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Children gathered around to admire it. The boy who was playing
with the sign was scornful.
“I could easily do that!” he announced.
“Try it and see what a slap you‟ll get,” his mother said.
“Miss Rahel!” the nurse shouted and looked around. “It‟s Out!”
Ammu said to the nurse. “It‟s come out.” She held up her crumpled
handkerchief.
The nurse had no idea what she meant.
“It‟s all right. We‟re leaving,” Ammu said. “The bead‟s out.”
“Next,” the nurse said, and closed her eyes behind her
rat-filters. (“It takes all kinds,” she told herself.) “S. V. S. Kurup!”
The scornful boy set up a howl as his mother pushed him
into the doctor‟s room.
Rahel and Estha left the clinic triumphantly. Little Lenin
remained behind to have his nostril probed by Dr. Verghese
Verghese‟s cold steel implements, and his mother probed by other,
softer ones.
That was Lenin then.
Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.
Rahel handed Comrade Pillai back the sachet of photographs
and tried to leave. “One mint,” Comrade Pillai said. He was like a
flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples and then
forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of
photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin‟s Life-in-a-Minute) to the
last one.
“Orkunnundo ?”
It was an old black-and-white picture. One that Chacko took
with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma had brought
him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin,
Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of
the Ayemenem House. Behind them Baby Kochamma‟s Christmas
trimmings hung in loops from the ceiling. A cardboard star was
tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked like frightened
animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees