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And I do not want any more of their praise. So I
do not share my solution to the poverty problem with anyone. I feel
as if I'm sitting on an important state secret but that can't
be helped.

Perhaps one day I'll have a chance to share
my plans with the Prime Minister herself. And then India will be poor
no more.

F
OR YEARS, THE OVALTINE LADY has been my
real mother.

Nobody knows that this is so.

The Ovaltine woman has long, straight black hair
and a round, dimpled face. She has two children, a boy and girl, who
look nothing like me. These children are shiny, happy, and bright as
young pups. They bound in every afternoon after school, drop their
satchels and head into the kitchen, where their mother has two
steaming cups of Ovaltine waiting for them. I imagine that it is dark
and raining outside, that it begins to thunder even as the children
sit in the warm, safe kitchen sharing the treasures of their day with
their beautiful, soft-spoken mother.

But what I most love about the Ovaltine woman are
her hands. As she shuts tight the metal lid on the big, brown can of
Ovaltine, the camera zooms to a close-up of her long, slender,
well-groomed fingers. It is hard to describe the wistfulness and
longing I feel as I sit in a darkened movie theatre and watch those
graceful hands. To me, those hands say motherhood. I imagine that
those hands are capable of smoothing out all my rough, jagged,
splintered edges; hands that can take the rawness of my life and turn
it into something round and wholesome. Hands that can save me, that
can pull me back from the edge I'm about to step off—from
the world of gloom and desperation and rootlessness that I am about
to enter. I imagine that those hands have healing powers, that they
can comfort, nurture, restore, rebuild. I am unsure of what is broken
in me, what needs rebuilding, but I long for deliverance just the
same.

But the Ovaltine woman stays on the silver screen.
She has two celluloid children of her own and does not come to rescue
me. Like them, I too, drink milk—sometimes with Ovaltine,
sometimes with Horlicks, sometimes with raspberry syrup but unlike
them, I do not smack my lips after I have gulped down the very last
drop. Unlike them, I am allergic to milk but nobody seems to notice.
My mother takes my dislike for milk as a personal affront to her
parenting skills. She pushes milk on me with a kind of religious
fervour. But I refuse this conversion by sword. Every chance I get, I
pour my glass of milk down the kitchen sink. Once, Mehroo catches me
red-handed.

With tears in her eyes she says, ‘There are
children starving down the street from us. And here you are, wasting
precious milk. Shame on you.'

I have heard this line many times but still its
logic eludes me. All the more reason not to drink the milk I think,
so that those poor starving babies can have my share. I have pondered
this paradox for several months, convinced that only my young age
keeps me from solving the riddle at its core.

My mother also insists that I swallow a raw egg
every morning, faithfully following the instructions of the alcoholic
family doctor who had treated me for a serious lung problem when I
was six. No adult will tell me what the matter is with my lungs.
(Years later, when I ask one of them whether I had TB there is a lot
of shuffling of the feet, and clicking of the fingers to ward off
evil but no direct answer. ‘Not quite,' is the closest to
a direct answer I would ever get.) I stare at the yellow yolk
swimming in its transparent sea and imagine an eye following my every
move. The eye is watching me watch it. The eye is watching me
grimace. Now, the eye watches me tilt the stainless steel cup as I
put it up to my mouth. Gulp. The eye is now floating somewhere inside
me. Sometimes when I swallow, I feel the egg as a dull ache in my
back as it makes its way down. When I complain to my mother she says,
‘See? It's a sure sign of weakness. You need to increase
your intake.'

I know that food is my mother's shorthand
for love. I know it is one of the few ways she knows how to express
her feelings about me. From my grandmother's stories about the
hard times that followed her husband's sudden and premature
death, I have learned that my mom and her siblings grew up in
poverty.

I have heard about how, once the steady pay
cheques stopped, the family lived on the money from his meagre
pension and whatever they could get from Parsi charities. I know the
premium my mother's family puts on food and feeding others.

