But neither Muniandy nor his wife and children will ever use the bedsheet, because they don't own a mattress. They sleep on coir mats on a mud floor in a village whose name Amma can't remember. They'll never use the long-sleeved shirts or the bestquality trousers either. Chellam's father has never worn a long-sleeved shirt in his life; he doesn't work in an air-conditioned office like Appa, and the shirts are far too warm for the seamy toddy shop. To the end of his days he will therefore prefer his sarong and his sweat rag for swabbing his bare chest. But for now he can't tell what's inside the bundle. He takes it from Suresh and says, "Romba thanks, aiyya," as if Suresh is a grown man, a chief minister, the toddy-shop owner to whom he's pledged all his wages for the next five years.
"See?" Amma says inside the house. "I told him, isn't it? Soooo shy he was to just go and give Muniandy the bundle, and look how much pride the man himself has. I told him, with this type of people you don't need to feel shy."
Now Chellam's father bounces the bundle in his arms, judging its weight: another bulky encumbrance to lug to the bus station, to maneuver through queues and crowds. He will have to carry it there on his shoulders, and already he's unsteady from the morning's five bottles of samsu. On the bus the other passengers will suck their teeth and glare at him for needing extra space for his bundle. "Romba thanks," he repeats. If Suresh looked up now to meet his eyes, he'd see that they're as unreadable as tinted windows in the daytime. But he doesn't look up. He watches a fat black ant slip into a crack in the cement; then he turns and walks back to the house, his shoulder blades burning from the embarrassment of Chellam's father's following eyes.
"Good, good," says Amma. "Sure enough, isn't it," she repeats as if Suresh could hear her, "he grabbed whatever we could give. Where beggars can be choosers?" Satisfied with the outcome of the transaction, she rewards herself with a prim sip of tea.
In the corner, Chellam twists Paati's thin hair into a walnut-sized knot. "Aiyo! Enna?" Paati cries out again, more loudly this time, though her voice is still morning-phlegmy. She raises a groping hand to her head as if she might find the source of her stinging scalp sticking out from it: a scrap of durian skin, a leftover fish skeleton, a barbed bobby pin? The hand ranges over her head like a spider. Chellam thrusts a kovalai of coffee, Paati's reward for enduring her morning toilet, at her other hand. It knocks against a knuckle with a woody sound; Paati winces and jumps. The teaspoon falls out of the kovalai and onto the floor, and hot coffee splashes onto her saree. Chellam turns on her heels and walks away, the lump in her jaw throbbing green through her skin.
"Aiyo! What sins I must have committed to be left to the mercy of a servant as useless as that girl!" Paati shouts. "How many times I've told her not to leave the spoon in the kovalai! Just stir it, take the spoon out, and give me the kovalai—how hard is that? The whole family has washed their hands of me and entrusted me to this idiot!" Paati bends over in her rattan chair and gropes for the fallen teaspoon, but her arm's too short: her hand clasps and unclasps a full foot above the floor, a goat's mouth in a grassless pasture.
In her slant-ceilinged room under the stairs, Chellam pulls all her clothes out of her cupboard, including the four long-sleeved shirts she's inherited from Appa. She dumps them—a single armful—onto her unmade bed and folds them carefully, for no particular reason, as if she's packing to go somewhere. Then she puts them all back in the cupboard and sits on the edge of her bed, her breathing barely audible above the buzzing of a fly trapped between the window and the mosquito netting. After twenty minutes, she hears Paati shouting and gets up to take her to the bathroom.
That evening, Aasha counts three new marks on Paati: two dark pinch-spots on her right arm and a red welt on her left temple. She files them neatly away under Evidence That Chellam Is Taking Out Her Frustrations on Paati. It's one thing for Amma to inflict mouthslaps and thighpinches and headknocks on Paati; it's another for Chellam to do the same, or worse. She isn't even part of the family. But Aasha can't tell anyone about what she's seen. Not Amma, of course, because Amma would say Oho, so who do you think you are? And so on and so forth, and—and if Amma learns that Aasha notices such things, that she stations herself behind settees and armchairs and watches whoever happens to be around, then the words she uses to indict Chellam—slap, pinch, knock—will hang between them like moths caught in a spiderweb. No, not Amma. And not Suresh: he'd only laugh and tell her she's stoopid. Mind your own business, he'd say. Don't simply-simply go poking your nose here there everywhere, spying on people like a Russian. And not Appa, because he's never home and when he is he doesn't want to talk. Which leaves only Uma, but Uma is not for telling things to. Uma would just get up and walk away when she saw Aasha coming. She'd close her room door and sit humming behind it.
