Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami

  “Memsahib, tell me, if you sit in a mortar can you avoid being hit by the pestle?” she asks suddenly, her hands full of tamarind.

  Linda Ayah rarely spills a word that is useless. She might wander about spouting proverbs and fables, but always, always there is a message for me. I pretend deafness and continue picking stones from the soopa of rice grains. Linda squats across from me in the sunny verandah, carefully removing seeds from the pulpy brown tamarind. In between us, on a sheet of newspaper, is a growing pile of stones, glass bits, rat shit. I make a mental note to talk to Theli Ram the grocery store owner about the quality of the rice. He told me that his stock was guaranteed good.

  “Personal eye I keep, Memsahib,” he said, placing a hand on his heart, his eyes honest. “On my mother’s body I swear that each grain in this humble shop is personally checked by myself.”

  “The rascal’s mother will writhe in jahannum!” I hold up an orange bead. “Out of ten kilos of rice, two kilos are stones.”

  “What I mean is,” says Linda Ayah, ignoring my comment as completely as I ignored hers, “what it is I want to say is, if you put your hand under the wheels of a running cart it will surely get crushed, no?”

  She looks at me, waiting for me to unwind her string of thought. I stare back, unable to see her eyes behind her glasses. She is facing the sun and the light turns the lenses into two radiant orbs.

  “Hanh, answer me, will you or won’t you crush your hand?” she demands.

  “Linda, you want to say something, then say it quick-quick and get back to work,” I say, trying to retrieve my authority.

  And that spectacle-face, as stubborn as the dhobi’s mule, asks again, “Will the pestle hit you?”

  “Yes baba yes! My head will be paste and my hand will be smashed by the wheel. Happy?”

  “No, I am not happy, that is why I dare to open my mouth.” Linda flexes her fingers stained with sticky tamarind. “You think, who is she to tell me what to-do not-to-do? You will even think kick her out, get another ayah. But my heart will not let me hold my tongue.”

  “Linda, if you don’t stop wandering around the world to reach your neighbour’s house, I will have to find another ayah.” What is she getting at?

  “Why you look tukur-tukur at that three-fourth person?” asks Linda finally.

  “Who are you talking about? And what do you mean three-fourth?” Does Linda know about Paul? Has she told anybody? Servants are like drains, they carry all the muck round and round from house to house.

  “Three parts low caste and one part pink-face.”

  “He is just like you, then, Linda.”

  “Memsahib, what you are getting by insulting me, henh? See this skin?” Linda pulls a wrinkled flap of skin off her forearm. “This skin is tough, so many years it has fried in the sun. My parents were good people, no half-caste business for us. Respectable people. They owned five acres of land. My grandmother, she had ten tholas of gold. But I was a fool and married a no-good drunk. My fault. I had no brains, only wet loins. That is why I am telling you, this Linda Ayah has now collected brains after many-many years. What you see in that Paul person that your own mister doesn’t have, henh?”

  I find no words to reply, and in the silence all other sounds are magnified. The crow on the electric wire over the road is going kaan-kaan-kaan. Maybe it has spotted a dead mouse in the ditch below. Thick earth is being dug and loosened by the gardener next door, and the sound reminds me that it is time to start preparing beds for the nasturtiums and poppies. The peanut-vendor approaches our road,“Garam-thaaja, hottest-fresh chana choor!” He gives the last word a questioning lilt, a blandishment.

  Should I tell Linda that my husband likes me to screw up my hair in a bun like an old Anglo aunty because he cannot stand its loose abundance? He says I look like a slut when I wear the long emerald earrings my grandmother gave me for a wedding gift—green for a full womb, she said. He sleeps with me on Wednesday night at 21:40 sharp and Sunday same time if his train is in town. My feet tangle in his pyjamas for he doesn’t like undressing completely. How can I explain to her the yawning monotony of my life with this man? How do I translate the dislike that rages through me when his voice touches my ears, or his hands brush mine?

  Linda interrupts my silence. “Does your mister drink? No. Does the poorgood man smell of some other woman? Nono. Does he beat you? No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I told you,” she says. “This Linda was born Jesu knows when, but I got a brain in my skull now, after all these years. I can see things.”

  “Oh, a chudail in my house! Tell me, o four-eyed one, what else can you see?” I ask.

  “Make fun, what do I care? You want to know what I see? Lots of tears for you, that’s what. And for those poor babies of yours. No fault of theirs either.”

  Suddenly I have had enough of this conversation. “I am glad your brains have multiplied since your birth, Ayah,” I snap. “But I can see your tongue has also grown longer than it should. You want to give advice, give it to your own daughter. I hear she is called scissor-legs by all the goondas in town. Grab her arms, they say, and she will spread her legs.”

  Linda glares at me. “I opened my mouth because you are like my daughter. To me no difference.” She has to have the last word.

  She smacks the tray of rice down and huffs away into the house. What a nuisance she is getting to be! Did I escape from my mother’s home to listen to her voice coming from this soda-glasses witch?

  “But Aunty-ji,” says Sohaila. “So many servants and all you had, how you didn’t get caught?”

