Free Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair Page A

mother won’t disapprove of these books?’ she asked the first time.
    ‘They are not bad books. They just have covers like these to attract attention,’ Akhila hastened to explain before Sarasa Mami changed her mind about letting her borrow the books.
    ‘I suppose you are right. But if your mother makes a fuss, don’t tell her I gave it to you. She’ll give me hell.’
    ‘Sarasa Mami,’ Akhila called as she knocked at her door.
    Subramani Iyer’s face split into a wide grin. ‘Look who’s here,’ he said. It was rare to see him without a smile on his face. ‘All dressed up as a princess, I see.’
    Akhila looked down at her davani self-consciously. Her skirt and blouse were not new. But the purple-coloured georgette half-sari was almost new. No one but Subramani Iyer would have noticed it.
    Akhila knew no one quite like him. She had seen him saunter towards Sarasa Mami and fling his arms around her while she blushed and squirmed to escape from the circle of his embrace. He called her his queen and his children their
treasure. Akhila had heard him weep large wet tears, moved by the tragedy of a film they had all gone together to watch at the cinema one afternoon. Every month on the day he was paid, he brought home a large box of sweets from the big sweet shop on Broadway — Ramakrishna Lunch Home. During Deepavali, he bought enough firecrackers to keep ten boys happy. He gifted them to Akhila’s brothers and then joined them at the street corner as they sparkled, whizzed and exploded the firecrackers, filling the air with smoke and the acrid stench of gun powder. All he asked was that every now and then they give blind Srini a lit sparkler to hold, so that he didn’t feel left out. ‘He can’t see but all his other senses are intact and probably work better than ours,’ Subramani Iyer would say, ruffling his son’s hair affectionately.
    His forehead was high and marked with a scar like a half moon right above the bridge of his nose. ‘Aren’t I lucky? Even if I have forgotten to smear vibuthi on my head, everyone thinks I have …’ He giggled, fingering the scar. His eyes popped out of his face, bearing in them a perennial expression of wonder. A child taken for the first time to a fairground.
    His clothes were always scruffy and hung on him as if they belonged to someone else. His shirtsleeves flapped and his trouser bottoms stood three inches above his ankles. He worked as a peon in an office where he had to fetch cups of tea and coffee, carry files from one table to another, empty the wastepaper bins and clean the office every morning, apart from doing an endless number of chores and yet, there was none of that aura of suffering that Appa with his superior clerical job wore around him.
    ‘He’s a happy-go-lucky sort of a chap,’ Akhila’s morose father was fond of saying. ‘Though how he can be with a grown-up daughter, a blind son and two young daughters, I wonder.’
    But when the ambulance came screeching down the road early in the evening, its shrill siren wailing, and when
someone rushed to Sarasa Mami’s house with a message for Akhila to come home immediately, there had been an accident, it was Subramani Iyer who hurried out with her murmuring, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be anything serious. Pattabhi Iyer is a good man. Nothing bad could ever happen to him.’
    Who were these people? Where did they come from? Why were they all here? Questions pounded as they hurried towards Akhila’s house. They were greeted by the sight of Akhila’s father’s balding scalp, a steady murmur of voices and Amma’s wails: How could this happen? How could he do this to me?
    Appa lay on a reed-mat on the floor. A white sheet was drawn up to the chin, beneath which his limbs were tidily arranged. His eyes were closed and there was cotton wool stuffed up his nose. He looked as though he were fast asleep. There was none of that harried exhaustion, the frustration and the bitterness that had marked his