Monsoon Diary Read online

  “Wretched girl!” she hissed. “Who asked you to go up the tamarind tree? Don’t you know that Taylor Sahib’s ghost resides there? Your mother is going to kill me when she finds out about this.” Ammu doused me with water compulsively, as if that would exorcise the ghost out of my body.

  “He was an evil man, that Taylor! He committed suicide after that woman left him. Hanged himself on that tree. And you, wretched girl, have gone and stirred up his ghost! What am I going to do with you?”

  Ammu twisted my ear and poured another bucket of water over me. My mind was teeming with questions. Who was this Mr. Taylor, and why did he hang himself? Who was the woman? Was she Indian or English? Were they in love? But the buckets of cold water numbed my senses and discouraged questions.

  The whole household watched me for a week after that, to see if Taylor Sahib’s ghost had entered my head. Ammu especially followed me everywhere, looking for signs of aberrant behavior. I wasn’t allowed to nap in the afternoon, in case the ghost further penetrated my head. Finally, they decided that I was untainted and let down the vigil.

  The tamarind tree became magical to me after that. With a child’s flexible imagination, I attributed many things to the tree. Every type of ghost and gremlin resided in it. Some were good ghosts that brought pots of gold and hid them under the tree. Others were satanic and had to be fought and vanquished. The branches became my weapons, the tree my fort. I would scurry up the branches, swing down the long secondary roots that hung on all sides, and camouflage myself within the green fronds. I was princess, pauper, spy, and warrior.

  THE MOST PROMINENT GHOST in Vaikom House was a woman. Ammu called her Mohini. She was supposed to take the guise of a beautiful young woman, lure young people behind a tree, and slap them into stone figures.

  “When you come back home at night and hear tinkling anklets behind you, don’t look back,” Ammu would warn in a hushed voice. “That’s Mohini, just waiting for you to turn. She will rush at you, slap you dead, and suck your blood.”

  “Don’t worry!” Ammu would reassure our rounded eyes. “She can’t do anything unless you look back. And she will do everything to make you look back—laugh so melodiously that you will think it is music, waft a fragrance so wonderful, you will want to turn and find out where it’s coming from. But don’t look back! Or you will become stone.”

  On full-moon nights we would gaze out the attic window, wrapped securely in blankets. Our eyes would roam the speckled landscape, straining to catch a glimpse of Mohini’s flowing white sari, listening for the sound of her silver anklets. The coconut palms would rustle in the breeze, the shadows of the full moon would ripple through the darkness. Mohini was definitely taking a walk that night.

  ALL TOO SOON, two months passed and it was time to leave. A week before our departure date the packing started: jute sacks full of fresh mangoes, just-picked coconuts, bottles of jackfruit jam, packets of tapioca and banana chips, cashews, cloves, and cardamom that were all grown on my grandfather’s land.

  On the day we were to leave, my grandmother woke up early and began to make puttu, kadala, and inji curry. Puttu is a mixture of rice flour and grated coconut, which is steamed in a brass container with a cyclindrical steaming chamber on top, while kadala is made of spicy black lentils. They complement each other perfectly.

  Early that morning I went into the dim kitchen, redolent with spices and steam, and watched the production. One woman was grating coconuts, the other roasting the rice flour. The third mixed the flour with the coconut and handed it to my grandmother, who liberally doused it with ghee and stuffed it into the puttu maker. This was a cylindrical colander that could be placed flush and airtight on the lip of a pot of boiling water.

  Fifteen minutes later we unscrewed the colander and the puttu fell out. My grandmother wrapped the steaming puttu in banana leaves, which turned dark green from the heat and emitted an earthy aroma.

  In the adjacent stove was a gargantuan container of kadala. My grandmother stirred it frequently and watched the lentils soak up the masala, becoming softer and softer with time. An hour later it had reduced to a thick, fragrant gravy that was as spicy as the puttu was bland.

