Visitors to the house, p.7
Visitors to the House, page 7
This cottage of ours stood away from Didoli town for that’s the way Ammu had wanted it. It was she who had bought it fifteen years ago simply to escape the dreary, dark air of Delhi. Up here in the mountains the only buildings you saw were oaks and pines and chestnut. And the only noise you heard was of the wind, the birds and the stream in the gorge far below. Vurf would bark for no reason because he could hear a spoon fall miles away and imagined it was smeared in jam. He was the most beautiful dog. No, he was our brother.
Like I said, on a Sunday once a month Bani and I cleaned the house. Actually, Bani did the cleaning while I lay on Ammu’s favourite chair, feeling happy and sad. When you’ve mastered daydreams you can do both at the same time. You have to let your eyes open a chink and watch the mountains hazily as melancholic thoughts seep into your brain. Ammu creaks into a wicker chair beside you, rubbing her knees and laughing at what someone said or did when she was a kid. Aum sits on a windowsill and lifts his nose out of a book with ferocious beasts baring fangs on the cover. He laughs at Ammu’s silliness. And Vurf, he runs to the gate and back, barking his head off like he always did to please Ammu. Sometimes, I must say, he did things that kept him in her golden book. If he knew we were up to no good he stayed close to her, making it very clear he was on her side, the noble side of the law. Good old Vurf, how I miss him. How I miss all of us messing around in the garden and the baby orchard blossoming just behind the house. And as it happens, the tiniest teardrop escapes and hangs on to an eyelash like dew clinging to a thorn. I’m good at crying shamelessly, I feel happy after.
That Sunday, I heard the gate clang. Through narrowed eyes I could see the form of a woman walk up the slate path. It wasn’t Ammu because Ammu, even in my dreams, was never so thin. The lady said not a word and turned off the dripping tap behind the blooming yellow easter roses before settling down on the chair I reserved for Ammu. She made no sound until she spoke.
‘I hear you are the daughter of the cottage,’ she said.
It was an odd expression coming from a stranger, so I kept my mouth shut. She looked, even as a blur, a few years older than Mini-Mummy. There was something familiar about her that I couldn’t place a finger on. We sat without a word until Bani knocked over a chair inside and called it stupid instead of admitting her clumsiness. She worked like a diminutive singing tornado sweeping aside anything that came in her path. She shattered more china than she washed, but Ammu said not a word because in her world, in her words, a poor dumb donkey was superior to a sly smart fox. It was the innocence of the ignorant that charged the batteries of mankind. Without their errors, we would be one super-intelligent civilization devoid of character. I didn’t exactly know what she meant.
‘That Bani of yours,’ the visitor spoke, ‘is quite an army. I’m glad you have a tambeygon by your side.’
‘A tambeygon?’ I asked.
‘A mixed race,’ she said, with a straight face. ‘A unique combination difficult to find in these times.’
‘A tambeygon?’ I couldn’t believe there was anything extraordinary about our cleaning lady.
My uninvited guest broke into a smile. ‘She’s a tiger, a lamb, a donkey and a dragon. That’s a tambeygon. You have to overlook her faults because she has virtues too many. It is the humble that are the batteries of the world.’
‘That’s exactly what my grandmother said. Do you know her? Are you a friend of Ammu’s? She’s away in Delhi.’
‘Oh yes, I knew her many years ago. She was such a delightful mouseasunsky.’
I glared. ‘That sounds like an insult. I hope you are not calling my Ammu a Russian rat. Real friends don’t call friends names behind their backs.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, laughing. ‘Actually only real friends have the right to call their friends whatever they want to, even behind their backs. I shall call your grandmother anything I feel like because I have known her far longer than you. And mouseasunsky is the best of the lot. Why do you imagine a stranger would insult your Ammu? You don’t own her, you know. So many others have a right to her too. Now let’s not quarrel at our first how-do-you-do.’
