“What if Ammu finds us and begs us to come back?”
“Then we will. But only if she begs.”
Estha-the-Compassionate.
Sophie Mol had convinced the twins that it was essential that she go along too. That the absence of children, all children, would heighten the adults’ remorse. It would make them truly sorry; like the grown-ups in Hamelin after the Pied Piper took away all their children. They would search everywhere and just when they were sure that all three of them were dead, they would return home in triumph. Valued, loved, and needed more than ever. Her clinching argument was that if she were left behind she might be tortured and forced to reveal their hiding place.
Estha waited until Rahel got in, then took his place, sitting astride the little boat as though it were a seesaw. He used his legs to push the boat away from the shore. As they lurched into the deeper water they began to row diagonally upstream, against the current, the way Velutha had taught them to. (If you want to end up there, you must aim
In the dark they couldn’t see that they were in the wrong lane on a silent highway full of muffled traffic. That branches, logs, parts of trees, were motoring towards them at some speed.
They were past the Really Deep, only yards from the Other Side, when they collided with a floating log and the little boat tipped over. It had happened to them often enough on previous expeditions across the river and they would swim after the boat and, using it as a float, dog-paddle to the shore. This time, they couldn’t see their boat in the dark. It was swept away in the current. They headed for the shore, surprised at how much effort it took them to cover that short distance.
Estha managed to grab a low branch that arched down into the water. He peered downriver through the darkness to see if he could see the boat at all.-
“I can’t see anything. It’s gone.”
Rahel, covered in slush, clambered ashore and held a hand out to help Estha pull himself out of the water. It took them a few minutes to catch their breath and register the loss of the boat. To mourn its passing.
“And all our food is spoiled,” Rahel said to Sophie Mol and was met with silence. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming silence.
“Sophie Mol?” she whispered to the rushing river. “We’re here! Here! Near the illimba tree!”
Nothing.
On Rahel’s heart Pappachi’s moth snapped open its somber wings.
Out.
In.
And lifted its legs.
Up.
Down.
They ran along the bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway. Graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it,
There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy.
Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist
It was four in the morning, still dark, when the twins, exhausted, distraught and covered in mud, made their way through the swamp and approached the History House. Hansel and Gretel in a ghastly fairy tale in which their dreams would be captured and re-dreamed. They lay down in the back verandah on a grass mat with an inflatable goose and a Qantas koala bear. A pair of damp dwarfs, numb with fear, waiting for the world to end.
“D’you think she’s dead by now?”
Estha didn’t answer.
“What’s going to happen?”
“We’ll go to jail.”
He Jolly Well knew. Little Man. He lived in a Cara-van. Dum dum.
They didn’t see someone else lying asleep in the shadows. As lonely as a wolf. A brown leaf on his black back. That made the monsoons come on time.
Chapter 17.
Cochin Harbor Terminus
In his clean room in the dirty Ayemenem House, Estha (not old, not young) sat on his bed in the dark. He sat very straight. Shoulders squared. Hands in his lap. As though he was next in line for some sort of inspection. Or waiting to be arrested.
The ironing was done. It sat in a neat pile on the ironing board. He had done Rahel’s clothes as well.
It was raining steadily. Night rain. That lonely drummer practicing his roll long after the rest of the band has gone to bed.
In the side mittam, by the separate “Men’s Needs” entrance, the chrome tailfins of the old Plymouth gleamed momentarily in the lightning. For years after Chacko left for Canada, Baby Kochamma had had it washed regularly. Twice a week for a small fee, Kochu Maria’s brother-in-law who drove the yellow municipal garbage truck in Kottayam would drive into Ayemenem (heralded by the stench of Kottayam’s refuse, which lingered long after he had gone) to divest his sister-in-law of her salary and drive the Plymouth around to keep its battery charged. When she took up television, Baby Kochamma dropped the car and the garden simultaneously. Tutti-frutti.
With every monsoon, the old car settled more firmly into the ground. Like an angular, arthritic hen settling stiffly on her clutch of eggs. With no intention of ever getting up. Grass grew around its flat tires. The PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES signboard rotted and fell inward like a collapsed crown.
A creeper stole a look at itself in the remaining mottled half of the cracked driver’s mirror.
A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way in through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
Kochu Maria was asleep on the drawing-room floor, curled into a comma in the flickering light of the television that was still on. American policemen were stuffing a handcuffed teenaged boy into a police car. There was blood spattered on the pavement. The police-car lights flashed and a siren wailed a warning. A wasted woman, the boy’s mother perhaps, watched fearfully from the shadows. The boy struggled. They had used a mosaic blur on the upper part of his face so that he couldn’t sue them. He had caked blood all over his mouth and down the front of his T-shirt like a red bib. His babypink lips were lifted off his teeth in a snarl. He looked like a werewolf. He screamed through the car window at the camera.
“I’m fifteen years old and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear my pathetic story?”
He spat at the camera and a missile of spit splattered over the lens and dribbled down.
Baby Kochamma was in her room, sitting up in bed, filling in a Listerine discount coupon that offered a two-rupee rebate on their new 500m1 bottle and two-thousand-rupee gift vouchers to the Lucky Winners of their lottery.
Giant shadows of small insects swooped along the walls and ceiling. To get rid of them Baby Kochamma had put out the lights and lit a large candle in a tub of water. The water was already thick with singed carcasses. The candlelight accentuated her rouged cheeks and painted mouth. Her mascara was smudged. Her jewelry gleamed.
She tilted the coupon towards the candle.
