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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
The Asian literary phenomenon of the 90s.More magical than Mistry, more of a rollicking good read than Rushdie, more nerve-tinglingly imagined than Naipaul, here, perhaps, is the greatest Indian novel by a woman. Arundhati Roy has written an astonishingly rich, fertile novel, teeming with life, colour, heart-stopping language, wry comedy and a hint of magical realism.Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, Southern India, The God of Small Things tells the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel. Amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of peppercorns in their grandmother’s factory, they try to craft a childhood for themselves amidst what constitutes their family – their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist and bottom-pincher) and their avowed enemy Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grand-aunt).



ARUNDHATI ROY
The God of Small Things





Copyright (#)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This edition published by Fourth Estate 2009
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1997
Copyright © Arundhati Roy 1997
Arundhati Roy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This is a work of fiction. The characters in it are all fictional. Liberties have been taken with the location of rivers, level crossings, churches and crematoria.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006550686
Ebook edition © May 2011 ISBN: 9780007383948 Version: 2018-08-13

Praise (#)
From the British reviews:
‘The God of Small Things vividly describes a landscape and society about which I knew nothing. Perceptive and imaginative, she is an authentic new voice.’
SHUSHA GUPPY, Independent on Saturday Books of Year
‘The great soaring masterpiece of 1997.’
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, Sunday Times Books of the Year
‘Rich and compelling. Roy has a refreshing originality and desire to tell a good yarn that I found really appealing.’
WILL HUTTON, Observer Books of the Year
An intricate, clever, skilfully constructed story which overwhelms by its exuberance and its verbal virtuosity.’
PHILIP ZIEGLER, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
‘An affecting and intricate story … written with amazing confidence.’
IAN JACK, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year
‘The God of Small Things is an ancient drama played out against an unmistakably modern backdrop. It turns the clash of tongues and histories in Kerala into the motor of its comedy, its lyricism and its fine intelligence. And in doing so, it makes the remarkable Arundhati Roy a fitting standard-bearer for the immensely rich literature of India today.’
BOYD TONKIN, Independent
‘A gripping tale of love and loss … in The God of Small Things, Roy has given us a novel moored in anguish but told with compelling wit, eroticism and consummate tenderness.’
UTTARA CHOUDHURY, Financial Times
‘A beautifully fractured tale … infused with luminous imagery, wry wit and butterfly-delicate characters.’
Esquire
‘A quite astonishing first novel by any standards—broad in its historical sweep, emotionally profound and marvellously acute and delicate.’
Economist
‘The God of Small Things draws the reader into a mesmerising world, conjured up in a lush, lyrical prose that sets the nerves tingling.’
SARAH STRICKLAND, Evening Standard
‘Roy is truly gifted, not just in her ability to make words playful and meaning mischievous, but to use this to create a language texture that bowls you along, gathering momentum like the narrative itself … Witty and vivid, full of rich, memorable images … a verbal stream of steady beauty.’
ALI SMITH, Scotsman
‘The God of Small Things is a magically written effort … quite brilliant. Savvy, beautiful, and with the sort of overall rhythm that artists of all media should dream of managing … One can only strongly recommend this extremely funny and enchanting and pretty much genius piece of debut fiction.’
TOM HINEY, Spectator
From the US and Australian reviews:
‘The quality of Ms Roy’s narration is so extraordinary—at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple—that the reader remains enthralled all the way to its agonising finish. A devastating first novel.’
ALICE TRUAX, New York Times Book Review
‘Roy is impressively adept with language. Words and images flip across the pages like acrobats, combining and contorting in unexpected ways. Not only is the story rich and compelling, but the inventive energy and honour with which it is told keep the reader constantly surprised and captivated.’
TAMSIN TODD, Washington Post
‘A tantalising mix of Indian exotica, mysticism and history on a domestic and national level … a remarkably assured novel, ambitious in scope, innovative in style, filled with moments of quiet beauty … its wonders and wonderings are, for me, unparalleled.’
BETH YAHP, The Australian
‘After you turn the last page [of this] glowing first novel, you find you’re still deep inside it. You can smell the pickled mangoes and the sweet banana jam, hear the children singing as their uncle’s car carries them home to disaster. The details don’t fall into place until the end of the book but making our way there, we move through such a landscape of sensory imagery that we seem to have lived the tragedy long before we can understand it. An outstanding novel.’
LAURA SHAPIRO, Newsweek
‘The God of Small Things offers such magic, mystery and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that hauntingly wonderful.’
DEIRDRE DONAHUE, USA Today
‘A stunning first novel, this book is sure to send ripples—and even stir up waves—for a long time to come.’
ANDERSON TEPPER, Time Out New York
‘The God of Small Things is lush and humid with a tropic density of language … a compelling novel from an energetic writer of real power.’
JANET CHIMONYO, Canberra Times
From the Indian reviews:
‘Roy handles the shifting surfaces of past and present with extraordinary fineness and delicacy, producing a controlled, intricate narrative structure through which the themes of love, spite, betrayal, hatred and guilt run like a spider’s web. A remarkable achievement.’
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI, Asian Age
‘The God of Small Things has it all: the echoes, calls and the cries of the Earth. But more importantly, an intellectual daring. This … is not just an extraordinary novel, but an uncoiling spring of human foreboding and inevitability. It’s quite simply unbeatable.’
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR, Sunday Observer
‘A sad story, told very hilariously, very tenderly and very craftily.’
PAUL ZACHARIA, The Pioneer
‘The poetic intensity of Roy’s prose, her dynamic energy, her capacity to touch the combined strain of high jinks and pathos in childish humour, her presentation of characters through the children’s disturbing perspective have a function beyond that of holding the reader to the narrative. They create within the framework of Rahel’s desolation the magic of prelapsarian Eden, and make the fall from innocence doubly poignant.’
BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY, The Telegraph (Calcutta)
‘A work of unusual range and depth and feeling, all the more remarkable for finding expression in a first novel. It is so well-paced, evocative and densely-plotted that it sustains the tension and tautness of a thriller. ’
SUNIL SETHI, Outlook
‘Arundhati Roy has stretched language and imagination to recreate the fun-filled, magical yet anguished world of childhood with poignant simplicity, directness and wit.’
MARIA COUTO, Frontline
For Mary Roy who grew me up.
Who taught me to say ‘excuse me’ before interrupting her in Public. Who loved me enough to let me go.
For LKC, who, like me, survived.
Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.
JOHN BERGER

Contents
Cover (#ued83e675-1FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Title Page (#ued83e675-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Copyright (#ued83e675-3FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Praise (#ued83e675-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
1 Paradise Pickles & Preserves (#ued83e675-10FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
2 Pappachi’s Moth (#ued83e675-12FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
3 Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Abhilash Talkies (#litres_trial_promo)
5 God’s Own Country (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Cochin Kangaroos (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Wisdom Exercise Notebooks (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Mrs Pillai, Mrs Eapen, Mrs Rajagopalan (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The River in the Boat (#litres_trial_promo)
11 The God of Small Things (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Kochu Thomban (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Pessimist and the Optimist (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Work is Struggle (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Crossing (#litres_trial_promo)
16 A Few Hours Later (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Cochin Harbour Terminus (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The History House (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Saving Ammu (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Madras Mail (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Cost of Living (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Paradise Pickles & Preserves (#)
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.
The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.
She was Rahel’s baby grand aunt, her grandfather’s younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn’t come to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grand aunt laboured under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. ‘Dizygotic’ doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha—Esthappen—was the older by eighteen minutes.
They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, worm-ridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual ‘Who is who?’ and ‘Which is which?’ from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox Bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem house for donations.
The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.
In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches—Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate—on the Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the small things.
Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They’d be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the winding tea estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple and for the rest of the journey Estha and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.
According to Estha, if they’d been born on the bus, they’d have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t clear where he’d got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harboured a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.
They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course there were no zebra crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest town, but they’d seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was a two hour drive away.
The Government never paid for Sophie Mol’s funeral because she wasn’t killed on a zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha and Rahel’s cousin, their uncle Chacko’s daughter. She was visiting from England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was almost nine. She had a special child-sized coffin.
Satin-lined.
Brass handle shined.
She lay in it in her yellow Crimplene bellbottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the coffin, and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled at babies the way they did on usual Sundays.
The long candles on the altar were bent. The short ones weren’t.
An old lady masquerading as a distant relative (whom nobody recognized), but who often surfaced next to bodies at funerals (a funeral junkie? a latent necrophiliac?) put cologne on a wad of cotton wool and with a devout and gently challenging air, dabbed it on Sophie Mol’s forehead. Sophie Mol smelled of cologne and coffinwood.
Margaret Kochamma, Sophie Mol’s English mother, wouldn’t let Chacko, Sophie Mol’s biological father, put his arm around her to comfort her.
The family stood huddled together. Margaret Kochamma, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, and next to her, her sister-in-law, Mammachi—Estha and Rahel’s (and Sophie Mol’s) grandmother. Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses when she went out of the house. Her tears trickled down from behind them and trembled along her jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof. She looked small and ill in her crisp off-white sari. Chacko was Mammachi’s only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.
Though Ammu, Estha and Rahel were allowed to attend the funeral, they were made to stand separately, not with the rest of the family. Nobody would look at them.
It was hot in the church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died in a coffin flower. Ammu’s hands shook and her hymnbook with it. Her skin was cold. Estha stood close to her, barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like glass, his burning cheek against the bare skin of Ammu’s trembling, hymnbook-holding arm.
Rahel, on the other hand, was wide awake, fiercely vigilant and brittle with exhaustion from her battle against Real Life.
She noticed that Sophie Mol was awake for her funeral. She showed Rahel Two Things.
Thing One was the newly painted high dome of the yellow church that Rahel hadn’t ever looked at from the inside. It was painted blue like the sky, with drifting clouds and tiny whizzing jet planes with white trails that crisscrossed in the clouds. It’s true (and must be said) that it would have been easier to notice these things lying in a coffin looking up than standing in the pews, hemmed in by sad hips and hymnbooks.
Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner. She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, bare bodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky.
She thought of what would happen if the rope snapped. She imagined him dropping like a dark star out of the sky that he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret.
By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Thing Two that Sophie Mol showed Rahel was the bat baby.
During the funeral service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a ‘Whatisit? Whathappened?’ and for a furrywhirring and a sariflapping.
The sad priests dusted out their curly beards with goldringed fingers as though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them.
The baby bat flew up into the sky and turned into a jet plane without a crisscrossed trail.
Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin.
The sad singing started again and they sang the same sad verse twice. And once more the yellow church swelled like a throat with voices.
When they lowered Sophie Mol’s coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf), the softsounds of the red mud and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dullthudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priests’ voices muffled by mud and wood.
We entrust into thy hands, most merciful Father, The soul of this our child departed, And we commit her body to the ground, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear screams through earth and stone.
Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe.
Her funeral killed her. Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus. On her tombstone it said A Sunbeam Lent To Us Too Briefly.
Ammu explained later that Too Briefly meant For Too Short a While.
After the funeral Ammu took the twins back to the Kottayam police station. They were familiar with the place. They had spent a good part of the previous day there. Anticipating the sharp, smoky stink of old urine that permeated the walls and furniture, they clamped their nostrils shut well before the smell began.
Ammu asked for the Station House Officer and when she was shown into his office, she told him that there had been a terrible mistake and that she wanted to make a statement. She asked to see Velutha.
Inspector Thomas Mathew’s moustaches bustled like the friendly Air India Maharajah’s, but his eyes were sly and greedy.
‘It’s a little too late for all this, don’t you think?’ he said. He spoke the coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Ammu’s breasts as he spoke. He said the police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn’t take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children. Ammu said she’d see about that. Inspector Thomas Mathew came around his desk and approached Ammu with his baton.
‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d go home quietly.’ Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t. Policemen have that instinct.
Behind him a red and blue board said:
Politeness Obedience Loyalty Intelligence Courtesy Efficiency
When they left the police station Ammu was crying, so Estha and Rahel didn’t ask her what veshya meant. Or for that matter, illegitimate. It was the first time they’d seen their mother cry. She wasn’t sobbing. Her face was set like stone, but the tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her rigid cheeks. It made the twins sick with fear. Ammu’s tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real. They went back to Ayemenem by bus. The conductor, a narrow man in khaki, slid towards them on the bus rails. He balanced his bony hips against the back of a seat and clicked his ticket-puncher at Ammu. Where to? the click was meant to mean. Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the steel bus-rails on the conductor’s hands.
‘He’s dead,’ Ammu whispered to him. ‘I’ve killed him.’
‘Ayemenem,’ Estha said quickly, before the conductor lost his temper.
He took the money out of Ammu’s purse. The conductor gave him the tickets. Estha folded them carefully and put them in his pocket. Then he put his little arms around his rigid, weeping mother.
Two weeks later, Estha was Returned. Ammu was made to send him back to their father, who had by then resigned his lonely tea estate job in Assam and moved to Calcutta to work for a company that made carbon black. He had remarried, stopped drinking (more or less), and suffered only occasional relapses.
Estha and Rahel hadn’t seen each other since.
And now, twenty-three years later, their father had re-Returned Estha. He had sent him back to Ayemenem with a suitcase and a letter. The suitcase was full of smart new clothes. Baby Kochamma showed Rahel the letter. It was written in a slanting, feminine, convent school hand, but the signature underneath was their father’s. Or at least the name was. Rahel wouldn’t have recognized the signature. The letter said that he, their father, had retired from his carbon black job and was emigrating to Australia where he had got a job as Chief of Security at a ceramics factory, and that he couldn’t take Estha with him. He wished everybody in Ayemenem the very best and said that he would look in on Estha if he ever came back to India, which, he went on to say, was a bit unlikely.
Baby Kochamma told Rahel that she could keep the letter if she wanted to. Rahel put it back into its envelope. The paper had grown soft, and folded like cloth.
She had forgotten just how damp the monsoon air in Ayemenem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on Baby Kochamma’s dim 40-watt bulbs. In the daytime their crisp, incinerated corpses littered the floor and windowsills, and until Kochu Maria swept them away in her plastic dustpan, the air smelled of Something Burning.
It hadn’t changed, the June Rain.
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-coloured puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-coloured minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent.
Further away, in the wind and rain, on the banks of the river, in the sudden thunderdarkness of the day, Estha was walking. He was wearing a crushed-strawberry-pink T-shirt, drenched darker now, and he knew that Rahel had come.
Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an ‘exactly when’. It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of aestivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha’s case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.
Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
After Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Estha was Returned, their father sent him to a boys’ school in Calcutta. He was not an exceptional student, but neither was he backward, nor particularly bad at anything. An average student, or Satisfactory work were the usual comments that his teachers wrote in his Annual Progress Reports. Does not participate in Group Activities was another recurring complaint. Though what exactly they meant by ‘Group Activities’ they never said.
Estha finished school with mediocre results, but refused to go to college. Instead, much to the initial embarrassment of his father and stepmother, he began to do the housework. As though in his own way he was trying to earn his keep. He did the sweeping, swabbing and all the laundry. He learned to cook and shop for vegetables. Vendors in the bazaar, sitting behind pyramids of oiled, shining vegetables, grew to recognize him and would attend to him amidst the clamouring of their other customers. They gave him rusted film cans in which to put the vegetables he picked. He never bargained. They never cheated him. When the vegetables had been weighed and paid for, they would transfer them to his red plastic shopping basket (onions at the bottom, brinjal and tomatoes on the top) and always a sprig of coriander and a fistful of green chillies for free. Estha carried them home in the crowded tram. A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise.
At meal times when he wanted something, he got up and helped himself.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, foetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquillizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.
When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel, decided to stage a miserable, long-drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow depended on it. In the last months of his life, Khubchand, who had the best of intentions but the most unreliable of bladders, would drag himself to the top-hinged dog-flap built into the bottom of the door that led out into the back garden, push his head through it and urinate unsteadily, bright yellowly, inside. Then with bladder empty and conscience clear he would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his grizzled skull like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leaving wet footprints on the floor. As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across. To Estha—steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man—the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s balls. It made him smile out loud.
After Khubchand died Estha started his walking. He walked for hours on end. Initially he patrolled only the neighbourhood, but gradually went further and further afield.
People got used to seeing him on the road. A well-dressed man with a quiet walk. His face grew dark and outdoorsy. Rugged. Wrinkled by the sun. He began to look wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him.
Now that he’d been re-Returned, Estha walked all over Ayemenem.
Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit, and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils.
Other days he walked down the road. Past the new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. Past the resentful older houses tinged green with envy, cowering in their private driveways among their private rubber trees. Each a tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own.
He walked past the village school that his great-grandfather built for Untouchable children.
Past Sophie Mol’s yellow church. Past the Ayemenem Youth Kung Fu Club. Past the Tender Buds Nursery School (for Touchables), past the ration shop that sold rice, sugar, and bananas that hung in yellow bunches from the roof. Cheap soft-porn magazines about fictitious South Indian sex fiends were clipped with clothes pegs to ropes that hung from the ceiling. They spun lazily in the warm breeze, tempting honest ration buyers with glimpses of ripe, naked women lying in pools of fake blood.
Sometimes Estha walked past Lucky Press—old Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s printing press, once the Ayemenem office of the Communist Party, where midnight study meetings were held, and pamphlets with rousing lyrics of Marxist Party songs were printed and distributed. The flag that fluttered on the roof had grown limp and old. The red had bled away.
Comrade Pillai himself came out in the mornings in a greying Aertex vest, his balls silhouetted against his soft white mundu. He oiled himself with warm, peppered coconut oil, kneading his old, loose flesh that stretched willingly off his bones, like chewing gum. He lived alone now. His wife, Kalyani, had died of ovarian cancer. His son, Lenin, had moved to Delhi, where he worked as a services contractor for foreign embassies.
If Comrade Pillai was outside his house oiling himself when Estha walked past, he made it a point to greet him.
‘Estha Mon!’ he would call out, in his high, piping voice, frayed and fibrous now, like sugarcane stripped of its bark. ‘Good morning! Your daily constitutional?’
Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet.
Comrade Pillai would slap himself all over to get his circulation going. He couldn’t tell whether Estha recognized him after all those years or not. Not that he particularly cared. Though his part in the whole thing had by no means been a small one, Comrade Pillai didn’t hold himself in any way personally responsible for what had happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics. The old omelette and eggs thing. But then, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was essentially a political man. A professional omeletteer. He walked through the world like a chameleon. Never revealing himself, never appearing not to. Emerging through chaos unscathed.
He was the first person in Ayemenem to hear of Rahel’s return. The news didn’t perturb him as much as excite his curiosity. Estha was almost a complete stranger to Comrade Pillai. His expulsion from Ayemenem had been so sudden and unceremonious, and so very long ago. But Rahel Comrade Pillai knew well. He had watched her grow up. He wondered what had brought her back. After all these years.
It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat. The world, locked out for years, suddenly flooded in, and now Estha couldn’t hear himself for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The Stock Market. A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in a swirling. Comets, violins, parades, loneliness, clouds, beards, bigots, lists, flags, earthquakes, despair were all swept up in a scrambled swirling.
And Estha, walking on the riverbank, couldn’t feel the wetness of the rain, or the suddenshudder of the cold puppy that had temporarily adopted him and squelched at his side. He walked past the old mangosteen tree and up to the edge of a laterite spur that jutted out into the river. He squatted on his haunches and rocked himself in the rain. The wet mud under his shoes made rude, sucking sounds. The cold puppy shivered—and watched.
Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria, the vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook, were the only people left in the Ayemenem house when Estha was re-Returned. Mammachi, their grandmother, was dead. Chacko lived in Canada now, and ran an unsuccessful antiques business.
As for Rahel.
After Ammu died (after the last time she came back to Ayemenem, swollen with cortisone and a rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting), Rahel drifted. From school to school. She spent her holidays in Ayemenem, largely ignored by Chacko and Mammachi (grown soft with sorrow, slumped in their bereavement like a pair of drunks in a toddy bar) and largely ignoring Baby Kochamma. In matters related to the raising of Rahel, Chacko and Mammachi tried, but couldn’t. They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.
The Loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case. In the scabs of the sores on Chacko’s shins that he constantly worried. In his slack, womanish legs.
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky? The harbinger of harsh reality: You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one. The guru of gore: I’ve seen a man in an accident with his eyeball swinging on the end of a nerve, like a yo-yo) slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a Government job. It ushered Rahel through childhood (from school to school) into womanhood.
Rahel was first blacklisted in Nazareth Convent at the age of eleven, when she was caught outside her Housemistress’s garden gate decorating a knob of fresh cowdung with small flowers. At Assembly the next morning she was made to look up depravity in the Oxford Dictionary and read aloud its meaning. ‘The quality or condition of being depraved or corrupt,’ Rahel read, with a row of stern-mouthed nuns seated behind her and a sea of sniggering schoolgirl faces in front. ‘Perverted quality: Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non-elect come into the world in a state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J. H. Blunt.’
Six months later she was expelled after repeated complaints from senior girls. She was accused (quite rightly) of hiding behind doors and deliberately colliding with her seniors. When she was questioned by the Principal about her behaviour (cajoled, caned, starved), she eventually admitted that she had done it to find out whether breasts hurt. In that Christian institution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren’t supposed to exist, and if they didn’t could they hurt?
That was the first of three expulsions. The second for smoking. The third for setting fire to her Housemistress’s false hair bun which, under duress, Rahel confessed to having stolen.
In each of the schools she went to, the teachers noted that she:
(a) Was an extremely polite child.
(b) Had no friends.
It appeared to be a civil, solitary form of corruption. And for this very reason, they all agreed (savouring their teacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking it like a sweet)—all the more serious.
It was, they whispered to each other, as though she didn’t know how to be a girl.
They weren’t far off the mark.
Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.
Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon.
So as long as she wasn’t noisy about it, she remained free to make her own enquiries: into breasts and how much they hurt. Into false hair buns and how well they burned. Into life and how it ought to be lived.
When she finished school, she won admission into a mediocre college of Architecture in Delhi. It wasn’t the outcome of any serious interest in Architecture. Nor even, in fact, of a superficial one. She just happened to take the entrance exam, and happened to get through. The staff were impressed by the size (enormous), rather than the skill, of her charcoal still-life sketches. The careless, reckless lines were mistaken for artistic confidence, though in truth, their creator was no artist.
She spent eight years in college without finishing the five-year undergraduate course and taking her degree. The fees were low and it wasn’t hard to scratch out a living, staying in the hostel, eating in the subsidized student mess, rarely going to class, working instead as a draughtsman in gloomy architectural firms that exploited cheap student labour to render their presentation drawings and to blame when things went wrong. The other students, particularly the boys, were intimidated by Rahel’s waywardness and almost fierce lack of ambition. They left her alone. She was never invited to their nice homes or noisy parties. Even her professors were a little wary of her—her bizarre, impractical building plans, presented on cheap brown paper, her indifference to their passionate critiques.
She occasionally wrote to Chacko and Mammachi, but never returned to Ayemenem. Not when Mammachi died. Not when Chacko emigrated to Canada.
It was while she was at the School of Architecture that she met Larry McCaslin who was in Delhi collecting material for his doctoral thesis on Energy Efficiency in Vernacular Architecture. He first noticed Rahel in the School library and then again, a few days later, in Khan Market. She was in jeans and a white T-shirt. Part of an old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight though it wasn’t. A tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run.
There goes a jazz tune, Larry McCaslin thought to himself, and followed her into a bookshop where neither of them looked at books.
Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a Sitting Down sense. She returned with him to Boston.
When Larry held his wife in his arms, her cheek against his heart, he was tall enough to see the top of her head, the dark tumble of her hair. When he put his finger near the corner of her mouth he could feel a tiny pulse. He loved its location. And that faint, uncertain jumping, just under her skin. He would touch it, listening with his eyes, like an expectant father feeling his unborn baby kick inside its mother’s womb.
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passer-by in the mist in a hat.
He was exasperated because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel’s eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha’s words had been. He couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.
After they were divorced, Rahel worked for a few months as a waitress in an Indian restaurant in New York. And then for several years as a night clerk in a bullet-proof cabin at a gas station outside Washington, where drunks occasionally vomited into the money tray, and pimps propositioned her with more lucrative job offers. Twice she saw men being shot through their car windows. And once a man who had been stabbed, ejected from a moving car with a knife in his back.
Then Baby Kochamma wrote to say that Estha had been re-Returned. Rahel gave up her job at the gas station and left America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain.
In the old house on the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the dining table rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. She was wearing a limp, checked, seersucker nightgown with puffed sleeves and yellow turmeric stains. Under the table she swung her tiny, manicured feet, like a small child on a high chair. They were puffy with oedema, like little foot-shaped air cushions. In the old days whenever anybody visited Ayemenem, Baby Kochamma made it a point to call attention to their large feet. She would ask to try on their slippers and say, ‘Look how big for me they are!’ Then she would walk around the house in them, lifting her sari a little so that everybody could marvel at her tiny feet.
She worked on the cucumber with an air of barely concealed triumph. She was delighted that Estha had not spoken to Rahel. That he had looked at her and walked straight past. Into the rain. As he did with everyone else.
She was eighty-three. Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses.
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ she said to Rahel. ‘What did you expect? Special treatment? He’s lost his mind, I’m telling you! He doesn’t recognize people any more! What did you think?’
Rahel said nothing.
She could feel the rhythm of Estha’s rocking, and the wetness of rain on his skin. She could hear the raucous, scrambled world inside his head.
Baby Kochamma looked up at Rahel uneasily. Already she regretted having written to her about Estha’s return. But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the rest of her life? Why should she? He wasn’t her responsibility.
Or was he?
The silence sat between grand-niece and baby grand aunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious. Baby Kochamma reminded herself to lock her bedroom door at night. She tried to think of something to say.
‘How d’you like my bob?’
With her cucumber hand she touched her new haircut. She left a riveting bitter blob of cucumber froth behind.
Rahel could think of nothing to say. She watched Baby Kochamma peel her cucumber. Yellow slivers of cucumber skin flecked her bosom. Her hair, dyed jetblack, was arranged across her scalp like unspooled thread. The dye had stained the skin of her forehead a pale grey, giving her a shadowy second hairline. Rahel noticed that she had started wearing makeup. Lipstick. Kohl. A sly touch of rouge. And because the house was locked and dark, and because she only believed in 40-watt bulbs, her lipstick mouth had shifted slightly off her real mouth.
She had lost weight on her face and shoulders, which had turned her from being a round person into a conical person. But sitting at the dining table with her enormous hips concealed, she managed to look almost fragile. The dim, dining-room light had rubbed the wrinkles off her face leaving it looking—in a strange, sunken way—younger. She was wearing a lot of jewellery. Rahel’s dead grandmother’s jewellery. All of it. Winking rings. Diamond earrings. Gold bangles and a beautifully crafted flat gold chain that she touched from time to time reassuring herself that it was there and that it was hers. Like a young bride who couldn’t believe her good fortune.
She’s living her life backwards, Rahel thought.
It was a curiously apt observation. Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards. As a young woman she had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it. She hugged it and it hugged her back.
When she was eighteen, Baby Kochamma fell in love with a handsome young Irish monk, Father Mulligan, who was in Kerala for a year on deputation from his seminary in Madras. He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.
Every Thursday morning Father Mulligan came to Ayemenem to visit Baby Kochamma’s father, Reverend E. John Ipe, who was a priest of the Mar Thoma church. Reverend Ipe was well known in the Christian community as the man who had been blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of the Syrian Christian Church—an episode which had become part of Ayemenem’s folklore.
In 1876, when Baby Kochamma’s father was seven years old, his father had taken him to see the Patriarch who was visiting the Syrian Christians of Kerala. They found themselves right in front of a group of people whom the Patriarch was addressing in the westernmost verandah of the Kalleny house, in Cochin. Seizing his opportunity, his father whispered in his young son’s ear and propelled the little fellow forward. The future Reverend, skidding on his heels, rigid with fear, applied his terrified lips to the ring on the Patriarch’s middle finger, leaving it wet with spit. The patriarch wiped his ring on his sleeve, and blessed the little boy. Long after he grew up and became a priest, Reverend Ipe continued to be known as Punnyan Kunju—Little Blessed One—and people came down the river in boats all the way from Alleppey and Ernakulam, with children to be blessed by him.
Though there was a considerable age difference between Father Mulligan and Reverend Ipe, and though they belonged to different denominations of the Church (whose only common sentiment was their mutual disaffection), both men enjoyed each other’s company, and more often than not, Father Mulligan would be invited to stay for lunch. Of the two men, only one recognized the sexual excitement that rose like a tide in the slender girl who hovered around the table long after lunch had been cleared away.
At first Baby Kochamma tried to seduce Father Mulligan with weekly exhibitions of staged charity. Every Thursday morning, just when Father Mulligan was due to arrive, Baby Kochamma force-bathed a poor village child at the well with hard red soap that hurt its protruding ribs.
‘Morning, Father!’ Baby Kochamma would call out when she saw him, with a smile on her lips that completely belied the vice-like grip that she had on the thin child’s soapslippery arm.
‘Morning to you, Baby!’ Father Mulligan would say, stopping and folding his umbrella.
