Gulbachan emerged from the library and glared at us. “You badmaash girls, don’t go into the library till I am back. I will know if any books are missing.” He trailed after Rajiv. “Arrey baba” he said nervously, “don’t get me into any trouble. I promise I will keep that new book for you. Harold Robbins or something, and so much naughty stuff, oh my god, you will love it. Whatall these foreigners do! I will reserve that book for you, eh?”
“Shut up, idiot,” said the Civil Engineer’s son, shoving Gulbachan into the billiards room. “Switch on the bloody lights.”
The lights flared dimly, concentrated over the tables.
“Ooee ma! What a stink!” exclaimed Gulbachan. I pinched my nose between my fingers, imitating him.
“What is it?” whispered Rani.
“I don’t want to see,” said Shabnam, holding her hands over her eyes and peering through the gaps between her fingers.
“There’s somebody hanging from the ceiling,” I remarked, looking curiously at the limp legs. In the dim light, I thought that the collapsed face seemed oddly familiar.
“Hey Ram, hey Ram,” moaned the librarian, backing out of the room nervously. “Who is it? One of the sahib boys or what?”
“What do we do now?” demanded Rajiv.
“How do I know? Do I see dead people every day? Phone General Manager sahib maybe?” He glanced impatiently at us, huddled near the door. “And you brats, stay out of there or I will tell your mummies.”
“I’ll get my father,” decided the boy, looking once more at the body. “You stay here and see that nobody else goes in, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Gulbachan shooed us out into the corridor and smiled weakly. “Just like Hindi movie, no?”
“You are scared,” said Rani, staring at the fidgeting librarian. “Because you know that person in there.” She nudged me.
“You’re going to be in trouble,” I said. Gulbachan was the easiest person in the world to provoke.
“Yes, and you also left the library door wide open. All the books will be stolen, you are in double-trouble,” giggled Shabnam. She had lost her fear by now and was dying to peep into the billiards room again to see the hanging body.
“Rubbish! The victim is unbeknown to myself,” said Gulbachan, leaning down and pushing his face close to Shabnam’s. “And I will tell your daddy that you have two rupees in fines, then we will see who is in trouble!” There were footsteps approaching and he straightened quickly. The boy was back with a whole horde of people, the GM in the lead like an agitated Pied Piper.
“Good evening, Sir!” said the librarian. “I regret that I had to leave my post in the library for four-five minutes. But I assure you my one eye was fixed on that door so that no mischief-maker could enter in my absence. I was engaged in work when this young gentleman begged me to accompany him to the billiards room. I don’t know anything else, sir, god-promise.”
The crowd surged forward, sweeping Gulbachan and his explanations aside.
“Switch on more lights,” said someone.
A voice in the crowd said, “Who is the fellow?”
I waited for a reply and when none was forthcoming, said in my best poetry elocution voice, “That is Paul the car mechanic.”
I might have added a few more details about how Mrs. Simoes had told Ma that he was an arrogant bastard, but I could hear Linda Ayah’s voice somewhere in the back of the crowd saying in a stern voice, “Kamini baby, come back here now-now!”
I had managed to give her the slip for a glorious half hour but here she was again, the tail of a woman, glass-eyed witch. Perhaps if I refused to reply Linda would think that I wasn’t here and go away. I wanted to see what they did with the car mechanic’s body. How were they going to bring it down? Would they have to call the ambulance? Perhaps they would cover it with one of the tablecloths that Mathew the bearer brought out on special occasions. And flowers—they needed flowers didn’t they? I wanted to know everything.
“Baby, did you hear me?” called Linda again, her voice loud, with an edge of anxiety. I could hide somewhere. But then Linda would go and tell Ma and I would surely get into trouble, for Ma was stretched as tight as a clothes-line these days.
I heard her asking somebody, “You saw that Kamini child, in a green frock?” I didn’t move, staring up at stinky old Paul da Costa.
Linda pushed through the pressing, murmuring crowd, spotted me and grabbed my arm. “What you doing in here, naughty? Some dead person, not good for a little girl’s eyes! The spirit from the fellow might still be flying about in the dark billiards room looking for a warm body to occupy. Serves you right then!”
