“How many times have I told you not to go near those dirty children?” Ma had said, towering over me, her hand tight around my wrist as if she was going to snap it in two. “You will catch some dirtyfilthy disease and then who has to run around for doctors and medicines and all? Me, who else?”
When I did get a violent attack of chicken-pox, Ma applied cool neem paste over my inflamed, itching body, muttering all the time, “Go-go, play with every slum child you can find, what did I tell you? Never listen to me, just like your father. And where is he when a child is sick in the house? In some jungle building lines for the nation. Thinks he is Gandhi, Nehru, Kamaraj, a hero for the nation! Hunh! Sell his own home to save the country, that kind your father is.”
“My Dadda is nice,” I protested, my nose tingling with the crushed neem-juice smell.
“Yesyes, all he does is tell fantastic stories when he comes back. Are stories enough to bring up a child?” asked Ma, her voice as bitter as the neem paste that turned my skin so green and cool so that when I drifted to sleep it was as if I had been buried in a pile of rain-soaked leaves. I dreamed then of Dadda going away, always-always, of Ma staring out the window at the Anglo-Indian Paul da Costa who hunched over Dadda’s car and hummed songs from Engelbert Humperdinck, Cliff Richards, sometimes Saigal’s mournful Hindi numbers, and Linda Ayah telling Ma half angrily, as if she were a mischievous child, “Watch out Memsahib, watch out!”
Devaki knew lots of secrets. She said that she had seen her father kissing her mother.
“I have seen my father holding my Mummy’s hands,” said Rani Bose with-the-big-fat-nose.
“How does she cook food then?” If I made fun of Rani, I could sneak out of saying that my parents did not hold hands or kiss.
“If you kiss a man, you have a baby.”
One day I had seen Paul da Costa catch Ma’s hand when she paid him for repairing the car. He called my mother “Tamarind Mem” behind her back and laughed with Ganesh Peon and the iron-man about it. Then he grabbed Ma’s hand. He was as wicked as the demon Ravana who dragged Queen Sita into the sky. The next time he bent over the bonnet of our car, I would throw a stone at him.
“No, you have a baby if you kiss and hold hands.”
“My mother said that God gives you babies,” said Rani.
“Stupid, you believed her?”
“You stupider stupid!” Rani pushed Devaki.
“Stupidest!”
“Your father is a servant!” sang Rani.
“And you are a vir-gin” I said. Nobody was allowed to make fun of my best friend.
“She lives where the Anglos live,” shouted Rani. It was true that Devaki lived in the Type Three Quarters at the other end of the colony.
“So what? Does that make her an Anglo?” I shouted back.
“If you touch an Anglo you become an acchooth!” said Rani with absolute certainty. Rani’s mother had told her that the Anglos were half-and-half people who hated Indians. She also said that Anglo women were spiders who waited to trap decent Hindu boys into marriage. They were shameless things, showing their legs in their little frocks. They might as well walk around naked and save money on clothes!
“And if an Anglo talks to you, you turn into a half-breed too,” continued Rani.
“You are a vir-gin liar!” I said. Ma had touched Paul’s hand but she was still the same, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?
Mrs. Bano ripened within the dark heat of her burkha. Even the searing summer sun couldn’t persuade her to remove those horrible garments. She moved ponderously about the house, one hand resting against the small of her back. Finally one afternoon there was unusual activity in their home. The peons ran in and out of the house carrying bags and baskets, piling them into the car. Mrs. Bano emerged followed by her husband and daughters. She ruffled the children’s hair, kissed them and climbed into the car. She was, according to Linda Ayah, going to her mother’s house, for her time was nearing. Shabnam told me that in a while she would have a baby brother.
“How do you know it will be a baby brother?” I asked jealously. Not only did she have two sisters to my one, now she was going to have a brother as well.
“Because my father said so,” replied Shabnam in a voice full of confidence, “and he is always right.”
“How do you know your mother will do what your father wants?”
“She always does,” said Shabnam. There was something about the way she said things that prevented all argument.
