Tamarind Mem (31 page)

“Why not?” demands Vicki. “She was unhappy with her life, no?”

“And what’s wrong with sharing some words with the poor man?” asks Latha, whose kind eyes allowed her to see only more kindness.

Before my marriage, the world seems a smooth, round place. My father is a true patriarch. As long as Appa is in charge, we don’t have to worry about anything. We live in one little town from birth to marriage or death and thereafter. That makes a difference, you see, living in one place. You know everybody as if they belong to your own family. If you have a problem, there are at least ten shoulders to help you carry your pain. Your happiness lights up the whole place. And in a small town, which gets its livelihood from sugar refining, nothing ever changes. Postman Subanna could wander blindfold about the place
and still deliver the mail correctly. Then when I turn twenty-three, that same Subanna brings a letter from our Delhi Aunty. “There is a good boy, son of a family friend,” she writes. “Good steady job.” How could she use the word “steady”? Nothing is steady after my marriage. I have no friend to talk to without feeling that I am revealing my inadequacies as a wife. Friendship is like a tree, it needs time to mature, and we never stay in one place long enough for that! And my husband is a gypsy who I see for a short while every month.

The first time Dadda tells me he is going on line duty, I stare at him, baffled.

“What does that mean?”

“I am going out on tour to check the railway lines.”

“I want to come too,” I say firmly, certain of my power as a bride.

“Women don’t go on line.”

“But I want to know what you do there,” I tell him.

“That’s where I work,” says Dadda with a smile. “Like you work in the home.”

Who could think that those beautiful Railway colonies that I have often admired from the outside would be like jars crowded with mosquitoes, full of bored women waiting for their sahibs to get back? In the colonies, there is nothing to do but spend your time going from house to house, sip a hundred cups of tea and exchange stories. Most of the time I sit in our bungalow, the lonely house at the north end of the colony, listening to the trains rattling by. I even write up my own timetable—1:30 a.m., Howrah-Bongaigaon Express; 2:30 a.m., Shillong-Dehradun passenger; 3:00 a.m., Delhi Mail. Another list to add to my growing collection; it will go nicely in the
spot next to the Godrej cupboard in my bedroom. I draw red lines to show arrivals and blue ones for the departures and begin to be quite pleased with the effect I create on the walls. A room twelve feet by thirteen feet is now papered with long lists. The one with the green and yellow lines is an inventory of vegetables I buy from the
haat
every Wednesday. I have to make that list to remind myself of the things Dadda dislikes. Cabbage and cauliflower give him gas pains in the lower left hand corner of his stomach, radish and capsicum smell too strong, tomato is a non-Brahmin vegetable, and
jhinga
is a low-caste person’s supper. That doesn’t leave too many vegetables. So I have to look all the time for different-different recipes for potato and peas. The recipes are a growing collection which I use to cover the empty wall to the left of the window. I decorate the edges with a clever collage of mouths clipped from the magazines to which we subscribe—some open, some pursed up like Dadda’s when he is full of gas on the left side of his stomach—so many different sizes. The plain blue sheet of paper near the mirror is a list of the clothes I pack for his duty tours—the going-on-line list. Two white pyjamas, two white
kurtas,
two white underpants and two sleeveless
banians.
Dadda also purses up his lips if I pack the
banians
with sleeves. Those are for nylon shirts which make him sweat in the underarms.

This particular section of the railway lines is very, very hot. I hope and hope that my husband will soon take me with him on line to Darjeeling so that I can get away from the heat, from the silence of this house broken only by the sound of trains. I wait a long-long time but he never takes me. And then Dadda is transferred to Calcutta, where everything is different, except for the heat. Here
the trains are far away, but their movement stays with me, for the river runs by the house, restless, eager for the sea. When the monsoons thunder across from the Bay of Bengal, the river swells and floods into the colony. Lawns turn to vast dirty lakes. There is no way of knowing where the drains end and the roads begin. If you are brave enough to step out of your house, you walk by guesswork. A step in the wrong direction and it is possible for you to drown in a river of sewage. A person looking down from the air might think that we are a population floating on water. Eventually the river recedes, leaving behind a mush of salty mud which it churns up from the sea, bones and corpses of dead dogs and pigs, and a stink that takes months for the sun to boil away.

Across the river is the Botanical Garden, which is really an enormous myth. The main attraction is an ancient banyan tree, a growing umbrella of shimmering leaves. Other than that, there is nothing, not a flower, and no birds but the crows. It is important, though, to have this green-green place across the ugly river, an enchanted forest away from our dull-brown monotony. At one time or another, every family in our colony makes a pilgrimage to that tree armed with baskets of
puri
and
aloo subzi,
lemon rice and curd rice,
laddoos
and banana cake.

In the Calcutta house you can hear the neighbours all about you. The building is an old bungalow, grandly named Godfrey Mansions, its wooden walls pock-marked with windows. The house originally belonged to some big-shot British sahib, and after the British leave, it is sectioned off into five apartments. Sounds sail in and out of rooms with no regard for privacy. Next door, the Saigani twins quarrel noisily, and in the second-floor flat, Ranjini
Abraham pedals on her ancient Singer machine, turning out perfectly tailored clothes for her children.

