Tamarind Mem Read online

  “Why she has to make a fuss about such silly things?” muttered Linda, making sure that Ma did not hear her. “How long does it take to find out which key is for what lock, henh?”

  “And worst of all,” said Ma, “I have to find schools for these children. Your Dadda sits there like a maharaja smoking a pipe and looking at the sky, thinking mighty thoughts no doubt, and I walk from one school to the next wearing out my slippers, saying to those nuns, ‘Take my daughters, please, they will bring honour to your school.’”

  Ma insisted on sending Roopa and me to convent schools, which were always booked full. It didn’t matter where we were transferred or how far away the school was, Ma stood in the admission queues and got us in. In Lucknow we went to St. Agnes’s School, in Calcutta it was Mount Carmel, and in Guwahati it was La Martinière’s. If Ma could not get us in because we had arrived in the middle of the term and there were no seats left in the classroom, she told the Mother Superior that she would get the nuns railway reservations anytime they had a problem if they could squeeze in two extra desks for us. Then on the way home she would say, “The old crows, they’ll do anything if you dangle a bribe. Even brides of the Lord have a price.”

  Dadda remained blissfully ignorant of Ma’s machinations as the nuns never did ask for reservations. He would have been shocked by her lack of scruples. And he could never understand why she insisted on sending me and Roopa to the nuns anyway.

  “What is wrong with a Central School education?” he demanded when Ma kicked up a fuss over getting transferred in the middle of the school term. Central Schools were set up for the children of government employees who had to move frequently.

  “They teach in Hindi,” said Ma.

  “So what? That is one of the languages in this country, in case you have forgotten,” argued Dadda.

  “Only one of them,” replied Ma. “You want them to learn a different language everywhere we move? Bengali in this place, Assamese there, Gujarati somewhere else? Poor things, as it is they are confused with first language, second language, third language and all. You want them to go crazy or what?”

  “They won’t go crazy,” insisted Dadda. “They will be true Indians.”

  “Yes, yes, you are a fine one to talk, you and your smoking jacket and pipe and British ways. Did your pujari father send you to Corporation school? Hanh? Did he? Oh no, you could go to Francis Xavier and St. Andrew’s, but it is okay for your daughters to go to any rubbish-pile place.”

  “Those days it was necessary,” said Dadda. “Now we’re an independent country, remember?”

  “Yes, but without English they will be like the servants’ children, what’s the difference then, you tell me?” argued Ma.

  As usual, Dadda got tired of the whole thing and ended up behind his screen of rustling newspapers, while Ma continued complaining to Linda Ayah, who was always ready with a sharp comment or sympathetic silence, depending on her own mood.

  Roopa and I knew that Linda was really a witch, a glass-eyed one, who could see what we were going to do even before we tried it.

  “Un-unh! Roopa Missy, no playing in dirty tap water otherwise I will tell Memsahib,” she would call from her favourite spot in the verandah, without even raising her eyes from the platter of rice or the soopa of coriander seeds that she was cleaning. “Kamini baby, if you climb that jamoon tree, showing your knickers to all the loafers passing on the road, you won’t be able to sit for a week, such a hard slap you will get!”

  When Roopa was a baby, Linda checked the dhobhi basket every day to see that the diapers were washed in Dettol and ironed properly. She harangued the milk-woman into bringing her cow to the back yard so that she could watch her draw milk. “My babies get milk without water mixup,” she told the milk-woman, who spat a stream of betel juice into the bushes to show Linda Ayah what she thought of her.

  I remember the woman, with her fat breasts swinging naked beneath the faded sari, standing astride a drain in full view of the road, her sari hitched up to her thighs, pissing a fierce stream. I had only ever seen men doing this and wondered if she was actually one of the eunuchs who dressed up in women’s clothes and roamed the streets during festivals, clapping their hands and singing obscene songs. I was scared to ask the milk-woman, and got a slap on my bottom from Linda Ayah for my curiosity. “What for you want to watch mannerless people making dirty water on the main road? Stupid child!”

  Linda Ayah had coarse, bony hands with knuckles large as tree-knots and palms criss-crossed so deeply with lines that they looked like the railway shunting yard. Her fingertips were stained yellow with khaini that she rolled out of a little tin tucked into the waistline of her sari.

