Bombay Time (16 page)

For a moment, Rusi looked lost, as if he didn’t know what to do. Then instinct took over. He cooed at the baby as he paced the hospital room. Next, he tested all of the baby’s fingers one by one, wriggling them up and down. Then he tested the ears, clicking his fingers on each side. “She’s a perfectly put together baby,” he declared happily. “If she has her mother’s looks and her mother’s brains, she will be all right.”

Later that day, with both of the baby’s grandmothers in the room, Rusi leaned over his daughter’s crib. He fished into his pocket and took out a bunch of keys. He jingled them near the baby’s right ear and then laid them down in the crib. “These are yours, sweetheart,” he whispered to her. “These are the keys to the house, to the factory. Everything I own now belongs to you. You already have the keys to my heart.”

Coomi smiled now, thinking of those happy times. At that moment, they knew so little about what awaited them. No knowledge then about the fact that Coomi wouldn’t be able to have any more children. About how valiantly Rusi would try to fight his disappointment at the wilting away of yet another dream; about how miserably he would fail at hiding his disappointment at having no more children. No idea then that Khorshed, not content with having the devotion of her son, would also lay claim to Binny’s heart. No hint of the fact that the triad of Khorshed-Rusi-Binny would make her feel like a stranger, an outsider in her own house.

It was Khorshed who named her first grandchild. During the ride home from the hospital, it was Khorshed who rode in the front seat with Binny, while Coomi alternately dozed and gazed out of the window in the backseat. Before Coomi and Rusi entered the flat with their precious cargo, it was Khorshed who performed the Parsi welcoming ceremony for Wadia Baug’s newest resident. Khorshed put a small red
tikka
on her granddaughter’s forehead. Then she took a raw egg and circled it around Binny’s tiny head before smashing it on the threshold. Next, she took a dried coconut and cracked it at the side of the door. Finally, the house was ready for Binny. “Enter with your right foot,” Khorshed told Coomi.

In the euphoria of those early days, Coomi was expansive, generous, ready to share her daughter with her widowed mother-in-law. She welcomed the fact that Khorshed watched Binny when she and Rusi went out in the evenings; basked in the glow of Khorshed’s unabashed pride in her granddaughter. But as Binny got older, Coomi began to see the trinity of Khorshed, Rusi, and Binny as a threat, in collusion against her. If she threatened to whip Binny for bringing home a poor report card, the old woman would intervene. Would get emotional, right in front of the child. If Binny needed extra lunch money, she took to asking her grandmother. Khorshed complained about Coomi’s extravagant household budget, but she always had a rupee or two for Binny. But what really dismayed Coomi was that, like her father, Binny was also sensitive, moody, easily devastated by an unkind word. She tried to toughen up her daughter but came up against the raw power of genetics. She could not diminish Binny’s tendency to be hurt any more than she could change her own capacity to wound her daughter unwittingly with her words. Coomi deeply regretted her teenaged daughter’s growing estrangement from her. But to have acknowledged her role in that estrangement would have devastated her. It was less painful to blame Khorshed for the distance between them. She complained to whoever would listen that she had given birth to Binny and Khorshed had adopted her a few hours later. Just like that. Without asking for permission, without any words exchanged. No contract, no signature. Just the authority of blood. “They stole my only child away from me,” she hissed to Dosamai. “Mother and son, they stole my daughter, until she, too, acts like a stone statue in my presence. Even Binny’s husband, Jack, was reserved with me when they were visiting us here a few years back. Polite but reserved. Not jovial the way he is with Rusi. They think I don’t notice, but I notice everything.”

Coomi watched as Bomi Mistry slid up to where Rusi was talking to the unknown woman. Before she could check herself, she felt glad that Bomi had interrupted Rusi’s conversation. Rusi had been standing a little too close to the woman for her liking. That sudden spurt of jealousy did not take Coomi by surprise. She wished she could feel toward Rusi the same frosty indifference he exhibited toward her, but she couldn’t. Whether she was blaming him or praising him, loving him or hating him, Coomi was still very aware of her husband’s presence in her life. She often prayed to be blessed with the kind of dead-ness that Rusi showed in her presence, but her prayers were not answered. Coomi needed to feel
something
—even if only self-pity and bitterness and a sense of being aggrieved—in order to stay alive. Years ago, she had come across the phrase “a strange and tangled love” and had immediately thought how well it described her feelings toward Rusi. She’d grimaced, knowing how startled Rusi would be to hear that his wife felt any kind of love toward him. But then, Rusi had never understood her, never appreciated the red-hot blood that pumped through her heart. That thought made her feel superior.

