It is useless for me to protest, to say, “Linda, I am folding the clothes, I want to fold the clothes today. You never fold them right. You go and do something outside, watch the gardener.”
Linda is a witch who can smell out secrets. She glares at me, her eyes stern behind the soda-glasses she insists on wearing. “Why you always want to argue with me? I am only thinking of your own good. Your eyes will go bad staring out of this window.”
As a girl, I wanted to wear a sleeveless dress.
My mother said, “No, decent girls don’t show their bodies to every passer-by.”
“That is so silly, only my arms will be seen.”
“I don’t care,” replied my mother. “You can do what you want when you are married and belong to someone else. Then dance naked for all I care.”
But after marriage there are new rules to follow, fresh boundaries. There is always someone in the house, the peon, the gardener, the maid, the dhobhi, and Linda Ayah with her terrible glasses. They watch me, discuss this new memsahib, make sure I do not stray from the correct lines of behaviour. They keep an eye on me for their sahib, for Dadda, the man to whom my parents hand me like a parcel wrapped in silk and gold. He is at home maybe one week out of four. As I stand near the window, grasping the edge of the sill to still my trembling hands, I can feel my mother’s disapproving glare in the middle of my back.
“Devaru nodtharey ninnana” she will say—the gods will fix you!
Evenings such as this one, with Dadda away, the house empty except for Linda Ayah snoring in the kitchen where she spreads her chatai, such evenings I love the most. I leave the windows open and gusts of air puff at the curtains, set the light bulb swinging wildly. Shadows fly around the room, dancing patterns created by the bamboo lampshade. Kamini is immersed in a colouring book, pastels scattered around her. Roopa has her doll across her legs.
“Oolulu-oolulu,” she sings patting the doll, imitating Linda Ayah. If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, “An ayah.”
She moves her leg up and down in a rocking motion, her face absorbed. Parts of a stainless-steel kitchen set lie on the floor, catching the light here and there. Dadda bought her the set on one of his line-duty tours. He is an affectionate father, imaginative, too. More imaginative than he is as a husband. If he goes somewhere he cannot find books or toys, he nevertheless brings an interesting gift, always with a story attached. A jar of translucent honey smelling of oranges with bits of waxy honeycomb trapped in its viscous depths.
“This is the honey Rama and Sita and Lakshmana ate,” he tells the girls, placing the jar on the dining table. His train has returned from deep within the Dandakaranya forests. For a month he wanders through dense jungle, moist, humming with mosquitoes. He taps and measures, guesses and gauges, filling his notebook with information about the land. He draws stories from this timeless landscape, which will soon be altered, and brings them home for his daughters.
Every month I check to see if I have put all that Dadda needs into his line-box. A large Horlicks bottle of sugar. Dadda does not add sugar to his coffee, but the peon on line duty has a sweet tooth. Salt in a Bournvita tin. I must remind Ganesh Peon not to throw away the empty ones. Even if I don’t use them all, I can sell them to the kabaadi-wallah or exchange them for stainless-steel utensils. Mrs. Baagchi in Number 16 bungalow shows me three stainless-steel bowls she got in exchange for old newspapers and tins.
“But of course those kabaadi-wallahs make a profit,” she says. “Are they simple-heads to just give away good steel? Arrey, I have heard they are millionaires! Yes, they take our raddhi to big factories. The factory-wallahs turn the raddhi into fancy boxes and whatnot and sell them back to us. But am I going to look for those factories with my garbage on my back? No baba no. Let the kabaadi-wallah do that. I am happy with my steel dibbas.”
The kabaadi-wallah also buys old bottles, especially the ones with wide necks—Complan, Nestlé coffee, Parlé jam. I prefer to keep these bottles. They fit neatly into the line-box and the peon can straight away see through the glass what is inside. Did I pack two bottles of dal or three? Two should be more than enough. I can never stop worrying, though, because no matter how often I check, there is something I forget, and then I never hear the end of it. One month it is salt.
“I had food without salt for three days,” says Dadda when he comes back. “Three days of dal without salt, do you know what that feels like? Or bhindi absolutely tasteless? Even the chilies don’t taste of anything without salt.”
