Teatime for the Firefly

by Shona Patel

  PREMIUM ASSAM TEA

  PRODUCT OF AYNAKHAL TEA ESTATE

  “Chaya!” I yelled. “Forget the milk. Quick, make me a cup of this tea, please.”

  I sat on the sofa feeling warmly, sweetly and deeply overwhelmed.

  The cat crawled out from under the coffee table and jumped up on my lap. He rubbed his head on my shoulder and flicked his furry tail under my nose.

  “Guess what, kitty?” I said, scratching his ears. “I am getting married.”

  The cat purred with approval. He jumped on the coffee table, sniffed the tea chest and proceeded to rub his whiskers on the metal edge.

  “He is a tea planter,” I added, stroking the cat’s belly with my big toe. “And he lives in the jungles with cats much bigger than you. So the next time he comes, show him a little respect, will you?”

  The cat blinked his big yellow eyes and then narrowed them down to slits. He was thinking deeply, I could tell.

  CHAPTER 14

  After my grandmother died, Dadamoshai never again slept in the master bedroom of the house. He moved out into a small room adjoining his study. It was narrow and sparsely furnished like a monk’s cell with a single bed against the wall, a small side table and reading lamp and not much else.

  The main bedroom remained dark and shuttered, largely unused. It had become a storeroom of sorts, filled with miscellaneous furniture and bric-a-brac. There were folding chairs, dusty files and old court manuscripts under the bed and a sitar in a cloth case in one corner.

  The morning after Manik’s proposal, Dadamoshai called me into his study. He was writing at his desk, his glasses askew and that preoccupied, faraway look he often had in his eyes. He opened a drawer absentmindedly and handed me a small silk pouch. It jangled. Inside was an old-fashioned bejeweled silver key chain, the kind traditional brides wore looped into the waistband of their saris.

  “In the old bedroom you will find a trunk,” Dadamoshai said. “One of these keys should fit. Inside are some of your grandmother’s things. You may need them for your wedding.”

  Tears pricked my eyes. I sat down on the cane ottoman and buried my face in my hands.

  “Hai Khuddah, now what’s the matter?” said Dadamoshai, looking at me anxiously. “Why the tears?”

  “What will happen...?” I began then choked up. “Who will take care of you, Dadamoshai? Who will do your work?”

  Dadamoshai sighed deeply. He removed his spectacles and squeezed the inside corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “My goodness, maiyya, is that what is worrying you? Did you for a moment think I would put such a burden on your tender shoulders?”

  I said nothing.

  “Layla, the work I do is not dependent on you or me. We are only conduits for the bigger forces, don’t you understand?”

  The cat emerged from behind the bookcase and yawned, extending its forepaws in a long, luxurious stretch. He then rubbed his head on the cane ottoman and proceeded to sharpen his claws on the sides, making a sharp, rasping noise.

  “Nobody is indispensable in this world,” Dadamoshai continued slowly. “When I am dead and gone, the universe will find replacements. I let the old man upstairs worry about these things. For all I know, there may be people more capable than I am. My job is to do what I can during my small sojourn and move on.”

  “I thought you were counting on me to take over your school,” I said.

  “You were inclined to follow in my footsteps, maiyya, so I let you. But remember, child, this work is bigger and goes beyond you or me.”

  He studied me tenderly, a velvety softness coming into his eyes. “Your life is with your husband now, maiyya. You were loaned to me for a little while. The time has come for me to let you go.”

  * * *

  The master bedroom smelled damp and musty. I cracked open the shutters and sharp sunlight sliced into the room. Dust motes floated in the air. A cockroach scurried across the floor dragging a broken leg. The old trunk sat in the corner under a faded green tablecloth with a pile of old files sitting on top.

  It was a solid bottle-green trunk, the old-fashioned kind, made of hammered metal, with brass rivets running along the seams. I tried the keys one by one in the rusty lock. It clicked open on the third try. The heavy lid swung open, and the air was suffused with the heady smell of cloves, sandalwood and mothballs.

