Monsoon Diary by Shoba Narayan

while my mom made him a cup of coffee (in a cup that was not used by anyone else).
    For all the servants my mother had designated dishes and cups, which were to be washed and placed on the kitchen windowsill. The chipped blue cup was the garbageman’s; the brown one was for the iron man and his family; the plastic plate and green cup were for Ayah, who ate as well as drank at our house; and the large brass tumbler was for the flower woman, who drank copious amounts of watered-down coffee.
    A plump, garrulous woman as dark as the night sky, the flower woman would bring several strings of fresh jasmine for the gods and goddesses in our
puja
room. My mother liked her cheerfulness, especially in light of her situation. She had three young children, who were attending the free government school. Her husband was a drunk who beat her for her daily earnings. Rather than belabor her woes, the flower woman had found an ingenious solution.
    Every day she gave my mother most of her money to put in the bank. My mother had a faded old notebook for this purpose, and every day she entered the amount that she received from the flower woman. Next to every entry my mother signed her name and the flower woman laboriously scrawled her name in Tamil; she could write little else. At the end of the month my dad tallied up everything and told the flower woman her monthly savings. For performing these duties, the flower woman gave my mother a free string of jasmine.
    With her savings, the flower woman planned to buy a gold necklace. She wore tattered saris given to her by her customers; her husband had no livelihood; her home was a tiny thatched hut in the slums; but like all Indian women, the flower woman, too, lusted after gold, and after two years of scrimping and saving she treated herself to a heavy necklace.
    MORNINGS IN OUR HOUSE were a series of comings and goings that began at daybreak and ended only when the chirping crickets went to sleep. My mother couldn’t even take her afternoon siesta without being interrupted by servants with questions, vegetable vendors who walked by shouting their wares, neighbors who dropped by unannounced for a chat and chai, cawing crows, mooing cows, barking dogs, and the shrilling telephone.
    ONE OF THE contradictions of India is the fact that many Hindu families send their children to Christian schools, believing, and perhaps rightly so, that dedicated Catholic nuns impart a better education. I was one of those Hindu children who studied in Christian schools through high school.
    By the time I got to second grade, I proved to be an indifferent student, rebellious toward the structure imposed on me. School, to me, was a never-ending parade of classes. We began at nine and ended at four. The day started when the peon rang the bell by beating a massive iron piece (actually an eighteen-inch piece of railway track, said to have been presented to the school by a retired railway official whose child once studied there) with a big steel rod. This was a call for the children to line up in the courtyard for assembly, when the entire lot of us shouted the Lord’s Prayer at the top of our voices. Many of us could hardly say the words, but that didn’t stop us from developing our own versions. Mine went something like this: “Ah father, Charty Nevin, ah low be thy knee. Thy kin dumb come thy will bidden north cities in heaven . . .” I skipped the line about trespasses, a real tongue twister for me, and went right along to “Amen.”
    After assembly, we had reading, math, handwriting, science, sports, and Scriptures, in no particular order, leavened by a long lunch hour in the middle of the day.
    The lunch hour was what I lived for. Our school didn’t have a lunchroom, so we students were left to fend for ourselves. Some went home (if they happened to live close by), but most of us congregated under the jacaranda tree for a shared meal. We would sit in a circle and ceremoniously open our lunch boxes. There was a