  Last to come was inji curry (tamarind and ginger pickle), a favorite condiment in our family. Thick, rich, and tangy, we ate it with everything: with rice, chapatis, white bread, and on toast. It was the color of chocolate and just as addictive.

  Fortified by the puttu, kadala, and inji curry, we drove to the station. Our suitcases and sacks were tied on top of the ancient Ambassador cars until they resembled wobbly farm wagons.

  The entire clan came to see us off, mostly because there was little else to do. They stood outside the train window and waited for the whistle to blow once, twice, and then three times. With a jolt the train started.

  “Bye-bye!” everyone shouted in unison, waving handkerchiefs and arms.

  We craned our necks and waved back until they became tiny specks on the rapidly receding platform.

  “Bye,” we said. “See you next summer.”

  INJI CURRY (GINGER-TAMARIND PICKLE)

  The story goes like this: a mother-in-law wanted a grandchild, preferably a granddaughter who would be named after her. But the newlywed couple wanted to enjoy their youth. No babies for three years, they said. The mother-in-law prayed to the fertility goddess; she bought new linens for their bedchamber; she planted a tamarind sapling, which grew into a sturdy tree. Still no grandchild, but the tamarind tree attracted other pregnant women, who craved the sour taste of its fruit. The mother-in-law plucked the beanlike fruit and lay it out to dry. She made tamarind candy and distributed it to all the pregnant women in the neighborhood.

  Then one day she went to the backyard and found her daughter-in-law clambering up the tree to pluck a tamarind. The mother-in-law watched with joy as the young woman greedily bit into the sour fruit. Gently, she led her daughter-in-law back into the house and made a giant pot of inji curry. “There,” she said. “You can eat till your heart is content.” Her ministrations succeeded, and the woman gave birth to a baby girl.

  Pregnant women in India crave tamarind and sour mango. In front of our school stood a man with a wooden hat selling raw tamarind pulp on a wooden trolley. Schoolchildren and pregnant women were his main customers. South Indians make inji curry (sometimes called puli-inji) with raw tamarind. It is a wonderful condiment that can be served on toast, with rice, and with naan. Try layering a bagel with inji curry and cream cheese.

  SERVES 6

  1 medium gingerroot, about 2 inches thick, peeled (If you are not

  fond of ginger, you can use a smaller piece.)

  1 cup concentrated tamarind (Tamcon)

  1/2 teaspoon turmeric

  1 teaspoon red chili powder

  1 tablespoon sesame oil

  1/4 teaspoon black mustard seeds

  2 red chiles

  10 curry leaves (available in Indian grocery stores)

  1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds, roasted and powdered

  Pinch of brown sugar

  1 1/2 teaspoons salt

  Cut the ginger into small pieces and grind coarsely.

  In a separate container, mix the tamarind, turmeric, and chili powder. Set aside.

  Pour the oil into a kadai (an Indian wok), then add the mustard seeds, chiles, and curry leaves. Add the tamarind mixture and bring it to boil. Add the ginger. Cook until the liquid is reduced and the mixture has a thick consistency. Add the fenugreek powder, brown sugar, and salt. Remove from heat.

  Serve with rice, bread, or chapatis. Inji curry will keep for months in the refrigerator.

  NINE

  A Feast to Decide a Future

  AS I CAME OF AGE, I fantasized about film stars and dreamed of romantic trysts with the boys on my immediate horizon. Even though I felt the first stirrings of passion and even though I was fifteen, I was shockingly naive when it came to the facts of life. I had been so busy trying to prove myself equal to the boys that I failed to explore o
r comprehend how I was different from them in certain fundamental ways. Besides, I had no close friend who demystified the secrets of the sexes on the back of a school bus. I cycled home.

  It was my mother who sat me down one night, after sending my brother and father to a movie, and explained the process of reproduction. I remember being appalled by her explanation. “You mean, you and Daddy did that?” was my first question.

