One Hundred Shades of White

On the days that things got really tough, I locked myself outside in the toilet and talked to Achan, begging him to make things a little better from wherever he was. I knew he was always consistent and listened, as things always improved after I spoke to him. That is how I knew that, despite him not being physically present, he was around us. Sometimes, I would ask Satchin if he spoke to him to make things better for him, but Satchin would get really sad. One day he became very distressed and said maybe he was to blame for what had happened to our father because of what he had done to Fluffy. There was nothing I could say to that as I remembered what the astrologer said about the rules of karma so I decided not to bring up the subject again and thought that maybe he did die because of the bad things we did. Maybe that’s what happened if we did really bad things. I would talk to Achan alone and I asked him many times if it was this but he never said anything. Other times when I talked to him, I would tell him what we had done in the day, because somewhere I was sure he could hear, even if he couldn’t answer. But my greatest wish was that I would wake up and he would come and find us in that house and take us away, saying that there had been a terrible mistake and that he hadn’t died.

NALINI (#)

I cannot easily put into words why I told my children that their father had died. To save them from the lies that inextricably led to the fact that the only person he could have possibly loved was himself, I suppose. Not only this, but what do you say to two small children who are about to lose almost everything? Self-worth is fragile enough as it is, isn’t it? What was I supposed to tell them? The truth? ‘Monu, Mol, your father has had enough of responsibility and if that is not enough, he has another family, he’s gone, left us.’ Maybe there are one hundred shades for explaining truth, a spectrum of light to dark, depending on the vulnerability of those who have to hear it. Things are not always so clear-cut, they are not either black or white, life just isn’t like that. I know my mother would disagree, arguing that there is one immutable truth and it is just a question of facing it. My husband left, just as my own father did, without saying a word. Not even goodbye.

My mother had a series of miscarriages before giving birth to me. She did not really care if I was a girl and she would have to find a dowry for me to marry. I think my mother was happy to prove to her in-laws and everyone else that she could bear children. She was elated when she found out she was carrying me and did not hide her bump like all the other women in the village did.

I was born in a part of India where God had a riot with the colour green; everywhere you looked He had created hues of luscious greens and made the air so healthy and calm. There was, however, not one moment of peace that I can draw from those childhood years. My father was always trying to kill my mother or she was threatening to kill herself by jumping into one of the many wells. The sound of screaming voices invaded the first eight years of my life but the screaming stopped suddenly with the death of my baby brother. My father had already left the day before the baby was born: one day he was there and the next, he was gone. The shame of what she would tell the other villagers meant that we had to leave the village. We walked twenty-seven kilometres barefoot, carrying our scant possessions on our heads, and settled in the village of Collenauta on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The only thing my mother could do exceptionally well was cook, so she offered her services to the patrons of the village who owned all the sugar cane plantations and who were immensely wealthy. The story I was asked to relay, whenever probed about my father, was that he had been killed whilst trying to save someone drowning. On hearing me say this with the intonation and facial movements that accompanied the phrase, the patrons, Thampurati and Mothalali, took pity on our plight and offered us a place to stay. That is how we came to be hired by the Kathi family, my mother as cook and I as her assistant, and we lived in the small quarters at the bottom of their land, surrounded by rich banana plantations, mango trees and paddy fields. It was a small room but beautifully decorated with simple woodcarvings and all the utensils we required to do our job along with a buffalo, which gave us fresh milk.

The art of putting together food is a magical thing and if it is done right it has the power to soften the most hardened heart. My mother always said that when you work with what you love, you work with magic. However, if the ingredients are incorrectly administered, or if you work with bad intention, it can also bring the most disastrous results. Subtly, we laboured, convinced that it was the love and gratitude we put into the preparation of the Kathi’s food that made them prosper. Just the right amount of cumin to stimulate appetite for life, a cinnamon quill to bring spice or action into stagnant phases of life, lemon juice to diffuse an argument, chilli to relieve pain and turmeric to heal the heart. Freshly picked coriander leaves tempered bad humour and gave a sense of clarity, fiery peppered rasam warmed the soul, and grated coconut added to many dishes soothed and comforted. Pounded lentils left to soak for days made the batter for soft pancakes filled with shallow fried masala potatoes for a sense of pride and stability. Golden beans added to vegetable thoran were for longevity and prosperity.

My mother would watch situations and then prescribe accordingly under the watchful eye of Annapurna, beautiful pale blue Goddess of food and abundance, lit by the fire and the passion of the sun and the moon. She was placed on a box in the kitchen area and was adorned every day with fresh flowers. We said a prayer to her when we woke up and just before we went to bed, thanking her and asking that she give us the courage to do our job. So I don’t know if we could really take the credit for delivering small doses of happiness wherever possible, but we believed it was Annapurna, and my mother said it really didn’t matter, for whatever you believed became true.

