Tamarind Mem Read online

  “Everything is true, and everything is false. It is the storyteller and the listener who decide what-what is what,” said Linda Ayah.

  I wished that I could summon Linda Ayah up from the past and ask her, “Tell me, was Paul da Costa real or not? Tell me, if he was such a magician with cars, if he fixed them so they never-ever broke, why did he come every Sunday for one whole year?”

  Perhaps Linda Ayah would have asked, “Who is this Paul person you keep talking about? Why you thinking of useless mens all the time, hanh? I will tell your Ma wait and see.”

  Or she might have patted a warm spot beside her on the verandah and begun a new story, “Once upon a time, there was a poor fool who had no brains, only magic in his head. He fell in love with a queen as beautiful as a blue lotus blossom.”

  Butbut, Linda Ayah was only a shadow in a child’s landscape. She was probably dead, or perhaps she had moved on to another Railway family. Did she tell her new Baby-missies that there were ghosts swinging from the rafters? Did she tell them about the clever goat-girl who stole fire from an evil sorcerer and flew away? And when the Baby-missy asked, “But Linda Ayah, how can a girl fly?” did she nod wisely and say, “That is the story way, my sugar child”?

  In stories things could be made to happen. You could grow wings on heroes, or give the heroine a voice like a koyal bird, and people never died. In real life, if you brayed like a donkey, no amount of honey could sweeten your throat; people went away and returned only as memories. In real life, I reflected, you warmed yourself on cold winter days in a foreign land by pulling out a rag-bag collection of those memories. You wondered which ones to keep and which to throw away, paused over a fragment here, smiled at a scrap. You reached out to grasp people you knew and came up with a handful of air, for they were only chimeras, spun out of your own imagination. You tried to pin down a picture, thought that you had it exactly the way it smelled and looked so many years ago, and then you noticed, out of the corner of your eye, a person who had not been there before, a slight movement where there should have been the stillness of empty canvas.

  It was time to put away the crockery, hide the knives and the forks, make sure the gardener and the maids and the iron-man and the peon knew what to do, because it was summertime again and the Aunties were coming. We all liked Vijaya Aunty, but Meera was straight from the lunatic asylum. Ma told her friends that she had an attention problem and a hearing problem. That sounded better than to say that she was a nut-case. The noise that Meera Aunty made was enough to rouse dead souls from their blanket of ashes. She created a different noise every day that one, oh she was clever at dreaming up new sounds each more irritating than the last. Sometimes she burped continuously, complicated belches whose sour odour poisoned the whole house and wouldn’t disappear even when Ma opened out all the windows and lighted twenty sandalwood joss-sticks. At other times she clicked a pair of blunted knitting needles, trailed yards of yellow wool. She said she was knitting a blanket for Ma. Sometimes it was a shawl, a bedspread or a rug.

  “To thank my sister-in-law for allowing me to visit my brother’s house,” she said in a precise, low voice that gave no hint of the screaming pitch it could reach. The wool wound between chair legs and tables, fluttered under doors, even lay like worms in the potted ferns lining the verandah.

  “Knitonepurloneknitknitknitonepurl,” murmured Aunty Meera non-stop for an entire day, a droning bee pausing only to slurp in the spit that filled her mouth. If the burps annoyed Ma, this knitting drove her into a frenzy. Meera was obviously imitating her, for Ma enjoyed knitting, her fingers busy twirling the wool around the needles as she supervised the servants or sat in the sunny verandah enjoying a gossip with Linda Ayah. What infuriated Ma was not knowing if Aunty was doing it deliberately or if it was part of her madness.

  “Tell her to stop,” she begged Dadda, the only person in the house who had any measure of control over Aunty Meera. I knew that Meera listened to Dadda not because she liked him better, but out of spite—to get Dadda’s attention all for herself.

  Once, Ma hid the wool and the knitting needles, and Meera walked out of the front gates in a petticoat and blouse, her plump, hairy belly, the colour of old flour, sagging over the waistband, right into Mrs. Goswami’s bungalow, where she methodically shredded all her Persian Queen roses. Ma returned the knitting and locked herself in her room.

  “Tell him,” she said to Roopa and me through the door, “tell your father that I will not step out of this room till that crazy has left my house. He can leave with her for all I care.”

  She yelled orders to the servants through the door. “Ganesh,” she called, “today we will have onion dal and rice. Tomato salad for Kamini baby, cucumber for Roopa and fried cauliflower for Sahib.”

  The Aunties were going to be with us till July, which meant that Ma would stay locked up for a whole month and Dadda would have to use the upstairs toilet and who would look after Roopa and me? Vijaya Aunty maybe, she was nice, at least when she stopped reading her magazines. In a way, despite the strain it put on the entire household, I was glad to have the Aunties around for the holidays. Everybody was so busy making sure that Aunty Meera was only knitting and not stabbing the cat, or trying to pinch Roopa to death, that there was no time for Linda Ayah to point out bhooths and monsters. There was no chance for Ma to disappear into the night when Dadda went away in his inspection saloon and no chance for them to quarrel when he got back. Instead, Ma stayed up all night listening for sounds from Meera’s room, for who knew what that shani creature was up to? Even when Meera was quiet, the house resounded with people asking, “Where is that screw-loose?” “Is she cooking any fresh mischief, the hucchi?” “Don’t leave her alone in the kitchen, she will burn the house down, then whattodo?”

  Meera Aunty did not like children, especially not little girls who spied on her. If she saw me or Roopa staring at her she made a horrible gobbling sound as if she wanted to eat us up. One time, after she had spilled water all over my math notebook, I called her a bitch—I had heard the older girls at school call Sister Jesuina that. Meera Aunty rushed out of her chair. “You are a foul-tongued nuisance,” she hissed, bringing her face close to mine. “I believe I’ll have to wash your mouth clean.”

  She wrapped her thin, long fingers around my arm and dragged me to the lotus pond at the far end of the garden. Only a few months ago, the gardener had dropped a basket of kittens there and I’d been haunted by their drowning mewls for weeks. In my moral science class Sister Imelda had said that God was an angry person who punished people often. Now I was certain that God was sending me to the lotus pond to be drowned like the kittens for calling my aunt a bitch. I opened my mouth and screamed and Linda Ayah panted out of the house.

  “Baap-re-baap!” she exclaimed, pulling me away from Meera Aunty. “What a house. One minute I turn my back and so much gad-bad happens!”

  After wrecking Mrs. Goswami’s roses, Aunty Meera turned her attention to Ma’s garden. She pulled up all the tiger-lilies, plucked the guavas while they were still unripe and told me that the papayas were so sweet because she pissed under that tree every morning.

  “Don’t touch that,” I whispered to Roopa, pointing to a bowl full of sliced papaya. “Meera Aunty did number-one in it.”

  Roopa thought that I wanted to eat it all myself and started crying when I held the bowl away. She was like that, cry-cry-cry.

  “Don’t tease your sister,” yelled Ma.

  “There is poison in the papaya,” I said.

  “Kamini!” Ma flashed her eyes at me. She was angry, and when her eyes went big and shiny and dangerous I knew that she was going to slap me.

  I would catch Roopa later for getting me into trouble. What did I care if she ate Meera Aunty’s pissy papayas? I was not going to touch them ever again.

  In the Ratnapura house with the flagstaff on the saucer-shaped lawn, Aunty Meera sat in the front verandah in full view of the neighbours and sang the national anthem. Vijaya Aunty told me that Ba
nkim Chandra Chatterjee made up the song when India achieved Independence.

  “That was the year poor Meera lost her mind,” explained Vijaya Aunty. “She was only sixteen then. The Jana-gana-mana was playing on the radio and she threw a plate at the neighbour’s husband, stupid fellow always peeping into our windows to see us in petticoat-underwear maybe.”

  I hadn’t made up my mind if Meera Aunty was really half in her head or only pretending. Or if she was possessed by a rakshasi, which was the story the servants believed. Ma told me firmly that Meera was mad, mad, mad.

  “It runs in your father’s family,” she said. “Your father hid it from us, though, he did not bother to let my Appa know about this streak of lunacy. Do you think I would have married him if I had known?”

  “Rubbish!” Vijaya Aunty countered. “Your grandfather wanted to get rid of your Ma as quickly as possible, that’s all he cared about. We have never kept our poor, unfortunate Meera a secret.”

  “Do you want to believe her or your mother?” demanded Ma. I did not know if I was standing on my head or what. Ma made up things sometimes, like when boring Mrs. Khanna phoned and Ma told her that she was going out and really couldn’t talk just now.

