After the bonfire dies, Uma goes indoors to finish packing. Aasha climbs the stairs behind her, a woeful pull-along toy on an invisible string. With silent wheels instead of squeaky ones, and cracks in hidden places.
Yellow light spills out of Uma's open door, setting the dark wood of the floor agleam. Almost as if she were inviting Aasha in, Uma leaves her door open tonight. But on the landing, Aasha stops, unsure. She studies Paati's wedding picture, an old black-and-white photograph with blurred outlines, hairlines bleeding into faces, noses melting into mouths. Grave, handlebar-mustachioed men in suspenders and bow ties. Women with accusing eyes, necks and wrists heavy with gold. And, seated cross-legged on the grass, a little girl with ringlets, in a frothy white frock and sturdy dark boots ridiculous in the Madras heat. No one seems to know her name, though Aasha once offered Paati suggestion after suggestion. Meenakshi? Malathi? Madavi? Radhika? If they knew then, the mustachioed men sweating under their collars or their aching-necked wives, no one knows now. Probably the little girl grew up to be a spinster aunt, sending out tins of murukku and thattai to her nieces and nephews every Deepavali. Probably she died in her bathroom and no one found out for a week. Aasha settles down on a stair and waits, chin in hands, for nothing in particular.
It's obvious, even from Paati's wedding photograph, that she will not share the unfortunate imagined fate of the little girl in ringlets. Eighteen years old and not a month more, Paati stands with her twenty-five-year-old groom in the front row, erect, unsmiling, feet and hands red with henna. You can see in her eyes, blurry as they are, the thousand guests that have been invited for the month-long celebration, the five canopies erected on her father's land, the special photographer from Singapore. (Watch the birdie, Mr. and Missussssss, he'd said over and over, grinning and winking, watch the birdie, later on you can look at each other, Mr. and Missussssss! though they hadn't been looking at each other, not then and not for days afterwards.)
Future, present, and past do brave battle in the bride's kajaled eyes, and the photograph refuses to reveal which Paati will win.
These are the Paatis competing for supremacy, in reverse chronological order:
6) The eagle-nosed matriarch, widow of Thambusamy the Rubber Baron, Cement King, Durian Duke, etc., etc., determined to rule in her son's house as she did in her husband's;
5) The beautiful maddam, powdered and painted, who feels the stares of white men follow her in town;
4) The good Indian wife adept at fading, in public, into the background behind her men;
3) The young mother of a newborn bigshot lawyer, glowing with the achievement of a boy-on-first-try;
2) The shy-smiling newlywed (with feet and hands still faintly red but fading), mismeasuring the sugar for her husband's tea and mourning the life she was used to in her father's house;
1) The spoiled little girl who has simply to hold out her hands for extra kolukattai and jelebi, secure in the knowledge that her parents, having lost three babies before her, are wrapped around her little finger.
Or will none of these prevail? In the end, has 7) the bag of aching bones in the rattan chair staked out the surest claim in the fertile territory of other people's memories? Or is it—no turning back now, because now that we've come this far we have to set a foot, however hesitant, onto the precarious ground before us—8) an even later incarnation that will stay with Paati's survivors? A little brown heap of bones turning cold as death rattles and gurgles in its throat?
A little brown seeping heap. It trickles into drains and dark wood floors, into the white sheets of a deathbed, into Aasha's head. She shakes her head like a wet dog. Be gone, brown heap; be gone, blood droplets; be gone, flailing hands and uncurling toes. But new waters rush in to fill Aasha's head, bearing their own flotsam and jetsam, because once, yes, Paati was as young as Amma, and before that she was as young as Uma (and Chellam), and before that, she was as young as Aasha. Younger, even. A toddler. A baby, soft and swaddled. Not for the first time, as Aasha's mind strains to accommodate this incredible, uncomfortable truth, something in her chest sinks and settles like silt in a slow river. She swallows and takes a deep breath; then, heavy-footed, she climbs the remaining five stairs up to Uma's room. The door's still open, but Uma's at the window and doesn't turn around when she walks in. Not that she expects Uma to comfort her; she's grateful enough for the tender offering she knows the open door to be. And the yellow light out of which she's been locked for years, and the view from Uma's window, and the clean smell of her pillow. All these are Uma's way of saying Sorry for everything.
