The God of Small Things

Chapter 13.

Chacko had moved out of his room and would sleep in Pappachi’s study so that Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma could have his room. It was a small room, with a window that overlooked the dwindling, somewhat neglected rubber plantation that Reverend E. John Ipe had bought from a neighbor. One door connected it to the main house and another (the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed for Chacko to pursue his “Men’s Needs” discreetly) led directly out onto the side mittam.

Sophie Mol lay asleep on a little camp cot that had been made up for her next to the big bed. The drone of the slow ceiling fan filled her head. Bluegrayblue eyes snapped open.

A Wake.

A Live.

A Lert.

Sleep was summarily dismissed.

For the first time since Joe had died, he was not the first thing that she thought about when she woke up.

She looked around the room. Not moving, just swiveling her eyeballs. A captured spy in enemy territory plotting her spectacular escape.

A vase of awkwardly arranged hibiscus, already drooping, stood on Chacko’s table The walls were lined with books. A glass-paned cupboard was crammed with damaged balsa airplanes. Broken butterflies with imploring eyes. A wicked king’s wooden wives languishing under an evil wooden spell.

Trapped.

Only one, her mother, Margaret, had escaped to England.

The room went round in the calm, chrome center of the silver ceiling fan. A beige gecko, the color of an undercooked biscuit, regarded her with interested eyes. She thought of Joe. Something shook inside her. She closed her eyes.

The calm, chrome center of the silver ceiling fan went round inside her head.

Joe could walk on his hands. And when he cycled downhill, he could put the wind inside his shirt.

On the next bed, Margaret Kochamma was still asleep. She lay on her back with her hands clasped together just below her rib cage.

Her fingers were swollen and her wedding band looked uncomfortably tight. The flesh of her cheeks fell away on either side of her face, making her cheekbones look high and prominent, and pulling her mouth downwards into a mirthless smile that contained just a glimmer of teeth. She had tweezed her once bushy eyebrows into the currently fashionable, pencil-thin arcs that gave her a slightly surprised expression even in her sleep. The rest of her expressions were growing back in a nascent stubble. Her face was flushed. Her forehead glistened. Underneath the flush, there was a paleness. A staved-off sadness.

The thin material of her dark-blue and white flowered cottonpolyester dress had wilted and clung limply to the contours of her body, rising over her breasts, dipping along the line between her long, strong legs-as though it too was unaccustomed to the heat and needed a nap.

On the bedside table there was a silver-framed black-and-white wedding picture of Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, taken outside the church in Oxford. It was snowing a little. The first flakes of fresh snow lay on the Street and sidewalk. Chacko was dressed like Nehru. He wore a white churidar and a black shervani. His shoulders were dusted with snow. There was a rose in his buttonhole, and the tip of his handkerchief, folded into a triangle, peeped out of his breast pocket. On his feet he wore polished black oxfords. He looked as though he was laughing at himself and the way he was dressed. Like someone at a fancy-dress party.

Margaret Kochamma wore a long, foaming gown and a cheap tiara on her cropped, curly hair. Her veil was lifted off her face. She was as tall as he was. They looked happy. Thin and young, scowling, with the sun in their eyes. Her thick, dark eyebrows were knitted together and somehow made a lovely contrast to the frothy, bridal white. A scowling cloud with eyebrows. Behind them stood a large matronly woman with thick ankles and all the buttons done up on her long overcoat Margaret Kochamma’s mother. She had her two little granddaughters on either side of her, in pleated tartan skirts, stockings and identical fringes. They were both giggling with their hands over their mouths. Margaret Kochamma’s mother was looking away, out of the photograph, as though she would rather not have been there. Margaret Kochamma’s father had refused to attend the wedding. He disliked Indians, he thought of them as sly, dishonest people. He couldn’t believe that his daughter was marrying one.

In the right-hand corner of the photograph, a man wheeling his bicycle along the curb had turned to stare at the couple.

Margaret Kochamma was working as a waitress at a cafâ‚ in Oxford when she first met Chacko. Her family lived in London. Her father owned a bakery Her mother was a milliner’s assistant. Margaret Kochamma had moved out of her parents’ home a year ago, for no greater reason than a youthful assertion of independence. She intended to work and save enough money to put herself through a teacher training course, and then look for a job at a school. In Oxford she shared a small flat with a friend. Another waitress in another cafâ.

Having made the move, Margaret Kochamma found herself becoming exactly the kind of girl her parents wanted her to be. Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against. So even up at Oxford, other than playing her gramophone a little louder than she was permitted at home, she continued to lead the same small, tight life that she imagined she had escaped.

Until Chacko walked into the cafâ one morning.

It was the summer of his final year at Oxford. He was alone. His rumpled shirt was buttoned up wrong. His shoelaces were untied. His hair, carefully brushed and slicked down in front, stood up in a stiff halo of quills at the back. He looked like an untidy, beatified porcupine. He was tall, and underneath the mess of clothes (inappropriate tie, shabby coat) Margaret Kochamma could see that he was well-built. He had an amused air about him, and a way of narrowing his eyes as though he was trying to read a faraway sign and had forgotten to bring his glasses. His ears stuck out on either side of his head like teapot handles. There was something contradictory about his athletic build and his disheveled appearance. The only sign that a fat man lurked inside him was his shining, happy cheeks.

