One Hundred Shades of White

by Preethi Nair

  Maggie was often at our house; she went part-time so she could help my mother out and so we saw a lot more of Amma. She took us to school and I made sure everyone knew she was my Amma. I held her hand all the way and once at school, shouted, ‘Bye, Ma’ in my loudest voice. Satchin would run off, sensing what was to follow, an even bigger, ‘We’ll see you after school.’ On the way back home, I told the lollipop man who used to help me across the road when I was going ‘solo’ that there was no need, my mother was there. She looked at him and smiled, at which point he pulled out an assortment of sweets from his pocket and handed them to me saying, ‘Oh, I know, dear, but I still have to make sure you all get across the road safely.’ Looking at Amma, I replied, ‘I really mustn’t take your sweets, sir,’ so she could see what a well mannered child she had brought up and I crossed the road hastily, dragging my Amma’s hand, hoping that the lollipop man would not mention the times when I used to ask him for sweets and then wolf them down.

  Just her being with us made that walk to school so nice. There was a Trebor factory near to where the lollipop man stood and the smell of sweets that emanated from the chimney would follow us home. As we walked past it, she said that the smell reminded her of home when the sugar cane was being harvested and processed. Bang on cue she said that, every time we got to the top of our road. By the time we stepped through the front door, that sweet smell would be beaten off with a chilli/garlic waft which seemed to attach itself to our clothes, and no matter how much they were washed, the odour lingered. The other kids who played on the street with us used that smell against us if they didn’t get their own way and it was the cause of many fights. Satchin and I could have retaliated, we had loads of ammunition against the other kids: Jatinder tied up his hair in a bobble and wore blue National Health glasses, we could have called him ‘four eyes’, but we didn’t. ‘You take no notice,’ Maggie would say, cleaning us up before presenting us back to our mother. ‘Your mother will be so proud to know that you’ve been good.’

  We played on Maggie’s side of the street and so she could hear an impending fight with all the noise. Just before it got dangerous, she would look through her window and come and extricate us from the point where bricks and stones were brought in. Then it changed when Amma bought Satchin a second-hand Budgie bike and me a Space Hopper, all the other kids wanted to know us then.

  I loved the evenings, especially in autumn when it began to get dark quickly. Maggie came in and Satchin and I would help her stick the labels on the jars. She was a really good story teller and told us about the castle her family used to live in and stories of when she was growing up in Ireland. Tom came around on some evenings but we saw him mostly on Sundays. Sometimes, we went for a drive with him, Amma and Maggie, occasionally as far as Brighton, and they would let us play in the arcades. When we got back home, that Sunday evening feeling crept into bed with us as we slept but now it was a safe feeling because whenever I woke up, my mother would be there.

  ‘¿Perdone, Señorita, está ocupado?’ I looked up and an elderly gentleman pointed to the seat. I didn’t have the heart to say yes. Bogey 2 was scrunched up and placed in the rack above me. The old man began to blink furiously and put his hand above his eye. I pulled the shutter down, not all the way, but just enough so I could still see outside.

  The countryside was still beautifully breathtaking even though I must have seen it at least a thousand times. I knew the way most of the valleys dipped and the streams that ran through them, the villages that were scattered between stations and the animals that were interspersed between the hills. The first time I came, I saw none of this. Armed with a phrase book, I was too busy practising my one sentence for the taxi driver so he wouldn’t sense that I didn’t have a clue where I was going and that I was scared.

  I was twenty and had been sent to this little town through unexpectedly winning a competition at university that I had entered as a bet. Competitions were not my forte and still traumatised me, so I knew it couldn’t possibly be me who would win. The first one I went in for was when I was nine and it was to make a robot from batteries and tin foil. Nicola Jory had told me that she had inside information, her mother was one of the teachers and also a judge and she said that I had won first prize. The winners were announced at assembly in reverse order and when Mr Mauldy said, ‘The first prize goes to‘…’ I stood up, but the prize went to John Saunders. Everyone laughed hysterically. I did not have any real inclination to learn Spanish but I went because I was led to believe that the prize was a luxury holiday with a bit of Spanish tuition thrown in.