“I want to stay,” I grumbled, fed up with Linda’s constant hovering.
“Wait, I will tell your Ma. You don’t listen to Linda Ayah, not one word. Wretched child, staring at a dead what-not person, chhee!” Linda’s voice sharpened, and she pulled me along behind her, glaring at anybody who objected to our rough passage out of the room. “Your Ma will say, ‘no more club, no more anything.’ Then Madame Kamini baby will have to sit at home with Linda Ayah and play Ludo.”
I made a face behind Linda’s back but kept quiet. I didn’t like playing with Linda, she won every game.
“Now open your ears and listen. Don’t you tell your Ma about this dead person,” continued Linda, marching through the club, nodding briskly at other ayahs dragging their charges home, their footsteps echoing off the worn wooden floors. Soon we were out on the gravel path, a dull, red line across wet grass. “What will she think when she hears what you saw, hanh? She will get angry, very angry. So you keep quiet and let Linda tell her everything nicely. Kamini baby will brush her teeth and go to sleep like a good girl.”
I did not listen, concentrating instead on the elusive cry of a koyal bird darting from tree to tree, its voice exquisitely sweet as it hung in the warm night air. Linda Ayah said that the koyal was actually the lost voice of a princess, not a bird that could be seen by human eyes.
“Ayah, lots of people have seen the bird,” I argued. “My teacher said it is a tiny, black creature, very timid.”
“Ah, she said that to make you think she is clever. Just like the story of the emperor who wore no clothes and thought he did.”
“Which emperor?”
“Another time, if you are good, I will tell you that story,” said Linda.
Linda and her tales, I thought, keeping an eye open for the koyal. I was nine years old, almost ten, and she thought that I was still a silly baby who believed in Santa Claus and jadoo-mantan True, some of her demon tales frightened me, I did not want to test if they were real or not. That did not mean I believed every single thing she ever said. But I was not going to let her know that. It was one way to dodge the old kannadi-face—so tiresome having her around every minute.
The billiards room suicide provided the Railway colony with a fresh source of gossip that lasted for weeks. The identity of the body did not interest most people. It was the gruesome idea of a death, an actual death, in the club of all places, that moved them. And the indignation that a mere workshop mechanic, an Anglo too, had broken the rules of membership to hang himself in the Officers’ Club!
Ma had learned the unspoken rules of the Railway colony very quickly, for she had Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon guiding her from the day she came to this life as Dadda’s bride. Ma knew, for instance that although the Inspector of Works was much lower than an officer, he wielded greater power, for he was in charge of maintenance. All the electricians, plumbers, gardeners and masons were at his command. So Ma never forgot to send Diwali sweets to his house. She might have a leaky faucet or a problem with the wiring and the IOW would send his men immediately. Ma hadn’t known how to make cutlets, or what to do with whisky and sherry and all that stuff in bottles, when she married Dadda. As a Railway wife, she was supposed to know, for instance, that you couldn’t serve whisky with dinner and wine was never, never to be poured into a pretty glass jug and kept in the fridge. These things Ganes
h Peon taught her on those long days when Dadda was out on line and he was sitting in the back yard polishing Dadda’s office shoes. He had a definite order of polishing. First he would carefully wipe away all traces of dirt from the shoes with a soft rag blackened with weeks of polish.
“This is a necessary step,” he told me and Roopa as we squatted close to him, watching with fascination the old hands flick deftly across the shoe. “Lots of peons I know miss this step and that is very, very bad for the shoe. VERY BAD. When you do something you must do it pukka-perfect. Otherwise what is the use, tell me? It is like plucking only half the feathers of a chicken before cooking it. You can put as much of the finest masala on it, but all you will hear are curses.”
After wiping one shoe clean, it was time to apply dots of black polish from a tin of Cherryblossom. “Now which little girl wants to help an old man open this tin?” he would ask, glancing from one face to another.
We bounced up and down, still on our haunches, screaming, “Memememe!”
Then Peon pulled a ten-paise coin from his kurta pocket and tossed it in the air. “The face is for big baby and the number for chhoti baby,” he yelled before snapping the coin in his palms as it dropped down. Somehow he managed it so that if I opened the tin one day, Roopa had a turn the next.
