Dahanu Road: A novel (11 page)

Zairos quickly rode away, not knowing if he should bless his stars for giving him a father like that or question the entire galaxy for the insanity of it.

At Anna’s, an old favourite had returned.

With a beard thick as the jungles of Vietnam, puffy cheeks and a paunch to match, Hosi was Zairos’ other cousin, ten years his senior. Hosi was priceless, a family heirloom. No one in Dahanu wanted Hosi to die because if he did, the Irani race would lose a grand specimen. People spoke about his death because that’s all Hosi ever spoke about. Whenever he met someone for the first time, he would be cordial, charming even. Then, just as he would shake the person’s hand to say goodbye, he would say, “I don’t think you’ll see me again. My
time has come.” He had been doing this for the past ten years. His most fatal problem was dandruff.

The other thing Hosi did was hug priests.

So as soon as Jamshed Moped showed up at Anna’s, smelling fresh as the sandalwood he fed daily into the temple fire, Hosi pressed his nose into the priest’s chest and inhaled deeply. Hosi was addicted to the smell of sandalwood and frankincense.

“Jamshed Moped,” he said, “you smell sweeter than a newborn.”

It was Aspi Irani, of course, who gave Jamshed that name. Instead of rightfully calling the priest a mobed, Aspi Irani called him Jamshed Mo
ped
because that’s what he rode.

“So you’re back,” said Jamshed Moped, adjusting his glasses, dabbing his thin moustache into his skin, worried that it was going to fall off. He looked more like a chartered accountant than a priest.

“Yes,” said Hosi, releasing Jamshed Moped from the bear hug. “One horse has a disease and they stop everything.”

Hosi had returned from Bombay because the racing season had been cut short. It was one of his darlings, Black Leila, who had fallen ill. Hosi’s life was full of mares with names such as Athena, Red Dawn, Chagall, Hazel Head, and Supreme Sword. They were his true loves, the only Juliets he was willing to die for. Otherwise, no woman was good enough for him.

“With the season stalled, what will I do in this depressing town?” he asked.

Of course, Hosi knew exactly what he was going to do. Until the horses were back, he would spend his days at Anna’s, trying to bed his sultry wife, who flirted with Hosi, teased him
to the point of madness, sent him up and down like the graph of a cardiogram, but never let him touch her.

Zairos watched Anna’s wife too, and something rose inside him, but it was lust of a different sort, of wanting to leave Anna’s, of wanting to do something, but he did not know what.

Leaning against the wall, he thought about Kusum.

He did not like how she occupied his mind. She had the power to intrude. Like lightning or thunder, she did not ask permission.

Night was a time for answers.

Zairos stared at his grandfather, a man of no movement who spoke about things in no order. Chronology, sequence, logic— only puppets ventured there, men and women who had not suffered. Shapur Irani had suffered, the past swirled inside him, and the moment it found a tear in his skin, it erupted.

Tonight Zairos wanted to direct the course of the conversation.

But Shapur Irani did not give his grandson the chance. “Damu told me that you allowed Ganpat’s daughter to work here?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Do you know why she wants to work here?”

“No,” said Zairos.

Shapur Irani took in a deep breath. It meant that he would exhale something, some sort of truth that Zairos was not aware of. His nostrils flared, his eyebrows rose, and he rubbed his right knee as though that jogged his memory.

“You are a good man,” said Shapur Irani.

Zairos knew what his grandfather was hinting at.
You are a good man, but if there is one thing I do not like, it is weakness.
And Shapur Irani had a pair of antennae on his head that could detect this flaw in others every single time.

“Both my sons are well settled now,” he continued. “They have their own land. They are landlords in their own right. Initially, I wanted to distribute this land between my three grandsons— you, Bumble, and Hosi. That was my intention. But things have changed now. I want to leave this land only to you.”

“But, Pa …”

“This land is mine. I can do with it as I wish.”

It was perhaps the only explanation he would receive from his grandfather. If a man could live in solitary confinement on fifty acres of open land, he could build walls around anything.

“Part of this land belonged to Ganpat’s father,” said Shapur Irani. “His name was Vithal.”

Zairos became just as still as his grandfather.

“When I moved to Dahanu at the age of fifteen, I started a liquor stall. I gave Vithal liquor on credit, and when he could not pay I had to take his land. That is why Ganpat came here before his death. He wanted money. He said this was his father’s land. I told him he was right. It was.”

Zairos wondered if Kusum knew this. Of course she did. That was why she could stand tall in front of him. She thought of him as a thief.

“Zairos, I will tell you all I know about this land,” said Shapur Irani. “I will tell you everything because only then will you be man enough to own it. Goodness will not take you far, my son. Only courage will. I know what you are thinking. If this land belonged to Vithal, then how can it ever be mine?

It is
always
somebody else’s land. We were chased out of Iran.

That was our land. What about that?”

What had his grandfather meant by
part
of this land? How much of it had actually belonged to Vithal?

“I did not cheat Vithal,” said Shapur Irani. “I was young then. I was poor too. I had to take the land when Vithal was unable to pay me. I was … it was soon after the death of Daryoush the baker.”

It was a time when Shapur Irani had become raw all over again.

For five years, Daryoush had looked after Shapur like the boy was one of his own. While Vamog used to slip slices of orange into his son’s mouth, Daryoush favoured apricots and pomegranates. If Vamog was big and booming, Daryoush was dainty and lush. When he spoke, Shapur sank into the softness of that voice like a body into a leather couch. But the two men, Vamog and Daryoush, had something in common. They instilled in Shapur a strong moral sense, the foundations of which were as solid and muscular as his legs.

