It was shaken in greeting. Hers, then Estha’s.
“And where, may I ask, are they off to by boat?”
“Off to Africa!” Rahel shouted.
“Stop shouting!” Estha said.
Velutha walked around the boat They told him where they had found it.
“So it doesn’t belong to anybody,” Rahel said a little doubtfully, because it suddenly occurred to her that it might “Ought we to report it to the police?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Estha said.
Velutha knocked on the wood and then scraped a little patch clean with his nail.
“Good wood,” he said.
“It sinks,” Estha said. “It leaks.”
“Can you mend it for us, Veluthapappychachen Peter Mon?” Rahel asked.
“We’ll see about that,” Velutha said. “I don’t want you playing any silly games on this river.”
“We won’t We promise. We’ll use it only when you’re with us.”
“First we’ll have to find the leaks,” Velutha said.
“Then we’ll have to plug them!” the twins shouted, as though it was the second line of a well-known poem.
“How long will it take?” Estha asked.
“A day,” Velutha said.
“A day! I thought you’d say a month!”
Estha, delirious with joy, jumped on Velutha, wrapped his legs around his waist and kissed him.
The sandpaper was divided into exactly equal halves, and the twins fell to work with an eerie concentration that excluded everything else.
Boat-dust flew around the room and settled on hair and eyebrows. On Kuttappen like a cloud, on Jesus like an offering. Velutha had to prise the sandpaper out of their fingers.
“Not here,” he said firmly. “Outside.”
He picked the boat up and carried it out. The twins followed, eyes fixed on their boat with unwavering concentration, starving puppies expecting to be fed.
Velutha set the boat up for them. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found. He showed them how to follow the grain of the wood. He started them off on the sandpapering. When he returned indoors, the black hen followed him, determined to be wherever the boat wasn’t.
Velutha dipped a thin cotton towel in an earthen pot of water. He squeezed the water out of it (savagely, as though it was an unwanted thought) and handed it to Kuttappen to wipe the grit off his face and neck.
“Did they say anything?” Kuttappen asked. “About seeing you in the March?”
“No,” Velutha said. “Not yet They will though. They know.”
“For sure?”
Velutha shrugged and took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat And wring. As though it was his ridiculous, disobedient brain.
He tried to hate her.
She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them.
He couldn’t.
She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else.
Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.
An hour into the sandpapering, Rahel remembered her Afternoon Gnap. And she was up and running. Tumbling through the green afternoon heat Followed by her brother and a yellow wasp.
Hoping, praying, that Ammu hadn’t woken up and found her gone.
CHAPTER 11
THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
That afternoon, Ammu traveled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor.
Shadows that only he could see.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.
She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of bumpy gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a swathe of breeze in a paddy field, like jet streaks in a blue church-sky. She could so easily have done that, but she didn’t. He could have touched her too. But he didn’t, because in the gloom beyond the oil lamp, in the shadows, there were metal folding chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people, with slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching. They all held polished violins under their chins, the bows poised at identical angles. They all had their legs crossed, left over right, and all their left legs were shivering.
Some of them had newspapers. Some didn’t. Some of them blew spit bubbles. Some didn’t. But they all had the flickering reflection of an oil lamp on each lens.
Beyond the circle of folding chairs was a beach littered with broken blue-glass bottles. The silent waves brought new blue bottles to be broken, and dragged the old ones away in the undertow. There were jagged sounds of glass on glass. On a rock, out at sea, in a shaft of purple light, there was a mahogany and wicker rocking chair. Smashed.
The sea was black, the spume vomit-green.
Fish fed on shattered glass.
Night’s elbows rested on the water, and falling stars glanced off its brittle shards.
Moths lit up the sky. There wasn’t a moon.
He could swim, with his one arm. She with her two.
His skin was salty. Hers too.
He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
She could have touched him with her fingers, but she didn’t. They just stood together.
Still.
Skin to skin.
A powdery, colored breeze lifted her hair and blew it like a rippled shawl around his armless shoulder, that ended abruptly, like a cliff.
A thin red cow with a protruding pelvic bone appeared and swam straight out to sea without wetting her horns, without looking back.
Ammu flew through her dream on heavy, shuddering wings, and stopped to rest, just under the skin of it.
She had pressed roses from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on her cheek.
She sensed her children’s faces hanging over her dream, like two dark, worried moons, waiting to be let in.
“D’you think she’s dying?” she heard Rahel whisper to Estha.
“It’s an afternoon-mare,” Estha-the-Accurate replied. “She dreams a lot.”
If he touched her he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.
Who was he, the one-armed man? Who could he have been? The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles? Of Sourmetal Smells—like steel bus rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them?
“Should we wake her up?” Estha said.
