Such A Long Journey (16 page)

Chapter Nine

i

Two things swirled and spun through Gustad’s mind the following week while he said his prayers at dawn, swirled like the whirling wind-tossed leaves fallen in the compound: Roshan’s enervating diarrhoea, and the forbidding package in the dingy
choolavati.
There was a third thing, but that, he pretended, did not exist.

The pills were powerless this time, both Entero-Vioform and the more potent Sulpha-Guanidine. Why? My poor child, missing school day after day. And Jimmy, of all people, asking me to do something criminal. The wind was strong, Gustad nudged and settled his black prayer cap. After last night’s brief shower, a light-hearted reminder of the approaching monsoon, the vinca’s leaves were green and fresh. He never ceased to wonder at the vinca’s endurance, surviving in the small dusty patch, year after year, despite the fenders of cars that ripped and clawed at its stems, or children who tore wantonly at its blooms.

He crouched to pick up an empty Char Minar packet entangled in the branches and heard a car approach. Without looking over his shoulder he knew it was the Landmaster. Inspector Bamji’s police duties called him out at all hours. Sometimes, if Gustad was up reading late at night and heard the car, he would smile and picture Soli Bamji rushing with his magnifying glass to find clues. People had named him Sherlock Bamji many years ago. Once, there had been a particularly gruesome murder, and Bamji, in the course of neighbourly chitchat, was asked how the police had solved the case. Without stopping to think, he replied, ‘Elementary, my dear fellow.’

The inevitable followed. Everyone knew Soli was not a private investigator, nor did he smoke a pipe. And whereas the archetype was always elegantly correct in speech and diction, Bamji was fond of verbal colour and ribaldry. But he was tall and thin, with a gaunt face and high forehead, and this, together with those ill-chosen words, was sufficient glue to make the name stick permanently.

Bamji beeped and stopped. ‘Hullo, bossie! Hope you said a prayer for me.’

‘Of course,’ said Gustad. ‘Crime is calling you very early today?’

‘Oh, nothing much. But seriously, bossie, it’s going to be a big problem if the
maader chod
municipality cuts our compound in half. How will my car get in?’ Good, thought Gustad, serve him right; Bamji was one of the worst offenders when it came to inflicting wounds on the vinca. ‘You think the landlord’s petition will be strong enough to bugger the municipal arses?’

‘Who knows? My feeling is, when government wants something, it gets it, one way or another.’

Inspector Bamji adjusted the rearview mirror. ‘If the bastards break down this wall, it will completely fuck up our privacy. You better pray every morning, bossie, for the good health of our wall.’

That reminded Gustad. ‘Have you noticed how much it stinks, and all the mosquitoes?’

‘Naturally, with the amount of piss that flows there. Every sisterfucker with a full bladder stops by the wall and pulls out his
lorri.
’

‘Can’t you use your authority to stop it?’

Inspector Bamji laughed. ‘If the police tried to arrest every illegal pisser, we would have to double-triple our force.’ He put the Landmaster in gear, waved goodbye, and hit the brakes again. ‘Almost forgot. When that Tehmul-Lungraa came with the petition, he was talking some nonsense. About seeing a mountain of money in your flat.’

Gustad feigned laughter. ‘How I wish.’

‘I said to him, Scrambled Egg, don’t tell lies. Then I gave him one solid
chamaat
across his face.’

‘Poor fellow.’

‘If his nonsense reaches the wrong ears, it would simply cause trouble. Temptation for bad elements. You don’t want thieves to come looking for imaginary money.’ He drove off.

That Tehmul. How to seal his drooling, babbling lips? Thankfully, Soli did not believe him, and others would also assume that Tehmul was gibbering as usual. Tonight I will warn him again. When he is loitering in the compound.

But when Gustad returned from work in the evening, the compound was deserted. He came out thrice before dinner, and was thwarted each time by Tehmul’s absence. He tried once more, after changing into his pyjamas. It was almost ten o’clock and still windy. Bits of newspaper and ice-cream wrappers had been blown into the bushes. Should I go up to his flat? But the older brother might be there.

A window opened noisily, and Gustad looked up. It was Cavasji, his white hair shining. He inspected the sky, cocking his head from side to side like an exotically plumaged bird. ‘Monsoon is coming, so You be careful! Year after year, Your floods are washing away poor people’s huts! Enough now! Where is Your fairness? Have You got any brains or not? Flood the Tatas this year! Flood the Birlas, flood the Mafatlals!’

When Cavasji was a young man once, he used to be called Cavas Calingar because he was round as a watermelon. But as he grew older he lost weight drastically, which made his height seem to increase, week by week, month by month. Tall he grew, and thin as an ancient prophet, as severe as a soothsayer, while his hair turned into a gleaming white halo. And the nickname was shed for ever, forgotten like a dry, shrivelled scab.

His daughter-in-law ran down the stairs to Gustad. ‘Sorry to disturb you at night,’ said Mrs. Pastakia, ‘but the
subjo
in Motta-Pappa’s garland is very dry. Please can I get some more?’

Gustad fetched his pruning shears. He disliked Mrs. Pastakia intensely, but tolerated her for the sake of Mr. Pastakia and his old father. She was as inquisitive, short-tempered and manipulative as her husband was high-minded, upright and patient. One wondered how the two had managed to stay together so long and raise five children. Of course, Mrs. Pastakia blamed all her shortcomings, including her occasional ill-treatment of old Cavasji, on her migraine. This invisible assailant struck at convenient intervals, sending her to bed for the day, where she suffered in silent agony and caught up on her back issues of
Eve’s Weekly, Femina,
or
Filmfare,
and Mr. Pastakia did the housework after coming home from office. He must have the soul of a saint, thought Gustad, to have endured her these many years.

‘Congratulations,’ said Mrs. Pastakia.

‘What?’

‘I heard you won a big lottery. How nice!’

Gustad handed her the
subjo,
told her she was sadly mistaken, and bade her goodnight. He broke off some flower spikes and took them inside. Dilnavaz silently watched him separate the seeds to soak in water. She knew he had been prejudiced against the
subjo
because it was Miss Kutpitia who had identified and broadcast the plant’s hidden powers. Now he gave the drink to Roshan, and she was grateful.

The next day was even windier. When Gustad returned from work, the compound’s solitary tree was swaying wildly. ‘Roshan is better, touch wood,’ said Dilnavaz. ‘
Subjo
was a good idea.’

He nodded, pleased. And Ghulam Mohammed will be back this week, I can send him a message then. Ask him when and where I can return the parcel.

He prepared the note and sealed the envelope. Tomorrow he would deliver it to Peerbhoy Paanwalla.

ii

Seven days later he went again to the House of Cages to see if there was a reply. Peerbhoy, sitting cross-legged on a wooden box before his large brass tray, said Ghulambhai had collected his messages, and that was all.

Three weeks passed. No word came from Ghulam Mohammed, but the monsoon arrived in full force on a Friday night, preceded by a severe lightning storm. Gustad stepped outside to examine the sky. He looked to the west, at the clouds over the Arabian Sea, and sniffed the air: yes, it was getting closer. He sat awhile after the others had gone to bed, reading the newspaper. The refugees were still coming. The official count put the figure at four and a half million, but the reporter who had returned from the refugee camps said it was closer to seven. The prediction was for ten million by next month. Four and a half or seven or ten, thought Gustad, what difference. Too many to feed, in a country that cannot feed its own. Maybe the guerrillas will soon win. If only I could have helped Jimmy.

He checked the cricket scores, then abandoned the paper. He went to his desk and picked up the Plato. The new books had sat on one corner of the desk since they were brought home four Fridays ago. And my plans for the bookcase—turned to dust. Like everything else.

Around midnight the rain commenced. He heard the first drops chime against the panes. By the time he got to the window the rain became a downpour. The wind was sweeping it inside. He took a deep breath to savour the fresh moist earth fragrance, feeling great satisfaction, as though he had had a hand in the arrival of the monsoon. It will be good for my vinca bush. And I remembered to push the rose to the edge of the steps—it will get the rain slanting into the entrance.

