Читать книгу Evening Is the Whole Day - Preeta Samarasan - Страница 13

IN 1959, when his father had been dead a full year, Appa set out to find himself a bride. Marriage was part of his first five year plan, which was itself every bit as determined, purposeful, and specific as the nation’s own. Marriage, children, two cars, servants, a job with prospects, hard-earned fame by forty: these would be the accoutrements of his climb to real power, to earning a generous piece of the national pie-in-the-oven. The climb itself had begun while he was still in Singapore, where he’d joined the Party, the only party that mattered, the party that believed in a Malaya for all Malayans, Chinese Indians Eurasians included, no matter what contrary chauvinist castles the Malays were building in the air. To Malaya, the Party would bring prosperity and peace, and to Appa, great glory both public and private.

Appa had no wish to settle down and procreate with any of the worldly women with whom he dallied. Lily Rozells, long-legged and sharp-tongued, smelled of brandy and had a preternatural eye for a winning horse; Claudine Koh had read English at Cambridge and Adorno and Benjamin in her spare time; Nalini Dorai entertained dreams of producing avant-garde political plays in Kuala Lumpur. These women were his equals, and they knew it. They looked him in the eye. They asked him to spell out his dreams for them: How, Raju? How will you convince the Party you’re the best man for the job? What’ll your platform be? Why would your average Ah Chong and Ramasamy vote for you? They flirted with him, viewed him with curiosity, fondness, and, yes, it had to be said, indulgence. Oh, that Raju. Such a darling. Such big-big dreams for our half-past-six country. Ah, but what would we do without angry young men like him to hope, yeah? Every nation needs them. Appa knew full well what they said about him behind his back; it was not what he wanted his wife saying. His wife would be admiring, respectful, adoring, but more than that—what was it he imagined? What was the quality so clearly lacking in Lily and Claudine and Nalini, who did, however grudgingly, admire him and his grand vision? Appa could not put his finger on it, but he knew he’d recognize it when he found it.

NEXT DOOR to the Big House, in the squat bungalow one day to be occupied by Baldy Wong and his harried parents, lived Amma, her six siblings, her father, and her mother. The house was barely visible from the street, situated as it was at the bottom of a narrow, dark garden thick with mango trees and hanging parasitic vines. Appa’s parents had never entered that house or any of the others in the neighborhood, nor invited any of their neighbors into the Big House; they had never even discussed such social adventuring. The Big House had stood aloof from its neighbors in Mr. McDougall’s time, and Tata and Paati had seen no reason to change the established order of the street. Among the other neighbors, Amma’s father was known to be the sort of man who kept to himself, who held his family to a life of quiet decorum and high principles. He’d been a bookkeeper for a cement factory; when the business had foundered and his British bosses had talked about retrenching their staff, he’d taken an early retirement to allow a younger colleague to keep his job. Word had spread. He was a decent man, a good man, a man who was vegetarian twice a week and didn’t let his daughters wear above-the-knee skirts. He spent his days listening to the wireless radio he’d bought after his retirement and watching the four angelfish he kept in a small tank. Once a month he allowed himself a solitary treat of the latest Tamil film at the Grand Theatre in Jubilee Park (choice of two masalvadai or one bottle Fanta Grape as intermission refreshment).

Behind his bland grey doors he regularly beat his modestly clad daughters with his leather belt, and had once held a meat cleaver to his wife’s neck when she’d gone into town to post a letter without his knowledge. None of his neighbors ever discovered his belt-and-cleaver tactics, which was somewhat of a pity, if only because several of them would have admired this ultimate show of mastery from a man they’d pegged as a phlegmatic, fish-feeding teetotaler.

The year that Appa came home from Singapore, Amma was twenty years old and still fit into her box-pleated Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus pinafore. No one, least of all Amma herself, had ever noticed her unpolished beauty: the reedy figure Uma would inherit from her; the impossibly straight teeth in her rare smile; the glossy skin all her negligence could not tarnish; the suggestion of concealed intelligence and unrelieved concentration in her eyes. To her siblings and schoolmates she was an unfortunate exemplum of all the worst physical characteristics of Tamil stock: skinny, shapeless legs, almost-black skin, frizzy hair. To her father her eyes betrayed nothing but impudence, stubbornness, and a secretly mutinous spirit. She was the eldest child, already careworn, slouching a little to hide her height. Her voice had a grainy edge. She’d struggled but never been a star at school, faithfully attended miserable, muddy practices but never been good at games. She’d disappointed her father’s belt-mourned dreams of an oldest son with a straight back and shiny shoes, who would be captain of the hockey team and study medicine in England. She’d watched helplessly as her mother, Ammachi, receded into an austere life of the spirit once she judged her children to be old enough to fend for themselves. “I’ve done my worldly duty as a wife and mother,” Ammachi had declared on her youngest child’s sixth birthday. “Vasanthi is already fifteen years old; she can run the house as well as I can. It’s time I went on to the third stage of life.”

“Ohoho,” her husband had proclaimed to the fidgeting relatives and neighbors who had, for the first time anyone could remember, been invited to a party at their house, “look at that, my Eighth Standard– educated wife is suddenly turning into a great Hindu scholar it seems! What all does this third stage involve, may I ask? Wandering naked from temple to temple? Begging for food with a wooden bowl?”

“Illaiyai,” Ammachi had demurred softly, frowning to herself as though her husband’s questions had been born of honest curiosity. “No, all that is the fourth stage, yaar,” she said, neatly placing slices of cake on saucers and handing them to Amma to pass around the table. “Fourth stage only is sannyasa, complete and total renunciation. Third stage is the stage of the forest dweller,” she said enigmatically, licking a blob of butter icing off one finger, “vanaprastya.”

But it had been decades since the last forests around Ipoh had given way to housing estates and cement factories, so Ammachi devised her own makeshift vanaprastya, comprising several non-negotiable elements: fasting three times a week, reading the Upanishads alone in her fanless white-curtained room, shunning meat, and sleeping on a wooden board. In just a few months she grew oblivious to the daily domestic struggles going on outside her door. She lay on her board chanting endless, booming mantras, humming bhajans, blind to the loneliness of a daydreaming oldest daughter being driven slowly to the brink of a terrible womanhood by her brood of needy, bickering siblings.

