“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! Ividay! 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 sourmetal smell, like steel bus rails, and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands 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 caste-less. 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, Velut
ha 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 wire-framed 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 Ayernenem house. A three-minute run through the coconut trees for Esthappen and Rahel. They had only just arrived in Ayernenem 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 Palghat. 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 flag 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 co-hecklers.
“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 Kochamma 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.
“Okaythen,” the man said to Baby Kochamma in English, as though they had successfully concluded a business deal. “Bye-bye!”