Cracking India (35 page)

Surprised at being so peremptorily disarmed Mother yells: “Get out of my sight!
Duffa ho!”

Large tears welling from his old eyes, Imam Din turns his broad back on her, and followed by my excited mother walks zombie-like into the crowd. Absorbed and protected by the crowd Imam Din visualizes the tears in his shirt and the fine lines of blood congealing on his forearms.

“Shame on you! Tormenting a small cat! Get out of my sight!” Mother shouts once more, and whirling around in her silk sari and tinted glasses marches inside.

“Look!” says Imam Din to the sympathetic crowd. “I can't believe it... She drew blood!”

“It was only a fly-swat,
yaar,”
says Yousaf taking hold of his arm. He shouts at the gawkers: “What's there to see? Go on, push off!”

Muttering and laughing among themselves the crowd breaks up. Some vault the walls to neighboring houses and some walk down the drive to the road.

Yousaf leads Imam Din into the kitchen. Hamida and I follow. Hamida saying in her conciliatory and submissive manner: “What if Baijee had a whip, brother? What would you've done then? Oh, ho! Look at the tears in your clothes,” she exclaims. “Tch-tch-tch! Don't worry. I'll sew them so they'll look like new!”

Imam Din refuses to have his clothes mended and remains sullen all afternoon.

When Father returns late in the evening Imam Din presents himself before Father's bicycle and with a most injured countenance says:
“Baijee
struck me with a fly-swat! I bled!”

Father places his cycle on its stand and raising his brows in a clutch of surprised wrinkles looks at us out of baffled eyes.

“Imam Din caught the
billa
in the kitchen door, and wouldn't let him go. And Mummy hit him with the fly-flapper,” I explain.

Father turns his astonished eyes upon Imam Din.

Turning and twisting, Imam Din displays a scattered and spidery mesh of wounds where the wire scratched him. “This ... And this. And see this!” he says stretching the small tears in his lungi and shirt.

Father locks his cycle. Making a few clucking noises of insincere sympathy he prepares to go in, when Mother bursts out of banging springdoors shouting: “Stop sniveling in front of Sahib, you big idiot! You're lucky it was only a fly-flap! Go in, someone, and get him bangles. If he whines like a woman he must wear bangles!”

Despite her shouting Mother sounds good-humored and we release our suppressed laughter. Even Father cannot suppress his tight little smile.

Shaking his head sheepishly Imam Din ambles off towards the kitchen and Mother laughs and clings to Father and Father continues to smile, despite her clinging, and says: “The fly-flap's upset him. If you'd used a stick he wouldn't have minded so much.”

Adi and I laugh and laugh and hug Father and our clinging mother. I feel deliriously lighthearted. So does Adi. Father has spoken directly to Mother: addressing her instead of the walls, furniture, ceiling—or using us as deflecting conduits to sound his messages off. It is becoming an increasingly rare occurrence—this business of his talking to our mother: out of public or party view that is.

And suddenly, the hunt for Ayah is off. I sense it. So does Adi.

They only pretend to look for her. Mother still takes off in the Morris but I know it is not to look for Ayah. I can tell by the
way the car's wheels flatten on the stones and by the determined angle of Skinny-aunt's chin—that the car's dicky is loaded with petrol. They can set fire to the world for all I care! I want my Ayah.

It is a bad phase in my life. Even Cousin is avoiding me. I haven't seen him for a week. I must talk to him about my concerns or I'll crack up. Adi and I go over to Electric-aunt's. Cousin is studying for his exams.

“I don't know where the sun rises these days,” says Electric-aunt in awed and perplexed pleasure, holding the screen door open and ushering us in. “Your cousin doesn't wish to be disturbed even by you!” She looks at me archly and flashes all her little goat's teeth in a conceited smile.

Electric-aunt parts the navy-blue curtains and, poking only her head through, quietly whispers: “Lenny and Adi are here, dear. Won't you see them for just five minutes?”

Since I can't hear his response, and I'm determined to see him, I throw him a line: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”

I know he'll bite. Imagine getting away with calling Cousin
dull
.

Cousin drifts into the sitting room in his long shorts and short socks, looking all standoffish and preoccupied, and greets us unenthusiastically. He perches on the edge of the three-piece sofa, tilting his legs primly to one side and, as if he's a grown man masquerading in short legs, makes desultory small talk with Adi. He doesn't even look at me. Except when I force him to by addressing him insistently and then he glances my way briefly and coldly, before again bestowing his attention on Adi. To leave no doubt of his tedium at our presence he folds the newspaper into a stiff bat and, with nerve-racking springs and explosive whacks, swats flies on the sofas, tables and radio top.

Electric-aunt covers her ears. “Oh! Do stop being so jumpy, dear,” she exclaims and, like an angular streak of zigzag lightning, darts from the room.

