Read Online Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami - Free Book Online

every house we moved to, Linda Ayah pointed out solidified
bhooths
and monsters, frozen into innocent objects till midnight, when they came alive “to take care of naughty Baby-missies.” The scrolled wooden banister supports in the echoing, whitewashed Bilaspur house were weird, hunchbacked imps. The grinding stone in the back verandah of the Bhusaval bungalow was a grey
shaitaan
with a hole in its stomach. A
daayin
with three rows of teeth and feet turned backwards lived up the ancient chimney in the Calcutta apartment. And in the corner of the verandah in Ratnapura, there inside the twisted bel tree, was the headless manwoman, and the bel fruit was its hundred breasts oozing sticky juice that coated small mouths with ooh painful boils.
    Linda Ayah pointed into the dark recesses of the ceilings, where hook-nosed goblins swung in cobweb baskets, and threatened me: “Now you eat that egg
phata-phat.
No
wak-wak
and rubbish fuss. Otherwise you know what will come howling down to sit on your tummy tonight.”
    As we grew older, the size of the monsters grew as well. Now they had complicated stories attached to them. If I didn’t behave myself at the club, the girl ghost with her feet twisted inward would walk into my room at night, for she was the ghost who disliked disobedient children. Make faces behind Linda’s back and the wind
pretha
would twist my face forever into a grimace.
    Roopa, with her closed-tin mind, had her own way of dealing with the spooks and haunts inhabiting every house we moved into. She believed unquestioningly in the monkey-god Hanuman, whose picture occupied a prominent place in Ma’s prayer room. This god, with his puffy cheeks and pouting red mouth, was Roopa’s talisman, her protection against Linda Ayah’s
bhooths
and
rakshasas.
Roopa wrote “Hanuman” under her pillow with a finger and slept soundly while I lay awake, my imagination too large and multihued, too dense to be blown away with a single name scrawled beneath the pillow. Linda Ayah’s creatures crept into my sleep and I would spring up, screaming wildly. There in the corner of my room where the moon shone straight into a mirror, lit up the red beadwork cushion on a chair, there sat a hag, her crimson eyes bleeding, her mouth, lined with rotting teeth, yawning wide.
    “Yo-yo
Rama-deva,”
cursed Ma, stumbling out of bed, tripping over the faded cotton sari she wore at night. “What a nuisance girl. Who will marry her if she screeches in his face every night?”
    She wrapped her arms tight around me and swayed to and fro, “Shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo.” It wasn’t good to wake a person from a dream, for the mind might remain in the dream and only the body would travel back to this world. So Ma just patted me on the back till I stopped quivering.
    Ma was afraid that Aunty Meera’s madness had infected me, nono, that one of those unfortunate lunatic genes in my father’s family was waking up in my body like Linda Ayah’s frozen spooks. These fears never extended to Roopa, normal, stubborn, whose personal demon was the colour of her skin, dark as a
jamoon
fruit. “You loveKamini more than me because she is prettier than I am,” she would say to Ma, looking slyly out of the corner of her eye at me. She knew that Ma, in an effort to prove that she loved us both equally, would give Roopa an extra kiss, the bigger slice of cake, let her have the first choice of ribbon. Roopa would pick the colour I liked and then make a show of sweet generosity, giving it to me with a smile, so that Ma could pat her on the head and say, “See, Kami, what a good little sister you have! Make sure you take care of her.”
    I took Ma’s instructions to heart, anything to win her approval, that warm smile. So when the boys teased Roopa,“
Kaali-kalooti,
black pepper, Coca-cola,” I leapt at them, punching and biting, while Roopa went yelling for Linda Ayah.
    “My Jesus-child!” yelled Linda, angry with us for dragging her away from a cosy gossip