My great-grandmother, Putti, marked the arrival of her first grandchild by inviting the entire town for the naming ceremony. She had every doorway decorated with mango-leaf garlands of beaten silver, and she even bought a cradle carved by the cradle-makers of Ranganathpuram. She gave silk saris to all the female relatives who came, smiling from ear to ear while her husband sat morosely in a corner counting the rupees as they rolled out of his money-box.
“She was a wicked creature, your great-granny,” sighed Chinna. “Sometimes people are driven to wickedness, who am I to say this or that? But she was very fond of your Ma, they were alike in so many ways.”
I was born fifteen years after an important event called Independence. When that Independence happened, explained Chinna, all the pink people with hats packed their pettis and sailed for England. Then the Indian politicians said “Ho! Ho! Ho! The kingdom of Lord Rama will be restored to its glory!”
“But what difference whether the politicians were pink or brown?” remarked Chinna. “I still had three saris to wear, your grandmother chewed six paans a day, and your Thatha’s money now bought one kilo of mangoes instead of ten!”
“And Ma,” I asked, “was my Ma pleased when she saw me?”
“Of course she was, you silly child. Were you not a piece of her being?”
I was never sure about Ma’s feelings for me. Her love, I felt sometimes, was like the waves in the sea, the ebb and flow left me reaching out hungrily. A love as uncertain as the year that I was born, when the Chinese had marched across the border into India, making a mockery of the slogan “Hindu-Chinee brothers-brothers.” That year the price of rice shot up, a grim famine swept across the north, and nothing was the same again.
“The year you were born, the whole country collapsed,” said Chinna, tweaking my nose and smiling.
Was my birth the dark moment in India’s horoscope, triggering calamity? Or was I merely one of thousands of children whose birth that year marked the end of an age, an age when even a rupee was worth something, and loyalty and morality were not just words in moral science class?
“Those days,” said Chinna, her fingers working warm coconut oil into my hair to keep it night-black, “those days you could leave all your doors wide open at night and go to sleep, so safe and nice. Only the angrezi could not be trusted. Pink and smiling, they would walk into your home, say hello-vello, fine day, howdoyoudo, and take away your table-chair-cupboard!”
Some mornings I woke to find frost on my window pane. If I peered at the window I could see the perfection of each icy crystal. And when I leaned away, there was a glittering filigree of ferns, silver fronds, tree branches as delicate as the ones in those fairy tale books my Ma used to buy for me.
My mother, who had seemed unchanging as the Dhruva star through my childhood, looked so different in my memory now when viewed from the distance that separated us. Her hair, once abundant, was a pathetic clump of white, her thin fingers no longer smooth and sure in their myriad tasks. She wore glasses to read although her eyes retained their sharp vitality. As children, Roopa and I were transfixed with fear when Ma glared at us with those large eyes. The same eyes had softened and glowed when she was pleased or proud of us.
But the image of my mother as a fading old woman disappeared as soon as I heard her sharp voice over the phone.
“Why you are wasting your money calling me every week? Will your hand drop off if you write instead?” she demanded.
I gave her glowing accounts of my research supervisor, my colleagues Greta and Bob, who turned pink with embarrassment when they tried to pronounce my name, apologizing profusely each time they transformed it into something different: Kemani, Kimani.
“Why you don’t tell them it is Kaa-mee-nee? What use telling me?” asked Ma.
I waited for her to interpret the silences between my words, to sense my loneliness, to say, “Why don’t you just come back home, I need you, I am getting old.” I would drop my work and catch the next flight back.
But Ma only said, “Do you remember Mr. Kumar, your father’s colleague? He and his wife live two blocks away from my apartment. Can you imagine? I met Mrs. Kumar at the shopping centre and thought that she was a ghost! I hadn’t seen a Railway face for so long. Their son is leaving for Toronto in a week or so. I will send some cobri-mitthai for you with him, and some clothes. I don’t want to send too much, it is not good to take advantage of a friend’s kindness. Besides, he might not want to take it at all. I knew the boy as a child in short pants, but who knows, people change!”