  “Oh, Mrs. Khanna,” she would say in her sugar voice, “I was thinking about you only yesterday. We must have a long-long chat, but now I have to go out with my husband, he gets so annoyed if I am not ready. I will call you tomorrow?” Then she would put down the phone and say in her normal voice, “Boring old bak-bak.”

  Ma was not always honest, but Dadda could not lie. He did not know of hidden things buried in mere words, so even the stories he came home with must be true. In spite of his thick glasses with the stainless-steel frames, Dadda could not see the invisible rivers rushing through the house, the chaos, the rage. Linda Ayah, who wore glasses thicker than Dadda’s, noticed every minute thing, heard even an ant dropping to the ground from the rangoon-creeper flowers.

  “Your father cannot see because he does not want to, and Memsahib is blinded by her anger,” she explained. “It is true-but, that all of us can’t see one thing or another. I, for instance, don’t know whyfor I didn’t spot that my husband was a loafer-insect first time I saw him, but that is my problem, whattodo?”

  Aunty Vijaya, who was supposed to keep an eye on her sister, spent the visits lying in her bed reading Woman’s Era and Filmfare magazines.

  “See this rascal Rakesh Dutt, he leaves his poor wife and runs around with new actresses! No shame,” she would comment, showing me pictures of the offending actor. I was only too happy to sit in the chik-shaded room smelling deliciously of wet khus mats dripping against the cooler, like the first monsoon rain on parched earth.

  Here was quiet and sanity and, best of all, Aunty Vijaya’s stories, not fairy stories but real-true ones. I insisted on knowing every tiny detail. Dates, names and places, smells and sights, each minute brush stroke that makes a picture whole. If my aunt started with, “Once upon a time,” I immediately wanted to know, “When? Exactly when?” Vijaya told my sister and me about the tiny village on the Mangalore coast where her great-great-grandparents had lived, the old house in the centre of undulating green paddy, their ancestral home haunted by a benign female ghost, the cobra castle near a peepul tree behind the house, the temple priests, the tong-tong of bells as the cows wandered home in the hazy dusk.

  Ma commented on the stories Aunty told us. “Stuffing your head with nonsense,” she grumbled. “What a fine imagination she has! Cooking up a whole line of grandmothers and fathers, what a talent, ahaha!”

  Hating my mother for destroying the carefully constructed details that recreated my father’s world, I clung obstinately to their veracity. But Ma insisted that nothing in the world was a fact.

  “The world itself is maya,” she said angrily. “What is there to believe? See that Meera out there in the verandah? Is she really crazy? Who knows? Not even those clever doctor wallahs with big-big books under their armpits. Oh yes, there was an Anjana Akka, Hari Ajja, a snake hole in their back yard. Every house has a snake hole, so what? And how can Vijaya describe Hari Ajja so precisely, did she ever see him? Was there such a thing as a photo so many years ago? Your Aunty is one big liar, that’s all! And you, Kamini, should be doing reading-writing instead of listening to her nonsense.”

  “We belong to the Gokulnatha family,” Aunty Vijaya told Roopa and me. “They were the best priests for miles around. One of our ancestors was even priest to the Maharaja of Mysore.”

  “Rubbish!” said Ma. “They are an unknown, beg-garedly bunch of Brahmins. Priests to the Maharaja of Mysore indeed!”

  Aunty Vijaya’s stories had happy endings and plenty of conversation—almost like watching a play or listening to the BBC. Even her accent was like the BBC announcer’s. Ma said that pretending to be high class was one of Aunty Vijaya’s talents.

  “When Baba-ji got his letter from Mr. James Baldwin, Chief Engineer, B.N.R. Railway, Calcutta,” said Vijaya when I asked, for the third summer in a row, the story of a grandfather I had never seen except in photographs, “his mother—my grandmother—made a huge pot of cashew halwa.”

  “But Vijaya Aunty,” objected Roopa, “the last time you said that she made a pot of jackfruit payasa.”

  I was irritated with my sister for interrupting the story. How did it matter what sweet was made? The story was about how Grandfather left his village and became a big officer in the Railways. Roopa took everything so literally!

