Monsoon Memories (4 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Sister Maya’s Bulbous Nose

V
inod called just as she was starting work on the system test plan for the housing module that was due that afternoon. ‘I’m sorry, Shonu,’ he said, without preamble. ‘I couldn’t talk to you just then.’

She could picture him: the stripy shirt he usually wore to the office carefully tucked into his trousers now coming untucked; his grey hair ever so slightly dishevelled from his habit of running his hands through it when he was thinking; his face puckered into a frown as he tried to explain. ‘I know.’

‘What happened?’

She looked at the test plan in front of her, needing to be reworked. If she started thinking about the morning again, there was no hope in hell of getting it done by lunchtime. But if she didn’t tell Vinod, he’d think she was sulking. ‘I thought I saw… eyes...’ They danced briefly in front of her: menacing, threatening, wanting to unnerve. She kept her mind firmly on the system test plan.

‘What? You had the nightmare?’ He sounded worried. Guilty.

‘Vinod. I’m fine. Truly. I have to go. I’m not cross with you, honest. I’m just busy. I’ve got to get something done by lunchtime. Speak to you later. Bye.’

She hung up before he could get a word in. Perhaps she was subconsciously annoyed with him. She didn’t know and didn’t have the time to analyse. Not now, with the team waiting on her to get the plan done so they could begin testing. She switched off all unnecessary thoughts and emotions—she was an expert, after years of practice, at keeping memories at bay—and concentrated on work.

When Shirin got home, she cooked. She made rice with carrots, peppers and cashew nuts. She pounded chillies, cumin and coriander seeds, turmeric powder and vinegar in the pestle and mortar she had bought at Wembley market and marinated the kingfish filets bought from the little Sri Lankan shop across the road in the spicy paste. She made cucumber-and-mint raita to go with the rice. And all the while, Madhu’s voice whispered in her ear: ‘Too much salt, Shirin. That’s quite enough. Add some more chilli powder. A teeny drop of coconut milk for flavour. Yes, that’s it.’

When, at the end of their first year in the UK, her fug of depression started to lift, Shirin had tentatively attempted to cook food from home: dishes she remembered eating, that she longed for. They were living in the rented flat in Kenton at the time and the kitchen, populated with strange appliances, seemed alien to her: gleaming white and unsoiled; so different from the cramped kitchen of her childhood, the walls dark with soot from the hearth. Madhu’s voice had haunted her then, and if she closed her eyes, she could picture Madhu in her worn apron, wispy hair escaping her bun and getting in her eyes, frying koilolis, stirring pork bafat, grinding spices. All too often, as Shirin had sniffed and swiped at the salty tears running down her cheeks, battling nostalgia, she’d ruined the food she was attempting to cook. So, hard though it was, she learned to ignore Madhu’s voice, pushing it away along with errant memories that threatened, and after a while, as the white kitchen became turmeric-tinged and the alien appliances commonplace, as Shirin discovered her own style of cooking, she didn’t hear Madhu anymore.

Until now.

Today, it was back: Madhu’s sweet, beloved voice, giving her company as she cooked.

‘Shonu, I’ve been thinking,’ Vinod said as he came in, and Shirin smiled at his expression as she shoved a plate of piping-hot green plantain podis and a mug of cardamom tea under his appreciative nose.

‘Yes?’

‘About what happened today,’ he said, dipping a podi in coriander chutney and taking a generous bite.

‘Uh-huh...’

Vinod chased the last of the chutney with his remaining podi, swallowed, pushed his plate away. ‘Her birthday was the trigger?’ he asked, his voice gentle.

Reena.
Regret. Overwhelming. All-consuming.

‘You want to talk about it?’ A soft pause. ‘About her?’

Kate had asked the same thing. She shook her head, no.

Vinod looked tired all of a sudden. Defeated. Then, ‘Shonu, this morning... Was it the nightmare?’

She tried to be matter of fact. ‘I thought I saw the Eyes. At a pedestrian crossing on Aldershot road.’ She used to see them so often in the beginning. They followed her everywhere and when she attempted sleep, exhausted, they lurked behind her heavy, closed eyelids like a second skin.

‘Can’t be. Not after all these years.’

‘That’s what Kate said.’

