Now that Uncle Ballroom was coming, life would be better still. For all Appa's putdowns and barbs, he could never hide his grudging fondness for his harmless, hapless brother: the minute he read the letter, the children knew, he'd be planning menus, ordering Lourdesmary to reserve whole goats at the market and bring home live chickens to hand-feed for five days.
This time, though, Appa did none of that. "Wonderful, wonderful," he said when Suresh brought him the letter, but he hardly looked at it before setting it down on the coffee table. Then he folded his newspaper, pushed his glasses up to the top of his head, leaned back in his armchair, and closed his eyes. He was besieged by difficulties these days. On one side, the draining gloom of yet another gruesome trial: the Curry Murder. An Indian housewife stood accused, the saree-clad, pottu-emblazoned type who emanated so much good-wifeliness, that she'd managed not only to eviscerate her husband with a fish knife, but subsequently to chop him up, cook him in her largest cast-iron wok—which wok she had brought with her to her husband's house as part of her dowry—and distribute his curried, plastic-bagged remains in dustbins over a twenty-mile radius before her neighbors had noticed anything amiss. The case against her remained flimsy, her word (Don't know where my husband went. Disappeared just like that. Probably got another woman.) against her neighbors' (Funny noises came from that house one night. Then for hours got meat-cooking smells, even at one o'clock in the morning.).
But it was the problem on the other side that was steadily sapping Appa's strength. Murder he could handle; he was accustomed to the grotesque imaginations of the depraved, even managed occasionally to relish them. The souring of his sweet mistress was another matter.
How Appa had come to take a char kuay teow lady as his mistress is a tale so delicate and complicated that to understand it one has to scrutinize their first meeting as if it were an exquisite Mughal miniature: here one must squint to make out the subjects' facial expressions, there to see just how much skin is exposed, and here to determine whether these fingers are really touching or there is a hairsbreadth of air between them.
What we know for certain: he met her on a workday morning in 1973, ten days after a stormy night on which Aasha had been unremarkably and unsatisfyingly conceived and Uma had been taken ill with an inexplicable fever.
Business was slow that morning for the char kuay teow lady. The flames under her wok leaped, danced, burned blue in Appa's glasses, and once, for a brief three seconds, soared as high as her chest, prompting Mr. Dwivedi, who was lunching with Appa on this first occasion, to draw in his breath, and causing Appa to exclaim, "My goodness! Bloody daredevils these Chinese cooks are sometimes!" We know also that while Appa and Mr. Dwivedi ate, the char kuay teow lady sat at an adjacent table to peel prawns for the evening rush, and Mr. Dwivedi, his already jocular mood enhanced by his consumption of two Anchor beers, began to call out friendly greetings and nosy questions in Malay: "Oi, Ah Moi! Why so glum on such a nice day? Oh, Miss! You making good business, isn't it? Otherwise why for you cleaning twenty pounds of prawns?" So by the time she came to clear away their plates and glasses, she felt it would be rude not to exchange a few words with them, and the few words turned into an outpouring of her marital woes and a public denouncement of her no-good husband, who had gone home to China to care for his aging parents and not sent her money or news for more than a month now.
In order to return this touching trust in two white-shirted strangers, Appa told her (by this time she was sitting on the bench opposite them) about his crazy wife—who recently burned a saree in the back yard just because he'd had a late night at the club—and her even crazier parents next door, such impossible cartoon tales that the laughter rose, like a belch after a good meal, from deep within the char kuay teow lady, and Appa noticed that she was not at all ashamed of her crooked teeth, and that he could suddenly smell, my God, yes, his nostrils were coming alive, sighing, swooning, singing, the hairs in them doing a joyous dance, cilia rousing themselves as though from a witch's spell, synapses that had lain idle since whatever mysterious, forgotten childhood injury knocked them out now popping like Chinese New Year firecrackers. And what he smelled was the char kuay teow lady's breath, sharp and salty, like other people's descriptions of the sea. He breathed deeply and looked and looked at her, drinking in the fiery spirit of the wok that cloaked her plump shoulders, her smokiness, her heat.
