Son, 1953

I

I had a Parsee girl in class. Nothing unusual—but, in Kanpur, it was. Kanpur and Benares wouldn’t know Parsees from polyester, if you ask me. Allahabad would, though, all because of that Feroze Gandhi, whom now the Jan Sangh wants to brand as Muslim. If you are a micro-community, the vibes are quite different when you run into a fellow crab-eater. It’s not that you have to break into Gujarati. In fact, you avoid the lingo. You turn bloody self-conscious—I sure did. If I consciously broke into ‘kem cho mai’ and that kinda stuff, she might actually think I was trying to get fresh, you never know with girls. I kept studiously to Anglo-Saxon, finest fucking language mankind ever invented. Or, for all you know, womankind may have invented language—must ask some tongue-twisting, vowel-vowing, consonant-contorting professor of linguistics some sad day.

Feroza had a gravelly voice, but you hardly got to hear the gravel, for she spoke in undertones, unless she became passionately indignant over something. As I was to discover later, her talk could suddenly speed up when she came out with a spurt of candour. Those were her ‘confessional’ moments, when she revealed a part of herself. She had shoulder-length hair, which seemed to have the merest touch of brown, if the light fell on it. I kept aloof from her to start with—didn’t want to give her ideas. Self-respect and keeping girls at the other end of a barge pole go together, in case you’re looking for my philosophy, pal. There were at least two better-looking girls in class, one was Salma and the other Meenakshi. Salma was out—she was a Pathani, my classmates told me. She was tall and beautiful in an aggressive Pathani way. But each of her male relatives carried a firearm made in the Darra. I didn’t know what Darras were, till I was told they were the badlands on the Afghan border. That would be even beyond Murree, I said to myself. Pal, you’ll be back to Gora Gully and the sand-rocking types if you meddle with her, I said to myself.

I had promised myself, I’d concentrate on work. A senior had told me, before I left Bombay for Kanpur, to study hard. ‘No one becomes a doctor by scratching his you know what.’ I had guessed what—sharp fellow, me. I had decided to slog hard on my books, and did. Mum was not too well off for about two years—she had stopped taking money from Dad, much as he wanted to pay and assuage his guilt. He was paying for me though—college, travel, the works. In fact, he gave me so much that I often helped Mum out. I even bought her a sari on her birthday. (She cried when I gave it to her.) Actually, there was a hitch in my Grandpa’s will. He had foolishly left most of his stuff to my parents jointly—never occurred to the old nut that hubby and wife can split some day when the male primate decides to go for white flesh, if ya knows what I means. But to his credit, I must say that Dad had signed off any claim to his father-in-law’s estate.

Meenakshi wore a sari once a week or so to college. She was in Kolhapuri chappals most of the time. She wore her lipstick so lightly that you were not sure if she had applied it at all. My classmates would be talking about it. They were even intrigued by her bindi. She shouldn’t be wearing it, said Damodar Pande, who had descended from the hills to try his hand at medicine. He had a fleshy, cherubic face and when he smiled, it broke into a few pieces. Not that he smiled too often. He was a sedate chap, seldom ruffled, but when he became exuberant, usually after a few drinks, he became uncontrollable. Only married women are entitled to the bindi, he said. Why don’t you try to suck up to her, I asked him. He didn’t know the phrase. Get thick with her, yaar. What, I am a Pahadi, you want me to get hooked to a plains woman! Plain woman? I asked, she’s not plain. I meant woman from the plains, he answered.

‘She has such a winsome smile, yaar. Take her out for a meal. And such simple beauty, you won’t find easily.’

He agreed with the simple beauty bit, but not the smile. Have seen better smiles than this. What is your definition of a good smile, Rohan? He often called me Rohan, couldn’t get used to Rohinton, though most people here compromised at Rohin. It should light up your heart, I said. What should? The smile, you idiot. Yes, yes, good definition. Damn good. But he was timid, couldn’t get anywhere near Meenakshi or her bindi, her simple sari or her Kolhapuri chappals. Not for the first year, that is. But he told me one day that when Meenakshi twirled her braids around her slender fingers, it was quite a sight. The days she wore a bun, I would condole with him. ‘Bad luck, yaar’. What bad luck? ‘She didn’t have her braids dangling away. Didn’t spin them round her delicate fingers.’

If I was avoiding Feroza, she too didn’t make any effort to get close. One day she complained that her diva, that cup of oil with a floating wick which we Parsees light daily, was causing trouble. What trouble, I asked. Has your roommate objected?

No, the ceiling has got blackened and the warden objected.

What oil are you using?

She was using ghee. ‘That must be dalda, the vegetable ghee, finest blocker of arteries the human heart has ever known. In cricketing terms, one would liken it to the stonewaller, Trevor Bailey.’ She burst out laughing. I could actually imagine that thin tendril of a cotton wick emitting a thick plume of smoke. Don’t use the damned thing, I told her. Use oil, the best you can get. You’ll be okay. Or just forget the diva, oil and wick.

‘You don’t think,’ and her voice trailed off. What don’t I think, I asked. She shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ and walked off. A few days later, I cornered her.

‘Come on Feroza, you stopped midway through a sentence that day. What stopped you from saying what you wanted to?’

‘It was nothing. Silly idea.’ She was shaking her head like she did earlier. Come out with it, I persisted. She almost turned coy.

‘You know, Rohinton, I am not happy in the hostel. Six months and I have had it up to here. The food doesn’t suit me and I need a separate bathroom. That’s the least you expect, damn it. I was walking past your apartment the other day and was told by my roommate Sushila that you had a room vacant on the ground floor. For a moment that day I thought I could move in there. But later I thought better of it.’

‘Good you changed your mind, Feroza. This is Kanpur not bloody Bombay.’ (I was rather free with my bloodies, reserving my French strictly for male company.) ‘Nothing will probably happen to you, except a plummeting reputation. But Dam and I will be thrown out—fucked, fired and finished, sorry for the French.’

‘Rohinton, you deserve a kick on your backside, that’s where.’ She gave me a dirty look but an instant later smiled, the kind that lit up her face and mine as well. Reflected effulgence, what?

The parting shot was mine, though. ‘Frankly though, we wouldn’t mind snaring you in there.’

‘Wouldn’t mind?’

Dam, that’s what I called Damodar Pande—though he didn’t like it, but had to lump it—and I had moved into a small house, fairly old but not decrepit. Actually, we were getting a better apartment than the place we moved in to. But there was no phone in the apartment, and to get one would have taken us years. Socialist India didn’t believe in phones, cooking gas, even scooters, and the only car it believed in was Birla’s Ambassador. The college told us that we had to be on call—a phone was a must. The first floor had two decent bedrooms with a balcony overlooking a patch of scruffy lawn. Above us was a barsati with wrought-iron stairs leading up to it. The stairs were for the sweepress, we were told by the landlord, named Jai Chandra, though I chose to call him Mr Jai Ramji ki, till Dam snubbed me and said Jai Ramji ki was a greeting and not a bloody name. (That was the one occasion he used the blood-smeared word. Too damned straight-laced, this Almora-born Dam.) When we went up to the barsati, we could peep into the courtyard behind us, or rather on our backside, as three-fourths of India puts it so felicitously. The ground floor was damp and the flooring chipped, a bit of a crumble if you ask me. When you walked over it, you heard a serrating noise, as if the tiles were intent on grinding the loose grit underneath. Or the grit was protesting. Due to some indulgence, the rooms had wire gauze doors through which the afternoon light slithered in.

The panes were dirty and though we had them washed, they still had a smudged opaque look about them. A thunderstorm saw to it that a few of the panes were smashed. Dam got the lot replaced with really good glass. Suddenly, the reflections of passing cars at night started invading the house. With it, the dust seemed to come in, and also the noise. I also saw life as lived in Kanpur—sadhus moving to the sangam in Allahabad, pilgrims carrying Ganga jal in those two pots slung over a pole carried on a shoulder (they’d be moving towards the Jumna or the Sarju), Holi being played with colour and oil and even dirt, Muharram processions and their tazias with the horse, Duldul, bringing the rear. It seemed that the new glass on the windows had brought the street into our house.There was this business of food. The walls in the kitchen were mouldy. We ate at dhabas for a week. The food was tasty alright, but too oily. We started going to the hostel for almost a month to eat there. People thought we were nuts. You get out of the hostel so that you can eat better. You guys have moved out and still eat here.

This is not what we moved out for, we both agreed. The hunt was on to find a cook. Jai Ramji ki had deflected a mehri towards us, called Bina, mid-forties, tall and straight-backed, nothing servile about her bearing. I asked Dam what a mehri meant. Someone who cleans utensils, Rohan what else? But Dam we haven’t got any frigging utensils, as you call them. Tell me then, what shall I call them! If we eat out, Dam, we don’t need ‘utensils’. And we don’t need utensils, if we don’t have a cook.

One day Bina said, ‘Kya git pit kar rahe ho sahib?’ That was a reference to our English. ‘You quarrel daily, when I come.’

‘Bina we are looking for a cook,’ said Damodar, ‘someone who can come for an hour or two, make some vegetable and dal and rotis and quit.’

‘And what about meat?’ I blurted. ‘I want meat, samjha tum Bina?’

‘Main jo hun. I can cook. And I am very clean.’ She showed us her hands. The first thing she did entering our ‘cottage’ was to rub her hands with a lifeboy soap we had provided her. Dam and I looked at each other. Bina was hired for cooking as well.

‘Why did you want someone who could quit the house quickly?’ she asked.

‘Because, Bina we didn’t want to give her the keys.’

She smiled. ‘If I keep the keys, no itraz, no objection? Chalega?’ Yes, chalega, we said in unison. We must give her money to buy the bajaar, I told Dam. ‘You want to buy the whole dashed bazaar, is it?’ he asked, his look incredulous. ‘And it is not bajaar but bazaar.’ I tried to take care not to be ticked off on the zee sounds again.

‘Baba, I am talking of meat and vegetables, lentils, flour, rice and so on. In Bombay we call all that by one name “bajaar”.’

We took Bina in a rickshaw with us to the bazaar, and got dieseled on the way, trailing a pick-up emitting foul smoke. We then got fumigated by two loud-clattering Lambrettas. She heard us growling and giggled. Phat-phatias are worse, she told us, referring to the three-wheelers. When she saw the vessels we were paying for, her face lit up. She would be using things she couldn’t at home. Frying pan, deghchis, a deep saucepan for deep-frying—occurred to me for the first time that pakoras were profound artefacts. We were delighted to see Bina delighted.

Where’s your house, Bina?

She laughed. No house, it is a jhompadi.

How old are you?

Chalees, pachaas, age doesn’t matter, babu.

What, you see no difference between forty and fifty, Bina?

Babu, age is not chandan stamped on your Brahmin forehead.

‘I am not a Brahmin, he is.’

She bent and touched Damodar Pande’s feet. ‘And babu, we don’t have salgirah (birthday) like you people have. Why celebrate a bad day?’

Bad day, Bina? Good day, surely. I ruminated on that chandan bit for a while. ‘These sandal-paste marks on foreheads of pujaris and pandits, they could be signposts, am I right Damodar? Some poor bugger with a chutiya, that tuft of hair pluming away from a shaved head, may have got knifed for putting four slashes of paste across his miserable forehead, when entitled to just two. Right, Dam?’

‘Wrong as ever, and we Brahmins don’t knife. We are not Khatiks.’

‘Now what or who are the Khatiks? Don’t do this to me, Dam, don’t confuse me with your seven-hundred-and-forty-three castes. I always thought there were just four.’

‘Thank your stars you don’t have a Parsee Manu. Forget about our castes, Rohan, and stick to medicine.’

Medicine? Yes, work can be tough. The first two years were supposed to be pre-clinical. We had to struggle with anatomy, biochemistry and physiology. Gray’s Anatomy and later, Cunningham’s Practical Anatomy, became our Bibles. I braved the dissections as well as anyone else. There were some of us who got quite queasy. (I hid my queasiness.) They called the corpses ‘la-waris’, sounded almost French to me, or Austrian—sounded like La-Paloma. The unclaimed corpse would have a number and half-a-dozen of us would get round it and reach for the dissection box with its blunt scalpels and the sharp ones. I told Feroza, who felt a bit out of sorts though she wouldn’t show it, to look at the poor corpse as an object. It doesn’t have a name, history, a family, and it’s not our fault that the poor fellow is divested of all this.

I am not going to plod through our life here year by year. We felt good in the third year when we could hang the stethoscope around our necks. (Sometimes the ward boys even salaamed when we strode by looking busy, but the matron, Sister Kutty, never looked at us. Beneath her empurpled dignity.) Dr Hamidullah of the bushy moustache and the equally bushy goatee put us through the works. He even wanted us to learn how to take blood pressure, but the matron flatly refused. ‘Too junior,’ she said. For a few Sundays, we were put under the charge of the matron, the formidable Miss Kutty, who had a purple birthmark as big as a potato on her neck, just beneath the jawline. Ashwin Agarwal, earlier my roommate at the hostel, was caught staring at it and got chewed up by her.

‘What are you staring at Mr Agarwal, haven’t you seen a birthmark before?’

Dr Satija, who had witnessed the scene, later told him, ‘Bad form to stare at a lady’s birthmark—or boobs.’

Dr Hamidullah, he was the medical superintendent, made us go through nursing after college hours—taking blood pressure, bandaging, administering injections. (Sister Kutty had forgotten her objections after a year.) Boiling the syringes afterwards was a must. You didn’t throw them away those days. Tapping opaque veins under an opaque epidermis was also no joke. One lady I had to give six semi-brutal pricks with the needle before I found that underground vein—and each time she yelped. What was worse, our frowning matron was standing right behind me all the while, unknown to me. Nurses slithered around in their rubber shoes, silent as snakes. One had to develop a sixth sense to register their presence. In our third year—the year we wound the stetho around our shoulders—we were at times asked to assist in the Casualty Ward. A train had hit a bus at a level-crossing. This kind of duty was something I took to. You had no time to think, or fall asleep, or notice the terrible smells emanating from wounds, and you steeled yourself by habit against whimpers and cries and screams. Wading in this pool of agony, you were armed. And the patients came on a non-stop conveyor belt—accident victims with broken bones and bruises all over their bodies, a child who had fallen from a roof, victims of knives, people purging and vomiting at the same time, burn victims screaming away. You rushed in with what little you could do, fix a drip, check heartbeat and pulse and BP and summon the right doctor, the Ortho, whom we called ‘Sawbones’, or the cardiac guy, junior doctors always. The seniors would only examine them in the wards. This duty came our way mostly at night. I kept a frenetic pace. Damodar was unruffled, calm as ever. Ashwin Agarwal would get terribly nervous if a patient’s erratic pulse shook and jabbered, as he put it once. Once Dam had to calm him down rather than the patient and some members of our batch couldn’t help giggling. Feroza was calm and business-like, as always.

