Dahanu Road: A novel (4 page)

Zairos took a step towards her. She seemed to be suffocating.

Her teeth clenched, fingers rolled into a fist, she went to her father’s body. She stood below it and looked up at his face the way one looked at an idol in a prayer hall.

“This is Ganpat’s daughter,” said the old woman. “Her name is Kusum.”

The old woman’s eyes were red. Fierce and tired, they already contained the smouldering ashes of the dead. The young
woman, Kusum, was still gazing at her father. Every breath she took in was deep and angry, wanting to blow out the flames of love and kindness that existed anywhere.

“I was walking through the farm this morning and I saw him,” said Zairos.

Zairos wanted to get out of there. Kusum was displaying an enormous amount of strength, and he needed to leave, to allow her to grieve, to heave and sigh as she pleased.

But Kusum did not respond to Zairos’ remark. She looked at her feet now, locked in the earth. So Zairos addressed the old woman, so old she could be death’s distant cousin.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Are you related to Ganpat?”

“I am Rami,” she replied. “Ganpat’s sister.”

She came closer to Zairos as she said this, and he could smell the tobacco on her breath. He found it strange that a tribal woman dared to come so close to his body. The Warlis always kept their distance. But the shock of the moment could have shaken the fear and respect out of her. When the news settled in, so would the old laws.

“Ganpat was fine when he left the house this morning …” said Rami.

When Rami spoke, Zairos felt an old door was creaking open. It was the voice of someone who did not speak much. Once again, she pressed her foot on the black pipes. They were too hard to be crushed, too solid for her to be able to stop anything.

“We can bring the body down now,” said Zairos.

He was being clinical on purpose, against his will. He did not want to encourage a discussion. But Kusum, he realized, had other plans.

“This morning my father was on his way to meet Shapur seth,” she said.

“Do not mention my grandfather’s name,” said Zairos.

Zairos knew he was being hard, but it was the right thing to do. Order had to be maintained. In the jungle, the lion was no doubt wise and just, but above all, the lion was feared. Any form of kindness could be viewed as weakness. Kindness could upset the order of things. In a jungle, kindness could lead to revolt.

His sternness made Kusum go near her father’s body again. Beauty and grief collided hideously in her face. The chickoo trees offered shade and nothing else. Through the trees, light snuck in. Kusum looked up for a moment and mocked the streams of light. It was a feeble attempt to provide comfort. She took her mouth close to her father’s ear. Her mouth was begging him to reveal why he had killed himself.

The first thing Kusum did when the body was lowered was place her hand on her father’s chest. Zairos was taken aback by the gesture. It was not that she was looking for signs of life. She just wanted her father to feel the warmth of her palm.

She moved when she saw Lakhu hold a white bedsheet in his hands. He had brought it from the house. He whipped the sheet and let it unfurl. It was too flamboyant, the ballooning sheet. He murmured a prayer as he covered Ganpat’s face. But Kusum did not want her father’s face to be covered. She slid the sheet off his head until it was just below his chin.

“Let the body stay here for now,” said Zairos. “Damu will bring him to you after sundown.”

He did not want the body to be taken in the tractor during daylight. A policewala would create trouble. There had been a suicide on a neighbouring farm only recently and the owner had to shell out twenty thousand rupees.

“Damu will take you back,” he said. “Use the tractor to collect wood.”

“There is no wood,” said Rami. “There is no wood anymore.”

It was uttered in a trance, as one would an age-old proverb. Sometimes it was hard for Zairos to understand the Marathi of the Warlis. It was a strange dialect that they spoke in staccato, suddenly going out of breath, their sentences amputated.

“Seth, I will pick up rubber tires from the petrol pump,” said Damu.

Time and again, Zairos had seen the Warlis line up outside petrol pumps and ask the owners for old tires so that their loved ones could be sent home. If the tires were not given, they were stolen.

Damu started the tractor, turned it around, and waited for the two women.

Kusum stayed near the body for a while. Her eyes were still moist, unlike Rami’s, which were now completely dry. Rami had done her share of crying years ago. There was nothing left, no well of tears she could draw from, just dust. She gave Kusum a gentle rub on the back and pulled her up.

They both looked at the ground as they passed Zairos.

The natural order had been restored. They walked with their heads down all the way to the tractor and sat in the back. After a brave and open display of grief, they had become frightened again.

AS ZAIROS RODE
towards the Anna Purna chai stall, he welcomed the sun. He hoped its heat would burn away the memories of the morning. He went past the abandoned train bogies, the bales of straw waiting to be transported to Bombay, the liquor booth where tribals numbed their brains for a few rupees, the collector’s office, the furniture shop that sold only mustard benches, the lumber mills with the creepy echo of sparrows, until he hit the main road, which was a dusty, rocky mess. It had been dug up, and bullock carts, trucks, vans, cars, and cycles wove through it, spraying rock debris from under their tires.

After Zairos passed Alan’s petrol pump with its wilted array of coconut trees, he turned left and almost ran over Pinky, a six-year-old orphan with an eternally runny nose, who had perched herself close to Anna Purna’s to secure her daily dose of Tiger biscuits.

Anna, the owner of the chai stall, was an Indian Clark
Gable: thin moustache, clean skin, hair always set in the most well-behaved manner. No one knew his real name so he was called Anna, or Elder Brother, the title given to any South Indian man who wore a lungi and ran a chai stall. Anna had an old Hollywood charm, but his wife was quite the opposite—dusky, and full enough to be on the cover of
Debonair.

