“For all we know,” Amma says, newly galvanized by her too-sweet tea, perhaps, or the mulishness of her children’s ears and brows, or the hesitation of Chellam and her empty suitcase on each separate stair, “she’s pregnant.”
The word, so raw they can almost smell it, contorts Amma’s mouth, offering the children an unaccustomed view of her teeth. It makes Suresh drop his eyelids and retreat into the complex patterns he’s spent his young life finding in the tabletop Formica. Men in bearskins. Trees with faces. Hook-nosed monks.
“On top of everything she has taken all that raffia from the storeroom without even asking,” Amma observes with a sigh and a long, loud slurp of her tea. Even this is out of character: Amma usually drinks her tea in small, silent sips, her lips barely parting at the rim of her mug.
For her journey home, Chellam has dressed herself in a striped men’s shirt with a stiff collar and a brown nylon skirt with a zipper in the back. The shirt is a hand-me-down from Appa. The skirt isn’t. “Look at her,” Amma says again through a mouthful of Marie biscuit, this time to no one in particular. “Just look at her. Dares to wear the shirt I gave her after all the havoc she’s caused. Vekkum illai these people. No bloody shame. Month after month I packed up and gave her your Appa’s shirts. Courthouse shirts, man, Arrow brand, nice soft cotton, all new-new. In which other house servants wear that type of quality clothes?”
In no other house, thinks Suresh. There aren’t any other houses, at least on Kingfisher Lane, staffed with scrawny servant girls dressed in oversized hundred-percent cotton courthouse shirts. If they’d saved Appa’s ties they could’ve had her wear those as well. And a bowler hat and gloves. Then they could’ve had her answer the door like a butler.
“Hmph,” Amma snorts into her teacup, “here I was trying to help her out, giving her clothes and telling her she could save her money for more useful things.”
Financial counseling and free shirts: a special Big House–only package deal. It had filled Amma with purpose and consequence, and had indeed impelled Chellam to try to save her money for More Useful Things. That is, until she realized that her father would turn up month after month to collect her wages on payday at the Big House, and that she was therefore saving her money for his daily toddies and samsus. For the back-street arrack that gave him the vision and vigor to beat his wife and children at home, and the cloudy rice wine the toddy shop owner made in a bathroom basin. Still, if you asked Chellam’s father (or the toddy shop owner), these were all Useful Things.
“In the end look what she’s done with my charity and my advice,” Amma says, wrapping up her tale with a jerk of the head towards the staircase. “She’s taken them and thrown both one shot in my face. Just wait, one by one the others also will be doing the same thing. Why not? After seeing her example they’ll also become just as bold. Vellamma can murder me, Letchumi can murder Appa, Mat Din can burn the house down, and Lourdesmary can stand and clap. Happily ever after.”
Aasha and Suresh silently note that they themselves are absent from this macabre prophecy. If Amma’s words can be taken at face value, the long fingers of fate will clutch at Suresh and Aasha but miss; for this they should probably feel lucky.
But they don’t.
Suresh is grateful only that Chellam doesn’t understand much English and is slightly hard of hearing (from all the clips her father’s fists, heavy with toddy and samsu, visited upon her ears in childhood). He notes that for some reason she’s left her suitcase leaning against the banister and hurried back upstairs. He isn’t going to point this out to Amma.
Aasha rocks back and forth in her chair so that her stretched-out toes, on every forward rocking, brush against Suresh’s knees under the table. It makes her feel better that he has knees, even if Uma has disappeared forever and Amma has been strangely transformed. He has knees. And again he has knees. Each time he has knees.
Behind Amma something stirs the curtains. Not wind, it’s not that sort of movement—not a gentle billowing, not a filling and unfilling with air, but a sudden jerk, as if someone’s hiding behind them, and sure enough, when Aasha checks she sees that her grandmother’s transparent ghost feet are peeking out from under the curtains, the broad toes she knows so well curling upward on the cool marble. So. Paati is back again, two weeks after her death, and for the very first time since her rattan chair was burned in the backyard. She’s not so easily scared off, is she? While everyone else is otherwise preoccupied, Paati’s hand darts out from behind the curtains, helps itself to a stray Marie biscuit crumb on the table beside Suresh’s plate, and slips back to its hiding place. And how would the others explain that? wonders Aasha in high dudgeon. What would they say, the faithless, doubting blind, who have stubbornly resisted the idea of Paati’s continued presence, and rolled their eyes at Aasha whenever she has tried to convey to them the needs and fears of Mr. McDougall’s daughter, the Big House’s original ghost and the one who has stuck by Aasha through all her losses and longings? No such thing as ghosts, they’ve scoffed (all except for Chellam, but other shortcomings mar her record). Now Aasha laps up this moment thirstily, thinks a flurry of I-told-you-so’s to herself.
