Mangoes of Steel
Amaa hated May. She called it: The Month of Dust.
and that turbulent afternoon too, in spite of shuttered windows and drawn curtains, fine grit had found its way in and coated all surfaces, alive and dead. Amaa, with her small platoon of household helpers, was fighting a losing battle. She had armed everyone with kerchiefs, old pillow-cases and surplus dupattas which they were stuffing into every chink and slot that linked the raging outdoor world to Amaa’s fragile realm – her frilled, crocheted, lace-edged, hand-woven world.
and that turbulent afternoon too, in spite of shuttered windows and drawn curtains, fine grit had found its way in and coated all surfaces, alive and dead. Amaa, with her small platoon of household helpers, was fighting a losing battle. She had armed everyone with kerchiefs, old pillow-cases and surplus dupattas which they were stuffing into every chink and slot that linked the raging outdoor world to Amaa’s fragile realm – her frilled, crocheted, lace-edged, hand-woven world.
From time to time, Amaa would pull her eyes away from the cleaning squad and look at the girls. When she did, they instantly blew their nostrils into wads of tissue paper that were given to them for this purpose. Soon, like other things that Amaa made them do, it became a
game.
“My turn; hoomph!”
“My turn; hoomph!”
And they showed each other brown clouds forming on the tissue. What else could they play? Amaa had covered
the toy racks and board-game drawers with sheets. And she had turned down the
appeal to go to their next-door friend Reema’s much before the storm had come, saying
that now that there was a tooth-paste bill-board erected in her front yard, it
would be dangerous to play anywhere close to it. Yes, she knew that Neha’s
wedding was two days away but, no, they still couldn't go.
And then the storm had
come.
“See. What if you’d gone?” Amaa
had said triumphantly, clearly very proud of her Mothers’ Instinct that, she
said, always gave her the warning vibes.
“Better safe than sorry, dear. The
board might fall or something!” she had said, and walked off as they began
playing a just-discovered clapping game: ‘Fall or something’ – double clap – ‘ball
or something’ – double clap – ‘tall or something’ – double clap.
The girls desperately wanted to
be let out in spite of the persistent storm and the bill-board. It was only two
days to Neha’s wedding and her dowry was still incomplete. This week it was
Reema’s turn to be Neha’s mother and hence enjoy its custody – and that of the
sewing paraphernalia – so they could not work on Neha’s wedding dress or string
Neha’s jewelry unless they were at Reema’s. Besides, they weren’t afraid
of the bill-board knocking them down. Bill-boards were meant to stand not fall.
Everyone knew that accept Amaa. Moon Bhai and his friends – Moon Bhai was the teenage
show-off who lived in the last house down the street – often climbed the
slanting bars that held the shampoo bill-board in his garden, to touch the
bottom edge of the green shampoo bottle.
The girls were now kneeling
down on the floor beside the landing window, their eyes following leaves,
papers and plastic bags being jostled up, up and up. Sometimes the object they followed,
would vanish in the dense haze in the gray sky. They dutifully pointed out to
each other anything unusual that they spotted flying. So far, they had seen
flailing an orange flannel cloth, a lightblue-darkblue striped sock, the
bearded face of a maulana on a torn poster, a biah nest, a piece
of a net of some kind( maybe from someone’s badminton court) and a nylon
national flag tied to a long plastic rope that happily floundered behind it.
From time to time, there were faceless crashing sounds that left everyone thinking
‘What was that?’ The wind whooped and howled, and smacked the window panes,
wobbling them mercilessly.
“Is it more posssible a toothpaste
big-board can fall and less possible a shampoo big-board can fall?” Uzzie asked
Selma, nodding her head a bit in expectation of the answer being in affirmative.
“Silly stupid you are, Uzzie,”
Selma said, furrows that had appeared on her forehead for worrying that the
wedding preparations would not be good enough, deepening a little more. She
always said this when a question, a rogue one amongst hundreds that Uzzie
asked every day, threw her off-balance.
Uzzie was used to hearing the
words ‘silly stupid you are, Uzzie’ and thought they had no viable meaning.
“Is it, Selma?” she asked, her
nostrils squashed against the glass.
“Well; yes.”
“Is it because it’s bigger?”
“Well; yes.”
