Patti was wonderstruck. ‘Gleaming like a pearl with a wide-open mouth and saliva in its throat,’ she said. However, next morning as Patti was in the prayer room, which was right below the toilet, she heard the flush and the gurgle of a giant gargle. She rushed up the stairs and knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Raman, come out, this very minute. Whatever you are doing in there, come out now!’ She punched Appa on his chest as he emerged out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist, and shaving cream on his face. ‘Aiyoo da, that dirty seat is right over the prayer room. You are shitting on top of Gods’ heads.’
Appa laughed; bits of shaving cream fell off his face. ‘Don’t worry. Plumbing is a modern science, ma. Not at all like the hole in the floor in the outhouse.’ He tried to explain to Patti about modern plumbing and how her Gods were safe from its exigencies. But the discourse on fluid mechanics and the behaviour of water collapsed.
Patti slapped her chest, burst into a wail. ‘Aiyoo Shiva-Shiva… No one will use this toilet as long as I am alive,’ she wailed. ‘Upon my dead body will anyone use this dirty seat. Otherwise I will pack all my Gods and leave this wretched house where Gods can’t even reside in peace without worrying what is happening over their heads.’
‘Don’t get hysterical, ma,’ Appa said. ‘If there’s any leak I’ll lock up this bathroom. Okay?’
‘Not even a drop of water, mind you.’ Then with a grunt Patti walked away. From that day on, as she prayed, her eyes were fixed to the ceiling instead of on her Gods. Almost a month later she asked Appa, ‘Where does all the muck go?’
***
My school, Convent of Jesus and Mary, was in a lane off Gibbs Road, and not too far from Rebecca’s house. She was two years senior to me and she walked me home after classes. My school uniform was a white shirt and blue shorts. Amma didn’t like it. What was more, Appa had had my earrings removed, and this upset Amma even more. Cracks had appeared in her illusion and, like a mirror, it threatened to break into a million little pieces. All this was very bad for her, and for me, even more. What was worse, I had my own room now, next to Appa’s. It was a small room with a large window and a balcony overlooking the road. It contained a small bed, a desk and an old wooden cupboard, a full-length mirror on its shutter.
In a drawer inside the cupboard I found stones, smooth and perfectly rounded like marbles. I wondered who had put them there. Georgie? I arranged the stones on the desk on which I had set the old toy hen with one eye missing. On the wall above the desk Appa had fixed Georgie’s picture from the hallway; I had asked him to. I liked sharing the room with Georgie; I didn’t feel alone. He must feel lonely too; his eyes were sad.
It was my first night in my new room. Amma stood at the door. ‘Come Tara, it’s time to sleep,’ she said.
‘Tara is dead,’ I said. ‘She is in Para-dies. And if you close your eyes she will whisper in your ear.’
A big crack in the mirror. Amma walked away. That night as I lay in my room I heard a loud crash, similar to the tinkling crash when a mirror hits the floor, and then Amma’s scream. ‘You killed Tara. You killed my Tara.’
The next morning Amma moved her things to the spare room on the second floor. She didn’t come out of her room all day. She stared out of the window all the time, Munniamma said. The tamarind tree outside shivered in the heat, and Amma, feeling its mild turbulence, trembled out of habit. Far far away, in the haze of the sunlight, she saw a dazzling sheet of white water, as though the land had been blanketed with the salted slimy sea. She remembered the salty sea in her womb, and how it had gushed out of her, flooded her, flooded her daughter. The old familiar sadness rose like water inside her, and in the distant white salty sea Amma saw a little shadow struggling in the water, then it stared at her with big watery eyes. The thirsty wind howled: ooooowr-oooowar-oowat-oowata-oowata-r-wate-r, before it was swept away. Munniamma had gone up to the spare room a number of times. Amma said to her, ‘Look look, far away in the sunlit water. Can you see the little shadow?’
‘She’s just standing in front of the window and staring out,’ Muniamma told Patti.
‘She’ll be fine tomorrow,’ Patti said. ‘Let her be.’
