I stood by the door, ten thousand ants eating at my heart. Making as little noise as possible, I crept up to the bed, picked up a piece of cake and bit into it. A dollop of icing stuck to my nose. I sneezed. Amma opened her eyes; they grew large and round. She slapped me hard on my face. My eyes full of tears, I ran out of the room and into Munniamma, who was standing by the door. ‘Why does Amma hate me?’
‘She doesn’t hate you kanna,’ Munniamma said, wiping my face with the end of her saree. ‘She loved too much too soon. She doesn’t have any love left.’
***
Up in the attic I collected my pencil, butterfly notebook and the envelopes I had hidden behind a trunk. I had found the notebook some days ago in the attic. On its pages were scribbled in scrawny handwriting:
D-O-G
C-A-T
C-O-W
F-A-H-T-E-R
G-O-R-G-E
S-E-A
But on one of its pages was a dead butterfly, secured with glue. Its wings were orange, purple and green. Then there were pages coloured blue and blue and more blue. Ghosts were messengers, Vishnu-thatha had told me, like postmen really. They lived in the in-between world and conveyed the thoughts of those living to those who were in Para-dies. So I wrote often to Tara and put the letter in an envelope addressed to:
Georgie the GHOST.
And under it:
T-E-L-I-G-A-R-M
Because Patti said it was the shortestfastest letter. I wrote ‘Happy birthday TARA’ on a sheet of notepaper and put it in an envelope and addressed it. Then I set it on the heap of old letters on the trunk, which I knew Tara had read and returned through Georgie the GHOST.
That done I leapt up and ran to the window and stuck my head out of it. I could see the grey folds of the sky. I looked to my left at the chakka tree outside the gate. The chakka leaves are fleshy and a darker shade of green. When clean they shine like the rexene sofa in our living room, but these chakka leaves were covered with dust and the greywhite droppings of pigeons and the black waste of bats. I peeped further out of the window so I could see the peepal tree with thin skinlike leaves. The chakka leaves made a swish-swish sound in the breeze. The peepal went sis-sis, similar to the sound Munniamma made when she was furious. Some of her teeth were missing.
Kuttan the chakka man was under the chakka tree as usual. He parked his cart there every day next to Cha-chi. The tree did not belong to him but long ago he’d claimed it as his own. The shade of the tree was his. The tree’s fruits were his. Even Cha-chi had become his. Every day Kuttan wheeled a cartful of bulging jackfruits, a large, dissected one placed on top, its entrails exposed. As he dug into the fruit with his fingers and prised the nuggetlike seeds from its sticky tentacles, it made noises. To accompany this, he made obscene noises with his tongue. Only a week ago, when I was playing with Cha-chi outside the gates, the chakka-man had made squishy noises with his mouth. His eyes turned lewd, his smile leering, as he shifted his lungi and pointed between his legs where, it seemed to me, a branch had grown. His hand moved over it. S-l-o-w-l-y. Fasterfaster. I didn’t quite understand but instinct warned me what he was doing was wrong. Tara trembled deep inside me. We were afraid of him.
I leaned out of the window looking the other way. Electrical cables divided the sky: untidy sleeping lines. On Gibbs Road a bus, a horizontal red band, rattled past and following it, like a yellow bug on a mission, a taxi. It started to rain: hyphenated lines, vertical-vertical, and as the wind moved through it, slanting-slanting. Horns honked as people ran thisway-thatway in the rain. Another bus hid the people across the street. I peered at the advertisement on the bus: Godrej Hair Dye, with the picture of a woman with lustrous, jetblack hair. Lobo-teacher at school also had bootpolish shine in her hair. When freshly dyed her hairline was lower, like the new watermarks on old buildings. The Godrej Hair Dye bus passed. I saw a man on a cycle grab the back bar of the bus and steer through the crowd, steel bands on his ankles holding up his trousers. He was getting his ride free; he seemed happy. And then the bus went over a pothole and the man lost control of his cycle and fell. Tara laughed in my head.
