Tamarind Mem (33 page)

“I wonder if we will ever come back here,” says Kamini.

And Roopa, in a nasal voice, “I’ll die if we do.”

It is pitch dark outside, not even the flicker of a kerosene lamp from a passing village.

Hameeda yawns and cracks her knuckles. “I am going to sleep, Aunty-ji, tomorrow I will listen to your story.”

I smile at her, knowing that she doesn’t entirely approve of me. Irritation, sometimes shock, flickered across her face as she listened to me. Was I telling the truth or making up everything? Why should I care what she thinks? I will be getting off this train early tomorrow morning and she will never see me again.

Her sister Sohaila is more sympathetic, nodding every time my words strike a chord in her. “Sometimes I feel like running away too,” she says, her soft thin face filled with guilt at her own declaration.

Latha stands up and yawns, scattering biscuit crumbs. She has finished a whole packet of Marie biscuits in the past two hours. She spreads a sheet on the berth and slaps her pillow a couple of times. “You don’t mind, no
bhabhi-ji
, if I sleep also? You too must be tired, so much talking-talking”

Sohaila checks to see if the door is securely locked and turns off the lights. I stretch out in my berth and allow memories to cover me like a blanket.

Into the compact space of the new apartment I move our steel trunks which carry scars from practically every corner of India, so much they have travelled. On the faded green sides are remnants of destination stickers—Ratnapur, Bhusaval, Lucknow, Calcutta—a summary of my incarnation as a Railway wife.

For a few months the trunks crowd up the flat, making it look smaller than it is. Eventually the girls and I arrange our belongings in the cupboards, and the place looks more like home and less like a loading yard. I drape our old curtains on all the windows, snipping off more than half the length, so that I will not have to look at the road running behind the flat. Nobody is very sure of the name—my maid thinks that it might be Ammattan Palai, but Uncle Gangadhar, the old man downstairs, has a different story. A hundred years ago, the British sahibs arrived here, couldn’t get their short foreign tongues around the name of the road. Maybe a Hamilton sahib
peed here, and so they called it Hamilton Bridge Road. Who knows why things are named what they are named? Then the people in the town rolled this new name round and round in their mouths till the edges wore smooth. When they spat it out like a well-chewed
paan,
it had become Ammattan Paalai. But the British couldn’t say “Ammattan,” so they put on their solar-hats and thought, “Hmm, what does Ammattan mean?” And someone, a
peon
or a
clerk-babu,
said, “Saar, saar, it means barber,
ammattan
most surely means barber.”

Until that time, the shops around the bridge sold Canjeevaram silk saris. It is said that when the sun hit the inside of the shops where the saris were piled high the whole bridge glowed like a valley of jewels. But when the name became Barber’s Bridge, all the barbers in town thought, “Hunh, why not open a shop there in that place which already has our name?”

And so the road truly became a barber’s strip. Today if you go in there you can hear the scissors going
kitiki-kitik,
the air a fine mist of hair and a smell of Dettol cancelling the pig-shit stink of the drains. And while it is true that these barbers give you the best haircuts in all of the city, they also leave a louse or two in your head.

There is also a fruit vendor whose apples and bananas and mangoes and oranges need to be washed several times to remove the fuzz of hair that has settled on them from the barber shops. One-armed Muruga is a permanent fixture beside the bus-stand. He sells pornographic books inside innocuous covers like
Gone With The Wind,
and
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
His books are displayed on a large bedsheet, and when he sees a policeman strolling by, he quickly gathers up the ends of the sheet, slings the
makeshift sack over his shoulder and disappears into one of the many back-alleys leading off the road. A fortuneteller, who, my maid tells me, is richer than Kubera the god of wealth himself, has staked a claim to the spot beneath a pathetic neem tree with barely any leaves or branches. The fortune-teller’s eyeballs move in their sockets completely out of control, engaged in a weird dance against the walls of his eyes. He claims that although he cannot see the people before him, he can see their future lying in wait all around their helpless bodies. My daughters are fascinated with him and waste their money sneaking out to have their fortunes read.

“You will travel far and away,” he tells Kamini. “Baba Blinding Light sees what ordinary eyes cannot.”

“Why you want to listen to that old bandicoot?” I ask her. “Study well, and work hard, you carve your own fortune. Look at me, if I had had the courage to take my future in my own two hands instead of listening to a potbellied priest, I might have been a doctor!”

Perhaps if I charge my girls fifty paise for each bit of advice I give them, they might listen to me.

My apartment is small, with several windows and balconies. A gulmohur tree dapples the corner of the front balcony with its shade. When my daughters and I move in here ten years ago, we have to look down from the balcony to catch a glimpse of the tree. I barely notice how it has grown till Roopa and Kamini leave the house.

These days, to fill the hours that tick by so gradually, I catch sight of the tiniest changes, hear every whisper. In the morning I sit in the front balcony, watch the sun swim out of the darkness and listen to the grey, fluffy birds—called the seven sisters, I think—quarrelling over
worms. The gulmohur tree creaks in the wind, and a few of its brilliant red flowers drift reluctantly onto my balcony. They are whole and unbruised and I pick them up to float in a shallow bowl of water. All of this summer, the tree was covered in blossoms, fiery with colour sucked from the sun. Now I can sense the approaching shift of season. The flowers are fewer, faint green leaves, multi-pinnate, feathery, are beginning to dust the branches once again. A sign that moisture gathers, the monsoons blow over the Ghats. With so much time on my hands, I seem to smell these little shifts. Feel them as well, if the growing ache in my right knee is any indication. Yes, I can almost hear the clouds, swollen-bellied, rolling in from the sea. The winds are cool and soft, the rain touches the earth tenderly. This is a gentle city to live in.

