A Fine Balance (35 page)

Maneck felt another segment of his universe collapse. He did not return to the garden after lunch. Mrs. Kohlah took him aside and said it was not nice to be unkind to Daddy who loved him so much. “What he is doing, sending you to a fine school, is for your own good. You should not think of it as punishment.”

In the evening, Mr. Kohlah bade his son sit beside him on the sofa. “Boarding school is not forever,” he said. “Remember, Mummy and I miss you more than you miss us. But what is the choice? You don’t want to be ignorant, unable to read or write, like these poor gaddi people who go through their whole lives cold and hungry, with a few sheep or goats, struggling to survive. Remember, the slow coach gets left behind. Once you obtain the Secondary School Certificate in another six years, nobody is going to send you away. You will take charge of this business.”

Maneck allowed himself a smile as his father continued, “In fact, the sooner it is, the better for me. I can relax and go hiking all day.”

Next morning at breakfast, Mr. Kohlah gave him the special big cup to drink from. Then he let him sit behind the till to make change for their customers. Maneck cherished that day for the rest of the school year. Whenever the pain of banishment surfaced, he summoned the happy memory to counterbalance his despair, his dark thoughts of rejection and loneliness.

Despite his initial dread of the eternity that was six years, time chipped away three of them at its steady pace. Maneck turned fourteen, and came home for the May vacation.

That year, for the first time, his parents were going to leave him on his own for two days while they attended a wedding. Instead of closing down the place and sending him to a neighbour’s house, Mr. Kohlah decided, as a special treat, to let him run the shop alone.

“Just do things the way we do when I’m here,” he said. “Everything will go smoothly. Don’t forget to count the soft-drink crates taken by the driver. And phone for tomorrow’s milk – very, very important. If there is a problem, call Grewal Uncle. I’ve told him to check on you later on.” Mr. and Mrs. Kohlah went around the shop one more time with Maneck, reminding and pointing, then departed.

The day passed like any other. There were flurries of activity followed by periods of calm during which he wiped the glass cases, dusted the shelves, cleaned the counter. The regulars inquired about his parents’ absence, and praised his ability. “Look at the boy, keeping the barracks shipshape. Deserves a medal.”

“Farokh and Aban could retire tomorrow if they wanted to,” said Brigadier Grewal. “Nothing to worry about, with Field Marshal Maneck in charge of General Store.” Everyone present laughed heartily at that.

Late in the evening, quiet descended upon the square as daylight began to fade. Maneck went to switch on the porch lamp, feeling proud of his day’s work. It was almost time to close the store. All that remained was to empty the till, count the money, and enter the amount in the book. From the porch he saw the shop’s interior, and paused. That big glass case in the centre, with soaps and talcum powders – it would look much nicer in the front. And the old newspaper table near the entrance, scarred and wobbly – wouldn’t it be better off pushed to the side?

The idea pursued Maneck and seized his imagination while he warmed his food. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a smart rearrangement of the display. He could easily manage it alone, tonight. What a surprise for Mummy and Daddy when they came back.

After eating his dinner, he returned to the darkened shop, switched on the light, and dragged the old table out of the way. The glass case was more difficult, heavy and cumbersome. He emptied the merchandise and pushed it slowly to its new, prominent spot. Then he replaced the cans and cartons, but not in their boring old stacks – he arranged them in interesting pyramids and spirals. Perfect, he thought, standing back to admire the effect, and went to bed.

The next evening, Mr. Kohlah walked in and saw the alterations. Without pausing to greet Maneck or ask how things were, he told him to shut the door, hang out the Closed sign.

“But there’s still one hour left,” said Maneck, hungry for his father’s praise.

“I know. Shut it anyway.” Then his father ordered him to put everything back the way it was. His voice was barren of emotion.

Maneck would have preferred it if his father had scolded or slapped him, or punished him in any manner he wanted. But this contempt, this refusal to even talk about it, was horrid. The enthusiasm drained from his face, leaving behind a puzzled anguish, and he felt on the verge of tears.

His mother was moved to intervene. “But Farokh, don’t you think it looks nice, what Maneck has done?”

“The looks are irrelevant. What instructions did we give when we trusted him with the shop for two days? This is how he repays the trust. It’s a question of discipline and following orders, not of looking nice.”

Maneck returned the displays to their old places, but for the rest of his school vacation he refused to enter the shop. “Daddy doesn’t need me – I don’t want to be there,” he said bitterly to his mother. “He only wants a servant in the shop.”

In bed at night she conveyed to Mr. Kohlah that Maneck’s feelings were badly hurt. “I am aware of that,” he said, facing away from her on the pillow. “But he must learn to walk before he can run. It’s not good for a boy to think he knows everything before his time.”

She persevered, and was successful just before the vacation came to an end. Peace was restored between father and son one morning when Mr. Kohlah started reorganizing one of the glass cases and called Maneck into the shop to ask his opinion. As school reopening day approached, they began working together again in the soft-drink factory in the cellar, Maneck taking down the cleaned empties, then carrying up the crates of freshly bottled Kaycee.

On the last night, Mr. Kohlah said, while switching off the machine, TU miss you when you leave tomorrow.” The motor’s dying throbs left his words clutching helplessly at the dank subterranean air. He hugged Maneck as they went up the stairs together.

Boarding school was the cause of Maneck’s second unwilling departure from the mountains. The first had come when he was six, when he and his mother went to visit her family in the city, travelling by train for two days. He had been fascinated by the towering buildings and palatial cinema houses, the avalanche of cars and buses and lorries, and the brightness of streets as the lights went on when night had fallen. But after the first few days, he had missed his father terribly. He was thrilled to return home when their holiday was over.

