Princess?
Sweetie-Cutie pulled out a knife and a watermelon from a bag. She sat down and holding the fruit between her feet she cut it in half, then slowly sawed a disc, and then another. She held out the fruit disc to me. ‘Come here, princess.’
I walked up to her and took the fruit from her hand. I lay under the chakka tree and raised the fruitdisc to my eyes. Tara watched the sun. The rays looked like tiny lights caught inside red teardrops. Tara licked the juice that trickled on my face; she stuck my tongue out and made a hole in the fruit disc, eating chunks of fruit as the hole got bigger and bigger, and finally there was only a ring left. Sweetie-Cutie lay close to me. We looked through the hole and the sky grew small and round and belonged only to us. Sweetie-Cutie-Tara-Me. Our own Para-dies.
‘How did you become a girl-boy?’ I asked.
Sweetie-Cutie arched an eyebrow. ‘When a baby is a tiny little thing in the mother’s womb it is always a girl first. Then as the mother’s belly grows, the baby grows in it and if it has to be a boy then it grows as a boy but only bit by bit. But some babies take a long time to fully become boys and the mother gets terrible pain and so the baby is born even before it is fully a boy. His heart is still a girl’s. So the girl inside him feels trapped and very sad.
‘I was born a boy like you,’ she said. ‘But I was not fully a boy. One day I was looking into the mirror I saw the face of a little girl. I could hear her in my ears talking to me. I could think her thoughts. I had memories of her. I wanted so much to be her. I knew I would be happy if I could be her. So I became her.’
***
Patti sent me to Vishnu-thatha’s house with a plate of New Year sweets. We sat on the steps of the veranda looking up at the setting sun. Sweetie-Cutie was very much in my thoughts. She had memories of a little girl, she said. How far back could memories go?
Vishnu-thatha asked, ‘Why the serious face?’
‘I was remembering,’ I said. ‘Thatha, how far back can we remember?’
‘Some memories go far back, which is why sometimes we feel as if we know something even before we know it. It is called déjà vu.’
‘Deyjhavoo?’
‘Correct. Our remembrance of old things is stored on a special shelf in our brain. It is called the subconscious shelf.’
‘What are memories?’
Vishnu-thatha asked me to get sheets of paper and the box of colour pencils from his desk. ‘Memories are a library of feelings,’ he said as I sat down beside him. ‘You remember something because of what you have felt about it. There are four feelings.’ He drew two perpendicular lines on the paper. Along the standing line he wrote Y and along the sleeping line, X. He wrote down numbers 1 to 10 along the Y line and along the X line he wrote down the words: anger, sadness, fear, happiness. ‘The Y-axis measures your feelings. The X-axis tells you what you feel.’ He held up the coloured pencils one by one. ‘Red is for anger, black for sadness, yellow for fear and green for happiness. Now think of a person and using the colours make bars to measure how you feel about them. Let me show you.’ On top of the page he wrote Vishnu-thatha. He wrote Siva along the X-axis and made a green bar reaching 10 on the Y-axis and a black bar reaching 3. He said, ‘See, I feel very happy and a bit sad about you.’
‘Why do you feel sad?’
‘Because your sister died. You would have loved her and your mother would have loved you.’
‘What colour is love?’
‘Love is like a rainbow,’ Vishnu-thatha said smiling, ‘it has all the colours in it. And lots and lots of green happiness.’
I made two graphs: one for Tara and one for me. I coloured them from Amma’s point-of-view. On Tara’s graph I made tiny bars of red, yellow and black, and a long bar of green reaching 10. On mine I made black and red bars shooting beyond 10. This was it: the hopeless graph of my life. I wanted Amma to love me in all the colours of the rainbow. Her love was what I most missed, and what I needed most. So I cancelled Tara’s name on her graph and put my name on it. I played Pretend. I was Tara. I was fully her. In a Mind-Over-Matter way.
That night I stood in the balcony of my room. It was my favourite Alone place. From here I peeped out at the world, outsidein, and deep into myself, insideout. I asked questions to myself that I dared not ask anyone else. Not even Tara. I had a lot of questions:
Was I a girl when I was in Amma’s womb?
