Baby Kochamma looked at them sternly. She said nothing for a long time. When she spoke her voice was hoarse and unfamiliar.
“Whose boat was it? Where did you get it from?”
“Ours. That we found. Velutha mended it for us,” Rahel whispered.
“How long have you had it?”
“We found it the day Sophie Mol came.”
“And you stole things from the house and took them across the river in it?”
“We were only playing…”
“Playing? Is that what you call it?”
Baby Kochamma looked at them for a long time before she spoke again.
“Your lovely little cousin’s body is lying in the drawing room. The fish have eaten out her eyes. Her mother can’t stop crying. Is that what you call playing?”
A sudden breeze made the flowered window curtain billow. Outside Rahel could see jeeps parked. And walking people. A man was trying to start his motorcycle. Each time he jumped on the kickstarter lever, his helmet slipped to one side.
Inside the Inspector’s room, Pappachi’s Moth was on the move.
“It’s a terrible thing to take a person’s life,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s the worst thing that anyone can ever do. Even God doesn’t forgive that. You know that, don’t you?”
Two heads nodded twice.
“And yet”—she looked sadly at them—“you did it.” She looked them in the eye. “You are murderers.” She waited for this to sink in.
“You know that I know that it wasn’t an accident. I know how jealous of her you were. And if the judge asks me in court I’ll have to tell him, won’t I? I can’t tell a lie, can I?” She patted the chair next to her. “Here, come and sit down—”
Four cheeks of two obedient bottoms squeezed into it.
“I’ll have to tell them how it was strictly against the Rules for you to go alone to the river. How you forced her to go with you although you knew that she couldn’t swim. How you pushed her out of the boat in the middle of the river. It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
Four saucers stared back at her. Fascinated by the story she was telling them. Then what happened?
“So now you’ll have to go to jail,” Baby Kochamma said kindly. “And your mother will go to jail because of you. Would you like that?”
Frightened eyes and a fountain looked back at her.
“Three of you in three different jails. Do you know what jails in India are like?”
Two heads shook twice.
Baby Kochamma built up her case. She drew (from her imagination) vivid pictures of prison life. The cockroach-crisp food. The chhi-chhi piled in the toilets like soft brown mountains. The bedbugs. The beatings. She dwelled on the long years Ammu would be put away because of them. How she would be an old, sick woman with lice in her hair when she came out—if she didn’t die in jail, that was. Systematically, in her kind, concerned voice she conjured up the macabre future in store for them. When she had stamped out every ray of hope, destroyed their lives completely, like a fairy godmother she presented them with a solution. God would never forgive them for what they had done, but here on Earth there was a way of undoing some of the damage. Of saving their mother from humiliation and suffering on their account. Provided they were prepared to be practical.
“Luckily,” Baby Kochamma said, “luckily for you, the police have made a mistake. A lucky mistake.” She paused. “You know what it is, don’t you?”
There were people trapped in the glass paperweight on the policeman’s desk. Estha could see them. A waltzing man and a waltzing woman. She wore a white dress with legs underneath.
“Don’t you?”
There was paperweight waltz music. Mammachi was playing it on her violin.
Ra-ra-ra-ra-rum
Parum-parum.
“The thing is,” Baby Kochamma’s voice was saying, “what’s done is done. The Inspector says he’s going to die anyway. So it won’t really matter to him what the police think. What matters is whether you want to go to jail and make Ammu go to jail because of you. It’s up to you to decide that.”
There were bubbles inside the paperweight which made the man and woman look as though they were waltzing underwater. They looked happy. Maybe they were getting married. She in her white dress. He in his black suit and bow tie. They were looking deep into each other’s eyes.
“If you want to save her, all you have to do is to go with the Uncle with the big meesbas. He’ll ask you a question. One question. All you have to do is to say ‘Yes.’ Then we can all go home. It’s so easy. It’s a small price to pay.”
Baby Kochamma followed Estha’s gaze. It was all she could do to prevent herself from taking the paperweight and flinging it out of the window. Her heart was hammering.
“So!” she said, with a bright, brittle smile, the strain beginning to tell in her voice. “What shall I tell the Inspector Uncle? What have we decided? D’you want to save Ammu or shall we send her to jail?”
As though she was offering them a choice of two treats. Fishing or bathing the pigs? Bathing the pigs or fishing?
The twins looked up at her. Not together (but almost) two frightened voices whispered, “Save Ammu.”
In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation?
In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing! They hadn’t given it more than a second of thought before they looked up and said (not together, but almost) “Save Ammu.” Save us. Save our mother.
Baby Kochamma beamed. Relief worked like a laxative. She needed to go to the bathroom. Urgently. She opened the door and asked for the Inspector.
“They’re good little children,” she told him when he came. “They’ll go with you.”
“No need for both. One will serve the purpose,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said. “Any one. Mon. Mol. Who wants to come with me?”
