Father Mulligan’s death did not alter the text of the entries in Baby Kochamma’s diary, simply because as far as she was concerned it did not alter his availability. If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers. Not to be shared with Faith, far less with competing co-nuns, and co-sadhus or whatever it was they called themselves. Co-swamis.
His rejection of her in life (gentle and compassionate though it was) was neutralized by death. In her memory of him, he embraced her. Just her. In the way a man embraces a woman. Once he was dead, Baby Kochamma stripped Father Mulligan of his ridiculous saffron robes and re-clothed him in the Coca-Cola cassock she so loved. (Her senses feasted, between changes, on that lean, concave, Christlike body.) She snatched away his begging bowl, pedicured his horny Hindu soles and gave him back his comfortable sandals. She re-converted him into the high-stepping camel that came to lunch on Thursdays.
And every night, night after night, year after year, in diary after diary after diary, she wrote: I love you I love you .
She put the pen back into the pen-loop and shut the diary. She took off her glasses, dislodged her dentures with her tongue, severing the strands of saliva that attached them to her gums like the sagging strings of a harp, and dropped them into a glass of Listerine. They sank to the bottom and sent up little bubbles, like prayers. Her nightcap. A clenched-smile soda. Tangy teeth in the morning.
Baby Kochamma settled back on her pillow and waited to hear Rahel come out of Estha’s room. They had begun to make her uneasy, both of them. A few mornings ago she had opened her window (for a Breath of Fresh Air) and caught them red-handed in the act of Returning From Somewhere. Clearly they had spent the whole night out. Together. Where could they have been? What and how much did they remember? When would they leave? What were they doing, sitting together in the dark for so long? She fell asleep propped up against her pillows, thinking that perhaps, over the sound of the rain and the television, she hadn’t heard Estha’s door open. That Rahel had gone to bed long ago. She hadn’t.
Rahel was lying on Estha’s bed. She looked thinner lying down. Younger. Smaller. Her face was turned towards the window beside the bed. Slanting rain hit the bars of the window-grill and shattered into a line spray over her face and her smooth bare arm. Her soft, sleeveless T-shirt was a glowing yellow in the dark. The bottom half of her, in blue jeans, melted into the darkness.
It was a little cold. A little wet. A little quiet. The Air.
But what was there to say?
From where he sat, at the end of the bed, Estha, without turning his head, could see her. Faintly outlined. The sharp line of her jaw. Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.
She turned her head and looked at him. He sat very straight. Waiting for the inspection. He had finished the ironing.
She was lovely to him. Her hair. Her cheeks. Her small, cleverlooking hands.
His sister.
A nagging sound started up in his head. The sound of passing trains. The light and shade and light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.
He sat even straighter. Still, he could see her. Grown into their mother’s skin. The liquid glint of her eyes in the dark. Her small straight nose. Her mouth, full-lipped. Something wounded-looking about it. As though it was flinching from something. As though long ago someone-a man with rings-had hit her across it. A beautiful, hurt mouth.
Their beautiful mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth. That had kissed his hand through the barred train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras.
“Bye, Estha. Godbless,” Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying-notto-cry mouth.
The last time he had seen her.
She was standing on the platform of the Cochin Harbor Terminus, her face turned up to the train window. Her skin gray, wan, robbed of its luminous sheen by the neon station light. Daylight stopped by trains on either side. Long corks that kept the darkness bottled in. The Madras Mail. The Flying Rani.
Rahel held by Ammu’s hand. A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport Fairy at a railway station.
Stamping her feet on the platform, unsettling clouds of settled station-filth. Until Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited. Around them the hostling-jostling crowd.
Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging bargaining reservation-checking.
Echoing stationsounds.
Hawkers selling coffee. Tea.
Gaunt children, blond with, malnutrition, selling smutty magazines and food they couldn’t afford to eat themselves.
Melted chocolates. Cigarette sweets.
Orangedrinks.
Lemondrinks.
Coca Cola Fanta icecream rose milk.
Pink-skinned dolls. Rattles. Love-in-Tokyos.
Hollow plastic parakeets full of sweets with heads you could unscrew.
Yellow-rimmed red sunglasses.
Toy watches with the time painted on them.
A cartful of defective toothbrushes.
The Cochin Harbor Terminus.
Gray in the stationlight. Hollow people. Homeless. Hungry. Still touched by last year’s famine. Their revolution postponed for the Time Being by Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Soviet Stooge. Running Dog,). The former apple of Peking’s eye.
The air was thick with flies.
A blind man without eyelids and eyes as blue as faded jeans, his skin pitted with smallpox scars, chatted to a leper without fingers, taking dexterous drags from scavenged cigarette stubs that lay beside him in a heap.
“What about you? When did you move here?”
As though they had had a choice. As though they had picked this for their home from a vast array of posh housing estates listed in a glossy pamphlet
A man sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His infinnate joy. His real foot was bare.
He bought some tea for his tumbler.
An old lady vomited. A lumpy pool. And went on with her life.
The Stationworld. Society’s circus. Where, with the rush of commerce, despair came home to roost and hardened slowly into resignation.
But this time, for Ammu and her two-egg twins, there was no Plymouth window to watch it through. No net to save them as they vaulted through the circus air.
Pack your things and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken door. A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were trembling, hadn’t looked up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin of ribbons lay open on her lap.
But Rahel had. Looked up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared and left a monster in his place.
A thicklipped man with rings, cool in white, bought Scissors cigarettes from a platform vendor. Three packs. To smoke in the train corridor.
For Men of Action
SatisfAction.
He was Estha’s escort. A Family Friend who happened to be going to Madras. Mr Kurien Maathen.
Since there was going to be a grown-up with Estha anyway, Mammachi said there was no need to waste money on another ticket. Baba was buying Madras-Calcutta. Ammu was buying Time. She too had to pack her things and leave. To start a new life, in which she could afford to keep her children. Until then, it had been decided that one twin could stay in Ayejnenem. Not both. Together they were trouble. nataS ni rieht scye . They had to be separated.
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