Suresh is assailed by a sudden vision of Appa ruffling the hair of one of his slant-eyed Chindian children. (Later he will tell Aasha: "They probably talk with their mouths full and have sores on their legs. They probably have runny noses and nasty Chinaman manners.") He looks at the OED on its high shelf and thinks: But Appa doesn't speak Malay! Appa's proud of his horrendous grasp of the language. "I've no use for their bloody Bumiputera tongue," he scoffs whenever he gets the chance. "It's good for nothing but fanning their bloody wounded pride. I was tricked into great expectations in my callow youth, but now I'll tell you one thing: we Indians should rue the day the British left this country. No way am I going to adopt their pidgin language just because they tell me to."
Yet out of sight, while his real children sit reading abridged classics in their Buster Brown clothing, Appa goes shopping for fish and spring onions with a woman who can't speak English. Afterwards, he probably lies in her arms and lets her feed him cockles pulled from their shells. The Malay language clearly has other uses than fanning wounded pride, and Amma must be thinking this thought along with Suresh, for now she laughs a laugh like a fine crack in a porcelain bowl and says, "Who needs English when you speak the language of love?"
Because Suresh's heart leaps with jubilation—Amma got the joke without my having to speak it!—and relief—Now she'll just laugh and tell Chellam to shut up, and everything will be all right—and even a glimmer of clannish solidarity—It's our joke, Chellam, of course you don't understand, so no need to stand there looking at us like a doonggu—he wrinkles his nose and laughs back at Amma. But Amma doesn't look at him and laugh some more, as he wants her to: she pirouettes like a dancer to face him and then smacks the grin off his face with her green-veined hand. "What's so funny?" she says. "Don't think you're not going to grow up to be just like your great father." He stands there, grin-less, tearless, sharp shoulder blades waiting to blossom into wings and carry him away from this foolishness. He will look down at the layers of dust on top of the kitchen cabinets and the useless cake pans on the fridge, at the tops of everyone else's heads and his own empty shoes on the floor. He'll hoot at them like an owl:
Who, who, whoooo do you think you are?
And with a last wave he will swoop out the door and up, up, up into the blue sky, free of his useless family forever.
Into the bristling silence Chellam persists, in a misguided attempt to soothe him with flattery: "Those childrens not like Suresh and Aasha, talking English like English people only. I think so those childrens cannot talk one word English also."
Stupid Chellam Newservant, thinks Suresh as he rubs at his wounded mouth. Rubber-estate tattletale. Think you going to get a gold star for attention to detail or what?
That night Amma waits at the dining table long past her usual bedtime, leaving the front door open though the mosquitoes swarm in in clouds she can see from where she sits. In the glass panel, all she can see are streetlamps and porchlights. At two o'clock she shuts the door and goes up to bed alone.
For three nights after Chellam spots him at the market, Appa doesn't come home.
When finally he does, Amma is ready for him.
Your Chindian clutch, she calls the mistress's children, alighting on the phrase with an immaculate satisfaction. She sits very straight, her teeth unnaturally white, her hair shining in the lamplight, as though she's been burnished from the inside by all her purifying hate. "Tell me," she says, "what else does your marketwoman cook for you? All the Chinaman food you pretend to make fun of in front of us and your more-English-than-the-English friends? Pig-intestine porridge? Bak kut teh? Pork trotters? Hanh?"
"Good one," Appa says. "For how long did your servant girl have to shadow me before she found out something worth reporting? Well, good for you. Zookeeper, assistant chef, and private detective in one. I knew you'd be pleased with your bargain."
"As though I need to pay someone to find out these things. I'm sure the rest of the world knows much more than Chellam. If I want more details all I have to do is ask Mrs. Balakrishnan or Mrs. Dwivedi." As she throws this declaration—nothing more than brash speculation—up in the air, Amma watches Appa's face for any clue that she may be right. If indeed everyone knows, does he know that they know? Appa holds her gaze and betrays nothing, no, not a flicker of guilt; he'll not give her a single inch to add to her self-importance.
