Tom Tiddler's Ground (an excerpt)
…a bad fairy had
made a deal with me, ‘give me your history and I will give you something to
take it away…’
–
Swimming Home, Deborah Levy
I
grew up watching silly Tamil movies until I was rescued by Harry Potter. Harry Potter was magic. It made me look for secret chambers in the stuck-up, run-down schools I was sent to. It made me ask my
mother to make me mashed potatoes and hot chocolate for breakfast instead of
the usual avial and pesarattu… We bought our first computer when
I was in 5th standard (I must’ve been ten years old) and when I asked
my father permission for computer games he said, ‘Computers are for computing.
Not playing silly games.’ (I couldn’t be thankful enough: I now think of
computers as ‘for composing’ not ‘playing silly games’.)
When
my father was a boy in Madurai one day, while he was sitting squat on the floor
at his uncle’s book store drawing margins (freehand) on exercise books he himself
had bound, an old man came up to him and
said, ‘My boy, you will grow up and become a great “ruler”!’ He became a
great engineer… He graduated from the IISc. ’74/’75. When he was a young man
he’d have to queue up for hours to get a chance at the IBM 129 key-punching
machine to have his Fortran programs (mostly for solving large differential
equations: he was a mechanical engineer) punched out into cards (thousands of
cards, he’d say) and then queue up for another few hours to get these loaded
into the Mainframe and have the results printed out… ‘Computers are for
computing.’ I don’t think Beethoven’s father might have been any different…
My
mother was the runt. She had five older brothers and an older sister she still
croons to on the phone. Her father was a railway clerk. They had a cow (who’d
now stopped milking) and exactly when my grandmother, pregnant with my mother,
went to the stable to feed the cow for the night, her water broke. My mother
was delivered at midnight (thirty three years later and after three still
births I’d be her birthday gift!) at the stable on a hay stack… My
grandfather’s boss, who’d come home the next day to see my baby mother was so
cut up by their financial status, and my emaciated grandmother, that he’d give
them a cow Meenakshi, and her calf Lakshmi after whom my mother would be named.
My mother would become a little milk girl. She’d deliver free milk to my
grandfather’s boss whose daughters Sita and Rajam would become her friends.
Sixteen years later–refusing many an offer to pursue a PhD in mathematics at
the pre-eminent institute of technology where she’d done MSc–she got married to my father and became a lecturer at a woman’s college in South Bangalore
where whom should she meet in her final year BSc class but Sita’s daughter
Malathi! Malathi took my mother to her home (which was right down the lane from
the apartment both our families would move into later, just before I’d be born)
and Sita auntie’s mother said to my mother, ‘You used to be a little milk girl di!
now you’ve gone and become my granddaughter’s lecturer!’
We
moved into the apartment. Shifted from flat to rented flat, until, when I got
to 5th standard, we bought our own. 317. (If you want to break into
our home now you will find a spare key in the number-locked letter box: the
combination of which is: 317.) Then we got richer and richer and by the time I
got to 8th standard we moved into the 1800 sq ft flat we’re living
in now, we bought a new Santro (it’s a larger car now I don’t know the brand
of) and by the time I finished my BE (my father had retired) and landed at a
job at Guindy my parents had saved enough to be able to fund my American degree
at a college at Chicago…
It’s
funny the tricks a vocabulary can play on you.
I’d wanted to know every word in the OED not so much out of that
Naipaulian spirit–‘I have got to show these people that I can beat them at
their own language.’ [Letters Between a Father and Son, 1999]–but because
I had had to for my GRE! With words the desire to write came. But I had grown
up watching silly Tamil movies… Yes, I
couldn’t read or write Tamil but I felt–after I’d gone deep enough into the
art–that my Tamil was far better. Give me a recording of a dialogue from a
movie and I could tell you everything about the characters who might have made
that dialogue – the part of the state they came from–you know how India is a
community, or caste riven society–their community, or caste… what they might’ve
had for breakfast. Isn’t that what it is to know a language well enough to be a
writer in that language unless you don’t know any other language that well?
Now, my
mother’s gone back to being the little milk girl; my father, the forlorn boy making
margins. I have left my body on a distant shore.
.
