Evening Is the Whole Day

When she comes back to the Big House, she’ll be able to walk around on her own (which is a good thing, since Chellam is in her bed with her sarong-blanket over her head). SH-sh-SH-sh, her silky soles will slide on the marble downstairs floors, just as they did fifteen or twenty times a day when Chellam led her to and from the big bathroom. She’d been a dense little bundle of bones and calluses enclosing a perpetually full bladder: Chellam has one bulging Popeye-theSailor-Man arm and one skinny-servant-arm, from a whole year of these daily journeys.

In the dining room, Uma and Suresh and Aasha can hear Chellam sniffing and creaking the bedsprings every time she turns, which is often. Uma tries to shut out these small noises. She’d be in the samesituation whatever had happened, Uma tells herself. Her job ended oncePaati was gone. Suresh wishes Chellam would just go to sleep. Drink a whole bottle of whiskey if she has to. Eat a whole goat. Whatever it takes.

Aasha wonders if Chellam, too, awaits Paati’s return. If she fears it, or welcomes it, or simply can’t be bothered anymore. Does she think Paati will come back to help her?

But you were nasty to Paati all the time, thinks Aasha. When she comesback she’ll be on our side. Because we’re family.

Over the curtainless window of her room under the stairs, Chellam draped a thin cotton saree when she first arrived at the Big House, a saree she must have brought with her for yard work, or for sleeping in, or for precisely such a use as this—substitute curtain, or dustcloth, or source of reusable sanitary pads—because it’s so thin, and so full of holes, that it surely could not have been used for anything else. It barely keeps the afternoon sun out today: Chellam sees bright red behind her shut eyelids, solid, bright red. Bright green bile froths at the back of her throat. She reaches under her pillow for her diminishing supply of Chinese red ginger (purchased from the corner shop with Uncle Ballroom’s generous rewards for miscellaneous favors) and shoves a piece between her parched lips. She hasn’t had a complete thought since she took to her bed. Her head is a jumble of snatches and shards, familiar smells, nauseating colors, unspoken fears that set her joints twitching. She’s been reduced to some dim, pre-sentient state, so that some of those who stop at her door to make sure she’s still alive feel the occasional pang of pity, or an uncomplicated tenderness, or an anodyne curiosity, but nothing more, because there she is, twitching and breathing her shallow, uneven breaths in her smelly room, and what can one do but shrug and turn away? What can one do but leave one’s trays of Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Maggi instant noodles and hurry back to the real world, where everything raw can be concealed behind words?

Today Uma cut Chellam her own slice of omelet for lunch. “No matter what they do to us,” Amma said before she left for the crematorium, “we don’t let our servants go hungry. That is not the kind of people we are.” And then, even though Uma had said nothing to contradict her, she’d added, “Let her sins sit on her head alone. All that is between her and God. We don’t need to sink to her level and starve her.”

Uma knew Chellam would not eat her part of the omelet. Appa, who was preparing to lift the casket into the hearse with the help of three old men and a good heave-ho, knew it. Amma herself knew it, Suresh knew it, Aasha knew it, and yet Uma cut that slice and Suresh carried it upstairs on its tray, so that it now sits, cold as a jelly, on the table outside Chellam’s door. A lost daytime moth is drowning in the glass beside the omelet, its wings spread against the water’s tough surface.

At five o’clock Appa and Amma come home, stopping at the outside tap to cleanse themselves of the crematorium’s unsalutary vapors. They splash, they gargle, they rub cool water on their scorched arms. There’s still no sign of Paati, who, as far as Aasha can tell from the sitting room window, is not perched on the roof of the car, or lying supine on the hood, or crouched in the back seat. (And yet she is, indisputably, not far away: Aasha is still so sure of this that she stares out the window for a minute without blinking, until her eyeballs dry out).