He had none of the vagueness or the apologetic awkwardness that one usually associates with untidy, absentminded men. He looked cheerful, as though he was with an imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed. He took a seat by the window and sat down with an elbow on the table and his face cupped in the palm of his hand, smiling around the empty cafâ‚ as though he was considering striking up a conversation with the furniture. He ordered coffee with that same friendly smile, but without appearing to really notice the tall, bushy-eyebrowed waitress who took his order.

She winced when he put two heaped spoons of sugar into his extremely milky coffee…

Then he asked for fried eggs on roast. More coffee, and strawberry jam.

When she returned with his order, he said, as though he was continuing an old conversation, “Have you heard about the man who had twin sons?”

“No,” she said, setting down his breakfast. For some reason (natural prudence perhaps, and an instinctive reticence with foreigners) she did not evince the keen interest that he seemed to expect from her about the Man with Twin Sons. Chacko didn’t seem to mind.

“A man had twin sons,” he told Margaret Kochamma. “Pete and Stuart. Pete was an Optimist and Stuart was a Pessimist.”

He picked the strawberries out of the jam and put them on one side of his plate. The rest of the jam he spread in a thick layer on his buttered toast.

“On their thirteenth birthday their father gave Stuart an expensive watch, a carpentry set, and a bicycle.”

Chacko looked up at Margaret Kochamma to see if she was listening. “And Pete’s-the Optimist’s-room, he filled with horse dung.”

Chacko lifted the fried eggs onto the toast, broke the brilliant, wobbling yokes and spread them over the strawberry jam with the back of his teaspoon.

“When Stuart opened his presents he grumbled all morning. He hadn’t wanted a carpentry set, he didn’t like the watch and the bicycle had the wrong kind of tires.”

Margaret Kochamma had stopped listening because she was riveted by the curious ritual unfolding on his plate. The toast with jam and fried egg was cut into neat little squares. The dc-jammed strawberries were summoned one by one, and sliced into delicate pieces.

“When the father went to Pete’s-the Optimist’s-room, he couldn’t see Pete, but he could hear the sound of frantic shoveling and heavy breathing. Horse dung was flying all over the room.”

Chacko had begun to shake with silent laughter in anticipation of the end of his joke. With laughing hands, he placed a sliver of strawberry on each bright yellow and red square of toast-making the whole thing look like a lurid snack that an old woman might serve at a bridge parry

“`What in heaven’s name are you doing?’ the father shouted to Pete.” -

Salt and pepper was sprinkled on the squares of toast. Chacko paused before the punchline, laughing up at Margaret Kochamma, who was smiling at his plate.

“A voice came from deep inside the dung. `Well, Father,’ Pete said, `if there’s so much shit around, there has to be a pony somewhere!’”

Chacko, holding a fork and a knife in each hand, leaned back in his chair in the empty cafâ‚ and laughed his high, hiccupping, infectious laugh till the tears poured down his cheeks. Margaret Kochamma, who had missed most of the joke, smiled. Then she began to laugh at his laugh. Their laughs fed each other and climbed to a hysterical pitch. When the owner of the cafâ‚ appeared, he saw a customer (not a particularly desirable one) and a waitress (an only averagely desirable one) locked in a spiral of hooting, helpless laughter.

Meanwhile, another customer (a regular) had arrived unnoticed, and waited to be served.

The owner cleaned some already clean glasses, clinking them together noisily, and clattered crockery on the counter to convey his displeasure to Margaret Kochamma. She tried to compose herself before she went to take the new order. But she had tears in her eyes, and had to stifle a fresh batch of giggles, which made the hungry man whose order she was taking look up from his menu, his thin lips pursed in silent disapproval.

She stole a glance at Chacko, who looked at her and smiled. It was an insanely friendly smile.

He finished his breakfast, paid, and left

Margaret Kochamma was reproached by her employer and given a lecture on Cafâ Ethics. She apologized to him. She was truly sorry for the way she had behaved.

That evening, after work, she thought about what had happened and was uncomfortable with herself. She was not usually frivolous, and didn’t think it right to have shared such uncontrolled laughter with a complete stranger. It seemed such an over-familiar, intimate thing to have done. She wondered what had made her laugh so much. She knew it wasn’t the joke.

She thought of Chacko’s laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time.

Chacko began to visit the cafâ quite often.

He always came with his invisible companion and his friendly smile. Even when it wasn’t Margaret Kochamma who served him, he sought her out with his eyes, and they exchanged secret smiles that invoked the joint memory of their Laugh.

Margaret Kochamma found herself looking forward to the Rumpled Porcupine’s visits. Without anxiety, but with a sort of creeping affection. She learned that he was a Rhodes Scholar from India. That he read Classics. And rowed for Balliol.

