Perhaps she really is crying.
On Monday Appa sends one of his office boys to Chellam's village, as planned. "Look for Muniandy," he tells the boy. "Short black fellow, curly hair, missing teeth. You'll probably find him in the toddy shop. Tell him we've had to let his daughter go, so he has to come to my house and get her. As soon as he can." He doesn't look up from the papers on his desk.
In court that day Appa stares into Shamsuddin bin Yusof's black eyes and allows something cold to slither from the crown of his head to the end of his tailbone. Yes. A frisson of revulsion: this is how he must begin. He will do his job, bask in the resulting glory, and forget about the rest. The reporters and the crowds will seize upon whatever stale bit of evidence he throws them; the jury and the judge are on someone's secret payroll. They agreed on Shamsuddin's guilt before today, before the trial began, before Shamsuddin was dangled by his feet before them, a rabbit out of some unseen magician's hat. Appa may as well luxuriate in the cleverness of his own tongue. His pleasures are not so different from Uma's: both can throw themselves into a role, secrete abundant hatred for invented villainy, scorn pretend fools. He clears his throat and draws in his breath.
The office boy, after a fruitless two-hour search for Muniandy, leaves a message at the toddy shop before driving back to Ipoh.
"What the bloody hell?" Amma says at home. "If he can't come and get her, let's just put her on the bus. That's how she came here in the first place, isn't it? If her father didn't need to bring her means why does he need to fetch her?"
"Hmm," Appa says from behind his newspaper. "Yes. Technically you're right. But one doesn't want to do anything hasty. One doesn't want to get blamed for any other havoc she wreaks after this. Best to deliver her straight into her father's hands, that way no one can point any fingers at us."
Amma silently ponders the sorts of havoc that Chellam might wreak if released into the wilds on her own: Jumping into the Kinta River? returning to prostitution, so that neighbors and strangers will point and say, Look what happened to that girl after Lawyer Rajasekharan kicked her out? Yes, perhaps Appa is right. Perhaps this is the only way for them to preserve their blameless status. Whatever happens, they'll be able to say: "Her own father came and took her home."
Not for a second does Appa believe what the grainy female voice on the other end of the phone line claims later the following afternoon: "My husband—my husband's sick, saar, very very sick, cannot come to Ipoh yet, please can you wait a little bit, aiyo, please, saar, I'm asking, we're asking, have some pity? Maybe one week—or—or two—two weeks?" He wonders how far Chellam's mother had to walk to get to the phone booth in which she now stands and stammers; how long it took her to scrape the necessary coins together (has she been searching, borrowing, begging for a day and a half, with such difficulty that it will take her another two weeks to scrounge up the round-trip bus fare for her husband plus the one-way ticket for her daughter?); whether it's raining as heavily over her phone booth as it is here in Ipoh (that it is raining he has no doubt: he can hear the rain's muffled hum behind her lie).
He could ask her: Oho, is that so? One whole year your husband has been showing up on the dot for payday at the Big House, and now suddenly he'll be too sick on the first Saturday of the month? Did he break his neck or his head, tell me, what? Instead he says, "I see, I see. Two weeks then. But he must come for sure on the second Saturday of the month. Otherwise I'll have to kick your daughter out onto the streets. Do you understand me?"
"Two weeks!" Amma shrieks that night. "Two weeks we have to feed her and keep her under our roof!"
Amma needn't worry, for Chellam has eaten almost nothing since Paati's death. As for her presence under their roof, perhaps even this is debatable. Certainly her body can be glimpsed on hurried trips to the toilet, but it's a barely inhabited, steadily shrinking body, one foot already in the world of ghosts. Thus begins Chellam's second (and final) self-enforced sequestration since her arrival at the Big House: for the next two weeks she will be spoken for and of and to, but she will not speak herself. Because it's been months since she's spoken to anyone but Paati, almost no one will notice the difference, and those who do will merely wonder idly if this is the same old silence or a new one with a new purpose. It's difficult to say. Perhaps there's a new hopelessness in her eyes. Or fear. Or disgust. Then again, perhaps it's just the old hopelessness. Hopelessnesses are so difficult to tell apart these days, particularly when one has no help from the hopeless.
