Imelda saw Augustine in the office. Her diary reads:
I finally located the source of the booming voice. I asked Andrade, who is the registered office flirt, about the noise and he said, ‘Oh, that’s AGM.’ I looked a bit puzzled and he looked a bit puzzled. ‘I don’t know his name. We all call him AGM. His initials, I think.’
‘Don’t you like him?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he’s a great guy. You’ll see.’
‘And you don’t know his name?’
‘I do. It’s AGM,’ he said.
Now what do you say to that?
I think I might like it here, as long as they don’t give me too many numbers to type . . .
We had carte blanche to read Em’s diaries and letters. Sometimes she read them out to us, her spectacles perched high on her nose, the black frame hiding her thick eyebrows. I never saw her tear up anything; every scrap and note written to her went into a series of cheerful cloth bags. On certain days, she would rummage around in the bags and pull out a note, a fragment, a whole letter. She would glance at some, read some in full, and dream.
While Em’s letters were public documents in the family, neither Susan nor I read her diaries during her lifetime (Susan still won’t). Perhaps we had understood very early that they would give us no clues to her illness, or ways to reach her on her worst days. Or – and this may be closer to the truth – we were afraid of what we might find there, and afraid of having to deal with it. Even now, I look in Em’s notebooks not for my mother but for Augustine’s Beloved.
It didn’t take Augustine, aka AGM, long to spot the new girl in the office of ASL – Ampersand Smith Limited – the engineering goods company at which Imelda was the new stenotypist and he was the junior manager, sales. Two days later, he spoke to her:
Booming Voice spoke to me. What nerve. He bounces past my desk, flashes his blue peepers at me and says, ‘Hello buttercup,’ and ricochets off the opposite wall to do something else.
I find it difficult to picture my father in these entries. To me, he seemed built for endurance, not speed. The thought of him ricocheting off walls is odd. I have tried reconstructing him in my head, dressing him in what up-and-coming young men wore to the office at the time: white shirt, black trousers, black shoes and socks. Like all such men, he probably also kept another couple of shirts with him, and a tin of talcum powder, so that he could change when the humidity leached his shirt of its starch. He was a man who liked women. When he won The Illustrated Weekly of India’s crossword contest, he bought every woman in his office a yellow rose with a little fern wrapped in white tissue and tied with a yellow satin ribbon. For that day, so Gertrude told Imelda, the office had felt like a garden. And for weeks the perfume of the roses had lingered, if not in reality, then at least in the imaginations of the young women of ASL. Gertrude had opened her bag and showed Imelda that the satin ribbon still lay at the bottom.
‘To remind me that all men aren’t the same, dear,’ she had said. Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars. She had been ‘carrying on’ with a married man for so many years, she had lost count. ‘And to add insult to injury, dear, he’s Muzzlim.’
Imelda was too young to understand that love could be an injury. She was too young to understand why Motasim’s religion was an added insult.
She was also too young to respond to ‘Hello buttercup’. So she hadn’t.
‘Why didn’t you?’ Gertrude was surprised.
‘I didn’t know what to say.’
‘You could have said “Hello”?’
But in all the films Imelda had seen, the suave young man would say ‘Hello buttercup’ and the heroine would answer such impudence with the kind of remark that would stop his airy advance through fields of irises and daisies and tansies. Such a crisp response marked her as someone different from the rest, a fitting sparring partner, someone to love.
That day, ‘Hello, buttercup’ had seemed unanswerable, and Imelda had only managed a weak roll of the eyes – ‘not even with the panache of Anna Magnani,’ she recalled. Gertrude did not know all this. In her world, men went hunting and women waited to be hunted. But when a man began to circle, it was up to the prey to draw the hunter in.
‘Unless you’re a fool for love, my dear,’ she said, over a Coke float at Bombelli’s. ‘Unless you throw your cap over a windmill.’
