In the only photograph they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other arm. She looked grumpy and bad-tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.

Ammu said that he had only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks, Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph

“Will you stop that!” Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.

“What?” Rahel said, but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.

“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel said.

“Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive,” Estha said.

“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”

“Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped.

“It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.

Rahel put on her sunglasses. The World became angry-colored.

“Take off those ridiculous glasses!” Ammu said.

Rahel took off her ridiculous glasses.

“It’s fascist, the way you deal with them,” Chacko said. “Even children have some rights, for God’s sake!”

“Don’t use the name of the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said.

“I’m not,” Chacko said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”

“Stop posing as the children’s Great Savior!” Ammu said. “When it comes down to brass tacks, you don’t give a damn about them. Or me.”

“Should I?” Chacko said. “Are they my responsibility?”

He said that Ammu and Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.

The backs of Rahel’s legs went wet and sweaty. Her skin slipped on the foamleather upholstery of the car seat. She and Estha knew about millstones. In Mutiny on the Bounty, when people died at sea, they were wrapped in white sheets and thrown overboard with millstones around their necks so that the corpses wouldn’t float. Estha wasn’t sure how they decided how many millstones to take with them before they set off on their voyage.

Estha put his head in his lap.

His puff was spoiled.

A distant train rumble seeped upwards from the frog-stained road. The yam leaves on either side of the railway track began to nod in mass consent. Yesyesyes,yesyes.

The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began to sing another bhajan.

“I tell you, these Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously. “They have no sense of privacy.”

“They have horns and scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies hatch from eggs.”

Rahel had two bumps on her forehead that Estha said would grow into horns. At least one of them would because she was half Hindu. She hadn’t been quick enough to ask him about his horns. Because whatever She was, He was too.

The train slammed past under a column of dense black smoke. There were thirty-two bogies, and the doorways were full of young men with helmetty haircuts who were on their way to the Edge of the World to see what happened to the people who fell off. Those of them who craned too far fell off the edge themselves. Into the flailing darkness, their haircuts turned inside out

The train was gone so quickly that it was hard to imagine that everybody had waited so long for so little. The yam leaves continued to nod long after the train had gone, as though they agreed with it entirely and had no doubts at all.

A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.

Chacko started the Plymouth. Baby Kochamma tried to be jolly. She started a song.

There’s a sad sort of c’anging

From the clock in the ball

And the bells in the steeple too.

And up in the nurs

Anabs-urd

Litt-le Bird

Is popping out to say-

She looked at Estha and Rahel, waiting for them to say “Coo-coo.”

They didn’t.

A carbreeze blew. Green trees and telephone poles flew past the windows. Still birds slid by on moving wires, like unclaimed baggage at the airport.

A pale daymoon hung hugely in the sky and went where they went. As big as the belly of a beer-drinking man.

Filth had laid siege to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.

Midges whizzed in teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.

The floor was sticky. White walls had turned an uneven gray. Brass hinges and door handles were dull and greasy to the touch. Infrequently used plug points were clogged with grime. Lightbulbs had a film of oil on them. The only things that shone were the giant cockroaches that scurried around like varnished gofers on a film set.

Baby Kochamma had stopped noticing these things long ago. Kochu Maria, who noticed everything, had stopped caring.

The chaise longue on which Baby Kochamma reclined had crushed peanut shells stuffed into the crevices of its rotting upholstery

In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts. Kochu Maria tossed nuts into her mouth. Baby Kochamma placed them decorously in hers.

On The Best of Donahue the studio audience watched a clip from a film in which a black busker was singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow ” in a subway station. He sang sincerely, as though he really believed the words of the song. Baby Kochamma sang with him, her thin, quavering voice thickened with peanut paste. She smiled as the lyrics came back to her. Kochu Maria looked at her as though she had gone mad, and grabbed more than her fair share of nuts. The busker threw his head back when he hit the high notes (the where of “somewhere”), and the ridged, pink roof of his mouth filled the television screen. He was as ragged as a rock star, but his missing teeth and the unhealthy pallor of his skin spoke eloquently of a life of privation and despair. He had to stop singing each time a train arrived or left, which was often.

Then the lights went up in the studio and Donahue presented the man himself, who, on a pre-arranged cue, started the song from exactly the point that he had had to stop (for a train), cleverly achieving a touching victory of Song over Subway.

The next time the husker was interrupted mid-song was only when Phil Donahue put his arm around him and said “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Being interrupted by Phil Donahue was of course entirely different from being interrupted by a subway rumble. It was a pleasure. An honor.

The studio audience clapped and looked compassionate.

The busker glowed with Prime-Time Happiness, and for a few moments, deprivation took a backseat. It had been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had just been robbed of that too.

There are big dreams and little ones.

“Big Man the Laltain sahib, Small Man the Mombatti,” an old coolie, who met Estha’s school excursion party at the railway station (unfailingly, year after year) used to say of dreams.

Big Man the Lantern. Small Man the Tallow-stick.

Huge Man the Strobe Lights, he omitted to say. And Small Man the Subway Station.

The Masters would haggle with him as he trudged behind them with the boys’ luggage, his bowed legs further bowed, cruel schoolboys imitating his gait. Balls-in-Brackets they used to call him.