India was a Free Country
You could make salt. Row jam, if you wanted to.
The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man could just walk in through the gauze doors,
If he wanted to.
And Ammu would offer him pineapple juice. With ice.
Rahel sat on the edge of a cement vat (frothy ends of buckram and lace, delicately dipped in tender mango pickle) and tried on the
rubber finger guards. Three bluebottles fiercely fought the gauze doors, wanting to be let in. And Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle-smelling silence that lay between the twins like a bruise.
Rahel’s fingers were Yellow Green Blue Red Yellow. Estha’s jam was stirred.
Rahel got up to go. For her Afternoon Gnap.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere.”
Rahel took off her new fingers, and had her old finger-colored fingers back. Not yellow, not green, not blue, not red. Not yellow
“I’m going to Akkara,” Estha said. Not looking up. “To the History House.”
Rahel stopped and turned around, and on her heart a drab moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts unfurled its predatory wings.
Slow out.
Slow in.
“Why?” Rahel said.
“Because Anything can Happen to Anyone,” Estha-said. “It’s Best to be Prepared.’
You couldn’t argue with that.
Nobody went to Kari Saipu’s house anymore. Vellya Paapen claimed to be the last human being to have set eyes on it. He said that it was haunted. He had told the twins the story of his encounter with Kari Saipu’s ghost. It happened two years ago, he said. He had gone across the river, hunting for a nutmeg tree to make a paste of nutmeg and fresh garlic for Chella, his wife, as she lay dying of tuberculosis. Suddenly he smelled cigar smoke (which he recognized at once, because Pappachi used to smoke the same brand). Vellya Paapen whirled around and hurled his sickle at the smell. He pinned the ghost to the trunk of a rubber tree, where, according to Vellya Paapen, it still remained. A sickled smell that bled clear, amber blood, and begged for cigars.
Vellya Paapen never found the nutmeg tree, and had to buy himself a new sickle. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that his lightning-quick reflexes (despite his mortgaged eye) and his presence of mind had put an end to the bloodthirsty wanderings of a pedophile ghost.
As long as no one succumbed to its artifice and unsickled it with a cigar.
What Vellya Paapen (who knew most things) didn’t know was that Kari Saipu’s house was the History House (whose doors were locked and windows open). And that inside, map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails whispered to the lizards on the wall. That History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues. That default led to dire consequences. That on the day History picked to square its books, Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid.
Vellya Paapen had no idea that Kari Saipu it was who captured dreams and re-dreamed them. That he plucked them from the minds of passersby the way children pick currants from a cake. That the ones he craved most of all, the dreams he loved re-dreaming, were the tender dreams of two-egg, twins.
Poor old Vellya Paapen, had he known then that History would choose him for its deputy, that it would be his tears that set the Terror rolling, perhaps he would not have strutted like a young cockerel in the. Ayemenem bazaar, bragging of how he swam the river with his sickle in his mouth (sour, the taste of iron on his tongue). How he put it down for just one moment while he kneeled to wash the river-grit out of his mortgaged eye (there was grit in the river sometimes, particularly in the rainy months) when he caught the first whiff of cigar smoke. How he picked up his sickle, whirled around and sickled the smell that fixed the ghost forever. All in a single fluid, athletic motion.
By the time he understood his part in History’s Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps. He had swept his footprints away himself. Crawling backwards with a broom.
In the factory the silence swooped down once more and tightened around the twins. But this time it was a different kind of silence. An old river silence. The silence of Fisher People and waxy mermaids.
“But Communists don’t believe in ghosts,” Estha said, as though they were continuing a discourse investigating solutions to the ghost problem. Their conversations surfaced and dipped like mountain streams. Sometimes audible to other people. Sometimes not.
“Are we going to become a Communist2” Rahel asked.
“Might have to.”
Estha-the-Practical.
Distant cake-crumbled voices and approaching Blue Army footsteps caused the Comrades to seal the secret.
It was pickled, sealed and put away. A red, tender-mango-shaped secret in a vat. Presided over by a Nowl.
The Red Agenda was worked out and agreed upon:
Comrade Rahel would go for her Afternoon Gnap, then lie awake until Ammu fell asleep. —
Comrade Estha would find the flag (that Baby Kochamma had been forced to wave), and wait for her by the river and there they would:
(b) Prepare to prepare to be prepared.
A child’s abandoned Fairy Frock (semipickled) stood stiffly on its own in the middle of Ammu’s darkened bedroom floor.
Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot. Rahel lay next to Ammu, wide awake in her matching airport knickers. She could see the pattern of the cross-stitch flowers from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on Ammu’s cheek. She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.
The slow ceiling fan. The sun behind the curtains. The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzz.
A disbelieving lizard’s blink.
High-stepping chickens in the yard.
The sound of the sun crinkling the washing. Crisping white bedsheets. Stiffening starched saris. Off-white and gold.
Red ants on yellow stones.
A hot cow feeling hot. Amhoo. In the distance.
And the smell of a cunning Englishman ghost, sickled to a rubber tree, asking courteously for a cigar.
“Umm… excuse me? You wouldn’t happen to have an umm… cigar, would you?”
In a kind, schoolteacherly voice.
And Estha waiting for her. By the river. Under the mangosteen tree that Reverend E.John Ipe had brought home from his visit to Mandalay.
What was Estha sitting on?
On what they always sat on under the mangosteen tree. Something gray and grizzled. Covered in moss and lichen, smothered in ferns. Something that the earth had claimed. Not a log. Not a rock.
Before she completed the thought, Rahel was up and running. Through the kitchen, past Kochu Maria fast asleep. Thickwrinkied like a sudden rhinoceros in a frilly apron.
Past the factory.
