Tamarind Mem (11 page)

Basheer transported us into a world of riches and romance, of dark eyes peeping through slatted bamboo screens and vast
durbar
halls adorned with chandeliers, of dancing girls pirouetting in swirling skirts and sly intrigues within palace walls. His grandfather was the royal barber, which explained his own intimacy with the happenings in the Mor Mahal. One Sunday he told me the tale of Begum Haseena, the youngest of the Nawab’s harem.

“She was more beautiful than a thousand jewels,” said Basheer, tilting my head so that he could trim a little bit of hair on the side of my face.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Arrey
Baby-missy, it wasn’t just I who knew, the whole world had heard about the
begum
whose face shone like the moon. Now don’t move your head this way and that, I will cut off too much hair and then you will have a boy-cut,” said Basheer.

“Oh, can you do boy-cuts?” If I couldn’t have really long hair, I would keep it as short as my father’s. “Can you cut my hair really short, hanh? Hanh?”

“
Baap-re-baap
this child chatters more than a pack of monkeys!” exclaimed Basheer. “Baby-missy, if I cut your hair short, your mother will chop off my head.”

I giggled, and didn’t tell Basheer that Ma probably wouldn’t even notice if he shaved me bald. Since we’d moved to Ratnapura she seemed to have stopped caring
about anything. She often lay in her room with a headache and Linda Ayah was ordered to make sure that we did not get into any mischief. On some days, she dressed up in a starched cotton sari and called for a taxi to take her out on an unknown errand. I hated these outings and always made a fuss.

“Now you be a good girl,” Ma would say, gently pulling away from my clinging arms.

“Where are you going? Take me with you.” I didn’t want to be left alone in this great big house with only Roopa and Linda Ayah for company.

Now, sitting in the shade of the rain tree, I said imperiously to Basheer, “Cut my hair short-short. Ma won’t say a thing.”

“But Baby-missy, don’t you want to look as beautiful as Begum Haseena?” asked Basheer.

Instantly, all thought of looking like a boy flew from my head. “What happened to her, Basheer?”

“The other queens were so jealous that they kept trying to hurt her. Oh! I cannot even describe the awful things those jealous queens tried.”

“Then what happened?”

“So the Nawab had a maze built into the palace and the queens lived in separate apartments within the maze. This way they never met each other, the five begums, each with the temperament of a tigress, and the Nawab could visit his beloved Haseena without creating a typhoon of envy in the
zenana.”

Basheer sank into a little silence, his scissors stilled, his hand resting on the top of my head. I jiggled impatiently in the chair. “Then what happened, Basheer? Why have you gone to sleep?”

“Arrey,
what a child! Can’t an old man stop a moment to swallow some spit?” After a minute or two he continued, “Everybody knew that Begum Haseena was a milkman’s daughter and the Nawab had met her in a little village outside the city. Rumour had it that she had been chasing a butterfly when the Nawab came upon her and ever since he had called her his
thithali.
But so possessive of her was he that she was allowed none of the finery the other queens had.”

“Not even a pair of earrings? And bangles, what about bangles?”

“Nothing, not even a pretty dress,” said Basheer, his scissors clicking away, creating a fine black dust of hair that danced in the sunlight before drifting down. “The Nawab Sahib was afraid that the evil eye might touch her, you see. He also insisted on her wearing heavy black robes, even in the privacy of her apartment, so that nobody would see her beauty but him. Poor butterfly, she languished in the labyrinth, yearning for the bright fields of her childhood, the gay mirrored skirts of a milkmaid, for the colour and light denied her. Then one day she disappeared. No one knew how she escaped the maze. Perhaps she turned into a butterfly and flitted out of the window.”

“Where did she go?”

“Ah Baby-missy, if I knew I would tell you, but I don’t. It is believed that she still roams the streets of this city disguised as an ordinary person. She wears a veil, I have heard.”

“But she must be very old, so nobody will be able to recognize her anyway.”

“No, no, such beauty never grows old, she is still young and glorious as a star, the poor Thithali Rani,” corrected Basheer.

I wanted desperately to believe in the charmed world he had conjured up, so different from mine of cold silences, angry voices in my parents’ room and Dadda’s long absences. And yet, I had to risk being disappointed, to ask, “Basheer, this story isn’t true, is it?”

“Baby-missy,” replied the barber solemnly, “it is as true as the hairs on my head!”

