Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami

  Amma is still doubtful. “He has too many sisters. With responsibilities like that, will he be able to look after my daughter?”

  “Look,” says the priest, holding up a pair of imaginary scales. “On this side education, looks, job, on that side big family. Are they going to live together? No. Maybe a few rupees every month will have to be sent; after all, the boy is the oldest son and has a duty to his family. And most important of all, the horoscope, where will you find such a beautiful horoscope?”

  The pujari is so ecstatic over the compatibility that he has already told half the town.

  “Invite the boy, let us have a viewing ceremony. I will pick a good date for you,” he tells my father. Appa hesitates. He had not expected a ceremony, just a quiet get-together with the boy. “I will select a date at no extra charge,” offers Raghotthamachar magnanimously, already planning to make up for that loss at the wedding, by asking for a silk dhothi with two lines of gold instead of one, perhaps. Naturally all our relatives arrive to view this auspicious creature with the marvellous horoscope. After all, if for some witless reason my family refuses this prince among grooms, there are other girls in our family in line for marriage.

  This is how I like to imagine it all happened. The priest, lusting after a silk cloth, ten rupees, a bag of rice and a bottle of ghee—which is what my father paid him—fiddled with the positions of birth stars and forced our horoscopes to agree.

  When I tell my mother this, she shrugs, irritated. “You are a disgruntled soul. From the moment you were born you could never be happy with what you had. You wanted everybody else’s share as well.”

  “Not another husband,” I retort, hurt by her lack of concern. “One is bad enough.”

  “I see the prospect of marriage hasn’t smoothed that knife in your mouth. Is this how you will talk to your husband?” Amma never lets me forget that my tongue has got me into trouble more than once. There is a time for words and then another when it is better to keep quiet, she says, to sit and listen, to watch and wait. My mother has mastered the art of dropping her words into the right slots, and look how peaceful her life is! “Saroja, Saroja, why do you have to cause trouble all the time?” she continues. “Don’t forget, you are a woman now, with a life of your own, and you will have to clean up the messes you create. I will not, and neither will your father.”

  My first meeting with the man I am to marry is almost like looking at a photograph. I learn nothing about him. And that sense of being in the presence of a puzzle does not diminish all the years I spend with him. He should have been a hermit, so distant is he from the world we live in. But of course I don’t know all that when we first meet.

  “Ah, Saroja, you are leaving us on a long journey,” sighs Chinna, her cataract-covered eyes milky with tears.

  “Chinna, that sounds like I am going to die,” I protest, peering over my shoulder to look at my elaborate braid. I know that as the day wears on, the clusters of flowers threaded into a soft mat of new hay will become uncomfortably heavy. But that, my Cousin Neela assures me, is nothing compared to the waiting terrors of marriage. The flower-woman Jayamma made the jadey with fresh jasmine buds, just beginning to open from the warmth of my head, and thin orange kanakambra blossoms that match my wedding sari.

  “Hanh, Chinna?” I tease. “Am I going to die, or what?”

  “Ayyo-Rama-Rama, don’t say such wretched things on this bright day,” scolds Chinna, pushing my head to one side so that she can screw the heavy gold drops into my ear lobe. “You are starting a new life, that’s all, a beautiful new life, may all the gods bless you.”

  “How do you know it will be a beautiful life?”

  Chinna’s eyes fill with tears once again. “How cruel you are today, child.” She wipes her eyes with the end of her sari. “But you are right, what would I know of the wonders of married life, unfortunate one that I am?”

  I immediately regret my words. Today I have promised myself that I will be good and sweet as the almond burfi that the cooks have prepared for the wedding feast. How can I forget that Chinna is a child-widow? Appa’s second cousin, she has been with our family for more than two decades. Her husband died when she was barely ten years old and her father, unable to bear the shame of a widowed daughter, packed her off to relatives.

  “She is no use to me,” he said mournfully to my grandfather. “Perhaps she will help in your home.”

  Chinna moves from house to house, cooking, looking after expectant mothers, bathing newborn babies, soothing quarrelsome children with sugar cubes and stories. My father’s sister, Vani Atthey, tells me that a widow is worth less than a servant. “Why your mother is spoiling that chicken-headed one, God only understands! Waste of money, that’s what I say!”

