by Tikiri
“What boys?” Grandma looked up sharply. Her eyes were milky white with cataracts, but sometimes I swore she saw better than any of us. She was hunched over the fire as usual, stirring a clay pot that was sizzling with spicy potato masala, making the whole apartment smell divine, quelling any other odors coming our way.
My father’s family had moved out of the slums and into a government-built complex a long time ago, as part of a local program to give slum dwellers a better life. “A Change for the Better,” was the program’s slogan, Aunty Shilpa told me. Their new apartment was on the ground floor of the complex and wasn’t far from the communal toilets. Some days, the smell was overpowering, but at least, Aunty Shilpa said, there was a tap with running water outside, a roof over their heads, and four walls, though part of it was already crumbling. “They just wanted our votes,” Grandma grumbled every time something stopped working.
Living here was a change for me too. After having had only two parents to fight over one bathroom every morning, I now waited in long lines with the female members of the ten other families on our floor. All for two minutes in a shower that trickled brown water, and for the use of the dirty hole in the ground that was our common toilet.
“Are you talking to boys now, Asha?” Grandma was asking me with a frown.
“No, Grandma, I didn’t talk to them. They were being really mean to me, so I told them off.”
“Told them off?” Grandma asked.
“Did you do anything naughty now?” Aunty Shilpa asked.
“No, Aunty Shilpa. They started it. They were shouting at Meena. They even hit—”
“Who’s Meena?” Grandma snapped.
Preeti sat up quickly, shooting me a warning look. “She’s a girl in our school.”
She was sitting on the frayed sofa that doubled as our bed at night. She looked pale from the flu she’d been fighting all week. On her lap was her scrapbook diary, a small pink book with hearts all over the cover. She told me it held her dreams and no one was allowed to touch it, not even Grandma. She took it with her everywhere she went, to school, to the beach, even to the market.
Eating chocolate was a luxury to Preeti, so whenever she got any, she carefully collected the wrapper, pressed it between the pages of the diary, and wrote a story about it. One day, she allowed me to peek at one page and to my surprise, I saw a shimmering silver Hershey’s Kisses wrapper. When she was in grade five, she told me, an American education group had come to the school and handed out books, pencils, school bags, and, to the delight of the girls, chocolate droplets shaped like miniature buddhist pagodas. From then on, she looked for Kisses in every candy store she walked by.
Preeti was a shy girl who stuck close to her friends. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father, my father’s oldest brother, had been crushed by an errant machine at the stone quarry where he’d worked. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to miss them much. Maybe, it was because she never had a chance to know them well. For Preeti, school and books were everything—her whole life. She had a brain and dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, or a “baby-doctor” as she called it. I was sure she’d succeed as she was consistently first in her class in all subjects, except for English. I held that honor now.
The adrenaline from my scrimmage with the boys was still hot in my veins. I was bursting to tell my story to someone. Anyone. I plopped down next to Preeti on the sofa bed.
“You know those boys who pick on us every day?” I whispered loudly. Preeti nodded. “When I got off the bus today, I saw them hitting Mee…I mean, that girl. She looked really scared and no one was helping her, so I shouted at them and told them to stop.”
“You didn’t?” Preeti said, drawing in a sharp breath.
“Then they came after me. Nuthead pushed me and Fartybag tried to hit me, but I hit him first, right on the nose.” My voice has gotten louder. “I hit him twice!” I suddenly realized what I’d done and grinned to myself. It feels good to fight back. “I hit him really hard.”
Aunty Shilpa was staring with her mouth open. Grandma was staring too, but her look was of severe disapproval.
“What’s this nonsense you are talking, child?” Grandma asked.
“They were awful, Grandma,” I said. “They threw my books on the floor and pulled my skirt. It was horrible. They called me bad names and I shouted at them to stop but they didn’t listen.” My words tumbled out haphazardly, and it took some effort not to revert to English. “I ran away and when I got to the candy store, I took the candy store man’s broom and fought the boys off. The candy store man helped me even.”
“You mean the bogeyman?” Preeti asked, eyes as wide as saucers.
“Yes, but he’s a good man. You should never judge someone by how they look, Preeti,” I admonished my cousin. “Anyway, he tried to help me. And the boys looked really scared.”
“I tell you!” Grandma banged the pot with her spoon, making us jump. “What’s wrong with this girl?”
“You’re just making the story up, aren’t you?” Aunty Shilpa said quickly, her eyes steady on mine, as if trying to tell me something. “You made all this up, right?”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “It really happened, just now. I swear. Look at my skirt. Look at what they did.” I pointed at the rips on my clothes and the red scrapes on my knees. “It was a big fight.”
“Fight?” Grandma spat.
“I had to defend myself,” I said. “There were three of them.”
“My Lord, have mercy on this stupid girl. She knows nothing about honor,” Grandma said to the ceiling.
“Honor for what?” I said.
“Honor for what?” Grandma looked positively flabbergasted I’d even asked the question.
“I don’t know what you were taught in those African schools, but it is different here,” she said. “Good girls don’t go running around in the streets talking to boys. A girl always bows to the gods and sadhus of the temple, then to her parents, and then to her husband. That is how she becomes respectable. If you don’t know that, you are as good as a mongrel on the street.”
