Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami

  “What does that doctor dolt mean, ‘affected her mind’?” demanded Ma. “Was it ever okay, hanh? All doctors are like that, knownothings.”

  Yet for all her ranting against Meera Aunty, I knew that Ma felt twinges of pity for her. Or perhaps it was guilt. She didn’t say anything when Dadda sent money for her hospital bills, small parcels of Diwali sweets, a new sari for the Yugadhi festival. Ma was like that, she said one thing and meant something else. It was her way of warding off evil, I think. She used to say that no good ever came out of telling the whole truth, that there were harmful creatures listening behind every door, bad winds lurking among the trees waiting to twist everything good and beautiful into hideous deformities.

  And Linda, like Ma, evaded the truth. If a friend called to compare notes before an exam, Ayah rushed to pick up the phone. “Halloo,” she would say, “Kamini baby? No, she is not here.”

  “Linda Ayah, who was it?” I would ask.

  “Some girl from your school. Cunning creature, purposely disturbing, trying to find out how much you have studied!”

  “Why did you lie to her, Linda? She knows I am at home. Where would I go at ten in the night?”

  “For you naughty babies,” Linda declared with a martyred look, “for you only, your Ma and I are sending ourselves to Hell telling lies and all.”

  Ma never told me and Roopa that we were clever or pretty, since such a blatant admission would surely summon up the worst of imps and goblins. No matter how often I brought home medals for coming first in history, geography, biology, Ma neverever praised me.

  “Why only one prize this time?” she asked instead. “Who got the medal for geometry? For Hindi? For English? That Reena Bukhshi, I am sure. Such a clever, hard-working angel that one is! She must have made her mother swell with pride!”

  Ma scolded and pushed and criticized all the time, and yet when I came home with prizes, she arranged them in the polished glass display case that Girdhari the carpenter made. Girdhari had sat in the side verandah of the house for one month, measuring and cutting, sawing and planing. The wood dust lay in fine drifts all over the house and drove the maid-servant mad with frustration, for no matter how many times she swept and swabbed, the sawdust piled up. The showcase had five shelves and I was expected to fill them all. I started to feel that each of the subjects I studied was a demon to be vanquished. At night, I woke struggling and breathless from trying to push off the heavy bhooth who sat on my face, crawled into my nostrils, my ear-holes, the slit between my eyelids, smothering me so that I would not be able to finish the task Ma had set me. Fill those shelves, fill those shelves. Ma dusted the shelves herself, polishing each cup and medal, pulling the pink and yellow and orange tags forward so that visitors could see that I had won all these honours since Upper KG, nono baby-class itself! She also made cobri-mitthai whenever I brought home a new prize, for she knew it was my favourite sweet.

  “Borrow some brains from your older sister and perhaps we can make a cupboard for you as well,” she said acidly, stabbing a flat hand in Roopa’s direction.

  In order to deflect the evil eye from both of us, she spoke in a code language of mentioning and not mentioning that would deceive the most envious of spirits. But I wished that Ma would praise me at least once. I craved a pat on my back, a “Shabaash, what a clever child!” Other people were dazzled by the array of glittering trophies in the showcase and remarked, “What a brilliant daughter you have, Mrs. Moorthy, an Einstein positively, she will be a nation’s pride one day!”

  But Ma would frown, smile, frown in rapid succession and protest, “Ohnono, you should see how well others in her class are doing. She is only mediocre. How many times I have to tell her, work hard or you will end up an ayah or jamedami. But does she listen?”

  Ma insisted that nobody ever listened to her, only Linda Ayah.

  Ma was ambitious for Roopa and me. “You have to be one step ahead of the rest of the world,” she declared, “better than the best. Don’t let anybody be ahead of you.”

  When I came second in grade one, Ma wept with frustration. Then she met the teacher and got a copy of the syllabus for the whole year. As soon as I came home, Ma gave me a glass of cold milk—good for the bones; a handful of almonds—good for the brains; and a banana—vitamins A and C. She sat with me at the dining table, teaching me to read from the books the teacher was planning to use towards the end of the year.