There was a special trick to opening a Cherryblossom tin. A tiny arrow on the lid pointed down to a slight depression. We had to press our thumbs really hard in that shallow curve and the tin snapped open magically.
Ganesh Peon beamed with pleasure when that happened and said, “Escallent baby, escallent!” Since he was the person I learned the word from, I could not say “excellent” for the longest time.
I dreamed of snow climbing higher and higher against the house, muffling the entrance to my underground dwelling. I dreamed that there was an awful blizzard bringing down the electric lines so that I could not even phone for help. I was buried alive in my burrow dying slowly from the cold.
And into this lonely, freezing dream came Ma. “So much drama-shama is necessary or what? If you sit on your hands and do nothing what else will happen to you, you silly girl?” Her voice was reassuringly strident. “Have you even tried opening that front door, or are you simply waiting for your imagination to kill you? Go and see if there really is snow there or if you are dreaming only!”
I jerked out of uneasy sleep gasping and sweaty, relieved that, even from thousands of miles away, my mother could reach out and pull me away from the nebulous terrors of a nightmare. The rustle of paper being thrust through the slot in my front door woke me completely. From my bed, I could see the entire apartment, the tiny kitchen-cum-living-cum-dining-room, the short flight of steps leading to the front door, the scattered mail. And almost as if my dream had summoned it up, another of Ma’s weekly postcards, bringing with it the warmth, the smells, the sounds of another country oceans away from Canada.
“On the train to Lucknow,” wrote my mother, “I met a magician. He insisted on showing the rest of us in the compartment all his tricks. He said that the success of his tricks lay in the movement of our eyes. But we must have moved our eyes wrong or something, for the poor man made a mess of it all. Finally he gathered up his cards and flung them out of the window. Then he turned to us and said, ‘Everything in this country is poor quality, whattodo? And for the rest of the trip, he refused to speak to anybody. Such a strange person. I could not sleep all night worrying about what he might do to us, his audience who failed him. I am sure that he thought that it was all our fault!”
Except to give Ganesh Peon instructions for the day’s meals, Ma refused to speak a word for a longlong time after Paul da Costa died. It was as if a terrible-horrible silence had settled over her like a shroud. I wished that I had obeyed Linda Ayah and shut up about the mechanic. But I could not stop the words from tumbling out, I could not keep quiet.
“Ma!” I screamed. “I was the one who recognized the mechanic even though he was all funny colours! His tongue was hanging out like the goddess Kali’s!” I imitated the dead man’s swollen face, mimed a limp body and swayed grotesquely. “He smelled like a rat.”
Linda tried to shush me. “Memsahib, you don’t listen to this stupid child. I’ll first take her for a bath and then tell you everything.”
I missed Ma’s voice, her snippy comments, and tried to coax her back to her normal state. I pinched Roopa and made her cry. Surely Ma would flare up and tell me to behave like a nine-year-old? I got zero in my math class-work, spelled stupid baby words like “there” and “here” wrong, and still Ma did not break her silence.
“Ma, tell me about Mrs. Ghosh and the painter,” I begged. “You know, when the painter took a week to paint her fence and you asked him if he was done and he said, ‘Yes, Ghosh Memsahib made me paint her whole house and now all that is left to paint is Ghosh Memsahib’s face!’ Do you remember that?”
Under normal circumstances, Ma would have had a caustic comment to add about Mrs. Ghosh and her misuse of Railway services, but now she only smiled. It was a strange state my mother was in, her body cutting through regular space, her eyes wide open, her hands directing Ganesh or knitting swiftly, purl-one-knit-one, her mind playing in another place. When she did speak, the strangest things popped out of her mouth.
“How foolish, how foolish,” she remarked once as she sat in the verandah shaded from the heavy summer sun.
She stopped abruptly, her face distracted, and I waited for the end of her sentence. But Ma had already moved to a new one. “Such a waste! As if life is a handful of berries that you can nibble at and throw away if you don’t like the taste.” She clicked her tongue and sighed.
