Youpee, or UP: My grandparents’ formidable landlady: An Excerpt from my Memoir-in-Progress, I Lift up my Eyes to the Hills

51 Chimbai Road was an old house, its yellowing “white-wash” molting flakes that my sister and I surreptitiously peeled, poking their jagged edges beneath our nails with a nervous pleasure in their sharpness. In the narrow strip behind the house and the high back walls, banana and papayas fell unharvested, their sweetness wasted.

“He never accepted a bribe,” my father said of his father-in-law. “And everyone else goes into customs only for the bribes;” deliberately turning blind for cash while smugglers introduced gold, synthetic sarees, watches, perfume, western music, juicers, or the coveted “mixie-grinder” into India’s protectionist markets.

“And so,” he continued, “his colleagues own huge beach houses, but he still rents”—the lower floor of the rambling two storey house facing the sea, in which my mother was born.

Their formidable old spinster landlady, Cissy (Cecilia) Valladares, lived in her lair on the upper floor of this house she’d inherited which—despite Bombay’s rent control laws—provided her with a comfortable predictable income, and the consequent ironic fate of becoming one of those un/fortunate people whose days are abysses of infinite space with no Jacob’s ladder of work across them.

When the Coelhos talked about her, they metonymically spelled out her name UP so we children wouldn’t realize who was being talked of, and so, with traditional Indian good manners, I called her Aunty Youpee, and a new code had to be invented.

She had once blocked my path, her face, a map of warts and wens beneath her Medusa curls. “What mischief did you do that you got those?” she pointed at a bruise on my tom-girls’ face. I pointed up in turn, and asked, “What mischief did you do that you got those?”

She gasped, my grandfather gasped, pulling me away, though he, shy, correct, unfailingly polite could barely conceal his merriment. “Anita!” my mother, grandmother and Aunt Joyce cried!!

My grandfather said—proudly, “See what answers she gives at five. What answers will she give at twenty-five?” My father laughed with gleeful pride and enjoyment.

* * *

Youpee stalked out increasingly infrequently until she no longer could. When I went up with Uncle Mervyn–her sole visitor—to read her the newspaper, the fearsome witch of my childhood lay helpless in her own excrement. Her around-the-clock ayahs malingered, squatting in the purer air of the balcony, absently sieving rice, far from her faint old woman voice. Her only relatives, three nieces, were invisible. We hollered, the ayah turned her over; the bed-sores on her bottom and back were chasms of pink raw flesh, almost reaching the bone.

She died, leaving the sprawling house to her now-visible nieces (that old, strange, stronger-than-water business) who in the Gotterdamerung that made the landscape of so many childhoods the landscape of memory, pulled down 51 Chimbai Road—a plummy location, opposite both the beach, and the huge St. Andrew’s Church, nucleus of the suburb’s Catholic social, cultural and religious life. “Bayside” went up in its stead (making them instant multi-millionaires)–twenty floors of apartments, no room now for quirky mansions with flaking paint. The old order yielded to lego block symmetries, boxy flats, to the left, to the right, on top of, below each other,
two hundred families living in a patch of earth which had housed two. And in this world where neither the good nor the evil get quite what they deserve, the aunt, shunned alive, gave them, dead, munificence they could never have dreamed of, growing up in sleepy Bandra.

And, as compensation for their torn down rented house, my grandparents were given a free flat in the posh new Bayside: a seaside residence, like their peers–through the interventions of providence and the current socialist legislation which protected long term tenants against radically raised rents or evictions—but without the stress, humiliations, and subterfuges of dishonesty.

The wages of honesty: not so bad after all.

Goals

Start Date—August 27^th, 2012

Completion Date—September 1^st, 2013

Word Count Goal-120,000

Words per day Goal—425

Progress (Aiming to write 6 days a week, excluding Sundays)

Day 16—6650—150 words short