Bombay Time (7 page)

“Shh, shh, Dosa. Not even to mention. After all, you are my wife. It is my responsibility to take care of you. I just wish I could take your pain away, put it on my head instead.”

Her eyes filled with tears again. “How can you love me still, after how I have treated you? I have destroyed your manhood, turned you into a shrimp. Any other man would have left years ago. All my
khoonas
against my daddy, I took out on you. Oh, Sorab, I should’ve jumped into that well years ago.”

“Now, Dosa. No sense in crying over spilt milk. What use bringing up old ghosts? You are needing rest, darling. Just sleep now.”

But she was inconsolable, and he soon realized that what Dosa needed was not sleep, but absolution. So he let her talk and she told him everything: How she’d won a book as the first prize for reading in second grade. How she still had the blue ribbon her book had been wrapped in. How she had been the best student in her class, always. How, although she had told not a soul, she had always believed she would be the first female Parsi doctor in the city. How her father had always encouraged her to do well in school, which was what had made his betrayal even harder to take. How she had loved and worshiped her father and how it tore up her heart to think he’d traded her future away like a pair of shoes. How he had come into her room the night before her wedding and told her he was sorry and how he had finally left when she didn’t say a word. How, even in her darkest rage, she had understood why her father couldn’t go back on his word to Darius, admired him for it even, and how she’d hated herself for loving him still. How it killed her, even today, to hear of her sisters’ accomplishments and how she hated herself for resenting the very people she loved. How she had been scared of having children at a young age, how she had hated Sorab because she was terrified of his power to make her pregnant. How she’d seen him as the embodiment of the trick fate had played on her, how she’d vowed to make him pay for her father’s mistake. How she had tried to continue hating Sorab and how she had failed. How his kindness, his mild temper had won her over. How lonely she felt when he was at work and how she looked forward to his footsteps each evening. How her terror of having children had dissipated, now that she was older, and how her heart warmed at the thought of having an infant to love. How she was tired of fixing everybody else’s problems when her own marriage was a lie. How she, yes, how she wanted love, needed it, needed to be able to give it and receive it. How she was terrified that she was too late, that she had chased love out of Sorab’s heart, just as she had chased him into the arms of strange women. How wrong she had been to punish him for another’s mistake, how terribly, horribly wrong, and how she regretted it now.

He looked at her with incredulity, afraid of trusting what he was hearing. Some ancient instinct told him that this was not the time for words, and so he took her in his arms. For a moment, she stiffened, as if by habit, and then he could feel the slow thawing of her frozen heart. After years of sleeping with women he did not care to hold a second longer than necessary, Sorab Popat held on to his tiny, fierce, willful wife like a man clinging to a lifeline.

Zubin was born a year later. He was a cheerful boy with his father’s easy, mild temperament and his mother’s intelligence. Dosa was a zealous mother and doted over her only child with a ferocity and protectiveness that amazed and exasperated her husband. Zubin was not allowed to join the other neighborhood kids when they played on the sidewalk, because Dosa was terrified that her little boy would get struck by a car or, at the very least, stumble and bruise his knee. She took every cut or bruise or fever the boy ever suffered as a reflection of her poor mothering. When Zubin came down with the inevitable illnesses of childhood, Dosa would sit up with her ailing child all night long, covering him with blankets, opening and closing windows, putting cold rags dipped in Tata’s eau de cologne on his fevered brow. It was as if the dark-haired boy with the ready smile had unlocked all the love that Dosa had kept hidden in her heart for seven long years. And strangely, there was enough love left over to include Sorab, so that some days, Sorab found it hard to remember the drought years. As the years rolled by, he thought of the time spent visiting prostitutes while his young wife slept virginlike in their bed, with the unreal air of a man struggling hard to remember a long-forgotten dream.

Once, on one of the rare evenings that they went to dinner without Zubin, Sorab decided to take a shortcut through the red-light district. As they rode down the street where Sorab used to visit his favorite prostitute, he slowed down his scooter ever so slightly to glance at the third-floor apartment he had visited for so many years. He thought he’d barely turned his head to sneak a look, but Dosa, eagle-eyed as ever, noticed.

“Someone you are knowing lives here?”

“Oh no, nobody. I mean, just someone from, you know …”

“I see.”

Later that night in bed, Sorab opened his eyes to find Dosa peering closely at his face.

“So, do you ever miss them, miss her?”

It took him a minute to understand who she was referring to. “Miss them? Not for an hour, not for a minute. Why should I? My whole world is right here, under this very roof.”

“Sure?”

He had never seen her like this, and his heart swelled with tenderness and pity. “Dosa, my Dosa. You are my wife as well as my life. The others were … paper. Understand? Paper. Whereas you are velvet—rich, heavy, dark. Something a man can hold in his hand and
feel
satisfied with.”

Two days before Zubin’s tenth birthday, Sorab decided to stop at Best Cake Shop to buy for his son and wife the chocolate eclairs they both loved so much. Since Zubin’s birth, it had become a ritual that every payday, Sorab would come home with a small surprise for his family. Before he left the shop, Sorab placed an order for Zubin’s birthday party. “Make sure it’s freshum-fresh,” he instructed the clerk. “I want the cake to melt in my son’s mouth. See you day after tomorrow.”

It was dark when he left the shop, and Sorab was filled with a longing to get home quickly to be with his wife and child. He decided to take a different route home. Balancing the small cake box on the front of his scooter, he cut in front of a motorist, who panicked and stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. It was a fatal mistake. The car hit the small scooter with an impact that lifted Sorab’s slight body like a kite and threw him over two lanes of traffic. Passersby who saw the broken, twisted body instinctively prayed for his death. Two minutes later, their prayers were granted. Sorab’s eyes fluttered for a moment, his mouth shaped into a wordless O, and then he was dead. Other witnesses shooed away the street urchins who had crawled under the flattened scooter in hopes of rescuing the enticing cake box.

Dosa refused to believe the news when it reached her. She could not accept that her life had taken yet another unexpected turn and that this time there was no ready target to blame for yet another betrayal, yet another delinquent promise. All the bitterness that Sorab’s steadfast love and decency had drained from Dosa’s heart now came pouring back, as did Dosa’s sense of persecution, of injustice. She shocked her mother by reciting the names of all the people she wished had died in her Sorab’s place. Her old mother, already guilt-ridden from a past mistake, tried desperately to help her bereaved daughter cope with this latest twist of fate, but Dosa was inconsolable. All three of her sisters rallied around her, including the youngest, Banu, who was in law school, and estranged from the eldest sister, who never let Banu forget that she was standing on the ashes of Dosa’s dreams. Two years prior to Sorab’s death, Banu had had it out with this eldest sister, whose grief had followed her like a shadow throughout her life. Dosa and Sorab had invited the entire family over to dinner, and, as was her habit, Dosa had made some barb about the “cushy” life her younger siblings led. But this time, Banu did not remain silent.
“Bas,
Dosa, enough is enough. Daddy’s dead; you are having a sweet little son and a good husband. Still it’s not enough. What happened to you is ancient history.
Baap re,
at this rate, the Hindus and Muslims will be friends before you forgive and forget. The rest of the family can keep saying, ‘Poor Dosa,’ but personally, I’m sick and tired of your
nakhras
and your caustic remarks. Don’t ever invite me to your house again, because I won’t be coming.”

Seeing Banu at her husband’s funeral made grief rise like bile in Dosa. She was on the verge of lashing out, of somehow blaming Sorab’s death on Banu, but Shenaz Framrose restrained her.
“Deekra,
don’t defile the memory of your saintly husband,” she murmured. “This is a time for family to be together. You are suffering enough
dookh.
No need to spread it further.”

After Sorab’s death, Dosa became obsessed with her son. “You are now my son and my sun, the only light in my life,” she would say to the bewildered boy, who was torn between wishing to protect his mother and wanting to run from her omnipresence.

Until Sorab’s death, Dosa had showered her son with books, so that some of Zubin’s earliest memories were of reading in the living room while the cries of the neighborhood children playing outdoors at dusk wafted in through his window. If he felt a pang of loneliness then, the novels and textbooks that he read more than compensated for it. Zubin had turned into a bookish, cautious young boy, more at home in a library or classroom than on a cricket field.