Why didn’t Dadda do anything? He went away on line as usual, and I, angry with his indifference, refused to listen to the stories he brought back for me.
“Come child,” he beckoned, his voice creaking like the floor of the Railway Club. “Do you know those tiny white ants that can be crushed to death by a falling leaf?” He was trying to distract me, but I didn’t care.
“Dadda, what is wrong with Ma?” I interrupted, and Dadda’s story died unheard.
Even Linda Ayah, normally so crotchety, sat close to Ma’s feet in the verandah, stroked her hand and said, “Bitiya, my daughter, what has happened, what has happened? You want me to leave a prayer for you with Jesu-Mary? Tell only, and I will do in two minutes. Ten candles I will light.”
When Ma finally crawled out of her abyss, she had become shiny sharp and more angry than ever. She ranted on about every little thing—the fact that Dadda was at home only about half the year, that his sisters still came every summer, following us around the country like a sickness, and of course his smoking. Roopa and I could hear her in their room, crying and scolding.
“Why you married and had children if you didn’t care what happened to us?” she sobbed.
Dadda did not reply and I knew he was stretched out in his chair reading the newspaper.
“You think you are a bloody English sahib, posing and posturing with that wretched pipe. At least those stupids got their money’s worth out of this country before they burnt their lungs out. But you, all you can think of is your own pleasure.”
“What nonsense you are talking!” said Dadda finally. “The British left the country twenty-three years ago.”
“They might have left the country but they took everything with them, including your brains, that’s what!”
Dadda told her to shut up and that was that. But her anger grew secretly, a fire that simmered beneath the surface all the time, like an animal crouched ready to spring. She changed her tactics. Instead of scolding and nagging, she became absolutely quiet. She never asked Dadda how his trips had been, whether the food in the line-box was enough, if it had been cold or warm, raining or sunny. Dadda would touch her arm and say, “Today, will you tell Ganesh to make aloo-parathas?” And Ma, shaking off the touch, would march into the kitchen. Not a word would she utter, not even to agree-disagree, and Dadda retreated from her u
nspoken hostility into his armchair, cold and remote. They skirted around each other, never talking unless it was about Dadda’s next line tour.
“I am leaving on the thirteenth,” he would tell Ma in a formal voice. “Don’t forget to pack a few sweaters, it might be cold.”
Or, “The Palits are coming over this Sunday for dinner. And the new Personnel Officer, Janaki Ram. Tell Ganesh not to make any meat, they are vegetarian.”
And Ma would reply, “Yes, I’ll take care of it.”
She would stop talking for days, sometimes weeks, and finally Dadda would have to apologize. For what? He had no idea. Her silence was a wall.
One day she gathered Dadda’s tobacco pouches, tins and packets and threw them in the rubbish dump. “You want to waste money? Here, I will help you,” she said vengefully. She was becoming a demoness, I decided, watching my mother’s face collapse into a harsh, bad-tempered mask. Dadda, desperate for the soothing tobacco taste, hid packets under our mattresses, behind pots, in vases. He got Ganesh Peon to buy cigarettes from the stall just outside the colony and gave Roopa and me two rupees each to keep our mouths shut. When Ma found out she was so angry she refused to allow any cooking in the house.
“Go home and sleep,” she ordered Ganesh. “Don’t show your face here for a week.”
“Are you mad?” demanded Dadda. “At least think of the children.”
“Why should I? Are they mine alone? Does anybody think about me?”
Ma finally relented when Roopa vomited all over her bed following three days of chholey and tandoori parathas from Chowhan’s Café. Roopa was the only one who knew how to get around Ma.
Dadda stopped buying tobacco, sucking at an empty pipe instead, and Ma’s eyes glittered triumph.
The summer after Paul da Costa’s death was also the last summer that the Aunties visited us, although Ma had nothing to do with this decision. After all these years of trying, Vijaya Aunty was expecting a baby. She would not have the time to accompany her sister to our home any more, and of course Meera could not travel alone. Her doctor had written to say that she was seriously ill. India had gone to war against Pakistan, and the sound of sirens shattering the air had affected her mind.
Tamarind Mem Page 10