Chinks of late afternoon light stole into the room through the curtains and fell on Ammu’s tangerine-shaped transistor radio that she always took with her to the river. (Tangerine-shaped too, was the Thing that Estha carried into The Sound of Music in his sticky Other Hand.)
Bright bars of sunlight brightened Ammu’s tangled hair. She waited, under the skin of her dream, not wanting to let her children in.
“She says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly,” Rahel said. “She says they could easily have a Heart Attack.”
Between them they decided that it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door that creaked.
Ammu, resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them.
The one-armed man blew out his lamp and wal
ked across the jagged beach, away into the shadows that only he could see.
He left no footprints on the shore.
The folding chairs were folded. The black sea smoothed. The creased waves ironed. The spume re-bottled. The bottle corked.
The night postponed till further notice.
Ammu opened her eyes.
It was a long journey that she made, from the embrace of the one-armed man to her unidentical two-egg twins.
“You were having an afternoon-mare,” her daughter informed her.
“It wasn’t a mare,” Ammu said. “It was a dream.”
“Estha thought you were dying.”
“You looked so sad,” Estha said.
“I was happy,” Ammu said, and realized that she had been.
“If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?” Estha asked.
“Does what count?”
“The happiness—does it count?”
She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff.
Because the truth is, that only what counts counts.
The simple, unswerving wisdom of children.
If you eat fish in a dream, does it count? Does it mean you’ve eaten fish?
The cheerful man without footprints—did be count?
Ammu groped for her tangerine transistor, and switched it on. It played a song from a film called Chemmeen.
It was the story of a poor girl who is forced to marry a fisherman from a neighboring beach, though she loves someone else. When the fisherman finds out about his new wife’s old lover, he sets out to sea in his little boat though he knows that a storm is brewing. It’s dark, and the wind rises. A whirlpool spins up from the ocean bed. There is storm-music, and the fisherman drowns, sucked to the bottom of the sea in the vortex of the whirlpool.
The lovers make a suicide pact, and are found the next morning, washed up on the beach with their arms around each other. So everybody dies. The fisherman, his wife, her lover, and a shark that has no part in the story, but dies anyway. The sea claims them all.
In the blue cross-stitch darkness laced with edges of light, with cross-stitch roses on her sleepy cheek, Ammu and her twins (one on either side of her) sang softly with the tangerine radio. The song that fisherwomen sang to the sad young bride as they braided her hair and prepared her for her wedding to a man she didn’t love.
Pandoru mukkuvan muthinu poyi,
(Once a fisherman went to sea,)
Padinjaran kattathu mungi poyi,
(The west wind blew and swallowed his boat,)
An Airport-Fairy frock stood on the floor, supported by its own froth and stiffness. Outside in the mittam, crisp saris lay in rows and crispened in the sun. Off-white and gold. Small pebbles nestled in their starched creases and had to be shaken out before the saris were folded and taken in to be ironed.
Arayathi pennu pizhachu poyi,
(His wife on the shore went astray,)
The electrocuted elephant (not Kochu Thomban) in Ettumanoor was cremated. A giant burning ghat was erected on the highway. The engineers of the concerned municipality sawed off the tusks and shared them unofficially. Unequally. Eighty tins of pure ghee were poured over the elephant to feed the fire. The smoke rose in dense fumes and arranged itself in complex patterns against the sky. People crowded around at a safe distance, read meanings into them.
There were lots of flies.
Kadalamma avaney kondu poyi.
(So Mother Ocean rose and took him away.)
Pariah kites dropped into nearby trees, to supervise the supervision of the last rites of the dead elephant They hoped, not without reason, for pickings of giant innards. An enormous gallbladder, perhaps. Or a charred, gigantic spleen.
They weren’t disappointed. Nor wholly satisfied.
Ammu noticed that both her children were covered in a fine dust. Like two pieces of lightly sugar-dusted, unidentical cake. Rahel had a blond curl lodged among her black ones. A curl from Velutha’s backyard. Ammu picked it out.
“I’ve told you before,” she said. “I don’t want you going to his house. It will only cause trouble.”
What trouble, she didn’t say. She didn’t know.
Somehow, by not mentioning his name, she knew that she had drawn him into the tousled intimacy of that blue cross-stitch afternoon and the song from the tangerine transistor. By not mentioning his name, she sensed that a pact had been forged between her Dream and the World. And that the midwives of that pact were, or would be, her sawdust-coated two-egg twins.
She knew who he was—the God of Loss, the God of Small Things. Of course she did.
She switched off the tangerine radio. In the afternoon silence (laced with edges of light), her children curled into the warmth of her. The smell of her. They covered their heads with her hair. They sensed somehow that in her sleep she had traveled away from them. They summoned her back now with the palms of their small hands laid flat against the bare skin of her midriff. Between her petticoat and her blouse. They loved the fact that the brown of the backs of their hands was the exact brown of their mother’s stomach skin.
