In Firozsha Baag things were still roughly the same, but Mrs. Mody had died, and no one knew what Pesi was doing now. In fact, ever since he had been sent away to boarding-school some years ago, Pesi’s doings were not spoken of at all. My friend Viraf of A Block, whom I had been unable to say goodbye to two years ago because he was away in Kharagpur studying at the Indian Institute of Technology, was absent for my hello as well. He did not return to Bombay because he had found a job in nearby Calcutta.
Tehmina had at last rid herself of the cataracts. She was suddenly very spry, very sure of herself in all she did. Along with her cataracts she had also jettisoned her old slippers and duster-coat. Her new ensemble consisted of a long, flowing floral-patterned kaftan and a smart pair of chappals with little heels that rang out her presence on the stairs and in the hallway.
But Najamai had aged considerably. She kept asking me why I had not yet been to see her daughters even though she had given me their addresses: Vera was somewhere in Alberta, and Dolly in British Columbia.
My brother, Percy, wrote from the small village that he wanted to meet me, but: “I cannot come to Bombay right now because I’ve received a letter from Jamshed. He’s flying in from New York, and has written about reunions and great times for all the old crowd. That’s out of the question as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to see him again.”
I wrote back saying I understood.
Our parents were disappointed. They had been so happy that the whole family would be together again for a while. And now this. They could not understand why Percy did not like Jamshed any more, and I’m sure at the back of their minds they thought their son envied his friend because of the fine success he’d made of himself in America. But who was I to explain things, and would they understand even if I tried? They truly believed that Jamshed was the smart young fellow, and Percy the idealist who forgot that charity begins at home.
This trip was not turning out to be anything I’d hoped it would. Jamshed was coming and Percy wasn’t, our parents were disappointed with Percy, I was disappointed with them, and in a week I would be flying out of Bombay, confused and miserable. I could feel it already.
Without any destination in mind I left the house and took the first empty bus to come along. It went to Flora Fountain. The offices were now closing for the day. The dirty, yellow-grey buildings would soon spill out typists and clerks and peons into a swelling stream surging towards bus-stops and train stations.
Roadside stalls were open for business. This would be their busy hour. They were lined up along the edge of the pavement, displaying their merchandise. Here a profusion of towels and napkins from shocking pink to peacock green; there, the clatter and gleam of pots and pans; further down, a refreshment stall selling sizzling sarnosas and ice-cold sherbet.
The pavement across the road was the domain of the smugglers with their stalls of foreign goods. But they did not interest me, I stayed where I was. One man was peddling an assortment of toys. He demonstrated them all in turn, calling out, “Baba play and baby play! Daddy play and Mummy play!” Another, with fiendish vigour, was throwing glass bowls to the ground, yelling: “Un-ber-rakable! Un-ber-rakable!”
Sunlight began to fade as I listened to the hawkers singing their tunes. Kerosene lamps were lit in some of the stalls, punctuating at random the rows on both sides of the street.
Serenely I stood and watched. The disappointment which had overcome me earlier began to ebb. All was fine and warm within this moment after sunset when the lanterns were lit, and I began to feel a part of the crowds which were now flowing down Flora Fountain. I walked with them.
Suddenly, a hand on my shoulder made me turn around. It was Jamshed. “Bet you weren’t expecting to see me in Bombay.”
“Actually, I was. Percy wrote you were coming.” Then I wished I hadn’t volunteered this bit of information.
But there was no need to worry about awkward questions regarding Percy. For Jamshed, in fine fettle, had other thoughts he was anxious to share.
“So what are you doing here? Come shopping?” he asked jokingly, indicating the little stalls with a disdainful sweep of his hand. “Terrible, isn’t it, the way these buggers think they own the streets – don’t even leave you enough room to walk. The police should drive them off, break up their bloody stalls, really.”
He paused. I wondered if I should say something. Something that Percy would love to hear me say. Like: these people were only trying to earn a meagre living by exercising, amidst a paucity of options, this one; at least they were not begging or stealing. But I didn’t have a chance.
