She bustles out of the bathroom, but Paati hasn't heard her; as soon as her back is turned Paati blinks three quick, surprised blinks and asks, "Enna?" What? What're you saying? When Chellam doesn't answer, Paati raises her voice a notch: "Eh, Enna?" Then two notches: "Engga porei?" Where're you off to? And then, because this interruption of her bath is so very rude, and also because her selective memory has allowed her to forget how recently she was in trouble, she's off like a train, unstoppable: "Where're you going without even telling me? Why're you leaving me here like this in the middle of my bath? Don't you know I've just recovered? Now I'll catch a chill again, I'll get a chest cold even worse than the last one, choom choom choom I'll be sneezing all day till my head hurts, I'll get pneumonia like that Malhotra woman's father got last year." Here she pauses, cocks her head like a bird to ascertain if her tirade has had any effect. It hasn't. "Eh!" she calls, real vitriol creeping into her voice now. "Eh, eh, where in God's name is everybody? Where are all you good-for-nothing, think-only-of-yourselves donkeys?" No one answers; Chellam has made her way down the corridor and into the kitchen to fill a pail with soapy water.
For a moment Aasha considers going up to Paati to tell her that she isn't alone, that she, Aasha, is here, that Chellam will be back after cleaning the floor. Something stops her, though: the length of the corridor? her indefatigable desire to be neither seen nor heard? Aasha's days are an endless game of hide-and-seek in which she is both hider and seeker: hiding to see what she can see, but seeking only Uma and Chellam, who refuse to be sought, who pretend not to have been found even when they have been, who never, no matter how many times Aasha finds them, look up and laugh and say "You win!" Though no one else is playing now—no one knows or cares (yet) that she's hiding—she's as loath to reveal herself as if it were a real game with a prize at the end of it. And what prize would she choose? A packet of Cheezels? A walking-talking doll? A box of thirty-six color pencils in shades she can't pronounce? No, none of these; Aasha's prize, though she's never named it to herself, is her sister. Uma as she used to be, walking-talking Uma, laughing Uma, Uma who drew her maps and taught her the names of African capitals and improbable diseases. Scurvy. Kwashiorkor. Beriberi. And if she can't have that Uma, then Chellam as she used to be. Consolation-prize Chellam.
Peace and shade reign in the space above Paati's fear and Chellam's anger. Aasha leans her chin on the headrest of the green settee and hangs her arms down the back. The PVC fabric is cool against her skin.
"Look!" Paati shouts. "Look at this! Look how they've all left me! What would my son say if he knew how they treat me behind his back! Nicely-nicely they all take his money, wife, servant, everybody, but then when it comes to taking care of his mother they make like it's not their job! Where would any of them be if not for me? Where?"
Aasha hears footsteps coming this way from the kitchen, and she knows they're not Chellam's. They're too brisk, too determined, none of Chellam's shuffle-and-drag. Amma appears around the corner to confirm Aasha's hypothesis. She swoops up the corridor in the blink of an eye and stands at the open bathroom door with her hands on her hips.
"What is it?" she barks. "Why all this noise?"
"Who's that?" asks Paati.
"It's me, Vasanthi. What's the matter?"
"Oh, you." A five-second silence, during which Amma and Paati reflect, as they have done dozens of times a day for the past two or so years, upon the nonchalance with which time is trying to reverse their roles in the household. Once Amma was the outsider, gauche and gaudy, struggling to reinvent herself with hairspray and silk caftans. Your mother's people, Paati would say to Uma, are not like us, which devastating diagnosis was meant to include their parochial morals, their choice of toothpaste and hair-oil brands, and certain rumors about a chamber pot under a bed. How small and cold and naked Amma felt then, hearing these words, and now what a literal revenge time seems to have chosen for her: standing at the bathroom doorway, she could (if she were so inclined) count the moles on Paati's old back and follow the course of a half-dried stream of shit down the back of her right thigh. It's Paati who's not like the rest of them now, Paati who's a shriveled extra limb hanging off the family's robust torso, waiting to fall off.
