The day before the prayers, Mrs. Balakrishnan comes to the Big House to extend the formal invitation, accompanied by Kooky Rooky It's clear Kooky Rooky isn't ready to leave when Mrs. Balakrishnan is; she takes another Nestlé biscuit from the plate Amma has set out and nibbles on it with her two front teeth, turning it slowly around in both hands like a hamster. She darts Amma a shifty, sidelong glance.
"Well all right then," Mrs. Balakrishnan says. "You can stay as long as you want, Rukumani, but I got work to do. See you on Sunday, Vasanthi."
When Mrs. Balakrishnan has left, Kooky Rooky picks the crumbs from her lips and says, "Such a blessing it is for us to have Anand in the house. God's rare gift, you know?"
"I suppose so, Rukumani, why not, yes," Amma says uncertainly. She knows Kooky Rooky hasn't stayed behind just to extol Anand's virtues.
"In my family also," Kooky Rooky goes on, "we have one cousin with same type of gift. Beeeyootiful temple my Appa built for him in our hometown, you know, Auntie? Gold carvings, marble floors all. Even tourists were coming to see our temple, you know or not, Auntie? Vellakaran from England, Australia, Germany, all over the place."
On other occasions Kooky Rooky has told Amma tales of growing up on gruel and daily whippings in a Methodist orphanage in Taiping, of sharing a worm-ridden, earthen-floored hovel in Perlis with her fifteen siblings and her lowly night-soil carrier parents, of being the only daughter of a devout Catholic father, the caretaker of the grounds of St. Anne's Church in Bukit Mertajam. It's these glaring inconsistencies that earned her the evocative sobriquet, courtesy of Suresh, who sits at the table politely eating a Nestlé biscuit of his own, wearing a poker face that betrays nothing of the snort waiting, fully formed, in his nose. And it's these same inconsistencies that will limit people's sympathy for her in the months to come. "For nothing simply making up stories all the time," they'll say. "What for simply-simply lie when you have no reason? Now she knows, isn't it? God is always watching from up there. Today you steal from a beggar, tomorrow a richer man steals from you. Today you tell lies, tomorrow your husband tells you lies." In the privacy of their homes they will repeat these elementary, universal rules to themselves, as a comfort and a reminder.
But this morning the winds of the future do not rule Kooky Rooky's feathers. It's the past she's come to investigate, and once the formalities and the amuse-bouche fictions are out of the way, she turns her attention to her principal pleasure.
"Eh Auntie," she says, and her rodent's nose twitches and wrinkles and flares as her mouth opens wide for the vowels, "eh Auntie, is it true or not what I heard about your servant girl?"
Amma fidgets in her seat, torn between her reluctance to satisfy Kooky Rooky—whom she has reviled in the past as an untiring digger-up of gossip, a sniffer-out of scandal, and a feaster on other people's misfortunes—and her growing dislike of Chellam, which continues to acquire layers of varying color and density, like a rock formation: on the bottom, her diamond-hard anger at Chellam for stumbling upon secrets she has no right to discover; in the middle, her distaste for the girl's alleged dalliance with Uncle Ballroom; on top, the soft surface of everyday annoyances. It would be well within Amma's rights as lady of the house to complain to the neighbors about these last: the laziness in Chellam's very blood, the slipshod way she does her chores, her seemingly willful failure to remember Paati's daily pre-bath hot coffee. In contrast, the bottom layer, unyielding though it is, must remain hidden, for Amma knows it to be unreasonable and morally suspect: really, she shouldn't blame Chellam for her accidental discoveries (though she does, oh, how she does, and how can she help it? How could any woman withstand such a slap in the face from her own servant?). The middle layer is porous, thirsty, troubling: unappealing as Amma finds the idea of Chellam lifting her skirt for Uncle Ballroom, she's also insatiably curious about the transaction, and eager to hear other people's speculations.
