The God of Small Things (11 page)

It was Mammachi, on vacation from Delhi and Imperial Entomology, who first noticed little Velutha’s remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little magician. He could make intricate toys—tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel boxes out of dried palm reeds; he could carve perfect boats out of tapioca stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding
them out on his palm (as he had been taught) so she wouldn’t have to touch him to take them. Though he was younger than she was, he called her Ammukutty—Little Ammu. Mammachi persuaded Vellya Paapen to send him to the Untouchables’ School that her father-in-law Punnyan Kunju had founded.

Velutha was fourteen when Johann Klein, a German carpenter from a carpenter’s guild in Bavaria, came to Kottayam and spent three years with the Christian Mission Society, conducting a workshop with local carpenters. Every afternoon, after school, Velutha caught a bus to Kottayam where he worked with Klein till dusk. By the time he was sixteen, Velutha had finished high school and was an accomplished carpenter. He had his own set of carpentry tools and a distinctly German design sensibility. He built Mammachi a Bauhaus dining table with twelve dining chairs in rosewood and a traditional Bavarian chaise longue in lighter jackwood. For Baby Kochamma’s annual Nativity plays he made her a stack of wire-framed angels’ wings that fitted onto children’s backs like knapsacks, cardboard clouds for the Angel Gabriel to appear between, and a manger for Christ to be born in. When her garden cherub’s silver arc dried up inexplicably, it was Dr. Velutha who fixed its bladder for her.

Apart from his carpentry skills, Velutha had a way with machines. Mammachi (with impenetrable Touchable logic) often said that if only he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might have become an engineer. He mended radios, clocks, water pumps. He looked after the plumbing and all the electrical gadgets in the house.

When Mammachi decided to enclose the back verandah, it was Velutha who designed and built the sliding-folding door that later became all the rage in Ayemenem.

Velutha knew more about the machines in the factory than anyone else.

When Chacko resigned his job in Madras and returned to Ayemenem with a Bharat bottle-sealing machine, it was Velutha who re-assembled it and set it up. It was Velutha who maintained the new canning machine and the automatic pineapple slicer. Velutha
who oiled the water pump and the small diesel generator. Velutha who built the aluminum sheet-lined, easy-to-clean cutting surfaces, and the ground-level furnaces for boiling fruit.

Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, however, was an Old-World Paravan. He had seen the Crawling Backwards Days and his gratitude to Mammachi and her family for all that they had done for him was as wide and deep as a river in spate. When he had his accident with the stone chip, Mammachi organized and paid for his glass eye. He hadn’t worked off his debt yet, and though he knew he wasn’t expected to, that he wouldn’t ever be able to, he felt that his eye was not his own. His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

Vellya Paapen feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not
what he
said, but the
way
he said it. Not
what
he did, but the
way
he did it.

Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.

While these were qualities that were perfectly acceptable, perhaps even desirable, in Touchables, Vellya Paapen thought that in a Paravan they could (and would, and indeed,
should
) be construed as insolence.

Vellya Paapen tried to caution Velutha. But since he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that bothered him, Velutha misunderstood his muddled concern. To him it appeared as though his father grudged him his brief training and his natural skills. Vellya Paapen’s good intentions quickly degenerated into nagging and bickering and a general air of unpleasantness between father and son. Much to his mother’s dismay, Velutha began to avoid going home. He worked late. He caught fish in the river and cooked it on an open fire. He slept outdoors, on the banks of the river.

Then one day he disappeared. For four years nobody knew where he was. There was a rumor that he was working on a building site for the Department of Welfare and Housing in Trivandrum.
And more recently, the inevitable rumor that he had become a Naxalite. That he had been to prison. Somebody said they had seen him in Quilon.

There was no way of reaching him when his mother, Chella, died of tuberculosis. Then Kuttappen, his older brother, fell off a coconut tree and damaged his spine. He was paralyzed and unable to work. Velutha heard of the accident a whole year after it happened.

It had been five months since he returned to Ayemenem. He never talked about where he had been, or what he had done.

Mammachi rehired Velutha as the factory carpenter and put him in charge of general maintenance. It caused a great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers because, according to them, Paravans were not
meant
to be carpenters. And certainly, prodigal Paravans were not meant to be rehired.

To keep the others happy, and since she knew that nobody else would hire him as a carpenter, Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than she would a Paravan. Mammachi didn’t encourage him to enter the house (except when she needed something mended or installed). She thought that he ought to be grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to touch things that Touchables touched. She said that it was a big step for a Paravan.