Just before school reopened for the new term, her mother came back with a new baby in her arms. Once again the gleaming black car had a flutter of servants around, unloading the luggage, hampers of food, baby-bags full of diapers.
“Arrey, Jhunjhun,” said Mrs. Bano to her ayah, “get some red chilies, we have to make sure that the evil eye does not touch our son.”
The ayah beamed happily, snapped her knuckles against her forehead, waved her hands over the baby and said, “Oh-oh-oh, may two hundred blessings hover over you, little monkey, little parrot.”
I stared at Mrs. Bano. In the confusion, she had forgotten to lower the veil over her face. My soul was flooded with disappointment. As long as the veil was in place, I had allowed myself to ignore the fact of Mrs. Bano’s pregnancy, to believe that behind that veil was a beautiful Butterfly Queen. Shabnam’s mother was a plain woman, her face pale and sharp with exhaustion. Her nose was too long, her eyes too small. Why, my own Ma was much better looking than her. I cried that night, my face buried in Ma’s lap.
“Basheer Barber is a liar,” I sobbed. “He said that the Thithali Queen was beautiful.”
Ma stroked my hair, unable to understand why I was so upset. “Why do you have to think all stories are true? Stories are a waste of time, I have told you, no?”
When Ma was a girl, her mother told her that stories were dreams, and that dreams were a waste of time. Girls had no time for such useless activities.
“Especially,” continued Ma, “when the pressure cooker is doing chhuss, the baby is crying, and there is so much to do. Only crazy people and men have the energy to dream!”
Once upon a time I had lived in a world where things were guaranteed. When Dadda was transferred from one town to another, I knew that there would be a house waiting for us. The house would most certainly have a garden run by a wrinkled gnome of a maali. We would always have Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon with us and there would be a Railway Club with a library full of crumbling books—volumes of Punch cartoons bound in faded maroon cloth with gold lettering, ancient Penguin paperbacks, Cherry The Nurse romances and children’s treasuries filled with virtuous tales about well-behaved children named Deirdre and Tabitha, Roger and William. When the books were opened, you found pages carved into strange shapes by white ants and silver-fish, and the powdery residue wafted into your nostrils and made you sneeze.
The librarian, tired of bloody officer brats, would say in a waspish voice, “Get out, get out! What you are spitting and sneezing into my books for? Spreading germs everywhere, no manners!”
It seemed to me that each Railway librarian was a carbon copy of the previous one: tyrannical, clinging grimly to his thin thread of authority as guardian of the books, watching bitterly as that authority was eroded by generation after generation of wretched railway children. The Railway hired its employees for life, and the librarian, his good humour soured by the boredom of the job, aged along with the books, hardly discernible against the brown teak of the shelves, the ancient chair with its sweat-stained leather seat, the creaky table with the marks of manymany years stamped, scratched, etched and rubbed into it.
In Ratnapura Junction, the librarian was Gulbachan. My friends and I teased him as he sat stiff-necked and annoyed in his high-backed chair. We strutted around his table, pinched his umbrella from the back of the chair where he hung it every day and giggled as he searched frantically for it, cursing at us under his breath. We annoyed him with our high-pitched chatter, our useless entreaties to sign out more than five boo
ks.
“Oh Gul-ji,” we chirped, delighted to see the way his fingers danced and drummed agitatedly on the table, a sure sign that we were getting on his nerves. “Ple-ease, we’ll tell our papas what a nice man you have been today!”
We batted our eyelids at him like the older girls at whom he smiled and simpered foolishly, but he only yelled at us, waving his umbrella like a sword. “Getout! Getout! No books you will get, no favouritism I say. I give same treatment to each and all. Now getout, badmaash!”