“God, what a racket! Impossible to take even a quiet little walk in this place. I tell you, I’ll be happy when it’s time to catch my plane back to New York.”
It was hopeless. It was his letter all over again, the one he’d written the year before from New York. He had then temporarily disturbed the order I was trying to bring into my new life in Toronto, and I’d struck back with a letter of my own. But this time I just wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible. Before he made the peace of mind I was reaching out for dissipate, become forever unattainable.
Suddenly, I understood why Percy did not want to meet him again – he, too, sensed and feared Jamshed’s soul-sapping presence.
Around us, all the pavement stalls were immersed in a rich dusk. Each one was now lit by a flickering kerosene lantern. What could I say to Jamshed? What would it take, I wondered, to light the lantern in his soul?
He was waiting for me to speak. I asked, perfunctorily, how much longer he would be in Bombay.
“Another week. Seven whole days, and they’ll go so slowly. But I’ll be dropping in at Firozsha Baag in a couple of days, tell Percy.” We walked to my bus-stop. A beggar tugged at his sleeve and he mechanically reached in his pocket for change. Then we said good-night.
On the bus I thought about what to say if he asked me, two days later, why I hadn’t mentioned that Percy was not coming.
As it turned out, I did not have to say anything.
Late next evening, Percy came home unexpectedly. I rushed to greet him, but his face revealed that he was not returning in this manner to give us a pleasant surprise. Something was dreadfully wrong. His colour was ashen. He was frightened and shaken, and struggled to retain his composure. He tried to smile as he shook my hand limply, but could not muster the effort to return my hug.
“What’s the matter?” said Mother. “You don’t look well.”
Silently, Percy sat down and began to remove his shoes and socks. After a while he looked up and said, “They killed Navjeet.”
No one spoke for the next few minutes. Percy sat with his socks dangling from his hands, looking sad, tired, defeated.
Then Mummy rose and said she would make tea. Over tea, he told us what had happened. Slowly, reluctantly at first, then faster, in a rush, to get the remembering and telling over with as soon as possible. “The money-lenders were ready to make trouble for us again. We didn’t think they’d do anything as serious as the last time. The press was following our progress and had reported the arson in many newspapers. Yesterday we were out at the wholesaler’s. Ordering seed for next year. But Navjeet had stayed behind. He was working on the accounts. When we returned he was lying unconscious. On the floor. His face and head were bleeding badly. We carried him to the makeshift clinic in the village – there is no hospital. The doctor said there was severe internal damage – massive head injuries – a few hours later he was dead.”
There was silence again. Perhaps when we were together later, sharing our old room again, Percy would talk to me. But he lay on his bed in the darkness, wide awake, staring silently at the ceiling, tracing its old familiar cracks as I was, by the hints of streetlights straying through the worn curtains. Was there nothing to say? There had to be something I could do to help.
Strangely enough, it was Jamshed who provided this something the next day.
When he arrived in the evening, he presented Mummy wit
h a box of chocolates and some cheese triangles. She asked him how he’d been enjoying his trip so far. He replied, true to form, “Oh Auntie, I’m tired of this place, really. The dust and heat and crowds – I’ve had enough of it.” And Mummy nodded sympathetically.
Soon, the moment Percy had been dreading was at hand. Mummy asked him to narrate, for Jamshed’s benefit, the events which had brought him home so suddenly. But Percy just shook his head, so she told the story herself.
When she finished, we shifted uneasily. What was next? But Jamshed could not contain himself. He heaved the sigh of the worldly-wise: “I told you from the beginning, all this was a waste of time and nothing would come of it, remember? Every time we met we would talk about it, and you used to make fun of me wanting to go abroad. But I still think the best thing for you is to move to the States. There is so much you could achieve there. There, if you are good at something, you are appreciated, and you get ahead. Not like here, where everything is controlled by uncle-auntie, and ….”
