Cracking India

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Neighbors and the servants already form a small crowd. Imam Din, one leg on the ground and one on the kitchen steps, has a huge black and battle-scarred cat trapped in the screen door and is pressing his whole weight on the frame to hold the slippery intruder. The cat, caught below its ribs, is suspended a foot off the floor. Frantically twisting, its teeth bared, the panicked creature is spitting wildly.

  Imam Din roars: “That’ll teach you to sneak into the kitchen, you one-eared monster! Make all the noise you want! I’m not letting go of you, you badmash billa!”

  The crowd outside the kitchen grows as more people run up from the road. Someone shouts: “That tom sneaks into our kitchen too! Teach the fellow!” and someone else yells: “He sure won’t poke his snout into your pans again!” And Yousaf yells, “That’s enough, yaar! Bas kar!” and Imam Din says, “This time I’m going to teach him ... It’s the third time I’ve caught the thug! Poke your nose into the milk will you?”

  “Let him go,” I scream. “He’ll die.”

  “He’s not about to die,” says Hamida. “He’s a tough old alley cat!”

  The Morris rolls up the drive and comes to a stop in the porch. Mother beeps the horn and shouts: “What’s going on?”

  Imam Din is so intent on chastising the cat that he doesn’t hear her, and oblivious of her presence roars invective at the caterwauling animal.

  “Let her go at once!” screams Mother, slamming shut the door of the car. She cannot see the cat’s gender—it is secreted behind the door—but the rest of us seem to know it’s a him.

  Mother grabs hold of Imam Din’s shirt and pulls but I don’t think he even notices.

  “Get the fly-swat, Lenny!” screams Mother in an absolute frenzy.

  I dash in and fetch the fly-swat with a long reed handle and a wire-mesh flap. Mother snatches it from my hand and, waving her arms in an awkwardly feminine and energetic way, swats Imam Din with it. She strikes his legs, arms, shoulders and even his shaven head.

  All at once Imam Din lets go the door and grips his arm. The surprised cat bounds down the steps and spitting and bouncing like a charred firecracker streaks zigzagging past the startled crowd.

  Imam Din turns to face Mother. Glasses dramatically awry, face flushed, she continues to whack him. Imam Din looks bewildered—and searches confusedly for the flies she is swatting on his person. When he realizes her fury is directed at him, his bewilderment turns to incredulity, and then to shock. He holds out his hand and like a man taking away a dangerous toy, snatches the fly-swat from Mother. He examines it as if he’s never seen a fly-swat before.

  Surprised at being so peremptorily disarmed Mother yells: “Get out of my sight! Duffa ho!”

  Large tears welling from his old eyes, Imam Din turns his broad back on her, and followed by my excited mother walks zombie-like into the crowd. Absorbed and protected by the crowd Imam Din visualizes the tears in his shirt and the fine lines of blood congealing on his forearms.

  “Shame on you! Tormenting a small cat! Get out of my sight!” Mother shouts once more, and whirling around in her silk sari and tinted glasses marches inside.

  “Look!” says Imam Din to the sympathetic crowd. “I can’t believe it... She drew blood!”

  “It was only a fly-swat, yaar,” says Yousaf taking hold of his arm. He shouts at the gawkers: “What’s there to see? Go on, push off!”

  Muttering and laughing among themselves the crowd breaks up. Some vault the walls to neighboring houses and some walk down the drive to the road.

  Yousaf leads Imam Din into the kitchen. Hamida and I follow. Hamida saying in her conciliatory and submissive manner: “What if Baijee had a whip, brother? What would you’ve done then? Oh, ho! Look at the tears in your clothes,” she exclaims. “Tch-tch-tch! Don’t worry. I’ll sew them so they’ll look like new!”

  Imam Din refuses to have his clothes mended and remains sullen all afternoon.

  When Father returns late in the evening Imam Din presents himself before Father’s bicycle and with a most injured countenance says: “Baijee struck me with a fly-swat! I bled!”

  Father places his cycle on its stand and raising his brows in a clutch of surprised wrinkles looks at us out of baffled eyes.

  “Imam Din caught the billa in the kitchen door, and wouldn’t let him go. And Mummy hit him with the fly-flapper,” I explain.