  “Two steps ahead,” she said with satisfaction when we were done.

  By then we were already tackling math problems that were on the school syllabus for grade three. I longed for Sundays when Ma let me go free. All the way through baby-school, high school and pre-university, my mother pushed and scolded, her words stinging, buzzing about my head like a crazed bee.

  “Why did Neetha Kamath get higher marks than you in math?”

  “Why didn’t you get the heroine’s role in the school play?”

  She embarrassed me by appearing at school to discuss my weak points with Sister Jesuina, or Sister Marie-Therèse, or Sister Clementine.

  “This silly girl,” she would say, patting my head, smiling falsely, her eyes watching the nun’s face, waiting for her to say, “No, Mrs. Moorthy, your daughter is doing fine.” Ma was never satisfied with a mere “doing fine.” She expected the sisters to tell her that I was brilliant, that I was a sure candidate for a rank in the All India School Board exams.

  I studied desperately into the night, prayed that everything I had learnt would remain in my head when I confronted the exam paper. I collected bundles of darbha grass to place before the tiny figure of the god Ganesha in Ma’s prayer room, for he was the remover of obstacles. When Ma asked, irritated, who was bringing rubbish into the room, I kept quiet, afraid to let my mother into my fears. I couldn’t bear to eat breakfast on exam days, for immediately my stomach cramped and coiled, making me want to rush to the toilet.

  “What is all this drama?” Ma demanded. “Making a big fuss-muss over everything. Do I give you poison in your food that you get loose motion every morning? Drink some Amruth-dhaara, you will be all right. Now eat.”

  I hated Amruth-dhaara. When I thought of those agonizing exam days, the anxiety of waiting for my report card, my mouth filled with the ugly taste of the shit-syrup. Roopa gave it that name—lucky Roopa who wasn’t ever concerned about what Ma would say if she came last in her class.

  “I don’t want to do anything except get married and have babies,” she said, her dark face mulish.

  I wished I had the courage of her convictions. Where did that defiance grow from? Ma withered before it.

  “You should be happy I am taking more interest in you than in your sister, useless monkey that she is,” she said to me. “At least one child of mine should get a chance to achieve all that I wanted. It is your duty to keep your mother’s head high. After you are married you do what you want, none of my business then.”

  Why did Ma push me so hard to studystudystudy if she was planning to get me married, decorate me with useless jewellery and zari saris? I would rather read Mills and Boon romances, where a tall, morose Greek tycoon clasped the heroine to his heaving chest and whispered “Agape mou” in her shell-like ear. I preferred discussing those torrid romances furtively with the other girls in moral science class, while Mother Superior Mary Albina whined in a high-pitched, exalted voice, “Girls, remember the three Ds—decency, dignity and decorum—they are your armour in the world outside. They will help you hold your head aloft in times of distress.”

  I wanted to swagger around the school grounds with Miranda Fernandez, who giggled through Mother Superior’s sermons and said loudly, “Bloody Albino, what she means is don’t let anyone get inside your sainted knickers. Keep your head aloft and your skirts down.” (Miranda, the daring one, who wrote “lover” and “bitch” on the toilet walls, and sprayed herself generously with perfume, defying the Sisters’ insistence that we wear no perfume, nail-polish, make-up.) Instead I was more decorous, dignified and dec
ent than a whole convent. I plodded doggedly through algebra, geometry theorems, calculus. Ma wanted me to major in science. An engineer or a doctor made money, no need to get married then.

  “You did science,” I sulked, “and you got married.”

  “Those days things were different,” Ma snapped. “My parents did not give me the encouragement I am giving you.”

  I had to get away from my mother. As quickly as possible. Even if it meant a hundred bottles of Amruth-dhaara, dozens of eggs to make my brains work and math tutoring every evening after school. I stayed awake till two-three o’clock in the morning, my one ambition being to finish school and get out of the house, away from Ma. Maybe even get married, although if Ma was to be believed, that would be like escaping from one locked room into another, forever wandering in a maze, hitting my nose against closed doors.