A year ago they changed the name of the road outside my house, yet again, to Vallabhai Patel Marg. The new minister is full of nationalistic fervour. He is the fellow who wears dark glasses all the time, because, his party men whisper, he doesn’t want to dazzle people with the brilliance of his eyes. The other party says that he is blind from syphillis caught from the whores of the city.

“Remove every sign of the blood-sucking British,” the minister said to justify renaming the road. I don’t know why it should matter, the Brits are gone forty years! But these ministers are like that, when they run out of ideas to collect votes, they attack the past. What is the use of that, I ask you? The past changes in the context of the present. But who am I to comment?

By the time I came to terms with my new address, another donkey, who I confess I voted for, decided that what we needed was a woman’s name for our road. So it
is Indira Gandhi Marg now. Why our road, I ask you? Out of sixteen thousand roads they choose ours. These constant interruptions in what I had hoped would be a smooth stretch of existence are beginning to get on my nerves. Just as my feet settle into the soil, the ground itself starts shifting. When my daughters phone, I tell them about the way the earth moves beneath my quiet feet, and they go into a silence that stretches uncomfortably long. They think I am senile or maybe even crazy. They think that the earth can move only when there is a quake. How wrong they are, but they are young. It is only when you reach my age that you notice the slight tremors, the nervous shifts that the earth makes beneath your tired feet. Or perhaps, like a sailor, I still feel the rocking of the trains on firm land.

The apartment is on the same street as the Chief Minister’s bungalow, which has its advantages. I never have a shortage of water, for the very same pipes that carry water to his bungalow also carry it to my flat. Heads will roll if the important gentleman does not have water to wash his bottom in the morning. Politics touch all our lives one way or another. Thanks to the Chief Minister, our road is swept clean, the trees are lush and well tended, none of those ragged limbs shorn of leaves by wandering cows, branches torn off by urchins in search of firewood. Someone with imagination—a poetic imagination—planted those trees. In the boiling heat of summer, the sky is a delicate mist of lavender jacaranda. The steaming tarmac of the road is sheeted with purple flowers, and the minute you enter the road, you are in a tunnel of fragrance.

Every morning at five o’clock I am awakened by the milk van. Not so much the van as Manja, the fellow who
owns the dealership. The pavement in front of my apartment building is his distribution centre. He parks there noisily and straight away begins a quarrel with the delivery boys—young fellows with bicycles who stream in like a circus parade, bells jangling, chains rattling, cracking obscene jokes. They pile plastic bags bulging with milk in baskets attached to the handlebars and the backs of their bicycles and wobble precariously away. Manja likes to heckle them, shouting about accounts and balances, lack of speed, lack of orders, anything to start an argument. The boys shout back, defying Manja’s authority as he struts around his van gesticulating furiously, his face screwed up inside the green muffler he wears through every season. I hurry down to collect my packet of milk. Although I am a regular customer, Manja resents the fact that I don’t pay a delivery charge. Why should I waste five rupees every month when all I need to do is step outside my own gate?

“No milk left,” Manja says, a mean glint in his eyes, if I get there just as the last boy cycles off on his rounds. “I told you, get it delivered, otherwise you have a problem.”

That is my cue to wheedle. “Come, come, I am an old customer, forever I have been getting from you only. If I wanted I could have asked Dhanraj Groceries to bring milk for me. But I thought, why should I go to someone I hardly ever see?”

It usually works. Manja looks at the sky for a few minutes, taps his foot and says, “I will have to see if I have any extra quota left. These days my business is growing all the time, and it is difficult to provide milk to everyone who asks. Only this time though, I will give you. Can’t say what will happen tomorrow.”

It is a game with him, makes his day worthwhile. He has power over someone in this world. I don’t grudge him that tiny satisfaction, I am only interested in getting milk. But when the Diwali festival rolls around I give nothing more than a five-rupee note as
bakhsheesh.

“What Ma,” he says disappointedly, “no sweets for my children? What is Diwali without sweets?”

And I retort with satisfaction, “I have to take so much trouble to get two litres of milk, where do I have the energy to make sweets to distribute, Manja?”

He understands what I mean, and for a few months after, I get milk without grovelling for it.

Now I rush up the stairs, leave the packet in the fridge, get into my walking shoes and set off down the road for a brisk stroll. In the morning, every minute counts. I have to be back at six sharp, or five minutes before if possible. Any later, and my maid Puttamma will have arrived, banged perfunctorily on the door and left in a huff. Another one of the games I play with the people in my daily life. These little tantrums and shows of temper never interrupted my routine as a Railway wife. Linda Ayah showed up every morning, the
peons
never fell ill, the
dhobhi
arrived on Tuesday to collect the laundry. That was another existence altogether. When I left that life I felt naked and vulnerable, the rough-and-tumble of the ordinary world scraping against my skin. Only after you lose something do you realize how valuable it was. Then you get used to the loss, dust the memories off your body and begin anew.