Chellam's still stirring that eversilver tumbler of coffee, though the sugar must be long dissolved by now, stirring stirring stirring, more and more vigorously, that teaspoon chiming like an alarm bell.
Aasha yawns, stretches, and—finally ready to take Suresh's advice —wanders upstairs to find a book. She chooses the book she took out of the public library on the one and only trip she made there with Uma in June. "Come and put on your shoes," Uma had said. "I can't be waiting all morning." Aasha had put on her shoes, and they had set off. As simple as that. For that is what miracles are like sometimes: quiet, unheralded, unglamorous to all but the beneficiary.
Uma long ago returned the book she checked out for herself that day, but Aasha, uninvited on subsequent trips to the library, has held on to The Wind in the Willows, and it is now shockingly overdue. She has dipped into it solely while waiting and watching, hoping and listening for greater things. One eye on Uma or Chellam, one eye on the book. By this method alone she has reached page 98, an achievement that would have been recognized as exceptional had not the novelty of genius worn off, within the family, after the golden age of Uma's childhood. Appa and Amma and Uma and Suresh barely notice what Aasha reads these days.
Book in hand, Aasha goes back downstairs and takes her place behind the green PVC settee in the corridor, from which vantage point she keeps track of Paati's many Chellam-assisted comings and goings from the bathroom.
Two years ago, Paati submitted to a magnificent decline. Almost overnight, as if some evil spirit had snatched away her old body for itself, her pinhead cataracts fattened into coins. The arthritis that had been nibbling at her knees for years sank its fangs right in. Soon after, it cauliflowered her hands, then coconut-shell-curved her back. Now she sits all day in her rattan chair, counting weeks and months, money and grudges, on her fingers. She rises only to be led to the bathroom or to bed by Chellam, who was hired for precisely these tasks (plus a few more). Behind her execrations of the obvious targets—Chellam, Amma—boil unregistered complaints against those she once trusted.
The arthritis and cataracts are minor woes compared to the devastation of her bladder and bowels. Her bladder and bowels, of all things—oh, for shame, for shame. She tries in vain to subdue them by sheer force of will. There have been accidents, increasingly frequent in recent months. Could she have expected better from her daughter-in-law than the slaps and knocks she's received? In the old days, children cleaned up their old parents' messes and kept quiet about it; they understood that the shame was chastening enough. Not today, and certainly not a woman of Vasanthi's class. The pettiness, the lack of scruples, the waiting for twenty years to get even—it's all in her blood, after all. People like that can paint their faces and style their hair, but their true colors always come through. The only way they can feel tall is to step on others' heads. No, no surprises there. But the servant girl, the girl Raju pays to see to her needs—from a mere servant she would never have anticipated such bold disrespect. It only goes to show what's become of society since the British left. The order and decency of the old Malaya, each man grateful for his place in life, everyone clean and scrubbed and ready to work, all that has been tossed to the birds.
There's a hole in the upholstery on the back of the green settee. Aasha finds it without having to search at all, sticks her finger into it, finds a mote of comfort in the lumpy stuffing and the rickety rigging underneath it.
Soon Paati and Chellam will be coming up the corridor. Fresh water is running into the water tank in the bathroom: Chellam has turned it on in preparation for Paati's bath. The bathroom door is wide open; the sunlight streaming in the high window in the back wall stipples the floor in front of the tank with fluid, glinting spots like fish scales.
No one knows Aasha is behind the settee, though only Suresh, who is putting together an Airfix Scammel Tank Transporter in his room, is even remotely wondering where she is.
Uma's in the sitting room, looking at photographs of the production she was in last month, Chekhov's Three Sisters. Uma played Masha, the middle sister. At the curtain call a St. Michael's boy she'd never seen named Gerald Capel came up to the edge of the stage to give her a bouquet of tea roses, and it's this picture, of Gerald shyly handing this offering up to her, that she's studying now: as she bends over in her patched-pinned-tucked, mothball-scented nineteenth-century costume, her cleavage tantalizes, but gentleman-Gerald appears to have his eyes steadfastly fixed on her face.
She hums along with Simon and Garfunkel while she turns the plastic pages of the complimentary-with-your-proofs album: Who will love a little sparrow / And who will speak a kindly word?
