Two sisters, Chhaya and Maya, take turns to clean the bathroom in our house in Bombay. I have seen the younger one, Chhaya, a girl with two protruding teeth who leaned wistfully between chores against a door to listen to my mother practise, or ran to snatch the bag of rubbish from Ponchoo, grow to a young woman with kaajal around her eyes, and unexpected breasts, two small, painless swellings. On the festival of Raakhi, she ties a thread around my wrist with a crazy silver flower upon it. Maya, the older one, is silent, ebony-dark, and wears clothes made from a shimmering synthetic material with silvery or purple hues, so that, even while collecting rubbish, she looks minty and refreshing.
The bathroom has a large square mirror like a window into which my father looks in the mornings. He wears floppy, unsmart pyjama trousers with buttons on the front which often remain inadvertently open, creating a dark, tiny fairytale entrance. After shaving, he splashes Old Spice on his cheeks, and the skin begins to glow with a faint green light. His hair started to grey when he was thirty, so he dyes it an unrealistic black, leaving one white plume smoking above his forehead. In the flat in Malabar Hill, where there was a bathtub, I used to hear him all my childhood rubbing the soles of his feet on it while bathing, making a sombre but musical sound as that of a double-bass.
In my childhood, too, my mother’s enormous friend, Chitrakaki, would visit us in the afternoons. This was when we lived in a flat in a tall building overlooking the sea, the Marine Drive, and the horizon. Together they would nap, my mother’s feet hidden by a cotton sheet, Chitrakaki, all two hundred pounds of her, inhabiting a loose, long gown and snoring and shuddering malarially in her sleep, both of them suspended a hundred feet above the earth without knowing it. Beneath them the Arabian Sea rushed and the earth moved, while their heads rested on pillows so soft that they were like bodies of pure flesh without skeleton. Bai, the maidservant, while she sat on the floor, rubbed oil upon my mother’s burning toes, and I, sitting beside her and looking over the edge of the bed, admired the trembling and lack of composure of Chitrakaki’s body, as her stomach soared and climbed and then toppled over, her head, though it was perfectly still, seeming to move animatedly behind her stomach. If Bai and I smiled at each other and passed satirical comments between her snores, she would say, in a god-like voice, ‘I can hear everything.’ She is now dead, though I remember her as before, waking from that sleep with my mother, and drinking tea, and avariciously cupping a spiced mixture or peanuts and thin crispy strands of gramflour that looked like screws or nails, and chewing upon it with an ostrich-like satisfaction in strange things. For, truly, both she and my mother loved this edible scrap, this tea-time assortment of spiced nuts and bolts; sometimes, she would bring with her a box of chakli, a savoury that is hard and brown and runs round itself in gnarled, concentric circles, and is like a coral, or the body of a sea-horse. Once or twice, we even went to a South Indian cafe together, for Chitrakaki loved exploring the tastes of different regions. Here, we ate from polished Formica tables, and were served by dignified Tamil waiters who, dressed in an impeccable uniform, looked like the soldiers of an ancient army. These men emerged from hot, swinging kitchen doors with plates balanced upon their palms, and on the plates were huge ‘paper’ dosas. These are large white cylinders made of rice paste; from a distance, they look like rolled-up rugs, and coming closer, they resemble ridiculous headdresses of vast importance; from table to table, the waiters bore them glumly, as if they were gifts.
When I think of food, I think of the cat-like way my mother disposes of fish-bones, and eats the head of the rohu fish, meticulously destroying its labyrinths. Here a silent contest ensues, as she chews and bites at it from all sides, till the head disappears and the indigestible bones lie clean and polished on one corner of the plate. At dinner, our leftovers—chicken bones, ribs, the white comb-like tail of the pomfret, which is simple and symmetrical—we deposit upon her beggar’s plate for her to chew and gnash and then blissfully spit out. My father, the most serious person at the table, uses, unexpectedly, a fork and a spoon to eat. He cannot begin till he has been served, and till that moment, remains sombre and paralysed. Once started, he floods his plate with daal, till it has made a yellow lake with white hillocks of rice upon its banks.