After a year, deciding perhaps that worldliness adhered to her sweaty skin like dust whenever she crossed the threshold of her room, she stopped leaving it altogether (with one unfortunate exception). When her meals were brought to her she ate only the rice or chapattis and drank all the water; the rest of the food, dhals and curries and bhajis, she pushed to the rim of her eversilver plate and arranged in neat little mounds with her spoon. After a week of this she left a note for Amma under the water tumbler on her tray. “Please: only rice or chapattis once a day,” it read, and after that when Amma brought in the tray and tried to coax her to eat two spoons of dhal or three French beans she’d shake her head, hold up one index finger, and pause in the chanting of the day’s mantra to repeat only that first word, please, inflected upwards as if it were a mnemonic device meant to call forth, from the recesses of Amma’s faulty memory, a profusion of words.

By far the most egregious result of her mother’s sequestration was the chamber pot, which was in fact not a chamber pot at all but an earthenware cooking vessel that Ammachi had taken from the kitchen on one of her last forays outside her room. It had its own earthenware lid and sat covered under her mattressless bed, but when Amma brought in her meal each afternoon the stench did brave battle with the smells of the family’s dinner simmering on the kitchen stove, so that when Amma stood in that bleak room, her blindsided faculties perceived the contents of the pots on the stove and those of the pot under the bed to be essentially interchangeable. Simmering shit, festering dhal, sizzling turds, it was all the same to her. Astonishing that excrement composed entirely of rice or bread—and that only one at a time—could pack such a punch. Amma’s head swam as if she’d lost a pint of blood, and as soon as she was out the door each afternoon she gagged, she swooned, she lay down on the settee with the back of her wrist on her forehead and dreamed ugly, malodorous dreams. It was true that Ammachi let no one else touch the pot; it was part of her humble new deal with the universe that she reject no task as being beneath her, that she welcome the lowliest, most odious of burdens as an opportunity to asphyxiate the id. Every night Ammachi waited until the family was asleep, and then, barefoot and squinting in the dark, stole out to an abandoned outhouse that no one had used since the Japanese occupation, to empty the pot into its narrow black hole. But her humility, as far as Amma was concerned, was all for nothing; Amma’s imagination, fertilized by her mother’s rich effluvia and flourishing as rapidly as the rest of her was withering, needed only to hear the click of her mother’s door and the shuffled footsteps across the corridor to conjure up unanswerable questions—why did she have to use the outhouse? why not empty the pot in the bathroom, where no risk of tripping on a pebble, of missing the dark hole in the night, of blindly splashing her own saree with its seething contents, presented itself?—and unbearable pictures.

As the weeks went on Amma ate less and less, grew thinner and thinner, and began to tie a man’s handkerchief over her nose and mouth to keep out the food smells as she cooked the family’s meals. Her principal fear in these last few years before she left her childhood home for the house next door was that one of her few acquaintances from school might unexpectedly pop in with a question about the day’s homework, or a new record or film star poster, or an invitation to an outing, and would then hear the chanting, smell the pot, and spread the ghastly word. She concentrated her efforts on keeping such encounters at bay, avoiding the casual advances of other girls, taking care to mention that she never listened to music or watched the latest films (both true), and rushing to and from school with her eyes lowered and her shoulders hunched around a soft center she knew people were waiting to poke at with sticks.

Motherless, waning, weak at the knees, she beat a shaky path through the duties she’d inherited, cooking and cleaning, ironing her father’s shirts and her sisters’ box-pleated pinafores, tying her brothers’ striped school ties, packing the family’s lunches, and bringing home, at the end of every month, report cards limp with C’s. Every report card day her father had the children line up in a row before him in reverse order, youngest first, Amma last. One after the other they’d sit on the ottoman in front of his armchair and hold out their report cards to him. Some bursting with pride. Some trembling with unspilled tears. Some indifferent to it all, waiting to get it over with so that they could resume the game of marbles, hopscotch, or five stones they’d abandoned for the ritual. Amma had the misfortune of coming right after her brother Shankar, captain of the boys’ hockey team, Best Speaker on the debate team, Assistant Head Prefect, straight-A student, teacher’s pet. Their father would take one look at Shankar’s report card, chuckle, and dismiss him with a “Not bad, not bad” and an admiring whack on the right shoulder. Then he’d look up at Amma and lick his lips like a wolf before a kill. “And what special treat have you brought us this time, Vasanthi?” he’d say. “No doubt about it, you’re the genius of the family, no?” Amma would sit on the ottoman with her head bowed, cleaning her nails with a hairpin, dreaming of her escape. Over the years she learned to concentrate on the world outside and bear her father’s cruel words like a chained dog in the rain. Hungry. Vigilant. Ready to grab her share when it showed up. “What?” her father would press on. “Hanh? Suddenly-suddenly this manicure is oh-so-urgent, yes? A girl with zero brains and zeroer prospects must of course have tip-top nails for all those high-flying job interviews and society tea parties just around the corner, what?” Then, just as she was starting to feel herself crumple under his gaze, just as the first tears began to sting her eyes, he’d pull his pen out of his pocket without warning, sign her report card, and throw it in her face. “Okay,” he’d say. “Go. Go and sit in front of your books and sleep.”

And sleep she did, though inexpertly, uncomfortably, and joylessly, just as she did everything else: exhausted from cooking and ironing, from trying to help her siblings with trigonometry problems she’d never understood how to do herself, from wading against the life-sapping current of her mother’s unsplendid isolation, she slept, one arm folded under her cheek, on geography textbooks, on history flash cards, on rulers and protractors and compasses. “Pah, pah, I can’t wait till you bring home the results from this exam,” her father said the year she finally sat her Senior Cambridge Certificate. He rubbed his belly under his cotton singlet, like a peasant sitting down to a hot midday meal of dosais and sambar. “Whatta whatta treat that will be for us all. Straightaway they will accept you for post of Head Drain Sweeper. No questions asked. Or maybe better I start buying cows for your dowry now itself, hanh?” Then he’d give her head a sudden shove with the flat of his palm, grunt, and pronounce, “Fifty sixty cows also won’t convince anyone to take this numskull off my hands, I tell you.”

