Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  And so, because Appa is a famous lawyer and must know what he's talking about, and also because Amma is inclined to agree with his estimate of the chastening that awaits Chellam in her village, Aasha is saved the terrible prospect of repeating her lie over and over before an audience.

  "I'll send one of my office boys to fetch the bugger from his village," Appa says. "He can use last month's money to come and pick her up, because after what she's done I'm certainly not giving them a penny for the bus fare back."

  After a minute or two—for Aasha has to knock on Chellam's door and butt her way blindly through the thick curtain of silence that stands on the other side of it—Chellam drags her feet into the dining room, a breathless Suresh behind her. Silhouetted against the blaze of Suresh's eyes, Chellam peers around the room from under her heavy red eyelids, her hair frizzing around her face in a black halo. Then she shambles towards the center of the room, where she and Appa face each other like sadly mismatched fighters in a ring: she skinny and skittish, he steely, elemental, legs planted firmly two feet apart, right hand on hip.

  "So," Appa says quietly, "what have you done, Chellam? Are you proud of yourself? Nothing you do now can fix it, do you know that? Do you know you've left us with no choice?"

  As he asks these questions he begins to realize what he wants out of the interrogation: to see her break down and cry, beg for forgiveness, at least tremble a little where she stands.

  He's tired and thirsty, and now he has two unavenged, mangled corpses to consider, one tender as a kid goat, one ancient. Why, why must he be mired in all this sordid melodrama? He wants to strangle the world and bend it to his will. He wants to slap Amma and Chellam both, for the stupid games and thoughtless messes into which they drag him. He's been boiling with anger at Chellam for months, for reasons he doesn't give himself time to revisit; now shame blows its dirty breath in his face and sickens him. How monstrous that this walleyed little bitch should wield all this unwitting power over him! She's reduced him to a Hindi-film villain, a Nazi sweating before his serene victims, a petty, vindictive, pitiful creature. For in answer to his battery of questions she simply stares at her toes. His hands itch to grab her arm and twist it behind her back, or spit in her eyes, or pull her hair. He grinds his jaw. He takes a deep breath.

  But the heat in his chest will not subside; it's so very much stronger than he, and how strange that at the very moment he feels weakest, his mouth springs open. Out of it pours the most powerful of sounds, a mountain collapsing, a lion's roar. A noise that cannot possibly be coming out of any human mouth, let alone his own, for he is not—has never been—a man who shouts, and yet here it is, this noise. He would think it was someone else but for the fact that he can feel it inside his head, vibrating every tiny bone in his ears, echoing in all the dark passages behind his face.

  He sees himself point with his left hand, to some distant horizon beyond the living room, beyond the front door, beyond this universe whose precarious order this stupid, weak-willed girl has disturbed. He sees his family staring at him—no, just at his mouth, as if they, too, are trying to make sense of the amorphous noise washing over them. He yearns to stop, to put out this horrible flame in his throat and go back to his office, but he cannot.

  Hearing him, Uma walks to her window, throws it open, and thirstily gulps the damp air that rushes in. Chellam? Could she really have—"Maybe so," she says out loud, addressing her conclusion to a sparrow on a high branch of the mango tree. Chellam had her own crosses to bear, didn't she? No, Appa might get on his high horse and make like a saint, but Uma wouldn't blame Chellam for letting her frustrations get the better of her, not when she herself, only minutes earlier ... She laughs mirthlessly and shakes her head at the sparrow. In and out of that bathroom all afternoon, a veritable procession of embittered women, eh? Poor Paati had been a fun-fair target for all their rotten apples. Who else had had a go? Still, why should I feel sorry for Paati? Why should I pity her when she never pitied me?

  Downstairs, the tempest continues. Appa can make out only a few of his own words here and there, garbled, the inflections all wrong: "Prostitute! Killer!" His tongue stumbles over the same syllables again and again, as if he's only just learning Tamil and hasn't got much further than memorizing handfuls of words from bad film scenes.

