Tamarind Mem (19 page)

Dadda’s secretary had brought the monstrous tuberose garland threaded with wisps of silver which he, along with the other clerks and
peons
in the office, had chipped in to purchase. The secretary was sobbing and hiccuping and dabbing nervously at his swollen red nose when Ma said, in a sharp voice, that the garland was a waste of money.

“Are you a millionaire that you spend so much on flowers?”

“Oh Madam, he was a good sir. If we had thousand rupees we would have bought a bigger garland. What a tragedy!” he howled, offering a flurry of explanations.

I drifted through the still rooms, wondering if I should join Ganesh Peon and Linda Ayah as they kept a vigil over Dadda. He would lie there till Vijaya Aunty arrived the next morning. Every now and then Ganesh and Linda packed crushed ice against him. The white cloth wrapped about the body was wet and Ayah mopped up the melting ice, wringing the cloth into a bucket. She had to make sure it didn’t flow out to the carpet rolled against the wall. It was an expensive carpet, forty counts per square inch, and Ma would throw a fit if it got damaged. Every time
Dadda was promoted, Ma got something posh for the house—after all, a big officer had to have a house to match his status. When we had guests she got all tight-lipped and miserable if they didn’t have the decency to take off their shoes before they walked on the carpet.

“Junglees!”
she said after the offenders had left. “They are the sort who teach their children to draw on the walls,
junglees.”

I wondered what would happen to the heavy silk curtains with the Chinese pattern, the squishy-soft sofa set, the rosewood dining-room set. Without Dadda there could be no more promotions, no more office parties or memsahibs with chiffon saris to admire Ma’s belongings. I glanced furtively at my father’s body, almost expecting it to sit up. The ice must make him feel cold. Even in Calcutta, where it never went below twenty degrees, Dadda wore a balaclava cap to sleep. And now he was lying in a bed of ice with only a thin
dhothi
cloth covering him, not even a cap or socks. I shivered, the hair on my arms standing up in bumps of skin. Perhaps I should cover him with another sheet. One of the new green-and-white ones Ma kept for guests, with the soft perfume of Lux soap drifting out when you unfolded them. Better than the stale stink of ice from the Railway Club. I could smell it, a thick stench of rotting plywood same as the corner of the garage where the roof dripped in the monsoons. A
dhobi-
fresh sheet all starchy clean would take away that smell.

I peered into the room where Ma was lying with Roopa curled up beside her. Both were fast asleep. Roopa would sleep through a cyclone. I shivered, a wave of anxiety washing over me, and wished that I had agreed
to sleep with them. But from that room I had a good view of the drawing room where Dadda lay.

Ma had not wanted to sleep. “I have to start packing,” she said, looking in annoyance at all the coffee tables and chairs, cupboards and sideboards, cots and shelves scattered about the house, a lifetime’s treasures suddenly a burden. She was already rearranging them to fit the little apartment Dadda had built for their retirement, already discarding the bulky pieces that might not even squeeze through the low doors there. But Aunty Lalli had forced her to swallow Calmpose tablets and Ma had dozed off, snoring in the bed, her mouth open. Age had stretched and altered her face, adding a padding of fat here, taking away a sharp line there, so that I felt that my mother looked like Plasticine moulded by a child. I tiptoed to the dark cupboard and drew out a sheet. I carried it to the drawing room where Dadda lay. The ambulance men had placed him right in the middle of the room. Roopa and I had watched silently from the verandah, wincing together at the dull thud as the two men dropped our father’s body carelessly on the floor. Then they stood, the dolts, talking quietly, waiting for Ma to sign the delivery papers. I wanted to slap them for their casual irreverence.

Linda Ayah looked up suddenly, startled by my silent entry into the room. She gave a little moan, “Oh-oh, ammama.” Her glasses shone in the light from the street-lamp streaming into the room. Why she wore glasses nobody knew, she couldn’t read a word, but she liked looking at all of our school-books.

“Ayah, shoo!” I whispered. “You’ll disturb everybody.”

“Yo-yo-yo,” Ayah moaned again, a little angrily now. “It
is you, child, why you scared me like that? What are you doing here you poor thing? Go, go, your Ma will get angry if she catches you here.”

“Isn’t he cold?” I asked.

Ganesh Peon giggled and remarked in a whisper, “In this pissing heat can anyone be cold?”

“Idiot, bite your loose tongue,” said Linda Ayah, glaring at him. “No baby
chikkamma,
my pet, he isn’t cold, see he is nicely covered with a cloth. You don’t worry, Linda will take care of him. You go to sleep now.”

I went slowly up the stairs to my bedroom and a minute later heard Ayah telling Ganesh, “Stop gaping, nitwit, and get more ice from the fridgi…tomorrow Sahib’s sisters and all are coming, what will they think if Sahib doesn’t look nice?”

Ten years ago, I had felt a simmering resentment against my mother. I believed that she had wronged Dadda with her rigid anger, her unkind words. I refused to acknowledge the years that Ma had spent being a good wife, looking after her daughters, supervising the household, making sure that Dadda got his meals exactly on schedule. How bored she must have been. If she wasn’t at home when Roopa and I came home from school, we sulked, accused her of being indifferent.

“We were starving,” we moaned. “Where were you?”

