The God of Small Things (24 page)

Ammu had endured cold winter nights in Delhi hiding in the mehndi hedge around their house (in case people from Good Families saw them) because Pappachi had come back from work out of sorts, and beaten her and Mammachi and driven them out of their home.

On one such night, Ammu, aged nine, hiding with her mother in the hedge, watched Pappachi’s natty silhouette in the lit windows as he flitted from room to room. Not content with having beaten his wife and daughter (Chacko was away at school), he tore down curtains, kicked furniture and smashed a table lamp. An hour after the lights went out, disdaining Mammachi’s frightened pleading, little Ammu crept back into the house through a ventilator to rescue her new gumboots that she loved more than anything else. She put them in a paper bag and crept back into the drawing room when the lights were suddenly switched on.

Pappachi had been sitting in his mahogany rocking chair all along, rocking himself silently in the dark. When he caught her, he didn’t say a word. He flogged her with his ivory-handled riding crop (the one that he had held across his lap in his studio photograph). Ammu didn’t cry. When he finished beating her he made her bring him Mammachi’s pinking shears from her sewing cupboard. While Ammu watched, the Imperial Entomologist shred her new gumboots with her mother’s pinking shears. The strips of black rubber fell to the floor. The scissors made snicking scissor-sounds. Ammu ignored her mother’s drawn, frightened face that appeared at the window. It took ten minutes for her beloved gumboots to be completely shredded. When the last strip of rubber had rippled to the floor, her father looked at her with cold, flat eyes, and rocked and rocked and rocked. Surrounded by a sea of twisting rubber snakes.

As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied
all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.

  “Has she gone?” Mammachi asked the silence around her.

“She’s gone,” Kochu Maria said loudly.

“Are you allowed to say ‘damn’ in India?” Sophie Mol asked.

“Who said ‘damn’?” Chacko asked.

“She did,” Sophie Mol said. “Aunty Ammu. She said ‘some damn godforsaken tribe.’”

“Cut the cake and give everybody a piece,” Mammachi said.

“Because in England, we’re not,” Sophie Mol said to Chacko.

“Not what?” Chacko said.

“Allowed to say Dee Ay Em En,” Sophie Mol said.

Mammachi looked sightlessly out into the shining afternoon.

“Is everyone here?” she asked.

“
Oower
, Kochamma,” the Blue Army in the greenheat said. “We’re all here.”

  Outside the Play, Rahel said to Velutha:
“We’re
not here, are we? We’re not even Playing.”

“That is Exactly Right,” Velutha said. “We’re not even Playing. But what I would like to know is, where is our Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon?”

  And that became a delighted, breathless, Rumpelstiltskin-like dance among the rubber trees.

And from Rumpelstiltskin it graduated to the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Kochu Maria cut a sample piece of cake for Mammachi’s approval.

“One piece each,” Mammachi confirmed to Kochu Maria, touching the piece lightly with rubyringed fingers to see if it was small enough.

Kochu Maria sawed up the rest of the cake messily, laboriously, breathing through her mouth, as though she was carving a hunk of roast lamb. She put the pieces on a large silver tray.

Mammachi played a
Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
melody on her violin.

A cloying, chocolate melody. Stickysweet, and meltybrown. Chocolate waves on a chocolate shore.

In the middle of the melody, Chacko raised his voice over the chocolate sound.

“Mamma!” he said (in his Reading Aloud voice). “Mamma! That’s enough! Enough violin!”

Mammachi stopped playing and looked in Chacko’s direction, the bow poised in midair.

“Enough? D’you think that’s enough, Chacko?”

“More than enough,” Chacko said.

“Enough’s enough,” Mammachi murmured to herself. “I think I’ll stop now.” As though the idea had suddenly occurred to her.

She put her violin away into its black, violin-shaped box. It closed like a suitcase. And the music closed with it.

Click. And click.

Mammachi put her dark glasses on again. And drew the drapes across the hot day.

  Ammu emerged from the house and called to Rahel.

“Rahel! I want you to have your afternoon nap! Come in after you’ve had your cake!”

Rahel’s heart sank. Afternoon Gnap. She hated those.

Ammu went back indoors.

Velutha put Rahel down, and she stood forlornly at the edge of the driveway, on the periphery of the Play, a Gnap looming large and nasty on her horizon.

“And please stop being so over-familiar with that man!” Baby Kochamma said to Rahel.

