too eagerly towards Amma. “My eldest,” he said, lowering his eyes as if fully conscious that the replacement offering was inadequate. “Vasanthi.” Appa looked at this thin, dark girl, several inches taller than he, too awkward to meet his eyes as she mumbled her pleasedtomeetyou, and saw, with considerable surprise, that she was beautiful. Excruciatingly gauche, yes, and quite dark, but the first oddly underscored her beauty, and the second was a matter of taste in which he took some pride. He liked obscure Continental writers, game, and dark women; among his friends he had a reputation as a man of rarefied appetites. And so he stored her away for future use, this girl whose loveliness could not be suppressed by her unfashionable oiled braids or by the probably unshaven legs beneath her drab ankle-length skirt; for now, he had other matters to see to. A father to cremate, three sisters to marry off.
It was a whole year before Amma met her new neighbor again. Between the slats of the shutters she saw him come and go in his pea-green Morris Minor every day, getting out of the car to open and close the high iron gates of the Big House. She knew in which pocket he kept his house keys (left), which way he ran the chain around the gate (always clockwise) before he padlocked it, and how many pairs of dress shoes he owned (three, two black and one brown). She learned to recognize the days when he was going to court by the black coat he carried on a hanger. She noticed when he came home with a new pair of glasses, in stylish horn-rimmed frames. One Saturday afternoon she saw him come out to the gate to pay the newspaper boy, wearing a cotton singlet and a checkered sarong, still sucking his lunch out of his teeth. She smiled to herself, and the wan light of her smile seeped out through the shutter slats and pooled in a patient, watery circle on the top of Appa’s Brylcreemed head.
When his sisters were married, one after the other, Amma watched from the upstairs windows as men put up marquees in the compound and strung colored bulbs from the awnings. The smell of sweetmeats frying in ghee wafted up to her, and every now and then a voice would detach itself from the general murmur: the shrill, nasal scolding of a fat old matron, a child’s whine, a man’s sozzled laughter. Her father attended all three weddings alone, the envelope of money for the newlyweds crisp in the front pocket of the batik shirt she’d ironed. The morning after each of these weddings there was a crumbling laddoo in a serviette on the dining table for whichever of her brothers was first to rise that day.
After the third wedding had been successfully executed and his youngest sister packed off to make her new home with her country-doctor husband in Padang Rengas, Appa went to call at the pale green bungalow next door. He sat in the sitting room and talked to Amma’s father, man to man; Ammachi stayed in her room reading the Gita, and whether Appa had heard tell of her odd habits, or merely thought it natural that she should leave them to their business, he didn’t inquire that day after the lady of the house. “Vasanthi!” Amma’s father called after Appa had been greeted and seated. “Can’t you see we have a guest? Our own next-door neighbor and you’re taking one hour to bring a cup of tea and some titbits, what is this?” Amma made the tea and laid out half a dozen ginger snaps and a plate of murukku on a bamboo tray. She looked in the mirror above the kitchen sink, wet her palms, and smoothed down her housework hair. Then she stepped through the bead curtain in the entryway and took the tea tray into the sitting room. Behind her the curtain drizzled quietly back into place. “Bleddi fool of a girl!” her father grumbled to his guest as she left the room. “First time you are coming to the house and she puts the murukku on a chipped plate. Useless bleddi girl, I tell you.” “It’s okay, Uncle,” she heard Appa say with his mouth full, “the murukku will still taste just as good.” At that visit Appa asked Amma’s father’s permission to have a brick wall built between their houses. “No offense, Uncle,” he said. “The hedge breeds mosquitoes, that is all. Without it it’ll be one job less for the gardener I’ll be hiring.” When that was settled he asked Amma’s father’s permission to take his daughter out.
Every Saturday for a year after that visit, while he was scrambling up the steep slopes of his career, Appa took Amma out with only her two youngest brothers as chaperones.
Brushing her hair, dabbing eau de toilette on her wrists, ironing her cotton skirts before these outings, what did Amma imagine lay at the Technicolor conclusion of her courtship?
Certainly not the crumbling white shell her parents called a marriage.
Nor would there be anything seamy about their marital bliss. It would have nothing in common with the vulgar cavortings of Tamil-film couples or the school gardener’s leer whenever a girl’s petticoat had showed under the hem of her skirt. No, their joy would be cool and pure and exalted. On the weekends she would bake cakes; when she had a baby they would have family portraits taken at a studio.
In Appa’s eyes, her lack of experience added to her allure. He would introduce her to the wonders of eros; she would bloom under his expert tutelage. Already he relished the prospect.
“That girl?” Paati said when she found out who was occupying his Saturday afternoons. “That clerk’s daughter? After all your foreign education? Why not look for a girl of your own standing?” This, as far as Paati was concerned, had been the purpose of all her husband’s hard work: that his sons should have the pick of the country’s marriageable Indian maidens. “She’s not even nice-looking also,” Paati reasoned. “As shapeless as a coconut tree, and so black.”
“Oh, come off it,” Appa said. “As if I’m marrying the girl tomorrow. Just a way to pass the weekends, that’s all.”
She believed him; hadn’t he always been the good son, the one who’d followed his father’s advice, taken a sensible degree, and written home every week? It’s true, she thought, he’s not serious about that girl. Well, let him have his fun. He’s young. Already saddled with so much responsibility, poor thing.
What she couldn’t have guessed: spice the satisfaction he already derived from his unusual tastes with a dash of the forbidden and a soupçon of public disapproval, and Appa was well and truly hooked. After all the years he’d been away, she hardly knew him. He’d left a boy and come back a half-foreign man, and every detail of that transformation startled her. The smell of cologne in the bathroom in the mornings; the plummy accent he couldn’t turn off even for her or the servants; the lordly, masculine way he spread himself out and drank whiskey after dinner, one arm thrown over the back of the chair next to him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened.
And so Appa’s casual lie about the tenor of his association with Amma slid smoothly down Paati’s throat as, away from Kingfisher Lane but still under the eagle eyes of Amma’s young brothers, he closed suavely in on his quarry.
“Ah, I look forward to this all week,” he told her every Saturday when he picked her and her brothers up for the matinee show at the Lido Theatre. “The thought that on Saturday I shall get to take the most beautiful girl in town to the pictures keeps me going from Monday to Friday.” And, when she averted her eyes in response and tucked her hair behind her ears: “I’m sure a girl like you must be inured to all these compliments by now, eh?” He knew it wasn’t true; he knew no one had ever paid this girl a compliment in all her mean, miserable life. One Saturday as she came out into the sitting room where Appa waited for her, her father stuck his head out from behind his newspaper, grunted with mild amusement, and said, “Who you trying to fool, Vasanthi? I think so Raju here still has his eyesight. Each week doing some fancy-fancy new thing with your hair, as if it makes any difference to your donkey face.” He looked at Appa with a “Hah!” that was more an order to laugh than an invitation. But Appa did not comply. He stood up, opened the door for Amma, and said, without taking his eyes off her, “I do indeed still have my eyesight, Uncle, and it’s yours I’m worried about. Either you’re blind, or you come from a land of supernally beautiful donkeys.”
“Hah!” Amma’s father said again. But his defeat was evident; he had not sufficiently understood Appa’s retort to attempt one of his own. Out of the corner of his eye Appa saw the pinched look on his face as he retreated behind his newspaper, but directly in front of him he saw Amma’s hungry, luminous eyes meet his own, and in them he recognized at once what he had longed for all this time, what had been lacking in the attentions of Lily and Claudine and Nalini: gratitude. This girl was