Anita and Me (23 page)

When I finally dragged myself up the stairs after the last visitor had gone, I found Nanima sleeping in my double bed, curled up in my quilt like a cocoon. As I stood there, shivering
in my nightie, mama entered quietly with Sunil sleeping in her arms. She carefully placed him in his cot at the foot of the bed, a mere gesture as he would be up in a few hours time, ready for the transfer to her bosom, and led me to the far side of my bed, motioning me to climb in. Sensing my resistence, she whispered, ‘There is nowhere else for Nanima to sleep. And anyway, you are so lucky. She has the warmest tummy in the world. Get in. And don’t fidget or you will wake her.’

I sidled in beside Nanima, pulling in as much quilt as I dared which barely covered my ankles and knees. She was snoring gently and breathed in huge deep sighs which seemed to swell her body to twice its size, her large stomach looked like a slowly rising loaf of bread which quickly deflated with every exhalation. Then quite suddenly she let out an enormous rasping fart which seemed to go on forever and shook the quilt around her, making me collapse into a fit of giggles which I had to stifle into my pillow. Then she heaved herself fully around so that she was facing me and dragged me under her arm where it smelt yeasty and safe, tucking the quilt around me expertly, imprisoning my freezing feet in between her soft fleshy knees. Then she opened one eye briefly and said, ‘Junglee!’ before dropping off to sleep.

At some point in the night I had a strange dream; Sunil was crying, nothing new in that, and I heard mama’s footsteps pad into the room. Then there were two voices, mama’s and Nanima’s which reminded me of the wood pigeons who would coo to each other under the eaves each morning. Then Sunil began crying again, for some reason he was still in the room; and then I heard a song, or rather I felt it, a lilting lullaby in a minor key which made me think of splashing stone fountains in shadowed courtyards and peacocks ululating on tiled flat rooftops, sunlight glinting off the deep blue feathers encircling their necks. And then I saw, although my eyes were closed, I saw Nanima rocking Sunil in her arms, quite violently I thought, and rise slowly into the air and circle the room, her pyjama bottoms flapping like Hermes’ wings at her ankles,
whilst he laughed with delight and tried to catch the sparks fizzing from her fingertips. When I woke up the next morning, I found myself looking into a pair of muddy doggy eyes. Sunil was lying across Nanima’s breast, sucking his thumb contentedly whilst she snored on, oblivious. From that day on, Sunil slept in his own cot, sometimes for eight hours at a stretch, and only a few days later, sat on papa’s lap for the first time ever to eat his breakfast.

Since Nanima’s arrival, we had fallen into a comfortable routine. The house would be warm and delicious smelling when we opened the front door and nothing would be where we left it the previous morning. Pots and pans would be stacked neatly in the larder, cushions from the settee would be arranged in symmetrical piles at the foot of the stairs, my magazines would be behind the television and papa’s shaving things would have somehow found their way into the bicycle shed. Although Nanima wanted to be useful, she had no idea where to put things once she had used them or picked them up to clean round, so she figured as long as they were in a tidy pile, she had done her bit. Mama had explained apologetically, ‘She’s always busy back home you see, there she has a place, a role. Don’t ever make her feel she has done anything wrong.’ But I admired this mad logic, and actually looked forward to the chaotic treasure hunt for our possessions on our return.

The rest of the evening would be devoted to a new activity called Entertaining Sunil. Since that first night when Nanima had applied some ancient witchery to finally cut the umbilical cord that was slowly strangling both him and us, Sunil was now anybody’s, especially mine. Although he was not yet crawling, every time I entered the room he would hold out his chubby hands towards me, demanding to be picked up and played with. His eyes followed me upstairs, outside, I would even occasionally glance up from the TV screen to find him
sitting next to my head as if on guard, waiting for my next command. I was not used to this, these demands on my time which I would rather have spent daydreaming on my bed or doing yet another
Jackie
quiz on How To Make Him Notice You Without Even Trying! It was a good job I was a social reject and did not have a boyfriend to whisk me off Down The Mingo, because every waking moment it seemed was taken up with my baby brother.