  For a few years, Chinna lives with Vani Atthey, who has just delivered her first child. One day after lunch, Atthey disappears into her bedroom to feed the baby, and my mother sits in the curving verandah making herself paan. I sit close beside her playing with a handful of cowrie shells, watching as she deftly spreads white chalk on the paan leaves. Chinna appears silently from the cool dark of the inside rooms and settles down near Amma’s feet.

  “I can’t live here,” she says abruptly, twisting the end of her sari. “You have to take me away. I will die if you don’t.”

  “Why, what is wrong?” Amma carefully folds a leaf around a small pile of betel-nut shavings and coconut and places it in her mouth. She purses her lips with pleasure and her heavy chin breaks into little creases and dimples.

  “I feel ashamed to tell you,” hedges Chinna, giving me a sidelong glance. I ignore the look, which clearly says “Go away, child.”

  “If you don’t tell me, how do I know what you want to say?” says Amma, applying chuna to yet another leaf. After lunch, regardless of whose house we are in, she settles in the verandah with a silver tin full of tiny containers of the white paste, betel-nut and coconut shavings, small red sugar balls, kesari, cloves and fresh paan leaves. She allows herself all of thirty minutes to make up the tiny triangles and another half an hour to chew five of them, slowly, one after another, her eyes narrowed with pleasure. She isn’t very happy about having her reverie interrupted.

  “Well, what is wrong?” Tiny flecks of crimson betel juice trickle out of the corner of her mouth. She wipes it delicately with the edge of her sari. All of Amma’s saris have red stains at exactly the same spot on the pallav, even her good silk ones. With time, the stains fade from bright red to brown, and when she pats one of the saris and says, “You can have this when you are married,” I have to force myself to smile and act excited. I do not want any of those saris marked by my mother’s life; they disgust me.

  “It’s Vani’s brother-in-law, that loafer Juggi, he isn’t decent.” Chinna lowers her voice so that I have to strain to hear what she is saying. I want to lean forward but am afraid that the movement will attract their attention and Amma will ask me to leave. I can sit through most adult conversations by keeping absolutely quiet, pretending to be absorbed in my games.

  Amma’s mouth, like a cow’s, is chewing, chewing steadily. I know that she doesn’t like Juggi very much. When Vani Atthey asks her to look for a bride for him, Amma tells her straight away that she cannot commit any poor innocent to Juggi’s hands.

  “I even talked to Vani,” Chinna sniffs, wiping her nose with her sari pallav. “But she can see no wrong in the wretched idler. She told me I was imagining things, I thought I was a great beauty and was hungry for a man’s glance. Chee-chee! I was so upset, I didn’t know what to do. Please take me away from here.”

  My mother, as usual, is silent. She does not trust herself to make any decisions without getting my father’s “Uh-hunh” of approval. I can hear her telling Appa, “Are you listening? We need Chinna again.”

  And Appa, smoothing a long hand over his dark, oiled hair, “Ohho?”

  A few weeks after we return home, Amma tells Vani Atthey that once again it is her turn to keep Chinna, for now she is expecting
my brother, and soon she will be too heavy to bend and lift and cook and clean. For many years after that, I believe that Amma has five children just to keep Chinna as long as possible.

  My father spares no expense for my wedding. A lavish display will, hopefully, draw grooms for my sisters like flies to honey. Our guests will go home and tell their friends, “Raghava’s daughter’s wedding? What a pity you weren’t invited. The food, cooked by Vishnu Bhatta himself, was fit for the gods. Such delicate pheni I have never tasted. Aha! you should have seen the arrangements they made for the boy’s party. Soap in silver cases for each person, two-sided zari saris for all the women, all, mind you, even the unimportant ones!”

  After the main ceremony, comes a series of smaller ones, for prosperity, for progeny, for health and long life. My cousins and aunts surround me with advice and information.

  “Do whatever he asks, he is your husband,” whispers Vani Atthey, coy and overdressed. She has forgiven me for refusing her brother-in-law.