Until the day she married him she never believed that she would ever consent to be his wife.

A few months after they began to go out together, he began to smuggle her into his rooms, where he lived like a helpless, exiled prince. Despite the best efforts of his scout and cleaning lady, his room was always filthy. Books, empty wine bottles, dirty underwear and cigarette butts littered the floor. Cupboards were dangerous to open because clothes and books and shoes would cascade down and some of his books were heavy enough to inflict real damage. Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic-who forgot the candles, who broke the wineglasses, who lost the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick-ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.

She had never before met a man who spoke of the world-of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it-in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.

Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them-as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp, She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

As for Chacko, Margaret Kochamma was the first female friend he had ever had. Not just the first woman that he had slept with, but his first real companion. What Chacko loved most about her was her self-sufficiency. Perhaps it wasn’t remarkable in the average Englishwoman, but it was remarkable to Chacko.

He loved the fact that Margaret Kochamma didn’t cling to him. That she was uncertain about her feelings for him. That he never knew till the last day whether or not she would marry him. He loved the way she would sit up naked in his bed, her long white back swiveled away from him, look at her watch and say in her practical way “Oops, I must be off.” He loved the way she wobbled to work every morning on her bicycle. He encouraged their differences in opinion, and inwardly rejoiced at her occasional outbursts of exasperation at his decadence.

He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him.

Of his family Margaret Kochamma knew very little. He seldom spoke of them.

The truth is that in his years at Oxford, Chacko rarely thought of them. Too much was happening in his life and Ayemenem seemed so far away. The river too small. The fish too few.

He had no pressing reasons to stay in touch with his parents. The Rhodes Scholarship was generous. He needed no money. He was deeply in love with his love for Margaret Kochamma and had no room in his heart for anyone else.

Mammachi wrote to him regularly, with detailed descriptions of her sordid squabbles with her husband and her worries about Ammu’s future. He hardly ever read a whole letter. Sometimes he never bothered to open them at all. He never wrote back.

Even the one time he did return (when he stopped Pappachi from hitting Mammachi with the brass vase, and a rocking chair was murdered in the moonlight), he was hardly aware of how stung his father had been, or his mother’s redoubled adoration of him, or his young sister’s sudden beauty. He came and went in a trance, yearning from the moment he arrived to return to the long-backed white girl who waited for him.

The winter after he came down from Balliol (he did badly in his exams), Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were married. Without her family’s consent. Without his family’s knowledge.

They decided that he should move into Margaret Kochamma’s flat (displacing the Other waitress in the Other cafâ) until he found himself a job.

The timing of the wedding couldn’t have been worse.

Along with the pressures of living together came penury. There was no longer any scholarship money, and there was the full rent of the flat to be paid.

With the end of his rowing came a sudden, premature, middleaged spread. Chacko became a fat man, with a body to match his laugh.

A year into the marriage, and the charm of Chacko’s studently sloth wore off for Margaret Kochamma. It no longer amused her that while she went to work, the flat remained in the same filthy mess that she had left it in. That it was impossible for him to even consider making the bed, or washing clothes or dishes. That he didn’t apologize for the cigarette burns in the new sofa. That he seemed incapable of buttoning up his shirt knotting his tie and tying his shoelaces before presenting himself for a job interview. Within a year she was prepared to exchange the frog on the dissecting table for some small, practical concessions. Such as a job for her husband and a clean home.

Eventually Chacko got a brief, badly paid assignment with the Overseas Sales Department of the India Tea Board. Hoping that this would lead to other things, Chacko and Margaret moved to London. To even smaller, more dismal rooms. Margaret Kochamma’s parents refused to see her.

She had just discovered that she was pregnant when she met Joe. He was an old school friend of her brother’s. When they met, Margaret Kochamma was physically at her most attractive. Pregnancy had put color in her cheeks and brought a shine to her thick, dark hair. Despite her marital troubles, she had that air of secret elation; that affection for her own body that pregnant women often have.

Joe was a biologist He was updating the third edition of a Dictionary of Biology for a small publishing house. Joe was everything that Chacko wasn’t.

Steady. Solvent. Thin.

Margaret Kochamma found herself drawn towards him like a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of light.

When Chacko finished his assignment and couldn’t find another job, he wrote to Mammachi, telling her of his marriage and asking for money. Mammachi was devastated, but secretly pawned her jewelry and arranged for money to be sent to him in England. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

By the time Sophie Mol was born, Margaret Kochamma realized that for herself and her daughter’s sake, she had to leave Chacko. She asked him for a divorce.

Chacko returned to India, where he found a job easily. For a few years he taught at the Madras Christian College, and after Pappachi died, he returned to Ayemenem with his Bharat bottle-sealing machine, his Balliol oar and his broken heart.

