Evening Is the Whole Day

In the distance, Chellam’s suitcase slides and grates on the marble floor, and Chellam herself wheezes and sniffs from the cold that never seems to leave her. Across the dining room she shambles, and into her room under the stairs, where her clothes lie in a heap on her unmade bed. From the walls Kamal Hassan, Jayasudha, Sridevi, and Rajnikanth eye her glossily: Chellam, Chellam, they chide her, all the months you gazed at us, at our forelocks and our nose-rings and our flared nostrils, while trying to fall asleep, and today you ignore us like this? But Chellam’s mind is elsewhere this morning, and besides, squatting over her suitcase, she’s much too far away from their film-star faces to see anything more than the blur of their uniformly wheatish complexions. The suitcase lid swooshes as she drops it and then presses down on it to retie the raffia. She turns the suitcase around and around, pulling the raffia so hard the fibers leave red welts on her palms. She drags the suitcase the few remaining yards to the front door, rubbing her nose with an index finger.

“Chhi!” Amma says, the syllable exploding directly into her mug of tea. “Can’t even be bothered to find a tissue! If she’d listened to your Appa and started packing nicely one month ago she wouldn’t be in such a mess now, all kacan-mucan running here running there and sniffing and gasping all over the place, isn’t it?”

The sniffing, the wheezing, the scraping, and the grating grow fainter and fainter.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, Paati mouths behind the curtain. Aasha manages to read her lips through the fabric, thanks only to a superhuman feat of concentration.

Through the window on the other side of the dining room, Chellam finally appears in the garden. Aasha and Suresh can see her, but Amma can’t. Her determined suitcase-dragging has worked the zipper on her skirt slowly around to her left hip. Her collar has twisted itself to one side, and a button has come undone at her waist. An inch of her stomach shows through the gap, creamy brown, lighter than the rest of her, perhaps pregnant, perhaps not. Unaware she’s being watched, she leans her suitcase against the ornamental swing and tugs at her waistband to bring the zipper round to the back again. She buttons the undone button, straightens her collar, and smoothes her frizzy hair. Then, with great difficulty, she drags her suitcase out to the gate, picking it up and kicking it weakly every time a bit of gravel gets caught in its wheels.

“Shall we go, Appa?” she says to her father in Tamil. She doesn’t look at Aasha and Suresh’s Appa.

He doesn’t look at her, either. With his long tongue he worries a desiccated coconut fiber that’s been stuck between his molars since lunch. He looks at the ground and scratches his left ankle with the toe of his right slipper, still holding his umbrella perfectly erect.

Chellam’s father delivers a quick, blunt blow to the side of her head. “Taking ten years to come with her suitcase,” he grunts to Appa. “God knows what she was doing inside there for so long. Bloody useless daughter I have, lawyer saar,” he continues, revving up his engine, “you alone know how much shame she has brought upon me, you alone know what a burden a daughter like this can be.” He looks from his daughter to Appa and from Appa to his daughter. He hawks and spits into the monsoon drain, and his spittle runs red with betel juice, staining the sides of the culvert as it dribbles. “How, lawyer saar, how will you forgive —”

“That all you don’t worry,” says Appa. “Forgiving-shorgiving all you don’t worry, Muniandy. Just take your daughter and go. Go away and leave us alone.”

“Okay, enough of it,” says Amma inside the house. “What for all this drama now? Are they waiting for the violin music or what? Why won’t he buzz off?”

The latch on the gate clicks shut and Chellam and her father are gone, she pulling the suitcase, her sozzled father swaying behind her. Till the end of her numbered days the green of the weedy verges she passes on her ignominious retreat will be stamped on the insides of Chellam’s eyelids; she will hear the neighbors’ whispers in her ears on quiet mornings; whenever it rains she will smell the wet clay and feel her feet sink with each step and her shoulder ache from the weight of her broken suitcase.

Appa stands with one foot on the lowest rung of the gate, watching them as they go. All down the street faces hang behind window curtains like dim bulbs.

“Sure enough,” Mrs. Malhotra from across the street mutters to herself, “they’re sending the girl home. These days you simply cannot trust servants.” She turns from the window and looks at her old father, who sits rocking in his chair and humming urgently like a small child needing to pee. “Arre, Bapuji!” she cries. “You lucky-lucky only that we haven’t dumped you into a servant’s lap, yah, otherwise you’ll also be dead and gone by now!”

