by Manil Suri
Mrs. Dugal boasted about her daughter’s productivity—how Pinky filled up her container, sometimes twice, every morning. She gave me a bottle of oily green medicine for you. “Mr. Dugal swallows a spoonful or two whenever he can’t go, but for Munna, a few drops should do.” I opened the bottle—it smelled like rancid ghee, so I threw it out. “I mix in a little with Pinky’s mashed banana every now and then,” Mrs. Dugal confessed. After that, I detected a whiff of potty whenever Pinky was around.
I tried to keep you away from Pinky—I didn’t want you to catch her potty smell. But no other children of that age lived in the building, and even though she was three years older, Pinky followed you around. In the afternoons, she rigged up a clumsy tent in the corridor using an old tablecloth and tried to lure you in. She especially liked playing with your hair. It was long and dense (and straight) by now, and Pinky kept sticking bows in it, tying it when she could, with a childish knot. I forbade her each time, but she stared at me blankly through eyes weighed down with kohl.
Coming up the steps one afternoon, I stumbled upon Pinky clutching you in her arms. I saw her lips pressed against yours, stars of adoration in her eyes. I tore her off your body and dragged her to the Dugal’s door to complain. “Is this what you’ve taught her?” I shouted at Mrs. Dugal, and pushed her daughter forward. Pinky started sobbing, her kohl leaving black streaks on her cheeks. Mrs. Dugal slammed the door in my face. I heard the sounds of slaps and Pinky’s crying rising to a wail.
You cried as well, as I washed your mouth and your face. “Chhee, dirty,” I explained to you, but you only cried some more. After satisfying myself that Pinky’s presence no longer lingered, I tried burying my face in your stomach, tickling your ears. But you did not relent, turning your face away even when I tried to capture your tears.
So I held you in my arms like Pinky had been doing, and kissed you. Your mouth was hot with anger and wet, but my lips smoothed away the indignation. I made exaggerated smacking sounds and blew air into your cheeks, until finally you laughed.
The next day, kohl back in place, Pinky rang our doorbell. “Can Ashvin come out to play house again?”
OUT OF ALL OUR NEIGHBORS, you liked Mrs. Azmi downstairs the most. I had befriended her ever since Mrs. Dugal had labeled her a Pakistani spy, not only to repudiate such charges, but also to put some more distance between us and the Dugals. Mrs. Azmi—Zaida, as she asked me to call her—had been married at the age of sixteen to her forty-four-year-old first cousin, Anwar. “I liked a boy in the next building,” she confided to me. “Also a Muslim, but not from the same community. We wouldn’t do anything, just talk and spend time together in secret. When my father learnt about it, he twisted back the little finger of my left hand until it snapped, and didn’t take me to a doctor for a week. Anwar was well-known to my father, so it was the easiest match to arrange.”
Now in his sixties, her husband suffered from indifferent health. Zaida came over in the afternoons, when he took his nap. There was something tantalizing about her visits, something conspirational—the signal tapped with a broom handle onto her ceiling, our floor, to inform us Anwar had fallen asleep, the vanishing act she performed right after tea, before Dev returned. She always had a toffee or hard candy on her person for you to find—hidden so skillfully (a Fruitee bar rolled into a whorl of her hair, a peppermint sweet taped behind her knee) that even I felt myself intrigued enough to join in the search sometimes.
She liked to listen to music when she came over. One afternoon, the radio broadcast a breathless number, the kind Lata Mangeshkar would never dream of singing, but her sister Asha had started specializing in. “It’s Helen’s cabaret dance from Teesri Manzil,” Zaida said. “Quick, turn the music louder.” She led you by the hand to the clearing between the sofa and the dining table and began to dance. Any notions I harbored of her diffidence were quickly dispelled as she swung and shook, mouthing the words, waving her dupatta and spinning you around in a pirouette. “You, too, Meera,” she said, pulling me in when the next song came on.
After that, Zaida made dancing a daily activity, one that you eagerly awaited (as did I). Surprisingly, “House of Bamboo” became one of her favorites. “Even though I don’t understand English, I can feel the lyrics in my heart.” One of her nieces had taught her the twist, and the version Zaida performed between us in the living room sizzled with even more passion than Dev’s rendition. “People keep talking about a band called the ‘Beadles’ or some such name—do you have anything by them?” A few months later, she presented you the “All You Need Is Love” single for your birthday.