“Over-familiar?” Mammachi said. “Who is it, Chacko? Who’s being over-familiar?”

“Rahel,” Baby Kochamma said.

“Over-familiar with
who?”

“With whom,” Chacko corrected his mother.

“All right, with
whom
is she being over-familiar?” Mammachi asked.

“Your Beloved Velutha—whom else?” Baby Kochamma said, and to Chacko, “Ask him where he was yesterday. Let’s bell the cat once and for all.”

“Not now,” Chacko said.

“What’s over-familiar?” Sophie Mol asked Margaret Kochamma, who didn’t answer.

“Velutha? Is Velutha here? Are you here?” Mammachi asked the Afternoon.

“
Oower
, Kochamma.” He stepped through the trees into the Play.

“Did you find out what it was?” Mammachi asked.

“The washer in the foot-valve,” Velutha said. “I’ve changed it. It’s working now.”

“Then switch it on,” Mammachi said. “The tank is empty.”

“That man will be our Nemesis,” Baby Kochamma said. Not because she was clairvoyant and had had a sudden flash of prophetic vision. Just to get him into trouble. Nobody paid her any attention.

“Mark my words,” she said bitterly.

  “See her?” Kochu Maria said when she got to Rahel with her tray of cake. She meant Sophie Mol. “When she grows up, she’ll be our Kochamma, and she’ll raise our salaries, and give us nylon saris for Onam.” Kochu Maria collected saris, though she hadn’t ever worn one, and probably never would.

“So what?” Rahel said. “By then I’ll be living in Africa.”

“Africa?” Kochu Maria sniggered. “Africa’s full of ugly black people and mosquitoes.”

“You’re the one who’s ugly,” Rahel said, and added (in English) “Stupid dwarf!”

“What did you say?” Kochu Maria said threateningly. “Don’t tell me. I know. I heard. I’ll tell Mammachi. Just wait!”

Rahel walked across to the old well where there were usually some ants to kill. Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed. Kochu Maria followed her with the tray of cake.

Rahel said she didn’t want any of the stupid cake.

“Kushumbi”
Kochu Maria said. “Jealous people go straight to hell.”

“Who’s jealous?”

“I don’t know. You tell me,” Kochu Maria said, with a frilly apron and a vinegar heart.

  Rahel put on her sunglasses and looked back into the Play. Everything was Angry-colored. Sophie Mol, standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as though she ought to be slapped. Rahel found a whole column of juicy ants. They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church.

The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast, or a crisp biscuit.

  
The Antly Church would be empty and the Antly Bishop would wait in his funny Antly Bishop clothes, swinging Frankincense in a silver pot. And nobody would arrive.

After he had waited for a reasonably Antly amount of time, he would get a funny Antly Bishop frown on his forehead, and shake his head sadly. He would look at the glowing Antly stained-glass windows and when he finished looking at them, he would lock the church with an enormous key and make it dark. Then he’d go home to his wife, and (if she wasn’t dead) they’d have an Antly Afternoon Gnap.

  Sophie Mol, hatted bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning, walked out of the Play to see what Rahel was doing behind the
well. But the Play went with her. Walked when she walked, stopped when she stopped. Fond smiles followed her. Kochu Maria moved the cake tray out of the way of her adoring downwards smile as Sophie squatted down in the well-squelch (yellow bottoms of bells muddy wet now).

Sophie Mol inspected the smelly mayhem with clinical detachment. The stone was coated with crushed red carcasses and a few feebly waving legs.

  Kochu Maria watched with her cake crumbs.

The Fond Smiles watched Fondly.

Little Girls Playing.

Sweet.

One beach-colored.

One brown.

One Loved.

One Loved a Little Less.

“Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely,” Sophie Mol suggested.

Rahel ignored her and killed them all. Then in her frothy Airport Frock with matching knickers (no longer crisp) and unmatching sunglasses, she ran away. Disappeared into the greenheat.

The Fond Smiles stayed on Sophie Mol like a spotlight, thinking, perhaps, that the sweetcousins were playing hide-and-seek, like sweetcousins often do.

MRS. PILLAI, MRS. EAPEN, MRS. RAJAGOPALAN

T
he 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 arrives exactly at 10:00 P.M.: “Hey, you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!”

She owned seven hundred dollars. And a gold bangle with snake-heads. 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 Locusts 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
Heeaagh!
, 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’ état, 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

  
titating

   
itating

   
tating

    
ating

     
ting

      
ing