Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  Motherless, waning, weak at the knees, she beat a shaky path through the duties she'd inherited, cooking and cleaning, ironing her father's shirts and her sisters' box-pleated pinafores, tying her brothers' striped school ties, packing the family's lunches, and bringing home, at the end of every month, report cards limp with C's. Every report card day her father had the children line up in a row before him in reverse order, youngest first, Amma last. One after the other they'd sit on the ottoman in front of his armchair and hold out their report cards to him. Some bursting with pride. Some trembling with unspilled tears. Some indifferent to it all, waiting to get it over with so that they could resume the game of marbles, hopscotch, or five stones they'd abandoned for the ritual. Amma had the misfortune of coming right after her brother Shankar, captain of the boys' hockey team, Best Speaker on the debate team, Assistant Head Prefect, straight-A student, teacher's pet. Their father would take one look at Shankar's report card, chuckle, and dismiss him with a "Not bad, not bad" and an admiring whack on the right shoulder. Then he'd look up at Amma and lick his lips like a wolf before a kill. "And what special treat have you brought us this time, Vasanthi?" he'd say. "No doubt about it, you're the genius of the family, no?" Amma would sit on the ottoman with her head bowed, cleaning her nails with a hairpin, dreaming of her escape. Over the years she learned to concentrate on the world outside and bear her father's cruel words like a chained dog in the rain. Hungry. Vigilant. Ready to grab her share when it showed up. "What?" her father would press on. "Hanh? Suddenly-suddenly this manicure is oh-so-urgent, yes? A girl with zero brains and zeroer prospects must of course have tip-top nails for all those high-flying job interviews and society tea parties just around the corner, what?" Then, just as she was starting to feel herself crumple under his gaze, just as the first tears began to sting her eyes, he'd pull his pen out of his pocket without warning, sign her report card, and throw it in her face. "Okay," he'd say. "Go. Go and sit in front of your books and sleep."

  And sleep she did, though inexpertly, uncomfortably, and joylessly, just as she did everything else: exhausted from cooking and ironing, from trying to help her siblings with trigonometry problems she'd never understood how to do herself, from wading against the life-sapping current of her mother's unsplendid isolation, she slept, one arm folded under her cheek, on geography textbooks, on history flash cards, on rulers and protractors and compasses. "Pah, pah, I can't wait till you bring home the results from this exam," her father said the year she finally sat her Senior Cambridge Certificate. He rubbed his belly under his cotton singlet, like a peasant sitting down to a hot midday meal of dosais and sambar. "Whatta whatta treat that will be for us all. Straightaway they will accept you for post of Head Drain Sweeper. No questions asked. Or maybe better I start buying cows for your dowry now itself, hanh?" Then he'd give her head a sudden shove with the flat of his palm, grunt, and pronounce, "Fifty sixty cows also won't convince anyone to take this numbskull off my hands, I tell you."

  His apprehensions were justified. Amma got C's in all her papers except geography, which she failed because of a panic attack at the last minute. "Syabas, Vasanthi!" her father exclaimed after glancing at the slip of paper she'd held out wordlessly. "Con-gra-chu-laaaaaa-tions. You've really outdone yourself this time. Surpassed even my expectations, man!" He whacked her heartily on the right shoulder, then walked away whistling. "Start drafting your career plans now itself," he called over his shoulder. "U.N. Secretary-General or editor in chief of the London Times? What'll it be?"

