The Stranger in My Home
Page 4
The Indian public however saw a hero in the petty, envious man. He appeared in the court inappropriately in the full regalia of his naval uniform, a World War veteran, the second in command of a battleship, who had killed a lecherous Lothario to protect his wife and home and upheld the honourable role of a man and a husband. He wasn’t even imprisoned, but kept pleasantly in naval detention. Men showered high-value bills on him, women their admiration and affection.
No surprise the jury voted overwhelmingly that Nanavati was innocent. The acclamation was thunderous. The judge, Ratilal Bhaichand Mehta, was not amused and declared the verdict perverse, one that reasonable people could not reach based on the evidence. The high court reviewed the evidence and sentenced Nanavati to jail for life; the supreme court confirmed the decision.
Nanavati had hardly settled in his cell, before he was pardoned by the state governor, released, got a lucrative job, then shortly emigrated to Canada with Sylvia and the children. He died in 2003.
I was young but I could not help noticing that nobody emerged unscathed from the affair. The press, largely dominated by Blitz’s Karanjia, distorted rather than represented the reality and daily fed trifles like truffles to the public. The judiciary looked inept at preventing a gross miscarriage of justice, though the High Court later restored the balance.The jury system became the victim of a quick, thoughtless overreaction and was hastily abolished. The Navy seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between gracious support for a fallen comrade and blind endorsement of a miscreant.
The Parsi community, in which I had discriminating friends, seemed singularly indiscriminate in its backing of a wayward Parsi, and let the trial be a show of strength between the Parsis and the Sindhis, the victim’s community.
Outrageously, it was evident that if you know the right people, you can literally get away with murder. Even more outrageously, the Indian society implicitly declared that honour killing is all right if someone dares to touch your prime property, your woman.
Sylvia perhaps emerged the worst. A pretty English girl, she married an Indian at eighteen, lived ill-at-ease with a mother-in-law in a country she was never at home, had practically no friends, produced and reared three children in quick succession, and met somebody she loved and wanted to marry, only to find him murdered by her husband.
All that was left to her was to continue in a loveless marriage with a man she now knew to be a jealous killer, stand uncomfortably in the witness box at the bidding of his lawyers, and be told in open court that, having lost her lover, she was obliging her spouse. Remained the final chore, on Nanavati’s release, of moving to a third land, unknown and friendless, and adjusting in middle age to a new life. One hopes Sylvia, in her eighties, had some peace in the end.
14
A MAJESTIC FALL
SOME ACHIEVE GLORY, SOME HAVE GLORY THRUST ON THEM
ALL MY FRIENDS HAD roles in the school play, but I had stood apart because the principal had talked about regular rehearsals and punctual attendance. Regularity and punctuality did not sound like a lot of fun.
My friends would not let go of me. ‘Don’t be a spoilsport. We can have a lot of fun doing this together.’
They enticed me even further by saying that I could have my pick of a role. I could take a look at the script, choose what I like and then they would all tell the drama coach that they didn’t want to do that role. It would fall quickly into my lap.
I read the script and knew immediately what I wanted. An all-powerful king struts about the stage, ordering his generals, harassing his ministers, pestering the hapless courtiers and, in general, being mean to his poor subjects. If I took the role, I would not only wear a fabulous crown and resplendent robe, I could ask for a moustache and a beard and a pair of jewel-encrusted shoes. I would have a whale of a time ordering around my classmates and whoever else came my way.
The best part of the role was its brevity. After doing his spiteful bit in the first scene, the king got the news from a courier that his soldiers had been decimated by the advancing army of the neighbouring king and he had no option but to surrender to his mortal enemy. So, stupid that he was, the king took out his sword, spouted some eloquent words and killed himself. Thus ended the first scene.
