Now I thought I could pick up a couple of things from my parents’ new cook’s repertoire. It would add a certain spark to my annual visit.
Around noon on the day after I arrived in Bombay, I was sitting by the window in Baba and Ma’s long, uncluttered living room, looking out to an imperturbable sea under a clear, sunny sky. It was low tide and the expanse of madly serrated and pitted black rock that was the beach here had emerged, glistening, the extremity of some enormous mythical undersea creature. The outcrop was dotted with men going about their morning ablutions: there were a couple bathing in the rock pools; quite a few of them washing their clothes, first stretching their sheets and towels and vests on the rocky surface and running a bar of soap along them vigorously, as if grating a carrot, then threshing the soaped clothes on the rough rocks to get the dirt out, and finally rinsing them … creamy rings of suds had formed around some of these men. Slightly further out, towards the sea end of the rocks, there were three or four men, each standing at a spot they considered to be sufficiently apart from the rest, pissing into the sea. Two boys appeared along the promenade-wall, their arms hugging plastic bags full of flowers, presumably the clear-out from a temple or a shrine, and, hopscotching along the rocks right to the edge of the sea, flung everything they were carrying into the water. I could see the orange marigolds and dried leaves and other assorted vegetation and rubbish disperse in a wide garland, which lost its shape as the circumference became bigger and bigger.
Ma was doing her usual thing of ministering to me fussily: ‘Do you want more tea?’, ‘Why aren’t you eating the fruits? The papaya is very nice’, ‘Tell me when you want the upma heated up.’ All she wanted to do was to serve me. On the first day, it felt comforting, as if I had regressed to childhood. By the third week, I would be thinking of the solitude of my mornings in London with such intense longing that I often barked at her to leave me alone. Sometimes her face would crumple and she would go quiet. At other times, she would strike back: ‘Alone, alone,’ she would mutter, ‘this is what you’ve learned from living abroad, you’ve lost all understanding of family and affection and how to live in society and be less self-centred.’
On the dining table, under a sizeable fine-mesh cover, sat small bowls of chunks of papaya, red jewels of pomegranate arils, halved guavas; and a large bowl, covered with a saucer, of upma, coarse-grained semolina cooked with mustard seeds and curry leaves and onions. It had fried cashews thrown in sometimes, or peanuts, or a small handful of peas. It was a South Indian breakfast dish and my mother knew it was one of my favourites, so she had asked the cook to prepare some this morning. By the time I had got up, the cook had left.
The upma was delicious. I had no idea why, but it was one of those things that I never cooked for myself in London, although it was a very simple and quick affair. In a divided life that was lived in two countries, separately and in rigorous succession, maybe I had saved a few things to belong to each of them solely, without flowing between the two.
‘This is lovely,’ I said. ‘I could eat this for breakfast every day.’
‘You can hardly call it breakfast at this time of the day. Here, have some more,’ Ma said, getting up to serve me.
The young woman who cleaned and did the washing up was going about her business as Ma and I chatted.
‘Is she new?’ I asked, indicating the cleaning woman, confident that she wouldn’t understand Bengali.
‘No, she’s been with us for nearly a year,’ Ma said, then addressed the woman in Hindi, ‘Milly, this is my son. He lives abroad. He has come here for a month.’
My mother’s Hindi was more than competent; unusual in a Bengali woman but, then, she had spent nearly twenty years in Bombay because my father’s work had brought them here in the mid-1980s. It was assumed that after my father’s retirement they would move back to Calcutta (Kolkata, now) but, to be fair to them, they had found Bombay – that was the name of the city then, and the name I still use – not an unsympathetic place, growing more and more over time to like its energy and urban, unprovincial personality.
The introduction was more an advertisement of my mother’s pride in her son than a courtesy extended to a maidservant, and Milly probably read it correctly: she refused to look at me, smile or nod or do whatever it was she did in these situations and instead turned her face away, as if in a calculatedly opposite response, and carried on with the dusting.
‘How friendly,’ I said in English.
‘Achha, enough,’ Ma hastily added, indicating with a gesture for me to stop being so openly critical of Milly’s attitude.
‘But she won’t understand what I’m saying,’ I persisted out of sheer cussedness.
‘Uff, stop now, will you?’ There was real annoyance in my mother’s voice. I was surprised, but I assumed that she was going to explain later, so I shut up. I dutifully lifted my feet while Milly swept the floor with the broom, then again when, on all fours, she swabbed it with a wet cloth dipped in water and wrung out, working it in wide arcs. The room filled with the odour of citronella oil.
When Milly went to the kitchen, my mother said in a breathless run of sotto voce, ‘She’s from Jharkhand, she’s a Christian convert, she says she understands Bengali and English’, then ran off to the kitchen to supervise Milly.
Jharkhand. It was one of India’s newest states, carved out of the southern and eastern part of Bihar only three or four years ago, after decades of agitation and activism by tribal peoples and backward castes – they had that dreaded Indian distinction, the branding iron of an acronym: OBC, Other Backward Castes – for a separate state where their interests and welfare would not be counted as nothing. It was also one of India’s most troubled states, with a strong Maoist presence and, consequently, brutal state-sponsored repression. It was the repository of vast mineral resources, and the state was not going to let a bunch of ragtag militants and expendable tribal peoples whining about their ancient land rights get in the way of those riches.
