A Matter of Geography

by Jasmine D'Costa

  “So why didn’t you do it?” he asked

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Peter. Why did you not get married? Thirty-seven and unmarried, with an apartment, a good job, education, a car… everything a girl could dream of, mostly anyway. Maybe you should install an air conditioner…” He tipped back his head and popped the paan into the recesses of his left cheek. “Surely, it is not because you cannot get a girl. Besides,” he added, as if it had anything to do with it, “you’re not bad looking either.”

  With a groan, I ignored this pest and returned to my bedroom to retrieve Anna’s notebook. And talking about marriages…as in all bad fiction novellas, I coincidentally arrived at Anna’s memories of Ali’s marriage. I place this before you since Ali is almost central to what took place that year that Anna’s family left for Canada. I looked at the calendar hanging on the wall just behind Dr. Apte’s head – little over a week for Anna to arrive in Bombay.

  The angle of the L at 10 Nesbit Road seemed stacked with Muslims. Yes, that too, I discovered in my teenage years. The restaurant on the ground floor was an Irani restaurant. Though we always called it “the Irani restaurant,” we never thought of the owners as Muslim. The room directly above the restaurant belonged to Sadiq Ali, Advocate, High Court. We did not know who he was since it was an office and we never went anywhere near the offices in Billimoria Building. Directly above Sadiq Ali’s office was our own playmate Ali on the second floor.

  It was the end of the monsoons. Five of us gathered to play in the passage near the stairs. Peter made a soft ball with a stuffed sock, and my brother Ivan invented a game that he called handball. He drew a circle on the wall with a piece of white chalk. The game had a batsman and a bowler, except there was no bat involved in the game. The batsman—for lack of a more inspired word—stood near the wall with his fist in the circle. The bowler threw the sock ball and the batsman pummelled it with his fist. The scoring was very much like cricket, the batsman taking runs when possible, and if the ball hit the centre of the circle he was bowled out. In a sense, the batsman was the guardian of the circle with his fist.

  It was my turn to bowl. I threw the handball to Ivan. He hit the ball with the top of his clenched fist and it arched in the air, following the high-beamed roof. Five pairs of eyes mimicked the trajectory. Before we knew it, Ali, who had appeared from nowhere, jumped up and caught the ball.

  “You want to play with us?”I asked.

  “No, but I want to give you some good news.”

  “Yeah?” we said, abandoning the game and clustered around him. “What is it?”

  We never played much with Ali, and when we all went in one big team to the Mazagaon Hill Gardens he never joined us. I don’t think he was much interested in games, really. He attended the Anjuman Islam School over the Byculla Bridge and spoke with an accent very different from our own convent-schooled tones. On occasion when we ran short of a player for a team, we stood outside his apartment and called out to him. He was a reluctant playmate, but never missed joining our tight circle outside Joe’s apartment each night.

  We waited now, our eyes turned towards Ali. The game stopped, not because Ali, having caught the ball, stood stroking it in his hand, unwilling to let go of his audience, but because of his visible excitement.

  “What?” Peter impatiently prodded.

  “I am getting married!” Ali said as he threw his head back and watched the ball, which assumed a life of its own, pop out of his hands and make its way toward the ceiling of the passage.

  It is always a moment of shock when someone your age makes an announcement like that. My Catholic upbringing made us feel uncomfortable with marital aspirations, even ashamed. We denied those thoughts as unholy and most certainly did not admit them to our families.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A nun.”

  “A priest.”

  And when our aunts and uncles teased, “You want to marry,” we strongly denied such wayward dreams and replied, shy and ashamed, “No, No, a nun, a priest.”

  So Ali’s news was a bit of a shock. He was sixteen. Only old people marry!

  “To who?”

  “Whom,”from Peter

  “Whatever, to who?”

  “Mumtaz.”

  “Who is she?’

  “I don’t know. My parents know her parents.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Mohammed Ali Road.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “I think so. I not meet her but her photo look really good.”

  “But don’t you need to meet?”

