Bombay Time (22 page)

“Dina Auntie, you are wrong,” Cyrus replied. “You have already given me a huge dowry, the biggest treasure that you possess— Tehmi’s hand. What more can I ask from you?”

Dinabai’s eyes filled with tears. “Live for a hundred years,
beta.
You have made an old lady happy with your godly words. May you and my daughter have long years of happiness.”

Part of Dinabai’s blessing came true. They did have years of happiness. They just weren’t long.

In the years to come, Cyrus’s father, Dali Engineer, told whoever would listen that he had never been opposed to his son’s choice of a bride, just the alacrity with which his only son was willing to sacrifice his future as a lawyer to take up a mediocre job at Bombay Chemicals. “I only said to him, ‘Get your law degree first and then marry,’ “ the distraught father would recount.
“Bas,
that was my only demand on him. We all liked Tehmi a lot, nothing against her. By the grace of God, we have enough; we didn’t care about dowry or anything like that. Only reason I boycotted the wedding was that I hoped my absence would shock Cyrus into leaving his job and returning to college. Of course, if he’d never taken this job, my son would have someday prayed for his dead father’s soul, rather than the other way around. May he rest in peace, my beloved Cyrus.”

Three days after Cyrus’s visit to Dinabai’s home, he took Tehmi to his parents’ home. The Engineers had met Tehmi several times before, but Cyrus was confident that once Dali really got to know Tehmi, his father’s objections to the marriage would disappear, that the older man would immediately grasp why his son would not want to waste another moment without being married to Tehmi. But Dali was not convinced. He remained opposed to them marrying this young—after all, Cyrus was only twenty-two and Tehmi even younger, a little over twenty. He also felt that Tehmi should finish her college degree before marrying. He said as much to Tehmi, who sat frozen, unsure of what to say or do. Naju and Mani tried to intervene on Cyrus’s behalf, but Dali silenced them with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Does no one in this family have any sense left? What these two youngsters are proposing is foolishness, I tell you. Cyrus has a great future ahead of him, and it isn’t at Bombay Chemicals.”

A few days before it was time to enroll for the next term at Cyrus’s law college, Dali made his son an offer. He would support Cyrus and Tehmi for a year if Cyrus promised to finish his degree. The older man was stunned when his son immediately dismissed the offer. It was his responsibility to provide for his wife, Cyrus declared. He wouldn’t let his daddy deprive him of that pleasure, even though he appreciated the generosity of the offer.

And so there was a subdued, simple wedding in Udwada, attended only by Dinabai, Naju, and Cyrus’s best friend, Percy. It broke Mani Engineer’s heart to miss her only son’s wedding, but, as she explained to the young couple, she would be disrespecting her husband if she went. Going to Udwada was suggested by Dinabai, who could not bear the thought of having a wedding in Bombay without the participation of Cyrus’s parents. Cyrus himself remained unworried about the breach. “Just give them a few weeks,” he told his new bride. “We’ll take some
mithai
over to them in a few weeks. My daddy cannot resist Parsi Dairy Farm’s
suterfeni,
I swear.”

But things never quite got resolved between father and son. Despite Cyrus’s popularity and success at his job, Dali could not make his peace with the fact that his intelligent son was working in a job that didn’t make full use of his talents. And although he liked Tehmi, he couldn’t help but subconsciously hold her responsible for his son’s detour from his destiny. And as valiantly as Dali tried to ignore it, he was always aware of the differences between his son and the girl he had married. “Nothing against Tehmi,” he once said to his wife, “but if she’d been a girl from a different family—you know, a family that valued education and culture—she would have never encouraged Cyrus to leave college.” Mani had spoken up then. “Nobody encouraged our Cyrus to leave college. He’s my son, too. But I have to put the blame where it lies, not on the shoulders of some poor twenty-year-old girl.”

As the expected thaw never materialized, Cyrus grew finely attuned to every real and imagined snub or slight directed at Tehmi. Once, while they were over for dinner, Dali was speaking to Tehmi, when he had a momentary memory lapse and couldn’t recall her name. Tehmi was about to make a joke of it, but Cyrus jumped in. “Tehmi. Her name is Tehmi and you know it,” he said through clenched teeth. “She has only been your daughter-in-law for seven months. About time you committed her name to memory.”

There was a shocked silence at the table. Then Naju spoke up. “Come on Cyrus, that’s not fair. Daddy just had a minute’s memory loss. Happens to me all the time.”