35th
street,
Chicago, January,
2016
‘Loose
Square. Loose Square.’ men tout for menthol cigarettes (the sort I’d smoke
(they’re really cheap) before Arundati would take me to Iwan Ries & co and roll me a fag of Peter Stokkebye) as Arundati and I
make our way to Walgreens to procure our second bottle for the night… Two hours
back I’d given Arundati the shock of her lifetime. It was only over the last
two weeks that we’d become this intimate. Every alternate day, two bottles.
She’d play Bach and Beethoven and Mozart (her favourite) while we’d drink, and
when I had asked her how she’d got into that kind of music, she told me: When
she was a girl and her friend Jerry had introduced her to pop music, she’d found herself in love with Led Zeppelin;
and while in her late teens (when the broadband had just reached the Indian
home) and she’d trawl through Youtube for interpretations of Led Zeppelin’s songs, she’d chance
on a London Philharmonic’s interpretation of her favourite – Stairway
to Heaven; something about the balance, the harmony, the symmetry,
so much like the Indian classical dance concerts she’d grown up watching, left
a marked effect on her so that when the autoplay suggested Mozart’s 25th symphony by
the same orchestra, she didn’t cancel; that was her first Mozart, seven years
ago; the first movement was so familiar, it was from that Titan watch add, she
never looked back… I had just been teaching myself to play the penny
whistle! It was a key of D whistle. (It’s got six holes: for those of you who
don’t google!) And I’d just learned on YouTube that the secret to playing Irish
folk music on the whistle was to begin at the penultimate note (E in my
whistle) – go up – go down – and end at the penultimate note. I kept twiddling with
my whistle and after about six days–not more–I arrived at something shocking… I put it down on a sheet of paper in a code
with which I’d come up because I was not yet used to sheet music notes: so,
fipple on top, I’d just put
a ‘1’ if a hole was to be covered, and a
‘0’ if not. So that–
D E
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 0
–and
so on. Arundati had had a dissertation to prepare for and had said she wasn’t
free for a week. Plus, she was skint. So, drunk to the gills, I went to her
flat. Her roommate Clarissa (whose
boyfriend had introduced me to Corne who sold me my marijuana) opened the door
and I asked for Arundati. She came. I wasn’t even called in. I stood at the
door way, my tweed jacket on, my passport in the breast-pocket, $4 in the pant
pocket, and played–
E
F# G F# E F#
1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 0 1 1 1
1 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
there’s a
lay- dy who’s
sure
E F#
G A G
F# E
1 1
1 1 1 1 1
1 1
1 1
1 1 1
1 1
1 0 1 1 1
1 1
0 0 0 1 1
1 0
0 0 0 0 1
0 0
0 0 0
0 0
all
that glit- ters
is go- uld
E F# G A G F# E D D E E
1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0
and
she’s
buy- ing a stair- way to he- a- ven
‘Loose
Square. Loose Square.’ We get back. The night is nippy. It is 12 o’ clock.
There’s half a bottle of the pinot noir we’d bought at Jewel Osco (where
I get Corne to deliver my marijuana) and a full bottle of the Cabernet
Sauvignon we’ve just bought at Wallgreens before it’s too late to go out…
That
is all I remember of that night. The next day when I woke at 11:00–as always on
nights like the last–naked on the mattress on the floor (my roommate, Priyanka,
on the other side of the puce fix-it-yourself-cloth-wardrobe I’d use to split our
room in two, screaming on the phone) and rolled myself a cigarette and rang
Arundati to ask her to come down for a smoke – she cut my call… I went down to ask
her for a smoke and Clarissa told
me she wasn’t there – which is strange because her boots were still lying… She
made it clear that she didn’t wish to be in my presence. I took the cue. What
did it matter anyway? There was the music, the poetry, the novels, the wine, and,
in a manner of speaking, even the marijuana she had brought into my life. I kept
trying to write fancy poems. My grades dropped. In the summer I landed at a job in
the library. $8/hour. More money, more books, more marijuana, no food, no wine.
A year later we’d meet. I’d be entirely different. New body. New music. New
food. New accent. We’d have tea at my place. Smoke. Exchange notes. Two weeks
later she’d die of asphyxiation… Arundati was form. I was material. Arundati was fish. I was chips. Arundati was photon.