‘You talked to her?’ Vinod reached across and gently tipped her face so her gaze met his. She willed herself not to stiffen against his touch. His hand smelt of coconut oil and fried spices—Madhu’s smell. She closed her eyes. Something skulked behind closed eyelids, waiting to pounce.

‘Good. You need to talk, get it all out,’ Vinod’s voice. Lips on hers. Pressing down. Eyes. Empty. Mocking. A pungent smell, tamarind-thick, laced with fear—hers. No. Her eyes flew open, met Vinod’s gaze. A whiff of musk mixed with sweat. Vinod’s scent. She relaxed.

‘I... I heard Madhu’s voice, after a long time. Years...’

‘Heard Madhu’s voice?’

‘As I cooked. Telling me what to do.’

Vinod nodded thoughtfully. ‘Fits in with my theory.’

‘What theory?’

‘Since your call this morning, I have been thinking,’

‘So you said.’

‘First you have a vivid dream. Then... the nightmare. And now you’re telling me you heard Madhu’s voice.’ He ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke. ‘All these you haven’t experienced in a while.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well. They haven’t affected you like they used to. Just think, in the days before... heck, even last year, if this had all happened in one day, you wouldn’t have been so... together, I guess.’

She thought of how, after one of her nightmares, she couldn’t function without a visit to the counsellor; how, after a dream of Taipur like the one she had had this morning, depression settled heavy and stifling like humidity before the monsoons, and she felt parched like barren fields aching for rain. ‘I know.’

‘But none of this happened all at once before. You’ve had the nightmare, but never on the same day or even the same week as the dream. And hearing Madhu’s voice...’ He nodded, ‘A good sign.’

‘Your point being?’

The furrows on Vinod’s face relaxed into a smile. Triumphant. ‘Shonu, it’s the healing process, that’s what this is. You are finally ready to revisit your memories; you have put enough distance between you and your past...’

‘You sound exactly like that counsellor I used to see.’

‘Well... I am quoting from one of her books...’

And then they were laughing, tension erased, nightmare if not forgotten then pushed aside—for the moment at least.

In bed that night, as Shirin closed her book, pulled the duvet up to her chin and nagged Vinod to switch off the light, he said, voice hesitant, ‘So, Shonu, did you really mean what you said this morning?’ A pause. ‘About going home?’ He played with her hair, fanned out on the turmeric pillow like shadows dancing in the sun, concentrating on threading strands between his fingers. He did not look at her.

Shirin stalled, focusing on how, even though they had spent the last eleven years in Harrow, North London, they both still referred to India as home.

‘I ache to go,’ she said finally. ‘And I know you do, too.’ A whisper. ‘I made a deal, Vinod.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘I want to break it.’ She watched Vinod’s eyes fly open, settle on her face. She held his gaze.

He smiled. That beautiful smile. Like the first delicious bite of a perfectly ripe, juicy mango. ‘The healing process,’ he said.

She smiled.

‘When?’ he asked.

Her mother’s face. The horror, the accusation. ‘Soon. Very soon.’

‘Invite the memories in, Shonu,’ He paused. ‘Even the bad ones. Then the past will not have such a hold over you.’

‘What I did...’
The baby’s cry, a high-pitched wail. And her, running, running barefoot, cars tooting, rickshaw drivers yelling, her hair flying in all directions, nightie soiled. Running.

‘You did what you thought was best.’ Vinod said. ‘She will understand. One day.’

He knew her so well.

‘Part of me was being selfish.’

‘Rubbish.’ A hint of impatience in her husband’s voice. ‘Stop beating yourself up. You did what you thought was best, in the circumstances.’

Really?

She looked at Vinod, wishing, as she always did, that she shared his certainty and saw the exhaustion etched in lines around his eyes. Eyes.
Don’t think about that.

‘Sleep,’ she said.

He reached across to switch off the light.

‘Let the memories come. Goodnight. Love you.’ He whispered.

A feather-soft kiss on her lips. Darkness. Her husband’s gentle snores—phut-a-phut-phut—like the ramshackle Bajaj moped that conveyed Doctor Kumar into Taipur every weekday morning. She fought the weariness weighting down her eyelids, afraid of what might be prowling behind closed lids—another pair of eyes? In the end, weariness won. She dreamt...

Of Sister Maya.

