A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be, what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away. It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realised that her husband, like many young men who worked on lonely tea estates, was hopelessly addicted to alcohol.
When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border districts. We moved to Calcutta. Once we got there, my mother decided that she would not return to Assam. From Calcutta we travelled across the country, all the way south to Ootacamund – Ooty – a small hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC – Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy – was four and a half years old, and I was a month away from my third birthday. We did not see or hear from our father again until we were in our 20s.
In Ooty we lived in one half of a “holiday” cottage that belonged to our maternal grandfather, who had retired as a senior government servant – an Imperial Entomologist – with the British government in Delhi. He and my grandmother were estranged. He had severed links with her and his children years ago. He died the year I was born.
I don’t know how we got into that cottage. Maybe the tenant who lived in the other half had a key. Maybe we broke in. The cottage was dank and gloomy with cold, cracked cement floors and an asbestos ceiling. A plywood partition separated our half from rooms occupied by the tenant. She was an old English lady called Mrs Patmore. She wore her hair in a high, puffy style, which made us wonder what was hidden inside it. Wasps, we thought, my brother and I. At night she had bad dreams and would scream and moan. I’m not sure if she paid any rent. She might not have known who to pay it to. We, certainly, paid no rent. We were squatters, interlopers – not tenants. We lived like fugitives amid huge wooden trunks packed full of the dead Imperial Entomologist’s opulent clothes – silk ties, dress shirts, three-piece suits.
We found an old biscuit tin full of cufflinks. Later, when my brother and I were old enough to understand, we would be told the legendary family stories about him: about his vanity (he had a portrait of himself taken in a Hollywood photo studio) and his violence (he whipped his children, turned them out of the house regularly, and split my grandmother’s scalp open with a brass vase). It was to get away from him, our mother told us, that she married the first man who proposed to her.
Quite soon after we arrived, she got a teaching job at a local school called Breeks. Ooty was, at the time, swarming with schools, some of them run by British missionaries who had chosen to stay on in India after independence. She became friends with a group of them who taught at an all-white school called Lushington, which catered to the children of British missionaries working in India. She managed to persuade them to let her sit in on their classes when she had time off from her job. She hungrily absorbed their innovative teaching methods while being simultaneously disturbed by their kindly, well-meaning racism towards Indians and India.
A few months into our fugitive life, my grandmother (the Entomologist’s widow) and her oldest son – my mother’s older brother, G Isaac – arrived from Kerala to evict us. I hadn’t seen either of them before. They told my mother that under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property and that we were to leave the house immediately.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that we had nowhere to go. My grandmother didn’t say much, but she scared me. She had conical corneas and wore opaque sunglasses. I remember my mother, my brother and me holding hands, running through the town in panic, trying to find a lawyer. In my memory it was night and the streets were dark. But it couldn’t have been. Because we did manage to find a lawyer, who told us that the Travancore act applied only in the state of Kerala, not Tamil Nadu, and that even squatters had rights. He said if anyone tried to evict us, we could call the police. We returned to the cottage shaking but triumphant.
Our uncle G Isaac could not have known then that, by trying to evict his younger sister from their father’s cottage, he was laying the ground for his own downfall. It would be years before my mother had the means and the standing to challenge the Travancore Christian Succession Act and demand an equal share of her father’s property in Kerala. Until then, she would shield and safeguard this memory of her mortification as though it were a precious family heirloom, which, in a way, it was.
After our legal coup we expanded into the cottage, made ourselves some space. My mother gave away the Imperial Entomologist’s suits and cufflinks to taxi drivers at the taxi stand near the market, and for a while Ooty had the best-dressed taxi drivers in the world.
Despite our hard-won but still tentative sense of security, things didn’t go our way. The cold, wet climate in Ooty aggravated my mother’s asthma. She would lie under a thick metallic-pink quilt on a high iron cot, breathing great, heaving breaths, bedridden for days on end. We thought she was going to die. She didn’t like us standing around staring at her and would order us out of her room. So my brother and I would go off to find something else to stare at.
