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“It‟s his eye,” Kochu Maria said loudly to Mammachi, her
own eyes bright with onion tears. By then Mammachi had already
touched the glass eye. She recoiled from its slippery hardness. Its
slimy marbieness.
“Are you drunk?‟ Mammachi said angrily to the sound of the
rain. “How dare you come here in this condition?”
She groped her way to the sink, and soaped away the sodden
Paravan‟s eye-juices. She smelled her hands when she‟d finished.
Kochu Maria gave Vellya Paapen an old kitchen cloth to wipe
himself with, and said nothing when he stood on the topmost step
almost inside her Touchable kitchen, drying himself, sheltered
from the rain by the sloping overhang of the roof. –
When he was calmer, Vellya Paapen returned his eye to its
rightful socket and began to speak. He started by recounting to
Mammachi how much her family had done for his. Generation for
generation. How, long before the Communists thought of it,
Reverend E. John Ipe had given his father, Kelan, title to the land
on which their hut now stood. How Mammachi had paid for his
eye. How she had organized for Velutha to be educated and given
him a job
Mammachi, though annoyed at his drunkenness, wasn‟t
averse to listening to bardic stories about herself and her family‟s
Christian munificence. Nothing prepared her for what she was
about to hear.
Vellya Paapen began to cry. Half of him wept. Tears welled
up in his real eye and shone on his black cheek. With his other eye
he stared stonily ahead. An old Paravan, who had seen the Walking
Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and Love.
Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of
him. He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little
boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The
story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight.
Skin to skin.
They went to Kari Saipu‟s House, Vellya Paapen said. The
white man‟s demon had entered them. It was Kari Saipu‟s revenge