Tamarind Mem (2 page)

“Time enough to be pampered and washed, to rest from the pain of bearing life,” said Ajji firmly, making sure that Ma heard, because she wasn’t willing to keep a married daughter in the house for longer than that. “After that you return to your husband.”

For three months Ma went back to being a girl, sleeping when Roopa did, playing
cowrie
with me. She sat in the back verandah allowing her oiled limbs to soak up the sun, waited for Chinna to summon her for a bath, moaning with pleasure as steamy-hot water was poured over her puffy body. Later on, she stood pliant and drowsy in her blouse and petticoat while Chinna wound a soft, old sari about her belly.

“To bring your mother’s waist back,” she explained to me, and pulled the cloth so tight that Ma said she couldn’t breathe.

Of all the people in Ajji’s house, Chinna was the most interesting. She was small and quick, with the look of a darting brown bird about her. Her head was shaved clean as she was a widow and was not allowed any vanities such as long hair or pretty clothes. Fate had deprived Chinna of the joys of normal life, yet she enjoyed herself more fully than anybody else I knew. Chinna loved the latest films, clapping enthusiastically with the rowdy theatre crowds when the hero appeared on screen. She smacked her lips over the chocolates that relatives brought for her from England.

“Ah, I can taste a different land, I can taste the sweetness of the people there,” she sighed, delicately unwrapping the silver paper and taking a lick at the little chocolate before
popping it into her mouth and sucking noisily. Ajji watched sourly. “Who would think she is a grown woman? Look at how silly she behaves!”

I was frightened of my grandmother, a slow, silent woman who regarded me with what seemed like a complete lack of interest. She never told me stories, like Chinna, nor did she pamper me with sweets and toys. Oh yes, Ajji bought me a new silk
lehenga
and matching bangles every time we visited, but the gold on the cloth was thinner than it was on Gopal Uncle’s daughter’s.

“Ajji, why is mine less shiny than Aparna’s?” I demanded, piqued by the unfairness.

“What a girl!” exclaimed my grandmother, her mouth stained with red
paan
juice as if she had drunk blood. “You are lucky that I even got you a nice skirt. Aparna is my
son’s
child, remember?”

Nono, I did not like Ajji very much at all. Thatha, my grandfather, was all right, but he insisted on reading to me from huge philosophy books, his voice putting me to sleep. “Thus did Krishna explain the nature of the world to Arjuna,” he droned, his hands waving, emphasizing every word that Lord Krishna uttered, while I looked longingly out the window or watched a large black ant march purposefully towards his twitching foot. Thatha had started twitching when he turned sixty, a couple of years before, tiny shudders that travelled in waves all over his liver-spotted body, as if a creature inside was struggling to get out. My cousins and I had made a game out of guessing when the next twitch would attack Thatha, and when the old man found out about it, he would shiver extravagantly to make us laugh. Thatha died three years after Roopa was born, a heart attack seizing his body as he energetically
chopped the green shell off a coconut. He had performed this task for as long as I could remember, his left hand cradling the coconut, his right clenched on a cleaver slicing the thin morning air and
thuck!
The pale, silver water lay revealed like a secret lake, sweet and ready to drink. Ajji grumbled at this ritual, complaining that Thatha was being silly, performing young tricks with an old body. “To show off to you little ones,” she said. “He is fond of children.”

Ajji did not think there was any point in becoming fond of people, especially children, for they grew up and changed, disappointed their parents, filled them with sorrow, got married and left the house, or died before you really knew them. Chinna said that at Ma’s birth the only thing Ajji asked was whether the child was a boy. When the
dai
said no, Ajji sighed, for now she would have to have another one.

That year the sugar cane yield was so good that everybody who came to see the baby said that she was Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, incarnate. Putti, Ma’s grandmother, wanted to name her after the goddess, but the family priest said that Ma’s name should begin with a different letter, one that was more auspicious, more in harmony with Ma’s birth stars.

