A Matter of Geography

by Jasmine D'Costa

  The chick grew into a giant cock. This was no ordinary cock, it was a giant “Rhode Island.” Its fiery red and blue feathers stood high on its neck when anyone passed it. It needed very little by way of provocation. In the small confines of our apartment, we had to pass very close to it and dodge the furious pecks he handed out with boundless aggression. The four of us made a game of ‘rushing past the cock’ when Dad went to work. We did not name it, nor did we hug him or stroke him, as one does with pets. We were afraid of him. Our teachers sometimes said, ‘You are a pet,’ when we ran an errand for them. But this was no pet.

  Anthony’s chick turned out to be a hen. However, Anthony did not feed it the magic formula and it remained an average-sized bird; nothing spectacular like our cock. It was just as well. Billimoria Building could not handle so much aggression, much less from birds. Anthony took his hen to bed with him each night, till Lolly, his wife, gave a not so private diktat—Get rid of the hen; it’s either her or me—loud enough for us to hear it through the thin walls that separated our apartments. We later learned that Anthony chose to sleep on the floor with the hen, till the following Christmas, when in his drunken inattention he ate his wife’s meal of chicken, hidden under a heap of stuffing, and could not find his hen that night. Towards midnight, we heard Anthony’s loud retching next door. Lolly said audibly in the otherwise quiet night, “You should not drink quite so much.”

  Four months later our cock disappeared from the verandah where he was kept tied during the day. We searched for him all over the building, knocking on everyone’s door to ask whether they had seen it. ‘No, we haven’t,’ ‘Why should we know where your cock is?’ ‘Good riddance, one bad bird.’No one had seen him.

  As I sat at the window after dinner, as I did most days, I saw him tied outside the door of the restaurant across the street. His red and blue glory was unmistakable. It strutted up and down to the end of its leash and back, moving its head to and fro as if pecking at some imaginary foe. It surprised us that someone had actually picked up that bird without casualty.

  “Daddy, the cock.” I stood, pointing at the road. I got no further. Dad, out like a rocket, rushed across the street, and the cock came home. The restaurant owner argued a while with Dad. He had paid Rs.10/ to Sammy for the cock, but of course it did not matter to Dad—you cannot transfer good value from bad—everyone in the neighbourhood knew Sammy pushed stolen goods, so the restaurant owner should have known better; taking anything from that no-gooder!

  That was it. The masala was ground for a chicken curry I want no memory of.

  One very wet day in September 1990—wet weather-wise, but also wet for Sammy, who came home that afternoon well hydrated, swaying on his toes, rocking from side to side and front and back on an imaginary swing, until he finally reached room 19—what transpired was nothing short of a miracle; at least most people would look at it that way. In Roman Catholicism, the working of miracles has been ascribed to its saints or the Christ himself; Sammy Marchon conformed to only one requirement: He was Roman Catholic.

  That very morning, he had nicked the wall clock from the Marchon home and sold it. Bruno and Oswald Marchon, despite their own advanced life of crime, had a strict code of ethics—one does not steal from one’s own home. Furious noises emanated from room no. 19. Bruno and Oswald took turns exfoliating their disgust at such despicable behaviour, and Sammy giggled in between, not really getting what all the fuss was about. When the altercation finally moved into their living room, all of us who had closely followed the exchange moved towards our windows. We hung over the sills, all the better to get a view or at least hear the proceedings, which had now reached a crescendo. Sammy’s head and half his body, helped forward by four muscular arms, finally toppled over the window ledge in a bizarre double somersault. A collective gasp resounded around the curved outer perimeter of the building as Sammy bounced onto the pavement two floors below. We rushed to our doors and ran out to the passage near the stairs. Was he dead?

  “He’s gone!” someone cried. Peeping over the ledge of the passage window, we were stunned: Sammy’s body had disappeared from the pavement. We disentangled ourselves from the collective knot and turned towards the stairs in shock. Sammy, grinning, not a scratch on his body, had appeared at the top of the stairs.

