But Dosamai had decided years ago that it was not in her best interest to encourage harmony between Rusi and Coomi. After all, why would Coomi come and spend half the day with an elderly widow if she didn’t need someone to whom she could spill the bitterness from her heart, like water from an urn? And so it was that each day Coomi arrived at Dosamai’s apartment, carefully carrying her urn heart, which had filled up again overnight, and the old woman eagerly waited for that gush of bitterness and anger that announced Coomi’s arrival.
If Rusi had walked out, Coomi and Dosamai would spend happy hours the next morning sticking motives on him like postage stamps. Rusi could imagine their conversation, sure as if he were present.
“This is the utter limit,” Coomi would say. “How many more insults have I to bear in this lifetime? That man is making it hard for me to hold up my head in public. Just because he has no abroo-ijjat, he must think I don’t care about my reputation, either.”
“What can you do, deekra?” Dosamai would say in her most fatalistic voice. “Who knows what’s inside the heads of these menfolk?”
They would be silent for a minute. Then Dosamai would play her ace. “What time did he get to the wedding hall—can you call someone and find out? Maybe he stopped to see someone first. Met somebody or went somewhere he didn’t want you to know.”
Rusi could see it now: Coomi would be sitting in Dosamai’s dark living room, a pained expression on her face. “Dosamai, even if he is running around, what can I do? I cannot go around following him all over Bombay like a stray dog. To tell the truth, that thought has also crossed my mind.”
Dosamai would sit still for a moment. Then she would speak as slowly and gravely as any prophet ever did. “If this dookh, this suffering, is also in your kismet, deekra, you will have to bear it. What I say to you is go to the fire temple and light a diva for five days in a row and pray for good luck. And keep an eye on Rusi’s comings and goings. I’ve known that Rusi since he was born. He’s always had an eye for the womenfolk.”
“Rusi always did like women,” Coomi had murmured, unable to keep the huskiness out of her voice.
But Dosamai didn’t hear her. “I remember, ever since he was a little boy, he was always telling big, big stories,” she continued. “How he was going to drive an imported car and buy a house at Worli and God knows what all other nonsense. Once, I caught him talking like this to my little Zubin, filling my boy’s head with this foolish nonsense. Straightum-straight, I said to him, ‘Ae you, Rusi. Your mummy may allow you to tell these foolish stories in your house. But my son is not interested in your Cadillac or your Buick cars. We are poor people, but my Zubin is a good student and he goes to school every day. I don’t want anyone filling his head with dreams of big houses or big cars. The house his old mother raised him in is good enough.’ “
“So what did Rusi say?”
“Say?” Dosamai cried. “What could he say? Walked away chup-chaap, without another word.”
For a second, Coomi’s face softened at the memory of the restless, ambitious young man Rusi had been. Oh God, that was whom she had married—that thin, fierce man whose dreams had rattled around in his head like silver coins in a tin can. Who was this broken, cautious, grief-bent man she found herself married to these days?
Coomi still remembered an evening from the first year of their marriage, when she was pregnant with their daughter, Binny. She and Rusi had gone to Chowpatty Beach, sitting on the gritty brown sand as they watched the pepper red Bombay sun go down. Rusi had been in high spirits that evening, talking about how his new son—it had never occurred to him that he might have a daughter—was going to bring him good luck, how he’d work even harder now that he had a whole family to support, how he wanted at least five more children (Coomi had rolled her eyes in mock horror), how he would take his son to the factory with him as soon as the kid could walk, train him, groom him to take over the family business someday. Saala, he’d pull his boys out of school and make them join the business as soon as they learned some arithmetic. He’d laughed then. “You’ll see, Coomi,” he said, his face as bright as the moon that was beginning to peer at them through the trees. “I know you don’t believe me and that you think I’m telling these tall-tall stories, but I’ll show you how successful I can be. I may not have gone to the university, but I’ll still put all those college graduates to shame.”
