There were more red steps to climb. The same red carpet from the cinema hall was following them around. Magic flying carpet.
Chacko was in his room. Caught feasting. Roast chicken, chips, sweet corn and chicken soup, two parathas and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Sauce in a sauceboat. Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating. Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness. Chacko said it was no such thing. He said it was Sheer Greed.
Chacko was puzzled to see everybody back so early, but pretended otherwise. He kept eating.
The original plan had been that Estha would sleep with Chacko, and Rahel with Ammu and Baby Kochamma. But now that Estha wasn’t well and Love had been re-apportioned (Ammu loved her a little less), Rahel would have to sleep with Chacko, and Estha with Ammu and Baby Kochamma.
Ammu took Rahel’s pajamas and toothbrush out of the suitcase and put them on the bed.
“Here,” Ammu said.
Two clicks to close the suitcase.
Click. And click.
“Ammu,” Rahel said, “shall I miss dinner as my punishment?”
She was keen to exchange punishments. No dinner, in exchange for Ammu loving her the same as before.
“As you please,” Ammu said. “But I advise you to eat. If you want to grow, that is. Maybe you could share some of Chacko’s chicken.”
“Maybe and maybe not,” Chacko said.
“But what about my punishment?” Rahel said. “You haven’t given me my punishment!”
“Some things come with their own punishments,” Baby Kochamma said. As though she was explaining a sum that Rahel couldn’t understand.
Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.
Baby Kochamma’s goodnight kiss left a little spit on Rahel’s cheek. She wiped it off with her shoulder.
“Goodnight Godbless,” Ammu said. But she said it with her back. She was already gone.
“Goodnight,” Estha said, too sick to love his sister.
Rahel Alone watched them walk down the hotel corridor like silent but substantial ghosts. Two big, one small, in beige and pointy shoes. The red carpet took away their feet sounds.
Rahel stood in the hotel room doorway, full of sadness.
She had in her the sadness of Sophie Mol coming. The sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less. And the sadness of whatever the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man had done to Estha in Abhilash Talkies.
A stinging wind blew across her dry, aching eyes.
Chacko put a leg of chicken and some finger chips onto a quarter plate for Rahel. “No thank you,” Rahel said, hoping that if she could somehow effect her own punishment, Ammu would rescind hers.
“What about some ice cream with chocolate sauce?” Chacko said.
“No thank you,” Rahel said.
“Fine,” Chacko said. “But you don’t know what you’re missing.”
He finished all the chicken and then all the ice cream.
Rahel changed into her pajamas.
“Please don’t tell me what it is you’re being punished for,” Chacko said. “I can’t bear to hear about it.” He was mopping the last of the chocolate sauce from the sauceboat with a piece of paratha. His disgusting, after-sweet sweet. “What was it? Scratching your mosquito bites till they bled? Not saying ‘Thank you’ to the taxi driver?”
“Something much worse than that,” Rahel said, loyal to Ammu.
“Don’t tell me,” Chacko said. “I don’t want to know.”
He rang for room service and a tired bearer came to take away the plates and bones. He tried to catch the dinner smells, but they escaped and climbed into the limp brown hotel curtains.
A dinnerless niece and her dinnerfull uncle brushed their teeth together in the Hotel Sea Queen bathroom. She, a forlorn, stubby convict in striped pajamas and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. He, in his cotton vest and underpants. His vest, taut and stretched over his round stomach like a second skin, went slack over the depression of his belly button.
When Rahel held her frothing toothbrush still and moved her teeth instead, he didn’t say mustn’t.
He wasn’t a Fascist.
They took it in turns to spit. Rahel carefully examined her white Binaca froth as it dribbled down the side of the basin, to see what she could see.
What colors and strange creatures had been ejected from the spaces between her teeth?
None tonight Nothing unusual. Just Binaca bubbles.
Chacko put off the Big Light.
In bed, Rahel took off her Love-in-Tokyo and put it by her sunglasses. Her fountain slumped a little, but stayed standing.
Chacko lay in bed in the pool of light from his bedside lamp. A fat man on a dark stage. He reached over to his shirt lying crumpled at the foot of his bed. He took his wallet out of the pocket, and looked at the photograph of Sophie Mol that Margaret Kochamma had sent him two years ago.
Rahel watched him and her cold moth spread its wings again. Slow out. Slow in. A predator’s lazy blink.
The sheets were coarse, but clean.
