Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  At least that is what Aasha believes for two days. Her rise in Uma's esteem is a physical ascent, as real as a journey in a hot air balloon. Each minute, each hour, that balloon expands and rises until, at tea-time on the second day, Aasha bobs high above the rest of the household. After fifteen minutes spent rapturously chasing the purple bubbles on the surface of her Ribena—what a delightful game, for each time her tongue is all but curled around the targeted bubble, it rolls away to the other side of the glass! Oh, what a fine, fine day this is, how good life has turned out to be! Aasha's overinflated optimism tries to engage Uma in another game, old but not forgotten.

  "Uma," she says, "which do you like better, tea or Ribena?"

  It's a game Uma invented long ago, before Aasha could talk. Perhaps she invented it for Suresh. Or perhaps Paati invented it for Uma. For whichever child and by whomever it was invented, the game remained the same until Uma stopped playing it with Aasha. It has only one rule: the tea-drinking player is to pretend they like Ribena better. And one (unstated) objective: to assuage the feelings of inadequacy experienced by the player who has to drink Ribena because they are not old enough for tea. On this exceptional day, Aasha is in fact perfectly happy to drink Ribena, is convinced it's the best drink there is, but she's willing to pretend for the sake of the game, and she's sure Uma will be too.

  In the old days, the question Aasha has just asked was Uma's cue to begin begging for the Ribena. Please, she would start out, just one little sip. I like Ribena better, but what to do? Big people have to drink tea. Pleeeease? She would squeeze tears from her eyes; she would fall to the floor; she would resort to such underhanded tactics as distracting Aasha in order to steal a sip of her Ribena.

  But today Uma hasn't heard.

  "Uma," Aasha says again, "do you like tea better or Ribena better?"

  Uma sips her tea. Her eyes flicker, but only to the face of the clock behind Aasha.

  Suresh takes a slice of cake from the cake plate and applies himself to crumbling it into a yellow pyramid on his serviette. Not a difficult task, because Lourdesmary took the easy way out this morning: this is cake from the roti man. These bloody Thulkans, Appa has oft pointed out in the past, without batting an eyelid they'll sell us cake as old as their grandmothers. He says it half admiringly, as though he wishes his own ancestors had converted to Islam and thereby laid claim to the famed frugality and business acumen of the Tamil Muslims. Suresh has inherited his admiration: as he draws out a long, oily hair from the center of his cake slice, he thinks, These Thulkans. Instead of butter they put their hair in their cake. One shot use the same coconut oil for both. But can he continue to ignore the delicate negotiations going on in front of him? Already Aasha is struggling to raise herself onto her knees, leaning forward across the table, repeating (with a soupçon of a whine behind her voice):

  "Uma, tell me. Which is better, Ribena or tea? Tea or Ribena?"

  Suresh looks up at Aasha now, his eyes flashing huge and dark, taking up all the space in the dining room, threatening to swallow her whole. Meeting those eyes, Aasha feels as though she's standing on tiptoe, craning her neck to see what lies over the edge. It could be nothing but the black sky. But it could be a return to a past that shimmers vitreous in her memory. To Old Times. Aasha closes her eyes and jumps.

  "Uma!" she shouts. "Uma, do you like TEA better or RIBENA better?" The blood rushes to her brain as she dives, and all that air in her face takes her breath away and stands her arm hairs on end. She plunges down through the dining room, spreading her fingers and toes to slow herself, screwing up her face against the sunlight, narrowly avoiding the whirling blades of the ceiling fan. Past Suresh's browful of dismay and Uma's unruffled mien, to land back in her seat just in time to hear Uma say, very softly, "Aasha, please leave me alone."

  It's cold and dark in the dining room, and the Ribena bubbles sink to the bottom of the glass like poisoned purple fish. Suresh stuffs a handful of cake crumbs into his mouth, takes a gulp of his Milo, gargles the resulting slurry, and sucks it through his teeth down into his throat.

  So Uma has gone back where she came from on the day of the library trip. Whatever took hold of her on that day—a possession as apparent to interested observers as Amuda's borrowing of Anand's body—has released her now.

  At least there's always Chellam. Or is there? For almost eight months Chellam's been not quite filling in for Uma: playing similar games in worse English, telling stories about garden pontianaks rather than about Ophelia, introducing them to Tamil cinema's best and brightest. She doesn't smell as nice as Uma—indeed, Suresh and Aasha believe her personal hygiene leaves much to be desired—but she'll do.

