Chapter 3: Margaret.
Margaret had a pot of tea ready on the table, kept warm with an old, worn out tea cosy. On a plate, she had laid out some Kannakkubol from Queen's Bakery. "Here, your favourite", she said, passing it to Ava. The Kannakkubol was crisp and light, crumbling slightly at Ava's bite. Trivandrum's version of shortbread cookies. Mama's tableware wasn't fancy. She had a few beautiful pieces gifted by relatives from England on their visits back home, but Ava remembered that she never considered them prized possessions, worthy of display.
She was a practical woman, not given to frills and flounces, or fussy tableware. Treselda Cottage never had the "showcase" that was the pride of most other houses then, filled with souvenirs and foreign crockery. Whatever she owned was put away in closed cupboards, taken out and used when needed, and given away if not used. The cottage belonged to, and was named after, Margaret's sister-in-law, Treselda, her brother Eric's wife. They were in East Africa, where Eric worked on a British tea estate, keeping books. Maragaret paid them a nominal rent to stay in Treselda Cottage.
Margaret had been brought up in relative comfort in one of the grand old houses, which had been named after her - "Margaret Cottage". Her husband, from a similarly old and landed family, had given up his claim to any inheritance of property with the dashing bravado of youth, and had set out to make his own fortune, working on an estate in Malaysia.
As a young wife, Margaret had lived on the estate briefly, but soon found she was not cut out for the lonely life in the dark, deep equatorial forests of Malaysia. The incessant sound of nocturnal insects had become a refrain in her head, urging her to go back home to Trivandrum. This was in the early 1920s. She brought her young children back to her hometown for their schooling and lived with her mother, known to Ava as Valiya Ammachi, in Margaret Cottage, helping to run the large house.
Unfortunately, her husband's health did not permit him to fulfill his dreams of making it big on distant shores, and he succumbed to pneumonia, quite young. A widowed Margaret depended on the largesse of her brothers, who continued to support her until her own children were of the age to be able to do so.
By then, her brother Terrence had left the estates in East Africa, and having made his fortune, moved back to Trivandrum with his family. As he had supported his mother and Margaret for years, he took over Margaret Cottage and its vast properties after the Matriarch's demise. Margaret moved to Treselda Cottage then, and Terrence had the family house renamed. Margaret was a proud woman and had imbibed the value of silence, never having anything to say on the turn of events in her life, gratefully accepting her lot, and lily-like, blooming wherever she was planted.
Ava used to wait for Mama to open her Almirah, so that she could get a glimpse of the treasures neatly secreted inside. Under the brown paper lining of one of the shelves, she kept a lone photograph of Jerome Pereira, her husband. It was a studio portrait. Jerome stood leaning against a tall stool that held a vase of flowers, staring straight into the camera. He was holding himself up straight, and was unsmiling, but Ava felt there was something gentle about him. His eyes had a hint of something. Uncertainty? She had heard that he was a poet of sorts and used to write a lot. Each time she looked at the picture, she would build up a new nugget of information to flesh out her grandfather in her mind. Mama never spoke of him. As usual, most of the children's incessant queries were met with a smile of silence.
It was common for men from the community to work on the tea estates in Sri Lanka, East Africa and Malaysia. Their basic education and felicity with the English language helped them get managerial positions, and most often, they would find themselves standing in for white bosses who preferred to go back to their own countries and leave their Indian employees to handle the estates. Margaret's brothers were all on the estates, as were her sons and sons-in-law, later.
As there were no schools near the estates at the time, Margaret's grand-children were sent back to Trivandrum, into her care when they came of school-going age. The bigger ones went to boarding schools across South India. During the holidays, however, they would all be with Margaret along with their siblings and cousins in Treselda Cottage. The tiny cottage would magically expand to house them all. It never seemed to lack space.
Mama's house had the boys' room and the girls' room, with four narrow cots in each room, lined up against the walls. Her small room had an extra cot, where anyone who fell sick would get to sleep, so that Mama could keep an eye on them at night.
Margaret was sent small amounts of money to take care of basic expenses. Sometimes things went smoothly on the estates. Sometimes, they didn't, and the money would trickle in slowly, or stop altogether. During the war, it was increasingly difficult to get remittances from abroad.
Ava's father, Margaret's son-in-law, had gone on to open his own factory in East Africa and his fortunes would fluctuate with the tides. Her brothers, at school in Bangalore would be down-graded from parlour boarders to ordinary boarders, and school fees woudn't get paid on time. Margaret always stepped up and managed the show. It must have been hard for Mama at times, Ava could see now, though the children never got to know then.
And neither did Margaret's relatives and neighbours who were not as well off, and came to her for a helping hand. Women from the old, proud houses who did not have family abroad, and whose menfolk couldn't get jobs in Trivandrum, would hesitatingly ask her for help. Margaret never turned anyone away empty-handed. She managed with what little she had, and from it, she gave.
Ava remembered the family that lived in a makeshift house by the canal-side, who sent their children to Mama to be fed. The would sit on the steps to the kitchen door and eat the rasam and rice that she gave them. Ava would hover over them, worried that the food was too plain, and would secret them an extra treat - a sweet or biscuit that she had saved.
(To be continued...)
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