Dadda, normally silent as the Delhi Iron Pillar, is passionate when it comes to food.
I want to say, “So what if you haven’t eaten salt for three days of your life, is it such a big tragedy?”
But of course I don’t. I have been married seven years and the lessons my mother drilled into my head hang like a sheet between Dadda and me.
“Your husband is your god. Always obey him, it is your duty. Never refer to him by name, it is a disrespect. And for god’s sake don’t let your too-smart tongue wag-wag more than necessary.”
If I allow my tongue to wag, the good strong sound of words might blow the sheet aside. But I do not, and the sheet grows stronger and more opaque. Dadda remains far on the other side, a dim figure, the father of my children, but that is all. When the most intimate space in a home has no words in it, what then of the rest of the house? I try to fill the other rooms with my voice.
“How was your trip?”
“Good. Next time don’t forget to pack a suit. I needed it this trip.”
“For what?”
“Meeting.”
All his words are reserved for his children.
Our train makes a tea-stop at another station, a small one. Two ragged boys push into the compartment. “Shoe polish, shoe polish, clean and dust dirty floor?” they sing hopefully.
“Go away,” says Latha, frowning at them. “They are big thieves, you know, they sit under the berths polishing shoes and steal from our bags.”
We never travel with Dadda except when we are transferred. I am not allowed into his private world of journeys, long spaces, trees that touch the sky, sky that meets the sea. Before the children are born, I cannot even call him by his name, and he never uses mine. Never “Saroja,” jewel, flower, gem, nothing. Just “Ay.” After Kamini arrives I find a name that I can utter without feeling discomfort—“Dadda.” But in the caverns of the children’s bodies are particles of his being. He is in the blood pumping through their hearts, their flesh and their bones. The currents running through their brains find some of their impulses in his. I feel a twinge of jealousy when I see the way he is with his daughters. He shows an interest in everything they do, an affection he never shows me.
Kamini is absorbed in drawing a boat, displaying it proudly to her Dadda. Enclosing her small fist in his, he guides the crayon over the paper, corrects mistakes, redoes proportions, murmurs instructions.
“See, this sail is too big. Your boat will drift away into the sky and then you will have to tell everybody that you have drawn an aeroplane.”
He likes to make them laugh, cannot bear their sorrow.
“Let them be,” he says if he hears me scolding either of them. “They are children. They will learn.”
The indulgence in his voice. Roopa and Kamini think he is Baba Cheeni, the kind old sugar-man in Linda Ayah’s stories. They probably believe that I am the witch, the daayin who says, “Do your homework; don’t pick your nose; sit properly, the whole world can see your knickers. Why did you get this sum wrong? Did you say good-morning to teacher-miss?”
I buy them bloomers, petticoats, school notebooks, water-bottles, toothbrushes. Dadda comes home like a magician bearing strange gifts, tales of wonderful things and places. He returns from the hills of Aarlong with two silkworm cocoons. One of them is sliced open and the silken interior glows like a moonlit cavern. The girls caress the rough, dull-brown outside of the cocoon and beg him to reveal its mysteries.
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�These cocoons came from a farm where the caterpillar isn’t boiled to yield up its trove of silk,” says Dadda, spinning his yarns, his gift to his daughters. While I, his wife, the other half of his body, I have only silences and the vast distances his travel creates between us.
“The caterpillar is shaken out of its nest of sleep onto fresh mulberry leaves and the silk is drawn out of the cocoon,” Dadda explains, bringing out two small pouches made of pale golden silk. Then from the bottom of the suitcase, which is still full of sweat-smelling shirts and underwear, he shyly draws out a sari, the same soft, golden silk, but with a flash of turquoise for the border.
“Give this to your mother,” he says, nudging Roopa.
This is his first gift to me, and I am not sure how to accept gifts from my husband the traveller. There are so many things I want to say, but my clumsy tongue takes over and the words fall before I can hold them back. “Yes, but this is too dull for my skin.”
