The Space Between Us (8 page)

Sere smiled thinly and sat beside him on the couch. After a few minutes, she felt the music enter her body and make it relax. She closed her eyes so that she was lost in a dark and orange world, where nothing intruded except the sacred sound of a single piano. “When I was young, I used to think the piano was my favorite instrument,” she said, modulating her voice so that it did not overpower the music. Her eyes were still shut, but she felt Freddy shift in place. “But now,” she continued, “now, I love the deep sound of the cello. Somehow, it sounds most like life—sad and sweet and lost. Lonely. I always think that if the heart could sing, it would sound like a cello. Do you think that’s too stupid?”

Freddy made a choked sound that caused her eyes to fly open. She turned her head slightly and realized with a start that the old man was crying. “Freddy pappa, what is wrong?” she cried. “Did I say something…”

He turned to face her, and she noticed for the first time how the skin under his trembling chin sagged, how his eyes were beginning to grow that thin film of age. With a shock, she noticed that he was folding his hands in a pleading gesture, and her eyes fell on the lines and age spots on his caramel-colored hands. “Forgive me,” Freddy was saying, the tears running freely down his cheeks. “Forgive me, my dear, for not saying something earlier.”

She looked at him in confusion. “No, Freddy pappa, it’s okay,” she said. “I just now only asked you about your favorite instrument—”

“I’m talking about her,” he said harshly, pointing his head toward Banu’s room. “When you first came here, when you were planning on marrying Feroz, I should’ve told you about her—
moods. How nasty-mean she can be at times. And about Feroz, too. But what to do, deekra? I liked you from the moment I met you. Remember the first time you came to this wretched house? How we spoke of classical music and you played with Polly and all? Right then, I wanted you as a daughter. I wanted so badly for someone new to come into this home. Someone more like me. And you, from such a good family. Your father himself a music fan, cultured and intelligent. Bas, I decided to keep my mouth shut. Somehow I was thinking that once you came here, she would get better. But it is not to be, I see that now. Gulab told me what transpired this morning. Forgive me, deekra, for this sin I have committed.”

Through the vortex of his words, Sera heard only one thing. “What about Feroz?” she said. “You said you should’ve warned me about Feroz.”

Freddy sighed. “Oh, nothing. I mean, my dear, he’s basically a good boy. But sometimes, he has a temper like his mother’s. Or perhaps he is like
my
mother, I don’t know. My mother was a terror, God bless her soul. Made Banu’s life miserable, you know. I used to secretly call her Mrs. Chilipowder, when I was a boy.”

“And…you said, Feroz is like her?”

Freddy stared at her intently, a pitying, sorrowful look in his eyes. “Feroz has a temper. With God’s grace, you will never get to see it. When he was a boy, I used to talk to him for hours and hours about controlling his anger. But what to say, beta? Blood is blood. If something is in your blood, it is very difficult to get rid of it, no? I thought he would learn his lesson when he lost Gulnaz. But he is like his mother—speaks first and thinks later.”

“Who’s Gulnaz?” Sera asked, wanting and not wanting to know.

Freddy’s eyes wandered the room before they came back to rest on Sera’s tired face. Suddenly, he reached out and ran his fingers through her hair. “Don’t look so sad, my dear,” he murmured. “I
feel like my talk is aging you ten-fifteen years.” He sighed heavily and began again. “Gulnaz was his girlfriend. They were engaged and all. Her parents were from Jamshedpur, nice, simple people. Till today, I don’t know exactly what all happened. But one Sunday, while we were eating lunch, Gulnaz showed up unexpectedly. Right in front of Banu and me, she took off her ring and threw it on the table. Threw it with such force, Sera, it bounced off the table and into Feroz’s dhansak. Said that she couldn’t take his temper-femper anymore and that she had heard enough stories about Banu to convince her she didn’t want to come into this family. Banu immediately asked her what all she had heard, but Feroz interrupted his mother and told Gulnaz to stop insulting his family and get out of the house. Bas, that was it. If he ever saw her again, I don’t know.”

