LITMIR.BIZ

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was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world), that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.

      ‘And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be—are just a twinkle in her eye,’ Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

      When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.

      Later, in the light of all that happened, twinkle seemed completely the wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.

      Though the Earth Woman made a lasting impression on the twins, it was the History House—so much closer at hand—that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on the other side of the river.

      Looming in the Heart of Darkness.

      A house they couldn’t enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand.

      They didn’t know then, that soon they would go in. That they would cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah.

      While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.

      History’s smell.

      Like old roses on a breeze.

      It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

      They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

      Chacko said that going to see The Sound of Music was an extended exercise in Anglophilia.

      Ammu said, Oh come on, the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music. It’s a World Hit.’

      ‘Nevertheless, my dear,’ Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. ‘Never. The. Less.’

      Mammachi often said that Chacko was easily one of the cleverest men in India. ‘According to whom?’ Ammu would say. ‘On what basis?’ Mammachi loved to tell the story (Chacko’s story) of how one of the dons at Oxford had said that in his opinion, Chacko was brilliant, and made of prime ministerial material.

      To this, Ammu always said, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ like people in the comics.

      She said:

      (a) Going to Oxford didn’t necessarily make a person clever.

      (b) Cleverness didn’t necessarily make a good prime minister.

      (c) If a person couldn’t even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?

      And, most important of all:

      (d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.

      Chacko said:

      (a) You don’t go to Oxford. You read at Oxford. And

      (b) After reading at Oxford you come down.

      ‘Down to earth, d’you mean?’ Ammu would ask. ‘That you definitely do. Like your famous airplanes.’

      Ammu said that the sad but entirely predictable fate of Chacko’s airplanes was an impartial measure of his abilities.

      Once a month (except during the monsoons), a parcel would arrive for Chacko by VPP. It always contained a balsa aeromodelling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propellor. When it was ready, he would take Estha and Rahel to the rice-fields in Nattakom to help him fly it. It never flew for more than a minute. Month after month, Chako’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained retrievers, to salvage the remains.

      A tail, a tank, a wing.

      A wounded machine.

      Chacko’s room was cluttered with broken wooden planes. And every month, another kit would arrive. Chacko never blamed the crashes on the kit.

      It was only after Pappachi died that Chacko resigned his job as lecturer at the Madras Christian College, and came to Ayemenem with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron dreams. He commuted his pension and provident fund to buy a Bharat bottle-sealing machine. His oar (with his team mates’ names inscribed in gold) hung from iron hoops on the factory wall.

      Up to the time Chacko arrived, the factory had been a small but profitable enterprise. Mammachi just ran it like a large kitchen. Chacko had it registered as a partnership and informed Mammachi that she was the sleeping partner. He invested in equipment (canning machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labour force. Almost immediately, the financial slide began, but was artificially buoyed by extravagant bank loans that Chacko raised by mortgaging the family’s rice-fields around the Ayemenem House. Though Ammu did as much work in the factory as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers, he always referred to it as my factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally, this was the case because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property.

      Chacko told Rahel and Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I.

      ‘Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society,’ Ammu said.

      Chacko said, ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine.’

      He had a surprisingly high laugh for a man of his size and fatness. And when he laughed, he shook all over without appearing to move.

      Until Chacko arrived in Ayemenem, Mammachi’s factory had no name. Everybody just referred to her pickles and jams as Sosha’s Tender Mango, or Sosha’s Banana Jam. Sosha was Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.

      It was Chacko who christened the factory Paradise Pickles & Preserves and had labels designed and printed at Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s press. At first he had wanted to call it Zeus Pickles & Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion—Parashu-ram Pickles—was vetoed for the opposite reason: too much local relevance.)

      It was Chacko’s idea to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.

      On the way to Cochin now, it rattled and made fallingoff noises.

      Near Vaikom they had to stop to buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for The Sound of Music.

      Then, as they approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level-crossing gate went down. Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t.

      She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet. Estha said that that was a Bad Sign.

      So now they were going to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts on to the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.

      The red sign on the red and white arm said STOP in white.

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