Son, 1961

I

Dad came back, unscathed I must say, loaded with a pair of jeans for me, tops and an expensive skirt for Feroza and, of course, chocolates. It was just a day before Karl landed up. Karl who? Son of Behram, the other half of Mom’s family. He introduced himself—even Mom never had any contact with this branch of the family tree. We gaped. Mom didn’t know where to look, and tried hard to keep her composure. Dad was there off-loading his booty from London. He was the one who got up and tried to put him at his ease, brought out a plate of almonds and cashew and placed it before him. And, of course, he brought out glasses and ice and whiskey. I noticed the forelock drooping on Karl’s forehead and his sparrow-brown eyes. Must be in his late fifties, I wondered, and still handsome. Mom started asking how he managed to locate us. It took the poor fellow ten minutes to explain. Thank god she didn’t ask him what brought you here.

‘You have sisters as well, haven’t you?’

Karl nodded.

‘Have you come to Bombay looking for a match?’ Both Dad and I felt uneasy at this line of questioning. Karl laughed. They are close to fifty now, he answered. We all are. I came looking for our lost family.

‘What family?’ asked mother, putting on her most innocent expression.

I broke in for no particular reason. ‘You are cousins, aren’t you? I am not sure if Mom is your aunt, Karl, or you her uncle.’

‘We are second or maybe third cousins. I have drawn a family tree.’

He was fishing out a paper from his pocket but mother stopped him with an imperious wave of her hand.

‘Let me come straight to the point. Why should we let this chasm between the two branches persist? Fissures can be filled in.’

Mother seemed to think otherwise. ‘What family? We are strangers. You have perhaps heard of us, but never seen us. I believe you have two sisters and they have married there. I don’t even know if they have married Parsees or people there. (She waved her hand vaguely.) And if they have married there, I wouldn’t know if they married whites or negroes.’

I must give it to her. Mom could be unpleasant when she wanted.

‘They’ve married Americans, white, if you must know. So have I. My wife’s name is Amanda.’

Mom was not done. ‘The two branches, as you called them, have forgotten each other. No one ever invited us to your wedding or the weddings of your sisters. We are strangers.’

‘Why must we remain strangers? Parsees are just a handful. So why are we happy keeping to ourselves?’

‘Is your father alive?’ Mom could be abrupt. Even Dad said, ‘Zarine!’

‘Very much so, though he is past ninety.’

‘Bhaijun theek chai?’

Karl couldn’t understand. Dad translated, giving a dirty look to Mama, ‘She is asking if he is all there,’ and he tapped his forehead.

‘Very much so, mind sharp as a Gillette blade. So is the memory; remembers Medhar and the salty creek. In his dreams, he mumbles in your language, which I can’t understand.’

Mom rolled her eyes when Karl dubbed Gujarati as ‘your language’.

Dad now intervened and, over whiskey, we drifted into small talk. What exactly Karl was doing, where he lived, things like that. Feroza returned from her clinic and refused to shake hands with Karl till she had washed. Then she went for a shower, and amazingly returned in a few minutes. ‘I didn’t want to miss any of it,’ she said to me at night in bed, once she had got a hang of what was happening.

Dad said to Karl, ‘Can I take you out for dinner?’

‘Thanks, but not today, if you don’t mind.’

‘Name the day,’ said Dad.

‘Why not here at home?’ he answered.

That settled it, I didn’t see any signs of disapproval on Mom’s face. ‘Come early,’ she said to Karl.

After Karl left, Feroza pitched into Mama. ‘Why don’t you want to meet him?’

‘I never said I won’t!’

Mom was offended or pretended to be. Feroza was not to be deterred. ‘It’s the one chance you have of reconciling.’

‘They have to “reconcile”, Feroza. You won’t understand.’

‘Why can’t we understand?’ I asked.

‘Because you don’t know a thing about what happened.Behram’s father—the letters he wrote. And Behram himself is no angel. He carried his father’s venom in him. You don’t know these people.’

Dad had not turned up by the time Karl came again. Nor had Feroza, who always kept late hours at the clinic.

After a few preliminaries, mother said, ‘I wish you had come just a few years earlier when my mother and aunt were alive.’