Mostly, we swung on the low, rickety gate at the corner of the triangular compound, watching newlywed couples on their honeymoon holding hands and walking past our home on their way to romance each other in Ooty’s famous botanical gardens. Sometimes they stopped and talked to us. They gave us sweets and peanuts. A man gave us a catapult. We spent days perfecting our aim. We made friends with strangers. Once, one of them grabbed my hand and marched me back into the house. He told my mother sternly that her daughter had chickenpox. He made me show her the blister on my stomach, which I had been showing off to anybody who cared to examine it. My mother was furious. After he left, she smacked me hard on my cheek and told me I was never to lift my dress and show my stomach to strangers. Especially men.
It could have been her illness or the medication, but she became extremely bad-tempered and began to hit us often. When she did this my brother would run away and only come home after dark. He was a quiet boy. He never cried. When he was upset he would put his head down on the dining table and pretend to be asleep. When he was happy, which wasn’t often, he would dance around me boxing the air, saying he was Cassius Clay. I don’t know how he knew who Cassius Clay was; I didn’t. Maybe our father told him. I think those years in Ooty were harder for him than for me because he remembered things. He remembered a better life. He remembered our father and the big house we had lived in on the tea estate. He remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.
My brother started school before me. He went to Lushington, the white-people’s school, for a few months. (It must have been a favour to my mother from the missionaries.) But when he began to call local children like ourselves “those Indian children” she pulled him out and enrolled him in Breeks, the school that she taught in.
On days when her asthma was really bad, my mother would write out a shopping list of vegetables and provisions, put it into a basket and send us into town with it. Ooty was a safe, small town then, with little traffic. The policemen knew us. The shopkeepers were always kind and sometimes even gave us credit. The kindest of them all was a lady called Kurussammal, who worked in the Knitting Shop. She knitted two polo‑neck sweaters for us. Bottle-green for my brother. Plum for me.
When my mother became completely bedridden for a few weeks, Kurussammal moved in with us. Our edgy lifestyle came to an end. It was Kurussammal who taught us what love was. What dependability was. What being hugged was. She would cook for us and bathe us outdoors in the bitter Ooty cold with water she boiled in a huge pot on a wood fire. To this day, my brother and I need to be almost boiled to feel properly bathed.
Before she bathed us, she combed the lice out of our hair and showed us how to kill them. I loved killing them. They made a satisfying sound when I squashed them with my thumbnail. Apart from being a lightning-quick knitter, Kurussammal was a superb cook. She specialised in producing food from almost no ingredients. Even boiled rice with salt and a fresh green chilli tasted good when she put it on our plates. Kurussammal’s name meant “mother of the cross” in Tamil. Her husband was Yesuratnam (“Jesus jewel”, “jewel of jewels”). He had a goitre on his neck that he hid with his woollen muffler. He, like us, always smelled of wood smoke.
Eventually my mother grew too sick to hold down her job. Even the steroids she was on didn’t help. We ran out of money. My brother and I grew undernourished and developed primary tuberculosis. After a few more grim months of fighting on all fronts, my mother gave up. She decided to swallow her pride and return to Kerala, to Ayemenem, our grandmother’s village. She was out of options.
As our train crossed the border from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, the land turned from brown to green. Everything, including the electric poles, was smothered with plants and creepers. Everything glistened. Almost all the people who slid past the train window, both men and women, wore white and carried black umbrellas.
My heart sang.
And then sank.
We arrived in Ayemenem uninvited and manifestly unwelcome. The house whose doorstep we appeared on with our invisible begging bowl belonged to my grandmother’s older sister, Miss Kurien. She would have been in her 60s then. Her thin, wavy grey hair was cut in a style that used to be called a pageboy. She wore starched, papery saris with big, loose blouses. Miss Kurien was far ahead of most women of her time. She was single, held a master’s degree in English literature and had taught at a college in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).
