"No time for long speeches now," Appa says. "Better get on the plane."
"Bye, Uma," says Suresh, rubbing the back of his neck.
Only Aasha says nothing. She scratches her rashes and stares at the plane, hunkered on its heavy haunches on the runway. Poor plane, desperately wishing for some privacy in which to pee. Disdainful of public toilets.
At the very last moment, Amma grabs the stiff scarecrowness of Uma by the shoulders and gives it an arm's-length hug, which gesture makes everyone look away tactfully: Appa pretends to consult his watch; Suresh looks the Visit Malaysia ladies in the eye one after the other, telling each one how nobody's going to be fooled by her fake smile; Aasha goes back to her carpet stains.
Uma walks out to the plane in the sun's breezeless glare. Her knees rub against each other like two starved cats. Aasha lays her hands on the big window, expecting nothing, hoping for little. Maybe Uma has secretly realized she didn't say goodbye to Aasha; maybe she's sorry.
And then, suddenly, so quickly Aasha might have missed it if she'd blinked at the wrong time, Uma turns and waves and smiles right at Aasha, not at her shoes or a spot above her head or a stranger behind them all. That lovely, old-Uma smile they haven't seen in years. Though Aasha forgives everyone else's confusion—at this distance, it's often difficult to know exactly what someone's looking at, so who can blame Amma and Suresh for waving back, or Appa for raising one arm in a stilted salute-cum-wave?—she knows the smile is for her. A tide of understanding washes through her: in that moment she knows where Uma is going and why, and what it means to escape, though as soon as she moves from the window she will find herself searching, once again, for those answers.
As Uma turns away, Aasha peels that smile off the glass and slips it into her pocket.
For what would happen to it if she didn't? It would dry up and fall to the floor, to be swept up by some airport sweeper woman in a uniform. A waste. A travesty.
When she gets home she will crouch in a corner of Uma's empty room to look at the smile in private, but her sweat will have worn away parts of it. Never again will she see it clearly, for of this smile there are no photographs.
At one-thirty they are in the car again, Appa and Amma in front, Suresh, No Uma, and Aasha in the back. Innocent and guilty, knowing and unknowing, hollow and bursting.
Like some oversized, sun-stunned insect on an aimless expedition, the silver Volvo creeps along, full of the heavy smell of hot leather. Suresh and Aasha stare out their respective windows. Sun in their eyes. Long way to go. Hungry thirsty headache stomachache nasty car smell no more oldest. Suresh's palms are slick, and a boil is burgeoning on his tongue, just as he predicted, from all Amma's unwanted attention. "Terrible heat," Amma says every now and then. "As soon as we reach we'll have to have a nice cold drink." Peering into her visor mirror, she peels off her sparkly adhesive pottu and then sticks it back onto the same spot between her eyebrows.
On Kingfisher Lane the sun lies straight ahead, liquid as an egg yolk in the valley between two distant limestone hills, quivering, ready, turning the surrounding foliage to gold. Closer and closer they draw to its beating light, and then, without warning—in the split second when Appa takes his foot off the accelerator for no clear reason—the sun looses itself, slides down into the foothills, and surges out into the street. It brings the water in the monsoon drains to a boil and singes the whiskers of stray cats. It crisps the ants on the asphalt and scorches the grass on the verges. It rolls all the way down the street and finally against the windscreen of the Volvo, comes to a reluctant rest.
They close their eyes and lean back. "Foof!" Appa sighs. "Hell of a bloody tired." Too tired even for a nice cold drink when they go indoors. In their separate places they lie down—Appa in his study Amma in her bed upstairs, Suresh sitting up at the dining table, Aasha on the PVC settee. Wherever each one is, they all hear Chellam sniffing and tossing, tossing and rolling to find a single cool spot in her bed.
But that stifling day gives way to a cool, breezy dusk, flickering with mothwings and stars and the gentle regret of the streetlights.
