Tamarind Mem (5 page)

“I don’t know where I am going,” said Ma. “A pilgrimage, like those old people in religious stories. Packed off their daughters, washed their hands of the sons, gave away all their useless belongings and left on long journeys to see how other people lived.”

“But how do we know if you are all right? How do we reach you?”

“What is the worst that can happen to me? I will die, that’s all. And if I die, the apartment and all that I have in it can be shared between you and Roopa. The bank manager has a spare set of keys. If he dies also, well, use your brains, break open the door, whatever! I don’t care.”

I was worried about being left behind by Ma who, every now and again, threatened Dadda that one morning he would wake up and find her gone.

“Go, why should I care what you do?” my father would say sometimes, although he usually puffed at his pipe and refused to enter into an argument with Ma. “And don’t forget to take your daughters with you.”

“My
daughters! Am I the Virgin Mary that I created them myself or what? When I leave, I go with no baggage but what I brought to this house.”

Vir-gin.
Good word or bad?

Their arguments were loud and made no pretence of secrecy. I think they assumed that my sister and I were asleep as soon as our heads touched our pillows.

They were right about Roopa, for she was one of those placid creatures who stayed completely impervious to undercurrents of anger or discontent in the house, certain that there would always be someone to look after her. She didn’t care who made her breakfast, or took her to the club to play on the swings in the evening, so long as the job was done. I, on the other hand, couldn’t bear the thought of becoming like our neighbour’s daughter, a thin, silent wisp of a girl who played house-house with us every afternoon and who was easily cowed into being our maidservant or cook or someone as menial. Her mother had died of brain fever and she was looked after by a series of stern aunts. The thought of being being brought up by Dadda’s sisters, especially crazy Aunty Meera, was extremely disagreeable. So I stayed awake, listening for footsteps, my body tensed to spring out of bed.
I thought that if I kept my ears open, I would know immediately if Ma was going to run away, and then I could scream, wind my arms around her legs and stop her. How would I manage on my own with a father who was away on tour most of the time? How would I battle Linda Ayah’s host of demons and monsters that roamed the house every day? Besides, I might not be able to keep my word about looking after Roopa and I’d go straight to Hell. And Hell, warned Linda Ayah, was a most uncomfortable place, full of drooling creatures who craved little girls to satisfy their horrible appetites.

Although Ma had assured me that Hell existed only in a person’s imagination and wasn’t a place like Delhi or Bombay to which one could travel by train, I was sure it lurked there at the edges of my world waiting for me to miss my step and slide in. Not only did Linda Ayah speak about it often and with a sort of deadly certainty, it was brought up every Friday at school by Miss Manley, the moral science teacher. She was an overpowering woman whose thick arms were covered with a pelt of bright orange hair so that, no matter what the colour of her dress, it looked as though she had orange sleeves. Miss Manley flung questions at the class to test our knowledge of the Bible.

“What happened at Gethsemane?” she thundered, going down the classroom, row by row, making sure that she caught everyone with her questions. If a student dared to stutter, “I don’t know, Miss,” she paused in awful silence for a minute and then bellowed, “Dunce, you are a dunce! Go stand in the corner and improve your memory!”

The dunce had to stand inside an aluminum dustbin and learn up Miss Manley’s favourite poem, “Daffodils,” before the count of ten.

“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’” murmured the dustbindunce.

“All right class, start counting,” commanded Miss Manley, and we chanted out loud, as slowly as possible, “One-two-three-four…”The closer we got to ten, the slower we counted to give the poor dunce a few seconds extra to memorize the lines. If the miscreant hadn’t learnt up the lines before ten, the wrath of God and Miss Manley descended. She slammed the dunce’s cheeks with a pair of chalkboard dusters, sending up billows of white powder, and said fiercely, “
Wicked
blight, may the Lord’s spit hail down upon you.”

Then she turned to the rest of the class, her tangerine hair flying out of her bun like streamers, and demanded with deep bitterness, “What do you
junglee
donkeys know of fields of golden daffodils nodding and dancing in the breeze?”

If Miss Manley found someone not paying attention, she casually picked up a piece of chalk, broke it in two and flung the bits with unerring aim at the miscreant, smiling at the yelp of pain as the chalk caught the dreamer on the face, or head, or on a tender ear.

“Very smart, think you can quietly sleep in my class and I won’t notice, what? Think again, too-too smart. Not only is Miss Manley watching you, but God in his Heaven, too!”

I usually finished Miss Manley’s homework first, because I couldn’t bear the shame of being a dustbindunce. One afternoon, she was in an unusually bad mood, flinging chalk like tiny missiles at various corners of the classroom. Twice Miss Manley had shouted at Devaki, my best friend, for stammering over an answer, and I hated her for it.

“She is a
vir-gin,”
I whispered to Devaki.

She clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Miss Manley is a
vir-gin,”
she hissed to Shabnam.

The chalk sang across the room and caught Devaki on her cheek. “I didn’t say it, I didn’t say it. It was Kamini,” she babbled, fat tears winding down her face.

“Say what?”

“That you are a
vir-gin.”

It was a bad word, I discovered, for Miss Manley made me sit under my desk. “The dustbin is too good for you,” she roared. “You stay down there where the Lord cannot see your sinful face!”

I crouched under the desk, so terrified that I did not come out even after the last bell rang and Miss Manley left. She did not seem to remember that I was still waiting to be forgiven.

Linda Ayah, who had come to take me home, squatted patiently at the door of the classroom and tried to persuade me to emerge. “God is kind and generous, your teacher is a mad woman. She does not know anything, come out Baby-missy,” she begged. “I will pray to Jesus and tell him that you are a good child who looks after her baby sister, shares all her toys and listens to Linda Ayah. I will tell God to fix that nut-case teacher of yours, don’t worry. Let us go home now, your Ma will be waiting with milk and biscuits.” When I finally crawled out, she hugged me fiercely and added,“Whatfor you have to be scared when Linda is here to look after you? God listens to this
ayah,
I am telling you.”