I could visualize myself making a fiery speech, and as the audience gasped at my brilliance, dramatically taking a swipe of the sword and closing the scene with a ghastly suicide, no doubt to rapturous applause of the audience. I imagined our bespectacled snobbish principal melting in admiration and clapping his bulbous hands for all he was worth. I didn’t have much to memorize, the rehearsals would be short for me, and, best of all, it would be all over quickly. I could go and sit in the audience with my father and mother and enjoy the rest of the play.
I told my friends I would do the play, and they in turn shortly confirmed to me that the king’s role was mine.
The mathematics teacher was the drama coach and, like most mathematics teachers (or so I fancied), was a nasty piece of work. An unflinching martinet, he drove us crazy with his demands. Memorization had to be faultless and delivery pitch perfect. I was glad when my hours of jumping through the hoops was over and came the day of the play.
The annual play was a big event. All the students and their parents came. The principal came with school board members and some bigwigs. The hall was packed. I could peek from behind the screen and was taken aback.
The make-up man was working feverishly on the characters to appear in the first scene. Came my turn. It felt icky with the tons of paint splashed on my face. When I softly asked, ‘Do I need any more paint?’ the guy gruffly answered, ‘Do you want to look good or not?’ He gladly added a massive beard and a matching moustache. When the clothes came, I was truly impressed. Glorious red and gold shiny stuff, duds appropriate for royalty. Though there were no jewels, the shoes were spectacular, with an uptilted nose and some kind of a stone on top.
I marched in as the screen parted for the first scene and began my starting harangue. Pin-drop silence. The spectators were lapping it up. Nervous as I was, I felt inspired by a royal spirit. Imperiously, I hollered at and hectored everybody in sight and my friends on the stage, in various docile roles, almost shrank visibly. I was getting a quick and early lesson in how a bully grows and how others help him grow.
Then came the final part, my last hurrah, what was to be my pièce de résistance. I stepped to the front of the stage and started my peroration. Midway I placed, as planned by our disgusting drama coach, my right hand at the waist to take out my sword with a flourish. At that moment, I discovered to my horror there was no sword. No sword! How was I to kill myself?
I stopped my speech peremptorily. I had to. Then I half-turned and ad libbed, ‘Am I to believe that the morons who serve me have forgotten even to give me my beloved sword?’ I said it with great feeling. That is exactly what I felt. I had been so excited about my regal accoutrements that I had quite overlooked the missing sabre.
The little fellow from the junior class, who couldn’t be given a role and had been comforted with the job of the stage manager, was cowering in the wings with the sword in hand, fearing a tongue lashing for his oversight from the principal the following day. I went to the wings, retrieved the sword and returned to the centre of the stage again.
‘Ah, my best friend, my sword,’ I ad libbed again.
Then I returned to the script, gave my dismal farewell speech and committed suicide. I fell with an audible thud. The screen closed.
Nobody noticed the mistake. Everybody thought I had done a good job. The next day the principal congratulated me and especially mentioned the thud I made when I fell. I didn’t explain that the coach had thought I didn’t have the appropriate regal girth and had inserted a piece of plywood under my royal robe. When I fell, I had landed awkwardly on the plywood with an unseemly clatter.
Enigmas
What Continues to Mystify
An Exchange in an Emirate
Blue Scarf
P
arallel Paths That Meet
He Loved the Sea
Making Friends
An Incomplete Novel
You Did Not Tell Me
Somebody Waited
The Outlier
What Is Fair?
House of Dreams
Let Us Play
A Stone through the Window
A Nurturing Eye
15
AN EXCHANGE IN AN EMIRATE
INTEGRITY? PRICELESS
I CAN’T FORGET THAT waiter.
I had just arrived in the United Arab Emirates for several months’ work and went for a long walk along the seaside in the capital city of Abu Dhabi. Hungry, I stopped for a meal at a large boat that had been converted into a charming seafood restaurant.
