English Lessons and Other Stories (10 page)

At Jorbagh market, I keep her from the tooting of the three-wheeled scooter-rickshaws and tell her the prices the fruit-seller asks. When she turns her face away so that she cannot read my lips anymore, it is my signal to tell the fruit-seller that is her rock-bottom price. She takes very little money with her — just a few notes tied in the corner of her dupatta, so that Balvir and Jai will inherit more of their father's wealth. Even so, she always gives me a little to buy an offering of marigold garlands at the Hindu temple and she waits outside in the shade while I ring the bell before Ganesh and ask him to smile upon my distant children. When I emerge, she offers a gentle chide. “Amma, Vaheguru also answers old women's prayers.”

Later, when she has put colour on her cheeks and her lips are hibiscus-red, she is ready to receive relatives. Ever since she lost her ears, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh, Sardar and Sardarni Sewa Singh — people her husband helped when a Partition-refugee's application lay between them and the begging bowl — are the only ones who still come to pay her respect.

They touch her feet in greeting; she represents her husband for them. It's been a long time since either Balvir or Jai touched her feet — or mine.

“Amma,” they say. It gives them status to call me Amma — old servants are rare these days, only good families have them. Today Khansama's white uniform jacket is crumpled and he wears its Nehru collar insolently unhooked, but Mem-saab does not
order him to change it before he wheels in the brass trolley-cart crowned with a wobbling tea cozy. She talks to her relatives in English about his “stealing.” As always, she says she will send him and his family back to his village.

She is ashamed to tell her relatives about the lock on her husband's room and the suitcase that says Balvir is staying for as long as it takes to break her again.

I have made sweet white rasgullahs to serve after dinner, but I should have made Balvir eat them before the meal to sweeten his words.

“You are getting so old, you cannot make up your mind about anything,” he tells Mem-saab. He remembers to speak slowly, but it is always difficult for her to lip-read men with mustaches and beards.

I leave out the part about being old when I repeat for her — she is younger than I, after all.

Mem-saab gestures for me to offer him more of Khansama's curry.

“Your father told me never to move from this house,” she says. “You know, we built it together, selling the jewellery we escaped with during Partition. I can still see him walking with me through these rooms the first time, telling me this house would replace all we had lost. Perhaps you are right that I cannot decide anything, Balvir, but you know…” she smiles apologetically, “your father always decided everything for me.”

Balvir scrapes the serving spoon around the bowl. He is too old for me to tell him not to be greedy.

“If your business is not doing well, Balvir, I can give you money. What more do you and Jai need?”

As always, she is too mild with her youngest.

Balvir rocks back in his father's chair, taking her measure through
half-closed eyes. Then he lets its legs thump to the carpet, and he shifts. A mongrel, kicked away once, will attack afresh. And from behind.

He mouths without sound, so that I too have to lip-read his words, “Today I made arrangements with a construction company. Tomorrow they will begin building two bedrooms on the terrace for Kiran and Manu and myself to move here and live with you.”

Mem-saab looks at me; I shake my head as if I have not understood. He repeats it, mouthing clearly so she cannot mistake his words.

She gestures for me to offer him a chapatti.

“Why?” she asks, wary.

Balvir's strong dark hands close around the softness of the chapatti. He tears a small piece from its slack circle. Then another and another. Intent as a counterfeit yogi, he tears every piece smaller and smaller.

“I will take care of you in your old age, Mama,” he says.

She reads the words from his lips. They are what she wants to read, and she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise.

Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”

White shreds of chapatti grow to a pile before Balvir. The handles of a silver salver I hold out to him feel as though they will burn through my serving cloth. I come level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lichees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.

Dinner is over.

I return the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. I think I will give the rasgullahs to Khansama instead.

*

The next morning, Jai calls from abroad. I answer the phone and tell him Mem-saab is well. I say this though she breathed through the night as though a grateful child might emerge in the morning.

I have always had a sleeping mat on the floor in Mem-saab's room, but since the anti-Sikh riots two rains ago, she is afraid she will not hear a mob of Hindus breaking down the gates, so I sleep closer now, on a woollen foot-carpet beside her bed.