“Bas, beta,
save your breath,” a hurt Dali interrupted. “Cyrus is all
gussa
and hatred these days. No point in saying anything to such a person.”

Tehmi and Cyrus had their first fight that night. During the train ride home, Tehmi tried to explain to Cyrus that his father had meant no harm and she had not been insulted. Cyrus listened silently, but once they got home, he erupted.

“My daddy has even turned you against me, has he? First Naju and now you. Even if I’m wrong, so what? You are
my
wife, not his. Why are you
khali-pili
taking his side? Can I not count on even you for support?”

She was stunned. “Cyrus, what are you saying, darling? Of course I’m on your side. You know I support you cent percent. I just hate to see you and your daddy angry with each other, that’s all. I know how much you love him.” She saw a new side to him that night, a childish side that wanted blind, unquestioned devotion from her. Strangely, this vulnerability only made her love him more.

There were other fights, most of them involving Dali. Tehmi knew that Cyrus loved and respected his father, but both men were reluctant to admit this central fact to one another. Dinabai, too, was upset at the growing distance between father and son. But the one time she commented on it, Cyrus cut her off abruptly. “Dinabai, please. This is my family
mammala.
not yours,” he snapped. The older woman was stunned at this uncharacteristic sternness and turned her face away before her son-in-law could see the hurt in her eyes. Later that night, a subdued Cyrus had apologized. She forgave him readily, but from then on, she didn’t involve herself in the matter.

In his sane moments, Cyrus often told Tehmi how much he appreciated her efforts and overtures to his father, but the quarrel with Dali was never completely resolved. There were times, early on, when they left Dali’s home with Cyrus vowing to never go back. But Tehmi prevailed on him. “We have so much love for each other, Cyloo, surely we have enough to spare for them. Soon, Dali Uncle will see how much we love each other and then he’ll be happy for us. Remember, everything your daddy says, it’s because he loves you. You don’t know what I would give to have my daddy back. Let the small things go, Cyloo.” Here, Tehmi got behind-the-scenes help from her mother-in-law. Mani, who was determined not to lose her only son to what she considered to be her husband’s silliness, early on established a tradition that the young couple was to have dinner every Saturday at the Engineers’ home in Flora Fountain. If it was a special occasion, Dinabai joined them, too.

At Wadia Baug, people marveled at the change in Dinabai. The bawdy, no-nonsense woman she had been before her husband’s death resurfaced after lying dormant for years. Now, Dinabai joined her neighbors in bargaining with the fish vendor and participated with gusto in their ritualistic tirades against the butcher and the milkman. There was some good-natured neighborhood gossip about the fact that Cyrus had taken not one but two brides. Tehmi was aware of the gossip but paid it no mind. She was just awed that Cyrus could draw out a side to her mother she had given up as lost forever. “My God, Mamma,” Cyrus once said after Dinabai had told a particularly bawdy joke, “how did your late husband ever manage you? You must have kept the poor man up all night.” Tehmi was about to reprimand Cyrus, when she saw the coy look on her mother’s face. “My husband was having no complaints about me in that department,” she replied. Tehmi blushed.

Most evenings, Cyrus came home from work armed with sweets and stories, both of which the two women eagerly consumed over dinner. Despite Cyrus’s protestations, Dinabai kept her part-time job as a cook at the Ratan Tata Institute, and Tehmi loved the days when both her mother and husband were at work and she spent the morning making an elaborate dinner for them. Sometimes, Cyrus had a friend from the factory call Tehmi from work. “Cyrus says he’s having an emergency. He’s not sure he can make it through the day without seeing you. Tehmiben, can you come meet him at the gates at shift change?” Invariably, Tehmi would drop whatever she was doing and go meet her husband. They would have dinner and then walk around Apollo Bunder before returning home. Dinabai, who, to Tehmi’s relief, had turned out to be a most noninterfering mother-in-law, always encouraged her daughter to spend time alone with her husband. “My mother-in-law was a real
daakan,
possessive and jealous of her son. Didn’t give us two minutes of peace or privacy,” she told Tehmi. “I’ve always vowed I would not be like that.”