‘There’s something I wanted to ask you, Father,’ Baby Kochamma would say. ‘In First Corinthians, chapter ten, verse twenty-three, it says … “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient”. Father, how can all things be lawful unto Him? I mean I can understand if some things are lawful for Him, but—’
Father Mulligan was more than merely flattered by the emotion he aroused in the attractive young girl who stood before him with a trembling, kissable mouth and blazing, coal-black eyes. For he was young too, and perhaps not wholly unaware that the solemn explanations with which he dispelled her bogus biblical doubts were completely at odds with the thrilling promise he held out in his effulgent emerald eyes.
Every Thursday, undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would stand there by the well. The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.
Invariably, in the middle of their conversation, the unfortunate soapy child that was being force-bathed would manage to slip away, and Father Mulligan would snap back to his senses and say, ‘Oops! We’d better catch him before a cold does.’
Then he would reopen his umbrella and walk away in chocolate robes and comfortable sandals, like a high-stepping camel with an appointment to keep. He had young Baby Kochamma’s aching heart on a leash, bumping behind him, lurching over leaves and small stones. Bruised and almost broken.
A whole year of Thursdays went by. Eventually the time came for Father Mulligan to return to Madras. Since charity had not produced any tangible results, the distraught young Baby Kochamma invested all her hope in faith.
Displaying a stubborn single-mindedness (which in a young girl in those days was considered as bad as a physical deformity—a harelip perhaps, or a club foot), Baby Kochamma defied her father’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic. With special dispensation from the Vatican, she took her vows and entered a convent in Madras as a trainee novice. She hoped somehow that this would provide her with legitimate occasion to be with Father Mulligan. She pictured them together, in dark sepulchral rooms with heavy velvet drapes, discussing Theology. That was all she wanted. All she ever dared to hope for. Just to be near him. Close enough to smell his beard. To see the coarse weave of his cassock. To love him just by looking at him.
Very quickly she realized the futility of this endeavour. She found that the Senior Sisters monopolized the priests and bishops with biblical doubts more sophisticated than hers would ever be, and that it might be years before she got anywhere near Father Mulligan. She grew restless and unhappy in the convent. She developed a stubborn allergic rash on her scalp from the constant chafing of her wimple. She felt she spoke much better English than everybody else. This made her lonelier than ever.
Within a year of her joining the convent, her father began to receive puzzling letters from her in the mail. My dearest Papa, I am well and happy in the service of Our Lady. But Koh-i-noor appears to be unhappy and homesick. My dearest Papa, Today Koh-i-noor vomited after lunch and is running a temperature. My dearest Papa, Convent food does not seem to suit Koh-i-noor, though I like it well enough. My dearest Papa, Koh-i-noor is upset because her family seems to neither understand nor care about her wellbeing…
Other than the fact that it was (at the time) the name of the world’s biggest diamond, Reverend E. John Ipe knew of no other Koh-i-noor. He wondered how a girl with a Muslim name had ended up in a Catholic Convent.
It was Baby Kochamma’s mother who eventually realized that Koh-i-noor was none other than Baby Kochamma herself. She remembered that long ago she had shown Baby Kochamma a copy of her father’s (Baby Kochamma’s grandfather’s) will in which, describing his grandchildren he had written: I have seven jewels one of which is my Koh-i-noor. He went on to bequeath little bits of money and jewellery to each of them, never clarifying which one he considered his Koh-i-noor. Baby Kochamma’s mother realized that Baby Kochamma, for no reason that she could think of, had assumed that he had meant her—and all those years later at the convent, knowing that all her letters were read by the Mother Superior before they were posted, had resurrected Koh-i-noor to communicate her troubles to her family.
Reverend Ipe went to Madras and withdrew his daughter from the convent. She was glad to leave, but insisted that she would not reconvert, and for the rest of her days remained a Roman Catholic. Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had by now developed a ‘reputation’ and was unlikely to find a husband. He decided that since she couldn’t have a husband there was no harm in her having an education. So he made arrangements for her to attend a course of study at the University of Rochester in America.
Two years later, Baby Kochamma returned from Rochester with a diploma in Ornamental Gardening, but more in love with Father Mulligan than ever. There was no trace of the slim, attractive girl that she had been. In her years at Rochester, Baby Kochamma had grown extremely large. In fact, let it be said, obese. Even timid little Chellappen Tailor at Chungam Bridge insisted on charging bush-shirt rates for her sari blouses.
To keep her from brooding, her father gave Baby Kochamma charge of the front garden of the Ayemenem House, where she raised a fierce, bitter garden that people came all the way from Kottayam to see.
It was a circular, sloping patch of ground, with a steep gravel driveway looping around it. Baby Kochamma turned it into a lush maze of dwarf hedges, rocks and gargoyles. The flower she loved the most was the anthurium. Anthurium andraeanum. She had a collection of them, the ‘Rubrum’, the ‘Honeymoon’ and a host of Japanese varieties. Their single succulent spathes ranged from shades of mottled black to blood red and glistening orange. Their prominent, stippled spadices always yellow. In the centre of Baby Kochamma’s garden, surrounded by beds of canna and phlox, a marble cherub peed an endless silver arc into a shallow pool in which a single blue lotus bloomed. At each corner of the pool lolled a pink plaster-of-Paris gnome with rosy cheeks and a peaked red cap.
Baby Kochamma spent her afternoons in her garden. In sari and gumboots. She wielded an enormous pair of hedge shears in her bright orange gardening gloves. Like a lion-tamer she tamed twisting vines and nurtured bristling cacti. She limited bonsai plants and pampered rare orchids. She waged war on the weather. She tried to grow edelweiss and chinese guava.
Every night she creamed her feet with real cream and pushed back the cuticles on her toe-nails.
Recently, after enduring more than half a century of relentless, pernickety attention, the ornamental garden had been abandoned. Left to its own devices, it had grown knotted and wild, like a circus whose animals had forgotten their tricks. The weed that people call communist patcha (because it flourished in Kerala like communism) smothered the more exotic plants. Only the vines kept growing, like toe-nails on a corpse. They reached through the nostrils of the pink plaster gnomes and blossomed in their hollow heads, giving them an expression half surprised, half sneeze-coming.
The reason for this sudden, unceremonious dumping was a new love. Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the World in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’état—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments. On weekdays she watched The Bold and The Beautiful and Santa Barbara, where brittle blondes with lipstick and hairstyles rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. Baby Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart, bitchy repartee. During the day disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle.
Kochu Maria, the cook, still wore the thick gold earrings that had disfigured her earlobes for ever. She enjoyed the WWF Wrestling Mania shows, where Hulk Hogan and Mr Perfect, whose necks were wider than their heads, wore spangled Lycra leggings and beat each other up brutally. Kochu Maria’s laugh had that slightly cruel ring to it that young children’s sometimes have.
All day they sat in the drawing room, Baby Kochamma on the long-armed planter’s chair or the chaise longue (depending on the condition of her feet), Kochu Maria next to her on the floor (channel surfing when she could), locked together in a noisy Television silence. One’s hair snow white, the other’s dyed coal black. They entered all the contests, availed themselves of all the discounts that were advertised and had, on two occasions, won a T-shirt and a Thermos flask that Baby Kochamma kept locked away in her cupboard.
Baby Kochamma loved the Ayemenem house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else. Mammachi’s violin and violin stand, the Ooty cupboards, the plastic basket chairs, the Delhi beds, the dressing table from Vienna with cracked ivory knobs. The rosewood dining table that Velutha made.
She was frightened by the BBC famines and Television wars that she encountered while she channel surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them. She used her windows for specific purposes. For a Breath of Fresh Air. To Pay for the Milk. To Let Out a Trapped Wasp (which Kochu Maria was made to chase around the house with a towel).
She even locked her sad, paint-flaking fridge where she kept her week’s supply of cream buns that Kochu Maria brought her from Bestbakery in Kottayam. And the two bottles of rice-water that she drank instead of ordinary water. In the shelf below the baffle tray, she kept what was left of Mammachi’s willow-pattern dinner service.
She put the dozen or so bottles of insulin that Rahel brought her in the cheese and butter compartment. She suspected that these days, even the innocent and the round-eyed could be crockery crooks, or cream-bun cravers, or thieving diabetics cruising Ayemenem for imported insulin.
She didn’t even trust the twins. She deemed them Capable of Anything. Anything at all. They might even steal their present back, she thought, and realized with a pang how quickly she had reverted to thinking of them as though they were a single unit once again. After all those years. Determined not to let the past creep up on her she altered her thought at once. She. She might steal her present back.
She looked at Rahel standing at the dining table and noticed the same eerie stealth, the ability to keep very still and very quiet that Estha seemed to have mastered. Baby Kochamma was a little intimidated by Rahel’s quietness.
‘So!’ she said. Her voice shrill, faltering. ‘What are your plans? How long will you be staying? Have you decided?’
Rahel tried to say something. It came out jagged. Like a piece of tin. She walked to the window and opened it. For a Breath of Fresh Air.
‘Shut it when you’ve finished with it,’ Baby Kochamma said, and closed her face like a cupboard.
You couldn’t see the river from the window any more.
You could, until Mammachi had had the back verandah closed in with Ayemenem’s first sliding-folding door. The oil portraits of Reverend E. John Ipe and Aleyooty Ammachi (Estha and Rahel’s great-grandparents), were taken down from the back verandah and put up in the front one.
They hung there now, the Little Blessed One and his wife, on either side of the stuffed, mounted bison head.
Reverend Ipe smiled his confident-ancestor smile out across the road instead of the river.
Aleyooty Ammachi looked more hesitant. As though she would have liked to turn around but couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t as easy for her to abandon the river. With her eyes she looked in the direction that her husband looked. With her heart she looked away. Her heavy, dull gold kunukku earrings (tokens of the Little Blessed One’s Goodness) had stretched her earlobes and hung all the way down to her shoulders. Through the holes in her ears you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent into it. And the fishermen in their boats. And the fish.
