THE LONGER HE STAYS at the Big House, the more care Uncle Ballroom takes to avoid his brother: Raju is bubbling, threatening to boil over each time his wife fans her fires, and Uncle Ballroom wants nothing to do with the trouble that is surely coming. Already Vasanthi's been trying to sweep him into the imbroglio:
"It's because your brother's here, isn't it, that you're coming home every night like a good boy? Want to show him what a family man you are?" she says to her husband every other morning. Then she turns to Uncle Ballroom: "Why don't you ask him, Balu, what his schedule is like when you're not here? Where he goes and what he does when he doesn't have to come home to put on a grand show for you?"
In response to these instigations, Uncle Ballroom merely smiles wanly and withdraws at the earliest opportunity.
Quietly, unobtrusively, he also tries to insulate Chellam from the ill winds blowing against her, for not only is the children's chumminess as patchy and expedient as it ever was (lush on lonely afternoons, thin as orphanage gruel after each of Amma's inquisitions on the matter of Appa's whereabouts and whatabouts), Appa's been eyeing her unkindly too. "Good work, Vasanthi," he says whenever Amma raises the subject, but it's at Chellam he looks when he speaks, not at his wife. "It's a rare flash of brilliance you've had, sending the girl to shadow me. Why don't you draw up a roster for all the servants and gather the whole coterie for a secret meeting every Monday morning?"
Uncle Ballroom should've known that the ratted-on naturally long to rat on others. That this law applies not only to children caught misbehaving but to grown men made to feel small. Appa might be a rich Lawyer-Saar with a leather-bound vocabulary, but humiliated in front of his too-wise children and his born-loser brother, he growls and paces. He prowls and snaps. He waits to pounce. Who will it be? Lourdesmary, cooking the tenggiri fish the wrong way? Mat Din, trying to cover up a tiny scratch caused by his careless washing of the Volvo? No, Lourdesmary's rubbing chili powder into the tenggiri to fry it just the way Appa likes it; the Volvo's perfect paintwork gleams in the setting sun as Mat Din waters his bougainvillea plants. Appa climbs the stairs, his skin itchy with sweat and rancor, yearning for a cold shower—and there, in the corridor leading to the upstairs bathroom, he sees a tableau that both satisfies and sickens him: Uncle Ballroom, shirt unbuttoned, forcing a red banknote into Chellam's right hand, the two of them stuttering extravagant thank-yous: "Thank you, my dear girl, so sorry to take advantage of you like this." "Thankyou MasterBallroomthankyou."
Appa catches Uncle Ballroom's eye, and Chellam, seeing Uncle Ballroom look past her, turns around to see Appa. Appa says nothing for now; good enough for him that he's caught them in the after-act. (And what a juicy after-act! He never suspected—but then, he tells himself, there's so much one doesn't suspect when one is hardly home.) Chellam! he thinks. How perfect! Maybe now you'll think twice about tattling, eh? Because I've got tales of my own now, don't I?
It doesn't occur to Chellam that this hurried transaction could look like anything other than what it is: a man rewarding a servant for ironing his shirt. She hides the money behind her back, fearing she's in trouble for doing work for other people behind Amma's back, for stealing time away from Paati's One Hundred Percent.
But Uncle Ballroom's heart sinks. He contemplates packing his bags and leaving that very night, because who knows what his brother's cooking up, or how he will manage to drag the hapless Ballroom Balu and the petrified Chellamservant into the internecine struggles of his household?
So Uncle Ballroom begins to leave the house earlier still, before Lourdesmary even arrives on her bicycle to put the teakettle on and boil the eggs; he returns each night long after everyone's in bed. And it's this unwarranted sneaking and skulking, in the end, that paradoxically lands him in the hot water he knows so well from his previous visit.
Climbing the stairs at two o'clock in the morning on the twenty-fifth of March (having spent four hours on a bench in the bus station, chatting with vagrants to pass the time until it was safe to go home), Uncle Ballroom walks straight into Appa's shadowy form. They stand at the top of the stairs, just outside Uma's room, blinking at each other in the dark for a long while before Appa speaks.