Of course she's right: Dhanwati Dwivedi's husband is a fellow bigshot lawyer in the deputy prosecutor's chambers. He has followed the flourishing of Appa's romance like a botanist cataloguing a new species. With steadily decreasing guilt, he has sugared the fruits of his study and hand-fed them to his wife: A Chinese char kuay teow hawker lady! Three children, looking just like him it seems. A terrace house in Greentown. Lies to his wife about traveling for work, actually he's taken that woman on whirlwind holidays all over the place! Singapore, Australia, maybe Europe. And Mrs. Dwivedi, daintily downing the lot, has bloated with delectation. In three years she gained sixteen pounds trying to keep these secrets. One afternoon a year ago she told all to Mrs. Jasbir Bhardwaj in a single breath. Within two weeks Dhanwati lost all that excess weight, Jasbir whispered the gist of the matter to the elderly Mrs. Justice Rosie Thomas during a five-minute break in their bonsai class, and Rosie single-mouthedly told everyone else. Through their regular Outside meetings, this faction of the teatime circle has formed a definite opinion of the Chinese mistress: gold digger, trap setter, mistress of all that is seen and unseen, gap-toothed, lard-fed, thick-necked, market-bred.
Now it's Appa's (real) family's turn to enhance reportage with imagination. Or with research of their own: Aasha turns to Mr. McDougall's daughter, who was herself half of a bluff family.
"What did you call your bluff father?" Aasha asks, frowning, belligerent. In the days since Chellam's revelation, Aasha's fondness for Mr. McDougall's daughter has been clouded by an itch to pinch her. Which would be impossible, since ghosts can't be touched, let alone pinched, but just thinking about it gives Aasha great pleasure. A nice tight pinch, a fat wad of that peachy flesh between thumb and forefinger. She tries to convey the pinching in her voice.
As predicted, Mr. McDougall's daughter turns defensive. "He wasn't my bluff father," she says. "He was my daddy, and that's what I called him."
"But you didn't live here. You didn't live in your so-called daddy's house."
"No, but he bought me these clothes." Mr. McDougall's daughter twirls to show off her ice-blue smocked frock and then holds out her patent-leathered feet one by one.
"But he didn't let you come into the house, isn't it? Don't lie to me. I already know your story."
Aasha has by-hearted every detail of that story: the emerald-green silk cheongsam the girl's mother wore on their last taxi ride to the Big House (because she was much more fashionable, it seems, than Appa's Chinese mistress); the calling and calling at the gate; the mother taking off her shoes and flinging them over the gate (which was higher and blacker than the gate with which Tata was to replace them two years later); Mr. McDougall's real family's amah (also Chinese) coming out to chase them away. The taxi going back where it came from, with Mr. McDougall's mistress sobbing open-mouthed in the back, her bare, blistered feet up on the seat. Only the taxi doesn't reach its destination; suddenly the mistress tells the driver to stop and says, This way, this way. Turn left and right and left again. Stop here.
The taxi driver saying Are you sure, are you sure? And after Mr. McDougall's Chinese mistress takes out all her money and gives it to him, reversing his car and speeding away like a crazy man, hoo! Tires screeching, engine roaring, like a TV car chase.
Then that pond, glittering mirror-bright in the harsh noonday light, it looked as if they might walk on it.
"Och, what a hot day it was!" Mr. McDougall's daughter cries out at the memory. That's how she talks sometimes, like a storybook, peppering her speech with ochs and exclamation marks to prove she's half Scottish.
Usually Aasha appreciates her exotic manners,
but today she says, "Action-action only, you think you're the Queen of England or what?"
Mr. McDougall's daughter's face falls, and falls, and falls, until Aasha can barely recognize it: it is no longer the face of an old friend but a long, watery glimmer, already fading, a face for lanterns, candlelight, oil paintings in ornate frames. A dream. A haunting. An unwelcome, unwelcoming stranger. Mr. McDougall's daughter trickles down the bathroom wall and is gone.
"STUPID CHELLAM," Suresh says about a week after Chellam's discovery. "Thinks she's so great." It is three in the afternoon. In the dining room, Amma sits staring into a mug of tea so cold it may as well have been brewed on the morning Chellam came back from the market with her news. Suresh and Aasha are in the yard, melting small plastic objects (toothpaste tube caps, drawer knobs, Chinese pill bottles) with matches to stop up holes in the garden wall that Appa built in 1956. There are too many for them to fill in a single afternoon, but they have braced themselves for weeks of work; they will do what they can today. "Ugly Fairies live in these holes," Suresh tells Aasha. "They look like Chellam's stoopid father. They squat inside there and lick their arms all the way down to their elbows after eating their rice and sambar. And even while eating they're shitting."
