My mother nods and nods. She clings to Chinna these days, frightened of her sharp-tongued older daughter-in-law who has assumed the position of mistress of the house since my father’s death.
“I don’t want any bad blood between us,” she has told my mother firmly. “I won’t poke my nose into your kitchen and you keep yours out of mine. You know the old saying, ‘A man can have two women in his bedroom, but more than one in his kitchen is murder.’”
So Amma keeps her mouth shut. Sometimes it is wiser to be quiet. And anyway, she has completed her responsibilities as a wife and a mother, now she can retreat into silence.
I, on the other hand, have a long way to walk before I can settle quietly in a corner. After Dadda dies I still have my daughters to bring up. It is hard for me to believe he isn’t here. I find myself saying things into thin air. I smell cigarette smoke where there is none and resist the impulse to tell Dadda that he is killing himself inhaling all that tobacco. Kamini and Roopa prefer to think of their father as they last saw him, his face calm in death, untouched by the cankers that swarmed through his body, eating steadily through the flesh and marrow, turning wholesome red blood pale and sickly. They do not want to acknowledge the slow death that moved through his body, or remember the bottles leaking fluids into him, the tubes draining pitiful wastes away. Such indignity for a man who could not bear the smell of his own sweat.
My crazy sister-in-law Meera sends me two mangoes in a box a week after Dadda dies. “For my brother’s children and his widow, a small gift from my orchards to relieve your sorrow.”
What orchards? She is in an asylum for the mentally ill.
Meera always surprises me. For a person who doesn’t know who she is or why or where, her handwriting is remarkably lucid. Beautifully formed, neatly rounded, every “t” precisely crossed. She even used to write letters to me sitting on my own verandah.
“Respected lady, I would appreciate it very much if you put three spoons of sugar in my evening coffee instead of only two.”
“Madam, I have noticed two young girls entering the house. When I asked them who they were and if they required anything in particular, they made discourteous faces at me. I am offended by this behaviour and would request you to take immediate action.”
Polite, meticulously neat letters. And then suddenly a wild burst of anger, pure lunacy like a raging summer storm. The girls stayed out of sight and worried about whether the neighbours could hear the awful raving. I locked her into her room and prayed that she would, in the grip of the nightmares that possessed her, kill herself. But why think about her? It is time now to shed the past, to begin yet another phase of life. We are no longer a part of the Railways, this house is ours only till the end of next month.
I start selling all our things. The car goes to a motor-parts dealer. It was never anything more than a collection of nuts and bolts and wires anyway. The carved rosewood chair with the scratch down its front leg made by Meera’s knitting needle, the teak coffee table carved by Girdhari the carpenter, both are sold. The niwaar beds, the big mango-wood cots—how much the children jumped on them and still they are as good as new—the sideboard, the meat-safe, toy cupboard, Dadda’s father’s mahogany office chair with the broken wicker back, all gone. I am beginning to feel weightless. With each piece of furniture that leaves our house, a sliver of memory escapes, forever lost. Kamini says that is impossible, you can never lose memories. She is sixteen and dangerously sensitive about every little thing, from the way she looks to the way I behave in front of her friends. Roopa is too young to feel anything other than bewilderment at the loss of her father, but Kamini imagines that we are somehow discarding our past along with the furniture.
“Do you have to sell my grandfather’s chair?” asks Kamini. Why is she making such a fuss over that chair? Kamini never even knew her father’s father!
“It is an ugly thing,” I argue. “And the only memory I have of it is of Dolly Aranha sitting on it, telling me about her husband.”
“Don’t, don’t! I refuse to hear another of your stories.”
“It’s not a story,” I protest. “It’s true.”
Dolly’s husband had returned from a trip to France with a suitcase full of lacy undergarments for his wife.
“I asked him for an umbrella,” Dolly complained, tears running down her curved cheeks. Everything about Dolly was sweetly round—her face, her little nose, her eyes, even her hair, which she wore in two coils on either side of her head. “See what dirty things he got for me. He told me that they were naughty things for a naughty girl. I am a good girl, my Mamma brought me up to be nice and respectful. Where this man got such dirty ideas from you tell me?”
“They are pretty,” I remarked.