The Wongs’ retarded son, Baldy, points at them as they pass the house next door, where Amma’s parents used to live until they died three years ago. Baldy crows through the branches of the mango tree in which he’s perched in the rain, but nobody pays him any attention. His father’s at work. His mother’s peeling shallots in the kitchen. The neighbors are all used to him.

“Don’t say retarded,” Amma had scolded the first time Appa had used the word to describe Baldy. “He’s just a bit slow, that’s all.”

“To retard is to slow,” Appa had said. “Ecce signum: the inestimable OED.” He’d pulled the dictionary off the bookshelf in the sitting room and laid its dusty black cardboard cover on Amma’s breakfast plate.

“Okay, enough of it,” Amma’d said then, and pushed her chair back so vehemently to leave the table that her tea sloshed onto her saucer. But Uma and Appa had shared a triumphant, twinkling grin, and even Suresh and Aasha had got the joke.

No curtains are stirring at the Manickams’ window three doors down: the former Mrs. Manickam is lying in bed in Kampong Kepayang eating peeled and pitted longans from the hand of her new husband, who leaves the office early every day for this very purpose, and Mr. Manickam is at the office though it’s a Saturday, burying his sorrows in work as usual.

“Looklooklook,” says Mrs. Balakrishnan farther down the street, flicking her husband’s sleeve as he sits reading the newspaper. “Sure enough man, they’ve sent the girl off from the Big House. What for all this drama now? Now only they’ll sit and cry. As if it will bring the old lady back. When she was sitting in her corner the whole time they were complaining only. Cannot manage her it seems. Must get another servant it seems. Too grand to look after her themselves. That’s what too much money will get you in the end. Just troubles and tears.”

With one foot Appa sweeps a few dead leaves and stray pebbles out under the gate. Then he turns and makes his way back to the house, dragging his Japanese slippers on the gravel. For a few seconds he stands looking up at the tops of trees as if he were a visitor admiring the lush foliage, his umbrella turning like a Victorian lady’s parasol on his shoulder. Wah, wah, Mr. Raju, very nice, man, your garden! What kind of fertilizer you use? “Big-House Uncle!” shouts Baldy from the top of his tree next door. “Uncle, Uncle, Big-House Uncle! Uncle ah! Uncle where? Uncle why?” Appa looks right at Baldy but says nothing. Then, as if he’s suddenly remembered something important, he starts and strides briskly into the house.

“What are you two sitting there wasting time for?” he asks Suresh and Aasha as he enters the dining room. “As if the whole family must sit and bid a solemn farewell to the bloody girl like she’s the Queen of England on a state visit. Go and do your homework or read a book or do something useful, for heaven’s sake.”

The children’s heads turn towards Amma, and they sit holding their breath and biting their lips, waiting for her permission. To go and do their homework (although Aasha doesn’t really have any). To read a book. To do unnamed useful things. To scamper off and live children’s lives (or to discover that such a thing has become impossible for them, even after the morning’s promise of a new beginning) and leave Amma bereft at a crumb-scattered table, with no audience.

“What? What are you looking at me for?” says Amma. “As if I wanted you to sit here. Both of you sitting with your busybody backsides glued to your chairs as if this whole tamasha is a Saturday morning cartoon, and now looking at me as if I’m the one who wouldn’t let you go.”

A tiny gust of air escapes Appa’s nostrils. A laugh, a snip of surprise, a puff of fear. Good grief, Appa thinks, it’s true: she’s kept them here to witness her righteous fury at Chellam the Ingrate. And not just to witness it—to share it, to catch the whole rolling mass of rage with nowhere else to go, to parcel it out for future use. Lesson One: how some people turn against you even After Everything you’ve done for them.

He unfolds the two-color map of his wife in his head and adds to it another little landmark, a white dot before the border. Call it Shamelessness. Call it Stopping-at-Nothing, a triple-barreled name for a quaint English village. From the pit of his belly his own ravaging shamelessnesses threaten to rise in twos and threes and fours into his chest, waiting to accuse him in their discordant voices of calling the kettle black, waiting for him to acknowledge that the children have been caught between his old shamelessnesses and her new ones. He blinks and swallows, and thinks instead of the children’s pause for permission. That’s what has really jolted him, not this sudden change in his wife. That’s what has sent cold air spiraling out his nostrils in two swift exclamation points. She’s kept them here, he thinks, and they know it. For some reason he can’t put his finger on, this frightens him. His head swims a little, as if he’s just woken from a dream in which chickens talked and suns turned into moons.

