Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami Read Free Book Online

it. Roopa and I exchanged our own memories of him, hoarding them like a pair of misers. For if we did not, Dadda would float away like a puff of dandelion seed. I looked at our family photographs often, of us in Guwahati and Lucknow, Ratnapura and Calcutta. I had all of Dadda’s childhood pictures as well. Roopa said that she wasn’t interested in them.
    “What will I do with these ancient pieces of paper?” she asked, dismissing the fading images of our family.
    “How about your children? Don’t you want them to know something of their grandfather?”
    “I have pictures of Dadda as an adult. Those are enough, I think.”
    I tried to read the lives behind the enigmatic sepia silence, to fathom the meanings in those still eyes, the unmoving smiles. I phoned Ma in India and asked her about this picture or that, but she only wanted to know why I was wasting my time thinking about ghosts, and a useless bunch at that, who did nothing more worthwhile than produce children.
    “Ma, stop being so nasty all the time, I can’t stand it,” I snapped.
    “Oho, look at this madam, all grown up and thinks she can say whatall she wants to her mother!”
    Yes, Ma, I am no longer a child, I wanted to tell her, will you ever realize that?
    “When are you leaving on this trip of yours?” I asked instead.
    “Tomorrow, next week, next month. How does it matter? I have all the time in the world and no one to question how I spend it, no?”

    My father came home from his long trips with bags full of stories. I liked to think that the stories were for me alone. Besides, I was the only one who would listen to them. Roopa fidgeted and yawned through Dadda’s tales and after a while ran away to play. For her, Dadda brought dolls and kitchen toys and windmills and bracelets, worthless things that disintegrated or were forgotten in a few days.
    “Dadda, tell me a story,” I begged when he returned from a trip to Shillong. I danced impatiently around him, watching him light his pipe.
    “Waste of time,” grumbled Ma. Her fight with Dadda had begun long before I was born, so I could not understand it at all. Was it because he refused to take her along when he went away? Or perhaps because he smoked so much? Maybe she wanted him to tell
her
all the stories that he told me alone.
    “See this crown?” Dadda caressed imaginary Himalayan ranges, his hand conjuring them up in the air before us. He recited the names of the peaks and ranges like a sacred chant. “Karakoram, Kailash, Annapoorna, Kanchenjunga, each a jewel bearing a tale. This is where Lord Shiva dances, this is where Parvathi performed her wild penance, and here River Ganga lay waiting for Bhageerathi to summon her down to the plains.”
    Dadda’s trains had not breached the Himalayas yet, meandering instead across smiling valleys, occasionally bursting through stony, obdurate hills.
    “We tried to fling a bridge across the Ganga at this point, but she is a creature of moods. She was annoyed that we mere humans had not appeased her first with flowers and song,” said Dadda, narrating the flood that had swept the Howrah-Kalka Mail off the tracks during the monsoons last year. There were twenty carriages strung together and floating in the murky waters. People must have screamed as they drifted out of the choking windows and sank in dirty bubbles, suitcases floating all around, photographs, timetables, a wedding garland perhaps, lunch-boxes dispersing soaked
rotis,
a film of oily
dal.
The disaster had happened at night and the passengers musthave been asleep, unaware that they were drowning till they began to breathe muddy water, felt it fill their lungs inflating them like bags, swelling through every orifice, flooding dreams and memories till there was nothing left but a floating chaos of wet, wet, wet. So the engineers and workers held a grand
pooja,
offered the milk of a hundred coconuts to Ganga, showered pink rose petals on her body, called out paeans in praise of her