One Hundred Shades of White

by Preethi Nair

  That first week he came in September, he brought all sorts of vegetables both Indian and English. ‘Do you remember Mol, Onam? It’s all for Onam,’ Amma said, pointing at the vegetables. The prickly bitter gourd looked almost offensive sitting next to a sedate cucumber, the black-eyed beans looked evil next to the green garden peas, and the hairy yam looked as if it was going to eat up the potato. ‘For aviyal, olan, thoran.’ She reeled off a list of dishes just like she used to do when she trapped me in the kitchen in India and I nodded and made my way quickly out of there before she decided to paste me up with them and put me in the bath.

  Her food would often go to waste as Satchin and I discovered that we liked burgers and fishfingers with ketchup a whole lot better. We would gang up against her and make her place these items on the grill instead or tell her how to make English things. The food that was all dressed up on the table would go into our tiffin carriers the following day but it got embarrassing doing that whole tiffin carrier routine day after day, especially when Catherine Hunter held her nose, so we would get the chauffeur to stop on the way to school, run out and throw the contents over somebody’s fence. Amma didn’t know better and was happy that we ate it all. We also asked Amma if we could get rid of the red stains and sandalwood tribal look. She got very upset at this and said it was God’s blessing for the day to us. Satchin asked her if God could put it somewhere else and she almost cried. So instead of upsetting her further we washed it off before we got into class and would tell her that it was smudged off during the course of the day. We also decided against broaching the shampoo concept, that could wait a while longer.

  Even though Satchin and I went to the same school, had the only two ethnic-looking faces and the greased back look, he refused to acknowledge me as his sister. ‘Is that your sister?’ his friends would enquire and Satchin would swear no relation to me and walk off. I really did envy his group of large friends and longed to break free from my role as ‘Danny’.

  This was around the time when ‘Grease Lightning’ took hold of the playground. All the girls with blonde hair became Sandy and because most of the boys didn’t want to join in, I was elected to play John Travolta’s role. I passed myself off as a cheap stand-in for Danny, even though I hadn’t seen the film and couldn’t really sing in English. This didn’t seem to matter as the other girls just needed someone to twirl them around and because I was quite tall for my age and had jet-black, greased back hair, I seemed to fit the role. The way I just kept saying ‘summer lubbing’ over and over again also seemed to swing it for me, so at every playtime for the next two months or so this is what I did. Nobody ever knew that I harboured a desperate yearning to have blonde hair and become Catherine Hunter, they just thought it was a strange foreign custom thing that Indian people did when I shaved off my eyebrows.

  I took one of Achan’s razors and shaved off my black bushy eyebrows so I could draw new ones in with a yellow crayon. It would have looked good but I didn’t know how to use a razor properly and so cut myself and then the yellow didn’t show. Amma looked horrified when she saw me and she said Achan would be very upset when he got back from his trip. This didn’t scare me as Achan never got upset with me. She also said that the sooner she got me out of England the better, adding that it was making me do things that even she couldn’t understand.

  More than a year had passed by then and, if I am honest, I stopped counting the days and remembering the things that Ammamma told me, because I grew to really like England. I loved my school, my teacher, the food, television, and I didn’t want to go back. If I was asked to make a choice, I would choose England every time. It wasn’t that I forgot India or my Ammamma but India became less and less important and I thought maybe Ammamma could come and live with us. If she came, I knew she would like England too. I didn’t tell Amma that, or that I secretly willed Achan’s contract to go on forever.

