Tamarind Mem (15 page)

Except to give Ganesh Peon instructions for the day’s meals, Ma refused to speak a word for a longlong time after Paul da Costa died. It was as if a terrible-horrible silence had settled over her like a shroud. I wished that I had obeyed Linda Ayah and shut up about the mechanic. But I could not stop the words from tumbling out, I could not keep quiet.

“Ma!” I screamed. “I was the one who recognized the mechanic even though he was all funny colours! His tongue was hanging out like the goddess Kali’s!” I imitated the dead man’s swollen face, mimed a limp body and swayed grotesquely. “He smelled like a rat.”

Linda tried to shush me. “Memsahib, you don’t listen to this stupid child. I’ll first take her for a bath and then tell you everything.”

I missed Ma’s voice, her snippy comments, and tried to coax her back to her normal state. I pinched Roopa and made her cry. Surely Ma would flare up and tell me to behave like a nine-year-old? I got zero in my math class-work, spelled stupid baby words like “there” and “here” wrong, and still Ma did not break her silence.

“Ma, tell me about Mrs. Ghosh and the painter,” I begged. “You know, when the painter took a week to paint her fence and you asked him if he was done and he said, ‘Yes, Ghosh Memsahib made me paint her whole house and now all that is left to paint is Ghosh Memsahib’s face!’ Do you remember that?”

Under normal circumstances, Ma would have had a caustic comment to add about Mrs. Ghosh and her misuse of Railway services, but now she only smiled. It was a strange state my mother was in, her body cutting through regular space, her eyes wide open, her hands directing Ganesh or knitting swiftly, purl-one-knit-one, her mind playing in another place. When she did speak, the strangest things popped out of her mouth.

“How foolish, how foolish,” she remarked once as she sat in the verandah shaded from the heavy summer sun.

She stopped abruptly, her face distracted, and I waited for the end of her sentence. But Ma had already moved
to a new one. “Such a waste! As if life is a handful of berries that you can nibble at and throw away if you don’t like the taste.” She clicked her tongue and sighed.

Why didn’t Dadda do anything? He went away on line as usual, and I, angry with his indifference, refused to listen to the stories he brought back for me.

“Come child,” he beckoned, his voice creaking like the floor of the Railway Club. “Do you know those tiny white ants that can be crushed to death by a falling leaf?” He was trying to distract me, but I didn’t care.

“Dadda, what is wrong with Ma?” I interrupted, and Dadda’s story died unheard.

Even Linda Ayah, normally so crotchety, sat close to Ma’s feet in the verandah, stroked her hand and said,
“Bitiya,
my daughter, what has happened, what has happened? You want me to leave a prayer for you with Jesu-Mary? Tell only, and I will do in two minutes. Ten candles I will light.”

When Ma finally crawled out of her abyss, she had become shiny sharp and more angry than ever. She ranted on about every little thing—the fact that Dadda was at home only about half the year, that his sisters still came every summer, following us around the country like a sickness, and of course his smoking. Roopa and I could hear her in their room, crying and scolding.

“Why you married and had children if you didn’t care what happened to us?” she sobbed.

Dadda did not reply and I knew he was stretched out in his chair reading the newspaper.

“You think you are a bloody English sahib, posing and posturing with that wretched pipe. At least those stupids got their money’s worth out of this country before they
burnt their lungs out. But you, all you can think of is your own pleasure.”

“What nonsense you are talking!” said Dadda finally. “The British left the country twenty-three years ago.”

“They might have left the country but they took everything with them, including your brains, that’s what!”

Dadda told her to shut up and that was that. But her anger grew secretly, a fire that simmered beneath the surface all the time, like an animal crouched ready to spring. She changed her tactics. Instead of scolding and nagging, she became absolutely quiet. She never asked Dadda how his trips had been, whether the food in the line-box was enough, if it had been cold or warm, raining or sunny. Dadda would touch her arm and say, “Today, will you tell Ganesh to make
aloo-parathas?”
And Ma, shaking off the touch, would march into the kitchen. Not a word would she utter, not even to agree-disagree, and Dadda retreated from her unspoken hostility into his armchair, cold and remote. They skirted around each other, never talking unless it was about Dadda’s next line tour.

“I am leaving on the thirteenth,” he would tell Ma in a formal voice. “Don’t forget to pack a few sweaters, it might be cold.”

