The God of Small Things

Chapter 10.

While the Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol Play was being performed in the front verandah and Kochu Maria distributed cake to a Blue Army in the greenheat, Ambassador E. Pelvis/S. Pimpernel (with a puff) of the beige and pointy shoes, pushed open the gauze doors to the dank and pickle-smelling premises of Paradise Pickles. He walked among the giant cement pickle vats to find a place to Think in. Ousa, the Bar Nowl, who lived on a blackened beam near the skylight (and contributed occasionally to the flavor of certain Paradise products), watched him walk.

Past floating yellow limes in brine that needed prodding from time to time (or else islands of black fungus formed like frilled mushrooms in a clear soup).

Past green mangoes, cut and stuffed with turmeric and chili powder and tied together with twine. (They needed no attention for a while.)

Past glass casks of vinegar with corks.

Past shelves of pectin and preservatives.

Past trays of bitter gourd, with knives and colored finger guards.

Past gunny bags bulging with garlic and small onions.

Past mounds of fresh green peppercorns.

Past a heap of banana peels on the floor (preserved for the pigs’ dinner).

Past the label cupboard full of labels.

Past the glue.

Past the glue-brush.

Past an iron tub of empty bottles floating in soapbubbled water

Past the lemon squash.

The grape crush.

And back.

It was dark inside, lit only by the light that filtered through the clotted gauze doors, and a beam of dusty sunlight (that Ousa didn’t use) from the skylight. The smell of vinegar and asafetida stung his nostrils, but Estha was used to it, loved it. The place that he found to Think in was between the wall and the black iron cauldron in which a batch of freshly boiled (illegal) banana jam was slowly cooling.

The jam was still hot and on its sticky scarlet surface, thick pink froth was dying slowly. Little banana-bubbles drowning deep in jam and nobody to help them.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man could walk in any minute. Catch a Cochin-Kottayam bus and be there. And Ammu would offer him a cup of tea. Or Pineapple Squash perhaps. With ice. Yellow in a glass.

With the long iron stirrer, Estha stirred the thick, fresh jam.

The dying froth made dying frothly shapes.

A crow with a crushed wing.

A clenched chicken’s claw.

A Nowl (not Ousa) mired in sickly jam.

A sadly swirl.

And nobody to help.

As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:

(a)Anything can happen to Anyone. and

(b)It’s best to be prepared.

Having thought these thoughts, Estha Alone was happy with his bit of wisdom.

As the hot magenta jam went round, Estha became a Stirring Wizard with a spoiled puff and uneven teeth, and then the Witches of Macbeth.

Fire burn, banana bubble.

Ammu had allowed Estha to copy Mammachi’s recipe for banana jam into her new recipe book, black with a white spine.

Acutely aware of the honor that Ammu had bestowed on him, Estha had used both his best handwritings.

Bananajam (in his old best writing)

Crush ripe banana. Add water to cover and cook on a ~ hot fire till fruit is soft.

Sqweeze out juice by straining through course muslin.

Weigh equal quantity of sugar and keep b~.

Cook fruit juice till it turns scarlet and about half the quantity evapoarates.

Prepare the gelatin (pectin) thus

Proportion 1:5

ie: 4 teaspoons Pectin. 20 teaspoons sugar.

Estha always thought of Pectin as the youngest of three brothers with hammers, Pectin, Hectin and Abednego. He imagined them building a wooden ship in failing light and a drizzle. Like Noah’s sons. He could see them clearly in his mind. Racing against time. The sound of their hammering echoing dully under the brooding, storm-coming sky.

And nearby in the jungle, in the eerie, storm-coming light, animals queued up in pairs:

Girl boy.

Girl boy.

Girl boy. Girl boy.

Twins were not allowed.

The rest of the recipe was in Estha’s new best handwriting. Angular, spiky. It leaned backwards as though the letters were reluctant to form words, and the words reluctant to be in sentences:

Add the Pectin to concentrated juice. Cook for a few (5) minutes.

Use a strong fire, burning heavily all around.

Add the sugar. Cook until sheeting consistency is obtained.

Cool slowly.

Hope you will enjoy this recipe.

Apart from the spelling mistakes, the last line-Hope you will enjoy this recipe-was Estha’s only augmentation of the original text.

