One Hundred Shades of White

If the lady was dark, rake-thin and had buckteeth, then Laxmiammayi couldn’t do much about that and the man’s family would ask for an extortionately high dowry to take her away. If, however, the family background checked out all right, the lady was pretty, well mannered, not belligerent in any way and could cook, then sometimes they would wave the dowry altogether. It was very rare, but this is what I think happened to my Amma. She was all of those things and could cook exceptionally well, due to the fact that she and my Ammamma were the village cooks. But even not having to pay the dowry didn’t make my Ammamma happy; she became upset at the bit when she told me how Amma left home and then said she really couldn’t talk about any of it.

My parents married when she was seventeen and he was twenty-six. The astrologer says that when an event takes place, like a birth, death or marriage, then something else happens in quick succession. ‘Nature responds,’ he says, ‘and moves things around in accordance with the new energy.’ So after they married, an enormous combustion of luck moved them to a bigger town and promoted Achan once again. He became chief oil importer for India and Amma had to move out of the village and settle in a town near Mumbai.

My brother Satchin’s arrival a year later sent my Achan soaring to the dizzy heights of true success and gave my family four more servants, including a kitchen hand for the irritable cook, and ten more cows. It also brought my Ammamma to come and live with them. My Ammamma wasn’t really a town person; she said that people are born city people, town people or village people, and she was definitely a village person. Village people understood how nature worked whereas town and city people couldn’t because the pace was just too fast to be able to take all the signs in properly. The pace of village life definitely ran through her whole body, she said, and although people gossiped, they had something very solid about them; they were firmly grounded and had time to stop and notice things. But Ammamma never complained about the move to the north and said that sometimes you have to do things even if you don’t like them because it makes other people happy and that in turn made her happy.

They all lived in a big, white colonial-style house with a red roof and matching floor tiles. The house was encircled by many, many gardens and was protected by trees and huge iron gates. Although it was near the town you would never have known as a sea of tall palms kept the noise of traffic, pollution and bustle at bay. It was a very comfortable life: my Achan would go out to work, my brother would chase anything that moved, and the whole household would run after him. Amma spent lazy afternoons talking to neighbours who came to visit or went shopping for groceries and other items with Ammamma and Nila, her servant boy, or she would cook. At five o’clock sharp, Satchin would sit looking out of one of the windows, waiting for Achan’s blue scooter to pull into the veranda, and then he would indicate by some blubbering that he was waiting to be taken out for a ride.

My arrival hindered this ritual that he had set up for himself. Now at five o’clock, my Achan would walk into the room and head straight for where I was sleeping. He would pick me up and rock me and his odour of damp linen and the musty scent of burnt wood would waft in the air with the motion. His moustache tickled my ear, a soothing presence like his voice which was deep and rhythmic. Whilst I was in his arms, Satchin would pull at his trouser leg, a technique he had learnt with Nila and the mango trees; Nila would shake the trunk and he would watch the mangoes fall one by one. Satchin secretly hoped I would meet the same fate. Achan would laugh and hoist Satchin up and say ‘Give our little Maya Mol a kiss,’ and so he would salivate over my face, accidentally biting me in the process. Achan would stay for a while and then he had to leave; he was a very busy man.

I was especially close to the young Aya who was assigned to assist with my care. Her particular role was to make sure I got to sleep okay and, if I awoke, to see if I needed anything. She did her job so beautifully and sang melodically whenever she could, the tunes whistled through the gap in her teeth. Aya was unlike the old toothless woman who didn’t understand her own job description and thought she was there to make sure my blood circulated correctly. She did this by vigorously knocking my joints with her bony hand. Then she would massage me like she was stretching out a piece of dough and put me in this cradle-type thing made from starched sheets, and hang me out to dry like some old piece of popadom. But this, along with bath time, was the only hardship I had to endure and attentive people were never really far away, my Achan being at the very front of all of them. If he was on one of his trips then it was Ammamma who I needed.

When she went to bed, she would pick me up and take me with her, cradling me against her warm flesh as she told me stories. There was, she began, a musician who lived in the sky who was responsible for changing the seasons. In the dry season, people planted their dreams and then they waited patiently for the musician to send the heavy rains; if they didn’t believe enough, the rains flooded their dreams, but if they held on with faith, trusted and let go, the rain would bring them many things and these things came in the month of Shravan, harvest time. Ammamma knew lots about harvest time and food because, as I said already, she was a cook. She and Amma would spend hours in the kitchen and Aya would take me in to watch them.

