Tamarind Mem (20 page)

Ma had always been suspicious of the world around her. Everybody had a secret to hide, a motive to conceal. Not a soul could be trusted, especially where Roopa and I
were concerned. At the crowded, stale-smelling airport in Madras, as we waited for my flight to the North Pole, she hissed a warning, “You be careful who you talk to on the plane. Don’t leave your bags here and there. Such stories I have heard of terrorists and whatnot planting bombs and drugs and all. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Don’t eat or drink anything except fresh, uncut fruit and bottled water.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“And phone me as soon as you reach Calgary. Doesn’t matter how late it is, I will be waiting.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Can’t you think of anything else to say?” demanded Ma. “Or you don’t want me to talk? All right, not another word from me! Once you are gone, who will I have to talk to, anyway? Better get used to silence now itself.”

“Ma, I’ll phone every week, I’ll write! Okay?”

Silence.

I
rest my forehead against the window grille and let cool morning air brush my skin. Beggars have touched these windows, spit from a thousand mouths has dried on them, they carry the germs of millions who have travelled before me. If Dadda was here, he would have rebuked me sharply, told me to wipe the bars with Dettol. Ah! Poor man, so worried about tinytiny details that he missed the big world around him. Butbut, now I travel alone, not even my daughters to watch me, wonder if my mind is decaying along with my body.

I will send them a postcard from Nagpur, my next stop. Perhaps I will rub an orange peel against the paper and write, “This is how Nagpur smells right now, of oranges ripening in the heat!”

As we approach a small station, I open the window wider. My mouth yearns for a
khullar
of sugary tea to scald the staleness of sleep off my tongue, clear my throat for a fresh round of stories. I have a captive audience in this rattling “Ladies Only” compartment. In a moment, Latha the bank clerk’s wife in the berth across will be awake. She is already twitching under her sheets, her toes curling. In the upper two berths are Hameeda Ali, the schoolteacher, and her sister Sohaila. Soon they will be down as well. There will be a rush for the bathrooms, which is why I like waking up before the sun has risen, and after we have all settled for the day’s journey, Latha will lean forward and say, “So, Saroja
bhabhi
, then what happened?”

And I, depending on where my memories carry me, will tell them about my husband the builder of tracks, or Paul the Anglo mechanic, perhaps my widowed Aunt Chinna. We have a long way to go and I have so many stories for this compartment full of strangers who smile at me kindly, nodding as they listen to the reminiscences of an old woman. I am sure they look at me and think, “Ah, if it makes her happy to talk, why should we stop her? What else is there to do in a train anyway except spin yarns, eat and look out of the window?”

Now if I was my mother, or Delhi Aunt, or even Chinna, I would have no problem telling my story. I would only be drawing a line between two points, birth and the present moment. But what is one to do with a life like mine, scrawled all over the country, little trails here and there, moving, moving all the time, and never in one fixed direction? As if the seven circles I take around the marriage fire with Dadda dance out like the ripples from a stone dropped in water, carrying us on wider journeys every time. That is the life of a Railway memsahib. I pack our bags every three years, find new schools for the children, settle in among strangers, learn the local language so I can bargain with vendors in the markets. People tell me that I should be proud of my husband. After all, it is a privilege for an officer to get a transfer, fresh responsibilities, a show of faith in his capabilities. Like getting a pat on the back, being told by the General Manager, “Mister, you are good enough to handle anything in this country. You can take challenges like a Railway man.” Only the useless fellows remain in the same town, never getting a promotion, rusty and creaking like condemned engines.
And the wives of the transferred officers, oh, we go from house to house, for farewell dinners and lunches, smiling, smiling, and thinking inside, hope they have good schools in that new place, hope we don’t have to pay high-high fees, hope the windows in the next house are the same size as this old one, otherwise where to find money for curtains that fit?