"What were you doing downstairs all this time?" he asks.
"I ... actually I just got back. I was—"
"Hah! Hoping to catch rats in the dark? Staying up to commune with the undead?"
"I've been out this whole time." Uncle Ballroom's lips and tongue feel suddenly and oddly thick to him, as though he's been drinking all night or sucking on ice. His speech is slow, the words like cotton in his mouth.
"Well, if you don't mind," Appa says, already pushing past his brother, "I'd like to go downstairs and get my glass of water."
Uncle Ballroom moves aside to let him pass.
At the bottom of the staircase, Appa turns around to see Uncle Ballroom still standing there, as he expected. "If you must know," Appa says, "I'm sleeping upstairs in the music room tonight because the air conditioner in my study is giving trouble."
Without a word, Uncle Ballroom goes into the upstairs bathroom. There he waits, running his fingers along the edge of the sink, rubbing at spots on the taps. After a minute or two, he hears Appa come up the stairs, walk briskly up the corridor, and on towards the music room. A door opens and closes. He really is sleeping in there, thinks Uncle Ballroom. But now he reckons I'm here to—He breathes hard onto the mirror, making a perfect circle of mist the size of his face. Then he brushes his teeth and goes to his room.
When he doesn't appear downstairs the next morning, a hesitant Chellam opens the guest room door a crack to find the bed impeccably made, the almirah door ajar, and the windows flung wide open. A fresh breeze wafts across the room to tingle her bare arms; the cornflower-blue curtains softly billow. The air smells of wet grass and starched cotton. Did Uncle Ballroom squeeze out the window onto the awning and then throw himself onto the frangipani tree or shimmy down the drainpipe? Did he let himself down with a rope of bedsheets filched from the linen closet? Chellam cannot imagine how he left without waking anyone, but:
"Maddam, Master Ballroom gone," she announces downstairs.
They follow her upstairs. Appa opens the dresser drawers in the empty room, peers into the almirah, looks out the window. "No note," he says. "Nothing." He turns to Amma with a tight smile. "Want to know what I think? I think Big Ballroom Balu was just not big enough to face his own music, that's all. I saw a few things I kept to myself, but now I better tell you. He was slipping her money behind our backs as if this house were a cheap brothel—a fellow who couldn't even pay for his taxi when he came. I mean, what do you think he was paying her off for?" When Amma says nothing, he answers his own question: "For the privilege of banging her right under our own roof, that's what. In front of our children."
Amma wants to say something clever about all the things that happen in front of and behind and around the children, and how they must certainly be used to it by now, but her ears and cheeks are burning from the word banging—its immediacy, its aptness, the precision with which it evokes the worst aspects of this hypothetical union, thighs banging thighs, chest banging chest, banging, bouncing, slapping—when Appa puts yet another question to her. "I'm sure he tried to buy Chellam's silence," he says, "and then got frightened she'd squeal anyway. But what do you plan to do, dear wife, if the girl's with child? Have her whelp in the garden shed and then hire the child as a shoe polisher when he turns three? I mean, really, what'll you do if she gives birth in this house?"
"Don't be silly," Amma says. "It won't come to that." But already Appa can see the shadow of worry under her eyes. Well, he says to himself, Chellam may or may not be. If she is—well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The problem will take care of itself. At least now I have one less busybody breathing down my neck.
Miles away, in a seedy boarding house above a massage parlor, Uncle Ballroom watches cobwebs—one, two, three, four—turn with the blades of the ceiling fan above
his bed. His one regret is not having the chance to slip Chellam thirty or forty ringgit before leaving. But never mind, he tells himself, at least I did what I could for her. I didn't fail her the way I failed others.
He doesn't know about Shamsuddin bin Yusof, whose arrest later this week he could have prevented by keeping his eyes peeled on the number 22 bus, or about Angela Lim, over whose rosebud mouth a hard, hairy hand is clamping this very minute at a construction site in Ipoh's Old Town. Gagged and bound and terrified, Angela arches her back to look her attacker in the face. Arrows of recognition shoot from her eyes and ears to shower impotently on the ground around her. You, you, you!
