Breathless in Bombay

by Murzban Shroff

  They were referring to a group of married couples in the colony who were having it out with each other’s partners. The three friends had nicknamed them the bold and the beautiful for their ability to change partners without a thought to their marriages or to their children.

  “There are things not easy to forget,” said Hilda moodily. It was as if she hadn’t heard her friends; she had entered a dark tunnel of thought through which she must pass, must grope and blunder on until she saw the exit, the light at the end.

  “There are things he has done that make my blood boil, even today, after all these years,” said Hilda. “One time, Nadir’s parents had gone for a weekend to Udvada, leaving him alone at home. He invited his friends over, and they had spent the day drinking and listening to Hindi film songs. We could hear them shouting, singing, cursing, at times laughing hysterically. Around late morning, a Koli woman by the name of Gomti came around selling fish. She was a buxom thing, and it was no secret that many of the men in the colony had the hots for her. They would stare secretly at her curves, drink in her voluptuousness, but that is all they would do. Every morning, Gomti would go around the colony, calling out the catch of the day and its price. She had done this for years, fish being the main trade of the Kolis. As she passed the Ravankhot house, Nadir invited her in. Drunk and red-eyed, he bought fish from her. But when it was time to pay, he asked her to take the money from his pocket. He said his hands were greasy; he had applied some ointment after working on his motorcycle. She slipped her hand into his pocket only to find the bottom cut away. Her hand touched bare, flickering flesh. She screamed and ran out, forgetting to take the money he owed her. Standing outside his door, she hurled terrible insults at him, which drew the residents of the colony onto their balconies. She cursed him and his friends who stood there watching. She said they would all suffer; they would never have children, never know what it is like to procreate. For what he had done, he—Nadir—would become impotent; he would lose his powers of manhood. Knotting the end of her sari around her waist, her face blazing, she swore he would become a chhakka, a eunuch. She swore on her children, her Goddess, and the ocean that sustained her trade. No one thought of going down to pacify her, for it made no sense to get involved with an enraged Koli. Also, no one wanted the wrath of Nadir and his friends upon them. People stayed inside their homes, listening and trying to piece together the events that might have transpired. Later a mob of Koli men armed with sticks arrived at the gates of the colony, and they threatened to burn down the place if the culprit was not handed over to them. It took Dastoorji Dubash, the white-haired, white-bearded priest, to calm them. The culprit was drunk, said the dastoorji, employing his most dulcet voice. He didn’t know what he was doing; he wasn’t in his senses. The Kolis left after threatening never to come to the colony again, and much to the chagrin of the Parsis, who were great fish eaters, they kept their word. No Koli woman ever crossed the threshold of the colony again. Even when the Parsi women went to the market, the Koli women would up their prices, or they’d look away or turn to attend to other customers, making their disgust clear.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Roxanne. “Imagine not getting to eat patra fish. I can imagine how difficult it must have been.”

  “Do you think Nadir got carried away with his own bravado?” asked Gul. “Perhaps he was so intoxicated on a sense of youth that he lacked the discernment to judge the consequences of his actions. I knew someone like that once: a friend of my brother’s, who used to delight in phoning people and giving them a hard time. He would send people on fictitious interviews, phone and say they had won a huge prize, to come and collect it from some place far off. One of his favorite charades was to single out someone he did not like, and he would call up the Towers of Silence and get them to dispatch a hearse to this person’s house, and he would follow it up with a call to the eye donation center, which would send a team to scoop out the person’s eyes, believing him to be dead. The person at the receiving end would go hysterical, thinking someone actually wanted him dead, and this boy—my brother’s friend—would feel tickled about it. He would chuckle over it for days.”

