Tamarind Mem (16 page)

I wanted to swagger around the school grounds with Miranda Fernandez, who giggled through Mother Superior’s sermons and said loudly, “Bloody Albino, what she means is don’t let anyone get inside your sainted knickers. Keep your head aloft and your skirts down.” (Miranda, the daring one, who wrote “lover” and “bitch”
on the toilet walls, and sprayed herself generously with perfume, defying the Sisters’ insistence that we wear no perfume, nail-polish, make-up.) Instead I was more decorous, dignified and decent than a whole convent. I plodded doggedly through algebra, geometry theorems, calculus. Ma wanted me to major in science. An engineer or a doctor made money, no need to get married then.

“You did science,” I sulked, “and you got married.”

“Those days things were different,” Ma snapped. “My parents did not give me the encouragement I am giving you.”

I had to get away from my mother. As quickly as possible. Even if it meant a hundred bottles of Amruth-dhaara, dozens of eggs to make my brains work and math tutoring every evening after school. I stayed awake till two-three o’clock in the morning, my one ambition being to finish school and get out of the house, away from Ma. Maybe even get married, although if Ma was to be believed, that would be like escaping from one locked room into another, forever wandering in a maze, hitting my nose against closed doors.

When Dadda came home the earth swung around and became a warm, comforting place. I could tell him how Ma was forcing me to join the stupid dance-drama at school and after I cried a bit Dadda would rescue me from the grasping tentacles of Ma’s will. But if I was my father’s favourite child, then Roopa was most certainly Ma’s. When I back-chatted my mother, or left my underwear on top of the laundry basket instead of burying it at the bottom as a girl with a sense of shame would, Ma would remark, “Just like your crazy aunt! You are turning out to be a Meera!” When Roopa did the same, Ma said
that she was a dog’s child, a dirty-dirty
shani,
but never-ever used the Meera curse.

I was always alert to the rivers threading their way through every house we inhabited. I had developed a fine instinct for these unseen bodies of water, knowing which ones ran deep, where the currents were dangerous and whirlpools lurked. I knew that a chasm gaped between my parents, a hole so deep that even Dadda with his engineer’s hands could not build a bridge to span it. If I spoke of the currents and eddies to Roopa, she ran to Ma complaining that I was scaring her.

“Ma!” she cried. “Kamini says that if I don’t walk carefully in the house, I will drown.”

Roopa could see nothing beyond her own tilted nose, and Ma only yelled at me. “Act your age,” she scolded. “You are too big to be scaring your sister with stupid nonsense stories.”

As we grew older, I stopped trying to show Roopa the hidden worlds that seethed beneath the surface of the ordinary, for it seemed that she had, in her mind, closed the doors that opened into imagination. If she could not
see
a purple rose on a bush or a peacock on the front lawn, she declared, it couldn’t possibly be there.

“I
have rubbed the peel of a ripe Nagpur orange on this card,” wrote Ma. “Right now it smells as fresh and tangy as the fruit itself. I hope the smell has not faded by the time the card reaches you. And if it has, all you have to do is imagine.”

The postcard had the picture of a Hindi film actress with thick, pinkish thighs and breasts that jutted aggressively under a shimmering brassiere of sequins. Where did Ma manage to pick up these awful cards? As usual, apart from the vague note, there was nothing else, no information on where she was planning to go next, no return address.

I stared out the narrow window set high in the wall of my basement apartment. The snow had piled up in chill swaths, and I could barely see what lay beyond. I felt like a mole tunnelled into its lair of darkness, weary of the never-ending night that had descended on the city. When I left home in the morning the stars were still scattered in the sky, the moon a pale aureole. And at five in the evening when I trudged home laden with coat and sweater and muffler and mitts, barely able to turn my head for the padding around my neck, it was still night. I held Ma’s card against my face and breathed in deeply. Opened my eyes and I could see, against the implacable white of the snow outside my window, dark leaves and the bright colour of fruit ripening in the sun. My mouth filled with the tart juice of a burst orange.

In the unkempt garden that was shared by all the apartments in our Calcutta house, there grew a lemon tree. I loved to crush the thick, porous leaves and sniff at the lingering spice on my fingertips. The tree never bore fruit. Our washerwoman, pounding the life out of clothes in the cemented courtyard behind the building, said that it
was because the tree was male. She nudged Linda Ayah and remarked, “Like our Ganesh Peon, that lemon tree! Big-big
kottays
and no kiddies!” She cupped her hands and moved them up and down as if weighing fruit, and then shouted with laughter, her mouth wide open, revealing large, jagged teeth stained black and orange with tobacco juice.

On Sundays, after an oil-bath, Ma sent me out into the sunny courtyard where Linda Ayah waited to rub my hair dry. Our building sat at the far end of the colony, and across the high brick wall I could hear the sounds of traffic on Cunningham Road and the wail of ambulance sirens, for there was at least one accident in the city every single day. Sometimes I would catch the mournful boom of a steamer on the River Hooghly, or the siren crying out warning of the bore tide rushing in. The streets of Calcutta were so crowded that it seemed you were stuck in the same spot for hours, inching only slightly towards your destination. There was invariably a procession or a strike going on, creating tedious traffic jams, so that, one day in every week, we were late to school. Roopa and I travelled by bus now, for this was a large city and our school was too far to walk to.

