The God of Small Things (18 page)

No one read the magazines.

From below the scanty curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street came the relentless slip-slap of disembodied feet in slippers. The noisy, carefree world of Those with Nothing Up Their Noses.

Ammu and Kalyani exchanged children. Noses were pushed up, heads bent back, and turned towards the light to see if one mother could see what the other had missed. When that didn’t work, Lenin, dressed like a taxi—yellow shirt, black stretchlon shorts—regained his mother’s nylon lap (
and
his packet of Chiclets). He sat on sari flowers and from that unassailable position of strength surveyed the scene impassively. He inserted his left forefinger deep into his unoccupied nostril and breathed noisily through his mouth. He had a neat side parting. His hair was slicked down with Ayurvedic oil. The Chiclets were his to
hold
before the doctor saw him, and to consume after. All was well with the world. Perhaps he was a little too young to know that Atmosphere in Waiting Room, plus Screams from Behind Curtain, ought logically to add up to a Healthy Fear of Dr. V. V.

A rat with bristly shoulders made several busy journeys between the doctor’s room and the bottom of the cupboard in the waiting room.

A nurse appeared and disappeared through the tattered-curtained doctor’s door. She wielded strange weapons. A tiny vial. A rectangle of glass with blood smeared on it. A test tube of sparkling, back-lit urine. A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles. The hairs on her legs were pressed like coiled wires against her translucent white stockings. The box heels of her scuffed white sandals were worn away on the insides, and caused her feet to slope in,
towards each other. Shiny black hairpins, like straightened snakes, clamped her starched nurse’s cap to her oily head.

She appeared to have rat-filters on her glasses. She didn’t seem to notice the bristly-shouldered rat even when it scuttled right past her feet. She called out names in a deep voice, like a man’s:
A. Ninan … S. Kusumalatha … B. V. Roshini … N. Ambady.
She ignored the alarmed, spiraling air.

Estha’s eyes were frightened saucers. He was mesmerized by the
Doctor is
IN
Doctor is
OUT
sign.

A tide of panic rose in Rahel. “Ammu, once again let’s try.”

Ammu held the back of Rahel’s head with one hand. With her thumb in her handkerchief she blocked the headless nostril. All eyes in the waiting room were on Rahel. It was to be the performance of her life. Estha’s expression prepared to blow its nose. Furrows gathered on his forehead and he took a deep breath.

Rahel summoned all her strength.
Please God, please make it come out.
From the soles of her feet, from the bottom of her heart, she blew into her mother’s handkerchief.

And in a rush of snot and relief, it emerged. A little mauve bead in a glistening bed of slime. As proud as a pearl in an oyster. Children gathered around to admire it. The boy who was playing with the sign was scornful.

“I could easily do that!” he announced.

“Try it and see what a slap you’ll get,” his mother said.

“Miss Rahel!” the nurse shouted and looked around.

“It’s out!” Ammu said to the nurse. “It’s come out.” She held up her crumpled handkerchief.

The nurse had no idea what she meant.

“It’s all right. We’re leaving,” Ammu said. “The bead’s out.”

“Next,” the nurse said, and closed her eyes behind her rat-filters. (“
It takes all kinds
,” she told herself.) “S. V. S. Kurup!”

The scornful boy set up a howl as his mother pushed him into the doctor’s room.

Rahel and Estha left the clinic triumphantly. Little Lenin remained behind to have his nostril probed by Dr. Verghese Verghese’s
cold steel implements, and his mother probed by other, softer ones.

That was Lenin then.

Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an
issue.

  Rahel handed Comrade Pillai back the sachet of photographs and tried to leave. “One mint,” Comrade Pillai said. He was like a flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples and then forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life-in-a-Minute) to the last one.

“Orkunnundo?”

It was an old black-and-white picture. One that Chacko took with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma had brought him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin, Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of the Ayemenem House. Behind them Baby Kochamma’s Christmas trimmings hung in loops from the ceiling. A cardboard star was tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked like frightened animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their sides, chests swiveled to face the photographer. As though standing sideways was a sin.

Only Sophie Mol, with First World panache, had prepared for herself, for her biological father’s photo, a face. She had turned her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked like pink-veined flesh petals (gray in a black-and-white photograph). She wore a set of protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi’s silver thimble fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays drinking only from a thimble.) She held out a lit candle in each hand. One leg of her denim bell-bottoms was rolled up to expose a white, bony knee on which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel (arguing
away any evidence to the contrary, photographs, memories) how there was a pretty good chance that they were bastards, and what bastard really meant This had entailed an involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. “See what they do is…”

That was only days before she died.

Sophie Mol.

Thimble-drinker.

Coffin-cartwheeler.

She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight Hatted, bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.

COCHIN KANGAROOS

A
t Cochin Airport, Rahel’s new knickers were polka-dotted and still crisp. The rehearsals had been rehearsed. It was the Day of the Play. The culmination of the
What Will Sophie Mol Think?
week.

  In the morning at the Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu—who had dreamed at night of dolphins and a deep blue—helped Rahel to put on her frothy Airport Frock. It was one of those baffling aberrations in Ammu’s taste, a cloud of stiff yellow lace with tiny silver sequins and a bow on each shoulder. The frilled skirt was underpinned with buckram to make it flare. Rahel worried that it didn’t really go with her sunglasses.

Ammu held out the crisp matching knickers for her. Rahel, with her hands on Ammu’s shoulders, climbed into her new knickers (left leg, right leg) and gave Ammu a kiss on each dimple (left cheek, right cheek). The elastic snapped softly against her stomach.

