"Poor woman," Appa says when Lourdesmary shows up for work the day after the mass funeral. "Needs the money, what to do?"
On the afternoon Chellam drags her broken suitcase through the front gate, Suresh and Aasha are outside on the culvert, peering at the collapsed caves in the distance.
"Yes I can," Aasha says. "Really I can. I'm not bluffing. I can still hear them."
"Ah, shaddup lah," Suresh says for the fourth time. "They're all dead already by this time. What you think, no food no water, hands legs faces also smashed, and they got the strength to keep shouting for one week?"
"Not shouting," Aasha says. "Just crying a bit. Like—like cats in the nighttime. Like baby cats."
"Yah. Sure. But tell me one thing: how come nobody else has heard these, er, baby cats except you?"
"Nobody else is listening, what."
"Oho. So what else can you hear? Can you hear them singing campfire songs? Fighting with the older ghosts for houses to haunt? Making plans for Deepavali?"
"No. They got no words. They cry like cats only, I told you, isn't it?"
But even as Asha and Suresh wrestle with the aftermath of the cave tragedy, they keep an eye on a quieter tragedy unfolding in their own world: on the ornamental swing, Uma idly riffles the pages of four college catalogues. When these catalogues first arrived, Aasha did not dare to remind anyone that she had told them so, that she had, months ago, warned them all that Uma was planning to leave them. Now she knows that this tragedy is at least as grave as last week's, because everyone can only stand and watch while Uma leaves them; because not only should they have known, all of them, but they could have known if they had listened to Aasha; because Aasha herself shouldn't have let things get to this state, this immutable knowledge, Uma's going away, Uma's going away, this scene that eviscerates her now though she grants it nothing more than one eye: Uma turning glossy pages of America on the swing. Between them, Suresh and Aasha have a whole eye with which to measure not only the speed and manner of each page-turning and the displayed interest in each brochure (as suggested by the frequency of Uma's blinks), but also distance and depth and perspective: how far away Uma already is, and how much closer to a world composed primarily of these elements:
Red brick.
Green ivy.
Black trees.
White people.
On the other side of the fence, Baldy Wong perches high in the mango tree, swinging his legs and squealing each time he crushes an ant between his fingers. In between ants he pelts Suresh and Aasha with sticks and leaves and unripe mangoes.
"Just ignore him," Suresh says. "He's seeking attention."
Aasha reflects that this was one of the harsh judgments passed on her when, all those months ago, she tried to warn them about Uma's plans.
At ten past three Amma pokes her head out of the back door. "What, no sign of the servant girl yet?" she calls out. "I thought Mrs. Dwivedi said she'd be here in an hour or so when she called at two o'clock?"
But Mrs. Dwivedi, never having ridden a bus in her life, could've had no clear idea of how long the trip would take. She'd been driven past the bus stop a thousand times; she was therefore certain of its existence and its location. "Go straight until the end of the road and turn right," she'd said to Chellam, opening the gate for her. "Tell the bus conductor you want to get off at Taman Pekaka, I think so he'll know. All these bus people must be knowing, what." Then she and her chauffeur had watched Chellam drag her suitcase down the driveway and up the road, she with her hands on her hips, the chauffeur with his chamois in hand, for he had just finished polishing the Mercedes and was about to start on the Alfa Romeo. When Mrs. Dwivedi had no longer felt like standing there tracking Chellam's progress in the punishing heat, she'd come indoors, ordered her cook to make her a tall glass of iced sharbat, and telephoned Amma. "The girl's on her way," she'd said. "Probably it will take her about an hour to reach your place, don't you think so?"
Suresh rolls around on his tongue the sorts of answers his schoolmates might give to Amma's question: Yah, the servant's here already, I've been keeping her in my pocket only. Yah. She came, but I at once sent her to the corner shop to buy me a toddy and two packs of Marlboros. Yah, wait let me check inside my left ear, okay? Then, satisfied with just that hint of their flavor, he calls back, "No, no sign of the servant girl."