  THE TEENAGE YEARS were trying for all of us. All of a sudden, it seemed that my parents had clamped down on my independence. I couldn’t go anywhere without a hundred cautions; I couldn’t come home late; my friends were scrutinized, my actions censored. Adolescent insecurities lay siege to my confidence. I felt inadequate, embarrassed by everything: my face, my hair, my clothes, my parents’ arbitrary actions and intrusions into my freedom. My father once appeared to pick me up after a debating contest even though I had expressly told him that I would find my way home. He was the only parent there! I didn’t speak to him during the entire ride home, and he didn’t understand why I was so upset. We fought constantly. I hated their rules and they hated my attitude.

  Two of my close friends hatched a plan to take a cruise to the Andaman Islands and wanted me to go with them. It would be such fun, we all decided. The fact that a friend’s older brother on whom I had a crush was coming along as chaperone was a huge incentive. I desperately wanted to go, but my mother said no.

  I lay in bed and sobbed all evening. My mother banged pots and pans in the kitchen and pretended not to hear. My father periodically came into the bedroom to give me a hug and hear my woes—the voyage was only three days, and we would be together; what could happen on a ship, it wasn’t as if we would get lost or something; after all, I was almost sixteen, old enough to take care of myself; the whole thing was so unfair. But he didn’t change his mind.

  I was angry with my parents for days. My friends didn’t go on the trip either; apparently, their parents had made the same decision as mine. To add another blow to my injured ego, the ship that we were to sail on caught fire en route. It wasn’t a major accident and nobody was hurt, but it merited a small column in our newspaper, causing my mother to crow, “I told you so.”

  SHYAM AND I VIEWED each other with more tolerance as we got older. After getting on each other’s nerves all through childhood, we became comrades in arms against our parents and their stifling rules. Still, we weren’t confidants. When I became interested in one of his friends, I couldn’t share my feeling with him or get his viewpoint. I tried asking tentative questions about the object of my interest. But he would become all holier-than-thou and give me lectures about concentrating on my studies rather than boys.

  Shyam, on the other hand—rather hypocritically, I thought— exhibited a huge interest in my friends and my actions. He was curious about the things we discussed, the mysterious objects that I carried into the bathroom once a month, the contents of my handbag. It seemed like there was nowhere I could go for privacy.

  Adding to the tension in our household was the fact that Shyam and I were caught up in India’s ultracompetitive educational system and the process of getting into the right college. I was cramming for exams, taking extra classes to bone up on my math, and trying to better my grades.

  India’s undergraduate education begins at seventeen. It takes three years to get a bachelor’s degree and four to get an engineering or medical one. I had no interest in engineering or medicine. Rather, I wanted to study psychology at Women’s Christian College in Madras. Human beings fascinated me, and I wanted to learn how they thought, how they processed information, and what made them tick. So I laboriously wrote out college applications, attended interviews, and waited for the admission letter. I had vague plans of going abroad for graduate school but hadn’t told my parents.

  Shyam had thought through his future in more detail. One evening he announced that he had decided to join the merchant marine. My parents were aghast. They had hoped that he would choose a more traditional career like medicine or law. Having a sailor for a son was not something they had pictured.

  “Why can’t you be like the other boys and get into an engineering college?” my father asked.

  “It is all because you indulged him as a child,” my mother accused my dad.

  I vociferously endorsed Shyam’s decision. I had an ulterior motive: I wanted his support when I told my parents about my plans for going abroad. So when my parents got all testy and terse about his college admissions, I commiserated with him.

  My dad walked around the house muttering to himself. My mother’s friends added fuel to her worries by talking about sailors having a “wife in every port.”

  “How will he get married?” my mother asked. “No decent Brahmin family is going to let their daughter marry a sailor.”

  Her comments infuriated Shyam. “What does my career have to do with marriage?” he asked. “First of all, I won’t be just a sailor; I’ll be an officer. Second of all, if a girl doesn’t want to marry me just because I’m commanding a ship on high seas, then it is her loss.”

  It was perhaps not the best climate to tell my parents that I wanted to go to America for graduate school, but my sense of timing has never been great. When I did tell them, it produced a worse reaction than Shyam’s announcement.

