These displays were nothing new; the whole family was familiar with that other nonsense concerning Mr. McDougall's dead daughter. "Maybe," Chellam had often whispered to Suresh, "your sister can see ghost, what. Maybe she got special chance from God."
The family had sought explanations less metaphysical.
"You people," Amma said, "you people tell her funny-funny stories, who tells a child this age those kinds of stories? Of course she's going to make up all these rubbish stories. Trying to make herself interesting, that's all."
"Well, it's not working, is it?" said Suresh.
Yet for reasons best known to them—and each of them had different reasons—they could not dismiss Aasha's sightings of Paati quite so easily. "This is getting a bit too much," said Amma. "Some ghost story character is one thing. Talking to her own dead grandmother is another. People are going to think she's a Disturbed Child."
Appa said, "What I want to know is, since when did she and the old lady become such soul mates?" A fair question, for Aasha had hardly spoken to Paati when Paati was alive. She'd been born too late to know the Paati who'd sung Uma to sleep and picked the peas out of her fried rice, and in any case Uma had always been Paati's favorite; there'd hardly been room for Suresh and Aasha in her heart.
The day Amma found a pile of disintegrating bondas, rock-hard jelebis, dusty omapoddi, and limp curry puffs on the rattan chair, she picked it up by its armrests and made off with it.
"Chhi!" Amma said to Aasha on her way out the front door with the chair. "Just because we're feeling sorry for you you're climbing on our head now. Taking advantage of everybody's sympathy."
Defying this last assertion, Aasha threw herself down on the marble floor and loosed a wordless series of ascending wails that floated like bright scarves—purple, fuchsia, puce—towards the ceiling, to be blown into the street by the fan as Amma set the chair down by the dustbin and shook her head.
"That girl is having fits or what," said Mrs. Balakrishnan to Kooky Rooky, her boarder. "I'm not surprised. What a terrible thing she saw, no joke, isn't it?"
"Aieeee! Aieeee! Aieeee!" shrieked Baldy Wong. "I also can scream what! I can scream louder! AIEEEEEEEEE!"
Mrs. Malhotra's barrel-shaped dog began to howl.
"Chhi!" said Amma, slamming the front door shut. "The whole world is going mad. Aasha, you want one tight slap? Hanh?"
Aasha swallowed her viscous, salty saliva and sat hiccupping on the floor for an hour until she fell asleep. At dinnertime Suresh came and poked her in the ribs with a foot and then sidled off to his own rice and rasam.
"Why you threw away Paati's chair, Amma?" he asked. He knew the answer; his question was nothing but a thinly disguised accusation. He'd had to muster up all his courage to ask it, and the mustering had left his ears sticking out farther than ever. Under the table his knees were cold. You threw it away, he thought, because you couldn't bear to look at it anymore, isn't it? Maybe you're scared Paati's really sitting in that chair and you can't see her.
Amma only said breezily, "Oh, why should we selfishly hang on to things we can't use? The dustbin men will probably want it. It's still usable, after all. Some families would kill for a chair like that."
Suresh considered this. Some families killed for lesser reasons, but poor chairless families, needing the chair-ity of rich families, were driven to violence only by their desperation. The thought was terrible and wonderful: skinny men in open-chested shirts with red bandanas around their heads, wrestling for an old rattan chair while the women and children gasped and shrieked in the background. Then one of them would pull out a gleaming knife. He'd pick up the chair in one arm and his beauty-marked, melon-breasted village belle in the other; he'd hoist the chair on his back, slip his bloody knife back under his belt, and before you knew it he'd be leaping across the moonlit rooftops, leaving the others to moan in their spreading pools of blood.
On Monday morning, when the dustbin men came to collect the rubbish, they picked up the chair and tossed it playfully between them. "This one's for you, Ayappan," one of them chortled, "you can sit in it and eat your thairsadham and scratch your armpits."
"Ei, maddayan!" Ayappan shot back, as the other demonstrated the armpit-scratching part of the deal. "The family personally told me it was for you, special-special only, for you to sit on the porch and comb your lovely locks." When they exhausted the chair's possibilities they dropped it, dumped the rubbish into their lorry and drove away. It lay on the grassy verge by the culvert, where Aasha could hear its labored breathing. In the evening Amma dragged it into the backyard and left it by the shed. "Oo wah, style-style only these dustbin men nowadays," she said. "Those days they used to grab whatever we left for them. Broken also they would fight for it. Now even we would lose to them in taste and class, lah!" she grumbled, as if she'd paid for the old kind of dustbin man and received the new kind in the post.