I looked at Aunty Shilpa and Preeti. Both had eyes downcast. They’d heard these lectures before.
“That is our culture.” Grandma jabbed the potatoes violently. “Listen to me and learn to become a good Indian girl for once.”
Grandma owned India’s culture. There was only one way, and that was her way.
“I told you about eve-teasing, Asha,” Aunty Shilpa said in a soft voice. “You just need to be more careful, dear.”
Aunty Shilpa was the careful one.
She was also our aunt and therefore, responsible for us girls. She was my father’s youngest sibling and only sister, barely twenty when I met her. She looked like an older Preeti with her long black hair framing her heart-shaped face. Her midnight-black eyes and long eyelashes made it look like she was wearing makeup, though she couldn’t afford any. Her hair was done in one thick braid that hung down to her knees. If Preeti was pretty, Aunty Shilpa was beautiful. Though she had lines on her brow and calluses on her hands from overworking, men were always following her on the streets.
Her much older husband had died six months earlier. Childless and husband-less, she was now as good as a leper. No one wanted her near their home for fear of the bad luck she could bring. Normally, a family would never accept a widow back into their home, so she had been one of the lucky ones, I was told. Back in the village, she told me one day, she’d have been burned the same day they cremated her husband. I took a sharp breath.
“You mean like Princess Aouda?” I asked.
“Who’s this Princess Ooda?” she said, wrinkling her brow.
“Oh, no one special,” I said, remembering Aunty Shilpa couldn’t read. “Just a story I read a long time ago.” The stories in my father’s favorite book, Around the World in Eighty Days, had been so fantastic I was sure they lived only in the wild imagination of its author. To learn something so ghastly happened in real life was shocking.
“That would have made me respectable and revered,” Aunty Shilpa said wistfully.
Burnt and dead too, I thought with a shudder. “But it wasn’t your fault your husband died,” I said. “It was an accident, so how can they blame you?”
“That’s not the point,” Aunty Shilpa said, looking at me with sad eyes. She sighed. “You’re just a child. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“I still think it’s wrong,” I said. “Fogg thought it was wrong too.”
“Who’s this fog? You think too much about these things, Asha,” she said. “Only the gods can know what’s right and wrong.”
“Then how can they let girls burn like that?”
Aunty Shilpa paused and bit her lip. Maybe she realized how strange her statement had been.
“How come the police don’t stop this sort of thing?” I asked.
Aunty Shilpa sighed loudly. “If you have enough money, you can pay them to not see anything.” She paused. “They don’t work for poor people like us.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“If it makes you feel better,” she said, with another sigh, “the ashrams take in widows these days. They don’t burn them anymore, at least in the city.”
Yes, I’d seen these women and their children begging near the temple. Whether in a village or in a city, a widow’s life ended at her husband’s pyre. But Grandma had been kind. She’d taken Aunty Shilpa in even though she was almost an untouchable. That Aunty Shilpa had found a job cleaning toilets in a luxury hotel right on the beach, one teeming with rich Western tourists who liked to give big tips, wasn’t such a bad thing. Aunty Shilpa was the only breadwinner in the family and Grandma knew exactly which side her chapati was buttered.
“Always talking back, always running around and blackening our family name,” Grandma was talking angrily to her pot now. “What will the neighbors think? They will spit on me one of these days.” She banged the spoon on her pot, making us all jump. “That is what happens when you take in a foreign girl. A good Indian mother would teach her these things. The problem with this girl is she has too much of her mother’s blood. That is the problem.”
I pulled back like I’d been stung.
“Sri Lanka’s not like India,” This time she looked at me as she spoke. “No rules, no traditions, no respectability. Savages. That’s what your mother was.”
“How can you say that?” I blurted out. “Stop disrespecting my mama!”
“Oh, Lord Vishnu!” Grandma cried as she stood up, her old bones cracking with every move. She walked toward me, holding her curry-soaked wooden spoon high. “Oh, my Lord, save this girl!”
I watched her come close in dread. Grandma bent down and slapped my thighs hard. I winced.
“When will this stupid girl learn?” She towered over me, waving her spoon. “Look at your skirt! Like those tourist girls who come here wearing next to nothing. Are you going to start running around naked like them?” She glared. “You think you’re a white girl? This is why the boys follow you and talk to you. Because you make them.”
“Make them?” I asked.
“I should make you stay home and learn to cook and clean like all the other good little girls. Maybe it’s time to stop you going to school!”
I stared at her. Didn’t she hear anything I’d said?
“If you were a boy, I would already give you a proper beating!”
I looked up at Grandma, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face, looking like she’d grown into a giant over the past few minutes. I’d been preparing to tell her about my schoolbooks, the ones on the ground at the bus station, dirty and spat on, but decided this was not the time for that news. I glued my knees together and sat straight, just like a good little Indian girl.
“But Grandma,” I said in my most respectful voice, “I was only trying to defend myself.”
Ignoring me, she walked back to her pot, muttering to herself, “It’s time to take care of this footloose girl for good.”