Or, “The Palits are coming over this Sunday for dinner. And the new Personnel Officer, Janaki Ram. Tell Ganesh not to make any meat, they are vegetarian.”

And Ma would reply, “Yes, I’ll take care of it.”

She would stop talking for days, sometimes weeks, and finally Dadda would have to apologize. For what? He had no idea. Her silence was a wall.

One day she gathered Dadda’s tobacco pouches, tins and packets and threw them in the rubbish dump. “You
want to waste money? Here, I will help you,” she said vengefully. She was becoming a demoness, I decided, watching my mother’s face collapse into a harsh, bad-tempered mask. Dadda, desperate for the soothing tobacco taste, hid packets under our mattresses, behind pots, in vases. He got Ganesh Peon to buy cigarettes from the stall just outside the colony and gave Roopa and me two rupees each to keep our mouths shut. When Ma found out she was so angry she refused to allow any cooking in the house.

“Go home and sleep,” she ordered Ganesh. “Don’t show your face here for a week.”

“Are you mad?” demanded Dadda. “At least think of the children.”

“Why should I? Are they mine alone? Does anybody think about me?”

Ma finally relented when Roopa vomited all over her bed following three days of
chholey
and
tandoori parathas
from Chowhan’s Café. Roopa was the only one who knew how to get around Ma.

Dadda stopped buying tobacco, sucking at an empty pipe instead, and Ma’s eyes glittered triumph.

The summer after Paul da Costa’s death was also the last summer that the Aunties visited us, although Ma had nothing to do with this decision. After all these years of trying, Vijaya Aunty was expecting a baby. She would not have the time to accompany her sister to our home any more, and of course Meera could not travel alone. Her doctor had written to say that she was seriously ill. India had gone to war against Pakistan, and the sound of sirens shattering the air had affected her mind.

“What does that doctor dolt mean, ‘affected her mind’?” demanded Ma. “Was it ever okay, hanh? All doctors are like that, knownothings.”

Yet for all her ranting against Meera Aunty, I knew that Ma felt twinges of pity for her. Or perhaps it was guilt. She didn’t say anything when Dadda sent money for her hospital bills, small parcels of Diwali sweets, a new sari for the Yugadhi festival. Ma was like that, she said one thing and meant something else. It was her way of warding off evil, I think. She used to say that no good ever came out of telling the whole truth, that there were harmful creatures listening behind every door, bad winds lurking among the trees waiting to twist everything good and beautiful into hideous deformities.

And Linda, like Ma, evaded the truth. If a friend called to compare notes before an exam, Ayah rushed to pick up the phone. “Halloo,” she would say, “Kamini baby? No, she is not here.”

“Linda Ayah, who was it?” I would ask.

“Some girl from your school. Cunning creature, purposely disturbing, trying to find out how much you have studied!”

“Why did you lie to her, Linda? She knows I am at home. Where would I go at ten in the night?”

“For you naughty babies,” Linda declared with a martyred look, “for you only, your Ma and I are sending ourselves to Hell telling lies and all.”

Ma never told me and Roopa that we were clever or pretty, since such a blatant admission would surely summon up the worst of imps and goblins. No matter how often I brought home medals for coming first in history, geography, biology, Ma neverever praised me.

“Why only one prize this time?” she asked instead. “Who got the medal for geometry? For Hindi? For English? That Reena Bukhshi, I am sure. Such a clever, hard-working angel that one is! She must have made her mother swell with pride!”

Ma scolded and pushed and criticized all the time, and yet when I came home with prizes, she arranged them in the polished glass display case that Girdhari the carpenter made. Girdhari had sat in the side verandah of the house for one month, measuring and cutting, sawing and planing. The wood dust lay in fine drifts all over the house and drove the maid-servant mad with frustration, for no matter how many times she swept and swabbed, the sawdust piled up. The showcase had five shelves and I was expected to fill them all. I started to feel that each of the subjects I studied was a demon to be vanquished. At night, I woke struggling and breathless from trying to push off the heavy
bhooth
who sat on my face, crawled into my nostrils, my ear-holes, the slit between my eyelids, smothering me so that I would not be able to finish the task Ma had set me. Fill those shelves, fill those shelves. Ma dusted the shelves herself, polishing each cup and medal, pulling the pink and yellow and orange tags forward so that visitors could see that I had won all these honours since Upper KG, nono baby-class itself! She also made
cobri-mitthai
whenever I brought home a new prize, for she knew it was my favourite sweet.