Hardly had I taken a seat when an elderly waiter came to the table with a bill on his tray. Seeing me, he asked if I was with the Indian gentleman who had been sitting there earlier. I explained that, though I was from India, I did not know the previous Indian diner. Visibly perturbed, the waiter stated the obvious: that the man had left an unpaid bill. I suggested that he leave the bill on the table, explaining that the client might have gone to the restroom or left absent-mindedly and could come back.
I then placed my order and, when it came, was pleased to find the food delicious. By the time I finished my meal, however, the earlier client hadn’t come back and the bill remained unpaid. When the waiter came with my tab, I paid it, tipped, and added another sixty dollars to cover the earlier customer’s meal. The waiter remonstrated, ‘But, sir, you didn’t even know him!’
‘That is true,’ I gently responded, ‘but I wouldn’t like you to think poorly of Indians.’ The waiter was very appreciative. I told him that I was staying at the nearest hotel and expected to visit the restaurant again to benefit from his excellent service.
The next day, my first day at work, I stayed late at the office, and when I returned to my hotel I was surprised to receive an envelope from the receptionist at the front desk.
Inside were sixty dollars and a note in Arabic that I could not decipher. The receptionist translated the message for me:
‘Thank you for your kindness. The Indian gentleman came back today and paid his cheque. I wouldn’t like you to think poorly of Arabs.’
16
BLUE SCARF
A VOID IN THE HEART
THE PLANE WAS FULL of tourists flying from Delhi to Jaipur, a popular vacation spot in India. My eyes were riveted on one passenger in particular: demure smile, twinkling eyes, auburn hair, bright blue scarf.
When the plane landed, she walked from one end of the tiny airport to the other, as if searching for someone.
As she passed me, I noticed her anxious look and asked, ‘Is anything wrong?’
A car was supposed to pick her up, she said, but it wasn’t there, and she couldn’t remember the name of her hotel. She was clearly disconcerted. I told her she could come to my hotel and make some calls: there were only three main hotels in town.
It turned out her reservation was in the same hotel as mine. The manager apologized profusely to her and explained that the car sent to fetch her had broken down on the way. He also thanked me and suggested that both of us be free guests for dinner.
The dinner was excellent. The manager made it better with the generous gift of a Dom Perignon. We had a long and pleasant conversation. She told me she was visiting from Germany and would return there after her vacation. The next three days we saw a lot of each other.
Eight months later I was in Frankfurt for a conference and had a free evening, so I called her. She picked me up from my hotel, and we had dinner at her place. I ended up staying the night. After I returned home to India, we phoned and wrote to each other often. Her photograph had the pride of place on my desk: the smile, the auburn hair, the scarf. But the distance and demands of work took their toll over time, and the relationship languished.
Five years later I missed a connection at a London airport and ordered an espresso while I waited. I looked up from the first sip to see a pair of twinkling eyes and auburn hair. It was her. We hugged, and she told me she worked in England now. I abandoned my flight and took her to my favourite Westminster restaurant.
Over dessert I asked, ‘Do you wear scarves anymore?’ She searched in her bag, found one, and placed it around her neck. The same bright blue scarf. I could have wept.
17
PARALLEL PATHS THAT MEET
SIBLINGS CHANGELINGS
MY MOTHER SAID THAT when we were kids, people often asked whether my brother and I were twins. I found it hard to believe. He was taller, better looking and fairer, the last quite important in India.
I would be tongue-tied and even failed to say my name when my parents introduced me to their ever-flowing stream of friends. In contrast, my brother would announce his name clearly, with a confident smile, and add that he was a student in the school next door. I remember guests would turn to my parents and say how bright their eldest son was. Then, realizing that I was within earshot, added, ‘Your other son is charming too.’
We were close, always together. Our parents took great pains to treat us equally. If he got a new shirt, I got one too. On his birthday, I too received gifts, and he on mine. We were avid readers and always asking for books. Father never chanced buying a book for one without buying another for the ogling brother as well.