Mammachi joyfully welcomed him back into her life. She fed him, she sewed for him, she saw to it that there were fresh flowers in his room every day. Chacko needed his mother’s adoration. Indeed, he demanded it, yet he despised her for it and punished her in secret ways. He began to cultivate his corpulence and general physical dilapidation. He wore cheap, printed Terylene bush shirts over his white mundus and the ugliest plastic sandals that were available in the market. If Mammachi had guests, relatives, or perhaps an old friend visiting from Delhi, Chacko would appear at her tastefully laid dining table-adorned with her exquisite orchid arrangements and best china-and worry an old scab, or scratch the large, black oblong calluses he had cultivated on his elbows.

His special targets were Baby Kochamma’s guests-Catholic bishops or visiting clergy who often dropped by for a snack. In their presence Chacko would take off his sandals and air a revolting, pus-filled diabetic boil on his foot.

“Lord have mercy upon this poor leper,” he would say, while Baby Kochamma tried desperately to distract her guests from the spectacle by picking out the biscuit crumbs and bits of banana chips that littered their beards.

But of all the secret punishments that Chacko tormented Mammachi with, the worst and most mortifying of all was when he reminisced about Margaret Kochamma. He spoke of her often and with a peculiar pride. As though he admired her for having divorced him. “She traded me in for a better man,” he would say to Mammachi, and she would flinch as though he had denigrated her instead of himself.

Margaret Kochamma wrote regularly, giving Chacko news of Sophie Mol. She assured him that Joe made a wonderful, caring father and that Sophie Mol loved him dearly-facts that gladdened and saddened Chacko in equal measure.

Margaret Kochamma was happy with Joe. Happier perhaps than she would have been had she not had those wild, precarious years with Chacko. She thought of Chacko fondly, but without regret. It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an extraordinary man. And because Chacko had not then, or since, exhibited any of the usual symptoms of grief and hearthreak, Margaret Kochamma just assumed that he felt it had been as much of a mistake for him as it had been for her. When she told him about Joe he had left sadly, but quietly. With his invisible companion and his friendly smile.

They wrote to each other frequently, and over the years their relationship matured. For Margaret Kochamma it became a comfortable, committed friendship. For Chacko it was a way, the only way, of remaining in touch with the mother of his child and the only woman he had ever loved.

When Sophie Mol was old enough to go to school, Margaret Kochamma enrolled herself in a teacher training course, and then got a job as a junior schoolteacher in Clapham. She was in the staff room when she was told about Joe’s accident. The news was delivered by a young policeman who wore a grave expression and carried his helmet in his hands. He had looked strangely comical, like a bad actor auditioning for a solemn part in a play. Margaret Kochamma remembered that her first instinct when she saw him had been to smile.

For Sophie Mol’s sake, if not her own, Margaret Kochamma did her best to face the tragedy with equanimity. To pretend to face the tragedy with equanimity. She didn’t take time off from her job. She saw to it that Sophie Mol’s school routine remained unchanged-Finish your bomework. Eat your egg. No, we can’t not go to school.

She concealed her anguish under the brisk, practical mask of a schoolteacher. The stern, schoolteacher-shaped Hole in the Universe (who sometimes slapped).

But when Chacko wrote inviting her to Ayemenem, something inside her sighed and sat down. Despite everything that had happened between her and Chacko, there was nobody in the world she would rather spend Christmas with. The more she considered it, the more tempted she was. She persuaded herself that a trip to India would be just the thing for Sophie Mol.

So eventually, though she knew that her friends and colleagues at the school would think it odd-her running back to her first-husband-just-as-soon as her second-one-had-died-Margaret Kochamma broke her term deposit and bought two airline tickets. London-Bombay-Cochin.

She was haunted by that decision for as long as she lived.

She took with her to her grave the picture of her little daughter’s body laid out on the chaise longue in the drawing room of the Ayemenem House. Even from a distance, it was obvious that she was dead. Not ill or asleep. It was something to do with the way she lay. The angle of her limbs. Something to do with Death’s authority. Its terrible stillness.

Green weed and river grime was woven into her beautiful redbrown hair. Her sunken eyelids were raw, nibbled at by fish. (O yes they do, the deepswimming fish. They sample everything.) Her mauve corduroy pinafore said Holiday! in a tilting, happy font. She was as wrinkled as a dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long.

A spongy mermaid who had forgotten how to swim.

A silver thimble clenched, for luck, in her little fist.

Thimbe-drinker.

Coffin-cartwheeler.

Margaret Kochamma never forgave herself for taking Sophie Mol to Ayemenem. For leaving her there alone over the weekend while she and Chacko went to Cochin to confirm their return tickets.

It was about nine in the morning when Mammachi and Baby Kochamma got news of a white child’s body found floating downriver where the Meenachal broadens as it approaches the backwaters. Estha and Rahel were still missing. Earlier that morning the children-all three of them-hadn’t appeared for their morning glass of milk. Baby Kochamma and Mammachi thought that they might have gone down to the river for a swim, which was worrying because it had rained heavily the previous day and a good part of the night. They knew that the river could be dangerous. Baby Kochamma sent Kochu Maria to look for them but she returned without them. In the chaos that ensued after Vellya Paapen’s visit, nobody could remember when they had actually last seen the children. They hadn’t been uppermost on anybody’s mind. They could have been missing all night.

