BLAME THE SHORT NOTICE on the various postal services involved: Uncle Ballroom arrived at the Big House a scant week after his letter. Uma, who went out to pay his taxi, got a pick-me-up-and-twirl-me-round hug, though she was taller than Uncle Ballroom now, and had to fold her legs to get her feet off the ground when he tried to lift her.
Uncle Ballroom hadn't changed much since his previous visit, yet he was not the same fellow Appa liked to point out to the children in his old family albums. That trim figure had bloomed into a paunch, saddlebags, and man-dugs whose dropping nipples, like panda eyes, showed through the white cotton shirt he was wearing. His jowls were as soft as overripe bananas, his chin substantial as a dugong's, his thick lips perpetually glistening as if he'd just eaten a bhajia, but he still rigged himself out in the same dapper outfits he wore in those old pictures. The pleated pants four sizes too tight and pulled up to his chest, the red cravat, the shiny oxford wingtips, as if he'd put them on one day in the 1950s and worn them bravely through his ballooning. Partly because of this outfit, partly because of his posh English accent ("Like royalty," Aasha said when he wasn't listening, "like people who got horses"), the way he ate his rice with a fork, and the cold-weather smell of his clothes, he remained as glamorous to the children as a foreign dignitary on a classroom visit: they all wanted to be noticed, called by name, chosen. The minute he walked in the door Aasha was tugging at his trouser legs and Suresh was bombarding him with riddles:
Which Singh owns the swimming pool company?
Kuldip Singh! Ha-ha, Cool Dip, you see!
Which Singh never drinks tea?
Jasbir Singh! Get it, get it? Just Beer Singh!
Even Appa, suddenly faced with such fierce competition for his children's affections, pulled himself together and guffawed appreciatively. "What do you think of our Suresh?" he said. "Can't tell you where he learns all these things."
Uncle Ballroom's suitcase was full, as usual, of peculiar, offhand gifts, a jumbled, wet-wool-smelling free-for-all, each item going to whichever child first pulled it gleefully out. "Oh, that," he said to everything they found. "Yes, I didn't know what else to do with that." But there was one object he'd brought especially for Uma, and this he handed to her, saying, "Watch out, it's breakable. Ha-ha! You'll be getting spoiled now." It was a souvenir egg cup commemorating the moon landing, with 1969 in gold on one side, and on the other the American flag under an image of the Apollo 11.
"Wasn't that ten years ago?" said Suresh.
"Eight and a half," said Uncle Ballroom, "but I thought Uma might like it nevertheless, because one day in the not so distant future she's probably going to be an astronaut herself. Eh? With those brains of hers?" He tapped his temple and winked exaggeratedly at Uma.
"Ohoho!" Appa exclaimed. "With her brains, she's probably going to be the one designing the spaceship, Balu."
"Appa, please! It's not like I'm Albert Einstein or something," said Uma, furrowing her brow playfully, covering her eyes in pretend shame.
"Oh no," Uncle Ballroom said. "Of course not. You're much prettier."
"And more multitalented," Paati chimed in. "Tell me, could Albert Einstein act like Uma? Now itself she could go to Hollywood and become a top actress!"
And so, on this merry note, began what no one knew would be Uncle Ballroom's penultimate visit.
Every night before dinner they ate chicken wings and pakoras in front of the TV. At dinner there was always beer for Appa and Uncle Ballroom, lovely, fizzy gunner for the children, and shandy for Paati, and once, on the first Saturday after Uncle Ballroom's arrival, Uma was allowed a shandy of her own. After Uma had put Aasha to bed, there were games in the library: Monopoly, and blackjack and cheat and trumps, all of which Paati invariably won after a neck-and-neck race with Uma, for Paati, despite her arthritis and her incipient cataracts, was as sharp as a pork seller's cleaver, and as decisive in her victories.
Sometimes she liked to pretend the shandy at dinner had enfeebled her faculties: "Oh my, oh my oh my," she'd say, "this time I'm really done for. Uma's going to trounce me all right." At other times she took a playing-field pleasure in dispiriting her opponents. "You men may as well surrender now itself and leave the game to me and Uma," she'd say, condemning Appa and Uncle Ballroom to oblivion with a flick of her wrist. Then she'd cackle with laughter, take a sip of the sherry Appa poured her while he and Uncle Ballroom worked through his reserve of single-malt scotch, and peer at each of her opponents in turn, shrewd, grey-faced, predatory even in her half-blind state, like an old, balding vulture.
