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photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the center of his upper lip that drooped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout—the kind that children who suck their thumbs develop. He had an elongated dimple on his chin, which only served to underline the threat of a lurking manic violence. A sort of contained cruelty. He wore khaki jodhpurs though he had never ridden a horse in his life. His riding boots reflected the photographer’s studio lights. An ivory-handled riding crop lay neatly across his lap.
    There was a watchful stillness to the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in which it hung.
      When he died, Pappachi left trunks full of expensive suits and a chocolate box full of cuff-links that Chacko distributed among the taxi drivers in Kottayam. They were separated and made into rings and pendants for unmarried daughters’ dowries.
    When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—“To link cuffs together,” Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language.
Cuff+link
=
cuff-link.
This, to them, rivaled the precision and logic of mathematics.
Cuff-links
gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
    Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for
chhi-chhi poach
and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was
Anglophile.
He made Rahel and Estha look up
Anglophile
in the
Reader’s Digest
Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
It said:
Person well disposed to the English.
Then Estha and Rahel had to look up
dispose.
    It said:
(1)
Place suitably in particular order.
(2)
Bring mind into certain state.
(3)
Do what one will with, get off one’s hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell.
    Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2)
Bring mind into certain state.
Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been
brought into a state
which made him like the English.
    Chacko told the twins that, though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a
family
of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.
    “To understand history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”
    Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had “gone native.” Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago, when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school. After the suicide, the property had become the subject of extensive litigation between Kari Saipu’s cook and his secretary. The house had lain empty for years. Very few people had seen it. But the twins could picture it.
    The History House.
    With cool stone floors and dim walls and billowing ship-shaped shadows. Plump, translucent lizards lived behind old pictures, andwaxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers.
    “But we can’t go in,” Chacko explained, “because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very