“Bloody hell!” Appa says in the dining room. “It’s a furnace out there.” He takes off his glasses and runs the palms of his hands over his face. The edges of his hair are still damp from his post-funeral ablutions. The circles under his eyes are darker than ever; he’s been staying up every night for weeks working on his latest case, the notorious Angela Lim murder trial. The nights have lately been noiseless and stuffy, as if someone turns off the flame under the earth every evening but forgets to lift the lid. In that steamer-pot silence, Appa has been bending over his desk, poring over the facts of the case. Which are:

Angela Lim, ten years old, raped and murdered and found stuffed down a manhole near the Tarcisian Convent School.

Shamsuddin bin Yusof, an office boy accused of the rape, and the murder, and the stuffing.

On the front page of Appa’s newspaper (which now lies at his feet, its pages fluttering in the fanbreeze like the wings of a hurt bird), the Minister of Internal Security has urged the public not to turn the case into a Racial Issue. (But on the letters to the editor page, that public continues to sneak their subtle defiance past the tea-break-heavy eyes of the censors: in pointed comparisons to past murder trials, in disingenuously philosophical nature-versus-nurture meditations, in dry discussions of urban demographics.)

Tonight, as on many previous nights, Aasha’s wide-open eyes beam two bright spots on the ceiling above her bed. In addition to the facts of the case, which have been on TV and on the radio and on the lips of the Ladies at Amma’s tea parties, Aasha knows all sorts of other things without knowing how she knows them: the number of parts Angela Lim was in when they pulled her out of that manhole; the colors of the bruises on her thighs; the splintery feel of the stick with which Shamsuddin (a tongue twister, that name: not Shamshuddin, not Samsuddin, but Shamsuddin, a drill for those aspiring to she-sells-seashells) clubbed her before tightening the just-in-case rope around her neck; the type of white canvas Bata shoes (mud-spattered from a recent game of rounders) Angela was wearing when Shamsuddin lured her into his red Datsun. But it’s not what she knows that keeps Aasha awake at night; it’s what she doesn’t. The exact meaning of rape, a word that suggests scrape and grate and rake, all sharp and painful things not nice to do to a soft human body. The tricks of timing by which a man can stuff a girl in five parts into a manhole on a street where people drive and cycle and walk day and night. What kind of man this Shamsuddin is, because the question of kind rises to the surface of every conversation, and yet, once there at the surface, stays just beneath, refusing to show itself, slipping away from her hands when she reaches for it. You know what, their kind of people. Theonly reason they pray five times a day is to cover up the havoc they do. Hah!Even five times a day is not enough for them. Rape, incest, drugs, you name itit’s their kind who’s responsible for ninety-five percent of it.

As far as Aasha can tell, Shamsuddin is a skinny kind of a man in a cheaply made bush jacket. His hair is already thinning. He looks as if he might have bad teeth, but she can’t be sure because he isn’t smiling in any of the newspaper pictures.

“Sick bastard,” Appa has said every day since he took on the case. “Doing a thing like that to a child that age.”

“Suresh, bring me a glass of ice water,” Appa says now, just back from Paati’s cremation, even though Suresh is in the middle of his maths homework, his face a ball of concentration over the square-lined pages of his exercise book, while Uma is reading what is technically (however much she, too, must concentrate to squeeze meaning out of it) a storybook. Even though Uma has no homework whatsoever and will no longer have any for her remaining five days in the Big House, because she’s home and dry now, she’s scored the ultimate goal, college in America, just waiting to leave, sitting on laurels that leave welts on her bum and make her shift constantly in her chair. Even so. Appa does not look at Uma; Suresh sees to his ice water. Thunk-thunk-thunk, it pours heavily out of the already-sweating Johnnie Walker Black Label bottle into Appa’s glass, and Suresh wonders if he should whistle, just to make a sound, any sound to which meaning cannot be attached, anything other than Appa breathing hard in his chair, and Chellam twitching and sniffing behind her too-thin door, and Paul Simon’s successive songs about suicides. Still wondering, he refills the Johnnie Walker bottle at the kitchen sink, caps it, and puts it back in its place inside the fridge door.

