“He’s out. I paid the ayah to take him to a movie. I just needed some time by myself. And I couldn’t bear for him to see me like this.”
“But darling, what’s wrong?” he said, taking a step toward her. “Is it bad news about your mummy or daddy? Why didn’t you call me at the office?”
“No. Nothing like that. Everybody’s okay. Except me. I’m just slowly-slowly going out of my mind. Cracking up.”
“But … what?” he spluttered. He felt breathless, as if he had taken a hard blow to the stomach.
“Jimmy, I can’t take it anymore. I’m going. I’m taking Mehernosh and going back to Wadia Baug. You can come visit us there on week-ends, if you like. I’m sorry, janu. I tried, I really did. But I can’t live here anymore. You don’t know what it’s like during the day. The quiet. When the wind blows from over the sea, it moans, like an old woman crying. I just miss the hustle-bustle of our old building. I miss our friends, all the joking around. I miss the smell of Parsi food being cooked next door to us. No, those people weren’t perfect, but at least they cared about things other than the price of gold and the share bazaar.”
“Zarin. What are you saying? Leaving our marriage, leaving me over a lousy flat? You are obviously under a lot of strain. I’m sorry, darling. I’ve left you alone at home far too much, I think. Come sit with me. We’ll deal with this problem, I promise.”
They went to bed that night without the issue being resolved. But lying in bed that night, Jimmy had a revelation. Even the strongest of marriages were made up of more than just the two people involved, he realized. He had foolishly thought that Zarin and he were married only to each other. In reality, they were married to an entire group of people, a neighborhood, a way of life. Despite his love for her, he alone could not save Zarin. She needed all those others, their friends and relatives, in order to be whole and happy. Tears rolled down Jimmy’s checks and onto his pillow. He suddenly felt incredibly lucky. All these years, he had been surrounded by a wealth of people, and he hadn’t even known it. Had taken them for granted. Oh sure, they were irritating at times—Dosamai, with her penchant for gossip; Bomi and Sheroo, with their koila jokes; Rusi, with his ill-concealed competitiveness. But they were his community. His people. They had befriended him when he hadn’t had two nickels to rub together, cared for his only son, sheltered his wife, held up his marriage. And he had left them behind like yesterday’s newspaper. He had pulled his son out of a school he loved and his wife out of a community she cared about, all so that they could go and live among people who didn’t care if they were alive or dead, as long as they paid their association fees on time. He had sacrificed a year out of their lives to the altar of his ambitions. He rolled over to face Zarin. “Sweetie, wake up,” he whispered. “I’ve something to say to you.”
When he casually told a client the next morning that he had decided to return to his old neighborhood, the man understood at once. “Of course, of course, Jimmy,” he said. “You are a Parsi, born and raised among Parsis. Here at Cuffe Parade, you are forced to live among Gujus, Punjabis, Sikhs. Very hard adjustment to make, I’m sure.”
Jimmy was shocked. Like many post-independence Bombayites, he was wedded to the idea of a secular, nonsectarian city. He resented his client’s casual assumption that his discomfort with Cuffe Parade had to do with religion. After all, he was always telling his Parsi friends to think of themselves as Indians first, to divest themselves of their superiority and smugness. But driving home that evening, he forced himself to confront his own prejudices. He decided that he could not be certain that religious difference had played no role in his disenchantment with Cuffe Parade. So often, he had come home in the evenings and involuntarily screwed up his nose at the smell of unfamiliar food being cooked next door. Was that religious insularity? Or merely a cultural difference? Was he splitting hairs? What distinguished one from the other? And while he was on the subject, he dissected the guiding principle behind his philanthropy: Charity begins at home. This is how he had justified donating money exclusively to Parsi causes. Was that chauvinism? Or merely looking out for an incredibly small ethnic minority? He was only one man, after all, with a finite amount of money. And there was nothing wrong with helping your own. That’s what the Marwadis and the Gujus did, and look at how those communities were prospering. Bombay was fast slipping into the gutter, and he could not pull it up by himself. What was wrong with trying to save just a tiny bit of it? And if he had to choose, why not save the ones he loved? And yet … If everyone felt that way, who would take care of those who needed the most help? By the time he got home, Jimmy had a ferocious headache.
But if Jimmy was unsure of his reasons for disliking Cuffe Parade, he was certain of his reasons for loving Wadia Baug. Their return to Wadia Baug was the mirror image of their departure a year earlier. Then, the neighbors had been awkward and tentative when it was time to say good-bye. Their departure had bruised their neighbors’ pride, but they were not about to show the Kangas that. The farewells had veered from the hearty to the plaintive.
“Heck, we lived with you being gone to England; we can live with this,” Soli said. “Just across town you are now. Be forewarned—the entire gang will be descending on your flat if our mouths water at the thought of Zarin’s cheese pakodas.”
“Don’t forget us,” Coomi cried. “Oh, what are we going to do without our little Mehernosh here? My poor Binny is going to miss him so. Promise you’ll keep bringing him back for visits.”
“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold,” recited Dosamai in that righteous voice that made Jimmy bristle.
Their arrival was a different story. Their return was universally hailed as a triumph, as if Wadia Baug had won a secret war with its Cuffe Parade rival. “The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming,” Binny cried, mocking the adults’ fawning over the prodigal son’s return, but her sarcasm could not mask her pleasure at being reunited with Mehernosh. “Hi, Georgie Porgie,” she said softly, reprising their childhood association. Mehernosh beamed with joy.
Pooh-poohing Jimmy’s decision to hire professional movers, Soli insisted that he and the other neighborhood men would move the Kangas back into their flat. Neither Jimmy nor Zarin had the heart to interfere with Soli’s obvious pleasure, although Zarin had to look away when Soli handled her china. Three days after they’d moved in, Zarin looked around her flat and said what Jimmy had been thinking earlier that day: “Gosh, it looks like we never left.”
Jimmy often thanked his lucky stars for his wife’s minibreakdown. It had taken that, to bring him to his senses. Bombay’s social fabric had frayed so badly in the years since their return to Wadia Baug. Every few days now, Jimmy heard of some millionaire or businessman being kidnapped at gunpoint, read about some retired executive found murdered by a house servant. So many of these incidents occurred in the rich parts of town, it seemed. Despite his wealth and prominence, Jimmy Kanga felt anonymous and safe in his old neighborhood. It was too middle-class a neighborhood to attract the attention of the gangsters who were constantly on the lookout for prospective targets. In the last ten years, Jimmy had stopped doing newspaper interviews for this very reason. He did not want to be trapped in the net of a gangster’s attention. He had even given up his old habit of buying a new car every three years. New cars attracted too much attention. And truth to tell, driving in Bombay was no longer a pleasure. Each trip felt like a survival test. Mehernosh still had the driving bug, but Jimmy constantly lectured his son about the virtues of nonostentatious living. “Times are different, sonny,” he told Mehernosh. “Better to fly under the radar these days. Too many Mafia types around now.”
Looking at Mehernosh sitting comfortably between his elders, watching as they adored his son with their eyes, Jimmy Kanga knew that he had made the right decision. Mehernosh had grown up knowing the difference between how much something cost and what it was worth. Despite his American education, despite the sophisticated circles that Mehernosh moved in
, his son had learned to value his heritage, Jimmy realized. He might spend his day among combative lawyers and tight-lipped, tightfisted businessmen, but at the end of the day, he came home to the down-to-earth reality of Wadia Baug. Of course, that was about to change. Jimmy had given Mehernosh and Sharon the Cuffe Parade flat as a wedding gift. Jimmy knew there was some dissent among the neighbors about whether Meher-nosh should move out of the building. Dosamai, he knew, was spreading a rumor that Zarin was behind the move because she and Sharon had had a falling-out. Jimmy took such speculation in stride. After his return to Wadia Baug, he had decided that the occasional spurts of pettiness and jealousy were the price he would pay for the security and community the building provided his family. No, Jimmy was more concerned about Mehernosh’s safety away from Wadia Baug. Still, Jimmy was a reasonable man. His son had argued with him that, statistically speaking, Bombay was a pretty safe city and that one could not stop living because of fear. After all, it wasn’t as if nobody ever got killed near Wadia Baug. It was just that those stories attracted less attention. Mehernosh had assured his father that he and Sharon had no interest in an ostentatious, flashy lifestyle. And that they would take all reasonable precautions to be safe. Looking at his responsible, thoughtful son, Jimmy knew he had made the right call. Living in Cuffe Parade would make it so much easier for Sharon to commute to her job. Also, the newlyweds needed their privacy. Hopefully, they could make a go of it in their new home. If not, they could always sell the flat in a few years and buy something closer to Wadia Baug. The Cuffe Parade flat that he’d bought for a song years ago was now worth over Rs. 1 crore.
As if he had conjured her up, Jimmy’s sprightly daughter-in-law came up behind him and started rubbing his shoulders. His heart swelling with love for her, Jimmy took her hand and kissed it. “Come sit with me, my dear,” he said. As Sharon took her seat in the circle, Jimmy thought about the years that Mehernosh had been at Harvard. How worried Zarin and he had been that Mehernosh would find an American girl and break off his engagement with Sharon. There were so many such cases. Surprisingly, they did not worry about Sharon getting tired of waiting for Mehernosh. As if it were unthinkable that anyone could dump Mehernosh, he now thought guiltily. But both children rose to the occasion. They stayed in touch by phone and letters and Sharon and her sister visited Mehernosh in Cambridge at the end of his first year. They loved Cambridge—the street musicians and the eclectic shops in Harvard Square, the long row of exotic restaurants in Inman Square, the quaint bridges that linked the banks of the Charles River—but Mehernosh scared them with stories about Boston in the winter—how the bony trees lost their green flesh and stood naked and shivering; how the frozen ground beneath his feet was as hard and uncompromising as some of his professors at the law school. Before she left, Sharon made Mehernosh promise not to sleep with the many women she saw lusting after him. He readily promised. And as far as Jimmy knew, Mehernosh had stayed faithful. From his own experiences, Jimmy knew how tempting it was for Indian men to go crazy when they left India for the sexually permissive West. He had seen some unbelievable things at Oxford. Men who returned to India with Ph.D.s in fucking. And that was during the ice age, as far as sex went. He could scarcely imagine the opportunities available to a hand-some fellow like Mehernosh in America in the 1990s. He hoped for his son’s sake that Mehernosh had had some experiences with American women. Jimmy was a great believer in broadening one’s horizons. But he also knew that he would admire his son more if Mehernosh had resisted temptation.
As if he knew his father was thinking of him, Mehernosh got upfrom the circle of friends and strolled over. “Hey, Dad, just wanted to remind you. You better let people know about the surprise before they start to take off. The third paath will be sitting for dinner pretty soon.”
Jimmy nodded. “Yah. I’ve already said something to a few of them. I need to tell the rest.” He dug into his suit pocket and pulled out a short list of names.
Sitting back in his chair, Jimmy smiled to himself. He was glad that he had planned this little surprise for a few select friends. Nothing fancy, just a little something to top things off. Just a way to make the evening last a little longer. Jimmy sighed. This was the happiest day of his life. He wished it would never end.
Four
Coomi Bilimoria surveyed the scene before her eyes and blinked. Click. Whirl. She turned her head ever so slightly and blinked again. Click. Another photograph of another scene, this one of Mehernosh Kanga holding up a glass of whiskey to his new bride’s face as she screwed up her nose in disgust. It was a game Coomi played with herself every time she wanted to memorize something, this blinking of the eyes, as if for a moment she was not Coomi Bilimoria, wife of Rusi, mother of Binny, but, instead, an inanimate object, a camera. Someone who stood slightly outside the circle, watching, observing everything, in the hopes of repeating it all faithfully the next day when she sat on Dosamai’s old stained sofa. Fodder for the gossip mill. Fuel for the fire. I am a camera. Watch me explode in a whiff of smoke and light.
It had started innocently enough, this habit, this obsession with mental photographs. After Binny left for England, Coomi waited for those weekly phone calls from her daughter. For the first few months, she wrote daily letters to her daughter in her head, letters that she somehow forgot to set on paper and mail to Binny. Soon, she added pictures to those letters. Oh, I must remember to tell this story to Binny when she calls, she said to herself. And to help herself remember, she took a picture of the scene. Click. Happy pictures. Sad pictures. A picture of Nillo Vakil’s kidney stone floating in a glass of water by her hospital bed. A picture of Dosamai the first time Coomi saw her without her dentures on. A picture of Sheroo Mistry showing off the new gold necklace her husband had bought for her. A picture of Rusi praying out loud along with the dastoors at his mother’s funeral, his melodious singsong voice overshadowing their professional, nasal chanting.
But Binny seemed strangely disinterested in her mother’s pictures. Coomi could hear the impatience in her voice as she told her daughtet about someone’s appendectomy, somebody’s Navjote ceremony, someone’s broken hip. Binny only wanted to talk about Rusi and Coomi and about Khorshed, when her grandmother was alive. “Mummy,” she said through gritted teeth, “enough of how the neighbors are doing. I want to know how you are.” Binny was simply not intetested in hearing about everyone else’s life. That fact never ceased to amaze Coomi. She had an insatiable curiosity about the people around her and could not understand how her daughter could survive without such vital air. “I’m fine, fine. Chalta hai. But enough about me. Did you heat about …”
There were other things that made Coomi blink. She clicked on the fact that no mattet how rushed and annoyed Binny seemed with her, she always had the time and money to talk to her father. Binny bristled when Coomi talked to her about trivial things, but she hung on to Rusi’s every word as if he were King Solomon. When Coomi complained about Binny’s favoritism to Dosamai, the old woman sighed deeply. “What to do, deekra? Such is the way of the world. Us womenfolk hold our children to our breasts, go through a lifetime of ‘Drink your milk’ and ‘Do your homework’ and ‘Go do soo-soo’ and whatnot and then these menfolk come around and, bas, the children flock to their daddies like the Pied Piper. Girls always love their daddies more. Fact of nature.” As the silence grew between her only daughter and herself, Coomi stopped taking pictures for Binny and instead started collecting them for Dosamai. Over the years, she built a photo album of angry, bitter pictures. Of Binny’s husband, Jack, looking at Rusi with raised eyebrows after Coomi snapped at Rusi at a restaurant during their trip to England. Of Rusi glaring at her while his mother complained about something Coomi had done earlier that day. Of Soli Contractor’s shocked expression when he realized Coomi had overheard him commiserating with Rusi about his marriage. Every morning, after Rusi left for work, she took the album over to Dosamai’s flat, where the two women pored over the pictures, revisiting the old ones, looking at the new one
s with a fresh sense of injury and insult.
When Binny was younger, Coomi had laughed off her daughter’s devotion to her father. Binny’s fierce love for Rusi reminded her of how she had adored her own father, and she was proud of the fact that Rusi delighted in his daughter so much. She and Rusi had laughed uproariously the day their six-year-old daughter looked solemnly at her father and declared that she would marry him as soon as she was old enough.
“But I’m married to your daddy.” Coomi laughed.
Binny looked at her with those big hurt eyes. “Oh no,” she said, as if the thought had never occurred to her. “Oh no.” And then, fiercely she added, “But Daddy loves me best of all. I’m correct, na, Daddy?”
As Rusi nodded, Coomi felt nothing but joy and gratitude. Not a bit of the jealousy that she now felt.
Those were the good years. In the early years of their marriage, she and Rusi had fought, but somehow there was enough elasticity in their marriage that it could snap back together. Sexual attraction, the optimism of youth, their hopes and ambitions, the desire for companionship—all covered up the basic differences between them. Like boxers, they withdrew from each other as far as they could to nurse their wounds, but they always made their way back into the ring. Yes, those were the good old days. Despite the fact that by then both she and Rusi realized how different they were from each other. Despite the fact that Coomi believed that Khorshed Bilimoria was waiting for their marriage to fail, that her earlier doubts about the suitability of her daughter-in-law had now crystallized into open contempt and hostility.
“Khorshed Mamma can’t wait for me to walk out, so she can get you married to that Mani who lives in Paradise Building,” she once cried to Rusi as they were driving to a work party. They had been married about three years by then. “Don’t think I don’t understand all her tingal-tangal.”
Bombay Time Page 9
