Tamarind Mem (24 page)

“Beggars have been holding those same bars.” He wrinkles his nose fastidiously, as if he can smell rotting flesh. “We should have brought some antiseptic solution to wipe down the windows.”

The
thak-thaka-thak-thak
of gravel hitting the wheels fills the compartment with noise. There is a thin whistle of air through the slats in the metal window shutters. My husband has pulled them down so that people on the platform looking for an empty compartment will not know that there is space available. We can hear thumps on our door all night, people wheedling to be let in, cursing our silence.

“Excuse please,” a peremptory voice. “I have six children needing place to sit for night only.”

“Excuse please, don’t be selfish. Share and share alike, my children can sleep under the berths no problem.”

“Excuse please, God will punish you for your lack of concern for fellow citizens.” The unseen man kicks the door hard. “Bloody high-class selfish no manners no
kindness!” he rants. There is a brief silence punctuated by the scrape of a trunk against the corridor floor, a child’s cough. Then the voice again. “Ay Chunnoo, Munnoo, go to the toilet
phata-phat. You
piss here at night and I will twist your ears off. Tunnoo, put those pillows here.” A slap is followed by a howl of pain and a sharp reproach. “Witless like your mother, I said here, HERE!”

We sit silent as breath, my husband still buried in his newspaper and me fighting the urge to open the door and let that swarm in. I would have welcomed the chattering warmth of other people in the compartment. Perhaps he is a shy person, I think. Tense as a clothes-line, I wait for a tentative sound, a touch. Isn’t that why he has booked a whole compartment for us, a honeymoon on wheels? Will I seem forward if I make the first move? I want to ask my new husband a hundred questions—after all, our lives are now linked. What is your job like? Do you travel a lot? Will you take me with you? What are your favourite foods? I hate bitter-gourd
gojju,
how about you? I will tell him how I long to be a doctor. I’ll warn him of my sharp tongue, assure him that it wags a lot but rarely causes any harm. I want him to know that my favourite flower is champa with its gentle perfume. My father buys my Amma flowers every Sunday from the temple. He does it even though she tells him that it is a complete waste of good money. But she tucks the long strand of jasmine into her oiled bun, a pleased smile teasing her lips. Will my husband perform these little courtesies, I wonder? Soon I can hear his even breathing over the clatter of the window shutters, the slap of gravel against the wheels. The narrow space between the berths is striped with light from passing stations. I lie awake for a
long time, missing my room in my father’s house with its tiny barred window set high in the wall, and the rustle of wind in the coconut palms outside.

The next morning I find speech blooming in my mouth. If he does not speak, I will. He is my husband, after all, even if he is fifteen years my senior. My mother isn’t around, hovering over my shoulder telling me how to behave, how to address a husband.

“It is wrong to address him as ‘you,’” she would remark, her mouth pursed with disapproval. “Be respectful, say ‘thou.’ Don’t give him the impression that we haven’t done our duty as parents and brought you up properly.” All her advice is given to me during the long Sunday baths when she rubs and slaps warm mustard oil into my skin. Those are her private sessions with each child, when she has the time to pass on wisdom handed to her by her elders, or to scold misdeeds. With me she always-always starts with, “How many times have I told you and still you don’t listen…” Her hard hands knead the muscles of my back, and I sit in a daze of steam from the copper pot, the acrid stink of oil, and the muscles in my body slowly unwind. But this man is my husband, I have a right to talk to him.

“I wonder when we will reach Ratnapura?” I ask.

My husband mumbles a response, his lips clamping and unclamping like some strange fish on the stem of his pipe. It occurs to me that he is almost as old as my own father, a difference of only six years between them. The realization shocks me into silence. Why did my parents have to get me married to this old man? I could have finished my studies, found a job and supported myself. Of course Appa objects to the women in his family working. It demeans him somehow.

“I haven’t reached the stage where I need to send my daughters out to earn money,” he roars when I suggest that I can get a job in the local college. “Only harlots work for a living.”

“But Appa, all my teachers are women.”

“They are all harlots!” says Appa, ending the argument.

I sit in the dusty compartment and brood. I do not use the right tactics. My own mouth is my worst enemy. Look at my younger sister Lalitha, so docile, her eyes pleading as a cow’s going to slaughter, never a word, but gets her way every time. She is two years younger and knows all the tricks. She even tells me that all I need to do is make Appa feel as if he is dispensing a great favour.

“Why do you fight with him?” she asks. “Cry a little, beg, wheedle. How does it hurt you? Appa feels that he has the power to refuse and you get what you want. All men are like that. Why you have to say this and that and make everybody angry?”

“What your sister said is true,” nods Sohaila, the afternoon sun catching her nose-pin and making it glitter fiercely. “You can get more done if you keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open.”

“Rubbish,” says her sister, “if you don’t like something, let the whole world know, that’s what I say.”

The train slows down and stops in the middle of pale-green fields of
dal
. There is a smelly pond just outside our window, and a few huts in the distance.

“Chain-puller,” says Latha wisely. “Some fellow lives in those huts there, too far from the station, so he must have pulled the
chain. Thinks this train is his personal
tonga
to stop wherever he wants!”

“Latha-ji, do you think it is wise for a woman to keep her thoughts to herself, or shout her anger to the whole world?”

