Evening Is the Whole Day

Convinced that the Big House should grow and glow and celebrate sympathetically, Tata consulted a firm of architects about several extensions. An extra guest room. Two extra bathrooms (one with a clawfoot bathtub). An orchid conservatory. A music room–cum–smoking room (although there was but one gramophone, and no one smoked). An English kitchen equipped with a gleaming Aga range, in which the cook refused to set foot, preferring her outdoor Indian kitchen with its squealing tap and its gaping drains ready to receive fish guts, vegetable peelings, and leftover curries. And finally a servant’s room under the back staircase, although neither Tata nor Paati got around to hiring a live-in servant to occupy it. Paying no heed to Mr. McDougall’s conservative taste, Tata had the new wings built in a proud local style: solid wooden slats on a concrete base, patched willy-nilly onto the austere symmetry of the original grey stone structure, so that in less than two years the house metamorphosed into something out of an Enid Blyton bedtime story. Unnecessary corridors met each other at oblique angles. Additions, partitions, and covered porches seemed to rise out of nowhere before the eye. Green mosquito netting thumbed its nose at the Battenburg lace curtains in the next room. Sweat and steam and coal smoke from the hot Indian kitchen invaded the immaculate English kitchen and smeared its shiny surfaces. And above it all, the house’s bold features—the quick, damning eyelids of the shutters, the sharp gable noses so different from the flat roofs around them—shuddered with a Scotsman’s thin-lipped rancor. These bloodyNati’es. That’s whit ye gie when ye gie a boorichie ay wogs ’eh reit tae rule.

Tata’s last home-improvement venture before he died was to paint the outside of the house an unapologetic peacock blue, as if to stamp upon the building his ownership, his nation’s liberty and his own. It was a color Tata’s neighbors were accustomed to seeing only in wedding sarees and Mughal miniature paintings. Now the house practically glowed in the dark. The Big House. 79 Kingfisher Lane. You can’t miss it, people took to saying when giving directions. It’s nothing like the others. Appa’s one concession to the mawkish sentimentality of the Indian son, as far as his children were ever able to tell, was to select the same blinding color every five years when he had the house repainted. “Any other color just wouldn’t be the same,” he’d say with a regretful headshake. “Got to honor the old man’s magnificent jasmine-and-marigolds curdrice-and-pickle Madras-masala aesthetic sensibilities.”

WHEN TATA keeled over in his vegetable garden one luminous May morning in 1958, Paati ordered her daughters to summon their oldest brother. Then she settled herself on the south-facing porch (noncovered, alas) to wait, squinting at the horizon as if she could see the hump of Singapore rising like a turtle’s back through the blue water three hundred miles away, and astride that hump, like the Colossus of Rhodes, her fearless firstborn, ready to clear the Tebrau Strait in a single leap and come lumbering across the land into this manless garden, law degree in one hand and hoe in the other. At dusk her daughters begged her to come indoors; at eight, despairing, they brought her mosquito coils and a pillow for her back. But she barked her questions without looking at them. At what time had the telegram been sent? Had a response been received? At what time was Raju to start from Singapore? In the morning she was still there in her rattan chair, covered in red bites the size of grapes, her voice hoarse from the smoke of the useless mosquito coils. Scratching furiously, she got up to greet Appa as his pea-green Morris Minor pulled into the driveway.

“I dropped everything and sped straight home, foof!” he was to tell his children years later. “Just like that I had to tender my resignation. Tup-tup-tup and I was standing here consoling the old lady and taking charge of everything.” Tup-tup-tup and three snaps of his fingers. So magical had been his haste, so uncanny the lightning progress of the Morris Minor on the old backcountry byways. “Just imagine,” Appa would say, “just try and imagine if you can. Zipped home just like that.” And dutifully the children would feel the wind of that speed in their faces, and see unanimously the image each one had purloined without a word from the thoughts of the other: a young Appa zooming through the brightening air with one arm stuck straight out before him like some undersized, chicken-chested superhero.