  The cab driver that picked me up from Palmadoro station had shifty eyes and greased back hair. I spoke my one phrase that I had rehearsed over and over again, ‘El monasterio Santo Paulo, por favor.’ He began a conversation with me, to which I yawned, indicating that the trip had been very long and I was in no mood to converse. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at a secluded place in the middle of nowhere. I thought that El monesterio was a five-star hotel so I kept insisting that there was some mistake. He shook his head vehemently, pointing to the monk who was making his way towards us. The monk said nothing but indicated the monastery. So I followed him, wheeling my suitcase through the cloisters; he left me at the reception area.

  The monastery was run by Father Antonio, a bearded man who had eyebrows that knitted heavily together in a knit one, purl one sort of style and eyes that were perhaps a little too close together. ‘So pleased to meet you. Let me show you to your accommodation, Señorita Thakker.’ I was relieved he spoke English.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for El monesterio.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes and welcome,’ he said, patting my back and then he took me to my room. It was sparsely furnished with an old bed, a cupboard, a table and a lamp. Four weeks, I thought. He said his office was just two floors below if I needed anything and the dining room was across the cloisters, a large hall which I couldn’t miss. Dinner would be served at eight. It was all so quiet and there was nothing to do but to wait for dinner. I began to wonder what I had got myself into.

  I strolled across the grounds to the dining room and as I entered, I was met by a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes, all male, waiting to eat. I walked nervously in and Father Antonio came over. ‘The foreigners’ table is over there, none have arrived yet, they are expected in the next week, but please make yourself comfortable, join us.’ I joined the head table and just smiled, as I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. After finishing the meal, I left and a torpedo of men came after me. I let them all pass by with a ‘no entiendo.’

  Nobody told me that monastery rooms also served as halls of residents for the male university students who were studying in the town. Come to think of it, nobody had told me anything. I sat in complete boredom, until the other foreigners came. Most of them were elderly people from Canada who had decided to take up Spanish for their retirement years, but there were also a few French girls, and a Scottish couple whom I latched onto.

  The course consisted of Father Antonio droning on at us, teaching us Spanish for four boring hours every day. One day, I needed to speak to him because I had decided that I wanted to go back home, so I knocked on his office door and went in. There was another door at the back of the room so I knocked on that too and even though there was no answer, I entered. In that room was a four-poster bed covered with purple silk sheets, a television, video recorder, hi-fi and photos of women everywhere. I panicked as I heard footsteps, closed the door and ran out. Not looking where I was going, I bumped into someone.

  I looked up and was met by a pair of deep blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘Uhmmm, just looking for Father Antonio.’ He smiled, nodded and walked away. That was the first Spanish man that didn’t attempt to strike up a broken conversation with me which always led to the words ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘coffee’. As he walked away, something came over me, taking away all thoughts of going home. Father Antonio walked up the stairs. ‘Can I h
elp you with something, Maya?’

  ‘No thank you, Father,’ I said, thinking of my fingerprints all over his door. ‘I was just passing. Just wanted to let you know how much I am enjoying the course.’

  ‘Good, good to hear it.’

  Every evening, to entertain ourselves, we played cards. Sometimes a few of the Spanish students joined us and when they played, I lost the thread of the game, thinking that maybe the man with the deep, blue eyes that I had met outside Father Antonio’s room would come in. So I kept looking out onto the terrace, missing my turn, but I never saw him. Miguel the Poker King’s favourite words were, ‘Maya, I’ll let you cheat if you want, but just play.’ He thought I was one of those people who couldn’t cope with getting myself up and dressed in the morning and he took it upon himself to take care of me. He already had a girlfriend, Lucía, about whom he talked endlessly, so I felt he was safe and allowed him to show me the town.

