If Today Be Sweet (9 page)

Wrong, Rustom, she now thought. Wrong, my darling. Look how
I am floundering without you. Look how I can't make the smallest decisions without you.

Tehmina got out of her bed and made her way barefoot to the small desk under the window. Opening the drawer, she groped around in the dark until her fingers found the cool metal of the small picture frame.

Her hand on the light switch above her bed, Tehmina hesitated. The last thing she wanted to do was have the light spill from her room and disturb the children as they tried to get some hard-earned sleep. She decided to turn on the small lamp by her side instead. Sitting up in bed, the down comforter wrapped around her so that only her cold hands stuck out, Tehmina opened the double picture frame. She had bought this frame from Akbarally's just before she left for America this time, knowing that she had to carry her Rustom close to her if she was to survive the long journey away from the land where her beloved husband had died to the land where her beloved son lived, worked, breathed. She had hesitated over which two pictures to carry with her—one of their wedding pictures? The picture of Rustom holding Sorab for the first time, a half hour after Sorab's birth? Rustom's passport picture in which he looked uncharacteristically serious and stern? In the end she had decided on a picture of a young Rustom in his twenties and a picture of him a few months before he died. How much time, how many lifetimes, had passed between those two pictures. In that flash of time between the two clicks, they had had a son, raised him on a diet of parental love and pride and worry, felt that same trinity of feelings—love, pride, worry—when he'd left for America, been saddened but not shocked when he'd announced that he was marrying an American woman, had accepted and come to love Susan once they'd spent some time with her, been delirious with joy at the birth of their grandson. In that same sliver of time, they had attended the funerals of their parents, lost some of their close friends to an assortment of illnesses, survived
Rustom's own scare with prostate cancer. (Till today, Tehmina believed that Rustom actually did have prostate cancer at the time of his test but that her most sincere and heartfelt prayers had altered the biopsy results.)

So much of her life had been lived with this man who now stared back at her from his glass prison. Holding the picture frame up to her face, she brushed her lips against Rustom's full, sensuous lips. It was hard to believe that someone as passionate, as hot-blooded and larger than life as Rustom could be confined to a small, cheap photo frame. It was hard to believe that all that gusto for life, all that grandeur, all that magnificence could be felled by a heart attack, that the bones and flesh of this man were now decomposing in the well at the Tower of Silence, no different from the flesh and bones of more mediocre, frightened men. What was the point, Tehmina thought, the point of all his hard work, his success, his passion, his hunger for life, the buzzing energy that coursed through his veins, the relentless ticking of his intelligent mind, what was the point if all that could be snatched away at the age of sixty-seven, as abruptly as someone stilling the hands of a clock? Not to mention the labor pains his mother must have experienced when she gave birth to him, and the sacrifices that his parents made to send him to good schools, the sitting up with him when he burned with a fever as a child, oh yes, all the love that they—and later, she, Tehmina—lavished on him, and the pains that she took once they were married to make him happy—to make him saffron rava for breakfast every Saturday morning, to learn to make dhansak that tasted just like his mother's, to make love to him even when she wasn't in the mood—was none of this powerful enough to keep him alive beyond sixty-seven? So much went into the making of a man—the amount of rice and sugar and lentils that had to be grown for him to consume, the number of chickens and goats and lambs that had to be slaughtered so he could have meat in his curry. And it was more than even this, really. It went
back to the beginning of the world, to the splitting of the continents, to the rise of a species who could walk upright, who had opposable thumbs, and it carried on, down to the invention of fire, to the making of the fist, to the throwing of the first stone. How many untold thousands had died trying to figure out which berries were poisonous and which weren't? Who was the first man or woman to discover that rice needed to be boiled for twenty minutes or that corn tasted better roasted? How many empires rose and fell, how many millions died, in the search of spices? And all this labor, all this knowledge, all this blood and sweat, all these tears, all this achievement, all this triumph, all the glories and all the miseries of human history, for what? So that a man—a man as grand as a mountain, as large as the ocean, as generous as a continent—so that such a man could die at sixty-seven?

