“Loafer,” said one of them, giving him a disgusted look. “Even at this age they act funny.”
Sripathi turned away, feeling ill. His legs began to shake, and it was with great effort that he crossed the parking lot to where his scooter still stood. I need a doctor, he thought, panic-stricken. He wished that old Dr. Pandit was alive. When Arun and Maya were young, they always seemed to develop soaring fevers in the middle of the night. He didn’t have a phone in those days, or the scooter, and he’d had to cycle frantically to Dr. Pandit’s house for help. The doctor lived forty-five minutes away, and Sripathi was certain that his child had died while he cycled through the still night—past shuttered stores and empty tourist buses with tarpaulin-shrouded luggage piled on their roofs, parked along the road like slumbering elephants, and the pavements full of sleeping street people who looked like bundles of grey rags. The doctor had been a genial old man. “Ah! Don’t worry about it!” he would say, waving away Sripathi’s profuse apologies for disturbing him so late. “Everybody falls ill and has babies in the middle of the night. I sleep all morning in my clinic because no patients come then.”
Five years ago, Dr. Pandit had died. His heart had given one final lurch and he had collapsed on top of a patient who had almost expired with shock too, so the rumours went. The doctor’s son had taken over the clinic, but he finished all his business in the morning and firmly told the patients whom he had inherited that, unlike his father, he did not like to be woken in the middle of the night, and neither would he make house calls.
“Don’t you finish at your office and go home at five o’clock?” he had asked Sripathi once. “Would you go back to work if somebody phoned and asked you at one in the morning? Just because my father was crazy enough to do it, does it mean that I should follow in his footsteps? No-no-no. These days even doctory is a business, sir, like everything else.”
He had handed Sripathi a list of all the hospitals and nursing homes in the area, along with phone numbers, and told him firmly that, in case of a medical emergency at an ungodly hour, he should contact them.
Sripathi missed old Dr. Pandit, his willingness to listen, his involvement in a patient’s family, his entire life—for as he was fond of saying, a human being is not merely a ticking body, but a sum of all that happens in the world around him.
“If you have a headache, do I immediately jump to the conclusion that you have a tumour in your brain? No, no. There are many other possibilities—a fight with your wife, too much work to finish in too little time, not enough sleep—so many things can cause pain, eh?” And all the while his wrinkled fingers that had probed and gauged and soothed so many bodies would find their experienced way around, almost as if he could hear and see with them as he did with his stethoscope and his glasses.
What a good man he had been. He most certainly would have known what was wrong with Sripathi Rao, aged fifty-seven, father of two children (one dead), burnt-out copywriter and a man whose body was out of control. Yes, he would have known.
It was October the fifteenth. Only two weeks to Halloween, Nandana remembered, although she didn’t see pumpkins anywhere. Nobody talked about their costumes. Her mother used to buy bags of candy several weeks before Halloween, but Nandana hadn’t seen any in Big House. Of course, they could be in the kitchen cupboards, which were too high for her to reach, but she doubted it.
The kids at school talked about a festival called Deepavali that Nandana had never heard of. It sounded like fun though—they were allowed to play with firecrackers. The two fat boys said that their father burst lots of bombs. No way, thought Nandana. She remembered the television news that her father had watched every evening at eight—weren’t bombs used only in wars? Radha told her she was getting three new sets of clothes—one from each of her grandmas and one from her mother. Nandana wondered if Mamma Lady would get her new clothes, whether she would get to burst bombs and eat tons of sweets, although what she really, really wanted was a Mars bar. Mamma Lady went to the market every day, but she never ever bought any chocolates or cakes or doughnuts. Only yukky vegetables and bananas and sometimes two apples, which she’d cut into slices and give to Nandana. If she didn’t eat them, because she didn’t really like these India apples, Mamma Lady looked sad and said, “No-no, chinna, you mustn’t waste good food. There are too many hungry people just outside our gates.” And slowly, she would put a piece at a time into Nandana’s mouth, kissing her every time she ate one. Which she had to admit she liked, even though she wasn’t a baby and could eat it by herself.
