Every morning at five o’clock I am awakened by the milk van. Not so much the van as Manja, the fellow who owns the dealership. The pavement in front of my apartment building is his distribution centre. He parks there noisily and straight away begins a quarrel with the delivery boys—young fellows with bicycles who stream in like a circus parade, bells jangling, chains rattling, cracking obscene jokes. They pile plastic bags bulging with milk in baskets attached to the handlebars and the backs of their bicycles and wobble precariously away. Manja likes to heckle them, shouting about accounts and balances, lack of speed, lack of orders, anything to start an argument. The boys shout back, defying Manja’s authority as he struts around his van gesticulating furiously, his face screwed up inside the green muffler he wears through every season. I hurry down to collect my packet of milk. Although I am a regular customer, Manja resents the fact that I don’t pay a delivery charge. Why should I waste five rupees every month when all I need to do is step outside my own gate?
“No milk left,” Manja says, a mean glint in his eyes, if I get there just as the last boy cycles off on his rounds. “I told you, get it delivered, otherwise you have a problem.”
That is my cue to wheedle. “Come, come, I am an old customer, forever I have been getting from you only. If I wanted I could have asked Dhanraj Groceries to bring milk for me. But I thought, why should I go to someone I hardly ever see?”
It usually works. Manja looks at the sky for a few minutes, taps his foot and says, “I will have to see if I have any extra quota left. These days my business is growing all the time, and it is difficult to provide milk to everyone who asks. Only this time though, I will give you. Can’t say what will happen tomorrow.”
It is a game with him, makes his day worthwhile. He has power over someone in this world. I don’t grudge him that tiny satisfaction, I am only interested in getting milk. But when the Diwali festival rolls around I give nothing more than a five-rupee note as bakhsheesh.
“What Ma,” he says disappointedly, “no sweets for my children? What is Diwali without sweets?”
And I retort with satisfaction, “I have to take so much trouble to get two litres of milk, where do I have the energy to make sweets to distribute, Manja?”
He understands what I mean, and for a few months after, I get milk without grovelling for it.
Now I rush up the stairs, leave the packet in the fridge, get into my walking shoes and set off down the road for a brisk stroll. In the morning, every minute counts. I have to be back at six sharp, or five minutes before if possible. Any later, and my maid Puttamma will have arrived, banged perfunctorily on the door and left in a huff. Another one of the games I play with the people in my daily life. These little tantrums and shows of temper never interrupted my routine as a Railway wife. Linda Ayah showed up every morning, the peons never fell ill, the dhobhi arrived on Tuesday to collect the laundry. That was another existence altogether. When I left that life I felt naked and vulnerable, the rough-and-tumble of the ordinary world scraping against my skin. Only after you lose something do you realize how valuable it was. Then you get used to the loss, dust the memories off your body and begin anew.
When I ask Puttamma why she doesn’t bother to wait she tells me that she thought I had gone abroad to visit my daughters.
“You saw me only yesterday, wouldn’t I have told you if I was going away?” I demand.
“People forget,” shrugs Puttamma.
She knows that I cannot afford to lose my temper with her. It is difficult to find honest maidservants, and if she feels offended in any way, she will demand her wages and leave. So I control my tongue, although I long to comment on the way she sweeps the rooms in my apartment, the broom flicking across the floor, barely touching it, or the way she leaves a trail of damp after slapping a wet mop around, not even bothering to squeeze out the extra water. My helplessness infuriates Roopa and Kamini.
“Why don’t you get rid of the rotten woman?” shouts Kamini across the phone line.
“Because the next one I find might be worse.”
“How much worse can they get?”
“Well, I could end up with a thief or a murderer,” I say. “These days anything is possible. Gone is the era of the devoted peon, the doting ayah.”
“Ma, why do you do this to us?”
“What?”
“Scare us out of our wits? You know we worry about you.”
“I worried over you and your sister for more than twenty years each. Now it’s your turn,” I retort. “And anyway, what’s the point worrying about me from the North Pole?”
“Are you still going for a walk at the crack of dawn?” Kamini changes the subject.
“Yes.”
“All alone?”
“No, arm in arm with the Chief Minister and his bibi-ji,” I say.
“Well if something happens to you, walking around all alone, don’t blame me,” says my daughter, sounding almost as illogical as I am.
As a matter of fact, I have never even seen the Chief Minister’s face. He wears large goggles and a furry cap, both of which hide his face almost entirely. Maybe the stories about him are true. The minister has suffered a stroke and is an imbecile. A double has taken his place to help prevent political turmoil. Doubles are very popular these days. In at least two Hindi films and one Tamil film the hero plays multiple roles. Twin brothers are separated in childhood; triplets lose each other; identical sisters marry twin brothers—endless variations. Doubles create all sorts of interesting problems. They fall in love with the same girl, or they fool their alarmingly stupid mother who doesn’t seem to remember that her body produced two children on the same wave of pain. In any case, this Chief Minister, or his double, is very popular. He has been re-elected to office at least thrice. He used to be a film star long ago, and the residue of that life is evident in the way he conducts his manoeuvres. The state is his kingdom, he the benevolent rajah. The man makes flamboyant speeches, soliloquies almost, wears glittering clothes and addresses all women as “mother” or “sister.” He gets most of his votes from the women—that’s what the polls say. The older ones dream of cradling the Chief Minister’s stubby body against their breasts. He is the son who made it to the top, the one who will take care of them in their old age. Younger women, like my maid Puttamma, adore him for his swaggering walk, his succulent lips, the eyes enigmatically hidden behind the dark glasses.
