by Farahad Zama
“Monday?” Mrs Ali was dismayed. A butterfly was fluttering up from a small pink grass-rose flower towards a white guava blossom. Her eyes misted over when she realised that the ground-hugging grass-rose and the tall guava tree would soon be gone. And then, would she ever see a butterfly?
“Yes, madam. Monday.”
“Every time I see you, I hear bad news and lose money. I hope I don’t see you again for a long time.”
“You’ll see me in a few weeks, madam, for Dusserah.”
“Another maamool? You are asking for money now to feel happy along with us when we celebrate our festival. What will your excuse be then?”
Shyam laughed, his teeth bright and his mouth wide. “To make you feel happy along with us when we celebrate our festival, of course.”
Mrs Ali watched him walk away. A man like Shyam would always do well in life – he was an entrepreneur and always had a ready answer for everything. Unfortunately, her own future wasn’t looking so bright.
♦
On the verandah, the marriage bureau was open for business as usual. The postman delivered the letters; Aruna reorganised some files, weeding out old members’ details; Mr Ali filled in the paying-in slips for the cheques that had come by post; two potential clients came and one became a member, but the second could not be convinced despite their best efforts; a fishwife came to the gate, shouting that she had large fresh-caught prawns for sale, and Mr Ali called out to his wife to handle the woman.
The phone rang and Mr Ali picked it up. “Hello, the Marriage Bureau for Rich People.”
A voice came down the wire.
Mrs Ali nodded. “Yes, sir. Of course I remember. Your son Sukumar was here. How could I forget?”
Mr Ali had always thought himself a brave man – though his wife would probably describe him as foolishly naive – but his domain was words, and physical violence was something he was not used to. Sukumar’s threatening behaviour had left a big impression on him.
Aruna could hear the tinny squawk at the other end of the line, but could not make out any more than the fact that the caller was excited. She remembered his name, however: Mr Koteshwar Reddy, and his granddaughter’s name was Sujatha.
“That’s great news, sir,” said Mr Ali finally. “Congrats and I hope that it all goes well.” He put the phone down and gazed into the distance as if lost in thought. After a moment, he turned to Aruna and said, “Can you take out the papers for Raju?”
Aruna went to the wooden wardrobe and handed the folder to Mr Ali. He flipped through the papers and looked up with a big smile. “Bingo!” he said.
“I don’t understand, sir,” said Aruna. “Raju is a Christian. Mr Reddy seemed like a very orthodox gentleman – not somebody who would want his granddaughter to marry outside his religion.”
“Aha,” said Mr Ali. “They are actually the same caste. Didn’t you see?”
“Yes, but – ”
Aruna bit her tongue. She was pretty sure that the caste wouldn’t matter when the religions themselves were different.
♦
Pari had just come back home from her call-centre office and was wondering what to make for dinner. Vasu would like bone soup, she thought, before she remembered, with a pang, that Vasu was not here. Rehman and Vasu had returned after the festival to Vasu’s grandfather’s village to stay away from the clutches of the Hindu activists. And she didn’t have bones either, she realised.
She might as well make a dhal and eat it with rice. What was the point of cooking nice meals for just one person?
She picked up her mobile phone and opened the list of recently called numbers. If she couldn’t see her son, she could at least speak to him. And Rehman, of course. It was always fun talking to him. Before she dialled the number, a knock came at the door. She put the phone down, puzzled. Since the day that the group of men had come to take Vasu away, her neighbours had avoided her and she had stopped receiving any visitors.
There were two constables at the door, wearing khaki and carrying bamboo lathis. “Are you the mother of the Hindu boy?” one of them asked rudely without any introduction.
Pari nodded mutely.
“You have to come to the police station.”
Pari almost agreed, but then remembered what she had heard many times: that it was not a good idea for a single woman to go alone to a police station. She shook her head and said, “Have you got a warrant?”
