DAMINI
AMANJIT SINGH HAS ARRIVED ON A PRE-DAWN FLIGHT from Bombay to find the speared iron gates at the foot of the driveway locked. He’s shouting, “Open up! Open up!” and swearing. His taxi driver’s honking, the neighbour’s dogs are barking, and mynah birds screech.
Damini snatches up her dupatta and drapes it across her chest, slips into her rubber sandals, and rushes downstairs. As she runs down the driveway, she yells again and again that she’s coming, she’s sorry, it was her fault for sleeping so soundly. As soon as she unlocks the double gates and pushes them open, he strides past her, bounds up the driveway, dashes upstairs and begins shouting at his mother.
Mem-saab is standing at the front door of her apartment, fumbling with the zip of her dressing gown. Confronted by her son’s ferocious look, she gazes first at Amanjit’s lips, then over his shoulder at Damini, her eyes huge and questioning.
This turbaned man, who Damini knew when he was still coaxing his beard with coconut oil, towers over his mother and shouts, “You knew I was coming, and you locked me out of my father’s house!”
Aman could be yawning or yelping for all Mem-saab knows. He should speak slowly. He should remember Mem-saab can’t lip-read properly through a moustache and beard—even a tidily rolled, hair-netted beard such as his.
Damini ducks past them through the doorway, and takes her place behind Mem-saab. She lays her hand gently on Mem-saab’s shoulder. “Be more respectful, Aman-ji,” says Damini, her respectful “ji” coming with effort. “No one was trying to lock you out. See, everything is open.” She needs an excuse to come between them—she takes a dupatta from its hook behind the door, and offers it to Mem-saab to cover her head. “She’s old and left without a man to protect her.”
That should shame him. He should remember his duty to protect his mother. But there’s no shame in the look he flashes at Damini. That look says she may have been his mother’s ears since he was twenty-two, but she is only that pair of ears. “Go, Damini-amma.” His thumb jerks past her eye. “Go sit in the kitchen.”
Damini ignores that thumb as she used to ignore his tantrums, and helps Mem-saab to her room instead. Mem-saab’s grip on her arm is tighter than usual.
Aman is now shouting down the stairs for Khansama, the cook who is probably still in his servant quarters. “Bring my suitcase,” he yells. The Embassy-man, his wife and children, who rent the five bedrooms on the ground floor, must be well woken up by now. She hears the cook’s sandals slap-slap on the driveway as he runs to the gate.
Damini fetches Mem-saab’s silver water glass and her pills. Mem-saab says, “Tell Aman I am not signing any more papers. I already gave him twenty-five percent of this house last time he came.” She makes her way to the bathroom and closes the door.
Water purrs into the plastic bucket. Mem-saab’s preparing to bathe, without taking a single cup of tea.
Damini goes to deliver Mem-saab’s message but Aman has pointedly closed the door to his father’s room. She can hear him inside, unpacking. She could shout or write a note to slip under the door, but Mem-saab’s message might make matters worse. Soon he will want breakfast.
Mem-saab has begun reciting the Japji aloud in her tuneless chant—she must have emerged from the bathroom. The prayer takes about twenty minutes. Mem-saab should eat breakfast immediately afterwards, to avoid further argument.
Damini opens the screen door to the kitchen and pops her head in so she doesn’t have to remove her sandals. The rail-thin cook looks up from his cane stool, his face grey-brown as a potato. Why doesn’t he just wear a moustache and beard? Then he won’t look like a parched lawn every morning. Hairy forearms poke from his sleep-rumpled kurta and rest upon pyjama-clad knees. Even his toes look like small potatoes.
“Khansama,” says Damini, severely enough to pull him together, “Serve Mem-saab her breakfast.”
Back in Mem-saab’s room, she squats in front of Mem-saab’s chair and enters the chant with her. When the prayer is over and Mem-saab opens her eyes, Damini mouths soundlessly, “What does he want you to sign?”
“He wants me to give all of this house to him and Timcu.”
“Will they live with us?” Damini mouths. Khansama will need to know—he has four children and a wife in the one-room servants’ quarters behind the house. As for Damini, she has a son; she will never need to go begging. Unless Suresh has somehow learned disrespect, like Aman.
“No, they want to make condos in its place,” Mem-saab’s voice swoops like a bulbul bird ascending. Damini gives a hand signal for her to lower it.
“What is ‘condos’?”
“Tall buildings.”
Damini can tell Mem-saab doesn’t quite understand the word either, though she has two more years of schooling than Damini, having studied up to Class 10. At sixteen, the chauthi-lav of the Sikh marriage ceremony ringing in her jewelled ears, Mem-saab came from Pari Darvaza, her village in the part of Punjab that was cut away to make Pakistan. Came wrapped in red silk to ornament Sardar-saab’s home in Rawalpindi as his second wife, to birth the sons his first wife couldn’t. There was one daughter who died early. Then Devinder, pet named Timcu, then Amanjit.
So respectful was Mem-saab, she never used her husband’s real name or called him the familiar tu, even after his first wife died. Always, she called him Sardar-ji. After their home in Rawalpindi was abandoned to the Muslims of Pakistan in August 1947, they fled to Delhi and built their lives along with the city.
Until Sardar-saab’s demise, Mem-saab needed only to know to pray, decorate the house, shop and give orders to servants.
It’s about thirty rains since Damini came from Gurkot in the hills to live here—perhaps more, perhaps less, for sometimes the rains desert the land, sometimes they are ceaseless. And the saab-log have the abroad calendar, ordinary people have the harvest and temple calendar. But for about thirty years, Damini has only needed to know the art of massage and the timing that turns flattery to praise.