He shakes his head and strides past them to calm his nerves with a cool shower in a bathroom humming with the ghost of his dead mother, before driving off the screen into an alternate universe in which he can forget the intransigent truths of this one.

In the kitchen Amma puts the dishes in the sink, and says, without turning around, “Next time why don’t you just go with your father on Lourdesmary’s days off? You want me to plan each Saturday night dinner one week in advance or what? Write out a full dinner menu with a fountain pen? Wear white gloves to serve you from silver trays?” Then she goes up to her room and stays there until Suresh and Aasha have made and eaten a dinner composed of Emergency Rations: golden syrup on Jacob’s Cream Crackers, Milo powder straight from the tin, raw Maggi noodles broken into pieces and sprinkled with their grey (chicken-flavored) seasoning powder. At eight o’clock, Amma comes downstairs to eat her own dinner while listening to the kitchen radio in the half-dark. The radio’s still set to the Tamil station to which Chellam used to listen while combing Paati’s hair in the mornings. The theme song for the ten o’clock film-music program would always come on just as she pulled Paati’s hair into a silky white knot barely big enough for two hairpins. Now, though, there’s only a man with a gravelly, black-mustachioed voice interviewing a young lady doctor about the health benefits of almonds.

Suresh ceremoniously lays out his books and pencils, then takes his HB pencil and ruler out of their metal tin and starts his mathematics homework. “Please can I have just —” Aasha begins, and Suresh tears her a sheet of foolscap from his scrap paper pad and gives her a blue rollerball pen with a fat nib. On this cadged piece of paper Aasha draws an elaborate picture indecipherable to everyone but herself, a picture of Chellam the ex–servant girl, once beloved (but hated) and hated (but beloved) by Suresh and Aasha, now in ex-ile in her faraway village of red earth and tin roofs.

Ex-ile is an island for people who aren’t what they used to be. On that lonely island in Aasha’s picture Chellam wanders, tripping on blunt rocks in barren valleys, scaling sharp, windblown slopes on her hands and knees, minding starved cows that graze on rubbish heaps as if they’re mounds of fresh clover. Blindly arranging and rearranging clouds of dust and dirt and bloodstained bathroom buckets with a ragged broom. Inside her head a dozen snakes lie coiled around one another in a heavy mass. Inside her belly stands a tiny matchstick figure, a smaller version of herself, pushing against the round walls of its dwelling with its tiny hands.

This matchstick representation of Chellam is accurate in at least one respect: there is indeed a terrible colubrine knot of bad memories and black questions inside Chellam’s head that will die with her, unhatched. Aasha outlines the snakes again and then colors and colors them till the ink spreads down into Chellam’s heavy-lobed, oversized ears.

“Tsk, Aasha,” grumbles Suresh, “wasting my good pen only. For nonsense like that can’t you use a pencil?”

Aasha caps the pen and rolls it across the table to Suresh with a pout. She climbs down from her chair and goes upstairs to sit in Uma’s empty room. Around her the night sings with crickets and cicadas, with creaky ceiling fans and the theme songs of all the television programs being watched all the way down Kingfisher Lane. Hawaii Five-O. B.J. and the Bear. Little House on the Prairie. Aasha’s quivering ears make out each one, separating them like threads on a loom, but downstairs she hears only silence. The silence, too, can be teased apart like threads: the silence of Amma staring out the kitchen window into the falling darkness. The silence of Appa’s empty study, from which there are no rustlings of papers or whistlings of tunes. The silence of Suresh doing his homework all alone, feeling guilty for grumbling about his wasted pen. The silence of Paati, whose weightless, see-through body bumps noiselessly into furniture and walls, looking for the unraveling rattan chair on which she once sat all day in her mosquito-thronged corner. Merciful flames have freed the chair’s spirit just as Paati’s cremation freed hers, but the chair hasn’t reappeared to sit transparently in its corner, and Paati is inconsolable. Her clear-glass joints creak silently as she settles onto the floor where her chair used to be.

