Tamarind Mem Read online

  “Ooo!” he said, and I turned and ran then, before he could sing the rest of his spells, before he could make my feet become dark furry wings. I squeezed through the hedge and ran into my room. Perhaps he wouldn’t realize that I lived in this house. He hadn’t actually seen me going into the house. Perhaps he had not seen me at all, for the sun was in his eyes.

  I didn’t go out of the house the next day. I was so quiet that Ma noticed and asked what was the matter with me.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “I just feel like playing inside today.”

  “Must be bored, poor child,” said Ma. “Maybe we’ll visit Simoes Aunty, you can play with Lily.”

  Ma thought that Lily was a sweet child and a good influence on me. She was actually a sneaky pie-face who cried when she lost a game. Lily had pinched Roopa the last time she’d visited. I’d seen her pinch my sister and make her cry and I’d said so.

  Mrs. Simoes had raised her eyebrows, pulled my cheek and said, “What a little story-teller you are! My Lily loves babies. She keeps asking me when I am going to get her one.” She laughed in a silly way.

  Ma smiled as well but she was annoyed. She knew that there were some things about which I would never make up stories. And even if I did, nobody was allowed to comment but her.

  “I think I have a headache,” I lied, not looking at Ma. If you looked your mother in the eye and told a fib she would turn to stone.

  Ma touched my forehead and gave me lots of water to drink.

  “We have to go and meet the Loretto School principal tomorrow,” she said anxiously. “You can’t fall ill, it’s so difficult to get an appointment with those people.”

  “Lily Simoes is a liar and she makes me sick,” I confessed. “I don’t want to play with her.”

  Ma sighed. “All right, don’t go out in the sun, then. And don’t tease Linda Ayah.”

  Two afternoons later, when Ma took her nap, I crawled through the hedge again. I couldn’t see anyone in the verandah; the screens were rolled up and rattled slightly in the breeze. So I was startled when the Nigerian’s apartment door banged open and he appeared suddenly. He glanced down the length of the verandah, spotted me and smiled. “Hey, little girl,” he called. “What you doing there, eh?”

  He knew that I was the nosy-parker girl and now he was going to yell at me. I edged back towards the safety of the besharam hedge. Would he catch me before I could squeeze through the hole to my own garden? Did it hurt to be turned into a moth and put in a bottle? My mouth was dry, my ponytail stuck to my neck.

  “Hey, hey!” said the man, his voice so loud in the still afternoon. “Visiting your neighbour? I met your Daddy at work today.”

  Don’t shout so, I thought, Ma might wake up. Linda Ayah might come running to see what’s going on.

  He knew my Dadda, so he couldn’t be bad. He also had pink palms, I could see that now. He was not a hubshi.

  “I am sorry I was peeping at you,” I said.

  “Ah, a curious girl aren’t you? Not as curious as my little girl, though.”

  “You have a little girl?”

  “Yes, yes, and two boys, but my little girl is the smart one, eh?”

  “What does she do?”

  “She reads books better than her Daddy and Mam, that’s what,” said the man. “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can!” I replied. “Does your little girl read about Nora and Tilly?”

  “I don’t know about Noratilly, but she knows Tongua the jackal and Nubi the Mighty King,” said the man. “Do you want to hear those stories? Better than your Noratilly.”

  He stared out at the garden. “In a river lived a wicked crocodile and across the river lived Nubi the Mighty Who Ruled the Land,” he began, and I was instantly entranced. The story ended quickly, however, and the man said in a soft, sad voice, “That happened long-long ago when the land was green and the river heavy with water.”

  “And now, isn’t the land green now?” I was puzzled by the change in his voice, for when he told the story it became singsong, swinging up and down, assuming different pitches for the various characters: the crocodile, the king, the jackals and the little princess who could balance ten pots of water on her head without dropping a single one.

