Evening Is the Whole Day
Page 39
For Appa would only too gladly have erased that night from both their memories, if even the attempt would not have required him to face her, somehow to force his tongue to speak that too-big, too-small word, sorry. For months he hoped that one morning Uma would make some shaky overture—a joke, a barb about the neighbors, anything—and he would be able to proceed from there, to work his way towards demonstrating his contrition, if not speak it. But as her silence deepened instead of faded, and he came to realize that she would not so much as acknowledge his own flawed overtures, he settled for denial. He compressed the memory of that night into a knot as tough and wrinkled as a kidney; he did his best to ignore the ensuing tightness in his gut. Eventually, magically, that knot turned itself inside out: he began to believe that he was the one who had been wronged, by a hyperbolic, overreacting teenager who could not forgive; he began to resent and then to despise her childish obstinacy.
In other respects his life did rewind itself and continue from that night when it had stopped short as though a speck of something foreign had found its way into its workings: at the end of two months, his mistress's husband, having burned her curtains and bedclothes, fed her pet finch to a stray cat, put her furniture out for the dustbin men, and, in short, done everything he could to destroy all evidence of her illicit life short of poisoning her two dusky-skinned children, realized that a wife could not be repossessed the way a car could.
All the inexplicable rage she'd flashed at Appa had fizzled out during their separation, leaving behind a hollowness she could not fathom herself. She didn't open her char kuay teow stall for weeks; all day she lay on the floor and wept, refusing to share the new bed her husband had bought for them even when he swore not to touch her.
"This man," her husband finally asked one morning, after they'd eaten Maggi mee in silence at every meal for three weeks, "do you love him?"
"What do you know about love?" she said. "If I said yes, would you let me go back to him?"
That evening he packed his suitcase (so much lighter now, without all those tinned and boxed delicacies) and left quietly.
The next morning the mistress went to find Appa at his office. "Ah yes," Appa said, so as not to put his witnesses in an awkward situation, "one of my clients." But he left with her, and they went to her house, where they sat in her stripped-bare sitting room, on the patch of pale floor where the ottoman had been. He pulled both children into his lap and told them a story about a woman with a magic cooking pot that produced as much chicken curry as she had guests to feed (except, thought Appa, it wasn't really chicken). By the following week, he'd replaced all the furniture the dustbin men had claimed.
And the week after that, Appa received a telephone call from an anonymous man claiming to have useful information relating to the Curry Murder case. That boy, the man said, the boy who claims he was watching TV while the woman was in bed with his father? Not a chance. He was here, in our flat, terrorizing our children.
This sort of thing Appa had dealt with before, and he knew just how to proceed: an offer of money (not so generous as a layman might think, for they were hard up, these low-cost-flat types, and what they really wanted out of these anonymous phone calls they made after watching too much TV was to be begged, to feel important), a promise of protection from the untruthful boy's thug father, and the man would come forward. He was a relative by marriage of the boy's father, and he and his wife had served, for the past three years, as unpaid babysitters for the boy whenever the Curry Murderess—for a murderess she was, and he was sure of it—came to ride his father's cockhorse on the carpeted floor of their sitting room, on the kitchen counter, or wherever else they did it. On the night of the murder, all of this man's neighbors had been made aware of the boy's presence in their block of flats, because he'd beaten up the man's youngest son and been belted and then caned with the finest of rotans. He'd wailed and screamed and threatened to throw himself off the babysitter's balcony; three people had come running to drag him away from the railing. For a little less money than the star witness himself, each of these people came forward, and Appa soon forgot that this meant his firm would have to ensure the protection of the entire building from the murderess's grief-crazed lover and the useful connections the man would doubtless soon seek out. Appa never remembered: when, months later, three of the neighbors died violent deaths (a man run over by a burger van in the building's car park; a woman slashed, strangled, and dumped at a nearby pig farm; a second man decapitated, skinned like a goat, and hung from a hook in the bicycle shed), only the gossip-hungry public spoke of them—on their tea breaks, at their mamak stalls, at sweltering and shadeless bus stops—as the La-hat Road Flats Murders. Officially they remained three separate cases, each one so bizarre it never came to trial.