To answer It's okay I forgive you, she clambers onto Uma's bed and folds her thin legs under her tartan skirt. Uma backs away from the window and returns to her packing, pulling from the shopping bags under her bed clothes stiff with newness, their tags turning like mobiles in the fan breeze: a hooded cotton sweatshirt that won't be warm enough even on the plane; a stack of practical skin-tone panties that come up to her waist, specially picked out by Amma; a white blazer that will soon reveal itself to be comically unfashionable in New York. She lays these things on top of the clothes already in the red suitcase and smoothes them down with her hands. The suitcase smells of oilcloth on the outside, mothballs on the inside, and everywhere, inside and outside, of the cold, sterile rush of foreign airports, the rubber of conveyor belts, the suspense and rewards of Appa's trips abroad back when the courts of young Malaysia took their appeals to their ex-Queen. Once there'd been a hand-embroidered dress for Uma in the bottom of that suitcase, once a model aeroplane kit for Suresh. Now floury mothball dust clogs the ridges of its grey lining. Uma's eyes are too bright, her hands too quick, her nails bled white and bitten ragged.
"Uma," whispers Aasha.
Uma looks up, and it's only now that Aasha notices a tear hanging off her chin, round and heavy as quicksilver. The more Aasha looks at it, the more it doesn't fall. Pictures move inside it, swirling, melting into each other like palm sugar syrup stirred into coconut milk.
Afternoon sunlight on bathroom tiles.
An eversilver tumbler of water.
A blackened chair with swirling skirts of flame.
Now there's a tiny body (brown, with a cracked hip and a cracked-er skull) in the flames instead of a chair.
Then only the flames are left.
"Uma!" Aasha gasps, and her breath makes the tear fall. Uma reaches out and touches Aasha's cheek lightly with one cool finger, and underneath that fingertip the blood blooms hot in Aasha's cheek. Can it be, can it really be that all is forgiven? That Aasha's atonement for her sins of the past has been noted and accepted? Because Aasha is overcome with the surprise and thrill of being noticed at last, because she is bowled over by her own hereness and nowness, by the solid warmth of her cheek under Uma's finger, by the volcanic joy of being not Aasha-alone-and-invisible, but Aasha-with-Uma, taking up space on Uma's bed and in her life, she offers up all her hope in a single, shameless rush:
"Promise you'll write to me, Uma," she says. "Promise you'll send me stamps and maps. And stickers for my birthday."
Uma blinks, slow as a cow. Then she says, "Promise me you'll never again ask for a promise or make one yourself."
And because this is an impossible conundrum—how can she promise if she's no longer supposed to make promises?—Aasha can do nothing but watch Uma turn back to her suitcase and stuff into it the six pairs of footwear she has wrapped in twelve plastic bags, each shoe in its own bag so that the sole of one will not besmirch the upper of its mate. Curled up on Uma's bed for the last time, Aasha thinks about packing, about what people take and what they leave behind, about how much room there is in a suitcase, and how you can take everything you want with you wherever you go, your packed-up life, no stopping no promises. She hugs her knees to her chest and holds perfectly still, a small heap of tinder, ardent, waiting, ready.
4. AN OLD-FASHIONED COURTSHIP
IN 1959, when his father had been dead a full year, Appa set out to find himself a bride. Marriage was
part of his first five-year plan, which was itself every bit as determined, purposeful, and specific as the nation's own. Marriage, children, two cars, servants, a job with prospects, hard-earned fame by forty: these would be the accoutrements of his climb to real power, to earning a generous piece of the national pie-in-the-oven. The climb itself had begun while he was still in Singapore, where he'd joined the Party, the only party that mattered, the party that believed in a Malaya for all Malayans, Chinese Indians Eurasians included, no matter what contrary chauvinist castles the Malays were building in the air. To Malaya, the Party would bring prosperity and peace, and to Appa, great glory both public and private.
