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We soon find out. Jamal has come to take his
leave. He thanks us for giving him a job when he'd come to
Bombay from his village in the north as a gauche, unworldly boy of
twenty. He tells Babu that he has been like a father to him, thanks
him for the numerous times he has bailed him out of financial
situations. He flushes and apologizes for the whole strike business
and says he realizes that things will never be the same because of
that situation. He says he knows that now he has lost dad's and
Babu's and Mehroo's trust and because of that he has come
to take his leave because he cannot continue working at the factory,
not with the fallout from the strike still floating like dust
particles in the air. I hear myself gasp when Jamal says he is
leaving but I don't know if he hears me because he goes on. He
has another job lined up at a factory in Chembur but wherever he
goes, he will always remember us and our many kindnesses towards him.

No one has interrupted Jamal while he has been
talking.

Now, I wait for someone to say something—for
Mehroo, who has come into the room, to say it's time to let
bygones be bygones, for dad to say he is in no position to lose his
favourite worker, for Babu to call Jamal a sisterfucker and put his
arm around him. But no one moves. Finally, dad clears his throat and
thanks Jamal for his years of service and asks when his last day will
be. He touches Jamal lightly on the arm and wishes him good luck and
Jamal nods his head to acknowledge the gesture. I am stunned at how
easily Jamal is being let go, like a discarded piece of machinery.
But I do not say a word because I sense the unspoken disappointment
and hurt that all four adults in this room are experiencing and I
suddenly feel very small and inexperienced.

After Jamal leaves, Dad and Babu decide to give
Jamal an extra month's salary for his long years of service. I
know that I should be glad about this but I'm still reeling
from how casually the relationship has been severed. I am also struck
by how broken, how defeated Jamal had looked while the rest of us
have recovered unscathed from the strike. I think of him starting out
afresh in a new place, and wonder if this new, serious, sad-faced
Jamal is permanent or whether the old, impish Jamal will resurface
again. And I realize that I will never know because I will never see
him again. I am angry at myself for having ever believed that Jamal
and I were friends, for believing that friendship was possible
between us. I realize that on those occasions when I pretended to
work by his side—when he indulged me by letting me wash the
walls with him, for instance—he was working until he was
bone-tired, working in addition to his full-time job at the factory,
in order to earn some extra money for—for what? To send home to
his family? To save in a bank? To buy himself a new set of clothes?

I realize that in all the years that Jamal had
ordered Cokes for me when I visited the factory, I had never seen him
sip a soft drink. Here I thought he was treating me as his friend
when actually he was treating me like a spoilt princess, a visiting
dignitary who had to be entertained with soft drinks. And that day of
the demonstration on the balcony—what did I think he would do
if he caught my eye? Walk away from the strike?

Decide that his friendship with me was more
important than a fair wage? What kind of arrogance on my part did it
take for me to stand on that balcony? And what I'd thought of
as solidarity, wasn't solidarity at all. It was just liberal
guilt.

No, Jamal and I were never friends. He probably
always knew that, aware as he had to be of the class barriers between
us. I had been blithely unaware of those barriers, or, had felt good
about myself for ignoring them. Now, I realize that ignoring those
barriers had not been an act of humility and democracy but of hubris
and privilege.

I go to bed that night, angry and disappointed at
myself.

When I sleep, I dream of Jamal. His face is in the
sky, cloudlike, and his eyes are opaque and dripping with tears. I am
on the ground, looking up at Jamal's face in the sky, watching
his tears turn into rain as they fall around me. I want to say
something to him, console him, but he is very far away.

We are both very far away from each other.

For only the second time in my life, my father has
lost his temper with me but this time, we have gone almost four
months without speaking to each other despite living under the same
roof. He is open about the fact that the months of my punishing
silence have been hell for him but my teenage pride will not let me
concede the same point.