He shut the window and sat again to read but could not concentrate. The advent of the monsoon was exciting—and it was always like this with the first big storm, even in his earliest memories, back to a time when the torrential rain coincided with the new school year, new classroom, new books, new friends. Sloshing in new raincoat and gumboots through flooded streets of floating bottle caps, empty cigarette packets, ice-cream sticks, torn shoes and slippers. Watching the normally vicious traffic paralysed and drowned, which had a marvellous sense of poetic justice about it. And the ever-present hope that it would rain so hard, school would be cancelled. Somehow, that childhood excitement blossoming with the first rain had never faded.

The thunder was sporadic now, but the crashing torrents made up for the noise. He could distinguish, within the large sound of water, the individual ones: on the asphalt strip in the centre of the compound, a flat, slapping noise; on the galvanized awnings, loud and reverberating, like a huge tin drum; against the windows, the soft tap-tap-tap of a shy visitor; and the biggest sound of all from the five rainspouts on the roof, which delivered their accumulations like cataracts plunging mightily to the ground. It was an orchestra in which he could separate the violins and violas, oboes and clarinets, timpani and bass drum.

He felt a twinge in his left hip. Yes, a sure sign the monsoon had arrived. It came again, the pain. Sharp enough to bring back the agonizing weeks I spent in bed. Jimmy, God bless him, had been such a help.

Like a baby Jimmy carried me inside the hall, in his arms. What a busy place it was, where Madhiwalla Bonesetter was holding his clinic—volunteers helping with patients, carrying them in on stretchers or pushing their wheelchairs, others preparing bandages. Two men were sorting various types of fragrant herbs and bark into little packages. The glue for their labels was homemade—a mucilage of flour and some foul ingredients, but the herbs and bark covered up the smell.

And at the centre of it all stood the great Bonesetter himself, surrounded by his loyal helpers. In appearance he was so ordinary, no one could have guessed what extraordinary powers he possessed. He wore a long white
duglo
and a prayer cap, resembling one of those men in charge of serving dinner at a Parsi wedding: the chief of the
buberchees,
who supervised everything from making the dinner announcements to dispatching busboys with washbowls, soap and hot water ewers down the rows of sated guests after the feasting ended.

But Madhiwalla was revered like a saint for his miraculous cures. He had saved shattered limbs, broken backs, cracked skulls—cases which even specialists and foreign-trained doctors (with degrees from famous universities in England and America) who worked in well-equipped hospitals had looked into, seen nothing worth saving, and shaken their heads despairingly. And Madhiwalla Bonesetter redeemed them all, all those hopeless cases, with no more than his two bare hands, his collection of herbs and bark, and, in the case of slipped discs, his right foot, with which he delivered a carefully controlled kick to the lumbar region that promptly restored the wayward disc.

No one knew exactly how he did what he did—magical was his footwork, magical the passes with his hands: feeling here, kneading there, bending, twisting, turning, and setting. Quickly, quietly, painlessly. Some said he first mesmerized the patient into not feeling pain. But those who had watched him closely knew this could not be, because he never bothered to look into the patient’s eyes, which were often closed to begin with. The Bonesetter’s eyes followed his hands: they could see deeply, piercingly, through skin, through fat, through muscle, bearing down to the very bone, down to where the damage was. It was no wonder that X-ray laboratories rued the day of his arrival.

Setting Gustad’s fractured hip would be child’s play for Madhiwalla, the onlookers had said. (Always, there were onlookers when the Bonesetter was in attendance: well-wishers, admirers, patients’ relatives, the merely curious, all were welcome to watch—his skills and accomplishments were open to public scrutiny.) But it was a hideous and pitiful sight to behold, certainly not for the faint of heart. Broken bodies were everywhere—laid out on stretchers, bundled on the floor, collapsed in chairs, huddled in corners, their moans and shrieks filling the air. Splintered fibulae and tibiae that had ruptured the skin; a cracked humerus grotesquely twisting an elbow; the grisly consequences of a shattered femur—all these awaited their turn with the Bonesetter, awaited deliverance.

And Gustad, seeing and hearing such horrors as he had never witnessed before, soon forgot about the pain coursing through his own body. He wondered what could have inflicted such injuries on these people. In his grandfather’s furniture workshop he had seen the occasional severed finger or pulped thumb, but nothing like this. It seemed to him that somewhere, in a factory, someone was churning out these extravagant mutilations with great deliberation.