Or would she? What if Aasha could make Uma see that Chellam is secretly a bad person, and no replacement at all for a proper oldest-eldest? What if Aasha's findings are important enough to make Uma sit up and say Hmm, and knit her brow, and listen? Because they are indeed important findings: if they aren't, why does Chellam bully Paati only when she thinks no one's watching or listening?
What Aasha cannot know is that the new red welt owes its existence to Paati's nodding off and banging her head hard on the wall next to her rattan chair, and that Chellam applied liniment to Paati's temple and rubbed it vigorously to minimize the swelling.
Believing, therefore, that she has valuable information that would benefit all concerned (except Chellam), she spends days summoning up her courage. Every time she thinks she might have summoned an adequate supply, it ebbs when she catches sight of Uma. But finally one afternoon, Uma comes downstairs without a book or a college catalogue, with nothing at all in her hands, and she isn't humming. She goes out to the gate and leans on it, staring down the lane as if she's waiting for someone, except that she isn't. If she has friends at school, they never visit her at home. Now, Aasha says to herself. Now's the moment when I tell her. At first it seems too much too soon, too huge a truth to impart to Uma just like that, out of the blue, when it's been ages and ages since Uma spoke to her or she spoke to Uma: weeks, months, maybe fifty or sixty months, at any rate not since Suresh got his Standard Five exam results or the Malay girl down the road started school. Maybe she should get Uma to friend her again first, maybe she should—but there's no time for all that, because soon Uma will sigh and go back up to her room, just as abruptly as she came down. So Aasha goes out to the yard and stands at Uma's elbow, and as she expected, Uma doesn't look at her. But she must, she must do it before she loses heart. Quickly, breath held, like swallowing cough medicine.
"Uma," she says, "do you—do you think Chellam is nice?"
Uma turns to look at her, frowning. Aasha's heart turns a somersault, her ears are singing, her breath is hot, and now she remembers that it isn't just speaking they haven't done in ages and ages, but looking at each other, right in the eyes, openly like this. She might explode from the fear and the joy of it. She might burst into tears and not be able to stop.
"What?" Uma says. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm just—I only—do you think Chellam is a good person?"
"Am I a good person?" Uma says. "Are you a good person?"
To this, Aasha can find nothing to say. She keeps her lips together and rolls her tongue around like Baldy Wong, like a deaf-and-dumb idiot, like a cow inconvenienced by the thick, meaty slab inside its own mouth. Of course you're a good person, she thinks, with a blazing loyalty that shows only in the twisting of her right leg around her left. Of course I'm also a good person. But Uma doesn't want an answer, and knowing this, all Aasha can do is to shake her head, No no don't be angry, sorry for disturbing you, and run away to lie on the green PVC settee. After a few minutes she hears Uma come in, shut the front grille behind her, and go up to her room. When she closes her eyes she can hear the chuff-chuff-chuff of Uma's feet on the floor as she moves around, the creak of her ceiling fan, her wordless humming, to which Aasha fills in the words:
>
Who will love a little sparrow?
Who's traveled far and cries for rest?
THE NEXT MORNING, a craving for appams seizes Paati and will not let go.
"Bread and butter, bread and butter every day," she grumbles, "keeping house these days is so easy, I tell you! What-what I used to make every morning for the family's breakfast in my time! Dosais! Idlis! Appams! With extra coconut milk and eggs for the boys! Now all I have to do is mention appams and my son's fashionable painted-and-powdered wife says it's the cook's day off it seems. Hanh, Raju? What do you say to this? God forbid your wife should—"
"Okay, enough of it," Amma says. "Your great son, in case you haven't noticed, is not at home to hear your complaints. I'll send Chellam to the market to buy you some appams. Now just shut up and wait."
