by Bapsi Sidhwa
Wise heads nod—Godmother’s, Electric-aunt’s, Slavesister’s—although Slavesister’s can hardly be called wise.
“I hope no Lahore Parsee will be stupid enough to court trouble,” continues the colonel. “I strongly advise all of you to stay at home—and out of trouble.”
“I don’t see how we can remain uninvolved,” says Dr. Mody, whose voice, without aid of mike, is louder than the colonel’s. “Our neighbors will think we are betraying them and siding with the English.”
“Which of your neighbors are you not going to betray?” asks a practical soul with an impatient voice. “Hindu? Muslim? Sikh?”
“That depends on who’s winning, doesn’t it?” says Mr. Bankwalla. “Don’t forget, we are to run with the hounds and hunt with the hare.”
“No one knows which way the wind will blow,” thunders the colonel, silencing everyone with his admirable rhetoric. “There may be not one but two—or even three—new nations! And the Parsees might find themselves championing the wrong side if they don’t look before they leap!”
“Does it matter where they look or where they leap?” enquires the impatient voice. “If we’re stuck with the Hindus they’ll swipe our businesses from under our noses and sell our grandfathers in the bargain: if we’re stuck with the Muslims they’ll convert us by the sword! And God help us if we’re stuck with the Sikhs!”
“Why? Which mad dog bit the Sikhs? Why are you so against them?” says Dr. Mody contentiously.
“I have something against everybody,” declares the voice, impartial and very hurt.
“Order! Order!” says Mr. Bankwalla. And Colonel Bharucha clears his throat so effectively that the questions, answers and wisecracks subside.
“I’ll tell you a story,” the colonel says, and susceptible to stories the congregation and I sit still in our seats.
“When we were kicked out of Persia by the Arabs thirteen hundred years ago, what did we do? Did we shout and argue? No!” roars the colonel, and hastily provides his own answer before anyone can interrupt. “We got into boats and sailed to India!”
“Why to India?” a totally new wit sitting at the end of my bench enquires. “If they had to go some place, why not Greece? Why not to France? Prettier scenery... ”
“They didn’t kick us hard enough,” says Dr. Mody, with hearty regret. “If only they’d kicked us all the way to California ... Prettier women!”
There is an eruption of comments and suggestions. The meeting is turning out to be much more lively than I’d anticipated. Godmother’s brother-in-law restores order with his built-in microphone. “Shut up!” he bellows, startling us with the velocity of his voice.
Colonel Bharucha continues as if he’s not been interrupted at all.
“Do you think it was easy to be accepted into a new country? No!” he booms. “Our forefathers were not given permission even to disembark!”
“What about our foremothers?” someone enquires.
“And our foreskins?” an invisible voice pipes up from the back.
“Mind! There are ladies here!” says the colonel sternly. There is a long pause no one dares interrupt. Satisfied by our silence, the colonel continues: “Our forefathers and foremothers waited for four days, not knowing what was to become of them. Then, at last, the Grand Vazir appeared on deck with a glass of milk filled to the brim.” He looks intently at our faces. “Do you know what it meant?”
Knowledgeable heads nod wisely.
“It was a polite message from the Indian Prince, meaning: ‘No, you are not welcome. My land is full and prosperous and we don’t want outsiders with a different religion and alien ways to disturb the harmony!’ He thought we were missionaries.
“Do you know what the Zarathushtis did? God rest their souls?”
Knowing heads nod, and among them I spy Cousin’s. I feel annoyed. I am not privy to information that is rapidly being revealed as my birthright. Even if Godmother, Mother, Slavesister and Electric-aunt did not tell me, Cousin ought to have!
Colonel Bharucha, again answering his own question, continues: “Our forefathers carefully stirred a teaspoon of sugar into the milk and sent it back.
“The Prince understood what that meant. The refugees would get absorbed into his country like the sugar in the milk... And with their decency and industry sweeten the lives of his subjects.
“The Indian Prince thought: what a smart and civilized people! And he gave our ancestors permission to live in his kingdom!”
“Shabash! Well done!” say the Parsees, regarding each other with admiration and congratulatory self-regard.
“But as you see, we have to move with the times,” roars the colonel, his oratorical capacities in full form. “Time stands still for no one!”
