Suresh throws the chicken bones into his wastepaper basket and washes his hands in the upstairs bathroom. He studies his face in the mirror without switching on the light, and then squeezes the skin of his nose hard between his index fingers to extrude the margariney grease the way Chellam taught them to. The whites of his eyes are very white in the dark, and the black of his Brylcreemed hair very black. He whistles, finally, all the whistles he's been holding back all afternoon, released in a single, too-full-to-be-tuneful burst of blown air. He whistles a snippet of Boney M and a snatch of a Boy Scout song, a phrase of Barry Manilow and five notes of A Night on Bald Mountain.
In the dark, after even Amma and Uma have gone upstairs to bed, after Suresh has stolen down and up the stairs two more times for two more pairs of bony chicken pieces, after Chellam's sniffing and tossing has slowed somewhat for the night, after Appa has fallen asleep over Angela Lim's glowing moonface in the leather armchair in his study (to whom will he go crying with the crick in his neck? Amma doesn't ask, because she knows the answer), Kooky Rooky's husband revs up his tour bus with an ear-splitting roar and takes off at top speed, a Tupperware of bhajia and chutney on the passenger seat beside him.
Of course, he's only a So-Called Husband. A bluff one. He and Kooky Rooky aren't really married. He has to talk like her husband and act like her husband when they're playing house, which is still better than being a bluff baby, but he probably got tired of it anyway. It was only a matter of time before he left like this, in the dark, at full speed. Now perhaps the make-believe will be over, and they will all stop calling him her husband in her presence. Or will they?
***
"The fellow's tour bus has disappeared," Amma says in the morning. "Left late at night in a big hurry. I thought Kooky Rooky said he was on leave for a week or so? Then what so fast gone already?"
They are having breakfast in the dining room, Appa (trying to ignore the crick in his neck), Amma, Uma, Suresh, and Aasha. No one attempts an answer to Amma's questions, though Aasha remembers quite vividly the dream she had in the hour or so of sleep she snatched in the night: a dark figure at the wheel of the tour bus, crazed, teeth bared, veins sticking out everywhere, driving straight off a cliff. But when people went to tell Kooky Rooky the awful news, they found her husband upstairs in their rented room, eating green grapes and watching TV. And that was when they realized it'd been Kooky Rooky in the bus, Kooky Rooky who'd driven off the cliff with her eyes closed.
What woke Aasha from her dream: toes tickling her forehead. She looked up to see Mr. McDougall's daughter perched on the headboard of her bed. Mr. McDougall's daughter smiled at her, a don't-be-scared smile, small and warm and quiet.
"Something must have happened between him and Kooky Rooky," Amma goes on now, at the breakfast table. "Or suddenly he must have been overcome with love for his first wife. Couldn't wait another minute to see her."
"Kooky Rooky died," Aasha says flatly. She notes that even Uma looks up for a moment before turning back to the comics page of the newspaper. Let them all see that Aasha has her own sources. So what if they hide their secrets from her with words and voices designed to keep her out of their adult world? She knows things they don't, even if she doesn't yet understand what kind of a man Shamsuddin bin Yusof is.
But Appa only chuckles at her revelation. "If only," he says. "It would make things so much easier for that poor bloke. And for the noble cause of truth in this dishonest world. Without Kooky Rooky, there'd be five hundred fewer lies told per day, worldwide. Here, Suresh, pass me the butter, would you?"
"Tsk, don't simply-simply make everything into a joke," Amma says. "Your daughter talks rubbish as usual and you turn it into a grand comedy. Living and dying is not a joke, Aasha. Kooky Rooky might be sitting at home crying, but she's not dead. Please."
Aasha knows very well that living and dying isn't a joke; it infuriates her to be told. She frowns at her toast and falls into silence.
Suresh looks at Amma and thinks, You, of all people, telling her that dying is no joke! Aloud, he says, "Can I have the butter back, Appa?"