  “If you want to know about cruel pranks, hear this,” said Hilda. “In K block lived an Irani called Bahadur Minocheri. He was a typical Irani, simpleminded, good-hearted, and candidly vocal about his feelings. He had a modest job, delivering milk every morning to the residents of the colony. He would do so on his bicycle, in his pajamas and vestment, unbothered as to what people might think of him. Minocheri had long ago decided that the rigors of a day job were not for him. He had tried his hand at being a cashier in a restaurant and a supervisor at the docks, but both jobs had ended in disaster. At the restaurant, when the BMC officers had come around asking for bribes, Minocheri had railed abuses at them and demanded why they were such fokatchoddoos, freeloaders who enriched themselves at the expense of those who tried to eke out an honest living. It had taken extreme tact on the part of Hausangbhai Irani—the young, broad-faced owner and a distant relative of Minocheri—to talk the BMC officers out of canceling his license. Likewise, at the docks, Bahadur Minocheri had a run-in with a customs officer who staked his claim to a few bottles of Chivas Regal. This was enough to incense Minocheri, who once again saw it as reason to expatiate on the beggarliness of the officer and on the fate of the country were there more officers of his sort in places of authority. It did not help that both jobs had come to Minocheri because his father had requested their relatives to accommodate his uneducated, good-natured son, and after these incidents the relatives had washed their hands of Minocheri. Drawing on his modest shares and fixed deposits income, Minocheri’s father supported his son till he turned thirty; then he got him married to a girl from Iran whom he selected on the basis of a photograph. Thereafter, he persuaded Minocheri to leave Bombay and take up a job in an Arab country where he would earn a tax-free income and build up his bank balance. In Arabia, Minocheri had an idea. He decided to learn Arabic, with the intention of impressing the Arabs who, he was told, could confer great wealth on him. He spent all his evenings in his room—a small bachelor pad within a larger apartment—trying to spell out Arabic words in English; he tried hard to roll his words and utter them in the deep, throaty accent of the Arabs. His first courtesy to an Arab policeman, attempted after twenty-one days of practice, landed him in jail, and though Minocheri insisted he had only intended to ask the Arab how on that day his life was, the policeman told Minocheri’s sponsor who came to visit him in jail that smart-aleck Minocheri had the gall to ask him how his wife was faring. Now this was a country where you don’t as much as glance or talk to another man’s wife, let alone ask about her. The policeman would have passed a five-year sentence on Minocheri, as per the powers conferred on him by the state, had the sponsor not been able to strike some sort of a deal that involved surrendering all that Minocheri had earned so far and seeing him off safely on the next flight to Bombay. On his arrival at the Bombay airport, Minocheri’s father broke the news: Minocheri was to become a father himself. Even as he saw his son’s joy, his father realized that Minocheri was unfit for regular employment—he could only be employed in some pursuit where there was no chance of him taking a moral or an emotional stand. So he struck a deal with a dairy at Marine Lines that Minocheri would collect and deliver milk on their behalf to the residents of the colony and for that he would earn a commission that would allow him to cope with the growing expenses of a family.”

  “What an interesting character this Minocheri sounds like,” said Roxanne wistfully. “I wish we had more of his type around. Now it seems the colony is only for the wealthy. People are too prim and proper. The fun has gone out of our lives.”

  “You will be glad it has, my girl, if you let me finish what I have to share,” said Hilda dryly. “Minocheri’s father expired soon after he had fixed up his son, and three years later Minocheri’s wife, too, died of some illness that Minocheri had failed to understand and get treated. The lot of bringing up his daughter fe
ll to Minocheri, and because he was a loving man and because the child had no mother he was extra demonstrative with her. He would fuss over her, dress her well, take her every evening to Apollo Bunder on his bicycle, where he would buy her ice cream, balloons, boat rides, anything the girl wanted. Clearly, Minocheri loved her dearly, and she loved him with an equal intensity. ‘Papa Jaan,’ she used to call him. ‘Papa Jaan, my hero.’

