Estha waited until Rahel got in, then took his place, sitting astride the little boat as though it were a seesaw. He used his legs to push the boat away from the shore. As they lurched into the deeper water they began to row diagonally upstream, against the current, the way Velutha had taught them to. (If you want to end up there, you must aim there.)
In the dark they couldn’t see that they were in the wrong lane on a silent highway full of muffled traffic. That branches, logs, parts of trees, were motoring towards them at some speed.
They were past the Really Deep, only yards from the Other Side, when they collided with a floating log and the little boat tipped over. It had happened to them often enough on previous expeditions across the river, and they would swim after the boat and, using it as a float, dog-paddle to the shore. This time, they couldn’t see their boat in the dark. It was swept away in the current. They headed for the shore, surprised at how much effort it took them to cover that short distance.
Estha managed to grab a low branch that arched down into the water. He peered downriver through the darkness to see if he could see the boat at all.
“I can’t see anything. It’s gone.”
Rahel, covered in slush, clambered ashore and held a hand out to help Estha pull himself out of the water. It took them a few minutes to catch their breath and register the loss of the boat. To mourn its passing.
“And all our food is spoiled,” Rahel said to Sophie Mol and was met with silence. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming silence.
“Sophie Mol?” she whispered to the rushing river. “We’re here! Here! Near the illimba tree!”
Nothing.
On Rahel’s heart Pappachi’s moth snapped open its somber wings.
Out.
In.
And lifted its legs.
Up.
Down.
They ran along the bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway. Graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it.
There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy.
Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist.
It was four in the morning, still dark, when the twins, exhausted, distraught and covered in mud, made their way through the swamp and approached the History House. Hansel and Gretel in a ghastly fairy tale in which their dreams would be captured and re-dreamed. They lay down in the back verandah on a grass mat with an inflatable goose and a Qantas koala bear. A pair of damp dwarfs, numb with fear, waiting for the world to end.
“D’you think she’s dead by now?”
Estha didn’t answer.
“What’s going to happen?”
“We’ll go to jail.”
He Jolly Well knew. Little Man. He lived in a Cara-van. Dum dum.
They didn’t see someone else lying asleep in the shadows. As lonely as a wolf. A brown leaf on his black back. That made the monsoons come on time.
CHAPTER 17
COCHIN HARBOR TERMINUS
In his clean room in the dirty Ayemenem House, Estha (not old, not young) sat on his bed in the dark. He sat very straight. Shoulders squared. Hands in his lap. As though he was next in line for some sort of inspection. Or waiting to be arrested.
The ironing was done. It sat in a neat pile on the ironing board. He had done Rahel’s clothes as well.
It was raining steadily. Night rain. That lonely drummer practicing his roll long after the rest of the band has gone to bed.
In the side mittam, by the separate “Men’s Needs” entrance, the chrome tailfins of the old Plymouth gleamed momentarily in the lightning. For years after Chacko left for Canada, Baby Kochamma had had it washed regularly. Twice a week for a small fee, Kochu Maria’s brother-in-law who drove the yellow municipal garbage truck in Kottayam would drive into Ayemenem (heralded by the stench of Kottayam’s refuse, which lingered long after he had gone) to divest his sister-in-law of her salary and drive the Plymouth around to keep its battery charged. When she took up television, Baby Kochamma dropped the car and the garden simultaneously. Tutti-frutti.
With every monsoon, the old car settled more firmly into the ground. Like an angular, arthritic hen settling stiffly on her clutch of eggs. With no intention of ever getting up. Grass grew around its flat tires. The PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES signboard rotted and fell inward like a collapsed crown.
A creeper stole a look at itself in the remaining mottled half of the cracked driver’s mirror.
A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way in through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
Kochu Maria was asleep on the drawing-room floor, curled into a comma in the flickering light of the television that was still on. American policemen were stuffing a handcuffed teenaged boy into a police car. There was blood spattered on the pavement. The police-car lights flashed and a siren wailed a warning. A wasted woman, the boy’s mother perhaps, watched fearfully from the shadows. The boy struggled. They had used a mosaic blur on the upper part of his face so that he couldn’t sue them. He had caked blood all over his mouth and down the front of his T-shirt like a red bib. His babypink lips were lifted off his teeth in a snarl. He looked like a werewolf. He screamed through the car window at the camera.
“I’m fifteen years old and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear my pathetic story?”
He spat at the camera and a missile of spit splattered over the lens and dribbled down.
Baby Kochamma was in her room, sitting up in bed, filling in a Listerine discount coupon that offered a two-rupee rebate on their new 500ml bottle and two-thousand-rupee gift vouchers to the Lucky Winners of their lottery.