This morning Suresh replaced yesterday's omelet-bearing tray with a fresh one on the table outside Chellam's door: this one holds a plastic plate with two buttered-and-jammed slices of Sunshine bread on it and a cup of Milo that has already acquired a thin skin. Amma has made Quaker Oats for the rest of them, but—"No no no, not for Chellam," she said when Suresh approached the pot with Chellam's bowl, "give her bread and jam—oats is so disgusting when it gets cold, you know?" So even Amma understands the futility of these many trays; even she acknowledges that this apparent kindness is a mere formality. Chellam didn't stir when Suresh left the tray on the table, but now, as the rest of them sit in the dining room eating their oats, she rises and stumbles, eyes—Suresh can almost swear it though he catches only the quickest glimpse of her—still closed, down the corridor along which she led Paati fifteen-twenty times a day until two days ago, and into the big downstairs bathroom where she allegedly put a definitive end to Paati's dwindling days.
And there in that bathroom, as Appa and Amma and Uma and Suresh and Aasha try valiantly to eat their porridge, Chellam has a thundering, volcanic attack of diarrhea, all rapid-fire bangs and squeaks and liquescent bursts, all orchestral-class hooting and tooting and blasting and rolling, an attack so explosive and so importunate that despite Amma's attempts to drown it out by blowing energetically on every spoonful of her oats (because yes, the one thing about Amma that hasn't changed after all these years is her continued mortification at eating shitting sweating fucking and at any hint of others' participation in said activities), it continues to command their attention, so that eventually Suresh snorts ever so lightly, and Aasha giggles despite her persistent secret worries, and Uma concedes an ephemeral half-smile. "Goodness gracious," says Appa, "how on earth can she have so much to shit out when she hasn't eaten for more than a week?" This new question supersedes all prevailing inner monologues on life and death, truth and untruth.
"Who knows?" Amma says, her lower lip still curled. "Maybe she is expecting after all. That can play havoc with one's digestion."
They put down their spoons and ponder Appa's question and Am-ma's hypothesis, because oats porridge is a very difficult thing indeed to eat within earshot of a diarrhea attack: five bowls of it are left to cool into lumpy beige sludge that is dumped, later that morning, into the kitchen rubbish by a still-revolted Amma.
This morning, Appa and a small band of die-hard funeral enthusiasts will return to the crematorium to collect Paati's ashes and un-burned bones, all of which they will set free at the seaside in Lumut. After breakfast, Appa pulls on a pair of non-courthouse trousers (because he must wade into the sea for this final sendoff) and is gone, with a jingle and a jangle of his car keys, with a slam of the grille that brings a small shower of paint flakes down onto the front steps. Amma is left to clean up the breakfast things and do the dishes, something she hasn't done since she reinvented herself in the image of a tea-party-throwing bigshot-lawyer's wife. But clean up she must, because Lourdesmary and Letchumi and Vellamma have been given two days' leave, and Chellam has subsided into her bed after ejecting the last contents of her bowels. And not only must she clean up today, but she must do it alone, because:
1) Uma has beaten a hasty retreat to sit on her bed and read and think about what she will put in the battered red suitcase that was once a brand-new, going-to-university gift from her grandfather to her father.
2) Suresh has also hurried upstairs, for upon waking this morning he noticed a fat black trail leading to his wastepaper basket, and in the basket a velvety black blanket over the six chicken bones he so mindlessly discarded there last night. Drawing closer, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he affirmed that the blanket was indeed of the minutely milling, moiling, swarming sort, a blanket of juicy-bodied black ants, an ecstatic, feasting blanket. So he returns after his non-breakfast to embark upon a quick recovery mission: he stamps his bare feet on the trai
l of ants, leaving juiceless black bodies crusted on feet and floorboards (and a few ant legs still stirring, feeble and futile, in the air); he dumps the contents of the wastebasket onto three sheets of newspaper surreptitiously filched from the storeroom; he balls up the newspaper into a snug bundle and saunters, light and steady, down the stairs and out the back door to deposit it in the outside dustbin.
3) Aasha has stationed herself in her favorite spot in the house: behind the green PVC settee at the end of the corridor leading to the downstairs bathroom. She waits, her faith undented, although a day has passed since the funeral, and even now Appa is gathering Paati's ashes and her unburned bones into two clay pots; Aasha suspects Paati will show up first either in her chair, where she spent most of her days, or in the bathroom, where her life ended.
