Left from the Nameless Shop

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Left from the Nameless Shop Page 14

by Adithi Rao


  Twenty minutes later, Basavaraj reached the front door of Christos Home for the Aged and rang the old-fashioned doorbell. James answered and led Basavaraj into the visitor’s parlour. Gesturing for him to take a chair, James left to call the priest. He did not meet Basavaraj’s eyes.

  Basavaraj looked around him at the pictures of Jesus Christ on the wall, at the messages of love and service inscribed everywhere, at the crucifix. He felt the serenity of the place sink in and calm his apprehensions. Getting up, he moved to the window that overlooked the back garden full of fruit trees and rose bushes so carefully tended. He thought of his friend – happy and safe, working there among those trees he loved, and it brought a smile to the old man’s face. There was a sound from behind him. He turned to find Brother Abranches watching him from the door.

  Basavaraj folded his hands in greeting. The priest indicated the sofa with a nod. His face looked sober and Basavaraj’s smile faded.

  ‘Does … does he want to see me, Brother?’ he asked, sitting down.

  ‘He passed away last night.’

  Basavaraj looked at the priest in silence. Then slowly, as if it hurt him to, he got to his feet and went to the window to look out again. His movements were stiff. Looking at him from across the room, the folds of his thin neck, the gnarled hand gripping the grill on the window, it suddenly struck Brother Abranches how old Basavaraj was. After a moment, Basavaraj turned back to the priest.

  ‘I don’t understand … only two days … How?’

  ‘We’re not sure,’ replied the priest quietly. ‘James says that the day you brought him here, he went straight into the back garden, talking about trees over and over again. Then he began to search for something. When James tried to bring him back inside, he wouldn’t come in but kept walking around. Finally, James called in another helper and they forced him to go to the room that had been prepared for him. These past two days he’s been walking around from one dormitory to the other, searching for something; we couldn’t make out what. Finally, last night we called in our physician—’

  ‘Doctor Bhaskara,’ Basavaraj interrupted quickly, ‘you should have called Doctor Ayya. He would have made him okay.’

  ‘We already have a doctor from our parish who takes care of all our residents,’ said Brother Abranches, a slight edge in his voice. Basavaraj nodded and dropped his gaze to his hands.

  ‘The doctor came in and gave him an injection to calm him down,’ continued the priest. ‘After that, your friend went to sleep. When James went to wake him this morning, he wouldn’t get up. He had passed away sometime during the night.’

  Basavaraj looked up then, and in the other man’s eyes he saw sadness and something like an apology. He suddenly recognized how hard the priest struggled to do his duty and be true to his god. His apparent lack of emotion was only an attempt to keep afloat through the countless hardships and failures he must face every day. With a feeling of dull surprise, Basavaraj thought that in so many ways this man was like Raghuvir.

  He would have liked to say something, to tell Brother Abranches that it was not his fault that the beggar had died. To take his hand and thank him for trying to give his friend a place to live in, and for giving him a safe place in which to die. But his heart was heavy, and there were no words to be found in there, so he walked slowly to the door.

  ‘Would you like to see him?’ the priest asked gently, but Basavaraj shook his head and kept going.

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ said Brother Abranches, and Basavaraj waited. The priest left the room and returned with the beggar’s dirty, cloth-bound walking stick.

  ‘This seemed to be dear to him,’ he said. ‘We thought perhaps you’d like to have it, since you were his friend.’

  Basavaraj nodded, his eyes on the floor. He took the stick and went away.

  Once outside the large iron gates, Basavaraj walked on, not certain where to go or what to do next. Death itself was not a bad thing. Indeed, by the time a man got to his age, it almost seemed like a friend. And the beggar’s death had been easy, probably the only easy thing in a struggle-filled life. He was only sad because the man had searched and searched so desperately for something that he never found.

  Basavaraj found himself sitting on the old stone wall under the shade of the raintree, holding the cloth-bound walking stick across his lap. He looked up and thought vaguely that there were clouds in the sky, and that perhaps it might rain today. Everything was green and quiet all around. His fingers tugged at the coarse rope that held the dirty outer covering in place until it came loose. As he unwound it, his sadness gave way to curiosity as a light-coloured wooden object was gradually revealed underneath the fabric. He tugged away at the cloth until the whole thing came undone. Crumpled newspaper clippings fell out and scattered everywhere. Inside was a beautiful hockey stick. It was by no means new; clearly, someone had played with it and maintained it with great care.