"Hmm!" muses Amma. "Got lost in town or what." She withdraws once more into the kitchen, and a silence settles over the compound. Even Baldy seems to have been shaken into relative decorum by Am-ma's brief appearance, for he holds on to the next unripe mango he plucks, looks at it for a few seconds, and seems to decide not to lob it at them after all. He takes a pensive bite of it, puckers his face, and spits the whole mouthful out. As it dribbles down the bark of the tree he takes another bite, and another, and another, spitting out each bite but somehow remaining optimistic that the next one will be better.
"Stoopid idiot," Suresh says. "Look what he's doing, look look. Disgusting doonggu." Secretly, though, he wonders what it would be like to have a memory so short that every new second is full of fresh anticipation.
At four-fifteen, after Suresh and Aasha have floated two twig boats down the monsoon drain, driven one of Mat Din's poles into the earth by the hump to see how far down it would go, and purchased two packets of Chickadees and one of Mamee from the roti man, the gate latch clicks and they look up to see a skinny girl maneuvering a big brown suitcase through the gate. One of the suitcase's wheels scrapes the cement noisily; its skin, pocked, pitted, peeling, and blotchy, matches the girl's. When she's closed the gate behind her, she wipes the sweat off her face with both hands and redoes her loosened knot of hair. Under her arms two dark patches stain the shiny red polyester of her blouse.
For the remaining year and a half of her life, Chellam will retain a crystalline impression of all the conflicting and concerted stimuli that meet her senses in this moment preceding her introduction: the yellow butterfly that bobs across her field of vision, from the guava tree to the tamarind tree, where it's swatted at by a shirtless, bulging-eyed boy perched high in a dark cage of branches; the Milo jingle playing on some neighbor's radio or television; the unshakable feeling that she's being watched (and indeed, at their secret sentry posts behind their lace curtains, the neighbors are separately finding it hard to swallow the idea that Chellam really is old enough to be a live-in maid: Seventeen! Can this chit of a girl really be seventeen?); the pavement-steaming heat; the smells of manure and frying teatime bananas and sun-stirred jasmine; the dust that sticks to her sweaty skin and tickles her throat. She's tired and thirsty; her head throbs in rhythm to a distant crow's caws. She wants nothing more than to lie on a cool cement floor and go to sleep. No coir mat nothing: if they offer her one, she'll say thank you very much and roll off it onto the cool cement when they're not looking. She hopes she'll never have to take a bus again.
In fact, Chellam didn't lose her way navigating the town bus network; the trip simply took longer than Mrs. Dwivedi could've imagined. Chellam had to change buses twice, and the conductor, having asked her three times, with increasingly apparent frustration, which of the three stops in Taman Pekaka she wanted, ejected her at the one farthest from the Big House. From there, she asked hawkers and passersby and, finally, the corner shop man for directions, heaving her suitcase over roadside rocks, ignoring the amatory trills and ululations of long-distance lorry drivers whose groins burned for release.
Her hair knotted and smoothed, she squints around her, one hand shielding her eyes from the white sunlight. What she sees (and hears): two small blurs near a wall in the distance (murmuring to each other); a bigger blur on a low swing (creaking, humming). She takes hold once more of her suitcase (its handle attached only by a twisted tongue of leather) and begins her journey up the driveway, still watching the figure on the swing. The humming grows more audible as she approaches, and gradually her eyes pick out more details: A wild black frizz poised over color pictures in a glossy magazine. Dry sk
in on exposed knees. Sharp elbows. Long fingers turning pages. And then, just as she passes the swing, the girl's long face lifts, and her eyes find Chellam's with not a moment's hesitation, as if she's been keeping track all this time of Chellam's progress towards the house, and knows—with her ears, her nose, her skin, for she hasn't looked until now—that Chellam is watching her. Under the frank stare of her narrow black eyes, her eyelids are two blue-black half-moons. A half-smile ripples like sunlight on dark water around her wide mouth, so brief Chellam's not sure if she imagined it, though its last dispersed vestiges glint and sparkle in the periphery of her vision. The afternoon sun has burned the gravel so intensely it seems to vibrate under Chellam's feet, and its heat rises through the rubber of her Japanese slippers to scorch her calloused soles. Somewhere an outdoor tap squeals and gushes. Now the girl on the swing, who has not looked away all this while, blinks an answering blink at Chellam and then lowers her gaze once more to the bright pages in her lap.