  “No, now it is as brown as these little sparrows,” he said pointing at the tiny chattering birds hopping on the dusty grass growing through the cracks in the cement paving outside the verandah.

  “My Linda Ayah can catch the sparrows in her sari,” I said.

  “Why you want to catch those little fellows, eh?”

  “I don’t keep them,” I said, a little frightened. I had remained standing through the story, poised to run down the verandah if the man showed any sign of anger. “I just look at them and let them fly away.”

  “I’ll show you something,” said the man. “Wait here.”

  He went into his apartment and returned a few minutes later with a few grains of rice in his hand. “Now keep very still and watch,” he said, squatting on the edge of the verandah and stretching his hand out slowly to where the sparrows pecked and hopped. The grains of rice sat invitingly on his pink palm. The sparrows hopped closer to the palm, pecking ceaselessly at the dry ground. Then a daring one fluttered on to his hand, picked up a grain and flew away. Another sparrow did the same thing. The man sat motionless as a third sparrow landed on the outstretched palm. It did not fly away; instead it stayed there as the man gently closed his fingers around the tiny body and stroked its head.

  “See,” he said, “not afraid of me. It says to itself, this man, he is kind, he won’t hurt any living thing.”

  He opened his hand and the bird flew down to the ground again, throwing up little pinwheels of dust as it scrabbled for grains of rice. Outside the sun was low in the sky, ready to drop beneath the horizon. A peon was making his way down the verandah, rolling up the rest of the screens and letting in cool evening air. I heard my mother calling me in for tea and got up reluctantly.

  “Do you know any more stories?”

  “Maybe,” he said, grinning. “Question number two?”

  “Why are you black?” It was a question that had been nagging me ever since I saw the multicoloured Anglo-Indians at the railway station. Where did all these people get their colour from?

  The man smiled and asked quizzically, “Why are you brown, little girl?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He shrugged too and said, “And I don’t know either.”

  Ma’s insistent “Mini, Kamini, come and get your tiffin” echoed down the verandah.

  “What were you doing, talking to unknown people?” she demanded, shaking me hard. She had been waiting to catch me as I crawled back through the hedge. “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t talk to anybody-everybody!”

  “But Ma, he was telling me stories about Africa!”

  “Stories, stories, stories!” said Ma, shaking me again. “Some person on the road says ‘Come child, I will tell you stories,’ and this idiot girl will go behind him, no problem! Do you ever listen to me?”

  “Never listens, whattodo?” sighed Linda Ayah, materializing from somewhere.

  “And where were you?” asked Ma. “You are supposed to make sure that she doesn’t get into any mischief.”

  “Memsahib, my eyes blinked once only and this monkey had vanished. What can I do?” protested Linda Ayah.

  “Liar-liar-lipstick,” I chanted immediately. “You were sitting behind the building doing khusur-phusur with the other ayahs.”

  “Ma, do you know where Linda Ayah is now?” I asked, hit by a wave of nostalgia so strong that I had called my mother at 11:00 a.m. Indian time, when the rates were at their highest.

  “I have no idea. Maybe she went back to her village. Maybe I will stop at her village on my trip,” remarked Ma.

  “Trip, what trip?”

  “I am going on a train journey, across the country.”

  “With Lalli Aunty?” I was pleased that my moth
er was going to do something other than sit in her apartment quarrelling with the milkman or her latest maidservant. Ma seemed to have a new one every few months or so. “Whattodo?” she had said, when I remarked on it. “This is the real world. Not like our Railway life, with faithful Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon.”

  “Are you going with Lalli Aunty?” I asked again.

  “Why should I go with her? Am I incapable of doing anything myself?”

  “All right, all right, but where are you going?”

  “Everywhere,” snapped Ma irascibly. “Do I ask you all about your coming and going? Do I ask you why you have to live in the North Pole, hanh? Did I ask your sister why she ran away?”

  “Ma, Roopa got married. She did not run away.”