“Don’t talk to strangers,” warned Ma. “Kamini, don’t dream and stare out of the window. Hold your sister’s hand, so you are together all the time. It is time you learned to be responsible for someone else.”

Now that I had turned twelve, I noticed that Ma spoke to me differently, almost like a friend. Even the dreaded oil-bath day was no longer a wet battleground but a time when Ma talked to me, told me of her own childhood, gave me advice. Ayah was not allowed into the bathroom
to pour water over my head any more. Now only Ma could see my body, decide that it was time I wore a brassiere. I wanted her to buy me a red one from the vendor outside our colony gates. The man claimed that it would give me a figure like that of the film actress Rekha. Then maybe Frankie Wood the club caretaker would look at me.

“Only harlots wear those things,” Ma said as she pushed my head downwards, her fingers stroking oil into the base of my skull, so warm, so warm. “Be careful how you dress, be careful who you speak to. You are twelve years old and you don’t know whatall can happen.”

I was too grown up to be afraid of Linda Ayah’s ghosts and imps, but not too old to worry over Ma’s tales of girls who got into terriblehorrible trouble.

“There was a girl named Alamelu,” said Ma, “who lived in a house with a garden full of shoe-flowers and travelled by bus to college.”

This Alamelu loved university, her teachers, the smell of books in the high-ceilinged library, the stone buildings, even the grumpy librarian. Her favourite subject was chemistry, for the professor had the ability to turn it into something more magical than a dry profusion of formulae. Alamelu planned to do a Master’s degree and perhaps a Ph.D., provided her parents did not get her married.

“It is good for a woman to be ambitious,” said Ma approvingly. Her stories had several messages—study hard, reach for the best, don’t be brazen—and she never failed to point them all out to me.

Alamelu wanted to spend a lifetime with sulphides, oxides, carbides, powders, ores and solutions, all those substances frothing and fuming in bell-jars and test-tubes.
Which was why she was reluctant to tell her parents about the three loafers from Dominic’s College across the road.

I could imagine them, with their tight pants, their loud shirts open to reveal their chests, their slick hair and bold glances. Ma said that they lounged at the bus-stand, near the tea-stalls, scribbling obscenities on walls and aiming spit at the pillars holding up the tin roof of the bus-shelter.

“They might not even have noticed Alamelu in her cotton
salwar-kameez
suits, or dull saris with long blouses that covered most of her waist,” continued Ma. Alamelu’s mother was strict about her clothes, insisting on getting her to hide as much skin as possible, and never mind the steaming summer heat. But unfortunately for Alamelu, the three boys caught the same bus as she, swaying along on the ride back to the colony stop. At first, they were content with comments—“Hi Miss,” “Hey-hey beauty”—accompanied by leering glances that made Alamelu want to jump off the bus. Instead she sat stony-faced as near the driver as possible, staring out the window. They hung over her and pushed their crotches into her shoulder, leaned across her to peer out of the window. Sometimes they got lucky and found a seat beside her. Then they pressed against her thigh, dropped a careless arm across the back of her seat and whispered in her ear. Nobody in the bus had the courage to interfere, for these were
goondas,
violent fellows who carried knives.

One evening they followed her into the colony and one of them pulled out a knife. With a single stroke, he sliced open the back of Alamelu’s
kameez,
and a little of her back as well. “She should have screamed, she should have told someone about the rogues,” sighed Ma. “Listentome! A woman is never safe!”

I felt the power of my mother’s fingers in my scalp, kneading the skin and bone and flesh. Knowing that this was the only time I might get a reply, I asked Ma why she loved Roopa more than me.

“You are both the same to me,” said Ma.

“But Ma, you rub almond oil on her skin and mustard on mine. You never scold her when she gets her sums all wrong. You love my sister more.”

“I did the same for you when you were younger. You don’t remember, that’s all.”

Soon after, for the Diwali festival, she bought me my first sari, and pinned it in place with two dozen safety pins so that it wouldn’t slide off when I walked.

“Don’t rush like a wild thing,” she scolded. “Take small steps, learn to walk with a little grace.”

“She looks like a stick in sheets,” said Roopa.

“And you are a blackie,” I replied.

“Kamini!”

“She started it.”

“You are older, you should know better!” remarked my mother as always.

“She is your darling baby who can say whatever she pleases. I don’t want this ugly sari.”

“You look beautiful in it,” said Ma in a firm voice.

Dadda looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. I waited for him to say something. He smiled such a sad smile and I thought guiltily of the last time I had sat with him and listened to his stories. Was it a month ago? Six months? A year? Had he noticed that one of his daughters had moved away from childhood? Or did he exist in a changeless world, where the only things that moved were his trains? Dadda knew the trains as well as he did
his own body. He knew their schedules, when they were late and why, where they had been held up by landslides, boulders, fallen trees, wandering cows. But did he remember that I had turned twelve, that I did not find Charlie Chaplin movies so funny any longer, that I wanted shoes with heels for my next birthday instead of books by Enid Blyton? On the India-map in my room, his finger moved across the crisscross line between Siliguri and Gariahat.

“The old WG 2-8-2 engine had a roar that made the forest shake,” he said. He had just returned from the site of a terriblehorrible accident. “A bull elephant as big as this house heard the engine deep inside the leaf shadow of the jungle and thought it was a mating call.
Noni,
don’t you want to know what happened then? Don’t you want to hear my story?”