But now …
“Where will we live?” she asks Mem-saab.
“Aman is concerned about me here … such a big house … alone … with my poor health.”
Aman’s concern is like a farmer’s for a crop of jute—how much can be harvested and how much will it bring? And Mem-saab is not alone. Damini is here. And Khansama, the driver, two gardeners, two sweepers, a daytime security guard, the washerman, the Embassy-man’s servants—each looks after her as if she were his mother.
But we are nothing, no one for the saab-log.
“He says a smaller house in Delhi would be better, or that I should go to the hills and live in the Big House in Gurkot.” Mem-saab means the estate Sardar-saab received as compensation from the Government of India for the loss of his home and villages in Pakistan.
“The snow there gets this high,” Damini says, bringing her palm level with her midriff. “Too cold for you. And me. Though the first year I came to Delhi, I thought I’d die of the heat.”
That year began auspiciously enough with her success in giving birth to Suresh, after only one daughter, Leela. But then Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru died, and the whole country mourned. Then her Piara Singh was electrocuted while working and Damini consigned her marriage collar to his funeral pyre after less than five years as a wife. In Gurkot, in those days, everyone did khuss-puss, khuss-puss whispering Damini must have done something terrible in a past life to give her widowhood in this one. That Piara Singh’s death was foretold, that Damini’s bhagya in this life was to be a living ghost. And far away in New Delhi, young Mem-saab’s ears stopped speaking to her. So at the end of peach season, Sardar-saab hired Damini to replace those ears, and Damini left Suresh and Leela with her in-laws and became an amma in Delhi.
Mem-saab sighs, “Money—the expectation of Sardar-ji’s money—is changing my sons.”
Changing? Damini remembers the first time she saw Aman: home from university hostel for the winter holidays, whipping a tonga horse who could go no faster. And his elder brother Timcu, not restraining Aman, just letting him do it! She remembers Aman a few years later, laughing when a barefoot beggar dived into a ditchful of slime to escape the swerve of his car. And Timcu in the front seat with him, estimating the amount they’d need for a police bribe to forget the poor man’s life, should it come to that. A good amma needs to forget much more than she remembers.
“How true, how true,” she replies, hanging up Mem-saab’s dressing gown.
If Amanjit and Timcu still had a sister, maybe they would be kinder. And if Aman and Timcu had been younger when Damini came, maybe she could have taught them more gentleness. But like Mem-saab, she gave these little maharajas too much love, too much forgiveness. She passed down their clothes to Suresh and gave them all the blessings and hopes she should have given to her own children.
Leela understands. She knows that but for their fear of Sardar-saab, Piara Singh’s brothers would have thrown Damini out. But here, an amma gets chai in the morning and two meals a day.
Damini chooses three salwar-kameezes from the cupboard and shows them to Mem-saab, along with chiffon dupattas. If the salwar, kameez or dupatta is a slightly different shade, Mem-saab will look bad.
Piara Singh’s brothers were a shade different from him—just enough to make the whole family look bad. But their karma caught up. They had many misfortunes, while Damini has survived when so many said she would end up selling her body for money. She has her ears, she has strong hands and bhagya.
Mem-saab points to a rose and grey silk. Damini lays it on the bed.
Aman has a business that exports fine silks like these. And women’s clothing that would barely cover a child. Another business sells plywood, furniture, crates, cricket bats, hockey sticks, cedar oil and varnish. And Timcu—instead of becoming a doctor so he could cure the pains that strike his mother every time she climbs the stairs—Timcu is an astrologer in Canada, divining if prices will go up or down and will there be too much of one thing and not of another. Even his Damini-amma knows prices go up and there is never too much of anything in this eon of greed called Kalyug. So much money spent on Timcu’s education, and the man cannot even tell Damini if Suresh will love her when she can no longer give him money.
Foolish mothers like me make astrologers rich.
A knock at the door—Khansama’s standing outside, steam rising from the tray in his hands. He has changed his kurta.
Damini takes the tray and elbows the door shut. She places it on a small table in the sitting area and helps Mem-saab to her sofa-chair. Damini adjusts the table before her, pours milk into the bowl of oatmeal, adds raisins and honey.
Mem-saab’s spoon stops halfway to her lips. “Where’s he now?”
Damini can hear Aman opening and closing drawers, then a creak as Sardar-saab’s mirror tilts for the first time in seven years. He’s trying on a dead man’s silk ties and turbans. “Unpacking,” she says.
“Stand here while I eat.” The order is a plea. There are things Aman cannot say to his mother in the presence of a servant.
When she has finished, Damini helps her to dress and then calls, “Khansama, tell Zahir Sheikh to bring Mem-saab’s car.” Her driver will take Mem-saab shopping before the May sun beats down at full strength.
Damini takes her towel upstairs to the terrace. She uses the squat-toilet in her wash area behind the half-wall, and then sits before the tap. She pulls a basin of soiled clothing across the floor, and waits for a thin stream of water.
Aromas of scrambled egg-bhurji, toast and butter rise up the stairwell as she kneads Mem-saab’s heavy silk salwar-kameezes, then Mem-saab’s transparent dupattas. Rising, she moves past the half-wall to hang the clothes on the line.
Returning to the wash area, Damini half-fills a plastic bucket, pulls her kameez over her head and steps from the legs of her salwar. The water, sun-warmed from the tank at the other end of the terrace, wakes the skin of her forehead and shoulders.
