The God of Small Things

Chapter 2.

…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 traveled 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 practice 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-Orhvays

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 favorite 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. “Bat moonin’ an’ a groonin’ gonna satisfy mah soul, less have apardy…”

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 eighteenminute age difference could cause such a discrepancy in fronttooth 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 All 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 good-byes 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. Pappachi 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 easygoing charm and juvenile but totally disarming sense of humor. 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 humor. 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 whiskey. 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 jewelry and most of the other presents that they had been given. He died before the twins were born-on the operating table, while his gallbladder 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 lam‚ 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 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 rumors 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 labor 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 anymore. “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 postdrunken 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 offense 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 jeweled bride. Her silk sunset-colored 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 snake heads 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 divorcehood. 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, chiseled 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 backseat of the Plymouth, between Estha and Rahel, sat Baby Kochamma. Ex-nun, and incumbent baby grandaunt. In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate, Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered them doomed, fatherless wail. 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 quarreling 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 Kosby 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 lokatbinde Rayivu, 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 redo 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 Flavor and would stand them in good stead-when they entered the Overseas Market.

Ammu said that the billboard made them look ridiculous. Like a traveling 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 highranking ex-Government official. He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting. He slouched about the compound in his immaculately tailored suits, weaving sullen circles around mounds of red chilies 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 favorite 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 woolen 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 be 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-humored long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost-gray, 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 AM, 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 largish 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 lightbrown 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 center of his upper lip that drooped 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 box 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, rivaled the precision and logic of mathematics. Cuff-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 dispose.

It said:

(1) Place suitably in particular order.

(2) Bring mind into certain state.

(3) Do what one will with, get off one’s bands, stow away, demolish, finish, r~ 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 Saibu’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 Saibu’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 dryly, 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 forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. 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 “Hal 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 aeromodeling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft, with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propeller. When it was ready, he would rake 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, Chacko’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 (can fling machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labor 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 Bananajam. 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-Parashuram 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.

Now, on the way to Cochin, it rattled and made fallingoff noises. Near Vaikom they had to stop and 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 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 onto 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 till my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak! ”

“And it is I, Raksha, 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 bunt with the pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs-frogeater-fish-killer-he shall bunt thee! ”

Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them an abridged version of The Tempest 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 sertanrvdA 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 ni rieht 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 Tirupan. 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 Parsis.

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 practiced 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 backwards-bending legs and signaled 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 forever, 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 a 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 icebox 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 KM

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.

Runter.

Moonner.

Estha noticed that the hair on his head was curly gray, 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 labor 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 West Bengal.

There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled 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 (picklefactory-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. Namtoodiripad’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 Center.”

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 flow? The stupid goons are agitating against our People’s Government Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren’t People anymore?”

Over the next two years the political discord, fueled 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 by 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 gray, 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.

Cardamon 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 laborers 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 Zindabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.

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.

A bun.

A banana.

Another balled fist slammed down on it, and the bonnet closed. Chacko rolled down his window and called out to the man who had done it.

“Thanks, keto!” he said. “Valarey thanks!”

“Don’t be so ingratiating, Comrade,” Ammu said. “It was an accident. He didn’t really mean to help. How could he possibly know that in this old car there beats a truly Marxist heart?”

“Ammu,” Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, “is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”

Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. “Washed-up” cut like a knife through a soft thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

Just then Rahel saw Velutha. Vellya Paapen’s son, Velutha. Her most beloved friend Velutha. Velutha marching with a red flag. In a white shirt and mundu with angry veins in his neck. He never usually wore a shirt.

Rahel rolled down her window in a flash. “Velutha! Velutha!” she called to him.

He froze for a moment, and listened with his flag. What he had heard was a familiar voice in a most unfamiliar circumstance. Rahel, standing on the car seat, had grown out of the Plymouth window like the loose, flailing horn of a car-shaped herbivore. With a fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo and yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.

“Velutha! lvidaj &’ Velutha!” And she too had veins in her neck.

