Tamarind Mem (7 page)

She allowed Roopa and me to open delicate silver tins still stained with turmeric and vermilion,
akshathey
and sandal paste from her wedding.

“When you get married,” said Ma, “I will fill these boxes with joy, my blessings will perfume each of them.” She touched her wedding sari, a Benaras tissue of red and gold. “For you I will buy only Canjeevaram. A tissue is beautiful when it is new, but in a few years it is a pile of powder. Looklook how it crumbles and breaks!”

“But Ma, I want a wedding sari just like this,” I begged, in love with the frail, whispery fabric like a butterfly’s wing.

“Listen to me
chinni,
your mother knows what from what. Some things look better than they are,” said Ma.

Hindi melodies from Mukesh movies streamed out of the bathroom along with the sound of rushing water as Ma washed her cascading black hair. She hummed in the bedroom, patted puffs of talcum powder under her arms, across her back, where sweat sprang and wet her Rubia blouse. She sang as she wrapped a rustling cotton sari around herself and then came out to dry her hair on the verandah, where the sun roared out of a blue, blue sky. I remember how she smiled at me upside down, through a flying sheet of hair, and I stared in awe at my luminous mother. Once, when she came out to the verandah, I was eating my breakfast, my mouth opening and closing as Linda Ayah spooned in
sooji-halwah
rich with raisins. When I saw Ma, I kicked my legs and pursed up my mouth, turning away from Linda’s coaxing.

“Come on, Baby-missy, my
kanmani,
don’t you want to grow big-big?” wheedled Linda, her fingers hard on my chin trying to turn my puckered face towards her. But no, I wanted to go to my mother, so pretty and smiling. I climbed her fresh crackling lap, buried my face in the long neck and smelled her jasmine skin. I pushed my head between Ma’s breasts, wondering at the tender yielding beneath my face. Her chain of gold and black wedding beads pressed against my cheek, leaving tiny imprints. Gold for the good and black for the bad, Ma had explained. In a marriage you were obliged to live with both. Through the spiky fringe of my eyelashes, I could see the peacock eyes on Ma’s sari border, the fine brown hair on her arm, the two moles like flecks of coal-dust. I could hear her heart
ka-thump-a-thump,
the rumble
of her stomach. I held my own breath for a second and released it so that it matched the rise and fall of Ma’s breath. But I couldn’t burrow into her fragrant warmth for long for she had to go somewhere.

“I want to go with you, takemetakemetakeme,” I wailed as Ma peeled away, ready to sing out of the house.

She spent hours chatting with her friends on the telephone, disappearing for a matinee show sometimes. When she returned, she acted out funny bits from the movie for Roopa and me, her long arms flying in the air, her eyes bright with laughter. Sometimes, on a Saturday, she might clap her hands and say, “Let’s go for a picnic today!” And then Ganesh Peon would scurry around preparing baskets of food, grumbling aloud about the Memsahib’s erratic moods. “She thinks I am a magician. Make
puri,
make
aloo-dutn
! And all in ten minutes if you please!”

There were times when she did nothing at all. Her sewing piled up in great coloured heaps in the guest room, her knitting lay abandoned in its faded cloth bag. Even when strips of sunlight picked out dust patches under the furniture, and she knew right away that the maid Rani had not touched that place with her broom for days, Ma ignored it. And Rani swung her hips in her saucy skirts, tossed her head and breezed through the house, leaving dustballs and cobwebs where they were. Later, later, when Dadda came home and Ma went thin-lipped and mean, Rani would get a good scolding. Then my mother swallowed her smile and ordered Ganesh Peon to make hot
phulkas.
She spent hours in the spare room cutting up cloth to make dresses for Roopa and me, her face so serious that for a long time I was certain that I had two mothers. Ma was a two-headed pushmi-pullyu from
Dr. Dolittle’s zoo, or the Ramleela drama woman with a good mask on her face and a bad mask on the back of her head, changing her from Seetha to Soorpanakhi in a single turn.

Linda Ayah went gloomy when Ma sang. Her face crumpled into a frown like an irritated monkey and she muttered beneath her breath. She fought with Ganesh Peon, yelled at the
dhobhi
for putting so much starch in my frocks that the cloth scratched Baby-missy’s skin. Her thin nose quivered with displeasure. She became as huge as a cloud threatening to erupt into thunder, and finally even Ma couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What?” she demanded, glaring at Linda. “What’s wrong with you?”

“With me? I am as fine as this morning. Why should anything be wrong with me?” said Linda. “Am
I
doing anything I should not do? Nono.”

“Then if everything is okay with you, stop giving me those looks,” snapped Ma, her fingers nervously braiding her hair into a plait that flickered like dark lightning down her back when she walked.

When Dadda was at home, Ma wore all that hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, secured by curly hairpins. Perhaps he had told her that it was undignified for a memsahib to leave her hair flying about her face like a wild woman. Dadda did that sometimes, made odd comments that made Ma cry. If I found a pin lying on the floor, let loose from the sliding brilliance of my mother’s hair, I kept it under my pillow, for it was almost like having Ma next to me, patting me to sleep as she used to when I was much, much younger.

It was now four months since Ma had taken off on that absurd trip of hers, wandering around India like a gypsy with only a bed-roll, a flask of water and a small bag. She sent us postcards after she had reached her destination, never letting us know where she was going next. She spent her journey telling stories to sweepers from Jhansi, fishwives from Sanghli, a minister from Guntoor who had just lost the elections.

