Evening Is the Whole Day

“No problem,” said Ammachi, “not intruding at all. All this is no longer my business, after all. Who comes and goes, who eats what. I’ve taken a vow to withdraw from this world, you see. All my mundane duties I’ve carried out. Simply only today I came out, I thought first time someone coming to the house after so long, maybe something was wrong or what.”

“Actually,” said Appa, “it’s not the first time. I live next door, you see. I came first to ask for Uncle’s kind permission to build that new wall. And now I drop in every Saturday to pick up Vasanthi and Nitya and Krishen for a film.”

Amma kept her eyes lowered, avoiding her mother’s inscrutable gaze. Yet she felt that gaze sweep across her face, and she knew the thoughts behind it: So that is what my daughter has become. A glorifiedcall girl. Going out with men in exchange for a free meal. Giving in to all ofher base instincts at once.

But Ammachi only said: “Ah. I see. Well all that is not my concern. Carry on. Please carry on. Time already for my evening puja.” Then she turned and shuffled back to her room. A fresh whiff of excrement-spiced air wafted out from the folds of her saree and draped itself around Amma like an octopus tentacle. Ammachi’s door shut with another loud creak. Amma looked down at her plate, her tongue suddenly thick and salty, her throat clotted with viscous tears. She felt herself rise and strain, suspended in time like a wave ready to crash against a rocky shore.

“Better I turn up the fan,” exclaimed Valli, ever the resourceful one, “I think so somebody’s septic tank must be broken again. So sorry Raju Anneh, you see that Malay family on the other side of the road is always having this problem and always it happens at dinnertime.” She jumped up and turned the ceiling fan up to its highest setting. “Let me open the windows also. Tsk tsk, whatta whatta terrible stink, no?”

“Stink?” said Appa, pausing with a forkful of noodles an inch from his mouth. “What stink? Must be I’m sitting in the best bloody seat in the house because I can’t smell anything.”

It was the first Amma knew of his missing sense of smell. She looked up, blinked disbelievingly, and then felt the blood drain from her burning cheeks to see him chewing peaceably on a tough cockle. In the heavens a chorus of angels with clothespegs on their ethereal noses began to sing, the nasal strains of their joy filling the skies just as Ammachi’s praise rose in concurrence:

Om Trayambakam

Yajaamahe

Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam …

THREE WEEKS after that miracle, on one of those balmy Malayan evenings when the light turns milky before dying, Appa asked Nitya and Krishen to wait in the Morris Minor while he and Amma crossed the street to buy the now-customary dinner. “I need a bit of help today,” he said. He handed her a third bowl and turned to the boys in the back seat. “How about a little after-dinner something for an extra-special treat?” he said with a wink. “Ice kacang? Or would you prefer cendol?”

They decided on ice kacang (with dollops of vanilla ice cream for the boys), and as Amma and Appa stood before the char kuay teow stall in the smoky dusk, the boys rolled down a window and leaned out like two eager young dogs, nudging and smirking, whistling too quietly for Appa or their sister to hear them, and enjoying the exhaust-fumed, lard-spiked air in their faces.

Across the street, Appa leaned towards Amma and gripped her elbow as if to steer her along the right path. Towards respectability and comfort, ladies’ tea parties and sturdy furniture, nest eggs and new clothes for the children every Deepavali. The wild flames under the hawker’s cast-iron wok burned blue in Appa’s horn-rimmed glasses. Sweat circles darkened the underarms of his wilting pinstriped shirt, and his nascent bald spot gleamed like a baby moon. Like a dancer’s jewels, perfect round beads of sweat studded the dip between Amma’s nose and lip.

“I want to marry you,” he said, “even if I have to pay your father a dowry. I can’t wait any longer. You know I will make you happy. You know you’ll have a first-class life. No cooking no cleaning. Whatever jewelry you want. Chauffeur-driven car.”

“Tsk. What is this, talking about private matters all here on the roadside.”

But she smiled and giggled and shrugged, as if reading from a script. As if she’d already read the play and picked a part in advance. Across the street, two little extras in a Morris Minor sniggered and demonstrated the mechanics of copulation with their hands. A Chinese grandmother pushing a pram along the five-foot-ways of the shophouses caught sight of them, averted her offended eyes, and hissed imprecations about bad Indian boys to her drowsy grandchild.

“What’s wrong?” Appa said half indignantly to Amma’s shy, shrugging shoulders. To himself he noted that the hair at the nape of her neck was soft and almost straight, most unlike the coarse frizzy mane she’d pulled into a loose knot today. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he persevered. “Bloody Chinaman can’t understand a word anyway.”

