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 brittlewhite 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 barkless 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 disconnected delights of underwater farting.
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 [b.] 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 boat 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,)
Ende parambil thooralley.
(Don’t shit here in my compound.)
Chetende parambil thoorikko,
(You can shit next door in my brother’s compound.)
Pa pera-pera-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. Kuttapp
en 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 just-caught 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 he lay there on his hard bed, 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 Rand’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 and 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 personality, she appeared to have been reared on a diet of hardware: hasps and clasps and nails and old screws.
“Aiyyo, Mon! Mol! What must yon 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) frilled 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 bustles 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: I’m 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 look
s 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 thaiy thaka thaiy thaiy 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 1 ask are these Fisher People?”
“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon. Mr. and Mrs. Pleasetomeetyou.” Rahel held out her ladle to be shaken in greeting.