  “She didn’t do anything, to get caught.” Latha turns her round, trusting face and looks at me. “Did you bhabhi-ji, did you?” And when I smile faintly at her, she is shocked. “Bhabhi-ji, you really left your husband-children-home to go behind an Anglo? Hai-Ram! I don’t understand why. You are truly crazy!”

  I push my face against the bars in the open window and catch the wind with my mouth. It is dark now, and I can only guess at the names of huddled trees. Puddles and ponds stream by, silver in the passing light of our windows.

  “A woman is her husband’s shadow,” says my mother. “She follows him wherever he goes.”

  She says this so many times it runs as the blood in my veins. Only after Paul da Costa interferes with my placid life do I take her words apart, piece by piece, examining them for all their faults, if only to give myself an excuse to disregard them. A shadow follows its body around, yes. But I am an individual who makes my own shadow. Sometimes this shadow stretches out longer than my body; sometimes it pools like ink about my feet. It changes, dances along behind the body, beneath its feet, in front and beside it, eccentric, erratic, moved by light. My mother sees herself only as an extension of Appa, refuses to be anyone other than his wife. She does not want to lose him like Putti Ajji lost Rayaru.

  “She did not lose him,” I say. “He was the one who was dissatisfied with one woman. He was greedy.”

  “No,” insists Amma. “Your grandmother talked too much for a woman. She had too many opinions, she drove him away.”

  My grandmother Putti might have lost her husband to another woman, but she held on to her pride, and to my grandfather’s property. Small and spiteful, tart as a raw amda fruit, she reigned queen of the vast ancestral house, thankfully ceded to her by her husband, my grandfather, who preferred to give her all she asked rather than be attacked by her scorn. So what if he escaped to his mistress’s house, a tiny whitewashed structure at the other end of town?

  “Think, think,” said Putti Ajji. “Who is the winner here? I have my self-respect, my children have a house and a father’s name. The slut your grandfather visits has nothing.”

  I admire Putti for exactly the reasons Amma does not. My mother wanted to get as far away as possible from her mother, and so she followed every rule Putti Ajji broke.

  “I didn’t want you children to grow up with shame,” Amma tells me.

  “But Putti Ajji
did not care about shame and things like that,” I argue. “The shame belonged to Rayaru’s mistress.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” says Amma. “What is the use of having a palace of a house, boxes full of jewellery, when your man is busy admiring another woman’s charms? And have you ever thought how we, their children, felt? Those pitying looks from all our relatives. Poor children, they seemed to say, paying for their parents’ sins. Nobody blamed Rayaru, you know, the fault was entirely Putti’s.”

  At least my grandmother fought for all that she could get from that hollow marriage, I think to myself. She didn’t leave any doubt about what she thought of her husband.

  “Baddi-suley maganey, son of a whore in debt, fucking an untouchable piece of flesh. Even a pariah dog will not sniff that woman and my fine husband goes to her!” Ajji screamed to her neighbours from the terrace of her house, where she spent whole mornings supervising the servants as they laid out sheets of appala and shandigey to dry in the silver heat of the sun.

  My mother refused to fight for anything. But who am I to say that her life with Appa was unhappy? She framed her conditions for contentment and found them within marriage. My father gave her security, a home, the freedom to do what she pleased inside that home. His affection for her was as solid as a pillar, and my mother’s life grew rich and bountiful twining about that pillar.

  I, on the other hand, am married to a man who has no feelings to spare for a wife. A dried-out lemon peel whose energies have already been squeezed out caring for a sick mother, worrying about his sisters, inheriting his dead father’s unfinished duties. It ate up his youth. With my tamarind tongue, never yielding a moment, I use my grandmother’s strategy of words to ward off the pain of rejection. His aloof, merciless cool, my defensive anger. I will not beg for the affection that is due to me, his wife. Why, even a cat demands a caress, a gentle word. Deprive it of attention and it will wander to another home.

  The Ratnapura house is strangely designed. All the rooms open onto one verandah or another, even the bathrooms. Probably built in a more trusting period. No, that can’t be true. The house was made by the British for the British, and they didn’t trust anyone. They could not, for they were foreigners in a hostile land. The mutiny—for us it was a battle for freedom—of 1857 erased the fragile peace between the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps this open house, which can be entered from twelve different doors, was created by a madman. Or a fatalist. Perhaps the person who made this house thought the worst that could happen would be that the people who lived here would be killed. The best was that there would be cool air and the scent of jasmine wandering about the house all day and through the night.

  My parents, on the other hand, live in a place that is strictly Hindu. A corridor flies from the front door right out the back. A single straight line, so that if an evil spirit enters, it will be carried out on a draft of air. The rooms open out off the corridor like neat rows of teeth. One tiny set of barred windows in each room. The walls in between the rooms are thick, but it is possible to hear sounds.

  My brother murmuring his lessons aloud, “Ten two-za twenty, ten three-za thirty.”

  Chinna pressing her swollen feet and moaning softly with the painful joy of blood rushing through her numb veins.

  The rhythmic creak-creak of the wooden slats on my parents’ bed.

