Tamarind Mem Read online

  “I want to go with you, takemetakemetakeme,” I wailed as Ma peeled away, ready to sing out of the house.

  She spent hours chatting with her friends on the telephone, disappearing for a matinee show sometimes. When she returned, she acted out funny bits from the movie for Roopa and me, her long arms flying in the air, her eyes bright with laughter. Sometimes, on a Saturday, she might clap her hands and say, “Let’s go for a picnic today!” And then Ganesh Peon would scurry around preparing baskets of food, grumbling aloud about the Memsahib’s erratic moods. “She thinks I am a magician. Make puri, make aloo-dutn! And all in ten minutes if you please!”

  There were times when she did nothing at all. Her sewing piled up in great coloured heaps in the guest room, her knitting lay abandoned in its faded cloth bag. Even when strips of sunlight picked out dust patches under the furniture, and she knew right away that the maid Rani had not touched that place with her broom for days, Ma ignored it. And Rani swung her hips in her saucy skirts, tossed her head and breezed through the house, leaving dustballs and cobwebs where they were. Later, later, when Dadda came home and Ma went thin-lipped and mean, Rani would get a good scolding. Then my mother swallowed her smile and ordered Ganesh Peon to make hot phulkas. She spent hours in the spare room cutting up cloth to make dresses for Roopa and me, her face so serious that for a long time I was certain that I had two mothers. Ma was a two-headed pushmi-pullyu from Dr. Dolittle’s zoo, or the Ramleela drama woman with a good mask on her face and a bad mask on the back of her head, changing her from Seetha to Soorpanakhi in a single turn.

  Linda Ayah went gloomy when Ma sang. Her face crumpled into a frown like an irritated monkey and she muttered beneath her breath. She fought with Ganesh Peon, yelled at the dhobhi for putting so much starch in my frocks that the cloth scratched Baby-missy’s skin. Her thin nose quivered with displeasure. She became as huge as a cloud threatening to erupt into thunder, and finally even Ma couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “What?” she demanded, glaring at Linda. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “With me? I am as fine as this morning. Why should anything be wrong with me?” said Linda. “Am I doing anything I should not do? Nono.”

  “Then if everything is okay with you, stop giving me those looks,” snapped Ma, her fingers nervously braiding her hair into a plait that flickered like dark lightning down her back when she walked.

  When Dadda was at home, Ma wore all that hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, secured by curly hairpins. Perhaps he had told her that it was undignified for a memsahib to leave her hair flying about her face like a wild woman. Dadda did that sometimes, made odd comments that made Ma cry. If I found a pin lying on the floor, let loose from the sliding brilliance of my mother’s hair, I kept it under my pillow, for it was almost like having Ma next to me, patting me to sleep as she used to when I was much, much younger.

  It was now four months since Ma had taken off on that absurd trip of hers, wandering around India like a gypsy with only a bed-roll, a flask of water and a small bag. She sent us postcards after she had reached her destination, never letting us know where she was going next. She spent her journey telling stories to sweepers from Jhansi, fishwives from Sanghli, a minister from Guntoor who had just lost the elections.

  “The man had a forest of hair growing out of his ears and nose,” she remarked in one of her wretched cards. “And he didn’t believe a word of what I was telling him about my life. I think he suspected that I had escaped from the Ranchi asylum.”

  I wished that I could write and inform Ma that the minister was not alone in his suspicions. She was definitely crazy, an old woman like her who disappeared, leaving a trail of postcards, not even decent letters, to mark her wanderings!

  I called Roopa to discuss the situation. We talked to each other frequently now and compared postcards, for Ma did not always write the same things to both of us.

  “What are we to do if there is an emergency?” I asked. “Suppose something happens to her? How will we know? And what if one of us has a problem? We can’t even contact our own mother! Ridiculous!”

  “Oh, leave her alone,” said Roopa. Her voice sounded indulgent, almost as if I was one of her children. I think she imagined that her marriage, her mortgaged home, even her motherhood gave her a certain status, a maturity that I had yet to gain. “Ma is probably having a wonderful time. And even if she was sitting at home and fell down the stairs or something, what could we do? It would take me at least three days to get there. I’d have to find somewhere to leave my children, can’t afford to take the whole jing-bang lot with me.”

