He slammed the skyblue door shut. Baby Kochamma wobbled. The crowd around the car unclotted and went on with its march.
Baby Kochamma rolled the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with this and that, trying to salvage some dignity.
After the last few men walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.
“Are you sure it was him?” Chacko asked Rahel.
“Who?” Rahel said, suddenly cautious.
“Are you sure it was Velutha?”
“Hmmm …?” Rahel said, playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.
“I said, are you sure that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.
“Mmm … nyes… nn … nn … almost,” Rahel said.
“You’re almost sure?” Chacko said.
“No… it was almost Velutha,” Rahel said. “It almost looked like him…”
“So you’re not sure then?”
“Almost not” Rahel slid a look at Estha for approval.
“It must have been him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”
Nobody seemed particularly impressed by her insight.
“We should keep an eye on him,” Baby Kochamma said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory … I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he—”
“I saw Velutha at home before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”
“For his own sake,” Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t interrupt.”
She was annoyed that nobody asked her what a scree bed was.
In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her.
She began to hate him.
From the way Ammu held her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch. Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more like a frog-shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten had been squashed into a Miss Mitten-shaped stain by the milk truck that killed her.
With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat—shaped holes in the Universe.
There were so many stains on the road.
Squashed Miss Mitten—shaped stains in the Universe.
Squashed frog—shaped stains in the Universe.
Squashed crows that had tried to eat the squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.
Squashed dogs that ate the squashed crow—shaped stains in the Universe.
Feathers. Mangoes. Spit.
All the way to Cochin.
The sun shone through the Plymouth window directly down at Rahel. She closed her eyes and shone back at it. Even behind her eyelids the light was bright and hot. The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weath-erwise or otherwise.
Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute?—then fall, Caesar.”
“It just goes to show,” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody”
With children, she said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.
At night, Estha would stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?—Then fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would complain to Mammachi.
“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”
Estha would rise from the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?—Then fall, Estha!” and die again.
Kochu Maria was sure that Et tu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.
The woman in the neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after-biscuit cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a Baby Voice.
Rahel ignored her and blew an inadvertent spit bubble.
Ammu hated them blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.
Aristocrats were people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.
Though Baba wasn’t a clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.
When they were alone, Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit.
“It’s not a ruddy sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.
They remembered his anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.
In the only photograph they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other arm. She looked grumpy and bad-tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.
Ammu said that he had only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks, Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph
“Will you stop that!” Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.
“What?” Rahel said, but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.
“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel said.
“Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive,” Estha said.
“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”
“Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped.
“It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.
Rahel put on her sunglasses. The World became angry-co
lored.
“Take off those ridiculous glasses!” Ammu said.
Rahel took off her ridiculous glasses.
“It’s fascist, the way you deal with them,” Chacko said. “Even children have some rights, for God’s sake!”
“Don’t use the name of the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said.
“I’m not,” Chacko said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”
“Stop posing as the children’s Great Savior!” Ammu said. “When it comes down to brass tacks, you don’t give a damn about them. Or me.”
“Should I?” Chacko said. “Are they my responsibility?”
He said that Ammu and Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.
The backs of Rahel’s legs went wet and sweaty. Her skin slipped on the foamleather upholstery of the car seat. She and Estha knew about millstones. In Mutiny on the Bounty, when people died at sea, they were wrapped in white sheets and thrown overboard with millstones around their necks so that the corpses wouldn’t float. Estha wasn’t sure how they decided how many millstones to take with them before they set off on their voyage.
Estha put his head in his lap.
His puff was spoiled.
A distant trainrumble seeped upwards from the frog-stained road. The yam leaves on either side of the railway track began to nod in mass consent. Yesyesyesyesyes.
The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began to sing another bhajan.
“I tell you, these Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously. “They have no sense of privacy?”
“They have horns and scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies hatch from eggs.”
Rahel had two bumps on her forehead that Estha said would grow into horns. At least one of them would because she was half-Hindu. She hadn’t been quick enough to ask him about his horns. Because whatever She was, He was too.
The train slammed past under a column of dense black smoke. There were thirty-two bogies, and the doorways were full of young men with helmetty haircuts who were on their way to the Edge of the World to see what happened to the people who fell off. Those of them who craned too far fell off the edge themselves. Into the flailing darkness, their haircuts turned inside out.
The train was gone so quickly that it was hard to imagine that everybody had waited so long for so little. The yam leaves continued to nod long after the train had gone, as though they agreed with it entirely and had no doubts at all.
A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.
Chacko started the Plymouth. Baby Kochamma tried to be jolly She started a song.
There’s a sad sort of clanging
From the clock in the hall
And the bells in the stee-ple too.
And up in the nurs’ry
An abs-urd
Litt-le Bird
Is popping out to say—
She looked at Estha and Rahel, waiting for them to say “Coo-coo.”
They didn’t.
A carbreeze blew. Greentrees and telephone poles flew past the windows. Still birds slid by on moving wires, like unclaimed baggage at the airport.
A pale daymoon hung hugely in the sky and went where they went. As big as the belly of a beer-drinking man.
CHAPTER 3
BIG MAN THE LALTAIN, SMALL MAN THE MOMBATTI
Filth had laid seige to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.
