Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  Amma clung to the windowsill with one white-knuckled hand and matched Uma's short, shallow breaths with her own. "Aiyo!" she cried. "Aiyo, what are we going to do?"

  Subru pulled on a shirt, unlocked the deadbolt on the back door and the three padlocks on the iron grille, and scurried out the side gate into the violet twilight, toast crumbs still dotting his whiskers.

  "Don't worry," Valli said to Uma, "we'll take your Amma to hospital and everything will be okay."

  But everything-will-be-okay was, as it so often is, a premature verdict, wishful thinking, for in the falling night Subru ran from locked gate to locked gate, peered into dark windows, was barked at by jittery dogs. A Chinese taxi driver lived three doors down—his taxi stood on his cement porch, flaunting its glossy paint in the light of the streetlamp—but no one answered Valli's husband's hollering at his gate.

  "We have to go home to Ipoh," Uma declared, solemn and unshakable, in Valli's kitchen. "We have to go home now, on the Malay Land train."

  "No, no, don't be silly," Amma shot back between gasps, "no no no no all that cannot."

  Valli, panic rendering her unreasonable enough to try to reason with a six-year-old, explained, "No time for all that, Uma, you know how long the train takes, isn't it? Chittappa has gone to find a taxi."

  Finally, as Amma sank onto all fours on the greasy kitchen floor that had so repulsed her, Subru came rocketing in through the back door he'd (with uncharacteristic laxity) left open, trailing an elderly, bowlegged Indian man with two days of stubble on his cheeks. This was Ratnam, a onetime taxi driver who still owned his vehicle and drove it distractedly around the neighborhood on weekends, shuttling the prettier housewives to and from the wet market for a nominal charge and refusing all lengthier assignments. Ratnam preferred to pass his time drinking Anchor beer and cracking groundnut shells with his bad teeth in his dusty sitting room, his radio turned up loud enough to compete with his wife's scolding. Look at the Chinese, she said every day. Look at that Chinese taxi man two streets away. Look how hard they work, look how rich they get, and here you sit on your fat arse, man, and spend money you don't have on Anchor beer and Thumb groundnuts. That is why we Indians are in this state.

  Today, for once, Ratnam's wife had been keeping to herself. She'd been crouching like a mouse in her favorite armchair, sewing a pajama set for their grandchild and secretly reflecting that she'd never thought the day would come when she'd be glad not to be Chinese, when Subru had jumped over their front gate and come pounding on their door. "Please," he'd panted. "My wife's sister is giving birth now itself." He'd invoked Rule Number One in the survival handbook of the wet-behind-the-ears, would-be Multiethnic Paradise that was Malaysia: We have to help our own kind, man. We Indians have to stick up for each other, otherwise we'll all sink together.

  Rule Number Two was that anyone who said no to such appeals was officially a selfish bastard and a traitor to the blood in his veins. Ratnam had tsk-tsked and repeated relevant phrases both Rumor and Fact had whispered in his waxy ears during the night. He'd offered his considered opinion that they'd never reach the hospital. But now his taxi was idling outside Valli's gate, coughing and sputtering, sending worrisome puffs of black smoke into the already smoky night. Valli helped Amma to her feet, Subru and Ratnam stretched their arms out under her, and together the two men lifted her sedan-chair style, Ratnam's bowlegs bowing even more, caving in like melting wax under Amma's weight, curving irremediably into two opposed C's, so that Uma, hot on their heels, felt compelled to cry out, "Taxi Uncle, don't drop my Amma, careful Uncle careful!"

  They loaded Amma into the back seat of the taxi; Valli climbed into the front seat. "No room for anyone else, don't you worry Uma, you stay here with Chittappa and the baby," each of them said in turn, Amma, Valli, Subru, Ratnam the taximan. "Everything will be okay."

  Everything is not okay, Uma retorted in her head. You're all lying, just like you always lie. I should've stayed with Paati.

  Ratnam sucked his teeth and drove off down the road. At the traffic light he opened the glove compartment—"What is this, Uncle," fretted Valli, "light changed already and you are sitting there searching for what I don't know?"—and impassively extracted a box of toothpicks. He stuck one between his two chipped bottom incisors before driving on. "You thee maa," he lisped, turning to look Valli in the eye, the toothpick wiggling as he spoke, "the big problem ith going to be getting into town."

