Tamarind Mem (8 page)

But in this house full of unexpected currents, I knew that a rupee coin was useless. I would have to move silently, carefully, make sure I did not wake the sleeping crocodiles. So I tiptoed around my room, unwilling to touch my stainless-steel cooking set, the Minoo doll that squeaked, anything that might make a noise. Through the verandah without my Hawaii sandals and into the kitchen, whisper to Ganesh Peon for biscuits from the green Dalda tin. Don’t flush the pee-water in the toilet, don’t spit too loud in the sink, don’t open the black squeaky cupboard door. No noise, no noise, no noise.

“What is wrong with that child?” muttered Linda Ayah, irritated with my whispering, gliding, crazynonsenserub-bish.“What she is trying to do, Jesu only knows!”

I went to school thinking of nothing but when I was going to be back. And when Linda Ayah brought me home I rushed straight to Ma, crawled into her lap and stayed there even when Ayah called me for a glass of Bournvita, frothy and sweet.

Ayah, who had been with me since the day I was born practically, was scary these days. She threw anxious glances at Ma when Dadda was in the house, as if she was also afraid that my mother would run away like she threatened. And when my father went away and Ma began to sing, Linda Ayah sat, malevolent as a toad, in the corner of the verandah.

“Why you are so pleased when Sahib leaves the house?” she demanded.

“Are you my servant or are you Lord Vishnu keeping an eye on me?” snapped Ma. “I can’t be happy in my own home?”

Linda didn’t dare to say anything more to Ma and instead took out her anxieties on me and Roopa, frightening us with stories of the ghosts and goblins that hovered about us. Over the years, the number of supernatural creatures grew and became more horrible and threatening. In every house we moved to, Linda Ayah pointed out solidified
bhooths
and monsters, frozen into innocent objects till midnight, when they came alive “to take care of naughty Baby-missies.” The scrolled wooden banister supports in the echoing, whitewashed Bilaspur house were weird, hunchbacked imps. The grinding stone in the back verandah of the Bhusaval bungalow was a grey
shaitaan
with a hole in its stomach. A
daayin
with three rows of teeth and feet turned backwards lived up the ancient chimney in the Calcutta apartment. And in the corner of the verandah in Ratnapura, there inside the twisted bel tree, was the headless manwoman, and the bel fruit was its hundred breasts oozing sticky juice that coated small mouths with ooh painful boils.

Linda Ayah pointed into the dark recesses of the ceilings, where hook-nosed goblins swung in cobweb baskets, and threatened me: “Now you eat that egg
phata-phat.
No
wak-wak
and rubbish fuss. Otherwise you know what will come howling down to sit on your tummy tonight.”

As we grew older, the size of the monsters grew as well. Now they had complicated stories attached to them. If I didn’t behave myself at the club, the girl ghost with her feet twisted inward would walk into my room at night, for she was the ghost who disliked disobedient children. Make faces behind Linda’s back and the wind
pretha
would twist my face forever into a grimace.

Roopa, with her closed-tin mind, had her own way of dealing with the spooks and haunts inhabiting every house we moved into. She believed unquestioningly in the monkey-god Hanuman, whose picture occupied a prominent place in Ma’s prayer room. This god, with his puffy cheeks and pouting red mouth, was Roopa’s talisman, her protection against Linda Ayah’s
bhooths
and
rakshasas.
Roopa wrote “Hanuman” under her pillow with a finger and slept soundly while I lay awake, my imagination too large and multihued, too dense to be blown away with a single name scrawled beneath the pillow. Linda Ayah’s creatures crept into my sleep and I would spring up, screaming wildly. There in the corner of my room where the moon shone straight into a mirror, lit up the red beadwork cushion on a chair, there sat a hag, her crimson eyes bleeding, her mouth, lined with rotting teeth, yawning wide.

“Yo-yo
Rama-deva,”
cursed Ma, stumbling out of bed, tripping over the faded cotton sari she wore at night. “What a nuisance girl. Who will marry her if she screeches in his face every night?”

She wrapped her arms tight around me and swayed to and fro, “Shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo.” It wasn’t good to wake a person from a dream, for the mind might remain in the dream and only the body would travel back to this world. So Ma just patted me on the back till I stopped quivering.

Ma was afraid that Aunty Meera’s madness had infected me, nono, that one of those unfortunate lunatic genes in my father’s family was waking up in my body like Linda Ayah’s frozen spooks. These fears never extended to Roopa, normal, stubborn, whose personal demon was the colour of her skin, dark as a
jamoon
fruit. “You love
Kamini more than me because she is prettier than I am,” she would say to Ma, looking slyly out of the corner of her eye at me. She knew that Ma, in an effort to prove that she loved us both equally, would give Roopa an extra kiss, the bigger slice of cake, let her have the first choice of ribbon. Roopa would pick the colour I liked and then make a show of sweet generosity, giving it to me with a smile, so that Ma could pat her on the head and say, “See, Kami, what a good little sister you have! Make sure you take care of her.”

I took Ma’s instructions to heart, anything to win her approval, that warm smile. So when the boys teased Roopa,“
Kaali-kalooti,
black pepper, Coca-cola,” I leapt at them, punching and biting, while Roopa went yelling for Linda Ayah.

“My Jesus-child!” yelled Linda, angry with us for dragging her away from a cosy gossip session with the other
ayahs
out in the club verandah. “What a tomboy. Come here you puppy, why you hitting all the childrens in the colony like a wild thing? You bad girl, wait you, a fish
bhooth
will breathe poison over your face at night!”