I remained quiet. Bani was in the kitchen, frying something for lunch, brinjal perhaps. The smell of honey wafted down from high up in the chestnut tree, where I could see a large black beehive humming like the transformer with a danger sign that we passed on our way to school. It was a big fat grey brain thinking of a million things all at once.
‘What’s a mouseasunsky, anyway?’ I said, at last.
The lady didn’t turn her head to look at me. ‘You must first say sorry for doubting me without reason.’
I never enjoy saying sorry, so I merely made a sound, more like a growl.
She smiled. ‘I accept your apology. A mouseasunsky is the best of the best. It’s someone who is a mountain, a sea, the sun and the sky. Such people are rare. They have the strength and magnanimity of all these. I know she is not well and that makes you angry and sad. She is frail and tiny now, so you imagined I called her a mouse. You can never take bravery out of the brave. You can never take wisdom out of the wise. You can never take generosity out of the generous no matter how unwell they are.’
‘I get it.’ Long lectures gore me. ‘Ammu is in Delhi.’
‘I am aware. I came to see you. There is something I needed to tell you.’
I waited, staring at her sideways. I had seen her before, in Didoli or in Delhi. Or perhaps she had visited us when Ammu was herself and I was just a kid. I had definitely seen her. She said she was Ammu’s friend and I’d been sharp with her, almost disrespectful.
‘What?’ I asked softly, a trifle humbled by a self-admission of having been bad.
‘Those plastic earrings you are wearing, they look fine on you, but they are mine,’ she said, getting up abruptly.
I snapped out of my surprise only when the gate clanged for the second time and she was gone.
Tin Box
I rushed into the house. Bani sat on the floor in the kitchen with her back against the flour cabinet, sipping tea from her chipped blue mug. The windows had all been flung open and the mountains and tufts of clouds peeped in, curious to know why the old woman with the stick had been missing all these days. Every inch of the house was strewn with memories of the time we spent together.
The dining table where Ammu would sit and stare at the wall after supper like she was watching some old movie. The windowsill Aum had made his nook and where he would disappear behind the tall curtain, sometimes reading, sometimes pretending to read, sometimes hiding from Vurf in jest. The stain on the floorboard was Vurf’s doing. It was he who had tipped the jar of pickle right out of my hand and blamed it on me. His red collar hung on a nail by the main door as if he had merely gone out for a stroll and should be in for lunch. Ammu’s room too was stuffed with memories.
I sat on the bed, thinking of what to think. The lady had called me a thief. My hands went to my ears. The dangling, worthless bits of maroon plastic were hers, she’d said. Had she come all the way for nothing, then?
I opened Ammu’s walnut cupboard. The smell of mothballs swirled out. Her cotton saris and the gowns she had started wearing for convenience in the last few years hung in a neat row. I buried my nose in the sari she wore most often. It had been darned in two places.
‘Get a new one, Ammu, this one’s ancient. I’m giving it away. You go out in that and we will disown you,’ I had once said to her.
‘Get a new Ammu,’ she had said without looking up from the peas she’d been shelling. ‘She’ll wear fancy dresses and boil the three of you in mustard oil. I’ll come over and help her stuff you in bottles. And what business do you have in my cupboard, you and that Vurf of yours?’
The sari had a special place. It was full of little incidents suspended from a steel hanger. It was so worthless and yet so precious. The cheap earrings evoked a similar emotion. No thief would steal them, but you would walk several miles to claim them. My hands went under a pile of petticoats and touched the cold, sharp edge of the tin box.
It was grey and the latch seemed to have been twisted with pliers and pulled out to get at the contents. The lock, blue enamelled and rusty in places, had not been tampered with. The thief had been smart enough in going for the weakest link, and that thief was me.
I had touched the box so many times after Ammu left and I was alone in the empty house with nothing to do. I looked for the key in every imaginable nook and cranny. And the more I searched the greater became its mystery. I sat with the box on my knees on ten different days. I put it to my ear and shook it. The jingle went and planted itself in my brain. I was consumed by it. I imagined a treasure, the kind that throws up secrets. I started believing there was a bejewelled golden knife inside that had been used in a killing. I saw Ammu sleepwalking in her old, torn sari, holding aloft the dagger in the pale light of the moon. You know how it is.
