“Wrong,” Chacko said. He turned to Mammachi, smiling a proud smile that his mother couldn’t see. “She’s as lovely as ever.”
“I was very sorry to hear about… Joe,” Mammachi said. She sounded only a little sorry. Not very sorry.
There was a short, Sad-About-Joe silence.
“Where’s my Sophie Mol?” Mammachi said. “Come here and let your grandmother look at you.”
Sophie Mol was led to Mammachi. Mammachi pushed her dark glasses up into her hair. They looked up like slanting cat’s eyes at the moldy bison head. The moldy bison said, “No. Absolutely Not.” In Moldy Bisonese.
Even after her cornea transplant, Mammachi could only see light and shadow. If somebody was standing in the doorway, she could tell that someone was standing in the doorway. But not who it was. She could read a check, or a receipt, or a banknote only if it was close enough for her eyelashes to touch it. She would then hold it steady, and move her eye along it. Wheeling it from word to word.
The Townspeople (in her fairy frock) saw Mammachi draw Sophie Mol close to her eyes to look at her. To read her like a check. To check her like a banknote. Mammachi (with her better eye) saw redbrown hair (N… Nalmost blond), the curve of two fatfreckled cheeks (Nnnn… almost rosy), bluegrayblue eyes.
“Pappachi’s nose,” Mammachi said. “Tell me, are you a pretty girl?” she asked Sophie Mol.
“Yes,” Sophie Mol said.
“And tall?”
“Tall for my age,” Sophie Mol said.
“Very tall,” Baby Kochamma said. “Much taller than Estha.”
“She’s older,” Ammu said.
“Still …” Baby Kochamma said.
A little way away, Velutha walked up the shortcut through the rubber trees. Barebodied. A coil of insulated electrical wire was looped over one shoulder. He wore his printed dark-blue-andblack mundu loosely folded up above his knees. On his back, his lucky leaf from the birthmark tree (that made the monsoons come on time). His autumn leaf at night.
Before he emerged through the trees and stepped into the driveway, Rahel saw him and slipped out of the Play and went to him.
Ammu saw her go.
Offstage, she watched them perform their elaborate Official Greeting. Velutha curtsied as he had been taught to, his mundu spread like a skirt, like the English dairymaid in “The King’s Breakfast” Rahel bowed (and said “Bow”). Then they hooked little fingers and shook hands gravely with the mien of bankers at a convention.
In the dappled sunlight filtering through the dark-green trees, Ammu watched Velutha lift her daughter effortlessly as though she was an inflatable child, made of air. As he tossed her up and she landed in his arms, Ammu saw on Rahel’s face the high delight of the airborne young.
She saw the ridges of muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed—so quietly, from a flatmuscled boy’s body into a man’s body. Contoured and hard. A swimmer’s body. A swimmer-carpenter’s body. Polished with a high-wax body polish.
He had high cheekbones and a white, sudden smile.
It was his smile that reminded Ammu of Velutha as a little boy. Helping Vellya Paapen to count coconuts. Holding out little gifts he had made for her, flat on the palm of his hand so that she could take them without touching him. Boats, boxes, small windmills. Calling her Ammukutty. Little Ammu. Though she was so much less little than he was. When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw in the march. She hoped it had been him that had raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against.
She hoped it had been him.
She was surprised at the extent of her daughter’s physical ease with him. Surprised that her child seemed to have a sub-world that excluded her entirely. A tactile world of smiles and laughter that she, her mother, had no part in. Ammu recognized vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.
The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the rug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed.
In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn’t seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers.
Simple things.
For instance, he saw that Rahel’s mother was a woman.
That she had deep dimples when she smiled and that they stayed on long after her smile left her eyes. He saw that her brown arms were round and firm and perfect That her shoulders shone, but her eyes were somewhere else. He saw that when he gave her gifts they no longer needed to be offered flat on the palms of his hands so that she wouldn’t have to touch him. His boats and boxes. His little windmills. He saw too that he was not necessarily the only giver of gifts. That she had gifts to give him, too.
This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment.
Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History’s fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Ammu walked up to the verandah, back into the Play. Shaking.
Velutha looked down at Ambassador S. Insect in his arms. He put her down. Shaking too.
“And look at you!” he said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock. “So beautiful! Getting married?”
Rahel lunged at his armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!
“I saw you yesterday,” she said.
“Where?” Velutha made his voice high and surprised.
“Liar,” Rahel said. “Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a flag. And you ignored me.”
“
“Which Long-lost Twin brother?”
“Urumban, silly… The one who lives in Kochi.”
“Who Urumban?” Then she saw the twinkle. “Liar! You haven’t got a Twin brother! It wasn’t Urumban! It was
Velutha laughed. He had a lovely laugh that he really meant.
“Wasn’t me,” he said. “I was sick in bed.”
“See, you’re smiling!” Rahel said. “That means it was you. Smiling means ‘It was you.’”
“That’s only in English!” Velutha said. “In Malayalam my teacher always said that `Smiling means it wasn’t me.’”
It took Rahel a moment to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickike ickilee ickike!
Still laughing, Velutha looked into the Play for Sophie. “Where’s our Sophie Mol? Let’s take a look at her.