Amma is in the kitchen, browsing through a Ladies' Home Journal cookery book with a view to selecting three guaranteed-to-impress recipes for the Ladies' next tea party. Will it be salmon mousse or jellied prawns? Lobster Newburg or crab canapés? Bombe Alaska or lemon soufflé?
Appa is at the office, preparing to go to court for day three of the Angela Lim case, where he will look Shamsuddin bin Yusof squarely in the eye, fix his mind on Angela's ravaged body, and dazzle everyone once again with his wit.
Chellam is in Paati's dim, mosquito-thronged corner, combing the knots out of Paati's hair because today, Tuesday, is the day for Paati's weekly hairwashing.
"Ei," Paati says, and then again more loudly, "Ei! You're being too rough." In Tamil, and not just because Chellam's English is like a child's or a clown's, but because the language is another layer flaking off Paati with time. Underneath are all the old words, not only the words for thoughts too big and dark or too small and twisted for English, but also for the basic materials of a life being lived out in a rattan chair: sweetmeats, vegetables, colors, days of the week, calls of nature, chicken parts, public and private parts of the human body, types of fish, denominations of currency, breakfast beverages, balms and unguents. "You're pulling my hair," Paati says. "It hurts my head."
Chellam holds her tongue. Her silence creeps icily past Amma's ears and Aasha's, tickling Uma's earlobes in the sitting room.
The sun is out today, but what a thin, watery sun! It keeps Aasha's very skin wide awake with its suggestion of timid newness, of just beginning.
The Rat [she reads in her book] let his egg-spoon fall on the tablecloth, and sat open-mouthed.
"The hour has come!" said the Badger at last with great solemnity.
"What hour?" asked the Rat uneasily, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Out of nowhere, the fresh, hopeful feeling of the day notwithstanding, that teardropped butterfly flits frantic into Aasha's head: Too late!
Chellam has finished combing Paati's hair, and they're making their way to the bathroom for Paati's bath-cum-hairwashing. Aasha hears the slap-slap-slap of Chellam's Japanese slippers on the marble floor, and the sh-sh-sh-sh of Paati's bare soles. Sh-SH, sh-SH, sh-SH. Paati favors her left leg, such as it is: as bowed at the knee as the right leg, but somehow, invisibly, more trustworthy. Sh-SH, sh-SH, sh-SH.
They hobble and shuffle into view, an incongruous pair in everything but their equal bitterness, and begin their laborious journey up the corridor. Paati's a little slower, a little more wobbly at the knees than she was only a few months ago: she's just recovered from a nasty bout of flu brought on by Chellam's neglect (according to her) or by exposure to Chellam's own, prior fever.
Chellam herself is as good as new, as far as Aasha can see, though new was never all that good. Her skin is as sallow as ever, flabby on her chicken-wing arms, scarred tight and shiny on her brow, worn to a high shine on her knees and elbows. But at least her hair's oiled and freshly plaited, and the curdy smell that never left her during her illness has been scrubbed away in the shower. There's that hard lump in the corner of her jaw, bitter as a langsat seed. Aasha looks for it every time, and every time she finds it.
A quarter of the way up the corridor, Chellam fizzes over with the words she's been bottling up in her belly. "What is this?" she says. 'Are you trying to walk as slow as p
ossible on purpose so that I'll have to clean up after you? Just this once why don't you try to make it to the bathroom on time? Why?"
Paati's the only person to whom Chellam says more than a few words at a time these days, and then only when she thinks no one else can hear her. At these paroxysms, Paati flinches or sniffs or rears her head weakly like a hot-and-bothered turtle. Aasha notes every word uttered but never repeats a single one to anyone else.
Paati stiffens her shoulders and does not answer Chellam's why; it's obvious to all present that Chellam isn't expecting an answer.
"Just this once!" Chellam repeats. Putting her own recommendation into practice, she hurries forward, her thin arm dragging Paati's loose-skinned one along with it, and the sh-SH-sh-SH of Paati's soles turns spastic, going faster faster faster and then stopping short, starting and stopping, stopping and starting, so that Paati's arm-skin flaps like a luffing sail. Aasha can't see Paati's face, but doesn't need to: she's seen it before, that cowed yet bullish face, flinching at unspoken threats but preparing to bite.