  “What is that?” I asked, watching Linda Ayah pinch a ball of khaini delicately between finger and thumb and rub it against her leathered palms till it powdered. Then she slapped at it briskly before tossing it into her mouth. A deep sigh of contentment, her eyes gleaming pleasure behind her glasses.

  “A magic powder,” said Linda. “Something to make an old woman happy.” The khaini box went back into the folds of sari and petticoat to be taken out the next time the household became too heavy for her.

  “But you are not old,” I said.

  “I feel very old sometimes, Baby-missy,” said Linda, still absorbed in the pleasure of the khaini as it mingled with saliva in her mouth, its vapours reaching her heart and brain, a langorous stretching of her creaky muscles.

  “Ma says she feels old too,” I said. “Can’t you give her some khaini?”

  It was true that Ma said she felt as if she had aged twenty years since her marriage. “Look at this grey,” she grumbled to Dadda during one of her arguments, jabbing at her head. “You are responsible for this. Already I look like my Ajji!”

  I never thought of the arguments as anything other than my mother’s, for Ma did all the talking and Dadda locked himself into a tight box of silence. A deep silence, only the soft phhp-phhp suck of his lips on the pipe stem. Smoke wreathed his head and his face was an indistinct blur.

  “Can’t you say something?” cried Ma, enraged by his relentless quiet, which was more deadly than angry words could ever be. “Say something, say something, say something!” she screamed once, flinging all the bone china cups and saucers Dadda had bought from England many years ago into the kitchen sink. My father sat in his armchair, a ballooning grey shadow, and said not a word, staring into the mist of smoke, refusing to listen to Ma’s hysterical sobbing. I shook Roopa awake, forcing her into her slippers and a sweater, for if Ma was going to leave the house after smashing all the china, I wanted us to be dressed and ready to follow her.

  The nicest thing about Ma’s flat was the gulmohur tree that scattered its flaming red flowers all over her balcony. Here, in Calgary, I had no gulmohur outside my window, but a lilac bloomed in summer and filled my home with its delicate fragrance. Sometimes I wished that I could trap the beauty of those flowers to last me through the winter, as well. But as Dadda told me once, there are some things you cannot keep forever—youth and beauty and the breath in your mortal body.

  Of Dadda himself, there remained so little to hold on to. Roopa said that she remembered him as an absence. His chair at the dining table sat empty flor at least fifteen days of the month. And when he was at home, she couldn’t see his face, only the sheets of newspaper rustling before it. Roopa and I exchanged our own memories of him, hoarding them like a pair of misers. For if we did not, Dadda would float away like a puff of dandelion seed. I looked at our family photographs often, of us in Guwahati and Lucknow, Ratnapura and Calcutta. I had all of Dadda’s childhood pictures as well. Roopa said that she wasn’t interested in them.

  “What will I do with these ancient pieces of paper?” she asked, dismissing the fading images of our family.

  “How about your children? Don’t you want them to know something of their grandfather?”

  “I have pictures of Dadda as an adult. Those are enough, I think.”

  I tried t
o read the lives behind the enigmatic sepia silence, to fathom the meanings in those still eyes, the unmoving smiles. I phoned Ma in India and asked her about this picture or that, but she only wanted to know why I was wasting my time thinking about ghosts, and a useless bunch at that, who did nothing more worthwhile than produce children.

  “Ma, stop being so nasty all the time, I can’t stand it,” I snapped.

  “Oho, look at this madam, all grown up and thinks she can say whatall she wants to her mother!”

  Yes, Ma, I am no longer a child, I wanted to tell her, will you ever realize that?

  “When are you leaving on this trip of yours?” I asked instead.

  “Tomorrow, next week, next month. How does it matter? I have all the time in the world and no one to question how I spend it, no?”

  My father came home from his long trips with bags full of stories. I liked to think that the stories were for me alone. Besides, I was the only one who would listen to them. Roopa fidgeted and yawned through Dadda’s tales and after a while ran away to play. For her, Dadda brought dolls and kitchen toys and windmills and bracelets, worthless things that disintegrated or were forgotten in a few days.

  “Dadda, tell me a story,” I begged when he returned from a trip to Shillong. I danced impatiently around him, watching him light his pipe.

  “Waste of time,” grumbled Ma. Her fight with Dadda had begun long before I was born, so I could not understand it at all. Was it because he refused to take her along when he went away? Or perhaps because he smoked so much? Maybe she wanted him to tell her all the stories that he told me alone.

