Monsoon Diary (5 page)

“Are you free this morning?” she would ask softly. “Or do you have a lot of homework?”

“What is it, Ayah?” I would reply. “I have a lot of work.”

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Nothing, my dear. It’s just that the new milk cards for this month have come.”

I pretended not to hear and acted busy instead, flipping through my textbook, muttering multiplication tables to myself, while Ayah waited with a patience that was entirely out of character. A few moments later I looked up at Ayah’s suppliant face and held out a commanding hand. Ayah handed me a stack of square cards.

“Thank you very much, my dear,” she said as I counted her milk cards. “You have saved my life. I don’t know what I would do without a smart kid like you to help me.”

AFTER THE MILKMAN and Ayah came the iron man, Chinnapan. The iron man didn’t really work for us. He ironed clothes for the entire neighborhood. But since he set up his stand right outside our house, under the shade of
our
mango tree, he gave us a discount. Instead of charging five rupees to iron my mother’s sari, he charged her three.

I thought Chinnapan was magical. He was a thin, dark man with a bare torso (the better to deal with the heat), bulging biceps (from all the ironing), and teeth that protruded when he smiled, which was frequently. With his oily, slicked-back hair and penetrating white eyes, he had the calm stillness of a snake charmer. He appeared at sunrise, wheeling his iron stand, about the size of a small table and thus perfectly suited for ironing wide saris. Since he didn’t have an electric connection, he used a heavy, old-fashioned coal iron, a hollow structure with a removable top that he filled and refilled with coals throughout the day.

The iron man’s arrival roused my brother from the depths of sleep because he possessed a skill that Shyam coveted: an unerring aim. On weekends Shyam and I would stand outside and watch the iron man light a fire in an adjoining mud pit, throw some coals in, and blow life into them. He raked the spitting coals with a charred stick till they bloomed into bright orange.

To me, Chinnapan’s dalliances with fire had a certain scientific precision to them. For years I tried to anticipate the exact moment when he deemed the coals ready for his iron—did they crackle a certain way, or brighten to a specific shade of orange? But I was always off. At what seemed like an arbitrary moment, the iron man exhaled slightly and squatted on the ground. This was the moment my brother and I had been waiting for.

We watched with breathless fascination as the iron man casually picked up a glowing coal in his hand, “his bare hands,” as my brother often said, and lobbed it over his shoulder into the open iron that was sitting on the stand about five feet away. He repeated this with about a dozen coals, his rhythm unerring as he tossed them like miniature basketballs into the waiting net of iron. He didn’t look back once. In all the days and years that we watched him, Chinnapan never missed his mark or charred his hands.

“Don’t try this at home,” he would say with a slight crooked smile when he finished.

Eyes round, we would nod in unison.

As my brother grew up and became an accomplished ballplayer, he joined his school team and went on to win medals and awards. Yet our neighborhood iron man was always the standard by which he measured himself.

CHINNAPAN’S WIFE, Jaya, had sharp features, long black hair, and a wide smile. Her only failing was her excessive belief in the cosmetic powers of turmeric. Many South Indian women, my mother included, apply turmeric paste to their faces early in the morning before washing it off while bathing. When I developed pimples as a teenager, the first thing my mother turned to was turmeric, believing, rightly so, that it would heal my skin and make it supple. Turmeric is widely used in Indian cooking for its antibacterial properties.

Jaya, however, smeared turmeric paste on her face with a liberal hand every day, with the result that her dark face grew more and more yellow over time. In addition, she applied a bright red
bindi
on her forehead, which shone like a headlight from a distance. The whole effect of her beaky nose, bright yellow face, and wide smile was that of a jaundiced Big Bird wearing a
bindi.

THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS found my father in the garden tending to the six coconut trees that were like children to him. Having grown up on a large estate, my father missed the wide expanses and profusion of trees that surrounded him in childhood. He remedied that by planting trees immediately after buying the land that would become our home. With typical absentmindedness, he forgot to consider that the land needed to hold a building as well as the trees. When my parents returned after a two-year sabbatical to begin constructing their home, they found a veritable forest covering their land. Besides the six plump coconut saplings, there were neem, banana, guava, and mango trees, not to mention thriving jasmine, hibiscus, chrysanthemum, and bougainvillea bushes.