  They'd turned onto the main road before it became clear that Ratnam's prediction had been accurate. Before them a Chinese provision shop was burning grandiosely to the ground. Screams flew through the air and spattered the windscreen of the taxi. A little boy blood-drenched from a gaping head wound ran across the road. Thicker, darker blood, shining under the flames, was coagulating on the asphalt. "Better you roll up the windowth on your thide, maa," Ratnam said.

  Amma began to whimper. Valli began to pray.

  "Open your bloody eyes and help me," growled Amma, "who do you think you are, our bloody mother or what? Chanting-banting while the world comes to an end!"

  "Taxi Uncle," said Valli, coming to her senses, "can't you take another route?"

  "Other route ellam illai maa," explained Ratnam peaceably, leaning back against the headrest. "All the roadth around here are going to be like thith only."

  "Then drive, Uncle, drive, maybe they'll let us through, isn't it?"

  "Not to worry, Uncle can drive"—he shifted gears, bobbing his head from side to side—"but if we get ththuck then the big problem will come."

  And the big problem, invoked with such faith, did come. As Ratnam drove on, the crowd thickened around the taxi; people poured out of burning buildings; faces loomed large and bright through the windshield and windows, twisted and glistening, full of teeth and eyes. Something small and hard grazed the roof of the taxi.

  A man's face pressed itself against Ratnam's window, white headband, greying hair, fat mole between crevice of nose and left cheek, sweat spraying the glass as the man's hand slapped the window hard.

  "Uncle!" cried Valli, but it was too late, Ratnam was rolling down the window, his toothpick jutting insolently into the man's face, his right hand trembling on the gearshift. The thick, smoky air rushed in, the groans and screams and sobs, the heat of a dozen hate-fueled fires. "Aiyo, aiyo," Amma cried. "Cannot even breathe!"

  Though Ratnam took care to withdraw his toothpick before speaking, his market Malay, already tyrannized by his Tamil tongue, now tripped on his panic, stumbled, stopped and started, searched for words that would not come, lost itself in a labyrinth of prefixes and honorifics and useless, invented tenses. "Sorry lah, Encik," he said over and over. "This woman, you see this woman. Baby coming. Sorry Encik, sorry sorry sorry," and what he really wanted to say was not just Sorry for driving blithely through your streets in these turbulent times, Sorry for appearing so oblivious to your far more important cause, but also: Sorry for being outsiders, for failing to master your language with its many subtleties and its splendid tradition of pastoral poetry, Sorry for having skin just a shade too brown, Sorry for being a blatant worshiper of wood and stone idols, Sorry, most of all, for voting for those who would wrest control of this fecund Malay Land from your deserving hands. But since Ratnam could barely have articulated these sentiments in Tamil, he did not, under the extreme conditions of that night, come close to saying them in Malay.

  Whether the mole-in-crevice man nevertheless understood all these various apologies from Ratnam's ham-fisted Sorry Enciks, no one, least of all Ratnam and the man himself, could say for sure, but after ninety seconds of Ratnam's blithering, the man straightened up, yelled "Orang Keling!" to the amassed forces, and, turning back to Ratnam, pointed unambiguously down the road they had come. "Go home, get a midwife," he said. "Are you crazy, trying to go to the hospital on a night like this? The hospital," he added grimly, "has better things to do tonight." Keling Bodoh. Keling mabuk todi. Duduk Malaysia, tak tahu cakap Bahasa Melayu. Words, words, only words—what we
re these compared to the sticks and stones (and parangs and cangkuls and flaming torches and gleaming knives) out there? Pure, childlike gratitude rushed to Ratnam's waxy ears, to Valli's hot cheeks, to Am-ma's tortured womb. Ratnam shifted gears and began a laborious, exultant U-turn on that burning road, his heart beating sweet relief in his mouth because O, thank all his inferior gods, they were Orang Keling, mere bloody Indians and nothing more, deserving only of all the harmless qualifiers the mole-man had heaped upon their innocent heads: stupid Indians, drunk-on-toddy Indians good for nothing else, Indians who lived in Malaysia but could not speak the Na-tio-nal Language, but still just Indians, O yesyesyes, thank all the gods, because look at the Chinese. Look at the Chinese tonight.

