Fishy Chronicles 98: The Webs We Weave (30)

I looked over at the mound that was my parents – the sheet over them rose and fell with their breathing. How could they sleep with so much going on!

I was seething. My grandfather had endless cunning! He knew exactly what had transpired up in the loft that day (FC70), and there they were – the photographs… and letters – in his lowest desk drawer. Clearly their possession of the incriminating evidence showed he, and my grandmother, had been aware of the romance between Sarojmama and the handsome sardar. A sudden memory of Meeto Singh from school surfaced – he never let me touch his pagdi or showed me what was under it even though we were good friends. Now that he had sprouted facial hair and muscles, and grown a good six inches, any eye contact we had made me uncomfortable. Luckily, Anjali lusted after him too.

I forced thoughts of handsome Meeto out of my mind. Appachan had to have had help retrieving the photos from the loft. I rocked to and fro on my mattress on the ground, trying not to use bad language while thinking of my um… deceitful… grandfather. Deceitful seemed tame, like home lemon juice versus the roadside one where you got heaps of sugar and soda in your glass and it frothed into your nostrils.

After what felt like hours, I went to the sitting room – dark, except for the streetlight streaming in. I shivered. Even though everyone knew I watched TV in the dark most nights, it still felt like I was doing something wrong and this feeling was hammered home every time I passed Appachan’s bedroom. There was always the chance of him intercepting me. As I passed the room I wanted to kick the door, but the dent in it from when I threw the brass vase at it (FC75) made me hesitate. I leaned against an open window in the sitting room and watched Timmychyan totter along the road, his gait extremely unsteady, occasionally squinting around him and murmuring lovingly at the stray dog that walked him home each night. I watched him disappear from sight, around the wall of darkness that comprised the tall teak trees of my granduncle’s courtyard.

I glared at the wall behind which my grandparents snored and moved quietly to the telephone in Appachan’s study. I was going to break his bank with long-distance calls to my friends. I sat at the desk and took out his keys from the unlocked drawer. Some hours earlier I had debated leaving his keys in the lock (FC97), as I had found them. What if he remembered he had left it in the lock, but what if he didn’t and someone else came and rummaged in his drawers just as I did. I ran my hands along the polished wood… thinking… and fast losing interest in punishing him with STD calls. My luck was so good that his wrinkled fingers with their overgrown nails would point at me first.

I opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the letters. There had been no copies of the photographs. Even if there had been, would I have been bold enough to take one? Would Appachan have noticed a couple of photos missing?

I pulled the smallish bundle of yellow envelopes and blue inlands out. A tightly knotted brown string bent their sides, and I could see my previous efforts at trying to pull out a letter had torn the edge of the top envelope. Sweat trickled from my brow with the effort of loosening and untying the knot. I reached for the large black-handled scissor in the top drawer. Amma used the same one to snip off fish fins and tails. Why was Appachan using it to cut his envelopes. Something shone in the table lamp light – a small brass letter opener. I sniffed the scissor. It smelt of… nothing.

The letters had remained unopened all these years, but someone had viciously cut out the address at the back with black ink. I could still see a bit of the address, so it seemed a more personal effort at scratching out his name and street rather than to obscure the address.

Rajouri Gardens and a pin code. Why hadn’t my grandparents read the letters. What was a real love letter like? I had read the one a boy had sent across via Nidhi in Sunday School some weeks ago (FC95) and it seemed like rubbish. Laughable. Surely grown-ups, rather college students, could write better ones – and they probably felt love more intensely than us.

I tried to pry the flap away from the envelope but it tore. On TV people steamed letters open. I got the electric kettle from the dining room and started it. The journal with the English and Malayalam entries had also disappeared from the loft. They were probably below all the rubbish in the lowest drawer. When the kettle began to whistle, I closed both doors leading into the study, and drew the curtains. I shivered with fear and tension. I shook it off and held the letter against the billowing steam, which scalded my hand. I then pinched the top left corner of the envelop, holding it as close to the steam as I dared. The whistling noise bothered me, and I wondered what sort of an excuse I could offer in case someone found me with an electric kettle trying to make tea with an old envelop.

When I finally looked, the flap was still firmly stuck to the envelop! What was I going to do! My eyes fell on the untied bundle and my panic began to mount. Hurry, you idiot!

A door opened. Shit. I jumped up and switched off the kettle and the light and crouched under the table, trying to hold my breath. The footsteps come to the edge of the corridor and waited.

After an eternity, it walked away, the footsteps sounding fainter and the bathroom door shutting. The latch, which needed oiling, did not slam into its groove. This person – probably a man – wouldn’t care if someone barged in on him.

There was nothing for it. I took one, two, three letters… and started to retie the bundle. But… when would Appachan leave his key dangling from his drawer again… four, give six… seven for good luck or bartering… or blackmail? What if I got caught going into my room? I stuffed the letters into my armpits. To the naked eye it didn’t look like there were any bulges. My gaze lingered on the four remaining letters in the bundle. What if Appachan decided to tidy his drawer and found the bundle looking skinny.

Nah, the drawer was too dusty and there were cobwebs even in there. I started. A big fat lizard watched me from the ceiling. A dog barked in the distance, and there was a rustle outside – or did I imagine it.

I reached into the nearest corner behind Appachan’s chair and took a newspaper from the top. The Malayalam Manorama folded easily into a thick square and I wedged it between the letters and retied the bundle. I would have to wait for Appachan to forget his keys again, and for me to return the letters and get at the next few.

Could I keep the keys and… make a set? Too many gymnastics required. I left the key in the lock, adjusted the letters in my armpits and went to the door.

Something wasn’t right. Anyone could ransack Appachan’s drawer. I turned back to the desk and put the bunch of keys in the bottom drawer.

I wiped my dusty hands on the pristine white turkey towel hanging on the back of his chair. There would be some shouting early in the morning when Appachan couldn’t locate his keys. Good. Very good. 

I eyed the phone.

Tomorrow I would phone Anjali with my findings.

                                                         ******

The narrator discovers her aunt's missing love letters and photographs
in her grandfather's table . 

This is a work of fiction and is the latest episode of the Webs We Weave series. You can read the earlier ones here   FC69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80,81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97)

                                                          ******

#younglove #punjabi #love #youngadult #fiction #keralastories #keralavillage #kerala #farmanimals #youngboy #younggirl #teenager #teenagestories #fishychronicles #websweweaveseries #websweweave #bombaymalayalis #syrianchristianmalayalis #syrianchristians #bestfriends #friends #oldphotos #roma #oldromances #oldloves #lovestories #loveletters #teenagelove #teenromance #adolescence #romance #failedromance #sardarji #sardar #youngadultfiction 

Fishy Chronicles 69: Lockdown Diaries – The Webs We Weave (1)

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.