“Is it bigger because they need
more space for drawing the big teeth than the gianty woman with long hair?”
“We-e-ll, yes! but ‘gianty
woman’ is wrong English,” Selma said, amazed that her little sister had come up with a wonderful analogy about bill-board sizes; but sounding as if she thought that Uzzie’s had solved the
mystery by fluke.
“Is that why Amaa isn’t letting
us go nextdoors; that they have a big-board that is too big because it’s a
toothpaste big-board and we’d die if it fell on us?” Uzzie said in one breath,
putting the whole thing together in one long question. She always did in the
end.
“Bill-board not big-board,
stupid,” said Selma.
But Uzzie was sure the word was
big-board not bill-board. But she didn’t know who to go to for correcting the
universal mistake.
Months ago, when they had first
heard that ‘The Government’ had planned to make a flyover bridge over their
street, Baba had told Amaa that it was ‘a violation’ and the Residents’ Committee
would never let it actually happen. There had been meetings at Moon Bhai’s where
all the men had put their heads together – literally, considering the size of
Moon Bhai’s dinner table – to come up with a scheme to stop the bridge from
being raised.
But the bridge had come up before
the scheme.
And then ‘The
Government’ had allowed Bill-boards. When the first one was raised on the other
side of the bridge, Baba told Amaa that it was ‘a violatation’ and the Residents’ Committee would see that the
horrendous configuration was removed. Again, the men had met at Moon Bhai’s. But
in less than a month’s time, another one had popped up from one of the front
yards in their lane. There had been an avalanche since.
Baba seldom
spoke after that; and he did not go to the committee meetings any more. The
girls hadn't met or seen 'The Government' but they both thought that, in many ways, she was resposible for the dreadful
silence at their dinner table these days.
Bill-boards had multiplied as
fast as Amaa’s vegetable crops did when the sprouting season came; a yield of
steel and screen-print plastic; two pictured caravans parked along both
parapets of the overhead bridge, showing off the colored sides to the commuters
on the bridge and bad ones to the dwellers down in the alley. There were
suitcase-size juice cans with manicured fruit; milk tetra-packs, showing foreign-looking
cows; half-open cookie packs with cookies sliding out, thin females with fat
lips, wearing colorful voile prints and lolling on divans; legs wearing jeans
(just legs); a beautiful bride who, closer-up, looked like a clown wearing
jewelry and a classroom of children with made-up faces and slick hair.
Uzzie best liked the one which
was shaped like a bar of chocolate whose wrapper was peeled off a bit from one
corner to reveal the luscious chocolate inside and a little man crouching down
and licking. She would daydream that the chocolate bar was real and that she
was climbing up the steel bars to snap off a piece. Sometimes, when it was
hot, she would walk to the window that overlooked the road, half expecting to
see the chocolate melting and dribbling down.
It took an hour for the storm
to tame down into a harmless breeze. When it did, Selma whispered in Uzzie’s
ear.
“Ask her if we can go to Bi
Ji’s. Kunnu Khala might have sewed the red dress by now; and she’s doing
other things too. You want Neha’s wedding to be good na Uzzie?”
Uzzie nodded and, straddling
the wooden railing, slid down the stairs.
“Can we go to Bi Ji’s house, Amaa?
The wind has stopped and Bi Ji doesn’t have a big-board in her garden,” Uzzie
asked.
The dirt-mark on Uzzie’s frock – from straddling the railing – was worrying Amaa. They could both tell it was. Amaa’s eyes were fixed on it
and she wasn’t really listening to Uzzie. On the landing, Selma waited, holding
her breath in dread of a refusal coming up.
“Can we, Amaa?” Uzzie shouted
in Amaa’s ear, shrill and loud, as Amaa spanked her frock free of dust.
“Uh-huh! But stay inside and
don’t be gone long. And don’t be in the way; Bi Ji and Kunnu Khala are busy
packing stuff,” Amaa said inattentively, her gaze now following the broom with
which the maid was sweeping dust off the floor, onto a dust-pan. Uzzie could
see that Amaa had a shriek in her mouth, ready to be released in case the broom
touched the cream upholstery.
“We will,” Uzzie said, “and we’ll
be careful that our frocks don’t get dirty,” she said, forseeing the advice
coming up or, perhaps, just to please Amaa.
