Chapter One- The first days

Chapter One

The first days

One of the clearest memories from my childhood is of my first day of school after we moved back to South India. Buck-toothed, hair in plaits, sticking to my head, unused to humidity, I felt as repulsive as I looked. Not knowing what was expected of me, I covertly followed my classmates to General Assembly held in the open courtyard around which the school building stood. Crows swooped across, threatening to void their bowels onto unfortunate victims. I noticed others trying to spot the next pooping and heard the Principal announce, "If you look up at the crows, instead of landing on your clothes, the poop is going elsewhere." That wise remark focussed all distracted heads back to her. The Principal was a tiny dark lady with a gold chain joining both arms of her glasses at the back so that she could leave them dangling from her neck when she fixed "mis-chee-vus" students with a cold stare. I cannot recall much else of that first day other than becoming friends with Girish, the tongue-tied student on the bench next to mine, asking me to play "Catch me if you can" during break. Years later, when I remembered how he used to squeeze my eight-year-old thigh under my pinafore dress (in response to the teacher asking me a difficult question to give me "extra-superpowers" for answering), I realised that I may have been his first crush.

My father must have picked me up on his scooter that day after school as he did on most days. It was only a twenty minute walk but my father preferred to pick us up, coming back at the different times that school finished for my siblings and myself. This was when he was working from home, managing investments on the stock market. My mother called it "gambling", sometimes to his face, not often, as this situation freed her up to go back to work. She was a freelance anaesthetist, borrowing my father's scooter to drive to different hospitals across the city. She sometimes used to answer work calls in the middle of the night. As a child, I imagined her as a superhero on a scooter with the sari ballooning out behind her like a cape, riding the streets at night. She always smelled of formalin when she returned home. For a long time, I thought that adventure, grown-up people's business, smelled of formalin.

I remember the day she turned across the path of an oncoming lorry on one of these trips. My grandfather, my father's father, Thatha, who took the phone call told us that she had been taken ill and would be home shortly. The reality of the situation hit me when Thatha tried to make dinner for what seemed to be the first time in his life, consisting mainly of rice and salty watery sambar (stew, supposed to be thick) with no vegetables. I could not bring myself to eat it. My uncle, my father's brother, who had come over as moral support, took one look at the food and said we were all too distraught to eat. We, my sister, my uncle and I, waited in silence on the steps on the front porch, waiting for Amma to come home and make us dinner.

My grandmother, my mother's mother, Paati, moved in with us for a month following the accident. She was the same height as eight year old me and was always slightly hunched forward, resembling nothing so much as a coiled spring, taut with nervous energy. She wore saris that were ragged, reaching the end of their life and insisted on wearing them out so that she could feel that she had made full use of them. She took on the role of personal hand-maiden to both my sister and myself, spoiling us, while instructing my five year old brother on how to look after himself so that he did not expect women to care for him his entire life.

She found life in our house with its modern contraptions confusing at times. Once, when she was getting me ready for school, she placed some shaving cream on my toothbrush, something I only realised after I had started brushing my teeth. She who was used to grinding spices on a stone in her kitchen found the taste of spices ground in a machine artificial. Slowly, she started sneaking in fresh supplies from her home on the outskirts of the city. Dinner time changed from eating at the table to sitting on the floor, clustered in a circle around her. My sister and I would extend our cupped right hands in which she would place a small spherical mound of rice and sambar (thick stew) or rasam (thin stew) with some fried or steamed vegetables on top of the mound as a side. She would feed my brother by placing food directly in his mouth. When he was fussy, she would start telling stories and would pause every so often to demand that he swallowed his food before continuing.

Thatha was a small, shrivelled man with a face like a dried raisin. He often forgot that he shared the house with three children, preferring to escape into his room at the back of the house which resembled a medieval apothecary's store. He was a homeopath and practitioner of Ayurveda, often making up remedies in competition with my mother's Western cures. Paati treated him with deference, partly because he was a man but mostly because he was the son-in-law's father, traditionally a position of importance in the family. She would place his dinner on the table first before summoning us children to eat, sometimes sitting on the kitchen floor, sometimes sitting in the balcony outside the living room.

When it was time for Paati to return to her home, I hid in the stairwell under our first floor flat, crying, where she found me and told me to pull myself together. She was only a thirty minute drive away. We would visit her every other weekend. I nodded, sniffing.

This was true, Amma often drove us to Paati's part of town. Her older and favourite sister lived across the road from my grandmother. Amma was the third of five siblings, Perima (literally big mother, word used for one's mother's older sister) was the second. They were the closest sisters in terms of age and geographical proximity. My mother would drop us off at Perima's house, sometimes leave to do grocery shopping, often stay to have a gossip. If we were at my grandmother's house when she returned, she would come over, exchange a few polite words with her and then take us home. My mother and her mother did not get along. When I had first realised this, I remember taking the opportunity to badmouth my mother to Paati when I was feeling particularly mad at her. My ears never looked as red as they did when she boxed them that day. When I asked Perima about what had happened between them, all she would say was that sometimes people loved each other too much and then distance is the only solution.

Perima had two children, our cousins, Brindha and Ravi. Brindha was two years older than me, Ravi one year older. However, they seemed much older and more fun, especially in the first days of our return to South India. They invented "Dino, Dino", a game where Ravi would pretend to be a dinosaur come back to life from extinction and chase us around the house. They invented the game of using Paati's grind-stone for spices to crush leaves from every tree in their garden, mango and lime and neem, and then convince their father, Peripa (big father), to apply the mixture to his moles as an "Ayurvedic cure". He almost always said yes. With his big stature and moustache, we found Peripa scary at first. We got over our fear the first time we saw him walk across the living room naked to get to the bedroom for dressing. For some reason, we found this hilarious and spent many private hours together, bringing it up and crying with laughter.