Uma - chooses between Ghosts and Scorpions

Uma has just returned from a long trip. Everyday this trip takes her to another town, a cosy but bustling city compared to the contained campus she lives in, to attain what adults call an ‘education’. She is not sure if her school, a catholic convent named Alvernia, provides her with as much wisdom as do the daily doses of dazzling seconds and minutes that pepper her blank slate of a brain with enough spice. She will commit to memory all that there is such that at a future date: which will be when she is older, prettier, more popular and less lazier, she will pen all this down to win the hearts of her nostalgia ridden peers. Even at twelve she is backsighted. She knows there will be history in the future. That would be made up of the Now. Hence the urgency to reach home, do her homework, polish her shoes, press her tie, shine her belt, do the school thing. After all she will not be twelve ever again.

“Good Evening aunty, is Uma home aunty?” she can hear Akhila ask her mother. She fervently hopes that her mother will not fall for her friend’s charms and sacrifice her daughter to an evening of childish prattle. Akhila’s father’s recent demise and her own inability to be civil and pay proper condolences had made Amma all the more solicitous of the ‘poor kid’ as though it were her fault that uncle had died. She didn’t even know how he died and when they met after a few days the two friends of course never brought up such mundane matters.

The thing with Akhila was that she wanted to play everyday. She was also a member (the only other) of her Secret Service Club so it was tough to avoid her altogether. Added to that her mother literally forced her to ‘play’ with ‘such a sweet girl and she comes first in class’, obviously the sweetness of any girl was dependent on her rank in class. First she did not enjoy what these girls ‘played’. Is this not why she had founded the Club? Secondly she had other ideas about who was sweet and who wasn’t. In reality sweet as a word was anathema to her therefore anyone depicting that quality was not to her taste. What kindled her was spice.

In the 80s there were very few spicy girls in South India.

“ No beta, her bus has not yet come, I am also worried….” Her mother lying? Impossible! If there was anyone after Satya Harishchandra, the king whose love for Truth made for an absolutely pathos ridden and painful life (which was wasted on a whole comic book), it was Amma. “ I will tell her that you came by as soon as she comes, ok? Say hello to your mother”……

“ Thank you aunty” sometimes Akhila overdid it she thought. It would be good to meet her thirty years hence to see if she was really truly ‘sweet’. This whole business of wishing all aunties and uncles was grating. Some kids could do it very well, the innocent smile and the heightened excitement accompanying the greeting, exemplifying the well-brought up lass. Apart from coming first in class the one other parameter of scoring the top-of-the camp charts was to be thought of as‘Mrs So and So has such well behaved children’, since complimenting you directly meant they were guilty of spoiling you.

You could also see that the adults did not care much about anyone who did not in some convoluted way help them get a promotion. What was the point of the Good Evenings? They lived in a boiling cauldron of an Air Force Base with murky goings on. The goings on that fathers at work whispered to their willing wives’ ears which were promptly overheard by their respective kids who fashionably displayed in public this knowledge of your father by pointedly ignoring you or excessively fawning over you depending on where your father stood with their father.

This was what roiled her. Sweet girls, Politicking fathers, Malleable mothers. Now her mother was playing plaint while her ‘sweet’ collaborator stood outside awaiting her company while her father was still working, this was four in the evening, in a country which was not at war. What does the military do in peacetime, she wondered.

Her mother came in while she busied herself with labelling notebooks and sharpening pencils ( Ah! One day to be able to write with a pen!! ) She was naturally conscientious and had earned a ‘good name’ among aunties which she tried desperately to shrug off by such wanton behaviour as not going out to play with her one and only friend instead sitting down to complete her Moral Science lesson on ‘Anger causes Bitterness’.

It was strange how the Kendriya Vidyalayas, where Thank God she was not studying, had no such subject. They had PT, SUPW and other acronym-ed classes that were as wasted on the children but nothing ‘moral’ about them. So if a child was studying in KV Sulur was that child going to be immoral or amoral? Would she turn out more moral than others? Would studying moral science make her automatically more moral? Is awareness as good as knowing? Right now she knew that she was behaving in an extremely dishonest way by making her mother lie, by hiding from her one and only pal and by attempting to study a lesson with a lot of anger (which arose in her for no reason these days) while the lesson had expressly said that it would cause her bitterness.