Gertrude became Imelda’s closest friend at ASL, and would have been her guide in matters of the heart, had her own love life not been so pitted with compromise. At first, Gertrude’s allusions to her secret sorrow over Motasim caused Imelda deep distress. But over a couple of weeks she began to see that the references were mechanical. Gertrude had settled into a comfortable pattern in which she had love and tragedy in equal measure, and a male presence in her life to warm her bed and take her to dak bungalows in hill stations, but never to get in the way of her decisions.
‘Buy your own house, I say to all the girls. I can see them thinking, “Who’s this soiled dove to give us advice?” But my heart is good and I know what’s what and God is my judge. If it’s your home, you can do what you want there. If it’s your home, no one is going to tell you to sit if you want to stand.’
‘Not even Motasim, Gertie?’ asked Imelda.
‘Certainly not Motasim,’ said Gertrude. ‘Do you know he wasn’t married when we met? And it was like that –’ and here she snapped her fingers.
‘Un coup de foudre!’ said Imelda happily. She had always wanted one of those to happen, not necessarily to her but to someone, so she could watch from a safe distance.
‘That only. He took one look at me at Andrade’s – this was after the flickers, we had all gone from the office – one look and he knew. He was looking at me, saying with his eyes, “I want, I want.” I was so young then, so innocent. I believed in love.’
Like many women Gertrude saw herself as a cynic, largely because the man she loved would not marry her and because she had two cigarette holders – one of onyx and one of mother-of-pearl – which she dug out of her capacious bag when she could be bothered. And finally, because there had once been a good young man, a medical representative, who had loved her and wanted to take her away from it all.
‘And so I put in a word,’ she told me on one of the few occasions she came to meet her old, old friend Imelda, our Em. She chose her times carefully, never coming when Em wanted to meet her. She would come when Em was depressed and withdrawn. This meant Susan or I had to entertain her for the mandatory forty-five minutes which she thought constituted a visit to a sick friend. Then she could go away and pretend to be offended when Em really did want to see her. I could see that she thought this made her a friend in need. It was one of my first lessons in the self-deception people practise on themselves. I hated talking to Gertrude for this reason. But I loved talking to her because she had known Em when she was whole. I loved it also because talking to anyone normal was an invitation to the world of ordinary people who had ordinary woes and worries: money, sex, sin and real estate, for instance. They were not, or so I imagined, people with ambivalences about their mothers or fears about their own acceptability.
‘I put in a word with your father,’ Gertrude said. ‘If you’re looking to talk to her, I told him, you’ll have to go a little easy. No yorricking about.’
‘Yorricking?’
‘You’ll have to step carefully, I told him. She wasn’t like one of us; she wouldn’t love’em and leave’em. And she seemed lost, I could tell.’
• • •
Gertrude was right. Em was not quite sure what she was doing in an office. She began her day with Mass; or she was supposed to. And then she was on the tram to work. It seemed like a job she could have done in her sleep: taking dictation and typing letters, doing the filing and answering telephones. Em had been a teacher before this, and I could imagine her as one. I couldn’t see her as a steno. My version of elitism, perhaps.
‘The job was all right, but I was a little worried about being in a big office with adults,’ she told us.
‘Adults? Weren’t you one?’
‘Technically, I was. But I didn’t think of myself that way. All those cartoons about “Come in and take some dictation” and being chased around the desk . . . and I hadn’t even wanted to be an office girl.’
When Em finished her Senior Cambridge at the age of sixteen, she had thought she was going to college. She dreamt of standing at the bus stop, chattering with her friends and refusing to admit that those boys were looking. She dreamt of lectures and Milton and prosody (‘It sounded so naughty’). She dreamt of French literature. In the confines of her head, she debated whether she would wear dresses like the other Roman Catholic and Anglo-Indian girls of Byculla or whether she would follow the Coelho sisters in their khadi saris and Kolhapuri chappals – carelessly, gorgeously beautiful, incidental flowers in their hair.
She stopped dreaming when she came home with her certificate and the good wishes of her teachers.
‘Daddy will ask,’ Granny said. ‘You say no.’