Chacko closed his wallet and put out the light. Into the night he lit a Charminar and wondered what his daughter looked like now. Nine years old. Last seen when she was red and wrinkled. Barely human. Three weeks later, Margaret his wife, his only love, had cried and told him about Joe.
Margaret told Chacko that she couldn’t live with him anymore. She told him that she needed her own space. As though Chacko had been using her shelves for his clothes. Which, knowing him, he probably had.
She asked him for a divorce.
Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate. He memorized the brown down on her soft skull. The shape of her puckered, constantly moving mouth. The spaces between her toes. The suggestion of a mole. And then, without meaning to, he found himself searching his baby for signs of Joe. The baby clutched his index finger while he conducted his insane, broken, envious, torchlit study. Her belly button protruded from her satiated satin stomach like a domed monument on a hill. Chacko laid his ear against it and listened with wonder at the rumblings from within. Messages being sent from here to there. New organs getting used to each other. A new government setting up its systems. Organizing the division of labor, deciding who would do what.
She smelled of milk and urine. Chacko marveled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity, of a grown man.
When he left, he felt that something had been torn out of him. Something big.
But Joe was dead now. Killed in a car crash. Dead as a doorknob. A Joe-shaped Hole in the Universe.
In Chacko’s photograph, Sophie Mol was seven years old. White and blue. Rose-lipped, and Syrian Christian nowhere. Though Mammachi, peering at the photograph, insisted she had Pappachi’s nose.
“Chacko?” Rahel said, from her darkened bed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Ask me two,” Chacko said.
“Chacko, do you love Sophie Mol Most in the World?”
“She’s my daughter,” Chacko said.
Rahel considered this.
“Chacko? Is it Necessary that people HAVE to love their own children Most in the World?”
“There are no rules,” Chacko said. “But people usually do.”
“Chacko, for example,” Rahel said, “just for example, is it possible that Ammu can love Sophie Mol more than me and Estha? Or for you to love me more than Sophie Mol for example?”
“Anything’s possible in Human Nature,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the
darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.”
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it Like a sad fish with fins all over.
A cold moth lifted a cold leg.
The cigarette smoke curled into the night. And the fat man and the little girl lay awake in silence.
A few rooms away, while his baby grandaunt snored, Estha awoke.
Ammu was asleep and looked beautiful in the barred-blue streetlight that came in through the barred-blue window. She smiled a sleepsmile that dreamed of dolphins and a deep barred blue. It was a smile that gave no indication that the person who belonged to it was a bomb waiting to go off.
Estha Alone walked weavily to the bathroom. He vomited a clear, bitter, lemony, sparkling, fizzy liquid. The acrid aftertaste of a Little Man’s first encounter with Fear. Dum dum.
He felt a little better. He put on his shoes and walked out of his room, laces trailing, down the corridor, and stood quietly outside Rahel’s door.
Rahel stood on a chair and unlatched the door for him.
Chacko didn’t bother to wonder how she could possibly have known that Estha was at the door. He was used to their sometimes strangeness.
He lay like a beached whale on the narrow hotel bed and wondered idly if it had indeed been Velutha that Rahel saw. He didn’t think it likely. Velutha had too much going for him. He was a Paravan with a future. He wondered whether Velutha had become a card-holding member of the Marxist Party. And whether he had been seeing Comrade K. N. M. Pillai lately.
Earlier in the year, Comrade Pillai’s political ambitions had been given an unexpected boost. Two local Party members, Comrade J. Kattukaran and Comrade Guhan Menon had been expelled from the Party as suspected Naxalites. One of them—Comrade Guhan Menon—was tipped to be the Party’s candidate for the Kottayam by-elections to the Legislative Assembly due next March. His expulsion from the Party created a vacuum that a number of hopefuls were jockeying to fill. Among them Comrade K. N. M. Pillai.
Comrade Pillai had begun to watch the goings-on at Paradise Pickles with the keenness of a substitute at a soccer match. To bring in a new labor union, however small, in what he hoped would be his future constituency, would be an excellent beginning for a journey to the Legislative Assembly.
Until then, at Paradise Pickles, Comrade! Comrade! (as Ammu put it) had been no more than a harmless game played outside working hours. But if the stakes were raised, and the conductor’s baton wrested from Chacko’s hands, everybody (except Chacko) knew that the factory, already steeped in debt, would be in trouble.
Since things were not going well financially, the labor was paid less than the minimum rates specified by the Trade Union. Of course it was Chacko himself who pointed this out to them and promised that as soon as things picked up, their wages would be revised. He believed that they trusted him and knew that he had their best interests at heart.
