Читать книгу Evening Is the Whole Day - Preeta Samarasan - Страница 11

August 26, 1980

ONE EVENING a week after Paati’s death, Aasha follows Uma down the stairs and to the back door of the Big House, her heart hammering like a wedding drum, elemental words blistering her tongue like beads of hot oil: What, Uma? Why? But her mouth will not spit these words out, and her legs refuse to shorten her customary following distance of three yards. What is it about Uma that frightens her this evening? Her purposeful step, the resolute look in her eye, the way her arms are folded tightly over her stomach? Or is it something greater than the sum of these signals, yet unnameable? Certainly it could be no threat or suggestion Uma herself has made: she has neither uttered a word nor done anything else unusual all day. She has remained behind the locked door of her bedroom; she has ignored Aasha just as she has been ignoring her for so long that you might mistakenly believe this icy, silent Uma had obliterated the memory of that other Uma, the laughing, teasing, bicycle-pushing Uma who had inherited Paati’s dimples and smelled (close up) of Pear’s soap.

But when Aasha trails the new Uma around the house, the old one walks behind them both, soft-footed, humming under her breath. When Aasha swivels around on the balls of her feet, hoping to catch her, she is gone. What else can Aasha do but follow the new Uma around, hoping, wishing, willing her thoughts to fly across the three yards between them and settle, dove-winged, on Uma’s impregnable heart? From the back door, she watches as Uma strides through the garden.

It is dusk, that aching, violet dusk that has come to seem the permanent state of this whole year. Just as Uma reaches the garden shed the streetlights come on, and clouds of moths and beetles appear from nowhere, as if they’ve been waiting for this moment all day. They divide themselves into equal clusters, even around the one streetlight that flickers on and off and on and off all night but refuses to die.

In front of the shed, Uma stops and stares at Paati’s worn rattan chair, in which the old lady sat every day from eight in the morning till nine at night (except during her fever this year, when she didn’t get out of bed for weeks). For as long as Aasha can remember, this chair has belonged to Paati, though In The Beginning she sat in it only to relax after lunch. Then one day she made an official announcement that she was Old and Tired. With that, all the air seemed to leak from her at an alarming rate. Her after-lunch rests grew longer; then before-lunch eye-closings preceded them. And finally, after-breakfast catnaps ran into those, until Paati simply ceased to stir from the chair all day. During all that time the chair never budged from its original spot next to the crockery cabinet at the end of the long corridor outside the English kitchen, in a sleepy, dark corner where shadows drift and settle like feathers, and where the mosquitoes fly in slow motion and hum an octave lower than they do anywhere else in the Big House.

Never budged, that is, until Amma threw it out. From the afternoon Paati died, Amma was forced to repeat regularly for five days: “Aasha, please stop staring at that chair. Come away. Never mind, it was better for Paati this way, don’t you know? Too old already she was. At least she went quickly.” The first time he heard these words, Suresh ran upstairs to lie down on his bed and think: Quicklyquicklyquicklyquickly. Quickly is merciful and merciful is quick and it’s true no matter what that everything is better this way and anyway I don’t know anything and I don’t remember anything. After that he made sure never again to be in the room to hear Amma coax Aasha away from the chair, which was easy enough, for an eleven-year-old boy goes to Boy Scout meetings, trots off to the corner shop with twenty cents and a plan in hand, sequesters himself in his room to read Dandy and Beano comics, and no one thinks anything of it. Boys at that age. You know how they are.

But Aasha, trapped at home, jabbered and chattered and spewed the fruits of her tortured mind at Amma’s feet.

“Look how Paati curled up in her chair,” she squealed the morning after Paati died. “Look, she pulled up her feet also, look at her curled up small-small round-round like a cat! Then after she’ll be complaining only, knees paining legs paining joints paining. Silly Paati!”

“Tsk, come and drink your Milo, Aasha. Paati passed away. Paati is not there.”

But passed away was what the soapy black water from afternoon bucket baths did, gurgling and burping into the bathroom drain, sweeping a hair clump and a stray sliver of soap with it.

That was not, in fact, how Paati had gone. Her departure had been much messier—oh, so much more than water into the bathroom drain!—and more dramatic (incorporating all the elements of a firstrate thriller: gasps, footsteps rushing hither and thither, impulsions and compulsions). Also far less final, for Paati was not yet all gone. She was transparent now, and each day since she died she’d been missing another small part of herself: first one of her dangly, distended earlobes, then a knobby big toe, then a little finger. But the important parts—fierce head, fired-up chest, burning belly—made their piss-and-vinegar presence felt.