On the day I first opened the box, I sent Bani off to the Didoli market on some lame errand. It was a good four mile walk, which meant I would have two hours to crack the safe. The plan worked perfectly and so did the pliers that I’d already hidden under the mattress in Aum’s room, now mine. It was still called Aum’s room the way old names stick to streets even when they have been officially changed. In a grand ceremony, amidst the blow of a conch shell and a shower of confetti made from shredded old newspapers, the entire clan had stood around clapping as Aum handed over the keys to me.
‘This is not a key to the room, Mira,’ he had told me solemnly, ‘it is a responsibility.’
The others, who, I suspect, had been grinning, too wore serious expressions and nodded in earnest when I looked up. There was a trick in this entire drama I just could not comprehend exactly. My responsibility was in keeping the house clean, but did it also mean that the house would keep an eye on me? I hadn’t planned on getting up to any mischief on my own, yet it was expected of me. The idea sounded exciting. And I ended up not behaving quite like an angel on these monthly outings. I did not touch my books. I ate food that mostly came out of cans and boxes and not the kitchen. My hair I washed rarely, though Bani had been instructed to go down to the roots regularly. I refused to listen to her and as long as I wasn’t murdering somebody, she didn’t bother to complain.
That day, with Bani off to the market, the box invited my indulgence. I tried pulling off the latch with the pliers on the table, but it didn’t work. I had underestimated the strength of tin. It yielded not between the knees, no. The last resort was to stand on it and yank it off. The lid flew open, and I was flung on to my back by the spirit residing within. I approached the box on my knees.
No stone-crusted, gold-hilted dagger lay inside. There was a fat green pen made in Germany. A couple of wiry yellow bangles, perhaps gold or brass, I couldn’t tell. A little porcelain figurine of a goat being led by a girl. A sealed envelope, bearing no address, which showed the outline of a letter when held up to the light. A pair of gold earrings in the shape of temple bells and a couple of red plastic ones. Also, tightly held by a rubber-band were five photographs, black and white and yellowed with age. It made no sense. My effort seemed futile and silly. What was Ammu doing with all these? Were they things she owned as a girl? She had indeed gone back to being a girl. Had the memories from the box come out and possessed her?
The plastic earrings seemed totally worthless and those were all I had taken. The lady had said they belonged to her, scaring me because I had committed a sin and a crime, and I lay exposed. Though Ammu would no longer understand even if she was told she had been robbed of a childhood memory by her very own, the granddaughter she trusted.
As I held the tin box for the last time, I saw the photograph, that I’d barely noticed earlier, looking at me. It was a picture, much younger, of the lady who had visited me and called me a thief. The upturned nose was remarkable. She was there in all the pictures. And she was certainly not Ammu, although she resembled someone I knew.
I put the red plastic earrings back, returned the box to its nook under the petticoats and fled the room.
Lost Girl
The days went by in a daze. The sixth grade dormitory had thirty beds. Mine lounged next to a large window overlooking the entire school and the hills beyond. My desk in class too crouched like a fat brown toad beside a window and had a view of the pines and a sliver of Didoli Lake in the distance. I looked so lost and guilty that thrice I had been asked by three different teachers in two days if I was in love. The girls made a happy noise and other teachers landed up at our doorstep, demanding to know what the commotion was all about. The fountainhead of Civics, Mrs Chelvam, bemoaned in a theatrical manner with a casual glance in my direction how one of her students appeared to show symptoms of having been struck by a dart to the heart. And as it happens in small towns, a little harmless teasing became a strong suspicion and then a certainty before the week was done. It was being said that I had met my prince on my Sunday sojourns. Such conjectures, if not crushed, withered away naturally, but in my case the story turned into a minor storm for which I had only myself to blame. I was the lost girl sleepwalking through classes and recess alike. The headmistress called me into her office after supper one evening.