My mother assured her that we would stay only as long as it took for her to find a job. Miss Kurien, who prided herself on being a good Christian, agreed to let us stay, but made no effort to hide her disapproval of us and our situation. She did this by ignoring us and showering her delicate affections on other relatives’ children who visited her. She gave them gifts, played her piano and sang to them in her quavering voice. Even though she made it clear that she did not like us (which made us not like her), she was the one person who helped us out and gave us a roof over our heads when we most needed it.
My grandmother lived with her, too. She was almost blind by then and still wore her dark glasses. Even at night. She had a ridge that ran across her scalp – her famous brass-vase scar. Sometimes she let me run my finger over it. Every evening she would sit on the veranda and play her violin. She had taken music lessons when her Imperial Entomologist husband was posted to Vienna. When her tutor told him that his wife had the potential to become a concert-class violinist, he stopped the lessons and, in a fit of jealous rage, smashed the first violin she owned.
I was too young to tell how well she played, but as darkness fell in Ayemenem and the sound of crickets swelled, her music made the evenings and the very dark nights more melancholic than they already were.
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My uncle G Isaac lived in an annexe attached to the main house. At first, I was terrified of him. I only knew him as the tall, fat, angry man who had tried to turn us out of our home in Ooty. In Ayemenem, though, I grew to love him after he began to take my brother and me down to the river and teach me to swim. G Isaac was one of India’s first Rhodes scholars. His subject was Greek and Roman mythology. At the dining table he would suddenly say things like: “Isn’t it wonderful to have a god of wine and ecstasy?” Everybody would look at him blankly. And he would tell us about Dionysus, or whoever his god of the day was.
After teaching for a few years in a college in Madras, he gave up his academic career to return to his roots and start a pickle, jam and curry powder factory with his mother. It was called Malabar Coast Products. They ran it out of the Imperial Entomologist’s family home in Kottayam town, which was a short bus ride away. (This was the house that would become the centre of the dispute when my mother challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act.) G Isaac, notwithstanding his keen interest in inheritance and private property, was a Marxist. He said he had given up his career to start a factory to promote small industry and generate local employment. Fed up with his nonsense, his Swedish wife, Cecilia, whom he had met in Oxford, left him and returned to Sweden with their three young sons. In these strange and manifold ways, this constellation of extraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life, converged on the tiny village of Ayemenem.
Life there was like living on a ledge that we could be nudged off at any moment. Even Kochu Maria, the cook, would tell me that we had no right to be living there. She would mutter and grumble about the shamefulness of having fatherless children living under the same roof as decent people. Every few days the Cosmopolitans would quarrel. When they fought, the whole house shook. Plates would be smashed; doors broken down.
As soon as the shouting began, I would flee. The river was my refuge. It made up for everything that was wrong in my life. I spent hours on its banks and came to be on intimate, first-name terms with the fish, the worms, the birds and the plants. I became close friends with other children (and some adults) in the village. I picked up Malayalam quickly and was soon able to communicate with everybody quite easily. They inhabited a different universe from mine. Most of them worked in nearby paddy fields and rubber plantations, or picking coconuts or working as house-help. They lived in mud-and- thatch-roofed houses. Many of them belonged to castes that were considered “untouchable”. I didn’t know much about this horror at the time, because everybody in the Ayemenem house was too busy fighting with one another to bother about indoctrinating me.
One young man who lived in Ayemenem but worked in Kottayam in Malabar Coast Products became my most beloved friend. We spent a lot of time together. He made me a fishing rod out of a culm of bamboo and showed me where to find the best earthworms to use as bait. He taught me to fish; he taught me to stay still and be quiet. He fried the tiny fish I caught, and we ate them together as though we were feasting at a banquet. He was the inspiration for the character called Velutha, Ammu’s lover, in The God of Small Things.