  Except now she's gone too. She's in her room, but gone. The evening after the ill-fated Ribena game, Aasha opens Chellam's door a crack to see her curled up stiffly in her bed, like a dead cat on the roadside. "Chellam!" she hisses. "Chellam, got Tamil song on the radio." The lump doesn't stir, then or for the remainder of the day. Aasha would've heard it if it had stirred, for she waited on the green PVC settee for a sound or a sign until Amma ordered her to go to bed.

  On the fourth day after the prayers, when Chellam gets up and gets dressed and goes about her tasks, she is no longer the same Chellam. She's turned into an echo of Uma. A diluted version, with duller skin, slumpier shoulders, and a pocked face. Nevertheless, the fact remains: eight months ago they had nothing in common but their age, and now they are alike. Their ruinous silence fills the jumbled rooms and labyrinthine corridors of the Big House; their footsteps quiet, their eyes bottomless, they fade like ghosts whenever anyone turns to look at them. Despairing of ever hearing them speak again, Aasha follows one or the other around the house for hours at a time. "Tsk, just forget it, Aasha," Suresh begs her. "Action-action only Uma and Chellam, don't want to talk to us means why should we care? Come I'll take you to the corner shop and buy you whatever you want. I got twenty sen left over from today's pocket money. Okay, don't want to go to the corner shop means come and watch CHiPs. Your favorite program, what? Oo wah, soooo handsome Erik Estrada is looking today on his motorcycle. No? Come I'll draw you a color picture of Miss Malaysia for your bedroom wall. I'll draw you a map. Russia, China, Brazil, anything you want also can."

  None of these bribes lure Aasha. Up the stairs, down the stairs, into the kitchen or the back yard or the garden, she follows Chellam and Uma in turn. Sometimes when she waits long enough she sees Uma's shadow and Chellam's escape their bodies and together dance wistful waltzes on the walls: a tall young tree shadow with spidery fingers and ravaged nails, and a tiny one, sere as a leaf in a drought, with hands skinned by years of steel wool and blue scrubbing soap. When Aasha tries to join in, though, they turn away from her and flutter, moth-like, up the wall and onto the ceiling, waltzing faster and faster around the chandeliers and fans as she lies on the floor watching them. The seam between ceiling and wall sometimes bends their shins in half when they whirl, unheeding, too close to it. It makes Aasha wince and close her eyes. What she doesn't know is that it's always Uma or Chellam who finds her in the morning, picks her up silently under the arms, and lays her on the nearest settee. Or, on rare occasions, on her bed, if her sleep is deep enough not to be disturbed by the journey up the stairs. For they fear Aasha most when she's awake; when she's asleep they sometimes allow themselves to see—in the fists that refuse to unclench, in the frowns that come and go across her sleeping face and in the tears crusted to her lashes—the waxing sorrow of her need.

  Suresh has no time for such pining; he wants to punish someone—anyone, really—for this untenable situation. Uma's out of his reach; Amma would give him a mouthslap for trying anything too funny with her; Appa's never home; and Suresh has a shred of pity left for Aasha, who has been punished enough for nothing at all. So one morning he gathers his exasperation into a ball and waits behind a corner for Chellam. "Chellam, Chellam, you want a fortune, come I tell your fortune," he offers when she passes. She doesn't seem to hear him, but he grabs her han
d and peers at it. "Wah wah!" he says. "That bloody fool Anand didn't know what he was talking about, man! It says here you'll be a shitpot carrier, but the best shitpot carrier in all the land. Then you'll be rich and you'll start an international shitpot carrying business." The thick spittle of revenge bubbles in the corners of his mouth. "Satisfied?" he says. But Chellam doesn't laugh or suck her teeth, and in the days that follow she responds to none of his attempts to provoke her, not even the old, hissed Chellamservant!