My father was a civil engineer in the Indian railways, and as a girl I imagined that he was a very important man indeed, for every time a new railway line was being planned, he had to visit the site, check if the terrain was all right, and decide if it was worth spending money on bridges and tunnels or whether there was a less expensive route that could be taken. Dadda was always being transferred to new sites. In fact, we moved so frequently that my memories have blurred and melded together, a bit like the landscape viewed through the windows of a speeding train. Then, occasionally, the picture becomes sharp and focused. For instance, I can recall in exquisite detail the summer months when Dadda’s sisters visited us, for those months were always filled with the drama of unexpected events. I remember my mother’s constant unhappiness, which ran like a dark thread right through our lives. And I remember Ratnapura Junction, where we were transferred when I was about nine years old.
It was a large, busy station, and when we alighted with our suitcases and bags, I was overwhelmed by the solid wave of sound and smell that hit my senses. Coolies in bright red uniforms gathered around us and fought over the luggage, striding away with boxes and suitcases piled on their heads and slung across their shoulders. Dadda disappeared behind them, shouting directions, and Ma was left holding Roopa and me tightly by the hand. I stared in amazement at the number of angrezis, with skin ranging from dark pink to dead white, and hair, oh their hair, so many shades of yellow, brown and red. Ma said that they were only pretend English people—they were the Anglo-Indians of Ratnapura, half Indian and half English. There was even an old lady with blue hair. I stared so hard that Ma noticed and pinched my underarm.
“Stop that, your face looks like an open pot,” she hissed.
She picked up Roopa, took my hand in hers and, with her nose in the air, swept past the ticket-collector at the entrance to the railway station. In Bhusaval, where everyone knew that she was a Railway officer’s wife, she didn’t need to show anyone her ticket. She just said “Pass!” and walked through the gates. At Ratnapura Junction it was different. The ticket collector wanted to see Ma’s pass. There were so many people here that he could not be expected to remember who was an officer and who was not. He took a long time staring at the pass and then at Ma, as if he suspected that she had stolen it, and Roopa started screaming that Ma was holding her too tight, and there was so much fuss and noise by the time we were out of the crowded platform that Ma was hot and furious.
I knew that she was wishing that Linda Ayah or Ganesh Peon had travelled with us instead of going on ahead with the brake-van carrying all the furniture, the fridge and other big things that had been packed up in gunny sacks and newspaper and wooden crates. They would be waiting at our new bungalow with pots of hot tea and biscuits. Ganesh would have stocked up on provisions and got the kitchen going, and Linda Ayah would sweep out the house, find out about new maidservants, washermen and toilet-cleaners. For now, Ma had to manage the two of us herself, and she pursed her lips grimly when Dadda asked what took us so long. I was worried she would say something nasty and that they would start an argument in front of everybody, but Ma’s attention was distracted by a beggar, painted blue all over, who touched her arm and sang mournfully, “Ma-ma-ma-ma, pity me mother, pity me.” Ma shook her hand off but it came back like a big insect, touching and touching. Finally Ma said, “Tchuk, what a nuisance!” and gave the girl a ten-paise coin. Immediately we were surrounded by a crowd of children, all of t
hem patting Ma’s hands, my face, Roopa’s legs and crying, “Pity us, mother, pity us!”
“Come on, come on. Why did you have to give them anything?” urged Dadda from inside the car, and Ma bundled us in, looking more and more angry.
Just as I was getting in, one of the beggars said to me, “May you die of too much food,” and pushing a hand up my frock twisted the tender flesh hard.
I squealed with agony and Ma looked alarmed. “What happened, baby?” she asked, thinking that my hand or foot had caught in the door.
“Nothing,” I said, slowly lifting my frock to see if that vicious pinch had left a mark on the thigh, and I felt the hot tears start in my eyes when I saw the blueing skin. I was starting to hate this city already.
The car entered the Railway colony via Noonmaati Road, a long, narrow stretch of tarmac, which curved around the walls of the colony. But it was so crowded, it took us forever to reach the North Gate, the entrance closest to our house. The driver casually announced that every day an accident took place on this road.
“Yesterday, a padri, Father Joseph, from that boys’ school across the road, was smashed like a fly against the side of Number 21 bus,” said the driver. “Total chutney, the poor man.”