“The man I marry has to be like Him,” says Puttamma, pointing to a picture of the Chief Minister in the newspaper. She is in a rare good mood. “Full of vigour, you know.” She tosses her head naughtily and giggles.
I am tempted to say that the man is a pot-bellied old buffalo with a piece of straw for a penis. She will most definitely leave me then, and I will have to explain to my daughters long-distance. What will I tell them? My maid quit because I jeered at the Chief Minister’s organ?
My daughters aren’t happy about my decision to live here alone. They believe that I should move in with them, a few months with Kamini, the rest of the year with Roopa.
“I don’t want to go anywhere, I need to rest my tired feet,” I say firmly.
“Come here and rest your feet,” says Kamini. “We can’t come to India every year, Ma.”
“Nobody is asking you to come to India every year,” I retort with some of my old asperity. It makes me feel glad to hear that tone in my voice; at least I have not changed as much as the world around me. In my younger days, when I was a Railway wife, the servants called me Tamarind Mem for my acid tongue. And they thought I didn’t know! Stupid idiots, with old Linda Ayah at my side I saw and heard and smelled everything in and out of the house. She looked after me, that one. But…but… there I go wandering off into new stories without finishing the old.
Kamini continues to whine long-distance. “But we need to see you,” she protests.
“Why?” I ask, beginning to get bored with the conversation.
“Ma, stop being silly, we want to see you because we get
worried about you,” says Kamini sharply.
“Nothing to worry about, I am fine. I eat and drink and sleep all without any problem, so what do you have to worry about?”
“Roopa heard from someone that you were not well, why didn’t you tell us? What happened?”
“Tell that air-headed sister of yours not to listen to gossip. I scratch my behind and people tell you I have piles, sneeze once and they think I am dying of consumption. When I am sick I will personally inform you and Roopa and you can catch the next flight home, okay?”
“Ma, you are really crude. And mean! We are your daughters, after all, and if we don’t worry about you, who will?” Kamini’s voice wavers with tears. That is Kamini, a fountain stationed right behind her eyelids, ready to spurt any time.
“Okay, okay, I am sorry,” I say. “Look, I told you I am fine. I just don’t want to go anywhere this year. I need to stay in one place for a while—in my own place.”
It is necessary to add that last bit. I know my daughter’s arguments far too well. “You can rest in my house,” she will say. “What’s wrong with my house, don’t I do everything for you?”
I also know that this conversation will be repeated verbatim to the younger one, who will call later when she thinks that I have cooled down.
Her tactics are different. “Ma, I need you,” she starts, with a slight insistence on “need.” In the past, even last year, I might have panicked at that word and gone racing to be with my emotional Roopa. But not any more. They are grown women now, with worlds of their own, and decisions they alone can make. Do I interfere in their lives? Ask Roopa why she ran away like a thief to get married to a perfectly acceptable man? Perhaps the melodrama of the whole thing appealed to her, she was always so fond of cheap films. Do I ask Kamini why she never marries, why she had to go to Canada to study? As if there aren’t any colleges in this country! No, I leave them alone, but they cling to me like leeches, sucking up my energy with their constant nagging.
They call in the middle of the night.
“Ma, it’s just me, Roopa, to see if you are okay.”
“Do you know what time it is?” I demand.
“Sorry Ma, it’s cheaper to make transatlantic calls now.”
Cheaper! It nearly costs me my life, my heart startled out of its sleep-rhythm as the scream of the telephone echoes around my empty flat.
“Ma, Ma, are you still there? Say something, this is a waste of money if I have to do all the talking.”
“Who asked you to call?”
“What do you do there all alone?” asks Kamini.
“I have a busy social life,” I reply. “Yesterday I had coffee with the Chief Minister, today the Minister of Industry and Development is visiting, I think he needs to consult with me.”
My replies annoy her. But she is even more worried when I tell her that I spend most of the time sitting in the balcony enjoying life, remembering my past, telling myself stories—something I never had time to do as a memsahib.
“Do you talk to yourself? What things do you remember?” she asks, suspicious, as if I am about to embark on a life of crime. Why is she always so worried about everything? Even as a child she sat silently, nibbling at her fingernails, spitting out the little arcs of calcinated skin. The incessant uselessness of that activity drove me crazy, and every time I caught her, I slapped the hand away from her mouth. Why tell her what I remember? My memories are private realms, rooms that I wander into, sometimes sharply focused, sometimes puffy and undefined. When Dadda was transferred to Guwahati, we travelled in an inspection car, an oval glass bubble, which stopped every fifteen minutes on its slow route up green hills that became higher and higher and finally grew into distant Himalayan ranges. We entered thick banks of fog, the only humans in this soundless blanket, and I began to feel that we were afloat. Roaming through my memories feels like that trip in the bubble, breaking from soft welling banks of cloud into landscapes so clearly defined they seem almost unnatural.