On Saturdays, when her husband spent the day visiting his brother in Sewri, Zaida invited us to have tea at her flat. For you, she had a bowl of steaming rice kheer ready, with extra almonds and raisins fished out from the pot and arranged on top. You sat on the floor and savored each spoonful, watching the large hanging tapestry of women picking apples with baskets on their backs. “It’s from our vacation in Kashmir—they really do pick apples like that. The only trip we ever took together, just the two of us without Anwar’s mother.”
Zaida’s mother-in-law had passed away a little before you were born. “Sixteen years I spent in this flat living under that woman’s thumb—peace be on her, but the only kindness she ever showed me was to die. All these years of being suffocated, all the catching up that remains. Can you believe it, I was forbidden to even greet anyone on the stairs!”
Sometimes your Zaida auntie swathed you in scarves of silk and nylon and fashioned a hat for you out of an old dupatta in preparation for the dance. “Please, please, will you make up my face as well?” you clamored, reminding me how I used to plead with Roopa to do the same. Unlike my sister, Zaida did not stint on cosmetics—she treated you to the full production—the foundation, the eyeliner, the rouge, the lipstick. The end result always stunned me—you could be a film actress, a Japanese geisha, a beauty queen. “Princess Ashvini,” Zaida declared. “The most exquisite dancer in the whole of Bombay.” You ran to the mirror near the door and stared at yourself, the dance forgotten as you stroked your cheeks and pouted your lips.
“I always wanted to have a baby girl. But after the two miscarriages, Anwar lost interest—perhaps he felt he was getting too old. He’s not been bad, otherwise—I shouldn’t complain. With his mother gone, I can do almost anything—listen to the radio, put on makeup, even go to the pictures, and he doesn’t care.”
I went quite often to the movies with Zaida. I even accepted her invitation to take us to a mosque. She extended it one Divali, when I took over a box of sweets, and she did not have anything to present in return. “Why not?” I said. “We’ve been to so many temples, it’ll be good for Ashvin to see a masjid as well.”
We caught the bus to Haji Ali. I had passed by several times, but never ventured to the mosque floating on its island in the middle of the bay. “There was a wealthy businessman who renounced all his wealth,” Zaida told us. “He died on the way back from Mecca—this is the spot to which his casket miraculously floated.” One could only reach the mosque during low tide, when the walkway that connected it to the mainland emerged from the waves. “The sea’s only recently gone out—watch out for the puddles,” she said.
We followed the crowds. A long line of beggars squatted along the edge of the path, holding out bowls clutched in bandaged hands or between the stumps of diseased limbs. Zaida gave you the small sack of one-and two-paise coins she had brought along. “A single coin for each one of them—it depends on their luck, what they get. Make sure you aim for the bowls—don’t let your fingers touch their skin.”
You were small enough that we could take you with us into the women’s section. You stared at the marble floors, the decorated walls and ceiling, the women praying silently. As we approached the railing cordoning off the flower-covered shrine, a look of confusion came over your face. Finally, you asked, “Where’s Ganesh?”
I tried to shush you, but Zaida laughed. “He’s in there,” she said. “They all are�
�you just can’t see them.”
That year, during Eid, I got to drink the almond milk that in Nizamuddin, Mataji used to pour down the drain. Zaida’s version was garnished with a green layer of crushed pistachios and flavored extravagantly with cardamom and saffron. After finishing the jug she brought over, we did the twist.
HEMA FINALLY MADE her trip to Bombay, with her sons. She had put on weight, her face becoming full and fleshy, her chin peeking through like the nub of a particularly swollen mango. “What to do?” she moaned. “Both Rahul and Tony are such poor eaters, I’m the one who has to clean off their plates.” Already she had acquired the manner of someone two or three times her age. “Tony, get me a glass of water from the fridge,” she said, as she sat on the bed and sliced betel nuts for her paan. “Oh, my aching legs—Rahul, can you come give your poor mother a press?”
