‘Why?’ There were a hundred other questions that rattled in my head but all I could ask was why.
‘Because you are a woman and a good woman is one who safeguards her virtue.’ Sujata Akka mouthed words I had heard so many times in the films. Virtue. Modesty. Words that slithered and crept through my nerves as the redness oozed between my legs.
During the course of the next few days, I learnt that my life had changed forever. I was not to hug my brothers or cuddle up to them when we slept; I was not to light the lamp, or touch the pickle jars or the curry leaf plant in the courtyard or the stove, or even enter the kitchen on the days the blood came calling; I was to always cover my bosom with the davani; I was to wash my hair every Friday and smear my face with green turmeric paste to prevent pimples and any ungainly hair from growing; I was to avoid being in the company of men – young and old alike – as men couldn’t be trusted; I was to never sit with my legs wide open or fill my lungs with air – the bodice my mother had the tailor stitch constricted my chest so tightly that it hurt me to take a deep breath. I was a woman and nothing was the same again.
… But why am I telling you all this? You are a woman and it must have been the same for you. Except that I had Sujata Akka …
She gave me her old cotton drawers; she was too fat to fit into them but they were as good as new. She’d had them specially made for her wedding trousseau, with lace edging. She gave me her frayed brassieres so that I didn’t have to wear the hated bodice that squashed my breasts and ate up my breath. I began to breathe again.
She let me forget this business of being a woman and if the davani slipped from my shoulders, she didn’t hiss angrily
at my brazen manner as my mother did. She didn’t moan about finding me a dowry or plague me to walk with my head bent like all modest women did. She saw me as Marikolanthu – a person, neither girl nor woman.
One day Sujata Akka saw that the hems of my skirts had to be let down and that my breasts filled her cast-off bras. She caught her younger brother-in-law stripping me with his eyes and saw how her husband looked up from his files each time I walked past. And Sujata Akka could no longer accept that I was just Marikolanthu. Suddenly I had become a woman to her as well.
Sujata Akka’s aunt lived in Vellore. She had a tenant – two in fact. Two lady doctors from across the seas. And they were looking for a young girl to be their housemaid.
Sujata Akka pressed a hundred-rupee note into my hand when no one was looking and said in a voice thick with tears, ‘I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t necessary. But there are young men in this house …’
‘But I don’t ever talk to them,’ I pleaded, hoping she would change her mind and let me stay.
‘I know you are a good girl, but it is unwise to leave cotton and a matchstick side by side. One wrong move and everything could go up in flames.’
I stared at the floor hopelessly. I knew Sujata Akka well enough to know that she sought proverbs only when she wanted to sort out a difficult situation and that she had already made up her mind. I was a difficult situation.
Amma said little. I knew she didn’t like me leaving the village. But Rukmini Akka was excited enough for all of us. ‘Lucky girl! To be able to live in a town and that too in a house with doctors. You’ll be able to see all kinds of diseases. Don’t forget to wash your hands before you eat or you might catch a disease. They are foreigners, I hear, with white skin and blue eyes. You must observe them carefully and tell me everything. I have heard that their skin has a stench from all the meat they devour. And that they don’t
wash their backsides after they shit and instead use paper. Now don’t you start behaving like them, and watch out that you don’t eat beef mistaking it for mutton. And tell me how they eat, whether they bathe as regularly as us and if they ever oil their hair.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Sujata Akka snapped. ‘You make them sound like a travelling circus.’
‘They are women just like you and me,’ Sujata Akka said, turning to me, seeing my eyes widen in fear. ‘One of them has lived in Vellore for more than five years and she can speak Tamil well enough. So you have nothing to worry about. They’ll take good care of you.’
Vellore town was congested. The houses crowded, one upon the other. And there were so many people. Not all of them lived there. Some of them were relatives of the patients in Vellore Hospital. I began to feel hot and sweaty and a little claustrophobic. After the wide-open spaces of the village, how could I thrive in this town where there was too much of everything – houses, shops, roads, people and noise.
