Rusi and Coomi exchanged wry looks. Khorshed caught the look and said, “You youngsters think I’m doing all fekhem-fekh. Think what you will. But I tell you, this is the voice of experience talking,” She turned to Rusi. “Did you ever tell Coomi about what happened to my Hilla’s husband?”
“No, Mamma, I didn’t. We’ve had … more important things to talk about.” Rusi’s voice was teasing but affectionate.
Khorshed smiled. “Yes, of course. No need to bore you youngsters with ancient history. Pardon the ravings of a middle-aged woman, Coomi.”
There was a brief, awkward silence. In an effort to end it, Coomi said, “No, please, Khorshed Auntie, of course I’m interested. Who is Hilla? And what happened to Hilla’s husband?”
Rusi groaned, but the two women ignored him. Khorshed leaned forward in her chair. “Hilla is my older sister. Her husband’s name was Pervez. They were well-off. No children, and Pervez had a good job selling insurance. He was a good husband—my Hilla would just have to look at a gold bangle or a silk sari and, has, Cyrus would buy it for her. Treated her like a queen.
“But then Pervez fell in with this group of friends and they started turning his head with silly notions about Gandhiji and home rule and all. This was around 1945. They gave him all kinds of fanatical books and pamphlets to influence him. The freedom bug bit him hard. Stopped wearing a shirt, tie, and pants and started wearing those uncomfortable khadi kurtas. Can you imagine a Parsi dressing like that? Looked ridiculous in them. He and Hilla used to come over and he’d sit right where you’re sitting on that sofa. Pervez and my husband would argue for hours. My husband would remind Pervez that he was a married man and that he had a responsibility to his wife. But he was like a man possessed. Wanted to give up his job and work full-time for independence only. ‘Pervez,’ I once said to him. ‘Have you no akkal left? You think they’ll make you prime minister or something if we get independence? Can’t you see these people are making a fool out of you?’ Well, he huffed and puffed and walked out of my house. Called me a traitor to my country. Can you imagine? Me, a traitor. What state secret did I ever sell anybody? But I made up with him the next day because of my poor sister. My Hilla was beside herself. Bit by bit, he was making her sell the gold daagina that she had brought as her dowry. All the money went to the Congress party. Finally, he did what she had long feared—left his job. One fine day, he left work at noon and never went back. Hilla begged him, but he had taken leave of his senses. While he was having fun with his sir-downs and hunger strikes and what all, Hilla was the one sitting at home, having to deal with creditors. I used to slip her a note out of my household expenses whenever I could.”
Khorshed paused for a minute, but neither Coomi nor Rusi had the nerve to interrupt her. “Anyway, this went on for months. Then one day, they were having another pro-independence demonstration at Flora Fountain. Hilla begged Pervez not to go. Despite having little money, she even suggested going to the cinema, because before this madness gripped him, Pervez loved movies. ‘Let’s go to the pictures today, Pervez,’ she said. ‘Just spend the day together, the two of us.’ But he looked at her like she had insulted God or something. There would be time for movies-fovies after independence, he said. And so off he went, dressed in his white kurta-pajama costume. Well, it was as Hilla had feared. The crowd got out of hand and the police opened a laathi charge. They say a policeman was beating one of the demonstrators, and Pervez, of course, had to jump in. From what we heard, he was cursing and attacking the hawaldar with his bare hands. Well, the fellow just swings his baton and brings it crashing down on Pervez’s head. Just one blow. But Pervez was down.”
“Baap re,” Coomi said. “The poor man. What—did he die?” She looked at Rusi, but he sat with a deadpan look on his face. He’d heard the story numerous times before.
“ ‘Poor man’? If you’re going to feel sorry, my dear, feel sorry for my innocent sister. No, Pervez didn’t die. Not right then anyway. But the blow to his head made him go mad. Just cracked up, you could say. Hilla tried taking care of him at home, but it got too dangerous. Once, he came after her with a kitchen knife. That same day, my husband got him admitted to the hospital. Poor Hilla used to visit him every day, although she had to change two buses to do so. But then Pervez took to tearing his clothes, and he turned even more violent when he saw Hilla. They had to keep him strapped to the hospital bed whenever we would visit. But he was like a mad dog. Even now I can remember the khoonas with which he would look at Hilla, like he wanted to kill her. It was horrible. ‘Pervez hates me,’ she would sob. ‘Mera khodai, I don’t know for what paap I’m being punished that my husband hates me so much.’ Once, I walked into his room and caught him spitting at my Hilla. Spitting. I lost my temper. ‘Pervez, stop this behavior this very minute,’ I said. And you know, he stopped immediately and smiled this angelic smile. It was enough to melt even my heart. ‘See, Hilla,’ I said. ‘He’s not as mad as we think. Mostly, he is just acting.’ But then he started crying softly. Even today, my hair stands up when I remember it. He cried as if his heart were a shattered windowpane. Somehow, I knew right then that he would not live too much longer. And surely, less than two weeks later, we got a call saying that Pervez was dead. He hung himself with some wire that he found.”
There was a long silence. Coomi groped around for the perfect response to the gloomy tale, but she was at a loss for words. Fortunately, Rusi cleared his throat and seized hold of the conversation. “Speaking of the British, my daddy was quite a collector of things from the British time,” he said. “Ae, Mamma, will you show Coomi some of Daddy’s old currency notes?”
Mother and son got up to get the photo albums in which Khorshed kept the notes. Sitting alone for a moment in the living room, Coomi looked around at the austere space, idly thinking of how she would redecorate it. She heard a murmur of voices from the next room and strained to hear. “Seems to be a nice girl,” Khorshed was saying. “A little saamli, not very fair-skinned, but nice all the same.”
On that day, Coomi was relieved to pass muster. But in later years, as relations worsened between her and her mother-in-law, Coomi would remember Khorshed’s mild criticism as something more emphatic and ominous. “Your mummy didn’t like me from the first day,” she once accused Rusi. “Blamed me for not being as light-skinned as you Bilimorias. Thought I wasn’t good enough for her golden boy, at the first meeting, only.”
“That’s not fair, Coomi. Mamma has gone out of her way to accept you into the family. Besides, I had warned you.”
They both knew what he meant. Before they married, Rusi made it clear that he expected his wife to respect his mother as much as he did. “My mamma raised me with love and kindness,” he told her. “In return, I love and respect her. See, Coomi, all these years, it was just the two of us. Naturally, when a new person comes in, there will be some adjustment. But my mamma is basically a good and decent woman. You will have no problems with her. I don’t even know whether to say this to you or not, but I believe in being honest, so I’ll say it: I want none of the problems that other people living in joint families have. If you ever have a disagreement with my mummy, I will take her side. Blindly. I’m telling you this now because I don’t want problems later. Even if I think you are right, I will back her up. Out of respect for her age. I love you very much, darling, but please don’t ever make me choose between the two of you.”
Bathed in the golden light of a Chowpatty Beach sunset, warmed by the ocean breeze, dizzy with love for this skinny, fierce young man by her side, she agreed. She understood. After her father left, she, too, had been raised by a single parent, after all. In her case, there had been three other people in the house. She could hardly imagine the closeness between Rusi and his mother, the two of them alone in that big flat all these years. “I love you because you love your mummy so much,” she said. “Rusi, I promise. I will never make you choose. You’ll see, we’ll all live like one great big family. I am already having one mother. Now, I’ll have an
other.”
But it didn’t work out that way. Khorshed was awkward and distant in Coomi’s presence and seemed quite satisfied playing mother to only Rusi. Although Khorshed seldom said a critical word to Coomi’s face, Coomi could never escape the feeling that Khorshed was watching her every move, waiting for her to stumble, ready to judge and criticize. If Coomi left the lights on in the kitchen or the dining room, Khorshed silently came up behind her and turned them off. Or she went over Coomi’s housework after Coomi had already cleaned the house. Khor-shed also kept control of the household finances and always seemed critical at the amount of money Coomi spent when she went grocery shopping. “That’s all the change left?” she asked in a mild voice. And Coomi bristled, sensing an implicit criticism in her manner.
She could have dealt with Khorshed’s wrath or open hostility, because Coomi knew how to use words like swords. But she was helpless against Khorshed’s imperial gaze, the silently contemptuous way Coomi felt she looked at her. “I swear, my mother-in-law speaks with her eyebrows,” Coomi complained to Sheroo. “Anything I do—sleep in late one day, yell at Binny, or, God forbid, forget to iron my husband’s shirt—and that eyebrow gets raised. I wish whatever that woman was thinking, she’d say to my face. Instead, she waits till Rusi gets home and then complains to him. He must then talk to me. Heaven forbid that Queen Victoria of Bombay could tell me something directly. Khorshed Mamma thinks this is a civilized way to handle things, but I think it’s plain underhanded and sneaky. Poisoning my husband against me.”
Khorshed’s manner graced especially when Coomi’s brothers stopped by her house for a visit. “Saala. I feel like I’m walking into a morgue or an ice factory when I enter yout house,” Fali said jokingly. But there was enough truth in the statement for Coomi to feel the sting of his words. She seethed over how frostily Khorshed greeted her brothers when they stopped by, how primly she talked to them, until they shuffled awkwardly on the sofa, suddenly aware of the break-fast stain on their shirts, their dull, unpolished shoes, their loud, gruff voices. She was angry at her brothers then. Don’t let her intimidate you, she wanted to shout at them. She’s no better than you are; don’t let her convince you otherwise. But she could not embarrass them by telling them she had noticed their embarrassment. Instead, she indulged in small talk, laughed and joked with them as if blissfully unaware of the tension in the room, all the time painfully conscious of Khorshed’s watchful gaze.
“Why do you always sit there when my brothers come to visit me?” she said to Khorshed after she had been married for two years. “After all, it’s me they come to see.”
Khorshed’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I didn’t know it was causing you a problem. After all, they are visitors in my late husband’s house. It is my duty to see they don’t misbehave.”
“‘Misbehave’? What are my brothers, wild dogs? What do you think they’ll do, Khorshed Mamma, steal your dead husband’s picture from the wall?”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare take my husband’s name in vain. He was worth more than you will ever know,”
When Rusi came home from work that night, he went directly into his mother’s room, as was his practice. It was a custom Coomi hated. Khorshed often relayed the events of the day to Rusi, and Coomi felt cheated at not being the first one to have her husband’s attention and ear. Then Rusi came into their room, a worried look on his face. “Mamma tells me there’s a problem,” he began.
Coomi let out a shriek. “Bas, enough, no more. Mamma always tells you there’s a problem. And usually the problem is me. Why doesn’t she talk to me khoollam-khoolla about what troubles her?” Before Rusi could stop her, she rushed into a startled Khorshed’s room. “I thought our little argument today was over, but of course it wasn’t. Why is it that you never say anything to my face, even though we are alone all day long?” she asked, her eyes blazing. “Why do you do this guss-puss with your son every evening, poisoning him against me? If you didn’t want him to marry me, you should’ve said something earlier. Lots of others would’ve gladly married me. This plotting behind my back, I cannot stand. From this day on, whatever you want to say, you say directly to me, you understand?”
Khorshed looked from one to the other and then burst into tears. Rusi was transfixed at the sight of his mother’s tears, horrified at the pain and hurt he saw on her face. Khorshed’s tears reminded him of those awful days after his father’s death, and he was furious with Coomi for making him relive those days. Placing himself between the two women, he turned to his wife. “Coomi, enough,” he said in a fierce low voice, which scared Coomi. “Don’t you dare stand here and insult my mummy. You better control your bleddy tongue, right now.” It was the angriest Coomi had ever seen Rusi and it shook her up. It was also the first time that Rusi spent the night away from her, sleeping on the couch in the living room.
The next morning, Coomi rose early and prepared rava for break-fast. Khorshed loved the sugared wheat dish, and Coomi fried a liberal amount of golden raisins and cashew nuts to sprinkle on top. She waited until mother and son joined her at the breakfast table. “Khor-shed Mamma, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ve been emotional lately, I think. Please to forgive me.”
Khorshed looked embarrassed. “Please, please. We’re family members. Sometimes, angry words are spoken. This has been a hard adjustment for all of us. Let’s carry on. Everything is okay.”
But a week later, there was another fight. Over lunch, Khorshed commented on how high the previous month’s water bill had been, and Coomi immediately assumed the comment was directed at her. “If you like, I will start taking baths at my mother’s house,” she said. “That way, it will save you a few paise each month.”
“Coomi, stop this nonsense. All I was saying was how expensive everything has become in Bombay.”
“Oh, change your story, change your story. But Khorshed Mamma, you can’t fool me anymore. I know your barbs and cuts well by now.”
This time, Coomi waited for three days before making up with Khorshed. Other bursts of anger followed, along with bouts of recrimination and apologies. Over time, the quarrels grew more frequent and the apologies never followed. “I don’t know what to do, bossie,” Rusi confided to Soli Contractor. “Coomi is more and more convinced that Mamma hates her guts. And Mamma, God bless her, says she’s bewildered by that, but frankly, yaar, she does little to change Coomi’s mind. Some days, I feel like a bone being pulled at by two dogs.”
“Women,” Soli said. “Women.”
Busy with their own lives, Coomi’s brothers began to visit the Bilimoria home less frequently. But Coomi was convinced this was because of Khorshed’s intimidating presence. As Coomi grew more defensive about her own family, she brought more and more of her old habits and behaviors into her new home. “So what if we shout and scream at one another like savages?” she told Rusi. “We are bhola-bhala people; we don’t carry a grudge like some people I could mention. Bas, we say what’s on our minds and then it’s over. At least our hearts are clean, even if our fingernails may not always be.”
“It’s over for you, maybe,” Rusi said excitedly. “But what about the person at the other end? You release the arrow from your bow and, you’re right, you no longer are carrying the arrow around. But what about the person whose heart it is now stuck in?”
But no matter how hard they tried, neither could make the other see his or her point of view. Once, frustrated and hot from one of their many agonizing arguments, they made love, furiously, desperately, silently struggling like wild animals in each other’s arms. Afterward, with Rusi cradling her, Coomi broke down hard. “I don’t know why we can’t go past a few weeks without a fight. So different we are— like two people speaking different languages. But wasn’t there a time when we spoke the same language?”
After her birth, three years into their marriage, Binny became the glue that held her parent’s marriage together. They both adored their little girl, and Binny was an instinctive peac
emaker, a child whose need for love was so great and naked that it often shamed them into making up with each other. Once, after a particularly heated argument with Rusi, Coomi was busying herself in the kitchen, when she felt a tug on her dress. “Come on, na, Mummy,” Binny said, dragging Coomi from the kitchen. “Daddy has a headache. Let’s both of us give him some kissy-koti to help him feel good.” Reluctantly, Coomi allowed herself to be pulled out of the kitchen. By the time they reached the bedroom, Coomi was smiling despite herself. When Rusi looked up at them, she shrugged. “What to do? Little lovebug here won’t leave me in peace until I give you a kiss.” They grinned over Binny’s head, their argument forgotten. When they went to bed that night, they let Binny sleep between them. Coomi fell asleep marveling again at her daughter’s peacemaking abilities. Before Binny drifted off to sleep, Coomi whispered to her the song she’d made up when Binny was six months old:
“Good night my darling and God bless you
And happy dreams and angels guard you
And I love you and I love you
And pom pom pom pom pom pom POM.”
When they didn’t feel anything for each other as man and wife, Coomi and Rusi were still proud to step into the world as Binny’s parents, each of them holding one of her hands. Binny was wise. When she was three, she looked up one morning from the banana she was eating for breakfast. “Mummy,” she said seriously. “Who put the banana inside the peel?” Coomi felt such tenderness for her daughter at that moment that she thought her breast milk was going to start flowing again. Binny was funny; she made her parents laugh. She also made them angry, frightened, worried, sad, proud, joyous, giddy. Together, they attended her parent-teacher conferences and school plays. Together, they chided her when she occasionally brought a bad report card home. Together, they anxiously paced their apartment the night Rusi finally allowed Binny to attend a late-night party when she turned seventeen.
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