All the way up the length of her tunnel, from the darkness at its end into the light of promise at its beginning, Chellam has dragged her suitcase for our spectatorial pleasure. Think of our telescoping tale as the opposite of an old-fashioned cartoon close: instead of the pitch black creeping in on Bugs Bunny from all directions, the light expands, and out there, before Chellam, stretches all of life: sight, sympathy (for if that girl smiled at her—and Chellam is almost certain she did—then she might find compassion, if not friendship, here in this house), savings for her savings tin (for perhaps this new boss will, unlike Mr. Dwivedi, have the balls to face her father squarely). Oh, Chellam is not so naïve after seventeen years of hard knocks—of starvation, scabies, ringworm, prostitution, beatings, spittings in the face—to believe in fairy-tale endings or fresh starts, and yet the day is so unremittingly bright, and the Big House such an absurdly happy peacock color, that she can't help but feel something leap in her parched throat, sweeter than mere relief to have arrived at last, larger than new-job nerves.
On the other side of the shimmering wall of dust that separates Chellam from the ornamental swing, Uma smiles—yes, she does smile—and thinks: So you're the latest putative antidote to the ills of this house. Poor child, how old are you? Not old enough for us, surely. Then she drops her gaze to the panoramic photograph of the Princeton campus on her lap, but she looks (and turns the page) without seeing, for her thoughts remain with the new servant, and on whether such narrow shoulders will be able to bear all that is in store for them.
And Amma, watching Chellam's progress in the glass panel of the front door, says to herself: Hmm. Such a small thing. Feel almost sorry for her, actually. Maybe it'll be nice to have her in the house. Maybe she'll be company for Suresh and Aasha, on top of getting the old coot off my back. Maybe she can be their New Oldest Sister, haha. Maybe things will be better for everyone now.
Chellam's halfway up the driveway. When she focuses her mole eyes on Aasha and Suresh, they lick the Chickadee dust off their fingers and wipe their hands on their clothes, ready to face this stranger and the rest of the afternoon.
"Am-mAA!" shouts Suresh. "The new servant girl is here!"
From his aerie, his mouth full of sour, stringy mango, Baldy Wong screams, "Servant servant servant!" Then he shins down to inspect the newcomer from his side of the fence. He sticks his nose and mouth through a gap and unfurls his tongue like a giraffe, as if he means to touch Chellam with it. Longer and longer it grows, and just as it occurs to Aasha that she might grab it hard between her thumb and index finger and give it a good tug, she feels Amma's breath on her neck. Baldy's tongue has mesmerized them all, and not one of them has heard Amma come through the back door and across the outdoor kitchen on her soundless feet. Her caftan sleeves stir slightly in a brand-new breeze; she's breathing stertorously, as if she's run all the way.
"Suresh, what did you just say?" asks Amma, clipped and clear as a teacher reading Lesson One out loud. "Servant girl?"
"Uh-oh, uh-oh," offers Baldy, clutching at the fence. "Uh-oh. Sei lor. You gonna die." He jigs up and down. This is the exciting bit. Don't change the channel now. They'll probably stop for advertisements, though, and he'll have to wait till next week to see what'll happen.
Happily for Baldy, the show goes on: Suresh gets a mouthslap right then. A hard one, quick and flat, Amma's five fingers pressed together to form an unyielding paddle. "Aiyo!" cries Baldy. "Beat him so hard one! Pain, pain, pain!" He clutches his face and sways.
Aasha gets a tsk for laughing, but when she looks around to see who issued it (Amma, because she likes to claim one shouldn't laugh at Baldy even when he deserves it? Suresh, who has interpreted the laughter to mean Aasha isn't on his side? The servant girl herself, because she's hot and tired and irritated by both of them? Baldy, who envisioned his melodrama as a serious piece of theater?), she cannot tell, and therefore cannot categorize it as a warning of castigations to follow or a tsking to be dismissed and forgotten.
From her spot on the ornamental swing, Uma watches them all.
"Angryyyyy, oi!" bellows Baldy.
