A Matter of Geography

by Jasmine D'Costa

  Chapter Eighteen

  “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!”

  -Psalm

  133:1-3

  The drunkenness, music, dancing and frivolity, the usual hallmark of New Year, had not happened that year; not even the ‘old man.’ The situation in the city being tense, none of the parents let their children freely roam the streets on New Year’s Eve as we’d done every year. Too many things had burned in the past week and no, it was not safe to be out. The mood was dismal. The sun, unsympathetic with our mood, shone just as bright, laughing at us, daring us to go out.

  The day after Dad’s revelation, Mum made the first sortie next door, to Mr. Fernandes, the centre of all action. I followed her close on her heels, not wanting to miss out on the drama. Even at twenty-one, and in college, my life continued to be lived between the Fernandes apartment and our own. Dad stayed back at home of course. It was just not right for him to leak any official information or anything he had learnt in the course of his job. Mr. Fernandes, unlike Dad, said, “Stop it. Isabel, this has to stop! We cannot let the Farooquis be attacked by these villains.”

  “How? We are helpless, bhovoji.”

  “Let us have a meeting.”

  “This must be a more secret meeting. We do not know who to trust or when this will happen. We do not know who is the enemy.”

  “First,” said Mr. Fernandes, who always liked to thrash out matters linearly, “let us inform Mrs. Farooqui and Ali. We have to take care of them now that Mr. Farooqui is no more. Besides, I promised Mr. Farooqui on his deathbed. I have no choice.”

  “Who will tell them? Don’t forget, bhovoji, we have to keep the confidentiality of my husband’s information. The matter is not only life-and-death but also involves my husband’s job. All plans should take into account this issue.”

  “You can trust me.” Mr. Fernandes, ever the saviour, reassured Isabel, who had implicit faith in him and never really disagreed with him on any matter. “Secondly, we must ask Ali and his mother if they have someplace to go to till the trouble subsides.” Then, trying to cover all flanks like a good strategist, he carried on. “We will have a meeting and call a few people who can help us. No need to call everyone… Some of them are useless.” He waved his hands in the air, disgusted with their expected inaction. “Isabelbai, can you work out a list of who to include in this meeting while I speak to Mrs. Farooqui?”

  Mum and I departed, leaving Mrs. Fernandes looking very disturbed. Isabel sat down, pondering the list with one eye on the door waiting for Mr. Fernandes to pass. Dad sat quietly nearby, as anxious as Mother. Mr. Fernandes returned shaking his head. As he passed our door, which was left opened, Mother stalled him. Mr. Fernandes was as transparent and dramatic as they came. Deception would have been a challenge, what with his Catholic conscience screaming loudly within.

  No, he said, they did not have any place to go to… No, we will need a plan for where to keep them...

  Mr. Fernandes asked Dad and Mum to come over and discuss the matter. We went over to their apartment. Everyone sat around silently, each of us mentally engrossed with how to get the Farooqui family to safety. Let us first have a plan before we invite anyone else to the meeting, Mr Fernandes proposed. He was a very methodical man. So once again we went into numbers:

  “Firstly, let us define what exactly we want to do.” He looked around the circle for answers.

  Mrs. Fernandes, who generally waited for him to make the decisions, now looked around at each one of us and said, “We may have very little time. We need to act fast. So I think if we are in agreement that we have to save Ali and Mehroonisa then we should go directly to the point, but the first consideration is: do we want to save them despite the danger to our own families? I mean, isn’t there a big price to pay here? We are not experienced in secrecy and deceit, lies and discretion, and our children—just look at them—they are so simple, though loving. Are we really equipped for this task? Can’t we just hand it to the police?” She now looked at Dad.

  Dad looked a bit embarrassed. He put his head down, thinking how best to word his reply; he focussed on the centre of the floor between his two shoes.

  “Mrs. Fernandes, I agree with you in most part. I would like to agree with you completely and yes, I would also like to believe I work for an organisation that will uphold law and justice. So yes, logically it should be the work of the police to protect Ali and his mother. However, the force is riddled with men at this time and not police officers. Men with the same hatreds, anger, fear as you or any other person in society. They are operating as men and not police officers. Don’t get me wrong. I would be unfair to the hundreds who actually do their job and do it well. But these are special times; the normal rules of social engagement are suppressed by this madness.”