When her manners and laughter and scent drew Appa back to the stall the following day, and for many consecutive days after that, Mr. Dwivedi began to suspect that something was up: no simple craving for lard and cockles could explain Appa's devotion to this one stall. And after months of worrying his little loose-tooth secret, Mr. Dwivedi shared it with his wife, Dhanwati—hypotheses, observations, conclusions, conjecture, everything. Now the Chinese Mistress was a secret of the nationally sanctioned variety, that is to say, open but not aboveboard. Appa knew that all his colleagues, all their wives, and all their wives' friends knew what car his mistress drove, where she got her hair permed, approximately how much she must weigh, and how crooked her teeth were. The colleagues, their wives, and their wives' friends all knew Appa knew they knew. But none of them ever spoke about the mistress to Appa, nor mentioned her in front of him, and he reciprocated the courtesy.
Only Amma knew nothing of the Chinese Mistress's existence. Her innocence required superhuman feats of discretion, logistics, and cooperation on everyone else's part, but Appa, who should have been grateful for these efforts and for his own sheer luck, was too besotted to consider himself lucky.
Appa had never been one to believe in love before he met his char kuay teow lady; lust he'd believed in wholeheartedly, for he'd felt its pangs and known its effects. The protective fondness he'd once felt for Vasanthi, yes, that he remembered, though he doubted that that sort of thing ever survived uncorroded in any marriage. But falling in love, that was all filmic phantasm, all novelty and sophomoric sentiment.
Except that after their first meeting, Appa could not get the char kuay teow lady out of his head or his nostrils, and not merely because he was lusting after her generous loins. That first night Suresh climbed into his lap at home to see blue flames burning in his glasses, the wildest, hungriest flames he'd ever seen. He reached out to touch Appa's glasses, burned his fingers on them, and put his puzzled palms on Appa's stubbly cheeks. Later, lying awake in bed beside Amma, Appa saw the blue ire leaping in his glasses where he'd set them down on the bedside table. He watched them until, exhausted by their energy, he fell asleep.
Nine months after Appa's first fateful meeting with the char kuay teow lady, Aasha prepared to make her exit into the world, ten days late. She stretched her elbows; Amma gasped. She gave the walls of her dwelling three peremptory kicks; Amma shrieked.
Appa was not at the office when Paati telephoned, an oddity that escaped her indulgent eye. The boy was a lawyer, after all, and not just any lawyer but a Big Name. He might be in court. He might be out researching a case. Who knew? He'd been uncommonly busy of late (of late? Four five months? Five six months? Paati was not as adept at keeping track of time as she had once been, and at the moment Amma, her silk caftan drenched in the waters of her womb, was not as attentive to such minutiae as she would one day be). Just a few months ago, Appa had had to travel all the way to Johore to investigate a case. Such were the burdens of being so brilliant. Paati sighed as she set down the receiver. She shook her head and resolved to see that Lourdesmary fed Appa extra well when he was next home.
Once again a friendly neighbor came to Amma's rescue in her hour of need: not a taxi-driving neighbor this time, but Mr. Balakrishnan, only mildly sozzled at four in the afternoon. Paati sat in his front passenger seat; Amma lay in the back. Uma had been instructed to look after her brother and keep the doors closed. None of them could have imagined where Appa really was that day: on a bench at a stall in Greentown, where the char kuay teow lady had just announced to him, while shelling prawns, that she was expecting his child. In response, Appa stu
ck his chest out, chuckled, and suggested a string of hybrid names: "How about Ah Meng Arumugam son-of-Rajasekharan? Balasubramaniam Bing Ee? Kok Meng Kanagappa?" His mistress sucked her teeth good-humoredly and swatted his arm. Customers at the other stalls wondered at this informality, but the owners of those stalls, who were by now used to Appa's daily visits, did not.
