“Marry our conquerors, is more like it,” Ammu said dryly, 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.”

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling 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 forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. 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 “Hal 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 aeromodeling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft, with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propeller. When it was ready, he would rake 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, Chacko’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 (can fling machines, cauldrons, cookers) and expanded the labor 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 Bananajam. Sosha was Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.