“`What in heaven’s name are you doing?’ the father shouted to Pete.” —
Salt and pepper was sprinkled on the squares of toast. Chacko paused before the punchline, laughing up at Margaret Kochamma, who was smiling at his plate.
“A voice came from deep inside the dung. `Well, Father,’ Pete said, `if there’s so much shit around, there has to be a pony somewhere!’”
Chacko, holding a fork and a knife in each hand, leaned back in his chair in the empty cafa‚ and laughed his high, hiccupping, infectious laugh till the tears poured down his cheeks. Margaret Kochamma, who had missed most of the joke, smiled. Then she began to laugh at his laugh. Their laughs fed each other and climbed to a hysterical pitch. When the owner of the cafa‚ appeared, he saw a customer (not a particularly desirable one) and a waitress (an only averagely desirable one) locked in a spiral of hooting, helpless laughter.
Meanwhile, another customer (a regular) had arrived unnoticed, and waited to be served.
The owner cleaned some already clean glasses, clinking them together noisily, and clattered crockery on the counter to convey his displeasure to Margaret Kochamma. She tried to compose herself before she went to take the new order. But she had tears in her eyes, and had to stifle a fresh batch of giggles, which made the hungry man whose order she was taking look up from his menu, his thin lips pursed in silent disapproval.
She stole a glance at Chacko, who looked at her and smiled. It was an insanely friendly smile.
He finished his breakfast, paid, and left
Margaret Kochamma was reproached by her employer and given a lecture on Cafa Ethics. She apologized to him. She was truly sorry for the way she had behaved.
That evening, after work, she thought about what had happened and was uncomfortable with herself. She was not usually frivolous, and didn’t think it right to have shared such uncontrolled laughter with a complete stranger. It seemed such an over-familiar, intimate thing to have done. She wondered what had made her laugh so much. She knew it wasn’t the joke.
She thought of Chacko’s laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time.
Chacko began to visit the cafa quite often.
He always came with his invisible companion and his friendly smile. Even when it wasn’t Margaret Kochamma who served him, he sought her out with his eyes, and they exchanged secret smiles that invoked the joint memory of their Laugh.
Margaret Kochamma found herself looking forward to the Rumpled Porcupine’s visits. Without anxiety, but with a sort of creeping affection. She learned that he was a Rhodes Scholar from India. That he read Classics. And rowed for Balliol.
Until the day she married him she never believed that she would ever consent to be his wife.
A few months after they began to go out together, he began to smuggle her into his rooms, where he lived like a helpless, exiled prince. Despite the best efforts of his scout and cleaning lady, his room was always filthy. Books, empty wine bottles, dirty underwear and cigarette butts littered the floor. Cupboards were dangerous to open because clothes and books and shoes would cascade down and some of his books were heavy enough to inflict real damage. Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic—who forgot the candles, who broke the wineglasses, who lost the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick-ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.
She had never before met a man who spoke of the world—of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it—in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.
Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them—as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp, She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
As for Chacko, Margaret Kochamma was the first female friend he had ever had. Not just the first woman that he had slept with, but his first real companion. What Chacko loved most about her was her self-sufficiency. Perhaps it wasn’t remarkable in the average Englishwoman, but it was remarkable to Chacko.
He loved the fact that Margaret Kochamma didn’t cling to him. That she was uncertain about her feelings for him. That he never knew till the last day whether or not she would marry him. He loved the way she would sit up naked in his bed, her long white back swiveled away from him, look at her watch and say in her practical way “Oops, I must be off.” He loved the way she wobbled to work every morning on her bicycle. He encouraged their differences in opinion, and inwardly rejoiced at her occasional outbursts of exasperation at his decadence.
He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him.
Of his family Margaret Kochamma knew very little. He seldom spoke of them.
The truth is that in his years at Oxford, Chacko rarely thought of them. Too much was happening in his life and Ayemenem seemed so far away. The river too small. The fish too few.
He had no pressing reasons to stay in touch with his parents. The Rhodes Scholarship was generous. He needed no money. He was deeply in love with his love for Margaret Kochamma and had no room in his heart for anyone else.
Mammachi wrote to him regularly, with detailed descriptions of her sordid squabbles with her husband and her worries about Ammu’s future. He hardly ever read a whole letter. Sometimes he never bothered to open them at all. He never wrote back.
Even the one time he did return (when he stopped Pappachi from hitting Mammachi with the brass vase, and a rocking chair was murdered in the moonlight), he was hardly aware of how stung his father had been, or his mother’s redoubled adoration of him, or his young sister’s sudden beauty. He came and went in a trance, yearning from the moment he arrived to return to the long-backed white girl who waited for him.
The winter after he came down from Balliol (he did badly in his exams), Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were married. Without her family’s consent. Without his family’s knowledge.
They decided that he should move into Margaret Kochamma’s flat (displacing the Other waitress in the Other cafa) until he found himself a job.
The timing of the wedding couldn’t have been worse.
Along with the pressures of living together came penury. There was no longer any scholarship money, and there was the full rent of the flat to be paid.
With the end of his rowing came a sudden, premature, middleaged spread. Chacko became a fat man, with a body to match his laugh.
A year into the marriage, and the charm of Chacko’s studently sloth wore off for Margaret Kochamma. It no longer amused her that while she went to work, the flat remained in the same filthy mess that she had left it in. That it was impossible for him to even consider making the bed, or washing clothes or dishes. That he didn’t apologize for the cigarette burns in the new sofa. That he seemed incapable of buttoning up his shirt knotting his tie and tying his shoelaces before presenting himself for a job interview. Within a year she was prepared to exchange the frog on the dissecting table for some small, practical concessions. Such as a job for her husband and a clean home.
Eventually Chacko got a brief, badly paid assignment with the Overseas Sales Department of the India Tea Board. Hoping that this would lead to other things, Chacko and Margaret moved to London. To even smaller, more dismal rooms. Margaret Kochamma’s parents refused to see her.