  Not much is known about the progress of nature, for if it were, we would surely have known this to be a miracle. But the nature of things as they are, it is hard to define whether it was an interruption, a miracle, or just the natural flow of events. However, they do say that drunks and babies survive accidents—though I am not meaning to say that this was one (i.e., an accident).

  Sammy went home giggling in embarrassment and bravado and we all went back to our homes with a renewed respect for him.

  December 18th of 1992 was like every December 18th: Excited with Christmas round the corner and making goodies, we decorated our homes and sewed new clothes. That day, like so many others, we washed our hands after dinner and went to the passage, where Peter had called a meeting.

  Every year around this time, all the buildings in our area made their own ‘old man,’a stuffed straw man, very like a scarecrow, with firecrackers strategically placed within, to go off at well-spaced intervals and to blast even when the last ember had died down. For the face, many a year we used a mask of old Father Christmas left over from the Christmas party we had in the passage. Some buildings with their own twisted sense of humour put on a mask of the devil on their ‘old man.’ ‘Imagine,’they giggled, ‘the devil burning in a fire on earth, while he survives the fires of hell!’ Every building on St. Mary’s Road made one and hung the ‘old man’ over the street. We tied our ‘old man’ with a rope that went across the street from the second floor of Billimoria Building, to the second floor of the house opposite, with the ‘old man’ hanging high above the street and sometimes swinging in the breeze, almost as if sprung to life and wanting to escape his fate.

  I felt a familiar bubbling in my heart when it came time for these activities. Peter, Miriam, Susan, Ivan, Aaron, Conrad, Gordon and Ali came to the meeting. The other children in the building never joined any such activity when their parents were home.

  “We will make an ‘old man’,” said Peter assertively. Peter led all the activities in the building. He was handsome, clever and we all looked up to him. He never disappointed. We asked him questions, however unrelated, and Peter never failed to have an answer. He was the only one of us who listened to the BBC news on the radio; always up to date on the events in the world, he planned, he executed, he created our fun, our pranks, even our morality outside of our parents.

  “Yes, yes.”Everyone nodded their heads.

  “OK then, that’s settled. Let us make a list of what we need.”

  “Old trousers, old long sleeved shirt, old socks, shoes and we will need a mask,” Susan said.

  “How do we make a head? Francis asked.

  “A bag. One of those jute bags we use to buy rations with.” I sometimes wonder what we would do in a world without Peter. I for one would not survive. “And lots of firecrackers, hay, and newspapers. We have to outlast the other ‘old men’ on Nesbit Road.”

  “How do we get this? We can give some newspapers, but the bag, socks, shirt, firecrackers, hay, blah, blah, blah…where do we find it Peter?” Susan was the practical one. At this point Sammy entered the meeting.

  “I will get it,” he offered.

  “Sammy, I forgot to mention, we need gloves too, for his fingers.” Susan, who was otherwise not really strong on anatomy grades, began listing body parts.

  “Easy,”said Sammy.

  We all cheered and Sammy left the meeting quite happy.

  Peter turned around and said, “Watch your clothesline till New Year’s Day.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Monday after the very volatile weekend with Mother and Dr. Apte was different from others. The alarm rang and I reached, to no avail, to clamp it down and stop its irritating buzz in my e
ar. Finally, I opened one eye to locate the offensive aggressor. Now get this—small things seem larger when unexpected. I stared into a giant glaring eye sharing my pillow. If you think beetles have a body, I would have, at that moment, strongly argued otherwise: it’s only one large eye that makes up a beetle. An eye that can get you out of bed like no alarm clock can. I scrambled from the sheets in response.

  But no, this is not the difference I speak of. Shortly after I arrived at the college, I encountered, close-up, another insect that I had spent the last five years flicking off my sleeve.

