Thrity Umrigar

by Unknown

  But I feel a compelling urge to go back out on the balcony because I have an insane thought that if I can just make eye contact with Jamal, I will be able to re-establish our old friendship and then…then…but here my imagination fails me.

  I venture out anyway, but it is of no use. Upon spotting me, the bells and drums get louder and the chanting more frequent.

  I try to catch Jamal’s eye but the distance is too great and he is no longer in the forefront. I stand there, wanting to do something, make some grand gesture that expresses equal parts solidarity and disappointment, but nothing comes to mind. Just then, Roshan spots me. ‘Come in, you idiot,’ she yells from the living room. ‘Why do you always want to make a fool of yourself?’

  The strike is settled four days later. The outside union leader had approached dad and Babu the day after the demonstration and asked them how much they were willing to pay him to simply declare the strike over and skip town. ‘Of course, bhaisahibs, you’ll have to give the workers a small wage increase, just so I can save face,’ he added with a sly smile.

  ‘Otherwise, they’ll come after my throat.’

  Dad did not try to hide the contempt on his face. ‘So all this hero-giri was just for show? Disrupting my business, coming to my house and embarrassing me…’

  The union leader looked sheepish. ‘That was just theatre, sir. Something to make the workers feel good.’

  ‘And if we do not pay your…bribe?’

  The man remained unperturbed. ‘Not a bribe, sir. Baksheesh.

  A little reward for calling off the strike.’

  And so the strike has ended. But the easy, chatty relation between Babu and Jamal is gone, with Babu being wary and Jamal being uneasy and awkward. Sometimes, Babu cannot hide his bitterness at what he considers to have been Jamal’s disloyalty. Jamal, in turn, is increasingly sullen and quiet. When he greets me at the factory now, his face is blank and although he still automatically orders a Coke for me whenever I visit, it is a conditioned response, with none of the old knowingness or authority. The exuberant man with the ready grin seems to have fled along with the vanishing union leader.

  Occasionally, I try to engage him in conversation but the answers are brief and perfunctory.

  I am at the factory on a day when, four months after the strike has been settled, Babu’s lingering bitterness spills over. Jamal has screwed up on an order, has cut the logs of timber half a centimetre too short and Babu is furious at the waste. In his usual manner he cusses at Jamal but this time, the old teasing, the wink that used to take the sting out of Babu’s words, is missing. Jamal says nothing, which only seems to infuriate Babu more. ‘So where is the Lion of the Punjab these days?’

  Babu cries, berating the man in the presence of the other workers. ‘What has happened to his roar? Did he sell it for a fifteen-paise an hour pay raise?’ All heads turn to Jamal, expecting a fiery comeback. Instead, he smiles a self-effacing smile, lowers his head and walks away.

  But three days later, he shows up at our home in the evening.

  It is the first time he has been to the house since the demonstration and so when a startled Freny opens the door, she hesitates for a second before letting him in. ‘How are you, memsahib,’ he says to her and then spotting me behind Freny, he flashes me a quick but subdued smile. ‘Are both seths at home?’

  Freny leads him to the living room and then leaves to go get dad and Babu, so that Jamal and I are alone for a brief moment.

  ‘Ae, Jamal,’ I say brightly, desperately trying to reprise the easiness of our earlier encounters. ‘You want something to drink? Chai? Soft drink?’

  He smiles again but shakes his head no. We are quiet for a moment and then suddenly he says, ‘Pesi seth is very angry with me, baby.’ I open my mouth to say something, to contradict him, to reassure him but the sadness in his face takes my breath away. Before I can say anything, he continues,

  ‘I made a bad, bad mistake.’

  And now I am seized with contradictory feelings, so that one part of me agrees with him but another part also wants to lecture him on his right to strike and how he has nothing to apologize for. Again, he speaks before I can: ‘This family has been very good to me, baby.’ I look away from him, and when I can trust myself to look at his face again, I notice that his eyes are red and teary.