The school bell rang and Nandana ran to the door. If she could get to the gate before the rickshaw man arrived, she could slip out and walk back to Vancouver. But she wanted to stay and see what this Deepavali was all about. Perhaps, she thought, she would go home after she had burst a few crackers.
13
BANDIT QUEEN
AT THREE-THIRTY in the afternoon on Brahmin Street, Big House lay like a shaggy animal, drowsing in the heat. Ammayya had just woken from her nap, irritable and hungry.
“Akka, can I leave Ammayya’s room? I cleaned it properly this morning, and my daughter-in-law is taking me to the cinema,” she heard Koti ask Nirmala. The lazy shani didn’t want to work at all, never had in all the years Ammayya had known her. Ammayya didn’t like Koti, and never lost an opportunity to yell, or throw her pillow, at her.
“One sweep will do. No need to wipe the floors. I’ll come with you,” said Nirmala.
“What are you both doing phusur-phusur outside my room?” demanded Ammayya. “Plotting something no doubt. I am not safe, even in my own house.”
“Do you want your tea here in the room, or are you coming to the table?” asked Nirmala, drawing the curtains to let in some afternoon light. She had drawn them in the morning as well, and Ammayya had shut them immediately.
Ammayya shaded her eyes and snarled at her daughter-in-law, “Stop that! My eyes hurt. I don’t want all kinds of dirty people peering inside. Thieves and lechers, all of them. And am I sick that I should have food in my bed? Perhaps you hope that I am sick, dying even. Then you can lay your greedy hands on my jewellery. Aha, I know you only too well! I have left everything to my daughter, so don’t expect a single paisa.”
“Shall I make you your tea? Or will you make it for yourself?”
“Why, where are you going?” demanded Ammayya, rocking vigorously in her chair. She liked an argument if she could stir one up. It cleared the boredom that fogged her daily life.
Koti knelt down and swept under the bed. She hit Ammayya’s trunk with the flat of her hand and giggled, “What is in this petti Ammayya? Anything for me?”
Ammayya picked up a rubber slipper and flung it at her. Koti laughed and ducked. She hummed a tune from a Tamil movie and started to whisk her broom around.
“Cow! Fat, cross-eyed cow.” Ammayya picked up her other slipper. “Cheeky, black buffalo. Crawled out from a gutter and says dirty things about me to my face. And you, who are you?” She threw the slipper at Nirmala as she bent over the bed, straightening the sheets to check whether Ammayya had hidden any food under the pillow. Except for sweets, there was no restriction on what she ate, but Ammayya liked to pretend that she was being starved by her family. She stole food from the fridge and the kitchen cupboards, hid it all over the room and then promptly forgot about it. Once, a long time ago, when her fears of starvation first began, she had stuffed tomatoes under her mattress, and for weeks they had festered there.
Today Nirmala discovered a dry chapatti beneath the old woman’s pillow. “You do this again, and I will not make any food for you or do anything for you,” she said firmly.
Ammayya became senile. “I said, Who are you? What are you doing in my house?”
“I am Sripathi’s wife, Ammayya,” Nirmala said patiently.
“Sripathi, my son—ah, he is a handsome boy. I am looking everywhere for a good bride for him. It is time he got married; it isn’t good for a young man to stay a bachelor for too long. So if yo
u come across a nice girl, pretty, well educated, decent family …” Her voice dripped into a mumble, and she rocked too and fro in her chair. She looked slyly at Nirmala to see whether she had provoked a reaction. “He isn’t a doctor like I wanted him to be. It is always good to have a doctor in the family, but the idiot went and studied poetry. Will pretty words fill your stomach, that’s what I want to know? So we need a rich bride for Sripathi. Better that way. At least we won’t starve.” She shot another malicious look at Nirmala who had brought only two sets of jewellery with her.
Nirmala calmly continued to tuck the sheets, check under the mattress and plump the pillows.
Ammayya stopped rocking and glared at her, “What are you doing to my bed?”