“
There was food in the fridge, Ayah was at home,” snapped Ma, guilty at not having fulfilled the role that had been scripted for her, annoyed at being coerced into playing it. Perhaps Dadda was to blame for the person Ma had become. He shut her into rooms from which there was not even a chink of an escape. He himself had left again and again, and every
time he came back, he needed to be readmitted into lives altered daily during his absence.

I reread the most recent of Ma’s postcards. “The gulmohur tree outside my flat will be in bloom in a few weeks,” she had written. “I should be home in time to catch the flowers as they fall. Such a simple thing can give me so much pleasure. It has taken me so long to see that happiness isn’t hard to find. No?”

I remember little of the train ride that carried us away from the Railway life, from Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon, of the last few weeks in the Guwahati house surrounded by shapeless, looming masses of gunny-wrapped furniture. Our new apartment felt so tiny compared to the sprawling Railway houses. There were no echoes, no mysterious corners, dark hidy-holes. Our furniture looked gargantuan at first, but after a few weeks the tables and chairs, cupboards and desks seemed to shrink and shrug into their niches and stopped looking odd. For the next eight years, our lives were punctuated with nothing more remarkable than Ma’s regular tiffs with a series of maids who arrived at four in the morning one day, two in the afternoon the next, and sometimes not at all. Once in a while Roopa or I missed our bus home from school or college, and Ma would sulk and scold and predict awful mishaps.

Then, the year Indira Gandhi was assassinated, Roopa announced that she was getting married and for weeks we had all our relatives streaming in.

“Who is this unknown fellow? Is he our caste? Are his parents good people? Does anybody in this city know them? Saroja, Saroja, you should have locked up this
daughter of yours! Is she pregnant? Why this sudden marriage, no time to call anybody! What about the older one? How can Roopa get married when Kamini is still not hooked, hanh? Saroja, you are stupid.”

“He is a good boy,” snapped Ma. “My girls know how to pick their fruit.”

Then after they had all left, she slapped her forehead and shouted at Roopa. “What will you do if he divorces you in USA? Maybe he has a white woman there already and you he is taking to be her maid. At least finish your studies, idiot girl, then you don’t have to come back crying to your mother’s house!”

“I am never coming back,” said Roopa. “You don’t have to take care of me any more, don’t worry.”

I stayed with Ma for a further two years after Roopa left and then decided to leave my job and try for a doctorate in chemical engineering. In a university as far away from Madras as possible.

“Calgary?” exclaimed Ma when I showed her the letter from the research centre that was willing to take me on. “Where is this place? Has anybody ever heard of it? What is so special there that you have to go, hanh?”

“Ma, it’s in Canada. They grow wheat there, and cows. They have oil and natural gas,” I told her, exasperated, feeling like someone from the Chamber of Commerce. Just like my mother to dramatize the whole affair, blow it up into a major thing.

“Canada, Canada, and where is
that
place? In the North Pole, that’s where. Are you mad or what? Here itself when it rains you wear three-four sweaters, shawls, blankets and go hurru-hurru with cold!”

“But Ma…”

“And if you want to look at cows just glance out of the window, hundreds of cows you will see shitting on the roads.”

“What a strange thing to say, Ma!”

“Strange? Your sister and you are strange, not me. She marries the first man she meets, and you so old and not a sign of wanting to get married. If only your father was alive!”

After Roopa’s marriage, Ma had started beseeching Dadda to come back to life and look at the shambles he had left behind.

“See, I am stuck with two daughters who are busy doing god-knows-what!” she shouted in the general direction of the heavens. “While you are sitting up there relaxing with your pipe, no doubt. Always-always I am left with all the problems.”

I locked myself in my room, cringing at the thought of all the neighbours listening in. They would troop by later to console Ma, glare accusingly at me, offer advice. Gangadhar Uncle, the retired judge in the apartment below, didn’t even wait to come into the house, though. He preferred to join Ma in her histrionics from his balcony one floor down.

“I waste my youth showering love and affection on these children and what do I get in return? Nothing!” grumbled Ma, rattling pots and pans in the kitchen, fully aware that the little balcony outside was in direct line with Gangadhar Uncle’s.

“That is a parent’s fate,” agreed Uncle. “Look at my own incompetent son. I told him do a management degree, forget about philosophy and all that. But he did not listen and now he organizes political rallies for that
thief of a chief minister, while his wife earns the money in the house.”

“My daughter wants to go to some place near the North Pole. I ask you, what is wrong with her life here? Do I ever stop her from doing anything? No. Did I say a word when she refused to look at that bone doctor from England? He wanted to marry her right away, no fancy engagements and all that. Right away. Such a good boy. And my other daughter, married to a meat-eater. Oh my heart breaks. All this I have tolerated. I have been a modern-times mother and these girls have taken advantage of me.”

“Sister,” consoled Uncle, “you have performed your duty. Now you sit back and watch ‘Mahabharata’ serial on TV. Don’t worry-murry about ungrateful children. One day their mistakes will turn around and bite them in the face.”

“All these years I have made sure she doesn’t catch a tiny cold even. Her lungs are bad—she got that from her father’s side—and now she wants to go and live in ice and snow.”

“Let her go, let her go, I say,” bellowed Uncle Gangadhar. “That’s exactly what I said when the British left India.”

There was a momentary lull while Ma tried to figure out what the British had to do with this discussion. Uncle had fought for India’s independence and lost no opportunity to introduce the British into every conversation. I left the house, slamming the door behind me, cursing my mother for making it so hard to break away.