  The staff room was quiet except for Ms. Raikar slurping her tea from a saucer in loud satisfied noises. I looked at her in the corner blowing the steam from the saucer to cool down the tea. Disgusting habit…reminded me of Billy—another disgusting memory. I am told that the students have set out a marriage in some imaginary heaven between Ms. Raikar and me. Nothing could be more repulsive to me—and I guess that she feels the same, unless I am reading too much into the rude way she turns her back. A shame, really, I think absentmindedly; I would quite like to run my hand through that thick, straight hair down her back, and that skin… clean and smooth; she’s good looking, if one ignores that disdainful curl of her lips when she eyes me. I overheard her once say how “Western” I looked with my suit and tie. “Why can’t he look Indian?”

  I sighed. She was all that was wrong with this city, I thought resentfully, following as prejudiced a path as her thoughts of me.

  “Good morning, Ms. Raikar.” Still on formal surnames after five years of being on the faculty and sharing the staff room.

  “Good morning,” she said, without turning.

  Exasperating! How difficult is it to be civil? This was not a good way to start the morning or the week. It was time to confront her, and so I walked up to her from behind and stopped just a foot behind her, prepared to—Hell. Were those teardrops blotting the paper in front of her? Nothing is more surprising than when you see someone you don’t like exposing their vulnerability.

  I pushed back my first instinct to welcome her to the human race, but spontaneity long having been suppressed by a mind absorbed in quadratic equations, I restrained my sarcasm. Surely my “good morning” could not have brought on the tears? Focus Peter, focus, it is not about you. I set aside my belligerent thoughts and stood still there behind her—as all creatures of my sex, not knowing what to do with a crying woman.

  “Sorry,” I said softly.

  “Why?” she asked, but no longer in that sharp tone I was used to.

  “Why are you crying? Do you want to talk?”

  “Oh you won’t understand…”

  “I can try to.”

  “You are so structured and unemotional,” she said.

  When one delivers a comeuppance of someone who barely tolerates you, it helps if one looks good and dignified. Ms. Raikar, however, not so endowed right now, blew her nose loudly and turned her even less appealing red-rimmed eyes towards me. “Mathematical about everything,” she added. “How can you understand true feelings?”

  “I can try.” My incomprehension of this illogical trend of thought, and my own repulsion of her suddenly changed. Here she was, vulnerable, not seeing my caste, community, but only me as a person. True, I have been quite unemotional, uninvolved and very distant from her at least; so I looked at this phenomenon with interest—I am a person to her…

  “Ms. Raikar, can I ask you your first name?”

  “Shiela,” she said, now looking at me like…like, I don’t really know, but differently.

  “So, Shiela, let us start over,”

  She smiled. Oh my God! Five years and I had never seen her smile. Her teeth, white and even, and lips now red with all the biting she had done… I swallowed.

  “Peter,” I said, holding out my hand.

  She nodded, ignoring my hand. Ok, never mind that. At least she smiled.

  “Now, that we are on first names, tell me what is wrong.”

  “Peter,” she said, “have you ever been in love?”

  “Let’s talk about you,” I said, not wanting to confront this issue, least of all to Shiela. One does not go to a funeral and have discussions about oneself, or one’s views, with the grieving widow. “You are important at this time.”

  “I am in love with this man.”

  “Love makes you cry?”

  “No, but he is marrying another woman this Saturday.”

  “The bastard—forgive my language—are you telling me he has been seeing you and now marrying someone else?”

  “Yes, but he says he told me right at the start that we could never get married even if he loved me.”

  “So why did you continue to date him?”

  “I thought that he would want me so much that he would change his mind.”

  “Why did he say he couldn’t marry you even if he loved you?” “He is a Brahmin.”

  “Maharashtrian?”

  “No.”

  Interesting. Maharashtra for Marathis, but not in love?

  “You know it is best to forget him, don’t you think? Need I say?”

  “It is easy for you to say. You are a cold bachelor.”

  I must say this woman managed to alienate my sympathies just when I was warming up to her, but at least she looked more normal now. “You don’t know that.”

