Tamarind Mem (12 page)

Behind the grocer’s lane ran Sabzi-wali Gully which had nothing but vegetables—glistening purple aubergines, polished tomatoes, plump gourds, piles of tender beans that snapped crisply when Ma tested them for freshness.

“Come on, sister,” called the vendors. “Fresh-fresh, straight from the fields, and for you, a special early-morning rate.
Bauni
rate!”

If Ma did not buy, their tone would change, they would sulk and mutter, “Squeeze all our vegetables to death. They are for buying, not for touching only! She wants us to give it to her for free!”

Another lane was thick with the stink of ripened fruit. Here flies and sticky black mango insects buzzed and hung like a miasma over the baskets and pyramids of fruit. If you did not watch your step, you could slip on banana slime or step into a pile of rotting papaya. My mother bought oranges here, carefully picking out the ones with big-pored peels because they would be the juiciest. She usually wanted the ones at the bottom of the pyramid and the vendor would glare at her, reluctantly dismantling the tower of fruit.

I hated the fruit-and-vegetable lanes but dared not grumble because then Ma, already puffing and irritated by the dust and noise, might refuse to take us to Gadhbadh-Jhaala. This tiny street was an Aladdin’s cave of glittering jewellery, shiny ribbons, beads and baubles.

“Ma, pleaseplease, I want this and this and this,” I begged, gathering up handfuls of stringed beads, tinkling bangles. I darted in and out among the clusters of
burkha-clad
women who filled the market, drifting like shoals of dark fish, haggling with the shopkeepers. I could see nothing of them but brightly slippered feet flashing in and out of their heavy robes, ringed hands and the gleam of eyes. They moved slowly through the sunny lane, squatting before baskets heaped with Anarkali necklaces, Hyderabad earrings, Sholapuri bangles, nose-pins and hair-clips, their fingers sifting through the shimmering piles. I stood as close to these hidden women as possible, trying hard to get a glimpse of their faces,
ignoring the pungent smell of sweat oozing through coats of talcum powder which filled my nostrils. Once I watched a tall woman in sequinned slippers drape a necklace over the black cloth of her
burkha
and turn coquettishly this way and that before a tiny mirror on the wall of the shop. She must have seen herself without the confining robes, and I too wondered how the ornament would look against her skin. Ma never understood this odd fascination.

“They look like anyone else, those women,” she said, dragging Roopa and me from stall to stall, urging me to decide on a trinket or ribbon quickly and we might have time for an ice cream before we went home.

That summer, after Basheer told me the story of the Thithali Queen, I lost interest in the Saturday trips to the market. I liked to think that Shabnam’s mother, Mrs. Bano, was the mysterious queen, and I spent my entire day following her, watched avidly as she climbed into her car, noting, when the robes lifted a bit, the colourful frill of a petticoat or the drift of a sari edge. I wanted to see Mrs. Bano’s face. Behind her veil, was she frowning, smiling, crying? I hung about their house till I heard Linda Ayah’s voice calling, “Baby-missy,
arrey,
where has the monkey disappeared? Baby-missy, aren’t you going to eat anything today?”

Shabnam and I tussled constantly about where we should play each morning because she preferred my house to her own.

“I don’t want to play in my house,” said Shabnam. “My mother will make us sit inside and draw pictures.” She made a face and whispered, “She said that she would beat me if she caught me in the sun.”

It was strange watching Shabnam in her own home, for over there she was sedate and soft-voiced, playing with her collection of plump, pallid dolls and pinching her sisters into silence if they cried for one of her toys. In my house she became quite reckless, climbing right up to the top of the tamarind tree, careless of tears in her billowing bloomers, while I, amazed at her daring, yelled from below, “Shame-shame puppy-shame, naked bottoms is your name!”

“Why does your mother wear
purdah?”
I asked Shabnam.

She shrugged and said, “I don’t know, maybe because my father told her to.”

“But why only her, why not you?”

“Ammi says that I will get my
purdah
when I become a big girl.”

“Have you seen your mother’s face?”

“Of course I have,” said Shabnam.

“Is she pretty?”

“She is the most beautiful person in the whole world.”

When I told my mother about this conversation, Ma got thoroughly annoyed. “Why you poke your nose here and there?” she asked. “Haven’t I taught you any manners? Mrs. Bano, Mrs. Bano! Nonsense!”