* * *

Shirin, along with a group of boys from her class, had sneaked out to steal ‘bimblis’, a sour-sweet fruit, from a tree just outside the school and visible from their classroom. The tree, laden with bimblis, tempted them with its spoils and made their hungry stomachs growl. They had scaled out of the window, jumped over the wall of the school and were enjoying their hard-earned feast when they were apprehended by a tight-lipped Sister Shanthi, their class teacher.

Shirin was marched back to the school, along with the boys (some of them still furtively swallowing the last bits of the fruit), much to their humiliation and the guilty delight of the rest of the class. ‘Kneel down facing the statue of Jesus, and recite, “Our Father” and three “Hail Marys” ten times,’ snapped Sister Shanthi. And, once they’d done so, brandishing the wooden cane reserved for such occasions, ‘Hold out your palms.’

Shirin was at the end of the long line of boys—the lone girl sticking out like a guava in a basket of cashews. Her classmates sitting on the floor in front of them watched wide-eyed—the terror that Shirin felt writ large on their faces. She had never been caned before. She always cried when one of her classmates got caned, and now that she had to face the same thing, she could feel the sobs building in her chest and threatening to overflow. But none of the boys were crying and she didn’t want to be labelled a coward and a crybaby.

Anil, the first in line, cried out as the cane came whooshing down on his outstretched palm—not once, as was customary, but twice.

‘This will teach you not to run away from school again,’ said Sister Shanthi grimly as she started on Steven who was next.

Involuntary tears filled Shirin’s eyes. Her palm trembled. Oh, why had she done this? It was sheer agony, awaiting her turn, hearing the yells of her partners in crime, feeling their pain. When Sister Shanthi reached her, she stopped and shook her head in disapproval.

‘Shame on you,’ she said, ‘gallivanting with all those boys. What will your mother say?’

As it was the Catholic ‘English Medium’ school, the nuns spoke only in English, of course, and the pupils were expected to do so too. And even though Shirin didn’t know what ‘gallivanting’ meant, even though she couldn’t fathom why it would warrant such disgust and her mother’s displeasure, Sister Shanthi’s words hurt more than the caning. Shirin got caned not twice but thrice. As she watched welts rise like Madhu’s yeasty dosa mix on her red palm, Shirin thought,
I deserve this, for disappointing my mother.

But the worst was yet to come. Shirin had just joined the rest of her class when the headmistress of their school, Sister Maya, entered and looked at all of them in turn, until her eyes locked with Shirin’s.

‘Shirin,’ she said, her ugly face looking more ogre-like than ever, ‘please come into my office.’

The school building was comprised of two rooms. The larger of these housed the various classrooms, separated by cardboard dividers which could be moved depending on the size of the class. The other room served as the headmistress’s office. Scary Sister Maya closed the door to this room while meting out punishments. The rest of the school would hear the wails of the transgressor and imagine the worst. When the child came back out, he or she was so traumatised that they never talked about the incident again. But they were never what the nuns labelled as ‘naughty’ again either. The nuns were very effective at quashing their charges’ spirits.

Shirin could feel scores of terrified eyes on her, as the school collectively followed her progress, pitying her, and at the same time guiltily relieved that it was not one of them. She made her way to Sister Maya’s office, her legs trembling, her sore hand held slightly away from her dress so that it wouldn’t accidentally brush against it, her eyes fixed on Sister Maya’s unyielding back.

Once inside her office, Sister Maya turned to face Shirin, and reached behind her to close the door. As her fleshy hand neared Shirin, she tried hard not to flinch, even as a little stubborn part of her rebelled.
Why only me? Why not the boys as well?
Then the door slammed shut and she and Sister Maya were alone.

Sister Maya stared at Shirin from over the top of the spectacles that were perched precariously at the tip of her bulbous nose. This close up, Shirin could see the tiny black freckles dotting it. It reminded her of pictures of white mushrooms with red dots that she had seen somewhere once. A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble out of her throat—even as her eyes shone bright with tears—but she managed to swallow it down.

‘So, miss, who gave you permission to sneak out of the classroom with a bunch of boys and steal bimblis?’ Sister Maya asked.

Shirin couldn’t reply. Her words stuck in her throat. The acidity of the bimblis, along with the terror she felt, was making her nauseous. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she would vomit all over Sister Maya’s prized collection of holy statues arranged neatly on her desk.