Within months of being in Ayemenem, I turned into a part of its landscape – a wild child with calloused feet who knew every hidden path and shortcut in the village that led to the river. I lived outdoors and went home as seldom as possible. In the non-human category, my closest companion was a striped palm squirrel who lived on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. We shared secrets. She wasn’t my pet. She had her own life, but chose to share it with me. She would disappear often because she had things to do. At mealtimes she would appear, perch on my plate and nibble at my food. She was constantly watchful, eternally alert to every possibility of looming danger. She taught me things.
My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure on to my brother and me. We were the only safe harbour she had. Her temper, already bad, became irrational and uncontrollable. I found it impossible to predict or gauge what would anger her and what would please her. I had to pick my way through that minefield without a map. When she got angry with me, she would mimic my way of speaking. She was a good mimic and made me sound ridiculous to myself. I clearly remember everything about every instance she did that. Even what I was wearing. It felt as though she had cut me out – cut my shape out – of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.
The first time it happened was on our way home from Madras, where we had been for two weeks. Her older sister, Mrs Joseph, had asked if my mother could look after her three children while she and her husband were away on holiday. My mother agreed. She must have felt that she would – at least nominally – be earning her keep while she was there.
Unlike the quarrelsome Ayemenem Cosmopolitans, Mrs Joseph had a proper husband, who was a pilot for Indian Airlines; proper children; and a proper house with servants. Mrs Joseph was acutely conscious of the fact that in these matters she had succeeded where her siblings had failed. She was good-looking, with a high, smug voice that matched her starched, ironed saris and her neat hairstyle. She had a tight, knowing smile and always sounded as though she were confiding in the person she was talking to. There was no resemblance at all, neither physical nor temperamental, between her and my mother.
When Mrs Joseph came back from her holiday, the sisters had a terrible spat about something. We returned to Kerala the next day by plane. My aunt’s pilot husband had a quota of free tickets. We hadn’t been in a plane before. Once we were seated, intending to conduct a reasonable, adult conversation as should be conducted by co-passengers on an airplane, I asked my mother how, if Mrs Joseph was her real sister, was Mrs Joseph so thin?
My mother turned on me in a rage. I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like water down a sink until I was gone. Then she said: “By the time you are my age you’ll be three times my size.” I knew I had said something terrible, but I wasn’t sure what. (I was too young for “fat” and “thin” to be value judgments.) It was only years later, when I managed to think about it clearly without dwelling on my own feelings, that I finally realised how hurtful what I said must have been.
The steroids my mother was on had made her suddenly gain weight. She had developed a typical cortisone moon-face. Her striking, fine-featured face had disappeared behind puffy cheeks and a double chin. She must have been feeling forlorn and hopeless after her visit to her slimmer sister’s perfect home. Her triumphant career was still ahead of her, but there was no sign of it then.
My question to my mother about her thin sister would have felt like vinegar on an open wound. Careless words from a careless child. So she turned on me and mimicked my six-year-old’s way of speaking. And I turned on myself. I remember the colour of my dress. Sky-blue with polka dots. A perfect hand-me-down from my perfect cousin with straight hair and big doe eyes. I saw that the dress didn’t match my knees, which were full of scars and cuts – a comprehensive logbook of my wild, imperfect, fatherless, pilotless life on the banks of the Meenachil River in Ayemenem.
I staged an imaginary competition with my perfect cousin, which I won hands down. She had a pilot father. And lovely hair. But I had a green river. (With fish in it, with the sky and trees in it and at night the broken yellow moon in it.) And a squirrel. I looked at my feet and saw that they didn’t belong in the sandals they wore.
It was a horrible plane full of horrible people in a horrible sky. I wanted it to crash and for all of us to die. I especially hated the spoiled children with doting parents. But in a while my mother said: “I’m your mother and your father and I love you double.”
And then the plane was all right. The sky was all right. But my feet were still strangers to the sandals they wore. And there were still some unresolved issues.
If I was going to be three times her size, I would need three seats to sit on. So, three free tickets. Double. Triple. A maths class. A sum to solve. What is double-love divided by triple-my-size multiplied by free tickets divided by careless words? A cold, furry moth on a frightened heart. That moth was my constant companion.
I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.