and thank you were inadequate. Then they would both cry, for many of the same reasons.
She won’t do this. She can’t. It’s too late and too dangerous. Uma is an all-or-nothing sort of girl, and she must be what she’s chosen to be until the end. Until she boards that aeroplane in five days. If she makes an exception —even a brief one, even now, especially now —the walls will come tumbling down around all their ears. Chaos. Questions. Drama. Everything she doesn’t want, and none of it will do anyone a bit of good.
The alternative, much like the omelet, is easier and better for all concerned, even if some can’t accept that.
Soon Paati’s ghost will make its first appearance at the Big House. This is a certainty in Aasha’s world of doubts and questions and moral dilemmas: nothing can stop the dead from crossing the thin line that separates them from the living if they want to. And Paati will want to. She wasn’t done with life; she’ll be back to clamor for more teatime treats, more respect, more attention, more of everything her arthritis cheated her out of by confining her to a rattan chair in a dim corridor. At this very minute she is probably limping away from the flames, muttering darkly about ash-in-the-nostrils and smoke-in-the-lungs, scolding Appa for being God only knows where when she met her undignified end in the bathroom.
Sometimes Aasha’s heart races at the thought of Paati’s return. Will she punish them all for their many sins against her? Will she suck blood, break glass, overturn furniture, like the pontianaks and the hantu kumkums about which Chellam once warned them?
But at other times, Aasha is at peace. She knows, somehow, that Paati has forgiven them; liberated of her old bones, she’s seen and heard everything at once, the whole truth, past present future, and she’s understood it all. Why they did what they did. Why they had to. How they were sorry, even if they would never say so aloud, for their mistakes and their weaknesses. For leaping before looking. For being cowards. Now that she has no more aches and pains and cataracts, Paati’s turned into something like an angel or a fairy godmother. She floats above them like a kite. She forgives them afresh every day.
When she comes back to the Big House, she’ll be able to walk around on her own (which is a good thing, since Chellam is in her bed with her sarong-blanket over her head). SH-sh-SH-sh, her silky soles will slide on the marble downstairs floors, just as they did fifteen or twenty times a day when Chellam led her to and from the big bathroom. She’d been a dense little bundle of bones and calluses enclosing a perpetually full bladder: Chellam has one bulging Popeye-theSailor-Man arm and one skinny-servant-arm, from a whole year of these daily journeys.
In the dining room, Uma and Suresh and Aasha can hear Chellam sniffing and creaking the bedsprings every time she turns, which is often. Uma tries to shut out these small noises. She’d be in the same situation whatever had happened, Uma tells herself. Her job ended once Paati was gone. Suresh wishes Chellam would just go to sleep. Drink a whole bottle of whiskey if she has to. Eat a whole goat. Whatever it takes.
Aasha wonders if Chellam, too, awaits Paati’s return. If she fears it, or welcomes it, or simply can’t be bothered anymore. Does she think Paati will come back to help her?
But you were nasty to Paati all the time, thinks Aasha. When she comes back she’ll be on our side. Because we’re family.
Over the curtainless window of her room under the stairs, Chellam draped a thin cotton saree when she first arrived at the Big House, a saree she must have brought with her for yard work, or for sleeping in, or for precisely such a use as this—substitute curtain, or dustcloth, or source of reusable sanitary pads—because it’s so thin, and so full of holes, that it surely could not have been used for anything else. It barely keeps the afternoon sun out today: Chellam sees bright red behind her shut eyelids, solid, bright red. Bright green bile froths at the back of her throat. She reaches under her pillow for her diminishing supply of Chinese red ginger (purchased from the corner shop with Uncle Ballroom’s generous rewards for miscellaneous favors) and shoves a piece between her parched lips. She hasn’t had a complete thought since she took to her bed. Her head is a jumble of snatches and shards, familiar smells, nauseating colors, unspoken fears that set her joints twitching. She’s been reduced to some dim, pre-sentient state, so that some of those who stop at her door to make sure she’s still alive feel the occasional pang of pity, or an uncomplicated tenderness, or an anodyne curiosity, but nothing more, because there she is, twitching and breathing her shallow, uneven breaths in her smelly room, and what can one do but shrug and turn away? What can one do but leave one’s trays of Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Maggi instant noodles and hurry back to the real world, where everything raw can be concealed behind words?
Today Uma cut Chellam her own slice of omelet for lunch. “No matter what they do to us,” Amma said before she left for the crematorium, “we don’t let our servants go hungry. That is not the kind of people we are.” And then, even though Uma had said nothing to contradict her, she’d added, “Let her sins sit on her head alone. All that is between her and God. We don’t need to sink to her level and starve her.”
Uma knew Chellam would not eat her part of the omelet. Appa, who was preparing to lift the casket into the hearse with the help of three old men and a good heave-ho, knew it. Amma herself knew it, Suresh knew it, Aasha knew it, and yet Uma cut that slice and Suresh carried it upstairs on its tray, so that it now sits, cold as a jelly, on the table outside Chellam’s door. A lost daytime moth is drowning in the glass beside the omelet, its wings spread against the water’s tough surface.
At five o’clock Appa and Amma come home, stopping at the outside tap to cleanse themselves of the crematorium’s unsalutary vapors. They splash, they gargle, they rub cool water on their scorched arms. There’s still no sign of Paati, who, as far as Aasha can tell from the sitting room window, is not perched on the roof of the car, or lying supine on the hood, or crouched in the back seat. (And yet she is, indisputably, not far away: Aasha is still so sure of this that she stares out the window for a minute without blinking, until her eyeballs dry out).
“Bloody hell!” Appa says in the dining room. “It’s a furnace out there.” He takes off his glasses and runs the palms of his hands over his face. The edges of his hair are still damp from his post-funeral ablutions. The circles under his eyes are darker than ever; he’s been staying up every night for weeks working on his latest case, the notorious Angela Lim murder trial. The nights have lately been noiseless and stuffy, as if someone turns off the flame under the earth every evening but forgets to lift the lid. In that steamer-pot silence, Appa has been bending over his desk, poring over the facts of the case. Which are:
Angela Lim, ten years old, raped and murdered and found stuffed down a manhole near the Tarcisian Convent School.
Shamsuddin bin Yusof, an office boy accused of the rape, and the murder, and the stuffing.
On the front page of Appa’s newspaper (which now lies at his feet, its pages fluttering in the fanbreeze like the wings of a hurt bird), the Minister of Internal Security has urged the public not to turn the case into a Racial Issue. (But on the letters to the editor page, that public continues to sneak their subtle defiance past the tea-break-heavy eyes of the censors: in pointed comparisons to past murder trials, in disingenuously philosophical nature-versus-nurture meditations, in dry discussions of urban demographics.)
Tonight, as on many previous nights, Aasha’s wide-open eyes beam two bright spots on the ceiling above her bed. In addition to the facts of the case, which have been on TV and on the radio and on the lips of the Ladies at Amma’s tea parties, Aasha knows all sorts of other things without knowing how she knows them: the number of parts Angela Lim was in when they pulled her out of that manhole; the colors of the bruises on her thighs; the splintery feel of the stick with which Shamsuddin (a tongue twister, that name: not Shamshuddin, not Samsuddin, but Shamsuddin, a drill for those aspiring to she-sells-seashells) clubbed her before tightening the just-in-case rope around her neck; the type of white canvas Bata shoes (mud-spattered from a recent game of rounders) Angela was wearing when Shamsuddin lured her into his red Datsun. But it’s not what she knows that keeps Aasha awake at night; it’s what she doesn’t. The exact meaning of rape, a