Tamarind Mem (32 page)

With the arrogance of youth I had believed that health, wealth, wisdom and happiness were all mine for the asking. I would have a house larger than the one my parents lived in, for I meant to become a doctor and set up a
bustling practice. My husband would be a Hindi film star, all song and sacrifice, heroism and romance. But the strong dreams of youth can waver before the harsh mirror of reality. Dadda was not the husband I wanted him to be. He could not be, for he was a living, breathing man, not a cardboard film character. The realization came too late. His body had yielded to an invasion of sickness and his mind was busy warding off the savage onslaught of pain. Too late, too late for me to say let us begin again, I have eaten my anger, swallowed my conceits. Too late to say come back.

A person grows on you like an ingrown nail. You keep cutting and filing and pulling it out, but the nail just grows back. Then you get used to the wretched thing, you learn to ignore and even become fond of it. Same with Dadda. His quiet became a part of my noise. If he had not been so silent would I have babbled on? Can you clap with one hand? Which means that I cannot put the entire blame for our life on him. I can, but my daughters tell me I am being unfair. But that is an old story, enough to say that I learned to live with the man I married. As my mother might say, it is the lottery ticket I picked, and I could do nothing about it. Marriage is a game of give and take, sometimes one has to give a little more than the other, and so the balance is maintained.

“Nobody in the world is entirely happy,” Amma says, her voice creaky with age. The years have run by, both my sisters have married, my brothers are ponderous old men with a puffed-up air of importance about them. Amma’s hair has ribbons of grey, her skin is crushed into pouches and lines, her hands shake slightly as she folds her
paan
leaves. She no longer snaps at Chinna for making mistakes. Chinna’s bald head, which has been barber-shaved
every month since she was widowed more than fifty years ago, is like a grey brush now. She forgets things, leaves half-eaten food in various parts of the house and then curses the servants for being lazy.

“So careless they are,” she grumbles to Amma. “I have to follow them cleaning up like a scavenger!”

My mother nods and nods. She clings to Chinna these days, frightened of her sharp-tongued older daughter-in-law who has assumed the position of mistress of the house since my father’s death.

“I don’t want any bad blood between us,” she has told my mother firmly. “I won’t poke my nose into your kitchen and you keep yours out of mine. You know the old saying, ‘A man can have two women in his bedroom, but more than one in his kitchen is murder.’”

So Amma keeps her mouth shut. Sometimes it is wiser to be quiet. And anyway, she has completed her responsibilities as a wife and a mother, now she can retreat into silence.

I, on the other hand, have a long way to walk before I can settle quietly in a corner. After Dadda dies I still have my daughters to bring up. It is hard for me to believe he isn’t here. I find myself saying things into thin air. I smell cigarette smoke where there is none and resist the impulse to tell Dadda that he is killing himself inhaling all that tobacco. Kamini and Roopa prefer to think of their father as they last saw him, his face calm in death, untouched by the cankers that swarmed through his body, eating steadily through the flesh and marrow, turning wholesome red blood pale and sickly. They do not want to acknowledge the slow death that moved through his body, or remember the bottles leaking fluids into him,
the tubes draining pitiful wastes away. Such indignity for a man who could not bear the smell of his own sweat.

My crazy sister-in-law Meera sends me two mangoes in a box a week after Dadda dies. “For my brother’s children and his widow, a small gift from my orchards to relieve your sorrow.”

What orchards? She is in an asylum for the mentally ill.

Meera always surprises me. For a person who doesn’t know who she is or why or where, her handwriting is remarkably lucid. Beautifully formed, neatly rounded, every “t” precisely crossed. She even used to write letters to me sitting on my own verandah.

“Respected lady, I would appreciate it very much if you put three spoons of sugar in my evening coffee instead of only two.”

“Madam, I have noticed two young girls entering the house. When I asked them who they were and if they required anything in particular, they made discourteous faces at me. I am offended by this behaviour and would request you to take immediate action.”

Polite, meticulously neat letters. And then suddenly a wild burst of anger, pure lunacy like a raging summer storm. The girls stayed out of sight and worried about whether the neighbours could hear the awful raving. I locked her into her room and prayed that she would, in the grip of the nightmares that possessed her, kill herself. But why think about her? It is time now to shed the past, to begin yet another phase of life. We are no longer a part of the Railways, this house is ours only till the end of next month.

I start selling all our things. The car goes to a motor-parts dealer. It was never anything more than a collection
of nuts and bolts and wires anyway. The carved rosewood chair with the scratch down its front leg made by Meera’s knitting needle, the teak coffee table carved by Girdhari the carpenter, both are sold. The
niwaar
beds, the big mango-wood cots—how much the children jumped on them and still they are as good as new—the sideboard, the meat-safe, toy cupboard, Dadda’s father’s mahogany office chair with the broken wicker back, all gone. I am beginning to feel weightless. With each piece of furniture that leaves our house, a sliver of memory escapes, forever lost. Kamini says that is impossible, you can never lose memories. She is sixteen and dangerously sensitive about every little thing, from the way she looks to the way I behave in front of her friends. Roopa is too young to feel anything other than bewilderment at the loss of her father, but Kamini imagines that we are somehow discarding our past along with the furniture.

“Do you have to sell my grandfather’s chair?” asks Kamini. Why is she making such a fuss over that chair? Kamini never even knew her father’s father!

“It is an ugly thing,” I argue. “And the only memory I have of it is of Dolly Aranha sitting on it, telling me about her husband.”