I find myself recovering slowly in this building full of cheerful, everyday noises. Our flat has a fireplace which the servants tell us is actually a secret passage leading to Allahabad. If you stick your head up a little way into the chimney, you can hear Mrs. Anderson singing. When the British Empire ebbs away from Indian shores, it leaves a few shells behind, like the Andersons, Mr. and Mrs., who are too deeply embedded even to think of leaving. They live on the first floor, and while other families either transfer out of Calcutta or are promoted to Arundel House or Type Six bungalows, the Andersons stay. At half past eight in the morning Mr. Anderson leaves for work. Just as he emerges from under the portico of the building, Mrs. Anderson leans out of her window like a faded Juliet and calls in a high singsong voice, “Bye, Dorling, see you at six o’clock!”

At ten o’clock she starts playing the piano. You can hear it
tink-tink-tinkle-tonk, tonk, tonk, tonkle-tink,
right through the day. It crawls through the old cement walls into the flat next door, drips down the cracks in the wooden floors to the flats downstairs. The servants in their quarters behind Godfrey Mansions time their work by Mrs. Anderson’s piano. At one o’clock she stops for lunch and picks up again at two. She never speaks to any of us. One day, moved by her isolation, I try to make friends with her. Mrs. Anderson opens the door a crack, the safety-chain still on. She is in a cotton dressing gown, her hair piled in a bun on top of her head.

“Yes, can I do something for you?” she snaps.

“Just thought I’d drop by to say hello.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mrs. Anderson replies, and shuts the door. A few minutes later I can hear the piano. I never visit her again.

“She thinks she is the Queen of England,” I remark to Linda Ayah.

At four in the afternoon Mrs. Anderson starts singing along with the
tink-tonk
of the piano. That is when when the children of Godfrey Mansions, back from school, play in the porch and on the lawn outside.

“
Lavender Blooo,”
sings Mrs. Anderson.

“
Ooo-ooo-oooo,”
chorus the children downstairs.

“Ihove yoooo,”
Mrs. Anderson continues.

“
Ooo-ooo-oooo,”
yell the children in a perfect frenzy of mirth.

Kamini informs me that when I am not at home, Roopa and her friends make obscene noises up the chimney in tune with Mrs. Anderson’s music. They burp and make farting sounds by pressing their mouths against their palms and blowing hard. Kamini is becoming a sanctimonious little nuisance. Perhaps Dadda is right, I shouldn’t have sent her to the nunny-
amma
school. She refuses to wear skirts above her knees, or sleeveless frocks.

“I don’t want lustful eyes to fall upon me,” she says when I ask her what her problem is.

“Whose lustful eyes?” I demand.

“Anybody’s,” says Kamini the saint.

She spends her pocket-money on issues of “Soldiers of God,” which the nuns sell at school. Roopa steals them from her room and reads them aloud at the dinner table, making up sentences as she goes along. “God’s message to all young people: Wear not the sleeveless dress. Tattle against thy relatives.”

Dadda glares at me. These girls he loved as babies are now as puzzling as I am. That closeness they shared has begun to fade.

“See the trash they learn at your convent school?” he snaps.

“It’s just a phase she is going through,” I say.

Dadda does not reply. In the early years of our marriage, the argument would have been continued later, in whispers, in privacy. It wasn’t decent to quarrel before the children. Those days he was worried about losing the argument in front of them. Even later, in the bedroom, he was pleased if I gave in.

“It’s all right, everyone makes mistakes,” he would tell me, allowing himself a small smile and then sleeping soundly through the night. If I refused to let him win, he withdrew into a frozen silence for days, acting as if I did not exist.

Now Dadda’s silence, punctuated by hard coughs, is that of a man who is losing a painful battle against illness and so does not care about small victories any more. He scrapes his chair away from the table and moves slowly out into the verandah. My daughters continue their squabbling, their voices filling the momentary silence he leaves behind.

“She wants to become a nun, Ma,” says Roopa, waving the “Soldiers of God” at her sister. “If she becomes a nun, who will make cow-eyes at Frankie Wood?”

“
Chughal-kore,
tattle-tale. I’ll never tell you any secrets,” screams Kamini, her eyes filling with tears.

“I told you not to go near that Anglo fellow,” I say, glaring at Kamini. “Do you ever listen to anything I say?”

“I do nothing but listen to you,” she shouts. Where on earth did she learn to be so mouthy? “And you are a fine one to tell me not to mix with
Anglos!”

Roopa glances wide-eyed at us. Kamini stares defiantly at me, slightly frightened by her own temerity. She is almost as tall as I am, I think with a shock. I wonder whether I ought to slap her for her insolence. No use, the only person who feels the pain is me, my palm hurting as it bounces off her hard, bony legs. “Do what you please,” I say finally. “And don’t come running to me if you are in trouble afterwards.”

Kamini bursts into tears. “You never care about a thing I do. You never did. And now
he
doesn’t either.” She points towards the verandah where Dadda sits, staring out at the sunny garden, and then rushes out of the room. All these dramatic exits! Are we in a play or what?

“My oldest is at that age,” remarks Latha. “Do this and he wants that, say that and he thinks this. Every day a fight with his fiather. God knows what happens to them suddenly, henh?”

Linda Ayah used to tell me that a child is like a little god till the age of five, is human till it turns twelve, and after that it becomes a donkey. Perhaps the sudden descent from divinity is too much to bear! I stare out the window at barren sweeps of land, not even a bush to make shadows with the sun.

Vicki, the teenager, laughs suddenly. “And I, Aunty-ji” she says to Latha, “I am taking a holiday from my mother. God knows what happens to parents when their children grow up!”