The God of Small Things (9 page)

It was Chacko’s idea to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.

  Now, on the way to Cochin, it rattled and made fallingoff noises.

Near Vaikom they had to stop and buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for
The Sound of Music.

Then, as they approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level-crossing gate went down. Rahel
knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t.

She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet Estha said that was a Bad Sign.

So now they were going to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts onto the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.

The red sign on the red and white arm said STOP in white.

“POTS
,” Rahel said.

A yellow hoarding said
BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN
in red.

“NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB
,” Estha said.

The twins were precocious with their reading. They had raced through
Old Dog Tom, Janet and John
and their
Ronald Ridout Workbooks.
At night Ammu read to them from Kipling’s
Jungle Book.

The down on their arms would stand on end, golden in the light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu could make her voice gravelly, like Shere Khan’s. Or whining, like Tabaqui’s.

“Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak.!”

“And it is I, Raksha, who answer,”
the twins would shout in high voices. Not together, but almost.
“The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the pack and to hunt with the pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer—he shall hunt thee!”

Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them an abridged version of
The Tempest
by Charles and Mary Lamb.
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,”
Estha and Rahel would go about saying,
“In a cowslip’s bell I lie.”

So when Baby Kochamma’s Australian missionary friend, Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book—
The Adventures of Susie
Squirrel
—as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten, who belonged to a sect of Born-Again Christians, said that she was a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her, backwards.

They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both
Malayalam
and
Madam I’m Adam
backwards as well as forwards. She wasn’t amused and it turned out that she didn’t even know what Malayalam was. They told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She said she had been under the impression that it was called Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken an active dislike to Miss Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it was a Highly Stupid Impression.

Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes.
nataS ni rieht seye.

They were made to write—
In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards.
A hundred times. Forwards.

A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been
reversing.

  More buses and cars had stopped on either side of the level crossing. An ambulance that said
SACRED HEART HOSPITAL
was full of a party of people on their way to a wedding. The bride was staring out of the back window, her face partially obscured by the flaking paint of the huge red cross.

The buses all had girls’ names. Lucykutty, Mollykutty, Beena Mol. In Malayalam, Mol is Little Girl and Mon is Little Boy. Beena Mol was full of pilgrims who’d had their heads shaved at Tirupati. Rahel could see a row of bald heads at the bus window, above evenly spaced vomit streaks. She was more than a little curious about vomiting. She had never vomited. Not once. Estha had, and
when he did, his skin grew hot and shiny, and his eyes helpless and beautiful, and Ammu loved him more than usual. Chacko said that Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy. And so was Sophie Mol. He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding like most Syrian Christians. And Parsis.

Mammachi said that what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding. She meant having parents who were divorced. As though these were the only choices available to people: Inbreeding or Divorce.

Rahel wasn’t sure what she suffered from, but occasionally she practiced sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do. Than I have ever done,”
she would say to herself sadly. That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of
A Tale of Two Cities.

She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.

Initially, when the level crossing had just closed, the air was full of the impatient sound of idling engines. But when the man that manned the crossing came out of his booth, on his backwards-bending legs and signaled with his limp, flapping walk to the tea stall that they were in for a long wait, drivers switched off their engines and milled about, stretching their legs.

With a desultory nod of his bored and sleepy head, the Level Crossing Divinity conjured up beggars with bandages, men with trays selling pieces of fresh coconut, parippu vadas on banana leaves. And cold drinks. Coca-Cola, Fanta, Rosemilk.

A leper with soiled bandages begged at the car window.

“That looks like Mercurochrome to me,” Ammu said, of his inordinately bright blood.

“Congratulations,” Chacko said. “Spoken like a true bourgeoise.”

Ammu smiled and they shook hands, as though she really was being awarded a Certificate of Merit for being an honest-to-goodness
Genuine Bourgeoise. Moments like these the twins treasured, and threaded like precious beads, on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.

Rahel and Estha squashed their noses against the Plymouth’s quarter-windows. Yearning marshmallows with cloudy children behind them. Ammu said “No” firmly, and with conviction.

Chacko lit a Charminar. He inhaled deeply and then removed a little flake of tobacco that had stayed behind on his tongue.

Inside the Plymouth, it wasn’t easy for Rahel to see Estha, because Baby Kochamma rose between them like a hill. Ammu had insisted that they sit separately to prevent them from fighting. When they fought, Estha called Rahel a Refugee Stick Insect. Rahel called him Elvis the Pelvis and did a twisty, funny kind of dance that infuriated Estha. When they had serious physical fights, they were so evenly matched that the fights went on forever, and things that came in their way—table lamps, ashtrays and water jugs—were smashed or irreparably damaged.

