Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  But though Uma had assured her uncle that the music room was soundproof, even the quiet strains of the most mellow number in Appa's generally mellow collection reached Aasha's ears on the other side of the house.

  When at first she opened her eyes, she thought Mr. McDougall's little daughter had woken her again.

  "Go to sleep," she said, not unkindly. "It's sleeping time now, okay?"

  But then she heard faraway music, and voices—two voices—her sister's voice—and sat up. She swung her legs out of bed and waited. There it was again, her sister's voice. She slid off the edge of her bed, dropped onto her feet, and wandered across her room as though in a dream, running her hand along the wall, her small wardrobe, then the door, so as not to bump into things in the dark.

  At the end of the corridor there was a faint light on as usual, for when Paati got up to go to the bathroom, which she did four or five times a night these days, cursing her bladder fruitily in the mornings. But the music and the voices were coming from the music room, and beyond this one light, all the corridors in between lay in darkness.

  Now Aasha was determined, and nothing, no endless dark corridors, no sleepless spirits waiting to pull her hair or blow into her ears, would stop her. All the way across the house she journeyed, running her hands along walls, and anyone who saw her would've believed her to be drifting aimlessly; maybe she'd meant to go to the bathroom and her sleep-soaked brain had misled her, or maybe she was sleepwalking. But no, this barefoot, tousle-headed walk was in fact entirely purposeful, even if Aasha's rumpled appearance belied her doughty heart.

  In the music room Uncle Ballroom was counting faster, one two three four, slow-slow-quickhold-slow, and Uma was laughing and gasping, barely keeping up, for all Uncle Ballroom's lamenting of his flown youth.

  "Oh, this is fun," Uma said. "I wish I could dance like this every night."

  "Yes, it is fun, isn't it?" said Uncle Ballroom. "I'd forgotten how much fun it was."

  "Tell me about New York," she said breathlessly. "Is it—oops, sorry—just like in the films?"

  "Oh, goodness, quite."

  "But really?"

  "New York, my sweet child"—and here he stopped and released her, and pulled out a handkerchief with which to mop his brow, because he really was quite, quite winded now, and moreover this dreadful humidity became less and less bearable each time he returned—"oh what a place it is. What a place."

  And then, because Uncle Ballroom loved few things more than telling a good story—and also because he was half drunk with the stirring up of old memories in his feet and head, with the soulful beauty of this dance that had once been his favorite, and with the hungry hero-worship in his niece's bright eyes—he mopped his brow some more, tugged at his shirt collar to let some air in, took a deep breath, and spun his niece the sort of tale she wanted to hear, against the inspiring background of Juan D'Arienzo's orchestra. He told her of the winters that bled you dry, yes, just like in the Simon and Garfunkel song, Uma, heh-heh, and the diner breakfasts, and the hot dog stands, and the leaves in the autumn, the colors no one in Malaysia could imagine. He told her of great universities hundreds of years old where, behind ivy-strangled red brick walls, the cleverest people in the world peered through microscopes and studied their way to Nobel Prizes. He told her of Central Park, of glass skyscrapers and brown-stones and fire escapes, of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, where the heels of women in furs and diamonds clicked all day long on the pavements.

  At the door of the music room Aasha stopped and listened. Not because she was a habitual eavesdropper or tattletale, for her transformation into Aasha the waiter-watcher-listener was still to come. She listened now, with her hand on the doorknob, only because Uncle Ballroom's voice was like a teacher's, a voice you didn't want to interrupt, and if she opened the door he might not finish his story, or he might change the ending just because she was there. Uma wouldn't want that; Aasha didn't want that either.

  "It's true," Uncle Ballroom was saying, "anything can happen in America. You can smell it in that cold air. You can see it in the way people walk. They're all expecting it to happen to them, this big anything, because in America you might be a doorman today and tomorrow find yourself rich and famous."

  He did the funny accents for her: Brooklyn, Texas, Boston.

  Uma doubled over laughing. "Oh, I can't picture all that," she said. "But I'll go there one day and see for myself."

  "Of course you will. You could get into one of the top universities, no problem. You must come. Come to New York! I'll take you around and show you the sights. Together we shall ride the subway and the yellow taxicabs."

