Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami

  Somewhere in the distance, probably from the servants’ quarters, floats the tinny bleat of a Hindi film song.

  O-o-o your eyes intoxicate,

  makes my heart palpitate.

  The silk of your skin

  makes my blood rush wild.

  O-o-o your eyes like wine.

  His breath puffs rapidly into my ear, his legs coarse with hair rub against mine. Then he rolls off, slowly collapsing on the bed, his head turned away from mine. I lie still on my back, stare unblinking at the ceiling fan rotating kiti-kit, kiti-kit. A rusty ball-bearing protests periodically, interfering with the sound of my husband’s rapid breath. I wait for him to stroke my face, tell me that I am beautiful. He stirs and stretches without a word, his breathing slows, eases into the soft snuffle of sleep. Moonlight from the window picks out the curve of his spine, shadows his buttocks.

  “Oh bhabhi-ji,” giggles Latha, her face smeared like a baby’s with mango pulp. “What naughty things you are telling us. You are making it all up, no?”

  Hameeda looks at me, a bit shocked, I think. Her full mouth is pursed censoriously and she wags her head as if to say, “This old woman, so shameless!”

  Her sister Sohaila has no such inhibitions. She waggles her eyebrows mischievously at me and says, “Arrey, just because she is old means that she must be like a sadhu? Go on, bhabhi-ji, tell us more of your xxx, censored stories. This is like sitting in a cinema house.”

  Hameeda looks at her and giggles. “Good thing this is a ladies only compartment, otherwise bhabhi-ji would be clicking her prayer beads in the corner.”

  “Somehow I can’t imagine her with prayer beads,” says Latha, her sharp eyes gleaming amusement. For all her gluttony and seeming lassitude, she is an observant woman.

  A strong odour wakes me from the thankful dark of sleep. That, and the warm band of sun lying across the bed, streaming in from the open windows. I blink and for a few minutes watch the specks of dust performing an energetic dance down the slide of light. I remember the soundless love-making of the night and wonder that my body neither thrills nor cringes at the memory. Perhaps this is because all that I can recall of the experience is my fear and my husband’s merciless quiet, his hands moving over me without any tenderness. I glance towards the windows, wide open, the curtains drawn apart. There are trees outside, the one closest to the window appears to be a mango. I can hear the insistent cawing of a crow and a whole cacophony of other bird sounds. Mynahs, perhaps. Another sound intrudes, one that I can’t identify immediately—khchak, khchak, chak-chak—rhythmic, with small pauses in between.

  I drape my sari across my shoulders like a shawl and gently draw the curtains. They are still warm with the sun. Outside, the grass stretches for several acres till it is stopped by a dense hedge. Two lines of crotons march down from the portico to the front gate. The road seems so far away from the house, so different from my childhood home where the entire town, it seemed, enacted a daily drama at our doorstep. The rhythmic sound, I discover, is the gardener scything grass in the front lawn. His thin, muscled arm swings in arcs, sending showers of green every time it descends.

  The wire mesh on the window adds a blurry edge to everything, making me feel that I am looking through a haze of dust. I gather my trailing clothes and head for the bathroom. What do I do? Should I make the bed, wash the sheets? Or leave it for the maid to do? Disgusting! How could I allow a maid to touch the marks and stains from my body and that man’s? I stand there in a debris of doubts and confused thoughts, not at all comforted by the river of sound that flows outside the room. A bath first, I remind myself, before I open those towering doors and go out to meet the household that is already awake and buzzing.

  My room opens out to a long corridor with screened windows, which in turn look out onto a courtyard. Two of the servants I remember seeing last night are squatting beneath the custard-apple tree in the centre. The door squeaks sharp and high when I open it, and both of them leap to their feet. The woman rushes to the edge of the courtyard and yells to somebody I cannot see, “Yay! Come quick-quick! Memsahib is awake!” Then she turns to me and beams, revealing two rows of brownish teeth. “I am Linda Ayah,” she declares, jabbing herself in the chest. “He is Ganesh Peon.” She points to each of the other people, “Dhobhi, jamedaar, ironing-man, maid.”

  They smile and nod, “Namastey, Mem, namastey!” I feel panic sweeping through me. I am supposed to supervise all these people by myself?

  “Hanh! Now Memsahib has seen all your faces. Why you are all standing here catching flies with your open mouths?” demands Linda’s shrill, energetic voice. “Go, go finish your work.”