After she'd soundly beaten them all half a dozen times, after they'd gone through half a bottle each of scotch and sherry, and fried a mound of prawn crackers for an emergency snack and eaten them, Paati would announce her bedtime, and Appa would yawn and stretch.
"Getting old, Brother? Turning in earlier and earlier, eh? Next time I come you'll be wearing striped pajamas and drinking hot milk before we tuck you in at seven," Uncle Ballroom said one night.
"Ah, no, I'm just tired," Appa said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, pulling at that fragile, ripe-plum skin, and Uma knew he was telling the truth. A blue melancholy seeped into her bones then, as surely as the encroaching dawn. A sick feeling, as though they'd all frittered away the night foolishly, and not just the night but so much else, her childhood, all that time, Appa getting old, how could he be old? She swallowed and thought of Uncle Ballroom's image—striped pajamas, hot milk in the nursery—not at all the sort of childhood she'd had, but now she longed for it as desperately as if it had once been hers, that stolid, inert childhood, because if only she could always be that little girl who'd sat on Appa's lap and shuddered and squealed for effect as she ran her palms along his stubbly cheeks, he would not be old. They would all be preserved forever in their safest, happiest states: Uma in her Buster Brown overalls, Appa at thirty, Paati brisk and busy, strong enough to swing Uma around by the arms. Amma as placid as a cow, years away from the slow boil that was her permanent state now.
"All right, Paati," Uma said, her voice so low and hushed that Suresh looked up, startled. "Shall I help you up to bed?" She stood and held out her arm, and creakily, stiffly, Paati rose to her feet and took it.
"Do you know, Balu," said Paati, "what-what Uma does for me? How would I survive without this girl? Everywhere I need to go she takes me. She's my legs and my eyes, I tell you, we all say yen kannu, yen kannu, but my Uma is really literally my eyes."
"I can see that, all right," said Uncle Ballroom. "You're a lucky old woman, Amma."
"Oh, Paati, Paati," said Uma. "When I was small you did everything for me, now I do everything for you. No need to make such a big deal about it."
And together Paati and Uma began their grueling nightly journey up the stairs, Paati lurching from side to side to spare her failing knee, Uma's left shoulder burning under Paati's weight.
"I keep telling the old lady," Appa said as soon as they were out of earshot, "to move downstairs. Lots of spare rooms downstairs, she could easily have one. Then she wouldn't have to kill herself to get upstairs every single night. 'Nonono,' she keeps saying. 'I'm fine. I'm not going to sleep downstairs like a servant.' She's stubborn, you know? Doesn't like to admit she's old. In her mind she's still the dynamo she was in her heyday."
"Yes," Uncle Ballroom said absently. His eyes were riveted to the doorway, as if he still saw his mother and his niece framed in it; his hands were clearing away the bottles and the dirty glasses, stacking the cards.
"Oh, leave all that, for heaven's sake," Appa said. "Letchumi will take care of it in the morning."
Still Uncle Ballroom's hands stacked cards and swept prawn cracker crumbs off the table. "Yes," he murmured, "I'm sure she misses those days in Butterworth. Her life is so—so different now. Not that you don't take splendid care of her, but..."
There he trailed off, but Appa wasn't listening anyway; he was rumpling Suresh's hair and hurrying him along to bed. No time for an eight-year-old to be up, he was saying, as i
f this were the first night Suresh had stayed up with them, as if he'd just realized what time it was.
Uncle Ballroom had much to say about Paati's heyday, but he would never say it, neither to Appa nor to anyone else, for he had carried it within him for thirty years, this knowledge that had taken up less and less space as he'd grown, yet had remained as heavy as it ever was. As a boy he'd staggered under its bulk; now it was a tiny, dense thing, threatening to tear a hole in the front pocket of his shirt.
There he was, ten years old, sent home from school at recess time because of a fever, cycling unsteadily towards his parents' back door, head swimming, hands clammy. And there, leaning against the house, was another bicycle, but it was all part of the day's confusion; his head was too light to wonder at it.
