Tales of familiar dilemmas
Nausheen Rahman speaks of weaver's myths
THE ingredients of Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem are: an interesting theme (the relationship between mothers and daughters); an engrossing story (told, in turns, by a mother and her daughter), and recognizable characters with familiar dilemmas portrayed with insight and poignancy. Kamini, the elder daughter, first tells her story. This narration is split in two parts, which are alternately about her present (her life in Calgary, Canada), and in the flashback technique, much more about her childhood as the daughter of a railway engineer and his discontented wife. Kamini loved both her parents dearly but never understood their strange relationship. Her recollection about the various houses and cities they lived in (her father being a civil engineer in the Railway, they had to move frequently), and the kind of people she grew up with, will ring a bell for many. This familiarity, however, is accompanied by a sense of wonder, because of the author's incisive understanding of human nature. A mother-daughter relationship has several shades: the love is often weighed down by expectations, disappointments, recriminations. Badami's characterization, coupled with her fluid writing style, helps us to see and feel for both sides. It's almost like you go inside the minds of the two major characters and think along with them (as they relate their respective tales). Kamini's younger sister, Roopa, who is very different from her in every way, their "Linda ayah", their usually taciturn father, and Paul da Costa, an Anglo-Indian car-mechanic, are just some of the characters who complete the circle of people in Kamini's life. The father reveals a different side of his personality when he is with his daughters; he is a treasure-trove of stories with which he regales them whenever he returns from his work-tours. After her father's death, Kamini goes away to Canada to study, and in the cold, lonely place her mother refers to as the "North Pole", gets attacks of nostalgia: "In real life, I reflected, you warmed yourself on cold winter days in a foreign land by pulling out a rag-bag collection of memories". Kamini's telephone conversations with her mother leave her feeling lost. Her sister gets married and their mother, Saroja, starts living a solitary life. Saroja decides to travel around her country, India. This travelling is different from the travelling they had to do every time her husband got transferred. She sends her daughters postcards from the places she visits. There is a deep bond, yet a distinct distance, between the mother and her daughters, especially Kamini. Each tries, in vain, to understand the other. Saroja, who has a very sharp tongue and blunt manner (hence the appellation "Tamarind Mem"), has had a hard personal married life (though a very comfortable existence otherwise, being a high Railway official's wife). She had to give up her dream of becoming a doctor when her parents married her off to a man much older than her. This man is a good provider and an affectionate father, but does not, or cannot, satisfy any of his wife's emotional needs, for which she turns to an anglo car-mechanic. When faced with the choice of either living life the way she wants, or resigning herself to the security and comfort of her "normal" life, she does not have the courage to choose the former. Saroja tells her story to some fellow-female passengers as she travels in a train. She does not hold anything back, and in her customary outright manner, tells them all. Now, we see the story from a different angle. It is outlined in the same pattern: reminiscing, then bits of the present (with different reactions from the different women in the compartment who listen to her story). One of the passengers, a teenager, at one point, comments "scornfully", "I would have walked out if I didn't like my husband", and an old lady replies "Going away is the easiest thing in the world. It is like dying. Living is hard, to make this small amount of time loaned to you by the gods worthwhile is hard. The real test is life itself, whether you are strong enough to stay and fight". The same teenager later says "I am taking a holiday from my mother. God knows what happens to parents when their children grow up". The book ends with Saroja preparing to get off at her station. She says to herself, "If my companions are awake, I will smile farewell. Otherwise, I shall slip away, leaving them with memories of an old story-teller, a weaver of myths."
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