Giant shadows of small insects swooped along the walls and ceiling. To get rid of them Baby Kochamma had put out the lights and lit a large candle in a tub of water. The water was already thick with singed carcasses. The candlelight accentuated her rouged cheeks and painted mouth. Her mascara was smudged. Her jewelry gleamed.
She tilted the coupon towards the candle.
Which brand of mouthwash do you usually use?
Listerine, Baby Kochamma wrote in a hand grown spidery with age.
State the reasons for your preference:
She didn’t hesitate. Tangy Taste. Fresh Breath. She had learned the smart, snappy language of television commercials.
She filled in her name and lied about her age.
Under Occupation: she wrote, Ornamental Gardening (Dip.) Roch. U.S.A.
She put the coupon into an envelope marked RELIABLE MEDICOS, KOTTAYAM. It would go with Kochu Maria in the morning, when she went into town on her Bestbakery cream-bun expedition.
Baby Kochamma picked up her maroon diary, which came with its own pen. She turned to 19 June and made a fresh entry. Her manner was routine. She wrote: I love you I love you.
Every page in the diary had an identical entry. She had a case full of diaries with identical entries. Some said more than just that. Some had the day’s accounts, To-do lists, snatches of favorite dialogue from favorite soaps. But even these entries all began with the same words: I love you I love you.
Father Mulligan had died four years ago of viral hepatitis, in an ashram north of Rishikesh. His years of contemplation of Hindu scriptures had led initially to theological curiosity, but eventually to a change of faith. Fifteen years ago, Father Mulligan became a Vaishnavite. A devotee of Lord Vishnu. He stayed in touch with Baby Kochamma even after he joined the ashram. He wrote to her every Diwali and sent her a greeting card every New Year. A few years ago he sent her a photograph of himself addressing a gathering of middle-class Punjabi widows a
t a spiritual camp. The women were all in white with their sari palloos drawn over their heads. Father Mulligan was in saffron. A yolk addressing a sea of boiled eggs. His white beard and hair were long, but combed and groomed. A saffron Santa with votive ash on his forehead. Baby Kochamma couldn’t believe it. It was the only thing he ever sent her that she hadn’t kept. She was offended by the fact that he had actually, eventually, renounced his vows, but not for her. For other vows. It was like welcoming someone with open arms, only to have him walk straight past into someone else’s.
Father Mulligan’s death did not alter the text of the entries in Baby Kochamma’s diary, simply because as far as she was concerned it did not alter his availability. If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers. Not to be shared with Faith, far less with competing co-nuns, and co-sadhus or whatever it was they called themselves. Co-swamis.
His rejection of her in life (gentle and compassionate though it was) was neutralized by death. In her memory of him, he embraced her. Just her. In the way a man embraces a woman. Once he was dead, Baby Kochamma stripped Father Mulligan of his ridiculous saffron robes and re-clothed him in the Coca-Cola cassock she so loved. (Her senses feasted, between changes, on that lean, concave, Christlike body.) She snatched away his begging bowl, pedicured his horny Hindu soles and gave him back his comfortable sandals. She re-converted him into the high-stepping camel that came to lunch on Thursdays.
And every night, night after night, year after year, in diary after diary after diary, she wrote: I love you I love you.
She put the pen back into the pen-loop and shut the diary. She took off her glasses, dislodged her dentures with her tongue, severing the strands of saliva that attached them to her gums like the sagging strings of a harp, and dropped them into a glass of Listerine. They sank to the bottom and sent up little bubbles, like prayers. Her nightcap. A clenched-smile soda. Tangy teeth in the morning.
Baby Kochamma settled back on her pillow and waited to hear Rahel come out of Estha’s room. They had begun to make her uneasy, both of them. A few mornings ago she had opened her window (for a Breath of Fresh Air) and caught them red-handed in the act of Returning From Somewhere. Clearly they had spent the whole night out. Together. Where could they have been? What and how much did they remember? When would they leave? What were they doing, sitting together in the dark for so long? She fell asleep propped up against her pillows, thinking that perhaps, over the sound of the rain and the television, she hadn’t heard Estha’s door open. That Rahel had gone to bed long ago.
She hadn’t.
Rahel was lying on Estha’s bed. She looked thinner lying down. Younger. Smaller. Her face was turned towards the window beside the bed. Slanting rain hit the bars of the window-grill and shattered into a fine spray over her face and her smooth bare arm. Her soft, sleeveless T-shirt was a glowing yellow in the dark. The bottom half of her, in blue jeans, melted into the darkness.
It was a little cold. A little wet. A little quiet. The Air.
But what was there to say?
From where he sat, at the end of the bed, Estha, without turning his head, could see her. Faintly outlined. The sharp line of her jaw. Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.
