IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE Read online

  Just then there was a rattling at the gate. Patti and Amma rushed to the front veranda. Sweetie-Cutie stood outside in a bright yellow saree. She had flowers in her hair. ‘May the good lord bless the house and your family and may you be blessed with a grandson,’ Sweetie-Cutie shouted in a hoarse, carrying voice.

  Patti signalled her to come through the gates. Sweetie-Cutie sauntered to the veranda and stood at the steps smiling redly at Amma. Patti undid the knot in the end of her saree and retrieved a hundred-rupee note and thrust it into Sweetie-Cutie’s hand.

  She tucked the note into her blouse. ‘What about the rice, ma? Everyone gives me a sack of rice.’

  ‘They do, do they?’ Patti retorted. ‘Then go to them and collect your rice.’

  ‘You should know better than to disappoint a hijra, ma,’ Sweetie-Cutie said, an edge to her voice. ‘We were cursed when we were born. And our curse is more deadly than a snakebite.’ Sweetie-Cutie stepped up to Amma. She waved her hand over Amma’s head. ‘May you give birth to a daughter,’ she smiled, then turned around and walked away.

  At once Patti retreated into the kitchen to pray away the hijra’s curse. Amma began to clean the house, moving from room to room with a duster. She gazed up at the old portrait hanging on the wall. She climbed up on a stool to wipe the cobwebs. Staring down at her was an image of a pale, bearded young man in a pair of high-waisted trousers, a shirt with decorative trim tucked into them. At his waist was a belt buckle with a symbol on it: three Ts joined at the bottom, and between them the letters E I C. The man stood against a backdrop of velvety curtains, a sword in one hand and a cap in the other. Amma read aloud the words stencilled below the picture: George Gibbs. The East India Trading Co. 1839. ‘Well, if it isn’t my lord Gibbs!’ Amma looked up into his blue eyes. ‘How kind it is in you to be thinking of me. I am fine.’ Then she ran the cloth carefully over the surface of the picture.

  ‘Mallika, go get a bunch of ripe bananas,’ Patti yelled out from the kitchen.

  At the back of the house Amma reached out to the bunch of rastali bananas drooping from the plantain tree and pinched the fruits one by one. Then, on a whim, she turned around and climbed the steps to the attic. She had never been up there. Her bare feet were black with dust as she stumbled through the debris on the floor. A bat darted across the room and she screamed. Siva started kicking in fright. His twin kicked him back. Amma stood still for a moment staring into the distance. She tiptoed to the far end of the attic, stepping over bundles of old newspapers and files, past a heap of mattresses, two broken umbrellas and wooden cases, to a tin trunk partially covered with an old bedsheet. Inside the trunk she found a bale of cloth wrapped in muslin with a paper tag attached to the end of it. Kalamkari on silk – Tree of Life.

  Amma tore open the muslin: handpainted on the cinnamon-brown silk inside were peacocks, parrots, interlacing leaves and plump pink lotus flowers. She touched the soft, musty fabric to her cheek.

  The light from the attic window revealed a thick ledger which had clearly been undisturbed for a very long time. Amma lifted it and blew away the dust. Particles glinted in the sunlight and a thread of dustlight traversed the room. Amma opened the cover carefully. On the first page, yellowed and stained, in indigo ink were the words:

  George Gibbs

  Victoria Villa

  23 Gibbs Road

  Machilipatnam

  Amma turned the page:

  Victoria Dyes April 1853.

  Allejaes. Red and white. Striped and checks. Medium quality. 16 yards long, 45 inches wide.

  Callowaypoos. Patterned. Medium quality. 14 yards long, 45 inches wide.

  Chintz. Block-printed.

  Dungarees. Plain white. Coarse.

  Gingham. Dyed. Medium quality.

  Sallampores. Dyed. Medium quality.

  Very quickly Amma flipped through the pages of inventories of cloth, chemicals, natural dyes, and detailed records of costs, written in short rushes. Here and there, interspersed, were jottings of a more personal sort, of things that happened each day. These accounts were mostly several pages long, scribbled hastily, some even shabbily; some others were not more than a condensed sentence:

  Made chicken curry last night.