  Inside, individually wrapped in soft mulmul cotton, were the most exquisite saris I had ever seen. They were rare heirloom silks, each a collector’s piece, breathtaking in their beauty. There were heavy brocaded Tanchois in aqua and mauve that captured light in faceted tones like mother-of-pearl. Benarasi silks flamed in vermilion, saffron and rich peacock-blue, interwoven with threads of pure gold. There were Dhakais delicate as gossamer and royal Baluchoris flamboyantly hand-embroidered with hunting scenes from the great Ramayana. Every sari had a perfectly tailored matching blouse and silk petticoat.

  At the bottom of the trunk I found a Kashmiri sandalwood box. Inside was a photo of my grandparents on their wedding day. Dadamoshai looked tall and stately in his crisp white dhoti and nagra slippers, their upturned toes curled like the prow of a ship. His face was tilted slightly toward his new bride. They both wore tuberose garlands, thick as pythons around their necks. My grandmother wore a shimmering silk of a dark color and a gold embroidered veil. She was a tall, slim woman. The top of her veiled head reached just below my grandfather’s chin.

  Beneath the photo was a small brass container in the shape of a teardrop, with a thin applicator stick. It was a sindoor jar containing the vermilion powder worn by married Hindu women in the part of their hair. There was also a set of traditional white and red wedding bangles.

  Later that evening I asked Dadamoshai why my own mother had not inherited the saris.

  “Your mother was very different,” Dadamoshai said. “She went the other extreme. She had very radical views and shunned material things. She became a communist when she eloped with your father.”

  “So why did you not sell the saris? They must be worth a fortune.”

  “I kept them for you,” he said simply. “You look exactly like your grandmother. I imagined you would make a beautiful bride someday.”

  Guahati

  5th January 1946

  My dear sister,

  I read your letter with great excitement. I can’t believe you are getting married to a tea planter! As you can imagine I am just bursting with questions. I must say you kept your secret very well. But now coming to think of it, Manik only proposed recently, didn’t he? Before that you had to be very discreet, I suppose.

  It makes me sad to think how out of touch we have been all these years. Getting married and moving to Guahati took my life in a different direction altogether. The children came along, first Anik then Aesha. In between, my father-in-law suffered a heart attack. Living in a big joint family can be overwhelming. I can’t seem to find time for myself anymore.

  I must say I am looking forward to your wedding. Unfortunately Jojo will not be able to attend. He just got a new job with a petrochemical company here in Guahati and he doesn’t get any leave. I am thinking of coming with Anik alone this time and leaving Aesha with my in-laws. She is crawling now and doesn’t sit still for a single minute. I don’t think I can manage both of them on the train by myself.

  I am sending you a photo of Aesha dressed up in a red sari taken on the day of her rice-eating ceremony. What she is chewing on is a gold bangle! As you can see, Jojo has a very big extended family.

  I am looking forward to seeing you soon, dear sister, and catching up on our chats.

  Yours,

  Moon

  Despite our best attempts to keep things low-key, the announcement of my engagement to Manik Deb still created a small furor in my hometown. It set tongues wagging up and down the neighborhood, all
around the coconut grove and all the way past the bamboobari to the fish market by the river.

  Most people thought it was an ill-conceived but oddly suitable match, like the marriage of two hunchbacks. Manik and I were both discards of society: misfits, two of the same shoe, hence not much use to anyone else.

  After all, who would marry a man who had been disowned by his family? Manik Deb had no future and no money to his name. He was a dubious character, wayward and reckless. And I, at the ripe old age of twenty, was almost a seed pumpkin. I was the bad-luck child. I was overeducated. I had no parents. I did not know how to embroider tablecloths or play the harmonium. I had no skills to raise a family or run a household. And the most unforgivable of all: I had no dowry to make up for my pathetic shortfalls.

  But by and large folks wished us well. It was the charitable thing to do. Still, a dark cloud of foreboding loomed over our marriage. We were ignoring the rules of society. The fortune-teller had not been consulted, our horoscopes had not been matched and no auspicious wedding date had been selected. These were but small, preemptive measures against the enormity of fate. One did not take chances. Manik and I were openly inviting the wrath of the gods. Such heedlessness could only have harsh repercussions.

