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The twins were too young to understand all this, so Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg – hot from a hen.
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.
Cuff+link = Cuff-link. This, to them, rivalled the precision and logic of mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.
‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.’
But we can’t go in,’ Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.’
‘We’re Prisoners of War,’ Chacko said. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.’
‘And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be – are just a twinkle in her eye,’ Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.
A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse.
Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zindabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.
That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers, too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
She’d been carried on it. More times than she could count. It had a light brown birthmark, shaped like a pointed dry leaf. He said it was a lucky leaf, that made the monsoons come on time. A brown leaf on a black back. An autumn leaf at night.
When the British came to Malabar, a number of Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas (among them Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the scourge of Untouchability. As added incentive they were given a little food and money. They were known as the Rice-Christians. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
It was Mammachi, on vacation from Delhi and Imperial Entomology, who first noticed little Velutha’s remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys – tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reeds; he could carve perfect boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashevV nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding them out on his palm (as he had been taught) so she wouldn’t have to touch him to take them.
Vellya Paapen feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but the way he said it. Not what he did, but the way he
Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.
At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched. Entered. Loved.
When the Terror took hold of him, Vellya Paapen went to Mammachi. He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The other stayed dry.
They were forbidden from visiting his house, but they did. They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches – hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings – and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him.
The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armour and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise 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? –
‘“Et tu? Brute? – Then fall Caesar!”’
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.
What a funny word old was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old.
Drownable in, as Larry McCaslin had said and discovered to his cost.
Head thrust forward. Silly smile. Bosom swinging low. Melons in a blouse. Bottom up and out. When the gurgling, bubbling sound came, she listened with her eyes. A yellow brook burbled through a mountain pass. Rahel liked all this. Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then, of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would never be together like this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma and she.
Estha convulsed, but nothing came. Just thoughts. And they floated out and floated back in. Ammu couldn’t see them. They hovered like storm clouds over the Basin City. But the basin men and basin women went about their usual basin business. Basin cars, and basin buses, still whizzed around. Basin Life went on.
‘Sweet chap, that Orangedrink Lemondrink fellow,’ Ammu said. ‘Chhi!’ Baby Kochamma said. ‘He doesn’t look it, but he was surprisingly sweet with Estha,’ Ammu said. ‘So why don’t you marry him then?’ Rahel said petulantly. Time stopped on the red staircase. Estha stopped. Baby Kochamma stopped. ‘Rahel,’ Ammu said. Rahel froze. She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn’t know where those words had come from. She didn’t know that she’d had them in her. But they were out now, and wouldn’t go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a Government office. Some stood,
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That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving. Baby Kochamma’s goodnight kiss left a little spit on Rahel’s cheek. She wiped it off with her shoulder. ‘Goodnight Godbless,’ Ammu said. But she said it with her back. She was already gone. ‘Goodnight,’ Estha said, too sick to love his sister. Rahel Alone watched them walk down the hotel corridor like silent but substantial ghosts. Two big, one small, in beige and pointy shoes. The red carpet took away their feet
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Margaret told Chacko that she couldn’t live with him any more. She told him that she needed her own space. As though Chacko had been using her shelves for his clothes. Which, knowing him, he probably had.
‘Anything’s possible in Human Nature,’ Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. ‘Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.’ Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that InfinnateJoy sounded the saddest.
Mammachi tried to caution Chacko. He heard her out, but didn’t really listen to what she was saying. So despite the early rumblings of discontent on the premises of Paradise Pickles, Chacko, in rehearsal for the Revolution, continued to play Comrade! Comrade!
So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise – ‘God’s Own Country’ they called it in their brochures - because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigour and Air-conditioning.
So there it was then, History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat.
Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it.
Ten to two it said.
Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
Some of them had camped at the airport overnight, and had brought their food with them. And tapioca chips and chakka velaichathu for the way back.
the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopans, the pining wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancées to be reassessed. The teacher’s husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher’s husband’s sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire-bender’s pregnant wife.
Margaret Kochamma told her to Stoppit. So she Stoppited.
Ammu said a grown-up’s Hello to Margaret Kochamma and a children’s Hell-oh to Sophie Mol.
She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo-British Behaviour Competition.
And Ammu’s angry eyes on Estha said, All right. Later. And Later became a horrible, menacing, goose-bumpy word. Lay.Ter. Like a deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery, and furred. Like moth’s feet. The Play had gone bad. Like pickle in the monsoon.
Phlegm is like fruit. Ripe or raw. You have to be able to tell.’
Ammu died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview as someone’s secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.
That night in the lodge, Ammu sat up in the strange bed in the strange room in the strange town. She didn’t know where she was, she recognized nothing around her. Only her fear was familiar. The faraway man inside her began to shout. This time the steely fist never loosened its grip. Shadows gathered like bats in the steep hollows near her collarbone.
Her head hit an iron bolt on the floor. She didn’t wince or wake up. There was a hum in Rahel’s head, and for the rest of the day Chacko had to shout at her if he wanted to be heard.
