Free Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami Page A

secret.”
    “Do you want to believe her or your mother?” demanded Ma. I did not know if I was standing on my head or what. Ma made up things sometimes, like when boring Mrs. Khanna phoned and Ma told her that she was going out and really couldn’t talk just now.
    “Oh, Mrs. Khanna,” she would say in her sugar voice, “I was thinking about you only yesterday. We must have a long-long chat, but now I have to go out with my husband, he gets so annoyed if I am not ready. I will call you tomorrow?” Then she would put down the phone and say in her normal voice, “Boring old
bak-bak.”
    Ma was not always honest, but Dadda could not lie. He did not know of hidden things buried in mere words, so even the stories he came home with must be true. In spite of his thick glasses with the stainless-steel frames,Dadda could not see the invisible rivers rushing through the house, the chaos, the rage. Linda Ayah, who wore glasses thicker than Dadda’s, noticed every minute thing, heard even an ant dropping to the ground from the rangoon-creeper flowers.
    “Your father cannot see because he does not want to, and Memsahib is blinded by her anger,” she explained. “It is true-but, that all of us can’t see one thing or another. I, for instance, don’t know whyfor I didn’t spot that my husband was a loafer-insect first time I saw him, but that is my problem, whattodo?”
    Aunty Vijaya, who was supposed to keep an eye on her sister, spent the visits lying in her bed reading
Woman’s Era
and
Filmfare
magazines.
    “See this rascal Rakesh Dutt, he leaves his poor wife and runs around with new actresses! No shame,” she would comment, showing me pictures of the offending actor. I was only too happy to sit in the
chik
-shaded room smelling deliciously of wet
khus
mats dripping against the cooler, like the first monsoon rain on parched earth.
    Here was quiet and sanity and, best of all, Aunty Vijaya’s stories, not fairy stories but real-true ones. I insisted on knowing every tiny detail. Dates, names and places, smells and sights, each minute brush stroke that makes a picture whole. If my aunt started with, “Once upon a time,” I immediately wanted to know, “When? Exactly when?” Vijaya told my sister and me about the tiny village on the Mangalore coast where her great-great-grandparents had lived, the old house in the centre of undulating green paddy, their ancestral home haunted by a benign femaleghost, the cobra castle near a peepul tree behind the house, the temple priests, the
tong-tong
of bells as the cows wandered home in the hazy dusk.
    Ma commented on the stories Aunty told us. “Stuffing your head with nonsense,” she grumbled. “What a fine imagination she has! Cooking up a whole line of grandmothers and fathers, what a talent, ahaha!”
    Hating my mother for destroying the carefully constructed details that recreated my father’s world, I clung obstinately to their veracity. But Ma insisted that nothing in the world was a fact.
    “The world itself is
maya,”
she said angrily. “What is there to believe? See that Meera out there in the verandah? Is she really crazy? Who knows? Not even those clever doctor
wallahs
with big-big books under their armpits. Oh yes, there was an Anjana Akka, Hari Ajja, a snake hole in their back yard. Every house has a snake hole, so what? And how can Vijaya describe Hari Ajja so precisely, did she ever see him? Was there such a thing as a photo so many years ago? Your Aunty is one big liar, that’s all! And you, Kamini, should be doing reading-writing instead of listening to her nonsense.”
    “We belong to the Gokulnatha family,” Aunty Vijaya told Roopa and me. “They were the best priests for miles around. One of our ancestors was even priest to the Maharaja of Mysore.”
    “Rubbish!” said Ma. “They are an unknown, beg-garedly bunch of Brahmins. Priests to the Maharaja of Mysore indeed!”
    Aunty Vijaya’s stories had happy endings and plenty of