Surprisingly for a Parsee dame, she was conforming—wore salwar-kameez or sari, hardly ever wore a skirt. Jeans, yes, when hardly anyone wore jeans, and certainly not the Kanpuriyas. Now and then on a Sunday, she’d startle people by wearing a men’s shirt with slacks. The Gau Raksha Samiti types, the Gurukul and the Govardhan types, also the Haj and Jama Masjid types, didn’t know where to look. But the shirt would always be full-sleeved, flesh almost never on display.

I was once made to sit with a woman patient who had suffered multiple fractures on her right leg. I was in the Emergency section when she was first brought in—her screams were louder than the siren of the ambulance she was carted in. Amazingly, she was recovering fast after Sawbones, Dr Avdhesh Kumar, had been at work with her. She was now chaffing under the plaster. ‘Take the damn thing off, doctor. I can’t stand the itching.’ She would scratch at the plaster, which covered half her thigh. Each time she talked about her itch, I let out a cheer, ‘You are recovering, Mrs Whoever-she-was. The thing is healing.’ Next time she whimpered, I cried out, ‘You’ve made it! Congratulations!’

Surprisingly, my efforts were not appreciated, and I was told to handle patients with greater empathy. I couldn’t understand it. I knew that in the West they had regular counsellors attached to hospitals. But just sitting there and telling a patient to pipe down, even if it was only once in a while, was no part of my job.

A worse instance was sitting with a man wilting away with bone cancer, till the poor fellow was finally de-boned. It wasn’t a pleasant affair, I can tell you. The worst part of it was he was not told he had cancer and was terribly querulous to start with. Eventually, I told him one day. He immediately calmed down. What was more surprising was that earlier he used to pray a lot and say his beads. From the day I handed him his sentence, he put beads and book aside and with great dignity awaited the call from his maker.

Witnessing our first post-mortem was a trauma. It was a murder case, someone brought in from a village bordering Unnao. The corpse smelt like hell. It outstank even Bombay duck drying in the sun. There was a gandasa wound in the head—first time I heard of a bloody gandasa, a kind of a cleaver very much in fashion with the murder lobby (which also means the political class) in UP. It has a sort of brand or designer status among killer weapons in this benign dozen-murders-per-acre state of Bharat Varsha. An iron ruler was given to me and I had to insert it in the skull of the cadaver to measure how deep it was, the wound, not the skull. It was three inches deep, I remember. ‘Exactly three inches?’ asked the doctor presiding over the proceedings. I had to measure it again. There were six other cuts on the body but the doctor was not interested in flesh wounds, not in their depth I mean, but only in their longitude and latitude, as I phrased it to Feroza later. (She laughed but then grimaced, pretending to disapprove of my levity.) Then the poor fellow was stitched back and handed over to wailing relatives. I asked Damodar what he thought of these autopsies.

‘If you are in a swamp, your hands will get muddy.’ Philosophical as ever. Don’t you give me any of your aphorisms, Dam. We’ll have to use a bottle of Old Spice before we go into a mortuary next time. Damodar just shook his head in dismay. I started terming these autopsies as cadaver introspections. The introspection bit was objected to and substitutes like inspection and survey were suggested. No one seemed to realize that my silly attempts at this uncalled for levity was to beat the unease I felt at these autopsies. Feroza warned me one evening after we came out of the mortuary.

‘You don’t seem to realize that all this is giving you a reputation of being hard-hearted and uncaring.’

‘You know I am not.’

‘I know, but others don’t. I had a chat with Damodar. He thinks the same.’ That was news—two friends discussing me. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do, discuss movies and Waheeda Rehman, for instance, or that obsessively entertaining subject—the socialistic pattern of society?’ I read dismay on her beautiful face.

‘Sometimes I wonder if you are cut out for this Rohinton.’

‘For what?’

‘For medicine, for becoming a doctor. You are just scraping through your exams by the skin of your teeth. I notice your attention wandering in class. Am surprised no professor has noticed it so far. And I see you humming verse and rhymes. You read novels, plays. If there’s a book review, you read it thoroughly, I’ve noticed. Must hear your rhymes one day. Your interests seem to lie elsewhere, Rohinton.’

What is it about women that they can hit the nail right on the head, I caught myself wondering. (I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone that I had been forced against my will to appear in the entrance exam, to begin with.)

A woman was wilting away in private ward No.5. It was a Jain lady. She had everything, lung cancer, kidney failure, diabetes, the works. Something went wrong with the dialysis machine. The whole hospital knew she was in big trouble now. Dr Hamidullah insisted Ashwin Agarwal sit with her. Suddenly, she threw away her supports and became hysterical. Ashwin didn’t know what to do. I was passing along in the corridor, when he shouted for me. Mrs Jain suddenly had this burst of frenetic energy, for a while she was like a mentally disturbed patient, kicking away at everything, forcing the drip out of her arm and lashing away. We called Feroza in. She put her soft, silken hand on her brow. Ashwin had been cooing to her and talking to her as if she was a baby or a loved Pomeranian. Not so Feroza, who conversed with her, woman to woman, gave her no false consolations. All of us have to go someday and the best we can hope for is we go quietly and with dignity. It calmed her. She gave her water to drink. ‘Am I going to die?’ You never know, she answered. She touched her Gita, said a brief prayer and didn’t object when she was put under oxygen again. She died peacefully next morning.

Bina asked for a grindstone one day. I couldn’t believe it. ‘What will you do with a chakki, Bina? Buy flour from the market.’ She didn’t trust the flour—Ram knows what they mix in it. These electric chakkiwallahs are all chors! We didn’t listen to her—though Dam was inclined to. I wrote about this to mother. She found nothing abnormal in Bina’s request. In her father’s house, the grindstone was put to great use and, as children, they ground their wheat and barley and sorghum. Why was I almost scandalized at the request? These were the fifties, not 1990. There were no designer clothes then, no Gucci shoes, no designer belts—not many wore belts. A handloom silk shirt was the acme of fashion. Shark skin was still in vogue, but tapering off. There were no burgers, no high-fives, none of those machines doling out instant tea or coffee in cardboard cups. Tongas or tum-tums, as we called them, were very common, and the only cars were the Fiat, the Ambassador from the Morris Minor stable or the Standard Herald. Dad had purchased a Standard Herald for eighteen thousand rupees. There was no Deutsche Bank or Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank anywhere in our country. We knew of being shanghaied though. No one said things like ‘when push comes to shove’. Thank god there was no TV and hence we were spared their know-all, aggressive, obstreperous anchors. And no one shouted ‘The nation wants to know!’

Talking of mother, she decides to parcel a set of silver salt and pepper cellars. I am as surprised as Damodar, on opening the package. We’ll have silverware on our dining table, exclaims Dam. We go and buy forks and knives, also side plates. No wretched katoris today, says Dam. Bina laughs when she sees it all. ‘Churi kanta! Hey Ram.’ But she had a fair idea what churi kanta were all about and laid the table correctly. We must have western food today. But the only dish I know how to cook is a roast meat—and that would need to be marinated for several hours. We’ll manage that for dinner, says I. Instead, I whipped up omelettes, fried some potatoes and we ate in propah Anglo-Saxon fashion with knife and fork. The Sunday roast at dinner turned out a bit hard on the jaw, but the potatoes were braised just right, and the boiled carrots and beans tasted good after all the oily and spiced dishes we had been used to for months. That particular evening, we had Bina serve us properly from the left, as Damodar taught her. Life was getting better.

Summer was on us real bad, with the hot winds buffeting us and slapping the cloth-covered bamboo blinds hard against the windows. In the hospital, the compounder and the ward boy grumbled because the principal would not allow any khas blinds this year. All that water being splashed on them made the atmosphere muggy and unhealthy, he said. Only private wards had air conditioners and of course the operating theatre. Our seniors missed the herbal fragrance of the wet khas blinds. But I certainly disliked the phrase, khas ki tatti. It was Dam who explained that tatti was a derivative of taat, mat.

We were into our second monsoon in Kanpur, when Bina walked in with her daughter one day. I had barely got up from sleep. It was drizzling, so I dashed down the stairs, opened the door hurriedly and took them in before they got drenched thoroughly. Bina was balancing what looked like a bedroll on her head, and the two of them were carrying a steel trunk between them. It was early morning and a holiday at that—to commemorate Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ call on 9 August. (What is there to celebrate about this day, father Saam Bharucha would say each year the day came round. Had started considering himself quite a political philosopher, after his stint at Junagadh which broke up our family. The Brits turned against us that day and started favouring the Muslim League, he would say. What his ‘us’ meant, I couldn’t fathom. Was he trying to appropriate the Congress or the nation? If only we could have waited the war out without these quit notices, there would have been no Pakistan, he thought. They wouldn’t have butchered the country. Butchered? I, a kid then, had asked. Yes, sliced it up, he said.)

‘What is her age?’ I asked pleasantly, ruffling the hair of her daughter.

‘Nau saal (nine years),’ Bina smiled back.

Dam came out of his room and I felt reassured. The situation needed him. ‘We have left his house,’ she said matter-of-factly and started climbing the wrought-iron stairs to the barsati.

‘That’s locked Bina, let me get the keys,’ I shouted after her.

‘I unlocked it last evening,’ she said, hiding a smile. Pre-planned, was it, this shift? Dam and I looked at each other, without speaking. While she was unpacking from her solitary bag, I made some tea and took it up in two steel glasses which we had purchased for the servant class—electrician, postman, plumber, maid, that kind. She was surprised, folded her hands and thanked me.

‘Has the bounder thrown her out?’ I asked Dam, after closing the door so that she couldn’t hear.

‘I think so; happens all the time.’

We turned out wrong. She had left him. We didn’t put her through a cross-examination, but still, in dribs and drabs, the story had come out by the evening. He had brought another woman in. She thought ek do din ki baat hai, a matter of one or two days. When it went beyond that, she just walked out. Was he drunk when he brought her in? No, he seldom drinks, and he was in his hosh, senses.

‘But you can’t do such things in hosh, Bina.’

‘Who can say anything about males, babuji? Would have been good if he was not in senses. But if you do all this without afeem or sharab, it is worse na?’

‘Did you cook for the other woman?’

‘I had to cook for my daughter na, and for my belly? What to do? She tried to help but I didn’t want her near me. And I didn’t want to speak to her. Became pechida, complicated, you understand, babu? Three days of this, enough. More not go down throat.’

‘Will you go back to him?’

‘No.’

‘Suppose he comes begging?’

‘Even he rubs nose in dust, no, I no go back. Once no, always no, babuji.’

Strong words, I thought. ‘What about your daughter?’

‘She likes her father, but she can’t go there, not with other woman there. She may train her to become a randi. Or she may treat her like servant. Bardasht na hovay sahib—I can’t bear that.’

Damodar told her he will come all right, if not tomorrow, a month, six months later.

‘Why not six years, babuji? Hope I can rest six years away from him.’

We found she had named her daughter Lakshmi. Why Lakshmi? Oh, babuji, we may be poor, but we can name our children as we like, isn’t it? So Bina had named her after the goddess of wealth, after whom entire India runs. If we put goddess Lakshmi at the winning post, we Indians would win in the Olympics. Lakshmi would now wash our clothes, she said. She wasn’t going to live for free. Nothing doing, we shouted. Isn’t she in school?

She left school last year, babuji. No money. We took her back to school, the next day. The headmistress said, ‘But she couldn’t pay for her uniform.’ We paid for books and uniform. Damodar would even coach her now and then and daily asked her, rather sternly, if she had done her homework. He would ask her to repeat her tables. He bought her a chair and a desk. We were almost turning into a family.

One day, I caught the child weeping and overheard her mother telling her firmly, ‘Don’t cry for what is left behind, jo beeth gaya.’ The kid was missing the father, I guessed, and Bina later told me I was right. ‘She is a child, babuji. He was not bad to her. But I won’t send her to him ever. What is the point in remembering a father who brings in a stepmother before the mother is dead?’A wedding procession passed by one evening and Bina, who was in the kitchen, shouted loudly, ‘Who is getting ruined—kiski barbadi ho rahi hai?’A bit uncharacteristic of her, for she was never one to make much of her predicament.

What do we do if the hubby comes, we wondered. We won’t let him in, said Dam passionately. But we might have to send her out. Why, Rohinton? To meet him, dash it! After a while, Damodar came round to my point of view. ‘You are right. She is still his wedded wife. The bastard could go to the police. These two lousy medical students have kidnapped my wife. That’s what he’d say. The police may even take action, raid the house. You never know, this is Kanpur.’ Six months passed before the guy showed his face; good-looking fellow, who really deserved a tall, striking woman like Bina. Damodar went out to collar him. I followed.

‘What do you want?’

‘Milna hai, I have to meet.’

‘Whom?’

‘You know whom.’ Surly guy, would have liked to give him a slap on his face.

‘Suppose she doesn’t want to meet you?’ I asked.

‘She will, biwi hai, is wife.’

I went in muttering ‘son of a pig’. She was standing on the first floor veranda along with Lakshmi. She knew who it was without being able to see his face. He wants to meet you, I said. She shook her head. I noticed she was holding on to her child’s hand.

‘Do you want to meet him or no?’

‘No, babuji. When something is over, it is over.’

We shooed the husband away. He gave us a dirty look and rode off on his bicycle.