It is as if I live within a series of dreams. As long as a dream holds I know where I am. I try to fix myself in one place, a single context. Perhaps in my childhood home, a long, narrow house on Mahathma Gandhi Street, two blocks away from the Krishna temple. It is a plain, ugly house with a flat terrace, none of the dripping eaves and red tiled roofs that some of the other houses have. No shiny brass name-plate on the gate pillar, not even a house name, just “Number 21” in black paint on the wall facing the road. A house needs a name to suit its character, the people who live inside it. The only name that suits our stern house is “Dharma”—duty, the word by which we live. My father goes to work every morning because it is his duty as the man of the house to earn money for his family; my mother cooks and cleans and has children because she is his wife; and it is our duty as children to obey them, respect their every word. Even the neem tree in the front yard, with none of the knots, gnarls or hollows that give a tree character, obligingly blooms in March to provide the buds and flowers needed to make bitter-sweet
bevu-bella
for the Yugadhi feast. The house is whitewashed every five years by Balaji, the contractor who lives down the road.

“Why can’t we paint it some other colour?” I ask.

“So long as you have a place to eat and sleep in, why do you care if a house is painted white or yellow?” My
mother is content with the comforting boredom of our lives. She has a home that moves like clockwork and does not want any needless changes. A child is born every two years for ten years; Appa gets a promotion in his bank once every five years till he becomes a Manager; Amma finishes the housework at eleven sharp and comes out to the verandah with her tin of betel leaves, chalk and
supari
and sits there all afternoon contemplating the dusty street, the multicoloured billboard advertising the latest film across the road. My childhood is drawn within the walls of that house, the protective circle my parents form about me, the road taking me to school or to the market. I see the same faces every morning—Ambi Maami, who sweeps all the dirt from her front yard into ours, calling down a hail of curses from Chinna, and Srinivasa the music master, who wails out
raagas
in his garden at the crack of dawn while his wife stuffs cotton-wool in her ears.

“
Baddi-maganey!
” she grumbles to my mother, who sits serene as a Buddha in her whitewashed house. “He says his voice is a gift from God. What I want to know is, can we fill our bellies with song? Tell me?”

Professor Subhash Rao in Number 16, who has refused to speak to anyone on the road for ten years, stands as an Independent candidate during the elections and receives no votes, not even his wife’s. He breaks his silence the day his wife disappears to ask if we know where she has gone. We wag our heads and say, “Ohho, how sad! No, we haven’t seen her at all.”

But later Chinna remarks, “Unh-unh. What an idiot! The cuckold is always the last to know. His wife has run away with the campaign manager for sure.”

Our maid nods vigorously, slaps wet clothes against the washing stone and says, “When have men ever seen beyond their noses?”

“Who would live with an unstable like him?” Amma comments, her face pinched into lines of disapproval. She will not even acknowledge Professor Subhash Rao if they pass each other on the road, and he, aware of her dislike, never fails to greet her in a loud, mocking voice, “Good Morning, Madam,
namaskaara,
and how is your
perr-fect
family doing?”

After high school, my world stretches out to include the Sriram College on the outskirts of town. How much I argue with Appa to study there. I beg my mother for support and receive nothing but a noncommittal silence. Amma wards off decisions, unpleasant incidents that break through the smooth shell of her life, by erecting a fortress of silence. I have no way of knowing what her silence means, what feelings it cloaks in its mystery. Sometimes I imagine that a still tongue is a powerful weapon, and at others I believe that my mother is a coward, a fence-sitter, a politician, neither aye nor nay. Her nod means nothing, an empty gesture. It is as if she has swallowed all her wilder emotions along with the
paan
juice that stains her lips. When she finally speaks, it is to agree with my father.

“A woman can read and study all she pleases, her words mean nothing after all. So why you are wasting your youth and our money? Get married.” Get married, she says. “A woman without a husband is like sand without the river. No man to protect you and every evil wind will blow over your body. Listen to your mother.”

