She was standing on the platform of the Cochin Harbor Terminus, her face turned up to the train window. Her skin gray, wan, robbed of its luminous sheen by the neon station light. Daylight stopped by trains on either side. Long corks that kept the darkness bottled in. The Madras Mail. The Flying Rani.

Rahel held by Ammu’s hand. A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport Fairy at a railway station.

Stamping her feet on the platform, unsettling clouds of settled station-filth. Until Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited. Around them the hostling-jostling crowd.

Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging bargaining reservation-checking.

Echoing stationsounds.

Hawkers selling coffee. Tea.

Gaunt children, blond with, malnutrition, selling smutty magazines and food they couldn’t afford to eat themselves.

Melted chocolates. Cigarette sweets.

Orangedrinks.

Lemondrinks.

Coca Cola Fanta icecream rose milk.

Pink-skinned dolls. Rattles. Love-in-Tokyos.

Hollow plastic parakeets full of sweets with heads you could unscrew.

Yellow-rimmed red sunglasses.

Toy watches with the time painted on them.

A cartful of defective toothbrushes.

The Cochin Harbor Terminus.

Gray in the stationlight. Hollow people. Homeless. Hungry. Still touched by last year’s famine. Their revolution postponed for the Time Being by Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad (Soviet Stooge. Running Dog,). The former apple of Peking’s eye.

The air was thick with flies.

A blind man without eyelids and eyes as blue as faded jeans, his skin pitted with smallpox scars, chatted to a leper without fingers, taking dexterous drags from scavenged cigarette stubs that lay beside him in a heap.

“What about you? When did you move here?”

As though they had had a choice. As though they had picked this for their home from a vast array of posh housing estates listed in a glossy pamphlet

A man sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His infinnate joy. His real foot was bare.

He bought some tea for his tumbler.

An old lady vomited. A lumpy pool. And went on with her life.

The Stationworld. Society’s circus. Where, with the rush of commerce, despair came home to roost and hardened slowly into resignation.

But this time, for Ammu and her two-egg twins, there was no Plymouth window to watch it through. No net to save them as they vaulted through the circus air.

Pack your things and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken door. A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were trembling, hadn’t looked up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin of ribbons lay open on her lap.

But Rahel had. Looked up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared and left a monster in his place.

A thicklipped man with rings, cool in white, bought Scissors cigarettes from a platform vendor. Three packs. To smoke in the train corridor.

For Men of Action

SatisfAction.

He was Estha’s escort. A Family Friend who happened to be going to Madras. Mr Kurien Maathen.

Since there was going to be a grown-up with Estha anyway, Mammachi said there was no need to waste money on another ticket. Baba was buying Madras-Calcutta. Ammu was buying Time. She too had to pack her things and leave. To start a new life, in which she could afford to keep her children. Until then, it had been decided that one twin could stay in Ayejnenem. Not both. Together they were trouble. nataS ni rieht scye. They had to be separated.

Maybe they’re right, Ammu’s whisper said as she packed his trunk and hold-all. Maybe a boy does need a Baba.

The thicklipped man was in the coup‚ next to Estha’s. He said he’d try and change seats with someone once the train started.

For now he left the little family alone.

He knew that a hellish angel hovered over them. Went where they went Stopped where they stopped. Dripping wax from a bent candle.

Everybody knew.

It had been in the papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police “Encounter” with a Paravan charged with kidnapping and murder. Of the subsequent Communist Party siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, led by Ayemenem’s own Crusader for Justice and Spokesman of the Oppressed. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai claimed that the Management had implicated the Paravan in a false police case because he was an active member of the Communist Party.

That they wanted to eliminate him for indulging in “Lawful Union Activities.”

All that had been in the papers. The Official Version.

Of course the thicklipped man with rings had no idea about the other version.

The one in which a posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, clumping into the Heart of Darkness.

Chapter 18.

A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuff in someone’s heavy pocket.

Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.

There were six of them. Servants of the State.

Politeness.

Obedience.

Loyalty.

Intelligence.

Courtesy.

Efficiency.

The Kottayam Police. A cartoonplatoon. New-Age princes in funny pointed helmets. Cardboard lined with cotton. Hairoil stained. Their shabby khaki crowns.

Dark of Heart.

Deadlypurposed.

They lifted their thin legs high, clumping through tall grass. Ground creepers snagged in their dewdamp leghair. Burrs and grass flowers enhanced their dull socks. Brown millipedes slept in the soles of their steel-tipped, Touchable boots. Rough grass left their legskin raw, crisscrossed with cuts. Wet mud fatted under their feet as they squelched through the swamp.

They trudged past darter birds on the tops of trees, drying their sodden wings spread out like laundry against the sky. Past egrets. Cormorants. Adjutant storks. Sarus cranes looking for space to dance. Purple herons with pitiless eyes. Deafening, their wraark wraark wraark. Motherbirds and their eggs.

The early morning heat was full of the promise of worse to come. Beyond the swamp that smelled of still water, they walked past ancient trees cloaked in vines. Gigantic mani plants. Wild pepper. Cascading purple acuminus.

Past a deepblue beetle balanced on an unbending blade of grass. Past giant spider webs that had withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.

A banana flower sheathed in claret bracts hung from a scruffy, torn-leafed tree. A gem held out by a grubby schoolboy. A jewel in the velvet jungle.

Crimson dragonflies mated in the air. Doubledeckered. Deft. One admiring policeman watched and wondered briefly about the dynamics of dragonfly sex, and what went into what. Then his mind clicked to attention and Police Thoughts returned.

Onwards.

Past tall anthills congealed in the rain. Slumped like drugged sentries asleep at the gates of Paradise.

Past butterflies drifting through the air like happy messages.