Did you remember to bring her, or did you leave her behind?”
“Don’t look there,” Rahel said urgently.
She stood up on the cement parapet that separated the rubber trees from the driveway, and clapped her hands over Velutha’s eyes.
“Why?” Velutha said.
“Because,” Rahel said, “I don’t want you to.”
“Where’s Estha Mon?” Velutha said, with an Ambassador (disguised as a Stick Insect disguised as an Airport Fairy) hanging down his back with her legs wrapped around his waist, blindfolding him with her sticky little hands. “I haven’t seen him.”
“Oh, we sold him in Cochin,” Rahel said airily. “For a bag of rice. And a torch.”
The froth of her stiff frock pressed rough lace flowers into Velutha’s back. Lace flowers and a lucky leaf bloomed on a black back.
But when Rahel searched the Play for Estha, she saw that he wasn’t there.
Back inside the Play, Kochu Maria arrived, short, behind her tall cake.
“Cake’s come,” she said, a little loudly, to Mammachi. Kochu Maria always spoke a little loudly to Mammachi because she assumed that poor eyesight automatically affected the other senses.
“Kandoo Kochu Mariye?” Mammachi said. “Can you see our Sophie Mol?”
“Kandoo, Kochamma,” Kochu Maria said extra loud. “I can see her.”
She smiled at Sophie Mol, extra wide. She was exactly Sophie Mol’s height. More short than Syrian Christian, despite her best efforts.
“She has her mother’s color,” Kochu Maria said.
“Pappachi’s nose,” Mammachi insisted.
“I don’t know about that, but she’s very beautiful,” Kochu Maria shouted. “
Littleangels were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms. Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport-Fairy frocks with forehead bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. And backwards-reading habits.
And if you cared to look, you could see Satan in their eyes. Kochu Maria took both Sophie Mol’s hands in hers, palms upward, raised them to her face and inhaled deeply.
“What’s she doing?” Sophie Mol wanted to know, tender London hands clasped in calloused Ayemenem ones. “Who’s she and why’s she smelling my hands?”
“She’s the cook,” Chacko said. “That’s her way of kissing you.”
“Kissing?” Sophie Mol was unconvinced, but interested. “How marvelous!” Margaret Kochamma said. “It’s a sort of sniffing! Do the Men and Women do it to each other too?”
She hadn’t meant it to sound quite like that, and she blushed. An embarrassed schoolteacher-shaped Hole in the Universe.
“Oh, all the time!” Ammu said, and it came out a little louder than the sarcastic mumble that she had intended. “That’s how we make babies.”
Chacko didn’t slap her.
So she didn’t slap him back.
But the Waiting Air grew Angry.
“I think you owe my wife an apology, Ammu,” Chacko said, with a protective, proprietal air (hoping that Margaret Kochamma wouldn’t say “Ex-wife Chacko!” and wag a rose at him).
“Oh no!” Margaret Kochamma said. “It was my fault! I never meant it to sound quite like that… what I meant was—I mean it is fascinating to think that—”
“It was a perfectly legitimate question,” Chacko said. “And I think Ammu ought to apologize.”
“Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?” Ammu asked.
“Oh dear,” Margaret Kochamma said.
In the angry quietness of the Play (the Blue Army in the greenheat still watching), Ammu walked back to the Plymouth, took out her suitcase, slammed the door, and walked away to her room, her shoulders shining. Leaving everybody to wonder where she had learned her effrontery from.
And truth be told, it was no small wondering matter.
Because Ammu had not had the kind of education, nor read the sorts of books, nor met the sorts of people, that might have influenced her to think the way she did.
She was just that sort of animal.
As a child, she had learned very quickly to disregard the Father Bear Mother Bear stories she was given to read. In her version, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases. Mother Bear suffered those beatings with mute resignation.
In her growing years, Ammu had watched her father weave his hideous web. He was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning on them if they happened to be white. He donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. He worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father.
Ammu had endured cold winter nights in Delhi hiding in the mehndi hedge around their house (in case people from Good Families saw them) because Pappachi had come back from work out of sorts, and beaten her and Mammachi and driven them out of their home.
On one such night, Ammu, aged nine, hiding with her mother in the hedge, watched Pappachi’s natty silhouette in the lit windows as he flitted from room to room. Not content with having beaten his wife and daughter (Chacko was away at school), he tore down curtains, kicked furniture and smashed a table lamp. An hour after the lights went out, disdaining Mammachi’s frightened pleading, little Ammu crept back into the house through a ventilator to rescue her new gumboots that she loved more than anything else. She put them in a paper bag and crept back into the drawing room when the lights were suddenly switched on.
Pappachi had been sitting in his mahogany rocking chair all along, rocking himself silently in the dark. When he caught her, he didn’t say a word. He flogged her with his ivory-handled riding crop (the one that he had held across his lap in his studio photograph). Ammu didn’t cry. When he finished beating her he made her bring him Mammachi’s pinking shears from her sewing cupboard. While Ammu watched, the Imperial Entomologist shred her new gumboots with her mother’s pinking shears. The strips of black rubber fell to the floor. The scissors made snicking scissor-sounds. Ammu ignored her mother’s drawn, frightened face that appeared at the window. It took ten minutes for her beloved gumboots to be completely shredded. When the last strip of rubber had rippled to the floor, her father looked at her with cold, flat eyes, and rocked and rocked and rocked. Surrounded by a sea of twisting rubber snakes.
As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.
“Has she gone?” Mammachi asked the silence around her.
“She’s gone,” Kochu Maria said loudly.
“Are you allowed to say `damn’ in India?” Sophie Mol asked.
“Who said ‘damn’?” Chacko asked.
“She did,” Sophie Mol said. “Aunty Ammu. She said some damn godforsaken tribe.’”
“Cut the cake and give everybody a piece,” Mammachi said. “Because in England, we’re not,” Sophie Mol said to Chacko. “Not what?” Chacko said.
“Allowed to say Dee Ay Em En,” Sophie Mol said. Mammachi looked sightlessly out into the shining
