came with the house were on display. A reed umbrella, a wicker couch. A wooden dowry box. They were labeled with edifying placards that said
So there it was then, History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat.
Comrade Namboodiripad’s house functioned as the hotel’s dining room, where semi-suntanned tourists in bathing suits sipped tender coconut water (served in the shell), and old Communists, who now worked as fawning bearers in colorful ethnic clothes, stooped slightly behind their trays of drinks.
In the evenings (for that Regional Flavor) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances (`Small attention spans,” the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos.
The performances were staged by the swimming pool. While the drummers drummed and the dancers danced, hotel guests frolicked with their children in the water. While Kunti revealed her secret to Karna on the riverbank, courting couples rubbed suntan oil on each other. While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged daughters, Poothana suckled young Krishna at her poisoned breast. Bhima disemboweled Dushasana and bathed Draupadi’s hair in his blood.
The back verandah of the History House (where a posse of Touchable policemen converged, where an inflatable goose was burst) had been enclosed and converted into the airy hotel kitchen. Nothing worse than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The Terror was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming of cooks. The cheerful chop-chop-chopping of ginger and garlic. The disemboweling of lesser mammals- pigs, goats. The dicing of meat. The scaling of fish.
Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain.
A small forgotten thing.
Nothing that the world would miss.
A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it
Ten to two, it said.
A band of children followed Rahel on her walk.
“Hello hippie,” they said, twenty-five years too late. “Whatisyourname?”
Then someone threw a small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.
On her way back, looping around the Ayemenem House, Rahel emerged onto the main road. Here too, houses had mushroomed, and it was only the fact that they nestled under trees, and that the narrow paths that branched off the main road and led to them were not motorable, that gave Ayemenem the semblance of rural quietness. In truth, its population had swelled to the size of a little town. Behind the fragile facade of greenery lived a press of people who could gather at a moment’s notice. To beat to death a careless bus driver. To smash the windscreen of a car that dared to venture out on the day of an Opposition bandh. To steal Baby Kochamma’s imported insulin and her cream buns that came all the way from Bestbakery in Kottayam.
Outside Lucky Press, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was standing at his boundary wall talking to a man on the other side. Comrade Pillai’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow them and he had just refused. The man across the wall shuffled through a bunch of photographs in a plastic sachet, with an air of contrived interest. The photographs were mostly pictures of Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s son, Lenin, who lived and worked in Delhi—he took care of the painting, plumbing, and any electrical work for the Dutch and German embassies. In order to allay any fears his clients might have about his political leanings, he had altered his name slightly. Levin he called himself now. P. Levin.
Rahel tried to walk past unnoticed. It was absurd of her to have imagined that she could.
“
“
Did she remember him? She did indeed.
Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot—that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes. —
“So!” Comrade Pillai said. “I think so you are in Amayrica flow?”
“No,” Rahel said. “I’m here.”
“Yes yes.” He sounded a little impatient. “But otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?” Comrade Pillai uncrossed his arms. His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary wall like a sad St. Bernard’s eyes.
“Recognized?” Comrade Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin.
The man hadn’t
“The old Paradise Pickle Kochamma’s daughter’s daughter,” Comrade Pillai said.
The man looked puzzled. He was clearly a stranger. And not a pickle-eater. Comrade Pillai tried a different tack.
“Punnyan Kunju?” he asked. The Patriarch of Antioch appeared briefly in the sky and waved his withered hand.
Things began to fall into place for the man with the photographs. He nodded enthusiastically.
“Punnyan Kunju’s son? Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi?” Comrade Pillai said.
“Oower, oower, oower,” the man said.
“His daughter’s daughter is this. In Amayrica now.”
The nodder nodded as Rahel’s ancestral lineage fell into place for him.
“Oower, oower, oower. In Amayrica now, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration.
He remembered vaguely a whiff of scandal. He had forgotten the details, but remembered that it had involved sex and death. It had been in the papers. After a brief silence and another series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of photographs.
“Okay then, comrade, I’ll be off.”
He had a bus to catch.
“So!” Comrade Pillai’s smile broadened as he turned all his attention like a searchlight on Rahel. His gums were startlingly pink, the reward for a lifetime’s uncompromising vegetarianism. He was the kind of man whom it was hard to imagine had once been a boy. Or a baby. He looked as though he had been born middle aged. With a receding hairline.
“Mol’s husband?” he wanted to know.
“Hasn’t come.”
“Any photos?”
“No.”
“Name?”
“Larry. Lawrence.”
“Oower. Lawrence.” Comrade Pillai nodded as though he agreed with it. As though given a choice, it was the very one he would have picked.
“Any issues?”
“No,” Rahel said.
“Still in planning stages, I suppose? Or expecting?’
“No.”
“One is must. Boy, girl. Anyone,” Comrade Pillai said. “Two is of course your choice.”
“We’re divorced.” Rahel hoped to shock him into silence. “Die-vorced?” His voice rose to such a high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word as though it were a form of death.
“That is most unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most unfortunate.”