The thread that Dadda spins towards me snaps, and his silence once again covers his tentative smile. I could so easily have said, “This is beautiful,” and meant the gesture rather than the gift. But now I must stumble to cover up the disappointment that hovers between us.
“It is beautiful, though,” I try. “I think if I wear it with a turquoise blouse, it will look perfect.”
Too late; Dadda moves out of the room to the verandah and sits nursing his pipe and the newspaper. Kamini scowls at me, tears threatening to rush out of her eyes. She calls me a mean-mean witch, says she hates me.
I have nothing to discuss with this stranger who takes me from one town to another, showing me a whole country. He sits with his daughters about him, telling his tales, while I hover in the penumbra of their shared happiness.
“There was only one line in Kantabhanji,” he tells them. “But a troublesome one. Nobody wanted to work there for the villagers were sure it was haunted. The train arrived every evening at nineteen hours.”
“Seven o’clock,” chorus the girls.
“Yes, it was dark by then and a porter had to walk down the tracks, about three furlongs or so, to change the signal. Those days the signals were not automatic. The station-master reminded the porter of the time by hitting a gong, so loud that it could be heard by the villagers for miles around. Everything worked fine for a while, and then suddenly the porters started disappearing. Sometimes their lanterns were found near the signal, sometimes not. The train drivers would get no signal and go right past the station. That’s when I was sent in to see what was going on.”
Dadda lives by rules. Just as he makes sure that nothing, not a syllable, in the Handbook for Railway Officers is ever violated, so does he follow an unwritten book on the duties of a Brahmin father. He is determined to avoid all the mistakes his own father made. But he is a good son, respecting his father no matter what he did, and so he never tells me what those mistakes were. Only once he says, “He neglected us. My father forgot his duty by us.” When he died he left Dadda, the oldest, to gather up all the pieces. I marry a man who is already old, who fulfils his obligation to society by acquiring a wife. I am merely a symbol of that duty completed.
Sometimes, Dadda orders a basket of apples from Simla, where his inspection carriage is stationed. Golden apples. Some men buy underwear for their wives, my husband is more down-to-earth. He is doing his duty by his wife and family, providing the nourishment a body needs. Sometimes, looking at a bridge over a tiny, ferocious river, checking for weaknesses in the enormous rock-and-iron pillars, Dadda remembers to send Banganapalli mangoes from Tenali. A sack of Basmati rice from Dehradoon, nuts from Delhi, lichees from Patna, oranges from Nagpur. They arrive without any message and Dadda never asks afterwards if we enjoyed these unannounced gifts. It is almost as if he remembers us till a certain point and then, by sending a basket of fruit, exorcises us. We are not to wander out of that little space he draws for us, as if we are his designs, those precise lines with which he fills drafting sheets, the minute scribbles that designate those drawings into their slots, taking into account every possible landslide, waterfall, monsoon storm, flood or wild animal that the earth could throw up. He studies the land, knows every pit and tumour on its surface before pinning on it endless tracks of steel and teak. But of us, his family, he knows nothing.
When Dadda leaves on line and Paul da Costa creeps onto the shadowy verandah of the Ratnapura house like a thief, I tell him that I cannot destroy my life for a half-breed man, a caste-less soul. I want to reach out and touch his warm skin, watch his clear smile. But words like duty and loyalty clamour in my ears. I think of Roopa and Kamini, their soft skins smelling of milk, their heads so vulnerable. They hold me with their helplessness, they twine about me as tenacious as bougainvillaea. I tell Paul that I will not leave my children. I don’t want to cut myself off, become a pariah, have other children who will be bastards. I let my evil tongue reduce him to a pile of nothing dust. Perhaps then he will stop asking me to go with him to England, to Australia, to Canada.
“This fool has two types blood in his body and your high-caste Brahmin mind cannot handle that? Can’t do anything about this, Memsahib, it is part of me, will go to my grave. Whattodo?” Paul rubs his skin. “I will kill myself,” he says. “You wait and see, you will be responsible.”
I smile at such melodrama. Has a man ever lost his life over a woman? His mind maybe, but his life? As my Amma would have said, such tragedies belong to the cinema screen. Only a Majnu would die for his Laila, a Ranjha for his Heer. And they exist between the lines of a bard’s song.