They worked like two magicians and with smoke they could turn piles of vegetables and colourful spices into feasts. Amma would point at the vegetables and tell me the names and all I had to do was to gurgle something back at her and that was enough to make her laugh. It took me a year to realise that this pointing game was a distraction because as she was pointing, Ammamma was getting the condiments ready for bath time. Bitter gourd skin mashed into a pulp, chickpeas ground into flour, and coconut oil, all prepared and on standby. Before I knew it, my clothes were removed. Aya would be running round quickly heating pots of water whilst I was placed on Amma’s outstretched legs. I wailed as she covered me in green gunk and yellow flour, ‘for healthy bones and beautiful skin, Mol,’ Amma would say, trying to console me. Then as I was washed and dried, coconut oil was poured on my head and massaged in and, after that, she tried to feed me. As a sign of protest, I spat out everything she placed in my mouth so Ammamma had to take over. When the whole ordeal was over, Aya took me to play in the sun. I learnt to hate the sight of the kitchen and when I was old enough to crawl, I would do my very best to scramble out of the situation but they would always get me.

As I began to walk and talk, Satchin found me interesting. He taught me how to put straw up the cows’ noses so we could make them sneeze and measure how far the mucus landed with our footsteps. This seemed to divert us for hours and we only stopped this because one of the cows lost her calf and she cried for days. The cow mucus game was replaced with another distraction: Satchin showed me how to open the catch of the chicken coop so they would all run freely on the compound and Amin, the hand, had to go and catch them all. Amin would panic at seeing the chickens everywhere and we would watch him jump up and down, running around chasing them. The driver only helped if he wasn’t too busy combing his hair in the car mirror or sitting in the front seat admiring his newly acquired decorations. When he did help, we would jump into the front seat of the car, lock the doors and begin playing with the horn.

‘Sahib will be very upset with you,’ he shouted through the side window.

Sahib was what he called my Achan but Achan was never upset with us. He got upset with other people, sometimes he shouted at them fiercely, like when the guard kept him waiting at the gate and didn’t open it quickly enough, but he never said anything to us. If anything, when he was there he let us do things that even Ammamma wouldn’t let us do.

This was because Achan was away a lot and so he really missed us. When he came back, he brought us many gifts from faraway places. Dolls for me and normally aeroplanes for Satchin and presents for Amma, too. We weren’t allowed to play with all our toys; some of the really special ones Achan kept locked in a glass cabinet in the sitting room so when visitors came they could see what we had. On these days, Amma also wore the clothes and jewellery bought for her. If it was a special occasion, we could take our toys out, one at a time, but we had to promise that we wouldn’t lose them, break them or take them outside.

Then Achan stopped buying us things because he went to a place called London. Before he went, he gave me a little golden Labrador. Satchin and I fought over the puppy because I was sure that Achan said it was for me. ‘Mol, this is especially for you because I am going to miss you very much. He’s called Tikko and he will look after you,’ he said, handing me the puppy. Amma explained that it was for sharing but that is not what I heard. I thought Achan would come home soon to sort it out but he was away for ages and we didn’t see him for what seemed to be a very, very long time.

When my Achan went away, Amma and Ammamma did strange things and were particularly busy making bundles of food which they sent somewhere with the driver. The house was also always full of people. One day it got particularly busy and there was much activity going on; banana leaves were collected, the veranda was decorated with flower petals, and it felt like the whole town had come to visit us. Ammamma said it was to celebrate Onam, a festival to give thanks for the harvest.

This Onam thing confused me because it kept changing; sometimes it was in August, sometimes in September, but Ammamma said that was because the calendar went according to the phases of the moon and then she began yet another story, this time about a king, but because she told me so many, I couldn’t remember it. The servants, their families and the neighbours didn’t care much about that king story either because they were busy polishing off the food, but they nodded fervently with their mouths full as she was trying to explain it to them.

Other times, the neighbours came with their elderly parents and their children who also finished off all of the food, every crumb, so even the red ants had nothing to fight over. Occasionally, a vada would unwittingly fall out of someone’s pocket as they said their goodbyes and made their way back home. At that moment, every conceivable life form made its way towards the food but normally Tikko got it first. The crows would screech with disappointment and attempt their fourth or fifth assault on the rice that lay in the sun but Aya was too quick for them and she waved them away with her palm switch. The polecat looked disappointed and took her eye from the crows and moved swiftly onto the chickens, just in case one of them escaped from the coop. Often, the polecat had to settle for a lazy lizard that couldn’t be bothered to move quickly enough in the hot sun and if this was the case, the polecat gobbled him up. Ammamma said you had to always be observant, even with nature, because predators were always about, waiting for an opportunity to descend on the vulnerable. She reminded me about the predator every time we went out of the enclave and as the only time we did this was when we went to the beach, I took the predator to mean the sea.