For the last four months, a flag of sorts, the
emblem of my defiance, has held a pride of place in my closet. It is
a striped, blue-and-white cotton shirt given to me by a friend and it
is what inaugurated my period of silence. The shirt is about three
sizes too large for my ninety-nine-pound frame but baggy shirts and
blue jeans are in fashion among the arty kids in college and I love
the fact that the shirt hides my small but growing breasts. My
well-dressed, dandified father, with his starched collars and pressed
pants, hates that shirt. He is embarrassed at the thought of his only
daughter walking around the neighbourhood wearing an ill-fitting
shirt and jeans torn at the knees. My head is filled with images of
scruffy, long-haired rock-stars like Bob Dylan. He still remembers
the impeccable dress style of a Sinatra or Cary Grant. We are from
two different worlds and soon, those worlds will collide.

For months, he keeps his silence. But it all comes
to a head one evening, hours before he is to catch the overnight
train to leave on a business trip. That afternoon, he is giving his
banker friend a ride home when he spots me at the bus-stop near my
college. Instinctively, his foot hits the brake to stop but when he
notices how ‘shabbily' I am dressed, he speeds by. He is
not sure if I have seen him. But for the rest of the afternoon the
fact that he did not stop for his only child shames him, makes him
disgusted with himself and by evening, the shame has hardened into
anger. That evening, he is glowering as I answer the doorbell and let
him in. Oblivious to what has transpired earlier in the day, I make
small talk while he hastily throws his clothes into his suitcase.
Mehroo tells him that dinner is ready but he mumbles something about
picking something up along the way. ‘Wait then,' she
says. ‘I'll just wrap the cutlets up for you to eat on
the train.' She hurries into the kitchen.

We are alone in the hallway as he waits for
Mehroo. The blue fluorescent light blinks and hums overhead.
Suddenly, my father's eyes narrow as they focus on a tiny hole
on my right shirtsleeve. When he speaks, his voice is choked.
‘Wearing torn clothes outside. My own child. Even when the
business was really bad, when we had no orders, when all we ate every
night was daal and rice, even then, nobody in this family ever went
outside with torn clothes…'

‘It's not really torn,' I reply.
‘The hole's so small, no one can see. Besides, that's
the fashion…'

‘
I
can see it. That's what
matters. I can see it.' And he takes a step toward me, puts his
index finger in the hole and moves it down the length of my arm, the
shirtsleeve tearing to expose my arm and hanging near my wrist.

There is a sudden silence. We stare at each other,
both of us unsure of what to do next. I am breathing hard, willing
myself not to cry. My dad looks as horrified as I feel. Mehroo walks
into the silence and gasps as she sees me, standing in my torn shirt,
looking like a street urchin. ‘Wh…what happened?
Burjor?'

In reply, my dad picks up his suitcase. ‘I'm…I'll
miss my train.' He opens the front door and then stops to look
at me.

‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘I…we'll
talk when I get home. Stay well.'

I do not reply. For the rest of the evening, I
ignore the pleas of the grown-ups and walk around in my torn shirt.
Each time I glance at the torn sleeve, I feel a warm sense of
satisfaction, like blood rushing into a cold limb. My father's
action has given voice to something I have felt but could never
vocalize, has exposed some essential truth: I am a misfit, an alien
in your midst, my torn shirt proclaims. I am different from the rest
of you. My values are different. I do not love or fear the same
things that you do. And that makes me different.

Two days later, I receive a blue aerogramme from
my father, the first letter he has ever addressed to me. ‘Darling
Thritu.

I'm about to board the train,' he
wrote. ‘I'm sorry for what happened…But I am
right.'

I hate him and admire him for the last sentence.
But I don't acknowledge the letter when my father returns from
his trip.

Mostly, I don't acknowledge him at all,
despite Mehroo's cajoling. When he asks me a question, I make
my eyes focus elsewhere while I answer in monosyllables. As the
months drag on, my hostility begins to feel silly even to me but now,
I don't know how to walk away from it and toward him. It seems
terribly important, a matter of life-and-death, to not be the one to
give in, lest I be perceived as weak. At times, seeing the hurt look
on his face, I weep hot tears into my pillow.