Another thing Rusi didn’t know about her: that she watched everything. Took pictures with her eyes. For instance, Rusi did not know that she had been watching his face while Bomi told that horrible story about poor Kashmira being robbed. She had read every expression on Rusi’s face—his disgust at the savagery of the robbery, his loathing of a city where such events occurred daily, his sudden, awful gladness that Binny had escaped Bombay. She could read him like a book. All the while she had been talking to “Killer Breath” Tehmi, trying not to breathe while Tehmi talked, she had been following Rusi with her eyes. She had seen him glance up at the pitiless sky as if asking for help, had known from the bright, wet, expansive look in his eyes that he was slightly drunk. Rusi always got sentimental when he was drunk. She was sure he didn’t know that about himself.

Khorshed had been dead for six years now. Binny had been gone for eight. It was just Rusi and Coomi in the house. Her prayers about wanting to be alone with her husband had been answered, but they had been answered by a God with a twisted sense of humor. Coomi had never been more angry at Rusi than in the weeks following Khor-shed’s death. She had really tried to win him over, but Rusi had rebuffed every overture. A missed opportunity. And now, a gap that stretched between them, wide as the Arabian Sea. And in the middle of this gap, a question mark: Why had things gone so horribly wrong? If dolts like Bomi and Sheroo could have a happy marriage, why not them? For all her faults, Khorshed had not been mean or tyrannical, the way so many Parsi mother-in-laws could be. Binny had been a beautiful child—curious, brimming with zest and laughter. Rusi was basically a kind, decent man. And she, Coomi, had come to this marriage with so much hope and expectation. She had been given so much. Why had she ended up with so little?

A few weeks earlier, Coomi had visited the fire temple in the afternoon. There was no one else there. Something about the thick old walls darkened from years of smoke, the tranquil silence that hung over the place, and the steady flame of the eternal fire that burned in the large urn made her acutely aware of how alone she was. Before she knew it, she was sobbing hard. “Please, Dadaji,” she prayed. “Help me. Forgive me for all the times I wished Khorshed dead. I would give anything just to have her company again. Living with Rusi is like living alone, almost.” It was true. The business still took so much of Rusi’s time. Rusi still spent an average of ten hours a day at the factory. Coomi knew that part of the reason Rusi worked so hard was simply to stay away from home. With Khorshed gone, Coomi now blamed Rusi’s business for the breakup of her marriage. She believed that Rusi brought the frustrations of his business home with him. Rusi believed just the opposite—that he took the frustrations of his marriage to work with him. “If I had just had a little encouragement at home, who knows where I could have been today?” Coomi once overheard him say to Soli Contractor. “In England, they have a saying—ninety percent of your success depends on whom you marry. So true, so true.” As always, Coomi had felt revulsion. She hated to heat Rusi admit to any weakness. The men she had grown up around remained stoic and
bindaas,
no matter what setbacks they faced.

Sheroo Mistry was saying something to Coomi, but she did not hear her. She was still watching her husband. Bomi had whispered something to Rusi and Coomi watched as Rusi threw back his head and laughed his familiar high-pitched laugh. It was a sound she heard so rarely these days. For a moment, she saw the outline of Rusi’s head—the broad, glistening forehead, the big Roman nose, the prominent Adam’s apple—framed against the black canvas of the sky. Quick as a breath, Coomi blinked.
Click.
She would save this picture, sharing it with neither Binny nor Dosamai. Something about the way Rusi looked right then reminded her of a younger, brighter face, and the memory made her smile.

But the next moment, her smile faded. Rusi had caught her staring at him, and the laughter that had bubbled in him like a spring froze as abruptly as a stream in winter. His face closed like a door and Coomi watched as the wary, guarded expression she hated took over.

Rusi was looking at her, a look of studied indifference on his face. Coomi turned her camera on herself.
Click.
She watched herself dissolve into nothingness.

