MATCHBOX

     Again and again, I emerge from the fissured walls of my storeroom. Again and again, I seek solace in old letters and faded photographs. Again and again, I howl to tattered suitcases and vinyl records with songs stuck in their throats. Only the dust mites know that I exist. Only Archie, Betty and Veronica, sipping a gigantic soda together at Pop Tate’s, seem to stare at me in perpetual bewilderment. As though my endless yearning for my unlived life, locked in suitcases and steel almirahs has distracted them-eternal teenagers-from their lovesick escapades. They look at me from the frayed cover of an Archie’s Double Digest, pityingly, wondering why I’m miserable, and why I don’t get out of this cobwebbed place, and why I don’t relax with an ice cream soda, a love interest, and a rival.

     The Archie’s Double Digest is actually a clever disguise. A Valentine’s Day card lies between its covers. The pages of the old comic were removed to accommodate this card. It belongs to The Wailer.

     Her first Valentine’s Day card, a creation of immense skill and some love, handed over to her in a lane where neighbours lay in ambush-at the milk booth, in the alcoves of the cylindrical minaret, behind the tiny shack where the local laundress ironed the neighbourhood’s clothes with a gigantic coal iron. It was a marvellous trickery, this act of giving the card on a February evening whose chill disappeared when clammy fingertips touched under the Archie’s Double Digest cover of the card. An entire universe of aunties and uncles with nothing better to do than to stand around and stare had been deceived into believing:

1. That a boy had given a girl an innocent comic book
2. That the boy and the girl were just good friends

     If the boy could have distributed cyclostyled copies of the aforementioned points to every aunty and uncle who had witnessed the transfer of the comic from schoolboy to schoolgirl hands, he would have. This was a new romance, a very secret one, and it could only be kept secret if it was conducted in the open-during evening walks in the neighbourhood, accompanied by a gang of friends who either facilitated conversation between the two, or steered the entourage away from trouble spots where amoeboid clusters of gossipy neighbours hovered, or played a boisterous game of pitthu on the streets, during which my Wailer and her skinny schoolboy lover would moon around-I can only imagine-sighing, gazing endlessly at each other’s pimply faces, and sometimes exchanging loony monosyllables.

     The evening walks were a convenient excuse to slip out of the house for a while. It was the summer of the year before I died, a frisky summer that The Wailer picked to embark upon her first long walk, unaccompanied by grown-ups, but with a fellow walker who seemed to draw the entire neighbourhood into her magnetic field.

     It was the summer of 1992; a year when The Wailer felt, with frightening intensity, the heat of things unknown. Her body had secrets that it was trying to convey; strange curves had erased her angular contours; there was hair in places unfamiliar and scary; she bled and oozed a musk and thought she smelt awful. It was also the summer when a guest arrived.

     Let’s just call her Little Bomb, this guest. She was the daughter of my college friend, Natasha, who was settled in Bombay. (I know you call the city Mumbai. A disconcerting habit of the living world-to suddenly change the name of a city or a road, causing a crisis of identity and remembrance for those who knew it by its former name). Anyway, as I was saying, Little Bomb was here for her summer vacations. She was staying with her grandparents, but would drop by often, to spend long afternoons with The Wailer. Little Bomb had managed to impress The Wailer immediately upon arrival. She was part Posh Spice, part Alisha Chinoy, and every bit the diva The Wailer thought she could never be. They were the same age, but Little Bomb had an air of worldliness about her (accentuated by a whiff of Davidoff Cool Water for Women, which had found its way from her mother’s dressing table into her suitcase, by what I can only imagine was a feat of stealth and cunning).

     She was Kemps Corner chic, with her knotted denim shirts and culottes, her plastic hoop earrings and that final touch to every outfit, which lifted her stature from precocious teenager to queen of pop-her black velvet choker. This accessory came with a variety of detachable pendants. The one that The Wailer admired most was a tiny silver skull, with red glass eyes and an oxidised rose wedged between two rows of magnificent teeth. The Wailer was, quite obviously, fascinated by this person from Bombay who always looked as though she had stepped out of a bubble bath. Her own looks and style quotient had begun to cause her, oflate, a fair amount of stress. Little Bomb’s arrival made her want to hide behind a curtain, or curl up under a blanket, pretending to be sick when she visited. How could she be friends with this heavenly creature, when all she ever wore were long t-shirts and tights in horrid neon colours? How could she entertain Little Bomb, when all she had were a few books and cassettes, and a new tape deck that Little Bomb had ignored when she had walked into her bedroom one afternoon, because I had wanted the girls to spend some time together?