The record had been over for several minutes, and Freddy rose to change it. As Sera sat in shocked silence on the couch, he picked out another record. “How about this?” he said. “The New York Philharmonic, conducted by our very own Zubin Mehta.”

She nodded absently, her head a junkyard of confusing, contradictory thoughts. Feroz with another woman. Someone he must’ve cared enough for to want to marry. Someone to whom he had given an engagement ring. So it was all a lie, his declarations about how no other woman had haunted him the way she, Sera, had; about how he had never known love until Sera had entered his life? What to make, then, of the relentless, eager way in which he had pursued her—was that merely the desperate, last-ditch effort of a middle-aged man who did not want to spend his life alone? Could any Parsi woman with reasonable good looks have caught his eye? Or had he picked her precisely because she was twenty-eight years old and was beginning to give off the scent of being desperate and unwanted? Had he sensed something about her, some vulnerability, some defect, some weakness, that he was able to exploit? Had she
blinded herself deliberately to his flaws, had she allowed herself to be flattered by his obvious desire for her?

As if he could read her confused mind, Freddy said, “One thing I know, Sera. My Feroz loves you. Those looks that he gives you at dinner, the way he straightens with pride when you walk in the room—only a father can see those things. Nothing bad about Gulnaz, but he never looked like that with her.”

She smiled her gratitude, but her eyes were cloudy with doubt. “Thank you, Freddy pappa. Feroz is a good—” She choked on her words. “Feroz is my life now,” she cried, her voice ragged with emotion and desperation.

Banu came home that evening at six-thirty, carrying ashes from the fire temple in her embroidered handkerchief. Freddy and Sera were still sitting on the sofa, listening to music as the evening shadows fell across the room. Turning the front door key, Banu let herself in and immediately switched on the light, destroying the dark, intimate mood that they had created for themselves. They sat blinking in the sudden light, and Sera saw a slight narrowing of Banu’s eyes as she took in the scene and sensed the obvious affection between Sera and her father-in-law. “My God, like a pair of gloomy owls you two look,” she said, walking briskly into the room. “Or should I say a pair of lovebirds?” Seeing Freddy’s outraged look, she added hastily, “In love with your Mozart-Fozart, of course.”

Standing in front of Freddy, she took a small pinch of the ash and smeared it on his forehead. “Dastur Homjee sends his salaams to you,” she said. “Says it’s been two-three months since he’s seen you in the agyari.” She pinched the ashes in her handkerchief once again, and Sera prepared herself for receiving the holy ashes. But Banu relaxed her grip and turned away from her daughter-in-law, leaving Sera sitting on the couch, feeling foolish and snubbed.

“Come on, get up, you two,” Banu said over her shoulder. “Turn off this sad funeral music. Feroz will be home soon.”

Sera waited to ask Feroz about Gulnaz until they were alone a few days later. They had had dinner at a new Chinese restaurant at Colaba, and after dinner, Sera wanted to go to the Gateway of India. “Want to go have tea at Sea Lounge in the Taj?” Feroz asked promptly.

“No, I was thinking it would be nice just to take an evening stroll near the water,” she said. “Get some fresh air.”

“Okay,” he said, giving her elbow a squeeze. “Whatever you say, my dear.”

After the tensions of the last few days, it felt wonderful to be alone with Feroz in a public place. Sera felt closer to him than she had all week as they strolled along Apollo Bunder in a companionable silence. So she was surprised and even dismayed to hear herself ask, “Why didn’t you tell me about Gulnaz?”

He tensed. “Who told you? Mamma?” he asked.

“Um, actually, it was your daddy.”

He exhaled harshly. “I should’ve known. Mr. Bigmouth himself.”

“Pappa didn’t mean anything bad,” she said. Anyway, this was something you should’ve told me. Why didn’t you?”

He stopped abruptly, so that a teenage couple walking in the opposite direction had to separate and go around both of them. The boy glared at Feroz as he passed by. “What rudeness, yaar,” he muttered. Feroz ignored him. When he turned toward Sera, his face was blank and expressionless. “I didn’t tell you, my dear,” he said, spitting each word out as if they were stuck between his teeth, “because frankly, it’s none of your business.”

