A Matter of Geography

by Jasmine D'Costa

  Dad returned home, showered and went to bed without talking. We did not disturb him.

  There was total silence in the building; we were all in shock. And we all shared a secret.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The next morning a crow kept cawing in between pecking at a small piece of leftover meat, pleading for us to awaken. Last evening’s report of the riots seemed like nothing compared to our own drama. A mob of 3000-4000 Muslims had damaged property in Dad’s jurisdiction while he had been at home after three days of continuous work. Soon after, a Hindu mob set about trashing Muslim properties in retaliation. The larger activity dwarfed the events of our small building in the eyes of the police. They lacked the manpower, will, or courage to investigate.

  Nobody hearkened to the cawing, incessant as it was. Nobody got out of bed till 10.00 a.m. Nobody went for Sunday Mass. Nobody wanted to even peep outside their door. But we finally came out onto the balcony, tiptoeing, responding to the wailing sounds we heard from room no. 6 on the first floor.

  Apparently, the Surves’ son had not returned home. Mr. Surve filed a missing persons complaint and the police asked him to identify the blood-soaked trousers that they had kept from the remains. The trousers were unrecognisable, but the belt that held them up had a buckle so like the one his son owned and had worn the previous day, that Mr. Surve was convinced it belonged to his son. There was no body to claim, the police informed him; since it had been found in several pieces, they’d had to cremate it. No, they could not provide him with the ashes, since several bodies had been cremated on the same pyre.

  Mr. Surve returned from the police station and broke the news to the family. Mrs. Surve wept shrilly and we all went back into our apartments in silence. None of us spoke or came out that day. We heard nothing from the Fernandeses’ room. Even Mother, who ordinarily would have gone to console them, stayed home, needing consoling herself. Our lives, tainted with attempted rape, murder, violence—all that we had never encountered or expected to in our sanctimonious world—seemed broken, irreparable. The secret that we all shared weighed us down.

  Ali’s matrimonial bed had been chopped into firewood by the vandals; it seemed significant, almost handy, in the cremation of the Surve boy that the family held as a symbolic gesture of sending their son away in dignity. None of us attended, nor did we go downstairs and sympathise with the grieving family. I suppose they must have felt the differences in our cultures in that moment. Neighbours who do not mourn with you…no shared grief, no shared happiness, no shared expectations… does not make for a good community. No. We seemed ghettoised. And communal lines and ghettos create bitterness, as history constantly reminds us.

  The Surve family left soon after. They moved out of the building a few months later without saying goodbye to us. We were relieved. No one wanted to speak to them. Nobody wanted to remember.

  -----

  The blood in the passage that had seeped into the grout could not be washed off easily. The Olivera family was left with the unhappy task since it was practically outside their door. Everyone else had shuddered, not wanting to touch it or clean it. The family boiled water, poured it on the floor and left it there to soften the blood so it could be cleaned. When that method proved unsuccessful, they bought a bottle of hydrochloric acid and applied it by dipping into the bottle a piece of cloth tied to a stick, and painting it over the grout. Mr. Fernandes, who would have normally taken the lead to solve this problem, had withdrawn into some netherworld, unreachable. ‘Isabel what do we do?’ the Oliveras asked Mum when the acid failed to work. So Mum hired Soni to clean the passage. She asked questions: ‘Kya hai, memsaab, khoon ki tra dikta hai?’ ‘Kya hua?’ ‘Koi gira kya?’ But Dad, now in his uniform as Inspector D’Souza, told her peremptorily that she should clean and leave since it was not in her place to ask questions. She silently returned to the task.

  The clothes beater had mysteriously disappeared, and there was no inquiry about any weapon. There was no inquiry about who had killed the boy or how. There was no search for weapons. Officially, the boy had committed suicide, jumped out of the window. No one knew why—no suicide note, no goodbyes. Case closed, the police moved on to more pressing matters, trying to contain the riots that raged around the city.