Appa had no wish to settle down and procreate with any of the worldly women with whom he dallied. Lily Rozells, long-legged and sharp-tongued, smelled of brandy and had a preternatural eye for a winning horse; Claudine Koh had read English at Cambridge and Adorno and Benjamin in her spare time; Nalini Dorai entertained dreams of producing avant-garde political plays in Kuala Lumpur. These women were his equals, and they knew it. They looked him in the eye. They asked him to spell out his dreams for them: How, Raju? How will you convince the Party you're the best man for the job? What'll your platform be? Why would your average Ah Chong and Ramasamy vote for you? They flirted with him, viewed him with curiosity, fondness, and, yes, it had to be said, indulgence. Oh, that Raju. Such a darling. Such big-big dreams for our half-past-six country. Ah, but what would we do without angry young men like him to hope, yeah? Every nation needs them. Appa knew full well what they said about him behind his back; it was not what he wanted his wife saying. His wife would be admiring, respectful, adoring, but more than that—what was it he imagined? What was the quality so clearly lacking in Lily and Claudine and Nalini, who did, however grudgingly, admire him and his grand vision? Appa could not put his finger on it, but he knew he'd recognize it when he found it.
NEXT DOOR to the Big House, in the squat bungalow one day to be occupied by Baldy Wong and his harried parents, lived Amma, her six siblings, her father, and her mother. The house was barely visible from the street, situated as it was at the bottom of a narrow, dark garden thick with mango trees and hanging parasitic vines. Appa's parents had never entered that house or any of the others in the neighborhood, nor invited any of their neighbors into the Big House; they had never even discussed such social adventuring. The Big House had stood aloof from its neighbors in Mr. McDougall's time, and Tata and Paati had seen no reason to change the established order of the street. Among the other neighbors, Amma's father was known to be the sort of man who kept to himself, who held his family to a life of quiet decorum and high principles. He'd been a bookkeeper for a cement factory; when the business had foundered and his British bosses had talked about retrenching their staff, he'd taken an early retirement to allow a younger colleague to keep his job. Word had spread. He was a decent man, a good man, a man who was vegetarian twice a week and didn't let his daughters wear above-the-knee skirts. He spent his days listening to the wireless radio he'd bought after his retirement and watching the four angelfish he kept in a small tank. Once a month he allowed himself a solitary treat of the latest Tamil film at the Grand Theatre in Jubilee Park (choice of two masalvadai or one bottle Fanta Grape as intermission refreshment).
Behind his bland grey doors he regularly beat his modestly clad daughters with his leather belt, and had once held a meat cleaver to his wife's neck when she'd gone into town to post a letter without his knowledge. None of his neighbors ever discovered his belt-and-cleaver tactics, which was somewhat of a pity, if only because several of them would have admired this ultimate show of mastery from a man they'd pegged as a phlegmatic, fish-feeding teetotaler.
The year that Appa came home from Singapore, Amma was twenty years old and still fit into her box-pleated Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus pinafore. No one, least of all Amma herself, had ever noticed her unpolished beauty: the reedy figure Uma would inherit from her; the impossibly straight teeth in her rare smile; the glossy skin all her negligence could not tarnish; the suggestion of concealed intelligence and unrelieved concentration in her eyes. To her siblings and schoolmates she was an unfortunate exemplum of all the worst physical characteristics of Tamil stock: skinny, shapeless legs, almost-black skin, frizzy hair. To her father her eyes betrayed nothing but impudence, stubbornness, and a secretly mutinous spirit. She was the eldest child, already careworn, slouching a little to hide her height. Her voice had a grainy edge. She'd struggled but never been a star at school, faithfully attended miserable, muddy practices but never been good at games. She'd disappointed her father's belt-mourned dreams of an oldest son with a straight back and shiny shoes, who would be captain of the hockey team and study medicine in England. She'd watched helplessly as her mother, Ammachi, receded into an austere life of the spirit once she judged her children to be old enough to fend for themselves. "I've done my worldly duty as a wife and mother," Ammachi had declared on her youngest child's sixth birthday. "Vasanthi is already fifteen years old; she can run the house as well as I can. It's time I went on to the third stage of life."
"Ohoho," her husband had proclaimed to the fidgeting relatives and neighbors who had, for the first time anyone could remember, been invited to a party at their house, "look at that, my Eighth Standard–educated wife is suddenly turning into a great Hindu scholar it seems! What all does this third stage involve, may I ask? Wandering naked from temple to temple? Begging for food with a wooden bowl?"