All through the evening, Soli Contractor had waited impatiently for Rusi Bilimoria to arrive. “Please God,” he murmured. “Just for today, let that slow coach Coomi be dressed on time.” But it was not to be. By the time Rusi and Coomi finally walked in, Soli felt as if the letter had burned a hole in his pocket and would at any minute drop to the floor.

Soli was a short walnut-colored man with twinkling light gray eyes that would’ve been more appropriate on a schoolboy’s face, rather than on his own wizened one. Someone had once told Soli that his smile was wider than the distance between Bombay and Calcutta, and sometimes when Soli caught himself smiling, he told himself, I am bridging an entire subcontinent with one smile.

But Soli was not smiling today. Throughout the wedding reception, old friends had teased him for not following his usual practice of eating dinner in the first shift and then going home for his “beauty sleep.” Soli’s rigid habits caused much merriment among his friends.
“A pucca
bachelor, you are, Soli,” a neighborhood wag once told him. “You’ve successfully managed to resist the demands of a wife, and you know what? You’ve instead succumbed to the tyranny of an alarm clock.”

Bomi Mistry was among those surprised to see Soli still at the reception. “What happened, Soli?” he boomed. “Bad case of diarrhea? Never heard of you refusing
lagan-nu-bhonu.
Or did you already eat at home?”

“Who said anything about refusing? Everybody is a joker today. If you are wanting the truth, Mr. Charlie Chaplin, I have decided to wait for my good friend Rusi, who is as always fashionably late.
Arre,
if I’d had dinner, I would be belching so loud, they’d hear it from here to Chembur.”

Bomi winked conspiratorially. “No use waiting for the Bilimorias. Mehernosh will be a grandfather before they show up. You know that Coomi.”

“Right you are,
bossie,”

But Soli could not prevent his head from shooting up every time there was a movement near the entrance to the reception hall. The other guests exchanged quizzical looks.
“Baap re,
Soli,” Sheroo Mistry said. “Who are you expecting to roll in through those gates? Queen Victoria? Or some secret Juliet?” She laughed at her own joke, her flabby, sleeveless arms flapping at her side. Soli scowled.

When he finally saw Rusi and Coomi walk in through the big iron gates, Soli heaved a sigh of relief. He intended to corner Rusi soon after he sat down, but then Jimmy walked Rusi back to get a drink and the opportunity was lost. Throughout the evening, he kept waiting for a chance to pull Rusi aside, but there never seemed to be a moment when the two of them were alone. Soli was beginning to think he would have to return home without having shown Rusi the letter.

Finally, he got his chance. As the remaining guests rose to dine in the third and final
paath,
Soli got Rusi’s attention.
“Bossie,
just one minute,” Soli said, casually pulling Rusi aside and letting the other guests walk past them. “Before we sit down to eat, something I have been wanting to share. Been troubling me for days now. Read this and tell me what I am to think about it.”

Rusi put on his reading glasses. It was a short, neatly typed letter.

Dear Soli:

It is with some trepidation I write. I know you still live at the same address because I checked with a mutual friend. It’s interesting—you have stayed at the same address all your life and I have moved so much. Strange how life has treated both of us so differently. Still, all circles must come to a close. Which is why I am writing my first letter to you in almost forty years.

My son, Moshe, and I are planning a trip to Bombay in the next few months. Hard to believe, but my son is now older than you and I were when my family lived in Bombay. Moshe is a serious young man and recently he has gotten it in his head that he wants to visit his mother’s birthplace. He wishes for me to accompany him. My husband, Nizzim, died last year of heart failure and I am ready for a vacation. Besides, it has been too many years since I have visited the city that I still think of with much affection.

But I’m rambling. The fact is that of all out old friends in Bombay, Soli, you are the one I would like to see the most. In fact, being in Bombay and not visiting you seems absurd. But that must be your decision, too, and if you would prefer not to disturb the sleep of the past years, I will understand.

If you do wish to get together, drop me a line. We can finalize plans.

Best wishes,

Mariam

Rusi looked up from the letter. Soli and he had not talked about Mariam in decades. There was a moment’s silence as he tried to figure out what response Soli wanted from him. “It’s a nice letter,” he said lamely.

