Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 8
Many of them worked for us and were housed in a long row of servants' quarters that ran west from the tamarind tree. Jai Singh was one of them. A fine-looking man with a chiseled nose and small piercing eyes that saw everything, he could have been, had he been educated, a leader of men. In his present situation, he was shrewd and calculating and a possessor of many family secrets.
Once, when he was escorting us to the river and I had jumped off a rock onto a jagged piece of glass, he had run all the way home with me in his arms. As I bled and cried, he tried to amuse me by imitating my lisp. I cannot actually remember that I lisped. And I do not even know why I remember this incident at all, as I must have been about three at the time. But I do have a clear image of Jai Singh's face, smelling of the bidis (small cheroots) he smoked, bending down over me, laughing at me as he ran up the steep road that curved around to the front of Number 7, and teasing me with, “Say khirki [window] again. You can't say it now, can you? O.K., say it your way, khilki. Who says khilki, huh?”
With Jai Singh as escort, we had gone down to the river for a watermelon that day, when I was about five. He stayed on the near shore with our clothes while we donned our bathing suits and waited for the boat. It was a ferryboat, a big, rough handmade wooden creation used mostly by the milkmen and farmers who brought their products to the city for sale. The ferryman stood high up at one end and used a pole to guide the boat across.
We were hoisted up and slowly taken across the calm waters. This was the summer guise of the river: during the monsoons it could rise and lash savagely at our cellar gates. On the other side of the Yamuna, we jumped down on our own, chased each other up the sand embankment, and made a run for the watermelon fields.
The watermelons seemed to grow right out of the sand. There they were, dozens and dozens of monstrous green balls, barely acknowledging the withered, browning vines they were attached to, just lying there, asking to be taken away from the burning sun and devoured.
We chose one, paid the farmer for it, and rolled it down the sand embankment to the edge of the water.
“Now,” said Rajesh, “I will teach you how to swim.”
He pushed the watermelon into the river. The giant fruit began to float. “Jump in after it and grab it with your hands,” he instructed. “Keep your arms stretched and your head down. Kick your feet without bending your knees.”
“I'll drown, I'll drown. The water is so deep in the middle of the river.”
“No, you won't drown. We are all with you.”
And so, with my cousins flanking me on all sides, I crossed the Yamuna River with the help of a watermelon. It was my first swimming lesson.
Jai Singh scooped me up on the other side. He threw towels on all our shoulders and carried the watermelon triumphantly home, where it was cut up and demolished. My grandmother pickled the rind. No signs of the fruit were left except the seeds, which were put in the sun and left to dry for future use.
It was during one of our summer trips to Delhi that I had my ears pierced. My finicky father would never agree to use one of the traditional women who came to the house and pierced ears with small gold hoops. They had done it all their lives, but my father insisted that they were untrained and unhygienic. He wanted us to go to a proper doctor who would use “clean instruments.” So he marched all of us girls off to Dr. S. B. Mathur, the family physician, whose office was in Chandni Chowk, the heart of the Old City, and who knew as much about piercing ears as he did about existentialism.
The doctor took a deep, brave breath and got himself some needles and thread. He carefully sterilized these, dabbed our ears with antiseptic lotion, and shoved the fat needle and thick thread in. We screamed, as might be expected, each in turn, as our ears were violated.
When we arrived home, with the ugly knotted-thread loops dangling from our ears, my mother and grandmother immediately fell upon us with home remedies for “quick” healing. It was a process that went on three times a day for a month: Ghee (clarified butter) was heated in a katori (small metal bowl) with ground turmeric. The ghee turned a bright yellow color, but the aroma, I remember, was pleasingly earthy. Sticks taken from a clean broom were covered at one end with cotton wool and dipped into the boiling liquid, and the bright color was transferred to our ears under the guise of a hot fomentation. Turmeric was considered the best antiseptic that the heavens had provided. That it left an indelible color seemed to bother no one. For one month we went to school with cooked yellow earlobes, drawing the stares of all our schoolmates. My ears were so badly and unevenly pierced that I can barely wear earrings today.
