Free Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami Page B

conversation—almost like watching a play or listening to the BBC. Even her accent was like the BBC announcer’s.Ma said that pretending to be high class was one of Aunty Vijaya’s talents.
    “When Baba-ji got his letter from Mr. James Baldwin, Chief Engineer, B.N.R. Railway, Calcutta,” said Vijaya when I asked, for the third summer in a row, the story of a grandfather I had never seen except in photographs, “his mother—my grandmother—made a huge pot of cashew
halwa
.”
    “But Vijaya Aunty,” objected Roopa, “the last time you said that she made a pot of jackfruit
payasa.”
    I was irritated with my sister for interrupting the story. How did it matter what sweet was made? The story was about how Grandfather left his village and became a big officer in the Railways. Roopa took everything so literally!
    “I couldn’t have said jackfruit
payasa,”
said Vijaya Aunty with a smile. “My father hated jackfruit, said it smelled like rotting garbage. Now shall we continue with the story? Shankari Atthey’s recipe was the best. She was my great-aunt, a wonderful cook, ask anybody from our village and they will have a recipe of hers in their kitchen even now. She insisted on two whole cups of pure, homemade
ghee.
Oil gave it a shop taste.”
    “They had never even smelled
ghee,
all they had in their begging bowls was
ganji-bhaath
and sometimes a piece of pickle,” said Ma when I asked her about Great-Aunt Shankari. “That Vijaya has a ripe imagination! It is a pity she does not cook food as well as she does stories!”
    “It was expensive for my grandmother, but now her son was in a job with the Birtish-sahibs, that had to be celebrated,” continued Aunty Vijaya. “She fried the cashew, four heaped cups, in two tablespoons
of ghee
till delicately gold. Whole cashew cost a lot of money, thebroken ones that shopkeeper Shetty sold in hundred-gram packets would do. Cashew was cashew after all, once it reached the mouth it got broken into tiny pieces. Two-three-four cups of sugar. Father liked things good and sweet. Maybe one more cup. Who knew what kind of food he would be getting at that Birtish railway place he was going to?”
    At this point I always laughed and said, “Bir-tish?”
    And Aunty Vijaya also smiled. “Yes, she didn’t know how to say it right, she knew only a few words in English—‘No,’ ‘Train,’ ‘Tomato.’ But she made all her children attend the school that taught English, even though people in the village grumbled and said that it was not right for a priest’s children to learn the foreign tongue and maybe foreign ways.”
    “Was it a big village, Aunty Vijaya?”
    “Not very. There were enough families in it to give my grandfather a living. Those days people cared about going to the temple and listening to the priest narrating stories from the epics.”
    “Was it a nice village?”
    “It was beautiful,” said Aunty. “There were many coconut trees and acres of paddy. The sea was on one side and all night long the people of the village could hear the shush-shush of water licking the sands. In the morning the Muslim fishermen floated in their
kattamarans
on the waves and when the wind was good brought home boatloads of fish. Even they visited the temple, because the deity of the temple had been good to them. Everybody knew how powerful that god was.”
    When I told Ma that I wanted to visit this beautiful village of my ancestors, she laughed. “There is no villageany more, you silly girl. Your aunt is telling you a tourist-magazine story. That village drowned years before she was even born. It is now a puddle of water.”
    I preferred to believe my aunt. It was nicer to imagine a green village with coconut trees as tall as the sky than a dried-up puddle that was once a village.
    “When my father got a job in the Railways,” said Aunty Vijaya, “my grandmother couldn’t contain her pride. Now all the villagers could see how right she was in sending her son to an English