Their Language of Love

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  ‘Oh, Mum, you’re too much,’ says Ruby, laughing despite her earlier inclination to remain indifferent. She bends forward to nuzzle her face against her mother’s headscarf. Sehra-bai has merged her daughter’s earlier contention about being ‘too tired’ with her own assertion that what she has to say will ‘refresh’ her, and given them narrative context. That’s sharper than anything Ruby could ever conjure up at such short notice.

  ‘I told you I’d freshen you up,’ says Sehra-bai gleefully, and her conceited smile stretches her mouth until it breaks in a triumphant chortle.

  Ruby kisses the top of her head. ‘You did,’ she says, ‘I’m so freshened I won’t be able to sleep.’ They chat for almost an hour until, finally, Ruby calls the nurse and together they lift Sehra-bai onto the bed.

  ‘How many boyfriends did you have, Grannums?’ Perin asks. She is besotted by her grandmother.

  Ruby sits back with an affectionate half-smile. She enjoys these exchanges between her daughter and her mother.

  ‘None. We didn’t have boyfriends in my days,’ says Grannums firmly. ‘Your grandfather was my first boyfriend. Not even kissy-cuddly allowed before marriage.’ A touch of mischief lifts her tone and she adds: ‘But when the family went to the cinema, and it was dark, he would hold my hand.’

  ‘And after marriage? How many boyfriends did you kissy-cuddly with?’

  Although Sehra-bai indulges her granddaughter brazenly, there is a limit to the familiarity she will permit. She stops short of allowing it to undermine her authority as grandmother. Perin frequently skirts the periphery, and tests the limits of her grandparent’s tolerance. This mixture of devotion and teasing, obedience and indulgence, has forged an inextricable bond between them.

  ‘I had no boyfriends! Not the way you mean boyfriend … silly girl,’ says Sehra-bai, tartly. ‘But I had admirers. Many.’

  ‘Really Grannums? Tell us! Who?’

  ‘I’ll only name the ones who’re dead.’

  ‘They must all be dead by now,’ declares Perin heartlessly. But Perin’s voice is mellow with affection. No matter what her grandmother says, or how truculently she frequently behaves, Perin’s demeanour and tone are consistently indulgent. Otherwise impatient, often short with her parents, Perin has a limitless store of patience where it concerns Sehra-bai. She loves to engage her easily distracted grandmother in little chats, and has become expert at ferreting out family secrets.

  ‘A lot you know!’ says Sehra-bai, affronted. ‘The older I grew, the younger my admirers became.’ But her bravado is fragile, and Sehra-bai looks uncertain. She’s not sure they believe her.

  Ruby signals her daughter with her eyes, and Perin immediately changes her tack. She leans over to tenderly smooth the wounded crevices that have formed between Sehra-bai’s eyes.

  ‘It must feel like the touch of dove-down,’ thinks Ruby, covertly observing her daughter through a thick fringe of lashes. She is suddenly suffused by a curiously satisfying sense of well-being. It is somehow appropriate that they should switch roles—the granddaughter as nurturer. Only the very young possess that surfeit of tenderness to lavish on the very old.

  Holding her grandmother’s hands captive in hers, Perin extracts the names of Grannums’s dead admirers. Sehra-bai’s memory somewhat blurs the distinction between the dead and the still alive. But Ruby knows them all.

  At cricket matches and dinner parties Ruby still runs into her mother’s ‘younger’ admirers—who are by now old codgers. A healthy assortment of Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, they ruminate aloud—respectfully, of course—with remarks like, ‘We were all in love with your mother,’ or, as G. Moinuddeen recently told her, ‘When Mrs Edulji and Mrs Kandawalla promenaded up and down the Mall in Murree, the entire male population of the hill-station turned up to look at them.’

  Even in her heyday, before age and respectability turned Sehra into Sehra-bai, her mother couldn’t possibly have been aware of all her admirers.

  Ruby’s was a manically isolated and angular adolescence and there was a stage when, prickly with complexes, she resented her mother’s relentless allure. The more accessible her mother became to others, the more confoundingly distanced from herself she appeared to grow. In an explosive mixture of indignation and envy she blamed Sehra-bai’s attraction on a conspiracy of duplicitous ruses and heartless depravity, and ached to expose her mother as artful.

