The God of Small Things (41 page)

Ambassador E. Pelvis. With saucer-eyes and a spoiled puff. A short ambassador flanked by tall policemen, on a terrible mission deep into the bowels of the Kottayam police station. Their footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor.

Rahel remained behind in the Inspector’s office and listened to the rude sounds of Baby Kochamma’s relief dribbling down the sides of the Inspector’s pot in his attached toilet.

“The flush doesn’t work,” she said when she came out. “It’s so annoying.”

Embarrassed that the Inspector would see the color and consistency of her stool.

  The lock-up was pitch-dark. Estha could see nothing, but he could hear the sound of rasping, labored breathing. The smell of shit made him retch. Someone switched on the light. Bright. Blinding. Velutha appeared on the scummy, slippery floor. A mangled genie invoked by a modern lamp. He was naked, his soiled mundu had come undone. Blood spilled from his skull like a secret. His face was swollen and his head look liked a pumpkin, too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down smile. Police boots stepped back from the rim of a pool of urine spreading from him, the bright, bare electric bulb reflected in it.

Dead fish floated up in Estha. One of the policemen prodded Velutha with his foot. There was no response. Inspector Thomas Mathew squatted on his haunches and raked his jeep key across the sole of Velutha’s foot. Swollen eyes opened. Wandered. Then focused through a film of blood on a beloved child. Estha imagined that something in him smiled. Not his mouth, but some other unhurt part of him. His elbow perhaps. Or shoulder.

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.

Childhood tiptoed out.

Silence slid in like a bolt.

Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared.

On their way back in the police jeep, Baby Kochamma stopped at
RELIABLE MEDICOS
for some Calmpose. She gave them two each. By the time they reached Chungam Bridge their eyes were beginning to close. Estha whispered something into Rahel’s ear.

“You were right. It wasn’t him. It was Urumban.”

“Thang god,” Rahel whispered back.

“Where d’you think he is?”

“Escaped to Africa.”

They were handed over to their mother fast asleep, floating on this fiction.

Until the next morning, when Ammu shook it out of them. But by then it was too late.

Inspector Thomas Mathew, a man of experience in these matters, was right. Velutha didn’t live through the night.

Half an hour past midnight, Death came for him.

And for the little family curled up and asleep on a blue cross-stitch counterpane? What came for them?

Not Death. Just the end of living.

  After Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu took them back to the police station and the Inspector chose his mangoes
(tap, tap)
, the body had already been removed. Dumped in the
themmady kuzby
—the pauper’s pit—where the police routinely dump their dead.

  When Baby Kochamma heard about Ammu’s visit to the police station, she was terrified. Everything that she, Baby Kochamma, had done, had been premised on one assumption. She had gambled on the fact that Ammu, whatever else she did, however angry she was, would never publicly admit to her relationship with Velutha. Because, according to Baby Kochamma, that would amount to destroying herself and her children. Forever. But Baby Kochamma hadn’t taken into account the Unsafe Edge in Ammu. The Unmixable Mix—the infinite tenderness of motherhood, the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.

Ammu’s reaction stunned her. The ground fell away from under her feet. She knew she had an ally in Inspector Thomas Mathew. But how long would that last? What if he was transferred and the case re-opened? It was possible—considering the shouting, sloganeering crowd of Party workers that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai had managed to assemble outside the gate. That prevented the laborers from coming to work, and left vast quantities of mangoes, bananas, pineapple, garlic and ginger rotting slowly on the premises of Paradise Pickles.

Baby Kochamma knew she had to get Ammu out of Ayemenem as soon as possible.

She managed that by doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with other people’s passions.

She gnawed like a rat into the godown of Chacko’s grief. Within its walls she planted an easy, accessible target for his insane anger. It wasn’t hard for her to portray Ammu as the person actually responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Ammu and her two-egg twins.

Chacko breaking down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was
her
idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned.

THE MADRAS MAIL

A
nd so, at the Cochin Harbor Terminus, Estha Alone at the barred train window. Ambassador E. Pelvis. A millstone with a puff. And a greenwavy, thick watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless bottomful feeling. His trunk with his name on it was under his seat. His tiffin box with tomato sandwiches and his Eagle flask with an eagle was on the little folding table in front of him.

Next to him an eating lady in a green and purple Kanjeevaram sari and diamonds clustered like shining bees on each nostril offered him yellow laddoos in a box. Estha shook his head. She smiled and coaxed, her kind eyes disappeared into slits behind her glasses. She made kissing sounds with her mouth.

