The God of Small Things (13 page)

Estha’s hair was plastered down in clumps, like the inverted petals of a flower. Slivers of white scalp shone through. Rivulets of water ran down his face and neck.

He walked to his room. A gloating halo appeared around Baby Kochamma’s head. “See?” she said.

Kochu Maria used the opportunity to switch channels and watch a bit of
Prime Bodies.

Rahel followed Estha to his room. Ammu’s room. Once.

  The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked-off shoe or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes arranged. The dustbin empty.

The obsessive cleanliness of the room was the only positive sign of volition from Estha. The only faint suggestion that he had, perhaps, some Design for Life. Just the whisper of an unwillingness to subsist on scraps offered by others. On the wall by the window, an iron stood on an ironing board. A pile of folded, crumpled clothes waited to be ironed.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas koala (from Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up and down in them.

Estha put on the tap and water drummed into a plastic bucket. He undressed in the gleaming bathroom. He stepped out of his sodden jeans. Stiff. Dark blue. Difficult to get out of. He pulled his crushed-strawberry T-shirt over his head, smooth, slim, muscular arms crossed over his body. He didn’t hear his sister at the door.

Rahel watched his stomach suck inwards and his rib cage rise as his wet T-shirt peeled away from his skin, leaving it wet and honey-colored. His face and neck and a
V
-shaped triangle at the base of his throat were darker than the rest of him. His arms too were double-colored. Paler where his shirtsleeves ended. A dark-brown man in
pale honey clothes. Chocolate with a twist of coffee. High cheekbones and hunted eyes. A fisherman in a white-tiled bathroom, with sea-secrets in his eyes.

  
Had he seen her? Was he really mad? Did he know that she was there?
They had never been shy of each other’s bodies, but they had never been old enough (together) to know what shyness was.

Now they were. Old enough.

Old.

A viable dieable age.

What a funny word
old
was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself
Old.

  Rahel at the bathroom door. Slim-hipped. (“Tell her she’ll need a cesarean!” a drunk gynecologist had said to her husband while they waited for their change at the gas station.) A lizard on a map on her faded T-shirt. Long wild hair with a glint of deep henna red sent unruly fingers down into the small of her back. The diamond in her nostril flashed. Sometimes. And sometimes not. A thin, gold, serpent-headed bangle glowed like a circle of orange light around her wrist. Slim snakes whispering to each other, head to head. Her mother’s melted wedding ring. Down softened the sharp lines of her thin, angular arms.

At first glance she appeared to have grown into the skin of her mother. High cheekbones. Deep dimples when she smiled. But she was longer, harder, flatter, more angular than Ammu had been. Less lovely perhaps to those who like roundness and softness in women. Only her eyes were incontestably more beautiful. Large. Luminous.
Drownable in
, as Larry McCaslin had said and discovered to his cost.

  Rahel searched her brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of his knees. The arch of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at which the rest of his arm met his elbow. The way his toe-nails tipped upwards at the ends. The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums
never grow up. Like school satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of childhood. Two vaccination marks on his arm gleamed like coins. Hers were on her thigh.

Girls always have them on their thighs, Ammu used to say.

Rahel watched Estha with the curiosity of a mother watching her wet child. A sister a brother. A woman a man. A twin a twin.

She flew these several kites at once.

He was a naked stranger met in a chance encounter. He was the one that she had known before Life began. The one who had once led her (swimming) through their lovely mother’s cunt.

Both things unbearable in their polarity. In their irreconcilable far-apartness.

A raindrop glistened on the end of Estha’s earlobe. Thick, silver in the light, like a heavy bead of mercury. She reached out. Touched it. Took it away.

Estha didn’t look at her. He retreated into further stillness. As though his body had the power to snatch its senses inwards (knotted, egg-shaped), away from the surface of his skin, into some deeper more inaccessible recess.

The silence gathered its skins and slid, like Spider Woman, up the slippery bathroom wall.

Estha put his wet clothes in a bucket and began to wash them with crumbling, bright blue soap.

ABHILASH TALKIES

A
bhilash Talkies advertised itself as the first cinema hall in Kerala with a 70mm CinemaScope screen. To drive home the point, its façade had been designed as a cement replica of a curved CinemaScope screen. On top (cement writing, neon lighting) it said
Abhilash Talkies
in English and Malayalam.

The toilets were called
HIS
and
HERS
.
HERS
for Ammu, Rahel and Baby Kochamma.
His
for Estha alone, because Chacko had gone to see about the bookings at the Hotel Sea Queen.

“Will you be okay?” Ammu said, worried.

Estha nodded.

Through the red Formica door that closed slowly on its own, Rahel followed Ammu and Baby Kochamma into
HERS
. She turned to wave across the slipperoily marble floor at Estha Alone (with a comb), in his beige and pointy shoes. Estha waited in the dirty marble lobby with the lonely, watching mirrors till the red door took his sister away. Then he turned and padded off to
HIS
.

In
HERS
, Ammu suggested that Rahel balance in the air to piss.
She said that Public Pots were Dirty. Like Money was. You never knew who’d touched it Lepers. Butchers. Car Mechanics. (Pus. Blood. Grease.)

Once when Kochu Maria took her to the butcher’s shop, Rahel noticed that the green five-rupee note that he gave them had a tiny blob of red meat on it. Kochu Maria wiped the blob away with her thumb. The juice left a red smear. She put the money into her bodice. Meat-smelling blood money.

