No one read the magazines.

From below the scanty curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street came the relentless slipslap of disembodied feet in slippers. The noisy, carefree world of Those with Nothing Up Their Noses.

Ammu and Kalyani exchanged children. Noses were pushed up, heads bent back, and turned towards the light to see if one mother could see what the other had missed. When that didn’t work, Lenin, dressed like a taxi-yellow shirt, black stretchlon shorts-regained his mother’s nylon lap (and his packet of Chiclets). He sat on sari flowers and from that unassailable position of strength surveyed the scene impassively. He inserted his left forefinger deep into his unoccupied nostril and breathed noisily through his mouth. He had a neat side parting. His hair was slicked down with Ayurvedic oil. The Chiclets were his to hold before the doctor saw him, and to consume after. All was well with the world. Perhaps he was a little too young to know that Atmosphere in Waiting Room, plus Screams from Behind Curtain, ought logically to add up to a Healthy Fear of Dr. V. V.

A rat with bristly shoulders made several busy journeys between the doctor’s room and the bottom of the cupboard in the waiting room.

A nurse appeared and disappeared through the tattered curtained doctor’s door. She wielded strange weapons. A tiny vial. A rectangle of glass with blood smeared on it A test tube of sparkling, back-lit urine. A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles. The hairs on her legs were pressed like coiled wires against her translucent white stockings. The box heels of her scuffed white sandals were worn away on the insides, and caused her feet to slope in, towards each other. Shiny black hairpins, like straightened snakes, clamped her starched nurse’s cap to her oily head.

She appeared to have rat-filters on her glasses. She didn’t seem to notice the bristly-shouldered rat even when it scuttled right past her feet. She called out names in a deep voice, like a man’s: A. Ninan… S.Kusumolatha… B. V. Roshini… N. Ambady. She ignored the alarmed, spiraling air.

Estha’s eyes were frightened saucers. He was mesmerized by the Doctor is IN-Doctor is OUT sign.

A tide of panic rose in Rahel. “Ammu, once again let’s try.” Ammu held the back of Rahel’s head with one hand. With her thumb in her handkerchief she blocked the beadless nostril. All eyes in the waiting room were on Rahel. It was to be the performance of her life. Estha’s expression prepared to blow its nose. Furrows gathered on his forehead and he took a deep breath.

Rahel summoned all her strength. Please God, please make it come out. From the soles of her feet, from the bottom of her heart, she blew into her mother’s handkerchief.

And in a rush of snot and relief, it emerged. A little mauve bead in a glistening bed of slime. As proud as a pearl in an oyster. Children gathered around to admire it. The boy who was playing with the sign was scornful.

“I could easily do that!” he announced.

“Try it and see what a slap you’ll get,” his mother said. “Miss Rahel!” the nurse shouted and looked around. “It’s Out!” Ammu said to the nurse. “It’s come out.” She held up her crumpled handkerchief.

The nurse had no idea what she meant.

“It’s all right. We’re leaving,” Ammu said. “The bead’s out.”

“Next,” the nurse said, and closed her eyes behind her rat-filters. (“It takes all kinds,” she told herself.) “S. V. S. Kurup!”

The scornful boy set up a howl as his mother pushed him into the doctor’s room.

Rahel and Estha left the clinic triumphantly. Little Lenin remained behind to have his nostril probed by Dr. Verghese Verghese’s cold steel implements, and his mother probed by other, softer ones.

That was Lenin then.

Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.

Rahel handed Comrade Pillai back the sachet of photographs and tried to leave. “One mint,” Comrade Pillai said. He was like a flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples and then forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life-in-a-Minute) to the last one.

“Orkunnundo?”

It was an old black-and-white picture. One that Chacko took with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma had brought him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin, Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of the Ayemenem House. Behind them Baby Kochamma’s Christmas trimmings hung in loops from the ceiling. A cardboard star was tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked like frightened animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their sides, chests swiveled to face the photographer. As though standing sideways was a sin.

Only Sophie Mol, with First World panache, had prepared for herself, for her biological father’s photo, a face. She had turned her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked like pink-veined flesh petals (gray in a black-and-white photograph). She wore a set of protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi’s silver thimble fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays drinking only from a thimble.) She held out a lit candle in each hand. One leg of her denim bell-bottoms was rolled up to expose a white, bony knee on which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel (arguing away any evidence to the contrary, photographs, memories) how there was a pretty good chance that they were bastards, and what bastard really meant. This had entailed an involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. “See what they do is…”

That was only days before she died.

Sophie Mol.

Thimble-drinker.

Coffin-cartwheeler.

She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight. Hatted, bellbottomed and Loved from the Beginning.

Chapter 6.

Cochin Airport, Rahel’s new knickers were polka-dotted and still crisp. The rehearsals had been rehearsed. It was the Day of the Play. The culmination of the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week.

In the morning at the Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu-who had dreamed at night of dolphins and a deep blue-helped Rahel to put on her frothy Airport Frock. It was one of those baffling aberrations in Ammu’s taste, a cloud of stiff yellow lace with tiny silver sequins and a bow on each shoulder. The frilled skirt was underpinned with buckram to make it flare. Rahel worried that it didn’t really go with her sunglasses.

Ammu held out the crisp matching knickers for her. Rahel, with her hands on Ammu’s shoulders, climbed into her new knickers (left leg, right leg) and gave Ammu a kiss on each dimple (left cheek, right cheek). The elastic snapped softly against her stomach.

“Thank you, Ammu,” Rahel said.

“Thank you?” Ammu said.

“For my new frock and knickers,” Rahel said.

Ammu smiled.

“You’re welcome, my sweetheart,” she said, but sadly.

You’re welcome, my sweetheart.

The moth on Rahel’s heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold. A little less her mother loved her.

The Sea Queen room smelled of eggs and filter coffee. On the way to the car, Estha carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the tap water. Rahel carried the Eagle vacuum flask with the boiled water. Eagle vacuum flasks had Vacuum Eagles on them, with their wings spread, and a globe in their talons. Vacuum Eagles, the twins believed, watched the world all day and flew around their flasks all night. As silently as owls they flew, with the moon on their wings.