  “The daughter grew up to be extremely beautiful. She had a fair complexion, red cheeks, dark eyes, and was well endowed in the right places. When she was in her teens, she was noticed by the Four Aces, and that was the beginning of trouble for poor Minocheri. They would phone him at odd times of the day, when he would be sleeping after his deliveries, and they would yell into the receiver, “Minocheri, chodoon tori dikri ne,” meaning, “Minocheri, should we fuck your daughter?” Or they’d ask if the milk he’d delivered that day was squeezed from his daughter’s jugs and if the cream was from her you-know-what. On hearing this, Minocheri would charge out of his flat in his pajamas, screaming and shaking his fist at no one in particular. It went on like this for months, and though many of us thought it funny then, we had no idea what the poor man must be going through. Until one day an ambulance came beeping into the colony and Minocheri was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. His daughter sat stone-faced through the funeral and through the four days of prayers. She sat, hands folded, eyes riveted to the place where her father’s body had been placed for the last time, the bare, cold slab of stone.

  “The day after she returned home, Hufrish Minocheri woke up at 5:00 A.M. She took her father’s bicycle, went to the dairy like he had for years, collected four big cans of milk, and went about delivering these. People were surprised to see her that early, and to encourage her they bought twice the quantity of milk they usually would. Last of all, she delivered milk to the Ravankhot house, where Nadir slept, numb after a night of drinking. She poured out a liter of milk for Mrs. Ravankhot, who invited her in for a cup of tea, which she refused. Two hours into the morning, Mr. and Mrs. Ravankhot complained of severe pain around the chest and stomach region. It was a fierce, burning pain, they said, which choked the life out of them. They fell to the ground, writhing in pain and foaming at the mouth. Nadir, awakened to their cries, had to go running for Dr. Doongaji, who took one look at them and said, ‘Baap re, baap. This looks like a case of deliberate poisoning. We will have to call both the ambulance and the police.’

  “It didn’t take long for the police to figure out the source of the poison. Hufrish Minocheri was taken in for questioning, and she just smiled and asked if the Ravankhots were dead—all of them. When she was told it was just the elderly couple who were seriously ill, battling for their lives, she said, ‘What a pity, but some punishment is better than none, and it is always the living who suffer more than the dead, the living who carry the cross.’ ”

  “Oh God, Hilda. Don’t tell me any more,” said Roxanne. “I don’t think I will be able to sleep tonight.”

  “I won’t be able to sleep, not knowing what might have happened to Franny Faraka,” said Gul. “I don’t mean to probe, dear Hilda, but that gap in the story is obsessing and depressing me.”

  Just then a flippant voice came over the hedge: “Auntie, I have got the bhelwalla. The regular man wasn’t there, so I got one from Apollo Bunder.”

  They looked and saw a scrawny bhelwalla perched on the carrier behind the young cyclist. He looked a sight, in his flared white lehenga and rubber slippers, balancing his aluminum vessel on his head and holding his stool high, so that it wouldn’t scrape the ground.

  “You certainly deserve more than an ice cream, young man,” said Gul, drawing a fifty-rupee note from her purse.

  “Don’t be silly, Gul. You will spoil the boy,” whispered Hilda.

  “Well, rather spoil him than have him grow up to spoil others, like Nadir and the Four Aces,” said Gul wryly. Her friends looked at her in surprise. Gul appeared affected by the story. This wasn’t like her at all, for of the three she was the tough one, the one who could take spices.

  The bhelwalla came inside the garden. He sat on the grass and began to prepare the bhel. He opened his vessel that had all the ingredients: the sev, the puffed rice, the puris, the potato disks, the finely chopped raw mangoes, the sliced onions, the pieces of tomato, and the cut coriander. From the side of the vessel he pulled out a newspaper, and twirling it round and round he made a cone of it. Using a steel measure, he scooped and poured two helpings of puffed rice and two helpings of sev into the cone. Into this he crushed a dozen or so puris and dropped some potato disks, some onions, some tomatoes, and half a teaspoon of finely chopped raw mango. Then he began to churn the mixture, stopping sporadically to add a little chutney—now some of that chili chutney, now some of that date chutney, now some of that mint and coriander chutney.