The architect my parents hired was appalled when he was told that he could not touch any of the plants or trees. How could he erect a house when there was no central clearing that could accommodate a building? he demanded. Well, my father replied, the neem tree could not be cut because its leaves were a purifying antibacterial, essential for growing children. The drumstick (murunga) tree near it had to live because it housed a colony of caterpillars. Besides, its leaves were full of folic acid and tasted wonderful when ground into dosa batter. We needed the mango leaves on auspicious days to decorate the entrance of the house, so it had to stay. The young guava tree was no hindrance, was it, considering its thin branches. The coconut trees were non-negotiable, and the flower bushes enhanced the beauty of any property. So they would stay. My father’s solution: build the house around the trees. The architect threatened to quit, but my father was unmoved. The resulting construction was odd-shaped and rambling, with rooms ducking in and out between trees and shrubs. It felt like a tree house, adjusting its shape to accommodate my father’s fetish for a garden.

LAST TO COME in the morning were the two people closest to my mother’s heart: the garbageman and the flower woman.

The garbageman would push his cart, stand outside houses, and yell “
Kuppa!,
” which means “garbage.” Unfortunately, he became known by his yell and people would habitually hail him by calling “Kuppa!” as if that was his name.

My parents had the greatest compassion for the garbageman. Poor thing, my mother said; he is doing a job that is so necessary but that no one wants to do. My father made it a point to call him by his given name, Natesan, instead of simply saying, “Kuppa, don’t forget our home.”

Rather than leaving the garbage out front, my mother invited Natesan in. He would walk around the house and stand respectfully by the back door while my mom made him a cup of coffee (in a cup that was not used by anyone else).

For all the servants my mother had designated dishes and cups, which were to be washed and placed on the kitchen windowsill. The chipped blue cup was the garbageman’s; the brown one was for the iron man and his family; the plastic plate and green cup were for Ayah, who ate as well as drank at our house; and the large brass tumbler was for the flower woman, who drank copious amounts of watered-down coffee.

A plump, garrulous woman as dark as the night sky, the flower woman would bring several strings of fresh jasmine for the gods and goddesses in our
puja
room. My mother liked her cheerfulness, especially in light of her situation. She had three young children, who were attending the free government school. Her husband was a drunk who beat her for her daily earnings. Rather than belabor her woes, the flower woman had found an ingenious solution.

Every day she gave my mother most of her money to put in the bank. My mother had a faded old notebook for this purpose, and every day she entered the amount that she received from the flower woman. Next to every entry my mother signed her name and the flower woman laboriously scrawled her name in Tamil; she could write little else. At the end of the month my dad tallied up everything and told the flower woman her monthly savings. For performing these duties, the flower woman gave my mother a free string of jasmine.

With her savings, the flower woman planned to buy a gold necklace. She wore tattered saris given to her by her customers; her husband had no livelihood; her home was a tiny thatched hut in the slums; but like all Indian women, the flower woman, too, lusted after gold, and after two years of scrimping and saving she treated herself to a heavy necklace.

MORNINGS IN OUR HOUSE were a series of comings and goings that began at daybreak and ended only when the chirping crickets went to sleep. My mother couldn’t even take her afternoon siesta without being interrupted by servants with questions, vegetable vendors who walked by shouting their wares, neighbors who dropped by unannounced for a chat and chai, cawing crows, mooing cows, barking dogs, and the shrilling telephone.

ONE OF THE contradictions of India is the fact that many Hindu families send their children to Christian schools, believing, and perhaps rightly so, that dedicated Catholic nuns impart a better education. I was one of those Hindu children who studied in Christian schools through high school.

By the time I got to second grade, I proved to be an indifferent student, rebellious toward the structure imposed on me. School, to me, was a never-ending parade of classes. We began at nine and ended at four. The day started when the peon rang the bell by beating a massive iron piece (actually an eighteen-inch piece of railway track, said to have been presented to the school by a retired railway official whose child once studied there) with a big steel rod. This was a call for the children to line up in the courtyard for assembly, when the entire lot of us shouted the Lord’s Prayer at the top of our voices. Many of us could hardly say the words, but that didn’t stop us from developing our own versions. Mine went something like this: “Ah father, Charty Nevin, ah low be thy knee. Thy kin dumb come thy will bidden north cities in heaven . . .” I skipped the line about trespasses, a real tongue twister for me, and went right along to “Amen.”