  “No. She is girl, I is boy. Come to my house, I show you.”

  We all traipsed behind him. A small passage stuck out like a tangent into the curve of the L, with smaller apartment rooms on either side. We walked one behind the other in a single file, of necessity, down the narrow passage to the end, right outside Ali’s door.

  We entered for the first time into this little home where Ali lived with his parents. While we visited all the Catholic homes at Christmas and New Year, we had no occasion to visit Ali. On Eid, too, we did not get invited, nor were they on our list of homes where we sent Christmas sweets. Really, though Ali lived on the second floor with us, his family could have well been part of the first, those who were just not part of our active lives.

  Ali’s apartment was very different from ours. It was stacked on top of the angle of the L, and we stepped onto a linoleum floor of bright red, patterned with yellow, black and orange geometrical labyrinth designs. It was as if we had stepped into the Arabian Nights of flying carpets and wondrous colors. Our own homes had black and white stone floors on which we played hopscotch. Our floor was smooth and shiny and we threw talcum powder on it and pretended we were skating, sliding once every so often, on what to us was our ice rink. But so fascinating was the design on Ali’s floor that I stood on my toes and tried to move through the mazes without touching the lines. We all took that on as a game, making Ali impatient.

  “This is the marriage bed,” he said, pointing to the only furniture in the room apart from two folding steel chairs standing in the far end. We were uninterested in the bed, but I was fascinated with Ali’s mother, who for the first time I saw without her black burqa. Ali grew impatient once again. He pointed to the bed more emphatically and said, “That is the marriage bed.”

  We did not really see the special qualities of a marriage bed. Ali was strange anyway, so we did not pay attention. He spoke English like it was Urdu, a language alien to us.

  We would have returned to our sock ball game had Ali’s mother not intervened at that moment.

  Ali,”she ordered, “give them some sherbet.”

  We all rushed to the bed and sat down, it being the only seating above floor level. Ali served us a bright green sherbet. This had an immediate effect on us. Sherbet was not common in our homes. Coffee, yes, tea, yes, milk, yes—sherbet, absolutely not! Not unless we had it surreptitiously from the hawkers outside our school gates, mostly with money saved from walking home instead of taking the bus.

  We sat sipping the sherbet delicately, slurping it through our lips and savouring the very last drop. Ali’s esteem had risen considerably in our eyes. We were even willing to discuss the marriage bed.

  “So Ali, what is it about the bed you wanted us to see?”

  “Don’t you understand? It is the MARRIAGE bed,” he said, now trying to make us understand, using emphasis and gestures which none of us could really get. Even Peter, who normally knew most things, looked away, embarrassed. The rest of us were once again convinced that Ali was strange, just not one of us.

  “Don’t you know ‘first night’?”

  Looking at our ignorant faces, Ali ushered us out of his house. We were just not the right crowd to share his excitement. I guess that went two ways. We were as alien to him as he was to us. As we walked back in single file, minus Ali, I asked Peter, “What did he mean, Peter?”

  Pe
ter blushed. “I don’t know what he meant. Forget it, Ali is crazy.”

  A few months later, Ali, wearing long trousers, knocked on all the doors of the second floor. Another way in which he stood out from the rest of us, who still wore short pants long after our legs grew hairy and we could no longer bear being teased by the school girls as we walked down the bridge past our school. He had invited all of us: Mr. and Mrs. Farooqui invite you, your family, friends and relatives to the reception of our son, Ali Mohammed...

  Our parents looked at the invitation card that Ali delivered to our houses. Since his parents did not come personally, as would be the custom, our parents did not attend the wedding—‘child’s play,’ they called it. ‘Really I mean, Nathie, one can’t take this seriously,’ Isabel dismissed it, waving it in the air. Visions of the sherbet fresh in our minds, we dreamed of treats far beyond mere green sugar water: ice-cream, we hoped, such a rare treat for us, to be had only at weddings. Dressed in our Sunday best and armed with the sealed envelopes with rupee notes inside, given by our parents, we walked down the bridge towards the Saboo Siddique hall in Nagpada.