I told Dam my brittle conversation with Bina. ‘What is over, Rohinton? She doesn’t realize a thing. She is not divorced, she is not living with another man. He will leave the other woman, when he tires of bedding her. And she’ll go with him, you watch.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

‘I don’t have a clue.’ said Dam.

‘Never mind, we’ll ask her.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rohan. He’s her husband. She’ll never utter his name.’

He came again, two days later. He started ringing his bell, the one he had on his push bike. ‘Milna hai, want to meet,’ he said again. I didn’t ask him whom he wanted to meet this time. But I remembered asking him his name. Vikram, he replied. This time, she went out to meet him. We went indoors, but kept peeping to find out what was happening. At one point the sound decibel rose and hot words were bandied about. They both were gesticulating rather extravagantly. Lakshmi looked on, her mouth wide open.

Every two months or so, we were favoured by a visit from him. Once we came to know that he had offered her money, which she refused. While hunkering down in the kitchen, grinding spices, she told us, ‘I said no. Give it to her, the other one. I earn enough to fill my belly and your child’s.’ But as Dam had foretold, he eventually won her over, though it took him more than a year. Of course, he had to throw the other woman out. But he timed things badly. The very next day he came and thought he could take Bina away. She refused and kept him hanging for a month. The fellow was getting more and more impatient, if not frenzied.

When she eventually left with a smiling Lakshmi, she said, ‘I will work the whole day here, sahib.’ Bina cooked, dusted, swept and swabbed. On holidays, Lakshmi helped, and we even got friends like Ashwin Agarwal and Feroza for lunch. Feroza had taught her a thing or two—a prawn patia and a kofta curry. Feroza invited us and Meenakshi to lunch. Life got caught in a spiral of routine. Routine, finest thing invented by the Lord.

Two years went by and we were in our third year. It is not that one was only studying, chopping up people and stitching them up (I had my eyes fixed on surgery), taking blood pressure and putting guys on drips. In our third year, doctors started making us sit in the OPDs. The rush here would be tremendous. There were also times when the senior doctor would be away for an hour or more and one had to deputize. Here, apart from feeling the pulse, recording temperature and blood pressure, one was also prescribing antibiotics by the tonne and proscribing. No sugar, no butter or cheese (as bad as butter, sir, you can’t afford it with your ballooning belly and choked arteries). No salt, not even a pinch (best to make the bloody thing taboo, so that they are at least cautious. Sex, did I hear you right? Speak up, sir, why have you lost your voice? Yea, yea, go ahead sir, enjoy yourself as long as you can, and it may not be that long, sir—I refer to the length of your enjoyment not the length of your penis. No, it won’t get shortened due to angina, don’t worry.)

Advising a Seth—owner of a gas agency, three petrol pumps and four hardware shops—was an experience, and I would relate it with élan to friends, including Feroza and Bina and even Salma. He had just had a near miss from strangulated hernia. No driving for three months. Tennis? No tennis. You don’t have a driver? Engage one, Sethji. No, you won’t trust someone with your imported car? I see. Then let your wife drive. (She was there with him.)

‘Daactar sahib, but she is very busy.’

‘Doing what, if I may ask?’

‘Attending parties, daactar, what will happen to them?’

‘She forgoes them, Sethji. Simple.’

Sethani—chiffon sari, high heels, ‘high class’ accent, big butt, three layers of lipstick—butts in. I agree with her. Yes, Sethaniji, I know parties are a very socially ameliorative activity. In that case, Sethji, you ride a rickshaw. No driving, you’ve just escaped from a strangulated hernia.

‘What strangulation you talk about daactar sahib?’

‘Sethji, strangulation is not confined to the throat.’ I was getting impatient.

‘Listen me, daactar sahib. You are very young. My brother-in-law, one who married my sister, engaged someone to strangle me from throat, not from where your strangulation hernia start.’

‘Strangulated, Sethji. And now, if you don’t mind, I have many patients waiting …’

‘Listen me, daactar—this is interesting, what I going to tell you. I hid two thugs in bathroom. When murderer come they pounce him.’

‘Bounced him, Sethji?’

‘No, no, pounced him. I tried to stop them, but they strangulation him from gardan.’ The wife tried to intervene here—‘Why are you talking all this nonsense?’—but he waved her aside.

‘In garden, Sethji?’ I asked.

‘No, no, neck, bhai, gardan. In room, not garden.’

‘But that would be murder, Sethji.’

‘No, daactar, only ass piss ia.’

What was the old nut mumbling about ass piss, I wondered. ‘What did you say?’

‘Quoting from post-mortem report only, ass piss ia. But what words you daactars use. Shiv Shankar, Shiv Shankar! You know what father gave to my sister?’

‘Sethji, patients are waiting. Big queue. I am deputizing for Dr Avdhesh Kumarji. If you don’t mind, next!’

‘Arre, just one minute, bhai. He gave everything—sofa, carpet, chandelier, beds, car, utensils, jewellery, and four lakhs—two lakhs black and two white. Now because father die, he still want hissa!’

‘Hissa, Sethji?’

‘Share, yaar. My thugs tie bed sheet around honewala would-be should-be assassin, take him back to hotel, sheet around ceiling fan and throat and hang him. Perfect suicide. Wanted hissa? Khatam kissa. Story end.’

He reached for his wallet, a pretty fat job stuffed with notes. It was a job for him to extricate it from his hip pocket. I thought he was handing me his card. ‘No need for the card, Sethji. Dr Avdhesh Kumar has your telephone.’

‘Not card, baba, just guru dakshina, nazrana.’

I told him to put his wallet back and not to take it out too often or he could strain his hernia. I felt relieved when he left. Next, the compounder sidled up to me. ‘Doctor, you don’t have to refuse.’

I feigned innocence. ‘Refuse what Dwarka Dheeshji?’

‘Money, sir, what else. Sethji is very rich. Doctor Sahib also doesn’t refuse when people force money on him. What can you do, if people force?’

Anything I said would be relayed faithfully to the boss, I knew; had also known of Dr Avdhesh Kumar’s reputation. I was cautious. ‘Force is force, Dwarka. What can one do against force?’ But I found him staring at me. He wasn’t taken in.

‘Doctor Rohinton, Sethji has joined politics. He will get elected from Calcutta one day. He’s a powerful man, rich Marwari.’

‘What can he do to me, Dwarka? I am not going to look for a job here in Kanpur. I’ll go back to Bombay, once I get my degree.’

‘Once you get it.’

The fellow was being cheeky, but I didn’t rebuke him. I was being cautious at every step, going against the grain of my nature.

When I told Dam a gist of our short conversation, he wagged his forefinger and said, ‘Be cautious.’ I thought he was warning me not to cross Avdhesh Kumar. I was wrong. ‘Have you had a good look at Dwarka Dheesh? He could darken a dark room. And he is a Brahmin, don’t forget. Beware of black Brahmins. Their words can be lethal.’

There was half a smile on his face as he said this, so I was not sure if it was a joke. Could he be serious? In a way, he was. It was difficult to believe in such racial, colour prejudice. One never encountered this in Bombay. I wanted to let him have it, but restrained myself. Dam was a very easy person to get on with—he had no complexes and was well-stocked with reserves of humour and patience. It was only after some hooch that he became exuberant. Tuesdays were dry days, and once when our stock finished, we granted certificates to each other to the effect that alcohol was most necessary for our ailing constitutions. It had been my idea. Worse, it was my idea once we were in our fourth year to have letterheads printed in my name with ‘Doctor’ as a prefix.

‘You are not entitled to, you idiot.’

‘Dam, how will we ever be able to write prescriptions without a “doctor” to our name?’ Servants of neighbours, drivers came to us with their ailments and we would tell them to get the tablets—paludrine for malaria, enterovioform, or maxoform (they weren’t banned then) for loose motions and things like that. Dam suffered from insomnia now and then, and I would ‘prescribe’ sleeping tablets. Once, we had sent Bina to get it from the chemist but he refused. He wanted a proper prescription, not just a chit with the name scribbled on it. Eventually, Dam got a similar letterhead printed. But we kept the writing pads in our cupboards, lest our colleagues notice them and rebuke us.

II

Damodar didn’t like English films—we didn’t call them movies those days. So Feroza and I went by ourselves on Sundays—that was the only day they showed English films. The tickets were two rupees. Feroza wouldn’t let me pay each time. Initially, Meenakshi would also come along, but later, she slackened off. I can’t remember all the films we saw, mostly oldies like The Guns of Navarone, a detective thriller or two. I remember La Dolce Vita was hooted down by the audience which sat in the front rows—mostly truck-drivers and rickshaw-peddlers. Feroza explained the satyr mask scene to Meenakshi—she was with us that day.

‘Good life they had, these satyrs,’ I said.

‘Are you envious?’ asked Feroza.

‘Of course, I am,’ I said.

Meenakshi later told me that she almost asked if satyrs had anything to do with the word satire. But she didn’t want to make a fool of herself before two Parsees and so she went home and consulted her dictionary. Rather sweet of her to have confided in me, I thought.

I had come to know a Parsee family, the Randerias. They did business in textiles and their two shops were the only authorized outlets for all Bombay Dyeing products. I got on well with the son, Boman, who had just returned from the US with a degree in mechanical engineering. A fitness fiend, he jogged, or rather loped, for over an hour each morning. Quite a handsome guy, actually. He was a film buff, had brought his own projector from the States and had a stock of unusual films. Feroza and I would visit him once in a fortnight or so. Apart from the few westerns that he possessed, he also had gangster and crime films.

‘They’re much the same, Boman, a gangster film is a crime film, what’s the difference, yaar?’

‘Rohinton, this is the trouble with casual observers, they don’t know a thing. Crime movies have several genres. There are private eye films, police films, detective films like the Orient Express, gangster films—Al Capone and his buddies shooting their way from one jam to another. And there’s another species coming up, they are even giving it a name now: film noir.’

‘What does that mean?’ Noir is black in French, Feroza explained, to my discomfiture. We saw gangster films, baddies shooting away at other baddies or the cops. Of course, they eventually copped it, though, at times, the line between the good and the bad got smudged. And there were streetwalkers and sultry femme fatales who made it more exciting. Feroza tired of all this. ‘Let’s see something else, a comedy. Boman must be having over fifty cans. Why do you like crime films, you a doctor? Why do you want to see blood and mayhem all the time? I know it’s not blood but actually tomato sauce, but on the screen it looks real. It is sickening.’

‘Feroza, there’s a moral twist in the end—normally the killers end up dead. Sometimes they dangle on the gallows. The killer gets his comeuppance.’

‘Oh, so you see it for vendetta?’

‘You can twist everything, Feroza. The moral order is restored in the end, didn’t I say that? Whether it is the avenger or cop or private eye, doesn’t make any difference.’ But like all truths it had a lie embedded in it. I saw films for their night-time photography, shadowed lighting, the drawl in the speech of the rogues, the felt hats, the old cars and the sheer ruthlessness of both the hunter and the hunted. I preferred the black-and-whites to lush colour. Black-and-white is what we are, metaphorically, as well—that’s what Zarathustra stated, isn’t it, though father would link this ‘chiaroscuro philosophy’, as he dubbed it, with the heretical Manes. The lighting in these black-and-whites would be such that in all the gloom, a face would suddenly be lit up into a contrast of white, and the paleness would not be as we know it, but more like a patch of salt. Boman explained that this was an essential feature of film noir, this and the dark brooding atmosphere, and the dialogue in low key.

‘What about the felt hats and the guns?’ I asked. He nodded, the way one would when a child asks a bright question.

‘That too.’

Where is all this building up to—the film noir and the low-key dialogues and Boman’s films, grainy and a bit spasmodic as they rolled over the spool? They were under the weather and some of the stuff was from the forties, Stranger on the Third Floor, for instance. The Maltese Falcon came from the pre-historic thirties. Mr Randeria, Boman’s father, sat with us one day. He didn’t relish these night-time scenes. Nor did Feroza. I told them these were mood films. What is a mood film, the old man asked. Boman broke in.

‘Don’t you see, Father, the light is the mood—and the shadows, walls, windows, doors all seem to be touched with the mood of menace …’

I added my tuppence. ‘These are dark narratives.’

‘What narratives are you talking about? Who narrates?’ asked Mr Randeria.

‘In a film, visuals are the narrative, not words,’ I said, and was pleased to see the old man nod.

As we sat in Boman’s living room, nothing ‘happened’ as far as I was concerned, and I am not talking of fake aesthetic encounters between me and the serrating celluloid spooling away.

It was in the regular theatre watching Hitchcock’s Psycho that Feroza held my hand suddenly. Her palm was moist and tender. We had heard about the scene in the bath, read about it in the reviews. Yet, when he comes in with the knife, it was bloody startling. She gripped my hand and shut her eyes for a moment. Women in the hall screamed. She held on to my hand and I was not going to let it go. Strange are the beginnings of love.

Of course, it didn’t stop there. She would come up to my room before going to a movie and the kissing session would start. It never went further. ‘Don’t you dare grope,’ she repeated categorically, and too often for my liking. Dam kept away. We had an inkling about something between him and Meenakshi. Once we went to see The Ten Commandments, and Dam had excused himself. When we reached the cinema house, we found another film running instead. The commandments hadn’t arrived. We returned and found the two together. They seemed a bit surprised and Meenakshi’s sari was just a wee bit crumpled.

I was falling terribly in love. This had never happened to me before, but then, I had never been that close to a girl earlier, never even kissed one. Feroza didn’t have a phone, so she complained about rapport, rather the lack of it. Be rational, I told her, we can’t converse telepathically. We meet in college and class the whole day. Yet, she had her head about her. She kept telling me, ‘I want to talk to you.’ But we are talking all the time, aren’t we Feroza? Not like this, she said. One evening she came out with it, at home, meaning Dam’s and my place. ‘You are not built to be a doctor. You just aren’t serious enough. There’s nothing steady about you.’ How was I to tell her that I had never been steadier than the last four years of my life in Kanpur? I did tell her though and she knew how hard I studied, though my heart was not in it.

‘That’s exactly the point. Your heart’s somewhere else!’ It’s with you love, I said.

