One Hundred Shades of White

The next thing I knew I woke up in a strange bed with lilac sheets and I was surrounded by beautiful lilac walls with balloons painted on them. Amma must have told him that I loved balloons and so he did that for me. That’s how I would say I woke up to my new life in England; happy, in a new, big five-bedroomed house in South London. I went to investigate all the devices and wandered into the bathroom. We didn’t really have a bathroom as such in India; Aya brought the hot water to us on the veranda, so the glistening silver taps intrigued me. I turned them and water came gushing out. It startled me so that I fell back, tumbled onto soft green carpets, and then hastily retreated. Then I saw him, my brother, in his room in a peculiar two-bedded house with a ladder. I climbed the stairs to meet him at the top. He was still asleep and so I shook him to wake him up but in one of his strange moments of fright, he rolled over, falling from a great height and crashing to the floor, making the sound of the dhobi’s wet clothes hitting the wall.

Amma came running in and found her son’s body under a blanket. She began crying, ‘Monu, Monu, are you all right?’

He was still for longer than he needed to be, making sure he had her full attention, and then he began to stir slowly back to life. She was kissing him on his forehead and checking if he was okay. He looked fine from where I was sitting – the body occasionally needs a good shake up. Then he began to moan, just a droning type of a sound, managing the word ‘Maya’. Her eyes widened as she plucked me off the top of the bed and she was about to shout at me when my father walked in and rescued me from whatever fate she had planned. ‘It’s just children playing, Nalini, no need to get upset,’ he said reassuringly. I was so happy to have him back and was taken into those arms with that familiar rocking motion. Amma made a big fuss over Satchin, which seemed to greatly ease the pain. Both of us looked at each other, with our respective parent on side, and drew the battle-lines. Within a few hours he had made a miraculous recovery, vowing some kind of pay back.

Later that day, Achan took us shopping. We went to a huge department store and he asked Amma to pick clothes for us for our new school and buy us anything else we needed. She didn’t know what to do so Achan called over a shop assistant and asked her to bring garments in our sizes. Then he turned to Amma and asked her to buy some English clothes for herself but she shook her head and wrapped her shawl tightly around her. He asked the shop assistant to get some clothes for Amma too and the shop assistant said something to her that she couldn’t understand. ‘She wants you to try them for size, Nalini.’ But Amma refused. Achan bought her the clothes anyway. He bought lots of things for all of us and then he took us to eat.

Amma looked distressed when we went into a restaurant and Achan ordered hamburgers for us. Up until then we had never eaten red meat but Achan said it was important to try new things. Whilst we waited, the waitress came and brought us a colouring book and crayons. This never happened in India; I couldn’t imagine Aya bringing us our slate and chalks before we ate. Then the burgers came and they had flags made from cocktail sticks on top of them and came with something called chips and ketchup. It was an amazing taste and Satchin and I looked at each other chomping into our food and drinking cola. I don’t think Amma was that hungry because she left hers.

That week Achan had a holiday and he did lots of things with us. We played in a big park, we went to a place called the cinema, we watched television and he let us do anything we wanted. Then he had to go to work and Amma prepared us to go to school.

‘Do we have to go to school?’ I moaned. Satchin went to school in India and never once did I envy him. The only part that I thought was fun was when Amin took him and collected him in a rickshaw. Satchin came home with a heavy satchel, his slate and lots and lots of things to memorise. He could recite everything about the Mogul empire by the time he was six.

‘Yes, Maya, you’ll enjoy it,’ Amma said, greasing my hair with coconut oil. I subsequently learnt that greasing is not the best technique in England to keep hair healthy and clean, in fact it was the opposite. There was a thing called shampooing but Amma didn’t know that back then. She also packed us off with moist sandalwood, bright red stains on our foreheads because we had just said our prayers, and a tiffin carrier each with our lunch in. Thank God we didn’t understand a word the other children said to us that first day.