Sssrp! Ssssrp! The sounds of Amma's slow, deliberate tea sips snake through the open dining room windows and into the children's ears.
"Yuck," Aasha says obligingly. "Chellam and her whole family are disgusting." She stops up a hole with pink strings of melted plastic, blowing on her burning fingers and sucking her breath in noisily as though she were eating a devil curry.
In their dirty, dark hovels in the garden wall, the Ugly Fairies wail and beat their breasts like jilted maidens in Tamil movies. Their writhing traps their matted hair in the hardening plastic; their lungs seize up from the fumes.
"Serves them right," Aasha says.
"Yah, no kidding," says Suresh.
The back yard fills with fumes like a medicine factory's: bone-clean, germ-free, yet somehow dangerous.
"Yabbah! What a stink!" Paati hollers from her rattan chair. "That idiot of a girl, where is she, she's gone and left the stove on. Gas is leaking, gas is leaking!" She blows the bad smell briskly out of her diamond-and-blackhead-studded nose.
Chellam starts awake from her catnap. "Hanh? What?" she says. "What gas?"
"Chhi!" Paati says, choking on the smell, wiping tears from her eyes with her papery palms. "When Raju is away I could die and nobody would notice, I tell you." Her voice quavers with phlegm.
Chellam pulls herself to her feet and shuffles to the kitchen window to see Suresh melting a toothpaste tube lid with unnecessary flourishes, like a roti canai man before a busload of tourists.
"Enna paithium!" Chellam shrieks, and is out the back door like a scalded cat.
Suresh drops his flaming match on the cement to die a slow death.
Amma lifts her head sharply, interrupting a silver teardrop's meandering course down her cheek and sending it flying into her mug, where it hits the surface of her tea with a plink! She sees Chellam sprint barefoot across the yard and grab her deviant offspring by their dusty elbows. Let his children burn themselves, she thinks. Serves them right. And why shouldn't she resent their blatant frivolity in the face of her sorrow, their refusal to bow and hold doors open for that greyly gliding figure in its high-collared robes?
Even as Suresh and Aasha feel Chellam's hard knuckles around their elbows, they're watching Amma, who blinks blankly at them before lowering her eyes to her tea. The gust of her thoughts chills their faces, so recently warm from their match flames; in a moment it has summarily extinguished Suresh's last match.
13. WHAT UNCLE BALLROOM SAW
TWO YEARS BEFORE Uncle Ballroom's final visit, he put in an appearance that started off with pomp and promise and brotherly benevolence, with hugs in the street, fizzy drinks for the children, briyani for dinner, and midnight feasts. But after two months of lushly orchestrated merriment, the visit ended with a single note on an out-of-tune piano. Tinny, unfamiliar, strangely sad. Perhaps even unsettling. Each member of the family was to remember that ending differently, although they would all remember it with equal clarity.
On the afternoon Uncle Ballroom's letter arrived, Aasha was waiting on the green PVC settee for Uma to finish her bucket shower in the downstairs bathroom. Her ears kept track of all Uma's movements through the closed bathroom door: the dips of the big plastic cup into the water basin, the splashes of cool water on hot head and hard tiles, the scrubbing of thick hair with firm fingers, the dropping of the wet soap cake on the floor. The soap would have one flat corner now, with tile marks on it, but there was none of the cursing or tooth-sucking that ensued when Appa or Amma dropped it, just a brief interruption in Uma's humming before she picked up where she left off. She wasn't singing the words, but Aasha knew them all, and filled them in from her seat:
Cecilia, you're breaking my heart
You're shaking my confidence daily...
Cecilia was a milk-white girl with dark brown hair and freckles everywhere. She was beautiful, more beautiful than Aasha would ever be, but oh, so cruel: she invited another boy into her bed while her boyfriend washed his face, and then ran away. Aasha suspected that when the lovelorn boyfriend begged her to come home, she would laugh at him, so hard he'd see the pink of her throat.