  "Really? Really you'll take me around?"

  And Uncle Ballroom didn't hesitate, or admit to Uma that she might have to pay for the taxicabs herself; like a priest blessing the communion offering, he held his palms up to the heavens and said, "But of course, my child, but of course!"

  "Soon I can really come, you know? In two-three years' time. I have to finish school first, then I'll apply."

  "Two-three years? Just study hard and that'll zip by in the blink of an eye, Uma! That's just around the corner. Before you can say Archbishop of Canterbury we'll be ice-skating together at Rockefeller Center."

  Outside the room, Aasha let the doorknob go and stood silent, barely breathing, frowning, pouting. In the blink of an eye. In the blink of an eye Uma was going to go away to New York, and Aasha wasn't invited. This adventure excluded her, that much was clear. Aasha had seen pictures of people ice-skating in the wintertime, two by two in fur-trimmed hoods and mittens. It was a special thing for two people, for a man and a lady, like waltzing and weddings and on-the-mouth kisses.

  And as if to underscore her deductions, someone put the needle of the record player at the beginning of a number, and fresh music started up.

  "Okay okay," Uma said. "One more dance, quickly-quickly, and then we'll go and sleep. Just one more lesson to seal it up nicely in my memory, this way I won't forget before tomorrow night." She'd already grabbed her uncle by the hand and shoulder; they were already poised to begin.

  All the way back in the dark Aasha shambled, running her hand along the wall. Inside her head her thoughts spat and sparked, threatening to flare up into a hundred small fires.

  IN THE MORNING, Aasha sat frowning over her toast, swinging her legs and humming to herself, intermittently smiling into the distance.

  "What are you smiling at, Aasha?" asked Uncle Ballroom after ten minutes of this.

  "Tsk, don't ask her that," said Suresh. "She's just seeking attention."

  "Well, and why shouldn't she be?" replied Uncle Ballroom. "Attention is a perfectly valid thing to seek, especially at four years of age. Do you have a joke to share, Aasha?"

  "No," said Aasha.

  "Let me see," Uncle Ballroom persisted, patting expressively at his head and face, "did I accidentally leave my funny hat on? Have I got a shaving cream mustache?"

  Aasha furrowed her brow still more and looked away.

  "Or maybe I've got—"

  "You no need to pay attention to me," Aasha said. "I'm playing a game with Mr. McDougall's daughter."

  "You see," said Suresh. "I told you."

  "Hah!" said Appa. "Mr. McDougall's daughter certainly manages to muster up some impressive cheer to be playing breakfast-time games with you after being drowned in a mining pond."

  "We're not playing games," said Aasha. "We're making plans."

  "Oho! Always wise to—"

  But before Appa could finish, Aasha went on: "You think only you all can have plans, is it?"

  "Mmm-hmm," said Suresh, making his eyelids droop, pretending to stifle a yawn. "Tell us some more. Tell us all about your plans."

  "Why should I tell you about our plans? You don't tell me about your plans, and Appa doesn't tell me about his plans and Amma doesn't tell anybody her plans and Uma—you don't know anything also but Uma's going to go to New York and marry Uncle Ballroom without telling anybody."

&nbs
p; This did make Suresh sit up and stop yawning, but not for the reasons Aasha had intended it to. No one was reacting the way Aasha had thought they all would. Nothing had worked the way she'd wanted, and now she was the laughingstock of the family, caught with both feet in the middle of a blunder she didn't recognize. What had she said wrong?

  "What? What what what?" Uma was saying, but she was laughing so hard her face was almost touching the table, and Appa was laughing too, and slapping both his own knee and Uma's, and Uncle Ballroom was revving up a big engine of a Santa Claus laugh, hohohohohoHO!, and Suresh was wiping real tears of laughter from his face now, not fake ones.

  "It's true," Aasha said desperately. "She was dancing with him in the music room after everybody went to bed."

  "That settles it, Balu," said Appa. "You know the laws about dancing with female relatives. You can't be teaching my daughter the two-step if you've no plans to put a ring on a finger."

  "Actually it was the tango," said Uncle Ballroom, and then they all burst into laughter again.