I did not tell her about Mrs. Bano again. It never occurred to me that if I just asked Mrs. Bano to show her face, she would very likely have done so. Or perhaps I wanted the thrill of not knowing, of never being quite sure who Mrs. Bano was. The magic of Basheer’s story sustained me through those sun-charged summer days. So long as I had the story, I could ignore the tight lines of anger and frustration building within our own house. In Shabnam’s
home I could forget Ma’s puffy face, her rages swirling up like a cyclonic storm. There was space for stories to blossom, for my imagination to wander. In my friend’s home I would ask to go to the toilet and on this pretext snoop around, peering into silent rooms, hoping to see Mrs. Bano. If anyone asked me what I was doing, I could put on an innocent face and say, “I was looking for the bathroom.”

Nobody ever caught me, and once I even went so far as to examine the contents of Mrs. Bano’s dressing table. The top was absolutely bare except for a set of combs and a small pot of kohl. The drawers had piles of handkerchiefs and two bottles of attar that belonged to Mr. Bano, who always smelled like a bouquet of flowers. The large cupboard yielded more. In it, row upon row, hung brilliantly hued saris and
salwar-kameez
sets, each with its matching petticoat, blouse or
dupatta.
I was exhilarated, almost as if I had gotten to know Mrs. Bano a little more intimately. From that moment my imagination built on those exotic clothes. Mrs. Bano was as beautiful as her daughter claimed. She must be very rich, too, to have so many glorious clothes. Ma had only four silk saris which she wore on special occasions. Mrs. Bano was a magical queen who threw off her drab
purdah
at midnight and twirled about the house like a Kathak dancer, her arms weaving delicately, her feet tapping out the drummer’s beat, her gauze skirts floating about her body like mist.

“Ma, do you think she knows Kathak dancing?” I asked.

“Who are you talking about, crazy child?” asked Ma. “Have you been poking around in Shabnam’s house again? What
is
the matter with you? Do you want a couple of slaps, hanh?”

I decided that Mrs. Bano’s consort was not her perfumed husband but a mysterious figure who hovered on the periphery of imagination. All my fantasies turned poor Mr. Bano into a villain who kept his wife prisoner, forcing her to wear black instead of her shimmering silks. Anything she said acquired a special significance. If she admired a frock I was wearing it was because she was filled with a heavy longing to get out of her
burkha.
When she asked me what my favourite colour was, it was because she yearned for the bright satins she was not allowed to wear.

Then, out of the blue, my myth was shattered. Mrs. Bano was expecting a baby. She was no different from Ma, who had ballooned for months before giving birth to Roopa. I heard drifts of conversation that lent different overtones to Mrs. Bano’s shrouded life.

“She seems desperate, three girls in a row, and now another child on the way,” said Linda Ayah to the washerwoman.

“
She
is not desperate,” said the washerwoman with a loud sniff, banging the clothes on the stone platform a bit harder. “It’s her
miyan.
He wants a son.”

“Son, son, son,” grumbled Linda, spitting a stream of betel juice straight into a bed of spinach.

“I’ll tell Ma that you are spitting in our plants,” I said, wagging a finger at her.

Linda ignored me and continued, “All these men are the same. If I didn’t have my Matthew the first time itself, you think that drunken bastard I married would have left me alone?”

“May all the men in this world go to
jahannum”
said the washerwoman cheerfully. “But you know, Bano
Memsahib is too old for another child. I might be illiterate yet even I know that.”

“And she has a bilad-pressure problem,” added Linda nodding her head and sending out another stream of red juice, at the tomatoes this time.

“Linda, I will most definitely tell Ma,” I said loudly.

“Yes, yes, tell her, let’s see what will happen,” laughed Linda.

Although Shabnam was my best friend on Sundays and in the evenings, at school I preferred Devaki. We sat next to each other and whispered through Sister Julia’s history class. If I broke my pencil lead, Devaki sharpened it for me, and I did the same for her. But at three in the afternoon, from the minute the home-bell rang, we went our different ways. I could never invite Devaki to my birthday parties and she would not invite me to hers because her father worked in the workshop and mine was an officer. Roopa and I played with the workshop people’s children at school, but the friendship stopped at the doors. Worse than playing with workshop children, however, was playing with the snot-nosed brats from the servants’ quarters.

