Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  "I'll tell your Amma," she threatens obligingly, to which, in unison, they always answer, "Tell lah!" But she never does.

  Although Amma regularly emphasizes that Chellam's Sole Undertaking is to look after Paati, Chellam sometimes cooks, too. "Every day–every day I cannot eat mutton-chicken curry," she says. "After I falling sick, then how?" For even after all these years in service, her digestion rebels against the rich diets of her bigshot bosses, requiring her to forage in their gardens for ingredients for her stewpot: dark leathery leaves, green bananas, banana flowers. She drains the water from rice on the stove and drinks it with a pinch of salt. She boils cem-pedak seeds and munches on them as if they were apples. She fries rice with mustard seeds and dried chilies and eats it plain, without any curry. On Lourdesmary's days off, she offers her poor man's lunches to the children when Amma isn't watching. "Not bad, this new servant," Appa says when he learns of this. "Two for the price of one. Zookeeper and assistant chef. Nothing like a bargain. Your mother would be quite happy with herself if she knew."

  For her intimate knowledge of human secretions and animal genitals, for her wide flashing eyes when she describes the disparate desires of ghosts, for her unlimited stores of arcane information, the children love her. It is a guilty, flickering love, one they will never admit out loud, but love nevertheless, tinged with respect for her witchy aura (the foraging, the plant-plucking, the pot-stirring, the warnings: don't these demand their respect?).

  And yet, at times, they hate her, with the primitive hatred of children for creatures weaker than themselves. They hate her coconut hair oil and her hairy armpits and her crushes on fat Tamil actors with moles; they hate her broken English, to which they sometimes stoop in mockery; they hate her T-shirts that came free with Horlicks and Kandos chocolates. They hate all the evidence of her rubber-estate tastes: the shiny polyester blouse she wears to run errands in town, the gaudy flowers she puts in her hair before going out, the chipped, pillar-box-red Cutex on her fingernails. And they hate her dirty habits: the yellow crotch stains on her underwear on the clothesline, the wiry, too-curly black hairs stuck to her soap bar. "Eee," Suresh says when he points these out to Aasha, "you know where these come from or not?" Aasha, though she didn't know before, knows now, suddenly and surely, without needing three guesses. Then one afternoon they catch Chellam stealthily picking her nose with her pillar-box-red nails. "Not red-handed but snot-fingered," whispers Suresh to Aasha, but Chellam doesn't know she's been caught. She wipes her fingers behind the sitting room settee and under the side table before pulling a hairpin from her head and running it under the fingernails to dislodge crescents of dirt that fall onto the white marble floor. "Ee-yer," Suresh whispers, "now just see, she's going to go and mix Paati's rice and paruppu curry with her hands. A real estate-woman she is." And later, a rhapsodic improvisation on Chellam's dubious origins burgeons between Suresh's ears: Estate-prostate-prostitate-prostitute! Estate prostitute with brothel fingernails!

  But more than any of these, they hate her father, who is a useless, drooling, toddy-drunk porukki bastard; who sits on their culvert and carries on and makes all the neighbors peer through their windows; who is proof of Chellam's dubious origins and the regrettable traits that are In Her Blood.

  On Chellam's third payday, her father arrives at the Big House as he did in October and November. Chellam is combing Paati's hair with her mother-of-pearl comb. The lump in the corner of her jaw is already there, throbbing like a tree lizard's green throat, but it's still small, not yet engorged by public humiliations and tragic prophecies.

  Outside, her father pops imaginary rice-and-sambar balls into his open mouth and loudly bemoans the plight of his six other children at home. His teats sag like a stray dog's; his grey heels are cracked and calloused.

  Trap him in a hole and block off the entrance with a stone, Suresh thinks.

  Crush him like an insect, krik krik krak.

  "What d'you think he smells like?" asks Aasha. "I mean if you stand near him?"

  "Catshit," says Suresh. "Clogged drains. Bus station toilets."

  "Simply-simply shouting like a—like a—"

  "Like a baboon," says Suresh.

  Then, from her seat at the Formica table, Amma calls out for the benefit of the whole household: "Oh God, it's him again! Our hero. The great Mr. Muniandy. Suresh, tell Lourdesmary to take him his monthly breakfast. Thirty days a month he has a liquid breakfast, one day he eats bread and jam. No wonder he has Twiggy's figure."