  Mr. Fernandes looked at his wife. Then he looked around at his children. Then he looked at the altar that was above the chest of drawers: a small wooden shelf with a carved bracket that held a cross with a statue of Jesus nailed to it, and statues of Mary and St. Anthony on either side, with a small night light that always stayed on, flickering, pretending to be a roaring flame.

  “Darling,” he said, using a word we never heard from him; trouble can bring out the soft core as well as the strength in men. “It is our Christian duty to help our neighbour.”

  “Yes, we do have to be good to our neighbours and so we are. We are not part of the rioting or the bigotry. So is that not enough to be a good Christian? How far can we carry the neighbourly duty? Are we responsible for even those we barely talk to? I mean, how far can we stretch our responsibility?”

  “Darling, in other words you want to limit and define the world into small circles of people—us, them—but that only separates us. If you recall Jesus’ answer when he is asked by…” He stopped and groped for the biblical reference. “Umm…someone, I forget right now but it will come back to me. Anyway, the question he asked is, ‘Lord, who is my neighbour?’ and Jesus responds to it with the story of the Good Samaritan, I think it is in Luke. The essence is that the one who helps is the neighbour and it is not defined by caste or creed or proximity. How could we reconcile with our Christian consciousness if we did not help them? How can we face our children, whom we constantly remind of the teachings of Christ, if we are not good role models for them ourselves?”

  “Is it not enough that we do not contribute to this madness? Must we be sucked in ourselves, to justify our Christian beliefs?”

  “There are errors of commission, but there also errors of omission. Can we turn our faces away while our neighbour gets killed? Ali is merely a boy, not much older than our own Anna. ‘Do unto others as thou would’st like them to do unto thyself,’ as you know, that is what the Bible says.”

  “Yes, dear.” She looked directly at him and said softly, “All I am saying is that in case you want to take them into our home it would endanger us all and may not achieve its purpose in any case.”

  “I was not thinking of having them here, but now that you mention it, yes, I think we have to move them out of that room.” He looked around the room and at the decorated Christmas tree. “Take that down,” he told Ivan, “and take the star down, this is no time for rejoicing.”

  Every year our Christmas festivities continued up to 6th January, the day of the Epiphany, or as most Catholics call it, the three kings feast. We finally take down our stars that we hang outside our windows, the nativity crib and the Christmas tree on the 6th of every January. Mr. Fernandes’ diktat set Ivan in motion. While he took down, ornament by ornament, mostly cheap Santas made of egg shells carefully cracked at the top, with cotton beard and moustache and painted faces, with red caps made of cheap crepe paper, Mr. Fernandes continued the meeting.

  “So at least we are agreed that we have to move Ali and his mother to a safe place.”

  There was a general silence only broken by Ivan’s noisy dismantling of the tree. Some of the eggshells cracked with the operation and Ivan was making a
game of smashing them further into smithereens by stamping on them. Everyone else looked around at each other, dumb with the enormity of the task… I mean, where could one be safe and where could we fit two adults? I should say two adult strangers, because our interactions with the family had been minimal. They lived so differently from us. Thankfully Ali’s wife was not yet sent to live with him since she was too young. Still, how could anyone hide in this building when we had such small apartments? Why, our postal addresses did not say apartment number or flat number, they only said room number. We lived in rooms… Any such move would definitely involve endangering ourselves, because others would for sure know we had hidden them. Besides, Ali’s mother was conspicuous with her black burqa, and she would never consent to taking it off, especially if she lived where another man lived. We were not only facing danger but something that had become a physical and cultural impossibility in our minds.

  A silent room is the noisiest one imaginable. The clock screamed almost like a drum, tick, tick, tick, and the fan above whirred violently. The children in the Municipal school down the road sang the national anthem in loud, unmusical tones. The trucks on the street below were unusually laborious, their engines gruff and gritting their teeth; the street dogs were barking. An occasional aircraft thundered above as we glanced at each other. But above all this noise, we could hear our fear in the room.