  Ma made her way from station to station, camping in waiting rooms, one of the hundreds of anonymous passengers waiting for a train. She travelled second class, sharing a compartment with six, sometimes even eight people, crammed shoulder to shoulder on the upper berths, the aisle, the floor.

  “Whatfor is a railway pass if not to passage everywhere?” she demanded on a postcard with a picture of lurid pink lotus flowers. “All my life I went where your father wanted me to and now I follow my whims.”

  A long time ago, Dadda had pinned a map on my wall. It was to stop me crying every time he left on tour.

  “This is where I will be,” he had said, drawing a line of red ink on the map. Over the years, the map grew crimson with Dadda’s routes, marking out stretches of land that he had helped to capture and tame, setting them firmly on maps and timetables, dots connected by iron and wood and sweat. Ma had the map now, and she was following the lines of faded ink.

  Of all the rooms in the Ratnapura house, the guest bedroom was Ma’s favourite. She said that she liked the view from the windows, and although I stood on a chair to see what she saw, there was nothing but the dirty old garage, the rain tree with the car parked under it some days, and Paul da Costa the car-magician leaning over the bonnet, or lying between the wheels with his big feet sticking out.

  When Dadda left on line, Ma allowed me and Roopa to play in the room where she herself sat reading or sewing. At night we would all huddle under the yellow-and-black bedspread with its pattern of elephants, and Ma would tell us a story till we went to sleep. I did not mind this room during the day when sunlight streamed through the windows. At night, however, I was uneasy here, missing the familiarity of the lamp in my own bedroom, the rocking horse with its toothy grin and gay pink and gold tassels streaming down its arched neck, that Girdhari the carpenter had made. This guest room had too many doors and I hated it if they weren’t firmly shut, the bathroom door especially, which led from the yellow warmth of the room into darkness. The toilet gurgled there suddenly even when nobody used it, creatures scurried in the dry drains, a translucent lizard clung to the wall above the mirror and went tchuk-tchuk-tchuk. Ma said that if the lizard made that noise when you were saying something, it meant that your words would come true. I tried it a few times.

  “I will get a new dolly,” I said once, although I never really cared for dolls the way Roopa did. Another time I said, “My Dadda will never go on line again.” The lizard went tchuk-tchuk-tchuk, but neither of my statements came true.

  Still, the bathroom door was less worrying than the one that opened to the cloying fragrance of the unused verandah. The floor there was deeply fissured, rangoon creeper and jasmine had conquered the cement pillars, and rolls of tattered chik-screens hung in arched apertures, disintegrating a little more every time monsoon winds smashed against the fragile bamboo. Sometimes the darkness lying like a pool of ink beyond this room seemed to speak.

  I woke suddenly one night, my eyes trying to find Ma’s body in the bed beside me, and felt cool, flower-filled breezes drifting through the verandah door, carrying the sound of voices. In the dim moon-radiance, I couldn’t see Ma beside me, only Roopa’s small shape, and my throat closed with panic. I pulled the sheet over my head and waited trembling for a bhooth to carry me away, out beyond the verandah where trees reared up like giants and the wild cry of night birds shattered the silence. Aft
er many hours, it seemed, in which I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my legs together to stop the urgent pee from sliding out, the bed undulated slightly. Ma was there again, her smell filling my nostrils with crushed darbha grass and mango leaves washed by rain. Different from her morning smell. Was it really Ma?

  In the morning, I asked her about the voices in the breeze and Ma laughed. “You were having a dream,” she said, stroking my hair, her brilliant eyes mirroring my face.

  “The dream took you away,” I said, remembering the crushed-grass smell, so different from the pale drift of lavender powder clouding Ma now.

  Linda Ayah glanced up from the coconut that she was scraping and shook her head. “You be careful, Memsahib, careful-careful,” she said, looking like an angry owl.