Tehmina, Rustom said. Darling, forgive my saying so but you're going a little potty, my dear. A man as generous as a continent? Please, darling, I'm blushing at your verbosity.

Tehmina looked around the room. She had heard Rustom's voice as clear as if he was lying in bed beside her. But there was no one else there. I'm going mad, she thought to herself. No wonder the children have been worried about me.

But then she saw Rustom, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed in the corner of the room. When he saw that she had spotted him, he got to his feet in one swift motion, without the revealing grunt of middle age that accompanied every movement that Tehmina made. Even as it snowed outside, Tehmina noticed that Rustom was dressed as if they were going to a movie on a warm Bombay evening—dark pants and a pale blue half-sleeved shirt that revealed his strong, muscular forearms, brown and shiny as leather. Despite the faint light in the room, she saw the familiar thin scar that ran across Rustom's left arm and her fingers itched to caress it as she had a million times before. But then fear overtook Tehmina as her
dead husband crossed the small guest room and stood in front of her. “Rustom,” she whispered. “How? What? What are you doing here? Darling, you are—”

“Baap re, woman. You should see your face right now. You look like you've seen a ghost.” Rustom grinned at his own joke.

Despite herself, Tehmina smiled reluctantly at the teasing affection she heard in her husband's voice. This was so much like Rustom, to rise from the dead and walk into her room halfway across the world and then to mock her for her astonishment. This is what she had loved and this is what she missed about him—the casual ease with which he occupied space wherever he was, the benign assumption that the world would give him his due and respond to him with friendliness and generosity. And some of this had rubbed off on her so that while he was alive it had been easy to delude herself that life was indeed hers for the taking, that the world was a house ready to be moved into and occupied. How effortless, how untroubled living had been when Rustom had been alive. Like riding in a Mercedes-Benz, Tehmina now thought, with tinted windows that kept the outside squalor at bay and shock absorbers that smoothened and muted all of life's bumps. And now, without Rustom at the wheel, she suddenly felt as if she was traveling in the old Ambassador her father used to own, with its rattling doors and the kind of shocks that made you feel every pothole at the base of your spine. Her fall from grace had been as quick and astounding as Rustom's heart attack.

But then again, here he was, in her room in Rosemont Heights, pushing her gently as he got under the covers with her. For a moment, Tehmina was sickened at the thought of sharing her bed with a dead man. But then she felt the warm heat of Rustom's body as it brushed against hers, smelled that stomach-dropping, familiar combination of Old Spice and sweat, felt the hair on Rustom's legs tickle the smoothness of her own, and her whole body seemed to sink deeper into the bed, as she felt herself give up a burden, a grief, that she had
had no memory of carrying. How stiffly she had been holding herself since the day she last saw her husband at the Tower of Silence, Tehmina now realized. She saw now what sorrow had done to her body, how it had made her heart feel as if it were a nylon bag that carried in it a thousand sharp pebbles, how a permanent nausea had wormed itself into her stomach, how depression had weighed down her tongue, sat on her eyelids, had conferred a kind of prickliness on her skin.

But all that was gone now as she touched Rustom's collarbone and felt the strap of his white sadra under her fingertips. How many of these muslin-cloth sadras she had stitched for him over the years. When they had first married she had insisted on ironing the thin undershirt for him until he at last put his foot down and told her that he had married her for love and companionship, and if he'd wanted someone to wash and iron his clothes, he would have married his dhobi instead. That, too, was part of Rustom's splendor—despite being always well dressed, he was the least vain of men. And his sense of fairness, his moral outrage at the inferior status of women, made him an object of good-natured ribbing from his male friends and Tehmina an object of whispered envy from their wives. How many times had one of those women pulled Tehmina aside at a party and expressed wonder at the sight of Rustom helping her in the kitchen. “What's the secret, Tehmina, yaar?” they would whisper to her. “How did you train him so well?”