In celebration of the murderess's death sentence, Suresh composed a rhyme:
There was a curry cook,
Who had a curry pot.
She found some curry spice
That tasted nice and hot.
She bought some curry bags,
Tah-powed her curried spouse,
And then she lived alone
In her little curry house.
And this time Appa did reward him with the sort of response he felt his efforts deserved—the roaring laughter, the thump on the back, the specific praise: "Nice and hot! I like that. Is that a reference to her love life, my boy?"
Suresh surmised that this satisfying reception owed itself to the fact that all Appa's attention and encouragement were being channeled in his direction, having been mysteriously diverted to bypass Uma since the end of Uncle Ballroom's visit. He could not begin to guess the reasons for this change, and did not care to; he only wished to profit from it for as long as it lasted.
Amma, returning from Kuala Lumpur to so many changes, had questions of her own, but no one to ask: not her husband, surely, with whom she hadn't had a real conversation since Aasha's birth; not the mother-in-law who still thought of her as a low-class interloper; not her children, from whose world she'd been excluded for years because she wasn't as clever as their father or as syrupy as their grandmother. But how had her mother-in-law changed so vastly in a single month, from a firecracker with a limp and the beginnings of cataracts into an aged lump, confined to a rattan chair, peering into the shadows, demanding old-folks-home treatment from the servants at all hours of the day? And what had turned her irrepressible, volatile oldest into a sullen teenager in the same span of time? Why had she abandoned her grandmother and her little sister to the care of the servants? Why was she no longer her Appa's girl, and why wasn't Appa more flummoxed by this transformation? They seemed almost to have made a secret agreement to avoid each other, to take turns going up or down the staircase, to find themselves seated across the dinner table from each other as rarely as possible, and, when that could not be prevented, to immerse themselves in a book or a newspaper.
Does it really matter? Amma said to herself after idly pondering these questions for a few days. How does it change my life? The old lady will continue to be the bane of my existence whether she's walking around making her cutting comments or sitting in her chair shouting for tea. And as for my children, they've always ignored me anyway, so what does it matter if they're ignoring each other into the bargain? Behind her indifference hovered a ghost of smugness: What happened, Uma? You always thought your father was some great hero, so now how come you won't even look at him?
Only Aasha could neither resign herself to the new order of things nor derive any satisfaction from it. Uma had flicked her away like a beetle that had settled on her dress, and it was her own fault. By harping on Uma's plans with Uncle Ballroom, by shouting that secret like a stupid O-mouthed town crier for everyone to hear, Aasha had angered Uma and lost her. Thus began, despite Uma's best efforts to shake her off, Aasha's long years of trailing silently behind an equally silent Uma, longing, hoping for clemency, if not a full pardon, until Chellam arrived to provide an occasional distraction.
14
. THE GOLDEN DESCENT OF CHELLAM, THE BRINGER OF SUCCOR
September 8, 1979
IN LATE AUGUST, Amma demands that Appa hire a new servant to look after Paati. In the past few months, Paati's condition has deteriorated so rapidly that some are too stunned to feel sorry for her, and others suspect her of purposely engineering her own senility.
But to what purpose?
"She just wants me to run around at her beck and call," Amma says. "She's realized that if she sits in a chair and acts helpless she can control me the way she has always wanted to. She always thought I was fit only to be her maid, isn't it? A nobody's daughter, after all. Well, now she's finally got her way. Very nicely all of you have dumped the old bat in my lap and washed your hands. What happened to all Uma's love for her wonderful grandmother? Best friends they both were, so faithfully Uma used to tend to her grandmother, but now that it's become a twenty-four-hour job what has happened?" The t's of twenty-four ring metallic in Amma's mouth, like the call of some cruel, red-eyed bird with a pointy black tongue: t-t-t-t.