But these are my memories, I want to remind Kamini. Why should you worry about them? Why do you allow my history to affect yours? Why should it matter to you if your father made me happy or an Anglo mechanic? They are dead and gone.
Yesyes, our stories touch and twine, but they are threads of different hues. Mine is almost at an end, but yours is still unwinding. Go, you silly girl, build your own memories.
Nowadays, I make long exploratory trips on the top of a double-decker bus around the city. As a child, living just a small distance away in Mandya, a visit to this city was like going to a foreign place. It is a city of fragrant trees, of cinema theatres and women dressed in fashionable clothes. Down on Commercial Street is the tailor where the Bell sisters, Clarabell, Isabell and Anabell, came to get shamefully tight blouses stitched. Once, soon after we had moved into this apartment, I wandered down Commercial Street and found it crowded and utterly devoid of the glamour I remembered from my childhood. Farrah Tailors was a shoddy little place, bits of thread and cloth littering the floor, the air cloudy with fluff and dust and the smell of cut fabric, the tailors hunched over their humming Singer machines. My daughters refused to go in.
“The master tailor is a creep,” commented Roopa.
“What do you mean ‘creep’? He’s supposed to be a really good tailor.”
“He fingers you,” she said airily. “You know, gives you a good feel-up. Pokes his measuring tape up and down and in between, you know?”
“Yech, he’s a lech,” added Kamini.
“He won’t do anything if I am there, will he?” I said, wondering how my daughters collected these snippets of information about a tailor, that too, one of hundreds in this city.
“Ma, he’s a dirty old man,” explained Kamini as if I were a slow child. “He’ll feel you up, too. Why do you want us to go in there anyways?”
“Well, he does good katora-cup cholis,” I said lamely. No use telling them about the Bell sisters, they would wrinkle their noses and say, “Oh, Ma! Another of your old-old stories.”
“Ma, I don’t want my boobies sticking out like little come-grab-me beacons,” said Kamini. Roopa giggled and nodded, “Katora-cup! What if you are built BIG? Will your Farrah Tailor make bucket-cup cholis?”
Disgusting brats, I think to myself, and they expect me to be decent and strait-laced. Double-standards, that’s what! That’s how my daughters are. Do one thing themselves and expect me to do something else—fit in with their image of the good mother, one who stays at home, waits for their phone calls, piously visits the temple to listen to religious lectures. How depressing, this future my flesh and blood have drafted out for me. They probably imagine that I have nothing else to do, no energy left.
The first few years after they both left India, I admit that I felt like a husk of rice, empty of energy, thought and feeling. I spent hours sitting in my darkened room trying to hold on to fading pictures of Dadda, of Railway friends, my daughters as babies. I couldn’t recollect why I was so unhappy those first years of marriage. Why I had liked a car mechanic so much. Was it because by wanting him I was defying the rules of conduct that defined me as a mem-sahib, a good Brahmin wife? I cannot even remember.
But now I have rested enough, my feet are beginning to grow wheels. Yesyes, it is time for me to pack up and go. Once I travelled because my husband did. Now it is time for me to wander because I wish to, and this little apartment with the gulmohur flowers will be here for me to return to when I am tired of being a gypsy. My daughters are surprised and not a little annoyed at this decision. So many years I refuse to visit them, and now, all of a sudden, I chart out a pilgrimage around the country, a jatra.
“Go where, Ma?” ask Kamini and Roopa together on one of those ridiculous conference calls where everybody yells together, pauses for a breath at the same time and then gaba-gaba-gaba like a flock of ducks. Stupid idea, waste of money.
“Anywhere,” I say and cut off the call. Then I pull the phone cord out. Hunh! They hop from plane to plane, go her
e and there, and I am supposed to sit at home and wait for them. What is that phrase the boy in the flat downstairs uses? No way, honeybun! I do not belong to anyone now. I have cut loose and love only from a distance. My daughters can fulfil their own destinies. In days of yore, aged parents left their worldly lives to retreat into the forest, where they shrugged off the manacles that bound them to their responsibilities and duties, and spent the days contemplating their histories. They shuffled their memories like a pack of cards, smiled at the joyous ones, shed a tear or two at others. They shook their heads over youthful follies and thought quietly about the journey, yet unknown, that stretched before their callused feet. I too have reached that stage in my life where I only turn the pages of a book already written, I do not write.
Dawn seeps into the compartment like pale grey milk. I roll up my bedding and buckle it tight, shake out my old Pashmeena shawl, fold it and place it in my suitcase. It won’t be needed in Nagpur. Lock the suitcase, slide open the door gently so as not to disturb Latha, and Sohaila, and Hameeda the teacher, and sway down the corridor to the washroom. Soon-soon Nagpur will arrive in a warm, steaming puff of noise and colour. If my companions are awake, I will smile farewell. Otherwise, I shall slip away, leaving them with memories of an old story-teller, a weaver of myths.
Tamarind Mem Page 23