Thrity Umrigar Read online

  Besides, I still cringe when I remember the episode from a few months ago.

  Roshan had left school on a Friday with six of her friends and stopped by Dipeta, the bakery that my family had opened a few years ago. Mehroo had fed the girls chicken patties and chocolate cake and given them Cokes to drink. They had left that evening with full stomachs and in good spirits. I was on my best behaviour while the older girls were there. But as soon as they left, I began whining. ‘My turn,’ I said, tugging at Mehroo’s fingers. ‘When can I bring my friends to the shop?’

  Mehroo was distracted, waiting on a customer. ‘Next week,’ she said as she was wrapping up some bread rolls. ‘If you want, we can have a small party for a few friends at Dipeta next Friday. But don’t invite more than three or four girls, okay?’

  I’d rather invite my school friends to Dipeta than to my house for one of our parties. For my birthday, I got intolerable birthday parties to which all the silly, well-behaved, soft-spoken neighbourhood girls were invited. I had to cut my specialty cake with a knife that was decorated with a pink satin bow. Then, there was the excruciating moment when the adults asked the girls with the good singing voices to sing a song. The girls giggled and squealed and squirmed and blushed. They were shy and had to be coaxed to sing. I did not join the chorus of voices asking them to sing. I knew that they would invariably have high, airy voices and that they would invariably sing some bullshit song like Strangers in the Night .

  These were good girls and I wanted nothing to do with them.

  They were not my people.

  I spent most of the following week trying to decide who to invite but the thought of having to leave any of my friends out, was too depressing. Besides, something else was nagging at me. Friday came around without my having invited a single classmate. Instead, I went up to the street urchins who invariably gathered around the shop. ‘See this eating-drinking shop?

  It belongs to my father,’ I said to dirty-faced children my own age. ‘You all go tell your friends to gather here in five-ten minutes. There will be lots to eat and drink.’ They stared at me dumbfounded for a few seconds and then they ran, whooping all the way.

  Within minutes, they were back. Mehroo, and my dad, who had stopped at the shop on his way from the factory, looked up to see a group of twelve children standing outside the shop, some of them giggling in excitement, others shoving and pushing each other, a few of them hopping on one foot. ‘What the hell?’ dad said, as he made to shoo the group away. The urchins looked ready to scatter like pigeons if my dad took another step towards them.

  I stood in front of dad to block his path. ‘These are my friends,’ I said quickly. ‘Mehroo said I could invite my friends for a small party today. Roshan had her turn last week.

  So instead of my school friends, I decided to invite my Dipeta friends. Now you have to feed them.’

  Mehroo started to say something to claim her innocence but I was looking up at my father. I watched several expressions flit across his face—annoyance, surprise, confusion, and finally, a bemused resignation. ‘Okay, Thrituma,’ he said. ‘You win.

  But just this time, okay? We cannot do this often.’

  I skipped to where the children were waiting patiently.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ I said but the children hesitated, waiting for my father to give them a command. Dad pulled me aside.

  ‘We cannot have them all the way inside the shop, you understand?’ he whispered. ‘Their hands and feet are too dirty—it will chase our regular customers away. Just tell them to come to the front of the store and wait there. And I cannot afford to give away bottles of Coca-Cola. They can have ice candies instead.’

  ‘Okay, daddy,’ I agreed, not wanting to push my luck.

  The group gathered in the small foyer that led to the store.

  Mehroo took out the red-and-white paper plates that said Dipeta on them and filled each of them with small cakes, and chicken patties. She took a few daar-ni-poris and cut them into equal-sized pieces, and then placed the individual pieces on each plate. In the meantime, dad was reaching into the deep freezer to take out the ice candies. ‘What flavour, what flavour?’

  I asked the group but most of them were too shy and tongue-tied to speak. One of the bolder kids from behind the group finally shouted out ‘Orange’ but the rest of them just looked at me with their big eyes.

  Mehroo began distributing the plates and the children took them from her eagerly. But once they held the plates in their hands, they were unsure of what to do next. They stood silently, waiting for some command or signal. I took one of the plates from Mehroo and bit into a chicken patty.

