Evening Is the Whole Day

Author:Preeta Samarasan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-07-12T09:20:14.769000+00:00

9. THE FUTILE INCIDENT OF THE SAPPHIRE PENDANT

July 6, 1980

SIX WEEKS BEFORE Paati dies, Amma hosts the weekly gathering of the Ladies' tea-party circle. She does so against her first instincts, for the household is in disarray. Chellam still harbors the dregs of the fever brought on by the Balakrishnans' nephew's unsoothing soothsaying, which dregs she has generously shared with Paati; whiffs of old-lady urine and Dr. Kurian's dark potions waft through the house on every breeze. But Amma will not live at the mercy of the psychosomatic ailments of lunatics. She will have the Ladies over because it is her turn and the show must go on; because she has nothing, no solace, but appearances, and must therefore fight tooth and nail to preserve them.

So she has Vellamma the washerwoman pull down all the drapes and wash them in hot water; she has Letchumi the sweeper shampoo the rugs and disinfect the floors with Dettol to banish the miasma of Paati's hand-me-down fever. She orders a Black Forest cake from the Ipoh Garden Cake Shop and commissions Lourdesmary to execute a baroque version of the usual tea-party menu: four kinds of noodles, two kinds of fried rice, three jellies (red, orange, blue), pyramids of cottony sandwiches (cucumber, butter-and-watercress, Norwegian sardine) and springy popiah, pigs in blankets, roly-poly pudding, rock buns, rum balls, rumaki. And fruit salad in sherry, stationed on either side of a towering centerpiece custom-made by Flower Power Florists.

A grim determination infects all involved in these preparations; the kitchen, never a hive of whistling gaiety under Lourdesmary's rule, is cold and silent as she chops and kneads and rolls. Suresh spends the weekend speeding up and down Kingfisher Lane alone on his Raleigh bicycle, making occasional trips to the corner shop for sustenance. Aasha tiptoes along the corridors and staircases of the Big House, dry-lipped and goose-bumped. They understand, on variously liminal levels, that this party will be more than an assertion of order over the chaos that has engulfed them in recent months, more even than the usual affirmation of Amma's place in the world. It will be a gauntlet thrown down before all those who have been chipping away, blindly or maliciously or out of sheer boredom, at that place: the busybody-ing servants, the behind-the-back smirkers and gloaters.

There is one other person before whom Amma wishes to flaunt her feigned equanimity, and that person cannot, try as she might, ignore the brassy glint of Amma's self-righteousness or the rattling of her saber underneath her silk saree. What Uma can or cannot ignore is a great mystery even to Aasha of the ever-peeled eyes, for Uma, unlike Amma, is a master of disguise and dissimulation.

Why, only a month ago, they watched her in a performance so convincing that they were all afraid—yes, Appa himself shifted uneasily in his seat. They'd all wondered if it was Uma who was crying up on that too-bright stage, and not Masha, the second of the Three Sisters, whose name Uma had borrowed for three nights.

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