  Muniandy gets his once-a-month solid breakfast thanks to two factors: Amma's unflinching knowledge that the watchers-from-windows would cluck and shake their heads at any lapse in the Big House's kindness to poor men and beggar men (So much money also they can be so stingy! Five cents is as big as a bullock-cart wheel for them!), and Lourdesmary's conviction that taking a beggar's bread and jam to him is the quickest and simplest of ways to propitiate the Lord. For in September, when Chellam first arrived at the Big House, the limestone caves that could be seen from the front gate had collapsed while Lourdesmary was bicycling to work. Lourdesmary had lived in one of those caves, and when they heaved and crumpled they buried her out-of-work husband, her eight children, and a hundred other squatter families. There were cries from under the rubble for days, but no one was saved. When the New Straits Times reporter came to interview her about the incident, Lourdesmary ticked the names of her eight children off on her fingers, one by one, as if they were items on a shopping list.

  "Poor bastards," Appa said. "The government only helps those who help themselves. God himself is up there taking bribes."

  Lourdesmary skipped one day of work for her family's mass funeral; after that she bicycled to the Big House every morning at six-thirty, as usual. Once a month she takes Muniandy his bread and jam to help herself by bribing God. The plate on which this breakfast is served, along with the tumbler that holds Muniandy's Nescafé, are from an outdoor shelf designated for the servants' plates and cups in 1963, when Letchumi and Vellamma were first hired. The bread and jam are, respectively, two slices from a Paris Bakery sandwich loaf and some Yeo Hiap Seng pineapple jam, both purchased solely for the consumption of the servants and Muniandy. But Lourdesmary believes the offering to be sufficient to stave off crippling bicycle accidents, stomach cancer, blindness, and other ills, and Amma doubts that Mrs. Balakrishnan can tell, through her curtains across the street, that they don't feed Muniandy Sunshine bread.

  Chellam's father's breakfast fortifies him for a still more impassioned performance. He wails so mightily that Suresh and Aasha can see the soggy bread bits clinging to his tongue; he pulls his hair and beats his chest.

  In Paati's corner, Chellam's hard hands keep themselves busy with Paati's comb.

  "Chari, enna?" Appa says when Muniandy's lament has gone on for a good ten minutes (not including breakfast). He stands at the other end of the corridor, waiting to see if Chellam has a plan of action. "Will you go out and talk to him or shall I send him away as usual?"

  "No," Chellam says. "I'm not going, Master." Not since her father's first visit to the Big House has she braved a face-to-face meeting with him. She'd known he'd turn up on her first payday; of course Mr. No-Balls Dwivedi would pass on her new employer's address to her father without a moment of hesitation. Appa, at least, made a token attempt to shoo him away on that first day. "Get lost!" he'd shouted from inside the house. "Go away! We don't need your nonsense here." But her father had moaned and carried on and subjected them all to his keening and skirling, and finally her new master had sent her out to deal with her father. "Pathinelu vaisu," her father had said over and over, slapping her mouth each time he confirmed her age: seventeen years old. And still so worthless as to try to keep your wages from her old father. When at last he'd released her shoulder, she'd run in to get the money from Appa. And when her father had left, fifty ring-git richer, she'd run to her room and crossed out the first row of her Spectacles Account with a dry, scratchy pen. Master Gave zero ring-git, nothing,
nothing at all; total Things I Bought, also zero. No kacang puteh, no boiled peanuts, no red ginger from the corner shop. Once, twice, thrice she'd crossed the row out, and then, determined to erase all evidence of this fruitless month, she'd gone over her three neat lines in loops and spirals, in lightning zigs and spiky zags, the dried-out nib loudly abrading the paper and finally tearing through it so that a few scratches marked the page underneath.

  For the next thirty days she'd consoled herself with a fresh plan: she'd refuse to go to her father when he came back. Nothing doing, she'd say. She didn't think Amma capable of the extremes to which Mrs. Dwivedi, in her pink silk and wrist-to-elbow bangles, had sometimes gone: grabbing Chellam by the hair, yanking her towards the door, screaming that she was not to come back into the house until she'd got rid of her father. This new maddam was too limp and empty and tired to turn herself into such a shrewing, frothing whirligig, and as for Master, Chellam had not, until then, seen him in anything but a good humor.