Em’s mother spoke in code. She omitted almost all the important words in every sentence. She had had far too many languages drummed into her ears – first Konkani in Goa, then Burmese in Rangoon, then Bengali in wartime Calcutta, and now English, in which her child spoke and dreamed. It had taken away most of her vocabulary. She communicated through gestures, facial expressions and the assumption that everyone knew what she was talking about. It doesn’t sound likely, but it worked.
Em realized that she was being asked to say that she had no wish to go to college. She didn’t understand why. So Granny told her.
‘Where there is? You have to. I can’t. How long?’
Em understood. There was no money for college. She would have to work. Granny had scrounged and saved for too long on granddad’s modest salary – a mathematics teacher’s salary. Besides, college would take an awful lot of time.
‘She was right. Daddy did ask if I wanted to go to college,’ Em said. ‘I couldn’t say “No” because I wanted to go and I didn’t want to lie. I asked, “Where will the money come from?” I was hoping he would have an answer. A gold wristwatch that he could sell, a ruby he had smuggled in from Burma. Anything. But he only said, “That can be arranged.” And I knew it would mean taking a loan and maybe the house would go. I didn’t talk about it again, and he didn’t talk about it either.’
Instead Granny went out looking and found her a job at a school run by nuns.
‘They hired you?’ I asked.
‘How could they? I was sixteen. So the nuns told Ma they would hire Astrid instead. Astrid the Ostrich, you know?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘You don’t remember Astrid the Ostrich? No, she must have been before your time. Astrid DeSa, poor dear, she’s dead. Died not long after she replaced me at the school – that’s what I heard. She was at the blackboard and she put her hand up to her head and coughed once. Then she threw up her lunch, right on the blackboard, and slumped. The stain is still there, they say. By the time the other teachers came, she was gone.’
‘She died with her boots on.’
‘That’s supposed to mean you died happy. Did she? I don’t know. Who can know? I would like to die with my boots on too. But what would that mean? I haven’t had any boots for a while. I don’t know that I ever had boots. I think I had booties once – booties . . . sounds like something you develop if you don’t wash. Or is that cooties? Spellings! I could never bear American spelling, not even when I took their dollars. For me, it was always the Queen’s English. How I longed to type “colour” at the AmConGen . . . that’s the American Consulate, before you ask.’
We didn’t have to ask. We knew that she worked there, after leaving ASL.
‘Why couldn’t you type it?’
‘Type what?’
‘Colour.’
‘I could type. No, I meant I couldn’t type it with a “u”. I had to do it all without “u”. And then you came along. Gosh. That’s another story.’
Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere.
‘So what did Astrid DeSa have to do with your job?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she had the paperwork. She had a Teacher’s Certificate. But she couldn’t work because she had had twins and there were abscesses on her nipples and she always said, “My boys drink my milk and pus and blood.” In my head, I called one Pus and the other Blood for a long time . . . So the nuns hired her on paper but I did the teaching.’
‘And Astrid agreed?’
‘She got twenty per cent.’
‘Of your salary?’
‘Of my salary. I got sixty per cent.’
‘And the rest?’
‘A donation to the work of Jesus.’
‘It went to the nuns?’
‘Don’t be harsh. They did all this to help your Granny. They could easily have turned her away.’
‘And you could have gone to college.’
‘Could I?’ She frowned. ‘I suppose I could have. But I would have had to ask Daddy. And he would have had to take a loan. And the house would have gone.’
‘Really? To send just one student to college?’
I tried to believe Em in everything she said. It was my act of faith, because I could see how the outside world immediately discounted whatever she said. But I wanted so hard to believe that I often found myself in the position of the inquisitor, the interrogator, demanding verification, corroboration, further proof. Most of the time, she didn’t seem to mind.
‘I know. It seems odd. It’s cheap now, so says Angel Ears. I thought we would have a tough time when Sue started college. I said he and I could eat bread and drink water and he laughed and said, “No. It’s not a problem, the fees are not a problem.”’
Then she was wandering again.
‘You know, I thought he was being all big and manly about it, sending his little girl to college, because the students had gone on strike and tried to set fire to a bus. Only the poor dears didn’t quite manage to; the papers showed the bus the next morning and it looked quite all right except the stuffing on the seats was torn. I think they should have got some expert advice from Calcutta. They burn buses there, don’t they?’
