he thought, because you couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, isn’t it? Maybe you’re scared Paati’s really sitting in that chair and you can’t see her.
Amma only said breezily, “Oh, why should we selfishly hang on to things we can’t use? The dustbin men will probably want it. It’s still usable, after all. Some families would kill for a chair like that.”
Suresh considered this. Some families killed for lesser reasons, but poor chairless families, needing the chair-ity of rich families, were driven to violence only by their desperation. The thought was terrible and wonderful: skinny men in open-chested shirts with red bandanas around their heads, wrestling for an old rattan chair while the women and children gasped and shrieked in the background. Then one of them would pull out a gleaming knife. He’d pick up the chair in one arm and his beauty-marked, melon-breasted village belle in the other; he’d hoist the chair on his back, slip his bloody knife back under his belt, and before you knew it he’d be leaping across the moonlit rooftops, leaving the others to moan in their spreading pools of blood.
On Monday morning, when the dustbin men came to collect the rubbish, they picked up the chair and tossed it playfully between them. “This one’s for you, Ayappan,” one of them chortled, “you can sit in it and eat your thairsadham and scratch your armpits.” “Ei, maddayan!” Ayappan shot back, as the other demonstrated the armpit-scratching part of the deal. “The family personally told me it was for you, special-special only, for you to sit on the porch and comb your lovely locks.” When they exhausted the chair’s possibilities they dropped it, dumped the rubbish into their lorry and drove away. It lay on the grassy verge by the culvert, where Aasha could hear its labored breathing. In the evening Amma dragged it into the backyard and left it by the shed. “Oo wah, style-style only these dustbin men nowadays,” she said. “Those days they used to grab whatever we left for them. Broken also they would fight for it. Now even we would lose to them in taste and class, lah!” she grumbled, as if she’d paid for the old kind of dustbin man and received the new kind in the post.
And there by the shed the chair has remained since last night, upside down, the watery stains of Paati’s numerous failed attempts to make it to the bathroom in time visible even on the underside of its sagging seat. One stain shaped like a one-eared bunny, another like a fat frog, a third like a butterfly. Three of Paati’s silver hairs, relics of a particularly savage combing by Chellam, are caught between two loose strips of rattan on the back of the chair. Its unraveling legs stick up in the air like the limbs of some dead mouse awaiting the ant armies.
As Aasha watches from the back door, Uma drags the chair to the hump by the garden wall and sets it right side up. Then she walks back to the shed, opens the door, and goes in.
While she’s inside, Paati’s ghost slips out from behind the tamarind tree and takes her rightful place in the chair, regal and disdainful as a queen. Is that where she’s been hiding all these days, behind the tamarind tree, since Amma first put the chair out for the dustbin men? No one knows, and before Aasha has a chance to ask her, Uma comes back. She’s carrying a big tin with both hands, her shoulders hunched in such a way Aasha can tell it’s heavy.
Then, in a shattering surge of memory, Aasha realizes what it is: a tin of kerosene. She’s seen Mat Din the gardener pour kerosene on his piles of branches and weeds before he lights his bonfires, huge, roaring, smoky flame-towers that darken the sky and make the birds disappear for hours.
Uma sets the tin down by her feet and folds her arms once more. There are permanent bags under her eyes because she hasn’t slept in a week. Oh, she’s caught forty winks here and a catnap there, but the winks are carefully rationed, thirty-eight thirty-nine forty okay enough, and the catnaps are not the cozy indulgences of the happy housepet but the vigilant sleep of the one-eye-open one-ear-missing stray. In the past week, the loose weave of her occasional slumber has let in many undesirable objects: old promises issued and received; the inexplicable scent of Yardley English Lavender talcum powder; a long sigh that revealed itself, when she opened her eyes, to have been nothing more than a sheet of paper blown by the ceiling fan from her desk to the floor.
The children call this grassy mound the ceremonial hump, for it was here that Amma burned her hand-embroidered, Kanchipuram silk wedding saree one long-ago morning after Appa didn’t come home all night. Uma had watched from the back door, and Paati had reminded her once again how much cleverer, how much worldlier and tougher and classier she was than her Amma, because she had her father’s blood in her and would therefore never do something as crass as throwing a fit in the backyard for all the neighbors to see.
And two years after the saree-burning, Uma and Suresh and Aasha buried Sassy the cat by the hump after Mr. Balakrishnan from across the street ran her over in his car in the middle of the night. If you’re not careful, Suresh has warned Aasha ever since, if you accidentally step on that hump or even brush against it carelessly, Sassy’s clawed foot—just white-white bones only, no more flesh—will burst through and grab your ankle.
In the old days, before Uma stopped speaking, she and Suresh used to take turns pushing Aasha around the hump on her tricycle, chanting:
Sassyhump
Dead cat bump
Smelly wormy rotty lump!
Once Aasha flew head-first off the tricycle into the African daisies, her foot grazing the hump. Her full-throated wail had brought Lourdesmary hurtling out into the backyard like a bumblebee launched from a cannon. “A big monkey like you, pushing your sister until she falls!” she scolded Uma. “You should have known better.”
Surely, surely, Aasha thinks now, watching Uma from the back door, Uma should also know better than to do whatever terrible thing she is going to do.
Except that Uma doesn’t think what she’s about to do is so terrible; in fact, she has deemed it necessary. One should never forget that all things pass: hopes, cats, chairs, life itself, each a spun-glass rose in a monkey’s hand. In the twinkling of an eye everything can change, and there’s never any going back. You can’t bring a dead cat back to life. You can’t resurrect a saree or a marriage from two charred tassels. You most certainly can’t uncrack the cracked skull of a cantankerous grandmother by imagining her back in her unraveling rattan chair.
Only Aasha sees the ghosts arrive from all directions, united by their unhealthy fascination with tragedy, with unfinishable business and lingering discontent. All the bloodsucking pontianaks about whom Chellam once warned the children; all the red-eyed, fleet-footed toyols; all the polongs and pelesits; and among them, almost unnoticed (but for Aasha’s extra-sharp eyes), Mr. McDougall’s petal-pretty daughter, a little afraid, a little unsure, but curious nevertheless. And though her bubble of a heart skips a beat at the sight of Uma—those dark, unblinking eyes, those impetuous movements, all these recall her mother’s most dangerous days—she’s resolved to provide her customary moral support to Aasha in lonely and troubled times.
The ghosts converge on the backyard like crows, long tresses streaming, red eyes glowing. They look at Paati in her chair and whisper to each other. They settle on tree branches and on the rims of flowerpots. They bear Aasha no ill will, yet she knows they would not be here if some ghastly spectacle were not about to unfold. She also knows that no one—not she herself, not Mr. McDougall’s fervent daughter, not any of the other ghosts with their hot breath and their portentous mouths—can reach Uma now. Uma’s stepped behind her invisible glass door and locked it; Aasha recognizes the signs.
On the garden wall, swinging his skinny legs, sits Suresh. He tilts his head back and pours into his mouth, while keeping a vigilant eye on Uma, an entire box of Chiclets he found on the schoolbus this afternoon. (You never know when someone might catch you and confiscate the Chiclets you’ve been saving so wisely and with so much restraint—and then where will you be? Better to relish life wholeheartedly while you can.) In his mouth the Chiclets form a fat, minty wad, smooth in some places but still surprisingly grainy in others. He bites down and bursts a hidden bubble with a snap. He watches Uma douse Paati’s chair in kerosene and draw a matchbox from under the waistband of her