Achan sent a driver and a lady from his office to take us to school and Amma came with us. My class had a lovely, white, round teacher called Miss Davies. They were making crocodiles and snakes from egg boxes when I walked in. Miss Davies stopped all the other children, said something to them, and then they looked at me strangely. Someone pointed at my forehead. Miss Davies said something else to them and then they clapped. All of them were eager for me to sit next to them and I sat next to a girl called Catherine Hunter. Miss Davies handed me a paintbrush to paint the snake she had strung together with parts of the egg box. I wanted to tell them all that Amin had once caught a real snake that had made its way into the house and then he put it into a bag and Satchin and I weren’t really frightened, but I couldn’t say any of it. Miss Davies smiled at me and I smiled back.

‘How was it?’ Amma asked when we got home.

‘Miss Davies is warm and cuddly and is nice to me, she sat with me at lunchtime, to make sure that I ate properly. She helped me undo all the tiffin carrier tins and then, Amma, all the other children looked at me when I ate with my hands. Miss Davies then taught me how to use a knife and fork.’

She shook her head at the knife and fork part. ‘And the other children, were they good to you?’

I told her that I played with a girl called Catherine and I remembered how to say her name because it sounded like ‘Kathi’, our surname, but I don’t think I said it correctly as she kept repeating her name. Everyone else was nice but then our company school, along with our company house and car, was very accommodating and all the other children were told to go out of their way to make us feel welcome. Then Amma asked what we had done that day and playing with the cows and chickens seemed so far removed from finger painting and crocodile egg boxes that I thought it might be too difficult to explain. So we both said that we learnt some new words in English like ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’ and Amma looked satisfied.

The only time Amma ventured out was when she had to occasionally take and collect us from school. This was if my Achan needed the chauffeur and, even then, she would grip tightly onto our hands, more out of a fear that we would run and leave her stranded in the middle of the road than to show us the way to school. She didn’t even go shopping. Groceries and things like spices and other ingredients, which weren’t readily available, were delivered to our house every Thursday by a man named Tom. Achan had arranged this as Amma liked to cook. It was the only thing she really loved to do. She could have done other things, like play tennis with Catherine Hunter’s mother, and I suggested it, but she didn’t want to. In any case, Amma only spoke a few jumbled phrases in English so she wouldn’t have understood the scoring system and she wouldn’t have worn the white outfit. Amma didn’t want to learn English either, as she secretly willed that we would be going home soon and her taking English classes would somehow indicate to whoever was listening out there that this would not be the case. So she spent her time cooking with the ingredients Tom brought.

That first week he came in September, he brought all sorts of vegetables both Indian and English. ‘Do you remember Mol, Onam? It’s all for Onam,’ Amma said, pointing at the vegetables. The prickly bitter gourd looked almost offensive sitting next to a sedate cucumber, the black-eyed beans looked evil next to the green garden peas, and the hairy yam looked as if it was going to eat up the potato. ‘For aviyal, olan, thoran.’ She reeled off a list of dishes just like she used to do when she trapped me in the kitchen in India and I nodded and made my way quickly out of there before she decided to paste me up with them and put me in the bath.

Her food would often go to waste as Satchin and I discovered that we liked burgers and fishfingers with ketchup a whole lot better. We would gang up against her and make her place these items on the grill instead or tell her how to make English things. The food that was all dressed up on the table would go into our tiffin carriers the following day but it got embarrassing doing that whole tiffin carrier routine day after day, especially when Catherine Hunter held her nose, so we would get the chauffeur to stop on the way to school, run out and throw the contents over somebody’s fence. Amma didn’t know better and was happy that we ate it all. We also asked Amma if we could get rid of the red stains and sandalwood tribal look. She got very upset at this and said it was God’s blessing for the day to us. Satchin asked her if God could put it somewhere else and she almost cried. So instead of upsetting her further we washed it off before we got into class and would tell her that it was smudged off during the course of the day. We also decided against broaching the shampoo concept, that could wait a while longer.

Even though Satchin and I went to the same school, had the only two ethnic-looking faces and the greased back look, he refused to acknowledge me as his sister. ‘Is that your sister?’ his friends would enquire and Satchin would swear no relation to me and walk off. I really did envy his group of large friends and longed to break free from my role as ‘Danny’.