  Chellam had guessed correctly that Amma hadn't the personality for hair-yanking and full-blast cursing, and that Appa preferred almost anything to a scene, but she hadn't considered alternate methods of avoiding a scene, so when—on the first Saturday of November—Appa patted his front shirt pocket and said, evenly, "Well, if you're not going to give him the money, I'll do it myself," a shard of disappointment like a chicken-bone splinter caught in her throat. For a month, she's tried to ignore it every time she swallows. Master won't do the same thing every month, she's told herself. He won't stand for it.

  Now her hands tug Paati's comb through her wispy hair as if it were a mass of tough tangles. Paati's eyebrows arch to meet her hairline, and her head jerks sharply back and forth, as if at any moment it might fall off and roll under the crockery cupboard, where it will shrivel up and turn into Yardley lavender-scented brown dust (all except for the eyes, which will lie like lost marbles under the cupboard, emitting an eerie light after everyone goes to bed at night).

  "Well, if you don't want to talk to your father...," says Appa. He pulls a wad of red banknotes out of his shirt pocket. "This month's wages," he says. "Do you want to give it to him yourself, or shall I?"

  "I'm not going, Master," says Chellam again, and the teeth of Paati's comb scrape her bone-dry scalp audibly, leaving white tracks.

  Three stray hairs float free and catch on the loose strips of rattan on the back of the chair, where they will stay until Paati herself has gone up in flames and returned to hunger, hollow and transparent, for teatime treats. Until Uma's backyard fire singes them, they will retain their substance, weight, and shadow.

  "Aiyo, Enna?" Paati fusses. "What are you simply-simply pulling my hair for?"

  At the front gate, Appa's voice is like a pair of scissors on smooth cloth, snip-snip-snip-snip, a voice he reserves for all the undesirables of this world, the theatrical tramps, the limping armies who offer unwanted parking assistance outside his office, the glib urchins who rush towards his already clean windscreen with wet rags. But Chellam's father isn't picky about delivery. He takes the wad of red notes with both hands and feels its weight course through him like a puff of bhang. Fifty dollars. More than fifty bottles of samsu. He's not as slow as he makes himself out to be, and already the effects of the morning's bibulous binge have begun to wear off, leaving him lean and ravenous, ready to kill a goat with his bare hands, father five more sons, swim the length of the Kinta River. He clasps his hands to his forehead and bows his head in prayer like a man before a temple flame. He falls at Appa's feet.

  "Chhi! Useless feller!" Appa turns and marches back to the house, his checkered sarong swishing. But the real source of his disgust isn't the knowledge that the wife and six children Muniandy invokes each month see nothing of this money (not a sniff, not a glimpse of the king's fleshy profile), or even a vicarious frustration with Chellam's situation (length of service up to now: three months; payment received: m$o). No, what repulses him is the man's obsequiousness: that's the ultimate insult to these pariahs, he thinks, not to let them kiss your bloody feet. Feeding on pity and debasing themselves as if it were some form of compensation. For fifty dollars a man like that will kiss your feet, lick your balls, swim through shit, whatever he thinks you want to see. Why can't these people have a little dignity? It's they themselves who perpetuate all the bloody problems—class, caste, you name it, they're the ones clinging to all that nonsense because all they know is begging. The more time you spend with them the more you start to see them as animals because that's what they want. In the end it's better to close your eyes and pretend they don't exist. Appa shudders and steps into the shower to cleanse himself of his contact with the world's filth, and unseen, Suresh and Aasha shudder and rub Muniandy's latest visit off their arms.

  Outside the gate, Muniandy is gathering himself to go, counting the bills, steadying himself on his feet, steeling himself for the short walk to the main road bus stop. But today, much to Suresh's dismay, Amma will drag out his visit and force Suresh to walk all the way down the driveway to look at his face and talk to him.

  With a start that topples her chair backwards, Amma shoots up from her seat at the Formica table. "Eh, eh, eh," she says, "I forgot lah, I meant to give the man that bundle in the shed this month. Chellam has enough shirts already, and Mat Din says the trousers are too big for him now. What'll we do with all those clothes? Suresh, go," she continues, her voice rising with the urgency of the moment, "hurry up and get that bundle in the shed and give it to him across the gate."