At seven o'clock, Aasha sits on the landing outside Uma's room with The Wind in the Willows. Uma never offered to return it for her. Now Aasha will have to keep it for the rest of her life. Perhaps she should bury it in the garden; perhaps she should stuff it into a drawer and pretend it's gone. Pretend she never read it, never had it, never went to the library that day with Uma. If she tries hard enough, she knows, she can force its laminated weight out of her mind, all of it, Toad of Toad Hall, Mole, Water Rat, the Irish Bargewoman, all gone. Failing that, she could, with Suresh's assistance, post it to a charity whose name and address they will find in the phone book. There must be charities that want books. She will tear out the date due slip; she will black out the library stamp with a marker pen.
For now, though, she's too sad to come to a decision. She stands on the landing out of habit, because she has nowhere else to go, and because the gathered guests in Paati's wedding photo have taken it upon themselves to comfort her on this sad night.
Never mind, says a fat lady in a saree with a foot-wide border of gold thread. Probably—maybe—Uma's thinking of you at this very minute. Don't you think so?
Just as Aasha's about to nod, a glass-cracking scream shoots through the Balakrishnans' roof and across the violet sky.
The neighbors come out into the street. One unwilling husband is dispatched to the Balakrishnans' house to investigate.
There's smoke in their back yard, snailing out of their back door. But that scream—still vibrating in all their ears—could have been spurred by no burned batch of jelebis, no pot of dhal left to scorch on a forgotten flame.
Amma, her airport makeup smudged, rushes to the gate in her caftan. Chellam shuffles out onto the porch in her Japanese slippers, slow and quiet, pressing her hands to her chest. A little cold. A little afraid that once more Blame will pick its way towards her through the crowds and put its arm around her waist with that eerie, toothless smile, like an old witch who recognizes her without being recognized.
From the window on the landing, Aasha watches.
There are tears and fainting spells, sprinting feet in the street, women rushing about with loose hair. Mrs. Malhotra's grey hair is wet from her evening bath, and her belly trembles under her thin house-dress. Mrs. Anthony from house number 27 sinks onto the Balakrishnans' culvert, her batik sarong making a hammock between her stout knees. Even the Malay family from down the street come cautiously out. The mother without her headscarf, her hair a soft bulge under her woolen cap, her lips aflutter as she solicits Allah's mercy under her breath. The father in a cotton singlet. The little girl pale and owlish.
An ambulance arrives, siren blaring, and Mrs. Balakrishnan emerges to sob and bang her head on walls before her stunned audience.
Baldy Wong bursts into song.
In the Big House, Mr. McDougall's daughter steps out of the upstairs bathroom in her patent-leather shoes and walks down the corridor in a perfectly straight line, stately as a bride, hands clasped at her waist, to stand behind Aasha at the window. As the sky darkens, her reflection shows more and more clearly in the glass: her custard-colored skin, her single dimple, her pink ribbons.
"Now Kooky Rooky's dead," she says matter-of-factly, though not unkindly. Her clasped hands shake a little; Aasha can tell she's trying to be brave. "This time for sure."
They creep down the stairs to the front door.
There's an odd smell, something burned, yes, but not something on the stove. A thick, sour smell, like insects crisped by a lightbulb, but worse.
Behind the ambulance Mrs. Balakrishnan rocks back and forth as if she is working up the momentum to race down the street. Baldy Wong's mother has emerged to nip and yap worriedly at his shoulders in a low voice that, against her best intentions, carries across the street: "Aiya boy-boy, stop it lah, please lah, people not joking-joking here, you know, you gonna get walloped if you don't watch it. Everybody
already so sad and angry and here you with your nonsense! Faster-faster go home. Please. Mummy's good boy."
But Baldy refuses to budge. Cross-eyed and drooling, he belts out his minor-key rendition of a Malay folk song:
Rasa sayang, eh, rasa sayang sayang eh
Eh lihat nona jauh
Rasa sayang sayang eh.
(I've got that loving feeling
See that woman in the distance
I've got that loving feeling.)