It was a long ride to the beach on a bumpy rickshaw. Ammamma shouted at the driver to avoid the potholes but he never took any notice and so we bounced up and down on the seat. On the way there we saw lots of rickshaws and taxis lined up like an army of yellowback beetles who had suddenly escaped from wherever they were trapped. It was like a race for them all to be first to get to where they were going and they left behind trails of smoke. Once we were at the beach, Ammamma would run into the waves and urge me to follow, but I was scared, the sea was a predator after all, so I dipped my toes in whilst she ran in with all her clothes on. We then sat together on the rocks to wait for her clothes to dry. ‘The sea has many answers, Mol, just sit and listen to it and it will bring back the pace.’ She described ‘the pace’ as a universal pulse. If you felt the pace, you could see the signs but the difficulty wasn’t really in seeing the signs but interpreting them. ‘Feel it, Mol, breathe it, listen to the waves and you’ll hear all the answers.’ The only answer I wanted to hear was her say yes to the balloon seller who often came up to us as we sat there. I was desperate for her to buy me one of his long balloons that he had twisted into an animal shape, but she never did. Other children rallied around him, fascinated by the shapes he had twisted, but knowing they could never have one, not unless he gave them away and this was highly unlikely. Ammamma said that they didn’t have Achans or Ammas who could buy one for them and that is why they looked sad and scruffy. ‘But we can do things for them, we can make them feel that someone is listening to their prayers and that magic exists,’ she said. So every time we went, we buried rupees and paisas along the beach. ‘All anyone needs is a little hope so that they are able to trust, and from trust, amazing things can happen,’ she informed me as we dug the money into the sand. What we did on the beach was our secret and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that, not even Achan when he came back, or, she said, she would be upset.

Ammamma hardly ever got upset and she only shouted at us once when Satchin and I kicked over the mountain of colourful spices that she had left out to dry. It went everywhere, staining the white walls with bright yellows, oranges, reds and browns. Nobody could clean it off, not even the dhobi, but that was hardly surprising as Ammamma said she wasn’t very good at removing stains. She said she was sorry she shouted at us but it wasn’t because of the mess we had made, but the lack of respect we showed for the spices. ‘You have to treat them with respect because they can do magical things,’ she explained. We didn’t see what magical things they did but we said we were sorry and that we would help Amin whitewash the walls. Ammamma said that we had done enough. The walls would have been whitewashed the next day had the postman not arrived with a telegram.

Amma tipped the postman, took the telegram and said that it was from England. Ammamma looked nervously at her.

‘He wants us to go and join him there as soon as we can,’ she said to Ammamma sadly. ‘It will only be for a short while, a year. He says he desperately misses the children and me. I am also to sell the house as soon as I can.’

Ammamma nodded.

‘Ma, I don’t want to go to England. If we have to go, you’ll come with us, won’t you?’

Ammamma didn’t say anything.

‘Come, we need you, the children need you,’ she pleaded.

Ammamma looked at her, looked down at me, and then back at her.

‘He’s left a number to call him. I’ll sort it all out and arrange it, Ma, you’ll see.’

I ran to find Satchin to tell him that we were going to England to be with our Achan. He was helping Amin collect coconuts and dumped the basket on the floor, running to find Amma. ‘Is it true, Amma? Is it true that we are going to England on an aeroplane? Is it?’

‘Yes, Monu,’ she said, but she looked very disappointed.

That is how I remember it. The telegram came and then time went at an exaggerated pace, like the hour hand decided to become the second hand so that it could make up for the things we had missed with Achan. Amma frantically began to sell the furniture and found the servants other positions in the town. Our dog Tikko sensed the chaos and left home so he didn’t have to say goodbye. Sellers were turned away as they came to the gates, all were told that we were moving and all looked devastated. I don’t know if this was because we were their best customers or because they knew something that we didn’t.

The whole move to England was explained to us as if we were going on a big adventure and we would return from our expedition shortly. The way Ammamma got herself into the habit of packing me with old wives’ tales, cramming me with every conceivable detail, told me she knew what the sellers did. There was something else that was happening and I was unaware of it, but she listened, listened to the pace and the signs.