“No, I want to be a doctor,” I argue.

“With a tongue like a knife, you aren’t fit to be a doctor.”

Where does she think I inherited my tongue?

I want to be an Ayurvedic doctor like Chitrangadhey, the Malayalee lady doctor on Old Parade Street, with her pure, bleached face, long hands that wave sickness away.

“Bad cough?” she asks. “Let me listen to your murmuring lungs.” Bitter roots carry the warmth of the earth straight into your clotted bronchioles. “A fever shaking your body? Come, let me touch your pulse.” A potion of herbs,
thulasi
to cool rushing blood.

Yesyes, I know, Chitrangadhey’s tongue is mild as summer rain, but is there any rule that says an Ayurved has to be gentle-voiced? Hanh?

My mother is deaf to words that have no place in the calm pool of our home. I can argue all I please, but what use if my voice bounces off walls and falls unheard to the red stone floors?

“A woman’s happiness lies in marriage,” she says.

In a wedding photograph, Amma’s face, now layered with folds of skin, is carved and delicate, the nose finely arched, eyes waiting for the happiness promised by the Sanskrit words mumbled across the marriage fire.

“Are you happy, Amma?” I ask her in the verandah one afternoon. Chinna mutters and moves in sleep on a mat at the far end, her body striped with shadows from the drawn bamboo blinds. At exactly three o’clock, she will awaken, leaping to her feet as if an invisible alarm has pealed inside her head, just in time to make the evening tea and snacks before father and my brothers come home. Amma glances towards Chinna to make sure she is asleep and not just pretending, and then turns to me.

“Why do you need to know such nonsense?” she demands. “Have you been seeing more of those stupid cinemas?”

“I need to know. Are you happy being Appa’s wife? A mother?”

“What large thoughts for a small head!” Amma chews steadily on her
paan
and gives me an ironic look. This is her half hour of luxury—no work, no interruptions. She is in a good mood.

“You haven’t answered me.”

“I have a house over my body, there is food in the house. All I need now is to see my daughters married.”

“Amma, Amma, why do you always dodge? I wasn’t talking about us. I asked about you. Does Appa make you happy?”

My mother does not look at me. She concentrates on making up her triangles of betel leaf, occasionally glancing up to nod at an acquaintance passing our gate. The house has no lawn in front, just a narrow cement yard opening to the main road. There is more space at the back, where five coconut trees soar up into the sky, each one planted for a child’s birth. Mine is already rich with fruit. There are guava, lime and mango trees, and in the slime near the well a profusion of fragrant mint. We eat mint chutney with steaming
idlis
every other day of the week. My mother, a thrifty woman, has lain out beds of green chilies and coriander, tomatoes and beans. A small square patch marked off with bricks has a single rose bush, a jasmine creeper, hibiscus and
maraga.
Amma does not believe in a garden grown for beauty alone. The flowers are for her daily prayers. Red hibiscus is the goddess Lakshmi’s favourite, jasmine and roses strewn at the feet of Lord
Krishna, creamy
champaka
from our neighbour’s tree for Shiva the ascetic. Why waste money buying flowers when they can be grown in our own garden? Every evening Chinna strings yards of jasmine, her fingers looping and knotting the thread deftly over fragile green stems. The buds must be plucked at dusk, says Chinna, for, by then, they are bursting with all the gathered sweetness of the day. She wraps the fragrant strings in fresh-sliced plantain leaves and places them tenderly in Amma’s silver flower basket.

“When you get married,” says my mother, offering a bribe, “you shall have a basket more handsome than mine.”

The buds unfold through the warm night and our dreams are threaded with their delicate scent. There is a string of jasmine for each of us three sisters and a special one with
maraga
leaves for my mother. We go to school, flowers tucked into oiled braids. I have long, thick hair that flicks off my back as I walk. Sometimes, in the early-morning darkness of my room, I wind my finger around loose strands and make a few curls.