But there's more to this realignment of their stars than meets the eye: face-to-face (and even face-to-back), Paati and Amma share too much history to accept their new positions without some misgivings (on Amma's part) and much righteous disdain (on Paati's). Twenty years ago she was dressing like a rubber-estate worker and picking her teeth with her fingernails when she thought no one was looking, thinks Paati, and now she tries to act like she owns this place. She might have everyone else fooled, but not me. Oh, no. And Amma has more to occupy her than mole-counting: What's the old wretch plotting now? she wonders. Not enough that she turned my own daughter against me, she's still cooking things up inside that balding head of hers. I can see her evil brain working away. Acts all pitiful and helpless, but she's not fooling me.
Aloud, Amma says: "Chellam's coming. No need to shout until your throat dries out." Without waiting for a response, she swoops back down the corridor, her caftan sleeves filling with forced importance like a magician's cloak. Back to her Ladies' Home Journal cookery book and her shopping list for Mat Din. (So far the list reads: two pounds prawns from Cold Storage, twenty-four eggs, a dozen lemons, icing sugar. Amma seems to be leaning towards the jellied prawns and the lemon soufflé.)
On her way down the corridor she passes Chellam, who's heading back this way with a full bucket in one hand and two fresh rags in the other. Aasha hears both sets of footsteps stop as they cross each other.
"Are you mad?" Amma says. "What are you doing, leaving Paati dripping wet in the bathroom while you do your sweeping mopping dusting?"
Chellam blinks and breathes.
"Hmm?" Amma says. To her unanswerable questions, Amma does expect answers. "What? Answer me! Don't stand there staring like a goat."
Still Chellam says nothing.
"If you need to do all this," Amma continues, "can't you do it before undressing her and pouring water on her head? If she catches a cold it'll only be more trouble for all of us, for you especially! Are you a six-year-old child that you can't think of these things for yourself? Go, go, stop standing there like a fool. The more I look at your face the angrier I get."
The footsteps resume: brisk ones receding, shuffling-dragging ones approaching. In the distance Aasha hears Amma mutter something to herself, but can't make out the words (Chellam can: "Feel like slapping her only").
In the bathroom, Paati's still as an old, hungry tiger. Waiting in the shadows, storing something up. Out it comes, as soon as she hears noises in the corridor (the bucket being set down, and Chellam's dragging, Japanese-slippered feet): "Chellam! Is that you? What do you think, leaving me here to shiver? It's not funny. You wait till Master hears. You just wait. Nobody in this house cares about me but him, but I've been taking pity on all of you and keeping quiet. All I have to do is tell him what really goes on—"
Chellam rises from all fours, rag still in hand, and goes to the bathroom door. She leans on the doorjamb, and when she speaks her voice is a little hoarse: "What now? Singing your same song? I've got some cleaning to do out here, have you forgotten? Let's see if you can close your mouth for two minutes. Two minutes and I'll clean up your mess and empty the bucket and come back to wait on you. Okay? Satisfied?"
Stillness again, quiet. Only Paati's knees move this time: a tiny movement, a not quite buckling, a hint of a wobble. She might be getting tired from the combined exertions of standing and vituperating, or she might actually be cold. She's eighty-one years old, after all. She wobbles a more definitive wobble, grabs the edge of the water tank.
Aasha watches the second hand on the red-and-cream clock on the wall. When that hand has gone twice around the clock face it will have been two minutes, and Chellam will have lied about how long cleaning the floor would take.
Lying, tricking Chellam, tell
ing a cold old lady tall stories just to shut her up.
The second hand comes back to seven, where it was when Aasha started watching it, for the first time. And the second time.
It's all the way up at two again before Chellam rises to her feet and picks up the bucket. That, already, is much longer than two minutes. Chellam must know this, because she stops once more at the bathroom door before going back out to the kitchen. "Just wait a bit," she says, "I have to go outside to empty this pail, I can't just leave the dirty water sitting here. I'll come back fast."
Then she is gone. Water drips off the ends of Paati's hair and down the wide crack between her bottom sacks, but Paati doesn't try to squeeze her hair out or sweep the water off her skin with one hand. She's not letting go of that water tank; perhaps she sees what's coming.
