The dark decay of her teeth adorn the hollows of her mouth, casually, like icicles hanging off eaves on cold wintery morning. Vasu was on board the Dadar express examining the singularity of her dental status in its tiny washroom mirror, standing lifted on her toes, looking for a change of countenance. There was none. She looks at it not with the concern of thought but merely with the diversion of appeal, a tendency of habit to investigate her most distinguishing feature. “Puchipallu Bombaikaari” (The Bombay girl with infested teeth) she thought, as her maternal grandpa liked to tease her, running her tongue along the jagged edges of her mismatched incisors. The staggering sight did not bother her. Vasu was eight, a lot of things did not bother her. Her mother who stood outside keeping guard, knocks softly on the door, but Vasu does not open it right away, instead, she watched the train in motion through the toilet, a travelling gaping hole on the floor on its way to a river town.

It was the summertime, and the family were on the annual visit to their small ancestral hometown, Keelakollathur, along the banks of river Agniar. It would take them an entire day and a half by train to get there. A southward journey filled as much with sliding lusty fields and great green groves between smudged cottage bundles, as bursts of barren lands passing unceremoniously between lesser towns.

Reclining on the lowest berth, next to her twin older brothers, Vasu gazed out of the barred train window, thoughtfully, in anticipation of the coming respite. She recalled the coconut grove noon’s with cousins, first and second, connections that start tender, loving aunts who had breastfed her like one of their own, towering uncles with sprawling moustaches, who on their Sunday market routine, rendered delightful shoulder rides and joyful sustenance for the heart and hunger, and most of all visions of sumptuous repasts, that all of town had known and loved for her grandma’s tempting genius in matters concerning feasts and festivities, whether innate or cultivated, had stood peerless. Even as she thought, Vasu’s mouth watered into a puddle of longing and she yearned for the far joys of the simpler charming kind.

On the bunk across them, Vasu’s father, a tall erudite man, sat subdued, smelling faintly of woody aftershave and cigarettes, moving gently in obedience to the train’s rhythm, his head buried in a massive book bound with stiff red cloth, which held within, a few ripped pages that had been torn in an act of remonstrance by his pretty wife. His intellectual employments, distinct as they were, were not enjoyed by her, for she was one of a simple mind and quick emotions. Brisk to anger but consenting to calm, she was, one moment, a thunderstorm with a wicked temper, slamming doors, blundering out barbed rebukes that came loose and easy, and happy rooms lay bruised with broken cups and books flung wide and the next, the most amiable creature of euphonious sounds, all charm and all courtesy. Amutha had only been seventeen when she had married Vasu’s father. Her own youth and inexperience had made her pointedly aware of his acquired knowledge, his insight, his foreign ideas, all of which had filled her with wonder. She had fallen hopelessly in love with both his form and novel inclinations.

On their wedding day, one of Vasu’s great grandaunt, who had been particularly fond of her, had expressed, quite bitterly, her undisguised disappointment at the arranged alliance. “You raise a parrot and give it away to a cat just when she sprouts out her first set of innocent plumes. Such blunder. Such blunder!”, she had cried. She had said this not to call attention to her own rank or dignity but rather to confirm the distinction of years, temperaments, and conditions, for as the eldest she possessed the wise pragmatic regard for weighing facts and realities too often neglected in favor of fixed ideas and deeply rooted rules. A thinker from quite another corner of town where many tread, the weary feet of farm help to silk merchants on horse carriages, toiling maids to ready mistresses, who, with the will and labor that alters chance, integrity that commands respect, grace and education that order natural authority, had found rising fame in superior society. And the great granddaughter of a great grand Zamindar, a budding goddess with beautiful eyes, blossoming in delight and dignity under watchful attendance, whose shadow had not yet journeyed beyond her mother’s saree pallu. The act of marriage between these unlikely two had struck her as hasty and in possibility of grave discontent.

Vasu’s father, not long after, had started calling her mother, secretly, ‘The green parrot’, who now sat next to him by the train window, offering the children banana chips and coconut biscuits from a fancy yellow rounded tin.

