Don't Let Him Know (11 page)

‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe seventeen or eighteen. But I don’t have that much – you should see my father.’

‘Really? It looks like a lot to me.’

‘No – see,’ Sultan said tugging his vest down with his finger.

‘I can’t see,’ Avinash complained.

He unbuttoned the other buttons and pulled down his vest further, exposing his chest. He was right – his hair grew like a dark soft feathery fan in the middle of his chest. More than anything else Avinash wanted to touch that hair. He wanted to trace it like a river on an India map and follow it down his belly and then he wanted his finger to burrow under his pants and trace it all the way down. All the way. Avinash shut his eyes terrified about where this was leading.

‘Touch it,’ said Sultan, his voice as silky as his hair, his tone teasing, almost a dare. Avinash kept his eyes shut but his fingers reached out of their own accord. As they traced the silky roughness of Sultan’s hair he felt the room grow stiflingly small, his own clothes uncomfortably tight. Sultan was no longer humming anything. Instead he moved closer to Avinash, his trousers rubbing up against his legs, at first casual and then insistently. Avinash realized his fingers were a hair’s breadth away from the buckle on Sultan’s belt. Avinash touched Sultan’s crotch and jerked back as if he had touched something scalding because he knew that if he pulled that zipper down there was no going back.

Just then Sultan laughed and said, ‘There, you are all done.’ He opened his eyes and saw the sheet still around him. Sultan was holding a little mirror behind him so Avinash could look at the back of his head.

‘Is that all right?’ he asked.

Avinash nodded for his mouth was too dry and his tongue too thick and twisted to trust with words. Sultan took a small towel and vigorously rubbed him. The roughness of the old towel seemed to set off sparks on his skin. Then, too soon, he stopped and handed him his shirt. Avinash’s fingers were all thumbs as he buttoned it.

As Avinash paid him, Sultan said ‘Wait, you’ve buttoned the shirt all wrong.’ Avinash just nodded and bolted from the store. ‘Come back again,’ Sultan called after him.

Avinash turned around. Sultan was standing at the door lighting a cigarette and looking at him. As their eyes met he smiled, and Avinash was not sure if he had imagined everything.

That night Avinash dreamt of him but he was in the old shop and then his mother was scolding him and Avinash woke up trembling with fear and guilt. But when he closed his eyes he saw him again standing at the door looking at him and smiling. And Avinash wondered what would happen if he just walked back, past the newspaper store, past the tea-stall, past the sleeping dog, up the two steps and Sultan shut the door behind him.

A few days later as Avinash was walking down the street he saw Sultan sitting on the steps in front of his shop. He was smoking a cigarette and chatting with the man who sold newspapers and magazines in the little stall down the road. Sultan saw him and grinned and waved, wispy tendrils of smoke curling up from his fingers. Caught in his grin, like an animal in the headlights of a car, Avinash suddenly knew he could not walk past him without remembering his dream and the strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. He stopped short and pretended he had just remembered something on the other side of the road. He turned and ran across the road almost knocking over a boy on a bicycle going the wrong way. The boy teetered down the street, a few choice curses wafting in his wake like Sultan’s cigarette smoke.

Once safely on the other side, Avinash looked across the street to see if Sultan had noticed his flight, if he was looking to see where Avinash had run off to. But he had gone back to his conversation. Avinash saw him toss his head back and laugh, his teeth white against his tan. He ran his fingers through his hair and Avinash shivered uncontrollably. He stood there for a couple of minutes trying to will him to turn and seek him out. But he carried on unconcerned, as if he had forgotten how their paths had almost intersected, before Avinash ran away. Then he finished his cigarette and stubbed it out with his sandal, stood up, stretched and wandered back inside his shop.

Avinash never went back to get his hair cut at Sultan’s again. One day he noticed the Badshah saloon had gone out of business. When Avinash got married and had a son, Amit got into St John’s School as well. ‘Like father, like son,’ Avinash’s mother said with a proud smile. Father Rozario was still there, as were hair-check days, but these were different times and no one got caned for long hair any more. Instead, they were fined.

