Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

“ Ay-yo , Rahel Mol!” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said, recognizing her instantly, “ Orkunnilky ? Comrade Uncle?”

“ Oower ,” Rahel said.

Did she remember him? She did indeed.

Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot-that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes. -

“So!” Comrade Pillai said. “I think so you are in Amayrica flow?”

“No,” Rahel said. “I’m here.”

“Yes yes.” He sounded a little impatient. “But otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?” Comrade Pillai uncrossed his arms. His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary wall like a sad St. Bernard’s eyes.

“Recognized?” Comrade Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin.

The man hadn’t

“The old Paradise Pickle Kochamma’s daughter’s daughter,” Comrade Pillai said.

The man looked puzzled. He was clearly a stranger. And not a pickle-eater. Comrade Pillai tried a different tack.

“Punnyan Kunju?” he asked. The Patriarch of Antioch appeared briefly in the sky and waved his withered hand.

Things began to fall into place for the man with the photographs. He nodded enthusiastically.

“Punnyan Kunju’s son? Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi?” Comrade Pillai said.

“Oower, oower, oower,” the man said.

“His daughter’s daughter is this. In Amayrica now.”

The nodder nodded as Rahel’s ancestral lineage fell into place for him.

“Oower, oower, oower. In Amayrica now, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration.

He remembered vaguely a whiff of scandal. He had forgotten the details, but remembered that it had involved sex and death. It had been in the papers. After a brief silence and another series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of photographs.

“Okay then, comrade, I’ll be off.”

He had a bus to catch.

“So!” Comrade Pillai’s smile broadened as he turned all his attention like a searchlight on Rahel. His gums were startlingly pink, the reward for a lifetime’s uncompromising vegetarianism. He was the kind of man whom it was hard to imagine had once been a boy. Or a baby. He looked as though he had been born middle aged. With a receding hairline.

“Mol’s husband?” he wanted to know.

“Hasn’t come.”

“Any photos?”

“No.”

“Name?”

“Larry. Lawrence.”

“Oower. Lawrence.” Comrade Pillai nodded as though he agreed with it. As though given a choice, it was the very one he would have picked.

“Any issues?”

“No,” Rahel said.

“Still in planning stages, I suppose? Or expecting?’

“No.”

“One is must. Boy, girl. Anyone,” Comrade Pillai said. “Two is of course your choice.”

“We’re divorced.” Rahel hoped to shock him into silence. “Die-vorced?” His voice rose to such a high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word as though it were a form of death.

“That is most unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most unfortunate.”

It occurred to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers’ bourgeois decadence.

One was mad. The other die-vorced. Probably barren.

Perhaps this was the real revolution. The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self-destruct.

Comrade Pillai lowered his voice as though there were people listening, though there was no one about.

“And Mon?” he whispered confidentially. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Rahel said. “He’s fine.”

Fine. Flat and bony-colored. He washes his clothes with crumbling soap.

“ Aiyyo paavam ,” Comrade Pillai whispered, and his nipples drooped in mock dismay. “Poor fellow.”

Rahel wondered what he gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at least bother to pretend otherwise?

“Lenin is in Delhi now,” Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride. “Working with foreign embassies. See!”

He handed Rahel the cellophane sachet. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands with a very well-dressed, very pink man.

“German First Secretary,” Comrade Pillai said.

They looked cheerful in the photographs, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

Rahel remembered the incident that made Lenin swim into focus as a Real Person for her and Estha, when they stopped regarding him as just another pleat in his mother’s sari. She and Estha were five, Lenin perhaps three or four years old. They met in the clinic of Dr. Verghese Verghese (Kottayam’s leading Pediatrician and Feeler-up of Mothers). Rahel was with Ammu and Estha (who had insisted that he go along). Lenin was with his mother, Kalyani. Both Rahel and Lenin had the same complaint-Foreign Objects Lodged Up Their Noses. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence now, but somehow hadn’t then. It was curious how politics lurked even in what children chose to stuff up their noses. She, the granddaughter of an Imperial Entomologist, he the son of a grassroots Marxist Party worker. So, she a glass bead, and he a green gram.

The waiting room was full.

From behind the doctor’s curtain, sinister voices murmured, interrupted by howls from savaged children. There was the clink of glass on metal, and the whisper and bubble of boiling water. A boy played with the wooden Doctor is IN-Doctor is OUT sign on the wall, sliding the brass panel up and down. A feverish baby hiccupped on its mother’s breast. The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.

No one read the magazines.

From below the scanty curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street came the relentless slipslap of disembodied feet in slippers. The noisy, carefree world of Those with Nothing Up Their Noses.

Ammu and Kalyani exchanged children. Noses were pushed up, heads bent back, and turned towards the light to see if one mother could see what the other had missed. When that didn’t work, Lenin, dressed like a taxi-yellow shirt, black stretchlon shorts-regained his mother’s nylon lap (and his packet of Chiclets). He sat on sari flowers and from that unassailable position of strength surveyed the scene impassively. He inserted his left forefinger deep into his unoccupied nostril and breathed noisily through his mouth. He had a neat side parting. His hair was slicked down with Ayurvedic oil. The Chiclets were his to hold before the doctor saw him, and to consume after. All was well with the world. Perhaps he was a little too young to know that Atmosphere in Waiting Room, plus Screams from Behind Curtain, ought logically to add up to a Healthy Fear of Dr. V. V.

A rat with bristly shoulders made several busy journeys between the doctor’s room and the bottom of the cupboard in the waiting room.

A nurse appeared and disappeared through the tattered curtained doctor’s door. She wielded strange weapons. A tiny vial. A rectangle of glass with blood smeared on it A test tube of sparkling, back-lit urine. A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles. The hairs on her legs were pressed like coiled wires against her translucent white stockings. The box heels of her scuffed white sandals were worn away on the insides, and caused her feet to slope in, towards each other. Shiny black hairpins, like straightened snakes, clamped her starched nurse’s cap to her oily head.