Dinabai was not the only one to fall prey to Cyrus’s charm. Wadia Baug’s older residents lit up like hundred-watt bulbs when he stopped to talk to them in that teasing manner of his. Several of the girls in the neighborhood had secret crushes on him. “I swear, he looks like an Englishman,” they said giggling. “Tehmi’s fair-skinned also, but she looks like black carbon paper compared to him.” Starstruck teen-agers like Rusi Bilimoria followed Cyrus around like groupies. Jimmy Kanga’s uncle once requested Cyrus to talk to his errant nephew about the importance of a good education, and young Jimmy emerged from that conversation dazzled. In later years, Jimmy always attributed his becoming a lawyer to Cyrus. “Changed my life, he did. I was much younger than he was, but he took me under his wing. I was a bad student, already headed for trouble. A bitter young man I was in those days. Didn’t care about my studies, didn’t care about anything. But he was so kind, so understanding, that Cyrus. Made me see the light. Of course, at that time, I was too young to know that he’d left law himself. That was the miraculous part—how a man who decided against law himself was responsible for me becoming a lawyer.”

Within months of moving into Wadia Baug, Cyrus organized a neighborhood cricket league. Every Sunday morning, Rusi and the other neighborhood boys rode the bus to a nearby practice field, where Cyrus coached them in the intricacies of the game. The boys played their hearts out, for fear of embarrassing their coach with a poor performance. They returned home around 1:00
P.M.,
hot, sweaty, and happy. On rare occasions, Cyrus asked a bewitched boy to stay to eat the mutton
dhansak
and kebabs that Dinabai had prepared for Sunday lunch. The guests watched, mesmerized, as Cyrus ate potato chips along with his
dhansak
—a boyhood habit that he could not forsake. “Need something crunchy with the
daal,”
he’d say.

How can one person make a difference in so many lives? Tehmi wondered as she looked at her mercurial husband. She noticed how Pestonji, the eighty-year-old widower who lived on the ground floor, made it a point to look out of his window around the time Cyrus came home each evening. As soon as the old man spotted Cyrus, he opened his door and waited on the landing. “Good evening, Cyrus,” he greeted him daily. “How was work today?” And no matter how tired he was, Cyrus would stop and chat for a few minutes. In the nearly three years they had been married, she noticed the change in her own mother, how Dinabai always combed her hair and changed into a fresh duster coat an hour before Cyrus was expected home. Until Cyrus came to live with them, Dinabai wore the same housedress for days, changing into her sari only when it was time to go to work. Most of all, Tehmi noticed the difference in herself, how the evening shadows did not make her cry anymore. Whereas once she had dreaded dusk, she now felt a quickened anticipation when the sun started to go down, because it meant that Cyrus would be home soon. The melancholia she had struggled with her whole life loosened its grip on her. Love was tearing holes into the veil of gloom that had covered her life since her father’s death. And it wasn’t as if Cyrus had coarsened her, made her lose her sensitivity. Quite the contrary. Cyrus often told her how much he loved the fact that she felt things deeply, that she was not like the silly, shallow girls that he had known. It was just that Cyrus had taught her that she had a responsibility to be happy, showed her how to look for pleasure in the small things, never to bypass a chance to laugh. Also, the world somehow seemed a little more ridiculous and funny and topsy-turvy when she was around Cyrus, not quite as filled with menace and sorrow as it had once seemed. How long can this happiness last? she asked herself as she stood at the window, waiting for Cyrus’s familiar shape to turn the corner and wave to her. Can life really be this easy, this effortless?

The night before Cyrus’s death, Tehmi dreamed of a white tiger. In her dream, the tiger was standing in a clearing in the forest. Slowly, the animal raised its striped snowy white paw and held it out in a pleading, poignant gesture. Tehmi saw that the tiger’s blue eyes were filled with tears. She woke up to a feeling of oppressive sadness, feeling crushed by the weight of emotions that were difficult to articulate. She tried falling back to sleep, but sleep had fled. Unable to face the long, cold night alone, she woke Cyrus up. But when he turned on the light and worriedly asked her what was wrong, Tehmi could not answer. Instead, she held him in her arms and kissed every inch of his face as lightly and tenderly as she could. She felt maternal, rather than sexual; she held his face as if it were the sacred, carved face of a deity. They made sweet, magical love that night, a love that transcended sex. Wrapped around him, she felt as if he was no longer simply her husband but her brother and friend, as well, that they had both shed their private skins, their gender even, to become an indivisible coiled entity, much like those indistinguishable male-female figures on ancient Hindu temples. “Nobody we know—none of our friends—shares what we share,” Cyrus whispered to her later. “Nobody I know feels more loved by his wife than I do. And if I tried to love you more than I do, I would burst, I swear.”