“I am never going to leave the mountains again,” he said. “Never, ever.”

Mrs. Kohlah whispered something in Mr. Kohlah’s ear, who was waiting on the station platform to receive them. He smiled, embraced Maneck, and said neither was he.

But the day soon came when the mountains began to leave them. It started with roads. Engineers in sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments and charted their designs on reams of paper. These were to be modern roads, they promised, roads that would hum with the swift passage of modern traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials.

One morning, at the worksite, a minister was garlanded as a band played. It was the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band: three brass winds, a pair of snares, and a bass drum. Their uniforms were white, with the letters
BNMB
in gold braid on their backs; on the bass drum, the initials were painted in red. The band’s specialty was wedding processions, and the ministerial programme included the paean of the bride’s mother, the lament of the bride’s mother-in-law, the bridegroom’s triumphal progress, an ode to the matchmaker, and a hymn to fertility. But the
BNMB
expertly adapted the repertoire for the occasion. The drums tattooed away militarily, heralding the march of progress, while the trombone eschewed its mournful matrimonial glissandi in favour of a sunburst staccato.

The audience of unemployed villagers cheered on cue, anxious to earn their attendance money. Speeches were delivered from a makeshift platform. The minister swung a golden pickaxe that missed its mark. He grinned at the crowd and swung again.

After the dignitaries left, the workers moved in. Progress was slow at first, so slow that Mr. Kohlah and all the inhabitants of the hills harboured an irrational hope: the work would never be completed, their little haven would remain unscathed. Meanwhile, Brigadier Grewal and he organized meetings for the townspeople where they condemned the flawed development policy, the shortsightedness, the greed that was sacrificing the country’s natural beauty to the demon of progress. They signed petitions, lodged their protest with the authorities, and waited.

But the road continued to inch upwards, swallowing everything in its path. The sides of their beautiful hills were becoming gashed and scarred. From high on the slopes, the advancing tracks looked like rivers of mud defying gravity, as though nature had gone mad. The distant thunder of blasting and the roar of earth-moving machines floated up early in the morning, and the dreaminess of the dawn mist turned to nightmare.

Mr. Kohlah watched helplessly as the asphalting began, changing the brown rivers into black, completing the transmogrification of his beloved birthplace where his forefathers had lived as in paradise. He watched powerlessly while, for the second time, lines on paper ruined the life of the Kohlah family. Only this time it was an indigenous surveyor’s cartogram, not a foreigner’s imperial map.

When the work was finished, the minister returned to cut the ribbon. In the years since the ground-breaking ceremony, he had grown more corpulent but not less clumsy. He shuffled up to the ribbon and dropped the golden scissors. Seven eager sycophants leapt to the rescue. A tussle ensued; the scissors were wrested away by the strongest of the seven and restored to the minister. He fixed them all with a fierce glare for calling so much attention to a simple slip, then smiled for the crowd and cut the ribbon with a flourish. The crowd applauded, the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band struck up, and in the off-key din of the brass winds no one noticed the minister struggling quietly to extricate his pudgy fingers from the scissors.

Then the promised rewards began rolling up the road into the mountains. Lorries big as houses transported goods from the cities and fouled the air with their exhaust. Service stations and eating places sprouted along the routes to provide for the machines and their men. And developers began to build luxury hotels.

That year, when Maneck came home for the holidays, he was puzzled (and later alarmed) to discover his father perpetually irritable. They found it impossible to get through the day without quarrelling, breaking into argument even in the presence of customers.

“What’s the matter with him?” Maneck asked his mother. “When I’m here, he ignores me or fights with me. When I’m at school, he writes letters saying how much he misses me.”

“You have to understand,” said Mrs. Kohlah, “people change when times change. It does not mean he doesn’t love you.”

For Mrs. Kohlah, this unhappy vacation would also be remembered as the one during which Maneck abandoned his habit of hugging his parents and whispering good morning. The first time that he came down and took his place silently, his mother waited with her back to the table till the pang of rejection had passed, before she would trust her hands with the hot frying pan. His father noticed nothing.

Stomach churning, Mr. Kohlah was absorbed in watching the growth of development in the hills. His friends and he agreed it was a malevolent growth. The possibility of increased business at the General Store was no consolation. All his senses were being assaulted by the invasion. The noxious exhaust from lorries was searing his nostrils, he told Mrs. Kohlah, and the ugly throbbing of their engines was ripping his eardrums to shreds.

Wherever he turned, he began to see the spread of shacks and shanties. It reminded him of the rapidity with which the mange had overtaken his favourite dog. The destitute encampments scratched away at the hillsides, the people drawn from every direction by stories of construction and wealth and employment. But the ranks of the jobless always exponentially outnumbered the jobs, and a hungry army sheltered permanently on the slopes. The forests were being devoured for firewood; bald patches materialized upon the body of the hills.

Then the seasons revolted. The rain, which used to make things grow and ripen, descended torrentially on the denuded hills, causing mudslides and avalanches. Snow, which had provided an ample blanket for the hills, turned skimpy. Even at the height of winter the cover was ragged and patchy.

Mr. Kohlah felt a perverse satisfaction at nature’s rebellion. It was a vindication of sorts: he was not alone in being appalled by the hideous rape. But when the seasonal disorder continued year after year, he could take no comfort in it. The lighter the snow cover, the heavier was his heart.

Maneck said nothing, though he thought his father was being overly dramatic when he declared, “Taking a walk is like going into a war zone.”