The next morning I find speech blooming in my mouth. If he does not speak, I will. He is my husband, after all, even if he is fifteen years my senior. My mother isn’t around, hovering over my shoulder telling me how to behave, how to address a husband.
“It is wrong to address him as ‘you,’” she would remark, her mouth pursed with disapproval. “Be respectful, say ‘thou.’ Don’t give him the impression that we haven’t done our duty as parents and brought you up properly.” All her advice is given to me during the long Sunday baths when she rubs and slaps warm mustard oil into my skin. Those are her private sessions with each child, when she has the time to pass on wisdom handed to her by her elders, or to scold misdeeds. With me she always-always starts with, “How many times have I told you and still you don’t listen…” Her hard hands knead the muscles of my back, and I sit in a daze of steam from the copper pot, the acrid stink of oil, and the muscles in my body slowly unwind. But this man is my husband, I have a right to talk to him.
“I wonder when we will reach Ratnapura?” I ask.
My husband mumbles a response, his lips clamping and unclamping like some strange fish on the stem of his pipe. It occurs to me that he is almost as old as my own father, a difference of only six years between them. The realization shocks me into silence. Why did my parents have to get me married to this old man? I could have finished my studies, found a job and supported myself. Of course Appa objects to the women in his family working. It demeans him somehow.
“I haven’t reached the stage where I need to send my daughters out to earn money,” he roars when I suggest that I can get a job in the local college. “Only harlots work for a living.”
“But Appa, all my teachers are women.”
“They are all harlots!” says Appa, ending the argument.
I sit in the dusty compartment and brood. I do not use the right tactics. My own mouth is my worst enemy. Look at my younger sister Lalitha, so docile, her eyes pleading as a cow’s going to slaughter, never a word, but gets her way every time. She is two years younger and knows all the tricks. She even tells me that all I need to do is make Appa feel as if he is dispensing a great favour.
“Why do you fight with him?” she asks. “Cry a little, beg, wheedle. How does it hurt you? Appa feels that he has the power to refuse and you get what you want. All men are like that. Why you have to say this and that and make everybody angry?”
“What your sister said is true,” nods Sohaila, the afternoon sun catching her nose-pin and making it glitter fiercely. “You can get more done if you keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open.”
“Rubbish,” says her sister, “if you don’t like something, let the whole world know, that’s what I say.”
The train slows down and stops in the middle of pale-green fields of dal. There is a smelly pond just outside our window, and a few huts in the distance.
“Chain-puller,” says Latha wisely. “Some fellow lives in those huts there, too far from the station, so he must have pulled the chain. Thinks this train is his personal tonga to stop wherever he wants!”
“Latha-ji, do you think it is wise for a woman to keep her thoughts to herself, or shout her anger to the whole world?”
I look curiously at the sweet-faced woman, with her inexhaustible supply of food. She has a large red bindhi on her forehead, like Shiva’s third eye, and pendulous gold earrings.
She shrugs. “There is a time for this and a time for that. When I am very angry, I cook so badly that it sticks in the throat. Then my husband and the children all look up from their busy lives and say, ah, something is wrong, she is upset.”
“But your man, what does he do?”
“What can he do? Am I neglecting my duties? Oh no! If he gets angry, my cooking becomes even worse.” She beams contentedly at us, and goes back to cracking her endless supply of peanuts.
When I talk too much or say something nasty, my mother remarks, “Both your tongues are wagging today.” Or, “You create too much noise, must be the little tongue.”
The little tongue is completely silent in some people. In others it adds drops of honey to their conversation. The little tongue can also make you choke and die if it drips poison. That is what happens to Seethu Akka who lives down by the Thousand Lights Temple.
Seethu Akka cannot stand her sister’s husband, Prakash. People say that it is because she wanted him to marry her and he turned to her younger sister.
Seethu Akka sits on her doorstep, doing small household chores like shelling a basin of peas or scraping coconuts. Now and again, she spits in the direction of her sister’s house and curses her brother-in-law. “Bastard birth, bastard brain. Bastard keeps my sister’s belly heavy so she has no energy to see what he is up to.”