Piara Singh never lived with these rounded shoulders, this slight pot-belly, these grey strands between her legs. But those legs are as lean and strong as when her husband was alive, her breasts still heavy, sagging only a little.
Somewhere below the canopy of gulmohar trees that screens her view of the driveway, Aman is shouting for Khansama to stop a taxi on the main road. Damini towels dry.
The taxi-man honks as Damini steps into a clean salwar and ties its cord at her waist.
Aman clatters down the stairs, shouting at Khansama. Why hasn’t the cook placed his ice water Thermos and his briefcase in the taxi yet? How many times does Khansama need to be reminded?
She pulls a clean kameez over her head and smooths it till it falls below her knees.
She can’t see Khansama or Aman. “Answer me, don’t just stand there—are you or are you not a moron?”
Some English words require no translation.
Khansama, have a thick skin.
Aman leaves. The house crouches in waiting silence.
“That suitcase was heavy.” Khansama takes a stool beside Damini, and leans back against the red gas cylinder of the two-burner hotplate.
Damini chews slowly on her morning roti, then takes a sip of chai. “How much did he pay you this time?”
“Full five hundred rupees.” He fans himself with the notes.
Just for carrying a suitcase? Payment to forget Aman called him a moron.
“You’ve forgotten your cap. Mem-saab will find your hair in the curry tonight,” says Damini.
Khansama rises and rummages in a cupboard as if he hasn’t heard her. He forgets sometimes that he is just a servant. He forgets even more often that there can be honour only from serving those who have honour.
When Sardar-saab was still in this life, Khansama made rogan josh and chicken jalfrezi swimming in layers of pure butter-ghee. His curries, Sardar-saab used to say, were better than those in five-star hotels. And sweet rice, and phirni fragrant with rosewater. He should have been told, “Hmm, these are good but you can do better.” But Mem-saab gave him so many compliments, now everyone has to suffer his swelled head. He sits idle most of the day now, and describes flavours and dishes he dreams of cooking—since she became a widow, Mem-saab doesn’t order meat or sweets unless she has guests.
Khansama places a small steel bowl before Damini—sugar for her second cup of tea. Damini swirls the square granules with her forefinger.
She lost her sweet tooth a year and a half ago on a December day when she saw Suresh on TV. There was her son—or someone just like him—at the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, clambering up the half-demolished sides of a masjid. The masjid was built by Muslims recently, only seven centuries ago. Who but his mother could have recognised that beloved face twisted with anger, those hands wielding a metal truncheon? Certainly no one in Ayodhya.
Suresh had been transported from Delhi along with 200,000 others by leaders in Nehru caps and sadhus in saffron robes. He looked fearless and brave on TV, shouting slogans as he and his fellow pilgrims leapt into the fray and tore down the Babri Masjid. As if fighting the whole Mughal Empire, more than three hundred years after its collapse.
But later, shame churned in Damini’s stomach like the milky ocean that birthed the world. Such disrespect for a sacred place. Had she taught him that? Had she forgiven him too many small paaps along the way?
She should, she could, she will, one day, ask Suresh if he was there. Can a mother mistake another woman’s son for her own? Impossible. But if he was there, Suresh had committed destruction that is only the right of Lord Shiv.
At that moment her taste for sweetness vanished.
Khansama raises his rupees to a shaft of sunlight that knifes through the chic-bamboo blinds. The notes are worn in the centre, but acceptable.
“Only a fool accepts dirty money,” says Damini—then regrets speaking so sharply to a man who has already been called a moron today. He may not be a moron, just a witless donkey.
“He says he will bring his wife and daughter and they will move in here too,” says Khansama.
“Here?”
“Where else? You too are becoming deaf.”
“Get a few years and some wisdom and your ears will ignore echoes from empty vessels: there are only two bedrooms on this floor. The second is not large enough for three people. If Aman moves in downstairs, Mem-saab will lose her income.”
“Aman-ji says he will build more rooms upstairs.”
On the third storey? Then where will Damini relieve herself? Where will she bathe? She’ll have to share the wash area with Khansama’s family. Or will Mem-saab allow Damini to share her bathroom if the sweeper cleans it afterwards? After all, Mem-saab’s Japji prayer says there’s no high-up, no low-down, all equal-equal. Damini may not be saab-log like Mem-saab, but she is a kshatriya. A warrior descended from rajas, not a sweeper. So maybe she can share Mem-saab’s bathroom. That is difficult to imagine.
Much has changed in thirty years—people in towns and cities eat from chai-stalls and in restaurants and who knows if a brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, sudra or outcaste cooked their food or ate from the same plates, or drank from the same glass? Respected people use public bathrooms that might have been used by lower castes. Newer buildings don’t have two doors into the bathrooms, and outcastes enter from the same door as Hindus with caste.
But even in this Sikh household, where caste is banished by decree of ten gurus, when Timcu cut his hair and stopped wearing a turban to marry a no-caste gora woman in Canada, Sardar-saab would not write to him for several years.
Mem-saab, a generation younger than her husband, is a better Sikh. She wouldn’t treat Damini like a sweeper. Damini has accepted the ten gurus as her gods and become a Sikh for Mem-saab’s sake. Damini’s husband’s name, which she writes as her second name to get his pension, was Singh—just like a Sikh. And a few times, when Mem-saab had no appetite, Damini persuaded her to eat a little from her own plate, as sisters do.
Hai! Sometimes Damini needs more gods than one, and more than ten gurus for inspiration; maybe she should become a Hindu again.