  ‘Eat,’ I said and they did, their eyes never leaving my face as we munched on the goodies, staring at each other.

  Several months after the incident, the adults are still talking about it, repeating it each time they want to impress a family acquaintance. They place both hands on my shoulders and brag about how warm-hearted and sensitive I am. But each retelling of the story makes me cringe because they are taking an absent-minded, spontaneous gesture and turning it into something different. Part of the reason I had approached the street kids was because I was bewitched by their horseplay and games and wanted to be included in them. It was my need that had drawn me to the urchins but in the retelling of the story, they had become the needy ones. Also, Roshan glares at me each time the story is told because she picks up on the unspoken critique—while Roshan invited her school friends, Thrity sought out the poor, the marginalized. Can’t the adults see that they are unwittingly pitting me and Roshan against each other? I marvel again at the insensitivity of grown-ups.

  And I do not want any more of their praise. So I do not share my solution to the poverty problem with anyone. I feel as if I’m sitting on an important state secret but that can’t be helped.

  Perhaps one day I’ll have a chance to share my plans with the Prime Minister herself. And then India will be poor no more.

  Five

  FOR YEARS, THE OVALTINE LADY has been my real mother.

  Nobody knows that this is so.

  The Ovaltine woman has long, straight black hair and a round, dimpled face. She has two children, a boy and girl, who look nothing like me. These children are shiny, happy, and bright as young pups. They bound in every afternoon after school, drop their satchels and head into the kitchen, where their mother has two steaming cups of Ovaltine waiting for them. I imagine that it is dark and raining outside, that it begins to thunder even as the children sit in the warm, safe kitchen sharing the treasures of their day with their beautiful, soft-spoken mother.

  But what I most love about the Ovaltine woman are her hands. As she shuts tight the metal lid on the big, brown can of Ovaltine, the camera zooms to a close-up of her long, slender, well-groomed fingers. It is hard to describe the wistfulness and longing I feel as I sit in a darkened movie theatre and watch those graceful hands. To me, those hands say motherhood. I imagine that those hands are capable of smoothing out all my rough, jagged, splintered edges; hands that can take the rawness of my life and turn it into something round and wholesome. Hands that can save me, that can pull me back from the edge I’m about to step off—from the world of gloom and desperation and rootlessness that I am about to enter. I imagine that those hands have healing powers, that they can comfort, nurture, restore, rebuild. I am unsure of what is broken in me, what needs rebuilding, but I long for deliverance just the same.

  But the Ovaltine woman stays on the silver screen. She has two celluloid children of her own and does not come to rescue me. Like them, I too, drink milk—sometimes with Ovaltine, sometimes with Horlicks, sometimes with raspberry syrup but unlike them, I do not smack my lips after I have gulped down the very last drop. Unlike them, I am allergic to milk but nobody seems to notice. My mother takes my dislike for milk as a personal affront to her parenting skills. She pushes milk on me with a kind of religious fervour. But I refuse this conversion by sword. Every chance I get, I pour my glass of milk d
own the kitchen sink. Once, Mehroo catches me red-handed.

  With tears in her eyes she says, ‘There are children starving down the street from us. And here you are, wasting precious milk. Shame on you.’

  I have heard this line many times but still its logic eludes me. All the more reason not to drink the milk I think, so that those poor starving babies can have my share. I have pondered this paradox for several months, convinced that only my young age keeps me from solving the riddle at its core.

  My mother also insists that I swallow a raw egg every morning, faithfully following the instructions of the alcoholic family doctor who had treated me for a serious lung problem when I was six. No adult will tell me what the matter is with my lungs. (Years later, when I ask one of them whether I had TB there is a lot of shuffling of the feet, and clicking of the fingers to ward off evil but no direct answer. ‘Not quite,’ is the closest to a direct answer I would ever get.) I stare at the yellow yolk swimming in its transparent sea and imagine an eye following my every move. The eye is watching me watch it. The eye is watching me grimace. Now, the eye watches me tilt the stainless steel cup as I put it up to my mouth. Gulp. The eye is now floating somewhere inside me. Sometimes when I swallow, I feel the egg as a dull ache in my back as it makes its way down. When I complain to my mother she says, ‘See? It’s a sure sign of weakness. You need to increase your intake.’