  But Amma and Chellam, and even Suresh and Aasha—whose Tamil consists largely of words for vegetables and demons and private parts Chellam taught them, or curse words and grumblings they have heard her speak when she can't see them—understand him perfectly well. "Shameless prostitute, don't think we don't know about you! How dare you come into our house and do all this under our roof! One thing after another it's been, sneaking around, spying, spreading your legs for any man that enters the house, but this, this, even I never thought you would kill! For one whole year we've housed you and fed you"—no one but Appa himself notes his pointed omission of paid you—"and you turn around and do this! How could you! How could you kill a defenseless old lady like that, how could you? What did she ever do to you? Hanh? What?"

  In the sudden silence that follows this question, the house throbs to the mad beat of Appa's heart, rattling even the china in the corner cabinet.

  The floor hums. A mouse in a kitchen cupboard drops the groundnut it's been gnawing and crouches quaking among the lentils, waiting for the deluge.

  Outside, the sparrows and mynah birds hurry home to huddle in their nests.

  Uma ponders Appa's question. What did she ever do to you, Uma? What? I'm just lucky, she thinks, though she cannot know how lucky she's been, or, more precisely, that her salvation has required much more than luck. Selfless devotion, kamikaze courage, masterly storytelling: of these contributions she knows nothing. It could've just as easily been my hand that killed her, she thinks. And why? What did she ever do to me?

  It's what she didn't do, she replies. It's what she could've done for me and didn't. She knows her plea would never stand up in court; it barely stands up to her own scrutiny.

  They're still waiting for Chellam to answer downstairs, or to cry, or even just to move, or for Appa to continue. But Appa's outburst is over as abruptly as it began. Now he stands looking out the window at the branches of the mango tree swaying in the pre-downpour wind, his arms folded, his face turned away from all of them. Good lord, whatever the old lady's faults, did she deserve that horrendous end? The papery skin of her face bloodstained and imprinted with the floor tile pattern. The hasty dusting off of the storeroom cot so that her slippery stiffening body could be laid out on it. The doctor jabbing at all those marks, all those mysterious marks, My God, what has been happening in this house, to the old lady, to all of us?

  "Monday morning," he says, oddly quiet, "I'll send for your father to come and get you. Do you understand me, Chellam?"

  When she doesn't reply, he doesn't press her.

  One of the children sniffs. The afternoon's first fat drops of rain begin to hammer the metal awnings outside. Chellam blinks at each of them in turn: Appa, Amma, Suresh, Aasha. Her arms fly up and across her chest, as if she's suddenly realized she's naked. Then she turns and, still blinking in all directions like a small animal looking for a hiding place, shuffles away to her room.

  For a few long moments no one says a word.

  Through the doorway, Aasha can see a pair of stockinged legs dangling between the banister posts, swinging in time to a tune she can't hear. Poor Mr. McDougall's daughter, always a little too hot in those stockings her mother insisted on dressing her in to remind her (and the rest of the world) that she was half white. She's waiting as patiently as she can, but it's not easy when you're wearing itchy stockings. Where is Paati? Mr. McDougall's daughter is all dressed up and ready to welcome her formally into the world of ghosts, but there's no sign of her. No, no sign at all. Aasha holds her breath and waits along with Mr. McDougall's daughter and, it seems, everyone else, until finally Amma speaks.

  "What?" she says. A quick puff of a word that startles everyone else, m
ost of all Mr. McDougall's daughter, who rises to her feet and skitters up the stairs. 'Are we all going to stand here until the curtains close?"

  But real-life stories do not enjoy the mercy of a curtain: there are always epilogues, codas, aftermaths, new stories sprouting from old seeds.

