But he needn't worry that this pitiful connect-the-dots puzzle with insufficient dots is a mockery of his mother's spirit, because as soon as he lays the big-toe bone down, Paati rises from her remains. Of course neither Appa nor his three spavined sidekicks recognize her, but rise she does, the scrappiest of vapors, buffeting the fringes of one old man's tonsure, lifting the other's dhoti. "Very windy today," one of them says as he holds his dhoti down girlishly. "Rain coming or what."
Appa rubs his forearms.
In the Big House, Uma is packing her suitcase. Aasha is squatting in the doorway, watching her, when two feathers from some mysterious source—a hole in Uma's mattress? a pigeon on the awning outside? a neighbor's illegal chicken?—spiral down right in front of her face, almost brushing her eyelashes.
The feathers land unnoticed on the bottom of Uma's suitcase.
A puff of Yardley English Lavender talcum powder teases Aasha's nose, but she can tell, in the split second before she sneezes—a godlike, seismic sneeze that rattles the windows and shakes Uma's bed frame—that Uma doesn't smell it.
So Paati is back. Aasha wanders out to the landing to look for her, and there she is: she must've slipped in between the bars of the front grille. She's acquired an odd new gait, a no-gravity shuffle, a geriatric astronaut's glide. At the foot of the stairs she sees Chellam's uneaten food on its tray outside her door.
Today it's rice and sambar, with ladies' fingers pacchadi on the side. The food has turned into a hard cake; it looks like a plastic toy meal.
If you let your plate dry out like that, Chellam once told Suresh and Aasha, hungry ghosts will come and eat from it. And sure enough, right before Aasha's eyes, peckish, transparent Paati clutches the edge of the little table with her permanently turmeric-stained fingers, unfurling her tongue, lizard-like, towards a particularly tempting grain on the rim of Chellam's untouched plate. Her jowls spread on the Formica tabletop. The white whiskers on her upper lip twitch and bristle. A flick and a lick of that deft tongue and the coveted grain shoots down her gossamer throat into the glass bowl of her belly. The rest she eats with her right hand as usual, making neat balls of the dried-out rice, popping them into her ready mouth. She soils only her fingertips; Paati was always a neat eater, not one of the palm-licking, curry-dripping ilk. When she's had enough—she's hardly made a dent in even Chellam's meager portion, but ghosts have small stomachs—she belches, a small, translucent sound like steam hissing in a pipe. Then she moves on through the house, towards her rattan chair. The gentle breeze of her trailing, transparent saree floats up to Aasha's face on the landing. It smells slightly musty, a little damp with seawater perhaps, but on the whole rather comforting. Aasha hears her settle soft as a feather into the chair to wait for teatime. Don't worry, Paati, she thinks. I'll bring you a handful of omapoddi and two murukkus. Now I can take care of you. Now that you're a ghost, I can make sure that no one is ever mean to you again.
Aasha goes back up to Uma's room, and this time she walks right in. She picks a Mad magazine up off the floor and riffles through it, and a sheaf of stamp-shaped Alfred E. Neuman for President stickers (free with a year's subscription) flutters out. The rashes on the insides of her elbows feel hot and itchy.
"Look, Uma!" she says, the words a single gust of need. "You can stick these free stickers on the suitcase. That way you won't lose it at the airport." She holds the stickers out to Uma, her arm so straight it bends the wrong way at the elbow. Her fingers clutch the sheaf; her eyes are as bright as disco balls. I'll take care of you too, Uma, she wants to say. I'll take care of you and everything will be all right.
She hopes the stickers convey at least part of this message.
Uma takes them with a soft smile at the floor. She drops the lid of her suitcase and begins to stick them all over it: first along the sides in neat rows and then haphazardly on the top, her hands working as though the task were somehow urgent. Aasha counts the stickers, fourteen fifteen sixteen just on top, and imagines Uma unpacking in a New York room with a carpet, humming, lifting out her scratchy sweaters three by three. At the bottom of the suitcase, underneath all those sweaters, will be those two (goose? pigeon? chicken?) feathers, refreshed from their long across-the-sea slumber. When Uma lifts out the last three sweaters they will float up and tickle her nose, and she will sneeze such a sneeze that they will be blown clear across the room and behind a bookshelf, where they will remain forever, a secret link to the Big House and Paati, and to Aasha, who is close to tears at this moment with her failure to prevent Uma's departure.