  But Sehra’s attraction was unselfconscious and effortless. The beautiful are no more accountable for the extravagance of their allure than the brilliant stellar objects for the cosmic flotsam they attract.

  In the photographs of her teens, and in her marriage photographs, Sehra is beautiful in the willowy way of a Botticelli virgin. And later, past her middle years, she again achieved the pliant gravity of Botticelli’s modest Madonnas.

  In her heyday, though, she had the needy, vampy, vulnerable quality that was so achingly captivating in Marilyn Monroe. Also a Gemini, Sehra had the same breathless innocence and anxiety to please that characterized the American icon; and, attached to that wishful, defenceless face, the erotic mould of a Hindu goddess.

  Sehra favoured filmy chiffon saris. Arranged at the shoulder in neat pleats and held by a gold pin, the adhesive drape of the material veiled a velvet span of beige midriff. The substantial tilt above her ribs, sculpted by the wicked fit of her bra and the seam of her short sari-blouse, drew male eyes like bedazzled beacons. And although her impulse to please was egalitarian, Sehra placed her trust only in impeccable men of formidable restraint.

  A more or less permanent entourage of distinguished men befriended Sehra over the years, and God knows she needed befriending. But Ruby doesn’t think her mother was ever adulterous. Her upbringing and the prevailing mores precluded that.

  Born under the sign of the twins, Sehra’s dual nature allowed her to be pleasing even to women. In the spring evenings the Jariwallas, the Coopers, the Bharuchas, the Adenwallas, and the Kings chugged up in their fifties autos to the Lahore Gymkhana Club and congregated at one of the benches in the Lawrence Gardens. Since a bench held at most five persons, they brought along canvas chairs and, for lightweights like Mr Jariwalla and Mr Cooper, folding stools. Ruby ran between the flower beds with the other children, and lay or sat on the grass when she was done with playing.

  Ten years younger than her husband Rustom, Sehra was the youngest in their group. Cast in the role of the quintessential ingénue, she was petted, teased and indulged. Sehra was also the recipient of much avuncular and ‘aunt-ly’ advice. Originally from Calcutta, she had arrived in Lahore after her wedding. Full of trepidation as a young transplant, she had played by the rules, and adopted the role assigned to her—that of the perpetual youngster who never overstepped her bounds or trod on another’s turf.

  Sehra revelled in the resulting acceptance, and the Parsee men and women, elevated by the evening scents of mown grass and sweetpeas and the abundance of roses for which Lahore is famous, took Sehra under their wing. When the creation of Pakistan in 1947 left her family behind in India, the embrace of their wings grew more protective.

  The Jariwallas arrive in the early afternoon in a chauffeur-driven, locally-assembled 1994 Toyota and are escorted to Sehra-bai’s bedroom. Hirabai Jariwalla’s constant hilarity and the old-goatish glint in Mr Jariwalla’s dissembling eyes lift Sehra-bai’s spirits. In their company she is more like her old self, gracious and hospitable, and less contrary. The Jariwallas are persuaded to stay to lunch and Sehra-bai is brought to sit at the head of the table.

  Ruby believes Mr Jariwalla was one of her mother’s earliest admirers, and like most of that elite coterie, her confidant.

  Mr Jariwalla has always carried his integrity in the fixed contours of his boyish face. Well into his eighties by now, the retired banker still retains his trim form and straight bearing, and his precise and soft-spoken ways.

  Hirabai, his plump consort, as loosely fleshed as he is tightly wrought, is his laughing-Buddha, his lucky talisman.
Originally from Bombay, she shimmied through her years in Lahore like an even-keeled boat, and has arrived at the calm shore of an arthritic and liver-spotted old age without rancour. She is helped to the other end of the table by Ruby and sits there in her flame-red sari, cracking jokes and giggling like a palsied strawberry set in a Jell-O of infectious merriment—a contagion that has induced a goatish and incurable twinkle in her spouse’s adoring eye ever since the day Jal J first met his thirteen-year-old fiancée at their engagement ceremony in Bombay.

  ‘He plucked the words right off her lips … he granted her littlest wish,’ says Sehra-bai after they leave. ‘When your husband is that good to you, you don’t care about anything else … you don’t care what goes on in the rest of your life.’ And later that evening when they gather round her bed, she is still in a philosophical mood. ‘He kept her so happy, Hirabai didn’t even fret all that much when her only son died.’ Sehra-bai’s eyes become glazed and ruminative, and she sighs. ‘That is how it is when your husband is devoted to you. It cushions life’s blows.’