  Basavaraj gathered up the clippings and smoothed them out on his lap. Every one of them featured a tall, handsome Anglo-Indian man with blue-grey eyes, in his prime. In some of them he was smiling with his team members, in others he was raising a cup in victory, and in yet others he had been captured solo, holding this very hockey stick in his hand. The various headlines spoke of a brilliant talent, an amazing new find in the world of hockey.

  As Basavaraj read through the news clippings – those that were in Kannada – in bits and pieces, he began to laugh and shake his head in sheer delight. There was no more sadness now, just joy that his friend had been a star after all, even if it had only been for a little while, one long-ago day.

  Basavaraj’s gnarled fingers caressed the name inscribed on the hockey stick. ‘Robert,’ he said softly. ‘So that is your name.’

  8

  The Memory

  At 11.30 in the morning on the day the beggar died, Ranganath walked into the Decent Haircutting Saloon. With a sigh, he threw himself down on the bench beside Suresh and Somu, who were waiting their turn to be attended to by Anthony. At seventy-nine, Anthony’s eyes were as good as ever and he didn’t use glasses. He could still clear the stubble off a customer’s face with his trusty razor without a single nick.

  ‘You look like you ran a race, Ranga,’ said Suresh by way of greeting. ‘Oh god, you smell like you did too! Uff!’ Suresh fanned himself vigorously to get rid of the sweaty odour emanating from Ranganath.

  Ranganath wiped his face on his handkerchief ‘What do you expect me to smell like? Jasmines? It is thirty-eight degrees outside!’

  ‘Perhaps you should invest in a bottle of talcum powder?’ suggested Suresh.

  Somu chuckled and added, ‘Be sure to pick the right kind. Nothing too flowery. We don’t want you attracting the wrong sort of … er … people.’

  Ranga scowled, everyone else laughed, and Anthony cautioned the fellow he was shaving not to smile or he’d get nicked. The man immediately rearranged his face into solemn lines. Anthony indicated a bottle filled with drinking water to Ranganath. Ranga reached for it gratefully and gulped down half the contents before gasping, ‘Thanks, Anthony Uncle! Devaru volleyadu maadali. God bless you!’

  He replaced the bottle and sat back down. ‘How is it that every time I see you, you are either lounging around drinking coffee, getting your hair cut, or chasing girls, Suresha? Aren’t you supposed to be at the garage?’

  Suresh, who was as diligent a mechanic as they came, and as little inclined towards ‘chasing girls’ as any young man of thirty could be, didn’t rise to the bait. He replied coolly, ‘And do what? There are only four cars in the whole of Rudrapura, and ever since the government laid out tar roads, those four cars have stopped breaking down quite so often.’

  ‘Sir, please don’t laugh! The blade might cut you!’ cried Anthony to his customer in alarm. ‘Ay Suresha, aache hogappa! Go crack your jokes outside! You will cause an accident in here if you keep talking like that.’ As usual, nobody took Anthony’s reprimands seriously, and Suresh made himself more comfortabl
e by sliding rearward on the bench so that his back was fully resting against the wall.

  ‘That’s a good excuse to be bunking work,’ said Ranganath to Suresh, unwilling to let it go.

  ‘Shut up, Ranga,’ said Suresh cheerfully. ‘You just want me to leave so your turn will come sooner. Forget it. I’m not leaving without my shave. It’s my turn next.’

  ‘Ay, I was here before you!’ cried Somu indignantly.

  Suresh gave him a cajoling smile. ‘Yes, Somanna. But you know I’m in a hurry to get back to work.’

  ‘You just said there are no cars to be—’

  ‘Those are just the cars. Think of all the scooters that need to be attended to. Rudrapura is filled with them!’

  Anthony wiped the last bit of foam from his customer’s face, briskly patted his cheeks down with Old Spice aftershave, then settled the matter by saying, ‘Somu, you’re next.’

  Somu, expecting Suresh to try and get ahead of him, felt anxious. But Suresh remained seated and gave him a broad grin and a wink. Relieved, Somu went to sit in the barber’s chair. Anthony placed a towel around his shoulders and got to work.

  ‘Did you hear the news?’ asked Ranganath. ‘Our infamous beggar turned out to be a famous hockey player! Can you believe it?’

