Tamarind Mem Read online

  In all the photographs I had seen of him, Dadda’s father looked like an English gentleman with a neat moustache, a solar hat, a jacket and a crisply pleated dhothi. There was another photograph in the box which must have been taken before my grandfather joined the Railways and came to Delhi, before he changed his name from Gokulnatha to Moorthy and turned from a priest’s son into an employee of the British. In this picture there was a row of thin men in turbans—the fancy ones with gold borders. My grandfather was the tall, thin youth without a turban, right at the end of the line. He had a Brahmin’s shaven head with a traditional juttu of uncut hair at the back. When he moved to Delhi, he shaved it off. Then, terrified that the gods would curse him for such a sacrilegious deed, he offered twenty rupees’ worth of coconuts to the Krishna temple, and for five years after that, donated a pair of silver lamps as well. When his first son, my Dadda, was born, he stopped his offerings to the gods, convinced that he had been forgiven for the loss of his Brahmin juttu.

  Aunty Vijaya did not remember if her father was married when the English-man picture was taken, or if Dadda, the oldest child, was born. All she had to say about the photograph was that Dadda exactly resembled their father.

  “Same forehead, same eyes, can you see the similarity?” she asked, tracing a finger over the yellowing face in the photo. I couldn’t see much of a resemblance. Of course, Dadda had a different haircut, and wore more modern clothes. He sat in the big red Burma-teak chair and smoked pipes. This was how I would always remember my father, I told Aunty Vijaya, and she remarked that memories were never the same.

  “They are pictures we create in our hearts, you see,” explained my aunt. “And each of us uses different sticks of chalk to colour them. I remember your father as a young man who came home for the holidays from college, and how much our mother waited for him to return and how she always said in a mournful voice, ‘Oh Vishwa, you look so much like your father, and now all his burdens have moved to your shoulders.’ We, the daughters, were burdens—only your father was worth loving.”

  Aunty Vijaya accepted everything that was handed out, expecting that her husband or her brother would take care of her always. In return, she gave Roopa and me her own memories, romantic and gently coloured, devoid of unpleasantness.

  “I come from a line of Brahmins,” I thought proudly, “poor in worldly goods but rich in knowledge.”

  I never told Ma or Roopa. They would laugh at me, I was certain of that. Especially Ma.

  “For all their learning they were a pack of incompetents,” Ma would say, “and unhealthy to boot. They were rotten inside—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, even their blood was rotten.”

  Ma came from healthy stock. Her parents were still alive and her grandparents had died only a few years ago, Putti Ajji at a ripe eighty-seven and her husband at a hundred and two.

  “We didn’t spend our wealth smoking bidis and eating oily food in restaurants. Restaurants! What is wrong with home food, I ask you? Simple, no cutlet-mutlet and fried gobi every day.”

  Ma cursed all of Dadda’s sahib ways. She told him that he should remember he was the ordinary son of an ordinary priest from a village in Udipi and not some pink angrez big shot.

  “I am a big shot,” snapped Dadda. “You wouldn’t be living in this fine house with all these servants if I wasn’t. Don’t forget that.”

  When I asked her if she remembered this incident or that, Roopa said, “Let the past sleep. Why should you poke here and there looking for memories? After you find them, and dust off all the cobwebs, you see that they are ugly and sad. I prefer living in today not in flashback, baba!”

  Roopa did not allow stories to invade her life, turn the world into a kaleidoscope with believing and not believing, true and untrue. She was completely happy with her husband Vikram who adored her for her round, tight body and flat mind. He asked her questions, testing the flatness of that mind, delighted that it held none of the wild fears that filled his. She offered him a warm harbour, a lush cove where he could drop anchor and find refuge from the nightmares that haunted him of technology triggering a holocaust which destroyed the planet and left us all floating in starlit space.

  Roopa claimed not to remember the times that Ma had faded away from us. “She was always there, large as life and twice as noisy, too much noisy and nosy if you ask me! Why you are not studying, why you are doing this, why that? My goodness, like a mosquito in my head she was.”

  “Rubbish!” I said. “She left you alone, it was always me she concentrated on! You never remember things the way they were, just the way you want them to be.”

  “And you of course have a memory as precise as the part in your hair,” laughed Roopa.

  She thought that I was crazy to live in the past like this. “Come and stay with me for a while,” she urged. “Come here before you go totally loony.”

  “Don’t be silly, I am not going loony,” I insisted. “It’s just nostalgia really. Something to do when I am not working on stupid lab experiments.”

  “You are looking over your shoulder at ghosts, Kamini. Remember Linda Ayah’s story about the fellow who did that?”

  Yes, I did. He was dragged away into the nothing world of shadows. Linda Ayah had told us longlong ago that everybody had ghosts trailing behind. The problem started when you looked over your shoulder at them. Memories were like ghosts, shivery, uncertain, nothing guaranteed, totally not-for-sure.

  And Ma’s reply, “Why only memory? Nothing in the world is for certain.”

  I was sure that if I had hair so long that it swept the ground, nobody would notice the length of my nose, about which my aunts teased me every time we visited my grandmother’s home. “Pinocchio,” they said. “We know who’s been telling stories.” Or they would give it a sharp tweak and say, “Better grow to fit your nose, or we will have trouble finding a groom for you!”

  I would loop my tresses up into intricate swirls with silver ornaments buried in the darkness—a swan with a long neck, a lotus, stars, moons and suns—like the ones adorning the hair of Princess Draupadi in the brightly coloured picture books Dadda brought from Delhi station. Ma said that my hair was too thin right now, but perhaps if she washed it often enough with shikakai, it would turn thick and luxuriant.

  “You didn’t get these strands of grass from my side of the family for sure,” she said one Sunday, vigorously rubbing castor oil into my scalp. A friend had advised Ma that castor oil was better than coconut oil. And what was left over from applying to the hair could be drunk to cleanse out the bowels. “Dual-purpose oil, Mrs. Moorthy,” she told my mother. “Inside and outside it will clean and shine.”

  I imagined my intestines glistening like polished silver after a dose of the thick, evil-smelling oil and told Ma that I would never-ever talk to her again if she made me drink it.

  Ma laughed and said, “Now stop going baka-baka and sit there quietly till I finish getting your sister ready for a bath.”

  She pushed me towards the warm dry corner of the bathroom where Linda Ayah waited to massage my arms and calves.

  “I don’t want to be a Mr. India muscleman weightlifter, Linda,” I protested, squealing as she pulled and stretched my limbs.

  “Ohho, missy,” snorted Linda, “a woman needs all the strength she can find to carry manymany weights in her life. If you don’t have the strength to look after yourself, who will?”

  I suffered Linda’s hard hands till Ma was done oiling Roopa and both of us had to get into the ancient porcelain bath-tub which filled half the room, where Ma would wash our hair with the shikakai powder.

  “I don’t want a head bath!” yelled Roopa as Ma whipped her petticoat over her head and Linda Ayah stripped off my bloomers and we both stood naked and helpless, shimmering with oil.

  Linda Ayah pulled her sari up between her thighs and tucked it into her waist at the back like a fishwife, her skinny legs smooth as mosquito net poles. Roopa and I had watched Linda on her free afternoons, sitting outside her quarters,
pinching all the hair off her legs. She dipped her fingers into a bowl of cold ash, gripped the tiny hairs and ripped them out one by one.

  “Oh-oh! Oh-oh!” we howled each time her fingers jerked, irritating her intensely.

  “My skin is like a crocodile’s, too ancient to feel anything,” she said. “So whyfor you are screaming like a pair of hyenas, henh?” Then she wagged her finger warningly and said that Roopa and I were not to try it on ourselves. “All that is not for baby-dew skin. Later, when you are older and troubles have given you thick hides, then you can pinch it back to life!”

  Much better, Ayah said, to use a paste of besan and sandal and milk, helping Ma to apply the fragrant, faintly abrasive mixture on our arms and legs, our backs and stomachs. Then came the shikakai for our hair, a dreadful green fire that singed our eyes and nostrils, making us scream and curse Ma. Even if I squeezed my eyes tight as Bournvita tin lids, the sour burning pierced my eyeballs, my ears, filled my mouth with its bitter taste.