When Jamshed concluded his harangue, Percy calmly turned to Mummy and said in his quiet voice, “Could we have dinner right away? I have to meet my friends at eight o’clock. To decide our next move in the village!”
Five days later I was back in Toronto. I unpacked my suitcases, which were quite flat on the return trip and had not required the extra leather straps. I put my things away and displayed in the apartment the little knick-knacks bought in handicraft places and the Cottage Industries store.
Gradually, I discovered I’d brought back with me my entire burden of riddles and puzzles, unsolved. The whole sorry package was there, not lightened at all. The epiphany would have to wait for another time, another trip.
I mused, I gave way to whimsy: I Tiresias, throbbing between two lives, humbled by the ambiguities and dichotomies confronting me…
I thought of Jamshed and his adamant refusal to enjoy his trips to India, his way of seeing the worst in everything. Was he, too, waiting for some epiphany and growing impatient because, without it, life in America was bewildering? Perhaps the contempt and disdain which he shed was only his way of lightening his own load.
That Christmas, I received a card from Jamshed. The Christmas seal, postage stamp, address label were all neatly and correctly in place upon the envelope, like everything else about his surface existence. I put it down without opening it, wondering if this innocuous outer shell concealed more of his confusion, disdain, arrogance.
Later, I walked out of the apartment and down the hallway, and dropped the envelope down the chute of the garbage incinerator.
Exercisers
If you don’t want to take our word for it,” said Jehangir Bulsara’s parents to him, “that’s fine. Ask Bhagwan Baba. Let him decide, with his holy wisdom, that the girl is unsuitable for you.”
That was last week. Now the day of the journey was here; Mr. and Mrs. Bulsara, with Jehangir, were bound for Bhagwan Baba’s dwelling place in the suburbs. From outside the gates of Firozsha Baag they took the bus to Bombay Central Station, and boarded the Sunday morning local.
Such guidance-seeking train journeys were customary for the parents, but this one was solely for Jehangir’s benefit. “Your entire life’s happiness is at stake,” they had insisted. “When Bhagwan Baba speaks your eyes will open, all will become clear.”
At first, Jehangir had refused to go. But: “You had double pneumonia when you were eight,” Father had reminded him, “and even the doctor was despairing. I came to Bhagwan Baba and your health returned.”
And Mother added, “After Father lost his job, who do you think helped, his friends, our relatives, who? Bhagwan Baba, and we have enough to eat and wear, thanks to him.”
Thus it went, although the examples were dredged with difficulty out of the past. Due to the passage of time they had relinquished the greater part of their preternatural lustre, and appeared in a disappointingly mundane light. But when Jehangir was younger, he used to think it wonderful that there was a Baba who aided his mother and father with blessings and advice and kind words. Life was hard, always full of want and worry, and assistance from any quarter was welcome. The little boy who used to sit on the steps of C Block to watch the others at play, and who used to spend Sunday mornings with Dr. Mody and his stamps, would ask God every night to help his father and mother.
The boy was now nineteen and in his third year at university, but he still carried the distinct memories of poverty and anxiety, memories of envelopes labelled Rent, School Fees, Ration, Kerosene, Light, and Water, envelopes which were forever examined and shuffled and re-examined because there was never enough money in them (and never would be), and were worn ragged and tattered along the edges due to such constant handling and scrutinizing, as if the shuffling and sorting and re-examining would lead to some discovery that would make the money last longer.
So in the end Jehangir agreed to consult the holy man of the suburbs and let him exercise his tenuous infallibility. He looked out of the train window. What he had not realized, till the moment of boarding, was the full baseness of it all. It struck suddenly, in the pit of his stomach, like nausea. Cringing inwardly, he wondered what she would say if she knew about the act of betrayal he was shortly to perpetrate. Probably despise him forever, and he would deserve it.
