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 tandopri pomfret and crêpe 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 knick-knacks 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 teen aged 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. “Whatis-yourname?”
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 facade 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 Best-bakery 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.
“Aiyyo, Rahel Mol!” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said, recognizing her instantly,“Orkunnilly?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 now?”
“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.
“Ooiver, 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 anot
her series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of photographs.
“Okaythen, 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 honey-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 fat.
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 slip-slap 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. Kusumalatha … 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 headless 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.
Tha
t 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.