All things considered, he’s decided against whistling, luckily for him, because Amma presses the Stop button on the cassette player and says, “For heaven’s sake, Uma, even today you must play your eerie music ah? At least today have some respect. Your own grandmother’s funeral today. Poor woman, what a terrible death. Hai hai”—she sits down across from Appa and rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers—“what is the use of dwelling on all that now anyway? Let go, let go and move on. What has happened has happened.” No response from Uma. A melancholy trinity of smells—camphor, wood smoke, sandalwood—wafts from Amma’s hair and the folds of her saree. Frosty glass in hand, Suresh studies the back of her head: drooping curls, three drops of sweat on the nape of her neck. What has happened has happened, he thinks, and perhaps it doesn’t really matter who made it happen. Time to let go, move on, or just move, but suddenly he can’t; he grips the glass ever more tightly, until he can feel it on the brink of shattering in his fingers. A drop of condensation wanders down one side at exactly—exactly, it seems to Suresh—the same pace as one of Amma’s sweat drops trickling down the top of her spine. He wonders why she doesn’t seem to feel it.

“Suresh,” says Appa, “what is this? Are you having a catatonic fit? Are you pretending to be a broken robot? By the time you bring me that water it’ll be hot enough to make tea with.”

Suresh tears his gaze away from the back of Amma’s neck, but on his way across the room he sees, out of the corner of his eye, red running down Amma’s face, bright red, liquid, sprung from somewhere on her scalp, making its way down her forehead, and he shudders, not a shudder that everyone can see—there’s much about Suresh that no one sees—but a single mouse-shudder deep inside his chest, somewhere between his rib cage and his stomach.

“Suresh,” says Appa again, “what is wrong with you? Spilling here there everywhere—do I have to tell you to hold the glass with both hands, as if you’re a bloody two-year-old?”

Of course. The rivulet of red on Amma’s face is just the vermilion she smeared on her center parting before the funeral, of course of course of course—Suresh has never seen Amma sweat like this, but that’s what it is, of course, the dastardly results of funeral heat. Vermilioned sweat, nothing to do with her skull, nothing whatsoever to do with skulls in general and how they crack and bleed. This isn’t some supernatural revenge, just a trick of the heat and his jittery eyes. Poor Paati will never have a chance at revenge, whether or not she deserves one. Suresh puts the glass down before Appa and clears his mind with a forced blast of cool relief.

But Aasha, whose belief in ghosts has never wavered, is baffled. Appa and Amma are back from the funeral; where is Paati? Why is she taking so long to get here? From where she sits, Aasha can see that her chair remains empty. But then again, why would she sit quietly in that chair once she’s back? What a way that would be to celebrate her new freedom. She’s spent more than enough time in that chair, none of it happy; in that chair she’s received slaps and knocks and pinches, all of them quick, some of them deserved. Because it’s true that there were times when Paati was Too Much, when her questions and her badgering and her fret-fret-fretting went Too Far, when she was asking for trouble from whoever gave it to her. That is to say, from Amma and Chellam.

Amma because she was a clockwork toy someone had wound up all the way and left unattended; she couldn’t help herself. She sat sipping tea at the Formica table, and threw tea parties, and gave Paati headknocks and thighpinches, because these were the only things she knew how to do.

And Chellam because she was just that kind. Whatever kind Shamsuddin was, Chellam was almost as bad. She was the kind who was nasty when other people weren’t looking. A very bad person. A terrible person who deserved everything she was going to get. Once she had fooled them; once they had loved her. Now they knew they’d been wrong.

“Did you all eat your lunch?” Amma is asking in the dining room. “Did you take Chellam a tray?”

Uma turns a page and Suresh says yes, yes, we ate our lunch.

“Eggs?” Amma asks. “For Chellam also?”

“Not nice also,” Suresh says. “Uma put too much cheese.” Clever Suresh, wise Suresh, quick-on-his-feet Suresh, always able to steer conversations around potholes.

