Bombay Time (6 page)

As the family prepared for the wedding, Dosa promised herself that she would never again be caught unawares by what people around her were saying or doing. The betrayal by her father crystallized her natural curiosity, so that soon after getting married, Dosa started prying, digging and unearthing all the hidden lives of the people in her new neighborhood. It was surprisingly easy. Most people long to talk about their lives, she found. Within weeks, she learned about who hated whom, which resident was in love with someone she shouldn’t love, which husband was abusive, and which mother-in-law was tyrannical. Bad marriages, alcoholic husbands, errant children, problems with domestic servants, chronic illnesses, failed business ventures, sibling rivalry—Dosa’s new neighbors brought the newcomer their litany of griefs, until she knew their lives as well as they did.

Over the years, she became the neighborhood’s midwife of information—gossip was born in her apartment and was carried like a baby into the neighborhood by the battalion of housewives who visited her daily. Mothers would come to her to complain bitterly about their uncaring children; wives would bring to her their daily offerings of their husbands’ infidelities or alcoholism or abuse. On rare occasions, the husbands themselves would march in unannounced to denounce their wives angrily and then appeal to Dosa to knock some sense into their silly, feminine heads. And Dosa herself would nab the errant children as they tried to creep past her apartment and lecture them how God was watching their every move. “Satan has been tied by God in thick-thick chains. But Satan is all day long working on these chains, making them thinner and thinner. Every time you are being rude to your Mummy, you know what’s happening? You are helping that Satan make his chains thinner. Now, once Satan is free, who do you think he’s going to come for, straightum-straight? For you.” It was hard to say whether the children were more afraid of Dosa’s twisted theology or of the sight of the short, pencil-thin woman with the long, clawlike fingers who peered at them with her beady eyes. But in either case, most of them went home after one of these encounters and sobbed their apologies to their wondrous mothers.

In this manner, Dosa found a way of realizing her lost ambition to be a doctor. Instead of fixing their broken bodies, she attempted to fix their broken lives. But Dosa never handed out enough medicine to actually cure them, just enough to keep them believing in her powers, to keep them coming back. Dosa’s credo was not familial reconciliation, but wifely dominance, and she trained her army of frustrated house-wives in that philosophy. Some of them took her message to heart, while others toyed with it, staying away from Dosa’s venomous presence during periods of reconciliation with their husbands and then dragging themselves back in her lair during times of marital discord. Always, she took them back.

Dosa herself was not exempt from the neighborhood gossip—in the early years, there was much speculation as to why Sorab’s young wife had not borne him a child. Few knew of the uneasy agreement Sorab and Dosa had reached on their wedding night. Few suspected that Sorab was being made to pay for the ugly betrayal Dosa had suffered at the hands of her father. In this, Dosa was lucky. Sorab was essentially a weak, mild-mannered youth, who was easily cowered by his strong-willed, fiercely intelligent wife.

Dosa allowed Sorab to inflict himself upon her on their wedding night. He was an uninspired, inexperienced lover, and she willed herself to stay still under his chaotic, frenzied thrashings; tolerated silently the sharp pain and the feeling of disgust that ran through her body when he entered her. She even allowed him to pull her close to him and stroke her hair as he whispered his apologies for having hurt her. She waited for his breathing to get back to normal, heard his thudding heart slow down to a normal rate. Then she went to the bathroom, shut the door, and vigorously washed herself. You will not get pregnant, she told herself fiercely. You will not.

When she got back, Sorab was curled up in sleep, looking like a warm, happy puppy. Steeling herself to this sight, Dosa sat on the edge of the bed and shook her husband awake. For a minute, Sorab looked at her blankly, as if he had no recognition of the fact that the woman on his bed would be the one he would share his life with. Then his face broke into a beaming smile.

But then he saw the look on Dosa’s face.

“Darling, what’s wrong?”

She looked at him steadily, her eyes steely as the knife she was about to plunge into him. “Sorab, I will only say this once, so listen carefully,” she began. “From this day forth, I will never have marital relations with you again. I will happily cook for you, keep your house for you, polish your shoes for you. But if you are so much as touching me with a fingernail, I will go to the fire temple and jump in the well there. I will be dead before the frogs in the well even know I’m there. This is my promise to you.”