“Estha.” Baby Kochamma chose. Knowing him to be the more practical of the two. The more tractable. The more farsighted. The more responsible. “You go. Goodboy.”
Little Man. He lived in a caravan. Dum dum.
Estha went.
Ambassador E. Pelvis. With saucer-eyes and a spoiled puff. A short ambassador flanked by tall policemen, on a terrible mission deep into the bowels of the Kottayam police station. Their footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor.
Rahel remained behind in the Inspector’s office and listened to the rude sounds of Baby Kochamma’s relief dribbling down the sides of the Inspector’s pot in his attached toilet.
“The flush doesn’t work,” she said when she came out. “It’s so annoying.”
Embarrassed that the Inspector would see the color and consistency of her stool.
The lock-up was pitch-dark. Estha could see nothing, but he could hear the sound of rasping, labored breathing. The smell of shit made him retch. Someone switched on the light. Bright. Blinding. Velutha appeared on the scummy, slippery floor. A mangled genie invoked by a modern lamp. He was naked, his soiled mundu had come undone. Blood spilled from his skull like a secret. His face was swollen and his head look liked a pumpkin, too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down smile. Police boots stepped back from the rim of a pool of urine spreading from him, the bright, bare electric bulb reflected in it.
Dead fish floated up in Estha. One of the policemen prodded Velutha with his foot. There was no response. Inspector Thomas Mathew squatted on his haunches and raked his jeep key across the sole of Velutha’s foot. Swollen eyes opened. Wandered. Then focused through a film of blood on a beloved child. Estha imagined that something in him smiled. Not his mouth, but some other unhurt part of him. His elbow perhaps. Or shoulder.
The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.
Childhood tiptoed out.
Silence slid in like a bolt.
Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared.
On their way back in the police jeep, Baby Kochamma stopped at RELIABLE MEDICOS for some Calmpose. She gave them two each. By the time they reached Chungam Bridge their eyes were beginning to close. Estha whispered something into Rahel’s ear.
“You were right. It wasn’t him. It was Urumban.”
“Thang god,” Rahel whispered back.
“Where d’you think he is?”
“Escaped to Africa.”
They were handed over to their mother fast asleep, floating on this fiction.
Until the next morning, when Ammu shook it out of them. But by then it was too late.
Inspector Thomas Mathew, a man of experience in these matters, was right. Velutha didn’t live through the night.
Half an hour past midnight, Death came for him.
And for the little family curled up and asleep on a blue cross-stitch counterpane? What came for them?
Not Death. Just the end of living.
After Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu took them back to the police station and the Inspector chose his mangoes (tap, tap), the body had already been removed. Dumped in the themmady kuzby—the pauper’s pit—where the police routinely dump their dead.
When Baby Kochamma heard about Ammu’s visit to the police station, she was terrified. Everything that she, Baby Kochamma, had done, had been premised on one assumption. She had gambled on the fact that Ammu, whatever else she did, however angry she was, would never publicly admit to her relationship with Velutha. Because, according to Baby Kochamma, that would amount to destroying herself and her children. Forever. But Baby Kochamma hadn’t taken into account the Unsafe Edge in Ammu. The Unmixable Mix—the infinite tenderness of motherhood, the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.
Ammu’s reaction stunned her. The ground fell away from under her feet. She knew she had an ally in Inspector Thomas Mathew. But how long would that last? What if he was transferred and the case re-opened? It was possible—considering the shouting, sloganeering crowd of Party workers that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai had managed to assemble outside the gate. That prevented the laborers from coming to work, and left vast quantities of mangoes, bananas, pineapple, garlic and ginger rotting slowly on the premises of Paradise Pickles.
Baby Kochamma knew she had to get Ammu out of Ayemenem as soon as possible.
She managed that by doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with other people’s passions.
She gnawed like a rat into the godown of Chacko’s grief. Within its walls she planted an easy, accessible target for his insane anger. It wasn’t hard for her to portray Ammu as the person actually responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Ammu and her two-egg twins.
Chacko breaking down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned.
CHAPTER 20
THE MADRAS MAIL
And so, at the Cochin Harbor Terminus, Estha Alone at the barred train window. Ambassador E. Pelvis. A millstone with a puff. And a greenwavy, thick watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless bottomful feeling. His trunk with his name on it was under his seat. His tiffin box with tomato sandwiches and his Eagle flask with an eagle was on the little folding table in front of him.
Next to him an eating lady in a green and purple Kanjeevaram sari and diamonds clustered like shining bees on each nostril offered him yellow laddoos in a box. Estha shook his head. She smiled and coaxed, her kind eyes disappeared into slits behind her glasses. She made kissing sounds with her mouth.
“Try one. Verrrry sweet,” she said in Tamil. Rombo maduram.