“Pretty? Pretty? What is here to call pretty?” Dolly gasped as she held up a tiny pink panty. “Low-caste rascal, says to me, ‘Dolly, this is for you and me.’ Shame-shame things he says.”
I wanted to tell her, Dolly, you are so lucky. My husband never bought me anything to decorate myself. My husband hardly even saw me.
“My Mamma was right, she said men have unnatural needs,” continued Dolly. “But it is my duty to close my eyes and do what he wants.”
“Ma!” interrupts Kamini. “Why are you selling my desk? I might need it. I still have to finish my studies, you know.”
“Do you remember when Dolly Aranha saw the first ghost?” I ask.
And Kamini, my first-born, full of virtue, says, “Why don’t you leave poor Dolly alone, Ma?”
“Do you remember or don’t you?”
“I don’t.”
“She made Mr. Aranha into a ghost. She even sprinkled holy water on him when he came home from work, remember? Dolly would not sleep with him because he was a ghost.”
“He was a creep,” says Kamini. “He stared at all the girls. Ma, you aren’t selling my grandfather’s chair! It’s an heirloom.”
Between her and Roopa, we end up with a lot more baggage than I intended to take with us to our apartment in Madras. But at last, we are ready to leave. The furniture, wrapped in old newspaper, faded bedsheets and yards of gunny sacking, waits like oddly shaped mummies in the spare bedroom before being loaded on to one of those goods bogies that meander across the country dropping off rice or wheat, coal or wood. Ganesh Peon and Linda have washed the floors of the house with Phenyle so that the place smells like a hospital ward. They stand awkwardly near the front door while we wait for the car that will take us to the station. All of a sudden they look like strangers to me, these two old people who I have known for eighteen years and might never meet again.
Five minutes more and the train will move away. The station bubbles with people haggling with the coolies and making sure that children, relatives and baggage are all safe. The tea-boys rush up and down the platform, shouting in high, nasal voices, “Chaichaichaichai-chaaaii!” The tea they sell is scalding, the skin on your tongue peels off and you tell yourself that the muddy numbness is the delicate taste of brew in an earthen tumbler. A woman in a green sari is thrusting a handful of rupee notes to a boy peering out the window in the compartment next to ours. Have you wiped the bars with some tissue dipped in Dettol? I feel like asking him. Beggars put their faces festering with sores against those bars; spittle dried there not five minutes ago! The woman in the green sari is crying now, shaking with large sobs. She wipes her nose with the end of her sari; the boy at the window looks embarrassed. He draws away from the window, but the woman shoots out a hand, the red glass bangles tinkling, and holds on to his shirt. She is his mother? Lover? Sister? No one ever weeps for me at a station, not even when I leave my mother’s house for my husband’s. Isn’t that when your female relatives burst into tears? Back away ululating their sorrow at having given away a daughter, not knowing if her life will be scattered with grief or filled with joy? Only Chinna cries a little for me, Chinna, who cries for everything from third-rate movies to the announcement of a stranger’s death in the newspapers.
&nbs
p; “Did either of you count the cases before we left home?” I ask Roopa and Kamini. If Dadda were here I would not have to worry about our luggage.
Roopa sits with her legs sprawled out, flicking through a comic book. Kamini perches nervously on the berth next to me, alternately staring out the window and biting her nails. I have booked all four seats. I tell Kamini to make sure the safety-catch on the door is closed. That way no last-minute passenger can barge in to occupy a seat with bags, potlis and water-bottles. I have paid for the luxury of extra space and I don’t mean to let anyone else have it. Perhaps I should shut the windows on the station side. The windows on the corridor side of the compartment are already shut, so no one can peep in and see that there are only three people in here. All they will have to do then is bribe the conductor and that will be the end of our privacy.
“Four sleeping berths, Madam,” the conductor will argue. “Daytime it is six seating. Railway rules, Madam. I am helpless.”
I am familiar with all the rules. I have lived with them for eighteen years. After all those years, I am entitled to break a rule or two. So until the train starts up and is well outside the station, past the stinks of Guwahati and into the clear air of the country, the doors and windows on that side remain shut. Never mind the terrible heat that envelops us, sweat springing out and filling the compartment with sourness. A low, booming horn is sounded, a diesel engine, the old steam engines are disappearing off the tracks and are lying unused in a workshop somewhere. The platform begins to slide away; the faces outside the windows look like distorting clay as we gather speed.