Chapter Ten
If anyone had been footloose, it had to be my father.
My father had always dreamed of seeing the world. He never talked about his childhood, but I knew it had been very different from mine.
The fastest way to annoy him was to beg for pocket money. “You are spoiled, my child,” he’d mutter, doling out a few shillings. “There were days when I didn’t have anything to eat when I was your age.” Is that really true? I’d wonder but didn’t dare ask.
My father was not much of a talker—unless he was preaching to me about school. Those Sunday mornings when I baked with my mother were the best times to ask my burning questions.
“Why didn’t Papa have enough food to eat when he was a kid?”
“Is India really hot, like a desert?”
“Can we visit Sri Lanka one day?”
“Did your mama teach you to bake when you were a girl?”
“Have you ever eaten a gulab jamun with real gold sprinkles?”
Little by little, between sifting flour and mixing dough, my mother told me about herself and my father, how they met, their childhoods, their lives before me. When she told me these stories, I listened enthralled, only paying half attention to my baking chores.
As a young boy growing up in India, my father used to watch the enormous ships that came into the harbor. He stared in wonder at the strange pale-skinned travelers who spilled onshore with their cameras and wide-brimmed hats. He would have given his soul to join them, to board one of those shiny ships and sail beyond the horizon. His friends mocked him and his siblings teased him. His parents made a living growing vegetables along the railway tracks near the slums, and had a hard time feeding their five children.
My father, his brothers, and his sister, Aunty Shilpa, had worked since the day they learned to walk. No one believed a grubby boy from a low-caste family from the outskirts of a shantytown could travel outside the city. Journeying outside of Goa, let alone India, was an unthinkable extravagance. A childish fantasy.
Over time, though, and with help from newfound friends at tourist cafés and shops where he hung around in his spare time, my father taught himself to read in English. He was a keen student, and eventually put himself through the local shantytown school, but it hadn’t been easy. His brothers thought he was being lazy. His mother accused him of being selfish. His father gave him a good beating more than once, for neglecting his duties and disappearing to school.
My father, though, had a dream and wouldn’t let go. He saved scraps of paper reeking of dead fish, stolen from fishmonger stalls, so he could write. He swiped any pen or pencil left unchecked at store counters, and he dove into garbage dumpsters at the back of bookstores, cafés and schools to unearth the one thing he treasured most: books, especially books about adventures in far-off, exotic worlds.
The dumpsters behind international hostels where young Europeans and Americans stayed offered the best selection of all. Sometimes he found trash, but there had also been gems, like the day he discovered the tattered copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He had found it without a cover, ripped, and smeared in fish oil. He’d cleaned it, taped back the pages, and carried it with him for the rest of his life.
But the greatest mystery of my childhood was how my parents had got married.
Every once in a while, I’d ask for the hundredth time, “Mama, how come Papa is from India and you’re from Sri Lanka?”
It took a long time before my mother opened up to me on this. It was three months before the car crash and we were making cakes for my father’s thirty-eighth birthday. To the twelve-year-old me, he was as ancient as the baobab trees of the savannah.
“Papa’s getting old,” I said to my mother as I poured the batter into blue cake liners. We were making his favorite cakes that day, chai fairy cakes, a rare treat for us all. She laughed. “He’s not that old, honey.”
Like good chocolate and fresh strawberries, loose cha
i tea leaves were not easy to find in East Africa at that time. My mother got her baking supplies from an Indian store in town. It was a musty shop that sold outdated Bollywood videos, samosas smothered in oil, and fifty-kilogram bags of rice with the blue UNICEF logo on them. They even exchanged local currency for US dollars for a fee, which you had to do if you ever wished to buy something from the fancy duty-free store downtown. At the back of this old shop was where the owners kept the special ingredients my mother ordered in advance.
My parents rarely squabbled, but I knew this was an issue between them.
“How can you go to that place?” my father would say. “You’re encouraging the black market, don’t you know?”
“That’s the only place I can find the ingredients I need,” my mother would reply in defense.
One day, I jumped in. “Everyone in school goes to the duty-free store or to Jo’burg,” I said. “Even Shanti’s family.”
“We can’t afford to go to Johannesburg to buy groceries, or anything else for that matter, honey,” my mother explained. “We’re not rich like Shanti.”
So we baked using the out-of-date ingredients from that musty store. Still, I remember the cakes tasting delicious, and my father’s birthday cakes were no exception.
That day, while we waited for the cakes to rise in the oven, my mother decided it was time to tell me their story.
My parents had met at a university in England. They’d been on a program that gave scholarships to students from Commonwealth countries, students with high grades but too poor to finish school.
When my father returned home in the last summer of university, all hell broke loose.
His overseas education had initially turned him from self-absorbed son to local superstar in his shantytown, but no one was prepared to hear his announcement the day he came back. He was planning to marry a girl he’d met in the UK, a foreign girl at that. The whole family, including grandparents, uncles, aunts, distant cousins, and neighbors, shunned him. “Even the lowest-caste families have standards to uphold,” they murmured to each other, shaking their heads. “Doesn’t he know these simple facts? What good is an education if he doesn’t understand the principles of life?”
