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“NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB,” Estha said.
The twins were precocious with their reading. They had
raced through Old Dog Tom , Janet and John and their Ronald
Ridout Workbooks . At night Ammu read to them from Kipling‟s
Jungle Book .
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free–
The down on their arms would stand on end, golden in the
light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu could make her
voice gravelly, like Shere Khan‟s. Or whining, like Tabaqui‟s.
“„Ye choose and ye do not choose.‟ What talk is this of
choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your
dog‟s den till my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak! ”
“And it is I, Raksha, who answer! ” the twins would shout
in high voices. Not together, but almost. “The man‟s cub is mine,
Lungri–mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with
the pack and to bunt with the pack; and in the end, look you,
hunter of little naked cubs–frogeater–fish-killer–he shall bunt thee!
”
Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal
education, had read them an abridged version of The Tempest by
Charles and Mary Lamb. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I,”
Estha and Rahel would go about saying, “In a cowslip‟s bell I lie.”
So when Baby Kochamma‟s Australian missionary friend,
Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book–The Adventures of
Susie Squirrel– as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they
were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten,
who belonged to a sect of Born-Again Christians, said that she was
a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her,
backwards.
“ehT sertanrvdA fo eisuS lerriuqS.
enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.”
They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both
Malayalam and Madam I‟m Adam backwards as well as
forwards. She wasn‟t amused and it turned out that she didn‟t even