His apprehensions were justified. Amma got C’s in all her papers except geography, which she failed because of a panic attack at the last minute. “Syabas, Vasanthi!” her father exclaimed after glancing at the slip of paper she’d held out wordlessly. “Con-gra-chu-laaaaaations. You’ve really outdone yourself this time. Surpassed even my expectations, man!” He whacked her heartily on the right shoulder, then walked away whistling. “Start drafting your career plans now itself,” he called over his shoulder. “U.N. Secretary-General or editor in chief of the London Times? What’ll it be?”

For a few months she halfheartedly combed the classifieds for job vacancies. Clerk, cashier, receptionist. She circled them all with her leaky red pen, made phone calls, set up interviews. She dressed for each interview in the same navy blue skirt, white blouse, and sensible leather pumps she’d bought with the money relatives had given her for passing he senior Cambridge exam. In between interviews she washed, ironed, and starched the skirt and the blouse. She took the town bus to each interview, thrilled but terrified to be out on her own, convinced it was all useless. They were going to snort with laughter the minute she walked in. They were going to shake their heads at her failing grade in geography and send her home. As it happened, they never asked to see her results. One after another, they took one look at her trembling hands, heard a single stuttering answer to the simplest question, and sent her home with a promise to call. She busied herself while she waited, scrubbing the sink three times a day, scraping the grout between the bathroom tiles, polishing the linoleum on all fours, her ugly cotton housedress tied in a knot around her knees. At the back of her mind a tiny black seed began to sprout: the frightening thought that this was what the rest of her life would be. Waiting and scrubbing. Polishing and dreaming. Its terrible tendrils threatened to cut her breath short, to clog her veins if she gave it free rein. So she stuffed her head full of unyielding, ready-made pictures that left no room for her seedling of doubt. She choked it to death with lurid love scenes from Indian films she’d seen on family outings in her childhood. With richly embroidered wedding sarees and a loving hand feeding her sweetmeats before a hairy-chested, chanting priest. With handsome, blurry men in fedoras and Italian suits. Smoking imported cigars. Peppering their Tamil with English declarations of love and defiance.

That was the year Appa came home from Singapore in his pea-green Morris Minor with beige leather seats. Amma was cleaning the shutters in her father’s bedroom as it pulled into the driveway next door one Sunday afternoon. Had she been standing there two days before, she would have seen Appa’s father keel over in his beautiful garden. Now, rag in hand, she peered through the shutters and watched Appa unload three matching leather suitcases, a black briefcase, and a small trunk. Sunlight spilled in between the wooden slats of the shutters and fanned out in neat swaths on the spotless floor of the bedroom. “Vasanthi!” her father called from the foot of the stairs. “What is this, taking three days just to wipe the shutters? If you have no brains can’t you at least make your hands useful?”

When she and her father went to pay their last respects to Tata, she sat with her navy interview skirt pulled carefully over her knees and watched Appa curiously out of the corner of her eye. So this was what someone with a law degree from England looked like. This was how one moved and talked when one had matching monogrammed luggage. With an air of subdued authority. She watched him make his rounds of the shady sitting room, full of drooping potted palms and women’s sorrow. When he got to Amma’s father he shook his hand wordlessly. “Very sorry, my wife simply couldn’t make it,” Amma’s father lied with a mournful shake of the head. “Not feeling well. We ourselves are getting old, what to do?” Amma thought of her mother, erect and white-lipped that morning when her father had gone to ask her to come next door for a few hours. “For God’s sake,” he’d said, “stop this nonsense for one day. All the neighbors will be wondering whether I’ve killed you and hidden the body. At least just come for a few minutes to pay your last respects to the old man.”

“Let the dead bury their dead,” Ammachi had said, momentarily switching from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible. Amma, who’d had twelve years of Scripture Knowledge at her convent school, noted the inappropriateness of the quotation’s coming from a woman who’d renounced the world and refused to budge from her room. “Why mourn?” her mother had continued, her philosophizing growing stubbornly expansive in the face of her husband’s intransigent scorn. “The old man has come one step closer to escaping the chains of rebirth. In fact we should all be rejoicing for him. Why all this fuss? Why two hundred three hundred people should crowd their house? All simply coming for free food only. Shameless. Why not let his family quietly remember him and celebrate his passing?”

In the end they’d had to go without her. Now, face to face with the dead man’s oldest son, Amma’s father hastened to compensate for his wife’s disrespectful absence by gesturing a little too eagerly towards Amma. “My eldest,” he said, lowering his eyes as if fully conscious that the replacement offering was inadequate. “Vasanthi.” Appa looked at this thin, dark girl, several inches taller than he, too awkward to meet his eyes as she mumbled her pleasedtomeetyou, and saw, with considerable surprise, that she was beautiful. Excruciatingly gauche, yes, and quite dark, but the first oddly underscored her beauty, and the second was a matter of taste in which he took some pride. He liked obscure Continental writers, game, and dark women; among his friends he had a reputation as a man of rarefied appetites. And so he stored her away for future use, this girl whose loveliness could not be suppressed by her unfashionable oiled braids or by the probably unshaven legs beneath her drab ankle-length skirt; for now, he had other matters to see to. A father to cremate, three sisters to marry off.

It was a whole year before Amma met her new neighbor again. Between the slats of the shutters she saw him come and go in his pea-green Morris Minor every day, getting out of the car to open and close the high iron gates of the Big House. She knew in which pocket he kept his house keys (left), which way he ran the chain around the gate (always clockwise) before he padlocked it, and how many pairs of dress shoes he owned (three, two black and one brown). She learned to recognize the days when he was going to court by the black coat he carried on a hanger. She noticed when he came home with a new pair of glasses, in stylish horn-rimmed frames. One Saturday afternoon she saw him come out to the gate to pay the newspaper boy, wearing a cotton singlet and a checkered sarong, still sucking his lunch out of his teeth. She smiled to herself, and the wan light of her smile seeped out through the shutter slats and pooled in a patient, watery circle on the top of Appa’s Brylcreemed head.

