with grease from the hawker’s stovetop.
Afterwards she was never sure what it was that had won her over: the simple eloquence of his pared-down proposal or the promise of prosperity in that brimming eversilver dish.
When she told her father the news, he smiled his acrid smile for a while before saying, “Not bad, Vasanthi. For an idiot you haven’t done too badly for yourself. Syabas!”
Next door in the Big House, Paati held her son by his shoulders and shook him. “You’re mad,” she said. “You’re going to regret this decision all your life. They’re not our kind of people. How can you bring a girl like that into this house?”
“Amma,” he said, freeing himself from her grip, “come off it. Enough of this nineteenth-century mentality. Not our kind of people? Well, last I looked they all had two eyes and a nose and a mouth, just like us. It’s thinking like yours that’s going to hold this country back.”
Paati drew back, folded her arms, and narrowed her eyes at him. “Now I see,” she said. “I see what that girl has done. Shameless gold-digger has poured out some sob story on your shoulder, and you’ve fallen for it. Good. Do what you want and suffer. Just don’t come crying to me, and don’t expect me to treat her like a queen in my own house.”
“Actually, it’s my house,” said Appa, “and you will treat her with the same respect you owe any human being.”
THE RECONDITE RETURN OF PAATI THE DISSATISFIED
August 21, 1980
ON THE AFTERNOON of Paati’s cremation, Uma makes a ham-and-cheese omelet to feed those members of the household who are not attending the funeral—to wit, herself, Suresh, Aasha, and Chellam.
This four-person omelet, Aasha reasons, means that Uma does not hate them. Its edges are a little burned; there is so much cheese in it that it clogs Suresh’s throat, and he makes a great show of choking to death, rolling his eyes back in his head, thumping frantically at his chest. “Death by cheese,” he gasps between coughs. “A Krafty murder. Tomorrow’s headline: St. Michael’s Boy Asphyxiated by Overstuffed Omelet.” Aasha would like to imagine that Uma smiles at this, just the breath of a smile before she turns the page of her book, but it’s simply not true. Uma doesn’t even look up; she only turns the page and spears a stray cube of ham with her fork.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its obvious imperfections, the omelet is proof that Uma harbors a new glimmer of fondness for them, perhaps especially for Aasha, because she served Aasha first, and then left Suresh to cut his own piece. Though Aasha can count on one hand the occasions on which Uma has spoken to her in the past year, it’s clear that Uma loves her once again, in some secret place. This evening Uma might invite them outside to wait for the roti man with her; then she might let Aasha sit on her bed and listen to Simon and Garfunkel. Tomorrow she might tell Appa and Amma she doesn’t want to go to New York after all. Return the plane ticket, she’ll say. Put away the brown airport suit in the rosewood chest. I’ll put the suitcase back in the storeroom.
The thought of it—the fragile possibility, thin as the air on a mountaintop—turns the air in Aasha’s nostrils cold and chills her throat and chest.
You goondu, Suresh would say if he were privy to Aasha’s deductions. You stoopit idiot. Uma made the omelet because Amma ordered her to, and Amma ordered her to because Chellam wouldn’t make it. Simple as that. Easy to see.
It’s true, Chellam wouldn’t have made the omelet, though Amma didn’t even ask her; since Paati died two days ago, Chellam’s been tossing and turning and burning in that bed in which she has suffered two fevers since coming to the Big House. Spread-eagled, fetus-curled, face-down, in all these positions and more she waits for her father’s final visit, when he will collect his unwanted daughter instead of the money that has kept him smacking his chops and rubbing his palms together every month for a year. When he comes, he will spit at her feet and knock her head with his knuckles. On the bus ride home he will not look at her. She’s squandered his toddy shop account, his still-novel popularity among the men of the village, his lazy afternoons, all his happy stupor. Each time she thinks of that imminent bus ride home, Chellam buries her face in her pillow and sees how long she can go without breathing.
“Uma,” Amma said before she left for the funeral, “you’ll have to do something about lunch. There’s bread, there are eggs, there are yesterday’s leftovers. After what Chellam did I don’t want her making your food.”
Amma shook her head as she said this, as if she’d made a difficultbut-firm decision, as if Chellam had been begging for the chance to make their lunch. But Suresh wasn’t fooled by Amma’s frowning and head-shaking; he knew she simply didn’t dare ask Chellam to rouse herself. He saw the fear in her fluttering hands; he wondered what she thought Chellam would say if asked to make an omelet. And what would Chellam say? They were all terrified of her now, because she knew their secrets, because she was a wounded, cornered beast—but sometimes a wounded beast just licks its wounds and slinks away. No, Suresh can’t quite imagine Chellam rising like a fury from her bed to point a bony finger at Amma and denounce her:
You! How dare you ask me to feed your lying children! If you can break an old lady’s head, you can break your own bloody eggs!
It’s almost funny to picture: shrimpy Chellam, suddenly turned into a pontianak ghost from an Indonesian horror film. Chellam, who for months has barely been able to look Amma in the face to tell her someone’s on the telephone, who seems to want nothing more than to disappear so that they can all pretend she never existed, whose very farts and toilet flushings, these days, are afraid, ashamed, damaged.
The Simon and Garfunkel cassette tape that Uma has had in her cassette player all morning has reached its end once again; the hiss of its static fills their ears. Uma puts her book and her fork down, gets up, and flips over the tape.
Hello darkness, my old friend, sings Paul Simon for the fifth time that day.
Uma resumes her seat, and the ceiling fan casts its regular shadows on her book-reading face above her omelet plate. And while Paul Simon warns his audience of fools that silence like a cancer grows, Suresh counts the seconds between the fan shadows on Uma’s face, and Aasha shovels gooey forkfuls of omelet into her mouth without swallowing, until she, too, gags. Hers is not a pretend gag for comic relief, so Suresh sucks his teeth, kicks her under the table, and says, “Ee yer, so disgusting you. Cannot take smaller mouthfuls, is it? If you want to be disgusting I also can be disgusting.” Then he burps long and loud, a mouth-open burp that echoes in the silence before the next song on Uma’s cassette.
Which one of them is right about the crucial question of Why Uma Made the Omelet? Aasha, in her terrified state of infinite and illogical hope, or Suresh, in his uncompromising realism?
Both, actually. It’s true that Uma made the omelet primarily because the process took far less time, effort, and thought than resisting Amma. She could’ve said, Let them all make their own omelet. Or, Let them starve for an afternoon. But then there would’ve been more words, more drama, more questions and accusations, and Uma has had enough of these, she feels, to last her the rest of her life. She wanted peace and quiet, no noise but the Simon and Garfunkel and the whir of the ceiling fan, and the easiest path to that was to make the bloody omelet.
And yet.
She will neither return the plane ticket nor put the suitcase back in the storeroom, but even as she keeps her eyes riveted to her book, she’s keenly aware of Aasha’s eyes on her. Today —unlike all the other days on which they have enacted this scene —this awareness brings a rush of tears to the very top of her throat. She swallows to keep them down.
Little Aasha. Uma wishes she could put down her book and look at Aasha, properly look at her and pull her onto