“Are you finished?” Khansama says, pointing to the steel bowl with the sugar.
Sardar-saab used to say never trust a clean-shaven man. Potato-face looks happy; to those who follow him, Aman can be the smile of Lords Ram, Krishna and Ganesh in one.
“No,” she says, pouring her share of sugar into her tea, though she cannot taste it. She will not share anything to sweeten his life. And no more of Mem-saab’s salt than she can help, till she knows the price of Khansama’s heart.
Mem-saab returns from her shopping without parcels or bags, eyes red and swollen. She stops several times to rest as she climbs the staircase.
Damini calls for Khansama to serve lunch. She stands by Mem-saab as she eats and then prepares her bed for her afternoon nap.
Damini had a sleeping mat on the floor in a corner of Mem-saab’s room until the anti-Sikh riots ten years ago. That night, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by a Sikh bodyguard and Congress Party officials used voter lists to lead mobs of angry young Hindu men to Sikh dwellings. Mem-saab’s Sikh driver was going to risk his life to inform the well-informed police, but Mem-saab ordered him not to go—if she hadn’t, he might have been arrested and shot with the rest. As it was the police seized licensed weapons from Sikh men, even veterans, then stood by as mobs burned homes and smoked out Sikh men, women and children. For three days and nights, Mem-saab kept her Sikh driver safe behind her gates, as Sikh women and children fought alongside their turbaned menfolk. On the third day, he begged to come out of hiding. He said he had to protect his family. Mem-saab told him to take her car so he’d look like a saab. But a Hindu mob tore him from the driver’s seat, hacked him to pieces, and set her car alight.
Madam G.’s son Rajiv became PM overnight, and promoted the police officers who allowed the massacres. And decorated the Congressmen for their role. So Mem-saab continues to fear Hindu men will come to break down the gates and she will not hear them. And Damini sleeps even closer, on a woollen foot-carpet right beside the bed—and tries to forget she is a Hindu.
Mem-saab lies down for her nap, and Damini does too, waiting till Mem-saab’s breathing becomes regular and even. Then she slips out, climbs to the third storey roof-terrace, rests her elbows on the latticed concrete balcony and waits.
A round face appears at the iron gates. Yes, those are Suresh’s bright black eyes, his beard and moustache like a close-trimmed hedge. Damini rushes downstairs to meet him. Her son has travelled three hours by bus to touch her feet in greeting, and it will take him three hours to return to the fly-bitten servant’s quarters he shares with five other men. He washes at a row of community taps, and lives on plates of pakoras and samosas from roadside chai-stalls, because he’s saving to get married as soon as he can find a girl.
Still he comes to see me.
Damini takes the roll of rupees she’s been saving for him from between her breasts, unclenches his fist, and slips it in. Mem-saab would say she shouldn’t give him everything, and make Suresh fend for himself. But he’s a good son—he attends prayer and exercise classes of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak every morning. And he doesn’t shout at his mother like Aman does.
Suresh dips his head in thanks and counts the money. His eyelashes are almost as long as his father’s.
“Do you have any more?” he says. “I was saving for a TV, but instead I donated the money.”
“To your swami?”
“And the Bajrang Dal, and the RSS.”
“No, that’s all I have. Don’t you donate it as well.”
“I tell matchmakers I’m descended from hill rajas,” he says, squatting beside her at the edge of the Embassy-man’s lime sheen lawn. “And here you are working as a maidservant.” Gladioli and begonias offer some shade from the sun. He lights a beedi and flicks the match into the flowerbed. “You need a better job.”
Damini shrugs. Everyone needs a better job. Suresh never has suggestions as to what she can do instead. His own job doesn’t pay enough even for one person, leave alone a family, but he must find a wife and become a man. “The gods give highborn and lowborn whatever we deserve,” she says, eying his beedi.
He laughs and takes a puff. “The gods didn’t stop you from leaving Gurkot—you should have stayed there until I grew up,” he says, meaning she should have claimed his patrimony by her presence.
“If I had stayed in Gurkot,” she says, extending two fingers, “I would be ashes now.”
He places the beedi between her fingers and looks through the speared gates to the road. He never believes his uncles would have killed her.
“And you would not be in Delhi,” she says.
“Then I would never have gone to Lodi Gardens, never have heard Swami Rudransh.”
Damini takes a long, deep drag. She doesn’t want to hear how the swami has opened Suresh’s eyes to India’s real history, or how the swami is Suresh’s second father. If Suresh tells her all that again, she’ll say one father is enough—you don’t need two—even if Suresh doesn’t want to hear that.
“You should get a better job,” she says. “Your eyes will roll round like marbles in your head if you spend more years minding those copy machines.”
“I don’t watch the copy being made,” he says. “One video makes another inside a box.”
“When I carried Leela and you, my stomach was like that. A dark box. I couldn’t watch either one being made. Most of life is like that only—important happenings are mostly unseen.”
He grunts. Maybe she’s told him this before.
Doesn’t matter. He should hear it again.
She passes him the beedi. “But birthing! It made me feel alive—rohm-rohm.” Through every pore and crevice of her body, as never before. Back then, she thought if she could survive childbirth and birth a son, everything else would be easy. Ha!
Suresh blows a smoke ring, and waits respectfully enough, but she knows he doesn’t want to hear how painful it was, or how she nearly died to give his atman flesh.
“I don’t have to do much,” he says, passing her his beedi. “Every videotape comes out the same.”
