Tamarind Mem (25 page)

Mrs. Moorthy. The name tastes strange.

In the town of my childhood, there is a sugar factory that marks the middle of everything. It is always there. If you are lost, you stop a moment, look for the tall chimney and say, “Oh yes, oh yes, now I have to go left,” or right, or straight ahead. And if you have lost the use of your eyes, your nose and ears will tell you where you are. The early morning wind carries the sickly odour of boiling
jaggery
to the east of the factory, and towards the west, you can hear the strong rustle of sugar cane in the fields. But when I become a Railway wife, I lose my bearings. One year I might be in Guwahati, the next in Calcutta. Lucknow I remember for its sweet-sweet watermelons which swelled on the banks of the Gomti River. In Guwahati, I become familiar with the roads, the trees, pineapple blades in every garden, smell of oranges ripening in the heat, the grumble of traffic outside the colony walls. On that side of the sullen Brahmaputra, which might flood or not, depending on the moods of the goddess and the monsoon, is Phookat Bazaar, where I go to get my new sari for the Diwali festival. On this side of the river is Colby School, where Behari Lal the farmer keeps his cows—only after class, you understand, and he always cleans up the hay and the droppings before school opens the next morning. Behari’s father donated all the ceiling fans for the school and so the principal cannot really refuse him. In Calcutta there is the Hooghly River, steaming, ugly, flowing filth. During the day it sucks air away from the colony, leaving a hole of heat, and in the evening it puffs warm stinking breezes back. The botanical gardens across the river are a green apparition, inviting only from a distance. Cunningham
Road frothing bedlam just outside the colony gates, the pavements alive with people, dogs, cows, vendors, fortunetellers, madmen, lawyers saving on office rentals, tailors, barbers, butchers, quacks and palmists. The ragged old woman in a palace of gunny sacks, Dalda tins, tires and plastic cans. She says she is the ex-queen of Dholpur, waiting for the government to return her riches to her.

“Remember, remember, the twelfth of December, when the bastards stole my home,” she howls, slamming a long-handled pan on an overturned metal bin that was once full of Parlé biscuits.

Beside her, just where Cunningham Road swerves to meet Elphinston Lane, a thin young man has set up shop. On the pavement in front of him, like mountain ranges, are rows and rows of brassieres. Red, white and black, the colours of Durga, the goddess of illusion.

“For Rekha-actress figure, sister!” shouts the man, thrusting his fist to fill the cup and pulling it out again to show how the fabric maintains its shape, “34 A, B, C, 36, 38, even extra large available. Sister, sister, even when nothing is there, it will give you a Rekha-actress figure.”

The illusion-monger holds a red bra over his own chest, bare brown, a thin coating of skin stretched over his ribs. “Best quality, lowest price,” he says, mincing up and down the pavement. “Export quality, sister, suspension like the Howrah Bridge, strong everlasting.”

And in Ratnapura Junction, we live in a whitewashed bungalow with a red tiled roof and a wide
bajri
driveway. Hyenas giggle and scream in the hills behind the house, snakes slip under the garden leaves, and a curling wrought-iron stairway winds up from the verandah to the terrace where I sometimes dry my hair.

There is a shift in the rhythm of the train as it picks up speed, whipping through warm-hued landscape rising out of the dust. Arundhathi, the evening star, is already a pale gleam in the sky, and far across the slow curve of mustard fields you can see the lights of a town like gathering fireflies. Double-stringed electric wires hum and sway, punctuated by rows of sleek, coat-tailed swallows.

“So Aunty-ji, you married the man with no horoscope?” asks Latha. She snaps a peanut open and pops it into her tiny mouth. She has been diving into her baskets of food at regular intervals, fishing out
burfis, pakodis, kachoris,
mixture,
om-pudi.
She likes munching when she travels, it helps time move faster.

“Aunty-ji, so much you travelled, so lucky!” remarks Sohaila. “I never go anywhere except to my mother’s house for this.” She pats her pregnant belly. This is her fourth child. “Whattodo but, that mother-in-law of mine says have sons, many many sons, they will be your arms and legs, your eyes and ears when you grow old. I would have liked to see the world a little before my children tied me down.”

“Yesbut,” I assure her, “it was no fun packing-shacking every two-three years. You just start making friends with your neighbour, talk about children and
ayahs
, and then husband comes home with transfer orders—go to Chittaranjan, Khurda Road, Kachrapara. So again you have to start all over….”

