The God of Small Things (20 page)

“What Ambassadors and a half you’ve been!” Baby Kochamma said.

Ambassador E. Pelvis and Ambassador S. Insect hung their heads.

“And the other thing, Rahel,” Ammu said, “I think it’s high time that you learned the difference between CLEAN and DIRTY. Especially in this country.”

Ambassador Rahel looked down.

“Your dress is—was—CLEAN,” Ammu said. “That curtain is DIRTY. Those Kangaroos are DIRTY. Your hands are DIRTY.”

Rahel was frightened by the way Ammu said CLEAN and DIRTY so loudly. As though she was talking to a deaf person.

“Now, I want you to go and say Hello
properly,”
Ammu said. “Are you going to do that or not?”

Two heads nodded twice.

  Ambassador Estha and Ambassador Rahel walked towards. Sophie Mol.

“Where d’you think people are sent to Jolly Well Behave?” Estha asked Rahel in a whisper.

“To the government,” Rahel whispered back, because she knew.

“How do you do?” Estha said to Sophie Mol loud enough for Ammu to hear.

“Just like a laddoo one pice two,” Sophie Mol whispered to Estha. She had learned this in school from a Pakistani classmate.

Estha looked at Ammu.

Ammu’s look said
Never Mind Her As Long As You’ve Done The Right Thing.

On their way across the airport car park, Hotweather crept into their clothes and dampened crisp knickers. The children lagged behind, weaving through parked cars and taxis.

“Does Yours hit you?” Sophie Mol asked.

Rahel and Estha, unsure of the politics of this, said nothing.

“Mine does,” Sophie Mol said invitingly. “Mine even Slaps.”

“Ours doesn’t,” Estha said loyally.

“Lucky,” Sophie Mol said.

Lucky rich boy with porketmunny. And a grandmother’s factory to inherit. No worries.

They walked past the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike. And past the people watching the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike.

And past the people watching the people watching the people.

A small tin sign on a big banyan tree said
For V.D. Sex Complaints contact Dr. OK. Joy.

“Who d’you love Most in the World?” Rahel asked Sophie Mol.

“Joe,” Sophie Mol said without hesitation. “My dad. He died two months ago. We’ve come here to Recover from the Shock.”

“But Chacko’s your dad,” Estha said.

“He’s just my
real
dad,” Sophie Mol said. “Joe’s my dad. He never hits. Hardly ever.”

“How can he hit if he’s dead?” Estha asked reasonably.

“Where’s
your
dad?” Sophie Mol wanted to know.

“He’s …,” and Rahel looked at Estha for help.

“… not here,” Estha said.

“Shall I tell you my list?” Rahel asked Sophie Mol.

“If you like,” Sophie Mol said.

  Rahel’s “list” was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.

  “First Ammu and Chacko,” Rahel said. “Then Mammachi—”

“Our grandmother,” Estha clarified.

“More
than your brother?” Sophie Mol asked.

“We don’t count,” Rahel said. “And anyway he might change. Ammu says.”

“How d’you mean? Change into what?” Sophie Mol asked.

“Into a Male Chauvinist Pig,” Rahel said.

“Very unlikely,” Estha said.

“Anyway, after Mammachi, Velutha, and then—”

“Who’s Velutha?” Sophie Mol wanted to know.

“A man we love,” Rahel said. “And after Velutha, you,” Rahel said.

“Me? What d’you love me for?” Sophie Mol said.

“Because we’re firstcousins. So I have to,” Rahel said piously.

“But you don’t even know me,” Sophie Mol said. “And anyway, I don’t love you.”

“But you will, when you come to know me,” Rahel said confidently.

“I doubt it,” Estha said.

“Why not?” Sophie Mol said.

“Because,” Estha said. “And anyway she’s most probably going to be a dwarf.”

As though loving a dwarf was completely out of the question.

“I’m not,” Rahel said.

“You are,” Estha said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. We’re twins,” Estha explained to Sophie Mol, “and just see how much shorter she is.”

Rahel obligingly took a deep breath, threw her chest out and stood back to back with Estha in the airport car park, for Sophie Mol to see just how much shorter she was.

“Maybe you’ll be a midget,” Sophie Mol suggested. “That’s taller than a dwarf and shorter than a … Human Being.”

The silence was unsure of this compromise.

  In the doorway of the Arrivals Lounge, a shadowy, red-mouthed roo-shaped silhouette waved a cemently paw only at Rahel. Cement kisses whirred through the air like small helicopters.

“D’you know how to sashay?” Sophie Mol wanted to know.

“No. We don’t sashay in India,” Ambassador Estha said.

“Well, in England we do,” Sophie Mol said. “All the models do. On television. Look—it’s easy.”

And the three of them, led by Sophie Mol, sashayed across the airport car park, swaying like fashion models, Eagle flasks and Made-in-England go-go bags bumping around their hips. Damp dwarfs walking tall.

Shadows followed them. Silver jets in a blue church sky, like moths in a beam of light.

  The skyblue Plymouth with tailfins had a smile for Sophie Mol. A chromebumpered sharksmile.