After Tata’s funeral, Appa bagged a coveted associateship in the venerable law firm of Rackham Fields & Company. Though his bosses were all British for now, they’d be throwing up their jobs and leaving one by one, and whom would they choose to fill their shoes if not a fellow who’d come down from Oxford with first-class honors? Both precedent and informed speculation suggested that such a job would provide the perfect sparkling counterpoint to the meteoric political career Appa envisioned for himself. He had inherited —oh, most precious of legacies! —his father’s uncompromising ambition. With a bit of work everything would be his: a Mercedes in the driveway, a Datukship on the King’s birthday, the country itself. The whole country, his for the taking, his generation’s. What an inheritance! They would not squander it. They would make this country the envy of all Asia, even of the bloody British themselves.

As part of the understanding that he would see his sisters well settled, Appa had also inherited an ancillary tripartite legacy: 1) the Big House, that twisted, hulking setting of his father’s twilight years; 2) half of the shipping company; 3) the lion’s share of Tata’s wisely invested nest egg.

The house welcomed its new lord with wide-open doors and a garland of vermilioned mango leaves strung across the top of the front doorway. But the shipping company, managed these past two years by a loyal secretary, could no longer be kept. “I’m a barrister, not a bloody boatman,” Appa declared to anyone who would listen. “And my brother is a fool. Amateur and professional. You think sambaing and rumbaing will keep the boats afloat or what?” So the company was sold, the rubber, cement, durian, and tapioca investments divided, and Uncle Ballroom’s share grudgingly forwarded to him in Europe per his instructions. Appa gave the boy five months (in the end it took seven) to spend it all before he began dashing off desperate pleas for more. Ah, well. The luckiest of men had thorns in their sides, and unlike some, he, at least, didn’t have to worry about a younger brother who would stumble into an unsuitable match with a dimwitted troglodyte, spawn six snotty brats, and ensconce himself and his family in a spare room upstairs whence they would all descend in a cavalcade for free idli sambar at each mealtime. No, such burdens would almost certainly never be his: on the shelf in the dining room sat his brother’s latest All-Round Ballroom Champion trophy and a framed photograph of him and his partner in some obscenely gilded ballroom in Vienna, in exactly the same pose as the faceless gold-trophy couple. Thus freed of the firstborn’s burden, Appa invested his half of the nest egg twice-wisely and pondered his place in the newborn nation.

3 (#ue6865c77-9c77-5ece-bcaa-d5b9c188ce68)

THE NECESSARY SACRIFICE OF THE BURDENSOME RELIC (#ue6865c77-9c77-5ece-bcaa-d5b9c188ce68)

August 26, 1980

ONE EVENING a week after Paati’s death, Aasha follows Uma down the stairs and to the back door of the Big House, her heart hammering like a wedding drum, elemental words blistering her tongue like beads of hot oil: What, Uma? Why? But her mouth will not spit these words out, and her legs refuse to shorten her customary following distance of three yards. What is it about Uma that frightens her this evening? Her purposeful step, the resolute look in her eye, the way her arms are folded tightly over her stomach? Or is it something greater than the sum of these signals, yet unnameable? Certainly it could be no threat or suggestion Uma herself has made: she has neither uttered a word nor done anything else unusual all day. She has remained behind the locked door of her bedroom; she has ignored Aasha just as she has been ignoring her for so long that you might mistakenly believe this icy, silent Uma had obliterated the memory of that other Uma, the laughing, teasing, bicycle-pushing Uma who had inherited Paati’s dimples and smelled (close up) of Pear’s soap.

But when Aasha trails the new Uma around the house, the old one walks behind them both, soft-footed, humming under her breath. When Aasha swivels around on the balls of her feet, hoping to catch her, she is gone. What else can Aasha do but follow the new Uma around, hoping, wishing, willing her thoughts to fly across the three yards between them and settle, dove-winged, on Uma’s impregnable heart? From the back door, she watches as Uma strides through the garden.

