Tamarind Mem (26 page)

Hameeda looks at her and giggles. “Good thing this is a ladies only compartment, otherwise
bhabhi-ji
would be clicking her prayer beads in the corner.”

“Somehow I can’t imagine her with prayer beads,” says Latha, her sharp eyes gleaming amusement. For all her gluttony and seeming lassitude, she is an observant woman.

A strong odour wakes me from the thankful dark of sleep. That, and the warm band of sun lying across the bed, streaming in from the open windows. I blink and for a few minutes watch the specks of dust performing an energetic dance down the slide of light. I remember the soundless love-making of the night and wonder that my body neither thrills nor cringes at the memory. Perhaps this is because all that I can recall of the experience is my fear and my husband’s merciless quiet, his hands moving over me without any tenderness. I glance towards the windows, wide open, the curtains drawn apart. There are trees outside, the one closest to the window appears to be a mango. I can hear the insistent cawing of a crow and a
whole cacophony of other bird sounds. Mynahs, perhaps. Another sound intrudes, one that I can’t identify immediately—
khchak, khchak, chak-chak
—rhythmic, with small pauses in between.

I drape my sari across my shoulders like a shawl and gently draw the curtains. They are still warm with the sun. Outside, the grass stretches for several acres till it is stopped by a dense hedge. Two lines of crotons march down from the portico to the front gate. The road seems so far away from the house, so different from my childhood home where the entire town, it seemed, enacted a daily drama at our doorstep. The rhythmic sound, I discover, is the gardener scything grass in the front lawn. His thin, muscled arm swings in arcs, sending showers of green every time it descends.

The wire mesh on the window adds a blurry edge to everything, making me feel that I am looking through a haze of dust. I gather my trailing clothes and head for the bathroom. What do I do? Should I make the bed, wash the sheets? Or leave it for the maid to do? Disgusting! How could I allow a maid to touch the marks and stains from my body and that man’s? I stand there in a debris of doubts and confused thoughts, not at all comforted by the river of sound that flows outside the room. A bath first, I remind myself, before I open those towering doors and go out to meet the household that is already awake and buzzing.

My room opens out to a long corridor with screened windows, which in turn look out onto a courtyard. Two of the servants I remember seeing last night are squatting beneath the custard-apple tree in the centre. The door squeaks sharp and high when I open it, and both of them
leap to their feet. The woman rushes to the edge of the courtyard and yells to somebody I cannot see, “Yay! Come quick-quick! Memsahib is awake!” Then she turns to me and beams, revealing two rows of brownish teeth. “I am Linda Ayah,” she declares, jabbing herself in the chest. “He is Ganesh Peon.” She points to each of the other people, “
Dhobhi, jamedaar,
ironing-man, maid.”

They smile and nod,
“Namastey,
Mem,
namastey!”
I feel panic sweeping through me. I am supposed to supervise all these people by myself?

“Hanh! Now Memsahib has seen all your faces. Why you are all standing here catching flies with your open mouths?” demands Linda’s shrill, energetic voice. “Go, go finish your work.”

That is Linda Ayah, bossy, irrepressible, wrinkled as an old leaf, ridiculous glasses perched on a sharp ridge of nose. She has a dusty silver nose-stud, absurdly out of place with the thick glasses.

“Who do you think you are? Giving orders like a memsahib! First find out if she wants you to stay or not,” says the
peon,
Ganesh, his dignified face creased with annoyance. He has been hired by the Railways, he explains, but Linda is just a nobody who lives in the servants’ quarters. She was the previous mem’s
ayah
and just stayed on after they were transferred. “You can get a different woman, Memsahib,” says Ganesh smugly, “a young and smart one.”

“Young, hah!” Linda Ayah waves her thin arms furiously at him. “So you can wear out your randy eyes looking-looking?” She turns to me and adds reassuringly, “Memsahib, I know everything. You don’t worry notatall. This old grumble-pot Ganesh is okay at cooking and
looking after Sahib, but who will look after you, tell me? And when the babas and babies are born, Linda will teach them a-b-c and jingle-bells and all. Memsahib, I will take care of you, not to worry.”

Faced with this declaration of loyalty, I surrender, for a while at least, command of the house.

“What is that smell?” I ask, sniffing at the remnants of the odour that woke me up.

“See-see, what did I tell you?” explodes Linda Ayah, her voice ricocheting off the bare walls. She glares at Ganesh Peon. “Before you know anything about our new Memsahib you start cooking up a stink of
egg-bhujiya.
Memsahib, I told this fellow, make plain
uppuma,
but he thinks he is too smart!”

“No, no, it is okay,” I say, catching sight of Ganesh’s worried face.

“Sahib likes egg and toast every morning,” he says defensively. “What can I do if Sahib wakes up and asks me for egg and toast?” He shoots a filthy look at Linda Ayah.

Reminded of the fact that I now have a husband, I glance around quickly, expecting to see him appear from one of the doors. Linda Ayah reads my thoughts and says, “Sahib has gone to office, he will be back at five o’clock. Then he will go to the club. You will have to wear a nice sari to go with him.”