Cousin perches on the sofa again, elegantly crossing his ankles this time and hastily, before he has a chance to spring up and swat more flies, I whisper: “They've stopped looking for Ayah!”

“Have they?” says Cousin, looking down at me coolly, and turns to Adi as if I've said something as uneventful and uncomplicated as: “Godmother rapped Mini Aunty's knuckles with her punkah!”

I can't understand it. I'm furious. “Let's leave him to his dreary studies,” I say witheringly. But Adi, who has not received such singular attention from Cousin since the time he was almost kidnapped and basked for two days in glory, is reluctant to leave. I have to drag him away.

It is unnerving. The more aloof Cousin becomes, the more I think about him. I find my daydreams, for the first time, occupied by his stubby person and adenoidal voice. They are pedestrian and colorless compared to my caveman and kidnapper fantasies, but they are as completely engrossing. I thrill. I feel tingles shoot from my scalp to my toe tips. And Cousin's proximity, compared to the remoteness of imagined lovers tucked away in unseen wildernesses, drives me to reckless excess.

Against all my instincts and sense of dignity, I chase Cousin. I hang around Electric-aunt's house and around Cousin—when he tolerates my presence. I fetch him glasses of water and bunches of grapes and sharpen his pencils and copy out his homework and follow him wherever he goes. If he goes into the bathroom I wait patiently outside the door—hungering for any crumbs he might throw by way of aloof comment or observation. These he restricts—like my father with Mother—to impatient and disparaging monosyllables, mute signals and irate scowls.

And while I hang about Cousin, my eyes hang on him, and I shamelessly and eloquently ogle Cousin.

“Are you in love with him or something?” Adi asks artlessly,
but I catch a sly glitter at the edge of his eyes when he turns away. I don't care. Let him think what he likes.

 

Ranna still visits us on Sundays, if he gets a ride on a bicycle or in a cart. But this Sunday when he comes, his scars covered by crisp white cotton, his bruised face eager; though my heart goes out to him, my mind is filled with thoughts of Cousin. My time consumed in his pursuit. Ranna tags along. But after this he visits less frequently. He goes to Imam Din's village instead, to be with his uncle and Noni
chachi
and his cousins. In any case we are growing apart. It is inevitable. The social worlds we inhabit are too different; our interests divergent.

Cousin is restored to me on a great surge of excitement when he bursts into my room and bolting the door breathes into my ear, “I saw Ayah!”

My heart pounds so wildly I cannot speak. Where? Here? In our house? But then Cousin wouldn't have bolted the door. Ayah must be at the Recovered Women's Camp!

“Where is she—in the camp?” I ask, voicing my assumption. And feeling weak-kneed, I sit on the bed.

“I saw her in a taxi. At Charing Cross,” says Cousin, breathing so close I'm forced to lie back. Looking annoyingly complacent and placing an arm on either side of me, Cousin, the bearer of great good news, the restorer of withheld warmth, bears down on me: and in that instant I realize that his aloofness was only a sham calculated to arouse my ardor. Bent on further pleasuring me, squashing his panting chest on my flattened bosom, Cousin gives me a soggy kiss. Poor Cousin. His sense of timing is all wrong. The news about Ayah has cooled my passion. Pushing him back and holding him at arm's length, I say, “If you don't tell me everything at once, I'll knee your balls!” (I have grown up!) “Who was she with? Where is she?”

Cousin, resuming his aloof stance, examines his nails and snottily says: “I said, I saw her in a taxi. You know... pass by.”

“You could have followed the taxi,” I howl.

“How? I have engines in my legs?”

I'm not perturbed by his sarcasm or his disdain. His coldness is a hoax anyway.

“Did she see you? How did she look? Did you wave?”

“I don't think she saw me,” says Cousin, thawing before my importunate queries. “She was all made up!”

“Really? Tell me! What do you mean, made up?”

I scramble across the bed on my knees and grab Cousin by his curly hair.

“Like a film actress,” he says.

Cousin turns in order to accommodate the rest of his body to his twisted neck and, focusing his eyes on my chest, carefully places his hands on my breasts. I draw back, slapping his hands till my palms sting, feeling sick and all shriveled up.

Cousin looks at me, lovesick and sheepish, his spanked fingers quivering guiltily on his thighs.

“If you ever do that again, I'll break your fingers, knuckle by knuckle,” I say severely. (The previous threat appears to have had no effect—hence the changed perspective.)

“But I love you,” says Cousin. As if that condones his lascivious conduct.

“Well I don't!”

“Then why did you hang around me? And make all those funny eyes and stare at me?”

“I won't anymore. You were only pretending to be standoffish! You're a phony!”

“Ha! It worked, didn't it? I had you panting with passion!”

“You didn't!”

“Oh, yes? Look,” says Cousin, conciliatory: “I love you. But I can't pretend not to all my life just so you'll run after me.”

“You're supposed to chase me!” I say. “Boys are supposed to chase girls!”

“But you run away!”