Sophie Mol.
Thimble-drinker.
Coffin-cartwheeler.
She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight Hatted, bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
CHAPTER 6
COCHIN KANGAROOS
At 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 runny 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 bursty. 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 papiermâché 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 fiancées 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 sky-blue sky that had her cousin in it, and what she saw was this: red-mouthed 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: emoc-leW ot eht ecipS tsaoC 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 bird-shit 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 Retur
nees 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 (lef, lef, lefrightlef).
There was
A girl,
Tall and
Thin and
Fair.
Her hair.
Her hair
Was the delicate colorov
Gin-nnn-ger (leftleft, 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, over-come 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 Grief 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 “ex-daughter.” But she didn’t. It was an easy-to-understand laugh. Not like the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s laugh that Estha hadn’t understood.
“‘llo,” 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 Deivomay! Eee 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. Pffft! 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 Compe
tition.
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 LayTer 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, pushing 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.