  I had no idea what Linda Ayah meant. Was she telling Ma to be careful about the ghost? Why only Ma? There were times when I felt that every single person in the house was talking about something different. Hidden rivers of meaning flowed across the room, sliding beneath and above each other, intersecting to create a savage whirlpool. When we moved from Bhusaval to Ratnapura, our train had crossed a bridge, a huge iron skeleton hovering over a river still and molten in the afternoon sun. Beneath that stretched and shining calm lay dangerous eddies and crocodiles, said Dadda. He pressed a rupee coin in my hand. “Give that to the river. She will be pleased with you.”

  But in this house full of unexpected currents, I knew that a rupee coin was useless. I would have to move silently, carefully, make sure I did not wake the sleeping crocodiles. So I tiptoed around my room, unwilling to touch my stainless-steel cooking set, the Minoo doll that squeaked, anything that might make a noise. Through the verandah without my Hawaii sandals and into the kitchen, whisper to Ganesh Peon for biscuits from the green Dalda tin. Don’t flush the pee-water in the toilet, don’t spit too loud in the sink, don’t open the black squeaky cupboard door. No noise, no noise, no noise.

  “What is wrong with that child?” muttered Linda Ayah, irritated with my whispering, gliding, crazynonsenserub-bish.“What she is trying to do, Jesu only knows!”

  I went to school thinking of nothing but when I was going to be back. And when Linda Ayah brought me home I rushed straight to Ma, crawled into her lap and stayed there even when Ayah called me for a glass of Bournvita, frothy and sweet.

  Ayah, who had been with me since the day I was born practically, was scary these days. She threw anxious glances at Ma when Dadda was in the house, as if she was also afraid that my mother would run away like she threatened. And when my father went away and Ma began to sing, Linda Ayah sat, malevolent as a toad, in the corner of the verandah.

  “Why you are so pleased when Sahib leaves the house?” she demanded.

  “Are you my servant or are you Lord Vishnu keeping an eye on me?” snapped Ma. “I can’t be happy in my own home?”

  Linda didn’t dare to say anything more to Ma and instead took out her anxieties on me and Roopa, frightening us with stories of the ghosts and goblins that hovered about us. Over the years, the number of supernatural creatures grew and became more horrible and threatening. In every house we moved to, Linda Ayah pointed out solidified bhooths and monsters, frozen into innocent objects till midnight, when they came alive “to take care of naughty Baby-missies.” The scrolled wooden banister supports in the echoing, whitewashed Bilaspur house were weird, hunchbacked imps. The grinding stone in the back verandah of the Bhusaval bungalow was a grey shaitaan with a hole in its stomach. A daayin with three rows of teeth and feet turned backwards lived up the ancient chimney in the Calcutta apartment. And in the corner of the verandah in Ratnapura, there inside the twisted bel tree, was the headless manwoman, and the bel fruit was its hundred breasts oozing sticky juice that coated small mouths with ooh painful boils.

  Linda Ayah pointed into the dark recesses of the ceilings, where hook-nosed goblins swung in cobweb baskets, and threatened me: “Now you eat that egg phata-phat. No wak-wak and rubbish fuss. Otherwise you know what will come howling down to sit on your tummy tonight.”

  As we grew older, the size of the monsters grew as well. Now they had complicated stories attached to them. If I didn’t behave myself at the club, the girl ghost with her feet twisted inward would walk into my room at night, for she was the ghost who disliked disobedient children. Make faces behind Linda’s back and the wind pretha would twist my face forever into a grimace.

  Roopa, with her closed-tin mind, had her own way of dealing with the spooks and haunts inhabiting every house we moved into. She believed unquestioningly in the monkey-god Hanuman, whose picture occupied a prominent place in Ma’s prayer room. This god, with his puffy cheeks and pouting red mouth, was Roopa’s talisman, her protection against Linda Ayah’s bhooths and rakshasas. Roopa wrote “Hanuman” under her pillow with a finger and slept soundly while I lay awake, my imagination too large and multihued, too dense to be blown away with a single name scrawled beneath the pillow. Linda Ayah’s creatures crept into my sleep and I would spring up, screaming wildly. There in the corner of my room where the moon shone straight into a mirror, lit up the red beadwork cushion on a chair, there sat a hag, her crimson eyes bleeding, her mouth, lined with rotting teeth, yawning wide.