Though you couldn’t see the river from the house any more, like a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem house still had a river-sense.
A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense.
From the dining-room window where she stood, with the wind in her hair, Rahel could see the rain drum down on the rusted tin roof of what used to be their grandmother’s pickle factory.
Paradise Pickles & Preserves.
It lay between the house and the river.
They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said.
As per their books.
Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question.
Perhaps, Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
Even before Sophie Mol’s funeral, the police found Velutha.
His arms had goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin. Cold handcuffs with a sourmetal smell. Like steel bus rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them.
After it was all over, Baby Kochamma said, ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap.’ As though she had had nothing to do with the Sowing and the Reaping. She returned on her small feet to her cross-stitch embroidery. Her little toes never touched the floor. It was her idea that Estha be Returned.
Margaret Kochamma’s grief and bitterness at her daughter’s death coiled inside her like an angry spring. She said nothing, but slapped Estha whenever she could in the days she was there before she returned to England.
Rahel watched Ammu pack Estha’s little trunk.
‘Maybe they’re right,’ Ammu’s whisper said. ‘Maybe a boy does need a Baba.’
Rahel saw that her eyes were a redly dead.
They consulted a Twin Expert in Hyderabad. She wrote back to say that it was not advisable to separate monozygotic twins, but that two-egg twins were no different from ordinary siblings and that while they would certainly suffer the natural distress that children from broken homes underwent, it would be nothing more than that. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And so Estha was Returned in a train with his tin trunk and his beige and pointy shoes rolled into his khaki holdall. First class, overnight on the Madras Mail to Madras and then with a friend of their father’s from Madras to Calcutta.
He had a tiffin carrier with tomato sandwiches. And an Eagle flask with an eagle. He had terrible pictures in his head.
Rain. Rushing, inky water. And a smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
But worst of all, he carried inside him the memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile. Of a spreading pool of clear liquid with a bare bulb reflected in it. Of a bloodshot eye that had opened, wandered and then fixed its gaze on him. Estha. And what had Estha done? He had looked into that beloved face and said: Yes.
Yes, it was him.
The word Estha’s octopus couldn’t get at: Yes. Hoovering didn’t seem to help. It was lodged there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars. That couldn’t be worried loose.
In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.
Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.



HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world…

2 Pappachi’s Moth (#)
…it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.
A skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice-fields and old rubber trees, on its way to Cochin. Further east, in a small country with similar landscape (jungles, rivers, rice-fields, communists), enough bombs were being dropped to cover all of it in six inches of steel. Here, however, it was peacetime and the family in the Plymouth travelled without fear or foreboding.
The Plymouth used to belong to Pappachi, Rahel and Estha’s grandfather. Now that he was dead, it belonged to Mammachi, their grandmother, and Rahel and Estha were on their way to Cochin to see The Sound of Music for the third time. They knew all the songs.
After that they were all going to stay at Hotel Sea Queen with the oldfood smell. Bookings had been made. Early next morning they would go to Cochin Airport to pick up Chacko’s ex-wife—their English aunt, Margaret Kochamma—and their cousin, Sophie Mol, who were coming from London to spend Christmas at Ayemenem. Earlier that year, Margaret Kochamma’s second husband, Joe, had been killed in a car accident. When Chacko heard about the accident he invited them to Ayemenem. He said that he couldn’t bear to think of them spending a lonely, desolate Christmas in England. In a house full of memories.
Ammu said that Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place.
Rahel and Estha had never met Sophie Mol. They’d heard a lot about her, though, that last week. From Baby Kochamma, from Kochu Maria, and even Mammachi. None of them had met her either, but they all behaved as though they already knew her. It had been the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week.
That whole week Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations, and whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted at source. From their pocket money. She made them write lines—‘impositions’ she called them—I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English. A hundred times each. When they were done, she scored them out with her red pen to make sure that old lines were not recycled for new punishments.
She had made them practise an English car song for the way back. They had to form the words properly, and be particularly careful about their pronunciation. Prer NUN sea ayshun.
Rej-Oice in the Lo-Ord Or-Orlways And again I say rej-Oice, RejOice, RejOice, And again I say rej-Oice.
Estha’s full name was Esthappen Yako. Rahel’s was Rahel. For the Time Being they had no surname because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.
Estha was wearing his beige and pointy shoes and his Elvis puff. His Special Outing Puff. His favourite Elvis song was ‘Party’. ‘Some people like to rock, some people like to roll,’ he would croon, when nobody was watching, strumming a badminton racquet, curling his lip like Elvis. ‘But moonin’ an’ a-groonin’ gonna satisfy mah soul, less have a pardy…’
Estha had slanting, sleepy eyes and his new front teeth were still uneven on the ends. Rahel’s new teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen. It puzzled everybody that an eighteen-minute age difference could cause such a discrepancy in front-tooth timing.
Most of Rahel’s hair sat on top of her head like a fountain. It was held together by a Love-in-Tokyo—two beads on a rubber band, nothing to do with Love or Tokyo. In Kerala Love-in-Tokyos have withstood the test of time, and even today if you were to ask for one at any respectable A-I Ladies’ Store, that’s what you’d get. Two beads on a rubber band.
Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place). Her yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses made the world look red. Ammu said that they were bad for her eyes and had advised her to wear them as seldom as possible.
Her Airport Frock was in Ammu’s suitcase. It had special matching knickers.
Chacko was driving. He was four years older than Ammu. Rahel and Estha couldn’t call him Chachen because when they did, he called them Chetan and Cheduthi. If they called him Ammaven he called them Appoi and Ammai. If they called him Uncle he called them Aunty, which was embarrassing in Public. So they called him Chacko.
Chacko’s room was stacked from floor to ceiling with books. He had read them all and quoted long passages from them for no apparent reason. Or at least none that anyone else could fathom. For instance, that morning, as they drove out through the gate, shouting their goodbyes to Mammachi in the verandah, Chacko suddenly said: ‘Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.’
Everyone was so used to it that they didn’t bother to nudge each other or exchange glances. Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was.
He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.
Of course that was then. Before the Terror.
In the Plymouth, Ammu was sitting in front, next to Chacko. She was twenty-seven that year, and in the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that for her, life had been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong man.
Ammu finished her schooling the same year that her father retired from his job in Delhi and moved to Ayemenem. Pappa-chi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl, so Ammu had no choice but to leave Delhi and move with them. There was very little for a young girl to do in Ayemenem other than to wait for marriage proposals while she helped her mother with the housework. Since her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry, no proposals came Ammu’s way. Two years went by. Her eighteenth birthday came and went. Unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon by her parents. Ammu grew desperate. All day she dreamed of escaping from Ayemenem and the clutches of her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother. She hatched several wretched little plans. Eventually, one worked. Pappachi agreed to let her spend the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta.
There, at someone else’s wedding reception, Ammu met her future husband.
He was on vacation from his job in Assam where he worked as an assistant manager of a tea estate. His family were once-wealthy zamindars who had migrated to Calcutta from East Bengal after Partition.
He was a small man, but well-built. Pleasant-looking. He wore old-fashioned spectacles that made him look earnest and completely belied his easy-going charm and juvenile but totally disarming sense of humour. He was twenty-five and had already been working on the tea estates for six years. He hadn’t been to college, which accounted for his schoolboy humour. He proposed to Ammu five days after they first met. Ammu didn’t pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem. She wrote to her parents informing them of her decision. They didn’t reply.
Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat.
Ammu’s father-in-law was Chairman of the Railway Board and had a Boxing Blue from Cambridge. He was the Secretary of the BABA—the Bengal Amateur Boxing Association. He gave the young couple a custom-painted, powder-pink Fiat as a present which after the wedding he drove off in himself, with all the jewellery and most of the other presents that they had been given. He died before the twins were born—on the operating table while his gall bladder was being removed. His cremation was attended by all the boxers in Bengal. A congregation of mourners with lantern jaws and broken noses.
When Ammu and her husband moved to Assam, Ammu, beautiful, young and cheeky, became the toast of the Planters’ Club. She wore backless blouses with her saris and carried a silver lamé purse on a chain. She smoked long cigarettes in a silver cigarette holder and learned to blow perfect smoke rings. Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown alcoholic with all of an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm. There were things about him that Ammu never understood. Long after she left him, she never stopped wondering why he lied so outrageously when he didn’t need to. Particularly when he didn’t need to. In a conversation with friends he would talk about how much he loved smoked salmon when Ammu knew he hated it. Or he would come home from the club and tell Ammu that he saw Meet Me in St Louis when they’d actually screened The Bronze Buckaroo. When she confronted him about these things, he never explained or apologized. He just giggled, exasperating Ammu to a degree she never thought herself capable of.
Ammu was eight months pregnant when war broke out with China. It was October of 1962. Planters’ wives and children were evacuated from Assam. Ammu, too pregnant to travel, remained on the estate. In November, after a hair-raising, bumpy bus ride to Shillong, amidst rumours of Chinese occupation and India’s impending defeat, Estha and Rahel were born. By candlelight. In a hospital with the windows blacked out. They emerged without much fuss, within eighteen minutes of each other. Two little ones, instead of one big one. Twin seals, slick with their mother’s juices. Wrinkled with the effort of being born. Ammu checked them for deformities before she closed her eyes and slept.
She counted four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses, twenty fingers and twenty perfect toe-nails.
She didn’t notice the single Siamese soul. She was glad to have them. Their father, stretched out on a hard bench in the hospital corridor, was drunk.
By the time the twins were two years old their father’s drinking, aggravated by the loneliness of tea estate life, had driven him into an alcoholic stupor. Whole days went by during which he just lay in bed and didn’t go to work. Eventually, his English manager, Mr Hollick, summoned him to his bungalow for a ‘serious chat’.
