When you go long periods without a goal in life, something gives. Maybe things about life become clearer. Or the muddle in your head gets worse. Do you learn to navigate the confusion? Does one adjust and forge ahead?
I did have a goal. Travel. Some, anyway.
My resignation from the Bombay Sentinel newspaper had been impulsive. I had not told anyone about it, except my best friend Anjali. Being unemployed is a rude reality, especially if you’ve worked for many years. The unnatural feeling is often heightened by unsympathetic family.
I once overheard
Joy Uncle tell his wife Elsa that I had deserved it. I assume he was referring
to the punishment of losing the bulk of my savings when the Reserve Bank of India
froze the assets of my rogue bank. It meant that my hiatus would end
sooner than later. Uncle didn’t know that crazy unfounded fears gnawed at my
gut almost all the time. Being a journalist, I knew the chances of
getting back even a small portion of that money were slim.
Joy Uncle’s offhand remark had riled me. Later, when I
had analysed the statement to death, I thought Uncle was a hypocrite for
many reasons. One of them was the successful engineering of a very good
marriage for his daughter Roma. It was understood that she would never go to
work and the MBA she had acquired just before she married, apparently a precondition
for increased and prosperous marriageability in our community, would be better
utilised in creating and nurturing a set of accomplished offspring and keeping
house.
But Roma, as hot-headed as her father, found her
in-laws suffocating and her husband a stuffy stethoscope that also functioned
as the mouthpiece for the Charter of Chauvinists. In an extreme act of
rebellion, Roma found a job and worked through both her pregnancies despite
various threats and entreaties to be a stay-at-home mother. The job helped her
to escape her family and maintain sanity, she told me several times, and the
income meant she had a say in her own fate.
So, I reiterate, Joy Uncle is an unalloyed hypocrite.
But, I was still unemployed and I was still being
reminded that I had made a huge mistake giving up my job.
For instance, yesterday Saroj Aunty, my father’s
youngest sister and mother of Eva (Mutiny At Pretty Villa, Noises In The Dark, etc) called me up. She
said she was sorry I didn’t have a job, when was I going to get one, how would
I survive without one, I was so imprudent with money I had to get married so
that my new husband would give me some good sense, and why had I alienated that
nice young divorcé boy Danny (Uncle's Man) that Joy Uncle had made me meet, a nice
husband would make me see what I was missing and handle all my money, make it
grow, give me children and all I had to do was marry, go to work, give my salary to my husband and I wouldn’t have to worry about a thing and if I married
a rich man things would be even better.
I felt numb – the thousands of exclamation marks
ricocheting in my cranium during the conversation attempted mass hara kiri.
How does one talk to the Sarojes of the world. She was
another hypocrite. I made a noise every now and then lest she thought I was
rude and complained about me to Joy Uncle, but my mind wandered to an incident
in my childhood.
I was spending the summer vacation with my paternal
grandparents in Kerala and my grandmother had ordered me to follow her to the
storeroom. It was a dark room in the middle of the old house, with no windows, but
surrounded by other rooms with two doors – one leading into a large room adjoining
the kitchen and the other into a corridor. The storeroom’s utility had changed
over the years, sometimes becoming a servants’ quarters, but eventually
staying a storage space.
My grandmother pointed at the loft-like space that ran
along one wall. It was about three feet high. I went into the dining room and
dragged one of the old rickety teakwood chairs into the storeroom and placed it
on the table. The impression I got was that the table would become useful to a
family member someday, but years on it still hadn’t found another use. I
climbed the table and then the chair and was able to hoist myself onto the
loft. It was a dusty cobwebbed section and I started coughing.
“Cover your nose and mouth with your handkerchief,
child!” Ammachi (grandmother) shouted from below.
“Don’t have one, Ammachi.”
She grimaced but went out and returned. I managed to
grab the balled-up handkerchief as it flew up in the air for the fourth time. I
tied it around my nose and mouth. It was my grandfather’s. Only he used
pristine white Irish linen handkerchiefs that he often asked relatives to
get him from abroad. Now, I wondered how he and Ammachi had got together.
Perhaps they had only met at the altar – and she had never had to open her
mouth until after the wedding.