Later that morning, Aasha returned to Paati’s shadowy, mosquito-saturated corner and gripped her rattan chair by its armrests.

“Eh Paati Paati, don’t pull your hair like that, don’t shout and scream, your throat will pain! Chellam cannot come and comb your hair lah. Chellam all the time sleeping only now. Wait I ask Amma to come, don’t scream, don’t scream!”

Amma dragged Aasha off by the strap of her Buster Brown overalls. “Come,” she said. “Come and read a book or draw a picture or something. I’ll ask Suresh to lend you his color pencils. You want F&N orange squash? You want ginger beer? I’ll send Mat Din to buy for you.”

For five afternoons Aasha went to the chair at teatime, with a jelebi or two bondas or a handful of omapoddi in her sweaty hand.

“Here, Paati,” she whispered, depositing her clandestine offerings on the chair. “Amma threw away your bowl already, what to do? Eat faster-faster, don’t tell anybody.” She stood and stared. Mosquitoes landed on her arms and legs ten fifteen twenty at a time like tiny aeroplanes, and she slapped and scratched but did not move away. “Nice or not, Paati?” she asked, leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her back. “Bondas hot-hot. No need to eat dry rice from our plates. Nice or not? Careful, don’t burn your mouth, what Paati, so hungry ah? So long didn’t eat, is it?”

These displays were nothing new; the whole family was familiar with that other nonsense concerning Mr. McDougall’s dead daughter. “Maybe,” Chellam had often whispered to Suresh, “your sister can see ghost, what. Maybe she got special chance from God.”

The family had sought explanations less metaphysical.

“You people,” Amma said, “you people tell her funny-funny stories, who tells a child this age those kinds of stories? Of course she’s going to make up all these rubbish stories. Trying to make herself interesting, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s not working, is it?” said Suresh.

Yet for reasons best known to them—and each of them had different reasons—they could not dismiss Aasha’s sightings of Paati quite so easily. “This is getting a bit too much,” said Amma. “Some ghost story character is one thing. Talking to her own dead grandmother is another. People are going to think she’s a Disturbed Child.”

Appa said, “What I want to know is, since when did she and the old lady become such soul mates?” A fair question, for Aasha had hardly spoken to Paati when Paati was alive. She’d been born too late to know the Paati who’d sung Uma to sleep and picked the peas out of her fried rice, and in any case Uma had always been Paati’s favorite; there’d hardly been room for Suresh and Aasha in her heart.

The day Amma found a pile of disintegrating bondas, rock-hard jelebis, dusty omapoddi, and limp curry puffs on the rattan chair, she picked it up by its armrests and made off with it.

“Chhi!” Amma said to Aasha on her way out the front door with the chair. “Just because we’re feeling sorry for you you’re climbing on our head now. Taking advantage of everybody’s sympathy.”

Defying this last assertion, Aasha threw herself down on the marble floor and loosed a wordless series of ascending wails that floated like bright scarves—purple, fuchsia, puce—towards the ceiling, to be blown into the street by the fan as Amma set the chair down by the dustbin and shook her head.

“That girl is having fits or what,” said Mrs. Balakrishnan to Kooky Rooky, her boarder. “I’m not surprised. What a terrible thing she saw, no joke, isn’t it?”

“Aieeee! Aieeee! Aieeee!” shrieked Baldy Wong. “I also can scream what! I can scream louder! AIEEEEEEEEE!”

Mrs. Malhotra’s barrel-shaped dog began to howl.

“Chhi!” said Amma, slamming the front door shut. “The whole world is going mad. Aasha, you want one tight slap? Hanh?”

Aasha swallowed her viscous, salty saliva and sat hiccupping on the floor for an hour until she fell asleep. At dinnertime Suresh came and poked her in the ribs with a foot and then sidled off to his own rice and rasam.

“Why you threw away Paati’s chair, Amma?” he asked. He knew the answer; his question was nothing but a thinly disguised accusation. He’d had to muster up all his courage to ask it, and the mustering had left his ears sticking out farther than ever. Under the table his knees were cold. You threw it away, he thought, because you couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, isn’t it? Maybe you’re scared Paati’s really sitting in that chair and you can’t see her.