  “She left college in the middle of the term, came home with a man we had never met. He might have belonged to a family of pimps for all I knew. And then she married him in less than a month—so suspicious it looked—and left for USA! Of course she ran away.”

  “Roopa’s husband is a perfectly nice man, Ma,” I protested feebly.

  “And now,” continued my mother, “it is my turn to go away.”

  “At least give us an address to write to,” I said. I could feel a tension headache coming on. It didn’t matter how far away I was, all my conversations with my mother ended in an argument.

  “I don’t know where I am going,” said Ma. “A pilgrimage, like those old people in religious stories. Packed off their daughters, washed their hands of the sons, gave away all their useless belongings and left on long journeys to see how other people lived.”

  “But how do we know if you are all right? How do we reach you?”

  “What is the worst that can happen to me? I will die, that’s all. And if I die, the apartment and all that I have in it can be shared between you and Roopa. The bank manager has a spare set of keys. If he dies also, well, use your brains, break open the door, whatever! I don’t care.”

  I was worried about being left behind by Ma who, every now and again, threatened Dadda that one morning he would wake up and find her gone.

  “Go, why should I care what you do?” my father would say sometimes, although he usually puffed at his pipe and refused to enter into an argument with Ma. “And don’t forget to take your daughters with you.”

  “My daughters! Am I the Virgin Mary that I created them myself or what? When I leave, I go with no baggage but what I brought to this house.”

  Vir-gin. Good word or bad?

  Their arguments were loud and made no pretence of secrecy. I think they assumed that my sister and I were asleep as soon as our heads touched our pillows.

  They were right about Roopa, for she was one of those placid creatures who stayed completely impervious to undercurrents of anger or discontent in the house, certain that there would always be someone to look after her. She didn’t care who made her breakfast, or took her to the club to play on the swings in the evening, so long as the job was done. I, on the other hand, couldn’t bear the thought of becoming like our neighbour’s daughter, a thin, silent wisp of a girl who played house-house with us every afternoon and who was easily cowed into being our maidservant or cook or someone as menial. Her mother had died of brain fever and she was looked after by a series of stern aunts. The thought of being being brought up by Dadda’s sisters, especially crazy Aunty Meera, was extremely disagreeable. So I stayed awake, listening for footsteps, my body tensed to spring out of bed. I thought that if I kept my ears open, I would know immediately if Ma was going to run away, and then I could scream, wind my arms around her legs and stop her. How would I manage on my own with a father who was away on tour most of the time? How would I battle Linda Ayah’s host of demons and monsters that roamed the house every day? Besides, I might not be able to keep my word about looking after Roopa and I’d go straight to Hell. And Hell, warned Linda Ayah, was a most uncomfortable place, full of drooling creatures who craved little girls to satisfy their horrible appetites.

  Although Ma had assured me that Hell existed only in a person’s imagination and wasn’t a place like Delhi or Bombay to which one could travel by train, I was sure it lurked there at the edges of my world waiting for me to miss my step and slide in. Not only did Linda Ayah speak about it often and with a sort of deadly certainty, it was brought up every Friday at school by Miss Manley, the moral science teacher. She was an overpowering woman whose thick arms were covered with a pelt of bright orange hair so that, no matter what the colour of her dress, it looked as though she had orange sleeves. Miss Manley flung questions at the class to test our knowledge of the Bible.

  “What happened at Gethsemane?” she thundered, going down the classroom, row by row, making sure that she caught everyone with her questions. If a student dared to stutter, “I don’t know, Miss,” she paused in awful silence for a minute and then bellowed, “Dunce, you are a dunce! Go stand in the corner and improve your memory!”

  The dunce had to stand inside an aluminum dustbin and learn up Miss Manley’s favourite poem, “Daffodils,” before the count of ten.

  “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’” murmured the dustbindunce.