  For a few months she halfheartedly combed the classifieds for job vacancies. Clerk, cashier, receptionist. She circled them all with her leaky red pen, made phone calls, set up interviews. She dressed for each interview in the same navy blue skirt, white blouse, and sensible leather pumps she'd bought with the money relatives had given her for passing her senior Cambridge exam. In between interviews she washed, ironed, and starched the skirt and the blouse. She took the town bus to each interview, thrilled but terrified to be out on her own, convinced it was all useless. They were going to snort with laughter the minute she walked in. They were going to shake their heads at her failing grade in geography and send her home. As it happened, they never asked to see her results. One after another, they took one look at her trembling hands, heard a single stuttering answer to the simplest question, and sent her home with a promise to call. She busied herself while she waited, scrubbing the sink three times a day, scraping the grout between the bathroom tiles, polishing the linoleum on all fours, her ugly cotton housedress tied in a knot around her knees. At the back of her mind a tiny black seed began to sprout: the frightening thought that this was what the rest of her life would be. Waiting and scrubbing. Polishing and dreaming. Its terrible tendrils threatened to cut her breath short, to clog her veins if she gave it free rein. So she stuffed her head full of unyielding, ready-made pictures that left no room for her seedling of doubt. She choked it to death with lurid love scenes from Indian films she'd seen on family outings in her childhood. With richly embroidered wedding sarees and a loving hand feeding her sweetmeats before a hairy-chested, chanting priest. With handsome, blurry men in fedoras and Italian suits. Smoking imported cigars. Peppering their Tamil with English declarations of love and defiance.

  That was the year Appa came home from Singapore in his pea-green Morris Minor with beige leather seats. Amma was cleaning the shutters in her father's bedroom as it pulled into the driveway next door one Sunday afternoon. Had she been standing there two days before, she would have seen Appa's father keel over in his beautiful garden. Now, rag in hand, she peered through the shutters and watched Appa unload three matching leather suitcases, a black briefcase, and a small trunk. Sunlight spilled in between the wooden slats of the shutters and fanned out in neat swaths on the spotless floor of the bedroom. "Vasanthi!" her father called from the foot of the stairs. "What is this, taking three days just to wipe the shutters? If you have no brains can't you at least make your hands useful?"

  When she and her father went to pay their last respects to Tata, she sat with her navy interview skirt pulled carefully over her knees and watched Appa curiously out of the corner of her eye. So this was what someone with a law degree from England looked like. This was how one moved and talked when one had matching monogrammed luggage. With an air of subdued authority. She watched him make his rounds of the shady sitting room, full of drooping potted palms and women's sorrow. When he got to Amma's father he shook his hand wordlessly. "Very sorry, my wife simply couldn't make it," Amma's father lied with a mournful shake of the head. "Not feeling well. We ourselves are getting old, what to do?" Amma thought of her mother, erect and white-lipped that morning when her father had gone to ask her to come next door for a few hours. "For God's sake," he'd said, "stop this nonsense for one day. All the neighbors will be wondering whether I've killed you and hidden the body. At least just come for a few minutes to pay your last respects to the old man."

  "Let the dead bury their dead," Ammachi had said, momentarily switching from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible. Amma, who'd had twelve years of Scripture Knowledge at her convent school, noted the inappropriateness of the quotation's coming from a woman who'd renounced the world and refused to budge from her room. "Why mourn?" her mother had continued, her philosophizing growing stubbornly expansive in the face of her husband's intransigent scorn. "The old man has come one step closer to escaping the chains of rebirth. In fact we should all be rejoicing for him. Why all this fuss? Why two hundred three hundred people should crowd their house? All simply coming for free food only. Shameless. Why not let his family quietly remember him and celebrate his passing?"

  In the end they'd had to go without her. Now, face-to-face with the dead man's oldest son, Amma's father hastened to compensate for his wife's disrespectful absence by gesturing a little too eagerly towards Amma. "My eldest," he said, lowering his eyes as if fully conscious that the replacement offering was inadequate. "Vasanthi." Appa looked at this thin, dark girl, several inc
hes taller than he, too awkward to meet his eyes as she mumbled her pleasedtomeetyou, and saw, with considerable surprise, that she was beautiful. Excruciatingly gauche, yes, and quite dark, but the first oddly underscored her beauty, and the second was a matter of taste in which he took some pride. He liked obscure Continental writers, game, and dark women; among his friends he had a reputation as a man of rarefied appetites. And so he stored her away for future use, this girl whose loveliness could not be suppressed by her unfashionable oiled braids or by the probably unshaven legs beneath her drab ankle-length skirt; for now, he had other matters to see to. A father to cremate, three sisters to marry off.