“Hear hear! Hear hear!”
Even I applauded on cue.
“Time and tide wait for no man!”
Thunderous applause.
“Let whoever wishes rule! Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian! We will abide by the rules of their land!”
A polite smattering of Hear hears! The congregation, wafted on self-esteem and British proverbs, does not want to be brought back to earth.
“As long as we do not interfere we have nothing to fear! As long as we respect the customs of our rulers—as we always have—we’ll be all right! Ahura Mazda has looked after us for thirteen hundred years: he will look after us for another thirteen hundred!”
Like English proverbs, Ahura Mazda’s name elicits enthusiasm.
“We will cast our lot with whoever rules Lahore!” continues the colonel.
“If the Muslims should rule Lahore wouldn’t we be safer going to Bombay where most Parsees live?” asks a tremulous voice weakened by a thirteen-hundred-year-old memory of conversions by the Arab sword.
A slight nervousness stirs amidst the timorous. There is much turning of heads, shifting on seats and whispering.
“We prospered under the Muslim Moguls didn’t we?” scolds Colonel Bharucha. “Emperor Akbar invited Zarathushti scholars to his darbar: he said he’d become a Parsee if he could ... but we gave our oath to the Hindu Prince that we wouldn’t proselytize—and the Parsees don’t break faith! Of course,” he says, “those cockerels who wish to go to Bombay may go.”
“Again Bombay?” says the man sitting at the end of my bench who had objected to our coming to India in the first place. “If we must pack off, let’s go to London at least. We are the English king’s subjects aren’t we? So, we are English!”
The suggestion causes an uproar: drowned, eventually, by Dr. Manek Mody’s remarkable voice. “And what do we do,” he asks, “when the English king’s Vazir stands before us with a glass full of milk? Tell him we are brown Englishmen, come to sweeten their lives with a dash of color?”
Mr. Bankwalla, precise as the crisp new rupee notes he handles at the bank, says, “Yes. Tell him, we came across on a coal steamer ... and drop a small lump of coal in the milk. That will convey the unspoken message of love and harmony.”
“As long as we conduct our lives quietly, as long as we present no threat to anybody, we will prosper right here,” roars the colonel over the mike.
“Yes,” says the banker. “But don’t try to prosper immoderately. And, remember: don’t ever try to exercise real power.”
The wag at the back, who’s been champing at the bit to butt in, stands up and irrelevantly shouts: “Those who want four wives say aye! Those who want vegetarian bhats and farts say nay!”
There is a raucous medley of ayes and nays. There is nothing like a good dose of bathroom humor to put us Parsees in a fine mood. It is impossible to conduct the meeting after this.
We emerge into the sun’s brassy blast and our faces crinkle in self-defense. Mother reminds us to rub the ash from our foreheads. Ayah looks as if she is melting. The tongaman removes the horse’s feed sack and we pile into the tonga.
Chapter 6
I sit on the small wooden stool and Ayah’s soapy hands move all over me. Water from th
e tap fills the bucket. Ayah, squatting before me, rubs between my toes. I’m ticklish. Deliberately she rubs the soles of my feet and, screaming, I fall off the stool and wiggle on the slippery floor. She pins me to the cement with her foot and douses me with water from the tin bucket. By the time I’m dried, powdered and lifted to the bed Ayah is drenched.
Now it is Mother’s turn. Ayah calls her and she appears: willing, conscientious, devout, her head covered by a gauzy white scarf and smelling of sandalwood. She has been praying.
Ever since Colonel Bharucha tugged at my tendon and pressed my heel down in the Fire Temple, Mother massages my leg. I lie diagonally on the bed, my small raised foot between her breasts. She leans forward and pushes back the ball of my foot. She applies all her fragile strength to stretch the stubborn tendon. Her flesh, like satin, shifts under my foot. I gaze at her. Shaded by the scarf her features acquire sharper definition. The tipped chin curves deep to meet the lower lip. The lips, full, firm, taper form a lavish “M” in wide wings, their outline etched with the clarity of cut rubies. Her nose is slender, slightly bumped: and the taut curve of her cheekbones is framed by a jaw as delicately oval as an egg. The hint of coldness, common to such chiseled beauty, is overwhelmed by the exuberant quality of her innocence. I feel she is beautiful beyond bearing.
