Nothing that the world would miss.

A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it

Ten to two, it said.

A band of children followed Rahel on her walk.

“Hello hippie,” they said, twenty-five years too late. “Whatisyourname?”

Then someone threw a small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.

On her way back, looping around the Ayemenem House, Rahel emerged onto the main road. Here too, houses had mushroomed, and it was only the fact that they nestled under trees, and that the narrow paths that branched off the main road and led to them were not motorable, that gave Ayemenem the semblance of rural quietness. In truth, its population had swelled to the size of a little town. Behind the fragile façade of greenery lived a press of people who could gather at a moment’s notice. To beat to death a careless bus driver. To smash the windscreen of a car that dared to venture out on the day of an Opposition bandh. To steal Baby Kochamma’s imported insulin and her cream buns that came all the way from Bestbakery in Kottayam.

Outside Lucky Press, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was standing at his boundary wall talking to a man on the other side. Comrade Pillai’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow them and he had just refused. The man across the wall shuffled through a bunch of photographs in a plastic sachet, with an air of contrived interest. The photographs were mostly pictures of Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s son, Lenin, who lived and worked in Delhi-he took care of the painting, plumbing, and any electrical work for the Dutch and German embassies. In order to allay any fears his clients might have about his political leanings, he had altered his name slightly. Levin he called himself now. P. Levin.

Rahel tried to walk past unnoticed. It was absurd of her to have imagined that she could.

“Ay-yo, Rahel Mol!” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said, recognizing her instantly, “Orkunnilky? Comrade Uncle?”

“Oower,” Rahel said.

Did she remember him? She did indeed.

Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot-that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes. -

“So!” Comrade Pillai said. “I think so you are in Amayrica flow?”

“No,” Rahel said. “I’m here.”

“Yes yes.” He sounded a little impatient. “But otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?” Comrade Pillai uncrossed his arms. His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary wall like a sad St. Bernard’s eyes.

“Recognized?” Comrade Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin.

The man hadn’t

“The old Paradise Pickle Kochamma’s daughter’s daughter,” Comrade Pillai said.

The man looked puzzled. He was clearly a stranger. And not a pickle-eater. Comrade Pillai tried a different tack.

“Punnyan Kunju?” he asked. The Patriarch of Antioch appeared briefly in the sky and waved his withered hand.

Things began to fall into place for the man with the photographs. He nodded enthusiastically.

“Punnyan Kunju’s son? Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi?” Comrade Pillai said.

“Oower, oower, oower,” the man said.

“His daughter’s daughter is this. In Amayrica now.”

The nodder nodded as Rahel’s ancestral lineage fell into place for him.

“Oower, oower, oower. In Amayrica now, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration.

He remembered vaguely a whiff of scandal. He had forgotten the details, but remembered that it had involved sex and death. It had been in the papers. After a brief silence and another series of small nods, the man handed Comrade Pillai the sachet of photographs.

“Okay then, comrade, I’ll be off.”

He had a bus to catch.

“So!” Comrade Pillai’s smile broadened as he turned all his attention like a searchlight on Rahel. His gums were startlingly pink, the reward for a lifetime’s uncompromising vegetarianism. He was the kind of man whom it was hard to imagine had once been a boy. Or a baby. He looked as though he had been born middle aged. With a receding hairline.

“Mol’s husband?” he wanted to know.

“Hasn’t come.”

“Any photos?”

“No.”

“Name?”

“Larry. Lawrence.”

“Oower. Lawrence.” Comrade Pillai nodded as though he agreed with it. As though given a choice, it was the very one he would have picked.

“Any issues?”

“No,” Rahel said.

“Still in planning stages, I suppose? Or expecting?’

“No.”

“One is must. Boy, girl. Anyone,” Comrade Pillai said. “Two is of course your choice.”

“We’re divorced.” Rahel hoped to shock him into silence. “Die-vorced?” His voice rose to such a high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word as though it were a form of death.

“That is most unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most unfortunate.”

It occurred to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers’ bourgeois decadence.

One was mad. The other die-vorced. Probably barren.

Perhaps this was the real revolution. The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self-destruct.

Comrade Pillai lowered his voice as though there were people listening, though there was no one about.

“And Mon?” he whispered confidentially. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Rahel said. “He’s fine.”

Fine. Flat and bony-colored. He washes his clothes with crumbling soap.

“Aiyyo paavam,” Comrade Pillai whispered, and his nipples drooped in mock dismay. “Poor fellow.”

Rahel wondered what he gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at least bother to pretend otherwise?

“Lenin is in Delhi now,” Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride. “Working with foreign embassies. See!”

He handed Rahel the cellophane sachet. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands with a very well-dressed, very pink man.

“German First Secretary,” Comrade Pillai said.

They looked cheerful in the photographs, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

Rahel remembered the incident that made Lenin swim into focus as a Real Person for her and Estha, when they stopped regarding him as just another pleat in his mother’s sari. She and Estha were five, Lenin perhaps three or four years old. They met in the clinic of Dr. Verghese Verghese (Kottayam’s leading Pediatrician and Feeler-up of Mothers). Rahel was with Ammu and Estha (who had insisted that he go along). Lenin was with his mother, Kalyani. Both Rahel and Lenin had the same complaint-Foreign Objects Lodged Up Their Noses. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence now, but somehow hadn’t then. It was curious how politics lurked even in what children chose to stuff up their noses. She, the granddaughter of an Imperial Entomologist, he the son of a grassroots Marxist Party worker. So, she a glass bead, and he a green gram.

The waiting room was full.

From behind the doctor’s curtain, sinister voices murmured, interrupted by howls from savaged children. There was the clink of glass on metal, and the whisper and bubble of boiling water. A boy played with the wooden Doctor is IN-Doctor is OUT sign on the wall, sliding the brass panel up and down. A feverish baby hiccupped on its mother’s breast. The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.