Linda Ayah had been with our family for years and years. She was allowed to boss the other servants and nobody
could utter a word. Ma said that she had never really hired Linda, at least not officially. When she came to this house as a bride, Dadda had left her alone and gone away to work. She would have been completely lost if it hadn’t been for Linda Ayah, always there like Aladdin’s genie, getting things done, making sure that Ma was settling in and everything was righty-tighty. She travelled with us every time we were transferred, insisting that if she wasn’t around we would all sink in chaos.

There might have been some truth in what she said because Ma became horribly disorganized when we had to move. She hated the whole process of packing, of rolling out yards of stale gunny sacking that had been stored in the garage from the last time we moved, of sending the
peon
around to neighbours’ homes for old newspaper to use for the china and the glass bottles in which Ma stored spices. Nobody wanted to part with old newspapers, for you could sell them to the
raddhi-man,
who paid by the kilo.

“So much expense, imagine having to beg other people for their rubbish, imagine having to
buy
their rubbish from them! Why do you have to keep getting transferred? Can’t you say your wife is sick, you are allergic to new places, something, and stay here?” grumbled Ma every time Dadda came home with his transfer orders.

She especially disliked finding keys for all the locks, and we had a huge collection of both for the many trunks and boxes that travelled with us when we moved.

“Why she has to make a fuss about such silly things?” muttered Linda, making sure that Ma did not hear her. “How long does it take to find out which key is for what lock, henh?”

“And worst of all,” said Ma, “I have to find schools for these children. Your Dadda sits there like a maharaja smoking a pipe and looking at the sky, thinking mighty thoughts no doubt, and I walk from one school to the next wearing out my slippers, saying to those nuns, ‘Take my daughters, please, they will bring honour to your school.’”

Ma insisted on sending Roopa and me to convent schools, which were always booked full. It didn’t matter where we were transferred or how far away the school was, Ma stood in the admission queues and got us in. In Lucknow we went to St. Agnes’s School, in Calcutta it was Mount Carmel, and in Guwahati it was La Martinière’s. If Ma could not get us in because we had arrived in the middle of the term and there were no seats left in the classroom, she told the Mother Superior that she would get the nuns railway reservations anytime they had a problem if they could squeeze in two extra desks for us. Then on the way home she would say, “The old crows, they’ll do anything if you dangle a bribe. Even brides of the Lord have a price.”

Dadda remained blissfully ignorant of Ma’s machinations as the nuns never did ask for reservations. He would have been shocked by her lack of scruples. And he could never understand why she insisted on sending me and Roopa to the nuns anyway.

“What is wrong with a Central School education?” he demanded when Ma kicked up a fuss over getting transferred in the middle of the school term. Central Schools were set up for the children of government employees who had to move frequently.

“They teach in Hindi,” said Ma.

“So what? That is one of the languages in this country, in case you have forgotten,” argued Dadda.

“Only one of them,” replied Ma. “You want them to learn a different language everywhere we move? Bengali in this place, Assamese there, Gujarati somewhere else? Poor things, as it is they are confused with first language, second language, third language and all. You want them to go crazy or what?”

“They won’t go crazy,” insisted Dadda. “They will be true Indians.”

“Yes, yes, you are a fine one to talk, you and your smoking jacket and pipe and British ways. Did your
pujari
father send you to Corporation school? Hanh? Did he? Oh no, you could go to Francis Xavier and St. Andrew’s, but it is okay for your daughters to go to any rubbish-pile place.”

“Those days it was necessary,” said Dadda. “Now we’re an independent country, remember?”

“Yes, but without English they will be like the servants’ children, what’s the difference then, you tell me?” argued Ma.

As usual, Dadda got tired of the whole thing and ended up behind his screen of rustling newspapers, while Ma continued complaining to Linda Ayah, who was always ready with a sharp comment or sympathetic silence, depending on her own mood.

Roopa and I knew that Linda was really a witch, a glass-eyed one, who could see what we were going to do even before we tried it.

“Un-unh! Roopa Missy, no playing in dirty tap water otherwise I will tell Memsahib,” she would call from her favourite spot in the verandah, without even raising her
eyes from the platter of rice or the
soopa
of coriander seeds that she was cleaning. “Kamini baby, if you climb that jamoon tree, showing your knickers to all the loafers passing on the road, you won’t be able to sit for a week, such a hard slap you will get!”

When Roopa was a baby, Linda checked the
dhobhi
basket every day to see that the diapers were washed in Dettol and ironed properly. She harangued the milk-woman into bringing her cow to the back yard so that she could watch her draw milk. “My babies get milk without water mixup,” she told the milk-woman, who spat a stream of betel juice into the bushes to show Linda Ayah what she thought of her.

I remember the woman, with her fat breasts swinging naked beneath the faded sari, standing astride a drain in full view of the road, her sari hitched up to her thighs, pissing a fierce stream. I had only ever seen men doing this and wondered if she was actually one of the eunuchs who dressed up in women’s clothes and roamed the streets during festivals, clapping their hands and singing obscene songs. I was scared to ask the milk-woman, and got a slap on my bottom from Linda Ayah for my curiosity. “What for you want to watch mannerless people making dirty water on the main road? Stupid child!”

Linda Ayah had coarse, bony hands with knuckles large as tree-knots and palms criss-crossed so deeply with lines that they looked like the railway shunting yard. Her fingertips were stained yellow with
khaini
that she rolled out of a little tin tucked into the waistline of her sari.