  Babu and dad enter the room, their faces guarded. ‘Salaam wa’alaykum,’ Jamal says and they automatically reply,

  ‘Wa’alaykum salaam.’

  ‘Everything at the factory okay?’ Babu asks and visibly relaxes when Jamal assures him that everything is fine. I realize that they have no idea about the reason for this visit.

  We soon find out. Jamal has come to take his leave. He thanks us for giving him a job when he’d come to Bombay from his village in the north as a gauche, unworldly boy of twenty. He tells Babu that he has been like a father to him, thanks him for the numerous times he has bailed him out of financial situations. He flushes and apologizes for the whole strike business and says he realizes that things will never be the same because of that situation. He says he knows that now he has lost dad’s and Babu’s and Mehroo’s trust and because of that he has come to take his leave because he cannot continue working at the factory, not with the fallout from the strike still floating like dust particles in the air. I hear myself gasp when Jamal says he is leaving but I don’t know if he hears me because he goes on. He has another job lined up at a factory in Chembur but wherever he goes, he will always remember us and our many kindnesses towards him.

  No one has interrupted Jamal while he has been talking.

  Now, I wait for someone to say something—for Mehroo, who has come into the room, to say it’s time to let bygones be bygones, for dad to say he is in no position to lose his favourite worker, for Babu to call Jamal a sisterfucker and put his arm around him. But no one moves. Finally, dad clears his throat and thanks Jamal for his years of service and asks when his last day will be. He touches Jamal lightly on the arm and wishes him good luck and Jamal nods his head to acknowledge the gesture. I am stunned at how easily Jamal is being let go, like a discarded piece of machinery. But I do not say a word because I sense the unspoken disappointment and hurt that all four adults in this room are experiencing and I suddenly feel very small and inexperienced.

  After Jamal leaves, Dad and Babu decide to give Jamal an extra month’s salary for his long years of service. I know that I should be glad about this but I’m still reeling from how casually the relationship has been severed. I am also struck by how broken, how defeated Jamal had looked while the rest of us have recovered unscathed from the strike. I think of him starting out afresh in a new place, and wonder if this new, serious, sad-faced Jamal is permanent or whether the old, impish Jamal will resurface again. And I realize that I will never know because I will never see him again. I am angry at myself for having ever believed that Jamal and I were friends, for believing that friendship was possible between us. I realize that on those occasions when I pretended to work by his side—when he indulged me by letting me wash the walls with him, for instance—he was working until he was bone-tired, working in addition to his full-time job at the factory, in order to earn some extra money for—for what? To send home to his family? To save in a bank? To buy himself a new set of clothes?

  I realize that in all the years that Jamal had ordered Cokes for me when I visited the factory, I had never seen him sip a soft drink. Here I thought he was treating me as his friend when actually he was treating me like a spoilt princess, a visiting dignitary who had to be entertained with soft drinks. And that day of the demonstration on the balcony—what did I think he would do if he caught my eye? Walk away from the strike?

  Decide that his friendship with me was more important than a fair wage? What kind of arrogance on my part did it take for me to stand on that balcony? And what I’d thought of as solidarity, wasn’t solidarity at all. It was just liberal guilt.

  No, Jamal and I were never friends. He probably always knew
that, aware as he had to be of the class barriers between us. I had been blithely unaware of those barriers, or, had felt good about myself for ignoring them. Now, I realize that ignoring those barriers had not been an act of humility and democracy but of hubris and privilege.

  I go to bed that night, angry and disappointed at myself.

  When I sleep, I dream of Jamal. His face is in the sky, cloudlike, and his eyes are opaque and dripping with tears. I am on the ground, looking up at Jamal’s face in the sky, watching his tears turn into rain as they fall around me. I want to say something to him, console him, but he is very far away.

  We are both very far away from each other.

  For only the second time in my life, my father has lost his temper with me but this time, we have gone almost four months without speaking to each other despite living under the same roof. He is open about the fact that the months of my punishing silence have been hell for him but my teenage pride will not let me concede the same point.

