Dahanu Road: A novel (21 page)

Only a few feet away from her hut, a man lay on the ground.

Liquor had knocked him out. During the festival season, especially during and after Holi, the tribals drank themselves to sheer death. There was a day called Gutter Ammas, when tribals were found collapsed in gutters in the darkness of Ammas, a night of no moon.

They walked past the man, not checking if he was breathing. If he was dead, nothing could be done. At dawn he would be spotted, or he would wake up himself and go off to work. Kusum continued to walk in front of Zairos, and the only time she acknowledged him was when she once looked over her shoulder, just slightly, to see if he was still with her.

Then, when she reached the opening of her hut, she finally faced him.

She was breathing heavily and Zairos could hear every gasp.

Things were clear to him now. It was up to him to keep her alive. From now on, she would depend on him for breath. Her lungs would be his, her heart’s pounding in his hands. He walked to a car two hundred yards away, where Chambal the dacoit was emptying the round stones from his white cloth onto the ground and Hosi had fallen asleep with his head on the gas cylinder.

Rami’s snoring could be heard from inside the hut, an old woman’s music.

Kusum could not go inside. Not yet.

She sat on the ground and looked around at the huts. No one in sight, except for a goat tied to a peg, and the shaking of trees.

Her mind was on Laxman. He was alive and impotent, a creature who had been left twitching on the floor of his own hut. She was responsible for that, not the dacoit with the gun, not the man walking away from her, running his fingers through his hair.

What would her father think of all this? His little girl, who once came up to his knee, then his waist, then his chest.

She had done what her father could not do. She had struck back the only way she knew how. Her father, a mortal, could not fight. Vaghai the Tiger God did nothing either. So she had no choice but to turn to a landlord, a being who was neither man nor god.

By taking his own life, her father had done something too. She was not going to let his death be wasted. His breath was wasted, it had no effect on anything around him, but his death was worth something.

And even if it was not, she was making it count.

That was what daughters did. They loved their fathers, and made their failures into trees. Or if not trees, shrubs. And if not shrubs, then one small blade of grass.

A blade of grass had a function too. It sheltered worms. It let worms snuggle together, and that had to mean something. Her mother had told her that.

Everything in nature had worth. Except the Warlis.

The folk tales tried to convince her that the Warlis were the last beings created by the gods. They were like unwanted seeds that were thrown from the sky. Being unwanted, no one offered them protection. No one encouraged them to grow.

She would do something. Walk a better road, a brave road that the wolves of the past would never be able to touch.

She was sitting on her haunches right now, in exactly the same way her mother Kamla used to sit. Her mother was named after a river. Some of her people were named after rivers. It felt like a cruel thing to do.

We hardly move, she said to herself. We wait. Have you ever seen a river wait?

But she had done something. She had chosen to move.

After dropping Chambal off, Zairos knew he had to see his grandfather.

It was a day of mourning for Shapur Irani, the death anniversary of his eldest son, Khodi. Shapur Irani preferred to be alone on this day, but Zairos felt no man should be left alone on such a day. Even cobras sobbed under the quiet shade of a tree once in a while.

Shapur Irani, custodian of the family’s memories, custodian of everything past, from the birth of insects to the beatings administered on his land, was in his chair holding his son’s photograph in his hand. It was too late for him to hide the photograph, too late for him to prevent Zairos from knowing that he had sat there for hours, certain of the fact that the
heart attack that killed his son was meant for him instead. But the gods, cruel in the way children were cruel, changed fates, assigned him a rocking chair instead of an electric one so that his punishment would be slow, meticulous, the only perfect thing in this imperfect world.

He remembered how he screamed for joy the day Khodi was born, a scream so loud he felt after all these years his voice was still travelling. That is why he was silent in his chair right now. He was trying to listen for that cry of joy he had let out years ago.

“When a father outlives his son, it’s a curse,” he said. “In some ways, Khodi was not my son. He was Banu’s son. Very gentle, very caring.”

“That photograph,” said Zairos. “My father has it too. Is it true that it was taken on the day Khodi kaka died?”

“Yes, it was your father who took the picture. Khodi’s last cup of tea. Taken here … at that table.”

Shapur Irani slowly pointed to an empty space on the porch. The table he was referring to was inside the house, but it did not matter. His eyes were closed and he could be anywhere by thought.

“Aspi, Sohrab, Khodi, and myself used to have tea together every Sunday morning without fail. Once Khodi died, we stopped.”

Zairos already understood why his grandfather did not touch tea. It was for the same reason that Hosi never came to visit Shapur Irani. Nor did he ever speak about his own father. For Hosi, Khodi Irani never existed. One body gone, one heart silenced, and the living were scrambling for cover, terrified of the landslide that followed.

Shapur Irani ran his forefinger along the edges of the black-and-white photograph, perhaps hoping to make a cut in his own skin so that he could feel his son again.

Khodi was the only one in the family who’d had a moustache. Zairos was surprised to see a soft smile on his grandfather’s lips. Maybe it was not a smile, just his skin playing tricks.