“I had nothing to do with it,” she would respond, trying to keep the pride drained out of her voice. “He came to me this way. My Rustom is the fairest person I know. He believes in equal rights for women.”

But now, her fingering of the strap of his undergarment conjured up another, unwelcome memory. Of her well-groomed husband lying on a slab on the floor of the Tower of Silence, stripped of his usual clothes and dressed instead in a simple white sadra and
pajamas. Even in death Rustom looked powerful, the muscles of his dark legs pushing against the thin cotton of the pajamas. But when the woeful-looking professional pallbearers came to lift Rustom's body to take it to its final journey to where the vultures were circling over the well, Tehmina had to admit that even Rustom could not beat death, that death had managed to turn the tanned, brown face to a kind of chalky gray, that it had opened and twisted Rustom's mouth into a grotesque O, that death's dark bolt of lightning was greater than the electric energy that had buzzed through Rustom's body. How pathetic, how small Rustom suddenly looked, how dirty and disheveled he seemed as the pallbearers lifted him up against her sobbing protests. For months later she had tried to blind herself to this final insult, had tried to forget how rigid with anger she had been when she realized that all the stony-faced pallbearers saw was a corpse, a lifeless body not much different—except perhaps a bit taller and heavier—than all the others they had carried. That they were completely immune to the uniqueness of Rustom—how his laugh seemed to encompass an entire octave, how he jiggled his leg or tapped his fingers impatiently if he ever had to wait in line, how he had a joke or an Omar Khayyám quote for every occasion, how he did a wonderful Charlie Chaplin imitation. But like death itself, like the vultures who hovered over the dreaded well, the pallbearers were indifferent to all this. And it was this indifference, the realization of this indifference, the acknowledgment that the world would continue to spin without Rustom in it, that had made Tehmina rigid with anger and pain. Until the rigidity had become a shell around her body, until it had become as natural as skin.

“Tehmina,” Rustom was now whispering to her. “Tehmi, open your eyes. Listen to me. I have a message for you.”

She opened her eyes and saw the heart-twistingly familiar brown eyes staring intently into hers. “Tehmina. Darling,” Rustom said. “What I want to say to you is, be brave. Courage, janu. That's who
I'd fallen in love with in the first place, my brave, outspoken wife. Who is this mouselike woman in her place? This woman I don't recognize. So please, janu. Be happy. Life goes on, you know?”

“Can you stay?” she whispered. “Then I will be happy.” But she saw the pained, distant look that came over his face and immediately regretted her words. “Will you at least come visit again?” she tried. “Come see me again?”

This time Rustom smiled, a smile so kind and loving and timeless, that Tehmina felt that all of history, all of the immensity of the universe, was in that smile. “Tehmina,” he said. “Don't be ridiculous. What do you mean, come and visit you? How can I do that, when I'm always at your side?”

So this is what happiness feels like, Tehmina thought. She had forgotten the feeling but recognized it immediately, like the face of a schoolmate that one has not seen in thirty years. “Will you stay with me tonight?” she asked even as she snuggled her chin into the V of his chest.

“I told you. I'm here. Now go to sleep,” he said as he stroked her hair.

And so, Tehmina slept.

S
he was awakened from a deep slumber by the ringing of the phone in Susan and Sorab's room next to hers. Her eyes flew open into the pitch dark and her heart began to race involuntarily—a phone call in the middle of the night usually spelled bad news, didn't it? Immediately, she reached for Rustom's warm body, but he was gone, scared away by the ringing of the phone, probably. The mattress felt cold, as if Rustom had left soon after she'd fallen asleep. Apprehension won over disappointment as she rolled over and turned on the light on her alarm clock. Four
A.M
. Who could be calling at four
A.M
.? Her thoughts flew immediately to Susan's eighty-year-old grandmother, a frail but feisty old woman with a voice that sounded like a pickup truck going down a gravel road. Old Ruthanne had always been short-statured, but her osteoporosis had almost bent her double. But what she lacked in size, she made up in personality. As bent over as she was, those twinkling eyes never missed a thing and that gravelly voice never wavered even when Ruthanne told jokes so bawdy they made the listener gasp at the in
congruity of the speaker being a sweet old lady with a soft Oklahoma accent. That voice made you ignore her misshapen body and see the spirit contained within it. Truth be told, she was Tehmina's favorite member of Susan's family and Tehmina's heart was already beginning to ache at the thought of the old lady being dead. Now she wouldn't get a chance to give Ruthanne the blue sweater that she had knitted for her for Christmas. Involuntarily, she began to say an Ashem Vahu to pray for Ruthanne's soul.

