Monsoon Diary Read Free Page B

garlic
rasam
to increase her breast milk, and betel leaves to chew on as a digestive.
    After lunch all the women in the household—pregnant and otherwise—gathered on a bamboo mat under the lazily swirling ceiling fan to chew betel. The curtains were drawn to keep the hot sun off the cool mosaic floor. Someone brought the
chella potti,
a perforated silver box containing stacks of betel leaves surrounded by a fragrant assortment of spices: betel nuts, fennel, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves,
gulkand
(rose paste), slaked lime, and coconut flakes.
    The women took the tender green betel leaves, brushed them lightly with white slaked lime, placed the betel nuts, fennel, and other spices in the center, wrapped the leaves into a triangle “the shape of a woman’s vagina,” as one of my more raunchy aunts said, and popped the opiate combination into their mouths. As they chewed and their lips and tongue became stained red, their jokes became more risqué, their gossip more personal, their bodies more horizontal. Soon the room was full of shrieking, laughing, swaying, red-toothed women whom I hardly recognized as the harassed housewives of the morning. I was convinced that betel leaves contained narcotics because the adults wouldn’t let me eat them, though of course they don’t. “Your tongue will thicken,” my mother said as she stuffed her mouth full of the green leaves.
    I would rest my head on my grandmother’s squishy abdomen as she lay on the floor, and feel her soft flesh rumble as she belly-laughed her way to tears. Although I didn’t know it at that time, it was the closest I would come to feeling totally at peace with the world.
    “Your mother was pushed into the buttermilk when she stole betel,” my grandmother began, jumping into the middle of a story as usual. “It was at a wedding at our ancestral home in Kerala, and the backyard was like a battlefield with large brass vats filled with rice, gravy, buttermilk, porridge, and cumin water. Right in the middle of the ceremony, your mother quietly crept up to the betel tray, grabbed a couple of betel leaves, and went out to the back where the cooks were cooking lunch. She hid between the vats and began to chew her stolen betel. It was there that your young uncle Ravi found her. He grabbed her long braids and began taunting her. He would tell everyone about the stolen betel, he said. Well, what does your mother do? She pulls Ravi’s spectacles off his face and stomps on them. No halfway measures for that girl. Ravi is standing there, almost crying with anger—he can hardly see. He chases her around the vats. Your mother rushes up a ladder, silly girl. Ravi rocks the ladder, and your mother falls, plop, right into a vat of buttermilk. Thank God it was buttermilk. Can you imagine if it had been some boiling water, or even curried
sambar
? Now, these vats are huge, like I said. Tall, about twice your mother’s height. And the girl can’t swim. So she sinks into the buttermilk, rises up, gurgles like a toad, and goes down again. Ravi is petrified by now. He climbs up the ladder and tries to reach for her. Your mother, of course, grabs Ravi and pulls him down with her. It was your great-aunt Gita who found them, two slithering masses, soaked with the white buttermilk. She grabbed your mother by her long braids and pulled Ravi out by his ears. That’s why your uncle Ravi’s ears are pointed. Because Aunt Gita grabbed them when he was a kid and yanked him out of a vat of buttermilk.”
    What my grandmother did best was tell stories. She had a phenomenal memory that stored colors, textures, sounds, and smells, and a gift for shaping them into spellbinding narratives. With a few words, she painted a vivid portrait of her parents and grandparents, volatile and passionate in temperament, who drank “loads of ghee and lived to be ninety”; about their life under the British rule when they were not admitted into British clubs; about her years as a child bride when she feared