True, she shouldn't encourage Kooky Rooky—look at her sitting there, rapacious, practically drooling—but for how long would Amma be able to hide the truth, anyway? Sooner or later people will find out, whether or not she says anything to Kooky Rooky today, for there has surely been some fishy business between Chellam and that good-for-nothing brother of her husband's. Really, why would a single man—a man itchy in all the wrong places and subject to the daily temptation of an eighteen-year-old maid at his mercy—bolt in the middle of the night and leave no forwarding address after staying for months? "Our upstanding uncle has once again won the top prize in his pet category," Appa said when Uncle Ballroom's sudden flight was discovered. "The Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am Waltz." In truth, it's been years since Uncle Ballroom did any waltzing at all, let alone won trophies. It's anyone's guess, though unsolicited hints will be provided for all, as to how Uncle Ballroom rewarded Chellam for her special services of extra ironing, laundry on short notice, late-night sandwiches when Uncle Ballroom stumbled in starving through the back door, and who knows what else in that room under the stairs. Two ringgit here five ringgit there he'd paid her, but perhaps he'd left her with a little something more difficult to dispose of as well. She's been looking waterlogged and puffy (at least Amma thinks so); she's been sucking on sour Chinese plums and dried ginger she must've bought with Uncle Ballroom's tips (which happen also to be the only wages her father doesn't know about and therefore doesn't seize for himself on his visits).
Amma sighs. Kooky Rooky leans forward. Suresh drags the plate of biscuits towards himself, and just as visibly as that plate moves, the balance shifts in favor of Kooky Rooky's needs.
"Oh, who knows," Amma says. "Could be true, who knows. Anything could be true, isn't it, Rukumani?"
"Yes," says Kooky Rooky. "Nowadays who knows. Nowadays people doing all type funny-funny thing. Even people from good family can go with servants. Very true."
"Nowadays anything can happen," affirms Amma.
"You think—but if she is—then what will happen, Auntie?"
"That all I don't know. That is her problem. If she doesn't tell us we can't do anything, isn't it? She made her own bed, now she can lie in it."
"But isn't that how she got herself into this mess?" Suresh says, and very quickly, because Amma's already drawing her breath in. "By lying in her bed and inviting other people to lie in it too?"
"Suresh!" says Amma. "Sitting here and listening to ladies' talk, like a pondan! What kind of man sits drinking tea and gossiping with the women, hanh? Get up and go and do your work! You're not a small boy anymore."
If he were a small boy—and how small? ten? eight? Aasha's age?—then would it be okay for him stay and discuss what Chellam's been doing in her (unmade, he would like to point out) bed? Suresh would like to know the answer to this question, but decides it's not worth Amma's wrath-for-visitors.
After he withdraws, Kooky Rooky sighs, leans back, and drags the biscuit plate back towards herself. As she nibbles on her fourth biscuit, her eyebrows rise slowly to her hairline.
"You know or not, Auntie," she says at last, "I think so it will be good if you bring Chellam also to the temple for the prayers. Sometime this type of holy man like Anand can make a person clean and pure again with his blessing. He will say some prayer over her head and she won't do that type of thing again. You agree or not, Auntie?"
Amma knows what motivates this advice: no benevolent desire to see Chellam cured of her alleged concupiscence for the good of all concerned, but an urge to get a closer look at the guilty one, the harlot herself, to study her face and hands and voice and gait for the horripilating evidence of her illicit adventure. Well, Amma says to herself, if they want to look at her, let them look in public instead of coming and sitting in my kitchen in the hope of catching a glimpse. To Kooky Rooky, she concedes: "Maybe so, maybe so. I'll ask her and see if she wants to come. Who knows whether Anand can help, but no harm trying, it's true."
That is how Kooky Rooky comes to carry a bulky load of gossip back to the Balakrishnans. Today she doesn't even give herself the time to nibbl
e through the five Nestle biscuits she normally allots herself. Stooped with the weight of her news, she scurries across the street. She kicks her slippers off at the back door and runs straight to Mrs. Balakrishnan, who is pounding onions in a mortar. "Auntie," Kooky Rooky says, "it seems the Big House servant girl and Lawyer Uncle's brother were really doing some monkey business. She was eating from his plate, he was massaging her legs. No wonder he running off in the middle of the night like that. I think so something must have happened, isn't it?"