Rahel was too short to balance in the air above the pot, so Ammu and Baby Kochamma held her up, her legs hooked over their arms. Her feet pigeon-toed in Bata sandals. High in the air with her knickers down. For a moment nothing happened, and Rahel looked up at her mother and baby grandaunt with naughty (now what?) questionmarks in her eyes.

“Come on,” Ammu said. “Sssss …”

Sssss for the Sound of Soo-soo. Mmmmm for the Sound of Myooozick. Rahel giggled. Ammu giggled. Baby Kochamma giggled. When the trickle started they adjusted her aerial position. Rahel was unembarrassed. She finished and Ammu had the toilet paper.

“Shall you or shall I?” Baby Kochamma said to Ammu.

“Either way,” Ammu said. “Go ahead. You.”

Rahel held her handbag. Baby Kochamma lifted her rumpled sari. Rahel studied her baby grandaunt’s enormous legs. (Years later during a history lesson being read out in school—
The Emperor Bahur had a wheatish complexion and pillarlike thighs
—this scene would flash before her; Baby Kochamma balanced like a big bird over a public pot. Blue veins like lumpy knitting running up her translucent shins. Fat knees dimpled. Hair on them. Poor little tiny feet to carry such a load!) Baby Kochamma waited for half of half a moment. Head thrust forward. Silly smile. Bosom swinging low. Melons in a blouse. Bottom up and out. When the gurgling, bubbling sound came, she listened with her eyes. A yellow brook burbled through a mountain pass.

Rahel liked all this. Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then, of how precious
a feeling this was.
Like friends.
They would never be together like this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma and she.

When Baby Kochamma finished, Rahel looked at her watch.

“So long you took, Baby Kochamma,” she said. “It’s ten to two.”

She thought of Slow being a person. Slow Kurien. Slow Kutty. Slow Mol. Slow Kochamma.

Slow Kutty. Fast Verghese. And Kuriakose. Three brothers with dandruff.

Ammu did hers in a whisper. Against the side of the pot so you couldn’t hear. Her father’s hardness had left her eyes and they were Ammu-eyes again. She had deep dimples in her smile and didn’t seem angry anymore. About Velutha or the spit bubble.

That was a Good Sign.

Estha Alone in
HIS
had to piss onto naphthalene balls and cigarette stubs in the urinal. To piss in the pot would be Defeat. To piss in the urinal, he was too short. He needed Height. He searched for Height, and in a corner of
HIS
, he found it. A dirty broom, a squash bottle half-full of a milky liquid (phenyl) with floaty black things in it. A limp floorswab, and two rusty tin cans of nothing. They could have been Paradise Pickle products. Pineapple chunks in syrup. Or slices. Pineapple slices. His honor redeemed by his grandmother’s cans, Estha Alone organized the rusty cans of nothing in front of the urinal. He stood on them, one foot on each, and pissed carefully, with minimal wobble. Like a Man. The cigarette stubs, soggy then, were wet now, and swirly. Hard to light. When he finished, Estha moved the cans to the basin in front of the mirror. He washed his hands and wet his hair. Then, dwarfed by the size of Ammu’s comb that was too big for him, he reconstructed his puff carefully. Slicked back, then pushed forward and swiveled sideways at the very end. He returned the comb to his pocket, stepped off the tins and put them back with the bottle and swab and broom. He bowed to them all. The whole shooting match. The bottle, the broom, the cans, the limp floorswab.

“Bow,” he said, and smiled, because when he was younger he had been under the impression that you had to say “Bow” when you bowed. That you had to
say
it to do it.

“Bow, Estha,” they’d say. And he’d bow and say, “Bow,” and they’d look at each other and laugh, and he’d worry.

Estha Alone of the uneven teeth.

Outside, he waited for his mother, his sister and his baby grandaunt. When they came out, Ammu said “Okay, Esthappen?”

Estha said, “Okay,” and shook his head carefully to preserve his puff.

Okay? Okay.
He put the comb back into her handbag. Ammu felt a sudden clutch of love for her reserved, dignified little son in his beige and pointy shoes, who had just completed his first adult assignment. She ran loving fingers through his hair. She spoiled his puff.

The Man with the steel Eveready Torch said that the picture had started, so to hurry. They had to rush up the red steps with the old red carpet. Red staircase with red spit stains in the red corner. The Man with the Torch scrunched up his mundu and held it tucked under his balls, in his left hand. As he climbed, his calf muscles hardened under his climbing skin like hairy cannonballs. He held the torch in his right hand. He hurried with his mind.

“It started longago,” he said.

So they’d missed the beginning. Missed the rippled velvet curtain going up, with lightbulbs in the clustered yellow tassels. Slowly up, and the music would have been “Baby Elephant Walk” from
Hatari.
Or “Colonel Bogey’s March.”

Ammu held Estha’s hand. Baby Kochamma, heaving up the steps, held Rahel’s. Baby Kochamma, weighed down by her melons, would not admit to herself that she was looking forward to the picture. She preferred to feel that she was only doing it for the children’s sake. In her mind she kept an organized, careful account of Things She’d Done For People, and Things People Hadn’t Done For Her.

She liked the early nun-bits best, and hoped they hadn’t missed them. Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved
best what they
Identified
most with. Rahel supposed she Identified most with Christopher Plummer, who acted as Baron von Trapp. Chacko didn’t Identify with him at all and called him Baron von Clapp-Trapp.

Rahel was like an excited mosquito on a leash. Flying. Weightless. Up two steps. Down two. Up one. She climbed five flights of red stairs for Baby Kochamma’s one.