He held out his hands for the dish of noodles, slick with grease from the hawker’s stovetop.

Afterwards she was never sure what it was that had won her over: the simple eloquence of his pared-down proposal or the promise of prosperity in that brimming eversilver dish.

When she told her father the news, he smiled his acrid smile for a while before saying, “Not bad, Vasanthi. For an idiot you haven’t done too badly for yourself. Syabas!”

Next door in the Big House, Paati held her son by his shoulders and shook him. “You’re mad,” she said. “You’re going to regret this decision all your life. They’re not our kind of people. How can you bring a girl like that into this house?”

“Amma,” he said, freeing himself from her grip, “come off it. Enough of this nineteenth-century mentality. Not our kind of people? Well, last I looked they all had two eyes and a nose and a mouth, just like us. It’s thinking like yours that’s going to hold this country back.”

Paati drew back, folded her arms, and narrowed her eyes at him. “Now I see,” she said. “I see what that girl has done. Shameless gold-digger has poured out some sob story on your shoulder, and you’ve fallen for it. Good. Do what you want and suffer. Just don’t come crying to me, and don’t expect me to treat her like a queen in my own house.”

“Actually, it’s my house,” said Appa, “and you will treat her with the same respect you owe any human being.”

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

THE RECONDITE RETURN OF PAATI THE DISSATISFIED (#ue6865c77-9c77-5ece-bcaa-d5b9c188ce68)

August 21, 1980

ON THE AFTERNOON of Paati’s cremation, Uma makes a ham-and-cheese omelet to feed those members of the household who are not attending the funeral—to wit, herself, Suresh, Aasha, and Chellam.

This four-person omelet, Aasha reasons, means that Uma does not hate them. Its edges are a little burned; there is so much cheese in it that it clogs Suresh’s throat, and he makes a great show of choking to death, rolling his eyes back in his head, thumping frantically at his chest. “Death by cheese,” he gasps between coughs. “A Krafty murder. Tomorrow’s headline: St. Michael’s Boy Asphyxiated by Overstuffed Omelet.” Aasha would like to imagine that Uma smiles at this, just the breath of a smile before she turns the page of her book, but it’s simply not true. Uma doesn’t even look up; she only turns the page and spears a stray cube of ham with her fork.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its obvious imperfections, the omelet is proof that Uma harbors a new glimmer of fondness for them, perhaps especially for Aasha, because she served Aasha first, and then left Suresh to cut his own piece. Though Aasha can count on one hand the occasions on which Uma has spoken to her in the past year, it’s clear that Uma loves her once again, in some secret place. This evening Uma might invite them outside to wait for the roti man with her; then she might let Aasha sit on her bed and listen to Simon and Garfunkel. Tomorrow she might tell Appa and Amma she doesn’t want to go to New York after all. Return the plane ticket, she’ll say. Put away the brown airport suit in the rosewood chest. I’ll put the suitcase back in the storeroom.

The thought of it—the fragile possibility, thin as the air on a mountaintop—turns the air in Aasha’s nostrils cold and chills her throat and chest.

You goondu, Suresh would say if he were privy to Aasha’s deductions. You stoopit idiot. Uma made the omelet because Amma ordered her to, and Amma ordered her to because Chellam wouldn’t make it. Simple as that. Easy to see.

It’s true, Chellam wouldn’t have made the omelet, though Amma didn’t even ask her; since Paati died two days ago, Chellam’s been tossing and turning and burning in that bed in which she has suffered two fevers since coming to the Big House. Spread-eagled, fetus-curled, face-down, in all these positions and more she waits for her father’s final visit, when he will collect his unwanted daughter instead of the money that has kept him smacking his chops and rubbing his palms together every month for a year. When he comes, he will spit at her feet and knock her head with his knuckles. On the bus ride home he will not look at her. She’s squandered his toddy shop account, his still-novel popularity among the men of the village, his lazy afternoons, all his happy stupor. Each time she thinks of that imminent bus ride home, Chellam buries her face in her pillow and sees how long she can go without breathing.

“Uma,” Amma said before she left for the funeral, “you’ll have to do something about lunch. There’s bread, there are eggs, there are yesterday’s leftovers. After what Chellam did I don’t want her making your food.”

Amma shook her head as she said this, as if she’d made a difficultbut-firm decision, as if Chellam had been begging for the chance to make their lunch. But Suresh wasn’t fooled by Amma’s frowning and head-shaking; he knew she simply didn’t dare ask Chellam to rouse herself. He saw the fear in her fluttering hands; he wondered what she thought Chellam would say if asked to make an omelet. And what would Chellam say? They were all terrified of her now, because she knew their secrets, because she was a wounded, cornered beast—but sometimes a wounded beast just licks its wounds and slinks away. No, Suresh can’t quite imagine Chellam rising like a fury from her bed to point a bony finger at Amma and denounce her:

You! How dare you ask me to feed your lying children! If you can break anold lady’s head, you can break your own bloody eggs!

