
she suffered from, but occasionally she practiced sad faces, and sighing in the
mirror.
“It is a far, far
better thing that I do, than I have ever done, ” she would say to herself sadly. That was
Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps,
waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A
Tale of Two Cities .
She wondered what had
caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited
together in a single, well orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm
of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.
Initially, when the
level crossing had just closed, the air was full of the impatient sound of
idling engines. But when the man that manned the crossing came out of his
booth, on his backwards‑bending legs and signaled with his limp, flapping walk
to the tea stall that they were in for a long wait, drivers switched off their
engines and milled about, stretching their legs.
With a desultory nod
of his bored and sleepy head, the Level Crossing Divinity conjured up beggars
with bandages, men with trays selling pieces of fresh coconut, parippu vadas on
banana leaves. And cold drinks. Coca‑Cola, Fanta, Rosemilk.
A leper with soiled
bandages begged at the car window.
“That looks like
Mercurochrome to me,” Ammu said, of his inordinately bright blood.
“Congratulations,”
Chacko said. “Spoken like a true bourgeoise.” Ammu smiled and they shook hands,
as though she really was being awarded a Certificate of Merit for being an
honest‑to‑goodness Genuine Bourgeoise. Moments like these the twins treasured,
and threaded like precious beads, on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.
Rahel and Estha
squashed their noses against the Plymouth’s quarter‑windows. Yearning
marshmallows with cloudy children behind them. Ammu said “No” firmly, and with
conviction.
Chacko lit a
Charminar. He inhaled deeply and then removed a little flake of tobacco that
had stayed behind on his tongue.
Inside the Plymouth,
it wasn’t easy for Rahel to see Estha, because Baby Kochamma rose between them
like a hill. Ammu had insisted that they sit separately to prevent them from
fighting. When they fought, Estha called Rahel a Refugee Stick Insect Rahel
called him Elvis the Pelvis and did a twisty; funny kind of dance that
infuriated Estha. When they had serious physical fights, they were so evenly
matched that the fights went on forever, and things that came in their way‑table
lamps, ashtrays and water jugs‑were smashed or irreparably damaged.
Baby Kochamma was
holding on to the back of the front seat with her arms. When the car moved, her
armfat swung like heavy washing in the wind. Now it hung down like a fleshy
curtain, blocking Estha from Rahel.
On Estha’s side of the
road was a tea shack that sold tea and stale glucose biscuits in dim glass
cases with flies. There was lemon soda in thick bottles with blue marble
stoppers to keep the fizz in. And a red icebox that said rather sadly
Things Go Better with Coca‑Cola
Murlidharan, the level‑crossing
lunatic, perched cross‑legged and perfectly balanced on the milestone. His
balls and penis dangled down, pointing towards the sign which said
COCHIN
23 KM
Murlidharan was naked
except for the tall plastic bag that somebody had fitted onto his head like a
transparent chef’s cap, through which the view of the landscape continued‑dimmed,
chef– shaped, but uninterrupted. He couldn’t remove his cap even if he had
wanted to, because he had no arms. They had been blown off in Singapore in ‘42,
within the first week of his running away from home to join the fighting ranks
of the Indian National Army. After Independence he had himself registered as a
Grade I Freedom Fighter and had been allotted a free first‑class railway pass
for life. This too he had lost (along with his mind), so he could no longer
live on trains or in refreshment rooms in railway stations. Murlidharan had no
home, no doors to lock, but he had his old keys tied carefully around his
waist. In a shining bunch. His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with
secret pleasures.
An alarm clock. A red
car with a musical horn. A red mug for the bathroom. A wife with a diamond. A
briefcase with important papers. A coming home from the office. An I’m sorry
Colonel Sabhapathy, but I’m afraid I’ve said my say . And crisp banana
chips for the children.
He watched the trains
come and go. He counted his keys.
He watched governments
rise and fall. He counted his keys.
He watched cloudy
children at car windows with yearning marshmallow noses.
The homeless, the
helpless, the sick, the small and lost, all filed past his window. Still he
counted his keys.
He was never sure
which cupboard he might have to open, or when. He sat on the burning milestone
with his matted hair and eyes like windows, and was glad to be able to look
away sometimes. To have his keys to count and countercheck.
Numbers would do.
Numbness would be
fine.
Murlidharan moved his
mouth when he counted, and made well‑formed words.
Onner.
Runter.
Moonner.
Estha noticed that the
hair on his head was curly gray, the hair in his windy, armless armpits was
wispy black, and the hair in his crotch was black and springy. One man with
three kinds of hair. Estha wondered how that could be. He tried to think of
whom to ask.
The Waiting filled
Rahel until she was ready to burst. She looked at her watch. It was ten to two.
She thought of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing each other
sideways so that their noses didn’t collide. She wondered whether people always
kissed each other sideways. She tried to think of whom to ask.
Then, from a distance,
a hum approached the held‑up traffic and covered it like a cloak. The drivers
who’d been stretching their legs got back into their vehicles and slammed
doors. The beggars and vendors disappeared. Within minutes there was no one on
the road. Except Murlidharan. Perched with his bum on the burning milestone.
Unperturbed and only mildly curious.
There was hustle‑bustle.
And Police whistles.
From behind the line
of waiting, oncoming traffic, a column of men appeared, with red flags and banners
and a hum that grew and grew.
“Put up your windows,”
Chacko said. “And stay calm. They’re not going to hurt us.”
“Why not join them,
comrade?” Ammu said to Chacko. “I’ll drive.”
Chacko said nothing. A
muscle tensed below the wad of fat on his jaw. He tossed away his cigarette and
rolled up his window.
Chacko was a self‑proclaimed
Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and
on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt
with them outrageously. He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call
him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and
Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.
Once he even took a
group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They
went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and
flowers in their hair.
Ammu said it was all
hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade. Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar
mentality–a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for
their livelihood.
As the marchers
approached, Ammu put up her window. Estha his. Rahel hers. (Effortfully,
because the black knob on the handle had fallen off.)
Suddenly the skyblue
Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. Like a wide lady
squeezing down a narrow corridor Like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to
the bread and wine.
“Look down!” Baby
Kochamma said, as the front ranks of the procession approached the car. “Avoid
eye contact. That’s what really provokes them”
On the side of her
neck, her pulse was. pounding. Within minutes, the road was swamped by
thousands of marching people. Automobile islands in a river of people. The air
was red with flags, which dipped and lifted as the marchers ducked under the
level‑crossing gate and swept across the railway tracks in a red wave.
The sound of a
thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a Noise Umbrella.
Inquilab Zindabad!
Thozhilali Ekta
Zindabad!
“Long Live the
Revolution!” they shouted. “Workers of the World Unite!”
Even Chacko had no
really complete explanation for why the Communist Party was so much more
successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except
perhaps in West Bengal.
There were several
competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of
Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians,
who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St.
Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled East after the
Resurrection. Structurally–this somewhat rudimentary argument went–Marxism was
a simple substitute for Christianity Replace God with Marx, Satan with the
bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society the Church with the Party, and the
form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a
prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.
The trouble with this
theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the
wealthy, estate‑owning (picklefactory‑running), feudal lords, for whom
communism represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the
Congress Party.
A second theory
claimed that it had to do with the comparatively high level of literacy in the
state. Perhaps. Except that the high literacy level was largely because of the
Communist movement.
The real secret was that
communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never
overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste‑ridden, extremely
traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides,
never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail
revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a
shot of democracy.
Though Chacko was not
a card‑holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had
remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.
He was an
undergraduate at Delhi University during the euphoria of 1957, when the
Communists won the State Assembly elections and Nehru invited them to form a
government. Chacko’s hero, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the flamboyant
Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala, became Chief Minister of the first
ever democratically elected Communist government in the world. Suddenly the
Communists found themselves in the extraordinary– critics said absurd–position
of having to govern a people and foment revolution simultaneously. Comrade E.
M. S. Namboodiripad evolved his own theory about how he would do this. Chacko
studied his treatise on “The Peaceful Transition to Communism” with an
adolescent’s obsessive diligence and an ardent fan’s unquestioning approval. It
set out in detail how Comrade E. M. S. Namtoodiripad’s government intended to
enforce land reforms, neutralize the police, subvert the judiciary and
“Restrain the Hand of the Reactionary anti‑People Congress Government at the
Center.”
Unfortunately, before
the year was out, the Peaceful part of the Peaceful Transition came to an end.
Every morning at
breakfast the Imperial Entomologist derided his argumentative Marxist son by
reading out newspaper reports of the riots, strikes and incidents of police
brutality that convulsed Kerala.
“So, Karl Marx,”
Pappachi would sneer when Chacko came to the table, “what shall we do with
these bloody students flow? The stupid goons are agitating against our People’s
Government Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren’t People anymore?”
Over the next two
years the political discord, fueled by the Congress Party and the Church, slid
into anarchy. By the time Chacko finished his BA and left for Oxford to do
another one, Kerala was on the brink of civil war. Nehru dismissed the
Communist government and announced fresh elections. The Congress Party returned
to power.
It was only in
1967–almost exactly ten years after they first came to power‑that Comrade
E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re‑elected. This time as part of a
coalition between what had by now become two separate parties–the Communist
Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI and the
CPI(M).
Pappachi was dead by
then. Chacko divorced. Paradise Pickles was seven years old.
Kerala was reeling in
the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon. People were dying. Hunger had to
be very high up on any government list of priorities.
During his second term
in office, Comrade E. M. S. went about implementing the Peaceful Transition
more soberly. This earned him the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. They
denounced him for his “Parliamentary Cretinism” and accused him of “providing
relief to the people and thereby blunting the People’s Consciousness and diverting
them from the Revolution.”
Peking switched its
patronage to the newest, most militant faction of the CPI(M)–the Naxalites–who
had staged an armed insurrection in Naxalbari, a village in Bengal. They
organized peasants into fighting cadres, seized land, expelled the owners and
established People’s Courts to try Class Enemies. The Naxalite movement spread
across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart.
In Kerala, they
breathed a plume of excitement and fear into the already frightened air.
Killings had begun in the north. That May there was a blurred photograph in the
papers of a landlord in Palghat who had been tied to a lamp post and beheaded.
His head lay on its side, some distance away from his body, in a dark puddle
that could have been water, could have been blood. It was hard to tell in black
and white. In the gray, predawn light.
His surprised eyes
were open.
Comrade E. M. S.
Namboodiripad (Running Dog, Soviet Stooge) expelled the Naxalites from his
party and went on with the business of harnessing anger for parliamentary
purposes.
The March that surged
around the skyblue Plymouth on that skyblue December day was a part of that
process. It had been organized by the Travancore‑Cochin Marxist Labour Union.
Their comrades in Trivandrum would march to the Secretariat and present the
Charter of People’s Demands to Comrade E. M. S. himself. The orchestra
petitioning its conductor. Their demands were that paddy workers, who were made
to work in the fields for eleven and a half hours a day‑from seven in the
morning to six‑thirty in the evening‑be permitted to take a one‑hour lunch
break. That women’s wages be increased from one rupee twenty‑five paisa a day
to three rupees, and men’s from two rupees fifty paisa to four rupees fifty
paisa a day. They were also demanding that Untouchables no longer be addressed
by their caste names. They demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or
Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan.
Cardamon Kings, Coffee
Counts and Rubber Barons–old boarding‑school buddies–came down from their
lonely, far‑flung estates and sipped chilled beer at the Sailing Club. They
raised their glasses: A rose by any other name , they said, and
sniggered to hide their rising panic.
The marchers that day
were party workers, students and the laborers themselves. Touchables and
Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with
a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.
Through the Plymouth
window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zindabad. And that
the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that
held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.
Inside the Plymouth it
was still and hot.
Baby Kochamma’s fear
lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the
beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That
would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines
and both her mouths. Hers too, was an ancient, age‑old fear. The fear of being
dispossessed.
She tried to count the
green beads on her rosary but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed
against the car window.
A balled fist banged
down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an
angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.
A bun.
A banana.
Another balled fist
slammed down on it, and the bonnet closed. Chacko rolled down his window and
called out to the man who had done it.
“Thanks, keto
!” he said. “Valarey thanks!”
“Don’t be so
ingratiating, Comrade,” Ammu said. “It was an accident. He didn’t really mean
to help. How could he possibly know that in this old car there beats a truly
Marxist heart?”
“Ammu,” Chacko said,
his voice steady and deliberately casual, “is it at all possible for you to
prevent your washed‑up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”
Silence filled the car
like a saturated sponge. “Washed‑up” cut like a knife through a soft thing. The
sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like
invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Just then Rahel saw
Velutha. Vellya Paapen’s son, Velutha. Her most beloved friend Velutha. Velutha
marching with a red flag. In a white shirt and mundu with angry veins in his
neck. He never usually wore a shirt.
Rahel rolled down her
window in a flash. “Velutha! Velutha!” she called to him.
He froze for a moment,
and listened with his flag. What he had heard was a familiar voice in a most
unfamiliar circumstance. Rahel, standing on the car seat, had grown out of the
Plymouth window like the loose, flailing horn of a car‑shaped herbivore. With a
fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo and yellow‑rimmed red plastic sunglasses.
“Velutha! lvidaj&’
Velutha!” And she too had veins in her neck.
He stepped sideways
and disappeared deftly into the angriness around him.
Inside the car Ammu
whirled around, and her eyes were angry. She slapped at Rahel’s calves which
were the only part of her left in the car to slap. Calves and brown feet in
Bata sandals.
“Behave yourself!”
Ammu said.
Baby Kochamma pulled
Rahel down, and she landed on the seat with a surprised thump. She thought
there’d been a misunderstanding.
“It was Velutha!” she
explained with a smile. “And he had a flag!” The flag had seemed to her a most
impressive piece of equipment. The right thing for a friend to have.
“You’re a stupid silly
little girl!” Ammu said.
Her sudden, fierce
anger pinned Rahel against the car seat. Rahel was puzzled. Why was Ammu so
angry? About what?
“But it was him!”
Rahel said.
“Shut up!” Ammu said.
Rahel saw that Ammu
had a film of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and that her eyes had
become hard, like marbles. Like Pappachi’s in the Vienna studio photograph.
(How Pappachi’s Moth whispered in his children’s veins!)
Baby Kochamma rolled
up Rahel’s window.
Years later, on a
crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to
Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu’s face.
Like a rogue piece in a puzzle. Like a question mark that drifted through the
pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence.
That hard marble look
in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of
that sudden, hurt silence.
What had it all meant?
The Sunday train was
almost empty. Across the aisle from Rahel a woman with chapped cheeks and a
mustache coughed up phlegm and wrapped it in twists of newspaper that she tore
off the pile of Sunday papers on her lap. She arranged the little packages in
neat rows on the empty seat in front of her as though she was setting up a
phlegm stall. As she worked she chatted to herself in a pleasant, soothing
voice.
Memory was that woman
on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and
emerged with the most unlikely ones‑a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of
smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she
left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
Her co‑passenger’s
madness comforted Rahel. It drew her closer into New York’s deranged womb. Away
from the other, more terrible thing that haunted her.
A sour metal smell,
like steel bus rails, and the smell of the bus conductor’s bands from holding
them. A young man with an old man’s mouth.
Outside the train, the
Hudson shimmered, and the trees were the redbrown colors of fall. It was just a
little cold.
“There’s a nipple in
the air” Larry McCaslin said to Rahel, and laid his palm gently against the
suggestion of protest from a chilly nipple through her cotton T‑shirt. He
wondered why she didn’t smile.
She wondered why it
was that when she thought of home it was always in the colors of the dark,
oiled wood of boats, and the empty cores of the tongues of flame that flickered
in brass lamps.
It was Velutha.
That much Rahel was
sure of. She’d seen him. He’d seen her. She’d have known him anywhere, any
time. And if he hadn’t been wearing a shirt, she would have recognized him from
behind. She knew his back. She’d been carried on it. More times than she could
count. It had a light‑brown birthmark, shaped like a pointed dry leaf. He said
it was a Lucky Leaf; that made the Monsoons come on time. A brown leaf on a
black back. An autumn leaf at night.
A lucky leaf that
wasn’t lucky enough.
Velutha wasn’t
supposed to be a carpenter.
He was called
Velutha–which means White in Malayalam–because he was so black. His father,
Vellya Paapen, was a Paravan. A toddy tapper. He had a glass eye. He had been
shaping a block of granite with a hammer when a chip flew into his left eye and
sliced right through it.
As a young boy,
Velutha would come with Vellya Paapen to the back entrance of the Ayemenem
House to deliver the coconuts they had plucked from the trees in the compound.
Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed
to touch anything that Touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians.
Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood,
when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away
their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile
themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint. In Mammachi’s
time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public
roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas.
They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their
polluted breath away from those whom they addressed.
When the British came
to Malabar, a number of Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas (among them Velutha’s
grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to
escape the scourge of Untouchability. As added incentive they were given a
little food and money. They were known as the Rice Christians. It didn’t take
them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate
priests. As a special favor they were even given their own separate Pariah
Bishop. After Independence they found they were not entitled to any government
benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because
officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a
little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not
being allowed to leave footprints at all.
It was Mammachi, on
vacation from Delhi and Imperial Entomology who first noticed little Velutha’s
remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years
younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys‑tiny
windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reeds; he could carve
perfect boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring
them for Ammu, holding them out on his palm (as he had been taught) so she
wouldn’t have to touch him to take them. Though he was younger than she was, he
called her Ammukutty–Little Ammu. Mammachi persuaded Vellya Paapen to send him
to the Untouchables’ School that her father‑in‑law Punnyan Kunju had founded.
Velutha was fourteen
when Johann Klein, a German carpenter from a carpenter’s guild in Bavaria, came
to Kottayam and spent three years with the Christian Mission Society conducting
a workshop with local carpenters. Every afternoon, after school, Velutha caught
a bus to Kottayam where he worked with Klein till dusk. By the time he was
sixteen, Velutha had finished high school and was an accomplished carpenter. He
had his own set of carpentry tools and a distinctly German design sensibility.
He built Mammachi a Bauhaus dining table with twelve dining chairs in rosewood
and a traditional Bavarian chaise longue in lighter jackwood. For Baby
Kochamma’s annual Nativity plays he made her a stack of wireframed angels’
wings that fitted onto children’s backs like knapsacks, cardboard clouds for
the Angel Gabriel to appear between, and a manger for Christ to be born in.
When her garden cherub’s silver arc dried up inexplicably, it was Dr. Velutha
who fixed its bladder for her.
Apart from his carpentry
skills, Velutha had a way with machines. Mammachi (with impenetrable Touchable
logic) often said that if only he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might have become
an engineer. He mended radios, clocks, water pumps. He looked after the
plumbing and all the electrical gadgets in the house.
When Mammachi decided
to enclose the back verandah, it was Velutha who designed and built the sliding‑folding
door that later became all the rage in Ayemenem.
Velutha knew more
about the machines in the factory than anyone else.
When Chacko resigned
his job in Madras and returned to Ayemenem with a Bharat bottle‑sealing
machine, it was Velutha who re‑assembled it and set it up. It was Velutha who
maintained the new canning machine and the automatic pineapple slicer. Velutha
who oiled the water pump and the small diesel generator. Velutha who built the
aluminum sheet‑lined, easy‑to‑clean cutting surfaces, and the ground‑level
furnaces for boiling fruit.
Velutha’s father,
Vellya Paapen, however, was an Old‑World Paravan. He had seen the Crawling
Backwards Days and his gratitude to Mammachi and her family for all that they
had done for him was as wide and deep as a river in spate. When he had his
accident with the stone chip, Mammachi organized and paid for his glass eye. He
hadn’t worked off his debt yet, and though he knew he wasn’t expected to, that
he wouldn’t ever be able to, he felt that his eye was not his own. His
gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
Vellya Paapen feared
for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was
nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but the way he said
it. Not what he did, but the way he did it.
Perhaps it was just a
lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he
held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the
quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.
While these were
qualities that were perfectly acceptable, perhaps even desirable, in
Touchables, Vellya Paapen thought that in a Paravan they could (and would, and
indeed, should) be construed as insolence.
Vellya Paapen tried to
caution Velutha. But since he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that
bothered him, Velutha misunderstood his muddled concern. To him it appeared as
though his father grudged him his brief training and his natural skills. Vellya
Paapen’s good intentions quickly degenerated into nagging and bickering and a
general air of unpleasantness between father and son. Much to his mother’s
dismay, Velutha began to avoid going home. He worked late. He caught fish in
the river and cooked it on an open fire. He slept outdoors, on the banks of the
river.
Then one day he disappeared.
For four years nobody knew where he was. There was a rumor that he was working
on a building site for the Department of Welfare and Housing in Trivandrum.
And more recently, the
inevitable rumor that he had become a Naxalite. That he had been to prison.
Somebody said they had seen him in Quilon.
There was no way of
reaching him when his mother, Chella, died of tuberculosis. Then Kuttappen, his
older brother, fell off a coconut tree and damaged his spine. He was paralyzed
and unable to work. Velutha heard of the accident a whole year after it
happened.
It had been five
months since he returned to Ayemenem. He never talked about where he had been,
or what he had done.
Mammachi rehired
Velutha as the factory carpenter and put him in charge of general maintenance.
It caused a great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers
because, according to them, Paravans were not meant to be carpenters. And
certainly, prodigal Paravans were not meant to be rehired.
To keep the others
happy, and since she knew that nobody else would hire him as a carpenter,
Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than
she would a Paravan. Mammachi didn’t encourage him to enter the house (except
when she needed something mended or installed). She thought that he ought to be
grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to
touch things that Touchables touched. She said that it was a big step for a
Paravan.
When he returned to
Ayemenem after his years away from home, Velutha still had about him the same
quickness. The sureness. And Vellya Paapen feared for him now more than ever;
But this time he held his peace. He said nothing.
At least not until the
Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat
being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he
saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched.
Entered.
Loved.
When the Terror took
hold of him, Vellya Paapen went to Mammachi. He stared straight ahead with his
mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The
other stayed dry. He shook his own head from side to side to side till Mammachi
ordered him to stop. He trembled his own body like a man with malaria. Mammachi
ordered him to stop it but he couldn’t, because you can’t order fear around.
Not even a Paravan’s. Vellya Paapen told Mammachi what he had seen. He asked
God’s forgiveness for having spawned a monster. He offered to kill his son with
his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created.
In the next room Baby
Kochamma heard the noise and came to find out what it was all about She saw
Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced.
She said (among other
things), How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a
particular smell, these Paravans!
And she shuddered
theatrically, like a child being force‑fed spinach. She preferred an Irish‑Jesuit
smell to a particular Paravan smell.
By far. By far.
Velutha, Vellya Paapen
and Kuttappen lived in a little laterite hut, downriver from the Ayemenem
house. A three‑minute run through the coconut trees for Esthappen and Rahel.
They had only just arrived in Ayemenem with Ammu and were too young to remember
Velutha when he left. But in the months since he had returned, they had grown
to be the best of friends. They were forbidden from visiting his house, but
they did. They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches–hunched
punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings–and wonder how he always seemed to
know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way
wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine.
He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh
wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The
best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world.
It was Velutha who
made Rahel her luckiest‑ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish.
And on that skyblue
December day, it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with
a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.
Steelshrill police
whistles pierced holes in the Noise Umbrella. Through the jagged umbrella holes
Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in. the red sky, hot red kites wheeled,
looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and redflags
marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark.
Marching.
Terror, sweat, and
talcum powder had blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of
neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth.
She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in
the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumored to have moved
south from Paighat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.
A man with a red flag
and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The
doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare.
“Feeling hot, baby?’
the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam.
Then, unkindly, “Ask
your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!” and he hooted with delight at his own
wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for
her father. Like a normal family.
“Don’t answer!” Baby
Kochamma whispered hoarsely. “Look down! Just look down!”
The man with the Rag
turned his attention to her. She was looking down at the floor of the car. Like
a coy, frightened bride who had been married off to a stranger.
“Hello, sister,” the
man said carefully in English. “What is your name please?”
When Baby Kochamma
didn’t answer, he looked back at his cohecklers.
“She has no name.”
“What about Modalali
Mariakutty?” someone suggested with a giggle. Modalali in Malayalam means
landlord.
“A, B, C, D, X, Y, Z,”
somebody else said, irrelevantly.
More students crowded
around. They all wore handkerchiefs or printed Bombay Dyeing hand towels on
their heads to stave off the sun. They looked like extras who had wandered off
the sets of the Malayalam version of Sinbad. The Last Voyage.
The man like a knot
gave Baby Kochamma his red flag as a present.
“Here,” he said. “Hold
it.”
Baby Kochamrna held
it, still not looking at him.
“Wave it,” he ordered.
She had to wave it.
She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and dusty
She tried to wave it
as though she wasn’t waving it.
“Now say “Inquilab
Zindabad.”
“Inquilab Zindabad,”
Baby Kochamma whispered.
“Good girl.”
The crowd roared with
laughter.
A shrillwhistle blew.
“Okay then,” the man
said to Baby Kochamma in English, as though they had successfully concluded a
business deal. “Bye‑bye!”
He slammed the skyblue
door shut Baby Kochamma wobbled. The crowd around the car unclotted and went on
with its march.
Baby Kochamma rolled
the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary
back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with
this and that, trying to salvage some dignity
After the last few men
walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.
“Are you sure it was
him?’ Chacko asked Rahel.
`Who?” Rahel said,
suddenly cautious.
“Are you sure it was
Velutha?”
“Hmmm…?” Rahel said,
playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.
“I said, are you sure
that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.
“Mmm… nyes… m… m…
almost,” Rahel said.
“You’re almost sure?”
Chacko said.
“No… it was almost
Vehitha,” Rahel said. “it almost looked like him…”
“So you’re not sure
then?”
“Almost not.” Rahel
slid a look at Estha for approval.
“It must have been
him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go
there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”
Nobody seemed
particularly impressed by her insight.
“We should keep an eye
on him,” Baby Kochamrna said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory…
I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked
him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he–”
“I saw Velutha at home
before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”
“For his own sake,”
Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t
interrupt.”
She was annoyed that
nobody asked her what a scree bed was.
In the days that
followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on
Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the
march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the
man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at
her.
She began to hate him.
From the way Ammu held
her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch.
Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel
the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her
chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog
squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more
like a frog‑shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten
had been squashed into a Miss Mitten‑shaped stain by the milk truck that killed
her.
With the certitude of
a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such
thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat‑shaped
holes in the Universe.
There were so many
stains on the road.
Squashed Miss Mitten‑shaped
stains in the Universe.
Squashed frog‑shaped
stains in the Universe.
Squashed crows that
had tried to eat the squashed frog‑shaped stains in the Universe.
Squashed dogs that ate
the squashed crow‑shaped stains in the Universe.
Feathers. Mangoes. Spit.
All the way to Cochin.
The sun shone through
the Plymouth window directly down at Rahel. She closed her eyes and shone back
at it. Even behind her eyelids the light was bright and hot. The sky was
orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping
to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a
forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a
spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according
to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their
helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make
any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.
Ammu had told them the
story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in
the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et
tu, Brute? –then fall, Caesar.”
“It just goes to
show;” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother,
husband, bestfriend. Nobody.”
With children, she
said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely
possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.
At night, Estha would
stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?–Then
fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed
corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would
complain to Mammachi.
“Tell your mother to
take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds
as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”
Estha would rise from
the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?–Then fall, Estha!” and
die again.
Kochu Maria was sure
that Ettu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable
opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.
The woman in the
neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after‑biscuit
cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a
fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a
Baby Voice.
Rahel ignored her and
blew an inadvertent spit bubble.
Ammu hated them
blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said
that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only
clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.
Aristocrats were
people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.
Though Baba wasn’t a
clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.
When they were alone,
Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit
bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their
father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his
cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with
spit.
“It’s not a ruddy
sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.
They remembered his
anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu
to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you
keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu
about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.
In the only photograph
they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing
a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With
one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin
resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other
arm. She looked grumpy and bad‑tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone
had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.
Ammu said that he had
only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she
was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the
photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks,
Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph
“Will you stop that!”
Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to
stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.
“What?” Rahel said,
but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.
“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel
said.
“Sorry doesn’t make a
dead man alive,” Estha said.
“Oh come on!” Chacko
said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”
“Mind your own
business,” Ammu snapped.
“It brings back
Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.
Rahel put on her sunglasses.
The World became angry‑colored.
“Take off those
ridiculous glasses!” Ammu said.
Rahel took off her
ridiculous glasses.
“It’s fascist, the way
you deal with them,” Chacko said. “Even children have some rights, for God’s
sake!”
“Don’t use the name of
the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said.
“I’m not,” Chacko
said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”
“Stop posing as the
children’s Great Savior!” Ammu said. “When it comes down to brass tacks, you
don’t give a damn about them. Or me.”
“Should I?” Chacko
said. “Are they my responsibility?”
He said that Ammu and
Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.
The backs of Rahel’s
legs went wet and sweaty. Her skin slipped on the foamleather upholstery of the
car seat. She and Estha knew about millstones. In Mutiny on the Bounty ,
when people died at sea, they were wrapped in white sheets and thrown overboard
with millstones around their necks so that the corpses wouldn’t float. Estha
wasn’t sure how they decided how many millstones to take with them before they
set off on their voyage.
Estha put his head in
his lap.
His puff was spoiled.
A distant train rumble
seeped upwards from the frog‑stained road. The yam leaves on either side of the
railway track began to nod in mass consent. Yesyesyes,yesyes.
The bald pilgrims in
Beena Mol began to sing another bhajan.
“I tell you, these
Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously. “They have no sense of privacy.”
“They have horns and
scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies
hatch from eggs.”
Rahel had two bumps on
her forehead that Estha said would grow into horns. At least one of them would
because she was half Hindu. She hadn’t been quick enough to ask him about his
horns. Because whatever She was, He was too.
The train slammed past
under a column of dense black smoke. There were thirty‑two bogies, and the
doorways were full of young men with helmetty haircuts who were on their way to
the Edge of the World to see what happened to the people who fell off. Those of
them who craned too far fell off the edge themselves. Into the flailing
darkness, their haircuts turned inside out
The train was gone so
quickly that it was hard to imagine that everybody had waited so long for so
little. The yam leaves continued to nod long after the train had gone, as
though they agreed with it entirely and had no doubts at all.
A gossamer blanket of
coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.
Chacko started the
Plymouth. Baby Kochamma tried to be jolly. She started a song.
There’s a sad sort of
c’anging
From the clock in the
ball
And the bells in the
steeple too.
And up in the nurs
Anabs‑urd
Litt‑le Bird
Is popping out to say–
She looked at Estha
and Rahel, waiting for them to say “Coo‑coo.”
They didn’t.
A carbreeze blew. Green
trees and telephone poles flew past the windows. Still birds slid by on moving
wires, like unclaimed baggage at the airport.
A pale daymoon hung
hugely in the sky and went where they went. As big as the belly of a beer‑drinking
man.
Chapter 3.
Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the
Mombatti
Filth had laid siege
to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It
clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.
Midges whizzed in
teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.
The floor was sticky.
White walls had turned an uneven gray. Brass hinges and door handles were dull
and greasy to the touch. Infrequently used plug points were clogged with grime.
Lightbulbs had a film of oil on them. The only things that shone were the giant
cockroaches that scurried around like varnished gofers on a film set.
Baby Kochamma had
stopped noticing these things long ago. Kochu Maria, who noticed everything,
had stopped caring.
The chaise longue on
which Baby Kochamma reclined had crushed peanut shells stuffed into the
crevices of its rotting upholstery
In an unconscious
gesture of television‑enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled
unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts. Kochu Maria tossed nuts into her mouth.
Baby Kochamma placed them decorously in hers.
On The Best of
Donahue the studio audience watched
a clip from a film in which a black busker was singing “Somewhere Over the
Rainbow ” in a subway station. He
sang sincerely, as though he really believed the words of the song. Baby
Kochamma sang with him, her thin, quavering voice thickened with peanut paste.
She smiled as the lyrics came back to her. Kochu Maria looked at her as though
she had gone mad, and grabbed more than her fair share of nuts. The busker
threw his head back when he hit the high notes (the where of “somewhere”), and the ridged, pink roof of
his mouth filled the television screen. He was as ragged as a rock star, but
his missing teeth and the unhealthy pallor of his skin spoke eloquently of a
life of privation and despair. He had to stop singing each time a train arrived
or left, which was often.
Then the lights went
up in the studio and Donahue presented the man himself, who, on a pre‑arranged
cue, started the song from exactly the point that he had had to stop (for a
train), cleverly achieving a touching victory of Song over Subway.
The next time the
husker was interrupted mid‑song was only when Phil Donahue put his arm around
him and said “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Being interrupted by
Phil Donahue was of course entirely different from being interrupted by a
subway rumble. It was a pleasure. An honor.
The studio audience
clapped and looked compassionate.
The busker glowed with
Prime‑Time Happiness, and for a few moments, deprivation took a backseat. It had
been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had
just been robbed of that too.
There are big dreams
and little ones.
“Big Man the Laltain
sahib, Small Man the Mombatti,” an old coolie, who met Estha’s school excursion
party at the railway station (unfailingly, year after year) used to say of
dreams.
Big Man the Lantern.
Small Man the Tallow‑stick.
Huge Man the Strobe
Lights, he omitted to say. And Small Man the Subway Station.
The Masters would
haggle with him as he trudged behind them with the boys’ luggage, his bowed
legs further bowed, cruel schoolboys imitating his gait. Balls‑in‑Brackets they
used to call him.
Smallest Man the
Varicose Veins he clean forgot to mention, as he wobbled off with less than
half the money he had asked for and less than a tenth of what he deserved.
Outside, the rain had
stopped. The gray sky curdled and the clouds resolved themselves into little
lumps, like substandard mattress stuffing.
Esthappen appeared at
the kitchen door, wet (and wiser than he really was). Behind him the long grass
sparkled. The puppy stood on the steps beside him. Raindrops slid across the
curved bottom of the rusted gutter on the edge of the roof, like shining beads
on an abacus.
Baby Kochamma looked
up from the television.
“Here he comes,” she
announced to Rahel, not bothering to lower her voice. “Now watch. He won’t say
anything. He’ll walk straight to his room. Just watch–”
The puppy seized the
opportunity and tried to stage a combined entry. Kochu Maria hit the floor fiercely
with her palms and said, “Hup! Hup! Poda Patti!”
So the puppy, wisely,
desisted. It appeared to be familiar with this routine.
“Watch!’ Baby Kochamma
said. She seemed excited. “He’ll walk straight to his room and wash his
clothes. He’s very over‑clean… he won’t say a word!”
She had the air of a
game warden pointing out an animal in the grass. Taking pride in her ability to
predict its movements. Her superior knowledge of its habits and predilections.
Estha’s hair was
plastered down in clumps, like the inverted petals of a flower. Slivers of
white scalp shone through, Rivulets of water ran down his face and neck.
He walked to his room.
A gloating halo appeared around Baby Kochamma’s head. “See?” she said.
Kochu Maria used the
opportunity to switch channels and watch a bit of Prime Bodies .
Rahel followed Estha
to his room. Ammu’s room. Once.
The room had kept his
secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the
untidiness of a kicked‑off shoe or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair.
Or a half‑read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just
been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes
arranged. The dustbin empty.
The obsessive
cleanliness of the room was the only positive sign of volition from Estha. The
only faint suggestion that he had, perhaps, some Design for Life. Just the
whisper of an unwillingness to subsist on scraps offered by others. On the wall
by the window, an iron stood on an ironing board. A pile of folded, crumpled
clothes waited to be ironed.
Silence hung in the
air like secret loss.
The terrible ghosts of
impossible‑to‑forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling fan. A
catapult. A Qantas koala (from Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An
inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two
ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up
and down in them.
Estha put on the tap
and water drummed into a plastic bucket He undressed in the gleaming bathroom.
He stepped out of his sodden jeans. Stiff. Dark blue. Difficult to get out of.
He pulled his crushed‑strawberry T‑shirt over his head, smooth, slim, muscular
arms crossed over his body. He didn’t hear his sister at the door.
Rahel watched his
stomach suck inwards and his rib cage rise as his wet T‑shirt peeled away from
his skin, leaving it wet and honeycolored. His face and neck and a V‑shaped
triangle at the base of his throat were darker than the rest of him. His arms
too were doublecolored. Paler where his shirtsleeves ended. A dark‑brown man in
pale honey clothes. Chocolate with a twist of coffee. High cheekbones and
hunted eyes. A fisherman in a white‑tiled bathroom, with sea‑secrets in his
eyes.
Had be seen her? Was
be really mad? Did be know that she was there? They had never been shy of each
other’s bodies, but they had never been old enough (together) to know what
shyness was.
Now they were. Old
enough.
Old.
A viable die‑able age.
What a funny word old
was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old.
Rahel at the bathroom
door. Slim‑hipped. (“Tell her she’ll need a cesarean!” a drunk gynecologist had
said to her husband while they waited for their change at the gas station.) A
lizard on a map on her faded T‑shirt. Long wild hair with a glint of deep henna
red sent unruly fingers down into the small of her back. The diamond in her
nostril flashed. Sometimes. And sometimes not. A thin, gold, serpent‑headed
bangle glowed like a circle of orange light around her wrist. Slim snakes
whispering to each other, head to head. Her mother’s melted wedding ring. Down
softened the sharp lines of her–thin, angular arms.
At first glance she
appeared to have grown into the skin of her mother. High cheekbones. Deep
dimples when she smiled. But she was longer, harder, flatter, more angular than
Ammu had been. Less lovely perhaps to those who like roundness and softness in
women. Only her eyes were incontestably more beautiful. Large. Luminous.
Drownable in, as Larry McCaslin had said and discovered to his cost.
Rahel searched her
brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of his knees. The arch
of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at which the rest of his
arm met his elbow. The way his toe‑nails tipped upwards at the ends. The
sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s
bums never grow up. Like school satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of
childhood. Two vaccination marks on his arm gleamed like coins. Hers were on
her thigh.
Girls always have them
on their thighs, Ammu used to say.
Rahel watched Estha
with the curiosity of a mother watching her wet child. A sister a brother. A
woman a man. A twin a twin.
She flew these several
kites at once.
He was a naked
stranger met in a chance encounter. He was the one that she had known before
Life began. The one who had once led her (swimming) through their lovely
mother’s cunt.
Both things unbearable
in their polarity. In their irreconcilable far‑apartness.
A raindrop glistened
on the end of Estha’s earlobe. Thick, silver in the light, like a heavy bead of
mercury. She reached out Touched it. Took it away.
Estha didn’t look at
her. He retreated into further stillness. As though his body had the power to
snatch its senses inwards (knotted, egg‑shaped), away from the surface of his
skin, into some deeper more inaccessible recess.
The silence gathered
its skirts and slid, like Spider Woman, up the slippery bathroom wall.
Estha put his wet
clothes in a bucket and began to wash them with crumbling, bright blue soap.
Chapter 4.
Abhilash Talkies
Abhilash Talkies
advertised itself as the first cinema hall in Kerala with a 70mm
CinemaScope screen. To drive home the point, its façade had been designed as a
cement replica of a curved CinemaScope screen. On top (cement writing, neon
lighting) it said Abhilash Talkies
in English and Malayalam.
The toilets were
called HIS and HERS. HERS for Ammu, Rahel and Baby Kochamma. His for Estha
alone, because Chacko had gone to see about the bookings at the Hotel Sea
Queen.
“Will you be okay?”
Ammu said, worried.
Estha nodded.
Through the red
Formica door that closed slowly on its own, Rahel followed Ammu and Baby
Kochamma into HERS. She turned to wave across the slipperoily marble floor at
Estha Alone (with a comb), in his beige and pointy shoes. Estha waited in the
dirty marble lobby with the lonely, watching mirrors till the red door took his
sister away. Then he turned and padded off to HIS.
In HERS, Ammu
suggested that Rahel balance in the air to piss. She said that Public Pots were
Dirty. Like Money was. You never knew who’d touched it. Lepers. Butchers. Car
Mechanics. (Pus. Blood. Grease.)
Once when Kochu Maria
took her to the butcher’s shop, Rahel noticed that the green five‑rupee note
that he gave them had a tiny blob of red meat on it. Kochu Maria wiped the blob
away with her thumb. The juice left a red smear. She put the money into her
bodice. Meat‑smelling blood money.
Rahel was too short to
balance in the air above the pot, so Ammu and Baby Kochamma held her up, her
legs hooked over their arms. Her feet pigeon‑toed in Bata sandals. High in the
air with her knickers down. For a moment nothing happened, and Rahel looked up
at her mother and baby grandaunt with naughty (now what?) question marks in her
eyes.
“Come on,” Ammu said.
“Sssss…”
Sssss for the Sound of
Soo‑soo. Mmmmm for the Sound of Myooozick. Rahel giggled. Ammu giggled. Baby
Kochamma giggled. When the trickle started they adjusted her aerial position.
Rahel was unembarrassed. She finished and Ammu had the toilet paper.
“Shall you or shall
I?” Baby Kochamma said to Ammu.
“Either way,” Ammu
said. “Go ahead. You.”
Rahel held her
handbag. Baby Kochamma lifted her rumpled sari. Rahel studied her baby
grandaunt’s enormous legs. (Years later during a history lesson being readout
in school–The Emperor Babur–had a wheatish complexion and pillarlike
thighs–this scene would flash before her; Baby Kochamma balanced like a big
bird over a public pot. Blue veins like lumpy knitting running up her
translucent shins. Fat knees dimpled. Hair on them. Poor little tiny feet to
carry such a load!) Baby Kochamma waited for half of half a moment. Head thrust
forward. Silly smile. Bosom swinging low. Melons in a blouse. Bottom up and
out. When the gurgling, bubbling sound came, she listened with her eyes. A
yellow brook burbled through a mountain pass.
Rahel liked all this.
Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She
knew nothing then, of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would
never be together like this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma and she.
When Baby Kochamma finished,
Rahel looked at her watch. “So long you took, Baby Kochamma,” she said. “It’s
ten to two.”
Rub‑a‑dub‑dub (Rahel
thought), Three women in a tub, Tarry awhile said Slow…
She thought of Slow
being a person. Slow Kurien. Slow Kutty. Slow Mol. Slow Kochamma.
Slow Kutty. Fast
Verghese. And Kuriakore. Three brothers with dandruff.
Ammu did hers in a
whisper. Against the side of the pot so you couldn’t hear. Her father’s
hardness had left her eyes and they were Ammu‑eyes again. She had deep dimples
in her smile and didn’t seem angry anymore. About Velutha or the spit bubble.
That was a Good Sign.
Estha Alone in HIS had
to piss onto naphthalene balls and cigarette stubs in the urinal. To piss in
the pot would be Defeat. To piss in the urinal, he was too short. He needed
Height. He searched for Height, and in a corner of HIS, he found it. A dirty
broom, a squash bottle half‑full of a milky liquid (phenyl) with floaty black
things in it A limp floorswab, and two rusty tin cans of nothing. They could
have been Paradise Pickle products. Pineapple chunks in syrup. Or slices.
Pineapple slices. His honor redeemed by his grandmother’s cans, Estha Alone
organized the rusty cans of nothing in front of the urinal. He stood on them,
one foot on each, and pissed carefully, with minimal wobble. Like a Man. The
cigarette stubs, soggy then, were wet now, and swirly. Hard to light. When he
finished, Estha moved the cans to the basin in front of the mirror. He washed
his hands and wet his hair. Then, dwarfed by the size of Ammu’s comb that was
too big for him, he reconstructed his puff carefully. Slicked back, then pushed
forward and swiveled sideways at the very end. He returned the comb to his
pocket, stepped off the tins and put them back with the bottle and swab and
broom. He bowed to them all. The whole shooting match. The bottle, the broom,
the cans, the limp floorswab.
“Bow,” he said, and
smiled, because when he was younger he had been under the impression that you
had to say “Bow” when you bowed. That you had to say it to do it.
“Bow, Estha,” they’d
say. And he’d bow and say, “Bow,” and they’d look at each other and laugh, and
he’d worry.
Estha Alone of the
uneven teeth.
Outside, he waited for
his mother, his sister and his baby grandaunt. When they came out, Ammu said
“Okay, Esthappen?”
Estha said, “Okay,”
and shook his head carefully to preserve his puff.
Okay? Okay. He put the
comb back into her handbag. Ammu felt a sudden clutch of love for her reserved,
dignified little son in his beige and pointy shoes, who had just completed his
first adult assignment She ran loving fingers through his hair. She spoiled his
puff.
The Man with the steel
Eveready Torch said that the picture had started, so to hurry. They had to rush
up the red steps with the old red carpet Red staircase with red spit stains in
the red corner. The Man with the Torch scrunched up his mundu and held it tucked
under his balls, in his left hand. As he climbed, his calf muscles hardened
under his climbing skin like hairy cannonballs. He held the torch in his right
hand. He hurried with his mind.
“It started long ago,”
he said.
So they’d missed the
beginning. Missed the rippled velvet curtain going up, with lightbulbs in the
clustered yellow tassels. Slowly up, and the music would have been “Baby
Elephant Walk” from Hatan Or “Colonel Bogey’s March.”
Ammu held Estha’s
hand. Baby Kochamma, heaving up the steps, held Rahel’s. Baby Kochamma, weighed
down by her melons, would not admit to herself that she was looking forward to
the picture. She preferred to feel that she was only doing it for the
children’s sake. In her mind she kept an organized, careful account of Things
She’d Done For People, and Things People Hadn’t Done For Her.
She liked the early
nun‑bits best, and hoped they hadn’t missed them. Ammu explained to Estha and
Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with. Rahel
supposed she Identified most with Christopher Plummer, who acted as Baron von
Trapp. Chacko didn’t Identify with him at all and called him Baron von Clapp‑Trapp.
Rahel was like an
excited mosquito on a leash. Flying. Weightless. Up two steps. Down two. Up
one. She climbed five flights of red stairs for Baby Kochamma’s one.
