Evening Is the Whole Day

by Preeta Samarasan

  "How nice for you," the Ladies of the teatime circle say to Amma when they've had the chance to inspect Chellam from a distance. "What a lovely coincidence, the same age as your oldest, you said? She'll be good company for her, then, and another big sister for the two little ones."

  But Uma doesn't want company. That evanescent, sunlit smile seems now to Chellam to have been a figment of her imagination: how could this silent girl have even looked at her, this girl who hunched over her books and shut her face—closed shop, chup, lights out, iron grille crashing down like a newsagent's—when she heard Chellam's footsteps around a corner?

  Chellam's fading in and Uma's fading out are synchronizing before Aasha's eyes: the color, sound, and smell of Chellam permeate the brightening air as Uma's edges smudge and blur irreversibly. Two weeks after Chellam arrives, Uma starts to fill out her college applications. They're not due for another three months; even accounting for the vagaries of international postage, Uma has no reason to begin them now. No reason, that is, other than her immense excitement at the prospect of escape.

  She spreads the forms before her on the Formica table and turns the pages of one casually, as if it were a girls' magazine and she were looking for posters or free samples tucked between the buttery pages. She yawns and rubs the back of her neck; she chews the tip of her ballpoint pen. Softly, softly, just to himself, Paul Simon sings with deceptive tranquility:

  Now the sun is in the west

  Little kids go home to take their rest...

  From a few feet away, drawing closer with each blank Uma fills in, Aasha watches. Name. Age. Date of birth. P-e-r, per, m-a, ma, n-e-n-t, nent, permanent address. By the time Uma has finished filling this out, her pen making sharp, clean sounds on the paper, Aasha is hovering at her elbow. Almost, but not quite, on tiptoe. P-r-o, pro, s-p-e-c, spec, t-i-v-e, tive, Aasha spells out, rhyming tive with five. Prospective major. Whatever the meaning of this enigma, Uma now lifts her pen with great deliberation and, like a stonemason carving letters into a pedestal, writes BIOLOGY. The B a pompous doctor stomach, the O's tumbling one after another in disbelief, swelling and shrinking like parts of that question still ringing in Aasha's ears:

  whO do you think you are?

  who dO you think you are?

  Then, excruciatingly slowly, so that the pen's quick chirrups lengthen into thirty-second scrapes, Uma adds AND THEATRE.

  Aasha leans in so close her lips almost touch Uma's elbow. In the kitchen, the roar of pakoras dropped into hot oil erupts like applause. But Aasha doesn't feel like clapping, though she knows she should be proud of Uma for showing Appa and Amma and anyone else who's ever poked fun at her acting dreams that she's not so easily dissuaded. And she is showing them, even if they're not looking now: there it is, that word THEATRE, in black ink, plain as the numbers on the face of a clock and practically glowing. Uma's won. Uma's going to do what she pleases and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

  Aasha wants to be proud of Uma. She wants to say something small and marble-bright, like Yay! or Keep it up! or Our secret! And she does feel a whisper of pride, a tiny stirring, but it's no match for the great, heaving, howling sorrow that steals her words and sears her tongue. She wanders off and settles face-down on the green PVC settee, and Chellam keeps an eye on her for a full hour before hazarding a bit of unsolicited advice:

  "Putting your mouth nose all where people put their backside," she says, pawing at Aasha's shoulder, "get sick only then you know."

  "Ish," Aasha says, turning her face just enough to fix Chellam with one eye, "you no need to tell me what to do. You go and do your own work, otherwise I'll tell Amma."

  But there is a faint twinkle in that single eye, and the pout that follows this rebuke is almost beseeching, and now Aasha's lolling and rolling on the settee, like a lonely tiger cub itching for a tussle. Chellam understands these signals and knows what's expected of her: "Tell and see!" she says, grinning and tickling Aasha's ribs with five bony fingers. "Tell your Amma and see what I do to you next time!"