There was also a little bronze Annapurna, no bigger than my thumb which my mother kept in a makeshift pocket of her kasava mundu. She came everywhere with us and was placed in whichever kitchen we were cooking in and was always given the first offering of food. There were many kitchens the little Goddess visited as word spread rapidly through the village that we had the most amazing ability to cook. As we were hired out for village festivals, births and marriages, things in the village began to change: a new temple, renewed rainfall, and laughter. It was almost as if my mother turned the inability to mend her own life outwards and seeing the pleasure this produced fixed her in some way. She took pride in her work and it showed.

The astrologer first thought that these changes were negligible and had been induced by the new phase of the moon. When one of the village women, who had been trying for ten years to conceive, suddenly fell pregnant, he consulted his chart and once again found two new specks pointing in a northward direction. He paid us a visit.

My mother welcomed him in. He looked around at the walls that had been brightly painted and the kitchen area decorated with freshly cut flowers and then he saw the box with my mother’s Goddess covered with garlands and whatever pieces of jewellery she had. The room was infused with cooking smells and the fragrance of jasmine and incense and then he looked down at the floor which had been neatly swept. He felt a little reassured and he removed his chappels. My mother pulled out the best stool for him and he sat.

He was probably in his mid-thirties and had taken over from his father who had died suddenly. He found it difficult at first to speak and coughed everywhere, looking a little embarrassed, as he dabbed his cheeks with his loincloth. His bare chest had red saffron stains and a black piece of string hung diagonally along it. At the other end was a small bag where he kept a notebook, some seashells and a pendulum. My mother smiled at him and brought him some masala tea. He swiftly drank and coughed again. She pulled out some honey-coated jilebies and as she offered him one, his face softened. When that had disappeared, he took another and another, until his whole body surrendered and then he spoke.

‘Why did you come here?’ enquired the astrologer.

‘We were sent,’ my mother replied.

‘Dates of birth?’

She gave him the name of the rainy season and the time at which I was born and she said that he could plot my life for she knew for sure the path hers was going to take.

‘Just do Nali’s,’ she said.

He took out his notebook and began drawing and calculating. Smiling enthusiastically, he murmured the word ‘good’ half a dozen times and then he paused, long silent pauses where he shook his head, and then he began to discuss the plans that had been made for me.

‘Many men will come from afar to marry you and you will be a beautiful woman but you must not readily accept the first proposal and you must not marry in pursuit of love, for this, too, is an illusion, just a state of mind. You will be a very, very prosperous woman, unimaginably so, but never lose sight of your gift. If you do, you lose your centre and all else falls away. You are already very blessed, for many people must go in search of their gifts. Lifetimes are spent on this. You know where it resides, hold onto it.’ He looked up from what he was doing and asked, ‘Father dead?’

‘Yes, yes,’ interjected my mother hastily, ‘lost his life in a tragic accident.’

He was about to probe further when I looked at him sadly and said ‘drowning’ and then I asked him if I would be happy.

He responded by saying that happiness was a state of mind and nature dictates that states are forever changing. He opened his tin of moist sandalwood and placed two dots on our foreheads. Every Thursday after that he would pay a visit, have tea, share his counsel, bless us and leave.

I did go to school when I could but it wasn’t something that interested me. What I loved was the preparation of a wedding or a village festival; the anticipation, the chopping of food, the blending, the frying, the colours, the aromas, the tasting then adding, and then the final results offered alongside decorations. My mother understood this completely and the only stipulation she gave was that I learn to read and write.

We gained much respect for the work we produced in the village and although my mother had made enough money to buy her own plot of land, she decided not to, saving the money instead for my dowry. She hoped that the money would attract a good suitor for me.

When I was about sixteen, many young men and their families began to come and enquire if I was eligible for marriage. First, the tree climber and his family came. His job was to collect all the different fruit from the trees but my mother looked at the state of his feet and his fingernails and turned him away. Then the doctors’ family arrived, they weren’t doctors as such but were twins. In the village, twins were supposed to have curative powers and if someone had an ailment, one of the twins was brought in to touch the patient. If this failed, the other twin was brought in and the patient was supposedly healed. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, thinking that most complaints in the village were cured by her fiery pepper rasams. She said that ailments were very simple to cure; cold diseases treated by warm spices and warm diseases treated by cold spices. In any case this was all irrelevant; the family couldn’t decide on which twin to marry me to and they began arguing amongst themselves.

