“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 green-heat 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’renot 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 he in heaven?—Is he in bell?
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 ov
er-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 arrives exactly at 10:00 P.M.: “Hey, you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!”
She owned seven hundred dollars. And a gold bangle with snake-heads. 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 Locusts 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 Heeaagh!, 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’ état, 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
titating
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 Rand’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 taring ating ringing) 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.