All Aasha's strategies have been imperfect. Uma will leave, never to return; Chellam is sniffing and whimpering in her bed. As for Paati, well, neither sticks and stones (or slaps and knocks) nor words will hurt her now, but she's a lonely, restless, hungry spirit. It will be all Aasha can do to see to her needs.
6. AFTER GREAT EXPECTATIONS
DISAPPOINTMENT BLOOMED everywhere in the first days of Appa and Amma's marriage. It sprouted under Amma's feet, sick yellow, smelling of ammonia and new paint, as she stepped into the Big House on the night after their wedding reception at the Ipoh Club. She'd had too many crab rangoons, drunk alcohol for the first time in her life. Like a passenger fresh off the boat in a foreign land, she stood at attention in the sitting room, squinting at the oil paintings and running her fingers along the upholstery of the settee on which she'd sat only thrice before. Three times before the wedding Appa had invited her to tea. The first time, his mother had run her eyes up and down Amma, said hello with a smile that made Amma wonder if her blouse might be conspicuously stained or missing a button, and then retreated into the depths of the house. The second time, Paati had sat with them for two minutes, during which she'd asked Amma questions about her father's education and career and met each answer with a perfectly still face, no nod, no smile, no acknowledgment whatsoever that she'd received the information she'd sought. And the third time, she had greeted Amma at the front door with a curve to her lips that Amma had almost interpreted as a smile—perhaps she'd passed the old lady's tests after all?—until she spoke: "My goodness," she said, "red really doesn't suit a girl of your color, Vasanthi."
Now a sudden fear stole Amma's breath like a draft of cold air. What had she done? In the dim light the Big House felt vast and unyielding. Her father's house was just next door, but she could not run there for solace. If all she'd done was to jump out of her father's lovingly tended fire into her mother-in-law's sizzling frying pan, they would never know it. She would, she would make a new life here, whatever the odds against her. She would etiolate the miserable green house next door by keeping the curtains on that side of the Big House closed, by never speaking about it, by giving it no space in her mind, no air, no offhand concern.
Appa unknowingly interrupted her vision of the future: "What do you think? I got the place spruced up a bit. New paint and new curtains for the sitting room and dining room. Not bad, eh?"
Of course he could not smell the new paint, or the ammonia with which the maid had been mopping the floors as they'd sipped champagne at the club.
"Yes," Amma said weakly. "Quite nice."
This tepid approval was far removed from the praise Appa had expected—surely she could've at least been impressed with his choice of curtain fabric—so far removed that it seemed to come from a different girl than the one who'd been awestruck by a simple treat of popcorn at the cinema.
"Well," said Appa, "I thought that daffodil-colored fabric went very nicely with the blue upholstery in here." Then he took Amma's suitcase and led her up the grand staircase.
Just this morning in the master bedroom of the Big House one of Appa's officious aunts, her heavy hips swathed in a gaudy sarong, had maneuvered her breathy way around the double bed, pulling the clean white sheets a little too tight, folding the thin blue wool blanket and placing it demurely at the foot of the bed. Appa had walked down the corridor while she'd been making the bed and happened to catch her eye; he'd avoided her for the rest of the
day, even at the wedding, more out of consideration for her shaken sensibilities than any embarrassment of his own. Now he sat down on the bed, lowering his bottom carefully onto one corner as if he wished to take up no room on it, to mar its creaseless perfection as little as possible with the twin dents of his buttocks. He pulled off his shoes and then the black sport jacket, already sweat-soaked on the inside of its collar from the half hour since he'd left the air-conditioned banquet hall of the Ipoh Club. He tugged off his bow tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and sat watching Amma, elbows on knees, casual as a man in a cigarette advertisement, desperate to convince himself that it was proper and natural for his cotton singlet to be showing in front of a girl who had probably learned only that morning—if, dear God, some stoic and self-sacrificing aunt had filled in for the duties that should've been her mother's—what was to happen in this bed tonight.
Out of her suitcase Amma delicately extracted a white eyelet cotton nightgown.