  And Aasha allows a sad, fey smile to be coaxed out of her, a smile iridescent with tears but unquestionably a smile, for maybe, despite all Chellam's superficial deficiencies, she will pay Aasha the attention Uma used to, and scrub her hair on shampoo days, and teach her songs, even if they are inferior songs in a different language. When Uma goes away to America, Chellam will stay. In this moment, Aasha sees with a psychic's clarity, with a vision unclouded by the tears behind her eyes, that Chellam will be here long after Uma has forgotten who she is. Chellam will always be who she is now, Chellam(servant) of the Big House, even when Uma is someone else, many different someone elses, according to season and time. In summer: an American girl buying hot dogs from a stand. In autumn: a girl out for a walk among gold-colored leaves with her gold-colored dog. In those New York City winters that will bleed her, just like in the song: an ice skater in a fur-trimmed hood and mittens, sitting down to hot chocolate with a boy who wants to marry her. And many years from now: a rich lady rushing around with her hands in the pockets of her trench coat, her head held high because, emptied of old faces, it's lighter than anyone else's.

  15. THE GLORIOUS ASCENT OF UMA THE OLDEST-ELDEST

  August 29, 1980

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Uma leaves for America is so hot that people wake up drenched in their beds. At dawn the sparrows are neither seen nor heard; Mr. Balakrishnan, who has tossed a handful of rice outside his back door for them as usual, squints up into the bone-white sky and wonders where they could be hiding. By nine o'clock, leaves, flowers, hair, spirits, resolve, and biscuits left on breakfast tables are turning limp. Butter melts. Coconut milk curdles before it can be used for lunchtime curries. Men sit under ceiling fans with their knees wide apart, wiping their backs and bellies with the cotton singlets they've pulled off. Women fan themselves with kitchen towels and newspapers as they tend to their chores.

  On the red Formica table in the Big House, the New Straits Times flutters untouched under a vase. The sour, inky smell of the frontpage headlines (so bold! so black! so sure!) wafts all the way through the house to remind those who might have forgotten that this is a momentous day not only for them but for the nation at large, for this is the victory they have won today: "Death for Sex Killer." And in slightly smaller letters underneath: "Closure at Last for Lim Family." On all the front pages of all the newspapers (rolled up, languishing under paperweights, spread out before husbands too hot to read) Appa strides efficiently away from the courthouse in his bestquality suit, black as the headlines themselves; his shiny red silk tie; his glasses that reflect the sea of rapacious faces through which he wades. T. K. Rajasekharan, Counsel for the Prosecution. Courtroom genius, master storyteller, legendary wit. Behind him, in the blurry background, two police officers lead an unshaven shrimp of a man in a songkok and a loose baju Melayu away to a dim cell somewhere offstage.

  At ten-thirty Mat Din loads Uma's suitcase into the cavernous boot of the Volvo, wondering at the fifteen stamp-shaped stickers of some gap-toothed, wing-eared white boy that emblazon it. He doesn't know that Alfred E. Neuman is running (albeit unofficially) for president; he doesn't know Aasha intended the stickers to help Uma recognize her suitcase in the New York airport pullulating with grey people in trench coats. And he doesn't know, of course, that Uma accepted the stickers merely out of mercy and regret and a sudden, guilty nostalgia, not because she was worried she'd have trouble finding her suitcase.

  Mat Din's chauffeuring services will not be required today; Appa has explained to him that they will drive to the airport as a family. Much like a family. In a configuration approximating a normal family. Mat Din is not so presumptuous as to entertain these alternate meanings of Appa's words, but Uma, hearing him through her open bedroom window, does.

  On her way out to the car Uma walks past Chellam's door, behind which she hears her shallow breath, quick as a dog's panting on this merciless day.

  I'm sorry, Chellam, Uma thinks. It's the first apology she'
s made in two years. And she is sorry: sorry that Chellam had to be the one to do — and to get caught doing—what all of them wanted to do and any of them might have done, had their stars been aligned as inauspiciously as Chellam's were on that afternoon. Hadn't Amma visited her (un)fair share of slaps and pinches and knocks upon Paati? Hadn't she, Uma, herself stood behind Paati, and thought terrible thoughts, and even—yes — acted on them that very afternoon? So Chellam had been the one to deliver the coup de grâce. Still, Uma cannot help but believe — she surprises herself with this irrational thought — that Chellam's act derived its fatal efficacy from all their guilty wishes (and unseen attempts). Like praying for world peace, Uma reflects grimly only just the opposite. The collective force of their frustrations had animated Chellam that day, quickened her shuffling feet, lifted her arm. She'd only been a puppet.