     It wasn’t The Wailer’s fault that she was such a tremulous specimen of adolescence. I was dying, she was observing me die instead of deciding what to wear at birthday lunches and dance parties, instead of kissing boys and wanting to be kissed in return and thoroughly enjoying the mortification her escapades caused at home. She was alone through the terrifying claim puberty was making on her body; she only had sad songs and books to turn to, for friendship, and for reciprocal feelings of anger and pain.

     It so happened that Little Bomb was quite the smuggler. Apart from the bottle of Davidoff Cool Water for Women, there were other goods in her suitcase that had sneakily found their way in. One of these was destined to stoke the teenager who lay, crumpled and hurt, inside The Wailer. It would mock her convent-school decorum with its rhythm-so rough and sexy. It would tease her with its wild tongue of music; it would make her throb somewhere deep inside with its twisted manoeuvres. It was a LaserDisc of Dirty Dancing.

     How this LD travelled from Bombay to Delhi will always remain a mystery; its appearance in our home-Little Bomb had brought it out with a flourish, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, immediately after lunch-caused a minor commotion.

     ‘What is that disc doing here?’ my husband, LP, who hardly ever raised his voice now that I had fallen sick, asked somewhat sharply. ‘Where did you get it from?’

     ‘I thought The Wailer and I would watch it together, uncle… on your new LD player,’ said Little Bomb, evading his questions.

     It was a brave, but clever, pronouncement. Brave because she was assuming she had the permission to do something that was considered risque by the grown-ups, clever because she knew how to push the right buttons to get what she wanted. LP’s LaserDisc player was, in fact, new. And a shiny reminder of how pleasant life could be, on celluloid. On it, we had watched The Sound of Music, Ben-Hur, and Casablanca, on days when the illness granted me a brief respite from the pain. Happy recesses, we used to call them, moments of normalcy when the disease was temporarily destabilised by the sight of Ingrid Bergman in Humphrey Bogart’s arms, when the disease was so enthralled by seven motherless pranksters and their governess, that it stopped its minions from proliferating inside my body, if only for a while.

     The summer of Little Bomb’s arrival was also a happy recess. We were all fooled by it, especially me. The disease was behaving itself; it would allow me to raise my teenager, to ruin her with too much love, to watch her grow from meek to rebellious to totally unmanageable. I was wrong, I died the very next year, before spring wilted into summer. But during that happy recess, when Little Bomb convinced LP that she was keen for a demonstration of the LD player’s technology, and that Dirty Dancing was the only film befitting the new player, I felt shamelessly immortal. Nothing could destroy that infinite summer and its rainbow tincture, reflected on the surface of the gleaming LD. In an instant, we were all at Kellerman’s, watching Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman fall in love with Johnny Castle, watching him teach her how to grind her pelvis, watching him hoist her up in a lake as they rehearsed for the climatic dance show of the film.

     The Wailer had never seen real people move the way they did in Dirty Dancing. She blushed, deeply, and very pinkly, when Baby stumbled into the staff quarters, cradling a gigantic watermelon, and found herself in the midst of bodies gyrating to a growly ‘Do You Love Me?’

     What a carnival of intertwined torsos, of flying skirt and open white shirt, of nose against midriff and face between the swell of thighs…The Wailer stole a glance at me. But I pretended not to notice.

     Let her walk into this place… this place with its smoky lights and neon MILLER sign, this part of the resort that was not meant for nice girls, these dingy quarters in which a nice girl found herself saying, to a dance instructor with a sneer hanging from his upper lip, ‘I carried a watermelon!’

