The God of Small Things (33 page)

She couldn’t see them crouched against the door. A Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. Bewildered Twin Ambassadors of God-knows-what. Their Excellencies Ambassadors E. Pelvis and S. Insect.

“Just go away!” Ammu had said. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone?!”

So they had.

But when the only answer Baby Kochamma got to her question about the children was something crashing against Ammu’s bedroom door, she went away. A slow dread built up inside her as she began to make the obvious, logical and completely mistaken connections between the night’s happenings and the missing children.

  The rain had started early the previous afternoon. Suddenly the hot day darkened and the sky began to clap and grumble. Kochu Maria, in a bad mood for no particular reason, was in the kitchen standing on her low stool savagely cleaning a large fish, working up a smelly blizzard of fish scales. Her gold earrings swung fiercely. Silver fish scales flew around the kitchen, landing on kettles, walls, vegetable peelers, the fridge handle. She ignored Vellya Paapen when he arrived at the kitchen door, drenched and shaking. His real eye was bloodshot and he looked as though he had been drinking. He stood there for ten minutes waiting to be noticed. When Kochu Maria finished the fish and started on the onions, he cleared his throat and asked for Mammachi. Kochu Maria tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t go. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, the smell of arrack on his breath hit Kochu Maria like a hammer. She had never seen him like this before, and was a little frightened. She had a pretty good idea of what it was all about, so she eventually decided that it would be best to call Mammachi. She shut the kitchen door, leaving Vellya Paapen outside in the back mittam, weaving drunkenly in the driving rain. Though it was December, it
rained as though it was June. “Cyclonic disturbance,” the newspapers called it the next day. But by then nobody was in any condition to read the papers.

Perhaps it was the rain that drove Vellya Paapen to the kitchen door. To a superstitious man, the relentlessness of that unseasonal downpour could have seemed like an omen from an angry god. To a drunk superstitious man, it could have seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. Which, in a way, it was.

When Mammachi arrived in the kitchen, in her petticoat and pale pink dressing gown with rickrack edging, Vellya Paapen climbed up the kitchen steps and offered her his mortgaged eye. He held it out in the palm of his hand. He said he didn’t deserve it and wanted her to have it back. His left eyelid drooped over his empty socket in an immutable, monstrous wink. As though everything that he was about to say was part of an elaborate prank.

“What is it?” Mammachi asked, stretching her hand out, thinking perhaps chat for some reason Vellya Paapen was returning the kilo of red rice she had given him that morning.

“It’s his eye,” Kochu Maria said loudly to Mammachi, her own eyes bright with onion tears. By then Mammachi had already touched the glass eye. She recoiled from its slippery hardness. Its slimy marbleness.

“Are you drunk?” Mammachi said angrily to the sound of the rain. “How dare you come here in this condition?”

She groped her way to the sink, and soaped away the sodden Paravan’s eye-juices. She smelled her hands when she’d finished. Kochu Maria gave Vellya Paapen an old kitchen cloth to wipe himself with, and said nothing when he stood on the topmost step, almost inside her Touchable kitchen, drying himself, sheltered from the rain by the sloping overhang of the roof.

When he was calmer, Vellya Paapen returned his eye to its rightful socket and began to speak. He started by recounting to Mammachi how much her family had done for his. Generation for generation. How, long before the Communists thought of it, Reverend E. John Ipe had given his father, Kelan, title to the land on
which their hut now stood. How Mammachi had paid for his eye. How she had organized for Velutha to be educated and given him a job …

Mammachi, though annoyed at his drunkenness, wasn’t averse to listening to bardic stories about herself and her family’s Christian munificence. Nothing prepared her for what she was about to hear.

Vellya Paapen began to cry. Half of him wept. Tears welled up in his real eye and shone on his black cheek. With his other eye he stared stonily ahead. An old Paravan, who had seen the Walking Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and Love.

Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of him. He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to skin.

They went to Kari Saipu’s House, Vellya Paapen said. The white man’s demon had entered them. It was Kari Saipu’s revenge for what he, Vellya Paapen, had done to him. The boat (that Estha sat on and Rahel found) was tethered to the tree stump next to the steep path that led through the marsh to the abandoned rubber estate. He had seen it there. Every night. Rocking on the water. Empty. Waiting for the lovers to return. For hours it waited. Sometimes they only emerged through the long grass at dawn. Vellya Paapen had seen them with his own eye. Others had seen them too. The whole village knew. It was only a matter of time before Mammachi found out. So Vellya Paapen had come to tell Mammachi himself. As a Paravan and a man with mortgaged body parts, he considered it his duty.

The lovers. Sprung from his loins and hers. His son and her daughter. They had made the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen.

Vellya Paapen kept talking. Weeping. Retching. Moving his mouth. Mammachi couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sound of the rain grew louder and exploded in her head. She didn’t hear herself shouting.

Suddenly the blind old woman in her rickrack dressing gown and with her thin gray hair plaited into a rat’s tail stepped forward and pushed Vellya Paapen with all her strength. He stumbled backwards down the kitchen steps and lay sprawled in the wet mud. He was taken completely by surprise. Part of the taboo of being an Untouchable was expecting not to be touched. At least not in these circumstances. Of being locked into a physically impregnable cocoon.

Baby Kochamma, walking past the kitchen, heard the commotion. She found Mammachi spitting into the rain, THOO! THOO! THOO!, and Vellya Paapen lying in the slush, wet, weeping, groveling. Offering to kill his son. To tear him limb from limb.

Mammachi was shouting, “Drunken dog! Drunken Paravan liar!”