Gradually, as Estha stirred, the banana jam thickened and cooled, and Thought Number Three rose unbidden from his beige and pointy shoes.

Thought Number Three was:

(c) A boat.

A boat to row across the river Akkara. The Other Side. A boat to carry Provisions. Matches. Clothes. Pots and Pans. Things they would need and couldn’t swim with.

Estha’s arm hairs stood on end. The jam-stirring became a boatrowing. The round and round became a back and forth. Across a sticky scarlet river. A song from the Onam boat race filled the factory. Thaiy thay thaka rbazy thaiy thome!”

Enda da korangacha, chandi ithra thenjada?

(Hey, Mr. Monkey man, why’s your bum so red?)

Pandyill thooran poyappol nerakkamathiri nerangi njan.

(I went for a shit to Madras, and scraped it till it bled.)

Over the somewhat discourteous questions and answers of the boat song, Rahel’s voice floated into the factory

“Estha! Estha! Estha!”

Estha didn’t answer. The chorus of the boat song was whispered into the thick jam.

Theeyome

Thithome

Tharako

Thithome

Theem

A gauze door creaked, and an Airport Fairy with hornbumps and yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses looked in with the sun behind her. The factory was angry-colored. The salted limes were red. The tender mangoes were red. The label cupboard was red. The dusty sunbeam (that Ousa never used) was red.

The gauze door closed.

Rahel stood in the empty factory with her Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. She heard a nun’s voice singing the boat song. A clear soprano wafting over vinegar fumes and pickle vats.

She turned to Estha bent over the scarlet broth in the black cauldron.

“What d’you want?” Estha asked without looking up.

“Nothing,” Rahel said.

“Then why have you come here?”

Rahel didn’t reply. There was a brief, hostile silence.

“Why’re you rowing the jam?” Rahel asked.

“India’s a Free Country,” Estha said.

No one could argue with that.

India was a Free Country

You could make salt. Row jam, if you wanted to.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man could just walk in through the gauze doors,

If he wanted to.

And Ammu would offer him pineapple juice. With ice.

Rahel sat on the edge of a cement vat (frothy ends of buckram and lace, delicately dipped in tender mango pickle) and tried on the

rubber finger guards. Three bluebottles fiercely fought the gauze doors, wanting to be let in. And Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle-smelling silence that lay between the twins like a bruise.

Rahel’s fingers were Yellow Green Blue Red Yellow. Estha’s jam was stirred.

Rahel got up to go. For her Afternoon Gnap.

“Where’re you going?”

“Somewhere.”

Rahel took off her new fingers, and had her old finger-colored fingers back. Not yellow, not green, not blue, not red. Not yellow

“I’m going to Akkara,” Estha said. Not looking up. “To the History House.”

Rahel stopped and turned around, and on her heart a drab moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts unfurled its predatory wings.

Slow out.

Slow in.

“Why?” Rahel said.

“Because Anything can Happen to Anyone,” Estha-said. “It’s Best to be Prepared.’

You couldn’t argue with that.

Nobody went to Kari Saipu’s house anymore. Vellya Paapen claimed to be the last human being to have set eyes on it. He said that it was haunted. He had told the twins the story of his encounter with Kari Saipu’s ghost. It happened two years ago, he said. He had gone across the river, hunting for a nutmeg tree to make a paste of nutmeg and fresh garlic for Chella, his wife, as she lay dying of tuberculosis. Suddenly he smelled cigar smoke (which he recognized at once, because Pappachi used to smoke the same brand). Vellya Paapen whirled around and hurled his sickle at the smell. He pinned the ghost to the trunk of a rubber tree, where, according to Vellya Paapen, it still remained. A sickled smell that bled clear, amber blood, and begged for cigars.

Vellya Paapen never found the nutmeg tree, and had to buy himself a new sickle. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that his lightning-quick reflexes (despite his mortgaged eye) and his presence of mind had put an end to the bloodthirsty wanderings of a pedophile ghost.

As long as no one succumbed to its artifice and unsickled it with a cigar.

What Vellya Paapen (who knew most things) didn’t know was that Kari Saipu’s house was the History House (whose doors were locked and windows open). And that inside, map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails whispered to the lizards on the wall. That History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues. That default led to dire consequences. That on the day History picked to square its books, Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid.

