The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Yea; Life in India

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Cartamma and Mutamma • Nate Bell I thought that I was their favorite student. After breakfast, I would carry the metal plates left by classmates through the kitchen and drop them in the long trough-like sink that filled most of the space between the outside wall of the kitchen and the cement partition dividing the property from the neighbors next door. Then, when they had cleaned the dishes and I had checked my email, I would sit with them at the giant empty table while they ate their own breakfasts.

"Good food?" Mutamma would ask from behind a mouthful of rice. She was the lighter skinned, smaller and prettier of the two. Though child birth and starchy white rice had deposited their excesses upon her belly, her frame was tiny.
"Good food," I would respond as I shook my head from ear-to-shoulder, ear-to-shoulder. This head nod would arise almost unconsciously in India between two conversants. I liked to call it an outward mirror of rapport. Whenever I spoke to Indians, even in English, my head would follow their swaying. It was with Cartamma and Mutamma that I felt connected to the "real" India. Working side by side and laughing with me, they became all that was right about this exotic country.

I had thought that Cartamma and Mutamma were friends. All year I had thought it. I even wrote home to my parents about the "moving" friendship of the two Dalit cooks who I hung out with in the kitchen of the program house. Together the two cooks were grandmothers to a baby girl. I praised them to my program leader Sekar and he said something about everyone having their quarrels, but I still didn’t notice any disconnect. None seemed apparent.

Each day, they alternated who cooked over the stove, and who sat on the ground in the kitchen, sari flattened against the tile like a tablecloth, chopping vegetables. They cleaned dishes together and swept the floor side by side and once a week, they marched off with brooms in hand to clean the apartment of each student. They seemed to have a frictionless working relationship, but beyond that, they appeared to have a deep friendship which had surpassed the need for words that I, in my gushy extroversion, marveled at.

Talking with them after breakfast Cartamma would make a joke, or I might make a funny voice that they both laughed at, or one of them would compliment me for being such a "nice boy." I was the hub of our conversations, and so tickled by the attention, I didn’t notice that the two of them never spoke.

It was in Cartamma's house that I first learned of their disconnection. She lived in a Dalit neighborhood. Maybe it was the fact that it was dark by the time the auto-rickshaw pulled up in her neighborhood, or maybe this area was even more depressed than the other poor places I had visited. Old women lay on cots beside doorsteps, making enough room on the floor of the huts for their families to sleep inside. A group of dark drunk men stood in the puddle of light emanating from a tiny storefront. Other drunk men stumbled towards the group or away from it. The one room huts leaned against each other, huddled almost, oppressing and dark. I felt unsafe.

Cartamma must have heard the auto-rickshaw approach, because she appeared from the shadows and called to me from the edge of a narrow alley. The entrance to her house was down the alley and past the opening to a few other huts. Cartamma feigned a smile, but as we stepped through the door and came into a tight, bright room, I saw Cartamma's forced smile fall harshly. Her house was bigger than the others packed all around her. It had multiple rooms. A bed dominated the space of the cramped main room. In one corner there was a tiny countertop with a propane burner. Underneath this counter were an assortment of pots and a big plastic jug filled with water which stuck out into the middle of the room. Above the counter, there was a small television. It was showing music videos from Tamil cinema. On the far wall, within reach from the bed, was a door. Near it was a ladder which must have led to a loft.
Cartamma motioned me to sit on the bed and served me some chicken that she had prepared for me. It was the first time she fed me meat; in the program house she was permitted only to cook vegan. Then, as always happened when I entered someone's house, she went to fetch her photo album. All this was done with an unusual grudging heaviness, not the jokes and fun we usually shared. She glanced more often at the open door to the dark alley, and at the closed door, then at me. It was as if she hadn't wanted me to come after all. I wondered if I had done anything wrong but, after thinking through the possible mistakes I could have made and deciding I hadn’t committed any infractions, I put my lens back on Cartamma. Was something wrong tonight? Or was she just so jovial with me in the program house to keep her job?

She took a tiny album out of a box next to the bed and handed it to me. The photos were small and discolored, mostly of weddings but too poorly taken to make out faces. After a few minutes, through the door, a shrunken man, dark and hunched, stumbled against the countertop and banged against the wall. Two drunken steps later, and without even a look towards us sitting on the bed, he disappeared with a few slips up the wooden ladder. Cartamma's face was stone. Without turning she said to me, "My husband" and handed me another picture.

I didn't stay much longer. The tight room and unnerving tensions, about which I knew little but could feel distinctly, disturbed me and made me want to go. But before I went, the door to the back room opened and a young man, light skinned and burly, came out. Looking in the door as it closed, I saw a smooth brown-skinned young woman sitting on the floor cradling a tiny baby in her lap. Her head drooped and her lips were drawn together into a tight line. Cartamma and the young man spoke sharply in Tamil, then the man retreated to the room again, and Cartamma fought out a smile. "My son," she said. I knew that the tired woman stowed away in the miniscule space was Mutamma’s daughter. From the anxious looks on the faces of the young couple, I could see that their love marriage, a marriage I had idealized, was draining.