But along with the agony suffusing their screams and groans, he also detected a strain of hope, hope such as had never been expressed in the words of the most eloquent. Hope pure and primal, that sprang unattended and uncluttered from the very blood of the patients, telling Gustad that redemption was now at hand.

Later, he tried to remember what Madhiwalla had done to set the fractured hip. But all he could recall was his foot being grasped and the leg swung in a peculiar way. From that moment, the pain decreased. The setting was complete, and the bone would be healed by repeated application of a paste made from the bark of a special tree. The Bonesetter wrote down a number for Jimmy. The two who were labelling packets with smelly glue matched the coded number and gave him what was prescribed. Madhiwalla never charged a paisa for his treatment, nor did he reveal the names of the trees and herbs, in order to keep the unscrupulous from commercially exploiting his knowledge at the expense of the ailing poor. The rich were welcome to make donations. His secrecy was applauded by all, but it was also a source of concern: Madhiwalla was an old man, what would happen when he was no more, if his knowledge died with him? It was believed, however, that he was secretly training a successor who would emerge and heal when the need became evident.

Dilnavaz made the paste according to the Bonesetter’s prescription: by soaking the bark in water and grating it against the rough stone slab they used for grinding
masala.
It was hard work, making enough paste to coat the entire hip. And no sooner had she finished than it seemed to be time for the next application. Gustad felt guilty to see her sweat and pant over the stone, disregarding her back and shoulders that were screaming for rest, and with little Roshan also to take care of, just three months old. But for twelve weeks she gritted her teeth and carried on, refusing the help of outsiders, determined that her efforts alone would get her husband back on his feet.

A car door slammed in the rain. The Landmaster. What bad luck for Bamji, to have night duty on a night like this. But the car seemed to be idling outside. There was a burst of thunder, and then a splash. Was he having trouble with the engine? Gustad went to the window.

The car drove off before he could undo the clasp. The clock showed almost one. He opened the glass and stopped the pendulum with a finger, groping for the key. The shining stainless steel felt cool in his palm. He wound the clock and went to bed.

He slept fitfully, dreaming that he was walking to the bank from the Flora Fountain bus stop. Something struck him from behind. He turned and saw a hundred-rupee bundle at his feet. As he bent to pick it up, several more hit him, painfully hard. He asked his tormentors why. They refused to answer and continued their barrage. His spectacles were knocked off. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll complain to the police! I don’t want your rubbish!’ He flung back the money, but it returned as fast as he threw it. A police van drove up and Inspector Bamji stepped out. Gustad was overwhelmed by his good fortune. Bamji, however, without showing any sign of recognition, went to the crowd of money-throwers. ‘Soli, listen to me, let me tell you what happened!’ begged Gustad. Inspector Bamji, speaking in Marathi, to Gustad’s astonishment, told him to shut up: ‘
Umcha
section
nai.
’ ‘He’s a bank worker and he won’t take our money,’ the others complained, while Gustad watched, bewildered. ‘Where are we to go if the bank refuses it?’ ‘No!’ yelled Gustad, ‘I cannot take it, I have no place to put it! What will—’ Out of nowhere appeared Mr. Madon, his gold snuffbox in one hand and his Rolex chronometer in the other: ‘What is going on, Noble? Opening a branch operation on the pavement, hmm?’ He crunched Gustad’s fallen spectacles, brushed aside his explanations, and said it was past ten o’clock. ‘I give you thirty seconds to be at your desk.’ He held up the chronometer and said, ‘On your mark. Get set. Go.’ Gustad ran, elbowing his way through the crowds who were all headed in the other direction. How can that be, he wondered, it is not evening. As he reached the bank entrance, limping wildly, a sardonically smiling Mr. Madon materialized in the doorway and showed him the chronometer: ‘Thirty-four seconds. Sorry,’ and handed him a termination notice. ‘Please, Mr. Madon, please. Give me one more chance, please, it was not my fault, I…’

Dilnavaz shook him by the shoulder: ‘Gustad, you are dreaming. Gustad.’ He grunted once, turned over, and slept soundly the rest of the night.