  Uma is sorry, too, about the thousand insectile mouths now relishing Chellam's fate, on Kingfisher Lane and other lanes, in Kuala Lumpur and Sydney and London. There but for the grace of God ... Never mind, she reasons. Maybe Chellam's headed for better things. A factory job. Who knows? Uma, having never considered a factory job herself, doesn't know the requirements, but she can hope.

  At eleven o'clock she sits in the back of the Volvo, ensconced between her sister's broken heart and her brother's maddened whistling. Aasha has lost; she's tried everything she could think of to win Uma back, to coax out of her one real smile or one true sentence—not a question pretending to be a sentence—meant solely for her, or one tiny promise, just to write, just to remember, anything. One sign that Uma would be a little bit sorry to leave. But that sign never came. Promise me you'll never again ask for a promise, Uma said the night she burned Paati's chair. Even if Aasha had promised, though, it wouldn't have been enough to bring the old Uma back.

  Suresh doesn't know about the promise Aasha couldn't make; all he knows is that Aasha is going to wander the corridors of their house like a lost kid goat for the rest of her life, falling asleep on its floors, sitting on the stairs to talk to ghosts, and this vision of her future makes him want to give her a good, hard thighpinch, to box her ears or clamp a hand over her nose and mouth until she's dying for a gulp of air so huge and frantic that she will swallow some sense with it.

  Majestic and almost silent, the silver Volvo glides down the driveway. The sun glints off its receding fender, and all down the street the same eyes that will watch Chellam's retreat a week from today, from behind the same window curtains, water and blink. Aasha pulls herself up onto her knees to look out the rear window and sees Paati's ghost, standing just outside the gate, not waving, not angry, not crying, not smiling. Among the objects that show through her transparent, inscrutable body: the distant limestone hills; Mr. Malhotra's Datsun Sunny, parked half on the street and half on the grass verge; Mrs. Manickam's untended hibiscus bushes. Aasha neither waves at Paati nor attempts to alert anyone else to her lukewarm farewell.

  As the Volvo passes the Wongs' front gate, Baldy Wong screeches his jubilation into the cloudless sky: "Big House girl gone America! Big House girl gone America!"

  "Looklooklook," says Mrs. Balakrishnan, poking her husband's shoulder, "they're going, man, they're going. Style-style only. Acting like soooo many problems they got, crying here crying there. But in the end everything works out tip-top for them, isn't it? When you have money whaaat is the big problem? Today you cry tomorrow you put on your five-hundred-dollar saree and send your daughter to America."

  But if Mrs. Balakrishnan accompanied them to the Ipoh airport, the only evidence of a festive mood she'd glean from their journey, their arrival, or their surroundings would be the following:

  1) The life-size cardboard ladies advertising Visit Malaysia Year 1980. They are MalayChineseIndian, IbanKadazanDayak, sleek and beaming ladies of every race, namaste-ing and salam-ing the wide world in toothy testimony to the country's legendary Racial Harmony. From the front these ladies seem perfect. Perfectly happy. Perfectly shapely. Perfectly poised. From the side, though, Aasha sees that they are just perfectly flat, and further, that they have no back parts whatsoever.

  2) Amma's impressive getup, from the cream-colored crepe silk saree with little indigo flowers cascading down the pallu (only three hundred ringgit, not five hundred, Mrs. B.) to the sapphire studs in her ears and the peacock pin on her shoulder. But the sapphire pendant is missing, and with a little prying Mrs. Balakrishnan would discover that its absence remains a source of suspicion and strife.

  3) A large Malay family picnicking on the ragged, notbrown-not-grey carpet, boisterously unaffected by the public sacrifice of one of their own to the gods of closure. Their portions of nasi lemak are generous; their noodles are steaming hot. But Suresh is only one of several people staring at them from a safe distance, and he disguises his disgust better than most. "After eating all those hard-boiled eggs," he whispers to Aasha, "they'll be able to propel themselves to their destination by farting. No need to get on the plane also."

  To excuse herself gently from the duty of laughing, Aasha lowers herself into a squat and begins to count the stains on her patch of the carpet.

  "Aasha," Amma says, "sit properly. What is this? Behaving like a junglee. No wonder Uma's thanking her lucky stars to be getting away from you. Here itself she already wants to pretend like she doesn't know you."

  Now Aasha's given Uma one more reason never to come back. Aasha stares fixedly at the carpet, and the stains blur and bleed into each other.