Tehmina could hear Susan's muffled voice through the thin walls that separated her bedroom from theirs. She braced herself for the tears that would follow once Susan hung up. Susan adored Ruthanne, Tehmina knew. Often, she would ruefully admit that her grandmother was the only “colorful” member of her family, and then Tehmina never knew whether it was polite to agree or disagree. Certainly, Susan's father, Fred, a tall, ruddy-cheeked man, was nothing like his flamboyant mother, although he had been nothing but gracious to her and Rustom. In fact, it was Fred who had insisted that Rustom learn to play golf during their first visit to the States. A divorcé who lived in Texas, Fred was also deeply appreciative of Tehmina's cooking—though when he had first met them, he had boasted about being a staunch meat-and-potatoes man. “Wow, this sure beats Burger King, Tammy,” Fred had said to her the first time he ate one of her meals, which Tehmina didn't think was much of a compliment. But Susan had beamed and marveled at the fact that her conservative, rigid father had even agreed to try something different from the burgers and pot roasts that he lived on.

Now Tehmina remembered the first time she had met Ruthanne. It was at Sorab and Susan's wedding reception. Ruthanne noticed the proud look with which Tehmina caressed her son every time he walked past her. “That boy of yours reminds me of my late husband,” the old woman had said, sidling up to Tehmina. “A good,
decent, solid man, your son. Good thing that granddaughter of mine had the sense to marry him.”

Tehmina turned to Ruthanne with grateful eyes. One of her misgivings about Sorab having married a white American was whether he would be accepted into his bride's family. Although Tehmina was too young to remember too much about when the British ruled India, she had heard enough to believe that all white people considered themselves superior to nonwhites. And the thought of anybody considering her smart, handsome son less than perfect was enough to make her bristle. “Thank you,” she said to Ruthanne. “My Sorab is…I can assure you he will make a good husband to your Susan.”

Ruthanne laughed a strangely irreverent laugh. “Aw, honey, I ain't worried about that,” she said. “A boy that's built the way he is…oh, he's already making my Susan very, very happy. I can tell from that Cheshire-cat smile she has on her face all the time now. Naw, that son of yours knows how to keep a girl satisfied, that's fo' sure.”

Tehmina blushed, scarcely believing her ears. Luckily, Sorab came to her rescue. Grabbing Ruthanne's bent body from behind, he put his arms around the older woman. “Now, Grandma.” He grinned. “You better mind your manners around my mom, here. None of your naughty jokes, you hear? And if I catch you flirting with my dad once again, why, we'll just have to cut off your beer.”

Tehmina marveled at how effortlessly Sorab picked up the cadences of Ruthanne's speech, of how easily he teased his in-law. Sorab doesn't just belong to us anymore, she realized with a pang. He now belongs to this other family, also.

“It ain't the father I'm interested in,” Ruthanne was saying. “It's the son.”

And her laughter was so loud and wicked that even a slightly scandalized Tehmina felt compelled to join in.

By the time there was a tap on her bedroom door, Tehmina had already finished saying twelve Ashem Vahus for Ruthanne's recently departed soul. “Yes, dear?” she called back. “Come in. I'm awake.”

A grim-faced Susan stood at the door, but what Tehmina noticed immediately and with some surprise was that Susan was not crying. “I'm so sorry, beta,” she began, but Susan cut her off with a quizzical look.

