“Don’t rush like a wild thing,” she scolded. “Take small steps, learn to walk with a little grace.”
“She looks like a stick in sheets,” said Roopa.
“And you are a blackie,” I replied.
“Kamini!”
“She started it.”
“You are older, you should know better!” remarked my mother as always.
“She is your darling baby who can say whatever she pleases. I don’t want this ugly sari.”
“You look beautiful in it,” said Ma in a firm voice.
Dadda looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. I waited for him to say something. He smiled such a sad smile and I thought guiltily of the last time I had sat with him and listened to his stories. Was it a month ago? Six months? A year? Had he noticed that one of his daughters had moved away from childhood? Or did he exist in a changeless world, where the only things that moved were his trains? Dadda knew the trains as well as he did his own body. He knew their schedules, when they were late and why, where they had been held up by landslides, boulders, fallen trees, wandering cows. But did he remember that I had turned twelve, that I did not find Charlie Chaplin movies so funny any longer, that I wanted shoes with heels for my next birthday instead of books by Enid Blyton? On the India-map in my room, his finger moved across the crisscross line between Siliguri and Gariahat.
“The old WG 2-8-2 engine had a roar that made the forest shake,” he said. He had just returned from the site of a terriblehorrible accident. “A bull elephant as big as this house heard the engine deep inside the leaf shadow of the jungle and thought it was a mating call. Noni, don’t you want to know what happened then? Don’t you want to hear my story?”
Aunty Vijaya had told me the lore of a woman who grew fatter and fatter, pregnant with the stories that clamoured within her, till she was about to burst, hardly able to carry herself from one room to another. Finally she whispered her tales to the walls of her house and was relieved of her burden. I imagined that the stories within him had turned my father huge and grey. Sometimes I paused in my headlong flight out of childhood and noticed him in his favourite chair in the corner of the living room, his bald head glowing under the light, smoke from stolen cigarettes curling about his misty face turning him into an amorphous cloud. His buried eyes followed Ma, resigned, as she roared around the house gathering strength from his mountainous quiet. But with so many other things to do, who had time to listen to stories about trains any more?
A day after Durga Pooja my friend Nibha and I saw a naked man for the first time. In the River Hooghly, pinned against the jetty like a butterfly against the pilings, his eyes wide, his tongue bulging out, a pale fish. On his forehead near the right eye was a wound like an open mouth. He looked like crucified Jesus in the “Soldiers of God” pamphlets that Sister Angelica urged us to buy at ten paise an issue.
“God will punish you if you don’t,” she threatened, her face pushed close to mine, her black silk veil fluttering against my frightened cheek.
“Tell your mother it is compulsory,” she said when Ma sent my copy back to school with a note refusing to buy it. Sister Angelica warned that I might fail in needlework if I didn’t bring the money by Monday, which meant I would be held back for a whole year. So I stole ten paise every week from my mother’s change tin on the meat-safe in the kitchen.
The naked man was stretched out across the iron pillars holding up the jetty, his face puffy and grey. The water touched his body and he moved as if in sleep. One hand hung over a cross-beam, the other just touched the water. The bore tide often brought in pigs and stray dogs but this was the first time I had seen a human being.
“Look at his Thing,” whispered Nibha.
Miss Joseph had been teaching us the reproductive system all week. She still hadn’t mentioned the word penis. She sent the boys to Room 4 where Father Julius would teach them the same thing. Miss Joseph wound her sari tightly around her bee-like figure, so tightly that she hopped about in short, swift steps.
“Now all you girls will soon mature,” she said, hopping from the blackboard, where she had drawn something that looked like a sack full of wires, to the desks in the front row and back to her own table.
“What will happen to us, Miss?” asked someone in the class.
“Menstruation,” said Miss Joseph in a doomed voice. “Your uterus will clean itself out every month.”
“What about boys, Miss, do they menstruate?”
