Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey

Author:Madhur Jaffrey [Jaffrey, Madhur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-51769-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Chicken Pox • Soup-Toast and Sewing •

A Fancy-Dress Party

The chicken pox lasted a good three weeks. I was convinced I that I would come out of it severely deformed, as many of the blisters had filled up with pus and some were a good three-quarters of an inch in diameter. No one was allowed to visit: I was completely quarantined. The blisters first hurt, then itched, never allowing me to lie in comfort. My father's eldest sister, Bhuaji, offered me little food packets over the Number 5 wall filled with mutthris (savory cookies). I devoured these quickly with thick layers of my grandmother's meethi chutney (sweet chutney made with shredded green mangoes and ginger). One good thing that came of this long illness is that our family began eating all its meals in Number 5. Our much smaller kitchen was humming all day now, and we were ecstatic.

My mother, whose calm ministrations had so comforted my father during all his minor illnesses, now turned her full attention to me, but her tactics were entirely different. Besides spoonfeeding me “soup-toast,” simple chicken and meat broths with slices of toast for dunking, which I loved, she approached me with another of her talents. She began teaching me how to sew. She had already taught me knitting at the age of five. By now I was knitting the most complicated designs, many of my own devising, requiring several colors that snaked their way across and up the insides of cardigans, vests, and pullovers.

Sewing was another matter. We had a tailor, Ram Narain, to do the simple stuff. He came to us from the Old City on a bicycle and worked at one end of the Number 5 dining room for weeks at a time. We bought the fabrics and sketched out the designs. He sat on the floor on a mat with my mother's Singer sewing machine and did his best to interpret our thoughts. If there was a wedding on the horizon, he stayed for months. He irritated us, because he never followed our designs to the letter, and because his finishing was hurried and careless. His buttons were never aligned, and his hemming was slipshod. Besides, he always cut the thread with his teeth. My mother kept reminding us that any help was hard to find and that we should be grateful to have him at all.

I considered myself highly stylish and was not content with Ram Narain's bumbling approach. There were no ready-made clothes in India then, so, with my mother's expert help, my chicken-pox days were happily employed with sewing. In this period I made two kameezes (shirts) to go on top of the shalwars (baggy trousers) that we wore. One was a delicate white poplin with a turtleneck, and the second was a cream silk. The first I boldly embroidered with an anchor placed just above the left breast. A “rope” (which I made by twisting some silk threads) wound around the anchor, going in and out of the white poplin through strategically placed buttonholes.

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