And there by the shed the chair has remained since last night, upside down, the watery stains of Paati's numerous failed attempts to make it to the bathroom in time visible even on the underside of its sagging seat. One stain shaped like a one-eared bunny, another like a fat frog, a third like a butterfly. Three of Paati's silver hairs, relics of a particularly savage combing by Chellam, are caught between two loose strips of rattan on the back of the chair. Its unraveling legs stick up in the air like the limbs of some dead mouse awaiting the ant armies.
As Aasha watches from the back door, Uma drags the chair to the hump by the garden wall and sets it right-side up. Then she walks back to the shed, opens the door, and goes in.
While she's inside, Paati's ghost slips out from behind the tamarind tree and takes her rightful place in the chair, regal and disdainful as a queen. Is that where she's been hiding all these days, behind the tamarind tree, since Amma first put the chair out for the dustbin men? No one knows, and before Aasha has a chance to ask her, Uma comes back. She's carrying a big tin with both hands, her shoulders hunched in such a way Aasha can tell it's heavy.
Then, in a shattering surge of memory, Aasha realizes what it is: a tin of kerosene. She's seen Mat Din the gardener pour kerosene on his piles of branches and weeds before he lights his bonfires, huge, roaring, smoky flame-towers that darken the sky and make the birds disappear for hours.
Uma sets the tin down by her feet and folds her arms once more. There are permanent bags under her eyes because she hasn't slept in a week. Oh, she's caught forty winks here and a catnap there, but the winks are carefully rationed, thirty-eight thirty-nine forty okay enough, and the catnaps are not the cozy indulgences of the happy housepet but the vigilant sleep of the one-eye-open one-ear-missing stray. In the past week, the loose weave of her occasional slumber has let in many undesirable objects: old promises issued and received; the inexplicable scent of Yardley English Lavender talcum powder; a long sigh that revealed itself, when she opened her eyes, to have been nothing more than a sheet of paper blown by the ceiling fan from her desk to the floor.
The children call this grassy mound the ceremonial hump, for it was here that Amma burned her hand-embroidered, Kanchipuram silk wedding saree one long-ago morning after Appa didn't come home all night. Uma had watched from the back door, and Paati had reminded her once again how much cleverer, how much worldlier and tougher and classier she was than her Amma, because she had her father's blood in her and would therefore never do something as crass as throwing a fit in the backyard for all the neighbors to see.
And two years after the saree-burning, Uma and Suresh and Aasha buried Sassy the cat by the hump after Mr. Balakrishnan from across the street ran her over in his car in the middle of the night. If you're not careful, Suresh has warned Aasha ever since, if you accidentally step on that hump or even brush against it carelessly, Sassy's clawed foot—just white-white bones only, no more flesh—will burst through and grab your ankle.
In the old days, before Uma stopped speaking, she and Suresh used to take turns pushing Aasha around the hump on her tricycle, chanting:
Dead cat bump
Smelly wormy rotty lump!
Once Aasha flew head-first off the tricycle into the African daisies, her foot grazing the hump. Her full-throated wail had brought Lourdesmary hurtling out into the backyard like a bumblebee launched from a cannon. "A big monkey like you, pushing your sister until she falls!" she scolded Uma. "You should have known better."
Surely, surely, Aasha thinks now, watching Uma from the back door, Uma should also know better than to do whatever terrible thing she is going to do.
Except that Uma doesn't think what she's about to do is so terrible; in fact, she has deemed it necessary. One should never forget that all things pass: hopes, cats, chairs, life itself, each a spun-glass rose in a monkey's hand. In the twinkling of an eye everything can change, and there's never any going back. You can't bring a dead cat back to life. You can't resurrect a saree or a marriage from two charred tassels. You most certainly can't uncrack the cracked skull of a cantankerous grandmother by imagining her back in her unraveling rattan chair.