Paati waits until the warmth of Amma's breath on her arms has dissipated before whispering to herself, "Look at them, Raju, look at them. You see how they talk to me when you're not here? This is what you get for marrying—" But she's miscalculated the acuity of Amma's ears, for in one smooth movement Amma swings around and gives Paati a mouthslap that echoes all through the house. Suresh hears it in the back yard, where he is racing two snails on the garden wall; Aasha hears it in the dining room. And Mr. McDougall's daughter, who's been sitting in Suresh's chair, dives under the table to shiver and shake unseen. Aasha respects her privacy but drops two margarined crusts of bread so that the poor girl doesn't go hungry.
When Amma appears in search of Chellam, her face is clear and her hands are calm.
Charged with her appam-buying mission, Chellam sallies forth, marketing basket on one arm. She'll have to take a bus, because Mat Din's not here to drive her; Sunday's his day off too. "Oi Chellam!" Suresh calls out to her. "Chellam, going to meet your boyfriend in the market, yah? Combed your hair and put on lipstick blush eye shadow! Walking like a model only!"
Chellam swats at his arm and sucks her teeth, but she's smiling broadly. "Ish!" she says. "Where got makeup? Never comb hair also!"
When she returns, the smile's been wiped off her face, never to reappear in quite the same sunny hue, for she brings with her news that is not for smiling at. News whose reception and dissemination will forever change her place in the Big House.
"Maddam," she says, standing at the back door with her basket of appams (hot-hot, wrapped in newspaper), "I seeing Master outside market with ... with Chinese woman!" Half triumphant, half terrified, holding on to the doorjamb as if she can't possibly step over the threshold with this news; as if, like someone returning from a funeral, she must cleanse herself in the yard before entering the house.
"What do you mean?" asks Amma. "What are you simply-simply blabbering about?" But Amma's voice is like vinegar. Her heart sends up a great splash of bile as it hurtles down into her stomach. At once she hates Chellam for her gloating, for reporting this as if it were gossip about Kooky Rooky, or the latest episode of a TV show. She's furious and disgusted. She's melting away where she stands, weakening, disappearing. And most of all she's frightened of whatever else Chellam has to say. She doesn't want to hear it, none of it, no, no, she could give the girl two tight slaps to shut her up, but already Chellam has gone on:
"Yah, one Chinese woman, Maddam. I think so she like Master's another wife like that. Because two of them together buying sayur sawi, Chinese cabbage, big piece ginger, one bunch spring onions, big white bawal like this." She holds her hands apart to illustrate the size of the fish, as if this alone leaves no doubt about Appa's salacious intentions. "But Master carrying everything."
And, in a way, the fish does change everything. For Amma has always known there were other women: Lily Rozells, Claudine Koh, Nalini Dorai, all those miniskirted, cigarette-smoking women who gave her mocking sidelong glances at her wedding. Of course, during those long nights when Appa doesn't come home, he's at the club with them, gambling, drinking whiskey, doing other things to prove to each other how open-minded and free-spirited and European they all are. But this, this idyllic domestic scene Chellam has just sketched for them (for now Amma knows, without turning to look, that the children are standing behind her, listening wide-eyed to this account of their Appa's extracurricular activities)—the ginger and spring onions, clearly for steaming the fish, proof that they'd already planned the evening meal—this Amma never imagined. Not even in the depths of her tea-sipping gloom, when she has suspected others of knowing more than she does (why else the specks of pity in their eyes when they look at her? why the falling over each other to pamper her ego?), has she pictured such details. Cabbage. Ginger. Spring onions. Have the Ladies and the neighbors made weekly notes of Appa's secret shopping lists too?
No matter how much Amma wants to fall down on the kitchen floor and weep, she cannot, she will not, cry in front of a servant.
Even if Chellam stopped now, it would be too late. Suresh's and Aasha's grudging affection for her has shifted imperceptibly, for while servant girls may be caught red-handed (and while they themselves, not so very long ago, caught Chellam digging for treasure in her nose, and then—and then—oh, disgusting Chellam with her disgusting habits!), they must never do the catching themselves. Yet Chellam doesn't seem to rein herself in; her skin itches with what she's seen, and her eyes are dry with its heat. "Got childrens also!" she cries, her voice rising. "One girl same size like Aasha like that, some more two small-small boys! All of them calling him Pa!"
