Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

“If you want to save her, all you have to do is to go with the Uncle with the big meeshas . He’ll ask you a question. One question. All you have to do is to say `Yes.’ Then we can all go home. It’s so easy. It’s a small price to pay.”

Baby Kochamma followed Estha’s gaze. It was all she could do to prevent herself from taking the paperweight and flinging it out of the window. Her heart was hammering.

“So!” she said, with a bright, brittle smile, the strain beginning to tell in her voice. “What shall I tell the Inspector Uncle? What have we decided? D’you want to save Arnmu or shall we send her to jail?”

As though she was offering them a choice of two treats. Fishing or bathing the pigs? Bathing the pigs or fishing?

The twins looked up at her. Not together (but almost) two frightened voices whispered, “Save Ammu.”

In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation?

In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing! They hadn’t given it more than a second of thought before they looked up and said (not together, but almost) “Save Ammu.” Save us. Save our mother.

Baby Kochamma beamed. Relief worked like a laxative. She needed to go to the bathroom. Urgently. She opened the door and asked for the Inspector.

“They’re good little children,” she told him when he came. “They’ll go with you.”

“No need for both. One will serve the purpose,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said. “Any one. Mon. Mol. Who wants to come with me?”

“Estha.” Baby Kochamma chose. Knowing him to be the more practical of the two. The more tractable. The more farsighted. The more responsible. “You go. Goodboy.”

Little Man. He lived in a cara-van. Dum dum.

Estha went.

Ambassador E. Pelvis. With saucer-eyes and a spoiled puff. A short ambassador flanked by tall policemen, on a terrible mission deep into the bowels of the Kottayam police station. Their footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor.

Rahel remained behind in the Inspector’s office and listened to the rude sounds of Baby Kochamma’s relief dribbling down the sides of the Inspector’s pot in his attached toilet.

“The flush doesn’t work,” she said when she came out “It’s so annoying.”

Embarrassed that the Inspector would see the color and consistency of her stool.

The lock-up was pitch-dark. Estha could see nothing, but he could hear the sound of rasping, labored breathing. The smell of shit made him retch. Someone switched on the light. Bright Blinding. Velutha appeared on the scummy, slippery floor: A mangled genie invoked by a modern lamp. He was naked, his soiled mundu had come undone. Blood spilled from his skull like a secret. His face was swollen and his head look liked a pumpkin, too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down smile. Police boots stepped back from the rim of a pool of urine spreading from him, the bright, bare electric bulb reflected in it.

Dead fish floated up in Estha. One of the policemen prodded Velutha with his foot. There was no response. Inspector Thomas Mathew squatted on his haunches and raked his jeep key across the sole of Velutha’s foot. Swollen eyes opened. Wandered. Then focused through a film of blood on a beloved child. Estha imagined hat something in him smiled. Not his mouth, but some other unhurt part of him. His elbow perhaps. Or shoulder.

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.

Childhood tiptoed out.

Silence slid in like a bolt.

Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared.

Ammu’s reaction stunned her. The ground fell away from under her feet. She knew she had an ally in Inspector Thomas Mathew. But how long would that last? What if he was transferred and the case re-opened? It was possible considering the shouting, sloga~fleeting crowd of Party workers that Comrade K. N. M. Pillai had managed to assemble outside the gate. That prevented the laborers from coming to work, and left vast quantities of mangoes, bananas, pineapple, garlic and ginger rotting slowly on the premises of Paradise Pickles.

Baby Kochamma knew she had to get Ammu out of Ayemenem as soon as possible.

She managed that by doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with other people’s passions.

She gnawed like a rat into the godown of Chacko’s grief. Within its walls she planted an easy, accessible target for his insane anger. It wasn’t hard for her to portray Ammu as the person actually responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Ammu and her two-egg twins.

Chacko breaking down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned.

And so, at the Cochin Harbor Terminus, Estha Alone at the barred train window. Ambassador E. Pelvis. A millstone with a puff. And a greenwavy, thickwatery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless bottomful feeling. His trunk with his name on it was under his seat. His tiflin box with tomato sandwiches and his Eagle flask with an eagle was on the little folding table in front of him.

Next to him an eating lady in a green and purple Kanjeevaram sari and diamonds clustered like shining bees on each nostril offered him yellow laddoos in a box. Estha shook his head. She smiled and coaxed, her kind eyes disappeared into slits behind her glasses. She made kissing sounds with her mouth.

“Try one. Verrrry sweet,” she said in Tamil. Rombo maduram.

“Sweet,” her oldest daughter, who was about Estha’s age, said in English.

Estha shook his head again. The lady ruffled his hair and spoiled his puff. Her family (husband and three children) was already eating. Big round yellow laddoo crumbs on the seat. Trainrumbles under their feet. The blue nightlight not yet on.

The eating lady’s small son switched it on. The eating lady switched it off. She explained to the child that it was a sleeping light. Not an awake light.

Every First Class train thing was green. The seats green. The berths green. The floor green. The chains green. Darkgreen Lightgreen.

To Stop Train Pull Chain, it said in green.

Ot pots niart llup niahc, Estha thought in green.

Through the window bars, Ammu held his hand.

“Keep your ticket carefully,” Ammu’s mouth said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth. “They’ll come and check.”

Estha nodded down at Ammu’s face tilted up to the train window. At Rahel, small and smudged with station dirt. All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.

That wasn’t in the papers.

It took the twins years to understand Ammu’s part in what had happened. At Sophie Mol’s funeral and in the days before Estha was Returned, they saw her swollen eyes, and with the self-centeredness of children, held themselves wholly culpable for her grief.

“Eat the sandwiches before they get soggy,” Ammu said. “And don’t forget to write.”

She scanned the finger-nails of the little hand she held, and slid a black sickle of dirt from under the thumb-nail.

“And look after my sweetheart for me. Until I come and get him.”

“When, Ammu? When will you come for him?”

“Soon.”

“But when? When eggzackly?”

“Soon, sweetheart. As soon as I can.”

“Month-after-next? Ammu?” Deliberately making it a long time away so that Ammu would say Before that, Estha. Be practical. What about your studies?