Tamarind Mem Read Online Free PDF

sun was low in the sky, ready to drop beneath the horizon. A
peon
was making his way down the verandah, rolling up the rest of the screens and letting in cool evening air. I heard my mother calling me in for tea and got up reluctantly.
    “Do you know any more stories?”
    “Maybe,” he said, grinning. “Question number two?”
    “Why are you black?” It was a question that had been nagging me ever since I saw the multicoloured Anglo-Indians at the railway station. Where did all these people get their colour from?
    The man smiled and asked quizzically, “Why are you brown, little girl?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    He shrugged too and said, “And I don’t know either.”
    Ma’s insistent “Mini, Kamini, come and get your tiffin” echoed down the verandah.
    “What were you doing, talking to unknown people?” she demanded, shaking me hard. She had been waiting tocatch me as I crawled back through the hedge. “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t talk to anybody-everybody!”
    “But Ma, he was telling me stories about Africa!”
    “Stories, stories, stories!” said Ma, shaking me again. “Some person on the road says ‘Come child, I will tell you stories,’ and this idiot girl will go behind him, no problem! Do you ever listen to me?”
    “Never listens, whattodo?” sighed Linda Ayah, materializing from somewhere.
    “And where were you?” asked Ma. “You are supposed to make sure that she doesn’t get into any mischief.”
    “Memsahib, my eyes blinked once only and this monkey had vanished. What can I do?” protested Linda Ayah.
    “Liar-liar-lipstick,” I chanted immediately. “You were sitting behind the building doing
khusur-phusur
with the other
ayahs.”

    “Ma, do you know where Linda Ayah is now?” I asked, hit by a wave of nostalgia so strong that I had called my mother at 11:00 a.m. Indian time, when the rates were at their highest.
    “I have no idea. Maybe she went back to her village. Maybe I will stop at her village on my trip,” remarked Ma.
    “Trip, what trip?”
    “I am going on a train journey, across the country.”
    “With Lalli Aunty?” I was pleased that my mother was going to do something other than sit in her apartment quarrelling with the milkman or her latest maidservant. Ma seemed to have a new one every few months or so. “Whattodo?” she had said, when I remarked on it. “This is the real world. Not like our Railway life, with faithful Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon.”
    “Are you going with Lalli Aunty?” I asked again.
    “Why should I go with her? Am I incapable of doing anything myself?”
    “All right, all right, but where are you going?”
    “Everywhere,” snapped Ma irascibly. “Do I ask you all about your coming and going? Do I ask you why you have to live in the North Pole, hanh? Did I ask your sister why she ran away?”
    “Ma, Roopa got married. She did not run away.”
    “She left college in the middle of the term, came home with a man we had never met. He might have belonged to a family of pimps for all I knew. And then she married him in less than a month—so suspicious it looked—and left for USA! Of course she ran away.”
    “Roopa’s husband is a perfectly nice man, Ma,” I protested feebly.
    “And now,” continued my mother, “it is my turn to go away.”
    “At least give us an address to write to,” I said. I could feel a tension headache coming on. It didn’t matter how far away I was, all my conversations with my mother ended in an argument.
    “I don’t know where I am going,” said Ma. “A pilgrimage, like those old people in religious stories. Packed off their daughters, washed their hands of the sons, gave away all their useless belongings and left on long journeys to see how other people lived.”
    “But how do we know if you are all right? How do we reach you?”
    “What is the worst that can happen to me? I will die, that’s all. And if I die, the apartment and all that I have in it can be shared