  When Dadda came home the earth swung around and became a warm, comforting place. I could tell him how Ma was forcing me to join the stupid dance-drama at school and after I cried a bit Dadda would rescue me from the grasping tentacles of Ma’s will. But if I was my father’s favourite child, then Roopa was most certainly Ma’s. When I back-chatted my mother, or left my underwear on top of the laundry basket instead of burying it at the bottom as a girl with a sense of shame would, Ma would remark, “Just like your crazy aunt! You are turning out to be a Meera!” When Roopa did the same, Ma said that she was a dog’s child, a dirty-dirty shani, but never-ever used the Meera curse.

  I was always alert to the rivers threading their way through every house we inhabited. I had developed a fine instinct for these unseen bodies of water, knowing which ones ran deep, where the currents were dangerous and whirlpools lurked. I knew that a chasm gaped between my parents, a hole so deep that even Dadda with his engineer’s hands could not build a bridge to span it. If I spoke of the currents and eddies to Roopa, she ran to Ma complaining that I was scaring her.

  “Ma!” she cried. “Kamini says that if I don’t walk carefully in the house, I will drown.”

  Roopa could see nothing beyond her own tilted nose, and Ma only yelled at me. “Act your age,” she scolded. “You are too big to be scaring your sister with stupid nonsense stories.”

  As we grew older, I stopped trying to show Roopa the hidden worlds that seethed beneath the surface of the ordinary, for it seemed that she had, in her mind, closed the doors that opened into imagination. If she could not see a purple rose on a bush or a peacock on the front lawn, she declared, it couldn’t possibly be there.

  “I have rubbed the peel of a ripe Nagpur orange on this card,” wrote Ma. “Right now it smells as fresh and tangy as the fruit itself. I hope the smell has not faded by the time the card reaches you. And if it has, all you have to do is imagine.”

  The postcard had the picture of a Hindi film actress with thick, pinkish thighs and breasts that jutted aggressively under a shimmering brassiere of sequins. Where did Ma manage to pick up these awful cards? As usual, apart from the vague note, there was nothing else, no information on where she was planning to go next, no return address.

  I stared out the narrow window set high in the wall of my basement apartment. The snow had piled up in chill swaths, and I could barely see what lay beyond. I felt like a mole tunnelled into its lair of darkness, weary of the never-ending night that had descended on the city. When I left home in the morning the stars were still scattered in the sky, the moon a pale aureole. And at five in the evening when I trudged home laden with coat and sweater and muffler and mitts, barely able to turn my head for the padding around my neck, it was still night. I held Ma’s card against my face and breathed in deeply. Opened my eyes and I could see, against the implacable white of the snow outside my window, dark leaves and the bright colour of fruit ripening in the sun. My mouth filled with the tart juice of a burst orange.

  In the unkempt garden that was shared by all the apartments in our Calcutta house, there grew a lemon tree. I loved to crush the thick, porous leaves and sniff at the lingering spice on my fingertips. The tree never bore fruit. Our washerwoman, pounding the life out of clothes in the cemented courtyard behind the building, said that it was because the tree was male. She nudged Linda Ayah and remarked, “Like our Ganesh Peon, that lemon tree! Big-big kottays and no kiddies!” She cupped her hands and moved them up and down as if weighing fruit, and then shouted with laughter, her mouth wide open, revealing large, jagged teeth stained black and orange with tobacco juice.

  On Sundays, after an oil-bath, Ma sent me out into the sunny courtyard where Linda Ayah waited to rub my hair dry. Our building sat at the far end of the colony, and across the high brick wall I could hear the sounds of traffic on Cunningham Road and the wail of ambulance sirens, for there was at least one accident in the city every single day. Sometimes I would catch the mournful boom of a steamer on the River Hooghly, or the siren crying out warning of the bore tide rushing in. The streets of Calcutta were so crowded that it seemed you were stuck in the same spot for hours, inching only slightly towards your destination. There was invariably a procession or a strike going on, creating tedious traffic jams, so that, one day in every week, we were late to school. Roopa and I travelled by bus now, for this was a large city and our school was too far to walk to.