  That is Linda Ayah, bossy, irrepressible, wrinkled as an old leaf, ridiculous glasses perched on a sharp ridge of nose. She has a dusty silver nose-stud, absurdly out of place with the thick glasses.

  “Who do you think you are? Giving orders like a memsahib! First find out if she wants you to stay or not,” says the peon, Ganesh, his dignified face creased with annoyance. He has been hired by the Railways, he explains, but Linda is just a nobody who lives in the servants’ quarters. She was the previous mem’s ayah and just stayed on after they were transferred. “You can get a different woman, Memsahib,” says Ganesh smugly, “a young and smart one.”

  “Young, hah!” Linda Ayah waves her thin arms furiously at him. “So you can wear out your randy eyes looking-looking?” She turns to me and adds reassuringly, “Memsahib, I know everything. You don’t worry notatall. This old grumble-pot Ganesh is okay at cooking and looking after Sahib, but who will look after you, tell me? And when the babas and babies are born, Linda will teach them a-b-c and jingle-bells and all. Memsahib, I will take care of you, not to worry.”

  Faced with this declaration of loyalty, I surrender, for a while at least, command of the house.

  “What is that smell?” I ask, sniffing at the remnants of the odour that woke me up.

  “See-see, what did I tell you?” explodes Linda Ayah, her voice ricocheting off the bare walls. She glares at Ganesh Peon. “Before you know anything about our new Memsahib you start cooking up a stink of egg-bhujiya. Memsahib, I told this fellow, make plain uppuma, but he thinks he is too smart!”

  “No, no, it is okay,” I say, catching sight of Ganesh’s worried face.

  “Sahib likes egg and toast every morning,” he says defensively. “What can I do if Sahib wakes up and asks me for egg and toast?” He shoots a filthy look at Linda Ayah.

  Reminded of the fact that I now have a husband, I glance around quickly, expecting to see him appear from one of the doors. Linda Ayah reads my thoughts and says, “Sahib has gone to office, he will be back at five o’clock. Then he will go to the club. You will have to wear a nice sari to go with him.”

  “Sahib told me to tell Memsahib that.” Ganesh Peon snaps a tea towel in the air to show his annoyance.

  “Yes, but did you remember till I opened my mouth?” demands Linda.

  “Your mouth is always open, baka-baka-baka. Nobody has a chance to say anything,” retorts Ganesh, and he stalks away to the kitchen, a wounded rooster.

  Such a tenuous thread, this relationship forged in a single day, at 7:30 in the morning on the sixth of September. Priest Raghotthamachar said it was the perfect moment for the union of my star with V. Moorthy’s. My father had an unshakeable faith in the priest, who, he believed, carried the wisdom of ancient sciences in his head. The priest knew all about the stars laid out on yellowing sheets of paper, the movements of those distant points of light and how their wanderings affect the lives of us mortals. When I was still in my mother’s womb, warm in the waters of her body, the priest was summoned for the Sreemantha ceremony. He would carry my parents’ messages to God. “I am only a postman,” he was fond of saying, his tiny eyes gleaming benevolence. “I take your prayers to the Almighty: sometimes they are heard, sometimes not. Nothing else I can do.”

  “Eat, eat well,” said various female relatives to my mother as she sat there in a green
silk sari with gold zari all over the cloth. The first day of the eighth month of her pregnancy she was spoilt with an abundance of food, clothes, gifts and jewellery. For who knew what might happen when the pains finally started? She might die, the baby might be a deaf-mute or an idiot. So many uncertainties. The women squeezed glass bangles onto my mother’s swollen hands, pressed vermilion on her forehead and asked Raghotthamachar to murmur prayers for her well-being. I was the first child and it was good for godly words to wash over my mother. Was it not true that the unfolding child heard everything the mother did? Was it not true that my mother heard only honey words and music, laughter and praise?

  Afterwards, nobody could explain where my bitter tongue came from.

  Eighteen months after my wedding, I am heavy with child. When I inform my mother, she writes to me, “It is the custom for you to be here three months before birth. That is, if your husband thinks it is all right.”

  She addresses the letter to my husband, for she knows that I will lie, say, “No, my husband wants me to have the child here in my own house.” Not that he cares where the child is born. Of course I do not tell my parents this.