It is dusk, that aching, violet dusk that has come to seem the permanent state of this whole year. Just as Uma reaches the garden shed the streetlights come on, and clouds of moths and beetles appear from nowhere, as if they’ve been waiting for this moment all day. They divide themselves into equal clusters, even around the one streetlight that flickers on and off and on and off all night but refuses to die.

In front of the shed, Uma stops and stares at Paati’s worn rattan chair, in which the old lady sat every day from eight in the morning till nine at night (except during her fever this year, when she didn’t get out of bed for weeks). For as long as Aasha can remember, this chair has belonged to Paati, though In The Beginning she sat in it only to relax after lunch. Then one day she made an official announcement that she was Old and Tired. With that, all the air seemed to leak from her at an alarming rate. Her after-lunch rests grew longer; then before-lunch eye-closings preceded them. And finally, after-breakfast catnaps ran into those, until Paati simply ceased to stir from the chair all day. During all that time the chair never budged from its original spot next to the crockery cabinet at the end of the long corridor outside the English kitchen, in a sleepy, dark corner where shadows drift and settle like feathers, and where the mosquitoes fly in slow motion and hum an octave lower than they do anywhere else in the Big House.

Never budged, that is, until Amma threw it out. From the afternoon Paati died, Amma was forced to repeat regularly for five days: “Aasha, please stop staring at that chair. Come away. Never mind, it was better for Paati this way, don’t you know? Too old already she was. At least she went quickly.” The first time he heard these words, Suresh ran upstairs to lie down on his bed and think: Quicklyquicklyquicklyquickly.Quickly is merciful and merciful is quick and it’s true no matterwhat that everything is better this way and anyway I don’t know anythingand I don’t remember anything. After that he made sure never again to be in the room to hear Amma coax Aasha away from the chair, which was easy enough, for an eleven-year-old boy goes to Boy Scout meetings, trots off to the corner shop with twenty cents and a plan in hand, sequesters himself in his room to read Dandy and Beano comics, and no one thinks anything of it. Boys at that age. You know how they are.

But Aasha, trapped at home, jabbered and chattered and spewed the fruits of her tortured mind at Amma’s feet.

“Look how Paati curled up in her chair,” she squealed the morning after Paati died. “Look, she pulled up her feet also, look at her curled up small-small round-round like a cat! Then after she’ll be complaining only, knees paining legs paining joints paining. Silly Paati!”

“Tsk, come and drink your Milo, Aasha. Paati passed away. Paati is not there.”

But passed away was what the soapy black water from afternoon bucket baths did, gurgling and burping into the bathroom drain, sweeping a hair clump and a stray sliver of soap with it.

That was not, in fact, how Paati had gone. Her departure had been much messier—oh, so much more than water into the bathroom drain!—and more dramatic (incorporating all the elements of a firstrate thriller: gasps, footsteps rushing hither and thither, impulsions and compulsions). Also far less final, for Paati was not yet all gone. She was transparent now, and each day since she died she’d been missing another small part of herself: first one of her dangly, distended earlobes, then a knobby big toe, then a little finger. But the important parts—fierce head, fired-up chest, burning belly—made their piss-and-vinegar presence felt.

Later that morning, Aasha returned to Paati’s shadowy, mosquito-saturated corner and gripped her rattan chair by its armrests.

“Eh Paati Paati, don’t pull your hair like that, don’t shout and scream, your throat will pain! Chellam cannot come and comb your hair lah. Chellam all the time sleeping only now. Wait I ask Amma to come, don’t scream, don’t scream!”

Amma dragged Aasha off by the strap of her Buster Brown overalls. “Come,” she said. “Come and read a book or draw a picture or something. I’ll ask Suresh to lend you his color pencils. You want F&N orange squash? You want ginger beer? I’ll send Mat Din to buy for you.”

For five afternoons Aasha went to the chair at teatime, with a jelebi or two bondas or a handful of omapoddi in her sweaty hand.

