Tamarind Mem (18 page)

A change of season trembled at the edge of the river, just below the ice, hidden in the brown stubble of last year’s grass, coursing through dormant branches. The snow outside my window seemed to shift and tiny green shoots pushed through. Almost all of them would be dandelions, which were considered weeds here in this country. But I liked their tenacious brightness. They reminded me of the besharam plants in our Ratnapura house. The next time Roopa called, I asked her if she remembered the plant, a brave plant that survived wherever it was thrown. Ma said that it had given meaning to its life by simply flowering. “That plant grew in Guwahati not Ratnapura,” said Roopa. “In the front garden, where we spent the nights swatting mosquitoes and gazing at the stars. Do you remember doing that?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever spot the huntress in the sky?”

“No,” I confessed. “It always looked like a deer to me.”

I wondered what Ma saw those dark nights. She seemed to have forgotten so many things, she might not even remember. Or she might remember it all differently. Sometimes it seemed as if the past was a painting that she had dipped in water, allowing
the colours to run and drip, merge and fade so that an entirely altered landscape remained. Perhaps she only pretended that she did not recollect—knowing Ma, that was far more likely than a fading mind. Ma’s memory was as sharp as the afternoon sun. She preferred to spin her own stories.

That summer, temperatures in Guwahati peaked at fifty degrees Celsius. The newspapers carried stories about people falling dead in the heat.
The Daily Chronicle
had an item about a cow that dropped its calf on the pavement and watched it roast to death. It was impossible to walk on the roads, which had turned to molten black rivers, clung to tires, dragged slippers off your feet. Winds from across the mountains howled the dust up into whirling dervishes, and the boiling sun sliced through cracks in the shuttered windows, entered Dadda’s body, sizzled in his veins, the hollows of his bones, and burst like a burning flower in his eye. At least that’s what it looked like, the bright-red blood-spot with a frilled edge. When Dadda wore his glasses, the rose was magnified, an amoeba drifting towards his dark pupil and threatening to eclipse it. It scared Roopa.

“Nono, don’t worry child, it is only this wretched heat,” Linda soothed.

The violent heat dried the cold tea-juice that Ma pressed on Dadda’s eye, and the eye-drops that Dr. Pathronobis recommended were useless.

“We need to see a specialist,” said the doctor, alarmed by the glaring, crimson spot. “We need to run some tests.”

They tested his blood, his marrow, his heart, kidneys, liver, brain, lungs. “Lose some weight,” said the army of doctors at the hospital. “Take rest, eat oil-free food.”

Ma broke coconuts at the Kali temple in Guwahati. But nothing helped. Poor Ma, sneaking to the temple, reluctant to believe in superstition, yet afraid not to, furious with the goddess for failing her, furious with all the gods in the pantheon, angry with Dadda for giving up so easily. Ma was always there for me and Roopa and Dadda, no matter where Dadda’s trains took him, no matter where he took us in those same trains. Was it wrong for her to expect some return for her services to him? She had wanted to die first, as a
sumangali,
with her marriage beads about her neck, the vermilion bright on her forehead. Dadda wasn’t playing fair by falling ill, threatening to leave before her. And so Ma argued and fought for his life with the doctors and nurses, specialists and priests, gods and goddesses.

“You haven’t finished anything,” she yelled at him the first time he returned from the hospital. The doctors had allowed him to go home for Diwali. “You haven’t finished your work, that’s why they transferred you here, didn’t they, to build a new railway section? You can’t let the Railways down.” Ma was certain that if she made enough of a noise somebody would hear her, one of the gods, perhaps.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Dadda wearily. “I’m not the only person who can design lines.”

“What about the lines for this route?” she continued, barely even hearing Dadda’s voice. “Finish those, it’s your duty. And what about your children? You can’t just dump them on me!”

Ma even got a self-styled priest called Brother Joseph to try holy water on Dadda. Brother Joseph said he needed a new suit and a thin gold chain to be really
effective. “Getout-getout, you rogue!” said Ma, and I was glad that she hadn’t completely lost her senses.

“Go, go,” Ma shouted at the row of silver idols in her gods room. “Why did I waste my time asking you for help? Have you ever granted any of my wishes? Hanh?”

She swept Shiva and Parvathi in their swing of silver flowers, Krishna, Ganesha, Lakshmi, all those mute figures into a bag and stuffed them into her wedding-
petti
. She did not have the courage to throw her gods into the dustbin yet.

I was sure my mother was becoming an Aunty Meera. Why couldn’t she allow Dadda release from his grey pall of pain? Why was she fighting for a life she had spent so many years cursing? I prayed for Ma to come back to normal. And I made Roopa pray to her monkey-god as well. “You said that he was very powerful,” I reasoned. “Well, then ask him to
do
something. Ask him to save our Dadda, or is he just another one of your useless hoaxes?”

I drove my sister to tears, yelling at her every time Dadda had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. “Liar, liar, liar,” I wept. “Your rotten god is useless, you must have made him angry or something. That’s why he is punishing you and me. It’s all your fault.”