She felt a pain in her stomach, as if his contempt had reached her like a punch. “I’m your wife,” she said weakly.

“Correct. You’re my wife. Now. Today. You weren’t my wife then. And what I did then was my business. Nothing to do with you, okay?”

She gazed out at the dark sea, as big and fathomless as the grief that rose in waves in her. She blinked back her tears, trying to reason with herself, asking herself if he was right, if somehow she had violated some unspoken rules of marital etiquette. Was it really not her business that Feroz had been in love with someone else before he had met her? Was it not her place to ask?

Then she remembered how he had yelled at her the night before when she had stepped into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth; how he always turned off the light when he changed into his pajamas. He was cordoning off his past just as he cordoned off his body to her, she realized.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said brusquely. “It’s getting late.”

The thought of entering that house again, of having Banu’s restless eyes following her every move, made her voice quiver with intensity. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Please, I need to walk more. I’m not ready to go yet.”

He sighed impatiently. “Okay, I’ve been at work all day already, but if the wife wants to walk, we will walk.”

Just then she saw a Muslim couple coming toward them. The man’s clean-shaven face was young and golden under the streetlights. Sera couldn’t see the woman’s face because she was wearing a black burqua, which covered her from head to toe so that only her eyes were visible from behind the net. Normally, the sight would’ve repulsed her. She would’ve thought uncharitable thoughts about the husband who allowed his wife to walk around in this prison of cloth, who ignored statistics that showed a higher prevalence of TB among women who kept their faces covered all day long. But now, she noticed that the veiled woman’s index finger protruded out of the black robe and that it was linked to her husband’s finger. Thus they walked, their fingers touching in a poignant connection that proved the fallacy of the veil and suggested something deeper and more eternal than human conventions.

The sight tore at Sera’s heart and filled her with a sudden, hot envy. “Feroz,” she said, wanting to explain everything to him—how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua. She turned to him, feeling feverish with desire. “Feroz,” she said again. “I…I really love you.”

Two things happened then. Feroz turned to her, his eyes warm and moist. “I love you, also, Sera,” he said, his voice deep with emotion. “I’m sorry for acting like such an idiot.” And even as she was grateful for his words, she was aware of a feeling of letdown, of having betrayed herself. She knew that she had taken the easy way out, that she had let the steam escape from the boiling pot of her emotions. What she had meant to say was not “I love you” at all. What she had wanted to say was “I love life,” a self-declaration as naked and real and authentic as an X-ray. And then, a door slammed shut somewhere in the inner recesses of Sera’s mind: If she had said what she really intended to say, she knew Feroz would not have understood. A lonely feeling swept over her like an icy wind, and she shivered.

“Are you cold?” he said immediately, his voice solicitous. “Come on, let’s go to the Taj and get you a hot cuppa tea.”

As he took her hand to cross the street, she hated herself for the duplicitous, betraying thoughts flapping around her mind like bats.
Why should you not say “I love you” to Feroz? She fought with herself. After all, it is true, no? Even if that’s not what you meant to say at exactly that moment, it’s true, right? But still, the cold feeling of self-betrayal lingered.

The waiter seated them at the table, and Sera gazed out of the picture windows at the shadowy waters of the Arabian Sea. “I think I’ll have beer instead of tea, janu,” she said.

“A Kingfisher and a sherry,” Feroz ordered. “And bring a bowl of cashews along.”

R
iding next to Viraf in his air-conditioned car, Bhima smiles. She treasures this Saturday morning ritual with him. She is grateful at not having to ride to the bazaar in the crowded, rickety BEST buses. She is getting too old to handle the inevitable rushing that occurs when one of the red buses appears at the stop. Just last week, Serabai had told her the story of one of her distant relatives, a bony woman of sixty-eight, who had broken her wrist when she was knocked aside by the frenzied crowd trying to board the bus. “I swear they target Parsis,” Sera had muttered. “Everybody knows our bones are as brittle as Britannia glucose biscuits.”