This was around the time when ‘Grease Lightning’ took hold of the playground. All the girls with blonde hair became Sandy and because most of the boys didn’t want to join in, I was elected to play John Travolta’s role. I passed myself off as a cheap stand-in for Danny, even though I hadn’t seen the film and couldn’t really sing in English. This didn’t seem to matter as the other girls just needed someone to twirl them around and because I was quite tall for my age and had jet-black, greased back hair, I seemed to fit the role. The way I just kept saying ‘summer lubbing’ over and over again also seemed to swing it for me, so at every playtime for the next two months or so this is what I did. Nobody ever knew that I harboured a desperate yearning to have blonde hair and become Catherine Hunter, they just thought it was a strange foreign custom thing that Indian people did when I shaved off my eyebrows.

I took one of Achan’s razors and shaved off my black bushy eyebrows so I could draw new ones in with a yellow crayon. It would have looked good but I didn’t know how to use a razor properly and so cut myself and then the yellow didn’t show. Amma looked horrified when she saw me and she said Achan would be very upset when he got back from his trip. This didn’t scare me as Achan never got upset with me. She also said that the sooner she got me out of England the better, adding that it was making me do things that even she couldn’t understand.

More than a year had passed by then and, if I am honest, I stopped counting the days and remembering the things that Ammamma told me, because I grew to really like England. I loved my school, my teacher, the food, television, and I didn’t want to go back. If I was asked to make a choice, I would choose England every time. It wasn’t that I forgot India or my Ammamma but India became less and less important and I thought maybe Ammamma could come and live with us. If she came, I knew she would like England too. I didn’t tell Amma that, or that I secretly willed Achan’s contract to go on forever.

Dundee cakes came and went to celebrate all the special occasions. Everyone got a cake for their birthday and I was about to have my third one with six big candles. Somebody should have told my Achan that we absolutely hated them and that these cakes only served in joining my brother and I in a perverse friendship. The only time we teamed up was when we threw those chunks of cake behind the sitting-room cabinet. The fear of our father finding this Dundee cake wall behind a hideous mahogany cabinet united us in a way that had never seemed possible. Achan came back for my sixth birthday but he could only stay for two weeks because he had to go back to America again for business. Secretly, I liked it when he went there and came back because he would buy us things that you couldn’t even get in England. Once he bought me an air hostess doll that talked and even the teachers were so impressed that they allowed me to take her into assembly to do a demonstration for the other children. I also loved it when Achan was home because he played with us; piggyback rides; hide and seek. He’d understand the games and play what we wanted.

Satchin and I didn’t really play together, not even after school. I tried to be his friend but he never let me because he thought I was too messy and chaotic. So after school we did our own thing. He had this endless obsession for colouring with his felt-tip pens, which he guarded with his life. My scrawny colouring pencils were not of the same standard so I didn’t relish the prospect of colouring as much as he did. On several occasions, I offered to swap the whole set of my pencils for just his pink and blue pens. His refusal was categorical. So the day these very same pens went missing, all hell broke loose in our house. The only way I survived the neck lock he held me in was by signalling with my eyes at the Dundee cake wall that we had built together. But I suppose that if we knew what was going to happen, then the Dundee cake wall hardly would have mattered. When the cabinet was eventually removed and all the old bricks of cake lay there, nobody said anything. My Achan never got to see it.

Achan’s trips abroad became longer and my Amma really missed him because at night we could hear her cry a lot: not a loud inconsolable cry, more of a whimper, a bit like when the school hamster was trapped in his wheel. Amma started learning English, annoying us by interrupting the television programmes we were watching with questions every five minutes as to who was saying what, but she did make a big effort to learn. Maybe this was a sign that we were going to stay in England for longer. She would even venture out to get some of the groceries herself and collect us from school. Achan didn’t see any of this or he would have been proud of her; he was always telling her to be a bit more independent. When he did return it was always to a hero’s welcome and his gifts became more ostentatious. Satchin and I could have whatever we asked for; a new bicycle, games, toys, anything. Our only preoccupation at this time was whether we should stay in and watch Blue Peter and learn how to make what they had made earlier. That was until the death of Fluffy.

