"Tsk," said Tata now. "How many times have I told you to peel the onions under water and wear your glasses while doing it? Aadiyappa, how you women let vanity rule your lives!"
Obediently Paati dropped each onion with a plop into a large ever-silver bowl of water, and no more was said of the British on that day.
BY THE TIME Mr. McDougall packed away his coconut-frond fans and his tropical-weather Wellingtons for good, Ipoh, never the cultural hub of British Malaya, had begun to split her thin colonial skin, and a new town peered out from under it, its pavements wet with phlegmy spittle. Bustling kopitiams sprouted around derelict whiskey bars like toadstools around rotting logs. Inside them flocks of old Chinamen squatted at marble-topped tables, dipping fluffy white bread in their morning coffee, slurping their midday bak kut teh. The Cold Storage, with its gleaming, chrome-stooled milk bar, closed forever on a quiet Saturday afternoon. In its place arose an establishment shifting uneasily between supermarket and wet market, alive with flies, slick with the sanguine juices of fish and fowl. The University Bookstore folded, and all over town, small, disreputable-looking bookstalls, with Chinese names and Indian film magazines strung across dark doorways, popped up. The raucous revelry of Chinese businessmen and Indian doctors expelled the last ghosts of Englishmen's subdued scotch-and-cigar evenings from the richly paneled rooms of the Ipoh Club.
Having selected an auspicious moving day from their Tamil calendar, Tata and Paati packed up their house in Butterworth and drove to Ipoh with her rosewood trunk on the back seat and his wiry old bicycle strapped to the roof of their maroon Bentley. Tata's pleated khaki trousers bulged with assets and liabilities: a hefty balance at Lloyd's Bank, various and sundry investments in the industries of the inchoate nation (so that when he died the obituary writer at the Straits Times fanned out for his readers the entire pack of catchy double-barreled monikers Tata had amassed: Rubber Baron, Cement King, Duke of Durians, Tapioca Tycoon, Import-Export Godfather), a wife still fresh and dimpled at fifty-eight, and three unmarried daughters. His two sons were away: Raju had got a job with a law firm in Singapore after coming down from Oxford, and Balu, newly married, was winning ballroom-dancing competitions all over Europe.
"Useless bloody fool," Appa was to growl years later, pointing out Uncle Ballroom to Uma and Suresh and Aasha in old family albums with moldering construction-paper pages. And, jabbing with an index finger the pictures of Uncle Ballroom's doomed garden-party wedding: "Tangoing and foxtrotting his way to penury. Foxtrotting only he found his fox. Too bad she could trot faster than him. He was cha-chaing this side, she was choo-chooing that side. Bloody idiot got outfoxed by his own fox. Hah!"
"And probably eating steek," Suresh would whisper to Aasha when they were out of earshot, "with a knife and fork. And sleeping with no shirt on. Like J. R. Ewing only."
But in 1956, Tata was untroubled by visions of his profligate son's future. As the country charged towards birth and impetuous youth, he embraced his twilight years with a grateful sigh and a settling-in sense. Hiring servants only to cook and clean, he busied himself with his rose bushes and his vegetable garden. He harvested ripe chilies and twined tender tomato plants around stakes. He pruned, he weeded, he mowed twice a week. He planted trees: guava, mango, tamarind. He put up garden walls and trellises and came in for tea at ten past four, sweating but radiant, smiling around his kitchen at the rightness, the in-placeness of it all.
In a shed hastily erected in the garden, he spread mail-order instructions out on a workbench and built and varnished strange pieces of furniture he had previously only read about in books: secretaries, hall trees, cane stands.
He ordered a chandelier from France and, when it arrived, spent six days sitting in front of the opened crate, turning each part around and around in his hands. On the seventh day, a sudden fire roaring in his belly, he stayed up well past his usual bedtime to assemble the chandelier by the light of a kerosene lamp, frowning and muttering at the poorly translated directions, struggling, struggling, lipchewing, jawgrinding, squinting at the diagrams, until finally, at one minute to midnight, he dragged Paati from her bed in breathless triumph. They raised their faces towards the hanging chandelier in numinous expectation. Tata put the index finger of his right hand to the switch, took a deep breath, and flicked it on. At exactly midnight on the thirty-first of August 1957, there was Light...