     LP and I crept out of the room after the first dance scene concluded. We left the girls alone, so that they might feel the thrill of each move-the fancy legwork, the salsa fusing into mambo, the pelvic thrusts, the perfect coordination between rib cage, shoulder, and head that achieved a grand sexiness. I realised that The Wailer would keep looking at me, trying to read my face for signs of disapproval. The teenager in her would not have jumped out, had I remained in the room. I wanted this teenager to surprise her with everything she was capable of feeling and responding to. I wanted her to know, on that very day, the shock of pleasure, its insolent needs, its immodesty. So shameless in its desires, this gorgeous, live-wire body, I wanted to tell her; it wants what it wants and tries to get it anyhow-sometimes by petitioning directly, often through treachery. Cover it up, with polite manners, with a convent­ school uniform and decent upbringing, and it will find ways to tear you apart and make itself known. Scold it, tell it to go away, and it will plot a rebellion against your mind, the seat of your good sense.

     Would I be around to guide her through the tugs of desire, through endless yearnings and brief ecstasies?

     Back then, during that happy recess when our bedroom with its new LD player became a fancy Catskills resort, I thought I just might.

     Dirty Dancing changed The Wailer in ways that were imperceptible to others, but obvious to me. She relaxed in Little Bomb’s company; she relaxed into herself. Her awkward hand movements-she touched the bridge of her nose whenever she was trying to make a point-became less frequent. She giggled, tilted her head, and said ‘Ooh really,’ frequently.

     ‘Ooh really,’ she chirruped, when I said, ‘Switch the fan off before you leave your room.’

     ‘Ooh really,’ she sang, when Little Bomb informed her that an eyelash had fallen on her cheek, and that she should lift it off her face and make a wish, quickly.

     The teenager inside her finally made an appearance, hesitant at first, then bolder, more audacious. Her slouchy, old-man walk gave way to an elegant stride-almost as though she was moving to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, inaudible to all except her. They took evening walks together, Little Bomb and The Wailer. Maybe they were celebrating The Wailer’s new stride, I thought, as I watched them through the French windows in the living room. They would circle the park opposite our house; Little Bomb would chatter away, walking forwards and backwards, swinging her little bum and gyrating her torso ever so slightly; The Wailer seemed to glide behind her, throwing her head back and laughing at Little Bomb’s moves, and saying ‘Ooh really!’ constantly and pointlessly, I was certain.

     The evening walks grew longer. I didn’t realise how quickly the girls would disappear from sight, only to return when the sparrows in the neem and jamun trees announced dusk. I could only imagine them walking through my favourite by­ lanes in the neighbourhood: the one canopied with magenta bougainvillea, the crooked one that led to a grassy dead end, the loopy one that wound itself around the cylindrical minaret, the one with a speed-breaker that looked like the undulating paunch of a sleeping man. They probably stood at the intersection of the three arterial lanes-three lazy sisters, I used to call them, for they seemed to recline by the parks-and chattered as the neighbours spied on them. Mrs So-and-So walking her Pomeranian would have whispered to Mr So-and­ So about The Wailer being allowed to roam free and wild, now that her mother had fallen sick. Squad Septuagenarian would have collectively bared its dentures at the girls or squinted in delight whenever Little Bomb sashayed down a lane, whenever The Wailer caught up with her, whenever they walked hand­ in-hand, teenagers swooning with too much summer.

     It was obvious that they would draw other jaunty young things, madden them with their secret nectar, rouse them to feral play. It was only a matter of time before the pair of them became a gang, before boys with facial hair so scant that it looked like bluish-black crayon marks on soft flesh, made themselves known in strange but sure ways. I imagined someone hitting a six in a rowdy game of cricket, or someone bringing a Sony Walkman to the park and listening to it, all by himself, on a bench under the eucalyptus tree, or someone else tossing a Frisbee into the evening sky, still drenched in sunlight, or reading an Archie’s Double Digest on the grass, beside rows of badly-mangled marigold flowers.