We hadn’t really seen death before. The calf’s death was different because we never saw her die but Satchin actually witnessed Fluffy’s death. Fluffy was my brother’s class hamster. To my astonishment, he asked me to come along and attend Fluffy’s burial. All the children held hands and prayed as Miss Turnbull said a few words. She said that Fluffy had gone so peacefully and was happy in heaven, playing with his friends, but the truth, confided in a moment of frenzied grief, was that my brother had accidentally murdered him. Dropped from a great height because he had had a fight with Jessica Thomas and didn’t want her to take him home for the holiday, Fluffy’s death was instantaneous. Nobody saw. So how he could have played in heaven in that state I really don’t know. Not unless God had fixed up his tiny legs along the way.

For weeks, Satchin was terrorised by Fluffy’s face coming to him in his dreams. I could hear him from my room, crying, shouting and jumping around like a fish in his bed. A truce descended between us when I offered to move into his room and sleep on the top bunk bed. I managed to convince him that just in case Fluffy decided to come down and get him, he would find me lying on the top bed instead.

Ammamma would say that we should have read the signs, but we lived in a big city and the pace didn’t allow it. Three weeks after that, my Achan died and life would never, ever be the same.

Amma picked us up from school. She had a bandage wrapped around her hand, her hair was unbraided and she was wearing a pair of trousers and a light green pullover. She never dressed like that and was always wrapped like a mummy from head to toe in a sari, even covering her head with the final piece of material that remained. So instantly we knew something was wrong.

‘What’s happened to your hand, Ma? Are you all right?’ we asked.

‘My hand will be fine, I had a little accident.’ There was a long silent pause and then she told us. ‘Makkale, Achan had an accident too.’

Was Achan’s hand damaged? I thought, but before I had a chance to ask, she blurted it out.

‘He died.’

Satchin started to cry.

No, he couldn’t have died, my father would never die, he went away but he always came back. There must have been some mistake; you can’t die from a hand injury.

‘He’s not coming back, Mol,’ she said again, crying.

I watched her lips move and the only other thing I heard was that, ‘He died a hero and there was no pain.’

He was rerouted on one of his business trips and he went to heaven instead as he saved a boy from having a horrific accident. He would save a little boy, that was the kind of thing that my Achan would do, but he wouldn’t die. There was some mistake.

We gripped her hand firmly, more so that she would not run and leave us, and we walked home in silence, not stopping once to jump and scrunch the leaves on the ground as we normally did.

The house was in a mess. Where were his pictures? They couldn’t have gone with him. I ran into the bathroom to see if his toothbrush had come back but it wasn’t there either. Did Amma think that she could put his pictures away and that we would forget about him? I went into his closet to look for them and saw his clothes weren’t there either. They were packed away in a big cardboard box. How could she pack him up like that? In just one day, like he never existed. I told Satchin but he made no response.

‘Why are Achan’s clothes packed away, Amma?’ ‘Mol, he’s not coming back. Come, eat something.’ Eat? Is that all she ever thought about? How could we eat? She had cooked an elaborate dinner and placed some chicken drumsticks coated with breadcrumbs on a side plate (more as an afterthought that we might not like the rest). We ate none of it and went to bed. The three of us slept together in my Amma’s bed. I wanted to cry but I remembered that Ammamma said that crying would indicate that the person would not come back and this was clearly not the case so I couldn’t cry. Amma lay in bed with us and Satchin whimpered as she held us. I contained my sadness and desperately wanted to hold both of them but then I decided not to get too attached to either of them. Everyone I ever really loved seemed to disappear.