‘Em. We were talking about your going to college.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t. Not now. I’ve read those nice Reader’s Digest things where an old lady goes to college and everyone is fond of her, but I don’t think it would be the same. I don’t want to study now. And I don’t want people to be fond of me. It sounds like I’d be the sheepdog of the class. Or I’d have to be a muddha-figure and for that I’ve got the two of you and God knows I messed that up as well.’
‘Oh come on.’
‘That’s sweet of you. But see, if you weren’t a messed up child, my messed up child, you would have made a nice long speech about how I was the perfect mother. But you can’t. So we’re all messed up by Reader’s Digest standards. We’ll never make it to a heart-rending story you can read on your summer vacation.’
‘Em, you’re not listening. Was college really that expensive in your time?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it cost . . . How old are you?’
‘Shouldn’t you know?’
‘Shouldn’t you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Gosh, seventeen and so many questions! I couldn’t ask questions like that. I didn’t say: show me the bank books. But I knew I had to bring in some money. So I put on my blue dress with the lace collar and went to work.’
• • •
Em would tell us that she liked being a schoolteacher, and from memories I have of Em combing a young patient’s hair in her hospital ward, or feeding the old lady in the bed next to hers as she would feed an infant, I can believe this. But her first day as a teacher nearly destroyed her. Schoolchildren can smell a nervous teacher. They see it in her gait as she enters the room, uncertain of her ability to command and instruct. They hear it in her voice as she clears her throat before she begins to speak. They sense it when she looks at the teacher’s table and chair, set on a platform to give her a view of the class, as if she has no right to be there. They watch without remorse or sympathy as she walks the gauntlet and suddenly they are in the grip of a completely new sensation. It is power that they are feeling as they anneal into a single organism: the class. At any moment now, they will cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. Every schoolchild has felt that collective rill of joy trickle down his throat as the hierarchy breaks down and revenge may be had.
‘I think Mother Superior meant well,’ Em remembered. ‘But she made a fatal mistake. She came and introduced me and said that I was the new teacher and that it was my first day at teaching. She said she knew what well-behaved children they were and how they would help me. For a few minutes after she left, they tolerated me. Or they held themselves back. I remember trying to think what teachers did or said. No one had even told me what I was supposed to be teaching. I asked what period it was and the class shouted back in one voice, “Mathematics.” I almost wept, because I hated mathematics and now it seemed I was supposed to be teaching it. In the next five minutes, they were ready. All of them had pieces of paper under their feet. They began rubbing them on the floor. Khuzzz. Khuzzz. Khuzzz. I said, “Please don’t do that,” or something. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to say. I knew I sounded weedy. But that was all I could manage.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, feeling a pang of guilt. The future sins of the son had been visited on the mother. How many times had I helped do this to a new teacher?
‘They all chorused, “So-rry tea-cher.” I said, “That’s all right.” They chorused, “Than-kyou tea-cher . . .” I can still hear their voices, the dirty little shits, though I came to love them later, but they were still dirty little shits . . . and then they began singing “Happy birthday” to me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I ran out of the class crying.’
‘What?’
‘I was terrified. I just wanted to hide somewhere so I thought I’d hide in a toilet. Only, it was the boys’ toilet.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Luckily, it was empty. Then I found the staffroom by mistake and Mother Superior was there, examining workbooks or something. She made me wash my face and then she took me back to class. She made the class kneel down on their desks and pray for forgiveness to the benevolent God who had allowed them to be born in families that sent them to school.’
‘The Hindus and Muslims too?’
‘Everyone. Then they had to write a letter of apology to their parents. She was quite, quite brilliant, Mother Soup.’
‘Who were you teaching?’
‘Seventh standard. I think she assumed I couldn’t do too much damage there. I must have been a terrible teacher because I didn’t understand any of the stuff I was teaching. Each day I’d ask Daddy what to say about integers or fractions or ratio and proportion and I would read it out slowly in class. Then I would make a clever boy come up to the blackboard and do the sums.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘What does that mean? No, don’t bother telling me. As if I don’t know. But what could I do? I didn’t understand ratio and proportion. The numbers seemed to skip about, some went up and some went down and nothing seemed to work out. But after a year, they gave me English and history. I was so happy I could have danced.’