Just then I heard Munniamma call out to me from the garden; I scrambled down the stairs. She came to me in her floral nylex saree. Her long black hair was combed back and tied into a knot covered with a shiny black nylon net. Two golden pins with fake rubies held wisps of hair behind her ears. She waved her hands over my head and then, making fists of her hands, pressed her knuckles to her own head and cracked them.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘So that I take away any blemish in you into myself. Come kanna, Patti said we must go to the temple.’
‘Why?’
‘Because God wants to see you. He wants to talk to you. He wants to say Happy Birthday.’ She grabbed my arm and led me into the house, up the stairs into my room. She combed my hair, gathering it into a tight ponytail and then rubbed talcum powder all over my face. She made a kissing sound with her lips. She held my chin between her thumb and forefinger. She touched her finger to her dark kohled eye and smeared the soot on my chin. ‘Now this will keep the evil eyes away.’ She patted my back. ‘Let’s go.’
Cha-chi set up a loud bark followed by a friendly whine as we walked out of the gate. Kuttan whistled.
‘What are you whistling at me for eh?’ Munniamma leaned toward him and poked her finger into his ribs.
‘I am whistling at him,’ he said, pointing at me. ‘So pretty.’
Munniamma hissed through her teeth. ‘I’ll pull your tongue out and you’ll never whistle again.’ Then grabbing my hand she pulled me down the road built of big stones, small pebbles and gravel. Munniamma and I trundled on, the Gibbs Road under our feet, old tar melting in the heat.
I stopped at Sweet Heaven Cake Shop. ‘Let’s buy a cake?’
‘We can’t,’ Munniamma shook her head.
‘But it’s my birthday.’
‘You know we can’t celebrate your birthday, kanna.’
‘But Amma celebrated Tara’s birthday.’
‘She was only playing Pretend.’
We walked on. Closer to the temple, Munniamma stopped at Ranga Roses. ‘Leave your sandals here kanna,’ she said as she slipped her own inside the stall. ‘Ranga will look after them.’
I took my sandals off and dropped them on top of Munniamma’s. She bought a cone of roses from Ranga. A tall woman approached us, smacking her large hands together. She stood before me and with a delicate movement of her hand she caressed my face. She circled her hands over my head and then, making fists, she touched her knuckles to her own head and cracked them. ‘Sweetie-Cutie blesses you with happiness and wealth,’ she said. Pouting, she added, ‘Although your grandmother refused to give me rice when you were to be born. I won’t forget that.’ Clapping her hands she walked down the road.
I stared after her. ‘Is she a man?’
‘Yes,’ Munniamma nodded.
‘Then why is he wearing a saree?’
‘Because she is a hijra.’
‘Confucius.’ Tommy Gonzalves had walked up to us. He was the owner of Tommy’s Garage, and an ardent follower of the Confucian way of life. Everyone called him Mr Quotes. He frequently quoted others’ quotes but mostly his own, most of them derived from others’ quotes. One of his favourite Confucius quotes was: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Appa’s old Ambassador was regularly in Tommy’s Garage for repairs and Tommy-uncle would say: The Ambassador is a manly car with a womanly temperament. It is a hijra automobile!
Now Tommy-uncle asked, ‘So Siva, where are you off to?’
‘God wants to talk to me.’
Tommy-uncle laughed heartily. ‘Remember son, when you talk to God, people will say you’re a God-loving man. But when you tell them God talks to you, they will say you’re insane.’ And with that he walked away, laughing.
&
nbsp; The temple’s main hall was noisy: young and old people praying with raised voices so that the Gods could hear them. Piety had a mixedup smell: jasmine-rose-milk-ghee-sandalwood-jaggery-incense-camphor-sweat. God must like the smell a lot but it made me nauseous. Munniamma pulled me through the crowd and the God-awful smell to the front. There she shut her eyes and chanted aloud over the din. Some moments later she opened one eye and followed my gaze up to the pigeons on the wooden rooftruss. It wasn’t the pigeons I was looking at. I had drifted off into Taraland; I was listening to the song in my head, the song without words: our wombsong – Tara’s and mine.
Munniamma slapped me on my back. ‘Close your eyes and pray to God or he won’t talk to you.’