When his sisters were married, one after the other, Amma watched from the upstairs windows as men put up marquees in the compound and strung colored bulbs from the awnings. The smell of sweetmeats frying in ghee wafted up to her, and every now and then a voice would detach itself from the general murmur: the shrill, nasal scolding of a fat old matron, a child’s whine, a man’s sozzled laughter. Her father attended all three weddings alone, the envelope of money for the newlyweds crisp in the front pocket of the batik shirt she’d ironed. The morning after each of these weddings there was a crumbling laddoo in a serviette on the dining table for whichever of her brothers was first to rise that day.

After the third wedding had been successfully executed and his youngest sister packed off to make her new home with her country-doctor husband in Padang Rengas, Appa went to call at the pale green bungalow next door. He sat in the sitting room and talked to Amma’s father, man to man; Ammachi stayed in her room reading the Gita, and whether Appa had heard tell of her odd habits, or merely thought it natural that she should leave them to their business, he didn’t inquire that day after the lady of the house. “Vasanthi!” Amma’s father called after Appa had been greeted and seated. “Can’t you see we have a guest? Our own next-door neighbor and you’re taking one hour to bring a cup of tea and some titbits, what is this?” Amma made the tea and laid out half a dozen ginger snaps and a plate of murukku on a bamboo tray. She looked in the mirror above the kitchen sink, wet her palms, and smoothed down her housework hair. Then she stepped through the bead curtain in the entryway and took the tea tray into the sitting room. Behind her the curtain drizzled quietly back into place. “Bleddi fool of a girl!” her father grumbled to his guest as she left the room. “First time you are coming to the house and she puts the murukku on a chipped plate. Useless bleddi girl, I tell you.” “It’s okay, Uncle,” she heard Appa say with his mouth full, “the murukku will still taste just as good.” At that visit Appa asked Amma’s father’s permission to have a brick wall built between their houses. “No offense, Uncle,” he said. “The hedge breeds mosquitoes, that is all. Without it it’ll be one job less for the gardener I’ll be hiring.” When that was settled he asked Amma’s father’s permission to take his daughter out.

Every Saturday for a year after that visit, while he was scrambling up the steep slopes of his career, Appa took Amma out with only her two youngest brothers as chaperones.

Brushing her hair, dabbing eau de toilette on her wrists, ironing her cotton skirts before these outings, what did Amma imagine lay at the Technicolor conclusion of her courtship?

Certainly not the crumbling white shell her parents called a marriage.

Nor would there be anything seamy about their marital bliss. It would have nothing in common with the vulgar cavortings of Tamil-film couples or the school gardener’s leer whenever a girl’s petticoat had showed under the hem of her skirt. No, their joy would be cool and pure and exalted. On the weekends she would bake cakes; when she had a baby they would have family portraits taken at a studio.

In Appa’s eyes, her lack of experience added to her allure. He would introduce her to the wonders of eros; she would bloom under his expert tutelage. Already he relished the prospect.

“That girl?” Paati said when she found out who was occupying his Saturday afternoons. “That clerk’s daughter? After all your foreign education? Why not look for a girl of your own standing?” This, as far as Paati was concerned, had been the purpose of all her husband’s hard work: that his sons should have the pick of the country’s marriageable Indian maidens. “She’s not even nice-looking also,” Paati reasoned. “As shapeless as a coconut tree, and so black.”

“Oh, come off it,” Appa said. “As if I’m marrying the girl tomorrow. Just a way to pass the weekends, that’s all.”

She believed him; hadn’t he always been the good son, the one who’d followed his father’s advice, taken a sensible degree, and written home every week? It’s true, she thought, he’s not serious about that girl. Well, let him have his fun. He’s young. Already saddled with so much responsibility, poor thing.

What she couldn’t have guessed: spice the satisfaction he already derived from his unusual tastes with a dash of the forbidden and a soupçon of public disapproval, and Appa was well and truly hooked. After all the years he’d been away, she hardly knew him. He’d left a boy and come back a half-foreign man, and every detail of that transformation startled her. The smell of cologne in the bathroom in the mornings; the plummy accent he couldn’t turn off even for her or the servants; the lordly, masculine way he spread himself out and drank whiskey after dinner, one arm thrown over the back of the chair next to him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened.

And so Appa’s casual lie about the tenor of his association with Amma slid smoothly down Paati’s throat as, away from Kingfisher Lane but still under the eagle eyes of Amma’s young brothers, he closed suavely in on his quarry.

“Ah, I look forward to this all week,” he told her every Saturday when he picked her and her brothers up for the matinee show at the Lido Theatre. “The thought that on Saturday I shall get to take the most beautiful girl in town to the pictures keeps me going from Monday to Friday.” And, when she averted her eyes in response and tucked her hair behind her ears: “I’m sure a girl like you must be inured to all these compliments by now, eh?” He knew it wasn’t true; he knew no one had ever paid this girl a compliment in all her mean, miserable life. One Saturday as she came out into the sitting room where Appa waited for her, her father stuck his head out from behind his newspaper, grunted with mild amusement, and said, “Who you trying to fool, Vasanthi? I think so Raju here still has his eyesight. Each week doing some fancy-fancy new thing with your hair, as if it makes any difference to your donkey face.” He looked at Appa with a “Hah!” that was more an order to laugh than an invitation. But Appa did not comply. He stood up, opened the door for Amma, and said, without taking his eyes off her, “I do indeed still have my eyesight, Uncle, and it’s yours I’m worried about. Either you’re blind, or you come from a land of supernally beautiful donkeys.”