Only Aasha sees the ghosts arrive from all directions, united by their unhealthy fascination with tragedy, with unfinishable business and lingering discontent. All the bloodsucking pontianaks about whom Chellam once warned the children; all the red-eyed, fleet-footed toyols; all the polongs and pelesits; and among them, almost unnoticed (but for Aasha's extra-sharp eyes), Mr. McDougall's petal-pretty daughter, a little afraid, a little unsure, but curious nevertheless. And though her bubble of a heart skips a beat at the sight of Uma—those dark, unblinking eyes, those impetuous movements, all these recall her mother's most dangerous days—she's resolved to provide her customary moral support to Aasha in lonely and troubled times.
The ghosts converge on the backyard like crows, long tresses streaming, red eyes glowing. They look at Paati in her chair and whisper to each other. They settle on tree branches and on the rims of flowerpots. They bear Aasha no ill will, yet she knows they would not be here if some ghastly spectacle were not about to unfold. She also knows that no one—not she herself, not Mr. McDougall's fervent daughter, not any of the other ghosts with their hot breath and their portentous mouths—can reach Uma now. Uma's stepped behind her invisible glass door and locked it; Aasha recognizes the signs.
On the garden wall, swinging his skinny legs, sits Suresh. He tilts his head back and pours into his mouth, while keeping a vigilant eye on Uma, an entire box of Chiclets he found on the school bus this afternoon. (You never know when someone might catch you and confiscate the Chiclets you've been saving so wisely and with so much restraint—and then where will you be? Better to relish life wholeheartedly while you can.) In his mouth the Chiclets form a fat, minty wad, smooth in some places but still surprisingly grainy in others. He bites down and bursts a hidden bubble with a snap. He watches Uma douse Paati's chair in kerosene and draw a matchbox from under the waistband of her skirt, as if it were a sword for fighting off anyone else who wants the chair. He rests his chin on his hands and knows he's not getting involved. No way, no fear, not even if the police come. None of this is his problem. Not even if Uma is flagrantly breaking a rule she herself made up at a long-ago feline funeral: no bonfires in the backyard, she'd said when he'd suggested cremating Sassy. Well, look at her now. Rules, too, were fragile.
Aasha steps out into the backyard and makes her way, holding her breath, clenching her fists, past the teeming ghosts. At the tamarind tree, directly across from Uma, she stops and kneels. The ground here is covered with tough, brown tamarind pods, and because Aasha's helpless hands itch to do something, she gathers them up in familiar fistfuls and pulls them apart for the seeds. She fills her pockets with these, as if they were insurance against future catastrophe.
"Don't you wish we could do something?" Mr. McDougall's daughter whispers to her. She's sidled past the others to come and kneel beside Aasha. "But maybe we've no choice. Nobody really cares what we want. My ma," she begins, and for once Aasha doesn't want to hear her story—not now, she thinks, not now, I have to keep both eyes and both ears on Uma—"you know how my ma wouldn't let go of my hand that day? So tight she held it. Nobody ever held my hand like that before so I was a little bit happy. A little bit happy and a big bit frightened. It was all mixed up. When my ma jumped, at first I didn't realize we'd jumped, that's how mixed up I was."
"Wait a minute," says Aasha, because Uma's lighting the match. But Mr. McDougall's daughter, trapped as always in the net of her last memory, goes on:
"The whole time we were falling through the air, my ma held on to my hand. I could feel her fingers with my eyes closed, and I could hear her breathing, and I could feel her long hair on my neck. The air wasn't hot anymore while we were falling. But now I know she only held my hand to comfort herself. And to make sure I didn't get away."
Uma flings her match onto the chair and steps back.
"It was a long way down to the water," Mr. McDougall's daughter remembers, "a long long time between jumping and swallowing water. I counted to twenty and I wasn't even counting fast. Even when we hit the water my ma didn't let go of my hand. And all the while we were sinking, she still didn't let go of it."
There's a brief burst of flame as the kerosene burns. Paati clutches the armrests and pulls her feet up onto the seat.
Mr. McDougall's daughter turns a terror-stricken, fire-lit face to Aasha. For a long moment they stare at each other, two old friends marooned together on the uncertain island of adult whims. At least they have each other. In Mr. McDougall's daughter's grey eyes the fire glows amber.
