Tamarind Mem (29 page)

I stand at the window in the girls’ room, shielded by the light bamboo
chik,
safe in the knowledge that I cannot be seen from outside, and watch him bend over the car, the muscles high on his back bunching and relaxing as his arms move. If Linda Ayah comes in I grab a frock, a panty, a petticoat from a pile on the chair near the window, and pretend to fold it.

“Nice day, hanh, Memsahib?” she says nastily, picking up the pile of clothes. “Why you are sitting inside and spoiling your health? Go, go out and get some clean air. Bad for you to hide inside here and do nothing.”

It is useless for me to protest, to say, “Linda, I am folding the clothes, I want to fold the clothes today. You never fold them right.
You
go and do something outside, watch the gardener.”

Linda is a witch who can smell out secrets. She glares at me, her eyes stern behind the soda-glasses she insists on wearing. “Why you always want to argue with me? I am only thinking of your own good. Your eyes will go bad staring out of this window.”

As a girl, I wanted to wear a sleeveless dress.

My mother said, “No, decent girls don’t show their bodies to every passer-by.”

“That is so silly, only my arms will be seen.”

“I don’t care,” replied my mother. “You can do what you want when you are married and belong to someone else. Then dance naked for all I care.”

But after marriage there are new rules to follow, fresh boundaries. There is always someone in the house, the
peon,
the gardener, the maid, the
dhobhi,
and Linda Ayah
with her terrible glasses. They watch me, discuss this new memsahib, make sure I do not stray from the correct lines of behaviour. They keep an eye on me for their sahib, for Dadda, the man to whom my parents hand me like a parcel wrapped in silk and gold. He is at home maybe one week out of four. As I stand near the window, grasping the edge of the sill to still my trembling hands, I can feel my mother’s disapproving glare in the middle of my back.

“Devaru nodtharey ninnana”
she will say—the gods will fix you!

Evenings such as this one, with Dadda away, the house empty except for Linda Ayah snoring in the kitchen where she spreads her
chatai,
such evenings I love the most. I leave the windows open and gusts of air puff at the curtains, set the light bulb swinging wildly. Shadows fly around the room, dancing patterns created by the bamboo lampshade. Kamini is immersed in a colouring book, pastels scattered around her. Roopa has her doll across her legs.

“Oolulu-oolulu,” she sings patting the doll, imitating Linda Ayah. If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, “An
ayah.”

She moves her leg up and down in a rocking motion, her face absorbed. Parts of a stainless-steel kitchen set lie on the floor, catching the light here and there. Dadda bought her the set on one of his line-duty tours. He is an affectionate father, imaginative, too. More imaginative than he is as a husband. If he goes somewhere he cannot find books or toys, he nevertheless brings an interesting gift, always with a story attached. A jar of translucent honey smelling of oranges with bits of waxy honeycomb trapped in its viscous depths.

“This is the honey Rama and Sita and Lakshmana ate,” he tells the girls, placing the jar on the dining table. His train has returned from deep within the Dandakaranya forests. For a month he wanders through dense jungle, moist, humming with mosquitoes. He taps and measures, guesses and gauges, filling his notebook with information about the land. He draws stories from this timeless landscape, which will soon be altered, and brings them home for his daughters.

Every month I check to see if I have put all that Dadda needs into his line-box. A large Horlicks bottle of sugar. Dadda does not add sugar to his coffee, but the
peon
on line duty has a sweet tooth. Salt in a Bournvita tin. I must remind Ganesh Peon not to throw away the empty ones. Even if I don’t use them all, I can sell them to the
kabaadi-wallah
or exchange them for stainless-steel utensils. Mrs. Baagchi in Number 16 bungalow shows me three stainless-steel bowls she got in exchange for old newspapers and tins.

“But of course those
kabaadi-wallahs
make a profit,” she says. “Are they simple-heads to just give away good steel?
Arrey,
I have heard they are millionaires! Yes, they take our
raddhi
to big factories. The factory-wallahs turn the
raddhi
into fancy boxes and whatnot and sell them back to us. But am I going to look for those factories with my garbage on my back? No
baba
no. Let the
kabaadi-wallah
do that. I am happy with my steel
dibbas
.”

The
kabaadi-wallah
also buys old bottles, especially the ones with wide necks—Complan, Nestlé coffee, Parlé jam. I prefer to keep these bottles. They fit neatly into the line-box and the
peon
can straight away see through the glass what is inside. Did I pack two bottles
of dal
or three?
Two should be more than enough. I can never stop worrying, though, because no matter how often I check, there is something I forget, and then I never hear the end of it. One month it is salt.

“I had food without salt for three days,” says Dadda when he comes back. “Three days of
dal
without salt, do you know what that feels like? Or
bhindi
absolutely tasteless? Even the chilies don’t taste of anything without salt.”

Dadda, normally silent as the Delhi Iron Pillar, is passionate when it comes to food.

I want to say, “So what if you haven’t eaten salt for three days of your life, is it such a big tragedy?”

But of course I don’t. I have been married seven years and the lessons my mother drilled into my head hang like a sheet between Dadda and me.

“Your husband is your god. Always obey him, it is your duty. Never refer to him by name, it is a disrespect. And for god’s sake don’t let your too-smart tongue wag-wag more than necessary.”

