A Fine Balance (5 page)

“Put her in a nursing home,” said Ruby. “She’ll be better off there.”

He nodded placatingly, and did something less expensive and more human than shipping his mother to the old-age factory – as some unkind relatives would doubtless have put it – he hired a full-time nurse.

The nurse’s assignment was short-lived; Mrs. Shroff died later that year, and people finally understood that a doctor’s wife was no more immune to grief than other mortals. She died on the same day of the Shahenshahi calendar as her husband. Their prayers were performed consecutively at the same fire-temple by Dustoor Framji. By this time, Dina had learned how to evade the trap of his overfriendly hugs. When he approached, she held out a polite hand and took a step back, and another, and another. Short of pursuing her around the prayer-hall amid the large thuribles of flaming sandalwood, he could only smile foolishly and give up the chase.

After the first month’s prayer ceremonies for Mrs. Shroff were completed, Nusswan decided there was no point in Dina’s matriculating. Her last report card was quite wretched. She would have been kept back were it not for the principal who, loyal to the memory of Dr. Shroff, preferred to see the marks as a temporary aberration.

“Very decent of Miss Lamb to promote you,” said Nusswan. “But the fact remains that your results are hopeless. I’m not going to waste money on school fees for another year.”

“You make me clean and scrub all the time, I cannot study for even one hour a day! What do you expect?”

“Don’t make excuses. A strong young girl, doing a little housework – what’s that got to do with studying? Do you know how fortunate you are? There are thousands of poor children in the city, doing boot-polishing at railway stations, or collecting papers, bottles, plastic – plus going to school at night. And you are complaining? What’s lacking in you is the desire for education. This is it, enough schooling for you.”

Dina was not willing to concede without a struggle. She also hoped that Nusswan’s wife would intervene on her behalf. But Ruby preferred to stay out of the quarrel, so next morning when she was sent to market with a shopping list, Dina ran to her grandfather’s flat.

Grandfather lived with one of her uncles, in a room that smelled of stale balm. She held her breath and hugged him, then poured out her troubles in a torrent of words. “Please, Grandpa! Please tell him to stop treating me like this!”

Already started on the road to senility, he took a while to realize who Dina was exactly, and longer to understand what she wanted. His dentures were not in, making it difficult to decipher his speech. “Shall I get your teeth, Grandpa?” she offered.

“No, no, no!” He raised his hands and shook them vehemently. “No teeth. All crooked, and paining in the mouth. Bastard stupid dentist, useless fellow. My carpenter could make better teeth.”

She repeated everything slowly, and at last he grasped the issue. “Matric? Who, you? Of course you must do your matric. Of course. Of course. You must matriculate. And then college. Yes, of course I will tell that shameless rascal to send you, I will order that Nauzer. No, Nevil – that Nusswan, yes, I will force him.”

He dispatched a servant with a message for Nusswan to visit him as soon as possible. Nusswan could not refuse. He cared deeply about the family’s opinion of him. After delaying for several days, citing too much work at the office, he went, taking Ruby along to have an ally by his side. She was instructed to ingratiate herself with the old man in any way possible.

Grandfather had misplaced more of his memory since Dina’s visit. He remembered nothing of their conversation. He was wearing his teeth this time but had very little to say. With much prompting and reminiscing he appeared to recognize them. Then, ignoring Ruby altogether, he abruptly decided that Nusswan and Dina were man and wife. He refused to relinquish this belief, however much Dina coaxed and cajoled.

Ruby sat on the sofa holding the old man’s hand. She asked if he would like her to massage his feet. Without waiting for an answer she grabbed the left one and began kneading it. The toenails were yellow, long overdue for a clipping.

Enraged, he tore his foot from her grasp. “Kya karta hai? Chalo, jao!”

Too startled at being addressed in Hindi, Ruby sat there gaping. Grandfather turned to Nusswan, “Doesn’t she understand? What language does your ayah speak? Tell her to get off my sofa, wait in the kitchen.”

Ruby rose in a huff and stood by the door. “Rude old man!” she hissed. “Just because my skin is a little dark!”

Nusswan said a gruff goodbye and followed his wife, stopping to turn and look triumphantly at Dina, who was trying to sort out the confusion. She stayed behind, hoping Grandpa would summon some hidden resource and come to her rescue. An hour later she too gave up, kissed his forehead, and left.

It was the last time she saw him alive. He died in his sleep the following month. At the funeral, Dina wondered how much longer Grandpa’s toenails had grown under the white sheet that hid everything from view but his face.

For four years, Nusswan had been faithfully putting money aside for Dina’s wedding expenses. A considerable sum had collected, and he planned to get her married in the near future. He was certain he would have no trouble finding a good husband – as he proudly said to himself, Dina had grown into a beautiful young woman, she deserved nothing less than the best. It would be a lavish celebration, befitting the sister of a successful businessman, and people would talk about it for a long time to come.

When she turned eighteen, he started inviting eligible bachelors to their home. She invariably found them repugnant; they were her brother’s friends, and reminded her of Nusswan in all they said and did.

Nusswan was convinced that sooner or later there would be one she liked. He could no longer place restrictions on her comings and goings – she had outgrown those adolescent controls. So long as she did the housework and daily shopping according to Ruby’s lists, relative calm prevailed in the house. Nowadays the quarrelling, if there was any, was between Ruby and Dina, as though Nusswan had delegated this function to his wife.

At the market Dina sometimes used her initiative and substituted cauliflower for cabbage; or she felt a sudden yearning for chickoos and bought them instead of oranges. Then Ruby promptly accused her of sabotaging the carefully planned meals: “Wicked, malicious woman, ruining my husband’s dinner.” She delivered the charge and the verdict in a matter-of-fact, mechanical manner, all part of her role as the dutiful wife.