Ammu was still locked into her bedroom. Baby Kochamma had the keys. She called through the door to ask Ammu whether she had any idea where the children might be. She tried to keep the panic out of her voice, make it sound like a casual enquiry. Something crashed against the door. Ammu was incoherent with rage and disbelief at what was happening to her-at being locked away like the family lunatic in a medieval household. It was only later, when the world collapsed around them, after Sophie Mol’s body was brought to Ayemenem, and Baby Kochamma unlocked her, that Ammu sifted through her rage to try to make sense of what had happened. Fear and apprehension forced her to think clearly, and it was only then that she remembered what she had said to her twins when they came to her bedroom door and asked her why she had been locked up. The careless words she hadn’t meant.

“Because of you!” Ammu had screamed. “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here! None of this would have happened! I wouldn’t be here! I would have been free! I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones round my neck!”

She couldn’t see them crouched against the door. A Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. Bewildered Twin Ambassadors-of-God-knows-what Their Excellencies Ambassadors E. Pelvis and S. Insect.

“Just go away!” Ammu had said. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone?!”

So they had.

But when the only answer Baby Kochamma got to her question about the children was something crashing against Ammu’s bedroom door, she went away. A slow dread built up inside her as she began to make the obvious, logical and completely mistaken connections between the night’s happenings and the missing children.

The rain had started early the previous afternoon. Suddenly the hot day darkened and the sky began to clap and grumble. Kochu Maria, in a bad mood for no particular reason, was in the kitchen standing on her low stool savagely cleaning a large fish, working up a smelly blizzard of fish scales. Her gold earrings swung fiercely. Silver fish scales flew around the kitchen, landing on kettles, walls, vegetable peelers, the fridge handle. She ignored Vellya Paapen when he arrived at the kitchen door, drenched and shaking. His real eye was bloodshot and he looked as though he had been drinking. He stood there for ten minutes waiting to be noticed. When Kochu Maria finished the fish and started on the onions, he cleared his throat and asked for Mammachi. Kochu Maria tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t go. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, the smell of arrack on his breath hit Kochu Maria like a hammer. She had never seen him like this before, and was a little frightened. She had a pretty good idea of what it was all about, so she eventually decided that it would be best to call Mammachi. She shut the kitchen door, leaving Vellya Paapen outside in the back mittam, weaving drunkenly in the driving rain. Though it was December, it rained as though it was June. “Cyclonic disturbance,” the newspapers called it the next day. But by then nobody was in any condition to read the papers.

Perhaps it was the rain that drove Vellya Paapen to the kitchen door. To a superstitious man, the relentlessness of that unseasonal downpour could have seemed like an omen from an angry god. To a drunk superstitious man, it could have seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. Which, in a way, it was.

When Mammachi arrived in the kitchen, in her petticoat and pale pink dressing gown with rickrack edging, Vellya Paapen climbed up the kitchen steps and offered her his mortgaged eye. He held it out in the palm of his hand. He said he didn’t deserve it and wanted her to have it back. His left eyelid drooped over his empty socket in an immutable, monstrous wink. As though everything that he was about to say was part of an elaborate prank.

“What is it?” Mammachi asked, stretching her hand out, thinking perhaps that for some reason Vellya Paapen was returning the kilo of red rice she had given him that morning.

“It’s his eye,” Kochu Maria said loudly to Mammachi, her own eyes bright with onion tears. By then Mammachi had already touched the glass eye. She recoiled from its slippery hardness. Its slimy marbieness.

“Are you drunk?’ Mammachi said angrily to the sound of the rain. “How dare you come here in this condition?”

She groped her way to the sink, and soaped away the sodden Paravan’s eye-juices. She smelled her hands when she’d finished. Kochu Maria gave Vellya Paapen an old kitchen cloth to wipe himself with, and said nothing when he stood on the topmost step almost inside her Touchable kitchen, drying himself, sheltered from the rain by the sloping overhang of the roof. -

When he was calmer, Vellya Paapen returned his eye to its rightful socket and began to speak. He started by recounting to Mammachi how much her family had done for his. Generation for generation. How, long before the Communists thought of it, Reverend E. John Ipe had given his father, Kelan, title to the land on which their hut now stood. How Mammachi had paid for his eye. How she had organized for Velutha to be educated and given him a job

Mammachi, though annoyed at his drunkenness, wasn’t averse to listening to bardic stories about herself and her family’s Christian munificence. Nothing prepared her for what she was about to hear.

Vellya Paapen began to cry. Half of him wept. Tears welled up in his real eye and shone on his black cheek. With his other eye he stared stonily ahead. An old Paravan, who had seen the Walking Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and Love.

Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of him. He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to skin.