I’m Popeye the sailor
man dum dum
I live in a cara‑van
dum dum lop‑en the door
And fall‑on the floor
I’m Popeye the sailor
man dum dum.
Up two. Down two. Up
one.Jump, jump.
“Rahel,” Ammu said,
“you haven’t Learned your Lesson yet. Have you?”
Rahel had: Excitement
Always Leads to Tears. Dum dum.
They arrived at the
Princess Circle lobby. They walked past the Refreshments Counter where the
orangedrinks were waiting. And the lemondrinks were waiting. The orange too
orange. The lemon too lemon. The chocolates too melty.
The Torch Man opened
the heavy Princess Circle door into the fan‑whirring, peanut‑crunching
darkness. It smelled of breathing people and hairoil. And old carpets. A
magical, Sound of Music smell
that Rahel remembered and treasured. Smells, like music, hold memories. She
breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
Estha had the tickets.
Little Man. He lived in a caravan. Dum dum.
The Torch Man shone
his light on the pink tickets. Row J. Numbers 17, 18, 19, 20. Estha, Ammu,
Rahel, Baby Kochamma. They squeezed past irritated people who moved their legs
this way and that to make space. The seats of the chairs had to be pulled down.
Baby Kochamma held Rahel’s seat down while she climbed on. She wasn’t heavy
enough, so the chair folded her into itself like sandwich stuffing, and she
watched from between her knees. Two knees and a fountain. Estha, with more
dignity than that, sat on the edge of his chair.
The shadows of the
fans were on the sides of the screen where the picture wasn’t.
Off with the torch. On
with the World Hit
The camera soared up
in the skyblue (car‑colored) Austrian sky with the clear, sad sound of church
bells.
Far below, on the
ground, in the courtyard of the abbey, the cobblestones were shining. Nuns
walked across it. Like slow cigars. Quiet nuns clustered quietly around their
Reverend Mother, who never read their letters. They gathered like ants around a
crumb of toast. Cigars around a queen Cigar. No hair on their knees. No melons
in their blouses. And their breath like peppermint. They had complaints to make
to their Reverend Mother. Sweetsinging complaints. About Julie Andrews, who was
still up in the hills, singing. The hills are alive with the sound of music,
and was, once again, late for Mass.
She climbs a tree
and scrapes her knee
The nuns sneaked
musically.
Her dress has got a
tear
She waltzes on her way
to Mass
And whistles on the
stair…
People in the audience
were turning around.
“Shhh!” they said.
Shh! Shh! Shh!
And underneath her
wimple
She has curlers in her
hair
There was a voice from
outside the picture. It was clear and true, cutting through the fan‑whirring,
peanut‑crunching darkness.
There was a nun in the
audience. Heads twisted around like bottle caps. Black‑haired backs of heads
became faces with mouths and mustaches. Hissing mouths with teeth like sharks.
Many of them. Like stickers on a card.
“Shhhh!” they said
together. It was Estha who was singing. A nun with a puff. An Elvis Pelvis Nun.
He couldn’t help it.
“Get him out of here!”
The Audience said, when they found him.
Shutup or Getout.
Getout or Shutup.
The Audience was a Big
Man. Estha was a Little Man, with the tickets.
“Estha for heaven’s
sake, shut UP!!” Ammu’s fierce whisper said. So Estha shut UP. The mouths and
mustaches turned away. But then, without warning, the song came back, and Estha
couldn’t stop it.
“Ammu, can I go and
sing it outside?” Estha said (before Ammu smacked him). “I’ll come back after
the song.”
“But don’t ever expect
me to bring you out again,” Ammu said. “You’re embarrassing all of us.”
But Estha couldn’t
help it. He got up to go. Past angry Ammu.
Past Rahel
concentrating through her knees. Past Baby Kochamma.
Past the Audience that
had to move its legs again. Thiswayandthat.
The red sign over the
door said EXIT in a red light. Estha EXITed.
In the lobby, the
orangedrinks were waiting. The lemondrinks were waiting. The melty chocolates
were waiting. The electric blue foamleather car‑sofas were waiting. The Coming
Soon! posters were waiting.
Estha Alone sat on the
electric blue foamleather car‑sofa, in the Abhilash Talkies Princess Circle
lobby, and sang. In a nun’s voice, as clear as clean water.
But how do you make
her stay
And listen to all
you say?
The man behind the
Refreshments Counter, who’d been asleep on a row of stools, waiting for the
interval, woke up. He saw, with gummy eyes, Estha Alone in his beige and pointy
shoes. And his spoiled puff. The Man wiped his marble counter with a dirtcolored
rag. And he waited. And waiting he wiped. And wiping he waited. And watched
Estha sing.
How do you keep a wave
upon the sand?
Oh, how do you solve a
problem like Maria?
“Ay! Eda cherukka!”
The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, in a gravelly voice thick with sleep.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”
How do you hold a
moonbeam in your hand?
Estha sang.
“Ay!” the Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man said. “Look, this is my Resting Time. Soon I’ll have to wake up
and work. So I can’t have you singing English songs here. Stop it.” His gold
wristwatch was almost hidden by his curly forearm hair. His gold chain was
almost hidden by his chest hair. His white Terylene shirt was unbuttoned to
where the swell of his belly began. He looked like an unfriendly jeweled bear. Behind
him there were mirrors for people to look at themselves in while they bought
cold drinks and refreshments. To reorganize their puffs and settle their buns.
The mirrors watched Estha.
“I could file a
Written Complaint against you,” the Man said to Estha. “How would you like
that? A Written Complaint?”
Estha stopped singing
and got up to go back in.
“Now that I’m up,” the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, “now that you’ve woken me up from my Resting
Time, now that you’ve disturbed me, at least come and have a drink. It’s the
least you can do.”
He had an unshaven,
jowly face. His teeth, like yellow piano keys, watched little Elvis the Pelvis.
“No thank you,” Elvis
said politely. “My family will be expecting me. And I’ve finished my pocket
money.”
“Porketmunny?” The
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said with his teeth still watching. `First English
songs, and now Porketmunny! Where d’you live? On the moon?”
Estha turned to go.
“Wait a minute!” the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said sharply. “Just a minute!” he said again, more
gently, “I thought I asked you a question.’
His yellow teeth were
magnets. They saw, they smiled, they sang, they smelled, they moved. They
mesmerized.
“I asked you where you
lived,” he said, spinning his nasty web. “Ayemenem,” Estha said. “I live in
Ayemenem. My grandmother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She’s the
Sleeping Partner.”
“Is she, now?” the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “And who does she sleep with?”
He laughed a nasty
laugh that Estha couldn’t understand. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Come and have a
drink,” he said. “A Free Cold Drink. Come. Come here and tell me all about your
grandmother.”
Estha went. Drawn by
yellow teeth. –
“Here. Behind the
counter,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. He dropped his voice to a
whisper. “It has to be a secret because drinks are not allowed before the
interval. It’s a Theater Offense. Cognizable,” he added after a pause.
Estha went behind the
Refreshments Counter for his Free Cold Drink. He saw the three high stools
arranged in a row for the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man to sleep on. The wood
shiny from his sitting.
“Now if you’ll kindly
hold this for me,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis
through his soft white muslin dhoti, “I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?”
Estha held it because
he had to.
“Orange? Lemon?” the
Man said. “Lemonorange?”
“Lemon, please,” Estha
said politely.
He got a cold bottle
and a straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard,
hot, veiny. Not a moonbeam.
The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man’s hand closed over Estha’s. His thumbnail was long like a
woman’s. He moved Estha’s hand up and down. First slowly. Then fastly.
The lemondrink was
cold and sweet. The penis hot and hard.
The piano keys were
watching.
“So your grandmother
runs a factory?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “What kind of factory?”
“Many products,” Estha
said, not looking, with the straw in his mouth. “Squashes, pickles, jams, curry
powders. Pineapple slices.”
“Good,” the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, “Excellent” His hand closed tighter over
Estha’s. Tight and sweaty. And faster still.
Fast foster flies: –
Never let it rest
Until the fast is
faster;
And the faster’s fest.
Through the soggy
paper straw (almost flattened with spit and fear), the liquid lemon sweetness
rose. Blowing through the straw (while his other hand moved), Estha blew
bubbles into the bottle. Stickysweet lemon bubbles of the drink he couldn’t
drink. In his head he listed his grandmother’s produce.
PICKLES
SQUASHES
JAMS
Mango
Orange
Banana
Green pepper
Grape
Mixed fruit
Bitter gourd
Pineapple
Grapefruit marmalade
Garlic
Mango
Salted lime
Then the gristly‑bristly
face contorted, and Estha’s hand was wet and hot and sticky. It had egg white
on it. White egg white. Quarterboiled.
The lemondrink was
cold and sweet. The penis was soft and shriveled like an empty leather change
purse. With his dirtcolored rag, the man wiped Estha’s other hand.
“Now finish your
drink,” he said, and affectionately squished a cheek of Estha’s bottom. Tight
plums in drainpipes. And beige and pointy shoes. “You mustn’t waste it,” he
said. “Think of all the poor people who have nothing to eat or drink. You’re a
lucky rich boy, with porketmunny and a grandmother’s factory to inherit. You
should Thank God that you have no worries. Now finish your drink.”
And so, behind the
Refreshments Counter, in the Abhilash Talkies Princess Circle lobby, in the
hail with Kerala’s first 70mm CinemaScope screen, Esthappen Yako finished his
free bottle of fizzed, lemon‑flavored fear. His lemon too lemon, too cold. Too
sweet. The fizz came up his nose. He would be given another bottle soon (free,
fizzed fear). But he didn’t know that yet. He held his sticky Other Hand away
from his body.
It wasn’t supposed to
touch anything.
When Estha finished
his drink, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, “Finished? Goodboy.”
He took the empty
bottle and the flattened straw, and sent Estha back into The Sound of Music.
Back inside the
hairoil darkness, Estha held his Other Hand carefully (upwards, as though he
was holding an imagined orange). He slid past the Audience (their legs moving
thiswayandthat), past Baby Kochamma, past Rahel (still tilted back), past Ammu
(still annoyed). Estha sat down, still holding his sticky orange.
And there was Baron
von Clapp‑Trapp–Christopher Plummer. Arrogant. Hardhearted. With a mouth like a
slit. And a steel shrill police whistle. A captain with seven children. Clean children,
like a packet of peppermints. He pretended not to love them, but he did. He
loved them. He loved her (Julie Andrews), she loved him, they loved the
children, the children loved them. They all loved each other. They were clean,
white children, and their beds were soft with Ei. Der. Downs.
The house they lived
in had a lake and gardens, a wide staircase, white doors and windows, and
curtains with flowers.
The clean white
children, even the big ones, were scared of the thunder. To comfort them, Julie
Andrews put them all into her clean bed, and sang them a clean song about a few
of her favorite things. These were a few of her favorite things:
(1) Girls in white
dresses with blue satin sashes.
(2) Wild geese that
fly with the moon on their wings.
(3) Bright copper
kettles.
(4) Doorbells and
sleigbbells and.rcbnizzel with noodles.
(5) Etc.
And then, in the minds
of certain two‑egg twin members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies, some
questions arose that needed answers:
(a)Did Baron von
Clapp– Trapp shiver his leg?
He did not.
(b)Did Baron von Clapp‑Trapp
blow spit bubbles? Did be?
He did most certainly
not.
(c)Did he gobble?
He did not.
Oh Baron von Trapp,
Baron von Trapp, could you love the little fellow with the orange in the smelly
auditorium?
He’s just held the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s soo‑soo in his hand, but could you love him still?
And his twin sister?
Tilting upwards with her fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo? Could you love her too?
Baron von Trapp had
some questions of his own.
(a)Are they clean
white children? No. (But Sophie Mol is.)
(b)Do they blow spit
bubbles? Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)
(c)Do they shiver
their legs? Like clerks? Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)
(d)Have they, either
or both, ever held strangers’ soo‑soos?
N… Nyes. (But Sophie
Mol hasn’t.)
“Then I’m sorry,”
Baron von Clapp‑Trapp said. “It’s out of the question. I cannot love them. I
cannot be their Baba. Oh no.”
Baron von Clapp‑Trapp
couldn’t
Estha put his head in
his lap.
“What’s the matter?”
Ammu said. “If you’re sulking again, I’m taking you straight home. Sit up
please. And watch. That’s what you’ve been brought here for.”
Finish the drink.
Watch the picture.
Think of all
thepoorpeople–
Lucky rich boy with
porketmunny. No worries.
Estha sat up and
watched. His stomach heaved. He had a greenwavy, thick‑watery, lumpy, seaweedy,
floaty bottomless‑bottomful feeling.
“Ammu?” he said.
“Now WHAT?” The WHAT
snapped, barked, spat out. “Feeling vomity,” Estha said.
“Just feeling or d’you
want to?” Ammu’s voice was worried. “Don’t know.”
“Shall we go and try?”
Ammu said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Okay,” Estha said.
Okay? Okay.”Where’re
you going?” Baby Kochamma wanted to know. `Estha’s going to try and vomit,”
Ammu said. “Where’re you going?” Rahel asked.
“Feeling vomity,”
Estha said. “Can I come and watch?” “No,” Ammu said.
Past the Audience
again (legs thiswayandthat). Last time to sing. This time to try and vomit Exit
through the EXIT. Outside in the marble lobby, the Orangedrink Lemondrink man
was eating a sweet His cheek was bulging with a moving sweet He made soft,
sucking sounds like water draining from a basin. There was a green Parry’s
wrapper on the counter. Sweets were free for this man. He had a row of free
sweets in dim bottles. He wiped the marble counter with his dirtcolored rag
that he held in his hairy watch hand. When he saw the luminous woman with
polished shoulders and the little boy, a shadow slipped across his face. Then
he smiled his portable piano smile.
“Out again so soon?”
he said.
Estha was already
retching. Ammu moonwalked him to the Princess Circle bathroom. HERS.
He was held up, wedged
between the notclean basin and Ammu’s body. Legs dangling. The basin had steel
taps, and rust stains. And a brownwebbed mesh of hairline cracks, like the road
map of some great, intricate city.
Estha convulsed, but
nothing came. Just thoughts. And they floated out and floated back in. Ammu
couldn’t see them. They hovered like storm clouds over the Basin City But the
basin men and basin women went about their usual basin business. Basin cars,
and basin buses still whizzed around. Basin Life went on.
“No?” Ammu said. “No,”
Estha said. No? No. “Then wash your face,” Ammu said. “Water always helps. Wash
your face and let’s go and have a fizzy lemondrink.”
Estha washed his face
and hands and face and hands. His eyelashes were wet and bunched together. –
The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man folded the green sweet wrapper and fixed the fold with his
painted thumbnail. He stunned a fly with a rolled magazine. Delicately, he
flicked it over the edge of the counter onto the floor. It lay on its back and
waved its feeble legs. –
“Sweet boy this,” he
said to Ammu. “Sings nicely.”
“He’s my son,” Ammu
said. –
“Really?” the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, and looked at Ammu with his teeth. “Really?
You don’t look old enough–”
“He’s not feeling
well,” Ammu said. “I thought a cold drink would make him feel better.”
“Of course,” the Man
said. `Of course of course. Orangelemon? Lemonorange?” Dreadful, dreaded question.
“No. Thank you.” Estha
looked at Ammu. Greenwavy, seaweedy, bottomless‑bottomful.
“What about you?” The
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man asked Ammu. “Coca‑ColaFanta? Icecream Rosemilk?”
“No. Not for me. Thank
you,” Ammu said. Deep dimpled, luminous woman.
“Here,” the Man said,
with a fistful of sweets, like a generous Air Hostess. “These are for your
little Mon.”
“No thank you,” Estha
said, looking at Ammu.
“Take them, Estha,”
Ammu said. “Don’t be rude.’
Estha took them.
“Say thank you,” Ammu
said.
“Thank you,” Estha
said. (For the sweets, for the white egg white.) “No mention,” the Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man said in English.
“So!” he said. “Mon
says you’re from Ayemenem?”
“Yes,” Ammu said.
“I come there often,”
the Orangedrink Lemondrink man said. “My wife’s people are Ayemenem people. I
know where your factory is. Paradise Pickles, isn’t it? He told me. Your Mon.”
He knew where to find
Estha. That was what he was trying to say. It was a warning.
Ammu saw her son’s
bright feverbutton eyes.
“We must go,” she
said. “Mustn’t risk a fever. Their cousin is coming tomorrow.” She explained to
Uncle. And then, added casually, “From London.”
“From London?” A new
respect gleamed in Uncle’s eyes. For a family with London connections.
“Estha, you stay here
with Uncle. I’ll get Baby Kochamma and Rahel,” Ammu said.
“Come,” Uncle said.
“Come and sit with me on a high stool.”
“No, Ammu! No, Ammu,
no! I want to come with you!” Ammu, surprised at the unusually shrill
insistence from her usually quiet son, apologized to the Orangedrink Lemondrink
Uncle.
“He’s not usually like
this. Come on then, Esthappen.”
The back‑inside smell.
Fan shadows. Backs of heads. Necks. Collars. Hair. Buns. Plaits. Ponytails.
A fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo.
A little girl and an ex‑nun. Baron von Trapp’s seven peppermint children had
had their peppermint baths, and were standing in a peppermint line with their
hair slicked down, singing in obedient peppermint voices to the woman the Baron
nearly married. The blonde Baroness who shone like a diamond. –
–The hills are
alive with the sound of music‑
“We have to go,” Ammu
said to Baby Kochamma and Rahel. “But Ammu!” Rahel said. “The Main Things
haven’t even happened yet. He hasn’t even kissed her! He hasn’t even torn down the Hitler flag
yet! They haven’t even been betrayed
by Rolf the Postman!” –
“Estha’s sick,” Ammu
said. `Come on!”
“The Nazi soldiers
haven’t even come!”‑
“Come on,” Ammu said.
“Get up!”
“They haven’t even
done `High on a hill lived a lonely goatherd’ !”
“Estha has to be well
for Sophie Mol, doesn’t he?” Baby Kochamma said.
“He doesn’t,” Rahel
said, but mostly to herself.
“What did you say?”
Baby Kochamma said, getting the general drift, but not what was actually said.
“Nothing,” Rahel said.
–
“I heard you,” Baby
Kochamma said.
Outside, Uncle was
reorganizing his dim bottles. Wiping with his dirtcolored rag the ring‑shaped
water stains they had left on his marble Refreshments Counter. Preparing for
the Interval. He was a Clean Orangedrink Lemondrink Uncle. He had an air
hostess’s heart trapped in a bear’s body.
“Going then?” he said.
“Yes,” Ammu said.
`Where can we get a taxi?”
“Out the gate, up the
road, on your left,” he said, looking at Rahel. “You never told me you had a
little Mol too.” And holding out another sweet “Here, Mol–for you.”
“Take mine!” Estha
said quickly, not wanting Rahel to go near the man. –
But Rahel had already
started towards him. As she approached him, he smiled at her and something
about that portable piano smile, something about the steady gaze in which he
held her, made her shrink from him. It was the most hideous thing she had ever
seen. She spun around to look at Estha.
She backed away from
the hairy man.
Estha pressed his
Parry’s sweets into her hand and she felt his fever‑hot fingers whose tips were
as cold as death.
“Bye, Mol” Uncle said
to Estha. “I’ll see you in Ayemenem sometime.”
So, the redsteps once
again. This time Rahel lagging. Slow. No I don’t want to go. A ton of bricks on
a leash.
“Sweet chap, that
Orangedrink Lemondrink fellow,” Ammu said. – “Chhi !” Baby Kochamma
said. –
“He doesn’t look it,
but he was surprisingly sweet with Estha,” Ammu said.
“So why don’t you
marry him then?” Rahel said petulantly.
Time stopped on the
red staircase. Estha stopped. Baby Kochamma stopped.
“Rahel,” Ammu said.
Rahel froze. She was
desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn’t know where those words had
come from. She didn’t know that she’d had them in her. But they were out now,
and wouldn’t go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a
government office. Some stood, some sat and shivered their legs.
“Rahel,” Ammu said,
“do you realize what you have just done?”
Frightened eyes and a
fountain looked back at Ammu.
“It’s all right. Don’t
be scared,” Ammu said. “Just answer me. Do you?”
“What?” Rahel said in
the smallest voice she had.
“Realize what you’ve
just done?” Ammu said.
Frightened eyes and a
fountain looked back at Ammu.
“D’you know what
happens when you hurt people?” Ammu said. “When you hurt people, they begin to
love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a
little less.”
A cold moth with
unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s heart. Where its icy
legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart
A little less her Ammu
loved her.
And so, out the gate,
up the road, and to the left. The taxi stand. A hurt mother, an ex‑nun, a hot
child and a cold one. Six goosebumps and a moth.
The taxi smelled of
sleep. Old clothes rolled up. Damp towels. Armpits. It was, after all, the taxi
driver’s home. He lived in it. It was the only place he had to store his
smells. The seats had been killed. Ripped. A swathe of dirty yellow sponge
spilled out and shivered on the backseat like an immense jaundiced liver. The
driver had the ferrety alertness of a small rodent. He had a hooked Roman nose
and a Little Richard mustache. He was so small that he watched the road through
the steering wheel. To passing traffic it looked like a taxi with passengers
but no driver. He drove fast, pugnaciously, darting into empty spaces, nudging
other cars out of their lanes. Accelerating at zebra crossings. Jumping lights.
“Why not use a cushion
or a pillow or something?” Baby Kochamma suggested in her friendly voice.
“You’ll be able to see better.”
“Why not mind your own
business, sister?” the driver suggested in his unfriendly one.
Driving past the inky
sea, Estha put his head out of the window. He could taste the hot, salt breeze
on his mouth. He could feel it lift his hair. He knew that if Ammu found out
about what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, she’d love him less
as well. Very much less. He felt the shaming churning heaving turning sickness
in his stomach. He longed for the river. Because water always helps.
The sticky neon night
rushed past the taxi window. It was hot inside the taxi, and quiet Baby
Kochamma looked flushed and excited. She loved not being the cause of ill‑feeling.
Every time a pye‑dog strayed onto the road, the driver made a sincere effort to
kill it.
The moth on Rahel’s
heart spread its velvet wings, and the chill crept into her bones.
In the Hotel Sea Queen
car park, the skyblue Plymouth gossiped with other, smaller cars. HJ’I:p H.thp
Hsnooh‑snah. A big lady at a small ladies’ party. Tailfins aflutter.
“Room numbers 313 and
327,” the man at the reception desk said. “Non‑airconditioned. Twin beds. Lift
is closed for repair.”
The bellboy who took
them up wasn’t a boy and hadn’t a bell, He had dim eyes and two buttons missing
on his frayed maroon coat. His grayed undershirt showed. He had to wear his
silly bellhop’s cap tilted sideways, its tight plastic strap sunk into his
sagging dewlap. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to make an old man wear a cap
sideways like that and arbitrarily re‑order the way in which age chose to hang
from his chin.
There were more red
steps to climb. The same red carpet from the cinema hall was following them
around. Magic flying carpet.
Chacko was in his room.
Caught feasting. Roast chicken, chips, sweet corn and chicken soup, two
parathas and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Sauce in a sauceboat.
Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating. Mammachi said it
was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness. Chacko said it was no such thing. He
said it was Sheer Greed.
Chacko was puzzled to
see everybody back so early, but pretended otherwise. He kept eating.
The original plan had
been that Estha would sleep with Chacko, and Rahel with Ammu and Baby Kochamma.
But now that Estha wasn’t well and Love had been re‑apportioned (Ammu loved her
a little less), Rahel would have to sleep with Chacko, and Estha with Ammu and
Baby Kochamma.
Ammu took Rahel’s
pajamas and toothbrush out of the suitcase and put them on the bed.
“Here,” Ammu said.
Two clicks to close
the suitcase.
Click. And click.
“Ammu,” Rahel said,
“shall I miss dinner as my punishment?”
She was keen to
exchange punishments. No dinner, in exchange for Ammu loving her the same as
before.
“As you please,” Ammu
said. “But I advise you to eat. If you want to grow, that is. Maybe you could
share some of Chacko’s chicken.”
“Maybe and maybe not,”
Chacko said.
“But what about my
punishment?” Rahel said. “You haven’t given me my punishment!”
“Some things come with
their own punishments,” Baby Kochamma said. As though she was explaining a sum
that Rahel couldn’t understand.
Some things come with
their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built‑in cupboards. They would all
learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some
were so big they were like cupboards with built‑in bedrooms. You could spend
your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.
Baby Kochamma’s
goodnight kiss left a little spit on Rahel’s cheek. She wiped it off with her
shoulder.
“Goodnight Godbless,”
Ammu said. But she said it with her back. She was already gone.
“Goodnight,” Estha
said, too sick to love his sister.
Rahel Alone watched
them walk down the hotel corridor like silent but substantial ghosts. Two big,
one small, in beige and pointy hoes. The red carpet took away their feet
sounds.
Rahel stood in the
hotel room doorway, full of sadness.
She had in her the
sadness of Sophie Mol coming. The sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less.
And the sadness of whatever the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man had done to Estha in
Abhilash Talkies.
A stinging wind blew
across her dry, aching eyes.
Chacko put a leg of
chicken and some finger chips onto a quarter plate for Rahel. “No thank you,”
Rahel said, hoping that if she could somehow effect her own punishment, Ammu
would rescind hers.
“What about some ice
cream with chocolate sauce?” Chacko said.
“No thank you,” Rahel
said.
“Fine,” Chacko said.
“But you don’t know what you’re missing.”
He finished all the
chicken and then all the ice cream.
Rahel changed into her
pajamas.
“Please don’t tell me
what it is you’re being punished for,” Chacko said. “I can’t bear to hear about
it.” He was mopping the last of the chocolate sauce from the sauceboat with a
piece of paratha. His disgusting, after‑sweet sweet. “What was it? Scratching
your mosquito bites till they bled? Not saying `Thank you’ to the taxi driver?”
“Something much worse
than that,” Rahel said, loyal to Ammu.
“Don’t tell me,”
Chacko said. “I don’t want to know.”
He rang for room
service and a tired bearer came to take away the plates and bones. He tried to
catch the dinner smells, but they escaped and climbed into the limp brown hotel
curtains.
A dinnerless niece and
her dinnerfull uncle brushed their teeth together in the Hotel Sea Queen
bathroom. She, a forlorn, stubby convict in striped pajamas and a Fountain in a
Love‑in‑Tokyo. He, in his cotton vest and underpants. His vest, taut and
stretched over his round stomach like a second skin, went slack over the
depression of his belly button.
When Rahel held her
frothing toothbrush still and moved her teeth instead, he didn’t say mustn’t.
He wasn’t a Fascist.
They took it in turns
to spit. Rahel carefully examined her white Binaca froth as it dribbled down
the side of the basin, to see what she could see.
What colors and
strange creatures had been ejected from the spaces between her teeth?
None tonight. Nothing
unusual. Just Binaca bubbles.
Chacko put off the Big
Light
In bed, Rahel took off
her Love‑in‑Tokyo and put it by her sunglasses. Her fountain slumped a little,
but stayed standing.
Chacko lay in bed in
the pool of light from his bedside lamp. A fat man on a dark stage. He reached
over to his shirt lying crumpled at the foot of his bed. He took his wallet out
of the pocket, and looked at the photograph of Sophie Mol that Margaret
Kochamma had sent him two years ago.
Rahel watched him and
her cold moth spread its wings again. Slow out. Slow in. A predator’s lazy
blink.
The sheets were
coarse, but clean.
Chacko closed his
wallet and put out the light. Into the night he lit a Charminar and wondered
what his daughter looked like now. Nine years old. Last seen when she was red
and wrinkled. Barely human. Three weeks later, Margaret his wife, his only
love, had cried and told him about Joe.
Margaret told Chacko
that she couldn’t live with him anymore. She told him that she needed her own
space. As though Chacko had been using her shelves for his clothes. Which,
knowing him, he probably had.
She asked him for a
divorce.
Those last few
tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch
and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To
ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be
accurate. He memorized the brown down on her soft skull. The shape of her
puckered, constantly moving mouth. The spaces between her toes. The suggestion
of a mole. And then, without meaning to, he found himself searching his baby for
signs of Joe. The baby clutched his index finger while he conducted his insane,
broken, envious, torchlit study. Her belly button protruded from her satiated
satin stomach like a domed monument on a hill. Chacko laid his ear against it
and listened with wonder at the rumblings from within. Messages being sent from
here to there. New organs getting used to each other. A new government setting
up its systems. Organizing the division of labor, deciding who would do what.
She smelled of milk
and urine. Chacko marveled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in
her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the
sanity of a grown man.
When he left, he felt
that something had been torn out of him. Something big.
But Joe was dead now.
Killed in a car crash. Dead as a doorknob. A Joe‑shaped Hole in the Universe.
In Chacko’s
photograph, Sophie Mol was seven years old. White and blue. Rose‑lipped, and
Syrian Christian nowhere. Though Mammachi, peering at the photograph, insisted
she had Pappachi’s nose.
“Chacko?” Rahel said,
from her darkened bed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Ask me two,” Chacko
said.
“Chacko, do you love
Sophie Mol Most in the World?”
“She’s my daughter,”
Chacko said.
Rahel considered this.
“Chacko? Is it
Necessary that people HAVE to love their own children Most in the World?”
“There are no rules,”
Chacko said. “But people usually do.”
“Chacko, for example,”
Rahel said, “just for example, is it possible that Ammu can love Sophie Mol more
than me and Estha? Or for you to love me more than Sophie Mol for example?”
“Anything’s possible
in Human Nature,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the
darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain‑haired niece. “Love.
Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.”
Of the four things
that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate joy sounded
the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a
church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.
A cold moth lifted a
cold leg.
The cigarette smoke
curled into the night. And the fat man and the little girl lay awake in
silence.
A few rooms away,
while his baby grandaunt snored, Estha awoke.
Ammu was asleep and
looked beautiful in the barred‑blue streetlight that came in through the barred‑blue
window. She smiled a sleepsmile that dreamed of dolphins and a deep barred
blue. It was a smile that gave no indication that the person who belonged to it
was a bomb waiting to go off.
Estha Alone walked
wearily to the bathroom. He vomited a clear, bitter, lemony, sparkling, fizzy
liquid. The acrid after taste of a Little Man’s first encounter with Fear. Dum
dum.
He felt a little
better. He put on his shoes and walked out of his room, laces trailing, down
the corridor, and stood quietly outside Rahel’s door.
Rahel stood on a chair
and unlatched the door for him. Chacko didn’t bother to wonder how she could
possibly have known that Estha was at the door. He was used to their sometimes
strangeness.
He lay like a beached
whale on the narrow hotel bed and wondered idly if it had indeed been Velutha
that Rahel saw. He didn’t think it likely. Velutha had too much going for him.
He was a Paravan with a future. He wondered whether Velutha had become a card‑holding
member of the Marxist Party. And whether he had been seeing Comrade K. N. M.
Pillai lately.
Earlier in the year,
Comrade Pillai’s political ambitions had been given an unexpected boost. Two
local Party members, Comrade J. Kattukaran and Comrade Guhan Menon had been
expelled from the Party as suspected Naxalites. One of them–Comrade Guhan
Menon–was tipped to be the Party’s candidate for the Kottayam by‑elections to
the Legislative Assembly due next March. His expulsion from the Parry created a
vacuum that a number of hopefuls were jockeying to fill. Among them Comrade K.
N. M. Pillai.
Comrade Pillai had
begun to watch the goings‑on at Paradise Pickles with the keenness of a
substitute at a soccer match. To bring in a new labor union, however small, in
what he hoped would be his future constituency; would be an excellent beginning
for a journey to the Legislative Assembly.
Until then, at
Paradise Pickles, Comrade! Comrade!
(as Ammu put it) had been no more than a harmless game played outside
working hours. But if the stakes were raised, and the conductor’s baton wrested
from Chacko’s hands, everybody (except Chacko) knew that the factory already
steeped in debt, would be in trouble.
Since things were not
going well financially, the labor was paid less than the minimum rates
specified by the Trade Union. Of course it was Chacko himself who pointed this
out to them and promised that as soon as things picked up, their wages would be
revised. He believed that they trusted him and knew that he had their best
interests at heart.
But there was someone
who thought otherwise. In the evenings, after the factory shift was over,
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai waylaid the workers of Paradise Pickles and shepherded
them into his printing press. In his reedy, piping voice he urged them on to
revolution. In his speeches he managed a clever mix of pertinent local issues
and grand Maoist rhetoric, which sounded even grander in Malayalam.
“People of the World,”
he would chirrup, “be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance
wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the People. Monsters of all
kinds shall be destroyed. You must demand what is rightfully yours. Yearly
bonus. Provident fund. Accident insurance.”
Since these speeches
were in part rehearsal for when, as the local Member of the Legislative
Assembly, Comrade Pillai would address thronging millions, there was something
odd about their pitch and cadence. His voice was full of green rice fields and
red banners that arced across blue skies instead of a small hot room and the
smell of printer’s ink.
Comrade K. N. M.
Pillai never came out openly against Chacko. Whenever he referred to him in his
speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as
an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. A theoretical construct. A pawn
in the monstrous bourgeois plot to subvert the revolution. He never referred to
him by name, but always as “the Management” As though Chacko was many people.
Apart from it being tactically the right thing to do, this disjunction between
the man and his job helped Comrade Pillai to keep his conscience clear about
his own private business dealings with Chacko. His contract for printing the
Paradise Pickles labels gave him an income that he badly needed. He told
himself that Chacko‑the‑client and Chacko‑the‑Management were two different
people. Quite separate of course from Chacko‑the‑Comrade.
The only snag in
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s plans was Velutha. Of all the workers at Paradise
Pickles, he was the only card‑holding member of the Party, and that gave
Comrade Pillai an ally he would rather have done without. He knew that all the
other Touchable workers in the factory resented Velutha for ancient reasons of
their own. Comrade Pillai stepped carefully around this wrinkle, waiting for a
suitable opportunity to iron it out.
He stayed in constant
touch with the workers. He made it his business to know exactly what went on at
the factory. He ridiculed them for accepting the wages they did, when their own
government, the People’s Government, was in power.
When Punnachen, the
accountant who read Mammachi the papers every morning, brought news that there
had been talk among the workers of demanding a raise, Mammachi was furious.
“Tell them to read the papers. There’s a famine on. There are no jobs. People
are starving to death. They should be grateful they have any work at all.”
Whenever anything
serious happened in the factory it was always to Mammachi and not Chacko that
the news was brought. Perhaps this was because Mammachi fitted properly into
the conventional scheme of things. She was the Modalali. She played her part.
Her responses, however harsh, were straightforward and predictable. Chacko on
the other hand, though he was the Man of the House, though he said “My pickles,
my jam, my curry powders,” was so busy trying on different costumes that he
blurred the battle lines.
Mammachi tried to
caution Chacko. He heard her out, but didn’t really listen to what she was saying.
So despite the early rumblings of discontent on the premises of Paradise
Pickles, Chacko, in rehearsal for the Revolution, continued to play Comrade!
Comrade!
That night, on his
narrow hotel bed, he thought sleepily about pre‑empting Comrade Pillai by
organizing his workers into a sort of private labor union. He would hold
elections for them. Make them vote. They could take turns at being elected
representatives. He smiled at the idea of holding round‑table negotiations with
Comrade Sumathi, or, better still, Comrade Lucykutty; who had much the nicer
hair.
His thoughts returned
to Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol. Fierce bands of love tightened around his
chest until he could barely breathe. He lay awake and counted the hours before
they could leave for the airport.
On the next bed, his
niece and nephew slept with their arms around each other. A hot twin and a cold
one. He and She. We and Us. Somehow, not wholly unaware of the hint of doom and
all that waited in the wings for them.
They dreamed of their
river.
Of the coconut trees
that bent into it and watched, with coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream
in the mornings. Downstream in the evenings. And the dull, sullen sound of the
boatmen’s bamboo poles as they thudded against the dark, oiled boatwood.
It was warm, the
water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk.
With fish in it.
With the sky and trees
in it.
And at night, the
broken yellow moon in it.
When they grew tired
of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the curtains and drifted through the
Sea Queen windows to dance the night away on the dinner‑smelling sea.
The time was ten to
two.
Chapter 5.
God’s Own Country
Years later, when
Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with
holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.
Both things had
happened.
It had shrunk. And she
had grown.
Downriver, a saltwater
barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy‑farmer
lobby. The barrage regulated the inflow of salt water from the backwaters that
opened into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead of
one. More rice–for the price of a river.
Despite the fact that
it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A
thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side,
sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a
succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles underwater.
Bronze‑winged lily‑trotters walked across it. Splay‑footed, cautious.
Once it had had the
power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit
spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid
garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface
like subtropical flying‑flowers.
The stone steps that
had once led bathers right down to the water, and Fisher People to the fish,
were entirely exposed and led from nowhere to nowhere, like an absurd corbelled
monument that commemorated nothing. Ferns pushed through the cracks.
On the other side of
the river, the steep mud banks changed abruptly into low mud walls of shanty
hutments. Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto
the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their
dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening,
the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to
the sea, leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. Upstream, clean
mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People
bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts on a thin,
rocking, ribbon lawn.
On warm days the smell
of shit lifted off the river and hovered over Ayemenem like a hat.
Further inland, and
still across, a five‑star hotel chain had bought the Heart of Darkness.
The History House
(where map‑breath’d ancestors with tough toe‑nails once whispered) could no
longer be approached from the river. It had turned its back on Ayemenem. The
hotel guests were ferried across the backwaters, straight from Cochin. They
arrived by speedboat, opening up a V of foam on the water, leaving behind a
rainbow film of gasoline.
The view from the
hotel was beautiful, but here too the water was thick and toxic. No Swimming
signs had been put up in stylish calligraphy. They had built a tall wall to
screen off the slum and prevent it from encroaching on Kari Saipu’s estate.
There wasn’t much they could do about the smell.
But they had a
swimming pool for swimming. And fresh tandoori pomfret and crepe suzette on
their menu.
The trees were still
green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and
plugged their smelly paradise–God’s Own Country they called it in their
brochures–because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like
other peoples’ poverty was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of
discipline. Of Rigor and Air‑conditioning. Nothing more.
Kari Saipu’s house had
been renovated and painted. It had become the centerpiece of an elaborate
complex, crisscrossed with artificial canals and connecting bridges. Small
boats bobbed in the water. The old colonial bungalow with its deep verandah and
Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses‑ancestral homes‑that
the hotel chain had bought from old families and transplanted in the Heart of
Darkness. Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice
in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English
magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in
attitudes of deference. “Heritage,” the hotel was called.
The Hotel People liked
to tell their guests that the oldest of the wooden houses, with its airtight,
paneled storeroom which could hold enough rice to feed an army for a year, had
been the ancestral home of Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Kerala’s Mao
Tsetung,” they explained to the uninitiated. The furniture and knickknacks that
came with the house were on display. A reed umbrella, a wicker couch. A wooden
dowry box. They were labeled with edifying placards that said Traditional
Kerala Umbrella and Traditional
Bridal Dowry –box .
So there it was then,
History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms
to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat.
Comrade
Namboodiripad’s house functioned as the hotel’s dining room, where semi‑suntanned
tourists in bathing suits sipped tender coconut water (served in the shell),
and old Communists, who now worked as fawning bearers in colorful ethnic
clothes, stooped slightly behind their trays of drinks.
In the evenings (for
that Regional Flavor) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali
performances (`Small attention spans,” the Hotel People explained to the
dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six‑hour classics
were slashed to twenty‑minute cameos.
The performances were
staged by the swimming pool. While the drummers drummed and the dancers danced,
hotel guests frolicked with their children in the water. While Kunti revealed
her secret to Karna on the riverbank, courting couples rubbed suntan oil on
each other. While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile
teenaged daughters, Poothana suckled young Krishna at her poisoned breast.
Bhima disemboweled Dushasana and bathed Draupadi’s hair in his blood.
The back verandah of
the History House (where a posse of Touchable policemen converged, where an
inflatable goose was burst) had been enclosed and converted into the airy hotel
kitchen. Nothing worse than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The
Terror was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming of
cooks. The cheerful chop‑chop‑chopping of ginger and garlic. The disemboweling
of lesser mammals‑pigs, goats. The dicing of meat. The scaling of fish.
Something lay buried
in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty‑three years of June rain.
A small forgotten
thing.
Nothing that the world
would miss.
A child’s plastic
wristwatch with the time painted on it
Ten to two, it said.
A band of children
followed Rahel on her walk.
“Hello hippie,” they
said, twenty‑five years too late. “Whatisyourname?”
Then someone threw a
small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.
On her way back,
looping around the Ayemenem House, Rahel emerged onto the main road. Here too,
houses had mushroomed, and it was only the fact that they nestled under trees,
and that the narrow paths that branched off the main road and led to them were
not motorable, that gave Ayemenem the semblance of rural quietness. In truth,
its population had swelled to the size of a little town. Behind the fragile
façade of greenery lived a press of people who could gather at a moment’s
notice. To beat to death a careless bus driver. To smash the windscreen of a
car that dared to venture out on the day of an Opposition bandh. To steal Baby
Kochamma’s imported insulin and her cream buns that came all the way from
Bestbakery in Kottayam.
Outside Lucky Press,
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was standing at his boundary wall talking to a man on
the other side. Comrade Pillai’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he
clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow
them and he had just refused. The man across the wall shuffled through a bunch
of photographs in a plastic sachet, with an air of contrived interest. The
photographs were mostly pictures of Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s son, Lenin, who
lived and worked in Delhi–he took care of the painting, plumbing, and any
electrical work for the Dutch and German embassies. In order to allay any fears
his clients might have about his political leanings, he had altered his name
slightly. Levin he called himself now. P. Levin.
Rahel tried to walk
past unnoticed. It was absurd of her to have imagined that she could.
“Ay‑yo , Rahel
Mol!” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said, recognizing her instantly, “Orkunnilky
? Comrade Uncle?”
“Oower ,” Rahel
said.
Did she remember him?
She did indeed.
Neither question nor
answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both
she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that
cannot–that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways‑staring
eyes. –
“So!” Comrade Pillai
said. “I think so you are in Amayrica flow?”
“No,” Rahel said. “I’m
here.”
“Yes yes.” He sounded
a little impatient. “But otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?” Comrade Pillai
uncrossed his arms. His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary
wall like a sad St. Bernard’s eyes.
“Recognized?” Comrade
Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin.
The man hadn’t
“The old Paradise
Pickle Kochamma’s daughter’s daughter,” Comrade Pillai said.
The man looked
puzzled. He was clearly a stranger. And not a pickle‑eater. Comrade Pillai
tried a different tack.
“Punnyan Kunju?” he
asked. The Patriarch of Antioch appeared briefly in the sky and waved his
withered hand.
Things began to fall
into place for the man with the photographs. He nodded enthusiastically.
“Punnyan Kunju’s son?
Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi?” Comrade Pillai said.
“Oower, oower, oower,”
the man said.
“His daughter’s daughter
is this. In Amayrica now.”
The nodder nodded as
Rahel’s ancestral lineage fell into place for him.
“Oower, oower, oower.
In Amayrica now, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration.
He remembered vaguely
a whiff of scandal. He had forgotten the details, but remembered that it had
involved sex and death. It had been in the papers. After a brief silence and
another series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of
photographs.
“Okay then, comrade,
I’ll be off.”
He had a bus to catch.
“So!” Comrade Pillai’s
smile broadened as he turned all his attention like a searchlight on Rahel. His
gums were startlingly pink, the reward for a lifetime’s uncompromising
vegetarianism. He was the kind of man whom it was hard to imagine had once been
a boy. Or a baby. He looked as though he had been born middle aged. With a
receding hairline.
“Mol’s husband?” he
wanted to know.
“Hasn’t come.”
“Any photos?”
“No.”
“Name?”
“Larry. Lawrence.”
“Oower. Lawrence.”
Comrade Pillai nodded as though he agreed with it. As though given a choice, it
was the very one he would have picked.
“Any issues?”
“No,” Rahel said.
“Still in planning
stages, I suppose? Or expecting?’
“No.”
“One is must. Boy,
girl. Anyone,” Comrade Pillai said. “Two is of course your choice.”
“We’re divorced.”
Rahel hoped to shock him into silence. “Die‑vorced?” His voice rose to such a
high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word
as though it were a form of death.
“That is most
unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to
uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most unfortunate.”
It occurred to Comrade
Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers’ bourgeois
decadence.
One was mad. The
other die‑vorced. Probably barren.
Perhaps this was the
real revolution. The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self‑destruct.
Comrade Pillai lowered
his voice as though there were people listening, though there was no one about.
“And Mon?” he
whispered confidentially. “How is he?”
“Fine,” Rahel said.
“He’s fine.”
Fine. Flat and bony‑colored.
He washes his clothes with crumbling soap.
“Aiyyo paavam
,” Comrade Pillai whispered, and his nipples drooped in mock dismay. “Poor
fellow.”
Rahel wondered what he
gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her
answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at
least bother to pretend otherwise?
“Lenin is in Delhi
now,” Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride.
“Working with foreign embassies. See!”
He handed Rahel the
cellophane sachet. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His
wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands
with a very well‑dressed, very pink man.
“German First
Secretary,” Comrade Pillai said.
They looked cheerful
in the photographs, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator
in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.
Rahel remembered the
incident that made Lenin swim into focus as a Real Person for her and Estha,
when they stopped regarding him as just another pleat in his mother’s sari. She
and Estha were five, Lenin perhaps three or four years old. They met in the
clinic of Dr. Verghese Verghese (Kottayam’s leading Pediatrician and Feeler‑up
of Mothers). Rahel was with Ammu and Estha (who had insisted that he go along).
Lenin was with his mother, Kalyani. Both Rahel and Lenin had the same
complaint–Foreign Objects Lodged Up Their Noses. It seemed an extraordinary
coincidence now, but somehow hadn’t then. It was curious how politics lurked
even in what children chose to stuff up their noses. She, the granddaughter of
an Imperial Entomologist, he the son of a grassroots Marxist Party worker. So,
she a glass bead, and he a green gram.