“No,” said Miss Joseph. “They masturbate.” I was in love with Frankie Wood, the club caretaker. Actually all of us were in love with him. He had eyes like Gregory Peck, a nose like Rishi Kapoor, and he had brushed my fingers when he gave me my Coca-cola. I was sure that it was deliberate. If I could summon up the courage to stay at the club till everybody else had left, he would tell me that he wanted to hold my hand.
“Hey girlie,” he said instead. “Your ayah was looking for you. You better go home. Children not allowed in the club after seven o’clock. Go, go, your Mama will be worried.”
I hated Frankie Wood.
“Where were you?” shouted Ma, slapping my legs hard. “Linda Ayah was looking all over the place for you.”
“I was with my friends. I forgot to look at the time.”
“She was making goo-goo eyes at the caretaker. Chochweet Frankie!” teased Roopa, rolling her eyeballs. I hated her as well.
Nobody in the world was worth talking to except my friend Nibha. She had long nails and curled her hair. She wore glasses that swooped up at the edges of her face like brown wings, and she was going to be an artist. Nibha stayed in the school as a boarder and I was the only one allowed into her dormitory because I was her current best friend. I sprawled on her bed and watched her drawing animated peas for a frozen pea advertisement. She planned to attend art college after high school and was making up a portfolio of all her art, she said. That was the first time that I had heard that word—portfolio—and the weightiness impressed me. The peas jumped all over the page and shouted in little balloons, “I might be frozen but I am still alive!” Nibha drew the peas in mapping ink, then smudged a blob of Fevicol glue within that outline. When the glue was half dry, she painted delicately with poster colours. That way the pea looked three-dimensional. Nibha told me that her father belonged to a royal family. Or used to, till the government banned maharajas. Now he was the manager of a tea estate in Shillong. Which was why Nibha hated tea. The smell of tea drove her crazy. At this point she looked solemnly at me, her eyes magnified by her glasses. “Maybe I get it from my mother,” she added.
“What?” I asked stupidly.
“The tea thing, and maybe the madness,” said Nibha. “My mother went mad, because she couldn’t stand the tea smell and the sound of panthers in the night.”
If Nibha was to be believed, the railways had played as big a role in her father’s life as they had in mine.
“We would have been fabulously wealthy if my grandmother had not got into the Lahore Express,” Nibha told me. “She was visiting her brother in Pakistan—this was just before partition from India. Her three children and her maid Ameera were with her. She also had a casket with the royal jewels—all the jewels—diamonds, emeralds, pearls.”
“Why did she have to take her jewels on a visit to her brother?” I asked timidly. I didn’t want Nibha to think I disbelieved her. She might stop telling the story altogether.
“Who knows? Her brother was also a chhota-mota prince and maybe they were going to celebrate the birth of his son or something. The main point is that she had all the family heirlooms. The train stopped for some reason. You know how trains are, your father runs them.”
“He decides where they should run,” I corrected, not liking the thought of Dadda being reduced to an engine driver.
“Whatever,” agreed Nibha. “The train stopped near a pond full of lotuses—you know those stunning magenta ones. Well my father and his younger sister started wailing to get down and pick a lotus. My grandmother go
t off the train with them, leaving Ameera in the compartment with the baby to guard their luggage. The jewels stayed behind in a trunk under the seat. Of course you know the rest. The train started and Grandmother, my father and his sister were left stranded in the middle of nowhere.”
“Why didn’t Ameera pull the emergency chain?”
“Because it wasn’t working, maybe. Have you ever heard of anything in the railways actually working perfectly thheek-thhak?”
“So what happened to Ameera and the baby?”
“Who knows? Maybe she was murdered along with other trainloads of people crossing the border. It was Independence time, remember? Or perhaps she is living in style somewhere, having sold all those jewels, and the baby, my aunt, has been brought up by her as a servant.”
Nibha’s tale sounded like something out of a Hindi movie. Mother on train with children. Child lost. Mother bereft. Settles down in the village where she was stranded and takes up a job as seamstress to support the children with her. In Hindi films, helpless mothers became either seamstresses or whores. They contracted tuberculosis and spent the rest of the film coughing.
“Where did your dad meet your mother?” I asked Nibha.