  Suresh feels his bottom sink stubbornly into his seat. "But Amma—" he begins.

  "Tsk, no ifsandsorbuts," she snaps. "What is all this answering back? For a small thing like this also too shy or what?"

  "I don't want to talk to Muniandy."

  "Ohoho! You think you are some fine high-class Englishman, is it? You'll catch some disease just by talking to him across the gate? Hanh? Just because the man isn't dressed in bestquality courthouse clothes like your father doesn't mean he's not a human being, okay? Just because he's poor doesn't mean he's a dog. A ten-year-old boy calling a fifty-year-old man by his name! Who ever heard such a thing! I don't want to talk to Muniandy it seems. Who do you think—"

  "But Amma, I don't think Chellam's father would want—"

  "Who are you to sit there and decide what people want and what people don't want? Hanh? Oo wah, Mister Lord Mayor of London sitting there and deciding who needs what it seems. Let me tell you something you won't know because you've been a rich man's son all your life: people like that man can't afford to be choosy. People like that will wear gunny sacks if you give them for free. Go and get the bundle—I don't want it sitting there in the shed for the rest of our lives."

  Slowly Suresh peels his bottom off the seat. He sighs and pushes his chair back inch by noisy inch.

  "Tsk! Please, yaar," says Amma, "no need for all this drama. What next, will you wait for the violin music and then start sobbing? Give me a break. Please."

  Half standing, half sitting, his hand on the back of his chair, Suresh stops and stares at Amma. His shoulder blades jut farther out than ever.

  Suresh is right, in fact, that Chellam's father won't want a big bundle of old clothes—he'll have to walk all the way from the bus station to his village with it—but Amma, in her eagerness for public charity hasn't thought about that journey.

  Every three or four months Amma skims the choicest items off the family's old-clothes pile, stuffs them into plastic bags large and small, and rations them out with her chastened pity. She acquired this proclivity to charity and her voice-for-servants at the same time: together they were one rung on the ladder to Society Wifehood. Each new month her handouts continue to make her feel flush with benevolence, and is this feeling so misplaced? What other household's servants can dress their worm-ridden offspring in Buster Brown and Ladybird clothing? Amma's fantasy is not so far from the truth: on new-clothes day, Vellamma's children and Letchumi's (but not Lourdesmary's, who are turning to dust und
er the rubble of their cave dwelling) wait by the front door of their respective huts, clapping their hands when they see their mothers approaching, feeling for all the world luckier than princes.

  And there have been courthouse shirts for Chellam (who now has enough for a lifetime of gender-bending housework) and trousers for Mat Din. The arrangement has been perfect until quite recently, but Mat Din, alas, has been growing steadily skinnier as prosperity has padded Appa's belly. Amma will not be denied any of her pleasure just because Appa's trousers no longer fit the imploding Mat Din. "Just go and give Chellam's father the bundle," she hisses now, her voice flat and relentless as a dripping tap. Suresh and Aasha will do anything to turn off that voice; only Uma, softly humming her Simon and Garfunkel tunes to block it out, is ever able to resist it. "If you don't want to talk to him, fine, don't talk to him. Just hand him the bundle and come back."

  At the front gate, Suresh does her bidding. The bundle is larger than any the other servants have ever received, because pairs and pairs of bestquality courthouse trousers have been accumulating for months, since even Mat Din's belt could no longer hold them up. Besides the trousers, the bundle contains six long-sleeved cotton shirts, the lot wrapped in a worn bedsheet. It smells slightly musty, and on the bedsheet there's a three-toned stain where dirty water has dripped through the shed roof and spread like ink on filter paper. Suresh bites his lower lip and stands with his knees locked and his bare feet turned inwards. In the glass panel of the front door he looks like the picture of the African-child-with-rickets sandwiched inconsolably between the child-with-kwashiorkor and the child-with-goiter in his health science textbook. He's secretly rebelling by not wearing his Japanese slippers. He doesn't need Amma to notice; he doesn't even want her to. He knows he isn't following the rules. He might just get hookworm.

  "In fact the bedsheet also they can use," Amma says out loud to herself, watching his reflection in the glass panel, which ends a few inches above the ground and therefore doesn't show his bare feet. "It's still good."