  As a child the creaking comforts me, assures me of their presence when most of the world is dead asleep. As a teenager it fills me with curiosity and then disgust. They are doing what the dogs in the alley behind our house do. As I grow older, the bed creaks less frequently. My parents are getting old, perhaps the warmth of my father’s back against my mother’s is enough.

  I am the first daughter, and it is time for them to discuss my marriage: perform it well and the offers will come rushing in for my sisters. In my room, I imagine my future husband. He will be gentle and caring, discuss his work with me, talk to me often. My imaginary husband has no face, just a body that drifts tentatively over me. I am too frightened, even in my dreams, to let that hovering body touch me, for a girl from a good family does not think such shameful thoughts. My mother’s voice is there, always, always. As are the stories Chinna brings back from various relatives.

  “Did you hear, Radhu’s youngest has brought shame upon the whole family! Pretended to go to her friend’s place and what was she doing instead? Having coffee with a boy, not any boy that too, but a Muslim from Rajan Road.”

  And, “Have you seen where Leelavati Gururaj ties her sari? Down here.” Chinna runs her palms indignantly along her hips. “No wonder every useless goonda in town follows her with his tongue hanging out. A sari tied that low is an invitation for youknowwhat!” Chinna rolls her eyes meaningfully. “If something happens to her it will be her own fault.”

  And my mother, “Decent girls don’t go to the movies alone or with boys. Decent girls spend their time at home learning to cook.”

  We are decent people living in that long, secretive house with its furtive night noises. And then I marry and move to a Railway house with such soaring ceilings that I have to tie two long bamboo poles to the broom so the servants can brush out cobwebs. Its windows conceal nothing, gaping spaces that I cover with yards of heavy fabric.

  I glance at Kamini and Roopa sprawled out on the ground. We are in the spare bedroom, the one that opens without any preliminaries onto the lawn. When Dadda goes on line, I spend the evenings in this room. The large bed has a bright Rajasthani cover. In the corner, a heavy chair with ochre cushions. Kamini calls it the waiting-room kursi because it has arms that grow out into footrests just like the ones in the ladies’ waiting room at the station. It is a hideous chair, but large enough to cross your legs when you sit. Dadda bought it from an old Anglo couple near the Medical Clinic. Massey, that’s the name, Jack and Valerie Massey. They are leaving India for Australia, to live with their daughter. Jack is a fitter in the Railway workshop and has known Dadda since he was a probationary officer. Dadda takes me and the children to visit the Masseys on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I, in my turquoise silk sari with a gold border of mangoes, sit upright on the edge of a huge curving sofa, a starched smile stretching my lips. I am the only one in a sari. The other women are in frocks, mostly sleeveless, mostly with low necklines.

  “Couldn’t you have made some kind of conversation?” says Dadda later, furious.

  “Couldn’t you take your eyes off those bazaari bosoms?”

  The older women wear wide floral dresses, their varicosed legs lumpy like bags full of marbles. They flock around the room, talking in hearty voices, uncomfortable with a Hindu officer and his prim-mouthed wife in their midst.

  “Hey, Johnny boy, whatcha drinking, man?”

  “Annie darling, you made that frock yourself or what?”

  “Ooh look at these cutie-pie girlies. Whatch your name, sweetie?”

  I resist the impulse to snatch my daughters close to me, watching to make sure nobody gives them any of that cake, it has brandy in it for sure. I hate this house crowded with ponderous furniture from another era, the aged Royal Doulton china with its pattern of pink and yellow flowers, the rows of wine glasses and whisky tumblers. Mrs. Massey is telling someone that they are genuine Waterford crystal. She rings a spoon against one of the glasses and the clear bell note stops the chitter of voices for a few seconds. The desperate gaiety of these people, the few that remain in the country, frightens me. They are all slipping out, moving to Canada, Australia, Britain. They will pass there with their fair skins. Nobody will notice their knees. Mrs. Simoes tells me that you can spot an Anglo by the knees. “Knock-knees, every one of them. You can make out straight away. White skin, light eyes, coloured hair, just like an angrezi. But look at their knees and you will know, chhata-chhat, mixed breed.”

  Paul da Costa is the exception. He is dark. Darker even than Ganesh Peon. He does not have knock-knees. When he comes to tinker with Dadda’s car on Sunday mornings, he wears a pair of khaki pants, cut off mid
-thigh. His legs are long and hairless and the knees join the thighs to the calves smoothly, with no hint of bony protruberances. Only his eyes, bright green, give him away. The servants call him kaala billee, the black cat, right to his face. He might be a skilled mechanic, but on the social scale he is at the same level as the servants, lower maybe, because he is without caste.

  I stand at the window in the girls’ room, shielded by the light bamboo chik, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be seen from outside, and watch him bend over the car, the muscles high on his back bunching and relaxing as his arms move. If Linda Ayah comes in I grab a frock, a panty, a petticoat from a pile on the chair near the window, and pretend to fold it.

  “Nice day, hanh, Memsahib?” she says nastily, picking up the pile of clothes. “Why you are sitting inside and spoiling your health? Go, go out and get some clean air. Bad for you to hide inside here and do nothing.”