‘Stop fooling. I notice your clippings—they’re littered all over the room. Dien Bien Phu—what the bloody hell are you doing with that? How do jungle and swamp and battles interest you? You don’t fancy yourself as a journalist, do you? Bloody war correspondent?’

How can women hit the nail right at the spot?! It wasn’t the first time I had thought of that. Frankly, I daydreamed a lot and ran a whole gamut of roles, from test cricket (playing alongside Rusi Modi) to trudging through slush and gunfire in some southeastern mudhole.

‘And there’s that book on Treblinka. Shut up, I know what it is, don’t interrupt. But it’s over. Why would anyone want to relive those horrors?’

III

Things sometimes change abruptly. Routine has to be broken—fundamental law of life. Routine got broken on that warm August Tuesday evening. I felt like having a chilled beer. Dam was always game for a drink—a speciality of guys from Almora. Not a single regular wine-and-liquor shop where we could flog our ‘certificates’ about hooch being essential for our ‘ailing constitutions’ was open. ‘Let’s go to Solomon’s,’ I suggested. Solomon’s was a dhaba opened initially by a Sikh called Manjit Singh. The Hindi caption on the billboard read, ‘Solomon di hatti.’ It had opened bang opposite Sheba, the only posh restaurant in Kanpur. I thought it was damn smart of Manjit, a personable fellow, always dressed in western clothes. What is more, he even spoke English. Western clothes and English—now you couldn’t ask for better markers to be called civilized. We came here for our liver-and-kidney plates. Mince was on the menu, deliciously cooked in lots of oil, which we would drain. And there were tandoori rotis, garma-garam as we Parsees say. Regrettably, the year we came to the medical college, Manjit had taken a partner called Krishan Kumar, also from Punjab. Manjit Singh found that Kumar had started selling native country hooch on the sly. Of course, there was no license. Manjit Singh wanted no part of it, sold his share and quit, like the decent guy he was. It merely convinced me that slacks and a smattering of the Anglo-Saxon tongue are unfailing pointers to civility.

So we came to Solomon’s, sidled into the ‘Family Room’, the place where you were served hooch, and knocked back a glass. The family room was partitioned from the main dhaba through a rattan mat. There were times when they served stale food, leftovers of the night before. I said, ‘All that simmers is not sold/seldom have you heard that told.’ Damodar pooh-poohed it. ‘Not the right place to bring in the Bard,’ he said. Had no idea he knew of Will. We had eaten the spicy chicken and the coriander mutton swimming in greasy gravy here earlier—had never tasted their bootleg arrack. Solomon’s had slowly become slightly upmarket. The prices were not so low as to inveigle sweaty truck-drivers and the like anymore. The arrack we imbibed had the hind kick of an army mule. Army mules have a harder kick than civilian mules—must be the pep talks from Generals in their haw-haw angrezi and pidgin Hindustani. Neither of us cared much for this kind of furtive boozing. The arrack had a pungent smell and was served in the same thick tumblers in which scalding tea, boiled in the same tea leaves three times, was served. There was also the risk of an excise or a police raid. We were knocking them back fast—we had four drinks each and I ordered one for the road but Dam would have none of it. I felt terribly hungry and we had parathas and a plate of mince and some kebabs. We took a cycle-rickshaw and came home, with me singing away and Dam huddling into himself, which was strange, for normally he became exuberant after drinks.

A few hours later, I showed what I now think amounted to rare willpower by dragging myself from the bed to the washbasin and throwing up. My insides were revolting. The head was heavy as lead and the face felt as if there was no sensation there. I gulped down some water and threw up again. During the night, I made at least three such trips to the washbasin. On the third occasion, I was surprised to find I had picked myself up from the floor. There wasn’t even a rug on the floor. Had I fainted? The only thing reassuring was that there was no commotion in Dam’s room. He was sleeping peacefully. Somewhere round five in the morning, with a hint of light just smearing the horizon, I had my last vomit. I peeped into Dam’s room, but he was sleeping like a log. I felt a wee bit better and hit the bed. When I got up, I was stunned to see the clock. It was nine-thirty. I made myself some black coffee and felt better after swallowing two cups. The mouth still felt sour and the entire system seemed to have turned bilious. I rang up the medical superintendent and asked for a day’s leave. I could not leaf through the morning paper. Half an hour later, I thought it was time that Damodar woke up. I went into his room, parted the curtains and threw open the window. He did not stir when the light hit him.

‘Get up, bugger,’ I said and shook him, but he slept on like a plank. Then it occurred to me that he was sleeping in the same posture when I had peeped in at five. I placed my hand on his forehead and found it cold; felt for his heartbeat, dived for his pulse. There was none. He had been dead for a good few hours. Panic, shock, grief all fought with one another for a while. The panic was absolute—it was with difficulty that I controlled my instinct to lock the apartment and bolt. Then I took the telephone and dialled everyone I knew, including the Randerias, who were there in ten minutes. Ashwin Agarwal came over, followed moments later by Feroza, her face bleached white. Bina was a great help, she dried her tears and kept her composure and started handing out cups of tea without bothering about saucers. As I talked, both on the phone and with people streaming in now, I found I had the wrong answers to everything. No one likes to hear words like booze and bootleg arrack when they are associated with death. And when the medical superintendent, Dr Hamidullah, and the professor of surgery, Dr Amit Ranjan Mitra, came over, it was almost noon. As the two switched on their questions, I was stumped. They either elicited silence or wild incoherence from me. Why had I not told him about Damodar when I phoned him for leave over an hour back? Dash it, sir … dash it! I … I knew nothing then—thought he was sleeping.

‘Didn’t you find something unnatural in Pande sleeping on till ten?’

‘Very unnatural, sir, extremely unnatural.’

‘Then why didn’t you check—feel his pulse—er, things to that effect?’

‘It never occurred to me, sir.’

‘What made you finally check his pulse?’

‘Well, sir, there he was sleeping in the same posture for as long as I could remember. And it was nearing noon.’

‘Why didn’t that strike you earlier, at ten o’clock, Bharucha? Admitted you people are novices at medicine, though this is your fourth year, and we professors must carry some blame for your abject ignorance, why didn’t that occur to you?’

‘I myself got up close to ten, sir.’

By this time, they were joined by the professor of orthopaedics, the guy whom we called Sawbones. Dr Hamidullah was being kind, he even tried to restrain the other two. But by now, Sawbones had caught the drift—earlier he was talking in whispers to Agarwal and some other colleagues of mine to ferret out the story. Sawbones was now on the prowl.

How do you distinguish between a sleeping patient and a dead one, Rohinton?

I wanted to tell him that Dam was not a patient—he was a friend. I could only answer, ‘Why, really, sir, really!’ After a pause, ‘Breathing, sir, regular breathing.’

How is it you failed to notice the lack of it in Damodar Pande? No answer. Then he became sententious. ‘As a senior medical student, you’d be aware of the determinants of unconsciousness, semi-consciousness and consciousness, Rohinton?’

‘Yes, sir,’ shortest and safest answer I gave that day.

When the police rolled in, it was worse. Things were never going to get better, the thought struck me. I found I had no answers, or bad ones, to the simplest questions.

How many trips to the washbasin? When you were feeling so sick, why didn’t you go for help to Damodar Pande? Wasn’t it the most natural thing to do—go to a fellow doctor? Didn’t my experience as a doctor tell me that there was something more to this than a mere hangover? And your experience as a ‘practitioner of wines’? That last one would have made me laugh in better days. ‘Practitioner of spirits’ indeed! Moreover, the police was already giving me my MBBS degree, it seemed.

Did the term food-poisoning never cross your mind? Admitted, you were in a daze (fuck you, I am still in a daze, I wanted to say), still, if a doctor would not think of it, who would? Couldn’t you go and ask for Dr Pande’s help? After all, he was a roommate and a qualified physician.

I answered with some spirit now, ‘He was not my roommate. We had separate rooms. And he was not a “qualified physician”, and neither am I, sir.’ I am not sure if anyone realized that it must have been a pretty near thing for me too. I didn’t even say this as taut-shouldered professors questioned me. And there were the relaxed police executives with their sombre expressions, slapping their canes against their taut calves. One of them looked at the washbasin for traces of vomit. Later, I was told the basin was still smelling sour. One of them smelt my mouth. It couldn’t have smelt of saffron. Feroza stood up for me.

‘With respect, obviously Rohinton was in a bad way himself, he still is. Just look at him! His vomits saved him! If Dam, I mean Damodar, had thrown up, he too may have escaped.’

‘But he didn’t get up!’ one of the doctors, I don’t know who, exclaimed. ‘If Bharucha had woken him up or gone or staggered up to him, things may have turned out differently.’

Others had not voiced it. Nor did anyone tell me that it was all my bloody fault and Dam would damn well be alive but for me. Later, within a day, rumours would do the rounds. Our one or two pegs a day were exaggerated into a booze binge each day. Alcoholics, the two of them, more so Rohinton—after all, a Parsee—couldn’t stay one day without hooch! For days, I walked around stricken with the savagery of voices I hadn’t heard. The guilt remained—all other realities seemed to have been crowded out.

The police officers were taking Damodar’s body away for the autopsy. Hamidullah went up to them and said he would ask the doctors to be ready. Sorry, said the deputy superintendent. Since it’s a matter concerning your medical college, we will ask the civil surgeon to have the post-mortem conducted. Feroza later told me she could see the shock on Dr Hamidullah’s face. Even the other doctors were aghast.

In the next few days, I sought an appointment with Dr Hamidullah, but didn’t get one. He sent a message through Feroza which basically said I must start attending classes. All the same, I barged into his office one day. I asked him bluntly if he wanted me to resign. His eyebrows rose an inch. ‘Resign?’ Sorry, sir, used the wrong word. I meant pull out of the college.

‘Take it easy, Bharucha. Don’t precipitate matters. Relax and let the whole thing blow over.’ I was sent packing with these few words. But the words were welcome, for a hot rumour had started in the college that the management was seriously thinking of throwing me out.

Meenakshi, who had broken down earlier, had recovered now. Obviously, something had gone on between her and Dam. We, meaning Feroza and I, guessed that this must have happened when Feroza and I went to the movies. We asked Bina and she confirmed it. Matters had gone on to the extent that Dam had written to his parents about her. And when they arrived, they had asked for her. She had met them. Actually, Sawbones himself and Feroza had received them at the station. They were put up in the college guest house where I met them and cried for the only time. The funeral was held in Kanpur itself, since the body would have rotted by the time they took it to Almora. Within a day of the parents and relatives leaving for Almora, another strong rumour went round the college. The trouble about rumours was that in my case, they proved right. The parents had complained to the police that they must examine the possibility of my having poisoned Damodar. This was a shock, for they had spoken very nicely to me, both at the guest house and when they came to take his things away. Feroza even thought that when Hamidullah had said ‘Don’t precipitate matters’, he had this complaint in mind. Feroza started asking, ‘What are you going to do, if they sack you?’ As always, I had no answer.

‘You aren’t going to quit on your own, are you? Don’t, Rohinton. For my sake don’t.’

‘I find it very tough to stomach Kanpur anymore, Feroza. Just look at my situation. Friends avoid me. Doctors look the other way.’ When the whole thing was over, that is, inquest, autopsy, funeral, and there were not many more questions to answer, and the viscera was received from the chemical examiner, and it was clear to the police that Damodar Pande had not been poisoned but had died due to bad hooch, I was summoned to the medical superintendent’s office. Instead of Hamidullah, I found Sawbones in the chair. He asked me to see the principal. The principal, well-groomed, silver-haired massive head, gestured with his arm that I should sit down. He didn’t lift his head from the papers he was examining for a good five minutes. As he looked up, the phone started ringing. I could hear his private secretary shouting, ‘Madam, sir.’

The conjugal conversation went on for ten minutes at least. I didn’t offer to step out. He passed me a paper, I sure wasn’t elated to read. I had got the boot, it was my expulsion order. As the wife finished, and I thought I could get a word in, his lawyer rang up. Ten minutes, it lasted, the tête-à-tête with the attorney. Then another lawyer rang up—I could hear his secretary as he put the call through—after all, only a wooden partition separated him from his boss. I had had enough. I stood up.

‘Sir, I’ll come when you are done with the phone—your lawyers and your wives!’

‘What did you say? What did you say!’

‘Nothing, sir, just that I’ll come in when you are through with the phone.’

I went in again—shouldn’t have. When you get the boot, walk out; don’t wait for recrimination or sympathy. ‘Sahib is very worried—legal matter,’ his secretary, wearing a hangdog look, as if he was about to go to a funeral, told me.

Again, he was looking down. Again, he lifted his rather massive head.

‘Yes?’

‘I am R. Bharucha, sir, fourth year. Was with you ten minutes back. You had sent for me.’

‘I won’t be sending for you again. I intended sympathizing with you a while ago, and the rather odd circumstances you have found yourself in recently. This, despite that incident at the blood bank, if you recall. The management has taken a very dim view—drinking on a dry day, illicit hooch and all of this resulting in this tragedy. I can assure you that if Damodar Pande had survived, he would have been in for similar punishment.’

I sat down—this time he hadn’t asked me to park my arse. I waited silently. A minute passed.

‘Well, Bharucha?’

‘Well, sir?’

That seemed to irritate him and he asked me if I had nothing to say.

‘Sir, it was a misdemeanour of a kind, I admit. But who would have expected such a tragedy? It was in a way an accident.’

‘Hmm, the management didn’t think so, though Dr Hamidullah took your side and did his best. But management was adamant, I am sorry, I mean I am not sorry, in view of the statement you just made about ten minutes ago.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Fifteen minutes ago, sir,’ I repeated.

‘I must add Bharucha that I was not equally vociferous in your defence, in view of the blood bank incident.’

‘That was a prank, sir, an April Fool’s joke.’

‘Nevertheless.’

The interview ended with that one word. Last year on 1 April, Agarwal and I had given a vial of pig’s blood, written the name of some fake patient and asked for a report from the pathology department—sugar, haemoglobin, cholesterol, the works. We were later called and given a severe tick off, but had no idea the principal had been informed.