Mrs. Balakrishnan interrupts her pounding, pestle in midair. She wipes a drop of onion-loosened phlegm off the tip of her nose with the back of her hand and says, "Tsk, Rukumani, mind your own business once in a while, can or not? What the Big House people do is not for us to worry about. They can do anything and get away with it. Today they make five servant girls pregnant, tomorrow it'll be all hush-hush. That type of filthy-rich people can cover up anything. You'll get yourself into trouble only poking your nose into their lives."
Kooky Rooky, shamefaced, slinks upstairs to find a more willing audience for her discovery, though her prickling ears have caught that word, pregnant, and held on to it. Perhaps she can interest one of the fifteen or so bored housewives from Penang and Kuantan and Singapore, currently gathered in a circle around the TV, cracking groundnut shells with their teeth and fanning themselves with palm-frond fans (if they came prepared) and folded-up pages of the New Straits Times and the Tamil Nesan (if they did not).
By the end of that week, all the housewives, all their husbands, and most of their children know the details (and possible results) of Chellam's dalliance with the ludicrous, onetime-ballroom-dancer brother of Lawyer Rajasekharan across the street. Each behind the other's back, Mrs. B. and Kooky Rooky have been elaborating on the spare tale (which may be summarized as: Nowadays Anything Can Happen). In front of each other they've been stringing jasmine blossoms and marigolds and limes into garlands for the idols in the temple; they've been stirring milk and ghee in vats over coal fires to produce enough sweetmeats for three hundred guests; they've been laying out banana-leaf plates on the floor in never-ending rows—kitchen to sitting room, sitting room to porch—to feed the children in shifts at every meal while the adults eat at folding tables outside.
Not long after Anand disembarks like a statesman from the Volkswagen to be garlanded immediately by five different women (two marigold garlands, two jasmine, one mixed), he, too, hears about the dirty business between the skinny servant girl across the street and Lawyer Uncle's black-sheep brother. It doesn't take long for him to piece together, before he ever lays eyes on her, the star of the snatches of gossip that flutter around his ears and the snippets that fall at his feet. What he fashions out of them is not a quilt, not a collage, but an unambiguous portrait with an equally unambiguous caption. Chellam is evil incarnate. Chellam is a whore, a dirty girl, an itchy woman. Chellam might be carrying a bastard child in her belly. He's sure he won't like her when he sees her.
He may be five foot ten, the tallest of his many cousins; he may have hair on his chest and even a single silver hair on his head that no one has discovered yet, but Anand has a mind eager for cartoon heroes and villains. Without his clean distinctions he would not be able to function; if someone came to him now (a necessarily hypothetical soul, for no person truly exists who can see or say all this clearly) and said, "Look, this servant girl, she's not all bad; she was kind to those lonely children when they needed her; she took them by the hands their oldest-eldest sister had left dangling and taught them useful tips they'll never forget. And listen, she tried to do a good job with the old lady in the beginning, but who would keep doing a good job when their wages were going towards their father's toddy shop bills, and who wouldn't—" Well, if someone had said all this to Anand, he would've plugged his ears with his pointer fingers and recited his Tamil alphabet at the top of his voice, or buried his face in one of the plump pillows on the king-size bed he's been given in the Balakrishnans' house and covered his head with the other, because he doesn't want or need such complications in his universe, and his delicate constitution is simply not up to them.
For three days, while Mrs. Balakrishnan hand-feeds him extrasweet neyyi urundai and jelebi and coconut-milk appams with egg in the batter for extra-crispy crusts, Anand feeds his hatred for the unseen servant girl with the extra-sweet gossip his sticking-out ears detect. Rubber-estate girl, he thinks, taking entirely too much pride in this contemptuous formulation, for not only is it a hackneyed insult (visit any school playground, Anand; listen to what rich girls call poor girls on the bus; ask anyone to caption a picture of a young woman with coconut-oiled plaits and unfashionable polyester clothes), it's been silently lobbed at Chellam before, by minds much younger than his just across the street. Tapper's daughter, Anand adds with some satisfaction. Doing shameful frontside-backside games with old men. Because Anand, though celibate by default (who would marry a primary school dropout who froths at the mouth and strips naked in public once a year on a preappointed date?), once caught a glimpse of a pirated porn film his father was watching while his mother was out visiting relatives, and that blurred, flickering image of frontsides and backsides continues to inform his perception of Things Bad Women Do with Bad Men.
