Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Mammachi consulted a book that Chacko bought her, Homescale Preservations , but it offered no solutions. Then she dictated a letter to Annamma Chandy’s brother-in-law who was the Regional Manager of Padma Pickles in Bombay. He suggested that she increase the proportion of preservative that she used. And the salt. That had helped, but didn’t solve the problem entirely. Even now, after all those years, Paradise Pickles’ bottles still leaked a little. It was imperceptible, but they did still leak, and on long journeys their labels became oily and transparent. The pickles themselves continued to be a little on the salty side.

Mammachi wondered whether she would ever master the art of perfect preservation, and whether Sophie Mol would like some iced grape crush. Some cold purple juice in a glass.

Then she thought of Margaret Kochamma and the languid, liquid notes of Handel’s music grew shrill and angry.

Mammachi had never met Margaret Kochamma. But she despised her anyway. Shopkeeper’s daughter was how Margaret Kochamma was filed away in Mammachi’s mind. Mammachi’s world was arranged that way. If she was invited to a wedding in Kottayam, she would spend the whole time whispering to whoever she went with, “The bride’s maternal grandfather was my father’s carpenter. Kunjukutty Eapen? His great-grandmother’s sister was just a midwife in Trivandrum. My husband’s family used to own this whole hill.”

Of course Mammachi would have despised Margaret Kochamma even if she had been heir to the throne of England. It wasn’t just her working-class background Mammachi resented. She hated Margaret Kochamma for being Chacko’s wife. She hated her for leaving him. But would have hated her even more had she stayed.

The day that Chacko prevented Pappachi from beating her (and Pappachi had murdered his chair instead), Mammachi packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chacko’s care. From then onwards he became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her Man. Her only Love.

She was aware of his libertine relationships with the women in the factory, but had ceased to be hurt by them. When Baby Kochamma brought up the subject, Mammachi became tense and tight-lipped.

“He can’t help having a Man’s Needs,” she said primly.

Surprisingly, Baby Kochamma accepted this explanation, and the enigmatic, secretly thrilling notion of Men’s Needs gained implicit sanction in the Ayemenem House. Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido. They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to force men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made pregnant. Of course they did not even remotely suspect that the missile, when it was fired, the one that would annihilate the family’s Good Name forever, would come from a completely unexpected quarter.

Mammachi had a separate entrance built for Chacko’s room, which was at the eastern end of the house, so that the objects of his “Needs” wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the house. She secretly slipped them money to keep them happy. They took it because they needed it. They had young children and old parents. Or husbands who spent all their earnings in toddy bars. The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings.

Margaret Kochamma, however, was a different kettle of fish altogether. Since she had no means of finding out (though she did once try to get Kochu Maria to examine the bedsheets for stains), Mammachi could only hope that Margaret Kochamma was not intending to resume her sexual relationship with Chacko. While Margaret Kochamma was in Ayemenem, Mammachi managed her unmanageable feelings by slipping money into the pockets of the dresses that Margaret Kochamma left in the laundry bin. Margaret Kochamma never returned the money simply because she never found it. Her pockets were emptied as a matter of routine by Aniyan the dhobi. Mammachi knew this, but preferred to construe Margaret Kochamma’s silence as a tacit acceptance of payment for the favors Mammachi imagined she bestowed on her son.

So Mammachi had the satisfaction of regarding Margaret Kochamma as just another whore, Aniyan the dhobi was happy with his daily gratuity, and of course Margaret Kochamma remained blissfully unaware of the whole arrangement.

From its perch on the well, an untidy coucal called Hwoop-Hwoop and shuffled its rust-red wings.

A crow stole some soap that bubbled in its beak.

In the dark, smoky kitchen, short Kochu Maria stood on her toes and iced the tall, double-deckered WELCOME-HOME-OUR-SOPHIE-MOL cake. Though even in those days most Syrian Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless half- sleeved white chatta with a V-neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp cloth fan on her behind. Kochu Maria’s fan was more or less hidden by the blue-and-white checked, filled, absurdly incongruous housemaid’s apron that Mammachi insisted she wear inside the house.

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened with age.

She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.

Kochu Maria hadn’t yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn’t yet seen a television set. She wouldn’t have believed television existed. Had someone suggested that it did, Kochu Maria would have assumed that he or she was insulting her intelligence. Kochu Maria was wary of other peoples’ versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier) gullibility. In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said. A few months ago, in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No sir. Nor did she trust the vague gray pictures that had appeared in the Malayala Manorama that she couldn’t read.

She remained certain that Estha, when he said, “Et ta, Kochu Maria?’ was insulting her in English. She thought it meant something like Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf. She bided her time, waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about him.

She finished icing the tall cake. Then she tipped her head back and squeezed the leftovericing onto her tongue. Endless coils of chocolate toothpaste on a pink Kochu Maria tongue. When Mammachi called from the verandah (“Kochu Mariye! I hear the car!”) her mouth was full of icing and she couldn’t answer. When she finished, she ran her tongue over her teeth and then made a series of short smacking sounds with her tongue against her palate as though she’d just eaten something sour.