But there was someone who thought otherwise. In the evenings, after the factory shift was over, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai waylaid the workers of Paradise Pickles and shepherded them into his printing press. In his reedy, piping voice he urged them on to revolution. In his speeches he managed a clever mix of pertinent local issues and grand Maoist rhetoric, which sounded even grander in Malayalam.
“People of the World,” he would chirrup, “be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the People. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed. You must demand what is rightfully yours. Yearly bonus. Provident fund. Accident insurance.”
Since these speeches were in part rehearsal for when, as the local Member of the Legislative Assembly, Comrade Pillai would address thronging millions, there was something odd about their pitch and cadence. His voice was full of green rice fields and red banners that arced across blue skies instead of a small hot room and the smell of printer’s ink.
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai never came out openly against Chacko. Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. A theoretical construct A pawn in the monstrous bourgeois plot to subvert the revolution. He never referred to him by name, but always as “the Management” As though Chacko was many people. Apart from it being tactically the right thing to do, this disjunction between the man and his job helped Comrade Pillai to keep his conscience clear about his own private business dealings with Chacko. His contract for printing the Paradise Pickles labels gave him an income that he badly needed. He told himself that Chacko-the-client and Chacko-the-Management were two different people. Quite separate of course from Chacko-the-Comrade.
The only snag in Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s plans was Velutha. Of all the workers at Paradise Pickles, he was the only card-holding member of the Party, and that gave Comrade Pillai an ally he would rather have done without. He knew that all the other Touchable workers in the factory resented Velutha for ancient reasons of their own. Comrade Pillai stepped carefully around this wrinkle, waiting for a suitable opportunity to iron it out.
He stayed in constant touch with the workers. He made it his business to know exactly what went on at the factory. He ridiculed them for accepting the wages they did, when their own government, the People’s Government, was in power.
When Punnachen, the accountant who read Mammachi the papers every morning, brought news that there had been talk among the workers of demanding a raise, Mammachi was furious. “Tell them to read the papers. There’s a famine on. There are no jobs. People are starving to death. They should be grateful they have any work at all.”
Whenever anything serious happened in the factory, it was always to Mammachi and not Chacko that the news was brought. Perhaps this was because Mammachi fitted properly into the conventional scheme of things. She was the Modalali. She played her part Her responses, however harsh, were straightforward and predictable. Chacko on the other hand, though he was the Man of the House, though he said “My pickles, my jam, my curry powders,” was so busy trying on different costumes that he blurred the battle lines.
Mammachi tried to caution Chacko. He heard her out, but didn’t really listen to what she was saying. So despite the early rumblings of discontent on the premises of Paradise Pickles, Chacko, in rehearsal for the Revolution, continued to play Comrade! Comrade!
That night, on his narrow hotel bed, he thought sleepily about pre-empting Comrade Pillai by organizing his workers into a sort of private labor union. He would hold elections for them. Make them vote. They could take turns at being elected representatives. He smiled at the idea of holding round-table negotiations with Comrade Sumathi, or, better still, Comrade Lucykutty, who had much the nicer hair.
His thoughts returned to Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol. Fierce bands of love tightened around his chest until he could barely breathe. He lay awake and counted the hours before they could leave for the airport.
On the next bed, his niece and nephew slept with their arms around each other. A hot twin and a cold one. He and She. We and Us. Somehow, not wholly unaware of the hint of doom and all that waited in the wings for them.
They dreamed of their river.
Of the coconut trees that bent into it and watched, with coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream in the mornings. Downstream in the evenings. And the dull, sullen sound of the boatmen’s bamboo poles as they thudded against the dark, oiled boatwood.
It was warm, the water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk.
With fish in it.
With the sky and trees in it.
And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to dance the night away on the dinner-smelling sea.
The time was
ten to two.
CHAPTER 5
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY
Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.
Both things had happened.
It had shrunk. And she had grown.
Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby. The barrage regulated the inflow of salt water from the backwaters that opened into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead of one. More rice, for the price of a river.
Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles underwater. Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it. Splay-footed, cautious.
Once it had had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers.
The stone steps that had once led bathers right down to the water, and Fisher People to the fish, were entirely exposed and led from nowhere to nowhere, like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing. Ferns pushed through the cracks.
On the other side of the river, the steep mud banks changed abruptly into low mud walls of shanty hutments. Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the squeichy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening, the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to the sea, leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts on a thin, rocking, ribbon lawn.
The God of Small Things Page 12