“Your strength is not for you,” Daryoush would say. “It is there to serve others.”

At first, Shapur took this literally. “What do you want me to lift?” he asked.

“You are indeed Anushirvan the Clown. Now bend down. You have become too tall for me.”

So Shapur bent down, and Daryoush put some dough on his nose. But Shapur was determined to put into practice what Daryoush had mentioned. He saw an opportunity a few days later, when he found out that the old lady who lived above their bakery could not walk anymore.

So Shapur went to her small room, picked her up, carried her downstairs, and placed her on a chair outside the bakery, so she could hear the trams, smell the warm bread, and watch a woman thread garlands out of magnolias and lilies, which temple-goers used to buy every single morning.

Shapur knew he had done well when he saw the beam on Daryoush’s face. It had the contentment of one who owned kingdoms.

Perhaps that was why Daryoush left.

One day, after Shapur had gone upstairs to bring the old lady down, he came back to find no one behind the bakery counter. This was unusual because a customer was waiting. And whenever there was a customer, Daryoush’s head was always there, just a couple of feet above the glass.

When Shapur lifted the wooden counter to enter, he found Daryoush on the ground. Shapur’s thick legs gave way.

He did not want his grandson to feel pain like that.

Ever.

He had made the mistake of softening up to Daryoush, to his dough, to his meaningless theatrics about clowns. That day Shapur Irani realized that softness did not take a man far. It brought a man close to happiness, just inches away, only to tear him apart soon after.

Shapur Irani could see that same softness in Zairos. The willingness to believe in life, the notion that goodness took a man places. Once and for all, he would tell Zairos what this land had done to him, what it had made him do, and all along he had convinced himself that he was working from a place of conscience, an inner voice, which had failed to give him any solace at all.

WHEN THE WAR ENDED,
there was elation all over. It came in through the radio, waves of relief, frenzied announcements that lifted Indian spirits even though they had no real stake in the war. When Shapur Irani went to Bombay to visit Banu’s mother, the city’s mesh of two-wheelers, trams, and cycles was dizzy with excitement; perhaps even India’s fortunes would change and the country would gain independence. But there was also fatigue from what seemed to be an unending struggle—the freedom marches, the bombs, and lathi charges.

Shapur Irani had remained far away from it all.

The British were too large an entity for him to think of. His mind was on another revolution, another war. The War of the Warlis.

For years the Warlis had endured the beatings, the loss of their land, and the hunger in their belly like one giant knife wound. The gods, it seemed, had taken everything
from them, but they had also left them with a gift—endurance.

The Warlis would have continued to endure had it not been for a woman from Bombay who was known as the Lady of the Red Flag. The landowners failed to realize that their cruelty was serving as inspiration; not inspiration in the way sunlight was inspiring, but in the way a dead baby could cause a young mother to scream.

For the first time, the Warlis were united. They had a voice, they were being educated, and they were being reminded that they were humans, not animals. They were being taught self-respect.

“This woman from Bombay is raising their hopes,” Shapur Irani told Banu. “She is putting them in more danger. Nothing is going to change. Only blood will be shed, that is all, and it will be Warli blood.”

“Shapur, please don’t talk like that in front of Khodi.”

“He’s not even three. He doesn’t understand what we’re saying.”

“Look, I know you are worried, but calm down.”

“You don’t understand, Banu. The Warlis have attacked a landowner. They have invited trouble.”

A week before, Pestonji and his friend Noshir Irani, owners of adjoining farms, were returning home after attending the wedding of a forest officer’s daughter. It was midnight, and their breath was heavy with country liquor made from jaggery and battery acid, a poisonous brew that hit them so hard they almost ran into the tribal running away from their farm with stolen coconuts.

Pestonji caught the tribal by the neck so tight and deep it felt as though he was looking for a vein. Noshir Irani took a cricket
bat made from the finest English willow and hammered it into the tribal’s chest.

Ribs cracked. They asked him his name.

With cracked ribs, it was hard for a man to remember his name.

They wanted his name as though that would solve anything. His name could have been Sukhla, Ravi, Lakhu, Patlya, or Navsia. It would not have quenched Pestonji and Noshir Irani because the battery acid from the liquor had singed their hearts.

They were sick of their coconuts being stolen.

The cricket bat was not enough. They needed iron. So while Pestonji continued to grip the tribal’s neck, Noshir Irani went to the tool shed and came back with a parai.

It was pure iron. They would send a reminder, a lesson deep into this tribal’s body, a lesson his entire being would resonate with. They turned him around and shoved the parai inside him.

If a scream came from the tribal, no one heard it.

And even if someone did hear it, it must have been so full of agony, it had to have been unreal.

Or perhaps the tribal did not scream because he was dead.

When they removed the parai from him, he was silent. When they turned him around, he was even more silent. Now the landlords were heaving and panting.

A wedding had made them do this.

They looked at each other. Yes, it was the country liquor at the wedding.

They needed to hide the body. But their heads were still spinning, their judgment so disabled that they took the tribal
to a heap of cow dung, a ten-foot mound to be used as fertilizer, and buried him in there.

Then Pestonji and Noshir Irani staggered into their own homes, into beds with wives who could not understand why there was blood on their husbands’ trousers and cow dung on the sheets.

We’ve been to a wedding was all their husbands said the next morning.