Tamarind Mem (30 page)

Sometimes, Dadda orders a basket of apples from Simla, where his inspection carriage is stationed. Golden apples. Some men buy underwear for their wives, my husband is more down-to-earth. He is doing his duty by his wife and family, providing the nourishment a body needs. Sometimes, looking at a bridge over a tiny, ferocious river, checking for weaknesses in the enormous rock-and-iron pillars, Dadda remembers to send Banganapalli mangoes from Tenali. A sack of Basmati rice from Dehradoon, nuts from Delhi, lichees from Patna, oranges from Nagpur. They arrive without any message and Dadda never asks afterwards if we enjoyed these unannounced gifts. It is almost as if he remembers us till a certain point and then, by sending a basket of fruit, exorcises us. We are not to wander out of that little space he draws for us, as if we are his designs, those precise lines with which he fills drafting sheets, the minute scribbles that designate those drawings into their slots, taking into account every possible landslide,
waterfall, monsoon storm, flood or wild animal that the earth could throw up. He studies the land, knows every pit and tumour on its surface before pinning on it endless tracks of steel and teak. But of us, his family, he knows nothing.

When Dadda leaves on line and Paul da Costa creeps onto the shadowy verandah of the Ratnapura house like a thief, I tell him that I cannot destroy my life for a half-breed man, a caste-less soul. I want to reach out and touch his warm skin, watch his clear smile. But words like duty and loyalty clamour in my ears. I think of Roopa and Kamini, their soft skins smelling of milk, their heads so vulnerable. They hold me with their helplessness, they twine about me as tenacious as bougainvillaea. I tell Paul that I will not leave my children. I don’t want to cut myself off, become a pariah, have other children who will be bastards. I let my evil tongue reduce him to a pile of nothing dust. Perhaps then he will stop asking me to go with him to England, to Australia, to Canada.

“This fool has two types blood in his body and your high-caste Brahmin mind cannot handle that? Can’t do anything about this, Memsahib, it is part of me, will go to my grave. Whattodo?” Paul rubs his skin. “I will kill myself,” he says. “You wait and see, you will be responsible.”

I smile at such melodrama. Has a man ever lost his life over a woman? His mind maybe, but his life? As my Amma would have said, such tragedies belong to the cinema screen. Only a Majnu would die for his Laila, a Ranjha for his Heer. And they exist between the lines of a bard’s song.

I need to straighten the cyclone of thoughts filling my mind, so I let Linda take responsibility for the children, the house, me, everything. Linda Ayah teaches my children all sorts of rubbish. But it keeps them occupied so who am I to say this or that? She tells them not to clip their nails at night. A
daayin
might collect the clippings and cast a spell on them. When she takes the girls to the club to play in the evening she makes them fix their gaze on the road.

“Watch out,” she says, frightening them out of their wits. “Watch out for evil things. If you see a pile of cut hair or a lemon tied with turmeric-stained thread, make sure you don’t step on it! You will be caught in a witch’s web for sure.”

Linda Ayah teaches Kamini and Roopa good Christian songs. She doesn’t like leaving anything to chance, feels that my careless Hindu ways are a bad influence on my girls.

she sings, clapping her hands and urging the girls to repeat.

She tells them long, rambling stories and nursery rhymes:

The sound of the Ranigunj Mail rushing past the house at exactly 21:56 hours deafens me so that I miss the first scraping, hesitant knock on the verandah door. The door
is normally locked because the room is for guests, hardly used except in summer when my sisters-in-law arrive. It leads through the verandah onto a vast, unkempt gathering of trees and bushes which I toy with eliminating, perhaps making a park for the children to play in. The gardener is enthusiastic but finds an excuse every time I ask him to start work.

“For that kind of jungle you need big clippers. I have to requisition from the main office, Memsahib,” he says, squatting in the shade of the rain tree separating our compound from the neighbours.’

His passion is the front garden, where he has managed to coax a riot of flowers out of hard soil. Lazy bugger, I think, but keep the thought to myself. I don’t want a full-scale union fight on my hands. The union is exceptionally powerful—strikes occur at the drop of a hat,
gheraos,
stop-the-train movements. For example, a train is delayed for two hours. Nobody is at fault, but passengers at the station shout at the engine-driver, who yells back and is slapped on his face.

“No more work,” says the engine-driver, his linesman, the guard, the signalman. “We won’t work. No engines will run, no trains will move. We demand compensation for this insult. Are we dogs to be kicked by this person and that?”

In the colonies,
jamedaars
put down their pails and brooms, let garbage pile up on the roads; gardeners refuse to water the lawns, just sit in the shade of the tamarind trees chewing
khaini.
Even Paul da Costa joins in the
thamaasha.
Such stories I hear about how he leads a gang of workers in the loco-shop to down their tools, to paint posters in red and white—“No Pay No Work, Are We
Animals Or Human?” Later, after the strike has blown over like a spent storm, Paul smiles at me. “Scared your officer sahibs, didn’t we?”

