Evening Is the Whole Day

“Yes, Raju Anneh,” said Krishen.

“Then hurry up and say sorry to your Akka and let’s go.”

“Sorry,” said Nitya.

“Sorry, Akka,” said Krishen.

It was, as far as she could remember, the first time anyone had ever apologized to her for anything. Never again were Nitya or Krishen offhandedly rude to her, in Appa’s presence or otherwise.

One Saturday eleven months after Appa had first picked Amma up for a matinee, they were reaching the end of their pot of tea at the FMS Bar when he announced his intention to bring dinner home to her family.

“Mee goreng and char kuay teow,” he said. “Half and half. That way there’ll be something for everyone.”

“I don’t think …” she began. “Actually there’s plenty of food in the house, I—we’ve—cooked all week, so many leftovers there are —”

“Oh yesyes, that of course,” he said hastily, “that I understand. It’s not that you don’t have food. No doubt they are not sitting and starving and waiting for my two measly bowls of noodles. But just for a change, no? It’ll be a treat for your brothers and sisters. Eh? Why always Nitya and Krishen only should be the ones nicely-nicely enjoying?” He gave Nitya an affectionate rap on the head with his knuckles. “How about it, boy?”

“Can also,” said Nitya. The more he looked at his sister, the more his misgivings encroached on his appetite. When she caught him alone he was probably going to get a few good ones. Thighpinches, mouthslaps, earboxes. Assorted hot-and-spicy treats. But mee goreng was mee goreng, and in the grand scheme of things it would be worth a few good ones.

In the car there were two enormous eversilver dishes Appa had brought for the mee goreng and char kuay teow. He parked on Anderson Road and crossed the busy street alone, holding first one dish and then the other out to a hawker as Amma and her brothers watched from the car. Krishen licking his lips. Nitya patting his rumbling belly and hoping he’d get to pick out at least six prawns before his siblings helped themselves. Amma reacquainting herself with the smoky flavor of certain doom. If Appa came to dinner at her father’s house, she knew, her friable fairy tale would crumble. Her mother’s room was just off the dining room, three steps up the corridor. He would not sit at the table for two hours without piecing together—from her mother’s conspicuous absence, from the odor that would steal into the room, from her siblings’ indiscretions and unfunny jokes—the startling truth of her mother’s illness. For that was how Amma thought of it: an illness, a sad and irreparable snapping in the head, a condition to be whispered about within the immediate family.

After tonight, nothing would put her façade back together again, no radiant hint of her motherly potential, no searingly romantic American film theme shared silently in those plush red seats in the darkness of the rolling credits. Her five senses closed shop one by one, and all things faded away: the creaking of overloaded trishaws, the mingling smells of street food and exhaust fumes, the slap-slapping of rickshaw men’s slippered feet, the whizzing of cars and ringing of bicycle bells outside her open window, until she found herself looking as if through a tunnel at the terrible scene unfolding in her head: Appa crossing the threshold of her father’s house, bearing his eversilver bowls aloft like a hotel waiter. Left toe to right heel, right toe to left heel, shiny leather shoes slid effortlessly off on the doorstep, no hands needed. Man and bowls sailing into dining room, man in finest-gauge black socks, whistling “Bengawan Solo,” bowls laden with fragrant noodles. Then the chanting that could no longer be ignored, the small befuddled smile with which she’d grown so familiar. And finally, most horrendously of all, the depredatory bouquet of the chamber pot (brimming as it always was at this late hour), sneaking through the keyhole and the crack under the door. The painfully polite meal, the reddening of Appa’s eyes as he tried manfully to hold his breath for an hour. And at the end of it, the retreat: No no, it’s okay, keep the bowls, don’t worry, see you next week. Only of course there would be no next week. She would stand at the front door and watch the pea-green Morris Minor reverse carefully down her father’s driveway. Next Saturday would come and go, and she would return to watching a stranger—shoes keys black coat for court cases—through the upstairs shutters.