“Aaah,” says Appa, smacking his lips after a long drag from his ice-water glass, “that is because Uma’s head is already in America. Yes or not? Her body is here, but her mind is at Columbia University, within the ivy-covered walls, not on our omelets-bomelets my boy, oh yes sure enough, already Joyce is her choice, hi-funda stuff beyond the rest of us, yes or not?”

Uma raises her eyes from her book and blinks in Appa’s direction several times in quick succession, as if she’s thinking of something else and wishes he would move out of the way.

Appa chuckles three colorless chuckles, his mouth stretched tight in a grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. It doesn’t go away; his face won’t ungrin itself now. Suresh watches a weariness creep from those aching face muscles into Appa’s eyes, then give way to panic when Appa realizes his face is stuck fast. Then, just when Suresh has stopped breathing, Appa’s face breaks free. He closes his eyes and presses his thumbs hard into their inside corners. “One more, please,” he says when he opens them, holding his empty glass out to Suresh, and Suresh repeats the steps with only minor modifications: brisk walk to fridge, open door, grab second Johnnie Walker bottle (because the first, so recently refilled, isn’t cold enough yet), fill glass with a thunk-thunk-thunk and a private should I whistle? This time he notes, as he stands there by the fridge, that Aasha has made her meandering way (stopping here and there to sniff and listen and retrace, he’s sure, like the lost ant she’s been for the past few days) to Paati’s old rattan chair.

“Psst!” he hisses. “Oi! What stupid thing are you doing now?” Not as though he can’t see: Aasha is running her hands (still oily with butter from her omelet) down the thin arms of Paati’s chair, patting the seat, pulling on each loose bit of rattan, and even—this is when he knows she is irredeemably crazy—putting her nose to the backrest and breathing deeply, as if the chair were a bloody jasmine garland.

“Nothing,” Aasha says, and when she turns to look at him her eyes are as wide as Sassy the cat’s were on the afternoon Amma caught her with a whole fish in her mouth. “Not doing anything also.”

“Stoooopid,” Suresh offers pleasantly, and returns to the dining room with Appa’s glass of ice water.

“Thanks, my boy, heartfelt thanks,” says Appa. “I better take this into my study. Hell of a lot of work to do. This case is giving me bad dreams and making my hair fall out.” Chair legs grate on the marble floor, and Appa is gone, into his den with a sweating water glass and a head full of troubling facts.

There’s a Paati-bum-sized trough in the chair’s sunken seat, and it smells funny, different from the backrest. The piss of a thousand accidents has infiltrated the very fibers of the seat, never to be completely got out, not with all the Dettol-scrubbing and Clorox-splashing in the world, and God knows Chellam tried, because Amma made her. With great difficulty, Aasha clambers up onto the chair and scoots her bottom back, cheek by cheek. In the afternoon lull she begins to nod, just as Paati used to, and her chin, just as Paati’s used to, drops to her chest, and finally she surrenders to the great grey blanket of sleep, leans her head on the arm of the chair, and dozes, just as Paati used to …

… until Amma—who has gone upstairs and showered and changed, put her funeral saree to soak in a pail in the outdoor kitchen, and attempted to assuage her crematorium headache with repeated sniffs of a handkerchief doused in Axe Brand Camphorated Oil—comes swishing, caftan-clad, past the rattan chair, catches sight of Aasha, and wakes her with a hearty smack on the knee.

“Aasha! Go and sleep properly on your bed, please!” she snaps. “Sleeping like a dog in the kitchen. When your neck is paining who will you go crying to?”

Whom, indeed? To whom would Aasha go crying with a crick in her neck? Not to Amma, certainly. Not to Appa, who will be either locked in his study with the quinquepartite ghost of Angela Lim or out (in town, at the club, or on other adventures). Not to Suresh, who will laugh and call her stooopid for falling asleep in an uncomfortable chair. Not to Chellam, who might once have sympathized but who now has greater worries of her own. And not to Uma, who might also once—longer ago—have sympathized, but that was so very long ago that Aasha must make a conscious effort to hold on to the memory.