  CHAPTER 15

  I had envisioned my wedding as a simple affair, with a few close relatives and minimum fuss, but this was not to be.

  One week before my wedding day, a huge flock of relatives descended upon us like noisy cranes from the sky. Many came from Dadamoshai’s hometown in Sylhet, from across the river in East Bengal. These were the kith and kin I never knew I had. Cousins, aunts, grandmothers, great-aunts, and so-and-so related to so-and-so, twice removed from places unheard of in some village tucked in some bamboo grove somewhere.

  First came the womenfolk with children in tow. They took over Dadamoshai’s house, camping out like squatters on every inch of space they could find. Overnight our peaceful house turned into a raucous fish market. Every room except Dadamoshai’s was invaded and filled with miscellaneous lumpy bags belonging to miscellaneous people. Small children tore through the rooms like mini typhoons. They romped and squealed and dragged quilts off unmade beds onto the floor. Every now and then an ear-piercing howl erupted when some irritable adult smacked one. The din was unholy, the chaos unbelievable.

  Dadamoshai beat a hasty retreat to the town courthouse, where he stayed for long hours, coming home only for dinner. I, on the other hand, was expected to mingle with the womenfolk and partake in the wedding preparations, which truthfully there was not much of.

  Manik and I had opted for a secular Bhramo Samaj wedding ceremony, which many relatives considered drastically abbreviated and radically modern. It had none of the elaborate rituals and fanfare that went with the three-day, traditional Hindu wedding. For our wedding, there would be a simple exchange of vows and garlands followed by a blessing ceremony and a wedding luncheon.

  The trimming down of festivities dismayed many of our relatives, but it hardly stopped them from using the occasion to have a party of their own. The Biyebari, or wedding house, traditionally the bride’s home, was the place where relatives gathered to catch up with one another. Women came minus their husbands—husbands showed up later, usually on the day of the wedding itself—so they were free to gossip, joke and curse with glee.

  The mobile kitchen arrived in an impressive convoy of rickshaws. There were the traditional wedding cooks sitting atop sacks of potatoes and onions, followed by helpers bearing big-eared brass cauldrons and ladles long as boating oars. The cooking crew dug a coal fire pit, strung a tarp for shade and set up a makeshift kitchen beneath the mango tree by the front gate. All day long, the ghee spluttered and spices sizzled while fragrant spirals of smoke wafted through the tree branches. Gigantic meals were served piping hot on fresh banana leaves to relatives and any neighbors or friends who cared to stop by. There was always plenty for all.

  Mima swept in, bossy, energetic and bristling with excitement. Getting “the girls nicely settled” had been her top priority all along. Moon was already happily married with two children, and I was on my way. Mima dusted her palms, as though she had just put the last bun in the oven.

  “Very good, very good,” she kept muttering, beaming at all. “Now even Layla will be nicely settled.” What “nicely settled” meant was anyone’s guess.

  Mima appointed herself as the event manager. She hitched her sari higher and pointed a fat finger and ordered everyone around, left and right. The skinny relatives scurried like cockroaches. The chubby ones grumbled behind her back. More often than not, things went hopelessly awry, and everyone blamed everyone else.

  Mima took charge of my bridal wardrobe, as well. She summoned the town tailor, who arrived wheeling a bicycle heaped with bales of cloth, followed by a young lad carrying a sewing machine on his head. The tailor parked himself on one corner of the veranda. He tucked a pencil behind his ear and clenched sewing pins in his teeth as he rolled out bales of cloth across the floor, which he cut with a loud crunching noise of his mammoth scissors. The sewing machine clattered and stopped, clattered and stopped right through the sleepy afternoon amidst the chirping of sparrows, while his skinny helper boy hemmed and ironed.

  With amazing speed and on Mima’s bossy instructions, he turned out nighties, petticoats and blouses and, of all things, a frilly apron. Since nobody quite knew the functions of an apron or what it actually looked like, the tailor had to devise a design from an illustration in the Woman’s Journal Cookbook. It pictured only the front, so he used his imagination to design the back. The end result was a frilly frocklike creation worthy of Goldilocks.