But now, Dosa wanted to talk to her son in the evenings, rather than have him bury his nose in a book. All day long, while Zubin was at school, Dosa would scour the neighborhood for nuggets of gossip, which she would then hoard and offer to Zubin at the end of the day. If the boy showed his boredom at the comings and goings of the adults around him, Dosa would chide him. “Just like the rest of them you’re becoming, Zubin,” she would say. “Not a care for your poor widowed mother.” It was both Dosa’s fortune and ill fortune that between Sorab’s pension and investments and Darius Popat’s generosity, she did not have to work for a living. Darius Popat had announced at his son’s funeral that he would die before he would let his daughter-in-law
get
a job. Dosa was happy with that. After years of relative quiet, her apartment once again hummed with the sound of gossiping visitors. While Zubin was away at school, Dosa sat on her couch like royalty and made her pronouncements while her visitors brought her the juiciest tidbits of information.

A year after Sorab’s death, Dosa found Zubin in the kitchen, taking apart a dead cockroach, a look of fierce concentration on his face. “My goodness, Zubin. What are you doing, looking like a murderer? Drop that dirty thing and go wash your hands,
fatta-faat.”

“Is okay, Mamma,” the boy said importantly. “I’m just practicing for my biology class. If I’m going to be a brilliant doctor, my teacher, Mr. Pinto, says I have to get over my
soog
and be ready to cut up people and all. But first, I start with insects.”

This was the first Dosa had heard about Zubin’s desire to be a doctor. The boy’s words stirred up the envy that lived right below the surface of Dosa’s skin. And on the heels of that envy came fear. Fear that her son would burn with the same ambition she had and then get destroyed by the fire of that ambition when it was snuffed out, as Dosa superstitiously believed it invariably would be. The envy alone, she would have been able to conquer, because Dosa genuinely loved her little boy. But the combination of fear and envy was toxic. She convinced herself that Zubin was about to make the same mistake she had, that his dreams were too large for his puny, middle-class life to hold. Her heart ached for her son, as if the disappointments she believed awaited him had already occurred.

In a panic, Dosa called Yasmin Shroff at work. Yasmin was now a secretary at Tata Industries and worldly in a way that Dosa admired. “Yasmin? Dosamai here. Sorry to disturb you at work, but I am having a problem. No, no, everybody is fine. It’s just that—Zubin told me today he is wanting to be a doctor.”

Yasmin sounded bewildered. “That’s great, Dosa. But what about your problem?”

Dosa was impatient. “But that is the problem, stupid. At one time, I also was wanting to be a doctor. But my dear departed father had other ideas. Instead, I married Sorab. I don’t want my Zubin to go through the same disappointment that I did.”

“Well, Dosamai, it’s not as if you will marry Zubin off against his wishes. Also, children want to be different things at different ages. But if Zubin is serious, I think it would be so wonderful if he could actually live out your dream. In a way, Zubin could keep your dream alive. See what I mean?”

Dosa hung up from the conversation angry at herself for having called Yasmin. “That stupid Yasmin,” she said out loud. “Has scrambled eggs for brains. Thinks because she works for Tata, she is as smart as Mr. Tata himself. Stupid fool.”

Dosa did not want to realize her own aborted dreams through Zubin’s achievements. Rather, she saw her role as protecting Zubin from future heartbreak. And if that meant she had to be the one to break his heart now, she was willing to pay the price. That evening, for the first time, she pushed Zubin outdoors to play cricket with the other neighborhood kids. “Enough of this mugging and studying. A real bookworm you are becoming. Sitting home all day and tearing apart poor little cockroaches. How you think the baby cockroaches’ mummies and daddies must be feeling?”

Zubin, who had grown up hearing his mother curse daily the roaches that infested their kitchen, stared at his mother openmouthed. He had never so much as owned a cricket bat and had no idea what he would do among the tough, tanned, muscled neighborhood kids he was now being encouraged to socialize with. He put his mom’s strange behavior down to her ongoing grief at his father’s death.

From then on, Dosa embarked on a plan to save Zubin from his own intelligence. In a total reversal of her former behavior, she now encouraged him to do less homework. She extolled the virtues of humility, praised the holiness of small things. Why, working as a clerk with other Parsis at the Central Bank of India was as good a job as any other. A steady paycheck, good benefits, job security, long lunch breaks. She took to scanning the newspapers for any accounts of doctors who had killed patients through negligence, conducted weird experiments on them, stabbed their wives, or been involved in scandals. Any such nugget, she placed where Zubin would be sure to see it.