“How many times have I told you not to go near those dirty children?” Ma had said, towering over me, her hand tight around my wrist as if she was going to snap it in two. “You will catch some dirtyfilthy disease and then who has to run around for doctors and medicines and all? Me, who else?”

When I did get a violent attack of chicken-pox, Ma applied cool
neem
paste over my inflamed, itching body, muttering all the time, “Go-go, play with every slum child you can find, what did I tell you? Never listen to
me, just like your father. And where is he when a child is sick in the house? In some jungle building lines for the nation. Thinks he is Gandhi, Nehru, Kamaraj, a hero for the nation! Hunh! Sell his own home to save the country, that kind your father is.”

“My Dadda is nice,” I protested, my nose tingling with the crushed
neem
-juice smell.

“Yesyes, all he does is tell fantastic stories when he comes back. Are stories enough to bring up a child?” asked Ma, her voice as bitter as the
neem
paste that turned my skin so green and cool so that when I drifted to sleep it was as if I had been buried in a pile of rain-soaked leaves. I dreamed then of Dadda going away, always-always, of Ma staring out the window at the Anglo-Indian Paul da Costa who hunched over Dadda’s car and hummed songs from Engelbert Humperdinck, Cliff Richards, sometimes Saigal’s mournful Hindi numbers, and Linda Ayah telling Ma half angrily, as if she were a mischievous child, “Watch out Memsahib, watch out!”

Devaki knew lots of secrets. She said that she had seen her father kissing her mother.

“I have seen my father holding my Mummy’s hands,” said Rani Bose with-the-big-fat-nose.

“How does she cook food then?” If I made fun of Rani, I could sneak out of saying that my parents did not hold hands or kiss.

“If you kiss a man, you have a baby.”

One day I had seen Paul da Costa catch Ma’s hand when she paid him for repairing the car. He called my mother “Tamarind Mem” behind her back and laughed with Ganesh Peon and the iron-man about it. Then he
grabbed Ma’s hand. He was as wicked as the demon Ravana who dragged Queen Sita into the sky. The next time he bent over the bonnet of our car, I would throw a stone at him.

“No, you have a baby if you kiss
and
hold hands.”

“My mother said that God gives you babies,” said Rani.

“Stupid, you believed her?”

“You stupider stupid!” Rani pushed Devaki.

“Stupidest!”

“Your father is a servant!” sang Rani.

“And you are a
vir-gin”
I said. Nobody was allowed to make fun of my best friend.

“She lives where the Anglos live,” shouted Rani. It was true that Devaki lived in the Type Three Quarters at the other end of the colony.

“So what? Does that make her an Anglo?” I shouted back.

“If you touch an Anglo you become an
acchooth!”
said Rani with absolute certainty. Rani’s mother had told her that the Anglos were half-and-half people who hated Indians. She also said that Anglo women were spiders who waited to trap decent Hindu boys into marriage. They were shameless things, showing their legs in their little frocks. They might as well walk around naked and save money on clothes!

“And if an Anglo talks to you, you turn into a half-breed too,” continued Rani.

“You are a
vir-gin
liar!” I said. Ma had touched Paul’s hand but she was still the same, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?

Mrs. Bano ripened within the dark heat of her
burkha.
Even the searing summer sun couldn’t persuade her to
remove those horrible garments. She moved ponderously about the house, one hand resting against the small of her back. Finally one afternoon there was unusual activity in their home. The
peons
ran in and out of the house carrying bags and baskets, piling them into the car. Mrs. Bano emerged followed by her husband and daughters. She ruffled the children’s hair, kissed them and climbed into the car. She was, according to Linda Ayah, going to her mother’s house, for her time was nearing. Shabnam told me that in a while she would have a baby brother.

“How do you know it will be a baby brother?” I asked jealously. Not only did she have two sisters to my one, now she was going to have a brother as well.

“Because my father said so,” replied Shabnam in a voice full of confidence, “and he is always right.”

“How do you know your mother will do what your father wants?”

“She always does,” said Shabnam. There was something about the way she said things that prevented all argument.

Just before school reopened for the new term, her mother came back with a new baby in her arms. Once again the gleaming black car had a flutter of servants around, unloading the luggage, hampers of food, baby-bags full of diapers.