“We are leaving in May.”
Mum was stunned. She never believed that the Fernandes family could ever surprise her. She believed she knew everything that went on there, sometimes before it happened. So to be fair, yes, she was not surprised. That indeed was not the word—but stunned, stunned, stunned! She opened and closed her mouth several times, her words sticking somewhere in the epiglottis and escaping back into her lungs, making her splutter and gasp for breath, bringing tears to her eyes. Finally, having received a fresh gust of oxygen by her continuous rubbing of her chest, she exhaled one gust of words that had mixed up in her lungs and could only sound like ‘whoooaa’ maybe a ‘t’ at the end of it but we could not hear it. She got up, erect, stern, and said in a more discernible syllable, “Where?”
“Canada.”
“Canada?” She sat down once again, and if Isabel D’Souza could look defeated, this was it. She was losing her family…we were losing our family—they were losing their family, I could see, from the total silence we sat in for an eternity.
Then Francis said, “And we are going in an airplane!”
I think he was the only one who did not really seem affected. The airplane, and all the other things Canada stood for in his mind, made up for leaving us. Suddenly they looked different: Susan, Ivan and Anna sitting together, their arms over each other’s shoulders and I, the stranger outside that little circle—redundant, an unwanted comma that needed editing. They had each other, and till now I’d thought in my deluded mind that I was part of them. At twenty-one, of course there were my friends, but siblings? Didn’t they see it that way? Didn’t they feel the dull pain I was feeling? Maybe they had an unknown world to look forward to—a new life—but I, sitting there, taking in this scene of a stunned mother, a father who sat stoically, and the Fernandes family looking at us like we were already strangers, I felt alone. I looked at Anna now. Her body slumped, her eyes looked back at me guilty, apologetic, pleading for forgiveness. In that moment, I knew that she felt my dismay and was asking for understanding, asking for forgiveness, blaming herself for this separation that had been brought about by her inability to overcome her fear, her horror, her weak succumbing to shame.
I looked at her, feeling a strange kind of excitement inside me. I did not see the little sister who had followed me, adored me, hung on every word I spoke…I saw a woman, neat, that cute little nose, her fingers that lay still on the table were long and shapely, artistic hands, the hands of a beautiful woman, a stranger. We were separate, she and I. I looked at her remembering that shiny nipple in the moonlight. I had to leave…
Mum and Dad followed me, but I did not look back at them. I did not go home; running instead to the passage and down the stairs, I walked hurriedly towards the one place I went to when in trouble, St. Anne’s Church, down the street. The church, closed to the public at this time, the sacristan perhaps gone to lunch, had its huge doors barred and locked. I sat on the stone border at the grotto at the back of the church. Looking up at the statue in the rocky niche, the Madonna holding the child protectively, I wept, mindless that men don’t weep… I felt abandoned.
When one takes stock of all the hurts that one faces, abandonment is by far the worst. Does one learn when one is still in the cradle to remain emotionless, distant, uninvolved? Along the way, the little abandonments of life keep piling into the big decision sometime in life. I did not know whether this was the small or the big touchstone of my life, but I did not like what my body felt right now.
Eventually I returned home, making my way slowly down St. Mary’s Road, looking at the buildings, past Bad-rud-din/Sad-rud-din, the deaf-and-dumb institute, and to Billimoria Building. The building looked worn out, old, the façade neglected and the inside bloody. I walked up the stairs and in the passage near the stairs, our social space, I found Anna waiting. She held out a notebook in her hands, an offering, as she looked at me silently with what I could only take as intense longing and love. I believe it was longing for me as a man, as I longed now for her as a woman. Love, I feared not. We had forever loved each other; as brothers and sisters did. I took the book, never taking my eyes off her. So many feelings mixed up inside me then. Hope, longing, love, and as a tear streamed down her face, despair. I knew then that she was suffering too.
Billimoria Building had changed, or perhaps, only we had.