  Hilda spoke slowly, as though with effort. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you about Franny. It’s just that it is too painful. I was in Franny’s class in school and college. Every year, I would try and beat her for first place, and when I couldn’t, when I realized she was more intelligent than me, I prayed and wished her dead. You see, I wasn’t very pretty, quite ordinary, in fact, and dark, and overweight, and the only way I could enhance my self-worth was by standing first, and when that didn’t happen, when I saw myself as second best and unable to change that, my hatred grew. It built up to something fierce in my head, something like a monster. That year, the year of the incident, our class was going on a cruise to Singapore. I was in love with a boy then, who, I knew, was going on the cruise. It was important I get on that ship, and the only way I could do so was by standing first, for that was my father’s condition. My father was an army man. He set high standards for himself and for his children, and I knew that there was no way I was going to make that trip unless I stood first. As things went, the incident took place before the exams, and seeing how badly Franny was affected, I decided to make sure she wouldn’t recover. I decided to tell everyone—especially the boys in the colony—what had happened. I was there, next to her, when she passed out. I had seen the fear in her eyes, the disbelief as she looked down at her hands and fell away, as if disowning them. When she recovered, she wasn’t imagining that people knew. They did know, and they did speak about it—she could see it in their eyes and hear it in their whispers—and this is what humiliated her, broke her. Well, I got my rank, I got my trip, and though I failed to attract the boy, I did end up having a nice time. But when I returned to Bombay I found that Franny had been sent away to an institution, from where she would never return. The treatment failed to compensate her for the love of learning she had abandoned. The institution created a false sense of security. She got used to the privacy and isolation it offered. The drugs took their toll: she could no longer remember names, faces, equations, theories, all those things she had excelled in. One night, when an inebriated ward boy thrust himself on her, she did not even protest; she let him do his thing and leave. The next day she hanged herself from the ceiling fan, leaving behind a note that said no one was to be blamed for her action. It was her destiny, her karma—she alone was responsible; she had willed this onto herself by her actions in her past life. Why else would such things happen to her? If only Franny knew the real cause—not Nadir Ravankhot, not her karma, but me and my jealousy, me and my enormous hatred of her.”

  Hilda began to cry. She covered her face with her hands and began to sob convulsively.

  Promptly Roxanne went and sat beside her. She hugged her friend warmly. Gul, rising, rested her hand on Hilda’s head and began to stroke it lightly.

  “Don’t worry, love,” said Gul. “We all do unreasonably cruel things when we are young. But we learn to forget and the world forgets with us. That is the kindness of memory. It allows us to forget, to overcome our shame. That is also the beauty of life, its regenerating power.”

  “Yes, just look at Nadir now,” said Roxanne. “No one re
members what he has done. No one remembers his terrible past. He is considered a hero, and you know why, don’t you? Because one day he used his influence with that local thug, Varun Paoli, to stop slum dwellers from stealing our water connection. He took the initiative to end our water crisis, which had us getting up early in the morning to fill water in drums and rationing our use. He ended our misery, and from that day on people’s opinion about him changed. What was seen as his intimidating past became our collective strength. It takes just one little act of goodness—intentional or unintentional—to wipe out a lifetime of bad, and in your case you were young then; you didn’t mean it. Don’t feel bad, dear Hilda. It was a mistake and you have left it behind. Come, now, have your bhel. Should I ask him to make it nice and khatta—the way you like it?”

  The bhelwalla had laid out three paper plates. The basic mix of the bhel was ready. Now it was only a matter of adding the chutneys that would decide the flavor: sweet, sour, or spicy.

  Hilda daubed at her eyes with a small white perfumed handkerchief with roses embroidered in one corner. She looked into the warm brown eyes of her friend Roxanne, and she thought she saw a world of compassion in them, pools of reassurance in which she could dissolve her fears, her past. They were the eyes of a woman who saw no bad in the world, a woman who always tasted sweet.

  Hilda looked up at her friend Gul. Cool Gul, they used to call her, for nothing could ruffle her. Gul was known to sparkle even under duress, and yet now she looked worried and pensive, and her fingers felt soft and soothing to Hilda, many years her senior.

  Hilda looked at her friends and, managing a smile, said, “Know what? I think I will try a sweet bhel today. I will try a different kind of chutney. The sweet date chutney. Then, perhaps, I will have a new taste to imagine and remember.”

  BUSY SUNDAY