touched herself her flesh was taut and smooth. Under her hands her nipples wrinkled and hardened like dark nuts, pulling at the soft skin on her breasts. The thin line of down from her belly button led over the gentle curve of the base of her belly, to her dark triangle. Like an arrow directing a lost traveler. An inexperienced lover
She undid her hair and turned around to see how long it had grown. It fell, in waves and curls and disobedient frizzy wisps—soft on the inside, coarser on the outside—to just below where her small, strong waist began its curve out towards her hips. The bathroom was hot. Small beads of sweat studded her skin like diamonds. Then they broke and trickled down. Sweat ran down the recessed line of her spine. She looked a little critically at her round, heavy behind. Not big in itself. Not big per se (as Chacko-of-Oxford would no doubt have put it). Big only because the rest of her was so slender. It belonged on another, more voluptuous body.
She had to admit that they would happily support a toothbrush apiece. Perhaps two. She laughed out loud at the idea of walking naked down Ayemenem with an array of colored toothbrushes sticking out from either cheek of her bottom. She silenced herself quickly. She saw a wisp of madness escape from its bottle and caper triumphantly around the bathroom.
Ammu worried about madness.
Mammachi said it ran in their family. That it came on people suddenly and caught them unawares. There was Pathil Ammai, who at the age of sixty-five began to take her clothes off and run naked along the river, singing to the fish. There was Thampi Chachen, who searched his shit every morning with a knitting-needle for a gold tooth he had swallowed years ago. And Dr. Muthachen, who had to be removed from his own wedding in a sack. Would future generations say, “There was Ammu—Ammu Ipe. Married a Bengali. Went quite mad. Died young. In a cheap lodge somewhere.”
Chacko said that the high incidence of insanity among Syrian Christians was the price they paid for Inbreeding. Mammachi said it wasn’t.
Ammu gathered up her heavy hair, wrapped it around her face, and peered down the road to Age and Death through its parted strands. Like a medieval executioner peering through the tilted eye-slits of his peaked black hood at the executionee. A slender, naked executioner with dark nipples and deep dimples when she smiled. With seven silver stretchmarks from her two-egg twins, born to her by candlelight amid news of a lost war.
It wasn’t what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish, perhaps it would only have been Not to Know. Not to know what each day held in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend. And Ammu knew. Or thought she knew, which was really just as bad (because if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish). And what Ammu knew (or thought she knew) smelled of the vapid, vinegary fumes that rose from the cement vats—of Paradise Pickles. Fumes that wrinkled youth and pickled futures.
Hooded in her own hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep.
For herself.
For the God of Small Things.
For the sugar-dusted twin midwives of her dream.
That afternoon—while in the bathroom the fates conspired to horribly alter the course of their mysterious mother’s road, while in Velutha’s backyard an old boat waited for them, while in a yellow church a young bat waited to be born—in their mother’s bedroom, Estha stood on his head on Rahel’s bum.
The bedroom with blue curtains and yellow wasps that worried the windowpanes. The bedroom whose walls would soon learn their harrowing secrets.
The bedroom into which Ammu would first be locked and then lock herself. Whose door Chacko, crazed by grief, four days after Sophie Mol’s funeral, would batter down.
“Get out of my house before I break every bone in your body!”
My house. My pineapples. My pickle.
After that for years Rahel would dream this dream: a fat man, faceless, kneeling beside a woman’s corpse. Hacking its hair off. Breaking every bone in its body. Snapping even the little ones. The fingers. The ear bones cracked like twigs. Snapsnap the soft sound of breaking bones. A pianist killing the piano keys. Even the black ones. And Rahel (though years later, in the Electric Crematorium, she would use the slipperiness of sweat to slither out of Chacko’s grasp) loved them both. The player and the piano.
The killer and the corpse.
As the door was slowly battered down, to control the trembling of her hands, Ammu would hem the ends of Rahel’s ribbons that didn’t need hemming.
“Promise me you’ll always love each other,” she’d say, as she drew her children to her.
“Promise,” Estha and Rahel would say. Not finding words with which to tell her that for them there was no Each, no Other.
Twin millstones and their mother. Numb millstones. What they had done would return to empty them. But that would be Later.
Lay Ter. A deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery and furred like moth’s feet.
At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The color of a ribbon. The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns—that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse—was suddenly lost.
“Pack your things and go,” Chacko would say, stepping over the debris. Looming over them. A chrome door handle in his hand. Suddenly strangely calm. Surprised at his own strength. His bigness. His bullying power. The enormity of his own terrible grief.
Red the color of splintered doorwood.
Ammu, quiet outside, shaking inside, wouldn’t look up from her unnecessary hemming. The tin of colored ribbons would lie open on her lap, in the room where she had lost her Locusts Stand I.
The same room in which (after the Twin Expert from Hyderabad had replied) Ammu would pack Estha’s little trunk and khaki holdall: 12 sleeveless cotton vests, 12 half-sleeved cotton vests.
Promise, Estha would say. Not wholly cognizant of his situation. The sharp edge of his apprehensions blunted by this sudden wealth of worldly possessions. They were His. And had his name on them in ink. They were to be packed into the trunk (with his name on it) that lay open on the bedroom floor.
The room to which, years later, Rahel would return and watch a silent stranger bathe. And wash his clothes with crumbling bright blue soap.
Flatmuscled, and honey colored. Sea-secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop on his ear.
Chapter 12.