  As I was going back to my room after dinner one night, Miguel called out to me, ‘Maya, I want you to meet a good friend of mine, come over here.’ I looked back and there he was, the man with the blue eyes. ‘Let me introduce you to Marcos, Maya.’ As I said hello, I gulped, so my heart wouldn’t pound out of my mouth and make me say something silly. He spoke some English and I some Spanish. They were words that were really useful at the time like, ‘Where is the post office?’ but I sat with them both for half an hour and then I left. I went to bed with my head full of this man called Marcos, hoping that I would see him the next day.

  Before dinner, Marcos appeared. The French girls were hanging around him so I went onto the terrace and sat on the wall. Soon after, he came to join me. Typical of fate, I thought. I had less than a week left and I was attracted to this man in a way that I couldn’t even begin to explain. Maybe it was the way he seemed so in control. A man in control allows no room for instability, chaos or change; you knew where you were with such stability. Women flocked around him but he seemed not to care.

  Véronique, a French girl who was really very attractive, came over as we sat talking. He asked her to get a lighter from his room and handed her his keys. When she came down and stood with a lighter and a box of cigarettes in her hand, he turned to me and said, ‘Have dinner with me tonight.’ He had Véronique in the palm of his hand, but he didn’t want her, he wanted me. I met him that evening and the next, and then on the third evening, he kissed me and I felt like everything that had gone before didn’t matter so much.

  Ravi Thakker was the man who replaced my father and the one who threw our lives into chaos once again. When I first met him, I thought he looked like a duck. We barely had time to have Amma to ourselves and then he waddled into our lives. First with a big box of assorted chocolates and a pink jack-in-the-box, I mean, what did he think I was going to do with that? Then as the months went by, he came loaded with games, toys and other gifts, trying to buy our affection.

  The first time he arrived, he took us to see some boring waxworks and we went for a pizza. That was the best bit of it because it was the very first time we’d had pizza, all stringy cheese and tomato. I loved it, Amma liked it too. She normally never ate with us when we went to Wimpy, but at Pizza Hut, she pulled out a Tabasco bottle from her handbag, put it on her pizza and ate it all. Ravi Thakker made some comment, I can’t remember now what he said, but Amma laughed. She always laughed when he was there, he probably made her nervous. When he left, Satchin and I called him ‘Duck bum’. ‘Did you see how Duck bum drove his car?’ he would say, imitating him, but as the months passed when I did it, Satchin didn’t find it funny any more. He grew to like him. Every time we got settled somewhere, something came along to uproot us, and I knew after a few weeks of seeing Ravi, that he was there to stay and that Amma would marry him.

  There were the little signs like the way she got dressed up on Sundays when he was coming, brushing her long hair over and over again. She put a deeper colour of lipstick on so it showed. If she was going to marry anyone, I wanted her to marry Tom. Tom was always there for us and he would do anything for Amma. He was the one that invented the pickle story about customers wanting pickles so she would have something else to focus on. I heard him and Maggie talking about it when I was upstairs with them. I was lying on their sofa pretending to be asleep.

  ‘We’ve got to do something for her, she’s an awful lot going for her and I don’t want her to end up here for the rest of her life,’ Maggie said.

  So they talked about ways they could help Amma. When I heard some of their ideas, I wanted to jump up and shout, ‘no way’, but then they both decided on the pickle story and that was quite good. It was Tom who came up with that. Only after she had begun making those pickles did he find her customers that wanted to buy them, driving for hours and hours. Tom was kind to her, kind to us.

  Even when he was tired he would play with us. When he stayed at Maggie’s house we would wake him up by jumping up and down on his bed and instead of shouting, he would grab us by the legs and fight until we said ‘surrender’, he would get us caps and show us how to let them off without a gun and teach us karate moves. When the ice-cream van came he would give us money to go out and get a Flake 99 each and would sit on the wall with us until we finished eating it. Sometimes, on a Friday night if we were at Maggie’s, he’d let us watch Starsky and Hutch with him; that’s what he’d call us, Starsky and Hutch. He really loved us and we loved him and then we had to leave.

