Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami

  “Mrs. Moorthy, did you hear the news?”

  Since I came to Ratnapura, Ruma has caught me every morning as soon as I come out into the verandah, inviting herself for a cup of tea and staying to lunch as well. It is because of her that I plant my morning-glory wall, now a thick, crawling forest of tendrils, leaves and pale-purple flowers. Black ants march crisply up and down the stems, dropping on my shoulder if I sit too close. A wasp has been trying to make a nest in the corner where the morning-glory meets the verandah pillar. I scrape the still damp mud off every day, refusing to let her lay the eggs hanging within her body. It is a small act of cruelty worked into the pattern of my daily life. Maybe for that I will be reborn as a pregnant wasp. Every morning a sun-bird shimmers over open blossoms, inserting its long beak delicately into the violet interior. Its wings vibrate frantically, holding the bird up till it drains the flower.

  Today, Ruma wants to discuss something unbearably interesting with me. She has not seen me leave the house, the front door is wide open, and my maidservant is washing the dishes in the courtyard outside, all of which are signs that I am around. I toy with the idea of slipping into the house and out through the verandah on the far side, but Ruma is already at my gate. She spots me on the verandah, waves and huffs up the driveway.

  “Why you didn’t answer me?” she demands sulkily. “I called you and called you, what you were doing?”

  “I must have been in the bath, with the water running, you cannot hear anything you know.”

  “Such shocking news, baap-re-baap! I need some hot tea, so upside-down my system is from the shock,” says Ruma, clutching her left breast which forms a plump nest for her heart. She pulls a chair into the sun and settles down with a sigh.

  “Ganesh!” I call, resigned to a day full of gossip. “Bring two chais, super hot. Boil the milk, don’t forget.”

  “Hanh, Memsahib,” replies Ganesh from inside the house.

  I already know what Ruma’s news is. I have known it since eight o’clock yesterday evening.

  “They found a mechanic in the billiards room,” says Mrs. Ahluwalia.

  I know that Paul da Costa hanged himself.

  “Istupid idiot, why defile our billiards room tell me? No manners or respect for other people’s feelings.”

  I broke his heart. As if a heart is made of glass!

  “Why you are so quiet? You know the fellow?” Ruma gives me an inquisitive look.

  How could he live without a heart?

  “Paul de Souza or something, he did repairy work on cars and all. Didn’t I see him with his head inside your car also?”

  “Paul da Costa, his name was da Costa,” I say.

  “Something, the bechaara is with his Christ, baba, how it is mattering what his name is?” says Mrs. Ahluwalia.

  “When you die, would you like it if people call you something else?” I snap, and Ruma gapes at me.

  “You want me to die?”

  I shrug. “Why should I care whether you live or die?”

  Ruma stands up and glares. “Baap-re-baap! What a wicked tongue you have, Madam! Tell your peon not to bother with tea and all.”

  I know that she will rush around the colony later today complaining to the other ladies about me. “That woman is such a chunt” she will tell them. “Too-too moody, I tell you. I knew, first time I met her, not a nice type.”

  Did I truly tear out the mechanic’s heart like the daayin in the stories Linda Ayah tells my girls? What if, like Paul, I had forgotten that I was a memsahib?

  “Come, come,” says Latha kindly, offering me a slice of mango. “Don’t feel sad, behen-ji, it was time for the man to leave this world, so he left. Whattodo?”

  “What did you do then?” asks Sohaila

  “Did your hubby ever find out?” Even the teenager Vicki is snared by my tale.

  I shrug. I don’t know. He never said anything.

  Hameeda shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have done all that,” she says. “It wasn’t right.”

  “Why not?” demands Vicki. “She was unhappy with her life, no?”

  “And what’s wrong with sharing some words with the poor man?” asks Latha, whose kind eyes allowed her to see only more kindness.