  But Ratnam had neither the time nor the heart to look too closely. Relief powered his taxi's homeward journey, and what a different journey it was: charged with urgency, full speed, toothpickless, brimming with brisk assurances and unlisped sibilants. "Sh-sh-sh, we'll go home, my children," he told Valli and Amma, "and there my wife knows a lady a few doors away, an old lady, a kind lady, delivers her own grandchildren by the dozens every year like batches of idlis only, that's how easy it is for her, nicely-nicely they pop out, perfect and unharmed and healthy. Sh-sh, don't worry."

  That was how, on that night of bloodshed and bedlam, of dreams sent up in flames and ideals abandoned in dirty back alleys, Suresh was born in Ratnam the taxi man's back room, where Salachi, the grandchild-popper-outer from three doors down, had set up a makeshift bed and Ratnam's wife had filled the metal basin normally used for washing greens with boiling water. Out Suresh tumbled, wet with the brave blood of life and hope, while so near and yet so far away the heroes of Malay Land soared through the skies, soaked with a seamier blood. Tonight was one of those rare nights terrible enough to force these storied heroes out of their hibernation, and when they emerged, clad in sarongs, in regal tengkoloks, in songkoks with no mangy spots whatsoever, their Chinese foes blinked in disbelief and prepared for the worst. Bullets could not pierce the hearts of these heroes; knives could not break their skin. They flew into burning houses and came out unscathed. They slipped into locked houses through keyholes and under doors, and appeared, whole and glowing, before people cowering behind sacks of rice in dark storerooms.

  Their invincibility, their foolproof strategies for survival, their thick skin: Suresh breathed all these in as he was born, and as he slippery-fished his way into Salachi's knobby hands, they were seeping into his bloodstream (along with soot particles, molecules of burned flesh, dying whispers, and Amma's beginnings-of-a-cold).

  There would never be another night like this in Malay Land. Yes, there'd always be the cracks under the skin, the whispered cautions, the weak spots. But hands would be slapped and acts would be passed. After the state of emergency had been lifted and parliament had resumed, after the blood had been cleaned from the streets and only the faintest haze lingered in the sky—barely odorous, indistinguishable, really, from the haze of hawker fires and lorry fumes—the gomen would introduce the New Economic Policy. Stated goal: the eradication of poverty, regardless of race. But come on let's face it (said the gomen, suddenly pally, arms around shoulders, ready to stand everyone a round of teh tarik): talking about poverty without talking about race, mana boleh, in this country? Not possible. A little redistribution of wealth, ala sikit-sikit aje, and a few small guarantees, you Chinese are so rich you won't even notice the difference, and the Indians, never mind the Indians, they hardly know how to make a real fuss. Thirty percent of national wealth for the Malays, that should make everyone happy, no?

  No? No means please shaddup your mouth and go away. Go back where you came from, otherwise sit here and keep quiet, because questioning this, or Article 153, our master status—which makes you all what? If we're the masters, you're the—go and fill in the blanks yourselves in the corner, over there, like good boys and girls, but above all please be quiet, because we've got news for you: questioning any of this is sedition. No more pontificating, no more Malaysian Malaysia campaigns, no more talking about race (unless you made the laws, in which case you are free to mention the R word as and when necessary).

  Thus would the heroes and Everymen of Malay Land be lulled into sugared bliss, with the abundant, buttery, magical cake of these pocket-filling policies (Eat all you want, the cake grows no smaller! Every missing slice reappears in its place!), with the stern warnings to Chongs-come-lately, and with the deftly piped icing: Malay would be enshrined as the one and only Na-tio-nal Language, so that henceforth all thanggachis and ah mois would have to learn it in school, speak and read and write it to get anywhere in life, and never, never have to ask their ignorant colonial throwback parents what a simple thing like Keretapi Tanah Melayu meant.

  And the firebrands, the dreamers and campaigners, the heroes of the other side? They would learn to sit on their hands to keep from moving while Fact watched them reproachfully with his earnest eyes and Rumor winked provocatively, because man-made disasters, in this magnificent land where everyone was to get along in vaunted harmony, would be strictly against the law.

  If Appa had been a different sort of man—braver or more cowardly, more principled or less principled, more happy-go-lucky—he might have chosen any of a number of options available to him. He might have risked jail or emigrated to Australia. He might have switched parties and gone nonchalantly on in politics with the if-you-can't-beat-'em pragmatism of some of his former cronies. He might have released his dreams through the nearest window, brushed off his hands, and turned to the easier goals of his nondreaming peers: making what pots of money you could without (overtly) breaking the rules. Finding clever, tortuous paths around the new limitations on non-Malay wealth.

