Evening Is the Whole Day

In the old days, before Uma stopped speaking, she and Suresh used to take turns pushing Aasha around the hump on her tricycle, chanting:

Sassyhump

Dead cat bump

Smelly wormy rotty lump!

Once Aasha flew head-first off the tricycle into the African daisies, her foot grazing the hump. Her full-throated wail had brought Lourdesmary hurtling out into the backyard like a bumblebee launched from a cannon. “A big monkey like you, pushing your sister until she falls!” she scolded Uma. “You should have known better.”

Surely, surely, Aasha thinks now, watching Uma from the back door, Uma should also know better than to do whatever terrible thing she is going to do.

Except that Uma doesn’t think what she’s about to do is so terrible; in fact, she has deemed it necessary. One should never forget that all things pass: hopes, cats, chairs, life itself, each a spun-glass rose in a monkey’s hand. In the twinkling of an eye everything can change, and there’s never any going back. You can’t bring a dead cat back to life. You can’t resurrect a saree or a marriage from two charred tassels. You most certainly can’t uncrack the cracked skull of a cantankerous grandmother by imagining her back in her unraveling rattan chair.

Only Aasha sees the ghosts arrive from all directions, united by their unhealthy fascination with tragedy, with unfinishable business and lingering discontent. All the bloodsucking pontianaks about whom Chellam once warned the children; all the red-eyed, fleet-footed toyols; all the polongs and pelesits; and among them, almost unnoticed (but for Aasha’s extra-sharp eyes), Mr. McDougall’s petal-pretty daughter, a little afraid, a little unsure, but curious nevertheless. And though her bubble of a heart skips a beat at the sight of Uma—those dark, unblinking eyes, those impetuous movements, all these recall her mother’s most dangerous days—she’s resolved to provide her customary moral support to Aasha in lonely and troubled times.

The ghosts converge on the backyard like crows, long tresses streaming, red eyes glowing. They look at Paati in her chair and whisper to each other. They settle on tree branches and on the rims of flowerpots. They bear Aasha no ill will, yet she knows they would not be here if some ghastly spectacle were not about to unfold. She also knows that no one—not she herself, not Mr. McDougall’s fervent daughter, not any of the other ghosts with their hot breath and their portentous mouths—can reach Uma now. Uma’s stepped behind her invisible glass door and locked it; Aasha recognizes the signs.

On the garden wall, swinging his skinny legs, sits Suresh. He tilts his head back and pours into his mouth, while keeping a vigilant eye on Uma, an entire box of Chiclets he found on the schoolbus this afternoon. (You never know when someone might catch you and confiscate the Chiclets you’ve been saving so wisely and with so much restraint—and then where will you be? Better to relish life wholeheartedly while you can.) In his mouth the Chiclets form a fat, minty wad, smooth in some places but still surprisingly grainy in others. He bites down and bursts a hidden bubble with a snap. He watches Uma douse Paati’s chair in kerosene and draw a matchbox from under the waistband of her skirt, as if it were a sword for fighting off anyone else who wants the chair. He rests his chin on his hands and knows he’s not getting involved. No way, no fear, not even if the police come. None of this is his problem. Not even if Uma is flagrantly breaking a rule she herself made up at a long-ago feline funeral: no bonfires in the backyard, she’d said when he’d suggested cremating Sassy. Well, look at her now. Rules, too, were fragile.

Aasha steps out into the backyard and makes her way, holding her breath, clenching her fists, past the teeming ghosts. At the tamarind tree, directly across from Uma, she stops and kneels. The ground here is covered with tough, brown tamarind pods, and because Aasha’s helpless hands itch to do something, she gathers them up in familiar fistfuls and pulls them apart for the seeds. She fills her pockets with these, as if they were insurance against future catastrophe.