But Amma wasn’t fine. As days passed she became more remote and absent. She grew cheerless and confused and stayed away from me. After her chores were over for the day she pedalled on the sewing machine for hours on end: swish-swish-swish. She didn’t stitch anything. Only swish-swish-swished.
My bare necessities became bare. I despaired, and so would Baloo the Bear despair. I should have known then, it was the beginning of ‘over’ time.
O-V-E-R.
7
There was less of Amma when she was around and more of her when she was not. I found myself dreaming of her and waking up with her name on my lips. But she was not there for me. She was just not there. Each day I chose an aspect of her: her aubergine eyes and how they crinkled when she smiled, or her aquiline nose with the dazzling mercury clots on them, and the way her nostrils flared when she was annoyed, and her smile, as red as crushed cherries, until she was there, there right in front of me. Then I felt warmth surging through me, turning to fondness, and ultimately, inexorably, to love. Unrequited though it was. I turned to the next best thing: Patti. I was with her most of the time. She was there for me.
Patti had planted more plantain trees at the back of the house where the soil was red and bleeding. They had grown tall and one of them had given fruit: plump fingers of mustard yellow rastali bananas. New anthills had cropped up under the tamarind tree: the home of lonely ghosts, full of old loneliness. Its ghostly arms reached up, swayed and sang in the breeze. Bats hung on its branches, upsidedown, watching everything around downsideup. When I sat under the tree its leaves lisped to me in eerie fashion and when I touched the leaves to my cheek they felt soft like ghostly skin.
Don’t sit under the tamarind tree, the ghosts will climb into your dreams and nightmare you, Patti often told me. I was not afraid of ghosts. Georgie must live on the topmost branch of the tree. From there he would see the sea and far far away toward London. He was farsighted. Further down from the tamarind tree, on a low brick wall someone had left white and red impressions of their palms. Who had done this? I heard footsteps behind me.
‘Here you are.’ Patti stood before me holding a plate of semolina ladoos. She set a laddoo at the base of the low wall.
‘What is this, Patti?’
‘It is a shrine. Here’s one for you,’ she said pressing a laddoo into my hand. Then she walked to the huddle of plantain trees, reached out to a cluster of bananas and pinched one of them with her thumb. ‘They are almost ripe,’ she said and walked away.
I broke the laddoo and dropped bits of the sweet around the anthill and watched ants scurrying around them. I crouched on the ground. ‘Come, come,’ I called out to ants, ‘come and eat sweet laddoo.’ I held my breath lest I blew the ants away. As the ants moved with their sweet burden, I plucked a hair from my head then with my cheek against the ground, I nudged each ant gently on its way with the strand of hair, ‘Go, go,’ I whispered as I guided them to the anthill.
Go go, Tara said.
Not far away from the anthill I noticed a caterpillar. The garden was full of them. They wandered out because of the heat, Vishnu-thatha had told me. This one was on its back and it wiggled its life away leg by leg by leg. Ants marched towards the dying creature in mock Brahmin ritual.
‘Shoo,’ I shouted at the ants.
Shoo. Shoo.
I breathed hard and blew them off the scene of extinction. A lone cricket chirped: cri-ket, cri-ket, crik-et… and then I heard Patti call out to me. I picked up the dead caterpillar and ran to the kitchen. Patti was sorting mangoes from a basket, picking out the ripe ones. She heaped a plate with food and then sat down on the floor. I sat down beside her and put the dead caterpillar on the floor. ‘Why does everything have to die?’ I asked.
&nbs
p; ‘Time ripens the creatures, Time rots them.’ Patti thrust her head back in an operatic manner. ‘From the Mahabharata, 1.1.188.’ She was good with numbers. She was always quoting from religious books. She had once told me that when we died our souls rose and followed the way of the spirits, through nights, dark fortnights, along the northern course of the sun, and eventually came back to the earth, clinging to the raindrops to be born again. It was from Chandogya Upanishad 5.3.1. – 5.3.10. She was really good with numbers.