  Before my marriage, the world seems a smooth, round place. My father is a true patriarch. As long as Appa is in charge, we don’t have to worry about anything. We live in one little town from birth to marriage or death and thereafter. That makes a difference, you see, living in one place. You know everybody as if they belong to your own family. If you have a problem, there are at least ten shoulders to help you carry your pain. Your happiness lights up the whole place. And in a small town, which gets its livelihood from sugar refining, nothing ever changes. Postman Subanna could wander blindfold about the place and still deliver the mail correctly. Then when I turn twenty-three, that same Subanna brings a letter from our Delhi Aunty. “There is a good boy, son of a family friend,” she writes. “Good steady job.” How could she use the word “steady”? Nothing is steady after my marriage. I have no friend to talk to without feeling that I am revealing my inadequacies as a wife. Friendship is like a tree, it needs time to mature, and we never stay in one place long enough for that! And my husband is a gypsy who I see for a short while every month.

  The first time Dadda tells me he is going on line duty, I stare at him, baffled.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am going out on tour to check the railway lines.”

  “I want to come too,” I say firmly, certain of my power as a bride.

  “Women don’t go on line.”

  “But I want to know what you do there,” I tell him.

  “That’s where I work,” says Dadda with a smile. “Like you work in the home.”

  Who could think that those beautiful Railway colonies that I have often admired from the outside would be like jars crowded with mosquitoes, full of bored women waiting for their sahibs to get back? In the colonies, there is nothing to do but spend your time going from house to house, sip a hundred cups of tea and exchange stories. Most of the time I sit in our bungalow, the lonely house at the north end of the colony, listening to the trains rattling by. I even write up my own timetable—1:30 a.m., Howrah-Bongaigaon Express; 2:30 a.m., Shillong-Dehradun passenger; 3:00 a.m., Delhi Mail. Another list to add to my growing collection; it will go nicely in the spot next to the Godrej cupboard in my bedroom. I draw red lines to show arrivals and blue ones for the departures and begin to be quite pleased with the effect I create on the walls. A room twelve feet by thirteen feet is now papered with long lists. The one with the green and yellow lines is an inventory of vegetables I buy from the haat every Wednesday. I have to make that list to remind myself of the things Dadda dislikes. Cabbage and cauliflower give him gas pains in the lower left hand corner of his stomach, radish and capsicum smell too strong, tomato is a non-Brahmin vegetable, and jhinga is a low-caste person’s supper. That doesn’t leave too many vegetables. So I have to look all the time for different-different recipes for potato and peas. The recipes are a growing collection which I use to cover the empty wall to the left of the window. I decorate the edges with a clever collage of mouths clipped from the magazines to which we subscribe—some open, some pursed up like Dadda’s when he is full of gas on the left side of his stomach—so many different sizes. The plain blue sheet of paper near the mirror is a list of the clothes I pack for his duty tours—the going-on-line list. Two white pyjamas, two white kurtas, two white underpants and two sleeveless banians. Dadda also purses up his lips if I pack the banians with sleeves. Those are for nylon shirts which make him sweat in the underarms.

  This particular section of the railway lines is very, very hot. I hope and hope that my husband will soon take me with him on line to Darjeeling so that I can get away from the heat, from the silence of this house broken only by the sound of trains. I wait a long-long time but he never takes me. And then Dadda is transferred to Calcutta, where everything is different, except fo
r the heat. Here the trains are far away, but their movement stays with me, for the river runs by the house, restless, eager for the sea. When the monsoons thunder across from the Bay of Bengal, the river swells and floods into the colony. Lawns turn to vast dirty lakes. There is no way of knowing where the drains end and the roads begin. If you are brave enough to step out of your house, you walk by guesswork. A step in the wrong direction and it is possible for you to drown in a river of sewage. A person looking down from the air might think that we are a population floating on water. Eventually the river recedes, leaving behind a mush of salty mud which it churns up from the sea, bones and corpses of dead dogs and pigs, and a stink that takes months for the sun to boil away.

  Across the river is the Botanical Garden, which is really an enormous myth. The main attraction is an ancient banyan tree, a growing umbrella of shimmering leaves. Other than that, there is nothing, not a flower, and no birds but the crows. It is important, though, to have this green-green place across the ugly river, an enchanted forest away from our dull-brown monotony. At one time or another, every family in our colony makes a pilgrimage to that tree armed with baskets of puri and aloo subzi, lemon rice and curd rice, laddoos and banana cake.