Aasha contemplates the girl who is the same size as she is. In what other ways is she like Aasha? Does she like yam chips and sago pudding? Has she read The Water Babies? Does she have a blue denim skirt that buttons down the side and a twenty-four-color Staedtler pencil set?
Uma, who's pouring herself a glass of ice water in the kitchen, files away Pa instead of Appa: a small but crucial variation. To Amma and Suresh and Aasha this is a gratuitous tidbit, Chellam's way of rubbing all their noses in her discovery. How dare you? Suresh thinks. Like a stupid cat bringing a dead mouse in your mouth and expecting us to be proud! "Chellamservant," he will say to her later that day, "who cares what they call him anyway? You think you so great, is it?"
But Uma watches the two words—Pa, Appa—turn in her head like balls juggled in slow motion in a clear blue sky. She will come back to them again and again in the coming months, at every moment she gets to herself and many moments she doesn't, savoring the secret of her wondering when people carry on other conversations around her. Pa or Appa? Moral, a-moral. Typical, a-typical. Pa, A-pa. Father or un-father, which was he?
"What is this, Chellam," Amma says now, "did you stand there and watch them for two hours?"
Even this between-the-teeth question doesn't deter Chellam. The howling storm in her head won't allow her to see or hear the small signs of danger around her.
"No, Maddam," Chellam says, "I not simply-simply standing there. I going this way, Master coming that way"—she blocks out their steps with her feet, like a dancing teacher—"then suddenly he standing in front of me. Then Master say sorry sorry sorry and quickly-quickly he going away. I no time to say Hello Master also. They going in a blue car, Maddam, nicely shining, I think so must be new."
Now she launches into a full report of the mistress's attire. Brown samfoo. Cheap wooden clogs with red plastic uppers, "you know that type, Maddam, all Chinese women also wearing that type." A single jade bangle around one wrist. No earrings. And she licks her lips to prepare them for the most important morsel of information yet: "She not pretty also, Maddam! Fat-fat like this." Chellam makes a circle of her arms, as if she were holding one of the enormous urns in which the mother-in-law's tongue plant grows by the front door. "Some more not white-white like some Chinese lady. Almost black like ... like..." Here she hesitates, because of course Amma herself is the standard of superlative blackness. Like you already buds in her mouth, but as little as she understands the implications of her revelation, Chellam knows enough not to compare Master's real wife to his bluff wife; she knows it is not her place as a servant
even to notice Maddam's complexion; and finally, she's reluctant to tell a lie: the mistress is indeed dark for a Chinese lady, but nowhere near as dark as Amma. "Almost black like me, Maddam!" she exclaims. These details Suresh and Aasha digest eagerly—they tilt towards Chellam, willing her to paint a still-less-flattering portrait of the mistress—but alas, unpracticed storyteller that she is, Chellam cannot read her audience and does not stop on this high note. "At least if she so young and so pretty, Maddam," she babbles, squandering her advantage, "at least then we can understand, isn't it?"
No, Chellam. They wouldn't be able to understand, not if the mistress were as exquisite as a Mughal empress in a fountained garden, not even if she were as fair as daylight itself. Look, look at Aasha's fierce and unyielding eye; recognize this thing with which you're toying, because you'll come to know it well soon enough. Fire. A ticking bomb. A lit Deepavali sparkler, spitting its sparks closer and closer to your spellbound hands. These are no superficial alliances you're stoking; this is no impartial audience. You're shortsighted in ways no spectacles will ever fix: you're forgetting the thickness and pull of blood. For suggesting that a fair-skinned mistress would be a tolerable thorn in the side of this family, you'll not be forgiven here.
That chill in the air isn't just Uma opening the fridge to get more ice water, but Chellam, oblivious, goes on: "And you know what, Maddam, she got a big hole in her mouth! Tooth come out already or what, I don't know. So ugly this woman and still Master following-following her! Maybe she put charm on Master, Maddam. She got one Chinese bomoh giving her black magic."
More deficiencies follow the description of the tooth hole: oily hair, blotchy skin, rough hands with cracked and dirty nails (worn, though Chellam does not know it, from nights of washing dishes in an enormous plastic basin, evenings of scrubbing sooty woks, mornings of plucking the heads off prawns). "Not high class," Chellam says. "Cannot speak English also. Master talking to all of them in Malay, Maddam."
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