“Why are you staring at him like an owl?” the woman asks me in Marathi. She squirts a stream of betel juice out on the ground. Flecks of betel nut stain her lips orange—I notice a quarrelsome tilt to her jaw.
Would it be terribly elitist not to acquaint myself with this woman after all? As I try to negotiate this ethical conundrum, a loud banging at the door silences the room. The orderlies look nervously at each other, their menace evaporated. They proceed up the steps where one of them fumbles with the keys. Some of the khaki-clad men pick up chairs, ready to defend us against the Pakistani threat, apparently advanced to our very door.
The lock is turned, to reveal an ebullient group of doctors and nurses. They’ve risen to the call of duty, they proudly announce, by sticking with an operation even after the siren sounded in the middle. I look for a stretcher bearing the patient, but they’ve left him upstairs in his room. His appendix is out, so he won’t succumb to it, but whether or not he weathers a bomb attack isn’t in their purview.
The drama successfully concluded, the orderlies return to their scowling and the khaki-clad men to their strategies of defending the motherland. I can sense the woman still staring at me—I try not to look at her, but find my gaze pulled in. Her expression is no longer hostile but a mixture of amusement and craft. “Raju, say hello to Auntie,” she says, not taking her eyes off me. “Auntie wants to know who that is on your shirt.”
“Bimal Batak.” Bimal the duck. I remember the new coalition government’s edict to mollify their loony right fringe: all cartoon characters must now have traditional Hindu names. Bugs Bunny has become “Khatmal Khargosh.” Superman was first dubbed “Maha Manush,” but with Superdevi’s success, gets by as “Supermanush.” Archie and his gang have been banned altogether for being too culturally subversive.
The boy starts complaining he is hungry, and his mother’s gaze falls to my lap. Too late, I realize the reason for her sudden friendliness—she has spied the pomegranate. I quickly cover it with my dupatta. “I’m hungry, too,” I tell the boy, and it’s true. These days I am always hungry, we all are. For now, though, I have given up on fish. Suddenly, it’s Marmite I crave.
THE MORNING OF THE PICNIC, I saw my mother rummage in the fridge for things to add to the chicken. We had eaten the bird the night before in a curry—just the skeleton really, since my mother had stripped the bones clean for the sandwiches. Not quite satisfied with her pile of shredded meat, she found some leftover coriander chutney to mix in, half an onion, chopped cabbage to pass off as lettuce, and the secret ingredient without which the taste would be incomplete: a generous dollop from the jar of Marmite in the corner of the vegetable bin.
Uma and I were raised on Marmite, we craved its saltiness, its aroma, its pungency, more than chocolate or ice cream. Even a trace mixed in stimulated us to eat foods we normally abhorred. Marmite could make us overlook the blandness of cauliflower, forgive the mealiness in chickpeas. My mother always dirtied two separate spoons while adding it to a dish, so that Uma and I didn’t fight afterwards over who got to lick the tar-like residue clean. I remember the day after my ninth birthday, when we found the Marmite lying open on the dining table. We took turns spooning it into our mouths, in such voluptuous quantities that we were able to actually bite into each gob. Our mother found us lolling light-headed on the ground that evening, our faces all black and sticky and smeared, the jar between us licked clean. After that, she used elaborate hiding places to store her jars (including a half-full one she forgot about in the blanket chest, which Uma only found, and polished off, several years later). She continued to hide the Marmite in the vegetable bin out of force of habit, even after we grew up.
The first bite that day on the beach was perfection—the dark yeastiness of the Marmite rose into my nostrils and swirled into my mouth. Uma appeared entranced as well, taking small nibbles of her sandwich and rolling them around slowly with her tongue. Then I looked at Karun’s face and saw his dismayed expression, noticed the way he tried to gulp down his bites without chewing. In the effort to impress him, my mother had added too much.
“Everyone loves these,” my mother said, taking a bite of her own sandwich and nodding in agreement with herself. “It’s the secret ingredient I add. Though I can’t reveal it, since then it would no longer be secret.” She tittered girlishly. Karun smiled at her, then bravely swallowed.
Afterwards, we played rummy. In an effort to make Karun win, my mother kept discarding cards she thought he might need. “Such good technique and yet such unfortunate hands,” she clucked, as he ignored the latest offering she laid in front of him, the ten of spades. She frowned as Uma picked up a joker from the deck and declared once again. “My daughters seem to have sucked the air dry of luck today,” she remarked, hoping to end our winning streak by throwing us the evil eye. But the cards (and Uma and I) refused to cooperate. “I’m getting bored of this,” my mother finally announced, as Uma counted up the points in Karun’s tenth losing hand. “Why don’t we try something else?”
So we switched to sweep, which wasn’t much better. We played flush and gambler, and Anoop even taught us poker at my mother’s insistence. No matter what we tried, Karun continued to lose.
“You’re not very good, are you?” Uma remarked.
“There’s more important things in life than cards,” my mother snapped.
“Perhaps he’ll be lucky in love,” Uma leaned towards me and whispered.
Worried about Karun’s losses, my mother tried to distract him by asking about his work. “Anoop says you manufacture quartz,” she ventured.
“Quarks,” Anoop corrected. “And Karun doesn’t go around manufacturing them, he studies them.”
“It’s all so fascinating,” she said. “That man in the wheelchair—something Hawkings—not sure if he’s still alive—he’d come to India once—did you ever meet him?” Karun shook his head.
“Poor bechara, though Mrs. Dugal says not to go by his upside-down face—that he’d make mincemeat of Einstein in a match of brains—is that true?”
Uma rescued Karun from my mother’s question. “What exactly are quarks?” she asked.
So Karun started talking about the building blocks of matter, the fact that even protons and neutrons could be split, the six “flavors” of quarks with names like “up” and “charm” and “strange.” His face took on an expression of wonder, like that of a child transported to a zoo, a circus, an amusement park. My mother’s features began to relax as well, the drowsiness from her sandwiches and parathas rose in her eyes. She struggled briefly with it before succumbing in a corner of the remaining shade. “Don’t mind me, it’s the heat,” she murmured, stretching out and covering her face with a handkerchief. “It’s very interesting, all these flavored particles—like little sweets.” Soon, she was snoring politely.
“Let’s all go into the water,” Anoop said.
THE WOMAN WITH the boy tries to attract my attention. I do my best to ignore her, but she is too determined. “Excuse me.” She tugs at my shoulder. “He really is very hungry.”
I cover the pomegranate with another fold of my dupatta and close my hand protectively over it. “It’s always harshest on the children.” I hope the compassion in my voice will be enough to appease her.