Chapter Six

Leaning back, I pushed my head on the couch and stretched my legs in front of me, knocking down a cup under the centre of the table. Did I place it there? Above me, near the ceiling, a fly struggled in the spider web. With a sigh, I changed my spot; going into the spare bedroom that doubles as my study, I sat where I could not be distracted by the odd cobweb. I kept my books here, lining all the walls: Blaise Pascal, Descartes, Hans Kung, books on the Holocaust, Mathematics, the complete leather-bound set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and of course, P.G. Wodehouse. My writing desk, my collection of music CDs, long-playing records, spools of tapes, and art work kept me company. I sat on the rocking armchair that my grandmother left me, ancient, but Mother’s meticulous preservation was reflected in the shiny polish of the lotus carved on the back rest. Anna’s book lay open on my lap and I looked around with a sense of self…A man without a wife can take much pleasure in his hobbies and the things he owns.

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Billimoria Building was not the cleanest of apartment buildings. The exterior paint was long since gone with the monsoons lashing over decades of unchanged weather; the balustrade, wrought iron, looked as wrought iron should, but the floors outside the general areas had dirt of the ages embedded, such that one could not see the black and white stone under. The ceiling, high, wooden, unpainted and with occasional spider nests that escaped the agile lizards’ tongues, had here and there a pigeon’s nest, some abandoned and some renewed. The toilets we shared with our neighbours quite increased our intimacy—standing in queues if the toilet was occupied by your neighbour, discussing the length of time they took or the kinds of sounds that emanated from behind the locked door, giggling, laughing, unconcerned that we may have embarrassed the occupant; yes indeed we were very intimate, almost a lifting of the seventh veil. It was also where I learnt relativity—i.e., the length of a minute was relative to which side of the door you were on. Sometimes our conversations and sense of fun descended to the level of Anthony’s flatulence—a detail that is ordinarily kept private, only to be aired in one’s marriage. Though I must say, nothing in Anthony Vaz’s married life was much of a secret. The thin walls between room no. 15 where he lived and room no. 16, the apartment of the Fernandes family, ensured that privacy remained an elusive concept.

In a meeting on the second floor—one of several meetings we frequently held—it was decided that Anthony Vaz’s family, the Fernandeses, and us would share one toilet. The Marchon family, the Olivera family, and Mimosa shared the next, and it went down the line, three families in a row to the next. Ours was the cleanest. Mr. Fernandes tiled the toilet with white glazed tiles and we contributed and paid Soni, the methrani—sweeper—to clean the toilet daily. The others in the building did not have a tiled toilet and the floor was coarse concrete, which became black over time. The landlord had no hand in cleanliness, maintenance, or waste disposal. Billy, so disliked by the tenants, cared nothing about his popularity. He came to his office and collected the rent, which I must admit was small and absolutely impossible to raise each year since, I suppose, as far back as from when the building was built. Our rents never did catch up with inflation, and Billy self-righteously pointed this out whenever anyone was indecent enough to complain.

Anna was the only one of us who shared private time with Billy. Well, what can I say but that it was so like Anna? She had a trick of viewing the world through her own lens and placing it in some Anna logic.

I remember a time I was fourteen—Anna would have been about nine—and I came home from school, running up the wooden stairs two at a time, reaching the top a little out of breath. There was Anna, hanging upside down from the door frame of the passage, her feet wedged between the bars, using them as a hook. She had blocked the passage and I had to stop.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking at the world.”

“What world?”

“The world, the air, the people in it, my thoughts.”

“Why upside down?”

“Kalyug,” she said.

“Kalyug? Anna, do you want to explain or will you just let me through?”

“My teacher said that this is the Age of Kalyug: the world is upside down. Good is bad, bad is good, our thinking is upside down. I want to see how the world looks right side up.”

We saw Billy as mean, selfish, and idle. Everyone spoke of him with distaste. We saw a very dirty man reflected in our crumbling building, dirty compound, and the poor toilets. Billy himself lived in a bungalow somewhere beyond civilization; somewhere in some suburb that none of us knew of. It would take up an occasional summer night, arguing about where Billy lived. Sometimes we spent the evening speculating on the state of his home and his toilets, and sometimes we discussed his wife, Roshan Billimoria. She, in contrast to Billy, was a very fashionable Parsee woman, a bun on the top of her head, always very dark red lipstick and stiletto heels. She would come once a year, I suppose when Billy had not given her the previous month’s rent, and would sit in his chair, call for the bar-wallah, and ask him to go from room to room demanding the rent. She made no conversation with any of the tenants, and we had no doubt her manner was disdain rather than reserve. So in our more vicious moments we disparaged her—“Roshan, what do you know; ‘ray of light,’ ha, ha.” We imagined Billy’s life at home with this ‘light’ of his life, and the tenor of our discussions veered between sympathy and wicked glee.

But Anna did not see him through our lens. She saw only the good in people, and why not? Ironically, Billy, who hated Mr. Fernandes for his attempts at unionisation of the tenants—mostly failed attempts, but nevertheless attempts—was always kind to Anna. Everyone was kind to Anna. Expecting Billy to do anything for the building, however, was carrying naiveté to the extreme…

The naivete we showed back then continues to disturb me, so forgive me if I repeat myself on how we carried on in a very solid enclave shielded from the reality around us, almost obtuse in the way we led our lives. Over and over again it spins in my head, especially in those moments when I encounter the triggers to my deepest despair: the paranoia of religious differences, of man’s cruelty to man, and the lack of ability to understand events except with hindsight…Have you been deceived by a lover because you refused to believe her inconstancy even though it stares you in the face? And when she walks out on you, you wonder how you could have missed the signs and red flags? Revisiting the history of events, we pick on every look, every small sign, every twist that should have alerted us, and hate ourselves for not being suspicious, for taking no notice of all the road signs, and then finally for our own stupidity. Self-loathing…that’s what it is. I find it hard to absolve myself or forgive ourselves collectively.

Though Dad was a police inspector, we still lived in a very protective bubble, away from the rough and tumble, engulfed by Mother and the Fernandes family. Bad was out there, somewhere, and sinning happened, like lies and disobedience to our parents; but sex, drugs, violence, theft happened almost in fantasy, in unreal worlds outside our perimeter, in the movies or in the Marchon household.

It was past midnight and Anna’s book lay open on my lap. I imagined that she was already here now, not a month away. Right there under the lamp she stood: not Anna the child, but Anna the woman. And she—she tearfully said she was sorry for abandoning me, loving me as she did. She begged me to forgive her, to take her in my arms, to console her and tell her all is well. And I lovingly forgave, held her and kept her there right beside me where our hands and thighs stayed against each other, cell for cell matching our shared connection. But there was only that sixteen-year-old, bright-eyed optimist she was before Mohamed’s death and the events that followed in 1993 caused her to leave, pushing my lids down, coaxing me to sleep…

We spent so many years without a light, going up and down the stairs in the darkness, but when Mother slipped on the stairs and hurt her ankle, we felt it was indeed essential. Surprising how significant a light on a stair can get, as we discovered on that gruesome day in 1993.