No way, no fear, not even if the police come. None of this is his problem. Not even if Uma is flagrantly breaking a rule she herself made up at a long-ago feline funeral: no bonfires in the backyard, she’d said when he’d suggested cremating Sassy. Well, look at her now. Rules, too, were fragile.
Aasha steps out into the backyard and makes her way, holding her breath, clenching her fists, past the teeming ghosts. At the tamarind tree, directly across from Uma, she stops and kneels. The ground here is covered with tough, brown tamarind pods, and because Aasha’s helpless hands itch to do something, she gathers them up in familiar fistfuls and pulls them apart for the seeds. She fills her pockets with these, as if they were insurance against future catastrophe.
“Don’t you wish we could do something?” Mr. McDougall’s daughter whispers to her. She’s sidled past the others to come and kneel beside Aasha. “But maybe we’ve no choice. Nobody really cares what we want. My Ma,” she begins, and for once Aasha doesn’t want to hear her story—not now, she thinks, not now, I have to keep both eyes and both ears on Uma—“you know how my ma wouldn’t let go of my hand that day? So tight she held it. Nobody ever held my hand like that before so I was a little bit happy. A little bit happy and a big bit frightened. It was all mixed up. When my ma jumped, at first I didn’t realize we’d jumped, that’s how mixed up I was.”
“Wait a minute,” says Aasha, because Uma’s lighting the match. But Mr. McDougall’s daughter, trapped as always in the net of her last memory, goes on:
“The whole time we were falling through the air, my ma held on to my hand. I could feel her fingers with my eyes closed, and I could hear her breathing, and I could feel her long hair on my neck. The air wasn’t hot anymore while we were falling. But now I know she only held my hand to comfort herself. And to make sure I didn’t get away.”
Uma flings her match onto the chair and steps back.
“It was a long way down to the water,” Mr. McDougall’s daughter remembers, “a long long time between jumping and swallowing water. I counted to twenty and I wasn’t even counting fast. Even when we hit the water my ma didn’t let go of my hand. And all the while we were sinking, she still didn’t let go of it.”
There’s a brief burst of flame as the kerosene burns. Paati clutches the armrests and pulls her feet up onto the seat.
Mr. McDougall’s daughter turns a terror-stricken, fire-lit face to Aasha. For a long moment they stare at each other, two old friends marooned together on the uncertain island of adult whims. At least they have each other. In Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s grey eyes the fire glows amber.
Undeterred, pitiless, Uma licks her dry lips and waits. Aasha drops a handful of tamarind seeds. Click, clack, click, they slip through her fingers and fall onto other seeds already under the tree. She stands up. She takes one step forward, no more. She thinks of Uma in The Three Sisters in July, emoting onstage as she never does at home; of Uma reciting long, winding lines in funny English before her mirror; of Uma standing on the rug outside the bathroom, wrapped in one towel and drying her hair with another, smiling, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs under her breath. That is the real Uma; this is a different Uma, blind, unforgiving, a dangerous shapeshifter.
On the wall Suresh snaps his gum again. And again. Snap! The sound cracks like a whip in Aasha’s face. She flinches and sniffs. She rubs her nose with an index finger. The air is full of smoke and frying pork from the Wongs’ kitchen. She waits, balanced on her heels.
Paati’s chair braces itself for a difficult battle. It stiffens its arms and hunkers down, while on the seat, tight and tiny as a coiled pangolin now, Paati cowers.
Oh, Uma should know better, she should. A big monkey like her, trying to set fire to a chair that’s been sitting outside in the damp for days. What’s left of the flame singes the three silver hairs, chars the chair’s thick legs on the outside, and begins to subside. So Uma adds more kerosene. Then she folds her arms across her chest and hugs herself as if she’s cold, as if the weather is different where she stands.
Slowly, gleefully, sensuously, the flames finally begin to creep up the legs of Paati’s chair. Paati trembles and covers her face. The heat of the fire lays its gold-flecked wings across Aasha’s face, and a drop of sweat traces a searching trail down the misted glass of Uma’s invisible door. From someone’s television set the Muslim call to prayer lifts off into the air like a man in a billowy white robe tiptoeing lightly off a roof.
Allah-u akhbar! Allaaaaaah-u akhbar! The man’s sleeves fill like sails. There he hangs, not rising or falling, looking up and down and left and right for some thoughts to think.
The man turns into a dove.
The chair crumples and kneels, weeping, gathering its skirts of flame about itself.
It’s just a scrap of a chair with a scrap of a ghost in it, a skin-and-bones ghost whose feet don’t touch the ground. What an unbearable indignity it is that Paati must summon her few remaining shreds of will to outwit these new flames that tastelessly echo the funereal flames of just-last-week. It’s entirely possible that this time, weakened by those first flames, deprived of days of teatime omapoddi and curry puffs, Paati will not make it.
Aasha opens her mouth to scream. Suresh snaps his gum, three times in a row, each louder than the last, because that’s all he can do without sticking his own neck out. But it’s too late. The scream rolls roundly out of Aasha’s mouth, like a bubble escaping from an underwater balloon, and shoots up to the leafy top of the tamarind tree. On its way it pops against a sharp, low branch and spills its words onto the rain-dark earth.
“Uma, Uma, please don’t burn Paati, please! Pull her out! Pull her out! Pleeeease!” The last please quivers, turns to liquid, and seeps into the damp soil, suffusing the roots of the tamarind tree in its desperate grief. Next week Lourdesmary will complain that its fruit is becoming less succulent, drying out and turning too fibrous in the pod.
Transparent Paati lies amid the flames, limp as an empty plastic bag, her eyes slightly surprised, her head and chest and belly growing smaller and smaller as they melt. Stunned and saddened, the other ghosts drift off down the driveway in twos and threes, like mourners going home after a small child’s funeral. Unsure how to arrange their faces or hold their heads.
At the last possible minute, just as the fire begins to lick at her chin, Paati spirits herself out of the flames with a final burst of her posthumous strength. She’s put everything she had into this effort, and now she spirals up to the sky in a puff of smoke, a decrepit little genie with no wishes to grant. Her deflated head and chest and belly refill like balloons. Aasha holds her breath and hopes Uma hasn’t noticed; she would close her eyes, too, but then she wouldn’t be able to make sure Uma doesn’t leap up and grab Paati by a foot and hurl her back into the flames. But Uma’s flame eyes are glued to the crackling chair. Paati is safe, after all; she’s lost nothing but the ends of her hair to the fire. All the same, she’s had a good scare. Now she drifts off towards the Wongs’ house, and after a moment Aasha hears Baldy start to whimper at nothing on his porch swing.
After the bonfire dies, Uma goes indoors to finish packing. Aasha climbs the stairs behind her, a woeful pull-along toy on an invisible string. With silent wheels instead of squeaky ones, and cracks in hidden places.
Yellow light spills out of Uma’s open door, setting the dark wood of the floor agleam. Almost as if she were inviting Aasha in, Uma leaves her door open tonight. But on the landing, Aasha stops, unsure. She studies Paati’s wedding picture, an old black-and-white photograph with blurred outlines, hairlines bleeding into faces, noses melting into mouths. Grave, handlebar-mustachioed men in suspenders and bow ties. Women with accusing eyes, necks and wrists heavy with gold. And, seated cross-legged on the grass, a little girl with ringlets, in a frothy white frock and sturdy dark boots ridiculous in the Madras heat. No one seems to know her name, though Aasha once offered Paati suggestion after suggestion. Meenakshi? Malathi? Madavi? Radhika? If they knew then, the mustachioed men sweating under their collars or their aching-necked wives, no one knows now. Probably the little girl grew