Family Matters (16 page)

How naive, to have kept hoping his father would change his mind, or that a passive stance would avoid unpleasantness, improve the chances for Lucy and himself. He had underestimated his father’s stamina, his willingness to trade familial happiness for narrow beliefs.

Then Mr. Arjani’s scathing letter appeared in the newspaper, and his father’s morning entertainment ended abruptly. Coming from the
ground-floor neighbour, it felt like an attack from a traitor in his own camp. And though he had decided at the outset that he would restrict himself to just one letter, taking the high road thereafter and ignoring the yip-yap of the rabble, he lifted his pen to fire a second salvo.

He called Mr. Arjani a prime example of the substandard mind whose cogitations were clearly worthless, unable to grasp the simplest tenets of the religion and the supreme significance of the navjote. Mr. Arjani’s views, he wrote, did not deserve the dignity of debate.

Mr. Arjani joined the battle with vigour. The exchange became ever more vitriolic, ending with the letter that took them to court. In it, Mr. Vakeel was accused of being a rabid racist who, in his maniacal quest for purity, wouldn’t think twice about eliminating the spouses and offspring of intermarriage.

His father was advised by his Sunday-evening group that it was time to sue for defamation of character. Mr. Arjani was offered the chance to withdraw his statements and apologize. He refused. A group of Reformists financed the defence and, though they lost, were pleased with the ensuing publicity.

His father gave a party to celebrate the victory. The Sunday-evening group presented him with the page from the
Jam-e-Jamshed,
framed behind glass, featuring the full retraction and apology.

They were behaving as though they’d won a cricket match, thought Nariman. For them, the ruling was a validation of their beliefs rather than a technicality of libel law. While the case was before the court, his emotions had been mixed. He didn’t want his father to lose; at the same time, he had hoped that if those bigoted ideas were scrutinized in public, his father might recognize them for what they were.

But there had been no such redemption. And now, ten years later, with his parents dead, he had to watch Lucy become the instrument of the Arjanis’ confused vengeance. Mr. Arjani bragged to everyone in Chateau Felicity – hiring Marazban Vakeel’s son’s girlfriend as an ayah was a fine revenge. To see the drama that Professor Vakeel and Lucy put on was first-class fun. Poetic justice, he said, far superior to the justice of law courts.

If only Mr. Arjani had thought a little. If only he’d realized that his late father, with his narrow views, would have agreed with his old
enemy that Lucy was better suited to be an ayah than his daughter-in-law anyway.

But Lucy’s decision flabbergasted Nariman. He asked her if she was doing it for the money. He would help her, no need to humiliate herself he would find her an office job.

Smiling, she shook her head. “Don’t you understand why I am here? You’re on the third floor, I am on the ground floor, and it comforts me.”

He warned her that for all the good that would do, they might as well be in different cities – he was going to keep his word, he would not see her any more. “You’re wasting your time, slaving for a pittance.”

She smiled. “I never even notice the work. And the three children are very sweet. You know how much I love children. Remember the plans we made, Nari? Six little ones we wanted, and the names we picked —”

“Please, Lucy, don’t do this to me!” he walked away in anger.

But then, every morning, as he left for work, he saw her take the three Arjani children to school. He heard Mr. Arjani shouting instructions to her from the window, to carry the children’s school bags because the books were too heavy for their little shoulders. “I don’t want my grandchildren deformed by humps,” he said.

Nariman watched Lucy struggle with the three bags. Not many mornings passed before he went to relieve her of their weight, walking with her to the children’s school.

At noon, Lucy had to deliver the children’s lunches. Depending on his lecture schedule, he would be there to help with the hot tiffin boxes and the basket of crockery and the Thermoses filled with cold drinks. Mr. Arjani boasted that he now had two servants for the price of one.

Nariman, his conscience heavy, knew his wife was watching it all from upstairs. He knew that what he was doing was utterly unfair to Yasmin. When he returned from work, he found Jal and Coomy beside their mother, trying to console her. They would not look at him. They no longer came to wish him good night before going to bed.

And Yasmin asked what she had done to deserve such treatment. Why was he torturing her? Why had he married her if he cared so much for Lucy?

“I care for her only as a human being – to make her end her madness.”

“You said you had ended it, that time when she used to stare at our window in the evening. Why should I believe you now?”

“Please understand, without speaking to her, how will I convince her to give up this awkward situation?”

“She’s not going to listen. Don’t you see she’s making a fool of you? Trying to make you feel guilty?”