Nirmala gave the sheets a final pat and straightened up, wincing as she did so.
Koti gave her a concerned look. “Akka, what happened?”
“My back,” said Nirmala. “Yesterday I brought down that pile of books for the raddhi-wallah. They were heavy.”
“Books, what books? You are throwing away my husband’s books?” demanded Ammayya.
“Maybe it was the dance step I demonstrated to my class on Saturday.”
“Nobody in this house listens to me,” Ammayya shouted. “Why are you checking my bed? Are you looking for my money? You won’t get any of it, I am telling you.”
“Ammayya, I am going out. If you want tea, come to the dining room right away.”
Ammayya rose slowly from her chair, and her knuckles whitened on the arms with the effort. Nirmala handed her the walking stick and moved quickly out of the way, in case she decided to take a swipe at her. You never knew what demon was going to spark her mind from one minute to the next.
“Do you need any help?” she asked tentatively.
“I don’t need anybody’s help,” snapped the old woman as she shuffled out of the room. She concentrated on not losing her balance or crumpling to a heap on the floor. How humiliating that would be, especially in front of the servant maid, the squinting monkey. Neither age nor illness would rob her of dignity; she would walk by herself, no matter how long it took her.
“Don’t go too fast,” said Nirmala. “You’ll slip and break your hip.”
“Shut-up, stop treating me like I am a two-year-old, Nirmala,” snapped Ammayya.
“Oh, so you do remember who I am, eh, Ammayya?”
“Do you think I am senile, or what?”
“Where is Putti?” asked Nirmala, holding her mother-in-law firmly under the elbow. For all her protestations to the contrary, the older woman had been losing her balance lately, and Nirmala was afraid she might break her hip bone and need surgery. The last thing they could afford right now was hospital bills, which, if her friend who had just returned from a hysterectomy was to be believed, were horrendous nowadays.
“How do I know where she is? Am I her shadow to follow her around everywhere she goes?”
“So we will be entertaining another groom for our Putti. I hope this one clicks.”
“What is the hurry?” demanded Ammayya. “Is she on your head or what?”
“No-no, nothing of the sort,” said Nirmala. But she had noticed Putti’s secret interest in Gopala, the way she rushed to get the milk in the morning when he rang the doorbell and the flirtation that had developed between them.
Ammayya looked suspiciously at Nirmala. She knew her daughter-in-law only too well, especially that feeble, wishy-washy expression on her face. The silly creature was hiding something from her.
“What is it?” she demanded, tapping her stick impatiently on the floor. The sound set Nirmala’s teeth on edge. “What is going on in this house? Nobody tells me anything. Nowadays I am like a guest here.” She was pleased with her martyr act. It had no effect on her son, but her daughter-in-law was more susceptible, and it delighted the old woman to hone her tongue on her.
Nirmala hesitated and Ammayya pounced. “Tell me, I want to know. Is it Putti?”
“Oh no! I was just thinking whether it would be all right to buy new clothes for Deepavali this year. For the child at least, poor thing. We can’t give her very much, but a new langa-choli would look so pretty on her.”
“Don’t ask me for money. I have nothing,” Ammayya said quickly. “And I want to know where Putti is. That girl is becoming very strange these days. I will have to ask Menon doctor for some medicine for her. Have you noticed anything strange also?”
“Like what?” asked Nirmala warily.
“She stares at things all the time. At the mirror, at the walls, everything. And she is always drying her hair on the terrace in the morning, and looking at the sky from the verandah in the afternoon. God knows what is wrong.”
“Maybe she is feeling the heat,” suggested Nirmala.
“Unh-hunh. Who wouldn’t feel it?” said Koti, giving the floor one final swipe with her broom and backing out of the room. “You should hear the stories that are going around about this heat. Why, the other day, that income-tax inspector, you know the one on Second Main, near the cinema? Well, he was quietly eating a mango on his verandah when his wife came out of the house and demanded the seed to suck.”
“Enh, why couldn’t she get her own seed?” Ammayya wanted to know.
