“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.
He clapped 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 Pillai 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 hectoring 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 ranks 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 Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, 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 sitting 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 out 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.
Koo-koo kookum theevandi
Kooki paadum theevandi
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 he 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.
Individuals 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.
Annibilation 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 presenc
e, 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.