They sneaked out of the front door
rather quietly, afraid that Amaa would change her mind and call them back. Outside,
a cool breeze touched their cheeks and blew their hair back from their faces.
The ever-sparkling floor of
their veranda was littered with leaves and twigs and pieces of a broken
hanging-pot. Amaa’s pride and joy, the pretty little front yard looked like it
had been given a quick spin in Amaa’s mixing machine. The bougainvillea bush
hung desolate, stripped of each of its little balloons of purple flowers. The
green fabric that had been the summer-roof of the drive in Reema’s house had
flown over to their side and was hanging from the roof banister like a huge
flag.
The tapering alley, with the
houses on one side and the cemented wall that held the bridge on the other, lay
deserted. The hideous mixture of graffiti and paper-posters on the wall looked
as if someone with good taste had been tampering with it. The wind had shredded
the posters and they flapped about like streamers; the graffiti had a film of
dust on it that had dulled the florescent colors into soft pastels.
They hopped and skipped the
small distance to Bi Ji’s, their eyes squinted to keep out the grit in the
breeze that, although much weakened, was still blowing. They sang:
‘Tum kis ko lene aaey ho, aaey ho, thanday mausam mai?
Hum tum ko lene aaey hai, aaey hai, thanday mausam
mai.’
Elderly Bi Ji and her daughter
Kunnu Khala had been a part of their lives since as far as their memories went.
Bi Ji was Amaa’s aunt (her mother’s sister) and lived three doors down the
street. She loved using foul words and knew the funniest of stories about Amaa’s
childhood – stories that they could never refer to in Amaa’s presence. They
were stories in which Amaa and her sisters had lice in their hair as big as
little tadpoles(Bi Ji’s exact words); in which Amaa picked her nose and
sometimes swallowed the little blobs of phlegm she picked; in which Amaa held
out dried droppings of a goat on the palm of her hand and asked if they were
playing marbles. If Amaa ever found out that her Perfect-Woman Image was being
tarnished, that she was being accused of having any connection with lice and
phlegm-blobs and goat-droppings – any whatsoever – she would force them to stay
away from the ‘Nutty Old Woman’.
They couldn’t really construe –
not that they tried very hard – the exact nature of the relationship between
Amaa and Bi Ji. Although, superficially, the two were at daggers drawn, there
was something between them which ran deeper than the apparent hatred. For
instance, Amaa was unable to hide the troubled look that came to her eyes
whenever the topic of Bi Ji’s migration to Sialkot was brought up.
***
Cut out in the left leaf of the
steel gate, there was a little gate that was open as usual and swinging back
and forth. Huge rectangular wooden containers which the girls had seen being
unloaded the night before, were stacked in the small front garden. An enormous
canvas cloth was stretched above the containers and it made the garden look
like the back of a big truck carrying a load of big boxes. The canvas was
probably the only relocatable object that the storm had been unable to
relocate.
They entered and ran
towards the darkened side-passage to go to the back of the house. Both sides
of the passage were lined with sacks full of useless items, leaking tubs and
buckets, cracked flower-pots, old
hose-pipes, broken chairs and other bits of furniture. Sprawling along the
parallel walls, the twin cities of plastic, wood and metal lay unperturbed by
the storm. Rain, however, would have been a totally different prospect. When Kunnu
Khala had last washed the passage with a hose-pipe, hundreds of white ants and
grey crickets had sailed off towards the drain.
Inside Bi Ji’s house, packed
and sealed cartons were stacked along the walls of the living room which had
been stripped of all accessories and small furniture. Only two old sofas which
could easily be told apart from the sofas in the drawing room because of their
tea stains and cigarette holes, lay facing each other.
Yes! The biggest secret the
girls’ had hidden from the world was: ‘Kunnu Khala Smokes!’.
Bi Ji and Kunnu Khala were
standing beside the dining table on which they had laid out a huge quantity of
spoons and forks and other cutlery in rows and other patterns in which Uzzie
became immediately interested. The women both wore baggy shalwar-kamises
made of limp voile with vague, hodgepodge prints. There was a little box full of
rubber bands and all possible kinds of pins, lying open on one side. The rubber-bands
were wilted and sticky, and the pins had fused with them to make little spiky
lumps which looked like steel porpoises. On the other end of the table, an old sewing machine lay amidst an array of silk pieces and spools of thread. A doll-sized red dress was sprawled on the upper curve of the machine.