As Appa heard the bathroom lock click into place, the bolt follow it, the tap gush, he thought of a girl he'd known in Singapore who'd slipped off her panties and peed in front of him as he'd stood talking to her in the doorway of her tiny bathroom. Afterwards, in her bed, they'd eaten a whole roast chicken with their hands. Wooden blinds, the kind that usually hung outside Chinese shophouses, covered her windows. A ceiling fan grey with dust stirred the webs of two spiders in a corner of the room. The roast chicken had been fatty and salty, and three quarters of the way through it the girl—what was her name? Mei Ying? Mei Yin? Su Yin?—had run downstairs and out into the street in nothing but a batik housedress pulled over her naked body to buy them two packets of iced sugarcane water, sweet and sticky and sweating on the outsides when she brought them into the bedroom.
But he had decided to leave all that behind: the women who slurped noodles in their underwear, the women who smoked skinny cigarettes and swore like bottle-shop men, the women who compared him to former lovers or speculated out loud about future ones. He had chosen this instead, not for the sake of novelty, nor merely to defy the consternation of his colleagues and his mother, although that gave him private satisfaction. He had chosen this—this life that begins tonight, he thought, and his whiskey-slowed heart stirred and soared—because he believed in goodness and simplicity, in the value of a blank slate, in his own power to exalt and educate.
The unfamiliar path stretched before him. Doubt, regret, a sudden reluctance to make the sacrifices he had pledged—all these were normal, he told himself. All these would pass. Tonight he must set himself the most modest of goals: only to try not to turn up the heat of Vasanthi's already stifling discomfort.
So Appa, who had once (and not so long ago) walked stark naked and nonchalant, cock flopping, balls swinging like two mangosteens in a net bag, around that Singapore girl's room, and around other girls' rooms in other shophouses, and, further, around the larger and more impressive rooms and flats and houses of still more girls and some women too, now seized these minutes of Amma's private preparations to undress himself in a flash and slip into his silk pajamas. Then he spread the wool blanket and arranged himself in a suitably patient, unconcerned attitude under it.
The bathroom tap ceased its gushing; the bolt slid back. Very quietly, faint as the tapping of a fingernail in a dream, the lock clicked open. For a moment Amma stood in the bathroom doorway, her thin legs showing under the nightgown in the bright light. Then she switched off the light and walked, silent except for her breath, towards the bed. In the moonlight he saw her put out a hand and pat the pillow as if to make sure it was there, then lay down and stretch out her legs on top of the blanket instead of under it. "Nice big window," she said, looking out the window.
"You must be tired. Quite early you must have had to wake up for them to dress you." He waited, half hoping she would grab this rope, agree that she was exhausted, turn away, and curl up on her side. Stray jasmine buds clung to her loosened hair in places, recalling the strings of flowers that had been braided into it for the chaste scent that was wasted on him. He reached out and plucked a single bud from her hair; then, unsure what to do with it, he let it fall to the floor.
"Oh, not too early," she said. If she'd noticed him touch her hair, she gave no sign of it. "Six-thirty seven something like that. I'm okay."
Should he invite her to tuck herself under the blanket? If he contrived to pull it out from under her and spread it over her himself, would the gesture come off more brutish than chivalric? Should he simply climb out from under it? In the end he went with the third option, to avoid either verbal or mechanical awkwardness.
On that England-imported blanket Tata had purchased for the house during his emphatically domestic retirement, Appa and Amma had pungent, painful sex for the first time. He didn't know what else to say, and so said nothing more—he, a man of words if of nothing else, consummate spinner of sweet nothings in all four major Malaysian languages, whisperer of naughty suggestions into the ears of giggling waitresses. The moonlight seeped stubbornly in through the lace curtains, and he wished she could switch this last light off just as she'd switched off all the others.
He wished several other things besides: that Amma would close her eyes, or at least turn her head, so that he would not be faced with her mildly puzzled frown; that his own senses, save his mercifully impotent nose, were not so uncannily, distressingly heightened (for every creak of the bedframe echoed in his ears, and each one of Amma's meek twitches shook his consciousness gale-like); that he had pressed upon her the option of delaying the deed until tomorrow. Tomorrow, her wedding nerves subsided, she would not have been quivering before the mythical hurdle of The Wedding Night. Let's get some sleep, he could've said. Kindly, lightly, after paying her some reassuring compliment or other. We're both exhausted.
He fished around for fantasies, but this moment—the creaks, the twitches, the knees knocking shins, the elbows driving into ribs, Am-ma's eyes huge and incandescent in the moonlight—permitted none. He wondered idly why his penis had never felt quite so much like a battering ram although one or two of his girlfriends had been virgins.