For four years Appa and his char kuay teow lady had a fairytale romance. When Paati and the rest of the family had believed him to be in Johore, he'd been in a beach chalet on Pangkor Island with his mistress. When Aasha was a year old they went to Australia, Appa inventing yet another demanding out-of-town case for his real family. He sent his lady on shopping trips to Singapore and package tours of Hong Kong. The lovesick state Appa had once dismissed as a Hollywood invention survived two babies, the lovers' long, tiring workdays, and other people's insidious bafflement (what Appa knew other people said about his ladylove had not diminished his adoration). After her sea scent and her inner fire, beyond the unrivaled kick of her chili sauce and the inexplicable plumpness of her prawns, Appa had discovered her wicked sense of humor, different from his only in vocabulary (and perhaps not so different in that respect in her own tongue: Appa and his mistress were forced to speak Malay to each other, a language that displayed neither one's sharp wit to full effect). And after that he'd uncovered what he still thought of, earnestly, boyishly, as her sweetness, a deep, palm-sugar sweetness, the kindness and gentle spirit he had once, for one year, thought Amma had. It brought him a relief he hadn't known he'd longed for; he closed his eyes and settled into it, as his father had settled into the Big House. He felt himself gently embraced, his thirst slaked, his wounds soothed. Other people's love affairs guttered and died out in two or three years, but the Malay language, inside which neither Appa nor his mistress belonged completely, had slowed time for them, so that in her cramped, pinkwalled, fluorescent-lit, shrimp-paste-smelling terrace house in Green-town, Appa felt he was unfolding a continuing mystery by candlelight, and had never doubted she felt the same way.
But now something was changing, and Appa didn't know why or how to stop it. Had he been blind to small signs and slow changes, untutored as his eye was from a marriage that had started out stale? No, the perfection he remembered was not imaginary. Was the change his fault? Did she want a bigger house, a new car, was she not as forthright as he'd thought all these years and therefore too shy, or too proud, to ask for these things directly? Had he been expected to read her mind, and failed?
He surprised her with jewelry and flowers on ordinary days. Once, in a reckless move the town talked about for weeks—Lawyer Rajasekharan's gone mad! What could he have been thinking?—he brought her to the club for drinks and dinner.
"I'm tired" was all she would say when he asked her what was wrong. "It's these children. They eat up all my energy. And the work. Every day, day after day. This isn't what I thought my life would be like when I was a girl."
"You don't have to work, you know," he told her every so often. "You can sit at home and take it easy. I can afford to take care of you."
"Of course," she said. "Of course you can afford it. But my father used to say a person shouldn't trust anything but his own two hands. And this is all I know how to do. Frying noodles. Ha!"
To this insinuation that she did not trust his promises, Appa had no reply.
He wondered if even she knew why, if she could name the reasons for which, before he left her on the evening Suresh brought him Uncle Ballroom's letter from New York, she flew into the sort of rage that brought cases to his desk. A fury that made him think about hiding the knives and pouring the cleaning solutions down the sink, checking their children into a hotel, spending the night across the street in his car to keep watch over her house.
"Everybody knows you'll never marry me," she'd said out of the blue, interrupting Appa's toe-counting game with the older child, a girl of almost four—only months younger than Aasha (who, at home in the Big House, was having her own toes counted by Uma). She was stir-frying leeks on the stove with her back to him. She'd never mentioned marriage before, never indicated it was a dream or a possibility—anyway, wasn't she still legally married to someone else? Into the silence that had met this statement, she'd gone on: "Those children you sit and play with every day, they'll always be bastards."
"Don't say that," Appa had said lamely, and then, already ashamed that this was all he could think of to offer, "Why don't we go out for a film tomorrow? Take the afternoon off and bring the children with us. You've been working too hard."
In relief—her mother's poisonous mood dispelled by her pa! with a practical solution she could understand!—the girl had begun to clamor and whine coquettishly. "No, no, let's go tonight! Tonight! I say tonight!"
"Aiyo yo," Appa said, smiling and shaking his head at her, "I can't say anything in front of you, hanh? We can't go tonight, Ling, we—"
But the child's air-raid siren of a demand—Promise, Pa! Promise, tomorrow!—had drowned out his excuse. He'd been about to pick her up, sling her over his knees, and wrestle her into silence when her mother had shot across the kitchen like a comet, her face wet with tears, her crooked teeth bared, and before Appa's brain could register her presence in front of him, she had begun to slap the child. Eight times she'd slapped her, as the leeks smoked and burned, sending up fumes that would once have barely ruffled Appa's feathers but now lacerated his sinuses. "What do you expect?" she'd asked with each right-cheek slap, and with each left-cheek slap she'd answered her own question: "You expect to be treated like a princess when you're just a whore's daughter. You expect to be more important than your father's real family. You expect your stupid tears to melt your father's heart. You expect people to make promises to a bastard child."