“How do you know?” says Damini. “Maybe each video copy tells a slightly different story—it depends who is telling, who is watching, who is listening, when the tale is told, and where.” She holds smoke deep in her lungs, feels it hit, and exhales. “I thought Leela would be my copy and that you would be just like your father. But you aren’t even like each other.”
“I should be like a woman?”
“I mean she’s so trusting and hardworking,”
“I’m not hardworking?”
“Arey! One word and you get angry. I only wish I knew how you and Leela grew inside me. If I had gone to college like Aman and Timcu and Kiran, I might know.”
“They know? Ha!”
“I saw a doctor on TV pointing to pink and white pictures. Bapre-bap! How much that man said happens inside a woman—but how does a man know? Only a woman can feel and tell what happens inside her.”
“Ask Mem-saab to read you her magazines.”
“I can read them myself, slowly, but lady-doctors don’t tell about giving birth, even in the new glossy-glossy ones. TV is better—because when I hear something, I don’t forget.”
“TV is bad for women.”
“Bad for us but not bad for you? Why were you saving to buy one, then?”
“To watch Swami Rudransh,” he says.
“Ha! You want to watch movies.”
“So? You should listen to the radio.”
His protectiveness is a comforting omen for her old age, but she says, “I can’t, now. Amanjit-saab is visiting.” She can’t tell him how afraid Mem-saab looks, or that she has a feeling trouble is coming. He’ll just say Sikhs are known to be troublemakers. He thinks Sikhs should be given a chance to revert to Hinduism or be told to leave India.
He’ll never know Mem-saab has made Damini a Sikh—boys and men seldom learn anything unspoken.
All too soon, Suresh folds his hands in namaste and rises. Damini aims her last puff at the gladioli and stubs the beedi out in their bed. Mem-saab will smell tobacco though Damini only smoked half, and say she must give it up to be a better Sikh.
In blessing and farewell, she rests her right hand on Suresh’s dark curly hair for a moment. Then she returns to Mem-saab’s room.
Mem-saab has woken from her nap. Aman is still gone.
“I will give you a massage; you will feel better,” Damini offers.
She draws the curtains and brings a steel bowl of warmed mustard-seed oil. Sweeping the line of Mem-saab’s back, Damini’s fingers seek and press marma points where seen and unseen energies unite. Then with Mem-saab facing her and watching her lips, Damini talks about old times, golden times—eleven thousand magical years of Ram Rajya—when Lord Ram ruled, and children lived with their parents, and parents with loving, caring children and grandchildren. Her massages take a long time; anything important should be done slowly.
Damini helps Mem-saab to be beautiful, though she is a widow and her ears hear no sound. Mem-saab applies her foundation and powder on a face the colour of milky chai, not deodar wood-brown like Damini’s. Despite daily applications of Orange Skin Cream, Mem-saab’s wrinkles trail across her forehead and bunch at the corners of her eyes. Though twenty years her junior, Damini’s look almost as deep. Damini stands behind Mem-saab, and Mem-saab takes black kajal pencils from Damini’s hands to make eyebrows. Damini regards Mem-saab in the mirror and mouths how beautiful she looks.
Mem-saab’s hair, resting in Damini’s palms as she braids it, is the colour of spent fire-coals. Damini’s hair, which went white upon widowhood, looks flame-red in the mirror. For hair dye, she buys an egg each month and mixes its yolk with dark henna powder and water that has known the comfort of tea leaves.
Mem-saab goes to the door of her husband’s room and sees the padlock. She weighs it in her hands, then tugs it. She looks over her shoulder at Damini.
“Did he say when he would be back?”
“No, Mem-saab.”
“Tell me as soon as you hear him arrive.”
“Will you have dinner together?” Damini mouths. Mem-saab can pretend she knows the answer; Khansama will need to know how much food to make.
“Serve enough for two,” Mem-saab says.
Around five in the evening, when the fiery heat has tempered to sweat-crawling haze, Damini leads Mem-saab to her Ambassador car for a ride to the market.
“Hilloh,” she says to the Embassy-man downstairs, trying to sound like Timcu calling from Canada on the phone. He takes the word as Mem-saab’s greeting, but Damini enjoys that in Hindi it orders him to move.
The gora man—beardless, moustacheless, pink as Himalayan salt—folds his hands strangely, lower than his heart. Today he forgets to speak to Mem-saab in Hindi and Damini cannot help much, though she understands most of his English words. Mem-saab and he stand for long minutes, smiling, with Zahir Sheikh holding the car door open.
At the market, Damini guides Mem-saab out of the way of tooting three-wheeled scooter-rickshaws, and tells her the prices the fruit-sellers ask. When she turns her face away so that she cannot read Damini’s lips anymore, it is Damini’s signal to say: that is Mem-saab’s rock-bottom price. Mem-saab has very little money with her—just a few notes tied in the corner of her dupatta. Always thrifty, so Aman and Timcu will inherit more of their father’s wealth. Even so, she always gives Damini a fifty-rupee note to buy a marigold garland at the Hindu temple. And she waits outside with Zahir Sheikh, in the hot oven of the car, while Damini rings the bell before Lord Ganesh’s raised trunk, offers him the garland, and asks his blessing upon her children. The liquid sound of a voice intoning Sanskrit verses circles the inner sanctum with Damini. For a few minutes, she leans against the welcome cool of a marble pillar and listens to a pandit, sitting cross-legged in his corner telling the Bhagvad Gita. She takes a few marigolds with her as blessing and braves the dull burn of the air outside.
Mem-saab offers her usual gentle admonition as Damini takes her seat in front, beside Zahir Sheikh, “Amma, remember Vaheguru also answers women’s prayers.”
