Mrs
Blarsingdale
From seven floors up, all Anandi Joshi could
see was the young woman’s straight black hair, ‘ape cut’ in the style of 1970s
Singapore. Pale shoulders showed from a halter necked t-shirt. Neat ivory
coloured legs emerged from under the shortest of shorts – hot pants, they were
called, then. And with her, always, there were two Pekinese dogs on red and
green leashes - their silky blonde coats groomed in the same ape-cut style.
It was the dogs that 12-yr-old Anandi,
seven stories up in Taman Sarasi Apartments, wanted to make friends with. She’d
been watching the threesome for over a month now, but her gawky adolescent
Indian looks and frizzy hair - which she hated even more, now that she was in
this land of nifty figures, translucent skin and unreal hair - stopped her. And
then there was her Indian convent school accent that no one seemed to
understand here, except the Mehra kids upstairs on the 11th floor.
Anandi begged her mother to come downstairs
with her, to help her make friends. “But this is a good opportunity to learn
how to deal with total strangers in a new country,” Aai had said, nudging her
to go and just introduce herself, ask the young woman her name, play with her
dogs.
The dogs were named Chok (bamboo flower) and
Bo (precious). And she was Mrs Blarsingdale. A very western name on a very
oriental person. She lived in the other wing on the 9th floor. They
talked very little at first, Anandi and Mrs Blarsingdale, mainly about dogs.
But they fell into an easy rhythm, meeting every day around 5 in the evening.
Chok and Bo walked ahead of them,
waddling grandly at an imperial pace even when off their leash.
In a few weeks, Anandi was calling her by
her Chinese name – Lien, which meant lotus. Aai had suggested she should call
her Lien Didi – but Anandi had vetoed it as odd-sounding - and anyway she’s not
my Didi (older sister) she’s my Friend, she said firmly to her Aai.
On their walks, Anandi would talk a lot
and Mrs Blarsingdale would listen much, smiling, nodding, asking her briefly
worded questions in her chopped-up Singapore English: “why for say that?” or
the slightly breathless: “andthen?”
Anandi would fill her in about the Singapore American School that she
went to, in which, confusingly, even the Singaporeans spoke like Americans and
she could spend an entire school day without having understood a single thing
that she heard and saw. Not words, not tones, not expressions, not even
gestures. The school counselor had wondered, in a report to her parents, if she
was Slow. Mrs Blarsingdale had doubled over and laughed at that, like a little
girl. Anandi had then asked her age. She was 25.
She was the prettiest, best dressed person
Anandi had ever met in India or in Singapore. Shorts, leather skirts, belts,
enormous watches, boots, flipflops with big flowers on them, rectangular hoop
earrings, square bangles – funky stuff (but that word didn’t exist then – it
was called ‘go-go’ or ‘psychadelic’, back in ‘seventies Singapore). Anything she wore looked terrific on Lien;
Anandi marveled at this silently. “Did your mother always let you wear these
things? Does your husband like them?” Anandi had asked, and Mrs Blarsingdale
had smiled and asked her what kind of dogs they had back in India.
Anandi’s mother was pleased with this new
big sister friend she’d made. And on the day that Mrs Blarsingdale invited
Anandi to go see her apartment and her clothes, her mother nodded yes from the
balcony, seven stories up, when Anandi had shouted up in delight asking if she
could go.
The apartment smelt of incense and dogs,
with an undertone of cigarette smoke. “Does Mr Blarsingdale smoke?” Anandi
asked. No, she had nodded vaguely. “Do you smoke, then?” – and Mrs Blarsingdale
had said with a solemn face – “I tell you secret - Chok and Bo smoke. Chain smokers they are.”
The image was so funny that they’d laughed hard enough for the dogs to bark in
alarm.