“Hah!” Amma’s father said again. But his defeat was evident; he had not sufficiently understood Appa’s retort to attempt one of his own. Out of the corner of his eye Appa saw the pinched look on his face as he retreated behind his newspaper, but directly in front of him he saw Amma’s hungry, luminous eyes meet his own, and in them he recognized at once what he had longed for all this time, what had been lacking in the attentions of Lily and Claudine and Nalini: gratitude. This girl was grateful to him, had been grateful from the day he’d first rescued her from her father’s house for four hours, and would, if he played his cards right, be forever grateful. He swallowed, and the knowledge warmed him like whiskey as it went down. Outside, the whole street—windows and leaves, bicycles, the Saturday smiles of Amma’s two brothers—glittered in the sunlight.

Every Saturday evening upon her return to her father’s house, he made her stand before him and deliver a thorough account of the film she’d seen. “Stand straight,” he’d say, “stand straight and talk properly.” When she’d fidgeted he’d reached out with one equine leg and hooked a foot around her ankle to jerk her closer. “What’s the matter?” he’d say. “All this high-class gallivanting around town and still you behave like a goat.” But now she knew he was doing all this just to humiliate her, because he knew she was winning, slipping from his grasp as he watched; he was in a hurry to grind her down before she got away. She’d show him, all right. Old devil. Syaitan. Think you’ll be able to bully me like this when I’m the lady of the Big House?

Of her rise in the world’s esteem she was deliciously conscious, for each week some small incident reminded her of it. One afternoon they were sitting in the FMS Bar & Restaurant, their customary teatime haunt, when Amma struck up a wordless, effervescent friendship with a child at an adjacent table. She’d caught the child’s eyes and smiled at him deliberately, wanting Appa to witness this interaction, and sure enough, just as the child began to play peekaboo with her through the bars of his chair, Appa said, “I see you’re a natural with children, after all these years mothering your brothers and sisters.”

Her brother Nitya snorted loudly at this, and his shoulders shivered with laughter over his F&N orange squash.

“Pfft!” her brother Krishen smirked.

“Nitya, Krishen,” said Appa, cuffing them one after the other on the head, “show a little respect for your Akka, please. After all she’s done for you. Bringing you up single-handedly because of your poor mother’s frail health.”

She looked up at Appa. His eyes were invisible behind the glare of his glasses, but she felt seen then, more seen than ever, her sacrifices noted, appreciated, and put into words; her sufferings keenly felt; her many weaknesses—her report card C’s, her failed geography paper, the chipped murukku bowl—forgiven.

“You want to buy comics on the way home or not?” Appa barked at the boys’ downcast faces. “Hanh?”

“Yes,” said Nitya.

“Yes, Raju Anneh,” said Krishen.

“Then hurry up and say sorry to your Akka and let’s go.”

“Sorry,” said Nitya.

“Sorry, Akka,” said Krishen.

It was, as far as she could remember, the first time anyone had ever apologized to her for anything. Never again were Nitya or Krishen offhandedly rude to her, in Appa’s presence or otherwise.

One Saturday eleven months after Appa had first picked Amma up for a matinee, they were reaching the end of their pot of tea at the FMS Bar when he announced his intention to bring dinner home to her family.

“Mee goreng and char kuay teow,” he said. “Half and half. That way there’ll be something for everyone.”

“I don’t think …” she began. “Actually there’s plenty of food in the house, I—we’ve—cooked all week, so many leftovers there are —”

“Oh yesyes, that of course,” he said hastily, “that I understand. It’s not that you don’t have food. No doubt they are not sitting and starving and waiting for my two measly bowls of noodles. But just for a change, no? It’ll be a treat for your brothers and sisters. Eh? Why always Nitya and Krishen only should be the ones nicely-nicely enjoying?” He gave Nitya an affectionate rap on the head with his knuckles. “How about it, boy?”

“Can also,” said Nitya. The more he looked at his sister, the more his misgivings encroached on his appetite. When she caught him alone he was probably going to get a few good ones. Thighpinches, mouthslaps, earboxes. Assorted hot-and-spicy treats. But mee goreng was mee goreng, and in the grand scheme of things it would be worth a few good ones.

In the car there were two enormous eversilver dishes Appa had brought for the mee goreng and char kuay teow. He parked on Anderson Road and crossed the busy street alone, holding first one dish and then the other out to a hawker as Amma and her brothers watched from the car. Krishen licking his lips. Nitya patting his rumbling belly and hoping he’d get to pick out at least six prawns before his siblings helped themselves. Amma reacquainting herself with the smoky flavor of certain doom. If Appa came to dinner at her father’s house, she knew, her friable fairy tale would crumble. Her mother’s room was just off the dining room, three steps up the corridor. He would not sit at the table for two hours without piecing together—from her mother’s conspicuous absence, from the odor that would steal into the room, from her siblings’ indiscretions and unfunny jokes—the startling truth of her mother’s illness. For that was how Amma thought of it: an illness, a sad and irreparable snapping in the head, a condition to be whispered about within the immediate family.

After tonight, nothing would put her façade back together again, no radiant hint of her motherly potential, no searingly romantic American film theme shared silently in those plush red seats in the darkness of the rolling credits. Her five senses closed shop one by one, and all things faded away: the creaking of overloaded trishaws, the mingling smells of street food and exhaust fumes, the slap-slapping of rickshaw men’s slippered feet, the whizzing of cars and ringing of bicycle bells outside her open window, until she found herself looking as if through a tunnel at the terrible scene unfolding in her head: Appa crossing the threshold of her father’s house, bearing his eversilver bowls aloft like a hotel waiter. Left toe to right heel, right toe to left heel, shiny leather shoes slid effortlessly off on the doorstep, no hands needed. Man and bowls sailing into dining room, man in finest-gauge black socks, whistling “Bengawan Solo,” bowls laden with fragrant noodles. Then the chanting that could no longer be ignored, the small befuddled smile with which she’d grown so familiar. And finally, most horrendously of all, the depredatory bouquet of the chamber pot (brimming as it always was at this late hour), sneaking through the keyhole and the crack under the door. The painfully polite meal, the reddening of Appa’s eyes as he tried manfully to hold his breath for an hour. And at the end of it, the retreat: No no, it’s okay, keep the bowls, don’t worry, see you next week. Only of course there would be no next week. She would stand at the front door and watch the pea-green Morris Minor reverse carefully down her father’s driveway. Next Saturday would come and go, and she would return to watching a stranger—shoes keys black coat for court cases—through the upstairs shutters.