     In this dingy storeroom, that one summer is a splash of orange squash in the parched void of my yearnings. What happened during those long evening walks will always remain a mystery; the exact details of how The Wailer met her lanky schoolboy, how he made himself known to her, will always lurk under the shade of the golden amaltas or hide behind the bougainvillea trellis, or slip away just when one feels one has caught an illuminating fact. But a mother’s fancy guesswork can be far more entertaining than the truth of the matter, so I concocted their first meeting, that first ‘Umm… hi’ in a million different ways. They were playful. .. no… they were shy… at least The Wailer was shy-I was certain her face was splotched with pink, like a bruised peach, during that first encounter. He told her his name first, then asked for hers… or… Little Bomb, sensing the onset of a big fat crush, presided over the introductions, a precocious Cupid with hoop earrings, prompting them on.

     ‘Tell him your name,’ she must have whispered fiercely to The Wailer.

     ‘Hi!’ She must have beamed at the lanky schoolboy, making his ears burn.

     Little Bomb, a proper summer sun in denim shorts, was probably the one the entire neighbourhood had swooned over, during those long evenings. She was the reason they swarmed around the neighbourhood, those boys on the precarious edge of manhood, unsure of everything except a maddening scent of something new in the air. She was a fever; she drove them to play vicious games of cricket or badminton or even pitthu in the heat; she turned friends into petty rivals vying for a smile, or a glance or a ‘Hiiii!’ The Wailer’s infatuation with her lanky schoolboy was incidental, a byproduct of the collision between Little Bomb and the neighbourhood’s adolescent residents. But it outlived the summer, it outlived the winter, it outlived me.

     Little Bomb returned to Bombay, but left behind a crowd of heartbroken people. Some of these were: the boys of summer­ the pitthu players and air guitar swayers, the smooth operators and sweet talkers, the newly-shaved show-offs. Her extended family of swooning aunties and uncles, and dumbstruck cousins. The Wailer, worthy of a special mention, because of the intensity of her heartache.

     Little Bomb’s arrival, frightening to The Wailer at first, became the happiest occurrence in her life that summer. She came out of her hiding place, confused and numb, only to find herself swept away by Little Bomb’s special brand of friendship. It didn’t seem to matter to Little Bomb that The Wailer wore oversized t-shirts, that a curly forest had sprouted in her armpits and that she was certain the down on her upper lip would soon become a full moustache. Little Bomb hadn’t noticed that The Wailer wasn’t cool or hot or fun. She wasn’t any of the things a fully functional teenager was meant to be. She hardly had any friends; her most steadfast companions were her Sony tape deck and a new Sophie B. Hawkins cassette.

     Little Bomb barged into The Wailer’s dank cave of silent tears and too many feelings, mildewed before their time, with the thrill of being young, and all the paraphernalia required for their forthcoming misadventures. She brought with her a variety of white goods: clothes, expensive perfumes, music and films on shiny discs, faux leather handbags and stilettos. She had an air of cosmopolitan chic that was borrowed from either Madonna or Julia Roberts or indeed, her mother Natasha, who had acted in a few plays when we were in college, and had moved to Bombay in… when was it… either 1975 or ’76… to become ‘an actress, you know, like Zeenat Aman or Parveen Babi… otherwise I will die playing Lady Macbeth or Juliet or some witch or fairy on the stage… ‘ she used to say.

     Little Bomb was contagious, like her mother, and The Wailer, bereft of companionship, was quick to catch the contagion.

     When Little Bomb left for Bombay, The Wailer, newly introduced to what being a teenager looked and felt like, slipped temporarily into her sad old self. Her dank cave of melancholia was waiting to swallow her; her t-shirts and tights, abandoned for trendier outfits, resurfaced on the lonesome evenings she spent in her room. The walks she had embarked upon with Little Bomb stopped abruptly-that interlude in the sun was in every danger of being snuffed out, had it not been for the Tring! Tring! of the black telephone that squatted on a table in the hall.

     It was a fierce and beautiful summer, my last. It crept into my home and claimed The Wailer. It signalled her to come out and play, with its sharp Tring! Tring! Once. Twice. There was no answer, when LP picked up the phone and said ‘Hello?’ There was no answer when I picked up the phone a few times and enquired, gently, ‘Who is this?’