She turned her head and looked at him. He sat very straight. Waiting for the inspection. He had finished the ironing.
She was lovely to him. Her hair. Her cheeks. Her small, clever-looking hands.
His sister.
A nagging sound started up in his head. The sound of passing trains. The light and shade and light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.
He sat even straighter. Still, he could see her. Grown into their mother’s skin. The liquid glint of her eyes in the dark. Her small straight nose. Her mouth, full-lipped. Something wounded-looking about it. As though it was flinching from something. As though long ago someone—a man with rings—had hit her across it. A beautiful, hurt mouth.
Their beautiful mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth.
That had kissed his hand through the barred train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras.
‘Bye, Estha. Godbless, Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth.
The last time he had seen her.
She was standing on the platform of the Cochin Harbor Terminus, her face turned up to the train window. Her skin gray, wan, robbed of its luminous sheen by the neon station light. Daylight stopped by trains on either side. Long corks that kept the darkness bottled in. The Madras Mail. The Flying Rani.
Rahel held by Ammu’s hand. A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport Fairy at a railway station. Stamping her feet on the platform, unsettling clouds of settled station-filth. Until Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited. Around them the hostling-jostling crowd.
Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging bargaining reservation-checking.
Echoing stationsounds.
Hawkers selling coffee. Tea.
Gaunt children, blond with malnutrition, selling smutty magazines and food they couldn’t afford to eat themselves.
Melted chocolates. Cigarette sweets.
Orangedrinks.
Lemondrinks.
CocaColaFantaicecreamrosemilk.
Pink-skinned dolls. Rattles. Love-in-Tokyos.
Hollow plastic parakeets full of sweets with heads you could unscrew.
Yellow-rimmed red sunglasses.
Toy watches with the time painted on them.
A cartful of defective toothbrushes.
The Cochin Harbor Terminus.
Gray in the stationlight. Hollow people. Homeless. Hungry. Still touched by last year’s famine. Their revolution postponed for the Time Being by Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Soviet Stooge, Running Dog). The former apple of Peking’s eye.
The air was thick with flies.
A blind man without eyelids and eyes as blue as faded jeans, his skin pitted with smallpox scars, chatted to a leper without fingers, taking dexterous drags from scavenged cigarette stubs that lay beside him in a heap.
“What about you? When did you move here?”
As though they had had a choice. As though they had picked this for their home from a vast array of posh housing estates listed in a glossy pamphlet.
A man sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His infinnate joy. His real foot was bare.
He bought some tea for his tumbler.
An old lady vomited. A lumpy pool. And went on with her life.
The Stationworld. Society’s circus. Where, with the rush of commerce, despair came home to roost and hardened slowly into resignation.
But this time, for Ammu and her two-egg twins, there was no Plymouth window to watch it through. No net to save them as they vaulted through the circus air.
Pack your things and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken door. A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were trembling, hadn’t looked up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin of ribbons lay open on her lap.
But Rahel had. Looked up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared and left a monster in his place.
A thicklipped man with rings, cool in white, bought Scissors cigarettes from a platform vendor. Three packs. To smoke in the train corridor.
For Men of Action
SatisfAction.
He was Estha’s escort. A Family Friend who happened to be going to Madras. Mr. Kurien Maathen.
Si
nce there was going to be a grown-up with Estha anyway, Mammachi said there was no need to waste money on another ticket. Baba was buying Madras-Calcutta. Ammu was buying Time. She too had to pack her things and leave. To start a new life, in which she could afford to keep her children. Until then, it had been decided that one twin could stay in Ayemenem. Not both. Together they were trouble. nataS ni riebt seye. They had to be separated.
Maybe they’re right, Ammu’s whisper said as she packed his trunk and hold-all. Maybe a boy does need a Baba.
The thicklipped man was in the coupe next to Estha’s. He said he’d try and change seats with someone once the train started.
For now he left the little family alone.
He knew that a hellish angel hovered over them. Went where they went. Stopped where they stopped. Dripping wax from a bent candle.
Everybody knew.
It had been in the papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police “Encounter” with a Paravan charged with kidnapping and murder. Of the subsequent Communist Party siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, led by Ayemenem’s own Crusader for Justice and Spokesman of the Oppressed. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai claimed that the Management had implicated the Paravan in a false police case because he was an active member of the Communist Party. That they wanted to eliminate him for indulging in “Lawful Union Activities.”
All that had been in the papers. The Official Version.
Of course the thicklipped man with rings had no idea about the other version.
The one in which a posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, clumping into the Heart of Darkness.
CHAPTER 18
THE HISTORY HOUSE
A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket.