Tamarind Mem (13 page)

“Arrey,
Jhunjhun,” said Mrs. Bano to her
ayah,
“get some red chilies, we have to make sure that the evil eye does not touch our son.”

The
ayah
beamed happily, snapped her knuckles against her forehead, waved her hands over the baby and said, “Oh-oh-oh, may two hundred blessings hover over you, little monkey, little parrot.”

I stared at Mrs. Bano. In the confusion, she had forgotten to lower the veil over her face. My soul was flooded with disappointment. As long as the veil was in place, I had allowed myself to ignore the fact of Mrs. Bano’s pregnancy, to believe that behind that veil was a beautiful Butterfly Queen. Shabnam’s mother was a plain woman, her face pale and sharp with exhaustion. Her nose was too long, her eyes too small. Why, my own Ma was much better looking than her. I cried that night, my face buried in Ma’s lap.

“Basheer Barber is a liar,” I sobbed. “He said that the Thithali Queen was beautiful.”

Ma stroked my hair, unable to understand why I was so upset. “Why do you have to think all stories are true? Stories are a waste of time, I have told you, no?”

When Ma was a girl, her mother told her that stories were dreams, and that dreams were a waste of time. Girls had no time for such useless activities.

“Especially,” continued Ma, “when the pressure cooker is doing
chhuss,
the baby is crying, and there is so much to do. Only crazy people and men have the energy to dream!”

O
nce upon a time I had lived in a world where things were guaranteed. When Dadda was transferred from one town to another, I knew that there would be a house waiting for us. The house would most certainly have a garden run by a wrinkled gnome of
a
maali
. We would always have Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon with us and there would be a Railway Club with a library full of crumbling books—volumes of
Punch
cartoons bound in faded maroon cloth with gold lettering, ancient Penguin paperbacks, Cherry The Nurse romances and children’s treasuries filled with virtuous tales about well-behaved children named Deirdre and Tabitha, Roger and William. When the books were opened, you found pages carved into strange shapes by white ants and silver-fish, and the powdery residue wafted into your nostrils and made you sneeze.

The librarian, tired of bloody officer brats, would say in a waspish voice, “Get out, get out! What you are spitting and sneezing into my books for? Spreading germs everywhere, no manners!”

It seemed to me that each Railway librarian was a carbon copy of the previous one: tyrannical, clinging grimly to his thin thread of authority as guardian of the books, watching bitterly as that authority was eroded by generation after generation of wretched railway children. The Railway hired its employees for life, and the librarian, his good humour soured by the boredom of the job, aged along with the books, hardly discernible against the brown teak of the shelves, the ancient chair with its sweat-stained leather seat, the creaky table with the marks of manymany years stamped, scratched, etched and rubbed into it.

In Ratnapura Junction, the librarian was Gulbachan. My friends and I teased him as he sat stiff-necked and annoyed in his high-backed chair. We strutted around his table, pinched his umbrella from the back of the chair where he hung it every day and giggled as he searched
frantically for it, cursing at us under his breath. We annoyed him with our high-pitched chatter, our useless entreaties to sign out more than five books.

“Oh Gul-ji,” we chirped, delighted to see the way his fingers danced and drummed agitatedly on the table, a sure sign that we were getting on his nerves. “Ple-ease, we’ll tell our papas what a nice man you have been today!”

We batted our eyelids at him like the older girls at whom he smiled and simpered foolishly, but he only yelled at us, waving his umbrella like a sword. “Getout! Getout! No books you will get, no favouritism I say. I give same treatment to each and all. Now getout,
badmaash!”

