Tamarind Mem Read online

  “Arrey!” remarked Ganesh Peon, leaning forward. “He went up to the General Manager memsahib—you know how she dresses!”

  The servants nodded eagerly. GM memsahib was notorious for her low-cut blouses so tight that they might have been painted on to her skin. For parties she wore sleeveless cholis which allowed everybody else glimpses of her naked, grey underarms.

  “Well,” continued Ganesh, “the drunk sahib went up to her—she was sitting in a corner—and you know how she sits!”

  Again the servants nodded. The GM memsahib crossed her legs when she sat, her sari gaping to reveal plump, well-shaped calves. Other memsahibs adjusted the folds of their saris so that only their feet were visible, but the GM mem had no such modesty.

  “She was sitting with her sari up to her knees and the Number Five Bungalow sahib grabbed her ankle and said, ‘What a fine chicken!’ And then the madman bit her leg!”

  “Hai-Ram!” The servants sent up a collective gasp. I giggled at the thought of a plump leg being bitten, and immediately Linda Ayah turned to catch me. I ran into the house, knowing that Linda would follow, grumbling about missing the many interesting details that could be carved out of the main story, chewed over and commented upon.

  Later in the day, I played with Shabnam, who was allowed out only after three o’clock, when the sun hovered low in the sky.

  “My mother says I will become dark and nobody will marry me,” she explained primly.

  “Then I’ll come to your house and we can play inside,” I suggested, eager to watch Mrs. Bano drifting about the house enveloped in her burkha. All that could be seen of her face were her eyes through a little panel in the veil, and her hands, tipped with bright nail-polish, emerging from the long sleeves.

  “I think she is the Butterfly Begum,” I told Ma, who lay in her darkened bedroom, a damp towel covering her face. She had a headache and had not left the house today. I was pleased, and instead of going out to play, I sat near the window, filling in a colouring book. I didn’t say a word, even when Roopa broke one of my crayons. She had her own crayons but insisted on playing with mine, and if I made a fuss, Ma said that I was not behaving like an older sister. I didn’t ask to be anybody’s older sister, I wanted to say, but Ma might slap me if I did.

  “Ma, do you think she is the Butterfly Queen?” I asked again.

  “Oh Baby, what are you talking about?” murmured Ma fretfully. “Don’t bother me now.”

  “The wife who ran away,” I continued impatiently. I had told Ma the story a million times.

  “Whose wife? Baby, don’t chatter so much, you know Ma is unwell.” Faint irritation tinged her voice. I knew she was beginning to get into a bad mood and I slipped out of the room.

  Ma spent lots of time in bed, seemingly paralysed by the copper shimmer of the sun. Sometimes she said it was the heat that bothered her. At other times, she could not bear the constant roar of traffic outside the colony walls. And if there was nothing else the matter, Ma said that she could not stand the smell of Dadda’s tobacco or the sight of his dirty shoes in the verandah. When Ma had her headache coming on, Roopa and I had to be as quiet as mice. She did not like the sound of chalk on the slate, or the whisper of our slippered feet.

  I knew almost everything about my mother, even that she sometimes fibbed to Dadda about what she did all morning. But when I told her that I heard her fibbing, she pulled me on her lap and said, “My darling Baby knows everything about Ma, hanh? But it’s our secret, okay? Yours and mine? And if you are a good girl and keep the secret, what do you think you will get from me?”

  “A box of crayons?”

  Sometimes Ma gave me only a box of Veera Sweet Mint, and at others I could persuade her to get me dolls and books. There were times, though, when Ma got mad with me and slapped me instead.

  “What cheek!” she would exclaim, her slaps brisk and sharp, stinging my thighs.

  I would wait for Dadda to come home, and cry, “Ma beat me, I didn’t do anything, only asked her not to go out, and she beat me.”

  It always worked. Dadda scolded Ma, his face cold with anger, “Your place is in this house, not out there in the streets doing social work and gossip while my daughters run around like gypsy beggars.”