Seethu does not move from the doorstep except when her bed-ridden mother yells for her from within. Then she spits once more towards her sister’s house and hurries into the bedroom where her mother lies, shrivelled and noisy, against brilliant pink-and-green-and-yellow Chennur sheets.
“I called and called,” she yells in a voice piercing enough for people out on the road to hear. “What sins I must have committed in my last birth to deserve this. Hold my shit till this maharani daughter, whose bottom I spent my youth wiping, decides to appear!”
After taking care of her mother, Seethu reappears to spew yet more venom from the front doorstep. She dies, one day, cursing her brother-in-law, her rage exploding through the blood-vessels in her head as she hurries in to tend to her screaming mother.
When my Amma gets angry with me she says that Seethu’s evil voice has flown straight into my throat. On those days she furiously chops up pale-green bitter-gourd, fresh from our back garden, and boils it in a soup of tamarind and jaggery, red chilies and coriander. It is a delicacy for the rest of the family, but I hate the taste. For me, it is a punishment which I swallow, gagging miserably at every mouthful, my mother’s eyes mean on me.
“If you vomit,” she threatens, “I will make you eat it off the floor.”
Amma no longer has the right to punish me for the things I say, for now that I am married, that right has been transferred to my husband.
In the rattling compartment, I turn to him. “Why did you wait so long to marry?”
He is surprised, I can sense that, and he has to reply. He cannot brush this question away with an “Unh-hunh.”
“I had responsibilities, things to take care of before I thought of marriage.”
“What responsibilities?”
In the background, I hear my mother’s voice. “A good wife does not go bada-bada at her husband asking him this and that.” Amma, I think, I am no longer a daughter of your house. Remember? You gave me away to this old man with a handful of puffed rice and some Sanskrit words that even you could not understand.
“One brother and a sister, they were my responsibilities,” says my husband.
“I thought you had two sisters.”
“Yes, Vijaya is her husband’s headache.” He smiles slightly and I can almost hear him thinking, “Like you are now my headache.”
My little tongue, the one my mother tries to soften with bitter-gourd, rushes in to say, “How do you know your sister is the headache? Could be the other way around.”
He shrugs. “Perhaps. My second sister is still our responsibility.”
“We have to find a boy for her?” I wonder at the sudden shift of responsibility from “mine” to “our.” Married only two days and already I am expected to share his burdens?
“She will stay with us for a few months every year,” he says.
“Why? What does she do the rest of the year?”
“She is sick. She stays in a nursing home. She will spend the summer with us.”
Not only have my parents tied me to a man so old and silent I feel I am enclosed in the quiet of a funeral-ground, but he also has a sick sister for whom I must care. I am their sacrifice to the fire god so that my sisters might get fine young men. I turn away from my
husband, and the scene outside the window blurs as my eyes fill with tears. The train is slowing down, probably at a station, a large one going by the number of tracks criss-crossing away in all directions. I glance at my husband from the corner of my eye. He has a severe face, which in later years dissolves into plumpness, hair straight back on his skull, a small moustache, large ears. He isn’t bald yet, thank goodness. Just a touch of grey in the sideburns. His fingers are long and knobbly but not wrinkled. I have heard that age shows first in the knees. He stands up abruptly, hauling all our bags down from the upper berth.
“We’ve arrived,” he says. “There will be somebody to meet us.”
The train grinds to a halt, a final scream of wheels against the tracks, the moaning hiss of steam echoing against the arched tin roof of Ratnapura Junction. My husband slides the door of the compartment open. There is a brief pause, and suddenly it seems as if the entire station is in our compartment. A cacophony of voices.
“Salaam, Sir, congratulations on your marriage.”
“Shubh kamnaye, Saar!”
“Good afternoon, Sir, and the new Medem.”
The trunks and bags are unloaded and whisked off to a waiting station-wagon. A woman in a crisp green cotton sari presses my hand and says, “Congratulations Mrs. Moorthy, and welcome to Ratnapura.”