  ‘Don’t do it, don’t marry him, Ma, can’t you see he’s just some fat duck that wants to take you away from us,’ I wanted to scream when she told us. But I had lost Satchin as my ally and deeply regretted cutting off the sleeves and the hood of his parka coat to make myself a body warmer the week before. He looked at me as if to say that he would not support me and would make my life hell if I said no to Amma. So I said yes and then I left Amma to pack my things. Just heaped all my dolls, material, sewing things, scissors and clothes in a corner and said there, that’s it, all done. Maggie said she would come and be near us again and Tom didn’t say anything, not one word, so the day I was supposed to go across the road and say goodbye, I went to see Fatima instead.

  Seeing as it was probably the last time I would see her, I thought she would invite me in but she didn’t. I handed over my Space Hopper because she loved it and could never get enough goes on it and I couldn’t see myself jumping up and down on it in Mill Hill. The kids there probably had roller skates and sophisticated toys. I also gave Fatima a paper and envelope set that I made up for her. In my haste, it wasn’t done as professionally as it could have been. She looked disappointed at the jagged edges but she said she would write. I said that I would phone her and then I remembered her family didn’t have a phone. Her mother called her back in and she ran off. I took a long route home, walking slowly along the filthy grey pavements now covered with cherry tree blossom. ‘Achan,’ I whispered. ‘She’s getting married to a man called Ravi Thakker, but I won’t forget you, ever.’ They were waiting for me outside and I didn’t have enough time to say goodbye to Tom or Maggie and that was the only thing that stopped me from crying.

  Amma’s wedding was horrific. I was followed around by Ravi’s mother who thought she was my newly adopted grandmother. She kept pinching my cheeks with her oily fingers that she had not bothered to wipe after the buffet. ‘Such a cute girl,’ she said to everyone who passed, ‘Looks exactly like her mother.’ How would she know anyway? I could have been the spitting image of my father. Another woman called Nita agreed, nodding furiously, and then looking over at her own children added, ‘but Beta, such a pretty girl could have chosen a prettier dress.’ Ra-ra skirts and puffy blouses or pedal pushers with T-bar shoes were not for the style-conscious, only for sheep who wanted to follow the current fashion trend. ‘Maggie and I made this,’ I said defiantly, looking in Maggie’s direction. ‘Yes, yes, that would make sense,’ said the chief spokeswoman.

  I followed this Nita specimen into the bathroom and, as she went in, I jammed the lock
with a few hairpins. Nobody missed her and she came out an hour later, looking shaken and dishevelled. She gathered up her two meringue-attired children, found her husband (who was engrossed with Jack Daniels) and left. The oily-fingered grandma came over, screeching, ‘You must come to America, Beta, and visit us. We’ll take you to Disneyland,’ heaving me into her bosom as if Disneyland were situated there. The grandpops splattered his Bombay mix everywhere as he said, ‘You and your brother, come anytime, we’re related now.’ What kind of a family was this?

  Ravi Thakker’s house smelt of polished floors and fresh paint. It was obviously redecorated to impress us. He had done up my room with horrible bright pink polka dots which kept me awake at night. I couldn’t really sleep, so I wandered into Satchin’s room and slept in the spare bed he had. Satchin didn’t like this and filled the bed with his trainers and I had to stop doing this. When he reached his teens, he put obstacles between us, obliterating all that had happened before and so I reminded him of the stories of how it used to be and what we used to do together. It was no use, Satchin wasn’t interested, he had bonded with the cricket-loving Ravi. Ravi had won and Satchin was on his side. I made it clear to Ravi that no matter how many gifts he brought me or wherever he took me, he would never be my father. That he didn’t even come close. ‘Okay, Maya,’ was always the way he responded, he never shouted. Okay, Ravi Thakker, it was them against me, but Maggie would be moving out of the East End of London and she would be here soon.

  The train pulled into Valamoro and lots of passengers got off as it was market day. Valamoro, the neighbouring town, was much bigger than Palmadoro, it had a lot more shops, restaurants and bars. I often came to the market here on Sunday mornings just to feel the bustle of activity and to see the gypsies who would come in and sell their handmade goods. I always bought something from the children, a handwoven bracelet or necklace, but I couldn’t wear it back in Palmadoro as it caused such unnecessary arguments between Marcos and I.