  “So have you been in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, she turned you down?”

  “No. I never asked her.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  On 2nd January 1993, Dad came home a very troubled man. Mother immediately talked—one may even describe it as babbling—about dinner: food being her solution to all of Dad’s problems. It showed on Dad too. For a police inspector, he would have been described as portly if he wasn’t as tall as he was.

  “Sit down, love, and rest. I will make chappatis. I have kneaded the flour and kept it covered so that the chappatis become soft. You know you love soft chappatis. I bought the seventeen-rupees variety of wheat. I tried the fifteen, last time, and you did not like the chappatis. Maybe it is the level of gluten in the wheat. I will make the phulkas, the small puffed ones that you so like.” Mum, delivering a monologue of uneasiness about the silence, immediately went into the kitchen and started rolling out chappatis.

  Dad silently pulled off his socks, went to the small shower, pulled the shower curtain that separated the kitchen from his bath. We did not have showers or running water, and a bucket full of water was what we dipped a plastic mug into and washed ourselves. The kitchen dipped into silence, except for the steel spatula on the iron pan as Mum fried chappatis on it, and the splashing of water as Dad’s shadow behind the curtain scooped water and poured it over his head in successive arm movements.

  We followed his bathing silently sitting in the smoke-filled room, smelling fresh cooked dough on the pan and the spices blended in the fish curry Mum had put on the fire for reheating. Now occupied with soaping his body, we followed his bathing till we heard water splash once again. From years of experience, we knew not to disturb him with questions during this time. Dad did the questioning; maybe a fallout of the job in the police department. He did not take very kindly to being on the other side of the table. Silence continued till I broke the air with the BBC broadcast on the radio and Mum joined me in the living room, waiting for him to finish his bathing.

  He stepped into the living room not much later and Mum once again bustled into the kitchen.

  “Dinner is served.”

  “Can we sit a while, here? I have something to tell you both.” Standing in his office earlier that day, Dad had been seized by the dilemma of how to mitigate the tension in the city caused by the pulling down of the Babri Mosque a month earlier by Hindus who had claimed it stood in the sacred place of Lord Ram’s birth. He’d stared at the falling plaster on the wall, making mental notes to get the maintenance department on the job. The f---ers, he thought, we have just renovated this building. Cheap f---ers, the walls are s
o thin I can hear everyone breathe in this bloody place. Then he realised the real source of his annoyance: his assistant in the next room talking incessantly on the phone!

  “Yes, yes, we have the list,” he was saying. “Billimoria Building?”

  At which point Dad leaned against the wall to hear more closely.

  “Yes, yes, one family. Where? Second floor, corner room, above the Irani restaurant. Yes, yes, I am sure they are Muslims. Farooqui, what do you expect them to be, Brahmins? Of course I am sure they are Muslims. Okay, okay.”

  Dad had no doubt that this was a call for a hit on the Farooqui family. He had been aware for a while that something was amiss. Chaos had set in. Cause and effect. Chicken-and-egg syndrome. If we don’t get them they will get us. There seemed no end in sight—the panic of survival from the very beginning of time! Disturbed, he went back to his desk and began to change the blotting pad on his desk, too distraught to move. He did not know how to address this. He came home a very troubled man.

  Mum said, “Ali?”

  “His family and their property.”

  “Haven’t they faced enough? His father has just been killed.”

  “These are not the best of times, love.” Dad now stood to go to the dinner table.

  “Can’t you save them?” Mother, who had followed him as he sat to dinner, kept piling his plate with food now.

  “This disturbance is more ground level, my dear. You know, grassroots, civilian. Leaders may instigate, but nothing happens without the participation of civil society. The police, though they have a role in maintaining law and order, are also part of that very same civil society. They form part of the same social fabric we are all woven from; same religion, same culture, same fears. They have families that are part of civil society. No, love, I don’t think I can do anything alone.”