  “Do not be as sweet as sugar, your in-laws will overwhelm you with work,” says a distant cousin known for the quality of her almond burfi, “nor as sour as tamarind or they will spit you out.”

  “Keep your jewellery in your own locker,” advises another aunt. “Such stories I have heard of men taking away the jewellery and giving to their own sisters and all! A woman’s bangaara is her safeguard against future calamity.”

  “Why do you have to say such unlucky words?” snaps my mother.

  The crowd stays with me for what seems to be the entire night, till somebody remembers that I am supposed to be in my husband’s room. I am escorted there with a lot of whispering and giggling, nudging and pinching. The room is on the second floor of the wedding house. Someone has strung yards of jasmine from ceiling fan to walls and it dribbles down the mosquito net poles, against the curtained windows. Brilliantly coloured pictures of gods and goddesses adorn the white walls. On a small table next to the bed is a jug of milk with crushed almonds.

  “Don’t forget to give him a BIG glass of it,” whispers a cousin. “I give my husband a glass every night and oh my, he turns into a stallion.”

  I let all the comments wash over my demurely bent head, allow them to shepherd me into the room. The day-long festivities have left me too exhausted to think, too numb to be nervous. My husband is already asleep. The relatives leave, disappointed, and I settle down in the easy chair for the night. How can I sleep in the same bed as a man I met only once? I am now Mrs. Vishwa Moorthy. I married this man in the presence of agni, varuna, vayu—fire, water and wind. To be certain, I am awed by the rituals that have bound us together: my sari pallav knotted to the end of his shawl, his fingers inserting rings on my toes, filling the part in my hair with blood-red kumkum. But, I ask myself as I sit in the darkened room, what is the significance of this blood and gold and silver? The priest has all the meanings wrapped up in Sanskrit, hidden from me.

  We leave for the station early next morning to catch the train that will carry my husband and me across the country to Ratnapura. The smell of our wedding still clings to me, a fading aroma of jasmine and sandal paste. Fresh vermilion singes a fiery mark on my forehead. My bangles tinkle every time I move and my toe-rings rub against my skin, raising thin blisters. I let them chafe against my toes, reluctant to take them off lest I draw ill upon myself.

  My family fills the compartment, smiling, awkward. They are here to say goodbye, for it is rude to parcel off daughter and new son-in-law without any ceremony. My brothers, shy with my husband, arrange my new trunks beneath the berths, and then crowd the entrance, smiling uneasily at nothing in particular. The entire compartment is reserved for us, and my mother cannot hide her awe.

  She nudges Chinna, who is weeping, rubbing her nose repeatedly in her sari pallav. “Did you see? What a fine boy we have got for our girl, eh? A whole compartment! Oh, her stars were auspicious!”

  My mother has lost her stoic expression, her usual lack of interest in everything. Perhaps it is just relief that I am finally out of her hair. My sisters shift from foot to foot; their eyes slide to my silent husband and drop almost immediately to stare at their feet. Appa disappears to return with a brown paper bag full of Cadbury’s chocolates, oranges and some magazines. I am taken aback by this sudden indulgence. When we were children, chocolates were an unusual treat in our home. After all, they were foreign, and anything British was suspect. My father notices my surprise and shrugs. Then he glances at my husband, the silent man standing a little away from my family with his hands clasped behind his back, and says, “A small something for the journey. To while your time away. As they say, time-pass, heh? Now we will have to leave, station-master just gave a green light.” He pats my head and looks significantly at Amma. “Let us go,” the look says, “we cannot waste the whole day here.”

  My mother touches my cheek and says, “Be good, be happy. Write us a postcard.”

  I nod silently, pushing away the urge to grab her hand and plead to go home with her and Appa. I don’t know this man, I want to say, how can you send me away with a stranger?

  Chinna hugs me fiercely, her nose wet and sticky against my neck. “A hundred years of happiness waits for you,” she mumbles. “Come back soon with an armful of good news.”