They went to Kari Saipu’s House, Vellya Paapen said. The white man’s demon had entered them. It was Kari Saipu’s revenge for what he, Vellya Paapen, had done to him. The boat (that Estha sat on and Rahel found) was tethered to the tree stump next to the steep path that led through the marsh to the abandoned rubber estate. He had seen it there. Every night. Rocking on the water. Empty. Waiting for the lovers to return. For hours it waited. Sometimes they only emerged through the long grass at dawn. Vellya Paapen had seen them with his own eye. Others had seen them too. The whole village knew. It was only a matter of time before Mammachi found out. So Vellya Paapen had come to tell Mammachi himself. As a Paravan and a man with mortgaged body parts, he considered it his duty.

The lovers. Sprung from his loins and hers. His son and her daughter. They had made the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen.

Vellya Paapen kept talking. Weeping. Retching. Moving his mouth. Mammachi couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sound of the rain grew louder and exploded in her head. She didn’t hear herself shouting.

Suddenly the blind old woman in her rickrack dressing gown and with her thin gray hair plaited into a rat’s tail stepped forward and pushed Vellya Paapen with all her strength. He stumbled backwards down the kitchen steps and lay sprawled in the wet mud. He was taken- completely by surprise. Part of the taboo of being an Untouchable was expecting not to be touched. At least not in these circumstances. Of being locked into a physically impregnable cocoon.

Baby Kochamma, walking past the kitchen, heard the commotion. She found Mammachi spitting into the rain, THOO! THOO! THOO!, and Vellya Paapen lying in the slush, wet, weeping, groveling. Offering to kill his son. To tear him limb from limb.

Mammachi was shouting, “Drunken dog! Drunken Paravan liar!” Over the din Kochu Maria shouted Vellya Paapen’s story to Baby Kochamma. Baby Kochamma recognized at once the immense potential of the situation, but immediately anointed her thoughts with unctuous oils. She bloomed. She saw it as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and simultaneously avenging her (Baby Kochamma’s) humiliation at the hands of Velutha and the men in the march-the Modalali Mariakutty taunts, the forced flagwaving. She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin.

Baby Kochamma put her heavy arm around Mammachi.

“It must be true,” she said in a quiet voice. “She’s quite capable of it. And so is he. Vellya Paapen would not lie about something like this.”

She asked Kochu Maria to get Mammachi a glass of water and a chair to sit on. She made Vellya Paapen repeat his story, stopping him every now and then for details-whose boat? How often? How long had it been going on? -

When Vellya Paapen finished, Baby Kochamma turned to Mammachi. “He must go,” she said. “Tonight. Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.”

Then she shuddered her schoolgirl shudder. That was when she said: How could the stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans.

With that olfactory observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled.

Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on beat. Her tolerance of “Men’s Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generations to come, forever now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms and birthday parties. They’d nudge and whisper. It was all finished-now.

Mammachi lost control.

They did what they had to do, the two old ladies. Mammachi provided the passion. Baby Kochamma the Plan. Kochu Maria was their midget lieutenant. They locked Ammu up (tricked her into her bedroom) before they sent for Velutha. They knew that they had to get him to leave Ayemenem before Chacko returned. They could neither trust nor predict what Chacko’s attitude would be.

It wasn’t entirely their fault, though, that the whole thing spun out of control like a deranged top. That it lashed out at those that crossed its path. That by the time Chacko and Margaret Kochamma returned from Cochin, it was too late.

The fisherman had already found Sophie Mol.

Picture him.

Out in his boat at dawn, at the mouth of the river he has known all his life. It is still quick and swollen from the previous night’s rain.

Something bobs past in the water and the colors catch his eye. Mauve. Redbrown. Beach sand. It moves with the current, swiftly towards the sea. He sends out his bamboo pole to stop it and draw it towards him. It’s a wrinkled mermaid. A mer-child. A mere merchild. With redbrown hair. With an Imperial Entomologists’ nose, and, a silver thimble clenched for luck in her fist. epiillsherou of the water into his boat. He puts his thin cotton towel under her, she lies at the bottom of his boat with his silver haul of small fish. He rows home-Thaiy thaiy thakka thaiy tbaiy thome- thinking how wrong it is for a fisherman to believe that he knows his river well. No one knows the Meenachal. No one knows what it may snatch or suddenly yield. Or when. That is what makes fishermen pray.

At the Kottayam police station, a shaking Baby Kochamma was ushered into the Station House Officer’s room. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew of the circumstances that had led to the sudden dismissal of a factory worker. A Paravan. A few days ago he had tried to, to… to force himself on her niece, she said. A divorcee with two children.

Baby Kochamma misrepresented the relationship between Ammu and Velutha, not for Ammu’s sake, but to contain the scandal and salvage the family reputation in Inspector Thomas Mathew’s eyes. It didn’t occur to her that Ammu would later invite shame upon herself-that she would go to the police and try and set the record straight. As Baby Kochamma told her story, she began to believe it.

Why wasn’t the matter reported to the police in the first place, the Inspector wanted to know.

“We are an old family,” Baby Kochamma said. “These are not things we want talked about…

Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters-whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs…

“Where is the molestee now?”

