on a street where people drive and cycle and walk day and night. What kind of man this Shamsuddin is, because the question of kind rises to the surface of every conversation, and yet, once there at the surface, stays just beneath, refusing to show itself, slipping away from her hands when she reaches for it. You know what, their kind of people. The only reason they pray five times a day is to cover up the havoc they do. Hah! Even five times a day is not enough for them. Rape, incest, drugs, you name it it’s their kind who’s responsible for ninety-five percent of it.
As far as Aasha can tell, Shamsuddin is a skinny kind of a man in a cheaply made bush jacket. His hair is already thinning. He looks as if he might have bad teeth, but she can’t be sure because he isn’t smiling in any of the newspaper pictures.
“Sick bastard,” Appa has said every day since he took on the case. “Doing a thing like that to a child that age.”
“Suresh, bring me a glass of ice water,” Appa says now, just back from Paati’s cremation, even though Suresh is in the middle of his maths homework, his face a ball of concentration over the square-lined pages of his exercise book, while Uma is reading what is technically (however much she, too, must concentrate to squeeze meaning out of it) a storybook. Even though Uma has no homework whatsoever and will no longer have any for her remaining five days in the Big House, because she’s home and dry now, she’s scored the ultimate goal, college in America, just waiting to leave, sitting on laurels that leave welts on her bum and make her shift constantly in her chair. Even so. Appa does not look at Uma; Suresh sees to his ice water. Thunk-thunk-thunk, it pours heavily out of the already-sweating Johnnie Walker Black Label bottle into Appa’s glass, and Suresh wonders if he should whistle, just to make a sound, any sound to which meaning cannot be attached, anything other than Appa breathing hard in his chair, and Chellam twitching and sniffing behind her too-thin door, and Paul Simon’s successive songs about suicides. Still wondering, he refills the Johnnie Walker bottle at the kitchen sink, caps it, and puts it back in its place inside the fridge door.
All things considered, he’s decided against whistling, luckily for him, because Amma presses the Stop button on the cassette player and says, “For heaven’s sake, Uma, even today you must play your eerie music ah? At least today have some respect. Your own grandmother’s funeral today. Poor woman, what a terrible death. Hai hai”—she sits down across from Appa and rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers—“what is the use of dwelling on all that now anyway? Let go, let go and move on. What has happened has happened.” No response from Uma. A melancholy trinity of smells—camphor, wood smoke, sandalwood—wafts from Amma’s hair and the folds of her saree. Frosty glass in hand, Suresh studies the back of her head: drooping curls, three drops of sweat on the nape of her neck. What has happened has happened, he thinks, and perhaps it doesn’t really matter who made it happen. Time to let go, move on, or just move, but suddenly he can’t; he grips the glass ever more tightly, until he can feel it on the brink of shattering in his fingers. A drop of condensation wanders down one side at exactly—exactly, it seems to Suresh—the same pace as one of Amma’s sweat drops trickling down the top of her spine. He wonders why she doesn’t seem to feel it.
“Suresh,” says Appa, “what is this? Are you having a catatonic fit? Are you pretending to be a broken robot? By the time you bring me that water it’ll be hot enough to make tea with.”
Suresh tears his gaze away from the back of Amma’s neck, but on his way across the room he sees, out of the corner of his eye, red running down Amma’s face, bright red, liquid, sprung from somewhere on her scalp, making its way down her forehead, and he shudders, not a shudder that everyone can see—there’s much about Suresh that no one sees—but a single mouse-shudder deep inside his chest, somewhere between his rib cage and his stomach.
“Suresh,” says Appa again, “what is wrong with you? Spilling here there everywhere—do I have to tell you to hold the glass with both hands, as if you’re a bloody two-year-old?”
Of course. The rivulet of red on Amma’s face is just the vermilion she smeared on her center parting before the funeral, of course of course of course—Suresh has never seen Amma sweat like this, but that’s what it is, of course, the dastardly results of funeral heat. Vermilioned sweat, nothing to do with her skull, nothing whatsoever to do with skulls in general and how they crack and bleed. This isn’t some supernatural revenge, just a trick of the heat and his jittery eyes. Poor Paati will never have a chance at revenge, whether or not she deserves one. Suresh puts the glass down before Appa and clears his mind with a forced blast of cool relief.
But Aasha, whose belief in ghosts has never wavered, is baffled. Appa and Amma are back from the funeral; where is Paati? Why is she taking so long to get here? From where she sits, Aasha can see that her chair remains empty. But then again, why would she sit quietly in that chair once she’s back? What a way that would be to celebrate her new freedom. She’s spent more than enough time in that chair, none of it happy; in that chair she’s received slaps and knocks and pinches, all of them quick, some of them deserved. Because it’s true that there were times when Paati was Too Much, when her questions and her badgering and her fret-fret-fretting went Too Far, when she was asking for trouble from whoever gave it to her. That is to say, from Amma and Chellam.
Amma because she was a clockwork toy someone had wound up all the way and left unattended; she couldn’t help herself. She sat sipping tea at the Formica table, and threw tea parties, and gave Paati headknocks and thighpinches, because these were the only things she knew how to do.
And Chellam because she was just that kind. Whatever kind Shamsuddin was, Chellam was almost as bad. She was the kind who was nasty when other people weren’t looking. A very bad person. A terrible person who deserved everything she was going to get. Once she had fooled them; once they had loved her. Now they knew they’d been wrong.
“Did you all eat your lunch?” Amma is asking in the dining room. “Did you take Chellam a tray?”
Uma turns a page and Suresh says yes, yes, we ate our lunch.
“Eggs?” Amma asks. “For Chellam also?”
“Not nice also,” Suresh says. “Uma put too much cheese.” Clever Suresh, wise Suresh, quick-on-his-feet Suresh, always able to steer conversations around potholes.
“Aaah,” says Appa, smacking his lips after a long drag from his ice-water glass, “that is because Uma’s head is already in America. Yes or not? Her body is here, but her mind is at Columbia University, within the ivy-covered walls, not on our omelets-bomelets my boy, oh yes sure enough, already Joyce is her choice, hi-funda stuff beyond the rest of us, yes or not?”
Uma raises her eyes from her book and blinks in Appa’s direction several times in quick succession, as if she’s thinking of something else and wishes he would move out of the way.
Appa chuckles three colorless chuckles, his mouth stretched tight in a grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. It doesn’t go away; his face won’t ungrin itself now. Suresh watches a weariness creep from those aching face muscles into Appa’s eyes, then give way to panic when Appa realizes his face is stuck fast. Then, just when Suresh has stopped breathing, Appa’s face breaks free. He closes his eyes and presses his thumbs hard into their inside corners. “One more, please,” he says when he opens them, holding his empty glass out to Suresh, and Suresh repeats the steps with only minor modifications: brisk walk to fridge, open door, grab second Johnnie Walker bottle (because the first, so recently refilled, isn’t cold enough yet), fill glass with a thunk-thunk-thunk and a private should I whistle? This time he notes, as he stands there by the fridge, that Aasha has made her meandering way (stopping here and there to sniff and listen and retrace, he’s sure, like the lost ant she’s been for the past few days) to Paati’s old rattan chair.
“Psst!” he hisses. “Oi! What stupid thing are you doing now?” Not as though he can’t see: Aasha is running her hands (still oily with butter from her omelet) down the thin arms of Paati’s chair, patting the seat, pulling on each loose bit of rattan, and even—this is when he knows she is irredeemably