Mr. Fernandes was not the only person who had exploded a bomb that day. Dad had been summoned back to work. Several bombs had exploded around Bombay: at the Stock Exchange, Air India Building, Juhu Centaur Hotel, Plaza Theatre and Lucky Petrol near the Shiv Sena castle, Worli, the area around Century Bazaar, the Passport Office, Katha Bazaar, Hotel Sea Rock, Fisherman’s Colony in Mahim Causeway, Zaveri Bazaar, and finally but not the least, Sahar Airport, where Mr. Fernandes worked.
I went next door with Mum. In the Fernandes household, they had suddenly discovered how important the events that took place that December through to January actually were. Mr. Fernandes, who had skipped work that day, was alive, and Anna once again the heroine.
Chapter Thirty-Two
That March marked the change in our summers. We no longer sat outside on the balcony huddled together like an overturned basket, our arms intertwined over each other’s shoulders in a circle. Joe disappeared on that 12th day of March, like so many others in buses, cars, buildings or merely passing by the places that had exploded. He did not return home and something told us he never would. The police could not trace him, and like many other families in Bombay, the Marchons eventually gave up searching.
But the Farooqui family did return. They came home one Sunday morning in early May, unloaded their belongings, amongst which was a new bed, cleaned up their apartment and continued their life there, same as earlier. Mehroonisa wore her black burqa, despite the hot May sun, and walked straight to her home without as much as a hello to any of us. Ali had changed; we looked at him anew. He returned with his wife; a slightly pregnant wife. His earlier well-oiled hair, parted at the centre, had morphed into a combed-back, insolent sweep. He looked like he had added ten years to his age; he had become a man. He too, did not speak to us and, holding his wife’s arm, escorted her to room no 26 in silence.
Mum wanted to leave too. She kept on at Dad, and we finally moved to Bandra—a Catholic neighbourhood, with the church and market nearby, she said. We sold our apartment to a Muslim family. They were from the Borah community and had their business at Mohammed Ali Road. They moved in from a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood and paid an obscene sum of money for our apartment, which was small, in an old building with a toilet that had to be shared. They were just grateful that some people in the city still sold their apartments to Muslims.
The Olivera family moved too. Just as we had, they chose Bandra, for almost similar reasons and quite near our home. Isabel, we are so used to you that we would like to stay close by. They sold to a Muslim family too, from the Borah community, once again for an obscene amount of money.
Our relationship with Anthony Vaz (who was clutching his kitten that had replaced his hen, as if it was all he possessed) and his family pretty much disappeared behind the moving truck that transplanted their home to a far flung suburb, Malad, where I do not think we would ever travel to. It is a Christian suburb, they assured us, as if it served to sanctify the decision to a bunch of people to whom they did not really owe an explanation. They sold their home to a Borah family too.
The Marchon family, we discovered, did actually have an inheritance. But Joe did not enjoy it, nor did his creditors of the past who had hoped to get their bills paid. Joe did have a father, brothers and a sister. For a man who seemed to have come from nowhere, and whose relatives never visited, this came as a shock to us all—even his own children. His father left behind a huge property somewhere in Bandra, which, once sold and divided between Joe’s siblings, amounted to a tidy amount that even after being shared with all Joe’s children, still amounted to a big sum for each of them.
Oswald and Bruno
let their money slip through their hands like they were sieves with very large holes. Sammy’s inheritance was recycled into cirrhosis of the liver, which he did not survive. Miriam left India in search of that evasive respectability that she could never find here. I am told she did find it, marrying a rich old man in Cyprus. He never let her out of his sight and she never returned to India. Shirlen went back to school. She took drama and literature and graduated with honours. She went on to write a bestseller, My Love, and Other Lies, that is still being sold by young street urchins at the traffic lights. I have never seen her in all these years, but guessing from the sales at the street lights, she must be well. The Marchon family kept the apartment, something like a family home. It became a refuge, almost like a stop-gap arrangement for the Marchon children whenever they needed it.
