Cracking India (39 page)

“Did you marry her, then, when you realized that Lenny's mother had arranged to have her sent to Amritsar?”

Ice-candy-man, his muddied hair falling forward from his bowed head, remains still.

“Why don't you speak? A little while back you couldn't stop talking!”

Suddenly Ice-candy-man clenches his hair in his fists. His eyes are bloodshot. His face is a puffy patchwork of tears and mud. He tugs his hair back in such a way that his throat swells and bulges like a goat's before a knife, and in a raw and scratchy voice he says: “I can't exist without her.” Then, rocking on his heels in his strange, boneless way, he pounds his chest and pours fistfuls of dirt on his penitent's head. “I'm less than the dust beneath her feet! I don't seek forgiveness... ”

There is a suffocating explosion within my eyes and head. A
blinding blast of pity and disillusion and a savage rage. My sight is disoriented. I see Ice-candy-man float away in a bubble and dwindle to a gray speck in the aftermath of the blast and then come so close that I can see every pore and muddy crease in his skin magnified in dazzling luminosity. The popsicle man, Slavesister and we and our chairs and the table with the fan skid at a tremendous angle to dash against the compound wall and the walls bulge and fly apart. Godmother's house and Mrs. Pen's house sway crazily, the bricks tumbling.

The images blur and I try desperately to suck the air into my deflated lungs and Godmother holds my violently shivering body tight and I hear her say as if from far away, “Look how you have upset the child! You've turned us all insane!” And she pats my breathless face and sharply says, “Stop it! Stop it! Take a deep breath! Come on, inhale. Everything is going to be all right!”

She must have signaled to Slavesister because the slave heaves herself off her stool and, anxiety quickening her movements, stoops to lift me. Her face, too, is streaked with tears and her eyes red and she is muttering: “Finish it now, Rodabai, that's enough. Pack him off.” And I cling to Godmother. And stretch like bubble gum when Slavesister tries to pull me away. And at a signal from Godmother she lets me be. And I, rubbing my face in Godmother's tightly bound bosom, grind the cloth between my teeth and shake my head till the khaddar tears and I smell blood and taste it.

“Ouch! Stop it! You've turned into a puppy have you?” says Godmother pushing my face away.

And when my teeth are pried away from her bloodied blouse and I at last look into her shrewd, ancient eyes, I can tell her tongue is once again in her cheek.

Everything's going to be all right!

 

Jinnah cap in hand, Ice-candy-man stands before us. His ravaged face, caked with mud, has turned into a tragedian's mask. Repentance, grief and shock are compressed into the mold of his features ... And his inflamed eyes are raw with despair.

The storm that has been gathering all day rushes up the drive,
slamming open the doors and windows. The three-pronged eucalyptus dips threateningly above our heads. As we scurry to shut the windows and carry the chairs inside, waves of mud obscure the drive and swallow the poet's fluttering white clothes.

 

The innocence that my parents' vigilance, the servants' care and Godmother's love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin's carnal cravings, nor the stories of the violence of the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged round me. The confrontation between Ice-candy-man and Godmother opened my eyes to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion. To the demands of gratification—and the unscrupulous nature of desire.

To the pitiless face of love.

Just as Godmother feels the urge to donate blood, she is impelled by an urge to pop up at the right place in the hour of a person's need. Yet I am surprised when, fingering her gray silk sari and matching blouse laid out on the stack of trunks, I ask, “Where are you going?” and she, after an unintended and dramatic pause, replies, “I'm going to see Ayah.”

My heart stops. I feel as if I've run all the way from Warris Road instead of walking here, holding Hamida's finger. If I don't hold her finger Hamida turns hysterical and babbles,
“Hai!
We'll be run over by the cars and tongas.”

It is Saturday morning. Adi and Cousin have gone to the grassless Warris Road park to play cricket. That is, Cousin will play and Adi will probably be forced to spectate. Mother is out.

I cannot speak. Godmother holds my twiggy arm beneath my starched and puffed-out sleeve and pulls me to the cot. Oldhusband, sitting before his desk on the bentwood chair, is reading his prayer book. Sibilant hisses flutter between his lips and every short while he clears his phlegmy throat. And, in a voice that sounds inaudible, and quivers with anxiety, I finally ask, “Can I come with you?”

Godmother stares somberly before her and remains quiet.

“Please.” I swallow a lump in my throat.

“I can't take you,” Godmother says. “It's no place for children.”

“I want to see Ayah,” I say, my longing making me sigh between the words.

“I really wish I could take you.”

“Why don't you ask her to come here? Won't her husband bring her?”

“He is willing to. But she refuses to come.”

I cannot believe Ayah wouldn't want to see me. See us.

“Her husband is lying,” I say fiercely. “He's making excuses.”

“No, she is ashamed to face us,” says Godmother.

“Ashamed?” I say surprised. And even as Godmother says: “She has nothing to be ashamed of,” I know Ayah is deeply, irrevocably ashamed. They have shamed her. Not those men in the carts—they were strangers—but Sharbat Khan and Ice-candy-man and Imam Din and Cousin's cook and the butcher and the other men she counted among her friends and admirers. I'm not very clear how—despite Cousin's illuminating tutorials—but I'm certain of her humiliation. Sensing this, I more than ever want to see Ayah: to comfort and kiss her ugly experiences away.

“I want to tell her I am her friend,” I say sobbing defenselessly before Godmother. And remembering Hamida's remarks, I cry, “I don't want her to think she's bad just because she's been kidnapped.”

I have never cried this way before. It is how grown-ups cry when their hearts are breaking.

Mini Aunty returns, silently bearing grocery bags and ice, looking like a fat and elderly sari-clad wax doll melting.

Godmother greets her. “I thought the tongaman had run off with you! What took you so long?”

It is a purely rhetorical salutation and Mini Aunty need not reply if she doesn't want to. Ignoring Godmother, looking neither guilty nor annoyed, Slavesister is preoccupied with stashing the groceries and splintering and stuffing the ice into a thermos.

We hear a horse snort, and the creak of tonga wheels outside the door. Then a steady liquid noise, as of water gushing from a hose under pressure.

Oldhusband raises his praying voice in forbidding censure.

“Ummm, umM, uMM, UMM!” hums Godmother in a rising
crescendo of disapproval, and breaking into speech she says, “My God! How do you expect us to sit outside this evening?”

“It will evaporate ... You can't imagine how hot it is!” says Slavesister, unperturbed.

“Can't I? Where do you think I live? In the North Pole?” and then, reverting to the matter in hand: “What if the horse decides to perform on a grander scale? Will that evaporate too? How often must I tell you not to let the tonga come in?”

“I've told the tongawallah to take care of that.”

“Oh? What will he do? Diaper the horse?”

Mini Aunty continues placidly to unwrap her sari, and turning mildly pleading eyes to Godmother says, “The tongawallah said the poor horse really had to get some water or he'd collapse.”

We hear the tongaman cluck his tongue and lead his horse and tonga to the trough at the back.

“You'd better remember to sprinkle the evaporated puddle with rose water before we sit out,” says Godmother sarcastically, but in a softer tone, thereby conceding Mini Aunty a reprieve on compassionate grounds.

“I've arranged for the tonga to take you to—” In deference to my youthful presence Mini Aunty abruptly checks herself. She ends by enigmatically saying, “You-know-where, at two o'clock.”

“Then you'd better set about getting lunch ready,” says Godmother.

Godmother's fingers are slightly trembling. Not with the tremor of age but with nervous concentration as she drapes her sari, with its finely embroidered floral border, before a slender half-mirror embedded in the cupboard. Her concentration is a tribute to the six yards of heavy gray silk, and to the occasion for which it is being worn. Normally, not bothered with their appearance, both she and Slavesister wrap their saris without the aid of mirrors. Unlike Mother, who pivots fastidiously in high heels in front of a
full-length mirror to adjust the hem of her sari and precisely arrange the dainty fall of her pleats. It wouldn't be fitting if Mother dressed with less circumspection. In her case I feel adorning and embellishing her person is an obligatory rite and not a vanity.

Godmother moves closer to the mirror. As she carefully begins to pin the border to her hair, Mini Aunty, looking as if she has arrived at a decision, suddenly and gravely declares: “I think I'd better come with you. You'll need my support!”

Her teeth clamped on a tangle of U-shaped hairpins Godmother turns abruptly. Facing Slavesister she says: “Since when have I started needing your support in such matters?”

“You can't go there alone, Roda. You must have someone with you.”

Notice the unembellished Roda? Mini Aunty uses this form of address to sidle into a more dominant role. This has been occurring with alarming frequency of late: and the slave gets away with it—and the meager Roda—with alarming frequency.

“Oh, all right! If it makes you feel any better, I'll take Lenny along,” says Godmother, attempting to appear reasonable but only managing to sound devious.

“You can't be serious!” exclaims Mini Aunty.

“Why not? She won't be contaminated—if that's what you're afraid of.”

“How can you even dream of taking the child there!” says Mini Aunty, her eyes brimming with reproach, the chubby disk of her cheeks lengthening in solemn consternation.

“I'm not taking her
there,”
says Godmother. “We are only visiting a simple housewife in her simple house. The house merely happens to be
there.”

“But what will her mother say?”

“That's between me and her mother. You know perfectly well she trusts my judgment... Not like some ungrateful brats I could name!”

“I know you...,” says Slavesister, pale and hangdog. “The more I say the more stubborn you become. One can't tell you anything. Have your way...”

“Have I ever done otherwise?”

“Oh, I know! You always have your way... ”

“Then why are you wasting my time?”

“But have you given a thought to what people might say?”

“That I've become a dancing-girl? With bells on my ankles? Or worse?”

It is too much for Slavesister. Blinking tears she goes into the kitchen and commences mumbling.

Come to think of it, I'm hearing her mumbles after a long time.

 

At two o'clock the tongaman taps on the door with the bamboo end of his whip and shouts: “I've arrived,
jee.
I'm parked by the gate.”

Godmother quickly compresses her lips and daubs her face with talcum powder. She peers at me through the chalk storm and, almost shyly, winks into my awed and smitten countenance. She looks grand. Her noble ghost-white face and generous mouth set off to advantage by the slate-gray sari and its pretty border. She is my very own whale—and her great love for me is plain in her shining eyes.