A small voice outside the window says: “That’s how Paati knows she’s dead. Her chair isn’t there anymore.” Aasha turns to see her oldest (yet very young) ghost friend perched on the wide windowsill, tilting her head as she sometimes does. If Aasha were tall enough and strong enough to open this window on her own she would, though Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s not asking to be let in this time.

“You remember how I knew I was dead, don’t you?” She doesn’t look at Aasha as she asks the question, but off into the distance, so as to hide her great yearning for the correct answer.

“Yes,” says Aasha, “of course I do. But tell me again anyway.”

“When I couldn’t see the sunlight and the birds. Before that I was alive, the whole time my Ma and I were sinking down through the pond—there were no fish in it at all, it was silent and dark like a big empty church—but I could see the light far away at the top, above the water. When I couldn’t see it anymore, that’s when I was dead.”

Aasha lays her head on Uma’s pillow, curls up, and closes her eyes to meditate once more upon this familiar confidence.

The following afternoon Amma finds Aasha’s abandoned drawing of Chellam under the dining table. She squints briefly at the drawing, and then, deciding it must be a character from one of Aasha’s storybooks, makes her list for Mat Din on the back. Chocolate wafers, Nutella, star anise for mutton curry, tinned corn and peas to go with chicken chops.

2

BIG HOUSE BEGINNINGS

IN 1899, Appa’s grandfather sailed across the Bay of Bengal to seek his fortune under familiar masters in a strange land, leaving behind an emerald of a village on the east coast of India. Barely had he shuffled off the boat with the rest of that vast herd in Penang when a fellow offered him a job on the docks, and there he toiled, sleeping four or five hours a night in a miserable dormitory, sending the bulk of his wages home, wanting nothing more for himself than to be able to pay his passage back home someday.

What changed his dreams in twenty years? All Appa’s father, Tata, knew of it was that by the time he was old enough to stand before his father in knee-length khakis for morning inspections before school, his father was saying: “Study hard. Study hard and you won’t have to be a coolie like me.” Every single goddamn morning he said it, the milky coffee frothing in his mustache. Study hard and the world will be yours. You could be a rich man. With a bungalow and servants.

And so Tata studied hard enough to get himself a clerk’s position with the Cowan & Maugham Steamship Company when he left school at sixteen, and somewhere in all that hoping and studying and preparing, something else changed: India ceased to be home. Sometimes it glimmered green and gold in Tata’s father’s tales of riverbank games and ten-day weddings and unbreakable blood bonds. At other times it was a threat, a nightmare, a morass in which those who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape still flailed. But Tata had no pictures of his own to attach to his father’s word for India: Ur, the country. This, this flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot place to which they had found their way almost by accident, this was his country now. Malays Chinese Indians, motley countrymen they might be, but countrymen they were, for better or for worse. What was coming was coming to them all. It would be theirs to share.

This was what Tata, eyes shining in the dark, told his pretty wife. It’s our country, not the white man’s. And when she said, But they’ve only been good to us, he insisted: You don’t know. You don’t know their dirty hearts. But you’ll see what this country can become without them. You’ll see.

To his five children—Raju the good-for-everything, Balu the good-for-nothing, and their three inconsequential sisters—Tata regularly said: We’re lucky to live here. It’s the best place on earth, none of India’s problems. Peace and quiet and perfect weather. Just work hard and the world could belong to you here. Then he’d ruffle the hair on Raju’s attentive head and box distracted Balu’s ear.

By the time Tata retired, in 1956, he owned a shipping company that rivaled his old employer’s. A wry sun was setting with a vengeance on the British Empire. Tata decided to buy himself a house that would declare his family’s stake in the new country. A great house, a grand house, a dynastic seat. He would leave Penang and look for such a house in Ipoh, far away from the dockyards, hilly, verdant, the perfect place to retire.

The house of Tata’s dreams belonged to one Mr. McDougall, a dyspeptic Scotsman who had owned two of the scores of mines that had sprouted up in and around Ipoh in the 1850s to tap the Kinta Valley’s rich veins of tin. He had already sold the mines to a Chinese towkay; now he had only to get rid of his house.