Standing across from each other on either side of the gate, Appa and Chellam’s father are reflected in the glass panel of the open front door. Insider and outsider, bigshot lawyer and full-of-snot laborer, toothful and toothless. Chellam’s father’s dirty white singlet is spattered with rain; Appa holds his umbrella perfectly erect above his impeccably slicked-and-styled hair.
“Tsk,” Amma says, leaning forward to peer at the glass panel, “your father’s tea will be ice cold by the time he comes in. That man is a pain in the neck, I tell you. Normal people will know, isn’t it, okay, my daughter has caused so much trouble, better I shut up and go away quietly? But not him. No bloody shame.” She takes a biscuit from the biscuit plate. “Of course,” she says, and here she shifts her gaze from the glass panel back to the children, looking from one to the other, raising her eyebrows to impart to them the full extent of her inside knowledge, “if you want to talk about shameless men —”
Suresh pulls the biscuit plate towards himself, loudly grating its bottom against the table. “Only Marie biscuits?” he says plaintively. “No more chocolate wafers?”
Amma pauses with her own biscuit halfway to her mouth. She smiles knowingly, leans her head back, exhales, but Suresh, oh brave soldier sister-savior Suresh, does not yield. He holds her gaze, and wordlessly they do battle. For five terrible seconds she sweeps her searchlight eyes over Suresh’s face.
“No,” says Amma finally, “no more chocolate wafers.” Her eyes are still restless. “I’ll have to send Mat Din to the shop.”
“And Nutella,” says Suresh quickly, seizing the advantage. “Marie biscuits are much nicer with Nutella.”
“We’ll have to make a list,” says Amma. “Nutella also finished.”
Aasha lets go of the edge of her chair and slips her hands under her bottom on the seat. Under the chair she swings her legs. They will make a list. Tomorrow or next week Amma will give it to Mat Din the driver along with ten ringgit for petrol. He will take the list to a provision shop in town and come back with a carful of groceries: chocolate wafers, Nutella, rice, mustard seeds, star anise for mutton curry, tinned corn and peas to go with chicken chops. Lourdesmary the cook will put everything away, grumbling about the papaya seeds masquerading among the peppercorns and the staleness of the star anise. And life will go on as it did before Chellam ever arrived, or even better, except there’ll be new ghosts in the house: the ghost of dead Paati, growing younger and older and younger again, wrinkles melting into dimples and dimples into hollows, now a toddler, now a bride, now an old lady with a back as curved as a coconut shell; the ghost of Uma Past, suspended in time and forever eighteen years old; and far more terrible than the others, though Aasha doesn’t know it yet, will be the ghost of Chellam Future, her eyes wild as she screams to them from her funeral pyre, the ends of her hair already aflame, whole bitter planets orbiting at the back of her gaping mouth.
The two voices at the gate drone on and on. The wheedling dances sorrowfully around the weary voice, now grabbing at it, now stroking it, now tying it lovingly in knots as it falls lower and lower, so low they have to strain to hear it under the gentle fingerwork of raindrops on the metal awning, the whir of the ceiling fan, and the buzzing of a fly that has just entered the dining room. In the glass panel of the front door Amma sees Chellam’s father shake his head and wring his wrists like a woman. Then he wipes his cheeks with the heels of his hands, one after the other. He whimpers and moans, and his tremulous voice breaks and bubbles with drink and phlegm. Appa watches wordlessly. From the way he holds his shoulders under his umbrella Suresh can tell that he’s waiting for Chellam’s father to ask him for something. At best, more tea or a slice of plain bread. At worst, fifty ringgit. Or twenty. Or even two—just enough, he liked to say (as a glorious, conscience-pricking coup before he was given the fifty ringgit he knew he’d get every time), for a handful of amaranth leaves from his neighbor’s tree to go with his children’s lunchtime rice. But this time Chellam’s father doesn’t ask for any of these things; he grovels on behalf of his daughter, who hasn’t the shame to do it herself. Useless girl, saar, he says. I should’ve drowned her when she was born. Appa’s shoulders remain stiffly squared two inches below his ears.
Chellam is huffing and puffing once again, dragging her suitcase through the house’s endless, haphazard corridors. “Eh! What is this?” Amma whispers, low, urgent, her eyes darting around the room as if the confirmation of her suspicions might lie behind a painting or inside an urn. “Why she took so long to come down the stairs? Halfway down she must’ve gone back up, you see! And what was she doing up there all this time? Very funny. Very strange.”