Vellya Paapen had no idea that Kari Saipu it was who captured dreams and re-dreamed them. That he plucked them from the minds of passersby the way children pick currants from a cake. That the ones he craved most of all, the dreams he loved re-dreaming, were the tender dreams of two-egg, twins.

Poor old Vellya Paapen, had he known then that History would choose him for its deputy, that it would be his tears that set the Terror rolling, perhaps he would not have strutted like a young cockerel in the. Ayemenem bazaar, bragging of how he swam the river with his sickle in his mouth (sour, the taste of iron on his tongue). How he put it down for just one moment while he kneeled to wash the river-grit out of his mortgaged eye (there was grit in the river sometimes, particularly in the rainy months) when he caught the first whiff of cigar smoke. How he picked up his sickle, whirled around and sickled the smell that fixed the ghost forever. All in a single fluid, athletic motion.

By the time he understood his part in History’s Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps. He had swept his footprints away himself. Crawling backwards with a broom.

In the factory the silence swooped down once more and tightened around the twins. But this time it was a different kind of silence. An old river silence. The silence of Fisher People and waxy mermaids.

“But Communists don’t believe in ghosts,” Estha said, as though they were continuing a discourse investigating solutions to the ghost problem. Their conversations surfaced and dipped like mountain streams. Sometimes audible to other people. Sometimes not.

“Are we going to become a Communist2” Rahel asked.

“Might have to.”

Estha-the-Practical.

Distant cake-crumbled voices and approaching Blue Army footsteps caused the Comrades to seal the secret.

It was pickled, sealed and put away. A red, tender-mango-shaped secret in a vat. Presided over by a Nowl.

The Red Agenda was worked out and agreed upon:

Comrade Rahel would go for her Afternoon Gnap, then lie awake until Ammu fell asleep. -

Comrade Estha would find the flag (that Baby Kochamma had been forced to wave), and wait for her by the river and there they would:

(b) Prepare to prepare to be prepared.

A child’s abandoned Fairy Frock (semipickled) stood stiffly on its own in the middle of Ammu’s darkened bedroom floor.

Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot. Rahel lay next to Ammu, wide awake in her matching airport knickers. She could see the pattern of the cross-stitch flowers from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on Ammu’s cheek. She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.

The slow ceiling fan. The sun behind the curtains. The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzz.

A disbelieving lizard’s blink.

High-stepping chickens in the yard.

The sound of the sun crinkling the washing. Crisping white bedsheets. Stiffening starched saris. Off-white and gold.

Red ants on yellow stones.

A hot cow feeling hot. Amhoo. In the distance.

And the smell of a cunning Englishman ghost, sickled to a rubber tree, asking courteously for a cigar.

“Umm… excuse me? You wouldn’t happen to have an umm… cigar, would you?”

In a kind, schoolteacherly voice.

Oh dear.

And Estha waiting for her. By the river. Under the mangosteen tree that Reverend E.John Ipe had brought home from his visit to Mandalay.

What was Estha sitting on?

On what they always sat on under the mangosteen tree. Something gray and grizzled. Covered in moss and lichen, smothered in ferns. Something that the earth had claimed. Not a log. Not a rock.

Before she completed the thought, Rahel was up and running. Through the kitchen, past Kochu Maria fast asleep. Thickwrinkied like a sudden rhinoceros in a frilly apron.

Past the factory.

Tumbling barefoot through the greenheat, followed by a yellow wasp.

Comrade Estha was there. Under the mangosteen tree. With the red flag planted in the earth beside him. A Mobile Republic. A Twin Revolution with a Puff.

And what was he sitting on?

Something covered with moss, hidden by ferns.

Knock on it and it made a hollow knocked-on sound.

The silence dipped and soared and swooped and looped in figures of eight.

Jeweled dragonflies hovered like shrill children’s voices in the sun. Finger-colored fingers fought the ferns, moved the stones, cleared the way. There was a sweaty grappling for an edge to hold on to. And a One Two and.

Things can change in a day.

It was a boat. A tiny wooden vallom.

The boat that Estha sat on and Rahel found.

The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.

So old a boat that it had taken root. Almost.

