Tamarind Mem
returned only as memories. In real life, I reflected, you warmed yourself on cold winter days in a foreign land by pulling out a rag-bag collection of those memories. You wondered which ones to keep and which to throw away, paused over a fragment here, smiled at a scrap. You reached out to grasp people you knew and came up with a handful of air, for they were only chimeras, spun out of your own imagination. You tried to pin down a picture, thought that you had it exactly the way it smelled and looked so many years ago, and then you noticed, out of the cornerof your eye, a person who had not been there before, a slight movement where there should have been the stillness of empty canvas.

    It was time to put away the crockery, hide the knives and the forks, make sure the gardener and the maids and the iron-man and the
peon
knew what to do, because it was summertime again and the Aunties were coming. We all liked Vijaya Aunty, but Meera was straight from the lunatic asylum. Ma told her friends that she had an attention problem and a hearing problem. That sounded better than to say that she was a nut-case. The noise that Meera Aunty made was enough to rouse dead souls from their blanket of ashes. She created a different noise every day that one, oh she was clever at dreaming up new sounds each more irritating than the last. Sometimes she burped continuously, complicated belches whose sour odour poisoned the whole house and wouldn’t disappear even when Ma opened out all the windows and lighted twenty sandalwood joss-sticks. At other times she clicked a pair of blunted knitting needles, trailed yards of yellow wool. She said she was knitting a blanket for Ma. Sometimes it was a shawl, a bedspread or a rug.
    “To thank my sister-in-law for allowing me to visit my brother’s house,” she said in a precise, low voice that gave no hint of the screaming pitch it could reach. The wool wound between chair legs and tables, fluttered under doors, even lay like worms in the potted ferns lining the verandah.
    “Knitonepurloneknitknitknitonepurl,” murmured Aunty Meera non-stop for an entire day, a droning bee pausing only to slurp in the spit that filled her mouth. Ifthe burps annoyed Ma, this knitting drove her into a frenzy. Meera was obviously imitating her, for Ma enjoyed knitting, her fingers busy twirling the wool around the needles as she supervised the servants or sat in the sunny verandah enjoying a gossip with Linda Ayah. What infuriated Ma was not knowing if Aunty was doing it deliberately or if it was part of her madness.
    “Tell her to stop,” she begged Dadda, the only person in the house who had any measure of control over Aunty Meera. I knew that Meera listened to Dadda not because she liked him better, but out of spite—to get Dadda’s attention all for herself.
    Once, Ma hid the wool and the knitting needles, and Meera walked out of the front gates in a petticoat and blouse, her plump, hairy belly, the colour of old flour, sagging over the waistband, right into Mrs. Goswami’s bungalow, where she methodically shredded all her Persian Queen roses. Ma returned the knitting and locked herself in her room.
    “Tell him,” she said to Roopa and me through the door, “tell your father that I will not step out of this room till that crazy has left my house. He can leave with her for all I care.”
    She yelled orders to the servants through the door. “Ganesh,” she called, “today we will have onion
dal
and rice. Tomato salad for Kamini baby, cucumber for Roopa and fried cauliflower for Sahib.”
    The Aunties were going to be with us till July, which meant that Ma would stay locked up for a whole month and Dadda would have to use the upstairs toilet and who would look after Roopa and me? Vijaya Aunty maybe, she was nice, at least when she stopped readingher magazines. In a way, despite the strain it put on the entire household, I was glad to have the Aunties around for the holidays. Everybody was so busy making sure

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