"Don't you think so, Uma?" Aasha asked when Uma appeared, wrapped in two towels. "If she's not cruel, why doesn't she just come home?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Uma. She unwound the towel around her head and, still standing on the rug outside the bathroom, began to dry her hair. "Maybe the other boy in the song is better. Or maybe she doesn't love this boy. Just because someone loves you, doesn't mean you love them."
This was not, as it would have been to many young children, a revelation to Aasha. "That's true," she said. "Like Mr. Manickam from house number 67 loved Mrs. Manickam, but she didn't love him."
"Yes." They were walking up the stairs now, Aasha in Uma's trailing cloud of scents: Pear's soap, Clairol shampoo, Fab washing powder from her towel.
"That's why," reasoned Aasha, "Mrs. Manickam went with the government clerk in a taxi and never came back."
"Exactly."
"And like Kooky Rooky loves her half husband, but he's half someone else's husband, so he can't love her back the same amount."
"Quite so."
"But they deserve it, don't they?" Aasha stretched out on Uma's bed like a lounging farm boy, arms folded under her head, right ankle balanced on left knee.
"Who deserves what?" Uma was combing her long hair, working out the knots at the end. Droplets of water rode through the air on sunbeams and landed on Aasha's face and legs, cold, hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, but Aasha ignored them to follow her argument through:
"Mr. Manickam and Kooky Rooky. Because Mr. Manickam was just working-working only all the time, and Kooky Rooky tells lies. Who wants to love people like that?"
"Too true," said Uma. "Shall we go and do our homework?"
Aasha had no real homework: seated between Uma and Suresh, she usually had to invent her own, but today, when they went downstairs, Suresh had news for them.
"There was a letter," he said. "From Uncle Ballroom. In New York."
"New York!" Uma and Aasha cried in unison, for the previous year Uncle Ballroom had come from Buenos Aires.
"He says he's coming."
"Of course he's coming," Uma said, for they all knew that Uncle Ballroom wrote only when the unsympathetic winds had emptied his pockets and were blowing him back to the godforsaken strip of land in the South China Sea from which he'd escaped at the age of eighteen with nothing to his name but a pair of dancing shoes and a bespoke suit. But Uma's words tumbled forth a little too fast and too high for the cynic's sour note she'd tried to lend them, and in addition to this discord between content and tone, her brother and sister noticed a puckish twinkle in her right eye, a sudden leaning forward, a quarter smile (the upturn of one m
outh corner, just a twitch, a glimmer, a dream). Because a visit from Uncle Ballroom meant fun and games all the way: late nights playing cards in the library, sips of brandy, Sunday roasts, Appa coming home for dinner and staying home on the weekends, rhumba lessons in the music room. And this time they could be uninhibited in their revelry, because Amma, who did nothing but stew in the background and mutter about Uncle Ballroom being a bad influence and Starting Young and what children learned from their elders, was away. She was in Kuala Lumpur at her sister Valli's house, where there would be no race riots and no babies this time, indeed no babies ever again, for Valli was in hospital for a hysterectomy. Valli didn't know anyone else who could take a month off from their life to come to Kuala Lumpur, and so Amma, having a whole fleet of servants to tend to her family's needs in her absence (as they did in her presence), had gone to Valli's rescue.
The children felt Amma's departure on their skin and in their lungs. Now they ate ice cream for lunch and snacks from the roti man for dinner, under Paati's indulgent, milky eye. They watched Indonesian films on TV until midnight and helped Mat Din water the plants. And Suresh rolled out the jokes, loud and hearty, for anyone who happened to be within earshot:
One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock ROCK,
Dorairaj tied a RIBBON to his COCK!
"If your Amma were here!" Paati said, wheezing with laughter. And her eyes said: How delicious it is that she isn't!
"What's long, hard, and full of seamen? Ho-ho! What you thinking? Such dirty-filthy minds you all got! It's just a submarine!"
This made everyone present shake their heads and groan, all except for Appa, who'd been preoccupied lately, placating them with hmms and ehs and sures when they knew he wasn't listening. "Heh-heh," he chuckled. "Not bad." The skin around his eyes looked thin and dark, like wet newspaper, like something that would shred if he rubbed it. Yet he smiled and rumpled Suresh's hair and gave him a dutiful punch on the shoulder, and Suresh grinned and racked his brain for something even dirtier.
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