“Borrow some brains from your older sister and perhaps we can make a cupboard for you as well,” she said acidly, stabbing a flat hand in Roopa’s direction.

In order to deflect the evil eye from both of us, she spoke in a code language of mentioning and not
mentioning that would deceive the most envious of spirits. But I wished that Ma would praise me at least once. I craved a pat on my back, a “
Shabaash,
what a clever child!” Other people were dazzled by the array of glittering trophies in the showcase and remarked, “What a brilliant daughter you have, Mrs. Moorthy, an Einstein positively, she will be a nation’s pride one day!”

But Ma would frown, smile, frown in rapid succession and protest, “Ohnono, you should see how well others in her class are doing. She is only mediocre. How many times I have to tell her, work hard or you will end up an
ayah
or
jamedami.
But does she listen?”

Ma insisted that nobody ever listened to her, only Linda Ayah.

Ma was ambitious for Roopa and me. “You have to be one step ahead of the rest of the world,” she declared, “better than the best. Don’t let anybody be ahead of you.”

When I came second in grade one, Ma wept with frustration. Then she met the teacher and got a copy of the syllabus for the whole year. As soon as I came home, Ma gave me a glass of cold milk—good for the bones; a handful of almonds—good for the brains; and a banana—vitamins A and C. She sat with me at the dining table, teaching me to read from the books the teacher was planning to use towards the end of the year.

“Two steps ahead,” she said with satisfaction when we were done.

By then we were already tackling math problems that were on the school syllabus for grade three. I longed for Sundays when Ma let me go free. All the way through baby-school, high school and pre-university, my mother
pushed and scolded, her words stinging, buzzing about my head like a crazed bee.

“Why did Neetha Kamath get higher marks than you in math?”

“Why didn’t you get the heroine’s role in the school play?”

She embarrassed me by appearing at school to discuss my weak points with Sister Jesuina, or Sister Marie-Therèse, or Sister Clementine.

“This silly girl,” she would say, patting my head, smiling falsely, her eyes watching the nun’s face, waiting for her to say, “No, Mrs. Moorthy, your daughter is doing fine.” Ma was never satisfied with a mere “doing fine.” She expected the sisters to tell her that I was brilliant, that I was a sure candidate for a rank in the All India School Board exams.

I studied desperately into the night, prayed that everything I had learnt would remain in my head when I confronted the exam paper. I collected bundles of
darbha
grass to place before the tiny figure of the god Ganesha in Ma’s prayer room, for he was the remover of obstacles. When Ma asked, irritated, who was bringing rubbish into the room, I kept quiet, afraid to let my mother into my fears. I couldn’t bear to eat breakfast on exam days, for immediately my stomach cramped and coiled, making me want to rush to the toilet.

“What is all this drama?” Ma demanded. “Making a big fuss-muss over everything. Do I give you poison in your food that you get loose motion every morning? Drink some Amruth-dhaara, you will be all right. Now eat.”

I hated Amruth-dhaara. When I thought of those agonizing exam days, the anxiety of waiting for my report
card, my mouth filled with the ugly taste of the shit-syrup. Roopa gave it that name—lucky Roopa who wasn’t ever concerned about what Ma would say if she came last in her class.

“I don’t want to do anything except get married and have babies,” she said, her dark face mulish.

I wished I had the courage of her convictions. Where did that defiance grow from? Ma withered before it.

“You should be happy I am taking more interest in you than in your sister, useless monkey that she is,” she said to me. “At least one child of mine should get a chance to achieve all that I wanted. It is your duty to keep your mother’s head high. After you are married you do what you want, none of my business then.”

Why did Ma push me so hard to studystudystudy if she was planning to get me married, decorate me with useless jewellery and
zari
saris? I would rather read Mills and Boon romances, where a tall, morose Greek tycoon clasped the heroine to his heaving chest and whispered “
Agape mou”
in her shell-like ear. I preferred discussing those torrid romances furtively with the other girls in moral science class, while Mother Superior Mary Albina whined in a high-pitched, exalted voice, “Girls, remember the three Ds—
d
ecency,
d
ignity and
d
ecorum—they are your armour in the world outside. They will help you hold your head aloft in times of
d
istress.”