Many even waived the dowry like Luxmiammayi; she made her money by casting off the evil eye. Luxmiammayi did this by blowing ashes of holy vibuthi at those touched by the evil eye and purported to fix any number of problems by doing so. One of the farmers was preoccupied that his hens weren’t laying eggs; he was convinced that a neighbouring farmer had put a curse on him, so she looked into it and blew. A few days later the hens started laying again. There was, however, some tension between her and my mother because every time we cooked for a major occasion Luxmiammayi would sit and gossip about how salty the plantain upperie tasted or how badly cut the spinach thoran was. My mother could have said many things about her, like the fact that she didn’t use proper vibuthi and it was really leftover wood ash, but she said nothing and Luxmiammayi too was sent packing. The only good thing about the son, my mother proclaimed, was that he had shiny white teeth and this was because he had nothing better to do all day except suck twigs from the neem tree. My mother warded them all off with strong garlic which she mixed in their tea. None of them, she said, were good enough. She didn’t know that I had fallen in love with one of the Kathis’ sons.

The Kathis had two boys, Raul and Gobi. Both were much older than me and I barely saw them when I was growing up due to the fact they both boarded at the school in the main town. Their father made sure they went to college and got respectable jobs. Gobi, the younger of the two, visited town often on leave and I had seen him a few times but never spoken with him. One day, I was delivering trays and pots to his home, balancing one on my head and carrying the others. He startled me, coming from nowhere, and asked if I was going to his house and if I needed help. ‘No,’ I replied, meaning I didn’t want any help.

It took me half an hour to cross the fields, the sun that day was painfully hot, and I arrived at their kitchen door, sweating. The maid started shouting at me, saying that Thampurati was getting impatient with her and it was my fault. She went on and on and all I could think of was how hot and thirsty I was and I needed a glass of water. She was furious and continued banging pots and pans so that the noise brought down several members of the household.

Gobi walked past the kitchen and stopped when he saw me. ‘You said you weren’t coming here.’

‘I was, but,’ I hesitated, desperate for some water.

‘But,’ he continued.

‘I need some …’ I fainted.

I remember waking up in the most luxurious room. Cool, tiled floors, beautiful alcove ceilings, and the noise of a water fountain. ‘Who is she?’ I heard a voice say.

‘She’s Nalini, the daughter of one of the cooks,’ Gobi replied.

I opened my eyes and there he was. Deep almond eyes looking down at me, full, defined lips, jet-black hair, very tall and sturdy. ‘Get her some water,’ the man said to Gobi.

He touched my forehead which pulsated and took hold of my hand. It fell into his voluntarily.

‘Will she be okay, Raul?’ Gobi asked, as he handed him the glass.

‘Heat,’ he replied, as he put the glass to my lips and poured the water gently into my mouth.

All of a sudden there was a shout. ‘Monu, Monu, what’s happening? What are you doing? Why are you giving the servant girl something to drink and in one of our best glasses, we won’t be able to use that again.’ Raul stared at his mother who had just walked in. He ignored her, turned to me and said, ‘Nalini, drink.’

‘They are silly girls, no sense, walk in the full sun, what do you expect and then, then they land up here and give us problems,’ Thampurati continued.

‘I feel better,’ I whispered, getting up uneasily. ‘I have to go home.’ There was a pause and he, Raul said, ‘I will take you.’

Another loud shrill broke the silence. ‘But, Monu, you can’t be seen out walking with a servant girl. Tell him, Gobi.’

At first Gobi said nothing and then his mother glared at him. Gobi suggested that perhaps the maid take me home.

Raul got up, took my arm, and walked with me past his mother. As we walked together across the fields, he held up an umbrella to protect me from the sun. The workers in the fields stared at us, women turned their heads, shyly pretending not to notice him when he passed. We said nothing to each other, the silence between us said more than was necessary. Some of the older women, like Kochuammayi, stood with their mouths open. She had a mouth like a buffalo and I was sure that after her work was done she would run to tell her husband in the toddi shop. ‘Come home, I have something important to tell you,’ she would shout, attempting to entice him away from his drink, but he would ignore her. She would then run over to the temple and sit outside on the bench and add a little more to the story, sharing it to those who were ready to listen.

I didn’t want Raul to see where we lived, because just for those moments, I wasn’t the cook’s daughter, I was somebody important, somebody who he wanted to be with. Almost sensing this, he stopped at the tree on the path that led to our dwelling and said with certainty, ‘I have to go but will come back to visit for Onam.’ I wanted to say, ‘Wait, there are so many things I haven’t told you.’ But I could not say or do anything.

My head was full of so many ideas as I opened the front door. ‘Ma, I have found him. It’s him,’ I wanted to scream.

‘What took you so long?’ asked my mother.

‘Nothing,’ I replied.

Nine weeks. Nine weeks until Onam and then I could see him again. Every detail of that afternoon was etched on my mind and played over and over again; the way he smelt, the strength of his hands, the confidence in his stride, the tenderness in his eyes. My mother rushed back in, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Nali, you didn’t tell me you fainted and Raul Kathi brought you home.’

‘It wasn’t important, Ma.’