Her firm strokes, her healing touch. The motherliness of Mother. It reaches from her bending body and cocoons me. My thighs twitch, relaxed.
Her motherliness. How can I describe it? While it is there it is all-encompassing, voluptuous. Hurt, heartache and fear vanish. I swim, rise, tumble, float, and bloat with bliss. The world is wonderful, wondrous—and I a perfect fit in it. But it switches off, this motherliness. I open my heart to it. I welcome it. Again. And again. I begin to understand its on-off pattern. It is treacherous.
Mother’s motherliness has a universal reach. Like her involuntary female magnetism it cannot be harnessed. She showers material delight on all and sundry. I resent this largesse. As Father does her unconscious and indiscriminate sex appeal. It is a prostitution of my concept of childhood rights and parental loyalties. She is my mother—flesh of my flesh—and Adi’s. She must love only us! Other children have their own mothers who love them ... Their mothers don’t go around loving me, do they?
A portion of our house at the back is lent to the Shankars. They are newly married, fat and loving. She is lighter skinned than him and has a stout braid that snuggles down her back and culminates in a large satin bow, red, blue or white. At about five every evening Shankar returns from work. He trudges up the drive, up along the side of our house, and somewhere in the vicinity of our bathroom lets loose a mating call.
“Darling! Darling! I’ve come!”
No matter where we are, Ayah, Adi and I rush to the windows and peer out of the wire netting.
“My life! My Lord! You’ve come!” rejoices Gita, as if his return is a totally unexpected delight.
At his mate’s answering call Shankar puffs out, and further diminishing a slender leather briefcase he carries under his arm, breaks into a thudding trot.
Because theirs is an arranged marriage, they are now steamily in love. I drop in on Gita quite often. She is always cooking something and mixed up with the fumes of vegetables and lentils is the steam of their night-long ecstasy. It is very like the dark fragrance Masseur’s skillful fingers generate beneath Ayah’s sari. Gita is always smiling, bubbling with gladness. She is full of stories. She tells me the story of Heer and Ranjah, of Romeo and Juliet.
Ayah, too, knows stories. Sitting on the lawn in front of the house she stretches her legs and dreamily chews on a blade of grass. Hari the gardener, squatting in his skimpy loincloth, is digging the soil around some rosebushes. He moves on to trim the gardenia hedge by the kitchen. It is the middle of the day in mid-February.
Pansies, roses, butterflies and fragrances—the buzz of bees and flies and of voices drifting from the kitchen. The occasional clipclop of tonga horses on Warris Road, and bicycle bells and car horns. Hawks wheeling and distantly shrieking beneath a massive blue sky. I think of God, I pick up a dandelion and blow. “He loves me—he loves me not. He loves me—he loves me not ... ”
Ayah hums. I recognize the tune.
“Tell me the story of Sohni and Mahiwal,” I say.
Ayah’s hum becomes louder and she half croons, half speaks the Punjabi folktale immortalized in verse. We drift to rural Punjab—to a breeze stirring in wheat stalks and yellow mustard fields. To village belles weaving through the fields to wells.
Ayah’s eyes are large and eloquent, rimmed with kohl, soft with dreams. “Beautiful Sohni—handsome Mahiwal... ”
Their love is defiant, daring, touching. Their families bitter enemies. Sohni is not allowed to meet Mahiwal.
The wide Chenab flows between their villages, separating the lovers. But late one night, slipping furtively from her village, risking treacherous currents and fierce reprisal, Sohni floats across on an inflated buffalo hide to her lover.
Mahiwal’s delight is boundless. He celebrates in rapturous outbursts of verse. But he is distraught when he discovers he has nothing in the house to feed his Sohni.
It is too late to send for sweets—the bazaar is closed. “But such is the strength of his passion—the tenderness of his love,” says Ayah lowering her lids over her faraway and dreamy eyes, “that he cuts a hank of flesh from his thigh, and barbecuing it on skewers, offers his beloved kebabs!”
Ayah cannot speak any more. Her voice is choked, her eyes streaming, her nose blocked.
“Does she eat it?” I enquire, astonished.