In the evening, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh come to the gates and they find them closed, though I have made Memsaab beautiful and she is waiting upstairs. I hear Khansama tell them Mem-saab went to tea at the Delhi Golf Club with her son, Balvir, and I start down the stairs to correct him.

How nice of him, he's looking after his mother. Such a fine son,” I hear Sardar Gulab Singh say. Helpless, I watch his Bajaj scooter putt-putt away, with Sardarni Gulab Singh seated erect and side-saddle behind.

Khansama smiles as he turns from the gate, and I see him look at a new watch on his wrist. Balvir does not like poor relations.

“He's always been a generous boy,” Mem-saab says of the wristwatch. “What a misunderstanding. I'll tell Balvir he must phone them to apologize. Put on the TV, Amma — tell me what other mothers and their sons are doing.”

I watch Balvir for three days, but he does not call Sardar Gulab Singh to apologize.

The construction men pound above us. The walls on the terrace rise higher and higher.

A fine grey cement dust settles on the furniture and I tell Khansama to dust the painting of Balvir's father above the mantle twice a day. I am still hoping the old man's steady gaze will shame his son and his daughter-in-law, but last night, when Balvir was
drunk enough and he thought no one was listening, he raised his glass to his father and said, “What does a widow need with all that money?”

I heard him.

Not once since Kiran and Manu arrived has the family sat at table with my Mem-saab. Khansama has orders to serve Balvir and Kiran morning tea in “their” bedroom. Kiran says she cannot accompany Mem-saab for shopping, because her taste is
so
different. Instead, she orders Mem-saab's car and driver almost every day — to visit her friends, she says. Mem-saab gives the driver money for petrol and tells him to treat Kiran with respect. And she even admonishes me, though gently, as Kiran squeals that I broke all the plastic half-circles in her brassieres when I washed them.

Every day at teatime Balvir tells her they are too busy to sit with her and talk. He's not too busy to talk all day on the phone to Bombay. When the phone bill comes Mem-saab says nothing, but takes a taxi to Grindlays Bank to get the money to pay it. He's not too busy to entertain every evening, buying whisky in cases on his mother's account at the market. Every night Balvir makes Khansama bring them Mem-saab's best crystal and all of them put their feet up on Mem-saab's polished teak tables and her sofas. He and Kiran sit in Mem-saab's drawing room with their raucous white friends — he calls them “buyers” — long after decent people have gone to bed. Once he made a buyer stay two hours longer just because Kiran gave a bad luck sneeze as the man rose to leave.

Mem-saab sits in her bedroom for long hours at a time. Before her are martyr's pictures: of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the Sikh guru executed by Aurangzeb for his defence of the right of all Hindus to worship, and of Bhai Deep Singh, whose tortured bleeding trunk straddles a white steed and who carries his severed head aloft in defiance. Her lips move, soundless, before the martyrs'
image. I think even Sikhs sometimes need images to witness their tears.

“Shall I bring oil for your massage?” It is all I have to offer.

“Not today, Amma. My chest is hurting.”

When Kiran breaks a glass bangle, Balvir buys her a new gold one, saying, “You mustn't bring bad luck to me by breaking bangles.” I begin to notice the disappearance of things familiar. Fine vases have found their way to “their” room, a china rose that Mem-saab brought back from abroad is no longer in the sideboard. A set of silver candlesticks vanishes. A mirror with a golden frame is replaced by a cheap Rajasthani silk painting smelling of the street-hawker's bundle. An ivory miniature departs in gift paper for Kiran's mother.

When I tell Mem-saab, she says it must be Khansama, stealing again. Then she turns her head away so she cannot read my answer.

“Go away, Amma,” she says. “I am going to write to Jai.”

Once, I rejoiced with Mem-saab when Balvir called from Bombay to tell us he'd had a son. At Manu's naming, I took him in my arms and I showed him proudly through the gates, to my Shiv. I had expected Mem-saab to send me to Bombay so I could massage his baby limbs or feed him gripe water, but Kiran was too modern for that.