He stepped sideways and disappeared deftly into the angriness around him.

Inside the car Ammu whirled around, and her eyes were angry. She slapped at Rahel’s calves which were the only part of her left in the car to slap. Calves and brown feet in Bata sandals.

“Behave yourself!” Ammu said.

Baby Kochamma pulled Rahel down, and she landed on the seat with a surprised thump. She thought there’d been a misunderstanding.

“It was Velutha!” she explained with a smile. “And he had a flag!” The flag had seemed to her a most impressive piece of equipment. The right thing for a friend to have.

“You’re a stupid silly little girl!” Ammu said.

Her sudden, fierce anger pinned Rahel against the car seat. Rahel was puzzled. Why was Ammu so angry? About what?

“But it was him!” Rahel said.

“Shut up!” Ammu said.

Rahel saw that Ammu had a film of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and that her eyes had become hard, like marbles. Like Pappachi’s in the Vienna studio photograph. (How Pappachi’s Moth whispered in his children’s veins!)

Baby Kochamma rolled up Rahel’s window.

Years later, on a crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu’s face. Like a rogue piece in a puzzle. Like a question mark that drifted through the pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence.

That hard marble look in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of that sudden, hurt silence.

What had it all meant?

The Sunday train was almost empty. Across the aisle from Rahel a woman with chapped cheeks and a mustache coughed up phlegm and wrapped it in twists of newspaper that she tore off the pile of Sunday papers on her lap. She arranged the little packages in neat rows on the empty seat in front of her as though she was setting up a phlegm stall. As she worked she chatted to herself in a pleasant, soothing voice.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones-a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Her co-passenger’s madness comforted Rahel. It drew her closer into New York’s deranged womb. Away from the other, more terrible thing that haunted her.

A sour metal smell, like steel bus rails, and the smell of the bus conductor’s bands from holding them. A young man with an old man’s mouth.

Outside the train, the Hudson shimmered, and the trees were the redbrown colors of fall. It was just a little cold.

“There’s a nipple in the air” Larry McCaslin said to Rahel, and laid his palm gently against the suggestion of protest from a chilly nipple through her cotton T-shirt. He wondered why she didn’t smile.

She wondered why it was that when she thought of home it was always in the colors of the dark, oiled wood of boats, and the empty cores of the tongues of flame that flickered in brass lamps.

It was Velutha.

That much Rahel was sure of. She’d seen him. He’d seen her. She’d have known him anywhere, any time. And if he hadn’t been wearing a shirt, she would have recognized him from behind. She knew his back. She’d been carried on it. More times than she could count. It had a light-brown birthmark, shaped like a pointed dry leaf. He said it was a Lucky Leaf; that made the Monsoons come on time. A brown leaf on a black back. An autumn leaf at night.

A lucky leaf that wasn’t lucky enough.

Velutha wasn’t supposed to be a carpenter.

He was called Velutha-which means White in Malayalam-because he was so black. His father, Vellya Paapen, was a Paravan. A toddy tapper. He had a glass eye. He had been shaping a block of granite with a hammer when a chip flew into his left eye and sliced right through it.

As a young boy, Velutha would come with Vellya Paapen to the back entrance of the Ayemenem House to deliver the coconuts they had plucked from the trees in the compound. Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians. Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed.

When the British came to Malabar, a number of Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas (among them Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the scourge of Untouchability. As added incentive they were given a little food and money. They were known as the Rice Christians. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests. As a special favor they were even given their own separate Pariah Bishop. After Independence they found they were not entitled to any government benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.

It was Mammachi, on vacation from Delhi and Imperial Entomology who first noticed little Velutha’s remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys-tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reeds; he could carve perfect boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding them out on his palm (as he had been taught) so she wouldn’t have to touch him to take them. Though he was younger than she was, he called her Ammukutty-Little Ammu. Mammachi persuaded Vellya Paapen to send him to the Untouchables’ School that her father-in-law Punnyan Kunju had founded.