The light of his ambition had dazzled her. It was so overpowering that it burned away her words, her protests. So it remained unsaid: that she would be as happy with a baby girl; that coming from a large family herself, she didn’t particularly want six children; that it didn’t matter to her how successful or rich he was, she’d rather have him home in time for dinner; that she would fight him tooth and nail if he ever encouraged one of her children not to finish school. What she actually said to him was, “I know, Rusi, I know. I know all your dreams will come true someday. I just wish you didn’t have to work so hard, darling.”
Later that evening, they had walked up to the food stalls on the beach and each had two plates of panipoori. As always, Rusi was incredibly generous with his money, urging her to eat more, wanting to walk over to Cream Centre for ice cream. But she wanted a lassi instead, and Rusi made sure that the lassiwalla washed her glass twice, wiped the edge of the glass with his handkerchief “for germs,” and only then was Coomi allowed to sip the frothy milk drink. While she drank, she eyed her dandified young husband in bemusement, thinking how different he was from the rough-tough men she had grown up around. Even then, in his white shirt and blue tie, he looked more like an energetic schoolboy than the businessman he was. It was the long, thin neck, she decided, that gave him his lost, innocent look. It was the cleanest, most vulnerable-looking neck she had ever seen, though she was at a loss to explain how a neck could so break your heart. And those eyes! They burned like coal in the gaunt cave of his face. All of him is in those eyes, she thought, all his hurts, all his losses, his father’s death, his fierce ambition, his burning desire to be somebody. To do something large.
Dosamai’s grave voice shook Coomi out of her reverie. “Don’t just sit there like a dumb statue, Coomi. You listen to old Dosa—watch that husband of yours like a hawk,” she said. “This is exactly the age when they get bad ideas, as soon as they are having too many white hairs to count. And enough wicked women are out there, only wanting a man to take them to nice-nice restaurants and to buy them new clothes and gold jewelry and whatnot.”
Dosamai warmed to her subject. “Arre, Coomi, I used to watch my dear Sorab so carefully, he used to tell me it was good training for him for when he was dead. He would say, ‘Dosa, all your staring and watching is building me up for the final hour. When I am dead and they finally lay me in the well in the Tower of Silence, naked as the day I was born, and I’ll see all those vultures staring at me, I’ll yell at them, “You black devils, you think your evil eye has the power to scare me? Arre, one look from my Dosa darling is more powerful than all your hungry looks put together.”
The two women laughed. After a few minutes, Coomi reluctantly got up to leave. “Don’t worry, Coomi,” Dosamai said. “I will make a few discreet inquiries about Rusi myself.”
If Rusi had indeed gone to the wedding without Coomi, Dosamai would have been true to her word. Those discreet inquiries meant the old woman getting on the phone and calling on her small but loyal army of woman warriors in the neighborhood. “Amy,” she would have said. “This is Dosamai speaking. Heard that Mehernosh’s wedding reception went well. Though why Jimmy must spend that much money on the flower decorations onstage, God only knows. Jimmy Kanga was always a big show-off, na? I say if people have money to waste, give it to charity, like the Parsi Panchayet Fund. Still, it is their business. Some people have money to burn.”
After a few minutes of speculating about the nefarious ways in which Jimmy Kanga made his fortune, Dosamai would cut to the chase. “Poor Coomi was here a minute ago, crying her eyes out. That husband of hers left her at h
ome all dressed up and went to the recep-tion alone. Coomi says he came home, got dressed, and left the house, only. She sat for an hour thinking he would come back. Afterward, she removed her sari and just went to bed, all hungry. And you know how much Coomi likes the lagan-nu-bhonu, especially the Mughlai chicken and the pallao-daar.”
“Oh, the bleddy liar,” Amy would say. “He told me Coomi had the flu. But right away, I was knowing he was lying, because he turned his lace away while he was talking.”
“What time did he come in?” Dosamai would ask eagerly.
“He was late. I know the first paath had finished eating before he walked in.”
“Ummmm,” Dosamai would mutter. “Something is as fishy as a pomfret. I think Rusi has some woman on the side.”
“Bechari Coomi,” Amy would say. “Does she know?”