“Hold your noses, the stinks are starting,” says Roopa.
We are all familiar with this geography of smells. The platform first, with its odours of cigarettes, beedis, overripe fruit, urine and frying fish. Then the drains sluggish with faeces and engine oil. The slum with the monotonous grey pall of poverty and the slimy green pond. There is no way to define the stench from that noxious pond. A leather factory vomiting out smoke. And then, just when you feel that you will explode from holding your breath, the paddy begins and the air is clean.
“I wonder if we will ever come back here,” says Kamini.
And Roopa, in a nasal voice, “I’ll die if we do.”
It is pitch dark outside, not even the flicker of a kerosene lamp from a passing village.
Hameeda yawns and cracks her knuckles. “I am going to sleep, Aunty-ji, tomorrow I will listen to your story.”
I smile at her, knowing that she doesn’t entirely approve of me. Irritation, sometimes shock, flickered across her face as she listened to me. Was I telling the truth or making up everything? Why should I care what she thinks? I will be getting off this train early tomorrow morning and she will never see me again.
Her sister Sohaila is more sympathetic, nodding every time my words strike a chord in her. “Sometimes I feel like running away too,” she says, her soft thin face filled with guilt at her own declaration.
Latha stands up and yawns, scattering biscuit crumbs. She has finished a whole packet of Marie biscuits in the past two hours. She spreads a sheet on the berth and slaps her pillow a couple of times. “You don’t mind, no bhabhi-ji, if I sleep also? You too must be tired, so much talking-talking”
Sohaila checks to see if the door is securely locked and turns off the lights. I stretch out in my berth and allow memories to cover me like a blanket.
Into the compact space of the new apartment I move our steel trunks which carry scars from practically every corner of India, so much they have travelled. On the faded green sides are remnants of destination stickers—Ratnapur, Bhusaval, Lucknow, Calcutta—a summary of my incarnation as a Railway wife.
For a few months the trunks crowd up the flat, making it look smaller than it is. Eventually the girls and I arrange our belongings in the cupboards, and the place looks more like home and less like a loading yard. I drape our old curtains on all the windows, snipping off more than half the length, so that I will not have to look at the road running behind the flat. Nobody is very sure of the name—my maid thinks that it might be Ammattan Palai, but Uncle Gangadhar, the old man downstairs, has a different story. A hundred years ago, the British sahibs arrived here, couldn’t get their short foreign tongues around the name of the road. Maybe a Hamilton sahib peed here, and so they called it Hamilton Bridge Road. Who knows why things are named what they are named? Then the people in the town rolled this new name round and round in their mouths till the edges wore smooth. When they spat it out like a well-chewed paan, it had become Ammattan Paalai. But the British couldn’t say “Ammattan,” so they put on their solar-hats and thought, “Hmm, what does Ammattan mean?” And someone, a peon or a clerk-babu, said, “Saar, saar, it means barber, ammattan most surely means barber.”
Until that time, the shops around the bridge sold Canjeevaram silk saris. It is said that when the sun hit the inside of the shops where the saris were piled high the whole bridge glowed like a valley of jewels. But when the name became Barber’s Bridge, all the barbers in town thought, “Hunh, why not open a shop there in that place which already has our name?”
And so the road truly became a barber’s strip. Today if you go in there you can hear the scissors going kitiki-kitik, the air a fine mist of hair and a smell of Dettol cancelling the pig-shit stink of the drains. And while it is true that these barbers give you the best haircuts in all of the city, they also leave a louse or two in your head.
There is also a fruit vendor whose apples and bananas and mangoes and oranges need to be washed several times to remove the fuzz of hair that has settled on them from the barber shops. One-armed Muruga is a permanent fixture beside the bus-stand. He sells pornographic books inside innocuous covers like Gone With The Wind, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. His books are displayed on a large bedsheet, and when he sees a policeman strolling by, he quickly gathers up the ends of the sheet, slings the makeshift sack over his shoulder and disappears into one of the many back-alleys leading off the road. A fortuneteller, who, my maid tells me, is richer than Kubera the god of wealth himself, has staked a claim to the spot beneath a pathetic neem tree with barely any leaves or branches. The fortune-teller’s eyeballs move in their sockets completely out of control, engaged in a weird dance against the walls of his eyes. He claims that although he cannot see the people before him, he can see their future lying in wait all around their helpless bodies. My daughters are fascinated with him and waste their money sneaking out to have their fortunes read.
