Family Matters (15 page)

“Always Bavaji made me sit at his right hand, and my brother, Dali, at his left. And for Sunday lunch the rexine tablecloth was topped with another, of Belgian lace. Bavaji did not allow knick-knacks or vases upon it, saying it was a crime to cover up a work of art.

“How lovely those days were, Yezadji. Wait a minute, let me show you something.”

She returned with a framed photograph: a family of four, posed formally at one end of a long dining table. Mother, father, two well-behaved children, the boy scrubbed and shining in short trousers, shirt, and tie, the little girl in her ribbon-bedecked frock of pink organza.

“My seventh birthday – which fell on a Sunday. Very special.” She sighed. “Why is it that when we grow up, suddenly the happy days are behind us?”

Yezad had no answer. “What happened to that dining table?”

“My brother took it to his new flat when he got married.”

“Does he have big Sunday lunches, family tradition?”

Villie twisted her mouth in answer. “He destroyed the table. It wouldn’t fit through his front door, so he got a carpenter to turn it into a sectional table. God knows what junglee wood he used for framing, but in two years it was eaten to bits by white ants.”

She stroked the cloth and began folding. Yezad helped, wondering about the workings of a fate that had transformed Villie from the sweet little pink-frocked girl, sitting at her father’s right hand for Sunday dhansak, to the dream-obsessed, Matka-besotted woman with a rancid smell. What cruel trajectory had led from there to here?

She did not replace the tablecloth in its bag. “I’m sure this will be large enough to cover the balcony.”

Yezad was startled. “Don’t you want to save such an important memento?”

“Memento-femento I don’t believe in. A big tablecloth without a big table, without guests to sit and laugh and talk, is no use. Cover the balcony before your little boy catches a chill.”

“Thanks, Villie.”

She pushed the odds and ends back into the drawers and slammed them shut. “You know, Yezadji, you’re right. If my dream was in Gujarati, I’d use a different method: the sound of the word. Cat would become bilaari – bey number for bilaari. Combined with zero for saucer, I should bet twenty. And you too, my dear, put some money on twenty and eighty, safe in both languages. You’ll win enough to build a pukka room on your balcony.”

He said no need, he wanted to keep it as a balcony, the situation was temporary.

“That means nothing,” said Villie, seeing him to the door. “Everything is temporary, Yezadji. Life itself is temporary.”

Wasn’t it typical of that woman, said Roxana, to keep a man chatting for as long as possible with her dear-darling nonsense. And when she heard that Villie had shown him a photo, she asked what kind of new perversion was that woman up to, wasn’t Matka enough for her?

“It was a family photo, when she was seven,” said Yezad, which made Roxana feel foolish, and then guilty about taking the tablecloth, as he told the story behind it, repeating Villie’s sad remembrances. “You know, she’s not a bad person. Just a little weird. And she offered to get your shopping from the bunya, she goes every morning.”

He spread the rexine on the balcony and made holes at suitable distances along the edges, feeling a twinge at each perforation. He would buy metal eyelets tomorrow at the Bora’s hardware shop, reinforce the raw punctures, make it strong as tarpaulin. With short lengths of rope through each hole, he fastened the sheet to the balcony railing.

Murad began equipping his rexine tent for the night. He took his toy binoculars, compass, and weapons: a paper knife and water pistol. He wanted to keep a candle and matches as well in his emergency hideout, deep in the darkest recesses of the Sumatran jungle, but his mother refused.

“Mummy is right,” said Yezad. “It won’t be very pleasant if you burn down Pleasant Villa.”

“Ha, ha, very funny. Mummy always imagines horrible things.”

“Speaking of imagining, chief, what’s this about being depressed? Are Jal and Coomy imagining it? I can’t believe it of a philosopher like you.”

“Depression is a red herring,” said Nariman. “I think a lot about the past, it’s true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.”

“You’ve got many years left with us, Pappa.”

“I wonder why Dr. Tarapore thought it was depression,” said Yezad.

“The quack misdiagnosed based on what Coomy and Jal said. He has yet to learn not everything can be explained clinically. ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’ ”

“That’s lovely,” said Roxana. “Shakespeare?”

“Pascal.”

She repeated the words to herself, silently, The heart has its reasons …

Lying on his cot, Jehangir listened, attentive to the adults’ conversation, wondering what depression felt like. Was it the sad feeling when it kept raining for many days? He watched, envious, as Murad prepared for his night on the balcony. Then he heard Grandpa ask in a timid voice for the soo-soo bottle.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, jumping off the cot.

His father crossed the room in two violent strides and stood in his path. “What did I say about that bottle?”

Jehangir froze. He thought his father was going to hit him. He sounded angriest when his voice was so scarily quiet.

“Answer me. What did I tell you?”

Cowering, he replied, “Not to touch those things.”

“So why did you try to get it?”

“I forgot,” he said, his voice tiny. “I wanted to help.”

Next moment the anger disappeared, and his father’s hand was on his shoulder. “You don’t have to help with this, Jehangla.”

His father nudged him towards the cot. He watched his mother pick up the soo-soo bottle. She lifted the sheet and put Grandpa’s soosoti into it. It was small, not much bigger than his. But Grandpa’s balls were huge. Like onions in a sock, even bigger than Daddy’s, which he had seen many times when Daddy came out of the bathroom and took the towel off to put on his clothes. His own were like little marbles. He wondered if the size and weight of Grandpa’s made it uncomfortable.