The doctors’ house was in a little lane off Barbara Street. Periaswamy, the old gardener, told me that more than a hundred years ago, in an adjacent street, there was a young bride who was suddenly taken ill and as she lay dying, she asked for a bowl of rasam to be brought to her. But lunch was long over and the rasam pot was empty. The bride died with her last wish unfulfilled. And so, to make amends, her father-in-law ordered that a cauldron of simmering rasam be kept near the doorstep all day and night so that anyone in Vellore town who ever felt a craving for rasam at any time of the day or night could appease their desire.
‘When I was a young boy, I would go there everyday and fill the yawning hole in my belly with bowls of rasam. It was the best I have ever tasted in my life,’ Periaswamy said and I saw his Adam’s apple bob as saliva filled his mouth and gushed down his throat. Wait till you taste
mine, I thought. ‘One day, I’ll take you there and you can taste it yourself, but it’s not as good as it used to be.’
Periaswamy was only as tall as I was. His hair was a grey stubble and his skin was like old leather, crinkly and ashen. His eyes shone like pebbles behind his thick glasses and often he burst into a rasping cough that sucked in his cheeks and turned his breath into a whistle. He looked frail and ill and I wondered how good a gardener he could be. One tug at a firmly-rooted weed and he would fall back, I thought with a giggle.
On my first day, I couldn’t take my eyes off the two lady doctors. Sujata Akka had arranged for me to be dropped off at their house. ‘No. 24, Doctors Villa, off Barbara Street; ask anyone and they’ll show you the place. Everyone knows that house,’ she told Muniandi the driver who escorted me to Vellore.
‘Don’t talk to him or to anyone else on the bus. Do your work well and be a good girl.’ These were my mother’s parting words.
I was to call them Missy V and Missy K, they said. Missy V was young, with green eyes and hair that seemed spun of gold-coloured silk. She wore it in a plait and only in the evening did she leave it loose and then it fell to her waist. Like a jamandi field in full blossom, the blooms swaying their golden heads when the breeze blew. She had come to Vellore only six months ago and could speak only a few words of Tamil. But Missy K’s Tamil was very good, even if the way she spoke it made it sound harsh. There was an edge to everything about Missy K. Her eyes were like slivers of brown rock, her hair that was a dark brown was chopped off at ear level, and she had big hands and feet like a man’s, with nails cut very close.
‘What’s your name?’ Missy K asked when Muniandi had left.
‘Marikolanthu,’ I whispered, overwhelmed by the strangeness of all I saw and felt around me.
‘What does that mean, Kate?’ Missy V’s voice bore the inflection of a little girl’s.
Missy K drew out a white handkerchief from her skirt pocket and mopped her brow. The rains had begun, but even then it was very warm. I could feel the sweat run down my back as well. In our village, the rains would have stirred the cool winds to blow. The leaves of the trees would be dripping, the earth would be damp and fragrant … Suddenly I wished I could roll on the grass and cup the fragrance in my palms and drink deep of that wetness.
‘Marikolanthu is the name of a plant,’ Missy K explained, breaking into my thoughts. ‘It’s rather like the lavender.’
That evening when the flower-seller went by the gate, I asked for a sprig of marikolanthu. I took it to Missy V.
‘Marikolanthu,’ I said, giving it to her.
Missy V sniffed at it. ‘Kate, look what she’s brought me. You were right. It is rather like the lavender, but it’s not lavender. So Marikolanthu, is that what you are? Sister to the real thing?’
Missy K explained what Missy V had said and I smiled, not letting them see how rankled I was. Who wants to be sister to the real thing?
‘But we can’t call her that. Her name is such a mouthful. I think we’ll call her Mari. What do you think, Kate?’
Missy K grunted and my name changed to Mari with the ‘eee’ echoing long after my name was said. But I liked it and it had none of that sister-to-the-real-thing allusion.