Patti rolled the rice, sambhar and vegetables into a small ball and pressed it into my mouth. ‘I’ll tell you a story about death,’ she said. ‘When the gods built the world, there was no death. So creatures and people went on and on being born. Soon the earth was full. So many people in it with so many problems and wants that the gods could not attend to them all. So what to do? The gods thought and thought and then introduced Time. So the young ones grew old, the old ones grew older, and the older ones grew still older. The tired ones wanted to rest. Those with pain in their bones cried out. The gods became worried. So they came up with the plan of death. They made categories, and then decided who should live and for how long. They made the germs live the longest, flowers the shortest and the trees, birds, beasts and people in proportion to their need on earth.’
Patti stuffed another ball of rice into my mouth. ‘So, Siva, that is how death came on earth,’ she said. ‘And always remember what the Bagavad Gita 8.24 says – what is gained depends on the path followed.’
‘What that means?’
‘What comes after depends on what happens before. So if you live this life properly you will live forever in Heaven.’ She put the plate away and picked up a ripe mango.
‘Why did God make Tara die? She was not old.’
‘How I wish Tara had lived. Everything would have been all right. But I knew Tara would die the moment she was born. She was so weak and yellow like this mango. I know who will die soon and who will die later. The gods drop the children from heaven with special smells and return dates stamped on their foreheads.’ Patti sniffed the mango. ‘See, like this mango. The children who have to die, smell over-ripe.’ Her eyes filled with tears.
I blew air into my palms and pressed them to Patti’s eyes. ‘Now your hurt will go away.’
***
The sky was darker than usual that evening. Rebecca and I were out on the veranda. Patti stepped out of the door with a silver tray. Arranged on it were a lamp, a tumbler of water, a bottle of raw rice and sesame seeds, and flowers. ‘Come, it’s time to feed our ancestors,’ Patti said. ‘It is Amavasya today.’
‘What’s Ama. Vas. Ya?’ Rebecca asked.
‘It’s the night when there is no moon in the sky,’ Patti explained. ‘It is the time for new beginnings, the time to embrace the promise of new light.’
We went out into the garden. Patti looked up into the moonless sky, clutched a fistful of jasmine and dropped the flowers on the ground. She took a pinch of rice and sesame seeds from the bottle and sprinkled it on the soil.
‘Why do you do that, Patti?’
‘Sesame seeds are magic seeds, they can change rice to any food of the dead person’s liking.’
‘Can they change rice into ice-cream?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Rice can’t become ice-cream,’ Rebecca said.
‘And chicken curry?’ I asked. ‘Mani said the Englishman he had worked for loved the chicken curries that he made for him.’
‘Don’t listen to Mani’s stories,’ Patti said. ‘He’s a fibber.’
‘But can the seeds change rice into chicken curry?’
‘Oh yes. But kanna, not one of our ancestors was English. They were all vegetarian only.’ She poured water from the tumbler into her hand and sprinkled it about. ‘After feeding them you have to give them water.’
I took a pinch of the rice and seed and sprinkled them about: ice-cream for Tara. Chicken curry for Georgie. Then I took the tumbler from Patti and poured some water out, then drank what was left in it. I felt happy in my belly. It now contained the same water Tara and Georgie had drunk.
To all of these curious things was added, a few days later, a friendly chameleon that showed me the way to the attic. It emerged out of a hole in the neem tree: brightgreen at first, then sunbleached, then stonebrown. It hopped off the tree, scrambled down the low stonewall to the stairs at the back of the house, then leapt up on a step. It cocked its head and looked up at me, swishing its tail in a friendly fashion, and then with a change of colour it disappeared into a crack in the wall.
I climbed the stairs to the top. Up on the terrace I tried the door and it opened into a small landing. I climbed the steep flight of steps 1-2-3-4-5-6… 11, and stood in the doorway. The corner of the attic leaned as though it was looking out. There was a hole in the attic-roof where the tiles had fallen off and birds flew in and out through the hole. I went on my knees and hands and crept around the floor trying not to make any sound. The attic was home to many insects.
Moths flew like mini aeroplanes navigating the dark space; frogs watched them through binocular eyes, and spiders with thin, long ballerina legs spun in a creepycrawly dance. Lizards fluttered their tongues and made tut-tut sounds. Dragonflies teased the air; confused cockroaches ran helterskelter like people did in the rain; rats squealed from crevices and big fat mosquitoes buzzed around me, sucked at the blood and left crimson hillocks on my skin. Crickets sang their evening song in the day. A butterfly flitfluttered and flew away.