I imagined the priest, one moment hanging outside the gaping maw of the bus, the tail of a fat caterpillar of people tenaciously clinging to the window bars, each other’s shirts, anything, his right foot barely touching the footboard, the left waving free under his priestly robes, and in the next moment brushed to death by a passing lorry.
“They’ll have to bury the bus with the father. Couldn’t scrape him off, that’s what I heard,” added the driver laconically.
Noonmaati Road was narrow, pressed in on both sides by the pavement people. There were fruit-sellers and hawkers with stands full of jewellery, shoes, lurid yellow water in Chanel No. 5 perfume bottles. Almost all the vendors looked as though they were arguing ferociously with their customers, waving and gesticulating, scowling and nodding. I had never seen so many people in one place. It frightened me, this big town with no trees, just lots and lots of angry people. There were foreigners on this road, real ones this time, with little swarms of beggar children following them, touching their pink and white arms, dancing around in front and at the back. Some of them looked confused by the children, but others just walked on and on, stopping to take pictures or watch some of the people on the pavement.
“Look at those poor angrezi people,” said Ma. “Can’t the police do something about beggars?”
She called all white people angrezi. For her there were only two countries in the world, no matter what anyone else said. This side of the seven seas it was India and across it was Angrez-land, home of the Queen-Who-Never-Shat. Ma had told me, a little sheepishly, that when she was little, she had believed that the Queen of England was so royal that human failings such as the desire to visit the toilet did not bother her. Even as an adult, her devotion to all things British never wavered. Ma regularly subscribed to Women At Home magazine, which cost fifteen rupees per issue.
“Why can’t you buy an Indian magazine instead?” Dadda asked her when the bill arrived. “With fifteen rupees we can buy provisions for a whole week.”
Ma didn’t bother to reply, just told the paper man to bring the magazine. She made pretty dresses for me and Roopa out of it and even cut my hair to match one of the models. I had to read the children’s section out loud to her each month, making sure that I remembered to round my mouth over the “w”s and bite my lip on the “v”s like the British radio news-readers on the BBC. There were always two stories for children. I preferred the one about Nora and Tilly, two little girls who went for picnics all the time and ate lots of food. Their mother, unlike mine, let them wander around without an ayah at their heels. I always felt very hungry when I read about their picnic baskets loaded with chocolate cakes and sandwiches, pies, fruit and ginger beer. However, I didn’t like the taste of ginger and could not imagine drinking something made of it. I liked Nora and Tilly but wished that they had different names—Gauri and Geetha, perhaps, or Mini and Bani.
When we received our transfer orders, Ma had to write all the way to England to give the magazine our change of address: Type Five, Number Two on Gulmohur Avenue.
I knew our address by heart. Ma said that it was important for me to keep it in my head, just in case. “Just-incase” scared me—it included kidnapping, theft, losing my way, an accident, all sorts of horrible things that lurked around the corner waiting to happen. But if I remembered my address, all would be well. I had even memorized the route back home from my new school: straight down Pilkington Road, left on to Tiller’s Lane, through the South Gate into the colony, past the Railway Club and Chopra’s dispensary, left again on Gulmohur Avenue and up the red gravel path to Bungalow Number Two.
It was easy to spot our new house, with its arched, brick entrance like the mouth of a yawning lion. The verandahs had bougainvillaea and morning-glory all twined up and around the pillars, and Ma was sure that there were snakes hiding in them. A shaggy rain tree on one side of the house had dropped thousands of pink flowers on the garage the day we arrived, and a tamarind tree leaned almost into the back verandah. On the other side was the transit house where people who were visiting the Railway colony stayed. Right now there was a man from Nigeria. Linda Ayah called him a hubshi but Ma got angry with her for saying such rude things. “As though you are the snow queen,” she said to Linda, who screwed up her mouth and refused to talk to Ma all morning.