But there was, at first, no chanting to be heard when they got out of the Morris Minor. In the sitting room Amma’s father was ensconced in his armchair, peering intently at his angelfish, tapping the glass of the aquarium with a fingernail. He looked up when Amma and the boys came in.

“So?” he grunted. “Today what grand-grand flim did you see? Hanh?”

“I’ve brought —” said Amma.

“Raju Anneh came home with us,” said Krishen. “Brought dinner also. Mee goreng. Char kuay teow.”

“Ohoho,” said his father. “Ohoho, I see. Very nice. Very nice. Not always we get company in this house. Go and ask your brothers and sisters to wash their hands and come down and say hello.” He stood up and shut the fish food canister with a click.

Now that every wriggling cell in Amma’s nose was tuned to the shitpot station, she had to admit to herself that the keyhole and doorcrack were not so easily overcome by its noxious emanations as she’d remembered. Perhaps she’d confused her own mephitic dreams with this milder reality; perhaps her judgment had been warped by her years of shame and resentment of all that the chamber pot stood for, because this smallest of earthenware pots, sooty-bottomed and unassuming, hardly big enough for one day’s dhal back when it had been in kitchen use, had been so much more for so many years. The selfish piety of a mother who thought she sat and shat at the right hand of God. The pitiful, caged life she’d blithely inflicted on her abandoned daughter. The odious nighttime clicks of the door latch on her unnecessary outhouse missions. The ceaseless bhajan-singing and chanting that provided the ridiculous background to the beatings and beltings and sobs of her children.

Amma stood outside all this and considered it. These things were invisible now; humiliation had no odor, and the sounds of this afternoon’s beatings, as far as she could tell, had dissipated into the still, grey air. If luck remained on her side—just this once—Appa need never know about their secret lives.

Wordlessly, her ears buzzing with anxiety, she stepped through the bead curtain into the dining room. In the far corner of the room was a glass-doored cabinet lined with Straits Times pages from June 1950 and filled with the remnants of her parents’ senescent marriage. A tarnished pewter kris and moon kite, still in the box in which they’d arrived as wedding presents. Frayed baskets and a brass plate etched with the Dutch Fort, from their honeymoon in Malacca. Faded formal photographs of their children at various ages in cracked leather frames. Miniature models of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and Buckingham Palace lined up conveniently in a row, courtesy of their better-traveled relatives, a majestic but garbled package deal for the miniature tourist in a hurry. The bottom two shelves of the cabinet were taken up by a set of dishes and glasses that hadn’t been used since the birthday party at which Ammachi had announced her withdrawal from the world.

Amma knelt and drew these things out, noting as she did so the disintegrating bodies of flies and beetles in the grooves of the sliding doors. With a clean, wet dishcloth she wiped the plates off one by one. She poured ice water into the clear blue glasses and saw Appa slip cleanly into the beginning of the scene she’d spun out in her head. It was like watching a master diver: one minute he was outside, standing in the harsh light of the low-slung sun, and the next minute he’d slid sharp as a knife into the soft dim of the sitting room, a larger-than-life five-foot-five magnet with a field too powerful for this little house. Already his ample, energetic gestures seemed to overwhelm it. He slid his shoes off with his dexterous toes, just as she’d imagined, and as he strode in with his eversilver bowls, arrogant and unapologetic, a small-minded, prudish shiver seemed to run through the walls.

“Ah, good, good,” he said when he caught sight of Amma with her bottle of ice water. “Put out plates for everyone. Nitya, Krishen, call all your brothers and sisters.” His booming voice ricocheted off every unyielding, dusty surface. The old mahogany sideboard rattled its stores of cutlery as Amma opened its top drawer. The dining table shook under its oilcloth cover. The angelfish darted in marble-eyed alarm from corner to corner of the fingerprint-smeared fish tank. Under Appa’s cool, commanding gaze Nitya and Krishen turned sniggering and pigeon-toed.

“What?” said Appa. “What’s the problem? Want to eat but don’t want to help, is that it?”

They turned and scuttled up the stairs.

Appa laid his bowls on the two wooden trivets Amma had set on the table and strode off to the kitchen to wash his oily hands.

Amma set the table with the newly wiped plates and the forks and spoons she’d found in the sideboard drawer. Stained stainless steel; she hadn’t thought it was possible. To compensate, she rummaged in another drawer and found an unopened packet of serviettes in a pretty cerise, also left over from that fateful birthday party seven years ago. She pulled out nine and began to fold them meticulously into fans, running over each crease with a thumbnail.

“Oo wah,” said Appa, coming back into the kitchen with his hands in his pockets, “getting rather fancy for a couple of bowls of roadside noodles, aren’t we?”

She smiled but said nothing, and he stood and watched her with arms akimbo.

Her father came in through the bead curtain. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Not bad, not bad.” But he didn’t give Appa a friendly shoulderwhack. He pulled out the chair at the head of the table and took his seat, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. One by one the other children trudged down the stairs, the hair around their faces damp from quick splashings at the bathroom sink. One sister’s eyes still red-rimmed from an afternoon beating or punishment Amma had missed. Again the thought struck her that if luck stayed on her side everything that happened in this brutalizing house, even if it remained stolidly next door, may as well be taking place in some terrible faraway dictatorship she read about in the newspapers.

The children took their seats, shuffling, lipbiting, sniffing diffidently, each one vaguely aware of the momentousness of this occasion and its import for their trembling, serviette-folding sister.

“Wah,” said Valli, the oldest girl after Amma and her special favorite, “thanks for bringing all this, Raju Anneh. So nice of you.” But she avoided Appa’s eyes, and smiled instead at the eversilver bowls.

