Son

I

I was in Delhi at the Parsee Dharamsala, next to the Feroz Shah Kotla, when I got a call from Bombay I couldn’t take. The place had just one phone and by the time someone came and knocked on your door and you rushed to the instrument, a few minutes had gone by. Those were the days of trunk calls and the line would go dead in a minute. I had come looking for a good position—editor or joint editor of some national daily. Dailies had their own problems for me; they belonged to dynasties—the Birlas, Goenkas, Jains. And in politics, you focus on only one dynasty in India—descended from the author of The Discovery of India. If I may reiterate the obvious, that discovery came post-Vasco da Gama. (Am told Salazar took great offence when Nehru’s book hit the stands.) How do dynasty papers comment on the main dynasty? Reporter and sub would have been given their briefs, the lakshman rekha, the red line, handed down—you cross that on your peril, chum. One editorial against the dynasty, and you’ll be back in your two-bedroom hovel across the Jumna.

No, a daily wouldn’t do, has to be a journal. The Illustrated Weekly had not been murdered by its editors as yet. (They were never charged, incidentally, not even with homicide.) But that would mean hanging on in Bombay. I didn’t want that at this juncture. There was also that bit about the Radhakrishnan Fellowship—though I had been told that only fuddy-duddy guys got anywhere near it—stodgy, leaden-eyed ex-secretaries in the Ministry of Culture, for instance. I would apply for that. Why not? I would work on corruption—customs, police, pharmaceuticals, hospitals—the works. Good idea. I dashed off my proposal.

I returned to my room in the evening and was told there were two calls for me from Bombay. I rang up home but no one picked up the phone. Where was Mama? Rang up Dad and he was home. I told him I had come to Delhi’s Fleet Street looking for a job, a better job. It was six months after my wedding, or, shall I say, since Feroza left. I was staying at the Dharamtala on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, named after the last Mogul emperor. His sons were murdered by Hodson after the English, ably supported by Indian troops (who else), had won Delhi after the Mutiny. The place is now known as khooni darwaza (bloody gate), a stone’s throw from where I was staying. I thought I had told him all he needed to know about me.

He asked, ‘I am told you applied for some fellowship as well?’

Where did he get that? Was he putting some detective on me? His tone didn’t seem acerbic as usual, thank god. My application was a bit of a lark, but so what? Then he started telling me about Mehar Grandma. She was down with fever, and had problems breathing, was taken to a hospital. He told me to hang on in Delhi. Grandma had a lung infection and should get over it. Of course, he added she was old and frail. I thought old age and frailty were more than half the problem. I felt uneasy, however. Shadows had come loping into my dreams, and I went back to Bombay a week later.

Things were fine, I was told, Grandma had recovered and was discharged from the hospital the day I landed there by train. Mama was waiting at home to receive her. She told me it looked very bad earlier and Grandma had to be put on oxygen. She also said that there had been a call from Feroza and she had told her about Grandma. Dad had insisted she couldn’t be taken home, not to Vatcha Building in Mazgaon where she would have to walk up a slope, which was so rutted that even a wheelchair would be of no use. He had gone to pack her things and bring her home. Then came the bad news. Before Dad could reach, Grandma got impatient, took a cab and started off and met with trouble. A child ran across the street, the cab screamed to a halt. The child was saved but Mehar was thrown from the back seat right onto the windshield almost and was unconscious. Father saw a crowd, stopped, saw Grandma and took her to Masina Hospital, which was close by.

We rushed there, Mum and I. It was not that easy. The cab driver didn’t know where Masina Hospital was. Mama flared up. ‘Khopdi hai ke gobar? (Is that a brain or cow dung you have?)’ I had never been to Masina. After asking six people, we got our bearings, past Dockyard station and then into the lanes, past Hasanabad and Ismaili Seva Mandal and the Bhikaiji-Bejanji-Timber Owners, past all those signboards crawling with alliterations—Lusitanian Laundry, Gulzar-e-Gafar Hotel, Bharat Bamboo Bhandar—and bang opposite that Irani restaurant called the Star of Iran, we sighted the hospital. I was starving, hadn’t had breakfast. There was another restaurant there, called King of Iran. We seemed to have the whole of the Persian Gulf to choose from. We could dine either with the Magi or with the Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. What kebabs do we order, guys, oozing fat as they roll on spits, what linseed-peppered breads from aromatic ovens? Instead, we headed for the casualty. The chaukidar opened the ornate wrought-iron gate, painted in green and all sorts of angels and Latin quotes, allowed us through the palm-shaded avenue, till we reached the ward.