  In retrospect, I wonder why we were astonished at the crowds that attended his wedding—family, friends, and relatives indeed! We may have been the only folk there who had not taken that clause seriously. Crowds streamed in and out of the wedding hall.

  The hall, divided into two sections and separated by a curtain, kept the women and men apart. Ali, with a gold embroidered kurta and a headdress that befitted a maharaja, sat there looking pleased with being the centre of all this attention—and anyway it was his party. We were not allowed to go to the bride’s side, and even Anna and Susan did not get to see her, though they sat on that side of the hall. The boys in our little group, separated from the girls irrespective of our ages, sat on opposite side of the hall with the men.

  Nothing was really happening. I mean no music, no dance, nothing to watch but the streaming humanity in various colours, like sunshine through a prism, some with burqas and others with long, brilliant-coloured clothes. We looked around for the waiters, for the ice-cream, for the sherbet, perhaps water, as we felt our throats dry. Finally, we got wind that nothing would be served and we looked at each other, Ivan and I, and down at the cash in the envelopes. Maybe we should get ice-creams for ourselves…

  We left the rest there, took Susan and Anna with us, and walked down the other side of the bridge to Clare Road. What an unforgettable wedding! We had piyali, cups filled with chickpeas and potatoes with a lot of spices thrown in, sherbet at Johnny’s, the cold drink shop at the side, and finally rounded up our evening with kulfi, an Indian ice-cream, a block away, though rumours had it that it was made of blotting paper.

  Anna, not our conscience, asked, “Peter, don’t you think this is wrong?”

  “No,”

  “But, this is Ali’s gift money.”

  “So did you get ice-cream, which all weddings serve?” I asked.

  “No…but…”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” Ivan said, “And if you tell Mummy and Daddy, you are out of all our games, I hope you remember that!”

  I was startled when Dr. Apte, now his feet down and alert, slapped his thigh, watching me through large, astonished eyes. It would not be an exaggeration to say his eyes goggled and his Adam’s apple moved excitedly.

  He pointed at the book in my hands. “There is a woman, there is a woman, I can tell.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The history of life on this planet may well be the history of the sun, the stars and the history of God himself. But more importantly to us, it is the history of mothers. They breed, they nurture, they dominate all we do, and, if we allow them, they would even take over our lives. Everyone has a mother, so you know what I speak of. I did not have a chance to answer Dr. Apte’s question, for mine was standing on my doorstep at that very moment, seeming quite agitated.

  Isabel looked at the partially naked skeleton draped in my armchair with a haughty distaste that only she could convey—a look that has prompted many a butcher to sheepishly put the extra gram of meat on the scale, or the unfortunate government clerk, who usually cannot find his corrupt little pen until a currency note is slipped onto his desk, to do quite promptly whatever this formidable figure has requested in her very quiet, polite tones. Dr. Apte, however, was made of sterner stuff. Women did not faze him at all. Yes, he would have been upset with a bit of extra salt in his food or the darker hue of yellow in his dal, but any disapproval his eyes might meet, completely lost its way somewhere between two opposing retinas. He said in his most friendly of tones, even perhaps, one could say, familiar,

  “Isabel, how good of you to come visit Peter. I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

  Mother may be disapproving, but she prided herself on her impeccable manners.

  “Good morning, Dr. Apte. I see you are feeling the heat.”

  “So I am. I keep telling Peter to install an air-conditioner, but will he listen? Single, good job and everything…I don’t know what he does with his money.”

  Isabel did not deign to respond. Quite unlike her. She walked out of the room to my bedroom with me in tow.

  “Mother, are you upset?”

  “Peter, why do you encourage that mannerless man into your living room?”

  “Mother, surely you are not serious? It is very unlike you to be so inhospitable towards others. What is it that’s agitating you?”

  “They are back with their nonsense.” She pushed a church bulletin under my nose.

  “Who do you speak of? Who is back?” I say, ignoring the paper.