Amma opens the gate and runs across the street. From the front door Aasha watches her, dry-mouthed, empty-eyed. Only Mr. McDougall's daughter's breath, on Aasha's neck, is moist, for Aasha has no room left in her for grief. Other people's sorrow knocks against her like a spoon seeking a water glass, expecting to draw forth the round, ringing note of a child's innocent sympathy, but finding instead a solid wooden block. Clunk. And then nothing. Humming a tune of her own invention, Aasha strolls out to the gate.
Two men bring a long, blanketed shape out of the Balakrishnans' house on a stretcher, but when they try to load it into the ambulance, Mrs. Balakrishnan blocks their path. She pummels the ambulance windows with her fists; she falls to her knees. She clings to the driver's legs and sobs, and he stands there, bewildered, apologetic, exhausted. Scratching his head, blowing again and again through pursed lips. It's just his job, and he has a cup of masala tea and a new wife both cooling at home.
Mrs. Balakrishnan sees Amma and runs to her, seizing her shoulders, unleashing her demons for this fresh victim. "Aiyo, aiyo, aiyo, I never knew this would happen! Aiyo, aiyo! Who knows how many years of bad luck she has brought onto our house! Why take revenge on us for what her husband did to her? Until I die I'll never forget the sight of her lying there like that! Aiyo, paavam!" She shakes Amma and sinks once more onto her knees, screaming for the solace of her dead mother and her deaf gods. "Aiyo, Amma! Aiyo, saami!"
"Enough, Parvatha," Mr. Balakrishnan barks. Suddenly he's no longer the foolish drunkard rumored to have been beaten, on occasion, by his shrewish wife. "Pull yourself together," he says. "What for all this drama now?"
Mrs. Anthony stands up and grabs Amma's elbow. Aasha sees her thick saliva frothing gleefully at the corners of her mouth, her glasses filmed with cooking oil, but she cannot quite make out her words. Amma's face quakes, her cheeks and brow and jaw on the verge of pulling away from one another like small continents.
"Kooky Rooky burned herself alive," Amma says when she comes home. Almost as matter-of-fact as Mr. McDougall's daughter (who has disappeared, unremarked, into the night). "Poured kerosene on her head and set fire to herself in Mrs. Balakrishnan's kitchen."
The neighbors have all gone home. The splashes of bucket showers drift into the street from the nervous ablutions of people determined to wash off the day's unwholesomeness, Kooky Rooky's restless spirit, the lingering evil luck of what she's done. Not in their houses, thank God. A thorough bath and their fortunes should be safe. Too bad for Mrs. B.
Aasha imagines Kooky Rooky with a kerosene tin just like the one Uma used on Paati's chair. Tilting it to pour a little kerosene into one cupped hand and sprinkling this in her loosened hair as though it were holy water. Then hefting the tin with both hands, closing her eyes, emptying its contents onto her shoulders. The kerosene would've gurgled as it poured. Did she light a match or use Mrs. Balakrishnan's stove lighter? Did she change her mind when it was too late? Did she scream a lot, or just once, very loudly?
I'm sure she realized she was damaged goods, Amma will tell Uma in the first of many letters she will write, because now, at last, she's found one motherly duty she can fulfill without having to face her children's supercilious eyes. After what happened with her so-called husband. Let that be a warning to you when dealing with men.
Now God himself is up there listening to her lies, Suresh will joke in the note Amma forces him to add at the bottom of that letter. In our opinion she and God both deserved what they got. Speaking for Aasha without her permission, for in fact, if asked, she would argue that Kooky Rooky didn't deserve to die writhing in agony on a kitchen floor just because she told a few lies.
Uma will not reply to that letter or any of those that follow it. It will be up to each of them—Appa, Amma, Suresh, Aasha, and Chellam in the red-earthed hell she will inhabit for the last year of her life—to imagine her adventures in America for themselves. With hope and remorse, with longing, with envy, with whatever answers the particular needs of each imaginer.