“Try one. Verrrry sweet,” she said in Tamil.
Rombo maduram.

“Sweet,” her oldest daughter, who was about Estha’s age, said in English.

Estha shook his head again. The lady ruffled his hair and spoiled his puff. Her family (husband and three children) was already eating. Big round yellow laddoo crumbs on the seat. Trainrumbles under their feet. The blue nightlight not yet on.

The eating lady’s small son switched it on. The eating lady switched it off. She explained to the child that it was a sleeping light. Not an awake light.

Every First Class train thing was green. The seats green. The berths green. The floor green. The chains green. Darkgreen Lightgreen.

TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN
it said in green.

OT POTS NIART LLUP NIAHC
Estha thought in green.

Through the window bars, Ammu held his hand.

“Keep your ticket carefully,” Ammu’s mouth said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth. “They’ll come and check.”

Estha nodded down at Ammu’s face tilted up to the train window. At Rahel, small and smudged with station dirt. All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.

That
wasn’t in the papers.

  It took the twins years to understand Ammu’s part in what had happened. At Sophie Mol’s funeral and in the days before Estha was Returned, they saw her swollen eyes, and with the self-centeredness of children, held themselves wholly culpable for her grief.

  “Eat the sandwiches before they get soggy,” Ammu said. “And don’t forget to write.”

She scanned the finger-nails of the little hand she held, and slid a black sickle of dirt from under the thumb-nail.

“And look after my sweetheart for me. Until I come and get him.”

“When, Ammu? When will you come for him?”

“Soon.”

“But when? When eggzackly?”

“Soon, sweetheart. As soon as I can.”

“Month-after-next? Ammu?” Deliberately making it a long time away so that Ammu would say
Before that, Estha. Be practical. What about your studies?

“As soon as I get a job. As soon as I can go away from here and get a job,” Ammu said.

“But that will be never!” A wave of panic. A bottomless bottomful feeling.

The eating lady eavesdropped indulgently.

“See how nicely he speaks English,” she said to her children in Tamil.

“But that will be never,” her oldest daughter said combatively. “En ee vee ee aar. Never.”

By “never” Estha had only meant that it would be too far away. That it wouldn’t be
now
, wouldn’t be
soon.

By “never” he hadn’t meant, Not Ever.

But that’s how the words came out.

But that will be never!

For Never they just took the
O
and
T
out of Not Ever.

They?

The Government.

Where people were sent to Jolly Well Behave.

And that’s how it had all turned out.

Never. Not Ever.

It was
his
fault that the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting.
His
fault that she died alone in the lodge with no one to lie at the back of her and talk to her.

Because he was the one that had
said
it.
But Ammu that will be never!

“Don’t be silly, Estha. It’ll be soon,” Ammu’s mouth said. “I’ll be a teacher. I’ll start a school. And you and Rahel will be in it.”

“And we’ll be able to afford it because it will be ours!” Estha said with his enduring pragmatism. His eye on the main chance. Free bus rides. Free funerals. Free education. Little Man. He lived in a cara-van. Dum dum.

“We’ll have our own house,” Ammu said.

“A little house,” Rahel said.

“And in our school we’ll have classrooms and blackboards,” Estha said.

“And chalk.”

“And Real Teachers teaching.”

“And proper punishments,” Rahel said.

This was the stuff their dreams were made of. On the day that Estha was Returned. Chalk. Blackboards. Proper punishments.

They didn’t ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

Without warning the train began to move. Very slowly.

Estha’s pupils dilated. His nails dug into Ammu’s hand as she walked along the platform. Her walk turning into a run as the Madras Mail picked up speed.

Godbless, my baby. My sweetheart. I’ll come for you soon!

“Ammu!” Estha said as she disengaged her hand. Prising loose small finger after finger.

“Ammu! Feeling vomity!”

Estha’s voice lifted into a wail.

Little Elvis-the-Pelvis with a spoiled, special-outing puff. And beige and pointy shoes. He left his voice behind.

On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed.

The train pulled out. The light pulled in.

T
wenty-three years later, Rahel, dark woman in a yellow T-shirt, turns to Estha in the dark.

“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon,” she says.

She whispers.

She moves her mouth.

Their beautiful mother’s mouth.

Estha, sitting very straight, waiting to be arrested, takes his fingers to it. To touch the words it makes. To keep the whisper. His fingers follow the shape of it. The touch of teeth. His hand is held and kissed.

Pressed against the coldness of a cheek, wet with shattered rain.

  Then she sat up and put her arms around him. Drew him down beside her.