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white, it means it isn‟t ripe. When it‟s yellow and has a rotten
smell, it‟s ripe and ready to be coughed out. Phlegm is like fruit.
Ripe or raw. You have to be able to tell.”
Over lunch she belched like a truck driver and said, “Excuse
me,” in a deep, unnatural voice. Rahel noticed that she had new,
thick hairs in her eyebrows, long–like palps. Ammu smiled at the
silence around the table as she picked fried emperor fish off the
bone. She said that she felt like a road sign with birds shitting on
her. She had an odd, feverish glitter in her eyes.
Mammachi asked her if she‟d been drinking and suggested
that she visit Rahel as seldom as possible.
Ammu got up from the table and left without saying a word.
Not even good-bye. “Go and see her off,” Chacko said to Rahel.
Rahel pretended she hadn‟t heard him. She went on with her
fish. She thought of the phlegm and nearly retched. She hated her
mother then. Hated her.
She never saw her again.
Ammu died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in
Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview as someone‟s
secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company
and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was
thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.
She had woken up at night to escape from a familiar,
recurrent dream in which policemen approached her with snicking
scissors, wanting to hack off her hair. They did that in Kottayam to
prostitutes whom they‟d caught in the bazaar–branded them so that
everybody would know them for what they were. Veshyas. So that
new policemen on the beat would have no trouble identifying
whom to harass. Ammu always noticed them in the market, the
women with vacant eyes and forcibly shaved heads in the land
where long, oiled hair was only for the morally upright.
That night in the lodge, Ammu sat up in the strange bed in
the strange room in the strange town. She didn‟t know where she
was, she recognized nothing around her. Only her fear was