  “There is no sanctuary here in the building,” said Mrs. Fernandes, now on the verge of tears. She, from experience, knew that Mr. Fernandes would take it upon himself to move Ali and his mother to the only place that would have them: the Fernandes home.

  “Except Ms. Ezekiel’s room, where nobody expects to look,” Anna piped in. We all snickered. Just another impossibility added to the pile.

  “No harm in trying,” said Francis, who unfailingly aligned himself with Anna.

  “Well, Ms. Ezekiel is out of the question.” Mr. Fernandes waved it aside, not a sweeping wave but one with a loose wrist, fanning it around like he really needed several sweeps to get rid of it.

  “Anna, my child, that is such a wild suggestion.” Isabel tried to make up for Mr. Fernandes’ disrespectful dismissal. “She will not even open the door for a discussion. You children have been harassing her and we will never have her consent. Besides, she is Jewish and Ali and his mother, Muslims.”

  “Isabelbai, let us not even go there. Being Jewish or Muslim has nothing to do with being a neighbour.” Mr. Fernandes snorted. Then he looked around the room and realised how stupid that sounded under the present circumstances. “Well, at least it shouldn’t…” he said in a more uncertain tone.

  “Well, my dear, if it didn’t, we would not be discussing this as it is,” Mrs. Fernandes said kindly.

  “Be that as it may, I feel that we should take them in, darling. How would you want it to be if the shoe was on the other foot?”

  “Catholics do not interfere with anyone, dear. Why would the shoe be on the other foot? Besides, we do not have space here.”

  “But it is never always about interference, darling. This is mob madness we are talking about. It is Jesus’ teachings: do unto others as you would unto thyself.”

  “Dad, may I ask Ms. Ezekiel in private?” Anna and Francis, whispering to each other, had totally ignored the conversation that had just taken place. “Besides, she does not speak with anyone, so it will be as good as a secret,” Anna persisted.

  “Ok. Take care that no one knows what you are doing,” Mrs. Fernandes said indulgently, and I think, mostly to get rid of the two kids. She succeeded, if that was the intention. Anna and Francis left the room to do whatever they could do, or thought they could. The rest of us sunk back into the depressed silence, quite impoverished for ideas or solutions. Dad sat apologetically in his chair, wondering if they could shift Ali and his mother to another location. But where was it safe for a black burqa to be?

  “Damn the woman,” he finally said, “does she have to be so conspicuous in such troubled times?”

  “Mr. D’Souza.” Mrs. Fernandes spoke with gentle admonishment. “That is the identity she has been brought up with. Should she be deprived of the last vestige of what she is?”

  Dad sunk back into guilty silence.

  Anna, in the meantime, undeterred, sat penning a letter to Ms. Ezekiel, aided by the adoring Francis. In the view of Mr. Fernandes, such childish solutions should be best left to children to work out. He took a break from this dismal activity to caution that no one should know anything of the discussions taking place within the confines of their home. Susan, seeing that there was no role for her, picked a book and leafed through its pages, uncertain whether she wanted to get lost in its folds. Mrs. Fernandes left the room to resume her cooking and other chores interrupted by this meeting, and Mother and Mr. Fernandes sat with a crease between their foreheads indicating that they were still searching for solutions. Dad left for work. “I will keep you informed,” he said.

  Anna had come up with the letter after many scribblings and scratches and flinging several drafts into the waste bin in the kitchen. “May I read it aloud, Aunt Isabel?” she said. Mum looked at her and said kindly, “Sure, darling, I am sure it is fine, can we do it later? I am thinking right now.”

  Then Anna turned to me and said, “Peter, do you want to hear what I have written?”

  “No, Anna. This is only an exercise in futility and I have better things to do.” I decided to go back to my album of stamps which I had collected over the last few years and not engage in this hopeless optimism Anna displayed by placing confidence in someone so disengaged from society – as Ms. Ezekiel so obviously was.