Visiting Mem-saab, he fell once — as children do — and I'd swabbed Dettol on his wound. Direct from the bottle, just as I always had for his father and Jai. Kiran confronted me, bottle in hand, scolding that I would kill him with pain, and didn't I know Dettol must be diluted with water? How would I have known — the directions were written on the white label in English. She'd taken Manu from me to sit before the TV.

And here the boy sits as though he'd never moved, just grown,
so a sky-blue turban bobs above the sun-bleached gold silk sofa. A strange boy, still beardless, who needs video-boxes from the market to tell him stories of men and women pale as the Embassy-walla downstairs.

He does not rise as she enters her own drawing-room.

“Manu,” she says. “Go tell the driver to bring my car.”

He shouts, facing her so she reads him, “Amma, tell Driver to bring the car.”

Mem-saab says gently, “No, Manu, dear. You go and tell the driver to bring my car. The video can wait.”

The boy turns his head, but he does not move.

“You can't order me around. Daddy says you're nobody.”

Offspring of a snake! I stand silent with shock.

Mem-saab looks at me, “What… what did he say?”

I turn to her and speak the words slowly, just as the boy said them.

She comes around to face Manu. A small hand grips his arm above the elbow.

“I said, go and tell the driver to bring my car. Amma has to prepare to go with me.”

The boy shakes off her hand, but he goes.

In the car Mem-saab says, “Amma, we are going to meet a lady-lawyer.”

The lady-lawyer has an office in the one-car garage attached to her home. She wears a starched white tie dangling lopsided on a soiled string above the plunge of her sari-blouse neckline. Her skin would spring to the touch, like my Leela's — she seems too young to have read all the maroon books that line the walls of the garage.

The lady-lawyer listens to Mem-saab with weary though gentle respect; too many women must have cried before her. I sit
on the floor while they sit in chairs, and I massage Mem-saab's leg through her salwar as she speaks so she will know there is someone who cares.

Mem-saab speaks in Punjabi, as she always does when there are private matters to be said. She ignores my usual signal to lower the strength of her voice and her outrage assaults us, drowning the rattle of the straining air conditioner. I content myself with interjecting a word or two in Hindi occasionally for the lady-lawyer.

Though I am still her ears, Mem-saab has seen much that I — and maybe Balvir, too — had thought she denied.

When Mem-saab has no words left, the lady-lawyer sees Mem-saab's embroidered hanky has turned to a useless wet ball and she offers her own. She tells me to tell her, “Be strong. I will try to help you.”

Mem-saab's hand seeks mine and grips it. Her fingers are cold despite the close heat.

Now the lady-lawyer talks directly to Mem-saab. She tries to speak slowly, but I have to repeat her words sometimes for Memsaab to read them from my lips.

“You say your son now owns twenty-five percent of your house?”

Mem-saab looks at her from beneath her black-pencilled arches, expecting reproach.

“Yes.”

“Then, legally, he can occupy the premises.”

This is not what she wishes to read, so I have to repeat it.

The lady-lawyer continues, “We can charge that he gained his rights by putting you under duress. And if you wish to stop him from building, we can ask the court to do that.”

“Nothing more?” says Mem-saab.

I want to tell the lady-lawyer to make Balvir and Kiran and Manu evaporate like the first monsoon rain on a hot tar road, but
I am just a pair of ears for my Mem-saab, and this is her family matter, and now our triangular exchange has faltered.

Nothing more.

Mem-saab writes a check and signs a vakalatnama appointing the lady-lawyer to begin her mukadma. She leans heavily on my arm as I lead her back to the car.

Mem-saab is lying on her bed. The effort of getting dressed seems to have exhausted her today.

Balvir is angry. Through the keyhole, I see him waving the papers that the lady-lawyer caused to be sent him.

“This is the thanks I get for giving up my business in Bombay, for moving my family to Delhi to live with you. How could three people live in Sardarji's old room? If you didn't want me to build, you should have just told me so.”

I have locked Mem-saab's bedroom door and he rages outside.