A doctor was examining her and the search was on for a room. She had been taken into the X-ray room. The doctor’s face was like a monsoon cloud when he saw the plate. The hipbone was broken. An operation was on the cards. How old was she? Daughter and son-in-law looked at each other. I’ve seldom felt so embarrassed; educated, France-returned couple, ignorant of the old woman’s age. Seventies, said Dad. ‘Soon ghela karech (what are you talking)?’ said Mom. She is at least eighty. We will go ahead, said the long-nosed Parsee doctor, can’t allow the old lady to be bedridden for life. But she’s frail, fifty pounds, I’d say. Long Nose shook his head in medicinal dismay.

Days went by—ECG, heart echo, X-ray again. What were they up to? I threw my daactary at them, lied ever so slightly—was in my fourth year of MBBS. They were bloody afraid, I discovered. No one wanted to touch her, including Long Nose. The gutlessness of surgeons when faced with a frail old patient is to be seen to be believed. A mishap or two, and tongues start wagging. Even ward boys start sniggering. Kahan jata, sahib, going to that daaktar sahib means free ticket to morgue, ek dum. The doctor is equally dismal. A steel nail would perhaps have to be put in, we are told. Wish I had turned surgeon and Damodar Pande was around.

I sleep at the hospital during the night. Mom comes in with lunch and looks after her mother till dinner-time. We eat the hospital dinner, bland as bland can be. Mamai grand-massi comes in at tea-time and stays till dusk. I hang around during the day as well, for someone is needed to run for medicine or call a doctor or nurse if she is feeling particularly unwell. Grandma is all there at times, otherwise the painkillers make her sleep. ‘Thari baeeiri kyan chai?’ she asks me, ‘Where is your wife?’ I lie unconvincingly but she doesn’t see through it. Mamai grand-aunt glares at me, as if I am some criminal. Her eyeballs (‘dora’, in Gujarati) are large and when she is angry, they get further enlarged. When I was a kid she would glare angrily and ask, ‘Mara dora joya ke (do you notice my angry looks)?’ Her eyeballs became a joke between me and Mom.

Four days after the accident Dad comes in and says, ‘Feroza rang up and talked to Zarine.’ Mamai grand-aunt greets this announcement with an icy stare. I am not sure which of us two she considers more culpable—Feroza or me. A week has gone by in tension. On the eighth day, there is dhamaal, a flurry of activity. The operation is ‘on’, says a nurse. At that very moment, Feroza steps in, looking very neat and beautiful in a well-starched cotton sari. Am not happy with her dark fingernails and ask her if she has painted them with Worcestershire sauce. She first gives me a dirty look, but then sees the joke and smiles. Mamai grand-aunt meanwhile has gasped audibly twice, when she entered and then with this sauce-smeared query of mine. She won’t say anything to me, if I know her, but Mom will get it from her. Feroza talks to Grandma, and elicits responses from her. ‘When did you come?’ the old lady asks. You could knock us down with a pin. For the last half hour they’ve been drugging her.

‘Came last night,’ Feroza answers, and holds her hand and caresses it.

Mom bursts in. ‘Putting up with your people?’

‘No Mama, I stayed the night with Rati.’

It is Feroza who trundles Grandma into the operation theatre.

Mother and Mamai grand-aunt are so confounded they don’t know how to react. Even the operation takes a backseat till the head sister tells us, ‘Will take, two maybe three hours.’ She is from Malabar, nut-brown skin, frizzy hair and, for a matron, surprisingly slim. Feroza starts talking to her and ferreting out the details. She’s a doctor, after all, I am not—after four years of cutting up cadavers, if you please. The two ladies now vent their frustration. ‘She turns up after six months—no letter, no phone call—and stays with a friend! Not with parents, nor husband.’ Aunt is more acerbic—‘If you can call him a husband.’ Mom gives her aunt a dirty look. So do I.

What do I do? I don’t feel any anger against her. Don’t laugh, but at this moment, I admire her composure and guts. Feroza suffered from no discomfiture, her eyes met the ladies head on—I thought they had forgotten how to blink. I tell myself may amnesia descend like a cloud over the last six months. I was alone these months. I have said this before, aloneness is a cave where you talk to the walls and the walls talk back, they are sensitized, they echo thought, feeling. Mind you, you are not talking to yourself. Yes, I felt shut out. No question of ‘felt’, dash it, I was shut out.

