In the bathroom, Uma undoes her loose knot of hair and redoes it, low on the nape of her neck. Little Aasha. You'd use me like everyone else did if I let you, and then you'd grow up to be just like the rest of them. It's partly for your own good I've washed my hands of you. She opens the bathroom door and pretends not to notice Aasha following her, soft-footed as a cat. But today Aasha is oddly bold: she slips in through the open door of Uma's bedroom before Uma has the chance to close it behind her. Still Uma doesn't meet her eyes. She sits on her impeccably made bed; she picks up Finnegans Wake.
Now Aasha's hands are on the bed, flat palms facing down. Now she is drawing her breath in to speak.
"Uma," she says, and already Uma winces at her breathless urgency. "Uma, don't listen to Amma. She's stupid. She doesn't know anything. You're going to be a famous actress and when your picture comes in the papers then she'll—"
Uma turns to her, her right thumb keeping her place in Finnegans Wake, her face quizzical. She seems at first to be searching for the words she needs; then, shaking her head, she says, "Can't you leave me in peace, Aasha? Go away and find something else to do, for heaven's sake. Mind your own business."
As if she's waiting for more, for everything Uma wants to say and all she herself can bear to hear, Aasha stands at strict attention, her face growing longer and longer, her lower lip more and more pendulous, before she steps backwards, very slowly, through the open door.
Uma turns back to her book, but her eyes remain on the same line for a long while. Acting as if you're my guardian angel, she thinks. Such altruism. Like I don't know all you want is for me to stay here and be your surrogate mother. Feeling sorry for you never got me anywhere.
Afterwards, in the commotion that follows Amma's discovery of the missing pendant, no one can confirm Aasha's movements that afternoon. Did she go looking for Suresh at the corner shop, or on the football field on Hornbill Lane? Did she fall asleep in the old velvet armchair in Appa's study, or on the floor behind the green PVC settee? Did she go outside to collect tamarind seeds? It's because none of them know that Appa questions her, and her crude, jumbled story falls apart.
"Yes," she says at first, "I saw the sapphire pendant on Amma's bed after the Ladies left and Amma changed her clothes and went back downstairs. I—I picked it up and looked at it, but then I put it back on the bed."
Then: "N-no, I took it downstairs. Just for a few minutes. I was going to put it back on Amma's bed, but then Dr. Kurian came and—and everyone was running here and there and I forgot. I don't know what happened to it. I left it on the coffee table."
"Want to lie also cannot lie properly," Suresh sneers.
And Appa almost pities her, this fumbling little fibber sitting before him with a cracked and trembling lower lip.
"Of course she took it," he says to Amma later. "She must have left it somewhere or dropped it. It'll turn up somewhere, no need for your hysterics, for God's sake. Already she's so frightened she can't stick to her own story. Ha! If you ask me we should enjoy that kind of innocence while it lasts."
But to pacify Amma, he punishes Aasha, piteously inept liar though she is. Kneeling on the hard marble floor, elbows balanced on the coffee table, she must copy Appa's line twenty-five times: I will not take things without asking.
The sapphire pendant never turns up. They cannot blame the servants: none of them were in that afternoon but Chellam, and Chellam, well, Chellam has the perfect alibi.
Amma had found her sprawled, unconscious, in the back yard after the Ladies left that afternoon. Squatting over her, cooing the only two lines he knew of a Malay folk song, was Baldy Wong from next door.
"Chellamservant die already," he said to Amma, rubbing his dripping nose on his knees. "Chellamservant sudah mati."
Chellam wasn't dead, of course. She'd merely fainted. She'd gone out to the yard to empty the Dutch Baby condensed-milk tin Paati was using as a spittoon during her flu. Perhaps she'd had some terrifying vision sparked by the Balakrishnans' nephew's grim prophecy. She'd been seeing shadows and hearing voices since the prayers in their garden temple, jumping out of her Japanese slippers at the slightest sound. Or perhaps she'd simply collapsed from the effort of keeping Paati quiet all afternoon so soon after her own ravaging fever. ("I don't want Paati coughing and gasping and carrying on while the Ladies are here," Amma had warned her. "Please." And please, Chellam knew as surely as the children did, meant business.)