“Don’t you wish we could do something?” Mr. McDougall’s daughter whispers to her. She’s sidled past the others to come and kneel beside Aasha. “But maybe we’ve no choice. Nobody really cares what we want. My Ma,” she begins, and for once Aasha doesn’t want to hear her story—not now, she thinks, not now, I have to keep both eyesand both ears on Uma—“you know how my ma wouldn’t let go of my hand that day? So tight she held it. Nobody ever held my hand like that before so I was a little bit happy. A little bit happy and a big bit frightened. It was all mixed up. When my ma jumped, at first I didn’t realize we’d jumped, that’s how mixed up I was.”

“Wait a minute,” says Aasha, because Uma’s lighting the match. But Mr. McDougall’s daughter, trapped as always in the net of her last memory, goes on:

“The whole time we were falling through the air, my ma held on to my hand. I could feel her fingers with my eyes closed, and I could hear her breathing, and I could feel her long hair on my neck. The air wasn’t hot anymore while we were falling. But now I know she only held my hand to comfort herself. And to make sure I didn’t get away.”

Uma flings her match onto the chair and steps back.

“It was a long way down to the water,” Mr. McDougall’s daughter remembers, “a long long time between jumping and swallowing water. I counted to twenty and I wasn’t even counting fast. Even when we hit the water my ma didn’t let go of my hand. And all the while we were sinking, she still didn’t let go of it.”

There’s a brief burst of flame as the kerosene burns. Paati clutches the armrests and pulls her feet up onto the seat.

Mr. McDougall’s daughter turns a terror-stricken, fire-lit face to Aasha. For a long moment they stare at each other, two old friends marooned together on the uncertain island of adult whims. At least they have each other. In Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s grey eyes the fire glows amber.

Undeterred, pitiless, Uma licks her dry lips and waits. Aasha drops a handful of tamarind seeds. Click, clack, click, they slip through her fingers and fall onto other seeds already under the tree. She stands up. She takes one step forward, no more. She thinks of Uma in The ThreeSisters in July, emoting onstage as she never does at home; of Uma reciting long, winding lines in funny English before her mirror; of Uma standing on the rug outside the bathroom, wrapped in one towel and drying her hair with another, smiling, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs under her breath. That is the real Uma; this is a different Uma, blind, unforgiving, a dangerous shapeshifter.

On the wall Suresh snaps his gum again. And again. Snap! The sound cracks like a whip in Aasha’s face. She flinches and sniffs. She rubs her nose with an index finger. The air is full of smoke and frying pork from the Wongs’ kitchen. She waits, balanced on her heels.

Paati’s chair braces itself for a difficult battle. It stiffens its arms and hunkers down, while on the seat, tight and tiny as a coiled pangolin now, Paati cowers.

Oh, Uma should know better, she should. A big monkey like her, trying to set fire to a chair that’s been sitting outside in the damp for days. What’s left of the flame singes the three silver hairs, chars the chair’s thick legs on the outside, and begins to subside. So Uma adds more kerosene. Then she folds her arms across her chest and hugs herself as if she’s cold, as if the weather is different where she stands.

Slowly, gleefully, sensuously, the flames finally begin to creep up the legs of Paati’s chair. Paati trembles and covers her face. The heat of the fire lays its gold-flecked wings across Aasha’s face, and a drop of sweat traces a searching trail down the misted glass of Uma’s invisible door. From someone’s television set the Muslim call to prayer lifts off into the air like a man in a billowy white robe tiptoeing lightly off a roof.

Allah-u akhbar! Allaaaaaah-u akhbar! The man’s sleeves fill like sails. There he hangs, not rising or falling, looking up and down and left and right for some thoughts to think.

The man turns into a dove.

The chair crumples and kneels, weeping, gathering its skirts of flame about itself.

It’s just a scrap of a chair with a scrap of a ghost in it, a skin-and-bones ghost whose feet don’t touch the ground. What an unbearable indignity it is that Paati must summon her few remaining shreds of will to outwit these new flames that tastelessly echo the funereal flames of just-last-week. It’s entirely possible that this time, weakened by those first flames, deprived of days of teatime omapoddi and curry puffs, Paati will not make it.