I never hoped and never feared hope. But I did tamp it down.

After five hours in the operation theatre, Grandma was brought back. ‘What happened, why did you take so long?’ asked grand-massi Mamai. The doctor replied that even after the operation they kept her for an hour to make sure nothing untoward happened. My mother looked at her watch and shouted she has been with you five hours! The doctor didn’t choose to argue.

I made it clear that I would stay with her each night. The head nurse heard me and said, ‘No need, tonight. The patient is thoroughly sedated.’ I stayed the night nonetheless, getting up every two hours or so to see how she was faring. I stared at her, watching her chest heave as she breathed from the oxygen cylinder. She somehow looked even thinner than in the morning, slender as a twig, the face a bit cadaverous; the cheeks had sunk in further and the wrinkles travelled laterally from her eyes to her ears like the elongation of an eye-pencil mark. The skin on her hands and face looked thin as tissue paper, almost membranous. With the flesh gone, the nose looked more prominent. But she slept soundly.

Feroza was there next morning at six. Our conversation was limited to the patient—neither of us wanted to open the Pandora’s box of the past. Mama was not feeling well, but came all the same till ordered by Dad to go home. ‘You’ll give her infection,’ he rightly told her. The night was bad. Grandma was feeling terribly restless and hardly slept for two hours. She was also in pain. A novalgin tablet didn’t work. Then the doctor gave her a vesparex tablet.

In the morning, she looked through me. She felt good as Feroza caressed her hand. She never responded to the numerous queries of her sister Mamai till we told her not to pester the patient—she’d answer in her own good time. I went home for a bath and a meal, feeling uneasy. She hadn’t said a word and no recognition seemed to flit across her eyes, seeing her near ones. I prayed after my bath, something quite unusual for me. Hope nothing goes wrong with her brain, Lord, I prayed. And hope she can move about a little on a crutch.

The next night with Grandma was even worse. She didn’t seem to understand about her operation or that she was not supposed to move. Four times she tried to get up and go to the loo. It was the left hip that had broken. She had managed to put her right leg on the floor when I prevented her. After midnight, I was horrified to find she had removed her surgical bandage. I could see the stitches. She was bandaged again, but early morning the nurse informed me that even the second bandage had been thrown on the floor. When she talked, she rambled. When I told her I was her grandson, she laughed. And she talked of the past as if it was the present. For the next week, it was routine, Feroza was with her during the day, I at night. This way, we successfully avoided each other.

She started thinking this was a hotel. I tried to bluff her. This is not a hotel, Grandma, you are sleeping at home. ‘Which home?’ she asked. Grandma, people have only one home, not a hundred, I replied brutally. I was still arguing with her on a rational plane. She asked, ‘Where did I leave my clothes when I came yesterday?’ Grandma, you came here a fortnight back. And you are not eating, you’re wasting away. She replied, ‘We must pay back our debts here. The blood loaned to the body must be returned to the blood bank.’

I was almost knocked out. Where did these ideas come from? The whole day, rather night, she hadn’t recognized me. Who are you? Where do you work? Why are you here? Do you have to go to office? Then she quietened down, exhausted.

When they catch you, tell them you are neither Hindu nor Muslim. This was at ten in the morning when I was about to leave, and Feroza had been around for an hour. From where did these fears of the partition era emerge? She must have been thinking in her befogged mind about me. Later, she said, you take cover in a doctor’s house if they surround you. She told Feroza, you do the same, but make sure the doctor’s reputation is good; some of them are fast. How fast Grandma, what speed? She laughed and slapped my hand.

Another day, she asked, do you have a real father and mother? Yes, Grandma, I am your daughter’s son. She laughed. That way I have a thousand sons! Anyone twenty years younger will be my son! I came close to her bed. Who am I, Grandma? She answered, don’t ask me stupid questions, I am warning you.

My husband will be waiting, she said. I remember he died after my parents returned from France. She tries to turn her bedsheet into a sari. She looked for her petticoat all the time and cursed it was not there. She wanted to go home. I reasoned with her. You’ve been in bed for twenty days. She asked, ‘Then how did I go out in the morning?’ What could I answer. She hallucinated, kept repeating this is a hotel. This is a hospital, Ma, didn’t you talk to the nurse just now? Do hotels have nurses?

‘She was a call girl smuggled into the hotel in the garb of a nurse.’