“She gobbles it up!” says Ayah, sobbing. “Poor thing, she doesn’t know what the kebabs are made of... ”
In the end the doomed lovers die.
A shout, a couple of curses, a laugh, break away from the hum of voices coming from the kitchen. And then a receding patter of bare feet.
They are after the gardener’s dhoti.
Ayah and I jump up from the grass and following the pattering feet run along the side of the house and past Gita’s window.
“What’s happening?” Gita calls from within.
“They’re after Hari’s dhoti!” I shout.
We approach the servants’ yard and, sure enough, see the ragged scuffle around Hari. Hari’s spare, dark body is almost hidden. Ayah stops to one side and I dive into the tangle of limbs yelling for all I’m worth, contributing my mite of rowdyism to the general row.
Yousaf the odd-job man, Greek-profiled, curly-haired, towers mischievously over Hari. Everybody towers over the gardener—even the sweeper Moti. I, of course, am still far from towering. As is Papoo, the sweeper’s daughter, who comes galloping and whooping from the servants’ courtyard, an infant wobbling dangerously on her hip, and brandishing a long broom. Her wide, bold mouth flashing a handsome smile she plunges herself, the insouciant babe, and the fluffy broom into the scuffle.
Yousaf has a grip on Hari’s hand—which is hanging on to the knot at his waist. Yousaf casually shakes and pulls the hand, trying to loosen its hold on the loincloth, and Hari’s slight, taut body rocks back and forth and from side to side.
Imam Din, genial-faced, massive, towers behind Hari. He is our cook. His dusty feet, shod in curly-toed leather slippers, are placed flat apart. He drums his chest, flexes his muscles and emits the fierce barruk cries with which Punjabi village warriors bluff, intimidate and challenge each other. “O vay!” he roars. “I’ll chew you up and I won’t even burp!” Majestically, good-naturedly, he lunges at the cloth between the gardener’s legs.
Hari is having a hard time fending off the cook’s hand with his spare arm, and also coping with Moti’s sly attacks, and Papoo’s tickling broom. The washerman, who has brought our laundry for the week, has also joined the melee. We are like a pack of puppies, worrying and attacking each other in a high-spirited gambol.
But we play to rules. Hari plays the jester—and he and I and they know he will not be hurt or denuded. His d
hoti might come apart partially—perhaps expose a flash of black buttock to spice the sport—but this happens only rarely.
It is a good-natured romp until suddenly three shrill and familiar screeches blast my ears. “Bitch! Haramzadi! May you die!” And Muccho’s grasping hand reaches for the root of her daughter’s braid. The gaunt, bitter fingers close on the hair, yanking cruelly, and Papoo bows back and staggers backwards at an improbable angle. She falls sitting on her small buttocks, her legs straight out; still holding the jolted and blinking infant on her hip and the broom in her hand.
“Haram-khor! Slut! Work-shirker! Move my eyes from you, and off you go!” shrieks Muccho in ungovernable rage, raining sharp, hard slaps on Papoo’s head and back.
Ayah swoops down to snatch the infant to safety, and with an outstretched leg tries to fend off the blows. We abandon Hari. And the men, Hari included, group around Papoo, setting up a protective barrier of arms and hands, and muttering: “Forgive her, Muccho, she’s just a child...You’re too hard on her... ”
They cannot physically restrain Muccho. Handling a woman not related to them would be an impropriety. Her husband, Moti, dares not interfere either. Muccho would make his life intolerable. Submissive in all other respects, Muccho’s murderous hatred of their daughter makes her irrational.
Despite the intervening arms, Muccho manages to pound her daughter with her fists and with swift vicious kicks. Her hands protecting her head Papoo roils in a ragged ball in the dust, screaming, “Hai, I’m dead.”
I hate Muccho. I cannot understand her cruelty to her own daughter. I know that someday she will kill her. From the improbable angle of Papoo’s twisted limbs, I’m sure she has already done so.
Papoo lies deathly still, crumpled in a dusty heap. Ayah, holding Muccho’s son on her hip, dips her palloo into a mug of water and sponges the dust from Papoo’s lifeless face. “I don’t know what jinn gets into her every time she sees Papoo,” she declares. “Even a stepmother would be kinder... After all, what’s the innocent child done that’s so terrible?”