Karl, poor fellow, had nothing to say. But mother put him at his ease. I had not noticed till then how she could change her moods and her masks. Mum talked of Grandma Mehar and her aunt, Mamai, and her grandmother, Manizeh, the one who walked out after her husband, Neville, couldn’t defend her enough against the wild charges made by his brother, Navroz. Mum on her nostalgia trip was mellowness personified. Dad came in and the conversation turned to politics and events in the courts. Mum laid out an elaborate dinner, not just dhansak but also baked fish, Russian salad with heaps of mayonnaise and the plate ringed with sliced hardboiled eggs. The table too was well-laid, with her old cutlery her parents had left her, and serviettes in silver rings. I noticed Feroza rolling her eyes seeing all this. As Karl thanked her profusely, mother told him they needed another meeting. He was a bit surprised.

‘I leave in another two days and have many things to tie up.’

But mother was insistent. ‘Well then, I’ll peep in for a few minutes—has to be in the morning.’

Next morning turned out to be different. I was not going to miss the encounter for anything. Mother started by asking how Karl’s father was.

‘I thought we had been over this already. He is over ninety, but no sign of kicking the bucket. He’s slightly wonky though,’ he grinned and rotated his forefinger round his temple.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, to start with, he keeps about six dogs and spends his day looking after them. He has a bulldog, too, which killed one of his pets the other day.’

‘Does he write any letters?’

‘Letters? I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

I noticed mother had that up-to-no-good look upon her face.

‘So you haven’t heard of the letters?’ persisted mother.

‘What letters? It’s not love letters you’re hinting at?’ Karl, he had all my sympathies at that moment, was befuddled a bit.

‘I am talking of hate letters, Mr Karl Medhora.’

Even I was stunned, leave alone the brown-eyed relative from Texas, with the swatch of hair curling around his forehead.

‘Hate letters, did you say?’

Mum was ready. She brought out a box, overturned it and out tumbled yellowing news clippings, mostly in Gujarati, culled out of papers like the Bombay Samachar and Jam-e-Jamshed.

‘They are in Gujarati. An American won’t be able to read them.’

She picked up a clipping seemingly at random. There’s this one which carries the name Navroz Dubash. She read parts of it, a diatribe against so-called ‘modern flirtatious’ Parsee women playing bridge. ‘That was aimed at Grandma Manizeh, if you please. She left home and hearth and took sanctuary at Shirdi because of this campaign. The editors had no idea that a particular lady was being targeted. There was another letter which claimed that General Dyer was in love with her, but she fell for a Sikh who was very much there in the Bagh at Amritsar, and so, the General ordered his troops to fire with their machine guns. This letter didn’t find a place in the letters column and so your grandfather posted it to his brother, my Grandpa, Neville. Then, your father changed the family name to Medhora. And here’s a letter which talks of “whist-playing whores”. It is these letters I am talking about, Karl.’

There was about ten minutes of silence after this. Then mother said, ‘Your people were not vicious till the market let him down and they lost all their money. Your side was supposed to be the wealthier branch. Your father made good in Medhar, of all places, but the climbdown to a village caught in the salt lands and living side by side with fisherfolk got to him. America must have made him a different man, America and money.’

Karl got up. ‘I’ve nothing to say. But Dad has very carefully kept photographs of your side of the family, as you choose to call it. Manizeh is very much there and so are Mehar Aunt and Mamai. You are there as a babe in a pram with “Z” marked under it. I have seen my father browse over that album rather nostalgically.’

II

Fry your eggs—eat them; boil your coffee—drink it; polish your shoes—wear them; walk to the bus—clamber in—that’s what I call life without event, and we had a good six months of it, this uneventfulness or eventlessness.

When nothing eventful happens, said Grandma once, know that the times are meditating. If you go by that, the times sat cross-legged, in deep meditation, after Karl left. Nothing much occurred in the next six months as far as he was concerned, except for a call from him once, the formal kind. Nothing happens in most lives in six months. I sometimes feel that there are surely people who go through their entire lives without an ‘event’. If I were to speculate, for a zamindar of old, a real patriarch, getting another mistress (someone picked up from among the ‘lower’ castes) would be an event. ‘Patriarchal’ is gonna become a dirty word one day, mind you. Among our trading classes, the Gargs and Goels and Bhatias a wife dying in childbirth could, I suppose, be counted as an event and, of course, a tragedy. The real tragedy is gonna come later, pal, the second wife would come without a dowry; second-hand husband after all!

