she died in her bathroom and no one found out for a week. Aasha settles down on a stair and waits, chin in hands, for nothing in particular.
It’s obvious, even from Paati’s wedding photograph, that she will not share the unfortunate imagined fate of the little girl in ringlets. Eighteen years old and not a month more, Paati stands with her twenty-five-year-old groom in the front row, erect, unsmiling, feet and hands red with henna. You can see in her eyes, blurry as they are, the thousand guests that have been invited for the month-long celebration, the five canopies erected on her father’s land, the special photographer from Singapore. (Watch the birdie, Mr. and Missussssss, he’d said over and over, grinning and winking, watch the birdie, later on you can look at each other, Mr. and Missussssss! though they hadn’t been looking at each other, not then and not for days afterwards.)
Future, present, and past do brave battle in the bride’s kajaled eyes, and the photograph refuses to reveal which Paati will win.
These are the Paatis competing for supremacy, in reverse chronological order:
6) The eagle-nosed matriarch, widow of Thambusamy the Rubber Baron, Cement King, Durian Duke, etc., etc., determined to rule in her son’s house as she did in her husband’s;
5) The beautiful maddam, powdered and painted, who feels the stares of white men follow her in town;
4) The good Indian wife adept at fading, in public, into the background behind her men;
3) The young mother of a newborn bigshot lawyer, glowing with the achievement of a boy-on-first-try;
2) The shy-smiling newlywed (with feet and hands still faintly red but fading), mismeasuring the sugar for her husband’s tea and mourning the life she was used to in her father’s house;
1) The spoiled little girl who has simply to hold out her hands for extra kolukattai and jelebi, secure in the knowledge that her parents, having lost three babies before her, are wrapped around her little finger.
Or will none of these prevail? In the end, has 7) the bag of aching bones in the rattan chair staked out the surest claim in the fertile territory of other people’s memories? Or is it—no turning back now, because now that we’ve come this far we have to set a foot, however hesitant, onto the precarious ground before us—8) an even later incarnation that will stay with Paati’s survivors? A little brown heap of bones turning cold as death rattles and gurgles in its throat?
A little brown seeping heap. It trickles into drains and dark wood floors, into the white sheets of a deathbed, into Aasha’s head. She shakes her head like a wet dog. Be gone, brown heap; be gone, blood droplets; be gone, flailing hands and uncurling toes. But new waters rush in to fill Aasha’s head, bearing their own flotsam and jetsam, because once, yes, Paati was as young as Amma, and before that she was as young as Uma (and Chellam), and before that, she was as young as Aasha. Younger, even. A toddler. A baby, soft and swaddled. Not for the first time, as Aasha’s mind strains to accommodate this incredible, uncomfortable truth, something in her chest sinks and settles like silt in a slow river. She swallows and takes a deep breath; then, heavy-footed, she climbs the remaining five stairs up to Uma’s room. The door’s still open, but Uma’s at the window and doesn’t turn around when she walks in. Not that she expects Uma to comfort her; she’s grateful enough for the tender offering she knows the open door to be. And the yellow light out of which she’s been locked for years, and the view from Uma’s window, and the clean smell of her pillow. All these are Uma’s way of saying Sorry for everything.
To answer It’s okay I forgive you, she clambers onto Uma’s bed and folds her thin legs under her tartan skirt. Uma backs away from the window and returns to her packing, pulling from the shopping bags under her bed clothes stiff with newness, their tags turning like mobiles in the fan breeze: a hooded cotton sweatshirt that won’t be warm enough even on the plane; a stack of practical skin-tone panties that come up to her waist, specially picked out by Amma; a white blazer that will soon reveal itself to be comically unfashionable in New York. She lays these things on top of the clothes already in the red suitcase and smoothes them down with her hands. The suitcase smells of oilcloth on the outside, mothballs on the inside, and everywhere, inside and outside, of the cold, sterile rush of foreign airports, the rubber of conveyor belts, the suspense and rewards of Appa’s trips abroad back when the courts of young Malaysia took their appeals to their ex-Queen. Once there’d been a hand-embroidered dress for Uma in the bottom of that suitcase, once a model aeroplane kit for Suresh. Now floury mothball dust clogs the ridges of its grey lining. Uma’s eyes are too bright, her hands too quick, her nails bled white and bitten ragged.
“Uma,” whispers Aasha.
Uma looks up, and it’s only now that Aasha notices a tear hanging off her chin, round and heavy as quicksilver. The more Aasha looks at it, the more it doesn’t fall. Pictures move inside it, swirling, melting into each other like palm sugar syrup stirred into coconut milk.
Afternoon sunlight on bathroom tiles.
An eversilver tumbler of water.
A blackened chair with swirling skirts of flame.
Now there’s a tiny body (brown, with a cracked hip and a crackeder skull) in the flames instead of a chair.
Then only the flames are left.
“Uma!” Aasha gasps, and her breath makes the tear fall. Uma reaches out and touches Aasha’s cheek lightly with one cool finger, and underneath that fingertip the blood blooms hot in Aasha’s cheek. Can it be, can it really be that all is forgiven? That Aasha’s atonement for her sins of the past has been noted and accepted? Because Aasha is overcome with the surprise and thrill of being noticed at last, because she is bowled over by her own hereness and nowness, by the solid warmth of her cheek under Uma’s finger, by the volcanic joy of being not Aasha-alone-and-invisible, but Aasha-with-Uma, taking up space on Uma’s bed and in her life, she offers up all her hope in a single, shameless rush:
“Promise you’ll write to me, Uma,” she says. “Promise you’ll send me stamps and maps. And stickers for my birthday.”
Uma blinks, slow as a cow. Then she says, “Promise me you’ll never again ask for a promise or make one yourself.”
And because this is an impossible conundrum—how can she promise if she’s no longer supposed to make promises?—Aasha can do nothing but watch Uma turn back to her suitcase and stuff into it the six pairs of footwear she has wrapped in twelve plastic bags, each shoe in its own bag so that the sole of one will not besmirch the upper of its mate. Curled up on Uma’s bed for the last time, Aasha thinks about packing, about what people take and what they leave behind, about how much room there is in a suitcase, and how you can take everything you want with you wherever you go, your packed-up life, no stopping no promises. She hugs her knees to her chest and holds perfectly still, a small heap of tinder, ardent, waiting, ready.
IN 1959, when his father had been dead a full year, Appa set out to find himself a bride. Marriage was part of his first five year plan, which was itself every bit as determined, purposeful, and specific as the nation’s own. Marriage, children, two cars, servants, a job with prospects, hard-earned fame by forty: these would be the accoutrements of his climb to real power, to earning a generous piece of the national pie-in-the-oven. The climb itself had begun while he was still in Singapore, where he’d joined the Party, the only party that mattered, the party that believed in a Malaya for all Malayans, Chinese Indians Eurasians included, no matter what contrary chauvinist castles the Malays were building in the air. To Malaya, the Party would bring prosperity and peace, and to Appa, great glory both public and private.
Appa had no wish to settle down and procreate with any of the worldly women with whom he dallied. Lily Rozells, long-legged and sharp-tongued, smelled of brandy and had