Slumdog Millionaire: A Novel (8 page)

panting, their 'oohs' and 'aahs', and we snicker.

I adjust a stainless-steel cup against the wall adjoining Mr Shantaram's room and bury my ear in it. I can hear Shantaram speaking.

'This place is nothing less than a black hole. It is totally beneath my dignity to be staying here, but just for the sake of you two, I will endure this humiliation till I get a proper job. Listen, I don't want any of the street boys to enter the house. God knows what hell holes they have come from. There are two right next to us. Rascals of the highest order, I think. And Gudiya, if I catch you talking to any boy in the chawl, you will receive a hiding with my leather belt, understood?'

he thunders. I drop the cup in panic.

* * *

Over the next couple of weeks, I hardly see Shantaram and I never see his wife or daughter. She probably goes to college every day, but by the time I return home from the foundry, she is inside her house and the door is always firmly shut.

Salim doesn't even notice that we have new neighbours. He hardly gets any spare time from his work as a tiffin delivery boy. He wakes up at seven in the morning and gets dressed. He wears a loose white shirt, cotton pyjamas and puts a white Nehru cap on his head. The cap is the badge of identification of all
dabbawallahs
in Mumbai, and there are nearly five thousand of them. Over the next two hours he collects home-cooked meals in lunch boxes from approximately twenty-five flats. Then he takes them to the Ghatkopar local train station. Here the tiffins are sorted according to their destination, each with colour-coded dots, dashes and crosses on the lids, and then loaded on to special trains to be delivered promptly at lunch time to middle-class executives and blue-collar workers all over Mumbai. Salim himself receives tiffins by another train, which he delivers in the Ghatkopar area after deciphering the dots and dashes which constitute the address. He has to be very careful, because one mistake could cost him his job. He dare not hand over a container with beef to a Hindu, or one with pork to a Muslim or one with garlic and onions to a Jain vegetarian.

* * *

It is nine at night. Salim is flipping through the pages of a film magazine. I am kneeling on my bed with my left ear inside a stainless-steel cup held to the wall. I hear Shantaram speaking to his daughter. 'Here, Gudiya, see through the eyepiece. I have adjusted the telescope now. Can you see the bright-red object in the middle? That is Mars.'

I whisper to Salim, 'Quick, get a cup. You must hear this.'

Salim also glues his ear to the wall. Over the next thirty minutes, we listen to a running commentary on the state of the sky. We hear about stellar constellations and galaxies and comets. We hear about the Great Bear and the Little Bear. We hear of something called the Milky Way and the Pole Star. We learn about the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.

Listening to Shantaram, I am filled with a strange longing. I wish I too had a father who would teach me about stars and planets. The night sky, which till now was just a big black mass to me, suddenly becomes a place of meaning and wonder. As soon as Shantaram's tutorial ends, Salim and I crane our necks out of our first-floor window and try to find the celestial landmarks pointed out by him. Without the aid of a telescope we see only little white dots in the dark sky, but we squeal with delight when we recognize the seven stars of the Great Bear, and even the

knowledge that the dark patches on the moon are not blemishes but craters and seas fills us with a sense of satisfaction, as though we have unlocked the mysteries of the universe.

That night I don't dream about a woman in a fluttering white sari. I dream about rings around Saturn and moons around Jupiter.

* * *

A week later, I am alerted by a totally new sound coming from Shantaram's room. 'Meow!' I

scramble to the wall with my stainless-steel listening device in hand.

I hear Gudiya speaking. 'Papa, look, I've got a cat. Isn't he lovely? My friend Rohini gave him to me from her cat's new litter. Can I keep him?'

'I am not in favour of any pets,' Mrs Shantaram grumbles. 'There's hardly space in this room for humans – where will we keep an animal?'

'Please, Mummy, he is such a tiny thing. Papa, please agree,' she pleads.

'OK, Gudiya,' says Shantaram. 'You can keep him. But what will you call him?'

'Oh, thank you, Papa. I was thinking of calling him Tommy.'

'No, that is such a commonplace name. This cat is going to live in an astronomer's family, so it should be named after one of the planets.'

'Which one? Should we call him Jupiter?'

'No. He is the smallest in the family, so he can only be called Pluto.'