Like most small-town girls her age, Amutha had been groomed to be a concerned wife and mother and in all her tens and teens it had never occurred to her to see herself as anyone else. She had pursued her conditioned calling with remarkable dexterity and pride. To her husband, she was, at home, his lady in waiting attending to his every notion and necessity. To her children, she was a spirited mother. They were measured and monitored, trained and tutored, oiled and massaged, dressed and dewormed with assiduous attention. To her friends, she was too dear. To her they confessed their heart and hopes, their troubles and trifles, their most delicate doubts, and their crushing convictions. She had, to them, become a source of great comfort and relief, a caring and sympathizing figure, and to her they granted their affections cheerfully and in full measure.

Yet with all this, Amutha had often felt ruin, in her husband’s profuse use of time in matters of philosophy, in his greedy appetite for books, in his recent renunciation of meat eating and in his blunt disinterest in all things condemned social and ordinary. It had happened gradually, the weakening of her convictions as she had earlier gained. The culmination of years of contrasts that had manifested between the two had led to the dissent of her own agreement in the most prosaic manner.

It was sometime last spring, after much persuasion, Amutha had convinced her husband to go to the movies with her, the 1981 blockbuster, a romantic tragedy named ‘Ek Duuje Ke Liye’. She had arranged for the tickets beforehand through friends, worn one of special outing chiffon sari, darkened her eyes with kohl and painted her lips a ruby red. She had looked terrific. He had said so himself. They had arrived at the theatre looking fashionable and sank into their good seats with the freshly buttered popcorn and the sparkling drinks. Twenty minutes into the movie she had turned to find him deep in sleep, next to her, snoring loudly without care or regard, killing the experience for everyone around them which was promptly informed to her in a manner so displeasing that she had to repeatedly pinch or elbow him awake. She had stormed out of the theatre halfway through the movie, with her disconcerted husband tumbling behind her, never more aware of the steep difference in their interest and age, and found herself, somewhat to her own surprise, guarded against giving into the rollicking reproach that bubbled at the edge of her tongue.

At other times, in house parties and such, when she and others were in high spirits, disposed to gaiety, lively in the pleasures of congenial society, Vasu’s father would choose, with intention, to discourse on the path of spiritual transcendence or relative consciousness or some such undesired and out of place matter. His conduct, indecorously off putting as it was, provoked most guests to scramble out of his view and invariably earned him their faulting perception as a ‘party killjoy’. Amutha, at such times, sensed the disparity between their minds and moods growing beyond recovery, past help or hope, like a broken kite lost to the dark monsoon winds. And though the initial admiration for her husband’s instincts and sensibilities still thrived in her heart, his growing appetite and zeal for affairs beyond her appreciation caused her much grief and left her feeling unanchored. She had started, diligently first and monstrously later, praying to her gods, visiting temple after temple, keeping fast, performing rituals, beseeching for a remedy for this confident handsome man to become simpler, more manageable, more like her and more for her.

She looked at him now, sitting next to her on the train, the strong straight of his nose, his fingers, long and delicate, as they absentmindedly feel the strays of the morning shave on his chin, his eyes engaged in the distant pages of a massive red book, that she instantly recognizes from her own not too distant past. It was in the late morning, sometime in early June, she remembered walking to the green bookshelf in the living room corner, reach for the newest looking book she could find and tear the pages out, one at a time, slowly, until her fists were clenched full of keen displeasure and firm intentions. She had put the torn pages back into the book and waited for it to be found, for her husband to bring it up, ready for a quarrel. But he hadn’t. Instead, he had spent the evening quietly mending the pages, playing scrabble with the children, and had gone to bed early without dinner. The loss of attention had left her immensely bothered.

“Don’t sit too close to the window Vasu. Coal dust will fall into your eyes. “reminds Mrs. Pillai, the chatty passenger on the side berth of the cabin, who spoke with the familiarity of an overbearing aunt, as if she had known vasu from her early crib days, instead of the reserve of a fellow traveler whom she had just met. But it was not new for the children to be regarded so closely, to be chaperoned by well-meaning companions, for strangers on buses and trains to become aunties and uncles at a moment’s notice. They were accustomed to suffer such interferences, and they did so, the twins with patience, polite manners and tolerant smiles and Vasu through clenched teeth.