Appa had watched her, speechless, wishing he understood far less of the Cantonese she'd reverted to in her rage. When she'd sent the howling girl to bed and locked herself in the bathroom, he'd stood staring at the bathroom door for five minutes before putting the eggs destined for the stir-fry back in the fridge, turning off the stove, and leaving.
Now, leaning back in his armchair with his eyes closed, listening to Uncle Ballroom's letter flutter in the fan breeze, Appa was exhausted, broken, afraid.
"Appa, did Suresh tell you? That Uncle Ballroom's coming?" Uma came to ask when, after twenty minutes, Appa still hadn't said a word about Uncle Ballroom's welcome meal. She stood in the archway of the sitting room, frowning and smiling simultaneously at Appa, poor tired Appa, no energy even to loosen his necktie.
"Oh yes, yes. Useless bugger squanders all his money until he has nothing left for a plane ticket and then runs home with his tail between his legs."
"When Lourdesmary comes tomorrow shall I tell her to talk to the butcher? About local mutton for a briyani?"
"Yes, why not?"
"All right then." She retreated, only to return in a few moments with a cold bottle of orange squash and an ice-cube-filled glass. "Appa. Open your eyes and drink something before you fall asleep in that chair."
He opened his eyes and winked at Uma. "Don't you worry about me. But tell Lourdesmary to make sure she sees the whole goat before the butcher skins it. What with all the inventiveness one hears about these days, one wants to make sure one isn't feeding visiting uncles on the butcher's enemies."
"Tsk! Appa!" But Appa could tell from the wide smile that broke over her face before she stifled it that she was relieved, even proud, of having pulled a joke out of him. I'm the only one who can do that without fail, she was thinking, and without trying. Silently he confirmed her assessment: Yes you are, Uma, yes you are.
For Uma was his favorite, a fact that no one could change, that Suresh nevertheless resented, and that Aasha celebrated; lovely Uma, whose heart was as beautiful as her face! She deserved to be everyone's favorite, like the heroine of any fairy tale: the woodcutter's youngest and best daughter, the third and last princess, the good queen. My Uma is worth ten sons, Appa often said to his friends, and he
meant it, though he'd wished for a boy before her birth. Not that he didn't love Suresh; the boy who'd arrived at last, after seven years, was a fine child, clever as a temple monkey, easy to please, difficult to upset. And Aasha, Aasha had promise, though she was a queer little mushroom of a child, always seeing ghosts and drawing odd conclusions. But there was something special about Uma, a hidden incandescence neither of the others had, a rejuvenating energy that made you say Yes, of course another card game, why not turn on the music, shall we fry up some prawn crackers for a midnight snack? But also—for there was more to Uma than strangers saw in her quirky teenage smile with its overlapping front teeth—a great strength. He remembered in mosaic detail the play Uma had put her brother and sister up to last year, how she had quietly broken his heart with her bravery. How afterwards, when no miraculous happily-ever-after had ensued in real life, she'd made a point of coming to his study to wish him good night (that low voice, that brief flash of conciliatory dimples) on his increasingly infrequent evenings at the Big House. As if to let him know she forgave him, as if to console him for the imperfection of their lives.
Suresh and Aasha recognized Uma's strength too: it was she they ran to when in need, not their mother. Uma's calm smile, Uma's even breathing, that nearly generous—yet faintly quizzical—look she trained on their mother's abundant incompetence. If there was something in this world that could upset Uma, none of them had yet discovered it.
No one—none of the powerful old men Appa knew, no barrister, judge, privy councillor, professor, minister, tycoon—had that kind of strength. Appa loved it, admired it, and almost, sometimes, feared it.
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