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In the years to come, even though he had been ill-humoured long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost—grey, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts—haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children.
Until the day he died, even in the stifling Ayemenem heat, every single day, Pappachi wore a well-pressed three-piece suit and his gold pocket watch. On his dressing table, next to his cologne and silver hairbrush, he kept a picture of himself as a young man, with his hair slicked down, taken in a photographer’s studio in Vienna where he had done the six-month diploma course that had qualified him to apply for the post of Imperial Entomologist. It was during those few months they spent in Vienna that Mammachi took her first lessons on the violin. The lessons were abruptly discontinued when Mammachi’s teacher, Launsky-Tieffenthal, made the mistake of telling Pappachi that his wife was exceptionally talented and, in his opinion, potentially concert class.
Mammachi pasted, in the family photograph album, the clipping from the Indian Express that reported Pappachi’s death. It said:
Noted entomologist, Shri Benaan John Ipe, son of late Rev. E. John Ipe of Ayemenem (popularly known as Punnyan Kunju), suffered a massive heart attack and passed away at the Kottayam General Hospital last night. He developed chest pains around 1.05 a.m. and was rushed to hospital. The end came at 2.45 a.m. Shri Ipe had been keeping indifferent health since last six months. He is survived by his wife Soshamma and two children.
At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them.
After the funeral Mammachi asked Rahel to help her to locate and remove her contact lenses with the little orange pipette that came in its own case. Rahel asked Mammachi whether, after Mammachi died, she could inherit the pipette. Ammu took her out of the room and smacked her.
‘i never want to hear you discussing people’s deaths with them again,’ she said.
Estha said Rahel deserved it for being so insensitive.
The photograph of Pappachi in Vienna, with his hair slicked down, was reframed and put up in the drawing room.
He was a photogenic man, dapper and carefully groomed, with a little man’s largeish head. He had an incipient second chin that would have been emphasized had he looked down or nodded. In the photograph he had taken care to hold his head high enough to hide his double chin, yet not so high as to appear haughty. His light brown eyes were polite, yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the centre of his upper lip that dropped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout—the kind that children who suck their thumbs develop. He had an elongated dimple on his chin which only served to underline the threat of a lurking manic violence. A sort of contained cruelty. He wore khaki jodhpurs though he had never ridden a horse in his life. His riding boots reflected the photographer’s studio lights. An ivory-handled riding crop lay neatly across his lap.
There was a watchful stillness to the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in which it hung.
When he died, Pappachi left trunks full of expensive suits and a chocolate tin full of cuff-links that Chacko distributed among the taxi drivers in Kottayam. They were separated and made into rings and pendants for unmarried daughters’ dowries.
When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—‘To link cuffs together,’ Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = Cuff-link. This, to them, rivalled the precision and logic of mathematics. Cliff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said Person well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up disposed.
It said:
(1) Place suitably in particular order.
(2) Bring mind into certain state.
(3) Do what one will with, get off one’s hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell.
Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English.
Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.
‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.’
Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native’. Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school. After the suicide, the property had become the subject of extensive litigation between Kari Saipu’s cook and his secretary. The house had lain empty for years. Very few people had seen it. But the twins could picture it.
The History House.
With cool stone floors and dim walls and billowing ship-shaped shadows. Plump, translucent lizards lived behind old pictures, and waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers.
‘But we can’t go in,’ Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.’
‘Marry our conquerors, is more like it,’ Ammu said drily, referring to Margaret Kochamma. Chacko ignored her. He made the twins look up Despise. It said: To look down upon; to view with contempt; to scorn or disdain.
Chacko said that in the context of the war he was talking about—the War of Dreams—Despise meant all those things.
‘We’re Prisoners of War,’ Chacko said. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.’
Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of historical perspective (though perspective was something which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman—as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
‘The whole of human civilization as we know it,’ Chacko told the twins, ‘began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin.’
It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world), that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.