Perhaps Milly belonged to one of those tribes that had been displaced by mining companies grabbing their land? Perhaps her life did not hold much for her there: from Jharkhand to Bombay was a long distance for her to have come to work as a domestic help. (My mother’s generation still called them servants. My politically correct tag had not a jot of correlation to their status: their position in the Indian social hierarchy or economy had never changed.)
I went to the kitchen to deposit my empty bowl and spoon for Milly to wash up and discovered her sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the corner between the fridge and the cupboard, almost hiding, a plate heaped with food on her lap, eating her lunch. In the couple of awkward seconds that I was there, wishing I had not walked in on her eating, all kinds of childhood strictures about not watching servants eat flooded back, along with a new kind of discomfort.
Milly did not look up. I fled.
After Milly had gone, Ma filled me in on her background over the course of the day as I pottered around aimlessly, doing nothing at all and enjoying the lazing. I even paid a kind of passive attention to Ma’s intermittent chatter – chit-chat about her friends and neighbours, gossip about celebrities and Bombay film stars culled from glossy magazines. It turned out that even Ma had noticed that Milly did not talk to, or even look at, men, so my mother had assumed that the girl had an unpleasant history with them and had left it at that. What she had done instead was to engage the young woman in conversation during the hours that she came to work and, in the process, had pieced together a sort of surface narrative of her life.
It went something like this: Milly was married to a man from Jharkhand who worked as kitchen staff in a low-end restaurant in Bandra. They had a daughter, who was around three or four years old, and a son, who was just under one. Milly was pregnant when she began working for my parents, so Ma decided to give her a heavy meal every day. The good practice had continued, I was cheered to note, even though Milly, I assumed, had stopped breastfeeding.
‘But where does sh
e leave the children when she goes to work?’ I asked.
‘With her husband, of course,’ Ma answered. ‘He does the evening shift in the restaurant.’
‘Does she come from far?’
‘No, no, she lives just around the corner, in the slum along the sea wall on that side,’ she said, indicating with her hand the direction towards Taj Land’s End, the luxury hotel which sat on the tip of this centre-west finger of Bombay jutting out into the sea and forming the top part of the curve of land nestling Mahim Bay.
‘Is there a slum there?’ I asked; I had no idea. ‘But where? I thought there was only the sea on the other side of the wall.’
‘Have a look when you’re out there for your morning walk,’ she said.
Around seven in the evening, Renu arrived to cook dinner. She was short and dark and could have been any age between forty and fifty-five. The way she wore her sari Bengali-style, with the aanchol thrown over on the front but her head uncovered, made her look even more shapeless than she was. My mother introduced us. Without looking at me, Renu nodded at Ma, almost imperceptibly, and asked her, ‘What shall I cook?’ This, I gathered, was the order of things – she would arrive and, while still standing just over the threshold, ask my mother what she wanted for dinner, then she would go into the kitchen and set about her business.
Ma, indicating me, said, ‘While he’s here, he’s going to be in charge of these things. I’m on holiday now. Mind you, he’s a very good cook. And he loves eating.’ She tried to sound amusing, as if encouraging Renu to step up her game for the visiting son, but in a bantering, tongue-in-cheek kind of way.
Renu, looking impassive and unimpressed, gave no sign that she had even registered this and instead asked Ma again, ‘Tell me, quick quick, what you want cooked. I have to go at seven-thirty, they turn the tap off after half an hour, I can’t stand here all day.’ She made a gesture, even gave a ghost of a forced smile, that lent her impatient words the cast of a joke, too; the implied insubordination in her words would otherwise have been intolerable.
Ma repeated, ‘He’ll tell you.’
Renu continued to look resolutely at my mother.
Her voice was like a child’s tin recorder made by an amateur, with every stop hitting the wrong frequency. It reminded me of nails scraping down a blackboard, or the pitch of a screech of metal on metal that seemingly existed merely to shred the uninsulated edge of nerve-endings. This voice was the most immediately conspicuous thing about her and unignorable.
I said, using the most formal and respectful version of ‘you’, ‘Let’s go into the kitchen and see what there is …’
These things are difficult to give cast-iron evidence in support of, but I could sense that she hadn’t taken to me. It was as if she had developed an invisible force field around her. She seemed to be surly – even impertinent – by nature, but my unease seemed disproportionate to the brusqueness of her manner. What was it that was really bothering me?
‘Show me what’s in the fridge,’ I said, ‘and we can decide after that. Achchha, this morning’s upma was delicious, I’ve never had such good upma. You can make that again. What do you think are your best dishes? We can have one of those tonight.’
I jabbered on; even recalling it now is a touch neuralgic. Instead of answering the question, she emptied the contents of the vegetable crisper on to the floor and on the worktop, running through them one by one, ‘Here. Green bananas. Spinach. Green papaya. Cauliflower. Cabbage. Brinjal. Carrots. Spring onions …’
The language she spoke in, although identifiably Bengali, had flecks of hybridity marking it – she had earlier used the Hindi expression for ‘quick quick’, now she said ‘palak’ for ‘spinach’.