There's no need for Chellam to speak, anyway, or room for her to get a word in edgewise if she'd wanted to, for Appa's prediction turns out to have been conservative. Thanks in large part to Mrs. Balakrishnan from across the street, all the Indian families in Ipoh and all their relatives and friends—not only all over Malaysia, but also in Singapore, in Australia and New Zealand, in England and America and Canada—have heard the dreadful news within days of Paati's death: Chellam pushed Paati, for whom she was paid to care, with whom she's been rough and mean and impatient from the beginning. Chellam has cold-bloodedly murdered a helpless old woman who trusted her.
"Quietly-quietly she agreed to go, yaar?" Mrs. Balakrishnan says when Amma tells her about Chellam's imminent departure. "Lucky for you. This type of people you never know. Sometime will make trouble only."
"What is there for her to make trouble about?" Amma snaps. "She knows she's in the wrong. A six-year-old child is her witness. Out of the mouths of babes as they say."
As they do indeed say. Amma herself is unsure of the rest of the quotation, and its significance is entirely lost on the less-educated Mrs. Balakrishnan, who adjusts her hair bun, tut-tuts, and coos, "I say, I say, nonono, Vasanthi, please don't take offense yaar, not to say babesshabes or anything like that, I simply talking only. Not bad, what, quietly-quietly she agreeing to go."
"Yaar," says Amma, pushing her teacup away and standing up abruptly, "quiet-quiet-nice-nice, those are the worst types. Quietly-quietly minding their own business, making like good girls, and then stabbing you in the back when you're not looking."
Mrs. Balakrishnan, who has not encountered the metaphor enough to be inured to its violence, is suitably hushed.
On their busy telephones people shake their heads for friends and relatives who can't see them, and remark upon how the incident will scar Aasha forever. Probably going to have nightmares for years, they tell each other. And maybe worse. Who knows what it does to people who witness that type of violence at such a young age.
Uma, too, has heard the details of Chellam's denouncement. Not all at once; no one has sat her down and given her a full account, for she hasn't displayed much interest. The story has floated to her ears in bits and pieces, and always—whether in Vellamma and Letchumi's backyard chatter or in the hushed, behind-one-hand gossip of housewives on the town buses—Aasha stands at the center of it, glowing with courage, wreathed in pity. And if Aasha ratted on Chellam just so she could feel like a heroine? She's only six, Uma reasons. Children are selfish. She, for one, knew that before. If you let them they'll eat you alive. In their sleep. Without even meaning to. At least Chellam has only two weeks left in this house; then it'll be all over. Whereas if my hand had been the unlucky one and Aasha had been spying on me, it would never have been over, never.
The neighbors and all their international friends and relatives note how gracious it is of Appa not to press charges, given how easy it would be for him to have Chellam put behind bars, bigshot lawyer that he is, connections in the High Court, judges eating out of his hands. These days, everyone agrees, you just can't trust servants. You pay them and feed them and house them and in the end they murder your old parents or kidnap your baby or steal your wedding jewelry and elope with their goonda boyfriends. No bloody shame. Doing a thing like that in front of a patchai kozhundai, a babe barely out of arms, green, raw, unripe. God knows she's probably done plenty of other things in front of the children as well. What was that story about her and Raju's brother? They dredge up that stor
y, in light of this new evidence of Chellam's depravity. "I mean you would've had to send the girl away anyway, wouldn't you?" Mrs. Anthony from house number 57 says to Amma. "If she's pregnant—you wouldn't want—"
"Yes," Amma hastens to agree, "yes, sooner or later we would've had to get rid of her."
In the bathroom mirror beside the water tank on which Paati hit her head, Aasha studies her face. When people say the words, the spittle collects in the corners of their mouths: patchai kozhundai. An unripe baby. A green baby. A raw baby. Isn't she all of these things? A poor, shivering baby, naked as a peeled banana, with no one to sing her lullabies and blow away her nightmares? But try as she might to see such a creature in the mirror, Aasha feels less like a baby than she ever has. She's all grown up; she has a secret she'll never tell, and no one to answer to but herself. Wasn't she right to do what she did? Didn't she need to make up for all the trouble she'd caused Uma? Even if she told a lie to protect Uma, it was only one lie—less than a whole one, in fact, because Chellam has pushed and knocked and pinched Paati before, and pulled her hair.