  But from his uncomfortable, in-between spot, Appa viewed all these possibilities with distaste. Jail scared him; wealth bored him. He was already rich, and the thought of devoting his energies to the acquisition of more wealth kept him in his bed in the mornings, blinking at the ceiling, wondering if his life was over. His life as he'd planned it, dreamt it, and loved it, at least. When a prestigious job opened up in the deputy public prosecutor's office, Appa sacrificed the last of his ideals to personal glory, applied, and was, to his great surprise, hired. Did they not know who he was and what he'd been fighting for in his recent past? Or was hiring him their last dig, a victory gesture calculated to show the public who was at whose mercy now? Look how your hero has come crawling to us for a pat on the head. Why should he care? What was so wrong with a little vanity when he had so little else left to him? Maybe the illusion of power was better than nothing. The grand pretense, the grinning page 2 photos people would mock in between the headlines and the sports page. And yes, on the King's birthday, maybe, someday, if he behaved himself, a Datukship. You should've stayed far, far away from the bloody boat that brought you here, he said to his grandfather silently. In India I would've had a real chance.

  8. WHAT AASHA SAW

  August 19, 1980

  ON THE DAY Paati dies, a black butterfly finds its way into the Big House. It's the biggest butterfly Aasha has ever seen: each wing is the size of Amma's palm, with trailing teardrop tails. Around the edges of its wings are tiny flashes of cobalt blue, easy to miss because the butterfly moves so haphazardly, alighting for half a second on a bookshelf and two seconds on the coffee table, but Aasha nevertheless notices the blue and thinks of a certain sapphire pendant once belonging to Amma, and of how that, too, turned and twirled and trapped the morning light. As she ponders this memory, the butterfly's panic drips blackly from its teardrop tails into her wide eyes and open mouth, so that all of a sudden the spectacle of Suresh trying to shoo the butterfly out the window with one of Paati's coconut-frond fans makes her heart pound. She breathes so fast and hard that each breath sweeps hurricane-like through the house, blowing the lace curtains ceiling-high, sending pages of the New Straits Times flying from coffee table to dining room and kitchen floor and back yard, rotating the blades of the turned-of
f ceiling fans. "Tsk, Aasha," says Suresh, opening another window, "what you behaving like there's a tiger in the house? It's just a butterfly, for heaven's sake. Calm down."

  But the more Aasha looks at that butterfly, the more her eyes search for those elusive flashes of blue, and the more panic suffuses her face ears neck shoulders, until it seems that there are fever hands touching her everywhere, and all she can think, though the words make no sense to her at this moment, is too late too late too late. Is someone else too late to save Aasha, or is she too late for some unknown but crucial engagement? She doesn't know, she cannot know, and not knowing is the worst part of it—how is she supposed to do anything to remedy the situation? Just when she's about to burst into tears with the unbearable weight of this realization, the butterfly seems to fall through the air towards her burning face, and then there it is, just above her nose, the size of a bat the size of a crow the size of an owl, only now it's all blue, though it still casts a black shadow on her face, a black owl-shaped shadow, and the tears hanging round and ready in her throat bloom into a ragged scream.

  "Aasha! Ish! Go, go away. Go and read a book," says Suresh, fanning at the butterfly where it hovers above her face.

  But Aasha's feet are frozen; she slumps down onto an ottoman and continues to watch. By the time one of Suresh's fan-swipes sends the butterfly flitting out an open window, her ribs ache from all that battering her heart has inflicted on them, and her eyeballs are so dry she can't blink. She moves to the settee, lies face-down, and sleeps until almost noon.

  When Aasha wakes up she hears Chellam stirring sugar into Paati's pre-bath coffee.

  "Chhi!" she hears Paati scold; she can tell by the pitch and timbre of Paati's voice that Paati thinks no one's listening. This is her low-heat, just-barely-bubbling, complaining-to-herself voice. "Every day," she continues, "every day I have to remind her about the coffee. If I don't tell her nicely-nicely she pretends to forget, just to get out of it. When it comes to taking my son's money every month she doesn't forget; only the work she's being paid for she forgets. How many times does she have to be told, if I don't have a hot drink before my bath just like that I'll get sick again. Choom, choom, choom all day, I'll be sneezing till my head hurts. Haven't I just been sick? Did she learn nothing from that? She thinks I'm sixteen years old, that I can take a bath without a hot drink first."