But Shapur Irani was smiling. It was not the kind farmers smiled when they saw the first sign of rain, but it was something. He was having a playful moment with his dead son. On the photograph, he was twirling the ends of Khodi’s moustache to see if he would make a sound. He knew that the dead did not speak to the living, but they might speak with the ones in between, men such as himself.

“It is also your father’s birthday today,” said Shapur Irani.

“I know,” said Zairos.

“Death and Time are like two clowns. They play pranks only they find funny.”

Shapur Irani’s eyes were still on the photograph.

“Your father does not celebrate his birthday,” he continued. “He does it out of respect for his brother, and for me. On this one day, the garrulous Aspi Irani retreats into the shadows. But he thinks he does it by choice.”

“What do you mean, Pa?”

“Right from the start, your father was a child of shadows.”

BANU SAT IN HER
rocking chair and traced shadows on the wall.

Shapur Irani pretended not to notice her. He continued doing his push-ups, his temples swelling red.

“Look,” said Banu. “Look at that one.”

She fanned herself with a white paper fan. It had a blue hummingbird on it.

“See how fast they move,” she said.

Khodi joined in, pointing at the wall. He had his father’s strong limbs, but in their movement one could catch Banu’s grace.

“That one looks like a bull,” said Khodi, now staring at the grandfather clock. “A bull with wings.”

Shapur Irani was relieved that his son did not realize something was wrong. Khodi thought Banu was playing a game, doing it all for him.

“He’s so imaginative,” said Banu. “He’ll become an actor or writer.”

“Be quiet,” said Shapur Irani. “My sons are landowners. Landowners command respect. They do not act or write.”

It was all those books she was reading.

Each time he took Banu to Bombay to meet her mother and sisters, she would come back with novels by Charles Dickens and other English writers that Shapur Irani did not care about. On the train, he sat with a pile of books in his lap and watched his wife read, the wonder on her face something he knew he could never create.

To him, stories were a waste of time. They were too thin and invisible. He preferred the solidity of land.

After she got home, she left those books all over the house, in small piles, like stacks of bricks here and there, and she would not let him touch any of them. If he picked a few of them up to get them out of the way, she would, in the kindest tone, request him to put them back in exactly the same spot he had found them.

She made him feel he was not good enough to hold her books.

“This one is so large, Shapur,” she said about a shadow again. “It’s playing with me. Up and down, up and down …”

Khodi was watching his mother, but the wonder had disappeared from his face. Maybe he could feel the heat of his mother’s intense belief in those shadows.

Shapur Irani certainly could. “Banu,” he said. “Let the shadows be.”

With the clockwork movement of a puppet, she bent to one side and picked up a book from the stone floor.

“Aren’t you from Iran?” she asked her husband.

She was talking to someone she had recognized after years, after oceans of separation.

“This poet was from Iran too. Do you know Hafez?”

She folded the white paper fan and placed it in her lap.

“This poem is my favourite. It’s about selfless love. How the sun never asks the Earth for anything in return for providing light.”

Shapur Irani remained unmoved. He could hardly read English, and each time his wife held a book under the light, something in him dimmed.

“I’m going outside,” he said to Banu.

He took his shotgun and fired in the air. It was to let the Warlis know that he had a gun and he knew how to use it. That is what he would tell his wife in case she asked.

But he knew the truth.

Each time he fired, he was shooting himself, punishing himself for not being learned, or he was shooting the books that she read, but at least the books took her mind off the shadows, and of the two, he would rather that the books remained.

By the time he got back in, Khodi was trying to console his mother, who was crying. She was staring at the paper fan, opening it, then snapping it shut, then opening it again, caressing the jagged edges of the blue hummingbird.

Shapur Irani knelt beside Banu and rubbed her thigh.

“Banu, what’s wrong?”

“It’s so sad,” she said. “I’ve crushed the hummingbird’s wings.”

Something happened,
Banu wrote to her mother,
but I wish I could remember what it was.

That was all she wrote. She stared at the letter while Sohrab slept in her lap. She folded the letter and put it inside the book she was reading. She needed
Oliver Twist,
a novel thick enough to make the days at the farm seem bearable.

Her husband was in the living room doing push-ups again, this time with Khodi on his back. She was glad that Khodi loved his father—his thick neck, his biceps, the way he opened a soda bottle with his teeth, how he suddenly stripped down to his undershorts and slapped his thighs like a wrestler, sending a resounding echo throughout the room.

Banu dreamt of sending both the boys to private school in Bombay, but she knew her husband would never allow it. So she bought books, lots of them. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, Aesop’s fables, children’s books on ancient Indian history, even cookbooks for herself to pass the time, but Shapur Irani would never appreciate the English food she made, the shepherd’s pie, for instance. He could not live without his dal and potatoes dipped in red masala, so spicy that their eyes would water, their noses would run, and they would sweat as though they were toiling in the fields.

She wished he could read. Then he might be perceptive enough to notice the shadows on the wall. On some days they were so large and obvious, it almost made her giggle that he could not see them. And they were not the shadows that the lantern cast on the wall. She knew the difference between those shadows and the ones that were following her, strangling her, creeping up on her like thieves—only they had taken everything she had, and now there was nothing left.