The waiting room was
full.
From behind the
doctor’s curtain, sinister voices murmured, interrupted by howls from savaged
children. There was the clink of glass on metal, and the whisper and bubble of
boiling water. A boy played with the wooden Doctor is IN‑Doctor is OUT sign on the wall, sliding the brass panel up
and down. A feverish baby hiccupped on its mother’s breast. The slow ceiling
fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly
to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.
No one read the
magazines.
From below the scanty
curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street
came the relentless slipslap of disembodied feet in slippers. The noisy,
carefree world of Those with Nothing Up Their Noses.
Ammu and Kalyani
exchanged children. Noses were pushed up, heads bent back, and turned towards
the light to see if one mother could see what the other had missed. When that
didn’t work, Lenin, dressed like a taxi‑yellow shirt, black stretchlon
shorts–regained his mother’s nylon lap (and his packet of Chiclets). He sat on
sari flowers and from that unassailable position of strength surveyed the scene
impassively. He inserted his left forefinger deep into his unoccupied nostril
and breathed noisily through his mouth. He had a neat side parting. His hair
was slicked down with Ayurvedic oil. The Chiclets were his to hold before the
doctor saw him, and to consume after. All was well with the world. Perhaps he
was a little too young to know that Atmosphere in Waiting Room, plus Screams
from Behind Curtain, ought logically to add up to a Healthy Fear of Dr. V. V.
A rat with bristly
shoulders made several busy journeys between the doctor’s room and the bottom
of the cupboard in the waiting room.
A nurse appeared and
disappeared through the tattered curtained doctor’s door. She wielded strange
weapons. A tiny vial. A rectangle of glass with blood smeared on it A test tube
of sparkling, back‑lit urine. A stainless‑steel tray of boiled needles. The
hairs on her legs were pressed like coiled wires against her translucent white
stockings. The box heels of her scuffed white sandals were worn away on the
insides, and caused her feet to slope in, towards each other. Shiny black
hairpins, like straightened snakes, clamped her starched nurse’s cap to her
oily head.
She appeared to have
rat‑filters on her glasses. She didn’t seem to notice the bristly‑shouldered
rat even when it scuttled right past her feet. She called out names in a deep
voice, like a man’s: A. Ninan… S.Kusumolatha… B. V. Roshini… N. Ambady. She ignored
the alarmed, spiraling air.
Estha’s eyes were
frightened saucers. He was mesmerized by the Doctor is IN–Doctor is OUT sign.
A tide of panic rose
in Rahel. “Ammu, once again let’s try.” Ammu held the back of Rahel’s head with
one hand. With her thumb in her handkerchief she blocked the beadless nostril.
All eyes in the waiting room were on Rahel. It was to be the performance of her
life. Estha’s expression prepared to blow its nose. Furrows gathered on his
forehead and he took a deep breath.
Rahel summoned all her
strength. Please God, please make it come out. From the soles of her feet, from
the bottom of her heart, she blew into her mother’s handkerchief.
And in a rush of snot
and relief, it emerged. A little mauve bead in a glistening bed of slime. As
proud as a pearl in an oyster. Children gathered around to admire it. The boy
who was playing with the sign was scornful.
“I could easily do
that!” he announced.
“Try it and see what a
slap you’ll get,” his mother said. “Miss Rahel!” the nurse shouted and looked
around. “It’s Out!” Ammu said to the nurse. “It’s come out.” She held up her
crumpled handkerchief.
The nurse had no idea
what she meant.
“It’s all right. We’re
leaving,” Ammu said. “The bead’s out.”
“Next,” the nurse
said, and closed her eyes behind her rat‑filters. (“It takes all kinds,” she
told herself.) “S. V. S. Kurup!”
The scornful boy set
up a howl as his mother pushed him into the doctor’s room.
Rahel and Estha left
the clinic triumphantly. Little Lenin remained behind to have his nostril
probed by Dr. Verghese Verghese’s cold steel implements, and his mother probed
by other, softer ones.
That was Lenin then.
Now he had a house and
a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.
Rahel handed Comrade
Pillai back the sachet of photographs and tried to leave. “One mint,” Comrade
Pillai said. He was like a flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples
and then forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of
photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life‑in‑a‑Minute) to the last one.
“Orkunnundo ?”
It was an old black‑and‑white
picture. One that Chacko took with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma
had brought him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin,
Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of the Ayemenem
House. Behind them Baby Kochamma’s Christmas trimmings hung in loops from the
ceiling. A cardboard star was tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked
like frightened animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees
pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their sides,
chests swiveled to face the photographer. As though standing sideways was a
sin.
Only Sophie Mol, with
First World panache, had prepared for herself, for her biological father’s
photo, a face. She had turned her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked
like pink‑veined flesh petals (gray in a black‑and‑white photograph). She wore
a set of protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her
tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi’s silver thimble
fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to
spend her holidays drinking only from a thimble.) She held out a lit candle in
each hand. One leg of her denim bell‑bottoms was rolled up to expose a white,
bony knee on which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was
taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel (arguing away
any evidence to the contrary, photographs, memories) how there was a pretty
good chance that they were bastards, and what bastard really meant. This had
entailed an involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. “See what
they do is…”
That was only days
before she died.
Sophie Mol.
Thimble‑drinker.
Coffin‑cartwheeler.
She arrived on the
Bombay‑Cochin flight. Hatted, bellbottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
Chapter 6.
Cochin Kangaroos
Cochin Airport,
Rahel’s new knickers were polka‑dotted and still crisp. The rehearsals had been
rehearsed. It was the Day of the Play. The culmination of the What Will Sophie
Mol Think? week.
In the morning at the
Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu–who had dreamed at night of dolphins and a deep
blue–helped Rahel to put on her frothy Airport Frock. It was one of those
baffling aberrations in Ammu’s taste, a cloud of stiff yellow lace with tiny
silver sequins and a bow on each shoulder. The frilled skirt was underpinned
with buckram to make it flare. Rahel worried that it didn’t really go with her
sunglasses.
Ammu held out the
crisp matching knickers for her. Rahel, with her hands on Ammu’s shoulders,
climbed into her new knickers (left leg, right leg) and gave Ammu a kiss on
each dimple (left cheek, right cheek). The elastic snapped softly against her
stomach.
“Thank you, Ammu,”
Rahel said.
“Thank you?” Ammu
said.
“For my new frock and
knickers,” Rahel said.
Ammu smiled.
“You’re welcome, my
sweetheart,” she said, but sadly.
You’re welcome, my
sweetheart.
The moth on Rahel’s
heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold. A little
less her mother loved her.
The Sea Queen room
smelled of eggs and filter coffee. On the way to the car, Estha carried the
Eagle vacuum flask with the tap water. Rahel carried the Eagle vacuum flask
with the boiled water. Eagle vacuum flasks had Vacuum Eagles on them, with
their wings spread, and a globe in their talons. Vacuum Eagles, the twins
believed, watched the world all day and flew around their flasks all night. As
silently as owls they flew, with the moon on their wings.
Estha was wearing a
long‑sleeved red shirt with a pointed collar and black drainpipe trousers. His
puff looked crisp and surprised. Like well‑whipped egg white.
Estha–with some basis,
it must be admitted–said that Rahel looked stupid in her Airport Frock. Rahel
slapped him, and he slapped her back.
They weren’t speaking
to each other at the airport
Chacko, who usually
wore a mundu, was wearing a funny tight suit and a shining smile. Ammu
straightened his tie, which was odd and sideways. It had had its breakfast and
was satisfied.
Ammu said, “What’s
happened suddenly to our Man of the Masses?”
But she said it with
her dimples, because Chacko was so burst. So very happy.
Chacko didn’t slap
her.
So she didn’t slap him
back.
From the Sea Queen
florist Chacko had bought two red roses, which he held carefully.
Fatly.
Fondly.
The airport shop, run
by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, was crammed with Air India
Maharajahs (small medium large), sandalwood elephants (small medium large) and
papier‑mâchâ masks of kathakali dancers (small medium large). The smell of
cloying sandalwood and terry‑cotton armpits (small medium large) hung in the
air.
In the Arrivals
Lounge, there were four life‑sized cement kangaroos with cement pouches that
said USE ME. In their pouches, instead of cement joeys, they had cigarette
stubs, used matchsticks, bottle caps, peanut shells, crumpled paper cups and
cockroaches.
Red betel spitstains
spattered their kangaroo stomachs like fresh wounds.
Red‑mouthed smiles the
Airport Kangaroos had.
And pink‑edged ears.
They looked as though
if you pressed them they might say Mama in empty battery voices.
When Sophie Mol’s
plane appeared in the skyblue Bombay‑Cochin sky the crowd pushed against the
iron railing to see more of everything.
The Arrivals Lounge
was a press of love and eagerness, because the Bombay‑Cochin flight was the
flight that all the Foreign Returnees came home on.
Their families had
come to meet them. From all over Kerala. On long bus journeys. From Ranni, from
Kumili, from Vizhinjam, from Uzhavoor. Some of them had camped at the airport
overnight, and had brought their food with them. And tapioca chips and chakka
velaichathu for the way back.
They were all
there–the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopans, the pining
wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancâes to be reassessed.
The teacher’s husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher’s husband’s
sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire‑bender’s pregnant wife.
“Mostly sweeper
class,” Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, not wanting
to give up her Good Place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby’s penis
into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him.
“Sssss...” his mother
hissed. First persuasively, then savagely. But her baby thought he was the
pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle.
“Don’t forget that you
are Ambassadors of India,” Baby Kochamma told Rahel and Estha. “You’re going to
form their First Impression of your country.”
Two‑egg Twin
Ambassadors. Their Excellencies Ambassador E(lvis). Pelvis, and Ambassador
S(tick). Insect.
In her stiff lace
dress and her fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo, Rahel looked like an Airport Fairy
with appalling taste. She was hemmed in by humid hips (as she would be once
again, at a funeral in a yellow church) and grim eagerness. She had her
grandfather’s moth on her heart. She turned away from the screaming steel bird
in the skyblue sky that had her cousin in it, and what she saw was this:
redmouthed roos with ruby smiles moved cemently across the airport floor.
Heel and Toe
Heel and Toe
Long flatfeet
Airport garbage in
their baby bins.
The smallest one
stretched its neck like people in English films who loosen their ties after
office. The middle one rummaged in her pouch for a long cigarette stub to
smoke. She found an old cashew nut in a dim plastic bag. She gnawed it with her
front teeth like a rodent. The large one wobbled the standing up sign that said
Kerala Tourism Development Corporation Welcomes You with a kathakali dancer
doing a namaste. Another sign, unwobbled by a kangaroo, said: emocleW ot cbt
ecipS tsooC fo aidnI
Urgently, Ambassador
Rahel burrowed through the press of people to her brother and co‑Ambassador.
Estha look! Look Estha
look!
Ambassador Estha
wouldn’t. Didn’t want to. He watched the bumpy landing with his tap‑water Eagle
flask slung around him, and a bottomless‑bottomful feeling: The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man knew where to find him. In the factory in Ayemenem. On the banks
of the Meenachal.
Ammu watched with her
handbag.
Chacko with his roses.
Baby Kochamma with her
sticking‑out neckmole.
Then the Bombay‑Cochin
people came out. From the cool air into the hot air. Crumpled people uncrumpled
on their way to the Arrivals Lounge.
And there they were,
the Foreign Returnees, in wash’n’wear suits and rainbow sunglasses. With an end
to grinding poverty in their Aristocrat suitcases. With cement roofs for their
thatched houses, and geysers for their parents’ bathrooms. With sewage systems
and septic tanks. Maxis and high heels. Puff sleeves and lipstick. Mixygrinders
and automatic flashes for their cameras. With keys to count, and cupboards to
lock. With a hunger for kappa and meen vevichathu that they hadn’t eaten for so
long. With love and a lick of shame that their families who had come to meet
them were so… so… gawkish. Look at the way they dressed! Surely they had more
suitable airport wear! Why did Malayalees have such awful teeth?
And the airport
itself! More like the local bus depot! The birdshit on the building! Oh the
spitstains on the kangaroos!
Oho! Going to the dogs
India is.
When long bus
journeys, and overnight stays at the airport, were met by love and a lick of
shame, small cracks appeared, which would grow and grow, and before they knew
it, the Foreign Returnees would be trapped outside the History House, and have
their dreams re‑dreamed.
Then, there, among the
wash’n’wear suits and shiny suitcases, Sophie Mol.
Thimble‑drinker.
Coffin‑Cartwheeler.
She walked down the
runway, the smell of London in her hair. Yellow bottoms of bells flapped backwards
around her ankles. Long hair floated out from under her straw hat. One hand in
her mother’s. The other swinging like a soldier’s (left left lefrightleft).
There was
A girl,
Tall and
Thin and
Fair.
Her hair–
Her hair
Was the delicate
colorriv
Gin‑nnn‑ger (left‑lef‑right)
There was
A girl–
Margaret Kochamma told
her to Stoppit.
So she Stoppited.
Ammu said, “Can you
see her, Rahel?”
She turned around to
find her crisp‑knickered daughter communing with cement marsupials. She went
and fetched her, scoldingly. Chacko said he couldn’t take Rahel on his
shoulders because he was already carrying something. Two roses red.
Fatly.
Fondly.
When Sophie Mol walked
into the Arrivals Lounge, Rahel, overcome by excitement and resentment, pinched
Estha hard. His skin between her nails. Estha gave her a Chinese Bangle,
twisting the skin on her wrist different ways with each of his hands. Her skin
became a welt and hurt. When she licked it, it tasted of salt. The spit on her
wrist was cool and comfortable.
Ammu never noticed.
Across the tall iron
railing that separated Meeters from the Met, and Greeters from the Gret,
Chacko, beaming, bursting through his suit and sideways tie, bowed to his new
daughter and ex‑wife.
In his mind, Estha
said, “Bow.”
“Hello, Ladies,”
Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice (last night’s voice in which he said,
Love. Madness. Hope. Infinnate joy). “And how was your journey?”
And the Air was full
Of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things
are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
“Say Hello and How
d’you do?” Margaret Kochamma said to Sophie Mol.
“Hello and How d’you
do?” Sophie Mol said through the iron railing, to everyone in particular.
“One for you and one
for you,” Chacko said with his roses.
“And Thank you?”
Margaret Kochamma said to Sophie Mol.
“And Thank you?”
Sophie Mol said to Chacko, mimicking her mother’s question mark. Margaret
Kochamma shook her a little for her impertinence.
“You’re welcome,”
Chacko said. “Now let me introduce everybody.” Then, more for the benefit of
onlookers and eavesdroppers, because Margaret Kochamma needed no introduction
really: “My wife– Margaret”
Margaret Kochamma
smiled and wagged her rose at him. “Ex‑wife, Chacko!” Her lips formed the
words, though her voice never spoke them.
Anybody could see that
Chacko was a proud and happy man to have had a wife like Margaret. White. In a
flowered, printed frock with legs underneath. And brown back‑freckles on her
back. And arm‑freckles on her arms.
But around her, the
Air was sad, somehow. And behind the smile in her eyes, the was a fresh,
shining blue. Because of a calamitous car crash. Because of a Joe‑shaped Hole
in the Universe.
“Hello, all,” she
said. “I feel I’ve known you for years.”
Hello wall.
“My daughter, Sophie,”
Chacko said, and laughed a small, nervous laugh that was worried, in case
Margaret Kochamma said “exdaughter.” But she didn’t. It was an easy‑to‑understand
laugh. Not like the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s laugh that Estha hadn’t
understood.
“`ho,” Sophie. Mol
said.
She was taller than
Estha. And bigger. Her eyes were bluegrayblue. Her pale skin was the color of
beach sand. But her hatted hair was beautiful, deep red‑brown. And yes (oh
yes!) she had Pappachi’s nose waiting inside hers. An Imperial Entomologist’s
nose‑within‑a‑nose. A moth‑lover’s nose. She carried her Made‑in‑England go‑go
bag that she loved.
“Ammu, my sister,”
Chacko said.
Ammu said a grown‑up’s
Hello to Margaret Kochamma and a children’s Hell‑oh to Sophie Mol. Rahel
watched hawk‑eyed to try and gauge how much Ammu loved Sophie Mol, but
couldn’t.
Laughter rambled
through the Arrivals Lounge like a sudden breeze. Adoor Basi, the most popular,
best‑loved comedian in Malayalam cinema, had just arrived (Bombay‑Cochin).
Burdened with a number of small unmanageable packages and unabashed public
adulation, he felt obliged to perform. He kept dropping his packages and
saying, “Ende Deivoinay! Lee sadhanangal! ”
Estha laughed a high,
delighted laugh.
“Ammu look! Adoor
Basi’s dropping his things!” Estha said. “He can’t even carry his things!”
“He’s doing it
deliberately,” Baby Kochamma said in a strange new British accent. “Just ignore
him.”
“He’s a filmactor,”
she explained to Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol, making Adoor Basi sound like
a Mactor who did occasionally Fil.
“Just trying to
attract attention,” Baby Kochamma said and resolutely refused to have her
attention attracted.
But Baby Kochamma was
wrong. Adoor Basi wasn’t trying to attract attention. He was only trying to
deserve the attention that he had already attracted.
“My aunt, Baby,”
Chacko said.
Sophie Mol was
puzzled. She regarded Baby Kochamma with a beady‑eyed interest. She knew of cow
babies and dog babies. Bear babies‑yes. (She would soon point out to Rahel a
bat baby.) But aunt babies confounded her.
Baby Kochamma said,
“Hello, Margaret,” and “Hello, Sophie Mol.” She said Sophie Mol was so
beautiful that she reminded her of a wood‑sprite. Of Ariel.
“D’you know who Ariel
was?” Baby Kochamma asked Sophie Mol. “Ariel in The Tempest?”
Sophie Mol said she
didn’t.
“Where the bee sucks
there suck I’?” Baby Kochamma said. Sophie Mol said she didn’t.
“In a cowslip’s bell I
lie’?’ Sophie Mol said she didn’t.
“Shakespeare’s The
Tempest?” Baby Kochamma persisted.
All this was of course
primarily to announce her credentials to Margaret Kochamma. To set herself
apart from the Sweeper Class.
“She’s trying to
boast;” Ambassador E. Pelvis whispered in Ambassador S. Insect’s ear.
Ambassador Rahel’s giggle escaped in a bluegreen bubble (the color of a
jackfruit fly) and burst in the hot airport air. Pffot! was the sound it made.
Baby Kochamma saw it,
and knew that it was Estha who had started it.
“And now for the
VIPs,” Chacko said (still using his Reading Aloud voice).
“My nephew,
Esthappen.”
“Elvis Presley,” Baby
Kochamma said for revenge. “I’m afraid we’re a little behind the times here.”
Everyone looked at Estha and laughed.
From the soles of
Ambassador Estha’s beige and pointy shoes an angry feeling rose and stopped
around his heart
“How d’you do,
Esthappen?” Margaret Kochamma said.
“Finethankyou,”
Estha’s voice was sullen.
“Estha,” Ammu said
affectionately, “when someone says How d’you do? You’re supposed to say How
d’you do? back. Not `Fine, thank you.’ Come on, say How do YOU do?”
Ambassador Estha
looked at Ammu.
“Go on,” Ammu said to
Estha. “How do YOU do?”
Estha’s sleepy eyes
were stubborn.
In Malayalam Ammu
said, `Did you hear what I said?”
Ambassador Estha felt
bluegrayblue eyes on him, and an Imperial Entomologist’s nose. He didn’t have a
How do YOU do? in him.
“Esthappen!” Ammu
said. And an angry feeling rose in her and stopped around her heart A Far More
Angry Than Necessary feeling. She felt somehow humiliated by this public revolt
in her area of jurisdiction. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for
her children in the Indo‑British Behavior Competition.
Chacko said to Ammu in
Malayalam, “Please. Later. Not now.”
And Ammu’s angry eyes
on Estha said: All right. Later.
And Later became a
horrible, menacing, goose‑bumpy word.
Lay. Ter.
Like a deep‑sounding
bell in a mossy well. Shivery, and furred. Like moth’s feet.
The Play had gone bad.
Like pickle in the monsoon.
“And my niece,” Chacko
said. `Where’s Rahel?” He looked around and couldn’t find her. Ambassador
Rahel, unable to cope with seesawing changes in her life, had raveled herself
like a sausage into the dirty airport curtain, and wouldn’t unravel. A sausage
with Bata sandals.
“Just ignore her,”
Ammu said. “She’s just trying to attract attention.”
Ammu too was wrong.
Rahel was trying to not attract the attention that she deserved.
“Hello, Rahel,”
Margaret Kochamma said to the dirty airport curtain.
“How do YOU do?” The
dirty curtain replied in a mumble.
“Aren’t you going to
come out and say Hello?” Margaret Kochamma said in a kind‑schoolteacher voice.
(Like Miss Mitten’s before she saw Satan in their eyes.)
Ambassador Rahel
wouldn’t come out of the curtain because she couldn’t She couldn’t because she
couldn’t Because Everything was wrong. And soon there would be a Lay Ter for
both her and Estha.
Full of furred moths
and icy butterflies. And deep‑sounding bells. And moss.
And a Nowl.
The dirty airport
curtain was a great comfort and a darkness and a shield.
“Just ignore her,”
Ammu said and smiled tightly.
Rahel’s mind was full
of millstones with bluegrayblue eyes.
Ammu loved her even
less now. And it had come down to Brass Tacks with Chacko.
“Here comes the baggage”
Chacko said brightly. Glad to get away. “Come, Sophiekins, let’s get your
bags.”
Sophiekins.
Estha watched as they
walked along the railing, pulling through the crowds that moved aside,
intimidated by Chacko’s suit and sideways tie and his generally bursty
demeanor. Because of the size of his stomach, Chacko carried himself in a way
that made him appear to be walking uphill all the time. Negotiating
optimistically the steep, slippery slopes of life. He walked on this side of
the railing, Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol on that.
Sophiekins.
The Sitting Man with
the cap and epaulettes, also intimidated by Chacko’s suit and sideways tie,
allowed him into the baggage claim section.
When there was no
railing left between them, Chacko kissed Margaret Kochamma, and then picked
Sophie Mol up.
“The last time I did
this I got a wet shirt for my pains,” Chacko said and laughed. He hugged her
and hugged her and hugged her. He kissed her bluegrayblue eyes, her
Entomologist’s nose, her hatted redbrown hair.
Then Sophie Mol said
to Chacko, “Ummm… excuse me? D’you think you could put me down now? I’m ummm…
not really used to being carried.”
So Chacko put her
down.
Ambassador Estha saw
(with stubborn eyes) that Chacko’s suit was suddenly looser, less bursty.
And while Chacko got
the bags, at the dirty‑curtained window LayTer became Now.
Estha saw how Baby
Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation.
Der‑Dboom, Der‑Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der‑green, der‑blueblack,
dermustardyellow.
Twins for tea
It would bea.
“All right,” Ammu
said. “That’s enough. Both of you. Come out of there, Rahel!”
Inside the curtain,
Rahel closed her eyes and thought of the green river, of the quiet deep‑swimming
fish, and the gossamer wings of the dragonflies (that could see behind them) in
the sun. She thought of her luckiest fishing rod that Velutha had made for her.
Yellow bamboo with a float that dipped every time a foolish fish enquired. She
thought of Velutha and wished she was with him.
Then Estha unraveled
her. The cement kangaroos were watching. Ammu looked at them. The Air was quiet
except for the sound of Baby Kochamma’s throbbing neckmole.
“So,” Ammu said.
And it was really a
question. So?
And it hadn’t an
answer.
Ambassador Estha
looked down, and saw that his shoes (from where the angry feelings rose) were
beige and pointy. Ambassador Rahel looked down and saw that in her Bata sandals
her toes were trying to disconnect themselves. Twitching to join someone else’s
feet. And that she couldn’t stop them. Soon she’d be without toes and have a
bandage like the leper at the level crossing.
“If you ever,” Ammu
said, “and I mean this, EVER, ever again disobey me in Public, I will see to it
that you are sent away to somewhere where you will jolly well learn to behave.
Is that clear?”
When Ammu was really
angry she said jolly well. Jolly Well was a deeply well with larfing dead
people in it.
“Is. That. Clear?”
Ammu said again.
Frightened eyes and a
fountain looked back at Ammu.
Sleepy eyes and a
surprised puff looked back at Ammu.
Two heads nodded three
times.
Yes. It’s. Clear.
But Baby Kochamma was
dissatisfied with the fizzling out of a situation that had been so full of
potential. She tossed her head.
“As if!” she said.
As if!
Ammu turned to her,
and the turn of her head was a question. “It’s useless,” Baby Kochamma said.
“They’re sly. They’re Uncouth, Deceitful. They’re growing wild. You can’t
manage them.”
Ammu turned back to
Estha and Rahel and her eyes were blurred jewels.
“Everybody says that
children need a Baba. And I say no. Not my children. D’you know why?”
Two heads nodded.
“Why. Tell me,” Ammu
said.
And not together, but
almost, Esthappen and Rahel said:
“Because you’re our
Ammu and our Baba and you love us Double.”
“More than Double,”
Ammu said. “So remember what I told you. People’s feelings are precious. And
when you disobey me in Public, everybody gets the wrong impression.”
“What Ambassadors and
a half you’ve been!” Baby Kochamma said.
Ambassador E. Pelvis
and Ambassador S. Insect hung their heads. “And the other thing, Rahel,” Ammu
said, “I think it’s high time that you learned the difference between CLEAN and
DIRTY. Especially in this country.”
Ambassador Rahel
looked down.
“Your dress is‑was‑CLEAN,”
Ammu said. “That curtain is DIRTY. Those Kangaroos are DIRTY. Your hands are
DIRTY.”
Rahel was frightened
by the way Ammu said CLEAN and DIRTY so loudly. As though she was talking to a
deaf person.
“Now, I want you to go
and say Hello properly,” Ammu said. “Are you going to do that or not?”
Two heads nodded
twice.
Ambassador Estha and
Ambassador Rahel walked towards Sophie Mol.
“Where d’you think
people are sent to Jolly Well Behave?” Estha asked Rahel in a whisper.
“To the government,”
Rahel whispered back, because she knew. “How do you do?” Estha said to Sophie
Mol loud enough for Ammu to hear.
“Just like a laddoo
one pice two,” Sophie Mol whispered to Estha. She had learned this in school
from a Pakistani classmate.
Estha looked at Ammu.
Ammu’s look said Never
Mind Her As Long As You’ve Done The Right Thing.
On their way across
the airport car park, Hotweather crept into their clothes and dampened crisp
knickers. The children lagged behind, weaving through parked cars and taxis. –
“Does Yours hit you?”
Sophie Mol asked.
Rahel and Estha,
unsure of the politics of this, said nothing.
“Mine does,” Sophie
Mol said invitingly. “Mine even Slaps.”
“Ours doesn’t,” Estha
said loyally.
“Lucky,” Sophie Mol
said.
Lucky rich boy with
porketmunny. And a grandmother’s factory to inherit. No worries.
They walked past the
Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one‑day hunger strike. And past the
people watching the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one‑day hunger
strike.
And past the people
watching the people watching the people.
A small tin sign on a
big banyan tree said For VD. Sex Complaints contact Dr. OK Joy.
“Who d’you love Most
in the World?” Rahel asked Sophie Mol. “Joe,” Sophie Mol said without
hesitation. “My dad. He died two months ago. We’ve come here to Recover from the
Shock”
“But Chacko’s your
dad,” Estha said.‑
“He’s just my
realdad,” Sophie Mol said. “Joe’s my dad. He never hits. Hardly ever.”
“How can he hit if
he’s dead?” Estha asked reasonably.
“Where’s your dad?”
Sophie Mol wanted to know.
“He’s…” and Rahel
looked at Estha for help.
“…not here,” Estha
said.
“Shall I tell you my
list?” Rahel asked Sophie Mol.
“If you like,” Sophie
Mol said.
“Rahel’s `list” was an
attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love
and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.
“First Ammu and
Chacko,” Rahel said. “Then Mammachi‑”
“Our grandmother,”
Estha clarified.
“More than your
brother?” Sophie Mol asked.
“We don’t count,”
Rahel said. “And anyway he might change. Ammu says.”
“How d’you mean?
Change into what?” Sophie Mol asked.
“Into a Male
Chauvinist Pig,” Rahel said.
“Very unlikely,” Estha
said.
“Anyway, after
Mammachi, Velutha, and then–”
“Who’s Velutha?”
Sophie Mol wanted to know.
“A man we love,” Rahel
said. “And after Velutha, you,” Rahel said “Me? What d’you love me for?” Sophie
Mol said. “Because we’re firstcousins. So I have to,” Rahel said piously. “But
you don’t even know me,” Sophie Mol said. “And anyway, I don’t love you.”
“But you will, when
you come to know me,” Rahel said confidently.
“I doubt it,” Estha
said.
“Why not?” Sophie Mol
said.
“Because,” Estha said.
“And anyway she’s most probably going to be a dwarf.”
As though loving a
dwarf was completely out of the question.
“I’m not,” Rahel said.
“You are,” Estha said.
“I’m not”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. We’re
twins,” Estha explained to Sophie Mol, “and just see how much shorter she is.”
Rahel obligingly took
a deep breath, threw her chest out and stood back to back with Estha in the
airport car park, for Sophie Mol to see just how much shorter she was.
Maybe you’ll be a
midget,” Sophie Mol suggested. “That’s taller than a dwarf and shorter than a…
Human Being.”
The silence was unsure
of this compromise.
In the doorway of the
Arrivals Lounge, a shadowy, red‑mouthed roo‑shaped silhouette waved a cemently
paw only at Rahel. Cement kisses whirred through the air like small
helicopters.
“D’you know how to
sashay?” Sophie Mol wanted to know.
“No. We don’t sashay
in India,” Ambassador Estha said.
“Well, in England we
do,” Sophie Mol said. “All the models do. On television. Look‑it’s easy.”
And the three of them,
led by Sophie Mol, sashayed across the airport car park, swaying like fashion
models, Eagle flasks and Made‑in‑England go‑go bags bumping around their hips.
Damp dwarfs walking tall.
Shadows followed them.
Silver jets in a blue church sky, like moths in a beam of light.
The skyblue Plymouth
with tailfins had a smile for Sophie Mol. A chromebumpered sharksmile.
A Paradise Pickles
carsmile.
When she saw the
carrier with the painted pickle bottles and the list of Paradise products,
Margaret Kochamma said, “Oh dear! I feel as though I’m in an advertisement!”
She said Oh dear! a lot.
Oh dear! Oh
dearohdear!
“I didn’t know you did
pineapple slices!” she said. “Sophie loves pineapple, don’t you Soph?”
“Sometimes,” Soph
said. “And sometimes not.”
Margaret Kochamma
climbed into the advertisement with her brown back‑freckles and her arm‑freckles
and her flowered dress with legs underneath.
Sophie Mol sat in
front between Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, just her hat peeping over the car
seat. Because she was their daughter.
Rahel and Estha sat at
the back. The luggage was in the boot.
Boot was a lovely
word. Sturdy was a terrible word. Near Ettumanoor they passed a dead temple
elephant, electrocuted by a high tension wire that had fallen on the road. An
engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the
carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent
for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be
treated lightly. There was a fire engine and some confused firemen. The municipal
officer had a file and was shouting a lot. There was a Joy Ice Cream cart and a
man selling peanuts in narrow cones of paper cleverly designed to hold not more
than eight or nine nuts.
Sophie Mol said,
“Look, a dead elephant.”
Chacko stopped to ask
whether it was by any chance Kochu Thomban (Little Tusker), the Ayemenem temple
elephant who came to the Ayemenem House once a month for a coconut. They said
it wasn’t
Relieved that it was a
stranger, and not an elephant they knew, they drove on.
“Thang God,” Estha
said.
“Thank God, Estha,”
Baby Kochamma corrected him.
On the way, Sophie Mol
learned to recognize the first whiff of the approaching stench of unprocessed
rubber and to clamp her nostrils shut until long after the truck carrying it
had driven past.
Baby Kochamma
suggested a car song.
Estha and Rahel had to
sing in English in obedient voices. Breezily. As though they hadn’t been made
to rehearse it all week long. Ambassador E. Pelvis and Ambassador S. Insect.
RejOice in the– Lo‑Ord
Or‑ways
And again I say re‑jOice.
Their Prer NUN sea
ayshun was perfect.
The Plymouth rushed
through the green midday heat, promoting pickles on its roof, and the skyblue
sky in its tailfins.
Just outside Ayemenem
they drove into a cabbage‑green butterfly (Or perhaps it drove into them).
Chapter 7.
Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
In Pappachi’s study,
mounted butterflies and moths had disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent
dust that powdered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins
that had impaled them naked. Cruel. The room was rank with fungus and disuse.
An old neon‑green hula hoop hung from a wooden peg on the wall, a huge saint’s
discarded halo. A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill,
their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby
Berkeley musical silhouetted against the sun. Butted and beautiful.
Rahel (on a stool, on
top of a table) rummaged in a book cupboard with dull, dirty glass panes. Her
bare footprints were clear in the dust on the floor. They led from the door to
the table (dragged to the bookshelf) to the stool (dragged to the table and
lifted onto it). She was looking for something. Her life had a‑size and a shape
now. She had half‑moons under her eyes and a team of trolls on her horizon.
On the top shelf, the
leather binding on Pappachi’s set of The Insect Wealth of India had lifted off each book and buckled like
corrugated asbestos. Silverfish tunneled through the pages, burrowing
arbitrarily from species to species, turning organized information into yellow
lace.
Rahel groped behind
the row of books and brought out hidden things.
A smooth seashell and
a spiky one.
A plastic case for
contact lenses. An orange pipette.
A silver crucifix on a
string of beads. Baby Kochamma’s rosary.
She held it up against
the light. Each greedy bead grabbed its share of sun.
A shadow fell across
the sunlit rectangle on the study floor. Rahel turned towards the door with her
string of light.
“Imagine. It’s still
here. I stole it. After you were Returned.” That word slipped out easily.
Returned. As though that was what twins were meant lot To be borrowed and
returned. Like library books.
Estha wouldn’t look
up. His mind was full of trains. He blocked the light from the door An Estha‑shaped
Hole in the Universe.
Behind the books,
Rahel’s puzzled fingers encountered something else. Another magpie had had the
same idea. She brought it out and wiped the dust off with the sleeve of her
shirt. It was a fiat packet wrapped in clear plastic and stuck with Sellotape.
A scrap of white paper inside it said Esthappen and Rahel . In Ammu’s writing.
There were four
tattered notebooks in it. On their covers they said Wisdom Exercise
Notebooks with a place for Name,
School, College, Class, Subject. Two had her name on them, and two Estha’s.
Inside the back cover
of one, something had been written in a child’s handwriting. The labored form
of each letter and the irregular space between words was full of the struggle
for control over the errant, self‑willed pencil. The sentiment, in contrast,
was lucid:
I Hate Miss Mitten
and I Think Her gnickers are TORN
On the front of the
book, Estha had rubbed out his surname with spit, and taken half the paper with
it. Over the whole mess, he had written in pencil Un‑known. Esthappen Unknown.
(His surname postponed for the Time Being, while Ammu chose between her
husband’s name and her father’s.) Next to Class it said: 6 years. Next to
Subject it said: Story‑writing.
Rahel sat cross‑legged
(on the stool on the table).
“Esthappen Un‑known,”
she said. She opened the book and read aloud. –
When Ulycsses came
home his son came and said father I thought you would not come back, many
princes came and each wanted to marry Pen Lope. but Pen Lope said that the man
who can stoot through the twelve rings can mary me. and everyone failed. and
ulysses came to the palace dressed liked a beggar and asked if be could try.
the men laughed at him and said if we cant do it you cant. ulysses son stopped
them and said let him try and be took the bow and shot right through the twelve
rings.”
Below this there were
corrections from a previous lesson.
Ferus Learned Neither
Carriages Bridge Bearer Fastened
Ferus Learned
Niether Carriages Bridge Bearer Fastened
Ferus Learned
niether
Ferus Learned
Nieter
Laughter curled around
the edges of Rahel’s voice.
`”Safety First,’ “she
announced. Ammu had drawn a wavy line down the length of the page with a red
pen and written Margin? And joint handwriting in future, please!
When we walk on the
road in the town, cautious Estha’s story went, we should
always walk on the pavemnet. If you go on the pavement there is no traffic to
cause accidnts, but on the main road there is so much dangerouse traffic that
they can easily knock you down and make you senseless or a ~~ If you break your
bead or back‑bone you will be very unfortunate. policemen can direct the
traffic so that there won’t be too many inwalids to go to hospital. When we get
out of the bus we should do so only after asking the conductor or we will be
injured and make the doctors have a busy time. The job of a driver is very
fq~L~ His famly should be very angshios because the driver could easily be
dead.
“Morbid kid,” Rahel
said to Estha. As she turned the page something reached into her throat,
plucked her voice out, shook it down, and returned it without its laughing
edges. Estha’s next story was called Little Ammu.
In joint handwriting.
The tails of the V’s and G’s were curled and looped. The shadow in the doorway
stood very still.
On Saturday we went
to a bookshop in Kottayam to buy Ammu a present because her birthday is in 17th
of novembre. We bore her a diary. We hid it in the coherd and then it began to
be night. Then we said do you want to see your present she said, yes I would
like to see it. and we wrote on the paper For a Little Ammu with Love from
Estha and Rahel and we gave it to Ammu and she said what a lovely present its
just what I whanted and then we talked for a little while and we talked about
the diary then we gave her a kiss and went to bed.
We talked with each
other and went of to sleep. We had a little dream.
After some time I
got up and I was very thirsty and went to Ammu’s room and said I am thirsty.
Ammu gave me water and I was just going to my bed when Ammu called me and said
come and sleep with me. and I lay at the back of Ammu and talked to Ammu and
went of to sleep. After a little while I got up and we talked again and after
that we had a mi~~~ f~st. we had orange coffee bananana. afterwards Rahel came
and we ate two more bananas and we gave a kiss to Ammu because it was her
birthday afterwards we sang happy birthday. Then in the morning we had new
cloths from Ammu as a back‑present. Rahel was a maharani and I was Little
Nehru.
Ammu had corrected the
spelling mistakes, and below the essay had written: If I am Talking to
somebody you may interrupt me only if it is very urgent. When you do, please
say “Excuse me.” I will punish you very severely if you disobey these
instructions. Please complete your corrections.
Little Ammu.
Who never completed her corrections.
Who had to pack her
bags and leave. Because she had no Locusts Stand I. Because Chacko said she had
destroyed enough already.
Who came back to
Ayemenem with asthma and a rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man
shouting.
Estha never saw her
like that.
Wild. Sick. Sad.
The last time Ammu
came back to Ayemenem, Rahel had just been expelled from Nazareth Convent (for
decorating dung and slamming into seniors). Ammu had lost the latest of her
succession of jobs–as a receptionist in a cheap hotel–because she had been ill
and had missed too many days of work. The hotel couldn’t afford that, they told
her. They needed a healthier receptionist.
On that last visit,
Ammu spent the morning with Rahel in her room. With the last of her meager
salary she had bought her daughter small presents wrapped in brown paper with
colored paper hearts pasted on. A packet of cigarette sweets, a tin Phantom
pencil box and Paul Bunyan‑a Junior Classics Illustrated comic. They were
presents for a seven‑year‑old; Rahel was nearly eleven. It was as though Ammu
believed that if she refused to acknowledge the passage of time, if she willed
it to stand still in the lives of her twins, it would. As though sheer
willpower was enough to suspend her children’s childhoods until she could
afford to have them living with her. Then they could take up from where they
left off. Start again from seven. Ammu told Rahel that she had bought Estha a
comic too, but that she’d kept it away for him until she got another job and
could earn enough to rent a room for the three of them to stay together in.
Then she’d go to Calcutta and fetch Estha, and he could have his comic. That
day was not far off, Ammu said. It could happen any day. Soon rent would be no
problem. She said she had applied for a UN job and they would all live in The
Hague with a Dutch ayah to look after them. Or on the other hand, Ammu said,
she might stay on in India and do what she had been planning to do all
along–start a school. Choosing between a career in Education and a UN job
wasn’t easy, she said–but the thing to remember was that the very fact that she
had a choice was a great privilege.
But for the Time
Being, she said, until she made her decision, she was keeping Estha’s presents
away for him.
That whole morning
Ammu talked incessantly. She asked Rahel questions, but never let her answer
them. If Rahel tried to say something, Ammu would interrupt with a new thought
or query. She seemed terrified of what adult thing her daughter might say and
thaw Frozen Time. Fear made her garrulous. She kept it at bay with her babble.
She was swollen with
cortisone, moonfaced, not the slender mother Rahel knew. Her skin was stretched
over her puffy cheeks like shiny scar tissue that covers old vaccination marks.
When she smiled, her dimples looked as though they hurt. Her curly hair had
lost its sheen and hung around her swollen face like a dull curtain. She
carried her breath in a glass inhaler in her tattered handbag. Brown Brovon
fumes. Each breath she took was like a war won against the steely fist that was
trying to squeeze the air from her lungs. Rahel watched her mother breathe.
Each time she inhaled, the hollows near her collarbones grew steep and filled
with shadows.
Ammu coughed up a wad
of phlegm into her handkerchief and showed it to Rahel. “You must always check
it,” she whispered hoarsely, as though phlegm was an Arithmetic answer sheet
that had to be revised before it was handed in. “When it’s white, it means it
isn’t ripe. When it’s yellow and has a rotten smell, it’s ripe and ready to be
coughed out. Phlegm is like fruit. Ripe or raw. You have to be able to tell.”
Over lunch she belched
like a truck driver and said, “Excuse me,” in a deep, unnatural voice. Rahel
noticed that she had new, thick hairs in her eyebrows, long–like palps. Ammu
smiled at the silence around the table as she picked fried emperor fish off the
bone. She said that she felt like a road sign with birds shitting on her. She
had an odd, feverish glitter in her eyes.
Mammachi asked her if
she’d been drinking and suggested that she visit Rahel as seldom as possible.
Ammu got up from the
table and left without saying a word. Not even good‑bye. “Go and see her off,”
Chacko said to Rahel.
Rahel pretended she
hadn’t heard him. She went on with her fish. She thought of the phlegm and
nearly retched. She hated her mother then. Hated her.
She never saw her
again.
Ammu died in a grimy
room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview as
someone’s secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company and
no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty‑one. Not
old, not young, but a viable, die‑able age.
She had woken up at
night to escape from a familiar, recurrent dream in which policemen approached
her with snicking scissors, wanting to hack off her hair. They did that in
Kottayam to prostitutes whom they’d caught in the bazaar–branded them so that
everybody would know them for what they were. Veshyas. So that new policemen on
the beat would have no trouble identifying whom to harass. Ammu always noticed
them in the market, the women with vacant eyes and forcibly shaved heads in the
land where long, oiled hair was only for the morally upright.
That night in the
lodge, Ammu sat up in the strange bed in the strange room in the strange town.
She didn’t know where she was, she recognized nothing around her. Only her fear
was familiar. The faraway man inside her began to shout. This time the steely
fist never loosened its grip. Shadows gathered like bats in the steep hollows
near her collarbone.
The sweeper found her
in the morning. He switched off the fan.
She had a deep blue
sac under one eye that was bloated like a bubble. As though her eye had tried
to do what her lungs couldn’t. Some time close to midnight, the faraway man who
lived in her chest had stopped shouting. A platoon of ants carried a dead
cockroach sedately through the door, demonstrating what should be done with
corpses.
The church refused to
bury Ammu. On several counts. So Chacko hired a van to transport the body to
the electric crematorium. He had her wrapped in a dirty bedsheet and laid out
on a stretcher. Rahel thought she looked like a Roman Senator. Et tu, Ammu? she
thought and smiled, remembering Estha.
It was odd driving
through bright, busy streets with a dead Roman Senator on the floor of the van.
It made the blue sky bluer. Outside the van windows, people, like cut‑out paper
puppets, went on with their paper‑puppet lives. Real life was inside the van.
Where real death was. Over the jarring bumps and potholes in the road, Ammu’s
body jiggled and slid off the stretcher. Her head hit an iron bolt on the
floor. She didn’t wince or wake up. There was a hum in Rahel’s head, and for
the rest of the day Chacko had to shout at her if he wanted to be heard.
The crematorium had
the same rotten, rundown air of a railway station, except that it was deserted.
No trains, no crowds. Nobody except beggars, derelicts and the police‑custody
dead were cremated there. People who died with nobody to lie at the back of
them and talk to them. When Ammu’s turn came, Chacko held Rahel’s hand tightly.
She didn’t want her hand held. She used the slickness of crematorium sweat to
slither out of his grip. No one else from the family was there.
The steel door of the
incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring.
The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel’s Ammu was fed to
it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love
her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, thou and I! Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their
faces steady with one hand (squashed‑cheeked, fish‑mouthed) while she parted
and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out, for Rahel
to climb into. Left leg, right leg . All this was fed to the beast, and
it was satisfied.
She was their Ammu and
their Baba and she had loved them Double.
The door of the
furnace clanged shut. There were no tears.
The crematorium “In‑charge”
had gone down the road for a cup of tea and didn’t come back for twenty
minutes. That’s how long Chacko and Rahel had to wait for the pink receipt that
would entitle them to collect Ammu’s remains. Her ashes. The grit from her
bones. The teeth from her smile. The whole of her crammed into a little clay
pot. Receipt No. Q498673.
Rahel asked Chacko how
the crematorium management knew which ashes were whose. Chacko said they must
have a system.
Had Estha been with
them, he would have kept the receipt. He was the Keeper of Records. The natural
custodian of bus tickets, bank receipts, cash memos, checkbook stubs. Little
Man. He lived in a Caravan. Dum dum.