  “I couldn’t have said jackfruit payasa,” said Vijaya Aunty with a smile. “My father hated jackfruit, said it smelled like rotting garbage. Now shall we continue with the story? Shankari Atthey’s recipe was the best. She was my great-aunt, a wonderful cook, ask anybody from our village and they will have a recipe of hers in their kitchen even now. She insisted on two whole cups of pure, homemade ghee. Oil gave it a shop taste.”

  “They had never even smelled ghee, all they had in their begging bowls was ganji-bhaath and sometimes a piece of pickle,” said Ma when I asked her about Great-Aunt Shankari. “That Vijaya has a ripe imagination! It is a pity she does not cook food as well as she does stories!”

  “It was expensive for my grandmother, but now her son was in a job with the Birtish-sahibs, that had to be celebrated,” continued Aunty Vijaya. “She fried the cashew, four heaped cups, in two tablespoons of ghee till delicately gold. Whole cashew cost a lot of money, the broken ones that shopkeeper Shetty sold in hundred-gram packets would do. Cashew was cashew after all, once it reached the mouth it got broken into tiny pieces. Two-three-four cups of sugar. Father liked things good and sweet. Maybe one more cup. Who knew what kind of food he would be getting at that Birtish railway place he was going to?”

  At this point I always laughed and said, “Bir-tish?”

  And Aunty Vijaya also smiled. “Yes, she didn’t know how to say it right, she knew only a few words in English—‘No,’ ‘Train,’ ‘Tomato.’ But she made all her children attend the school that taught English, even though people in the village grumbled and said that it was not right for a priest’s children to learn the foreign tongue and maybe foreign ways.”

  “Was it a big village, Aunty Vijaya?”

  “Not very. There were enough families in it to give my grandfather a living. Those days people cared about going to the temple and listening to the priest narrating stories from the epics.”

  “Was it a nice village?”

  “It was beautiful,” said Aunty. “There were many coconut trees and acres of paddy. The sea was on one side and all night long the people of the village could hear the shush-shush of water licking the sands. In the morning the Muslim fishermen floated in their kattamarans on the waves and when the wind was good brought home boatloads of fish. Even they visited the temple, because the deity of the temple had been good to them. Everybody knew how powerful that god was.”

  When I told Ma that I wanted to visit this beautiful village of my ancestors, she laughed. “There is no village any
more, you silly girl. Your aunt is telling you a tourist-magazine story. That village drowned years before she was even born. It is now a puddle of water.”

  I preferred to believe my aunt. It was nicer to imagine a green village with coconut trees as tall as the sky than a dried-up puddle that was once a village.

  “When my father got a job in the Railways,” said Aunty Vijaya, “my grandmother couldn’t contain her pride. Now all the villagers could see how right she was in sending her son to an English school. The villagers knew that to be in the Railways was as good as being in the Delhi government offices. You were a part of the system, the Birtish system, and if you kept your head down and ears open, you could go a long way. What was the use of revolution-shevolution, fighting and killing? Wasn’t it better to first learn the ways of the enemy and then kill them with their own knives? Oh yes, her son was clever, no doubt about it. After all, whose child was he, hanh?”

  The only thing that disappointed me about Vijaya’s stories was that there was no mention of Dadda. My aunt did not remember very much about her brother as a boy.

  “He was much older than me,” was virtually all she would say before veering back to her own father’s exploits. “He never gave our parents any trouble, he was a good child, I believe.”

  I tried to make up my Dadda, build him from things he told me, or from the few things that remained from his childhood. I spent hours examining an oval cardboard box in which my father had saved pictures of cricket stars; they still smelled of talcum powder after forty-five years. And in a square Yardley Lavender Soap tin there were matchbox-sized pictures of Hollywood actresses with crimson cupid’s bow lips, hair waved precisely into even corrugations, eyebrows like thin black rainbows. At the bottom of this pile of cards was a slip of paper with a childish drawing of a bird and a scribble, “My sister Viji is a duck,” along with some sepia photographs. In one, a child, who must have been Dadda, wore a pair of baggy shorts, balanced on his left foot and squinted shyly up at the camera. With his left hand he clutched at the sari of a woman who was visible only from the waist down. To my disappointment, Dadda could not remember when the picture was taken or who the woman might have been. Behind them were lots of coconut trees, perhaps in his home village. But he never talked about the village or any of his relatives. Not even about his father, who had died years ago, before Dadda and Ma got married.