He looked at her and for a moment he thought he was asleep and dreaming. “Dosa, I’m not knowing you well enough to know … If this is a joke, darling …”

“No joke.” And then, to make sure he understood, she repeated, “No joke. And another thing. I am not wanting anyone to know about this talk. Let them wonder why there are no children, let them do their
guss-puss,
I don’t care. If anyone asks, tell them to mind their own business.”

“But I want children,” he cried. “Always I’ve been wanting children.”

“Then you should have been a man enough to stand up to your
pappa
and told him you would find your own bride,” she cried fiercely. “Instead of ruining my life, you should have spoken to
him
about wanting children. I don’t want children, not now, not ever. All I wanted was to finish school and go to college. Instead, I have
this.”

“But … but I had no idea. Millions of people have arranged marriages, after all. And I am a young man. It is impossible, what you are suggesting, Dosa. I have my needs, if you understand what I’m saying. All these years, I waited for you to become a woman, waited patiently. I’m a twenty-two-year old man. What am I supposed to do with my normal needs?”

“Go see a prostitute, if you have to. But I’m telling you Sorab, if you ever touch me again, the next time you touch me, it will be my cold, dead body.”

She could not be reasoned with. For the first few months, Sorab pleaded with her, prayed to God for guidance and understanding, shed hot tears of bitterness and frustration, but it was to no avail. At times, his desire for her was so acute that he would leap out of bed in frustration and spend the night sleeping in the easy chair in the living room. Several times, he thought of leaving, but he knew that a divorce would break his mother’s heart. And part of him felt sympathetic to the bright, fiercely intelligent woman whose life he had unwittingly destroyed.

Finally, in the seventh month of their marriage, he went to Dosa, the usual torment in his eyes replaced by something that approached calm. “Dosa, sit down,” he said, motioning to a chair in the kitchen. “In all my nightmares, I never thought I was having to talk to my wife in this way. But you have left me no choice. Dosa, I am a man. If you will not fulfill your wifely duties then I am going to start visiting prostitution houses. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

For the first time in months, her face softened. She reached out and took his hand in hers, so that for one quick moment, his heart was alive again. “I do understand,” she said softly. “It was never my intention to deprive you of your normal urges. You have my blessings to visit as many prostitutes as you want to.”

He hit her then, hard, across the face, this man who had never gotten into a fistfight even as a young boy.
“Saali besharam.
I have married a demon, not a woman. You are lower than a common prostitute, talking to your husband like this. I should’ve let you jump into that well when you promised to. Should’ve pushed you in myself. At least then you could’ve inflicted your
dookh
on those poor frogs, instead of on me. What happened in November was not my wedding; it was my funeral.”

She sat before him motionless, willing her already-swollen face to remain calm, willing her hands not to touch the blood on her upper lip. She waited for the thundercloud of his dark fury to pass and for Sorab to turn back into the kind, apologetic man that he was. She didn’t have to wait long. His eyes widened at the sight of her swollen face as he emerged from the fog of his anger and his lower lip started to tremble. “Dosa. Darling. Oh, Dadaji, what have I done? Oh, Dosa, say something, please. Oh God. May my hands be chopped off for this. Oh, Dosa, forgive me, forgive me, please.”

He never bothered her after that. But by their second wedding anniversary, he was making discreet visits to prostitutes, although he never told a soul about these visits. Whenever his mother asked him about grandchildren, he found a way of laughing off the question. He grew used to seeing the curious, slightly pitying look in the eyes of his neighbors. Strangely, their secret bound him to Dosa, gave him a sense of connection with his wife, whom, paradoxically, he loved more the more she scorned him. Dosa, too, found a way of dealing with the unspoken question that she knew was on the minds of her friends and neighbors. Without ever saying so, she lightly hinted at Sorab’s “problem,” and she expertly made her husband the focus of their unspoken pity and derision and herself of sympathy and admiration. “Whatever God puts our way, we must accept,” she said stoically, while her audience nodded and tsk-tsked in sympathy.