I looked up at the picture of Lord Shiva framed in glass. Two bulbs were reflected in his eyes, affording them a divine glow: yellow, shiny. In the picture of Jesus Christ in my school, He had a heart, all red and glowing, and shaped like the Ace of Hearts in Appa’s deck of cards. I focussed my eyes to the spot where Shiva’s heart should be; it wasn’t there.
At school we prayed to Jesus Christ: Avur Father who art in Hay-ven halloo-d be Thy name... At home Patti made me pray to lots of Gods: Shiva-Rama-Vishnu-Krishna-Ganesha-Murugan etc. and all their respective wives and their families. Jesus was strong; he did the work of all our Gods; he did not have a wife or children to help him. Our Gods were choosy about their work: Ganesha for good luck, Lakshmi for money, Saraswati for intelligence, Shiva for peace, Vishnu for goodness and so on. What was more, Patti made me pray in Sanskrit; the words were long and difficult to mouth and I didn’t understand what they meant. Jesus understood English, which was very fine, and my prayers to him were precise and short, all ending with Amen. My schoolteacher had told me that Jesus was everywhere so I looked up at Lord Shiva and prayed to Our Lord Jesus. ‘Please send Tara home for one day, please. It is her star birthday today. Amen.’
Prayer done, I turned around and darted through the crowd and out of the door. Munniamma caught up with me at Ranga’s shop. We collected our footwear and in silence walked up Gibbs Road. I stopped in front of Rebecca’s house and called out to her. Munniamma gave me a light pat on my head and holding my arm she dragged me homeward.
Kuttan was fast asleep under the tree; Cha-chi barked, then wagged his tail. I ran past our house down the mudpath and Munniamma, sissing through her teeth, rushed after me. We walked through the woods to the lake. There we sat under the old chakka tree. The leaves swayed in the wind, made chakchak sounds. Milky sap oozed from its trunk and jackfruits, like big, bloated balls, grew from the wrong places: not from the branch ends but some place in between. Munniamma looked up at the tree trunk, at the markings chiselled all over it: half-circles, like pockmarks on skin. Some of the markings looked to me like GG. Below the pockmarks there were more markings: Yusuf Loves Meena. Gita Loves Mukesh, Cindy my darling, my sweetheart, and so on. I read each one out loud, one syllable at a time.
Munniamma made a grimace. She scooped out damp soil with both her hands. She patted the soil into a mud cake. ‘Appy baday to yoo, kanna,’ she said.
I picked up dried twigs and stuck them in a circle into the mud mound. ‘Happy birthday Tara.’
9
The small occurrences of daily routine kept me distracted from worrying about the bigger ones. An entire year passed this way: eating, praying, studying, playing, more eating, some sleeping and, looming over them all like a dark cloud, Patti’s forewarning, the Before-After bit: what is gained depends on the path followed. Path followed? Did I have a choice? My ‘gains’ had been pre-calculated and they didn’t amount to much. My life had a shape to it and had I stared at it hard enough I would have known its form and the route it would take. But I got to see it only in silhouette.
A different kind of darkness had come over Amma. It was as though there was a weight on top of her, something that pressed her down. Although she helped with the cooking she did not dust the house or tend to the garden. It was not that she was lazy; she didn’t see the dust anymore, and the plants, she told Patti, were meant to grow. The plants grew, the weeds too. Dust covered them, and everything else.
As for Appa, he was too busy at the institute to be bothered about home, though it must be said that he tried several times to talk some sense into Amma. But something had changed about her. Appa knew a great deal about the behaviour of female mosquitoes but he didn’t know much about women. He did not understand what had happened to Amma. So he let her be.
However, Patti never stopped trying to ease matters between Amma and Appa. ‘And how long will this go on? This arrangement of separate rooms, eh?’ Patti confronted Appa one morning as he was leaving for work.
‘She can come down when she wants to, ma,’ Appa said wearily and stepped out onto the veranda.
Patti followed him with a duster in her hand. ‘After all these years you don’t understand women even,’ she grunted. ‘Mallika won’t come down until you ask her. Women need to be asked, not told or ignored.’
‘Let her be,’ Appa replied.
