yellow hoarding said BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN in red.
‘NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB,’ Estha said.
The twins were precocious with their reading. They had raced through Old Dog Tom, Janet and John and their Ronald Ridout Workbooks. At night Ammu read to them from Kipling’s Jungle Book.
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free -
The down on their arms would stand on end, golden in the light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu could make her voice gravelly, like Shere Khan’s. Or whining, like Tabaqui’s.
‘Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I Shere Khan, who speak!
‘And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answer,’ the twins would shout in high voices. Not together, but almost.
‘The man’s cub is mine Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog eater—fish killer—he shall hunt thee!’
Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them a version of The Tempest abridged by Charles and Mary Lamb.
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I,’ Estha and Rahel would go about saying. ‘In a cowslip’s bell I lie.’
So when Baby Kochamma’s Australian missionary friend, Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book—The Adventures of Susie Squirrel—as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten, who belonged to a sect of born-again Christians, said that she was a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her, backwards.
‘ehT serutnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS. enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.’
They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and Madam I’m Adam backwards as well as forwards. She wasn’t amused and it turned out that she didn’t even know what Malayalam was. They told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She said she had been under the impression that it was called Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken an active dislike to Miss Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it was a Highly Stupid Impression.
Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS in their seye.
They were made to write In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards. A hundred times. Forwards.
A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
More buses and cars had stopped on either side of the level crossing. An ambulance that said Sacred Heart Hospital was full of a party of people on their way to a wedding. The bride was staring out of the back window, her face partially obscured by the flaking paint of the huge red cross.
The buses all had girls’ names. Lucykutty, Mollykutty, Beena Mol. In Malayalam, Mol is Little Girl and Mon is Little Boy. Beena Mol was full of pilgrims who’d had their heads shaved at Tirupati. Rahel could see a row of bald heads at the bus window, above evenly spaced vomit streaks. She was more than a little curious about vomiting. She had never vomited. Not once. Estha had, and when he did, his skin grew hot and shiny, and his eyes helpless and beautiful, and Ammu loved him more than usual. Chacko said that Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy. And so was Sophie Mol. He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding like most Syrian Christians. And Parsees.
Mammachi said that what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding. She meant having parents who were divorced. As though these were the only choices available to people: Inbreeding or Divorce.
Rahel wasn’t sure what she suffered from, but occasionally she practised sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.
‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,’ she would say to herself sadly. That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.
She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.
Initially, when the level crossing had just closed, the Air was full of the impatient sound of idling engines. But when the man that manned the crossing came out of his booth, on his backward bending legs and signalled with his limp, flapping walk to the tea stall that they were in for a long wait, drivers switched off their engines and milled about, stretching their legs.
With a desultory nod of his bored and sleepy head, the Level Crossing Divinity conjured up beggars with bandages, men with trays selling pieces of fresh coconut, parippu vadas on banana leaves. And cold drinks. Coca-Cola, Fanta, Rosemilk.
A leper with soiled bandages begged at the car window.
‘That looks like Mercurochrome to me,’ Ammu said, of his inordinately bright blood.
‘Congratulations,’ Chacko said. ‘Spoken like a true bourgeoise.’
Ammu smiled and they shook hands, as though she really was being awarded a Certificate of Merit for being an honest-to-goodness Genuine Bourgeoise. Moments like these, the twins treasured and threaded like precious beads on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.
Rahel and Estha squashed their noses against the Plymouth’s quarter-windows. Yearning marshmallows with cloudy children behind them. Ammu said, ‘No,’ firmly, and with conviction.
Chacko lit a Charminar. He inhaled deeply and then removed a little flake of tobacco that had stayed behind on his tongue.
Inside the Plymouth, it wasn’t easy for Rahel to see Estha, because Baby Kochamma rose between them like a hill. Ammu had insisted that they sit separately to prevent them from fighting. When they fought, Estha called Rahel a Refugee Stick Insect. Rahel called him Elvis the Pelvis and did a twisty, funny kind of dance that infuriated Estha. When they had serious physical fights, they were so evenly matched that the fights went on for ever, and things that came in their way—table lamps, ashtrays and water jugs—were smashed or irreparably damaged.
Baby Kochamma was holding on to the back of the front seat with her arms. When the car moved, her armfat swung like heavy washing in the wind. Now it hung down like a fleshy curtain, blocking Estha from Rahel.
On Estha’s side of the road was the tea shack that sold tea and stale glucose biscuits in dim glass cases with flies. There was lemon soda in thick bottles with blue marble stoppers to keep the fizz in. And a red ice-box that said rather sadly Things go better with Coca-Cola.
Murlidharan, the level-crossing lunatic, perched cross-legged and perfectly balanced on the milestone. His balls and penis dangled down, pointing towards the sign which said:
COCHIN
23
Murlidharan was naked except for the tall plastic bag that somebody had fitted onto his head like a transparent chef’s cap through which the view of the landscape continued—dimmed, chef-shaped, but uninterrupted. He couldn’t remove his cap even if he had wanted to because he had no arms. They had been blown off in Singapore in ’42, within the first week of his running away from home to join the fighting ranks of the Indian National Army. After Independence he had himself registered as a Grade I Freedom Fighter and had been allotted a free first-class railway pass for life. This too he had lost (along with his mind), so he could no longer live on trains or in refreshment rooms in railway stations. Murlidharan had no home, no doors to lock, but he had his old