  Mr. Fernandes finally came out of his room on Monday morning and went to work. He nodded absently at all those who stood outside and wished him well. None of the children went to school for the whole week. There was silence till our ears hurt with the noise of the traffic. No children’s laughter, no sounds of balls being thrown against the walls, not even our evening gathering for stories from Joe.

  After that week all seemed normal in Bombay. The cobbler’s wife took over her husband’s business. She sat on the steps of their home ordering her eldest son who now had replaced his father at the awl. The city seemed to bustle back: early morning clanking of pots and pans in a million sinks around the city; the sounds of milk bottles tinkling; trucks rolling down the streets. The stables, some of them burned down and others shut, belonged mostly to Muslim owners. Had they fled? We were too absorbed in our own silence to know. We just did not hear the hooves on the macadam roads anymore, and we no longer looked down on the first floor from the other side of the L.

  Ms. Ezekiel had disappeared somewhere into the unknown, like vapour merging unnoticed into the atmosphere. She sometimes flitted into our dream moments: a brightly patterned dress through a taxi window or a large brimmed straw hat pulled low, climbing the upper deck of the red BEST bus. I run, arms outstretched—Ms. Ezekiel, Ms. Ezekiel, wait, wait, I am sorry, I am sorry, I shout behind a disappearing figure; disappearing without a backward glance, old, tired, wonderfully generous. I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry…where are you? How do you live? Sorry, sorry, sorry…

  The needle of our lives gradually swung back to normal. In our attempt to forget, all the older children, who knew that something evil had just happened, took to reading. We read book after book, comic after comic. We exchanged books. We smiled at each other. But laughter seemed the sole preserve of the younger kids. Their games returned. And occasionally they tapped our doors in the afternoon and ran away.

  The Farooqui family disappeared, leaving the door of Ms. Ezekiel’s room locked. They did not say goodbye either. No one knew when they’d left or where they’d gone. Somehow we all wanted to live in silence, occasionally acknowledging each other with half smiles or nods. I guess we were all afraid of what we might find beneath the surface if we did speak.

  Two weeks after the incident, Anna finally emerged, looking all normal and sweet. I could not look at her, embarrassed as I was by my own fantasies of her. She, I think, sensed the change in our relationship. She assumed a shyness with me that hadn’t been there earlier. Mr. Fernandes dropped her at school every morning and picked her up every evening. He did it for the next three months till it was summer vacations. He went late to work and left early for those three months, even staying home on occasion.

  And in March, that is precisely what saved his life.

  Chapter Thirty

  A gentle breeze played with our hair as we sat on the verandah outside Joe’s door. Today, March 10, 1993, was the last day of the S.S.C. exams: Anna’s finishing year. We had a tradition of celebrating the last day of exams, the group of us, sitting out late and talking, singing, and wherever our hearts took us on that day. So we wondered—would Anna want that? Would she come out and play, laugh, love?

  All the children who usually sat outside Joe’s room, except Anna and Francis, waited. Shirlen and Miriam were there too. They brought the guitar out. Francis came out and looked at us.

  “If you are waiting for Anna, she is reading. I don’t think she plans to come.”

  “Not today,” I said, “Francis, can you convince her? It is her day today.”

  Francis went back in. He came back almost a minute later.

  “Nope. She says no. Maybe, Peter you should ask her.”

  Susan and Ivan nodded. So I
asked my mother to ask her.

  Nobody really says no to Isabel, and ten minutes later, Anna came out smiling at us. It was the first day she’d smiled after that fateful January night, at least at the rest of us. Yes, we spoke in monosyllables in the toilet queue, but this was the closest to normal we’d come. All of us clapped, and Shirlen strummed the guitar while we sang, ‘…she’s the jolly good fella, so say all of us.’ Anna was here and she seemed like she was recovering from her shock. We went on to sing songs that we were all familiar with: Boney M, Cliff Richard, Abba, the Beatles. Shirlen and Miriam took turns playing the guitar and Miriam led the singing. The Marchon family had it all: theft, prostitution, murder and crime, but also talent, and love, and loyalty. We looked at them and thought, how wonderful to have them with us. They were our connection with the big, bad world out there—outside our bubble. They were also our means of survival…

  Joe came home an hour later. We clapped for him and then put our arms around each other in the tight circle. Even I, who normally sat outside this circle as I grew older, now wanted the comfort of hugging these, my friends.

