The God of Small Things (17 page)

Y
ears later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.

Both things had happened.

It had shrunk. And she had grown.

Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby. The barrage regulated the inflow of salt water from the backwaters that opened into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead of one. More rice, for the price of a river.

Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles underwater. Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it. Splay-footed, cautious.

Once it had had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers.

The stone steps that had once led bathers right down to the water, and Fisher People to the fish, were entirely exposed and led from nowhere to nowhere, like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing. Ferns pushed through the cracks.

On the other side of the river, the steep mud banks changed abruptly into low mud walls of shanty hutments. Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the squeichy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening, the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to the sea, leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts on a thin, rocking, ribbon lawn.

On warm days the smell of shit lifted off the river and hovered over Ayemenem like a hat.

Further inland, and still across, a five-star hotel chain had bought the Heart of Darkness.

The History House (where map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails once whispered) could no longer be approached from the river. It had turned its back on Ayemenem. The hotel guests were ferried across the backwaters, straight from Cochin. They arrived by speedboat, opening up a
V
of foam on the water, leaving behind a rainbow film of gasoline.

The view from the hotel was beautiful, but here too the water was thick and toxic.
No Swimming
signs had been put up in stylish calligraphy. They had built a tall wall to screen off the slum and prevent it from encroaching on Kari Saipu’s estate. There wasn’t much they could do about the smell.

But they had a swimming pool for swimming. And fresh tandopri pomfret and crêpe suzette on their menu.

The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise—
God’s Own Country
they called it in their brochures—because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.

  Kari Saipu’s house had been renovated and painted. It had become the centerpiece of an elaborate complex, crisscrossed with artificial canals and connecting bridges. Small boats bobbed in the water. The old colonial bungalow with its deep verandah and Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses—ancestral homes—that the hotel chain had bought from old families and transplanted in the Heart of Darkness. Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. “Heritage,” the hotel was called.

The Hotel People liked to tell their guests that the oldest of the wooden houses, with its airtight, paneled storeroom which could hold enough rice to feed an army for a year, had been the ancestral home of Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Kerala’s Mao Tsetung,” they explained to the uninitiated. The furniture and knick-knacks that came with the house were on display. A reed umbrella, a wicker couch. A wooden dowry box. They were labeled with edifying placards that said
Traditional Kerala Umbrella
and
Traditional Bridal Dowry-box.

So there it was then, History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat.

Comrade Namboodiripad’s house functioned as the hotel’s dining room, where semi-suntanned tourists in bathing suits sipped
tender coconut water (served in the shell), and old Communists, who now worked as fawning bearers in colorful ethnic clothes, stooped slightly behind their trays of drinks.

In the evenings (for that Regional Flavor) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances (“Small attention spans,” the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos.

The performances were staged by the swimming pool. While the drummers drummed and the dancers danced, hotel guests frolicked with their children in the water. While Kunti revealed her secret to Karna on the riverbank, courting couples rubbed suntan oil on each other. While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teen aged daughters, Poothana suckled young Krishna at her poisoned breast. Bhima disemboweled Dushasana and bathed Draupadi’s hair in his blood.

The back verandah of the History House (where a posse of Touchable policemen converged, where an inflatable goose was burst) had been enclosed and converted into the airy hotel kitchen. Nothing worse than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The Terror was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming of cooks. The cheerful chop-chop-chopping of ginger and garlic. The disemboweling of lesser mammals—pigs, goats. The dicing of meat. The scaling of fish.

Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain.

A small forgotten thing.

Nothing that the world would miss.

A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it.

Ten to two, it said.

  A band of children followed Rahel on her walk.

“Hello hippie,” they said, twenty-five years too late. “Whatis-yourname?”

Then someone threw a small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.

  On her way back, looping around the Ayemenem House, Rahel emerged onto the main road. Here too, houses had mushroomed, and it was only the fact that they nestled under trees, and that the narrow paths that branched off the main road and led to them were not motorable, that gave Ayemenem the semblance of rural quietness. In truth, its population had swelled to the size of a little town. Behind the fragile facade of greenery lived a press of people who could gather at a moment’s notice. To beat to death a careless bus driver. To smash the windscreen of a car that dared to venture out on the day of an Opposition bandh. To steal Baby Kochamma’s imported insulin and her cream buns that came all the way from Best-bakery in Kottayam.

Outside Lucky Press, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was standing at his boundary wall talking to a man on the other side. Comrade Pillai’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow them and he had just refused. The man across the wall shuffled through a bunch of photographs in a plastic sachet, with an air of contrived interest. The photographs were mostly pictures of Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s son, Lenin, who lived and worked in Delhi—he took care of the painting, plumbing, and any electrical work—for the Dutch and German embassies. In order to allay any fears his clients might have about his political leanings, he had altered his name slightly. Levin he called himself now. P. Levin.