  I collected these small instances and bided my time. It all depended on how annoyed I was with Ma. Sometimes, it didn’t even matter how many toys Ma got for me. I disliked being left at home with Linda Ayah. She made me eat up all the carrots and peas that I picked out of the food and arranged on the side of the plate, insisting that if I didn’t eat them, the vegetable bhooth would sit on my stomach when I went to sleep. Or she would force me to take a nap along with Roopa so that she could watch both of us without chasing about the house.

  Once when Dadda came home from a trip to Chittaranjan, he asked Ma what she had done all week and she shrugged and said, “I wasn’t well, I slept most of the time.”

  I hated my mother for leaving me with Linda, and for not getting me the paint-box she had promised, so I told Dadda, “Ma is fibbing, she went out in a taxi.”

  For a few days after, Dadda came home at five in the evening only to have a quick shower before driving away to the club, where he stayed till late at night. Sometimes I woke to the sound of his keys in the front door and the low angry murmur of Ma’s voice. Sometimes I thought that the angry voice was Dadda’s, but in my half-sleep I was never sure. Then I felt sorry for having tale-tattled to Dadda. I wished that I was more like Roopa who kept her mouth buttoned up tight, never breathing a word people did not want to hear. I envied my sister’s willingness to listen to everybody and then swallow all that she had heard. It made her seem such a good girl. Even Linda Ayah, with her glasses that saw right into a person’s heart, could find no fault with Roopa. “Why can’t you learn a few things from that sister of yours? Half your size and twice as smart, that child,” she sighed.

  On Saturdays, Ma took both of us for a trip to Simon’s Market to buy provisions and other necessaries for the house. It was also the day she bought us a toy or a trinket. She got a little gift for herself as well, telling us with a naughty twinkle in her eyes, “Don’t tell your Dadda, he will make a face and scold me. He will say don’t waste money.”

  Once she bought herself a pair of long silver earrings with meena-work in blue and magenta and said that she would give them to me on my wedding day. Another time it was eight toe-rings decorated with tiny flowers, fish and peacocks. I never saw her wear any of these ornaments and often wondered why she even bought them.

  Ma and Roopa and I had so many secrets, I was becoming afraid to talk to my father in case a secret slipped out, although at one time I had loved cuddling up on his lap and telling him about school and my friends, and listening to his railway stories.

  “In Aunlajori, where we had to stay for the night,” said Dadda, “the stationmaster warned us that the Railway rest-house was haunted. An English mem had died there, waiting for her husband who had gone boating up the Ganga. In the middle of the night, she started to play the piano.”

  “Then what, Dadda, then what?”

  “Is this man any better than that stupid Linda?” demanded Ma, who only seemed to hear Dadda when she disagreed with his words. “Scaring the child with ghost stories!”

  Simon’s Market consisted of one main road with several narrow alleys branching out haphazardly. Cows blocked the traffic for hours, and dogs scavenged and fought in the piles of garbage outside restaurants. The pavements were occupied by vendors selling everything from American visas to fountain pens that stopped working as soon as you took them home. We walked in the middle of the road with cars and scooters, bicycles and trucks inching their way before and behind us, honking futilely. Shopkeepers sat like greasy maharajas on elevated platforms inside windowless stores and measured out rice and sugar, dal and spices. We always bought our provisions from Theli Ram’s store, a dank, lightless hole of a place with several assistants dashing about in the gloom like rats. Ma found Theli Ram hi
mself disgusting, for he had a habit of scratching vigorously at his sweaty armpit while he repeated her grocery list to the scuttering assistants, but he also had the best groceries in town. Sometimes when we arrived he would be finishing off food from a tiffin-carrier which looked like it had not been washed in years. When he saw us, he swiftly wiped the yellow oil from his fingers on to his fleshy calves and beamed a welcome. He snapped his fingers at his assistants, the movement making his loose, pouchy breasts quiver, his belly jiggle up and down, and yelled, “Railway Memsahib’s order, phata-phat!” He always reminded me of the wooden dolls you could get at Waltair station—squat, round things that you tapped on the head to set off a chain of dancing motions.

  Behind the grocer’s lane ran Sabzi-wali Gully which had nothing but vegetables—glistening purple aubergines, polished tomatoes, plump gourds, piles of tender beans that snapped crisply when Ma tested them for freshness.