Amma only said breezily, “Oh, why should we selfishly hang on to things we can’t use? The dustbin men will probably want it. It’s still usable, after all. Some families would kill for a chair like that.”

Suresh considered this. Some families killed for lesser reasons, but poor chairless families, needing the chair-ity of rich families, were driven to violence only by their desperation. The thought was terrible and wonderful: skinny men in open-chested shirts with red bandanas around their heads, wrestling for an old rattan chair while the women and children gasped and shrieked in the background. Then one of them would pull out a gleaming knife. He’d pick up the chair in one arm and his beauty-marked, melon-breasted village belle in the other; he’d hoist the chair on his back, slip his bloody knife back under his belt, and before you knew it he’d be leaping across the moonlit rooftops, leaving the others to moan in their spreading pools of blood.

On Monday morning, when the dustbin men came to collect the rubbish, they picked up the chair and tossed it playfully between them. “This one’s for you, Ayappan,” one of them chortled, “you can sit in it and eat your thairsadham and scratch your armpits.” “Ei, maddayan!” Ayappan shot back, as the other demonstrated the armpit-scratching part of the deal. “The family personally told me it was for you, special-special only, for you to sit on the porch and comb your lovely locks.” When they exhausted the chair’s possibilities they dropped it, dumped the rubbish into their lorry and drove away. It lay on the grassy verge by the culvert, where Aasha could hear its labored breathing. In the evening Amma dragged it into the backyard and left it by the shed. “Oo wah, style-style only these dustbin men nowadays,” she said. “Those days they used to grab whatever we left for them. Broken also they would fight for it. Now even we would lose to them in taste and class, lah!” she grumbled, as if she’d paid for the old kind of dustbin man and received the new kind in the post.

And there by the shed the chair has remained since last night, upside down, the watery stains of Paati’s numerous failed attempts to make it to the bathroom in time visible even on the underside of its sagging seat. One stain shaped like a one-eared bunny, another like a fat frog, a third like a butterfly. Three of Paati’s silver hairs, relics of a particularly savage combing by Chellam, are caught between two loose strips of rattan on the back of the chair. Its unraveling legs stick up in the air like the limbs of some dead mouse awaiting the ant armies.

As Aasha watches from the back door, Uma drags the chair to the hump by the garden wall and sets it right side up. Then she walks back to the shed, opens the door, and goes in.

While she’s inside, Paati’s ghost slips out from behind the tamarind tree and takes her rightful place in the chair, regal and disdainful as a queen. Is that where she’s been hiding all these days, behind the tamarind tree, since Amma first put the chair out for the dustbin men? No one knows, and before Aasha has a chance to ask her, Uma comes back. She’s carrying a big tin with both hands, her shoulders hunched in such a way Aasha can tell it’s heavy.

Then, in a shattering surge of memory, Aasha realizes what it is: a tin of kerosene. She’s seen Mat Din the gardener pour kerosene on his piles of branches and weeds before he lights his bonfires, huge, roaring, smoky flame-towers that darken the sky and make the birds disappear for hours.

Uma sets the tin down by her feet and folds her arms once more. There are permanent bags under her eyes because she hasn’t slept in a week. Oh, she’s caught forty winks here and a catnap there, but the winks are carefully rationed, thirty-eight thirty-nine forty okay enough, and the catnaps are not the cozy indulgences of the happy housepet but the vigilant sleep of the one-eye-open one-ear-missing stray. In the past week, the loose weave of her occasional slumber has let in many undesirable objects: old promises issued and received; the inexplicable scent of Yardley English Lavender talcum powder; a long sigh that revealed itself, when she opened her eyes, to have been nothing more than a sheet of paper blown by the ceiling fan from her desk to the floor.

The children call this grassy mound the ceremonial hump, for it was here that Amma burned her hand-embroidered, Kanchipuram silk wedding saree one long-ago morning after Appa didn’t come home all night. Uma had watched from the back door, and Paati had reminded her once again how much cleverer, how much worldlier and tougher and classier she was than her Amma, because she had her father’s blood in her and would therefore never do something as crass as throwing a fit in the backyard for all the neighbors to see.

And two years after the saree-burning, Uma and Suresh and Aasha buried Sassy the cat by the hump after Mr. Balakrishnan from across the street ran her over in his car in the middle of the night. If you’re not careful, Suresh has warned Aasha ever since, if you accidentally step on that hump or even brush against it carelessly, Sassy’s clawed foot—just white-white bones only, no more flesh—will burst through and grab your ankle.