Ammu sat in the verandah of her home waiting anxiously for her husband to return. She was sure the only reason that Hollick wanted to see him was to sack him. She was surprised when he returned looking despondent but not devastated. Mr Hollick had proposed something, he told Ammu, that he needed to discuss with her. He began a little diffidently, avoiding her gaze, but he gathered courage as he went along. Viewed practically, in the long run it was a proposition that would benefit both of them, he said. In fact all of them, if they considered the children’s education.
Mr Hollick had been frank with his young assistant. He informed him of the complaints he had received from the labour as well as from the other assistant managers.
‘I’m afraid I have no option,’ he said, ‘but to ask for your resignation.’
He allowed the silence to take its toll. He allowed the pitiful man sitting across the table to begin to shake. To weep. Then Hollick spoke again.
‘Well, actually there may be an option … perhaps we could work something out. Think positive, is what I always say. Count your blessings.’ Hollick paused to order a pot of black coffee. ‘You’re a very lucky man, you know, wonderful family, beautiful children, such an attractive wife…’ He lit a cigarette and allowed the match to burn until he couldn’t hold it any more. ‘An extremely attractive wife…’
The weeping stopped. Puzzled brown eyes looked into lurid, red-veined, green ones. Over coffee, Mr Hollick proposed that Baba go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be ‘looked after’.
Already there were a number of ragged, lightskinned children on the estate that Hollick had bequeathed on tea-pickers whom he fancied. This was his first incursion into management circles.
Ammu watched her husband’s mouth move as it formed words. She said nothing. He grew uncomfortable and then infuriated by her silence. Suddenly he lunged at her, grabbed her hair, punched her and then passed out from the effort. Ammu took down the heaviest book she could find in the bookshelf—The Reader’s Digest World Atlas—and hit him with it as hard as she could. On his head. His legs. His back and shoulders. When he regained consciousness, he was puzzled by his bruises. He apologized abjectly for the violence, but immediately began to badger her about helping with his transfer. This fell into a pattern. Drunken violence followed by post-drunken badgering. Ammu was repelled by the medicinal smell of stale alcohol that seeped through his skin, and the dry, caked vomit that encrusted his mouth like a pie every morning. When his bouts of violence began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem. To everything that she had fled from only a few years ago. Except that now she had two young children. And no more dreams.
Pappachi would not believe her story—not because he thought well of her husband, but simply because he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife.
Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability, and their willingness to love people who didn’t really love them, exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them—just as an education, a protection.
It was as though the window through which their father disappeared had been kept open for anyone to walk in and be welcomed.
To Ammu her twins seemed like a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other’s company, lolloping arm in arm down a highway full of hurtling traffic. Entirely oblivious of what trucks can do to frogs. Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offence on their behalf.
For herself she knew that there would be no more chances. There was only Ayemenem now. A front verandah and a back verandah. A hot river and a pickle factory.
And in the background, the constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval.
Within the first few months of her return to her parents’ home, Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy. Old female relations with incipient beards and several wobbling chins made overnight trips to Ayemenem to commiserate with her about her divorce. They squeezed her knee and gloated. She fought off the urge to slap them. Or twiddle their nipples. With a spanner. Like Chaplin in Modern Times.
When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eyebrows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory—not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing firewood.
She went to the village goldsmith and had her heavy wedding ring melted down and made into a thin bangle with snakeheads that she put away for Rahel.
Ammu knew that weddings were not something that could be avoided altogether. At least not practically speaking. But for the rest of her life she advocated small weddings in ordinary clothes. It made them less ghoulish, she thought.
Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this, there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorceehood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. To use by night the boat that her children used by day. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found.
On the days that the radio played Ammu’s songs, everyone was a little wary of her. They sensed somehow that she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu’s songs, people avoided her, made little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.
On other days she had deep dimples when she smiled.
She had a delicate, chiselled face, black eyebrows angled like a soaring seagull’s wings, a small straight nose and luminous nutbrown skin. On that skyblue December day, her wild, curly hair had escaped in wisps in the car wind. Her shoulders in her sleeveless sari blouse shone as though they had been polished with a high-wax shoulder polish. Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn’t.
On the back seat of the Plymouth, between Estha and Rahel, sat Baby Kochamma. Ex-nun, and incumbent baby grand aunt. In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate, Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered them doomed, fatherless waifs. Worse still, they were Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry. She was keen for them to realize that they (like herself) lived on sufferance in the Ayemenem House, their maternal grandmother’s house, where they really had no right to be. Baby Kochamma resented Ammu, because she saw her quarrelling with a fate that she, Baby Kochamma herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched Man-less woman. The sad, Father Mulligan-less Baby Kochamma. She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing.
She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter—according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.
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. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least.
On the way back from the airport, Margaret Kochamma would sit in front with Chacko because she used to be his wife. Sophie Mol would sit between them. Ammu would move to the back.
There would be two flasks of water. Boiled water for Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol, tap water for everybody else.
The luggage would be in the boot.
Rahel thought that boot was a lovely word. A much better word, at any rate, than sturdy. Sturdy was a terrible word. Like a dwarf’s name. Sturdy Koshy Oommen—a pleasant, middle-class, God-fearing dwarf with low knees and a side parting.
On the Plymouth roof rack there was a four-sided tin-lined, plywood billboard that said, on all four sides, in elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves. Below the writing there were painted bottles of mixed-fruit jam and hot-lime pickle in edible oil, with labels that said, in elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves. Next to the bottles there was a list of all the Paradise products and a kathakali dancer with his face green and skirts swirling. Along the bottom of the S-shaped swirl of his billowing skirt, it said, in an S-shaped swirl, Emperors of the Realm of Taste—which was Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s unsolicited contribution. It was a literal translation of Ruchi lokathinde Rajavu, which sounded a little less ludicrous than Emperors of the Realm of Taste. But since Comrade Pillai had already printed them, no one had the heart to ask him to re-do the whole print order. So, unhappily, Emperors of the Realm of Taste became a permanent feature on the Paradise Pickle labels.
Ammu said that the kathakali dancer was a Red Herring and had nothing to do with anything. Chacko said that it gave the products a Regional Flavour and would stand them in good stead when they entered the Overseas Market.
Ammu said that the billboard made them look ridiculous. Like a travelling circus. With tailfins.
Mammachi had started making pickles commercially soon after Pappachi retired from Government service in Delhi and came to live in Ayemenem. The Kottayam Bible Society was having a fair and asked Mammachi to make some of her famous banana jam and tender mango pickle. It sold quickly, and Mammachi found that she had more orders than she could cope with. Thrilled with her success, she decided to persist with the pickles and jam, and soon found herself busy all year round. Pappachi, for his part, was having trouble coping with the ignominy of retirement. He was seventeen years older than Mammachi, and realized with a shock that he was an old man when his wife was still in her prime.
Though Mammachi had conical corneas and was already practically blind, Pappachi would not help her with the pickle-making, because he did not consider pickle-making a suitable job for a high-ranking ex-Government official. He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting. He slouched around the compound in his immaculately tailored suits, weaving sullen circles around mounds of red chillies and freshly powdered yellow turmeric, watching Mammachi supervise the buying, the weighing, the salting and drying, of limes and tender mangoes. Every night he beat her with a brass flower vase. The beatings weren’t new. What was new was only the frequency with which they took place. One night Pappachi broke the bow of Mammachi’s violin and threw it in the river.
Then Chacko came home for a summer vacation from Oxford. He had grown to be a big man, and was, in those days, strong from rowing for Balliol. A week after he arrived he found Pappachi beating Mammachi in the study. Chacko strode into the room, caught Pappachi’s vase-hand and twisted it around his back.
‘I never want this to happen again,’ he told his father. ‘Ever.’
For the rest of that day Pappachi sat in the verandah and stared stonily out at the ornamental garden, ignoring the plates of food that Kochu Maria brought him. Late at night he went into his study and brought out his favourite mahogany rocking chair. He put it down in the middle of the driveway and smashed it into little bits with a plumber’s monkey wrench. He left it there in the moonlight, a heap of varnished wicker and splintered wood. He never touched Mammachi again. But he never spoke to her either as long as he lived. When he needed anything he used Kochu Maria or Baby Kochamma as intermediaries.
In the evenings, when he knew visitors were expected, he would sit on the verandah and sew buttons that weren’t missing onto his shirts, to create the impression that Mammachi neglected him. To some small degree he did succeed in further corroding Ayemenem’s view of working wives.
He bought the skyblue Plymouth from an old Englishman in Munnar. He became a familiar sight in Ayemenem, coasting importantly down the narrow road in his wide car, looking outwardly elegant but sweating freely inside his woollen suits. He wouldn’t allow Mammachi or anyone else in the family to use it, or even to sit in it. The Plymouth was Pappachi’s revenge.
Pappachi had been an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute. After Independence, when the British left, his designation was changed from Imperial Entomologist to Joint Director, Entomology. The year he retired, he had risen to a rank equivalent to Director.
His life’s greatest setback was not having had the moth that he had discovered named after him.
It fell into his drink one evening while he was sitting in the verandah of a rest house after a long day in the field. As he picked it out he noticed its unusually dense dorsal tufts. He took a closer look. With growing excitement he mounted it, measured it and the next morning placed it in the sun for a few hours for the alcohol to evaporate. Then he caught the first train back to Delhi. To taxonomic attention and, he hoped, fame. After six unbearable months of anxiety, to Pappachi’s intense disappointment he was told that his moth had finally been identified as a slightly unusual race of a well-known species that belonged to the tropical family Lymantriidae.
The real blow came twelve years later, when, as a consequence of a radical taxonomic reshuffle, lepidopterists decided that Pappachi’s moth was in fact a separate species and genus hitherto unknown to science. By then, of course, Pappachi had retired and moved to Ayemenem. It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.
In the years to come, even though he had been ill-humoured long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost—grey, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts—haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children.