At the crematorium, under the hawk eyes of three old men who are somehow, surely, related to him, Appa sprinkles water and milk on Paati's ashes and gingerly picks out seven unburned bones: big-toe bone, bit-of-kneecap, hip scraps number one and two, fourth rib, collarbone tips.
On his way out to the dustbin with his own bundle of bones, Suresh nearly collides with Kooky Rooky, who has run barefoot across the street, everything about her coming loose: hair bun, sarong, face, blouse buttons. Aasha sees her too, from the landing upstairs. A most unghostly Kooky Rooky. Shaking, and full of tears waiting to come out, but not dead yet. Aasha doesn't care that she misinterpreted her dream very slightly, as past rather than prediction. Watch out, Kooky Rooky, she thinks. You better be careful.
Kooky Rooky looks at the bundle in Suresh's left hand as if it might contain something she's been yearning for all her life, and he wants to say, Here, take, take, please take and go away and leave us alone, and don't come crying and sniffing and spilling in here because we've had enough of that recently.
But before he can speak, she looks from the bundle to Suresh's unyielding face, and she says, "Where your Amma?"
"Inside the house only."
The briefest of exchanges; he proceeds on his errand, and she trips, light but not so steady, towards the back door and into the kitchen, where she finds Amma scrubbing out the porridge pot with a firm wrist and a clenched jaw.
In an attempt to pick a particularly stubborn crusted bit off the bottom of the pot, Amma chips one manicured fingernail, mutters "Chhi!" under her breath, turns off the tap, and senses someone behind her. Does she hear Kooky Rooky inhale before speaking, or glimpse a desperate, trapped-bird movement in the corner of her eye, or smell the sleepless night of devastation that rises off Kooky Rooky's skin? Whichever it is, she turns just in time to hear her speak:
"Vasanthi Akka!"
Amma takes one look at Kooky Rooky and knows that what's coming is more than just a routine display of kookiness. She's not here to tell Amma about the time she went to England and met the Queen in a supermarket, or about her father's two condominiums in Hollywood, or about the seventeen kinds of pullao served at her wedding; no, she wants something large and impossible. Amma's back and shoulders ache from all her pot-scrubbing, and her head still throbs faintly from funeral fumes trapped somewhere in the back of her throat. Whatever Kooky Rooky wants, it's too heavy for Amma to lift alone, and she's seized by an urge to sit down and lay her head on one outstretched arm and pretend to sleep, as children do at nap time in nursery school. But she only dries her hands on her caftan and says:
"What is it, Rukumani? Come, come, sit down"—Amma pulls out a chair, all briskness and bustle—"you want hot drink or cold drink?" Instead of waiting for an answer, she fills the kettle, far fuller than it needs to be for two mugs of tea or coffee or Milo.
"Akka," Kooky Rooky says, still standing in the doorway, "he gone away. He not coming back."
"What nonsense, why shouldn't he come back?" Amma lights the stove under the kettle. "He has to give his tours, isn't it, to pay the bills? He'll give his tour and come home as usual, don't worry. Next week he'll come home as usual, bringing five-six packets of nutmeg from Penang or dodol from Kelantan or whatever it is, you know how he is, isn't it?"
"No, Akka, this time he not coming back."
Amma puts her hand on her hip and ponders this. "Why?" she says. "What happened this time?"
"He told me, Akka, he only told me. He said enough of this, he got not enough money not enough time to have two family." Kooky Rooky says this matter-of-factly, as if her husband's real family has never been a secret, as if she's always discussed the subject openly with anyone who cared to listen. For the briefest of moments Amma considers keeping up her end of the appearances, considers saying, What two families, Rukumani, what are you talking about? But exhaustion overcomes her again, a leaden weight in her head and chest. She can't summon the will to speak, let alone play her part in a farce that seems to have ended.
"I was all the time asking him," Kooky Rooky is saying, "when will we move to our own place, because I tired of staying in other people's house, Akka, that Mrs. Balakrishnan everything also she counting, how much water I using in the bathroom, how long I bathe, how much electricity I using at night, everything—"
"That you have to understand," says Amma, "Mr. Balakrishnan is nicely-nicely drinking up all their money every night, so of course she wants to be careful. That you mustn't—"
"Of course, yes I know, Akka, but one side I must understand Mrs. Balakrishnan's problem, the other side I must understand my husband's problem, in the end who is going to understand my problem? I got nowhere to go. I understand, yes, my husband got another family, so many small-small children all that, he got no choice, yes I know, but what about me?" Kooky Rooky's voice cracks, and she comes forward and sits, finally, in the chair that Amma pulled out for her when she first appeared. She folds her thin hands in her lap and hangs her head.
