by Meira Chand
None of it then had seemed to matter. And since already they knew one another, they left their doors open and lived as one family. Without thought of imposition they entered each others’ homes, to help in crisis and in quarrel, to tend sick neighbours, nurse fractious babies or stir imprudent schemes. In time most found their grip again, reasserting their claim to a heritage of irrepressible merchant genes. Children were born who knew nothing of Sind. The gold of Bombay became no longer a myth, but something solid in their hands. Many moved out of Sadhbela, selling their tenements to neighbours anxious to expand. Those who stayed on and made enough money moved upwards, and to the front of the building with its fine view of the sea. A new hierarchy established itself, different from the one they had known in Sind. There, the discrimination of profession, not mercenary values, had divided them into Amil or Bhaibund. Hardworking Bhaibund merchants and rich landowners, whatever their worth, were looked down upon by superior Amils, employed in professions, education or the civil services.
In Bombay, the comfort of this past superiority vanished overnight; each did what he must to live. The once-wealthy landowner’s son, Murli Murjani from Rohri, quickly learned the common Bhaibund trade of shopkeeper, his family forced to forget easy past income. Murli developed instead a rare relish for money that in Bombay, vulgar city of vulgar business, propelled him swiftly to new heights. But there were accidents amongst the cultured Amils. The respected headmaster from Sukkur, Kishin Pumnani, whose erudite reputation once drew to his school the cream of local offspring, failed both in trade and the schools of Bombay. It was not easy to support nine small children on the proceeds of part-time tutoring. Soon tattered clothes were no longer replaced, and handouts of pulses and grain were accepted at last by proud Pumnani. He and those like him, dismissed by luck and dexterity, fell quickly to low status. They were forced by small bribes of money to move to the tenements that faced into the sunless, odoriferous wells of the building, rife with rubbish and rodents. There, with their families, they remained refugees. The rest of Sadhbela adopted Bombay.
Lokumal’s mind dwelt upon this past and the many changes of destiny so apparent in Sadhbela. He himself had been lucky. He already had business contacts in Bombay, and had re-established himself with comparative ease in his textile business. Even the sustenance of his tree view he exchanged happily for the sea, finding in it a familiar essence. His mind rolled now on its gentle swell. He sighed again at the thought of leaving it; a pain no less, in its way, than that long-ago departure from his garden in Sind. The afternoon sun was thick and mellow on the walls of his room, and molten on the waves. He halted his thoughts with an effort. Such nostalgia was attachment, an earthly tie he had broken with long before. He must clear his mind and think. June 11. He pondered the date again, the day before Mrs Hathiramani’s Saturn would move out of the House of the Sun.
3
‘A job?’ questioned Mr Bhagwandas, as if he considered the matter. Sham Pumnani nodded and looked down from a superior height upon Mr Bhagwandas’ head. He noticed the encroachment of white at the base of each ebony wave, the plump diamond-ringed hands, the dapper feet. He tried to smile, to fight down the anger that rose within him.
‘In my trade,’ answered Mr Bhagwandas, ‘our first requirement is trust. That requirement you cannot fulfil, since now you are known as a thief.’
‘I am not a thief—’ Sham began, there was a hot, choking feeling within him. Mr Bhagwandas speared him with a look. The sun beat down upon them before the entrance of the building.
‘But that is now your reputation. It will stick like the tail on a dog. I cannot help you.’ Mr Bhagwandas turned into Sadhbela, swallowed by its dinginess. In a corner of the courtyard, an old woman from one of the back tenements had spread a sheet. From an aluminium pot held on her hip, she ladled out spoonfuls of thin tapioca to dry in the sun to a crisp. She squinted up at Sham, a grandchild played at her feet. He glared at her and turned out of the gate. He crossed the road to sit upon a low wall opposite Sadhbela; behind him was the beach and the sea. He bought some roasted gram from a vendor and settled down to eat. On the beach a beggar squatted, defecating, nearby another fanned a fire beneath a pan of tea. Some children surrounded the corpse of a dog washed up on the tide, and poked at it with a stick.
