Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next morning a crow kept cawing in between pecking at a small piece of leftover meat, pleading for us to awaken. Last evening’s report of the riots seemed like nothing compared to our own drama. A mob of 3000-4000 Muslims had damaged property in Dad’s jurisdiction while he had been at home after three days of continuous work. Soon after, a Hindu mob set about trashing Muslim properties in retaliation. The larger activity dwarfed the events of our small building in the eyes of the police. They lacked the manpower, will, or courage to investigate.

Nobody hearkened to the cawing, incessant as it was. Nobody got out of bed till 10.00 a.m. Nobody went for Sunday Mass. Nobody wanted to even peep outside their door. But we finally came out onto the balcony, tiptoeing, responding to the wailing sounds we heard from room no. 6 on the first floor.

Apparently, the Surves’ son had not returned home. Mr. Surve filed a missing persons complaint and the police asked him to identify the blood-soaked trousers that they had kept from the remains. The trousers were unrecognisable, but the belt that held them up had a buckle so like the one his son owned and had worn the previous day, that Mr. Surve was convinced it belonged to his son. There was no body to claim, the police informed him; since it had been found in several pieces, they’d had to cremate it. No, they could not provide him with the ashes, since several bodies had been cremated on the same pyre.

Mr. Surve returned from the police station and broke the news to the family. Mrs. Surve wept shrilly and we all went back into our apartments in silence. None of us spoke or came out that day. We heard nothing from the Fernandeses’ room. Even Mother, who ordinarily would have gone to console them, stayed home, needing consoling herself. Our lives, tainted with attempted rape, murder, violence—all that we had never encountered or expected to in our sanctimonious world—seemed broken, irreparable. The secret that we all shared weighed us down.

Ali’s matrimonial bed had been chopped into firewood by the vandals; it seemed significant, almost handy, in the cremation of the Surve boy that the family held as a symbolic gesture of sending their son away in dignity. None of us attended, nor did we go downstairs and sympathise with the grieving family. I suppose they must have felt the differences in our cultures in that moment. Neighbours who do not mourn with you…no shared grief, no shared happiness, no shared expectations… does not make for a good community. No. We seemed ghettoised. And communal lines and ghettos create bitterness, as history constantly reminds us.

The Surve family left soon after. They moved out of the building a few months later without saying goodbye to us. We were relieved. No one wanted to speak to them. Nobody wanted to remember.

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The blood in the passage that had seeped into the grout could not be washed off easily. The Olivera family was left with the unhappy task since it was practically outside their door. Everyone else had shuddered, not wanting to touch it or clean it. The family boiled water, poured it on the floor and left it there to soften the blood so it could be cleaned. When that method proved unsuccessful, they bought a bottle of hydrochloric acid and applied it by dipping into the bottle a piece of cloth tied to a stick, and painting it over the grout. Mr. Fernandes, who would have normally taken the lead to solve this problem, had withdrawn into some netherworld, unreachable. ‘Isabel what do we do?’ the Oliveras asked Mum when the acid failed to work. So Mum hired Soni to clean the passage. She asked questions: ‘Kya hai, memsaab, khoon ki tra dikta hai?’ ‘Kya hua?’ ‘Koi gira kya?’ But Dad, now in his uniform as Inspector D’Souza, told her peremptorily that she should clean and leave since it was not in her place to ask questions. She silently returned to the task.

The clothes beater had mysteriously disappeared, and there was no inquiry about any weapon. There was no inquiry about who had killed the boy or how. There was no search for weapons. Officially, the boy had committed suicide, jumped out of the window. No one knew why—no suicide note, no goodbyes. Case closed, the police moved on to more pressing matters, trying to contain the riots that raged around the city.

Mr. Fernandes finally came out of his room on Monday morning and went to work. He nodded absently at all those who stood outside and wished him well. None of the children went to school for the whole week. There was silence till our ears hurt with the noise of the traffic. No children’s laughter, no sounds of balls being thrown against the walls, not even our evening gathering for stories from Joe.

After that week all seemed normal in Bombay. The cobbler’s wife took over her husband’s business. She sat on the steps of their home ordering her eldest son who now had replaced his father at the awl. The city seemed to bustle back: early morning clanking of pots and pans in a million sinks around the city; the sounds of milk bottles tinkling; trucks rolling down the streets. The stables, some of them burned down and others shut, belonged mostly to Muslim owners. Had they fled? We were too absorbed in our own silence to know. We just did not hear the hooves on the macadam roads anymore, and we no longer looked down on the first floor from the other side of the L.

Ms. Ezekiel had disappeared somewhere into the unknown, like vapour merging unnoticed into the atmosphere. She sometimes flitted into our dream moments: a brightly patterned dress through a taxi window or a large brimmed straw hat pulled low, climbing the upper deck of the red BEST bus. I run, arms outstretched—Ms. Ezekiel, Ms. Ezekiel, wait, wait, I am sorry, I am sorry, I shout behind a disappearing figure; disappearing without a backward glance, old, tired, wonderfully generous. I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry…where are you? How do you live? Sorry, sorry, sorry…

The needle of our lives gradually swung back to normal. In our attempt to forget, all the older children, who knew that something evil had just happened, took to reading. We read book after book, comic after comic. We exchanged books. We smiled at each other. But laughter seemed the sole preserve of the younger kids. Their games returned. And occasionally they tapped our doors in the afternoon and ran away.

The Farooqui family disappeared, leaving the door of Ms. Ezekiel’s room locked. They did not say goodbye either. No one knew when they’d left or where they’d gone. Somehow we all wanted to live in silence, occasionally acknowledging each other with half smiles or nods. I guess we were all afraid of what we might find beneath the surface if we did speak.

Two weeks after the incident, Anna finally emerged, looking all normal and sweet. I could not look at her, embarrassed as I was by my own fantasies of her. She, I think, sensed the change in our relationship. She assumed a shyness with me that hadn’t been there earlier. Mr. Fernandes dropped her at school every morning and picked her up every evening. He did it for the next three months till it was summer vacations. He went late to work and left early for those three months, even staying home on occasion.

And in March, that is precisely what saved his life.