“Stop dreaming! Here’s the broom!” It sailed through the air, narrowly missed my head, smacked the wall instead and landed on my ankle. It stung, but I grabbed the broom and waved it through the cobwebs about me and they disintegrated. I had to remove the webs sticking to the broom, which made me feel icky, but a look at my grim-looking granny kept me going.
I
swept what I could in the poorly-lighted haze of dust. There were many plastic
bags stuffed with possessions, and boxes, holdalls and appliances. The
appliances needed fixing. My orders were simple – to hand down all the bags to
Ammachi. As the hour passed, Ammachi changed tack. She ordered me to open all
the bags, have a look, tell her what to expect and then toss the bags down.
It was slow and very boring. I opened cardboard
cartons tied with brown string or rope, rummaged through old clothes, torn
sheets, papers and toys. Several piles rose on the floor below.
While Ammachi sorted, I opened a peeling rexine holdall that revealed nice colourful folded
and ironed clothes. This was unusual. None of the other bags had ironed clothes. I felt a box underneath the clothes and fished out a Butter
Cookies biscuit tin. In it were old beads and jewellery, the kind that
dominated the 1960s and 1970s and were now trying to rot in landfills. A fat,
ageing envelope lay under the jewellery. I pulled out a couple of faded
photographs and saw Saroj Aunty with a handsome man, his arm around her, and
she in a figure-hugging salwar kameez. She looked happy and beautiful.
Only, this wasn’t her husband Pilipochyan. The man in
the photo was a very handsome Sardarji. My aunt had, unusually for our very
conservative family, attended college in Delhi. She had been allowed to then because
my parents were stationed there and she had moved in with them. But in the last
year of her bachelor’s degree, my father had been transferred elsewhere and
Saroj Aunty moved into a hostel.
I knew that she had wanted to do the civil services
exams –this I gleaned from a long-ago conversation with Appa. But she had
returned to Kerala as soon as she had graduated and married almost immediately.
I trained the torchlight on the box’s contents – nothing. I removed the envelope
of photographs, closed the box gently and slipped it back into the holdall. I
moved to the edge of the loft and dropped the bag on the table below and waited
to see what would happen.
Ammachi looked surprised and her hands, hovering over
the bag, trembled a little. “This looks like Saroj’s.” I held my breath. She
opened it, paused at the sight of the clothes and immediately her hands dived
in and fished out the cookie box. She looked at the old tin for a couple of seconds
and then pried it open. My eyes moved to the closed side zippers. I had
forgotten to look there. Ammachi was now using her index finger to push a few
things around the box. I leaned back when I saw her raising her head to look at
me. “Was there anything else in the bag, kochumol (granddaughter)?”
“No, Ammachi, only clothes and that tin. I didn’t look
in the side pockets.” She immediately tore one of the side pocket zips open.
There was nothing in either side. “There are only three more bags to go through
here.”
“Well, hurry up. We need to finish before lunch!” Ammachi
pushed her hands inside the clothes and felt around thoroughly and then sat on
a chair waiting for the next bag.
“You don’t want to throw it out?” Those clothes
wouldn’t fit Saroj Aunty. She had thickened everywhere, though she was
still beautiful and very stylish. Her daughter Eva would never want the clothes.
And there had been no saris in the bag, only salwar kameezes.
“We’ll ask Saroj if she wants it,” Ammachi said.
“Do you want to keep it with you till she arrives next
week?”
Ammachi hesitated, “No. There’s no space in my room.
We’ll pull it out of the loft when she’s here. Give me whatever is over there,”
she pointed at the dark corner to my left. There was a large black spider in
the corner, with its eggs in a white mass under its belly. Due to the weight of
the eggs, these spiders often made a plopping sound when they fell off the walls.
I had never actually seen the eggs hatch or the babies.
“Quickly!” Ammachi ordered.
“The large pregnant spider is there.”
“It is not pregnant, it’s got its eggs under its
tummy.”
“Same one.”
“Use the broom to chase it away.”
I jabbed the broom’s feathery bristles at the cobwebs
and they gave way, but the spider only crawled upwards, nearer the ceiling, and
stayed put. I looked down at my impatient grandmother. I had had enough, but
now was not the time to tell her I felt weak with fear. She looked like she’d
throw a leg on the chair, climb up into the loft and thrash me. The
family, with the exception of my gentle father and even gentler grandfather,
was filled with human firecrackers.