Here, in this quiet part of the town, where life moved slow as garden snails, Basheer’s stories added colour to a boring summer. Roopa was a silly baby who didn’t know how to play anything, Ma’s strangeness frightened me, and I was tired of Linda Ayah’s vigilance. It was like having a scrawny shadow dogging my footsteps. Sometimes I managed to give the old spectacle-face the slip. The corner in the dining room between the sideboard and the curving wall was my favourite hiding place. At that point, the windows that swept around half the room began their journey, and Ma, obsessed with privacy in this shameless house with its gaping apertures, had covered them with heavy green curtains. I was a ruffle in the drape, safely concealed from Linda Ayah’s sharp gaze.

“Kamini baby!” she called, irritated. “I will tell your Ma, teasing Ayah all the time. Naughty,
badmaash
girl!”

I peeped out and glimpsed Linda shuffling into the verandah, Roopa slung over her hip, mumbling and cursing. Ayah was angry mostly because she wanted to be out in the back verandah with the other servants, slapping
khaini
and gossiping about the sahib in Bungalow Five. How much he drank, no control at all! His wife, it was rumoured, was so fed up that she was leaving for her mother’s house. Especially after the party at the club, the
day before yesterday, where the sahib had behaved like a perfect fool.

“Arrey!”
remarked Ganesh Peon, leaning forward. “He went up to the General Manager memsahib—you know how she dresses!”

The servants nodded eagerly. GM memsahib was notorious for her low-cut blouses so tight that they might have been painted on to her skin. For parties she wore sleeveless
cholis
which allowed everybody else glimpses of her naked, grey underarms.

“Well,” continued Ganesh, “the drunk sahib went up to her—she was sitting in a corner—and you know how she sits!”

Again the servants nodded. The GM memsahib crossed her legs when she sat, her sari gaping to reveal plump, well-shaped calves. Other memsahibs adjusted the folds of their saris so that only their feet were visible, but the GM mem had no such modesty.

“She was sitting with her sari up to her knees and the Number Five Bungalow sahib grabbed her ankle and said, ‘What a fine chicken!’ And then the madman bit her leg!”

“Hai-Ram!”
The servants sent up a collective gasp. I giggled at the thought of a plump leg being bitten, and immediately Linda Ayah turned to catch me. I ran into the house, knowing that Linda would follow, grumbling about missing the many interesting details that could be carved out of the main story, chewed over and commented upon.

Later in the day, I played with Shabnam, who was allowed out only after three o’clock, when the sun hovered low in the sky.

“My mother says I will become dark and nobody will marry me,” she explained primly.

“Then I’ll come to your house and we can play inside,” I suggested, eager to watch Mrs. Bano drifting about the house enveloped in her
burkha.
All that could be seen of her face were her eyes through a little panel in the veil, and her hands, tipped with bright nail-polish, emerging from the long sleeves.

“I think she is the Butterfly Begum,” I told Ma, who lay in her darkened bedroom, a damp towel covering her face. She had a headache and had not left the house today. I was pleased, and instead of going out to play, I sat near the window, filling in a colouring book. I didn’t say a word, even when Roopa broke one of my crayons. She had her own crayons but insisted on playing with mine, and if I made a fuss, Ma said that I was not behaving like an older sister. I didn’t ask to be anybody’s older sister, I wanted to say, but Ma might slap me if I did.

“Ma, do you think she is the Butterfly Queen?” I asked again.

“Oh Baby, what are you talking about?” murmured Ma fretfully. “Don’t bother me now.”

“The wife who ran away,” I continued impatiently. I had told Ma the story a million times.

“Whose wife? Baby, don’t chatter so much, you know Ma is unwell.” Faint irritation tinged her voice. I knew she was beginning to get into a bad mood and I slipped out of the room.

Ma spent lots of time in bed, seemingly paralysed by the copper shimmer of the sun. Sometimes she said it was the heat that bothered her. At other times, she could not bear the constant roar of traffic outside the colony walls.
And if there was nothing else the matter, Ma said that she could not stand the smell of Dadda’s tobacco or the sight of his dirty shoes in the verandah. When Ma had her headache coming on, Roopa and I had to be as quiet as mice. She did not like the sound of chalk on the slate, or the whisper of our slippered feet.

I knew almost everything about my mother, even that she sometimes fibbed to Dadda about what she did all morning. But when I told her that I heard her fibbing, she pulled me on her lap and said, “My darling Baby knows everything about Ma, hanh? But it’s our secret, okay? Yours and mine? And if you are a good girl and keep the secret, what do you think you will get from me?”

“A box of crayons?”

Sometimes Ma gave me only a box of Veera Sweet Mint, and at others I could persuade her to get me dolls and books. There were times, though, when Ma got mad with me and slapped me instead.

“What cheek!” she would exclaim, her slaps brisk and sharp, stinging my thighs.

I would wait for Dadda to come home, and cry, “Ma beat me, I didn’t do anything, only asked her not to go out, and she beat me.”

It always worked. Dadda scolded Ma, his face cold with anger, “Your place is in this house, not out there in the streets doing social work and gossip while my daughters run around like gypsy beggars.”

I collected these small instances and bided my time. It all depended on how annoyed I was with Ma. Sometimes, it didn’t even matter how many toys Ma got for me. I disliked being left at home with Linda Ayah. She made me eat up all the carrots and peas that I picked out
of the food and arranged on the side of the plate, insisting that if I didn’t eat them, the vegetable
bhooth
would sit on my stomach when I went to sleep. Or she would force me to take a nap along with Roopa so that she could watch both of us without chasing about the house.

Once when Dadda came home from a trip to Chittaranjan, he asked Ma what she had done all week and she shrugged and said, “I wasn’t well, I slept most of the time.”

I hated my mother for leaving me with Linda, and for not getting me the paint-box she had promised, so I told Dadda, “Ma is fibbing, she went out in a taxi.”

For a few days after, Dadda came home at five in the evening only to have a quick shower before driving away to the club, where he stayed till late at night. Sometimes I woke to the sound of his keys in the front door and the low angry murmur of Ma’s voice. Sometimes I thought that the angry voice was Dadda’s, but in my half-sleep I was never sure. Then I felt sorry for having tale-tattled to Dadda. I wished that I was more like Roopa who kept her mouth buttoned up tight, never breathing a word people did not want to hear. I envied my sister’s willingness to listen to everybody and then swallow all that she had heard. It made her seem such a
good
girl. Even Linda Ayah, with her glasses that saw right into a person’s heart, could find no fault with Roopa. “Why can’t you learn a few things from that sister of yours? Half your size and twice as smart, that child,” she sighed.

On Saturdays, Ma took both of us for a trip to Simon’s Market to buy provisions and other necessaries for the house. It was also the day she bought us a toy or a trinket.
She got a little gift for herself as well, telling us with a naughty twinkle in her eyes, “Don’t tell your Dadda, he will make a face and scold me. He will say don’t waste money.”

Once she bought herself a pair of long silver earrings with
meena
-work in blue and magenta and said that she would give them to me on my wedding day. Another time it was eight toe-rings decorated with tiny flowers, fish and peacocks. I never saw her wear any of these ornaments and often wondered why she even bought them.

Ma and Roopa and I had so many secrets, I was becoming afraid to talk to my father in case a secret slipped out, although at one time I had loved cuddling up on his lap and telling him about school and my friends, and listening to his railway stories.

“In Aunlajori, where we had to stay for the night,” said Dadda, “the stationmaster warned us that the Railway rest-house was haunted. An English mem had died there, waiting for her husband who had gone boating up the Ganga. In the middle of the night, she started to play the piano.”

“Then what, Dadda, then what?”

“Is this man any better than that stupid Linda?” demanded Ma, who only seemed to hear Dadda when she disagreed with his words. “Scaring the child with ghost stories!”

Simon’s Market consisted of one main road with several narrow alleys branching out haphazardly. Cows blocked the traffic for hours, and dogs scavenged and fought in the piles of garbage outside restaurants. The pavements were occupied by vendors selling everything
from American visas to fountain pens that stopped working as soon as you took them home. We walked in the middle of the road with cars and scooters, bicycles and trucks inching their way before and behind us, honking futilely. Shopkeepers sat like greasy maharajas on elevated platforms inside windowless stores and measured out rice and sugar,
dal
and spices. We always bought our provisions from Theli Ram’s store, a dank, lightless hole of a place with several assistants dashing about in the gloom like rats. Ma found Theli Ram himself disgusting, for he had a habit of scratching vigorously at his sweaty armpit while he repeated her grocery list to the scuttering assistants, but he also had the best groceries in town. Sometimes when we arrived he would be finishing off food from a tiffin-carrier which looked like it had not been washed in years. When he saw us, he swiftly wiped the yellow oil from his fingers on to his fleshy calves and beamed a welcome. He snapped his fingers at his assistants, the movement making his loose, pouchy breasts quiver, his belly jiggle up and down, and yelled, “Railway Memsahib’s order,
phata-phat!”
He always reminded me of the wooden dolls you could get at Waltair station—squat, round things that you tapped on the head to set off a chain of dancing motions.