  "Aasha," said Suresh when he'd recovered sufficiently, "are you daft? People can't marry their uncles, stoopid."

  And for days afterwards, as Aasha brooded and whispered in dark corners, they all repeated her dramatic announcement to each other, and expanded on it for their own amusement.

  But after that comic opening, Appa's week quickly deteriorated. He no longer had the time to play Monopoly and card games after dinner; he excused himself, rushed off to his study while still chewing his last bite, and sometimes left the house during the night. They heard his car disappear down the driveway and expressed their regrets about the hard life of a lawyer while sighing and sucking their teeth over their cards; in the morning they made Lourdesmary bring him extra-strong tea.

  The following week, he stopped appearing for dinner entirely. The children were well acquainted with this schedule, of course, but never before had Appa been so absent during one of Uncle Ballroom's visits. "Poor Appa," Uma said. "I'm sure he would rather be sitting here eating black pepper crabs with us. What to do?"

  "Aye," said Uncle Ballroom, "but this is the sort of life you'll be condemned to, my girl, when you're a famous scientist or a heart surgeon, rushing around all over the place, eating hot dogs from a cart for your meals."

  "Oh," said Uma airily, "I don't think I'll be a scientist. It's all very interesting but my true dream is to act."

  "You can do both!" Paati said. "You can be the first one! Whatever you want to be also you can be."

  A month into Uncle Ballroom's visit, the Curry Murder trial gained an unexpected momentum that distressed Appa. The defense counsel for the Curry Murderess produced a chimeric alibi, courtesy of a ten-year-old boy who swore the defendant had been in his father's bedroom on the night of the murder, while he himself had been watching Hawaii Five-O in the sitting room. As fishy as this young witness and his testimony smelled to Appa, neither he and his faithful team of clerks nor the police could put their finger on anything more damning than the boy's age, his obfuscatory lisp, and his stake in the outcome of the trial. ("She's my Amma," he'd said of the Curry Murderess, in direct contradiction to all existing documents, including, but not limited to, the boy's own birth certificate and a marriage certificate that bound the accused in matrimony to the curried man. "My Appa and I want her to come home and stay with us," he pleaded. "We always wanted her to, but she couldn't because there was a bad man keeping her prisoner. Now he's dead, so now my Appa can marry her and she can come and stay with us.")

  That night, Appa's mistress's errant husband got out of a taxi in Greentown at midnight, having traveled home from China on a surprise visit. His suitcase brimmed with rare gifts: dried birds' nests and sharks' fins and abalone for soup, a red silk cheongsam he didn't know would be two sizes too small for his wife now that she'd had two babies; a jade necklace. He noticed a silver Volvo parked a few feet away and marveled at the fortunes of his neighbors. Whistling, he ambled into his house and opened the bedroom door to find his sobbing wife locked in the frantic embrace of a short Indian man. In the sitting room, two terrified children were watching television; none of them were to remember whether it'd been Hawaii Five-O. The mistress's husband bellowed, bursting a blood vessel in his eye and waking everyone in their row of terrace houses and the next. He ran to the kitchen, grabbed the cleaver his wife used to chop pig livers for her char kuay teow, and chased Appa out of the house with it. He picked up her wooden clogs and hurled them after Appa's silver Volvo. Up and down the street, lights went on in upstairs windows, and the faces of the neighbors who'd watched the progression of the affair with interest (for these were the days before imported American soap operas would satisfy their desire for sensation) and resentment (for many of these women were much prettier than the mistress, and therefore felt they had more right to a rich benefactor) and disgust (for those who weren't pretty thought it shameful that a married woman should carry on like this behind her husband's back) and jealousy (for, pretty or not, they all wanted to be taken on package tours in Hong Kong and sent on shopping trips to Singapore) hovered behind mosquito netting and curtains.

  Speeding past the roaring trade of the suppertime hawker stalls and then over the black, shining waters of the Kinta River, Appa kept a tight grip on the steering wheel, but before him he saw only that menacing steel blade, broad as a loaf of bread, raised high above the cuckolded man's head, and then swinging so dangerously close to his own neck that he'd felt the breeze of its trajectory on his skin and heard its hwoop in his ear. Clutching the wheel ever harder, Appa began to cry. His hands shook; his glasses fogged up in the cool night air.