I jabbed at the spider again, closing my eyes. When I
opened them, the black spider was still in place. I stretched and grabbed the
edge of a dusty old holdall and pulled it towards me slowly. I exhaled the tension
and slid the bag's stiff zip open.
“What have you got?” Ammachi’s voice said from below. My hands felt about the bag. Only men's clothing. I dropped the bag on the table.
Before she could say anything, I inched towards the
spider again. If it attacked me I was going to use the broom to toss it off the
loft. The spider watched me drag away the last two bags.
One bag had old shoes, slippers and more clothes – all
worn out and meant to be thrown away – and the other books.
“What do you have there?”
Ammachi was now standing and had once again emptied the
contents of Saroj Aunty’s bag onto the table’s top. She was behaving so
strangely. I emptied the bag with the books, looked quickly at random pages and
put them back in the bag. They were all textbooks. I stopped when I came to a
diary and saw handwriting. Most of the entries were in Malayalam. I shone the
torch on the pages in the middle and back and found some in English.
“How much more is there, kochumol?” Ammachi
asked from below.
“Two bags, Ammachi. One sec.” I hurriedly shoved the
rest of the books into the bag, wiped the dust off both bags and dropped them
carefully onto the table below. I swept the loft absently, wondering how I could remove the diary and photos from the loft without Ammachi noticing. They
were too big to stuff into my dress.
I looked over the edge and waited for Ammachi to
finish looking at everything. She was shaking the books. Bits of paper flew out.
She picked them up, looked at them and frowned.
“Do you want me to come down and read them to you,
Ammachi?”
“Eh? Yes… yes. These are in English. I don’t have my
glasses either. Go fetch them.
I sat at the edge of the loft, let my bare feet feel
the seat of the chair, got on to the table and jumped to the ground.
I picked up the slips of paper. “You look beautiful”
was scrawled boldly across a small, yellowed chit of lined paper. The paper had
been folded and opened many times and was tearing off at the creases.
“What does it say?” Ammachi asked from over my
shoulder.
My heartbeat hammered against my chest. “Oh, it is the
title of some textbook.” This morning Amma had told me we would ask Roma for
her old text books for my new school year. I picked up the rest of the chits from
the floor – all of them were similar. “I love your hair. Don’t ever cut it.”
“Come to the cafeteria at 4pm…” “You look lovely in yellow. Yellow is
now my favourite colour, I want you to wear it tomorrow too.” How absurd it
all sounded! But it screamed of illicit romance. Many of the older girls and
boys were passing around love notes in school. Were their notes like these?
“Well? What’s written on those pieces of
paper?”
“Ammachi, this one says, “Come to the library at 4pm”.
This other one says… oh... I can’t read the handwriting. Looks like rubbish.
I’ll throw them away.” I gently crushed the pieces of yellowed paper in my hand
and dropped them into the dust pan. Ammachi’s mouth opened in shock and then closed,
her mouth set in a thin stern line. I hurried out of the storeroom before she
could protest, fished out the balled pieces from the dustpan when I was out of
her sight and pushed them into my bra.
My aunts were in the kitchen, I smiled at them and emptied
the pan’s contents into the dustbin. I hurried back to the storeroom because my
grandmother hated being kept waiting.
She made me pack up the text books and good clothes in separate bags. The rest was to be thrown away, after it was inspected by its previous
owners.
“How do you know whose stuff it is?” I was curious.
“From the clothes. The boys didn’t want any of the
books. Can’t say so with the girls. I have to let them decide what they want to
keep?”
That was news. Ammachi never let anyone else’s opinions
matter. But she was a little afraid of Saroj Aunty.
I felt a push. So I climbed back into the loft. The
spider was still guarding its corner. Ammachi placed the bags on the chair and
table. I stacked the bags against the wall and hid the photos and diary and climbed
out of the loft.
I was going to come back for them when everyone was
asleep and before the rest of the families turned up next week.
******
This is a fictional series following a 30-something Mumbai-based divorcée. She is remembering an old family vacation that starts innocently but skews family relationships in the most unimaginable way. The Webs We Weave series begins with this episode. Read the rest here 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91.