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the Balakrishnans' prayers, a minor distraction presents itself—no, to be precise, it is a distraction for some, for others a rhapsody on a terrifying theme, and for Appa an opportunity for rigorous analysis. In a low-cost flat near the Kinta River, one Shamsuddin bin Yusof is arrested for the murder of Angela Lim, a Chinese schoolgirl in Standard Four, and Appa receives a telephone call about the arrest. Just a few inconsistencies, he is told—some busybody or other claims to have seen Shamsuddin in a different part of town on the night of the murder—but otherwise the thing is certain. The police have found the chap's identity card at the scene of the crime. (It's blue, of course, for Shamsuddin is as citizen as citizen could be, a Malay, a Bumiputera, a prince made of Malaysia's own fertile earth, onto which he would gladly spill the blood the national anthem demands of him, though he hasn't yet had a chance, and seems instead—in compensation?—to have spilled the blood of a child with far less reason to feel patriotic.)

  "Sick bloody bastard," Appa says that evening. He has come home for dinner tonight, for the first time in weeks. They are eating a fine bawal kuzhambu, courtesy of Lourdesmary. Appa shakes his head and continues, "The girl was ten years old." And even Amma, who for so long has not accorded so much as a nod to Appa's attempts at conversation, shudders expressively as she lays a fish bone on the rim of her plate. Chellam, who is washing Paati's dinner plate in the English kitchen, can just barely piece together Appa's summary of the facts: Angela Lim's body uncovered at the construction site, terrible things done to her beforehand, bite marks, burn marks, a sharp piece of wood in her—

  "Please," Amma says then, "Suresh and Aasha are sitting right in front of you."

  Suresh and Aasha exhale, one in a rush, the other slowly, but Chellam does not. Death, death everywhere: as long as she doesn't meet Angela Lim's fate, perhaps she should count herself lucky to expire in an accident, or from sudden heart failure, or from unidentified chemicals in her food. Even she, imprisoned and blindfolded by her own terrors, remembers Angela Lim's face on TV when the girl first went missing a week ago. She'd rather go like the two boys who died retching after eating dried peaches three weeks before that.

  She prepares herself daily, upon waking and before falling asleep, for Death, however he might choose to dress when he comes for her.

  Time's running out for everyone: three more pages of the 1980 Perak Turf Club calendar and Uma will be gone. At night before she falls asleep (on the floor, or on the green PVC settee, or even, occasionally, in her bed), Aasha berates herself for asking the wrong question that afternoon two weeks ago. Who cares about tea and Ribena? Stupid stupid stupid. I should've asked her a real question. But maybe I can still ask her now. It's just one question. Maybe if I ask her nicely and politely when she's free—when she's not reading or doing something important—she'll answer properly. She won't be so angry then. I'm sure she'll answer. I'm sure of it.

  This is Aasha's straightforward question: Uma, you friend me or you don't friend me?

  But when she wakes up (on the green settee or in her bed, but never on the floor) to find the forgiving night gone again, and harsh daylight streaming in through the windows, she never asks.

  11. THE FINAL VISIT OF THE FLEET-FOOTED UNCLE

  January 17-March 25, 1980

  NO ONE, least of all Uncle Ballroom himself, expected him to turn up at the Big House ever again after his unceremonious expulsion two years ago. Certainly Appa's relationship with his brother had always been a precarious thing, dependent on Appa's freedom to call Uncle Ballroom a good-for-nothing to his face—and also a useless bastard, a pondan, a pansy, a mooch, a louse, and a go-go boy—and on Uncle Ballroom's willingness to swallow these gibes with a good-natured grin and even a chuckle or two.

  Uncle Ballroom's wife had left him in 1970, after they'd been married for five years, and according to Appa the blame fell squarely on Uncle Ballroom's once manly shoulders. "What woman in her right mind would want to stay with a moron like this?" Appa would say pleasantly at the tea table, passing Uncle Ballroom the biscuit plate. "Doing the lobster quadrille and the lindy hop-hoppity-hop for a living, like a bleeding poufter." But these showers of brotherly abuse had never led to all-out war, first because Uncle Ballroom was essentially a peace-loving man, second because he was perceptive enough to notice the affection—an arrogant, warped affection, but affection nevertheless—that underlay Appa's insults, and third because he was willing to withstand a certain amount of defamation in exchange for free food and lodging whenever he fell on hard times. Which he did often enough, disembarking at the gate of the Big House at least once a year from a taxi whose fare he couldn't pay. Appa was resigned to his sponging; Amma complained only behind his back; the children looked forward to his visits, for he looked them in the eye, laughed at their jokes, told them stories, and brought them the varied vestiges of his last hasty moving-out day, odds and ends most adults would never think to give a child: empty tobacco tins, anti–Vietnam War stickers well after the fall of Saigon, shoe trees, dancing figurines that had come unstuck from their trophy pedestals. And then, two years ago, Uncle Ballroom had Crossed a Line and tottered (the children had pictured him on pointe, in a leotard) towards a Slippery Slope, and Appa, sensing the precarious position of his impressionable children and the seedy world awaiting them at the bottom of that Slope, had thrown him out on his ear.