Mrs. Moorthy. The name tastes strange.
In the town of my childhood, there is a sugar factory that marks the middle of everything. It is always there. If you are lost, you stop a moment, look for the tall chimney and say, “Oh yes, oh yes, now I have to go left,” or right, or straight ahead. And if you have lost the use of your eyes, your nose and ears will tell you where you are. The early morning wind carries the sickly odour of boiling jaggery to the east of the factory, and towards the west, you can hear the strong rustle of sugar cane in the fields. But when I become a Railway wife, I lose my bearings. One year I might be in Guwahati, the next in Calcutta. Lucknow I remember for its sweet-sweet watermelons which swelled on the banks of the Gomti River. In Guwahati, I become familiar with the roads, the trees, pineapple blades in every garden, smell of oranges ripening in the heat, the grumble of traffic outside the colony walls. On that side of the sullen Brahmaputra, which might flood or not, depending on the moods of the goddess and the monsoon, is Phookat Bazaar, where I go to get my new sari for the Diwali festival. On this side of the river is Colby School, where Behari Lal the farmer keeps his cows—only after class, you understand, and he always cleans up the hay and the droppings before school opens the next morning. Behari’s father donated all the ceiling fans for the school and so the principal cannot really refuse him. In Calcutta there is the Hooghly River, steaming, ugly, flowing filth. During the day it sucks air away from the colony, leaving a hole of heat, and in the evening it puffs warm stinking breezes back. The botanical gardens across the river are a green apparition, inviting only from a distance. Cunningham Road frothing bedlam just outside the colony gates, the pavements alive with people, dogs, cows, vendors, fortunetellers, madmen, lawyers saving on office rentals, tailors, barbers, butchers, quacks and palmists. The ragged old woman in a palace of gunny sacks, Dalda tins, tires and plastic cans. She says she is the ex-queen of Dholpur, waiting for the government to return her riches to her.
“Remember, remember, the twelfth of December, when the bastards stole my home,” she howls, slamming a long-handled pan on an overturned metal bin that was once full of Parlé biscuits.
Beside her, just where Cunningham Road swerves to meet Elphinston Lane, a thin young man has set up shop. On the pavement in front of him, like mountain ranges, are rows and rows of brassieres. Red, white and black, the colours of Durga, the goddess of illusion.
“For Rekha-actress figure, sister!” shouts the man, thrusting his fist to fill the cup and pulling it out again to show how the fabric maintains its shape, “34 A, B, C, 36, 38, even extra large available. Sister, sister, even when nothing is there, it will give you a Rekha-actress figure.”
The illusion-monger holds a red bra over his own chest, bare brown, a thin coating of skin stretched over his ribs. “Best quality, lowest price,” he says, mincing up and down the pavement. “Export quality, sister, suspension like the Howrah Bridge, strong everlasting.”
And in Ratnapura Junction, we live in a whitewashed bungalow with a red tiled roof and a wide bajri driveway. Hyenas giggle and scream in the hills behind the house, snakes slip under the garden leaves, and a curling wrought-iron stairway winds up from the verandah to the terrace where I sometimes dry my hair.
There is a shift in the rhythm of the train as it picks up speed, whipping through warm-hued landscape rising out of the dust. Arundhathi, the evening star, is already a pale gleam in the sky, and far across the slow curve of mustard fields you can see the lights of a town like gathering fireflies. Double-stringed electric wires hum and sway, punctuated by rows of sleek, coat-tailed swallows.
“So Aunty-ji, you married the man with no horoscope?” asks Latha. She snaps a peanut open and pops it into her tiny mouth. She has been diving into her baskets of food at regular intervals, fishing out burfis, pakodis, kachoris, mixture, om-pudi. She likes munching when she travels, it helps time move faster.
“Aunty-ji, so much you travelled, so lucky!” remarks Sohaila. “I never go anywhere except to my mother’s house for this.” She pats her pregnant belly. This is her fourth child. “Whattodo but, that mother-in-law of mine says have sons, many many sons, they will be your arms and legs, your eyes and ears when you grow old. I would have liked to see the world a little before my children tied me down.”