  For the last four months, a flag of sorts, the emblem of my defiance, has held a pride of place in my closet. It is a striped, blue-and-white cotton shirt given to me by a friend and it is what inaugurated my period of silence. The shirt is about three sizes too large for my ninety-nine-pound frame but baggy shirts and blue jeans are in fashion among the arty kids in college and I love the fact that the shirt hides my small but growing breasts. My well-dressed, dandified father, with his starched collars and pressed pants, hates that shirt. He is embarrassed at the thought of his only daughter walking around the neighbourhood wearing an ill-fitting shirt and jeans torn at the knees. My head is filled with images of scruffy, long-haired rock-stars like Bob Dylan. He still remembers the impeccable dress style of a Sinatra or Cary Grant. We are from two different worlds and soon, those worlds will collide.

  For months, he keeps his silence. But it all comes to a head one evening, hours before he is to catch the overnight train to leave on a business trip. That afternoon, he is giving his banker friend a ride home when he spots me at the bus-stop near my college. Instinctively, his foot hits the brake to stop but when he notices how ‘shabbily’ I am dressed, he speeds by. He is not sure if I have seen him. But for the rest of the afternoon the fact that he did not stop for his only child shames him, makes him disgusted with himself and by evening, the shame has hardened into anger. That evening, he is glowering as I answer the doorbell and let him in. Oblivious to what has transpired earlier in the day, I make small talk while he hastily throws his clothes into his suitcase. Mehroo tells him that dinner is ready but he mumbles something about picking something up along the way. ‘Wait then,’ she says. ‘I’ll just wrap the cutlets up for you to eat on the train.’ She hurries into the kitchen.

  We are alone in the hallway as he waits for Mehroo. The blue fluorescent light blinks and hums overhead. Suddenly, my father’s eyes narrow as they focus on a tiny hole on my right shirtsleeve. When he speaks, his voice is choked. ‘Wearing torn clothes outside. My own child. Even when the business was really bad, when we had no orders, when all we ate every night was daal and rice, even then, nobody in this family ever went outside with torn clothes…’

  ‘It’s not really torn,’ I reply. ‘The hole’s so small, no one can see. Besides, that’s the fashion…’

  ‘I can see it. That’s what matters. I can see it.’ And he takes a step toward me, puts his index finger in the hole and moves it down the length of my arm, the shirtsleeve tearing to expose my arm and hanging near my wrist.

  There is a sudden silence. We stare at each other, both of us unsure of what to do next. I am breathing hard, willing myself not to cry. My dad looks as horrified as I feel. Mehroo walks into the silence and gasps as she sees me, standing in my torn shirt, looking like a street urchin. ‘Wh…what happened? Burjor?’

  In reply, my dad picks up his suitcase. ‘I’m…I’ll miss my train.’ He opens the front door and then stops to look at me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I…we’ll talk when I get home. Stay well.’

  I do not reply. For the rest of the evening, I ignore the pleas of the grown-ups and walk around in my torn shirt. Each time I glance at the torn sleeve, I feel a warm sense of satisfaction, like blood rushing into a cold limb. My father’s action has given voice to something I have felt but could never vocalize, has exposed some essential truth: I am a misfit, an alien in your midst, my torn shirt proclaims. I am different from the rest of you. My values are different. I do not love or fear the same things that you do. And that makes me different.

  Two days later, I receive a blue aerogramme from my father, the first letter he has ever addressed to me. ‘Darling Thritu.

  I’m about to board the train,’ he wrote. ‘I’m sorry for what happened…But I am right.’

  I hate him and admire him for the last sentence. But I don’t acknowledge the letter when my father returns from his trip.

  Mostly, I don’t acknowledge him at all, despite Mehroo’s cajoling. When he asks me a question, I make my eyes focus elsewhere while I answer in monosyllables. As the months drag on, my hostility begins to feel silly even to me but now, I don’t know how to walk away from it and toward him. It seems terribly important, a matter of life-and-death, to not be the one to give in, lest I be perceived as weak. At times, seeing the hurt look on his face, I weep hot tears into my pillow.

