STORM IN A TEACUP

NEEL AND MAE had spent the day in the city, strolling through the Tibetan traders’ stalls in Janpath. On their return Tota wanted to examine the purchases Mae had made, something she had always done with Savitri whenever she went off to any of the Delhi markets. Somehow it was less satisfying doing it with Mae, but she felt obliged to go through the motions and was even slightly curious about what sort of clothes this foreigner would most like to wear.

‘Let’s have a fashion show!’ Tota suggested with great pomp and ordered some tea, which arrived just as Mae was changing into a diaphanous top made of cheap nylon. ‘I hope you didn’t pay more than a hundred rupees for it,’ she quipped, barely casting an eye over it.

‘I paid five hundred,’ Mae replied. ‘Only ten dollars.’

Tota was indignant. ‘Neel, darling, why didn’t you bargain for her?’

‘I did,’ he replied, ‘only Mae’s too blonde.’

After a few more outfits the tea arrived and Mae pulled out the exquisite present she’d bought for her future in-laws, in return for the diamond ring they’d presented her with on arrival: two cushion covers with Aboriginal designs, stitched in the Kashmiri embroidery style.

‘Look, I chose these for you. They were designed by Aboriginal women with a start-up in Kashmir,’ Mae explained. ‘This is the symbol for a women’s sacred site, and this here is a sacred river.’

Tota was finding it hard to concentrate. She had to order the evening meal and she decided they would have channa bhatura, the deceitful dish she had supposedly cooked as a first meal for her in-laws. The dish that had given her the upper hand in her husband’s family. But will Mae eat channa bhatura? Probably not. She has a white palate. Maybe I’ll order pasta.

She called for the cook, distractedly. ‘You know we have Aboriginals in India, too, and their art is also so simple and lovely like this.’

‘Neel wouldn’t let me bring you anything when I was in Australia, because he said you had everything you wanted and more … but nobody has everything, right? You didn’t have these, did you?’

Tota made signs that she was warming up. She made a show of examining the cushions further and then, with complete innocence, piped up with a radical question. ‘Do Australian Aboriginals make good household help?’

Mae, who was by now balancing a cup and saucer together carefully on her lap, sat paralysed for a second. ‘What?’ She shook her head, startled. ‘Did you just ask me if Australian Aboriginals make good servants?’ She looked at Neel. ‘Did your mother really just ask me if Aboriginals made good servants?’

‘Mama, you can’t say that. It’s not the same over there …’

Mae seemed to produce a rash on her chest as she raised her voice now, with more rage than confidence. ‘Aboriginal people are not fucking servants, all right?’

Incredible. Had she just heard this chit of a girl fall into a trap that she couldn’t possibly crawl out of?

‘Excuse me?’

Mae continued, with a red flag raised alongside her Australian one. ‘Nobody talks about my people like you just did.’ She glared at Neel. ‘I can’t believe that such a lovely boy like you could have such a heartless bitch of a mother,’ she roared, and as she stood up the cup and saucer slipped to the ground, unbroken.

Seeing the perfect porcelain at her feet, she picked up the cup and threw it. ‘Your mother has to be just about the rudest fucking –’

‘Mae, please …’

Tota could see that Neel was trying to silence the girl, trying to catch the bullet that flew from her mouth with his bare hands, but with all her heart she was willing Mae to continue, erecting a firewall with her shoulders pressed back, readying herself for this unexpected assault.

‘Mama, over there things are different … What you said was rude.’

Mae started to make her way towards the door, shaking. Anuj, the chef’s peon, who had come bearing more biscuits for tea, moved quickly to one side and looked at his feet. Tota could tell that he was deeply embarrassed that the house guest was daring to scream at her future mother-in-law. Watching him gave her the gumption to continue.

‘I wasn’t being rude.’ Tota snorted. ‘We’ve had many Bihari Aboriginals working with us in the past, and I think they make excellent household help. Other people can be so unfair and unkind about Bihari servants, but if you treat them well …’

‘Oh, it’s easy enough for you to sit here in your fucking superior home, ordering this and that and paying nothing to the people who work for you, but we don’t have the same low standards in Australia. We don’t just use people because we can. We wash our own fucking dishes, we cook our own fucking dinner …’

‘I can’t speak for Australians,’ Tota replied, ‘but in our country we respect our elders.’

‘Mummy, Mae, can we just stop this right now?’

‘Mummy, Mummy,’ Mae mimicked. ‘In our country boys are expected to grow up to be men and stand up to their mothers if they’re out of order.’ She was screaming now.

Anuj stood watching like a colonial statue of a slave bearing biscuits, clearly hoping that he was invisible. Neel ordered him to animate and get back to the kitchen. Tota took a split-second summary of the situation: the news would now spread for miles across the kitchens and servants’ quarters of Delhi. The servants would tell their bosses and then everyone in Delhi would come to the wedding prepared with bulletproof vests. No harm.

As Anuj left the room he attempted to pick up the broken porcelain, but Neel hurried him through the door with the evidence of the family feud still visible in shards on the floor for all to see. Would the cup even be worth fixing after all this?

‘Neel. Tell your mother that she’s absolutely out of order,’ Mae demanded.

Tota saw Neel’s gaze follow Anuj as he left the room, wishing he could be anywhere but in the firing line. Seeing that Mae had no reserve army, Tota summoned the courage to take another line of attack.

‘I only asked if Aboriginals made good household help,’ she repeated, like the parrot she was named after, delighted to give the offending question some air once again. She saw Mae begin to shake. ‘You can’t tell me that the British didn’t get them to work. We were a British colony for two hundred years ourselves. We were all servants of the British. You can’t lie and say that you British Europeans went over to Australia and the Aboriginals politely shared their country as equals! You might not think it, but some Indians are educated. We do know our history.’

‘I’m not saying that we didn’t do all of that,’ Mae started. ‘What I’m saying is that you’ve spent your entire life thinking you can get away with this horrific domination. You walk all over Neel, and you’ve turned your husband into a yes-man, and all of them have to play along with your stupid –’

‘Stop it right there. You’re going to regret what you’ve said and all of it is nonsense, anyway.’

‘I’m not going to regret it. You don’t want to hear me out because you don’t want to look at yourself –’

‘Neel, can you bring me over that cup? I’m going to see if Anuj can glue it.’

Before the instructions even struck Neel’s eardrum, Mae was up off her chair and standing over the incriminating porcelain. By the time Neel saw what she had planned, Mae was already stamping on the cup again and again until it was as irrecoverable as Humpty Dumpty after his fall, no matter how many kings and queens, memsahibs or servants tried to stick it back together again.

‘Neel, can you call the airline to change my ticket? I’m going home,’ she shouted as she headed straight to her room to pack. She didn’t look back, even to notice the flicker of relief that spread over Tota’s face at these words – the first and only words she had wanted to hear from Mae’s lips from the moment she arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Thank God. Hai Ram Bhagwan.

At last Tota would have Neel back and there would be no sense in him ever seeing the girl again once he had dropped her off at the airport. The relief of it. Mae had already stuck her tongue out so far that she tripped over it. Now there was no other option but for her to disappear from their lives altogether and never come back. The wedding was surely off.

Finally, success.