Free Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami

that Aunty Meera was only knitting and not stabbing the cat, or trying to pinch Roopa to death, that there was no time for Linda Ayah to point out
bhooths
and monsters. There was no chance for Ma to disappear into the night when Dadda went away in his inspection saloon and no chance for them to quarrel when he got back. Instead, Ma stayed up all night listening for sounds from Meera’s room, for who knew what that
shani
creature was up to? Even when Meera was quiet, the house resounded with people asking, “Where is that screw-loose?” “Is she cooking any fresh mischief, the
hucchi?”
“Don’t leave her alone in the kitchen, she will burn the house down, then whattodo?”
    Meera Aunty did not like children, especially not little girls who spied on her. If she saw me or Roopa staring at her she made a horrible gobbling sound as if she wanted to eat us up. One time, after she had spilled water all over my math notebook, I called her a bitch—I had heard the older girls at school call Sister Jesuina that. Meera Aunty rushed out of her chair. “You are a foul-tongued nuisance,” she hissed, bringing her face close to mine. “I believe I’ll have to wash your mouth clean.”
    She wrapped her thin, long fingers around my arm and dragged me to the lotus pond at the far end of the garden. Only a few months ago, the gardener had dropped a basket of kittens there and I’d been haunted by their drowning mewls for weeks. In my moral science class Sister Imelda had said that God was an angry person who punished people often. Now I was certain that God wassending me to the lotus pond to be drowned like the kittens for calling my aunt a bitch. I opened my mouth and screamed and Linda Ayah panted out of the house.
    “Baap-re-baap!”
she exclaimed, pulling me away from Meera Aunty. “What a house. One minute I turn my back and so much
gad-bad
happens!”
    After wrecking Mrs. Goswami’s roses, Aunty Meera turned her attention to Ma’s garden. She pulled up all the tiger-lilies, plucked the guavas while they were still unripe and told me that the papayas were so sweet because she pissed under that tree every morning.
    “Don’t touch that,” I whispered to Roopa, pointing to a bowl full of sliced papaya. “Meera Aunty did number-one in it.”
    Roopa thought that I wanted to eat it all myself and started crying when I held the bowl away. She was like that, cry-cry-cry.
    “Don’t tease your sister,” yelled Ma.
    “There is poison in the papaya,” I said.
    “Kamini!” Ma flashed her eyes at me. She was angry, and when her eyes went big and shiny and dangerous I knew that she was going to slap me.
    I would catch Roopa later for getting me into trouble. What did I care if she ate Meera Aunty’s pissy papayas? I was not going to touch them ever again.
    In the Ratnapura house with the flagstaff on the saucer-shaped lawn, Aunty Meera sat in the front verandah in full view of the neighbours and sang the national anthem. Vijaya Aunty told me that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee made up the song when India achieved Independence.
    “That was the year poor Meera lost her mind,” explained Vijaya Aunty. “She was only sixteen then. The
Jana-gana-mana
was playing on the radio and she threw a plate at the neighbour’s husband, stupid fellow always peeping into our windows to see us in petticoat-underwear maybe.”
    I hadn’t made up my mind if Meera Aunty was really half in her head or only pretending. Or if she was possessed by a
rakshasi,
which was the story the servants believed. Ma told me firmly that Meera was mad, mad, mad.
    “It runs in your father’s family,” she said. “Your father hid it from us, though, he did not bother to let my Appa know about this streak of lunacy. Do you think I would have married him if I had known?”
    “Rubbish!” Vijaya Aunty countered. “Your grandfather wanted to get rid of your Ma as quickly as possible, that’s all he cared about. We have never kept our poor, unfortunate Meera a