But there was, at first, no chanting to be heard when they got out of the Morris Minor. In the sitting room Amma’s father was ensconced in his armchair, peering intently at his angelfish, tapping the glass of the aquarium with a fingernail. He looked up when Amma and the boys came in.

“So?” he grunted. “Today what grand-grand flim did you see? Hanh?”

“I’ve brought —” said Amma.

“Raju Anneh came home with us,” said Krishen. “Brought dinner also. Mee goreng. Char kuay teow.”

“Ohoho,” said his father. “Ohoho, I see. Very nice. Very nice. Not always we get company in this house. Go and ask your brothers and sisters to wash their hands and come down and say hello.” He stood up and shut the fish food canister with a click.

Now that every wriggling cell in Amma’s nose was tuned to the shitpot station, she had to admit to herself that the keyhole and doorcrack were not so easily overcome by its noxious emanations as she’d remembered. Perhaps she’d confused her own mephitic dreams with this milder reality; perhaps her judgment had been warped by her years of shame and resentment of all that the chamber pot stood for, because this smallest of earthenware pots, sooty-bottomed and unassuming, hardly big enough for one day’s dhal back when it had been in kitchen use, had been so much more for so many years. The selfish piety of a mother who thought she sat and shat at the right hand of God. The pitiful, caged life she’d blithely inflicted on her abandoned daughter. The odious nighttime clicks of the door latch on her unnecessary outhouse missions. The ceaseless bhajan-singing and chanting that provided the ridiculous background to the beatings and beltings and sobs of her children.

Amma stood outside all this and considered it. These things were invisible now; humiliation had no odor, and the sounds of this afternoon’s beatings, as far as she could tell, had dissipated into the still, grey air. If luck remained on her side—just this once—Appa need never know about their secret lives.

Wordlessly, her ears buzzing with anxiety, she stepped through the bead curtain into the dining room. In the far corner of the room was a glass-doored cabinet lined with Straits Times pages from June 1950 and filled with the remnants of her parents’ senescent marriage. A tarnished pewter kris and moon kite, still in the box in which they’d arrived as wedding presents. Frayed baskets and a brass plate etched with the Dutch Fort, from their honeymoon in Malacca. Faded formal photographs of their children at various ages in cracked leather frames. Miniature models of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and Buckingham Palace lined up conveniently in a row, courtesy of their better-traveled relatives, a majestic but garbled package deal for the miniature tourist in a hurry. The bottom two shelves of the cabinet were taken up by a set of dishes and glasses that hadn’t been used since the birthday party at which Ammachi had announced her withdrawal from the world.

Amma knelt and drew these things out, noting as she did so the disintegrating bodies of flies and beetles in the grooves of the sliding doors. With a clean, wet dishcloth she wiped the plates off one by one. She poured ice water into the clear blue glasses and saw Appa slip cleanly into the beginning of the scene she’d spun out in her head. It was like watching a master diver: one minute he was outside, standing in the harsh light of the low-slung sun, and the next minute he’d slid sharp as a knife into the soft dim of the sitting room, a larger-than-life five-foot-five magnet with a field too powerful for this little house. Already his ample, energetic gestures seemed to overwhelm it. He slid his shoes off with his dexterous toes, just as she’d imagined, and as he strode in with his eversilver bowls, arrogant and unapologetic, a small-minded, prudish shiver seemed to run through the walls.

“Ah, good, good,” he said when he caught sight of Amma with her bottle of ice water. “Put out plates for everyone. Nitya, Krishen, call all your brothers and sisters.” His booming voice ricocheted off every unyielding, dusty surface. The old mahogany sideboard rattled its stores of cutlery as Amma opened its top drawer. The dining table shook under its oilcloth cover. The angelfish darted in marble-eyed alarm from corner to corner of the fingerprint-smeared fish tank. Under Appa’s cool, commanding gaze Nitya and Krishen turned sniggering and pigeon-toed.

“What?” said Appa. “What’s the problem? Want to eat but don’t want to help, is that it?”