“Yesbut,” I assure her, “it was no fun packing-shacking every two-three years. You just start making friends with your neighbour, talk about children and ayahs, and then husband comes home with transfer orders—go to Chittaranjan, Khurda Road, Kachrapara. So again you have to start all over….”
The Ratnapura bungalow. In that rambling building with its bare windows like hungry eyes, its verandahs wide as roads and creaking fans rotating dust in lost ceilings, the first thing I notice is the thunder of passing trains. At first I think that my long journey has left the sound of the Madras Mail in my ears. I have just spent sixty hours in the slow chuffing train with my new husband. Two and a half days of solitude in spite of the fact that there were two of us. The trains fill my first night in the house with muffled sounds. Distant vibrations shake the window panes in our bedroom, the room where finally my husband touches me, his hand a dim creature faintly visible in the light filtering through the plain white curtains. Pure star-shine, for the house is separated from the roads by a vast garden, too far away for streetlights to reach. That first night neither I nor my husband has the courage to turn on any lamp, each afraid of the imperfections it might reveal. His warm hand drifts questingly across my face, the hollow guarded by two bones in the base of my throat, my breasts. I hold my breath, lying stiff and silent as the hand moves delicately, pushes my sari away, fumbles with the hooks on my blouse. I wish that he would say something. His breathing fills the room and I shut my eyes from the shame of being seen naked by a strange man.
My mother is the only other person who has seen my body unclothed. Every Sunday, I wait for Amma in the smoky warmth of the bathing room, an old petticoat tied below my armpits. In one corner, where the slime needs to be scraped away daily, a huge copper pot simmers over the cement oven. Burning coconut fibre, set alight by Chinna, blazes up crackling hot. By the time I have my bath, the water is scalding. But till Amma arrives, I have to wait.
“Amma, I am cold, hurry up.”
“A little cold won’t kill you.”
“Amma, the fire is dying, send Chinna in with more gari.”
In that house, where every word is heard in every room, Chinna grumbles, “Did you hear that? She thinks she is the Queen of England ordering everybody about!”
Amma likes making me wait. It will teach me patience, the art of sitting within my own thoughts. So I shiver sullenly, glare at
the fire spitting out tiny sparks, the dry leaf-stems and coconut husk smouldering red. I cannot sit any closer to the oven for it snaps out burning embers that sizzle angrily on the wet bathroom floor. The knots in the husk crackle and explode. Nothing in the house is wasted. Every part of the coconut tree is thoroughly used, the leaves along with coconut shells dried for fuel, the extra sold to the grocery shop around the corner where two hags silently peel long veins from the leaves and bunch them together to sell as brooms. Amma arrives finally, bringing a sharp draft of air into the bathroom.
“It’s slippery near the fire,” I warn.
Deep within my heart is the fear that one day something will happen to her. She is too fleshy, her heart might stop beating. She chews too much paan, cancer will eat her away. She hurries too much, she might fall and break her hip. But we do not demonstrate our affections in that house, so I hide my fears beneath a bruising tongue and an argument for everything she says.
“Take off your petticoat,” orders Amma, her fingers scooping up a hot drip of mustard oil from the brass bowl on the stove. I shiver with the anticipation of my mother’s strong fingers working the oil into my flesh.
Does Vishwa Moorthy notice how soft my skin is from all those weekly oil baths? He says nothing that first night. Instead, he fumbles with the knot on my petticoat, the sari a pool of purple and green about my body. He speaks finally, his voice cracking with impatience, “Open this.” I am glad to have something to do with my trembling hands. His body descends on mine, warm and heavy. What am I supposed to do? If I part my legs will he think that I have done this before? Stupid, I tell myself, he knows I am not ignorant. I am not an illiterate poorthing like Mariamma the tailor’s daughter who thought that a demon was hiding in her body when she swelled with child. Who did not know she had been raped.
Tamarind Mem Page 17