Kamini is singing
“Baa-baa black ship”
the night Paul knocks on the door of the guest bedroom one last time. The Raniganj Express rattles the windows of the house so loudly that I think that the first knock is just a shutter banging. Only after the entire train has passed, in the sudden stillness as the house settles back to listen to the night, only then do I hear the second knock. And pretend that I do not.

“Mrs. Moorthy!” I hear Ruma Ahluwalia calling me from her side of the hedge between our houses, but I do not reply. This is the first moment in the day that I have had to sit down to a cup of hot tea. All by myself. When Dadda is home he has his breakfast at eight o’clock sharp—a minute later makes him furious and a minute earlier means that a fresh batch of crisp
dosai
or toast has to be made. Food cannot be kept waiting for him and he refuses to wait for it, either. In this house things run like trains, by the clock. The girls leave for school at eight-fifteen, the
dhobhi
comes at eight-thirty, the vegetable-man at eight-forty-five and the ironing-boy at nine. My neighbour’s voice reaches me from across the hedge as soon as I settle into the easy chair. She can’t see me sitting in the verandah through the thick wall of morning-glory but she knows that I am here.

“Mrs. Moorthy, did you hear the news?”

Since I came to Ratnapura, Ruma has caught me every morning as soon as I come out into the verandah,
inviting herself for a cup of tea and staying to lunch as well. It is because of her that I plant my morning-glory wall, now a thick, crawling forest of tendrils, leaves and pale-purple flowers. Black ants march crisply up and down the stems, dropping on my shoulder if I sit too close. A wasp has been trying to make a nest in the corner where the morning-glory meets the verandah pillar. I scrape the still damp mud off every day, refusing to let her lay the eggs hanging within her body. It is a small act of cruelty worked into the pattern of my daily life. Maybe for that I will be reborn as a pregnant wasp. Every morning a sun-bird shimmers over open blossoms, inserting its long beak delicately into the violet interior. Its wings vibrate frantically, holding the bird up till it drains the flower.

Today, Ruma wants to discuss something unbearably interesting with me. She has not seen me leave the house, the front door is wide open, and my maidservant is washing the dishes in the courtyard outside, all of which are signs that I am around. I toy with the idea of slipping into the house and out through the verandah on the far side, but Ruma is already at my gate. She spots me on the verandah, waves and huffs up the driveway.

“Why you didn’t answer me?” she demands sulkily. “I called you and called you, what you were doing?”

“I must have been in the bath, with the water running, you cannot hear anything you know.”

“Such shocking news,
baap-re-baap!
I need some hot tea, so upside-down my system is from the shock,” says Ruma, clutching her left breast which forms a plump nest for her heart. She pulls a chair into the sun and settles down with a sigh.

“Ganesh!” I call, resigned to a day full of gossip. “Bring two
chais,
super hot. Boil the milk, don’t forget.”

“Hanh,
Memsahib,” replies Ganesh from inside the house.

I already know what Ruma’s news is. I have known it since eight o’clock yesterday evening.

“They found a mechanic in the billiards room,” says Mrs. Ahluwalia.

I know that Paul da Costa hanged himself.

“Istupid idiot, why defile our billiards room tell me? No manners or respect for other people’s feelings.”

I broke his heart. As if a heart is made of glass!

“Why you are so quiet? You know the fellow?” Ruma gives me an inquisitive look.

How could he live without a heart?

“Paul de Souza or something, he did repairy work on cars and all. Didn’t I see him with his head inside your car also?”

“Paul da Costa, his name was da Costa,” I say.

“Something, the
bechaara
is with his Christ,
baba,
how it is mattering what his name is?” says Mrs. Ahluwalia.

“When you die, would you like it if people call you something else?” I snap, and Ruma gapes at me.

“You want
me
to die?”

I shrug. “Why should I care whether you live or die?”

Ruma stands up and glares.
“Baap-re-baap!
What a wicked tongue you have, Madam! Tell your
peon
not to bother with tea and all.”

I know that she will rush around the colony later today complaining to the other ladies about me. “That woman is such a
chunt”
she will tell them. “Too-too moody, I tell you. I knew, first time I met her, not a nice type.”

Did I truly tear out the mechanic’s heart like the
daayin
in the stories Linda Ayah tells my girls? What if, like Paul, I had forgotten that I was a memsahib?

“Come, come,” says Latha kindly, offering me a slice of mango. “Don’t feel sad,
behen-ji,
it was time for the man to leave this world, so he left. Whattodo?”

“What did you do then?” asks Sohaila

“Did your hubby ever find out?” Even the teenager Vicki is snared by my tale.

I shrug. I don’t know. He never said anything.

Hameeda shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have done all that,” she says. “It wasn’t right.”