“It's for you, Mom,” she said. “It's Persis auntie, calling from Bombay. Guess she forgot what time it was over here.” Tehmina could tell that Susan was fighting to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

“Persis?” she said, getting out of bed. “Calling at this time? Has she lost her mind?” And then, stricken by another thought, “Is she all right?”

“She's fine,” Susan said tightly. “But it seems as though there's a situation with your apartment. But—well, she's waiting to tell you. You can take the call in our bedroom. Save you a trip downstairs.” Now Tehmina could hear the sleepiness in Susan's voice.

She hurried behind Susan murmuring her apologies. That Persis was an idiot. Why had she ever entrusted her apartment key to her? And what was so urgent that it couldn't wait till morning? Entering the bedroom, she noticed immediately that the call had woken up Sorab also. To block out the overhead light, he had covered his head with a pillow, but still he was tossing and turning and muttering about inconsiderate callers. She made up her mind to get off the phone as quickly as she could.

“Persis?” she said, trying to keep her voice low. “Su che? It's four in the morning here, bhai.”

“I'm so sorry, so sorry,” the voice at the other end sobbed. “I…what to do, Tehmina, I was so shocked that I just didn't even think of the time difference and all that.”

Now Tehmina felt a slight panic. “What is it?” she repeated. “Is…everybody all right?”

“Everybody is fine, fine,” Persis said. “Except that shameless nephew of mine. I swear, when he wakes up, I'm going to skin him alive. Badmaash, betraying my trust like this.”

Persis had called her in America at four in the morning to complain about her nephew? Was her neighbor mad? Was this early dementia, something that affected so many Parsi men and women?

“Persis,” Tehmina said cautiously.

“No, no, Tehmi, don't be angry with me, please. Let me explain. See, my nephew Sharukh was visiting us from Pune. But what to do, Tehmi, my sister and her children were visiting the same week. And, Sharukh has had such troubles with the bottle, Tehmi, remember? Anyway, he promised me he is totally clean, swears he's not had one drink since the last three months. And my small flat is so crowded with all the company. So, like a bevakoof, I tell him he can stay at your apartment. I know it was wrong, I should've asked your permission, Tehmi. But I'm thinking, it's just for two nights, and after all, your apartment was empty and only two floors below us. That way, the whole family can be together, you know?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Tehmina could see Sorab rolling in bed, trying to find a comfortable position. He was muttering something about a hangover and a bad headache. “Persis,” she whispered into the phone. “If you're calling about this, I don't have a problem with—”

Persis sounded even more distraught. “No, no, you don't understand. That ungrateful nephew of mine, he—oh my God, Tehmi, I am so ashamed—he stole your TV and your stereo. Must've done it in the middle of the night. Loaded it up in his car and sold it. Turns out he's still hitting the bottle. I went down this afternoon to let the servant in as usual, and you can imagine my shock. Immediately I
noticed that something was not right. And like a roadside ruffian, there's Sharukh, passed out on the bed. I tell you, Tehmi, I shook him so hard, he would've woken up even if he was as dead as the Dead Sea. Confessed everything to me before falling asleep again. But he scared poor Hansu so that she refused to stay alone in the house with him there. So I had to let her go without cleaning your apartment today. Though of course, with these servants you never know—probably just did some acting-facting, to get out of having to work. As if my Sharukh could've done anything to her. Snoring loud as a freight train, he was.”

Tehmina felt her head spinning. If only Persis would stop talking for a moment. This would teach her to entrust her apartment to someone as flighty as Persis. “So, what else is missing?” she asked, trying to focus Persis's attention on the theft.

Persis wailed so loudly Tehmina was afraid Sorab would hear it. “Oh, God, Tehmi, that's the whole problem. I don't know. I haven't even looked through the whole apartment yet. And that besharam nephew of mine is still sleeping, so I can't even ask him. Forgive me, Tehmi. I am so ashamed. My sister said we should call the police, but Sharukh is my dead brother's only child. How to call the police on him, Tehmi?”