It’s almost funny to picture: shrimpy Chellam, suddenly turned into a pontianak ghost from an Indonesian horror film. Chellam, who for months has barely been able to look Amma in the face to tell her someone’s on the telephone, who seems to want nothing more than to disappear so that they can all pretend she never existed, whose very farts and toilet flushings, these days, are afraid, ashamed, damaged.

The Simon and Garfunkel cassette tape that Uma has had in her cassette player all morning has reached its end once again; the hiss of its static fills their ears. Uma puts her book and her fork down, gets up, and flips over the tape.

Hello darkness, my old friend, sings Paul Simon for the fifth time that day.

Uma resumes her seat, and the ceiling fan casts its regular shadows on her book-reading face above her omelet plate. And while Paul Simon warns his audience of fools that silence like a cancer grows, Suresh counts the seconds between the fan shadows on Uma’s face, and Aasha shovels gooey forkfuls of omelet into her mouth without swallowing, until she, too, gags. Hers is not a pretend gag for comic relief, so Suresh sucks his teeth, kicks her under the table, and says, “Ee yer, so disgusting you. Cannot take smaller mouthfuls, is it? If you want to be disgusting I also can be disgusting.” Then he burps long and loud, a mouth-open burp that echoes in the silence before the next song on Uma’s cassette.

Which one of them is right about the crucial question of Why Uma Made the Omelet? Aasha, in her terrified state of infinite and illogical hope, or Suresh, in his uncompromising realism?

Both, actually. It’s true that Uma made the omelet primarily because the process took far less time, effort, and thought than resisting Amma. She could’ve said, Let them all make their own omelet. Or, Let them starve for an afternoon. But then there would’ve been more words, more drama, more questions and accusations, and Uma has had enough of these, she feels, to last her the rest of her life. She wanted peace and quiet, no noise but the Simon and Garfunkel and the whir of the ceiling fan, and the easiest path to that was to make the bloody omelet.

And yet.

She will neither return the plane ticket nor put the suitcase back in the storeroom, but even as she keeps her eyes riveted to her book, she’s keenly aware of Aasha’s eyes on her. Today —unlike all the other days on which they have enacted this scene —this awareness brings a rush of tears to the very top of her throat. She swallows to keep them down.

Little Aasha. Uma wishes she could put down her book and look at Aasha, properly look at her and pull her onto her lap. In this impossible alternate world, Uma would find a way to express all the wrenching thoughts for which sorry and thank you were inadequate. Then they would both cry, for many of the same reasons.

She won’t do this. She can’t. It’s too late and too dangerous. Uma is an all-or-nothing sort of girl, and she must be what she’s chosen to be until the end. Until she boards that aeroplane in five days. If she makes an exception —even a brief one, even now, especially now —the walls will come tumbling down around all their ears. Chaos. Questions. Drama. Everything she doesn’t want, and none of it will do anyone a bit of good.

The alternative, much like the omelet, is easier and better for all concerned, even if some can’t accept that.

Soon Paati’s ghost will make its first appearance at the Big House. This is a certainty in Aasha’s world of doubts and questions and moral dilemmas: nothing can stop the dead from crossing the thin line that separates them from the living if they want to. And Paati will want to. She wasn’t done with life; she’ll be back to clamor for more teatime treats, more respect, more attention, more of everything her arthritis cheated her out of by confining her to a rattan chair in a dim corridor. At this very minute she is probably limping away from the flames, muttering darkly about ash-in-the-nostrils and smoke-in-the-lungs, scolding Appa for being God only knows where when she met her undignified end in the bathroom.

Sometimes Aasha’s heart races at the thought of Paati’s return. Will she punish them all for their many sins against her? Will she suck blood, break glass, overturn furniture, like the pontianaks and the hantu kumkums about which Chellam once warned them?

But at other times, Aasha is at peace. She knows, somehow, that Paati has forgiven them; liberated of her old bones, she’s seen and heard everything at once, the whole truth, past present future, and she’s understood it all. Why they did what they did. Why they had to. How they were sorry, even if they would never say so aloud, for their mistakes and their weaknesses. For leaping before looking. For being cowards. Now that she has no more aches and pains and cataracts, Paati’s turned into something like an angel or a fairy godmother. She floats above them like a kite. She forgives them afresh every day.