“We prayed to Vaheguru this morning,” she reminds Mem-saab.
Returning home, she helps Mem-saab put colour on her cheeks and paint her lips hibiscus-red, making her ready to receive relatives. Ever since Mem-saab lost her hearing, she has been too ashamed to go visiting relatives herself. Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh, Sardar and Sardarni Sewa Singh—people her husband helped when their Partition-refugees’ application was all that lay between them and the begging bowl—are the only ones who still come to pay her respect.
They touch Mem-saab’s feet in greeting; she represents her husband for them. It’s been a long time since either Aman or Timcu touched Mem-saab’s feet—or Damini’s, who also was considered their mother.
“Damini-amma,” they call her, with respect because nowadays only higher-caste families have servants who live with them.
Today Khansama’s white uniform jacket is crumpled and he wears its Nehru collar insolently unhooked, but Mem-saab does not order him to change it before he wheels in the brass trolley-cart crowned with a wobbling tea cozy. She talks to her relatives in English about his “stealing”—threatening with a laugh to send him and his family back to his village.
When they leave, Damini brings Mem-saab’s prayer book. Mem-saab removes it from its silk pouch and Damini joins her in chanting the Rehraas. After the evening prayer, Mem-saab tells Vaheguru she was ashamed to tell her relatives about the lock on her husband’s room and the suitcase that says Aman is staying for as long as it takes.
It’s 10 p.m., long past Mem-saab’s usual dinnertime. Khansama’s sweet white rasgullahs still wait in the kitchen. Not for Mem-saab, who ordered the dessert, but for Amanjit. Listening to him now, Damini thinks she should have made him eat them before the meal to sweeten his words.
“You are getting so old, you cannot make up your mind about anything.” Aman has switched to Punjabi and remembers to speak slowly, but it is still difficult for Mem-saab to read his lips through his beard.
Damini leaves out the part about being old when she repeats his words for Mem-saab.
Mem-saab gestures for Damini to offer Aman more curry.
“Your father told me never to sell or move from this house,” she says in Punjabi. “You know, we built it together, selling the jewellery we escaped with during Partition. I still see him walking with me through these rooms—there were only wood beams then, to mark where the walls would rise. This house and the estate in Gurkot, he said, would replace all he’d lost.”
“Certainly not all,” says Aman. “The government didn’t give Sardar-ji any compensation for so many of his villages. They were lost to Pakistan.”
“We escaped with our lives—so many didn’t.”
“Yes, I know. Haven’t I heard it, and heard it, and heard it from Sardar-ji and you? He looked backward to Rawalpindi the rest of his life. But Mama, we must look forward. It’s a new world now—why don’t you decide to live in it?”
Even with the air conditioner going and Khansama’s curry steaming, Damini can smell Aman’s exotic cologne.
“I do live in it, Aman—maybe you haven’t noticed. Perhaps you are right that I cannot decide anything, but …” she smiles apologetically, “your father always decided everything for me.”
Aman scrapes the serving spoon around the bowl, retrieving the last morsels. He is too old for Damini to tell him not to be greedy.
“If your businesses are not doing well, Aman, I can help. How much more do you need?” As always, she is too mild with her youngest.
Amanjit rocks back in his father’s chair, taking her measure through half-closed eyes. “My businesses are doing well, Mama—not that you and my father ever had confidence in any of my projects when I really needed the investment. But one must grow—no limits.”
Mem-saab holds up her hand to stop Damini from repeating—he has enunciated clearly enough.
“You’re competing with something, someone?”
“There’s no one I want to compete with in India. No, it’s time to scale up, think bigger, aim higher. All I want is more.”
He lets the chair legs thump to the carpet, and shifts.
A mongrel, kicked away once, will attack afresh. And from behind.
He mouths without sound, so that Damini too must lip-read his words. “Today I made arrangements with a construction company. Tomorrow they will begin building bedrooms on the terrace. Kiran and Loveleen and I will move from Bombay and live here with you.”
Mem-saab looks at Damini; Damini shakes her head as if she has not understood, so Aman has a chance to change his words. Building on the terrace would make his share far more than a quarter of the house. But Aman mouths it clearly again, just as before, so Mem-saab cannot mistake him.
She gestures for Damini to offer him a chapati.
“Why do you need to move?” she asks, a little too loud.
Aman’s strong dark hands close around the softness of the chapati. He tears a small piece from its slack circle. Then another and another. Intent as a counterfeit yogi, he tears every piece smaller and smaller.
“I will look after you in your old age, Mama,” he says.
She reads the words from his lips. Reads what she wants to read, but she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise. Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”
She doesn’t mention Timcu’s rights; Timcu’s not the son sitting before her, taking far more than he was given. White shreds of chapati grow to a pile before Aman. The handles of a silver salver Damini holds out to him feel as if they will burn through her serving cloth. She comes level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lychees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.
Damini returns the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. She will just forget to serve Aman the rasgullahs. She will give them to Khansama’s children instead.
The next morning, Timcu calls from Canada and asks in halting Hindi about Mem-saab. Damini tells him Mem-saab is well and not to worry, though Mem-saab breathed heavily through the night.
That evening, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh come to the gates and find them locked, though Damini has made Mem-saab beautiful and she is waiting upstairs. Damini hears Khansama tell them that Mem-saab went to tea at the Delhi Golf Club with Aman. She starts down the stairs to correct him.
“Looking after his mother. Such a fine son.” Sardar Gulab Singh’s voice travels down the driveway. Damini opens her mouth to yell, but already his scooter is putt-putting away, with Sardarni Gulab Singh seated erect and sidesaddle behind.