  Joe stood smiling down at us till we could see the gold tooth at the back of his mouth from down below. He suddenly went serious and wagged his finger at us.

  “So what do you think happened to me today?” he said.

  “You saw a ghost?” we chorused. He smiled once again. Joe had a white smile in a very dark face. His smile and manner of speech made him really distinctive and tall from our low vantage point, though with hindsight now, I think he was shorter than average.

  “Tell us, Joe,” we begged. The suspense was killing us now, even more than before. He looked at our faces one by one.

  “I finished my duty and came out of the factory gate.”

  “Where is your factory?” I asked, to check whether he’d vary the place today.

  “Close to Gangabowdi Street,” he said.

  “Never mind, Peter, let Joe tell us what happened,” the others shushed me.

  Joe sat on his haunches, slowly moving his eyes round the circle. We huddled close. The moon had waned and the light was very low. His shadow on the wall and ceiling looked ominous as he bobbed on his haunches.

  “I finished work at 7.00 p.m., a bit later than usual. A tiring day, so I stopped to have a cup of tea at the canteen. I walked from my office to the factory gates, and it took me a while to get to there.”

  “Why, Joe?” Susan asked. Small details are very important to her.

  “Why, what?”

  “Why did it take a while to get to the gate?”

  “Because I work in a very large company. The gate of the factory is nearly a mile away from the building where I am stationed.”

  The younger ones were impressed, as Joe intended. I nudged Ivan, who nudged Susan, who nudged Anna.

  “Coming out through the gate I noticed him for the first time. A tall, dark man, the same shade as Peter…”

  “Peter is not dark, Joe,” Francis piped.

  “Yes, he is,” Miriam said.

  “Oh never mind, black, brown, white, who cares,” I said, “Just get on with the story, Joe.”

  “Same shade as Peter, right behind me, I guess following me. I turned into a side street…if he turned I would know he was indeed following me.” He stopped and smiled his golden grin.

  “Did he, Joe, did he?” Francis asked, moving his body, anxious to reduce the suspense to the barest minimum. I guess these were not exactly the stories we should have been exposed to at this time in our lives, but the very normalcy of sitting and listening to Joe’s adventures made us forget our own tragic secret.

  “You betcha…he turned too.” Joe stopped once again and made some gargling sounds in his throat, coughed a bit and carried on. “I was not sure what to think. Being born in a veil, I sometimes confuse the spirit world with this world, and what with all the trouble in the city and all…” He swept his arms in a big circle to engulf the entire world. “I started walking briskly.” At this point we heard a clanging of a bicycle chain coming from Joe’s apartment, followed by a spoon banging on a pan. Chickpea, for the first time, was participating in our storytelling night, hidden behind the door of the apartment.

  “Were you afraid?” Francis asked. I could see Anna’s muscles tense. I don’t think we’d chosen the right entertainment for the evening, but nothing could be done now; everyone, rapt, gazed large-eyed at Joe.

  Joe shrugged. “Of course not, frightened? You must be joking! I had my pay packet in my shirt pocket, you see?” He patted his shirt pocket. “It is bad luck to talk to strangers with your pay packet in your pocket.”

  “And then what happened?” Ivan asked, impatient at this digression. But Joe wouldn’t be rushed. He pulled out a bright yellow comb, smiling widely enough for us to see his gold tooth, smoothed down his sparse hair, and then continued.

  “The stranger quickened his pace too.”

  The younger ones gasped. We hugged each other tighter, showing our anticipation and fear. Anna began to shake but stayed there, waiting.

  “I started to run.” He paused and looked at our scared faces. “He started to run… I started thumbing vehicles that were passing.”

  “More likely to stick them up,” I whispered to Ivan, who giggled.

  “Cars just whizzed past… Damn, if you need help in this city…Indifferent bast—” He stopped short, suddenly aware he was talking to a bunch of kids, and went on. “He was nearly three feet away from me… Now, I don’t like to admit this, but I began to get a trifle anxious. Sweating. I wondered—maybe the heat and the exercise was getting to me?”