  Anthony had stopped listening and was completely immersed in giving Somu a much-needed haircut.

  ‘I know. Basavaraj Thatha told us about it just now, on his way back from the old age home. He found newspaper clippings about the man,’ replied Suresh.

  ‘Incredible, no?’ said Ranga. ‘And all along we thought he was some raving lunatic.’

  ‘Shows how wrong people can be,’ commented Somu from the barber’s chair.

  ‘Shows how wrong we were to judge so carelessly,’ corrected Suresh. He had spent the morning with Basavaraj at the garage. The old man had been rather shaken by the death of his friend and the sudden discovery he had made about him.

  ‘Well, what else were we to think?’ demanded Ranganath.

  Suresh turned to look at him mildly. ‘We could have thought nothing. We delude ourselves that we are required to form an opinion about everything.’

  Ranga looked away, remembering his own unkind words the afternoon he had drunk coffee with Suresh and Basavaraj at the Nameless Shop. He felt defensive and somewhat ashamed, and so did not realize that Suresh was reprimanding himself as much as everybody else.

  ‘What I don’t understand is what happened to bring the poor fellow to this state. I mean, how does one go from being a star hockey player to a lunatic beggar?’ asked Somu.

  ‘There was an article from an English newspaper that Basavaraj Thatha found among the others. Srikanth read it to us. It said that the beggar took an injury to the head during a match in Bombay. He had been trying out for the national team.’

  Anthony felt a strange prickling at the back of his neck.

  ‘National level? That’s pretty good!’ said Somu, impressed.

  ‘Yes, it seems he was an excellent player. The injury was a bad one, it put him in the hospital for months, hanging between life and death. He survived, but obviously he never really recovered from it.’

  Anthony was watching Suresh intently, scissors suspended mid-air.

  ‘Poor man,’ Somu chimed in. ‘How life can change in a flash! One minute you are a star and next, you are on the streets.’

  ‘That’s not quite the way it happened,’ said Suresh. ‘I think he had been in a mental institution all that time before he turned up here. How he got out of there and made his way to Rudrapura of all the places, nobody knows.’

  ‘Trees are green here, apparently, that’s why he came,’ said Ranganath, who was well-versed with that story.

  ‘What?’ asked Anthony softly. No one noticed how pale he had gone.

  ‘Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But that’s what he told Basavaraj,’ explained Ranganath.

  ‘What was his name?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘Albert something, I think?’ said Somu.

  ‘Robert. Robert Foster,’ said Suresh, fanning himself with a newspaper.

  Anthony put down his scissors and reached for the hand mirror to show Somu the back of his head. His hand was a little unsteady as he held it up. Somu glanced at his reflection, turning his head this way and that to get a better look. He nodded his approval. Pulling off the towel and putting the money down on the platform, he said, ‘Well, I’m off. Thanks, Anthony Uncle. Suresha, see you later at the Nameless Shop.’

  He went away and Suresh took his place on the chair. Before Anthony began shaving him, he went outside and turned the sign on the window to ‘closed’. He came back inside, shaved Suresh, then Ranga, and sent them on their way. He worked silently, mechanically, without his usual enthusiasm.

  As soon as Ranganath left, Anthony shut the windows and bolted the heavy wooden door of the Decent Haircutting Saloon one full hour earlier than usual. The old barber made his way up Thatcher Mine Road, took a right at the pond and walked around it towards the Sacred Heart Girls’ High School. It was lunch hour and, as he crossed the school premises, girls big and small, dressed in white puff-sleeved blouses and navy blue skirts roamed freely about the grounds chattering, laughing and eating food out of tiffin boxes. Anthony usually had a smile for them.

  ‘Tessie ma’am’s husband! Tessie ma’am’s husband!’ they would cry and point excitedly every time he came that way. Anthony would always grin and wave, his heart bursting with pride (even after all these years) that he was Tessie ma’am’s husband.

  But today he walked in a daze, noticing little of what was going on around him. He passed the school and headed towards the chapel that was situated at the far side of the pond. It stood alone, its slim steeple rising white and tall against the verdant background. The sky was blue, and the pond was alive with egrets and ducks. It was a beautiful sight and, despite his perturbed spirits, Anthony paused for a moment to let the serenity touch him. It made him feel better, and he walked on again until he reached the doors of the chapel. There was nobody inside except for a woman. Her back was to him, her head covered in a scarf. But even from here, Anthony knew it was she.