We were avid sportsmen too. Whatever he played, cricket, soccer, badminton or table tennis, I wanted to play as well. He excelled in table tennis; I was relieved to find that I was adept in badminton. We loved cricket and wanted to be like Don Bradman or Mushtaq Ali, having been taken by Father to see the latter in Eden Gardens. I wasn’t a great batsman, but bowled competently and fielded diligently. But I noticed our friends always chose my brother to be the captain of a side, never me.
This was understandable, because he was highly sociable. He talked, laughed, and could easily start a conversation with a total stranger. I could at best join a group and be congenial.
I could see how smart he was. Though Bengali was our mother tongue, we learned to speak English early because several of our parents’ colleagues were English and we played with their children on social occasions. We had barely learned English before my brother started reading Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. He talked excitedly about the ideas he had picked up from new authors. I listened open-mouthed and tried hard to keep up. I admired his acumen, particularly as I saw nothing comparable in other young people I met, and I felt like a plodder next to him.
He could be shockingly direct and rebellious. Father once saw him reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and wondered whether he should be reading such a book. My brother asked whether our father had read the book and if he had, did he understand it. I overheard my parents discussing his obstreperousness for days.
My brother had a simple solution. He went to visit my aunt in a distant town and decided not to come back. He stayed with her, went to a different college and attended a different course.
He did not realize the magnitude of the shock he had administered to our parents. And to me. We were such a close-knit family and so constantly together that his absence felt like an enormous physical void. Mother’s eyes turned moist every time she looked at the vacant chair at our dinner table.
Our paths diverged from that point. To our surprise, he forged a successful academic track, gained a doctorate, worked at a clinical institute, and eventually joined the country’s most creative social science think tank. He pioneered research in new areas and wrote a series of seminal books. One thing never changed. He remained steadfastly his own person. He stayed disorganized and idiosyncratic, resolutely original and invariably controversial.
I worked for industry and government. I didn’t care for status. I didn’t even care much for immediate results. But I had fun analysing how things worked or didn’t work. Pompously, we called it strategy. I found my plodding approach a help: People are always throwing facts at you and often
views pretending to be facts – and you need a way to get past that and unmask what lies behind. I learned to respect tradition, but also be ready to try the untried.
The curious truth is I feel I have become more articulate and less asocial, while my brother has turned more inward. Even curiouser is the truth that, though we have lived in different continents for thirty years, our links were never stronger.
I still admire him, but there is also a touch of insight now. When he calls me, he uses a name nobody else does. When I call him, he never says his name; a friendly growl tells me all I need to know. I flatter myself I understand him better. I know he understands me better than anyone else.
We could indeed be twins.
18
HE LOVED THE SEA
THE CALL OF WATER
THE MALLIKS, OUR NEIGHBOURS, were an affluent family and every year they went on a family vacation. Roy, their eldest son, was in my class and would tell me of the exotic places they visited. I must have evinced some interest – my family could only afford to visit relatives for vacation – because one summer Roy startled me by inviting me to join him on his family jaunt. My parents were hesitant, but once they had spoken to Roy’s dad, a hearty sociable businessman, they felt reassured and let me go. I was thrilled, for I had never spent two full weeks on a beach, living in a five-star hotel.
Roy had some of his dad’s disposition and in no time made dozens of friends in the hotel and on the beach. It meant I too had a glorious time in the company of new and exciting friends. We ate delectable food, played games and went on excursions to local tourist spots in two large cars that Roy’s family had rented. But I also enjoyed the quiet, lazy hours I spent with Roy in our double room overlooking the sea, chatting about our life and dreams. Roy said he didn’t want to be an engineer like his father; nor did he want to run a business. Rather, he wanted to be a forest officer, like my uncle he had met, live in a quiet rural town, explore the woods every day and come home in the evening and listen to folk music. He loved the sea, he said, and would take every vacation on a beach. He said he liked the sea so much that he would one day like to die right next to it. We spent our days swimming long hours and then relaxing on the beach under a large umbrella and reading.