  Father turns his astonished eyes upon Imam Din.

  Turning and twisting, Imam Din displays a scattered and spidery mesh of wounds where the wire scratched him. “This ... And this. And see this!” he says stretching the small tears in his lungi and shirt.

  Father locks his cycle. Making a few clucking noises of insincere sympathy he prepares to go in, when Mother bursts out of banging springdoors shouting: “Stop sniveling in front of Sahib, you big idiot! You’re lucky it was only a fly-flap! Go in, someone, and get him bangles. If he whines like a woman he must wear bangles!”

  Despite her shouting Mother sounds good-humored and we release our suppressed laughter. Even Father cannot suppress his tight little smile.

  Shaking his head sheepishly Imam Din ambles off towards the kitchen and Mother laughs and clings to Father and Father continues to smile, despite her clinging, and says: “The fly-flap’s upset him. If you’d used a stick he wouldn’t have minded so much.”

  Adi and I laugh and laugh and hug Father and our clinging mother. I feel deliriously lighthearted. So does Adi. Father has spoken directly to Mother: addressing her instead of the walls, furniture, ceiling—or using us as deflecting conduits to sound his messages off. It is becoming an increasingly rare occurrence—this business of his talking to our mother: out of public or party view that is.

  And suddenly, the hunt for Ayah is off. I sense it. So does Adi.

  They only pretend to look for her. Mother still takes off in the Morris but I know it is not to look for Ayah. I can tell by the way the car’s wheels flatten on the stones and by the determined angle of Skinny-aunt’s chin—that the car’s dicky is loaded with petrol. They can set fire to the world for all I care! I want my Ayah.

  Chapter 28

  It is a bad phase in my life. Even Cousin is avoiding me. I haven’t seen him for a week. I must talk to him about my concerns or I’ll crack up. Adi and I go over to Electric-aunt’s. Cousin is studying for his exams.

  “I don’t know where the sun rises these days,” says Electric-aunt in awed and perplexed pleasure, holding the screen door open and ushering us in. “Your cousin doesn’t wish to be disturbed even by you!” She looks at me archly and flashes all her little goat’s teeth in a conceited smile.

  Electric-aunt parts the navy-blue curtains and, poking only her head through, quietly whispers: “Lenny and Adi are here, dear. Won’t you see them for just five minutes?”

  Since I can’t hear his response, and I’m determined to see him, I throw him a line: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”

  I know he’ll bite. Imagine getting away with calling Cousin dull.

  Cousin drifts into the sitting room in his long shorts and short socks, looking all standoffish and preoccupied, and greets us unenthusiastically. He perches on the edge of the three-piece sofa, tilting his legs primly to one side and, as if he’s a grown man masquerading in short legs, makes desultory small talk with Adi. He doesn’t even look at me. Except when I force him to by addressing him insistently and then he glances my way briefly and coldly, before again bestowing his attention on Adi. To leave no doubt of his tedium at our presence he folds the newspaper into a stiff bat and, with nerve-racking springs and explosive whacks, swats flies on the sofas, tables and radio top.

  Electric-aunt covers her ears. “Oh! Do stop being so jumpy, dear,” she exclaims and, like an angular streak of zigzag lightning, darts from the room.

  Cousin perches on the sofa again, elegantly crossing his ankles this time and hastily, before he has a chance to spring up and swat more flies, I whisper: “They’ve stopped looking for Ayah!”

 
“Have they?” says Cousin, looking down at me coolly, and turns to Adi as if I’ve said something as uneventful and uncomplicated as: “Godmother rapped Mini Aunty’s knuckles with her punkah!”

  I can’t understand it. I’m furious. “Let’s leave him to his dreary studies,” I say witheringly. But Adi, who has not received such singular attention from Cousin since the time he was almost kidnapped and basked for two days in glory, is reluctant to leave. I have to drag him away.

  It is unnerving. The more aloof Cousin becomes, the more I think about him. I find my daydreams, for the first time, occupied by his stubby person and adenoidal voice. They are pedestrian and colorless compared to my caveman and kidnapper fantasies, but they are as completely engrossing. I thrill. I feel tingles shoot from my scalp to my toe tips. And Cousin’s proximity, compared to the remoteness of imagined lovers tucked away in unseen wildernesses, drives me to reckless excess.

  Against all my instincts and sense of dignity, I chase Cousin. I hang around Electric-aunt’s house and around Cousin—when he tolerates my presence. I fetch him glasses of water and bunches of grapes and sharpen his pencils and copy out his homework and follow him wherever he goes. If he goes into the bathroom I wait patiently outside the door—hungering for any crumbs he might throw by way of aloof comment or observation. These he restricts—like my father with Mother—to impatient and disparaging monosyllables, mute signals and irate scowls.

  And while I hang about Cousin, my eyes hang on him, and I shamelessly and eloquently ogle Cousin.

  “Are you in love with him or something?” Adi asks artlessly, but I catch a sly glitter at the edge of his eyes when he turns away. I don’t care. Let him think what he likes.

  Ranna still visits us on Sundays, if he gets a ride on a bicycle or in a cart. But this Sunday when he comes, his scars covered by crisp white cotton, his bruised face eager; though my heart goes out to him, my mind is filled with thoughts of Cousin. My time consumed in his pursuit. Ranna tags along. But after this he visits less frequently. He goes to Imam Din’s village instead, to be with his uncle and Noni chachi and his cousins. In any case we are growing apart. It is inevitable. The social worlds we inhabit are too different; our interests divergent.

  Cousin is restored to me on a great surge of excitement when he bursts into my room and bolting the door breathes into my ear, “I saw Ayah!”

  My heart pounds so wildly I cannot speak. Where? Here? In our house? But then Cousin wouldn’t have bolted the door. Ayah must be at the Recovered Women’s Camp!

  “Where is she—in the camp?” I ask, voicing my assumption. And feeling weak-kneed, I sit on the bed.

  “I saw her in a taxi. At Charing Cross,” says Cousin, breathing so close I’m forced to lie back. Looking annoyingly complacent and placing an arm on either side of me, Cousin, the bearer of great good news, the restorer of withheld warmth, bears down on me: and in that instant I realize that his aloofness was only a sham calculated to arouse my ardor. Bent on further pleasuring me, squashing his panting chest on my flattened bosom, Cousin gives me a soggy kiss. Poor Cousin. His sense of timing is all wrong. The news about Ayah has cooled my passion. Pushing him back and holding him at arm’s length, I say, “If you don’t tell me everything at once, I’ll knee your balls!” (I have grown up!) “Who was she with? Where is she?”

  Cousin, resuming his aloof stance, examines his nails and snottily says: “I said, I saw her in a taxi. You know... pass by.”

  “You could have followed the taxi,” I howl.

  “How? I have engines in my legs?”

  I’m not perturbed by his sarcasm or his disdain. His coldness is a hoax anyway.

  “Did she see you? How did she look? Did you wave?”

  “I don’t think she saw me,” says Cousin, thawing before my importunate queries. “She was all made up!”

  “Really? Tell me! What do you mean, made up?”

  I scramble across the bed on my knees and grab Cousin by his curly hair.

  “Like a film actress,” he says.

  Cousin turns in order to accommodate the rest of his body to his twisted neck and, focusing his eyes on my chest, carefully places his hands on my breasts. I draw back, slapping his hands till my palms sting, feeling sick and all shriveled up.

  Cousin looks at me, lovesick and sheepish, his spanked fingers quivering guiltily on his thighs.

  “If you ever do that again, I’ll break your fingers, knuckle by knuckle,” I say severely. (The previous threat appears to have had no effect—hence the changed perspective.)

  “But I love you,” says Cousin. As if that condones his lascivious conduct.

  “Well I don’t!”

  “Then why did you hang around me? And make all those funny eyes and stare at me?”

  “I won’t anymore. You were only pretending to be standoffish! You’re a phony!”

  “Ha! It worked, didn’t it? I had you panting with passion!”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Oh, yes? Look,” says Cousin, conciliatory: “I love you. But I can’t pretend not to all my life just so you’ll run after me.”

  “You’re supposed to chase me!” I say. “Boys are supposed to chase girls!”

  “But you run away!”

  “It’s only when you put your hands here and there and everywhere.”

  “Even before you grew your breasts you didn’t love me,” says Cousin bitterly. “You find everybody but me attractive!”