  I can imagine my mother discussing it with my sister. “He is a good man. It is her, my own daughter, her fault. She never learned to say the right things. Hasn’t learned to hold her tongue.”

  I have held my tongue but the silence filling the house drives me insane. There is so much quiet that I can hear the spiders crawling across the ceiling, their spinnerets whirring. The immense silence is broken only in the summer when my sisters-in-law arrive. Meera, with her bags of knotted, fraying wool, and Vijaya, unwinding long threads of story about her family, both of them irritating me with their helplessness, their need to depend on my husband, their brother.

  My father gets all prickly when I complain. “He is a worthy man, your husband, we did the best we could for you.”

  And Amma, his echo, tells me that I should learn to shoulder my responsibilities. “I have four sisters-in-law to cope with, all in the same town. Have I ever complained?”

  So I write pleasant letters assuring them that I am happy, managing my life well, a memsahib.

  “Dear Amma, how are you? We are fine here. I know you want me to have the baby in Mandya, but I can manage here by myself. Really.”

  My mother is offended. She says I hurt her by showing such reluctance to have their first grandchild in their house, I am too proud for my own good, always have been, and one day I will trip over this awful pride.

  “Dear Amma, I am sorry you feel that I don’t want to come to Mandya. No, I am not behaving like a great memsahib. Neither do I think your house is too small. I will have the child there, if that is what you wish. My husband will not be able to accompany me. He has lots of tours to make in the next few months. They are building new lines in the North-East sector where the monsoons held up the work. Now they are trying to finish before the winter sets in, and my husband has to be on site. He might be able to bring me and the baby back home if nothing important comes up. The weather has cooled down considerably, for which I am grateful, as I will not find it so hard to travel down to Mandya in my condition.”

  My parents are rigid about conventions, which is why they insist on my having the child there. They worry about what people might say if I don’t go.

  “What a paisa-pinching miser of a father,” they might say. “Cannot even spend for their oldest daughter’s first delivery. Tchhu-tchhu-tchhu!”

  It fills the hollow spaces of my body, this child conceived in silence, it squeezes against my lungs, makes me breathless, sends sour belches searing up my throat. Chinna is kept busy making snacks and sweets for my aunts and cousins who come and go, my pregnancy giving them a reason to visit. They pat my back, exclaim over my looks, offer to press my swollen feet, give advice, make predictions.

  “It will be a girl, look at the shape of Saroja’s belly, a perfect cone. A daughter for sure!”

  “Nono, look at her hips, definitely she is carrying a boy, a male child needs all that space.”

  “There’s a glow on her face. It is a girl, a daughter gives her mother beauty.”

  I feel like a buffalo, awkward and waddling, wearing my mother’s blouses, which are as large as shamianas.

  “Do I have to eat this?” I demand petulantly when Amma serves up spinach or a mashed mess of boiled bottle-gourd. My mother has a gourd for every problem.

  “Yes, it will bring out the milk,” she replies.

  I resent being in my mother’s house for the birth of my child, feel like a little girl all over again, forced to follow rules.

  “I don’t think it fair that women have to go through all this fuss-mess,” I complain, patting my stomach. I find it difficult to sit, sleep or even walk comfortably.

  “That’s what women said long, long ago to Brahma the Creator, and look at what happened,” says Chinna.

  “What women? What happened?”

  “Listen and I will tell you. Once a group of women decided to go to Lord Brahma with a complaint.

  “‘O Lord,’ they grumbled. ‘It really isn’t fair the way you have divided things between men and women. Not only do women have to carry babies for nine long months, looking all fat and ugly, they also have to undergo labour pain.’

  “‘Un-hunh, you have a point,’ said Brahma, nodding all his heads. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  “‘I have an idea,’ said one of the supplicants. ‘The woman will carry the child in her belly, but the man who fathered the child must suffer the pains.’

  “‘So be it,’ said Brahma, raising the lower of his two right hands in blessing.

  “Many months later, one of the women was ready to give birth to her child. But as she lay in bed, to the astonishment of the entire street, her neighbour’s husband started howling in labour. And so women decided that they would rather bear the pain and keep their secrets.”

  I glance sharply at Chinna.

  “Well, did you like the story or not?”

  “Un-hunh,” I say, but she has turned away.

  Soon, soon, my child will be born and I will have to go back to my own home. Will my husband be a better father than a husband? It occurs to me that by the time the child is ten, my husband will be fifty.