Mr. McDougall had three teenage children who’d been born and bred among the Chinese miners’ offspring in Ipoh, running around in Japanese slippers and eating char siu pau for breakfast. He also had a mistress and a bastard child, whom he kept in relative luxury in a bungalow in Tambun. Mr. McDougall’s life had meandered pleasantly along its course for years—mornings visiting the mines, afternoons with the mistress, evenings at the club—when he decided to leave the country, for two reasons. The first was that Her Majesty’s government was preparing to withdraw. The second was that his mistress, sniffing Mr. McDougall’s own flight in the air, had begun to demand a bigger house, a chauffeured car, and a wedding ring. If you don’t leave your family, she told him, I’ll come and pull you away myself. I’ll drag you off with my hands and my teeth, and your wife can watch.

In response, Mr. McDougall had whisked his wife—Elizabeth Mc-Dougall, née Fitzwilliam, a colonel’s daughter and in her time a great beauty whose attentions all the British bachelors of Malaya had coveted—and their three children off to a home they’d never known in the Scottish Highlands. And the mistress? For attention, for revenge, or out of simple, untainted despair, she had drowned herself and her six-year-old daughter in a mining pond. If Mr. McDougall had learned of her demise, he had never given any sign of it.

“I’m not sure his legitimate children fared any better,” Appa would say whenever he told the story of the house. “Wonder what happened to them. The father simply uprooted them just like that and packed them all off lock stock and barrel.”

Lock, Stock and Barrel, three men in a tub.

One said roll over and another said rub.

It was Suresh who penned these two inspired lines on the inside cover of his science textbook. He was nine years old at the time, and he entertained the idea of sharing the couplet with Appa, who would surely roar with laughter and pat him on the shoulder (if they were standing up) or the knee (if they were sitting down), the way he laughed and patted Uma whenever she displayed a wit worthy of her genes. But in the days after Suresh composed the verse Appa was hardly ever at home, and when he was his mood was so uneven that after three weeks of waiting, Suresh scratched the lines out with a marker pen to avoid trouble in case of a spot check by the school prefects.

“Going home it seems,” Appa would snort, recalling Mr. McDougall’s final words to Tata. “That’s what McDougall told them. What nonsense! His home, maybe, not theirs. Their skin may have been white but they were Chinks through and through, let me tell you.” Chink was a small, sharp sound that made Amma suck her teeth and shake her head, but this only encouraged Appa. “Probably wandering the moors looking for pork-entrail porridge,” he’d go on. “Wiping their backsides with the Nanyang Siang Pau’s business pages. Shipped specially to them by courier service.”

Then Uma would giggle, and Suresh, watching her, would giggle with equal intensity, a number of giggles empirically guaranteed to flatter Appa without risking a mouthslap or a thighpinch from Amma. Only Aasha never joined in, for amusing as she found Appa’s portraits of the McDougall children, her heart was with the little drowned girl, who wore her hair in pigtails; who had eyes like longan seeds and lychee-colored cheeks; who sometimes, on close, moonless nights, begged to be let in at the dining room window. Please, she mouthed to Aasha, can’t I sit at the table in my father’s house?

Don’t talk rubbish, Appa and Amma and Uma and Suresh said when Aasha told them. And when once she opened that window, she got a slap on the wrist for letting in a cicada.

WHEN MR. MCDOUGALL fled to the Scottish Highlands, it had been nine years since King George VI had relinquished the cherished jewel of his crown. To be more precise: he’d dropped it as if it were a hot potato, towards the outstretched hands of a little brown man in a loincloth and granny glasses; a taller, hook-nosed chap in a still-unnamed jacket; and three hundred and fifty million anonymous Natives who’d fiercely stayed up until, by midnight, they’d been watery-eyed, delirious with exhaustion, and willing to see nearly anything as a precious gift from His Majesty. Down, down, down it had fallen, this crown jewel, this hot potato, this quivering, unhatched egg, none of them knowing what would emerge from it and yet most of them sure—oh blessed, blissful certainty!—that it was just what they wanted. Alas, the rest, too, is history: in their hand-clapping delight they’d dropped it, and it had broken in two, and out of the two halves had scurried not the propitious golden chick they’d imagined, but a thousand bloodthirsty monsters multiplying before their eyes, and scrabble as they might to unscramble the mess, it was too late, all too late even for them to make a last-minute omelet with their broken egg.