But at the end of six months, Granny arrived in Mother Soup’s office. Her daughter was now eighteen years old and she was no longer going to work at the school. She wouldn’t teach anymore, but learn. She would join the Standard Shorthand and Typewriting Institute.
‘“We set the standard”, that was their motto. Mae said it was the right thing for me to do. Someone must have told her that secretaries make more money. Or something like that. So she decided that I would become a secretary.’
‘Did she ask you?’
Em gave me a speaking look.
‘I was so unhappy I wept almost all the time. I remember a couple of my students passing me on the street and saying, “Good morning, Miss” and I burst into tears. I remember crying because I didn’t think I would ever be able to change a typewriter ribbon without getting my fingers dirty. I remember crying because I didn’t understand tabs. And just when I had started to understand the typing thing, the shorthand started and the typing seemed like easy butter-jelly-jam. Typing was about getting English out of a machine. Shorthand was a new language and it was terrible, full of chays and jays and things like that. I can’t tell you how much I cried.’
How to read those tears would always be a problem. For anyone else, they would be the outpourings of an eighteen-year-old forced out of a world she had grown to enjoy into a new one. But each time Em told me something about her life, I would examine it for signs, for early indications of the ‘nervous breakdown’. It was an obsession and might have something to do with my curiosity about her life. She was born in Rangoon, I knew, and had come to India on one of the ships that crossed the Bay of Bengal when the Japanese attacked Burma. Her father had walked, from Rangoon to Assam; legend has it that he had departed with a head of black hair and appeared again in Calcutta with a shock of white hair. Was this it? Was this the break? She didn’t seem to remember much about that crossing except how she used orange sweets to quell her nausea and began menstruating on board the ship. Was this just how people remembered things, in patches and images, or was this the repression of a painful memory?
Somewhere along the way their piano had been jettisoned to lighten the boat. When I first heard this, I thought it was a good place for things to start, for my mother’s breakdown to begin. I imagined the dabbassh as the piano hit the water with, perhaps, a wail of notes. I imagined my mother weeping for the piano as it began to bubble its way to the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. I cut between her tears, the white handkerchief handed to her by her impatient mother, the plume of dust rising from the seabed, the tear-soaked face, the first curious fish . . .
Then I heard another Roman Catholic Goan family speak of their piano. And another. And a fourth. Then I got it. The pianos were a metaphor, a tribal way of expressing loss. It did not matter if the pianos were real or had never existed. The story was their farewell to Rangoon. It expressed, also, their sense of being exiled home to Goa, to a poor present. The past could be reinvented. It could be rich with Burmese silk and coal mines and rubies and emeralds and jade. It could be filled with anything you wanted and a piano that was thrown overboard could express so much more than talking about how one lent money out at interest in the city. Or how one taught English to fill up the gaps of a schoolteacher’s salary.
The family had come to Goa and then to Bombay. They had lived in a single room that would later become a laundry before Em’s father found a job as a mathematics teacher. Was that it? The years of deprivation? Only, it didn’t seem to be much more deprivation than many young women of the time endured. Was it the sacrifice of her teaching job, then? Hundreds of women had sacrificed the same or more. Every fact, every bit of information had to be scanned. Sometimes it was exhausting to listen to her because she seemed to be throwing out clues faster than I could absorb them.
Eventually Em did learn to type sixty words per minute and take dictation. The Standard Shorthand and Typewriting Institute awarded her a certificate and gave her a special mention for her shorthand.
‘Which is very good, even if I say so myself. Most of the other girls couldn’t read their own shorthand one hour later. I can still read my notes thirty years after I made them.’
For the next two months, Em worked with a small firm called Mehta Mechanical Electrical and Engineering Corporation.
‘It was called Memecorp. So Baig the joker called it Mommecorp.’