  “One child wants to escape to America, the other wants to go to sea,” my mother wailed. “What have we done wrong?”

  “Will you stop?” my father snapped. “There is no need for Shoba to go abroad. We have enough good universities in our country.”

  “But not for psychology,” I said. “Not in the area I want to specialize in.”

  “Oh, you think you are such a hotshot that you need to go abroad to study,” my mother said. “Get married and go to Timbuktu if you want.”

  “What does marriage have to do with it?” I asked.

  “Enough of this discussion,” my normally placid father said firmly. “You are not going to America, and that’s final.”

  When I opened my mouth to protest, my father got a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Get a bachelor’s degree first,” he said.

  I ENROLLED IN Women’s Christian College, known as WCC. After the awkwardness of high school, college was refreshing. Tall, graceful girls with sophisticated accents ambled through the tree-lined campus with its potted hibiscus plants and climbing bougainvillea.

  As freshmen, we were hazed by our seniors, but it was all in good humor and not taken very seriously. I was asked to propose to our college watchman, a grim old fellow who went by the politically incorrect name of Hitler. Thankfully, he didn’t understand English very well and glared balefully when I fell to my knees and asked him to marry me. He had probably watched legions of freshmen make fools of themselves in this fashion and therefore didn’t evince much of a reaction.

  “Freshers’ Night,” a huge party with music and dancing, was hosted by our seniors, who strode through campus with an aplomb that awed me. I would watch them from a distance, envying the casual ease of their comportment, the confidence of their attire: torn jeans and cutoff T-shirts. Their rapid, staccato English was filled with slang and secret jargon. They seemed to know everything, have all the answers. Beside them, I felt gawky and inadequate.

  Once classes began, we became earnest and busy students, toting heavy books about clinical, abnormal, and developmental psychology; sitting for hours in the library perusing reference material, visiting mental institutions, drug rehabilitation centers, and halfway homes to interview inmates and write case studies. We had excellent teachers, passionate and articulate, who lectured to us daily, not just about psychology but also about our lives.

  Very soon I settled into the comfortable rhythms of college life. It seemed terribly important that I do certain things to remind myself that I was not in high school anymore. I made a mental list: cutting class to watch a movie; going to the nearby Alsa Mall to try out the latest fashions; sitting in our college cafeteria and discussing arcane subjects for hours on end; atte
nding an honest-to-goodness party with guys and without adult supervision.

  My first party ended all such future opportunities. There were lots of guys, some drinking (alcohol was hard to come by in conservative Madras), and dancing. Around ten o’clock a group of us decided to go to the beach and packed ourselves into a small Fiat. The driver was my friend’s brother, a twenty-year-old who probably wanted to show off a bit and was spurred by our nervous giggles. He took a sharp turn at high speed and ended up overturning the car. My friend Deepa and I sat upside down in the car, scared out of our wits. At our first party we suffered the ignominy of being hauled out of an upturned car by an irate cop and shamefacedly receiving a lecture from our parents the next day. No more parties for me.

  My daily visits to our college cafeteria did not involve such high drama. A group of us would sit around the cheap metal tables and endlessly discuss literature, philosophy, movies, and men over cups of watery chai and oil-dripping spicy samosas. When all else seemed uninteresting, we attended “cultural festivals.”

  There were dozens of colleges in Madras, and each one set aside five days to host a series of competitive events and invited all the colleges in the region, if not the nation, to participate. The ultracompetitive Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), for instance, hosted a five-day extravaganza called Mardi Gras and put up visiting teams in their dorms. There were debates, music, dance, drama, and Just a Minute (JAM)—a contest in which each participant spoke intelligently but nonstop about randomly chosen topics such as “If I were a cockroach . . .”

  I was part of the debating team and JAMmed as well. We submitted permission slips, signed off from classes, and went to each cultural festival, determined to be cool and act adult. My classmates started calling me Enthu, short for Enthusiastic.