  It was a whole year before Amma met her new neighbor again. Between the slats of the shutters she saw him come and go in his pea-green Morris Minor every day, getting out of the car to open and close the high iron gates of the Big House. She knew in which pocket he kept his house keys (left), which way he ran the chain around the gate (always clockwise) before he padlocked it, and how many pairs of dress shoes he owned (three, two black and one brown). She learned to recognize the days when he was going to court by the black coat he carried on a hanger. She noticed when he came home with a new pair of glasses, in stylish horn-rimmed frames. One Saturday afternoon she saw him come out to the gate to pay the newspaper boy, wearing a cotton singlet and a checkered sarong, still sucking his lunch out of his teeth. She smiled to herself, and the wan light of her smile seeped out through the shutter slats and pooled in a patient, watery circle on the top of Appa's Brylcreemed head.

  When his sisters were married, one after the other, Amma watched from the upstairs windows as men put up marquees in the compound and strung colored bulbs from the awnings. The smell of sweetmeats frying in ghee wafted up to her, and every now and then a voice would detach itself from the general murmur: the shrill, nasal scolding of a fat old matron, a child's whine, a man's sozzled laughter. Her father attended all three weddings alone, the envelope of money for the newlyweds crisp in the front pocket of the batik shirt she'd ironed. The morning after each of these weddings there was a crumbling laddoo in a serviette on the dining table for whichever of her brothers was first to rise that day.

  After the third wedding had been successfully executed and his youngest sister packed off to make her new home with her country-doctor husband in Padang Rengas, Appa went to call at the pale green bungalow next door. He sat in the sitting room and talked to Amma's father, man to man; Ammachi stayed in her room reading the Gita, and whether Appa had heard tell of her odd habits, or merely thought it natural that she should leave them to their business, he didn't inquire that day after the lady of the house. "Vasanthi!" Amma's father called after Appa had been greeted and seated. "Can't you see we have a guest? Our own next-door neighbor and you're taking one hour to bring a cup of tea and some titbits, what is this?" Amma made the tea and laid out half a dozen ginger snaps and a plate of murukku on a bamboo tray. She looked in the mirror above the kitchen sink, wet her palms, and smoothed down her housework hair. Then she stepped through the bead curtain in the entryway and took the tea tray into the sitting room. Behind her the curtain drizzled quietly back into place. "Bleddi fool of a girl!" her father grumbled to his guest as she left the room. "First time you are coming to the house and she puts the murukku on a chipped plate. Useless bleddi girl, I tell you."

  "It's okay, Uncle," she heard Appa say with his mouth full, "the murukku will still taste just as good." At that visit Appa asked Amma's father's permission to have a brick wall built between their houses. "No offense, Uncle," he said. "The hedge breeds mosquitoes, that is all. Without it it'll be one job less for the gardener I'll be hiring." When that was settled he asked Amma's father's permission to take his daughter out.

  Every Saturday for a year after that visit, while he was scrambling up the steep slopes of his career, Appa took Amma out with only her two youngest brothers as chaperones.

  Brushing her hair, dabbing eau de toilette on her wrists, ironing her cotton skirts before these outings, what did Amma imagine lay at the Technicolor conclusion of her courtship?

  Certainly not the crumbling white shell her parents called a marriage.

  Nor would there be anything seamy about their marital bliss. It would have nothing in common with the vulgar cavortings of Tamil-film couples or the school gardener's leer whenever a girl's petticoat had shown under the hem of her skirt. No, their joy would be cool and pure and exalted. On the weekends she would bake cakes; when she had a baby they would have family portraits taken at a studio.

  In Appa's eyes, her lack of experience added to her allure. He would introduce her to the wonders of eros; she would bloom under his expert tutelage. Already he relished the prospect.

  "That girl?" Paati said when she found out who was occupying his Saturday afternoons. "That clerk's daughter? After all your foreign education? Why not look for a girl of your own standing?" This, as far as Paati was concerned, had been the purpose of all her husband's hard work: that his sons should have the pick of the country's marriageable Indian maidens. "She's not even nice-looking also," Paati reasoned. "As shapeless as a coconut tree, and so black."