“Oh, I don’t know, someone’s aunt’s cousin’s mother-in-law must have suggested the match,” said Nibha. “My mother’s mother was fairly well known in those days.”
“Why, what did she do?” I was enthralled with Nibha’s family.
“She was, still is, a herbalist, sort of village witch doctor. She was good at mixing herbs and pastes and things, she got it from her father. She used to be famous for her bone-setting paste.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” I demanded.
“I never joke about my family,” said Nibha. “And what’s so strange about having a herbalist for a grandmother? People in the village were uneducated, they thought she was practising magic.”
“Did her cures work?”
“Of course they did! Well, they usually did, and nobody minded the occasional lapse. I mean, the big army hospital couldn’t always help sick people either, so how could an old witch-doctor?”
“So, what could she guarantee cures for?”
“Malaria, cholera, broken bones, coughs and colds. Simple stuff like that.”
“How about cancer?”
“Maybe. I remember there was this fellow with cancer of the stomach. Nani Ma gave him all sorts of potions and things. Apparently one day he shat multicoloured shit and became perfectly all right.”
“That’s disgusting, and not true.”
Nibha shrugged. “It could have been his wife. She broke five coconuts every day at the Mangeshi temple and five at the Pir Baba grave. Maybe that cured the man.”
Then Nibha lost interest and went back to painting while I stared at the ceiling thinking of maharajas and madness, tea parties and panthers. I had madness in my family, too. And tea parties and panthers. Once, in Guwahati, a panther had prowled through the lychee trees in the back garden, cracking the still night air with its sawing, rough growls.
In Guwahati, just before the monsoon broke, a thick, humid heat descended like a skin and the fans circled hopelessly, moving nothing but dusty spider webs high in the ceilings. Sometimes the power failed, plunging the house into a sticky darkness. Then Ganesh Peon and Linda Ayah moved wraith-like through the house, lighting candles and kerosene lanterns, pools of heat shimmering in every room, and it felt like we were inside an oven. I could hear the stealthy scuttering of cockroaches as they came out of hiding, safe for now in the deep shadows. Ma’s poisoned balls of flour and sugar no longer killed the creatures and they returned twice as numerous. They were as immune to deadly poison as the man from Madurai who had been imbibing venom for twenty years. The fibres of his body were bitter with poison, his blood as noxious as a cobra’s spit. He had lived through three hundred snake bites—rattlesnakes, mambas, kraits and cobras—his skin punctured and pocked with strange discolorations, his eyes glittering maniacally. The man hoped to make it to the Guinness Book of World Records for being bitten by more poisonous snakes than anyone in the world. I had seen a picture of him in a magazine, along with photographs of another man who had grown his nails for twenty-five years so that they looked like knotted yellow ropes hanging from his fingertips. The snake man said in italics beneath his photograph, “I aim to live in a cage with 200 snakes, nobody in the world has done that.”
As it was impossible to stay inside the house, we moved our chairs out onto the pitch-dark lawn and sat there draped in mosquito netting. It was the only way we could escape the swarming mosquitoes, which, like the cockroaches, were immune to Odomos repellent, Tortoise mosquito coils, neem paste, mustard oil, everything. They whined and swarmed, hysterical with blood lust, attacking skin, lying on arms, legs, face, bloated and inert till they were slapped dead in a crimson spatter.
“Kamini,” called Ma, “tell Linda to lock the back door. Anybody can walk in and we won’t even know.”
“Am I a fool to leave the whole house open?” grumbled Linda from the verandah where she sat, impervious to all the mosquitoes in the world. She told Roopa and me that her useless children had sucked every last drop of blood from her veins and so the mosquitoes had no use for her. “See, something good always comes out of something bad. Don’t the sweetest flowers grow out of a pile of smelly cow dung?”