"Baldy," spits Amma, "behave yourself, for goodness' sake. Go inside and find your ma. All this is not your business, know or not?" Then she says to Aasha and Suresh, "We don't say servant girl." The two words are framed by hot, white silences. "Servant or lawyer or doctor, we are all human beings."
"But—" says Suresh.
"But—" says Aasha, at almost exactly the same time, so that together their two buts are a single stammer: b-b-ut-ut.
Glumly, Baldy picks his gluey nose and yearns for more slapstick action.
"No ifsandsorbuts," says Amma. "Servant girl! Oho, and you are both brilliant sparks, is it? Nuclear scientists? Heart surgeons? Highflying jet-setting diplomats? Who do you think you are?"
The question rises and ripples in the afternoon heat. Parts of it swell and other parts shrink as it climbs higher and higher in the air and settles, shimmering, on the top branch of the tamarind tree.
WHO do you think you are?
Who do you THINK you are?
Who DO you think you are?
Who do you think you are, servant girl, Suresh asks silently, to stand there like a queen and watch our mother shame us?
"Suresh," Amma says, "take Chellam Akka's suitcase to her room." Then she turns her back to him pointedly and says to Chellam, "Please come inside and have a drink. Tsk tsk tsk, you must be so tired, so hot it is today. Tea coffee sofdrink? What you want?"
ON CHELLAM'S FIRST full day, Mrs. Balakrishnan strolls across the street to wonder aloud about her narrow hips, flat chest, and tiny hands. On her second, Kooky Rooky comes a-calling for the same purpose. "Too-too sorry for her I feel, Auntie," she says to Amma. "I myself was forced to work in other people's houses at that age, you know? Twelve, thirteen years old I was washing bedsheets and big-big pails of clothes with my hands."
"That must've been in a different lifetime from the one in which her father sent her to a boarding school in England," Suresh says after she's left.
Because it simply won't do for Lawyer Rajasekharan and family to be caught employing a child laborer, Amma sits Chellam down at the Formica table for a thorough interrogation. "No birth cettificayte, Maddam," Chellam says over and over. "In my house we got no birthday-birthday all that." And try as Amma might to intimidate her into a confession with knowing looks and insinuations, Chellam can only say that she is seventeen, give or take a few months.
"Her growth might have been stunted by malnutrition," Amma concludes. When she gives Chellam Appa's like-new-only courthouse shirts, she advises her to pin up the sleeves. "Or you can cut and sew them," Amma says. "Then they won't be forever getting wet and dirty when you do your work, and that way they will last longer also."
Perhaps it is Chellam's youth that arouses some didactic impulse in Amma, or perhaps it's the subtle, childlike quality of her manners and movements: the way she wrinkles her nose to laugh at Suresh's rudest jokes; the way she turns her feet in and fidgets w
henever she stands before Amma, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and back again, scratching her calves with her toenails as if invisible flies were bothering her; the way she sticks her tongue out of one corner of her mouth when applying herself to a tricky task. Whatever the reason, Amma brims with this teach-a-man-to-fishing in Chellam's early days. When she catches the girl squinting at the dining room clock from one foot away, she tells her, "Your eyesight is something you must take care of. If you're careful with your money and save up properly, you can go for an eye exam and get spectacles." Amma finds Chellam an empty Quality Street tin to use as a piggy bank. "Here," she says. "Every month put your money in this. Don't simply-simply waste it on magazines and kacang puteh."
Taking the tin firmly in both hands, Chellam runs up to her room and puts it under her bed. She has fifty sen left over from the money Mrs. Dwivedi gave her to take the bus; instead of opening her Spectacles Account with this, she decides to spend it on a long-term investment for more efficient account-keeping. She purchases a pocket-sized notebook from the corner shop, and on the first page she makes two columns, marking one "Master Gave" and the other "Things I Bought" in her beetling Tamil characters. Then she lists the months in a third column, next to the first, one through twelve, deciding one year is good enough to start with. And together (but separately), she and Amma pat themselves on the back: Amma for her invaluable contribution to Chellam's moral education, and Chellam for the good sense apparent in the very preparation of this notebook. She will do good work; she will never grumble back when the old lady grumbles at her; she will be so impressive that they will raise her pay after the first few months.
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