Velutha was fourteen when Johann Klein, a German carpenter from a carpenter’s guild in Bavaria, came to Kottayam and spent three years with the Christian Mission Society conducting a workshop with local carpenters. Every afternoon, after school, Velutha caught a bus to Kottayam where he worked with Klein till dusk. By the time he was sixteen, Velutha had finished high school and was an accomplished carpenter. He had his own set of carpentry tools and a distinctly German design sensibility. He built Mammachi a Bauhaus dining table with twelve dining chairs in rosewood and a traditional Bavarian chaise longue in lighter jackwood. For Baby Kochamma’s annual Nativity plays he made her a stack of wireframed angels’ wings that fitted onto children’s backs like knapsacks, cardboard clouds for the Angel Gabriel to appear between, and a manger for Christ to be born in. When her garden cherub’s silver arc dried up inexplicably, it was Dr. Velutha who fixed its bladder for her.

Apart from his carpentry skills, Velutha had a way with machines. Mammachi (with impenetrable Touchable logic) often said that if only he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might have become an engineer. He mended radios, clocks, water pumps. He looked after the plumbing and all the electrical gadgets in the house.

When Mammachi decided to enclose the back verandah, it was Velutha who designed and built the sliding-folding door that later became all the rage in Ayemenem.

Velutha knew more about the machines in the factory than anyone else.

When Chacko resigned his job in Madras and returned to Ayemenem with a Bharat bottle-sealing machine, it was Velutha who re-assembled it and set it up. It was Velutha who maintained the new canning machine and the automatic pineapple slicer. Velutha who oiled the water pump and the small diesel generator. Velutha who built the aluminum sheet-lined, easy-to-clean cutting surfaces, and the ground-level furnaces for boiling fruit.

Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, however, was an Old-World Paravan. He had seen the Crawling Backwards Days and his gratitude to Mammachi and her family for all that they had done for him was as wide and deep as a river in spate. When he had his accident with the stone chip, Mammachi organized and paid for his glass eye. He hadn’t worked off his debt yet, and though he knew he wasn’t expected to, that he wouldn’t ever be able to, he felt that his eye was not his own. His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

Vellya Paapen feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but the way he said it. Not what he did, but the way he did it.

Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.

While these were qualities that were perfectly acceptable, perhaps even desirable, in Touchables, Vellya Paapen thought that in a Paravan they could (and would, and indeed, should) be construed as insolence.

Vellya Paapen tried to caution Velutha. But since he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that bothered him, Velutha misunderstood his muddled concern. To him it appeared as though his father grudged him his brief training and his natural skills. Vellya Paapen’s good intentions quickly degenerated into nagging and bickering and a general air of unpleasantness between father and son. Much to his mother’s dismay, Velutha began to avoid going home. He worked late. He caught fish in the river and cooked it on an open fire. He slept outdoors, on the banks of the river.

Then one day he disappeared. For four years nobody knew where he was. There was a rumor that he was working on a building site for the Department of Welfare and Housing in Trivandrum.

And more recently, the inevitable rumor that he had become a Naxalite. That he had been to prison. Somebody said they had seen him in Quilon.

There was no way of reaching him when his mother, Chella, died of tuberculosis. Then Kuttappen, his older brother, fell off a coconut tree and damaged his spine. He was paralyzed and unable to work. Velutha heard of the accident a whole year after it happened.

It had been five months since he returned to Ayemenem. He never talked about where he had been, or what he had done.

Mammachi rehired Velutha as the factory carpenter and put him in charge of general maintenance. It caused a great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers because, according to them, Paravans were not meant to be carpenters. And certainly, prodigal Paravans were not meant to be rehired.

To keep the others happy, and since she knew that nobody else would hire him as a carpenter, Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than she would a Paravan. Mammachi didn’t encourage him to enter the house (except when she needed something mended or installed). She thought that he ought to be grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to touch things that Touchables touched. She said that it was a big step for a Paravan.

When he returned to Ayemenem after his years away from home, Velutha still had about him the same quickness. The sureness. And Vellya Paapen feared for him now more than ever; But this time he held his peace. He said nothing.