“Akhila was looking for you, I think you should go play and come back later and study” Her mother seemed not in the least bothered by the lie she had so easily subjected an innocent victim to. Her mother it seemed was happy to have a child who wanted to study and therefore by the powers vested in mothers thought it was alright to give her that one whiff of permission and to award her daughter’s studiousness by debasing herself with a lie. Uma was getting angrier by the minute.

“Why did you lie to her?” she almost choked at the bitterness with which she spit out the accusation.

“I can’t stand your pouting everyday when they come and you have to go out, anyone would think you were being sent to war not to play! I can’t imagine what’s wrong with you…you were such a sweet child….” That word again! Oof! Uma did not think her pout was justification enough for her mother to commit a sin. She got angrier. Reasons ! reasons shouldn’t be the reason to fall from grace.

“How was I to know you are back? Do you even say hello these days? I can hardly hear the school bus in this terrible din! How many times I ask your father and he doesn’t answer me….this temporary accommodation is killing me…right next to the helipad, landing and take off, landing and take off and the Kirans have been flying since morning….I will go deaf soon, from tomorrow you can go and answer the door and your friends yourself…..” Amma took away her empty tiffin box with a “ did you eat your lunch or you gave it all to someone again?”

All is well with the world Uma thinks, she would not have accepted a flawed mother.

Except that Amma was turning out to be a coward instead! Ever since Puri aunty had warned her about Snakes and Scorpions in the camp and how to protect your home from their invasion, Ma was seen, along with Ramankutty Aunty and Kishore Aunty, reinforcing the battlements. Which meant every evening the clothes had to be brought in from the clothes-line before dusk, the doors had to be shut the moment the sun started his night-cap and all the children had to bring out old newspapers (or borrow them if your mother had inadvertently sold the old bunch to the kabaaDiwaalah) and lay it out at the threshold such that the offensive snakes met their match in the fading ink of a month old Indian Express. As for scorpions, which she personally thought of as more piercing, they had to be endured with a courage that only defence families possessed. After all a flying green viper and wild elephants on rampage in Kumbhigram had not deterred her mother, what were scorpions but small ugly creatures who got irritated for no reason at all and stung the nearest available human out of malice? One had to simply AVOID them.

Which meant you couldn’t take long nightly walks because one young honeymooning couple were treated to the horrors of encountering a soporific scorpion disturbed from slumber. The poor pregnant lady had lost her unborn child to the poison. Though none of her friends or she herself were pregnant the prospect of meeting the same killer scorpion on his nightly jaunts dissuaded her adventurous spirit more than her mother’s warnings. She would have liked to investigate the Case of the Biting Scorpion at night, to map out its routes, its habits but she thought that India might benefit more if she were alive.

Though now it seemed that the scorpion species was out to get them!! They were definitely angry (and most certainly bitter) at being ousted from their homes and were sure to have talked to their neighbours, the snakes, who seemed to have agreed that the humans inhabiting their world without permission needed to be taught a lesson. Many lessons. Suddenly there were reports of more and more sightings and more and more bites, stings, close encounters and almost brushes with death. It seemed for a while that everyone had a tale but her, so unfair! Why were the scorpions avoiding her? All her friends had their own scorpion tales to tell, she had to listen to them, they got all the attention. Maybe these creatures know of my club and its motto? That ‘Unearth the Truth at all Costs’ was coined by her? Maybe they are afraid of me! Yes that could be it.

So she sent a mental message to the underlings of the underworld to come face her if they had the guts. And they did.

The first one was quite clever, it camouflaged its look such that under the hazy twilight sky with winds whirring from the blades of the helicopter nearby, it appeared but a pebble lost in muddy thoughts. She went out to get the clothes before the downpour as instructed by her mother and Uma would have added heavy karma to her young heretofore unsullied life, by accidently stepping on this agent but for the timely surfacing of her disgust for female undergarments. Uma was sure she would never wear one herself. This conical cup like, thing. Why did her mother have to dry it out in the sun? Even if it was ostensibly hidden under a towel? Her distaste for such public displays of the private selves saved the country from losing one of its finest potential detectives that evening.

She stops short of going right there to where that ‘thing’ lay enjoying what was left of the sun, unaware of the riot it was capable of causing in Uma’s mind. Right under it lay the agent, very aware that feminine charms were always hidden from public view and hence needed more time to be un-clipped. From the clothesline. He waited for his adversary in vain. For Uma did an about turn and hastily walked into her house lest some boy spying on her might associate that ‘thing’ with her. That would never do! But she now had her story too……it was getting dark, about to rain, I went out to get the clothes, there he was hidden from my view, I was about to step on him when the lightening struck and saved my life...that was sure to get a LOT of attention.