  ‘Did Grandpa make you happy?’ asks Perin. ‘Did he pluck the words right off your lips?’

  ‘He was deaf when I spoke,’ says Sehra-bai with equanimity. ‘He never heard me.’

  ‘But Grandpa was devoted to you,’ asserts Perin protectively, as if she was around when her grandfather was alive.

  ‘Yes,’ says Sehra-bai. ‘In his own way he was devoted to me.’ Although her voice is confident, her eyes, diffident, shift to Ruby.

  Ruby accompanied her mother to the Central Bank ever since she could remember. Mr Jariwalla was chairman of the bank. Mr Cooper was chairman after him.

  Whether she was going to the locker to change her jewellery, or with ledgers and files on some business errand assigned to her by Rustom, the trip to the bank was a formal occasion. And as befitted formal occasions, it was heralded by certain rites.

  Sehra bolted the bedroom doors and, removing the massive middle drawer from her cupboard, staggering under its wooden bulk, dumped it on one of the beds. She then pushed open the little doors of the secret chambers cunningly concealed on either side of the vacated spaces in the cupboard. When Ruby grew older she helped her mother remove the drawer and fetch the precious contents of the secret chambers.

  Perched sideways on the bed Sehra opened the little boxes lined with velvet to examine the diamond and emerald necklaces and earrings, the gold and ruby choker set, the delicately painted gold meena-work sets, the cloth pouches so heavy with gold guineas Ruby needed both hands to lift them, the heavy, hand-wrought twenty-two-carat gold chains, belts, bracelets and dangling earrings. Sehra would ponder over them and set aside the items she might choose to wear at forthcoming events. The gold guineas, embossed with Queen Victoria’s profile, were always at hand to give as wedding, Navjote, and new-born baby gifts. The jewellery that Sehra decided to relinquish to the bank locker she would wrap in silk scarves and pack into a leather handbag reserved for the occasion.

  Tucked beneath her arm, the bloated handbag was inadequately concealed by the ends of Sehra’s sari as, Ruby in tow, she swished solemnly across the dusty black-and-white squares of the bank floor. Her purposeful air and the preoccupied pucker of her lips indicated the enormity of the task she was about to accomplish—a transaction that was, at the very least, commensurate with the stature of her husband’s standing.

  No one was fooled, not even the handsome turbaned Pathan security guard from the Khyber Pass who stood double-barrelled guard outside the entrance and militarily salaamed when mother and daughter entered the building. As they put down their pens, the bankers sighed: and the sighing bankers knew that whatever worldly airs she might put on, no matter what important reason she might assign her mission—whether she’d come to balance a discrepancy in her husband’s ledgers or to remove jewellery—Sehra-bai was there to distract them from their drudgery and to refresh their eyes.

  As they ogled the goddess carting gold to the bank’s steely vault, they hoped she would exchange a few words with them on her way out. But when Sehra arrived bearing ledgers, memos and files, they knew their turn would surely come. Sooner or later, courting help, Chanel-scented, she would spread the ponderous ledgers before them and, listing forward, follow their clever pens as they made the requisite entries, adjustments and corrections—a hair’s breadth from her charmingly packaged bottom and bosom.

  But first, swishing across the black-and-white floor, Sehra would head for the chairman’s door, which the salaaming doorman opened with adroit timing. Flashing her splendid teeth in a winsome smile, Sehra breezed in just as Jal J, flushed of face and ears, dapper in his pin-stripe suit, courteously stood up behind his mahogany desk. He welcomed her with a glad and indulgent eye and, with compact movements of his arms and head, graciously indicated the two chairs opposite him.

  Sehra, as was her wont, planted her globular rump on his desk instead. Ruby, her presence barely noted, primly parked herself on a cane-bottomed chair.

  With practised movements of her hands and shoulders, Sehra adjusted her sari across her chest and, leaning back on the heels of her hands, placing one svelte sari-sheathed knee over the other, swung her leg with its pretty shoe.

  Swinging her shoe right under his nose, she chattered away, engaging Jal J in a discourse leavened by innuendo and repartee, and an occasional exuberant laugh that penetrated the bank corridors and echoed in its lofty halls.