Then, I force myself to look at the tattered shirt
hanging in my closet, to buttress my position. Finally, at the end of
four months, he breaks down at the dining table one day, his eyes
filling with tears. That is all it takes. I go over and hug him while
the other adults sigh in relief.

But it takes me another three weeks to remove the
torn shirt from where it's hanging in my closet. Even then, I
neatly fold it and place it on a shelf, where it will remain for
years.

The channawalla wanders up to the car and my dad
buys a rupee's worth of roasted peanuts. This is the first time
since our estrangement that we have come to the seaside. He tells me
how ashamed he is for having lost his temper with me, how the memory
of the aborted trip to Hanging Gardens still hurts him. This is the
amazing thing about my father—unlike most adults I know, he has
no problems admitting he is wrong.

In fact, his relentless drive for
self-improvement, his paroxysms of self-doubt, his candidness in
talking about his life, both embarrass and fascinate me. In contrast
to him, I am already closed, emotionally guarded. In some ways, my
dad is younger, more trusting, more innocent than I am. It occurs to
me that just as he can still outrun or outwalk me, my dad can also
emotionally outdistance me.

We started doing this several years ago, dad and
I, coming to the seaside after dusk, sitting in the car and talking.
Mostly, he talks and I listen. Or rather, he talks and I let my mind
wander down its familiar paths—daydreaming about being older
and out of the house and wearing cotton saris to my journalist job
at
The Times of India
and perhaps even having my own little
apartment somewhere far from my childhood home. But my dad does not
know my futuristic fantasies and he still talks to the teenager that
I am. Sometimes he notices how my head tilts away from him as he
lectures me about the importance of honesty (‘Don't even
pick up a ten-paise coin from the ground, if it doesn't belong
to you'), the value of education (‘If you don't
finish college, the best I can promise you is maybe I can get you a
job as a packer at a box factory') and the dangers of
premarital sex (‘Boys want different things in a girlfriend
than in a wife'). Then his voice gets even more intense than
usual. ‘Listen to me, Thrituma,' he says urgently. ‘Learn
from my life experience, don't make all the mistakes I have
made. I want to spare you all the pain I've gone through. I had
no one to advice me. Everything I've learned, I've
learned the hard way, through trial and error.

Even if you forget eighty-five per cent of
everything I am telling you, just the fifteen per cent will come back
to you when you're older. That is why I say the same things
over and over again, like a broken record.'

I hear him, even understand what he's
saying, but I can't help myself. I am bored. I have heard this
lecture too many times and I am bored. Besides, I have now begun to
realize the gulf between our worlds. My father had quit school in the
sixth grade. He is a self-made man and everything that he knows he
has had to teach himself. He has never read a Shakespeare play in his
life. Already, I have read books whose very existence my father is
unaware of. I know things about art and music that my father does
not. Nor does he realize how those things have changed me. For
instance, my father is unaware that ever since I read
Lust for Life
, the

biography of Vincent van Gogh, two years ago, I
have stopped asking him for car rides, preferring instead to ride the
public buses. I identify so strongly with Van Gogh that I even
develop a stutter to sound like him. I walk around with what I
imagine is a haunted, crazed look and cultivate Van Gogh's
contempt for the bourgeois life. Hermann Hesse's
Damien
and
Steppenwolf
give further voice to the alienated stranger I
have become. I am no longer the earnestly good child who gave all her
lunch money to the nuns. I am no longer a child.

In contrast to the intellectual, passionate,
art-filled world that I am reading about—a world, it is clear
to me that I have to die trying to be part of—the world
described by my father sounds tediously conscripted, pale and
bloodless. His is the world of virtue and practicality. But my soul
hankers for a greyer world, filled with ambiguity and complexity. My
father promises me a world of answers—‘Honesty is the
best policy',