Baby Kochamma was holding on to the back of the front seat with her arms. When the car moved, her armfat swung like heavy washing in the wind. Now it hung down like a fleshy curtain, blocking Estha from Rahel.

On Estha’s side of the road was a tea shack that sold tea and stale glucose biscuits in dim glass cases with flies. There was lemon soda in thick bottles with blue marble stoppers to keep the fizz in. And a red icebox that said rather sadly
THINGS GO BETTER WITH COCA-COLA
.

Murlidharan, the level-crossing lunatic, perched cross-legged and perfectly balanced on the milestone. His balls and penis dangled down, pointing towards the sign which said

Murlidharan was naked except for the tall plastic bag that somebody had fitted onto his head like a transparent chef’s cap, through which the view of the landscape continued—dimmed, chef-shaped,
but uninterrupted. He couldn’t remove his cap even if he had wanted to, because he had no arms. They had been blown off in Singapore in ’42, within the first week of his running away from home to join the fighting ranks of the Indian National Army. After Independence he had himself registered as a Grade I Freedom Fighter and had been allotted a free first-class railway pass for life. This too he had lost (along with his mind), so he could no longer live on trains or in refreshment rooms in railway stations. Murlidh-aran had no home, no doors to lock, but he had his old keys tied carefully around his waist. In a shining bunch. His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with secret pleasures.

An alarm clock. A red car with a musical horn. A red mug for the bathroom. A wife with a diamond. A briefcase with important papers. A coming home from the office. An
I’m sorry, Colonel Sabhapathy, but I’m afraid I’ve said my say.
And crisp banana chips for the children.

He watched the trains come and go. He counted his keys.

He watched governments rise and fall. He counted his keys.

He watched cloudy children at car windows with yearning marshmallow noses.

The homeless, the helpless, the sick, the small and lost, all filed past his window. Still he counted his keys.

He was never sure which cupboard he might have to open, or when. He sat on the burning milestone with his matted hair and eyes like windows, and was glad to be able to look away sometimes. To have his keys to count and countercheck.

Numbers would do.

Numbness would be fine.

Murlidharan moved his mouth when he counted, and made well-formed words.

Onner

Runder

Moonner

Estha noticed that the hair on his head was curly gray, the hair in his windy, armless armpits was wispy black, and the hair in his
crotch was black and springy. One man with three kinds of hair. Estha wondered how that could be. He tried to think of whom to ask.

  The Waiting filled Rahel until she was ready to burst She looked at her watch. It was ten to two. She thought of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing each other sideways so that their noses didn’t collide. She wondered whether people always kissed each other sideways. She tried to think of whom to ask.

Then, from a distance, a hum approached the held-up traffic and covered it like a cloak. The drivers who’d been stretching their legs got back into their vehicles and slammed doors. The beggars and vendors disappeared. Within minutes there was no one on the road. Except Murlidharan. Perched with his bum on the burning milestone. Unperturbed and only mildly curious.

There was hustle-bustle. And Police whistles.

From behind the line of waiting, oncoming traffic, a column of men appeared, with red flags and banners and a hum that grew and grew.

“Put up your windows,” Chacko said. “And stay calm. They’re not going to hurt us.”

“Why not join them, comrade?” Ammu said to Chacko. “I’ll drive.”

Chacko said nothing. A muscle tensed below the wad of fat on his jaw. He tossed away his cigarette and rolled up his window.

  Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.

Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned
by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair.

Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing
Comrade! Comrade!
An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.

As the marchers approached, Ammu put up her window. Estha his. Rahel hers. (Effortfully, because the black knob on the handle had fallen off.)

Suddenly the skyblue Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. Like a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor. Like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to the bread and wine.

“Look down!” Baby Kochamma said, as the front ranks of the procession approached the car. “Avoid eye contact. That’s what really provokes them.”

On the side of her neck, her pulse was pounding.

Within minutes, the road was swamped by thousands of marching people. Automobile islands in a river of people. The air was red with flags, which dipped and lifted as the marchers ducked under the level-crossing gate and swept across the railway tracks in a red wave.

The sound of a thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a Noise Umbrella.

“Long Live the Revolution!” they shouted. “Workers of the World Unite!”

  Even Chacko had no really complete explanation for why the Communist Party was so much more successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except perhaps in West Bengal.

There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do
with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled East after the Resurrection. Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.