Tamarind Mem (10 page)

In all the photographs I had seen of him, Dadda’s father looked like an English gentleman with a neat moustache, a solar hat, a jacket and a crisply pleated
dhothi. There
was another photograph in the box which must have been taken before my grandfather joined the Railways and came to Delhi, before he changed his name from Gokulnatha to Moorthy and turned from a priest’s son into an employee of the British. In this picture there was a row of thin men in turbans—the fancy ones with gold borders. My grandfather was the tall, thin youth without a turban, right at the end of the line. He had a Brahmin’s shaven head with a traditional
juttu
of uncut hair at the back. When he moved to Delhi, he shaved it off. Then, terrified that the gods would curse him for such a sacrilegious deed, he offered twenty rupees’ worth of coconuts to the Krishna temple, and for five years after that, donated a pair of silver lamps as well. When his first son,
my Dadda, was born, he stopped his offerings to the gods, convinced that he had been forgiven for the loss of his Brahmin
juttu.

Aunty Vijaya did not remember if her father was married when the English-man picture was taken, or if Dadda, the oldest child, was born. All she had to say about the photograph was that Dadda exactly resembled their father.

“Same forehead, same eyes, can you see the similarity?” she asked, tracing a finger over the yellowing face in the photo. I couldn’t see much of a resemblance. Of course, Dadda had a different haircut, and wore more modern clothes. He sat in the big red Burma-teak chair and smoked pipes. This was how I would always remember my father, I told Aunty Vijaya, and she remarked that memories were never the same.

“They are pictures we create in our hearts, you see,” explained my aunt. “And each of us uses different sticks of chalk to colour them. I remember your father as a young man who came home for the holidays from college, and how much our mother waited for him to return and how she always said in a mournful voice, ‘Oh Vishwa, you look so much like your father, and now all his burdens have moved to your shoulders.’ We, the daughters, were burdens—only your father was worth loving.”

Aunty Vijaya accepted everything that was handed out, expecting that her husband or her brother would take care of her always. In return, she gave Roopa and me her own memories, romantic and gently coloured, devoid of unpleasantness.

“I come from a line of Brahmins,” I thought proudly, “poor in worldly goods but rich in knowledge.”

I never told Ma or Roopa. They would laugh at me, I was certain of that. Especially Ma.

“For all their learning they were a pack of incompetents,” Ma would say, “and unhealthy to boot. They were rotten inside—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, even their blood was rotten.”

Ma came from healthy stock. Her parents were still alive and her grandparents had died only a few years ago, Putti Ajji at a ripe eighty-seven and her husband at a hundred and two.

“We didn’t spend our wealth smoking
bidis
and eating oily food in restaurants. Restaurants! What is wrong with home food, I ask you? Simple, no cutlet-mutlet and fried
gobi
every day.”

Ma cursed all of Dadda’s sahib ways. She told him that he should remember he was the ordinary son of an ordinary priest from a village in Udipi and not some pink
angrez
big shot.

“I
am
a big shot,” snapped Dadda. “You wouldn’t be living in this fine house with all these servants if I wasn’t. Don’t forget that.”

When I asked her if she remembered this incident or that, Roopa said, “Let the past sleep. Why should you poke here and there looking for memories? After you find them, and dust off all the cobwebs, you see that they are ugly and sad. I prefer living in today not in flashback, baba!”

Roopa did not allow stories to invade her life, turn the world into a kaleidoscope with believing and not believing, true and untrue. She was completely happy with her husband Vikram who adored her for her round, tight body and flat mind. He
asked her questions, testing the flatness of that mind, delighted that it held none of the wild fears that filled his. She offered him a warm harbour, a lush cove where he could drop anchor and find refuge from the nightmares that haunted him of technology triggering a holocaust which destroyed the planet and left us all floating in starlit space.

Roopa claimed not to remember the times that Ma had faded away from us. “She was always there, large as life and twice as noisy, too much noisy and nosy if you ask me! Why you are not studying, why you are doing this, why that? My goodness, like a mosquito in my head she was.”

“Rubbish!” I said. “She left you alone, it was always me she concentrated on! You never remember things the way they were, just the way you want them to be.”

“And you of course have a memory as precise as the part in your hair,” laughed Roopa.

She thought that I was crazy to live in the past like this. “Come and stay with me for a while,” she urged. “Come here before you go totally loony.”

“Don’t be silly, I am not going loony,” I insisted. “It’s just nostalgia really. Something to do when I am not working on stupid lab experiments.”

“You are looking over your shoulder at ghosts, Kamini. Remember Linda Ayah’s story about the fellow who did that?”

Yes, I did. He was dragged away into the nothing world of shadows. Linda Ayah had told us longlong ago that everybody had ghosts trailing behind. The problem started when you looked over your shoulder at them. Memories were like ghosts, shivery, uncertain, nothing guaranteed, totally not-for-sure.

And Ma’s reply, “Why only memory? Nothing in the world is for certain.”

I
was sure that if I had hair so long that it swept the ground, nobody would notice the length of my nose, about which my aunts teased me every time we visited my grandmother’s home. “Pinocchio,” they said. “We know who’s been telling stories.” Or they would give it a sharp tweak and say, “Better grow to fit your nose, or we will have trouble finding a groom for you!”

I would loop my tresses up into intricate swirls with silver ornaments buried in the darkness—a swan with a long neck, a lotus, stars, moons and suns—like the ones adorning the hair of Princess Draupadi in the brightly coloured picture books Dadda brought from Delhi station. Ma said that my hair was too thin right now, but perhaps if she washed it often enough with
shikakai,
it would turn thick and luxuriant.