Aasha opens her mouth to scream. Suresh snaps his gum, three times in a row, each louder than the last, because that’s all he can do without sticking his own neck out. But it’s too late. The scream rolls roundly out of Aasha’s mouth, like a bubble escaping from an underwater balloon, and shoots up to the leafy top of the tamarind tree. On its way it pops against a sharp, low branch and spills its words onto the rain-dark earth.

“Uma, Uma, please don’t burn Paati, please! Pull her out! Pull her out! Pleeeease!” The last please quivers, turns to liquid, and seeps into the damp soil, suffusing the roots of the tamarind tree in its desperate grief. Next week Lourdesmary will complain that its fruit is becoming less succulent, drying out and turning too fibrous in the pod.

Transparent Paati lies amid the flames, limp as an empty plastic bag, her eyes slightly surprised, her head and chest and belly growing smaller and smaller as they melt. Stunned and saddened, the other ghosts drift off down the driveway in twos and threes, like mourners going home after a small child’s funeral. Unsure how to arrange their faces or hold their heads.

At the last possible minute, just as the fire begins to lick at her chin, Paati spirits herself out of the flames with a final burst of her posthumous strength. She’s put everything she had into this effort, and now she spirals up to the sky in a puff of smoke, a decrepit little genie with no wishes to grant. Her deflated head and chest and belly refill like balloons. Aasha holds her breath and hopes Uma hasn’t noticed; she would close her eyes, too, but then she wouldn’t be able to make sure Uma doesn’t leap up and grab Paati by a foot and hurl her back into the flames. But Uma’s flame eyes are glued to the crackling chair. Paati is safe, after all; she’s lost nothing but the ends of her hair to the fire. All the same, she’s had a good scare. Now she drifts off towards the Wongs’ house, and after a moment Aasha hears Baldy start to whimper at nothing on his porch swing.

After the bonfire dies, Uma goes indoors to finish packing. Aasha climbs the stairs behind her, a woeful pull-along toy on an invisible string. With silent wheels instead of squeaky ones, and cracks in hidden places.

Yellow light spills out of Uma’s open door, setting the dark wood of the floor agleam. Almost as if she were inviting Aasha in, Uma leaves her door open tonight. But on the landing, Aasha stops, unsure. She studies Paati’s wedding picture, an old black-and-white photograph with blurred outlines, hairlines bleeding into faces, noses melting into mouths. Grave, handlebar-mustachioed men in suspenders and bow ties. Women with accusing eyes, necks and wrists heavy with gold. And, seated cross-legged on the grass, a little girl with ringlets, in a frothy white frock and sturdy dark boots ridiculous in the Madras heat. No one seems to know her name, though Aasha once offered Paati suggestion after suggestion. Meenakshi? Malathi? Madavi? Radhika? If they knew then, the mustachioed men sweating under their collars or their aching-necked wives, no one knows now. Probably the little girl grew up to be a spinster aunt, sending out tins of murukku and thattai to her nieces and nephews every Deepavali. Probably she died in her bathroom and no one found out for a week. Aasha settles down on a stair and waits, chin in hands, for nothing in particular.

It’s obvious, even from Paati’s wedding photograph, that she will not share the unfortunate imagined fate of the little girl in ringlets. Eighteen years old and not a month more, Paati stands with her twenty-five-year-old groom in the front row, erect, unsmiling, feet and hands red with henna. You can see in her eyes, blurry as they are, the thousand guests that have been invited for the month-long celebration, the five canopies erected on her father’s land, the special photographer from Singapore. (Watch the birdie, Mr. and Missussssss, he’d said over and over, grinning and winking, watch the birdie, later on you canlook at each other, Mr. and Missussssss! though they hadn’t been looking at each other, not then and not for days afterwards.)