In the old days, before Uma stopped speaking, she and Suresh used to take turns pushing Aasha around the hump on her tricycle, chanting:

Sassyhump

Dead cat bump

Smelly wormy rotty lump!

Once Aasha flew head-first off the tricycle into the African daisies, her foot grazing the hump. Her full-throated wail had brought Lourdesmary hurtling out into the backyard like a bumblebee launched from a cannon. “A big monkey like you, pushing your sister until she falls!” she scolded Uma. “You should have known better.”

Surely, surely, Aasha thinks now, watching Uma from the back door, Uma should also know better than to do whatever terrible thing she is going to do.

Except that Uma doesn’t think what she’s about to do is so terrible; in fact, she has deemed it necessary. One should never forget that all things pass: hopes, cats, chairs, life itself, each a spun-glass rose in a monkey’s hand. In the twinkling of an eye everything can change, and there’s never any going back. You can’t bring a dead cat back to life. You can’t resurrect a saree or a marriage from two charred tassels. You most certainly can’t uncrack the cracked skull of a cantankerous grandmother by imagining her back in her unraveling rattan chair.

Only Aasha sees the ghosts arrive from all directions, united by their unhealthy fascination with tragedy, with unfinishable business and lingering discontent. All the bloodsucking pontianaks about whom Chellam once warned the children; all the red-eyed, fleet-footed toyols; all the polongs and pelesits; and among them, almost unnoticed (but for Aasha’s extra-sharp eyes), Mr. McDougall’s petal-pretty daughter, a little afraid, a little unsure, but curious nevertheless. And though her bubble of a heart skips a beat at the sight of Uma—those dark, unblinking eyes, those impetuous movements, all these recall her mother’s most dangerous days—she’s resolved to provide her customary moral support to Aasha in lonely and troubled times.

The ghosts converge on the backyard like crows, long tresses streaming, red eyes glowing. They look at Paati in her chair and whisper to each other. They settle on tree branches and on the rims of flowerpots. They bear Aasha no ill will, yet she knows they would not be here if some ghastly spectacle were not about to unfold. She also knows that no one—not she herself, not Mr. McDougall’s fervent daughter, not any of the other ghosts with their hot breath and their portentous mouths—can reach Uma now. Uma’s stepped behind her invisible glass door and locked it; Aasha recognizes the signs.

On the garden wall, swinging his skinny legs, sits Suresh. He tilts his head back and pours into his mouth, while keeping a vigilant eye on Uma, an entire box of Chiclets he found on the schoolbus this afternoon. (You never know when someone might catch you and confiscate the Chiclets you’ve been saving so wisely and with so much restraint—and then where will you be? Better to relish life wholeheartedly while you can.) In his mouth the Chiclets form a fat, minty wad, smooth in some places but still surprisingly grainy in others. He bites down and bursts a hidden bubble with a snap. He watches Uma douse Paati’s chair in kerosene and draw a matchbox from under the waistband of her skirt, as if it were a sword for fighting off anyone else who wants the chair. He rests his chin on his hands and knows he’s not getting involved. No way, no fear, not even if the police come. None of this is his problem. Not even if Uma is flagrantly breaking a rule she herself made up at a long-ago feline funeral: no bonfires in the backyard, she’d said when he’d suggested cremating Sassy. Well, look at her now. Rules, too, were fragile.

Aasha steps out into the backyard and makes her way, holding her breath, clenching her fists, past the teeming ghosts. At the tamarind tree, directly across from Uma, she stops and kneels. The ground here is covered with tough, brown tamarind pods, and because Aasha’s helpless hands itch to do something, she gathers them up in familiar fistfuls and pulls them apart for the seeds. She fills her pockets with these, as if they were insurance against future catastrophe.

“Don’t you wish we could do something?” Mr. McDougall’s daughter whispers to her. She’s sidled past the others to come and kneel beside Aasha. “But maybe we’ve no choice. Nobody really cares what we want. My Ma,” she begins, and for once Aasha doesn’t want to hear her story—not now, she thinks, not now, I have to keep both eyes and both ears on Uma—“you know how my ma wouldn’t let go of my hand that day? So tight she held it. Nobody ever held my hand like that before so I was a little bit happy. A little bit happy and a big bit frightened. It was all mixed up. When my ma jumped, at first I didn’t realize we’d jumped, that’s how mixed up I was.”

