and-white photograph). She wore a set of protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi’s silver thimble fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays drinking only from a thimble.) She held out a lit candle in each hand. One leg of her denim bell-bottoms was rolled up to expose a white, bony knee on which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel (arguing away any evidence to the contrary, photographs, memories) how there was a pretty good chance that they were bastards, and what bastard really meant. This had entailed an involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. “See what they do is…”
That was only days before she died.
Sophie Mol.
Thimble-drinker.
Coffin-cartwheeler.
She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight. Hatted, bellbottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
Chapter 6.
Cochin Kangaroos
Cochin Airport, Rahel’s new knickers were polka-dotted and still crisp. The rehearsals had been rehearsed. It was the Day of the Play. The culmination of the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week.
In the morning at the Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu—who had dreamed at night of dolphins and a deep blue— helped Rahel to put on her frothy Airport Frock. It was one of those baffling aberrations in Ammu’s taste, a cloud of stiff yellow lace with tiny silver sequins and a bow on each shoulder. The frilled skirt was underpinned with buckram to make it flare. Rahel worried that it didn’t really go with her sunglasses.
Ammu held out the crisp matching knickers for her. Rahel, with her hands on Ammu’s shoulders, climbed into her new knickers (left leg, right leg) and gave Ammu a kiss on each dimple (left cheek, right cheek). The elastic snapped softly against her stomach.
“Thank you, Ammu,” Rahel said.
“Thank you?” Ammu said.
“For my new frock and knickers,” Rahel said.
Ammu smiled.
“You’re welcome, my sweetheart,” she said, but sadly.
You’re welcome, my sweetheart.
The moth on Rahel’s heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold. A little less her mother loved her.
The Sea Queen room smelled of eggs and filter coffee. On the way to the car, Estha carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the tap water. Rahel carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the boiled water. Eagle vacuum flasks had Vacuum Eagles on them, with their wings spread, and a globe in their talons. Vacuum Eagles, the twins believed, watched the world all day and flew around their flasks all night. As silently as owls they flew, with the moon on their wings.
Estha was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt with a pointed collar and black drainpipe trousers. His puff looked crisp and surprised. Like well-whipped egg white.
Estha—with some basis, it must be admitted—said that Rahel looked stupid in her Airport Frock. Rahel slapped him, and he slapped her back.
They weren’t speaking to each other at the airport
Chacko, who usually wore a mundu, was wearing a funny tight suit and a shining smile. Ammu straightened his tie, which was odd and sideways. It had had its breakfast and was satisfied.
Ammu said, “What’s happened suddenly to our Man of the Masses?”
But she said it with her dimples, because Chacko was so burst. So very happy.
Chacko didn’t slap her.
So she didn’t slap him back.
From the Sea Queen florist Chacko had bought two red roses, which he held carefully.
Fatly.
Fondly.
The airport shop, run by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, was crammed with Air India Maharajahs (small medium large), sandalwood elephants (small medium large) and papier-macha masks of kathakali dancers (small medium large). The smell of cloying sandalwood and terry-cotton armpits (small medium large) hung in the air.
In the Arrivals Lounge, there were four life-sized cement kangaroos with cement pouches that said USE ME. In their pouches, instead of cement joeys, they had cigarette stubs, used matchsticks, bottle caps, peanut shells, crumpled paper cups and cockroaches.
Red betel spitstains spattered their kangaroo stomachs like fresh wounds.
Red-mouthed smiles the Airport Kangaroos had.
And pink-edged ears.
They looked as though if you pressed them they might say Mama in empty battery voices.
When Sophie Mol’s plane appeared in the skyblue Bombay-Cochin sky the crowd pushed against the iron railing to see more of everything.
The Arrivals Lounge was a press of love and eagerness, because the Bombay-Cochin flight was the flight that all the Foreign Returnees came home on.
Their families had come to meet them. From all over Kerala. On long bus journeys. From Ranni, from Kumili, from Vizhinjam, from Uzhavoor. Some of them had camped at the airport overnight, and had brought their food with them. And tapioca chips and chakka velaichathu for the way back.
They were all there—the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopans, the pining wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancaes to be reassessed. The teacher’s husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher’s husband’s sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire-bender’s pregnant wife.
“Mostly sweeper class,” Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, not wanting to give up her Good Place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby’s penis into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him.
“Sssss...” his mother hissed. First persuasively, then savagely. But her baby thought he was the pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle.
“Don’t forget that you are Ambassadors of India,” Baby Kochamma told Rahel and Estha. “You’re going to form their First Impression of your country.”
Two-egg Twin Ambassadors. Their Excellencies Ambassador E(lvis). Pelvis, and Ambassador S(tick). Insect.
In her stiff lace dress and her fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo, Rahel looked like an Airport Fairy with appalling taste. She was hemmed in by humid hips (as she would be once again, at a funeral in a yellow church) and grim eagerness. She had her grandfather’s moth on her heart. She turned away from the screaming steel bird in the skyblue sky that had her cousin in it, and what she saw was this: redmouthed roos with ruby smiles moved cemently across the airport floor.
Heel and Toe
Heel and Toe