They turned and scuttled up the stairs.

Appa laid his bowls on the two wooden trivets Amma had set on the table and strode off to the kitchen to wash his oily hands.

Amma set the table with the newly wiped plates and the forks and spoons she’d found in the sideboard drawer. Stained stainless steel; she hadn’t thought it was possible. To compensate, she rummaged in another drawer and found an unopened packet of serviettes in a pretty cerise, also left over from that fateful birthday party seven years ago. She pulled out nine and began to fold them meticulously into fans, running over each crease with a thumbnail.

“Oo wah,” said Appa, coming back into the kitchen with his hands in his pockets, “getting rather fancy for a couple of bowls of roadside noodles, aren’t we?”

She smiled but said nothing, and he stood and watched her with arms akimbo.

Her father came in through the bead curtain. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Not bad, not bad.” But he didn’t give Appa a friendly shoulderwhack. He pulled out the chair at the head of the table and took his seat, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. One by one the other children trudged down the stairs, the hair around their faces damp from quick splashings at the bathroom sink. One sister’s eyes still red-rimmed from an afternoon beating or punishment Amma had missed. Again the thought struck her that if luck stayed on her side everything that happened in this brutalizing house, even if it remained stolidly next door, may as well be taking place in some terrible faraway dictatorship she read about in the newspapers.

The children took their seats, shuffling, lipbiting, sniffing diffidently, each one vaguely aware of the momentousness of this occasion and its import for their trembling, serviette-folding sister.

“Wah,” said Valli, the oldest girl after Amma and her special favorite, “thanks for bringing all this, Raju Anneh. So nice of you.” But she avoided Appa’s eyes, and smiled instead at the eversilver bowls.

“Sit, sit,” said Appa. “Come, let’s eat before everything gets cold. What about your mother? Not joining us?”

“Oh, she doesn’t take Chinese food,” said Amma casually. “And anyway she only takes a midday meal, not dinner.” She took another serviette from the pile and began to pleat it.

“Maybe she’d like to come out and have a cup of tea with us?”

“She’s resting,” said Amma. “She retires very early for the night.”

“I see, I see. Well, that’s all right then, let her rest, yesyesyes, my own mother is the same. No appetite she says. Getting older, what to do, she says.”

No one else said anything. No repressed giggles from the boys. No muttered invective from her father. Amma looked up and saw her father’s eyes on her busy hands, his lips thin and tight, his nostrils flared. Like a cold gust in her face it dawned on her: not only was he in on the game, he was, for once, on her side, slavering at the prospect of its many benefits: the rich son-in-law, the numskull daughter taken off his hands forever, the stamped and sealed reputation as just another nice, old-fashioned Indian family. Gingerly she put each finished serviette fan next to the others. There were six of them in two rows now, bright on the dark wood of the table.

“Come, Uncle,” said Appa with a clap of his hands, “why don’t you do the honors?”

But Amma’s father, unfamiliar with the invitation, served only himself, and with a grunt began to shovel the mountain of noodles on his plate into his mouth. “What’re you all waiting for?” he said to the children between mouthfuls. “You heard what Raju Anneh said. Serve yourselves and eat before it all gets cold. No need to wait for your sister to finish her handicraft project. By the time she’s done the food will have gone moldy also.”

“Oh, nonono, not to worry, Uncle,” said Appa, “see, all ready.” He picked up the fans in both hands and with a flourish deposited one at each place setting. “Sit,” he said to Amma, gesturing at the empty chair beside him. Lifting the plates one by one, he heaped food onto them.