Soon, rumors would run from home to home like a telephone cable; idle speculation would harden into suspicion; suspicion would crystallize into truth, till half of Dosamai’s guerrilla army would be willing to swear that they had glimpsed Rusi hopping out of the taxi at Cama Baug, with a strange young woman blowing him a kiss before the cab carried her away.
Rusi Bilimoria was of an age where it mattered what the neighbors said about him. For many years, his naked ambition and the fact that he owned his own business, no matter how erratic his fortunes, had attracted their envy and attention. Gossip buzzed around him like flies at a picnic; rumors danced around him like ghosts. But unlike the days of his ambitious youth, Rusi no longer wanted their awe or admiration. Now all he wanted was their approval. And failing that, he wanted them simply to leave him alone. So Rusi Bilimoria gritted his teeth and waited for Coomi to get dressed.
Despite himself, he could not help the rush of admiration when Coomi finally emerged from her room, wrapped up in her rose-colored sari. After all these years, Coomi was still an attractive woman. Unlike most of the women he knew, her body had not taken on the doughlike softness of age. The once-black hair was now splecked with gray but the darting dark eyes were as sharp as ever. The long nose was even more prominent now as it hung over the full, sensual lips. And yet, as he discreetly studied that face, Rusi wondered at the loss of the cheery, openhearted woman he had once loved. They used to laugh so much in the early days. Their entire group of friends had been drunk with youth and madcap playfulness, it seemed, the older members of the group as ready for a laugh as the younger ones like Rusi and Jimmy. Practical jokes, daredevil stunts, outrageous dares had made up their days: Zarin Kanga refusing to marry Jimmy until after he’d caught a stray pig for her. Soli Contractor drinking twelve Cokes on a dare and then retching at the sight of the soft drink for years. Bomi Mistry walking down the street wearing glasses with no lenses and scaring passersby when he scratched his eyes through them. How he himself had loved playing tricks on Coomi, how he’d loved it when she’d pretend to scold him and he’d pretend to be chastised. And the inevitable moment when her mock anger would be eaten up by her involuntary smile.
Like the time they’d all gone to Khandala in his car. Six or seven of them, all packed into his tiny Fiat. They were approaching a particularly steep hill when the devil got into him. He winked at his male friends, Jimmy and Bomi, silently asking them to play along. Halfway up the hill, he made the car splutter and then come to an abrupt halt. Somehow, he convinced the girls that they had to push the car uphill. The boys scattered, pretending to flag other cars down. And when, at the top of the hill, the car magically started and he finally let the women in on the joke, he thought he would die laughing. God, they were angry! Coomi especially, her dark eyes flashing as she lectured him on his bad manners and twisted sense of humor. But later, he looked at her in the rearview mirror and she smiled at him and then quickly looked away before any of the others could notice. Something lurched in his chest then, like a muscle spasm. After that, he began to pay special attention to her, noticed how quick she was to laugh and how she stood up to him in a way the other women did not.
Since Coomi lived in the same neighborhood as Rusi, he had seen her around for years. But until they were in their twenties, they had never exchanged a word. Coomi was never part of the group of boys and girls Rusi had been friends with his whole life. It was only after Coomi met Sheroo Mistry in college that Sheroo brought her into the group. Still, Rusi never paid her much attention. At that time, he had a crush on Tina, a voluptuous girl with fierce dark eyebrows and lips soft as red cushions. Tina was a wonderful cook, and every Sunday Rusi went over for lunch to eat Tina’s legendary chicken dhansak, under the watchful eye of Tina’s father and hovering great-aunt. “Here’s a nice fat piece of chicken. Eat more, na, Rusi,” the girl would urge him, heaping more of the delicious rice and spicy daal onto his plate. In this way, Rusi figured out that Tina liked him. But when he tried to talk to her about how he felt, she would giggle and move away from him. “Enough, na, Rusi. All you boys want to do this kissy-koti, only. I am a girl from a good family, baba.” One Sunday afternoon, smarting from having lost a bid for a job and fired by the determination to try even harder, he poured his heart out to Tina. But the fire of his ambition singed her. “Hey, Rusi, stop this crazy big-shot talk, yaar,” she said. “I swear, sometimes you scare me. Why are you always wanting what’s not there? Everybody says you are a show-off, and they are correct.” Her words hurt him more than they’d any right to. His mouth suddenly tasted of dry ashes and the Sunday meal lasted forever as he went through the motions of praising Tina’s cooking and making small talk with her father. When he left that day, his heart was cold. He never went back.
