‘You’ll have your work cut out with the cleaning up,’ he tells me. ‘Was the fire all in the side wing? Once it’s aired out the smoke shouldn’t be this bad.’
Tom, I remember, likes to advise. He walks ahead of me to the dining room and opens the back door. While his back’s turned I grab the bag of fireworks from the dining-room table. The kitchen almirah’s right next to me, and I shove the bag high up on the top shelf. He turns round a second afterwards, as though he’d heard. There’s guilt squatting in the room with us, stringy as spit.
‘So Ammuma didn’t tell you I was coming back to Malaysia?’ I ask quickly. I keep my face turned away from him, pretending to be very busy with cups and plates in the kitchen.
Tom laughs, sitting down in a chair with his legs straddled wide. ‘Of course not. She wouldn’t talk about you, Durga. You have forgotten things.’
He’s right. Even if he weren’t Tom and I weren’t me – even without Peony’s shadow stitched to our feet – Ammuma wouldn’t have discussed me with him. The best thing you can hear about a girl is nothing at all, she always used to say.
‘She didn’t tell me you’d come back either,’ I say, rubbing dish soap onto a plate slightly harder than necessary. Tom just smiles.
‘So, do you have any … family here?’ I ask. Wives, girlfriends; women I won’t name for fear of conjuring them up. Cowardy-custard, I hear Peony jeer.
He doesn’t reply, not at first. He scrapes that chair over the floor, tips it back and then back again – in another moment he’ll be in the almirah with the fireworks – and says, ‘Well, Mary-Auntie’s like family to me.’
No lovers, then, no ex-girlfriends left alive. Tom’s the sort to prefer a midnight dash, underwear in his pocket as he slips out of the door. I can see it, Tom running for his life and me with one of my hands clasped round the verandah ironwork and the other flailing in mid-air, grabbing for whatever I can get. Undignified, to say the least. That thought brings Peony’s face back to me, smiling out of that strange photograph behind the shrines.
‘Tom,’ I say slowly. ‘I want to ask you about something. In the prayer room, just now –’
He looks up warily and I see he’s misunderstood. He’s expecting recriminations and arguments. He’s expecting expectations.
‘In the prayer room – it was very … nice, Durga. Honestly.’
Nice. I store that one away to wring bitterness out of later. In any case he’s already pushing forward with a conversation that’s going to go just how he’d like.
‘Now, let me give you a hand,’ he says busily. ‘You’re doing that coffee all wrong.’
I give in. It’s cowardly, but I can’t bring myself to say her name. And so the coffee carries us safely over the next few minutes, with both of us pretending to share a fascination with brewing times. There are little fusses with filters and granules – Tom, unsurprisingly, has firm opinions on the way this should all be done – and whether or not the milk is fresh. He directs me to bring water, sugar, a teaspoon and tells me where to find them, too.
When I was growing up the kitchen was Vellaswamy-cook’s domain. Karthika took over three years ago, when Ammuma stopped being able to manage. She’s hung copper pans on the mud-green walls and there’s a dim, aqueous chill over the place. When I open the cupboards in search of coffee I can see they’re almost empty: nothing but mud-clumped stalks of kai lan, Milo, Maggi-noodles and Nutella.
‘Do you think this is all Ammuma eats?’ I ask, distracted. It’s so different from Canadian-style refrigerators, full of frozen meat and plastic-labelled vegetables. ‘I don’t know what Karthika’s been spending the money on.’
Karthika used to cook, until last year. She went missing for six months, then turned up one day with a baby and still no wedding ring or kum-kum in her hair. Ammuma won’t stand for her touching the food any more, so nowadays Karthika comes in to scrub the toilets and bathrooms. Ammuma’s begun to call her the night-soil man, with a fine disregard for detail.
‘I hope you’re not nagging at Karthika,’ Tom says, opening the top cupboard for mugs. ‘She’s quite sensitive, you know, Durga.’
I stare at him. But she’s the servant-girl: the phrase comes almost instinctively. ‘Since when did you care so much about her?’ I ask instead, and he laughs.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him really smile – a genuine, unpractised grin – and it smooths over the edge of irritation I’ve been feeling. He looks fifteen again when he smiles, and that gives me courage. I don’t want to chatter about servants and coffee and food with him. I want to talk about us, about guilt and growing up. About Peony. He’s the only one who’d ever understand, after all. He’s the other set of footprints on my desert island.
‘Tom,’ I say, moving closer to him. ‘When you first came back, was it strange? Remembering her?’
He raises an eyebrow, puzzled.
‘Peony, I mean.’ Her name sends a little shock through the air and I plunge on. ‘Because I see her everywhere. It’s like she hasn’t gone, like she’s been here all along just waiting for me to come back. Ammuma’s even put a picture of her in the prayer room.’
He coughs. I wonder if he’s going to tell me to forget it. To forget her. It’s just a picture, Durga; she was just Peony. He might even say that it wasn’t our fault she drowned, a fact which is both true and useless.
‘That picture,’ he says, fidgeting with his mug. He adjusts the collar of his sharp-ironed shirt and takes another gulp of coffee.
‘Mary-Auntie didn’t put it there.’ He sounds very English all of a sudden, very foreign. ‘I found it last