In the evening Amma will find two ringgit missing from the glass bowl in which she keeps change for the roti man and the newspaper man, and Chellam will be accused in her absence of one last crime, pettier perhaps than the one for which she has been expelled from the Big House, but more shameless given everything that has transpired. Insult to injury, salt to an open wound, another inch taken from the yard of mercy they’ve already given her. Accused she will remain, until one night Appa happens to mention that the Volvo has been looking quite nice since he gave Mat Din two ringgit from the glass bowl to polish and wax it. (In fact, Chellam went back upstairs in a mostly futile attempt to impose some order on a storeroom thrown into disarray by the hasty extrication of her suitcase from under a pile of old newspapers.)
In the distance, Chellam’s suitcase slides and grates on the marble floor, and Chellam herself wheezes and sniffs from the cold that never seems to leave her. Across the dining room she shambles, and into her room under the stairs, where her clothes lie in a heap on her unmade bed. From the walls Kamal Hassan, Jayasudha, Sridevi, and Rajnikanth eye her glossily: Chellam, Chellam, they chide her, all the months you gazed at us, at our forelocks and our nose-rings and our flared nostrils, while trying to fall asleep, and today you ignore us like this? But Chellam’s mind is elsewhere this morning, and besides, squatting over her suitcase, she’s much too far away from their film-star faces to see anything more than the blur of their uniformly wheatish complexions. The suitcase lid swooshes as she drops it and then presses down on it to retie the raffia. She turns the suitcase around and around, pulling the raffia so hard the fibers leave red welts on her palms. She drags the suitcase the few remaining yards to the front door, rubbing her nose with an index finger.
“Chhi!” Amma says, the syllable exploding directly into her mug of tea. “Can’t even be bothered to find a tissue! If she’d listened to your Appa and started packing nicely one month ago she wouldn’t be in such a mess now, all kacan-mucan running here running there and sniffing and gasping all over the place, isn’t it?”
The sniffing, the wheezing, the scraping, and the grating grow fainter and fainter.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Paati mouths behind the curtain. Aasha manages to read her lips through the fabric, thanks only to a superhuman feat of concentration.
Through the window on the other side of the dining room, Chellam finally appears in the garden. Aasha and Suresh can see her, but Amma can’t. Her determined suitcase-dragging has worked the zipper on her skirt slowly around to her left hip. Her collar has twisted itself to one side, and a button has come undone at her waist. An inch of her stomach shows through the gap, creamy brown, lighter than the rest of her, perhaps pregnant, perhaps not. Unaware she’s being watched, she leans her suitcase against the ornamental swing and tugs at her waistband to bring the zipper round to the back again. She buttons the undone button, straightens her collar, and smoothes her frizzy hair. Then, with great difficulty, she drags her suitcase out to the gate, picking it up and kicking it weakly every time a bit of gravel gets caught in its wheels.
“Shall we go, Appa?” she says to her father in Tamil. She doesn’t look at Aasha and Suresh’s Appa.
He doesn’t look at her, either. With his long tongue he worries a desiccated coconut fiber that’s been stuck between his molars since lunch. He looks at the ground and scratches his left ankle with the toe of his right slipper, still holding his umbrella perfectly erect.
Chellam’s father delivers a quick, blunt blow to the side of her head. “Taking ten years to come with her suitcase,” he grunts to Appa. “God knows what she was doing inside there for so long. Bloody useless daughter I have, lawyer saar,” he continues, revving up his engine, “you alone know how much shame she has brought upon me, you alone know what a burden a daughter like this can be.” He looks from his daughter to Appa and from Appa to his daughter. He hawks and spits into the monsoon drain, and his spittle runs red with betel juice, staining the sides of the culvert as it dribbles. “How, lawyer saar, how will you forgive —”
“That all you don’t worry,” says Appa. “Forgiving-shorgiving all you don’t worry, Muniandy. Just take your daughter and go. Go away and leave us alone.”
“Okay, enough of it,” says Amma inside the house. “What for all this drama now? Are they waiting for the violin music or what? Why won’t he buzz off?”
The latch on the gate clicks shut and Chellam and her father are gone, she pulling the suitcase, her sozzled father swaying behind her. Till the end of her numbered days the green of the weedy verges she passes on her ignominious retreat will be stamped on the insides of Chellam’s eyelids; she will hear the neighbors’ whispers in her ears on quiet mornings; whenever it rains she will smell the wet clay and feel her feet sink with each step and her shoulder ache from the weight of her broken suitcase.
Appa stands with one foot on the lowest rung of the gate, watching them as they go. All down the street faces hang behind window curtains like dim bulbs.
“Sure enough,” Mrs. Malhotra from across the street mutters to herself, “they’re sending the girl home. These days you simply cannot trust servants.” She turns from the window and looks at her old father, who sits rocking in his chair and humming urgently like a small child needing to pee. “Arre, Bapuji!” she cries. “You lucky-lucky only that we haven’t dumped you into a servant’s lap, yah, otherwise you’ll also be dead and gone by now!”
