Cracking India (5 page)

Spring flowers, birds and butterflies scent and color the air. It is the end of March, and already it is hot in the sun. Cousin and I come indoors and see my brother, embedded in the sag of a charpoy, fast asleep. We gently turn him on his back and propped on elbows scrutinize his face.

“He's put on lipstick,” Cousin says.

“Yes,” I agree.

His face has the irresistible bloom of spring flowers. Turn by turn Cousin and I softly brush our lips and cheeks against his velvet face, we pry back a sleek lick of dark brown hair and kiss his forehead and the cushioned cleft in his chin. His vulnerability is breathtaking, and we ravish it with scrutiny and our childish kisses. Carried away by our ardor we become rough. Adi wakes up and opens indulgent, jewel-et eyes. They are trusting and kind as a saint's.

“You've put on lipstick?” I ask, inviting confidence.

“No,” he says mildly.

“Of course he has!” says Cousin.

“No, I've not,” says Adi.

“Can I rub some tissue and find out?” I ask courteously.

“Okay,” he says.

I stroke the Kleenex across his lips and look at it. It is unblemished. I moisten it with my tongue and rub harder. Cousin is armed with his own tissue. Adi withstands our vigorous scouring with the patience of the blameless. I notice blood on the Kleenex. The natural red in his lips has camouflaged the bleeding. Astonished, we finally believe him.

“He should have been a girl,” says Cousin.

By now Adi is fully awake. I watch helplessly as mercurial preoccupation veils his eyes. He becomes remote. His vulnerability vanishes. He kicks out, pushing back our hands with the tissues. He is in control.

Passing by, Ayah swoops down on him and picks him up. After hugging him and nuzzling his face she abruptly puts him down again, saying: “He is my little English baba!”

Last evening Ayah took us for a walk in Simla-pahari and a passerby, no doubt impelled by her spherical agitation into spouting small talk, inquired: “Is he an English's son?”

“Of course not!” said Ayah imperiously. However, vanity softening her contempt, she added: “Can any dough-faced English's son match his spice? Their looks lack salt!”

Ayah is so proud of Adi's paucity of pigment. Sometimes she takes us to Lawrence Gardens and encourages him to run across the space separating native babies and English babies. The ayahs of the English babies hug him and fuss over him and permit him to romp with their privileged charges. Adi undoes the bows of little girls with blue eyes in scratchy organdy dresses and wrestles with tallow-haired boys in the grass. Ayah beams.

On bitterly cold days when ice sales plummet, Ice-candy-man transforms himself into a birdman. Burdened with enormous cages stuffed with sparrows and common green parrots he parades the paths behind the Lahore Gymkhana lawns and outside the Punjab Club. At strategic moments he plants the cages on the ground and rages: “I break your neck, you naughty birds! You do too much
chi chi!
What will the good memsahibs think? They'll think I no teach you. You like jungly lions in zoo. I cut your throat!”

He flourishes a barber's razor. It is an infallible bait. Clutches of tenderhearted Englishwomen, sporting skirts and tennis shoes, abandon their garden chairs and dainty cucumber and chicken tea sandwiches to rush up and scold: “You horrid man. Don't you dare cut their throats!”

“Them fresh parrots, memsahib. They not learn dirty words yet. I catches them today,” coaxes Birdman, plunging his crafty hands into the cages. “They only one rupee for two birds.”

His boneless fingers set up such a squawking and twittering among the parrots and the sparrows that the ladies become frantic. They buy the birds by the dozen, and, cooing, “You poor little itty-bitty things,” snuggle them to their bosoms.

After the kissing and the cuddling, holding the stupefied birds aloft, they release them, one by one. Their valiant expressions and triumphant cries enthrall the rapt crowd of native gawkers as they exclaim: “There! Fly away, little birdie. Go, you poor little things!”

Squatting on his heels Birdman surveys the tearful and spirited mems with open-mawed and marveling admiration. Conjuring
rueful little nods and a catch to his voice, he remarks: “It go straight to mama-papa.” Or, sighing heavily, “It fly to hungry little babies in nest.”

And today, foreshadowing the poetic impulse of his future, wiping tears and pointing at a giddily spinning and chirping sparrow, Ice-candy-man says: “Look! Little sparrow singing, ‘See? See? I free!' to mad-with-grief wife!”

Ayah, Adi and I watch the performance with concealed glee. Every now and then we heighten the histrionics and encourage sales by shouting, “Cut their throats! Cut their throats!” We cheer and clap from the sidelines when the birds are released.

Ice-candy-man resorts to his change in occupation only two or three times a year, so his ingenuity works. He usually clears a packet. And if the sale has been quick and lucrative, as on this Saturday afternoon just before Christmas, he treats us to a meal at Ayah's favorite wayside restaurant in Mozang Chungi.

We are regulars. The shorn proprietor acknowledges us with a solemn nod. He is a
pahailwan:
a wrestler. Covering his massive torso with a singlet in deference to Ayah's presence, he approaches. Despite the cold, his shoulders gleam with sweat and a striped lungi clings to his buttocks and legs.

We are directed to sit on a narrow backless bench. Opposite us Ice-candy-man drapes his lank and flexible length on another bench, and leaning across the table ogles Ayah. He straightens somewhat when an urchin-apprentice plonks down three tin plates heaped with rice and a bowl of vegetable curry. The rice is steaming and fragrant. We fall to it silently. Ayah's chocolate fingers mold the rice into small golf balls which she pops into her mouth. She eats with her right hand while her left hand reposes in her lap.