  January 1853 – Elizabeth Arrives.

  April 1854 – John arrives.

  Amma turned over clusters of pages. Closer to the end of the ledger, after a folded and marked page, were carefully worded notes, fragments really, a diary perhaps, not of the events of each day but a short summary of entire seasons. These notes were written neatly, widely spaced in slanting handwriting, unusually large. The ‘Y’s had long tails made with a flourish of a steel nib, and like musical notes the ‘Y’s rained through the pages. Amma caressed the words with a forefinger, finding pleasure in touching what George Gibbs had written so many years ago.

  Carrying the bale of silk and the ledger, Amma stepped out of the dark attic. Then, on an impulse, she sat on the sunlit landing and opened the ledger.

  September 1840 – December 1850.

  A giant wall of water rose and the wind roared, swirled round the ship’s hull and thumped it on the sea. I stood on the deck, swaying, my heavy robes encrusted with droplets of seawater. Salt seared my nostrils and eyes; the wild wind deafened me.

  It was still summer in London when the English East India Trading Company ship put to sea. It had carried more than 500 people, guns, supplies and cargo. The water on the ship was unfit to drink and the staple ration of salt pork and rice was inedible. Some of the seamen, ravaged by typhoid and malaria, made stifled sounds of suffering. The healthy ones drank toddy until they were drunk and nauseous, uttering pitiable moans. Only 400 people were left by the time the ship reached the Cape of Good Hope. Carrion birds hovered in the sky.

  Towards dawn, many moons later, gongs and drums were beaten, a trumpet brayed, an announcement blared. The ship had docked at Machilipatnam, on the east coast of India. The air was moist and warm, and heavy with the stench of fish.

  I dusted my coat with a handkerchief, swept my hair back with both hands, and looked up at the still dark sky. The stars in it were not English: they glittered anyhow.

  ***

  Birds shrieked and shrilled all day long and the sound of wingbeats filled the air; overhead a white skein of eagles unravelled the sky. The labourers were alarmed by the bird cries, but they continued digging the earth for the foundations of the house. At the back of the site they found a grave, with human bones embedded in the dust. A skull smiled up at them from the dirt. A ripple of shock spread through them and they fell back, collected their tools and left the site.

  The contractor asked me to find another location for the house. His men were terrified of ghosts and evil spirits, he said. I regarded him coolly and then burst into laughter, upon which the contractor gravely told me that ghosts had memories and they looked for someone to latch on to. If I lived here on this land, then the dead person’s memories would seep into me and haunt me all my days. The contractor was serious. His men didn’t report for work the next day so I decided to send Matthew Thekkel, my cook, butler and general factotum, hotfoot to the tribal workers who, according to Matthew, had long ago devised a way to deal with spirits.

  The tribal workers came at once: a bunch of forty, attired in nothing more than loincloths, with blue-black markings on their arms. They built a low brick wall on the North side of the site and left lime and terracotta handprints on it. They knelt around it and joined their hands in prayer. They beseeched the ghost to go away. They made shrill sounds which to my mind seemed like a collective fit of hysterics.

  However, Matthew assured me that the ghost had been banished and the house was finished without any further hitch. It was three storied with an attic; the roof, which was cut at the top in notches, arches and pinnacles, fell in graceful sweeps like a voluminous skirt. The two verandas, one in the front and the
other alongside the kitchen, resembled two arms of the house folded across its chest. I named it then and there, and without too much thought – Victoria Villa.

  Some distance from the villa, where the swamps gave way to fields I built a factory to manufacture natural dyes and named it Victoria Dyes. It was not very different from the villa except for the tall clock tower. But one stormy night an eagle flew straight into the face of the clock and broke one of its hands. Over the years the clock remained one-handed, timeless.

