The God of Small Things

It occurred to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers’ bourgeois decadence.

One was mad. The other die-vorced. Probably barren.

Perhaps this was the real revolution. The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self-destruct.

Comrade Pillai lowered his voice as though there were people listening, though there was no one about.

“And Mon?” he whispered confidentially. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Rahel said. “He’s fine.”

Fine. Flat and bony-colored. He washes his clothes with crumbling soap.

“Aiyyo paavam,” Comrade Pillai whispered, and his nipples drooped in mock dismay. “Poor fellow.”

Rahel wondered what he gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at least bother to pretend otherwise?

“Lenin is in Delhi now,” Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride. “Working with foreign embassies. See!”

He handed Rahel the cellophane sachet. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands with a very well-dressed, very pink man.

“German First Secretary,” Comrade Pillai said.

They looked cheerful in the photographs, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

Rahel remembered the incident that made Lenin swim into focus as a Real Person for her and Estha, when they stopped regarding him as just another pleat in his mother’s sari. She and Estha were five, Lenin perhaps three or four years old. They met in the clinic of Dr. Verghese Verghese (Kottayam’s leading Pediatrician and Feeler-up of Mothers). Rahel was with Ammu and Estha (who had insisted that he go along). Lenin was with his mother, Kalyani. Both Rahel and Lenin had the same complaint—Foreign Objects Lodged Up Their Noses. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence now, but somehow hadn’t then. It was curious how politics lurked even in what children chose to stuff up their noses. She, the granddaughter of an Imperial Entomologist, he the son of a grassroots Marxist Party worker. So, she a glass bead, and he a green gram.

The waiting room was full.

From behind the doctor’s curtain, sinister voices murmured, interrupted by howls from savaged children. There was the clink of glass on metal, and the whisper and bubble of boiling water. A boy played with the wooden Doctor is IN-Doctor is OUT sign on the wall, sliding the brass panel up and down. A feverish baby hiccupped on its mother’s breast. The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.

No one read the magazines.

From below the scanty curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street came the relentless slipslap of disembodied feet in slippers. The noisy, carefree world of Those with Nothing Up Their Noses.

Ammu and Kalyani exchanged children. Noses were pushed up, heads bent back, and turned towards the light to see if one mother could see what the other had missed. When that didn’t work, Lenin, dressed like a taxi- yellow shirt, black stretchlon shorts—regained his mother’s nylon lap (and his packet of Chiclets). He sat on sari flowers and from that unassailable position of strength surveyed the scene impassively. He inserted his left forefinger deep into his unoccupied nostril and breathed noisily through his mouth. He had a neat side parting. His hair was slicked down with Ayurvedic oil. The Chiclets were his to hold before the doctor saw him, and to consume after. All was well with the world. Perhaps he was a little too young to know that Atmosphere in Waiting Room, plus Screams from Behind Curtain, ought logically to add up to a Healthy Fear of Dr. V. V.

A rat with bristly shoulders made several busy journeys between the doctor’s room and the bottom of the cupboard in the waiting room.

A nurse appeared and disappeared through the tattered curtained doctor’s door. She wielded strange weapons. A tiny vial. A rectangle of glass with blood smeared on it A test tube of sparkling, back-lit urine. A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles. The hairs on her legs were pressed like coiled wires against her translucent white stockings. The box heels of her scuffed white sandals were worn away on the insides, and caused her feet to slope in, towards each other. Shiny black hairpins, like straightened snakes, clamped her starched nurse’s cap to her oily head.

She appeared to have rat-filters on her glasses. She didn’t seem to notice the bristly-shouldered rat even when it scuttled right past her feet. She called out names in a deep voice, like a man’s: A. Ninan… S.Kusumolatha… B. V. Roshini… N. Ambady. She ignored the alarmed, spiraling air.

Estha’s eyes were frightened saucers. He was mesmerized by the Doctor is IN—Doctor is OUT sign.

A tide of panic rose in Rahel. “Ammu, once again let’s try.” Ammu held the back of Rahel’s head with one hand. With her thumb in her handkerchief she blocked the beadless nostril. All eyes in the waiting room were on Rahel. It was to be the performance of her life. Estha’s expression prepared to blow its nose. Furrows gathered on his forehead and he took a deep breath.

Rahel summoned all her strength. Please God, please make it come out. From the soles of her feet, from the bottom of her heart, she blew into her mother’s handkerchief.

And in a rush of snot and relief, it emerged. A little mauve bead in a glistening bed of slime. As proud as a pearl in an oyster. Children gathered around to admire it. The boy who was playing with the sign was scornful.

“I could easily do that!” he announced.

“Try it and see what a slap you’ll get,” his mother said. “Miss Rahel!” the nurse shouted and looked around. “It’s Out!” Ammu said to the nurse. “It’s come out.” She held up her crumpled handkerchief.

The nurse had no idea what she meant.

“It’s all right. We’re leaving,” Ammu said. “The bead’s out.”

“Next,” the nurse said, and closed her eyes behind her rat-filters. (“It takes all kinds,” she told herself.) “S. V. S. Kurup!”

The scornful boy set up a howl as his mother pushed him into the doctor’s room.

Rahel and Estha left the clinic triumphantly. Little Lenin remained behind to have his nostril probed by Dr. Verghese Verghese’s cold steel implements, and his mother probed by other, softer ones.

That was Lenin then.

Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.

Rahel handed Comrade Pillai back the sachet of photographs and tried to leave. “One mint,” Comrade Pillai said. He was like a flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples and then forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life-in-a-Minute) to the last one.

“Orkunnundo?”

It was an old black-and-white picture. One that Chacko took with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma had brought him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin, Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of the Ayemenem House. Behind them Baby Kochamma’s Christmas trimmings hung in loops from the ceiling. A cardboard star was tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked like frightened animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their sides, chests swiveled to face the photographer. As though standing sideways was a sin.

Only Sophie Mol, with First World panache, had prepared for herself, for her biological father’s photo, a face. She had turned her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked like pink-veined flesh petals (gray in a black-