Death precipitated events, just like the astrologer said it would. With no income and no way of getting back to India, Amma began packing things. The grocery man, Tom, came most evenings to help her. He had a sister who lived in the East End of London and he thought perhaps we could rent one of her bedsits. Tom helped us sell most of the furniture, Amma sold her jewellery and our toys, and she put down the deposit for two months’ rent on a shabby room. Satchin and I didn’t want to leave and we were sad but Satchin said that we had to be strong and not make any fuss. We did not say goodbye to our teachers or school friends. We left like thieves with the three suitcases, all tied with string, and as we climbed into Tom’s van, our childhood effectively ended.

I can’t remember much of that journey, except that it was raining hard and that the rain began to fall inside of me, suffocating me and taking with it any hope that I had of Achan’s return. The sea predator could not get me so it sent the rain. My heart beat faster and the rain fell harder: the rest, I cannot remember.

The flat was a semi-furnished bedsit off Green Street in the East End of London. We had to share an outside toilet with the man on the same landing as us. He was Polish and he dressed in an old black pinstriped suit every day of the week and rarely left the house, except on Sunday when he went to Church. Tom’s sister, Maggie, was the Irish landlady and she lived above us with her two cats, Arthur and One Eye. She was the one that came over to us as Tom parked the van.

Maggie was a fiery lady with bright red curly hair and a big bust that she emphasised with a light sweater. She wore a black pencil skirt which was obviously too tight. Miss Davies would say that she was having her last fling with youth, that’s what I heard her say to another teacher about Catherine Hunter’s mother who dressed in those type of short skirts. Maggie also had long nails and her fingertips were stained the colour of dried henna, like her teeth. She showed us into our new home. Amma thanked her. Maggie looked down at our three suitcases and smiled at us, a smile that pretended to look reassuring. She ruffled Satchin’s hair, which was the wrong thing to do because he only let Amma do that. He stepped back from her and clung to Amma who held onto him. Maggie smiled at me and I smiled back.

‘What’s your name, darling?’

‘Maya, Maya Kathi, and I’m six and my brother’s called Satchin and he’s eight.’

‘Well, Maya Kathi, if you ever need anything, I live upstairs,’ she said as she left.

The room had horrific orange psychedelic wallpaper, a decorative attempt to distract us from what it really was; damp, cold and sparse. It had dripping taps, a hob ring for a cooker, and a greasy, thick green curtain to divide the kitchen from the sleeping/sitting area. Tom showed us how to insert the ten pence pieces in the electric meter under the sink. He looked at my mother and he told her that it would not be forever, it was just a start. When he said that, I could tell Amma wanted to cry, but she didn’t. He left and we unpacked our things.

Maggie and Tom came back a few hours later with an old iron bed for the three of us to sleep in and a few other bits and pieces which Maggie said she didn’t need. ‘Tom said you’ll need a job,’ Maggie said to Amma. We translated and Amma nodded. ‘There’s a factory a bus ride away from here that is always looking for people. Can you sew?’ Maggie waited for us to relay what she had said and Amma shook her head. ‘It’s not difficult, it’ll take a day or two to get into it. I’ve a machine upstairs. I’ll teach you.’

That is how we spent the next two days, in Maggie’s warm room with an electric bar heater and a Singer sewing machine buzzing away. One Eye and Arthur were jumping about and playing with us, whilst the television was on in the background. Maggie said Amma was a natural and would have no problems in finding work. We, in the meantime, she said, would have to be good for her and go to school. On Monday, she would take us to enrol at the local primary school and she would then accompany my mother to the factory. I thought that Maggie was another sign and that my father had sent her to show us that he hadn’t forgotten us. I could tell, though, that Amma was very cautious of her. I don’t know what exactly it was about Maggie but Amma wasn’t herself when she was around her. Maybe she didn’t understand her.

That Sunday evening, before we went to bed, I wrote a letter to my Ammamma telling her all that had happened to us. I hadn’t written religiously like I had promised because we had been so busy, but that Friday, I began my first letter, not something that I told Amma to write for me. I really missed her and I tried to remember the things she taught me but I couldn’t, so I told her things that we did and how it was now. I asked Satchin if he wanted to write anything to her on my letter. He took it from me and began laughing. He read from the beginning: ‘Dear Ammamma, Who are you?’