  I know that food is my mother’s shorthand for love. I know it is one of the few ways she knows how to express her feelings about me. From my grandmother’s stories about the hard times that followed her husband’s sudden and premature death, I have learned that my mom and her siblings grew up in poverty.

  I have heard about how, once the steady pay cheques stopped, the family lived on the money from his meagre pension and whatever they could get from Parsi charities. I know the premium my mother’s family puts on food and feeding others.

  I once caught her sister licking a packet of Polson’s butter with her tongue and was horrified and embarrassed. In my house, Mehroo would not even let us lick our fingers after a good meal. I also know that compared to my family, with its spartan eating habits, my mother’s family is a family of enthusiastic meat and fish-eaters.

  But try as I might, this emphasis on food repels me. There is something oddly animalistic and savage about my mother’s desire to feed me. I think if she could chew my food for me, she gladly would. She reminds me of a female lion, especially in the way she steals pieces of mutton and chicken out of the family meals that Mehroo cooks before she leaves for the workshop, and forces them into my mouth. Sometimes, she has to pry my jaws open because I hate the taste of hunks of meat. I chew and chew until the meat is dry and yucky in my mouth and then, sometimes, I gag on it and spit it out. Her wrath descends on me then, her eyes dark with fury and powerlessness. I think in those moments she must know how different we are from each other and hate me for growing away from her. I don’t care. I hate her too during those moments, hate and fear the mad fury that makes her shove food into my mouth, hate the humiliation and powerlessness of having to chew and swallow food that I despise.

  There is also something else: I am excruciatingly aware that this is stolen food, am ashamed of the furtive movements my mother makes as she runs in the kitchen, fishes out the pieces of mutton from the daal or the white sauce that Mehroo has cooked and hurriedly pushes them into my mouth. My father’s business is not doing well, I know, and meat is a luxury. Beside, what’s in the dish is meant to serve the entire family and I know what will inevitably follow: Mehroo will come home in the evening, get ready to warm the evening meal and immediately spot the missing pieces. She will accuse my mother who will swear on her mother’s head that she knows nothing about this. She may also burst into tears and accuse Mehroo of deliberately making her use her mother’s name in vain. And I will choke on my secret, much as I have choked earlier on the piece of meat. My Catholic school education—with the nuns telling us daily that lying is a sin—will collide with my mother’s strict instructions to never tell the others about the missing pieces of meat. As usual, I will fall between the gap of what I learn daily during Moral Science and what I must do at home to keep the peace. It never occurs to me to defy my mother and speak the truth and my role in this drama makes me feel complicit, dirty and shameful.

  Indeed, food complicates every aspect of my life. Sometimes, if my mother is still sleeping when I dress to go to school, I manage to escape out the front door without drinking my milk before any adult can nab me. But my road to freedom is short and ends two flights down in the building’s lobby. I pray desperately for the rickety old school-bus to arrive when I hear my mother’s footsteps coming down the stairs. My stomach heaves. There she is, in her long nightgown, carrying the glass of milk, a piece of cardboard or newspaper covering it from dust and flies.

  I open my mouth to protest when the ground-floor apartment door opens and the old, white-haired lady who lives there comes out. ‘Drink your milk, deekra,’ she says in a kindly fashion. ‘So many children not so lucky, to have a mother who loves them so much.’ I drink the milk, praying that the school-bus does not arrive until after I am done. Immediately, I feel the familiar, bloated sensation. I promise myself that when I’m older and living on my own, I will never ever drink milk again.