Our back-door neighbour was Mrs. Ahluwalia, who sent us a tray full of pakodas the day we arrived and after that came over every afternoon for tea. Mrs. Simoes, Ma’s old friend from Bhusaval, lived across the colony and she said that Mrs. Ahluwalia was a big gossip. “Don’t listen to anything she says, she has only a bird’s nest for brains!” Mrs. Simoes told Ma that the best rice was to be bought from Kali Charan’s Grocery Bhandaar, the iron-man should not be paid more than fifty paise per sari and four annas for a shirt, and the best way to get to the vegetable market was by the Number 16 bus and then a rickshaw. No use taking the car, because by the time you did your shopping and came back, some goonda would have stripped it of everything worth stealing.
“And if there is something wrong with your car, a kut-kut sound under the bonnet, a whine instead of the roar of a healthy engine, you just get hold of Paul da Costa. He is an Anglo.” Mrs. Simoes wrinkled her nose slightly. “Acts too smart sometimes, I tell you, but the best mechanic in Ratnapura. Once he puts his charmed fingers into the belly of your car, god-promise it will purr like a billee!”
She said that I would positively have to join Loretto Convent for Girls. “Irish nuns,” said Mrs. Simoes, her thin, curved eyebrows rising sharply, as they always did when she wanted to emphasize a point. “Excellent discipline, sooparb manners. My Lily loves it there. She will take care of Kamini, our daughters will be best friends, eh?” Mrs. Simoes pinched my cheek.
There were six apartments in the transit house and the third one was occupied by the Nigerian visitor. I could see him vaguely through the thin besharam hedge with its yellow flowers. Ma told us that besharam meant shameless, and the plant was called that because it was parasitic and grew anywhere you threw it. Ma knew a lot about plants. She had studied biology and zoology when she was at the university. “I could have been a doctor,” she used to say, her voice sharp and rancorous, after an especially bad quarrel with Dadda.
The Nigerian man was doing a technical course and was out every morning. In the afternoons, he relaxed in an easy chair on the verandah, staring out across the garden, occasionally looking down at the book on his lap. Some days he had visitors, but he was alone most of the time. I was curious about the man. In spite of Ma’s scolding, Linda Ayah insisted that he was a hubshi, perhaps even a genie from my Arabian Nights storybook.
“His eyes are actually ears and his mouth is his magic eye,” she warned. “You better stay inside the house when your mother slee
ps in the afternoon. Otherwise he might stuff you inside a bottle and take you back with him to Afreeka!”
I was almost certain that Linda Ayah was only trying to get me out of her hair while she gossiped with her cronies. But what if the man next door was really a hubshi? I wouldn’t know till I saw his palms, for hubshis had green palms.
One afternoon, while Ma napped, I sat in our shady verandah and played with my toys, clattering the miniature stainless-steel vessels of my cooking set to assure her that I was not getting into any trouble. As soon as she and Roopa were asleep, I slipped out of the verandah and crept through the hole in the green rustling hedge on to the cement path running around the transit house, my bare feet scorched by the baking surface. One-two-three, I counted in my head as I crossed the door of each apartment. I hoped the man would be in his usual chair in the verandah.
Three bamboo screens marked the end of an apartment, and when I reached the third one, I held my breath and stood shivering with fear. There were so many things to be afraid of. But I had my excuses ready. If Ma woke up suddenly and found me gone, I could say, “Ma, I was looking for Linda Ayah.” And if Linda Ayah saw me sneaking around, I could threaten to tell Ma that she had left me alone. However, if the man glanced this way and saw me peering through the slats of the screen, he would transform me into a moth and cork me inside a bottle. I gazed at him, noting every little crease in his sleeping face, his tight curls of hair and the backs of his hands as they rested on the arms of the easy chair. Why didn’t he turn his hands so that I could see the colour of his palms?
He stood up suddenly and stretched, yawned widely, then moved towards the screen and tugged on the cord that rolled it up. I stood there like a petrified squirrel. Saw his feet in blue rubber slippers, the kind you got from the pavement vendor for a couple of rupees. Then the soft cuffs of his white trousers, higher and higher, past the blue-and-white-checked shirt up to his face. He was still looking up at the chik as it piled in a roll near the high ceiling of the verandah. I could have run away and he might not even have noticed, but my feet were stuck to the ground: he had cast a magic spell, just as Linda Ayah had warned. I could feel myself turning into a moth. He glanced down at me and his face fell open, astonished.
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