Undeterred, pitiless, Uma licks her dry lips and waits. Aasha drops a handful of tamarind seeds. Click, clack, click, they slip through her fingers and fall onto other seeds already under the tree. She stands up. She takes one step forward, no more. She thinks of Uma in The Three Sisters in July, emoting onstage as she never does at home; of Uma reciting long, winding lines in funny English before her mirror; of Uma standing on the rug outside the bathroom, wrapped in one towel and drying her hair with another, smiling, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs under her breath. That is the real Uma; this is a different Uma, blind, unforgiving, a dangerous shapeshifter.
On the wall Suresh snaps his gum again. And again. Snap! The sound cracks like a whip in Aasha's face. She flinches and sniffs. She rubs her nose with an index finger. The air is full of smoke and frying pork from the Wongs' kitchen. She waits, balanced on her heels.
Paati's chair braces itself for a difficult battle. It stiffens its arms and hunkers down, while on the seat, tight and tiny as a coiled pangolin now, Paati cowers.
Oh, Uma should know better, she should. A big monkey like her, trying to set fire to a chair that's been sitting outside in the damp for days. What's left of the flame singes the three silver hairs, chars the chair's thick legs on the outside, and begins to subside. So Uma adds more kerosene. Then she folds her arms across her chest and hugs herself as if she's cold, as if the weather is different where she stands.
Slowly, gleefully, sensuously, the flames finally begin to creep up the legs of Paati's chair. Paati trembles and covers her face. The heat of the fire lays its gold-flecked wings across Aasha's face, and a drop of sweat traces a searching trail down the misted glass of Uma's invisible door. From someone's television set the Muslim call to prayer lifts off into the air like a man in a billowy white robe tiptoeing lightly off a roof.
Allah-u akhbar! Allaaaaaah-u akhbar! The man's sleeves fill like sails. There he hangs, not rising or falling, looking up and down and left and right for some thoughts to think.
The man turns into a dove.
The chair crumples and kneels, weeping, gathering its skirts of flame about itself.
It's just a scrap of a chair with a scrap of a ghost in it, a skin-and-bones ghost whose feet don't touch the ground. What an unbearable indignity it is that Paati must summon her few remaining shreds of will to outwit these new flames that tastelessly echo the funereal flames of just-last-week. It's entirely possibl
e that this time, weakened by those first flames, deprived of days of teatime omapoddi and curry puffs, Paati will not make it.
Aasha opens her mouth to scream. Suresh snaps his gum, three times in a row, each louder than the last, because that's all he can do without sticking his own neck out. But it's too late. The scream rolls roundly out of Aasha's mouth, like a bubble escaping from an underwater balloon, and shoots up to the leafy top of the tamarind tree. On its way it pops against a sharp, low branch and spills its words onto the rain-dark earth.
"Uma, Uma, please don't burn Paati, please! Pull her out! Pull her out! Pleeeease!" The last please quivers, turns to liquid, and seeps into the damp soil, suffusing the roots of the tamarind tree in its desperate grief. Next week Lourdesmary will complain that its fruit is becoming less succulent, drying out and turning too fibrous in the pod.
Transparent Paati lies amid the flames, limp as an empty plastic bag, her eyes slightly surprised, her head and chest and belly growing smaller and smaller as they melt. Stunned and saddened, the other ghosts drift off down the driveway in twos and threes, like mourners going home after a small child's funeral. Unsure how to arrange their faces or hold their heads.
At the last possible minute, just as the fire begins to lick at her chin, Paati spirits herself out of the flames with a final burst of her posthumous strength. She's put everything she had into this effort, and now she spirals up to the sky in a puff of smoke, a decrepit little genie with no wishes to grant. Her deflated head and chest and belly refill like balloons. Aasha holds her breath and hopes Uma hasn't noticed; she would close her eyes, too, but then she wouldn't be able to make sure Uma doesn't leap up and grab Paati by a foot and hurl her back into the flames. But Uma's flame eyes are glued to the crackling chair. Paati is safe, after all; she's lost nothing but the ends of her hair to the fire. All the same, she's had a good scare. Now she drifts off towards the Wongs' house, and after a moment Aasha hears Baldy start to whimper at nothing on his porch swing.
Evening Is the Whole Day Page 5