It was the month of June, the time when the wild musician took over the skies and began jamming, hitting his drums with such strength that the rains fell harder than ever, flooding people’s dreams. The workers abandoned their fields, shaking their heads; beautiful flower blossoms fell, drenched by the weight of the water, and their petals were washed into murky puddles that splashed everywhere; ugly furry caterpillars, red and black centipedes crawled out of the ground; food became inedible and schoolchildren ran as fast as they could to avoid the night fever, arriving home with soaking books to a beating because there was no money to be so careless.

Ammamma, interpreting the signs, went to consult the astrologer. When the rain did not subside as all had hoped, her visits to the astrologer became even more frequent and she took me with her, as if to verify that the child he spoke about was the right one. They got into this shell-throwing routine. He would mumble a prayer and throw three shells across a board. Ammamma would look up at him, he would talk to the shells and then shake his head or ruffle his beard, at which point she would try not to look upset or cry. We followed this routine twice a week, always with the same outcome.

On one of our trips, we stopped off at the beach, yet Ammamma didn’t run into the sea but instead sat on the side.

‘Mol, promise me you’ll try to remember this, all of this, the place you are from when you are older, not just the place but the pace. You won’t forget the language, the smells, colours, the people, will you, Mol? Don’t ever forget where you’re from.’

What was she talking about? I wouldn’t forget in one year; Achan went away for a year and I never forgot him. I would remember her every day for that year because Amma said that a year wasn’t really a long time. The balloon seller stopped and instead of waving him away, she asked me to pick two, one for me and one for Satchin. I was elated and chose a blue one that looked like a dog for Satchin and a pink one that looked like a bird for me. As we rode back, she told me that it would be hard to say goodbye, that I should try not to cry because crying would indicate that the person wasn’t coming back and that was not the case as she would be with me always. ‘Mol, sometimes when you have to say goodbye it will feel like there is a monsoon inside. When it feels like this, breathe.’

‘Amma says that a year is not such a long time,’ I said to Ammamma.

‘It’s not so long, Mol,’ she replied.

Little by little, the house was emptied of our possessions until all that remained were three suitcases packed with our worldly goods, tied with string. The patter of raindrops echoed throughout the empty house. Ammamma stood at the gates, waving her young family off. Amma would not let go of her, drenched in a pink sari and with wet hair, rain running down her face. Ammamma kept looking over at us both seated in the car and mumbled, ‘The children, the children, you just take care of the children.’ And then she pulled out a little bronze figure from the pocket of her mundu and gave it to Amma.

‘We’ll see you soon, Ammamma,’ Satchin shouted.

I was sitting in the car, trying desperately not to cry, thinking how was it possible to have the monsoon drummer inside and not let it show. I breathed and tried not to look at her.

‘Yes, Monu, look after your Amma and be good for her. Bye, Mol.’

I said nothing. I wish I had taken one last look at her.

We arrived in England on my fourth birthday.

I thought my father would be waiting for us on the other side with a big gift, but he sent a driver to come and get us. We pulled into the Hilton on Park Lane. It was cold for me, despite being the end of August. Amma took a big yellow cardigan out of her bag and wrapped it around me whilst Satchin had his nose stuck out of the window, mesmerised by the different types of cars. I didn’t feel that way because that was day one of remembering my Ammamma. Although it was just the first day, I felt sad, so I looked down at the floor and occasionally I looked out of the window. The only way I can describe our arrival was that it was like being taken from bright Technicolor into a silent black and white film. No rickshaw noise or horns or buffaloes or cows crowding the street, blocking traffic, no grasshoppers or croaking toad lullaby or screeching chickens, just a mute, inoffensive calm.

Half asleep, we waited in the lobby for my father. He arrived a few hours later in an immaculate dark blue suit and a big smile and Amma woke us up, telling us that that he was there. Satchin and I went running over to him and I asked him what he had got us. He laughed, squeezing me tightly, hoisting both of us up, and then he went over to kiss Amma. Her lower lip began to tremble and she looked as if she was going to cry, but she smiled and looked at my father saying, ‘You know it’s Maya’s birthday today. We have to celebrate.’ The driver came back later with a Dundee cake and a rag doll that he said my father had left behind in his excitement. ‘She’s called Jemima, Mol,’ he said, giving her to me. What kind of a strange name was that? ‘Jemina,’ I repeated.

‘Jemima,’ he said, making a face.

I made the same face.

‘Oh, my funny little Mol,’ he laughed. ‘You will like England.’

If he said that I would like England, then I knew I would like England.

We sat and played in the lobby and then I was taken off by a deep, deep sleep.