Across the road the windows of Sadhbela looked down like multiple eyes upon him. His own home was on the seventh and top floor. It did not face the sea, but looked into a dark inner well of the building, white-washed by pigeon droppings. The outer façade of Sadhbela was little cleaner than its inner walls. It was weathered by brine and humidity to a blotched and blackened appeaarance. The residents were conditioned to this grime; they saw it as stability, its layers gave them history. The broken guttering of the fifth floor was from the time Mr Watumal was flooded by a clogged pipe in a record monsoon. Everyone appeared to help in the crisis, sweeping the flood down the lift shaft. The burn on the ceiling of the entrance hall was where Mr Murjani’s son, at the age of four, had let off a Divali firecracker near an open drum of kerosene, and nearly killed himself. The building was streaked by remembrance. The patina of age was a comfort, nobody noticed the dirt.
He had returned from Japan two days ago, and already Sadhbela had reclaimed him more securely than before. Sham gazed at the building in fury. All the small balconies were strung with washing; some had plants in old cooking-oil tins, and rusted trunks crammed upon them. Many people had glassed-in their balconies, incorporating the extra space into the room behind. But, except for Mr Murjani’s apartment and Dada Lokumal’s, these glassed-in additions had washing lines or metal cupboards pushed up close against them still. Only Mr Murjani’s home, which stretched the entire front of the seventh floor, stood out, dominating the top of the building. Sham gazed at the wealth of Mr Murjani’s plate glass, agleam in the sun, and thought of the splendours behind. Of the chandeliers, reflective of sunlight and the movement of waves, of the soft fitted carpets and the crystal chairs from a Maharajah’s palace, worth millions of rupees. And he thought of his own home on the same floor, at the back of the lift shaft, where a half-hearted light filtered through the small windows, netted against large insects. In those rooms now, his father lay dying. He finished the last of the gram and got up to cross the road again.
His mother, Rekha, opened the door and smiled at his return, but Meena frowned, looking up from a magazine, as he entered the room.
‘So he is back,’ she said. ‘For food he has returned. Where have you been? Loafing about as usual?’
‘You will eat now, son?’ Rekha asked, ignoring her daughter’s scorn. Meena shrugged and returned her attention to a film magazine. At her feet her two children played five-stones. She had come home for the day on a visit; she was the eldest of Sham’s sisters. Behind her, Lakshmi massaged old Chachi’s short legs, stretched out beneath a loose tunic in a pair of striped pyjamas. Chachi pulled her veil over her face as soon as Sham entered the room. She had not spoken to him directly yet, to show her disapproval. She was his father’s widowed sister, and the eldest in the family; her anger could not be ignored. From a corner Padma giggled nervously. Veena looked up from where she was trimming lemon rinds, received that morning in charity from Mrs Bhagwandas, to make into pickles.
‘Your father is awake. See him first before you eat,’ Rekha urged. She took Sham’s hand and led him behind a curtained screen, pulling it back with a smile of encouragement. The shadow of a moustache stretched over her lips, a dimple puckered her cheek. Sham tried to imagine her as a young girl, but his mind could not manage the feat. She appeared to have been always as old and tired as his father.
Behind the screen, his father still lay as he had for some months, since a stroke half-paralysed him. Rekha bent towards him, and the old man turned his head. His skin was thin and papery, the bones beneath clearly visible. His face was lopsided, one part dead and slack, the other twisted grotesquely with life. Spittle dribbled from his mouth, and Rekha wiped it with a muslin cloth. The old
man stirred, his face began to jerk and at last some sounds issued up. Sham stepped forward, a lump in his throat. His father raised a hand, catching Sham’s fingertips. His voice was slurred.
‘You have come back from Japan on holiday? They are pleased with you, son, in that office? Any promotion yet?’ He had said the same thing the day before. Beneath distorted words there was still the old tone of whining insistence Sham remembered hearing all his life. The lump in his throat hardened, from distress into resentment. The old man grimaced, revealing long yellow teeth.
The day before his mother had ordered, ‘You will tell him you are here on holiday. God willing, he will never know the real shame.’ Beside him now she nodded and Sham stepped back into the room, relieved to get away. His heart was beating fast. Chachi drew her veil over her face again, twitching her sharp, thin nose, and gave an angry snort. Veena and Padma, his younger sisters, giggled. Meena looked up from her magazine and frowned.
