What did her mother need? A house of her own? A piece of jewellery? Akhila knew Padma’s dreams. She wanted a silk skirt and a blouse. Akhila didn’t know what it was she wanted, though. All she knew was that she felt a strange restlessness echoed by the long-drawn out moan of the swing as it moved this way and that.
For an hour, the house remained in a trance. Around midday, it was Akhila’s duty to switch on the radio. On Sunday afternoon, they listened to several programmes. Appa wanted the boys to listen carefully to the Bournvita Quiz Show. Amma and Akhila waited for the Horlicks family show – Suchitravin
Kudumbam.
‘Suchitra’s Family, the happy Horlicks family’ was the slogan that ran in the advertisements. There were pictures of Suchitra and her family doing happy family things with a gigantic bottle and steaming cups of Horlicks in the background. Everyone knew that it was a sponsored radio play. But to Amma and
Akhila, Suchitra and her family were the relatives they didn’t have. When they came across an advertisement for Horlicks in a magazine or newspaper, they lingered, looking at the picture carefully, etching in their minds the faces of Suchitra and her children.
Amma and Akhila listened week after week to hear about the happenings in Suchitra’s life, chuckling at the escapades of the children, Raju and Sujatha. There was a husband Shankar and the family’s best friend Bhaskar. But it was Suchitra whom they loved. Capable, funny, warm Suchitra, solving problems, distributing largesse, love and Horlicks. The perfect mother and wife. She was the woman Akhila wanted to be.
When the Horlicks family show came to an end and the music programme began, Amma would sit with her back to a wall and clean the rice for the week. There were dust balls and blackened grains, chips of pebbles and pieces of husk. All of it had to be carefully picked. Amma would have liked Akhila to help her. But Akhila sat with her ball of gunny thread. Akhila collected every scrap of gunny thread she could find. Every Friday, when they bought the weekly groceries, there was a big enough pile to satisfy her. The groceries came wrapped in newspaper and fastened with gunny thread. When the groceries were put away in the tins, Akhila put aside the gunny thread in a bag and, on Sunday afternoons, she sat unravelling the knots and tying broken ends so that all she had to do was fasten it to the ball that was already as big as a coconut.
Amma sniffed her nose at it. ‘Anyone would think that it was silk thread … Why do you waste time on that? What use is it? Anyone would think you ran a grocery shop … If you used this time every Sunday to write “Sree Rama Jayam” a thousand times, you would at least collect enough blessings to find you a good husband.’
But Akhila would pretend she wasn’t listening. She liked seeing her ball of thread grow. Besides, when Amma or anyone else wanted gunny thread to tie something, they
turned to her. Akhila would have liked to tell Amma, ‘Will writing “Sree Rama Jayam” help tie your parcel now?’
Later, Amma would put off the radio and rouse Appa by gently sliding his head onto the cushion of her lap. She would hum under her breath some of the kirtanas she knew he liked to hear. Chelmela ra saketh
Rama, chelmele ra
… why are you so obstinate, my lord, why are you obstinate?
When he was awake, she would begin shelling peanuts in time to the music, to the motion of the swing, to the rhythm of their lives. Crack the shell into two halves. When the nuts rolled into her palm, she would slide them between his lips. Occasionally she would toss one into her mouth. With each offering, Amma restored a little of the self-worth that had drained out of him at the end of a week’s humiliation at the income-tax office.
Akhila would sit with her back to them, untangling the thread and winding it around her finger; an unwilling witness to this Sunday noon ritual of loving, giving and healing.
Just occasionally, only occasionally, a sour thought like the aftertaste of a particularly oily masala dosa would rise into her mouth: when will they realize that I am no longer a child? When will they see that inside me flutter desires that I don’t understand? This ache, this wetness, this flooding of nerve ends, what does it all mean?
But just as soon as the thought filled her mouth, she would swallow it down and rush to the kitchen seeking to still her ugly thoughts.