“Perhaps I am,” he said, and wished he hadn’t, for Yasmin began to lose her temper.

“Forget about me. You’ve already ruined my life. Think of yourself, how it hurts your reputation at university, and how it will affect the way people talk about our little Roxana. She will carry her father’s shame.”

“There is nothing shameful about my behaviour,” he said quietly. “I consider it an honourable way of conducting myself, under the circumstances.”

“A strange idea of honour! First you marry me, then throw me aside. Now you sniff like a dog after her. And what about her family, why are they letting her abuse herself this way?”

“Her family has disowned her, you know that.”

After enduring the mortification for months, Yasmin issued an ultimatum: she would take Roxana and leave if he did not stop being the ayah’s assistant. He had one week to decide.

“What good will it do?” he tried to reason. “There will be hardship for you and our child.”

“You have the gall to talk about hardship? What do I have now? Comfort and happiness?”

As the week drew to a close, he requested her not to make a bad situation worse. She said he’d regret the day he was born if he didn’t heed her warning. She had had enough, she was going to stand up for her rights, if not as wife then at least as mother.

“You can’t go,” he pleaded, a note of hysteria entering his voice for the first time. “I need my darling Roxana, you will not take her from me …”

Roxana and Yezad stood in the dark, peering into the front room. It had distinctly sounded like Pappa was calling her.

“Must have had a dream,” said Yezad.

They waited a few moments, then went back to bed, agreeing not to mention it in the morning. It would only make him feel foolish. Better to keep his spirits up. Whatever was bothering him would recede of its own accord.

T
HE NINE-ELEVEN LEFT
the station as Yezad arrived at the platform. He fought his way onto the nine-seventeen; the train moved out with men running alongside.

Grabbing an overhead railing, he chose to stay near the exit – too far in would mean a return struggle at Marine Lines. He squeezed himself nearer one of the fans, though, to minimize his own sweating and the smell of armpits around him.

These tactical manoeuvres were performed by instinct, the instinct for survival in the urban jungle, he used to joke with college friends – instead of tree branches, you swung from railings inside trains and buses, hung from bars outside them. Tarzan comics and the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs were more instructive than he or his teachers had imagined.

His dream for an end to this apeman commute had led him to apply for immigration to Canada. He wanted clean cities, clean air, plenty of water, trains with seats for everyone, where people stood in line at bus stops and said please, after you, thank you. Not just the land of milk and honey, also the land of deodorant and toiletry.

But his fantasy about that new life in a new land had finished quickly, Canada was done with. And he assuaged his disappointment by keeping track of problems in the land of excess and superfluity, as he now called it: unemployment, violent crime, homelessness, language laws of Quebec. Not much difference between there and here, he would think: we have beggars in Bombay, they have people freezing to death on Toronto streets; instead of high- and low-caste fighting, racism and police shootings; separatists in Kashmir, separatists in Quebec – why migrate from the frying pan into the fire?

Of course, there were times when he wished his application had been successful. That immigration officer, bastard racist, he thought, I’ll never forget his name. If I’d been accepted, Jal and Coomy would have been forced to look after the chief – they couldn’t have driven him in an ambulance to Canada.

Ten days of Nariman’s three weeks’ bedrest had elapsed. Almost halfway there. But it troubled him to see Roxana struggling to cope, pretending everything was normal. He thought about their quarrel that morning; and later, she had stopped him for an extra kiss before he left for work. They had held each other on the landing, first checking Villie Cardmaster’s peephole – the smallest noise could summon her eye. The sense of lurking danger made the kiss sweeter. But Roxana didn’t know that since Nariman came to stay he’d been late for work every day, it would have given her one more thing to worry about.

At Marine Lines station the crowd trying to get on met the avalanche of alighting passengers. He pushed himself clear, glancing at his watch – nine-thirty already – and mopped his face. The air was a gigantic wet sponge. He thrust the damp handkerchief into his pocket and waited to cross the road.

Being manager of the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium meant he had to unlock the shop door by nine-thirty to let in the peon who swept and swabbed the entrance and the front steps, made tea, and dusted the glass cases displaying cricket bats, stumps, caps, footballs, badminton racquets, and other samples from their stock. Then the peon, Husain, would remove padlocks from the security shutters that covered the two large windows. Clanking and rattling, the steel would roll up, revealing plate glass behind which sat more sports equipment. Now Husain would take his cloth and give the glass a quick shine. By ten o’clock they would be open for business.

