She remained certain that Estha, when he said, “Et ta, Kochu Maria?’ was insulting her in English. She thought it meant something like Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf. She bided her time, waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about him.

She finished icing the tall cake. Then she tipped her head back and squeezed the leftovericing onto her tongue. Endless coils of chocolate toothpaste on a pink Kochu Maria tongue. When Mammachi called from the verandah (“Kochu Mariye! I hear the car!”) her mouth was full of icing and she couldn’t answer. When she finished, she ran her tongue over her teeth and then made a series of short smacking sounds with her tongue against her palate as though she’d just eaten something sour.

Distant skyblue carsounds (past the bus stop, past the school, past the yellow church and up the bumpy red road through the rubber trees) sent a murmur through the dim, sooty premises of Paradise Pickles.

The pickling (and the squashing, the slicing, boiling and stirring, the grating, salting, drying, the weighing and bottle sealing) stopped.

“Chacko Saar vannu,” the traveling whisper went. Chopping knives were put down. Vegetables were abandoned, half cut, on huge steel platters. Desolate bitter gourds, incomplete pineapples. Colored rubber finger guards (bright, like cheerful, thick condoms) were taken off. Pickled hands were washed and wiped on cobalt-blue aprons. Escaped wisps of hair were recaptured and returned to white headscarves. Mundus tucked up under aprons were let down. The gauze doors of the factory had sprung hinges, and closed noisily on their own.

And on one side of the driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the kodam puli tree, a silent blue-aproned army gathered in the greenheat to watch.

Blue-aproned, white-capped, like a clot of smart blue-and-white flags.

Achoo, Jose, Yako, Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma, Latha, Sushila, Vijayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykutty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls with bus names). The early rumblings of discontent, concealed under a thick layer of loyalty.

The skyblue Plymouth turned in at the gate and crunched over the gravel driveway crushing small shells and shattering little red and yellow pebbles. Children tumbled out.

Collapsed fountains.

Flattened puffs.

Crumpled yellow bell-bottoms and a go-go bag that was loved. Jet-lagged and barely awake. Then the swollen-ankled adults. Slow from too much sitting.

`Have you arrived?” Mammachi asked, turning her slanty dark glasses towards the new sounds: car doors slamming, gettingoutedness. She lowered her violin.

“Mammachi!” Rahel said to her beautiful blind grandmother. “Estha vomited! In the middle of The Sound of Music! And…”

Ammu touched her slaughter gently. On her shoulder. And her touch meant Shhhh… Rahel looked around her and saw that she was in a Play. But she had only a small part.

She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree.

A face in the crowd. A Townspeople.

Nobody said Hello to Rahel. Not even the Blue Army in the greenheat.

“Where is she?” Mammachi asked the car sounds. “Where is my Sophie Mol? Come here and let me see you.”

As she spoke, the Waiting Melody that hung over her like a shimmering temple elephant’s umbrella crumbled and gently fell about like dust.

Chacko, in his What Happened to Our Man of the Masses? suit and well-fed tie, led Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol triumphantly up the nine red steps like a pair of tennis trophies that he had recently won.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

“Hello, Mammachi,” Margaret Kochamma said in her kindschoolteacher (that sometimes slapped) voice. “Thank you for having us. We needed so much to get away.”

Mammachi caught a whiff of inexpensive perfume soured at the edges by airline sweat. (She herself had a bottle of Dior in its soft green leather pouch locked away in her safe.)

Margaret Kochamma took Mammachi’s hand. The fingers were soft, the ruby rings were hard.

“Hello, Margaret,” Mammachi said (not rude, not polite), her dark glasses still on. “Welcome to Ayemenem. I’m sorry I can’t see you. As you must know, I am almost blind.” She spoke in a slow deliberate manner.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Margaret Kochamma said. “I’m sure I look terrible anyway.” She laughed uncertainly, not sure if it was the right response.

“Wrong,” Chacko said. He turned to Mammachi, smiling a proud smile that his mother couldn’t see. “She’s as lovely as ever.”

“I was very sorry to hear about… Joe,” Mammachi said. She sounded only a little sorry. Not very sorry.

There was a short, Sad-About-Joe silence.

“Where’s my Sophie Mol?” Mammachi said. “Come here and let your grandmother look at you.”

Sophie Mol was led to Mammachi. Mammachi pushed her dark glasses up into her hair. They looked up like slanting cat’s eyes at the moldy bison head. The moldy bison said, “No. Absolutely Not.” In Moldy Bisonese.

Even after her cornea transplant, Mammachi could only see light and shadow. If somebody was standing in the doorway, she could tell that someone was standing in the doorway. But not who it was. She could read a check, or a receipt, or a banknote only if it was close enough for her eyelashes to touch it. She would then hold it steady, and move her eye along it. Wheeling it from word to word.

The Townspeople (in her fairy frock) saw Mammachi draw Sophie Mol close to her eyes to look at her. To read her like a check. To check her like a banknote. Mammachi (with her better eye) saw redbrown hair (N… Nalmost blond), the curve of two fatfreckled cheeks (Nnnn… almost rosy), bluegrayblue eyes.

“Pappachi’s nose,” Mammachi said. “Tell me, are you a pretty girl?” she asked Sophie Mol.

“Yes,” Sophie Mol said.

“And tall?”

“Tall for my age,” Sophie Mol said.

“Very tall,” Baby Kochamma said. “Much taller than Estha.”

“She’s older,” Ammu said.

“Still…” Baby Kochamma said.

A little way away, Velutha walked up the shortcut through the rubber trees. Barebodied. A coil of insulated electrical wire was looped over one shoulder. He wore his printed dark-blue-andblack mundu loosely folded up above his knees. On his back, his lucky leaf from the birthmark tree (that made the monsoons come on time). His autumn leaf at night.

Before he emerged through the trees and stepped into the driveway, Rahel saw him and slipped out of the Play and went to him.

Ammu saw her go.

Offstage, she watched them perform their elaborate Official Greeting. Velutha curtsied as he had been taught to, his mundu spread like a skirt, like the English dairymaid in “The King’s Breakfast” Rahel bowed (and said “Bow”). Then they hooked little fingers and shook hands gravely with the mien of bankers at a convention.

In the dappled sunlight filtering through the dark-green trees, Ammu watched Velutha lift her daughter effortlessly as though she was an inflatable child, made of air. As he tossed her up and she landed in his arms, Ammu saw on Rahel’s face the high delight of the airborne young.

She saw the ridges of muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed-so quietly, from a flatmuscled boy’s body into a man’s body. Contoured and hard. A swimmer’s body. A swimmer-carpenter’s body. Polished with a high-wax body polish.

He had high cheekbones and a white, sudden smile.

It was his smile that reminded Ammu of Velutha as a little boy. Helping Vellya Paapen to count coconuts. Holding out little gifts he had made for her, flat on the palm of his hand so that she could take them without touching him. Boats, boxes, small windmills. Calling her Ammukutty. Little Ammu. Though she was so much less little than he was. When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.