anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.
Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? —then fall, Caesar.”
“It just goes to show;” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody.”
With children, she said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.
At night, Estha would stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?—Then fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would complain to Mammachi.
“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”
Estha would rise from the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?—Then fall, Estha!” and die again.
Kochu Maria was sure that Ettu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.
The woman in the neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after-biscuit cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a Baby Voice.
Rahel ignored her and blew an inadvertent spit bubble.
Ammu hated them blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.
Aristocrats were people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.
Though Baba wasn’t a clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.
When they were alone, Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit.
“It’s not a ruddy sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.
They remembered his anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.
In the only photograph they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other arm. She looked grumpy and bad-tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.
Ammu said that he had only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks, Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph
“Will you stop that!” Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.
“What?” Rahel said, but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.
“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel said.
“Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive,” Estha said.
“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”
“Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped.
“It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.
Rahel put on her sunglasses. The World became angry-colored.
“Take off those ridiculous glasses!” Ammu said.
Rahel took off her ridiculous glasses.
“It’s fascist, the way you deal with them,” Chacko said. “Even children have some rights, for God’s sake!”
“Don’t use the name of the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said.
“I’m not,” Chacko said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”
“Stop posing as the children’s Great Savior!” Ammu said. “When it comes down to brass tacks, you don’t give a damn about them. Or me.”
“Should I?” Chacko said. “Are they my responsibility?”
He said that Ammu and Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.
The backs of Rahel’s legs went wet and sweaty. Her skin slipped on the foamleather upholstery of the car seat. She and Estha knew about millstones. In
Estha put his head in his lap.
His puff was spoiled.
A distant train rumble seeped upwards from the frog-stained road. The yam leaves on either side of the railway track began to nod in mass consent. Yesyesyes,yesyes.
The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began to sing another bhajan.
“I tell you, these Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously. “They have no sense of privacy.”
“They have horns and scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies hatch from eggs.”
Rahel had two bumps on her forehead that Estha said would grow into horns. At least one of them would because she was half Hindu. She hadn’t been quick enough to ask him about his horns. Because whatever She was, He was too.
The train slammed past under a column of dense black smoke. There were thirty-two bogies, and the doorways were full of young men with helmetty haircuts who were on their way to the Edge of the World to see what happened to the people who fell off. Those of them who craned too far fell off the edge themselves. Into the flailing darkness, their haircuts turned inside out
The train was gone so quickly that it was hard to imagine that everybody had waited so long for so little. The yam leaves continued to nod long after the train had gone, as though they agreed with it entirely and had no doubts at all.
A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.
Chacko started the Plymouth. Baby Kochamma tried to be jolly. She started a song.
There’s a sad sort of c’anging
From the clock in the ball
And the bells in the steeple too.
And up in the nurs
Anabs-urd
Litt-le Bird
Is popping out to say—
She looked at Estha and Rahel, waiting for them to say “Coo-coo.”
They didn’t.