  “Don’t talk to strangers,” warned Ma. “Kamini, don’t dream and stare out of the window. Hold your sister’s hand, so you are together all the time. It is time you learned to be responsible for someone else.”

  Now that I had turned twelve, I noticed that Ma spoke to me differently, almost like a friend. Even the dreaded oil-bath day was no longer a wet battleground but a time when Ma talked to me, told me of her own childhood, gave me advice. Ayah was not allowed into the bathroom to pour water over my head any more. Now only Ma could see my body, decide that it was time I wore a brassiere. I wanted her to buy me a red one from the vendor outside our colony gates. The man claimed that it would give me a figure like that of the film actress Rekha. Then maybe Frankie Wood the club caretaker would look at me.

  “Only harlots wear those things,” Ma said as she pushed my head downwards, her fingers stroking oil into the base of my skull, so warm, so warm. “Be careful how you dress, be careful who you speak to. You are twelve years old and you don’t know whatall can happen.”

  I was too grown up to be afraid of Linda Ayah’s ghosts and imps, but not too old to worry over Ma’s tales of girls who got into terriblehorrible trouble.

  “There was a girl named Alamelu,” said Ma, “who lived in a house with a garden full of shoe-flowers and travelled by bus to college.”

  This Alamelu loved university, her teachers, the smell of books in the high-ceilinged library, the stone buildings, even the grumpy librarian. Her favourite subject was chemistry, for the professor had the ability to turn it into something more magical than a dry profusion of formulae. Alamelu planned to do a Master’s degree and perhaps a Ph.D., provided her parents did not get her married.

  “It is good for a woman to be ambitious,” said Ma approvingly. Her stories had several messages—study hard, reach for the best, don’t be brazen—and she never failed to point them all out to me.

  Alamelu wanted to spend a lifetime with sulphides, oxides, carbides, powders, ores and solutions, all those substances frothing and fuming in bell-jars and test-tubes. Which was why she was reluctant to tell her parents about the three loafers from Dominic’s College across the road.

  I could imagine them, with their tight pants, their loud shirts open to reveal their chests, their slick hair and bold glances. Ma said that they lounged at the bus-stand, near the tea-stalls, scribbling obscenities on walls and aiming spit at the pillars holding up the tin roof of the bus-shelter.

  “They might not even have noticed Alamelu in her cotton salwar-kameez suits, or dull saris with long blouses that covered most of her waist,” continued Ma. Alamelu’s mother was strict about her clothes, insisting on getting her to hide as much skin as possible, and never mind the steaming summer heat. But unfor
tunately for Alamelu, the three boys caught the same bus as she, swaying along on the ride back to the colony stop. At first, they were content with comments—“Hi Miss,” “Hey-hey beauty”—accompanied by leering glances that made Alamelu want to jump off the bus. Instead she sat stony-faced as near the driver as possible, staring out the window. They hung over her and pushed their crotches into her shoulder, leaned across her to peer out of the window. Sometimes they got lucky and found a seat beside her. Then they pressed against her thigh, dropped a careless arm across the back of her seat and whispered in her ear. Nobody in the bus had the courage to interfere, for these were goondas, violent fellows who carried knives.

  One evening they followed her into the colony and one of them pulled out a knife. With a single stroke, he sliced open the back of Alamelu’s kameez, and a little of her back as well. “She should have screamed, she should have told someone about the rogues,” sighed Ma. “Listentome! A woman is never safe!”

  I felt the power of my mother’s fingers in my scalp, kneading the skin and bone and flesh. Knowing that this was the only time I might get a reply, I asked Ma why she loved Roopa more than me.

  “You are both the same to me,” said Ma.

  “But Ma, you rub almond oil on her skin and mustard on mine. You never scold her when she gets her sums all wrong. You love my sister more.”

  “I did the same for you when you were younger. You don’t remember, that’s all.”

  Soon after, for the Diwali festival, she bought me my first sari, and pinned it in place with two dozen safety pins so that it wouldn’t slide off when I walked.