IV

Any drunken bum chucked out of a bar or a nightclub would tell you that once you get thrown out, things change. For one thing, you are out and not in. Status, friends, even your premises can be in for a shift, hombre. You get all bunched up, don’t want to have nothin’ to do with your folks, buddy. Looks become shifty, your own, I mean; you notice things to your right and left which you never did before, means you ain’t looking straight, man. Fortunately, my people, my disparate parents as I would define them to Feroza, were insulated from the Kanpur press, which had its knife into the callous alcohol-soaked bum from Bombay. ‘Hooch Horror’—a headline had screamed in the only yellow rag in English which came out of this industrial piss pot. The incident had even led to a demand that only students from UP should be admitted to medical or engineering colleges. Luckily, there were no protest meetings—so-and-so hai hai or bloody Rohin murdabad—that sort of stuff. Not very subtle hints were thrown about girls too. A headline said, ‘Fair Sex as Fair Game—Post Mortem of Hooch Incident in Medical College.’ The Hindi gutter press talked of ‘madira paan’. Did the buggers think we had imbibed Madeira that blasted evening? And where did they get the idea I chewed paan? The only time I had chewed the thing, I had swallowed the supari and it got stuck in my gullet. That very day I had decided that suparis should be left to the blasted Bombay mafia. A thing that had riled me was that I had no time, no space to grieve for Damodar, as decent a fellow as I was ever likely to meet. And he went out like a light and no one gave me the chance of dropping a tear for him—and his parents almost accusing me of murder. You never get over some regrets.

Parents were a worry, they always are. They had no inkling of what had happened—Dad would have used the word ‘transpired’. He would have thrown himself into righteous rage—sleepers with other women are good at that sort of thing. What Mama would think of it, I had no idea. Mothers are best left alone. I knew what I had to do. Go to Bombay and then Mazgaon. Mamai grand-aunt lived there with her varicose veins and her filarial foot for companions, not forgetting her sister. Grand-aunt’s snuff would be all over her nostrils and I knew I would sneeze the moment she embraced me. We called a hug a ‘koti’. She lived there with her older sister, my maternal grandmother, Meher. My mother would look them up at least once a week. Mamai grand-aunt would get up at four in the morning to fill up her water drums till five, for that was the only hour the municipality released the water for the area. Generosity, consideration for others, comes naturally to municipal corporations. It’s built into their genes, if you ask me. If you missed getting up, or the alarm clock didn’t play ball, your bum and armpits would remain unwashed for the day.

I took a train to Mathura, boarded the deluxe train (chair car, if you please) and landed at Bombay Central. To Victoria Terminus thereafter, where I lugged my two suitcases into a local train and took the Harbour Line. The stations rolled by, Masjid, Sandhurst Road and then Dockyard Road, where I got off. The familiar smell of sawdust and spice hit me the moment I got down. Got a labourer to carry one bag, walked past the agiary, or fire temple, right up to Vatcha building—you still couldn’t reach it by car.

The two ladies, Meher and Mamai, were aghast to see me—may have thought I had robbed a bank or something. Thu kem ayo? How did you come? Have you told your mother you are here? They sound pretty simple, these questions. It took me an entire morning telling her why I hadn’t gone to her. I had failed and so left the college and didn’t want to upset her.

‘You didn’t fail on purpose?’ They knew I had been, in a way, coerced into becoming a doctor. I realized, not for the first time, how low my stock was with the family. How come there seemed to be no deviousness I wasn’t capable of? Flunking an exam on purpose, that took the cake. I started walking out every morning to buy papers and applying for jobs.

Aunt was inquisitive. Where are you applying? Everywhere, grandma. That is no answer, Rohinton! It’s the only answer I can give you—hotels, restaurants, banks, newspapers.

What will you do in hotels, become a chaiwallah? And what will you do with newspapers?

Write. I didn’t tell them that now I could work splendidly for a yellow rag, could track their sewers, had got so much stink from them. Journalism was the thing for me, Feroza had said. I could write a monograph on the sewer press; could start a yellow rag myself. Only, I’d bring imagination into play. What does imagination boil down to in this brand of writing? Firstly, photographs—bighas, hectares, of female flesh, and not just bare midriffs, but legs slithering through something diaphanous, half a pedicured foot peeping out of a stiletto; celeb tittle-tattle—which star or model called the other a bitch. If you can’t get the story, invent it. The stars/models will deny it, appear indignant, even hold a press conference to denounce you. The more they deny it, the more your rag will sell. Link up model with the designer (sexually, I mean), star with the producer or the one who financed the film—just a photograph will do, and a wicked comment. How those housewives, cooking away and wiping away the tears brought about by sliced onions, will lap it up. I could almost picture them switching off the gas and running to the shower, just to get their hands early at my rag. Then the phones would shrill through the still afternoons—‘She looked such a gau mata, but I always suspected something false about that innocent façade—though had no idea she’d be sleeping around with that blubbery pock-marked bum. He’d be kicked out of a whorehouse, I tell you, if the girls saw his face. And to think she was sleeping with him! Didn’t she play Savitri in that mythological? No? She was just an apsara? You sure?’

As for the Indian male—whether builder or realtor or the businessman or the boss at the office, there was no need to invent. Anything you said about his sexual escapades would actually amount to an understatement. One could be hauled up for concealing evidence!

There was also that Calcutta offer. Sethji, of near-strangulated hernia, had come to the house a day before I left for Bombay. He had commiserated and then told me he was starting a chain of chemist shops in Calcutta. Later, he would proliferate to the north. He wanted me to head the chain, currently restricted to two chemist shops. ‘You are almost a doctor, you will be of great help,’ he said. ‘I also have a rest house, small, but you can stay there as long as you like. I never use it.’ I had just nodded. He actually gave me an appointment letter and told me he was sending a telegram to his shops in Cal. ‘I really don’t need it, thank you,’ I told him.

‘Keep it, keep it.’

I moved out of Bombay.

IV

(We’ll cut out the endearments, may we?) So you are in Cal, Rohinton my love, are you? You really seem to be tossed from side to side, reminds me of a lurching ship. I have no idea what you are going through and yet I know—doesn’t take much prescience to know what one feels after seeing four years of a life gone down the drain. Of course, you have to see it doesn’t go down the drain—the four years, I mean. Easier said … What the hell are you going to do now? Big question—not sure if you can answer that at the moment. I wouldn’t have been able to, were I you. Thank god, I am not. Wrong thing to say, I know, but then, I am like that. We need to be what we are.

That vial with the pig’s blood cost you a hell of a lot, didn’t it? Cost you a career. Chaps would give their right arm to become doctors.

I also have to cope, just in case you’ve forgotten. It’s not so easy, coping. One had got used to a particular rhythm. Now things have changed, with both of you gone—I refer to Dam, poor soul. His going took away a lot. The two worst hit of course were you and Meenakshi. She is trying to recover. She took it very badly. I think she bears not just you but even me a semblance of a grudge. People change. And how! You didn’t kill him—don’t ever fall into that guilt trap. I would have written about the classes and what’s going on, but wasn’t sure if you’d appreciate that. You’d burn inside.

Boman came around the other day but I refused to go with him for one of his noir films. Movies are out. You are out. I mean out and away. And very little is coming in—now don’t ask what that means. I don’t know myself. This winter, they are going to have a test match here—you’d have been interested. I don’t even know which team is coming.

What exactly are you doing in Cal? You wrote last that journalism was an option. Have you explored that? A rumour has gone around here that you are turning to pharmaceuticals. I don’t wish to pry, but is it true?

The letter irritated me—but everything was irritating me now. We had been through much of all this—the vial with the pig’s blood, it hadn’t cost me that much. It was Dam’s death and complaints from the parents to the police. Amazing how anything to do with the cops makes people wet their pants. Also, I had no MLA to back me—I never went to one. Why, even Sethji could have helped if I had only run to him! You need a supple backbone in order to run to people and ask for help. And we had been through these questions—what was I to do now? We had even talked of it at the Kanpur railway platform. I hoped her other letters would not merely regurgitate the past. Damned if I was going to reply. Yet it was tough to hold back. Alone, one recalls strange things, even hand touching hand, hands damp with love and tension, expectation perhaps. She had doused the fires. ‘No nonsense, Rohinton. When I marry, I want to be virgin.’

Will it be me, I had asked. She shrugged. Time will tell, and she flashed a naughty smile—I could have smothered her with kisses then, she looked so fetching and naughty. Then this had happened—the sack, or as Feroza reminded me, hooch and death and the sack. One shouldn’t forget the sequence, she told me. Then Agarwal wrote to me—how on earth did he get my address? Feroza was quite upset and her mother had to come and stay in Kanpur for a week. I was worried and I wrote, but I did say, as postscript, that I hope her other letters would not be a string of interrogatives.

Her next letter was not.

Mother had gone back. Please don’t start preening your stupid self that it was because of your absence that I went into this temporary depression. These ups and downs happen. More people eye me now when I walk down the streets. However you may want to merge into the background, a Parsee can’t be anonymous in the north. That’s not what you’d expect—for, in the first place, they don’t have the faintest idea what animal a Parsee is. Just lucky they don’t think I am a foreigner or half-breed—someone could have made a pass at me.

Is she preaching? I bought a second-hand car, hit an electric pole while reversing, and broke the rear parking light. It was a minor scrape, foolish of me that I wrote to her about it. What did she have to say?

Don’t mind it Rohinton, but you have problems. No, you are not accident-prone. You are (and don’t mind my saying it for the nth time) the product of a broken home. Now that’s quite a cross to bear. Can you do anything about it, apart from shouldering it, I mean? (Was she thinking of Calvary, I wondered, and Barabbas?) Yes. You could keep that in mind while driving, while about to lose your temper, while signing some contract rashly—and, I’d have added, while operating on a patient, had you still been on the road to becoming a doctor.

(She was rubbing it in, wasn’t she, without in the least wanting to hurt me?) That broken home business got my goat. I didn’t write for a fortnight. Another letter:

Met Bina the other day. She put her hand on my shoulder—quite sad. New tenants have stepped into your cottage. No Hindu would move in because death had visited the place. Your landlord had a drum full of Ganges water sprinkled all over the house. Now, much against his will, Jai Chandra, or Jai Ramji ki, as you used to call him, has got a Muslim tenant. Which means that when this tenant leaves, he will have to get more Ganges water drums. Bina had initially left, but when told that a Muslim has moved in and finds it hard to get a servant, she promptly volunteered to work. She was worried about Lakshmi’s fees, now that you’ve left. I am paying up—least one can do.

The letter went on. This is no letter from someone in love, I thought. This is a letter from a friend—Kanpur is fine, dew is getting heavier, the first woollies are being pulled out of steel trunks and getting aired. The wind in the peepul tree rattles the leaves. Where did the peepul tree come in? There was one in our cottage, but she wouldn’t be going there now. I am almost growing to like the city, she writes. Really frightened me. I read it again. How can you like Kanpur? Is she going nuts? This was not what Rohinton Bharucha, selfish so-and-so that I am, was interested in. I wanted her to say how much she missed me, never having written how much I missed her.

V

Dad’s solicitude for just-widowed women cost me my childhood. Not exactly true, just one widowed woman. Enough to do the trick, if you know what I mean. Not exactly a nice thing to say, but then, between Gora Gully, that is Lawrence College, Murree, and the imbroglio in Junagadh, I didn’t have much of a childhood. I sensed the tension—even a twelve-year-old child feels it, no matter how much the parents try to hide facts. In such cases, there are often not very many ‘facts’, just resentments, grudges, concealed or not-so-concealed passions. Any attempt to keep things from your son is, I feel, shameful. Did Dad and Mama ever feel ashamed for all the dissembling that went on in front of me, I have often wondered. Dissembling for the sake of a child is not lying, I guess. There is one truth for adulthood and another for childhood.

I was taken to Claire—both Mama and Dad were with me and I was given cake. She tried to pat me on the head, but I drew away. She laughed. I remember her accent wasn’t as sharp as our principal’s wife’s. ‘Has she lived long in India?’ I remember asking mother. She nodded.

Sympathy and sex, what have they in common, I wonder. Yet, I have come across another case like that, a pilot falling in love with the widow of a friend he was trying to console. Why must sympathy, or even affection, parachute into sex? No answer.

I now reflect that if her husband hadn’t copped it just then, nothing would have happened. Dad would have gone to the high court, or the small causes court, as the case demanded, had his lunch at the Rippon Club and gone in the evening to the endless navjotes and weddings, sit at the pehli or beeji paanth (the first or the second shift), and gorged on fried eggs and saria, steamed banana-leaf-wrapped fish and the Parsee lagan nu custar (Parsees neither spell nor pronounce it as custard) and all would have been well. On Sundays, he used to take me to Morenas—they made the best pastries and patties in town. Some Sundays, he went to the Parsee Gymkhana for cricket. He would be playing and Mama would drive me back after a dhansak lunch. That soon stopped, for I had picked up one of those aesthetic obscenities I heard there and narrated it to Mom. The Gujarati is too stinging to put down on paper, but sieved into English it would read, ‘May I squeeze your sister’s papayas?’ That ended the Parsee Gymkhana trips for me.

After that they often took me to the Metro theatre for flicks. It was a great theatre those days, with glossy curtains, and huge wall paintings, not the shabby thing you see today. All that is behind me now and I want to forget it.

I had my work cut out. Earn your bread. Money was running out—those days we called it dough. I debated going to Sethji’s chemist chain, but something held me back. Not that so-and-so. A chance encounter came my way. I got invited to what Bengalis call an adda—had never heard of the word earlier. It was a smoky room—everyone smoked, everyone talked Marx, Neruda and Allen Ginsberg, who took hash with whom. In Calcuttan culture, no matter how shitty your verse is, if you have smoked grass, say, with Günter Grass or with Ginsberg, you rise to a status next only to Jibanananda Das. Or perhaps Shakti Chatterjee. At the adda everyone spoke loudly, laughed loudly, and interrupted the other guy. The subjects ranged from Alan Davidson to the decline of Mohun Bagan to dancing girls and (in whispers) even whores—except that a Bengali whisper uttered in Chowringhee can be heard in Tollygunge. Amidst dirty chappals and calloused feet and unshaved chins sat a rather dapper fellow—clean shirt, creased trousers, patent leather shoes—where could the bugger be from? The same thought apparently struck him and he came over to my side. His opening gambit was a line from Jibanananda Das, which he had translated into English. I told him quite honestly I liked the line. In return, I trotted out some lines from Ogden Nash and he doubled up laughing. Moving to a corner, we kept spouting poetry. Eventually, he asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Fuck all, just looking for a job.’

