of her feet, hoping to catch her, she is gone. What else can Aasha do but follow the new Uma around, hoping, wishing, willing her thoughts to fly across the three yards between them and settle, dove-winged, on Uma’s impregnable heart? From the back door, she watches as Uma strides through the garden.
It is dusk, that aching, violet dusk that has come to seem the permanent state of this whole year. Just as Uma reaches the garden shed the streetlights come on, and clouds of moths and beetles appear from nowhere, as if they’ve been waiting for this moment all day. They divide themselves into equal clusters, even around the one streetlight that flickers on and off and on and off all night but refuses to die.
In front of the shed, Uma stops and stares at Paati’s worn rattan chair, in which the old lady sat every day from eight in the morning till nine at night (except during her fever this year, when she didn’t get out of bed for weeks). For as long as Aasha can remember, this chair has belonged to Paati, though In The Beginning she sat in it only to relax after lunch. Then one day she made an official announcement that she was Old and Tired. With that, all the air seemed to leak from her at an alarming rate. Her after-lunch rests grew longer; then before-lunch eye-closings preceded them. And finally, after-breakfast catnaps ran into those, until Paati simply ceased to stir from the chair all day. During all that time the chair never budged from its original spot next to the crockery cabinet at the end of the long corridor outside the English kitchen, in a sleepy, dark corner where shadows drift and settle like feathers, and where the mosquitoes fly in slow motion and hum an octave lower than they do anywhere else in the Big House.
Never budged, that is, until Amma threw it out. From the afternoon Paati died, Amma was forced to repeat regularly for five days: “Aasha, please stop staring at that chair. Come away. Never mind, it was better for Paati this way, don’t you know? Too old already she was. At least she went quickly.” The first time he heard these words, Suresh ran upstairs to lie down on his bed and think: Quicklyquicklyquicklyquickly. Quickly is merciful and merciful is quick and it’s true no matter what that everything is better this way and anyway I don’t know anything and I don’t remember anything. After that he made sure never again to be in the room to hear Amma coax Aasha away from the chair, which was easy enough, for an eleven-year-old boy goes to Boy Scout meetings, trots off to the corner shop with twenty cents and a plan in hand, sequesters himself in his room to read Dandy and Beano comics, and no one thinks anything of it. Boys at that age. You know how they are.
But Aasha, trapped at home, jabbered and chattered and spewed the fruits of her tortured mind at Amma’s feet.
“Look how Paati curled up in her chair,” she squealed the morning after Paati died. “Look, she pulled up her feet also, look at her curled up small-small round-round like a cat! Then after she’ll be complaining only, knees paining legs paining joints paining. Silly Paati!”
“Tsk, come and drink your Milo, Aasha. Paati passed away. Paati is not there.”
But passed away was what the soapy black water from afternoon bucket baths did, gurgling and burping into the bathroom drain, sweeping a hair clump and a stray sliver of soap with it.
That was not, in fact, how Paati had gone. Her departure had been much messier—oh, so much more than water into the bathroom drain!—and more dramatic (incorporating all the elements of a firstrate thriller: gasps, footsteps rushing hither and thither, impulsions and compulsions). Also far less final, for Paati was not yet all gone. She was transparent now, and each day since she died she’d been missing another small part of herself: first one of her dangly, distended earlobes, then a knobby big toe, then a little finger. But the important parts—fierce head, fired-up chest, burning belly—made their piss-and-vinegar presence felt.
Later that morning, Aasha returned to Paati’s shadowy, mosquito-saturated corner and gripped her rattan chair by its armrests.
“Eh Paati Paati, don’t pull your hair like that, don’t shout and scream, your throat will pain! Chellam cannot come and comb your hair lah. Chellam all the time sleeping only now. Wait I ask Amma to come, don’t scream, don’t scream!”
Amma dragged Aasha off by the strap of her Buster Brown overalls. “Come,” she said. “Come and read a book or draw a picture or something. I’ll ask Suresh to lend you his color pencils. You want F&N orange squash? You want ginger beer? I’ll send Mat Din to buy for you.”
For five afternoons Aasha went to the chair at teatime, with a jelebi or two bondas or a handful of omapoddi in her sweaty hand.
“Here, Paati,” she whispered, depositing her clandestine offerings on the chair. “Amma threw away your bowl already, what to do? Eat faster-faster, don’t tell anybody.” She stood and stared. Mosquitoes landed on her arms and legs ten fifteen twenty at a time like tiny aeroplanes, and she slapped and scratched but did not move away. “Nice or not, Paati?” she asked, leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her back. “Bondas hot-hot. No need to eat dry rice from our plates. Nice or not? Careful, don’t burn your mouth, what Paati, so hungry ah? So long didn’t eat, is it?”
These displays were nothing new; the whole family was familiar with that other nonsense concerning Mr. McDougall’s dead daughter. “Maybe,” Chellam had often whispered to Suresh, “your sister can see ghost, what. Maybe she got special chance from God.”
The family had sought explanations less metaphysical.
“You people,” Amma said, “you people tell her funny-funny stories, who tells a child this age those kinds of stories? Of course she’s going to make up all these rubbish stories. Trying to make herself interesting, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s not working, is it?” said Suresh.
Yet for reasons best known to them—and each of them had different reasons—they could not dismiss Aasha’s sightings of Paati quite so easily. “This is getting a bit too much,” said Amma. “Some ghost story character is one thing. Talking to her own dead grandmother is another. People are going to think she’s a Disturbed Child.”
Appa said, “What I want to know is, since when did she and the old lady become such soul mates?” A fair question, for Aasha had hardly spoken to Paati when Paati was alive. She’d been born too late to know the Paati who’d sung Uma to sleep and picked the peas out of her fried rice, and in any case Uma had always been Paati’s favorite; there’d hardly been room for Suresh and Aasha in her heart.
The day Amma found a pile of disintegrating bondas, rock-hard jelebis, dusty omapoddi, and limp curry puffs on the rattan chair, she picked it up by its armrests and made off with it.
“Chhi!” Amma said to Aasha on her way out the front door with the chair. “Just because we’re feeling sorry for you you’re climbing on our head now. Taking advantage of everybody’s sympathy.”
Defying this last assertion, Aasha threw herself down on the marble floor and loosed a wordless series of ascending wails that floated like bright scarves—purple, fuchsia, puce—towards the ceiling, to be blown into the street by the fan as Amma set the chair down by the dustbin and shook her head.
“That girl is having fits or what,” said Mrs. Balakrishnan to Kooky Rooky, her boarder. “I’m not surprised. What a terrible thing she saw, no joke, isn’t it?”
“Aieeee! Aieeee! Aieeee!” shrieked Baldy Wong. “I also can scream what! I can scream louder! AIEEEEEEEEE!”
Mrs. Malhotra’s barrel-shaped dog began to howl.
“Chhi!” said Amma, slamming the front door shut. “The whole world is going mad. Aasha, you want one tight slap? Hanh?”
Aasha swallowed her viscous, salty saliva and sat hiccupping on the floor for an hour until she fell asleep. At dinnertime Suresh came and poked her in the ribs with a foot and then sidled off to his own rice and rasam.
“Why you threw away Paati’s chair, Amma?” he asked. He knew the answer; his question was nothing but a thinly disguised accusation. He’d had to muster up all his courage to