Future, present, and past do brave battle in the bride’s kajaled eyes, and the photograph refuses to reveal which Paati will win.

These are the Paatis competing for supremacy, in reverse chronological order:

6) The eagle-nosed matriarch, widow of Thambusamy the Rubber Baron, Cement King, Durian Duke, etc., etc., determined to rule in her son’s house as she did in her husband’s;

5) The beautiful maddam, powdered and painted, who feels the stares of white men follow her in town;

4) The good Indian wife adept at fading, in public, into the background behind her men;

3) The young mother of a newborn bigshot lawyer, glowing with the achievement of a boy-on-first-try;

2) The shy-smiling newlywed (with feet and hands still faintly red but fading), mismeasuring the sugar for her husband’s tea and mourning the life she was used to in her father’s house;

1) The spoiled little girl who has simply to hold out her hands for extra kolukattai and jelebi, secure in the knowledge that her parents, having lost three babies before her, are wrapped around her little finger.

Or will none of these prevail? In the end, has 7) the bag of aching bones in the rattan chair staked out the surest claim in the fertile territory of other people’s memories? Or is it—no turning back now, because now that we’ve come this far we have to set a foot, however hesitant, onto the precarious ground before us—8) an even later incarnation that will stay with Paati’s survivors? A little brown heap of bones turning cold as death rattles and gurgles in its throat?

A little brown seeping heap. It trickles into drains and dark wood floors, into the white sheets of a deathbed, into Aasha’s head. She shakes her head like a wet dog. Be gone, brown heap; be gone, blood droplets; be gone, flailing hands and uncurling toes. But new waters rush in to fill Aasha’s head, bearing their own flotsam and jetsam, because once, yes, Paati was as young as Amma, and before that she was as young as Uma (and Chellam), and before that, she was as young as Aasha. Younger, even. A toddler. A baby, soft and swaddled. Not for the first time, as Aasha’s mind strains to accommodate this incredible, uncomfortable truth, something in her chest sinks and settles like silt in a slow river. She swallows and takes a deep breath; then, heavy-footed, she climbs the remaining five stairs up to Uma’s room. The door’s still open, but Uma’s at the window and doesn’t turn around when she walks in. Not that she expects Uma to comfort her; she’s grateful enough for the tender offering she knows the open door to be. And the yellow light out of which she’s been locked for years, and the view from Uma’s window, and the clean smell of her pillow. All these are Uma’s way of saying Sorry for everything.

To answer It’s okay I forgive you, she clambers onto Uma’s bed and folds her thin legs under her tartan skirt. Uma backs away from the window and returns to her packing, pulling from the shopping bags under her bed clothes stiff with newness, their tags turning like mobiles in the fan breeze: a hooded cotton sweatshirt that won’t be warm enough even on the plane; a stack of practical skin-tone panties that come up to her waist, specially picked out by Amma; a white blazer that will soon reveal itself to be comically unfashionable in New York. She lays these things on top of the clothes already in the red suitcase and smoothes them down with her hands. The suitcase smells of oilcloth on the outside, mothballs on the inside, and everywhere, inside and outside, of the cold, sterile rush of foreign airports, the rubber of conveyor belts, the suspense and rewards of Appa’s trips abroad back when the courts of young Malaysia took their appeals to their ex-Queen. Once there’d been a hand-embroidered dress for Uma in the bottom of that suitcase, once a model aeroplane kit for Suresh. Now floury mothball dust clogs the ridges of its grey lining. Uma’s eyes are too bright, her hands too quick, her nails bled white and bitten ragged.

“Uma,” whispers Aasha.

Uma looks up, and it’s only now that Aasha notices a tear hanging off her chin, round and heavy as quicksilver. The more Aasha looks at it, the more it doesn’t fall. Pictures move inside it, swirling, melting into each other like palm sugar syrup stirred into coconut milk.

Afternoon sunlight on bathroom tiles.

An eversilver tumbler of water.

A blackened chair with swirling skirts of flame.