  Dundee cakes came and went to celebrate all the special occasions. Everyone got a cake for their birthday and I was about to have my third one with six big candles. Somebody should have told my Achan that we absolutely hated them and that these cakes only served in joining my brother and I in a perverse friendship. The only time we teamed up was when we threw those chunks of cake behind the sitting-room cabinet. The fear of our father finding this Dundee cake wall behind a hideous mahogany cabinet united us in a way that had never seemed possible. Achan came back for my sixth birthday but he could only stay for two weeks because he had to go back to America again for business. Secretly, I liked it when he went there and came back because he would buy us things that you couldn’t even get in England. Once he bought me an air hostess doll that talked and even the teachers were so impressed that they allowed me to take her into assembly to do a demonstration for the other children. I also loved it when Achan was home because he played with us; piggyback rides; hide and seek. He’d understand the games and play what we wanted.

  Satchin and I didn’t really play together, not even after school. I tried to be his friend but he never let me because he thought I was too messy and chaotic. So after school we did our own thing. He had this endless obsession for colouring with his felt-tip pens, which he guarded with his life. My scrawny colouring pencils were not of the same standard so I didn’t relish the prospect of colouring as much as he did. On several occasions, I offered to swap the whole set of my pencils for just his pink and blue pens. His refusal was categorical. So the day these very same pens went missing, all hell broke loose in our house. The only way I survived the neck lock he held me in was by signalling with my eyes at the Dundee cake wall that we had built together. But I suppose that if we knew what was going to happen, then the Dundee cake wall hardly would have mattered. When the cabinet was eventually removed and all the old bricks of cake lay there, nobody said anything. My Achan never got to see it.

  Achan’s trips abroad became longer and my Amma really missed him because at night we could hear her cry a lot: not a loud inconsolable cry, more of a whimper, a bit like when the school hamster was trapped in his wheel. Amma started learning English, annoying us by interrupting the television programmes we were watching with questions every five minutes as to who was saying what, but she did make a big effort to learn. Maybe this was a sign that we were going to stay in England for longer. She would even venture out to get some of the groceries herself and collect us from school. Achan didn’t see any of this or he would have been proud of her; he was always telling her to be a bit more independent. When he did return it was always to a hero’s welcome and his gifts became more ostentatious. Satchin and I could have whatever we asked for; a new bicycle, games, toys, anything. Our only preoccupation at this time was whether we should stay in and watch Blue Peter and learn how to make what they had made earlier. That was until the death of Fluffy.

  We hadn’t really seen death before. The calf’s death was different because we never saw her die but Satchin actually witnessed Fluffy’s death. Fluffy was my brother’s class hamster. To my astonishment, he asked me to come along and attend Fluffy’s burial. All the children held hands and prayed as Miss Turnbull said a few words. She said that Fluffy had gone so peacefully and was happy in heaven, playing with his friends, but the truth, confided in a moment of frenzied grief, was that my brother had accidentally murdered him. Dropped from a great height because he had had a fight with Jessica Thomas and didn’t want her to take him home for the holiday, Fluffy’s death was instantaneous. Nobody saw. So how he could have played in heaven in that state I really don’t know. Not unless God had fixed up his tiny legs along the way.

  For weeks, Satchin was terrorised by Fluffy’s face coming to him in his dreams. I could hear him from my room, crying, shouting and jumping around like a fish in his bed. A truce descended between us when I offered to move into his room and sleep on the top bunk bed. I managed to convince him that just in case Fluffy decided to come down and get him, he would find me lying on the top bed instead.

  Ammamma would say that we should have read
the signs, but we lived in a big city and the pace didn’t allow it. Three weeks after that, my Achan died and life would never, ever be the same.

  Amma picked us up from school. She had a bandage wrapped around her hand, her hair was unbraided and she was wearing a pair of trousers and a light green pullover. She never dressed like that and was always wrapped like a mummy from head to toe in a sari, even covering her head with the final piece of material that remained. So instantly we knew something was wrong.

  ‘What’s happened to your hand, Ma? Are you all right?’ we asked.

  ‘My hand will be fine, I had a little accident.’ There was a long silent pause and then she told us. ‘Makkale, Achan had an accident too.’

  Was Achan’s hand damaged? I thought, but before I had a chance to ask, she blurted it out.

  ‘He died.’