  “No need for shampoo-tampoo,” said Ma, working the shikakai into a lather while Linda Ayah, damp and spattered, poured mug after mug of steaming water.

  “Ma, I am burning!” I wailed, thrashing and sliding in the oily tub.

  Ma slapped my buttock. “Stop that, you silly girl, you’ll slip and break your head. Don’t you want nice thick hair?”

  “Nonono!” I howled, and Roopa, her eyesmouthnose pursed tight against the onslaught of shikakai, skidded blindly against me, trying to escape while I had Ma’s attention.

  “If you behave like a monster, your hair will fall off,” threatened Ma, her relentless hand shooting out to grab Roopa, and whoosh, Linda Ayah emptied a bucket of blessed water on my head, wrapped a towel around me, and before I knew it I was out of the bathroom, the shikakai fading into a memory.

  And as Linda Ayah towelled me dry, ran a gentle comb through the wild snarls and knots, she murmured, “Nothing in this life comes easily, child, you want long hair, you have to weep a little for it.”

  The shikakai did not work, nor did the carrot juice which I thought was how piss must taste, and neither did castor oil, almond extract or olive oil. My hair never grew beyond my shoulders. Ma would not let me grow it any longer because she said it looked like a rat’s tail. So when Basheer the barber arrived to cut my father’s hair, he was ordered to trim mine and Roopa’s as well.

  Basheer arrived every third Sunday at seven o’clock in the morning. On those days, the back yard of our house was the scene of great activity. A chair was placed in the shade of the rain tree, a sheet draped over the back and a mug of water on the ground beside it. Basheer bustled in, right on time, trim in a spotless white chooridar and fitted Nehru jacket. My father was first. Basheer snapped open the sheet, draped it across Dadda’s shoulders with a flourish. Then, with a flick of the wrists, he anointed Dadda’s head with water, tilting it forward just so, and started to trim. Clickety-click went the scissors, and over it, the barber’s voice speaking a rich blend of Hindi and Urdu. Basheer told us stories of the princely family who had once ruled Ratnapura.

  The conversation usually started with Dadda asking, “So Basheer, how are you these days?”

  The barber nodded his head slowly and said, “Getting along. But times have changed since Nawab Sahib, changed a lot.”

  “Nawab Sahib?” prompted Dadda, setting off Basheer.

  “Such a life! We were lucky to have lived such a life,” sighed Basheer. “We were only servants, but my grandmother served kheer in silver bowls! Nothing like the bowls of gold decorated with Japani pearls used in the Nawab’s kitchens, oh nono! Although there were some people in the Nawab’s court who lived better than his highness. Lots of crookedness went on! More often than not, the poor Nawab did not know what was happening behind the silk curtains of his own bedroom!”

  Basheer transported us into a world of riches and romance, of dark eyes peeping through slatted bamboo screens and vast durbar halls adorned with chandeliers, of dancing girls pirouetting in swirling skirts and sly intrigues within palace walls. His grandfather was the royal barber, which explained his own intimacy with the happenings in the Mor Mahal. One Sunday he told me the tale of Begum Haseena, the youngest of the Nawab’s harem.

  “She was more beautiful than a thousand jewels,” said Basheer, tilting my head so that he could trim a little bit of hair on the side of my face.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Arrey Baby-missy, it wasn’t just I who knew, the whole world had heard about the begum whose face shone like the moon. Now don’t move your head this way and that, I will cut off too much hair and then you will have a boy-cut,” said Basheer.

  “Oh, can you do boy-cuts?” If I couldn’t have really long hair, I would keep it as short as my father’s. “Can you cut my hair really short, hanh? Hanh?”

  “Baap-re-baap this child chatters more than a pack of monkeys!” exclaimed Basheer. “Baby-missy, if I cut your hair short, your mother will chop off my head.”

  I giggled, and didn’t tell Basheer that Ma probably wouldn’t even notice if he shaved me bald. Since we’d moved to Ratnapura she seemed to have stopped caring about anything. She often lay in her room with a headache and Linda Ayah was ordered to make sure that we did not get into any mischief. On some days, she dressed up in a starched cotton sari and called for a taxi to take her out on an unknown errand. I hated these outings and always made a fuss.

