The God of Small Things (27 page)

Velutha wasn’t home. Nor Vellya Paapen. But someone was.

A man’s voice floated out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely.

The voice shouted the same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more hysterical register. It was an appeal to an over-ripe guava threatening to fall from its tree and make a mess on the ground.

The shouter was Kuttappen, Velutha’s older brother. He was paralyzed from his chest downwards. Day after day, month after month, while his brother was away and his father went to work, Kuttappen lay flat on his back and watched his youth saunter past without stopping to say hello. All day he lay there listening to the silence of huddled trees with only a domineering black hen for company. He missed his mother, Chella, who had died in the same corner of the
room that he lay in now. She had died a coughing, spitting, aching, phlegmy death. Kuttappen remembered noticing how her feet died long before she had. How the skin on them grew gray and lifeless. How fearfully he watched death creep over her from the bottom up. Kuttappen kept vigil on his own numb feet with mounting terror. Occasionally he poked at them hopefully with a stick that he kept propped up in the corner to defend himself against visiting snakes. He had no sensation in his feet at all, and only visual evidence assured him that they were still connected to his body, and were indeed his own.

After Chella died, he was moved into her corner, the corner that Kuttappen imagined was the corner of his home that Death had reserved to administer her deathly affairs. One corner for cooking, one for clothes, one for bedding rolls, one for dying in.

He wondered how long his would take, and what people who had more than four corners in their houses did with the rest of their corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die in?

He assumed, not without reason, that he would be the first in his family to follow in his mother’s wake. He would learn otherwise. Soon. Too soon.

Sometimes (from habit, from missing her), Kuttappen coughed like his mother used to, and his upper body bucked like a just-caught fish. His lower body lay like lead, as though it belonged to someone else. Someone dead whose spirit was trapped and couldn’t get away.

Unlike Velutha, Kuttappen was a good, safe Paravan. He could neither read nor write. As he lay there on his hard bed, bits of thatch and grit fell onto him from the ceiling and mingled with his sweat. Sometimes ants and other insects fell with it. On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, refilling glasses). Kuttappen thought with envy of madmen who could walk. He had no doubts about the equity of the deal; his sanity, for serviceable legs.

  The twins put the boat down, and the clatter was met with a sudden silence from inside.

Kuttappen wasn’t expecting anyone.

Estha and Rahel pushed open the door and went in. Small as they were, they had to stoop a little to go in. The wasp waited outside on the lamp.

“It’s us.”

  The room was dark and clean. It smelled of fish curry and woodsmoke. Heat cleaved to things like a low fever. But the mud floor was cool under Rand’s bare feet. Velutha’s and Vellya Paapen’s bedding was rolled up and propped against the wall. Clothes hung on a string. There was a low wooden kitchen shelf on which covered terra-cotta pots, ladles made of coconut shells and three chipped enamel plates with dark-blue rims were arranged. A grown man could stand up straight in the center of the room, but not along its sides. Another low door led to a backyard, where there were more banana trees, beyond which the river glimmered through the foliage. A carpenter’s workstation had been erected in the backyard.

There were no keys or cupboards to lock.

The black hen left through the backdoor, and scratched abstractedly in the yard, where woodshavings blew about like blond curls. Judging from her personality, she appeared to have been reared on a diet of hardware: hasps and clasps and nails and old screws.

  “
Aiyyo, Mon! Mol!
What must yon be thinking? That Kuttappen’s a basket case!” an embarrassed, disembodied voice said.

  It took the twins awhile for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Then the darkness dissolved and Kuttappen appeared on his
bed, a glistening genie in the gloom. The whites of his eyes were dark yellow. The soles of his feet (soft from so much lying down) stuck out from under the cloth that covered his legs. They were still stained a pale orange from years of walking barefoot on red mud. He had gray calluses on his ankles from the chafing of the rope that Paravans tied around their feet when they climbed coconut trees.

On the wall behind him there was a benign, mouse-haired calendar-Jesus with lipstick and rouge, and a lurid, jeweled heart glowing through his clothes. The bottom quarter of the calendar (the part with the dates on it) frilled out like a skirt. Jesus in a mini. Twelve layers of petticoats for the twelve months of the year. None had been torn out.

There were other things from the Ayemenem House that had either been given to them or salvaged from the rubbish bin. Rich things in a poor house. A clock that didn’t work, a flowered tin wastepaper basket. Pappachi’s old riding boots (brown, with green mold) with the cobbler’s trees still in them. Biscuit tins with sumptuous pictures of English castles and ladies with bustles and ringlets.

A small poster (Baby Kochamma’s, given away because of a damp patch) hung next to Jesus. It was a picture of a blond child writing a letter, with tears falling down her cheeks. Underneath it said:
I’m writing to say I Miss You.
She looked as though she’d had a haircut, and it was her cropped curls that were blowing around Velutha’s backyard.

A transparent plastic tube led from under the worn cotton sheet that covered Kuttappen to a bottle of yellow liquid that caught the shaft of light that came in through the door, and quelled a question that had been rising inside Rahel. She fetched him water in a steel tumbler from the clay koojah. She seemed to know her way around. Kuttappen lifted his head and drank. Some water dribbled down his chin.

The twins squatted on their haunches, like professional adult gossips in the Ayemenem market.

They sat in silence for a while. Kuttappen mortified, the twins preoccupied with boat thoughts.

  “Has Chacko Saar’s Mol come?” Kuttappen asked.

“Must have,” Rahel said laconically.

“Where’s she?”

“Who knows? Must be around somewhere. We don’t know.”

“Will you bring her here for me to see?”

“Can’t,” Rahel said.

“Why not?”

“She has to stay indoors. She’s very delicate. If she gets dirty she’ll die.”