“Here, Paati,” she whispered, depositing her clandestine offerings on the chair. “Amma threw away your bowl already, what to do? Eat faster-faster, don’t tell anybody.” She stood and stared. Mosquitoes landed on her arms and legs ten fifteen twenty at a time like tiny aeroplanes, and she slapped and scratched but did not move away. “Nice or not, Paati?” she asked, leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her back. “Bondas hot-hot. No need to eat dry rice from our plates. Nice or not? Careful, don’t burn your mouth, what Paati, so hungry ah? So long didn’t eat, is it?”

These displays were nothing new; the whole family was familiar with that other nonsense concerning Mr. McDougall’s dead daughter. “Maybe,” Chellam had often whispered to Suresh, “your sister can see ghost, what. Maybe she got special chance from God.”

The family had sought explanations less metaphysical.

“You people,” Amma said, “you people tell her funny-funny stories, who tells a child this age those kinds of stories? Of course she’s going to make up all these rubbish stories. Trying to make herself interesting, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s not working, is it?” said Suresh.

Yet for reasons best known to them—and each of them had different reasons—they could not dismiss Aasha’s sightings of Paati quite so easily. “This is getting a bit too much,” said Amma. “Some ghost story character is one thing. Talking to her own dead grandmother is another. People are going to think she’s a Disturbed Child.”

Appa said, “What I want to know is, since when did she and the old lady become such soul mates?” A fair question, for Aasha had hardly spoken to Paati when Paati was alive. She’d been born too late to know the Paati who’d sung Uma to sleep and picked the peas out of her fried rice, and in any case Uma had always been Paati’s favorite; there’d hardly been room for Suresh and Aasha in her heart.

The day Amma found a pile of disintegrating bondas, rock-hard jelebis, dusty omapoddi, and limp curry puffs on the rattan chair, she picked it up by its armrests and made off with it.

“Chhi!” Amma said to Aasha on her way out the front door with the chair. “Just because we’re feeling sorry for you you’re climbing on our head now. Taking advantage of everybody’s sympathy.”

Defying this last assertion, Aasha threw herself down on the marble floor and loosed a wordless series of ascending wails that floated like bright scarves—purple, fuchsia, puce—towards the ceiling, to be blown into the street by the fan as Amma set the chair down by the dustbin and shook her head.

“That girl is having fits or what,” said Mrs. Balakrishnan to Kooky Rooky, her boarder. “I’m not surprised. What a terrible thing she saw, no joke, isn’t it?”

“Aieeee! Aieeee! Aieeee!” shrieked Baldy Wong. “I also can scream what! I can scream louder! AIEEEEEEEEE!”

Mrs. Malhotra’s barrel-shaped dog began to howl.

“Chhi!” said Amma, slamming the front door shut. “The whole world is going mad. Aasha, you want one tight slap? Hanh?”

Aasha swallowed her viscous, salty saliva and sat hiccupping on the floor for an hour until she fell asleep. At dinnertime Suresh came and poked her in the ribs with a foot and then sidled off to his own rice and rasam.

“Why you threw away Paati’s chair, Amma?” he asked. He knew the answer; his question was nothing but a thinly disguised accusation. He’d had to muster up all his courage to ask it, and the mustering had left his ears sticking out farther than ever. Under the table his knees were cold. You threw it away, he thought, because you couldn’tbear to look at it anymore, isn’t it? Maybe you’re scared Paati’s really sittingin that chair and you can’t see her.

Amma only said breezily, “Oh, why should we selfishly hang on to things we can’t use? The dustbin men will probably want it. It’s still usable, after all. Some families would kill for a chair like that.”

Suresh considered this. Some families killed for lesser reasons, but poor chairless families, needing the chair-ity of rich families, were driven to violence only by their desperation. The thought was terrible and wonderful: skinny men in open-chested shirts with red bandanas around their heads, wrestling for an old rattan chair while the women and children gasped and shrieked in the background. Then one of them would pull out a gleaming knife. He’d pick up the chair in one arm and his beauty-marked, melon-breasted village belle in the other; he’d hoist the chair on his back, slip his bloody knife back under his belt, and before you knew it he’d be leaping across the moonlit rooftops, leaving the others to moan in their spreading pools of blood.