The suburban local was at the outskirts of Bombay; they would arrive at their destination in forty-five minutes. The “17 Standees Allowed” by the scratched and peeling sign had already been exceeded by the crush of Sunday morning commuters, but not to the extent of a weekday train: as yet, there were no roof-riders or window-clingers. In the sky the sun was higher than when the train left Bombay Central. The heat began to strengthen rapidly now, seeming to feed on itself, growing more oppressive with every breath. From metal straps hung the standees, listless, upraised arms revealing identical damp patches under sleeves of shirts and blouses. Overhead, the fans turned ineffectively, whirring and rattling, their blades labouring with feeble rotations, trying to chop the air thick with heat and odour, scattering it around uselessly in the compartment.
In fitful sleep his parents leaned against each other. They swayed as one with the train’s motion, on the wooden bench that constituted third-class seats. The bench, and the compartment in general, was randomly adorned with red stains of paan: the oral effluences of past passengers, relics of journeys done and gone. Time and dust had done their work, too, aging and dulling the tobacco-betel-nut juices to varying degrees of redness.
Mother held a brown paper bag in her lap. It contained three oranges and three bananas for Bhagwan Baba. Offerings were not compulsory but people brought gifts out of gratitude, she had explained to Jehangir: “And Bhagwan Baba usually gives back half after blessing it. Very rich people bring expensive gifts, boxes of almonds and pistachios, large cartons of mithat, whole baskets of prime alphonso mango, sometimes even jewellery. But the beautiful thing is, he does no more for them than he does for the poorest. It is one of the signs of his saintliness.”
All in the compartment were now asleep or trying to attain that envious state. Even the ones hanging from the straps like drowsy trapeze artists, lost in a swaying, somnolent exercise. Occasionally a new set of people entered when the train stopped. They were noisy and fidgety at first. But the contagion of lethargy quickly subdued them. They fell silent under the spell of the whirring fans which swivelled jerkily from side to side. With a nervous tic, twitching like victims of a heat-induced malady.
Sleep was one way to escape the discomfort; Jehangir shut his eyes to see if he could. He ceased bracing himself against the movement of the train, allowed the head and shoulders to droop forward to sway, and let his whole body sway with the train, unresisting. Like his parents’ opposite him, his movement became one with the movement of the compartment. Rolling to and fro, swaying side to side, as the train decreed. Surrendering to the torridity of the air and the hypnotic drone of the fans, the close click-click of the standees’ metal straps and the seemingly remote clackety-
clack of the rails, he was ready to cross over from the edge of torpor into slumber, succumbing slowly to the swaying, swaying slowly.
The train stopped, and Jehangir straightened with a start. Did I really fall asleep? He anxiously scanned the platform for the station’s name. No, this was not the one. The compartment lurched into motion. The train resumed its journey, and the possibility of sleep was now crowded out by thoughts of Bhagwan Baba, his parents, and her; but mainly of her.
She was the first girl he had ever gone out with.
Jehangir’s school years had been devoid of girls. His parents could not afford the exorbitant fees which, for some peculiar reason, were common to all coeducational high schools, and from whence issued rumours, periodically, about students being “dismissed for attempting sexual intercourse on school property.” The rumours, vicariously relished and savoured when they reached the boys’ schools, fuelled and stoked high the envy and frustration rife within those walls. Their occupants had a heavy study load. Besides the regular subjects, they learned to forgo things taken for granted by their wealthy counterparts in coeducational schools – things such as music lessons, camping trips, and guided tours to Jammu and Kashmir. But they discovered ways to make up for it. They learned how to use their eyes to undress their female teacher and gaze longingly at the outline of her bra, drop erasers or pencils and linger at floor level to retrieve them while she sat at her desk on an elevated platform (the days when she wore a sari were barren, black days), and carry home unforgettable images of flowery panties.
These pursuits went a long way in honing imaginations and developing agility and suppleness in tight places. Unfortunately, the supply of female teachers dwindled drastically in the higher grades, when their need was greatest. But the students believed that within the egalitarianism of university life all wrongs would be righted, and continued to believe until they arrived, bright-eyed and optimistic despite their awkwardness, to discover their faith had been groundless.
Tales From Firozsha Baag Page 20