  “Now you be a good girl,” Ma would say, gently pulling away from my clinging arms.

  “Where are you going? Take me with you.” I didn’t want to be left alone in this great big house with only Roopa and Linda Ayah for company.

  Now, sitting in the shade of the rain tree, I said imperiously to Basheer, “Cut my hair short-short. Ma won’t say a thing.”

  “But Baby-missy, don’t you want to look as beautiful as Begum Haseena?” asked Basheer.

  Instantly, all thought of looking like a boy flew from my head. “What happened to her, Basheer?”

  “The other queens were so jealous that they kept trying to hurt her. Oh! I cannot even describe the awful things those jealous queens tried.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “So the Nawab had a maze built into the palace and the queens lived in separate apartments within the maze. This way they never met each other, the five begums, each with the temperament of a tigress, and the Nawab could visit his beloved Haseena without creating a typhoon of envy in the zenana.”

  Basheer sank into a little silence, his scissors stilled, his hand resting on the top of my head. I jiggled impatiently in the chair. “Then what happened, Basheer? Why have you gone to sleep?”

  “Arrey, what a child! Can’t an old man stop a moment to swallow some spit?” After a minute or two he continued, “Everybody knew that Begum Haseena was a milkman’s daughter and the Nawab had met her in a little village outside the city. Rumour had it that she had been chasing a butterfly when the Nawab came upon her and ever since he had called her his thithali. But so possessive of her was he that she was allowed none of the finery the other queens had.”

  “Not even a pair of earrings? And bangles, what about bangles?”

  “Nothing, not even a pretty dress,” said Basheer, his scissors clicking away, creating a fine black dust of hair that danced in the sunlight before drifting down. “The Nawab Sahib was afraid that the evil eye might touch her, you see. He also insisted on her wearing heavy black robes, even in the privacy of her apartment, so that nobody would see her beauty but him. Poor butterfly, she languished in the labyrinth, yearning for the bright fields of her childhood, the gay mirrored skirts of a milkmaid, for the colour and light denied her. Then one day she disappeared. No one knew how she escaped the maze. Perhaps she turned into a butterfly and flitted out of the window.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Ah Baby-missy, if I knew I would tell you, but I don’t. It is believed that she still roams the streets of this city disguised as an ordinary person. She
wears a veil, I have heard.”

  “But she must be very old, so nobody will be able to recognize her anyway.”

  “No, no, such beauty never grows old, she is still young and glorious as a star, the poor Thithali Rani,” corrected Basheer.

  I wanted desperately to believe in the charmed world he had conjured up, so different from mine of cold silences, angry voices in my parents’ room and Dadda’s long absences. And yet, I had to risk being disappointed, to ask, “Basheer, this story isn’t true, is it?”

  “Baby-missy,” replied the barber solemnly, “it is as true as the hairs on my head!”

  Here, in this quiet part of the town, where life moved slow as garden snails, Basheer’s stories added colour to a boring summer. Roopa was a silly baby who didn’t know how to play anything, Ma’s strangeness frightened me, and I was tired of Linda Ayah’s vigilance. It was like having a scrawny shadow dogging my footsteps. Sometimes I managed to give the old spectacle-face the slip. The corner in the dining room between the sideboard and the curving wall was my favourite hiding place. At that point, the windows that swept around half the room began their journey, and Ma, obsessed with privacy in this shameless house with its gaping apertures, had covered them with heavy green curtains. I was a ruffle in the drape, safely concealed from Linda Ayah’s sharp gaze.

  “Kamini baby!” she called, irritated. “I will tell your Ma, teasing Ayah all the time. Naughty, badmaash girl!”

  I peeped out and glimpsed Linda shuffling into the verandah, Roopa slung over her hip, mumbling and cursing. Ayah was angry mostly because she wanted to be out in the back verandah with the other servants, slapping khaini and gossiping about the sahib in Bungalow Five. How much he drank, no control at all! His wife, it was rumoured, was so fed up that she was leaving for her mother’s house. Especially after the party at the club, the day before yesterday, where the sahib had behaved like a perfect fool.