Khansama wears a half-smile as he turns from the gate. He glances at a new watch on his wrist. Aman does not like poor relations.
“What a misunderstanding,” Mem-saab says, when Damini tells her what happened. “I’ll tell Aman he must phone them and apologize for Khansama’s mistake.” And when Damini tells her about Khansama’s new watch she says, “Aman has always been a generous boy.” She turns her eyes away. “Put on the TV, Amma—tell me what other mothers and their sons are doing.”
On TV you can see past, present, future, upper, middle and lower worlds at once, as Lord Arjun could, but you can’t smell or feel them. Damini places the marigold blossoms from the Ganesh temple at its base. She presses the right buttons. An actor’s deep voice booms as the Ramayan begins, guiding her back to the time of Lord Ram and Sita Mata, and Lord Hanuman. When Lord Ram and Sita Mata were married, two great energies collided. Purush the masculine, shakti the feminine, the same that create the world. The Aryans of the day make sacrifices and get attacked by dark demons …
Today on TV, Lord Ram and Sita Mata have been banished for fourteen years to save Ram’s father’s honour, and have arrived at Chitrakoot. There is Lord Ram, placing a clod of earth wrapped in saffron cloth on a mantelpiece very much like the one in Mem-saab’s drawing-room. And he prays to that clod of earth, to the earth of his birthplace, saying its presence has purified his camp.
“See,” says Mem-saab, who doesn’t need Damini to explain or tell her this story, “he’s forgetting his mother and thanking a clod of earth for his life. And he’s forgetting Sita Mata, the incarnation of Earth. Ha! He should be praying to her, begging forgiveness for bringing her into the jungle! Where is she?”
You can’t stop a TV story to ask the storyteller such a question; his tale is shaped long before it is shown. Sita Mata must be praying and doing puja somewhere—she’s so good.
The story moves on when it moves on, and then it stops.
Each god and goddess’s face is being shown up close, with a short sharp trumpet blast.
Damini turns to Mem-saab. “Why is Ram’s birthplace more important than any other place?” she mouths, “The whole world is Lord Ram’s to take birth in anywhere he wants, isn’t it?” The question has bothered her since her glimpse of Suresh on TV.
The gods and goddesses are all having similar reactions of shock, as if they weren’t gifted with any foresight. But they never disagree with each other. Or at least, not for long.
“He can come as Ram-ji, he can stay as Vaheguru-ji,” says Mem-saab. “This is just a TV play, Damini. You know this is an actor, not the real Lord Ram.”
But even when you know the actor is just an actor, Lord Ram’s name and crown make him seem larger than the TV. And even when you know Sita Mata will be abducted by the ten-headed Ravan, and that Lord Ram will go to Sri Lanka with the help of Lord Hanuman and burn Lanka to the ground and rescue her, you have to watch out of respect, though this Ramayan is taking weeks and weeks to tell. The Punjabi song-story version Damini’s mother taught her takes four or five hours to recite, and she can recite the Hindi telling she learned from her father in eight hours.
Maybe Leela and Damini’s grandchildren are watching TV right now. Once they’ve seen this show, will they need her song-stories? Mem-saab has not felt well enough to spend summers in Gurkot, and Damini has not seen her daughter or grandchildren for five years now. Who knows when she’ll see them again.
Even if TV is just illusion, it’s what Mem-saab calls a ‘time-pass.’ And Lord Ram, Sita Mata and Lord Hanuman are familiar, serene and soothing. By the end of this week’s episode, Mem-saab seems to have forgotten her son’s slight to their relatives.
“It’s only three weeks since Aman-ji began construction, but I can already see the new walls from down here,” says Suresh. He’s hunkered down beside Damini, both balancing on the low wall of the Embassy-man’s lawn. Gulmohar trees give some shade, but the sun still burns through the back of Damini’s sari blouse. She draws the end of her sari around her, mops her face, then covers her head with it.
“It’s good that Mem-saab can’t hear the construction workers, but she feels the vibrations.”
“Do you still bathe on the terrace?”
“Not anymore. I told the women who carry the bricks and cement upstairs they could use my wash area to keep their babies safe. I have been washing Mem-saab’s clothes in her bathroom, and bathing there after Mem-saab has bathed.”
“Toilet?”
“Khansama’s, in his quarter.”
“Where do you dry the clothes?”
“In the back garden.” She can’t tell her son how much it bothers her to hang Mem-saab’s undergarments where any passing man can leer at them. Or that she’s been watching Aman every day, but he hasn’t called Sardar Gulab Singh to apologize. Sardar Gulab Singh ventured to visit twice more, but Khansama turned him away.
“Cement dust is settling everywhere,” she says. She wants to tell Suresh that she ordered the sweeper to use a wet rag to wipe the painting of Aman’s late father above the mantle twice a day, hoping the old man’s steady gaze from beneath his white turban and bushy grey eyebrows would shame his son, but last night, when Aman was drunk enough to think no one was listening, he raised his glass, and said, “Hey, Sardar-ji”—he still wouldn’t dare call the old gentleman Papa or Dad—“What does your widow need with all this money?”
But if she confides this, Suresh will say, “Sikhs are so greedy.”
“You are serving Amanjit and Kiran at table?” he asks.
“No,” she says. Because not once since Kiran and Loveleen arrived has the family sat at table with Mem-saab. Khansama has orders to serve Aman, Kiran and Loveleen morning tea in “their” bedroom. “They’re often out for lunch, cocktails, or dinner.”