On Sundays, Amma insisted on cooking every meal herself and brushed aside all offers of help. She would slice aubergines into half moons, dip them in a batter speckled with finely chopped onions, green chillies and curry leaves and drop them into a pan of hot oil smoking over the kerosene stove. The aubergines, coated with Amma’s need to prove her esteem for Appa, would hiss, splutter and then settle to becoming golden brown relics of devotion. Succulent quivering insides, with just a crunch of spice to
tantalize his appetite. Feast, feast, my husband, my lord and master. On my flesh, my soul, my kathrika-bhajis.
But wait, Amma never mixed the filter coffee decoction with milk till she had made the sweet. Semolina toasted a golden brown. Cooked in double the quantity of water, an equal portion of sugar, plenty of ghee and a hint of cardamom. Stirred till the grains glistened, separate and whole. Coloured with saffron. Garnished with raisins and roasted cashewnuts. They would sip the coffee, bite on the bhajis, sink their teeth into the richness of the sweet kesari and watch Appa as Amma piled his plate with double helpings he would leave untouched while the boys and Padma hungered for a wee bit more.
Later the boys would run out to play under the mango tree and Amma would fetch the dice for a game. The dice that had been part of Amma’s dowry.
The tinkle of the brass dice as it fell from their hands. The screech of the chalk on the slate as Padma practised her alphabets. The crackle of the radio that sang in the background. The hum of voices as they talked. Appa had this to sustain him through a whole week of anguish at the income-tax office.
Later, when their lives fell apart, Akhila thought of those Sundays when Appa was alive as a time when nothing ever went wrong. And everything was the way it was meant to be.
The day Appa died dawned as usual. Days later, Amma would claim that she had a certain foreboding. All night a lone dog had howled. She woke up to a twitching right eyelid. The milk curdled when she boiled it; the vessel with the dosa batter had slipped out of her hands and fallen to the floor, splashing it with a thick white rivulet of fermented fear. At the doorstep as she had bid farewell to Appa, she had seen a mangy cat cross his path …
‘I should have stopped him then. I should have read the signs that his life was in danger and kept him at home beside
me. Instead I stood there and watched him walk away to his death,’ Amma wailed again and again to the women who huddled around her as she kept vigil at his cold rigid side.
If the gods had thought it fit to warn Amma of the impending change in her destiny, they decided that Akhila needed no such signals. On the contrary, she woke up that morning to a quickening of her senses. An exhilaration that got her out of bed with a leap and had her rushing through the morning ablutions.
Akhila usually hated morning. Now that she had finished her pre-university course, her parents considered her education complete and she was expected to fine-tune all her housekeeping abilities in preparation for the day she would be married.
Amma insisted that she draw the kolam just outside the front doorstep every morning. ‘That’s how a home is judged,’ she never tired of telling Akhila. ‘Do you know what Thiruvalluvar said? A true wife is she whose virtues match her home.’
Akhila sighed. The bearded and matted-haired poet-saint had tormented her school years with his prolific verses. The teacher who taught her class Tamil found it abominable that she faltered when asked to recite from memory Thiruvalluvar’s poetry while she was always word-perfect in the English recitations. ‘Who is this fellow Wordsworth? A pipsqueak if you compare his poetry to the immortal Thiruvalluvar’s. Does he teach you how to be a good wife or a mother? Do his words give you an insight into what is expected of a son or a pupil? And yet, you would rather memorize his verse. What was it you recited in the assembly the other day?’ He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“‘Daffodils”, sir,’ Akhila mumbled.
“‘Daffodils.” And what is that? Have you seen one? Do you think you’ll ever see one in your life?’ he sneered. ‘Can it match the fragrance of our jasmine or the colour of our marigolds?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Sit down. Don’t stand there like a great big bird,’ he said, leaning against the blackboard, quite overcome by emotion. ‘Tamil is the oldest living language but do we consider it important? We’d rather learn about daffodils and nightingales. I tell you, India might have got its independence but we are still slaves to the English language … Class, turn to page sixteen.’
The spectre of Thiruvalluvar didn’t stop there. Every time Akhila got into a bus, there he was, seated on its side. Almost all buses that plied through the roads of Madras and its suburbs had a dark brown metal board mounted above the driver’s head with an illustration and a quote.
