LITMIR.BIZ

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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.’

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