"Raju," she growls, "why have you left me here with them? Don't you know what happens while you're there at your office? Raju, O Raju, my child, my son, my eye, look at them! Look at your useless family!" She pauses, as though she's trying to think of what to say next, of what entreaty might be most likely to reach Appa's distant ears and bring him speeding back to the Big House in his silver Volvo—but in fact this song, too, is a familiar one, and she shouldn't need to pause to remember what comes next, because Aasha does. Aasha has said the words three times in her head before Paati joins in, her out-loud rendition exactly in time with Aasha's silent one:
"Rajooooo, Rajooooo! My throat will dry out from calling and calling before anyone comes! After all I did for my children, all that hard work all my life, and now look, it's freezing in here, chhi, what you're paying that girl for I don't know Raju, nicely she's cheating you, she and her low-caste drunkard father!"
This time Paati's so loud that Aasha hasn't heard Amma's footsteps when, suddenly, she appears in the corridor. She doesn't stop at the bathroom door this time. She goes right inside, her bare feet making squelchy sounds on the wet floor. (Wet squelchy sounds! Still more wet squelchy sounds! They are everywhere this morning, and no longer able to bear them, Aasha presses first one ear down onto the headrest of the green settee and then the other. She knows she should cover her ears with her hands, it would be easier and more effective, but somehow she can't, can't move her hands, her hands won't move, only her neck turns to protect each ear in turn.)
There's another sound, a wet thump, a flat slap, but because Aasha's left ear is pressed to the headrest, she doesn't see the source of this sound, and only her right ear hears it. She knows what it is, though, because she's witnessed its production before: a hand on a back. Thump, slap, ouch. Paati growls some more, and snarls a little, just like a tiger, but because she's an old tiger, riddled with aches and lumps, her growls and snarls are not just worse than her bite, they're all she's got. No literal bite at all: dentures replaced her teeth years ago, and she's not wearing them now. And hardly any metaphorical bite: how could her tiny, crumbling body stand up to any of them? Even Aasha could knock her over with one hand. Her body's the least fearsome part of her, the only part Amma's brave enough to attack.
"Shut up!" Amma says, very softly, after her hand has done her mind's dirty work.
Very softly is worse than very loudly. Amma folds her arms quickly, as if to deny to herself that that hand, not a minute ago, was slicing ruthlessly through the air and towards an arthritic shoulder. Still very softly, so that her words are barely discernible in the low hum that reaches Aasha's ears, she goes on: "Shut up now! That's enough. We don't need to hear about your wonderful son, okay? He's not here now. He's nicely fled for the day, leaving you on our heads. So no need to call him. Understand?"
A brief silence. Paati pulls her shoulders up to her earlobes and frowns at the water tank. Then she says, just under her breath, "Chhi! Can't even ask for a small thing in this house without everyone behaving like junglees."
"What? What's this small thing you want?" Amma asks.
"Never mind. It doesn't matter. I'm sure all of you have much more important things to do. No need to bother yourselves on my account."
"What do you need?" Amma asks again.
So Paati racks her brains for a plausible necessity and, clearing her throat, announces: "Very nicely that girl gave me my coffee before my bath, to keep me warm it seems, but now I've to stand here for two hours without a cloth around my loins while she does I don't know what. But one small tumbler of hot water would be too much trouble it seems."
Amma steps out into the corridor. "Chellam!" she calls. "Chellam! Please bring Paati a tumbler of hot water! Now, please!"
But Chellam is emptying her pail and putting her rags to soak in the outdoor kitchen, well out of earshot. Above the squealing of the outside tap she thinks she hears her name, carried on the wind like a song from a neighbor's radio. She pauses mid-scrub, looks up, then shakes her head and goes on with her task. She'll be done in thirty seconds (forty-five, to be precise, but Aasha isn't here to count), then she'll go in and see if someone is indeed wanting something urgent. It's probably just Paati, yelling her frustrations to the gods as usual.
In the corridor Amma's getting impatient. "Where the bloody hell is that girl?" she says to herself. She wanders into the middle of the corridor, looks around, sees only the empty settee, behind which Aasha is now crouching, her book open on her lap.
"This very morning," continued the Badger, taking an armchair, "as I learned last night from a trustworthy source, another new and exceptionally powerful motorcar will arrive at Toad Hall on approval or return."