“When Saroja, your Ma, was born,” said Chinna, her old eyes squinting as if searching the past, “you could get a whole garden of beans for a rupee. Why, you could get three bushels of sugar cane fresh from the fields for that princely sum of money. These days a bit of cane is a luxury, even here in this place where the fields are full. What is the world coming to?”

I didn’t want to know about the prices of things, I wanted Chinna to tell me about my mother’s childhood.
Did she cry till she had a choking fit, as Ma had told me I used to do? Did she like boiled peanuts better than roasted ones? Did she cry when she fell or strut around showing off her wounds, like my cousin Indu? I believed that if I knew every little thing about Ma, I would be able to understand why she was happier here in this old building with high, thin windows that let in hardly any light than in the grand Railway colony houses where my Dadda waited for us to return with the new baby.

“The month that your Ma was born,” continued Chinna, trying to place Ma in history for me, “the sugar cane was being harvested and rivers of juice turned the soil to mush. If you stuck out your tongue, you could taste the wind laden with sweetness. That year, our neighbour and his son had a terrible fight. Old Thimmaya was a supporter of the British and insisted on having the Union Jack in his own compound. The British, in return for his loyalty, rewarded him handsomely with fertile sugar land. Ah! that Thimmaya was like a posh English gentleman himself, with his fine
angrezi
shoes which his servant polished with beer! But Bheema joined Gandhi in his struggle for India’s independence and called his father a traitor. He built a pyre on his lawn right before the flagstaff and burned all of Old Thimmaya’s fine English shirts and books, even his watch. A foreign watch with fancy gold work on it! Bheema was a good boy, a patriotic boy you know, and he wanted to marry your mother.”

“Then why didn’t he?” I asked.

“Oh nono! He was of a different caste. Besides, their horoscopes didn’t match at all, and then his father threw him out of the house for causing such
gad-bad.”

I could not understand this horoscope business. Your horoscope was supposed to predict your future. The priest would read the position of the stars at your birth and then tell you how your life was going to be. But then everybody I knew should have had a good life, for their horoscopes must have told them what to watch out for. And yet there was Ma’s cousin who had lost his leg in an accident two years ago, and an uncle whose wife had run away from home leaving behind two little children. Take Ma herself. She could not marry Bheema the boy next door because his horoscope did not match hers. And yet she had married Dadda, whose horoscope didn’t exist because he was not even sure when he was born!

Ma never failed to get intensely irritated by this story of the missing horoscope. “Your father says he comes from a family of priests! Probably a lie, like everything else about him. Who ever heard of a priest’s child not having an exact record of his birth? His father must have been the village sweeper!”

My Dadda wasn’t a sweeper’s son. Did a sweeper have such an elegant nose, such a bigwide forehead, such a way with stories? True, he did not tell me anything about his birth, his childhood. I knew my father only as a grownup person who travelled in trains and sometimes told Ma to shut up when she yelled and screamed. Ma, on the other hand, had dozens of stories surrounding her. In fact, there were so many conflicting ones from her brothers and sisters, her mother, grandmother and Chinna, that sometimes Ma seemed as much a puzzle as Dadda. What was I to make of her when half her relatives claimed that my mother was such a nice, well-behaved child and the other half insisted that she was a stubborn fusspot?

“Saroja and her sisters used to go to school together,” said my grandmother. “Lalli and Kusuma came back home looking as neat as when they left. But your mother,
Rama-Rama,
what a messy girl she was! And she was the oldest, too!”

Ma’s cousin Radha agreed, “We used to have a little rhyme for your Ma—‘Fuss-miss, fighter-cock, queen of the mud, Sa-ro-ja.’”

The year that Ma was born, the mango tree in the corner of the back yard bore fruit. Ajji said that it was because she had been pouring cow-dung water around the tree for a whole year. Chinna protested that it was because Lakshmi incarnate had arrived in the house. Who to believe?

