Tamarind Mem Read online

  Ma even got a self-styled priest called Brother Joseph to try holy water on Dadda. Brother Joseph said he needed a new suit and a thin gold chain to be really effective. “Getout-getout, you rogue!” said Ma, and I was glad that she hadn’t completely lost her senses.

  “Go, go,” Ma shouted at the row of silver idols in her gods room. “Why did I waste my time asking you for help? Have you ever granted any of my wishes? Hanh?”

  She swept Shiva and Parvathi in their swing of silver flowers, Krishna, Ganesha, Lakshmi, all those mute figures into a bag and stuffed them into her wedding-petti. She did not have the courage to throw her gods into the dustbin yet.

  I was sure my mother was becoming an Aunty Meera. Why couldn’t she allow Dadda release from his grey pall of pain? Why was she fighting for a life she had spent so many years cursing? I prayed for Ma to come back to normal. And I made Roopa pray to her monkey-god as well. “You said that he was very powerful,” I reasoned. “Well, then ask him to do something. Ask him to save our Dadda, or is he just another one of your useless hoaxes?”

  I drove my sister to tears, yelling at her every time Dadda had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. “Liar, liar, liar,” I wept. “Your rotten god is useless, you must have made him angry or something. That’s why he is punishing you and me. It’s all your fault.”

  Roopa, silent as usual, clung to Linda Ayah, and all that Linda said to me was, “Don’t be afraid, child, your mother will come back. Wait only.”

  I knew that Dadda was dying. It was there in the colour of his skin, the shallow whisper of his breath, the deep hollows in his face, the smell of sickness drifting through the house. I wished that I had listened to his stories more carefully. I wished that I had asked him more questions about his childhood, that I had spent more time with him. I wished.

  For a year, Ma worked herself into a frenzy trying to keep Dadda alive. She harassed the hospital staff, checked every pill, swab and syringe the nurses carried in to Dadda’s room.

  “Bloody useless loafers only they employ in this hospital place. See what we have to suffer after serving the Railways, giving our lives to useless train-shain? Suspicious people trying out experiments on an officer’s body, that’s what.”

  Dadda lay helpless on the hospital bed, covered in Ma’s special-time green-and-white sheets.

  “God knows what diseased person has used that dirty-filthy hospital linen!” she ranted. “If I turn my head for a even few seconds, these thief goonda rascals in this morgue of a hospital will drain all my husband’s blood for selling to rich Arabs. Kidneys, hearts, arms, legs, blood, everything those fellows will buy to stay alive forever,” said Ma.

  Dr. Ramesh, the Chief Medical Officer at the hospital, was not on speaking terms with Ma any more. No surprise that, considering the way Ma questioned every injection he administered.

  “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” she asked, hovering over the doctor’s shoulder, refusing his orders to stay outside till he was done. “We need a second opinion,” she pronounced, dragging in doctors from the General, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Ashwini Medical Centre. Sickness had triumphed after all, and Ma blamed Dr. Ramesh for it. “Useless bloody basket. Third-rate degree from some village college. And these are the people we trust with our lives,” she told visitors to the sick-room.

  Ma hated admitting defeat, even to death. She would have liked to have been a Savithri, dragging her husband back to life from the death god Yama’s arms using the sheer cunning of words. When I was younger, Ma had read me the story of Savithri and Satyavan over and over again, her long, smooth index finger with its glittering vanki ring pointing at the pictures. Here was the happy couple sitting languidly under a mahua tree; there was Satyavan, face a picture of agony, clutching his chest; here came Yama on his buffalo to drag the body away. And finally, a triumphant Savithri, her arms outstretched, receiving her husband’s life back from the god of death.

  “You want something hard enough, you can get it. Just need persistence, that’s all,” Ma would say when the story ended.

  For all her persistence, however, Ma could not stop the marrow in my father’s bones from drying up in the heat of his illness, or his blood cells from turning a dazzling white, so that when he finally died, he was as pale as tracing paper.

  “I am now in Varanasi, the holiest of holy cities and the dirtiest,” wrote Ma. “I don’t know why people come here to die. I suppose if my heart collapses on me, I will depart a blessed soul, and some stranger will set my ashes afloat in the River Ganga.”