‘Have they turned you into a Christian? What is this Mari nonsense?’ Periaswamy alone took umbrage to my new name.
‘Of course not. Have they turned you into a Christian? I hear them calling you Perry,’ I giggled and bent to pick a weed that had escaped his notice.
Periaswamy was old and cranky, but he was the only friend I had ever had. We had nothing in common but we
were equals in each other’s eyes and that was enough to nurture our friendship.
They didn’t really need him but they liked having him – a man around the house, they said, and looked at each other giggling.
They called him the gardener, but he was more an odd-job man whose only business in the garden was to weed and water the potted plants.
Missy K did the real gardening. My father would have approved of her. She had the same primitive power to speak to the earth and tame it to do her bidding. Her roses were the darkest red and when they bloomed, they scented the air, subduing the jasmine to a pale whiff.
‘She must have magic in her fingers,’ I told Periaswamy, burying my nose in a blossom.
Missy K didn’t like either of us tampering with her rose patch. But during the day I had the house and garden to myself and did as I pleased. I examined their rooms, taking care to put everything back the way it was. Not that they had too many possessions. Compared to what Sujata Akka had in her room and wardrobes, their rooms were bare. I tasted the strange foods they stored in the fridge and often dipped a spoon into the condensed milk tin and licked it off, Someday when I had the money, I would buy a whole tin of condensed milk and eat it up all by myself. Once I used a bit of Missy V’s shampoo to see if it would make my hair wave like hers did. But mine stayed straight as always.
‘I’ve never seen roses as beautiful as these,’ I repeated loudly. Periaswamy was hard of hearing, but he hid his deafness behind feigned surliness.
Periaswamy snorted. ‘You’ll never see roses like these, anywhere in the world. Do you know why?’ He lowered his voice and drew close to me. ‘She brings afterbirth from the hospital, chops it up like liver and feeds it to the earth. The roses thrive on blood, human blood. So tell me, why won’t they be unique?’
I felt bile rush up to my mouth. Periaswamy stared at me,
defying me to disbelieve him. For the first time, I wondered if he was a little mad. Only someone deranged could come up with such a preposterous story.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.
‘No one does. But I don’t care. I only say what I have seen. What do you know of this world? You are knee high to a jasmine bush and you think you know everything. Stupid girl!’ Periaswamy went back to digging the soil around the coconut tree.
For the rest of the morning, we didn’t talk to each other, but by lunchtime I forgot to be angry with him. We always ate our lunch together. After the first few days I began to cook a little extra food for Periaswamy. I had seen how meagre his lunch packet was and decided to risk the Missies’ displeasure. Except when they did find out, all they did was look at each other and say, ‘Quite a bleeding heart!’
What on earth is a bleeding heart?
Every morning Periaswamy came in, dressed in a white shirt and veshti. He took them off as soon as he closed the gate, and hung them on the crook of a branch. Then in a pair of khaki shorts that came to his knees and an old vest with more holes than cloth, he went about his chores. In the evening, he would sluice himself clean at the garden pipe, don his clothes and leave, for all purposes like a man who had done nothing but fan himself all day.
We ate lunch in the backyard. Rice, kara kozambhu or vatha kozambhu or mor kozambhu, one poriyal and pickle, and buttermilk. Sometimes there would be leftovers from the fish or mutton I had cooked for the Missies and these I kept aside for him.
‘I haven’t eaten a tastier kara kozambhu,’ he said that afternoon as he dribbled the curry over the mound of rice. I accepted his apology and we never talked about the roses again.
I didn’t know how much truth there was in what he claimed, but I knew that the more he needed the Missies, the more he resented it. He knew that no one else would
employ him and that what he was paid was merely charity disguised as wages. He was never rude or surly, but when they were not looking, he shot them malevolent looks and muttered under his breath about their strangeness.
In spite of everything I was very fond of Periaswamy. He taught me about plants and how to change a light bulb. He showed me how to fix a leaking tap and clean windowpanes with newspapers. And without knowing it, he taught me to observe.