‘What about green-banana koftas?’ I suggested.
‘No,’ she said peremptorily. ‘If you want to eat koftas, you tell me the day before – it’s a lot of work and it takes time.’
A deep-seated, almost hard-wired, cultural training injected outrage into my system at the fact of a servant answering back. But no sooner had it manifested than the overriding educated-liberal reaction to the retrogressive nature of that first response pushed it down. I had managed to put my finger on what was bothering me. The knowledge was shaming. The whole cognition process had taken a fraction of a second.
‘Yes, yes, of course koftas take a long time,’ I wittered, ‘that’s true, very true. OK, then, what about brinjal bharta? And green papaya with prawns? Are there prawns in the freezer? Let’s see what fish there is in the freezer.’
My mother, who must have been listening from the living room, called out, ‘Yes, your father bought lots of fish last weekend from the fish market. The freezer is full.’
This was one of the Bengali rituals my parents had held on to: the man, too busy or elevated to be involved in the domestic drudgery of daily or even weekly grocery-shopping, made an exception for buying fish because fish held a special place in Bengali cuisine and only a man could discern the freshest and the best specimens. Baba went to the big indoor fish market in Khar every Saturday morning to stock up on weekly supplies.
Renu now took out shallow Tupperware boxes from the freezer, prised open the lids and rattled off the names of the fish each held, ‘Rui. Pomfret’ – she pronounced this as ‘pom-plate’ – ‘Rawas. Bombil …’
Bombil. I stopped her there. It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that this fish, also known as Bombay duck, was one of my main reasons for visiting the city at least once every year. Laid out on the fisherwomen’s concrete, the collected fish looked like congealing grey snot with a pinkish tinge, just one step up from liquid in the solidification ladder. Shallow-fried after a light dredging in semolina, or stuffed with a hot coriander-and-chilli green chutney and then fried, it was, in the words of my friend Ankita, ‘life-changing’. You realised that there seemed to be a purpose in the near-incapability of the flesh in holding its form – that very amorphous nature transformed into the signature buttery meltedness after cooking.
I asked her to fry some bombil. ‘That should be enough, no?’ I asked, trying to be democratic. ‘Green papaya, aubergine, bombil fry.’
Renu gave a nod and began her preparations. She went about them as if powered by some restless wind. Half a dozen things were started simultaneously: the container of frozen Bombay duck was left in the sink, under running water, to thaw; pots and pans were taken out; the vegetables that were not needed for the evening meal were returned to the fridge; a chopping board and knife appeared … she seemed to have ten hands.
Without looking at me, she asked, ‘Rice or chapatis? And would you like a dal?’
I noticed that she too was using the most respectful form of ‘you’ in the conjugations of her verbs to talk to me; also, that her Bengali was slightly awry – if I had to translate her question literally, it would be, ‘Will you take some dal?’
‘Chapatis,’ I answered. ‘Dal … yes …’ I hesitated.
‘Jaldi jaldi, I’ll be in trouble if they turn the tap off before I get to it,’ she said again. This time the ameliorating gesture or smile was missing.
I curtly said, ‘Whichever dal you think goes best with chapatis’ and left the kitchen, making sure to draw shut the sliding door that divided it from the living room.
Keeping my voice down, I said, ‘Well, a personality like good mustard oil – it goes straight up your nose’, trying to make a joke of it.
My mother indicated to me in signs and whispers that we should speak about this only after Renu had left.
‘But what is all this going-to-the-tap-on-time business?’ I asked, my voice still low.
‘She has to get her water from the municipal tap,’ Ma said. ‘The corporation water supply is limited to fixed hours, so she has to be there, at the tap, during those times, otherwise she’ll be without water for an entire day.’
‘But what water?’ I was still baffled.
‘Water for daily use – bathing, washing, cleaning …’
‘Doesn�
�t she have water where she lives?’
‘She lives in the slum over there’ – again, that pointing towards the west – ‘there’s no running water in the slum.’
‘You mean the same slum where Milly lives?’
Ma nodded. Then she added, ‘Renu can’t abide her.’
‘Who, Milly?’
‘Yes. I’ll fill you in later.’
Half an hour later, Renu came out of the kitchen, made for the front door with the words, ‘I’ll be back soon’ and left.
Ma said to me, ‘In a couple of minutes you’ll see her, if you stand at the window.’
Yes, there she was, I could discern, standing in a small queue, with two large buckets and what looked like an industrial-sized plastic container. The promenade was full of people – strollers, wooing lovers, children – and the road crawling with buses, motorbikes, auto-rickshaws. The snack-vendors had come out in force, drawing good business from the evening crowd. All life, and all of life’s motions and sounds and energies, seemed to be concentrated there. In the island of green, where the tap was situated, there were three old men on the red stone bench, three or four stray dogs, half a dozen children running around. The big trees around it blocked the orange sodium-vapour light and kept most of the area in the shadows. In the balmy sea breeze the trees stirred, making the dappled mass of orange light and black shade sway and move.
A State of Freedom Page 4