Coomi was different. He felt she understood him, understood that all he had were his dreams. Even when she teased him, there were places she never went to. “It’s funny,” he once said to her. “You are the only person I know who is not afraid of my dreaming. Even my mamma sometimes looks at me like I’m mad.” She looked him right in the eye, then. “I’ll be afraid the day you stop dreaming,” she said seriously. He knew at that moment that he would someday marry her, that he had found a woman who would carry his boat to the shore.
So many hopes we had, he now thought. Each one of them dashed. What happened? Why did we let it? Would it have been different if Mamma had not lived with us? So many of our early quarrels had to do with Mamma. Or maybe I really did have an unrealistic expectation of marriage, like Soli says. “Too many Hollywood movies you are seeing, bossie,” his best friend, Soli Contractor, always told him. “After all, what do you expect? That all bloody women will be Ingrid Bergman, or what?”
After all these years, it came down to this: They were different. After marriage, Coomi showed a side he’d never seen before. She could be moody, cruel, caustic. And since he had never grown some essential layer of protective skin, her words directly pierced his bones, settling there like cancer. Coomi used words like razors, as weapons with which to cut. To Rusi, words were like the offerings of sandalwood he took to the fire temple—scented, delicate, beautiful. Coomi always claimed that the words she said in anger were pieces of paper that flew away once they left her mouth. But to Rusi, they were poison darts, powerful enough to destroy a man.
Coomi had grown up with several older brothers, all of them big, burly men whose favorite pastime was cutting one another with an insult or a crude quip. Rusi was an only child, raised by a genteel widowed mother whose only mode of chastisement was a disappointed silence. Hurts stuck to Rusi like fat to the ribs. Rusi’s warehouse of resentments bewildered Coomi. But he was devastated by his wife’s careless, cruel words. He was especially hurt when those words were directed toward his mother. Coomi tried to tell him she didn’t mean what she said in moments of rage, that her temper flashed and died out like a match struck in the wind. He tried to tell her that he was a different kind of man, that he felt defenseless against the gust of her anger.
It became a pattern. Coomi would erupt. Rusi would withdraw into his shell. Sometimes, they went months without talking to each other. As their only child, Bi
nny, grew older, she ran around like a mail carrier, relaying messages from one parent to the other. Then, in his desperate need for comfort, sex, love, kindness, he would go to Coomi again. After months of distancing, she would make him smile again with a sharp, witty observation. Or she would roll toward him in the middle of the night and hold him close until lust melted his resentment. For many years, each reconciliation was loaded with hope. Maybe she’s learned her lesson this time, he’d think. And after all, she’s basically a good woman. In later years, he went to her, while hating himself for his weakness, for needing her so.
Neither one of us realized how vital Binny was in keeping our marriage afloat, Rusi now thought. If Binny had not left for England, I wonder if the boat of our marriage would’ve ever leaked this openly? And then Mamma dying a few years after Binny moved out. Rusi remembered how in the weeks after his mother’s death, Coomi had tried hard for a reconciliation with her husband. But it was much too late. By then, Rusi had learned how to harden himself to Coomi. He taught himself how to rearrange his face, made it go blank in Coomi’s presence, as if it were covered by a translucent plastic sheet. He knew it scared Coomi, this blankness, this cool detachment. The bewildered hurt, the wounded expression in his eyes, the occasional outpouring of his bitterness, Coomi was used to those. But this indifference was something new and dangerous. Rusi himself thought he acted like a virgin each time Coomi touched him, flinching at the most casual contact. But he couldn’t help it. He was polite to her, considerate even. But the light had gone out of his eyes. He treated her as if they were strangers sharing the same train compartment.
Bombay Time Page 2