‘What is a Parsee doing here looking for a job? You should be in Bombay. Biharis come here looking for jobs, Neps and even Santhals come here, thirty years earlier, even Armenians and Chinese came. You should be on Hornby Road or Dhobi Talao, man. Do you write?’

Splendidly, I answered—this was no time for modesty. Literary? He asked. Literary what? I asked in turn. On matters literary—reviews, commentary? I told him I preferred writing on politics. Wouldn’t I love writing on Dien Bien Phu? He told me his father had almost 30 per cent shares in a weekly called The Political and Literary Weekly. And that’s how I got a job with Chatterjee.

Met Mahendra, of all people in the office, the boy who got expelled from my school. It was a good decade or so since we met, but I recognized him. He, of course, had seen my name. ‘Kithe aa gaya hai tu? What could have brought you to Calcutta?’ There followed the usual bear hugs you can’t avoid with a Punjabi and a school pal. I am looking after their finances, he told me. He was helpful, got me a room to stay in across the Howrah Bridge, in fact close to Belur Math, at land’s end. You could come across a monk in the streets clot-clotting away in his wooden sandals. I didn’t want to hang on to Sethji’s rest house, even though I had lived there free for almost a month. The other sub in the office went by the unlikely name of Jessica—everyone called her Jesse. She was Goan, neat, correct and very efficient and very pleasant.

Seasons change, a corny thing to say, but they don’t wait for your depression to blow away. Autumn leaves have disappeared from grass verges. Her letters have also disappeared. Studying hard for the finals, I presume, and letters must be priority number two. I have watched the thinning Anglo-Indian crowd at Christmas and fireworks on New Year with disinterest. Mine was the last letter. I am not going to write. A month later, I do send her a short missive, expressing concern at the absence of a note from her. I hope she is all right, I tell her. A bit spurious that concern, I admit, and I felt bad. It’s a nice feeling this—feeling bad, I mean—shows you still have some decency about you.

I have taken rooms on the second floor in a First World War vintage building named Biswas Bhavan. Am still on the other side of Howrah Bridge and it is nice to see the monks. Plaster and paint are peeling off from my digs. Above me lives a widow whose one aim in life seems to be to get hold of a gas connection for her stove. That ain’t easy in socialist India. Her kitchen is coal-fired and I can see the smoke issuing from the chimney on the few occasions when I return at dusk—my hours are longer on weekends, when we go to press. She is buxom, with a pulpy torso. Does she or does she not put on a bra?

Then I get a card. It is no ordinary card. It invites me to the engagement of Feroza with Boman Randeria. The Farohar is there on top of the card, his wings golden and a circlet round his head, and the roz, or day, by the Parsee calendar is printed in all its exotica. She has put in a short note saying, Sorry, it had to come to this, but things have changed. Unaccountably, I grin. When you are terribly self-conscious, you can react the wrong way. My fellow sub, Jesse, is with me and she says, ‘You got the giggles. How come?’ I have no answer, just show her the card. ‘Old friends?’ she asks. I nod.

My night-stands have been with books in Cal. Now they are with books lying open and unread. The eye refuses to traverse the lines. I sometimes feel I am being dreamt by the times. There’s no nexus with the world around me. Reality becomes distant, so heavily veiled, you start doubting it, start theorizing about it like scientists discuss the nature of matter or black holes. There are always things to be grateful for. I still can sleep as I switch the light off and turn into the folds of the dark.

You can’t help reflecting. Fate and illicit hooch on a particular Tuesday have painted me in a corner. Fate was my biggest enemy at the moment and I didn’t know what else it had in store for me. At such moments, you don’t know what to do. If you move, you could be ambushed. If you stay put, a bulldozer gone berserk could crash into you through window or door or a rock from a burning meteorite could get you through the skylight. Feel like reading King Lear again. Avaunt morbidity, I tell myself. Expel those thoughts, switch from morbidity to optimism—the way she switched her preferences—develop a positive outlook, go for Zen, or yoga; don’t play the Bombay film thespian, drunk and drizzling with self-pity. Self-pity nay shelf par raakh, I tell myself in Gujarati, keep the damned thing on the shelf. Inhale the dawn ozone, watch a sunrise, herons in the paddies, a lost crane landing on the banks of the Hooghly, listen to the sounds of the night—an owl’s hoot, a watchman’s stave go tap-tap over midnight flagstones.

I go to bed one night with the words ‘bottom of the pool’ ringing in my ears—I’ve no knowledge where these words come from. Another night it is ‘a songbird in a cage’. Other words follow, and when I wake up, I can tell that the mind was working consciously. ‘A songbird in a cage is as happy there as out of it. The song may be unhappy though.’ Where is all this coming from?

Silence lies like a river between us, Feroza and me. The soundtrack of silence between two people is still a soundtrack, unheard, half-heard, whisper-track. Imagining dialogues, or concocting them, becomes a pastime.

One morning a loud bang jogs me out of a deep slumber. I get up with a jolt, only to find utter silence around me. Eerie, this fog, this blanket of silence that envelops me. That noise came from my dream. Some bugger had banged at my dream-door.

I stop my nightly kusti, winding the sacred thread around the belly, accompanied, of course, with prayers. Where’s the point? But one can be fickle-minded about such things. I restart, and now, when it comes to cursing Ahriman and sorcerers and daevas (demons), I snap my kusti harder, almost with anger in my heart.

One night, the lights go off. I light candles and a kerosene lamp, which my landlady has thoughtfully left in the house. I start reading by lamplight—I actually read.

VI

The years go by, three is it, or four? Less, less. They are empty years, though I am involved like hell in what is going around. A movement starts from a village called Naxalbari—armed struggle against the state. The press gives them a name—Naxalites. Absolute brutes—killers of the first order. How much of Marx or Lenin could the buggers have absorbed, or of dialectic materialism, for that matter? Chatterjee wants me to write against them. It seems the villagers with the pipe guns don’t see eye to eye with the Left. Now, I have never trusted the Left. If some rich black-marketeer serves them the best whiskey in town, all leftists will polish off half a bottle each. And then the guys will go to a public meeting and rail against the very black-market don who poured the firewater for them. I refrain from attacking the poor pipe-gunwallahs. I hunt them down in prison and interview them. Then I write what they tell me—poverty, exploitation, the works. I don’t ‘splash’ the stories, keep headlines low-key, never reach for the front page. Don’t wish to attract attention. Still, I get unpopular with cops. I slip in an atrocity or two—by men in khaki mostly, but also by patwaris, revenue officials, jailors. Their ire is understandable.

But in this kind of thing, you shouldn’t ‘understand’ the other guy. Once you see his point of view, the game is lost. That’s what journalism is all about.

They accost me-–the men in khaki and blue—my stories about police lock-ups and jails have riled them. Do you have any idea of the people these bastards have killed? They ask me. They’ve shot mothers in front of children—that’s because the father they were after managed to run away. Take care, son, these are muddy waters.

Yet, through all this drama, the empty feeling doesn’t leave me. Bad thing emptiness—you never know what will fill it. Could fillers be worse than emptiness? Philosophy should have something on emptiness, must study it one fine day.

Ashwin Agarwal tracks me down. How? He hints at bad news in the first line and then goes off at a tangent about our old colleagues, who is where. He himself has joined his father’s clinic in Lucknow. On the second page of his letter, he comes to Boman. He’s in a bad way—cancer. Chemotherapy has knocked his immune system out. The phrase ‘in a bad way’ has been repeated three times. He has visited them in Kanpur and philosophizes, ‘Wives do look terrible when husbands are at the end of the rope.’ I thought that phrase was used for guys who were to drop ‘feet foremost through the floor into an empty space’.

I take a train and go to Kanpur. I first check into a small hotel, then get into a rickshaw and go to the Randerias. Boman’s father comes out and is he happy to see me? You bet. The thought occurs to me that he would know of my interest in Feroza. The old man keeps shaking his head. After getting me a cup of tea, he takes me to Boman’s room. He is reclining against his bedstead, looks a wreck, all shrivelled up and stuff, but his handshake is firm. Must have made an effort.

‘So that’s how it is. Did you expect me to look that bad?’

‘I have seen people worse off.’

‘That’s because you’re a doctor.’

‘Almost doctor, past tense doctor.’ We laugh.

I hear a car in the driveway, a door bangs and Feroza comes in with medicine and some groceries. We shake hands. It’s been three years, or is it four? Three. She puts up a brave face. Sometimes I feel we live for facades. As long as they are neat, how does anything else matter? Which philosopher should one go to in order to pick up some nuggets on facades and the core? ‘I didn’t expect you,’ she says. ‘Came to see Boman,’ I reply and proceed to tell her about Agarwal’s letter. We go over the years cursorily. I tell her about my job with The Political and Literary Weekly. That kind of thing was up your street, she says. ‘Not daactary?’ I ask, and can’t help a trace of sarcasm creep into my voice. She shakes her head.

I go to our old house—to see Bina. She is extremely happy to see me. At least someone is, I say to myself. Her daughter Lakshmi has shot up—amazing. Girls on the verge of puberty grow like a bamboo plant. I leave a hundred rupee note with them and take a train back next day. I sleep well in trains, the movement and the insistent sound rock me to sleep. I dream of a lonely house on a ridge-top, an elongated house it is, running along the ridge, very lonely and very empty. I peep out of a window in the rear. Down below is an ugly, scruffy-looking dog who barks constantly at me. It has a slightly squarish mouth, like that of a hyena. I have a feeling it is chained and try calling out to it, but that makes him angrier and he barks more fiercely. The bark wakes me up and I get up and go to the loo, as the train clangs and rocks and roars past small, lonely ill-lit stations, wrapped in night. The dog doesn’t bother me, but the loneliness that pervaded the house was palpable, dense, like a ground fog that has wandered in. That did disturb me. When one is down, each odd dream feels like a premonition.

Back in Calcutta, I expect the worst and the tension begins to crawl evening after evening. It is a nerve-racking feeling knowing that death is round the corner and there’s nothing you can do about it, except wait for it to strike. I made a conscious effort now and conscious efforts, I have learnt to my cost, are seldom fully successful. Disappear from my life, blur into the night, I seemed to say to both Feroza and Boman. Then Boman slipped into the night. I get to hear about Boman a good week after he has left. I send a telegram. I am shocked and sorry, and that’s the truth. Try not to think of Feroza and the state she must be in. I try to push them away from the mind. You can’t intrude, so you won’t intrude, so what’s the point thinking of them? Even the thought of them would sometimes make me feel guilty. I had no bloody right! Boman goes, I can think of him. Bad luck friend, but cancer happens, runs into you like a runaway truck.

What right have I to think of Feroza—wife of another, now widow? Think of the Olympics, cricket—was Nissar faster than Fred Trueman, or would Joe Louis have beaten Jack Dempsey—that sort of thing, but you can’t think of her. Would be haram, a Sufi would have said, that is, if Sufis believe in haram and halal. Trouble is, the mind doesn’t take directions—the will and mind work at cross-purposes. I kept thinking of her. Widowhood is better among Parsees than Hindus. Though Mamai grand-aunt wore a black sari till almost the end of her life, except the last years, when she changed to white.

I submerge myself in work. What happens to people who are in a bad way and have no jobs to get buried into, a housewife whose husband is having an affair, or worse, sleeping with the maid? What must have happened to Mom when Dad had his fling with Claire? I thought of him, and the next day I get a call—trunk calls are frightfully expensive I know, but Dad goes on. He is beating about the bush, I can tell. Then I seem to catch what academics call the seminal bit. ‘Being alone must be tough. You would be pretty lonely I guess.’

I know what this sort of conversation leads to. I wade into him and tell him to leave my loneliness to me. ‘You’d be lonely too, but I have never mentioned that, have I? You don’t trespass into the lonesomeness of others.’

It didn’t shut him up. ‘Others, yes,’ he says (I can almost visualize him nodding his head), ‘but you are not other. I’d like to remind you, son, that you are family.’ And he hung up.

He had just kicked me in the arse, hadn’t he? It’s less than six months since Boman kicked the bucket. Now things start moving in a way I wouldn’t have imagined. I get a letter from mother. There’s even a decent missive from Dad. ‘You decide, son. It’s left to you.’ Dad’s letter reaches me first and is irritatingly short. What the hell am I supposed to decide? There’s something missing somewhere. Bureaucrats, when they deliberately misconstrue their political boss’ orders and give a license to someone who has lined their pockets rather than the politico’s, call it a communication gap.

Then Mom’s letter makes things clearer. A left hook to the jaw from Jersey Joe Walcott couldn’t have left me more punch drunk.

Feroza’s brother Jamshed comes to see me—he is taller than her, same brown hair, but he has grey eyes. Where did they come from, I catch myself wondering. He had telephoned to say casually that he was in Cal on business and would like to see me. I invite him to a restaurant. He beats about the bush initially and I let him. I am more unsettled than him, I guess.

‘To come straight to the point Rohinton, my parents are a bit shattered. The death of a son-in-law is a calamity in our country—more so amongst Hindus, I agree, where a widow remarrying still raises eyebrows. But it is no walk in the park for us either. Equally shattered was Feroza when this happened. They were a happy couple. Fortunately, there’s no encumbrance.’

I pretend not to understand. ‘Encumbrance?’

‘Children, I mean, thought you’d catch on.’

I make no apologies for being slow-witted.

‘How is she now?’

‘Well, Father Time heals, but not as fast as we’d like it to.’

‘Difficult to have a line to Father Time,’ I interject, not to Jamshed’s liking.

‘My parents are in a bit of a hurry.’

