in her spare time; Nalini Dorai entertained dreams of producing avant-garde political plays in Kuala Lumpur. These women were his equals, and they knew it. They looked him in the eye. They asked him to spell out his dreams for them: How, Raju? How will you convince the Party you’re the best man for the job? What’ll your platform be? Why would your average Ah Chong and Ramasamy vote for you? They flirted with him, viewed him with curiosity, fondness, and, yes, it had to be said, indulgence. Oh, that Raju. Such a darling. Such big-big dreams for our half-past-six country. Ah, but what would we do without angry young men like him to hope, yeah? Every nation needs them. Appa knew full well what they said about him behind his back; it was not what he wanted his wife saying. His wife would be admiring, respectful, adoring, but more than that—what was it he imagined? What was the quality so clearly lacking in Lily and Claudine and Nalini, who did, however grudgingly, admire him and his grand vision? Appa could not put his finger on it, but he knew he’d recognize it when he found it.
NEXT DOOR to the Big House, in the squat bungalow one day to be occupied by Baldy Wong and his harried parents, lived Amma, her six siblings, her father, and her mother. The house was barely visible from the street, situated as it was at the bottom of a narrow, dark garden thick with mango trees and hanging parasitic vines. Appa’s parents had never entered that house or any of the others in the neighborhood, nor invited any of their neighbors into the Big House; they had never even discussed such social adventuring. The Big House had stood aloof from its neighbors in Mr. McDougall’s time, and Tata and Paati had seen no reason to change the established order of the street. Among the other neighbors, Amma’s father was known to be the sort of man who kept to himself, who held his family to a life of quiet decorum and high principles. He’d been a bookkeeper for a cement factory; when the business had foundered and his British bosses had talked about retrenching their staff, he’d taken an early retirement to allow a younger colleague to keep his job. Word had spread. He was a decent man, a good man, a man who was vegetarian twice a week and didn’t let his daughters wear above-the-knee skirts. He spent his days listening to the wireless radio he’d bought after his retirement and watching the four angelfish he kept in a small tank. Once a month he allowed himself a solitary treat of the latest Tamil film at the Grand Theatre in Jubilee Park (choice of two masalvadai or one bottle Fanta Grape as intermission refreshment).
Behind his bland grey doors he regularly beat his modestly clad daughters with his leather belt, and had once held a meat cleaver to his wife’s neck when she’d gone into town to post a letter without his knowledge. None of his neighbors ever discovered his belt-and-cleaver tactics, which was somewhat of a pity, if only because several of them would have admired this ultimate show of mastery from a man they’d pegged as a phlegmatic, fish-feeding teetotaler.
The year that Appa came home from Singapore, Amma was twenty years old and still fit into her box-pleated Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus pinafore. No one, least of all Amma herself, had ever noticed her unpolished beauty: the reedy figure Uma would inherit from her; the impossibly straight teeth in her rare smile; the glossy skin all her negligence could not tarnish; the suggestion of concealed intelligence and unrelieved concentration in her eyes. To her siblings and schoolmates she was an unfortunate exemplum of all the worst physical characteristics of Tamil stock: skinny, shapeless legs, almost-black skin, frizzy hair. To her father her eyes betrayed nothing but impudence, stubbornness, and a secretly mutinous spirit. She was the eldest child, already careworn, slouching a little to hide her height. Her voice had a grainy edge. She’d struggled but never been a star at school, faithfully attended miserable, muddy practices but never been good at games. She’d disappointed her father’s belt-mourned dreams of an oldest son with a straight back and shiny shoes, who would be captain of the hockey team and study medicine in England. She’d watched helplessly as her mother, Ammachi, receded into an austere life of the spirit once she judged her children to be old enough to fend for themselves. “I’ve done my worldly duty as a wife and mother,” Ammachi had declared on her youngest child’s sixth birthday. “Vasanthi is already fifteen years old; she can run the house as well as I can. It’s time I went on to the third stage of life.”