  “Yo-yo Rama-deva,” cursed Ma, stumbling out of bed, tripping over the faded cotton sari she wore at night. “What a nuisance girl. Who will marry her if she screeches in his face every night?”

  She wrapped her arms tight around me and swayed to and fro, “Shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo.” It wasn’t good to wake a person from a dream, for the mind might remain in the dream and only the body would travel back to this world. So Ma just patted me on the back till I stopped quivering.

  Ma was afraid that Aunty Meera’s madness had infected me, nono, that one of those unfortunate lunatic genes in my father’s family was waking up in my body like Linda Ayah’s frozen spooks. These fears never extended to Roopa, normal, stubborn, whose personal demon was the colour of her skin, dark as a jamoon fruit. “You love Kamini more than me because she is prettier than I am,” she would say to Ma, looking slyly out of the corner of her eye at me. She knew that Ma, in an effort to prove that she loved us both equally, would give Roopa an extra kiss, the bigger slice of cake, let her have the first choice of ribbon. Roopa would pick the colour I liked and then make a show of sweet generosity, giving it to me with a smile, so that Ma could pat her on the head and say, “See, Kami, what a good little sister you have! Make sure you take care of her.”

  I took Ma’s instructions to heart, anything to win her approval, that warm smile. So when the boys teased Roopa,“Kaali-kalooti, black pepper, Coca-cola,” I leapt at them, punching and biting, while Roopa went yelling for Linda Ayah.

  “My Jesus-child!” yelled Linda, angry with us for dragging her away from a cosy gossip session with the other ayahs out in the club verandah. “What a tomboy. Come here you puppy, why you hitting all the childrens in the colony like a wild thing? You bad girl, wait you, a fish bhooth will breathe poison over your face at night!”

  That night I dreamt of a fish with glittering, sharp scales scraping its way up to my cot, its dead eyes fixed on my helpless body. Then the dreaming screaming started, and Ma came running in. “Shani! Devil girl, why is she turning my hair grey like this? Is she possessed or what?”

  The next morning she shouted at Linda, cursed Dadda and Aunty Vijaya. “Stuff this silly girl’s brains with more idiotic stories! Deva-deva, there is no room left in her head for sense!”

  But Linda Ayah still spun her spider webs, Dadda crammed moreandmore stories in my head, and soon it was summer, time for the Aunties to arrive, for Aunty Vijaya to cover the heated months with trailing histories, rambling family sagas, all of which knotted and looped messy as Meera Aunty’s mad knitting, till I felt that I did not exist except in somebody’s story, completely fictional.

  A sunbeam shot straight through my living-room window, was caught by the prismatic jewel hanging there and splintered into dancing rainbows on the
walls. I hoped that the rainbows would stay till my neighbour brought her daughter over. Claire stayed with me on Tuesdays while her mother was away at work. She was a solemn child who perched delicately on the edge of my sofa, nibbled at a cookie and listened to the stories with which I entertained her. Sometimes I spread out all of Ma’s brightly coloured postcards on the floor and we would cook up wild adventures for the travelling mommy, as Claire liked to call my mother. At other times, I would simply tell her about my crazy Aunty Meera, Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon, the ghosts in the tamarind tree, or the cobra in our Bhusaval garden.

  Long, long ago, I would begin, there was an old witch named Linda Ayah who had great big knuckles and four eyes. She sat in the verandah of a house with bougainvillaea and morning-glory and jasmine and spun stories out of warm yellow sunshine, honeybee murmurs, the flash of a kingfisher’s wing. She reached out into thin air and drew out ghosts and imps; she clapped her hands and dancing girls and jugglers swirled and tumbled on the floor.

  A little girl sat before her, open-mouthed, and demanded, “Is it true, is it real?”