Billy, the landlord, took over the empty apartment left by Ms. Ezekiel. He sold it to a Muslim, another Borah, with a shoe shop at Pydhonie, near Mohammed Ali Road. Ms. Ezekiel never claimed the apartment nor did she return, vanishing completely. With the kind of events that took place that day in 1993, none of us had the courage or the morality to report her missing to the police. We told ourselves that she did not want to be found, her being a recluse and all that.
The Madrassis continued their life in the building without interruption. They never made the mistake of closing their door again.
The Cabrals moved. Mrs. Cabral searched for a Catholic locality to move to. Billimoria Building has become more Muslim than Catholic and I want my children to be exposed more to Catholics than Muslims—so they moved to Goa, where the entire village they lived in was Christian. Mimosa had nowhere to go. She stayed in Billimoria Building till the very end of her days.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!”
- Lewis Caroll
Alice in Wonderland
It was the 13th October, the day after collecting Anna from the airport, and I went to the college to gather a semblance of normalcy. I entered a very bright and airy staff room to find Sheila in the corner, smiling at me.
“So, things sorted out with you?” I asked.
“Yes, but not the way you think.”
In the past this would have been her red flag to my bull, but we have come a long way. She is human, and I guess she sees me that way too. Smiling, I nodded. “You are going to tell me how?”
“I put him on the railway track and let the speeding train go over him; very therapeutic, that. I recommend you do it with this woman you are hung up on.”
“There’s a bit of a difference.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that?”
“We have not been seeing each other like you; she lives in Canada and she is a beautiful, kind, loving soul—you see, not the same thing.”
“If she is not with you, it is the same. It is about getting them out from under the epidermis, changing the pigment colour, choosing an even tone. What use is a relationship at a distance?”
“She is in Bombay right now.”
“Ah.” She went back to her book, leaving me with my calculations.
There comes a time in a man’s life when he sits back and appraises his history. I don’t believe in History. I am a mathematician, and what is History if not the ramblings of oppressive men who smother the voices around them, giving colour, form, and life to events they were never part of? No certainty in history, no accountability for distortions—and yet its repercussions are weighty enough to distort minds and humankind.
Then there is God. He is history too; the kind that streams from man’s imagination. Perhaps he’d lived once in some aeon, or perhaps he was the construct of some fevered mind drunk on opium, created and painted, sculpted and varnished and set atop our garden gates or altars to ward off evil. He is history, like every history: written about by many, painted in their own colours. It’s in those differences that history keeps us apart; unlike animals, we elevate ourselves to the status of Gods, arguing that in his image and likeness we are created.
So what makes us superior? Mathematics? Calculating in light years of where we are; no certainty, no accuracy, based only on assumptions, comparisons and relativity; like the Cheshire cat in Alice who eventually disappears, leaving behind the grin all on its own, can we disappear while the numbers stay up there? Do they have meaning on their own? I mean, one God, two Gods, it’s still about God, and the numbers are meaningful only with God present. For that matter, why “God”? We all believe in one God, we just call him by a different name. Allah, Om, Jesus…are they any different? Are they reason enough not to live together in harmony, in civility? Civilization is just another movement of history; of people making rules along the way to protect their own misdeeds of history. The ‘Ownership of Property Act,’ for example, to protect property previously stolen from the colonies. Truth—knowledge—is a shifting ground. Built on experience over time, with observations of the underlying consistencies of environment. So knowing when to plant rice, e.g., is knowledge of the weather timings. But with climate change, what is the world of experience to us? We have to wait for a long stretch of stability to know anew. The fears we have are about the fear of loss of centuries of knowledge. We need certainties. Is there any certainty in our lives? Or is reality uncertain?