  That very night, Amma discovers eight boiled sweeties left in Paati's red Danish Butter Cookies tin on the shelf next to her rattan chair. It's unclear to all present (Amma, Suresh, Aasha) why Paati was saving them, since it's been years since she's distributed boiled sweeties or offered them as rewards. "Here, take, take," Amma says, "I'm going to tell Letchumi to clean up this corner nicely tomorrow. Take two each and give two to Uma." Of course, thinks Suresh, of course you want this corner cleaned up first thing in the morning. Of course you want the tin emptied and thrown out right now. He remembers Paati's blunt fingers and thick nails struggling to get off the lid of that tin, struggling struggling struggling until one day she could no longer do it and had to ask for help. "I helped you thread the needle first," he'd said at the time, "and then I helped you open the tin, so don't I get two sweeties for two favors?" She'd laughed and called him a sly one and let him take two. Even impervious Suresh, remembering that long-ago transaction, is suddenly not sure he wants a sweetie; when Amma gets the tin open all the colors look sickly to him and he tastes them in his mouth, nasty and sticky and cough-syrup sweet. But reason prevails: he tells himself that he might change his mind later and regret not having taken any. More important, not taking any sweeties won't fix anything now. It's too late.

  Amma has miscounted: two each and two for Uma still leaves two extra. At Suresh's suggestion, he and Aasha take three each. Now there's the problem of delivering the remaining two to Uma, who hasn't left her room since this afternoon.

  "We better go and give them to her," Aasha says, leaning towards Suresh with a sad, meaningful look. "How can she come out of her room?" If Amma sees Uma's face, she means, if anyone else sees that face of Uma's (for she pictures it frozen in the anguish that seized it when their eyes met in the bathroom), won't they guess—

  Instead of the well-laid strategy she expects of him, Suresh gives her a blank, open-mouthed stare.

  "What you mean? Why should Uma get special service? You want means you go and give them to her lah."

  Aasha stares back at him, fiddling with the crinkly wrapping of the boiled sweeties for an eternity. Why should Uma get special service? Because, Suresh, because. Asking for the sake of asking only, isn't it? You know the answer.

  "Ohhhh," Suresh says suddenly. He covers his mouth like a small boy who's just found out where babies come from, a gesture of innocent discovery so unlike him it makes Aasha back away. "Ohhhh. You mean." His voice has dropped to a whisper.

  "I mean what?"

  "You mean Uma also saw Amma ah? And now she's scared to look at Amma?"

  "What—oh—yah," says Aasha weakly. The truth shoots through her like an eel in black water: Suresh thinks Amma pushed Paati, not Uma, and before she can fit the whole of this oversized thought into her head he goes on:

  "Never mind what. She saw means she saw lah, so what? If we can face Amma means why can't she? She's bigger, so isn't she supposed to be braver?"

  "Don't know. I don't know anything. I'm going to go and give her the sweeties now."

  Aasha hurries away and up the stairs, her hot hands melting the sweeties through their wrappers. So she's alone after all; Suresh doesn't understand anything. It all makes sense: of course he thought it was Amma she was protecting, Amma, whose scoldings and slap-pings and knuckleknockings of Paati they've all had to pretend not to see or hear for years; Amma, whose voice Suresh probably heard echoing in that big, drafty bathroom just minutes before Chellam screamed; Amma, whose breath thrashes about in her throat like a bird in a net whenever she recalls Paati's venomous past. "Your grandmother," Amma said only last week, "acts like a helpless old lady now, but when I first came to this house she was like the devil himself. With a heart of coal and a tongue of fire. Only when she dies I'll have some peace."

  And today, Suresh believes, Amma grew impatient and greedy, and snatched at that peace before it was ripe.

  Let Suresh think what he must; Aasha cannot, will not, will never tell him the truth, however lonely her secret will make her. Because if he doesn't already know, who can say how he might react to the truth?

  Outside Uma's room, Aasha finds that she cannot knock. She stands and stands, curls her left foot around her right ankle, her right foot around her left ankle, readies herself to slip the two sweeties under Uma's door and run away when—oh, the feeling of it, like swooshing down a too-steep slide, your stomach turning to cold water—Uma's door opens.

  There she stands, lovely Uma, her hair down her back.

  "Here," says Aasha, and holds out the sweeties. There is nothing else to say.

  Uma plucks them off her palm. "Thank you," she says. She smiles then, a gentle, misty smile, not at Aasha but at the sweeties in her own hand. Such a faint smile, and Aasha's head still swimming from the open door, her vision blurry from the shock of it—yet there's no doubt in her mind that Uma smiled. And said thank you. A great sigh of a thank you. A thank you not just for the sweeties.