I truly am shocked. Where is all this coming from? Then she talks of a plot and that I had hidden her sari. Twice she threatens to jump out of the window. ‘Grandpa must be waiting for me.’ I tell her he died years ago. It doesn’t sink in. He must be wild with fright, she says. All her own terrors, she is transferring to him. Then I ask directly one day, how many years ago did Grandpa die? Seven years, she says. Wrong, twelve years, I correct her. ‘You want to kill him?’ she asks accusingly. Six times that night she tells me her husband must be waiting for her and she has to go. Each time I have to make her lie down almost forcibly. In the morning, she catches her sister’s hand and getting up from the bed, says, ‘Mamai, let’s go home.’

Feroza’s parents make an appearance. Dad comes in and Grandma smiles at him. ‘Thu ayo (you’ve come)?’ Where does that memory lurk, daughter separated from son-in-law. Not a flicker of recognition, when she looks at us, and this man comes twice a week and gets an instant welcome. He pats her hand, makes polite enquiries. Grandma nods and even answers now and then coherently. Then Dad starts roundly cursing the doctors—wants to pick up a fight with them. ‘They operate on her for five hours! Doctors or bloody butchers? It’s the drugs that have hit her memory—and the pain. Six-inch steel rod in her hip bone! Damned carpenters!’

We took her home, Vatcha Building, no point lingering here. True to form, her troubles start at night. She keeps asking, ‘Who is climbing the steps? Who has opened the door? Just take a look, will you? Is it my sister returning? (She’s in the other room, Grandma, I yell, but it makes no difference.) It has been pouring heavily—hope she reaches the house safely. Get a tailor to stitch a gown for me. (She just can’t do without her ijar or a petticoat.) My sister must have climbed the steps alone today. Who has climbed the steps? Who has banged that door shut?’ Still, I find she is improving, but sand grain by sand grain.

Not that she is much better during the day. Feroza attends to her during daytime, helping Mamai grand-massi, who is also cooking lunch—and chicken soup for her sister. Feroza tells me about Grandma’s antics. ‘Is that the voice of my sister? (Actually, it was a neighbour on the telephone screaming into the instrument.) Why are they fighting?’ Feroza tried to calm her, ‘No one’s fighting, Mama. She’s speaking into the telephone.’

‘No one fights with a telephone! You all think I am a fool!’

A gust of wind makes the doors fly open. ‘Who is this?’ she asks. ‘Has someone come in? Why does he have to dash in? Can’t he close the door behind him gently?’

‘Just the breeze, Mama,’ Feroza tell her, ‘no one’s come in.’

‘Well, tell them to open the door gently.’

Feroza told me that Grandma talked to the cooker. When it whistled, she told it to shut up. I had left my pyjamas in the wash-room and she tried to wear them thinking it was her petticoat. She also asks her sister if their mother (that would be my great grandmother) knows about her ‘sickness’, as she terms it. Yet, we feel she’s on the mend. Feroza sponges her daily. She suddenly barks one day, ‘No sponging for me from today. Put a hot water bucket and I’ll have my bath!’ And she does manage it with some assistance.

The wages of self-doubt are loss of confidence. You crumble like an osteoporosis-stricken knee hitting the floor. I never let anything show—in fact, was a bit rude to seniors—remember Chatterjee and that Biswas fellow? And I didn’t apply too respectfully for the Radhakrishnan Fellowship either. What about our wages, we, the ordinary folk? Doesn’t it initially boil down to what you are born with—poverty or estates or epilepsy, various legacies bequeathed from the begetters to the begotten? What about humdrum guys like us who navigate the shallows? Are our channels defined already, and the currents that will propel or buffet us? Is life a fucked-up fix? As long as you don’t do anything extraordinarily stupid or vicious, you get what’s coming to you. That is a mix of what is apportioned to you and what you deserve—half, half I feel. I am gonna raise my glass to normality.

II

We are lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, not that there is much to see, for the lights are out. We are careful not to touch, can hear each other breathe, to stretch it a bit, can almost hear the other’s thoughts clicking away in the skull. Suddenly, Feroza says, ‘What was it like for you?’

‘A bit of a bleed, but nothing one can’t manage.’

The silence becomes a bit heavier after that. Silence can become a presence sometimes, sits with you, usurps a chair, becomes a third party in the room.

‘I don’t want to ask about you,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Can’t I guess? Someone gets married and then finds she has not got over Boman, her previous husband. How can she get over all this? Simple, by going back to her old in-laws.’