“Ohoho,” her husband had proclaimed to the fidgeting relatives and neighbors who had, for the first time anyone could remember, been invited to a party at their house, “look at that, my Eighth Standard– educated wife is suddenly turning into a great Hindu scholar it seems! What all does this third stage involve, may I ask? Wandering naked from temple to temple? Begging for food with a wooden bowl?”
“Illaiyai,” Ammachi had demurred softly, frowning to herself as though her husband’s questions had been born of honest curiosity. “No, all that is the fourth stage, yaar,” she said, neatly placing slices of cake on saucers and handing them to Amma to pass around the table. “Fourth stage only is sannyasa, complete and total renunciation. Third stage is the stage of the forest dweller,” she said enigmatically, licking a blob of butter icing off one finger, “vanaprastya.”
But it had been decades since the last forests around Ipoh had given way to housing estates and cement factories, so Ammachi devised her own makeshift vanaprastya, comprising several non-negotiable elements: fasting three times a week, reading the Upanishads alone in her fanless white-curtained room, shunning meat, and sleeping on a wooden board. In just a few months she grew oblivious to the daily domestic struggles going on outside her door. She lay on her board chanting endless, booming mantras, humming bhajans, blind to the loneliness of a daydreaming oldest daughter being driven slowly to the brink of a terrible womanhood by her brood of needy, bickering siblings.
After a year, deciding perhaps that worldliness adhered to her sweaty skin like dust whenever she crossed the threshold of her room, she stopped leaving it altogether (with one unfortunate exception). When her meals were brought to her she ate only the rice or chapattis and drank all the water; the rest of the food, dhals and curries and bhajis, she pushed to the rim of her eversilver plate and arranged in neat little mounds with her spoon. After a week of this she left a note for Amma under the water tumbler on her tray. “Please: only rice or chapattis once a day,” it read, and after that when Amma brought in the tray and tried to coax her to eat two spoons of dhal or three French beans she’d shake her head, hold up one index finger, and pause in the chanting of the day’s mantra to repeat only that first word, please, inflected upwards as if it were a mnemonic device meant to call forth, from the recesses of Amma’s faulty memory, a profusion of words.
By far the most egregious result of her mother’s sequestration was the chamber pot, which was in fact not a chamber pot at all but an earthenware cooking vessel that Ammachi had taken from the kitchen on one of her last forays outside her room. It had its own earthenware lid and sat covered under her mattressless bed, but when Amma brought in her meal each afternoon the stench did brave battle with the smells of the family’s dinner simmering on the kitchen stove, so that when Amma stood in that bleak room, her blindsided faculties perceived the contents of the pots on the stove and those of the pot under the bed to be essentially interchangeable. Simmering shit, festering dhal, sizzling turds, it was all the same to her. Astonishing that excrement composed entirely of rice or bread—and that only one at a time—could pack such a punch. Amma’s head swam as if she’d lost a pint of blood, and as soon as she was out the door each afternoon she gagged, she swooned, she lay down on the settee with the back of her wrist on her forehead and dreamed ugly, malodorous dreams. It was true that Ammachi let no one else touch the pot; it was part of her humble new deal with the universe that she reject no task as being beneath her, that she welcome the lowliest, most odious of burdens as an opportunity to asphyxiate the id. Every night Ammachi waited until the family was asleep, and then, barefoot and squinting in the dark, stole out to an abandoned outhouse that no one had used since the Japanese occupation, to empty the pot into its narrow black hole. But her humility, as far as Amma was concerned, was all for nothing; Amma’s imagination, fertilized by her mother’s rich effluvia and flourishing as rapidly as the rest of her was withering, needed only to hear the click of her mother’s door and the shuffled footsteps across the corridor to conjure up unanswerable questions—why did she have to use the outhouse? why not empty the pot in the bathroom, where no risk of tripping on a pebble, of missing the dark hole in the night, of blindly splashing her own saree with its seething contents, presented itself?—and unbearable pictures.