Preethi Nair - Gypsy Masala

‘What happens to me now?’ I asked her.

‘Whatever you want to happen,’ she replied. ‘When you break it to your family, be gentle with them,’ she added. ‘All they have ever wanted for you is the best.’

‘I have come to realise this,’ I replied. And this was the saddest part of it; that it had taken me so long to understand this.

The happy gang no longer appeared to me as bag people but as a chorus of voices that would do battle with the preconceived ideas that continued to invade my head. I was escorted to the taxi stand to continue the rest of my journey.

The taxi driver lacked the passion of José Del Rey. He stopped diligently at each set of traffic lights. Waiting for the amber light to flash, he would slowly pull away. Every time he stopped, my stomach churned. This was the part I was dreading: returning home and facing the ‘Mob’—the extended family of aunties. The problem was the ‘best’ that they wanted for me wasn’t what I had wanted. As we drew closer to the house, all that had happened on that mountain seemed a distant memory.

I recollected leaving a message hastily on my Auntie Sasha’s answer-machine saying that I was going away for a few days and needed time to think. I asked her to inform my Auntie Sheila as I didn’t have the courage to do it myself. Asking my Auntie Sheila not to worry about me was like asking the Pope not to be Catholic and she would have somehow managed to persuade me not to go, to come straight back home, for that was the power she had: she could persuade anyone to do anything. Anyone except Sasha, her sister, who invented her own rules away from those of the Mob. She was somehow able to do this whilst pretending to participate wholeheartedly in their antics.

As the cab got closer to our street, my heart began thumping. ‘Breathe,’ I kept telling myself, ‘it will be all right.’ But I knew it wouldn’t. How could I tell her what. I had done; what I was planning to do—that I had no job to go to, that I was going to move out and be an actress? I thought about what the bag lady had told me, to see things from different perspectives, but the facts were clear. My Auntie Sheila would be truly mortified. And then there was the rest of the ‘Mob’ that she would have to break the news to. They had already been dealt a heavy blow six months earlier when Navi (Auntie Asha’s daughter) decided to go travelling for a year. Secret talks were conferred in a bid to dissuade her, a deposit for her own flat was even offered, but to no avail. Navi went. What I was now going to do, especially after my broken engagement, would most probably lead to Auntie Sheila’s downfall. Auntie Meena had her eye on the top job and was waiting for an opportunity to step in and take over.

Auntie Sheila was head of the Mob. She drove around in a tinted black BMW with a personalised number-plate that read SHEILA 1. My Uncle Bali had bought this car for her for their thirtieth wedding anniversary last month and the comment she muttered under her breath was ‘Sheila didn’t win anything.’ My uncle had very selective hearing and so he didn’t hear this and continued to undo the big pink bow he had put on it as he handed Sheila the keys. Shortly after, Auntie Meena pulled up in our driveway with a new silver Saab convertible—there was no way she could be outdone—and the outside of our house would have looked like a show’room had it not been for my Auntie Sasha’s clapped-out Mini Metro, which Sheila insisted she park on the road, although Sasha didn’t.

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