‘You are the head of the family now. From somewhere you must get money,’ she hissed. ‘How is Ama to live now you have returned as a thief? Did she raise you for this shame?’
‘Where can I get money from?’ he protested, anger pumping through him. ‘I have nothing.’ He turned his head away. He understood his responsibility; he was the only surviving son. One brother had been killed in a bus accident, two more had died in childhood.
‘Why should you have anything?’ Meena scoffed. ‘When people go to foreign countries they only learn to spend money. They become selfish. They forget their own people at home, who must go without this and that just to send their children to school. There are also some who cannot eat, who have no money for medicines.’ She looked at the screen about their father’s bed.
He leaned forward. ‘Is your head made of wood? How many times must I tell you that I was just a junior in the business there, and my salary was low. I sent all I could.’
She replied cockily; even in childhood she had never let him get the better of her. ‘Only shouting, shouting. How to give respect to elders you have also forgotten, there in Japan. Since you returned you have only once touched Chachi’s feet in respect.’ Chachi sniffed in agreement behind her veil.
Anger made him dizzy. ‘Do you think I am really a thief, that I wanted deliberately to steal? It was you who forced me to it. All of you.’ He turned, spitting out the words at last.
It had begun soon after he arrived in Japan. Letters and more letters. From sisters, aunts and cousins, from his father and his mother, filled with the memory of all he had escaped. Every letter asked for money, but each small amount he sent back only fuelled further demands. Lists of commodities and appliances were asked for, help for sickness, help for schooling. When his father had a stroke the letters hung upon him, heavy as a weight. Money was needed for medicine and doctors. He asked his employer for a loan and was refused. Desperation had suffused him.
At first it had been small amounts of cash he took, collecting slowly until he had enough to send to his family. No one seemed to notice. Then his mother’s letter, describing his father’s paralysis, stained with tearmarks, recalling events of his childhood, made him take a larger amount. This was soon missed and traced to him.
‘You forced me to do it,’ he repeated. Padma and Veena clung together; Lakshmi stood transfixed with an expression that cut him deeply. He had no wish to hurt Lakshmi, she was his favourite sister. She started forward and laid a hand on his arm.
‘Calm yourself,’ she whispered. ‘Father will hear.’ But Meena was already off again, her eyes blazing.
‘What lies you tell. What you earned in Japan in a month would keep us here for a year. You have spent it all, on drinking, on gambling, on bad women. In Foreign these are the evil things that take men’s money and corrupt them. I know. I have read about it in magazines,’ Meena yelled.
Sham raised his arm to strike her, but Lakshmi pulled him off. He saw her face, wet with tears, and sat down on the floor, his head in his hands.
‘There was no money for medicines. He would already be dead without all that you sent,’ Lakshmi comforted. ‘For such reasons how can anybody be called a thief?’
‘I did not ask you for anything,’ Padma said, kneeling beside him.
‘I was lucky just to be sacked and sent back here,’ Sham replied in a low voice. Everyone had remarked on the goodness of his employer in this respect.
After three years away, he had been catapulted back to India in a way he had never dreamed of. There was no hiding the shame; his employer was a cousin of Mr Murjani. Before he returned the whole building knew the reason he was back. What work would he find to keep not only himself, but the crowd of them in this room? And Lakshmi was now eighteen and must be married soon. Where would he find the money for a dowry? Who would marry her if he did not? He had had no reliable job, even before he went to Japan. With a B.A. degree he had worked as a scribe and a typist, writing letters for the illiterate on a roadside stall. What good, he had wondered then, was his father’s brave talk of education? And yet, without this education, Mr Murjani would not have invited Sham into his home one evening, three years ago.
He had eaten the savouries Mrs Murjani offered with a drink, and absorbed as discreetly as he could the effect of silken drapes and banks of glinting crystal. He had left in a daze, and described the place to his father. He told him of the possibility of a job with Mr Murjani’s cousin, a trader settled in Japan, who had asked for a reliable Indian boy to be found, to train for an executive post in his export office in Osaka.