But it was not always squabbles and bickering between them. More and more, the two women worked together amicably. Among the items that Ruby had brought to the house following her marriage was a small sewing-machine with a hand crank. She showed Dina how to use it, teaching her to make simple items like pillowcases, bed-sheets, curtains.

When Ruby’s first child was born, a son who was named Xerxes, Dina helped to look after him. She sewed baby clothes and knitted little caps and pullovers. For her nephew’s first birthday she produced a pair of bootees. On that happy morning they garlanded Xerxes with roses and lilies, and made a large red teelo on his forehead.

“What a sweetie pie he is,” said Dina, laughing with delight.

“And those bootees you made – just too cute!” said Ruby, giving her a huge hug.

But it was the rare day that passed entirely without argument. Once the chores were done, Dina preferred to spend as much time out of the house as possible. Her resources for her outings were limited to what she could squeeze from the shopping money. Her conscience was clear; she regarded it as part-payment for her drudgery, barely a fraction of what was owed her.

Ruby demanded an account down to the last paisa. “I want to see the bills and receipts. For every single item,” she pounded her fist on the kitchen table, rattling the saucepan’s lid.

“Since when do fishmongers and vegetable-women on the footpath give receipts?” fired back Dina, throwing at her the bills for shop purchases, along with the change kept ready after juggling undocumented prices. She left the kitchen while her sister-in-law searched the floor to retrieve and count the coins.

The savings were sufficient to pay for bus fares. Dina went to parks, wandered in museums and markets, visited cinemas (just from the outside, to look at posters), and ventured timidly into public libraries. The heads bent over books made her feel out of place; everyone in there seemed so learned, and she hadn’t even matriculated.

This impression was dispelled when she realized that the reading material in the hands of these grave individuals could range from something unpronounceable like
Areopagitica
by John Milton to
The Illustrated Weekly of India
. Eventually, the enormous old reading rooms, with their high ceilings, creaky floorboards and dark panelling, became her favourite sanctuary. The stately ceiling fans that hung from long poles swept the air with a comforting
whoosh
, and the deep leather chairs, musty smells, and rustle of turning pages were soothing. Best of all, people spoke in whispers. The only time Dina heard a shout was when the doorman scolded a beggar trying to sneak inside. Hours passed as she flipped through encyclopaedias, gazed into art books, and curiously opened dusty medical tomes, rounding off the visit by sitting for a few minutes with eyes closed in a dark corner of the old building, where time could stand still if one wanted it to.

The more modern libraries were equipped with music rooms. They also had fluorescent lights, Formica tables, air-conditioning, and brightly painted walls, and were always crowded. She found them cold and inhospitable, going there only if she wanted to listen to records. She knew very little about music – a few names like Brahms, Mozart, Schumann, and Bach, which her ears had picked up in childhood when her father would turn on the radio or put something on the gramophone, take her in his lap and say, “It makes you forget the troubles of this world, doesn’t it?” and Dina would nod her head seriously.

In the library she selected records at random, trying to memorize the names of the ones she enjoyed so she could play them again another day. It was tricky, because the symphonies and concertos and sonatas were distinguished only by numbers that were preceded by letters like Op. and K. and BWV, and she did not know what any of it meant. If she was lucky she found something with a name that resonated richly in her memory; and when the familiar music filled her head, the past was conquered for a brief while, and she felt herself ache with the ecstasy of completion, as though a missing limb had been recovered.

She both desired and dreaded these intense musical experiences. The perfect felicity of the music room was always replaced by an unfocused anger when she returned to life with Nusswan and Ruby. The bitterest fights took place on days when she had visited the record collection.

Magazines and newspapers were far less complicated. Through reading the dailies, she discovered there were several cultural groups that sponsored concerts and recitals in the city. Many of these performances – usually the ones by local amateurs or obscure foreigners – were free. She started using her bus fares to go to these concerts, and found them a welcome variation on the library. The performers, too, were no doubt grateful for her presence at these meagrely attended evenings.

She lingered at the periphery of the crowd in the foyer, feeling like an imposten Everyone else seemed to know so much about music, about the evening’s performers, judging from the sophisticated way they held their programmes and pointed to items inside. She longed for the doors to open, for the dim lights within to disguise her shortcomings.

In the recital hall the music did not have the power to touch her the way it did during her solitary hours in the library. Here, the human comedy shared equal time with the music. And after a few recitals she began to recognize the regulars in the audience.

There was an old man who, at every concert, fell asleep at precisely four minutes into the first piece; latecomers skirted his row out of consideration, to avoid bumping his knees. At seven minutes, his spectacles began sliding down his nose. And at eleven minutes (if the piece was that long and he hadn’t yet been wakened by applause), his dentures were protruding. He reminded Dina of Grandpa.

Two sisters, in their fifties, tall and lean with pointed chins, always sat in the first row and often clapped at the wrong moment, unnecessarily disturbing the old man’s nap. Dina herself did not understand about sonatas and movements, but realized that a performance was not over just because there was a pause in the music. She took the lead from a goateed individual in round wire-rimmed glasses who wore a beret, looked like an expert, and always knew when to clap.

Then there was an amusing middle-aged fellow who wore the same brown suit at every concert, and was everyone’s friend. He dashed around madly in the foyer, greeting people, his head bobbing wildly, assuring them what a splendid evening it was going to be. His ties were the subject of constant speculation. On some evenings they hung long, dominating his front, flapping over his crotch. At other times they barely reached his diaphragm. The knots ranged in size from microscopic to a bulky samosa. And he did not walk from one person to the next so much as prance, keeping his comments brief because, as he liked to explain, there were just a few minutes before the curtain went up, and still so many he had to greet.