The constable spoke into a radio walkie-talkie. “Sir, the party is here. She is asking for a warrant. Shall we bring her in anyway?”
She heard the squawk of a negative. Boots sounded on the steps and a police inspector appeared. His uniform was khaki too, but the cloth was more expensive and crisply ironed. He carried a short, smooth, mahogany-varnished baton rather than the long iron-banded bamboo sticks of his men.
“May we come in, madam?” he said.
Pari stood aside and the men tramped in. Pari was torn between keeping the door open and closing it. Finally, her sense of caution won over the need for privacy and she left the door wide open.
“Do you want tea or coffee?” she asked.
“No, madam. It’s very simple. We have received information that you are a Muslim and you are bringing up a Hindu boy.”
“I don’t know anything about Hindu or Muslim,” she replied. “Vasu is my son, legally adopted. Do you want to see the papers?”
“Legally?”
“Yes, at the registrar’s office.”
She took a photocopy from a drawer, thanking Rehman for his foresight in asking her to do this, and handed it to the inspector.
“Hmm…I see…” The inspector seemed a bit deflated.
“My uncle, Azhar, is a good friend of the inspector in the three-town police station. I think his name is Bhaskar. I can call my uncle and you can speak to his friend,” she said, hoping sincerely that he wouldn’t take up her offer. Mrs Ali’s brother wasn’t currently talking to any of them, which would complicate things slightly.
“Oh, Inspector Bhaskar is a friend of the family?”
She saw the constables exchange glances. The inspector frowned in thought. “See, I will ask Guru-ji to withdraw his complaint. I am sure we don’t need to do this formally. But I need to see the boy and talk to him myself.”
“Why?” said Pari. “Isn’t the certificate good enough?”
“It should be, but this is election time and I don’t want to clash with politicians.”
“Do you want me to give up my son? What kind of cruel man are you that would tear a child away from its mother?”
The constables stirred but the officer remained calm. “In the course of our duty, we policemen do not have the luxury of worrying about kindness or cruelty. I have received a formal complaint and I have to investigate. I want to see your son and talk to him myself. Where is he?”
“He is not here.”
The officer frowned. “I can arrest you for obstruction of justice, young lady. Don’t play games with me. I expect to see your son produced at the police station within a week or the consequences will be dire.”
He strode out and his men followed him.
Pari went after them to close the door. At the steps, the inspector turned and said, “Don’t think of running away, madam. You can’t escape from us.”
Pari stood at the door until they disappeared from view. Seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the man in the opposite flat staring at her through the bars of his outer door.
“First rioters and now policemen…What is our building coming to?” he said.
Pari slammed the door shut and sank to the floor behind it. Priests, imams, police, neighbours…She stayed there without moving as the room slowly grew dark. The phone rang and her stomach growled but she didn’t answer either call.
♦
After a while, Pari didn’t know how long, she became aware that somebody was knocking on the door. She could feel the vibration of the wood on her back. It’s surely a man rapping on
the door, she thought. A woman’s touch would be different – softer, not so peremptory. She thought of her husband, but to her horror she couldn’t recall his face very well. She could still see the curve of his smiling lips, but the rest of his features had somehow faded away. She frowned and concentrated, snapping out of her fugue when the face of her dead husband was replaced by Rehman’s: his thin, curved eyebrows – a look that many women would pay beauticians good money to achieve, his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. How could that be? How could she forget what her husband looked like? She was a horrible, horrible woman, faithless, inconstant, flighty…
A feminine voice called out her name. Sheer surprise shifted Pari’s thoughts away from herself. She had been so sure that it was the knock of a man. She stood up and opened the door. Aruna and Gita, together with their husbands, were standing there.
Aruna came forward and hugged her tightly. “You look as if something terrible has happened. Are you all right?”
They passed into the house. Pari finally came to her senses about her duties as a hostess, asking, “Do you want tea or coffee?”
Gita jumped up. “Don’t worry about it. You sit there with Akka. I’ll make the drinks.”
Gita and Aruna were not related. They had met in the forest when both women – along with their husbands, plus Rehman and Pari’s ex-fiancé Dilawar – had been kidnapped by Maoist insurgents. It was then that Gita had started calling Aruna akka, elder sister, and she had continued to do so. Aruna seemed quite happy to be referred to as elder sister, though what Vani, Aruna’s real younger sister, thought of it, wasn’t clear.
Srinu, Gita’s husband, had followed his wife into the kitchen. It was quite sweet how he helped her with all the housework.
“How come you are all here?” asked Pari.
“Why didn’t you pick up the phone? Rehman was trying to call you and got worried when you didn’t answer. So he asked us to check on you. We were together so we all decided to come,” said Aruna.
“Oh. I’m sorry that I broke up your evening.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Aruna. “The evening is still going and now there are five of us, instead of four.”
Pari smiled wanly. She didn’t particularly feel like company at the moment, but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts either.
Gita came out of the kitchen and whispered into Aruna’s ear. Aruna turned towards Pari. “You haven’t had dinner, have you?”
“No, but…Have you all eaten?”
“Not yet.”
Pari got up from her chair. “Let me cook something up. Nothing elaborate.”
Gita spoke. “Don’t worry about it. Just tell me where the rice, vegetables and the pans are and I’ll make something.”
“This is the first time you’ve come to my house. I can’t let you do that.”
Eventually, Pari had to give in and Gita rejoined Srinu in the kitchen. It was so strange to hear the noise of pots and pans in her own kitchen, while she was sitting in the living room, that she got up, unable to help herself. “Let me go and help Gita and Srinu first with making the dinner. My mother used to say that all problems are easier to solve when your belly is full.”
Aruna followed Pari into the kitchen and they chased Srinu out. It didn’t take long for the three young women to whip up a simple meal of rice, dhal and aubergine-fry. At the last minute, Pari filled a small wok with oil in which she fried poppadums and a few sundried gourd vadiyams as an accompaniment for the meal. She turned to Gita. “Please slice a couple of onions and cucumbers for the salad.”
Gita soon had rings of red onions and ovals of greenish-white cucumbers arranged alternately on a steel plate, with wedges of lemon in the middle.
Pari removed the last of the vadiyams from the hot oil with a slotted spoon and glanced at Gita’s work. “That looks very pretty, Gita. The green chillies are in the brown paper bag – put them on the plate in case anybody wants to eat them.”
The table was set and dinner was relatively quiet, though Ramanujam, Aruna’s husband, tried to enliven it with a tale about a tout who had recently been caught outside the district hospital where he worked.
“I don’t think he’s studied beyond high school, but he probably knows more about medicine than most house surgeons and even some of the experienced doctors. A family of villagers come to the hospital looking confused. He goes up to them and asks, ‘Who’s ill?’ The villagers might reply, ‘My son is not well.’ He will say, ‘What’s his problem?’
‘My boy has headaches and keeps vomiting.’
‘He needs to be seen by a neurosurgeon. If you give me a hundred rupees, I’ll get him admitted. I know the porter in the department.’
“And that’s how I saw the patient today. I too have noticed before that he directs the patients perfectly: whether to cardiology, ENT, dermatology or renal. As far as I can tell, he takes people to the right department just by asking a couple of questions.”
“What would have happened if the tout had made a mistake and taken your patient to the cardiology department?” asked Gita.
“Then, heaven help the patient. They would probably have carried out open-heart surgery on him.”
They all laughed, even Pari; but silence descended again until the meal was finished.
“How do you solve a problem like Vasu?” asked Ramanujam.
Pari, who hadn’t seen many, or actually any, English films, bridled. “Vasu is not the problem. It’s those stupid priests and imams.”
“Pari is right,” said Aruna, glaring at her husband. She hadn’t seen any English movies either.
Ramanujam threw up his hands in despair and bit his tongue at the last moment before he landed himself in greater trouble with his wife.