Then events took over. It was a letter from him, Behram Medhora, in a slanting tremulous scrawl, which I and Feroza got to recognize, for another letter and another would turn up. This one had a sliver of sellotape on the edge where the flap is pasted. I don’t like envelopes—have always feared getting one under some lawyer firm’s logo reading, ‘In the matter of Mr Saam Bharucha and Mrs Zarine Bharucha.’ Mother left the letter on the table after quietly going through it. It read:

Dear Zarine,

My memory is a bit wooly now and I am not sure if we have ever met. Today, I am not even sure if I am your cousin or your uncle—the latter more likely. We could have met at a wedding or two, or a navjote in Bombay somewhere. My memory is a bit fuzzy now, as I just said. Karl has met you, he told me and you all received him very well. Karl is a good boy, even though he has married an American. But I have nothing against Amanda, his wife. She has been very civil, if not caring, but they want to live alone.

I repeat Amanda has never been nasty unlike my sons-in-law, one of whom, Joe Something or the other—will recall his name in a jiffy—found my lighting a lamp daily in front of my wife’s photograph a ‘heathen practice’. Homai Aunty’s photograph—in slightly smudged sepia—is also on that little table—wonder if you recall her. It is a long time since our families—I should say family—met.

I have had two lives—wrongly put, I know—one in Navsari and that village Medhar, not forgetting the salty creek, and the other here in Austin. Neither has treated me badly, nor treated me well, and I have no idea which of these two segments was ill-spent. That is a sad admission to make when one is in his nineties and reaching the end. But I can’t forgive Medhar—the fishermen and the salt creek, the general way we lived because of our reduced means, that cost me my father’s sanity. Yet, I remember the dynamo-worked mill and the electricity it churned out for two hours a day.

I sure am glad that Karl came and met you. I wanted to tell you that he took that trip to Bombay just to find you people. The young have initiative. I also had to show some. Hence this letter.

Lately, I have developed a ‘seclusive’ nature, by which I mean I keep to myself. It is seclusion by circumstance. You stay alone so you keep to yourself—what is so heroic about that? I am not a monk in the mountains living in a cave or grotto. Am a bit grubby and dog-eared, like an old book in which weevil has burrowed into, except that there is nothing much in the book now; the cheap print has faded away.

I would like to invite you to Austin. It’s a good city and the people very friendly, except that now and then, I get mistaken for a Latino, a Mexican, if you please. That is not a compliment to my Persian nose. I’ve nothing against Mexicans, they are simpler than the others. You could have a nice time here. I’ll take you to that Texan memorial at Alamo in San Antonio.

My cardiac consultant told Karl the other day ‘to keep me happy’. Karl has no idea what that means. But I know—means I am on my last legs—tattered heart muscles just hanging on. I get breathless, at times. I will await your reply—and your arrival here.

Sincerely,

Behram

Mother wanted to go. I was appalled, so was Dad. We never got to know what she wrote back, but she did let out that she had a close friend in Austin. It was Dr Nazneen and her husband, Hoshang Vajifdar. I imagined Hoshang Vajifdar to be pot-bellied and whiskery and dressed in a suit. Then I realized Americans don’t wear suits and a creased T-shirt and and equally rumpled jeans are considered the height of fashion there. Nazneen was from Dadar and I remember had visited us some years back. Of course, Mom was not going to stay with that long-lost uncle of hers. ‘Whatever made you think of that, Rohinton?’ she asked indignantly.

For a month, there was a letter every week from the man. Mom was getting insistent now. Dad became apoplectic, ‘You want to resuscitate some slump-shouldered bum from the grave?’ he asked with tactless acerbity.

‘Don’t say that, Saam. He is well and alive. I want to go and see him. Want to know how he looks like, what it feels like talking to him.’

‘His father spewed venom against you all. If he feels contrite, it’s his job to come here.’

‘His son came, Saam, and he dissembled, saying he was on a business trip, when he had actually come just to find us.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do I know? Haven’t you read the letter? You’ve become mistrustful. You have to believe in the mandala, and its concentrics.’

‘Mandala?’ asked Dad, but then he clammed up. Dad avoided anything that smacked of swami-talk: mandala, rebirth, transcendence, transmigration.