After assembly, we had reading, math, handwriting, science, sports, and Scriptures, in no particular order, leavened by a long lunch hour in the middle of the day.

The lunch hour was what I lived for. Our school didn’t have a lunchroom, so we students were left to fend for ourselves. Some went home (if they happened to live close by), but most of us congregated under the jacaranda tree for a shared meal. We would sit in a circle and ceremoniously open our lunch boxes. There was a clear pecking order that had little to do with each girl’s talents, personality, or brains, and everything to do with her mother’s culinary prowess.

At the top of our lunch group’s hierarchy was Amina, a Muslim girl whose mother sent fragrant
biriyanis,
redolent with herbs and spices. Being Hindu, Brahmin, and vegetarian, I was technically not supposed to eat her chicken
biriyanis,
and indeed, I would have received a clip on the ear from my mother had she found out. I circumvented my mom’s clear instructions not to eat meat by having Amina remove all the chicken and meat pieces before giving me morsels of rice.

Every Sunday, I cycled to Amina’s house, ostensibly to play chess but really to feast on her mother’s food, something I knew my parents would frown upon if they found out. A thin but definite line divided Hindus and Muslims in conservative Madras. Like other traditional Hindus, my parents bought their groceries from Salim Store, since they considered Muslim merchants more honest than Hindu ones. Our family doctor was a Muslim lady who treated us for myriad health problems but rarely if ever visited our home. My parents encouraged us to befriend Muslim children, but the tacit understanding was that we wouldn’t eat at their homes because they cooked and ate beef. While I had no desire to eat meat, I couldn’t resist the delicious meals that emerged from Amina’s school lunch box.

After Amina came Annie, a Syrian Christian from Kerala whose mother sent feathery, pancakelike
appams
with a spicy stew of potatoes, onions, peas, and coconut milk. The
appams
tasted somewhat like the
idlis
my mother made and therefore held little appeal to me. But Annie’s vegetable stew was a world apart from the
sambars
and
rasams
that I was used to. It was rich with spices and full of cashews and other expensive nuts, which I loved even more than Amina’s
biriyanis.

Sheela was a Golt (a person speaking Telegu) from the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Her food was similar to mine, but her pickles were mouthwatering. Her mother was a genius at taking the simple mango and turning it into a variety of hot pickles. The mangoes were chopped or grated, then liberally doused with sesame oil, mustard-seed powder, asafetida, and lots of chili powder, which turned them into a juicy, spicy, lip-smacking condiment that we never tired of.

Outside our core group were other girls, “wanderers” who moved between lunch groups in search of the best food. We would only accept a wanderer if she had something we wanted to eat. The wanderers usually had the best food, which was how they bargained their way into whichever group caught their fancy.

Within the confines of our core group, there were clear rituals. We all opened our lunch boxes at the same time and looked around. The person who had the best lunch, usually Amina, opened negotiations. Amina would casually glance around the circle until her eyes came to rest on a lunch box. If it was mine, I wouldn’t hesitate.

“Here, Amina. You want my lunch?” I would hold up the entire contents of my lunch box eagerly and hopefully.

Amina would purse her lips as she studied my lunch box. “Maybe just a tiny piece,” she would say finally.

Grinning victoriously, I would allocate a generous portion of my lunch for Amina in exchange for a meager portion of hers. Once the first barter was made, the rest of the group could begin negotiations. On a good day, I got bite-sized pieces of everyone’s lunch so that my own humble lunch box looked like a miniature picnic table lined with a variety of dishes. On a bad day nobody wanted my lunch and I had to eat the entire thing myself. Most of the time, however, I would barter my lunch with a few people while the others would pass on my food, either because they were allergic to okra, tired of
idlis,
hated vermicelli, or just didn’t want to part with their own lunch. The worst days were when Amina refused to share her lunch for reasons best known to herself. Amina was a tiny, pigtailed girl whom I regularly beat in class and at sports, but during the lunch hour she was the queen and could dictate the rules. From time to time she would declare a “no-sharing” day, leaving our hearts broken and our mouths watering.