The God of Small Things

Chapter 9.

The green-for-the-day had seeped from the trees. Dark palm leaves were splayed like drooping combs against the monsoon sky. The orange sun slid through their bent, grasping teeth.

A squadron of fruit bats sped across the gloom.

In the abandoned ornamental garden, Rahel, watched by lolling dwarfs and a forsaken cherub, squatted by the stagnant pond and watched toads hop from stone to scummy stone. Beautiful Ugly Toads.

Slimy. Warty. Croaking.

Yearning, unkissed princes trapped inside them. Food for snakes that lurked in the long June grass. Rustle. Lunge. No more toad to hop from stone to scummy stone. No more prince to kiss.

It was the first night since she’d come that it hadn’t rained. Around now, Rahel thought, if this were Washington, I would be on my way to work. The bus ride. The streetlights. The gas fumes. The shapes of people’s breath on the bulletproof glass of my cabin. The clatter of coins pushed towards me in the metal tray. The smell of money on my fingers. The punctual drunk with sober eyes who arrived exactly at 10.00 P.M.: “Hey you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!”

She owned seven hundred dollars. And a gold bangle with snakeheads. But Baby Kochamma had already asked her how much longer she planned to stay. And what she planned to do about Estha.

She had no plans.

No plans.

No L…custs Stand I.

She looked back at the looming, gabled, house-shaped Hole in the Universe and imagined living in the silver bowl that Baby Kochamma had installed on the roof. It looked large enough for people to live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger, for instance, than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters.

If they slept there, she and Estha, curled together like fetuses in a shallow steel womb, what would Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow do? If the dish were occupied, where would they go? Would they slip through the chimney into Baby Kochamma’s life and TV? Would they land on the old stove with a Heeaugh!, in their muscles and spangled clothes? Would the Thin People-the famine-victims and refugees-slip through the cracks in the doors? Would Genocide slide between the tiles?

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds-blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d’ etat, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.

Heeaagh!

Rahel returned to contemplating toads.

Fat. Yellow. From stone to scummy stone. She touched one gently. It moved its eyelids upwards. Funnily self-assured.

Nictitating membrane, she remembered she and Estha once spent a whole day saying. She and Estha and Sophie Mol.

Nictitating

ictitating

ctitating

itating

tating

ating

ting

ing

They were, all three of them, wearing saris (old ones, torn in half) that day. Estha was the draping expert. He pleated Sophie Mol’s pleats. Organized Rahel’s pallu and settled his own. They had red bindis on their foreheads. In the process of trying to wash out Ammu’s forbidden kohl, they had smudged it all over their eyes, and on the whole looked like three raccoons trying to pass off as Hindu ladies. It was about a week after Sophie Mol arrived. A week before she died. By then she had performed unfalteringly under the twins’ perspicacious scrutiny and had confounded all their expectations.

She had:

(a) Informed Chacko that even though he was her Real Father, she loved him less than Joe (which left him available-even if not inclined-to be the surrogate father of certain two-egg persons greedy for his affection).

(b) Turned down Mammachi’s offer that she replace Estha and Rahel as the privileged plaiter of Mammachi’s nightly rat’s tail and counter of moles.

(c) ( & Most Important) Astutely gauged the prevailing temper, and not just rejected, but rejected outright and extremely rudely, all of Baby Kochamma’s advances and small seductions.

As if this were not enough, she also revealed herself to be human. One day the twins returned from a clandestine trip to the river (which had excluded Sophie Mol), and found her in the garden in tears, perched on the highest point of Baby Kochamma’s Herb Curl, “Being Lonely,” as she put it. The next day Estha and Rahel took her with them to visit Velutha.

They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass (nictitating ictitating tating ating ting ing) and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.

To let it be, to travel with it as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Three days before the Terror, he had let them paint his nails with red Cutex that Ammu had discarded. That’s the way he was the day History visited them in the back verandah. A carpenter with gaudy nails. The posse of Touchable Policemen had looked at them and laughed.

“What’s this?” one had said. “AC-DC?”

Another lifted his boot with a millipede curled into the ridges of its sole. Deep rust-brown. A million legs.

The last strap of light slipped from the cherub’s shoulder. Gloom swallowed the garden. Whole. Like a python. Lights came on in the house.

Rahel could see Estha in his room, sitting on his neat bed. He was looking out through the barred window at the darkness. He couldn’t see her, sitting outside in the darkness, looking in at the light.

A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief.

Unable, somehow, to change plays. Or purchase, for a fee, some cheap brand of exorcism from a counselor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say, in one of many ways: “You’re not the Sinners. You’re the Sinned Against You were only children. You had no control. You are the victims, not the perpetrators.”

It would have helped if they could have made that crossing. If only they could have worn, even temporarily, the tragic hood of victimhood. Then they would have been able to put a face on it, and conjure up fury at what had happened. Or seek redress. And eventually, perhaps, exorcize the memories that haunted them.

But anger wasn’t available to them and there was no face to put on this Other Thing that they held in their sticky Other Hands, like an imaginary orange. There was nowhere to lay it down. It wasn’t theirs to give away. It would have to be held. Carefully and forever.

Esthappen and Rahel both knew that there were several perpetrators (besides themselves) that day. But only one victim. And he had blood-red nails and a brown leaf on his back that made the monsoons come on time.

He left behind a Hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar. Through which their mother followed without even turning to wave good-bye. She left them behind, spinning in the dark, with no moorings, in a place with no foundation.

Hours later, the moon rose and made the gloomy python surrender what it had swallowed. The garden reappeared. Regurgitated whole. With Rahel sitting in it.

The direction of the breeze changed and brought her the sound of drums. A gift. The promise of a story. Once upon a time, they said, there lived a…

Rahel lifted her head and listened.

On clear nights the sound of the chenda traveled up to a kilometer from the Ayemenem temple, announcing a kathakali performance.

Rahel went. Drawn by the memory of steep roofs and white walls. Of brass lamps lit and dark, oiled wood. She went in the hope of meeting an old elephant who wasn’t electrocuted on the Kottayam-Cochin highway. She stopped by the kitchen for a coconut.

On her way out, she noticed that one of the gauze doors of the factory had come off its hinges and was propped against the doorway. She moved it aside and stepped in. The air was heavy with moisture, wet enough for fish to swim in.

The floor under her shoes was slick with monsoon scum. A small, anxious bat flitted between the roof beams.

The low cement pickle vats silhouetted in the gloom made the factory floor look like an indoor cemetery for the cylindrical dead.

The earthly remains of Paradise Pickles & Preserves.

Where long ago, on the day that Sophie Mol came, Ambassador E. Pelvis stirred a pot of scarlet jam and thought Two Thoughts. Where a red, tender-mango-shaped secret was pickled, sealed and put away.

It’s true. Things can change in a day.