But Estha wasn’t with
them. Everybody decided it was better this way. They wrote to him instead.
Mammachi said Rahel should write too. Write what? My dear Estha, How are
you? I am well. Ammu died yesterday.
Rahel never wrote to
him. There are things that you can’t do–like writing letters to a part of
yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
In Pappachi’s study,
Rahel (not old, not young), with floor‑dust on her feet, looked up from the
Wisdom Exercise Notebook and saw that Esthappen Un‑known was gone.
She climbed down (off
the stool off the table) and walked out to the verandah. She saw Estha’s back
disappearing through the gate.
It was midmorning and
about to rain again. The green–in the last moments of that strange, glowing,
pre‑shower light–was fierce.
A cock crowed in the
distance and its voice separated into two. Like a sole peeling off an old shoe.
Rahel stood there with
her tattered Wisdom Notebooks. In the front verandah of an old house, below a
button‑eyed bison head, where years ago, on the day that Sophie Mol came, Welcome
Home, Our Sophie Mol was performed.
Things can change in a
day.
Chapter 8.
Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
It was a grand old
house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof‑looking. As though it had little to do
with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching
children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their
wholehearted commitment to life.
The steep tiled roof
had grown dark and mossy with age and rain. The triangular wooden frames fitted
into the gables were intricately carved, the light that slanted through them
and fell in patterns on the floor was full of secrets. Wolves. Flowers.
Iguanas. Changing shape as the sun moved through the sky. Dying punctually, at
dusk.
The doors had not two,
but four shutters of paneled teak so that in the old days, ladies could keep
the bottom half closed, lean their elbows on the ledge and bargain with
visiting vendors without betraying themselves below the waist. Technically,
they could buy carpets, or bangles, with their breasts covered and their
bottoms bare. Technically.
Nine steep steps led
from the driveway up to the front verandah. The elevation gave it the dignity
of a stage and everything that happened there took on the aura and significance
of performance. It overlooked Baby Kochamma’s ornamental garden, the gravel
driveway looped around it, sloping down towards the bottom of the slight hill
that the house stood on.
It was a deep
verandah, cool even at midday, when the sun was at its scorching best.
When the red cement
floor was laid, the egg whites from nearly nine hundred eggs went into it. It
took a high polish.
Below the stuffed
button‑eyed bison head, with the portraits of her father‑in‑law and mother‑in‑law
on either side, Mammachi sat in a low wicker chair at a wicker table on which stood
a green glass vase with a single stem of purple orchids curving from it.
The afternoon was
still and hot. The Air was waiting
Mammachi held a
gleaming violin under her chin. Her opaque fifties sunglasses were black and
slanty‑eyed, with rhinestones on the corners of the frames. Her sari was
starched and perfumed. Offwhite and gold. Her diamond earrings shone in her
ears like tiny chandeliers. Her ruby rings were loose. Her pale, fine skin was
creased like cream on cooling milk and dusted with tiny red moles. She was
beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.
Blind Mother Widow
with a violin.
In her younger years,
with prescience and good management, Mammachi had collected all her falling
hair in a small, embroidered purse that she kept on her dressing table. When
there was enough of it, she made it into a netted bun which she kept hidden in
a locker with her jewelry. A few years earlier, when her hair began to thin and
silver to give it body, she wore her jet‑black bun pinned to her small, silver
head. In her book this was perfectly acceptable, since all the hair was hers.
At night, when she took off her bun, she allowed her grandchildren to plait her
remaining hair into a tight, oiled, gray rat’s tail with a rubber band at the
end. One plaited her hair, while the other counted her uncountable moles. They
took turns.
On her scalp,
carefully hidden by her scanty hair, Mammachi had raised, crescent‑shaped
ridges. Scars of old beatings from an old marriage. Her brass‑vase scars.
She played Lentement–a
movement from the Suite in D/G of Handel’s Water Music. Behind her slanted
sunglasses her useless eyes were closed, but she could see the music as it left
her violin and lifted into the afternoon like smoke.
Inside her head, it
was like a room with dark drapes drawn across a bright day.
As she played, her
mind wandered back over the years to her first batch of professional pickles.
How beautiful they had looked! Bottled and sealed, standing on a table near the
head of her bed, so they’d be the first thing she would touch in the morning
when she woke up. She had gone to bed early that night, but woke a little after
midnight. She groped for them, and her anxious fingers came away with a film of
oil. The pickle bottles stood in a pool of oil. There was oil everywhere. In a
ring under her vacuum flask. Under her Bible. All over her bedside table. The
pickled mangoes had absorbed oil and expanded, making the bottles leak.
Mammachi consulted a
book that Chacko bought her, Homescale Preservations , but it offered no
solutions. Then she dictated a letter to Annamma Chandy’s brother‑in‑law who
was the Regional Manager of Padma Pickles in Bombay. He suggested that she
increase the proportion of preservative that she used. And the salt. That had
helped, but didn’t solve the problem entirely. Even now, after all those years,
Paradise Pickles’ bottles still leaked a little. It was imperceptible, but they
did still leak, and on long journeys their labels became oily and transparent.
The pickles themselves continued to be a little on the salty side.
Mammachi wondered
whether she would ever master the art of perfect preservation, and whether
Sophie Mol would like some iced grape crush. Some cold purple juice in a glass.
Then she thought of
Margaret Kochamma and the languid, liquid notes of Handel’s music grew shrill
and angry.
Mammachi had never met
Margaret Kochamma. But she despised her anyway. Shopkeeper’s daughter was how
Margaret Kochamma was filed away in Mammachi’s mind. Mammachi’s world was
arranged that way. If she was invited to a wedding in Kottayam, she would spend
the whole time whispering to whoever she went with, “The bride’s maternal
grandfather was my father’s carpenter. Kunjukutty Eapen? His great‑grandmother’s
sister was just a midwife in Trivandrum. My husband’s family used to own this
whole hill.”
Of course Mammachi
would have despised Margaret Kochamma even if she had been heir to the throne
of England. It wasn’t just her working‑class background Mammachi resented. She
hated Margaret Kochamma for being Chacko’s wife. She hated her for leaving him.
But would have hated her even more had she stayed.
The day that Chacko
prevented Pappachi from beating her (and Pappachi had murdered his chair
instead), Mammachi packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chacko’s care.
From then onwards he became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her
Man. Her only Love.
She was aware of his
libertine relationships with the women in the factory, but had ceased to be
hurt by them. When Baby Kochamma brought up the subject, Mammachi became tense
and tight‑lipped.
“He can’t help having
a Man’s Needs,” she said primly.
Surprisingly, Baby
Kochamma accepted this explanation, and the enigmatic, secretly thrilling
notion of Men’s Needs gained implicit sanction in the Ayemenem House. Neither
Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind
and feudal libido. They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to
force men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made
pregnant. Of course they did not even remotely suspect that the missile, when
it was fired, the one that would annihilate the family’s Good Name forever,
would come from a completely unexpected quarter.
Mammachi had a separate
entrance built for Chacko’s room, which was at the eastern end of the house, so
that the objects of his “Needs” wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the
house. She secretly slipped them money to keep them happy. They took it because
they needed it. They had young children and old parents. Or husbands who spent
all their earnings in toddy bars. The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in
her mind, a fee clarified things.
Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings.
Margaret Kochamma,
however, was a different kettle of fish altogether. Since she had no means of
finding out (though she did once try to get Kochu Maria to examine the
bedsheets for stains), Mammachi could only hope that Margaret Kochamma was not
intending to resume her sexual relationship with Chacko. While Margaret
Kochamma was in Ayemenem, Mammachi managed her unmanageable feelings by
slipping money into the pockets of the dresses that Margaret Kochamma left in
the laundry bin. Margaret Kochamma never returned the money simply because she
never found it. Her pockets were emptied as a matter of routine by Aniyan the
dhobi. Mammachi knew this, but preferred to construe Margaret Kochamma’s
silence as a tacit acceptance of payment for the favors Mammachi imagined she
bestowed on her son.
So Mammachi had the
satisfaction of regarding Margaret Kochamma as just another whore, Aniyan the
dhobi was happy with his daily gratuity, and of course Margaret Kochamma
remained blissfully unaware of the whole arrangement.
From its perch on the
well, an untidy coucal called Hwoop‑Hwoop and shuffled its rust‑red wings.
A crow stole some soap
that bubbled in its beak.
In the dark, smoky
kitchen, short Kochu Maria stood on her toes and iced the tall, double‑deckered
WELCOME‑HOME‑OUR‑SOPHIE‑MOL cake. Though even in those days most Syrian
Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless
half– sleeved white chatta with a V‑neck and her white mundu, which folded into
a crisp cloth fan on her behind. Kochu Maria’s fan was more or less hidden by
the blue‑and‑white checked, filled, absurdly incongruous housemaid’s apron that
Mammachi insisted she wear inside the house.
She had short, thick
forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared
nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and
separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head
was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped
from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened
with age.
She kept damp cash in
her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian
breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been
distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting
in them like gleeful children in a merry‑go‑(not all the way)‑round. Her right
lobe had split open once and was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese.
Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would
people know that despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy‑five rupees a month) she
was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan.
But a Touchable, upper‑caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like
tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.
Kochu Maria hadn’t yet
made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk
Hogan addict. She hadn’t yet seen a television set. She wouldn’t have believed
television existed. Had someone suggested that it did, Kochu Maria would have
assumed that he or she was insulting her intelligence. Kochu Maria was wary of
other peoples’ versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took
them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier)
gullibility. In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now,
as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said. A few months ago,
in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong
had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali
acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up
his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never
seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might
conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit?
No sir. Nor did she trust the vague gray pictures that had appeared in the Malayala
Manorama that she couldn’t read.
She remained certain
that Estha, when he said, “Et ta, Kochu Maria?’ was insulting her in English.
She thought it meant something like Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf. She
bided her time, waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about him.
She finished icing the
tall cake. Then she tipped her head back and squeezed the leftovericing onto
her tongue. Endless coils of chocolate toothpaste on a pink Kochu Maria tongue.
When Mammachi called from the verandah (“Kochu Mariye! I hear the car!”) her
mouth was full of icing and she couldn’t answer. When she finished, she ran her
tongue over her teeth and then made a series of short smacking sounds with her
tongue against her palate as though she’d just eaten something sour.
Distant skyblue carsounds
(past the bus stop, past the school, past the yellow church and up the bumpy
red road through the rubber trees) sent a murmur through the dim, sooty
premises of Paradise Pickles.
The pickling (and the
squashing, the slicing, boiling and stirring, the grating, salting, drying, the
weighing and bottle sealing) stopped.
“Chacko Saar vannu
,” the traveling whisper went. Chopping knives were put down. Vegetables were
abandoned, half cut, on huge steel platters. Desolate bitter gourds, incomplete
pineapples. Colored rubber finger guards (bright, like cheerful, thick condoms)
were taken off. Pickled hands were washed and wiped on cobalt‑blue aprons.
Escaped wisps of hair were recaptured and returned to white headscarves. Mundus
tucked up under aprons were let down. The gauze doors of the factory had sprung
hinges, and closed noisily on their own.
And on one side of the
driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the kodam puli tree, a silent
blue‑aproned army gathered in the greenheat to watch.
Blue‑aproned, white‑capped,
like a clot of smart blue‑and‑white flags.
Achoo, Jose, Yako,
Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma,
Latha, Sushila, Vijayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykutty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls
with bus names). The early rumblings of discontent, concealed under a thick
layer of loyalty.
The skyblue Plymouth
turned in at the gate and crunched over the gravel driveway crushing small
shells and shattering little red and yellow pebbles. Children tumbled out.
Collapsed fountains.
Flattened puffs.
Crumpled yellow bell‑bottoms
and a go‑go bag that was loved. Jet‑lagged and barely awake. Then the swollen‑ankled
adults. Slow from too much sitting.
`Have you arrived?”
Mammachi asked, turning her slanty dark glasses towards the new sounds: car
doors slamming, gettingoutedness. She lowered her violin.
“Mammachi!” Rahel said
to her beautiful blind grandmother. “Estha vomited! In the middle of The Sound
of Music! And…”
Ammu touched her
slaughter gently. On her shoulder. And her touch meant Shhhh… Rahel looked
around her and saw that she was in a Play. But she had only a small part.
She was just the
landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree.
A face in the crowd. A
Townspeople.
Nobody said Hello to
Rahel. Not even the Blue Army in the greenheat.
“Where is she?”
Mammachi asked the car sounds. “Where is my Sophie Mol? Come here and let me
see you.”
As she spoke, the
Waiting Melody that hung over her like a shimmering temple elephant’s umbrella
crumbled and gently fell about like dust.
Chacko, in his What
Happened to Our Man of the Masses?
suit and well‑fed tie, led Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol triumphantly
up the nine red steps like a pair of tennis trophies that he had recently won.
And once again, only
the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.
“Hello, Mammachi,”
Margaret Kochamma said in her kindschoolteacher (that sometimes slapped) voice.
“Thank you for having us. We needed so much to get away.”
Mammachi caught a
whiff of inexpensive perfume soured at the edges by airline sweat. (She herself
had a bottle of Dior in its soft green leather pouch locked away in her safe.)
Margaret Kochamma took
Mammachi’s hand. The fingers were soft, the ruby rings were hard.
“Hello, Margaret,”
Mammachi said (not rude, not polite), her dark glasses still on. “Welcome to
Ayemenem. I’m sorry I can’t see you. As you must know, I am almost blind.” She
spoke in a slow deliberate manner.
“Oh, that’s all
right,” Margaret Kochamma said. “I’m sure I look terrible anyway.” She laughed
uncertainly, not sure if it was the right response.
“Wrong,” Chacko said.
He turned to Mammachi, smiling a proud smile that his mother couldn’t see.
“She’s as lovely as ever.”
“I was very sorry to
hear about… Joe,” Mammachi said. She sounded only a little sorry. Not very
sorry.
There was a short, Sad‑About‑Joe
silence.
“Where’s my Sophie
Mol?” Mammachi said. “Come here and let your grandmother look at you.”
Sophie Mol was led to
Mammachi. Mammachi pushed her dark glasses up into her hair. They looked up like
slanting cat’s eyes at the moldy bison head. The moldy bison said, “No.
Absolutely Not.” In Moldy Bisonese.
Even after her cornea
transplant, Mammachi could only see light and shadow. If somebody was standing
in the doorway, she could tell that someone was standing in the doorway. But
not who it was. She could read a check, or a receipt, or a banknote only if it
was close enough for her eyelashes to touch it. She would then hold it steady,
and move her eye along it. Wheeling it from word to word.
The Townspeople (in
her fairy frock) saw Mammachi draw Sophie Mol close to her eyes to look at her.
To read her like a check. To check her like a banknote. Mammachi (with her
better eye) saw redbrown hair (N… Nalmost blond), the curve of two fatfreckled
cheeks (Nnnn… almost rosy), bluegrayblue eyes.
“Pappachi’s nose,”
Mammachi said. “Tell me, are you a pretty girl?” she asked Sophie Mol.
“Yes,” Sophie Mol
said.
“And tall?”
“Tall for my age,”
Sophie Mol said.
“Very tall,” Baby
Kochamma said. “Much taller than Estha.”
“She’s older,” Ammu
said.
“Still …” Baby
Kochamma said.
A little way away,
Velutha walked up the shortcut through the rubber trees. Barebodied. A coil of
insulated electrical wire was looped over one shoulder. He wore his printed
dark‑blue‑andblack mundu loosely folded up above his knees. On his back, his
lucky leaf from the birthmark tree (that made the monsoons come on time). His
autumn leaf at night.
Before he emerged
through the trees and stepped into the driveway, Rahel saw him and slipped out
of the Play and went to him.
Ammu saw her go.
Offstage, she watched
them perform their elaborate Official Greeting. Velutha curtsied as he had been
taught to, his mundu spread like a skirt, like the English dairymaid in “The
King’s Breakfast” Rahel bowed (and said “Bow”). Then they hooked little fingers
and shook hands gravely with the mien of bankers at a convention.
In the dappled
sunlight filtering through the dark‑green trees, Ammu watched Velutha lift her
daughter effortlessly as though she was an inflatable child, made of air. As he
tossed her up and she landed in his arms, Ammu saw on Rahel’s face the high
delight of the airborne young.
She saw the ridges of
muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the
divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed–so
quietly, from a flatmuscled boy’s body into a man’s body. Contoured and hard. A
swimmer’s body. A swimmer‑carpenter’s body. Polished with a high‑wax body
polish.
He had high cheekbones
and a white, sudden smile.
It was his smile that
reminded Ammu of Velutha as a little boy. Helping Vellya Paapen to count
coconuts. Holding out little gifts he had made for her, flat on the palm of his
hand so that she could take them without touching him. Boats, boxes, small
windmills. Calling her Ammukutty. Little Ammu. Though she was so much less
little than he was. When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that
the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His
smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into
manhood.
Suddenly Ammu hoped
that it had been him that Rahel saw in the march. She hoped it had been him
that had raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his
careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the
smug, ordered world that she so raged against.
She hoped it had been
him.
She was surprised at
the extent of her daughter’s physical ease with him. Surprised that her child
seemed to have a sub‑world that excluded her entirely. A tactile world of
smiles and laughter that she, her mother, had no part in. Ammu recognized
vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She
didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own
child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.
The man standing in
the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body,
holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries
telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong‑footed, caught off
guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds
from old wars and the walking‑backwards days all fell away. In its absence it
left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a
river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the
rug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed.
In that brief moment,
Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn’t seen before. Things that had
been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers.
Simple things.
For instance, he saw
that Rahel’s mother was a woman.
That she had deep
dimples when she smiled and that they stayed on long after her smile left her
eyes. He saw that her brown arms were round and firm and perfect That her
shoulders shone, but her eyes were somewhere else. He saw that when he gave her
gifts they no longer needed to be offered flat on the palms of his hands so
that she wouldn’t have to touch him. His boats and boxes. His little windmills.
He saw too that he was not necessarily the only giver of gifts. That she had
gifts to give him, too.
This knowing slid into
him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took
a moment.
Ammu saw that he saw.
She looked away. He did too. History’s fiends returned to claim them. To re‑wrap
them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived.
Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Ammu walked up to the
verandah, back into the Play. Shaking.
Velutha looked down at
Ambassador S. Insect in his arms. He put her down. Shaking too.
“And look at you!” he
said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock. “So beautiful! Getting married?”
Rahel lunged at his
armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!
“I saw you yesterday,”
she said.
“Where?” Velutha made
his voice high and surprised.
“Liar,” Rahel said.
“Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a
flag. And you ignored me.”
“Aiyyo kathtam
,” Velutha said. “Would I do that? You tell me, would Velutha ever do that? It
rnust’ve been my Long‑lost Twin brother.”
“Which Long‑lost Twin
brother?”
“Urumban, silly… The
one who lives in Kochi.”
“Who Urumban?” Then
she saw the twinkle. “Liar! You haven’t got a Twin brother! It wasn’t Urumban!
It was you !”
Velutha laughed. He
had a lovely laugh that he really meant.
“Wasn’t me,” he said.
“I was sick in bed.”
“See, you’re smiling!”
Rahel said. “That means it was you. Smiling means ‘It was you.’”
“That’s only in
English!” Velutha said. “In Malayalam my teacher always said that `Smiling
means it wasn’t me.’”
It took Rahel a moment
to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickike ickilee ickike!
Still laughing,
Velutha looked into the Play for Sophie. “Where’s our Sophie Mol? Let’s take a
look at her. Did you remember to bring her, or did you leave her behind?”
“Don’t look there,”
Rahel said urgently.
She stood up on the
cement parapet that separated the rubber trees from the driveway, and clapped
her hands over Velutha’s eyes.
“Why?” Velutha said.
“Because,” Rahel said,
“I don’t want you to.”
“Where’s Estha Mon?”
Velutha said, with an Ambassador (disguised as a Stick Insect disguised as an
Airport Fairy) hanging down his back with her legs wrapped around his waist,
blindfolding him with her sticky little hands. “I haven’t seen him.”
“Oh, we sold him in
Cochin,” Rahel said airily. “For a bag of rice. And a torch.”
The froth of her stiff
frock pressed rough lace flowers into Velutha’s back. Lace flowers and a lucky
leaf bloomed on a black back.
But when Rahel
searched the Play for Estha, she saw that he wasn’t there.
Back inside the Play,
Kochu Maria arrived, short, behind her tall cake.
“Cake’s come,” she
said, a little loudly, to Mammachi. Kochu Maria always spoke a little loudly to
Mammachi because she assumed that poor eyesight automatically affected the
other senses.
“Kandoo Kochu Mariye?”
Mammachi said. “Can you see our Sophie Mol?”
“Kandoo, Kochamma,”
Kochu Maria said extra loud. “I can see her.”
She smiled at Sophie
Mol, extra wide. She was exactly Sophie Mol’s height. More short than Syrian
Christian, despite her best efforts.
“She has her mother’s
color,” Kochu Maria said.
“Pappachi’s nose,”
Mammachi insisted.
“I don’t know about
that, but she’s very beautiful,” Kochu Maria shouted. “Sundari kutty. She’s a little angel.”
Littleangels were
beach‑colored and wore bell‑bottoms. Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport‑Fairy
frocks with forehead bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love‑in‑Tokyos.
And backwards‑reading habits.
And if you cared to
look, you could see Satan in their eyes. Kochu Maria took both Sophie Mol’s
hands in hers, palms upward, raised them to her face and inhaled deeply.
“What’s she doing?”
Sophie Mol wanted to know, tender London hands clasped in calloused Ayemenem
ones. “Who’s she and why’s she smelling my hands?”
“She’s the cook,”
Chacko said. “That’s her way of kissing you.”
“Kissing?” Sophie Mol
was unconvinced, but interested. “How marvelous!” Margaret Kochamma said. “It’s
a sort of sniffing! Do the Men and Women do it to each other too?”
She hadn’t meant it to
sound quite like that, and she blushed. An embarrassed schoolteacher‑shaped
Hole in the Universe.
“Oh, all the time!”
Ammu said, and it came out a little louder than the sarcastic mumble that she
had intended. “That’s how we make babies.”
Chacko didn’t slap
her.
So she didn’t slap him
back.
But the Waiting Air
grew Angry.
“I think you owe my
wife an apology, Ammu,” Chacko said, with a protective, proprietal air (hoping
that Margaret Kochamma wouldn’t say “Ex‑wife Chacko!” and wag a rose at him).
“Oh no!” Margaret
Kochamma said. “It was my fault! I never meant it to sound quite like that…
what I meant was–I mean it is fascinating to think that–”
“It was a perfectly
legitimate question,” Chacko said. “And I think Ammu ought to apologize.”
“Must we behave like
some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?” Ammu asked.
“Oh dear,” Margaret
Kochamma said.
In the angry quietness
of the Play (the Blue Army in the greenheat still watching), Ammu walked back
to the Plymouth, took out her suitcase, slammed the door, and walked away to
her room, her shoulders shining. Leaving everybody to wonder where she had
learned her effrontery from.
And truth be told, it
was no small wondering matter.
Because Ammu had not
had the kind of education, nor read the sorts of books, nor met the sorts of
people, that might have influenced her to think the way she did.
She was just that sort
of animal.
As a child, she had
learned very quickly to disregard the Father Bear Mother Bear stories she was
given to read. In her version, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases.
Mother Bear suffered those beatings with mute resignation.
In her growing years,
Ammu had watched her father weave his hideous web. He was charming and urbane
with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning on them if they happened to be
white. He donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. He worked hard on
his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his
wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak
of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the
envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father.
Ammu had endured cold
winter nights in Delhi hiding in the mehndi hedge around their house (in case
people from Good Families saw them) because Pappachi had come back from work
out of sorts, and beaten her and Mammachi and driven them out of their home.
On one such night,
Ammu, aged nine, hiding with her mother in the hedge, watched Pappachi’s natty
silhouette in the lit windows as he flitted from room to room. Not content with
having beaten his wife and daughter (Chacko was away at school), he tore down
curtains, kicked furniture and smashed a table lamp. An hour after the lights
went out, disdaining Mammachi’s frightened pleading, little Ammu crept back into
the house through a ventilator to rescue her new gumboots that she loved more
than anything else. She put them in a paper bag and crept back into the drawing
room when the lights were suddenly switched on.
Pappachi had been
sitting in his mahogany rocking chair all along, rocking himself silently in
the dark. When he caught her, he didn’t say a word. He flogged her with his
ivory‑handled riding crop (the one that he had held across his lap in his
studio photograph). Ammu didn’t cry. When he finished beating her he made her
bring him Mammachi’s pinking shears from her sewing cupboard. While Ammu
watched, the Imperial Entomologist shred her new gumboots with her mother’s
pinking shears. The strips of black rubber fell to the floor. The scissors made
snicking scissor‑sounds. Ammu ignored her mother’s drawn, frightened face that
appeared at the window. It took ten minutes for her beloved gumboots to be
completely shredded. When the last strip of rubber had rippled to the floor,
her father looked at her with cold, flat eyes, and rocked and rocked and
rocked. Surrounded by a sea of twisting rubber snakes.
As she grew older,
Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty
sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone
Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly
nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that
she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.
“Has she gone?”
Mammachi asked the silence around her.
“She’s gone,” Kochu
Maria said loudly.
“Are you allowed to
say `damn’ in India?” Sophie Mol asked.
“Who said ‘damn’?”
Chacko asked.
“She did,” Sophie Mol
said. “Aunty Ammu. She said some damn godforsaken tribe.’”
“Cut the cake and give
everybody a piece,” Mammachi said. “Because in England, we’re not,” Sophie Mol
said to Chacko. “Not what?” Chacko said.
“Allowed to say Dee Ay
Em En,” Sophie Mol said. Mammachi looked sightlessly out into the shining
afternoon. “Is everyone here?” she asked.
“Oower Kochamma,” the Blue Army in the greenheat
said. “We’re all here.”
Outside the Play,
Rahel said to Velutha: “We’re not here are we? We’re not even Playing.”
“That is Exactly
Right,” Velutha said. “We’re not even Playing. But what I would like to know
is, where is our Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon?”
And that became a
delighted, breathless, Rumpelstiltskin‑like dance among the rubber trees.
Oh Esthapappychachen
Kuttappen Peter Mon.
Where, oh where have
you gon?
And from
Rumpelstiltskin it graduated to the Scarlet Pimpernel.
We seek him here, we
seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek
him everywhere.
Is be in heaven? Is be
in hell?
That demmedel‑usive
Estha –Pen?
Kochu Maria cut a
sample piece of cake for Mammachi’s approval.
“One piece each,”
Mammachi confirmed to Kochu Maria, touching the piece lightly with rubyringed
fingers to see if it was small enough.
Kochu Maria sawed up
the rest of the cake messily, laboriously, breathing through her mouth, as
though she was carving a hunk of roast lamb. She put the pieces on a large
silver tray.
Mammachi played a
Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol melody on her violin.
A cloying, chocolate
melody. Stickysweet, and meltybrown. Chocolate waves on a chocolate shore.
In the middle of the
melody, Chacko raised his voice over the chocolate sound.
“Mamma!” he said (in
his Reading Aloud voice). “Mamma! That’s enough! Enough violin!”
Mammachi stopped
playing and looked in Chacko’s direction, the bow poised in midair.
“Enough? D’you think
that’s enough, Chacko?”
“More than enough,”
Chacko said.
“Enough’s enough,”
Mammachi murmured to herself. “I think I’ll stop now.” As though the idea had
suddenly occurred to her.
She put her violin
away into its black, violin‑shaped box. It closed like a suitcase. And the
music closed with it.
Click. And click.
Mammachi put her dark
glasses on again. And drew the drapes across the hot day.
Ammu emerged from the
house and called to Rahel. “Rahel! I want you to have your afternoon nap! Come
in after you’ve had your cake!”
Rahel’s heart sank.
Afternoon Gnap. She hated those.
Ammu went back
indoors.
Velutha put Rahel
down, and she stood forlornly at the edge of the driveway, on the periphery of
the Play, a Gnap looming large and nasty on her horizon.
“And please stop being
so over‑familiar with that man!” Baby Kochamma said to Rahel.
“Over‑familiar?”
Mammachi said. “Who is it, Chacko? Who’s being over‑familiar?”
“Rahel,” Baby Kochamma
said.
“Over‑familiar with
who?” “With whom,” Chacko corrected his mother. “All right, with whom is she
being over‑familiar?” Mammachi asked.
“Your Beloved
Velutha–whom else?” Baby Kochamma said, and to Chacko, “Ask him where he was
yesterday. Let’s bell the cat once and for all.”
“Not now,” Chacko
said.
“`What’s over‑familiar?”
Sophie Mol asked Margaret Kochamma, who didn’t answer.
“Velutha? Is Velutha
here? Are you here?” Mammachi asked the Afternoon.
“Oower ,
Kochamma.” He stepped through the trees into the Play.
“Did you find out what
it was?” Mammachi asked.
“The washer in the
foot‑valve,” Velutha said. “I’ve changed it. It’s working now.”
“Then switch it on,”
Mammachi said. “The tank is empty.”
“That man will be our
Nemesis,” Baby Kochamma said. Not because she was clairvoyant and had had a
sudden flash of prophetic vision. Just to get him into trouble. Nobody paid her
any attention.
“Mark my words,” she
said bitterly.
“See her?” Kochu Maria
said when she got to Rahel with her tray of cake. She meant Sophie Mol. “When
she grows up, she’ll be our Kochamma, and she’ll raise our salaries, and give
us nylon saris for Onam.” Kochu Maria collected saris, though she hadn’t ever
worn one, and probably never would.
“So what?” Rahel said.
“By then I’ll be living in Africa.”
“Africa?” Kochu Maria
sniggered. “Africa’s full of ugly black people and mosquitoes.”
“You’re the one who’s
ugly,” Rahel said, and added (in English) “Stupid dwarf!”
“What did you say?”
Kochu Maria said threateningly. “Don’t tell me. I know. I heard. I’ll tell
Mammachi. Just wait!”
Rahel walked across to
the old well where there were usually some ants to kill. Red ants that had a
sour farty smell when they were squashed. Kochu Maria followed her with the
tray of cake.
Rahel said she didn’t
want any of the stupid cake.
“Kushumbi, ” Kochu Maria said. “Jealous people go
straight to hell.”
“Who’s jealous?”
“I don’t know. You
tell me,” Kochu Maria said, with a frilly apron and a vinegar heart
Rahel put on her
sunglasses and looked back into the Play. Everything was Angry‑colored. Sophie
Mol, standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as though she ought
to be slapped. Rahel found a whole column of juicy ants. They were on their way
to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there.
Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church.
The ants made a faint
crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast or a crisp biscuit.
The Antly Church
would be empty and the Antly Bishop would wait in his funny Antly Bishop
clothes, swinging Frankincense in a silver pot. And nobody would arrive.
After he had waited
for a reasonably Antly amount of time, he would get a funny Antly Bishop frown
on his forehead, and shake his head sadly. He would look at the glowing Antly
stained‑glass windows and when he finished looking at them, he would lock the
church with an enormous key and make it dark. Then he’d go home to his wife and
(if she wasn’t dead) they’d have an Antly Afternoon Gnap.
Sophie Mol, hatted
bell‑bottomed and Loved from the Beginning, walked out of the Play to see what
Rahel was doing behind the well. But the Play went with her. Walked when she
walked, stopped when she stopped. Fond smiles followed her. Kochu Maria moved
the cake tray out of the way of her adoring downwards smile as Sophie squatted
down in the well‑squelch (yellow bottoms of bells muddy wet now).
Sophie Mol inspected
the smelly mayhem with clinical detachment. The stone was coated with crushed
red carcasses and a few feebly waving legs.
Kochu Maria watched
with her cake crumbs.
The Fond Smiles
watched Fondly.
Little Girls Playing.
Sweet.
One beach‑colored.
One brown.
One Loved.
One Loved a Little
Less.
“Let’s leave one alive
so that it can be lonely,” Sophie Mol suggested.
Rahel ignored her and
killed them all. Then in her frothy Airport Frock with matching knickers (no
longer crisp) and unmatching sunglasses, she ran away. Disappeared into the
greenheat.
The Fond Smiles stayed
on Sophie Mol like a spotlight, thinking, perhaps, that the sweetcousins were
playing hide‑and‑seek, like sweetcousins often do.
Chapter 9.
Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs.
Rajagopalan
The green‑for‑the‑day
had seeped from the trees. Dark palm leaves were splayed like drooping combs
against the monsoon sky. The orange sun slid through their bent, grasping
teeth.
A squadron of fruit
bats sped across the gloom.
In the abandoned
ornamental garden, Rahel, watched by lolling dwarfs and a forsaken cherub,
squatted by the stagnant pond and watched toads hop from stone to scummy stone.
Beautiful Ugly Toads.
Slimy. Warty.
Croaking.
Yearning, unkissed
princes trapped inside them. Food for snakes that lurked in the long June
grass. Rustle. Lunge. No more toad to hop from stone to scummy stone. No more
prince to kiss.
It was the first night
since she’d come that it hadn’t rained. Around now, Rahel thought, if this were
Washington, I would be on my way to work. The bus ride. The streetlights. The
gas fumes. The shapes of people’s breath on the bulletproof glass of my cabin.
The clatter of coins pushed towards me in the metal tray. The smell of money on
my fingers. The punctual drunk with sober eyes who arrived exactly at 10.00
P.M.: “Hey you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!”
She owned seven
hundred dollars. And a gold bangle with snakeheads. But Baby Kochamma had
already asked her how much longer she planned to stay. And what she planned to
do about Estha.
She had no plans.
No plans.
No L…custs Stand I.
She looked back at the
looming, gabled, house‑shaped Hole in the Universe and imagined living in the
silver bowl that Baby Kochamma had installed on the roof. It looked large
enough for people to live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s
homes. Bigger, for instance, than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters.
If they slept there,
she and Estha, curled together like fetuses in a shallow steel womb, what would
Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow do? If the dish were occupied, where would they
go? Would they slip through the chimney into Baby Kochamma’s life and TV? Would
they land on the old stove with a Heeaugh!, in their muscles and spangled
clothes? Would the Thin People–the famine‑victims and refugees–slip through the
cracks in the doors? Would Genocide slide between the tiles?
The sky was thick with
TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky
among the bats and homing birds‑blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows,
coups d’ etat, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding
towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills.
Flowers blooming and unblooming.
Heeaagh!
Rahel returned to
contemplating toads.
Fat. Yellow. From
stone to scummy stone. She touched one gently. It moved its eyelids upwards.
Funnily self‑assured.
Nictitating membrane,
she remembered she and Estha once spent a whole day saying. She and Estha and
Sophie Mol.
Nictitating
ictitating
ctitating
itating
tating
ating
ting
ing
They were, all three
of them, wearing saris (old ones, torn in half) that day. Estha was the draping
expert. He pleated Sophie Mol’s pleats. Organized Rahel’s pallu and settled his
own. They had red bindis on their foreheads. In the process of trying to wash
out Ammu’s forbidden kohl, they had smudged it all over their eyes, and on the
whole looked like three raccoons trying to pass off as Hindu ladies. It was
about a week after Sophie Mol arrived. A week before she died. By then she had
performed unfalteringly under the twins’ perspicacious scrutiny and had
confounded all their expectations.
She had:
(a) Informed Chacko
that even though he was her Real Father, she loved him less than Joe (which
left him available–even if not inclined–to be the surrogate father of certain
two‑egg persons greedy for his affection).
(b) Turned down
Mammachi’s offer that she replace Estha and Rahel as the privileged plaiter of
Mammachi’s nightly rat’s tail and counter of moles.
(c) (& Most
Important) Astutely gauged the prevailing temper, and not just rejected, but
rejected outright and extremely rudely, all of Baby Kochamma’s advances and
small seductions.
As if this were not
enough, she also revealed herself to be human. One day the twins returned from
a clandestine trip to the river (which had excluded Sophie Mol), and found her
in the garden in tears, perched on the highest point of Baby Kochamma’s Herb
Curl, “Being Lonely,” as she put it. The next day Estha and Rahel took her with
them to visit Velutha.
They visited him in saris,
clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass (nictitating ictitating
tating ating ting ing) and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and
Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother
Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost
courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma and gave them fresh coconut water
to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his
opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in
Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry
tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.
It is only now, these
years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that
gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real
ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care
not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.
It is after all so
easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a
dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.
To let it be, to
travel with it as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
Three days before the
Terror, he had let them paint his nails with red Cutex that Ammu had discarded.
That’s the way he was the day History visited them in the back verandah. A
carpenter with gaudy nails. The posse of Touchable Policemen had looked at them
and laughed.
“What’s this?” one had
said. “AC‑DC?”
Another lifted his
boot with a millipede curled into the ridges of its sole. Deep rust‑brown. A
million legs.
The last strap of
light slipped from the cherub’s shoulder. Gloom swallowed the garden. Whole.
Like a python. Lights came on in the house.
Rahel could see Estha
in his room, sitting on his neat bed. He was looking out through the barred
window at the darkness. He couldn’t see her, sitting outside in the darkness,
looking in at the light.
A pair of actors
trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling
through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s
grief.
Unable, somehow, to
change plays. Or purchase, for a fee, some cheap brand of exorcism from a
counselor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say, in one of many
ways: “You’re not the Sinners. You’re the Sinned Against You were only
children. You had no control. You are the victims, not the perpetrators.”
It would have helped
if they could have made that crossing. If only they could have worn, even
temporarily, the tragic hood of victimhood. Then they would have been able to
put a face on it, and conjure up fury at what had happened. Or seek redress.
And eventually, perhaps, exorcize the memories that haunted them.
But anger wasn’t
available to them and there was no face to put on this Other Thing that they
held in their sticky Other Hands, like an imaginary orange. There was nowhere
to lay it down. It wasn’t theirs to give away. It would have to be held.
Carefully and forever.
Esthappen and Rahel
both knew that there were several perpetrators (besides themselves) that day.
But only one victim. And he had blood‑red nails and a brown leaf on his back
that made the monsoons come on time.
He left behind a Hole
in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar. Through which
their mother followed without even turning to wave good‑bye. She left them
behind, spinning in the dark, with no moorings, in a place with no foundation.
Hours later, the moon
rose and made the gloomy python surrender what it had swallowed. The garden
reappeared. Regurgitated whole. With Rahel sitting in it.
The direction of the
breeze changed and brought her the sound of drums. A gift. The promise of a
story. Once upon a time, they said, there lived a…
Rahel lifted her head
and listened.
On clear nights the
sound of the chenda traveled up to a kilometer from the Ayemenem temple,
announcing a kathakali performance.
Rahel went. Drawn by
the memory of steep roofs and white walls. Of brass lamps lit and dark, oiled
wood. She went in the hope of meeting an old elephant who wasn’t electrocuted
on the Kottayam‑Cochin highway. She stopped by the kitchen for a coconut.
On her way out, she
noticed that one of the gauze doors of the factory had come off its hinges and
was propped against the doorway. She moved it aside and stepped in. The air was
heavy with moisture, wet enough for fish to swim in.
The floor under her
shoes was slick with monsoon scum. A small, anxious bat flitted between the
roof beams.
The low cement pickle
vats silhouetted in the gloom made the factory floor look like an indoor
cemetery for the cylindrical dead.
The earthly remains of
Paradise Pickles & Preserves.
Where long ago, on the
day that Sophie Mol came, Ambassador E. Pelvis stirred a pot of scarlet jam and
thought Two Thoughts. Where a red, tender‑mango‑shaped secret was pickled,
sealed and put away.
It’s true. Things can
change in a day.
Chapter 10.
The River in the Boat
While the Welcome
Home, Our Sophie Mol Play was being
performed in the front verandah and Kochu Maria distributed cake to a Blue Army
in the greenheat, Ambassador E. Pelvis/S. Pimpernel (with a puff) of the beige
and pointy shoes, pushed open the gauze doors to the dank and pickle‑smelling
premises of Paradise Pickles. He walked among the giant cement pickle vats to
find a place to Think in. Ousa, the Bar Nowl, who lived on a blackened beam
near the skylight (and contributed occasionally to the flavor of certain
Paradise products), watched him walk.
Past floating yellow limes
in brine that needed prodding from time to time (or else islands of black
fungus formed like frilled mushrooms in a clear soup).
Past green mangoes,
cut and stuffed with turmeric and chili powder and tied together with twine.
(They needed no attention for a while.)
Past glass casks of
vinegar with corks.
Past shelves of pectin
and preservatives.
Past trays of bitter
gourd, with knives and colored finger guards.
Past gunny bags
bulging with garlic and small onions.
Past mounds of fresh
green peppercorns.
Past a heap of banana
peels on the floor (preserved for the pigs’ dinner).
Past the label
cupboard full of labels.
Past the glue.
Past the glue‑brush.
Past an iron tub of
empty bottles floating in soapbubbled water
Past the lemon squash.
The grape crush.
And back.
It was dark inside,
lit only by the light that filtered through the clotted gauze doors, and a beam
of dusty sunlight (that Ousa didn’t use) from the skylight. The smell of
vinegar and asafetida stung his nostrils, but Estha was used to it, loved it.
The place that he found to Think in was between the wall and the black iron
cauldron in which a batch of freshly boiled (illegal) banana jam was slowly
cooling.
The jam was still hot
and on its sticky scarlet surface, thick pink froth was dying slowly. Little
banana‑bubbles drowning deep in jam and nobody to help them.
The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man could walk in any minute. Catch a Cochin‑Kottayam bus and be
there. And Ammu would offer him a cup of tea. Or Pineapple Squash perhaps. With
ice. Yellow in a glass.
With the long iron
stirrer, Estha stirred the thick, fresh jam.
The dying froth made
dying frothly shapes.
A crow with a crushed
wing.
A clenched chicken’s
claw.
A Nowl (not Ousa)
mired in sickly jam.
A sadly swirl.
And nobody to help.
As Estha stirred the
thick jam he thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
(a)Anything can happen
to Anyone. and
(b)It’s best to be
prepared.
Having thought these
thoughts, Estha Alone was happy with his bit of wisdom.
As the hot magenta jam
went round, Estha became a Stirring Wizard with a spoiled puff and uneven
teeth, and then the Witches of Macbeth.
Fire burn, banana
bubble.
Ammu had allowed Estha
to copy Mammachi’s recipe for banana jam into her new recipe book, black with a
white spine.
Acutely aware of the
honor that Ammu had bestowed on him, Estha had used both his best handwritings.
Bananajam (in his
old best writing)
Crush ripe banana.
Add water to cover and cook on a ~ hot fire till fruit is soft.
Sqweeze out juice
by straining through course muslin.
Weigh equal
quantity of sugar and keep b~.
Cook fruit juice
till it turns scarlet and about half the quantity evapoarates.
Prepare the gelatin
(pectin) thus
Proportion 1:5
ie: 4 teaspoons
Pectin. 20 teaspoons sugar.
Estha always thought
of Pectin as the youngest of three brothers with hammers, Pectin, Hectin and
Abednego. He imagined them building a wooden ship in failing light and a
drizzle. Like Noah’s sons. He could see them clearly in his mind. Racing
against time. The sound of their hammering echoing dully under the brooding,
storm‑coming sky.
And nearby in the
jungle, in the eerie, storm‑coming light, animals queued up in pairs:
Girl boy.
Girl boy.
Girl boy. Girl boy.
Twins were not
allowed.
The rest of the recipe
was in Estha’s new best handwriting. Angular, spiky. It leaned backwards as
though the letters were reluctant to form words, and the words reluctant to be
in sentences:
Add the Pectin to
concentrated juice. Cook for a few (5) minutes.
Use a strong fire,
burning heavily all around.
Add the sugar. Cook
until sheeting consistency is obtained.
Cool slowly.
Hope you will enjoy
this recipe.
Apart from the
spelling mistakes, the last line–Hope you will enjoy this recipe–was Estha’s
only augmentation of the original text.
Gradually, as Estha
stirred, the banana jam thickened and cooled, and Thought Number Three rose
unbidden from his beige and pointy shoes.
Thought Number Three
was:
(c) A boat.
A boat to row across
the river Akkara. The Other Side. A boat to carry Provisions. Matches. Clothes.
Pots and Pans. Things they would need and couldn’t swim with.
Estha’s arm hairs
stood on end. The jam‑stirring became a boatrowing. The round and round became
a back and forth. Across a sticky scarlet river. A song from the Onam boat race
filled the factory. Thaiy thay thaka rbazy thaiy thome!”
Enda da korangacha,
chandi ithra thenjada?
(Hey, Mr. Monkey man,
why’s your bum so red?)
Pandyill thooran
poyappol nerakkamathiri nerangi njan.
(I went for a shit to
Madras, and scraped it till it bled.)
Over the somewhat
discourteous questions and answers of the boat song, Rahel’s voice floated into
the factory
“Estha! Estha! Estha!”
Estha didn’t answer.
The chorus of the boat song was whispered into the thick jam.
Theeyome
Thithome
Tharako
Thithome
Theem
A gauze door creaked,
and an Airport Fairy with hornbumps and yellow‑rimmed red plastic sunglasses
looked in with the sun behind her. The factory was angry‑colored. The salted
limes were red. The tender mangoes were red. The label cupboard was red. The
dusty sunbeam (that Ousa never used) was red.
The gauze door closed.
Rahel stood in the
empty factory with her Fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo. She heard a nun’s voice
singing the boat song. A clear soprano wafting over vinegar fumes and pickle
vats.
She turned to Estha
bent over the scarlet broth in the black cauldron.
“What d’you want?”
Estha asked without looking up.
“Nothing,” Rahel said.
“Then why have you
come here?”
Rahel didn’t reply.
There was a brief, hostile silence.
“Why’re you rowing the
jam?” Rahel asked.
“India’s a Free
Country,” Estha said.
No one could argue
with that.
India was a Free
Country
You could make salt.
Row jam, if you wanted to.
The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man could just walk in through the gauze doors,
If he wanted to.