Midges whizzed in teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.
The floor was sticky. White walls had turned an uneven gray. Brass hinges and door handles were dull and greasy to the touch. Infrequently used plug points were clogged with grime. Lightbulbs had a film of oil on them. The only things that shone were the giant cockroaches that scurried around like varnished gofers on a film set.
Baby Kochamma had stopped noticing these things long ago. Kochu Maria, who noticed everything, had stopped caring.
The chaise longue on which Baby Kochamma reclined had crushed peanut shells stuffed into the crevices of its rotting upholstery.
In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts. Kochu Maria tossed nuts into her mouth. Baby Kochamma placed them decorously in hers.
On The Best of Donahue the studio audience watched a clip from a film in which a black busker was singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in a subway station. He sang sincerely, as though he really believed the words of the song. Baby Kochamma sang with him, her thin, quavering voice thickened with peanut paste. She smiled as the lyrics came back to her. Kochu Maria looked at her as though she had gone mad, and grabbed more than her fair share of nuts. The busker threw his head back when he hit the high notes (the where of “somewhere”), and the ridged, pink roof of his mouth filled the television screen. He was as ragged as a rock star, but his missing teeth and the unhealthy pallor of his skin spoke eloquently of a life of privation and despair. He had to stop singing each time a train arrived or left, which was often.
Then the lights went up in the studio and Donahue presented the man himself, who, on a pre-arranged cue, started the song from exactly the point that he had had to stop (for a train), cleverly achieving a touching victory of Song over Subway.
The next time the busker was interrupted mid-song was only when Phil Donahue put his arm around him and said “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Being interrupted by Phil Donahue was of course entirely different from being interrupted by a subway rumble. It was a pleasure. An honor.
The studio audience clapped and looked compassionate.
The busker glowed with Prime-Time Happiness, and for a few moments, deprivation took a backseat. It had been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had just been robbed of that too.
There are big dreams and little ones.
“Big Man the Laltain sahib, Small Man the Mombatti,” an old coolie, who met Estha’s school excursion party at the railway station (unfailingly, year after year) used to say of dreams.
Big Man the Lantern. Small Man the Tallow-stick.
Huge Man the Strobe Lights, he omitted to say. And Small Man the Subway Station.
The Masters would haggle with him as he trudged behind them with the boys’ luggage, his bowed legs further bowed, cruel schoolboys imitating his gait. Balls-in-Brackets they used to call him.
Smallest Man the Varicose Veins he clean forgot to mention, as he wobbled off with less than half the money he had asked for and less than a tenth of what he deserved.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The gray sky curdled and the clouds resolved themselves into little lumps, like substandard mattress stuffing.
Esthappen appeared at the kitchen door, wet (and wiser than he really was). Behind him the long grass sparkled. The puppy stood on the steps beside him. Raindrops slid across the curved bottom of the rusted gutter on the edge of the roof, like shining beads on an abacus.
Baby Kochamma looked up from the television.
“Here he comes,” she announced to Rahel, not bothering to lower her voice. “Now watch. He won’t say anything. He’ll walk straight to his room. Just watch!”
The puppy seized the opportunity and tried to stage a combined entry. Kochu Maria hit the floor fiercely with her palms and said, “Hup! Hup! Poda Patti!”
So the puppy, wisely, desisted. It appeared to be familiar with this routine.
“Watch!” Baby Kochamma said. She seemed excited. “He’ll walk straight to his room and wash his clothes. He’s very over-clean… he won’t say a word!”
She had the air of a game warden pointing out an animal in the grass. Taking pride in her ability to predict its movements. Her superior knowledge of its habits and predilections.
Estha’s hair was plastered down in clumps, like the inverted petals of a flower. Slivers of white scalp shone through. Rivulets of water
ran down his face and neck.
He walked to his room. A gloating halo appeared around Baby Kochamma’s head. “See?” she said.
Kochu Maria used the opportunity to switch channels and watch a bit of Prime Bodies.
Rahel followed Estha to his room. Ammu’s room. Once.
The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked-off shoe or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes arranged. The dustbin empty.
The obsessive cleanliness of the room was the only positive sign of volition from Estha. The only faint suggestion that he had, perhaps, some Design for Life. Just the whisper of an unwillingness to subsist on scraps offered by others. On the wall by the window, an iron stood on an ironing board. A pile of folded, crumpled clothes waited to be ironed.
Silence hung in the air like secret loss.
The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas koala (from Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up and down in them.
Estha put on the tap and water drummed into a plastic bucket. He undressed in the gleaming bathroom. He stepped out of his sodden jeans. Stiff. Dark blue. Difficult to get out of. He pulled his crushed-strawberry T-shirt over his head, smooth, slim, muscular arms crossed over his body. He didn’t hear his sister at the door.
Rahel watched his stomach suck inwards and his rib cage rise as his wet T-shirt peeled away from his skin, leaving it wet and honey-colored. His face and neck and a V-shaped triangle at the base of his throat were darker than the rest of him. His arms too were double-colored. Paler where his shirtsleeves ended. A dark-brown man in pale honey clothes. Chocolate with a twist of coffee. High cheekbones and hunted eyes. A fisherman in a white-tiled bathroom, with sea-secrets in his eyes.