One Hundred Shades of White. Preethi Nair
bought her the clothes anyway. He bought lots of things for all of us and then he took us to eat.
Amma looked distressed when we went into a restaurant and Achan ordered hamburgers for us. Up until then we had never eaten red meat but Achan said it was important to try new things. Whilst we waited, the waitress came and brought us a colouring book and crayons. This never happened in India; I couldn’t imagine Aya bringing us our slate and chalks before we ate. Then the burgers came and they had flags made from cocktail sticks on top of them and came with something called chips and ketchup. It was an amazing taste and Satchin and I looked at each other chomping into our food and drinking cola. I don’t think Amma was that hungry because she left hers.
That week Achan had a holiday and he did lots of things with us. We played in a big park, we went to a place called the cinema, we watched television and he let us do anything we wanted. Then he had to go to work and Amma prepared us to go to school.
‘Do we have to go to school?’ I moaned. Satchin went to school in India and never once did I envy him. The only part that I thought was fun was when Amin took him and collected him in a rickshaw. Satchin came home with a heavy satchel, his slate and lots and lots of things to memorise. He could recite everything about the Mogul empire by the time he was six.
‘Yes, Maya, you’ll enjoy it,’ Amma said, greasing my hair with coconut oil. I subsequently learnt that greasing is not the best technique in England to keep hair healthy and clean, in fact it was the opposite. There was a thing called shampooing but Amma didn’t know that back then. She also packed us off with moist sandalwood, bright red stains on our foreheads because we had just said our prayers, and a tiffin carrier each with our lunch in. Thank God we didn’t understand a word the other children said to us that first day.
Achan sent a driver and a lady from his office to take us to school and Amma came with us. My class had a lovely, white, round teacher called Miss Davies. They were making crocodiles and snakes from egg boxes when I walked in. Miss Davies stopped all the other children, said something to them, and then they looked at me strangely. Someone pointed at my forehead. Miss Davies said something else to them and then they clapped. All of them were eager for me to sit next to them and I sat next to a girl called Catherine Hunter. Miss Davies handed me a paintbrush to paint the snake she had strung together with parts of the egg box. I wanted to tell them all that Amin had once caught a real snake that had made its way into the house and then he put it into a bag and Satchin and I weren’t really frightened, but I couldn’t say any of it. Miss Davies smiled at me and I smiled back.
‘How was it?’ Amma asked when we got home.
‘Miss Davies is warm and cuddly and is nice to me, she sat with me at lunchtime, to make sure that I ate properly. She helped me undo all the tiffin carrier tins and then, Amma, all the other children looked at me when I ate with my hands. Miss Davies then taught me how to use a knife and fork.’
She shook her head at the knife and fork part. ‘And the other children, were they good to you?’
I told her that I played with a girl called Catherine and I remembered how to say her name because it sounded like ‘Kathi’, our surname, but I don’t think I said it correctly as she kept repeating her name. Everyone else was nice but then our company school, along with our company house and car, was very accommodating and all the other children were told to go out of their way to make us feel welcome. Then Amma asked what we had done that day and playing with the cows and chickens seemed so far removed from finger painting and crocodile egg boxes that I thought it might be too difficult to explain. So we both said that we learnt some new words in English like ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’ and Amma looked satisfied.
The only time Amma ventured out was when she had to occasionally take and collect us from school. This was if my Achan needed the chauffeur and, even then, she would grip tightly onto our hands, more out of a fear that we would run and leave her stranded in the middle of the road than to show us the way to school. She didn’t even go shopping. Groceries and things like spices and other ingredients, which weren’t readily available, were delivered to our house every Thursday by a man named Tom. Achan had arranged this as Amma liked to cook. It was the only thing she really loved to do. She could have done other things, like play tennis with Catherine Hunter’s mother, and I suggested it, but she didn’t want to. In any case, Amma only spoke a few jumbled phrases in English so she wouldn’t have understood the scoring system and she wouldn’t have worn the white outfit. Amma didn’t want to learn English either, as she secretly willed that we would be going home soon and her taking English classes would somehow indicate to whoever was listening out there that this would not be the case. So she spent her time cooking with the ingredients Tom brought.
That first week he came in September, he brought all sorts of vegetables both Indian and English. ‘Do you remember Mol, Onam? It’s all for Onam,’ Amma said, pointing at the vegetables. The prickly bitter gourd looked almost offensive sitting next to a sedate cucumber, the black-eyed beans looked evil next to the green garden peas, and the hairy yam looked as if it was going to eat up the potato. ‘For aviyal, olan, thoran.’ She reeled off a list of dishes just like she used to do when she trapped me in the kitchen in India and I nodded and made my way quickly out of there before she decided to paste me up with them and put me in the bath.
Her food would often go to waste as Satchin and I discovered that we liked burgers and fishfingers with ketchup a whole lot better. We would gang up against her and make her place these items on the grill instead or tell her how to make English things. The food that was all dressed up on the table would go into our tiffin carriers the following day but it got embarrassing doing that whole tiffin carrier routine day after day, especially when Catherine Hunter held her nose, so we would get the chauffeur to stop on the way to school, run out and throw the contents over somebody’s fence. Amma didn’t know better and was happy that we ate it all. We also asked Amma if we could get rid of the red stains and sandalwood tribal look. She got very upset at this and said it was God’s blessing for the day to us. Satchin asked her if God could put it somewhere else and she almost cried. So instead of upsetting her further we washed it off before we got into class and would tell her that it was smudged off during the course of the day. We also decided against broaching the shampoo concept, that could wait a while longer.
Even though Satchin and I went to the same school, had the only two ethnic-looking faces and the greased back look, he refused to acknowledge me as his sister. ‘Is that your sister?’ his friends would enquire and Satchin would swear no relation to me and walk off. I really did envy his group of large friends and longed to break free from my role as ‘Danny’.
This was around the time when ‘Grease Lightning’ took hold of the playground. All the girls with blonde hair became Sandy and because most of the boys didn’t want to join in, I was elected to play John Travolta’s role. I passed myself off as a cheap stand-in for Danny, even though I hadn’t seen the film and couldn’t really sing in English. This didn’t seem to matter as the other girls just needed someone to twirl them around and because I was quite tall for my age and had jet-black, greased back hair, I seemed to fit the role. The way I just kept saying ‘summer lubbing’ over and over again also seemed to swing it for me, so at every playtime for the next two months or so this is what I did. Nobody ever knew that I harboured a desperate yearning to have blonde hair and become Catherine Hunter, they just thought it was a strange foreign custom thing that Indian people did when I shaved off my eyebrows.
I took one of Achan’s razors and shaved off my black bushy eyebrows so I could draw new ones in with a yellow crayon. It would have looked good but I didn’t know how to use a razor properly and so cut myself and then the yellow didn’t show. Amma looked horrified when she saw me and she said Achan would be very upset when he got back from his trip. This didn’t scare me as Achan never got upset with me. She also said that the sooner she got me out of England the better, adding that it was making me do things that even she couldn’t understand.
More than a year had passed by then and, if I am honest, I stopped counting the days and remembering the things that Ammamma told me, because I grew to really like England. I loved my school, my teacher, the food, television, and I didn’t want to go back. If I was asked to make a choice, I would choose England every