  ‘Why weren’t you and Hirabai at the Lawrence Gardens last evening? I missed you so much …’ she might ask with a flirtatious glance from the corner of her eyes, and then add, ‘I missed both of you.’

  ‘If I knew you were coming I’d have come too.’ Jal J’s caressing murmur implied a double-entendre Ruby was too young to fathom, and Sehra too old not to. ‘I’d have—’

  ‘Hired a band?’ Sehra interrupted, and her tart tone implied a warning: there is a line he may not cross before the child.

  ‘That too,’ murmured the chastened banker, his pale skin lightly flushed. ‘But I would have certainly brought you chocolate cake.’

  His proprieties once again intact, smiling neatly beneath his goatish gaze, the impeccably behaved and soft-spoken banker matched his client’s wit, and continued to flirt back with commendable cool.

  ‘And what about now? What will you get me now?’ Sehra leaned forward to accommodate her cleavage to Jal J’s stealthy gaze.

  ‘Anything … anything you want.’

  ‘Anything I want? What will Hirabai have to say to that?’

  ‘She will say: Give her the stars and the moon … Give her chicken sandwiches …’

  ‘And mango juice.’

  Just as Ruby began to wonder about the curious puffiness around the snug fit of Jal J’s trousers, Mr Jariwalla buttoned up his coat and primly sat down. Ringing for the chaprasi he asked him to bring chicken sandwiches from Shezan and two bottles of mango juice for Sehra and Ruby, adding: ‘Use your bicycle and be quick about it.’

  Is there an impropriety in viewing one’s mother as a sex object, even if she is an ex-sex object? But that is the only way Ruby knows to view her. The mould of her mother’s body and the voluptuous wallop it packed could no more be ignored than the sudden puffiness that formed behind Jal J’s fly whenever they were alone in his office … or the clear split in her mother’s dual nature that could express an exuberance so contrary to the reserve she displayed to her children.

  Sehra had an enormous gift for friendship, and although she produced three children, little talent for motherhood.

  It is a balmy afternoon on New Year’s Day. Decked out in a lemony house-gown, cocooned in shawls, supported by Ruby, Sehra-bai is brought out to the veranda to greet visitors. Level with the lawn, the veranda is lined with stunted palms and curling chrysanthemums in clay pots. A green thicket of nasturtium leaves swells from Sehra-bai’s feet to flow over a rising rockery. The garden is fragrant with flowers, and the scent from neighbouring gardens. The bad mood Sehra-bai has been in
all morning has morphed into sudden bouts of hostility, but Ruby doesn’t allow this to affect her own mood.

  Mr and Mrs Cooper call. Colonel Manzoor and the Phailbuses from across the street call, and four committee members of the Parsee Anjuman bring Sehra-bai a pineapple cake with ‘Happy 1995 to our President’ written on it. More chairs are brought out and the circle spills over on to the lawn.

  By the time Aunty Tamy drops by laden with Indian sweets and curried chicken, and raucously announces her presence with her customary ‘Where is my Sehra-bai? How is my Sehroo-veroo?’ it is late afternoon and they have moved indoors.

  Exhausted and peevish, Sehra-bai barely countenances her friend’s hearty New Year’s greetings and cheerful chatter. Aunty Tamy is not related to them, in fact she is not even a Parsee, but she is one of Sehra-bai’s closest surviving friends. She is also the favourite and most faithful visitor. No one has ever seen her lose her temper. She is a few years younger than Sehra-bai and still a handsome woman with lazy-lidded hazel eyes, softly curving cheekbones and lips the shape of lipstick advertisements. Brown hair, streaked with grey, frames her oval face in becoming sweeps before it is coiled in a large bun at the back.

  Aunty Tamy accompanies Sehra-bai, who, too tired to walk, is wheeled to her room and prepared for bed.

  ‘Arrey wah! Look at the gorgeous gown madam’s wearing,’ she exclaims, when the shawls are removed and the splendour of the crewel-stitch embroidery on Sehra-bai’s housecoat is revealed. She tells Perin: ‘Why is your grandma sitting at home? Take her to the Burt Institute’s ball!’

  Still frequented by Anglo-Indians and the more Westernized among the Indian Christians, the Club is no longer the posh hangout it was during the Raj. Aunty Tamy turns to Sehra-bai: ‘If you go dancing in that dress you’ll be the belle of the ball.’