I need to straighten the cyclone of thoughts filling my mind, so I let Linda take responsibility for the children, the house, me, everything. Linda Ayah teaches my children all sorts of rubbish. But it keeps them occupied so who am I to say this or that? She tells them not to clip their nails at night. A daayin might collect the clippings and cast a spell on them. When she takes the girls to the club to play in the evening she makes them fix their gaze on the road.
“Watch out,” she says, frightening them out of their wits. “Watch out for evil things. If you see a pile of cut hair or a lemon tied with turmeric-stained thread, make sure you don’t step on it! You will be caught in a witch’s web for sure.”
Linda Ayah teaches Kamini and Roopa good Christian songs. She doesn’t like leaving anything to chance, feels that my careless Hindu ways are a bad influence on my girls.
Jesu Christo super star
Twinkling in the hea-vens
Jesu Christo son of Mary
Shining bright and haa-ppy!
she sings, clapping her hands and urging the girls to repeat.
She tells them long, rambling stories and nursery rhymes:
Baa-baa black ship,
Have you any oon?
Yessir, yessir theen bags phull.
The sound of the Ranigunj Mail rushing past the house at exactly 21:56 hours deafens me so that I miss the first scraping, hesitant knock on the verandah door. The door is normally locked because the room is for guests, hardly used except in summer when my sisters-in-law arrive. It leads through the verandah onto a vast, unkempt gathering of trees and bushes which I toy with eliminating, perhaps making a park for the children to play in. The gardener is enthusiastic but finds an excuse every time I ask him to start work.
“For that kind of jungle you need big clippers. I have to requisition from the main office, Memsahib,” he says, squatting in the shade of the rain tree separating our compound from the neighbours.’
His passion is the front garden, where he has managed to coax a riot of flowers out of hard soil. Lazy bugger, I think, but keep the thought to myself. I don’t want a full-scale union fight on my hands. The union is exceptionally powerful—strikes occur at the drop of a hat, gheraos, stop-the-train movements. For example, a train is delayed for two hours. Nobody is at fault, but passengers at the station shout at the engine-driver, who yells back and is slapped on his face.
“No more work,” says the engine-driver, his li
nesman, the guard, the signalman. “We won’t work. No engines will run, no trains will move. We demand compensation for this insult. Are we dogs to be kicked by this person and that?”
In the colonies, jamedaars put down their pails and brooms, let garbage pile up on the roads; gardeners refuse to water the lawns, just sit in the shade of the tamarind trees chewing khaini. Even Paul da Costa joins in the thamaasha. Such stories I hear about how he leads a gang of workers in the loco-shop to down their tools, to paint posters in red and white—“No Pay No Work, Are We Animals Or Human?” Later, after the strike has blown over like a spent storm, Paul smiles at me. “Scared your officer sahibs, didn’t we?”
Kamini is singing “Baa-baa black ship” the night Paul knocks on the door of the guest bedroom one last time. The Raniganj Express rattles the windows of the house so loudly that I think that the first knock is just a shutter banging. Only after the entire train has passed, in the sudden stillness as the house settles back to listen to the night, only then do I hear the second knock. And pretend that I do not.
“Mrs. Moorthy!” I hear Ruma Ahluwalia calling me from her side of the hedge between our houses, but I do not reply. This is the first moment in the day that I have had to sit down to a cup of hot tea. All by myself. When Dadda is home he has his breakfast at eight o’clock sharp—a minute later makes him furious and a minute earlier means that a fresh batch of crisp dosai or toast has to be made. Food cannot be kept waiting for him and he refuses to wait for it, either. In this house things run like trains, by the clock. The girls leave for school at eight-fifteen, the dhobhi comes at eight-thirty, the vegetable-man at eight-forty-five and the ironing-boy at nine. My neighbour’s voice reaches me from across the hedge as soon as I settle into the easy chair. She can’t see me sitting in the verandah through the thick wall of morning-glory but she knows that I am here.
Tamarind Mem Page 20