Was I born before I could become a boy?
Is my heart still a girl’s?
Am I a girl?
I am Tara?
14
I was ten years old and everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so with me. I had the sensation that I was in someone else’s house, in someone else’s clothes, in someone else’s body, and my mother belonged to someone else. My desire to please her, for her to love me back, was crushed each day. For Amma I could be a wall, a pillar, a chair or table, or a potato that she was peeling, or any such inanimate thing: as a person I seemed not to exist. Even if I was in the same room she completely ignored me. Her aloofness, her contempt for me was hurtful, but there was something about being in her presence that I liked. I smelled Tara in her.
But when Rebecca was with me I forgot my despair, momentarily. She was often in my house in the summer holidays. Cocooned in my room, or up in the attic, we played Snakes and Ladders; we read aloud from storybooks; we spun stories out of stories we had read. We surrendered ourselves to fantasy worlds and believed every aspect of our creation. I waited for her to come each day.
So did Amma. The sticky, moist cobwebs in her head had disappeared. She hummed as she dusted the house; she was often in the kitchen making savouries and sweets, and she had cleared the weeds in the garden. She had even planted saplings of fruit trees – guava, custard apple, chikoo, mango, pomegranate – and she arranged the pots of flowering shrubs and creepers according to the colours of their blooms. She knew each one intimately, by their botanical names: allamanda cathartica, thunbergia grandiflora, gloriosa superba, ipomea palmate, and more. With the love and care bestowed on them they bloomed madly: white, pink, yellow, blue, purple, and orange as red as the setting sun.
It was early evening. Amma was in the kitchen steaming jackfruit. She had promised Rebecca she’d make chakka payasam for her. I liked chakka payasam a lot. I was on the floor with Patti, helping her clean rice. It was infested with lice and cobwebbed with maggots. Only that morning Patti had spread the grains on sheets of newspaper on the rear veranda. The sun’s heat had flushed some of the maggots and lice out from the rice and crows had pecked at them, but not all the wiggly-wiggly things. I carefully looked over the rice for the black lice. Patti slurped her spit every time she found an obese maggot and crushed it on the floor. She grabbed a fistful of grains and smelled it. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Aiyoo, this rice still smells of maggots. Tch tch, I will have to give away all the rice to Munniamma.’ The thought didn’t seem to please her much. ‘Where is that Mani?’
‘You sent him out only ten minutes ago,’ Amma said laughing. She was in a good mood. She pulped the fruit with a wooden ladle, tossed it in a large vessel over the stove, and then added jaggery and ghee. The room soon filled up with the aroma of ghee, jaggery and the sour-sweet smell of jackfruit. When the mixture had reduced Amma poured in coconut milk. I got up from the floor and stood behind Amma, a stone pillar, watching the sweet concoction squelch and pop. My tongue popped and my saliva squelched. Rebecca stepped in through the kitchen door and at once Amma’s eyes lit up. She switched the stove off and filled a small bowl with payasam and gave it to Rebecca.
‘Thank you, aunty,’ Rebecca said.
Amma said, ‘Call me Amma,’
Patti’s eyebrows shot up and she made a sour grimace with her mouth.
‘Amma, I want some payasam too,’ I said.
Amma covered the vessel with a lid, put the ladle down and walked out of the kitchen
.
‘Mallika, your blood is thinner than tap water.’ Patti shook her head. ‘I’ll give you some, Siva. Let it cool before you eat it, or it will burn your tongue.’
‘I don’t want any, Patti,’ I said. I rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to my room. I picked up the Snakes and Ladders board from my desk and set it on the bed. Rebecca came in with her bowl of payasam and sat beside me. Blowing on the spoon of payasam she fed it to me, and then had a spoonful herself. Between us, between spoonfuls, we finished the payasam. Then we played Snakes and Ladders. We had given names to all the snakes on the board: Appa, Amma, Akka, Mama, Mami, Kanna and so on. Amma was the longest snake on square 98 – the mother of all snakes. I was almost winning the game but Amma snake swallowed me and I landed all the way to the bottom of the board.