It's true: for months Uma has no longer put Paati to bed at night or combed her hair in the morning, and Paati, far from fighting for Uma's favor, has quietly moved into a spare room downstairs. From that room she brays into the darkness whenever the fancy strikes her: for water, for an extra blanket, for the removal of the extra blanket, for no apparent reason. No one else seems bothered by this ruckus, but Amma feels herself shaken by Paati's ferocious will until her teeth chatter and the scruff of her neck smarts from its grip. When she can no longer bear the noise rattling around like hot stones inside her skull, she goes downstairs to throw a blanket at Paati or force water down her throat. And in the morning she has little chance to recover, for, curled crisp as a sun-baked millipede in her rattan chair, Paati clamors for her breakfast, her elevenses, a hot drink to tide her over until the next meal, the teatime treatbowl. The servants grumble at this virtual doubling of their workload, and Amma finds her arsenal of thighpinches and armpinches and mouthslaps to be a progressively deficient defense against the exigencies of daily life with her mother-in-law.
They are eating dinner when Amma registers her formal complaint with Appa, on one of his rare nights at home.
"Are you honestly accusing the old lady of developing chronic arthritis just to spite you?" Appa asks. "Does that not smack just a wee bit of persecution mania?" Then he stuffs a whole chicken gizzard into his mouth to keep down his own theories about Paati's abrupt decline, for in fact he secretly agrees with the basic premise that she's bluffing. At least that she started out bluffing, and has lately convinced herself that she's nothing but a pitiful, chair-ridden old thing who never did anyone any (serious) harm.
"I have to sit here all day in this posh prison," Amma says. "I can't talk your clever talk, I can't use your big-big words, I can't dump your mother and your children in someone else's lap and go off to golf and dining-wining at the club."
There follows a thirty-second silence, broken only by the sound of Aasha's rubbing an index finger against the rasam-wet bottom of her plate. SQUEAK-squeak, SQUEAK-squeak, SQUEAK-squeak.
"Aasha," says Amma. Aasha stops her rubbing.
"But I rather liked that little tune," Appa says. "A fitting musical accompaniment to this family meal. I felt it captured the spirit of the occasion." Noticing Suresh stifle a giggle, he ventures: "I think I have some supporters here."
"We should all join in," Suresh says, grinning broadly. "With our glasses also." "Of course," Amma says, ignoring Suresh. "Of course you have supporters. Of course all your children agree with whatever you say, because you appear only when it suits you, like a king on a royal visit, but I—"
"I don't want this," Aasha says, pushing her plate away. "I don't want any. I'm full." She peers at the big window across the dining room: pressed against the window, pale as a tree frog's belly, is a child's longing face. "Look," she says, "there she is. My ghost friend. So pretty she is."
"Aasha," says Suresh, rolling his eyes, "stop it. Not now."
No one knows that Amma, too, has been entertaining her own fantasies these days. On trial at the High Court is one Siti Mariam, a pretty Malay housewife from rural Terengganu, twenty-eight years old, a charming beauty mark on her chin in the manner of Malay starlets of the 1960s. Was she coldly calculating (as Appa has taken it upon himself to prove) or simply crazy, off her rocker, bonkers, round every bloody bend in the country (as the defense had it)? One halcyon afternoon, Siti Mariam had cut off her mother-in-law's feet and left her to bleed to death on the loamy soil under her hut-on-stilts. Amma imagined the scene in far richer detail than Appa had: the idyllic Malay kampung, chickens ducks geese goats everywhere, a back yard lush with petai and pandan, children playing five stones in the dirt, adults napping on verandas. Not so idyllic inside Siti Mariam's hut, though. With no trouble at all, Amma's ears conjure up that old lady's curses and carryings-on, oh yes, of course in a different language, in which only a few of the equivalent nouns and adjectives (time, blanket, coffee, cold, hot, water, tea, hungry, thirsty, useless) are known to Amma, but the sounds—the shouting screaming groaning moaning—the sounds of those afternoons she knows too well. And that was probably why the neighbors had paid no heed to the old woman's surely fearful screams on that last afternoon. That was why no children or field-weary men or rice-threshing women had come running. Not because they were used to afternoon butcherings. Oh, you know what goes on in their supposedly peaceful kampungs, people said: rape incest adultery murder, all the dreadful things they can fit in between their five-times-a-day prayers. Nevertheless, Amma told herself, that was not the reason Siti Mariam had been able to carry out her slicing-sawing-dragging with no interruptions: the neighbors had simply heard it all before. The shouting, the screaming, the groaning, the moaning, the crying wolf and negligence and torture and choking. They'd learned to sleep through it and work through it. That just goes to show, Amma said to herself, but such glorious action was not for her; she hadn't the guts. Hers was the realm of impotent thought.