  Just like my mother to make me feel indignant, anxious and guilty all with a few lines scribbled on the back of a postcard! What was all this about her heart? Why should a stranger set her ashes in the river? Didn’t she have two daughters to do that? But of course I had no way of reaching her, of finding out if she was merely being Ma or if she was really ill. Perhaps she had written to Roopa, given her a little more information than she had to me. That would be typical too, playing one daughter off against the other, teasing us by dangling that elusive bait of affection.

  “Ma’s written me exactly the same things,” shouted Roopa over the background sounds of her children screaming, the dishwasher rattling.

  “Well, aren’t you worried?”

  “Why should I be? It’s all drama. You know Ma, she hates doing anything, even writing a postcard, without adding a bit of glycerine for the tears and chili-powder for the spice.”

  The sweet odour of roses and rajni-gandha surrounding my father had seeped through the entire house. It was a dreadful smell, reminding me that Dadda was now just a body in the middle of the drawing room. He lay on a pile of rapidly melting ice, his mouth a thin blue line, cotton wool in his nostrils. Ma’s brother said it was to keep the fluids in. How disgusting, the idea of my fastidious father with no control over his leaking body. I preferred to believe Linda Ayah, who said the cotton was to keep Dadda’s spirit in his heart. Remove the cotton and the spirit would stream out leaving Dadda in limbo, a Trishanku suspended between swarga and earth. The spirit needed to be released with the proper rituals, cleansed in the heat of a sandalwood pyre so that it would ascend into the air.

  A warm draft puffed into the room from the open front door. People had been wandering in and out of the house all day long, occasionally stopping to straighten the edge of the sheet covering Dadda, light a few more sandalwood sticks, stare mournfully at his face or ask how Ma was doing. One of my uncles, after dressing Dadda in a clean dhothi, had daubed his face with Old Spice shaving lotion. Early this morning, the house had smelled like the flower shops on the road outside the colony where, all day long, women threaded flowers for weddings, funerals and temple ceremonies. But as the sun soared in the sky, relentlessly stripping the shadows from everything, the body decomposed, its juices vaporizing into the hot air mingling with the stale flowers, making the house smell like the Ralston Fish Mart.

  Dadda’s secretary had brought the monstrous tuberose garland threaded with wisps of silver which he, along with the other clerks and peons in the office, had chipped in to purchase. The secretary was sobbing and hiccuping and dabbing nervously at his swollen red nose when Ma said, in a sharp voice, that the garland was a waste of money.

  “Are you a millionaire that you spend so much on flowers?”

  “Oh Madam, he was a good sir. If we had thousand rupees we would have bought a bigger garland. What a tragedy!” he howled, offering a flurry of explanations.

  I drifted through the still rooms, wondering if I should join Ganesh Peon and Linda Ayah as they kept a vigil over Dadda. He would lie there till Vijaya Aunty arrived the next morning. Every now and then Ganesh and Linda packed crushed ice against him. The white cloth wrapped about the body was wet and Ayah mopped up the melting ice, wringing the cloth into a bucket. She had to make sure it didn’t flow out to the carpet rolled against the wall. It was an expensive carpet, forty counts per square inch, and Ma would throw a fit if it got damaged. Every
time Dadda was promoted, Ma got something posh for the house—after all, a big officer had to have a house to match his status. When we had guests she got all tight-lipped and miserable if they didn’t have the decency to take off their shoes before they walked on the carpet.

  “Junglees!” she said after the offenders had left. “They are the sort who teach their children to draw on the walls, junglees.”

  I wondered what would happen to the heavy silk curtains with the Chinese pattern, the squishy-soft sofa set, the rosewood dining-room set. Without Dadda there could be no more promotions, no more office parties or memsahibs with chiffon saris to admire Ma’s belongings. I glanced furtively at my father’s body, almost expecting it to sit up. The ice must make him feel cold. Even in Calcutta, where it never went below twenty degrees, Dadda wore a balaclava cap to sleep. And now he was lying in a bed of ice with only a thin dhothi cloth covering him, not even a cap or socks. I shivered, the hair on my arms standing up in bumps of skin. Perhaps I should cover him with another sheet. One of the new green-and-white ones Ma kept for guests, with the soft perfume of Lux soap drifting out when you unfolded them. Better than the stale stink of ice from the Railway Club. I could smell it, a thick stench of rotting plywood same as the corner of the garage where the roof dripped in the monsoons. A dhobi-fresh sheet all starchy clean would take away that smell.