"Illaiyai," Ammachi had demurred softly, frowning to herself as though her husband's questions had been born of honest curiosity. "No, all that is the fourth stage, yaar," she said, neatly placing slices of cake on saucers and handing them to Amma to pass around the table. "Fourth stage only is sannyasa, complete and total renunciation.
Third stage is the stage of the forest dweller," she said enigmatically, licking a blob of butter icing off one finger. "Vanaprastya."
But it had been decades since the last forests around Ipoh had given way to housing estates and cement factories, so Ammachi devised her own makeshift vanaprastya, comprising several non-negotiable elements: fasting three times a week, reading the Upanishads alone in her fanless white-curtained room, shunning meat, and sleeping on a wooden board. In just a few months she grew oblivious to the daily domestic struggles going on outside her door. She lay on her board chanting endless, booming mantras, humming bhajans, blind to the loneliness of a daydreaming oldest daughter being driven slowly to the brink of a terrible womanhood by her brood of needy, bickering siblings.
After a year, deciding perhaps that worldliness adhered to her sweaty skin like dust whenever she crossed the threshold of her room, she stopped leaving it altogether (with one unfortunate exception). When her meals were brought to her she ate only the rice or chapattis and drank all the water; the rest of the food, dhals and curries and bhajis, she pushed to the rim of her eversilver plate and arranged in neat little mounds with her spoon. After a week of this she left a note for Amma under the water tumbler on her tray. "Please: only rice or chapattis once a day," it read, and after that when Amma brought in the tray and tried to coax her to eat two spoons of dhal or three French beans she'd shake her head, hold up one index finger, and pause in the chanting of the day's mantra to repeat only that first word, please, inflected upwards as if it were a mnemonic device meant to call forth, from the recesses of Amma's faulty memory, a profusion of words.
By far the most egregious result of her mother's sequestration was the chamber pot, which was in fact not a chamber pot at all but an earthenware cooking vessel that Ammachi had taken from the kitchen on one of her last forays outside her room. It had its own earthenware lid and sat covered under her mattressless bed, but when Amma brought in her meal each afternoon the stench did brave battle with the smells of the family's dinner simmering on the kitchen stove, so that when Amma stood in that bleak room, her blindsided faculties perceived the contents of the pots on the stove and those of the pot under the bed to be essentiall
y interchangeable. Simmering shit, festering dhal, sizzling turds, it was all the same to her. Astonishing that excrement composed entirely of rice or bread—and that only one at a time—could pack such a punch. Amma's head swam as if she'd lost a pint of blood, and as soon as she was out the door each afternoon she gagged, she swooned, she lay down on the settee with the back of her wrist on her forehead and dreamed ugly, malodorous dreams. It was true that Ammachi let no one else touch the pot; it was part of her humble new deal with the universe that she reject no task as being beneath her, that she welcome the lowliest, most odious of burdens as an opportunity to asphyxiate the id. Every night Ammachi waited until the family was asleep, and then, barefoot and squinting in the dark, stole out to an abandoned outhouse that no one had used since the Japanese occupation, to empty the pot into its narrow black hole. But her humility, as far as Amma was concerned, was all for nothing; Am-ma's imagination, fertilized by her mother's rich effluvia and flourishing as rapidly as the rest of her was withering, needed only to hear the click of her mother's door and the shuffled footsteps across the corridor to conjure up unanswerable questions—why did she have to use the outhouse? why not empty the pot in the bathroom, where no risk of tripping on a pebble, of missing the dark hole in the night, of blindly splashing her own saree with its seething contents, presented itself?—and unbearable pictures.
As the weeks went on Amma ate less and less, grew thinner and thinner, and began to tie a man's handkerchief over her nose and mouth to keep out the food smells as she cooked the family's meals. Her principal fear in these last few years before she left her childhood home for the house next door was that one of her few acquaintances from school might unexpectedly pop in with a question about the day's homework, or a new record or film star poster, or an invitation to an outing, and would then hear the chanting, smell the pot, and spread the ghastly word. She concentrated her efforts on keeping such encounters at bay, avoiding the casual advances of other girls, taking care to mention that she never listened to music or watched the latest films (both true), and rushing to and from school with her eyes lowered and her shoulders hunched around a soft center she knew people were waiting to poke at with sticks.
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