2
" They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine]It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do. "
6
" Then Wanda proposed a health. " Health to abandoned wives!" she said. " Well now," I said. " 'Abandoned,' that's a little strong." " Pushed out, jettisoned, abjured, thrown away," she said. " I remember," I said, " a degree of mutuality, in our parting." " And when guests came," she said, " you always made me sit in the kitchen." " I thought you liked it in the kitchen," I said. " You were forever telling me to get out of the bloody kitchen." " And when my overbite required correction," she said, " you would not pay for the apparatus." " Seven years of sitting by the window with your thumb in your mouth," I said. " What did you expect?" " And when I needed a new frock," she said, " you hid the Master Charge." " There was nothing wrong with the old one," I said, " that a few well-placed patches couldn't have fixed." " And when we were invited to the Argentine Embassy," she said, " you made me drive the car in a chauffeur's cap, and park the car, and stand about with the other drivers outside while you chatted up the Ambassador." " You know no Spanish," I pointed out. " It was not the happiest of marriages," she said, " all in all." " There has been a sixty percent increase in single-person households in the last ten years, according to the Bureau of the Census," I told her. " Perhaps we are part of a trend. "