“I see.”

“We’re not allowed to bring her here … and anyway, there’s nothing to
see
,” Rahel assured Kuttappen. “She has hair, legs, teeth—you know—the usual, only she’s a little tall.” And that was the only concession she would make.

“Is that all?” Kuttappen said, getting the point very quickly. “Then where’s the point in seeing her?”

“No point,” Rahel said.

“Kuttappa, if a vallom leaks, is it very hard to mend?” Estha asked.

“Shouldn’t be,” Kuttappen said. “Depends. Why, whose vallom is leaking?”

“Ours—that we found. D’you want to see it?”

They went out and returned with the grizzled boat for the paralyzed man to examine. They held it over him like a roof. Water dripped on him.

“First we’ll have to find the leaks,” Kuttappen said. “Then we’ll have to plug them.”

“Then sandpaper,” Estha said. “Then polish.”

“Then oars,” Rahel said.

“Then oars,” Estha agreed.

“Then offity off,” Rahel said.

“Where to?” Kuttappen asked.

“Just here and there,” Estha said airily.

“You must be careful,” Kuttappen said. “This river of ours—she isn’t always what she pretends to be.”

“What does she pretend to be?” Rahel asked.

“Oh … a little old churchgoing ammooma, quiet and clean … idi appams for breakfast, kanji and meen for lunch. Minding her own business. Not looking right or left.”

“And she’s really a …?”

“Really a wild thing … I can hear her at night—rushing past in the moonlight, always in a hurry. You must be careful of her.”

“And what does she really eat?”

“Really eat? Oh … Stoo … and …” He cast about for something English for the evil river to eat.

“Pineapple slices …” Rahel suggested.

“That’s right! Pineapple slices and Stoo. And she drinks. Whiskey.”

“And brandy.”

“And brandy. True.”

“And looks right and left.”

“True.”

“And minds
other
people’s business …”

  Esthappen steadied the little boat on the uneven earth floor with a few blocks of wood that he found in Velutha’s workstation in the backyard. He gave Rahel a cooking ladle made of a wooden handle stuck through the polished half of a coconut shell.

The twins climbed into the vallom and rowed across vast, choppy waters. With a
Thaiy thaiy thaka thaiy thaiy thome.
And a jeweled Jesus watching.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have
swum
on land?

In matching knickers and dark glasses? With His Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would He have had the imagination?

Velutha returned to see if Kuttappen needed anything. From a distance he heard the raucous singing. Young voices, underlining with delight the scatology.

Temporarily, for a few happy moments, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man shut his yellow smile and went away. Fear sank and settled at the bottom of the deep water. Sleeping a dog’s sleep. Ready to rise and murk things at a moment’s notice.

Velutha smiled when he saw the Marxist flag blooming like a tree outside his doorway. He had to bend low in order to enter his home. A tropical Eskimo. When he saw the children, something clenched inside him. And he couldn’t understand it. He saw them every day. He loved them without knowing it. But it was different suddenly. Now. After History had slipped up so badly No fist had clenched inside him before.

Her
children, an insane whisper whispered to him.

Her
eyes,
her
mouth.
Her
teeth.

Her soft, lambent skin.

He drove the thought away angrily. It returned and sat outside his skull. Like a dog.

“Ha!” he said to his young guests, “and who may 1 ask are these Fisher People?”

“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon. Mr. and Mrs. Pleasetomeetyou.” Rahel held out her ladle to be shaken in greeting.

It was shaken in greeting. Hers, then Estha’s.

“And where, may I ask, are they off to by boat?”

“Off to Africa!” Rahel shouted.

“Stop
shouting
!” Estha said.

Velutha walked around the boat They told him where they had found it.

“So it doesn’t belong to anybody,” Rahel said a little doubtfully, because it suddenly occurred to her that it might “Ought we to report it to the police?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Estha said.

Velutha knocked on the wood and then scraped a little patch clean with his nail.

“Good wood,” he said.

“It sinks,” Estha said. “It leaks.”

“Can you mend it for us, Veluthapappychachen Peter Mon?” Rahel asked.

“We’ll see about that,” Velutha said. “I don’t want you playing any silly games on this river.”

“We won’t We promise. We’ll use it only when you’re with us.”

“First we’ll have to find the leaks,” Velutha said.

“Then we’ll have to plug them!” the twins shouted, as though it was the second line of a well-known poem.

“How long will it take?” Estha asked.

“A day,” Velutha said.

“A
day
! I thought you’d say a month!”

Estha, delirious with joy, jumped on Velutha, wrapped his legs around his waist and kissed him.

The sandpaper was divided into exactly equal halves, and the twins fell to work with an eerie concentration that excluded everything else.

Boat-dust flew around the room and settled on hair and eyebrows. On Kuttappen like a cloud, on Jesus like an offering. Velutha had to prise the sandpaper out of their fingers.

“Not here,” he said firmly. “Outside.”

He picked the boat up and carried it out. The twins followed, eyes fixed on their boat with unwavering concentration, starving puppies expecting to be fed.

Velutha set the boat up for them. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found. He showed them how to follow the grain of the wood. He started them off on the sandpapering. When he returned indoors,
the black hen followed him, determined to be wherever the boat wasn’t.

  Velutha dipped a thin cotton towel in an earthen pot of water. He squeezed the water out of it (savagely, as though it was an unwanted thought) and handed it to Kuttappen to wipe the grit off his face and neck.

“Did they say anything?” Kuttappen asked. “About seeing you in the March?”

“No,” Velutha said. “Not yet They will though. They know.”

“For sure?”

Velutha shrugged and took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat And wring. As though it was his ridiculous, disobedient brain.

He tried to hate her.

She’s one of them
, he told himself.
Just another one of them.