Until the day he died, even in the stifling Ayemenem heat, every single day, Pappachi wore a well-pressed three-piece suit and his gold pocket watch. On his dressing table, next to his cologne and silver hairbrush, he kept a picture of himself as a young man, with his hair slicked down, taken in a photographer’s studio in Vienna where he had done the six-month diploma course that had qualified him to apply for the post of Imperial Entomologist. It was during those few months they spent in Vienna that Mammachi took her first lessons on the violin. The lessons were abruptly discontinued when Mammachi’s teacher, Launsky-Tieffenthal, made the mistake of telling Pappachi that his wife was exceptionally talented and, in his opinion, potentially concert class.
Mammachi pasted, in the family photograph album, the clipping from the Indian Express that reported Pappachi’s death. It said:
Noted entomologist, Shri Benaan John Ipe, son of late Rev. E. John Ipe of Ayemenem (popularly known as Punnyan Kunju), suffered a massive heart attack and passed away at the Kottayam General Hospital last night. He developed chest pains around 1.05 a.m. and was rushed to hospital. The end came at 2.45 a.m. Shri Ipe had been keeping indifferent health since last six months. He is survived by his wife Soshamma and two children.
At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them.
After the funeral Mammachi asked Rahel to help her to locate and remove her contact lenses with the little orange pipette that came in its own case. Rahel asked Mammachi whether, after Mammachi died, she could inherit the pipette. Ammu took her out of the room and smacked her.
‘i never want to hear you discussing people’s deaths with them again,’ she said.
Estha said Rahel deserved it for being so insensitive.
The photograph of Pappachi in Vienna, with his hair slicked down, was reframed and put up in the drawing room.
He was a photogenic man, dapper and carefully groomed, with a little man’s largeish head. He had an incipient second chin that would have been emphasized had he looked down or nodded. In the photograph he had taken care to hold his head high enough to hide his double chin, yet not so high as to appear haughty. His light brown eyes were polite, yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the centre of his upper lip that dropped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout—the kind that children who suck their thumbs develop. He had an elongated dimple on his chin which only served to underline the threat of a lurking manic violence. A sort of contained cruelty. He wore khaki jodhpurs though he had never ridden a horse in his life. His riding boots reflected the photographer’s studio lights. An ivory-handled riding crop lay neatly across his lap.
There was a watchful stillness to the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in which it hung.
When he died, Pappachi left trunks full of expensive suits and a chocolate tin full of cuff-links that Chacko distributed among the taxi drivers in Kottayam. They were separated and made into rings and pendants for unmarried daughters’ dowries.
When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—‘To link cuffs together,’ Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = Cuff-link. This, to them, rivalled the precision and logic of mathematics. Cliff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said Person well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up disposed.
It said:

(1) Place suitably in particular order.
(2) Bring mind into certain state.
(3) Do what one will with, get off one’s hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell.
Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English.
Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. 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.’
Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native’. Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school. After the suicide, the property had become the subject of extensive litigation between Kari Saipu’s cook and his secretary. The house had lain empty for years. Very few people had seen it. But the twins could picture it.
The History House.
With cool stone floors and dim walls and billowing ship-shaped shadows. Plump, translucent lizards lived behind old pictures, and waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers.
‘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.’
‘Marry our conquerors, is more like it,’ Ammu said drily, referring to Margaret Kochamma. Chacko ignored her. He made the twins look up Despise. It said: To look down upon; to view with contempt; to scorn or disdain.
Chacko said that in the context of the war he was talking about—the War of Dreams—Despise meant all those things.
‘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.’
Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of historical perspective (though perspective was something which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman—as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
‘The whole of human civilization as we know it,’ Chacko told the twins, ‘began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin.’
It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world), that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.
‘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.
When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.
Later, in the light of all that happened, twinkle seemed completely the wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.
Though the Earth Woman made a lasting impression on the twins, it was the History House—so much closer at hand—that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on the other side of the river.
Looming in the Heart of Darkness.
A house they couldn’t enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand.
They didn’t know then, that soon they would go in. That they would cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah.
While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.
Like old roses on a breeze.
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.
Chacko said that going to see The Sound of Music was an extended exercise in Anglophilia.
Ammu said, Oh come on, the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music. It’s a World Hit.’
‘Nevertheless, my dear,’ Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. ‘Never. The. Less.’
Mammachi often said that Chacko was easily one of the cleverest men in India. ‘According to whom?’ Ammu would say. ‘On what basis?’ Mammachi loved to tell the story (Chacko’s story) of how one of the dons at Oxford had said that in his opinion, Chacko was brilliant, and made of prime ministerial material.
To this, Ammu always said, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ like people in the comics.
She said:
(a) Going to Oxford didn’t necessarily make a person clever.
(b) Cleverness didn’t necessarily make a good prime minister.
(c) If a person couldn’t even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?
And, most important of all:
(d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
Chacko said:
(a) You don’t go to Oxford. You read at Oxford. And
(b) After reading at Oxford you come down.
‘Down to earth, d’you mean?’ Ammu would ask. ‘That you definitely do. Like your famous airplanes.’
Ammu said that the sad but entirely predictable fate of Chacko’s airplanes was an impartial measure of his abilities.
Once a month (except during the monsoons), a parcel would arrive for Chacko by VPP. It always contained a balsa aeromodelling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propellor. When it was ready, he would take Estha and Rahel to the rice-fields in Nattakom to help him fly it. It never flew for more than a minute. Month after month, Chako’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained retrievers, to salvage the remains.
A tail, a tank, a wing.
A wounded machine.
Chacko’s room was cluttered with broken wooden planes. And every month, another kit would arrive. Chacko never blamed the crashes on the kit.
It was only after Pappachi died that Chacko resigned his job as lecturer at the Madras Christian College, and came to Ayemenem with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron dreams. He commuted his pension and provident fund to buy a Bharat bottle-sealing machine. His oar (with his team mates’ names inscribed in gold) hung from iron hoops on the factory wall.
Up to the time Chacko arrived, the factory had been a small but profitable enterprise. Mammachi just ran it like a large kitchen. Chacko had it registered as a partnership and informed Mammachi that she was the sleeping partner. He invested in equipment (canning machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labour force. Almost immediately, the financial slide began, but was artificially buoyed by extravagant bank loans that Chacko raised by mortgaging the family’s rice-fields around the Ayemenem House. Though Ammu did as much work in the factory as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers, he always referred to it as my factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally, this was the case because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property.
Chacko told Rahel and Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I.
‘Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society,’ Ammu said.
Chacko said, ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine.’
He had a surprisingly high laugh for a man of his size and fatness. And when he laughed, he shook all over without appearing to move.
Until Chacko arrived in Ayemenem, Mammachi’s factory had no name. Everybody just referred to her pickles and jams as Sosha’s Tender Mango, or Sosha’s Banana Jam. Sosha was Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.
It was Chacko who christened the factory Paradise Pickles & Preserves and had labels designed and printed at Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s press. At first he had wanted to call it Zeus Pickles & Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion—Parashu-ram Pickles—was vetoed for the opposite reason: too much local relevance.)
It was Chacko’s idea to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.
On the way to Cochin now, it rattled and made fallingoff noises.
Near Vaikom they had to stop to buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for The Sound of Music.
Then, as they approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level-crossing gate went down. Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t.
She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet. Estha said that that was a Bad Sign.
So now they were going to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts on to the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.
The red sign on the red and white arm said STOP in white.
‘POTS,’ Rahel said.
A yellow hoarding said BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN in red.
‘NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB,’ Estha said.
The twins were precocious with their reading. They had raced through Old Dog Tom, Janet and John and their Ronald Ridout Workbooks. At night Ammu read to them from Kipling’s Jungle Book.
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free -
The down on their arms would stand on end, golden in the light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu could make her voice gravelly, like Shere Khan’s. Or whining, like Tabaqui’s.
‘Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I Shere Khan, who speak!
‘And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answer,’ the twins would shout in high voices. Not together, but almost.
‘The man’s cub is mine Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog eater—fish killer—he shall hunt thee!’
Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them a version of The Tempest abridged by Charles and Mary Lamb.
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I,’ Estha and Rahel would go about saying. ‘In a cowslip’s bell I lie.’
So when Baby Kochamma’s Australian missionary friend, Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book—The Adventures of Susie Squirrel—as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten, who belonged to a sect of born-again Christians, said that she was a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her, backwards.
‘ehT serutnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS. enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.’
They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and Madam I’m Adam backwards as well as forwards. She wasn’t amused and it turned out that she didn’t even know what Malayalam was. They told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She said she had been under the impression that it was called Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken an active dislike to Miss Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it was a Highly Stupid Impression.
Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS in their seye.
They were made to write In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards. A hundred times. Forwards.
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.
More buses and cars had stopped on either side of the level crossing. An ambulance that said Sacred Heart Hospital was full of a party of people on their way to a wedding. The bride was staring out of the back window, her face partially obscured by the flaking paint of the huge red cross.
The buses all had girls’ names. Lucykutty, Mollykutty, Beena Mol. In Malayalam, Mol is Little Girl and Mon is Little Boy. Beena Mol was full of pilgrims who’d had their heads shaved at Tirupati. Rahel could see a row of bald heads at the bus window, above evenly spaced vomit streaks. She was more than a little curious about vomiting. She had never vomited. Not once. Estha had, and when he did, his skin grew hot and shiny, and his eyes helpless and beautiful, and Ammu loved him more than usual. Chacko said that Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy. And so was Sophie Mol. He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding like most Syrian Christians. And Parsees.
Mammachi said that what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding. She meant having parents who were divorced. As though these were the only choices available to people: Inbreeding or Divorce.
Rahel wasn’t sure what she suffered from, but occasionally she practised sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.
‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,’ she would say to herself sadly. That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.
She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.
Initially, when the level crossing had just closed, the Air was full of the impatient sound of idling engines. But when the man that manned the crossing came out of his booth, on his backward bending legs and signalled with his limp, flapping walk to the tea stall that they were in for a long wait, drivers switched off their engines and milled about, stretching their legs.