And Ammu would offer
him pineapple juice. With ice.
Rahel sat on the edge
of a cement vat (frothy ends of buckram and lace, delicately dipped in tender
mango pickle) and tried on the
rubber finger guards.
Three bluebottles fiercely fought the gauze doors, wanting to be let in. And
Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle‑smelling silence that lay between the
twins like a bruise.
Rahel’s fingers were
Yellow Green Blue Red Yellow. Estha’s jam was stirred.
Rahel got up to go.
For her Afternoon Gnap.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere.”
Rahel took off her new
fingers, and had her old finger‑colored fingers back. Not yellow, not green,
not blue, not red. Not yellow
“I’m going to Akkara,”
Estha said. Not looking up. “To the History House.”
Rahel stopped and
turned around, and on her heart a drab moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts
unfurled its predatory wings.
Slow out.
Slow in.
“Why?” Rahel said.
“Because Anything can
Happen to Anyone,” Estha‑said. “It’s Best to be Prepared.’
You couldn’t argue
with that.
Nobody went to Kari
Saipu’s house anymore. Vellya Paapen claimed to be the last human being to have
set eyes on it. He said that it was haunted. He had told the twins the story of
his encounter with Kari Saipu’s ghost. It happened two years ago, he said. He
had gone across the river, hunting for a nutmeg tree to make a paste of nutmeg
and fresh garlic for Chella, his wife, as she lay dying of tuberculosis.
Suddenly he smelled cigar smoke (which he recognized at once, because Pappachi
used to smoke the same brand). Vellya Paapen whirled around and hurled his
sickle at the smell. He pinned the ghost to the trunk of a rubber tree, where,
according to Vellya Paapen, it still remained. A sickled smell that bled clear,
amber blood, and begged for cigars.
Vellya Paapen never
found the nutmeg tree, and had to buy himself a new sickle. But he had the
satisfaction of knowing that his lightning‑quick reflexes (despite his
mortgaged eye) and his presence of mind had put an end to the bloodthirsty
wanderings of a pedophile ghost.
As long as no one
succumbed to its artifice and unsickled it with a cigar.
What Vellya Paapen
(who knew most things) didn’t know was that Kari Saipu’s house was the History
House (whose doors were locked and windows open). And that inside, map‑breath’d
ancestors with tough toe‑nails whispered to the lizards on the wall. That
History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues.
That default led to dire consequences. That on the day History picked to square
its books, Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid.
Vellya Paapen had no
idea that Kari Saipu it was who captured dreams and re‑dreamed them. That he
plucked them from the minds of passersby the way children pick currants from a
cake. That the ones he craved most of all, the dreams he loved re‑dreaming,
were the tender dreams of two‑egg, twins.
Poor old Vellya
Paapen, had he known then that History would choose him for its deputy, that it
would be his tears that set the Terror rolling, perhaps he would not have
strutted like a young cockerel in the. Ayemenem bazaar, bragging of how he swam
the river with his sickle in his mouth (sour, the taste of iron on his tongue).
How he put it down for just one moment while he kneeled to wash the river‑grit
out of his mortgaged eye (there was grit in the river sometimes, particularly
in the rainy months) when he caught the first whiff of cigar smoke. How he
picked up his sickle, whirled around and sickled the smell that fixed the ghost
forever. All in a single fluid, athletic motion.
By the time he
understood his part in History’s Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps.
He had swept his footprints away himself. Crawling backwards with a broom.
In the factory the
silence swooped down once more and tightened around the twins. But this time it
was a different kind of silence. An old river silence. The silence of Fisher
People and waxy mermaids.
“But Communists don’t
believe in ghosts,” Estha said, as though they were continuing a discourse
investigating solutions to the ghost problem. Their conversations surfaced and
dipped like mountain streams. Sometimes audible to other people. Sometimes not.
“Are we going to
become a Communist2” Rahel asked.
“Might have to.”
Estha‑the‑Practical.
Distant cake‑crumbled
voices and approaching Blue Army footsteps caused the Comrades to seal the
secret.
It was pickled, sealed
and put away. A red, tender‑mango‑shaped secret in a vat. Presided over by a
Nowl.
The Red Agenda was
worked out and agreed upon:
Comrade Rahel would go
for her Afternoon Gnap, then lie awake until Ammu fell asleep. –
Comrade Estha would
find the flag (that Baby Kochamma had been forced to wave), and wait for her by
the river and there they would:
(b) Prepare to prepare
to be prepared.
A child’s abandoned
Fairy Frock (semipickled) stood stiffly on its own in the middle of Ammu’s
darkened bedroom floor.
Outside, the Air was
Alert and Bright and Hot. Rahel lay next to Ammu, wide awake in her matching
airport knickers. She could see the pattern of the cross‑stitch flowers from
the blue cross‑stitch counterpane on Ammu’s cheek. She could hear the blue
cross‑stitch afternoon.
The slow ceiling fan.
The sun behind the curtains. The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in
a dangerous dzzzz.
A disbelieving
lizard’s blink.
High‑stepping chickens
in the yard.
The sound of the sun
crinkling the washing. Crisping white bedsheets. Stiffening starched saris. Off‑white
and gold.
Red ants on yellow
stones.
A hot cow feeling hot.
Amhoo. In the distance.
And the smell of a
cunning Englishman ghost, sickled to a rubber tree, asking courteously for a
cigar.
“Umm… excuse me? You
wouldn’t happen to have an umm… cigar, would you?”
In a kind,
schoolteacherly voice.
Oh dear.
And Estha waiting for
her. By the river. Under the mangosteen tree that Reverend E.John Ipe had
brought home from his visit to Mandalay.
What was Estha sitting
on?
On what they always
sat on under the mangosteen tree. Something gray and grizzled. Covered in moss
and lichen, smothered in ferns. Something that the earth had claimed. Not a
log. Not a rock.
Before she completed
the thought, Rahel was up and running. Through the kitchen, past Kochu Maria
fast asleep. Thickwrinkied like a sudden rhinoceros in a frilly apron.
Past the factory.
Tumbling barefoot
through the greenheat, followed by a yellow wasp.
Comrade Estha was
there. Under the mangosteen tree. With the red flag planted in the earth beside
him. A Mobile Republic. A Twin Revolution with a Puff.
And what was he
sitting on?
Something covered with
moss, hidden by ferns.
Knock on it and it
made a hollow knocked‑on sound.
The silence dipped and
soared and swooped and looped in figures of eight.
Jeweled dragonflies
hovered like shrill children’s voices in the sun. Finger‑colored fingers fought
the ferns, moved the stones, cleared the way. There was a sweaty grappling for
an edge to hold on to. And a One Two and.
Things can change in a
day.
It was a boat. A tiny
wooden vallom .
The boat that Estha
sat on and Rahel found.
The boat that Ammu
would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by
day.
So old a boat that it
had taken root. Almost.
A gray old boatplant
with boatflowers and boatfruit. And underneath, a boat‑shaped patch of withered
grass. A scurrying, hurrying boatworld.
Dark and dry and cool.
Unroofed now. And blind.
White termites on
their way to work.
White ladybirds on
their way home.
White beetles
burrowing away from the light.
White grasshoppers
with whitewood violins.
Sad white music.
A white wasp. Dead.
A bntrlewhite
snakeskin, preserved in darkness, crumbled in the sun.
But would it do, that
little vallom?
Was it perhaps too
old? Too dead?’
Was Akkara too far
away for it?
Two‑egg twins looked
out across their river.
The Meenachal.
Graygreen. With fish
in it. The sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
When Pappachi was a
boy, an old tamarind tree fell into it in a storm. It was still there. A smooth
barkiess tree, blackened by a surfeit of green water. Driftless driftwood.
The first third of the
river was their friend. Before the Really Deep began. They knew the slippery
stone steps (thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the afternoon weed
that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom. They knew the smaller
fish. The flat, foolish pallathi, the silver paral, the wily, whiskered koori,
the sometimes karimeen.
Here Chacko had taught
them to swim (splashing around his ample uncle stomach without help). Here they
had discovered for themselves the discotinected delights of underwater fatting.
Here they had learned
to fish. To thread coiling purple earthworms onto hooks on the fishing rods
that Velutha made from slender culms of yellow bamboo.
Here they studied
Silence (like the children of the Fisher People), and learned the bright
language of dragonflies.
Here they learned to
Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them. To move like lightning
when the bendy yellow bamboo arced downwards.
So this first third of
the river they knew well. The next two‑thirds less so.
The second third was
where the Really Deep began. Where the current was swift and certain
(downstream when the tide was out, upstream, pushing up from the backwaters
when the tide was in).
The third third was
shallow again. The water brown and murky. Full of weeds and darting eels and
slow mud that oozed through toes like toothpaste.
The twins could swim
like seals and, supervised by Chacko, had crossed the river several times,
returning panting and cross‑eyed from the effort, with a stone, a twig or a
leaf from the Other Side as testimony to their feat But the middle of a
respectable river, or the Other Side, was no place for children to Linger, Loll
or Learn Things. Estha and Rahel accorded the second third and the third third
of the Meenachal the deference it deserved. Still, swimming across was not the
problem. Taking the boat with Things in it (so that they could Prepare to
prepare to be prepared) was.
They looked across the
river with Old Boat eyes. From where they stood they couldn’t see the History
House. It was just a darkness beyond the swamp, at the heart of the abandoned
rubber estate, from which the sound of crickets swelled.
Estha and Rahel lifted
the little boat and carried it to the water It looked surprised, like a
grizzled fish that had surfaced from the deep. In dire need of sunlight. It
needed scraping, and cleaning, perhaps, but nothing more.
Two happy hearts
soared like colored kites in a skyblue sky. But then, in a slow green whisper,
the river (with fish in it, with the sky and trees in it), bubbled in.
Slowly the old boar
sank, and settled on the sixth step.
And a pair of two‑egg
twin hearts sank and settled on the step above the sixth.
The deep‑swimming fish
covered their mouths with their fins and laughed sideways at the spectacle.
A white boat‑spider
floated up with the river in the boat, struggled briefly and drowned. Her white
egg sac ruptured prematurely, and a hundred baby spiders (too light to drown,
too small to Swim), stippled the smooth surface of the green water, before
being swept out to sea. To Madagascar, to start a new phylum of Malayali
Swimming Spiders.
In a while, as though
they’d discussed it (though they hadn’t), the twins began to wash the boat in
the river. The cobwebs, the mud, the moss and lichen floated away. When it was
clean, they turned it upside down and hoisted it onto their heads. Like a
combined hat that dripped. Estha uprooted the red flag.
A small procession (a
flag, a wasp, and a boat‑on‑legs) wended its knowledgeable way down the little
path through the undergrowth. It avoided the clumps of nettles, and sidestepped
known ditches and anthills. It skirted the precipice of the deep pit from which
laterite had been quarried, and was now a still lake with steep orange banks,
the thick, viscous water covered with a luminous film of green scum. A verdant,
treacherous lawn, in which mosquitoes bred and fish were fat but inaccessible.
The path, which ran
parallel to the river, led to a little grassy clearing that was hemmed in by
huddled trees: coconut, cashew, mango, bilimbi. On the edge of the clearing,
with its back to the river, a low hut with walls of orange laterite plastered
with mud and a thatched roof nestled close to the ground, as though it was
listening to a whispered subterranean secret. The low walls of the hut were the
same color as the earth they stood on, and seemed to have germinated from a
house‑seed planted in the ground, from which right‑angled ribs of earth had
risen and enclosed space. Three untidy banana trees grew in the little front
yard that had been fenced off with panels of woven palm leaves.
The boat‑on‑legs
approached the hut. An unlit oil lamp hung on the wall beside the door, the
patch of wall behind it was singed soot black. The door was ajar. It was dark
inside. A black hen appeared in the doorway. She returned indoors, entirely
indifferent to boat visits.
Velutha wasn’t home.
Nor Vellya Paapen. But someone was.
A man’s voice floated
out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely.
The voice shouted the
same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more
hysterical register. It was an appeal to an over‑ripe guava threatening to fall
from its tree and make a mess on the ground.
Pa pera‑pera‑pera‑perakka,
(Mister gugga‑gug‑gug‑guava,)
Endeparambil
thooralley
(Don’t shit here in my
compound.)
Chetendeparambil
thoorikko.
(You can shit next
door in my brother’s compound.)
Pa pera‑pem‑pera‑perakka.
(Mister gugga‑gug‑gug‑guava.)
The shouter was
Kuttappen, Velutha’s older brother. He was paralyzed from his chest downwards.
Day after day, month after month, while his brother was away and his father
went to work, Kuttappen lay flat on his back and watched his youth saunter past
without stopping to say hello. All day he lay there listening to the silence of
huddled trees with only a domineering black hen for company. He missed his
mother, Chella, who had died in the same corner of the room that he lay in now.
She had died a coughing, spitting, aching, phlegmy death. Kuttappen remembered
noticing how her feet died long before she had. How the skin on them grew gray
and lifeless. How fearfully he watched death creep over her from the bottom up.
Kuttappen kept vigil on his own numb feet with mounting terror. Occasionally he
poked at them hopefully with a stick that he kept propped up in the corner to
defend himself against visiting snakes. He had no sensation in his feet at all,
and only visual evidence assured him that they were still connected to his
body, and were indeed his own.
After Chella died, he
was moved into her corner, the corner that Kuttappen imagined was the corner of
his home that Death had reserved to administer her deathly affairs. One corner
for cooking, one for clothes, one for bedding rolls, one for dying in.
He wondered how long
his would take, and what people who had more than four corners in their houses
did with the rest of their corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die
in?
He assumed, not
without reason, that he would be the first in his family to follow in his
mother’s wake. He would learn otherwise. Soon. Too soon.
Sometimes (from habit,
from missing her), Kuttappen coughed like his mother used to, and his upper
body bucked like a justcaught fish. His lower body lay like lead, as though it
belonged to someone else. Someone dead whose spirit was trapped and couldn’t
get away.
Unlike Velutha,
Kuttappen was a good, safe Paravan. He could neither read nor write. As belay
there on his hardbed, bits of thatch and grit fell onto him from the ceiling
and mingled with his sweat. Sometimes ants and other insects fell with it. On
bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him like
malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and
making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he
lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own
insignificance. That too made him cry out.
Insanity hovered close
at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes,
refilling glasses). Kuttappen thought with envy of madmen who could walk. He
had no doubts about the equity of the deal; his sanity, for serviceable legs.
The twins put the boat
down, and the clatter was met with a sudden silence from inside.
Kuttappen wasn’t
expecting anyone.
Estha and Rahel pushed
open the door and went in. Small as they were, they had to stoop a little to go
in. The wasp waited outside on the lamp.
“It’s us.”
The room was dark and
clean. It smelled of fish curry and woodsmoke. Heat cleaved to things like a
low fever. But the mud floor was cool under Rahel’s bare feet. Velutha’s and
Vellya Paapen’s bedding was rolled up and propped against the wall. Clothes
hung on a string. There was a low wooden kitchen shelf on which covered terra‑cotta
pots, ladles made of coconut shells arid three chipped enamel plates with dark‑blue
rims were arranged. A grown man could stand up straight in the center of the
room, but not along its sides. Another low door led to a backyard, where there
were more banana trees, beyond which the river glimmered through the foliage. A
carpenter’s workstation had been erected in the backyard.
There were no keys or
cupboards to lock.
The black hen left
through the backdoor, and scratched abstractedly in the yard, where
woodshavings blew about like blond curls. Judging from her persona1ity~ she
appeared to have been reared on a diet of hardware: hasps and clasps and nails
and old screws.
“Ayyo, Mon! Mol! What
must you be thinking? That Kuttappen’s a basket case!” an embarrassed,
disembodied voice said.
It took the twins
awhile for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Then the darkness
dissolved and Kuttappen appeared on his bed, a glistening genie in the gloom.
The whites of his eyes were dark yellow. The soles of his feet (soft from so
much lying down) stuck out from under the cloth that covered his legs. They
were still stained a pale orange from years of walking barefoot on red mud. He
had gray calluses on his ankles from the chafing of the rope that Paravans tied
around their feet when they climbed coconut trees.
On the wall behind him
there was a benign, mouse‑haired calendar–Jesus with lipstick and rouge, and a
lurid, jeweled heart glowing through his clothes. The bottom quarter of the
calendar (the part with the dates on it) filled out like a skirt. Jesus in a
mini.
Twelve layers of
petticoats for the twelve months of the year. None had been torn out.
There were other
things from the Ayemenem House that had either been given to them or salvaged
from the rubbish bin. Rich things in a poor house. A clock that didn’t work, a
flowered tin wastepaper basket. Pappachi’s old riding boots (brown, with green
mold) with the cobbler’s trees still in them. Biscuit tins with sumptuous
pictures of English castles and ladies with hustles and ringlets.
A small poster (Baby
Kochamma’s, given away because of a damp patch) hung next to Jesus. It was a
picture of a blond child writing a letter, with tears falling down her cheeks.
Underneath it said: Pm writing to say I Miss You. She looked as though she’d
had a haircut, and it was her cropped curls that were blowing around Velutha’s
backyard.
A transparent plastic
tube led from under the worn cotton sheet that covered Kuttappen to a bottle of
yellow liquid that caught the shaft of light that came in through the door, and
quelled a question that had been rising inside Rahel. She fetched him water in
a steel tumbler from the clay koojah. She seemed to know her way around.
Kuttappen lifted his head and drank. Some water dribbled down his chin.
The twins squatted on
their haunches, like professional adult gossips in the Ayemenem market.
They sat in silence
for a while. Kuttappen mortified, the twins preoccupied with boat thoughts.
“Has Chacko Saar’s Mol
come?” Kuttappen asked.
“Must have,” Rahel
said laconically.
“Where’s she?”
“Who knows? Must be
around somewhere. We don’t know.”
“Will you bring her
here for me to see?”
“Can’t,” Rahel said.
“Why not?”
`She has to stay
indoors. She’s very delicate. If she gets dirty she’ll die.”
“I see.”
“We’re not allowed to
bring her here… and anyway, there’s nothing to see,’ Rahel assured Kuttappen.
“She has hair, legs, teeth–you know–the usual, only she’s a little tall.” And
that was the only concession she would make.
“Is that all?”
Kuttappen said, getting the point very quickly. “Then where’s the point in
seeing her?”
“No point,” Rahel
said.
“Kuttappa, if a vallom
leaks, is it very hard to mend?” Estha asked.
“Shouldn’t be,”
Kuttappen said. “Depends. Why, whose vallom is leaking?”
“Ours–that we found.
D’you want to see it?”
They went out and
returned with the grizzled boat for the paralyzed man to examine. They held it
over him like a roof. Water dripped on him.
“First we’ll have to
find the leaks,” Kuttappen said. “Then we’ll have to plug them.”
“Then sandpaper,”
Estha said. “Then polish.”
“Then oars,” Rahel
said.
‘Then oars,” Estha
agreed.
“Then offity off,”
Rahel said.
“Where to?” Kuttappen
asked.
“Just here and there,
‘ Estha said airily.
‘You must be careful,”
Kuttappen said. “This river of ours–she isn’t always what she pretends to be.”
“What does she pretend
to be?” Rahel asked.
“Oh… a little old
churchgoing ammooma , quiet and clean... idi appams for breakfast, kanji
and meen for lunch. Minding her own business. Not looking right or left.”
“And she’s really a…?”
“Really a wild thing…
I can hear her at night–rushing past in the moonlight, always in a hurry. You
must be careful of her.”
“And what does she
really eat?”
“Really eat? Oh… Stoo…
and… “ He cast about for something English for the evil river to eat.
“Pineapple slices…”
Rahel suggested.
“That’s right!
Pineapple slices and Stoo. And she drinks. Whiskey.”
“And brandy.”
“And brandy. True.”
“And looks right and
left?
“True.”
“And minds other
people’s business…”
Esthappen steadied the
little boat on the uneven earth floor with a few blocks of wood that he found
in Velutha’s workstation in the backyard. He gave Rahel a cooking ladle made of
a wooden handle stuck through the polished half of a coconut shell.
The twins climbed into
the vallom and rowed across vast, choppy waters. With a Thaiy thaij thaka thaiy
thai thome. And a jeweled Jesus watching.
He walked on water.
Perhaps. But could He have swum on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses?
With His Fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would He have
had the imagination?
Velutha returned to
see if Kuttappen needed anything. From a distance he heard the raucous singing.
Young voices, underlining with delight the scatology
Hey Mr Monkey Man
Why’s your BUM so RED?
I went for a SHIT to
Madras
And scraped it till it
BLED!
Temporarily, for a few
happy moments, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man shut his yellow smile and went
away. Fear sank and settled at the bottom of the deep water. Sleeping a dog’s
sleep. Ready to rise and murk things at a moment’s notice.
Velutha smiled when he
saw the Marxist flag blooming like a tree outside his doorway. He had to bend
low in order to enter his home. A tropical Eskimo. When he saw the children,
something clenched inside him. And he couldn’t understand it. He saw them every
day. He loved them without knowing it. But it was different suddenly. Now.
After History had slipped up so badly. No fist had clenched inside him before.
Her children, an
insane whisper whispered to him.
Her eyes, her mouth.
Her teeth.
Her soft, lambent
skin.
He drove the thought
away angrily. It returned and sat outside his skull. Like a dog.
“Ha!” he said to his
young guests, “and who may I ask are these Fisher People?”
“Esthapappychachen
Kuttappen Peter Mon. Mr. and Mrs. Pleasetomeetyou.” Rahel held out her ladle to
be shaken in greeting.
It was shaken in
greeting. Hers, then Estha’s.
“And where, may I ask,
are they off to by boat?”
“Off to Africa!” Rahel
shouted.
“Stop shouting,” Estha
said.
Velutha walked around
the boat. They told him where they had found it.
“So it doesn’t belong
to anybody,” Rahel said a little doubtfully, because it suddenly occurred to
her that it might. “Ought we to report it to the police?”
“Don’t be stupid,”
Estha said.
Velutha knocked on the
wood and then scraped a little patch clean with his nail.
“Good wood,” he said.
“It sinks,” Estha
said. “It leaks.”
“Can you mend it for
us, Veluthapappychachen Peter Mon?” Rahel asked.
“We’ll see about
that,” Velutha said. “I don’t want you playing any silly games on this river.”
“We won’t. We promise.
We’ll use it only when you’re with us.”
“First we’ll have to
find the leaks,” Velutha said.
“Then we’ll have to
plug them!” the twins shouted, as though it was the second line of a well‑known
poem.
“How long will it
take?” Estha asked.
“A day,” Velutha said.
“A day! I thought
you’d say a month!”
Estha, delirious with
joy, jumped on Velutha, wrapped his legs around his waist and kissed him.
The sandpaper was
divided into exactly equal halves, and the twins fell to work with an eerie
concentration that excluded everything else.
Boat‑dust flew around
the room and settled on hair and eyebrows. On Kuttappen like a cloud, on Jesus
like an offering. Velutha had to prise the sandpaper out of their fingers.
“Not here,” he said
firmly. “Outside.”
He picked the boat up
and carried it out. The twins followed, eyes fixed on their boat with
unwavering concentration, starving puppies expecting to be fed.
Velutha set the boat
up for them. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found. He showed them how to
follow the grain of the wood. He started them off on the sandpapering. When he
returned indoors, the black hen followed him, determined to be wherever the
boat wasn’t
Velutha dipped a thin
cotton towel in an earthen pot of water. He squeezed the water out of it
(savagely, as though it was an unwanted thought) and handed it to Kuttappen to
wipe the grit off his face and neck.
“Did they say
anything?” Kuttappen asked. “About seeing you in the March?”
“No,” Velutha said.
“Not yet. They will though. They know.”
“For sure?”
Velutha shrugged and
took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat. And wring. As though it was
his ridiculous, disobedient brain.
He tried to hate her.
She’s one of them, he
told himself. Just another one of them.
He couldn’t.
She had deep dimples
when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else.
Madness slunk in
through a chink in History. It only took a moment.
An hour into the
sandpapering Rahel remembered her Afternoon Gnap. And she was up and running.
Tumbling through the green afternoon heat. Followed by her brother and a yellow
wasp.
Hoping, praying that
Ammu hadn’t woken up and found her gone.
Chapter 11.
The God of Small Things
That afternoon, Ammu
traveled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her
close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the
shadows that flickered around him on the floor.
Shadows that only he
could see.
Ridges of muscle on
his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by
the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a
high‑wax body polish.
He could do only one
thing at a time.
If he held her, he
couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he
couldn’t feel her.
She could have touched
his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh.
She could have let her fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach.
Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of
bumpy gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a swathe of
breeze in a paddyfield, like jet streaks in a blue church‑sky. She could so
easily have done that, but she didn’t. He could have touched her too. But he
didn’t, because in the gloom beyond the oil lamp, in the shadows, there were
metal folding chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people,
with slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching. They all held polished violins
under their chins, the bows poised at identical angles. They all had their legs
crossed, left over right, and all their left legs were shivering.
Some of them had
newspapers. Some didn’t. Some of them blew spit bubbles. Some didn’t But they
all had the flickering reflection of an oil lamp on each lens.
Beyond the circle of
folding chairs was a beach littered with broken blue‑glass bottles. The silent
waves brought new blue bottles to be broken, and dragged the old ones away in
the undertow. There were jagged sounds of glass on glass. On a rock, out at
sea, in a shaft of purple light, there was a mahogany and wicker rocking chair,
smashed.
The sea was black, the
spume vomit‑green.
Fish fed on shattered
glass.
Night’s elbows rested
on the water, and falling stars glanced off its brittle shards.
Moths lit up the sky.
There wasn’t a moon.
He could swim, with
his one arm. She with her two.
His skin was salty.
Hers too.
He left no footprints
in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
She could have touched
him with her fingers, but she didn’t. They just stood together.
Still.
Skin to skin.
A powdery, colored
breeze lifted her hair and blew it like a rippled shawl around his armless
shoulder, that ended abruptly, like a cliff.
A thin red cow with a
protruding pelvic bone appeared and swam straight out to sea without wetting
her horns, without looking back.
Ammu flew through her
dream on heavy, shuddering wings, and stopped to rest, just under the skin of
it.
She had pressed roses
from the blue cross‑stitch counterpane on her cheek.
She sensed her
children’s faces hanging over her dream, like two dark, worried moons, waiting
to be let in.
“D’you think she’s
dying?” she heard Rahel whisper to Estha.
“It’s an afternoon‑mare,”
Estha‑the‑Accurate replied. “She dreams a lot.”
If he touched her be
couldn’t talk to be, if he loved her be couldn’t leave, if be spoke he couldn’t
listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.
Who was he, the one‑armed
man? Who could he have been? The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God
of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles? Of Sourmetal Smells–like steel bus rails and
the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them?
“Should we wake her
up?’ Estha said.
Chinks of late
afternoon light stole into the room through the curtains and fell on Ammu’s
tangerine‑shaped transistor radio that she always took with her to the rivet
(Tangerine‑shaped too, was the Thing that Estha carried into The Sound of Music
in his sticky Other Hand.)
Bright bars of
sunlight brightened Ammu’s tangled hair. She waited, under the skin of her
dream, not wanting to let her children in.
“She says you should
never wake dreaming people suddenly,” Rahel said. “She says they could easily
have a Heart Attack.”
Between them they
decided that it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her
suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered
loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door
that creaked.
Ammu, resting under
the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them.
The one‑armed man blew
out his lamp and walked across the jagged beach, away into the shadows that
only he could see.
He left no footprints
on the shore.
The folding chairs
were folded. The black sea smoothed. The creased waves ironed. The spume re‑bottled.
The bottle corked.
The night postponed
till further notice.
Ammu opened her eyes.
It was a long journey
that she made, from the embrace of the one‑armed man to her unidentical two‑egg
twins.
“You were having an
afternoon‑mare,” her daughter informed her.
“It wasn’t a mare,”
Ammu said. “It was a dream.”
“Estha thought you
were dying.”
“You looked so sad,”
Estha said.
“I was happy,” Ammu
said, and realized that she had been.
“If you’re happy in a
dream, Ammu, does that count?” Estha asked.
“Does what count?”
“The happiness–does it
count?”
She knew exactly what
he meant, her son with his spoiled puff.
Because the truth is,
that only what counts counts.
The simple, unswerving
wisdom of children.
If you eat fish in a
dream, does it count? Does it mean you’ve eaten fish?
The cheerful man without
footprints–did he count?
Ammu groped for her
tangerine transistor, and switched it on. It played a song from a film called
Chemmeen.
It was the story of a
poor girl who is forced to marry a fisherman from a neighboring beach, though
she loves someone else. When the fisherman finds out about his new wife’s old
lover, he sets out to sea in his little boat though he knows that a storm is
brewing. It’s dark, and the wind rises. A whirlpool spins up from the ocean
bed.
There is storm‑music,
and the fisherman drowns, sucked to the bottom of the sea in the vortex of the
whirlpool.
The lovers make a
suicide pact, and are found the next morning, washed up on the beach with their
arms around each other. So everybody dies. The fisherman, his wife, her lover,
and a shark that has no part in the story, but dies anyway. The sea claims them
all.
In the blue cross‑stitch
darkness laced with edges of light, with cross‑stitch roses on her sleepy
cheek, Ammu and her twins (one on either side of her) sang softly with the tangerine
radio. The song that fisherwomen sang to the sad young bride as they braided
her hair and prepared her for her wedding to a man she didn’t love.
Pandoru mukkuvan
muthinupoyi,
(Once a fisherman went
to sea,)
Padinjaran katarbu
mungipoyi,
(The west wind blew
and swallowed his boat,)
An Airport‑Fairy frock
stood on the floor, supported by its own froth and stiffness. Outside in the
mittam, crisp saris lay in rows and crispened in the sun. Off‑white and gold.
Small pebbles nestled in their starched creases and had to be shaken out before
the saris were folded and taken in to be ironed.
Arayathi pennu
pizhachu poyi,
(His wife on the shore
went astray,)
The electrocuted
elephant (not Kochu Thomban) in Ettumanoor was cremated. A giant burning ghat
was erected on the highway. The engineers of the concerned municipality sawed
off the tusks and shared them unofficially. Unequally. Eighty tins of pure ghee
were poured over the elephant to feed the fire. The smoke rose in dense fumes
and arranged itself in complex patterns against the sky. People crowded around
at a safe distance, read meanings into them.
There were lots of
flies.
Kadalamma avaney kondu
poyi.
(So Mother Ocean rose
and took him away.)
Pariah kites dropped
into nearby trees, to supervise the supervision of the last rites of the dead
elephant. They hoped, not without reason, for pickings of giant innards. An
enormous gallbladder, perhaps. Or a charred, gigantic spleen.
They weren’t
disappointed. Nor wholly satisfied.
Ammu noticed that both
her children were covered in a fine dust. Like two pieces of lightly sugar‑dusted,
unidentical cake. Rahel had a blond curl lodged among her black ones. A curl
from Velutha’s backyard. Ammu picked it out.
“I’ve told you
before,” she said. “I don’t want you going to his house. It will only cause
trouble.”
What trouble, she
didn’t say. She didn’t know.
Somehow, by not
mentioning his name, she knew that she had drawn him into the tousled intimacy
of that blue cross‑stitch afternoon and the song from the tangerine transistor.
By not mentioning his name, she sensed that a pact had been forged between her
Dream and the World. And that the midwives of that pact were, or would be, her
sawdust‑coated two‑egg twins.
She knew who he
was–the God of Loss, the God of Small Things. Of coarse she did.
She switched off the
tangerine radio. In the afternoon silence (laced with edges of light), her
children curled into the warmth of her. The smell of her. They covered their
heads with her hair. They sensed somehow that in her sleep she had traveled
away from them. They summoned her back now with the palms of their small hands
laid flat against the bare skin of her midriff. Between her petticoat and her
blouse. They loved the fact that the brown of the backs of their hands was the
exact brown of their mother’s stomach skin.
“Estha, look,” Rahel
said, plucking at the line of soft down that led southwards from Ammu’s belly
button.
“Here’s where we
kicked you.” Estha traced a wandering silver stretchmark with his finger
“Was it in the bus,
Ammu?”
“On the winding estate
road?”
“When Baba had to hold
your tummy?”
“Did you have to buy
tickets?”
“Did we hurt you?”
And then, keeping her
voice casual, Rahel’s question: “D’you think he may have lost our address?”
Just the hint of a
pause in the rhythm of Ammu’s breathing made Estha touch Rahel’s middle finger
with his. And middle finger to middle finger, on their beautiful mother’s
midriff, they abandoned that line of questioning.
“That’s Estha’s kick,
and that’s mine,” Rahel said. “…And that’s Estha’s and that’s mine.”
Between them they
apportioned their mother’s seven silver stretch marks. Then Rahel put her mouth
on Ammu’s stomach and sucked at it, pulling the soft flesh into her mouth and
drawing her head back to admire the shining oval of spit and the faint red
imprint of her teeth on her mother’s skin.
Ammu wondered at the
transparency of that kiss. It was a clear‑as‑glass kiss. Unclouded by passion
or desire–that pair of dogs that sleep so soundly inside children, waiting for
them to grow up. It was a kiss that demanded no kiss‑back.
Not a cloudy kiss full
of questions that wanted answers. Like the kisses of cheerful one‑armed men in
dreams.
Ammu grew tired of
their proprietary handling of her. She wanted her body back. It was hers. She
shrugged her children off the way a bitch shrugs off her pups when she’s had
enough of them. She sat up and twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her
neck. Then she swung her legs off the bed, walked to the window and drew back the
curtains.
Slanting afternoon
light flooded the room and brightened two children on the bed.
The twins heard the
lock turning in Ammu’s bathroom door.
Click.
Ammu looked at herself
in the long mirror on the bathroom door and the specter of her future appeared
in it to mock her. Pickled. Gray. Rheumy‑eyed. Cross‑stitch roses on a slack,
sunken cheek.
Withered breasts that
hung like weighted socks. Dry as a bone between her legs, the hair feather‑white.
Spare. As brittle as a pressed fern.
Skin that flaked and
shed like snow.
Ammu shivered.
With that cold feeling
on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived. That her cup was full of dust.
That the air, the sky, the trees, the sun, the rain, the light and darkness
were all slowly turning to sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs,
her mouth. Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like
crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach.
Ammu undressed and put
a red toothbrush under a breast to see if it would stay. It didn’t Where she
touched herself her flesh was taut and smooth. Under her hands her nipples
wrinkled and hardened like dark nuts, pulling at the soft skin on her breasts.
The thin line of down from her belly button led over the gentle curve of the
base of her belly, to her dark triangle. Like an arrow directing a lost
traveler. An inexperienced lover
She undid her hair and
turned around to see how long it had grown. It fell, in waves and curls and
disobedient frizzy wisps–soft on the inside, coarser on the outside–to just
below where her small, strong waist began its curve out towards her hips. The
bathroom was hot. Small beads of sweat studded her skin like diamonds. Then
they broke and trickled down. Sweat ran down the recessed line of her spine.
She looked a little critically at her round, heavy behind. Not big in itself.
Not big per se (as Chacko‑of‑Oxford would no doubt have put it). Big only
because the rest of her was so slender. It belonged on another, more voluptuous
body.
She had to admit that
they would happily support a toothbrush apiece. Perhaps two. She laughed out
loud at the idea of walking naked down Ayemenem with an array of colored
toothbrushes sticking out from either cheek of her bottom. She silenced herself
quickly. She saw a wisp of madness escape from its bottle and caper
triumphantly around the bathroom.
Ammu worried about
madness.
Mammachi said it ran
in their family. That it came on people suddenly and caught them unawares.
There was Pathil Ammai, who at the age of sixty‑five began to take her clothes
off and run naked along the river, singing to the fish. There was Thampi
Chachen, who searched his shit every morning with a knitting‑needle for a gold
tooth he had swallowed years ago. And Dr. Muthachen, who had to be removed from
his own wedding in a sack. Would future generations say, “There was Ammu–Ammu
Ipe. Married a Bengali. Went quite mad. Died young. In a cheap lodge
somewhere.”
Chacko said that the
high incidence of insanity among Syrian Christians was the price they paid for
Inbreeding. Mammachi said it wasn’t.
Ammu gathered up her
heavy hair, wrapped it around her face, and peered down the road to Age and
Death through its parted strands. Like a medieval executioner peering through
the tilted eye‑slits of his peaked black hood at the executionee. A slender,
naked executioner with dark nipples and deep dimples when she smiled. With
seven silver stretchmarks from her two‑egg twins, born to her by candlelight
amid news of a lost war.
It wasn’t what lay at
the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road
itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled
shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no
turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily her clear view of the end.
This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who
wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one
small wish, perhaps it would only have been Not to Know. Not to know what each
day held in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next
year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay
beyond the bend. And Ammu knew. Or thought she knew, which was really just as
bad (because if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish). And
what Ammu knew (or thought she knew) smelled of the vapid, vinegary fumes that
rose from the cement vats–of Paradise Pickles. Fumes that wrinkled youth and
pickled futures.
Hooded in her own
hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep.
For herself.
For the God of Small
Things.
For the sugar‑dusted
twin midwives of her dream.
That afternoon–while
in the bathroom the fates conspired to horribly alter the course of their
mysterious mother’s road, while in Velutha’s backyard an old boat waited for
them, while in a yellow church a young bat waited to be born–in their mother’s
bedroom, Estha stood on his head on Rahel’s bum.
The bedroom with blue
curtains and yellow wasps that worried the windowpanes. The bedroom whose walls
would soon learn their harrowing secrets.
The bedroom into which
Ammu would first be locked and then lock herself. Whose door Chacko, crazed by
grief, four days after Sophie Mol’s funeral, would batter down.
“Get out of my house
before I break every bone in your body!”
My house. My
pineapples. My pickle.
After that for years
Rahel would dream this dream: a fat man, faceless, kneeling beside a woman’s
corpse. Hacking its hair off. Breaking every bone in its body. Snapping even
the little ones. The fingers. The ear bones cracked like twigs. Snapsnap the
soft sound of breaking bones. A pianist killing the piano keys. Even the black
ones. And Rahel (though years later, in the Electric Crematorium, she would use
the slipperiness of sweat to slither out of Chacko’s grasp) loved them both.
The player and the piano.
The killer and the
corpse.
As the door was slowly
battered down, to control the trembling of her hands, Ammu would hem the ends
of Rahel’s ribbons that didn’t need hemming.
“Promise me you’ll
always love each other,” she’d say, as she drew her children to her.
“Promise,” Estha and
Rahel would say. Not finding words with which to tell her that for them there
was no Each, no Other.
Twin millstones and
their mother. Numb millstones. What they had done would return to empty them.
But that would be Later.
Lay Ter. A deep‑sounding
bell in a mossy well. Shivery and furred like moth’s feet.
At the time, there
would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left
them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The color of a
ribbon. The weave of the cross‑stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking.
Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that
decodes life’s hidden patterns–that connects reflections to images, glints to
light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to
anger to remorse–was suddenly lost.
“Pack your things and
go,” Chacko would say, stepping over the debris. Looming over them. A chrome
door handle in his hand. Suddenly strangely calm. Surprised at his own
strength. His bigness. His bullying power. The enormity of his own terrible
grief.
Red the color of
splintered doorwood.
Ammu, quiet outside,
shaking inside, wouldn’t look up from her unnecessary hemming. The tin of
colored ribbons would lie open on her lap, in the room where she had lost her
Locusts Stand I.
The same room in which
(after the Twin Expert from Hyderabad had replied) Ammu would pack Estha’s
little trunk and khaki holdall: 12 sleeveless cotton vests, 12 half‑sleeved
cotton vests. Estha, here’s your name on them in ink. His socks. His drainpipe trousers. His pointy‑collared
shirts. His beige and pointy shoes (from where the Angry Feelings came). His
Elvis records. His calcium tablets and Vydalin syrup. His Free Giraffe (that
came with the Vydalin). His Books of Knowledge Vols. 1‑4. No, sweetheart,
there won’t be a river there to fish in.
His white leather zip‑up Bible with an Imperial Entomologist’s amethyst
cuff‑link on the zip. His mug. His soap. His Advance Birthday Present that he
mustn’t open. Forty green inland letter forms. Look, Estha, I’ve written our
address on it. All you have to do is fold it. See if you can fold it yourself. And Estha would fold the green inland letter
neatly along the dotted lines that said Fold here and look up at Ammu with a
smile that broke her heart. Promise me you’ll write? Even when you don’t
have any news?
Promise, Estha would
say. Not wholly cognizant of his situation. The sharp edge of his apprehensions
blunted by this sudden wealth of worldly possessions. They were His. And had
his name on them in ink. They were to be packed into the trunk (with his name
on it) that lay open on the bedroom floor.
The room to which,
years later, Rahel would return and watch a silent stranger bathe. And wash his
clothes with crumbling bright blue soap.
Flatmuscled, and honey
colored. Sea‑secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop on his ear.
Esthapappychachen
Kutappen Peter Mon.
Chapter 12.
Kochu Thomban
The sound of the
chenda mushroomed over the temple, accentuating the silence of the encompassing
night. The lonely, wet road. The watching trees. Rahel, breathless, holding a
coconut, stepped into the temple compound through the wooden doorway in the
high white boundary wall.
Inside, everything was
white‑walled, moss‑tiled and moonlit. Everything smelled of recent rain. The
thin priest was asleep on a mat on the raised stone verandah. A brass platter
of coins lay near his pillow like a comic‑strip illustration of his dreams. The
compound was littered with moons, one in each mud puddle. Kochu Thomban had
finished his ceremonial rounds, and lay tethered to a wooden stake next to a
steaming mound of his own dung. He was asleep, his duty done, his bowels empty,
one tusk resting on the earth, the other pointed to the stars. Rahel approached
quietly. She saw that his skin was looser than she remembered. He wasn’t Kochu
Thomban anymore. His tusks had grown. He was Vellya Thomban now. The Big
Tusker. She put the coconut on the ground next to him. A leathery wrinkle
parted to reveal a liquid glint of elephant eye. Then it closed and long,
sweeping lashes re‑summoned sleep. A tusk towards the stars.
June is low season for
kathakali. But there are some temples that a troupe will not pass by without
performing in. The Ayemenem temple wasn’t one of them, but these days, thanks
to its geography, things had changed.
In Ayemenem they
danced to jettison their humiliation in the Heart of Darkness. Their truncated
swimming‑pool performances. Their turning to tourism to stave off starvation.
On their way back from
the Heart of Darkness, they stopped at the temple to ask pardon of their gods.
To apologize for corrupting their stories. For encashing their identities.
Misappropriating their lives.
On these occasions, a
human audience was welcome, but entirely incidental.
In the broad, covered
corridor–the colonnaded kuthambalam abutting the heart of the temple where the
Blue God lived with his flute, the drummers drummed and the dancers danced,
their colors turning slowly in the night Rahel sat down cross‑legged, resting
her back against the roundness of a white pillar. A tall canister of coconut
oil gleamed in the flickering light of the brass lamp. The oil replenished the
light. The light lit the tin.
It didn’t matter that
the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of
the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones
you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and
inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.
They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house
you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you
listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you
will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who
lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery
and their magic.
To the Kathakali Man
these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them.
They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his
windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he
would a child, of his own. He teases it He punishes it. He sends it up–like a
bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it
because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop
for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey’s tail. He
can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman
washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa
with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the
sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief
of Krishna’s smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains.
The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of
the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is
the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument.
From the age of three it has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed
wholly to the task of storytelling. He has magic in him, this man within the
painted mask and swirling skins.
But these days he has
become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They
long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become
clerks and bus conductors. Class IV nongazetted officers. With unions of their
own.
But he himself, left
dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot
slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot
answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie
biscuits.
In despair, he turns
to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories
that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional
Flavor.
In the Heart of
Darkness they mock him with their lolling nakedness and their imported
attention spans. He checks his rage and dances for them. He collects his fee.
He gets drunk. Or smokes a joint. Good Kerala grass. It makes him laugh. Then
he stops by the Ayemenem Temple, he and the others with him, and they dance to
ask pardon of the gods.
Rahel (no Plans, no
Locusts Stand I), her back against a pillar, watched Karna praying on the banks
of the Ganga. Karna, sheathed in his armor of light. Karna, melancholy son of
Surya, God of Day. Karna the Generous. Karna the abandoned child. Karna the most
revered warrior of them all.
That night Karna was
stoned. His tattered skirt was darned, There were hollows in his crown where
jewels used to be. His velvet blouse had grown bald with use. His heels were
cracked. Tough. He stubbed his joints out on them.
But if he had had a
fleet of makeup men waiting in the wings, an agent, a contract, a percentage of
the profits–what then would he be? An impostor. A rich pretender. An actor
playing a part. Could he be Karna? Or would he be too safe inside his pod of wealth?
Would his money grow like a rind between himself and his story? Would he be
able to touch its heart, its hidden secrets, in the way that he can now?
Perhaps not.
This man tonight is
dangerous. His despair complete. This story is the safety net above which he
swoops and dives like a brilliant clown in a bankrupt circus. It’s all he has
to keep him from crashing through the world like a falling stone. It is his
color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours himself. It gives him
shape. Structure. It harnesses him. It contains him. His Love. His Madness. His
Hope. His Infinnate joy. Ironically, his struggle is the reverse of an actor’s
struggle–he strives not to enter a part but to escape it. But this is what he
cannot do. In his abject defeat lies his supreme triumph. He is Karna, whom the
world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty.
Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic
in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his
skull.
Then Kunti appeared.
She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from
doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of woman. Kunti,
too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a
story
Karna inclined his
beautiful head and listened.
Red‑eyed, Kunti danced
for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret
mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with
the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really
worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens
and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti
said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman,
bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine
months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold
earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the
emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved
her firstborn son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn’t keep
him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was
found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up at
Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head.
She’s here, she said. Standing before you. Karna’s elation and anger at the
revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her,
when I needed you most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did
you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took
the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on
his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy
of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His
fingertips. His lovely mother’s kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel
could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg traveling down an
ostrich’s neck.