  In the Calcutta house you can hear the neighbours all about you. The building is an old bungalow, grandly named Godfrey Mansions, its wooden walls pock-marked with windows. The house originally belonged to some big-shot British sahib, and after the British leave, it is sectioned off into five apartments. Sounds sail in and out of rooms with no regard for privacy. Next door, the Saigani twins quarrel noisily, and in the second-floor flat, Ranjini Abraham pedals on her ancient Singer machine, turning out perfectly tailored clothes for her children.

  I find myself recovering slowly in this building full of cheerful, everyday noises. Our flat has a fireplace which the servants tell us is actually a secret passage leading to Allahabad. If you stick your head up a little way into the chimney, you can hear Mrs. Anderson singing. When the British Empire ebbs away from Indian shores, it leaves a few shells behind, like the Andersons, Mr. and Mrs., who are too deeply embedded even to think of leaving. They live on the first floor, and while other families either transfer out of Calcutta or are promoted to Arundel House or Type Six bungalows, the Andersons stay. At half past eight in the morning Mr. Anderson leaves for work. Just as he emerges from under the portico of the building, Mrs. Anderson leans out of her window like a faded Juliet and calls in a high singsong voice, “Bye, Dorling, see you at six o’clock!”

  At ten o’clock she starts playing the piano. You can hear it tink-tink-tinkle-tonk, tonk, tonk, tonkle-tink, right through the day. It crawls through the old cement walls into the flat next door, drips down the cracks in the wooden floors to the flats downstairs. The servants in their quarters behind Godfrey Mansions time their work by Mrs. Anderson’s piano. At one o’clock she stops for lunch and picks up again at two. She never speaks to any of us. One day, moved by her isolation, I try to make friends with her. Mrs. Anderson opens the door a crack, the safety-chain still on. She is in a cotton dressing gown, her hair piled in a bun on top of her head.

  “Yes, can I do something for you?” she snaps.

  “Just thought I’d drop by to say hello.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Mrs. Anderson replies, and shuts the door. A few minutes later I can hear the piano. I never visit her again.

  “She thinks she is the Queen of England,” I remark to Linda Ayah.

  At four in the afternoon Mrs. Anderson starts singing along with the tink-tonk of the piano. That is when when the children of Godfrey Mansions, back from school, play in the porch and on the lawn outside.

  “Lavender Blooo,” sings Mrs. Anderson.

  “Ooo-ooo-oooo,” chorus the children downstairs.

  “Ihove yoooo,” Mrs. Anderson continues.

  “Ooo-ooo-oooo,” yell the children in a perfect frenzy of mirth.

  Kamini informs me that when I am not at home, Roopa and her friends make obscene noises up the chimney in tune with Mrs. Anderson’s music. They burp and make farting sounds by pressing their mouths against their palms and blowing hard. Kamini is becoming a sanctimonious little nuisance. Perhaps Dadda is right, I shouldn’t have sent her to the nunny-amma school. She refuses to wear skirts above her knees, or sleeveless frocks.

  “I don’t want lustful eyes to fall upon me,” she says when I ask her what her problem is.

  “Whose lustful eyes?” I demand.

  “Anybody’s,” says Kamini the saint.

  She spends her pocket-money on issues of “Soldiers of God,” which the nuns sell at school. Roopa steals them from her room and reads them aloud at the dinner table, making up sentences as she goes along. “God’s message to all young people: Wear not the sleeveless dress. Tattle against thy relatives.”

  Dadda glares at me. These girls he loved as babies are now as puzzling as I am. That closeness they shared has begun to fade.

  “See the trash they learn at your convent school?” he snaps.

  “It’s just a phase she is going through,” I say.

  Dadda does not reply. In the early years of our marriage, the argument would have been continued later, in whispers, in privacy. It wasn’t decent to quarrel before the children. Those days he was worried about losing the argument in front of them. Even later, in the bedroom, he was pleased if I gave in.