Soli looked incredulous. “Nice? ‘Nice letter’?” he cried. “This letter is costing me four nights of sleep. As soon as I saw who it was from, I should have torn it up. Like a ghost, she is entering my life after all these years. I tell you, Rusi, a letter is like a
bhoot.
It enters your home silently, slipping in through the mail slot of a closed door. And then it haunts you and haunts you. Four nights, and I tell you,
bossie,
not a wink of sleep.”

“But Soli, why? You can ignore it if you don’t want to see Mariam again. Though it may be good to see her again.”

“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because this letter is like walking through a graveyard and opening all the graves. Do you know what’s inside these graves? Coffins filled with memories. Memories, all buried and sleeping for years and years. Then what happens? Some woman in Israel is deciding to open up some graves in Bombay. Next thing, all the memories that were so nice and quiet begin to rattle around like bones. And the noise of their rattling is keeping me awake all night.”

Rusi had never seen Soli this upset—except for one other time. That time, too, it was Mariam who had been responsible. “But Soli, surely you’re not in love with her after so many years?”

“Love? Who’s talking of love? I’m talking about hate. Is the lion at Victoria Gardens loving the zookeeper? Are the fish at Tata Aquarium loving their tanks? Why, then, should I be loving the woman who trapped me years ago? No, I am older and wiser now, Rusi. Then, I was still a
baccha,
compared to what I am knowing now.”

Rusi blinked. He suddenly saw another, younger face transposed over Soli’s old wrinkled one. It was the face of a young man with disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes. A face from that night, so many years ago. They had all been so damn young then, he even younger than Soli. Still, he had been able to help his friend that night. Involuntarily, he sighed. So much pain in this world, he thought. So much damn pain.

Soli must have seen the look in Rusi’s eyes, because he said, “Rusi, do you remember that time I came to you after Mariam had left me?”

Rusi nodded. As for Soli, he remembered the day as if it were yesterday.

After Mariam left, Soli turned from the window to face Jamshed and Mehroo Katpitia’s suddenly shabby-looking room. The evening shadows on the wall reminded him of the way in which Mariam’s hair had fallen across her tear-streaked face. A clock ticked tormentingly; flies buzzed around the untouched tandoori chicken; the fizz in the raspberry drink sank into impotence. Slowly, heavily, Soli made his way across the room and sat at the edge of Jamshed’s bed. It was still warm from where Mariam had sat on it minutes earlier. He could still smell her perfume in the air, so that if he shut his eyes, it would be easy to pretend that Mariam was still here, that the world still spun as reliably and faithfully on its axis as it had an hour earlier. That nothing had changed. But the cold, empty feeling in his stomach told him differently. Fear and grief rose like vomit in him as a dark loneliness fell over him. He felt completely and utterly alone in that room, as if he were the only living being on the planet. As though if he never left that room, nobody in the outside world would miss him. For a long moment, he thought of that outside world—a sunlit world of jokes and love and hope—with something approaching nostalgia, the way an amputee misses a leg he no longer has.

He felt as though, on a whim, some cruel God had revoked his citizenship from that golden world. That he had been deported to a land of frigid temperatures and long, dark evenings, spent endlessly alone. That alone could explain the manner in which he was shaking, rustling like a piece of paper in the wind. But then a great sob rose like a black bubble inside him, started deep in his stomach and floated upward to his chest, and then the sob was in his throat, so that when he tried to swallow, he could not; pain was lodged in his throat like a pebble. Now the dark bubble was in his mouth, a sob so big, it felt like an extra tongue, so big that it forced his mouth open and then he had to let it out, a black apparition pouring out of him, like the water bubbles that gather at the mouth of a drowning man. It was then that he knew that the shaking of his body had been a prelude to the bubbling grief that was now spilling like sour milk from him.

With amazement, he listened to the wild, guttural noises he was making—he had never suspected that he, Soli Contractor, neighborhood clown, was capable of so much emotion. And he had never known that human misery could so much resemble animal pain, that howling at the moon was not merely the domain of the animal kingdom.