She half gets up, resting her back on the bedstead, and switches on the light. Her eyes are blazing. ‘You are not being sarcastic, are you Rohin?’

This is really the limit and I tell her that.

‘You think I am that insensitive? Come on, you know me better.’

I am aware that apologies don’t come naturally to her, but she does surprise me by saying sorry.

‘All I want you to know, and I won’t repeat that again because the matter is embarrassingly delicate, is that I perfectly understand what you went through. If only they had let me be for another six months or so. I just needed time.’

‘Who are they?’

‘My people, of course, Mom especially. My friends also turned the key (chavi fervi), kept telling her hurry up or she’ll remain a widow all her life. How long is that boy going to wait? It’s four years he hasn’t married, girls are out to hook him, especially the parjat types—that sort of stuff.’

The parjats, the non-Parsees, figure in our imagination only when it comes to matters matrimonial.

‘You could have put your foot down earlier Feroza, just told them you were not ready; joined a hospital, started work.’

‘Not as easy as you imagine, as men imagine. This is India.’

‘And another thing I want to tell you is I always wished Boman well.’

‘I know that, or …’ she pressed my palm.

‘Or what Feroza?’

‘I’d have thought it unbecoming of you.’

The air cleared, I dozed off.

A week later, this silly thing occurred. Mama kept a black, lacquered box—obviously Chinese, with a dragon painted in light gold. It contained letters, bric-a-brac, even beads and a photo of her swami. She was closing it and a gust from the sea blew a paper away and I caught it. Mama leapt at me like a jaguar. ‘Give me that paper!’ I kept my hand high so that she couldn’t reach it and took a look. It was a letter from Dad. I was gonna read it. I ran laughing into my—sorry, now our—room and bolted the door. Feroza in the dining room was also locked out. There were two letters stapled together. I was behaving like a kid I know, and seeing Dad’s writing, I was excited. Were they coming together again?

Didn’t look like it from the first few lines I read. It was terse. ‘Dear Zarine,’ it started, ‘you are having a hard time of it, I know. So is Rohinton, obviously, though he doesn’t seem to show it. But I am getting a bit weary of his antics and thought you should know. I am attaching a letter from an old friend, Cawas, whom you know very well. He’s made it in Delhi. Any good advocate worth his name makes it good in Delhi—high court, Supreme Court, law ministry—that’s where an attorney should be. In fact, I am thinking that my firm, Bharucha, Balsara and Hindlekar, should open a sub-office there. Cawas is now an associate solicitor general and was in the selection committee for the Radhakrishnan Fellowship. I am attaching his letter, not exactly flattering. I feel Rohinton would do well to stay with me for a while. He needs talking to—and, of course, great care, which you are giving him. A time of turmoil for him, I know. But please read the attached and then destroy. Yours, Saam.’

Cawas’ letter was a bit of a ramble, recalling early days, nostalgia for Bombay, and then he descended on me. ‘I must tell you,’ said the letter, ‘though in strictest confidence, that we got a very entertaining proposal from your son. He wants to do a project on corruption (I’ll tell you the title he suggested later). The selection committee thought such a proposal should come from some honest, retired bureaucrat or someone who had served in some vigilance department. R’s thrust was amusing. He started by saying that corruption was a very healthy development in a country—he noted that the economy was doing well and we would soon be past the one per cent rate of growth.

‘Then, in a section entitled “Double whammy”, he suggested that corruption, like LSD, made for great happiness. The bribe-giver was happy and so was the taker. What more could you want? It was a great boost to the “national index of happiness”. Some unknown angel of happiness had invented this device, obviously with the tacit approval of the Lord. Your son stated that:

When mian-bibi razi

Then what karega qazi?

‘One of our members was from Kerala and didn’t understand this half-English, half-Urdu couplet. We explained that when groom and bride were willing, what could the poor qazi do? The Malabari gentleman got almost apoplectic, much to my (covert) amusement—you know very well I could never disguise my giggles in class. Regrettably, we could not examine his later proposals where he condemned corruption in customs and police etc. and his rather authoritative dissertation on adulteration in pharmaceuticals. Properly worded, he might have even got the fellowship.’

I opened the door and read out the letter to Feroza and Mom. Feroza was delighted and couldn’t control her laughter. ‘That’s just like him, Mama, don’t you know your son?’ And before mother could say a thing Feroza came up, hugged me and gave me a passionate kiss on the lips. Mother was embarrassed and was hard put to restrain a smile.