‘About what?’

‘They think a wedding would heal her wounds.’

‘Wedding?’

‘Yes, wedding. I am sure you understand.’

‘I haven’t the faintest clue, Jamshed.’

‘Don’t make it difficult for me, Rohinton, for us I mean, I include my parents. She is a doctor with an MBBS degree, has a good practice—and in any case, you were in love once.’

‘Once.’ Monosyllables are a godsend on such occasions. We are both silent for a while. I have decided not to blurt out anything and keep my face expressionless. The trouble is you can’t pretend to be dim-witted for too long. The other guy may think you are trying to be too smart. Let me think it over, I say at length, and also ask if Feroza has been consulted. Of course, he says. I let it rest at that.

After a fortnight or so, I try to reach her. No one picks up the phone at the clinic. Stupid of me—Jamshed had clearly said she had left Kanpur and come to Bombay. I phone her at her parents’ house. She is out at the agiyari. I am a bit slow at empathizing with the agyari-and-sukhar (sandalwood) types, the aatish-nyas bhanoing (praying) types, but I can understand Feroza’s need for prayer. Mamai grand-aunt would mumble the entire prayer, aatish-nyas, each day as she sat with her prayer book, which we call Khordeh Avesta. It was the same in the evening. I booked three trunk calls and then gave up. Each time she wasn’t there and no one ever rang back. I gave it a week’s break and rang again. The lines were down, the operator told me. Then he connected at eleven. She picked up the phone this time. The time of the call must have startled her—it had even surprised me, but the trunks had done their job, after all; when the lines were restored, they connected. That’s what I told her, when she asked if I had looked at my watch. She even asked if I was drunk to ring up at midnight. This was sure a surly start. I was put off, so was she. I decided to be no less surly.

‘Are you put off because you picked up the phone?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Just thought that I had tried you three times and you were out at the fire temple always.’

‘Is there a law against going to the agiyari? Just because you don’t pray, doesn’t mean that all of us should become nastiks.’

Nastik is the Parsee word for atheists. For the pious, there couldn’t be a worse word in the lexicon. This was sure turning out to be one hell of a conversation, I thought. ‘Look Feroza, I booked that call in the morning. Do you get me?’ There was some crackle on the line.

‘Everyone in this house sleeps by ten,’ she said rather forcefully.

This was getting nowhere. ‘Will ring up some other time,’ I told her and wanted to hang up.

‘Not at the timings of the gehs,’ she said. I just hung up. We have five gehs—meaning time-slabs in a day and each slab has a name and a different short prayer attached to it. The Havan Geh lasts from dawn to noon. Then the Rapithvan Geh takes over till 3.40 p.m. when it hands over charge to the Uzirin Geh, which carries you till sunset. And there are two nocturnal gehs—all very complicated. When the time slab changes, bells are rung at the fire-temples, every Parsee within earshot stands to respectful attention, as if it’s the national anthem being sung. If you’re sleeping, you are forgiven if you don’t strike the attention pose. But a genuine sleepwalker had better click his heels if he knows what is good for him. There is no exemption for somnambulists. If an orthodox Parsee panchayat priest, schooled by an Oxonian Avesta scholar, catches him paying no heed, he could be ostracized. Blighter wakes up and finds he is no longer a Parsee. (Could this planet be a world of sleepwalkers? Wouldn’t that be a better metaphor than this maya business? Wouldn’t someday I, Rohinton Bloody Bharucha, thrown out of college because I threw up but didn’t see to it that my friend also threw up, get known as a philosopher?) Perhaps Feroza means I shouldn’t ring when the geh changes and the bell at the agiyari tolls. Well, well, I said to myself, life couldn’t be less complicated, could it?

The next time I mustered up courage to phone, her father came on the line. It was all deekra, deekra from his side—that’s the Parsee word for son. Sweet as honey he was. The mother also took the phone. I could hardly get a word in. They wanted a short ceremony, they said. What ceremony, I asked. Come on, deekra, we know you have an ‘impish sense of humour’, said the patriarch, but reality is reality, deekra.

What reality was he referring to, I wanted to ask but kept quiet. Be on your best behaviour, I told poor me—I give such good advice to myself, people would be surprised.

VII

To my utter surprise, we got married. Perhaps it was I who was now going through the sleepwalking bit. You never know, she may have been groggy as well. My people wanted a big wedding, they a subdued one. They were afraid of the sniping that would go on, perhaps from her own relatives. ‘Joyiyae, ketla lagan karvani chai!’ Let’s see how many weddings she’s going to go through—that’s what they’d say, her mother confided. Her relatives were not exactly above saying things like that. I was surprised at my parents. They insisted on all the ceremonies. There’s the Mado Soro, basically the planting of a sapling. It takes place at both the bride’s house and the boy’s. Relatives throng there, and there’s much feasting and drinking. Mom warned them the ceremony must be held.

‘Mama, that’s none of our business, they may not want to go through with it.’

‘The ceremony shows how close we are to nature. Planting a sapling means you’ll get a sturdy child.’

‘I am aware of the symbolism, Mama. All I am saying is it’s their business, not ours.’

‘Your child is not our business? What is wrong with father and son?’

She bore a grudge. Her son had been passed over by these very people once—her ‘soona jaevo deekro’, ‘gold-like son’, no less. It was the ultimate compliment, to be bracketed with the yellow metal. Needless to say, I didn’t even have a good job, had already been kicked out by Chatterjee, but never mind. There was a quarrel over dates. My people had chosen a day and even booked the Albless Baug, a well-known place where weddings are held. There was a fight on that one. Can’t you see that’s a Wednesday? Her mother snapped. Mama looked at her stupefied. There’s a saying with us, ‘Budh ni beti, kabhi nahin bhenti.’ Never give a girl on a Wednesday. Mama had to give in. We settled on the thirteenth of November, the only date the Baug had not been booked. The Bags, or Baugs as we called them, are available every thirteenth. We are good at borrowing superstitions.

There were also bickerings over the menu—should we have the banana-leaf-wrapped fish smeared with chutney or the fish sauce, machi no saas, as we call it? Will we have roast chicken or marghi na farcha? How big should the wedding cake be? What about another sweet after the traditional wedding custard? Dinner, after all, was a joint affair and the two sides always split the expenses.

On the few occasions that we met, Feroza kept saying she was feeling uneasy.

‘Why do you have to feel embarrassed?’ I kept asking. ‘It’s not unusual, for Chrissake; people marry a second time.’

‘They don’t, not here. And you’ll never understand.’

But she did clarify. ‘It’s not embarrassment, but unease.’ I failed to fathom that. And she did add, ‘I am not sure if I feel up to it.’

That sure made me uneasy. I wanted to say that it was your people who pushed matters. I checked myself. ‘What is actually biting you?’

‘The pace.’

‘Pace? Are we discussing some fast bowler? Nissar?’

She gave me a dirty look.

‘The haste, the unseemly haste.’

Haste? It wasn’t of our making. I should have said that but cat got my tongue, cats often did.

‘And putting on that eternal smile,’ she added.

A bit enigmatic, I thought. What could I say? ‘Make your smile more transient, Madam Feroza?’ Or ‘a damn sight better than an eternity of frowns, love’? But I said nothing.

The wedding went off like a breeze. The chant of the priests was nasally resonant. The floral arrangement on the stage was subdued, the music after the ceremony not too loud and I managed to throw the rice first. Whoever does that, of the two, he or she is supposed to dominate ever after—Parsee superstitions are in a class of their own. The moment the prayers are over and the curtain between the groom and the bride comes down, you are supposed to throw the rice on the other. There was much dancing and the liquor flowed well—Indian whisky, but Dad had arranged for half-a-dozen scotch bottles for the hoity-toity and the judges. Wouldn’t do to serve Hindustani hooch to the judiciary.

She didn’t want me to lift and carry her over the threshold of our house and I acceded to her plea. Mama was not happy. We slept without sex that night. I was in no hurry.

‘You haven’t planned a honeymoon, have you?’ Mother asked next morning at breakfast. Feroza kept a straight face. ‘Everything by and by, Mama,’ I said.

‘What by and by? Honeymoons are not by and by. They are instant.’

‘Like coffee.’

Even I was stunned. Feroza had said that nodding her head as if she totally agreed with mother. Mother couldn’t believe it. Her eyes flared like a leopard’s caught in the headlights on a dark night. And there was profound disbelief in those eyes. She stormed out of the room. I took note of the black ice of mother’s gaze for the rest of the day. I wish Dad were here, but he now lived separately in a small flat on the Napean Sea Road, next to the flats for diplomats. The one good thing about the flat was it had a lovely balcony overlooking the sea. He had been on his own for quite a few years now, but an evening drink on the balcony, watching the sunset, was one of his few pleasures

Mama didn’t make an appearance at lunch to start with. When I asked her, she said she had no appetite. I whispered, it would look very odd. After some coaxing, she did come, but ate very little. Her expression remained severe, stony-faced, but, bit by bit, it thawed. After the meal Feroza said, ‘I am going out for a while.’ She changed into a blue skirt.

‘Any particular place you want to go?’

She shook her head. I didn’t ask, didn’t want to crowd her with questions.

‘There are bound to be phone calls, you know.’

By way of an answer, she just nodded her head.

‘What do I tell them?’

She shrugged her shoulders and stepped out. I saw her hailing a cab.

‘Where did she go?’

That look of disbelief was back in Mama’s eyes. ‘She didn’t tell me, Mama.’

‘Didn’t tell you! Are you in your right mind?’

‘She’s not a prisoner here, Mama.’

‘It happens to be the first day after your wedding!’

‘I am aware of that.’

‘I don’t think you are aware of too many things, Rohinton. The two of you are supposed to go out together. What will people say?’

‘Which people?’

Mother turned speechless after that. Then I saw her going in a determined way to the telephone.

‘You are not going to speak to her mother, are you Mama?’

‘I am going to speak to your father!’

This had to be a record of sorts. She never on her own spoke to him. I stood next to her. She waved me away. But even in the next room I could hear her, for her voice was high-pitched with resentment. I caught the words ‘she’s gone off on her own’. There was a long talk between them, mostly in Gujarati.

When she put down the phone she called out, ‘He was worried she had gone to her people without you.’

‘She didn’t tell me where she was going Mama.’ There was an edge to my voice, and I tried to get a hold of myself.

‘But why didn’t you ask her? Isn’t it your duty?’

‘To keep asking her where she is going? Whom is she meeting? Come on, she could have gone to a friend.’

‘Which friend, and won’t the friend ask why isn’t Rohinton with you? What is she going to say?’

‘How would I know? Let her invent her own lies, I mean give her own take on the matter.’

‘And if she has gone to her people, then you’d better face it! First thing they’ll ask is what made you lag behind? Why the hell is the husband not with the bride a day after the wedding?’

‘She was a bride yesterday, Mama, not today. Now she is wife.’

‘They will ask first thing if you two have had a fight. Mara mari thayeech soon?’

I didn’t answer, just shrugged.

‘I am learning a lot from you, son, about weddings and instant honeymoons, brides and wives.’

She came back in less than two hours.

‘No problems during your outing?’

‘No. Mission successful.’

‘Don’t feel like telling me what it was?’

‘What was?’

‘The mission, what else.’

She shook her head.

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ I added needlessly.

She smiled enigmatically. ‘You’re becoming considerate lately, Rohinton. What’s come over you?’

‘How about eating out?’ I asked.

‘There’s so much food in the house, the entire bhonu from the caterers.’

Never mind, I said. Feroza told Mama that we’d be eating out. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Why should I mind? That’s what I would have wanted you to do.’

Mama seemed pleased as punch. We bickered over where we wanted to go. She asked for Wayside Inn. That’s where you go for lunch, and fried fish, I said. I had my way—took her out to the Taj.

The next day, we went to her parents’ for lunch. She had packed a few things in a small suitcase and we brought it along with us. ‘I’ll bring it back, Mama,’ she told her mother.

A full day went by counting the pehramnees—the gift envelopes stuffed with currency, which the guests hand over to the couple at the wedding, signed in red ink, if you please. A Parsee wouldn’t be caught dead signing a gift envelope in blue ink. Red is the colour of good luck. And the bride would be either in a red sari, the lucky colour, or in white lace, for purity, something borrowed from the British. You counted the money, noted it down in a register, so that it could be repaid when the guest invited you for his daughter or sister’s wedding or a thread ceremony, where Parsees also splurge. Mother was very particular about the register.

The third day Feroza said she would go to her people in the evening. ‘I’ll come. What time do you want to go?’

‘You don’t have to escort me each time. We can do away with the drill, if you don’t mind.’

I was in no position to mind. I loved her very much. She carried the suitcase back the next afternoon. I remembered she’d promised to return it. Mother again gave me an odd look. For a moment, I thought that she was looking at me through cross hairs.

At nine, when there was no sign of her, I told Mama to have her dinner. She shook her head angrily. An hour later she asked, ‘Aren’t you going to ring them up?’

‘She’s gone home, Mama.’

‘This is her home now!’

I asked for dinner to be laid and started eating. After a while, Mama joined in. We ate quietly, though maternal resentment was all-pervasive in the silence. At eleven, she asked, ‘Are you still not going to phone?’

‘Mama, she may be sleeping over there. She’s with her parents, for god’s sake!’

At nine next morning, I rang up. (Mama had meanwhile fried an egg for me, but I let it cool on the table.) Her mother came on the line. ‘How’s everything?’ she asked after the usual greetings.

‘All’s fine here, aunty (I still called her that), just wanted to know if Feroza is having breakfast at your place?’

‘Whatever gave you that idea, Rohinton?’

‘O, she must be on her way then?’

‘What do you mean? Has she gone out?’

‘She hasn’t returned, that’s what I am trying to tell you.’

‘Returned? From where?’

‘Your place, of course. She left yesterday at four in the afternoon for your place.’ My hand on the telephone was turning clammy now. That look of mingled disbelief and horror was plain in mother’s eyes. She was of course listening to my end of the conversation.

‘It’s nine in the morning, Rohinton.’

‘Last evening! She left for your place with that red suitcase at four in the afternoon yesterday!’