  “It’s all right, everyone makes mistakes,” he would tell me, allowing himself a small smile and then sleeping soundly through the night. If I refused to let him win, he withdrew into a frozen silence for days, acting as if I did not exist.

  Now Dadda’s silence, punctuated by hard coughs, is that of a man who is losing a painful battle against illness and so does not care about small victories any more. He scrapes his chair away from the table and moves slowly out into the verandah. My daughters continue their squabbling, their voices filling the momentary silence he leaves behind.

  “She wants to become a nun, Ma,” says Roopa, waving the “Soldiers of God” at her sister. “If she becomes a nun, who will make cow-eyes at Frankie Wood?”

  “Chughal-kore, tattle-tale. I’ll never tell you any secrets,” screams Kamini, her eyes filling with tears.

  “I told you not to go near that Anglo fellow,” I say, glaring at Kamini. “Do you ever listen to anything I say?”

  “I do nothing but listen to you,” she shouts. Where on earth did she learn to be so mouthy? “And you are a fine one to tell me not to mix with Anglos!”

  Roopa glances wide-eyed at us. Kamini stares defiantly at me, slightly frightened by her own temerity. She is almost as tall as I am, I think with a shock. I wonder whether I ought to slap her for her insolence. No use, the only person who feels the pain is me, my palm hurting as it bounces off her hard, bony legs. “Do what you please,” I say finally. “And don’t come running to me if you are in trouble afterwards.”

  Kamini bursts into tears. “You never care about a thing I do. You never did. And now he doesn’t either.” She points towards the verandah where Dadda sits, staring out at the sunny garden, and then rushes out of the room. All these dramatic exits! Are we in a play or what?

  “My oldest is at that age,” remarks Latha. “Do this and he wants that, say that and he thinks this. Every day a fight with his fiather. God knows what happens to them suddenly, henh?”

  Linda Ayah used to tell me that a child is like a little god till the age of five, is human till it turns twelve, and after that it becomes a donkey. Perhaps the sudden descent from divinity is too much to bear! I stare out the window at barren sweeps of land, not even a bush to make shadows with the sun.

  Vicki, the teenager, laughs suddenly. “And I, Aunty-ji” she says to Latha, “I am taking a holiday from my mother. God knows what happens to parents when their children grow up!”

  With the arrogance of youth I had believed that health, wealth, wisdom and happiness were all mine for the asking. I would have a house larger than the one my parents lived i
n, for I meant to become a doctor and set up a bustling practice. My husband would be a Hindi film star, all song and sacrifice, heroism and romance. But the strong dreams of youth can waver before the harsh mirror of reality. Dadda was not the husband I wanted him to be. He could not be, for he was a living, breathing man, not a cardboard film character. The realization came too late. His body had yielded to an invasion of sickness and his mind was busy warding off the savage onslaught of pain. Too late, too late for me to say let us begin again, I have eaten my anger, swallowed my conceits. Too late to say come back.

  A person grows on you like an ingrown nail. You keep cutting and filing and pulling it out, but the nail just grows back. Then you get used to the wretched thing, you learn to ignore and even become fond of it. Same with Dadda. His quiet became a part of my noise. If he had not been so silent would I have babbled on? Can you clap with one hand? Which means that I cannot put the entire blame for our life on him. I can, but my daughters tell me I am being unfair. But that is an old story, enough to say that I learned to live with the man I married. As my mother might say, it is the lottery ticket I picked, and I could do nothing about it. Marriage is a game of give and take, sometimes one has to give a little more than the other, and so the balance is maintained.

  “Nobody in the world is entirely happy,” Amma says, her voice creaky with age. The years have run by, both my sisters have married, my brothers are ponderous old men with a puffed-up air of importance about them. Amma’s hair has ribbons of grey, her skin is crushed into pouches and lines, her hands shake slightly as she folds her paan leaves. She no longer snaps at Chinna for making mistakes. Chinna’s bald head, which has been barber-shaved every month since she was widowed more than fifty years ago, is like a grey brush now. She forgets things, leaves half-eaten food in various parts of the house and then curses the servants for being lazy.

  “So careless they are,” she grumbles to Amma. “I have to follow them cleaning up like a scavenger!”