Akhila’s Tamil teacher knew that she travelled by bus to school and devised new and unique ways of making her memorize at least a few hundred stanzas of everything Thiruvalluvar ever had to say. Every morning in the Tamil class, she was expected to recite aloud the verse that rode with her in the bus. The Tamil teacher didn’t care whether the stanza was about ideal passengers or drivers or journeys … as long as Thiruvalluvar had authored it. And now here he was. Dancing on the tip of Amma’s tongue, heaping coals and housewifely hints on her nineteen-year-old head.
‘A sloppily drawn kolam suggests that the woman of the house is careless, indifferent and incapable. And an elaborately drawn one indicates self-absorption, a lavish hand and an inability to put others’ needs before yours. Intricate and complicated kolams are something you reserve for special occasions. But your everyday kolam has to show that while you are thrifty, you are not mean. It should speak of your love for beauty and your eye for detail. A restraint, a certain elegance and most importantly, an understanding of your role in life. Your kolam should reflect who you are: a good housewife,’ Amma said in those first few days after Akhila had put aside her college textbooks for good.
Amma had a scrapbook of kolam designs put together from the pages of the Tamil magazines she read. There was a kolam there to match every occasion conceivable in a
brahmin household and a few more. Then there was a selection of everyday kolams. Good housewifely kolams brimming with all the housewifely virtues that made mothers-in-law refer to their daughters-in-law as the ‘guiding light of the family’.
What to most households was a mere ritual was to Amma a science. And the everyday kolam that Akhila drew was a scientific experiment that she assessed every morning. First Akhila had to sweep the ground, then sprinkle water to settle the dust. Living in a town ensured that she didn’t have to mix cow-dung with the water. Then she took the bowl of coarse stone dust that Amma bought by the bag every month and set about creating a kolam. Eight dots in a row. Four on top and four beneath. When the dots were done, she circled them with interconnecting lines. When she had finished, Amma would come out and look at it. ‘Not bad, but next time see that the dots are equidistant and don’t break the lines between two dots. The trick is to let a steady stream of dust trickle out of your fingers. Now come and watch me while I do the inside kolam.’
Amma did the kolam in the puja room herself And for that she used fine rice flour and the designs came out of the scrapbook of her memories. Akhila hated it. Akhila hated all kolams: the outer and inner ones. She hated this preparation, this waiting, and this not knowing what her real life would be like.
But that morning, Akhila actually wanted to draw a beautiful kolam that would make Amma mouth rare words of praise. Akhila wanted to hear her say, ‘Akhilandeswari, that is a beautiful kolam befitting a good brahmin home.’ And Amma did. Perhaps that was the omen the gods sent Akhila’s way to tell her all was not right about that day.
Later in the afternoon when Akhila had finished all the chores, she went to her mother who lay on the swing reading a magazine. ‘Amma, I’m going to Sarasa Mami’s house. She’s asked me to come and help her with some vadaam.’
Amma looked up from the magazine and mumbled, ‘Isn’t it rather late in the day to begin making vadaam?’
‘Jaya and I are just going to clean the sago and soak it. Sarasa Mami said she’ll grind it and season the batter. So all I have to do is go there early in the morning before the sun gets too hot and help her pour tablespoons of it on to the cloth pieces. Oh, and Amma, she asked if you have any of Appa’s old dhotis lying around the house for her to use …’
Amma sat up with a sigh. ‘Sarasa is a wily creature. For so many years I have asked her what she uses to season her vadaam and she’s never revealed all the ingredients. Maybe she’ll share it with you. Tell her that you’ll bring the old dhotis tomorrow and also tell her that I don’t want you standing in the sun. I don’t want you burnt black. You need to look after your complexion. All men want fair-skinned wives even if they are black as coal themselves!’
That was Amma’s way of granting permission for her to step out. Padma and the boys had friends of their own in the same street. But Sarasa Mami lived two streets away. And each time, Akhila had to ask her mother if she could go visiting. According to Amma, the streets were fraught with all kinds of dangers that would rob her of her hymen before it was legally perforated by the man who would be her husband. Thereby bringing disgrace to her father, their family, and the whole brahmin community.