‘And you’re telling me now! There must be some mistake!’

‘There isn’t any mistake. She …’ Mother snatched the phone from me and elaborated on what had happened yesterday. She broke into Gujarati.

Mother-in-law couldn’t believe her ears. ‘You are telling me all this now! She never came here.’

‘Were you at home the whole evening?’

‘Of course, Zarine, we were home. But why didn’t you phone up yesterday?’

‘Ask your son-in-law! I kept telling him to ring up, but he wouldn’t. Obstinate mule! We waited till ten for dinner!’

‘Where could she have gone?’ asked her mother. Then her father came on the line and the whole thing had to be told all over again, except that we had to speak louder, for he was hard of hearing. Same questions as well, what kept you from ringing yesterday? The daughter-in-law, vahu, doesn’t turn up at night and you people, mai and deekra, are not worried? Soon vath karo cho? What are you talking? Jamshed didn’t come on the line. Thank god for small mercies!

The mother took the phone. ‘What clothes has she taken?’

‘We haven’t checked.’

‘Wah? Then check, damn it!’

Neither Mama nor I had any idea what clothes she had brought to the house.

Mama phoned up Dad. ‘Saam, come at once, attar ghari.’ He must have asked, poor man, what the emergency was. ‘Come right now!’ Mama yelled and banged the phone down. My fried egg remained uneaten on the plate.

Dad and the in-laws came in almost simultaneously. The blame game started with me in the dock. What kind of a man are you? ‘Dil chai ke pathar? Do you have a heart or stone for a heart?’ screamed mother-in-law. ‘Product of broken home. What else could you expect!’ she added for good measure. She sounded so much like the daughter. Jamshed was quiet, observing everything but saying nothing.

Dad intervened. We won’t get anywhere with this kind of talk, he said. Let’s first ask her friends. Mother had started crying meanwhile. Dad was about to yell at her, I could see, but restrained himself. They were divorced; she was not his wife to kick around anymore.

Calls were now made to friends. Two of them turned up, Farida and Rati, looking as shaken as we were. They had no clue—hadn’t talked to her even on the phone. No idea of where she could have gone.

‘Why didn’t you insist on accompanying her?’ asked mother-in-law, when we told her she wanted to go alone.

‘Because, aunty, she didn’t want me to come with her.’

Got yelled at by Mama now; must address mother-in-law as Mummy or Mother, said my Mom. Things would only get worse, I reflected. As if they weren’t bad enough. I started feeling hungry. Your wife of three days disappears and you feel hungry because you haven’t had breakfast. It is a bloody crime—not missing breakfast, but feeling hungry. God help us against our enzymes. Each time I passed the dining table, my by now limp fried egg gave me a forlorn look from that big yellow eye of his.

Mama opened her prayer book, the Khordeh Avesta, and started praying. She also prayed to her swami, cleaned the rudraksh rosary given by him, lighted a lamp in front of his photograph. Our luck refused to turn. Lamp and swami failed, as we had. He didn’t come to our aid—neither the swami nor his spirit—he was dead these ten years. (I remembered Dad telling me some years back, ‘Best thing that ever happened to Zarine.’ I hadn’t caught on, and shook my head. ‘The swami kicking the bucket,’ he had said.) Next day, there was a full-blown debate on. Do we report to the police? No, no, said mother-in-law, what a scandal it would be! Could she have gone to Udvada? What! By herself? If you want blessings of the holy fire, the two of them should have gone together. All the same, enquiries were made by her friends, Farida and Rati. The answer was terse. A hundred pilgrims come every day—how would we know if one Feroza came? No one by that name had got prayers recited at the fire temple.

Along with all this, everything had to be kept hush-hush. Mother said why don’t we all go to the agiyari? The priests were all smiles—everyone knows who has married whom in our community. They did make enquiries though, why the bride had not turned up? She couldn’t come to the agiyari today, said her mother. That would imply that she was midway through her monthly periods, a state of impurity that could never be countenanced anywhere near a fire temple. The Parsee word was arkaili, stained.

We lighted oil lamps, bought sandalwood sticks called sukhar and put them in the round silver tray lying at the threshold of the fire altar. We also banged our foreheads at the fire altar. The threshold wood had become dented—devout foreheads can do that. Come again, said the priests as we left. There was no respite. The third day, her brother Jamshed said all of a sudden, she was very fond of Boman. I was surprised not to feel the slightest envy.

Another two tense days passed.

‘How are you connecting with her friends?’ I asked mother-in-law.

‘I am not contacting them. How can I? They’ll start asking questions!’

After about ten days or a bit more, I got a call.

‘Rohin?’

‘Yes, Feroza.’

‘You must be wondering …’

‘Yes about sundry things, like what Morarji Desai said at a public meeting yesterday.’ There was silence at the other end.

‘Nothing else?’ she asked.

‘Was also wondering about sundry things like where you are and what went wrong.’ I kept my voice low so that Mama wouldn’t hear, but she did.

‘Or right, Rohin, at least for me.’

‘A time should come when what’s right for you is also right for me, Feroza. At least I hope so.’

‘Such a time will indeed come—hope it does.’

‘Glad you are striking a positive note—after a while, if I may say so.’ I noticed a sarcastic edge to my voice. ‘Suppose you tell me where you are speaking from? Or you may not—I don’t wish to force any details out of you. This ain’t a tooth extraction. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t.’

‘I am not sure.’

‘About what Feroza?’ There was silence at the other end.

‘Have you talked to your parents, Feroza?’

‘No.’

‘You mean not so far.’

‘Hmm …’ What’s that supposed to mean, I wanted to ask her. Didn’t. We held on to our phones without speaking. Then the line went dead. Mother came in as soon as I put down the phone. I expected a volley of questions. All she asked was, ‘Is she well?’ I nodded. She left me alone. When I think about it now, I am bowled over.

I reflected Feroza must be in a bad way. You don’t run away after a wedding. And she was not marrying a stranger. What had frightened her? She didn’t appear nervous the two days we were together. Before the wedding, she herself had suggested that we visit my grandmother, Meher, and her sister, Mamai, in Mazgaon of all places. The ladies didn’t have a phone. So we took them by surprise, but they looked well, the threshold stencilled with chalk prints of fish and a marigold string, a toran as we call it, strung over the door, indicative of celebration. Feroza had come back with a thick gold chain from Grandma and emerald earrings from my grand-aunt.

An hour later the phone rang again.

‘The last time I phoned, I meant to tell you.’

‘Go ahead now, if you feel like it,’ I said as cautiously as I could—no excitement in the voice, I wanted to be as normal as I could. There was a pause at the other end. ‘You’re not in Bombay, of that much I am certain.’

‘I am not,’ she said. I didn’t hurry her during those long pauses. ‘Rohinton, I am in Kanpur.’ There was a catch in her voice.

‘With Boman’s people?’ I blurted intuitively—couldn’t recollect the name Randeria that moment. I don’t know where this query of mine came up from.

‘Yes.’ I noticed the catch again. I thought she was crying. I kept quiet. I got frightened the line would go dead again.

‘Talk to your people, Feroza, they are frantic.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why don’t you talk to them?’

‘You tell them, Rohinton. And don’t get worried. I’ll be all right.’

‘I won’t—I mean I won’t get worried. I’ll tell them.’ I noticed a slight catch in my throat this time.

She hung up.

I rang them up. Her Dad picked up the phone.

‘She’s in Kanpur,’ I said.

‘In Kanpur? How d’you know?’

‘Got a call.’

‘From her!’ His voice had gone very high-pitched.

‘Obviously.’

‘There’s nothing obvious about it, I mean about her!’

‘She’s with the Randerias, with her in-laws.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? Saam and Zarine are her in-laws now! Do I have to tell you and Feroza even that!’

‘No, you don’t. Mum will phone you up in a minute.’

I first rang up Dad and told him. He didn’t ask too much but I noticed a lot of relief in his voice. Tense days for you, Rohin, just take it easy—that’s all, he said. Mama heard me giving him the details. Then she dialled Feroza’s Mom and I think spoke for half an hour. I left the room—didn’t want to listen in.That night after dinner (Dad also came home) Mama told me, she had even thought—rather, the thought had crossed her mind—that she could have committed suicide. Dad would never have thought so. Anxieties are a part of a woman’s genes. I was scandalized at her pessimism.

The next few days, I just parried questions—they were more like assaults—from Mama and mother-in-law. What are you going to do now? Nothing. Aren’t you going to bestir yourself? No. Are you going to just let things rest? Yes. We can’t understand you. Don’t. She just stays there and you here, is that it? Yes. For how long? Can’t tell. Is this a marriage, I’d like to ask? You were a witness to the ceremony, Mama. How long will this go on? What? This nonsense of she in Kanpur and you in Bombay? (This particular missile was from mother-in-law.) I don’t know, till she feels like coming back. Suppose she resumes her practice at Kanpur? I don’t think she has gone there to resume her medical practice, Mama. Things will sort themselves out. Give her some time. How much time? Don’t know.

My grand-aunt said, ‘Thanda pani nu maatlu,’ pitcher of cold water, that’s what he is. I took that as a compliment. (It wasn’t meant to be.) Nights were restless. I dreamt of being on lurching boats or trains that rocked and swayed. Usually, I got that sensation at dawn, just before I got up. Or perhaps, I got up because I had that sort of a dream. What frightened me was a dream that got repeated—two monks wearing rope sandals, their feet calloused and fissured. Where did they come from, which black cave in the mountains? Next time I dreamt of them, they were black-cowled.

V

I didn’t want to go haring off to Kanpur. What could she possibly say to me? What could I say to her? I could see myself standing there just gawking away, in the house of parents whose son had married my one-time fiancée and who were now home to my wife.

No point thinking of the past, breaking it bit by bit, unleafing it, unpetaling it.

That ‘unease’ of hers was haunting me now. What had she meant by it? She also talked of pace, I recollected. She just wanted time.

I got a call from Mahendra in Calcutta. I had hardly said hello and he asked, what is wrong? Nothing. ‘Come on, you don’t sound good. Where’s bhabi? Would like to greet her.’

I don’t much care for this bhabi-ing business. Why can’t people say Feroza or Mrs Bharucha? I am myself startled at the thought—never thought of her as Mrs Bharucha; have hardly started thinking of her as wife.

‘Oye, why are you silent?’

‘She’s gone to Kanpur.’ Might as well tell the truth.

‘Any particular reason?’

‘What reason?’ I ask.

‘Just asking,’ he answers. He was asking too much. There’s silence for a while.

‘Life is like Yiddish, yaar, a mystery.’

The line went dead. Where had he picked that up?

I have to make a conscious bid to appear fully normal. Shouldn’t appear self-conscious or deliberately off-hand. When asked about her, I invent a lie. She has to fulfil an assignment at the medical college there, actually do a short course there. Hasn’t she got her MBBS degree? Of course, she has. This is a course in gynaecology. Oh, she is becoming a gynaec? I shrug.

Have also to be up and about—wouldn’t do, being caught by Mama gazing into a wall; must look carefree, but not derisive of anything I discuss. People spot cynicism easily and link it to traumas. Now and then, it seemed they were scouting around, sniffing for any personal ghosts or guilts—guilts are also ghosts. The flat had become very quiet. Sometimes when the silence would sink in, I would think of our house as a well. One day, mother says, she will sleep with windows closed. Why, I ask, you’ve never done that except in January. She liked the sea breeze. They are squeaking too much, she said. I oil the hinges.

Don’t think too far ahead, I tell myself, doesn’t do any good. Guys who think in terms of skylines bang their heads walking into walls or glass doors. Cloak yourself in the belief that this will pass. Mother breaks the glass bubble of illusion one day. I hear her on the phone, once she lifts it off the cradle, she almost gets into a trance, a world of her own, away from the bric-a-brac of reality. ‘Marriage! Whatever there is of it, is hanging by a thread.’ Trust her to be cynical, I thought.

Mama asked me to go help her mother with the Muktad—those ten days before Navroze, our New Year, when prayers for the dead are intoned in fire temples. Each departed soul has a silver vase with his or her name inscribed on it—lest it gets mixed up with those of others. The priests sit down round a special fire (not the one already burning in the temple sanctum) and the names—actually the whole muster roll of dead relatives—is read out. If you are from the laity, the word ‘Bedin’ is always added to the name to denote caste. Fortunately, there are just two castes with us Parsees.

Prayers are held daily for those ten days. I escorted the two ladies to the Dockyard agiyari. Mamai grand-aunt, blunt and impulsive as always, would tick off the priest if she thought he had skipped some passage in the prayers. This skipping was known as ‘gapchas’—gaps—and hawk-eyed old ladies would wait breathlessly to spot a priest gloss over a passage and pounce on him. One morning, they wanted to walk back. As we neared the Vatcha Building where they stayed, Grandma said, ‘Now both of you are loners—father and son.’ I didn’t know where to look or what to say. (She didn’t include her daughter.)

Looked at myself in her tall mirror one day and noticed I was looking like Dad, the way he looked when he came back from London. Mother had been alerted about his departure by a call from the British Consulate about his visa or whatever. Mother never mentioned it to me, but I had heard her on the phone, ‘Peli aagal giyoch,’ has gone to her. Not that I didn’t know. A month or so later, he returned (rather unexpectedly, we thought) and I noticed his silvering forelock. I could swear there was no touch of white on his scalp a month earlier. He appeared more stoic, the jawline firmer, more full of resolve, more steeled, forged in a small fire which hadn’t really singed him. I remember with considerable embarrassment that I asked him, ‘How is Claire?’ If he was taken aback, he didn’t show it. Is a Parsee boy supposed to ask his father about his lover? Bet our scriptures have nothing on that one.

What I wanted to say was, I looked that dogged in the mirror. I have to keep a vigil on myself. Be cramped, enclosed. Others have dealt with ashfall. What am I worried about? Thoughts keep crowding—the mind ain’t a stadium which you lock up at night, lest lovers come and rut there. Would she be seeing Boman’s smoky reels? Watching all that sepia on celluloid? She wouldn’t touch the noir films, I know, but how can you tell? She is punishing herself isn’t she?