beatings and beltings and sobs of her children.
Amma stood outside all this and considered it. These things were invisible now; humiliation had no odor, and the sounds of this afternoon’s beatings, as far as she could tell, had dissipated into the still, grey air. If luck remained on her side—just this once—Appa need never know about their secret lives.
Wordlessly, her ears buzzing with anxiety, she stepped through the bead curtain into the dining room. In the far corner of the room was a glass-doored cabinet lined with Straits Times pages from June 1950 and filled with the remnants of her parents’ senescent marriage. A tarnished pewter kris and moon kite, still in the box in which they’d arrived as wedding presents. Frayed baskets and a brass plate etched with the Dutch Fort, from their honeymoon in Malacca. Faded formal photographs of their children at various ages in cracked leather frames. Miniature models of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and Buckingham Palace lined up conveniently in a row, courtesy of their better-traveled relatives, a majestic but garbled package deal for the miniature tourist in a hurry. The bottom two shelves of the cabinet were taken up by a set of dishes and glasses that hadn’t been used since the birthday party at which Ammachi had announced her withdrawal from the world.
Amma knelt and drew these things out, noting as she did so the disintegrating bodies of flies and beetles in the grooves of the sliding doors. With a clean, wet dishcloth she wiped the plates off one by one. She poured ice water into the clear blue glasses and saw Appa slip cleanly into the beginning of the scene she’d spun out in her head. It was like watching a master diver: one minute he was outside, standing in the harsh light of the low-slung sun, and the next minute he’d slid sharp as a knife into the soft dim of the sitting room, a larger-than-life five-foot-five magnet with a field too powerful for this little house. Already his ample, energetic gestures seemed to overwhelm it. He slid his shoes off with his dexterous toes, just as she’d imagined, and as he strode in with his eversilver bowls, arrogant and unapologetic, a small-minded, prudish shiver seemed to run through the walls.
“Ah, good, good,” he said when he caught sight of Amma with her bottle of ice water. “Put out plates for everyone. Nitya, Krishen, call all your brothers and sisters.” His booming voice ricocheted off every unyielding, dusty surface. The old mahogany sideboard rattled its stores of cutlery as Amma opened its top drawer. The dining table shook under its oilcloth cover. The angelfish darted in marble-eyed alarm from corner to corner of the fingerprint-smeared fish tank. Under Appa’s cool, commanding gaze Nitya and Krishen turned sniggering and pigeon-toed.
“What?” said Appa. “What’s the problem? Want to eat but don’t want to help, is that it?”
They turned and scuttled up the stairs.
Appa laid his bowls on the two wooden trivets Amma had set on the table and strode off to the kitchen to wash his oily hands.
Amma set the table with the newly wiped plates and the forks and spoons she’d found in the sideboard drawer. Stained stainless steel; she hadn’t thought it was possible. To compensate, she rummaged in another drawer and found an unopened packet of serviettes in a pretty cerise, also left over from that fateful birthday party seven years ago. She pulled out nine and began to fold them meticulously into fans, running over each crease with a thumbnail.
“Oo wah,” said Appa, coming back into the kitchen with his hands in his pockets, “getting rather fancy for a couple of bowls of roadside noodles, aren’t we?”
She smiled but said nothing, and he stood and watched her with arms akimbo.
Her father came in through the bead curtain. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Not bad, not bad.” But he didn’t give Appa a friendly shoulderwhack. He pulled out the chair at the head of the table and took his seat, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. One by one the other children trudged down the stairs, the hair around their faces damp from quick splashings at the bathroom sink. One sister’s eyes still red-rimmed from an afternoon beating or punishment Amma had missed. Again the thought struck her that if luck stayed on her side everything that happened in this brutalizing house, even if it remained stolidly next door, may as well be taking place in some terrible faraway dictatorship she read about in the newspapers.
The children took their seats, shuffling, lipbiting, sniffing diffidently, each one vaguely aware of the momentousness of this occasion and its import for their trembling, serviette-folding sister.
“Wah,” said Valli, the oldest girl after Amma and her special favorite, “thanks for bringing all this, Raju Anneh. So nice of you.” But she avoided Appa’s eyes, and smiled instead at the eversilver bowls.
“Sit, sit,” said Appa. “Come, let’s eat before everything gets cold. What about your mother? Not joining us?”
“Oh, she doesn’t take Chinese food,” said Amma casually. “And anyway she only takes a midday meal, not dinner.” She took another serviette from the pile and began to pleat it.
“Maybe she’d like to come out and have a cup of tea with us?”
“She’s resting,” said Amma. “She retires very early for the night.”
“I see, I see. Well, that’s all right then, let her rest, yesyesyes, my own mother is the same. No appetite she says. Getting older, what to do, she says.”
No one else said anything. No repressed giggles from the boys. No muttered invective from her father. Amma looked up and saw her father’s eyes on her busy hands, his lips thin and tight, his nostrils flared. Like a cold gust in her face it dawned on her: not only was he in on the game, he was, for once, on her side, slavering at the prospect of its many benefits: the rich son-in-law, the numskull daughter taken off his hands forever, the stamped and sealed reputation as just another nice, old-fashioned Indian family. Gingerly she put each finished serviette fan next to the others. There were six of them in two rows now, bright on the dark wood of the table.
“Come, Uncle,” said Appa with a clap of his hands, “why don’t you do the honors?”
But Amma’s father, unfamiliar with the invitation, served only himself, and with a grunt began to shovel the mountain of noodles on his plate into his mouth. “What’re you all waiting for?” he said to the children between mouthfuls. “You heard what Raju Anneh said. Serve yourselves and eat before it all gets cold. No need to wait for your sister to finish her handicraft project. By the time she’s done the food will have gone moldy also.”
“Oh, nonono, not to worry, Uncle,” said Appa, “see, all ready.” He picked up the fans in both hands and with a flourish deposited one at each place setting. “Sit,” he said to Amma, gesturing at the empty chair beside him. Lifting the plates one by one, he heaped food onto them.
The dining room clock ticked loudly. The fish tank pump hummed and whirred. On either side of their father Nitya and Krishen fought noiselessly over the prawns and cockles. Appa sat opposite Amma’s father, and to his right sat Amma, bent low over her plate, her skin raw with embarrassment at her father’s manners, at her own awkwardness with noodles and fork, at Appa’s eyes on her. After every mouthful she dabbed at her lips and chin with her serviette. But Appa, watching her, saw not her awkwardness but her simplicity: the anxious table manners, the missionary-school daintiness. A pang of nostalgia for his own childhood rose up through him; what had he been doing with women who smoked and quoted Marx and Engels? They would dismiss this girl as bourgeois, of course, but no matter; this was what he wanted to come home to. They would roll their eyes behind his back, accuse him of paying lip service to revolutionary notions while in private he kept a wife who fluttered her lashes and left the thinking to him. And yet —Appa realized now, watching Amma’s father scrape his fork determinedly against his plate, belch, and go on to his second helping —weren’t these the sort of people true socialism would have them all embrace? Somewhere along the way, hadn’t they confused idealism with elitism in choosing to consort only with fellow intellectuals? Let them believe, then, that he’d made the cowardly choice of a woman unsullied by inconvenient aspirations of her own; in fact, he would be the bravest of them by taking on the real work of nation-building.
Had