IndiaStar book review: Anita Rau Badami's "Tamarind Mem"

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IndiaStar--A Literary-Art Magazine

Tamarind Mem

by Anita Rau Badami
(Penguin Canada, 1996)
266 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Robbie Clipper Sethi

[Editor's note: Robbie Clipper Sethi, Ph.D.
(UC Berkeley,1981) is Associate Professor of English
at Rider University, New Jersey. She is the author
of The Bride Wore Red. ]

The dedication page of Tamarind Mem explains the title:
the tamarind fruit is sour and can turn ceremonies inauspicious
and fruitless; the spirits of the tree do not allow travellers sleeping
in its shade to survive. A tamarind mem, Badami's absorbing novel
reveals, is a woman whose tongue is as sharp as the acidic fruit.

But Anita Rau Badami creates a family whose women are anything
but fruitless, acid-tongues and all. Tamarind Mem offers two
first-person accounts-- that of Kamini, a "railroad brat" who grows up in
Ratnapura, Guwahati, Lucknow, Calcutta, wherever her father is posted as
a civil engineer in the Indian railways, and of Kamini's mother, Saroja,
the tamarind mem, whose tongue costs her, by her own reckoning, the
tenderness of her husband, even the independence that would have
made an indifferent, dispassionate husband unnecessary to her sustenance
and status.

Like the sour chutney that whets the appetite, Kamini's account
of the mysteries of her childhood--her father's official absences, her
mother's dark moods and unexplained escapes, sari starched and fresh,
from the Ratnapura house, made this reader hungry for Saroja's
own story of disappointment, dependence and dreams.
What Kamini's childhood perceptions can only suggest, Suroja's
mature reflections on her own childhood, marriage and motherhood explain:

But after marriage there are new rules to follow, fresh
boundaries. There is always someone in the house, the peon,
the gardener, the maid, the dobhi, and Linda Ayah with her terrible
glasses. They watch me, discuss this new memsahib, make sure I
do not stray from the correct lines of behaviour. They keep an
eye on me for their sahib, for Dadda, the man to whom my parents
hand me like a parcel wrapped in silk and gold.

For some readers it may seem a flaw of this first novel that
Kamini's voice dominates more than half the book when the story clearly
belongs to Saroja. Nevertheless Kamini's befuddlement prepares well for
Saroja's honest assessment of her life and provides innumerable ironies
that enrich Saroja's story. Moreover, Kamini's own escape from the
dependency of marriage somehow fulfills the legacy of sharp-tongued
women in her family, suggesting that there is a place in the world for
tamarind mems, though it may lie beneath the snows of North America.

Tamarind Mem reveals with sensitivity and subtlety the vicious
cycle of oppression that families impose upon each other, not always
consciously. Kamini, insulated by the snow surrounding her basement
apartment in Calgary, has achieved the education, independence and
experience of unseen places that her mother was denied by parents,
grandparents and husband. Yet Saroja initially protests Kamini's move,
complains, disapproves and chides her daughter for outliving a
maritable age. As a widow, both children living in North America, Saroja
takes to the railroad, a middle-class, modern-day sanyasi, seeing places
that her husband would not take her to on his frequent business trips and
telling her story in women-only compartments. Kamini worries, advises her
mother against travelling alone, urges her to come and stay with her in
Calgary or her sister, a housewife and mother, in the United States.

Love is a prison from which only the tamarind-tongued may
escape. Even the mechanic, Paul de Costa, who offers Saroja an
alternative to the passionless marriage her family arranged against
her will, would imprison Saroja with his family in Australia, far from
the only world she knows. Saroja's grandmother, Putti Ajji is her
model, who has maintained her dignity for twenty years while her
husband has kept a lower caste mistress. Since Rayaru will sleep with
but not eat with a lower caste woman, Putti Ajji charges him a rupee
for every meal he asks her to cook for him. Showing Saroja her
"fortune in coins," Putti Ajji says, "the old whore is deaf and
alone, and your grandfather lives on my charity." In a painful
stroke of irony it is by calling Putti Ajji "the only person who has
any guts" in the family that Saroja offends her grandfather's dignity
and condemns herself to the marriage that prevents her from becoming
the doctor she wants to be. Her grandmother remains her model,
perhaps the model for the book, as Saroja wants to tell her
daughters:

these are my memories, I want to remind Kamini. Why
should you worry about them? Why do you allow my
history to affect yours? Why should it matter to you if
your father made me happy or an Anglo mechanic?
They are dead and gone. Yesyes, our stories touch
and twine,but they are threads of different hues.
Mine is almost at an end, but yours is still unwinding.
Go, you silly girl, build your own memories.

Anita Rau Badami, of Vancouver, has published short fiction in
anthologies and literary magazines. This is her first book,
more concise and focused than Rohinton Mistry's A Delicate Balance,
more accessible than M. G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack. The feminine
of these Canadian authors to which she is compared, Badami makes
a brilliant debut with Tamarind Mem, and by it she enriches not only
Canadian literature but the literature of the boundless world we live in.