In the summer the power failed for longer and longer periods of time, and along with the dark, a silence descended over the whole colony. Sometimes the quiet was shattered by the wild, rising laugh of a hyena, the soft flutter of bats over our heads. When the waiting became unbearable, Dadda pointed out star patterns in the sky—mythical birds, dancing apsaras, strange beasts. I couldn’t make up my mind about which I hated more: the dense heat, the sly whisper of cockroaches, the saucer-sized spiders descending like acrobats from the ceiling or the demented chorus of mosquitoes in the dew-damp outside. I hated it all, the whole rotten place.
A change of season trembled at the edge of the river, just below the ice, hidden in the brown stubble of last year’s grass, coursing through dormant branches. The snow outside my window seemed to shift and tiny green shoots pushed through. Almost all of them would be dandelions, which were considered weeds here in this country. But I liked their tenacious brightness. They reminded me of the besharam plants in our Ratnapura house. The next time Roopa called, I asked her if she remembered the plant, a brave plant that survived wherever it was thrown. Ma said that it had given meaning to its life by simply flowering. “That plant grew in Guwahati not Ratnapura,” said Roopa. “In the front garden, where we spent the nights swatting mosquitoes and gazing at the stars. Do you remember doing that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever spot the huntress in the sky?”
“No,” I confessed. “It always looked like a deer to me.”
I wondered what Ma saw those dark nights. She seemed to have forgotten so many things, she might not even remember. Or she might remember it all differently. Sometimes it seemed as if the past was a painting that she had dipped in water, allowing the colours to run and drip, merge and fade so that an entirely altered landscape remained. Perhaps she only pretended that she did not recollect—knowing Ma, that was far more likely than a fading mind. Ma’s memory was as sharp as the afternoon sun. She preferred to spin her own stories.
That summer, temperatures in Guwahati peaked at fifty degrees Celsius. The newspapers carried stories about people falling dead in the heat. The Daily Chronicle had an item about a cow that dropped its calf on the pavement and watched it roast to death. It was impossible to walk on the roads, which had turned to molten black rivers, clung to tires, dragged slippers off your feet. Winds from across the mountains howled the dust up into whirling dervishes, and the boiling sun sliced through cracks in the shuttered windows, entered Dadda’s body, sizzled in his veins, the hollows of his bones, and burst like a burning flower in his eye. At least that’s what it looked like, the bright-red blood-spo
t with a frilled edge. When Dadda wore his glasses, the rose was magnified, an amoeba drifting towards his dark pupil and threatening to eclipse it. It scared Roopa.
“Nono, don’t worry child, it is only this wretched heat,” Linda soothed.
The violent heat dried the cold tea-juice that Ma pressed on Dadda’s eye, and the eye-drops that Dr. Pathronobis recommended were useless.
“We need to see a specialist,” said the doctor, alarmed by the glaring, crimson spot. “We need to run some tests.”
They tested his blood, his marrow, his heart, kidneys, liver, brain, lungs. “Lose some weight,” said the army of doctors at the hospital. “Take rest, eat oil-free food.”
Ma broke coconuts at the Kali temple in Guwahati. But nothing helped. Poor Ma, sneaking to the temple, reluctant to believe in superstition, yet afraid not to, furious with the goddess for failing her, furious with all the gods in the pantheon, angry with Dadda for giving up so easily. Ma was always there for me and Roopa and Dadda, no matter where Dadda’s trains took him, no matter where he took us in those same trains. Was it wrong for her to expect some return for her services to him? She had wanted to die first, as a sumangali, with her marriage beads about her neck, the vermilion bright on her forehead. Dadda wasn’t playing fair by falling ill, threatening to leave before her. And so Ma argued and fought for his life with the doctors and nurses, specialists and priests, gods and goddesses.
“You haven’t finished anything,” she yelled at him the first time he returned from the hospital. The doctors had allowed him to go home for Diwali. “You haven’t finished your work, that’s why they transferred you here, didn’t they, to build a new railway section? You can’t let the Railways down.” Ma was certain that if she made enough of a noise somebody would hear her, one of the gods, perhaps.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Dadda wearily. “I’m not the only person who can design lines.”
“What about the lines for this route?” she continued, barely even hearing Dadda’s voice. “Finish those, it’s your duty. And what about your children? You can’t just dump them on me!”
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