“Don’t, don’t! I refuse to hear another of your stories.”

“It’s not a story,” I protest. “It’s true.”

Dolly’s husband had returned from a trip to France with a suitcase full of lacy undergarments for his wife.

“I asked him for an umbrella,” Dolly complained, tears running down her curved cheeks. Everything about Dolly was sweetly round—her face, her little nose, her eyes, even her hair, which she wore in two coils on either side of her head. “See what dirty things he got for me. He told me that
they were naughty things for a naughty girl. I am a good girl, my Mamma brought me up to be nice and respectful. Where this man got such dirty ideas from you tell me?”

“They are pretty,” I remarked.

“Pretty? Pretty? What is here to call pretty?” Dolly gasped as she held up a tiny pink panty. “Low-caste rascal, says to me, ‘Dolly, this is for you and me.’ Shame-shame things he says.”

I wanted to tell her, Dolly, you are so lucky. My husband never bought me anything to decorate myself. My husband hardly even saw me.

“My Mamma was right, she said men have unnatural needs,” continued Dolly. “But it is my duty to close my eyes and do what he wants.”

“Ma!” interrupts Kamini. “Why are you selling my desk? I might need it. I still have to finish my studies, you know.”

“Do you remember when Dolly Aranha saw the first ghost?” I ask.

And Kamini, my first-born, full of virtue, says, “Why don’t you leave poor Dolly alone, Ma?”

“Do you remember or don’t you?”

“I don’t.”

“She made Mr. Aranha into a ghost. She even sprinkled holy water on him when he came home from work, remember? Dolly would not sleep with him because he was a ghost.”

“He was a creep,” says Kamini. “He stared at all the girls. Ma, you aren’t selling my grandfather’s chair! It’s an heirloom.”

Between her and Roopa, we end up with a lot more baggage than I intended to take with us to our apartment
in Madras. But at last, we are ready to leave. The furniture, wrapped in old newspaper, faded bedsheets and yards of gunny sacking, waits like oddly shaped mummies in the spare bedroom before being loaded on to one of those goods bogies that meander across the country dropping off rice or wheat, coal or wood. Ganesh Peon and Linda have washed the floors of the house with Phenyle so that the place smells like a hospital ward. They stand awkwardly near the front door while we wait for the car that will take us to the station. All of a sudden they look like strangers to me, these two old people who I have known for eighteen years and might never meet again.

Five minutes more and the train will move away. The station bubbles with people haggling with the coolies and making sure that children, relatives and baggage are all safe. The tea-boys rush up and down the platform, shouting in high, nasal voices, “
Chaichaichaichai-chaaaii!”
The tea they sell is scalding, the skin on your tongue peels off and you tell yourself that the muddy numbness is the delicate taste of brew in an earthen tumbler. A woman in a green sari is thrusting a handful of rupee notes to a boy peering out the window in the compartment next to ours. Have you wiped the bars with some tissue dipped in Dettol? I feel like asking him. Beggars put their faces festering with sores against those bars; spittle dried there not five minutes ago! The woman in the green sari is crying now, shaking with large sobs. She wipes her nose with the end of her sari; the boy at the window looks embarrassed. He draws away from the window, but the woman shoots out a hand, the red glass bangles tinkling, and holds on to
his shirt. She is his mother? Lover? Sister? No one ever weeps for me at a station, not even when I leave my mother’s house for my husband’s. Isn’t that when your female relatives burst into tears? Back away ululating their sorrow at having given away a daughter, not knowing if her life will be scattered with grief or filled with joy? Only Chinna cries a little for me, Chinna, who cries for everything from third-rate movies to the announcement of a stranger’s death in the newspapers.

“Did either of you count the cases before we left home?” I ask Roopa and Kamini. If Dadda were here I would not have to worry about our luggage.

Roopa sits with her legs sprawled out, flicking through a comic book. Kamini perches nervously on the berth next to me, alternately staring out the window and biting her nails. I have booked all four seats. I tell Kamini to make sure the safety-catch on the door is closed. That way no last-minute passenger can barge in to occupy a seat with bags,
potlis
and water-bottles. I have paid for the luxury of extra space and I don’t mean to let anyone else have it. Perhaps I should shut the windows on the station side. The windows on the corridor side of the compartment are already shut, so no one can peep in and see that there are only three people in here. All they will have to do then is bribe the conductor and that will be the end of our privacy.

“Four
sleeping
berths, Madam,” the conductor will argue. “Daytime it is six seating. Railway rules, Madam. I am helpless.”

I am familiar with all the rules. I have lived with them for eighteen years. After all those years, I am entitled to break a rule or two. So until the train starts up and is well
outside the station, past the stinks of Guwahati and into the clear air of the country, the doors and windows on that side remain shut. Never mind the terrible heat that envelops us, sweat springing out and filling the compartment with sourness. A low, booming horn is sounded, a diesel engine, the old steam engines are disappearing off the tracks and are lying unused in a workshop somewhere. The platform begins to slide away; the faces outside the windows look like distorting clay as we gather speed.

“Hold your noses, the stinks are starting,” says Roopa.

We are all familiar with this geography of smells. The platform first, with its odours of cigarettes,
beedis,
overripe fruit, urine and frying fish. Then the drains sluggish with faeces and engine oil. The slum with the monotonous grey pall of poverty and the slimy green pond. There is no way to define the stench from that noxious pond. A leather factory vomiting out smoke. And then, just when you feel that you will explode from holding your breath, the paddy begins and the air is clean.