  He watched her from the door, kneeling at one of the front pews with her head bowed. He was reluctant to disturb her, or perhaps he wanted to put off telling her for as long as he could. After a minute or so, she crossed herself and stood up. When she turned to leave, her eyes fell on her husband standing at the far end of the church by the entrance. He was silhouetted against the great wooden doorway and she couldn’t see his face, but something about the way he stood watching her filled her with a sense of foreboding. She stopped for a moment, a strange chill around her heart, then hurried forward to meet him.

  ‘What is it, Tony? Why aren’t you at the salon? Has something happened?’ she asked anxiously, gazing up into his face.

  Anthony didn’t reply. He couldn’t. Now she felt sure that it was something terrible. She gripped his arm and whispered fearfully, ‘Is it Rose or Patrick? Tony, please…’

  ‘Tessie,’ he said, ‘I found your hockey player.’

  Her hand dropped from his arm and she looked at him in silence.

  Fifty-two years ago, when Tessie was a girl of twenty, she had stood beside a man named Robert and held his hand tightly at the Austinpet Railway Station as they waited for the train to Bombay. His parents John and Wilma Foster were to travel with him, albeit reluctantly. They were loath to give up their beautiful villa, three Alsatian dogs and a battery of servants, and relocate to a chaotic, over-crowded city just to look after their son. Especially when it was his duty to marry and bring home a daughter-in-law to wait on them instead.

  John and Wilma did not come in the way of their son’s hockey career, but they did not encourage it either. They tolerated it, hoping that in time he would outgrow his passion. He was their only son and heir, and they hoped that he would eventually turn to the highly successful family business. They extended their tolerance to his fiancée as well, treating Te
ssie and her unassuming, middle-class parents with polite disdain.

  Tessie’s father, Peter, owned a bakery on Somaji Rao Street. Over the years, he had saved enough to build a small home for his wife and daughter, and they were comfortable, if not rich. The Fosters, on the other hand, were downright wealthy, having made a great success of the ceramic business they owned. Besides, John Forster traced his lineage directly back to a British Colonel stationed in India over a hundred years ago. This, and the fact that the Fosters had fair skin and blue-grey eyes, made them practically royalty among the sizeable Anglo-Indian community of Austinpet, a town situated in the Mysore State of British India.

  Austinpet was multilingual. The yellow board on the platform of the railway station spelled out the town’s name in English, Kannada and Tamil. But, fiercely loyal to their origins, the Anglo-Indians of the town confined themselves to English only, remaining coldly silent should anybody dare address them in the native language. Thus, the servants, the vegetable vendors in the marketplace and anyone else who wished to do business with them had no choice but to learn English (in whatever degree of fluency).

  Tessie’s father was a self-made man. While his ancestors had been British on one side, his blood had long ago been diluted by Indian strains down the generations. The Fosters considered him a ‘local’. Peter had built his business from scratch, cared for his old parents, and chosen a loving woman for a wife. Their daughter Tessie was so pretty and affectionate that she was a great favourite among the people of Austinpet. Her parents doted on her, but they neither spoiled nor indulged her, so that her disposition was generous and warm without being wilful or impractical.

  Tessie met Robert at the Otter’s Club, a charming 200-year-old building which showed English movies (exclusively) and served Anglo-Indian cuisine to its members. The ladies of the community came there to sew, exchange recipes and gossip, and to organize charities, fetes and balls. A sign on the polished rosewood door of the club read: No admittance for Indians.

  And since no thorough Englishman would dream of admitting himself into a place for ‘half-breeds’, this meant that the Otter’s Club was reserved for Anglo-Indians. Having distanced themselves from the easy-going locals and been ostracized by those they considered their own, the community might have fallen through the cracks of Austinpet society had they not firmly fortified themselves with club, concert hall, eateries and church, all of which were exclusively for their use. They pulled together tightly, understanding that in doing so lay their survival. If they quarrelled amongst themselves or looked down upon each other for the degree of English blood (or, rather, the extent of its dilution) flowing in their veins, the outside world never knew. But conscious they were. And so, when Tessie went to the Otter’s Club with her parents one evening to watch an English film, and when she saw Robert there with his friends, lounging by the hand-held projector smoking cigars, and when their eyes met across the room, and when they fell in love, Wilma and John Foster were politely horrified.

 

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