That night I dreamt of a fish with glittering, sharp scales scraping its way up to my cot, its dead eyes fixed on my helpless body. Then the dreaming screaming started, and Ma came running in. “
Shani!
Devil girl, why is she turning my hair grey like this? Is she possessed or what?”

The next morning she shouted at Linda, cursed Dadda and Aunty Vijaya. “Stuff this silly girl’s brains with more idiotic stories!
Deva-deva,
there is no room left in her head for sense!”

But Linda Ayah still spun her spider webs, Dadda crammed moreandmore stories in my head, and soon it
was summer, time for the Aunties to arrive, for Aunty Vijaya to cover the heated months with trailing histories, rambling family sagas, all of which knotted and looped messy as Meera Aunty’s mad knitting, till I felt that I did not exist except in somebody’s story, completely fictional.

A sunbeam shot straight through my living-room window, was caught by the prismatic jewel hanging there and splintered into dancing rainbows on the walls. I hoped that the rainbows would stay till my neighbour brought her daughter over. Claire stayed with me on Tuesdays while her mother was away at work. She was a solemn child who perched delicately on the edge of my sofa, nibbled at a cookie and listened to the stories with which I entertained her. Sometimes I spread out all of Ma’s brightly coloured postcards on the floor and we would cook up wild adventures for the travelling mommy, as Claire liked to call my mother. At other times, I would simply tell her about my crazy Aunty Meera, Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon, the ghosts in the tamarind tree, or the cobra in our Bhusaval garden.

Long, long ago, I would begin, there was an old witch named Linda Ayah who had great big knuckles and four eyes. She sat in the verandah of a house with bougainvillaea and morning-glory and jasmine and spun stories out of warm yellow sunshine, honeybee murmurs, the flash of a kingfisher’s wing. She reached out into thin air and drew out ghosts and imps; she clapped her hands and dancing girls and jugglers swirled and tumbled on the floor.

A little girl sat before her, open-mouthed, and demanded, “Is it true, is it real?”

“Everything is true, and everything is false. It is the storyteller and the listener who decide what-what is what,” said Linda Ayah.

I wished that I could summon Linda Ayah up from the past and ask her, “Tell me, was Paul da Costa real or not? Tell me, if he was such a magician with cars, if he fixed them so they never-ever broke, why did he come every Sunday for one whole year?”

Perhaps Linda Ayah would have asked, “Who is this Paul person you keep talking about? Why you thinking of useless mens all the time, hanh? I will tell your Ma wait and see.”

Or she might have patted a warm spot beside her on the verandah and begun a new story, “Once upon a time, there was a poor fool who had no brains, only magic in his head. He fell in love with a queen as beautiful as a blue lotus blossom.”

Butbut, Linda Ayah was only a shadow in a child’s landscape. She was probably dead, or perhaps she had moved on to another Railway family. Did she tell her new Baby-missies that there were ghosts swinging from the rafters? Did she tell them about the clever goat-girl who stole fire from an evil sorcerer and flew away? And when the Baby-missy asked, “But Linda Ayah, how can a girl fly?” did she nod wisely and say, “That is the story way, my sugar child”?

In stories things could be made to happen. You could grow wings on heroes, or give the heroine a voice like a koyal bird, and people never died. In real life, if you brayed like a donkey, no amount of honey could sweeten your throat; people went away and returned only as memories. In real life, I reflected, you warmed yourself on cold winter days in a foreign land by pulling out a rag-bag collection of those memories. You wondered which ones to keep and which to throw away, paused over a fragment here, smiled at a scrap. You reached out to grasp people you knew and came up with a handful of air, for they were only chimeras, spun out of your own imagination. You tried to pin down a picture, thought that you had it exactly the way it smelled and looked so many years ago, and then you noticed, out of the corner
of your eye, a person who had not been there before, a slight movement where there should have been the stillness of empty canvas.

It was time to put away the crockery, hide the knives and the forks, make sure the gardener and the maids and the iron-man and the
peon
knew what to do, because it was summertime again and the Aunties were coming. We all liked Vijaya Aunty, but Meera was straight from the lunatic asylum. Ma told her friends that she had an attention problem and a hearing problem. That sounded better than to say that she was a nut-case. The noise that Meera Aunty made was enough to rouse dead souls from their blanket of ashes. She created a different noise every day that one, oh she was clever at dreaming up new sounds each more irritating than the last. Sometimes she burped continuously, complicated belches whose sour odour poisoned the whole house and wouldn’t disappear even when Ma opened out all the windows and lighted twenty sandalwood joss-sticks. At other times she clicked a pair of blunted knitting needles, trailed yards of yellow wool. She said she was knitting a blanket for Ma. Sometimes it was a shawl, a bedspread or a rug.

“To thank my sister-in-law for allowing me to visit my brother’s house,” she said in a precise, low voice that gave no hint of the screaming pitch it could reach. The wool wound between chair legs and tables, fluttered under doors, even lay like worms in the potted ferns lining the verandah.

“Knitonepurloneknitknitknitonepurl,” murmured Aunty Meera non-stop for an entire day, a droning bee pausing only to slurp in the spit that filled her mouth. If
the burps annoyed Ma, this knitting drove her into a frenzy. Meera was obviously imitating her, for Ma enjoyed knitting, her fingers busy twirling the wool around the needles as she supervised the servants or sat in the sunny verandah enjoying a gossip with Linda Ayah. What infuriated Ma was not knowing if Aunty was doing it deliberately or if it was part of her madness.