Roopa, silent as usual, clung to Linda Ayah, and all that Linda said to me was, “Don’t be afraid, child, your mother will come back. Wait only.”

I knew that Dadda was dying. It was there in the colour of his skin, the shallow whisper of his breath, the deep hollows in his face, the smell of sickness drifting through the house. I wished that I had listened to his stories more carefully. I wished that I had asked him more
questions about his childhood, that I had spent more time with him. I wished.

For a year, Ma worked herself into a frenzy trying to keep Dadda alive. She harassed the hospital staff, checked every pill, swab and syringe the nurses carried in to Dadda’s room.

“Bloody useless loafers only they employ in this hospital place. See what we have to suffer after serving the Railways, giving our lives to useless train-shain? Suspicious people trying out experiments on an officer’s body, that’s what.”

Dadda lay helpless on the hospital bed, covered in Ma’s special-time green-and-white sheets.

“God knows what diseased person has used that dirty-filthy hospital linen!” she ranted. “If I turn my head for a even few seconds, these thief
goonda
rascals in this morgue of a hospital will drain all my husband’s blood for selling to rich Arabs. Kidneys, hearts, arms, legs, blood, everything those fellows will buy to stay alive forever,” said Ma.

Dr. Ramesh, the Chief Medical Officer at the hospital, was not on speaking terms with Ma any more. No surprise that, considering the way Ma questioned every injection he administered.

“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” she asked, hovering over the doctor’s shoulder, refusing his orders to stay outside till he was done. “We need a second opinion,” she pronounced, dragging in doctors from the General, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Ashwini Medical Centre. Sickness had triumphed after all, and Ma blamed Dr. Ramesh for it. “Useless bloody basket. Third-rate degree from some village college. And these are the people we
trust with our lives,” she told visitors to the sick-room.

Ma hated admitting defeat, even to death. She would have liked to have been a Savithri, dragging her husband back to life from the death god Yama’s arms using the sheer cunning of words. When I was younger, Ma had read me the story of Savithri and Satyavan over and over again, her long, smooth index finger with its glittering
vanki
ring pointing at the pictures. Here was the happy couple sitting languidly under a mahua tree; there was Satyavan, face a picture of agony, clutching his chest; here came Yama on his buffalo to drag the body away. And finally, a triumphant Savithri, her arms outstretched, receiving her husband’s life back from the god of death.

“You want something hard enough, you can get it. Just need persistence, that’s all,” Ma would say when the story ended.

For all her persistence, however, Ma could not stop the marrow in my father’s bones from drying up in the heat of his illness, or his blood cells from turning a dazzling white, so that when he finally died, he was as pale as tracing paper.

“I am now in Varanasi, the holiest of holy cities and the dirtiest,” wrote Ma. “I don’t know why people come here to die. I suppose if my heart collapses on me, I will depart a blessed soul, and some stranger will set my ashes afloat in the River Ganga.”

Just like my mother to make me feel indignant, anxious and guilty all with a few lines scribbled on the back of a postcard! What was all this about her heart? Why should a stranger set her ashes in the river? Didn’t she have two daughters to do that? But of course I had no way of reaching her, of finding out if she was
merely being Ma or if she was really ill. Perhaps she had written to Roopa, given her a little more information than she had to me. That would be typical too, playing one daughter off against the other, teasing us by dangling that elusive bait of affection.

“Ma’s written me exactly the same things,” shouted Roopa over the background sounds of her children screaming, the dishwasher rattling.

“Well, aren’t you worried?”

“Why should I be? It’s all drama. You know Ma, she hates doing anything, even writing a postcard, without adding a bit of glycerine for the tears and chili-powder for the spice.”

The sweet odour of roses and
rajni-gandha
surrounding my father had seeped through the entire house. It was a dreadful smell, reminding me that Dadda was now just a body in the middle of the drawing room. He lay on a pile of rapidly melting ice, his mouth a thin blue line, cotton wool in his nostrils. Ma’s brother said it was to keep the fluids in. How disgusting, the idea of my fastidious father with no control over his leaking body. I preferred to believe Linda Ayah, who said the cotton was to keep Dadda’s spirit in his heart. Remove the cotton and the spirit would stream out leaving Dadda in limbo, a
Trishanku
suspended between
swarga
and earth. The spirit needed to be released with the proper rituals, cleansed in the heat of a sandalwood pyre so that it would ascend into the air.

A warm draft puffed into the room from the open front door. People had been wandering in and out of the house all day long, occasionally stopping to straighten the edge of the sheet covering Dadda, light a few more
sandalwood sticks, stare mournfully at his face or ask how Ma was doing. One of my uncles, after dressing Dadda in a clean
dhothi,
had daubed his face with Old Spice shaving lotion. Early this morning, the house had smelled like the flower shops on the road outside the colony where, all day long, women threaded flowers for weddings, funerals and temple ceremonies. But as the sun soared in the sky, relentlessly stripping the shadows from everything, the body decomposed, its juices vaporizing into the hot air mingling with the stale flowers, making the house smell like the Ralston Fish Mart.