I was electron. She died inside
me and excited me to a higher energy level and my
book (titled after her poem) was the spark of light I’d emit before returning
to where I truly belong – my room…
I’m
a one-time very famous writer now as you might well know. I wrote one book that
once brought me a lot of money and still, two years since, brings enough to see
me through. (I live right opposite my parent’s flat: I nip in for meals!). I
feel I’ve reached that stage of life where one just wants to put her feet up
and wait for something new to happen, something more than a flash in the pan,
from someone more than a mere smart-alec (one of Arundati’s words). I feel I
might fall in love again, with the dear boy’s
mother (the minor poet): the dear boy–PG–who wrote that very touching
review of my book… But when I do look at the red-cheeked warbler, a jester bird
whose song made us cut papaya pieces for it that now so many birds feast on, pulling
rank with it, or when I wake from a (re-curring) dream of Arundati teaching
poetry to a class in that run-down
institution MAZE in which I used to be a maths teacher; (or when I
listen to the Adagietto) I find myself thinking of her and crying in a hoarse,
parched, echoing voice – ‘Come back,
Arundati.’
.
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When I had
come back from Chicago, pale and cadaver-ous, my parents had come to the
Bangalore International Airport to pick me up. When I got out of the airport,
my father started with a twitch when he saw me to help me with the luggage
while my mother puckered her lips and cried… I had to take her to the… to spend
a rupee, and while I was holding her handbag, wearing my ear-phones like a
shield, like I still do, listening to Mozart’s Requiem, convincing myself that I
didn’t belong here in the bustle, my father caught a taxi… Everything around
me–the road spotted in yellow traffic, the massive bill-boards with strange
hieroglyphics–everything, came as a blur. A schizophrenia I shall never come
out of…
My mother was still crying with her hands over mine; just like two years
back; only then I was menstruating. Pomegranate juice and a dosa wrapped with
honey were brought for me… One day when I was a girl and my mother took me
shopping at the Jayanagar 4th block complex, I’d asked her, ‘Was
Gandhi from Jayanagar?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then why did he fight for our freedom?’ The taxi reached familiar zone: Jayanagar; we’d soon reach
home.
My mother had given up her room for me. I had a room half–we shared
toilet, wardrobe, twin bed–half my own. A black table was laid for me. A beige
saree with golden borders, its table cloth; there was a vase with yellow
plastic asters, a bookshelf into which I’d pour my 60 kg of books. (‘So you’ve
spent all the money we gave you for food on books!’)
That night–and for another six months of nights–my mother would sleep by
me. She’d pluck my earphones out and then we’d look into each other’s eyes.
She’d keep patting my back... That night my mother had a dream. She dreamed that her father was looking
lugubriously from a chair by the toilet. (From then on she put a chair by the
toilet always, with a tea towel on its hand-rest so he might wipe his hands
with it!)
Next morning, she was fresh as a heifer!
I could see a slush around her that I hadn’t seen the night before. She’d done her hair up in a bun, silver whorls at the nape of her neck, the ragged teal cardigan clinging to her slender shoulder, dangling halfway down her bum. Vimala–our home-help–(like so many of our female relatives) wept when she first saw me and my mother smiled her martyr-smile… She started making me a kind of stew with vegetables and coconut and almond pastes that I’d eat with dosa and honey…
I’d remain
vegan until, a year later, I’d have a break-down and would be asked to eat curd
and drink milk… A breakdown, that came in the form of a post-PCOS autoimmune
disease: Pemphigus Vulgris–that would
form the subject of my first story (published–despite it exceeding their word
limit of 4000 words by 31.75%–by the Sunday
Reader) and trigger my debut novel that won the “prestigious” Cocker Prize…
Every story is the same story. It’s the story of a cute baby growing up to look like a ‘terrible fish’, then turning up its toes. We could think of this in terms of relationships, movements… What makes one rendering different from another is where the artist decides to stop; the way the artist decides on the major and the minor characters: is he/she going to keep footling with the baby or wonder why we have to reproduce like men at all, why not like pigeon? I’ve never thought very highly of an artist who doesn’t have a surreal imagination.
So, have I met all the major characters of my life? I think not. Who’s going to… do me away when I die? I have neither chick nor child, nor friend. I got a request to be the chair judge of the Sunday Reader short story competition, and I think I’ll accept. I read the review of my novel by a dear boy, PG, and I am convinced that he and his single mother (a minor poet) will write to me. I’m sure PG will have to enter my life. I’ll let him have the baton. I’ll have him pay people to burn me up when I die, and scatter my dust along on the banks of Vaigai… but it’s so hard to think of death when my mother still comes at me with her rolling pin when I ask for equal kitchen space! I am curious to find out how things might unfold… But I think it should be a happy ending…
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