  The tribal labourers had more work to do. They laid big stones on the mud path connecting the villa and the factory. With loud cries of haiya-haiya they filled the gaps between the stones with smaller pebbles, over which they drizzled gravel from large jute sacks. Haiya-haiya. Dusty clouds cluttered the air overhead. With jute cloth tied to their hands and feet, they poured hot liquid tar on the gravel; other workers rolled a heavy drum over puddles of sweaty tar. Haiya-haiya. And up ahead the path had been big-stoned, small-pebbled, gravelled, tarred and flattened. Here, a worker had put up the wooden road sign: Gibbs Road; and further on, the top of the new Gibbs Road curled like an uncoiled ribbon and rambled all the way to the beach.

  There I stood, lost in reverie, looking far out to sea.

  Amma could hear Patti move about in the kitchen below. She would have to return to her soon. But George Gibbs’ notes thrilled her: she lived in the house he had built, and her father owned his factory. How extraordinary was this! Teased by curiosity, she read on:

  The factory was hot as an oven. The outer walls had blistered in the heat. The stone floor inside was splattered with dye, red, yellow, indigo, black and brown; the room had a musty, tart smell. I stood by a large vat, the thick brown ledger in my hands, watching Chotoo, a dwarf, stirring the dye. Sunlight refracted through the glass roof tiles above and made him squint.

  ‘I daresay it could do with a touch of more red, Chotoo,’ I said. ‘Bright red but deep, and one that changes colour in the sun.’ I turned the pages of the ledger to the dog-eared leaf with my notes in indigo ink.

  Red – bark of Manjista.

  Yellow – skins of pomegranate.

  Dark blue – indigo plant.

  Brown-chocolate – Kasikalti.

  Black – Kaseem mineral.

  Purple-brown – Surupattal, catechu.

  ‘Add more Su-ru-pat-tal,’ I said looking up from the ledger.

  Chotoo lifted up the bucket of purple-brown dye; standing on his toes he poured it into the tall vat and stirred the liquid with a stick. For a dwarf he had big hands.

  ‘By God, fellow, that’s it,’ I said when the colour was just right. ‘That’s it!’

  I walked to the adjoining hall. All along its indigo-stained walls were bales of dyed silk, muslin and chintz; endless yards of silk hung from the roof. They had been previously washed in water, bleached by soaking them in buffalo dung solution and sundried for several days. Two workers dipped cloth in a trough of milk and the juice of myrobalan fruit. I asked them to add more milk. It would prevent the colours from running and tauten the fabric. I turned to two artists outlining the shapes of a peacock and a lotus on cinnamon-brown silk held tight by wooden frames. They dipped tufts of goat hair held in split bamboo sticks into a basin of iron filings and molasses, then painted fine lines on the cloth. This is a local craft, called Kalamkari. I tapped the centre of the cloth with my forefinger, ‘Make that lotus fuller and add more leaves here, and yes, a parrot.’

  At a distance the temple bells rang and sonorous chants rose into the sky. Like a counterpoint, the loudspeaker from the mosque blared out: la ilaha ila allah. On cue, even as I stood there watching them, the Hindu workers shut their eyes and folded their hands, the Muslim workers spread their mats on the floor, and together they remembered their separate Gods.

  Amma was now terribly excited. The bale of silk that she had found was most probably the same cloth that George Gibbs’ workers were painting. She tapped the cloth roll on the floor beside her and mimicked in a deep voice: Make that lotus fuller and add more leaves here, and yes, a parrot. Then she went back to the ledger, turning several pages at once and started to read the account dated February 1851:

  I followed Chotoo through the woods, a lantern in my hand. A whine of music and the dolorous wail of voices rippled the air. We walked on in the direction of the sounds. Beyond the trees closer to the sea, hidden by an outcrop of rocks, were some thatched huts. A great deal of noise came from them: the thuds and squeals of musical instruments accompanied by shrill ululations. We walked into a central court flooded by light from what seemed like a hundred lanterns. There, a gawky person dressed and made up as a woman danced. She had stubble on her face. On one side of her sat the musicians – all of them men dressed in colourful sarees and glittering ornaments. And on the other side were a host of villagers who sniggered and clapped.