If I allow my tongue to wag, the good strong sound of words might blow the sheet aside. But I do not, and the sheet grows stronger and more opaque. Dadda remains far on the other side, a dim figure, the father of my children, but that is all. When the most intimate space in a home has no words in it, what then of the rest of the house? I try to fill the other rooms with my voice.

“How was your trip?”

“Good. Next time don’t forget to pack a suit. I needed it this trip.”

“For what?”

“Meeting.”

All his words are reserved for his children.

Our train makes a tea-stop at another station, a small one. Two ragged boys push into the compartment. “Shoe polish, shoe polish, clean and dust dirty floor?” they sing hopefully.

“Go away,” says Latha, frowning at them. “They are big thieves, you know, they sit under the berths polishing shoes and steal from our bags.”

We never travel with Dadda except when we are transferred. I am not allowed into his private world of journeys, long spaces, trees that touch the sky, sky that meets the sea. Before the children are born, I cannot even call him by his name, and he never uses mine. Never “Saroja,” jewel, flower, gem, nothing. Just “Ay.” After Kamini arrives I find a name that I can utter without feeling discomfort—“Dadda.” But in the caverns of the children’s bodies are particles of his being. He is in the blood pumping through their hearts, their flesh and their bones. The currents running through their brains find some of their impulses in his. I feel a twinge of jealousy when I see the way he is with his daughters. He shows an interest in everything they do, an affection he never shows me.

Kamini is absorbed in drawing a boat, displaying it proudly to her Dadda. Enclosing her small fist in his, he guides the crayon over the paper, corrects mistakes, redoes proportions, murmurs instructions.

“See, this sail is too big. Your boat will drift away into the sky and then you will have to tell everybody that you have drawn an aeroplane.”

He likes to make them laugh, cannot bear their sorrow.

“Let them be,” he says if he hears me scolding either of them. “They are children. They will learn.”

The indulgence in his voice. Roopa and Kamini think he is Baba Cheeni, the kind old sugar-man in Linda Ayah’s stories. They probably believe that I am the witch, the
daayin
who says, “Do your homework; don’t pick your nose; sit properly, the whole world can see your knickers. Why did you get this sum wrong? Did you say good-morning to teacher-miss?”

I buy them bloomers, petticoats, school notebooks, water-bottles, toothbrushes. Dadda comes home like a magician bearing strange gifts, tales of wonderful things and places. He returns from the hills of Aarlong with two silkworm cocoons. One of them is sliced open and the silken interior glows like a moonlit cavern. The girls caress the rough, dull-brown outside of the cocoon and beg him to reveal its mysteries.

“These cocoons came from a farm where the caterpillar isn’t boiled to yield up its trove of silk,” says Dadda, spinning his yarns, his gift to his daughters. While I, his wife, the other half of his body, I have only silences and the vast distances his travel creates between us.

“The caterpillar is shaken out of its nest of sleep onto fresh mulberry leaves and the silk is drawn out of the cocoon,” Dadda explains, bringing out two small pouches made of pale golden silk. Then from the bottom of the suitcase, which is still full of sweat-smelling shirts and underwear, he shyly draws out a sari, the same soft, golden silk, but with a flash of turquoise for the border.

“Give this to your mother,” he says, nudging Roopa.

This is his first gift to me, and I am not sure how to accept gifts from my husband the traveller. There are so
many things I want to say, but my clumsy tongue takes over and the words fall before I can hold them back. “Yes, but this is too dull for my skin.”

The thread that Dadda spins towards me snaps, and his silence once again covers his tentative smile. I could so easily have said, “This is beautiful,” and meant the gesture rather than the gift. But now I must stumble to cover up the disappointment that hovers between us.

“It is beautiful, though,” I try. “I think if I wear it with a turquoise blouse, it will look perfect.”

Too late; Dadda moves out of the room to the verandah and sits nursing his pipe and the newspaper. Kamini scowls at me, tears threatening to rush out of her eyes. She calls me a mean-mean witch, says she hates me.

I have nothing to discuss with this stranger who takes me from one town to another, showing me a whole country. He sits with his daughters about him, telling his tales, while I hover in the penumbra of their shared happiness.

“There was only one line in Kantabhanji,” he tells them. “But a troublesome one. Nobody wanted to work there for the villagers were sure it was haunted. The train arrived every evening at nineteen hours.”

“Seven o’clock,” chorus the girls.

“Yes, it was dark by then and a porter had to walk down the tracks, about three furlongs or so, to change the signal. Those days the signals were not automatic. The station-master reminded the porter of the time by hitting a gong, so loud that it could be heard by the villagers for miles around. Everything worked fine for a while, and then suddenly the porters started disappearing. Sometimes their lanterns were found near the signal, sometimes not. The train drivers would get no signal and
go right past the station. That’s when I was sent in to see what was going on.”

Dadda lives by rules. Just as he makes sure that nothing, not a syllable, in the
Handbook for Railway Officers
is ever violated, so does he follow an unwritten book on the duties of a Brahmin father. He is determined to avoid all the mistakes his own father made. But he is a good son, respecting his father no matter what he did, and so he never tells me what those mistakes were. Only once he says, “He neglected us. My father forgot his duty by us.” When he died he left Dadda, the oldest, to gather up all the pieces. I marry a man who is already old, who fulfils his obligation to society by acquiring a wife. I am merely a symbol of that duty completed.