“Wait a minute,” says Aasha, because Uma’s lighting the match. But Mr. McDougall’s daughter, trapped as always in the net of her last memory, goes on:

“The whole time we were falling through the air, my ma held on to my hand. I could feel her fingers with my eyes closed, and I could hear her breathing, and I could feel her long hair on my neck. The air wasn’t hot anymore while we were falling. But now I know she only held my hand to comfort herself. And to make sure I didn’t get away.”

Uma flings her match onto the chair and steps back.

“It was a long way down to the water,” Mr. McDougall’s daughter remembers, “a long long time between jumping and swallowing water. I counted to twenty and I wasn’t even counting fast. Even when we hit the water my ma didn’t let go of my hand. And all the while we were sinking, she still didn’t let go of it.”

There’s a brief burst of flame as the kerosene burns. Paati clutches the armrests and pulls her feet up onto the seat.

Mr. McDougall’s daughter turns a terror-stricken, fire-lit face to Aasha. For a long moment they stare at each other, two old friends marooned together on the uncertain island of adult whims. At least they have each other. In Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s grey eyes the fire glows amber.

Undeterred, pitiless, Uma licks her dry lips and waits. Aasha drops a handful of tamarind seeds. Click, clack, click, they slip through her fingers and fall onto other seeds already under the tree. She stands up. She takes one step forward, no more. She thinks of Uma in The Three Sisters in July, emoting onstage as she never does at home; of Uma reciting long, winding lines in funny English before her mirror; of Uma standing on the rug outside the bathroom, wrapped in one towel and drying her hair with another, smiling, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs under her breath. That is the real Uma; this is a different Uma, blind, unforgiving, a dangerous shapeshifter.

On the wall Suresh snaps his gum again. And again. Snap! The sound cracks like a whip in Aasha’s face. She flinches and sniffs. She rubs her nose with an index finger. The air is full of smoke and frying pork from the Wongs’ kitchen. She waits, balanced on her heels.

Paati’s chair braces itself for a difficult battle. It stiffens its arms and hunkers down, while on the seat, tight and tiny as a coiled pangolin now, Paati cowers.

Oh, Uma should know better, she should. A big monkey like her, trying to set fire to a chair that’s been sitting outside in the damp for days. What’s left of the flame singes the three silver hairs, chars the chair’s thick legs on the outside, and begins to subside. So Uma adds more kerosene. Then she folds her arms across her chest and hugs herself as if she’s cold, as if the weather is different where she stands.

Slowly, gleefully, sensuously, the flames finally begin to creep up the legs of Paati’s chair. Paati trembles and covers her face. The heat of the fire lays its gold-flecked wings across Aasha’s face, and a drop of sweat traces a searching trail down the misted glass of Uma’s invisible door. From someone’s television set the Muslim call to prayer lifts off into the air like a man in a billowy white robe tiptoeing lightly off a roof.

Allah-u akhbar! Allaaaaaah-u akhbar! The man’s sleeves fill like sails. There he hangs, not rising or falling, looking up and down and left and right for some thoughts to think.

The man turns into a dove.

The chair crumples and kneels, weeping, gathering its skirts of flame about itself.

It’s just a scrap of a chair with a scrap of a ghost in it, a skin-and-bones ghost whose feet don’t touch the ground. What an unbearable indignity it is that Paati must summon her few remaining shreds of will to outwit these new flames that tastelessly echo the funereal flames of just-last-week. It’s entirely possible that this time, weakened by those first flames, deprived of days of teatime omapoddi and curry puffs, Paati will not make it.

Aasha opens her mouth to scream. Suresh snaps his gum, three times in a row, each louder than the last, because that’s all he can do without sticking his own neck out. But it’s too late. The scream rolls roundly out of Aasha’s mouth, like a bubble escaping from an underwater balloon, and shoots up to the leafy top of the tamarind tree. On its way it pops against a sharp, low branch and spills its words onto the rain-dark earth.

“Uma, Uma, please don’t burn Paati, please! Pull her out! Pull her out! Pleeeease!” The last please quivers, turns to liquid, and seeps into the damp soil, suffusing the roots of the tamarind tree in its desperate grief. Next week Lourdesmary will complain that its fruit is becoming less succulent, drying out and turning too fibrous in the pod.