TWELVE
The Drawing Room • Winter Evenings:
Family, Friends, Lemonade, Nuts, and
Pakori s • Dining at the Long Tables
On each and every winter evening we spent in Delhi's Number 7, we would all gather in the drawing room, where Ishri, my grandfather's manservant, had already lit a fire. “It must have snowed in Simla,” we would say, rubbing our cold hands and pulling shawls, cardigans, and coats closer to us. Simla, that much-loved Himalayan hill town where my sister Kamal had been born, was in the very distant North, but whenever it snowed there, icy blasts made sure we got the news.
No one in the Number 7 household had been blessed with much sense of style, so furniture bought wholesale at auction was shoved against all four walls. As you entered the drawing room from the gallery end, there was the radio around which we huddled to hear Hindi movie songs at midday and cricket commentaries in the afternoons. Beyond it, on the same north side, was a big sofa, above which hung a large framed print of Hope sitting, head bent, on top of the globe, playing a lyre. In the corner was a kind of organ that could only be played by pumping wind into it with a pair of foot pedals. Then, as you turned the corner to the east side, there were overstuffed chairs galore, of disparate designs. On the wall above them, attempting to give them some cohesion, was a tinted, rather nicely framed photograph of my grandfather, looking quite Edwardian—Raj Narain, Barrister-at-Law. Next, on a stand and enclosed in glass, was a miniature marble reproduction of the Taj Mahal, near a potted palm on a stand. On the south was the fireplace with a mantel that held a rather lovely Chinese cloisonné urn with dragons. On top of the mantel was a print of a young, free-spirited lady (European but with an Eastern abandon) gazing into a fishbowl.
Surrounding the fireplace was an upholstered bench. Farther into the room on the same south side was another large sofa, where my grandfather sat, and set around on the west were more overstuffed chairs. There was a Persian carpet of exquisite workmanship on the floor, which was also used as seating. The drawing room was, basically, a functional room that had been designed—or not designed—to hold a lot of people.
The evening routine in winter hardly varied, unless there was a religious festival, a wedding, or a music recital.
As sunset gave way to dusk, the air slowly filled with the perfumed smoke of uppalas, dried cow-dung cakes, which were being burned in hundreds of thousands of braziers throughout the city. This was, and to some extent still is, the winter smell of Delhi. As the cows mostly ate hay, that was what their dung smelled like: hay.
When the soft haze of uppala smoke began drifting through the glow of the setting sun, squawking birds by the hundreds, propelled by their own time clocks, would begin circling our trees in flocks, green-feathered parrots with red beaks, sparrows, yellow-beaked mynahs, and also the dreaded crows. They would fly round and round above the mighty tamarind, the umbrella-shaped
Cousins Rajesh (left, here in my grandfather's favorite seat) and Suresh in the drawing room of Number 7.
jujube, the mulberry near the gate, the medicinal neem, and the mangoes. As they circled, they would come lower and lower, disappearing, as night fell, into the darkness of the foliage. You could still hear them for a while, though, chattering noisily, and then there would be quiet. Outside, there would be darkness, perfumed faintly with uppala smoke.
Ishri would light the fire in the fireplace, then hobble off to prepare my grandfather's hookah, his hubble-bubble water pipe, a fairly formal floor-standing version. I would follow Ishri, because the odor of that wet, dark, manly-but-sweet tobacco drove me wild. Ishri would make a ball of the tobacco and deposit it in the top section, the chillum, of the hookah. Over this he would arrange small pieces of burning charcoal and blow on them repeatedly until they glowed, his cheeks puffing like a toad as he did so.
My white-bearded grandfather, supporting himself with his cane, would come through the door that connected his room to the drawing room and settle down in his accustomed place on the right side of the sofa. However old he may have been by this time, he was still king of the household. Ishri would put down the hookah and set a whiskey and soda on a small table near it. Babaji would draw on the hookah, and a roll of gurgling sounds would follow as the air went through the water in the pipe. He would then take a sip of his whiskey. It was the start of another winter evening at Number 7.