  “Come on, sister,” called the vendors. “Fresh-fresh, straight from the fields, and for you, a special early-morning rate. Bauni rate!”

  If Ma did not buy, their tone would change, they would sulk and mutter, “Squeeze all our vegetables to death. They are for buying, not for touching only! She wants us to give it to her for free!”

  Another lane was thick with the stink of ripened fruit. Here flies and sticky black mango insects buzzed and hung like a miasma over the baskets and pyramids of fruit. If you did not watch your step, you could slip on banana slime or step into a pile of rotting papaya. My mother bought oranges here, carefully picking out the ones with big-pored peels because they would be the juiciest. She usually wanted the ones at the bottom of the pyramid and the vendor would glare at her, reluctantly dismantling the tower of fruit.

  I hated the fruit-and-vegetable lanes but dared not grumble because then Ma, already puffing and irritated by the dust and noise, might refuse to take us to Gadhbadh-Jhaala. This tiny street was an Aladdin’s cave of glittering jewellery, shiny ribbons, beads and baubles.

  “Ma, pleaseplease, I want this and this and this,” I begged, gathering up handfuls of stringed beads, tinkling bangles. I darted in and out among the clusters of burkha-clad women who filled the market, drifting like shoals of dark fish, haggling with the shopkeepers. I could see nothing of them but brightly slippered feet flashing in and out of their heavy robes, ringed hands and the gleam of eyes. They moved slowly through the sunny lane, squatting before baskets heaped with Anarkali necklaces, Hyderabad earrings, Sholapuri bangles, nose-pins and hair-clips, their fingers sifting through the shimmering piles. I stood as close to these hidden women as possible, trying hard to get a glimpse of their faces, ignoring the pungent smell of sweat oozing through coats of talcum powder which filled my nostrils. Once I watched a tall woman in sequinned slippers drape a necklace over the black cloth of her burkha and turn coquettishly this way and that before a tiny mirror on the wall of the shop. She must have seen herself without the confining robes, and I too wondered how the ornament would look against her skin. Ma never understood this odd fascination.

  “They look like anyone else, those women,” she said, dragging Roopa and me from stall to stall, urging me to decide on a trinket or ribbon quickly and we might have time for an ice cream before we went home.

  That summer, after Basheer told me the story of the Thithali Queen, I lost interest in the Saturday trips to the market. I liked to think that Shabnam’s mother, Mrs. Bano, was the mysterious queen, and I spent my entire day following her, watched avidly as she climbed into her car, noting, when the robes lifted a bit, the colourful frill of a petticoat or the drift of a sari edge. I wanted to see Mrs. Bano’s face. Behind her veil, was she frowning, smiling, crying? I hung about their house till I heard Linda Ayah’s voice calling, “Baby-missy, arrey, where has the monkey disappeared? Baby-missy, aren’t you going to eat anything today?”

  Shabnam and I tussled constantly about where we should play each morning because she preferred my house to her own.

  “I don’t want to play in my house,” said Shabnam. “My mother will make us sit inside and draw pictures.” She made a face and whispered, “She said that she would beat me if she caught me in the sun.”

  It was strange watching Shabnam in her own home, for over there she was sedate and soft-voiced, playing with her collection of plump, pallid dolls and pinching her sisters into silence if they cried for one of her toys. In my house she became quite reckless, climbing right up to the top of the tamarind tree, careless of tears in her billowing bloomers, while I, amazed at her daring, yelled from below, “Shame-shame puppy-shame, naked bottoms is your name!”

  “Why does your mother wear purdah?” I asked Shabnam.

  She shrugged and said, “I don’t know, maybe because my father told her to.”

  “But why only her, why not you?”

  “Ammi says that I will get my purdah when I become a big girl.”

  “Have you seen your mother’s face?”

  “Of course I have,” said Shabnam.

  “Is she pretty?”

  “She is the most beautiful person in the whole world.”

  When I told my mother about this conversation, Ma got thoroughly annoyed. “Why you poke your nose here and there?” she asked. “Haven’t I taught you any manners? Mrs. Bano, Mrs. Bano! Nonsense!”