With a desultory nod of his bored and sleepy head, the Level Crossing Divinity conjured up beggars with bandages, men with trays selling pieces of fresh coconut, parippu vadas on banana leaves. And cold drinks. Coca-Cola, Fanta, Rosemilk.
A leper with soiled bandages begged at the car window.
‘That looks like Mercurochrome to me,’ Ammu said, of his inordinately bright blood.
‘Congratulations,’ Chacko said. ‘Spoken like a true bourgeoise.’
Ammu smiled and they shook hands, as though she really was being awarded a Certificate of Merit for being an honest-to-goodness Genuine Bourgeoise. Moments like these, the twins treasured and threaded like precious beads on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.
Rahel and Estha squashed their noses against the Plymouth’s quarter-windows. Yearning marshmallows with cloudy children behind them. Ammu said, ‘No,’ firmly, and with conviction.
Chacko lit a Charminar. He inhaled deeply and then removed a little flake of tobacco that had stayed behind on his tongue.
Inside the Plymouth, it wasn’t easy for Rahel to see Estha, because Baby Kochamma rose between them like a hill. Ammu had insisted that they sit separately to prevent them from fighting. When they fought, Estha called Rahel a Refugee Stick Insect. Rahel called him Elvis the Pelvis and did a twisty, funny kind of dance that infuriated Estha. When they had serious physical fights, they were so evenly matched that the fights went on for ever, and things that came in their way—table lamps, ashtrays and water jugs—were smashed or irreparably damaged.
Baby Kochamma was holding on to the back of the front seat with her arms. When the car moved, her armfat swung like heavy washing in the wind. Now it hung down like a fleshy curtain, blocking Estha from Rahel.
On Estha’s side of the road was the tea shack that sold tea and stale glucose biscuits in dim glass cases with flies. There was lemon soda in thick bottles with blue marble stoppers to keep the fizz in. And a red ice-box that said rather sadly Things go better with Coca-Cola.
Murlidharan, the level-crossing lunatic, perched cross-legged and perfectly balanced on the milestone. His balls and penis dangled down, pointing towards the sign which said:
COCHIN
23
Murlidharan was naked except for the tall plastic bag that somebody had fitted onto his head like a transparent chef’s cap through which the view of the landscape continued—dimmed, chef-shaped, but uninterrupted. He couldn’t remove his cap even if he had wanted to because he had no arms. They had been blown off in Singapore in ’42, within the first week of his running away from home to join the fighting ranks of the Indian National Army. After Independence he had himself registered as a Grade I Freedom Fighter and had been allotted a free first-class railway pass for life. This too he had lost (along with his mind), so he could no longer live on trains or in refreshment rooms in railway stations. Murlidharan had no home, no doors to lock, but he had his old keys tied carefully around his waist. In a shining bunch. His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with secret pleasures.
An alarm clock. A red car with a musical horn. A red mug for the bathroom. A wife with a diamond. A briefcase with important papers. A coming home from the office. An I’m sorry, Colonel Sabhapathy, but I’m afraid I’ve said my say. And crisp banana chips for the children.
He watched the trains come and go. He counted his keys.
He watched governments rise and fall. He counted his keys.
He watched cloudy children at car windows with yearning marshmallow noses.
The homeless, the helpless, the sick, the small and lost, all filed past his window. Still he counted his keys.
He was never sure which cupboard he might have to open, or when. He sat on the burning milestone with his matted hair and eyes like windows, and was glad to be able to look away sometimes. To have his keys to count and countercheck.
Numbers would do.
Numbness would be fine.
Murlidharan moved his mouth when he counted, and made well-formed words.
Onner.
Runder.
Moonner.
Estha noticed that the hair on his head was curly grey, the hair in his windy, armless armpits was wispy black, and the hair in his crotch was black and springy. One man with three kinds of hair. Estha wondered how that could be. He tried to think of whom to ask.
The Waiting filled Rahel until she was ready to burst. She looked at her watch. It was ten to two. She thought of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing each other sideways so that their noses didn’t collide. She wondered whether people always kissed each other sideways. She tried to think of whom to ask.
Then, from a distance, a hum approached the held-up traffic and covered it like a cloak. The drivers who’d been stretching their legs got back into their vehicles and slammed doors. The beggars and vendors disappeared. Within minutes there was no one on the road. Except Murlidharan. Perched with his bum on the burning milestone. Unperturbed and only mildly curious.
There was hustle-bustle. And police whistles.
From behind the line of waiting, oncoming traffic, a column of men appeared, with red flags and banners and a hum that grew and grew.
‘Put up your windows,’ Chacko said. ‘And stay calm. They’re not going to hurt us.’
‘Why not join them, comrade?’ Ammu said to Chacko. ‘I’ll drive.’
Chacko said nothing. A muscle tensed below the wad of fat on his jaw. He tossed away his cigarette and rolled up his window.
Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labour rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously. He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.
Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair.
Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade! Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.
As the marchers approached, Ammu put up her window. Estha his. Rahel hers. (Effortfully, because the black knob on the handle had fallen off.)
Suddenly the skyblue Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. Like a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor. Like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to the bread and wine.
‘Look down!’ Baby Kochamma said, as the front ranks of the procession approached the car. ‘Avoid eye contact. That’s what really provokes them.’
On the side of her neck, her pulse was pounding.
Within minutes, the road was swamped by thousands of marching people. Automobile islands in a river of people. The air was red with flags, which dipped and lifted as the marchers ducked under the level-crossing gate and swept across the railway tracks in a red wave.
The sound of a thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a Noise Umbrella.
‘Inquilab Zindabad! Thozhilali Ekta zindabad!’
‘Long Live the Revolution!’ they shouted. ‘Workers of the World Unite!’
Even Chacko had no really complete explanation for why the Communist Party was so much more successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except perhaps in Bengal.
There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty per cent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom Saint Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he travelled east after the Resurrection. Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.
The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning (pickle-factory-running) feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the Congress Party.
A second theory claimed that it had to do with the comparatively high level of literacy in the state. Perhaps. Except that the high literacy level was largely because of the communist movement.
The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.
He was an undergraduate at Delhi University during the euphoria of 1957, when the Communists won the State Assembly elections and Nehru invited them to form a government. Chacko’s hero, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala, became Chief Minister of the first ever democratically elected communist government in the world. Suddenly the communists found themselves in the extraordinary—critics said absurd—position of having to govern a people and foment revolution simultaneously. Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad evolved his own theory about how he would do this. Chacko studied his treatise on The Peaceful Transition to Communism with an adolescent’s obsessive diligence and an ardent fan’s unquestioning approval. It set out in detail how Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s government intended to enforce land reforms, neutralize the police, subvert the judiciary and ‘Restrain the Hand of the Reactionary Anti-People Congress Government at the Centre’.
Unfortunately, before the year was out, the Peaceful part of the Peaceful Transition came to an end.
Every morning at breakfast the Imperial Entomologist derided his argumentative Marxist son by reading out newspaper reports of the riots, strikes and incidents of police brutality that convulsed Kerala.
‘So, Karl Marx!’ Pappachi would sneer when Chacko came to the table. ‘What shall we do with these bloody students now? The stupid goons are agitating against our People’s Government. Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren’t People any more?’
Over the next two years the political discord, fuelled by the Congress Party and the Church, slid into anarchy. By the time Chacko finished his BA and left for Oxford to do another one, Kerala was on the brink of civil war. Nehru dismissed the Communist Government and announced fresh elections. The Congress Party returned to power.
It was only in 1967—almost exactly ten years after they first came to power—that Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected. This time as part of a coalition between what had now become two separate parties—the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI and the CPI(M).
Pappachi was dead by then. Chacko divorced. Paradise Pickles was seven years old.
Kerala was reeling in the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon. People were dying. Hunger had to be very high up on any government list of priorities.
During his second term in office, Comrade E. M. S. went about implementing the Peaceful Transition more soberly. This earned him the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. They denounced him for his ‘Parliamentary Cretinism’ and accused him of ‘providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People’s Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution’.
Peking switched its patronage to the newest, most militant faction of the CPI(M)—the Naxalites—who had staged an armed insurrection in Naxalbari, a village in Bengal. They organized peasants into fighting cadres, seized land, expelled the owners and established People’s Courts to try Class Enemies. The Naxalite movement spread across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart.
In Kerala, they breathed a plume of excitement and fear into the already frightened air. Killings had begun in the north. That May there was a blurred photograph in the papers of a landlord in Palghat who had been tied to a lamp post and beheaded. His head lay on its side, some distance away from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It was hard to tell in black and white. In the grey predawn light.
His surprised eyes were open.
Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Running Dog, Soviet Stooge) expelled the Naxalites from his party and went on with the business of harnessing anger for parliamentary purposes.
The march that surged around the skyblue Plymouth on that skyblue December day was a part of that process. It had been organized by the Travancore-Cochin Marxist Labour Union. Their comrades in Trivandrum would march to the Secretariat and present the Charter of People’s Demands to Comrade E. M. S. himself. The orchestra petitioning its conductor. Their demands were that paddy workers, who were made to work in the fields for eleven and a half hours a day—from seven in the morning to six-thirty in the evening—be permitted to take a one-hour lunch break. That women’s wages be increased from one rupee twenty-five paisa a day, to three rupees, and men’s from two rupees fifty paisa to four rupees fifty paisa a day. They were also demanding that Untouchables no longer be addressed by their caste names. They demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan, or Kuttan.
Cardamom Kings, Coffee Counts and Rubber Barons—old boarding school buddies—came down from their lonely, far-flung estates and sipped chilled beer at the Sailing Club. They raised their glasses. ‘A rose by any other name…’ they said, and sniggered to hide their rising panic.
The marchers that day were party workers, students, and the labourers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.
Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zjndabad. 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.
Inside the Plymouth it was still and hot.
Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers, too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.
She tried to count the green beads on her rosary, but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed against the car window.
A balled fist banged down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.

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