“The man had a forest of hair growing out of his ears and nose,” she remarked in one of her wretched cards. “And he didn’t believe a word of what I was telling him about my life. I think he suspected that I had escaped from the Ranchi asylum.”

I wished that I could write and inform Ma that the minister was not alone in his suspicions. She was definitely crazy, an old woman like her who disappeared, leaving a trail of postcards, not even decent letters, to mark her wanderings!

I called Roopa to discuss the situation. We talked to each other frequently now and compared postcards, for Ma did not always write the same things to both of us.

“What are we to do if there is an emergency?” I asked. “Suppose something happens to her? How will we know? And what if one of us has a problem? We can’t even contact our own mother! Ridiculous!”

“Oh, leave her alone,” said Roopa. Her voice sounded indulgent, almost as if I was one of her children. I think she imagined that her marriage, her mortgaged home, even her motherhood gave her a certain status, a maturity that I had yet to gain. “Ma is probably having a wonderful time. And even if she was sitting at home and fell down the stairs or something, what could we do? It would take me at least three days to get
there. I’d have to find somewhere to leave my children, can’t afford to take the whole jing-bang lot with me.”

Ma made her way from station to station, camping in waiting rooms, one of the hundreds of anonymous passengers waiting for a train. She travelled second class, sharing a compartment with six, sometimes even eight people, crammed shoulder to shoulder on the upper berths, the aisle, the floor.

“Whatfor is a railway pass if not to passage everywhere?” she demanded on a postcard with a picture of lurid pink lotus flowers. “All my life I went where your father wanted me to and now I follow my whims.”

A long time ago, Dadda had pinned a map on my wall. It was to stop me crying every time he left on tour.

“This is where I will be,” he had said, drawing a line of red ink on the map. Over the years, the map grew crimson with Dadda’s routes, marking out stretches of land that he had helped to capture and tame, setting them firmly on maps and timetables, dots connected by iron and wood and sweat. Ma had the map now, and she was following the lines of faded ink.

Of all the rooms in the Ratnapura house, the guest bedroom was Ma’s favourite. She said that she liked the view from the windows, and although I stood on a chair to see what she saw, there was nothing but the dirty old garage, the rain tree with the car parked under it some days, and Paul da Costa the car-magician leaning over the bonnet, or lying between the wheels with his big feet sticking out.

When Dadda left on line, Ma allowed me and Roopa to play in the room where she herself sat reading or sewing. At night we would all huddle under the yellow-and-black bedspread with its pattern of elephants, and Ma would tell
us a story till we went to sleep. I did not mind this room during the day when sunlight streamed through the windows. At night, however, I was uneasy here, missing the familiarity of the lamp in my own bedroom, the rocking horse with its toothy grin and gay pink and gold tassels streaming down its arched neck, that Girdhari the carpenter had made. This guest room had too many doors and I hated it if they weren’t firmly shut, the bathroom door especially, which led from the yellow warmth of the room into darkness. The toilet gurgled there suddenly even when nobody used it, creatures scurried in the dry drains, a translucent lizard clung to the wall above the mirror and went
tchuk-tchuk-tchuk.
Ma said that if the lizard made that noise when you were saying something, it meant that your words would come true. I tried it a few times.

“I will get a new dolly,” I said once, although I never really cared for dolls the way Roopa did. Another time I said, “My Dadda will never go on line again.” The lizard went
tchuk-tchuk-tchuk,
but neither of my statements came true.

Still, the bathroom door was less worrying than the one that opened to the cloying fragrance of the unused verandah. The floor there was deeply fissured, rangoon creeper and jasmine had conquered the cement pillars, and rolls of tattered
chik
-screens hung in arched apertures, disintegrating a little more every time monsoon winds smashed against the fragile bamboo. Sometimes the darkness lying like a pool of ink beyond this room seemed to speak.

I woke suddenly one night, my eyes trying to find Ma’s body in the bed beside me, and felt cool, flower-filled breezes drifting through the verandah door, carrying the sound of voices. In the dim moon-radiance, I couldn’t see Ma beside me, only Roopa’s small shape, and my throat
closed with panic. I pulled the sheet over my head and waited trembling for a
bhooth
to carry me away, out beyond the verandah where trees reared up like giants and the wild cry of night birds shattered the silence. After many hours, it seemed, in which I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my legs together to stop the urgent pee from sliding out, the bed undulated slightly. Ma was there again, her smell filling my nostrils with crushed
darbha
grass and mango leaves washed by rain. Different from her morning smell. Was it really Ma?

In the morning, I asked her about the voices in the breeze and Ma laughed. “You were having a dream,” she said, stroking my hair, her brilliant eyes mirroring my face.

“The dream took you away,” I said, remembering the crushed-grass smell, so different from the pale drift of lavender powder clouding Ma now.

Linda Ayah glanced up from the coconut that she was scraping and shook her head. “You be careful, Memsahib, careful-careful,” she said, looking like an angry owl.

I had no idea what Linda Ayah meant. Was she telling Ma to be careful about the ghost? Why only Ma? There were times when I felt that every single person in the house was talking about something different. Hidden rivers of meaning flowed across the room, sliding beneath and above each other, intersecting to create a savage whirlpool. When we moved from Bhusaval to Ratnapura, our train had crossed a bridge, a huge iron skeleton hovering over a river still and molten in the afternoon sun. Beneath that stretched and shining calm lay dangerous eddies and crocodiles, said Dadda. He pressed a rupee coin in my hand. “Give that to the river. She will be pleased with you.”