  I peered into the room where Ma was lying with Roopa curled up beside her. Both were fast asleep. Roopa would sleep through a cyclone. I shivered, a wave of anxiety washing over me, and wished that I had agreed to sleep with them. But from that room I had a good view of the drawing room where Dadda lay.

  Ma had not wanted to sleep. “I have to start packing,” she said, looking in annoyance at all the coffee tables and chairs, cupboards and sideboards, cots and shelves scattered about the house, a lifetime’s treasures suddenly a burden. She was already rearranging them to fit the little apartment Dadda had built for their retirement, already discarding the bulky pieces that might not even squeeze through the low doors there. But Aunty Lalli had forced her to swallow Calmpose tablets and Ma had dozed off, snoring in the bed, her mouth open. Age had stretched and altered her face, adding a padding of fat here, taking away a sharp line there, so that I felt that my mother looked like Plasticine moulded by a child. I tiptoed to the dark cupboard and drew out a sheet. I carried it to the drawing room where Dadda lay. The ambulance men had placed him right in the middle of the room. Roopa and I had watched silently from the verandah, wincing together at the dull thud as the two men dropped our father’s body carelessly on the floor. Then they stood, the dolts, talking quietly, waiting for Ma to sign the delivery papers. I wanted to slap them for their casual irreverence.

  Linda Ayah looked up suddenly, startled by my silent entry into the room. She gave a little moan, “Oh-oh, ammama.” Her glasses shone in the light from the street-lamp streaming into the room. Why she wore glasses nobody knew, she couldn’t read a word, but she liked looking at all of our school-books.

  “Ayah, shoo!” I whispered. “You’ll disturb everybody.”

  “Yo-yo-yo,” Ayah moaned again, a little angrily now. “It is you, child, why you scared me like that? What are you doing here you poor thing? Go, go, your Ma will get angry if she catches you here.”

  “Isn’t he cold?” I asked.

  Ganesh Peon giggled and remarked in a whisper, “In this pissing heat can anyone be cold?”

  “Idiot, bite your loose tongue,” said Linda Ayah, glaring at him. “No baby chikkamma, my pet, he isn’t cold, see he is nicely covered with a cloth. You don’t worry, Linda will take care of him. You go to sleep now.”

  I went slowly up the stairs to my bedroom and a minute later heard Ayah telling Ganesh, “Stop gaping, nitwit, and get more ice from the fridgi…tomorrow Sahib’s sisters and all are coming, what will they think if Sahib doesn’t look nice?”

  Ten years ago, I had felt a simmering resentment against my mother. I believed that she had wronged Dadda with her rigid anger, her unkind words. I refused to acknowledge the years that Ma had spent being a good wife, looking after her daughters, supervising the household, making sure that Dadda got his meals exactly on schedule. How bored she must have been. If she wasn’t at home when Roopa and I came home from school, we sulked, accused her of being indifferent.

  “We were starving,” we moaned. “Where were you?”

  “There was food in the fridge, Ayah was at home,” snapped Ma, guilty at not having fulfilled the role that had been scripted for her, annoyed at being coerced into playing it. Perhaps Dadda was to blame for the person Ma had become. He shut her into rooms from which there was not even a chink of an escape. He himself had left again and again, and every time he came back, he needed to be readmitted into lives altered daily during his absence.

  I reread the most recent of Ma’s postcards. “The gulmohur tree outside my flat will be in bloom in a few weeks,” she had written. “I should be home in time to catch the flowers as they fall. Such a simple thing can give me so much pleasure. It has taken me so long to see that happiness isn’t hard to find. No?”