I once caught her sister licking a packet of
Polson's butter with her tongue and was horrified and
embarrassed. In my house, Mehroo would not even let us lick our
fingers after a good meal. I also know that compared to my family,
with its spartan eating habits, my mother's family is a family
of enthusiastic meat and fish-eaters.

But try as I might, this emphasis on food repels
me. There is something oddly animalistic and savage about my mother's
desire to feed me. I think if she could chew my food for me, she
gladly would. She reminds me of a female lion, especially in the way
she steals pieces of mutton and chicken out of the family meals that
Mehroo cooks before she leaves for the workshop, and forces them into
my mouth. Sometimes, she has to pry my jaws open because I hate the
taste of hunks of meat. I chew and chew until the meat is dry and
yucky in my mouth and then, sometimes, I gag on it and spit it out.
Her wrath descends on me then, her eyes dark with fury and
powerlessness. I think in those moments she must know how different
we are from each other and hate me for growing away from her. I don't
care. I hate her too during those moments, hate and fear the mad fury
that makes her shove food into my mouth, hate the humiliation and
powerlessness of having to chew and swallow food that I despise.

There is also something else: I am excruciatingly
aware that this is stolen food, am ashamed of the furtive movements
my mother makes as she runs in the kitchen, fishes out the pieces of
mutton from the daal or the white sauce that Mehroo has cooked and
hurriedly pushes them into my mouth. My father's business is
not doing well, I know, and meat is a luxury. Beside, what's in
the dish is meant to serve the entire family and I know what will
inevitably follow: Mehroo will come home in the evening, get ready to
warm the evening meal and immediately spot the missing pieces. She
will accuse my mother who will swear on her mother's head that
she knows nothing about this. She may also burst into tears and
accuse Mehroo of deliberately making her use her mother's name
in vain. And I will choke on my secret, much as I have choked earlier
on the piece of meat. My Catholic school education—with the
nuns telling us daily that lying is a sin—will collide with my
mother's strict instructions to never tell the others about the
missing pieces of meat. As usual, I will fall between the gap of what
I learn daily during Moral Science and what I must do at home to keep
the peace. It never occurs to me to defy my mother and speak the
truth and my role in this drama makes me feel complicit, dirty and
shameful.

Indeed, food complicates every aspect of my life.
Sometimes, if my mother is still sleeping when I dress to go to
school, I manage to escape out the front door without drinking my
milk before any adult can nab me. But my road to freedom is short and
ends two flights down in the building's lobby. I pray
desperately for the rickety old school-bus to arrive when I hear my
mother's footsteps coming down the stairs. My stomach heaves.
There she is, in her long nightgown, carrying the glass of milk, a
piece of cardboard or newspaper covering it from dust and flies.

I open my mouth to protest when the ground-floor
apartment door opens and the old, white-haired lady who lives there
comes out. ‘Drink your milk, deekra,' she says in a
kindly fashion. ‘So many children not so lucky, to have a
mother who loves them so much.' I drink the milk, praying that
the school-bus does not arrive until after I am done. Immediately, I
feel the familiar, bloated sensation. I promise myself that when I'm
older and living on my own, I will never ever drink milk again.

It is eleven o'clock at night but still
sleep won't come. The fever courses through my weak body like
lava, sending lightning-like chills up my whole body. I am half
delirious with fever but I can still feel the anxiety that scuttles
like tall shadows in this room. Every so often, Mehroo pokes her head
through the doorway of my mother's bedroom and I can feel my
worried mother shake her head no, to Mehroo's unspoken
question: Has the fever come down yet? Babu comes in the room and
stands silently gazing at me, his hands crossed behind his back,
leaning against my mother's wardrobe, made of teak wood. I want
to open my mouth and assure them all that I'm all right but my
mouth is dry and hot and I worry that talking will unleash a coughing
spell. Also, even in the throes of delirium, some part of me is
enjoying the attention.