The women, freshly washed and changed into their evening sarees, would follow, coming in from various doors, one after another. The first two of them were generally commandeered by my grandfather to sit at his feet on the Persian carpet and play chess, or more often, Chaupar, a form of Parcheesi that used three long rectangular dice shaped like sticks of Kit Kat chocolate. He would direct the game; the women played it more to please him than each other.
The children, having finished their sports or their homework, wandered in as well. If we passed my grandfather, he would dip a finger in his glass of whiskey and give us a lick. We were known to queue up for these licks. The men returning from work would start dribbling in as well. If Shibbudada happened to come through the door—which was rare, as he was generally out at musical events or bridge parties or at the Roshanara Club most evenings—the air in the room would instantly get supercharged. He nearly always came in demanding our immediate attention. “Look what I have for you! These are dates from Iran. Sweet, sweet dates. Embedded in each one of them are the best walnuts you can ever hope to eat. Take a bite. Just take a bite.” Yells and shrieks of delight would follow. Taiji would look up at Shibbu-dada with fresh hope, forgetting for the moment the years of unfulfilled expectations.
This was the social part of our day, and we never knew who might visit. No one needed to call before showing up. Mostly it was relatives, both close and distant. There was no formality, only familiarity. Om and Shant—green-eyed sisters and granddaughters of Babaji's younger brother next door—might walk over to regale us with their wit or impersonations. Prema and Krishna, from Number 10, the daughters of my father's eldest and most beautiful sister, Bhuaji, might stop by. Prema and Krishna were about Lalit's age and identical twins. One wore glasses, the other did not. They were born as triplets, but only two had survived. I remember once when Prema and Krishna arrived, Prema was not wearing her customary glasses. As we looked quizzically, they told us that they had gone to a guru who had given Prema special eye exercises to do at dawn every morning while gazing at the rising sun. She had done the exercises religiously, and now she was cured! She was, indeed.
Other than the unassailable family rule that you always gave your chair to anyone older than you, seating was very much by the grab-what-you-can arrangement. Generally, the grown-ups settled into all the plump sofas and upholstered chairs while we cousins draped ourselves where we could, on the arms of the sofas, the carpet, and the bench by the fireplace.
All social occasions are fueled with food and drink, and our winter evenings in the drawing room were no exception. The men were offered whiskey-sodas, the women tea, and the children squashes and lemonade. Squashes and lemonades were not what the words might suggest. Squashes were fruit concentrates sold by the bottle. You poured some into a glass, added water and ice, and you had a tolerable drink. But I disliked squashes intensely. The Glacier brand that we drank was manufactured in the Himalayan foothills by close family friends. (My father had once wrested a superb marmalade recipe from them.) However, even that refused to endear these lifeless squashes to me. Now, lemonades were another matter.
In the mornings, as we sat sunning ourselves on the front veranda, we would hear a clip-clop of hooves and the cry of a hawker, “Lemonade-wallah … Lemonade-wallah.” We would plead with our mothers to get some cases for the evening. A servant would be dispatched to the gate to signal to the lemonade-wallah that his wares were desired, and the lemonade-wallah, sitting atop his laden horse-cart, would come clip-clopping in.
Lemonades had nothing to do with lemons. They were carbonated drinks, sodas really, that came in special returnable glass bottles with marbles in their narrow throats. It was the marbles that held the fizz inside. Once the marble was pushed down with a stopper-shaped gadget, red or green or clear lemonade was there for the taking.
With the drinks were served the inevitable nuts. Nuts were warming, according to my mother, my grandmother, and all the ladies of the house, and winter was the best time to eat them. They were freshest then, too, having been harvested in the autumn.