On Monday morning, when the dustbin men came to collect the rubbish, they picked up the chair and tossed it playfully between them. “This one’s for you, Ayappan,” one of them chortled, “you can sit in it and eat your thairsadham and scratch your armpits.” “Ei, maddayan!” Ayappan shot back, as the other demonstrated the armpit-scratching part of the deal. “The family personally told me it was for you, special-special only, for you to sit on the porch and comb your lovely locks.” When they exhausted the chair’s possibilities they dropped it, dumped the rubbish into their lorry and drove away. It lay on the grassy verge by the culvert, where Aasha could hear its labored breathing. In the evening Amma dragged it into the backyard and left it by the shed. “Oo wah, style-style only these dustbin men nowadays,” she said. “Those days they used to grab whatever we left for them. Broken also they would fight for it. Now even we would lose to them in taste and class, lah!” she grumbled, as if she’d paid for the old kind of dustbin man and received the new kind in the post.

And there by the shed the chair has remained since last night, upside down, the watery stains of Paati’s numerous failed attempts to make it to the bathroom in time visible even on the underside of its sagging seat. One stain shaped like a one-eared bunny, another like a fat frog, a third like a butterfly. Three of Paati’s silver hairs, relics of a particularly savage combing by Chellam, are caught between two loose strips of rattan on the back of the chair. Its unraveling legs stick up in the air like the limbs of some dead mouse awaiting the ant armies.

As Aasha watches from the back door, Uma drags the chair to the hump by the garden wall and sets it right side up. Then she walks back to the shed, opens the door, and goes in.

While she’s inside, Paati’s ghost slips out from behind the tamarind tree and takes her rightful place in the chair, regal and disdainful as a queen. Is that where she’s been hiding all these days, behind the tamarind tree, since Amma first put the chair out for the dustbin men? No one knows, and before Aasha has a chance to ask her, Uma comes back. She’s carrying a big tin with both hands, her shoulders hunched in such a way Aasha can tell it’s heavy.

Then, in a shattering surge of memory, Aasha realizes what it is: a tin of kerosene. She’s seen Mat Din the gardener pour kerosene on his piles of branches and weeds before he lights his bonfires, huge, roaring, smoky flame-towers that darken the sky and make the birds disappear for hours.

Uma sets the tin down by her feet and folds her arms once more. There are permanent bags under her eyes because she hasn’t slept in a week. Oh, she’s caught forty winks here and a catnap there, but the winks are carefully rationed, thirty-eight thirty-nine forty okay enough, and the catnaps are not the cozy indulgences of the happy housepet but the vigilant sleep of the one-eye-open one-ear-missing stray. In the past week, the loose weave of her occasional slumber has let in many undesirable objects: old promises issued and received; the inexplicable scent of Yardley English Lavender talcum powder; a long sigh that revealed itself, when she opened her eyes, to have been nothing more than a sheet of paper blown by the ceiling fan from her desk to the floor.

The children call this grassy mound the ceremonial hump, for it was here that Amma burned her hand-embroidered, Kanchipuram silk wedding saree one long-ago morning after Appa didn’t come home all night. Uma had watched from the back door, and Paati had reminded her once again how much cleverer, how much worldlier and tougher and classier she was than her Amma, because she had her father’s blood in her and would therefore never do something as crass as throwing a fit in the backyard for all the neighbors to see.

And two years after the saree-burning, Uma and Suresh and Aasha buried Sassy the cat by the hump after Mr. Balakrishnan from across the street ran her over in his car in the middle of the night. If you’re not careful, Suresh has warned Aasha ever since, if you accidentally step on that hump or even brush against it carelessly, Sassy’s clawed foot—just white-white bones only, no more flesh—will burst through and grab your ankle.