     But the Tring! Tring! followed by blankness at the other end of the phone’s receiver set into motion The Wailer’s return to warmth and light. She emerged from her room, eyeing the phone as it rang to inform her that the lanky schoolboy had not forgotten her, that there was still plenty of summer left, especially for them, and that they should not waste it by staying apart. She never attempted to pick up the phone when it rang; she knew, like we did, that it rang for her. She quietly asked if she could continue with her evening walks with the friends she had made over the past few weeks.

     I let her go; I gave her the permission to feel the sun scorch her soul. I allowed her the thrill of a summer crush, to feel what Baby must have felt when Johnny was around her.

     The Wailer would return from these walks when the incandescent sky darkened, almost somersaulting into the house like the rhesus monkeys on the eucalyptus trees outside. Often, there were blades of grass in her hair; her clothes smelt of sweat and dry mud and crushed roses.

     Sometimes, she brought with her an Archie comic or two.

     ‘Long walk?’ I remember asking her once. ‘And did you climb a tree?’ There were twigs and leaves that clung to her t-shirt, as though the park and its inhabitants had been

unwilling to let go of her.

     ‘No, Mama, we played baddy…and the shuttle got stuck in

one of those stupid bushes…’

     Baddy. Badminton. Racquet striking shuttlecock. Shuttlecock whizzing through air traffic congestion: wasps and butterflies. The terminally ill live off scraps of imagination, flung at them when others provide a glimpse of their days.

     I never questioned her after that day. Her evening walks were her only real outings, and she always came back and took to her books with renewed diligence. When the mid-term exams were upon her, she chose not to go. There were no blank calls during the exams, no Tring! Tring! to distract her from her studies. Clearly, her lanky schoolboy wooer was a man of good sense. I never met him; there was not enough time.

     But the Valentine’s Day card arrived and made itself known a few weeks before the disease announced itself, yet again. It slipped out of its clever disguise of the Archie’s Double Digest when The Wailer returned, more flushed than ever before, from her walk on that exquisite February evening. I was in the verandah, sipping what was to be my last cup of tea. A variety of tubes would soon invade my body, serving no purpose at all. But that February evening was a gift, a Valentine’s Day smooch from the cosmos. Giant dahlias in absurdly saturated colours­ red, yellow, orange, purple-watched over me (pityingly, I know now) as I drank my tea, fragrant with crushed cardamom. There were pansies too in neat little rows, their whiskered faces turned towards me.

     The sky was a vivid blue; a flock of pigeons flew in an arrow-like formation, turning here, climbing there, showing-off their manoeuvres as though they were fighter jets. They flew over the tops of trees, their wings changing colour from grey to white whenever they got tangled in rays of sunlight. It was a long goodbye, full of nature’s theatrics, but how was I to know?

     I felt healthy enough to holler for The Wailer, when I heard her stumble in. I was alive enough to follow her into her room, when she didn’t appear upon being summoned. The card slipped out of its comic-book cover just as she was about to hide it in the dark drawer she had assigned for its safekeeping.

     Was I a bitter old prude to confront her about it? Was I horrid to tell her that I had trusted her, that she had deceived me, that Little Bomb had turned her into a proper vamp, that henceforth, she was banned from stepping out of the house alone? Hadn’t I allowed her to embark upon these jaunts in the company of unknown friends? And didn’t I know that one of them was special to her?

     I don’t know why I said the things I did, to my darling, my Wailer. Maybe the beauty of the evening had tricked me into a sense of normalcy. This is how mothers and daughters fight, and we were no different. She was not a freak or a nerd or any of the unkind things they said about her at school; I was not sick.

     She was in a romantic relationship of some sort;  I disapproved. The fight we had was part of the ritual of being mother and daughter; it was a sobbing, heaving declaration that all was as it should be. I took the card from her, and locked it up in one of the Godrej almirahs in this storeroom. I meant to give it to her later, when the romance had thawed and she could look at it and laugh at its juvenile declaration of undying love.

     I could never return the card, and it lies on this shelf, in its Archie’s Double Digest cover-a souvenir that mocks me eternally for my ramblings.

Excerpted with permission from Of Mothers and Other Perishables by Radhika Oberoi (S&S India, 2024)