A gray old boatplant with boatflowers and boatfruit. And underneath, a boat-shaped patch of withered grass. A scurrying, hurrying boatworld.

Dark and dry and cool. Unroofed now. And blind.

White termites on their way to work.

White ladybirds on their way home.

White beetles burrowing away from the light.

White grasshoppers with whitewood violins.

Sad white music.

A white wasp. Dead.

A bntrlewhite snakeskin, preserved in darkness, crumbled in the sun.

But would it do, that little vallom?

Was it perhaps too old? Too dead?’

Was Akkara too far away for it?

Two-egg twins looked out across their river.

The Meenachal.

Graygreen. With fish in it. The sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

When Pappachi was a boy, an old tamarind tree fell into it in a storm. It was still there. A smooth barkiess tree, blackened by a surfeit of green water. Driftless driftwood.

The first third of the river was their friend. Before the Really Deep began. They knew the slippery stone steps (thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom. They knew the smaller fish. The flat, foolish pallathi, the silver paral, the wily, whiskered koori, the sometimes karimeen.

Here Chacko had taught them to swim (splashing around his ample uncle stomach without help). Here they had discovered for themselves the discotinected delights of underwater fatting.

Here they had learned to fish. To thread coiling purple earthworms onto hooks on the fishing rods that Velutha made from slender culms of yellow bamboo.

Here they studied Silence (like the children of the Fisher People), and learned the bright language of dragonflies.

Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them. To move like lightning when the bendy yellow bamboo arced downwards.

So this first third of the river they knew well. The next two-thirds less so.

The second third was where the Really Deep began. Where the current was swift and certain (downstream when the tide was out, upstream, pushing up from the backwaters when the tide was in).

The third third was shallow again. The water brown and murky. Full of weeds and darting eels and slow mud that oozed through toes like toothpaste.

The twins could swim like seals and, supervised by Chacko, had crossed the river several times, returning panting and cross-eyed from the effort, with a stone, a twig or a leaf from the Other Side as testimony to their feat But the middle of a respectable river, or the Other Side, was no place for children to Linger, Loll or Learn Things. Estha and Rahel accorded the second third and the third third of the Meenachal the deference it deserved. Still, swimming across was not the problem. Taking the boat with Things in it (so that they could Prepare to prepare to be prepared) was.

They looked across the river with Old Boat eyes. From where they stood they couldn’t see the History House. It was just a darkness beyond the swamp, at the heart of the abandoned rubber estate, from which the sound of crickets swelled.

Estha and Rahel lifted the little boat and carried it to the water It looked surprised, like a grizzled fish that had surfaced from the deep. In dire need of sunlight. It needed scraping, and cleaning, perhaps, but nothing more.

Two happy hearts soared like colored kites in a skyblue sky. But then, in a slow green whisper, the river (with fish in it, with the sky and trees in it), bubbled in.

Slowly the old boar sank, and settled on the sixth step.

And a pair of two-egg twin hearts sank and settled on the step above the sixth.

The deep-swimming fish covered their mouths with their fins and laughed sideways at the spectacle.

A white boat-spider floated up with the river in the boat, struggled briefly and drowned. Her white egg sac ruptured prematurely, and a hundred baby spiders (too light to drown, too small to Swim), stippled the smooth surface of the green water, before being swept out to sea. To Madagascar, to start a new phylum of Malayali Swimming Spiders.

In a while, as though they’d discussed it (though they hadn’t), the twins began to wash the boat in the river. The cobwebs, the mud, the moss and lichen floated away. When it was clean, they turned it upside down and hoisted it onto their heads. Like a combined hat that dripped. Estha uprooted the red flag.

A small procession (a flag, a wasp, and a boat-on-legs) wended its knowledgeable way down the little path through the undergrowth. It avoided the clumps of nettles, and sidestepped known ditches and anthills. It skirted the precipice of the deep pit from which laterite had been quarried, and was now a still lake with steep orange banks, the thick, viscous water covered with a luminous film of green scum. A verdant, treacherous lawn, in which mosquitoes bred and fish were fat but inaccessible.