Over the din Kochu Maria shouted Vellya Paapen’s story to Baby Kochamma. Baby Kochamma recognized at once the immense potential of the situation, but immediately anointed her thoughts with unctuous oils. She bloomed. She saw it as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and simultaneously avenging her (Baby Kochamma’s) humiliation at the hands of Velutha and the men in the march—the
Modalali Mariakutty
taunts, the forced flagwaving. She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin.

Baby Kochamma put her heavy arm around Mammachi.

“It must be true,” she said in a quiet voice. “She’s quite capable of it. And so is he. Vellya Paapen would not lie about something like this.”

She asked Kochu Maria to get Mammachi a glass of water and a chair to sit on. She made Vellya Paapen repeat his story, stopping him every now and then for details—whose boat? How often? How long had it been going on?

When Vellya Paapen finished, Baby Kochamma turned to Mammachi. “He must go,” she said. “Tonight. Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.”

Then she shuddered her schoolgirl shudder. That was when she said:
How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans.

With that olfactory observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled.

Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy
coolie.
She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell.
Like animals
, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited.
Like a dog with a bitch on heat.
Her tolerance of “Men’s Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generations to come,
forever
now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms and birthday parties. They’d nudge and whisper. It was all finished now.

Mammachi lost control.

They did what they had to do, the two old ladies. Mammachi provided the passion. Baby Kochamma the Plan. Kochu Maria was their midget lieutenant. They locked Ammu up (tricked her into her bedroom) before they sent for Velutha. They knew that they had to get him to leave Ayemenem before Chacko returned. They could neither trust nor predict what Chacko’s attitude would be.

It wasn’t entirely their fault, though, that the whole thing spun out of control like a deranged top. That it lashed out at those that crossed its path. That by the time Chacko and Margaret Kochamma returned from Cochin, it was too late.

The fisherman had already found Sophie Mol.

  Picture him.

  Out in his boat at dawn, at the mouth of the river he has known all his life. It is still quick and swollen from the previous night’s rain.
Something bobs past in the water and the colors catch his eye. Mauve. Redbrown. Beach sand. It moves with the current, swiftly towards the sea. He sends out his bamboo pole to stop it and draw it towards him. It’s a wrinkled mermaid. A mer-child. A mere mer-child. With redbrown hair. With an Imperial Entomologists’ nose, and a silver thimble clenched for luck in her fist. He pulls her out of the water into his boat. He puts his thin cotton towel under her, she lies at the bottom of his boat with his silver haul of small fish. He rows home—
Thaiy thaiy thakka thaiy thaiy thome
—thinking how wrong it is for a fisherman to believe that he knows his river well.
No one
knows the Meenachal. No one knows what it may snatch or suddenly yield. Or when. That is what makes fishermen pray.

  At the Kottayam police station, a shaking Baby Kochamma was ushered into the Station House Officer’s room. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew of the circumstances that had led to the sudden dismissal of a factory worker. A Paravan. A few days ago he had tried to, to … to force himself on her niece, she said. A divorcée with two children.

Baby Kochamma misrepresented the relationship between Ammu and Velutha, not for Ammu’s sake, but to contain the scandal and salvage the family reputation in Inspector Thomas Mathew’s eyes. It didn’t occur to her that Ammu would later invite shame upon herself—that she would go to the police and try and set the record straight. As Baby Kochamma told her story, she began to believe it.

Why wasn’t the matter reported to the police in the first place, the Inspecror wanted to know.

“We are an old family,” Baby Kochamma said. “These are not things we want talked about …”

Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters—whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs….

“Where is the molestee now?”

“At home. She doesn’t know I’ve come here. She wouldn’t have
let me come. Naturally … she’s frantic with worry about the children. Hysterical.”

Later, when the real story reached Inspector Thomas Mathew, the fact that what the Paravan had taken from the Touchable Kingdom had not been snatched, but
given
, concerned him deeply. So after Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu went to him with the twins to tell him that a mistake had been made and he tapped her breasts with his baton, it was not a policeman’s spontaneous brutishness on his part. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was a premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and terrorize her. An attempt to instill order into a world gone wrong.

Still later, when the dust had settled and he had had the paperwork organized, Inspector Thomas Mathew congratulated himself for the way it had all turned out.

But now, he listened carefully and courteously as Baby Kochamma constructed her story.

“Last night it was getting dark—about seven in the evening—when he came to the house to threaten us. It was raining very heavily. The lights had gone out and we were lighting the lamps when he came,” she told him. “He knew that the man of the house, my nephew Chacko Ipe, was—is—away in Cochin. We were three women alone in the house.” She paused to let the Inspector imagine the horrors that could be visited by a sex-crazed Paravan on three women alone in a house.

“We told him that if he did not leave Ayemenem quietly we would call the police. He started off by saying that my niece had
consented
, can you imagine? He asked us what proof we had of what we were accusing him of. He said that according to the Labor Laws we had no grounds on which to dismiss him. He was very calm. ‘The days are gone,’ he told us, ‘when you can kick us around like dogs.’” By now Baby Kochamma sounded utterly convincing. Injured. Incredulous.

Then her imagination took over completely. She didn’t describe how Mammachi had lost control. How she had gone up to Velutha
and spat right into his face. The things she had said to him. The names she had called him.

Instead she described to Inspector Thomas Mathew how it was not just
what
Velutha had said that had made her come to the police, but the
way
he said it. His complete lack of remorse, which was what had shocked her most. As though he was actually
proud
of what he had done. Without realizing it herself, she grafted the manner of the man who had humiliated her during the march onto Velutha. She described the sneering fury in his face. The brassy insolence in his voice that had so frightened her. That made her sure that his dismissal and the children’s disappearance were not, could not possibly be, unconnected.