Srinu said, “I don’t understand something. You said that Rehman has taken Vasu to his village where his uncles and other relatives live.”
“Yes,” said Pari. “What about it?”
“Forgive me for this doubt, but if he has family members in his own village, why aren’t they looking after him? Why is he being brought up by you?”
Gita hit Srinu on the shoulder. “What kind of question is that? Pari…”
Pari held up her hand and looked at all of them. “You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. I’m Vasu’s adopted mother. I know that, Vasu knows that, and I willingly declare it to the whole world. It’s not a secret.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Rehman knows Vasu’s story from the beginning and I know of it only through him. It seems strange, doesn’t it, that somebody else knows more about a boy’s past than his mother? But that’s the difference between a natural mother and an adopted mother.”
Pari smiled. Aruna thought that she looked both beautiful and ineffably sad.
“Vasu’s parents were classmates of Rehman’s and they were his good friends. Vasu’s mother was a girl from Vizag – the daughter of a rich, high-caste family. Vasu’s father, the son of an illiterate farmer, was the first person in his family to go to college. Vasu’s mother’s parents were naturally against the match. Most parents become reconciled to such situations after a child is born, but her mother and father were adamant. Anyway, when Vasu was still quite young, his father died in an accident at work.”
“That’s terrible,” said Gita, her eyes round.
Pari gave her a tight smile. “That’s just the beginning. Vasu’s mother went into a depression. She asked her parents for help, but they refused to have anything to do with her. Vasu had been born prematurely and they accused her of having premarital sex. Insulted, and as Rehman found out later, hoping that once she was gone, they would take their grandson into their fold and raise him as they had raised her, she killed herself. But she was mistaken and her parents refused to care for her son. Vasu was finally taken to his father’s village by his paternal grandfather, who had a small farm on which they lived from harvest to harvest. Rehman went and helped them sometimes. Anyway, Vasu’s grandfather made a mistake and was about to lose even
his tiny field to pay off a debt, so he drank pesticide and committed suicide.”
“Oh my God…”
“Yes, Vasu’s short life has been full of tragedies. After the grandfathers funeral, Vasu’s uncles and caste-men refused to take Vasu into their houses. They said that he was an ill-starred boy who brought misfortune to whoever was his guardian. So Rehman brought him to Vizag and then I adopted him.”
Aruna and Ramanujam knew the story but this was the first time that Gita and Srinu had heard it.
“So much trouble in such a young life,” said Gita.
Pari said, “In his eight years, Vasu has had to face so many changes, and now that he has found a bit of stability, the priests and the imams want to disturb him again. Useless do-gooders – why can’t they keep their noses in their own kitchens?”
Ramanujam laughed at Pari’s fierce expression. He remembered an old saying: for the sake of its calf, even a cow will fight like a tigress.
A knock came at the door and they looked at each other in surprise. Who could it be? Fear replaced the anger on Pari’s face.
Ramanujam stood up and said, “Let me see who it is.” Moments later, they all heard the surprise in his voice as he said, “Come in. Please!”
Pari exchanged a puzzled glance with Aruna before twisting round to see Mr and Mrs Ali walk in. Pari exclaimed, “Chaachi, Chaacha! What are you doing here at this time of the evening?”
“Rehman called us and said he was worried about you,” said Mrs Ali.
“I am all right. You shouldn’t have troubled yourselves.”
The older couple were offered dinner, which they refused, as a matter of course. Finally, cups of tea were made and they all sat sipping it.
Aruna turned to Pari. “So, tell me. The house was dark, there was no dinner being prepared and you were not answering any phone calls. What’s going on?”
Pari remembered a long-ago afternoon that had been spent in just such a way with her husband. Of course, the reason then was romantic. The following day the housewife next door had asked Pari much the same question with a knowing look, causing her considerable embarrassment. Pushing the thought aside, Pari told them about the police visit.