The path, which ran parallel to the river, led to a little grassy clearing that was hemmed in by huddled trees: coconut, cashew, mango, bilimbi. On the edge of the clearing, with its back to the river, a low hut with walls of orange laterite plastered with mud and a thatched roof nestled close to the ground, as though it was listening to a whispered subterranean secret. The low walls of the hut were the same color as the earth they stood on, and seemed to have germinated from a house-seed planted in the ground, from which right-angled ribs of earth had risen and enclosed space. Three untidy banana trees grew in the little front yard that had been fenced off with panels of woven palm leaves.

The boat-on-legs approached the hut. An unlit oil lamp hung on the wall beside the door, the patch of wall behind it was singed soot black. The door was ajar. It was dark inside. A black hen appeared in the doorway. She returned indoors, entirely indifferent to boat visits.

Velutha wasn’t home. Nor Vellya Paapen. But someone was.

A man’s voice floated out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely.

The voice shouted the same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more hysterical register. It was an appeal to an over-ripe guava threatening to fall from its tree and make a mess on the ground.

Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka,

(Mister gugga-gug-gug-guava,)

Endeparambil thooralley

(Don’t shit here in my compound.)

Chetendeparambil thoorikko.

(You can shit next door in my brother’s compound.)

Pa pera-pem-pera-perakka.

(Mister gugga-gug-gug-guava.)

The shouter was Kuttappen, Velutha’s older brother. He was paralyzed from his chest downwards. Day after day, month after month, while his brother was away and his father went to work, Kuttappen lay flat on his back and watched his youth saunter past without stopping to say hello. All day he lay there listening to the silence of huddled trees with only a domineering black hen for company. He missed his mother, Chella, who had died in the same corner of the room that he lay in now. She had died a coughing, spitting, aching, phlegmy death. Kuttappen remembered noticing how her feet died long before she had. How the skin on them grew gray and lifeless. How fearfully he watched death creep over her from the bottom up. Kuttappen kept vigil on his own numb feet with mounting terror. Occasionally he poked at them hopefully with a stick that he kept propped up in the corner to defend himself against visiting snakes. He had no sensation in his feet at all, and only visual evidence assured him that they were still connected to his body, and were indeed his own.

After Chella died, he was moved into her corner, the corner that Kuttappen imagined was the corner of his home that Death had reserved to administer her deathly affairs. One corner for cooking, one for clothes, one for bedding rolls, one for dying in.

He wondered how long his would take, and what people who had more than four corners in their houses did with the rest of their corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die in?

He assumed, not without reason, that he would be the first in his family to follow in his mother’s wake. He would learn otherwise. Soon. Too soon.

Sometimes (from habit, from missing her), Kuttappen coughed like his mother used to, and his upper body bucked like a justcaught fish. His lower body lay like lead, as though it belonged to someone else. Someone dead whose spirit was trapped and couldn’t get away.

Unlike Velutha, Kuttappen was a good, safe Paravan. He could neither read nor write. As belay there on his hardbed, bits of thatch and grit fell onto him from the ceiling and mingled with his sweat. Sometimes ants and other insects fell with it. On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, refilling glasses). Kuttappen thought with envy of madmen who could walk. He had no doubts about the equity of the deal; his sanity, for serviceable legs.

The twins put the boat down, and the clatter was met with a sudden silence from inside.

Kuttappen wasn’t expecting anyone.

Estha and Rahel pushed open the door and went in. Small as they were, they had to stoop a little to go in. The wasp waited outside on the lamp.

“It’s us.”

The room was dark and clean. It smelled of fish curry and woodsmoke. Heat cleaved to things like a low fever. But the mud floor was cool under Rahel’s bare feet. Velutha’s and Vellya Paapen’s bedding was rolled up and propped against the wall. Clothes hung on a string. There was a low wooden kitchen shelf on which covered terra-cotta pots, ladles made of coconut shells arid three chipped enamel plates with dark-blue rims were arranged. A grown man could stand up straight in the center of the room, but not along its sides. Another low door led to a backyard, where there were more banana trees, beyond which the river glimmered through the foliage. A carpenter’s workstation had been erected in the backyard.

There were no keys or cupboards to lock.

The black hen left through the backdoor, and scratched abstractedly in the yard, where woodshavings blew about like blond curls. Judging from her persona1ity~ she appeared to have been reared on a diet of hardware: hasps and clasps and nails and old screws.