THE ONLY TRUE MIRACLE that occurs on the day of the Balakrishnans' prayers goes unnoticed by Anand's captive audience. In fact, it begins before his performance, at ten in the morning, when Appa is reading his morning paper at the breakfast table, Aasha is reading the purloined comics section in the sitting room, and Amma has just informed Chellam that she is invited to the extravaganza across the street.
"Really, Maddam?" Chellam is saying. "Really I can come?" And her eyes flash, for all week she has smelled the ghee sweets frying at the Balakrishnans', and this morning she saw young girls in bright pavadais rushing about with trays of flowers and bananas and coconuts and betel leaves. Just like a wedding it looks to be, and it's been years since Chellam has attended anything resembling a wedding. Added to the promise of ghee sweets and front-yard feasting under a tent is the peculiar allure of Anand's gifts. Perhaps he will predict her own future, if there's time, if the lines aren't too long and the crowds not too vicious, if they let her near him...
"Thank you Maddam thank you," she says. "I bathe and put on my saree and come."
No sooner has she spoken these words than Uma descends the staircase, her hair pinned up, her school bag slung on her shoulder. In the kitchen doorway, she brushes past Amma and Chellam to get herself a glass of water.
"What are you doing, Uma?" Amma smiles almost encouragingly, as if she were asking the question of a child whose crayon drawing she can't interpret.
Uma drinks her water first, the whole glassful in one gulp, then puts the glass in the sink. "I'm going out," she says. She folds her arms and looks at Amma.
"Going out? But Chellam is coming to the temple prayers, and Suresh has gone fishing with Surgeon Jeganathan and his son. Aasha and Paati can't be left alone at home all day."
"You'll only be across the street," Uma says. "You'll see if the house is burning down."
In the sitting room Aasha pouts at Alley Oop's antics. If the house is burning down. Uma says it without batting an eyelid, just like that, like she's talking about something she saw on the evening news. Is she imagining it as she stands there with that half-smile of hers? Is she picturing Aasha cornered by the building-high flames, small and scared at an upstairs window? Is she thinking, Good riddance?
"It's not a question of fires and landslides and floods," Amma says. "Chellam can check on Paati every half an hour to take her to the toilet, no problem. Paati just sleeps all day anyway. But one doesn't leave a six-year-old child on their own in the house. What if—"
"Then," Uma says, "ask Aasha to come with me. I have to go to the library. My books are already overdue. She's old enough to walk to the bus stop with me."
At this, Amma looks at Appa, who fails to emerge from behind his newspaper. She looks at Um
a, who waits, arms still folded, and at Chellam, who has busied herself with peeling the onions for Paati's lunchtime upma in order to stay out of these delicate negotiations. No one will acknowledge the miracle that has just taken place, no one but Aasha, who acknowledges it silently but intensely, in communion with Alley Oop, Dagwood Bumstead, and Brenda Starr. How many times, Aasha asks them, has Uma said Aasha since—since she stopped friending me?
Brenda Starr, reporter extraordinaire, has the honest, unsensationalized answer: Probably less than three.
And how many times has she taken me anywhere on the town bus with her?
Alley Oop, caveman that he is, is brutish, merciless, and quick: None. Zero, kiddo.
In the kitchen doorway Amma, a little breathless, says, "Well, I suppose..."
"I can't be waiting all morning," Uma says. "Aasha! Come then. Put on your shoes."
And that is how the greatest miracle of the year unfolds, hours before Amuda-the-unappeased stakes her scheduled claim over her brother's underused body. No law of nature or history can explain the practiced ease with which Uma takes Aasha's hand as they walk down the long driveway, nor why it feels so natural to Uma, yet tingles the skin of Aasha's neck and arms (those stubborn rashes that never quite surrender!), presses her lips together in a solemn line, and sets her heart a-racing so fast it precedes her down Kingfisher Lane, a small red thing tumbling over itself two feet in front of them, tripping on pebbles and rocks and leaves, each of its dull thuds begging Please don't step on me please please be careful please. And here is additional proof of the supernatural forces governing the universe this bountiful morning: though Uma neither sees nor hears Aasha's sparrow-sized heart, her feet just miss it with each step. Just barely.
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