  The engine flings a long whistle to the rushing wind, mango trees hurry backwards into a darkening landscape. A teenager, Vicki, has got on at the previous station. She is travelling only for a couple of hours.

  “But he was a kind man, no?” asks Hameeda. “He gave you a good life!”

  “True. But I was young and didn’t think of kindness and all. I wanted him to talk to me, tell me my hair was like silk, my voice a sitar song.”

  “I would have walked out if I didn’t like my husband!” remarks the teenager, full of scorn. “Why you stayed?”

  “Arrey baba!” Latha claps her hand to her mouth. “How you young people talk! Can she just walk away from her home? What do you say, bhabhi-ji?”

  “Walking away is hard,” I reply. “It is easier to grit your teeth and stay.”

  “No-no, you have got it wrong,” protests Latha. “Going away is the easiest thing in the world. It is like dying. So simple it is to die. Living is hard, to make this small amount of time loaned to you by the gods worthwhile is hard. The real test is life itself, whether you are strong enough to stay and fight.”

  A man stands at the bottom of the steps leading to the verandah, staring at me, smiling.

  “Mr. Moorthy asked me to have a look at his car.”

  “He is having his breakfast,” I say. “Wait here till he is done.”

  “Ten minutes. I cannot wait longer.”

  Who is he to decide how long he should wait? He can stay there as long as it takes Dadda to finish his breakfast, which might be ten minutes, it might be an hour. But when I go inside to tell Dadda that a mechanic fellow is waiting for him, he pushes his plate aside. “Good, good! He can take a look at the spark-plugs.”

&n
bsp; “Why don’t you finish your breakfast, he can wait,” I say, as if it is going to have any effect at all.

  In between cleaning the car, wiping the spark-plugs, tuning the ancient engine, Paul da Costa sits in our verandah sipping hot cups of tea. He asks me for the tea, not Ganesh Peon. As if I am his servant, what cheek!

  “Go around the back to the kitchen and ask the peon,” I say.

  “Your peon is ver-r-ry high and mighty,” says Paul, grinning. “He might not want to make tea for a caste-less Anglo.”

  Nevertheless, he saunters off to the kitchen door and returns in ten minutes with a tumbler of tea. Ganesh Peon has served Paul da Costa in the tumbler reserved for the toilet-cleaner, and I imagine him handing it to this swaggering fellow with a condescending look.

  The mechanic settles on the steps leading into the verandah and sighs. “Good chai” he remarks. “My granny used to make tea like this.”

  “Is she dead?” I ask, looking up from my sewing. I feel obliged to make some comment.

  “Why you want to kill my poor granny, Memsahib? Nono, she is in Australia with my Uncle Albert.”

  I don’t know how to respond to this half-breed man who sits in my verandah and tells me about the latest films, about his cousins in Australia, about everything and everything. I smile timidly, afraid of what the servants will think if I join in his full-bodied laughter. I am, after all, a memsahib, and there is a distance to be maintained between us.

  After Paul da Costa leaves, I tell Dadda, “Why don’t you ask that mechanic man to come every Sunday to start up the car and keep it okay? Not good for a car to park there for days and days without running.”

  Linda Ayah looks disapprovingly at me. She squats in the verandah like an ancient crow, her knobbled fingers sorting through piles of tamarind fruit. She mumbles under her breath as she collects the pods scattered under the delicate branches at the far end of the verandah. The ground is littered with them, each thickly coated with red ants. The tree is very old, its thin green leaves throw a matted shadow, it scatters yellow flowers everywhere. You can eat the leaves and flowers and pods, make them into chutneys and sauces, so sour that you have to twist your face, screw up your eyes and squeeze your gut muscles to take the acid juice. Smack your tongue against your mouth and take another nibble, that’s the way to eat tamarind, a tiny bit at a time. Feel the sour sliding against your teeth edges like fingernails down a blackboard. Linda Ayah has been begging me to cut the tree down, she is fed up with keeping the children from eating the pods. My daughter Kamini, especially, for the more you tell her not to do something, the more likely she is to do it. Roopa is too young to disobey. But Linda has other objections, too. It is a spiteful tree, she says. If you sit under it too long it will gather all your secrets and then its feathery little leaves will whisper them out to the world. If you sleep under it at night, the tree spirits will fill your ears with nonsense and turn you into a lunatic.