One wall of the living room was fully
covered, ceiling to floor, with a
blow-up of her Lien’s face in black and white. That was the first thing that you
saw when you entered. The next thing you saw was the TV cabinet, which was in
black and white checks that became small and big, big and small - making your
eyes feel all wheely – Anandi had later told her mother. The transistor radio
could be worn like an enormous pink bangle around your arm. And the telephone –
she’d only ever seen black ones, and maybe a red one and a white one once in
India – was a fluorescent green, with pink flower-power stickers all over it.
The bedroom had red and pink satin throw cushions
everywhere. There was a mirror on the ceiling and no furniture except an
enormous bed, on which Mrs Blarsingdale invited her to sit. Anandi politely
declined, but she insisted. When Anandi did sit on it, she was immediately
engulfed by the mattress and gently tossed about. It was the first time she’d
ever seen or even heard of a waterbed. The more she struggled to sit up on it,
the more the bed bounced her around. With a straight face, Mrs Blarsingdale
asked pretend-severely: “Come on, sit up, sit down like a lady, why are you
rolling about like this?” Then, with a grin, she gave Anandi a hand to help her
get out of the clutches of the waterbed.
The second bedroom was not a bedroom at
all. It was a walk-in closet of huge proportions. Dresses, suits, pants, hung
pressed up against each other in long queues along the walls on hangers. A
rotating thing, like the one you saw in clothes stores, held belts and watches.
Jewellery hung on a panel of tiny hooks and overflowed from baskets on a
dresser. Rows of footwear sat neatly in the longest sloping shoe-shelf that
Anandi had seen anywhere outside a shoe shop. A big Chinese lacquered vanity
case, the only old thing in the house, stood propped open by its mirror. It
held several paintboxes of make-up. Anandi took it all in with a slow 360
degree turn. Mrs Blarsingdale giggled and held a soft white hand under Anandi’s
chin – “Close your mouth, or fly go in.”
Every time that she visited, Lien would
urge Anandi to try on her clothes, her belts, her shoes…but Anandi just
couldn’t. Her mother had told her not to overstep her welcome; and she herself,
once she’d held a few clothes and trinkets against herself, had decided that
they looked yukky on her. Only Mrs Blarsingdale could wear them.
The kitchen door was pasted over with a
poster of Snoopy dancing, and the words ‘Feeling Groovy’ above his head. The
lettering glowed in the dark, and Anandi waited for when she would be invited to
see this and all of the other wonders of this apartment at night. They would
drink tea in Mrs Blarsingdale’s little kitchen balcony, taking turns to sit either
in the swing chair that looked like a giant American football, or in the
turquoise blue bean bag.
Chok and Bo, the two potentates, sat on
their own tasseled cushions in this
balcony. With the Beejees or the Eagles
playing on the small cassette player in the kitchen, they’d watch the world go
by below. They would see the fat Malaysian taxi driver with his too-tiny prayer
cap, the Chinese grocer and his wife unloading their little truck, beefy white
people, forever going in or out of the swimming pool, Indians coming home
loaded with shopping bags from Mustafa’s.
On Wednesdays they would turn up the music
loud, to drown out the intermittent, muffled gunshots from the Botanical Gardens
nearby. Wednesday was the day for ‘monkey population control’ as the Singapore
government called it.
Sometimes, Anandi wouldn’t see Mrs
Blarsingdale and the dogs downstairs for a few days. She’d fret about the
house, and Aai would say “You know her well enough now, go upstairs and find
out where she is – ask her if she’s unwell.” But when Anandi did ring her
doorbell, sometimes there’d be no answer and sometimes she’d open the door a
crack and say “I’m little busy, Mr Blarsingdale is here.” Maybe she has her
Period, Anandi told her mother, a condition that she had only recently learnt
about.
A few days later, Anandi would see her and
the dogs in the garden again. They’d walk together and Anandi would fill her in
on the latest crimes of her tormentor in school, one Matt Danielson; she had
begun to understand the American accent well-enough to know when she was being
called names. As for baseball, she’d set a record of sorts, never having
connected her bat with the ball in school even once. At that, Mrs Blarsingdale
had said, with unusual vehemence, “What so great about hitting ball with round
bat. All this Matt Danielson type American boys, baseball hit them in head when
little – so they become mean and stupid.”