It was Rebecca’s turn and she threw the dice. We heard footsteps on the stairs. I wondered if it was Amma. She always came to my room when Rebecca was with me. But Appa stood at the door, waved out to us. ‘You should be out playing some sort of sport, or doing something more constructive. Go on,’ he said before he turned to go to his room.
We ran down and out of the gates. Rebecca held my hand as we crossed Gibbs Road. Her fingers were warm and firm. We walked past the market, a warm breeze on our faces. I looked around and everything seemed so fine: colours were brighter, sounds were sweet and the sun felt like it had donned a soft silk scarf. We walked past the Shiva temple and toward the beach. Vendors had put up their stalls: corncob, peanuts, channa, coconut, lemonade, watermelon and cucumber. We sat on the dry sand not far from the sea, eating corncobs. Now and then I felt Rebecca’s thigh brush against mine. Every time she leaned toward me to say something, each part of my body came alive, separately, continuously, like in the musical medley we had learnt at school. I studied her face. I hadn’t noticed before but her cheeks had filled out, and twin dimples dented the left cheek when she smiled. Her hair was gathered into a tight ponytail. Strands that had broken loose curled on her brow and neck. When she looked at me her gaze held, unwavering. My heart beat in my throat and I looked away. Gulls flew in the air, gliding, plunging, and squawking. At a distance a family of monkeys called out to one another. I raised my face to the evening sky. Tara felt the breeze in my hair.
Then a shout:
HOW’S THAT!
Some distance away a team of boys were playing cricket. The stumps had fallen and new batsman was taking his place at the crease. I watched the bowler take an extra-long run-up, and he delivered the ball at high speed.
FOUR!
The bowler tossed another ball into the air. The batsman took his position and then:
SIX!
I saw the ball soaring in a wide arc across the sands, catching the wind, turning, and coming down at me with great force. Cold fingers ran up my spine: I remembered this incident from a long time ago; it had happened before. It was Deyjhavoo. I knew what would happen next. Just then Rebecca pushed me and the ball dashed inches away from my head and sank into the wet sand. One of the boys yelled out to us and, muttering, Rebecca picked up the ball and threw it across.
High tide had now set in; waves licked at our feet and bits of paper, plastic, flowers, floated around us. Rebecca walked further into the sea. The waves thrashed against her groin, sprayed all over her chest and fondled her face. Her frock was wet, her face oiled with seasalt and sweat. She called out to me but I didn’t go to her; I was afraid. The muezzin’s voice could be heard over a loudspeaker from the old mosque. It wailed into the moist atmosphere – la ilaha ila allah. Not far away, the bells in the Shiva temple clanged. Fifteen minutes late. To make up for lost time, the devotees chanted in one seamless voice: ShivaShivaShivaShiva…Church bells pealed, quietly, softly. And through the clamour for the Gods, from a fisherman’s boat an old film song played from the radio, Ajeeb dastan hai yeh, kahan shuru kahan khatam…
The sky turned orange in the sunset. Wild orange. Red dancing. Yellow dancing. Rebecca called out to me again. As I walked to her the wind made Tara shudder and the salt spray hit my eyes. In the water I stood still, not daring to breathe. Tara was breath-less too. The sand beneath my feet shifted and sifted away. I felt the sea wind slaver. Tara licked the breeze. Rebecca scooped water in both her hands and threw it at my face. She tossed her head back and her body shook as she laughed. I laughed with half my heart. With the other half Tara laughed. I looked around me: the wind, the water, and the trees. They appeared to me to be laughing in chorus.. It was unusual for me – all this laughing. All this joy: green, green, and more green of pure happiness.
OUT! A yell rang out.
I bent down, scooped the water in both my hands and filled my mouth with the brine. Rebecca did the same and hand in hand we spat at the setting sun.
***
We were together all the time, Rebecca and I. The small town gathered us in its arms, shared its inner secrets, its quiet places, its meandering lanes: Gibbs Road, the market, Tommy’s Garage, Victoria Dyes factory, Eros Cinema, Good Morning Café, the beach, the fields in between, the lake in the woods, and the hidden cluster of bamboos on its shore that seemed to me like a womb. It was the only town we knew, Rebecca and I, and in our minds we shared a map of it, a coloured atlas that was our very own, in which green-green trees sprang out of the red soil, dwarfing the homes around, and the hills soared into the blue-blue sky ending in mountain peaks, and the rain fell incessantly, flooded the blue-blue sea, and here and there the lush paddy fields went sis-sis in the breeze. And above, the rainbow arched in all the colours of our days. The town had its histories; we had ours. I could not imagine being anywhere else; I could not imagine being with anyone else: only Rebecca.