“Sit, sit,” said Appa. “Come, let’s eat before everything gets cold. What about your mother? Not joining us?”

“Oh, she doesn’t take Chinese food,” said Amma casually. “And anyway she only takes a midday meal, not dinner.” She took another serviette from the pile and began to pleat it.

“Maybe she’d like to come out and have a cup of tea with us?”

“She’s resting,” said Amma. “She retires very early for the night.”

“I see, I see. Well, that’s all right then, let her rest, yesyesyes, my own mother is the same. No appetite she says. Getting older, what to do, she says.”

No one else said anything. No repressed giggles from the boys. No muttered invective from her father. Amma looked up and saw her father’s eyes on her busy hands, his lips thin and tight, his nostrils flared. Like a cold gust in her face it dawned on her: not only was he in on the game, he was, for once, on her side, slavering at the prospect of its many benefits: the rich son-in-law, the numskull daughter taken off his hands forever, the stamped and sealed reputation as just another nice, old-fashioned Indian family. Gingerly she put each finished serviette fan next to the others. There were six of them in two rows now, bright on the dark wood of the table.

“Come, Uncle,” said Appa with a clap of his hands, “why don’t you do the honors?”

But Amma’s father, unfamiliar with the invitation, served only himself, and with a grunt began to shovel the mountain of noodles on his plate into his mouth. “What’re you all waiting for?” he said to the children between mouthfuls. “You heard what Raju Anneh said. Serve yourselves and eat before it all gets cold. No need to wait for your sister to finish her handicraft project. By the time she’s done the food will have gone moldy also.”

“Oh, nonono, not to worry, Uncle,” said Appa, “see, all ready.” He picked up the fans in both hands and with a flourish deposited one at each place setting. “Sit,” he said to Amma, gesturing at the empty chair beside him. Lifting the plates one by one, he heaped food onto them.

The dining room clock ticked loudly. The fish tank pump hummed and whirred. On either side of their father Nitya and Krishen fought noiselessly over the prawns and cockles. Appa sat opposite Amma’s father, and to his right sat Amma, bent low over her plate, her skin raw with embarrassment at her father’s manners, at her own awkwardness with noodles and fork, at Appa’s eyes on her. After every mouthful she dabbed at her lips and chin with her serviette. But Appa, watching her, saw not her awkwardness but her simplicity: the anxious table manners, the missionary-school daintiness. A pang of nostalgia for his own childhood rose up through him; what had he been doing with women who smoked and quoted Marx and Engels? They would dismiss this girl as bourgeois, of course, but no matter; this was what he wanted to come home to. They would roll their eyes behind his back, accuse him of paying lip service to revolutionary notions while in private he kept a wife who fluttered her lashes and left the thinking to him. And yet —Appa realized now, watching Amma’s father scrape his fork determinedly against his plate, belch, and go on to his second helping —weren’t these the sort of people true socialism would have them all embrace? Somewhere along the way, hadn’t they confused idealism with elitism in choosing to consort only with fellow intellectuals? Let them believe, then, that he’d made the cowardly choice of a woman unsullied by inconvenient aspirations of her own; in fact, he would be the bravest of them by taking on the real work of nation-building.

Had Appa not been blinded by two equally powerful strains of romanticism, he might have noticed that Amma’s father showed little sign of sharing his optimism. That the man seemed to breathe only while drinking, behind the shield of his water glass. His face was drawn; his lips were pinched. His eyes darted around the table, accusing all his children of having sold their souls. Oh, he wasn’t exempting himself either: he may have been sitting at the head of the table, but with this bowl of char kuay teow he’d ceased to be the head of the household, and he knew it. Two bloody plates of noodles and he’d nicely wrapped his own balls up with a red ribbon and offered them to this bow-tied fop. He belched again, more loudly than before, and gulped down the rest of his water. “Well, well,” he said. “Thanks, man. This is a first-class meal. I’m sure you know we mostly eat simple home-cooked food only. All this flim-watching FMS-Barring all where I can afford?”

“Heh-heh,” said Appa, wiping his mouth with his unfolded serviette-fan, “no problem, Uncle, all this is nothing much —”

But before he could belittle himself in proper munificent style, the door to Ammachi’s room opened with a distinct creak, and Ammachi emerged, bony feet first, then the rest of her, gaunt, pasty, her hair bun flat from the plywood board on which she slept. She shuffled towards the table, the stench of her cramped quarters coming off her white saree in puffs as she moved. All around the table there was a unanimous sucking in of breath so deep the house turned for three seconds into a vacuum, still and voracious, and a sparrow flying past an open window was pulled against the mosquito netting and held fast for those three long seconds. Then everyone exhaled, the sparrow fled in a bewildered flurry of feathers, and Amma’s father dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. Grunting, he pushed the plate sharply away from him so that it slid a foot down the table and collided with one of Appa’s half-empty eversilver bowls. All around the table there was a stiffening of shoulders, with one cheery exception.

“Oh, hellohellohello Auntie,” said Appa, “how nice to see you. So sorry to interrupt your rest. Too-too loud we must have been—my fault —”

“Foof!” said Shankar the favorite son, burying his nose in his cupped hands. Through the open door of Ammachi’s room the fumes of the chamber pot, every bit as powerful as Amma had remembered them, slithered forth in a thousand black dragontails. Nitya picked up his water glass and pressed it to his face, his desperate breath misting its bottom. Krishen broke out in a fit of consumptive coughing, the tip of his pink tongue sticking out of his greasy mouth. Even sweet, sympathetic Valli picked up her crumpled serviette and began to pat her nose with it.

“Please join us, Auntie,” said Appa imperturbably, “there’s still so much left.”

“Oh, no,” said Ammachi quietly, pulling the pallu of her saree over her disheveled head. From under this hood she peered narrowly out at each one of them, her eyes slowly going around the table. “No thank you. I don’t take Chinese food.” She looked pointedly at the golden pool of pork fat on her husband’s plate. “Simply came out to see who came. Many many years we have not had any visitors, you see.”