"But Aasha," says a soft voice, "I've told you my story, so you have to tell me yours. It's only fair. You can't keep your secret for yourself." Mr. McDougall's daughter sits on the closed toilet bowl swinging her legs. Only her coconut-tree hairdo, affixed with a fat pink bow, is visible in the mirror.
"It was nothing," Aasha says to the pink bow. Secretly she's pleased, though not surprised, that Mr. McDougall's daughter is back, although Aasha almost ignored her last appearance. And why not? It's only fair that Aasha, who does all the needing and longing in the seen world, be on the receiving end of need in this other world. That once in a while she should get to breathe easy and relax her shoulders and let someone else burn their hands tugging at an ancient frayed rope. "It wasn't Uma's fault," she goes on. Measured, outwardly confident. "Uma was angry with—with everybody, I think. Or mostly with Paati. She threw the glass to show her temper. It's not a very good thing to do, showing your temper, is it?"
Mr. McDougall's daughter shrugs.
"But still, everything would've been okay, except that—well first of all Uma's hand slipped. I think so. I mean, she threw the glass and then her hand slipped on—on the way back. Or it moved just like that but it wasn't Uma moving it. It flew up like a bird and pushed Paati.
Just the hand, not Uma. And it was only one small push like—like when you suddenly feel too angry and you say ish! and you push whatever you see in front of you. You know what I mean, isn't it?" The pink bow doesn't stir, so Aasha elaborates: "Like when Suresh pushes me or I push him. Just one small push, and Paati didn't fall, so everything would still have been okay. It was only after that Paati fell. It was a ghost. I couldn't see it, I don't know why I couldn't see it but definitely there was a ghost. A toyol, maybe. It grabbed her knees because that's all it could reach. But Dr. Kurian wouldn't understand all that. If I tried to explain to them everybody would laugh at me only."
"Yah," says Mr. McDougall's daughter, convinced at last. Aasha breathes a sigh of relief that steams up the mirror and briefly obscures her view of the pink bow as the girl goes on: "When you're small nobody cares about what you think, anyway. You have to find your own way to get things done. Lucky for you that you thought of it in time." There's only a faint hint of wistfulness in her voice; mostly she sounds patient, gently generous with her wisdom, and proud, as always, of the stiff little accent that is her father's only legacy to her.
"That's what I also think," says Aasha. "That's what I've been saying to myself."
Yet the indigo-bright certainty of Aasha's conclusions dulls to grey within a week, despite Mr. McDougall's daughter's reassurances. Downstairs, Chellam tosses and sniffles in her bed. As each day passes she ventures less frequently out of her room, as though even her bladder and bowels might be shutting down. Upstairs, Uma hums "Mrs. Robinson" and "The Boxer" and "The Sound of Silence" and goes on with her packing as if nothing happened, as if Aasha still doesn't exist. Perhaps there's no atoning for old sins after all. Perhaps it was already too late.
9. THE FUTILE INCIDENT OF THE SAPPHIRE PENDANT
July 6, 1980
SIX WEEKS BEFORE Paati dies, Amma hosts the weekly gathering of the Ladies' tea-party circle. She does so against her first instincts, for the household is in disarray. Chellam still harbors the dregs of the fever brought on by the Balakrishnans' nephew's unsoothing soothsaying, which dregs she has generously shared with Paati; whiffs of old-lady urine and Dr. Kurian's dark potions waft through the house on every breeze. But Amma will not live at the mercy of the psychosomatic ailments of lunatics. She will have the Ladies over because it is her turn and the show must go on; because she has nothing, no solace, but appearances, and must therefore fight tooth and nail to preserve them.
So she has Vellamma the washerwoman pull down all the drapes and wash them in hot water; she has Letchumi the sweeper shampoo the rugs and disinfect the floors with Dettol to banish the miasma of Paati's hand-me-down fever. She orders a Black Forest cake from the Ipoh Garden Cake Shop and commissions Lourdesmary to execute a baroque version of the usual tea-party menu: four kinds of noodles, two kinds of fried rice, three jellies (red, orange, blue), pyramids of cottony sandwiches (cucumber, butter-and-watercress, Norwegian sardine) and springy popiah, pigs in blankets, roly-poly pudding, rock buns, rum balls, rumaki. And fruit salad in sherry, stationed on either side of a towering centerpiece custom-made by Flower Power Florists.