Appa, never the shrinking violet when it comes to spinning a good story, begins tonight. In his mistress's terrace house in Greentown, he pulls his Chindian children onto his lap and tells them a tale that soars and grips and wrings the breath out of them. He tells them of an aeroplane longer than the entire row of houses on their street; of air stewardesses in batik uniforms; of a foreign land regularly transfixed by such a spell of cold that people eat bacon fat every day and swaddle themselves in wool and feathers. He tells them of a great university hundreds of years old, where Uma, the half-sister they've never met, will study her way to a Nobel Prize. Here on the oily floor of his mistress's kitchen, he finally dares to be proud of Uma. Grants himself the permission to dream for her. Sees New York through her wise, hungry eyes. The autumn leaves, he tells them. The colors. You can't imagine.
If his tale bears certain striking resemblances to the one Uncle Ballroom wove for Uma two and a half years ago, it's because they're brothers, after all, and they've dreamed the same dreams.
He tells his bluff children of Central Park, where Uma will take Sunday afternoon walks; of the beautiful brownstone she will someday own; of how her heels will click up and down the sidewalks of busy streets when she is rich and famous.
And as he speaks his story, it acquires weight and momentum. It breathes. It becomes true. Somewhere in New York, the ghost of Uma Future strides up and down the sidewalks in a stylish trench coat, her heels clicking on the cement. For her, at least, there will be—there already is—a Happily Ever After in which Appa's Chindian children, and his awestruck mistress, and Appa himself, can believe.
In America, he says, his voice low with wonder (for this is the moral of his story, his grand conclusion), anything can happen.
You can go there a nobody, a no-name orphan, and tomorrow find yourself a United States senator.
You can go there starving and crippled, penniless and alone, and tomorrow find yourself a millionaire.
You can go there broken, and tomorrow find yourself whole.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the chapter on the 1969 riots, I referred to Anthony Reid's article "The Kuala Lumpur Riots and the Malaysian Political System," Australian Outlook 23:3, 258–78 (1969).
I also wish to thank:
The MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Hopwood Awards program at the University of Michigan for validation both material and abstract.
My teachers in Michigan and before that for their inspiration and encouragement: Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Laura Kasischke, Eileen Pollack, Nancy Reisman, and Anne Carson; Jennifer Wenzel, John Dalton, Joanna Scott, Sarah Dunant and Gillian Slovo, Janet Berlo, Hannah Tyson, and Cynthia Thomasz.
My friends and fellow writers at the University of Michigan, especially Uwem Akpan, Jasper Caarls, Ariel Djanikian, Jenni FerrariAdler, Joe Kilduff, Taemi Lim, Peter Mayshle, Marissa Perry, Celeste Ng, Phoebe Nobles, and Anne Stameshkin.
Ayesha Pande for loving this book more than I can and untiringly championing its cause.
Anjali Singh for being the most patient, perceptive, engaged editor any writer could hope for.
Mr. Kayes and the members of the Ipoh Talk forum for keeping me connected to my hometown and for their generous answers to my random questions.
My families by blood and by marriage for their love and support.
And most of all, Robert Whelan, for somehow being able to be both my first reader and my best friend.
Table of Contents
Title
Page
Front
1. THE IGNOMINIOUS DEPARTURE OF CHELLAMSERVANT DAUGHTER-OF-MUNIANDY
2. BIG HOUSE BEGINNINGS
3. THE NECESSARY SACRIFICE OF THE BURDENSOME RELIC
4. AN OLD-FASHIONED COURTSHIP
5. THE RECONDITE RETURN OF PAATI THE DISSATISFIED
6. AFTER GREAT EXPECTATIONS
7. POWER STRUGGLES
8. WHAT AASHA SAW
9. THE FUTILE INCIDENT OF THE SAPPHIRE PENDANT
10. THE GOD OF GOSSIP CONQUERS THE GARDEN TEMPLE
11. THE FINAL VISIT OF THE FLEET-FOOTED UNCLE
12. THE UNLUCKY REVELATION OF CHELLAM NEWSERVANT
13. WHAT UNCLE BALLROOM SAW
14. THE GOLDEN DESCENT OF CHELLAM, THE BRINGER OF SUCCOR
15. THE GLORIOUS ASCENT OF UMA THE OLDEST-ELDEST
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Evening Is the Whole Day Page 42