  I remember little of the train ride that carried us away from the Railway life, from Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon, of the last few weeks in the Guwahati house surrounded by shapeless, looming masses of gunny-wrapped furniture. Our new apartment felt so tiny compared to the sprawling Railway houses. There were no echoes, no mysterious corners, dark hidy-holes. Our furniture looked gargantuan at first, but after a few weeks the tables and chairs, cupboards and desks seemed to shrink and shrug into their niches and stopped looking odd. For the next eight years, our lives were punctuated with nothing more remarkable than Ma’s regular tiffs with a series of maids who arrived at four in the morning one day, two in the afternoon the next, and sometimes not at all. Once in a while Roopa or I missed our bus home from school or college, and Ma would sulk and scold and predict awful mishaps.

  Then, the year Indira Gandhi was assassinated, Roopa announced that she was getting married and for weeks we had all our relatives streaming in.

  “Who is this unknown fellow? Is he our caste? Are his parents good people? Does anybody in this city know them? Saroja, Saroja, you should have locked up this daughter of yours! Is she pregnant? Why this sudden marriage, no time to call anybody! What about the older one? How can Roopa get married when Kamini is still not hooked, hanh? Saroja, you are stupid.”

  “He is a good boy,” snapped Ma. “My girls know how to pick their fruit.”

  Then after they had all left, she slapped her forehead and shouted at Roopa. “What will you do if he divorces you in USA? Maybe he has a white woman there already and you he is taking to be her maid. At least finish your studies, idiot girl, then you don’t have to come back crying to your mother’s house!”

  “I am never coming back,” said Roopa. “You don’t have to take care of me any more, don’t worry.”

  I stayed with Ma for a further two years after Roopa left and then decided to leave my job and try for a doctorate in chemical engineering. In a university as far away from Madras as possible.

  “Calgary?” exclaimed Ma when I showed her the letter from the research centre that was willing to take me on. “Where is this place? Has anybody ever heard of it? What is so special there that you have to go, hanh?”

  “Ma, it’s in Canada. They grow wheat there, and cows. They have oil and natural gas,” I told her, exasperated, feeling like someone from the Chamber of Commerce. Just like my mother to dramatize the whole affair, blow it up into a major thing.

  “Canada, Canada, and where is that place? In the North Pole, that’s where. Are you mad or what? Here itself when it rains you wear three-four sweaters, shawls, blankets and go hurru-hurru with cold!”

  “But Ma…”

  “And if you want to look at cows just glance out of the window, hundreds of cows you will see shitting on the roads.”

  “What a strange thing to say, Ma!”

  “Strange? Your sister and you
are strange, not me. She marries the first man she meets, and you so old and not a sign of wanting to get married. If only your father was alive!”

  After Roopa’s marriage, Ma had started beseeching Dadda to come back to life and look at the shambles he had left behind.

  “See, I am stuck with two daughters who are busy doing god-knows-what!” she shouted in the general direction of the heavens. “While you are sitting up there relaxing with your pipe, no doubt. Always-always I am left with all the problems.”

  I locked myself in my room, cringing at the thought of all the neighbours listening in. They would troop by later to console Ma, glare accusingly at me, offer advice. Gangadhar Uncle, the retired judge in the apartment below, didn’t even wait to come into the house, though. He preferred to join Ma in her histrionics from his balcony one floor down.

  “I waste my youth showering love and affection on these children and what do I get in return? Nothing!” grumbled Ma, rattling pots and pans in the kitchen, fully aware that the little balcony outside was in direct line with Gangadhar Uncle’s.

  “That is a parent’s fate,” agreed Uncle. “Look at my own incompetent son. I told him do a management degree, forget about philosophy and all that. But he did not listen and now he organizes political rallies for that thief of a chief minister, while his wife earns the money in the house.”

  “My daughter wants to go to some place near the North Pole. I ask you, what is wrong with her life here? Do I ever stop her from doing anything? No. Did I say a word when she refused to look at that bone doctor from England? He wanted to marry her right away, no fancy engagements and all that. Right away. Such a good boy. And my other daughter, married to a meat-eater. Oh my heart breaks. All this I have tolerated. I have been a modern-times mother and these girls have taken advantage of me.”