Feroza and I walked Dad to his car. ‘What is she going to find in that old cave?’ Dad asked.

‘Old cave?’

‘The cave of the past, hoary with the grey hair of years. Something is screening her eyes from the obvious.’

I had never seen Dad so rattled before. ‘You are trying to join a sundered tribe,’ he had told Mom furiously in the living room. Feroza put in her tuppenceworth.

‘The whole family has gone out of the fold. They are no longer Zoroastrians, and their children will not be Zoroastrians.’

Dad’s eyebrows slanted upwards in surprise. I am sure he had no idea how solidly religious Feroza had turned after Boman’s death.

Dad was still seething. ‘All that talk about the mandala comes from Shirdi. A branch of a family tree gets lopped off by a dust storm; deservedly, if you ask me. When fortune smiles, we never seem to thank her.’

I got a bit befuddled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Fortune partitioned her family. Now she has gone looking for the other half.’

‘She hasn’t left,’ I said defensively.

‘You don’t know your mother. She’ll go.’

Mother left. She flew to London and took a flight from there.

Odd things stay in your memory. That Saturday morning the electric kettle had conked out and I was boiling the water over the gas range when the phone rang. It was Mr Hoshang Vajifdar. He introduced himself and then said, ‘I am sorry, but I have some bad news to give you.’ His voice was solemn, as if announcing that the Titanic had gone down. I was worried about the kettle steaming away on the fire.

‘I am listening.’

‘Am I talking to Mr Rohinton Bharucha?’

‘You are, sir.’

‘These things happen, Rohinton, these unexpected mishaps.’

‘Mishap? What mishap?’

‘As I said these mishaps occur, they are sad, very sad nonetheless.’

‘What mishap?’ I repeated, a bit of steel in my voice.

‘I am giving the phone to Mr Medhora, Karl Medhora.’

(Hope his pop hasn’t kicked the bucket, I thought.)

Karl came on the line. Hello, hello, he started. Yes, I am listening, I replied. Hello, hello, he said again and I got worried seriously now. The fellow was mustering up courage to say something.

‘A terrible thing has happened … I don’t know what to say.’

‘Terrible thing? What? Will someone please spill the beans?’

There was silence from their end. My hand shook a bit and Feroza took the phone from me. I ran and switched off the gas. Feroza said very calmly, ‘What has happened Karl? Tell us.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say it, damn it, whatever it is.’

‘I am terribly sorry, but there has been an accident, Feroza. Please tell Saam and Rohinton that I am very sorry.’

By now I was suspecting the worst. I just took a chair and sat down.

‘We were coming on the freeway—I mean the Vajifdars were—I was in my car, when someone came on a pick-up, ran a red light and hit us, I mean them, Vajifdar’s car. I was in my car.’

‘What has happened to Mummy? How is she?’

‘I am very sorry.’

Dad, Feroza and I packed our bags and left in a hurry and attended the funeral rites. A priest (we call him a mobed) came from Houston and read the prayers sonorously enough for me, though not coming up to Feroza’s standards.

That was not all—never is. Dad’s mind seemed fixed on vengeance. He was thinking in terms of the Indian law, specifically of Section 304(a) of the Indian Penal Code, death through culpable negligence. He pursued the matter, stalked both the pick-up driver and the US law, but nemesis is not written into each one’s fate. It turned out that the long-haired driver of the pick up was a volunteer fireman who was answering a heart attack call. Nothing could happen to him. Which was that river where the mother of Achilles dipped him in? This guy didn’t even have a vulnerable heel. It was a wonder the Texan police didn’t give him a medal for running a red light.

Dad should have been a big-game hunter. There was an obstinate jut to his jaw. He kept up with his enquiries. Did someone really have a heart attack? Or is the driver faking the whole thing after blazing through a red light? Who was the guy who had the heart attack, in any case? A dozen phone calls later he got to the bottom of it. It turned out to be Medhora, Behram Medhora, who had the attack. The pick-up driven by the long-haired driver had been in no condition to reach him after the accident. But neighbours had rushed him to a hospital and he survived. Dad refused to meet him, but Feroza and I paid our respects to the old man, even as he clucked his regret at Mom’s accident. I told Feroza I didn’t know why I felt guilty calling on the old man. She said we did the right thing. Form has to be kept.