  Francis now lost patience. “Joe, get to the story. You are frightening Anna.”

  The truth was that all the kids were now quivering. Joe looked at Anna and decided to be merciful.

  “I saw a car slow down and I opened the door, got in, and sat there panting… The car kept moving and I finally felt safe as I glanced behind us and saw the stranger disappear into a side street. And then I looked at the driver.”

  We were thankful Joe made it in time. Colleen, Joe’s youngest, sighed in relief.

  “But…there…was…no driver!” Joe paused and looked each of us in the eye.

  Our grip around each other tightened, the circle getting smaller.

  “The car continued to move. I saw a hand on the steering wheel, no body.” We sighed. Ghosts were preferable to humans, at least now.

  “Don’t panic, don’t panic, I told myself. Look ahead, Look at the road, there is an answer out there. I did not turn my head, just looked at the road, waiting for the opportunity to jump out. We reached the top of a slope. Then, just before we started rolling downhill, the door opened and a man jumped into the drivers’ seat.”

  The circle got smaller, we sweated and held our breath in the still, hot summer night.

  “‘What the devil! Have you been sitting in my car all the time while I was pushing it to start the engine?’ the man yelled at me angrily.” Joe looked around at our pale faces. “Gotcha!” He grinned.

  “You tricked us, Joe!” we shouted, almost together.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It seemed like the earth had taken one full trip around the sun since 9th January that year. We were beginning to forget, except for Mr. Fernandes, who did not speak to anyone but for Dad and Mum, in very brief sentences. He no longer had to drop Anna to school and pick her up. But he continued to come home early and go to work late. On the 12th of March he decided not to go at all. He invited Mum, Dad and me to join them for lunch. Dad had gone to work but would be home for lunch, and Mum, of course, could not stay away and just be a guest. She flitted in and out of the Fernandes home. Nathie, do you need help with anything? Do you want me to make the dessert? Peter and I could help on something?

  It all seemed like we were back again to our earlier days of being one large family, familiar and loving. Mrs. Fernandes gently turned down all offers of help. No, Isabel, you will be our guest today. Mr.
Fernandes sat on a stool at the dining table chopping and slicing the meat and Mum talked ceaselessly while we, adults and children, played rummy with two packs. Mr. Fernandes allowed us to play cards only in the summer vacation and never for money. Francis, not allowed to play, hung around, whispering the cards into Anna’s ears.

  Dad returned around noon. He showered and dressed for lunch. Today was special, obviously, so Mum, Dad, and I dressed up in our Sunday best. It seemed important, since it was not a festival, nor was it a birthday, and yet we had already seen that the cooking was elaborate in the Fernandes home. So, though we knew nothing of the reason for this occasion, we anticipated something special.

  The apartment was too little to celebrate a sit-down lunch, so it was a buffet and we all served ourselves. Ivan, Susan, Anna and Francis sat on a colourful striped dhurrie around the coffee table. We ate with a lot of banter and small talk flying across the room. Francis was sucking loudly on a bone to extract the marrow. Susan arranged all her meat in rows on one side of the plate and proceeded to arrange her vegetables like a garden on her plate. This was the first time since January that we were eating together like this, or for that matter, sitting down with the loving companionship we had always shared. The adults concentrated on the food, and mother sneezed once or twice till she got rid of the excess snuff under her nose with a handkerchief pulled from somewhere deep within her blouse. At peace, we all relished the fare, laughing, nudging, competing and slurping. Finally, with the last of the plates cleared, and now nearly 2.30 p.m., Isabel could not hold it any longer.

  “So Mr. Fernandes, what is the occasion?”

  Everyone turned their attention to him. He took his napkin and wiped his mouth, cleared his throat and asked Nathie to get him a glass of water. It had been a big meal and Francis burped loudly, moving us to laughter, except for Mr. Fernandes who had just gulped down the water Nathie had given him. He waited for the laughter to die down and then in a very sombre voice said,