He's nothing like Shamsuddin bin Yusof, this boy: he's tall and impressively muscled, he's Chinese, he's unafraid. He's her youngest paternal uncle, who's been extorting cash from his brother for his gang boss, on which payments her hapless father has defaulted one too many times. As he leaves the construction site, he pulls out of his pocket Shamsuddin bin Yusof's blue identity card (which was smoothly passed to him by the gang boss's bus-riding henchman at a lou shi fun stall this morning) and lets it fall from between his thumb and index finger onto the dusty ground.
By the time Angela Lim's muscly uncle is burning his blood-soaked clothes in a big bonfire in Buntong, Angela has only fish-life left to her, as the Malay expression goes—indeed, as the unsuspecting Sham-suddin, who is blithely buying a kati of rambutans at a roadside stall in Kampung Manjoi, might say—not death, not true life, but the twitches and squirms in between.
On Kingfisher Lane, the Big House has begun to whisper, then hiss, then snarl Chellam's name from its many corners. Dirty Chellam, shameless Chellam! Across the street, Mrs. Balakrishnan's already brewing hypotheses on her stove along with pacchapairu kanji for tea.
In the days following Uncle Ballroom's departure, Chellam sits quietly inside herself. She naps on the floor beside Paati's rattan chair when Paati dozes off in the afternoons; she buys sour Chinese plums and red ginger from the corner shop and sucks them surreptitiously as she goes about her work. She may as well enjoy these small pleasures: Uncle Ballroom didn't stay long enough to make a real difference to the Spectacles Account, and as Chellam judges by the tenor of the household since he left (now the other servants and the children are hissing and whispering her name too, and she's not oblivious to the quick silences that follow her entrance into a room, or to the needle-sharp looks of the neighbors), no one's going to help her hang on to the little money he did leave her. No one's on her side, and next month her father will turn up, as usual, like a pye-dog sniffing cooked mutton. She figures she has a month to use up her paltry funds on plums and ginger.
Each time Chellam goes to the corner shop to buy them, Mrs. Balakrishnan notes her movements, and Amma verifies the prevailing theory anew with a quick, unseen glance at her purchases.
A craving for sour plums and red ginger can mean only one thing.
"No shame in her," Mrs. Balakrishnan says. And, with a sigh, "We simply can't trust these girls these days. They learn all this from modern films and TV and they think they can do the same thing."
"In that case," Amma says one afternoon, "hadn't I better take her to see a doctor?"
"Don't bother," Mrs. Balakrishnan says. "This type of people got their own way of taking care of all this. She will find her own medicine. All the time she picks funny-funny leaves and weeds from your garden, isn't it? Now she can pick what she needs."
This prospect temporarily mollifies Amma. Yet contrary to Mrs. B.'s hypothesis, Chellam seems to have lost the foraging habits she had when she first came to the Big House. Though Amma expects to find her stewing leaves and seeds and sticks in a pot any day now, she hardly goes out to the garden anymore.
"She's scared to go outside," Suresh remarked to Aasha. "Remember she told us there was a pontianak spirit in the shed, waiting to drink pregnant women's blood? Now she herself better avoid the shed."
But is Chellam's belly growing or isn't it? It's hard to tell; these rubber-estate women's babies are usually tiny. Even six months pregnant, they barely show under their sarees. No matter. If and when she starts to swell, she'll be sent back to her village before the shame settles on the roof and awnings of the Big House, and there she'll have her bastard child: a tiny ballroom dancer with creases in the back of its neck, tangoing and foxtrotting its way through life with a tin cup held out to passersby.
12. THE UNLUCKY REVELATION OF CHELLAM NEWSERVANT
December 8, 1979
CHELLAM HAS BEEN at the Big House for almost three months. Into Uma's vacated shoes she has slipped her leaf-narrow feet, and though those shoes are three sizes too big for her, Suresh and Aasha have reconciled themselves to making do. After all, Chellam is better than nothing. Over the past three months, in return for the privilege of Uma's shoes, she has introduced them to many novel wonders. To wit:
— The use of tamarind seeds for backyard games, collected in their pods from under the tree, stripped of their pulp, washed, and dried on a windowsill.