“Sahib told
me
to tell Memsahib that.” Ganesh Peon snaps a tea towel in the air to show his annoyance.

“Yes, but did you remember till I opened my mouth?” demands Linda.

“Your mouth is always open,
baka-baka-baka.
Nobody has a chance to say anything,” retorts Ganesh, and he stalks away to the kitchen, a wounded rooster.

Such a tenuous thread, this relationship forged in a single day, at 7:30 in the morning on the sixth of September. Priest Raghotthamachar said it was the perfect moment for the union of my star with V. Moorthy’s. My father had an unshakeable faith in the priest, who, he believed, carried the wisdom of ancient sciences in his head. The priest knew all about the stars laid out on yellowing sheets of paper, the movements of those distant points of light and how their wanderings affect the lives of us mortals. When I was still in my mother’s womb, warm in the waters of her body, the priest was summoned for the
Sreemantha
ceremony. He would carry my parents’ messages to God. “I am only a postman,” he was fond of saying, his tiny eyes gleaming benevolence. “I take your prayers to the Almighty: sometimes they are heard, sometimes not. Nothing else I can do.”

“Eat, eat well,” said various female relatives to my mother as she sat there in a green silk sari with gold
zari
all over the cloth. The first day of the eighth month of her pregnancy she was spoilt with an abundance of food, clothes, gifts and jewellery. For who knew what might happen when the pains finally started? She might die, the baby might be a deaf-mute or an idiot. So many uncertainties. The women squeezed glass bangles onto my mother’s swollen hands, pressed vermilion on her forehead and asked Raghotthamachar to murmur prayers for her well-being. I was the first child and it was good for godly words to wash over my mother. Was it not true that the unfolding child heard everything the mother did? Was
it not true that my mother heard only honey words and music, laughter and praise?

Afterwards, nobody could explain where my bitter tongue came from.

Eighteen months after my wedding, I am heavy with child. When I inform my mother, she writes to me, “It is the custom for you to be here three months before birth. That is, if your husband thinks it is all right.”

She addresses the letter to my husband, for she knows that I will lie, say, “No, my husband wants me to have the child here in my own house.” Not that he cares where the child is born. Of course I do not tell my parents this.

I can imagine my mother discussing it with my sister. “He is a good man. It is her, my own daughter, her fault. She never learned to say the right things. Hasn’t learned to hold her tongue.”

I have held my tongue but the silence filling the house drives me insane. There is so much quiet that I can hear the spiders crawling across the ceiling, their spinnerets whirring. The immense silence is broken only in the summer when my sisters-in-law arrive. Meera, with her bags of knotted, fraying wool, and Vijaya, unwinding long threads of story about her family, both of them irritating me with their helplessness, their need to depend on my husband, their brother.

My father gets all prickly when I complain. “He is a worthy man, your husband, we did the best we could for you.”

And Amma, his echo, tells me that I should learn to shoulder my responsibilities. “I have four sisters-in-law to cope with, all in the same town. Have I ever complained?”

So I write pleasant letters assuring them that I am happy, managing my life well, a memsahib.

“Dear Amma, how are you? We are fine here. I know you want me to have the baby in Mandya, but I can manage here by myself. Really.”

My mother is offended. She says I hurt her by showing such reluctance to have their first grandchild in their house, I am too proud for my own good, always have been, and one day I will trip over this awful pride.

“Dear Amma, I am sorry you feel that I don’t want to come to Mandya. No, I am not behaving like a great memsahib. Neither do I think your house is too small. I will have the child there, if that is what you wish. My husband will not be able to accompany me. He has lots of tours to make in the next few months. They are building new lines in the North-East sector where the monsoons held up the work. Now they are trying to finish before the winter sets in, and my husband has to be on site. He might be able to bring me and the baby back home if nothing important comes up. The weather has cooled down considerably, for which I am grateful, as I will not find it so hard to travel down to Mandya in my condition.”

My parents are rigid about conventions, which is why they insist on my having the child there. They worry about what people might say if I don’t go.

“What a paisa-pinching miser of a father,” they might say. “Cannot even spend for their oldest daughter’s first delivery.
Tchhu-tchhu-tchhu!”

It fills the hollow spaces of my body, this child conceived in silence, it squeezes against my lungs, makes me breathless, sends sour belches searing up my throat.
Chinna is kept busy making snacks and sweets for my aunts and cousins who come and go, my pregnancy giving them a reason to visit. They pat my back, exclaim over my looks, offer to press my swollen feet, give advice, make predictions.

“It will be a girl, look at the shape of Saroja’s belly, a perfect cone. A daughter for sure!”

“Nono, look at her hips, definitely she is carrying a boy, a male child needs all that space.”

“There’s a glow on her face. It is a girl, a daughter gives her mother beauty.”

I feel like a buffalo, awkward and waddling, wearing my mother’s blouses, which are as large as
shamianas.