I had been to other Dalit neighborhoods. Dalits, the more politically correct name given to Untouchables, are outside of the caste system and ostracized. No restaurants would serve them and no employers would give them jobs. I imagined that Cartamma and Mutamma had the best jobs in their respective communities; everyone else would work with trash, feces, or dead bodies. But while other neighborhoods had been equally poor and congested, none had oppressed me as this visit had. Other times I came away impressed by the resilience of these communities. Maybe it was that I had come at night. Or maybe I was saddened by the sullenness permeating Cartamma's house and the tenseness of the young parents. Or it could have been the sour look that came over Cartamma's face the few times I mentioned Mutamma. For the first time I saw Cartamma, and by extension Mutamma, not as a happy exemplar of the oppressed class, but as a real person who was unhappy.

In the last week before I left India, I finally made it out to Mutamma's house. She had invited me to visit before, but with enough generality in the offer that it might have been a mere pleasantry. Since the visit to Cartamma's house, I thought I caught barely discernible sneers between the two cooks and heard underhanded comments about whichever one wasn't there. By the time I went to Mutamma's house over a month after visiting Cartamma, I was sure I hadn't seen them speak.

I visited Mutamma's neighborhood in the day, so maybe all comparisons with Cartamma's neighborhood are unfair. But when the auto-rickshaw bounded over potholes and halted in front of Mutamma's house, the air felt lighter and people seemed moderately content. This, too, was a Dalit neighborhood. No Indian from another caste would venture near.
But on the faces of men on bicycles coming back from work and women walking to the store for fresh food for dinner, I saw the resolve that I admired. I saw gangs of little kids playing cricket in lanes and the women washing clothes in jugs of soapy water on their doorsteps. Each person, it seemed, had an affectionate relationship with every other person in the vicinity and in the cohesiveness of this community, I felt safe.

Mutamma's house had four rooms including a separate kitchen, but all, it seemed, were unfurnished. She sat me on the tiled floor of the main room and, like Cartamma, fetched me some chicken and a photo album. My chicken had not cooled down enough to eat before she told me what, perhaps, she had been trying to tell me all year: she and Cartamma were enemies. Mutamma said that all year she and Cartamma had not spoken.

Mutamma, still dainty and sweet and usually so gentle that I wanted to hug her, was mad. She said, with a fury perhaps indicative of a lack of confidants, that Cartamma had been mean to her ever since the passing of Mutamma's husband, Cartamma’s older brother. Then, when their children had a love marriage, Cartamma had been infuriated. Love marriages are the only marriages which don’t involve a dowry. Though dowry is illegal, all marriages still require a dowry to pass from the family of the female to the family of the male. This sum of money is considerable. Families plan their financial futures around the money they will receive for their son's marriages, or save for their daughters'. Mutamma bitterly surmised that Cartamma was upset that she got no dowry, but Mutamma stressed that because of this she had paid for much of the wedding, even taking out a big loan to do so.

By this time I finished my chicken and as if we were back in the program house, Mutamma took my plate to the kitchen and refilled it. I sat looking around the bare, seemingly unlived in house. I had forgotten that Mutamma was a widow. When Mutamma re-entered the room with a plate once again full of chicken covered in a thick red curry, I asked about her son who I had seen in pictures. She took a deep breath and quickly said that he had gone to work in Dubai, but that the contractors were crooked and barely paid him and now he had no way to leave. But immediately Mutamma switched back to the subject of Cartamma and again her face got fierce. Mutamma sat on the floor next to me and looked ready to cry. Her hand was balled into a fist. Mutamma said then that she hated Cartamma because of the way she treated her daughter. Ever since the grandchild had been born, a cause of great celebration in the program house, Cartamma had changed. The child had been born dark, darker than Cartamma's son and darker than Mutamma's daughter, but lighter than Cartamma. Cartamma blamed Mutamma's daughter for the baby's complexion and made living in that cramped house unbearable for the recent mother. Dark skin was the one transgression that, to Cartamma, was unforgivable. She must have hated herself.

Two days before I left India, Cartamma and Mutamma gave my apartment a final cleaning. All of my possessions that I could carry home had been stuffed into two giant black suitcases and a green duffel bag. With their short brooms that made them stoop, they had swept the tile floor clean. The white walls, which had served as the backdrop to nights awake watching lizards snap up insects, and on which I had tacked maps of India and the world, were now bare. I had acquired little property during the year. Only two possessions were too big to bring home with me: a clay pot that was also a drum, and a small television.

The day before I left, as I walked restlessly around the program house from the computer with no new emails, to the fridge with the chilled water, to the breezeway where I put down each article after a couple of paragraphs, Cartamma and Mutamma took almost synchronized turns approaching me. Each time one of them drew near, I knew what would be said. Each time it was the same: "give me your television. I am your favorite." All day this procession took place until, feeling annoyed and smothered, and doubting that I had ever been friends with either one of them, I went home and gave the television to the old man who lived in the apartment below me.
© Nate Bell August 2009
<nbell1@gmail.com

Vaishali and Sachin
Nate Bell
The first time I met Vaishali was in Madison, where my seven classmates and I took Tamil in preparation for our year in Madurai.

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