“What did you say?” Kochu Maria said threateningly. “Don’t tell me. I know. I heard. I’ll tell Mammachi. Just wait!”

Rahel walked across to the old well where there were usually some ants to kill. Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed. Kochu Maria followed her with the tray of cake.

Rahel said she didn’t want any of the stupid cake.

“Kushumbi, ” Kochu Maria said. “Jealous people go straight to hell.”

“Who’s jealous?”

“I don’t know. You tell me,” Kochu Maria said, with a frilly apron and a vinegar heart

Rahel put on her sunglasses and looked back into the Play. Everything was Angry-colored. Sophie Mol, standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as though she ought to be slapped. Rahel found a whole column of juicy ants. They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church.

The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast or a crisp biscuit.

The Antly Church would be empty and the Antly Bishop would wait in his funny Antly Bishop clothes, swinging Frankincense in a silver pot. And nobody would arrive.

After he had waited for a reasonably Antly amount of time, he would get a funny Antly Bishop frown on his forehead, and shake his head sadly. He would look at the glowing Antly stained-glass windows and when he finished looking at them, he would lock the church with an enormous key and make it dark. Then he’d go home to his wife and (if she wasn’t dead) they’d have an Antly Afternoon Gnap.

Sophie Mol, hatted bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning, walked out of the Play to see what Rahel was doing behind the well. But the Play went with her. Walked when she walked, stopped when she stopped. Fond smiles followed her. Kochu Maria moved the cake tray out of the way of her adoring downwards smile as Sophie squatted down in the well-squelch (yellow bottoms of bells muddy wet now).

Sophie Mol inspected the smelly mayhem with clinical detachment. The stone was coated with crushed red carcasses and a few feebly waving legs.

Kochu Maria watched with her cake crumbs.

The Fond Smiles watched Fondly.

Little Girls Playing.

Sweet.

One beach-colored.

One brown.

One Loved.

One Loved a Little Less.

“Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely,” Sophie Mol suggested.

Rahel ignored her and killed them all. Then in her frothy Airport Frock with matching knickers (no longer crisp) and unmatching sunglasses, she ran away. Disappeared into the greenheat.

The Fond Smiles stayed on Sophie Mol like a spotlight, thinking, perhaps, that the sweetcousins were playing hide-and-seek, like sweetcousins often do.

The green-for-the-day had seeped from the trees. Dark palm leaves were splayed like drooping combs against the monsoon sky. The orange sun slid through their bent, grasping teeth.

A squadron of fruit bats sped across the gloom.

In the abandoned ornamental garden, Rahel, watched by lolling dwarfs and a forsaken cherub, squatted by the stagnant pond and watched toads hop from stone to scummy stone. Beautiful Ugly Toads.

Slimy. Warty. Croaking.

Yearning, unkissed princes trapped inside them. Food for snakes that lurked in the long June grass. Rustle. Lunge. No more toad to hop from stone to scummy stone. No more prince to kiss.

It was the first night since she’d come that it hadn’t rained. Around now, Rahel thought, if this were Washington, I would be on my way to work. The bus ride. The streetlights. The gas fumes. The shapes of people’s breath on the bulletproof glass of my cabin. The clatter of coins pushed towards me in the metal tray. The smell of money on my fingers. The punctual drunk with sober eyes who arrived exactly at 10.00 P.M.: “Hey you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!”

She owned seven hundred dollars. And a gold bangle with snakeheads. But Baby Kochamma had already asked her how much longer she planned to stay. And what she planned to do about Estha.

She had no plans.

No plans.

No L…custs Stand I.

She looked back at the looming, gabled, house-shaped Hole in the Universe and imagined living in the silver bowl that Baby Kochamma had installed on the roof. It looked large enough for people to live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger, for instance, than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters.

If they slept there, she and Estha, curled together like fetuses in a shallow steel womb, what would Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow do? If the dish were occupied, where would they go? Would they slip through the chimney into Baby Kochamma’s life and TV? Would they land on the old stove with a Heeaugh!, in their muscles and spangled clothes? Would the Thin People-the famine-victims and refugees-slip through the cracks in the doors? Would Genocide slide between the tiles?

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds-blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d’ etat, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.

Heeaagh!

Rahel returned to contemplating toads.

Fat. Yellow. From stone to scummy stone. She touched one gently. It moved its eyelids upwards. Funnily self-assured.

Nictitating membrane, she remembered she and Estha once spent a whole day saying. She and Estha and Sophie Mol.

Nictitating

ictitating

ctitating

itating

tating

ating

ting

ing

They were, all three of them, wearing saris (old ones, torn in half) that day. Estha was the draping expert. He pleated Sophie Mol’s pleats. Organized Rahel’s pallu and settled his own. They had red bindis on their foreheads. In the process of trying to wash out Ammu’s forbidden kohl, they had smudged it all over their eyes, and on the whole looked like three raccoons trying to pass off as Hindu ladies. It was about a week after Sophie Mol arrived. A week before she died. By then she had performed unfalteringly under the twins’ perspicacious scrutiny and had confounded all their expectations.

She had:

(a) Informed Chacko that even though he was her Real Father, she loved him less than Joe (which left him available-even if not inclined-to be the surrogate father of certain two-egg persons greedy for his affection).

(b) Turned down Mammachi’s offer that she replace Estha and Rahel as the privileged plaiter of Mammachi’s nightly rat’s tail and counter of moles.

(c) ( & Most Important) Astutely gauged the prevailing temper, and not just rejected, but rejected outright and extremely rudely, all of Baby Kochamma’s advances and small seductions.

As if this were not enough, she also revealed herself to be human. One day the twins returned from a clandestine trip to the river (which had excluded Sophie Mol), and found her in the garden in tears, perched on the highest point of Baby Kochamma’s Herb Curl, “Being Lonely,” as she put it. The next day Estha and Rahel took her with them to visit Velutha.

They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass (nictitating ictitating tating ating ting ing) and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.