'Great, I love the name, Papa. Here, Pluto! Pluto, come and have some milk.'

'Meow!' says Pluto.

* * *

These little snippets force me to reconsider my opinion of Shantaram. Perhaps he is not so bad after all. But, once again, I learn that appearances can be deceptive and the dividing line between good and bad is very thin indeed.

I see Shantaram come home one evening, completely drunk. His breath stinks of whisky. He

walks with unsteady steps and needs help to climb up the flight of stairs. This happens the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon it is common knowledge in the chawl that Mr Shantaram is a drunkard.

Drunkards in Hindi films are invariably funny characters. Think of Keshto Mukherjee with a bottle and you cannot help bursting out laughing. But drunkards in real life are not funny, they are frightening. Whenever Shantaram comes home in a stupor, we don't need listening devices.

He hurls abuses at the top of his voice and Salim and I quiver with fear in our room as if we are the ones being shouted at. His swearing becomes such a ritual that we actually wait for the sound of his snoring before falling asleep ourselves. We come to dread the interval between

Shantaram's return from work and his crashing out in bed. This interval is, for us, the zone of fear.

We think this is a passing phase and that Shantaram will eventually recover. But it actually gets worse. Shantaram begins drinking even more and then he starts throwing things. He begins with plastic cups and books, which he throws at the wall in disgust. Then he starts breaking pots and pans. The ruckus he creates makes living next door very difficult. But we know complaining to Mr Ramakrishna is out of the question. The voices of a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year old habitual rent offender do not carry much weight. So we simply duck in bed whenever an object thuds on to our common wall and cringe in fear whenever we hear the sound of a plate crashing or china breaking.

Even this phase does not last long. Pretty soon, Shantaram starts throwing objects at people.

Mainly his family members. He reserves maximum ire for his wife. 'You bloody bitch! You are the one who has brought me down in life. I could be writing research papers on black holes, and instead I am showing blouse pieces and saris to wretched housewives. I hate you! Why don't you die?' he would holler, and throw a peppershaker, a glass, a plate. At his wife, his daughter, her cat.

One night he exceeds all limits and throws a piping-hot cup of tea at his wife. Gudiya tries to shield her mother and the burning liquid falls on her instead, scalding her face. She shrieks in agony. Shantaram is so drunk he doesn't even realize what he has done. I rush out to get a taxi for Mrs Shantaram to take her daughter to hospital. Two days later, she comes to me and asks whether I will go with her to visit Gudiya. 'She gets very lonely. Perhaps you can talk to her.'

So I accompany Mrs Shantaram on my first-ever visit to a hospital.

* * *

The first thing that assails your senses when you enter a hospital is the smell. I feel nauseated by the cloying, antiseptic smell of disinfectant, which permeates every corner of the dirty wards.

The second thing that strikes you is that you don't see any happy people. The patients lying on their green beds are moaning and groaning and even the nurses and doctors seem grim. But the worst thing is the indifference. No one is really bothered about you. I had imagined there would be doctors and nurses swarming all over Gudiya, but I find her lying all alone on a bed inside the Burns Unit with not a single nurse on duty. Her face is completely bandaged; only her black eyes can be seen.

'Gudiya, look who has come to see you,' Mrs Shantaram says, beaming at me.

I feel diffident approaching the girl. She is obviously much older than me. I am just a voyeur who has heard some snippets from her life; I hardly know her. I don't see her lips, but I can see from her eyes that she is smiling at me and that breaks the ice between us.

I sit with her for three hours, talking about this and that. Gudiya asks me, 'How did you get such an unusual name – Ram Mohammad Thomas?'

'It is a very long story. I will tell you when you are well.'

She tells me about herself. I learn that she is about to finish her Intermediate and start University.

Her ambition is to become a doctor. She asks me about myself. I don't tell her anything about Father Timothy or what happened to me later, but I recount my experiences in the chawl. I tell her about life as a foundry worker. She listens to me with rapt attention and makes me feel very important and wanted.

A doctor comes and tells Mrs Shantaram that her daughter is lucky. She has received only first-degree burns and will not have any permanent scars. She will be discharged within a week.