“You didn’t get these strands of grass from my side of the family for sure,” she said one Sunday, vigorously rubbing castor oil into my scalp. A friend had advised Ma that castor oil was better than coconut oil. And what was left over from applying to the hair could be drunk to cleanse out the bowels. “Dual-purpose oil, Mrs. Moorthy,” she told my mother. “Inside and outside it will clean and shine.”

I imagined my intestines glistening like polished silver after a dose of the thick, evil-smelling oil and told Ma that I would never-ever talk to her again if she made me drink it.

Ma laughed and said, “Now stop going
baka-baka
and sit there quietly till I finish getting your sister ready for a bath.”

She pushed me towards the warm dry corner of the bathroom where Linda Ayah waited to massage my arms and calves.

“I don’t want to be a Mr. India muscleman weightlifter, Linda,” I protested, squealing as she pulled and stretched my limbs.

“Ohho, missy,” snorted Linda, “a woman needs all the strength she can find to carry manymany weights in her life. If you don’t have the strength to look after yourself, who will?”

I suffered Linda’s hard hands till Ma was done oiling Roopa and both of us had to get into the ancient porcelain bath-tub which filled half the room, where Ma would wash our hair with the
shikakai
powder.

“I don’t want a head bath!” yelled Roopa as Ma whipped her petticoat over her head and Linda Ayah stripped off my bloomers and we both stood naked and helpless, shimmering with oil.

Linda Ayah pulled her sari up between her thighs and tucked it into her waist at the back like a fishwife, her skinny legs smooth as mosquito net poles. Roopa and I had watched Linda on her free afternoons, sitting outside her quarters, pinching all the hair off her legs. She dipped her fingers into a bowl of cold ash, gripped the tiny hairs and ripped them out one by one.

“Oh-oh! Oh-oh!” we howled each time her fingers jerked, irritating her intensely.

“My skin is like a crocodile’s, too ancient to feel anything,” she said. “So whyfor you are screaming like a pair
of hyenas, henh?” Then she wagged her finger warningly and said that Roopa and I were not to try it on ourselves. “All that is not for baby-dew skin. Later, when you are older and troubles have given you thick hides, then you can pinch it back to life!”

Much better, Ayah said, to use a paste
of besan
and sandal and milk, helping Ma to apply the fragrant, faintly abrasive mixture on our arms and legs, our backs and stomachs. Then came the
shikakai
for our hair, a dreadful green fire that singed our eyes and nostrils, making us scream and curse Ma. Even if I squeezed my eyes tight as Bournvita tin lids, the sour burning pierced my eyeballs, my ears, filled my mouth with its bitter taste.

“No need for shampoo-tampoo,” said Ma, working the
shikakai
into a lather while Linda Ayah, damp and spattered, poured mug after mug of steaming water.

“Ma, I am burning!” I wailed, thrashing and sliding in the oily tub.

Ma slapped my buttock. “Stop that, you silly girl, you’ll slip and break your head. Don’t you want nice thick hair?”

“Nonono!” I howled, and Roopa, her eyesmouthnose pursed tight against the onslaught of
shikakai,
skidded blindly against me, trying to escape while I had Ma’s attention.

“If you behave like a monster, your hair will fall off,” threatened Ma, her relentless hand shooting out to grab Roopa, and whoosh, Linda Ayah emptied a bucket of blessed water on my head, wrapped a towel around me, and before I knew it I was out of the bathroom, the
shikakai
fading into a memory.

And as Linda Ayah towelled me dry, ran a gentle comb through the wild snarls and knots, she murmured,
“Nothing in this life comes easily, child, you want long hair, you have to weep a little for it.”

The
shikakai
did not work, nor did the carrot juice which I thought was how piss must taste, and neither did castor oil, almond extract or olive oil. My hair never grew beyond my shoulders. Ma would not let me grow it any longer because she said it looked like a rat’s tail. So when Basheer the barber arrived to cut my father’s hair, he was ordered to trim mine and Roopa’s as well.

Basheer arrived every third Sunday at seven o’clock in the morning. On those days, the back yard of our house was the scene of great activity. A chair was placed in the shade of the rain tree, a sheet draped over the back and a mug of water on the ground beside it. Basheer bustled in, right on time, trim in a spotless white
chooridar
and fitted Nehru jacket. My father was first. Basheer snapped open the sheet, draped it across Dadda’s shoulders with a flourish. Then, with a flick of the wrists, he anointed Dadda’s head with water, tilting it forward just so, and started to trim. Clickety-click went the scissors, and over it, the barber’s voice speaking a rich blend of Hindi and Urdu. Basheer told us stories of the princely family who had once ruled Ratnapura.

The conversation usually started with Dadda asking, “So Basheer, how are you these days?”

The barber nodded his head slowly and said, “Getting along. But times have changed since Nawab Sahib, changed a lot.”

“Nawab Sahib?” prompted Dadda, setting off Basheer.

“Such a life! We were lucky to have lived such a life,” sighed Basheer. “We were only servants, but my grandmother served
kheer
in silver bowls! Nothing like the
bowls of gold decorated with Japani pearls used in the Nawab’s kitchens, oh nono! Although there
were
some people in the Nawab’s court who lived better than his highness. Lots of crookedness went on! More often than not, the poor Nawab did not know what was happening behind the silk curtains of his own bedroom!”