Mr. and Mrs. Pillai were travelling back from the city after having attended their daughter’s graduation. Mrs. Pillai spoke often confiding old time stories to Vasu’s parents. And when the parents were unavailable, she would target the children, asking them all kinds of frivolous questions. She seemed to be the kind who was determined to augment the fugacious webs of train travel familiarity with words and much of them and would only take short breaks from her incessant jabber to drink water from her shiny brass kooja or to feast on all kinds of homemade food that came out of her seven-tier tiffin box, which, careful to ward off any ill feeling, she always offered to the children but never to the parents. Her husband, on the other hand, appeared discharged and paid no attention to her chatter. He hid behind newspapers and took conveniently long naps cleverly aimed to exempt himself from the labor of participation.

When Vasu became the point of Mrs. Pillai’s interest, of her relentless banality, she refused to speak. She pressed her lips tightly together, shook her head from side to side and looked suitably distressed, hoping to be ignored. “What happened?” Mrs. Pillai finally asked her, flustered.

“Teeth black no talk” announced Vasu tragically, pointing to her icicles.

Undeterred by this petty opposition, Mrs. Pillai, simply rolled her eyes, huffed her disapproval like a teapot and moved on to her twin brothers.

Few escaped Mrs. Pillai’s ripe faculty of engagement, not even the hawker or the chaiwallah were spared. If one of them was to approach her with the prospect of a quick sale, he was bound to find himself given to her prying curiosity. On one such inquiring exchange, a dust streaked gawky 15-year-old, who, perhaps unable to resist the offer of a fellow feeling or just looking for advantage from someone of superior means, disclosed the tragic details of his wretched life. An ailing bedridden mother, a married sister returned for not having borne a son and an ancestral debt of inflicting proportion, all of which had forced the poor lad to surrender his school and take up the lowly drudge and strain of the Velangani station.

Upon hearing the boy’s hardship, Mrs. Pillai seemed deeply touched and shook her head in solemn reflection. She fumbled into her straw basket as if looking for a rescue and came up with a brown leather moneybag that held the glorious promise of the much-anticipated support.

The hawker stood on the platform in front of her window with folded hands, looking humbled and grateful, his keen eyes fixed on Mrs. Pillai’s bulging handbag. Out of the mouth of the brown handbag, Mrs. Pillai pulled out a tiny book of Hanuman Chalisa, which she then handed to him through the barred train window and told him, that if he chanted the mantra three times a day, he would receive salvation from all his worldly vexations and would be driving a Benz on the Mount Road instead of hawking meduvadai from a tray strapped to his neck.

Her solemn advice was rudely interrupted by the blast of a steam trumpet announcing the departure. The train began to snail out of the railway station. People inside the train rushed about to settle into their seats, when suddenly an unexpected movement caught the attention of passengers in Vasu’s cabin. It was Mrs. Pillai’s small book that had come flying back through the barred window and landed squarely on the train floor. The tiny audience looked from the book back to Mrs. Pillai, who sat next to the window with her arms crossed over her chest and found her flush flamingo with indignation, her mouth open against her will, as if to cry out loud, her eyes turn questioning and her fine features twist comically with part shame and part disbelief. Behind her, the platform slipped away as the train gained pace. Her big red bindi loomed precariously between her strained full eyes as she continued to stare at the book on the floor, conflicted, trying to make sense of the retaliation, the unexpected protest.

Before Vasu’s chuckle could gain vocal tone, her mother shot her a sharp look, the kind she used to give her when she would find the candy jar empty, pushed to the dark corners, under her bed. Her twin brothers having witnessed beside her, all that had taken place, study in suspense and with great interest Mrs. Pillai’s return to her natural order. Meanwhile, Vasu’s father bent over to pick up the Hanuman Chalisa and handed it to Mrs. Pillai, which she accepts without a word.

Mrs. Pillai recovered quickly, betraying no further emotion and to everyone’s delight in the cabin, she resumed the rest of her travel in restrained silence. When her husband finally surfaced from behind the newspaper and asked her if she was alright, she simply nodded, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The family arrived at the Keelakolathur station to the early blended sun. The morning chill lunged at Vasu as she got off the train, making her shiver, tiny trembles tumble down the small of her back, little brown fingers seek refuge, curled and tucked under knitted willow jumper. The railway platform stood deserted, but for a lone sweeper and the station master, a dull, middle aged balding man, dried out by abiding service, who proceeds to flag the train through. The children watch the train roll out into the floating dust gleaming gold against the scattered strands of shy light, revealing, a clump of thatched roof houses work up a spiral cloud, on the other side of the tracks. At Keelakolathur station, all things smell of woodsmoke and cow barn to them, comforting and native.

