The marchers that day were party workers, students and the laborers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new.
Through the Plymouth window, Rahel could see that the loudest word they said was Zindabad. And that the veins stood out in their necks when they said it. And that the arms that held the flags and banners were knotted and hard.
Inside the Plymouth it was still and hot.
Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.
She tried to count the green beads on her rosary but couldn’t concentrate. An open hand slammed against the car window.
A balled fist banged down on the burning skyblue bonnet. It sprang open. The Plymouth looked like an angular blue animal in a zoo asking to be fed.
A bun.
A banana.
Another balled fist slammed down on it, and the bonnet closed. Chacko rolled down his window and called out to the man who had done it.
“Thanks,
“Don’t be so ingratiating, Comrade,” Ammu said. “It was an accident. He didn’t really mean to help. How could he possibly know that in this old car there beats a truly Marxist heart?”
“Ammu,” Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, “is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”
Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. “Washed-up” cut like a knife through a soft thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Just then Rahel saw Velutha. Vellya Paapen’s son, Velutha. Her most beloved friend Velutha. Velutha marching with a red flag. In a white shirt and mundu with angry veins in his neck. He never usually wore a shirt.
Rahel rolled down her window in a flash. “Velutha! Velutha!” she called to him.
He froze for a moment, and listened with his flag. What he had heard was a familiar voice in a most unfamiliar circumstance. Rahel, standing on the car seat, had grown out of the Plymouth window like the loose, flailing horn of a car-shaped herbivore. With a fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo and yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.
“Velutha! lvidaj&’ Velutha!” And she too had veins in her neck.
He stepped sideways and disappeared deftly into the angriness around him.
Inside the car Ammu whirled around, and her eyes were angry. She slapped at Rahel’s calves which were the only part of her left in the car to slap. Calves and brown feet in Bata sandals.
“Behave yourself!” Ammu said.
Baby Kochamma pulled Rahel down, and she landed on the seat with a surprised thump. She thought there’d been a misunderstanding.
“It was Velutha!” she explained with a smile. “And he had a flag!” The flag had seemed to her a most impressive piece of equipment. The right thing for a friend to have.
“You’re a stupid silly little girl!” Ammu said.
Her sudden, fierce anger pinned Rahel against the car seat. Rahel was puzzled. Why was Ammu so angry? About what?
“But it was him!” Rahel said.
“Shut up!” Ammu said.
Rahel saw that Ammu had a film of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and that her eyes had become hard, like marbles. Like Pappachi’s in the Vienna studio photograph. (How Pappachi’s Moth whispered in his children’s veins!)
Baby Kochamma rolled up Rahel’s window.
Years later, on a crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu’s face. Like a rogue piece in a puzzle. Like a question mark that drifted through the pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence.
That hard marble look in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of that sudden, hurt silence.
What had it all meant?
The Sunday train was almost empty. Across the aisle from Rahel a woman with chapped cheeks and a mustache coughed up phlegm and wrapped it in twists of newspaper that she tore off the pile of Sunday papers on her lap. She arranged the little packages in neat rows on the empty seat in front of her as though she was setting up a phlegm stall. As she worked she chatted to herself in a pleasant, soothing voice.
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones-a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
Her co-passenger’s madness comforted Rahel. It drew her closer into New York’s deranged womb. Away from the other, more terrible thing that haunted her.
A sour metal smell, like steel bus rails, and the smell of the bus conductor’s bands from holding them. A young man with an old man’s mouth.
Outside the train, the Hudson shimmered, and the trees were the redbrown colors of fall. It was just a little cold.
“There’s a nipple in the air” Larry McCaslin said to Rahel, and laid his palm gently against the suggestion of protest from a chilly nipple through her cotton T-shirt. He wondered why she didn’t smile.
She wondered why it was that when she thought of home it was always in the colors of the dark, oiled wood of boats, and the empty cores of the tongues of flame that flickered in brass lamps.
It was Velutha.
That much Rahel was sure of. She’d seen him. He’d seen her. She’d have known him anywhere, any time. And if he hadn’t been wearing a shirt, she would have recognized him from behind. She knew his back. She’d been carried on it. More times than she could count. It had a light-brown birthmark, shaped like a pointed dry leaf. He said it was a Lucky Leaf; that made the Monsoons come on time. A brown leaf on a black back. An autumn leaf at night.
A lucky leaf that wasn’t lucky enough.
Velutha wasn’t supposed to be a carpenter.
He was called Velutha—which means White in Malayalam—because he was so black. His father, Vellya Paapen, was a Paravan. A toddy tapper. He had a glass eye. He had been shaping a block of granite with a hammer when a chip flew into his left eye and sliced right through it.
As a young boy, Velutha would come with Vellya Paapen to the back entrance of the Ayemenem House to deliver the coconuts they had plucked from the trees in the compound. Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians. Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians
