When she got back, Sorab was curled up in sleep, looking like a warm, happy puppy. Steeling herself to this sight, Dosa sat on the edge of the bed and shook her husband awake. For a minute, Sorab looked at her blankly, as if he had no recognition of the fact that the woman on his bed would be the one he would share his life with. Then his face broke into a beaming smile.
But then he saw the look on Dosa’s face.
“Darling, what’s wrong?”
She looked at him steadily, her eyes steely as the knife she was about to plunge into him. “Sorab, I will only say this once, so listen carefully,” she began. “From this day forth, I will never have marital relations with you again. I will happily cook for you, keep your house for you, polish your shoes for you. But if you are so much as touching me with a fingernail, I will go to the fire temple and jump in the well there. I will be dead before the frogs in the well even know I’m there. This is my promise to you.”
He looked at her and for a moment he thought he was asleep and dreaming. “Dosa, I’m not knowing you well enough to know … If this is a joke, darling …”
“No joke.” And then, to make sure he understood, she repeated, “No joke. And another thing. I am not wanting anyone to know about this talk. Let them wonder why there are no children, let them do their guss-puss, I don’t care. If anyone asks, tell them to mind their own business.”
“But I want children,” he cried. “Always I’ve been wanting children.”
“Then you should have been a man enough to stand up to your pappa and told him you would find your own bride,” she cried fiercely. “Instead of ruining my life, you should have spoken to him about wanting children. I don’t want children, not now, not ever. All I wanted was to finish school and go to college. Instead, I have this.”
“But … but I had no idea. Millions of people have arranged marriages, after all. And I am a young man. It is impossible, what you are suggesting, Dosa. I have my needs, if you understand what I’m saying. All these years, I waited for you to become a woman, waited patiently. I’m a twenty-two-year old man. What am I supposed to do with my normal needs?”
“Go see a prostitute, if you have to. But I’m telling you Sorab, if you ever touch me again, the next time you touch me, it will be my cold, dead body.”
She could not be reasoned with. For the first few months, Sorab pleaded with her, prayed to God for guidance and understanding, shed hot tears of bitterness and frustration, but it was to no avail. At times, his desire for her was so acute that he would leap out of bed in frustration and spend the night sleeping in the easy chair in the living room. Several times, he thought of leaving, but he knew that a divorce would break his mother’s heart. And part of him felt sympathetic to the bright, fiercely intelligent woman whose life he had unwittingly destroyed.
Finally, in the seventh month of their marriage, he went to Dosa, the usual torment in his eyes replaced by something that approached calm. “Dosa, sit down,” he said, motioning to a chair in the kitchen. “In all my nightmares, I never thought I was having to talk to my wife in this way. But you have left me no choice. Dosa, I am a man. If you will not fulfill your wifely duties then I am going to start visiting prostitution houses. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
For the first time in months, her face softened. She reached out and took his hand in hers, so that for one quick moment, his heart was alive again. “I do understand,” she said softly. “It was never my intention to deprive you of your normal urges. You have my blessings to visit as many prostitutes as you want to.”
He hit her then, hard, across the face, this man who had never gotten into a fistfight even as a young boy. “Saali besharam. I have married a demon, not a woman. You are lower than a common prostitute, talking to your husband like this. I should’ve let you jump into that well when you promised to. Should’ve pushed you in myself. At least then you could’ve inflicted your dookh on those poor frogs, instead of on me. What happened in November was not my wedding; it was my funeral.”
She sat before him motionless, willing her already-swollen face to remain calm, willing her hands not to touch the blood on her upper lip. She waited for the thundercloud of his dark fury to pass and for Sorab to turn back into the kind, apologetic man that he was. She didn’t have to wait long. His eyes widened at the sight of her swollen face as he emerged from the fog of his anger and his lower lip started to tremble. “Dosa. Darling. Oh, Dadaji, what have I done? Oh, Dosa, say something, please. Oh God. May my hands be chopped off for this. Oh, Dosa, forgive me, forgive me, please.”
He never bothered her after that. But by their second wedding anniversary, he was making discreet visits to prostitutes, although he never told a soul about these visits. Whenever his mother asked him about grandchildren, he found a way of laughing off the question. He grew used to seeing the curious, slightly pitying look in the eyes of his neighbors. Strangely, their secret bound him to Dosa, gave him a sense of connection with his wife, whom, paradoxically, he loved more the more she scorned him. Dosa, too, found a way of dealing with the unspoken question that she knew was on the minds of her friends and neighbors. Without ever saying so, she lightly hinted at Sorab’s “problem,” and she expertly made her husband the focus of their unspoken pity and derision and herself of sympathy and admiration. “Whatever God puts our way, we must accept,” she said stoically, while her audience nodded and tsk-tsked in sympathy.
Seven years passed in this way. Each day, after Sorab left for work, Dosa cleaned house and prepared dinner. Then, her wifely duties done, she spent a few hours reading about the medicinal benefits of herbs, a topic that had piqued her interest a few years earlier. Often, a neighbor would stop by to pick up some of Dosa’s home remedies for colds, fevers, burns, joint pain, alcoholism, infidelity. She never accepted money for her medicines; instead, the visitor had to repay her with nuggets of gossip and information. While she treated their physical ailment, she also counseled them on their career choices, parenting skills, and marital relations. Despite her youth, Dosa’s reputation grew. Every woman she helped sang her praises to others. Women like Yasmin Shroff, who was five years older than Dosa but respected the younger woman’s formidable will and intelligence.
“Go get a job,” Dosa told Yasmin after the woman showed up at Dosa’s apartment with bruises on her arm. “The more you are staying at home, the less he is respecting you and the more he’s beating you. You have a good mind. Go use it. And don’t worry about that besharam husband of yours. Leave him to me.”
She was good to her word. Dosa visited the Shroff residence three days later to meet with Gustav Shroff. After some small talk, she got to the point. But Gustav was adamant about his wife not working. He spoke of manly pride and honor and family name. Dosa sighed. Gustav was not making this easy. She stared at him appraisingly. “Gustav, listen quietly for a minute,” she said at last. There was a long pause. “Because you are my dear friend’s husband, I will say this once,” Dosa said softly. “Better if you heed my advice. … You don’t want to have to worry about every meal you eat at home, Gustav. A man’s home is his castle. He should not worry about something being in his food. You know what I’m saying? Better to let Yasmin find a job so she can be happy, too.”
Gustav blinked. “You are threatening me, Dosa?”
“Threatening you? Baap re, Gustav, I am just a poor ignorant housewife. I just spend my time mixing my herbs and all. Some say they help; some say they don’t. What do I know? And who am I to threaten you? No, as your well-wisher, I am just giving you some good advice. Follow, don’t follow—your choice.”
Before Dosa left that day, an agitated Gustav agreed to let his wife get a job and even offered to walk Dosa home. It was later that evening that he realized that the woman who had broken his will was a full twelve years younger than he was.
As Dosa grew confident that Sorab did not need her sexually, she warmed up to him in other ways. On weekends, she and Sorab went to the seaside and ate bhelpuri and panipu
ri for dinner at the beachfront booths. Or they caught a movie at the Bombay Film Society. They both loved movies, and on the way home, they excitedly discussed what they had seen. These were the times Sorab loved best, when his wife looked happy and alive. At such moments, he thought of her as a good friend, rather than as his wife, and forgot the great wound she had inflicted upon him. In his most forgiving moments, he even told himself that he had a better marriage than most of his friends, freed as it was from the tyrannies of wailing infants, sexual jealousies, petty grievances. Dosa kept a clean house, had dinner ready when he got home, loved going to movies with him, never fought with him about how he spent his time or his money. Besides, he was now getting sex on a regular basis. Two days a week, Sorab returned home late from work. He never explained where he had gone; she never asked.