Koti shrugged. “Do you want to hear what happened next or not?”
“Okay, okay, go on with your silly stories.”
“Well, our big inspector-orey refused to give it to her. She tried to grab it and he ran out of the house holding the stupid thing. Can you imagine what a sight that must have been? All the people on Second Main saw it with their very own eyes. His wife raced after him screaming dirty-dirty words and waving a knife in one hand.”
“Ayyo! Why didn’t anybody stop her?” Nirmala asked.
“Too hot it was,” said Koti. “Besides, that Gajapati-amma is like Kali Devi herself when she gets angry, and nobody wanted to get near her, especially since she had a knife. But it was the heat that saved her husband, finally. She fainted from all that running around. What a drama!”
Nirmala laughed at the thought of the income-tax inspector sprinting down the street with a mango seed in his hand and, settling Ammayya in a chair, gave her a cup of tea.
Putti entered the room just then. “Where were you, child?” demanded Ammayya. “I wanted to tell you about my blood pressure. See how red my eyes are? Jayanthi Ammal told me that that is a sign of high pressure.”
“Are you going out, Nirmala?” Putti asked, not looking at her mother.
“Yes, to the vegetable shop. I need chilies and tomatoes. The child eats nothing at all. I don’t know what to give her, only. And since she won’t talk, she can’t tell me.”
“Putti, did you hear me?” whined Ammayya. “Nowadays you don’t speak to me at all. I am sitting and sitting and waiting for you every single day, and God knows where you disappear.”
“I am always at home,” said Putti. “Where will I go, other than to the library or the temple? And if you are ill, why don’t you visit Dr. Menon?”
“Tomorrow you can take me to him. Now you stay here with me, and tell me what and all Miss Chintamani said.”
“Not now, Ammayya. I want to go with Nirmala. Help her carry the vegetables.”
“Pah, no sense you have. That child won’t eat vegetables and all. She had a foreign father. They eat meat. I am telling you. Shanti Kumar told me. She had a really bad time when her grandchildren came from foreign. They wanted cow and goat and pig and all. Every day she used to send the servant to the Military Hotel to get tiffin carriers of food for them. She said that she felt like vomiting from the smell and had to get the Acharye to do a special cleansing ceremony in the house after they had all gone back.”
“Meat?” said Nirmala uncertainly. “The child eats meat?”
“Enh, what did you think? Your daughter brought her up like a Brahmana? Once she went there she forgot everything—flushed all our rules down with the shit water.” Ammayya frowned at Nirmala. “But don’t think I will allow you
to bring meat into this house. I am not a fool like Shanti Kumar, giving in to the demands of children.”
Nirmala gathered up her shopping bags and purse and left with Putti.
“Putti, you will become black as a crow with all this running around in the sun,” shouted Ammayya. “And next week that fellow who is coming to see you will run away. Listen to me.”
There was not a sound other than the cawing of a crow from the lime tree in the backyard. Ammayya wriggled with excitement in her chair, waving her feet that, in their thick socks, looked like a pair of white mice. Despite the heat, Ammayya never felt warm enough. In addition to the socks on her feet, she wore a woollen blouse and a shawl.
She tried to plan out her time. Sripathi was still at work, the child was at school and would be back only at a quarter past four. Plenty of time to make her way up the stairs to her son’s section of the house and check the cupboards, his desk, the drawers, under the pillows, for letters, cheques, wads of money. She would go through Nirmala’s cupboards to see if she had bought any new saris without telling her. She would check the child’s suitcases. Opportunities like these were rare, and she cherished them. Ammayya sucked in her dentures and released them with a moist click. Nobody told her anything these days. They kept secrets from her, she knew that for sure. She could smell it in their voices, see it in the sly looks they traded with each other—Sripathi and Nirmala, and Putti and Arun. Even the servant knew more than she did about the goings-on in this house. Ammayya tapped her stick furiously on the floor. She should never have given Nirmala charge of the keys to the house. Daughters-in-law were crooks. They stole power from you before you knew what was happening.
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