Unlike Badshah, the New Modern Saloon for Gents (Air-Conditioned) survived. But Avinash refused to take Amit there for his haircuts. Harish-babu had died and Lakshman-babu was now in charge. Avinash took Amit to a far more expensive saloon even though it was much further away, something the boy’s grandmother thought of as a ridiculous indulgence bound to spoil the child. Sometimes on lazy holiday afternoons she would tell her grandson the story of how his father hated having his hair cut. The story was part of family lore now, worn into familiarity by its telling, rendered perfectly harmless, even slightly boring.

V

Great-Grandmother's Mango Chutney

 

Two weeks after Amit was dumped by his first serious American girlfriend, he was suddenly stricken by an urge for homemade mango chutney. The memory, sweet and tart at the same time, tugged at him so insistently that he got into his run-down old Honda hatchback, drove down to Valencia Street, past the taquerias with their mariachi bands, the second-hand bookstores and the newly sprung chic tapas restaurants, until he found the only Indian grocery store in the neighbourhood. As he stood in the store deliberating over the bottles of Pataks and Priyas while a tinny song from the latest Bollywood blockbuster wafted through the aisles, he noticed a battered can next to the pickles. The blue paper on the can had faded in the sun and the yellow fruit pictured on it was bleached to a pale ivory. Amit looked at the expiry date – it was about four months ago. But there it was: canned jackfruit. It was a far cry from the jackfruits he would see in India – hacked open, their golden yellow pulp voluptuously spilling out on to the street, the buzzing shiny black-blue flies hovering over them as eager as wedding guests. But for a moment, in the aisle of that grocery store in San Francisco, over the sharp whiffs of fresh cumin and stale samosas, Amit could smell that cloying sweet jackfruit odour that clung thickly to everything it touched. And he heard his mother as if she was standing in the next aisle.

 

‘I will not have it,' said Romola. ‘Not in this house, while I am alive. I have told her once, I have told her a thousand times – I will not have jackfruit in my house. The smell makes me want to throw up.'

‘But did you find any?' asked his father, Avinash, trying to be rational.

‘Find any? You think she was born yesterday? She has eaten every last bit. She and that old maid of hers. But the smell – my whole refrigerator smells like it was bathed in it.'

‘Well, it's done now,' said Avinash placatingly, unwilling to forsake his newspaper and step into the fight.

But Romola was not to be appeased. ‘You think it's just for me? What about her? At her age, eating so much ripe jackfruit.'

She looked at her mother-in-law for support. But Amit's grandmother had told Romola a long time ago that she did not want to handle the old lady's demands any more. Now that Romola was around, her duty as daughter-in-law was done and she was going to spend more time volunteering with her Rotary Club Ladies Circle.

So Romola looked at Avinash and muttered, ‘If tomorrow she has an upset stomach, you clean up – she is your precious grandmother, after all.'

Amit's Boroma, his great-grandmother, was ninety-four. She still had her own teeth – with a few missing here and there. When it suited her she was blind. When she did not want to hear something she was deaf. At other times she would prop the thick black-framed glasses with their almost cloudy yellowish lenses on her hooked nose and peer at the newspaper with great concentration. Her favourite section was the obituaries, which she read with ghoulish relish.

‘Harihar Shastri died,' she would announce, looking at Romola chopping vegetables for lunch. ‘He used to come to study under your grandfather-in-law. He was a full twelve years younger than me.'

But today Great-Grandmother was in her helpless, sightless mode, as if her very spine had crumpled inside her. She sat on her bed, her plain white sari falling off her wrinkled shoulders, and peered up at Avinash.

‘Jackfruit, blackfruit,' she bleated mournfully. ‘When your grandfather still had the house in the village we had jackfruits the size of bolsters growing in our own courtyard. And all the mangos we could ever want. Do you remember?'

‘Ma, you make it sound like a zamindari plantation,' said Amit's grandmother. ‘I just remember a couple of mango trees. You really do exaggerate.'

