Tamarind Mem Read Online Free PDF Page B

between you and Roopa. The bank manager has a spare set of keys. If he dies also, well, use your brains, break open the door, whatever! I don’t care.”

    I was worried about being left behind by Ma who, every now and again, threatened Dadda that one morning he would wake up and find her gone.
    “Go, why should I care what you do?” my father would say sometimes, although he usually puffed at his pipe and refused to enter into an argument with Ma. “And don’t forget to take your daughters with you.”
    “My
daughters! Am I the Virgin Mary that I created them myself or what? When I leave, I go with no baggage but what I brought to this house.”
    Vir-gin.
Good word or bad?
    Their arguments were loud and made no pretence of secrecy. I think they assumed that my sister and I were asleep as soon as our heads touched our pillows.
    They were right about Roopa, for she was one of those placid creatures who stayed completely impervious to undercurrents of anger or discontent in the house, certain that there would always be someone to look after her. She didn’t care who made her breakfast, or took her to the club to play on the swings in the evening, so long as the job was done. I, on the other hand, couldn’t bear the thought of becoming like our neighbour’s daughter, a thin, silent wisp of a girl who played house-house with us every afternoon and who was easily cowed into being our maidservant or cook or someone as menial. Her mother had died of brain fever and she was looked after by a series of stern aunts. The thought of being being brought up by Dadda’s sisters, especially crazy Aunty Meera, was extremely disagreeable. So I stayed awake, listening for footsteps, my body tensed to spring out of bed.I thought that if I kept my ears open, I would know immediately if Ma was going to run away, and then I could scream, wind my arms around her legs and stop her. How would I manage on my own with a father who was away on tour most of the time? How would I battle Linda Ayah’s host of demons and monsters that roamed the house every day? Besides, I might not be able to keep my word about looking after Roopa and I’d go straight to Hell. And Hell, warned Linda Ayah, was a most uncomfortable place, full of drooling creatures who craved little girls to satisfy their horrible appetites.
    Although Ma had assured me that Hell existed only in a person’s imagination and wasn’t a place like Delhi or Bombay to which one could travel by train, I was sure it lurked there at the edges of my world waiting for me to miss my step and slide in. Not only did Linda Ayah speak about it often and with a sort of deadly certainty, it was brought up every Friday at school by Miss Manley, the moral science teacher. She was an overpowering woman whose thick arms were covered with a pelt of bright orange hair so that, no matter what the colour of her dress, it looked as though she had orange sleeves. Miss Manley flung questions at the class to test our knowledge of the Bible.
    “What happened at Gethsemane?” she thundered, going down the classroom, row by row, making sure that she caught everyone with her questions. If a student dared to stutter, “I don’t know, Miss,” she paused in awful silence for a minute and then bellowed, “Dunce, you are a dunce! Go stand in the corner and improve your memory!”
    The dunce had to stand inside an aluminum dustbin and learn up Miss Manley’s favourite poem, “Daffodils,” before the count of ten.
    “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’” murmured the dustbindunce.
    “All right class, start counting,” commanded Miss Manley, and we chanted out loud, as slowly as possible, “One-two-three-four…”The closer we got to ten, the slower we counted to give the poor dunce a few seconds extra to memorize the lines. If the miscreant hadn’t learnt up the lines before ten, the wrath of God and Miss Manley descended. She slammed the dunce’s cheeks with a pair of chalkboard dusters, sending up