In the old days, at least the women were spared the elbowing and jostling that occurred each time a bus appeared like a mythical beast at the stop. But in today’s Bombay, it was everybody for himself, and the frail, the weak, the young, and the old entered the overflowing buses at their own peril. Bhima felt as if she barely recognized the city anymore—something snarling and mean and cruel had been unleashed in it. She could see the signs of this new meanness everywhere: slum children tied firecrackers to the tails of the stray dogs and then laughed and clapped with glee as the poor animals ran around in circles, going mad with fear. Affluent college students went berserk if a five-year-old beggar child smudged the windows of their gleaming BMWs and Hondas. Every day Serabai
would read the newspaper and tell Bhima about some latest horror—a union organizer being bludgeoned to death for daring to urge factory workers to agitate for a two-rupee wage raise; a politician’s son being found not guilty after running over three slum children on his way to a party; an elderly Parsi couple being murdered in their beds by a servant who had worked for them for forty years; young Hindu nationalists writing congratulatory notes in their own blood to celebrate India’s successful test of a nuclear weapon. It was as if the city was mad with greed and hunger, power and impotence, wealth and poverty.

Bhima herself could feel the meanness course like sludge through her own veins as she waited for a bus. When the red beast arrived in a cloud of smog, she could feel her heart pounding as she eyed her fellow passengers, trying to assess who looked weak and vulnerable, and who could be elbowed out of her way. As soon as the bus rolled in, the queue disintegrated into a mob. Others came running from all directions, trying to leap onto the platform of the bus before it even came to a stop. Once, an old man with one foot on the deck and the other still on the ground was dragged half a block by the moving bus, until the cries of the other passengers alerted the conductor to stop. Bhima noticed the man’s legs were shaking so hard that it was impossible for him to board. The conductor eyed the man impatiently from his imperial perch. “Coming or not?” he asked, but the poor old man merely stood there panting. The conductor clucked his tongue and rang the bell again. The bus rolled on, leaving the passenger in the middle of the road, discarded like a package with no address on it.

“Is the air-conditioning too strong?” Viraf asks, and although Bhima is slightly cold, she shakes her head no. Viraf baba gets hot easily, she knows.

Bhima looks out of the window at the streets flitting by. The city looks so much nicer out of the tinted glass of an air-conditioned
car, she thinks. Even the exhaust fumes of the nearby buses and lorries are powerless to burn her eyes and throat, and she feels as if she has defeated her old nemesis, the sun. Better to be slightly cold than to feel the sun attacking her eyes and skin.

Viraf has the stereo on, some English music Bhima does not understand or like. She wonders why he always plays English songs, never the Hindi film music that is so popular in her basti. She eyes the man sitting next to her in his white cricket clothes, and he feels as alien to her as the white-skinned ferangas she sees when she and Serabai go shopping at Colaba. Serabai had once explained to her why these people had yellow hair and skin the color of a hospital wall—about how something was missing from their bodies and how they had to come to warm places like Bombay to darken their skin. She felt sorry for them then and, seeing their long hair and shabby clothes, wanted to give them some money, but Sera laughed at that and said she needn’t pity them, they actually were very proud of their white skin. How can you be proud if something is missing from your body? Bhima wanted to ask, but before she could, Sera said that they didn’t need money from her and that they came from places far richer than she could imagine. Now Bhima was sure that Sera was lying to her because one look at their dirty hair, faded shirts, and torn blue pants, and any fool could see that these untidy, colorless people were very poor.

Viraf is looking at her curiously. “Did you hear anything I just said?” he asks.

She jumps guiltily. “Oh, Viraf baba. Forgive me. I was just—”

“That’s okay.” He laughs. “I was just inquiring about Maya.”

She flushes, reluctant to discuss Maya’s situation with a man, even if that man is Viraf. But before she can say anything, he sails to her rescue. “Listen, Bhima,” he says awkwardly. “This is not a pleasant business, I know. But it must be dealt with. Listen, I have a friend who is a doctor. After I get home from the match today, I
was going to call him to get a name of a doctor who performs—that is, one who is—you know, someone who can help Maya get rid of the baby. It’s time to move on this, no?”