I found myself doing jobs I had run away from just a few weeks earlier, mashing up boiled vegetables into a runny goo for Sunil’s meals, boiling water for his bottles and nappies, even carrying his incredibly stinky nappies out to the bicycle shed, albeit at arm’s length, where they would solidify in a plastic bucket until mama spent a day boiling them clean, filling the whole house with clouds of citrusy steam. When I sat him on my lap after Nanima had given him a massage in warm olive oil, naked and slippery as a fish, feeling his legs bump against my knees and his tin pot dictator belly taut against my hands, I could not imagine how I ever resented him, could not even remember why. I decided that either I must be getting soft in my old age, or that Nanima was indeed some kind of sorcerer.

Most of all I enjoyed her stories, usually told by the light of the flickering TV screen when the last plate had been wiped and put away and papa was absorbed in one of his favourite programmes,
The Prisoner
or
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
By now he had become an expert in stereo-speak, translating Nanima’s words before they had barely left her mouth without even having to turn round. Nanima’s stories never followed any pattern, and mostly she would come out with anecdotes sparked off by something on the television, to which she was heavily addicted. ‘Go To Work On An Egg!’ sang the advert, and Nanima would tell us of how some passing British soldiers once took away all the family’s chickens claiming they needed the eggs to sustain them during a long march to visit the Rajah of Patiala. ‘But the
way those chickens fought and shat, they knew they were going to be eaten …’

Once, during an episode of
Randall and Hopkirk Deceased
, when Hopkirk, a friendly ghost, appeared at his living friend’s side to offer him some tasty clues on an ongoing murder hunt, Nanima chipped in with ‘My grandmother’s ghost lives at the top of our house in the village. I’ve never seen her, I only hear her walking around, carrying the son I had who died at birth. Only one person has seen her, my sister’s husband, and he has turned out to be a madman anyway …’ She even claimed that Peter Wyngarde, the Mexican moustachioed TV detective with a natty line in flowered cravats, was the spitting image of my grandfather’s brother, who tried to flee with the family assets whilst my nana (her husband), was lying supposedly on his death bed, following a terrible accident in one of his fleet of village trucks. ‘No one thought your nana would survive, his leg was so badly crushed. But the doctor-saab replaced the bone with a goat’s bone, cut him open after feeding your nanaji a whole bottle of whisky. You could hear his cries from the other side of the village. And just a few months later, the British came to put him in prison because he would not fight in their army. He was still limping when they took him away. I did not know he was alive for four years, until he limped back into our courtyard and I fell down in a faint.’

At first, these remembrances seemed so far fetched, so far removed from anything I recognised as reality, I wondered whether papa was having a joke at my expense and embroidering the translation when he got bored. This was compounded by my mother’s reaction to some of Nanima’s monologues, ‘I never knew that, mama!…When did that happen?…Why didn’t you tell me?’ I was beginning to realise that everyone’s mothers had secrets and kept them particularly from their daughters. I wondered if I would have to wait until I was a mother before mama would tell me some of hers. But gradually I got used to Nanima’s world, a world
made up of old and bitter family feuds in which the Land was revered and jealously guarded like a god, in which supernatural and epic events, murder, betrayal, disappearances and premonitions seemed commonplace, in which fabulous wealth and dramatic ritual was continually upstaged by marching armies and independence riots. They all put mama’s rickshaw story and papa’s unexploded bomb tale into some kind of context for me; my parents’ near brushes with death were not one-off happenings, they were simply two more incidents in a country that seemed full to bursting with excitement, drama and passion, history in the making, and for the first time I desperately wanted to visit India and claim some of this magic as mine.

It was all falling into place now, why I felt this continual compulsion to fabricate, this ever-present desire to be someone else in some other place far from Tollington. Before Nanima arrived, this urge to reinvent myself, I could now see, was driven purely by shame, the shame I felt when we ‘did’ India at school, and would leaf through tatty textbooks where the map of the world was an expanse of pink, where erect Victorian soldiers posed in grainy photographs, their feet astride flattened tigers, whilst men who looked like any one of my uncles, remained in the background holding trays or bending under the weight of impossible bundles, their posture servile, their eyes glowing like coals. There would be more photographs of teeming unruly mobs, howling like animals for the blood of the brave besieged British, the Black Hole of Calcutta was a popular image, angelic women and children choking on their own fear whilst yet more of my uncles and aunties in period clothes danced an evil jig of victory outside.

