to breathe only while drinking, behind the shield of his water glass. His face was drawn; his lips were pinched. His eyes darted around the table, accusing all his children of having sold their souls. Oh, he wasn’t exempting himself either: he may have been sitting at the head of the table, but with this bowl of char kuay teow he’d ceased to be the head of the household, and he knew it. Two bloody plates of noodles and he’d nicely wrapped his own balls up with a red ribbon and offered them to this bow-tied fop. He belched again, more loudly than before, and gulped down the rest of his water. “Well, well,” he said. “Thanks, man. This is a first-class meal. I’m sure you know we mostly eat simple home-cooked food only. All this flim-watching FMS-Barring all where I can afford?”
“Heh-heh,” said Appa, wiping his mouth with his unfolded serviette-fan, “no problem, Uncle, all this is nothing much —”
But before he could belittle himself in proper munificent style, the door to Ammachi’s room opened with a distinct creak, and Ammachi emerged, bony feet first, then the rest of her, gaunt, pasty, her hair bun flat from the plywood board on which she slept. She shuffled towards the table, the stench of her cramped quarters coming off her white saree in puffs as she moved. All around the table there was a unanimous sucking in of breath so deep the house turned for three seconds into a vacuum, still and voracious, and a sparrow flying past an open window was pulled against the mosquito netting and held fast for those three long seconds. Then everyone exhaled, the sparrow fled in a bewildered flurry of feathers, and Amma’s father dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. Grunting, he pushed the plate sharply away from him so that it slid a foot down the table and collided with one of Appa’s half-empty eversilver bowls. All around the table there was a stiffening of shoulders, with one cheery exception.
“Oh, hellohellohello Auntie,” said Appa, “how nice to see you. So sorry to interrupt your rest. Too-too loud we must have been—my fault —”
“Foof!” said Shankar the favorite son, burying his nose in his cupped hands. Through the open door of Ammachi’s room the fumes of the chamber pot, every bit as powerful as Amma had remembered them, slithered forth in a thousand black dragontails. Nitya picked up his water glass and pressed it to his face, his desperate breath misting its bottom. Krishen broke out in a fit of consumptive coughing, the tip of his pink tongue sticking out of his greasy mouth. Even sweet, sympathetic Valli picked up her crumpled serviette and began to pat her nose with it.
“Please join us, Auntie,” said Appa imperturbably, “there’s still so much left.”
“Oh, no,” said Ammachi quietly, pulling the pallu of her saree over her disheveled head. From under this hood she peered narrowly out at each one of them, her eyes slowly going around the table. “No thank you. I don’t take Chinese food.” She looked pointedly at the golden pool of pork fat on her husband’s plate. “Simply came out to see who came. Many many years we have not had any visitors, you see.”
Under the table Amma’s knees quivered. She curled her long toes and dug her heels into the cool cement floor.
“Oho, yesyes,” said Appa, “so sorry to intrude but I just thought —”
“No problem,” said Ammachi, “not intruding at all. All this is no longer my business, after all. Who comes and goes, who eats what. I’ve taken a vow to withdraw from this world, you see. All my mundane duties I’ve carried out. Simply only today I came out, I thought first time someone coming to the house after so long, maybe something was wrong or what.”
“Actually,” said Appa, “it’s not the first time. I live next door, you see. I came first to ask for Uncle’s kind permission to build that new wall. And now I drop in every Saturday to pick up Vasanthi and Nitya and Krishen for a film.”
Amma kept her eyes lowered, avoiding her mother’s inscrutable gaze. Yet she felt that gaze sweep across her face, and she knew the thoughts behind it: So that is what my daughter has become. A glorified call girl. Going out with men in exchange for a free meal. Giving in to all of her base instincts at once.
But Ammachi only said: “Ah. I see. Well all that is not my concern. Carry on. Please carry on. Time already for my evening puja.” Then she turned and shuffled back to her room. A fresh whiff of excrement-spiced air wafted out from the folds of her saree and draped itself around Amma like an octopus tentacle. Ammachi’s door shut with another loud creak. Amma looked down at her plate, her tongue suddenly thick and salty, her throat clotted with viscous tears. She felt herself rise and strain, suspended in time like a wave ready to crash against a rocky shore.
“Better I turn up the fan,” exclaimed Valli, ever the resourceful one, “I think so somebody’s septic tank must be broken again. So sorry Raju Anneh, you see that Malay family on the other side of the road is always having this problem and always it happens at dinnertime.” She jumped up and turned the ceiling fan up to its highest setting. “Let me open the windows also. Tsk tsk, whatta whatta terrible stink, no?”
“Stink?” said Appa, pausing with a forkful of noodles an inch from his mouth. “What stink? Must be I’m sitting in the best bloody seat in the house because I can’t smell anything.”
It was the first Amma knew of his missing sense of smell. She looked up, blinked disbelievingly, and then felt the blood drain from her burning cheeks to see him chewing peaceably on a tough cockle. In the heavens a chorus of angels with clothespegs on their ethereal noses began to sing, the nasal strains of their joy filling the skies just as Ammachi’s praise rose in concurrence:
Om Trayambakam
Yajaamahe
Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam …
THREE WEEKS after that miracle, on one of those balmy Malayan evenings when the light turns milky before dying, Appa asked Nitya and Krishen to wait in the Morris Minor while he and Amma crossed the street to buy the now-customary dinner. “I need a bit of help today,” he said. He handed her a third bowl and turned to the boys in the back seat. “How about a little after-dinner something for an extra-special treat?” he said with a wink. “Ice kacang? Or would you prefer cendol?”
They decided on ice kacang (with dollops of vanilla ice cream for the boys), and as Amma and Appa stood before the char kuay teow stall in the smoky dusk, the boys rolled down a window and leaned out like two eager young dogs, nudging and smirking, whistling too quietly for Appa or their sister to hear them, and enjoying the exhaust-fumed, lard-spiked air in their faces.
Across the street, Appa leaned towards Amma and gripped her elbow as if to steer her along the right path. Towards respectability and comfort, ladies’ tea parties and sturdy furniture, nest eggs and new clothes for the children every Deepavali. The wild flames under the hawker’s cast-iron wok burned blue in Appa’s horn-rimmed glasses. Sweat circles darkened the underarms of his wilting pinstriped shirt, and his nascent bald spot gleamed like a baby moon. Like a dancer’s jewels, perfect round beads of sweat studded the dip between Amma’s nose and lip.
“I want to marry you,” he said, “even if I have to pay your father a dowry. I can’t wait any longer. You know I will make you happy. You know you’ll have a first-class life. No cooking no cleaning. Whatever jewelry you want. Chauffeur-driven car.”
“Tsk. What is this, talking about private matters all here on the roadside.”
But she smiled and giggled and shrugged, as if reading from a script. As if she’d already read the play and picked a part in advance. Across the street, two little extras in a Morris Minor sniggered and demonstrated the mechanics of copulation with their hands. A Chinese grandmother pushing a pram along the five-foot-ways of the shophouses caught sight of them, averted her offended eyes, and hissed imprecations about bad Indian boys to her drowsy grandchild.
“What’s wrong?” Appa said half indignantly to Amma’s shy, shrugging shoulders. To himself he noted that the hair at the nape of her neck was soft and almost straight, most unlike the coarse frizzy mane she’d pulled into a loose knot today. “Nothing to be ashamed of,”