‘And what about me?’ Patti screamed at him. ‘Do you have no responsibility towards me? If only your father had been alive. Seeing me in this wretched state he would have promptly died. Have you any idea how much work there is in this house, eh? Mani and Munniamma can’t do everything. Everywhere there is dust and more dust.’ Patti slapped the duster in the air to stress her words. ‘And the bulb in the outhouse is fused. Do you even know this? And look at the garden, so overgrown.’
‘Let me be.’ Appa walked away.
Outside the gate Cha-chi barked, adding a footnote to their exchange.
Patti dashed into the house and reprimanded Amma in the kitchen. ‘If you carry on like this, Mallika, the bottle will soon replace you, and then Raman will find another woman. Men are unstable and no man can live alone. First whiskey and then woman. That’s what will happen. Mark my words.’
But Amma didn’t mark her words. Appa started leaving early for work and coming home late. He would have already eaten in the canteen at the institute. Once home, he shut himself in his study, drank rum and played Solitaire. He was tired of Amma’s ways. I knew this. This is how I knew: Appa forgot his pocketbook and I looked through it. Most of the pages were filled with notes about mosquitoes and experiments in the institute, of all things that had to be done each day. Here and there were jottings of a more personal sort, written in small antlike handwriting, as though Appa didn’t want them to be read. Some of these notes were long and others not more than a sentence.
- Why does she blame me? What did I do?
- Why can’t she accept that Tara died? Babies die all the time.
- She looks so unwell, so unhappy. What can I do?
- Is something wrong with this house? Should I go back to London?
- Must call the electrician.
- The pursuit of mosquitoes is for me the only exhilarating thing left of life to pursue. Mosquitoes are at least mostly predictable and responsive, and they never are unyielding. Women are something else really. I can’t understand them.
- Must get new shoes for Siva.
- I remember the day she came to Victoria Villa. She was all of seventeen, shy and innocent. And how much she giggled and laughed those days. She was happy. What happened to her? And now whenever she crosses my path she looks at me with the heavy hurt of betrayal. If she speaks to me at all it is only about mundane matters: of reminders about money or repairs. The tone she adopts invariably humiliates me. It is as though she has said: now why do I have to ask you? Or why did you have to do this to me? Her unyielding eyes defeat me. I have had enough of their silent accusation. They have destroyed my quiet.
- Must get a vacuum cleaner. Must hire a gardener.
- I can’t take this anymore. Let her be. Let me be.
Some months later when Appa returned from a trip to London he brought back a vacuum cleaner. He sho
wed Patti the way to use it to keep the house clean. Patti looked suspiciously at the gleaming red thing with a long elephant’s trunk. She left the machine in the prayer room for safekeeping. On occasion she would use it, the button in normal position, to vacuum the prayer room so her Gods remained tidy. And she learned to use it in the reverse position, to blow the husk of new rice. As she blew and blew the husk away, she kept at her refrain about Amma whenever Appa was within earshot.
Then one afternoon, when Patti was taking a nap, Rebecca and I used the vacuum cleaner in normal position to blow away the husk from rice that Patti had spread out on a mat on the kitchen veranda. The grains were sucked in with a ssss, and I quickly, quietly put the machine away. Some days later when Patti used the vacuum cleaner it rattled and roared and choked from within. Then it coughed and stopped. Patti wound an old red silk saree around the broken machine and set it in the prayer room on a low table as though it was a different sort of God, all sacred red with a long black corrugated snout.
She didn’t stop her daily refrain. ‘And what if I die?’ I overheard Patti ask Appa one evening. ‘Who will look after the house?’ She paused, then drove home the punch: ‘Look at your hair, it has already started graying. Soon you will go bald even. You are getting old, Raman, very, very old. Who will look after you then?’
What if Patti dies? This thought worried me. It worried Tara too.
***
I was out in the garden overgrown with creepers and flowering bushes. I circled my arms around a bunch of wild daisies that I hadn’t noticed before. I gathered the blooms around my face, rubbed my nose into their petals. I watched the tiny black ants chase the sweetsmell on the stickystems of flowers. With a dried leaf I soaked up the morning dewdrops on the spiderwebs on the grass.
IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Page 9