  “All right class, start counting,” commanded Miss Manley, and we chanted out loud, as slowly as possible, “One-two-three-four…”The closer we got to ten, the slower we counted to give the poor dunce a few seconds extra to memorize the lines. If the miscreant hadn’t learnt up the lines before ten, the wrath of God and Miss Manley descended. She slammed the dunce’s cheeks with a pair of chalkboard dusters, sending up billows of white powder, and said fiercely, “Wicked blight, may the Lord’s spit hail down upon you.”

  Then she turned to the rest of the class, her tangerine hair flying out of her bun like streamers, and demanded with deep bitterness, “What do you junglee donkeys know of fields of golden daffodils nodding and dancing in the breeze?”

  If Miss Manley found someone not paying attention, she casually picked up a piece of chalk, broke it in two and flung the bits with unerring aim at the miscreant, smiling at the yelp of pain as the chalk caught the dreamer on the face, or head, or on a tender ear.

  “Very smart, think you can quietly sleep in my class and I won’t notice, what? Think again, too-too smart. Not only is Miss Manley watching you, but God in his Heaven, too!”

  I usually finished Miss Manley’s homework first, because I couldn’t bear the shame of being a dustbindunce. One afternoon, she was in an unusually bad mood, flinging chalk like tiny missiles at various corners of the classroom. Twice Miss Manley had shouted at Devaki, my best friend, for stammering over an answer, and I hated her for it.

  “She is a vir-gin,” I whispered to Devaki.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Miss Manley is a vir-gin,” she hissed to Shabnam.

  The chalk sang across the room and caught Devaki on her cheek. “I didn’t say it, I didn’t say it. It was Kamini,” she babbled, fat tears winding down her face.

  “Say what?”

  “That you are a vir-gin.”

  It was a bad word, I discovered, for Miss Manley made me sit under my desk. “The dustbin is too good for you,” she roared. “You stay down there where the Lord cannot see your sinful face!”

  I crouched under the desk, so terrified that I did not come out even after the last bell rang and Miss Manley left. She did not seem to remember that I was still waiting to be forgiven.

  Linda Ayah, who had come to take me home, squatted patiently at the door of the classroom and tried to persuade me to emerge. “God is kind and generous, your teacher is a mad woman. She does not know anything, come out Baby-missy,” she begged. “I will pray to Jesus and tell him that you are a good child who looks after her baby sister, shares all her toys and listens to Linda Ayah. I will tell God to fix that nut-case teacher of yours, don’t worry. Let us go home now, your Ma will be waiting with milk and biscuits.” When I finally crawled out, she hugged me fiercely and added,“Whatfor you have to be scared when Linda is here to loo
k after you? God listens to this ayah, I am telling you.”

  Linda Ayah had been with our family for years and years. She was allowed to boss the other servants and nobody could utter a word. Ma said that she had never really hired Linda, at least not officially. When she came to this house as a bride, Dadda had left her alone and gone away to work. She would have been completely lost if it hadn’t been for Linda Ayah, always there like Aladdin’s genie, getting things done, making sure that Ma was settling in and everything was righty-tighty. She travelled with us every time we were transferred, insisting that if she wasn’t around we would all sink in chaos.

  There might have been some truth in what she said because Ma became horribly disorganized when we had to move. She hated the whole process of packing, of rolling out yards of stale gunny sacking that had been stored in the garage from the last time we moved, of sending the peon around to neighbours’ homes for old newspaper to use for the china and the glass bottles in which Ma stored spices. Nobody wanted to part with old newspapers, for you could sell them to the raddhi-man, who paid by the kilo.

  “So much expense, imagine having to beg other people for their rubbish, imagine having to buy their rubbish from them! Why do you have to keep getting transferred? Can’t you say your wife is sick, you are allergic to new places, something, and stay here?” grumbled Ma every time Dadda came home with his transfer orders.

  She especially disliked finding keys for all the locks, and we had a huge collection of both for the many trunks and boxes that travelled with us when we moved.