the whole street—windows and leaves, bicycles, the Saturday smiles of Amma’s two brothers—glittered in the sunlight.
Every Saturday evening upon her return to her father’s house, he made her stand before him and deliver a thorough account of the film she’d seen. “Stand straight,” he’d say, “stand straight and talk properly.” When she’d fidgeted he’d reached out with one equine leg and hooked a foot around her ankle to jerk her closer. “What’s the matter?” he’d say. “All this high-class gallivanting around town and still you behave like a goat.” But now she knew he was doing all this just to humiliate her, because he knew she was winning, slipping from his grasp as he watched; he was in a hurry to grind her down before she got away. She’d show him, all right. Old devil. Syaitan. Think you’ll be able to bully me like this when I’m the lady of the Big House?
Of her rise in the world’s esteem she was deliciously conscious, for each week some small incident reminded her of it. One afternoon they were sitting in the FMS Bar & Restaurant, their customary teatime haunt, when Amma struck up a wordless, effervescent friendship with a child at an adjacent table. She’d caught the child’s eyes and smiled at him deliberately, wanting Appa to witness this interaction, and sure enough, just as the child began to play peekaboo with her through the bars of his chair, Appa said, “I see you’re a natural with children, after all these years mothering your brothers and sisters.”
Her brother Nitya snorted loudly at this, and his shoulders shivered with laughter over his F&N orange squash.
“Pfft!” her brother Krishen smirked.
“Nitya, Krishen,” said Appa, cuffing them one after the other on the head, “show a little respect for your Akka, please. After all she’s done for you. Bringing you up single-handedly because of your poor mother’s frail health.”
She looked up at Appa. His eyes were invisible behind the glare of his glasses, but she felt seen then, more seen than ever, her sacrifices noted, appreciated, and put into words; her sufferings keenly felt; her many weaknesses—her report card C’s, her failed geography paper, the chipped murukku bowl—forgiven.
“You want to buy comics on the way home or not?” Appa barked at the boys’ downcast faces. “Hanh?”
“Yes,” said Nitya.
“Yes, Raju Anneh,” said Krishen.
“Then hurry up and say sorry to your Akka and let’s go.”
“Sorry,” said Nitya.
“Sorry, Akka,” said Krishen.
It was, as far as she could remember, the first time anyone had ever apologized to her for anything. Never again were Nitya or Krishen offhandedly rude to her, in Appa’s presence or otherwise.
One Saturday eleven months after Appa had first picked Amma up for a matinee, they were reaching the end of their pot of tea at the FMS Bar when he announced his intention to bring dinner home to her family.
“Mee goreng and char kuay teow,” he said. “Half and half. That way there’ll be something for everyone.”
“I don’t think …” she began. “Actually there’s plenty of food in the house, I—we’ve—cooked all week, so many leftovers there are —”
“Oh yesyes, that of course,” he said hastily, “that I understand. It’s not that you don’t have food. No doubt they are not sitting and starving and waiting for my two measly bowls of noodles. But just for a change, no? It’ll be a treat for your brothers and sisters. Eh? Why always Nitya and Krishen only should be the ones nicely-nicely enjoying?” He gave Nitya an affectionate rap on the head with his knuckles. “How about it, boy?”
“Can also,” said Nitya. The more he looked at his sister, the more his misgivings encroached on his appetite. When she caught him alone he was probably going to get a few good ones. Thighpinches, mouthslaps, earboxes. Assorted hot-and-spicy treats. But mee goreng was mee goreng, and in the grand scheme of things it would be worth a few good ones.
In the car there were two enormous eversilver dishes Appa had brought for the mee goreng and char kuay teow. He parked on Anderson Road and crossed the busy street alone, holding first one dish and then the other out to a hawker as Amma and her brothers watched from the car. Krishen licking his lips. Nitya patting his rumbling belly and hoping he’d get to pick out at least six prawns before his siblings helped themselves. Amma reacquainting herself with the smoky flavor of certain doom. If Appa came to dinner at her father’s house, she knew, her friable fairy tale would crumble. Her mother’s room was just off the dining room, three steps up the corridor. He would not sit at the table for two hours without piecing together—from her mother’s conspicuous absence, from the odor that would steal into the room, from her siblings’ indiscretions and unfunny jokes—the startling truth of her mother’s illness. For that was how Amma thought of it: an illness, a sad and irreparable snapping in the head, a condition to be whispered about within the immediate family.
After tonight, nothing would put her façade back together again, no radiant hint of her motherly potential, no searingly romantic American film theme shared silently in those plush red seats in the darkness of the rolling credits. Her five senses closed shop one by one, and all things faded away: the creaking of overloaded trishaws, the mingling smells of street food and exhaust fumes, the slap-slapping of rickshaw men’s slippered feet, the whizzing of cars and ringing of bicycle bells outside her open window, until she found herself looking as if through a tunnel at the terrible scene unfolding in her head: Appa crossing the threshold of her father’s house, bearing his eversilver bowls aloft like a hotel waiter. Left toe to right heel, right toe to left heel, shiny leather shoes slid effortlessly off on the doorstep, no hands needed. Man and bowls sailing into dining room, man in finest-gauge black socks, whistling “Bengawan Solo,” bowls laden with fragrant noodles. Then the chanting that could no longer be ignored, the small befuddled smile with which she’d grown so familiar. And finally, most horrendously of all, the depredatory bouquet of the chamber pot (brimming as it always was at this late hour), sneaking through the keyhole and the crack under the door. The painfully polite meal, the reddening of Appa’s eyes as he tried manfully to hold his breath for an hour. And at the end of it, the retreat: No no, it’s okay, keep the bowls, don’t worry, see you next week. Only of course there would be no next week. She would stand at the front door and watch the pea-green Morris Minor reverse carefully down her father’s driveway. Next Saturday would come and go, and she would return to watching a stranger—shoes keys black coat for court cases—through the upstairs shutters.
But there was, at first, no chanting to be heard when they got out of the Morris Minor. In the sitting room Amma’s father was ensconced in his armchair, peering intently at his angelfish, tapping the glass of the aquarium with a fingernail. He looked up when Amma and the boys came in.
“So?” he grunted. “Today what grand-grand flim did you see? Hanh?”
“I’ve brought —” said Amma.
“Raju Anneh came home with us,” said Krishen. “Brought dinner also. Mee goreng. Char kuay teow.”
“Ohoho,” said his father. “Ohoho, I see. Very nice. Very nice. Not always we get company in this house. Go and ask your brothers and sisters to wash their hands and come down and say hello.” He stood up and shut the fish food canister with a click.
Now that every wriggling cell in Amma’s nose was tuned to the shitpot station, she had to admit to herself that the keyhole and doorcrack were not so easily overcome by its noxious emanations as she’d remembered. Perhaps she’d confused her own mephitic dreams with this milder reality; perhaps her judgment had been warped by her years of shame and resentment of all that the chamber pot stood for, because this smallest of earthenware pots, sooty-bottomed and unassuming, hardly big enough for one day’s dhal back when it had been in kitchen use, had been so much more for so many years. The selfish piety of a mother who thought she sat and shat at the right hand of God. The pitiful, caged life she’d blithely inflicted on her abandoned daughter.