A traveling kiss whose
journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realized that his mother had
revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more
beloved sons–the Pandavas–poised on the brink of their epic battle with their
one hundred cousins. It, is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to
Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love
Laws.
They are your
brothers. Your own flesh and blood. Promise me that you will not go to war
against them. Promise me that.
Karna the Warrior
could not make that promise, for if he did, he would have to revoke another
one. Tomorrow he would go to war, and his enemies would be the Pandavas. They
were the ones, Arjuna in particular, who had publicly reviled him for being a
lowly charioteer’s son. And it was Duryodhana, the eldest of the one hundred
Kaurava brothers, that came to his rescue by gifting him a kingdom of his own.
Karna, in return, had pledged Duryodhana eternal fealty.
But Karna the Generous
could not refuse his mother what she asked of him. So he modified the promise.
Equivocated. Made a small adjustment, took a somewhat altered oath.
I promise you this,
Karna said to Kunti. You will always have five sons. Yudhishtra I will not
harm. Bhima will not die by my band. The twins–Nakula and Sahadeva–will go
untouched by me. But Arjuna–him I will make no promises about. I will kill him,
or he will kill me. One of us will die.
Something altered in
the air. And Rahel knew that Estha had come.
She didn’t turn her
head, but a glow spread inside her. He’s come, she thought. He’s here. With me.
Estha settled against
a distant pillar and they sat through the performance like this, separated by
the breadth of the kuthambalam, but joined by a story. And the memory of
another mother.
The air grew warmer.
Less damp.
Perhaps that evening
had been a particularly bad one in the Heart of Darkness. In Ayemenem the men
danced as though they couldn’t stop. Like children in a warm house sheltering
from a storm. Refusing to emerge and acknowledge the weather. The wind and
thunder. The rats racing across the ruined landscape with dollar signs in their
eyes. The world crashing around them.
They emerged from one
story only to delve deep into another. From Karna Shabadam–Karna’s Oath–to
Duryodhana Vadbam–the Death of Duryodhana and his brother Dushasana.
It was almost four in
the morning when Bhima hunted down vile Dushasana. The man who had tried to
publicly undress the Pandavas’ wife, Draupadi, after the Kauravas had won her
in a game of dice. Draupadi (strangely angry only with the men that won her,
not the ones that staked her) has sworn that she will never tie up her hair
until it is washed in Dushasana’s blood. Bhima has vowed to avenge her honor.
Bhima cornered
Dushasana in a battlefield already strewn with corpses. For an hour they fenced
with each other. Traded insults. Listed all the wrongs that each had done the
other. When the light from the brass lamp began to flicker and die, they called
a truce. Bhima poured the oil, Dushasana cleaned the charred wick. Then they
went back to war. Their breathless battle spilled out of the kuthambalam and
spun around the temple. They chased each other across the compound, twirling
their papier‑mâchâ maces. Two men in ballooning skirts and balding velvet
blouses, vaulting over littered moons and mounds of dung, circling around the
hulk of a sleeping elephant. Dushasana full of bravado one minute. Cringing the
next. Bhima toying with him. Both stoned.
The sky was a rose
bowl. The gray, elephant‑shaped Hole in the Universe agitated in his sleep,
then slept again. Dawn was just breaking when the brute in Bhima stirred. The
drums beat louder, but the air grew quiet and full of menace.
In the early morning
light, Esthappen and Rahel watched Bhima fulfill his vow to Draupadi. He
clubbed Dushasana to the floor. He pursued every feeble tremor in the dying
body with his mace, hammering at it until it was stilled. An ironsmith
flattening a sheet of recalcitrant metal. Systematically smoothing every pit and
bulge. He continued to kill him long after he was dead. Then, with his bare
hands, he tore the body open. He ripped its innards out and stooped to lap
blood straight from the bowl of the torn carcass, his crazed eyes peeping over
the rim, glittering with rage and hate and mad fulfillment. Gurgling blood
bubbles pale pink between his teeth. Dribbling down his painted face, his neck
and chin. When he had drunk enough, he stood up, bloody intestines draped
around his neck like a scarf and went to find Draupadi and bathe her hair in
fresh blood. He still had about him the aura of rage that even murder cannot
quell.
There was madness
there that morning. Under the rose bowl. It was no performance. Esthappen and
Rahel recognized it. They had seen its work before. Another morning. Another
stage. Another kind of frenzy (with millipedes on the soles of its shoes). The
brutal extravagance of this matched by the savage economy of that.
They sat there,
Quietness and Emptiness, frozen two‑egg fossils, with hornbumps that hadn’t
grown into horns. Separated by the breadth of a kuthambalam. Trapped in the bog
of a story that was and wasn’t theirs. That had set out with the semblance of
structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy.
Kochu Thomban woke and
delicately cracked open his morning coconut.
The Kathakali Men took
off their makeup and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one
with breasts.
Outside and around,
the little town masquerading as a village stirred and came to life. An old man
woke and staggered to the stove to warm his peppered coconut oil.
Comrade Pillai.
Ayemenem’s egg‑breaker and professional omeletteer.
Oddly enough, it was
he who had introduced the twins to kathakali. Against Baby Kochamma’s better
judgment, it was he who took them, along with Lenin, for all‑night performances
at the temple, and sat up with them till dawn, explaining the language and
gesture of kathakali. Aged six, they had sat with him through this very story.
It was he who had introduced them to Raudra Bhima–crazed, bloodthirsty Bhima in
search of death and vengeance. He is searching fir the beast that lives in him,
Comrade Pillai had told them–frightened, wide‑eyed children–when the ordinarily
good‑natured Bhima began to bay and snarl.
Which beast in
particular Comrade Pillai didn’t say. Searching for the Man who lives in him
was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the
boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its
range and power.
The rose bowl dulled
and sent down a warm gray drizzle. As Estha and Rahel stepped through the
temple gateway, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai stepped in, slick from his oil bath. He
had sandalwood paste on his forehead. Raindrops stood out on his oiled skin
like studs. In his cupped palms he carried a small heap of fresh jasmine.
“Oho!” he said in his
piping voice. “You are here! So still you are interested in your Indian
culture? Goodgood. Very good.”
The twins, not rude,
not polite, said nothing. They walked home together. He and She. We and Us.
Chapter 13.
The Pessimist and the Optimist
Chacko had moved out
of his room and would sleep in Pappachi’s study so that Sophie Mol and Margaret
Kochamma could have his room. It was a small room, with a window that
overlooked the dwindling, somewhat neglected rubber plantation that Reverend E.
John Ipe had bought from a neighbor. One door connected it to the main house
and another (the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed for Chacko to
pursue his “Men’s Needs” discreetly) led directly out onto the side mittam.
Sophie Mol lay asleep
on a little camp cot that had been made up for her next to the big bed. The
drone of the slow ceiling fan filled her head. Bluegrayblue eyes snapped open.
A Wake.
A Live.
A Lert.
Sleep was summarily
dismissed.
For the first time
since Joe had died, he was not the first thing that she thought about when she
woke up.
She looked around the
room. Not moving, just swiveling her eyeballs. A captured spy in enemy
territory plotting her spectacular escape.
A vase of awkwardly
arranged hibiscus, already drooping, stood on Chacko’s table The walls were
lined with books. A glass‑paned cupboard was crammed with damaged balsa
airplanes. Broken butterflies with imploring eyes. A wicked king’s wooden wives
languishing under an evil wooden spell.
Trapped.
Only one, her mother,
Margaret, had escaped to England.
The room went round in
the calm, chrome center of the silver ceiling fan. A beige gecko, the color of
an undercooked biscuit, regarded her with interested eyes. She thought of Joe.
Something shook inside her. She closed her eyes.
The calm, chrome
center of the silver ceiling fan went round inside her head.
Joe could walk on his
hands. And when he cycled downhill, he could put the wind inside his shirt.
On the next bed,
Margaret Kochamma was still asleep. She lay on her back with her hands clasped
together just below her rib cage.
Her fingers were
swollen and her wedding band looked uncomfortably tight. The flesh of her
cheeks fell away on either side of her face, making her cheekbones look high
and prominent, and pulling her mouth downwards into a mirthless smile that
contained just a glimmer of teeth. She had tweezed her once bushy eyebrows into
the currently fashionable, pencil‑thin arcs that gave her a slightly surprised
expression even in her sleep. The rest of her expressions were growing back in
a nascent stubble. Her face was flushed. Her forehead glistened. Underneath the
flush, there was a paleness. A staved‑off sadness.
The thin material of
her dark‑blue and white flowered cottonpolyester dress had wilted and clung
limply to the contours of her body, rising over her breasts, dipping along the
line between her long, strong legs‑as though it too was unaccustomed to the
heat and needed a nap.
On the bedside table
there was a silver‑framed black‑and‑white wedding picture of Chacko and
Margaret Kochamma, taken outside the church in Oxford. It was snowing a little.
The first flakes of fresh snow lay on the Street and sidewalk. Chacko was
dressed like Nehru. He wore a white churidar and a black shervani. His
shoulders were dusted with snow. There was a rose in his buttonhole, and the
tip of his handkerchief, folded into a triangle, peeped out of his breast
pocket. On his feet he wore polished black oxfords. He looked as though he was
laughing at himself and the way he was dressed. Like someone at a fancy‑dress
party.
Margaret Kochamma wore
a long, foaming gown and a cheap tiara on her cropped, curly hair. Her veil was
lifted off her face. She was as tall as he was. They looked happy. Thin and
young, scowling, with the sun in their eyes. Her thick, dark eyebrows were
knitted together and somehow made a lovely contrast to the frothy, bridal
white. A scowling cloud with eyebrows. Behind them stood a large matronly woman
with thick ankles and all the buttons done up on her long overcoat Margaret
Kochamma’s mother. She had her two little granddaughters on either side of her,
in pleated tartan skirts, stockings and identical fringes. They were both
giggling with their hands over their mouths. Margaret Kochamma’s mother was
looking away, out of the photograph, as though she would rather not have been
there. Margaret Kochamma’s father had refused to attend the wedding. He
disliked Indians, he thought of them as sly, dishonest people. He couldn’t
believe that his daughter was marrying one.
In the right‑hand
corner of the photograph, a man wheeling his bicycle along the curb had turned
to stare at the couple.
Margaret Kochamma was
working as a waitress at a cafâ‚ in Oxford when she first met Chacko. Her
family lived in London. Her father owned a bakery Her mother was a milliner’s
assistant. Margaret Kochamma had moved out of her parents’ home a year ago, for
no greater reason than a youthful assertion of independence. She intended to
work and save enough money to put herself through a teacher training course,
and then look for a job at a school. In Oxford she shared a small flat with a
friend. Another waitress in another cafâ.
Having made the move,
Margaret Kochamma found herself becoming exactly the kind of girl her parents
wanted her to be. Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old
remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against. So even up at
Oxford, other than playing her gramophone a little louder than she was
permitted at home, she continued to lead the same small, tight life that she
imagined she had escaped.
Until Chacko walked
into the cafâ one morning.
It was the summer of
his final year at Oxford. He was alone. His rumpled shirt was buttoned up
wrong. His shoelaces were untied. His hair, carefully brushed and slicked down
in front, stood up in a stiff halo of quills at the back. He looked like an
untidy, beatified porcupine. He was tall, and underneath the mess of clothes
(inappropriate tie, shabby coat) Margaret Kochamma could see that he was well‑built.
He had an amused air about him, and a way of narrowing his eyes as though he
was trying to read a faraway sign and had forgotten to bring his glasses. His
ears stuck out on either side of his head like teapot handles. There was
something contradictory about his athletic build and his disheveled appearance.
The only sign that a fat man lurked inside him was his shining, happy cheeks.
He had none of the
vagueness or the apologetic awkwardness that one usually associates with
untidy, absentminded men. He looked cheerful, as though he was with an
imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed. He took a seat by the window and sat
down with an elbow on the table and his face cupped in the palm of his hand,
smiling around the empty cafâ‚ as though he was considering striking up a
conversation with the furniture. He ordered coffee with that same friendly
smile, but without appearing to really notice the tall, bushy‑eyebrowed
waitress who took his order.
She winced when he put
two heaped spoons of sugar into his extremely milky coffee..
Then he asked for fried
eggs on roast. More coffee, and strawberry jam.
When she returned with
his order, he said, as though he was continuing an old conversation, “Have you
heard about the man who had twin sons?”
“No,” she said,
setting down his breakfast. For some reason (natural prudence perhaps, and an
instinctive reticence with foreigners) she did not evince the keen interest
that he seemed to expect from her about the Man with Twin Sons. Chacko didn’t
seem to mind.
“A man had twin sons,”
he told Margaret Kochamma. “Pete and Stuart. Pete was an Optimist and Stuart
was a Pessimist.”
He picked the
strawberries out of the jam and put them on one side of his plate. The rest of
the jam he spread in a thick layer on his buttered toast.
“On their thirteenth
birthday their father gave Stuart an expensive watch, a carpentry set, and a
bicycle.”
Chacko looked up at
Margaret Kochamma to see if she was listening. “And Pete’s–the Optimist’s–room,
he filled with horse dung.”
Chacko lifted the
fried eggs onto the toast, broke the brilliant, wobbling yokes and spread them
over the strawberry jam with the back of his teaspoon.
“When Stuart opened
his presents he grumbled all morning. He hadn’t wanted a carpentry set, he
didn’t like the watch and the bicycle had the wrong kind of tires.”
Margaret Kochamma had
stopped listening because she was riveted by the curious ritual unfolding on
his plate. The toast with jam and fried egg was cut into neat little squares.
The dc‑jammed strawberries were summoned one by one, and sliced into delicate
pieces.
“When the father went
to Pete’s–the Optimist’s–room, he couldn’t see Pete, but he could hear the
sound of frantic shoveling and heavy breathing. Horse dung was flying all over
the room.”
Chacko had begun to
shake with silent laughter in anticipation of the end of his joke. With
laughing hands, he placed a sliver of strawberry on each bright yellow and red
square of toast‑making the whole thing look like a lurid snack that an old
woman might serve at a bridge parry
“`What in heaven’s
name are you doing?’ the father shouted to Pete.” –
Salt and pepper was
sprinkled on the squares of toast. Chacko paused before the punchline, laughing
up at Margaret Kochamma, who was smiling at his plate.
“A voice came from
deep inside the dung. `Well, Father,’ Pete said, `if there’s so much shit
around, there has to be a pony somewhere!’”
Chacko, holding a fork
and a knife in each hand, leaned back in his chair in the empty cafâ‚ and
laughed his high, hiccupping, infectious laugh till the tears poured down his
cheeks. Margaret Kochamma, who had missed most of the joke, smiled. Then she
began to laugh at his laugh. Their laughs fed each other and climbed to a
hysterical pitch. When the owner of the cafâ‚ appeared, he saw a customer (not
a particularly desirable one) and a waitress (an only averagely desirable one)
locked in a spiral of hooting, helpless laughter.
Meanwhile, another
customer (a regular) had arrived unnoticed, and waited to be served.
The owner cleaned some
already clean glasses, clinking them together noisily, and clattered crockery
on the counter to convey his displeasure to Margaret Kochamma. She tried to
compose herself before she went to take the new order. But she had tears in her
eyes, and had to stifle a fresh batch of giggles, which made the hungry man whose
order she was taking look up from his menu, his thin lips pursed in silent
disapproval.
She stole a glance at
Chacko, who looked at her and smiled. It was an insanely friendly smile.
He finished his
breakfast, paid, and left
Margaret Kochamma was
reproached by her employer and given a lecture on Cafâ Ethics. She apologized
to him. She was truly sorry for the way she had behaved.
That evening, after
work, she thought about what had happened and was uncomfortable with herself.
She was not usually frivolous, and didn’t think it right to have shared such
uncontrolled laughter with a complete stranger. It seemed such an over‑familiar,
intimate thing to have done. She wondered what had made her laugh so much. She
knew it wasn’t the joke.
She thought of Chacko’s
laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time.
Chacko began to visit
the cafâ quite often.
He always came with
his invisible companion and his friendly smile. Even when it wasn’t Margaret
Kochamma who served him, he sought her out with his eyes, and they exchanged
secret smiles that invoked the joint memory of their Laugh.
Margaret Kochamma
found herself looking forward to the Rumpled Porcupine’s visits. Without
anxiety, but with a sort of creeping affection. She learned that he was a
Rhodes Scholar from India. That he read Classics. And rowed for Balliol.
Until the day she
married him she never believed that she would ever consent to be his wife.
A few months after
they began to go out together, he began to smuggle her into his rooms, where he
lived like a helpless, exiled prince. Despite the best efforts of his scout and
cleaning lady, his room was always filthy. Books, empty wine bottles, dirty
underwear and cigarette butts littered the floor. Cupboards were dangerous to
open because clothes and books and shoes would cascade down and some of his
books were heavy enough to inflict real damage. Margaret Kochamma’s tiny,
ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet
gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
She discovered that
underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war
with an impossible, incurable Romantic–who forgot the candles, who broke the
wineglasses, who lost the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took
her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting,
thick‑waisted, thick‑ankled girl. Not bad‑looking. Not special. But when she
was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.
She had never before
met a man who spoke of the world–of what it was, and how it came to be, or what
he thought would become of it–in the way in which other men she knew discussed
their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.
Being with Chacko made
Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines
of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her
feel as though the world belonged to them–as though it lay before them like an
opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
In the year she knew
him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and
for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp, She was perhaps
too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually
a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
As for Chacko,
Margaret Kochamma was the first female friend he had ever had. Not just the
first woman that he had slept with, but his first real companion. What Chacko
loved most about her was her self‑sufficiency. Perhaps it wasn’t remarkable in
the average Englishwoman, but it was remarkable to Chacko.
He loved the fact that
Margaret Kochamma didn’t cling to him. That she was uncertain about her
feelings for him. That he never knew till the last day whether or not she would
marry him. He loved the way she would sit up naked in his bed, her long white
back swiveled away from him, look at her watch and say in her practical way
“Oops, I must be off.” He loved the way she wobbled to work every morning on
her bicycle. He encouraged their differences in opinion, and inwardly rejoiced
at her occasional outbursts of exasperation at his decadence.
He was grateful to her
for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not
being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not
depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him.
Of his family Margaret
Kochamma knew very little. He seldom spoke of them.
The truth is that in
his years at Oxford, Chacko rarely thought of them. Too much was happening in
his life and Ayemenem seemed so far away. The river too small. The fish too
few.
He had no pressing
reasons to stay in touch with his parents. The Rhodes Scholarship was generous.
He needed no money. He was deeply in love with his love for Margaret Kochamma
and had no room in his heart for anyone else.
Mammachi wrote to him
regularly, with detailed descriptions of her sordid squabbles with her husband
and her worries about Ammu’s future. He hardly ever read a whole letter.
Sometimes he never bothered to open them at all. He never wrote back.
Even the one time he
did return (when he stopped Pappachi from hitting Mammachi with the brass vase,
and a rocking chair was murdered in the moonlight), he was hardly aware of how
stung his father had been, or his mother’s redoubled adoration of him, or his
young sister’s sudden beauty. He came and went in a trance, yearning from the
moment he arrived to return to the long‑backed white girl who waited for him.
The winter after he
came down from Balliol (he did badly in his exams), Margaret Kochamma and
Chacko were married. Without her family’s consent. Without his family’s
knowledge.
They decided that he
should move into Margaret Kochamma’s flat (displacing the Other waitress in the
Other cafâ) until he found himself a job.
The timing of the
wedding couldn’t have been worse.
Along with the
pressures of living together came penury. There was no longer any scholarship
money, and there was the full rent of the flat to be paid.
With the end of his
rowing came a sudden, premature, middleaged spread. Chacko became a fat man,
with a body to match his laugh.
A year into the
marriage, and the charm of Chacko’s studently sloth wore off for Margaret
Kochamma. It no longer amused her that while she went to work, the flat
remained in the same filthy mess that she had left it in. That it was
impossible for him to even consider making the bed, or washing clothes or
dishes. That he didn’t apologize for the cigarette burns in the new sofa. That
he seemed incapable of buttoning up his shirt knotting his tie and tying his
shoelaces before presenting himself for a job interview. Within a year she was
prepared to exchange the frog on the dissecting table for some small, practical
concessions. Such as a job for her husband and a clean home.
Eventually Chacko got
a brief, badly paid assignment with the Overseas Sales Department of the India
Tea Board. Hoping that this would lead to other things, Chacko and Margaret
moved to London. To even smaller, more dismal rooms. Margaret Kochamma’s
parents refused to see her.
She had just
discovered that she was pregnant when she met Joe. He was an old school friend
of her brother’s. When they met, Margaret Kochamma was physically at her most
attractive. Pregnancy had put color in her cheeks and brought a shine to her
thick, dark hair. Despite her marital troubles, she had that air of secret
elation; that affection for her own body that pregnant women often have.
Joe was a biologist He
was updating the third edition of a Dictionary of Biology for a small
publishing house. Joe was everything that Chacko wasn’t.
Steady. Solvent. Thin.
Margaret Kochamma
found herself drawn towards him like a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of
light.
When Chacko finished
his assignment and couldn’t find another job, he wrote to Mammachi, telling her
of his marriage and asking for money. Mammachi was devastated, but secretly
pawned her jewelry and arranged for money to be sent to him in England. It wasn’t
enough. It was never enough.
By the time Sophie Mol
was born, Margaret Kochamma realized that for herself and her daughter’s sake,
she had to leave Chacko. She asked him for a divorce.
Chacko returned to
India, where he found a job easily. For a few years he taught at the Madras
Christian College, and after Pappachi died, he returned to Ayemenem with his
Bharat bottle‑sealing machine, his Balliol oar and his broken heart.
Mammachi joyfully
welcomed him back into her life. She fed him, she sewed for him, she saw to it
that there were fresh flowers in his room every day. Chacko needed his mother’s
adoration. Indeed, he demanded it, yet he despised her for it and punished her
in secret ways. He began to cultivate his corpulence and general physical
dilapidation. He wore cheap, printed Terylene bush shirts over his white mundus
and the ugliest plastic sandals that were available in the market. If Mammachi
had guests, relatives, or perhaps an old friend visiting from Delhi, Chacko
would appear at her tastefully laid dining table–adorned with her exquisite
orchid arrangements and best china–and worry an old scab, or scratch the large,
black oblong calluses he had cultivated on his elbows.
His special targets
were Baby Kochamma’s guests–Catholic bishops or visiting clergy who often
dropped by for a snack. In their presence Chacko would take off his sandals and
air a revolting, pus‑filled diabetic boil on his foot.
“Lord have mercy upon
this poor leper,” he would say, while Baby Kochamma tried desperately to
distract her guests from the spectacle by picking out the biscuit crumbs and
bits of banana chips that littered their beards.
But of all the secret
punishments that Chacko tormented Mammachi with, the worst and most mortifying
of all was when he reminisced about Margaret Kochamma. He spoke of her often
and with a peculiar pride. As though he admired her for having divorced him.
“She traded me in for a better man,” he would say to Mammachi, and she would
flinch as though he had denigrated her instead of himself.
Margaret Kochamma
wrote regularly, giving Chacko news of Sophie Mol. She assured him that Joe
made a wonderful, caring father and that Sophie Mol loved him dearly–facts that
gladdened and saddened Chacko in equal measure.
Margaret Kochamma was
happy with Joe. Happier perhaps than she would have been had she not had those
wild, precarious years with Chacko. She thought of Chacko fondly, but without
regret. It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she
had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an
extraordinary man. And because Chacko had not then, or since, exhibited any of
the usual symptoms of grief and hearthreak, Margaret Kochamma just assumed that
he felt it had been as much of a mistake for him as it had been for her. When
she told him about Joe he had left sadly, but quietly. With his invisible
companion and his friendly smile.
They wrote to each
other frequently, and over the years their relationship matured. For Margaret
Kochamma it became a comfortable, committed friendship. For Chacko it was a
way, the only way, of remaining in touch with the mother of his child and the
only woman he had ever loved.
When Sophie Mol was
old enough to go to school, Margaret Kochamma enrolled herself in a teacher training
course, and then got a job as a junior schoolteacher in Clapham. She was in the
staff room when she was told about Joe’s accident. The news was delivered by a
young policeman who wore a grave expression and carried his helmet in his
hands. He had looked strangely comical, like a bad actor auditioning for a
solemn part in a play. Margaret Kochamma remembered that her first instinct
when she saw him had been to smile.
For Sophie Mol’s sake,
if not her own, Margaret Kochamma did her best to face the tragedy with
equanimity. To pretend to face
the tragedy with equanimity. She didn’t take time off from her job. She saw to
it that Sophie Mol’s school routine remained unchanged–Finish your bomework.
Eat your egg. No, we can’t not go to school.
She concealed her
anguish under the brisk, practical mask of a schoolteacher. The stern,
schoolteacher‑shaped Hole in the Universe (who sometimes slapped).
But when Chacko wrote
inviting her to Ayemenem, something inside her sighed and sat down. Despite
everything that had happened between her and Chacko, there was nobody in the
world she would rather spend Christmas with. The more she considered it, the
more tempted she was. She persuaded herself that a trip to India would be just
the thing for Sophie Mol.
So eventually, though
she knew that her friends and colleagues at the school would think it odd–her
running back to her first‑husband‑just‑as‑soon as her second‑one‑had‑died–Margaret
Kochamma broke her term deposit and bought two airline tickets. London‑Bombay‑Cochin.
She was haunted by
that decision for as long as she lived.
She took with her to
her grave the picture of her little daughter’s body laid out on the chaise
longue in the drawing room of the Ayemenem House. Even from a distance, it was
obvious that she was dead. Not ill or asleep. It was something to do with the
way she lay. The angle of her limbs. Something to do with Death’s authority.
Its terrible stillness.
Green weed and river
grime was woven into her beautiful redbrown hair. Her sunken eyelids were raw,
nibbled at by fish. (O yes they do, the deepswimming fish. They sample
everything.) Her mauve corduroy pinafore said Holiday! in a tilting, happy font. She was as wrinkled
as a dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long.
A spongy mermaid who
had forgotten how to swim.
A silver thimble
clenched, for luck, in her little fist.
Thimbe‑drinker.
Coffin‑cartwheeler.
Margaret Kochamma
never forgave herself for taking Sophie Mol to Ayemenem. For leaving her there
alone over the weekend while she and Chacko went to Cochin to confirm their
return tickets.
It was about nine in
the morning when Mammachi and Baby Kochamma got news of a white child’s body
found floating downriver where the Meenachal broadens as it approaches the
backwaters. Estha and Rahel were still missing. Earlier that morning the
children–all three of them–hadn’t appeared for their morning glass of milk.
Baby Kochamma and Mammachi thought that they might have gone down to the river
for a swim, which was worrying because it had rained heavily the previous day
and a good part of the night. They knew that the river could be dangerous. Baby
Kochamma sent Kochu Maria to look for them but she returned without them. In
the chaos that ensued after Vellya Paapen’s visit, nobody could remember when
they had actually last seen the children. They hadn’t been uppermost on
anybody’s mind. They could have been missing all night.
Ammu was still locked
into her bedroom. Baby Kochamma had the keys. She called through the door to
ask Ammu whether she had any idea where the children might be. She tried to
keep the panic out of her voice, make it sound like a casual enquiry. Something
crashed against the door. Ammu was incoherent with rage and disbelief at what
was happening to her–at being locked away like the family lunatic in a medieval
household. It was only later, when the world collapsed around them, after
Sophie Mol’s body was brought to Ayemenem, and Baby Kochamma unlocked her, that
Ammu sifted through her rage to try to make sense of what had happened. Fear
and apprehension forced her to think clearly, and it was only then that she
remembered what she had said to her twins when they came to her bedroom door
and asked her why she had been locked up. The careless words she hadn’t meant.
“Because of you!” Ammu
had screamed. “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here! None of this would have
happened! I wouldn’t be here! I would have been free! I should have dumped you
in an orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones round my neck!”
She couldn’t see them
crouched against the door. A Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo.
Bewildered Twin Ambassadors‑of‑God‑knows‑what Their Excellencies Ambassadors E.
Pelvis and S. Insect.
“Just go away!” Ammu
had said. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone?!”
So they had.
But when the only
answer Baby Kochamma got to her question about the children was something
crashing against Ammu’s bedroom door, she went away. A slow dread built up
inside her as she began to make the obvious, logical and completely mistaken
connections between the night’s happenings and the missing children.
The rain had started
early the previous afternoon. Suddenly the hot day darkened and the sky began
to clap and grumble. Kochu Maria, in a bad mood for no particular reason, was
in the kitchen standing on her low stool savagely cleaning a large fish,
working up a smelly blizzard of fish scales. Her gold earrings swung fiercely.
Silver fish scales flew around the kitchen, landing on kettles, walls,
vegetable peelers, the fridge handle. She ignored Vellya Paapen when he arrived
at the kitchen door, drenched and shaking. His real eye was bloodshot and he
looked as though he had been drinking. He stood there for ten minutes waiting
to be noticed. When Kochu Maria finished the fish and started on the onions, he
cleared his throat and asked for Mammachi. Kochu Maria tried to shoo him away,
but he wouldn’t go. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, the smell of arrack
on his breath hit Kochu Maria like a hammer. She had never seen him like this
before, and was a little frightened. She had a pretty good idea of what it was
all about, so she eventually decided that it would be best to call Mammachi.
She shut the kitchen door, leaving Vellya Paapen outside in the back mittam,
weaving drunkenly in the driving rain. Though it was December, it rained as
though it was June. “Cyclonic disturbance,” the newspapers called it the next
day. But by then nobody was in any condition to read the papers.
Perhaps it was the
rain that drove Vellya Paapen to the kitchen door. To a superstitious man, the
relentlessness of that unseasonal downpour could have seemed like an omen from
an angry god. To a drunk superstitious man, it could have seemed like the
beginning of the end of the world. Which, in a way, it was.
When Mammachi arrived
in the kitchen, in her petticoat and pale pink dressing gown with rickrack
edging, Vellya Paapen climbed up the kitchen steps and offered her his
mortgaged eye. He held it out in the palm of his hand. He said he didn’t deserve
it and wanted her to have it back. His left eyelid drooped over his empty
socket in an immutable, monstrous wink. As though everything that he was about
to say was part of an elaborate prank.
“What is it?” Mammachi
asked, stretching her hand out, thinking perhaps that for some reason Vellya
Paapen was returning the kilo of red rice she had given him that morning.
“It’s his eye,” Kochu
Maria said loudly to Mammachi, her own eyes bright with onion tears. By then
Mammachi had already touched the glass eye. She recoiled from its slippery
hardness. Its slimy marbieness.
“Are you drunk?’
Mammachi said angrily to the sound of the rain. “How dare you come here in this
condition?”
She groped her way to
the sink, and soaped away the sodden Paravan’s eye‑juices. She smelled her
hands when she’d finished. Kochu Maria gave Vellya Paapen an old kitchen cloth
to wipe himself with, and said nothing when he stood on the topmost step almost
inside her Touchable kitchen, drying himself, sheltered from the rain by the
sloping overhang of the roof. –
When he was calmer,
Vellya Paapen returned his eye to its rightful socket and began to speak. He
started by recounting to Mammachi how much her family had done for his.
Generation for generation. How, long before the Communists thought of it,
Reverend E. John Ipe had given his father, Kelan, title to the land on which
their hut now stood. How Mammachi had paid for his eye. How she had organized
for Velutha to be educated and given him a job
Mammachi, though
annoyed at his drunkenness, wasn’t averse to listening to bardic stories about
herself and her family’s Christian munificence. Nothing prepared her for what
she was about to hear.
Vellya Paapen began to
cry. Half of him wept. Tears welled up in his real eye and shone on his black
cheek. With his other eye he stared stonily ahead. An old Paravan, who had seen
the Walking Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and Love.
Then the Terror took
hold of him and shook the words out of him. He told Mammachi what he had seen.
The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who
was in it. The story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin
to skin.
They went to Kari
Saipu’s House, Vellya Paapen said. The white man’s demon had entered them. It
was Kari Saipu’s revenge for what he, Vellya Paapen, had done to him. The boat
(that Estha sat on and Rahel found) was tethered to the tree stump next to the
steep path that led through the marsh to the abandoned rubber estate. He had
seen it there. Every night. Rocking on the water. Empty. Waiting for the lovers
to return. For hours it waited. Sometimes they only emerged through the long
grass at dawn. Vellya Paapen had seen them with his own eye. Others had seen
them too. The whole village knew. It was only a matter of time before Mammachi
found out. So Vellya Paapen had come to tell Mammachi himself. As a Paravan and
a man with mortgaged body parts, he considered it his duty.
The lovers. Sprung
from his loins and hers. His son and her daughter. They had made the
unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen.
Vellya Paapen kept
talking. Weeping. Retching. Moving his mouth. Mammachi couldn’t hear what he
was saying. The sound of the rain grew louder and exploded in her head. She
didn’t hear herself shouting.
Suddenly the blind old
woman in her rickrack dressing gown and with her thin gray hair plaited into a
rat’s tail stepped forward and pushed Vellya Paapen with all her strength. He
stumbled backwards down the kitchen steps and lay sprawled in the wet mud. He
was taken– completely by surprise. Part of the taboo of being an Untouchable
was expecting not to be touched. At least not in these circumstances. Of being
locked into a physically impregnable cocoon.
Baby Kochamma, walking
past the kitchen, heard the commotion. She found Mammachi spitting into the
rain, THOO! THOO! THOO!, and Vellya Paapen lying in the slush, wet, weeping,
groveling. Offering to kill his son. To tear him limb from limb.
Mammachi was shouting,
“Drunken dog! Drunken Paravan liar!” Over the din Kochu Maria shouted Vellya
Paapen’s story to Baby Kochamma. Baby Kochamma recognized at once the immense
potential of the situation, but immediately anointed her thoughts with unctuous
oils. She bloomed. She saw it as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and
simultaneously avenging her (Baby Kochamma’s) humiliation at the hands of
Velutha and the men in the march–the Modalali Mariakutty taunts, the forced
flagwaving. She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of
sin.
Baby Kochamma put her
heavy arm around Mammachi.
“It must be true,” she
said in a quiet voice. “She’s quite capable of it. And so is he. Vellya Paapen
would not lie about something like this.”
She asked Kochu Maria
to get Mammachi a glass of water and a chair to sit on. She made Vellya Paapen
repeat his story, stopping him every now and then for details–whose boat? How
often? How long had it been going on? –
When Vellya Paapen
finished, Baby Kochamma turned to Mammachi. “He must go,” she said. “Tonight.
Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.”
Then she shuddered her
schoolgirl shudder. That was when she said: How could the stand the smell?
Haven’t you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans.
With that olfactory
observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled.
Mammachi’s rage at the
old one‑eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud
was re‑directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done.
She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a
filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand
on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her
parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like
animals , Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch
on beat. Her tolerance of “Men’s
Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable
fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little
Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial
Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its
knees. For generations to come, forever
now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms
and birthday parties. They’d nudge and whisper. It was all finished‑now.
Mammachi lost control.
They did what they had
to do, the two old ladies. Mammachi provided the passion. Baby Kochamma the
Plan. Kochu Maria was their midget lieutenant. They locked Ammu up (tricked her
into her bedroom) before they sent for Velutha. They knew that they had to get
him to leave Ayemenem before Chacko returned. They could neither trust nor
predict what Chacko’s attitude would be.
It wasn’t entirely
their fault, though, that the whole thing spun out of control like a deranged
top. That it lashed out at those that crossed its path. That by the time Chacko
and Margaret Kochamma returned from Cochin, it was too late.
The fisherman had
already found Sophie Mol.
Picture him.
Out in his boat at
dawn, at the mouth of the river he has known all his life. It is still quick
and swollen from the previous night’s rain.
Something bobs past in
the water and the colors catch his eye. Mauve. Redbrown. Beach sand. It moves
with the current, swiftly towards the sea. He sends out his bamboo pole to stop
it and draw it towards him. It’s a wrinkled mermaid. A mer‑child. A mere
merchild. With redbrown hair. With an Imperial Entomologists’ nose, and, a
silver thimble clenched for luck in her fist. epiillsherou of the water into
his boat. He puts his thin cotton towel under her, she lies at the bottom of
his boat with his silver haul of small fish. He rows home–Thaiy thaiy thakka
thaiy tbaiy thome– thinking how
wrong it is for a fisherman to believe that he knows his river well. No one knows the Meenachal. No one knows what it may
snatch or suddenly yield. Or when. That is what makes fishermen pray.
At the Kottayam police
station, a shaking Baby Kochamma was ushered into the Station House Officer’s
room. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew of the circumstances that had led to the
sudden dismissal of a factory worker. A Paravan. A few days ago he had tried
to, to… to force himself on her niece, she said. A divorcee with two children.
Baby Kochamma
misrepresented the relationship between Ammu and Velutha, not for Ammu’s sake,
but to contain the scandal and salvage the family reputation in Inspector
Thomas Mathew’s eyes. It didn’t occur to her that Ammu would later invite shame
upon herself–that she would go to the police and try and set the record
straight. As Baby Kochamma told her story, she began to believe it.
Why wasn’t the matter
reported to the police in the first place, the Inspector wanted to know.
“We are an old
family,” Baby Kochamma said. “These are not things we want talked about…
Inspector Thomas
Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly.
He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters–whole Touchable generations
waiting in their Touchable wombs…
“Where is the molestee
now?”
“At home. She doesn’t
know I’ve come here. She wouldn’t have let me come. Naturally… she’s frantic
with worry about the children. Hysterical.’
Later, when the real
story reached Inspector Thomas Mathew, the fact that what the Paravan had taken
from the Touchable Kingdom had not been snatched, but given, concerned him
deeply. So after Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu went to him with the twins to
tell him that a mistake had been made and he tapped her breasts with his baton,
it was not a policeman’s spontaneous brutishness on his part. He knew exactly
what he was doing. It was a premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and
terrorize her. An attempt to instill order into a world gone wrong.
Still later, when the
dust had settled and he had had the paperwork organized, Inspector Thomas
Mathew congratulated himself for the way it had all turned out.
But now, he listened
carefully and courteously as Baby Kochamma constructed her story.
“Last night it was
getting dark–about seven in the evening–when he came to the house to threaten
us. It was raining very heavily. The lights had gone out and we were lighting
the lamps when he came,” she told him. “He knew that the man of the house, my
nephew Chacko Ipe, was–is–away in Cochin. We were three women alone in the
house.” She paused to let the Inspector imagine the horrors that could be
visited by a sex‑crazed Paravan on three women alone in a house.
“We told him that if
he did not leave Ayemenem quietly we would call the police. He started off by
saying that my niece had consented, can you imagine? He asked us what proof we
had of what we were accusing him of. He said that according to the Labor Laws
we had no grounds on which to dismiss him. He was very calm. `The days are
gone,’ he told us, `when you can kick us around like dogs.’” By now Baby
Kochamma sounded utterly convincing. Injured. Incredulous.
Then her imagination
took over completely. She didn’t describe how Mammachi had lost control. How
she had gone up to Velutha and spat right into his face. The things she had
said to him. The names she had called him.
Instead she described
to Inspector. Thomas Mathew how–it was not just what Velutha had said that had
made her come to the police, but the way he said it. His complete lack of
remorse, which was what had shocked her most. As though he was actually proud
of what he had done. Without realizing it herself, she grafted the manner of
the man who had humiliated her during the march onto Velutha. She described the
sneering fury in his face. The brassy insolence in his voice that had so
frightened her. That made her sure that his dismissal and the children’s
disappearance were not, could not possibly be, unconnected.
She had known the
Paravan since he was a child, Baby Kochamma said. He had been educated by her
family, in the Untouchables’ school started by her father, Punnyan Kunju (Mr.
Thomas Mathew must know who he was? Yes, of course). He was trained to be a
carpenter by her family, the house he lived in was given to his grandfather by
her family. He owed everything to her family.
“You people,”
Inspector Thomas Mathew said, “first you spoil these people, carry them about
on your head like trophies, then when they misbehave you come running to us for
help.”
Baby Kochamma lowered
her eyes like a chastised child. Then she continued her story. She told
Inspector Thomas Mathew how in the last few weeks she had noticed some
presaging signs, some insolence, some rudeness. She mentioned seeing him in the
march on the way to Cochin and the rumors that he was or had been a Naxalite.
She didn’t notice the faint furrow of worry that this piece of information produced
on the Inspector’s brow.
She had warned her
nephew about him, Baby Kochamma said, but never –in her wildest dreams had she
thought that it would ever come to this. A beautiful child was dead. Two
children were missing.
Baby Kochamma broke
down.
Inspector Thomas
Mathew gave her a cup of police tea. When she was feeling a little better, he
helped her to set down all she had told him in her First Information Report. He
assured Baby Kochamma of the full cooperation of the Kottayam Police. The
rascal would be caught before the day was out, he said. A Paravan with a pair
of two‑egg twins, hounded by history–he knew there weren’t many places for him
to hide.
Inspector Thomas
Mathew was a prudent man. He took one precaution. He sent a Jeep to fetch
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai to the police station. It was crucial for him to know
whether the Paravan had any political support or whether he was operating
alone. Though he himself was a Congress man, he did not intend to risk any run‑ins
with the Marxist government. When Comrade Pillai arrived, he was ushered into
the seat that Baby Kochamma had only recently vacated. Inspector Thomas Mathew
showed him Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. The two men had a
conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged
numbers and not words. No explanations seemed necessary. They were not friends,
Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn’t trust each other.
But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had
abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their
own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never
wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics
who serviced different parts of the same machine.
Comrade Pillai told
Inspector Thomas Mathew that he was acquainted with Velutha, but oI~TIitted to
mention that Velutha was a member of the Communist Party or that Velutha had
knocked on his door late the previous night, which made Comrade Pillai the last
person to have seen Velutha before he disappeared. Nor, though he knew it to be
untrue, did Comrade Pillai refute the allegation of attempted rape in Baby
Kochamma’s First Information Report He merely assured Inspector Thomas Mathew that
as far as he was concerned Velutha did not have the patronage or the protection
of the Communist Party. That he was on his own.
After Comrade Pillai
left, Inspector Thomas Mathew went over their conversation in his mind, teasing
it, testing its logic, looking for loopholes. When he was satisfied, he
instructed his men.
Meanwhile, Baby
Kochamma returned to Ayemenem. The Plymouth was parked in the driveway.
Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were back from Cochin.
Sophie Mol was laid
out on the chaise longue.
When Margaret Kochamma
saw her little daughter’s body, shock swelled in her like phantom applause in
an empty auditorium. It overflowed in a wave of vomit and left her mute and
empty‑eyed. She mourned two deaths, not one. With the loss of Sophie Mol, Joe died
again. And this time there was no homework to finish or egg to eat. She had
come to Ayemenem to heal her wounded world, and had lost all of it instead. She
shattered like glass.
Her memory of the days
that followed was fuzzy. Long, dim, hours of thick, furry‑tongued serenity
(medically administered by Dr. Verghese Verghese) lacerated by sharp, steely
slashes of hysteria, as keen and cutting as the edge of a new razor blade.
She was vaguely
conscious of Chacko–concerned and gentlevoiced when he was by her
side–otherwise incensed, blowing like an enraged wind through the Ayemenem
House. So different from the amused Rumpled Porcupine she had met that long‑ago
Oxford morning at the cafâ.
She remembered faintly
the funeral in the yellow church. The sad singing. A bat that had bothered
someone. She remembered the sounds of doors being battered down, and frightened
women’s voices. And how at night the bush crickets had sounded like creaking
stars and amplified the fear and gloom that hung over the Ayemenem House.
She never forgot her
irrational rage at the other two younger children who had for some reason been
spared. Her fevered mind fastened like a limpet onto the notion that Estha was
somehow responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Odd, considering that Margaret Kochamma
didn’t know that it was Estha–Stirring Wizard with a Puff–who had rowed jam and
thought Two Thoughts, Estha who had broken rules and rowed Sophie Mol and Rahel
across the river in the afternoons in a little boat, Estha who had abrogated a
sickled smell by waving a Marxist flag at it. Estha who had made the back
verandah of the History House their home away from home, furnished with a grass
mat and most of their toys–a catapult, an inflatable goose, a Qantas koala with
loosened button eyes. And finally, on that dreadful night, Estha who had
decided that though it was dark and raining, the Time Had Come for them to run
away, because Ammu didn’t want them anymore.
Despite not knowing
any of this, why did Margaret Kochamma blame Estha for what had happened to
Sophie? Perhaps she had a mother’s instinct.
Three or four times,
swimming up through thick layers of druginduced sleep, she had actually sought
Estha out and slapped him until someone calmed her down and led her away.
Later, she wrote to Ammu to apologize. By the time the letter arrived, Estha
had been Returned and Ammu had had to pack her bags and leave. Only Rahel
remained in Ayemenem to accept, on Estha’s behalf, Margaret Kochamma’s apology.
I can’t imagine what came over me,
she wrote. I can only put it down to the effect of the tranquilizers.
I had no right to behave the way I did, and want you to know that I am ashamed
and terribly, terribly sorry.
Strangely, the person
that Margaret Kochamma never thought about was Velutha. Of him she had no
memory at all. Not even what he looked like.
Perhaps this was
because she never really knew him, nor ever heard what happened to him.
The God of Loss.
The God of Small
Things.
He left no footprints
in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
After all, Margaret
Kochamma wasn’t with the platoon of Touchable policemen when they crossed the
swollen river. Their wide khaki shorts rigid with starch.
The metallic clink of
handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket. It is unreasonable to expect a person to
remember what she didn’t know had happened.
Sorrow, however, was
still two weeks away on that blue cross‑stitch afternoon, as Margaret Kochamma
lay jet‑lagged and still asleep. Chacko, on his way to see Comrade K. N. M.