A bullock cart had been arranged for their transport. Ramaiyya, the househelp, acquired at the age of ten in a game of bridge by victory over the village tahsildar, is at the station gateway wrapped up in a layer of old blanket that is coarse with use. He had served in the family over generations, during which, he had earned the warmth of his master, gained concessions and liberties seldom offered to the help, and was even gifted a bit of land of considerable value not far from the main house, but had never slackened in his heavy sense of obedience and spent his time wifeless serving the Zamindar and all his seven children. To Vasu, Ramaiyya had appeared cheerful and unchanged, but the others notice, his skin flag and his back bend. His hair though, had magically remained untouched by the seasons, as if it belonged to someone else, someone decades younger.

The oxen’s, piled with the outsiders and their luggage, slugged along snorting their reluctance to leave their resting place by the wayside tamarind tree. Vasu sat on the back of the cart with her mother and father and her two brothers sat upfront with Ramaiyya, delighted in their privileged view. Ramaiyya whips the bullocks to a faster rhythm that’ s remindful of a familiar pattern of prior pleasures. The scented native air, sweet of the freshly turned wet soil, the riotous display of intermittent passing greens, the sight of men and women farming ankle deep in murky

waters and the palm breeze rustle blowing east, color pale memories bold. The happy bells around the oxen’s announce their arrival to all, inviting the curious attentions of a grocer caught in the middle of weighing his merchandise, the village barber, men in lungi reading paper, that tarry all morning at the local tea stall, and few other inquisitive heads, that peep out of open windows and pry behind busying pursuits, as they make their way home bumping gently along the old dusty route.

The bullock cart comes to a sudden halt in front of tall iron gates. The stone compound walls seem more swollen than Vasu remembered, the bougainvillea had spilled over, weaving pink and white blooms into the ground. They leave the cart at the main gate and walk by the trees lining the long driveway, who stood posted like upright old guards looking down upon them with their thick neem limbs spread under the growing sun.

Vasu’s grandfather stood at the entrance of his grand old home waiting for the children, when, having caught his imposing form, they bolt towards him squealing with excitement leaving their parents behind. Vasu ran hard, her little feet stumbling way behind her brothers, who to her, seemed far and fast. She watched her grandpa swoop them up into a tight embrace, plant kisses on their grimy cheeks, heard her brothers at the top of their voice, eager to compete with the other to hold his attention, her grandpa’s big throaty laugh roar and crumble into a settling smile. The fuzzy spirited chatter turned back into the majestic house, slowly fading out of her vision and hearing.

By the time she makes it to the porch, her little heart burnt with labor, was on fire inside her little chest. Vasu sat, catching her breath against the giant carved column that flanked the entryway, waiting for her mother and father. Impressions struggled, exaltations soon faded, and a troubled head turned to watch her grandpa’s full silver head disappear down the long verandah into the inner courtyard carrying his grandsons triumphantly, their entitled arms wrapped around his collared neck.

The seemingly innocuous incident had left her to sense a new kind of smallness exercising its effect, a strange sentiment revealed without meaning to, revealed without reserve, candidly, in the most ordinary way. The order of affections, sons before daughters, heirs before others. The denied consent to love seemed to brim her innocent eyes with wet realizations. It was a carelessness, an inattention to the bounty of a child’s eager affections, that the breeze itself seemed to object, having stilled down a measure. Even the old neem guards along the beaten driveway appear less alive, sound less clamorous, as if to mark the discourtesy.

At the sound of her mother, vasu flew to her feet and threw herself at her, hugging her dearly and though she did not say a word, she could not quite conceal her rapidly mounting sadness, which found its befitting conclusion wrapped up in her mother’s arms. And there under the delicate shadows of the flowering athimaram and the blue moving sky, a mother’s warmth and a father’s sonorous soothing concern make up for a grandpa’s remiss. The black frost that threatens to damage, before its time, the little innocent heart, now lay melted in a pool of tears and mucus.

Wedged between her parents Vasu steps into her maternal ancestral home and walks down the long verandah into the inner courtyard towards the welcoming sounds, with no impressions of having arrived. The house, in turn, welcomes her knowing fully well that tomorrow’s sun would blur the ways of today, its lucidity deprived to her beyond her next distraction. An act of kindness afforded by the fleeting habits of a tender age.