His father did not appear impressed. A sad look settled on his face, a look Sham knew well, called up at talk of easy money or the lowering of men’s mind’s.
‘In the past young men left the villages for work in the towns. Now they leave our India for work abroad,’ sighed Kishin Pumnani.
‘Many have made a fortune,’ Sham said. ‘I shall live like the Murjanis one day.’ His father had looked up sharply. The hot feelings in Sham danced about. He made an effort to control his anger.
‘Do not compare yourself with them. They are people of money, we are people of learning.’ Kishin Pumnani’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, like a cork in his long thin throat. ‘Be content with a decent life and with honest, well-earned money. That has always been my rule.’ He frowned in concern, seeing his son slipping already into the Murjanis’ fat world.
The school he had run in Sind before Partition came suddenly into Kishin’s mind, as he listened to Sham. He saw again its great compound filled with boisterous boys, kicking balls and climbing trees. The school was a group of low buildings, verandahs entwined with flowering creeper. He saw again the infant Murli Murjani running about in shorts, and the eldest of the Bhagwandas boys fighting with Lokumal’s youngest brother, later murdered in Lokumal’s garden. Sind Model High School. A blue board emblazoned the words in white, above the porch of the school. They had lived well in those days, each rupee earned by the power of the mind. He had taken only enough in salary to live with befitting dignity, everything else was ploughed back into the school, to provide the best. He had been able to employ an Englishman, a Mr Bigglesby, a sickly, bony, sallow-skinned man, but with a brain that outstripped his appearance. He had improved the standard of all modern subjects, while Kishin had maintained the quality of those subjects indigenous to Sind, and dearest to his heart. No boy left his school without fluent knowledge of his language, history and literature. ‘We put more of Sind into Sindhis,’ was Sind Model High School’s motto. It had not served Kishin well in Bombay.
He had taught many of Sadhbela’s residents, and they had approached him in those far-off days with an awe that vanished in Bombay. In this city of exile, in circumstances he refused to acknowledge as permanent, waiting always for a return to normal, he had not broken his back to educate Sham for him to earn suspect Bhaibund money. But neither had he urged Sham towards a B.A. to be a scribe for the illiterate, on a pavement stall. The boy had tried hard for a good job, he was not to be blamed. L
uck was against him, against all Pumnanis. Kishin sighed, resigned now to any fate. At least Bhaibund money would provide dowries for the youngest girls. He should not oppose the boy.
A decent life? Honest money? Sham looked at his father in disbelief. What decent life had they ever lived, and when had there been money, honest or not? He had no memory of Sind, he had been born in Bombay. Those days of plenty recalled by his father appeared the stuff of fairy tales, so distant were they from the familiarities of Sadhbela.
‘Times were bad,’ Kishin answered, as if reading Sham’s thoughts while removing his glasses, squinting down at them out of rheumy eyes, cleaning them with a handkerchief. ‘This was our destiny. But God has been good. When we needed he provided. You have all been educated. I do not ask more.’
Sham thought of the glitter beyond the Murjanis’ door, the imported cars and foreign travel, the wasted luxuries crammed upon shelves, the throwing away of food for no more than the whim of taste, and felt angry again.
‘Mr Murjani arrived penniless in Bombay, and look at him now,’ Sham insisted.
‘How many could do what he did? In his very blood there is money. In ours there is learning. Our respect in the world is as great as his,’ Kishin answered.
‘That kind of money is power,’ Sham mumbled.
‘Cease this line of thinking. It is corrupting,’ Kishin Pumnani ordered.
Yet his father had cried when it was confirmed that Sham had the job in Japan. His mother had cried too, in a different way from nowadays. She produced a plate of sweetmeats and fed him forcibly. ‘Eat son, eat,’ she had said, and pushed the sweet crumbs between his teeth, laughing and pushing the more he pulled his head away. And his father, emaciated and stooped, diminishing beneath a large bony head, had returned from tutoring wealthy children and banged some mathematics books down on the table. ‘Well done, sir. Well done,’ he repeated, slapping Sham’s back. Then immediately the building knew, for his mother rushed out to tell Gopal the liftman, and Gopal told them all.