But Great-Grandmother carried on undeterred. ‘We had fresh mangos, mango chutney, mango pickles, mango squash, even homemade mango ice cream. Where will I get that any more? Have I legs that I'll go walking? Have I my own money that I'll buy myself anything?'

As Avinash awkwardly patted his grandmother on her shoulder and fixed her sari, Romola standing near the doorway muttered darkly, ‘No legs? That woman has eight legs.'

Amit imagined Great-Grandmother as an ancient toothless spider crawling from room to room and giggled. Hearing him, Romola said, ‘Come here. I feel a white hair growing. Pluck it out carefully. Mind it, don't go pulling out all my black hairs too.' Romola often complained that her hair was turning white from looking after all of them – Amit and his father and his grandmother and his great-grandmother. ‘Your school ends at three, your office ends at six,' she would tell Amit and his father in exasperation. ‘My duties never end.'

Great-Grandmother survived the jackfruit without any stomach upset. ‘She could digest iron,' said Romola with grudging admiration.

‘It's all that unadulterated milk she drank in her day,' Amit's grandmother added.

Great-Grandmother one, Mother zero, Amit tallied in his head as if it was a football match. He wondered sometimes why his great-grandmother and mother always seemed to be butting heads. ‘Does Ma hate Boroma?' he asked his father once.

‘No, no of course not,' laughed his father. ‘They both think they are the boss of the house. But they both love you very much.'

That Amit knew. When Great-Grandmother sent the old maid Mangala out to get thick slices of batter-fried aubergine from Dasu's tea-stall down the street, she'd always sneak Amit a slice. He wasn't supposed to eat street food but Great-Grandmother said that was all nonsense.

‘You have to build the boy's immunity,' she would tell Romola. ‘You can't just shelter him. Why, when I was a child—'

‘Yes, yes, grandmother, when you were a child the world was ruled by the British and the cooking oil was pure,' said Romola shortly. ‘Amit has school tomorrow. He can't afford to have a tummy upset.'

But the next day when she picked Amit up from kindergarten, she bought him a chocolate pastry from the bakery on their way back. ‘There,' said Romola. ‘Isn't this much better than some oily gutter-fried aubergine?'

As he licked the chocolate icing Amit thought contentedly that if he played his cards right he could have both.

He almost did, except the next time Mangala tried to sneak the fried aubergine into the house, she bumped into Romola. Mangala immediately hid her hands behind her back but to no avail.

‘What do you have there?' demanded Romola.

‘Nothing,' Mangala lied.

‘Nothing – I'll teach you nothing. Show me at once.'

The offending article was revealed – thick slices of aubergine fried in hot golden-brown batter, the oil seeping through the newspaper cone they came in.

‘Oh! From Dasu's tea-stall,' Amit's grandmother said accusingly, looking at Romola to pick up the fight.

‘Filth and rubbish!' exclaimed Romola on cue. ‘Cooking in the open on the street next to that gutter. God knows what oil he uses. Here I am spending your master's hard-earned money to buy good oil on the black market and you want to poison her with this garbage?'

‘Oh, but they were for me,' said Mangala in a last-ditch effort to save Great-Grandmother.

Hearing the noise Great-Grandmother herself had now shuffled out. She stood there leaning on her little stool with wheels, which Avinash had designed for her after her knees started giving way.

‘What is it?' she demanded. ‘Can an old woman not shut her eyes in peace in this house?'

‘Mangala was just telling me that she bought some fried aubergine to have with her tea,' said Romola with a sly smile.

‘She'll have a stomach upset, no doubt' said Great-Grandmother sourly, eyeing the oil-stained paper cone.

They stood there watching Mangala eat five pieces of fried aubergine one by one.

When the last crumb was gone Romola turned to Great-Grandmother and asked sweetly, ‘And what would you like for dinner?'

Mother one, Boroma zero, thought Amit.

Great-Grandmother sighed heavily and said, ‘Whatever you give me. I am an old woman, a burden on you. I won't bother you too much longer. Legs gone, eyes gone, ears gone . . . how long before I am gone as well? Husband, brother, sisters – everyone is gone. Even my own son taken before his time. I ask God every day how long must I wait for you to take me.'