Amma measures out heaping teaspoons of Milo into two mugs, then sugar, and then, as she turns to get the condensed milk out of the fridge, sucks her teeth and says, "Rukumani, you just got to learn not to expect so much from men. After all, you knew what type of man he was from the beginning, isn't it? If he could do that to his wife, how reliable could he be?"
Kooky Rooky looks up at Amma with enormous, wet eyes. "Reliable?" she repeats. "How reliable?"
"I mean," says Amma, pouring hot water into the two mugs and stirring so furiously that the teaspoon chimes through the house like an alarm, "if he could play her out, why shouldn't he turn around and play you out?" She holds the condensed milk tin over the first mug and watches the pale yellow milk stream down in a thin, viscous line.
"Yes," says Kooky Rooky slowly. "Yes, that is also there. I only didn't realize..."
And perhaps because she's still tired from yesterday's funereal exertions, tired and dried out like something smoked over a slow fire, or perhaps because she's never liked Kooky Rooky all that much anyway, something goes off inside Amma's head—with a crack-and-flash like an old-fashioned camera—and she finds herself thinking thoughts so clear that they seem to scroll in thin letters across a blinding white screen behind her eyes. Needlethoughts. Knifethoughts. Sour-as-green-mangothoughts: they make her eyes narrow and her mouth pucker. Why should I, of all people, feel sorry for you? You deserve what you're getting, Rukumani. What goes around comes around.
She puts the condensed milk tin down on the counter and turns to face Kooky Rooky. "Of course you didn't realize," she says. "Of course as long as everything is working for us we don't realize what's happening in other people's lives. But it's time to realize now. You can live with him and call him your husband, but the truth is, that is still his real wife, isn't it? His first duty is to her. Those are his children, and that is his wife, not you."
Kooky Rooky nods like a punished child being asked if she's learned her lesson. As if every nod hurts her, but she knows she'll be dismissed if she can nod just a few more times. She sniffs, wipes her nose with the knuckle of an index finger. As Amma puts the two mugs down on the table, Kooky Rooky sobs a single sob, gets up, and hurries out the door, half running, hal
f walking.
Amma watches her from the kitchen window. Down the garden path she goes, barefoot, apparently unconcerned about ringworm, and then back across the street. The screen behind Amma's eyes flickers, dims, goes dark, and she's left with herself and two mugs of Milo, not one of which she wishes to drink, because, truth be told, she's still feeling a little ill from her diarrhea-disrupted breakfast. She pours the still-steaming Milo down the drain, one mug after the other, and thinks, Not my fault. Not my fault. I've got enough problems of my own. She's tired, so tired she feels she could go to bed and sleep for days, just like Chellam. She's tired of life and death and truths and lies, of betrayals and loyalties, of youth and age. Of blame and blamelessness and the long, winding road in between them; of those three feeble words themselves: not my fault.
NOT UNTIL APPA arranges her seven unburned bones in their original configuration on a layer of raw rice on the beach in Lumut is Paati's spirit resurrected. Appa is willfully unaware of his role in this metaphysical transaction; he has banished all macabre thoughts from his head by concentrating on the anatomical fact of these seven bones. His task is purely mundane, the solving of a brainteaser, the taking of a biology test. At the top the charred collarbone tips gracefully bracketing the unmistakable absence of neck and head; below them the rib, like one bar of a dismantled birdcage; below those—here Appa pauses, but the three old funeral die-hards do not offer any assistance in this case. They wait, silent as cold gulls, as Appa watches the hairs on his forearms stir in the sea breeze. Finally he places one scrap on the left and the other on the right, and about a foot below these, the bit-of-kneecap, curved like a piece of a rice bowl. And last of all, down at the bottom, the big-toe bone, perfectly flat on the rice. Appa vaguely wishes that he could make it hover in the air where it really belongs, or at least stand upright.
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