...at precisely the same moment as, two hundred hopeful miles away, Tunku Abdul Rahman raised his right arm high on a colonial cricket ground and saluted the country's new freedom to the accompaniment of an aroused-and-rousing cheer of "Merdeka!"—Freedom!—and the eager choreography of the flag boys: in perfect synchrony, the Union Jack was lowered and the new flag raised. There, too, was Light. The blazing Light of a dozen fluorescent streetlamps, the crackling Light of a hundred flashing cameras, the (metaphorical, now, but no less real) inner Light of pride and ambition that shone in a million patriotic breasts just as it had shone in other breasts at other midnights.
Convinced that the Big House should grow and glow and celebrate sympathetically, Tata consulted a firm of architects about several extensions. An extra guest room. Two extra bathrooms (one with a claw-foot bathtub). An orchid conservatory. A music room–cum–smoking room (although there was but one gramophone, and no one smoked). An English kitchen equipped with a gleaming Aga range, in which the cook refused to set foot, preferring her outdoor Indian kitchen with its squealing tap and its gaping drains ready to receive fish guts, vegetable peelings, and leftover curries. And finally a servant's room under the back staircase, although neither Tata nor Paati got around to hiring a live-in servant to occupy it. Paying no heed to Mr. McDougall's conservative taste, Tata had the new wings built in a proud local style: solid wooden slats on a concrete base, patched willy-nilly onto the austere symmetry of the original grey stone structure, so that in less than two years the house metamorphosed into something out of an Enid Blyton bedtime story. Unnecessary corridors met each other at oblique angles. Additions, partitions, and covered porches seemed to rise out of nowhere before the eye. Green mosquito netting thumbed its nose at the Battenburg lace curtains in the next room. Sweat and steam and coal smoke from the hot Indian kitchen invaded the immaculate English kitchen and smeared its shiny surfaces. And above it all, the house's bold features—the quick, damning eyelids of the shutters, the sharp gable noses so different from the flat roofs around them—shuddered with a Scotsman's thin-lipped rancor. These bloody Nati'es. That's whit ye gie when ye gie a boorichie ay wogs 'eh reit tae rule.
Tata's last home-improvement venture before he died was to paint the outside of the house an unapologetic peacock blue, as if to stamp upon the building his ownership, his nation's liberty and his own. It was a color Tata's neighbors were accustomed to seeing only in wedding sarees and Mughal miniature paintings. Now the house practically glowed in the dark. The Big House. 79 Kingfisher Lane. You can't miss it, people took to saying when giving directions. It's nothing like the others. Appa's one concession to the mawkish sentimentality of the Indian son, as far as his children were ever able to tell, was to select the same blinding color every five years when he had the house repainted. "Any other color just wouldn't be the same," he'd say with a regretful headshake. "Got to honor the old man's magnificent jasmine-and-marigolds curdrice-and-pickle Madras-masala aesthetic sensibilities."
WHEN TATA keeled over in his vegetable garden one luminous May morning in 1958, Paati ordered her daughters to summon their oldest brother. Then she settled herself on the south-facing porch (non-covered, alas) to wait, squinting at the horizon as if she could see the hump of Singapore rising like a turtle's back through the blue water three hundred miles away, and astride that hump, like the Colossus of Rhodes, her fearless firstborn, ready to clear the Tebrau Strait in a single leap and come lumbering across the land into this manless garden, law degree in one hand and hoe in the other. At dusk her daughters begged her to come indoors; at eight, despairing, they brought her mosquito coils an
d a pillow for her back. But she barked her questions without looking at them. At what time had the telegram been sent? Had a response been received? At what time was Raju to start from Singapore? In the morning she was still there in her rattan chair, covered in red bites the size of grapes, her voice hoarse from the smoke of the useless mosquito coils. Scratching furiously, she got up to greet Appa as his pea-green Morris Minor pulled into the driveway.
"I dropped everything and sped straight home, foof!" he was to tell his children years later. "Just like that I had to tender my resignation. Tup-tup-tup and I was standing here consoling the old lady and taking charge of everything." Tup-tup-tup and three snaps of his fingers. So magical had been his haste, so uncanny the lightning progress of the Morris Minor on the old backcountry byways. "Just imagine," Appa would say, "just try and imagine if you can. Zipped home just like that." And dutifully the children would feel the wind of that speed in their faces, and see unanimously the image each one had purloined without a word from the thoughts of the other: a young Appa zooming through the brightening air with one arm stuck straight out before him like some undersized, chicken-chested superhero.