Between chewing on her betel leaf and instructing Rahul where to knead and for how long, she filled me in on the gossip from Delhi. “Guess who showed up unannounced at her parents’ house? Pushpa. Said she was tired of being mistreated by her in-laws, can you imagine? Her parents sent her right back, of course—she was lucky her husband took her in again.” She lowered her voice. “Babuji has some disease of the bowel—he doesn’t even realize when he’s gone all over himself. The washerwoman refuses to touch his clothes any longer—Mataji has to clean them herself now. Yet another reason for Arya bhaiyya to get a new bahu, to help her in her old age. Have you seen anyone in Bombay you can recommend?”
Before I could reply, Hema shook her head. “How could you?—all the people you ever see are Muslim.”
Finally, Hema made it to the zoo—the wish she had expressed in so many letters before her marriage. This desire had long waned, but with two boys in tow now, she hardly had a choice. Rahul, who was seven, had a mean streak in him—he tried to prod the monkeys with a stick through the bars and I had to stop him from lobbing stones over the fence surrounding the giraffes. (“He’s just trying to get their attention,” Hema laughed.) Tony, a year older, was quiet and shy, and surprisingly friendly towards you, despite your age difference. He led you by the hand to the aviary cages and pointed out the birds for you one by one. Before leaving for Delhi, he gave you the largest of the shells he had gathered from the beach at Juhu. You cried so much as the train was about to pull out that we promised to take you to Delhi every year after that.
I could no longer avoid Arya on these trips, since we usually stayed at Nizamuddin. “See how good he is with children,” Mataji said, each time he chased you around the verandah or showed you how to hold a cricket bat. “Rahul and Tony just dote on their uncle, too—but Ashvin seems even more fond of him.” It was true—for some strange reason, you found Arya irresistible. I watched this rapport uneasily, unable to think of a seemly way to undermine it. You refused to go to sleep unless he had kissed you good night, you yelped puppy-like every time he invited you to run an errand with him, you even wanted to sit with him during meals and eat from his plate. A few times, I studied Arya’s face as he played with you. Instead of the look of watchfulness, of masked menace, his features were open and unthreatening, his smile almost child-like. But then I wondered whether, conscious of being watched, he was putting on such a wholesome display for my benefit. “What an unjust world we live in, that someone like him would not be given the chance to be a father himself,” Mataji said.
I wanted to correct her—the true injustice was what she had to bear. Every morning, she put an enormous pot of water on the fire to disinfect Babuji’s soiled sheets and pajamas. I offered to help, but she brushed me away. “This is my lot in life. As long as these hands are able to take care of him, they will.”
“But at least he could stop drinking. He’d have better control if he was sober, don’t you think?”
Mataji gave me a look that warned me not to continue. “How are your parents doing?” she asked.
PAJI, ACTUALLY, WAS doing quite well—I hadn’t seen him in such top form since before Nehru’s death. “Do you know where I was this morning? At 1, Safdarjung Road—does that ring a bell?”
I looked at him, startled—it was the most famous address in the country. “Yes,” he nodded, obviously pleased at my astonishment. “I was at Indira Gandhi’s. First in the garden with everyone else, but then inside, to speak to her in person. She said that the country depended on publishers like myself. She hinted that the Congress Party might have things in store for me as well. Who knows, your father may even end up standing for election someday. Rajinder Sawhney, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, what do you think?”
Over the last few years, Paji had grown increasingly enamored of Indira Gandhi, applauding her each time she did something daring. Snubbing the superpowers, nationalizing the banks, stripping the former maharajas of their titles and pensions, and through it all, ignoring the accusations of arrogance and high-handedness. The most recent act, where she formed her own breakaway Congress Party rather than take orders from the older politicians like Morarji Desai, sent Paji’s opinion of her skyrocketing. “She’s an example for all womanhood to emulate, I tell you—not afraid of any man. Any father would be proud to have such a daughter—were he still alive, she’d be able to stand up to Nehru himself.”
By now I threw away unread the cuttings Paji sent me—I found politics not only tedious but irrelevant. How could antagonizing America or confiscating the maharajas’ purses have any bearing on my life with you, notwithstanding the titillation these actions afforded Paji? The one exception concerned prices, which rose faster than we could keep up with on what Dev earned. The cost of food alone seemed to have doubled recently.