  At two-thirty in the morning Appa pulled into the driveway of the Big House, slipped his shoes off at the front door, and crept through the pitch-dark sitting room like a cat.

  On the landing, just in front of Paati's wedding photograph, Appa paused to catch his breath. Hmm hmm, his sepia-toned ancestors droned unanimously, the ringleted little girl in the front row suddenly as wise as the mamees in the back row with the twenty-sen-coin-sized pottus, hmm hmm (as Appa noted that Uma's door was open a crack and her light was still on), hmm hmm hmm, we're not sure this is such a good idea.

  But too many other noises were ringing in Appa's ears for him to hear his solicitous ancestors. There he stood, the palm of his right hand on Uma's door, feeling weaker and more lonely than he'd ever felt. He'd been publicly humiliated; he'd felt the breeze and heard the hwoop of his mortality brandished before his face; he might never again be able to see the woman he loved, who had once loved him back, or their children, who still did. Everything was collapsing around him. What if the sight of her husband reminded her of how much she'd once loved him? What if she went back to him for everything Appa couldn't give her: the respect of her neighbors, and for her children a father who didn't have to sneak and cower and not be seen with them in public, but who would be theirs alone seven days a week, wherever they were?

  Uma was awake. He wouldn't tell her what had happened, of course; no need to burden her with twenty years' worth of mistakes. He would talk to her about school, about her latest play, about what they'd had for dinner tonight and how their card games had gone, and just the effort, he knew—just the pretending to be fine for Uma—would pull him out of himself.

  He took his glasses off, wiped his tears on his sleeve, and pushed the door open.

  Uma jumped when he stepped into the room; she'd been leaning out of her open window, smoking a cigarette she'd inveigled from Uncle Ballroom. (Oh come on Uncle, this way I can try it in the safety of my own home and not get caught, and then I won't be curious anymore, and I won't have to fall prey to all of New York's temptations.) She stubbed it out on the windowsill and looked at Appa as he shut the door behind him, wide-eyed, breathing hard. Her skin glowed with sweat from her latest dancing lesson (the cha-cha this time); most of her hair had escaped from her braid and frizzed out in all directions.

  "Appa!" she said. And then, drawing in her brea
th, putting a hand to her mouth as if this were a scene from one of her plays: "What—what's going on?"

  He thought he hadn't managed to hide his distress; he thought she'd seen it at once, she with her preternatural senses and her infallible readings of her mother and siblings. His hands were shaking, after all, and he was swallowing hard to choke back his tears.

  Doesn't matter, he was going to say. I just came to say good night. Saw your light on, you know.

  But she hadn't interpreted his shaking and swallowing correctly, because she began to stammer and defend herself: "I—It's only this one time, Appa, I've never smoked even one cigarette before. I just thought—I don't know what gets into me late at night."

  Then he was walking towards her, taking her hands. No no, he was saying—or was that only what he thought he'd said? No no, it's okay my girl, who cares about one bloody cigarette, it's not that—

  This he knew he'd said: "Oh, Uma, Uma, I've been such a fool, I've made such a terrible mess of things." He was holding her now, more gently than Uncle Ballroom embraced her during their dancing lessons, and laying his forehead lightly on her shoulder, his tears dripping fast onto the floor, and what could she, not yet sixteen, say to this strangling self-doubt she'd never encountered? It frightened her and broke her heart, and he, sensing her fright, kept his remorse inside his mouth like a hot morsel of food he could not, must not, spit out, even if it burned his tongue and drove him mad with pain.

  "Appa, Appa," she said, as she might have comforted Aasha after a bad dream or a fall, but the inadequacy of these words left her helpless; these could be no small or imagined woes that had brought Appa sobbing into her arms, her nonchalant Appa who always turned everything into a joke, who answered Amma's most rhetorical questions with dictionary definitions and clever parryings, who simply refused to play her bitter games by bolting out the front door every time she rolled the dice. Trembling, Uma put her arms around Appa's shoulders and patted the back of his head.