After Tata's funeral, Appa bagged a coveted associateship in the venerable law firm of Rackham Fields & Company. Though his bosses were all British for now, they'd be throwing up their jobs and leaving one by one, and whom would they choose to fill their shoes if not a fellow who'd come down from Oxford with first-class honors? Both precedent and informed speculation suggested that such a job would provide the perfect sparkling counterpoint to the meteoric political career Appa envisioned for himself. He had inherited—oh, most precious of legacies!—his father's uncompromising ambition. With a bit of work everything would be his: a Mercedes in the driveway, a Datukship on the King's birthday, the country itself. The whole country, his for the taking, his generation's. What an inheritance! They would not squander it. They would make this country the envy of all Asia, even of the bloody British themselves.
As part of the understanding that he would see his sisters well settled, Appa had also inherited an ancillary tripartite legacy: 1) the Big House, that twisted, hulking setting of his father's twilight years; 2) half of the shipping company; 3) the lion's share of Tata's wisely invested nest egg.
The house welcomed its new lord with wide-open doors and a garland of vermilioned mango leaves strung across the top of the front doorway. But the shipping company, managed these past two years by a loyal secretary, could no longer be kept. "I'm a barrister, not a bloody boatman," Appa declared to anyone who would listen. "And my brother is a fool. Amateur and professional. You think sambaing and rumbaing will keep the boats afloat or what?" So the company was sold, the rubber, cement, durian, and tapioca investments divided, and Uncle Ballroom's share grudgingly forwarded to him in Europe per his instructions. Appa gave the boy five months (in the end it took seven) to spend it all before he began dashing off desperate pleas for more. Ah, well. The luckiest of men had thorns in their sides, and unlike some, he, at least, didn't have to worry about a younger brother who would stumble into an unsuitable match with a dimwitted troglodyte, spawn six snotty brats, and ensconce himself and his family in a spare room upstairs whence they would all descend in a cavalcade for free idli sambar at each mealtime. No, such burdens would almost certainly never be his: on the shelf in the dining room sat his brother's latest All-Round Ballroom Champion trophy and a framed photograph of him and his partner in some obscenely gilded ballroom in Vienna, in exactly the same pose as the faceless gold-trophy couple. Thus freed of the firstborn's burden, Appa invested his half of the nest egg twice-wisely and pondered his place in the newborn nation.
3. THE NECESSARY SACRIFICE OF THE BURDENSOME RELIC
August 26, 1980
ONE EVENING a week after Paati's death, Aasha follows Uma down the stairs and to the back door of the Big House, her heart hammering like a wedding drum, elemental words blistering her tongue like beads of hot oil: What, Uma? Why? But her mouth will not spit these words out, and her legs refuse to shorten her customary following distance of three yards. What is it about Uma that frightens her this evening? Her purposeful step, the resolute look in her eye, the way her arms are folded tightly over her stomach? Or is it something greater than the sum of these signals, yet unnameable? Certainly it could be no threat or suggestion Uma herself has made: she has neither uttered a word nor done anything else unusual all day. She has remained behind the locked door of her bedroom; she has ignored Aasha just as she has been ignoring her for so long that you might mistakenly believe this icy, silent Uma had obliterated the memory of that other Uma, the laughing, teasing, bicycle-pushing Uma who had inherited Paati's dimples and smelled (close up) of Pear's soap.
But when Aasha trails the new Uma around the house, the old one walks behind them both, soft-footed, humming under her breath. When Aasha swivels around on the balls of her feet, hoping to catch her, she is gone. What else can Aasha do but follow the new Uma around, hoping, wishing, willing her thoughts to fly across the three yards between them and settle, dove-winged, on Uma's impregnable heart? From the back door, she watches as Uma strides through the garden.
It is dusk, that aching, violet dusk that has come to seem the permanent state of this whole year. Just as Uma reaches the garden shed the streetlights come on, and clouds of moths and beetles appear from nowhere, as if they've been waiting for this moment all day. They divide themselves into equal clusters, even around the one streetlight that flickers on and off and on and off all night but refuses to die.