He took off his shoes and stepped through the back door.
He walked through the cool, shadowed kitchen.
And there, by the front window, in a patch of sunlight, were his mother and Mr. Boscombe, one of Tata's bosses at the shipping company. Mr. Boscombe and Mrs. Boscombe had come to tea at their house several times. In his booming, bearded voice, like an actor onstage, Mr. Boscombe had sung the praises of his mother's exotic confections—her vadai and pakoras and murukku, her sago pudding and coconut candy—and Mrs. Boscombe had sat with her knees pressed together, her blue eyes always searching, searching for specks of dust or smears of grime in Balu's mother's kitchen.
They were like a film poster now, Mr. Boscombe and his mother, standing in the sunshine with their arms around each other, laughing like two children who'd just shared a cigarette in the outhouse. They were at that moment when the music swelled and the heroine threw herself against the hero's chest. Then the screen would go black.
Balu padded softly back through the kitchen. Outside in the blinding sunlight he grabbed his bicycle and pedaled, so fast he felt he was turning into vapor. I'm feeling better, he told his teacher at school. My mother said I better come back so I don't miss anything for the test.
All those years growing up in that house with his father and mother and his brother, Uncle Ballroom had never been tempted to tell. Not even to one-up his cocky, know-it-all brother, so unaware of how little he actually knew. It wasn't a choice he made; he'd never thought I mustn't, because... There had never been a question of telling. It was simply impossible: what would he say? He could not describe what he had seen: the danger, the truly shameful secret, lay behind that, and he did not know the correct words for it. Anything he could say would come out sounding like his own dirty fantasy.
After some years, confessing had come to seem unnecessary. He had thought, when the image of that shining couple in the sunlight continued to visit him after fifteen or twenty years, Come on, Balu, it could've been much worse. You could've seen them naked. Caught them in the act. Because that afternoon had whittled his ears to a fine point and turned his eyes feline, and afterwards he had collected all the little clues, all the buttons fallen from his mother's castoff days, that had shown him the scene went on after the screen went black. He could have caught them then, and they might have seen him, and then what? He would have had to share the secret with her. In its dark and airless space they would've had to spend the rest of her life, like two strangers trapped in a lift for sixty years. So he'd counted himself lucky, kept his mouth shut, and tried to forget.
Yet tonight, in the half-light of his brother's wood-paneled study, the secret seemed unbearable, a boulder on his chest, a heat in his head. And a vise tightening behind his eyes: the same sun-blindness that had almost knocked him out on that delirious ride back to school that afternoon.
The boulder wasn't regret, and the heat wasn't anger; it was sorrow he felt, a debilitating sorrow he knew would only grow after tonight. Of all the reasons he might have felt sad, all the ways in which his secret might have reared its head, this was one he'd never seen coming: what he mourned was his mother's cruel decline, the idea that that kajaled, glowing, crimson-mouthed creature by the window could have been reduced to this old lady who could no longer make it up the stairs on her own. All that beauty gone who knows where. Yes, Balu, you're more than halfway there yourself. You're older now than she was when ... And what has the point of it all been? What good did your not telling ever do anybody? If he'd told, perhaps he would've exorcised the dangerous, goosepimpling beauty of that scene by the window. Perhaps his shame and guilt and fear would not have kept him alone all his life, afraid to trust, even now, on the edge of old-manhood, still afraid. What had the secret cheated him out of? Did he even know?
"Is everything all right?" Uncle Ballroom started at the sound of Appa's voice; hadn't Raju gone to bed with the boy? But there he was, leaning in the doorway looking at him, arms folded, suddenly as old and tired as their mother. "Just a little tired?" he went on, without waiting for Uncle Ballroom's answer. "The jetlag, maybe?"
"Hmm, yes, a bit tired," Uncle Ballroom said. "I was thinking, you know, Mother—funny to see her so old—"
"Yes, I suppose it must be a shock each time when you're not living in the same house. Creeps up on me gradually, you see, so I barely notice."
"Yes yes. The thing is, when she was young she was so—things were so different. She had—I mean, she was so beautiful and all that, the talk of the town, you know what I mean?"
"Hmm. Happens to the best of us, you know, Balu, this growing-old business."