  "Oh, come off it," Appa said. "As if I'm marrying the girl tomorrow. Just a way to pass the weekends, that's all."

  She believed him; hadn't he always been the good son, the one who'd followed his father's advice, taken a sensible degree, and written home every week? It's true, she thought, he's not serious about that girl. Well, let him have his fun. He's young. Already saddled with so much responsibility, poor thing.

  What she couldn't have guessed: spice the satisfaction he already derived from his unusual tastes with a dash of the forbidden and a soupçon of public disapproval, and Appa was well and truly hooked. After all the years he'd been away, she hardly knew him. He'd left a boy and come back a half-foreign man, and every detail of that transformation startled her. The smell of cologne in the bathroom in the mornings; the plummy accent he couldn't turn off even for her or the servants; the lordly, masculine way he spread himself out and drank whiskey after dinner, one arm thrown over the back of the chair next to him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened.

  And so Appa's casual lie about the tenor of his association with Amma slid smoothly down Paati's throat as, away from Kingfisher Lane but still under the eagle eyes of Amma's young brothers, he closed suavely in on his quarry.

  "Ah, I look forward to this all week," he told her every Saturday when he picked her and her brothers up for the matinee show at the Lido Theatre. "The thought that on Saturday I shall get to take the most beautiful girl in town to the pictures keeps me going from Monday to Friday." And, when she averted her eyes in response and tucked her hair behind her ears: "I'm sure a girl like you must be inured to all these compliments by now, eh?" He knew it wasn't true; he knew no one had ever paid this girl a compliment in all her mean, miserable life. One Saturday as she came out into the sitting room where Appa waited for her, her father stuck his head out from behind his newspaper, grunted with mild amusement, and said, "Who you trying to fool, Vasanthi? I think so Raju here still has his eyesight. Each week doing some fancy-fancy new thing with your hair, as if it makes any difference to your donkey face." He looked at Appa with a "Hah!" that was more an order to laugh than an invitation. But Appa did not comply. He stood up, opened the door for Amma, and said, without taking his eyes off her, "I do indeed still have my eyesight, Uncle, and it's yours I'm worried about. Either you're blind, or you come from a land of supernally beautiful donkeys."

  "Hah!" Amma's father said again. But his defeat was evident; he had not sufficiently understood Appa's retort to attempt one of his own. Out of the corner of his eye Appa saw the pinched look on his face as he retreated behind his newspaper, but directly in front of him he saw Amma's hungry, luminous eyes meet his own, and in them he recognized at once what he had longed for all this time, what had been lacking in the attentions of Lily and Claudine and Nalini: gratitude. This girl was grateful to him, had been grateful f
rom the day he'd first rescued her from her father's house for four hours, and would, if he played his cards right, be forever grateful. He swallowed, and the knowledge warmed him like whiskey as it went down. Outside, the whole street—windows and leaves, bicycles, the Saturday smiles of Amma's two brothers—glittered in the sunlight.

  Every Saturday evening upon her return to her father's house, he made her stand before him and deliver a thorough account of the film she'd seen. "Stand straight," he'd say, "stand straight and talk properly." When she'd fidget he'd reach out with one equine leg and hook a foot around her ankle to jerk her closer. "What's the matter?" he'd say. "All this high-class gallivanting around town and still you behave like a goat." But now she knew he was doing all this just to humiliate her, because he knew she was winning, slipping from his grasp as he watched; he was in a hurry to grind her down before she got away. She'd show him, all right. Old devil. Syaitan. Think you'll be able to bully me like this when I'm the lady of the Big House?

  Of her rise in the world's esteem she was deliciously conscious, for each week some small incident reminded her of it. One afternoon they were sitting in the FMS Bar & Restaurant, their customary tea-time haunt, when Amma struck up a wordless, effervescent friendship with a child at an adjacent table. She'd caught the child's eyes and smiled at him deliberately, wanting Appa to witness this interaction, and sure enough, just as the child began to play peekaboo with her through the bars of his chair, Appa said, "I see you're a natural with children, after all these years mothering your brothers and sisters."