‘Go to sleep,' mummy finally tells the
others. ‘I'm here with her. I'll wake you up if
there's any need.' One by one the adults all extract
promises from her that she'll be sure to wake him or her first,
at once only, if there's anything wrong at all. As always, they
all bend down and kiss my hot forehead, or rather they kiss my hair
because my forehead is covered with a wet rag dipped in a mixture of
water and eau-de-Cologne. The higher the fever, the less diluted this
mixture becomes, with my mother liberally pouring the eau-de-Cologne
into the dented aluminium bowl she keeps specifically for this use.
‘Sweet dreams, Thrituma,' Mehroo whispers.

‘Try to go to sleep like a good girl.'

Daddy kisses me last. His eyes are red with
disturbed sleep.

An hour ago, tired from the long day at the
factory and over-come by the drowsiness that he can never fight, he
had tried falling asleep on his side of the bed but the noise
generated by the tiptoeing adults had woken him up. Also, there is
this unspoken bitterness between him and my mother whenever I am
fighting a high fever like this. She wants him to stay up with me
along with her, but when he tries, she resents the intrusion.

So he gives up in frustration but she misreads
that frustration as indifference. I know all this because they both
tell me their ‘side' of the story after I recover from
each episode of sickness.

Telling one's side of the story is very
important in my family.

Mostly, I try to assure both of them that I feel
very cared for when I'm sick and am never bothered by who
specifically does what. This reassures my father but offends my
mother, who always concludes that, by not appreciating how much more
she has done for me while I'm sick, I've taken my dad's
side against her.

But all this will happen days later when I am
well. For now, I relish the sweetness of the cold rag against my hot
forehead, float in the glory of my mother's gentle stroking of
my hair.

The fever is so high that even my hair aches and
the rhythmic stroking is strangely comforting. This is the only time
when my mother touches me in affection, when I'm this sick, and
I bask in the feeling of her tenderness. My own heart feels liquidy
with love and gratitude. It is almost worth being this sick, just to
see this other side of my mother—gentle, compassionate,
soft-spoken—come out of the hard, brittle shell she usually is
covered in, her love for me oozing like yolk from a shell. My mamma
loves me, she loves me and this time I don't find out from the
baker or the neighbours, this time she telegraphs this knowledge to
me from the soft brushing of her own wise and slender fingers against
my hair.

This is the Ovaltine woman come to life.

I know that all of this care has been brought on
by fear, her fear of losing me. No matter how often I get sick, she
is still haunted by the memory of the lung ailment I had when I was
six and had to get a shot every second day for a full year.

I have unpleasant memories of that year—the
long, crowded bus ride to the doctor's dispensary after being
at school all day; doing my homework while sitting in the drab,
crowded waiting-room filled with sad-looking people; standing
half-naked behind a huge, cold machine in a pitch-black room as the
doctor screened my lungs; the hot, acrid smell as the doctor's
assistant boiled the needle on a kerosene stove; the sharp prick of
the needle on my skinny, fleshless thighs; the recurrent nightmares
about my white underwear being soaked in blood from a puncture caused
by an errant needle.

Often, my mom took me to a nearby Irani restaurant
for a treat after our visit to the clinic. There was a waiter there
who I loved, and he, a shy, working-class Muslim man, was so tickled
at the idea of a middle-class six-year-old calling him her friend,
that he invariably slipped me a treat—a jelly roll, a mava
cake—along with our order. I usually sipped a Fanta or a
Mangola and munched on an order of potato chips that I dipped in
pumpkin ketchup. Depending on her finances, my mother would sometimes
order herself a drink; often she just sat there, urging me to hurry
up so that we could start the ordeal of the bus ride home.

However, even this simple pleasure—which I
knew was my mother's way of loving me, of letting me know she
felt bad that I have to go through this torture at the doctor's
office—came with a price tag. It was well known that my mother
demanded her monthly allowance from my dad regardless of the state of
his finances. Money was often tight at home but my mother would
scream and fight with dad to make sure she got her money, which she
insisted was for basic provisions.