Ma sent Roopa and me to the Railway Club every evening with Linda Ayah. I didn’t mind going, because Linda was so busy following my sister around and gossip-ping with the other ayahs that she left me alone for long stretches of time with a stern warning not to wander out onto the road. All around the Ratnapura Club was a low hedge of bleeding-heart cactus. There was no wall, not even a gate at the entrance. Whatfor you needed a wall when everybody, from Basheer the barber to Rampyari the sweeper-woman, knew that entry was restricted to the officer sahibs and their mems? A long driveway led up to the generous portico where three cars could park side by side. By unspoken order, the space under the portico roof was reserved for the General Manager, the Chief Mechanical Engineer and the Chief Civil Engineer. Lesser personages, such as the officers who lived on Fourth and Fifth Avenue, parked beside the tin-roofed badminton court or beneath the tamarind trees shading the tennis courts.
It was all extremely pleasant, out on the lawns in summer or in the cosy lounge when the weather was bad, being served pakoras, samosas, tikkas and tea by the bearers. The club reaffirmed the identity of the officers. They could relax here, be among peers, talk politics, while their wives, in pale chiffon or crackling organdy saris, exchanged news about children and servants.
“My son Rahul, such a naughty boy you know. His teacher says he finishes his sums in five minutes and then disturbs other children. What to do with such a badmaash?” one of the ladies would say with an indulgent smile.
And another would remark, “Can somebody please-please recommend a good servant-girl? I am having such problems with my present one. She wants one full month off with pay, can you imagine! What cheeky fellows these servants are becoming.”
The officers discussed foreign powers who, they claimed, were creating all the chaos in India.
“Mark my words,” one of the officers would say, “there’s going to be a war in a few months if things go on the way they are! The foreign hand is at work again.” The foreign hand was responsible for mysterious groups of terrorists from neighbouring countries who were on the prowl, raising the price of rice and wheat, driving people to drink and suicide.
At the club, the officers could call the shop-floor workers “idiot” or “silly bugger” without fear of a union fight on their hands. They could talk about that famous affair in Dhanbad in ’69 or ’71, when an officer nearly got himself killed. The Eastern Railways had a militant union, rough bastards who went with the territory.
The Works Manager had said to one of the fitters, or perhaps a turner, “Abey saala, are you going to finish this work in your next life or what?” Sometimes even officers were brainless twits, whattodo? Perhaps this one was drunk—the Dhanbad posting drove even a sanyasi to drink, with all that bloody black coal-dust everywhere.
“Who are you calling a saala?” growled the turner-fitter-fellow, showing red eyes at the Works Manager.
“Yes, you mother-chooth, who you insulting, eh?” yelled another worker.
At that point the officer should have apologized, “Sorry brother, the coal dust has affected my head,” or “My wife’s mother is driving me crazy,” any old lie would have done. Instead, the fool said, “What-what rascal, get back to work. How dare you?” and other nitwit stuff like that. So the union jumped in, there was an almighty chaos, the officer was surrounded by hordes of ruffians, wasn’t allowed to drink water, eat anything, not even go to the toilet. If he so much as moved a finger they threw cow dung and eggs at him.
I had heard versions of this story a hundred-thousand times. It was repeated to every new officer and wife and child in the club, part of the folklore passed from memory to memory, sacred as the epic Mahabharata.
At exactly four o’clock, the club doors were opened by Tony Braganza or his father Mathew. A flight of steps swept up from the portico into a wide corridor with polished wooden floors and walls decorated with detailed India-ink drawings of tiger hunts. There had been talk of replacing these dull prints with paintings by the General Manager’s younger daughter, who was believed to be artistic.
“Hunh!” remarked Ma scornfully. She always had a remark about this or that. “The child won a prize in baby-class for painting, so her mother thinks that she has a Ravi Verma or Amrita Sher-Gill on her hands! Well, if they decide to hang that girl’s paintings, then I want them to hang up my Kamini’s crayon pictures, too!”
The corridor swelled out into a vast hall with a bar where, sometimes, Mathew’s granddaughter Leona leaned over the counter. She helped out periodically when she was home after running away from her husband, who followed a few weeks later, apologizing abjectly, giving her vast clumsy bunches of ixora flowers that he had picked from somebody’s garden. Another corridor curved around from that end, pocked with doors leading into the tiny library, the washrooms and the billiards room. There, above the rack for the cues, hung the skin of a large tiger. The inscription on a tarnished brass plate next to the lower right paw said: “For my fellow officers. In memory of the Shaitaan. John Winslow. August 8, 1935.”