Ajji spat betel juice into her silver spittoon, wiped her mouth with her sari
pallav
and remarked, “Hunh! Can a daughter ever be a Goddess Lakshmi in her parents’ home? She carries wealth
out
of the door! Your Ma climbed trees, tore all her beautiful silk
lehengas
and lost three gold earrings. I thought she would be a sweet Japanese doll, but things never turn out the way you expect. Such is life, remember that and you will never be disappointed.”

“Don’t believe your Ajji,” whispered Chinna to me. “
She
was happy. It was your grandfather who wanted a son. Men are like that, they need sons to show off to!” She dragged out a mouldy accounts ledger from the glass-fronted cupboard in the corner of the room. In his fine, curling hand, Thatha, my grandfather, had marked Ma’s birth in his accounts ledger as a list of expenses. Maternity hospital—Rs. 50.00;
ayah
—Rs. 1.00; sweets—Rs. 2.25;
jamedaar
—Rs. 1.50. (Chinna said that he grumbled about
the high sum spent on the
jamedaar,
a mere toilet-cleaner, but he knew that it was dangerous to annoy her for it was she who took away the bloody afterbirth and the umblical cord to bury deep in the earth, away from scavenging animals and evil spirits.) The list went on: a pink Canjeevaram sari and a gold necklace, which cost him 200 rupees, for Ajji. If she had borne him a son, it would have been a diamond pendant. But there was still time for that. Ma was only the first child, and a man must have daughters as well.

My great-grandmother, Putti, marked the arrival of her first grandchild by inviting the entire town for the naming ceremony. She had every doorway decorated with mango-leaf garlands of beaten silver, and she even bought a cradle carved by the cradle-makers of Ranganathpuram. She gave silk saris to all the female relatives who came, smiling from ear to ear while her husband sat morosely in a corner counting the rupees as they rolled out of his money-box.

“She was a wicked creature, your great-granny,” sighed Chinna. “Sometimes people are driven to wickedness, who am I to say this or that? But she was very fond of your Ma, they were alike in so many ways.”

I was born fifteen years after an important event called Independence. When that Independence happened, explained Chinna, all the pink people with hats packed their
pettis
and sailed for England. Then the Indian politicians said “Ho! Ho! Ho! The kingdom of Lord Rama will be restored to its glory!”

“But what difference whether the politicians were pink or brown?” remarked Chinna. “I still had three saris to wear, your grandmother chewed six
paans
a day, and your
Thatha’s money now bought one kilo of mangoes instead of ten!”

“And Ma,” I asked, “was my Ma pleased when she saw me?”

“Of course she was, you silly child. Were you not a piece of her being?”

I was never sure about Ma’s feelings for me. Her love, I felt sometimes, was like the waves in the sea, the ebb and flow left me reaching out hungrily. A love as uncertain as the year that I was born, when the Chinese had marched across the border into India, making a mockery of the slogan “Hindu-Chinee brothers-brothers.” That year the price of rice shot up, a grim famine swept across the north, and nothing was the same again.

“The year you were born, the whole country collapsed,” said Chinna, tweaking my nose and smiling.

Was my birth the dark moment in India’s horoscope, triggering calamity? Or was I merely one of thousands of children whose birth that year marked the end of an age, an age when even a rupee was worth something, and loyalty and morality were not just words in moral science class?

“Those days,” said Chinna, her fingers working warm coconut oil into my hair to keep it night-black, “those days you could leave all your doors wide open at night and go to sleep, so safe and nice. Only the
angrezi
could not be trusted. Pink and smiling, they would walk into your home, say hello-vello, fine day, howdoyoudo, and take away your table-chair-cupboard!”

Some mornings I woke to find frost on my window pane. If I peered at the window I could see the perfection of each icy
crystal. And when I leaned away, there was a glittering filigree of ferns, silver fronds, tree branches as delicate as the ones in those fairy tale books my Ma used to buy for me.