Then there were the ‘modern’ images, culled from newspaper and television clips, where hollow-eyed skeletons, barely recognisable as human beings, squatted listlessly around dry river beds, and machete-wielding thugs tore into each other in messy city streets, under the benevolent gaze of a statue of Queen Victoria. I always came bottom in history; I
did not want to be taught what a mess my relatives had made of India since the British had left them (their fault of course, nothing to do with me), and longed to ask them why, after so many years of hating the ‘goras’, had they packed up their cases and followed them back here.

That question was answered unexpectedly by mama one evening following an especially juicy Nanima anecdote involving two brothers, both the brightest in their district but poor with it. Their parents could raise only enough bribe money to secure a place at the district university for one of them. The successful brother went on to study law and became heavily involved in the Quit India Movement, the other brother disappeared without trace. Then one rainy monsoon night (these things always happened during the monsoon apparently), the lawyer, who was on his way to a meeting with Nehru-saab himself, was held up by a gang of
dacoits
and in the ensuing
tamasha
received a fatal
golee
to the heart. (My Punjabi vocabulary was expanding rapidly by now,
tamasha
, meaning ‘fracas’, made sense, the word sounded like a flurry of activity, but I still had not figured out why the word for ‘tablet’ and ‘bullet’ was the same.)

As the lawyer fell to the ground dying, there was a yelp of anguish from one of the masked bandits, who ran to the victim to cradle his head in his lap, crying and begging his brother for forgiveness. Shortly afterwards, the bad blood brother was found swinging from a neem tree, ‘too full of shame and remorse to continue his life …’ Nanima sat back with a satisfied grunt and helped herself to another doorstep slab of angel cake.

Mama shook her head sadly, ‘You see Meena, what happens when someone is deprived of education? At least in this country, you can get to the top university without having to pay a thousand greedy officials to get there. That’s why we had to leave, we were poor and clever, a bad combination in India.’

‘But mama, you’re too old to get to university now,’ I said, unthinkingly, walking straight into it.

‘Not for us, for you, silly! You and Sunil! Of course, if Britain had not left us in such a damn big mess, it would be a different story…but it’s all kismet, hey mamaji?’

Nanima burped wisely, she really could do that, and I felt suddenly depressed. I knew exactly what mama was getting at; next year would be the dreaded eleven-plus, the national entrance exam which for us Tollington children, would decide whether we got to attend the posh girls’ grammar school twenty miles away, or the spanking new comprehensive in the next town. Up until now, the eleven-plus had been a sort of swear word bandied about by various teachers when they were faced with yet another display of incompetence, like the time we were discussing
Othello
and Mr Williams had asked where the Moors came from, and I had put up my hand and answered confidently, ‘Yorkshire, sir!’

‘Woe betide you, girl, if you think this standard of rubbish is going to get you your eleven-plus!’

But now those two words took on an ominous significance; this was no longer a mere exam. If I failed, my parents’ five thousand mile journey would have all been for nothing. It was not even summer, and I was already dreading next year. And then I thought about Anita; failure also meant that I would be going to the same school as her, every day for the next seven years. A few months ago, the thought of having her all to myself like this would have made me so happy. And now, it worried me and I could not work out why.

When mama, Sunil and I rushed into our front room having just completed our last schoolday before Easter, drunk with freedom as we now had three weeks of holidays stretching before us which we would share with Nanima, we did not expect to find the house empty. There were the tell-tale signs that Nanima had been there recently, a saucepan of shelled peas on top of the wooden cabinet holding our ancient record player, layers of neatly-folded clothes on the dining table, but the kitchen was bare and unloved, and the back door leading to our small cobbled yard was wide open. ‘Mama! Mataji!’
mama called, dumping Sunil into my arms as she rushed outside, panic constricting her throat. She yanked open the back gate and shouted down the entry, her voice reverberating off the tall damp walls which, even in the spring afternoon haze, were gloomy and secretive. ‘Mama!
Tusi Kithe ho?
’ she called.