But as his initial wonderment passed, Soli began to wonder whether these strange animal sounds would ever cease, how he would ever reenter the world of human beings. He felt a moment of panic at the thought of that world. He had left it only a few hours ago and yet it already felt distant and strange, like a country he had not visited since childhood. What citizen from the outside world could he reach out to? Which friend would reach into this cold room and pluck him out of the darkness? Jamshed and Mehroo Katpitia were in Udwada, members of the outer world.

Rusi, he thought suddenly. Soli felt a moment’s hesitation at the thought of confiding in someone so much younger than him, but his desperation overrode his hesitancy. Rusi was sensitive and mature for his years. Besides, Rusi had lost his father at a young age. He knew what it was like to watch love vanish from your life. Yes, Rusi would be much more sympathetic than someone like, say, Bomi. He could not risk that buffoon Bomi making one of his
koila
jokes at a time like this.

As he made his way toward Wadia Baug, Soli prayed he would not run into his mother. Creeping past his own flat, he reached the Bili-moria apartment at 9:00 P.M. His shiny round face was smudged with tears, his hair wild and uncombed, and his eyes red and unnaturally large, as if the tears had forced them wide open, had made him see things he did not particularly want to see. When Rusi answered the persistent rings of his doorbell, he saw a small hunched figure leaning against the wall, as if he hoped the wall would hold him up.

Rusi, who was nursing a cold, had fallen asleep listening to the radio. The persistent bell jarred his sleep and he sat up in bed for a full moment, with a strange icy feeling in his stomach, before he recognized the source of the sound. Rusi’s knees were weak as he slipped out of bed and into his slippers. Who the hell can it be? he wondered as he walked to the front door, trying to get there before his mother did.

It was a moment before he recognized Soli, and when he saw the tearful face, his stomach lurched, so that he thought the flu was making him nauseous. “Soli,” he cried.
“Su che?
What’s wrong, boss? Is your mamma sick?” And then, in a flash of blind panic, he remembered Jamshed and Mehroo were out of town. “Is it Jamshed? An accident?” he cried.

“No, no, nothing like that, Rusi. Please, sorry, I was not meaning to upset you. I was not knowing it is so late at night. Khorshed Auntie, my apologies. I just wanted to see Rusi.”

Khorshed Bilimoria had come to the front door to see what the commotion was about. She gazed at the distraught young man quietly. “No harm done. I was just reading in bed. Would you like to come in, Soli? I was saying to your mother only today that I haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”

Soli smiled in gratitude. “No thanks, Auntie. And Khorshed Auntie, please to not say anything to Mamma about this. But please, may I disturb Rusi a little more and go
get
a cup of tea somewhere? Just for a short time only? It’s urgent, Auntie. I am needing to talk with a friend,” he added, his eyes filling up again.

“Ja,”
Khorshed said to Rusi. “Go get dressed,
beta.
But you boys don’t walk the streets at night. I will give you money. Go take a taxi and find a restaurant that’s open. Get something to eat.
Dosas
or
sa-mosas
or sandwiches. Both of you have red noses, all congested. Get some good food. It’s my treat.”

But at the restaurant, the sandwiches remained untouched as Soli recounted the details of his five-month love affair with Mariam. He ended the story by telling Rusi about his breakup with her earlier in the day. Concern for Madam’s reputation made Soli skip over the part about their lovemaking.

“Israel? Why are the Rubins moving there?” asked a bewildered Rusi as he picked at a pimple.
“Arre,
those Arabs will make mincemeat out of all of them.”

“She said all the Jews were her people,” Soli said in a choking voice. “That Israel was where her home was.”

“How can her home be where she has never even been?” Rusi cried. This time, he was genuinely puzzled. “Mariam is like us—Bombay-born and -raised. Forget Israel—if I had a chance to go to America or England even, I would not go. And Israel is like a newborn
bachcha
— who knows if she will walk or fall? I tell you, Abe Uncle’s brains must be getting all scrambled.”

“Rusi, you are saying word for word what I said to Mariam. But she is acting so strange—nothing I can say except ‘Yes, madam. Yes, madam.’ She was not listening to me whatsoever. I think even if I had said, ‘I am killing myself, Mariam,’ she would still be talking about Israel and Germany and that bastard Hitler and I don’t know what all.” And Soli felt the horrible shaking start again, so that he set down the teaspoon he had been holding.