Chapter Eight

Strange patterns danced on the wall and ceiling cast by the floor lamp in the corner. My own shadow on the ceiling was gigantic, unrecognizable, dancing, mocking me, daring me to equal its dimension, fit in its mould, match its reality. It curved along the wall adapting to the angles and moved up on the ceiling, taking part of me in a different direction, unable to break through the walls, distorting, bending, and yielding to its confines.. One can hide, change one’s shape, but there is always the shadow. I once read about the airplanes that cannot be seen, because of their coating or some such thing. But children look down at the road and point to its shadow—“Mummy, a plane”—while their mothers search overhead and worry about a child who sees nonexistent things.

It was nightfall. Beyond curtained windows, the woodworm screeched in drunken madness; mosquitoes, troubled by the shrillness of the woodworm, flew madly, searching for blood to soothe the whirring in their heads. The occasional rickshaw honked, heralding a life of struggle—people returning late or hurrying to the station to get to work in time. In the distance, Bollywood played a tune on some chawl loudspeaker facing outwards into the neighbourhood rather than inwards to entertain those at the party. Look at us, look at us, we are enjoying our miserable lives, it shouted out to the neighbourhood that was trying in vain to sleep. Spiders rappelled down to places where unsuspecting prey genuflected over grace in anticipation of dinner.

My bed, polished Burma teak wood, with a rose-carved headboard that matched the armoire, had Isabel written all over it. One year, overtaken by bed bugs, Dad insisted we get rid of the bed. Mother, shocked that he could be so cavalier about something that had been in her family for sixty years, went silent for a week, pulling up the cotton mattress obsessively, searching for the buggers to kill. She went to Mr. Fernandes; as always the fixer of things, and above all Isabel’s champion, he took on the project of cleaning the bed—even if I have to kill them one by one with my bare hands, Isabel—and salvaged the family heirloom.

My eyes caught the chequered pyjamas laid out on the coverlet by Premibai. That is new… Whatever…

I took Anna to bed with me, continuing from where I’d left off, in the midst of December 1990, and the incident with the stairs.

But now, this evening in our living room, the sounds of typing ceased to be a tik, tik, tok, tik. Dad was getting frustrated with the uncooperative ‘a.’ He had to roll up the paper to erase the mistake he had made.

“Damn,” he said, as the paper tore. He looked at us watching him and then silently rolled the carriage of the typewriter and adjusted a new set of paper and carbon. He resumed typing. Dad typed fast, tik-tak-tik-tok it went, depending on the word, but every time he hit an ‘a’ he stopped and, ignoring Pitman’s instructions—Do not lift your fingers from the keys—he raised his hands and tapped the stubborn key. His irritation mounted.

“One would think this is a simple one-page letter, easy to type — but so trying!”

“I just need a light,”Mum repeated.

Dad kept typing. At the end of the page he sighed, shut the typewriter, put a plastic dust cover on it, and we all went to bed. It was only minutes before Dad, mouth open, snored vengefully—almost like he was attacking Billy in his sleep.

Billimoria Building ran two hundred feet along Nesbit Road, took a bend at the intersection, and ran another fifty feet on St. Mary’s Road like a giant L. Not far from where we lived, a stable housed horses that during the day pulled carriages for the tourists. Now they clopped up and down with their owners who, after a day’s work and feeding, took a nightly stroll down our street. The regular stamp of horses on the tarred roads sent my imagination soaring to Rudyard Kipling’s “A Smuggler’s Song”:

If you do as you’ve been told, ‘likely there’s a chance,

You’ll be given a dainty doll, all the way from France,

With a cap of pretty lace, and a velvet hood—

A present from the Gentlemen, along o’ being good!

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark—

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie—

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

I crept up to the window after I heard Dad snore and watched for the gentlemen to go by, imagining bootleggers and highwaymen in the small street where we lived. I sat on a little round table waiting, and when I heard the stamp of the horses I ducked down. But were there gentlemen as the poem promised? Oh, never. Only the old cobbler who lived in a little tenement opposite, hammering into leather, his back at right angles to the pavement, making shoes till the first crow of the cock as the faint light of dawn showed in the night sky.

Anna’s habit of sitting Miss Marple-like, looking at the street and everything around, brought us up to speed on various things that happened in the night. The horses, Ms. Ezekiel’s groceries, lovers in the night from the neighbourhood, she saw it all. She saw the stabbing of Mohamed Farooqui in the thick of the events of December 1992, she saw the old cobbler decapitated as he bent over the shoes he was hammering, a martyr to his work, unconcerned about the events that were sweeping around us at that time—we were not the only insular people on that street. Most people want simplicity. They live for the day, struggle endlessly for the survival of their family, earn for their education and food, and then die, sometimes needlessly, believing they did their duty.

In January 1993, a month after Mohamed was stabbed, when we thought everything could be left behind and we could pretend it never happened, events once again swept us in an unexpected direction, telling us that we really had no control and that our choices would continue to be redefined by fate or by the larger society we lived in. Nothing could protect us; our shared expectation of life could only make us insular, stratified, cut off from others who had a different ideology; but larger events affect us all. And though the street resumed its regular drum minus the beating of leather, minus the bent figure opposite hammering into it, and though we went on with our lives, our futures were foreshadowed by events that sucked us out of apathy and unwillingly into the country in which we lived.