The God of Small Things

Chapter 3.

Filth had laid siege to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.

Midges whizzed in teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.

The floor was sticky. White walls had turned an uneven gray. Brass hinges and door handles were dull and greasy to the touch. Infrequently used plug points were clogged with grime. Lightbulbs had a film of oil on them. The only things that shone were the giant cockroaches that scurried around like varnished gofers on a film set.

Baby Kochamma had stopped noticing these things long ago. Kochu Maria, who noticed everything, had stopped caring.

The chaise longue on which Baby Kochamma reclined had crushed peanut shells stuffed into the crevices of its rotting upholstery

In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts. Kochu Maria tossed nuts into her mouth. Baby Kochamma placed them decorously in hers.

On The Best of Donahue the studio audience watched a clip from a film in which a black busker was singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow ” in a subway station. He sang sincerely, as though he really believed the words of the song. Baby Kochamma sang with him, her thin, quavering voice thickened with peanut paste. She smiled as the lyrics came back to her. Kochu Maria looked at her as though she had gone mad, and grabbed more than her fair share of nuts. The busker threw his head back when he hit the high notes (the where of “somewhere”), and the ridged, pink roof of his mouth filled the television screen. He was as ragged as a rock star, but his missing teeth and the unhealthy pallor of his skin spoke eloquently of a life of privation and despair. He had to stop singing each time a train arrived or left, which was often.

Then the lights went up in the studio and Donahue presented the man himself, who, on a pre-arranged cue, started the song from exactly the point that he had had to stop (for a train), cleverly achieving a touching victory of Song over Subway.

The next time the husker was interrupted mid-song was only when Phil Donahue put his arm around him and said “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Being interrupted by Phil Donahue was of course entirely different from being interrupted by a subway rumble. It was a pleasure. An honor.

The studio audience clapped and looked compassionate.

The busker glowed with Prime-Time Happiness, and for a few moments, deprivation took a backseat. It had been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had just been robbed of that too.

There are big dreams and little ones.

“Big Man the Laltain sahib, Small Man the Mombatti,” an old coolie, who met Estha’s school excursion party at the railway station (unfailingly, year after year) used to say of dreams.

Big Man the Lantern. Small Man the Tallow-stick.

Huge Man the Strobe Lights, he omitted to say. And Small Man the Subway Station.

The Masters would haggle with him as he trudged behind them with the boys’ luggage, his bowed legs further bowed, cruel schoolboys imitating his gait. Balls-in-Brackets they used to call him.

Smallest Man the Varicose Veins he clean forgot to mention, as he wobbled off with less than half the money he had asked for and less than a tenth of what he deserved.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The gray sky curdled and the clouds resolved themselves into little lumps, like substandard mattress stuffing.

Esthappen appeared at the kitchen door, wet (and wiser than he really was). Behind him the long grass sparkled. The puppy stood on the steps beside him. Raindrops slid across the curved bottom of the rusted gutter on the edge of the roof, like shining beads on an abacus.

Baby Kochamma looked up from the television.

“Here he comes,” she announced to Rahel, not bothering to lower her voice. “Now watch. He won’t say anything. He’ll walk straight to his room. Just watch-”

The puppy seized the opportunity and tried to stage a combined entry. Kochu Maria hit the floor fiercely with her palms and said, “Hup! Hup! Poda Patti!”

So the puppy, wisely, desisted. It appeared to be familiar with this routine.

“Watch!’ Baby Kochamma said. She seemed excited. “He’ll walk straight to his room and wash his clothes. He’s very over-clean… he won’t say a word!”

She had the air of a game warden pointing out an animal in the grass. Taking pride in her ability to predict its movements. Her superior knowledge of its habits and predilections.

Estha’s hair was plastered down in clumps, like the inverted petals of a flower. Slivers of white scalp shone through, Rivulets of water ran down his face and neck.

He walked to his room. A gloating halo appeared around Baby Kochamma’s head. “See?” she said.

Kochu Maria used the opportunity to switch channels and watch a bit of Prime Bodies.

Rahel followed Estha to his room. Ammu’s room. Once.

The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked-off shoe or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes arranged. The dustbin empty.

The obsessive cleanliness of the room was the only positive sign of volition from Estha. The only faint suggestion that he had, perhaps, some Design for Life. Just the whisper of an unwillingness to subsist on scraps offered by others. On the wall by the window, an iron stood on an ironing board. A pile of folded, crumpled clothes waited to be ironed.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas koala (from Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up and down in them.

Estha put on the tap and water drummed into a plastic bucket He undressed in the gleaming bathroom. He stepped out of his sodden jeans. Stiff. Dark blue. Difficult to get out of. He pulled his crushed-strawberry T-shirt over his head, smooth, slim, muscular arms crossed over his body. He didn’t hear his sister at the door.

Rahel watched his stomach suck inwards and his rib cage rise as his wet T-shirt peeled away from his skin, leaving it wet and honeycolored. His face and neck and a V-shaped triangle at the base of his throat were darker than the rest of him. His arms too were doublecolored. Paler where his shirtsleeves ended. A dark-brown man in pale honey clothes. Chocolate with a twist of coffee. High cheekbones and hunted eyes. A fisherman in a white-tiled bathroom, with sea-secrets in his eyes.

Had be seen her? Was be really mad? Did be know that she was there? They had never been shy of each other’s bodies, but they had never been old enough (together) to know what shyness was.

Now they were. Old enough.

Old.

A viable die-able age.

What a funny word old was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old.

Rahel at the bathroom door. Slim-hipped. (“Tell her she’ll need a cesarean!” a drunk gynecologist had said to her husband while they waited for their change at the gas station.) A lizard on a map on her faded T-shirt. Long wild hair with a glint of deep henna red sent unruly fingers down into the small of her back. The diamond in her nostril flashed. Sometimes. And sometimes not. A thin, gold, serpent-headed bangle glowed like a circle of orange light around her wrist. Slim snakes whispering to each other, head to head. Her mother’s melted wedding ring. Down softened the sharp lines of her-thin, angular arms.

At first glance she appeared to have grown into the skin of her mother. High cheekbones. Deep dimples when she smiled. But she was longer, harder, flatter, more angular than Ammu had been. Less lovely perhaps to those who like roundness and softness in women. Only her eyes were incontestably more beautiful. Large. Luminous. Drownable in, as Larry McCaslin had said and discovered to his cost.

Rahel searched her brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of his knees. The arch of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at which the rest of his arm met his elbow. The way his toe-nails tipped upwards at the ends. The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums never grow up. Like school satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of childhood. Two vaccination marks on his arm gleamed like coins. Hers were on her thigh.

Girls always have them on their thighs, Ammu used to say.

Rahel watched Estha with the curiosity of a mother watching her wet child. A sister a brother. A woman a man. A twin a twin.

She flew these several kites at once.

He was a naked stranger met in a chance encounter. He was the one that she had known before Life began. The one who had once led her (swimming) through their lovely mother’s cunt.

Both things unbearable in their polarity. In their irreconcilable far-apartness.

A raindrop glistened on the end of Estha’s earlobe. Thick, silver in the light, like a heavy bead of mercury. She reached out Touched it. Took it away.

Estha didn’t look at her. He retreated into further stillness. As though his body had the power to snatch its senses inwards (knotted, egg-shaped), away from the surface of his skin, into some deeper more inaccessible recess.

The silence gathered its skirts and slid, like Spider Woman, up the slippery bathroom wall.

Estha put his wet clothes in a bucket and began to wash them with crumbling, bright blue soap.