Even the one time he did return (when he stopped Pappachi from hitting Mammachi with the brass vase, and a rocking chair was murdered in the moonlight), he was hardly aware of how stung his father had been, or his mother’s redoubled adoration of him, or his young sister’s sudden beauty. He came and went in a trance, yearning from the moment he arrived to return to the long-backed white girl who waited for him.

The winter after he came down from Balliol (he did badly in his exams), Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were married. Without her family’s consent. Without his family’s knowledge.

They decided that he should move into Margaret Kochamma’s flat (displacing the Other waitress in the Other cafâ) until he found himself a job.

The timing of the wedding couldn’t have been worse.

Along with the pressures of living together came penury. There was no longer any scholarship money, and there was the full rent of the flat to be paid.

With the end of his rowing came a sudden, premature, middleaged spread. Chacko became a fat man, with a body to match his laugh.

A year into the marriage, and the charm of Chacko’s studently sloth wore off for Margaret Kochamma. It no longer amused her that while she went to work, the flat remained in the same filthy mess that she had left it in. That it was impossible for him to even consider making the bed, or washing clothes or dishes. That he didn’t apologize for the cigarette burns in the new sofa. That he seemed incapable of buttoning up his shirt knotting his tie and tying his shoelaces before presenting himself for a job interview. Within a year she was prepared to exchange the frog on the dissecting table for some small, practical concessions. Such as a job for her husband and a clean home.

Eventually Chacko got a brief, badly paid assignment with the Overseas Sales Department of the India Tea Board. Hoping that this would lead to other things, Chacko and Margaret moved to London. To even smaller, more dismal rooms. Margaret Kochamma’s parents refused to see her.

She had just discovered that she was pregnant when she met Joe. He was an old school friend of her brother’s. When they met, Margaret Kochamma was physically at her most attractive. Pregnancy had put color in her cheeks and brought a shine to her thick, dark hair. Despite her marital troubles, she had that air of secret elation; that affection for her own body that pregnant women often have.

Joe was a biologist He was updating the third edition of a Dictionary of Biology for a small publishing house. Joe was everything that Chacko wasn’t.

Steady. Solvent. Thin.

Margaret Kochamma found herself drawn towards him like a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of light.

When Chacko finished his assignment and couldn’t find another job, he wrote to Mammachi, telling her of his marriage and asking for money. Mammachi was devastated, but secretly pawned her jewelry and arranged for money to be sent to him in England. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

By the time Sophie Mol was born, Margaret Kochamma realized that for herself and her daughter’s sake, she had to leave Chacko. She asked him for a divorce.

Chacko returned to India, where he found a job easily. For a few years he taught at the Madras Christian College, and after Pappachi died, he returned to Ayemenem with his Bharat bottle-sealing machine, his Balliol oar and his broken heart.

Mammachi joyfully welcomed him back into her life. She fed him, she sewed for him, she saw to it that there were fresh flowers in his room every day. Chacko needed his mother’s adoration. Indeed, he demanded it, yet he despised her for it and punished her in secret ways. He began to cultivate his corpulence and general physical dilapidation. He wore cheap, printed Terylene bush shirts over his white mundus and the ugliest plastic sandals that were available in the market. If Mammachi had guests, relatives, or perhaps an old friend visiting from Delhi, Chacko would appear at her tastefully laid dining table-adorned with her exquisite orchid arrangements and best china-and worry an old scab, or scratch the large, black oblong calluses he had cultivated on his elbows.

His special targets were Baby Kochamma’s guests-Catholic bishops or visiting clergy who often dropped by for a snack. In their presence Chacko would take off his sandals and air a revolting, pus-filled diabetic boil on his foot.

“Lord have mercy upon this poor leper,” he would say, while Baby Kochamma tried desperately to distract her guests from the spectacle by picking out the biscuit crumbs and bits of banana chips that littered their beards.

But of all the secret punishments that Chacko tormented Mammachi with, the worst and most mortifying of all was when he reminisced about Margaret Kochamma. He spoke of her often and with a peculiar pride. As though he admired her for having divorced him. “She traded me in for a better man,” he would say to Mammachi, and she would flinch as though he had denigrated her instead of himself.

Margaret Kochamma wrote regularly, giving Chacko news of Sophie Mol. She assured him that Joe made a wonderful, caring father and that Sophie Mol loved him dearly-facts that gladdened and saddened Chacko in equal measure.

Margaret Kochamma was happy with Joe. Happier perhaps than she would have been had she not had those wild, precarious years with Chacko. She thought of Chacko fondly, but without regret. It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an extraordinary man. And because Chacko had not then, or since, exhibited any of the usual symptoms of grief and hearthreak, Margaret Kochamma just assumed that he felt it had been as much of a mistake for him as it had been for her. When she told him about Joe he had left sadly, but quietly. With his invisible companion and his friendly smile.

They wrote to each other frequently, and over the years their relationship matured. For Margaret Kochamma it became a comfortable, committed friendship. For Chacko it was a way, the only way, of remaining in touch with the mother of his child and the only woman he had ever loved.

When Sophie Mol was old enough to go to school, Margaret Kochamma enrolled herself in a teacher training course, and then got a job as a junior schoolteacher in Clapham. She was in the staff room when she was told about Joe’s accident. The news was delivered by a young policeman who wore a grave expression and carried his helmet in his hands. He had looked strangely comical, like a bad actor auditioning for a solemn part in a play. Margaret Kochamma remembered that her first instinct when she saw him had been to smile.

For Sophie Mol’s sake, if not her own, Margaret Kochamma did her best to face the tragedy with equanimity. To pretend to face the tragedy with equanimity. She didn’t take time off from her job. She saw to it that Sophie Mol’s school routine remained unchanged-Finish your bomework. Eat your egg. No, we can’t not go to school.

She concealed her anguish under the brisk, practical mask of a schoolteacher. The stern, schoolteacher-shaped Hole in the Universe (who sometimes slapped).

But when Chacko wrote inviting her to Ayemenem, something inside her sighed and sat down. Despite everything that had happened between her and Chacko, there was nobody in the world she would rather spend Christmas with. The more she considered it, the more tempted she was. She persuaded herself that a trip to India would be just the thing for Sophie Mol.

So eventually, though she knew that her friends and colleagues at the school would think it odd-her running back to her first-husband-just-as-soon as her second-one-had-died-Margaret Kochamma broke her term deposit and bought two airline tickets. London-Bombay-Cochin.