Despite her irritation, Tehmina felt her heart soften. “Of course you can't call the police on your own flesh and blood,” she said, and heard Persis's sigh of relief. “The stereo and TV were both old anyway. And there's nothing to forgive. I'm grateful to you for keeping an eye on the apartment for me and making sure it gets dusted and cleaned every day.” She thought for a moment. “Listen, Persis. You still have Sorab's e-mail address, yes? Good. Tell you what. After you find out whatall Sharukh sto—that is, whatall is missing—just send me an e-mail. That way, you don't waste your money on another phone call. And now get some rest. Put all this out
of your mind. Just—please—just make sure you take the key back from Sharukh.”

As she hung up she wondered: What if the boy had made a spare key to her apartment? Should she write to Persis and have her change the lock to the flat? Lost in her thoughts, she turned absentmindedly toward her son. “Sorab,” she said, “looks like Persis's nephew has stolen a few items from my flat. Do you think I need to change my front-door lock?”

Sorab let out a cry. Tossing off the pillow covering his head with a violent shake, pulling off the bedcovers, he sat up, a mad look on his sleepy face. “I don't give a rat's ass whether you change the locks or not,” he hissed, his voice shaking with outrage and anger. “I'm tired of having to blow my nose each time someone sneezes in Bombay.”

“I'm so sorry, beta,” a startled Tehmina said, but Sorab went on as if he'd not heard her. “It's friggin' four in the morning. I have to be up in less than two hours. Every day I go to work like a fucking zombie. Is that woman crazy, to call in the middle of the night? I tell you, Mamma, I don't know how much more of this I can—”

“Sorab.” It was Susan, and Tehmina heard the sharpness in her voice. “Shut up. Don't say anything you're going to regret in the morning.”

The room fell silent. Sorab blinked rapidly several times and looked down at his hands, as if he was trying to recognize the man he had become. Susan was staring at her husband as if seeing him for the first time. And Tehmina, Tehmina stared at the floor, waiting for it to open up and swallow her whole. Sorab had never before spoken to her in this way. More than his words, it was his tone, the bitterness in his voice, that made her realize how much frustration her son had been bottling up. The tears welling in her eyes were not of self-pity but of remorse and self-recrimination and sympathy. Her heart bled for her son. For she had heard it as clearly as if he'd said it—Sorab
was tired of living this half-life, living in the state of suspension that her indecisiveness was forcing upon them all. To him, the theft in Bombay was simply a symptom, a reminder of the fact that happenings in a city, in an apartment eight thousand miles away, could still cast a shadow over their lives here. And truth be told, hadn't her first instinct upon hearing Persis's news been to want to rush back to her apartment, to wash the sheets upon which the drunken Sharukh had lain, to take an inventory of her clothes, to make sure that the boy was too stupid to know the value of the Hussein that hung in the living room? Perhaps Sorab had read her treacherous thoughts—had known that at the slightest mention of the Bombay apartment, his mother had been willing to abandon him and his family and rush back to safeguard the apartment that Sorab, to Tehmina's eternal incomprehension, had left behind so utterly.

Sorab made a choking sound that awoke Tehmina from her reverie. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I'm so—”

“No.” Susan's voice rang out. “You have nothing to apologize for, Mom. It's this one here”—and she nudged Sorab hard on his back—“who needs to apologize.”

Tehmina appreciated what Susan was trying to do, but she wished she wouldn't embarrass Sorab further. She knew her son well enough to know that he was already eaten up by remorse. And sure enough, Sorab looked at her with glistening eyes. “I don't even know what I'm saying, Mamma,” he mumbled, looking exactly the way he had when he was seven. “I'm just so tired that the lack of sleep is making me nuts. But I'm truly sorry that I—”

“Please.” Tehmina took a few steps toward Sorab and stroked his hair. “Please, my darling. I know how hard you work. You need your sleep. Nothing to apologize for. I should've known better than to trust that crazy Persis with the apartment.”