Instead of the gratitude she knows she ought to feel, Bhima is shocked to feel a deep resentment at Viraf’s words. Easy for him to talk about getting rid of Maya’s baby, she thinks. After all, he and Dinaz baby are going to have a child of their own, a child who will never know what it is to have adults plot its death. A child who will be welcomed into the world. Who will never cause his parents shame or dishonor. She feels a moment’s blinding fury that is so large it encompasses Maya, Dinaz, and Viraf. All these young people, all these children about to be born. She is tired of it all—tired of this endless cycle of death and birth, tired of investing any hope in the next generation, tired and frightened of finding more human beings to love, knowing full well that every person she loves will someday wound her, hurt her, break her heart with their deceit, their treachery, their fallibility, their sheer humanity. Bhima feels dried out, scooped out, as hollow and wrinkled as a walnut shell. She has nothing left to give, no love left to spare. For this reason, she refuses to feed a morsel of leftover food to the stray dogs in the slum colony, who wag their tails and sigh expectantly each time she steps out of her hut. She cannot stand the sight of their matted, mangled, crippled bodies, their heartbreaking eagerness, the hunger for love in their eyes.

Gopal. Their two children, Amit and Pooja. And later, her sonin-law, Raju. She had loved them all, and one by one, they had all deserted her, left deliberately or left because they lost their battle with death. But the end result was the same—she was left behind while the others sailed on to what Bhima imagined were greener pastures.

She blinks her eyes and forces herself back to the present. She is ashamed of her envy at Dinaz and Viraf’s good fortune. Dinaz has grown up before Bhima’s eyes, and she still remembers what a won
derful child Dinaz was, full of hugs and laughter. A miracle that a child like that could blossom under the shadow cast by her dark mountain of a father. Once she started earning her own paycheck, Dinaz was forever slipping a ten- or a twenty-rupee note into Bhima’s hand. And Viraf baba—so sunny, so full of mischief and light. To punish herself for her uncharitable thoughts, Bhima digs her right thumb into the palm of her left hand until the pain makes her wince.

“You’re correct, Viraf baba,” she says numbly. “I was saying the same thing to Maya last evening, only.”

Viraf flashes her a quick look. His hand flutters in the space between them as if he wants to comfort her, but then it comes to rest on the steering wheel. “I’ll talk to my friend today,” he says quietly.

When he drops her off at the market, she notices that he waits until he sees she has safely crossed the street. Bhima smiles to herself. Such a thoughtful boy, that Viraf baba. Some of his gestures remind her of Amit—the same courteousness, the same solicitousness. Amit. Her only son. Where was Amit now? Did he ever think of his mother, long for her, miss her, the way she did him?

Lost in her thoughts, she almost runs into the wooden hathgadi parked in the middle of the sidewalk. She curses as the long wooden handle of the cart digs into her left hip, sending a bolt of pain through her bony thigh. A man in his early twenties is sprawled out on the flat cart, fast asleep. Bhima marvels at how he can sleep through the noise of the crowd that jostles around them. Ever since Maya’s pregnancy, Bhima’s sleep patterns have gotten so disturbed, even the chattering of the mice that scuttle around their hut can keep her awake. As Bhima rubs her hip and debates whether to shake awake the sleeping youth and ask him to move his hathgadi, she notices the bulge under his loose white pajama bottom. “Saala badmaash,” she mutters to herself, as she quickly averts her eyes. “Drunken lout, lying here in the open as if he owns the city. Shameless, shameless people.”

A familiar voice pierces her angry thoughts. “Arre, mausi, over here,” the voice calls. “I’ve been saving my best-of-best vegetables for you only.”

Bhima waves dismissively. “I’ll be over,” she yells back. “But first I have to find that good-for-nothing Rajeev.”

“He was here one-two minutes ago, only. Was looking for you, mausi.”

As if on cue, Rajeev appears, balancing the huge wicker basket on his head. He is a tall, stooped man of about fifty, with a long handlebar mustache. He reminds Bhima of the coolies from Rajasthan who populated Victoria Terminus Station in the old days, when she and Gopal used to take the train to his ancestral village. Although Gopal insisted on carrying their trunks, the coolies would follow them like a pack of hungry dogs, begging for a chance to carry their bags for them, lowering their asking price with every step that Bhima and Gopal took.