Rahel tried to walk past unnoticed. It was absurd of her to have imagined that she could.

“
Aiyyo
, Rahel Mol!” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said, recognizing her instantly,“
Orkunnilly?
Comrade Uncle?”

“Oower,”
Rahel said.

Did she remember him? She did indeed.

Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot—that sit
on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes.

“So!” Comrade Pillai said. “I think so you are in Amayrica now?”

“No,” Rahel said. “I’m here.”

“Yes yes.” He sounded a little impatient “But otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?” Comrade Pillai uncrossed his arms. His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary wall like a sad St. Bernard’s eyes.

“Recognized?” Comrade Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin.

The man hadn’t.

“The old Paradise Pickle Kochamma’s daughter’s daughter,” Comrade Pillai said.

The man looked puzzled. He was clearly a stranger. And not a pickle-eater. Comrade Pillai tried a different tack.

“Punnyan Kunju?” he asked. The Patriarch of Antioch appeared briefly in the sky—and waved his withered hand.

Things began to fall into place for the man with the photographs. He nodded enthusiastically.

“Punnyan Kunju’s son? Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi?” Comrade Pillai said.

“Ooiver, oower, oower
,” the man said.

“His daughter’s daughter is this. In Amayrica now.”

The nodder nodded as Rahel’s ancestral lineage fell into place for him.

“Oower, oower, oower.
In Amayrica now, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration.

He remembered vaguely a whiff of scandal. He had forgotten the details, but remembered that it had involved sex and death. It had been in the papers. After a brief silence and another series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of photographs.

“Okaythen, comrade, I’ll be off.”

He had a bus to catch.

  “So!” Comrade Pillai’s smile broadened as he turned all his attention like a searchlight on Rahel. His gums were startlingly pink,
the reward for a lifetime’s uncompromising vegetarianism. He was the kind of man whom it was hard to imagine had once been a boy. Or a baby. He looked as though he had been
born
middle aged. With a receding hairline.

“Mol’s husband?” he wanted to know.

“Hasn’t come.”

“Any photos?”

“No.”

“Name?”

“Larry. Lawrence.”

“Oower.
Lawrence.” Comrade Pillai nodded as though he agreed with it As though given a choice, it was the very one he would have picked.

“Any issues?”

“No,” Rahel said.

“Still in planning stages, I suppose? Or expecting?”

“No.”

“One is must. Boy, girl. Anyone,” Comrade Pillai said. “Two is of course your choice.”

“We’re divorced.” Rahel hoped to shock him into silence.

“Die-vorced?” His voice rose to such a high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word as though it were a form of death.

“That is most unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most-unfortunate.”

It occurred to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers’ bourgeois decadence.

One was mad. The other die-vorced. Probably barren.

Perhaps
this
was the real revolution. The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self-destruct.

Comrade Pillai lowered his voice as though there were people listening, though there was no one about.

“And Mon?” he whispered confidentially. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Rahel said. “He’s fine.”

Fine. Flat and honey-colored. He washes his clothes with crumbling soap.

“Aiyyo paavam,”
Comrade Pillai whispered, and his nipples drooped in mock dismay. “Poor fellow.”

Rahel wondered what he gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at least bother to pretend otherwise?

“Lenin is in Delhi now,” Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride. “Working with foreign embassies. See!”

He handed Rahel the cellophane sachet. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands with a very well-dressed, very pink man.

“German First Secretary,” Comrade Pillai said.

They looked cheerful in the photographs, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA fat.

  Rahel remembered the incident that made Lenin swim into focus as a Real Person for her and Estha, when they stopped regarding him as just another pleat in his mother’s sari. She and Estha were five, Lenin perhaps three or four years old. They met in the clinic of Dr. Verghese Verghese (Kottayam’s leading Pediatrician and Feeler-up of Mothers). Rahel was with Ammu and Estha (who had insisted that he go along). Lenin was with his mother, Kalyani. Both Rahel and Lenin had the same complaint—Foreign Objects Lodged Up Their Noses. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence now, but somehow hadn’t then. It was curious how politics lurked even in what children chose to stuff up their noses. She, the granddaughter of an Imperial Entomologist, he the son of a grassroots Marxist Party worker. So, she a glass bead, and he a green gram.

The waiting room was full.

From behind the doctor’s curtain, sinister voices murmured, interrupted by howls from savaged children. There was the clink of glass on metal, and the whisper and bubble of boiling water. A boy
played with the wooden
Doctor is
IN
Doctor is
OUT
sign on the wall, sliding the brass panel up and down. A feverish baby hiccupped on its mother’s breast. The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.