Halfway through the meal I sense a familiar tension and a small flurry of movement. Ice-candy-man's toes are invisibly busy. I glance up just as a supplicating smile on his face dissolves into a painful grimace: and I know Ayah's hand is engaged in an equally heroic struggle.

Meanwhile the mounds of rice steadily diminish. Outwardly calm, systematically popping golf balls, Ayah signals the proprietor for another helping.

After the meal, as we descend the rickety wooden steps into the crowded gully, Ayah tries, tactfully, to get rid of Ice-candy-man. But he hoists Adi onto the seat of his bicycle and persists in walking with us to Warris Road.

At the gate of our house, less tactfully, Ayah says: “You'd better go. I have chores.”

“What chores?” asks Ice-candy-man, reluctant to let Ayah go.

“A ton of washing... And I haven't even dusted
Baijee's
room!”

“Let me help you,” says Ice-candy-man.

“You gone crazy?” Ayah asks.

Imagine Ice-candy-man working alongside Ayah in our house. Mother'd throw a fit! He's not the kind of fellow who's permitted inside. With his thuggish way of inhaling from the stinking cigarettes clenched in his fist, his flashy scarves and reek of jasmine attar, he represents a shady, almost disreputable type.

“Okay, I'll go,” Ice-candy-man temporizes reluctantly, “but only if you'll come to the cinema later.”

“I told you I've work to do,” says Ayah, close to losing patience. “And I dare not ask Baijee for another evening off.”

“Talk to me for a while ... Just a little while,” pleads Ice-candy-man so piteously that Ayah, whose heart is as easily inclined to melt as Ice-candy-man's popsicles, bunches her fingers and says, “Only ten minutes.”

Aware of the impropriety of entertaining her guest on the front lawn Ayah leads us to settle on a bald patch of grass at the back near the servants' quarters. The winter sun is diffused by the dust and a crimson bank of clouds streaks the horizon. It is getting uncomfortably chilly and my hair already feels damp. Ayah notices it and, drawing me to her, covers my head with her sari
palloo.

“Now talk,” she says to Ice-candy-man. “Since you're so anxious to talk, talk!”

Ice-candy-man talks. News and gossip flow off his glib tongue like a torrent. He reads Urdu newspapers and the
Urdu Digest
. He can, when he applies himself, read the headlines in the
Civil
and Military Gazette
, the English daily.

Characteristically, Ice-candy-man starts by giving us news of
the world. The Germans, he informs us, have developed a deadly weapon called the V-bomb that will turn the British into powdered ash. A little later, drifting close to home, he tells us of Subas Chandra Bose, a Hindu patriot who has defected to the Japanese side in Burma. “Bose says the Japanese will help us liberate India from the
Angrez
,” Ice-candy-man says. “If we want India back we must take pride in our customs, our clothes, our languages ... And not go mouthing the got-pit sot-pit of the English!”

Obviously he's quoting this Bose. (Sometimes he quotes Gandhi, or Nehru or Jinnah, but I'm fed up with hearing about them. Mother, Father and their friends are always saying: Gandhi said this, Nehru said that. Gandhi did this, Jinnah did that. What's the point of talking so much about people we don't know?)

Finally, narrowing his focus to our immediate surroundings, he says to Ayah, “Shanta bibi, you're Punjabi, aren't you?”

“For the most part,” Ayah agrees warily.

“Then why don't you wear Punjabi clothes? I've never seen you in shalwar-kamize.”

Though it has never struck me as strange before—I'm so accustomed to Ayah only in a sari—I see the logic of his question and wonder about it.

“Arrey
baba,” says Ayah spreading her hands in a fetching gesture, “do you know what salary ayahs who wear Punjabi clothes get? Half the salary of the Goan ayahs who wear saris! I'm not so simple!”

“I've no quarrel with your saris,” says Ice-candy-man disarmingly demure, “I was only asking out of curiosity.”

And, catching us unawares, his ingenuous toe darts beneath Ayah's sari. Ayah gives a start. Angrily smacking his leg and smoothing her sari, she stands up.
“Duffa ho!
Go!” she says. “Or I'll get Baijee to V-bomb you into ash!” Applying all his strength, Adi restrains Ice-candy-man's irrepressibly twitching toe.

“Arrrrey!”
says Ice-candy-man holding his hands up as if to stave off Ayah's assault. “Are you angry?”

“Then what?” Ayah retorts. “You have no sense and no shame!”

Grinning sheepishly, groveling and wriggling in the grass to
touch the hem of Ayah's sari, he says, “I'm sorry, forgive me. I won't do it again ... Forgive me.”

“What for?” snaps Ayah. “You'll never change!”

Ice-candy-man coils forward to squat and, threading his supple arms through his calves from the back, latches on to his earlobes. It is a punishing posture called “the cock,” used in lower-class schools to discipline urchins. He looks so ridiculous that Ayah and I laugh.

But Adi, his face grim, dispenses a totally mirthless and vicious kick to his ankle.

Ice-candy-man stands up so abruptly that his movements are a blur.

And, my eyes popping, I stare at Adi dangling in the air at the end of his rangy arm. Ice-candy-man has a firm grip on the waistband of Adi's woolen trousers and Adi looks like an astonished and stocky spider plucked out of his web and suspended above the level of my eyes.

“I'm going to drop him,” Ice-candy-man says calmly. He takes a loping step and, holding Adi directly above the brick paving skirting the grass, raises his arm. “If you don't go to the cinema with me I'll drop him.”