“Where were you?” Bhima scolds Rajeev in her usual greeting. “You think I have time to waste like you? I’m in a hurry.”

“Ae, Bhima mausi, slow down, slow down,” Rajeev says with an appeasing smile that shows the red marks of the paan he has freshly placed in his mouth. “Why for you hurry so much? Your bai is nice—she doesn’t worry if you are a few minutes early or late.”

But Bhima is already walking toward the vegetable vendor who had earlier called her name. On her way there, she must walk past Parvati, the old woman who comes to the market every morning and stays until she sells her total inventory of six tiny, shriveled cauliflowers. The frail old woman sits on the footpath on a filthy cotton sheet, calling out for customers in her thin, nasal voice. Ever since Bhima has known Parvati, the old woman has had a large growth the size of an orange on her throat. Once, when Parvati had fallen asleep on the footpath, Bhima happened to walk by and noticed the old woman absently fingering the lump in her sleep.

As she does every Saturday, Bhima averts her head. The sight of Parvati and her sorry-looking vegetables fills her with unbearable sadness. She knows from the gossip of the other vendors that Parvati has no husband or children. She also knows that the others help the old woman, sending her home each evening with the overripe fruit and the spoiled vegetables they are unable to sell. Still, Bhima wonders how the woman can possibly stay alive on such a meager income. And why does Parvati not increase her stock? Why does she not get better-quality cauliflowers, so that she, Bhima, can buy some from her? As it is, her heads of cauliflower are so small and shriveled that even if Bhima bought her entire supply of six, it would not be enough to feed the Dubash family. Even as she asks the question, Bhima knows the answer—the old woman is so hand-to-mouth that she never makes enough profit to buy more supplies.

When Amit and Pooja were young, Gopal and she used to take them to the seaside every Saturday. There, she would insist on buying the children the animal-shaped balloons sold by the balloon-walla, a tall, gaunt Pathan from Afghanistan. Something about the man’s quiet dignity, the careful, nonshowy way in which he would twist the balloons into different shapes, broke Bhima’s heart. When the other balloonwallas tried to seduce the children with their flashy, nimble contortions, their agile fingers twisting the rubber into elephants and dogs, she would shoo them away and wait for the Pathan to arrive. As he worked on his creations, a slight, faraway smile on his face, she wanted to ask the old man questions—why he had left his rugged homeland, whose terrain seemed carved onto his creased, wind-battered face; whether it was hard to get used to the city’s noisy and polluted streets; whether he missed the sweet mountain air of his homeland. Above all, she wanted to find out how he could make ends meet merely by selling these red and white pieces of rubber and air. The income didn’t seem enough to
support one tall, skinny Pathan, let alone a family. But shyness, awkwardness made her hold her tongue, so that the greatest mystery of Bombay—how an entire breed of Bombayites (such as the balloonwallas and the earwax removers and the rag collectors) clung to the promise of this great metropolis by the skins of their teeth, how they managed to feed themselves despite their pathetic jobs—remained unsolved for her.

Now Bhima steps over a castaway banana peel and stops before her favorite vegetable vendor, Rajeev a few steps behind her. The man gets down on his haunches and lowers the wicker basket from his head and onto the sidewalk. Ignoring the vegetable vendor’s cries of “Ae, mausi, I’ve already taken out the best vegetables for you,” Bhima begins to pick through the colorful, beautifully arranged selection before her. She buys six kilos of ladies fingers, carefully picking out the small, tender pieces. She looks over the purple brinjals and screws up her nose at the bruises on them until the vendor, grumbling under her breath, reaches behind her and brings out four gleaming ones. She holds the pods of garlic in her hand, trying to find the largest ones. She fingers the cilantro, breaking off the dead leaves from a bunch. She has the woman chop off a new slice of red pumpkin for her because the cut piece has flies sitting on it. As the vendor weighs the vegetables on her old metal scale—the hexagonal weights on one side, the produce on the other, and places them into the pink plastic bags, Rajeev picks up the bags and tosses them into his basket.