“What are you two doing running
lose in this dust in these lovely new frocks? I find it very strange that our
dear ‘Miss Clean’ let you out. Don’t you too, Kunnu?” Bi Ji remarked, seeing
the girls slip in through the back door.
Kunnu Khala looked at the girls
fondly and said nothing.
“These frocks are old Bi Ji;
they’re just starched,” Selma explained, hurrying towards the sewing machine and picking the red dress.
Bi Ji’s eyes, big and flowy like
two shelled eggs behind the thick glasses of her specs, stared at their crisp
muslin frocks – baby pink, baby blue. For no viable reason.
“What’s this?” Uzzie asked,
pointing at the cutlery, looking at it as if never before had she seen a spoon
or a fork.
No one answered.
“When are you leaving Bi Ji?”
Uzzie asked, desperate for attention.
Bi Ji had sold off her house to
a man who wanted to convert it into a factory where they would sew T-shirts.
But before doing that, Bi Ji had made sure that she had told the neighbours,
all and sundry, that she thought they were all cowards who had failed in peventing
the mortification inflicted on them. Also, that she couldn’t possibly live in the
‘mouth of a cement alligator that had grown freak metal teeth’ – Bi Ji conjured
a fanciful metaphor to dramatize every situation’ – so she was moving to her
house in Sialkot which she had inherited from her father.
“I’ve told you a hundred times
Uzzie; on Sunday,” Bi Ji said a litttle crossly.
“Will you ever come back? I
mean ‘ev-v-ver’.”
“Why don’t you ask ‘Miss Clean’
to bring you all down to Sialkot every vacation; hm-m-m? It’s her hometown too.
She should; shouldn’t she Kunnu? They could even come this summer.”
Kunnu Khala smiled and nodded.
“The fear is that if I were to
ask my dear niece to bring you all down, she’d go all haughty totty and say, ‘Bi
Ji! What will I gain from forcing my girls to endure a bumpy car ride and a stay
in a house full of dust mites and lizards – not to speak of the compulsion of
walking through streets with open drains?
A reunion with my relatives? I’m sorry; I can’t risk the girls’ health... blah,
blah, blah!.” Bi Ji said, mimicking Amaa’s cultivated accent.
The girls laughed. Strangely,
Amaa’s obsession with cleanliness was a topic that seemed never to be done-with
with Bi Ji.
Meanwhile, Selma had moved to
stand very close to Kunnu Khala.
“Kunnu Khala?” she whispered,
searching Kunnu Khala’s eyes worriedly. “Neha’s dress doesn't have all the gold gota you said you'd put on it," she whined.
“After this, Selma. We'll complete the gota work today."
“And have you found the doli*?”
“Oh no! It totally slipped my
mind! When’s the wedding?” Kunnu Khala asked.
“In two days. On Saturday,”
Selma said, looking even more anxious.
“I’m sure it’s not in the
packed boxes. I packed them all myself. The cupboards…they are almost empty…if
it’s still in the house, it should be in the kitchen somewhere. That’s the only
place left,” she said, thinking aloud.
“If? You never said ‘if’
before,” Selma whimpered.
“That old doli that you
played with as a little girl?” Bi Ji interrupted. “Haven’t seen it for years. I’m
pretty much sure we gave it away…”
“No, no. I’m sure I still have
it,” Kunnu Khala said, looking at Selma to see how far she had believed Bi Ji’s
decree.
“Neha and her husband can
go off in Aadi’s red car, Selma. He said he could take off the roof with his
Dad’s little-one hammer,” Uzzie said in her pre-school English to please Kunnu
Khala who never failed to enjoy her mistakes.
“‘Little one hammer’ is wrong
English,” Selma said in a small voice.
“Listen Selma; I’ll make you a
new doli if I don’t find the old one,” Kunnu Khala reassured.
“By tomorrow?” Selma asked,
happy now.
“By tomorrow evening,” Kunnu
Khala promised.
