“Room numbers 313 and 327,” the man at the reception desk said. “Non-airconditioned. Twin beds. Lift is closed for repair.”

The bellboy who took them up wasn’t a boy and hadn’t a bell, He had dim eyes and two buttons missing on his frayed maroon coat. His grayed undershirt showed. He had to wear his silly bellhop’s cap tilted sideways, its tight plastic strap sunk into his sagging dewlap. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to make an old man wear a cap sideways like that and arbitrarily re-order the way in which age chose to hang from his chin.

There were more red steps to climb. The same red carpet from the cinema hall was following them around. Magic flying carpet.

Chacko was in his room. Caught feasting. Roast chicken, chips, sweet corn and chicken soup, two parathas and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Sauce in a sauceboat. Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating. Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness. Chacko said it was no such thing. He said it was Sheer Greed.

Chacko was puzzled to see everybody back so early, but pretended otherwise. He kept eating.

The original plan had been that Estha would sleep with Chacko, and Rahel with Ammu and Baby Kochamma. But now that Estha wasn’t well and Love had been re-apportioned (Ammu loved her a little less), Rahel would have to sleep with Chacko, and Estha with Ammu and Baby Kochamma.

Ammu took Rahel’s pajamas and toothbrush out of the suitcase and put them on the bed.

“Here,” Ammu said.

Two clicks to close the suitcase.

Click. And click.

“Ammu,” Rahel said, “shall I miss dinner as my punishment?”

She was keen to exchange punishments. No dinner, in exchange for Ammu loving her the same as before.

“As you please,” Ammu said. “But I advise you to eat. If you want to grow, that is. Maybe you could share some of Chacko’s chicken.”

“Maybe and maybe not,” Chacko said.

“But what about my punishment?” Rahel said. “You haven’t given me my punishment!”

“Some things come with their own punishments,” Baby Kochamma said. As though she was explaining a sum that Rahel couldn’t understand.

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

Baby Kochamma’s goodnight kiss left a little spit on Rahel’s cheek. She wiped it off with her shoulder.

“Goodnight Godbless,” Ammu said. But she said it with her back. She was already gone.

“Goodnight,” Estha said, too sick to love his sister.

Rahel Alone watched them walk down the hotel corridor like silent but substantial ghosts. Two big, one small, in beige and pointy hoes. The red carpet took away their feet sounds.

Rahel stood in the hotel room doorway, full of sadness.

She had in her the sadness of Sophie Mol coming. The sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less. And the sadness of whatever the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man had done to Estha in Abhilash Talkies.

A stinging wind blew across her dry, aching eyes.

Chacko put a leg of chicken and some finger chips onto a quarter plate for Rahel. “No thank you,” Rahel said, hoping that if she could somehow effect her own punishment, Ammu would rescind hers.

“What about some ice cream with chocolate sauce?” Chacko said.

“No thank you,” Rahel said.

“Fine,” Chacko said. “But you don’t know what you’re missing.”

He finished all the chicken and then all the ice cream.

Rahel changed into her pajamas.

“Please don’t tell me what it is you’re being punished for,” Chacko said. “I can’t bear to hear about it.” He was mopping the last of the chocolate sauce from the sauceboat with a piece of paratha. His disgusting, after-sweet sweet. “What was it? Scratching your mosquito bites till they bled? Not saying `Thank you’ to the taxi driver?”

“Something much worse than that,” Rahel said, loyal to Ammu.

“Don’t tell me,” Chacko said. “I don’t want to know.”

He rang for room service and a tired bearer came to take away the plates and bones. He tried to catch the dinner smells, but they escaped and climbed into the limp brown hotel curtains.

A dinnerless niece and her dinnerfull uncle brushed their teeth together in the Hotel Sea Queen bathroom. She, a forlorn, stubby convict in striped pajamas and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. He, in his cotton vest and underpants. His vest, taut and stretched over his round stomach like a second skin, went slack over the depression of his belly button.

When Rahel held her frothing toothbrush still and moved her teeth instead, he didn’t say mustn’t.

He wasn’t a Fascist.

They took it in turns to spit. Rahel carefully examined her white Binaca froth as it dribbled down the side of the basin, to see what she could see.

What colors and strange creatures had been ejected from the spaces between her teeth?

None tonight. Nothing unusual. Just Binaca bubbles.

Chacko put off the Big Light

In bed, Rahel took off her Love-in-Tokyo and put it by her sunglasses. Her fountain slumped a little, but stayed standing.

Chacko lay in bed in the pool of light from his bedside lamp. A fat man on a dark stage. He reached over to his shirt lying crumpled at the foot of his bed. He took his wallet out of the pocket, and looked at the photograph of Sophie Mol that Margaret Kochamma had sent him two years ago.

Rahel watched him and her cold moth spread its wings again. Slow out. Slow in. A predator’s lazy blink.

The sheets were coarse, but clean.

Chacko closed his wallet and put out the light. Into the night he lit a Charminar and wondered what his daughter looked like now. Nine years old. Last seen when she was red and wrinkled. Barely human. Three weeks later, Margaret his wife, his only love, had cried and told him about Joe.

Margaret told Chacko that she couldn’t live with him anymore. She told him that she needed her own space. As though Chacko had been using her shelves for his clothes. Which, knowing him, he probably had.

She asked him for a divorce.

Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate. He memorized the brown down on her soft skull. The shape of her puckered, constantly moving mouth. The spaces between her toes. The suggestion of a mole. And then, without meaning to, he found himself searching his baby for signs of Joe. The baby clutched his index finger while he conducted his insane, broken, envious, torchlit study. Her belly button protruded from her satiated satin stomach like a domed monument on a hill. Chacko laid his ear against it and listened with wonder at the rumblings from within. Messages being sent from here to there. New organs getting used to each other. A new government setting up its systems. Organizing the division of labor, deciding who would do what.

She smelled of milk and urine. Chacko marveled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity of a grown man.

When he left, he felt that something had been torn out of him. Something big.

But Joe was dead now. Killed in a car crash. Dead as a doorknob. A Joe-shaped Hole in the Universe.

In Chacko’s photograph, Sophie Mol was seven years old. White and blue. Rose-lipped, and Syrian Christian nowhere. Though Mammachi, peering at the photograph, insisted she had Pappachi’s nose.

“Chacko?” Rahel said, from her darkened bed. “Can I ask you a question?”