We were often at Victoria Dyes factory or Tommy’s Garage – Doing Something Constructive. Tommy-uncle had put up a new sign: it was midnight blue and it listed in small, neat running-hand letters all that was done at the garage:
dry wet servicing
car repair
painting
polishing
remodelling
bodywork
car interiors.
Old, imported cars also.
At the bottom of the list of jobs, boldly painted in black and underlined was the quote:
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Tommy-uncle was tall, with a great hooked nose like an eagle and an incredible moustache. He looked frightening but he was a kind man. He kindly let us watch the workers as they ripped a car apart. The skin and bones of the dismantled car lay in heaps: foamheap, leatherheap, clothheap, metalheap and partsheap. At the back of the garage Rebecca made wire flowers. I assembled metal junk and learned to weld and fabricate. I made a small brown lizard, its limbs three-quarters of its body, its tail twice its length. I painted it green and showed Tommy-uncle the green lizard.
‘Jolly good!’ Tommy-uncle said, scrutinising the reptile with lizard eyes. ‘But not the right proportions.’ Then he launched into a discourse on the Golden Ratio – the magic rectangle of Pure Proportions. ‘Remember everything fits into a pattern,’ he said. ‘The arrangement of branches, veins in leaves, skeletons of animals, patterns on shells, the geometry of crystals, human structure and perhaps even thought. And the Golden Ratio is the pattern. It is Universal Religion.’ He pointed a finger to the sky. ‘In fact it is the only religion.’
‘Who is its God?’ I asked.
‘It has no God,’ Tommy-uncle said seriously. ‘But it has a bible, a tool. The Great Divider.’ Tommy-uncle helped me build the Great Divider: two tiny metal strips secured at the top with a small bolt and nut. I used the divider as a measuring device, because Tommy-uncle told me the most important principle:
Everything in life is Proportional.
So with the Great Divider I made animal sculptures in Pure Proportions, making all the parts first and then assembling it into a whole. I made small anima
ls, a crab, a crocodile, a tortoise, and a large beetle with green button eyes. Rebecca liked the beetle the most, because its little green eyes were the best. She gave me a large rose made of copper wires and petals of pink upholstery. They were our keepsakes, the rose and the beetle, hers for me, mine for her. Forever.
At the Victoria Dyes factory Vishnu-thatha taught us all about dyeing. Soon we learnt to extract the dye pigment from plant fibre and wheat husk. We mixed crushed limestone, ash and toddy with it in a large vat to make a liquid dye. After a week when the dye had fermented, we soaked squares of cloth in the dye twenty times to deepen the colour. We dried the dyed cloth in the room with the skylight so that the dye impregnated the fabric and deepened in its veins. The walls of the room were stained with indigo. I called it the Blue Room. The room smelled moist, woody and strangely tart. Endless yards of cloth were hung from the roof to get rid of the folds and creases. Light from a glass tile above shone on the dyed cloth and gave the room an ethereal feel. I sat in it and dreamed of floating in the blue sky.
Amma came into the blue room one afternoon. She picked up a length of chiffon from the stacks and stepping up to Rebecca she wrapped it around her, round and round, until she was cocooned from neck to toe. Then she held the end of the cloth and spun Rebecca around like a top and then hugged her. ‘My sweet Tara.’
‘I am not Tara,’ Rebecca said.
‘You are Tara,’ Amma said, her eyes gleaming. ‘And I am your Amma.’
‘You are not my mother,’ Rebecca retorted. ‘My mother is dead.’ She pushed Amma with such force that Amma stumbled and fell. ‘Look what you made me do,’ Rebecca said and ran out of the room and out of the gates. She ran rather fast and I could catch up with her only close to Novelty Store. I held her hand. I could feel our breathlessness on my palm.
IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Page 14