There was more than one story though. More and more agents cropped up in the least likely places. She learned to avoid them, walk past them, jump over them, share space with them and finally even bathe while one agent crouched in the corner of the bathroom, watching the wall (his head was turned). She was not sure if anthropods came as male and female but this one was a gentleman. It was beginning to look like a horror film, her life. Uma did not want to scare her parents. This was spooky. Till a week ago she had never encountered any scorpions and now she was seeing them everywhere. Were they here because she had wished for them? Could they actually hear her? Did she believe that they understood her sub-conscious desire to face the enemy?

Maybe she should tell Akhila and get her opinion. Yes that’s what she should do. She could call a meeting and give out a new password. It was time to change the password anyway. Though they had not yet had any reason to use it they were meticulous about such details. They kept a register of the people they had ‘followed’, of the ‘cases’ they had tried to solve and the snacks they had eaten on the day of the meetings. Which was mostly a Sunday absolving them of trivialities such as school and homework. Since neither of them had access to any secret attics or islands unlike the lucky children that populated the books by Enid Blyton, they had to make do with meeting under the study table, for now. Amma provided them with saboodana pakorasand nimbu paani and left them alone after that but they continued to whisper. Whispering is the essential quality of any secret service as is evident from all the Bond movies they show in the Officer’s Mess. These men and women hardly talk. When they are not spending most of their time half naked wriggling in each other’s company they get to work, in whispers.

So it was decided by them over spicy snacks that they would dedicate their free time in the pursuit of finding the source of all these scorpions. If Evil exists, there is a reason with usually a source. Just as a snake resides in the snake-pit the scorpions have their own haven. The mission was to find their HQ and monitor the movement of the troops. They first made a plan of action. Uma was very found of POAs. It gave her something concrete to work on, while Akhila was miffed that no one else was joining their club.

“Maybe we can tell them about your mother’s pakoras, to encourage participation?” she suggested to a crabby Uma who was trying to fit the drawing of the floor plan of # 5 Base Repair Depot into her rough notebook. That is when they heard Amma sob. She was hiccupping and sobbing and clearing her throat and nose, all at once. She was also trying to convey something in whispers to Puri aunty, who as usual right on dot, at dusk, came by to make sure all the women in her block were taking precautions against the creepy creatures.

Hearing them whisper so uncharacteristically it seemed to her that her mother had hit upon the same idea too, of starting a secret club! Then again she realized that that could not be. Mothers just cooked and fed you and kept you safe. They also tried to force you to play with your friends when you didn’t want to but they did not usually whisper. On the contrary, she had always been a little embarrassed about her mother’s booming voice.

“I am telling you it is Mrs Sharma. I can hear her cry, she says ‘Save me Save me’ and I hear anklet bells and a sewing machine, like she is sewing in a frenzy and ….” Amma gulps down a glass of water takes a break and starts again “She was found hanging in this house you know that don’t you?” Puri aunty must have nodded thinks Uma. Puri aunty knew the Sharmas. Everyone in the camp had heard of how this beautiful lady had killed herself, leaving two young girls in the care of her doctor husband. What the girls had not known was that she had died right here!! Maybe in this room where they were sitting right now, under the table. Maybe she climbed this very table to get to the fan. Maybe. “Speak softly the kids are playing in the next room” Puri aunty warns in an audible whisper.

“Why did she hang herself?” Uma asks a perplexed Akhila. “What kind of mother would do that to her children?” Uma continues not realizing that Akhila is looking very excited all of a sudden. “I know, I know what we can do! We will tell everyone tomorrow about the Ghost who Cries and ask them to help us find out what it wants. Ghosts show themselves only when they want something, that way we can get more people to join our club” she concludes triumphantly.

Uma finally realized that she could not carry on being a small enterprise anymore, with more and more cases cropping up she would need to grow, scaling up was important for survival. This was a good idea, they could engage the interest of others with this scoop. Though in her heart she knew that her mother’s fears stemmed from her unhappiness in living in such cramped quarters and that she was ‘seeing’ things that she wanted to see not as they really were. It also dawned on her that they might be getting a permanent accommodation soon. Thanks to this Ghost who had appeared out of nowhere soon she would be rid of her own personal Scorpions.