Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami

school. The villagers knew that to be in the Railways was as good as being in the Delhi government offices. You were a part of the system, the Birtish system, and if you kept your head down and ears open, you could go a long way. What was the use of revolution-shevolution, fighting and killing? Wasn’t it better to first learn the ways of the enemy and then kill them with their own knives? Oh yes, her son was clever, no doubt about it. After all, whose child was he, hanh?”
    The only thing that disappointed me about Vijaya’s stories was that there was no mention of Dadda. My aunt did not remember very much about her brother as a boy.
    “He was much older than me,” was virtually all she would say before veering back to her own father’s exploits. “He never gave our parents any trouble, he was a good child, I believe.”
    I tried to make up my Dadda, build him from things he told me, or from the few things that remained from his childhood. I spent hours examining an oval cardboard box in which my father had saved pictures of cricket stars; they still smelled of talcum powder after forty-five years. And in a square Yardley Lavender Soap tin there were matchbox-sized pictures of Hollywood actresseswith crimson cupid’s bow lips, hair waved precisely into even corrugations, eyebrows like thin black rainbows. At the bottom of this pile of cards was a slip of paper with a childish drawing of a bird and a scribble, “My sister Viji is a duck,” along with some sepia photographs. In one, a child, who must have been Dadda, wore a pair of baggy shorts, balanced on his left foot and squinted shyly up at the camera. With his left hand he clutched at the sari of a woman who was visible only from the waist down. To my disappointment, Dadda could not remember when the picture was taken or who the woman might have been. Behind them were lots of coconut trees, perhaps in his home village. But he never talked about the village or any of his relatives. Not even about his father, who had died years ago, before Dadda and Ma got married.
    In all the photographs I had seen of him, Dadda’s father looked like an English gentleman with a neat moustache, a solar hat, a jacket and a crisply pleated
dhothi. There
was another photograph in the box which must have been taken before my grandfather joined the Railways and came to Delhi, before he changed his name from Gokulnatha to Moorthy and turned from a priest’s son into an employee of the British. In this picture there was a row of thin men in turbans—the fancy ones with gold borders. My grandfather was the tall, thin youth without a turban, right at the end of the line. He had a Brahmin’s shaven head with a traditional
juttu
of uncut hair at the back. When he moved to Delhi, he shaved it off. Then, terrified that the gods would curse him for such a sacrilegious deed, he offered twenty rupees’ worth of coconuts to the Krishna temple, and for five years after that, donated a pair of silver lamps as well. When his first son,my Dadda, was born, he stopped his offerings to the gods, convinced that he had been forgiven for the loss of his Brahmin
juttu.
    Aunty Vijaya did not remember if her father was married when the English-man picture was taken, or if Dadda, the oldest child, was born. All she had to say about the photograph was that Dadda exactly resembled their father.
    “Same forehead, same eyes, can you see the similarity?” she asked, tracing a finger over the yellowing face in the photo. I couldn’t see much of a resemblance. Of course, Dadda had a different haircut, and wore more modern clothes. He sat in the big red Burma-teak chair and smoked pipes. This was how I would always remember my father, I told Aunty Vijaya, and she remarked that memories were never the same.
    “They are pictures we create in our hearts, you see,” explained my aunt. “And each of us uses different sticks of chalk to colour them. I remember your father as a young man who came home for the