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched.

Entered.

Loved.

When the Terror took hold of him, Vellya Paapen went to Mammachi. He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The other stayed dry. He shook his own head from side to side to side till Mammachi ordered him to stop. He trembled his own body like a man with malaria. Mammachi ordered him to stop it but he couldn’t, because you can’t order fear around. Not even a Paravan’s. Vellya Paapen told Mammachi what he had seen. He asked God’s forgiveness for having spawned a monster. He offered to kill his son with his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created.

In the next room Baby Kochamma heard the noise and came to find out what it was all about She saw Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced.

She said (among other things), How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans!

And she shuddered theatrically, like a child being force-fed spinach. She preferred an Irish-Jesuit smell to a particular Paravan smell.

By far. By far.

Velutha, Vellya Paapen and Kuttappen lived in a little laterite hut, downriver from the Ayemenem house. A three-minute run through the coconut trees for Esthappen and Rahel. They had only just arrived in Ayemenem with Ammu and were too young to remember Velutha when he left. But in the months since he had returned, they had grown to be the best of friends. They were forbidden from visiting his house, but they did. They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches-hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings-and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world.

It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest-ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish.

And on that skyblue December day, it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.

Steelshrill police whistles pierced holes in the Noise Umbrella. Through the jagged umbrella holes Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in. the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and redflags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark.

Marching.

Terror, sweat, and talcum powder had blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth. She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumored to have moved south from Paighat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.

A man with a red flag and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare.

“Feeling hot, baby?’ the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam.

Then, unkindly, “Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!” and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family.

“Don’t answer!” Baby Kochamma whispered hoarsely. “Look down! Just look down!”

The man with the Rag turned his attention to her. She was looking down at the floor of the car. Like a coy, frightened bride who had been married off to a stranger.

“Hello, sister,” the man said carefully in English. “What is your name please?”

When Baby Kochamma didn’t answer, he looked back at his cohecklers.

“She has no name.”

“What about Modalali Mariakutty?” someone suggested with a giggle. Modalali in Malayalam means landlord.

“A, B, C, D, X, Y, Z,” somebody else said, irrelevantly.

More students crowded around. They all wore handkerchiefs or printed Bombay Dyeing hand towels on their heads to stave off the sun. They looked like extras who had wandered off the sets of the Malayalam version of Sinbad. The Last Voyage.

The man like a knot gave Baby Kochamma his red flag as a present.

“Here,” he said. “Hold it.”

Baby Kochamrna held it, still not looking at him.

“Wave it,” he ordered.

She had to wave it. She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and dusty

She tried to wave it as though she wasn’t waving it.

“Now say “Inquilab Zindabad.”

“Inquilab Zindabad,” Baby Kochamma whispered.

“Good girl.”

The crowd roared with laughter.

A shrillwhistle blew.

“Okay then,” the man said to Baby Kochamma in English, as though they had successfully concluded a business deal. “Bye-bye!”

He slammed the skyblue door shut Baby Kochamma wobbled. The crowd around the car unclotted and went on with its march.

Baby Kochamma rolled the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with this and that, trying to salvage some dignity

After the last few men walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.

“Are you sure it was him?’ Chacko asked Rahel.

`Who?” Rahel said, suddenly cautious.

“Are you sure it was Velutha?”

“Hmmm…?” Rahel said, playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.

“I said, are you sure that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.

“Mmm… nyes… m… m… almost,” Rahel said.

“You’re almost sure?” Chacko said.

“No… it was almost Vehitha,” Rahel said. “it almost looked like him…”

“So you’re not sure then?”

“Almost not.” Rahel slid a look at Estha for approval.

“It must have been him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”

Nobody seemed particularly impressed by her insight.

“We should keep an eye on him,” Baby Kochamrna said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory… I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he-”

“I saw Velutha at home before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”

“For his own sake,” Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t interrupt.”

She was annoyed that nobody asked her what a scree bed was.