To the Iranis, Anna’s chai stall was one of Dahanu’s most prized possessions. It was a beloved meeting place—its hard wooden benches had seated many an overweight Irani over the years—a dingy hole beautifully suited to the hirsute features of the men that frequented the joint. At Anna’s, they were like beasts in a cave where they could fart, joke, smoke, abuse, and pontificate. Of course, they did this
anywhere,
but Anna’s was the home ground. Each morning, after making a round of their chickoo farms, the Iranis would gather here and drink tea, coffee, or Pepsi. Cigarette smoke gave the place a sinister haze, like fog in a cemetery. Yet the place was alive, full of joy and horniness, and credit had to be given to Anna’s steaming chai and his steamy wife.

Anna stood under the sharp white glow of tube lights and poured chai from one steel jug into the other to cool it down. It was quite a show, this hot waterfall of milky tea, and Anna was always guaranteed an audience. There was Merwan Mota, the fattest man in Dahanu, who polished off three omelettes at a time, his little blue diabetes bag by his side; Behrooz, the smoothest bald head in town, who owned the spare-parts shop next door; Keki the Italian, who smoked beedis in a corner and brooded over Camus and Turgenev; and Dara Atom, the town’s official god-man-cum-healer, who was only a few chicken breasts away from being just as huge as Merwan Mota.

At its peak, which was from nine till eleven in the morning, Anna’s chai stall offered a heady cocktail of languages. Anna spoke softly in Tulu to his wife and loudly in Hindi to the balloon-factory owners; some of the Iranis conversed in Dari just to remind the ones who didn’t that they were inferior and had been polluted by India, and the inferior Iranis, who spoke Gujarati, spoke it in a crass manner to make the actual Gujaratis, the Indian ones, feel infuriated that their language was being bastardized in the cheapest way. But in the end, if one kept some distance, one could see the beauty of Anna’s, that brothel of languages. All languages knew each other well, were familiar with the twists and turns of each other’s bodies, and were not afraid to inhale the pungent smell of each other’s underarms.

Zairos heard a sound in the distance, a motorcycle zooming at full speed. Soon, one passed by on the tarmac. It was his dearest first cousin, Bumble. Bumble was his father’s brother’s son, two years older than Zairos. Bumble’s real name was Farhad, but he was called Bumble, as in bumblebee, because he whizzed around on his motorcycle, zigzag-zigzag, without any aim at all. He often overshot his destination because he was going too fast to stop, but he would never admit this. However, he was an expert rider and his bike was a beauty, a red BMW.

This morning, Bumble was dressed in a Santa Claus costume.

And he did, once again, miss his destination. He returned, his cotton-white beard hanging to one side. His Santa cap flopped out of his pants pocket, but his black aviator Ray-Bans balanced perfectly on the ridge of his nose. He parked
his motorcycle and walked over to the blue car outside Anna’s in which the gamblers of Dahanu were indulging in their favourite, most sacred activity—rummy. Men whose bodies were 70 per cent cards, not water: Aspi Irani looked over his silver reading glasses each time he threw a card on the black suitcase that served as the card table, Kavas Undie left the car, went into the bushes, and returned with his undies worn inside out to bring about a change in luck, and Bumble’s father, the left-handed Sohrab Irani, shuffled cards with fervour and dedication that would put any religious man to shame. This hallowed vehicle was known throughout Dahanu as the Mobile Casino.

“How did the party go?” Sohrab Irani asked his son.

“It was good,” replied Bumble, “until the children started pulling my beard.”

Bumble’s nephew was suffering from jaundice, so to cheer the boy up Bumble had thrown an early-morning Christmas party. Christmas was months away, but as Bumble put it, “The children don’t know.” As he took off his Ray-Bans—an affectation that made him look like a B Division football club owner from Naples—he asked Anna for some chai.

Zairos wished his grandfather would come to Anna’s.

Every once in a while, Zairos would ask Shapur Irani to sit with him on the rickety benches, even if he remained silent and just listened to the frying of eggs in Anna’s kitchen. Shapur Irani always politely declined. Maybe he thought of Anna’s as an aberration, something frivolous.

But on days like this, when Zairos had found a Warli man hanging from a tree, Anna’s provided a strange balm, and he could appreciate the lunacy of it all—the humongous Merwan
Mota, highly diabetic, eating strawberry ice cream in dollops; Behrooz scratching his bald skull, gripped by a Hindi graphic novel called
The Day My Wife Bled to Death;
Keki the Italian telling him to read a real writer like Tolstoy, and Behrooz, upon hearing that extraterrestrial name, giving Keki a disgusted look.

Anna’s was Zairos’ cocoon, and while he sat there, cozy in its extravagance, he thought of Kusum in the back of a tractor with only an old fatigued woman to help her cope with the loss of her father. There was no sugary chai in her world, no air-conditioned car where gamblers hugged their cards tighter than their wives, and certainly no leather wallet, fat with cash, to serve as a cushion when she sat down. As she went home, all she had was the burn of daylight and the roar of a tractor to aggravate the strain on an anguished, racing heart.

Kusum picked up a shovel from outside her neighbour’s hut. It felt heavy, the iron handle rusted, extra nails hammered at the base to keep it from coming loose. The sun gave the rust an orange sparkle as though the shovel were at the kiln instead of at the end of its life.

It was only fitting that Kusum was the one who would dig her father’s grave.

It was her fault that he killed himself. She had failed to hide the marks on her body from him, ones her husband had made. Perhaps it was the way she walked that had given her away. Or the manner in which her ribs caved when she sat down.