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When Margaret Kochamma saw her little daughter‟s body,
shock swelled in her like phantom applause in an empty
auditorium. It overflowed in a wave of vomit and left her mute and
empty-eyed. She mourned two deaths, not one. With the loss of
Sophie Mol, Joe died again. And this time there was no homework
to finish or egg to eat. She had come to Ayemenem to heal her
wounded world, and had lost all of it instead. She shattered like
glass.
Her memory of the days that followed was fuzzy. Long, dim,
hours of thick, furry-tongued serenity (medically administered by
Dr. Verghese Verghese) lacerated by sharp, steely slashes of
hysteria, as keen and cutting as the edge of a new razor blade.
She was vaguely conscious of Chacko–concerned and
gentlevoiced when he was by her side–otherwise incensed,
blowing like an enraged wind through the Ayemenem House. So
different from the amused Rumpled Porcupine she had met that
long-ago Oxford morning at the cafâ.
She remembered faintly the funeral in the yellow church.
The sad singing. A bat that had bothered someone. She
remembered the sounds of doors being battered down, and
frightened women‟s voices. And how at night the bush crickets had
sounded like creaking stars and amplified the fear and gloom that
hung over the Ayemenem House.
She never forgot her irrational rage at the other two younger
children who had for some reason been spared. Her fevered mind
fastened like a limpet onto the notion that Estha was somehow
responsible for Sophie Mol‟s death. Odd, considering that
Margaret Kochamma didn‟t know that it was Estha–Stirring
Wizard with a Puff–who had rowed jam and thought Two
Thoughts, Estha who had broken rules and rowed Sophie Mol and
Rahel across the river in the afternoons in a little boat, Estha who
had abrogated a sickled smell by waving a Marxist flag at it. Estha
who had made the back verandah of the History House their home
away from home, furnished with a grass mat and most of their
toys–a catapult, an inflatable goose, a Qantas koala with loosened