Every morning, Kiran wraps her satin dressing gown over a bosom as buxom as that new actress Madhuri Dixit, sits at her dressing table, and preens before the mirror as she applies a mask of gora-coloured makeup. Her sunglasses balance on her nose ring all day, even indoors. She looks petulant and irritated whether she’s talking to Damini or any other servant, and only smiles when Amanjit holds up a camera.
“What does she do all day?”
“She takes Mem-saab’s car and driver shopping. She likes to shop. I helped her unpack, and even her handbags and high-heeled shoes have saab-sounding names: Kochar, Fear-raga-mo, Hurmeez. Mem-saab gives Zahir Sheikh money for petrol and tells him to treat Kiran with respect, though after so many years of marriage Kiran still has no sons.” Mem-saab even admonished Damini, though gently, when Kiran squealed that Damini broke the plastic half-circles in her brassieres when she washed them.
“They must be meeting Mem-saab at chai-time?”
“They are too busy to sit with Mem-saab and talk.” Amanjit is not too busy to sit in his room with a newly installed air conditioner and talk on the phone to Bombay. He’s not too busy to pay a Chinese yogi to tell him where to position his bed for maximum energy flow, or a Hindu jyotshi to draw up a horoscope for a new business. And he’s never too busy to entertain, buying whisky by the case on his mother’s account at Malcha Marg market. Bills come, but Mem-saab doesn’t give them to Aman. She takes a taxi to Punjab National Bank for money to pay them.
Sometimes after dinner, Amanjit orders Khansama to bring Mem-saab’s best crystal and he and Kiran put their feet up on Mem-saab’s polished teak tables and her sofas. Sometimes he and Kiran sit in Mem-saab’s drawing-room with their raucous pink friends—he calls them “buyers”—long after decent people go to bed. They spend money on electricity the way rajas and ranis once did, keeping the air conditioner running all day and all night. Once he persuaded a buyer to stay two hours longer just because Kiran gave a bad luck sneeze as the man rose to leave.
“Mem-saab doesn’t use the drawing-room unless they are out. She watches for their arrivals and departures. Whenever Aman-ji is home, they argue.”
“What about?”
Damini sighs. Mem-saab wouldn’t want her to tell anyone but it angered her so …
“Yesterday Aman-ji said she hadn’t done anything useful her whole life. She said she brought him into the world, that she was a wife and mother and gave him love. But he said now that he’s in the world, he needs to live and she should give him the rent money.”
“If he wants it, how can she stop him?”
“You? Ha! So what does Mem-saab do all day?”
“She watches TV and I tell her the story, the lines, and the songs. Today I sang ‘Chal, chal, chal mere haathi, o mere saathi …’ ” She claps, urging him to join.
He sits silent, glowering.
“You always loved this song,” she protests. “You used to play the elephant, remember?”
“It reminds me of the new party for sweepers. The elephant is their symbol. Splitting the Hindu vote so that Muslims can take control of India.”
“Suresh, what are you saying? An elephant is also Lord Ganesh, and Lord Ganesh is Brahma, Vishnu and Shiv together … come sing, sing!” Damini rises, covers her head with her dupatta, half-veiling her face. She steps in and out of an imaginary circle singing, “Chal le chal ghatara kheechke …” The song lifts her spirit and eventually lightens his expression of discontent.
When she gives him her usual gift, he says, “I should be looking after you. If I still had my father’s land, I would be giving you money.”
“Don’t worry, beta. More will come.” It’s a line from the movie of another woman’s life—Damini once heard a saab-woman say it on TV. But no god is manufacturing any more land for people in India. Besides, if Suresh still farmed Piara Singh’s land, it would be mortgaged for Leela’s dowry.
It’s better this way.
When Suresh is gone, Damini returns upstairs to find Mem-saab sitting before martyr’s pictures: of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the guru executed by that mad Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for defending the right of all Hindus to worship, and of Baba Deep Singh, who carries his severed head aloft in defiance as his tortured bleeding body straddles a white steed. Her lips move, soundless, before the martyrs’ images, repeating her one god’s name: “Vaheguru, Vaheguru …”
Images and idols may be forbidden to Sikhs, but even they sometimes need a photo to witness their tears.
“You have Dipreyshun,” says Damini.
“No, my chest is hurting.”
“We should have gone to Gurkot for the summer.”
“Maybe next year.”
“Every year you say, ‘next year.’ It’s been five years since we were in the cool mountain air.”
“I said next year! Don’t you think I too yearn to be home in the Big House? But Aman doesn’t want me to go.”
Damini drops her gaze to the marble floor to show respect. After a minute, she says, “Shall I bring oil for your massage?” It’s all she has to offer.
“Not today, Amma.”
And not the next day or the next.
When Kiran breaks a glass bangle, Amanjit buys her a new gold one, saying, “Don’t bring me bad luck by breaking bangles.”
A carved ivory tusk disappears and a leopard skin is removed for reasons of ‘Feng Shooey.’ Fine vases find their way to ‘their’ room; a china rose Sardar-saab brought Mem-saab from abroad is no longer in the sideboard. A set of silver candlesticks vanishes. A mirror with a golden frame is replaced by a Rajasthani silk painting smelling of the street-hawker’s bundle.
Around the first week of June, an ivory miniature departs in a gift-wrapped box for a buyer. Mem-saab says it must be Khansama, stealing again. Then she turns her head away so she cannot read Damini’s answer.
“Go away, Damini-amma,” she says. “I am going to write to Timcu.”