So Dr. Kurian had to be summoned, "not for the old lady but for the servant girl this time," Suresh informed his receptionist on the phone, and in that bedlam, full of the slamming of doors and the shouting of orders and the insistent coughing and gasping and carrying on of an old lady outraged at being abandoned, Aasha took the sapphire pendant.
***
THE STREETLAMPS shone pale in the dying sunlight when Aasha went to stand before the monsoon drain that day, the pendant heavy in the pocket of her shorts.
A Kickapoo bottle bobbed along past her on the surface of the drainwater. A few feet away, an empty Twisties packet was snagged in a crack.
If the flickering streetlamp stops flickering for five seconds, she told herself, I won't do it. It was true, sometimes the lamp did briefly stop flickering, and didn't that prove—she was to tell herself later—that she had been willing to give Uma another chance?
Not just one chance, either, because when the streetlamp flickered on, more spasmodically than ever, she announced, to a ginger cat making its way along the edge of the monsoon drain: "If you get to the culvert without stopping, I won't do it." But the ginger cat, disdainful of ultimatums, stopped to wash its face two yards from the culvert.
Aasha took the pendant out of her pocket. Its blue light beamed all the way up to the main road and all the way down Kingfisher Lane, to the limestone hills and beyond.
The ginger cat paused in mid-lick and stared at her, its paw raised to its mouth.
She shouldn't do it, she mustn't do it, but—leave me alone, Uma'd said, just like Amma. No better than Amma. And worse still: Mind your own business. She'd been a baby, a stupid, slobbering baby, following people around, hoping for the old days. The old days were gone. Uma wouldn't care if she died. If an evil man came roaring down Kingfisher Lane on his motorcycle right now and kidnapped her, and did to her what Shamsuddin bin Yusof had done to Angela Lim, Uma would smile to herself and read her book. And then in September she would go to America and become famous, and one day she would marry a man with blue eyes and a chin dimple and Amma would give her the sapphire pendant. No one would remember Aasha or ever say a word about her. Uma wouldn't care that it was her fault that Aasha had gone out all alone to sit by the monsoon drain at dusk; she would get away scot-free, with her sapphire pendant and her white wedding cake.
They were just the same, Uma and Amma, two dragons, one on this side, the other on that side, snarling and snapping at Aasha. They'd ganged up on her; now they hated her more than they hated each other. They were in—what was that word?—in cahoots.
In a flash, Aasha climbed up onto the culvert and flung the pendant into the drain. It swallowed what was left of the daylight as it fell, growing brighter and bluer as the sky darkened. Then it sliced through the deep black drainwater and was gone.
Serves you right, Uma, Aasha forced herself to think. Now you'll never have it. Serves you right. But the effort stung the backs of her eyes, and even the ginger cat wasn't convinced. It blinked at her, slow and appraising. She sank onto her haunches and stared at the water. What had she done? She couldn't possibly retrieve the pendant now. It was on its way to Parit Buntar, Bagan Serai, Taiping, Shanghai, Canada, who knew? Who knew where the drain went? There was nothing she could do to fix what she'd done. Now there was no hope of Uma's ever speaking to her again.
At first, though, Uma barely seemed to notice the loss of the pendant, and considered the ensuing pandemonium as though from afar, throwing puzzled glances at Amma and Appa as the one ranted and the other reasoned. To look at Uma, they mig
ht have been bad actors in a play she'd been dragged to, or savages of whose rituals she did not approve. She stood in the kitchen doorway and ate cream crackers over a saucer as she watched them. Then Amma paused in the middle of her tantrum, as if she'd run out of words and tears and even strangled animal sounds, or realized, as tantrum throwers sometimes do, that no one could give her what she wanted. She looked up and saw Uma. "Good for you," she said to Appa, "you can be very proud of your children. Your youngest will be a champion thief and your oldest will be a high-class call girl. Such a wonderful example you've set for them with your own achievements."
"Stop it," Appa snapped. "That's enough."
"Why, afraid of the truth, is it? Your oldest daughter is standing there in front of you, why don't you ask her what she—"
But Uma was no longer standing in front of them; she'd dumped her saucer in the kitchen sink (thereby cracking it; the following day Lourdesmary would take it home with her, thanking Amma profusely for the gift) and fled up the stairs. Four pairs of ears heard her shut her door; one pair heard her climb into bed and breathe into her pillow as Appa and Amma resumed their bickering. Late at night, after everyone had come upstairs, Uma got up and opened her window. On the other side of the far wall, Aasha knew what she was doing as certainly as if she were sitting on Uma's bed watching her. She could hear it in Uma's breath and feel it in the wall they shared: Uma was staring at the flickering streetlamp. Counting the days until she could go away and never come back.
In the dark of her room, Aasha fought to keep her face above the black water of the monsoon drain. She was stuck, one sleeve snagged in a crack like that Twisties packet. She gasped and swallowed, spat and gasped; it was a losing battle, for she knew she'd drown. "I'm sorry, Uma," she mouthed into her cupped hands. "I'm sorry. I'll do anything. Just please don't go away forever and forget me."
But all she could do the next day was to follow Uma at a safe distance, as she had done every day for so long. Her eyes were red from her sleepless night. Behind the thin wall of her chest, her heart was pale and tired and almost still. She didn't hum. In the corridors, she didn't sniff or scratch. Her soft-footed shuffling was quick but strangely labored, as if she had a blister on the sole of one foot.
How could she ever make it up to Uma? How could she?
10. THE GOD OF GOSSIP CONQUERS THE GARDEN TEMPLE
May 4, 1980
THIS YEAR, as always, the Balakrishnans begin the preparations for their annual prayers by appointing a date, on which they settle only after their painstaking consultations of the Tamil calendar culminate in a conference with a sweating, potbellied, ash-vermilion-sandalwood-smeared priest, who licks his lips and runs a thumb down a faded chart, who hmms, who sighs eloquently, who pulls distractedly at the silver hairs on his chest. At the end of the half hour for which Mr. Balakrishnan has paid, the priest offers him a choice of three equally auspicious dates for the busing of Mrs. Balakrishnan's nephew Anand into town and the celebration of Anand's annual trance.
Anand is a holy fool, a starry-eyed savant who cannot quite count to twenty although he is easily twenty-five years old, maybe even thirty. No one really knows or cares. At twelve, he dropped out of school in his small east coast town, after six years of writing his name over and over in exquisitely curled letters on every lined sheet of examination foolscap ever handed to him. He went to work in his father's spice mill, coming home dredged in turmeric and garam masala, sneezing spicy snot all over his mother's kitchen. One morning at the mill he dropped a pair of weighing scales on his foot, fell to the floor, and lay writhing in the spice dust with his head lolling back and only the whites of his eyes showing. He spluttered the name of his dead sister, Amuda; he bawled his family's apologies for pretending she didn't exist anymore; he promised her gold hoops for her ears, a stack of bangles, and a red ribbon for her hair.
The doctors called it an epileptic fit; the family called it a trance.
Anand sucked on the Polar Mint they'd given him and reserved judgment on the incident. "Did you have any pain?" his mother asked him, slapping his cheeks lightly so he'd look at her. "No pain, isn't it? No pain no nothing. That is what I'm telling the doctor. This is not a sickness, it's a gift of the gods." By that afternoon Anand was squatting on the floor of the mill as if the seizure had never happened, scratching his backside and drawing patterns in the golden spice dust with a stick.
But every year after that, Amuda's spirit has returned to him. She foams in his mouth. She dances naked in his head, and he, unable to resist her unspoken directives, strips off his own clothes and mimics her pelvic thrusts and gyrations. She demands trinkets and sweets, and, after the first three years, has made prophecies both glorious and ominous in exchange. She clamps his tongue and throat and balls in her tight fists, and thus thrice throttled, he speaks in her puling five-year-old voice.
Anand's fame soon spread to the extended family. Uncles and aunts, cousins and in-laws made the long express-bus journey to the east coast to make him offerings and await fortune-tellings in return. But Amuda would not possess Anand on request, so these relatives often left disappointed, a dozen bangles or a jumbo pack of Sugus sweets poorer and nothing to show for it.