  ‘That is Sita, the eunuch queen,’ Chotoo said. ‘Tonight she will chose her man and pump him to such levels of ecstasy no woman can ever provide.’

  Sita writhed her hips and heaved her large counterfeit breasts. Now and then her enraptured audience shouted words of endearment as they flung coins at her. She smiled sweetly at them. Then she looked up and her eyes rested on me and she gave a cry of delight; holding up her saree with her hands, she hurried toward me. The crowd cheered, the drums began to beat. I stood still for a moment, mesmerised, then I turned around and ran into the dark. The eunuchs called out after me. The drums beat louder, harder. I ran out of the woods and down the road. I didn’t stop at my house because my feet had got used to the speed with which I had escaped; I ran on and on. I was panting by the time I reached the factory. The workers had left. I rushed into the main hall and stopped to catch my breath. In the light of the moon I saw the cinnamon-brown silk cloth painted with lotuses and peacocks hanging on a string to dry. I stood back and stared at it, then on a whim I swirled the cloth around my body; like the eunuch queen I had just seen, I pirouetted, round and round. And round…

  All at once I stopped and, flushing a little, I discarded the silk on a pile of cloth. Then I strode down Gibbs Road. When I entered my home I could smell smoke, cinnamon and cardamom. Butter too, melted. I made my way to the kitchen and found Matthew frying something on the woodfired stove. The kitchen was dark, lit only by the faint light of a lamp in a corner and the red glow of the fire.

  ‘Oh, good heavens! What’s that awful smell?’ I asked as I walked through the door.

  ‘Chakka sar, they all be ripe.’

  I looked at the bowl next to the stove containing what seemed to me odd oversized beans.

  ‘They being chakka seeds, sar,’ Matthew said. ‘I have roasted them.’

  I peeled a seed and popped it in my mouth. It was not bad at all. I took another.

  ‘Don’t eat too many of them,’ Matthew said. ‘It is being a hot food. If you eat too many, stomach gets loose.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens! I must have no more of that! What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I am make roast pork for you? You be liking that.’

  ‘Good lord no, not again. You made pork last night and two days ago. Come to think of it, I have to say I fancy a curry. Chicken curry.’

  ‘No problem sar. I make chickan curry now.’ Matthew brought down a bottle from the shelf.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Curry powder. I make it.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Turmeric, whole coriander, dry ginger, dried red chillies, pepper, cumin, cardamom and clove. All being ground together.’

  ‘Splendid. Tell you what: let’s make the curry together,’ I said, laughing heartily at Matthew’s visible discomfiture. ‘Now tell me, what do I do first?’

  ‘You be chopping onions and making paste of ginger and garlic, then cutting chickan into squares.’

  ‘I’ll cut the chicken and chop the onions.’ I pushed up the sleeves of my sh
irt.

  ‘Very good sar,’ Matthew said in a doubtful voice.

  When the chicken and onions were chopped and the garlic and ginger pounded, I had tears streaming from my eyes. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now sar, we be heating oil in pan. Frying onions brown. Adding ginger and garlic and curry powder and little bit vinegar. Then cooking till oil be separating out. Adding a pinch of salt then and water, and cooking and cooking until the chickan pieces are becoming cooked.’

  I ate the chicken curry with rice dyed yellow by turmeric.

  ‘By Jove, this is really good!’ I said to Matthew. ‘I must say I like chicken curry. Certainly, I do.’

  Patti’s voice came from below. ‘Mallika, are you getting the bananas or what?’

  ‘They are not ripe!’

  ***

  It was getting overcrowded in Amma’s womb: Siva’s twin had taken up all the room. She had grown bigger than him. He couldn’t kick his legs or move his arms. His sister’s body pushed him against the wall of the womb, and his head was squashed against her chest. Now and then she put her finger on the top of Siva’s forehead, then slowly ran it over the ridge of his nose, down its tip, over the lips, the chin and all the way down the neck to the hollow under it. Then she curled her finger into the dip, sheltered and safe.