  I did not tell her about Mrs. Bano again. It never occurred to me that if I just asked Mrs. Bano to show her face, she would very likely have done so. Or perhaps I wanted the thrill of not knowing, of never being quite sure who Mrs. Bano was. The magic of Basheer’s story sustained me through those sun-charged summer days. So long as I had the story, I could ignore the tight lines of anger and frustration building within our own house. In Shabnam’s home I could forget Ma’s puffy face, her rages swirling up like a cyclonic storm. There was space for stories to blossom, for my imagination to wander. In my friend’s home I would ask to go to the toilet and on this pretext snoop around, peering into silent rooms, hoping to see Mrs. Bano. If anyone asked me what I was doing, I could put on an innocent face and say, “I was looking for the bathroom.”

  Nobody ever caught me, and once I even went so far as to examine the contents of Mrs. Bano’s dressing table. The top was absolutely bare except for a set of combs and a small pot of kohl. The drawers had piles of handkerchiefs and two bottles of attar that belonged to Mr. Bano, who always smelled like a bouquet of flowers. The large cupboard yielded more. In it, row upon row, hung brilliantly hued saris and salwar-kameez sets, each with its matching petticoat, blouse or dupatta. I was exhilarated, almost as if I had gotten to know Mrs. Bano a little more intimately. From that moment my imagination built on those exotic clothes. Mrs. Bano was as beautiful as her daughter claimed. She must be very rich, too, to have so many glorious clothes. Ma had only four silk saris which she wore on special occasions. Mrs. Bano was a magical queen who threw off her drab purdah at midnight and twirled about the house like a Kathak dancer, her arms weaving delicately, her feet tapping out the drummer’s beat, her gauze skirts floating about her body like mist.

  “Ma, do you think she knows Kathak dancing?” I asked.

  “Who are you talking about, crazy child?” asked Ma. “Have you been poking around in Shabnam’s house again? What is the matter with you? Do you want a couple of slaps, hanh?”

  I decided that Mrs. Bano’s consort was not her perfumed husband but a mysterious figure who hovered on the periphery of imagination. All my fantasies turned poor Mr. Bano into a villain who kept his wife prisoner, forcing her to wear black instead of her shimmering silks. Anything she said acquired a special significance. If she admired a frock I was wearing it was because she was filled with a heavy longing to get out of her burkha. When she asked me what my favourite colour was, it was because she yearned for the bright satins she was not allowed to wear.

  Then, out of the blue, my myth was shattered. Mrs. Bano was expecting a baby. She was no different from Ma, who had ballooned for months before giving birth to Roopa. I heard drifts o
f conversation that lent different overtones to Mrs. Bano’s shrouded life.

  “She seems desperate, three girls in a row, and now another child on the way,” said Linda Ayah to the washerwoman.

  “She is not desperate,” said the washerwoman with a loud sniff, banging the clothes on the stone platform a bit harder. “It’s her miyan. He wants a son.”

  “Son, son, son,” grumbled Linda, spitting a stream of betel juice straight into a bed of spinach.

  “I’ll tell Ma that you are spitting in our plants,” I said, wagging a finger at her.

  Linda ignored me and continued, “All these men are the same. If I didn’t have my Matthew the first time itself, you think that drunken bastard I married would have left me alone?”

  “May all the men in this world go to jahannum” said the washerwoman cheerfully. “But you know, Bano Memsahib is too old for another child. I might be illiterate yet even I know that.”

  “And she has a bilad-pressure problem,” added Linda nodding her head and sending out another stream of red juice, at the tomatoes this time.

  “Linda, I will most definitely tell Ma,” I said loudly.

  “Yes, yes, tell her, let’s see what will happen,” laughed Linda.

  Although Shabnam was my best friend on Sundays and in the evenings, at school I preferred Devaki. We sat next to each other and whispered through Sister Julia’s history class. If I broke my pencil lead, Devaki sharpened it for me, and I did the same for her. But at three in the afternoon, from the minute the home-bell rang, we went our different ways. I could never invite Devaki to my birthday parties and she would not invite me to hers because her father worked in the workshop and mine was an officer. Roopa and I played with the workshop people’s children at school, but the friendship stopped at the doors. Worse than playing with workshop children, however, was playing with the snot-nosed brats from the servants’ quarters.