“Sweet,” her oldest daughter, who was about Estha’s age, said in English.
Estha shook his head again. The lady ruffled his hair and spoiled his puff. Her family (husband and three children) was already eating. Big round yellow laddoo crumbs on the seat. Trainrumbles under their feet. The blue nightlight not yet on.
The eating lady’s small son switched it on. The eating lady switched it off. She explained to the child that it was a sleeping light. Not an awake light.
Every First Class train thing was green. The seats green. The berths green. The floor green. The chains green. Darkgreen Lightgreen.
TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN it said in green.
OT POTS NIART LLUP NIAHC Estha thought in green.
Through the window bars, Ammu held his hand.
“Keep your ticket carefully,” Ammu’s mouth said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth. “They’ll come and check.”
Estha nodded down at Ammu’s face tilted up to the train window. At Rahel, small and smudged with station dirt. All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.
That wasn’t in the papers.
It took the twins years to understand Ammu’s part in what had happened. At Sophie Mol’s funeral and in the days before Estha was Returned, they saw her swollen eyes, and with the self-centeredness of children, held themselves wholly culpable for her grief.
“Eat the sandwiches before they get soggy,” Ammu said. “And don’t forget to write.”
She scanned the finger-nails of the little hand she held, and slid a black sickle of dirt from under the thumb-nail.
“And look after my sweetheart for me. Until I come and get him.”
“When, Ammu? When will you come for him?”
“Soon.”
“But when? When eggzackly?”
“Soon, sweetheart. As soon as I can.”
“Month-after-next? Ammu?” Deliberately making it a long time away so that Ammu would say Before that, Estha. Be practical. What about your studies?
“As soon as I get a job. As soon as I can go away from here and get a job,” Ammu said.
“But that will be never!” A wave of panic. A bottomless bottomful feeling.
The eating lady eavesdropped indulgently.
“See how nicely he speaks English,” she said to her children in Tamil.
“But that will be never,” her oldest daughter said combatively. “En ee vee ee aar. Never.”
By “never” Estha had only meant that it would be too far away. That it wouldn’t be now, wouldn’t be soon.
By “never” he hadn’t meant, Not Ever.
But that’s how the words came out.
But that will be never!
For Never they just took the O and T out of Not Ever.
They?
The Government.
Where people were sent to Jolly Well Behave.
And that’s how it had all turned out.
Never. Not Ever.
It was his fault that the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting. His fault that she died alone in the lodge with no one to lie at the back of her and talk to her.
Because he was the one that had said it. But Ammu that will be never!
“Don’t be silly, Estha. It’ll be soon,” Ammu’s mouth said. “I’ll be a teacher. I’ll start a school. And you and Rahel will be in it.”
“And we’ll be able to afford it because it will be ours!” Estha said with his enduring pragmatism. His eye on the main chance. Free bus rides. Free funerals. Free education. Little Man. He lived in a cara-van. Dum dum.
“We’ll have our own house,” Ammu said.
“A little house,” Rahel said.
“And in our school we’ll have classrooms and blackboards,” Estha said.
“And chalk.”
“And Real Teachers teaching.”
“And proper punishments,” Rahel said.
This was the stuff their dreams were made of. On the day that Estha was Returned. Chalk. Blackboards. Proper punishments.
They didn’t ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wanderin
g through its maze of shelves.
Without warning the train began to move. Very slowly.
Estha’s pupils dilated. His nails dug into Ammu’s hand as she walked along the platform. Her walk turning into a run as the Madras Mail picked up speed.
Godbless, my baby. My sweetheart. I’ll come for you soon!
“Ammu!” Estha said as she disengaged her hand. Prising loose small finger after finger.
“Ammu! Feeling vomity!”
Estha’s voice lifted into a wail.
Little Elvis-the-Pelvis with a spoiled, special-outing puff. And beige and pointy shoes. He left his voice behind.
On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed.
The train pulled out. The light pulled in.
Twenty-three years later, Rahel, dark woman in a yellow T-shirt, turns to Estha in the dark.
“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon,” she says.
She whispers.
She moves her mouth.
Their beautiful mother’s mouth.
Estha, sitting very straight, waiting to be arrested, takes his fingers to it. To touch the words it makes. To keep the whisper. His fingers follow the shape of it. The touch of teeth. His hand is held and kissed.
Pressed against the coldness of a cheek, wet with shattered rain.
Then she sat up and put her arms around him. Drew him down beside her.
They lay like that for a long time. Awake in the dark. Quietness and Emptiness.
Not old. Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter.
They had known each other before Life began.
There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened next. Nothing that (in Mammachi’s book) would separate Sex from Love. Or Needs from Feelings.
Except perhaps that no Watcher watched through Rahel’s eyes. No one stared out of a window at the sea. Or a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.
Except perhaps that it was a little cold. A little wet. But very quiet. The Air.