So it is to shut his wife up—at least temporarily, at least on this particular issue—and to make his own life easier, not to keep mutilation or murder at bay, that Appa agrees to the engagement of a fifth servant. This new servant will neither mutter about having to wash the greens when Paati demands to know the time, nor grumble about having to polish the brass when Paati wants a tumbler of hot tea. She will have no choice: Paati will be her number one priority. Her main, if not sole, undertaking.
"Maybe she misunderstood," Appa is to say during those last two weeks after Chellam had been ordered to pack her bags. "She thought making the old lady her main undertaking meant being her undertaker." But by then not even Suresh will be laughing at Appa's witticisms.
One other detail will set the new girl apart from Lourdesmary and Vellamma and Letchumi and Mat Din: she will be a live-in servant, for naturally, to take on a twenty-four-hour job, one has to be on the premises twenty-four hours a day. So this will be her home, Tata's rambling, lopsided old mansion on Kingfisher Lane, with its dented and dulled English kitchen, its slamming screen doors, its unused servant's room tucked under the main staircase like an unread newspaper under a businessman's arm, just waiting for her.
After a few weeks of word-of-mouth advertising, it emerges that the new servant is to be a hand-me-down: Mr. and Mrs. Dwivedi, Appa's colleague and his teatiming wife, have a servant girl they don't need anymore.
"Nothing wrong with the girl," says Mr. Dwivedi to Appa at the club on the night they shake on this deal. "The Wife wants to stop work and stay at home, that's all." Mr. Dwivedi called his wife The Wife, and his son The Son, even in their presence, as if they were elemental representations of their respective roles. "I'll give you one piece of advice, if you don't mind, Raju," he goes on. "Don't let the girl get out of hand. These bloody coolie types these days think they can make all sorts of demands. TV lah, day off lah, air con lah. The minute you start giving in they climb on your head." Hi
s beerlogged heart swelled with the passion of his cause: surely someone had to stand up for their side and stave off the mutiny of the great unwashed. Look at what was happening in other countries, special benefits for Scheduled Castes in India, communism in Vietnam. "I tell you," he says, thumping Appa on the back, "give the bleddi girl thirty-forty a month and a coir mat on the kitchen floor and tell her to shaddup her mouth." As an afterthought he adds: "And dhal curry twice a day, no need for her to be feasting on chicken mutton crabs."
So there's no question, in Appa's and Amma's minds, that the new servant should count herself lucky after her miserable existence at the Dwivedis'. Amma has heard rumors that Mrs. Dwivedi uses her considerable bulk against her servants, beating them with telephone directories, brass lamps, or Nataraja statues when they fail to please. At the Big House the new girl will have her own room, a bed with a real (if musty, dating back to Tata's days) mattress, the leftovers of their own meals, hand-me-down clothing. She will be practically family.
ONE WEEK BEFORE Chellam arrives, the limestone caves collapse, burying Lourdesmary's family. Burying dozens of hunger-shriveled grandmothers. Mothers wrinkled and caustic before their time. Lethargic, beedi-puffing grandfathers. And all their gourd-bellied children and grandchildren. People burn alive first, as their upset cooking fires spread under the rubble. All the way from the main road, bus passengers and hawkers hear their terrible, choked screams. Then there are quiet moans from under the boulders for days, though no one but the disheartened rescue workers hears these. The newspapers and the seven o'clock news buzz and mourn, crackle and sigh. The neighbors murmur: A horrible thing. An unprecedented tragedy. So many people, just like that. But it was illegal, you know, we know, they should've known. They shouldn't have been living in those caves. Under Lourdesmary's black face in the New Straits Times, a blacker headline reads: "Survivor of Cave Tragedy: The Government Cannot Replace My Children."