Transparent Paati lies amid the flames, limp as an empty plastic bag, her eyes slightly surprised, her head and chest and belly growing smaller and smaller as they melt. Stunned and saddened, the other ghosts drift off down the driveway in twos and threes, like mourners going home after a small child’s funeral. Unsure how to arrange their faces or hold their heads.

At the last possible minute, just as the fire begins to lick at her chin, Paati spirits herself out of the flames with a final burst of her posthumous strength. She’s put everything she had into this effort, and now she spirals up to the sky in a puff of smoke, a decrepit little genie with no wishes to grant. Her deflated head and chest and belly refill like balloons. Aasha holds her breath and hopes Uma hasn’t noticed; she would close her eyes, too, but then she wouldn’t be able to make sure Uma doesn’t leap up and grab Paati by a foot and hurl her back into the flames. But Uma’s flame eyes are glued to the crackling chair. Paati is safe, after all; she’s lost nothing but the ends of her hair to the fire. All the same, she’s had a good scare. Now she drifts off towards the Wongs’ house, and after a moment Aasha hears Baldy start to whimper at nothing on his porch swing.

After the bonfire dies, Uma goes indoors to finish packing. Aasha climbs the stairs behind her, a woeful pull-along toy on an invisible string. With silent wheels instead of squeaky ones, and cracks in hidden places.

Yellow light spills out of Uma’s open door, setting the dark wood of the floor agleam. Almost as if she were inviting Aasha in, Uma leaves her door open tonight. But on the landing, Aasha stops, unsure. She studies Paati’s wedding picture, an old black-and-white photograph with blurred outlines, hairlines bleeding into faces, noses melting into mouths. Grave, handlebar-mustachioed men in suspenders and bow ties. Women with accusing eyes, necks and wrists heavy with gold. And, seated cross-legged on the grass, a little girl with ringlets, in a frothy white frock and sturdy dark boots ridiculous in the Madras heat. No one seems to know her name, though Aasha once offered Paati suggestion after suggestion. Meenakshi? Malathi? Madavi? Radhika? If they knew then, the mustachioed men sweating under their collars or their aching-necked wives, no one knows now. Probably the little girl grew up to be a spinster aunt, sending out tins of murukku and thattai to her nieces and nephews every Deepavali. Probably she died in her bathroom and no one found out for a week. Aasha settles down on a stair and waits, chin in hands, for nothing in particular.

It’s obvious, even from Paati’s wedding photograph, that she will not share the unfortunate imagined fate of the little girl in ringlets. Eighteen years old and not a month more, Paati stands with her twenty-five-year-old groom in the front row, erect, unsmiling, feet and hands red with henna. You can see in her eyes, blurry as they are, the thousand guests that have been invited for the month-long celebration, the five canopies erected on her father’s land, the special photographer from Singapore. (Watch the birdie, Mr. and Missussssss, he’d said over and over, grinning and winking, watch the birdie, later on you can look at each other, Mr. and Missussssss! though they hadn’t been looking at each other, not then and not for days afterwards.)

Future, present, and past do brave battle in the bride’s kajaled eyes, and the photograph refuses to reveal which Paati will win.

These are the Paatis competing for supremacy, in reverse chronological order:

6) The eagle-nosed matriarch, widow of Thambusamy the Rubber Baron, Cement King, Durian Duke, etc., etc., determined to rule in her son’s house as she did in her husband’s;

5) The beautiful maddam, powdered and painted, who feels the stares of white men follow her in town;

4) The good Indian wife adept at fading, in public, into the background behind her men;

3) The young mother of a newborn bigshot lawyer, glowing with the achievement of a boy-on-first-try;

2) The shy-smiling newlywed (with feet and hands still faintly red but fading), mismeasuring the sugar for her husband’s tea and mourning the life she was used to in her father’s house;

1) The spoiled little girl who has simply to hold out her hands for extra kolukattai and jelebi, secure in the knowledge that her parents, having lost three babies before her, are wrapped around her little finger.

Or will none of these prevail? In the end, has 7) the bag of aching bones in the rattan chair staked out the surest claim in the fertile territory of other people’s memories? Or is it—no turning back now, because now that we’ve come this far we have to set a foot, however hesitant, onto the precarious ground before us—8) an even later incarnation that will stay with Paati’s survivors? A little brown heap of bones turning cold as death rattles and gurgles in its throat?