A Paradise Pickles carsmile.

When she saw the carrier with the painted pickle bottles and the list of Paradise products, Margaret Kochamma said, “Oh dear! I feel as though I’m in an advertisement!” She said Oh dear! a lot.

Oh dear! Oh dearohdear!

“I didn’t know you did pineapple slices!” she said. “Sophie loves pineapple, don’t you Soph?”

“Sometimes,” Soph said. “And sometimes not.”

Margaret Kochamma climbed into the advertisement with her brown back-freckles and her arm-freckles and her flowered dress with legs underneath.

Sophie Mol sat in front between Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, just her hat peeping over the car seat. Because she was their daughter.

Rahel and Estha sat at the back.

The luggage was in the boot.

Boot
was a lovely word.
Sturdy
was a terrible word.

Near Ettumanoor they passed a dead temple elephant, electrocuted by a high tension wire that had fallen on the road. An engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be treated lightly. There was a fire engine and some confused firemen. The municipal officer had a file and was shouting a lot. There was a
Joy Ice Cream
cart and a man selling peanuts in narrow cones of paper cleverly designed to hold not more than eight or nine nuts.

Sophie Mol said, “Look, a dead elephant.”

Chacko stopped to ask whether it was by any chance Kochu Thomban (Little Tusker), the Ayemenem temple elephant who came to the Ayemenem House once a month for a coconut. They said it wasn’t.

Relieved that it was a stranger, and not an elephant they knew, they drove on.

“Thang God,” Estha said.

“Than
k
God, Estha,” Baby Kochamma corrected him.

On the way, Sophie Mol learned to recognize the first whiff of the approaching stench of unprocessed rubber and to clamp her nostrils shut until long after the truck carrying it had driven past.

Baby Kochamma suggested a car song.

Estha and Rahel had to sing in English in obedient voices. Breezily. As though they hadn’t been made to rehearse it all week long. Ambassador E. Pelvis and Ambassador S. Insect.

Their Prer NUN sea ayshun was perfect.

The Plymouth rushed through the green midday heat, promoting pickles on its roof, and the skyblue sky in its tailfins.

Just outside Ayemenem they drove into a cabbage-green butterfly (or perhaps it drove into them).

WISDOM EXERCISE NOTEBOOKS

I
n Pappachi’s study, mounted butterflies and moths had disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent dust that powdered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins that had impaled them naked. Cruel. The room was rank with fungus and disuse. An old neon-green hula hoop hung from a wooden peg on the wall, a huge saint’s discarded halo. A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill, their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. Silhouetted against the sun. Buffed and beautiful.

Rahel (on a stool, on top of a table) rummaged in a book cupboard with dull, dirty glass panes. Her bare footprints were clear in the dust on the floor. They led from the door to the table (dragged to the bookshelf) to the stool (dragged to the table and lifted onto it). She was looking for something. Her life had a size and a shape now. She had half-moons under her eyes and a team of trolls on her horizon.

On the top shelf, the leather binding on Pappachi’s set of
The Inssect
Wealth of India
had lifted off each book and buckled like corrugated asbestos. Silverfish tunneled through the pages, burrowing arbitrarily from species to species, turning organized information into yellow lace.

Rahel groped behind the row of books and brought out hidden things.

A smooth seashell and a spiky one.

A plastic case for contact lenses. An orange pipette.

A silver crucifix on a string of beads. Baby Kochamma’s rosary.

She held it up against the light. Each greedy bead grabbed its share of sun.

A shadow fell across the sunlit rectangle on the study floor. Rahel turned towards the door with her string of light.

“Imagine. It’s still here. I stole it. After you were Returned.”

That word slipped out easily.
Returned.
As though that was what twins were meant for. To be borrowed and returned. Like library books.

Estha wouldn’t look up. His mind was full of trains. He blocked the light from the door. An Estha-shaped Hole in the Universe.

Behind the books, Rahel’s puzzled fingers encountered something else. Another magpie had had the same idea. She brought it out and wiped the dust off with the sleeve of her shirt. It was a flat packet wrapped in clear plastic and stuck with Sellotape. A scrap of white paper inside it said
Esthappen and Rahel.
In Ammu’s writing.

There were four tattered notebooks in it. On their covers they said
Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
with a place for
Name, School/College, Class, Subject.
Two had her name on them, and two Estha’s.

Inside the back cover of one, something had been written in a child’s handwriting. The labored form of each letter and the irregular space between words was full of the struggle for control over the errant, self-willed pencil. The sentiment, in contrast, was lucid:
I Hate Miss Mitten and I Think Her gnickers are TORN.

On the front of the book, Estha had rubbed out his surname with spit, and taken half the paper with it. Over the whole mess, he had written in pencil
Un-knowm.
Esthappen Unknown. (His surname
postponed for the Time Being, while Ammu chose between her husband’s name and her father’s,) Next to
Class
it said:
6 years.
Next to
Subject
it said:
Story-writing.

  Rahel sat cross-legged (on the stool on the table).

“Esthappen Unknown,” she said. She opened the book and read aloud.

  Below this there were corrections from a previous lesson.