Winslow was the Chief Mechanical Engineer at the time, and the town was renamed for him when he shot the man-eating tiger. After Independence in 1947, however, there was another change of name, from Winslow Nagar to Ratnapura Junction.
“Confusion only!” said Ma. “Why you need to change names all the time? Does it make the rivers in this country stop flooding? Does it feed all those poorthing beggars-veggars out there? Hanh?”
Except for old Mathew, the Anglo-Indian bearer, nobody remembered the story behind the tiger skin. When Mathew was drunk, he told it to anybody who cared to listen. Since he was in charge of the bar he was often drunk and the story was repeated in varying versions.
“That was a great sahib,” mumbled Mathew, weaving into the storeroom behind the bar for orders of Fanta or Coca-cola, beer or whisky. “You know, man, his daddy was a lord or something back in England. This Winslow sahib, he shot this great big monster tiger. That dirty dog of an animal, he was killing and eating all the peoples, man!”
Nobody bothered to listen to the entire story, since the British were irrelevant from the moment India got her independence.
Rani Bose, who seemed to know everything, said that the teenagers came to the billiards room because they wanted to kiss and hold hands. “I’ve seen them touching each other on their chee-chee parts,” she giggled. They would all have babies as a result, she said, and we did not believe her until one of the girls who went often to the billiards room became pregnant. Rani said that she had peered into the billiards room more than once and seen the big boys doing bad things with their pants down.
“Those aren’t boys,” I argued, “they’re demons, my ayah told me.” I rarely went near the billiards room.
“By Jesu-Christo’s bleeding heart, Kamini baby,” Linda Ayah had informed me with terrifying solemnity, “I swear, if you go in that room, you will never come out again. You will go mad because the demon that lives under the table there will eat your brain, I tell you, listentome!”
Rani laughed. “You stupid! There aren’t any demons. The boys go there to dream about that Leona Wood with her big boobies.” Rani bunched her fists against her chest and swayed up and down, pretending to be Leona in her transparent black shirt through which you could see her cream-coloured breasts like two melons.
“I don’t believe you,” said Shabnam. “God will punish you for making up such stories.”
“Come with me to the billiards room,” said Rani. “Then you will s
ee whether there are any ghosts there or not.”
“Linda Ayah will tell my mother,” I said nervously.
“She isn’t here right now, too busy gossiping. Come on.”
“You are a liar,” insisted Shabnam, but she trailed along with us. I knew that she disliked Rani as much as I did and was just as scared to go near the billiards room, but like me, her curiosity was greater than her fear. We had almost reached the room when we heard quick footsteps behind us.
“Linda Ayah,” I whispered, hurrying into the toilet instead.
“It’s not your ayah,” said Rani, dragging me out again. “It’s Rajiv Goswami, and he’s going to the billiards room. What did I tell you? Come on, let’s see what he’s doing there.”
The teenager had a magazine clutched against the front of his trousers and we giggled at the way he was walking. “Like he wants to pee,” suggested Shabnam, sending Rani and me into whoops of suppressed laughter.
“Let’s scare him,” I said, feeling very bold all of a sudden. “Let’s rush in there and scream, that’ll be funny.”
But before we could do anything, Rajiv Goswami came running out of the billiards room, looking for all the world as though he had met one of Ayah’s ghosts.
“There is something in there,” he gasped, not really seeing us. He looked around wildly.
Gulbachan the librarian poked his head out to see what all the fuss was about. “What and all is going on here?” he asked sternly.
“There’s somebody in the billiards room. Come and see, quick.”
Gulbachan sighed, “I know, I know, there is a ghost who moans and groans. Come on, sir, you think I am a fool or what?” He winked at the boy. “Lots of oonh-aanh going on there, eh?”
“No, not that, you moron,” said the boy, regaining some of his confidence now that there was an adult around, even if it was only the nitwit librarian. “Come here and see for yourself. I don’t want to go in there alone.”
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