"Well, that, yes. But Mother ... I used to look at her when I was a child, she was like a film star in my head, something that could never grow old. You know, you always think of them the way they looked in your favorite films, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, who imagines them old? Mother was in her own film in my head. Just as glamorous. Heh- heh."
"Yes," Appa said. "I know what you mean."
He could not possibly know. If he had had the same secret, he would never have kept it to himself all these years. Would he? Either way, Uncle Ballroom found he could not go on. "Hmm," he said. Then, with a long sigh: "Anyway, don't let me keep you. You're the one who has to be at the office bright and early tomorrow morning. Better be off to bed, no?"
"Too true, too true." Appa looked at his watch. "Feel free to help yourself to a nightcap. Just switch off the lights when you come upstairs."
And he was gone, leaving Uncle Ballroom in a study that smelled faintly of frying oil. His footsteps on the upstairs floorboards echoed through the house, impossibly loud against the cool silence of this hour.
Uncle Ballroom stood up, pushed his chair in, and was about to switch off the light when Uma appeared at the doorway.
"Oh," she said, "everyone went to bed."
"Indeed," he said. "It's late." He smiled at her.
"Everyone is always so tired nowadays," she said. "I wish we could all be young forever, or whatever age we ourselves choose. What age would you be if you could choose, Uncle?"
"Me?" he said, but he wasn't pondering her question; he couldn't get past the way she'd read his mind. Or had seemed to. It was only a coincidence, but—
"Oh, never mind," she said, and then, with that infectious, lightning bolt of a smile, "Let's do something fun. I feel like—I feel like I want to run all the way to the limestone hills and back just to breathe some fresh air." There was an electric wakefulness in her eyes, but he knew all she'd had was a sip of her grandmother's sherry, and that there was nothing dangerous in her mood.
"Heh-heh-heh, I'm afraid you'd have to do that one on your own," he said. "Ten years ago I might've kept up with you, but look at me now, for heaven's sake! I'd keel over and die if I tried to run to the end of the driveway. Oh, no, my lass, I'm not the man I used to be."
"Come on, Uncle, you used to be a dancer."
"Used to, used to, my girl. Used to is the operative term."
"Don't you dance anymore?"
"Ah, well—"
"Sometimes? Just for fun?"
"When the occasion arises, I suppose."
"Oh! How come you never show us?"
"Show you, heh
-heh, what do you mean, show you? Get up and start waltzing for no reason in the middle of dinner? Make your Paati tango with me in the kitchen?"
"I mean how come we've never seen you dance, and we're your own family, and you've won all those trophies and prizes and whatnot and all we ever see is the newspaper clippings! Not fair, isn't it? I think if you have a dancer in the family you should get free performances!"
"Oh, goodness gracious—"
"And free lessons too. I mean, can't you teach me?"
"I suppose I could, and I suspect you'd be a fine dancer, tall and graceful as you are, but look—"
"Teach me, then! You could teach me something now, just a bit, I mean. Come on, you're not sleepy, don't bluff, don't simply-simply start yawning to get out of it! I'm not sleepy either. Just ten minutes, we'll go upstairs to the music room, Appa has all his old records there."
"But everyone's asleep, Uma dearest."
"We'll put the music on low and we'll close the door. Nobody can hear anything when the door's closed. Paati and I always go in there so that I can rehearse my lines with her when we don't want Amma to hear, otherwise Amma's always looking for evidence that I joined the drama club just to meet boys. Come on, just ten minutes, and then we'll go to sleep and continue another time."
And so they went upstairs, and among Appa's old records managed to find some tango music, despite all Appa's apparent derision for tangoing (and foxtrotting).
And while they danced Uncle Ballroom laughed and shook his head at the comedy of it all, this walrus of a fellow who hadn't really danced in ten years, trying to teach an almost sixteen-year-old girl, a whole head taller than he, Good Lord, yes, she really was so very tall, this Uma child, and how awkward this was, but how contagious her joy. And so, laughing and shaking his head, he taught her—in fact quite carefully, quite precisely, for Uncle Ballroom was an exacting dancer if nothing else (as evinced by all those trophies): Slow-slow-quickhold-slow, slow-slow-quickhold-slow, yes, that's right, just let me lead, slow-slow-quickhold-slow, now you're getting the hang of it ...
Evening Is the Whole Day Page 36