Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami Page B

their fingers sifting through the shimmering piles. I stood as close to these hidden women as possible, trying hard to get a glimpse of their faces,ignoring the pungent smell of sweat oozing through coats of talcum powder which filled my nostrils. Once I watched a tall woman in sequinned slippers drape a necklace over the black cloth of her
burkha
and turn coquettishly this way and that before a tiny mirror on the wall of the shop. She must have seen herself without the confining robes, and I too wondered how the ornament would look against her skin. Ma never understood this odd fascination.
    “They look like anyone else, those women,” she said, dragging Roopa and me from stall to stall, urging me to decide on a trinket or ribbon quickly and we might have time for an ice cream before we went home.
    That summer, after Basheer told me the story of the Thithali Queen, I lost interest in the Saturday trips to the market. I liked to think that Shabnam’s mother, Mrs. Bano, was the mysterious queen, and I spent my entire day following her, watched avidly as she climbed into her car, noting, when the robes lifted a bit, the colourful frill of a petticoat or the drift of a sari edge. I wanted to see Mrs. Bano’s face. Behind her veil, was she frowning, smiling, crying? I hung about their house till I heard Linda Ayah’s voice calling, “Baby-missy,
arrey,
where has the monkey disappeared? Baby-missy, aren’t you going to eat anything today?”
    Shabnam and I tussled constantly about where we should play each morning because she preferred my house to her own.
    “I don’t want to play in my house,” said Shabnam. “My mother will make us sit inside and draw pictures.” She made a face and whispered, “She said that she would beat me if she caught me in the sun.”
    It was strange watching Shabnam in her own home, for over there she was sedate and soft-voiced, playing with her collection of plump, pallid dolls and pinching her sisters into silence if they cried for one of her toys. In my house she became quite reckless, climbing right up to the top of the tamarind tree, careless of tears in her billowing bloomers, while I, amazed at her daring, yelled from below, “Shame-shame puppy-shame, naked bottoms is your name!”
    “Why does your mother wear
purdah?”
I asked Shabnam.
    She shrugged and said, “I don’t know, maybe because my father told her to.”
    “But why only her, why not you?”
    “Ammi says that I will get my
purdah
when I become a big girl.”
    “Have you seen your mother’s face?”
    “Of course I have,” said Shabnam.
    “Is she pretty?”
    “She is the most beautiful person in the whole world.”
    When I told my mother about this conversation, Ma got thoroughly annoyed. “Why you poke your nose here and there?” she asked. “Haven’t I taught you any manners? Mrs. Bano, Mrs. Bano! Nonsense!”
    I did not tell her about Mrs. Bano again. It never occurred to me that if I just asked Mrs. Bano to show her face, she would very likely have done so. Or perhaps I wanted the thrill of not knowing, of never being quite sure who Mrs. Bano was. The magic of Basheer’s story sustained me through those sun-charged summer days. So long as I had the story, I could ignore the tight lines of anger and frustration building within our own house. In Shabnam’shome I could forget Ma’s puffy face, her rages swirling up like a cyclonic storm. There was space for stories to blossom, for my imagination to wander. In my friend’s home I would ask to go to the toilet and on this pretext snoop around, peering into silent rooms, hoping to see Mrs. Bano. If anyone asked me what I was doing, I could put on an innocent face and say, “I was looking for the bathroom.”
    Nobody ever caught me, and once I even went so far as to examine the contents of Mrs. Bano’s dressing table. The top was absolutely bare except for a set of combs and a small pot of kohl. The drawers had piles of handkerchiefs and two bottles of