“Ayyo, Mon! Mol! What must you be thinking? That Kuttappen’s a basket case!” an embarrassed, disembodied voice said.

It took the twins awhile for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Then the darkness dissolved and Kuttappen appeared on his bed, a glistening genie in the gloom. The whites of his eyes were dark yellow. The soles of his feet (soft from so much lying down) stuck out from under the cloth that covered his legs. They were still stained a pale orange from years of walking barefoot on red mud. He had gray calluses on his ankles from the chafing of the rope that Paravans tied around their feet when they climbed coconut trees.

On the wall behind him there was a benign, mouse-haired calendar-Jesus with lipstick and rouge, and a lurid, jeweled heart glowing through his clothes. The bottom quarter of the calendar (the part with the dates on it) filled out like a skirt. Jesus in a mini.

Twelve layers of petticoats for the twelve months of the year. None had been torn out.

There were other things from the Ayemenem House that had either been given to them or salvaged from the rubbish bin. Rich things in a poor house. A clock that didn’t work, a flowered tin wastepaper basket. Pappachi’s old riding boots (brown, with green mold) with the cobbler’s trees still in them. Biscuit tins with sumptuous pictures of English castles and ladies with hustles and ringlets.

A small poster (Baby Kochamma’s, given away because of a damp patch) hung next to Jesus. It was a picture of a blond child writing a letter, with tears falling down her cheeks. Underneath it said: Pm writing to say I Miss You. She looked as though she’d had a haircut, and it was her cropped curls that were blowing around Velutha’s backyard.

A transparent plastic tube led from under the worn cotton sheet that covered Kuttappen to a bottle of yellow liquid that caught the shaft of light that came in through the door, and quelled a question that had been rising inside Rahel. She fetched him water in a steel tumbler from the clay koojah. She seemed to know her way around. Kuttappen lifted his head and drank. Some water dribbled down his chin.

The twins squatted on their haunches, like professional adult gossips in the Ayemenem market.

They sat in silence for a while. Kuttappen mortified, the twins preoccupied with boat thoughts.

“Has Chacko Saar’s Mol come?” Kuttappen asked.

“Must have,” Rahel said laconically.

“Where’s she?”

“Who knows? Must be around somewhere. We don’t know.”

“Will you bring her here for me to see?”

“Can’t,” Rahel said.

“Why not?”

`She has to stay indoors. She’s very delicate. If she gets dirty she’ll die.”

“I see.”

“We’re not allowed to bring her here… and anyway, there’s nothing to see,’ Rahel assured Kuttappen. “She has hair, legs, teeth-you know-the usual, only she’s a little tall.” And that was the only concession she would make.

“Is that all?” Kuttappen said, getting the point very quickly. “Then where’s the point in seeing her?”

“No point,” Rahel said.

“Kuttappa, if a vallom leaks, is it very hard to mend?” Estha asked.

“Shouldn’t be,” Kuttappen said. “Depends. Why, whose vallom is leaking?”

“Ours-that we found. D’you want to see it?”

They went out and returned with the grizzled boat for the paralyzed man to examine. They held it over him like a roof. Water dripped on him.

“First we’ll have to find the leaks,” Kuttappen said. “Then we’ll have to plug them.”

“Then sandpaper,” Estha said. “Then polish.”

“Then oars,” Rahel said.

‘Then oars,” Estha agreed.

“Then offity off,” Rahel said.

“Where to?” Kuttappen asked.

“Just here and there, ‘ Estha said airily.

‘You must be careful,” Kuttappen said. “This river of ours-she isn’t always what she pretends to be.”

“What does she pretend to be?” Rahel asked.

“Oh… a little old churchgoing ammooma, quiet and clean… idi appams for breakfast, kanji and meen for lunch. Minding her own business. Not looking right or left.”

“And she’s really a…?”

“Really a wild thing… I can hear her at night-rushing past in the moonlight, always in a hurry. You must be careful of her.”

“And what does she really eat?”

“Really eat? Oh… Stoo… and… “ He cast about for something English for the evil river to eat.

“Pineapple slices…” Rahel suggested.

“That’s right! Pineapple slices and Stoo. And she drinks. Whiskey.”

“And brandy.”

“And brandy. True.”