Maybe it's just as well to get it over with tonight, he told himself. Maybe this way tomorrow will be better.
In the end there had been no need for the subtlety of the blanket, since Amma never moved to take off her steadily-less-virginal nightgown, and Appa, when he thought of it, was stopped by a vague sense that this would be cruel in some petty way, like forcing a cat to walk through a puddle.
Amma, too, reasoned with herself: Every married woman has to go through this, isn't it? Nobody enjoys it. Anyway it won't be every night. He's always so busy and preoccupied with his work. After staying late at the office he'll be too tired. It's okay, I'm okay, look at the moon outside, how low it has come, like it's hanging from the guava tree by a string only! For ten minutes she concentrated all her desperate energies on that large yellow moon; when this became an insufficient distraction from what was going on Down There, she shut her eyes and ears like windows and slipped effortlessly out of her skin to hover just below the ceiling. Rapt, incredulous, she watched the bodies on the bed until the sight shamed her. She drew her breath in until she could hold no more air, then disappeared in a quiet puff of smoke.
On the main road a cement lorry swerved, its brakes screeching, to avoid a stray dog out on a nocturnal hunt. A cicada fell silent, exhausted by its hours of ecstatic song.
When once more she found herself on that wide bed, Appa lay beside her with his eyes closed, his pajama bottoms pulled up and reknotted at the waist. She slid her legs off the bed and shuffled back to the bathroom, shutting and locking and bolting the door behind her before switching on the light.
Before Appa fell asleep he saw her feet in the sliver of light under the bathroom door, immobile, probably rooted to the floor in front of the mirror, probably cold. It was minutes before she stepped away towards the toilet.
APPA COULD NOT easily concede defeat or a failure of judgment: when Tomorrow N
ight was no better, he put his faith in the next night, and the next, and the one after that, until, a month and a half after their wedding, he found himself once more—and this time with unmitigated longing—thinking of the girl with whom he'd shared a roast chicken in bed. He still could not remember her name, but this time the vision of her slipping on her batik housedress and wooden clogs turned on a tap inside him, turned it so very slightly that it only dripped at first: one night he caught himself staring at Lily Rozells's panty line under her silk trousers, the next night he noticed how long and hard Nalini Dorai laughed at even the worst of his jokes, and about two weeks afterwards he realized with a jolt that the droll angle of Claudine Koh's eyebrows whenever she looked at him was nothing but an invitation cloaked in irony. He made no move to confirm or accept this invitation, but the tap continued to drip, and then to trickle, and finally to run steadily, sapping his hope that his nights and days with Amma would improve. Two months into their marriage, Amma still sat at attention at the dining table, knees pressed together, dabbing nervously at her mouth between bites whether or not Paati was present. Beads of sweat still broke out on her brow whenever either one of them had to use the bathroom while the other was in the room; when once he'd left the door open a crack while urinating, he came out to find her practically trembling at her dressing table, the damp hair at her temples curled into tight corkscrews from the shame. Her terror was as inconvenient as a small child's fear of its own shadow, for it was as impossible for her to shake off what made her hair stand on end: the human body, its varicolored viscous and runny fluids, its gradual absorptions and sudden expulsions, all the unconcealable noises of its flawed workings.
It wouldn't have mattered, Appa was to reflect later. None of that would've mattered if she hadn't been so stupid. He'd be lying to himself, of course. Had she been a genius, she would still have driven him to lascivious despair. That despair merely arrived more quickly because there was nothing behind her innocence after all, no raw proletarian wisdom for him to draw out and sculpt. When he brought her with him to official and social gatherings—for now that she was his wife, there was no hiding her from the likes of Lily and Nalini and Claudine—she stood around holding her drink in both hands, rewarding their ferocious curiosity with one-word answers. It was true these miniskirted, cigarette-puffing women and all their lushly side-burned firebrand boyfriends were daunting at first; Appa did his best to protect Amma from their clutches, answering for her, keeping his arm around her shoulder, steering her towards safer clusters of people whenever possible. She'd get used to his friends eventually, he thought. Even if she couldn't match their ideas, she'd think of questions to ask. But when, after half a dozen gatherings, she still hadn't thought of questions, he found his pity shifting, sliding slowly towards his old friends. He'd never thought he'd pity them, of all things, and yet how awkward it was for them to find this prudish, Form Five–educated girl planted in their midst.
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