Not a yard from the bathroom door, Paati comes to a dead stop, and her hips and thighs begin to shake visibly under her thin cotton saree, and there's a squelchy, bubbling sound that she and Chellam (and Aasha) know only too well: the sound of defeated bowels.
"Don't tell me!" Chellam mutters under her breath. The lump in her jaw comes to life now, throbs like the throat of a tree lizard. "You're a noose around my neck! Coming to this house must've been my punishment for all the sins I committed in my previous lives!"
A stream of brown dribbles onto the marble floor between Paati's broad, bony ankles.
Aasha counts the tiny slaps Chellam delivers to Paati's shoulders: one two three four in a row. They're only small, light finger-blows, but Paati's shaking with rage, and not just from the exertion of her battle with her bowels. She screws up her whole face and sniffs wetly and indignantly. Soon she'll wipe her nose on the sleeve of a saree blouse with a snotful sound to match the squelchy ones her bottom continues to make, but though all this is very disgusting indeed, Aasha is sure Chellam's the one who'd be in trouble now if she were found out. It's because Chellam's paid (or not paid, but Aasha's logic is too black-and-white for these subtleties) to perform her duties with a smile that she is so sneaky with these slaps, these quick-as-a-flash pinches, these under-the-breath threats and curses. Who do you think you are, Chellam? Aasha asks silently. Who do you think you are? Then, because Chellam won't be answering the question, Aasha does so for her: You're a sly, sneaky Chellam. You're a lazy, useless Chellam for not wanting to do what you're paid for. You're a big-bully Chellam for hitting and pinching the only person in the house more helpless than you are yourself.
The crowning grievance: Chellam snubs Suresh and Aasha now, acts as if they were never friends, as if she'd never taught them a hundred lessons they'd needed to be taught. All the things no one else could be bothered to teach them: the habits of ghosts, the shameful tricks of human and animal bodies, the names and defining characteristics of the ten most popular Tamil film actresses (this one had a curly forelock, that one a prominent chin-mole, the third eerily light-colored eyes). Why, now, did she refuse even to look at them? They hadn't done her any wrong; they were just the same as they'd always been. It was the rest of the world that was tilting and shifting under them, so that someone could be friending you before teatime and not-friending you after. These were strange times indeed, and Aasha didn't know when they'd begun, but the change in Chellam she could pinpoint exactly: it was after Chellam had had her fortune told. "Just ignore her," Amma had said when Chellam took to her bed and stopped eating or talking. "She's seeking attention only. All this drama, as if Uma's acting-shacting is not enough, now we have another flim star in the house."
So they'd ignored her, but she'd ignored them back. She'd no right. She was just some rubber-estate girl who put coconut oil in her hair. Who did she think she was?
Who, who, who do you think you are, Chellam?
"Intha veeduku vanthu maaraddikirain," Chellam is saying now, rising slowly to her feet after kneeling to mop up parts of Paati's accident with a rag (other parts, she's missed, because to her weak eyes Paati's brown spots blend into the floor's brown marbling). Halfway up, her knees still bent, she stops to pinch the fleshiest part of Paati's hip (which isn't so fleshy after all). Intha veeduku vanthu maaraddikirain: Here in this house I'm ... I'm ... Aasha doesn't know what those last words mean, but she memorizes the sounds. She prizes each new Tamil word she learns from Chellam while spying on her; she keeps them all in the pockets of her skirts, like evil little jewels, like saved-up nose pickings, and when she's alone she takes them out to admire them and wonder what she'll do with them.