“And looks right and left?

“True.”

“And minds other people’s business…”

Esthappen steadied the little boat on the uneven earth floor with a few blocks of wood that he found in Velutha’s workstation in the backyard. He gave Rahel a cooking ladle made of a wooden handle stuck through the polished half of a coconut shell.

The twins climbed into the vallom and rowed across vast, choppy waters. With a Thaiy thaij thaka thaiy thai thome. And a jeweled Jesus watching.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have swum on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With His Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would He have had the imagination?

Velutha returned to see if Kuttappen needed anything. From a distance he heard the raucous singing. Young voices, underlining with delight the scatology

Hey Mr Monkey Man

Why’s your BUM so RED?

I went for a SHIT to Madras

And scraped it till it BLED!

Temporarily, for a few happy moments, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man shut his yellow smile and went away. Fear sank and settled at the bottom of the deep water. Sleeping a dog’s sleep. Ready to rise and murk things at a moment’s notice.

Velutha smiled when he saw the Marxist flag blooming like a tree outside his doorway. He had to bend low in order to enter his home. A tropical Eskimo. When he saw the children, something clenched inside him. And he couldn’t understand it. He saw them every day. He loved them without knowing it. But it was different suddenly. Now. After History had slipped up so badly. No fist had clenched inside him before.

Her children, an insane whisper whispered to him.

Her eyes, her mouth. Her teeth.

Her soft, lambent skin.

He drove the thought away angrily. It returned and sat outside his skull. Like a dog.

“Ha!” he said to his young guests, “and who may I ask are these Fisher People?”

“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon. Mr. and Mrs. Pleasetomeetyou.” Rahel held out her ladle to be shaken in greeting.

It was shaken in greeting. Hers, then Estha’s.

“And where, may I ask, are they off to by boat?”

“Off to Africa!” Rahel shouted.

“Stop shouting,” Estha said.

Velutha walked around the boat. They told him where they had found it.

“So it doesn’t belong to anybody,” Rahel said a little doubtfully, because it suddenly occurred to her that it might. “Ought we to report it to the police?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Estha said.

Velutha knocked on the wood and then scraped a little patch clean with his nail.

“Good wood,” he said.

“It sinks,” Estha said. “It leaks.”

“Can you mend it for us, Veluthapappychachen Peter Mon?” Rahel asked.

“We’ll see about that,” Velutha said. “I don’t want you playing any silly games on this river.”

“We won’t. We promise. We’ll use it only when you’re with us.”

“First we’ll have to find the leaks,” Velutha said.

“Then we’ll have to plug them!” the twins shouted, as though it was the second line of a well-known poem.

“How long will it take?” Estha asked.

“A day,” Velutha said.

“A day! I thought you’d say a month!”

Estha, delirious with joy, jumped on Velutha, wrapped his legs around his waist and kissed him.

The sandpaper was divided into exactly equal halves, and the twins fell to work with an eerie concentration that excluded everything else.

Boat-dust flew around the room and settled on hair and eyebrows. On Kuttappen like a cloud, on Jesus like an offering. Velutha had to prise the sandpaper out of their fingers.

“Not here,” he said firmly. “Outside.”

He picked the boat up and carried it out. The twins followed, eyes fixed on their boat with unwavering concentration, starving puppies expecting to be fed.

Velutha set the boat up for them. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found. He showed them how to follow the grain of the wood. He started them off on the sandpapering. When he returned indoors, the black hen followed him, determined to be wherever the boat wasn’t

Velutha dipped a thin cotton towel in an earthen pot of water. He squeezed the water out of it (savagely, as though it was an unwanted thought) and handed it to Kuttappen to wipe the grit off his face and neck.

“Did they say anything?” Kuttappen asked. “About seeing you in the March?”

“No,” Velutha said. “Not yet. They will though. They know.”

“For sure?”

Velutha shrugged and took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat. And wring. As though it was his ridiculous, disobedient brain.

He tried to hate her.

She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them.

He couldn’t.

She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else.

Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

An hour into the sandpapering Rahel remembered her Afternoon Gnap. And she was up and running. Tumbling through the green afternoon heat. Followed by her brother and a yellow wasp.

Hoping, praying that Ammu hadn’t woken up and found her gone.