  "O Mr. Malay man," Suresh mutters under his breath, "with your stinky eggs. Sitting in the airport, stretching out your legs."

  Aasha slides one leg slyly out from under her dress and touches the toe of her sandal to the toe of Suresh's shiny airport shoe. A silent, thank-you toe touch, because Suresh is the only one who's trying to help. He looks at Aasha's foot, small and bony in its white sock, and knows quite well what she wants him to think, although she hasn't actually been cheered up by the rhyme. He doesn't compose a second verse. For a few moments Suresh and Aasha sit there looking at their just-touching feet, at Suresh's shiny, polished wingtip with its punched holes curling like cartoon steam, at Aasha's white sandal with its yellow plastic rose. And between the shoes, where their toes meet, a flurry of blue sparks: thank-yous and apologies, confessions and explanations and consolations, of which Aasha's thank-you for Suresh's extemporized egg poem is by far the least important.

  The occasion does lack gaiety, despite the efforts of the cardboard ladies and the Malay family, but Mrs. Balakrishnan's envy is understandable: today the Rajasekharan family could, in theory, have a lot to celebrate. Their star's rising and rising; how many families in Malaysia have spawned a winner of scholarships to Ivy League institutions? Even now two teenage Indian boys in open-chested shirts are fighting like goondas on the other side of the lounge, pinning each other to walls, clipping one another on the ears.

  "Tsk tsk," Amma says, "just look at our Indian boys. Good for nothing."

  "Loitering and playing the fool," agrees Appa.

  And this exchange is tantamount to a trumpet fanfare for their own arrival, their indisputable status as a good-for-something family, the great heights to which they have been climbing doggedly since Tata's dockyard worker days. Rising from the morass of tinkers tailors soldiers sailors stinkers drunkards abject failers, their offspring will live out new rhymes for new times: Doctor lawyer engineer, which will be your child's career?

  A whole hour remains before the boarding call for Uma's plane.

  "How about some pictures?" Appa says into the drowsy murmur of the lounge, jerking his head at Amma though the camera is in Uma's shoulder bag. "Eh? Put that latest-batest-model camera to use?"

  And so, because they have to do something with themselves, Uma takes the camera out of her bag, all the while staring at the clock above the Malaysian Airlines System desk. They begin to take pictures:

  Pictures of Uma and Amma standing exactly a foot apart.

  Pictures of Uma and Appa with thei
r arms folded.

  Pictures of Uma, Suresh, and Aasha with their arms at their sides.

  Strangers smile fondly and wait for them to finish before walking past them. Nice family saying goodbye. Eldest daughter going overseas in her smart brown suit and matching pumps. Congrachewlations. Wah, so clever one your daughter! They draw close to each other to whisper: "Eh, that one Lawyer Rajasekharan, isn't it?" "Just finished the Angela Lim case, man, yesterday only. If not for him that bastard would have got away."

  "Oh boy," says Appa as the camera flash goes off yet again, "here itself we'll use up five rolls of film!" But he doesn't stop Amma from arranging Suresh and Aasha on either side of the Visit Malaysia cardboard ladies for another picture. "Stand straight, Aasha, Suresh," Amma fusses. Her eyes flash in all directions, blinding the onlookers. "What is this, slouching at your age?"

  And Suresh and Aasha stand straight, because all this unfamiliar attention has shocked them into submission. Who knew Amma noticed menial sins like slouching and unladylike sitting? In the drab airport lounge she's like a rooster in a small back yard, strutting and preening as she's never done at home. If only the Ladies could see her like this—but no, as soon as the possibility occurs to Suresh, he backs away from it in trepidation. He must be careful what he wishes for; the Big House is not quite big enough for this Amma. He wouldn't be able to hide from her, and then all that attention would give him boils and stomachaches.

  As soon as the lady behind the desk turns on her microphone, Amma claps her hands briskly. "My goodness!" she says. "Boarding time already! Put the camera away, Uma, here, don't forget to put it right at the bottom of your bag, otherwise someone will flick it the minute you turn your head."

  The boarding announcement booms and screeches in their ears, amplified by all the unnecessary loudspeakers.

  "Okay then," Amma says. "Take care, study hard, enough of this drama club nonsense. No fooling around with boys. Just because some useless fellow brings you flowers—"