  Satchin started to cry.

  No, he couldn’t have died, my father would never die, he went away but he always came back. There must have been some mistake; you can’t die from a hand injury.

  ‘He’s not coming back, Mol,’ she said again, crying.

  I watched her lips move and the only other thing I heard was that, ‘He died a hero and there was no pain.’

  He was rerouted on one of his business trips and he went to heaven instead as he saved a boy from having a horrific accident. He would save a little boy, that was the kind of thing that my Achan would do, but he wouldn’t die. There was some mistake.

  We gripped her hand firmly, more so that she would not run and leave us, and we walked home in silence, not stopping once to jump and scrunch the leaves on the ground as we normally did.

  The house was in a mess. Where were his pictures? They couldn’t have gone with him. I ran into the bathroom to see if his toothbrush had come back but it wasn’t there either. Did Amma think that she could put his pictures away and that we would forget about him? I went into his closet to look for them and saw his clothes weren’t there either. They were packed away in a big cardboard box. How could she pack him up like that? In just one day, like he never existed. I told Satchin but he made no response.

  ‘Why are Achan’s clothes packed away, Amma?’ ‘Mol, he’s not coming back. Come, eat something.’ Eat? Is that all she ever thought about? How could we eat? She had cooked an elaborate dinner and placed some chicken drumsticks coated with breadcrumbs on a side plate (more as an afterthought that we might not like the rest). We ate none of it and went to bed. The three of us slept together in my Amma’s bed. I wanted to cry but I remembered that Ammamma said that crying would indicate that the person would not come back and this was clearly not the case so I couldn’t cry. Amma lay in bed with us and Satchin whimpered as she held us. I contained my sadness and desperately wanted to hold both of them but then I decided not to get too attached to either of them. Everyone I ever really loved seemed to disappear.

  Death precipitated events, just like the astrologer said it would. With no income and no way of getting back to India, Amma began packing things. The grocery man, Tom, came most evenings to help her. He had a sister who lived in the East End of London and he thought perhaps we could rent one of her bedsits. Tom helped us sell most of the furniture, Amma sold her jewellery and our toys, and she put down the deposit for two months’ rent on a shabby room. Satchin and I didn’t want to leave and we were sad but Satchin said that we had to be strong and not make any fuss. We did not say goodbye to our teachers or school friends. We left like thieves with the three suitcases, all tied with string, and as we climbed into Tom’s van, our childhood effectively ended.

  I can’t remember much of that journey, except that it was raining hard and that the rain began to fall inside of me, suffocating me and taking with it any hope that I had of Achan’s return. The sea predator could not get me so it sent the rain. My heart beat faster and the rain fell harder: the rest, I cannot remember.

  The flat was a semi-furnished bedsit off Green Street in the East End of London. We had to share an outside toilet with the man on the same landing as us. He was Polish and he dressed in an old black pinstriped suit every day of the week and rarely left the house, except on Sunday when he went to Church. Tom’s sister, Maggie, was the Irish landlady and she lived above us with her two cats, Arthur and One Eye. She was the one that came over to us as Tom parked the van.

  Maggie was a fiery lady with bright red curly hair and a big bust that she emphasised with a light sweater. She wore a black pencil skirt which was obviously too tight. Miss Davies would say that she was having her last fling with youth, that’s what I heard her say to another teacher about Catherine Hunter’s mother who dressed in those type of short skirts. Maggie also had long nails and her fingertips were stained the colour of dried henna, like her teeth. She showed us into our new home. Amma thanked her. Maggie looked down at our three suitcases and smiled at us, a smile that pretended to look reassuring. She ruffled Satchin’s hair, which was the wrong thing to do because he only let Amma do that. He stepped back from her and clung to Amma who held onto him. Maggie smiled at me and I smiled back.

  ‘What’s your name, darling?’

  ‘Maya, Maya Kathi, and I’m six and my brother’s called Satchin and he’s eight.’

