when they came to her bedroom door and asked her why she had been locked up. The careless words she hadn’t meant.
“Because of you!” Ammu had screamed. “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here! None of this would have happened! I wouldn’t be here! I would have been free! I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones round my neck!”
She couldn’t see them crouched against the door. A Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. Bewildered Twin Ambassadors-of-God-knows-what Their Excellencies Ambassadors E. Pelvis and S. Insect.
“Just go away!” Ammu had said. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone?!”
So they had.
But when the only answer Baby Kochamma got to her question about the children was something crashing against Ammu’s bedroom door, she went away. A slow dread built up inside her as she began to make the obvious, logical and completely mistaken connections between the night’s happenings and the missing children.
The rain had started early the previous afternoon. Suddenly the hot day darkened and the sky began to clap and grumble. Kochu Maria, in a bad mood for no particular reason, was in the kitchen standing on her low stool savagely cleaning a large fish, working up a smelly blizzard of fish scales. Her gold earrings swung fiercely. Silver fish scales flew around the kitchen, landing on kettles, walls, vegetable peelers, the fridge handle. She ignored Vellya Paapen when he arrived at the kitchen door, drenched and shaking. His real eye was bloodshot and he looked as though he had been drinking. He stood there for ten minutes waiting to be noticed. When Kochu Maria finished the fish and started on the onions, he cleared his throat and asked for Mammachi. Kochu Maria tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t go. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, the smell of arrack on his breath hit Kochu Maria like a hammer. She had never seen him like this before, and was a little frightened. She had a pretty good idea of what it was all about, so she eventually decided that it would be best to call Mammachi. She shut the kitchen door, leaving Vellya Paapen outside in the back mittam, weaving drunkenly in the driving rain. Though it was December, it rained as though it was June. “Cyclonic disturbance,” the newspapers called it the next day. But by then nobody was in any condition to read the papers.
Perhaps it was the rain that drove Vellya Paapen to the kitchen door. To a superstitious man, the relentlessness of that unseasonal downpour could have seemed like an omen from an angry god. To a drunk superstitious man, it could have seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. Which, in a way, it was.
When Mammachi arrived in the kitchen, in her petticoat and pale pink dressing gown with rickrack edging, Vellya Paapen climbed up the kitchen steps and offered her his mortgaged eye. He held it out in the palm of his hand. He said he didn’t deserve it and wanted her to have it back. His left eyelid drooped over his empty socket in an immutable, monstrous wink. As though everything that he was about to say was part of an elaborate prank.
“What is it?” Mammachi asked, stretching her hand out, thinking perhaps that for some reason Vellya Paapen was returning the kilo of red rice she had given him that morning.
“It’s his eye,” Kochu Maria said loudly to Mammachi, her own eyes bright with onion tears. By then Mammachi had already touched the glass eye. She recoiled from its slippery hardness. Its slimy marbieness.
“Are you drunk?’ Mammachi said angrily to the sound of the rain. “How dare you come here in this condition?”
She groped her way to the sink, and soaped away the sodden Paravan’s eye-juices. She smelled her hands when she’d finished. Kochu Maria gave Vellya Paapen an old kitchen cloth to wipe himself with, and said nothing when he stood on the topmost step almost inside her Touchable kitchen, drying himself, sheltered from the rain by the sloping overhang of the roof. —
When he was calmer, Vellya Paapen returned his eye to its rightful socket and began to speak. He started by recounting to Mammachi how much her family had done for his. Generation for generation. How, long before the Communists thought of it, Reverend E. John Ipe had given his father, Kelan, title to the land on which their hut now stood. How Mammachi had paid for his eye. How she had organized for Velutha to be educated and given him a job
Mammachi, though annoyed at his drunkenness, wasn’t averse to listening to bardic stories about herself and her family’s Christian munificence. Nothing prepared her for what she was about to hear.
Vellya Paapen began to cry. Half of him wept. Tears welled up in his real eye and shone on his black cheek. With his other eye he stared stonily ahead. An old Paravan, who had seen the Walking Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and Love.
Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of him. He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to skin.
They went to Kari Saipu’s House, Vellya Paapen said. The white man’s demon had entered them. It was Kari Saipu’s revenge for what he, Vellya Paapen, had done to him. The boat (that Estha sat on and Rahel found) was tethered to the tree stump next to the steep path that led through the marsh to the abandoned rubber estate. He had seen it there. Every night. Rocking on the water. Empty. Waiting for the lovers to return. For hours it waited. Sometimes they only emerged through the long grass at dawn. Vellya Paapen had seen them with his own eye. Others had seen them too. The whole village knew. It was only a matter of time before Mammachi found out. So Vellya Paapen had come to tell Mammachi himself. As a Paravan and a man with mortgaged body parts, he considered it his duty.
The lovers. Sprung from his loins and hers. His son and her daughter. They had made the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen.
Vellya Paapen kept talking. Weeping. Retching. Moving his mouth. Mammachi couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sound of the rain grew louder and exploded in her head. She didn’t hear herself shouting.
Suddenly the blind old woman in her rickrack dressing gown and with her thin gray hair plaited into a rat’s tail stepped forward and pushed Vellya Paapen with all her strength. He stumbled backwards down the kitchen steps and lay sprawled in the wet mud. He was taken— completely by surprise. Part of the taboo of being an Untouchable was expecting not to be touched. At least not in these circumstances. Of being locked into a physically impregnable cocoon.
Baby Kochamma, walking past the kitchen, heard the commotion. She found Mammachi spitting into the rain, THOO! THOO! THOO!, and Vellya Paapen lying in the slush, wet, weeping, groveling. Offering to kill his son. To tear him limb from limb.
Mammachi was shouting, “Drunken dog! Drunken Paravan liar!” Over the din Kochu Maria shouted Vellya Paapen’s story to Baby Kochamma. Baby Kochamma recognized at once the immense potential of the situation, but immediately anointed her thoughts with unctuous oils. She bloomed. She saw it as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and simultaneously avenging her (Baby Kochamma’s) humiliation at the hands of Velutha and the men in the march—the Modalali Mariakutty taunts, the forced flagwaving. She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin.
Baby Kochamma put her heavy arm around Mammachi.
“It must be true,” she said in a quiet voice. “She’s quite capable of it. And so is he. Vellya Paapen would not lie about something like this.”
She asked Kochu Maria to get Mammachi a glass of water and a chair to sit on. She made Vellya Paapen repeat his story, stopping him every now and then for details—whose boat? How often? How long had it been going on? —
When Vellya Paapen finished, Baby Kochamma turned to Mammachi. “He must go,” she said. “Tonight. Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.”
Then she shuddered her schoolgirl shudder. That was when she said:
With that olfactory observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled.
Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of
