Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 6
There were many places to slip up here. The napkins could pick up dabs of tomato from the soup. With the Indian course we were in really dangerous territory. We ate this course with our hands, naturally. My father would put his meat, with its sauce, in a katori (small metal bowl), which sat on his plate. First he would eat the pieces of meat with his chapati. Then—and he really loved this combined flavor—he would ask for the bowl of beets, add some of the sauce from the beets to the meat sauce, and scoop it all up with more chapati.
Naturally, I wanted to do what my father did. But there were some slip-ups, and traces of beet sauce with the dreaded yellow turmeric would find their way to the napkin. My father and mother both lectured us, “Only use the tips of your fingers to eat…. You must not dirty more than the first digit….” We were offered finger bowls after the Indian course, but we dunked once and then used our napkins. So my father started checking our napkins, and whoever had the cleanest napkin at the end of the week was declared the winner. Always anxious to win, I stopped using my napkin altogether. In emergencies, I used my frock. My father soon put a stop to that, but with another such vice he was a bit more encouraging.
This had to do with bones. It started one cold winter day when we had just eaten a chicken curry for dinner.
The chickens were always bought live, usually by my father. I remember going with him to the poultry market, where the birds were kept in rope cages. While the poultry man held on to the squawking chicken, my father's long fingers with their beautifully shaped nails would advance towards the bird, go through the feathers, and begin probing and prodding. He said he needed to feel their breasts to see if there was any meat on the bones. The chosen bird would ride back in the car with us, still squawking away. The slaughtering was done at home, near the grapevines— it was thought that the blood would make the grapes redder. Then the chicken was plucked and taken to the kitchen, which was at the end of a long, covered walkway. My mother would go there in the early evening to “start off” the cooking. Standing there perspiring, her cotton saree tucked between her legs, she would take some of the seasonings already chopped or ground by the masalchi (human spice-grinder) and throw them into the hot oil in the pateela (cooking pot). Cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaf, cloves would go in, then some sliced red onions, then a ground mixture of onions, garlic, and ginger. This would be stirred around with a sprinkling of water until it was all golden. Some freshly ground cumin, coriander, and turmeric would follow. Not too much chili powder, as my father could not stomach very hot food. Now the chicken pieces, all cut and skinned, would be added and stirred and stirred. My mother always said that the secret of a good curry lay in browning the spices and meat to just the right degree. Then she would add water and salt and leave. Her job was done. She could bathe and get dressed for the evening. The finishing of the chicken curry was left to the cook.
Needless to say, such lovingly made food tasted good to the last bone. I enjoyed all of the chicken, but I loved the bones and would suck them and chew them until there was almost nothing left. This particular day, I was still chewing on a bone when everyone got up from the table to listen to the radio. I followed, bone in hand, still chewing. My mother gave me an angry look, commented on my bad manners, and asked me to return to the dining room and leave the bone on my plate. I was considering complying when my father came in with “Let her chew on the bone. She probably needs it.” And from that day on, I was allowed to chew on bones until they were reduced, in the case of chicken at least, to smithereens.
Marrow bones from a goat curry were another matter. All flavored with cumin and coriander and onions and ginger, with the dark marrow popping out, they were glorious, and we all wanted them. My parents had bought two sleek silver marrow spoons to take the marrow out, but the problem was, there were never enough of the marrow bones themselves to go around. We just had to take turns: “You had the marrow bone yesterday, so it's MY turn today.”
All of us sisters liked to read. We could be caught all over the house in the weirdest positions: legs flung over the back of a wicker chair, book on chest; lying flat on the takht (divan) on our stomachs, book on floor; head down on the desk, book an inch from eyes. Sometimes we read in the garden. As it got darker, my mother would ask us to come in. Lalit and Kamal listened. I went on reading until Bauwa yelled, “If you go on reading in the dark, you will end up with glasses.”
Eventually, my eyes were checked. Sure enough, I needed glasses. Another woe! I would never be a pretty girl. Meanwhile, my sisters, already teenagers and already dainty and lovely, pranced around in their new multicolored wedge-heel shoes!
Around this time, my parents became very friendly with a doctor. She was always referred to as a “lady-doctor” and was the only respectable female I knew who worked. I immediately resolved to be a doctor. I followed Dr. Chandrakanta around whenever she visited, admiring her firm manner, her large watch, her sanitized smell, and her simple handloomed sarees. She was not married, as all the women around me were, and had a clear sense of mission. I so desperately wanted to be her.
EIGHT
My Caring, Reticent Sister • The Useful
Club • The Death of a Cousin
As the girls got older, the responsibility for our general welfare fell more and more on Lalit. It probably started with homework and then crept up from there. My mother could hardly help us with schoolwork, as it was all in English. Lalit had already gone over what Kamal and I were studying, so we naturally turned to her. And, of course, it was her own nature to help us out. She began to choose the patterns for our dresses and coats, she remembered our birthdays, and at Easter she made sure I got a prettily decorated Easter egg from the Goan bakers at Valerio's, which she knew would make me giddy with joy.