A grim determination infects all involved in these preparations; the kitchen, never a hive of whistling gaiety under Lourdesmary's rule, is cold and silent as she chops and kneads and rolls. Suresh spends the weekend speeding up and down Kingfisher Lane alone on his Raleigh bicycle, making occasional trips to the corner shop for sustenance. Aasha tiptoes along the corridors and staircases of the Big House, dry-lipped and goose-bumped. They understand, on variously liminal levels, that this party will be more than an assertion of order over the chaos that has engulfed them in recent months, more even than the usual affirmation of Amma's place in the world. It will be a gauntlet thrown down before all those who have been chipping away, blindly or maliciously or out of sheer boredom, at that place: the busybody-ing servants, the behind-the-back smirkers and gloaters.
There is one other person before whom Amma wishes to flaunt her feigned equanimity, and that person cannot, try as she might, ignore the brassy glint of Amma's self-righteousness or the rattling of her saber underneath her silk saree. What Uma can or cannot ignore is a great mystery even to Aasha of the ever-peeled eyes, for Uma, unlike Amma, is a master of disguise and dissimulation.
Why, only a month ago, they watched her in a performance so convincing that they were all afraid—yes, Appa himself shifted uneasily in his seat. They'd all wondered if it was Uma who was crying up on that too-bright stage, and not Masha, the second of the Three Sisters, whose name Uma had borrowed for three nights. Aasha alone was brave enough to ask out loud: "Is Uma crying? Is Uma really crying now, not bluffing anymore?" For her trouble, Appa shushed her, Amma pinched her thigh, and Suresh rolled his eyes. And after that point, Aasha knew what the others chose not to acknowledge: that Uma had borrowed Masha's name so as to be able to cry, loudly, in front of everyone.
The play itself is the root of Amma's latest grievance against Uma, the fruit on which her lassitude has been feeding, worm-like, for a month. For at the end of closing night, when Uma and the rest of the cast bowed deeply and gratefully, a boy in a blue shirt and bluer necktie stepped up to the stage with an enormous bouquet of pink roses in his arms, and Uma, in that tight Victorian bodice further tightened to highlight (rather pathetically, Appa considered, slouching with pity in his seat) what little cleavage she had, came forward to the edge of the stage to bend over and take those flowers from him.
At this, someone in the back of the audience whistled shrilly, a long and lewd whistle that attested to the regrettable thoughts everyone else shared with Amma.
Which though
ts she spoke aloud in the car on the way home, and afterwards, for days.
"Everyone knows," she said, trying to catch Uma's eye in the rear-view mirror, "the only reason you're so enthusiastic about this acting-shacting nonsense is that you crave attention. And not just any attention. You want attention from men."
That was Amma's opening gambit in a game Uma refused to join. More accurately, it was, like many opening gambits, merely the latest gesture in a war that had been smoldering for years: it was in the distant era of Uncle Ballroom's regular visits to the Big House that Uma's allegedly insatiable yearnings for male attention had been fate-fully and rancorously noted. Whenever Amma caught glimpses of certain clothes or expressions of Uma's these days, the idea of her concupiscence resurrected itself, buzzing and sparking like faulty wiring, shooting words into Amma's mouth and unbearable pictures—scenes of which she could only be ashamed—into her eyes. For a mother to picture her own daughter doing such things! And yet she could not help herself. Now this recent memory of a sleek-haired boy in blue spurred her on. Why couldn't she just ignore the girl, pretend not to notice who gave her flowers when, leave her to persist in her starry-eyed foolishness? According to all the other mothers she knew (with whom she never discussed this problem explicitly), that was by far the most effective cure for what they called Teenage Drama. Ignore it, and all the posing peters out.
But the rope that binds Amma to Uma, burning the hands of both, has a more twisted knot in it than other such ropes do. Amma is not merely jealous of Uma's youth, nor of the inborn wisdom that enables young women these days to float untouched above the mistakes of her own generation. Of course the sight of Uma confronts her mother with memories of her own dangerous naiveté a hundred times a day: but for the better-made clothing and the hands that attest to a liberally servanted household, Uma could be Amma twenty years ago. Stand her at the window just so, remove the effects of years of acting classes, the confidence in her shoulders, the proud tilt of her chin, and there before Amma's eyes is her younger self, gazing from the shutters as Appa's pea-green Morris Minor pulls up the driveway of the Big House for the first time.
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