It was an eight-minute walk to the shop, and Yezad increased his pace. Husain would be waiting: his kholi in Jogeshwari, rented on a twelve-hour basis, had to be vacated at seven a.m., when the other renter arrived from his factory night shift. So he killed time near the shop, aware that he was more fortunate than those who rented eight-hour rooms.

Yezad’s haste was not for Husain’s benefit, who was content to sit on the step, chew his first paan of the day, watch the world go by. The proprietor sometimes appeared early at the shop, and to be seen coming late made Yezad feel like a schoolboy.

Six shops down from the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium was the Jai Hind Book Mart (Texts For Schools & Colleges – Reference Books Our Specialty, stated its signboard). It, too, opened for business at ten. Vilas Rane sat outside, leaning against the locked doors, a clipboard and writing paper in his lap. He raised his hand in greeting.

Yezad nodded, waving back, and hurried on.

“No need to rush, Mr. Kapur hasn’t come yet.”

“Oh, good.”

When he reached the shop, Husain rose from his haunches and salaamed. Yezad unlocked the door and tossed his briefcase in his chair before returning to Vilas. “Busy? Lots of scribbling?”

“Nothing so far,” said Vilas, holding up the clipboard to reveal the blank page.

Besides his job as a salesman at the Book Mart, Vilas had a sideline. He was a writer of letters for those who couldn’t, who poured out, into his willing ear, their thoughts, feelings, concerns, their very hearts, which he transformed into words upon paper at the nominal rate of three rupees per page. The language could be one of three: Hindi, Marathi, or Gujarati, depending on the clients, mainly labourers come to the city from distant villages to work at the docks or on construction sites. A scribe-written letter was their only link with their families.

Sometimes, a client on a tight budget became silent when Vilas Rane’s pen had filled up the affordable number of pages. If it was a ramble, with the main substance already committed to paper, Vilas wound up the letter. But there were occasions when a customer, describing something crucial, in a voice fraught with emotion, would choke back the words because he had run out of money. Then Vilas would take what was offered and ask the man to continue at no charge till his heart had been lightened, while his pen turned the outpourings into narrative, into something tangible that the customer could carry to the post office and see off on its long journey to his family.

“You’ll never be a good businessman,” Yezad chided him. “Do you think Bombay Sporting would last if Mr. Kapur gave away cricket bats for free?”

“What to do, I’m human,” said Vilas. “Nothing is more cruel than a letter cut short for lack of money. It’s like death – one moment the words flowing, next moment silence, the thought unfinished, the love unconveyed, the anguish unexpressed. How can I let that happen? Sometimes, my clients receive this type of truncated letter from their village. I read it to them. And suddenly, in mid-sentence – it ends. The pain it causes is unbearable. I’ll never do something so unkind.”

Vilas Rane’s sideline as a scribe had started accidentally, when a cleaner was hired to work at the Book Mart. One morning while dusting the shelves and stacks, he said to Vilas, “Isn’t life a funny thing, Raneji. Here I am with books all day. I feel them in my hands, and smell them, sometimes even dream about them. And yet, not a single word can I read.”

The observation touched Vilas more profoundly than the periodic governmental laments and platitudes about illiteracy in the country. “So you want to learn to read?” he asked the cleaner, whose name was Suresh.

“No, no, no,” he said bashfully. “My brain is not willing to learn something so difficult. No, all I want is for you to write a letter for me.”

After the shop had closed, the two sat on the steps and Vilas prepared to scribble a quick paragraph. Between the salutation: “My dear Pitaji and Mataji” and the leave-taking: “Your obedient son,” he filled five pages.

Three weeks later came a reply, the first letter Suresh had ever received. He held his breath, watching as his benefactor took a sandalwood letter opener from the counter display and slit the envelope.

“Only one page,” observed Suresh sadly.

“Don’t be disappointed,” said Vilas. “A letter is like perfume. You don’t apply a whole bottle. Just one dab will fill your senses. Words are the same – a few are sufficient.”

Suresh was sceptical as Vilas began to read the scrawl of the village scribe. There were invocations for success and good wishes for health and prosperity. But the rest was devoted to conveying the family’s happiness at listening to Suresh’s letter. Such a beautiful letter, they said, it is like being with you in the city, sharing your life, taking the train to your book shop, watching you work. And we hear your voice in every line, so wonderful is the effect of the words.