Biji blamed it all on Indira Gandhi. “I’m supposed to be illiterate, so what can I say? All I can tell you is that when I give the servant five rupees to go to the market now, he asks for ten. What people like your Paji never talk about is how prices are crushing people, how families have so little that they can’t even keep their cattle from dying.” It startled me to discover this sudden interest in politics Biji had developed, even more so to be apprised of her newfound empathy for the common man. “I’m a zamindar’s daughter, remember—it runs in my blood—my ancestors have tended their villages for centuries. There’s no honor in warming your behind on the throne if you can’t even keep your population alive.”
Paji brushed aside such objections. “Look at all the respect India is gaining in the world for being so independent, for not kowtowing to the West. She’s only been in office for a few years—it takes time to solve problems of the economy. It’ll all be sorted out by the time my grandson’s up to my chest, won’t it, Ace?”
Paji had started calling you by this truly strange nickname. I complained to him that it sounded like a fighter pilot in the British air force, but he persisted. “Tell me, Ace, what would you like to be when you grow up? Not a singer like your father, I trust?”
Although you adored Biji, who ordered a full crate of Coca-Cola especially for you on the first day of each vacation visit, you always remained a little wary of Paji. Perhaps you sensed my own mistrust. He tried to lure you with candy or coins to come talk to him—enticements you would snatch from his hand and run. Each time you lingered, he lectured you on one of his pet topics—the evils of religion, the worthlessness of prayer. Sometimes he got quite aggressive, even towards you. “Perhaps you’re not quite an ace after all,” he said, when you told him about feeding Mickey Mouse, at the foot of Ganesh. “One can’t expect to breed a prize rose if it has stock mixed in from a pedestrian strain.”
This attitude towards you convinced me to take my chances with Arya at Nizamuddin rather than stay at Darya Ganj. I didn’t want Paji’s shadow to cast a pall over your life, like it had mine.
PAJI WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON I tried to make sure didn’t influence you too much. There was, of course, Arya as well, and also Hema’s husband Gopal. I worried about them brainwashing you with their HRM propaganda if my vigilance faltered. Already Hema’s younger son boa
sted about watching the new recruits wrestling in the mud—I saw him marching around the house one day, a stick propped against his shoulder as if it were a gun.
I also kept a wary eye on Roopa. She had managed to find out in advance about two of our Delhi trips, and shown up each time on the train from Madras, with her twins. Although Dilip and Shobha, being nine years older, already inhabited their own separate world, you fell instantly in love with your “Roo auntie,” much to my chagrin. “Darling Ashu,” she kneeled down and called to you, and you ran across the room to fling yourself into her arms.
Your Roo auntie bought you all sorts of expensive presents—a windup tank that spewed sparks when it ran, a toy gun that shot Ping-Pong balls. (Back in Bombay, you used these to terrorize poor Pinky with particular gusto—lodging a Ping-Pong ball in her mouth, setting fire to her hair with sparks from the tank.) When Roopa heard about Zaida’s makeup skills, she brought out her own bottles and brushes and did your face up so extravagantly that for two days you refused to wash it off. The night we slept over at Paji’s, she told you stories we had heard in our childhood—mangling the scenes, confusing characters and events, but managing, nevertheless, to tantalize you—she could have read you the telephone directory, and you would have still been rapt. The next morning, you wailed that you wanted her to bathe you, and I reluctantly gave in. After that, you insisted I lather you in the ears like Roo auntie did, that I float the Ping-Pong balls in the mugs of water poured over your head. “Roo auntie didn’t wash my shamey—she told me I was old enough to do it myself.”
“Did she show you how?” I asked, and you shook your head. “Then you’re not old enough.” I swished it as usual through the water in the mug.
I did not understand Roopa’s motives. What was behind this attempt to charm you, to make this new inroad into my life? That last time in Delhi, I had gone as far as threatening to inform her husband Ravinder if she ever repeated what I had witnessed between her and Dev. It didn’t quite seem like she still lusted after my husband, though I remained alert whenever they met. Perhaps I still intercepted the occasional wistful look or fleeting glance, mostly from Dev, but I could no longer be sure of it.