A few weeks before their eighth wedding anniversary, Minoo Fram-rose died in his sleep. Sorab had just reached his office when he received the phone call; he turned around immediately and headed home. He found Dosa as he had never seen her before—distraught, hysterical, alternating between raging at her father and torn with remorse at the thought of seven years of bitterness and estrangement. Together, they attended the four days of ceremonies at the Tower of Silence. In those days, Sorab found his manhood. He was firm with Dosa when she refused to eat, he was gentle with her when she couldn’t sleep, and he held her tightly when her body racked with sobs as they carried Mi-noo’s body away to be lowered into the well where the vultures waited.
At home, she was exhausted, spent, as if grief had wrung her dry. “Go to bed,” he said gently. “I will bring you some toast and butter for dinner.”
But when he entered the bedroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Thank you for the last few days. What I would have done without you, I don’t even know.”
“Shh, shh, Dosa. Not even to mention. After all, you are my wife. It is my responsibility to take care of you. I just wish I could take your pain away, put it on my head instead.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. “How can you love me still, after how I have treated you? I have destroyed your manhood, turned you into a shrimp. Any other man would have left years ago. All my khoonas against my daddy, I took out on you. Oh, Sorab, I should’ve jumped into that well years ago.”
“Now, Dosa. No sense in crying over spilt milk. What use bringing up old ghosts? You are needing rest, darling. Just sleep now.”
But she was inconsolable, and he soon realized that what Dosa needed was not sleep, but absolution. So he let her talk and she told him everything: How she’d won a book as the first prize for reading in second grade. How she still had the blue ribbon her book had been wrapped in. How she had been the best student in her class, always. How, although she had told not a soul, she had always believed she would be the first female Parsi doctor in the city. How her father had always encouraged her to do well in school, which was what had made his betrayal even harder to take. How she had loved and worshiped her father and how it tore up her heart to think he’d traded her future away like a pair of shoes. How he had come into her room the night before her wedding and told her he was sorry and how he had finally left when she didn’t say a word. How, even in her darkest rage, she had understood why her father couldn’t go back on his word to Darius, admired him for it even, and how she’d hated herself for loving him still. How it killed her, even today, to hear of her sisters’ accomplishments and how she hated herself for resenting the very people she loved. How she had been scared of having children at a young age, how she had hated Sorab because she was terrified of his power to make her pregnant. How she’d seen him as the embodiment of the trick fate had played on her, how she’d vowed to make him pay for her father’s mistake. How she had tried to continue hating Sorab and how she had failed. How his kindness, his mild temper had won her over. How lonely she felt when he was at work and how she looked forward to his footsteps each evening. How her terror of having children had dissipated, now that she was older, and how her heart warmed at the thought of having an infant to love. How she was tired of fixing everybody else’s problems when her own marriage was a lie. How she, yes, how she wanted love, needed it, needed to be able to give it and receive it. How she was terrified that she was too late, that she had chased love out of Sorab’s heart, just as she had chased him into the arms of strange women. How wrong she had been to punish him for another’s mistake, how terribly, horribly wrong, and how she regretted it now.
He looked at her with incredulity, afraid of trusting what he was hearing. Some ancient instinct told him that this was not the time for words, and so he took her in his arms. For a moment, she stiffened, as if by habit, and then he could feel the slow thawing of her frozen heart. After years of sleeping with women he did not care to hold a second longer than necessary, Sorab Popat held on to his tiny, fierce, willful wife like a man clinging to a lifeline.
Zubin was born a year later. He was a cheerful boy with his father’s easy, mild temperament and his mother’s intelligence. Dosa was a zealous mother and doted over her only child with a ferocity and protectiveness that amazed and exasperated her husband. Zubin was not allowed to join the other neighborhood kids when they played on the sidewalk, because Dosa was terrified that her little boy would get struck by a car or, at the very least, stumble and bruise his knee. She took every cut or bruise or fever the boy ever suffered as a reflection of her poor mothering. When Zubin came down with the inevitable illnesses of childhood, Dosa would sit up with her ailing child all night long, covering him with blankets, opening and closing windows, putting cold rags dipped in Tata’s eau de cologne on his fevered brow. It was as if the dark-haired boy with the ready smile had unlocked all the love that Dosa had kept hidden in her heart for seven long years. And strangely, there was enough love left over to include Sorab, so that some days, Sorab found it hard to remember the drought years. As the years rolled by, he thought of the time spent visiting prostitutes while his young wife slept virginlike in their bed, with the unreal air of a man struggling hard to remember a long-forgotten dream.