Whenever they met after one of these gaps,
Mrs Blarsingdale would have something new to show her. She’d invite her up to
see new clothes or a tiny new 9-inch counter-top TV for the kitchen, or abalone
earrings from Australia. And when they settled down with their tea in the
balcony, Anandi would realize how much she missed this when Mrs Blarsingdale
was busy. But she didn’t have the words to tell her.
On one such afternoon on the balcony,
Anandi looked below to see her mother’s Indian friend and neighbour who lived
on the 11th floor, Chandra Aunty, gesturing urgently to her. She was
also shouting something that Anandi couldn’t hear up on the 9th
floor. She said a quick bye to Mrs Blarsingdale and hurried down, where Chandra
Aunty was waiting near the lift. Pushing her back into the lift, she asked
rapidly “Why were you in that appartment? How do you know her? Does your mother
know you were there,” as the lift rose 7
stories up. When Anandi’s mother opened the door, Chandra Aunty
pushed importantly past, settled into a chair, signaled the Tamil maid to get
her water quickly, and asked Anandi to go to her room, as they wanted to talk
about Something.
From her room, Anandi caught parts of a
sentence: “God knows how many Mr Blarsingdales…” And then a brittle sounding
word: “Call-girl.” She thought she must
look it up in her dictionary. When Chandra Aunty left, her mother told her what
it meant, trying hard to explain why it also meant that she couldn’t be friends
with Mrs Blarsingdale anymore; but that Mrs Blarsingdale wasn’t an evil person
either. It was a facts-of-life conversation in which nothing made sense.
From then on, for the next few weeks, she
simply avoided going into the balcony during Chok and Bo’s walk time. She would
now be careful not to go to the lift in the other wing, taking the stairs when
she had to go to a birthday party on the 6th floor there. Once she’d seen them from 7 stories up and
waved her book at Mrs Blarsingdale, miming ‘I-have-to-study’, pulling a fake
regretful face…and had felt sick to the stomach.
Months passed, the smell of incense, dogs
and cigarettes almost forgotten. She heard the Wednesday garden gunshots
clearly now, unmuffled by the Beegees. Her stories of Matt Danielsen’s fresh
crimes and, most importantly, how she now had Periods, remained untold. Mrs
Blarsingdale was now just someone Anandi didn’t speak about and had to
avoid.
Till the day that she read the notice at
the Chinese grocer’s: Missing: Grey
Pekinese, answering to the name of Chok. Finder will be rewarded. Contact Mrs
Blarsingdale, 9th flr, Wing B.
Anandi
had run home, cheeks aching with unshed tears, heart pounding as she jumped
into the lift. She could almost hear her mother saying a firm No even before
she asked if she could go see Mrs Blarsingdale.
But Aai had stood very still for a few
seconds after Anandi had sobbed out the news of the missing Chok. She had then
picked up the house keys and gone with Anandi up to the 9th floor.
Mrs Blarsingdale opened the door, eyes swollen, a tissue held to her nose, car
keys in one hand. “I look for Chok in Bukit Timah Road today,” she said
briefly, as they headed out. They got into her little green Datsun, the lone
Pekinese Bo getting in quietly besides her in the front, Anandi and Aai getting
in at the back.
She drove slowly down the thickly wooded
road and parked where the road forked into three. Without a word to one
another, they fanned out into the paths. And above the persistent whine of the
Singapore palm-beetle, they raised their voices together, the three women
calling: Chokkkk, Chokky, good boy, Chokk-Chokk, Chokku, come home, come home,
come to Mamma. Anandi’s voice shrill and urgent, Mrs Blarsingdale’s now hoarse
from the crying, and Aai calling out, clear and reassuring, “Don’t worry Lien,
we’ll find him soon…he’ll come home.”
*******
Gouri
Dange (Caferatti – Stories at the Coffee Table)
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