Seven years passed in this way. Each day, after Sorab left for work, Dosa cleaned house and prepared dinner. Then, her wifely duties done, she spent a few hours reading about the medicinal benefits of herbs, a topic that had piqued her interest a few years earlier. Often, a neighbor would stop by to pick up some of Dosa’s home remedies for colds, fevers, burns, joint pain, alcoholism, infidelity. She never accepted money for her medicines; instead, the visitor had to repay her with nuggets of gossip and information. While she treated their physical ailment, she also counseled them on their career choices, parenting skills, and marital relations. Despite her youth, Dosa’s reputation grew. Every woman she helped sang her praises to others. Women like Yasmin Shroff, who was five years older than Dosa but respected the younger woman’s formidable will and intelligence.

“Go get a job,” Dosa told Yasmin after the woman showed up at Dosa’s apartment with bruises on her arm. “The more you are staying at home, the less he is respecting you and the more he’s beating you. You have a good mind. Go use it. And don’t worry about that
besharam
husband of yours. Leave him to me.”

She was good to her word. Dosa visited the Shroff residence three days later to meet with Gustav Shroff. After some small talk, she got to the point. But Gustav was adamant about his wife not working. He spoke of manly pride and honor and family name. Dosa sighed. Gustav was not making this easy. She stared at him appraisingly. “Gustav, listen quietly for a minute,” she said at last. There was a long pause. “Because you are my dear friend’s husband, I will say this once,” Dosa said softly. “Better if you heed my advice. … You don’t want to have to worry about every meal you eat at home, Gustav. A man’s home is his castle. He should not worry about something being in his food. You know what I’m saying? Better to let Yasmin find a job so she can be happy, too.”

Gustav blinked. “You are threatening me, Dosa?”

“Threatening you?
Baap re,
Gustav, I am just a poor ignorant housewife. I just spend my time mixing my herbs and all. Some say they help; some say they don’t. What do I know? And who am I to threaten you? No, as your well-wisher, I am just giving you some good advice. Follow, don’t follow—your choice.”

Before Dosa left that day, an agitated Gustav agreed to let his wife get a job and even offered to walk Dosa home. It was later that evening that he realized that the woman who had broken his will was a full twelve years younger than he was.

As Dosa grew confident that Sorab did not need her sexually, she warmed up to him in other ways. On weekends, she and Sorab went to the seaside and ate
bhelpuri
and
panipuri
for dinner at the beachfront booths. Or they caught a movie at the Bombay Film Society. They both loved movies, and on the way home, they excitedly discussed what they had seen. These were the times Sorab loved best, when his wife looked happy and alive. At such moments, he thought of her as a good friend, rather than as his wife, and forgot the great wound she had inflicted upon him. In his most forgiving moments, he even told himself that he had a better marriage than most of his friends, freed as it was from the tyrannies of wailing infants, sexual jealousies, petty grievances. Dosa kept a clean house, had dinner ready when he got home, loved going to movies with him, never fought with him about how he spent his time or his money. Besides, he was now getting sex on a regular basis. Two days a week, Sorab returned home late from work. He never explained where he had gone; she never asked.

A few weeks before their eighth wedding anniversary, Minoo Fram-rose died in his sleep. Sorab had just reached his office when he received the phone call; he turned around immediately and headed home. He found Dosa as he had never seen her before—distraught, hysterical, alternating between raging at her father and torn with remorse at the thought of seven years of bitterness and estrangement. Together, they attended the four days of ceremonies at the Tower of Silence. In those days, Sorab found his manhood. He was firm with Dosa when she refused to eat, he was gentle with her when she couldn’t sleep, and he held her tightly when her body racked with sobs as they carried Mi-noo’s body away to be lowered into the well where the vultures waited.

At home, she was exhausted, spent, as if grief had wrung her dry. “Go to bed,” he said gently. “I will bring you some toast and butter for dinner.”

But when he entered the bedroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Thank you for the last few days. What I would have done without you, I don’t even know.”