I think of Anna, of our history, our separate lives, but the certainty of our love, unchanged despite the change in our environments and our separation. Love perhaps will have a formula, an equation to predict or calculate—someone somewhere will find it, but till then its existence is certain, and like the grin on the Cheshire cat’s face that stays after the cat is gone, love will inexplicably hang around our lives; even when our oxygen is depleted and all earth is destroyed it will linger.
I guess what I am saying is that I believe in love.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Deep in the forest of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which surrounds the city of Bombay, and just beyond the point where the road for visitors ends, lie the Kanheri Caves carved into the basalt rock. Beyond the caves, as one climbs higher, taking the pathway on the left stamped out by a hundred feet, the air clears and the eye can stretch beyond the city through black rock and water bodies; through downy clouds on rainy days and bright sunshine on others. Climbing farther up the winding pathway, one loses the crowds and escapes the city where prying eyes are beyond where your own range of vision ends.
On either side of the pathway, trees of all kinds push upwards to the sky, lung-like, saving the city from choking in its own smog. If you are silent on foot, you might surprise a cobra in the middle of its breakfast. And spiders; spiders abound, hidden in the growth, waiting for their next prey to land on their gossamer hammocks—those maddening silken threads you have to wipe off your face as you make your way up. I’m half convinced the arachnids are taking over the forest, like Google’s search engines crawling through your space and life, gobbling and spitting it out for some other predator to live on.
If you get past all this, you reach the highest point in Bombay. This is where, two days after her arrival, Anna and I walked, hand in hand, and sometimes she put her hand around my waist and leaned her head on me, pointing in wonder at the monkeys that darted in and out of our path, sometimes coming daringly close to grab the apple that she bit into every now and then. I could see Eve in her—the quintessential temptress who changed the destiny of mankind. But Anna, unselfconscious, laughing, happy, had learnt to live like the animals. In the moment. Not a trace of history that sent the Fernandeses off to Canada was visible; I was the only link to any history she remembered.
We made our way to the high point on top of the hill. Anna sat atop a rock like a Greek goddess, or Roman—the ones that sat thinking, looking beautiful as they did—and ate the rest of her apple, seductive, all together. I sat beside her, a bit breathless from the walk, and perhaps from her presence. Her crepe cotton skirt flared around her
like a pretty Japanese umbrella, colourful but delicate, her skin smooth with health and her hair in affectionate curls: nature had been kind to Anna.
Suddenly, pointing toward the small glimpse of Vihar Lake, Anna said, “Peter, are you happy?”
I looked sideways at her, her nose little, her lips now red from all the activity with the apple, and wondered where all that seriousness came from. She continued to look at the lake and point as if the question itself had risen up from the depths of the lake and she, with her own special teleprompter, was asking me the questions that some water creature held up with dripping, spindly green arms.
Was I happy? Did I stop to think about this, ever? What did it mean anyway? Just a word that did not represent a single common, definable feeling. I had no answer. I did not understand the concept. I sat there silently looking at her finger pointing out: long, artistic fingers, fingers that perhaps created beauty; beauty I was not part of; beauty I did not know of…
It was some time before the silence was broken by a light wind that swept through her curls; time, in essence incalculable, relative—like happiness, notional. Our days represented the spinning of the earth around its axis, and if the earth took an eternity to spin around its axis, would that mean our day would be eternal? What would the year be like? Born and dead in a day, our life would be eternal. I had no answer for Anna.
“Peter, why are you still single? Do you have a woman? Or a man?”
“You, too, are single, Anna. Or are you? Do you have a man? Or woman?” I asked, not wanting to be the first to tell all.
She laughed. “I am quite as single as they come.”
“Anna, are the men in Canada blind?”
“Perhaps. Maybe I have not been open myself. Something holds me back.”
We sat looking at the lake. Anna finished the apple and threw the pip into the distance. A bird swooped down and picked it up, ever ready to eat the remnants of man’s indulgences; this is what keeps the wheels of the world turning. And love? Where does love come into all of this?
A Matter of Geography Page 19
