Tamarind Mem (27 page)

“Do I have to eat this?” I demand petulantly when Amma serves up spinach or a mashed mess of boiled bottle-gourd. My mother has a gourd for every problem.

“Yes, it will bring out the milk,” she replies.

I resent being in my mother’s house for the birth of my child, feel like a little girl all over again, forced to follow rules.

“I don’t think it fair that women have to go through all this fuss-mess,” I complain, patting my stomach. I find it difficult to sit, sleep or even walk comfortably.

“That’s what women said long, long ago to Brahma the Creator, and look at what happened,” says Chinna.

“What women? What happened?”

“Listen and I will tell you. Once a group of women decided to go to Lord Brahma with a complaint.

“‘O Lord,’ they grumbled. ‘It really isn’t fair the way you have divided things between men and women. Not only do women have to carry babies for nine long months, looking all fat and ugly, they also have to undergo labour pain.’

“‘Un-hunh, you have a point,’ said Brahma, nodding all his heads. ‘What do you think I should do?’

“‘I have an idea,’ said one of the supplicants. ‘The woman will carry the child in her belly, but the man who fathered the child must suffer the pains.’

“‘So be it,’ said Brahma, raising the lower of his two right hands in blessing.

“Many months later, one of the women was ready to give birth to her child. But as she lay in bed, to the astonishment of the entire street, her neighbour’s husband started howling in labour. And so women decided that they would rather bear the pain and keep their secrets.”

I glance sharply at Chinna.

“Well, did you like the story or not?”

“Un-hunh,” I say, but she has turned away.

Soon, soon, my child will be born and I will have to go back to my own home. Will my husband be a better father than a husband? It occurs to me that by the time the child is ten, my husband will be fifty.

The engine flings a long whistle to the rushing wind, mango trees hurry backwards into a darkening landscape. A teenager, Vicki, has got on at the previous station. She is travelling only for a couple of hours.

“But he was a kind man, no?” asks Hameeda. “He gave you a good life!”

“True. But I was young and didn’t think of kindness and all. I wanted him to talk to me, tell me my hair was like silk, my voice a sitar song.”

“I would have walked out if I didn’t like my husband!” remarks the teenager, full of scorn. “Why you stayed?”

“Arrey baba!
” Latha claps her hand to her mouth. “How you young people talk! Can she just walk away from her home? What do you say,
bhabhi-ji
?”

“Walking away is hard,” I reply. “It is easier to grit your teeth and stay.”

“No-no, you have got it wrong,” protests Latha. “Going away is the easiest thing in the world. It is like dying. So simple it is to die. Living is hard, to make this small amount of time loaned to you by the gods worthwhile is hard. The real test is life itself, whether you are strong enough to stay and fight
.”

A man stands at the bottom of the steps leading to the verandah, staring at me, smiling.

“Mr. Moorthy asked me to have a look at his car.”

“He is having his breakfast,” I say. “Wait here till he is done.”

“Ten minutes. I cannot wait longer.”

Who is he to decide how long he should wait? He can stay there as long as it takes Dadda to finish his breakfast, which might be ten minutes, it might be an hour. But when I go inside to tell Dadda that a mechanic fellow is waiting for him, he pushes his plate aside. “Good, good! He can take a look at the spark-plugs.”

“Why don’t you finish your breakfast, he can wait,” I say, as if it is going to have any effect at all.

In between cleaning the car, wiping the spark-plugs, tuning the ancient engine, Paul da Costa sits in our verandah sipping hot cups of tea. He asks me for the tea, not Ganesh Peon. As if I am his servant, what cheek!

“Go around the back to the kitchen and ask the
peon,”
I say.

“Your
peon
is ver-r-ry high and mighty,” says Paul, grinning. “He might not want to make tea for a caste-less Anglo.”

Nevertheless, he saunters off to the kitchen door and returns in ten minutes with a tumbler of tea. Ganesh Peon has served Paul da Costa in the tumbler reserved for the toilet-cleaner, and I imagine him handing it to this swaggering fellow with a condescending look.

The mechanic settles on the steps leading into the verandah and sighs. “Good
chai”
he remarks. “My granny used to make tea like this.”

“Is she dead?” I ask, looking up from my sewing. I feel obliged to make some comment.

“Why you want to kill my poor granny, Memsahib? Nono, she is in Australia with my Uncle Albert.”

I don’t know how to respond to this half-breed man who sits in my verandah and tells me about the latest films, about his cousins in Australia, about everything and everything. I smile timidly, afraid of what the servants will think if I join in his full-bodied laughter. I am, after all, a memsahib, and there is a distance to be maintained between us.

After Paul da Costa leaves, I tell Dadda, “Why don’t you ask that mechanic man to come every Sunday to start up the car and keep it okay? Not good for a car to park there for days and days without running.”