The Wongs’ retarded son, Baldy, points at them as they pass the house next door, where Amma’s parents used to live until they died three years ago. Baldy crows through the branches of the mango tree in which he’s perched in the rain, but nobody pays him any attention. His father’s at work. His mother’s peeling shallots in the kitchen. The neighbors are all used to him.
“Don’t say retarded,” Amma had scolded the first time Appa had used the word to describe Baldy. “He’s just a bit slow, that’s all.”
“To retard is to slow,” Appa had said. “Ecce signum: the inestimable OED.” He’d pulled the dictionary off the bookshelf in the sitting room and laid its dusty black cardboard cover on Amma’s breakfast plate.
“Okay, enough of it,” Amma’d said then, and pushed her chair back so vehemently to leave the table that her tea sloshed onto her saucer. But Uma and Appa had shared a triumphant, twinkling grin, and even Suresh and Aasha had got the joke.
No curtains are stirring at the Manickams’ window three doors down: the former Mrs. Manickam is lying in bed in Kampong Kepayang eating peeled and pitted longans from the hand of her new husband, who leaves the office early every day for this very purpose, and Mr. Manickam is at the office though it’s a Saturday, burying his sorrows in work as usual.
“Looklooklook,” says Mrs. Balakrishnan farther down the street, flicking her husband’s sleeve as he sits reading the newspaper. “Sure enough man, they’ve sent the girl off from the Big House. What for all this drama now? Now only they’ll sit and cry. As if it will bring the old lady back. When she was sitting in her corner the whole time they were complaining only. Cannot manage her it seems. Must get another servant it seems. Too grand to look after her themselves. That’s what too much money will get you in the end. Just troubles and tears.”
With one foot Appa sweeps a few dead leaves and stray pebbles out under the gate. Then he turns and makes his way back to the house, dragging his Japanese slippers on the gravel. For a few seconds he stands looking up at the tops of trees as if he were a visitor admiring the lush foliage, his umbrella turning like a Victorian lady’s parasol on his shoulder. Wah, wah, Mr. Raju, very nice, man, your garden! Whatkind of fertilizer you use? “Big-House Uncle!” shouts Baldy from the top of his tree next door. “Uncle, Uncle, Big-House Uncle! Uncle ah! Uncle where? Uncle why?” Appa looks right at Baldy but says nothing. Then, as if he’s suddenly remembered something important, he starts and strides briskly into the house.
“What are you two sitting there wasting time for?” he asks Suresh and Aasha as he enters the dining room. “As if the whole family must sit and bid a solemn farewell to the bloody girl like she’s the Queen of England on a state visit. Go and do your homework or read a book or do something useful, for heaven’s sake.”
The children’s heads turn towards Amma, and they sit holding their breath and biting their lips, waiting for her permission. To go and do their homework (although Aasha doesn’t really have any). To read a book. To do unnamed useful things. To scamper off and live children’s lives (or to discover that such a thing has become impossible for them, even after the morning’s promise of a new beginning) and leave Amma bereft at a crumb-scattered table, with no audience.
“What? What are you looking at me for?” says Amma. “As if I wanted you to sit here. Both of you sitting with your busybody backsides glued to your chairs as if this whole tamasha is a Saturday morning cartoon, and now looking at me as if I’m the one who wouldn’t let you go.”
A tiny gust of air escapes Appa’s nostrils. A laugh, a snip of surprise, a puff of fear. Good grief, Appa thinks, it’s true: she’s kept them here to witness her righteous fury at Chellam the Ingrate. And not just to witness it—to share it, to catch the whole rolling mass of rage with nowhere else to go, to parcel it out for future use. Lesson One: how some people turn against you even After Everything you’ve done for them.
He unfolds the two-color map of his wife in his head and adds to it another little landmark, a white dot before the border. Call it Shamelessness. Call it Stopping-at-Nothing, a triple-barreled name for a quaint English village. From the pit of his belly his own ravaging shamelessnesses threaten to rise in twos and threes and fours into his chest, waiting to accuse him in their discordant voices of calling the kettle black, waiting for him to acknowledge that the children have been caught between his old shamelessnesses and her new ones. He blinks and swallows, and thinks instead of the children’s pause for permission. That’s what has really jolted him, not this sudden change in his wife. That’s what has sent cold air spiraling out his nostrils in two swift exclamation points. She’s kept them here, he thinks, and they knowit. For some reason he can’t put his finger on, this frightens him. His head swims a little, as if he’s just woken from a dream in which chickens talked and suns turned into moons.
He shakes his head and strides past them to calm his nerves with a cool shower in a bathroom humming with the ghost of his dead mother, before driving off the screen into an alternate universe in which he can forget the intransigent truths of this one.