A Fine Balance (48 page)

As he fell asleep, thinking of Dina Aunty in the nightgown, she began to merge with the woman on the train, in the upper berth.

A
FTER THE INCIDENT WITH THE SANITARY
pads, Dina was certain that neither Ishvar nor Om would dare follow through with a dinner for Maneck at their house. And even if they did, he would refuse, for fear of offending her.

In a few days, however, the invitation was indeed renewed, and acceptance seemed to linger close at hand. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered angrily to Maneck. “After what you did that day, isn’t it enough? Haven’t you upset me enough?”

“But I apologized for that, Aunty. And Om was also very sorry. What’s the connection between the two things?”

“You think sorry makes it all right. You don’t understand the problem. I have nothing against them, but they are tailors – my employees. A distance has to be maintained. You are the son of Farokh and Aban Kohlah. There is a difference, and you cannot pretend there isn’t – their community, their background.”

“But Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t mind,” he said, trying to explain he hadn’t been brought up to think this way, that his parents encouraged him to mix with everyone.

“So you are saying I am narrow-minded, and your parents are broad-minded, modern people?”

He grew tired of arguing. Sometimes she seemed to him on the verge of being reasonable, only to make another absurd statement: “If you are so fond of them, why don’t you pack your things and move in with them? I can easily write to your mummy, tell her where to send the rent next month.”

“I just want to visit once. It feels rude to keep refusing. They think I’m too big to go to their house.”

“And have you thought of the consequences of one visit? Good manners is all very well, but what about health and hygiene? How do they prepare their food? Can they afford proper cooking oil? Or do they buy cheap adulterated vanaspati, like most poor people?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t fallen sick and died as yet.”

“Because their stomachs are accustomed to it, you foolish boy, and yours is not.”

Maneck pictured the hideous canteen food his own stomach had endured, and the roadside snacks devoured for weeks on end. He wondered if mentioning that would make her modify her culinary theories.

“And what about water?” she continued “Is there a clean supply in their neighbourhood, or is it contaminated?”

“I’ll be careful, I won’t drink any water.” His mind was made up, he was going. She was getting too bossy. Even Mummy never controlled his life the way Dina Aunty was trying to.

“Fine, do as you please. But if you catch something, don’t think I’ll be your nurse for one moment. You’ll be sent back by express delivery to your parents.”

“That’s all right with me.”

The next time Ishvar and Om asked him, he said yes. She flushed, and ground her teeth. Maneck smiled innocently.

“Tomorrow then, okay?” said Ishvar with delight. “We’ll leave together at six o’clock.” He inquired what he would like to eat. “Rice or chapati? And which is your favourite vegetable, hahn?”

“Anything,” answered Maneck to all questions. The tailors spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the menu, planning their humble feast.

Ishvar was first to notice that the smoke from cooking fires did not linger over the hutment colony. He tripped on the crumbling pavement, his eyes searching the horizon. At this hour the haze should have been clouding thick. “Everyone fasting or what?”

“Forget worrying about everyone – I’m starving.”

“You’re always starving. Do you have worms?”

Om did not laugh; the joke was growing stale. The absence of smoke bothered Ishvar. In its place a dull roar, as of heavy machinery, hung in the distance. “Repairing the roads at night?” he wondered, as the noise rose with their approach. Then, thinking about Maneck’s dinner, he said, “Tomorrow we will shop in the morning, keep everything ready. We shouldn’t waste time after work. Now if you were married, your wife would have the food cooked and waiting for our guest.”

“Why don’t
you
get married?”

“I’m too old.” But, he thought, teasing aside, it really was high time for Om – not wise to delay these things.

“But I’ve even selected a wife for you,” said Om.

“Who?”

“Dinabai. I know you like her, you’re always taking her side. You should give her a poke.”

“Shameless boy,” said Ishvar, thumping him lightly as they turned the corner into the slum lane.

The rumbling ball of sound that had been rolling towards them, slow and placid in the dusk, grew larger, louder. Then it detonated. The air was suddenly filled with noises of pain and terror and anger.

“Hai Ram! What’s going on?” They ran the final distance and came upon a battle in progress.

The hutment dwellers were massed on the road, fighting to return to their shacks, their cries mingling with the sirens of ambulances that couldn’t get through. The police had lost control for the moment. The residents surged forward, gaining the advantage. Then the police rallied and beat them back. People fell, were trampled, and the ambulances supplemented their siren skirls with blaring horns while children screamed, terrified at being separated from their parents.

The hutment dwellers straggled back from the pulse of the assault, spent, venting their anguish in helpless outrage. “Heartless animals! For the poor there is no justice, ever! We had next to nothing, now it’s less than nothing! What is our crime, where are we to go?”

During the lull, Ishvar and Om found Rajaram. “I was there when it all started,” he said, panting. “They went in and – just destroyed it. And just smashed – everything. Such crooks, such liars –”

“Who did it?” They tried to make him talk slowly.

“The men, the ones who said they were safety inspectors. They tricked us. Sent by the government, they said, to check the colony. At first the people were pleased, the authorities were taking some interest. Maybe improvements were coming – water, latrines, lights, like they kept promising at voting time. So we did as they told us, came out of the shacks. But once the colony was empty, the big machines went in.”