Once, when we were all playing on a high pile of rolled-up winter quilts, my youngest sister, Veena, tumbled down and broke her arm. It was Lalit who held her and telephoned my parents, who were away at a dinner party.
Perhaps because of this responsibility for her sisters' well-being, and because she was a teenager in a walled-up compound, she began disappearing into herself, into some inner recesses where I could not always follow her. When she spoke, if the subject was anything other than intellectual or of a household nature, I felt that more was left unsaid than was said. I was so used to unburdening myself of every last emotion that, as I got older, I began noticing her reticence more and more. I remember, years later, asking her in some desperation, “But what are you feeling? What are you FEELING?” She had learned to keep her feelings to herself. She never stopped being a very caring, loving older sister to me, listening to every last outburst of mine through the years, calming and soothing me, but her own heart remained private.
And then a cousin died. This was the first death in our joint family, and it left me desolate. I was about seven years old.
As we moved seamlessly from Kanpur to Delhi, we would take up with the cousins who were of similar ages to us as soon as we got there. The cousin who was closest in age to me was Brijesh, the second son of my father's youngest sister, Kiran Bhua. We would climb trees together, eat chaat (spicy snacks) together, and go for walks to the Yamuna River, hand in hand. I even started dressing like him, in boy's shorts. Best of all, we had started a club together.
A few years before, when we had both been sitting under the stairs that led to the roof of Number 7, we decided to cement our friendship by forming a very private club with just two members, him and me.
“What would the club do?” I wondered.
“Well, it could collect something,” Brijesh ventured. He had a fine nose, thin well-shaped lips, and thick dark hair.
What might we collect that mattered deeply to us? The answer was clear. It would have to be stationery. We both loved stationery. Special stationery. And so began the collection of The Useful Club (which I have to this day)—pens that could write in six colors, matching sets of silver pads and pencils for keeping bridge scores (all the cousins played bridge, starting around the age of six), pencils with tassels, boxed gold pencils, sleek wooden rulers, erasers that looked like toffee. … It was decided that I would be in charge of this collection and that it would be housed in the large bottom drawer of a cupboard my mother kept in our Kanpur bedroom. Of course, whenever I visited Delhi for the holidays, I would bring the collection with me so we could examine it and add to it.
Lalit went on a trip to Delhi, I think with my father. The rest of us stayed behind in Kanpur. This is the story she told on her return, and it is permanently etched in my head: It was the afternoon of a very hot day, and most of the household in Delhi were napping. She was sitting alone on the long front veranda when she noticed a stray dog with a strange gait meandering down the front drive. The next thing she remembers is hearing screaming and sounds of a struggle. She ran through the opening in the henna hedge into the south courtyard. There, in front of the bedroom of my middle uncle, Shibbudada, was the dog, growling, frothing at the mouth, and clutching Brijesh's hand. She tried to shake the hand free, but the dog's teeth were firmly embedded around Brijesh's thumb, so it took a while. In the meantime, she yelled for help, but not before getting a lot of blood on herself as well. Family and servants came running, and the dog was ultimately captured for examination in case it had rabies.
Lalit and my father left for Kanpur. It was in Kanpur that we got the call from Delhi saying that the dog did have rabies, that Brijesh was getting his rabies injections, and that Lalit should get them, too.
Lalit got her shots at the hospital on the way to school. I would go in with her. She would have to lie down and expose her stomach.
My cousin Brijesh, aged about four.
The biggest, thickest needle would be poked slowly right into her soft belly. The medicine went in slowly, too. Her face expressed her agony, but she did not make a sound. I wanted to cry for her but did not dare. It seemed to take forever. I would think of Brijesh, too. He was so much younger. The same would be happening to him.
Some months later, we learned that Brijesh had rabies and that he was in a hospital. The injections had not worked for him. It happened sometimes, they said. We got daily reports from Delhi. It was an agonizing death, they said, complete with hydrophobia and all the havoc that rabies wreaks. He cried for water but could not swallow a single drop.
NINE
Divided Loyalties • Preparing for War • Film
Buffs • The Nazi Connection • Wolfie and the
Gray Horse • The End of the Kanpur Idyll
World War II was in full swing, and it was testing loyalties. if My father's undefined ambivalences were seeping into all of us. We trusted our father enough to want to think like him, but what was he thinking?
First of all, there was the British Army in Europe, fighting the Nazis. Thousands of Indians were fighting along with them and were dying daily, just as they had done in World War I. We would get the reports: so-and-so's son was killed in Italy; so-and-so's brother was killed in Turkey. This was not in the British press; we just heard it. Indians were dying for the British while we, as a nation, were fighting the British in India for our independence. We were fighting nonviolently, under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi, but we were fighting nonetheless. Although we wanted the British to win in Europe, we wanted to be free of them in India.
The British Army was also in the jungles of Burma, skirmishing with the Japanese, who were advancing towards India. Fighting along with them were seven hundred thousand Indians, many of them Gurkhas, who were dying daily, too. Now, in the same Burmese jungles, fighting with the Japanese and against the British, were Indians of the INA, the Indian National Army, whose leaders were such heartthrobs that, when they were captured by the British and tried in Delhi's Red Fort, all teenage Indian girls cried their hearts out. The INA hoped to march into India with the Japanese and free the country.