  ‘Well, Maya Kathi, if you ever need anything, I live upstairs,’ she said as she left.

  The room had horrific orange psychedelic wallpaper, a decorative attempt to distract us from what it really was; damp, cold and sparse. It had dripping taps, a hob ring for a cooker, and a greasy, thick green curtain to divide the kitchen from the sleeping/sitting area. Tom showed us how to insert the ten pence pieces in the electric meter under the sink. He looked at my mother and he told her that it would not be forever, it was just a start. When he said that, I could tell Amma wanted to cry, but she didn’t. He left and we unpacked our things.

  Maggie and Tom came back a few hours later with an old iron bed for the three of us to sleep in and a few other bits and pieces which Maggie said she didn’t need. ‘Tom said you’ll need a job,’ Maggie said to Amma. We translated and Amma nodded. ‘There’s a factory a bus ride away from here that is always looking for people. Can you sew?’ Maggie waited for us to relay what she had said and Amma shook her head. ‘It’s not difficult, it’ll take a day or two to get into it. I’ve a machine upstairs. I’ll teach you.’

  That is how we spent the next two days, in Maggie’s warm room with an electric bar heater and a Singer sewing machine buzzing away. One Eye and Arthur were jumping about and playing with us, whilst the television was on in the background. Maggie said Amma was a natural and would have no problems in finding work. We, in the meantime, she said, would have to be good for her and go to school. On Monday, she would take us to enrol at the local primary school and she would then accompany my mother to the factory. I thought that Maggie was another sign and that my father had sent her to show us that he hadn’t forgotten us. I could tell, though, that Amma was very cautious of her. I don’t know what exactly it was about Maggie but Amma wasn’t herself when she was around her. Maybe she didn’t understand her.

  That Sunday evening, before we went to bed, I wrote a letter to my Ammamma telling her all that had happened to us. I hadn’t written religiously like I had promised because we had been so busy, but that Friday, I began my first letter, not something that I told Amma to write for me. I really missed her and I tried to remember the things she taught me but I couldn’t, so I told her things that we did and how it was now. I asked Satchin if he wanted to write anything to her on my letter. He took it from me and began laughing. He read from the beginning: ‘Dear Ammamma, Who are you?’

  ‘You mean how, Maya, not who.’

  That was the first time he had laughed since that day. It was worth saying ‘who’ if it made him laugh. How/who, it didn’t really matter, because Ammamma didn’t read English anyway. It was just so that she would get something from me to let her know that I hadn’t forgotten her and I wanted to send it because I needed her now. Amma lit a candle and burnt an i
ncense stick and placed it near her bronze figurine of a little Goddess with many arms and thanked Her for whatever she had sent. Momentarily, the scent masked the dampness and put us to sleep. It took me back to the veranda, waiting for my Achan, who would scoop me up and tickle me, or back to the big house when he came in late at night, kissing me and saying, ‘Who is my best little Mol?’ As morning approached, I had fragments of dreams of my Ammamma, the smell of the sea vividly invading my senses as we were running along the beach, or as I sat on the side, watching her swimming with all her clothes on. Occasionally, it didn’t make any sense, like when she appeared in a red telephone box. I promised whoever was listening out there that I would never complain if I could have those days back with the two people that I loved most. I awoke to the smell of that urine-stained mattress.

  Amma got up early that morning and insisted on washing and oiling our hair. ‘You want to look good for your new school don’t you, makkale?’

  I thought it was best not to make a fuss because she seemed sad at the prospect that it was the last time she would be able to do that for us. ‘If I get work at the factory, I will have to be up very early and go before you wake up, so I won’t have time to do this for you every day, not for a little while anyway.’

  She helped us get dressed and Maggie came down to get us. Maggie said she would be back for Amma in half an hour to take her to the factory. We kissed her goodbye and left her to get ready. ‘Be good,’ she shouted through the window.