Pillai, drifted past the bedroom window like an anxious, stealthy whale
intending to peep in to see whether his wife (‘Ex‑wife, Chacko,’) and daughter
were awake and needed anything. At the last minute his courage failed him and
he floated fatly by without looking in. Sophie Mol (A wake, A live, A lert) saw
him go.
She sat up on her bed
and looked out at the rubber trees. The sun had moved across the sky and cast a
deep house‑shadow across the plantation, darkening the already dark‑leafed
trees. Beyond the shadow, the light was flat and gentle. There was a diagonal
slash across the mottled bark of each tree through which milky rubber seeped
like white blood from a wound, and dripped into the waiting half of a coconut
shell that had been tied to the tree.
Sophie Mol got out of
bed and rummaged through her sleeping mother’s purse. She found what she was
looking for‑the keys to the large, locked suitcase on the floor, with its
airline stickers and baggage tags. She opened it and rooted through the
contents with all the delicacy of a dog digging up a flower bed. She upset
stacks of lingerie, ironed skirts and blouses, shampoos, creams, chocolate,
Sellotape, umbrellas, soap (and other bottled London smells), quinine, aspirin,
broad‑spectrum antibiotics. Take everything, her colleagues had advised
Margaret Kochamma in concerned voices, you never know, which was their way of
saying to a colleague traveling to the Heart of Darkness that
(a) Anything Can
Happen To Anyone.
So
(b) It’s Best to be
Prepared.
Sophie Mol eventually
found what she had been looking for.
Presents for her
cousins. Triangular towers of Toblerone chocolate (soft and slanting in the
heat). Socks with separate multicolored toes. And two ballpoint pens–the top
halves filled with water in which a cut‑out collage of a London streetscape was
suspended. Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Shops and people. A red doubledecker
bus propelled by an air bubble floated up and down the silent street. There was
something sinister about the absence of noise on the busy ballpoint street.
Sophie Mol put the
presents into her go‑go bag and went forth into the world. To drive a hard
bargain. To negotiate a friendship.
A friendship that,
unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete. Flailing in the air with no
foothold. A friendship that never circled around into a story which is why, far
more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while
The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every
season.
Chapter 14.
Work is Struggle
Chacko took the
shortcut through the tilting rubber trees so that he would have to walk only a
very short stretch down the main road to Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s house. He
looked faintly absurd, stepping over the carpet of dry leaves in his tight
airport suit, his tie blown over his shoulder.
Comrade Pillai wasn’t
in when Chacko arrived. His wife, Kalyani, with fresh sandalwood paste on her
forehead, made him sit down on a steel folding chair in their small front room
and disappeared through the bright pink, nylon‑lace curtained doorway into a
dark adjoining room, where the small flame from a large brass oil lamp
flickered. The cloying smell of incense drifted through the doorway, over which
a small wooden placard said Work is Struggle. Struggle is Work.
Chacko was too big for
the room. The blue walls crowded him. He glanced around, tense and a little
uneasy. A towel dried on the bars of the small green window. The dining table
was covered with a bright flowered plastic tablecloth. Midges whirred around a
bunch of small bananas on a blue‑rimmed white enamel plate. In one corner of
the room there was a pile of green unhusked coconuts. A child’s rubber slippers
lay pigeon‑toed in the bright parallelogram of barred sunlight on the floor. A
glass‑paned cupboard stood next to the table. It had printed curtains hanging
on the inside, hiding its contents.
Comrade Pillai’s
mother, a minute old lady in a brown blouse and off‑white mundu, sat on the
edge of the high wooden bed that was pushed against the wall, her feet dangling
high above the floor. She wore a thin white towel arranged diagonally over her
chest and slung over one shoulder. A funnel of mosquitoes, like an inverted
dunce cap, whined over her head. She sat with her cheek resting in the palm of
her hand, bunching together all the wrinkles on that side of her face. Every
inch of her, even her wrists and ankles, were wrinkled. Only the skin on her
throat was taut and smooth, stretched over an enormous goiter. Her fountain of
youth. She stared vacantly at the wall opposite her, rocking herself gently,
grunting regular, rhythmic little grunts, like a bored passenger on a long bus
journey.
Comrade Pillai’s SSLC,
BA and MA certificates were framed and hung on the wall behind her head.
On another wall was a
framed photograph of Comrade Pillai garlanding Comrade
E. M. S. Namboodiripad. There was a microphone on a stand,
shining in the foreground with a sign that said Ajantha.
The rotating table fan
by the bed measured out its mechanical breeze in exemplary; democratic
turns–first lifting what was left of old Mrs. Pillai’s hair, then Chacko’s. The
mosquitoes dispersed and re‑assembled tirelessly.
Through the window
Chacko could see the tops of buses, luggage in their luggage racks, as they
thundered by. A jeep with a loudspeaker drove past, blaring a Marxist Party
song whose theme was Unemployment. The chorus was in English, the rest of it in
Malayalam.
No vacancy! No
vacancy!
Wherever in the world
a poor man goes,
No no no no no
vacancy!
“No” pronounced to
rhyme with door.
Kalyani returned with
a stainless‑steel glass of filter coffee and a stainless‑steel plate of banana
chips (bright yellow with little black seeds in the center) for Chacko.
“He has gone to
Olassa. He’ll be back any time now,” she said. She referred to her husband as
addeham, which was the respectful form of “he,” whereas “he” called her “eli,”
which was, approximately, “Hey, you!”
She was a lush,
beautiful woman with golden‑brown skin and huge eyes. Her long frizzy hair was
damp and hung loose down her back, plaited only at the very end. It had wet the
back of her tight, deep‑red blouse and stained it a tighter, deeper red. From
where the sleeves ended, her soft arm‑flesh swelled and dropped over her
dimpled elbows in a sumptuous bulge. Her white mundu and kavath were crisp and
ironed. She smelled of sandalwood and the crushed green gram that she used
instead of soap. For the first time in years, Chacko watched her without the
faintest stirring of sexual desire. He had a wife (Ex‑wife, Chacko!) at home.
With arm freckles and back freckles. With a blue dress and legs underneath.
Young Lenin appeared
at the door in red Stretchlon shorts. He stood on one thin leg like a stork and
twisted the pink lace curtain into a pole, staring at Chacko with his mother’s
eyes. He was six now, long past the age of pushing things up his nose.
“Mon, go and call
Latha,” Mrs. Pillai said to him.
Lenin remained where
he was, and, still staring at Chacko, screeched effortlessly, in the way only
children can.
“Latha! Latha! You’re
wanted!”
“Our niece from
Kottayam. His elder brother’s daughter,” Mrs. Pillai explained. “She won the
First Prize for Elocution at the Youth Festival in Trivandrum last week.”
A combative‑looking
young girl of about twelve or thirteen appeared through the lace curtain. She
wore a long, printed skirt that reached all the way down to her ankles and a
short, waist‑length white blouse with darts that made room for future breasts.
Her oiled hair was parted into two halves. Each of her tight, shining plaits
was looped over and tied with ribbons so that they hung down on either side of
her face like the outlines of large, drooping ears that hadn’t been colored in
yet.
“D’you know who this
is?” Mrs. Pillai asked Latha.
Latha shook her head.
“Chacko saar. Our
factory Modalali.”
Latha stared at him
with a composure and a lack of curiosity unusual in a thirteen‑year‑old.
“He studied in London
Oxford,” Mrs. Pillai said. “Will you do your recitation for him?” –
Latha complied without
hesitation. She planted her feet slightly apart.
“Respected
Chairman”–she bowed to Chacko–”mydearjudges and”–she looked around at the
imaginary audience crowded into the small, hot room–”beloved friends.” She
paused theatrically.
“Today I would like to
recite to you a poem by Sir Walter Scott entitled `Lochinvar.’” She clasped her
hands behind her back. A film fell over her eyes. Her gaze was fixed unseeingly
just above Chacko’s head. She swayed slightly as she spoke. At first Chacko
thought it was a Malayalam translation of “Lochinvar.” The words ran into each
other. Like in Malayalam, the last syllable of one word attached itself to the
first syllable of the next. It was rendered at remarkable speed:
“O, young Loch in
varbas scum oat of the vest
Through wall the vide
Border his teed was the be:
sTand savissgood
broadsod he weapon sadnun,
He rod all unarmed,
and he rod al lalone..
The poem was
interspersed with grunts from the old lady on the bed, which no one except
Chacko seemed to notice.
Whe swam the Eske
river where fird there was none;
Buitair he alighted at
Netherby Gate,‑
The bride had
cansended, the galla ntcame late.”
Comrade Pillai arrived
mid‑poem; a sheen of sweat glazed his skin, his mundu was folded up over his
knees, dark sweatstains spread under his Terylene armpits. In his late
thirties, he was an unathietic, sallow little man. His legs were already
spindly and his taut, distended belly, like his tiny mother’s goiter, was
completely at odds with the rest of his thin, narrow body and alert face. As
though something in their family genes had bestowed on them compulsory bumps
that appeared randomly on different parts of their bodies.
His neat pencil
mustache divided his upper lip horizontally into half and ended exactly in line
with the ends of his mouth. His hairline had begun to recede and he made no
attempt to hide it His hair was oiled and combed back off his forehead. Clearly
youth was not what he was after. He had the easy authority of the Man of the
House. He smiled and nodded a greeting to Chacko, but did not acknowledge the
presence of his wife or his mother.
Latha’s eyes flicked
towards him for permission to continue, with the poem. It was granted. Comrade
Pillai took off his shirt, rolled it into a ball and wiped his armpits with it.
When he finished, Kalyani took it from him and held it as though it was a gift.
A bouquet of flowers. Comrade Pillai, in his sleeveless vest, sat on a folding
chair and pulled his left foot up onto his right thigh. Through the rest of his
niece’s recitation, he sat staring meditatively down at the floor, his chin
cupped in the palm of his hand, tapping his right foot in time with the meter
and cadence of the poem. With his other hand he massaged the exquisitely arched
instep of his left foot.
When Latha finished,
Chacko applauded with genuine kindness. She did not acknowledge his applause
with even a flicker of a smile. She was like an East German swimmer at a local
competition. Her eyes were firmly fixed on Olympic Gold. Any lesser achievement
she took as her due. She looked at her uncle for permission to leave the room.
Comrade Pillai beckoned to her and whispered in her ear.
“Go and tell Pothachen
and Mathukutty that if they want to see me, they should come immediately.”
“No comrade, really… I
won’t have anything more,” Chacko said, assuming that Comrade Pillai was
sending Latha off for more snacks. Comrade Pillai, grateful for the misunderstanding,
perpetuated it.
“No no no. Hah! What
is this? Edi Kalyani, bring a plate of those avalose oondas.”
As an aspiring
politician, it was essential for Comrade Pillai to be seen in his chosen
constituency as a man of influence. He wanted to use Chacko’s visit to impress
local supplicants and Party Workers. Pothachen and Mathukutty. the men he had
sent for, were villagers who had asked him to use his connections at the
Kottayam hospital to secure nursing jobs for their daughters. Comrade Pillai was
keen that they be seen waiting outside his house for their appointment with
him. The more people that were seen waiting to meet him, the busier he would
appear, the better the impression he would make. And if the waiting people saw
that the factory Modalali himself had come to see him, on his turf, he knew it
would give off all sorts of useful signals.
“So! comrade!” Comrade
Pillai said, after Latha had been dispatched and the avalose oondas had
arrived. “What is the news? How is your daughter adjusting?” Hc insisted on
speaking to Chacko in English.
“Oh fine. She’s fast
asleep right now.”
“Oho. Jet lag, I
suppose,” Comrade Pillai said, pleased with himself for knowing a thing or two
about international travel.
“What’s happening in
Olassa? A Party meeting?” Chacko asked.
“Oh, nothing like
that. My sister Sudha met with fracture sometime back,” Comrade Pillai said, as
though Fracture were a visiting dignitary. “So I took her to Olassa Moos for
some medications. Some oils and all that. Her husband is in Patna, so she is
alone at inlaws’ place.”
Lenin gave up his post
at the doorway, placed himself between his father’s knees and picked his nose.
“What about a poem
from you, young man?” Chacko said to him. `Doesn’t your father teach you any?”
Lenin stared at Chacko,
giving no indication that he had either heard or understood what Chacko said.
“He knows everything,”
Comrade PilIai said. “He is genius. In front of visitors only he’s quiet.”
Comrade Pillai jiggled
Lenin with his knees.
“Lenin Mon, tell
Comrade Uncle the one Pappa taught you. Friends Romans countrymen …”
Lenin continued his
nasal treasure hunt.
“Come on, Mon, it’s
only our Comrade Uncle–”
~Comrade Pillai~~
“Friends Roman:
countrymen lend me your–?”
Lenin’s unblinking
gaze remained on Chacko. Comrade Pillai tried again.
“Lend me your–?”
Lenin grabbed a
handful of banana chips and bolted out of the front door. He began to race up
and down the strip of front yard between the house and road, braying with an
excitement that he couldn’t understand. When he had worked some of it off, his
run turned into a breathless, high‑kneed gallop.
“kndmeyawYERS;”
Lenin shouted from the
yard, over the sound of a passing bus.
“I cometobery Caesar,
not to praise him. Thee‑vu that mendoo lives after them, The goodisoft interred
with their bones…”
He shouted it
fluently, without faltering once. Remarkable, considering he was only six and
didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. Sitting inside, looking out at
the little dust devil whirling in his yard (future service contractor with a
baby and Bajaj scooter), Comrade Pillai smiled proudly.
“He’s standing first
in class. This year he will be getting double promotion.”
There was a lot of
ambition packed into that hot little room.
Whatever Comrade Pillai
stored in his curtained cupboard, it wasn’t broken balsa airplanes.
Chacko, on the other
hand, from the moment he had entered the house, or perhaps from the moment
Comrade Pillai had arrived, had undergone a curious process of invalidation.
Like a general who had been stripped of his stars, he limited his smile.
Contained his expansiveness. Anybody meeting him there for the first time might
have thought him reticent. Almost timid.
With a street‑fighter’s
unerring instincts, Comrade Pillai knew that his straitened circumstances (his
small, hot house, his grunting mother, his obvious proximity to the toiling
masses) gave him a power over Chacko that in those revolutionary times no
amount of Oxford education could match.
He held his poverty
like a gun to Chacko’s head.
Chacko brought out a
crumpled piece of paper on which he had tried to sketch the rough layout for a
new label that he wanted comrade K. N. M. Pillai to print. It was for a new
product that Paradise Pickles & Preserves planned to launch in the spring.
Synthetic Cooking Vinegar. Drawing was not one of Chacko’s strengths, but
Comrade Pillai got the general gist. He was familiar with the logo of the
kathakali dancer, the slogan under his skirt that said Emperors of the Realm of
Taste (his idea) and the typeface they had chosen for Paradise Pickles &
Preserves.
“Design is same. Only
difference is in text, I suppose,” Comrade Pillai said.
“And the color of the
border,” Chacko said. “Mustard instead of red.” –
Comrade Pillai pushed
his spectacles up into his hair in order to read aloud the text. The –lenses
immediately grew fogged with hair oil.
“Synthetic Cooking
Vinegar,” he said. “This is all in caps, I suppose.”
“Prussian Blue,’
Chacko said.
“Prepared from Acetic
Acid?”
“Royal blue,” Chacko
said. “Like the one we did for green pepper in brine.”
“Net Contents, Batch
No., Mfg date, Expiry Date, Max Rd Pr. Ri... same Royal Blue color but c and
Ic?”
Chacko nodded.
“We hereby certify
that the vinegar in this bottle is warranted to be of the nature and quality
which it purports to be. Ingredients: Water and Acetic Acid. This will be red
color, I suppose.”
Comrade Pillai used “I
suppose” to disguise questions as statements. He hated asking questions unless
they were personal ones. Questions signified a vulgar display of ignorance.
By the time they
finished discussing the label for the vinegar, Chacko and Comrade Pillai had
each acquired personal mosquito funnels.
They agreed on a
delivery date.
“So yesterday’s march
was a success?” Chacko said, finally broaching the real reason for his visit.
“Unless and until
demands are met, comrade, we cannot say if it is Success or Non‑success.”
A pamphleteering
inflection crept into Comrade Pillai’s voice. “Until then, struggle must
continue.”
“But Response was
good,” Chacko prompted, trying to speak in the same idiom.
“That is of course
there,” Comrade Pillai said. “Comrades have presented Memorandum to Party High
Command. Now let us see. We have only to wait and watch.”
“We passed them on the
road yesterday,” Chacko said. “The procession.”
“On the way to Cochin,
I suppose,” Comrade Pillai said. “But according to Party sources Trivandrum
Response was much more better.” –
“There were thousands
of comrades in Cochin too,” Chacko said. “In fact my niece saw our young
Velutha among them.”
“Oho. I see,” Comrade
Pillai was caught off guard. Velutha was a topic he had planned to broach with
Chacko. Some day. Eventually. But not this straightforwardly. His mind hummed
like the table fan. He wondered whether to make use of the opening that was
being offered to him, or to leave it for another day. He decided to use it now.
“Yes. He is good
worker,” he said thoughtfiuly. “Highly intelligent.”
“He is,” Chacko said.
“An excellent carpenter with an engineer’s mind. If it wasn’t for‑”
“Not that worker,
comrade,” Comrade Pillai said. “Party worker.” Comrade Pillai’s mother
continued to rock and grunt. There was something reassuring about the rhythm of
the grunts. Like the ticking of a clock. A sound you hardly noticed, but would
miss if it stopped.
“Ah, I see. So he’s a
card‑holder?”
“Oh yes,” Comrade
Pillai said softly “Oh yes.”
Perspiration trickled
through Cha‡ko’s hair. He felt as though a company of ants was touring his
scalp. He scratched his head for a long time, with both his hands. Moving his
whole scalp up and down.
“Org kaaryam
parayattey ?” Comrade Pillai switched to Malayalam and a confiding,
conspiratorial voice. “I’m speaking as a friend, keto . Off the record.”
Before he continued,
Comrade Pillai studied Chacko, trying to gauge his response. Chacko was
examining the gray paste of sweat and dandruff lodged under his fingernails. I
“That Paravan is going
to cause trouble for you,” he said. “Take it from me… get him a job somewhere
else. Send him off.”
Chacko was puzzled at
the turn the conversation had taken. He had only intended to find out what was
happening, where things stood. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even
confrontation, and instead was being offered s1y, misguided collusion.
“Send him away? But
why?! have no objections to him being a card‑holder. I was just curious, that’s
all… I thought perhaps you had been speaking to him,” Chacko said. “But I’m
sure he’s just experimenting, testing his wings; he’s a sensible fellow,
comrade. I trust him…”
“Not like that,’ Comrade
Pillai said. “He may be very well okay as a person. But other workers are not
happy with him. Already they are coming to me with complaints. You see,
comrade, from local standpoint, these caste issues are very deep‑rooted.”
Kalyani put a steel
tumbler of steaming coffee on the table for her husband.
“See her, for example.
Mistress of this house. Even she will never allow Paravans and all that into
her house. Never. Even I cannot persuade her. My own wife. Of course inside the
house she is Boss.” He turned to her with an affectionate, naughty smile. “Allay
di , Kalyani?”
Kalyani looked down
and smiled, coyly acknowledging her bigotry.
“You see?” Comrade
Pillai said triumphantly. “She understands English very well. Only doesn’t
speak.”
Chacko smiled halfheartedly.
“You say my workers
are coming to you with complaints…”
“Oh yes, correct”
Comrade Pillai said.
“Anything specific?”
“Nothing specifically
as such,” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said. “But see, comrade, any benefits that
you give him, naturally others are resenting it. They see it as a partiality.
After all, whatever job he does, carpenter or electrician or whateveritis, for
them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I
myself have told them is wrong. But frankly speaking, comrade, Change is one
thing. Acceptance is another. You should be cautious. Better for him you send
him off.”
“My dear fellow,”
Chacko said, “that’s impossible. He’s invaluable. He practically runs the
factory–and we can’t solve the problem by sending all the Paravans away. Surely
we have to learn to deal with this nonsense.”
Comrade Pillai
disliked being addressed as My Dear Fellow. It sounded to him like an insult
couched in good English, which, of course, made it a double‑insult–the insult
itself, and the fact that Chacko thought he wouldn’t understand it. It spoiled
his mood completely.
“That may be,” he said
caustically. “But Rome was not built in a day. Keep it in mind, comrade, that
this is not your Oxford college. For you what is a nonsense for Masses it is
something different.”
Lenin, with his
father’s thinness and his mother’s eyes, appeared at the door, out of breath.
He had finished shouting the whole of Mark Antony’s speech and most of
Lochinvar before he realized that he had lost his audience. He re‑positioned
himself between Comrade Pillai’s parted knees.
– – flg Å“‑lapped
his hands over his father’s head, creating mayhem in the mosquito funnel. He
counted the squashed carcasses on his palms. Some of them bloated with fresh
blood. He showed them to his father, who handed him over to his mother to be
cleaned up.
Once again the silence
between them was appropriated by old Mrs. Pillai’s grunts. Latha arrived with
Pothachen and Mathukutty
The men were made to
wait outside. The door was left ajar. When Comrade PiIlai spoke next, he spoke
in Malayalam and made sure it was loud enough for his audience outside.
“Of course the proper
forum to air workers’ grievances is through the Union. And in this case, when
Modalali himself is a comrade, it is a shameful matter for them not to be
unionized and join the Party Struggle.”
“I’ve thought of
that,” Chacko said. “I am going to formally organize them into a union. They
will elect their own representatives.”
“But comrade, you
cannot stage their revolution for them. You can only create awareness. Educate
them. They must launch their own struggle. They must overcome their fears.”
“Of whom?” Chacko
smiled. “Me?”
“No, not you, my dear
comrade. Of centuries of oppression.”
Then Comrade Pillai,
in a hecronng voice, quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression
curiously like his niece’s.
“Revolution is not a
dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one
class overthrows another.”
And so, having bagged
the contract for the Synthetic Cooking Vinegar labels, he deftly banished
Chacko from the fighting rank of the Overthrowers to the treacherous ranks of
the To Be Overthrown.
They sat beside each
other on steel folding chairs, on the afternoon of the Day that Sophie Mol
Came, sipping coffee and crunching banana chips. Dislodging with their tongues
the sodden yellow mulch that stuck to the roofs of their mouths.
The Small Thin Man and
the Big Fat Man. Comic‑book adversaries in a still‑to‑come war.
It turned out to be a
war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pulai, would end almost before it began.
Victory was gifted to him wrapped and ribboned, on a silver tray. Only then,
when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without
so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai
realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome
of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all,
the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off
than when he started out.
He broke the eggs but
burned the omelette.
Nobody ever learned
the precise nature of the role that Comrade Pillai played in the events that
followed. Even Chacko–who knew that the fervent, high‑pitched speeches about
Rights of Untouchables (“Caste is Class, comrades”) delivered by Comrade Pillai
during the Marxist Party siege of Paradise Pickles were pharisaic–never learned
the whole story. Not that he cared to find out. By then, numbed by the loss of
Sophie Mol, he looked out at everything with a vision smudged with grief. Like
a child touched by tragedy, who grows up suddenly and abandons his playthings,
Chacko dumped his toys. Pickle Baron‑dreams and the People’s War joined the
racks of broken airplanes in his glass‑paned cupboard. After Paradise Pickles
closed down, some rice fields were sold (along with their mortgages) to pay off
the bank loans. More were sold to keep the family in food and clothes. By the
time Chacko emigrated to Canada, the family’s only income came from the rubber
estate that adjoined the Ayemenem House and the few coconut trees in the
compound. This was what Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria lived off after everybody
else had died, left, or been Returned.
To be fair to Comrade
Pillai, he did not plan the course of events that followed. He merely slipped
his ready fingers into History’s waiting glove.
It was not entirely
his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more
profitable than his life had ever been.
Velutha’s last visit
to Comrade Pillai–after his confrontation with Mammachi and Baby Kochamma–and
what had passed between them, remained a secret. The last betrayal that sent
Velutha across the river, swimming against the current, in the dark and rain,
well in time for his blind date with history.
Velutha caught the
last bus back from Kottayam, where he was having the canning machine mended. He
ran into one of the other factory workers at the bus stop, who told him with a
smirk that Mammachi wanted to see him. Velutha had no idea what had happened
and was completely unaware of his father’s drunken visit to the Ayemenem House.
Nor did he know that Vellya Paapen had been waiting for hours at the door of
their hut, still drunk, his glass eye and the edge of his ax glittering in the
lamplight, waiting for Velutha to return. Nor that poor paralyzed Kuttappen,
numb with apprehension, had been talking to his father continuously for two
hours, trying to calm him down, all the time straining his ears for the sound
of a footstep or the rustle of undergrowth so that he could shout a warning to
his unsuspecting brother.
Velutha didn’t go
home. He went straight to the Ayemenem House. Though, on the one hand, he was
taken by surprise, on the other he knew, had known, with an ancient instinct,
that one day History’s twisted chickens would come home to roost. Through the
whole of Mammachi’s outburst he remained restrained and strangely composed. It
was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that
lies beyond rage.
When Velutha arrived,
Mammachi lost her bearings and spewed her blind venom, her crass, insufferable
insults, at a panel in the sliding‑folding door until Baby Kochamma tactfully
swiveled her around and aimed her rage in the right direction, at Velutha
standing very still in the gloom. Mammachi continued her tirade, her eyes
empty, her face twisted and ugly, her anger propelling her towards Velutha
until she was shouting right into his face and he could feel the spray of her
spit and smell the stale tea on her breath. Baby Kochamma stayed close to
Mammachi. She said nothing, but used her hands to modulate Mammachi’s fury, to
stoke it anew. An encouraging pat on the back. A reassuring arm around the
shoulders. Mammachi was completely unaware of the manipulation.
Just where an old lady like her–who wore crisp ironed
saris and played the Nutcracker Suite on the violin in the evenings–had learned
the foul language that Mammachi used that day was a mystery to everybody (Baby
Kochamma, Kochu Maria, Ammu in her locked room) who heard her.
“Out!” she had
screamed, eventually. “If I find you on my property tomorrow I’ll have you
castrated like the pariah dog that you are! I’ll have you killed!”
“We’ll see about
that,” Velutha said quietly.
That was all he said.
And that was what Baby Kochamma in Inspector Thomas Mathew’s office, enhanced
and embroidered into threats of murder and abduction.
Mammachi spat into
Velutha’s face. Thick spit. It spattered across his skin. His mouth and eyes.
He just stood there.
Stunned. Then he turned and left.
As he walked away from
the house, he felt his Senses had been honed and heightened. As though
everything around him had been flattened into a neat illustration. A machine
drawing with an instruction manual that told him what to do. His mind,
desperately craving some kind of mooring, clung to details. It labeled each
thing it encountered.
Gate . He thought as he walked our of the gate. Gate.
Road Stones. Sky. Rain.
Gate.
Road.
Stones.
Sky.
Rain.
The rain on his skin
was warm. The laterite rock under his feet jagged. He knew where he was going.
He noticed everything. Each leaf. Each tree. Each cloud in the starless sky.
Each step he took.
Xoo‑koo kookum
theevandi
Kookipaadym theevand
Rapakal odum theevandi
Thalannu nilkum
theevandi
That was the first
lesson he had learned in school. A poem about a train.
He began to count.
Something. Anything.One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven
twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty
twenty‑one twenty‑two twenty‑three twenty‑four twenty‑five twenty‑six twenty‑seven
twenty‑eight twenty‑nine.
The machine drawing
began to blur. The clear lines to smudge. The instructions no longer made
sense. The road rose to meet him and the darkness grew dense. Glutinous.
Pushing through it became an effort. Like swimming underwater.
It’s happening , a voice informed him. It has begun.
His mind, suddenly
impossibly old, floated out of his body and hovered high above him in the air,
from where it jabbered useless warnings.
It looked down and
watched a young man’s body walk through the darkness and the driving rain. More
than anything else that body wanted to sleep. Sleep and wake up in another
world. With the smell of her skin in the air that be breathed. Her body on his.
He might never see her again. Where was she? What had they done to her? Had
they hurt her?
He kept walking. His
face was neither lifted towards the rain, nor bent away from it. He neither
welcomed it, nor warded it off.
Though the rain washed
Mammachi’s spit off his face, it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had
lifted off his head and vomited into his body. Lumpy vomit dribbling down his
insides. Over his heart. His lungs. The slow thick drip into the pit of his
stomach. All his organs awash in vomit. There was nothing that rain could do
about that.
He knew what he had to
do. The instruction manual directed him. He had to get to Comrade Pillai. He no
longer knew why. His feet took him to Lucky Press, which was locked, and then
across the tiny yard to Comrade Pillai’s house.
Just the effort of
lifting his arm to knock exhausted him.
Comrade Pillai had
finished his avial and was squashing a ripe banana, extruding the sludge
through his closed fist into his plate of curd, when Velutha knocked. He sent
his wife to open the door. She returned looking sulky and, Comrade Pillai
thought, suddenly sexy. He wanted to touch her breast immediately. But he had
curd on his fingers and there was someone at the door. Kalyani sat on the bed
and absentmindedly patted Lenin, who was asleep next to his tiny grandmother,
sucking his thumb
“Who is it?”
“That Paapen Paravan’s
son. He says it’s urgent.”
Comrade Pillai
finished his curd unhurriedly. He waggled his fingers over his plate. Kalyani
brought water in a little stainless‑steel container and poured it out for him.
The leftover morsels of food in his plate (a dry red chili, and stiff angular
brushes of sucked and spat‑out drumsticks) rose and floated. She brought him a
hand towel. He wiped his hands, belched his appreciation, and went to the door.
“Enda? At this time of the night?’
As he replied, Velutha
heard his own voice beat back at him as though it had hit a wall. He tried to
explain what had happened, but he could hear himself slipping into incoherence.
The man he was talking to was small and far away, behind a wall of glass.
“This is a little
village,” Comrade Pillai was saying. “People talk. I listen to what they say.
It’s not as though I don’t know what’s been going on.”
Once again Velutha
heard himself say something which made no difference to the man he spoke to.
His own voice coiled around him like a snake.
“Maybe,” Comrade
Pillai said. “But comrade, you should know that Party was not constituted to
support workers’ indiscipline in their private life.”
Velutha watched
Comrade Pillai’s body fade from the door. His disembodied, piping voice stayed
on and sent out slogans. Pennants fluttering in an empty doorway.
It is not in the
Party’s interests to take up such matters.
Individual’s
interest is subordinate to the organization’s interest.
Violating Party
Discipline means violating Party Unity.
The voice went on.
Sentences disaggregated into phrases. Words.
Progress of the
Revolution.
Annihilation of the
Class Enemy.
Comprador
capitalist.
Spring‑thunder.
And there it was
again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by
the human mind, decimated by human nature.
Comrade Pillai shut
the door and returned to his wife and dinner. He decided to eat another banana.
“What did he want?”
his wife asked, handing him one. “They’ve found out. Someone must have told
them. They’ve sacked him.”
“Is that all? He’s
lucky they haven’t had him strung up from the nearest tree.’
“I noticed something
strange,” Comrade Pillai said as he peeled his banana. “The fellow had red
varnish on his nails.”
Standing outside in
the rain, in the cold, wet light from the single streetlight, Velutha was
suddenly overcome by sleep. He had to force his eyelids to stay open.
Tomorrow , he told himself. Tomorrow when the rain
stops. His feet walked him to the
river. As though they were the leash and he was the dog.
History walking the
dog.
Chapter 15.
The Crossing
It was past midnight.
The river had risen, its water quick and black, snaking towards the sea,
carrying with it cloudy night skies, a whole palm frond, part of a thatched
fence, and other gifts the wind had given it.
In a while the rain
slowed to a drizzle and then stopped. The breeze shook water from the trees and
for a while it rained only under trees, where shelter had once been.
A weak, watery moon
filtered through the clouds and revealed a young man sitting on the topmost of
thirteen stone steps that led into the water. He was very still, very wet. Very
young. In a while he stood up, took off the white mundu he was wearing,
squeezed the water from it and twisted it around his head like a turban. Naked
now, he walked down the thirteen stone steps into the water and further, until
the river was chest high. Then he began to swim with easy, powerful strokes,
striking out towards where the current was swift and certain, where the Really
Deep began. The moonlit river fell from his swimming arms like sleeves of
silver. It took him only a few minutes to make the crossing. When he reached
the other side he emerged gleaming and pulled himself ashore, black as the
night that surrounded him, black as the water he had crossed.
He stepped onto the
path that led through the swamp to the History House.
He left no ripples in
the water.
No footprints on the
shore.
He held his mundu
spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted it like a sail. He was suddenly
happy. Things will get worse , he thought to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now towards the Heart
of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf.
The God of Loss.
The God of Small
Things.
Naked but for his nail
varnish.
Chapter 16.
A Few Hours Later
Three children on the
riverbank. A pair of twins and another, whose mauve corduroy pinafore said Holiday! in a tilting, happy font.
Wet leaves in the
trees shimmered like beaten metal. Dense clumps of yellow bamboo drooped into
the river as though grieving in advance for what they knew was going to happen.
The river itself was dark and quiet. An absence rather than a presence,
betraying no sign of how high and strong it really was.
Estha and Rahel
dragged the boat out of the bushes where they usually hid it. The paddles that
Velutha had made were hidden in a hollow tree. They set it down in the water
and held it steady for Sophie Mol to climb in. They seemed to trust the
darkness and moved up and down the glistening stone steps as surefooted as
young goats.
Sophie Mol was more
tentative. A little frightened of what lurked in the shadows around her. She
had a cloth bag with food purloined from the fridge slung across her chest
Bread, cake, biscuits. The twins, weighed down by their mother’s words–If it
weren’t for you I would be free. I should have dumped you in an orphanage the
day you were born. You’re the millstones round my neck! –carried nothing. Thanks to what the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha, their Home away from Home was already
equipped. In the two weeks since Estha rowed scarlet jam and Thought Two
Thoughts, they had squirreled away Essential Provisions: matches, potatoes, a
battered saucepan, an inflatable goose, socks with multicolored toes, ballpoint
pens with London buses and the Qantas koala with loosened button eyes.
“What if Ammu finds us
and begs us to come back?”
“Then we will. But
only if she begs.”
Estha‑the‑Compassionate.
Sophie Mol had
convinced the twins that it was essential that she go along too. That the
absence of children, all children, would heighten the adults’ remorse. It would
make them truly sorry; like the grown‑ups in Hamelin after the Pied Piper took
away all their children. They would search everywhere and just when they were
sure that all three of them were dead, they would return home in triumph.
Valued, loved, and needed more than ever. Her clinching argument was that if
she were left behind she might be tortured and forced to reveal their hiding
place.
Estha waited until
Rahel got in, then took his place, sitting astride the little boat as though it
were a seesaw. He used his legs to push the boat away from the shore. As they
lurched into the deeper water they began to row diagonally upstream, against
the current, the way Velutha had taught them to. (If you want to end up there,
you must aim there .)
In the dark they
couldn’t see that they were in the wrong lane on a silent highway full of
muffled traffic. That branches, logs, parts of trees, were motoring towards
them at some speed.
They were past the
Really Deep, only yards from the Other Side, when they collided with a floating
log and the little boat tipped over. It had happened to them often enough on
previous expeditions across the river and they would swim after the boat and,
using it as a float, dog‑paddle to the shore. This time, they couldn’t see
their boat in the dark. It was swept away in the current. They headed for the
shore, surprised at how much effort it took them to cover that short distance.
Estha managed to grab
a low branch that arched down into the water. He peered downriver through the
darkness to see if he could see the boat at all.‑
“I can’t see anything.
It’s gone.”
Rahel, covered in
slush, clambered ashore and held a hand out to help Estha pull himself out of
the water. It took them a few minutes to catch their breath and register the
loss of the boat. To mourn its passing.
“And all our food is
spoiled,” Rahel said to Sophie Mol and was met with silence. A rushing,
rolling, fishswimming silence.
“Sophie Mol?” she
whispered to the rushing river. “We’re here! Here! Near the illimba tree!”
Nothing.
On Rahel’s heart
Pappachi’s moth snapped open its somber wings.
Out.
In.
And lifted its legs.
Up.
Down.
They ran along the
bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway.
Graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the
broken yellow moon in it,
There was no storm‑music.
No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised
the tragedy.
Just a quiet handing‑over
ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small
life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little
fist
It was four in the
morning, still dark, when the twins, exhausted, distraught and covered in mud,
made their way through the swamp and approached the History House. Hansel and
Gretel in a ghastly fairy tale in which their dreams would be captured and re‑dreamed.
They lay down in the back verandah on a grass mat with an inflatable goose and
a Qantas koala bear. A pair of damp dwarfs, numb with fear, waiting for the
world to end.
“D’you think she’s
dead by now?”
Estha didn’t answer.
“What’s going to
happen?”
“We’ll go to jail.”
He Jolly Well knew.
Little Man. He lived in a Cara‑van. Dum dum.
They didn’t see
someone else lying asleep in the shadows. As lonely as a wolf. A brown leaf on
his black back. That made the monsoons come on time.
Chapter 17.
Cochin Harbor Terminus
In his clean room in
the dirty Ayemenem House, Estha (not old, not young) sat on his bed in the
dark. He sat very straight. Shoulders squared. Hands in his lap. As though he
was next in line for some sort of inspection. Or waiting to be arrested.
The ironing was done.
It sat in a neat pile on the ironing board. He had done Rahel’s clothes as
well.
It was raining
steadily. Night rain. That lonely drummer practicing his roll long after the
rest of the band has gone to bed.
In the side mittam, by
the separate “Men’s Needs” entrance, the chrome tailfins of the old Plymouth
gleamed momentarily in the lightning. For years after Chacko left for Canada,
Baby Kochamma had had it washed regularly. Twice a week for a small fee, Kochu
Maria’s brother‑in‑law who drove the yellow municipal garbage truck in Kottayam
would drive into Ayemenem (heralded by the stench of Kottayam’s refuse, which
lingered long after he had gone) to divest his sister‑in‑law of her salary and
drive the Plymouth around to keep its battery charged. When she took up
television, Baby Kochamma dropped the car and the garden simultaneously. Tutti‑frutti.
With every monsoon,
the old car settled more firmly into the ground. Like an angular, arthritic hen
settling stiffly on her clutch of eggs. With no intention of ever getting up.
Grass grew around its flat tires. The PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES signboard
rotted and fell inward like a collapsed crown.
A creeper stole a look
at itself in the remaining mottled half of the cracked driver’s mirror.
A sparrow lay dead on
the backseat. She had found her way in through a hole in the windscreen,
tempted by some seat‑sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one
noticed her panicked car‑window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her
legs in the air. Like a joke.
Kochu Maria was asleep
on the drawing‑room floor, curled into a comma in the flickering light of the
television that was still on. American policemen were stuffing a handcuffed
teenaged boy into a police car. There was blood spattered on the pavement. The
police‑car lights flashed and a siren wailed a warning. A wasted woman, the
boy’s mother perhaps, watched fearfully from the shadows. The boy struggled.
They had used a mosaic blur on the upper part of his face so that he couldn’t
sue them. He had caked blood all over his mouth and down the front of his T‑shirt
like a red bib. His babypink lips were lifted off his teeth in a snarl. He
looked like a werewolf. He screamed through the car window at the camera.
“I’m fifteen years old
and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear
my pathetic story?”
He spat at the camera
and a missile of spit splattered over the lens and dribbled down.
Baby Kochamma was in
her room, sitting up in bed, filling in a Listerine discount coupon that
offered a two‑rupee rebate on their new 500m1 bottle and two‑thousand‑rupee
gift vouchers to the Lucky Winners of their lottery.
Giant shadows of small
insects swooped along the walls and ceiling. To get rid of them Baby Kochamma
had put out the lights and lit a large candle in a tub of water. The water was
already thick with singed carcasses. The candlelight accentuated her rouged
cheeks and painted mouth. Her mascara was smudged. Her jewelry gleamed.
She tilted the coupon
towards the candle.
Which brand of
mouthwash do you usually use?
Listerine, Baby
Kochamma wrote in a hand grown spidery with age.
State the reasons
for your preference:
She didn’t hesitate. Tangy
Taste. Fresh Breath. She had learned
the smart, snappy language of television commercials.
She filled in her name
and lied about her age.
Under Occupation: she wrote, Ornamental Gardening (Dip)
Roch.
U.S.A.
She put the coupon
into an envelope marked RELIABLE MEDICOS, KOTTAYAM. It would go with Kochu
Maria in the morning, when she went into town on her Bestbakery cream‑bun
expedition.
Baby Kochamma picked
up her maroon diary, which came with its own pen. She turned to 19 June and
made a fresh entry. Her manner was routine. She wrote: I lovc you I love
you.
Every page in the
diary had an identical entry. She had a case full of diaries with identical
entries. Some said more than just that. Some had the day’s accounts, To‑do
lists, snatches of favorite dialogue from favorite soaps. But even these
entries all began with the same words: I love you I love you .
Father Mulligan had
died four years ago of viral hepatitis, in an ashram north of Rishikesh. His
years of contemplation of Hindu scriptures had led initially to theological
curiosity, but eventually to a change of faith. Fifteen years ago, Father
Mulligan became a Vaishnavite. A devotee of Lord Vishnu. He stayed in touch
with Baby Kochamma even after he joined the ashram. He wrote to her every
Diwali and sent her a greeting card every New Year. A few years ago he sent her
a photograph of himself addressing a gathering of middle‑class Punjabi widows
at a spiritual camp. The women were all in white with their sari palloos drawn
over their heads. Father Mulligan was in saffron. A yolk addressing a sea of
boiled eggs. His white beard and hair were long, but combed and groomed. A
saffron Santa with votive ash on his forehead. Baby Kochamma couldn’t believe
it. It was the only thing he ever sent her that she hadn’t kept She was
offended by the fact that he had actually, eventually, renounced his vows, but
not for her. For other vows. It was like welcoming someone with open arms, only
to have him walk straight past into someone else’s.
Father Mulligan’s
death did not alter the text of the entries in Baby Kochamma’s diary, simply
because as far as she was concerned it did not alter his availability. If
anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was
alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely,
hers. Not to be shared with Faith, far less with competing co‑nuns, and co‑sadhus
or whatever it was they called themselves. Co‑swamis.
His rejection of her
in life (gentle and compassionate though it was) was neutralized by death. In
her memory of him, he embraced her. Just her. In the way a man embraces a
woman. Once he was dead, Baby Kochamma stripped Father Mulligan of his ridiculous
saffron robes and re‑clothed him in the Coca‑Cola cassock she so loved. (Her
senses feasted, between changes, on that lean, concave, Christlike body.) She
snatched away his begging bowl, pedicured his horny Hindu soles and gave him
back his comfortable sandals. She re‑converted him into the high‑stepping camel
that came to lunch on Thursdays.
And every night, night
after night, year after year, in diary after diary after diary, she wrote: I love
you I love you .
She put the pen back
into the pen‑loop and shut the diary. She took off her glasses, dislodged her
dentures with her tongue, severing the strands of saliva that attached them to
her gums like the sagging strings of a harp, and dropped them into a glass of
Listerine. They sank to the bottom and sent up little bubbles, like prayers.
Her nightcap. A clenched‑smile soda. Tangy teeth in the morning.
Baby Kochamma settled
back on her pillow and waited to hear Rahel come out of Estha’s room. They had
begun to make her uneasy, both of them. A few mornings ago she had opened her
window (for a Breath of Fresh Air) and caught them red‑handed in the act of
Returning From Somewhere. Clearly they had spent the whole night out. Together.
Where could they have been? What and how much did they remember? When would
they leave? What were they doing, sitting together in the dark for so long? She
fell asleep propped up against her pillows, thinking that perhaps, over the
sound of the rain and the television, she hadn’t heard Estha’s door open. That
Rahel had gone to bed long ago. She hadn’t.
Rahel was lying on
Estha’s bed. She looked thinner lying down. Younger. Smaller. Her face was
turned towards the window beside the bed. Slanting rain hit the bars of the
window‑grill and shattered into a line spray over her face and her smooth bare
arm. Her soft, sleeveless T‑shirt was a glowing yellow in the dark. The bottom
half of her, in blue jeans, melted into the darkness.
It was a little cold.
A little wet. A little quiet. The Air.
But what was there to
say?
From where he sat, at
the end of the bed, Estha, without turning his head, could see her. Faintly
outlined. The sharp line of her jaw. Her collarbones like wings that spread
from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by
skin.
She turned her head
and looked at him. He sat very straight. Waiting for the inspection. He had
finished the ironing.
She was lovely to him.
Her hair. Her cheeks. Her small, cleverlooking hands.
His sister.
A nagging sound
started up in his head. The sound of passing trains. The light and shade and
light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.
He sat even
straighter. Still, he could see her. Grown into their mother’s skin. The liquid
glint of her eyes in the dark. Her small straight nose. Her mouth, full‑lipped.
Something wounded‑looking about it. As though it was flinching from something.
As though long ago someone–a man with rings–had hit her across it. A beautiful,
hurt mouth.
Their beautiful
mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth. That had kissed his hand through the barred
train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras.
“Bye, Estha.
Godbless,” Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying‑notto‑cry mouth.
The last time he had
seen her.
She was standing on
the platform of the Cochin Harbor Terminus, her face turned up to the train
window. Her skin gray, wan, robbed of its luminous sheen by the neon station
light. Daylight stopped by trains on either side. Long corks that kept the
darkness bottled in. The Madras Mail. The Flying Rani.
Rahel held by Ammu’s
hand. A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport
Fairy at a railway station.
Stamping her feet on
the platform, unsettling clouds of settled station‑filth. Until Ammu shook her
and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited. Around them the hostling‑jostling
crowd.
Scurrying hurrying
buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people
spitting coming going begging bargaining reservation‑checking.
Echoing stationsounds.
Hawkers selling coffee.
Tea.
Gaunt children, blond
with, malnutrition, selling smutty magazines and food they couldn’t afford to
eat themselves.
Melted chocolates.
Cigarette sweets.