The Ratnapura bungalow. In that rambling building with its bare windows like hungry eyes, its verandahs wide as roads and creaking fans rotating dust in lost ceilings, the first thing I notice is the thunder of passing trains. At first
I think that my long journey has left the sound of the Madras Mail in my ears. I have just spent sixty hours in the slow chuffing train with my new husband. Two and a half days of solitude in spite of the fact that there were two of us. The trains fill my first night in the house with muffled sounds. Distant vibrations shake the window panes in our bedroom, the room where finally my husband touches me, his hand a dim creature faintly visible in the light filtering through the plain white curtains. Pure star-shine, for the house is separated from the roads by a vast garden, too far away for streetlights to reach. That first night neither I nor my husband has the courage to turn on any lamp, each afraid of the imperfections it might reveal. His warm hand drifts questingly across my face, the hollow guarded by two bones in the base of my throat, my breasts. I hold my breath, lying stiff and silent as the hand moves delicately, pushes my sari away, fumbles with the hooks on my blouse. I wish that he would say something. His breathing fills the room and I shut my eyes from the shame of being seen naked by a strange man.

My mother is the only other person who has seen my body unclothed. Every Sunday, I wait for Amma in the smoky warmth of the bathing room, an old petticoat tied below my armpits. In one corner, where the slime needs to be scraped away daily, a huge copper pot simmers over the cement oven. Burning coconut fibre, set alight by Chinna, blazes up crackling hot. By the time I have my bath, the water is scalding. But till Amma arrives, I have to wait.

“Amma, I am cold, hurry up.”

“A little cold won’t kill you.”

“Amma, the fire is dying, send Chinna in with more
gari
.”

In that house, where every word is heard in every room, Chinna grumbles, “Did you hear that? She thinks she is the Queen of England ordering everybody about!”

Amma likes making me wait. It will teach me patience, the art of sitting within my own thoughts. So I shiver sullenly, glare at the fire spitting out tiny sparks, the dry leaf-stems and coconut husk smouldering red. I cannot sit any closer to the oven for it snaps out burning embers that sizzle angrily on the wet bathroom floor. The knots in the husk crackle and explode. Nothing in the house is wasted. Every part of the coconut tree is thoroughly used, the leaves along with coconut shells dried for fuel, the extra sold to the grocery shop around the corner where two hags silently peel long veins from the leaves and bunch them together to sell as brooms. Amma arrives finally, bringing a sharp draft of air into the bathroom.

“It’s slippery near the fire,” I warn.

Deep within my heart is the fear that one day something will happen to her. She is too fleshy, her heart might stop beating. She chews too much
paan,
cancer will eat her away. She hurries too much, she might fall and break her hip. But we do not demonstrate our affections in that house, so I hide my fears beneath a bruising tongue and an argument for everything she says.

“Take off your petticoat,” orders Amma, her fingers scooping up a hot drip of mustard oil from the brass bowl on the stove. I shiver with the anticipation of my mother’s strong fingers working the oil into my flesh.

Does Vishwa Moorthy notice how soft my skin is from all those weekly oil baths? He says nothing that first night.
Instead, he fumbles with the knot on my petticoat, the sari a pool of purple and green about my body. He speaks finally, his voice cracking with impatience, “Open this.” I am glad to have something to do with my trembling hands. His body descends on mine, warm and heavy. What am I supposed to do? If I part my legs will he think that I have done this before? Stupid, I tell myself, he knows I am not ignorant. I am not an illiterate poorthing like Mariamma the tailor’s daughter who thought that a demon was hiding in her body when she swelled with child. Who did not know she had been raped.

Somewhere in the distance, probably from the servants’ quarters, floats the tinny bleat of a Hindi film song.

His breath puffs rapidly into my ear, his legs coarse with hair rub against mine. Then he rolls off, slowly collapsing on the bed, his head turned away from mine. I lie still on my back, stare unblinking at the ceiling fan rotating
kiti-kit, kiti-kit.
A rusty ball-bearing protests periodically, interfering with the sound of my husband’s rapid breath. I wait for him to stroke my face, tell me that I am beautiful. He stirs and stretches without a word, his breathing slows, eases into the soft snuffle of sleep. Moonlight from the window picks out the curve of his spine, shadows his buttocks.

“Oh
bhabhi-ji,
” giggles Latha, her face smeared like a baby’s with mango pulp. “What naughty things you are telling us. You are making it all up, no?”

Hameeda looks at me, a bit shocked, I think. Her full mouth is pursed censoriously and she wags her head as if to say, “This old woman, so shameless!”

Her sister Sohaila has no such inhibitions. She waggles her eyebrows mischievously at me and says, “Arrey, just because she is old means that she must be like a
sadhu
? Go on,
bhabhi-ji
, tell us more of your xxx, censored stories. This is like sitting in a cinema house.”