Under the table Amma’s knees quivered. She curled her long toes and dug her heels into the cool cement floor.

“Oho, yesyes,” said Appa, “so sorry to intrude but I just thought —”

“No problem,” said Ammachi, “not intruding at all. All this is no longer my business, after all. Who comes and goes, who eats what. I’ve taken a vow to withdraw from this world, you see. All my mundane duties I’ve carried out. Simply only today I came out, I thought first time someone coming to the house after so long, maybe something was wrong or what.”

“Actually,” said Appa, “it’s not the first time. I live next door, you see. I came first to ask for Uncle’s kind permission to build that new wall. And now I drop in every Saturday to pick up Vasanthi and Nitya and Krishen for a film.”

Amma kept her eyes lowered, avoiding her mother’s inscrutable gaze. Yet she felt that gaze sweep across her face, and she knew the thoughts behind it: So that is what my daughter has become. A glorified call girl. Going out with men in exchange for a free meal. Giving in to all of her base instincts at once.

But Ammachi only said: “Ah. I see. Well all that is not my concern. Carry on. Please carry on. Time already for my evening puja.” Then she turned and shuffled back to her room. A fresh whiff of excrement-spiced air wafted out from the folds of her saree and draped itself around Amma like an octopus tentacle. Ammachi’s door shut with another loud creak. Amma looked down at her plate, her tongue suddenly thick and salty, her throat clotted with viscous tears. She felt herself rise and strain, suspended in time like a wave ready to crash against a rocky shore.

“Better I turn up the fan,” exclaimed Valli, ever the resourceful one, “I think so somebody’s septic tank must be broken again. So sorry Raju Anneh, you see that Malay family on the other side of the road is always having this problem and always it happens at dinnertime.” She jumped up and turned the ceiling fan up to its highest setting. “Let me open the windows also. Tsk tsk, whatta whatta terrible stink, no?”

“Stink?” said Appa, pausing with a forkful of noodles an inch from his mouth. “What stink? Must be I’m sitting in the best bloody seat in the house because I can’t smell anything.”

It was the first Amma knew of his missing sense of smell. She looked up, blinked disbelievingly, and then felt the blood drain from her burning cheeks to see him chewing peaceably on a tough cockle. In the heavens a chorus of angels with clothespegs on their ethereal noses began to sing, the nasal strains of their joy filling the skies just as Ammachi’s praise rose in concurrence:

Om Trayambakam

Yajaamahe

Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam …

THREE WEEKS after that miracle, on one of those balmy Malayan evenings when the light turns milky before dying, Appa asked Nitya and Krishen to wait in the Morris Minor while he and Amma crossed the street to buy the now-customary dinner. “I need a bit of help today,” he said. He handed her a third bowl and turned to the boys in the back seat. “How about a little after-dinner something for an extra-special treat?” he said with a wink. “Ice kacang? Or would you prefer cendol?”

They decided on ice kacang (with dollops of vanilla ice cream for the boys), and as Amma and Appa stood before the char kuay teow stall in the smoky dusk, the boys rolled down a window and leaned out like two eager young dogs, nudging and smirking, whistling too quietly for Appa or their sister to hear them, and enjoying the exhaust-fumed, lard-spiked air in their faces.

Across the street, Appa leaned towards Amma and gripped her elbow as if to steer her along the right path. Towards respectability and comfort, ladies’ tea parties and sturdy furniture, nest eggs and new clothes for the children every Deepavali. The wild flames under the hawker’s cast-iron wok burned blue in Appa’s horn-rimmed glasses. Sweat circles darkened the underarms of his wilting pinstriped shirt, and his nascent bald spot gleamed like a baby moon. Like a dancer’s jewels, perfect round beads of sweat studded the dip between Amma’s nose and lip.

“I want to marry you,” he said, “even if I have to pay your father a dowry. I can’t wait any longer. You know I will make you happy. You know you’ll have a first-class life. No cooking no cleaning. Whatever jewelry you want. Chauffeur-driven car.”

“Tsk. What is this, talking about private matters all here on the roadside.”

But she smiled and giggled and shrugged, as if reading from a script. As if she’d already read the play and picked a part in advance. Across the street, two little extras in a Morris Minor sniggered and demonstrated the mechanics of copulation with their hands. A Chinese grandmother pushing a pram along the five-foot-ways of the shophouses caught sight of them, averted her offended eyes, and hissed imprecations about bad Indian boys to her drowsy grandchild.

“What’s wrong?” Appa said half indignantly to Amma’s shy, shrugging shoulders. To himself he noted that the hair at the nape of her neck was soft and almost straight, most unlike the coarse frizzy mane she’d pulled into a loose knot today. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he persevered. “Bloody Chinaman can’t understand a word anyway.”

He held out his hands for the dish of noodles, slick with grease from the hawker’s stovetop.

Afterwards she was never sure what it was that had won her over: the simple eloquence of his pared-down proposal or the promise of prosperity in that brimming eversilver dish.

When she told her father the news, he smiled his acrid smile for a while before saying, “Not bad, Vasanthi. For an idiot you haven’t done too badly for yourself. Syabas!”

Next door in the Big House, Paati held her son by his shoulders and shook him. “You’re mad,” she said. “You’re going to regret this decision all your life. They’re not our kind of people. How can you bring a girl like that into this house?”

“Amma,” he said, freeing himself from her grip, “come off it. Enough of this nineteenth-century mentality. Not our kind of people? Well, last I looked they all had two eyes and a nose and a mouth, just like us. It’s thinking like yours that’s going to hold this country back.”

Paati drew back, folded her arms, and narrowed her eyes at him. “Now I see,” she said. “I see what that girl has done. Shameless gold-digger has poured out some sob story on your shoulder, and you’ve fallen for it. Good. Do what you want and suffer. Just don’t come crying to me, and don’t expect me to treat her like a queen in my own house.”

“Actually, it’s my house,” said Appa, “and you will treat her with the same respect you owe any human being.”