‘You look unwell, Miss Mira,’ Miss Jacob said, pointing to a chair for me to sink into in shame. ‘Is anything the matter?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Your teachers have a very different view. They are of the opinion you may have caught the flu on your trips to town. That maid of yours, what’s her name?’
‘Bani,’ I said weakly at the thought of poor Bani being interrogated in a prison cell for nothing. I had visions of her screaming and denying she had been complicit in me staining my character. Schools can be ruthless, you know, and quite often they can drive a peaceful citizen insane for a minor offence. Those were the days when reports of the more mischievous girls being struck on the knuckles with the broadside of a wooden ruler were not entirely unheard of. The punishment, of course, didn’t hurt as much as the humiliation did.
‘I would like to speak with her when she comes to take you home the next time. I would also like to have a word with your mother when she’s in town. Can it be arranged?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
I did not feel brave at all because the tin box still occupied my brain and my left ventricle. We were being taught the anatomy of the human heart and the whole class had looked in my direction. Smart comments, mostly from friends, flew about aimlessly like paper planes. Miss Jacob had obliquely warned me that my trips home could jolly well be curtailed. She was convinced I was up to no good since, I think, she saw guilt sitting at the tip of my nose. Clearly this nose had no business to go poking into Ammu’s cupboard.
‘You may go now.’ Miss Jacob put on her glasses and pretended to read the documents she had held in her hand all the while. All she had said, and the nature of the meeting, were what they called deterrents. Be warned, implied the look and the drumming of the table with her left hand, we will take away your privilege. You do know you are the only girl allowed a day off on your own, eh, Miss Mira?
‘You do know you have been allowed to be on your own upon your mother’s request, don’t you?’ There, she had said it, in case I was dumb enough not to see the threat. She was looking at me over the rim of her reading spectacles with a fixed smile. ‘And take the other door, Miss Mira. We don’t want the school to see you walk out of my office holding your head low. You have done nothing wrong.’ She even got up and came to me. Her chinaware fingers lifted my chin up. ‘I want my girls to stare mistakes in the eye and correct them.’
I nodded and left her room by the door that I’d been advised not to take. Let me stare at shame and let shame hang its head. Suddenly I had remembered a tiny detail that I may not have mentioned and I saw things quite differently. The reason for my sorrow was not only my breaking into Ammu’s tin box and taking the earrings, it was that Mini-Mummy would find out what I’d done. She would mistrust me forever. But in hindsight I had an excuse for the theft.
I had opened the box, I would tell her, because on the lid was scratched my name: Mira.
This was true. I was surprised at seeing my name etched in one corner, with the sharp edge of the key to the lock perhaps. Things were beginning to make sense. I was not a thief. I had opened the box because it bore my name, and I believed it was left there by Ammu for me to find. I could not ask for Ammu’s permission because her mind lived in a different world. So there – case solved, guilt resolved and the prisoner could walk away from the headmistress’s torture chamber with her head held high, a smile on her lips and her reputation intact in her own eyes. Barbs and arrows of a nosey society cannot hurt an honest person.
I had another realization.
The lady who had visited me was quite obviously a daydream. She had appeared since she was in the photographs and, therefore, on my mind. She had accused me of stealing only because I made her call me a thief. My mind knew I had not been responsible. My mind had called upon her to reprimand me, to remind me of my error. I was not a bad person after all. I had been sad because I had a conscience.
The only question that remained unanswered was: who was the lady?
Nosey Lady
Another Sunday arrived at the cottage. And with it came the head-wash. Bani made me bend over a large iron basin on the porch and with hands that scrubbed the floors until they shone, she held my hair and squeezed the life out of any germs that may have taken shelter there. Even though it was she who did all the vigorous exercise, I was the one left completely drained. A white towel wrapped around my head, I fell back on my deck chair, while Bani resumed cleaning the house as if nothing spectacular had occurred. I felt giddy and extremely sleepy. The sun filtered in through the leaves of the old chestnut and fell upon my face. I dreaded what had just happened, but the aftermath was sweet.