Suresh was glowing with pride as the letter ended. “One page only,” said Vilas. “And see how much pleasure it has given you?”

The cleaner began telling neighbours in his chawl about the marvellous letter-writer who had transported his thoughts and feelings to his family. And it was not long before Vilas’s scribal services were formalized into a full-fledged sideline. On the steps of Jai Hind Book Mart his clients gazed in wistful wonder at his penmanship, like the hungry on a feast to which they had no hope of being invited.

From time to time, Yezad tried convincing him to charge more. But Vilas said higher rates would mean fewer letters; besides, he had come to regard this as a form of social work. If he didn’t do it, his clients might turn for help to a Shiv Sena shakha where they would be exposed to vicious communal propaganda, might even get recruited in their sticks-and-stones method of political persuasion, their fine art of scoring debating points by breaking opposition bones.

“But let me be honest. More than anything else, I enjoy the letter-writing.”

“More than your acting group?” asked Yezad, for Vilas used to speak with great passion about his amateur drama society.

“That hobby is gone. There are some new members who think they know everything. They conduct workshops and discuss theories. Not my cup of tea.”

But his satisfaction from letter-writing grew more profound with time. He heard all about his clients’ lives: the birth of a child; a family quarrel about money; a wife left behind in the village who was sleeping with the sarpanch; a sick father who had died because the nearest hospital was two days’ travel on kutcha roads; a brother injured in a farm accident who had recovered and was home again.

And Vilas, writing and reading the ongoing drama of family matters, the endless tragedy and comedy, realized that collectively, the letters formed a pattern only he was privileged to see. He let the mail flow through his consciousness, allowing the episodes to fall into place of their own accord, like bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope. He felt that chance events, random cruelty, unexplainable kindness, meaningless disaster, unexpected generosity could, together, form a design that was otherwise invisible. If it were possible to read letters for all of humanity, compose an infinity of responses on their behalf, he would have a God’s-eye view of the world, and be able to understand it.

“Best of all,” he told Yezad, “it gives me so many ready-made families. I share their lives, like an uncle or grandfather who knows everything about everyone. Isn’t that a wonderful reward?”

“I’m having enough trouble with one family. If you’re not busy, write a letter for me.”

“Sure,” said Vilas. “To whom? God?”

“To my brother- and sister-in-law. Those bastards are making my life miserable. Two of them with nothing to do all day in their huge house. He wastes his time at the share bazaar, she at the fire-temple. And they can’t even look after their poor father. My wife has to slave instead. No room to move in the flat, and every night his bad dreams wake us up.”

Vilas urged patience, reminding him that in ten more days his father-in-law would return home and life would return to normal.

“Thank you for the obvious advice,” said Yezad. “Where do you get such wisdom?”

“Through my sideline. I write letters, therefore I am.”

“Ah, of course. See you later, Monsieur Rane,” said Yezad, and started back for the shop.

At the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, the steel shutters were still down, the litter in front of the shop not picked up. The shop was dark. Yezad switched on the lights. Nothing had been dusted, the tea hadn’t been made.

“Husain! Where are you? Sahab will be here any minute!”

He found the peon sitting on the floor in a corner of the storage area. Hugging his knees, which were drawn up to his chin, he was gazing at the wall. He looked up with a wan smile when Yezad approached.

“Chalo, Husain, start working.”

Husain returned his gaze to the wall and murmured, “Sorry, sahab, today I don’t feel able.”

Yezad sighed, studying the grizzled fellow in his khaki shirt and trousers. The collar was frayed, the knees worn thin. Time to order replacement uniforms for him. Though it was not really a uniform; Mr. Kapur provided two sets of the outfit periodically, to help Husain out.

He wondered whether to try and persuade the peon to rise, or leave him for Mr. Kapur. Husain had been hired at Bombay Sporting almost three years ago, several months after the Babri Mosque riots, at the urging of the Ekta Samiti, which was asking businesses to help rehabilitate riot victims. On the days that Husain was incapable of working, Mr. Kapur was the one who nursed his battered emotions till he was ready to resume his duties.

Whenever Yezad found himself getting annoyed by Husain, he would remind himself about the peon’s story, about the burning chawls in Antop Hill, goondas setting people on fire … Husain and his Muslim neighbours watching as their chawl went up in flames, wondering where his wife and three sons were … and then four burning figures tumbling down the steps of the building, their smoking hands beating at the flames … while the goondas sprinkled more kerosene from their cans over Husain’s family …