These were not nuts you could grab by the fistful and shove into your mouth. No, you had to work for every one of them, as they came in their shells. The shells could be tossed into the fireplace, which was fun, but the peeling was sometimes harder. Chilghoias (pine nuts) demanded the most time and concentration, and I liked them the best, especially the untoasted ones with their soft white flesh and green inner core. My preference then ran to walnuts, especially the kaghii akhrote, or “paper-shell” walnuts. They could be crushed between two hands without the help of a nutcracker. As I picked out the flesh from the mess of crushed shell, my mother would remind me, “Always eat walnuts with raisins or you will get …” “I know, I know,” I would answer, “a sore throat.” There would be peanuts, too, freshly roasted in karhais (woks) filled with sand, and pistachios from Iran, the best in the world.
The nuts were not always enough. So a servant would be dispatched to the distant kitchen for plates of pakoris, vegetable fritters made by dipping vegetables or slices of them in a spicy chickpea-flour batter and deep-frying them. We would shout in the general direction of the servant's departing back, “Ask the cook to make extra green-chili pakoris.” The pakoris were eaten by most with fresh green-mint chutney, but for those of us who wanted to set our mouths ablaze, a bite into a hot-chili pakori after a bite of the sliced-potato pakori was the perfect pairing.
Soon all the guests who did not live at Number 7 would begin to depart, and my grandfather would take his last sip of whiskey and say to no one in particular, “Have the food put on the table.” After a while, the servant who had taken the order would return, salaam my grandfather, and announce, “Sa'ab, the food is on the table.” We would all get up and start ambling towards the dining-room annex in small groups.
In the dining room, there was a long, formal dining table and, joined onto it, two other dining tables of decreasing quality.
There was a chair for my grandfather at the head of the formal table, a chair for my grandmother to his left, and more chairs for the grown-ups on either side. Farther down, at the tables of lesser quality generally reserved for the children, chairs gave way to benches. We children were so far away from the head of the table that I did not know until I was told years later by my aunt Saran Bhua that my grandmother was a vegetarian and that she had invented the East-West dish spicy cauliflower with cheese that we all loved so much. We could hardly hear or see what was going on at my grandfather's end. We made note of Babaji's bobbing white beard, but we were too busy with our own discussions to pay the upper end of the table much heed. I did know one thing, though. My grandfather did not drink water with his meals. He drank club soda. We saw it being poured.
Whatever was cooked in the kitchen's large pateelas (pots), it came to the dining room in recurring serving dishes, two or three to each of the tables. There was hardly a question of courses. Everything savory was part of the main course and came to the tables at the same time. Fresh fruit, and sometimes carrot halwa in the winter, followed.
Winter dinners often included game, as the men were avid hunters. There might be duck or partridge or quail, some with pellets still inside them, cooked with rich cardamom-flavored sauces; or my father's favorite, leg of wild boar, cooked for a whole day in beer. But most of the time it was the usual goat-and-potato curry, a standard and much-loved staple. Accompanying it might be cauliflower with peas, carrots with fenugreek greens, and some spinach, all to be eaten with phulkas, little puffed whole-wheat breads. We rarely had rice at night.
Special needs were not overlooked. A sick child might need a soup, or once, when Taiji was on a diet to control her ballooning weight, her meat was boiled, and instead of eating it with Indian bread she wrapped each morsel in lettuce leaves.
I began to notice a disturbing pattern. Very often, choice pieces of meat were missing. Marrow bones, pieces offish-shaped muscle—where were they? I would look around in the serving dish and find nothing I wanted. Then I would see Taiji emerge from the kitchen with a small bowl and quietly spoon out these choice pieces to just her own three children, Raghudada, Sheila, and Rajesh. Easily indignant and unable to deal with what I perceived as unfairness, I would look up at my mother, but she would blink her eyes, suggesting I be quiet.
At night, as I undressed for bed, I would complain bitterly to Bauwa, but she would hush me up—Taiji's room was just next door—and say something like, “You had enough to eat, didn't you?” or “Once we get back to Kanpur, you can have whatever you want.”