When he returned to Ayemenem after his years away from home, Velutha still had about him the same quickness. The sureness. And Vellya Paapen feared for him now more than ever. But this time he held his peace. He said nothing.

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched.

Entered.

Loved.

When the Terror took hold of him, Vellya Paapen went to Mammachi. He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The other stayed
dry. He shook his own head from side to side to side till Mammachi ordered him to stop. He trembled his own body like a man with malaria. Mammachi ordered him to stop it but he couldn’t, because you can’t order fear around. Not even a Paravan’s. Vellya Paapen told Mammachi what he had seen. He asked God’s forgiveness for having spawned a monster. He offered to kill his son with his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created.

In the next room Baby Kochamma heard the noise and came to find out what it was all about She saw Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced.

She said (among other things),
“How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans?”

And she shuddered theatrically, like a child being force-fed spinach. She preferred an Irish-Jesuit smell to a particular Paravan smell.

By far. By far.

  Velutha, Vellya Paapen and Kuttappen lived in a little laterite hut, downriver from the Ayernenem house. A three-minute run through the coconut trees for Esthappen and Rahel. They had only just arrived in Ayernenem with Ammu and were too young to remember Velutha when he left. But in the months since he had returned, they had grown to be the best of friends. They were forbidden from visiting his house, but they did. They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches—hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings—and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world.

It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest-ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish.

And on that skyblue December day, it
was
him that she saw
through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.

Steelshrill police whistles pierced holes in the Noise Umbrella. Through the jagged umbrella holes Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and redflags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark.

Marching.

Terror, sweat, and talcum powder had blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth. She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumored to have moved south from Palghat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.

A man with a red flag and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare.

“Feeling hot, baby?” the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam.

Then, unkindly, “Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!” and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family.

“Don’t answer!” Baby Kochamma whispered hoarsely. “Look down! Just look down!”

The man with the flag turned his attention to her. She was looking down at the floor of the car. Like a coy, frightened bride who had been married off to a stranger.

“Hello, sister,” the man said carefully in English. “What is your name please?”

When Baby Kochamma didn’t answer, he looked back at his co-hecklers.

“She has no name.”

“What about Modalali Mariakutty?” someone suggested with a giggle. Modalali in Malayalam means landlord.

“A, B, C, D, X, Y, Z,” somebody else said, irrelevantly.

More students crowded around. They all wore handkerchiefs or printed Bombay Dyeing hand towels on their heads to stave off the sun. They looked like extras who had wandered off the sets of the Malayalam version of
Sinbad: The Last Voyage.

The man like a knot gave Baby Kochamma his red flag as a present.

“Here,” he said. “Hold it.”

Baby Kochamma held it, still not looking at him.

“Wave it,” he ordered.

She had to wave it. She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and dusty.

She tried to wave it as though she wasn’t waving it.

“Now say
‘Inquilab Zindabad!’
”

“Inquilab Zindabad,”
Baby Kochamma whispered.

“Good girl.”

The crowd roared with laughter.

A shrillwhistle blew.

“Okaythen,” the man said to Baby Kochamma in English, as though they had successfully concluded a business deal. “Bye-bye!”

He slammed the skyblue door shut. Baby Kochamma wobbled. The crowd around the car unclotted and went on with its march.

Baby Kochamma rolled the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with this and that, trying to salvage some dignity.

After the last few men walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.

“Are you sure it was him?” Chacko asked Rahel.

“Who?” Rahel said, suddenly cautious.

“Are you sure it was Velutha?”

“Hmmm …?” Rahel said, playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.

“I said, are you sure that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.

“Mmm … nyes… nn … nn … almost,” Rahel said.

“You’re almost sure?” Chacko said.

“No… it was almost Velutha,” Rahel said. “It almost looked like him…”

“So you’re
not
sure then?”

“Almost not” Rahel slid a look at Estha for approval.

“It must have been him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”

Nobody seemed particularly impressed by her insight.

“We should keep an eye on him,” Baby Kochamma said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory … I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he—”

“I saw Velutha at home before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”

“For his own sake,” Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t interrupt.”

She was annoyed that nobody asked her what a scree bed was.

  In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her.

She began to hate him.

From the way Ammu held her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch. Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more like a frog-shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten had been squashed into a Miss Mitten-shaped stain by the milk truck that killed her.

With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat—shaped holes in the Universe.