They watched Kunnu Khala and Bi
Ji pile up stacks of matching cutlery in sets of dozens and tie them up with
the ever-lengthening rubber bands. Uzzie recounted each set. (She got very
excited when a counting mistake was corrected on her advice.) Selma watched everything
through wide, thinking eyes, her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her
hands. Afterwards, Kunnu Khala sat on the window-sill and lit a cigarette and Bi
Ji went to the toilet, muttering vague details of her purpose of going there,
saying that she’d be leaving the door unlocked from inside. Uzzie stuck her
tongue out and clamped her nostrils tightly shut to display her distaste for Bi
Ji’s disclaimer.
There was a sound coming from
the backyard; some kind of rhythmic thumps. Uzzie noticed it first and ran to
the window to see what was going on. In the middle of the clutter – as if what
the storm had done wasn’t enough – a bearded man was chopping down the old
mango tree in the backyard with a big axe; the tree that Selma could climb and
she couldn’t. Last Sunday, Selma had picked about a hundred raw mangoes from dangerously
far branches and she and Kunnu Khala had together made and jarred a pan full of
mango chutney.
“Kunnu Khala, why’s he doing that?”
Uzzie looked at Kunnu Khala and asked, feeling secretly pleased that, with the
tree gone, Selma would not be able to show-off her tree-climbing skills. Then
she remembered that it didn’t matter anymore because, after Sunday, they
wouldn’t be coming to Bi Ji’s house, ever.
E-v-v-ver!
“That man’s a freak,” Kunnu
Khala muttered. “He’s been chopping that tree since six in the morning. The storm
looked like it was going to blow forever but he didn’t leave. As soon as it was
gone, he began again.”
“But why is he doing that?”
Uzzie repeated her question.
“The man who bought the house
is getting the yard cleared. He’s going to make a store-house there.”
“Oh no!” cried Selma, all of a
sudden. Then she ran to the window and looked outside. “Stop him Kunnu Khala.
It’s still your house till Sunday.”
“Listen to me, girls; I’ll show
you the dress now. It’s so beautiful, you’ll go...” and she did an exaggerated
enactment of passing out.
“And I’ll paint the doli
red and decorate it with the left-over green brocade...!” she went on.
But Selma’s gaze was fixed. As
she looked on, tears welled up in her eyes and condensed along their lower
rims, threatening to brim over at any moment.
Then, not giving anyone a
chance to prepare for what she was about to do, she tore across the room to the
back door, threw it open and burst out like a bullet. Kunnu Khala charged after
her, yelling her name. Bi Ji shouted from inside the toilet, asking what was
going on. Uzzie too made off in panic. All she could think about was that the
man on the tree had a huge axe and Selma had nothing.
Uzzie stood frozen at the door,
watching the man standing on a low, level branch, the blade of his axe
reflecting the slanting beams of sun, looking in amazement at the little girl
in a fluffy pale-pink outfit, streaking towards him.
When she was close enough,
Selma braked to a stop, applying the same power with which she had started the
run, and shook the branch vehemently, crying, “Stop it, you bastard,” again and
again. Uzzie was shocked even more. ‘Bastard’ was a word Uzzie did not know and
had thought that Selma did not know either.
For a very brief while, the man
stood holding the upper branches, unaffected by the jerks and laughing at
Selma’s foolish attempts at throwing him off. But in next to no time he could
be heard shrieking at the top of his voice. Then he fell off. Quickly, he
rolled himself up and sat holding his foot up, crying like a child.
Selma had
bitten the man with the axe, on his right heel.
He hadn’t
bled because his heel was fibrous and woody, but it was wet with Selma’s spit
and had an arc of red tooth-marks that had risen from below his skin. He rubbed
the thorny skin on the sides of the wound and wept. Kunnu Khala crouched down
beside him and spoke to him gently.
Selma just shivered and
shivered.
Then Bi Ji spouted out from the
back door, swearing at everyone: Selma, Kunnu Khala, the man. Even at Uzzie.
For no good reason.
Seeing Bi Ji storming towards
them, Kunnu Khala stood up and embraced Selma in her arms protectively.
“Go inside, Bi Ji! Just go in!
Nothing’s happened; just go in!” she said in a croaky voice.
“What’s gotten into you, girl?
