“Don’t answer!” Baby Kochamma whispered hoarsely. “Look down! Just look down!”

The man with the Rag turned his attention to her. She was looking down at the floor of the car. Like a coy, frightened bride who had been married off to a stranger.

“Hello, sister,” the man said carefully in English. “What is your name please?”

When Baby Kochamma didn’t answer, he looked back at his cohecklers.

“She has no name.”

“What about Modalali Mariakutty?” someone suggested with a giggle. Modalali in Malayalam means landlord.

“A, B, C, D, X, Y, Z,” somebody else said, irrelevantly.

More students crowded around. They all wore handkerchiefs or printed Bombay Dyeing hand towels on their heads to stave off the sun. They looked like extras who had wandered off the sets of the Malayalam version of Sinbad. The Last Voyage.

The man like a knot gave Baby Kochamma his red flag as a present.

“Here,” he said. “Hold it.”

Baby Kochamrna held it, still not looking at him.

“Wave it,” he ordered.

She had to wave it. She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and dusty

She tried to wave it as though she wasn’t waving it.

“Now say “Inquilab Zindabad.”

“Inquilab Zindabad,” Baby Kochamma whispered.

“Good girl.”

The crowd roared with laughter.

A shrillwhistle blew.

“Okay then,” the man said to Baby Kochamma in English, as though they had successfully concluded a business deal. “Bye-bye!”

He slammed the skyblue door shut Baby Kochamma wobbled. The crowd around the car unclotted and went on with its march.

Baby Kochamma rolled the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with this and that, trying to salvage some dignity

After the last few men walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.

“Are you sure it was him?’ Chacko asked Rahel.

`Who?” Rahel said, suddenly cautious.

“Are you sure it was Velutha?”

“Hmmm…?” Rahel said, playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.

“I said, are you sure that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.

“Mmm… nyes… m… m… almost,” Rahel said.

“You’re almost sure?” Chacko said.

“No… it was almost Vehitha,” Rahel said. “it almost looked like him…”

“So you’re not sure then?”

“Almost not.” Rahel slid a look at Estha for approval.

“It must have been him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”

Nobody seemed particularly impressed by her insight.

“We should keep an eye on him,” Baby Kochamrna said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory… I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he-”

“I saw Velutha at home before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”

“For his own sake,” Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t interrupt.”

She was annoyed that nobody asked her what a scree bed was.

In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her.

She began to hate him.

From the way Ammu held her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch. Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more like a frog-shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten had been squashed into a Miss Mitten-shaped stain by the milk truck that killed her.

With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat-shaped holes in the Universe.

There were so many stains on the road.

Squashed Miss Mitten-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed crows that had tried to eat the squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed dogs that ate the squashed crow-shaped stains in the Universe.

Feathers. Mangoes. Spit.

All the way to Cochin.

The sun shone through the Plymouth window directly down at Rahel. She closed her eyes and shone back at it. Even behind her eyelids the light was bright and hot. The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.

Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? -then fall, Caesar.”

“It just goes to show;” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody.”

With children, she said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.

At night, Estha would stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?-Then fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would complain to Mammachi.

“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”

Estha would rise from the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?-Then fall, Estha!” and die again.

Kochu Maria was sure that Ettu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.

The woman in the neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after-biscuit cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a Baby Voice.

Rahel ignored her and blew an inadvertent spit bubble.

Ammu hated them blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.

Aristocrats were people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.

Though Baba wasn’t a clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.

When they were alone, Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit.

“It’s not a ruddy sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.

They remembered his anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.