In front of the shed, Uma stops and stares at Paati's worn rattan chair, in which the old lady sat every day from eight in the morning till nine at night (except during her fever this year, when she didn't get out of bed for weeks). For as long as Aasha can remember, this chair has belonged to Paati, though In The Beginning she sat in it only to relax after lunch. Then one day she made an official announcement that she was Old and Tired. With that, all the air seemed to leak from her at an alarming rate. Her after-lunch rests grew longer; then before-lunch eye-closings preceded them. And finally, after-breakfast catnaps ran into those, until Paati simply ceased to stir from the chair all day. During all that time the chair never budged from its original spot next to the crockery cabinet at the end of the long corridor outside the English kitchen, in a sleepy, dark corner where shadows drift and settle like feathers, and where the mosquitoes fly in slow motion and hum an octave lower than they do anywhere else in the Big House.
Never budged, that is, until Amma threw it out. From the afternoon Paati died, Amma was forced to repeat regularly for five days: "Aasha, please stop staring at that chair. Come away. Never mind, it was better for Paati this way, don't you know? Too old already she was. At least she went quickly." The first time he heard these words, Suresh ran upstairs to lie down on his bed and think: Quicklyquicklyquicklyquickly. Quickly is merciful and merciful is quick and it's true no matter what that everything is better this way and anyway I don't know anything and I don't remember anything. After that he made sure never again to be in the room to hear Amma coax Aasha away from the chair, which was easy enough, for an eleven-year-old boy goes to Boy Scout meetings, trots off to the corner shop with twenty cents and a plan in hand, sequesters himself in his room to read Dandy and Beano comics, and no one thinks anything of it. Boys at that age. You know how they are.
But Aasha, trapped at home, jabbered and chattered and spewed the fruits of her tortured mind at Amma's feet.
"Look how Paati curled up in her chair," she squealed the morning after Paati died. "Look, she pulled up her feet also, look at her curled up small-small round-round like a cat! Then after she'll be complaining only, knees paining legs paining joints paining. Silly Paati!"
"Tsk, come and drink your Milo, Aasha. Paati passed away. Paati is not there."
But passed away was what the soapy black water from afternoon bucket baths did, gurgling and burping into the bathroom drain, sweeping a hair clump and a stray sliver of soap with
it.
That was not, in fact, how Paati had gone. Her departure had been much messier—oh, so much more than water into the bathroom drain!—and more dramatic (incorporating all the elements of a first-rate thriller: gasps, footsteps rushing hither and thither, impulsions and compulsions). Also far less final, for Paati was not yet all gone. She was transparent now, and each day since she died she'd been missing another small part of herself: first one of her dangly, distended earlobes, then a knobby big toe, then a little finger. But the important parts—fierce head, fired-up chest, burning belly—made their piss-and-vinegar presence felt.
Later that morning, Aasha returned to Paati's shadowy, mosquito-saturated corner and gripped her rattan chair by its armrests.
"Eh Paati Paati, don't pull your hair like that, don't shout and scream, your throat will pain! Chellam cannot come and comb your hair lah. Chellam all the time sleeping only now. Wait I ask Amma to come, don't scream, don't scream!"
Amma dragged Aasha off by the strap of her Buster Brown overalls. "Come," she said. "Come and read a book or draw a picture or something. I'll ask Suresh to lend you his color pencils. You want F&N orange squash? You want ginger beer? I'll send Mat Din to buy for you."
For five afternoons Aasha went to the chair at teatime, with a jelebi or two bondas or a handful of omapoddi in her sweaty hand.
"Here, Paati," she whispered, depositing her clandestine offerings on the chair. "Amma threw away your bowl already, what to do? Eat faster-faster, don't tell anybody." She stood and stared. Mosquitoes landed on her arms and legs ten fifteen twenty at a time like tiny aeroplanes, and she slapped and scratched but did not move away. "Nice or not, Paati?" she asked, leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her back. "Bondas hot-hot. No need to eat dry rice from our plates. Nice or not? Careful, don't burn your mouth, what Paati, so hungry ah? So long didn't eat, is it?"
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