The dining room clock ticked loudly. The fish tank pump hummed and whirred. On either side of their father Nitya and Krishen fought noiselessly over the prawns and cockles. Appa sat opposite Amma’s father, and to his right sat Amma, bent low over her plate, her skin raw with embarrassment at her father’s manners, at her own awkwardness with noodles and fork, at Appa’s eyes on her. After every mouthful she dabbed at her lips and chin with her serviette. But Appa, watching her, saw not her awkwardness but her simplicity: the anxious table manners, the missionary-school daintiness. A pang of nostalgia for his own childhood rose up through him; what had he been doing with women who smoked and quoted Marx and Engels? They would dismiss this girl as bourgeois, of course, but no matter; this was what he wanted to come home to. They would roll their eyes behind his back, accuse him of paying lip service to revolutionary notions while in private he kept a wife who fluttered her lashes and left the thinking to him. And yet —Appa realized now, watching Amma’s father scrape his fork determinedly against his plate, belch, and go on to his second helping —weren’t these the sort of people true socialism would have them all embrace? Somewhere along the way, hadn’t they confused idealism with elitism in choosing to consort only with fellow intellectuals? Let them believe, then, that he’d made the cowardly choice of a woman unsullied by inconvenient aspirations of her own; in fact, he would be the bravest of them by taking on the real work of nation-building.

Had Appa not been blinded by two equally powerful strains of romanticism, he might have noticed that Amma’s father showed little sign of sharing his optimism. That the man seemed to breathe only while drinking, behind the shield of his water glass. His face was drawn; his lips were pinched. His eyes darted around the table, accusing all his children of having sold their souls. Oh, he wasn’t exempting himself either: he may have been sitting at the head of the table, but with this bowl of char kuay teow he’d ceased to be the head of the household, and he knew it. Two bloody plates of noodles and he’d nicely wrapped his own balls up with a red ribbon and offered them to this bow-tied fop. He belched again, more loudly than before, and gulped down the rest of his water. “Well, well,” he said. “Thanks, man. This is a first-class meal. I’m sure you know we mostly eat simple home-cooked food only. All this flim-watching FMS-Barring all where I can afford?”

“Heh-heh,” said Appa, wiping his mouth with his unfolded serviette-fan, “no problem, Uncle, all this is nothing much —”

But before he could belittle himself in proper munificent style, the door to Ammachi’s room opened with a distinct creak, and Ammachi emerged, bony feet first, then the rest of her, gaunt, pasty, her hair bun flat from the plywood board on which she slept. She shuffled towards the table, the stench of her cramped quarters coming off her white saree in puffs as she moved. All around the table there was a unanimous sucking in of breath so deep the house turned for three seconds into a vacuum, still and voracious, and a sparrow flying past an open window was pulled against the mosquito netting and held fast for those three long seconds. Then everyone exhaled, the sparrow fled in a bewildered flurry of feathers, and Amma’s father dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. Grunting, he pushed the plate sharply away from him so that it slid a foot down the table and collided with one of Appa’s half-empty eversilver bowls. All around the table there was a stiffening of shoulders, with one cheery exception.

“Oh, hellohellohello Auntie,” said Appa, “how nice to see you. So sorry to interrupt your rest. Too-too loud we must have been—my fault —”

“Foof!” said Shankar the favorite son, burying his nose in his cupped hands. Through the open door of Ammachi’s room the fumes of the chamber pot, every bit as powerful as Amma had remembered them, slithered forth in a thousand black dragontails. Nitya picked up his water glass and pressed it to his face, his desperate breath misting its bottom. Krishen broke out in a fit of consumptive coughing, the tip of his pink tongue sticking out of his greasy mouth. Even sweet, sympathetic Valli picked up her crumpled serviette and began to pat her nose with it.

“Please join us, Auntie,” said Appa imperturbably, “there’s still so much left.”

“Oh, no,” said Ammachi quietly, pulling the pallu of her saree over her disheveled head. From under this hood she peered narrowly out at each one of them, her eyes slowly going around the table. “No thank you. I don’t take Chinese food.” She looked pointedly at the golden pool of pork fat on her husband’s plate. “Simply came out to see who came. Many many years we have not had any visitors, you see.”

Under the table Amma’s knees quivered. She curled her long toes and dug her heels into the cool cement floor.

“Oho, yesyes,” said Appa, “so sorry to intrude but I just thought —”