Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami Page A

disappeared, leaving a trail of postcards, not even decent letters, to mark her wanderings!
    I called Roopa to discuss the situation. We talked to each other frequently now and compared postcards, for Ma did not always write the same things to both of us.
    “What are we to do if there is an emergency?” I asked. “Suppose something happens to her? How will we know? And what if one of us has a problem? We can’t even contact our own mother! Ridiculous!”
    “Oh, leave her alone,” said Roopa. Her voice sounded indulgent, almost as if I was one of her children. I think she imagined that her marriage, her mortgaged home, even her motherhood gave her a certain status, a maturity that I had yet to gain. “Ma is probably having a wonderful time. And even if she was sitting at home and fell down the stairs or something, what could we do? It would take me at least three days to getthere. I’d have to find somewhere to leave my children, can’t afford to take the whole jing-bang lot with me.”
    Ma made her way from station to station, camping in waiting rooms, one of the hundreds of anonymous passengers waiting for a train. She travelled second class, sharing a compartment with six, sometimes even eight people, crammed shoulder to shoulder on the upper berths, the aisle, the floor.
    “Whatfor is a railway pass if not to passage everywhere?” she demanded on a postcard with a picture of lurid pink lotus flowers. “All my life I went where your father wanted me to and now I follow my whims.”
    A long time ago, Dadda had pinned a map on my wall. It was to stop me crying every time he left on tour.
    “This is where I will be,” he had said, drawing a line of red ink on the map. Over the years, the map grew crimson with Dadda’s routes, marking out stretches of land that he had helped to capture and tame, setting them firmly on maps and timetables, dots connected by iron and wood and sweat. Ma had the map now, and she was following the lines of faded ink.

    Of all the rooms in the Ratnapura house, the guest bedroom was Ma’s favourite. She said that she liked the view from the windows, and although I stood on a chair to see what she saw, there was nothing but the dirty old garage, the rain tree with the car parked under it some days, and Paul da Costa the car-magician leaning over the bonnet, or lying between the wheels with his big feet sticking out.
    When Dadda left on line, Ma allowed me and Roopa to play in the room where she herself sat reading or sewing. At night we would all huddle under the yellow-and-black bedspread with its pattern of elephants, and Ma would tellus a story till we went to sleep. I did not mind this room during the day when sunlight streamed through the windows. At night, however, I was uneasy here, missing the familiarity of the lamp in my own bedroom, the rocking horse with its toothy grin and gay pink and gold tassels streaming down its arched neck, that Girdhari the carpenter had made. This guest room had too many doors and I hated it if they weren’t firmly shut, the bathroom door especially, which led from the yellow warmth of the room into darkness. The toilet gurgled there suddenly even when nobody used it, creatures scurried in the dry drains, a translucent lizard clung to the wall above the mirror and went
tchuk-tchuk-tchuk.
Ma said that if the lizard made that noise when you were saying something, it meant that your words would come true. I tried it a few times.
    “I will get a new dolly,” I said once, although I never really cared for dolls the way Roopa did. Another time I said, “My Dadda will never go on line again.” The lizard went
tchuk-tchuk-tchuk,
but neither of my statements came true.
    Still, the bathroom door was less worrying than the one that opened to the cloying fragrance of the unused verandah. The floor there was deeply fissured, rangoon creeper and jasmine had conquered the cement pillars, and rolls of tattered
chik
-screens hung in arched apertures,