Linda Ayah looks disapprovingly at me. She squats in the verandah like an ancient crow, her knobbled fingers sorting through piles of tamarind fruit. She mumbles under her breath as she collects the pods scattered under the delicate branches at the far end of the verandah. The ground is littered with them, each thickly coated with
red ants. The tree is very old, its thin green leaves throw a matted shadow, it scatters yellow flowers everywhere. You can eat the leaves and flowers and pods, make them into chutneys and sauces, so sour that you have to twist your face, screw up your eyes and squeeze your gut muscles to take the acid juice. Smack your tongue against your mouth and take another nibble, that’s the way to eat tamarind, a tiny bit at a time. Feel the sour sliding against your teeth edges like fingernails down a blackboard. Linda Ayah has been begging me to cut the tree down, she is fed up with keeping the children from eating the pods. My daughter Kamini, especially, for the more you tell her not to do something, the more likely she is to do it. Roopa is too young to disobey. But Linda has other objections, too. It is a spiteful tree, she says. If you sit under it too long it will gather all your secrets and then its feathery little leaves will whisper them out to the world. If you sleep under it at night, the tree spirits will fill your ears with nonsense and turn you into a lunatic.

“Memsahib, tell me, if you sit in a mortar can you avoid being hit by the pestle?” she asks suddenly, her hands full of tamarind.

Linda Ayah rarely spills a word that is useless. She might wander about spouting proverbs and fables, but always, always there is a message for me. I pretend deafness and continue picking stones from the
soopa
of rice grains. Linda squats across from me in the sunny verandah, carefully removing seeds from the pulpy brown tamarind. In between us, on a sheet of newspaper, is a growing pile of stones, glass bits, rat shit. I make a mental note to talk to Theli Ram the grocery store owner about the quality of the rice. He told me that his stock was guaranteed good.

“Personal eye I keep, Memsahib,” he said, placing a hand on his heart, his eyes honest. “On my mother’s body I swear that each grain in this humble shop is personally checked by myself.”

“The rascal’s mother will writhe in
jahannum
!
”
I hold up an orange bead. “Out of ten kilos of rice, two kilos are stones.”

“What I mean is,” says Linda Ayah, ignoring my comment as completely as I ignored hers, “what it is I want to say is, if you put your hand under the wheels of a running cart it will surely get crushed, no?”

She looks at me, waiting for me to unwind her string of thought. I stare back, unable to see her eyes behind her glasses. She is facing the sun and the light turns the lenses into two radiant orbs.

“Hanh, answer me, will you or won’t you crush your hand?” she demands.

“Linda, you want to say something, then say it quick-quick and get back to work,” I say, trying to retrieve my authority.

And that spectacle-face, as stubborn as the
dhobi’s
mule, asks again, “Will the pestle hit you?”

“Yes
baba
yes! My head will be paste and my hand will be smashed by the wheel. Happy?”

“No, I am not happy, that is why I dare to open my mouth.” Linda flexes her fingers stained with sticky tamarind. “You think, who is she to tell me what to-do not-to-do? You will even think kick her out, get another
ayah.
But my heart will not let me hold my tongue.”

“Linda, if you don’t stop wandering around the world to reach your neighbour’s house, I will have to find another
ayah
.” What
is
she getting at?

“Why you look
tukur-tukur
at that three-fourth person?” asks Linda finally.

“Who are you talking about? And what do you mean three-fourth?” Does Linda know about Paul? Has she told anybody? Servants are like drains, they carry all the muck round and round from house to house.

“Three parts low caste and one part pink-face.”

“He is just like you, then, Linda.”

“Memsahib, what you are getting by insulting me, henh? See this skin?” Linda pulls a wrinkled flap of skin off her forearm. “This skin is tough, so many years it has fried in the sun. My parents were good people, no half-caste business for us. Respectable people. They owned five acres of land. My grandmother, she had ten
tholas
of gold. But I was a fool and married a no-good drunk. My fault. I had no brains, only wet loins. That is why I am telling you, this Linda Ayah has now collected brains after many-many years. What you see in that Paul person that your own mister doesn’t have, henh?”

I find no words to reply, and in the silence all other sounds are magnified. The crow on the electric wire over the road is going
kaan-kaan-kaan.
Maybe it has spotted a dead mouse in the ditch below. Thick earth is being dug and loosened by the gardener next door, and the sound reminds me that it is time to start preparing beds for the nasturtiums and poppies. The peanut-vendor approaches our road,“
Garam-thaaja,
hottest-fresh
chana choor!”
He gives the last word a questioning lilt, a blandishment.

Should I tell Linda that my husband likes me to screw up my hair in a bun like an old Anglo aunty because he cannot stand its loose abundance? He says I look like a slut when I wear the long emerald earrings my grandmother
gave me for a wedding gift—green for a full womb, she said. He sleeps with me on Wednesday night at 21:40 sharp and Sunday same time if his train is in town. My feet tangle in his pyjamas for he doesn’t like undressing completely. How can I explain to her the yawning monotony of my life with this man? How do I translate the dislike that rages through me when his voice touches my ears, or his hands brush mine?

Linda interrupts my silence. “Does your mister drink? No. Does the poorgood man smell of some other woman? Nono. Does he beat you? No.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you,” she says. “This Linda was born Jesu knows when, but I got a brain in my skull now, after all these years. I can see things.”

“Oh, a
chudail
in my house! Tell me, o four-eyed one, what else can you see?” I ask.

“Make fun, what do I care? You want to know what I see? Lots of tears for you, that’s what. And for those poor babies of yours. No fault of theirs either.”

Suddenly I have had enough of this conversation. “I am glad your brains have multiplied since your birth, Ayah,” I snap. “But I can see your tongue has also grown longer than it should. You want to give advice, give it to your own daughter. I hear she is called scissor-legs by all the
goondas
in town. Grab her arms, they say, and she will spread her legs.”