“Estha, look,” Rahel said, plucking at the line of soft down that led southwards from Ammu’s belly button.
“Here’s where we kicked you.” Estha traced a wandering silver stretchmark with his finger.
“Was it in the bus, Ammu?”
“On the winding estate road?”
“When Baba had to hold your tummy?”
“Did you have to buy tickets?”
“Did we hurt you?”
And then, keeping her voice casual, Rand’s question: “D’you think he may have lost our address?”
Just the hint of a pause in the rhythm of Ammu’s breathing made Estha touch Rahel’s middle finger with his. And middle finger to middle finger, on their beautiful mother’s midriff, they abandoned that line of questioning.
“That’s Estha’s kick, and that’s mine,” Rahel said. “… And that’s Estha’s and that’s mine.”
Between them they apportioned their mother’s seven silver stretch marks. Then Rahel put her mouth on Ammu’s stomach and sucked at it, pulling the soft flesh into her mouth and drawing her head back to admire the shining oval of spit and the faint red imprint of her teeth on her mother’s skin.
Ammu wondered at the transparency of that kiss. It was a clear-as-glass kiss. Unclouded by passion or desire—that pair of dogs that sleep so soundly inside children, waiting for them to grow up. It was a kiss that demanded no kiss-back.
Not a cloudy kiss full of questions that wanted answers. Like the kisses of cheerful one-armed men in dreams.
Ammu grew tired of their proprietary handling of her. She wanted her body back. It was hers. She shrugged her children off the way a bitch shrugs off her pups when she’s had enough of them. She sat up and twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Then she swung her legs off the bed, walked to the window and drew back the curtains.
Slanting afternoon light flooded the room and brightened two children on the bed.
The twins heard the lock turning in Ammu’s bathroom door.
Click.
Ammu looked at herself in the long mirror on the bathroom door and the specter of her future appeared in it to mock her. Pickled. Gray. Rheumy-eyed. Cross-stitch roses on a slack, sunken cheek. Withered breasts that hung like weighted socks. Dry as a bone between her legs, the hair feather-white. Spare. As brittle as a pressed fern.
Skin that flaked and shed like snow.
Amnra shivered.
With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived. That her cup was full of dust. That the air, the sky, the trees, the sun, the rain, the light and darkness were all slowly turning to sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs, her mouth. Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach.
Ammu undressed and put a red toothbrush under a breast to see if it would stay. It didn’t. Where she t
ouched herself her flesh was taut and smooth. Under her hands her nipples wrinkled and hardened like dark nuts, pulling at the soft skin on her breasts. The thin line of down from her belly button led over the gentle curve of the base of her belly, to her dark triangle. Like an arrow directing a lost traveler. An inexperienced lover.
She undid her hair and turned around to see how long it had grown. It fell, in waves and curls and disobedient frizzy wisps—soft on the inside, coarser on the outside—to just below where her small, strong waist began its curve out towards her hips. The bathroom was hot. Small beads of sweat studded her skin like diamonds. Then they broke and trickled down. Sweat ran down the recessed line of her spine. She looked a little critically at her round, heavy behind. Not big in itself. Not big per se (as Chacko-of-Oxford would no doubt have put it). Big only because the rest of her was so slender. It belonged on another more voluptuous body.
She had to admit that they would happily support a toothbrush apiece. Perhaps two. She laughed out loud at the idea of walking naked down Ayemenem with an array of colored toothbrushes sticking out from either cheek of her bottom. She silenced herself quickly. She saw a wisp of madness escape from its bottle and caper triumphantly around the bathroom.
Ammu worried about madness.
Mammachi said it ran in their family. That it came on people suddenly and caught them unawares. There was Pathil Ammai, who at the age of sixty-five began to take her clothes off and run naked along the river, singing to the fish. There was Thampi Chachen, who searched his shit every morning with a knitting needle for a gold tooth he had swallowed years ago. And Dr. Muthachen, who had to be removed from his own wedding in a sack. Would future generations say, “There was Ammu—Ammu Ipe. Married a Bengali. Went quite mad. Died young. In a cheap lodge somewhere.”
Chacko said that the high incidence of insanity among Syrian Christians was the price they paid for Inbreeding. Mammachi said it wasn’t.
Ammu gathered up her heavy hair, wrapped it around her face, and peered down the road to Age and Death through its parted strands. Like a medieval executioner peering through the tilted eye-slits of his peaked black hood at the executionee. A slender, naked executioner with dark nipples and deep dimples when she smiled. With seven silver stretchmarks from her two-egg twins, born to her by candlelight amid news of a lost war.