  And that, the children had believed, was that. No more teatime tales of San Francisco and New York and Vienna, no more rusty tobacco tins and bent shoe trees.

  But on an overcast Saturday afternoon in March, Uncle Ballroom boards an air-conditioned taxi whose fare he will not be able to pay, and orders the driver to head to 79 Kingfisher Lane. "The Big House," he says. "Lawyer Rajasekharan's house. You know it?"

  The driver knows it well.

  This time, in a marked deviation from his standard procedure before his falling-out with Appa, Uncle Ballroom has given the family no prior notice of his plans. Appa isn't home, and though Amma has some suspicions—thanks to Chellam's bad timing and big mouth—of where he might be, she's sitting at the Formica table, her eyes locked on the reflection of Kingfisher Lane in the glass panel of the wide-open front door. Nothing's happening on the street before Uncle Ballroom's taxi pulls up; nothing ever happens at this hour. In these hours before the downpour, every tired housewife, re-tired husband, aged parent, servant, cat, and illegal backyard chicken retreats into the shadows for a long nap. They lie down where they can, sometimes where they are: on hot and sweaty cotton sheets, on scratchy coir mats, on cool cement, on grass already arching up from the roots for the distant deluge. On and beyond their porches the hibiscus plants and rose bushes droop; even pampered indoor ferns and prized money plants acquire a wilted air that will lift only with the gathering of rainclouds.

  Uma is at a rehearsal for The Three Sisters; Suresh is at a Boy Scout meeting. Inside the Big House Paati sleeps in her chair, Chellam on the floor at her feet, and Aasha on the green PVC settee. Lourdesmary and Vellamma and Letchumi, their morning tasks done, their bellies full with the rice and sambhar lunch they ate off their special servants' plates, are indulging in a ten-minute, sitting-up doze in three shady spots in the back yard. Mat Din is drooling on a deck chair by the garden shed. Only Amma does not nod off during these dead hours.

  What holds her rapt? Is her vision, honed by years of glass-panel peering, so powerful that she can make out the indefatigable ants on Mrs. Manickam's abandoned hibiscus blossoms? Does the sight of those unruly shrubs plu
nge her back into the old jealousy she felt for Mrs. Manickam when, two years ago, that ringleted lady eloped with her government-clerk lover, thereby becoming the only woman Amma has ever known to put her own happiness before propriety? Or is Amma merely transfixed by the twitches of the dreaming cat on Mrs. Malhotra's front porch, or perversely fascinated by the subconscious workings of Baldy's right hand inside his underpants as he sleeps, in full view of anyone who cares to look, in a woven plastic chair under the margosa tree on the grass verge? Whichever it is, Amma starts when Uncle Ballroom's taxi pulls up at the gate and into her field of vision, as if someone has waved a hand before her eyes. She jumps to her feet, toppling her chair, and inside the house three pairs of eyes jolt open. Paati cries out her standard whos and whats and wheres; Chellam yawns and stretches; Aasha sits up and rubs her eyes on the green PVC settee.

  "Don't know, don't know," Chellam says to Paati. "Just someone at the gate. No need to dry your throat out shouting."

  Uncle Ballroom is at the open door by the time Amma reaches it. "Oh—it's you," she says to him. Face-to-face they stand, separated only by the spirals and curlicues of the wrought-iron grille. "Did Raju know you were coming?"

  "Er—well, no," says Uncle Ballroom. "I'm afraid—I'm afraid I didn't have the opportunity to warn him this time, heh-heh. It was—well, it was a more sudden decision than usual. But—"

  "But he—"

  "But," persists Uncle Ballroom over whatever Amma's objection might have been, "I assure you I'll stay out of your way. You'll hardly see me. I've got business in town that will occupy all my time. I'll make sure not to step on anyone's toes."