  “You are so quick to judge. Just because she does not mix with us does not mean she is unwilling to help when called upon.”

  “Whatever. Anna, do as you may.”

  So we never really knew what Anna wrote.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity”

  -Proverbs 17:17

  Anna had a very long relationship with Ms. Ezekiel—that is, if one could have a relationship without the other’s participation or consent. (I am sure there is some impossible-sounding word given to this phenomenon in either Law or Psychology, no doubt accompanied by some deeply convoluted explanation.) Anna had for years—feeling that Ms. Ezekiel was very lonely and must thus be very unhappy—tirelessly conducted such a relationship with her. Every once in a while when she remembered, or by chance visited the first floor, she would stop outside Ms. Ezekiel’s door and say, ‘Good morning, Ms. Ezekiel,’ or ‘Good afternoon, Ms. Ezekiel,’ or ‘Ms. Ezekiel, I am quite well today and I hope you are too.’ Such was her relationship, mostly with a closed wooden door painted dull beige and remaining ever shut to the world.

  Anna had severe asthma. So for most of her childhood she stayed home from school. She did what none of us could: spend time with Billy, who none of us liked; talk to Ms. Ezekiel, who none of us had really seen or talked to. Through the closed door, Anna apologised for us and for our transgressions with little “sorry” notes slipped beneath, or sometimes a plate of cake left outside the door. The cake was a bit of a sacrifice since it was really very rare that anyone in Billimoria Building could afford a cake. But our romantic, loving Anna left her share out there like she was feeding a puppy or a bird.

  Did the cake get to the target? Ms. Ezekiel might be a recluse, but her sweet tooth did not move in the same direction. Anna patiently stood outside, plate in hand, and announced that she would love to share her cake and would Ms. Ezekiel please open the door? But of course it didn’t work. The door never opened. Then Anna would say, I am leaving it outside and moving away, so please enjoy it. Faithful to her promise, she would walk away before gnarled fingers reached from behind the door and slid the cake inside.

  I guess the eating of the cake did constitute a relationship. Words can distort and change emotions, feelings, can deceive or give meaning to what the heart thinks. But the heart thinks what the
heart thinks. By that measure I guess Anna did have a relationship.

  Now Anna, with her great penmanship, had written a long letter to Ms. Ezekiel. The Fernandes family ignored her naive attempts to find a solution, but did not discourage her. “Ensure that no one downstairs sees what you are doing, darling,” said Mrs. Fernandes to the retreating back.

  Putting a letter under the door seemed like an easy task, but Anna had to make two trips to the Ezekiel door. Her first trip was aborted by Surve’s son.

  “Hi, beby,” he said in a very stilted English accent.

  “Hi, but don’t call me baby.”

  “So what you doing here? Come to meet me?”

  “No, that is conceit.”

  “Cuntseat?

  “Whatever,” and she turned around and came back upstairs considerably huffed; if blushing under a dark tan were possible, Anna would have been bright red.

  “Stupid, stupid, s-stupid…” she stuttered with outrage.

  Second time around, Francis said he would stand on watch while she went and slipped the note. And so, an hour later, they tiptoed down to the first floor as noiselessly as possible. It was 2.30 p.m., and tiptoeing was completely unnecessary—the coast was all clear. Anna slipped the note beneath the door halfway and waited for it to be pulled in. Shortly after, she returned and stood on the second-floor verandah at the other side of the L waiting for a response…hopeful.

  Predictably, nothing happened, and we all went to bed that night wondering when and how to hide Ali and his mother—none of us wanting to face that it might be too late if we did not come up with a plan soon enough.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dad, who had most of the inside information, came home the next morning looking like hell. He said he did not want to talk and needed a short nap. We sat listening to his uneven snoring while we waited silently. The night before, someone had taken a knife to a Muslim in Dharavi. Though this was not Dad’s jurisdiction, his police station, located in a Muslim area, was on high alert. They’d also received information that a group of individuals posing as officials of the Maharashtra Housing and Development Agency were making the rounds in Antop Hill, noting the residences of the Muslims.