  It is eleven o’clock at night but still sleep won’t come. The fever courses through my weak body like lava, sending lightning-like chills up my whole body. I am half delirious with fever but I can still feel the anxiety that scuttles like tall shadows in this room. Every so often, Mehroo pokes her head through the doorway of my mother’s bedroom and I can feel my worried mother shake her head no, to Mehroo’s unspoken question: Has the fever come down yet? Babu comes in the room and stands silently gazing at me, his hands crossed behind his back, leaning against my mother’s wardrobe, made of teak wood. I want to open my mouth and assure them all that I’m all right but my mouth is dry and hot and I worry that talking will unleash a coughing spell. Also, even in the throes of delirium, some part of me is enjoying the attention.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ mummy finally tells the others. ‘I’m here with her. I’ll wake you up if there’s any need.’ One by one the adults all extract promises from her that she’ll be sure to wake him or her first, at once only, if there’s anything wrong at all. As always, they all bend down and kiss my hot forehead, or rather they kiss my hair because my forehead is covered with a wet rag dipped in a mixture of water and eau-de-Cologne. The higher the fever, the less diluted this mixture becomes, with my mother liberally pouring the eau-de-Cologne into the dented aluminium bowl she keeps specifically for this use. ‘Sweet dreams, Thrituma,’ Mehroo whispers.

  ‘Try to go to sleep like a good girl.’

  Daddy kisses me last. His eyes are red with disturbed sleep.

  An hour ago, tired from the long day at the factory and over-come by the drowsiness that he can never fight, he had tried falling asleep on his side of the bed but the noise generated by the tiptoeing adults had woken him up. Also, there is this unspoken bitterness between him and my mother whenever I am fighting a high fever like this. She wants him to stay up with me along with her, but when he tries, she resents the intrusion.

  So he gives up in frustration but she misreads that frustration as indifference. I know all this because they both tell me their ‘side’ of the story after I recover from each episode of sickness.

  Telling one’s side of the story is very important in my family.

  Mostly, I try to assure both of them that I feel very cared for when I’m sick and am never bothered by who specifically does what. This reassures my father but offends my mother, who always concludes that, by not appreciating how much more she has done for me while I’m sick, I’ve taken my dad’s side against her.

  But all this will happen days later when I am well. For now, I relish the sweetness of the cold rag against my hot forehead, float in the glory of my mother’s gentle stroking of my hair.

  The fever
is so high that even my hair aches and the rhythmic stroking is strangely comforting. This is the only time when my mother touches me in affection, when I’m this sick, and I bask in the feeling of her tenderness. My own heart feels liquidy with love and gratitude. It is almost worth being this sick, just to see this other side of my mother—gentle, compassionate, soft-spoken—come out of the hard, brittle shell she usually is covered in, her love for me oozing like yolk from a shell. My mamma loves me, she loves me and this time I don’t find out from the baker or the neighbours, this time she telegraphs this knowledge to me from the soft brushing of her own wise and slender fingers against my hair.

  This is the Ovaltine woman come to life.

  I know that all of this care has been brought on by fear, her fear of losing me. No matter how often I get sick, she is still haunted by the memory of the lung ailment I had when I was six and had to get a shot every second day for a full year.

  I have unpleasant memories of that year—the long, crowded bus ride to the doctor’s dispensary after being at school all day; doing my homework while sitting in the drab, crowded waiting-room filled with sad-looking people; standing half-naked behind a huge, cold machine in a pitch-black room as the doctor screened my lungs; the hot, acrid smell as the doctor’s assistant boiled the needle on a kerosene stove; the sharp prick of the needle on my skinny, fleshless thighs; the recurrent nightmares about my white underwear being soaked in blood from a puncture caused by an errant needle.

  Often, my mom took me to a nearby Irani restaurant for a treat after our visit to the clinic. There was a waiter there who I loved, and he, a shy, working-class Muslim man, was so tickled at the idea of a middle-class six-year-old calling him her friend, that he invariably slipped me a treat—a jelly roll, a mava cake—along with our order. I usually sipped a Fanta or a Mangola and munched on an order of potato chips that I dipped in pumpkin ketchup. Depending on her finances, my mother would sometimes order herself a drink; often she just sat there, urging me to hurry up so that we could start the ordeal of the bus ride home.