The three hours that I spend with Gudiya enable me to learn a lot about her father. Mrs

Shantaram tells me, 'My husband is a famous space scientist. Rather, he was a scientist. He used to work in the Aryabhatta Space Research Institute, where he investigated stars with the help of huge telescopes. We used to live in a big bungalow on the Institute's campus. Three years ago he discovered a new star. It was a very important scientific discovery but one of his fellow astronomers took credit for it. This shattered my husband completely. He started drinking. He started having fights with his colleagues and one day he got so angry with the director of the Institute he almost beat him to death. He was thrown out of the Institute immediately and I had to beg the director not to have him arrested by the police. After leaving the Institute, my husband got a job as a physics teacher in a good school, but he could not keep his drinking and his violent temper in check. He would thrash boys for minor lapses and was kicked out in just six months.

Since then he has been doing odd jobs, working as a canteen manager in an office, as an

accountant in a factory, and now as a sales assistant in a clothes showroom. And because we have exhausted all our savings, we are forced to live in a chawl.'

'Can't Mr Shantaram stop drinking?' I ask her.

'My husband swore to me he would not touch alcohol again and I had begun to hope that the worst was over. But he couldn't stick to his promise, and look what has happened.'

'Do me a favour, Ram Mohammad Thomas,' Gudiya says. 'Please look after Pluto till I return home.'

'Definitely,' I promise.

Suddenly she stretches out her arm and takes my hand in hers. 'You are the brother I never had.

Isn't he, Mummy?' she says. Mrs Shantaram nods her head.

I do not know what to say. This is a new relationship for me. In the past, I have imagined myself as someone's son, but never as someone's brother. So I just hold Gudiya's hand and sense an unspoken bond pass between us.

That night I dream of a woman in a white sari holding a baby in her arms. The wind howls

behind her, making her hair fly across her face, obscuring it. She places the baby in a laundry bin and leaves. Just then, another woman arrives. She is also tall and graceful, but her face is swathed in bandages. She plucks the baby from the bin and smothers him with kisses. 'My little brother,' she says. 'S-i-s-t-e-r,' the baby gurgles back. 'Meeeow!' A strangled cry from a cat suddenly pierces the night. I wake up and try to figure whether the cry I heard came from the dream or the adjacent room.

I discover Pluto's limp and mangled body the next morning, lying in the same dustbin in which Mr Barve disposes of his copy of the
Maharashtra Times.
The cat's neck has been broken and I can smell whisky on his furry body. Shantaram tells his wife that Pluto has run away. I know the truth, but it is pointless mentioning it. Pluto has indeed run away. To another, better world, I think.

'I like Gudiya very much,' I tell Salim. 'I have to ensure that Shantaram does not repeat what he did to her.'

'But what can you do? It is his family.' 'It is our business as well. After all, we are neighbours.'

'Don't you remember what you told me once? That it's not a good idea to poke your nose into other people's affairs, or make other people's troubles your own, Mohammad?'

I have no response to this.

* * *

Gudiya comes home, but I don't get to see her because Shantaram will not permit a boy to enter his house. Mrs Shantaram tells me that her husband has realized what he has done and will now reform, even though in her heart of hearts she knows that Shantaram is beyond redemption. But even she did not know the depths to which her husband could descend.

Barely a week after Gudiya returns from the hospital, he does something to her again. He tries to touch her. But not like a father. At first, I don't understand. All I hear is some references to Gudiya being his moon and then Mrs Shantaram crying, and Gudiya screaming, 'Papa, don't

touch me! Papa, please don't touch me!'

Something snaps in my brain when I hear Gudiya's plaintive cry. I want to rush into Shantaram's room and kill him with my bare hands. But even before I can gather my courage, I hear

Shantaram's loud snores. He has crashed out. Gudiya is still weeping. I don't need a glass to hear her sobbing.

Her crying affects me in a strange way. I don't know how a brother should react on listening to his sister's sorrow, because I have no experience of being a brother. But I know that somehow I have to comfort her. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to comfort someone when there is a wall, howsoever thin, between you. I notice then that right at the bottom of the wall, where the water pipes go into the other flat, there is a small circular opening, large enough to thrust an arm through. I jump down from the bed and, lying spreadeagled on the ground, push my hand