“You will travel far and away,” he tells Kamini. “Baba Blinding Light sees what ordinary eyes cannot.”
“Why you want to listen to that old bandicoot?” I ask her. “Study well, and work hard, you carve your own fortune. Look at me, if I had had the courage to take my future in my own two hands instead of listening to a potbellied priest, I might have been a doctor!”
Perhaps if I charge my girls fifty paise for each bit of advice I give them, they might listen to me.
My apartment is small, with several windows and balconies. A gulmohur tree dapples the corner of the front balcony with its shade. When my daughters and I move in here ten years ago, we have to look down from the balcony to catch a glimpse of the tree. I barely notice how it has grown till Roopa and Kamini leave the house.
These days, to fill the hours that tick by so gradually, I catch sight of the tiniest changes, hear every whisper. In the morning I sit in the front balcony, watch the sun swim out of the darkness and listen to the grey, fluffy birds—called the seven sisters, I think—quarrelling over worms. The gulmohur tree creaks in the wind, and a few of its brilliant red flowers drift reluctantly onto my balcony. They are whole and unbruised and I pick them up to float in a shallow bowl of water. All of this summer, the tree was covered in blossoms, fiery with colour sucked from the sun. Now I can sense the approaching shift of season. The flowers are fewer, faint green leaves, multi-pinnate, feathery, are beginning to dust the branches once again. A sign that moisture gathers, the monsoon
s blow over the Ghats. With so much time on my hands, I seem to smell these little shifts. Feel them as well, if the growing ache in my right knee is any indication. Yes, I can almost hear the clouds, swollen-bellied, rolling in from the sea. The winds are cool and soft, the rain touches the earth tenderly. This is a gentle city to live in.
A year ago they changed the name of the road outside my house, yet again, to Vallabhai Patel Marg. The new minister is full of nationalistic fervour. He is the fellow who wears dark glasses all the time, because, his party men whisper, he doesn’t want to dazzle people with the brilliance of his eyes. The other party says that he is blind from syphillis caught from the whores of the city.
“Remove every sign of the blood-sucking British,” the minister said to justify renaming the road. I don’t know why it should matter, the Brits are gone forty years! But these ministers are like that, when they run out of ideas to collect votes, they attack the past. What is the use of that, I ask you? The past changes in the context of the present. But who am I to comment?
By the time I came to terms with my new address, another donkey, who I confess I voted for, decided that what we needed was a woman’s name for our road. So it is Indira Gandhi Marg now. Why our road, I ask you? Out of sixteen thousand roads they choose ours. These constant interruptions in what I had hoped would be a smooth stretch of existence are beginning to get on my nerves. Just as my feet settle into the soil, the ground itself starts shifting. When my daughters phone, I tell them about the way the earth moves beneath my quiet feet, and they go into a silence that stretches uncomfortably long. They think I am senile or maybe even crazy. They think that the earth can move only when there is a quake. How wrong they are, but they are young. It is only when you reach my age that you notice the slight tremors, the nervous shifts that the earth makes beneath your tired feet. Or perhaps, like a sailor, I still feel the rocking of the trains on firm land.
The apartment is on the same street as the Chief Minister’s bungalow, which has its advantages. I never have a shortage of water, for the very same pipes that carry water to his bungalow also carry it to my flat. Heads will roll if the important gentleman does not have water to wash his bottom in the morning. Politics touch all our lives one way or another. Thanks to the Chief Minister, our road is swept clean, the trees are lush and well tended, none of those ragged limbs shorn of leaves by wandering cows, branches torn off by urchins in search of firewood. Someone with imagination—a poetic imagination—planted those trees. In the boiling heat of summer, the sky is a delicate mist of lavender jacaranda. The steaming tarmac of the road is sheeted with purple flowers, and the minute you enter the road, you are in a tunnel of fragrance.
Tamarind Mem Page 22