“Thank you, Ammu,” Rahel said.

“Thank you?” Ammu said.

“For my new frock and knickers,” Rahel said.

Ammu smiled.

“You’re welcome, my sweetheart,” she said, but sadly.

You’re welcome, my sweetheart.

The moth on Rahel’s heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold.
A little less her mother loved her.

The Sea Queen room smelled of eggs and filter coffee.

On the way to the car, Estha carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the tap water. Rahel carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the boiled water. Eagle vacuum flasks had Vacuum Eagles on them, with their wings spread, and a globe in their talons. Vacuum Eagles, the twins believed, watched the world all day and flew around their flasks all night. As silently as owls they flew, with the moon on their wings.

Estha was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt with a pointed collar and black drainpipe trousers. His puff looked crisp and surprised. Like well-whipped egg white.

Estha—with some basis, it must be admitted—said that Rahel looked stupid in her Airport Frock. Rahel slapped him, and he slapped her back.

They weren’t speaking to each other at the airport.

  Chacko, who usually wore a mundu, was wearing a runny tight suit and a shining smile. Ammu straightened his tie, which was odd and sideways. It had had its breakfast and was satisfied.

Ammu said, “What’s happened suddenly—to our Man of the Masses?”

But she said it with her dimples, because Chacko was so bursty. So very happy.

Chacko didn’t slap her.

So she didn’t slap him back.

From the Sea Queen florist Chacko had bought two red roses, which he held carefully.

Fatly.

Fondly.

  The airport shop, run by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, was crammed with Air India Maharajahs (small medium
large), sandalwood elephants (small medium large) and papiermâché masks of kathakali dancers (small medium large). The smell of cloying sandalwood and terry-cotton armpits (small medium large) hung in the air. In the Arrivals Lounge, there were four life-sized cement kangaroos with cement pouches that said
USE ME
. In their pouches, instead of cement joeys, they had cigarette stubs, used matchsticks, bottle caps, peanut shells, crumpled paper cups and cockroaches.

Red betel spitstains spattered their kangaroo stomachs like fresh wounds.

Red-mouthed smiles the Airport Kangaroos had.

And pink-edged ears.

They looked as though if you pressed them they might say
Mama
in empty battery voices.

  When Sophie Mol’s plane appeared in the skyblue Bombay-Cochin sky, the crowd pushed against the iron railing to see more of everything.

The Arrivals Lounge was a press of love and eagerness, because the Bombay-Cochin flight was the flight that all the Foreign Returnees came home on.

Their families had come to meet them. From all over Kerala. On long bus journeys. From Ranni, from Kumili, from Vizhinjam, from Uzhavoor. Some of them had camped at the airport overnight, and had brought their food with them. And tapioca chips and chakka velaichathu for the way back.

They were all there—the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopans, the pining wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancées to be reassessed. The teacher’s husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher’s husband’s sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire-bender’s pregnant wife.

“Mostly sweeper class,” Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, not wanting to give up her Good Place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby’s penis into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him.

“Sssss…” his mother hissed. First persuasively, then savagely. But her baby thought he was the pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle.

“Don’t forget that you are Ambassadors of India,” Baby Kochamma told Rahel and Estha. “You’re going to form their First Impression of your country.”

Two-egg Twin Ambassadors. Their Excellencies Ambassador E(lvis). Pelvis, and Ambassador S(tick). Insect.

  In her stiff lace dress and her fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo, Rahel looked like an Airport Fairy with appalling taste. She was hemmed in by humid hips (as she would be once again, at a funeral in a yellow church) and grim eagerness. She had her grandfather’s moth on her heart. She turned away from the screaming steel bird in the sky-blue sky that had her cousin in it, and what she saw was this: red-mouthed roos with ruby smiles moved cemently across the airport floor.

Long flatfeet.

Airport garbage in their baby bins.

The smallest one stretched its neck like people in English films who loosen their ties after office. The middle one rummaged in her pouch for a long cigarette stub to smoke. She found an old cashew nut in a dim plastic bag. She gnawed it with her front teeth like a rodent. The large one wobbled the standing up sign that said
Kerala Tourism Development Corporation Welcomes You
with a kathakali dancer doing a namaste. Another sign, unwobbled by a kangaroo, said:
emoc-leW ot eht ecipS tsaoC fo aidnI.

Urgently, Ambassador Rahel burrowed through the press of people to her brother and co-Ambassador.

Estha look! Look Estha look!

Ambassador Estha wouldn’t. Didn’t want to. He watched the bumpy landing with his tap-water Eagle flask slung around him,
and a bottomless-bottomful feeling: The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man knew where to find him. In the factory in Ayemenem. On the banks of the Meenachal.

Ammu watched with her handbag.

Chacko with his roses.

Baby Kochamma with her sticking-out neckmole.

  Then the Bombay-Cochin people came out From the cool air into the hot air. Crumpled people uncrumpled on their way to the Arrivals Lounge.

And there they were, the Foreign Returnees, in wash’n’wear suits and rainbow sunglasses. With an end to grinding poverty in their Aristocrat suitcases. With cement roofs for their thatched houses, and geysers for their parents’ bathrooms. With sewage systems and septic tanks. Maxis and high heels. Puff sleeves and lipstick. Mixygrinders and automatic flashes for their cameras. With keys to count, and cupboards to lock. With a hunger for kappa and meen vevichathu that they hadn’t eaten for so long. With love and a lick of shame that their families who had come to meet them were so… so … gawkish.
Look at the way they dressed! Surely they had more suitable airport wear! Why did Malayalees have such awful teeth?