“Lie down, Jehangla,” said Daddy. “You don’t have to look at everything. Good night.”

Then Mummy brought the basin for Grandpa to gargle and clean his mouth before going to sleep. He made that funny move with his jaw to push out his teeth. They slid into the glass, into their watery bed, before Jehangir closed his eyes.

With her head next to Yezad’s on the pillow, Roxana thanked him for being so understanding.

He suggested it might be best to hire a hospital ayah, running herself ragged was not the answer. “We’ll make Jal and Coomy pay the cost. Tell them it’s our condition for accommodating Pappa.”

“After the way they behaved, I don’t want a thing from them. I don’t want to see their faces for three weeks, till Pappa is on his feet.”

She assured him it wouldn’t be difficult, with a little patience and understanding. Then she described how bad Pappa smelled when he’d arrived. “All it took was a napkin and water, and talcum, but Jal and Coomy hadn’t bothered. And you saw the stubble on his poor face – they packed his razor in the bag. As if he can do it himself.”

“We’ll call a barber. But three weeks, and that’s it. I will accept no excuses from those two rascals.”

“Oh I’m not going to let them push Pappa from his house for longer than that. Just watch me, I’ll straighten them out.”

She came closer, hugged him, and kissed the ear into which she’d been whispering, nibbling it. He sighed. His fingers reached for the hem of her nightdress and pulled it up around her hips as she raised her bottom slightly. His hand moved under the soft fabric. She said better wait a little, the boys were asleep but she was not sure about Pappa.

Nariman opened his eyes and wished Lucy’s large, sad eyes would stop haunting him. Turning his head, he looked for the familiar bars on his window, and saw his grandson’s cot instead. He was not in Chateau Felicity. He must stay quiet tonight, muzzle his memories, must not disturb Roxana and Yezad, and the children sleeping close by.

Drowsy from the painkiller, he drifted on a cloud resembling slumber. Among the murmurs from the back room the word “ayah” caught his ear … and memory began its torments again. Lucy accepting employment as an ayah in Chateau Felicity – to be closer to him, she’d said. And the work was no hardship, she assured him, it was a great comfort to live and sleep in the same building.

Even before she became a servant, heartache had etched lines of fatigue on her face, making it gaunt. Domestic drudgery was now worsening it. How outrageous, he thought, that she would do this to herself, go to such absurd lengths just to retaliate, to make his life miserable because he had refused to meet her on the footpath any more.

Her employers were the ground-floor Arjanis. They knew who she was – they had often seen Lucy with him. The ground-floor Gestapo, he would joke with Lucy during the years when they were still going out, for Mr. and Mrs. Arjani were always at their window, keeping an eye on the comings and goings in Chateau Felicity. And later, they would watch her on those evenings when she stood like a lost child on the pavement, staring up at his window.

But hiring her as an ayah for their grandchildren, he realized, was an act of vengeance. Years earlier, around the time he had met Lucy, Mr. Arjani had been sued by Nariman’s father for libel, and this was the reprisal, it became clear now.

Such a monumental waste of time and energy the lawsuit had been, he thought, as he remembered the religious controversy that had fuelled the feud. A priest had performed a navjote ceremony for the son of a Parsi mother and non-Parsi father – an absolute taboo for the conservative factions. The event had ignited one of those periods of debate and polemics and bickering that infected the Reformists and the Orthodox from time to time, like the flu.

So his father, famous for his letters to the editor, wrote one condemning the priest: that for the misguided dustoor in question, the sacred investiture ceremony of sudra and kusti had no more significance than tying an ordinary string around ones waist, given the cavalier way he was bestowing it on all and sundry; that it was renegades like him who would destroy this three-thousand-year-old religion; that Zoroastrianism had survived many setbacks in its venerable history, but what the Arab armies had failed to achieve in A.D. 652, priests like him would accomplish; the purity of this unique and ancient Persian community, the very plinth and foundation of its survival, was being compromised. Ignorance may be bliss, he wrote; however, the ignorance of mischief-making priests was anything but – it was poison for the Parsi community.

Though the bombastic tone of his father’s rhetoric was amusing, it had left Nariman shaking his head in despair. The
Jam-e-Jamshed
dedicated a special box each morning to the controversy. And each morning his father sat back and enjoyed the letters, for and against, instigated by his missive, his face lighting up with satisfaction when he opened the paper over breakfast and read choice bits aloud to his family.

Invariably, his father would find a way to connect the controversy with Lucy. He would cite examples in it to illustrate why intermarriage was forbidden. Extracts from the correspondence would be presented as unshakeable arguments for prohibiting relationships between Parsi and non-Parsi.

Nariman tried to use the openings offered by the breakfast discourses. He pleaded with his father to invite Lucy to lunch or tea, talk to her before making his mind up. But his father refused – it would be unfair, he said, to raise the poor girl’s hopes. Sometimes, his mother suggested timidly that there was no harm in finding out what kind of person she was. His father said she might be a wonderful person, as gracious and charming as the Queen of England, but she was still unsuitable for his son because she was not a Zoroastrian, case closed.