Now Chellam and Paati are in the big bathroom. There's a brown smearsmudgestreak on the marble that Chellam will have to attend to on her second round of peering and wiping, before anyone walks in it and spreads it all over the house on the soles of their feet, before Amma sees it and threatens to dock Chellam's wages (which threat would have her father wailing and showering ear-splitting curses upon her the next time he came to collect those wages). But first, before attending to Paati's shit-wake, Chellam undresses her: she unwinds the thin blue saree, all six yards of it, and drapes it on the towel bar; she unhooks the four hooks fastening the front of the saree blouse; she tugs on the drawstring of the white cotton petticoat so that it puddles around Paati's feet. And all that time, Paati looks straight ahead, marmoreal and bitterly dignified even when, finally liberated of saree blouse and petticoat, she stands stark naked. Her feet are planted exactly two tiles apart. She's a monument to dignity—no, more than that, a warrior for the cause, ready to fight tooth and nail for what time is grabbing and pinching and picking from her. Certainly her plucked-pigeon body has little to fight for; it's nothing but skin flaps everywhere, sagging back, stretched-out-sack bottom. In each of those empty bottom sacks there's room for at least three coconuts. Her hair hangs down her shoulders in dry wisps so fine her scalp glows through them. No, her dignity comes from some other, deeper place: a walnut-sized gland in the center of her brain, a fifth chamber of the heart, two extra inches on her tough tongue. Whatever the anomaly, it will escape Dr. Kurian's gimlet eye, and no postmortem will introduce it to science.
The bathroom in which Paati waits to be watered and soaped hasn't changed much since the house was built in 1932. In the heat of his home-improvement fever Tata had it retiled, gave the walls above the tiles a fresh lick of paint, and put in a new medicine cabinet, but other than these sprucings-up, he left it in the local style Mr. McDougall had preferred: a water tank in one corner, a drain hole in the floor for the water from bucket baths and bottom washing. As far as Tata was concerned, Mr. McDougall had gone too far native, a tendency unbecoming in British expatriates, who should—so Tata considered—have preserved their dignity with bathtubs, powder rooms, and, most important of all, toilet paper. Tata himself had installed a clawfoot tub in the master bathroom upstairs, but whether he'd preserved the downstairs bathroom in its original state purely out of nostalgia, or as a testament to the addling effects of heat on the tastes of respectable white men, or simply because he'd died before he'd had a chance to renovate it, here it remained in 1980, four times repainted in the original pale green, twice retiled in the same color. Two tiles away from the main water pipe is a chipped tile, the only one in the whole bathroom, for Aasha has looked thoroughly on several afternoons—always with a deep sense of applying herself to a crucial task—and never found another. Only the toilet bowl is a different color now than it was in Tata's time: a delicate robin's-egg blue that looks like an egregious mismatch because it's so close to the pale green of everything else and yet not quite the same.
A foolish spider's web stretches from the main water pipe to the wall behind it. This, too, catches the sunlight, though Aasha can't see it from where she stands, Paati's too blind to see it even from three feet away, and Chellam isn't looking. In a few minutes Chellam wil
l splash water on that web and wreck it, and the spider will scurry up the wall to nurse its disappointment in a corner of the ceiling. The space between the water pipe and the wall is thick with cobwebs, but those are mere uninspired strings and tangles of dust; only this soon-to-be-destroyed web bears the marks of instinctive genius and blind persistence.
Chellam turns the taps off, and for a few moments, while the water settles, sunlight dances on its surface like suddenly scattered beads.
"Aah-pah! Mmm, mmm, mmm, Aah-mah!" Paati exclaims when Chellam pours the first bucketful of lukewarm water on her head, just as she exclaims every afternoon. She sucks her gums and smacks her lips; she opens her purblind eyes wide and blinks and blinks and blinks, forgetting the slings and arrows of the past few minutes, forgetting the late-as-usual coffee, the scalp-stinging combing, the slaps the pinches the scoldings the insults. That perfect water brings her such joy that Aasha's bat ears pick up those blissful blinks from yards away though her owl eyes can't see them: slup after soft slup of wet grey lashes on slack cheeks.
"Aah-pah! Mmm, mmm, mmm, Aah-mah!" Paati exclaims again after each new bucketful of water.
Half of the third bucketful spills on its way from the water tank to Paati's head: that's the end of the spiderweb, and there goes the unlucky spider.
Paati's sag-kneed legs still shake, now with pleasure.
But then Chellam puts down the bucket and slings a good-morning towel over her shoulder. "Stay here," she says. "Hold on to the edge of the water tank and wait. I have to go and clean up your mess properly."
Evening Is the Whole Day Page 18