“At home. She doesn’t know I’ve come here. She wouldn’t have let me come. Naturally… she’s frantic with worry about the children. Hysterical.’

Later, when the real story reached Inspector Thomas Mathew, the fact that what the Paravan had taken from the Touchable Kingdom had not been snatched, but given, concerned him deeply. So after Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu went to him with the twins to tell him that a mistake had been made and he tapped her breasts with his baton, it was not a policeman’s spontaneous brutishness on his part. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was a premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and terrorize her. An attempt to instill order into a world gone wrong.

Still later, when the dust had settled and he had had the paperwork organized, Inspector Thomas Mathew congratulated himself for the way it had all turned out.

But now, he listened carefully and courteously as Baby Kochamma constructed her story.

“Last night it was getting dark-about seven in the evening-when he came to the house to threaten us. It was raining very heavily. The lights had gone out and we were lighting the lamps when he came,” she told him. “He knew that the man of the house, my nephew Chacko Ipe, was-is-away in Cochin. We were three women alone in the house.” She paused to let the Inspector imagine the horrors that could be visited by a sex-crazed Paravan on three women alone in a house.

“We told him that if he did not leave Ayemenem quietly we would call the police. He started off by saying that my niece had consented, can you imagine? He asked us what proof we had of what we were accusing him of. He said that according to the Labor Laws we had no grounds on which to dismiss him. He was very calm. `The days are gone,’ he told us, `when you can kick us around like dogs.’” By now Baby Kochamma sounded utterly convincing. Injured. Incredulous.

Then her imagination took over completely. She didn’t describe how Mammachi had lost control. How she had gone up to Velutha and spat right into his face. The things she had said to him. The names she had called him.

Instead she described to Inspector. Thomas Mathew how-it was not just what Velutha had said that had made her come to the police, but the way he said it. His complete lack of remorse, which was what had shocked her most. As though he was actually proud of what he had done. Without realizing it herself, she grafted the manner of the man who had humiliated her during the march onto Velutha. She described the sneering fury in his face. The brassy insolence in his voice that had so frightened her. That made her sure that his dismissal and the children’s disappearance were not, could not possibly be, unconnected.

She had known the Paravan since he was a child, Baby Kochamma said. He had been educated by her family, in the Untouchables’ school started by her father, Punnyan Kunju (Mr. Thomas Mathew must know who he was? Yes, of course). He was trained to be a carpenter by her family, the house he lived in was given to his grandfather by her family. He owed everything to her family.

“You people,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said, “first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they misbehave you come running to us for help.”

Baby Kochamma lowered her eyes like a chastised child. Then she continued her story. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew how in the last few weeks she had noticed some presaging signs, some insolence, some rudeness. She mentioned seeing him in the march on the way to Cochin and the rumors that he was or had been a Naxalite. She didn’t notice the faint furrow of worry that this piece of information produced on the Inspector’s brow.

She had warned her nephew about him, Baby Kochamma said, but never -in her wildest dreams had she thought that it would ever come to this. A beautiful child was dead. Two children were missing.

Baby Kochamma broke down.

Inspector Thomas Mathew gave her a cup of police tea. When she was feeling a little better, he helped her to set down all she had told him in her First Information Report. He assured Baby Kochamma of the full cooperation of the Kottayam Police. The rascal would be caught before the day was out, he said. A Paravan with a pair of two-egg twins, hounded by history-he knew there weren’t many places for him to hide.

Inspector Thomas Mathew was a prudent man. He took one precaution. He sent a Jeep to fetch Comrade K. N. M. Pillai to the police station. It was crucial for him to know whether the Paravan had any political support or whether he was operating alone. Though he himself was a Congress man, he did not intend to risk any run-ins with the Marxist government. When Comrade Pillai arrived, he was ushered into the seat that Baby Kochamma had only recently vacated. Inspector Thomas Mathew showed him Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers and not words. No explanations seemed necessary. They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn’t trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

Comrade Pillai told Inspector Thomas Mathew that he was acquainted with Velutha, but oI~TIitted to mention that Velutha was a member of the Communist Party or that Velutha had knocked on his door late the previous night, which made Comrade Pillai the last person to have seen Velutha before he disappeared. Nor, though he knew it to be untrue, did Comrade Pillai refute the allegation of attempted rape in Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report He merely assured Inspector Thomas Mathew that as far as he was concerned Velutha did not have the patronage or the protection of the Communist Party. That he was on his own.

After Comrade Pillai left, Inspector Thomas Mathew went over their conversation in his mind, teasing it, testing its logic, looking for loopholes. When he was satisfied, he instructed his men.

Meanwhile, Baby Kochamma returned to Ayemenem. The Plymouth was parked in the driveway. Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were back from Cochin.

Sophie Mol was laid out on the chaise longue.

When Margaret Kochamma saw her little daughter’s body, shock swelled in her like phantom applause in an empty auditorium. It overflowed in a wave of vomit and left her mute and empty-eyed. She mourned two deaths, not one. With the loss of Sophie Mol, Joe died again. And this time there was no homework to finish or egg to eat. She had come to Ayemenem to heal her wounded world, and had lost all of it instead. She shattered like glass.