  “See this crown?” Dadda caressed imaginary Himalayan ranges, his hand conjuring them up in the air before us. He recited the names of the peaks and ranges like a sacred chant. “Karakoram, Kailash, Annapoorna, Kanchenjunga, each a jewel bearing a tale. This is where Lord Shiva dances, this is where Parvathi performed her wild penance, and here River Ganga lay waiting for Bhageerathi to summon her down to the plains.”

  Dadda’s trains had not breached the Himalayas yet, meandering instead across smiling valleys, occasionally bursting through stony, obdurate hills.

  “We tried to fling a bridge across the Ganga at this point, but she is a creature of moods. She was annoyed that we mere humans had not appeased her first with flowers and song,” said Dadda, narrating the flood that had swept the Howrah-Kalka Mail off the tracks during the monsoons last year. There were twenty carriages strung together and floating in the murky waters. People must have screamed as they drifted out of the choking windows and sank in dirty bubbles, suitcases floating all around, photographs, timetables, a wedding garland perhaps, lunch-boxes dispersing soaked rotis, a film of oily dal. The disaster had happened at night and the passengers must have been asleep, unaware that they were drowning till they began to breathe muddy water, felt it fill their lungs inflating them like bags, swelling through every orifice, flooding dreams and memories till there was nothing left but a floating chaos of wet, wet, wet. So the engineers and workers held a grand pooja, offered the milk of a hundred coconuts to Ganga, showered pink rose petals on her body, called out paeans in praise of her beauty, and finally the river was appeased, charmed out of her sulks.

  When Dadda went away I could trace on a railway map the exact lines of his journey. “Between Kumda and Karonji,” said Dadda, back home from yet another trip, “there was only one problem. An anthill as high as a hut which the villagers refused to destroy. A pair of king cobras lived in the hill along with the white ants. Nobody in their right senses destroys the home of a cobra.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Noni, it will bring a curse on your head, of sickness and sorrow. But my assistant said that he was protected from the curse by a boon which Vasuki, the king of serpents, gave to his ancestors. He said that manymany centuries ago, this ancestor had saved Vasuki, who was trapped in a ring of fire. He held out a staff to the mighty snake, who coiled around it and escaped certain death.”

  “So did you destroy the anthill?”

  “No, we laid tracks around it, because the villagers did not believe my assistant’s story.”

  And it seemed that as soon as we got used to having Dadda home again, it was time for him to leave, armed with a line-box full of provisions for a fortnight, sometimes a month. Each night before he left on a trip, I lay awake waiting for a quarrel to erupt.

  “What is so special about these trips that you cannot take us with you even once?” Ma demanded just before Dadda left for Darjeeling, a hill-station that my mother had been wanting to visit.

  “It is a duty trip, not a holiday, how many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Other officers go on these duty trips with their wives and children and mothers and aunts and all. Last month Mr. Khanna took his whole family to Simla.”

  “I don’t care what Mr. Khanna did, it is against railway policy and that’s the end of this stupid drama.”

  “Sathya Harischandra!” taunted Ma, referring to the mythological king who sold his wife and sacrificed his son for the sake of his principles. “Never mind the fact that I have to stay alone in this house and bring up two children without any help, and in the summer, look after your crazy sister as well. Oh no, all that does not matter so long as you stick to your noble duty!”

  “Rules are rules,” said Dadda stiffly.

  “Rules, rules, rules, that’s all you care about.” Ma started to cry, harsh, loud sobs that scared me. In the past, when Roopa was just a baby, she had argued bitterly but never-ever cried. Dadda left the room abruptly, slamming the door behind him. He would sleep in the guest room and slip out early next morning.

  Roopa, who usually slept through it all, stirred beside me and whispered, “Is Dadda beating Ma?” She clutched my hand under the sheets and I was glad to have her sticky fingers against mine.

  “Dadda doesn’t beat people,” I hissed indignantly. How could she imagine such a thing about him?

  “Then why does she cry? She cries every day when he is at home.”

  “No she does not! She cries when he goes away.”

  “They fight all the time and she cries all the time,” insisted Roopa.