  Then, I force myself to look at the tattered shirt hanging in my closet, to buttress my position. Finally, at the end of four months, he breaks down at the dining table one day, his eyes filling with tears. That is all it takes. I go over and hug him while the other adults sigh in relief.

  But it takes me another three weeks to remove the torn shirt from where it’s hanging in my closet. Even then, I neatly fold it and place it on a shelf, where it will remain for years.

  The channawalla wanders up to the car and my dad buys a rupee’s worth of roasted peanuts. This is the first time since our estrangement that we have come to the seaside. He tells me how ashamed he is for having lost his temper with me, how the memory of the aborted trip to Hanging Gardens still hurts him. This is the amazing thing about my father—unlike most adults I know, he has no problems admitting he is wrong.

  In fact, his relentless drive for self-improvement, his paroxysms of self-doubt, his candidness in talking about his life, both embarrass and fascinate me. In contrast to him, I am already closed, emotionally guarded. In some ways, my dad is younger, more trusting, more innocent than I am. It occurs to me that just as he can still outrun or outwalk me, my dad can also emotionally outdistance me.

  We started doing this several years ago, dad and I, coming to the seaside after dusk, sitting in the car and talking. Mostly, he talks and I listen. Or rather, he talks and I let my mind wander down its familiar paths—daydreaming about being older and out of the house and wearing cotton saris to my journalist job atThe Times of India and perhaps even having my own little apartment somewhere far from my childhood home. But my dad does not know my futuristic fantasies and he still talks to the teenager that I am. Sometimes he notices how my head tilts away from him as he lectures me about the importance of honesty (‘Don’t even pick up a ten-paise coin from the ground, if it doesn’t belong to you’), the value of education (‘If you don’t finish college, the best I can promise you is maybe I can get you a job as a packer at a box factory’) and the dangers of premarital sex (‘Boys want different things in a girlfriend than in a wife’). Then his voice gets even more intense than usual. ‘Listen to me, Thrituma,’ he says urgently. ‘Learn from my life experience, don’t make all the mistakes I have made. I want to spare you all the pain I’ve gone through. I had no one to advice me. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned the hard way, through trial and error.

  Even if you forget eighty-five per cent of everything I am telling you, just the fifteen per cent will come back to you when you’re older. That is why I say the same things over and over again, like a broken record.’

  I hear him, even understand what he�
�s saying, but I can’t help myself. I am bored. I have heard this lecture too many times and I am bored. Besides, I have now begun to realize the gulf between our worlds. My father had quit school in the sixth grade. He is a self-made man and everything that he knows he has had to teach himself. He has never read a Shakespeare play in his life. Already, I have read books whose very existence my father is unaware of. I know things about art and music that my father does not. Nor does he realize how those things have changed me. For instance, my father is unaware that ever since I readLust for Life , the

  biography of Vincent van Gogh, two years ago, I have stopped asking him for car rides, preferring instead to ride the public buses. I identify so strongly with Van Gogh that I even develop a stutter to sound like him. I walk around with what I imagine is a haunted, crazed look and cultivate Van Gogh’s contempt for the bourgeois life. Hermann Hesse’sDamien andSteppenwolf give further voice to the alienated stranger I have become. I am no longer the earnestly good child who gave all her lunch money to the nuns. I am no longer a child.

  In contrast to the intellectual, passionate, art-filled world that I am reading about—a world, it is clear to me that I have to die trying to be part of—the world described by my father sounds tediously conscripted, pale and bloodless. His is the world of virtue and practicality. But my soul hankers for a greyer world, filled with ambiguity and complexity. My father promises me a world of answers—‘Honesty is the best policy’,

  ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.

  but I am increasingly enthralled by a world in which people ask impossible questions, questions without answers.