Amma's in the empty dining room now, and then the sitting room. "Uma," she says, and her voice is like a small stone thrown with perfect aim into the blue pool of Paul Simon's gentle invitation:
Come a-runnin' down the stairs, pretty Peggy-o
Come a-runnin' down the stairs, pretty Peggy-o...
Uma looks up, her thumb and forefinger still holding one plastic page of the album (it's the picture of Gerald Capel with his laudatory bouquet again; she's come back to it, after reaching the album's end). She says nothing.
"Uma," Amma says again, "what are you doing here, anyway?"
"Looking at pictures."
"Pictures? What pictures?"
"From the play."
"Oho! From the play! Very nice. Here your own grandmother is shouting until she chokes, and you can't even get up to see what she wants, so busy looking at pictures, is it? Reliving the moment when you took that boy's flowers like a cheap prostitute? Can you please get up and bring your grandmother a tumbler of hot water, please?"
Please once is bad enough. Please twice, in the same sentence, is terrifying.
"Fine," Uma says, "I'll get her a glass of water." Her chair falls backwards as she stands up, but before Amma can say anything about that, she's strode past Amma and across the dining room. Her heels drive themselves into the marble floor as she walks, so hard Aasha can feel the vibrations all the way down the corridor.
At this moment, Chellam makes two decisions she will regret for the rest of her life: she goes out to hang up the rags on the clothesline in the sun, instead of draping them quickly over the garden wall. This takes her an extra minute, so that when she comes back into the house, Uma has already left the kitchen, water glass in hand. I'd better put the kettle on for the old lady's post-bath Milo, Chellam thinks. She'll claim she's freezing to death; she'll want her drink practically before she's sat down in her chair. All she knows how to do is fill her bladder all day to give me more work. Coffee Milo tea water, coffee Milo tea water ... She picks up the kettle and goes to the sink to fill it.
"Hanh!" Amma says with a dry laugh in the empty sitting room. Only Simon and Garfunkel are listening; enthusiastically Simon suggests that she go tell it on the mountain, but she dismisses this advice. "I've had enough of it, man!" she says, turning her back to the cassette player. "Enough! Everyone knows how to sulk and whine as if their life alone is hell. Hanh!" Then she climbs the stairs, faster than Aasha has ever heard her climb them, practically running.
Perhaps Paati's deaf ears somehow latch on to the sound of Am-ma's leaving, or perhaps her paper-thin short-term memory has failed her again: she takes up her litany once more, first a low rumble in her throat, a toad-crooning—"Rajoooo, Rajoooo," every oooo rising a little as if struggling to become a howl, "Rajoooo, oh this feckless family of yours, you don't know, you don't know what's going on behind your back"—then louder and louder, until, as Uma approaches with the glass of water, her hollering is drowning out everything: the whistling of the teakettle in the kitchen, the go-tell-it-on-the-mountaining of two fired-up New York boys, the chiming of the pendulum clock in the dining room (one chime: the half hour, twelve-thirty).
Abruptly—because her throat has worn itself out without the desired lubrication of the tumbler of water—Paati pulls in the heavy nets of her dirge and begins to whisper: "Raju, Raju, such a good boy you are, such a good son, if only you could see what consequences your one mistake in life has had, if only you could see the kind of blood you married into. Useless! Useless! Not one of them deserves you!"
What is it that freezes Uma just two feet behind Paati, within arm's reach? Holding the tumbler of mildly steaming water out to Paati's back, as if she and Paati are playing A-E-I-O-U and Paati might swing round at any minute? Is it the sudden drop in volume of Paati's voice (for Paati seems not to be playing the same game: on and on she whispers, shaking her head, rocking back and forth like some ecstatic worshiper), so that Uma has to keep still to hear her words? Is it the sunlight in Uma's eyes, streaming in from that high window (because Uma's tall, after all, taller than anyone else who's been in this bathroom today)? The startling sight of Paati's nakedness, on which Uma—unlike Aasha—has not laid eyes in years? The ruddy palm-and-five-fingers mark on Paati's back (which will, very shortly, begin turning blue in some spots and purple in others as Paati's blood thickens and slows)?
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