Orangedrinks.
Lemondrinks.
Coca Cola Fanta
icecream rose milk.
Pink‑skinned dolls.
Rattles. Love‑in‑Tokyos.
Hollow plastic
parakeets full of sweets with heads you could unscrew.
Yellow‑rimmed red
sunglasses.
Toy watches with the
time painted on them.
A cartful of defective
toothbrushes.
The Cochin Harbor
Terminus.
Gray in the
stationlight. Hollow people. Homeless. Hungry. Still touched by last year’s
famine. Their revolution postponed for the Time Being by Comrade E. M. S.
Namboodiripad (Soviet Stooge. Running Dog,). The former apple of Peking’s eye.
The air was thick with
flies.
A blind man without
eyelids and eyes as blue as faded jeans, his skin pitted with smallpox scars,
chatted to a leper without fingers, taking dexterous drags from scavenged
cigarette stubs that lay beside him in a heap.
“What about you? When
did you move here?”
As though they had had
a choice. As though they had picked this for their home from a vast array of
posh housing estates listed in a glossy pamphlet
A man sitting on a red
weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot
and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like
proper calves should be. (When you re‑create the image of man, why repeat God’s
mistakes?) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless‑steel
tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His
infinnate joy. His real foot was bare.
He bought some tea for
his tumbler.
An old lady vomited. A
lumpy pool. And went on with her life.
The Stationworld.
Society’s circus. Where, with the rush of commerce, despair came home to roost
and hardened slowly into resignation.
But this time, for
Ammu and her two‑egg twins, there was no Plymouth window to watch it through.
No net to save them as they vaulted through the circus air.
Pack your things
and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken door.
A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were trembling, hadn’t looked
up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin of ribbons lay open on her lap.
But Rahel had. Looked
up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared and left a monster in his place.
A thicklipped man with
rings, cool in white, bought Scissors cigarettes from a platform vendor. Three
packs. To smoke in the train corridor.
For Men of Action
SatisfAction.
He was Estha’s escort.
A Family Friend who happened to be going to Madras. Mr Kurien Maathen.
Since there was going
to be a grown‑up with Estha anyway, Mammachi said there was no need to waste
money on another ticket. Baba was buying Madras‑Calcutta. Ammu was buying Time.
She too had to pack her things and leave. To start a new life, in which she
could afford to keep her children. Until then, it had been decided that one
twin could stay in Ayejnenem. Not both. Together they were trouble. nataS ni
rieht scye . They had to be separated.
Maybe they’re
right, Ammu’s whisper said as she packed his trunk
and hold‑all. Maybe a boy does need a Baba.
The thicklipped man
was in the coup‚ next to Estha’s. He said he’d try and change seats with
someone once the train started.
For now he left the
little family alone.
He knew that a hellish
angel hovered over them. Went where they went Stopped where they stopped.
Dripping wax from a bent candle.
Everybody knew.
It had been in the
papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police “Encounter” with a
Paravan charged with kidnapping and murder. Of the subsequent Communist Party
siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, led by Ayemenem’s own Crusader for
Justice and Spokesman of the Oppressed. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai
claimed that the Management had implicated the Paravan in a false police case
because he was an active member of the Communist Party.
That they wanted to
eliminate him for indulging in “Lawful Union Activities.”
All that had been in
the papers. The Official Version.
Of course the
thicklipped man with rings had no idea about the other version.
The one in which a
posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen
with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, clumping
into the Heart of Darkness.
Chapter 18.
The History House
A posse of Touchable
Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain,
and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuff in
someone’s heavy pocket.
Their wide khaki
shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of
stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.
There were six of
them. Servants of the State.
Politeness.
Obedience.
Loyalty.
Intelligence.
Courtesy.
Efficiency.
The Kottayam Police. A
cartoonplatoon. New‑Age princes in funny pointed helmets. Cardboard lined with
cotton. Hairoil stained. Their shabby khaki crowns.
Dark of Heart.
Deadlypurposed.
They lifted their thin
legs high, clumping through tall grass. Ground creepers snagged in their
dewdamp leghair. Burrs and grass flowers enhanced their dull socks. Brown
millipedes slept in the soles of their steel‑tipped, Touchable boots. Rough
grass left their legskin raw, crisscrossed with cuts. Wet mud fatted under
their feet as they squelched through the swamp.
They trudged past
darter birds on the tops of trees, drying their sodden wings spread out like
laundry against the sky. Past egrets. Cormorants. Adjutant storks. Sarus cranes
looking for space to dance. Purple herons with pitiless eyes. Deafening, their
wraark wraark wraark. Motherbirds and their eggs.
The early morning heat
was full of the promise of worse to come. Beyond the swamp that smelled of
still water, they walked past ancient trees cloaked in vines. Gigantic mani
plants. Wild pepper. Cascading purple acuminus.
Past a deepblue beetle
balanced on an unbending blade of grass. Past giant spider webs that had
withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.
A banana flower
sheathed in claret bracts hung from a scruffy, torn‑leafed tree. A gem held out
by a grubby schoolboy. A jewel in the velvet jungle.
Crimson dragonflies
mated in the air. Doubledeckered. Deft. One admiring policeman watched and
wondered briefly about the dynamics of dragonfly sex, and what went into what.
Then his mind clicked to attention and Police Thoughts returned.
Onwards.
Past tall anthills
congealed in the rain. Slumped like drugged sentries asleep at the gates of
Paradise.
Past butterflies
drifting through the air like happy messages.
Huge ferns.
A chameleon.
A startling
shoeflower.
The scurry of gray
jungle fowl running for cover.
The nutmeg tree that
Vellya Paapen hadn’t found.
A forked canal. Still.
Choked with duckweed. Like a dead green snake. A tree trunk fallen over it. The
Touchable Policemen minced across. Twirling polished bamboo batons.
Hairy fairies with
lethal wands.
Then the sunlight was
fractured by thin trunks of tilting trees.
Dark of Heart
neS~&‑tiptoed 4fl to the Heart of Darkness. The sound of stridulating
crickets swelled.
Gray squirrels
streaked down mottled trunks of rubber trees that slanted towards the sun. Old
scars slashed across their bark. Sealed. Healed. Untapped.
Acres of this, and
then, a grassy clearing. A house.
The History House.
Whose doors were
locked and windows open.
With cold stone floors
and billowing, ship‑shaped shadows on the walls.
Where waxy ancestors
with tough toe‑nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps whispered papery
whispers.
Where translucent
lizards lived behind old paintings.
Where dreams were
captured and re‑dreamed.
Where an old
Englishman ghost, sickled to a tree, was abrogated by a pair of two‑egg twins–a
Mobile Republic with a Puff who had planted a Marxist flag in the earth beside
him. As the platoon of policemen minced past they didn’t hear him beg. In his
kindmissionary voice. Excuse me, would you, umm... you wouldn’t happen to
umm... I don’t suppose you’d have a cigar on you? No?… No, I didn’t think so.
The History House.
Where, in the years
that followed, the Terror (still‑to‑come) would be buried in a shallow grave.
Hidden under the happy humming of hotel cooks. The humbling of old Communists.
The slow death of dancers. The toy histories that rich tourists came to play
with.
It was a beautiful
house.
White‑walled once. Red‑roofed.
But painted in weather‑colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette.
Mossgreen. Earthbrown. Crumbleblack. Making it look older than it really was.
Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale‑kissed and barnacled.
Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows.
Deep verandah ran all
around. The rooms themselves were recessed, buried in shadow. The tiled roof swept
down like the sides of an immense, upside‑down boat. Rotting beams supported on
once‑white pillars had buckled at the center, leaving a yawning, gaping hole. A
History‑hole. A History‑shaped Hole in the Universe through which, at twilight,
dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the
night.
They returned at dawn
with news of the world. A gray haze in the rosy distance that suddenly
coalesced and blackened over the house before it plummeted through the History‑hole
like smoke in a film running backwards.
All day they slept,
the bats. Lining the roof like fur. Spattering the floors with shit.
The policemen stopped
and fanned out. They didn’t really need to, but they liked these Touchable
games.
They positioned
themselves strategically. Crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall.
Quick piss.
Hot foam on warm
stone. Police‑piss.
Drowned ants in
yellow bubbly.
Deep breaths.
Then together, on
their knees and elbows, they crept towards the house. Like Film‑policemen.
Softly, softly through the grass. Batons in their hands. Machine guns in their
minds. Responsibility for the Touchable Future on their thin but able
shoulders.
They found their
quarry in the back verandah. A Spoiled Puff. A Fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo. And
in another corner (as lonely as a wolf)–a carpenter with blood‑red nails.
Asleep. Making
nonsense of all that Touchable cunning.
The Surprise Swoop.
The Headlines in their
heads.
Desperado Caught in Police Dragnet
For this insolence,
this spoiling‑the‑fun, their quarry paid. Oh yes.
They woke Velutha with
their boots.
Esthappen and Rahel
woke to the shout of sleep surprised by shattered kneecaps.
Screams died in them
and floated belly up, like dead fish. Cowering on the floor, rocking between
dread and disbelief, they realized that the man being beaten was Velutha. Where
had he come from? What had he done? Why had the policemen brought him here?
They heard the thud of
wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked
in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath
when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib.
Blue‑lipped and dinner‑plate‑eyed,
they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the
absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have
been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.
They were opening a
bottle.
Or shutting a tap.
Cracking an egg to
make an omelette.
The twins were too
young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books
and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that
were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of
inchoate, unacknowledged fear–civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of
women, power’s fear of powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge
to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men’s Needs.
What Esthappen and
Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical
demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or
genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete
monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing
herself to an under‑age audience.
There was nothing
accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no
stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself
on those who lived in it.
History in live
performance.
If they hurt Velutha
more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection
between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least
biologically he was a fellow creature–had been severed long ago. They were not
arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate
how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how
permanently they had damaged him.
Unlike the custom of
rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the
Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not
frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear
out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff
them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.
After all they were
not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an
outbreak.
In the back verandah
of the History House, as the man they loved was smashed and broken, Mrs. Eapen
and Mrs. Rajagopalan, Twin Ambassadors of God‑knows‑what, learned two new
lessons.
Lesson Number One:
Blood barely shows
on a Black Man. (Dum dum)
And
Lesson Number Two:
It smells though.
Sicklysweet.
Like old roses on a
breeze. (Dum dum)
“Madiyo? ” one of History’s Agents asked.
“Madi aayirikkum, ”another replied.
Enough?
Enough.
They stepped away from
him. Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance.
Their Work, abandoned
by God and History; by Marx, by Man, by Woman, and–in the hours to come–by
Children, lay folded on the floor. He was semi‑conscious, but wasn’t moving.
His skull was
fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed,
leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his
upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip,
hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one
had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The
blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured
and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was
damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted
in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were
shattered.
Still they brought out
the handcuffs.
Cold.
With the sourmetal
smell. Like steel bus rails and the bus conductor’s hands from holding them.
That was when they noticed his painted nails. One of them held them up and
waved the fingers coquettishly at the others. They laughed.
“What’s this?” in a
high falsetto. “AC‑DC?”
One of them flicked at
his penis with his stick. “Come on, show us your special secret. Show us how
big it gets when you blow it up.” Then he lifted his boot (with millipedes
curled into its sole) and brought it down with a soft thud.
They locked his arms
across his back.
Click.
And click.
Below a Lucky Leaf. An
autumn leaf at night. That made the monsoons come on time.
He had goosebumps
where the handcuffs touched his skin.
“It isn’t him,” Rahel
whispered to Estha. “I can tell. It’s his twin brother. Urumban. From Kochi.”
Unwilling to seek
refuge in fiction, Estha said nothing.
Someone was speaking
to them. A kind Touchable Policeman. Kind to his kind.
“Mon, Mol, are you all
right? Did he hurt you?” And not together, but almost, the twins replied in a
whisper. “Yes. No.”
“Don’t worry. You’re
safe with us now.”
Then the policemen
looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans.
The inflatable goose.
The Qantas koala with
loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks
with separate colored toes.
Yellow‑rimmed red
plastic sunglasses.
A watch with the time
painted on it.
“Whose are these?
Where did they come from? Who brought them?” An edge of worry in the voice.
Estha and Rahel, full
of fish, stared back at him.
The policemen looked
at one another. They knew what they had to do.
The Qantas koala they
took for their children.
And the pens and
socks. Police children with multicolored toes. They burst the goose with a
cigarette. Bang. And buried the rubber scraps.
Yooseless goose. Too
recognizable.
The glasses one of
them wore. The others laughed, so he kept them on for awhile.
The watch they all
forgot. It stayed behind in the History House. In the back verandah.
A faulty record of the
time. Ten to two.
They left.
Six princes, their
pockets stuffed with toys.
A pair of two‑egg
twins.
And the God of Loss.
He couldn’t walk. So
they dragged him.
Nobody saw them.
Bats, of course, are
blind.
Chapter 19.
Saving Ammu
At the police station,
Inspector Thomas Mathew sent for two Coca‑Colas. With straws. A servile
constable brought them on a plastic tray and offered them to the two muddy
children sitting across the table from the Inspector, their heads only a little
higher than the mess of files and papers on it
So once again, in the
space of two weeks, bottled Fear for Estha. Chilled. Fizzed. Sometimes Things
went worse with Coke.
The fizz went up his
nose. He burped. Rahel giggled. She blew through her straw till the drink
bubbled over onto her dress. All over the floor. Estha read aloud from the
board on the wall.
“ssenetiloP,” he said.
“ssenetiloP, ecneidebO.”
“ytlayoL,
ecnegilletnI,” Rahel said.
“ysetruoC.”
“ycneiciffE.”
To his credit,
Inspector Thomas Mathew remained calm. He sensed the growing incoherence in the
children. He noted the dilated pupils. He had seen it all before… the human
mind’s escape valve. Its way of managing trauma. He made allowances for that,
and couched his questions cleverly. Innocuously. Between When is your birthday,
Mon? and What’s your favorite color, Mol?
Gradually, in a
fractured, disjointed fashion, things began to fall into place. His men had
briefed him about the pots and pans. The grass mat. The impossible‑to‑forget
toys. They began to make sense now. Inspector Thomas Mathew was not amused. He
sent a jeep for Baby Kochamma. He made sure that the children were not in the
room when she arrived. He didn’t greet her
“Have a seat,” he
said.
Baby Kochamma sensed
that something was terribly wrong. “Have you found them? Is everything all
right?” “Nothing is all right,” the Inspector assured her. From the look in his
eyes and the tone of his voice, Baby Kochamma realized that she was dealing
with a different person this time. Not the accommodating police officer of
their previous meeting. She lowered herself into a chair. Inspector Thomas
Mathew didn’t mince his words.
The Kottayam Police
had acted on the basis of an F.I.R. filed by her. The Paravan had been caught.
Unfortunately he had been badly injured in the encounter and in all likelihood
would not live through the night. But now the children said that they had gone
of their own volition. Their boat had capsized and the English child had
drowned by accident. Which left the police saddled with the Death in Custody of
a technically innocent man. True, he was a Paravan. True, he had misbehaved.
But these were troubled times and technically, as per the law, he was an
innocent man. There was no case.
“Attempted rape?” Baby
Kochamma suggested weakly. “Where is the rape‑victim’s complaint? Has it been
filed? Has she made a statement? Have you brought it with you?” The Inspector’s
tone was belligerent. Almost hostile.
Baby Kochamma looked
as though she had shrunk. Pouches of flesh hung from her eyes and jowls. Fear
fermented in her and the spit in her mouth turned sour. The Inspector pushed a
glass of water towards her.
“The matter is very
simple. Either the rape‑victim must file a complaint. Or the children must
identify the Paravan as their abductor in the presence of a police witness.
Or,” He waited for Baby Kochamma to look at him. “Or I must charge you with
lodging a false F.I.R. Criminal offense.”
Sweat stained Baby
Kochamma’s light‑blue blouse dark blue. Inspector Thomas Mathew didn’t hustle
her. He knew that given the political climate, he himself could be in very
serious trouble. He was aware that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai would not pass up
this opportunity. He kicked himself for acting so impulsively. He used his
printed hand towel to reach inside his shirt and wipe his chest and armpits. It
was quiet in his office. The sounds of police‑station activity, the clumping of
boots, the occasional howl of pain from somebody being interrogated, seemed
distant, as though they were coming from somewhere else.
“The children will do
as they’re told,” Baby Kochamma said. “If I could have a few moments alone with
them.”
“As you wish.” The
Inspector rose to leave the office.
“Please give me five
minutes before you send them in.”
Inspector Thomas
Mathew nodded his assent and left.
Baby Kochamma wiped
her shining, sweaty face. She stretched her neck, looking up at the ceiling in
order to wipe the sweat from crevices between her rolls of neckfat with the end
of her pallu. She kissed her crucifix.
Hail Mary, full of
grace…
The words of the
prayer deserted her.
The door opened. Estha
and Rahel were ushered in. Caked with mud. Drenched in Coca‑Cola.
The sight of Baby
Kochamma made them suddenly sober. The moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts
spread its wings over both their hearts. Why had she come? Where was Ammu? Was
she still locked up?
Baby Kochamma looked
at them sternly. She said nothing for a long time. When she spoke her voice was
hoarse and unfamiliar.
“Whose boat was it?
Where did you get it from?”
“Ours. That we found.
Velutha mended it for us,” Rahel whispered.
“How long have you had
it?”
“We found it the day
Sophie Mol came.”“And you stole things from the house and took them across the
river in it?”
“We were only
playing…”
“Playing? Is that what you call it?
Baby Kochamma looked
at them for a long time before she spoke again.
“Your lovely little
cousin’s body is lying in the drawing room. The fish have eaten out her eyes.
Her mother can’t stop crying. Is that what you call playing?”
A sudden breeze made
the flowered window curtain billow. Outside Rahel could see jeeps parked. And
walking people. A man was trying to start his motorcycle. Each time he jumped
on the kickstarter lever, his helmet slipped to one side.
Inside the Inspector’s
room, Pappachi’s Moth was on the move.
“It’s a terrible thing
to take a person’s life,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s the worst thing that anyone
can ever do. Even God doesn’t forgive that. You know that, don’t you?”
Two heads nodded
twice.
“And yet”–she looked
sadly at them–”you did it.” She looked them in the eye. “You are murderers.” She
waited for this to sink in.
“You know that I know
that it wasn’t an accident. I know how jealous of her you were. And if the
judge asks me in court I’ll have to tell him, won’t I? I can’t tell a lie, can
I?” She patted the chair next to her “Here, come and sit down‑”
Four cheeks of two
obedient bottoms squeezed into it.
“I’ll have to tell
them how it was strictly against the Rules for you to go alone to the river.
How you forced her to go with you although you knew that she couldn’t swim. How
you pushed her out of the boat in the middle of the river. It wasn’t an
accident, was it?”
Four saucers stared
back at her. Fascinated by the story she was telling them. Then what
happened?
“So now you’ll have to
go to jail,” Baby Kochamma said kindly. “And your mother will go to jail
because of you. Would you like that?”
Frightened eyes and a
fountain looked back at her
“Three of you in three
different jails. Do you know what jails in India are like?”
Too heads shook twice.
Baby Kochamma built up
her case. She drew (from her imagination) vivid pictures of prison life. The
cockroach‑crisp food. Thechhi‑chhi
piled in the toilets like soft brown mountains. The bedbugs. The
beatings. She dwelled on the long years Ammu would be put away because of them.
How she would be an old, sick woman with lice in her hair when she came out–if
she didn’t die in jail, that was. Systematically, in her kind, concerned voice
she conjured up the macabre future in store for them. When she had stamped our
every ray of hope, destroyed their lives completely, like a fairy godmother she
presented them with a solution. God would never forgive them for what they had
done, but here on Earth there was a way of undoing some of the damage. Of
saving their mother from humiliation and suffering on their account. Provided
they were prepared to be practical.
“Luckily,” Baby
Kochamma said, “luckily for you, the police have made a mistake. A lucky
mistake.” She paused. “You know what it is, don’t you?”
There were people
trapped in the glass paperweight on the policeman’s desk. Estha could see them.
A waltzing man and a waltzing woman. She wore a white dress with legs
underneath.
“Don’t you?”
There was paperweight
waltz music. Mammachi was playing it on her violin.
Ra‑ra‑ra‑ro‑rum
Parum‑parum.
“The thing is,” Baby
Kochamma’s voice was saying, “what’s done s done. The inspector says he’s going
to die anyway. So it won’t really matter to him what the police think. What
matters is whether you want to go to jail and make Ammu go to jail because of
you. It’s up to you to decide that.”
There were bubbles
inside the paperweight which made the man and woman look as though they were
waltzing underwater. They looked happy. Maybe they were getting married. She in
her white dress. He in his black suit and bow tie. They were looking deep into
each other’s eyes.
“If you want to save
her, all you have to do is to go with the Uncle with the big meeshas .
He’ll ask you a question. One question. All you have to do is to say `Yes.’
Then we can all go home. It’s so easy. It’s a small price to pay.”
Baby Kochamma followed
Estha’s gaze. It was all she could do to prevent herself from taking the
paperweight and flinging it out of the window. Her heart was hammering.
“So!” she said, with a
bright, brittle smile, the strain beginning to tell in her voice. “What shall I
tell the Inspector Uncle? What have we decided? D’you want to save Arnmu or
shall we send her to jail?”
As though she was
offering them a choice of two treats. Fishing or bathing the pigs? Bathing the
pigs or fishing?
The twins looked up at
her. Not together (but almost) two frightened voices whispered, “Save Ammu.”
In the years to come
they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As
adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked
into condemnation?
In a way, yes. But it
wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And
how quick they had been in the choosing! They hadn’t given it more than a
second of thought before they looked up and said (not together, but almost)
“Save Ammu.” Save us. Save our mother.
Baby Kochamma beamed.
Relief worked like a laxative. She needed to go to the bathroom. Urgently. She
opened the door and asked for the Inspector.
“They’re good little
children,” she told him when he came. “They’ll go with you.”
“No need for both. One
will serve the purpose,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said. “Any one. Mon. Mol. Who
wants to come with me?”
“Estha.” Baby Kochamma
chose. Knowing him to be the more practical of the two. The more tractable. The
more farsighted. The more responsible. “You go. Goodboy.”
Little Man. He
lived in a cara‑van. Dum dum.
Estha went.
Ambassador E. Pelvis.
With saucer‑eyes and a spoiled puff. A short ambassador flanked by tall
policemen, on a terrible mission deep into the bowels of the Kottayam police
station. Their footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor.
Rahel remained behind
in the Inspector’s office and listened to the rude sounds of Baby Kochamma’s
relief dribbling down the sides of the Inspector’s pot in his attached toilet.
“The flush doesn’t
work,” she said when she came out “It’s so annoying.”
Embarrassed that the
Inspector would see the color and consistency of her stool.
The lock‑up was pitch‑dark.
Estha could see nothing, but he could hear the sound of rasping, labored
breathing. The smell of shit made him retch. Someone switched on the light.
Bright Blinding. Velutha appeared on the scummy, slippery floor: A mangled
genie invoked by a modern lamp. He was naked, his soiled mundu had come undone.
Blood spilled from his skull like a secret. His face was swollen and his head
look liked a pumpkin, too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A
pumpkin with a monstrous upside‑down smile. Police boots stepped back from the
rim of a pool of urine spreading from him, the bright, bare electric bulb
reflected in it.
Dead fish floated up
in Estha. One of the policemen prodded Velutha with his foot. There was no
response. Inspector Thomas Mathew squatted on his haunches and raked his jeep
key across the sole of Velutha’s foot. Swollen eyes opened. Wandered. Then
focused through a film of blood on a beloved child. Estha imagined hat
something in him smiled. Not his mouth, but some other unhurt part of him. His
elbow perhaps. Or shoulder.
The Inspector asked
his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.
Childhood tiptoed out.
Silence slid in like a
bolt.
Someone switched off
the light and Velutha disappeared.
* * *
Ammu’s reaction
stunned her. The ground fell away from under her feet. She knew she had an ally
in Inspector Thomas Mathew. But how long would that last? What if he was
transferred and the case re‑opened? It was possible considering the shouting,
sloga~fleeting crowd of Party workers that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai had managed
to assemble outside the gate. That prevented the laborers from coming to work,
and left vast quantities of mangoes, bananas, pineapple, garlic and ginger
rotting slowly on the premises of Paradise Pickles.
Baby Kochamma knew she
had to get Ammu out of Ayemenem as soon as possible.
She managed that by
doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with
other people’s passions.
She gnawed like a rat
into the godown of Chacko’s grief. Within its walls she planted an easy,
accessible target for his insane anger. It wasn’t hard for her to portray Ammu
as the person actually responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Ammu and her two‑egg
twins.
Chacko breaking down
doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It
was her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be
Returned.
Chapter 20.
The Madras Mail
And so, at the Cochin
Harbor Terminus, Estha Alone at the barred train window. Ambassador E. Pelvis.
A millstone with a puff. And a greenwavy, thickwatery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty,
bottomless bottomful feeling. His trunk with his name on it was under his seat.
His tiflin box with tomato sandwiches and his Eagle flask with an eagle was on
the little folding table in front of him.
Next to him an eating
lady in a green and purple Kanjeevaram sari and diamonds clustered like shining
bees on each nostril offered him yellow laddoos in a box. Estha shook his head.
She smiled and coaxed, her kind eyes disappeared into slits behind her glasses.
She made kissing sounds with her mouth.
“Try one. Verrrry
sweet,” she said in Tamil. Rombo maduram.
“Sweet,” her oldest
daughter, who was about Estha’s age, said in English.
Estha shook his head
again. The lady ruffled his hair and spoiled his puff. Her family (husband and
three children) was already eating. Big round yellow laddoo crumbs on the seat.
Trainrumbles under their feet. The blue nightlight not yet on.
The eating lady’s
small son switched it on. The eating lady switched it off. She explained to the
child that it was a sleeping light. Not an awake light.
Every First Class
train thing was green. The seats green. The berths green. The floor green. The
chains green. Darkgreen Lightgreen.
To Stop Train Pull
Chain , it said in green.
Ot pots niart llup
niahc , Estha thought in
green.
Through the window
bars, Ammu held his hand.
“Keep your ticket
carefully,” Ammu’s mouth said. Ammu’s trying‑not‑to‑cry mouth. “They’ll come
and check.”
Estha nodded down at
Ammu’s face tilted up to the train window. At Rahel, small and smudged with
station dirt. All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that
they had loved a man to death.
That wasn’t in the
papers.
It took the twins
years to understand Ammu’s part in what had happened. At Sophie Mol’s funeral
and in the days before Estha was Returned, they saw her swollen eyes, and with
the self‑centeredness of children, held themselves wholly culpable for her
grief.
“Eat the sandwiches
before they get soggy,” Ammu said. “And don’t forget to write.”
She scanned the finger‑nails
of the little hand she held, and slid a black sickle of dirt from under the
thumb‑nail.
“And look after my
sweetheart for me. Until I come and get him.”
“When, Ammu? When will
you come for him?”
“Soon.”
“But when? When
eggzackly?”
“Soon, sweetheart. As
soon as I can.”
“Month‑after‑next?
Ammu?” Deliberately making it a long time away so that Ammu would say Before
that, Estha. Be practical. What about your studies?
“As soon as I get a
job. As soon as I can go away from here and get a job,” Ammu said. –
“But that will be
never!” A wave of panic. A bottomless bottomful feeling.
The eating lady
eavesdropped indulgently.
“See how nicely he
speaks English,” she said to her children in Tamil.
“But that will be
never,” her oldest daughter said combatively… “En ee vee ee aar. Never.”
By “never” Estha had
only meant that it would be too far away. That it wouldn’t be now, wouldn’t be
soon.
By “never” he hadn’t
meant, Not Ever.
But that’s how the
words came out
But that will be
never!
For Never they just
took the 0 and Tout of Not Ever.
They?
The Government.
Where people were sent
to Jolly Well Behave.
And that’s how it had
all turned out.
Never. Not Ever.
It was his fault that
the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting. His fault that she died alone
in the lodge with no one to lie at the back of her and talk to her.
Because he was the one
that had said it But Ammu that will be never! “Don’t be silly, Estha. It’ll be soon,”
Ammu’s mouth said. “I’ll be a teacher. I’ll start a school. And you and Rahel
will be in it.”
“And we’ll be able to
afford it because it will be Ours!” Estha said with his enduring pragmatism.
His eye on the main chance. Free bus rides. Free funerals. Free education.
Little Man. He lived in a cara‑van. Dum dum.
“We’ll have our own
house,” Ammu said.
“A little house,”
Rahel said.
“And in our school
we’ll have classrooms and blackboards,” Estha said.
“And chalk.”
“And Real Teachers
teaching.”
“And proper
punishments,” Rahel said.
This was the stuff
their dreams were made of. On the day that Estha was Returned. Chalk.
Blackboards. Proper punishments.
They didn’t ask to be
let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not
ones that came like cupboards with built‑in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your
whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.
Without warning the
train began to move. Very slowly.
Estha’s pupils
dilated. His nails dug into Ammu’s hand as she walked along the platform. Her
walk turning into a run as the Madras Mail picked up speed.
Godbless, my baby.
My sweetheart. I’ll come for you soon!
“Ammu!” Estha said as
she disengaged her hand. Prising loose small finger after finger.
“Ammu! Feeling
vomity!”
Estha’s voice lifted
into a wail.
Little Elvis‑the‑Pelvis
with a spoiled, special‑outing puff. And beige and pointy shoes. He left his
voice behind.
On the station
platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed.
The train pulled out.
The light pulled in.
Twenty‑three years
later, Rahel, dark woman in a yellow T‑shirt, turns to Estha in the dark.
“Esthapappychachen
Kuttappen Peter Mon,” she says.
She whispers.
She moves her mouth.
Their beautiful
mother’s mouth.
Estha, sitting very
straight, waiting to be arrested, takes his fingers to it. To touch the words
it makes. To keep the whisper. His fingers follow the shape of it. The touch of
teeth. His hand is held and kissed.
Pressed against the
coldness of a cheek, wet with shattered rain.
Then she sat up and
put her arms around him. Drew him down beside her.
They lay like that for
a long time. Awake in the dark. Quietness and Emptiness.
Not old. Not young.
But a viable die‑able
age.
They were strangers
who had met in a chance encounter. They had known each other before Life began.
There is very little
that anyone could say to clarify what happened next. Nothing that (in
Mammachi’s book) would separate Sex from Love. Or Needs from Feelings.
Except perhaps that no
Watcher watched through Rahel’s eyes. No one stared out of a window at the sea.
Or a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.
Except perhaps that it
was a little cold. A little wet. But very quiet. The Air.
But what was there to
say?
Only that there were
tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons.
Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat.
Only that a hard honeycolored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it.
Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what
they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.
Only that once again
they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how
much.
On the roof of the
abandoned factory, the lonely drummer drummed. A gauze door slammed. A mouse
rushed across the factory floor. Cobwebs sealed old pickle vats. Empty, all but
one‑in which a small heap of congealed white dust lay. Bone dust from a Bar Nowl.
Long dead. Pickled owl.
In answer to Sophie
Mol’s question: Chacko, where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones
fall like stones from the sky?
Asked on the evening
of the day she arrived. She was standing on the edge of Baby Kochamma’s
ornamental pond looking up at the kites wheeling in the sky.
Sophie Mol. Hatted,
bell‑bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
Margaret Kochamma
(because she knew that when you travel to the Heart of Darkness [b] Anything
can Happen to Anyone) called her in to have her regimen of pills. Filaria.
Malaria. Diarrhea. She had no prophylaxis, unfortunately, for Death by
Drowning.
Then it was time for
dinner.
“Supper, silly,”
Sophie Mol said when Estha was sent to call her.
At supper silly, the
children sat at a separate smaller table. Sophie Mol, with her back to the
grown‑ups, made gruesome faces at the food. Every mouthful she ate was
displayed to her admiring younger cousins, half‑chewed, mulched, lying on her
tongue like fresh vomit.
When Rahel did the
same, Ammu saw her and took her to bed.
Ammu tucked her
naughty daughter in and switched off the light. Her goodnight kiss left no spit
on Rahel’s cheek and Rahel could tell that she wasn’t really angry.
“You’re not angry,
Ammu.” In a happy whisper. A little more her mother loved her.
“No.”
Ammu kissed her again.
“Goodnight,
sweetheart. Godbless.”
“Goodnight, Ammu. Send
Estha soon.” And as Ammu walked away she heard her daughter whisper, “Ammu!”
“What is it?”
“We be of one
blood, Thou and I! ”
Ammu leaned against
the bedroom door in the dark, reluctant to return to the dinner table, where
the conversation circled like a moth around the white child and her mother as
though they were the only source of light. Ammu felt that she would die, wither
and die, if she heard another word. If she had to endure another minute of
Chacko’s proud, tennis‑trophy smile. Or the undercurrent of sexual jealousy
that emanated from Mammachi. Or Baby Kochamma’s conversation that was designed
to exclude Ammu and her children, to inform them of their place in the scheme
of things.
As she leaned against
the door in the darkness, she felt her dream, her Afternoon‑mare, move inside
her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The
cheerful one‑armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like
a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her.
Who was he?
Who could he have
been?
The God of Loss.
The God of Small
Things.
The God of Goosebumps
and Sudden Smiles.
He could do only one
thing at a time.
If he touched her he
couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her be couldn’t leave, if he spoke he
couldn’t listen, if he fought be couldn’t win.
Ammu longed for him.
Ached for him with the whole of her biology.
She returned to the
dinner table.
Chapter 21.
The Cost of Living
When the old house had
closed its bleary eyes and settled into sleep, Ammu, wearing one of Chacko’s
old shirts over a long white petticoat, walked out onto the front verandah. She
paced up and down for awhile. Restless. Feral. Then she sat on the wicker chair
below the moldy, button‑eyed bison head and the portraits of the Little Blessed
One and Aleyooty Ammachi that hung on either side of it. Her twins were
sleeping the way they did when they were exhausted–with their eyes half open,
two small monsters. They got that from their father.
Ammu switched on her
tangerine transistor. A man’s voice crackled through it. An English song she
hadn’t heard before.
She sat there in the
dark. A lonely, lambent woman looking out at her embittered aunt’s ornamental
garden, listening to a tangerine. To a voice from far away. Wafting through the
night. Sailing over lakes and rivers. Over dense heads of trees. Past the
yellow church. Past the school. Bumping up the dirt road. Up the steps of the
verandah. To her.
Barely listening to
the music, she watched the frenzy of insects flitting around the light, vying
to kill themselves.
The words of the song
exploded in her head.
There’s no time to lose
I heard her say
Cash your dreams before
They slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you
Will lose your mind.
Ammu drew her knees up
and hugged them. She couldn’t believe it. The cheap coincidence of those words.
She stared fiercely out at the garden. Ousa the Bar Nowl flew past on a silent
nocturnal patrol. The fleshy anthuriums gleamed like gunmetal.
She remained sitting
for awhile. Long after the song had ended. Then suddenly she rose from her
chair and walked out of her world like a witch. To a better, happier place.
She moved quickly
through the darkness, like an insect following a chemical trail. She knew the
path to the river as well as her children did and could have found her way
there blindfolded. She didn’t know what it was that made her hurry through the
undergrowth. That turned her walk into a run. That made her arrive on the banks
of the Meenachal breathless. Sobbing. As though she was late for something. As
though her life depended on getting there in time. As though she knew he would
be there. Waiting. As though be knew she would come.
He did.
Know.
That knowledge had
slid into him that afternoon. Cleanly. Like the sharp edge of a knife. When
history had slipped up. While he had held her little daughter in his arms. When
her eyes had told him he was not the only giver of gifts. That she had gifts to
give him too, that in return for his boats, his boxes, his small windmills, she
would trade her deep dimples when she smiled. Her smooth brown skin. Her
shining shoulders. Her eyes that were always somewhere else.
He wasn’t there.
Ammu sat on the stone
steps that led to the water. She buried her head in her arms, feeling foolish
for having been so sure. So certain .
Farther downstream in
the middle of the river, Velutha floated on his back, looking up at the stars.
His paralyzed brother and his one‑eyed father had eaten the dinner he had
cooked them and were asleep. So he was free to lie in the river and drift
slowly with the current. A log. A serene crocodile. Coconut trees bent into the
river and watched him float by. Yellow bamboo wept Small fish took coquettish
liberties with him. Pecked him.
He flipped over and
began to swim. Upstream. Against the current. He turned towards the bank for
one last look, treading water, feeling foolish for having been so sure. So certain
.
When he saw her the
detonation almost drowned him. It took all his strength to stay afloat. He trod
water, standing in the middle of a dark river.
She didn’t see the
knob of his head bobbing over the dark river. He could have been anything. A
floating coconut In any case she wasn’t looking. Her head was buried in her
arms.
He watched her. He
took his time.
Had he known that he
was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would
he have turned away?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not
Who can tell?
He began to swim
towards her. Quietly. Cutting through the water with no fuss. He had almost
reached the bank when she looked up and saw him. His feet touched the muddy
riverbed. As he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps, she saw
that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged to it. That it belonged
to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars. He moved so easily
through it. As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How
his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each
plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made had molded him. Had
left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.
He wore a thin white
cloth around his loins, looped between his dark legs. He shook the water from
his hair. She could see his smile in the dark. His white, sudden smile that he
had carried with him from boyhood into manhood. His only luggage.
They looked at each
other. They weren’t thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone.
Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later.
Lay Ter.
He stood before her
with the river dripping from him. She stayed sitting on the steps, watching
him. Her face pale in the moonlight. A sudden chill crept over him. His heart
hammered. It was all a terrible mistake. He had misunderstood her. The whole
thing was a figment of his imagination. This was a trap. There were people in
the bushes. Watching. She was the delectable bait. How could it be otherwise?
They had seen him in the march. He tried to make his voice casual. Normal. It
came out in a croak.
“Ammukutty… what is
it–” She went to him and laid the length of her body against his. He just stood
there. He didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror.
Partly aching desire. Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait.
It wanted her. Urgently. His wetness wet her. She put her arms around him.
He tried to be
rational. What’s the worst thing that can happen?
I could lose everything.
My job. My family. My livelihood. Everything.
She could hear the
wild hammering of his heart.
She held him till it
calmed down. Somewhat.
She unbuttoned her
shirt. They stood there. Skin to skin. Her brownness against his blackness. Her
softness against his hardness. Her nut‑brown breasts (that wouldn’t support a
toothbrush) against his smooth ebony chest. She smelled the river on him. His
Particular Paravan smell that so disgusted Baby Kochamma. Ammu put out her
tongue and tasted it,. in the hollow of his throat. On the lobe of his ear. She
pulled his head down toward her and kissed his mouth. A cloudy kiss. A kiss
that demanded a kiss‑back. He kissed her back. First cautiously Then urgently.
Slowly his arms came up behind her. He stroked her back. Very gently. She could
feel the skin on his palms. Rough. Callused. Sandpaper. He was careful not to
hurt her. She could feel how soft she felt to him. She could feel herself
through him. Her skin. The way her body existed only where he touched her. The
rest of her was smoke. She felt him shudder against her His hands were on her
haunches (that could support a whole array of toothbrushes), pulling her hips
against his, to let her know how much he wanted her.
Biology designed the
dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered
each other. As though they knew already that for each tremor of pleasure they
would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they
went would be measured against how far they would be taken. So they held back.
Tormented each other. Gave of each other slowly. But that only made it worse.
It only raised the stakes. It only cost them more. Because it smoothed the
wrinkles, the fumble and rush of unfamiliar love and roused them to fever pitch.
Behind them the river
pulsed through the darkness, shimmering like wild silk. Yellow bamboo wept.
Night’s elbows rested
on the water and watched them. They lay under the mangosteen tree, where only
recently a gray old boatplant with boatflowers and boatfruit had been uprooted
bya Mobile Republic. A wasp. A flag. A surprised puff. A Fountain in a Love‑in‑Tokyo.
The scurrying,
hurrying, boatworld was already gone.
The White termites on
their way to work.
The White ladybirds on
their way home.
The White beetles
burrowing away from the light The White grasshoppers with whitewood violins.
The sad white music.
All gone.
Leaving a boat‑shaped
patch of bare dry earth, cleared and ready for love. As though Esthappen and
Rahel had prepared the ground for them. Willed this to happen. The twin
midwives of Ammu’s dream.
Ammu, naked now,
crouched over Velutha, her mouth on his. He drew her hair around them like a
tent. Like her children did when they wanted to exclude the outside world. She
slid further down, introducing herself to the rest of him. His neck. His
nipples. His chocolate stomach. She sipped the last of the river from the
hollow of his navel. She pressed the heat of his erection against her eyelids.
She tasted him, salty in her mouth. He sat up and drew her back to him. She
felt his belly tighten under her, hard as a board. She felt her wetness
slipping on his skin. He took her nipple in his mouth and cradled her other
breast in his callused palm. Velvet gloved in sandpaper.
At the moment that she
guided him into her, she caught a passing glimpse of his youth, his youngness, the wonder in his eyes at the secret he had
unearthed and she smiled down at him as though he was her child.
Once he was inside
her, fear was derailed and biology took over. The cost of living climbed to
unaffordable heights; though later Baby Kochamma would say it was a Small Price
to Pay.
Was it?
Two lives. Two
children’s childhoods.
And a history lesson
for future offenders.
Clouded eyes held
clouded eyes in a steady gaze and a luminous woman opened herself to a luminous
man. She was as wide and deep as a river in spate. He sailed on her waters. She
could feel him moving deeper and deeper into her. Frantic. Frenzied. Asking to
be let in further. Further. Stopped only by the shape of her. The shape of him.
And when he was refused, when he had touched the deepest depths of her, with a
sobbing, shuddering sigh, he drowned.
She lay against him.
Their bodies slick with sweat. She felt his body drop away from her. His breath
become more regular. She saw his eyes clear. He stroked her hair, sensing that
the knot that had eased in him was still tight and quivering in her. Gently he
turned her over on her back. He wiped the sweat and grit from her with his wet
cloth. He lay over her, careful not to put his weight on her. Small stones
pressed into the skin of his forearm. He kissed her eyes. Her ears. Her
breasts. Her belly. Her seven silver stretchmarks from her twins. The line of
down that led from her navel to her dark triangle, that told him where she
wanted him to go. The inside of her legs, where her skin was softest. Then
carpenter’s hands lifted her hips and an untouchable tongue touched the
innermost part of her. Drank long and deep from the bowl of her.
She danced for him. On
that boat‑shaped piece of earth. She lived.
He held her against
him, resting his back against the mangosteen tree, while she cried and laughed
at once. Then, for what seemed like an eternity, but was really no more than
five minutes, she slept leaning against him, her back against his chest. Seven
years of oblivion lifted off her and flew into the shadows on weighty, quaking
wings. Like a dull, steel peahen. And on Ammu’s Road (to Age and Death) a
small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies.
Beyond it, an abyss.
Slowly the terror
seeped back into him. At what he had done. At what he knew he would do again.
And again.
She woke to the sound
of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way
out. For that movable rib. A secret sliding‑folding panel. His arms were still
around her, she could feel the muscles move while his hands played with a dry
palm frond. Ammu smiled to herself in the dark, thinking how much she loved his
arms–the shape and strength of them, how safe she felt resting in them when
actually it was the most dangerous place she could be.
He folded his fear
into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from
him and put it in her hair.
She moved closer,
wanting to be within him, to touch more of him. He gathered her into the cave
of his body. A breeze lifted off the river and cooled their warm bodies.
It was a little cold.
A little wet. A little quiet. The Air.
But what was there to
say?
An hour later Ammu
disengaged herself gently…
I have to go.
He said nothing,
didn’t move. He watched her dress.
Only one thing
mattered now. They knew that it was all they could ask of each other. The only
thing. Ever. They both knew that.
Even later, on the
thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small
Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for
them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.
They laughed at ant‑bites
on each other’s bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves,
at overturned beetles that couldn’t right themselves. At the pair of small fish
that always sought Velutha out in the river and bit him. At a particularly
devout praying mantis. At the minute spider who lived in a crack in the wall of
the back verandah of the History House and camouflaged himself by covering his
body with bits of rubbish. A sliver of wasp wing. Part of a cobweb. Dust. Leaf
rot The empty thorax of a dead bee. Chappa Thamburan, Velutha called him. Lord
Rubbish. One night they contributed to his wardrobe–a flake of garlic skin–and
were deeply offended when he rejected it along with the rest of his armor from
which he emerged‑disgruntled, naked, snot‑colored. As though he deplored their
taste in clothes. For a few days he remained in this suicidal state of
disdainful undress. The rejected shell of garbage stayed standing, like an
outmoded world‑view. An antiquated philosophy. Then it crumbled. Gradually
Chappa Thamburan acquired a new ensemble.
Without admitting it
to each other or themselves, they linked their fates, their futures (their
Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate joy), to his. They checked on
him every night (with growing panic as time went by) to see if he had survived
the day. They fretted over his frailty. His smallness. The adequacy of his
camouflage. His seemingly self‑destructive pride. They grew to love his
eclectic taste. His shambling dignity.
They chose him because
they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to Smallness.
Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other:
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow.
They knew that things
could change in a day. They were right about that.
They were wrong about
Chappu Thamburan, though. He outlived Velutha. He fathered future generations.
He died of natural
causes.
That first night, on
the day that Sophie Mol came, Velutha watched his lover dress. When she was
ready she squatted facing him. She touched him lightly with her fingers and
left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Like flat chalk on a blackboard. Like
breeze in a paddyfield. Like jet‑streaks in a blue church sky. He took her face
in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and smelled her skin.
Ammu laughed.
Yes, Margaret, she
thought. We do it to each other too.
She kissed his closed
eyes and stood up. Velutha with his back against the mangosteen tree watched
her walk away.
She had a dry rose in
her hair.
She turned to say it
once again: “Naaley.”
Tomorrow.