  “I can’t help it. If that’s the way I feel—that’s how it is.”

  The next day, angrily hauling me by my organdy sleeve before Godmother, Cousin complains, “She loves approximately half of Lahore ... Why can’t she love me?”

  Godmother, in her wisdom, says: “It’s simply a case of Ghar ki murg; dal barabar. A neighbor’s beans are tastier than household chickens.”

  “But she’s just a household chicken, too! Still I love her!” wails Cousin, his nasal voice cracking and squeaking. Passion does make one silly... I should know! I feel awfully sorry for him.

  “Don’t worry,” says the slave, waddling up and mussing his hair. “It’s only puppy love. Wait’ll you start noticing your neighboring chicks!”

  “So?” demands Godmother. “What about the young cocks Lenny will notice?”

  “Yes? What about them?” I repeat.

  If Cousin wasn’t trying so hard to be manful, he’d be crying.

  We arrive at a compromise, a finely delineated covenant: I will keep an open mind and let bygones be bygones, and Cousin will stop wooing me and wait a couple of years before touching my breasts again. We shall see how I feel about it then.

  In the meantime Cousin sensibly sets about becoming indispensable. Knowing the way to my heart, he scurries about trying to find out the whereabouts of Ayah. He brings me rumors, and acting on the misleading leads, wastes energy on futile forays into the remotest, seediest and most dangerous parts of the congested city.

  Chapter 29

  And then, late one evening, I, too, see Ayah. It doesn’t register at once. It is only after the taxi has driven past, slowing at the corner of Mozang Chawk and Temple Road, that I realize that the flashy woman with the blazing lipstick and chalky powder and a huge pink hibiscus in her hair, and unseeing eyes enlarged like an actress’s with kohl and mascaraed eyelashes, sitting squashed between two thin poets, was Ayah.

  In the evening I pester Hamida to take me to the Queen’s Garden. She has never taken us there. She says she feels shy sitting among all those strangers.

  When I finally get her to agree to take us, Mother announces that Godmother wants Adi and me to spend the night with her.

  Dr. Manek Mody is visiting again, and he wishes to see us.

  “It’s the third time I’ve told you to put the water to boil!” scolds Godmother from her bed. “What’s the matter with you? The Demon of Laziness finally get you?”

  “I’m going, I’m going.” Slavesister’s string-bed creaks as she stands up in her crumpled nightie. “Rod
abai, you are so impatient. Really... ”

  “I’m impatient? Do you know what time it is? Do you know Manek attended to the milkman while your Lazyship snored?”

  Dr. Manek Mody peeps alertly from behind his rustling newspaper. Having been awake for an hour, he’s ready for excitement.

  Adi stirs beside me and sits up sleepily. I prop myself up on my elbows.

  “Even the children awake before you,” says Godmother sternly.

  “Shame, shame,” says Dr. Mody fastidiously holding the tip of his nose. “Poppy shame!”

  Slavesister’s rat-tail braid has come loose and untidy strands of graying hair plaster her neck and back. Although it is only the middle of April we require the ceiling fan that is groaning round and round. Slavesister wipes her moist face on her sleeve.

  “I think the demon has found permanent lodging in her!” mutters Godmother.

  Abandoning the newspaper, the doctor springs out of his chair, saying, “I’ll exorcise the demon. I know how!”

  Tilting forward and extending his index finger he says to Mini Aunty: “Here, pull it.”

  “Don’t be silly, Manek,” says Mini Aunty.

  “Come on, pull,” coaxes the doctor, looking like a brown-domed elf. “I swear, you’ll hear the demon leave.”

  The flaps of Adi’s ears move forward. He’s that curious.

  So am I.

  Godmother, propped on her pillows, displays a solemn face. But curiosity and amusement quiver in the tension of her restrained muscles.

  “Do as Manek says,” she orders, as if instructing a child to drink Milk of Magnesia.

  Ignoring her and shaking her head, Slavesister carries her drowsy, martyr’s smile into the kitchen.

  Dr. Mody rushes in after her and, listing forward once again, points his finger.

  “Please, Mini Aunty, please pull it,” Adi and I clamor, crowding into the kitchen.