Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(55)

Despite James’s disinterest in reconciling with his relatives, Patti had always craved a family. She had tried hard to coax James into winning his back. But when they had rejected her children, she’d decided James knew what he was doing and she’d given up on them too.

Had the accident not happened, she would never have regretted that decision. Had James lived past thirty-five, maybe he would have made up with his parents, or maybe he would have moved his wife and children out of the flat that, unknown to Patti, still belonged to James’s father on paper although James had paid it off and cared for it for years. If that had happened, the fact that James’s father deeded the flat to his daughter wouldn’t have mattered, and James’s sister would never have been able to throw her brother’s widow and children out into the street after his death.

As it turned out, Patti was forced to regret her decision when, for the second time in her life, she had found herself without a roof over her head, and in need of charity. Then Emma had forced her to swallow her pride, and after a few days of sleeping under the London sky, she had gone to St. Joan’s and sought help. With the help of their pastor, she had found herself a job lifting bags off belts at Heathrow and turned into the kind of mother who said to her children: “Your mum’s a baggage handler, but she’ll be damned if you don’t end up doctors and engineers.”

For all her efforts, it was yet another thing that had not gone Patti Bamina Caine’s way.

One of the other baggage handlers at Heathrow, Charan Singh, had a few rooms to let in his house in Southall. Southall was a suburb of London just east of the airport that felt like it was a few thousand miles east of London, all the way in the middle of the Indian state of Punjab with its open street bazaars and the smell of spiced meat cooking in clay tandoor ovens scenting the air.

The rent was low enough that Patti could just about afford it. But he had offered her an even better deal: if DJ, who had been twelve at the time, spent the afternoons and evenings watching Charan Singh’s epileptic mother, he would forgo the rent altogether. That meant DJ and Emma could go to a private school in Richmond.

So Patti had worked sixteen-hour days, eight at the airport and eight at a bookstore in Hounslow, and given her children the kind of education she believed would break them out of the cycle of poverty. DJ had hardly seen his mum during those years at Charan’s. He was aware of how much guilt she carried about not having been there for her children. Not that DJ had ever had the time to miss her presence. He had come home from school every day, started Emma off on her homework, and then taken care of Charan’s Ammaji.

Ammaji had seizures a few times a month. It was only alarming that first time he’d witnessed it. She’d collapsed as if in slow motion, the white cotton of her loose kameez and salwar pants billowing around her before settling in a cotton cloud around her spasming body.

With nothing more than the slightest deepening of his always furrowed brow, Charan Singh had shown DJ how to push a piece of rubber into her open mouth as her limbs stiffened and shook without pause and her eyes turned up in her head. When she was done, Charan had placed a hand behind her back, propped her up, and led her to the bathroom where she could clean up.

Aside from the seizures, Ammaji was the most energetic person DJ had ever met. Every day she cooked enough to feed fifty people. Together they packed all the food in small plastic containers that Charan took to the corner store to be sold. No matter how much she made, they always sold out. No one in the neighborhood knew where the Khalsa General Store sourced their saag paneer, chicken makhani, and aloo gobi. Even Mr. Khalsa, the owner, didn’t know where Charan got the food from.

Ammaji was never allowed to leave the house. It was absolutely crucial that no one ever saw her have a seizure because Charan’s two brothers and two sisters had children they needed to get married off. Ammaji had explained to DJ in her at once patient and impatient way that no one in their community would marry her grandchildren if they knew of her ailment.

So she never left the house.

Charan, who was single, was tasked with the sick mother. The other children only visited on weekends every once in a while when DJ and Emma sat by the attic door and giggled at the spirited fights between the people from Ammaji’s stories. On weekdays Charan worked the evening and night shift, which meant he slept during the day. The only way he thought to accomplish this was to string small brass bells to a bracelet on his mother’s wrists. That way, when she had a seizure she woke him up, her convulsions rattling the bells like an alarm.

When DJ first started watching Ammaji, Charan had assured him that he could go about his schoolwork so long as he kept an ear out for the bells. But Ammaji hated those bells. “They give me a headache,” she said. “All day chun-chun-chun like a nautch girl in some brothel.”

She’d said all this to him in Punjabi, her bright brown eyes dancing with amusement instead of sadness. DJ had never heard Punjabi spoken before that, but she had a way of talking with her hands and her eyes and it had been remarkably easy to understand her. When he came home from school, the first thing DJ did was remove the bell bracelet. She always reminded him to clasp it back on before he left at the end of the day. Her children had made sure the metal band needed two hands to remove and put on.

In the years that he spent with her, DJ had learned to speak Punjabi like a Punjabi munda. But it wasn’t the only thing she taught him. Before he was thirteen he could outshine the most skilled cooks in all Southall. He could smell the readiness of onion in every one of its stages of cooking and knew exactly what stage worked best for each dish. He could identify the exact rapidity with which milk had to boil before adding the lemon to make the cheese curd separate into paneer. He could sense exactly when to add the tomatoes to tie together the onion, garlic, and ginger so that the curry came together perfectly with the oil separating from it in syrupy rivulets.