Ma sent Roopa and me to the Railway Club every evening with Linda Ayah. I didn’t mind going, because Linda was so busy following my sister around and gossip-ping with the other
ayahs
that she left me alone for long stretches of time with a stern warning not to wander out onto the road. All around the Ratnapura Club was a low hedge of bleeding-heart cactus. There was no wall, not even a gate at the entrance. Whatfor you needed a wall when everybody, from Basheer the barber to Rampyari the sweeper-woman, knew that entry was restricted to the officer sahibs and their mems? A long driveway led up to the generous portico where three cars could park side by side. By unspoken order, the space under the portico roof was reserved for the General Manager, the Chief Mechanical Engineer and the Chief Civil Engineer. Lesser personages, such as the officers who lived on Fourth and Fifth Avenue, parked beside the tin-roofed badminton court or beneath the tamarind trees shading the tennis courts.

It was all extremely pleasant, out on the lawns in summer or in the cosy lounge when the weather was bad, being served
pakoras, samosas, tikkas
and tea by the bearers. The club reaffirmed the identity of the officers. They could relax here, be among peers, talk politics, while their wives, in pale chiffon or crackling organdy saris, exchanged news about children and servants.

“My son Rahul, such a naughty boy you know. His teacher says he finishes his sums in five minutes and then disturbs other children. What to do with such a
badmaash?”
one of the ladies would say with an indulgent smile.

And another would remark, “Can somebody please-please recommend a good servant-girl? I am having such problems with my present one. She wants one full month off with pay, can you imagine! What cheeky fellows these servants are becoming.”

The officers discussed foreign powers who, they claimed, were creating all the chaos in India.

“Mark my words,” one of the officers would say, “there’s going to be a war in a few months if things go on the way they are! The foreign hand is at work again.” The foreign hand was responsible for mysterious groups of terrorists from neighbouring countries who were on the prowl, raising the price of rice and wheat, driving people to drink and suicide.

At the club, the officers could call the shop-floor workers “idiot” or “silly bugger” without fear of a union fight on their hands. They could talk about that famous affair in Dhanbad in ’69 or ’71, when an officer nearly got himself killed. The Eastern Railways had a militant union, rough bastards who went with the territory.

The Works Manager had said to one of the fitters, or perhaps a turner,
“Abey saala,
are you going to finish this work in your next life or what?” Sometimes even officers were brainless twits, whattodo? Perhaps this one was drunk—the Dhanbad posting drove even a
sanyasi
to drink, with all that bloody black coal-dust everywhere.

“Who are you calling a
saala?”
growled the turner-fitter-fellow, showing red eyes at the Works Manager.

“Yes, you
mother-chooth,
who you insulting, eh?” yelled another worker.

At that point the officer should have apologized, “Sorry brother, the coal dust has affected my head,” or “My wife’s mother is driving me crazy,” any old lie would have done. Instead, the fool said, “What-what rascal, get back to work. How dare you?” and other nitwit stuff like that. So the union jumped in, there was an almighty chaos, the officer was surrounded by hordes of ruffians, wasn’t allowed to drink water, eat anything, not even go to the toilet. If he so much as moved a finger they threw cow dung and eggs at him.

I had heard versions of this story a hundred-thousand times. It was repeated to every new officer and wife and child in the club, part of the folklore passed from memory to memory, sacred as the epic
Mahabharata.

At exactly four o’clock, the club doors were opened by Tony Braganza or his father Mathew. A flight of steps swept up from the portico into a wide corridor with polished wooden floors and walls decorated with detailed India-ink drawings of tiger hunts. There had been talk of replacing these dull prints with paintings by the General Manager’s younger daughter, who was believed to be artistic.

“Hunh!” remarked Ma scornfully. She always had a remark about this or that. “The child won a prize in baby-class for painting, so her mother thinks that she has a Ravi Verma or Amrita Sher-Gill on her hands! Well, if they decide to hang that girl’s paintings, then I want them to hang up my Kamini’s crayon pictures, too!”