— The little black balls that could be rolled from the paste of sweat and grime that came off their skin when they'd been playing in the sun.
— The white threads of grease that spiraled out of her pores like butter icing from a hundred tiny pastry bags when she squeezed the skin on her nose.
— The singular ability of cats' penises to retreat and hide like turtle heads when poked with lidi sticks.
— The whole bejeweled, mustachioed pantheon of Tamil filmland. Movie gods leer from Chellam's walls in the room under the stairs: Kamal Haasan and Jayasudha, Sridevi and Rajnikanth, lushly fore-locked and lubricious as lorry drivers. "Oh boy," Appa said when he first caught sight of this glossy shrine (courtesy of Movieland and Tamil Film News), "I fear our bonny young village lass is waiting for Rajnikanth to sweep her away on his white stallion. Ah, Chellam, Chellam, combing out your long hair in the back yard, gazing into the twilight, how keenly you feel it. 'Even noon is evening to she who waits,' eh?"
"Chellam, you think Rajnikanth is your lover, is it?" Suresh demanded to know. "Your love-love-loverboy? He gonna come and rescue you on a white horse? Hanh? Rescue you from our house?"
Chellam didn't understand the question, but she sucked her teeth at him, called him a useless boy, and gave him one of her long, grinning frowns as he and Appa looked at each other and laughed.
Like an aborigine showing new settlers the tricks of her land, she has shared with Suresh and Aasha glittering scraps of wisdom retained from a village childhood beset with unseen dangers:
If you lie on your stomach with your legs in the air, your mother will die.
If you rest your head on your hand at the dining table, you'll have no food next time.
Which time is next time?
Not dinner tonight.
Not lunch tomorrow.
Next time might be months away, but you'll have no food.
A pontianak spirit lives in the garden shed, waiting to drink the blood of pregnant women.
"But Chellam," Suresh says to this, "she better go somewhere else! She'll be thirsty. We don't even know any pregnant women."
"But better you watch out," Chellam insists with some self-satisfaction. "If any pregnant women coming you better faster-faster tell she don't go near the shed. Like that only they found one Malay lady in Kuala Kangsar, you don't know ah? When she going to toilet, you know isn't it the kampung toilet will be so far away outside? That time only the pontianak jump on her and suck all her blood and leave her body like chappai like that, nothing inside. Like the murunggakai when you chew and spit, puh puh, like that she was."
They are not to eat in the dark anymore, or hungry ghosts will eat from their plates.
Aasha likes that idea, though. A circle of ghosts nibbling from her plate, like fish around a sunken bread crust, their ghostly lips and cheeks and maws working busily. She will save the best bits for Mr. McDougall's daughter: the fish roe, the fried-chicken skin, the chicken heart. That is how A
asha will entice her back, for Mr. McDougall's daughter has not been seen since she and Aasha had a certain charged disagreement (which might be interpreted as having been, at least indirectly, Chellam's fault) in the downstairs bathroom. Aasha misses their chats more than she cares to admit to herself.
"What if you like them there, Chellam?" she asks now. "What if you like having the ghosts there?"
"Chhi!" Chellam scolds. "You crazy! You know what happened to one girl in my village? You want to know?"
"What?" they demand, consumed equally by defiance and curiosity.
"Every day the ghost eating her food until she so thin, all the doctor all don't know what to do also. Until he cannot stand cannot walk nothing. Until today she still like that, her mother only must wash her backside, bathe her, feed her."
"Then why when she started to get a bit thin her mother didn't make her eat with the lights on?"
"My village got no light all."
"Then eat outside lah! Eat outside at six o'clock, can what?"
"That all I don't know. You don't try to be too clever. You listen to me and switch on the light properly to eat your dinner."
Chellamservant! they hiss when she thrusts superstitions too audacious or untenable under their noses. Action-action only, making like a real oldest-eldest when she was just a servant girl.
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