  “We will never have peace. The communal and hate crimes have only increased over the years. First it was the South Indians, then the communists, then the Muslims, the north Indians, the Muslims, and now the Catholics. Peter, I am worried. All these hatreds, not unlike pennies dropped in the slot of a pink plastic pig, filling it bursting its banks, will one day fill their hearts.”

  She had obviously followed the news of the past two weeks, of the violence towards Christians in Mangalore.

  “Mother, you are safe here. Just don’t go out for a while.”

  “Peter, this is not about me. It is happening in Mangalore. Right now, Anna is in Mangalore. She flew directly there from Canada as I had informed you, that is, if you care to listen to your mother.”

  “Oh Mum, of course I know Anna is in Mangalore and arrives next week. See? I listen.”

  “And Maggie, your father’s sister, writes that the Ram Sena, some moral police group, is targeting young girls in pubs and other public places. You know Anna is now Canadian. She has lived there for so long that perhaps she may visit these pubs or some such place, and as you know, that is the worst thing that could happen to her. Look at this picture.” She once again pushed the paper to me. “They trashed the Milagres church. These Hindus will not rest till they kill everyone else in this country.”

  “Mother, careful, you may hurt our guest,” I whispered. At which, as if on cue, she walked into the living room—strode, I should say, spurring apprehension and a mounting headache in my already greatly tried body.

  Anna, with mathematical precision, had chosen to land in Mangalore on the 14th September, at the very time she’d have to hide her cross, strung on its black string—if she was still wearing it, that was. On that very morning, nearly 15 years after the communal violence of 1993 between the Hindus and Muslims and her departure to Canada as a consequence, we had watched with overwhelming horror and disbelief the images of the police assaulting the congregation around the Milagres Church. The year 2008 seemed marked for violence against Christains.

  Our shock at images of the broken Crucifix at the Adoration Monastery reverberated around the Christian world; the media covered it live and it appeared on the BBC and CNN as their main headline for the next 24 hours. Anna, waiting at the airport for connecting flights, would later tell us how she felt not just horror but fear. When you are at an unknown airpor
t, you have no option but to follow the path your baggage takes ahead of you.

  To the Christians watching fearfully in that moment, the images of the cross, broken, seemingly defeated, were ones of the humility of Christ; a return of his life on earth so to say. The hatred we saw in the eyes of the Hindu fundamentalists as they shattered the areas most sacred to the Christian communities, as they enacted their cruelty and sadistic violence on its symbols, could only be surpassed by our own dismay at the shocking connivance of the state machinery.

  Christian sanctimony aside, it was in that moment that I felt a sudden empathy with tax evaders. I have always paid mine diligently, but now I could see it being used to fund a bunch of bigots (for indeed the police and the administration are paid by our taxes) who were using it to crush the country’s own citizens, instead of protecting them. How many people felt the same as I did? Did the Hindus feel the horror I felt? Did the Muslims feel outrage for us, or did they feel relief that the attention towards them had diluted? Does citizenship in this country mean anything? Do we have citizens or only private inheritors of all that is “Indian”? History has always been political and written by the dominant group. Did I need to apologise for being Christian in a country that boasts of being the largest democracy?

  Love, I think, is the denial of questioning, for along the path of my questions, hate welled up inside of me. It felt like pig’s lard. As a child I loved the disgusting stuff, and one greedy Sunday I ate a plate full of it. The retching that ensued as punishment led to a self-loathing so palpable that I needed to look outside myself, pick an object, something that I could hate so that this disgust at my excess would disappear. I, of course, picked pork lard to hate. I never touched it again—not to this day. I think my hate lasted a week, but my words, “I hate lard,” lasted a lifetime. This felt the same. It accompanied waves of revulsion I was now feeling for all Hindus, every one of them who were silent. Everyone who thought it was not their fault, and could do no more than stand aside; everyone who voted these bigots in. My revulsion was all-engulfing, and not much later had expanded to the entire country. India, I hate you…