In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her.

She began to hate him.

From the way Ammu held her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch. Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more like a frog-shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten had been squashed into a Miss Mitten-shaped stain by the milk truck that killed her.

With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat-shaped holes in the Universe.

There were so many stains on the road.

Squashed Miss Mitten-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed crows that had tried to eat the squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed dogs that ate the squashed crow-shaped stains in the Universe.

Feathers. Mangoes. Spit.

All the way to Cochin.

The sun shone through the Plymouth window directly down at Rahel. She closed her eyes and shone back at it. Even behind her eyelids the light was bright and hot. The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.

Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? -then fall, Caesar.”

“It just goes to show;” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody.”

With children, she said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.

At night, Estha would stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?-Then fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would complain to Mammachi.

“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”

Estha would rise from the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?-Then fall, Estha!” and die again.

Kochu Maria was sure that Ettu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.

The woman in the neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after-biscuit cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a Baby Voice.

Rahel ignored her and blew an inadvertent spit bubble.

Ammu hated them blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.

Aristocrats were people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.

Though Baba wasn’t a clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.

When they were alone, Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit.

“It’s not a ruddy sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.

They remembered his anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.

In the only photograph they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other arm. She looked grumpy and bad-tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.

Ammu said that he had only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks, Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph

“Will you stop that!” Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.

“What?” Rahel said, but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.

“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel said.

“Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive,” Estha said.

“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”

“Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped.

“It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.

Rahel put on her sunglasses. The World became angry-colored.

“Take off those ridiculous glasses!” Ammu said.

Rahel took off her ridiculous glasses.

“It’s fascist, the way you deal with them,” Chacko said. “Even children have some rights, for God’s sake!”

“Don’t use the name of the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said.

“I’m not,” Chacko said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”

“Stop posing as the children’s Great Savior!” Ammu said. “When it comes down to brass tacks, you don’t give a damn about them. Or me.”

“Should I?” Chacko said. “Are they my responsibility?”

He said that Ammu and Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.

The backs of Rahel’s legs went wet and sweaty. Her skin slipped on the foamleather upholstery of the car seat. She and Estha knew about millstones. In Mutiny on the Bounty, when people died at sea, they were wrapped in white sheets and thrown overboard with millstones around their necks so that the corpses wouldn’t float. Estha wasn’t sure how they decided how many millstones to take with them before they set off on their voyage.

Estha put his head in his lap.

His puff was spoiled.

A distant train rumble seeped upwards from the frog-stained road. The yam leaves on either side of the railway track began to nod in mass consent. Yesyesyes,yesyes.

The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began to sing another bhajan.

“I tell you, these Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously. “They have no sense of privacy.”

“They have horns and scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies hatch from eggs.”

Rahel had two bumps on her forehead that Estha said would grow into horns. At least one of them would because she was half Hindu. She hadn’t been quick enough to ask him about his horns. Because whatever She was, He was too.

The train slammed past under a column of dense black smoke. There were thirty-two bogies, and the doorways were full of young men with helmetty haircuts who were on their way to the Edge of the World to see what happened to the people who fell off. Those of them who craned too far fell off the edge themselves. Into the flailing darkness, their haircuts turned inside out

The train was gone so quickly that it was hard to imagine that everybody had waited so long for so little. The yam leaves continued to nod long after the train had gone, as though they agreed with it entirely and had no doubts at all.

A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.

Chacko started the Plymouth. Baby Kochamma tried to be jolly. She started a song.

There’s a sad sort of c’anging

From the clock in the ball

And the bells in the steeple too.

And up in the nurs

Anabs-urd

Litt-le Bird

Is popping out to say-

She looked at Estha and Rahel, waiting for them to say “Coo-coo.”

They didn’t.

A carbreeze blew. Green trees and telephone poles flew past the windows. Still birds slid by on moving wires, like unclaimed baggage at the airport.

A pale daymoon hung hugely in the sky and went where they went. As big as the belly of a beer-drinking man.