  At last we are alone in the compartment. The train starts moving and the station, ebbing gently away, is an undulating blur of colour and smell. Yellow bananas on the fruit-seller’s cart, the flash of white robes as we pass a group of Jain mendicants, the A.H. Wheeler bookstore, Lambani women in mirror-work skirts like peacocks, army jawans, all khakhi green, sitting on their trunks. Odours of stale milk and rotting fruit, sweat and smoke, cigarettes and drains, sometimes rising above and at others buried under the sweet aroma of camphor sticks, jasmine and sandalwood. I perch nervously on the edge of my seat, stare out the window. A vast cloud of smoke belches from the funnel of the engine ahead, darkening the sky. There is a smell of burning bone. My new husband slides the door shut, sits across from me and shakes a newspaper open. All in all, we have spoken five words since our wedding the previous day.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” The man taps a pipe against the edge of the compartment window.

  He does not wait for me to say anything. Just takes out a pipe—a pipe! Does he think he is an angrezi sahib or what? And a tin of Three Nuns tobacco.

  “I think smoke affects my lungs.”

  “You think?”

  “I hate the smell of smoke,” I reply.

  My mother would have been horrified. I disagree with my husband only a few hours after marrying him!

  “You will have to get used to it.”

  I open the window violently and feel the air rushing into my face. Hold the bars tight and glare out at the ripe sugar-cane fields flashing past. What will my mother say if I knock the pipe from his mouth and fling it out into the cane? What will my husband do? Be indulgent about the capriciousness of a bride? Or compress those thin lips and invoke his status as a Railway officer to order the train to stop? Perhaps he will make me crawl among the sugar-dripping canes to search for it.

  “You might catch some disease,” my husband tells me. He has a pleasant voice, a Mukesh playback-singer voice. Maybe he is musical.

  “What?” I ask, puzzled.

  “Beggars have been holding those same bars.” He wrinkles his nose fastidiously, as if he can smell rotting flesh. “We should have brought some antiseptic solution to wipe down the windows.”

  The thak-thaka-thak-thak of gravel hitting the wheels fills the compartment with noise. There is a thin whistle of air through the slats in the metal window shutters. My husband has pulled them down so that people on the platform looking for an empty compartment will not know that there is space available. We can hear thumps on our door all night, people wheedling to be let in, cursing our silence.

  “Excuse please,” a peremptory voice. “I have six children needing place to sit for night only.”

  “Excuse please, don’t
be selfish. Share and share alike, my children can sleep under the berths no problem.”

  “Excuse please, God will punish you for your lack of concern for fellow citizens.” The unseen man kicks the door hard. “Bloody high-class selfish no manners no kindness!” he rants. There is a brief silence punctuated by the scrape of a trunk against the corridor floor, a child’s cough. Then the voice again. “Ay Chunnoo, Munnoo, go to the toilet phata-phat. You piss here at night and I will twist your ears off. Tunnoo, put those pillows here.” A slap is followed by a howl of pain and a sharp reproach. “Witless like your mother, I said here, HERE!”

  We sit silent as breath, my husband still buried in his newspaper and me fighting the urge to open the door and let that swarm in. I would have welcomed the chattering warmth of other people in the compartment. Perhaps he is a shy person, I think. Tense as a clothes-line, I wait for a tentative sound, a touch. Isn’t that why he has booked a whole compartment for us, a honeymoon on wheels? Will I seem forward if I make the first move? I want to ask my new husband a hundred questions—after all, our lives are now linked. What is your job like? Do you travel a lot? Will you take me with you? What are your favourite foods? I hate bitter-gourd gojju, how about you? I will tell him how I long to be a doctor. I’ll warn him of my sharp tongue, assure him that it wags a lot but rarely causes any harm. I want him to know that my favourite flower is champa with its gentle perfume. My father buys my Amma flowers every Sunday from the temple. He does it even though she tells him that it is a complete waste of good money. But she tucks the long strand of jasmine into her oiled bun, a pleased smile teasing her lips. Will my husband perform these little courtesies, I wonder? Soon I can hear his even breathing over the clatter of the window shutters, the slap of gravel against the wheels. The narrow space between the berths is striped with light from passing stations. I lie awake for a long time, missing my room in my father’s house with its tiny barred window set high in the wall, and the rustle of wind in the coconut palms outside.