A little brown seeping heap. It trickles into drains and dark wood floors, into the white sheets of a deathbed, into Aasha’s head. She shakes her head like a wet dog. Be gone, brown heap; be gone, blood droplets; be gone, flailing hands and uncurling toes. But new waters rush in to fill Aasha’s head, bearing their own flotsam and jetsam, because once, yes, Paati was as young as Amma, and before that she was as young as Uma (and Chellam), and before that, she was as young as Aasha. Younger, even. A toddler. A baby, soft and swaddled. Not for the first time, as Aasha’s mind strains to accommodate this incredible, uncomfortable truth, something in her chest sinks and settles like silt in a slow river. She swallows and takes a deep breath; then, heavy-footed, she climbs the remaining five stairs up to Uma’s room. The door’s still open, but Uma’s at the window and doesn’t turn around when she walks in. Not that she expects Uma to comfort her; she’s grateful enough for the tender offering she knows the open door to be. And the yellow light out of which she’s been locked for years, and the view from Uma’s window, and the clean smell of her pillow. All these are Uma’s way of saying Sorry for everything.

To answer It’s okay I forgive you, she clambers onto Uma’s bed and folds her thin legs under her tartan skirt. Uma backs away from the window and returns to her packing, pulling from the shopping bags under her bed clothes stiff with newness, their tags turning like mobiles in the fan breeze: a hooded cotton sweatshirt that won’t be warm enough even on the plane; a stack of practical skin-tone panties that come up to her waist, specially picked out by Amma; a white blazer that will soon reveal itself to be comically unfashionable in New York. She lays these things on top of the clothes already in the red suitcase and smoothes them down with her hands. The suitcase smells of oilcloth on the outside, mothballs on the inside, and everywhere, inside and outside, of the cold, sterile rush of foreign airports, the rubber of conveyor belts, the suspense and rewards of Appa’s trips abroad back when the courts of young Malaysia took their appeals to their ex-Queen. Once there’d been a hand-embroidered dress for Uma in the bottom of that suitcase, once a model aeroplane kit for Suresh. Now floury mothball dust clogs the ridges of its grey lining. Uma’s eyes are too bright, her hands too quick, her nails bled white and bitten ragged.

“Uma,” whispers Aasha.

Uma looks up, and it’s only now that Aasha notices a tear hanging off her chin, round and heavy as quicksilver. The more Aasha looks at it, the more it doesn’t fall. Pictures move inside it, swirling, melting into each other like palm sugar syrup stirred into coconut milk.

Afternoon sunlight on bathroom tiles.

An eversilver tumbler of water.

A blackened chair with swirling skirts of flame.

Now there’s a tiny body (brown, with a cracked hip and a crackeder skull) in the flames instead of a chair.

Then only the flames are left.

“Uma!” Aasha gasps, and her breath makes the tear fall. Uma reaches out and touches Aasha’s cheek lightly with one cool finger, and underneath that fingertip the blood blooms hot in Aasha’s cheek. Can it be, can it really be that all is forgiven? That Aasha’s atonement for her sins of the past has been noted and accepted? Because Aasha is overcome with the surprise and thrill of being noticed at last, because she is bowled over by her own hereness and nowness, by the solid warmth of her cheek under Uma’s finger, by the volcanic joy of being not Aasha-alone-and-invisible, but Aasha-with-Uma, taking up space on Uma’s bed and in her life, she offers up all her hope in a single, shameless rush:

“Promise you’ll write to me, Uma,” she says. “Promise you’ll send me stamps and maps. And stickers for my birthday.”

Uma blinks, slow as a cow. Then she says, “Promise me you’ll never again ask for a promise or make one yourself.”

And because this is an impossible conundrum—how can she promise if she’s no longer supposed to make promises?—Aasha can do nothing but watch Uma turn back to her suitcase and stuff into it the six pairs of footwear she has wrapped in twelve plastic bags, each shoe in its own bag so that the sole of one will not besmirch the upper of its mate. Curled up on Uma’s bed for the last time, Aasha thinks about packing, about what people take and what they leave behind, about how much room there is in a suitcase, and how you can take everything you want with you wherever you go, your packed-up life, no stopping no promises. She hugs her knees to her chest and holds perfectly still, a small heap of tinder, ardent, waiting, ready.