Most of the bulldozers were old jeeps and trucks, with steel plates and short wooden beams like battering rams affixed to the front bumpers. They had begun tearing into the structures of plywood, corrugated metal, and plastic. “And when we saw that, we rushed in to stop them. But the drivers kept going. People were crushed. Blood everywhere. And the police are protecting those murderers. Or the bastards would be dead by now.”

“But how can they destroy our homes, just like that?”

“They said it’s a new Emergency law. If shacks are illegal, they can remove them. The new law says the city must be made beautiful.”

“What about Navalkar? And his boss, Thokray? They collected this month’s rent only two days ago.”

“They are here.”

“And they’re not complaining to the police?”

“Complaining? Thokray is the one in charge of this. He is wearing a badge: Controller of Slums. And Navalkar is Assistant Controller. They won’t talk to anyone. If we try to go near them, their goondas threaten to beat us.”

“And all our property in the shacks?”

“Lost, looks like. We begged them to let us remove it, but they refused.”

Ishvar suddenly felt very tired. He moved away from the crowd and crossed the lane, where he sank to his haunches. Rajaram hitched up his pants and sat down beside him. “No sense crying for those rotten jhopdis. We’ll find somewhere else, it’s only a small obstacle. Right, Om? We’ll search together for a new house.”

Om nodded. “I’m going to take a closer look inside.”

“Don’t, it’s dangerous,” said Ishvar. “Stay here, with me.”

“I’m here only, yaar,” said Om, and wandered off to examine the demolition.

The evening was on the edge of darkness. A vigorous lathi-charge had finally cleared the area near the front of the colony. Slippers and sandals lost by the fleeing crowd littered the ground, strewn like the flotsam of a limbless human tide. The police cordon, now firmly in place, kept the rage of the residents smouldering at a safe distance.

The bulldozers finished flattening the rows of flimsy shacks and tackled the high-rental ones, reversing and crunching into the brick walls. Om felt nothing – the shack had meant nothing to him, he decided. Maybe now his uncle would agree to go back to Ashraf Chacha. He remembered Maneck, coming to visit tomorrow. He laughed mirthlessly about telling him the dinner was off – cancelled due to the unexpected disappearance of their house.

Sergeant Kesar’s megaphone blared in the dusk: “Work will be stopping for thirty minutes. Actually speaking, this is simply to give you a chance to collect your personal belongings. Then the machines will start again.”

In the crowd, the announcement was received with some scorn – a goodwill gesture from the police to avoid more trouble. But most were grateful for the opportunity to retrieve their few possessions. A desperate scramble commenced in the wreckage. It reminded Om of children on garbage heaps. He saw them every morning from the train. He rejoined his uncle to become part of the bustle among the ruins.

The machines had transformed the familiar field with its carefully ordered community into an alien place. There was much confusion amid the people rooting for their belongings. Which piece of ground had supported whose shelter? And which pile of scantlings and metal was theirs to comb through? Others were turning the turmoil to advantage, grabbing what they could, and fights broke out over pieces of splintered plywood, torn rexine sheets, clear plastic. Someone tried to seize the harmonium player’s damaged instrument while he was burrowing for his clothes. He fought off the thief with an iron rod. The tussle inflicted more wounds on the harmonium, ripping its bellows.

“My neighbours have become robbers,” he said tearfully. “Once, I sang for them, and they clapped for me.”

Ishvar offered him perfunctory solace, anxious about his own possessions. “At least our sewing-machines have a safe home with Dinabai,” he said to Om. “That’s our good fortune.”

They dragged aside the corrugated sheet that used to be the roof, and uncovered the trunk. The lid had sustained several deep dents. It swung open with a protesting squeal. Om aimed a kick at the biggest depression and the lid moved less stubbornly. They cleared more debris and came upon the small mirror they used for shaving. It was intact: the aluminium frying pan had fallen over it like a helmet.

“No bad luck for us,” said Om, stuffing both items into the trunk. The Primus stove was crushed beyond repair, and he tossed it back. Ishvar found a pencil, a candle, two enamel plates, and a polythene glass. Om found their razor, but not the packet of blades. By shifting more pieces of plywood they unearthed the copper water pot. Someone else spied it at the same moment, grabbed it, and ran.

“Thief!” shouted Om. Nobody paid attention. His uncle stopped him from chasing the man.

They pulled out their wicker mat, sheets, blankets, and the two towels used for pillows. Shaking out clouds of dust, Ishvar rolled it all into one neat bedding bundle and wrapped it with sackcloth.

Rajaram’s concern was solely for his hoard of hair. The stock was ravaged, the plastic sacks ripped, their contents spilled. “One month’s precious collection,” he grieved. “All scattered in the mud.” The allotted thirty minutes were running out. Ishvar and Om helped him gather what they could, concentrating on retrieving the longest specimens.

“It’s hopeless,” said Rajaram bitterly. “The bastards have ruined me. The locks and plaits have broken up, it’s impossible to join them together. Like trying to recover grains of sugar out of a cup of tea.”

The three made their way through the police barricade, where the Controller of Slums was giving instructions to his workers. “Levelled smooth – that’s how I want this field. Empty and clean, the way it was before all these illegal structures were built.” The debris was to be dumped in the ditch by the railway tracks.

The dispossessed lingered outside, watching numbly. The workers flattened walls and corners that had survived the first assault, then stopped, claiming it was too dark for the equipment to shift the rubble without tumbling into the ditch. The Controller of Slums could not risk that, there was much work ahead for his machines, many unlawful encroachments to be razed. He agreed to postpone the final phase till the morning, and the workers departed.