The God of Small Things

of the dresses that Margaret Kochamma left in the laundry bin. Margaret Kochamma never returned the money simply because she never found it. Her pockets were emptied as a matter of routine by Aniyan the dhobi. Mammachi knew this, but preferred to construe Margaret Kochamma’s silence as a tacit acceptance of payment for the favors Mammachi imagined she bestowed on her son.

So Mammachi had the satisfaction of regarding Margaret Kochamma as just another whore, Aniyan the dhobi was happy with his daily gratuity, and of course Margaret Kochamma remained blissfully unaware of the whole arrangement.

From its perch on the well, an untidy coucal called Hwoop-Hwoop and shuffled its rust-red wings.

A crow stole some soap that bubbled in its beak.

In the dark, smoky kitchen, short Kochu Maria stood on her toes and iced the tall, double-deckered WELCOME-HOME-OUR-SOPHIE-MOL cake. Though even in those days most Syrian Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless half— sleeved white chatta with a V-neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp cloth fan on her behind. Kochu Maria’s fan was more or less hidden by the blue-and-white checked, filled, absurdly incongruous housemaid’s apron that Mammachi insisted she wear inside the house.

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened with age.

She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.

Kochu Maria hadn’t yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn’t yet seen a television set. She wouldn’t have believed television existed. Had someone suggested that it did, Kochu Maria would have assumed that he or she was insulting her intelligence. Kochu Maria was wary of other peoples’ versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier) gullibility. In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said. A few months ago, in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No sir. Nor did she trust the vague gray pictures that had appeared in the Malayala Manorama that she couldn’t read.

She remained certain that Estha, when he said, “Et ta, Kochu Maria?’ was insulting her in English. She thought it meant something like Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf. She bided her time, waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about him.

She finished icing the tall cake. Then she tipped her head back and squeezed the leftovericing onto her tongue. Endless coils of chocolate toothpaste on a pink Kochu Maria tongue. When Mammachi called from the verandah (“Kochu Mariye! I hear the car!”) her mouth was full of icing and she couldn’t answer. When she finished, she ran her tongue over her teeth and then made a series of short smacking sounds with her tongue against her palate as though she’d just eaten something sour.

Distant skyblue carsounds (past the bus stop, past the school, past the yellow church and up the bumpy red road through the rubber trees) sent a murmur through the dim, sooty premises of Paradise Pickles.

The pickling (and the squashing, the slicing, boiling and stirring, the grating, salting, drying, the weighing and bottle sealing) stopped.

“Chacko Saar vannu,” the traveling whisper went. Chopping knives were put down. Vegetables were abandoned, half cut, on huge steel platters. Desolate bitter gourds, incomplete pineapples. Colored rubber finger guards (bright, like cheerful, thick condoms) were taken off. Pickled hands were washed and wiped on cobalt-blue aprons. Escaped wisps of hair were recaptured and returned to white headscarves. Mundus tucked up under aprons were let down. The gauze doors of the factory had sprung hinges, and closed noisily on their own.

And on one side of the driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the kodam puli tree, a silent blue- aproned army gathered in the greenheat to watch.

Blue-aproned, white-capped, like a clot of smart blue-and-white flags.

Achoo, Jose, Yako, Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma, Latha, Sushila, Vijayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykutty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls with bus names). The early rumblings of discontent, concealed under a thick layer of loyalty.

The skyblue Plymouth turned in at the gate and crunched over the gravel driveway crushing small shells and shattering little red and yellow pebbles. Children tumbled out.

Collapsed fountains.

Flattened puffs.

Crumpled yellow bell-bottoms and a go-go bag that was loved. Jet-lagged and barely awake. Then the swollen-ankled adults. Slow from too much sitting.

`Have you arrived?” Mammachi asked, turning her slanty dark glasses towards the new sounds: car doors slamming, gettingoutedness. She lowered her violin.

“Mammachi!” Rahel said to her beautiful blind grandmother. “Estha vomited! In the middle of The Sound of Music! And…”

Ammu touched her slaughter gently. On her shoulder. And her touch meant Shhhh… Rahel looked around her and saw that she was in a Play. But she had only a small part.

She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree.

A face in the crowd. A Townspeople.

Nobody said Hello to Rahel. Not even the Blue Army in the greenheat.

“Where is she?” Mammachi asked the car sounds. “Where is my Sophie Mol? Come here and let me see you.”

As she spoke, the Waiting Melody that hung over her like a shimmering temple elephant’s umbrella crumbled and gently fell about like dust.

Chacko, in his What Happened to Our Man of the Masses? suit and well-fed tie, led Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol triumphantly up the nine red steps like a pair of tennis trophies that he had recently won.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

“Hello, Mammachi,” Margaret Kochamma said in her kindschoolteacher (that sometimes slapped) voice. “Thank you for having us. We needed so much to get away.”

Mammachi caught a whiff of inexpensive perfume soured at the edges by airline sweat. (She herself had a bottle of Dior in its soft green leather pouch locked away in her safe.)

Margaret Kochamma took Mammachi’s hand. The fingers were soft, the ruby rings were hard.

“Hello, Margaret,” Mammachi said (not rude, not polite), her dark glasses still on. “Welcome to Ayemenem. I’m sorry I can’t see you. As you must know, I am almost blind.” She spoke in a slow deliberate manner.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Margaret Kochamma said. “I’m sure I look terrible anyway.” She laughed uncertainly, not sure if it was the right response.