I picked up dead cockroaches, spiders, a frog, a dragonfly, a rat, a lizard, and a small bird: all dead. I put them in a box I found on the floor then took it down into the garden and set it under the neem tree. Then I fetched water in a bottle and sprinkled water over them. Some days ago I had asked Vishnu-thatha why he was watering a dead plant. He told me that the plant would live if I watered it. Then on a whim I rushed to the grave at the back and poured the remaining water on Georgie’s grave. Where was Tara’s grave?
I was often in the attic. It was filled with old things: furniture, rugs, magazines and books. Appa told me they belonged to George Gibbs. I liked being in the attic; I liked being surrounded by Georgie’s things; I liked being with Georgie. I talked to him, and sometimes Georgie answered with signals. Like on the day when an old coin fell from above. I looked up: a rat scurried across the wooden beam and a pigeon was perched on the rafter. Neither the rat nor the bird could have dropped the coin. It had to be Georgie. I was sure about this.
I made it a point to come up to the attic almost every day. It was from here that I called out to Tara, Taaraa, far away in Para-dies. Sometimes I would take a plate of goodies to the attic for Tara and leave it there so she could eat later. I talked to her about the Hide-and-Seek game the clouds and the sun played. I told her about the moon and the stars, which were torchlights in the sky and how the soiled sky had a shower in the rain and when it was clean a rainbow popped out of its mouth like a multicoloured smile.
On some days I was in the attic with the comic books Appa had got me. I read aloud to Tara the tales of the Li’l Bad Wolf, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, Mickey Mouse and Goofy and tried to talk like them.
When a cobweb stuck to the hair on my arm, I heard Tara whisper in my ear.
Whazz this?
Cob-web. The spider makezz it.
It livezz in the web, eh?
Yeah. It asso traps other insectz in it.
Why?
It likez to eat ‘em.
Why?
Thass how it iz on eartz.
Thass awful!
How it iz in Para-dies?
Eenie,MeenieMineyMo
Then I lay under the hole in the roof and watched the blue sky. I saw a plane flying past. I saw its huge belly. I saw birdbellies flying. It was so different seeing the big sky in the open and seeing it through the hole in t
he roof. The sky became so small that it belonged only to Tara and me: our bright blue sky with planes and birds that flew on their bellies.
Whenever I needed to be with Tara, I hid in the attic. It was Tara’s and my wombworld, our own Para-dies on earth, with a tiny tiny sky.
8
After weeks of sizzling April heat and the air thick with dust, suddenly daylight dimmed and the wind held its breath for a moment, only for a moment, and then with sidelong gusts and a deafening roar it lacerated the descending rain. In the prayer room Patti lit the lamps one by one. She lit the incense sticks next, and then from a small silver jar she took a pinch of holy ash and smeared my forehead with it. I had on the new clothes Appa had got me the previous day: a pair of mudbrown shorts and a white t-shirt with red and blue aeroplanes on it. ‘It’s your star birthday today Siva,’ Patti said, ‘and you are six years old.’
‘What is star birthday?’
‘The Calendar was made by the English to control people all over the world,’ Patti said. ‘English birthdays are according to the calendar. But Hindus are born under stars. We have a special group of stars for each of us. Yours, Siva, is called Mrigasira. And when these stars come in the sky, it is your birthday.’ She added, her eyes moist. ‘It was also your sister’s birthday.’
It was not a day I liked; it was not a day that Amma liked. She needed to be with Tara. Even though dead Tara was most alive that day. And I needed to be with Amma.
Amma’s back was turned so she didn’t see me at the door to her room. She seemed to have just returned from the market. She took paper packages from a shopping bag and set them out on her bed. She opened one of them and plucked out a frock and laid it on the bed. From a box she lifted out a cake, pink and white with red roses on it. She set it next to the frock. From another box she took out six candles and planted them in a circle on the cake and lit them. Then she blew the candles out. She cut the cake into wedges, then shut her eyes and began to sing: Happy birthday to you… happy birthday dearest Tara…
IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Page 8