Meanwhile, much of North India, and this included us, was preparing for war, with air-raid drills and blackouts. We did not know who was going to bomb us, but we were ready. By the early 1940s, our windows and skylights had black shades on them. My father had trenches dug all along one side of the house, and we were fully prepared to dive in at the slightest hint of warfare from any quarter.
Life continued, however, and as a family we went to the movies almost every week, partly to take our minds off the war. The name “Bollywood” had yet to be invented, but Bombay Talkies was a major Bombay studio of the time, and we managed to see every film it made, even its “war-effort” films, which studios around the world were producing en masse then, each from its own national point of view. Bombay Talkies films were decidedly pro-British. We saw “war-effort” British films, “war-effort” American films, and “war-effort” Indian films, or whatever was showing at the picture house. We were film buffs. My father once declared, “Joan Crawford is a very handsome woman.” I did not know until then that a woman could be called handsome.
In those days, each movie concluded with a recording of the national anthem, then “God Save the King.” Everyone was supposed to stand up as soon as the Union Jack waved on the screen. Well, after he had seen the pro-British “war-effort” film, and enjoyed it, my father's form of protest against British rule was to walk out as soon as the flag appeared. His wife followed him, and the girls, like little ducklings, waddled behind them in support. Here, at least, we had devised a clear procedure to follow.
A much more serious issue was my father's cousin and dear friend, Guru Chacha. Guru Chacha had gone to Germany to study. There he had fallen in love with and married a German girl, Toni Aunty. As the drumroll for the war began, Guru Chacha took to the German airwaves, on the Nazi side.
My poor father was appalled. He glued himself to his large Phillips radio, hand on dial. There would be electronic whining and static, and then my uncle's voice would come forth, as clear and sharp as ever. “Guru is on. Guru is on,” my father would cry hysterically. We would all come running. My mother would make sure that my father had a cup of tea or a whiskey in hand to calm him down. We listened to Guru Chacha and then to the BBC, talking of the same war.
I remember Guru Chacha and Toni Aunty returning to India after the war, after Indian independence. Guru Chacha had put all his savings into buying a large machine that he was convinced would make him a fortune in the new India. It was a doughnut machine.
Poor, lost Guru Chacha. Post-independence India, however sweet-toothed, did not take kindly to doughnuts, and his venture proved quite ruinous. The last I heard of them, he and Toni Aunty had turned to some Indian religious group for solace and peace.
During the war years, we had also acquired some unusual protection in the shape of a dog. My mother had, until then, clung to the old Hindu school of thought that all animals were dirty, germ-carrying creatures that should be kept outside the house. She was not prepared for Wolfie. Wolfie was a German shepherd, and he was not, strictly, ours. His original German master, Karl Schneider, had come to work in my father's factory as a chemist, but once the war started, he was interned, and I never saw him again. Before he was carted off, he begged my father to take care of Wolfie. My father begged my mother, and she ultimately relented. And so we got our first dog.
The war also brought us a horse, a dappled gray-and-white beauty that I loved. We could no longer go to school in our car, as there was a shortage of petrol and it was strictly rationed. My father hired a tonga, a very simple horse carriage, to take us back and forth. That particular horse, attached to that particular carriage, had the inexplicable tendency to fall down, just give up and lie prone on the road, at the oddest moments, leaving the carriage part high in the air with three girls in pigtails, identical blue tunics, and white blouses screaming their heads off. My father had enough of this arrangement and ultimately bought his own horse and a very fancy high-off-the-ground red tonga painted on the sides, with an equally fancy get-out-of-the-way, tinkle-tinkle bell in front that the turbaned coachman could depress with his foot. The stables, where my adored gray horse could rest on straw, were near my father's office, so this gave me another destination to walk to every day as I did the rounds of the gardens. After every tonga ride, the horse needed to be walked. I would walk along with him, admiring my father all the more for being the most stylish man in the world.
Our cocooned idyll in Kanpur, such as it was, came to an abrupt end in 1944, when my father decided to leave his job and return to Delhi.
The pull of Delhi, with my grandfather tugging at the strings, had been constant, and now Babaji was getting really old. My father's guilt was mounting. There were probably other triggers, but I never really understood them. All I know is that the announcement seemed sudden and my mother was heartbroken. She cried almost constantly for a month. We would go to visit my parents' friends for farewell parties, and my mother would end up in a flood of tears. My father seemed distracted, as if his eyes were confronting a hundred ghosts. Both my parents seemed to know that perhaps the best part, the most independent part, of their lives was coming to an end. Henceforth, they would be mere cogs in a joint-family machine controlled by other, more domineering figures.
Schooling, that constant problem, was a consideration again. While my parents and I and my baby sister would be joining my brothers after nine years of on-again, off-again companionship, we would be leaving my two older sisters behind. They were to start off in a school in Kanpur and then, after two years, transfer to a boarding school, a sister convent, in the Himalayan hill-station-beside-a-lake, Nainital.