The corridor swelled out into a vast hall with a bar where, sometimes, Mathew’s granddaughter Leona leaned over the counter. She helped out periodically when she was home after running away from her husband, who followed a few weeks later, apologizing abjectly, giving her vast clumsy bunches of ixora flowers that he had picked from somebody’s garden. Another corridor curved around from that end, pocked with doors leading into the tiny library, the washrooms and the billiards room. There, above the rack for the cues, hung the skin of a large tiger. The inscription on a tarnished brass plate next to the lower right paw said: “For my fellow officers. In memory of the Shaitaan. John Winslow. August 8, 1935.”

Winslow was the Chief Mechanical Engineer at the time, and the town was renamed for him when he shot the man-eating tiger. After Independence in 1947, however, there was another change of name, from Winslow Nagar to Ratnapura Junction.

“Confusion only!” said Ma. “Why you need to change names all the time? Does it make the rivers in this country stop flooding? Does it feed all those poorthing beggars-veggars out there? Hanh?”

Except for old Mathew, the Anglo-Indian bearer, nobody remembered the story behind the tiger skin. When Mathew was drunk, he told it to anybody who cared to
listen. Since he was in charge of the bar he was often drunk and the story was repeated in varying versions.

“That was a great sahib,” mumbled Mathew, weaving into the storeroom behind the bar for orders of Fanta or Coca-cola, beer or whisky. “You know, man, his daddy was a lord or something back in England. This Winslow sahib, he shot this great big monster tiger. That dirty dog of an animal, he was killing and eating all the peoples, man!”

Nobody bothered to listen to the entire story, since the British were irrelevant from the moment India got her independence.

Rani Bose, who seemed to know everything, said that the teenagers came to the billiards room because they wanted to kiss and hold hands. “I’ve seen them touching each other on their
chee-chee
parts,” she giggled. They would all have babies as a result, she said, and we did not believe her until one of the girls who went often to the billiards room became pregnant. Rani said that she had peered into the billiards room more than once and seen the big boys doing bad things with their pants down.

“Those aren’t boys,” I argued, “they’re demons, my
ayah
told me.” I rarely went near the billiards room.

“By Jesu-Christo’s bleeding heart, Kamini baby,” Linda Ayah had informed me with terrifying solemnity, “I swear, if you go in that room, you will never come out again. You will go mad because the demon that lives under the table there will eat your brain, I tell you, listentome!”

Rani laughed. “You stupid! There aren’t any demons. The boys go there to dream about that Leona Wood with her big boobies.” Rani bunched her fists against her chest
and swayed up and down, pretending to be Leona in her transparent black shirt through which you could see her cream-coloured breasts like two melons.

“I don’t believe you,” said Shabnam. “God will punish you for making up such stories.”

“Come with me to the billiards room,” said Rani. “Then you will see whether there are any ghosts there or not.”

“Linda Ayah will tell my mother,” I said nervously.

“She isn’t here right now, too busy gossiping. Come on.”

“You are a liar,” insisted Shabnam, but she trailed along with us. I knew that she disliked Rani as much as I did and was just as scared to go near the billiards room, but like me, her curiosity was greater than her fear. We had almost reached the room when we heard quick footsteps behind us.

“Linda Ayah,” I whispered, hurrying into the toilet instead.

“It’s not your
ayah,”
said Rani, dragging me out again. “It’s Rajiv Goswami, and he’s going to the billiards room. What did I tell you? Come on, let’s see what he’s doing there.”

The teenager had a magazine clutched against the front of his trousers and we giggled at the way he was walking. “Like he wants to pee,” suggested Shabnam, sending Rani and me into whoops of suppressed laughter.

“Let’s scare him,” I said, feeling very bold all of a sudden. “Let’s rush in there and scream, that’ll be funny.”

But before we could do anything, Rajiv Goswami came running out of the billiards room, looking for all the world as though he had met one of Ayah’s ghosts.

“There is something in there,” he gasped, not really seeing us. He looked around wildly.

Gulbachan the librarian poked his head out to see what all the fuss was about. “What and all is going on here?” he asked sternly.