  Aasha cannot stay here and look at Uma. She's dizzy. Her mouth is dry. She turns on her heels and runs back down the stairs.

  That night the sweeties—one red, one yellow—sit on Uma's bedside table as she lies in bed staring out the window at the flickering streetlamp. Paati's leftover sweeties. Aasha did not say so, but Uma recognizes them. That Danish Butter Cookies tin. The way they'd bargain for three sweeties for a favor that deserved two. And Paati's obligatory show of reluctance before she caved in, every time, with a wink and a grin.

  At two in the morning, Uma climbs out of bed and flings the sweeties one by one (first the yellow, then the red) out the open window (to be discovered among the chili plants by Mat Din in the morning, and eaten several days afterwards by his goats). Then she gets back in bed and closes her eyes. Her body makes a shallow dent on the pale blue pool of her sleep; her hair fans out around her face. She dreams she is a little girl again, burrowing into Paati's back so that there's space for both of them in the bed. But the bed cracks and falls apart beneath their weight, and Paati is left hanging off the edge of the one remaining board. It takes all Uma's strength and both her arms to keep Paati from plummeting head-first to the floor. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she mumbles, neither awake nor asleep but in some dark gulf in between. And then: I'm not letting go. I'll keep you safe. Tomorrow we'll have laddoos for tea, okay?

  She rises at seven and begins to sort through the clothes in her cup-board: one pile for packing in her suitcase, one pile for whichever servant Amma chooses to foist them upon.

  "TSK. I don't know what I was thinking," Amma says at the breakfast table, with a child's sweep of flat palm against wet cheek. "After everyone warned me how difficult it is to find trustworthy servants these days."

  "I told you you should've gotten rid of the bloody girl after that first incident itself," Appa replies. "After that mess with my great hero of a brother."

  "Don't you think we should inform the police?" Amma says once more. "This type of madwoman will just turn around and do the same thing to someone else if we let her go free."

  But Appa's bravado has abated, never to be recovered on this particular subject. The longer his apoplectic rage echoes between his ears (all night it has raged, as he lay, eyes closed, on his pillow, and this morning it continues to rage), the more certain his impression that he has somehow—although there's no denying Chellam's brutish crime—made a fool of himself. That he should've been the bigger person, kept his temper in check, calmly given Chellam a month's notice so that she could go through the motions of looking for another job. Of course she'd never get a job in anyone else's house after this; every bloody Indian family in the country must already know what she's done. Just leave it to the gorgon across the street. But she could look for a fac
tory job, or a cleaner's position in some office building. Something to satisfy her father, because let's face it, all the man will care about is his monthly toddy money, not his daughter's doubtful morals. If she could be seamlessly transplanted from this house to some other job, she'd be safe from—from what?

  What will become of her in her father's house?

  That's not my problem, Appa tries to tell himself. I can't bear the whole world's woes on my shoulders.

  Blast the troublesome, contradictory voice that retorts: Ohoho, weren't you going to fix the whole world's woes? What happened to your big-big dreams, Raju? What kind of socialist hires a drunk tapper's daughter and pays her nothing?

  He tries to defend himself: But you see I wasn't paying her nothing; the money simply went to her father, who needed it just as badly, if not more, what with those six-seven-eight-however-many children waiting at home. I was only choosing to treat the problem at its source, don't you see, if the head of the household has a little more money doesn't it benefit everyone instead of just—

  Aah, shaddup your mouth, you bastard, says the other voice. It's a real rowdy, this voice, a lorry driver, a mamak-stall loafer with an open-chested shirt and a gold chain. It has none of Appa's refinements. Who do you think you're fooling? You paid off her father because you're a bloody pondan. A coward. Too scared to stand up for an eighteen-year-old girl. Some revolutionary you would've made.

  So once again he dissuades Amma from her apparent quest for justice (which everyone but Amma knows to be, in truth, a hunger for revenge). "Don't be silly," he says evenly. "You call in the police and the whole thing immediately becomes a front-page scandal. You want your face and your children's faces in the newspaper for everyone to see?"

  Amma starts to sob quietly, hiding her nose in the tasseled pallu of her saree.