  I couldn’t decide on whose side I wanted to be. I adored my father for his gentleness, for his willingness to listen to me, to tell me those wonderful stories when he was home. And yet I hated him for making Ma so angry all the time. In fact, I was secretly happy when he went away on line, and I tried to hide my feelings with an elaborate show of grief. I opened my mouth and bawled, pumped out hot tears, clutched the stern crease of his trousers and begged him not to go. I could not let him see that I was actually relieved, for when he left, Ma changed. She swept through the house smiling and smiling, not even a shout when I spilt a whole bottle of milk, when Roopa wrote all over the dining-room wall with blue chalk, not a word when the dhobhi dropped a cinder from his iron-box on a party frock and burnt a hole. Perhaps she did eat some of Linda’s magic powder.

  When Ma was happy, I loved her so much that intensity tingled up my nostrils and bit at my eyes, pulling out tears. Linda Ayah seemed to feel the same way, for she gathered me into her hard, dry arms and rocked me, murmuring all the time, “Oh-oh-oh-oh, I know, I know.” Her breath, leafy with the smell of the neem twigs she used to brush her teeth, feathered my face, her hands gentle on my head. Ma bustled through the house filling it with such joy that I felt like sobbing. It was the kind of feeling I got when I ate jackfruit in my grandmother’s house. The garbage stink of the silky, gold fruit made me gag at the same moment as it slid down my throat, almost unbearably honeysweet.

  And as she moved briskly about the house, her starched cotton sari whispering about her body, her thin gold bangles tinkling, my mother reached into her memory and pulled out soft threads of song. They were mournful Saigal tunes, lilting Geetha Dutt lyrics, gentle songs from oldold movies which Ma had seen when she was a girl. Sometimes she kneeled before her carved elephant-box made of rosewood and ivory, her treasure-b
ox, a wedding gift from Great-Aunt Manju, and drew out 75 rpm records in powdery paper jackets. Ma was in such a good mood when Dadda went away that she even let me try out her satin petticoats from the box.

  “See how thin I was!” she laughed once.“Baap-re-baap! Look at your mother now.” She made a circle with her fingers and said, “My waist was as tiny as this, not one chance that Scarlett O’Hara had next to my waist!”

  She allowed Roopa and me to open delicate silver tins still stained with turmeric and vermilion, akshathey and sandal paste from her wedding.

  “When you get married,” said Ma, “I will fill these boxes with joy, my blessings will perfume each of them.” She touched her wedding sari, a Benaras tissue of red and gold. “For you I will buy only Canjeevaram. A tissue is beautiful when it is new, but in a few years it is a pile of powder. Looklook how it crumbles and breaks!”

  “But Ma, I want a wedding sari just like this,” I begged, in love with the frail, whispery fabric like a butterfly’s wing.

  “Listen to me chinni, your mother knows what from what. Some things look better than they are,” said Ma.

  Hindi melodies from Mukesh movies streamed out of the bathroom along with the sound of rushing water as Ma washed her cascading black hair. She hummed in the bedroom, patted puffs of talcum powder under her arms, across her back, where sweat sprang and wet her Rubia blouse. She sang as she wrapped a rustling cotton sari around herself and then came out to dry her hair on the verandah, where the sun roared out of a blue, blue sky. I remember how she smiled at me upside down, through a flying sheet of hair, and I stared in awe at my luminous mother. Once, when she came out to the verandah, I was eating my breakfast, my mouth opening and closing as Linda Ayah spooned in sooji-halwah rich with raisins. When I saw Ma, I kicked my legs and pursed up my mouth, turning away from Linda’s coaxing.

  “Come on, Baby-missy, my kanmani, don’t you want to grow big-big?” wheedled Linda, her fingers hard on my chin trying to turn my puckered face towards her. But no, I wanted to go to my mother, so pretty and smiling. I climbed her fresh crackling lap, buried my face in the long neck and smelled her jasmine skin. I pushed my head between Ma’s breasts, wondering at the tender yielding beneath my face. Her chain of gold and black wedding beads pressed against my cheek, leaving tiny imprints. Gold for the good and black for the bad, Ma had explained. In a marriage you were obliged to live with both. Through the spiky fringe of my eyelashes, I could see the peacock eyes on Ma’s sari border, the fine brown hair on her arm, the two moles like flecks of coal-dust. I could hear her heart ka-thump-a-thump, the rumble of her stomach. I held my own breath for a second and released it so that it matched the rise and fall of Ma’s breath. But I couldn’t burrow into her fragrant warmth for long for she had to go somewhere.