It was Anand's rich Ipoh uncle, Mr. Balakrishnan, who decided that with God's help, Amuda could be persuaded to make more predictable appearances. After a long and involved discussion with the potbellied priest, Mr. Balakrishnan built the garden temple, a gleaming, blue-tiled, no-expenses-spared theater for Anand. An auspicious-day auditorium. The altar shimmers gold as daylight in the dark of night, confusing small birds and insects; before it stands a highly polished coin box for people to leave monetary offerings. In a corner grotto festooned with the flower du jour, a black deity swings his sword above his head in an eternal crescent moon. This is Mathurai Veeran, who feeds on green limes (according to ancestral wisdom) and the blood of field mice (according to Suresh and Aasha, who may at one time have asked Chellam), who howls at the moon and spits yellow stars, who tears at his own skin with his fingernails and grabs at the souls of little children as they pass.
Once the garden temple was complete, Mr. Balakrishnan was accorded (as guaranteed by the potbellied priest) the rare privilege of trances on demand (and by proxy, since it's not Mr. B. who howls for laddoos and does a mean Elvis impersonation in the buff once a year on a date appointed in advance, but his wife's nephew). Anand comes to Ipoh in style, in an air-conditioned express bus from the east coast, followed by a ride to Kingfisher Lane in Mr. Balakrishnan's baby-blue Volkswagen. The uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws congregate at the Kingfisher Lane house for days before Anand's performance each year, and stay on afterwards; they sleep in the sitting room, on the kitchen floor, in corridors, on stained, sheetless mattresses and coir mats and spare rugs. Mr. and Mrs. Balakrishnan feed them all in the compound, on folding tables spread with newspaper tablecloths and banana-leaf plates. Food, lodging, and fortunes for the bargain price of fifty ringgit per family.
Appa and Amma have always attended the prayers as VIPs, free of charge. In private, though, Appa entertains the children with his reports of the festivities. "One of Balakrishnan's country cousins has been fomenting unrest among the masses," he informed them one year. "Encouraging them to ask why all they get for fifty ringgit is vendikai and kathrikai the man grows in his own garden. I heard Mrs. B. explaining that it's inauspicious to serve meat. Riles up the evil spirits something fierce. Or something to that effect."
"I have my suspicions about their auspicions," Uma had announced, quickly, eagerly. She'd been fourteen then, proud of her wordplay. Her father's daughter. And sure enough, Appa had chortled and slapped her knee. "Not bad, not bad," he'd said, even as Amma had muttered, "Tsk, don't simply-simply make fun of people. So they believe in all these prayers and spirits and whatnot, so what if it makes them happy?" But Appa and Uma had high-fived with their eyes, and Suresh had been jealous, as he'd so often been in the old days.
A week before the prayers, t
he Balakrishnans' relatives begin to arrive in rickety taxis and ramshackle vans, even a few Japanese cars and a single Volvo. (The owners of this last are not among the kitchen-floor/corridor-sleeping number, of course; they're staying with equally rich friends in Ipoh Garden.) In the Balakrishnans' driveway they disembark: shuffling grandmothers from Kedah, stylish young wives from Kuala Lumpur, a balding-yet-still-eligible bachelor from Johore Baru (who has come primarily to scout out the extended family's offerings in the potential-wife department, though he hasn't made his true purpose clear to anyone), revved-up and hopeful relatives, gossip-gravid and news-hungry relatives, relatives high with the euphoria of reunion, relatives already jealous of this cousin's new car or that one's son's straight A's, bangles jangling, tongues clucking, hair reeking of jasmine and coconut oil and Ayurvedic hair tonics, relatives swarming in from all over the country and overseas: relatives who immigrated to Australia in the '60s but happen to be in the country this year, relatives who married white people in foreign places and are home on a rare visit to their aging, disappointed parents.
"A star-studded cast as usual," Appa says, rubbing his hands in glee. "I have my suspicions about their auspicions, ohyesIdoindeed." He doesn't remember that the phrase was originally Uma's, and no one has ever reminded him.
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