“You are all the same, though—Sanjay, Daddy, and you.” She slammed the phone down before Amma had the chance to react.
The guilt came soon enough. It always did. It made her feel like vermin, a mean, little, black-hearted vermin. She called Amma back.
“Amma, I’m sorry.”
Amma’s hello was thick and nasal. She had been crying.
“It’s not so bad. It really isn’t. I spend time vacuuming or cleaning the bathrooms. We have a computer, so I spend a couple of hours surfing the net and writing emails. I am learning to watch some of the daytime TV shows too.”
Amma continued to weep into the phone. “I want you to be happy,” she said. “That’s all a mother ever wants.”
That was Amma’s favorite line, repeated every so often, as if she had a constant need to be absolved of guilt. But if the past could be wiped clean at will, who would atone for the deep etches of memory that felt like scars?
Tara often wondered if her childhood memories would have been shaped differently if Pinky had been found in the boxes that arrived at New Mangalore Port by cargo ship four weeks after Tara and Amma moved to Shanti Nilaya. Would her transition to a new life have been easier?
Amma had spent an entire morning searching, emptying the boxes. But Pinky wasn’t there. Tara did not cry this time, because the four weeks of her new life in Mangalore had scattered her pain among new challenges. But the skies cried heavy sheets, flooding several low-lying areas on the west coast.
Tara stayed huddled inside their upstairs room with Amma after school, revisiting again and again the one afternoon she had spent with Pinky. Daddy had left to establish a new fairy tale for his family in Dubai. He would send for them after he had settled down, but it would take time. Until then, Shanti Nilaya was home to Amma and Tara, whether they liked it or not.
Amma had cried for a couple of days because she missed Daddy and her beautiful colonial home, her chauffeured station wagon, her kitty party friends. Then she had grown sullen. She came alive only at night, to help Tara with her homework. Her belly grew bigger by the day, like a ripe jackfruit. Tara knew now that it was not poop in her mother’s belly, but a baby that kicked her hard. The knowledge meant nothing to her, because the baby was only a ball inside Amma’s belly.
Six days a week, Tara trudged to St. Margaret’s Convent School, bundled up in a blue, red, and white flower-patterned raincoat with a massive hood. The first few days, Uncle Anand had walked with her. Then she walked alone, black rubber rain shoes on her feet, and a blue canvas school bag on her back, under the raincoat. The stretch from Shanti Nilaya up to the T-junction was the toughest to cross. The mud road was pitted with gaping craters that filled with water when it rained. Tara’s foot would invariably slip into a pool, filling her rubber shoe with muddied water. The first few times she had shuddered with revulsion—there was no telling what the water had touched. The lane was littered with cockleshells, and on the occasional day when it did not rain, she saw fresh goat droppings as well.
Walking to school was bad enough, but school was worse. There were fifty-three girls in her class, and she talked to none because her hair was too short—too short to plait or tie into pigtails; too short to look like her classmates. Each morning, before she left for school, Amma spent several minutes brushing her hair with a neat side parting. But by the time she reached school, wiry curls were springing up and sticking up in all directions, like an unkempt shrub.
“Your mummy doesn’t comb your hair?” Zainaba, the girl who sat next to Tara in class asked one day.
“She combs.” Tara felt her face growing hot.
“You must ask her to apply coconut oil. Your hair will grow long and thick like mine.”
Zainaba’s hair was always neatly braided into two plaits that were folded up and secured behind her ears with black ribbons. Sometimes, Tara saw black lice crawling up the side of Zainaba’s neck or on the top of her white shirt collar. Nobody pointed this out to Zainaba, so although Tara was repulsed by the lice the first few days, she changed her opinion quickly and wanted to cultivate some in her hair.
Every morning, after Zainaba’s advice, Tara insisted that her hair be drenched in oil before she set out to school. This pleased Grandmother Indira, who believed that coconut was essential to their lives—in their food, for prayers and as nourishment for hair.
Grandmother Indira was kind, but she stayed in the kitchen and cooked four meals, brewed tea and boiled milk, or she gave all of herself to her barn chores, retiring only after dinner with a long sigh, and the sigh was the only luxury she allowed herself.
Grandfather Madhava was a postmaster in his post office, and a reader of news at home. He left home precisely at eight thirty each morning and returned an hour before daylight faded. But before he left home and after he returned, Tara rarely stepped out to the verandah, where grandfather spent much time on an easy chair, feverishly rustling newspapers and gleaning the same news on All India Radio, as if some glitch in censorship during the emergency would allow real news to trickle into his day. Grandfather did not see little Tara, and when he did, his gruff manner sent her scurrying inside.
Uncle Anand held a clerical position at the Department of Central Excise in Attavar. He was the opposite of his father, Madhava. He allowed Tara to trail him like Mary’s little lamb. Often, when the rain gave respite in the evening, he took her to the Beary store past the T-junction and bought her peanut chikkis or coconut-jaggery candy.
Some evenings, when the mood struck him, Uncle Anand ambled to the verandah of an old vacant house down Morgan Hill, Tara in tow, an enormous, prickly, brown-green jackfruit wrapped in sheets of newspaper in one hand, and a sickle in the other. Tara sat beside him on the steps leading to the house and watched in fascination as he spread newspaper sheets on the dusty red verandah and placed the fruit at the center. He expertly sliced the fruit in half, wiped the oozing white gum away with several sheets of newspaper, cut the halves lengthwise again, and carefully removed the fleshy yellow bulbs. He piled Tara’s side of the newspaper high with the sweet, pungent bulbs, and showed her how to pull the seed out before plopping one into her mouth. Tara did not remember eating jackfruit before. Once she got used to its rich odor, she enjoyed its full, sweet taste.
When Amma got to know about the jackfruit events, she forbade Uncle Anand from giving Tara any. Not from a piece of paper, not sitting in a dirty verandah, she said. That was asking for a stomach upset. But Uncle Anand cast aside Amma’s concerns with a laugh. Tara believed him when he said Amma was being overly fussy, that jackfruit was the healthiest fruit on earth. Besides, somehow, jackfruit tasted better after Amma forbade her from eating it. So she indulged in the only sweet moments of her day, and listened to Uncle Anand narrate stories of Tulu Nadu, their land encompassing the southwestern coast of India.
Each time, he drew out a different fable from memory. The first time, it was the story of Koti and Chennaya, the legendary twin heroes from a Tulu epic who were raised by King Perumala Ballala of Padumale and fought valiantly against caste discrimination.
By the time Koti fell to a treacherous arrow from Perumala Ballala, whose very hands had fed him as a child, and Chennaya, unable to bear the grief over the loss of his twin brother, had killed himself, Tara had wet, brimming eyes.
The next time, it was the story of Abbakka, the warrior queen of Ullal who put up a spirited resistance against the Portuguese army. Then it was the story of Punyakoti, the noble cow, for whom keeping promises mattered more than life itself.