“Does what count?”
“The happiness—does it count?”
She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff.
Because the truth is, that only what
The simple, unswerving wisdom of children.
If you eat fish in a dream, does it count? Does it mean you’ve eaten fish?
The cheerful man without footprints—did he count?
Ammu groped for her tangerine transistor, and switched it on. It played a song from a film called Chemmeen.
It was the story of a poor girl who is forced to marry a fisherman from a neighboring beach, though she loves someone else. When the fisherman finds out about his new wife’s old lover, he sets out to sea in his little boat though he knows that a storm is brewing. It’s dark, and the wind rises. A whirlpool spins up from the ocean bed.
There is storm-music, and the fisherman drowns, sucked to the bottom of the sea in the vortex of the whirlpool.
The lovers make a suicide pact, and are found the next morning, washed up on the beach with their arms around each other. So everybody dies. The fisherman, his wife, her lover, and a shark that has no part in the story, but dies anyway. The sea claims them all.
In the blue cross-stitch darkness laced with edges of light, with cross-stitch roses on her sleepy cheek, Ammu and her twins (one on either side of her) sang softly with the tangerine radio. The song that fisherwomen sang to the sad young bride as they braided her hair and prepared her for her wedding to a man she didn’t love.
Pandoru mukkuvan muthinupoyi,
(Once a fisherman went to sea,)
Padinjaran katarbu mungipoyi,
(The west wind blew and swallowed his boat,)
An Airport-Fairy frock stood on the floor, supported by its own froth and stiffness. Outside in the mittam, crisp saris lay in rows and crispened in the sun. Off-white and gold. Small pebbles nestled in their starched creases and had to be shaken out before the saris were folded and taken in to be ironed.
Arayathi pennu pizhachu poyi,
(His wife on the shore went astray,)
The electrocuted elephant (not Kochu Thomban) in Ettumanoor was cremated. A giant burning ghat was erected on the highway. The engineers of the concerned municipality sawed off the tusks and shared them unofficially. Unequally. Eighty tins of pure ghee were poured over the elephant to feed the fire. The smoke rose in dense fumes and arranged itself in complex patterns against the sky. People crowded around at a safe distance, read meanings into them.
There were lots of flies.
Kadalamma avaney kondu poyi.
(So Mother Ocean rose and took him away.)
Pariah kites dropped into nearby trees, to supervise the supervision of the last rites of the dead elephant. They hoped, not without reason, for pickings of giant innards. An enormous gallbladder, perhaps. Or a charred, gigantic spleen.
They weren’t disappointed. Nor wholly satisfied.
Ammu noticed that both her children were covered in a fine dust. Like two pieces of lightly sugar-dusted, unidentical cake. Rahel had a blond curl lodged among her black ones. A curl from Velutha’s backyard. Ammu picked it out.
“I’ve told you before,” she said. “I don’t want you going to his house. It will only cause trouble.”
What trouble, she didn’t say. She didn’t know.
Somehow, by not mentioning his name, she knew that she had drawn him into the tousled intimacy of that blue cross-stitch afternoon and the song from the tangerine transistor. By not mentioning his name, she sensed that a pact had been forged between her Dream and the World. And that the midwives of that pact were, or would be, her sawdust-coated two-egg twins.
She knew who he was—the God of Loss, the God of Small Things. Of coarse she did.
She switched off the tangerine radio. In the afternoon silence (laced with edges of light), her children curled into the warmth of her. The smell of her. They covered their heads with her hair. They sensed somehow that in her sleep she had traveled away from them. They summoned her back now with the palms of their small hands laid flat against the bare skin of her midriff. Between her petticoat and her blouse. They loved the fact that the brown of the backs of their hands was the exact brown of their mother’s stomach skin.
“Estha, look,” Rahel said, plucking at the line of soft down that led southwards from Ammu’s belly button.
“Here’s where we kicked you.” Estha traced a wandering silver stretchmark with his finger
“Was it in the bus, Ammu?”
“On the winding estate road?”
“When Baba had to hold your tummy?”
“Did you have to buy tickets?”
“Did we hurt you?”
And then, keeping her voice casual, Rahel’s question: “D’you think he may have lost our address?”
Just the hint of a pause in the rhythm of Ammu’s breathing made Estha touch Rahel’s middle finger with his. And middle finger to middle finger, on their beautiful mother’s midriff, they abandoned that line of questioning.
“That’s Estha’s kick, and that’s mine,” Rahel said. “…And that’s Estha’s and that’s mine.”
Between them they apportioned their mother’s seven silver stretch marks. Then Rahel put her mouth on Ammu’s stomach and sucked at it, pulling the soft flesh into her mouth and drawing her head back to admire the shining oval of spit and the faint red imprint of her teeth on her mother’s skin.
Ammu wondered at the transparency of that kiss. It was a clear-as-glass kiss. Unclouded by passion or desire—that pair of dogs that sleep so soundly inside children, waiting for them to grow up. It was a kiss that demanded no kiss-back.
Not a cloudy kiss full of questions that wanted answers. Like the kisses of cheerful one-armed men in dreams.
Ammu grew tired of their proprietary handling of her. She wanted her body back. It was hers. She shrugged her children off the way a bitch shrugs off her pups when she’s had enough of them. She sat up and twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Then she swung her legs off the bed, walked to the window and drew back the curtains.
Slanting afternoon light flooded the room and brightened two children on the bed.
The twins heard the lock turning in Ammu’s bathroom door.
Click.
Ammu looked at herself in the long mirror on the bathroom door and the specter of her future appeared in it to mock her. Pickled. Gray. Rheumy-eyed. Cross-stitch roses on a slack, sunken cheek.
Withered breasts that hung like weighted socks. Dry as a bone between her legs, the hair feather-white. Spare. As brittle as a pressed fern.
Skin that flaked and shed like snow.
Ammu shivered.
With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived. That her cup was full of dust. That the air, the sky, the trees, the sun, the rain, the light and darkness were all slowly turning to sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs, her mouth. Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach.
Ammu undressed and put a red toothbrush under a breast to see if it would stay. It didn’t Where she