‘And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be—are just a twinkle in her eye,’ Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.
Later, in the light of all that happened, twinkle seemed completely the wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.
Though the Earth Woman made a lasting impression on the twins, it was the History House—so much closer at hand—that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on the other side of the river.
Looming in the Heart of Darkness.
A house they couldn’t enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand.
They didn’t know then, that soon they would go in. That they would cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah.
While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.
Like old roses on a breeze.
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.
Chacko said that going to see The Sound of Music was an extended exercise in Anglophilia.
Ammu said, Oh come on, the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music. It’s a World Hit.’
‘Nevertheless, my dear,’ Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. ‘Never. The. Less.’
Mammachi often said that Chacko was easily one of the cleverest men in India. ‘According to whom?’ Ammu would say. ‘On what basis?’ Mammachi loved to tell the story (Chacko’s story) of how one of the dons at Oxford had said that in his opinion, Chacko was brilliant, and made of prime ministerial material.
To this, Ammu always said, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ like people in the comics.
She said:
(a) Going to Oxford didn’t necessarily make a person clever.
(b) Cleverness didn’t necessarily make a good prime minister.
(c) If a person couldn’t even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?
And, most important of all:
(d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
Chacko said:
(a) You don’t go to Oxford. You read at Oxford. And
(b) After reading at Oxford you come down.
‘Down to earth, d’you mean?’ Ammu would ask. ‘That you definitely do. Like your famous airplanes.’
Ammu said that the sad but entirely predictable fate of Chacko’s airplanes was an impartial measure of his abilities.
Once a month (except during the monsoons), a parcel would arrive for Chacko by VPP. It always contained a balsa aeromodelling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propellor. When it was ready, he would take Estha and Rahel to the rice-fields in Nattakom to help him fly it. It never flew for more than a minute. Month after month, Chako’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained retrievers, to salvage the remains.
A tail, a tank, a wing.
A wounded machine.
Chacko’s room was cluttered with broken wooden planes. And every month, another kit would arrive. Chacko never blamed the crashes on the kit.
It was only after Pappachi died that Chacko resigned his job as lecturer at the Madras Christian College, and came to Ayemenem with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron dreams. He commuted his pension and provident fund to buy a Bharat bottle-sealing machine. His oar (with his team mates’ names inscribed in gold) hung from iron hoops on the factory wall.
Up to the time Chacko arrived, the factory had been a small but profitable enterprise. Mammachi just ran it like a large kitchen. Chacko had it registered as a partnership and informed Mammachi that she was the sleeping partner. He invested in equipment (canning machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labour force. Almost immediately, the financial slide began, but was artificially buoyed by extravagant bank loans that Chacko raised by mortgaging the family’s rice-fields around the Ayemenem House. Though Ammu did as much work in the factory as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers, he always referred to it as my factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally, this was the case because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property.
Chacko told Rahel and Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I.
‘Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society,’ Ammu said.
Chacko said, ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine.’
He had a surprisingly high laugh for a man of his size and fatness. And when he laughed, he shook all over without appearing to move.
Until Chacko arrived in Ayemenem, Mammachi’s factory had no name. Everybody just referred to her pickles and jams as Sosha’s Tender Mango, or Sosha’s Banana Jam. Sosha was Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.
It was Chacko who christened the factory Paradise Pickles & Preserves and had labels designed and printed at Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s press. At first he had wanted to call it Zeus Pickles & Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion—Parashu-ram Pickles—was vetoed for the opposite reason: too much local relevance.)
It was Chacko’s idea to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.
On the way to Cochin now, it rattled and made fallingoff noises.
Near Vaikom they had to stop to buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for The Sound of Music.
Then, as they approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level-crossing gate went down. Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t.
She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet. Estha said that that was a Bad Sign.
So now they were going to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts on to the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.
The red sign on the red and white arm said STOP in white.
‘POTS,’ Rahel said.
A 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.