‘Didn’t get that one.’
‘He spoke some Konkani.’
‘Oh right. Sorry.’
Momme, in demotic Konkani, is the word for breasts.
Despite its rather grand name, Memecorp was not a particularly good place to work.
‘They paid me a daily wage. If I went in, I got paid. If I didn’t, I didn’t. And two or three times, I went in and they said there’s no work for you today so you can go and I had to go, even though I had paid my tram fare.’
‘Like a labourer.’
‘That’s what I thought. So I kept an eye out, and one day I saw an ad for a steno in ASL and I applied. There was an Anglo-Indian lady at the reception desk. She looked at me and said, “Have you been teaching, dearie?” I said, “Yes.” She smiled at me and said, “It shows.” I was such a duffer then, I didn’t even know that she was insulting me. I said, “Yes, I want to go back and teach but we need the money at home.” She said, “My, you won’t get a job as a steno if you look like a teacher, dearie.” Then she gave me a card and told me to go and see a certain gentleman. “He’ll kit you out in the latest style,” she said. “What about the job interview?” I asked. “You won’t get the job,” she said. “Go on now.” That’s when I got a bit angry and said, “I’d like to take my chances.” I sat down and waited.’
‘And you got the job?’
Then, as now, I loved a happy ending. And at least this little bit of Em’s story had a happy ending.
‘Of course I did,’ she snorted. ‘I wrote good English and I knew when to use a dictionary. I knew grammar. They gave me a little test and I think I did very well on it. They also asked me to draft a letter to the bank asking for an overdraft. I didn’t know what an overdraft was so I kept it simple. But, as Andrade told me later, that was what got me the job.’
At the end of the test and a short interview, Em left but found the receptionist missing. She was having a cigarette outside the building, oblivious to the men staring at her.
‘I felt a bit triumphant as I told her that I had been offered the job. “Are you taking it?” she asked. I thought she must be out of her mind. In those days jobs were scarce and you took what you were offered. But she asked again, “Are you taking it?” I thought perhaps she had a sister and her sister had her eye on the job, so I said, “Yes. And I told them so.” Then I thought I would be kind and I said, “But I’ll need some new clothes so I’ll go to that gentleman who you said will kit me out.” But she didn’t seem very happy with that. She started saying that it wasn’t a good idea, I already had the job, so why bother? I don’t know why but I became stubborn. “I don’t want to look like a teacher,” I said. “What’s wrong with being a teacher?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said, “but I’m a steno in a big firm now so I want to look like that.” I don’t know why I was saying these things. I thought my clothes were all right, but there was something about Brigitte that made me say these things. I think she oozed a challenge. Do you remember that film we saw about the Bengali woman taking up a job?’
‘Mahanagar?’
We’d seen it together for some reason. It must have been on the Saturday evening slot that was reserved for ‘regional cinema’ on Doordarshan. We couldn’t have gone to a neighbour’s house to watch it. Not with Em. So it would have been after we got our own television. The memory makes me smile: Em, with her beedi, and Susan and I watching Satyajit Ray on a Saturday evening, with The Big Hoom working overtime or busy in the kitchen. Even when we were a family, we weren’t quite the usual.
‘Is that the one?’ Em asked. ‘The one in which you thought the Anglo-Indian woman was a bad actress?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Brigitte was a little like her. She was the kind of girl who thought only she had the right to wear lipstick. She was the kind who would laugh at anyone who tried out a new fashion before she did. I hadn’t even known her ten minutes but I knew the kind. So I thought she would be happy that I was taking some fashion advice from her. But she grabbed my arm and snarled at me. “What’s your game then, you bitch?” I was so startled I could hardly speak. “Give me back that card,” she said and her voice was like lava. And ice. Cold and angry. And her eyes were so full of hate, I flinched. I opened my handbag and began to rummage in it, frantically. Just then Andrade walked past and said, “Getting friendly, girls?” She let go of my arm and I rushed off. When I got home, my hands were still shaking. Mae looked at my face and said, “Never mind, you’ll get the next one. I’m sure of it.” She thought I hadn’t got the job. She thought I’d made a mess of the interview. How could I tell her that I had been terrified by a receptionist?’
‘Did you miss teaching?’ Susan asked.
‘No, actually, it was a big relief.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘You know, an office job means you don’t have to carry anything home. Not if you’re a steno, anyway. You do your work and you leave. Then you can forget about everything. You don’t have to worry about Celestine’s father who’s a violent drunk and won’t let him study. You don’t have to bother about Fatima who’s been taken out of school and her mother tells you she’s too sickly to study and you know it’s because they’ve arranged her marriage. No corrections. No papers to set. No destinies in your hands. Just some letters to type and some spellings to learn.’
‘Spellings?’
‘Machine names. They made electrostatic precipitators. I didn’t even know whether they actually made the damned things or bought them from someone else. Don’t look like that.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘You have your worst baby-Marxist look on your face.’
I had decided I was a socialist. One afternoon, the year before, I’d joined a protest march by mill workers that went past our school. I’d walked among them for fifteen minutes raising slogans and feeling light-headed, and when I came back home, I’d let Em and Susan know. I was proud of my achievement. Em had laughed. ‘Rite of passage. Next, you lose your virginity – and what a relief that will be.’
‘I have no such look,’ I said to her. ‘You were telling me about electrostatic precipitators.’
‘You do. You look like someone who’s thinking, “My mother was part of the alienated workforce and she didn’t mind it.” Well, you shame me not. I was happy to type and take messages and eat my sandwiches and go for a movie on Saturdays. I didn’t care whether the company made a profit or loss. I didn’t care because my bonus came anyway and I got my salary anyway and I handed it over to Mae.’
‘And thus you were alienated from your labour as well as from your wages.’
‘I don’t know about that. I lived the good life in my mother’s house. I don’t think I ever worried about how food was coming to the table or what was to be cooked. It appeared and I cribbed and I ate it and the plates went away again to be washed. I had no hand in any of that.’
‘As the wage earner?’
Em looked a bit thoughtful.
‘Oh, was that it? I thought it was just Mae’s way.’
‘Maybe it was. After all, other women earn but they also do the housework.’
‘I think there was a time when she tried to teach me to cook. We were in Goa then. Some small fish had been brought from the river and there were still a few that were hopping about a bit. I couldn’t bear it so I thought I’d drown them and put them out of their misery.’
‘That sounds like an apocryphal family story.’
‘It does? I thought it sounded like a really silly one. But if you know a word like apocryphal you should of course find a reason to trot it out. And there’s a sequel. When Mae came in, she was horrified to find a couple of fish now swimming about so she took them down to the river and let them go again. So there.’
The wage earner was spared the housework. But this was how the money was apportioned: Imelda earned it and Mae doled out a weekly allowance.
‘Sometimes I’d save my tram fare home. It was about an hour from Fort to Byculla if I walked, so I walked and saved my pence . . .’
‘To eat dates,’ I said.
‘Yes. Dates. Clever of you to remember. Is there a fruit anywhere in the world like the date? I mean, have you ever met a disappointing date? I’ve met apples that do not crunch and I’ve met pears that are too hard. I’ve met grapes that are sour . . .’
‘Okay, but a date is always sweet. I got that.’
‘What would I do without you to keep me on the conversational straight and narrow?’ Em waved her beedi in the air with a rhetorical flourish. ‘I bought dates and I ate them as I walked.’
‘It must have helped you stay slim.’
‘You know, perhaps it was because there was so little money in the house, but I don’t remember ever being worried about my figure. I knew it was okay and my face was okay and that was it. So I didn’t think . . . no . . . I never thought: is this good for my figure? I never thought about that. And if someone had come up to me and offered me a lift home in his car, I would have hopped in. But only with someone respectable. We were always being told about horrible things happening to young women who got into cars with the wrong people. But no wrong people were to hand, thankfully, so there I was walking down the road from Fort to Bicks, eating a handful of dates, very slowly and very slyly, because I think it was generally felt that a woman should not eat in public.’
And one day, a car did pull up next to her.