Once, on one of the rare evenings that they went to dinner without Zubin, Sorab decided to take a shortcut through the red-light district. As they rode down the street where Sorab used to visit his favorite prostitute, he slowed down his scooter ever so slightly to glance at the third-floor apartment he had visited for so many years. He thought he’d barely turned his head to sneak a look, but Dosa, eagle-eyed as ever, noticed.
“Someone you are knowing lives here?”
“Oh no, nobody. I mean, just someone from, you know …”
“I see.”
Later that night in bed, Sorab opened his eyes to find Dosa peering closely at his face.
“So, do you ever miss them, miss her?”
It took him a minute to understand who she was referring to. “Miss them? Not for an hour, not for a minute. Why should I? My whole world is right here, under this very roof.”
“Sure?”
He had never seen her like this, and his heart swelled with tenderness and pity. “Dosa, my Dosa. You are my wife as well as my life. The others were … paper. Understand? Paper. Whereas you are velvet—rich, heavy, dark. Something a man can hold in his hand and feel satisfied with.”
Two days before Zubin’s tenth birthday, Sorab decided to stop at Best Cake Shop to buy for his son and wife the chocolate eclairs they both loved so much. Since Zubin’s birth, it had become a ritual that every payday, Sorab would come home with a small surprise for his family. Before he left the shop, Sorab placed an order for Zubin’s birthday party. “Make sure it’s freshum-fresh,” he instructed the clerk. “I want the cake to melt in my son’s mouth. See you day after tomorrow.”
It was dark when he left the shop, and Sorab was filled with a longing to get home quickly to be with his wife and child. He decided to take a different route home. Balancing the small cake box on the front of his scooter, he cut in front of a motorist, who pa
nicked and stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. It was a fatal mistake. The car hit the small scooter with an impact that lifted Sorab’s slight body like a kite and threw him over two lanes of traffic. Passersby who saw the broken, twisted body instinctively prayed for his death. Two minutes later, their prayers were granted. Sorab’s eyes fluttered for a moment, his mouth shaped into a wordless O, and then he was dead. Other witnesses shooed away the street urchins who had crawled under the flattened scooter in hopes of rescuing the enticing cake box.
Dosa refused to believe the news when it reached her. She could not accept that her life had taken yet another unexpected turn and that this time there was no ready target to blame for yet another betrayal, yet another delinquent promise. All the bitterness that Sorab’s steadfast love and decency had drained from Dosa’s heart now came pouring back, as did Dosa’s sense of persecution, of injustice. She shocked her mother by reciting the names of all the people she wished had died in her Sorab’s place. Her old mother, already guilt-ridden from a past mistake, tried desperately to help her bereaved daughter cope with this latest twist of fate, but Dosa was inconsolable. All three of her sisters rallied around her, including the youngest, Banu, who was in law school, and estranged from the eldest sister, who never let Banu forget that she was standing on the ashes of Dosa’s dreams. Two years prior to Sorab’s death, Banu had had it out with this eldest sister, whose grief had followed her like a shadow throughout her life. Dosa and Sorab had invited the entire family over to dinner, and, as was her habit, Dosa had made some barb about the “cushy” life her younger siblings led. But this time, Banu did not remain silent. “Bas, Dosa, enough is enough. Daddy’s dead; you are having a sweet little son and a good husband. Still it’s not enough. What happened to you is ancient history. Baap re, at this rate, the Hindus and Muslims will be friends before you forgive and forget. The rest of the family can keep saying, ‘Poor Dosa,’ but personally, I’m sick and tired of your nakhras and your caustic remarks. Don’t ever invite me to your house again, because I won’t be coming.”
Bombay Time Page 5