Ordering me to go in! I have to sort this thing out. These little imps can’t be
allowed to…”
“Leave it to me, Bi Ji. I’ll
sort it out. She’s not in her right mind. And I’ve offered to take the man to a
doctor but he says he wants some money instead. Uzzie, run and get my handbag
from the dining room and the yellow ointment from the drawer,” Kunnu Khala said,
her tone flat and her voice gruff. Uzzie pondered which Kunnu Khala’s real
voice was: this or the birdy tuneful voice they had always heard.
Bi Ji inspected the man’s foot
from a distance, her eyes two runny yokes behind the thick glasses.
“Go and see if the rice is
done, Bi Ji,” Kunnu Khala said.
“Don’t lie. There’s no fire
under the rice pan,” Bi Ji said, staring at Selma accusingly.
“Then light the fire, Bi Ji.
It’s almost dinner time.”
Some time later, when Selma had
said her apology, the man’s wound had been tended to, he had been given the
money he wanted and had hobbled out through the side-passage; and Bi Ji had
crossed half the length of the yard to go in, Kunnu Khala again spoke in a
voice that was even more flatter and thicker than when she had spoken before.
“Nothing’s happened and we are
not telling anyone any stories Bi Ji; not even their mother.”
For a long time she sat there
on the grass, rocking Selma in her arms till both of them became the old Kunnu
Khala and Selma. Later, Uzzie slowly went close to them and put her little hand
on Kunnu Khala’s cold cheek. She patted Kunnu Khala’s head like a grown-up and then
twisted a stray salt-n-pepper lock of her hair and tucked it behind her ear.
“Why don’t you ever color your
hair, Kunnu Khala?” she asked, probing Kunnu Khala’s face for signs of
normalcy.
“Just like that, Uzzie?” Kunnu
Khala said in a voice that was almost a sob now.
Again and again, Selma glanced
at the mis-shapen mango tree from the corners of her eyes.
“Where did the little mangoes
all go? There are none left on the tree?” she asked quietly.
“We didn’t want them Selma, so
they took them,” Kunnu Khala said.
Selma nodded.
It was getting dark. Kunnu
Khala had a buzzy black haze above her head that she would repeatedly wag away;
but it would reappear instantly. Finally she said that the mosquitoes wanted
the garden to themselves so they must all go in.
On the way in, she told the
girls that she wanted them to have dinner with Bi Ji and her. There was pea-pulao
that she had started cooking earlier and she would make raita to go with it.
The prospect of eating Kunnu
Khala’s pea-pulao made Uzzie so happy, she smiled and nodded in spite of
the post-accident solemnity.
A few steps from the door,
Selma stopped and looked up at Kunnu Khala’s face.
“Do you have to go Kunnu Khala?
Do you really have to?” she asked in a small voice.
Kunnu Khala didn’t look back at
Selma; she just nodded. Then she tugged at her hand, urging her to walk again.
“What do you think of Uzzie’s
idea, Selma? Don’t you think she’s right? There are no dolis these days.
What about decorating Aadi’s little red car with flowers from the chameli
bush and…”
“But I want a doli for
Neha!” Selma moaned and now Kunnu Khala looked at her through the mist in her
eyes.
“I was just joking, Selma!” she
said in a voice that was a mix of laughing and crying. “I’ll make you a
beautiful doli tomorrow.”
***
It was dark and Selma was hopelessly
quiet when they walked down to their house, each holding a hand of the maid
whom Amaa had sent to fetch them.
“Mangoes!” Uzzie said, to
please Selma, pointing at the bill-board at the starting point of the bridge on
the other side of it, the only one whose good side could be seen from the
alley. Selma and the maid looked up. A woman with parted lips was facing
upwards with a just-landed drop-shaped drop of mango juice on her lower lip
which had probably fallen off the tilted juice can at the top of the board.
Behind the woman, there were three mangoes; yellow, ripe and glossy; hanging
from a branch of a tree, the rest of which could not be shown on the
board.
Selma turned her eyes back to
the road ahead and walked on in silence.
Footnotes
doli: a palanquin; it was used in South Asia as a ladies' commuter, especially a bride on her wedding day. Here it refers to a toy palanquin.
doli: a palanquin; it was used in South Asia as a ladies' commuter, especially a bride on her wedding day. Here it refers to a toy palanquin.