Her memory of the days that followed was fuzzy. Long, dim, hours of thick, furry-tongued serenity (medically administered by Dr. Verghese Verghese) lacerated by sharp, steely slashes of hysteria, as keen and cutting as the edge of a new razor blade.

She was vaguely conscious of Chacko-concerned and gentlevoiced when he was by her side-otherwise incensed, blowing like an enraged wind through the Ayemenem House. So different from the amused Rumpled Porcupine she had met that long-ago Oxford morning at the cafâ.

She remembered faintly the funeral in the yellow church. The sad singing. A bat that had bothered someone. She remembered the sounds of doors being battered down, and frightened women’s voices. And how at night the bush crickets had sounded like creaking stars and amplified the fear and gloom that hung over the Ayemenem House.

She never forgot her irrational rage at the other two younger children who had for some reason been spared. Her fevered mind fastened like a limpet onto the notion that Estha was somehow responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Odd, considering that Margaret Kochamma didn’t know that it was Estha-Stirring Wizard with a Puff-who had rowed jam and thought Two Thoughts, Estha who had broken rules and rowed Sophie Mol and Rahel across the river in the afternoons in a little boat, Estha who had abrogated a sickled smell by waving a Marxist flag at it. Estha who had made the back verandah of the History House their home away from home, furnished with a grass mat and most of their toys-a catapult, an inflatable goose, a Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. And finally, on that dreadful night, Estha who had decided that though it was dark and raining, the Time Had Come for them to run away, because Ammu didn’t want them anymore.

Despite not knowing any of this, why did Margaret Kochamma blame Estha for what had happened to Sophie? Perhaps she had a mother’s instinct.

Three or four times, swimming up through thick layers of druginduced sleep, she had actually sought Estha out and slapped him until someone calmed her down and led her away. Later, she wrote to Ammu to apologize. By the time the letter arrived, Estha had been Returned and Ammu had had to pack her bags and leave. Only Rahel remained in Ayemenem to accept, on Estha’s behalf, Margaret Kochamma’s apology. I can’t imagine what came over me, she wrote. I can only put it down to the effect of the tranquilizers. I had no right to behave the way I did, and want you to know that I am ashamed and terribly, terribly sorry.

Strangely, the person that Margaret Kochamma never thought about was Velutha. Of him she had no memory at all. Not even what he looked like.

Perhaps this was because she never really knew him, nor ever heard what happened to him.

The God of Loss.

The God of Small Things.

He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.

After all, Margaret Kochamma wasn’t with the platoon of Touchable policemen when they crossed the swollen river. Their wide khaki shorts rigid with starch.

The metallic clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket. It is unreasonable to expect a person to remember what she didn’t know had happened.

Sorrow, however, was still two weeks away on that blue cross-stitch afternoon, as Margaret Kochamma lay jet-lagged and still asleep. Chacko, on his way to see Comrade K. N. M. Pillai, drifted past the bedroom window like an anxious, stealthy whale intending to peep in to see whether his wife (‘Ex-wife, Chacko,’) and daughter were awake and needed anything. At the last minute his courage failed him and he floated fatly by without looking in. Sophie Mol (A wake, A live, A lert) saw him go.

She sat up on her bed and looked out at the rubber trees. The sun had moved across the sky and cast a deep house-shadow across the plantation, darkening the already dark-leafed trees. Beyond the shadow, the light was flat and gentle. There was a diagonal slash across the mottled bark of each tree through which milky rubber seeped like white blood from a wound, and dripped into the waiting half of a coconut shell that had been tied to the tree.

Sophie Mol got out of bed and rummaged through her sleeping mother’s purse. She found what she was looking for-the keys to the large, locked suitcase on the floor, with its airline stickers and baggage tags. She opened it and rooted through the contents with all the delicacy of a dog digging up a flower bed. She upset stacks of lingerie, ironed skirts and blouses, shampoos, creams, chocolate, Sellotape, umbrellas, soap (and other bottled London smells), quinine, aspirin, broad-spectrum antibiotics. Take everything, her colleagues had advised Margaret Kochamma in concerned voices, you never know, which was their way of saying to a colleague traveling to the Heart of Darkness that

(a) Anything Can Happen To Anyone.

So

(b) It’s Best to be Prepared.

Sophie Mol eventually found what she had been looking for.

Presents for her cousins. Triangular towers of Toblerone chocolate (soft and slanting in the heat). Socks with separate multicolored toes. And two ballpoint pens-the top halves filled with water in which a cut-out collage of a London streetscape was suspended. Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Shops and people. A red doubledecker bus propelled by an air bubble floated up and down the silent street. There was something sinister about the absence of noise on the busy ballpoint street.

Sophie Mol put the presents into her go-go bag and went forth into the world. To drive a hard bargain. To negotiate a friendship.

A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete. Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled around into a story which is why, far more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season.