The logic of Amma’s argument being thus unassailable, Aasha goes upstairs to sleep in her bed, with its pink gingham sheets and its peeling stickers of the Seven Dwarves.

Through her window Aasha sees a tour bus parked across the street, outside the Balakrishnans’ front gate. She knows this bus well: it belongs to the (so-called) husband of Kooky Rooky, who rents a room in the Balakrishnans’ house. The bright green lettering on the side of the bus sings in an operatic voice: Sri Puspajaya Tours. And in a softer, breathier, dewier voice, the smaller words sing the familiar tune from the TV ads: To Know (know, know) Malaysia Is to Love (love, love) Malaysia. Twilight begins to fall; the streetlights come on (even the one that will only flicker all night); downstairs, neither Amma nor Appa nor Uma says anything about dinner, so Suresh opens the fridge and lifts two small, bony morsels out of yesterday’s chicken curry, the fat clinging to them in translucent white gobs studded with coriander leaves. He takes them upstairs—Aasha hears his steps on the stairs, the lightest, steadiest steps in the house, light and steady past her door, light and steady down the corridor, light and steady into his room with nary a sound from the screen door—and eats them sitting on his bed in the dark, collecting the clean bones in one closed fist.

Downstairs in his study Appa considers the evidence against Shamsuddin bin Yusof: his identity card was found, along with a rope and a big stick and a bloodied Kwong Fatt Textiles plastic bag, stuffed in a culvert near the manhole that housed all of Angela Lim’s parts; an eyewitness saw Angela (or at any rate a Chinese schoolgirl with a ponytail) being lured away by a skinny Malay man near the Tarcisian Convent School gates; later that afternoon the owner of a mini-market in the area noted that a small, fair-skinned (yes, yes, probably Chinese, the mini-market man agreed when asked to clarify), anxious-seeming girl came into the shop with a young Malay man in a bush jacket to buy a packet of Kandos chocolates. Shamsuddin, of course, says he’s innocent, says the truth shall soon surface to set him free, says he was at home having dinner with his seven-months-pregnant wife. And she agrees, and rattles off that night’s menu (it’s a short menu, for Shamsuddin and his wife are not well off: plain rice, soy sauce, fried kembung fish), and makes dire predictions of curses to befall those who have framed her husband, and cries in court and wipes her tears with the ends of her headscarf.

Crocodile tears, the spectators say, shaking their heads. She knows he did it. She’s covering up for him.

And yet, paradoxically and obediently, they imagine the framers: fat men, rich men, men wearing dark glasses in the back seats of Mercedes Benzes, with thick curly hair on their forearms. Sultans’ sons, ministers’ brothers, industrialists with cushy government contracts. They know the types. In school the good people of Malaysia have been taught: The heights by great men reached and kept / Were notattained by sudden flight … That part, at least, is true. Not by sudden flight, but by hiring thugs to slit the tender throats of their rivals’ children, by strangling whores who threaten to talk and commissioning generals to blow up their bodies in the jungle, by paying off the police to ignore the drunken indiscretions of their children.

Appa alone cannot allow the framers to swagger around inside his head the way they want to, chuckling and thumping each other on the back. He puts them firmly out of his mind and concentrates on the face of the dismal little man he must convict: the flat nose, the overbite, the weak chin, all conjured up as clearly as if Shamsuddin were sitting across from him in this silent study.

Sick bastard, Appa repeats to himself. To do a thing like that to a—how old, how old now?—ten-year-old girl. Ten! Ten is a child! Ten is no breasts, no hips, no nothing. His job is to believe in guilt where guilt is assigned. He clicks the top of his rollerball pen five times in quick succession. It’s hot in the study, boiling hot; once again, the day’s furnace heat doesn’t seem to be retreating with the daylight. Appa rises and turns the fan all the way up to speed five so that it whips around dangerously, hwoop hwoop hwoop