I look curiously at the sweet-faced woman, with her inexhaustible supply of food. She has a large red
bindhi
on her forehead, like Shiva’s third eye, and pendulous gold earrings.

She shrugs. “There is a time for this and a time for that. When I am very angry, I cook so badly that it sticks in the throat. Then my husband and the children all look up from their busy lives and say, ah, something is wrong, she is upset.”

“But your man, what does he do?”

“What can he do? Am I neglecting my duties? Oh no! If he gets angry, my cooking becomes even worse.” She beams contentedly at us, and goes back to cracking her endless supply of peanuts.

When I talk too much or say something nasty, my mother remarks, “Both your tongues are wagging today.” Or, “You create too much noise, must be the little tongue.”

The little tongue is completely silent in some people. In others it adds drops of honey to their conversation. The little tongue can also make you choke and die if it drips poison. That is what happens to Seethu Akka who lives down by the Thousand Lights Temple.

Seethu Akka cannot stand her sister’s husband, Prakash. People say that it is because she wanted him to marry her and he turned to her younger sister.

Seethu Akka sits on her doorstep, doing small household chores like shelling a basin of peas or scraping coconuts. Now and again, she spits in the direction of her sister’s house and curses her brother-in-law. “Bastard
birth, bastard brain. Bastard keeps my sister’s belly heavy so she has no energy to see what he is up to.”

Seethu does not move from the doorstep except when her bed-ridden mother yells for her from within. Then she spits once more towards her sister’s house and hurries into the bedroom where her mother lies, shrivelled and noisy, against brilliant pink-and-green-and-yellow Chennur sheets.

“I called and called,” she yells in a voice piercing enough for people out on the road to hear. “What sins I must have committed in my last birth to deserve this. Hold my shit till this
maharani
daughter, whose bottom I spent my youth wiping, decides to appear!”

After taking care of her mother, Seethu reappears to spew yet more venom from the front doorstep. She dies, one day, cursing her brother-in-law, her rage exploding through the blood-vessels in her head as she hurries in to tend to her screaming mother.

When my Amma gets angry with me she says that Seethu’s evil voice has flown straight into my throat. On those days she furiously chops up pale-green bitter-gourd, fresh from our back garden, and boils it in a soup of tamarind and
jaggery,
red chilies and coriander. It is a delicacy for the rest of the family, but I hate the taste. For me, it is a punishment which I swallow, gagging miserably at every mouthful, my mother’s eyes mean on me.

“If you vomit,” she threatens, “I will make you eat it off the floor.”

Amma no longer has the right to punish me for the things I say, for now that I am married, that right has been transferred to my husband.

In the rattling compartment, I turn to him. “Why did you wait so long to marry?”

He is surprised, I can sense that, and he has to reply. He cannot brush this question away with an “Unh-hunh.”

“I had responsibilities, things to take care of before I thought of marriage.”

“What responsibilities?”

In the background, I hear my mother’s voice. “A good wife does not go
bada-bada
at her husband asking him this and that.” Amma, I think, I am no longer a daughter of your house. Remember? You gave me away to this old man with a handful of puffed rice and some Sanskrit words that even you could not understand.

“One brother and a sister, they were my responsibilities,” says my husband.

“I thought you had two sisters.”

“Yes, Vijaya is her husband’s headache.” He smiles slightly and I can almost hear him thinking, “Like you are now my headache.”

My little tongue, the one my mother tries to soften with bitter-gourd, rushes in to say, “How do you know your sister is the headache? Could be the other way around.”

He shrugs. “Perhaps. My second sister is still our responsibility.”

“We have to find a boy for her?” I wonder at the sudden shift of responsibility from “mine” to “our.” Married only two days and already I am expected to share his burdens?

“She will stay with us for a few months every year,” he says.

“Why? What does she do the rest of the year?”

“She is sick. She stays in a nursing home. She will spend the summer with us.”

Not only have my parents tied me to a man so old and silent I feel I am enclosed in the quiet of a funeral-ground, but he also has a sick sister for whom I must care. I am their sacrifice to the fire god so that my sisters might get fine young men. I turn away from my husband, and the scene outside the window blurs as my eyes fill with tears. The train is slowing down, probably at a station, a large one going by the number of tracks criss-crossing away in all directions. I glance at my husband from the corner of my eye. He has a severe face, which in later years dissolves into plumpness, hair straight back on his skull, a small moustache, large ears. He isn’t bald yet, thank goodness. Just a touch of grey in the sideburns. His fingers are long and knobbly but not wrinkled. I have heard that age shows first in the knees. He stands up abruptly, hauling all our bags down from the upper berth.

“We’ve arrived,” he says. “There will be somebody to meet us.”

The train grinds to a halt, a final scream of wheels against the tracks, the moaning hiss of steam echoing against the arched tin roof of Ratnapura Junction. My husband slides the door of the compartment open. There is a brief pause, and suddenly it seems as if the entire station is in our compartment. A cacophony of voices.

“Salaam, Sir, congratulations on your marriage.”

“
Shubh kamnaye,
Saar!”

“Good afternoon, Sir, and the new Medem.”

The trunks and bags are unloaded and whisked off to a waiting station-wagon. A woman in a crisp green cotton sari presses my hand and says, “Congratulations Mrs. Moorthy, and welcome to Ratnapura.”