  “If Layla is going to live with the English people, an apron is most essential,” Mima declared.

  “But when does one wear such a dress?” Spinster Aunt asked in her thin, reedy voice.

  “When she is serving her guests tea and cakes of course,” said Mima authoritatively. “I know these English people. It is very proper to wear an apron.” She glared around, daring anyone to challenge her wisdom.

  Mima’s big concern was that I be decked in full regalia like a proper Indian bride, including copious amounts of wedding jewelry. For me that was an odious thought.

  “Please, Mima,” I begged, “the wedding sari is gorgeous enough. I don’t need jewelry. It’s too much!”

  “What? What?” Mima’s eyebrows knotted like two angry snakes ready to fight. “Do you want to look like a widow on your wedding day? Do you want everyone to think your Dadamoshai is a pauper? The whole town will call him a stingy cat.”

  “Dadamoshai does not care what the neighbors say,” I retorted. “Besides, he is poor and not ashamed of it.”

  But there was no butting heads with Mima.

  She wagged a fat finger at me. “Now, don’t make big, big eyes at me, Layla. You will listen to your elders. I have decided you will wear all of Moon’s wedding jewelry. Nobody needs to know it is not yours. I don’t want to hear any arguments—understand? I have asked Moon to bring everything. You must dress like a proper bride.”

  “But, Mima, Moon is coming alone by train. Why are you making her carry her jewelry? She will get robbed!” I cried.

  “Moon will throw chili powder if someone attacks her,” Mima said confidently. “I have told her what to do.”

  I sighed. But despite my worry, I could hardly wait for Moon to get here. There was a personal matter I wanted to discuss with her. It was something I could not talk to anyone else about.

  Three days later, I spotted Moon paying off the rickshaw man at the gate. A small boy clung to her sari and drummed his feet, throwing up small clouds of dust as he howled loudly. Big tears rolled down his cheeks; his mouth was a big open O. He was oddly dressed from top to toe in a motley brown.

  “Who on EARTH are all these people?” Moon cried, seeing me. “My goodness, what a circus! I was
wondering if I had come to the right house!”

  The culinary feast was in full swing under the mango tree. The cook’s helper, a frail lad, sat on his haunches chopping a mountain of eggplant. A cauldron of tea bubbled on the coals, and a transistor radio wedged between the branches blared out soulful cinema songs.

  Moon was as pretty as ever. Despite the long journey and her slightly disheveled appearance, her honey skin glowed, and her curly hair, carelessly bunched up in a handkerchief, was coming undone all around her lovely face.

  “Oh, Moon, thank God you are here!” I cried, hugging her. “The whole world has descended for my wedding. It is intolerable.”

  I peeked at the small boy clinging to her sari. He was staring at me wide-eyed through tear-clumped lashes. He was a cute little fellow, with coal-black eyes and a tumble of curly hair.

  “Hey, who is this, Mr. Chocolate, all dressed in brown?” I asked.

  “Aye, Anik,” said Moon, giving him a little prod. “This is your Layla didi, who is getting married. You were asking all about her in the train, remember?”

  As soon she mentioned the train, his face crumpled and he erupted into another howl.

  “Enough, Anik!” said Moon sternly. She handed me her bag. “His toy engine fell down the train toilet. That’s what the big fuss is about. Just as well I left the baby with my in-laws. There was no way I could have managed them both.”

  The cook’s boy wiped his hands and came over to help unload Moon’s suitcase from the rickshaw.

  “I can’t wait to see baby Aesha,” I said. “She looks just like a little doll in the photo you sent.”

  “Everybody adores her. She crawls around everywhere and puts everything in her mouth.” Moon swiveled around. “Oh-hoh! Let go, please!” she said irritably, flapping her sari, trying to shake off Anik, who was clinging tightly to her. She rolled her eyes and mouthed silently, very jealous. “And Aesha has a big brother who does not listen to his mother and wants to wear brown all the time.”