Bombay Time (9 page)

That comment triggered a common memory.
“Ae,
remember when Jimmy first proposed to you, Zarin?” asked Soli Contractor. Except for Mehernosh, the rest of them laughed at the memory.

The whole gang had piled into Rusi’s car and gone to Khandala for the weekend. Zarin and the other girls had lied to their parents and told them they were going on an all-girls picnic. On their first day there, inspired by the beautiful red hills of Khandala, Jimmy proposed to Zarin. Confident that she would accept, he waited until all of them had finished lunching on the hotel’s veranda and then dramatically went down on one knee.

“Ae,
Jimmy, what happened? You broke your knee, or what? Get up from that dirty floor,” someone had said.

A look of disdain came over Jimmy’s face. “Stupid donkey,” he told the offender.
“Gadhera.
Can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m proposing marriage.”

At the word
marriage
conversation at the table came to a halt. Somebody let out a nervous giggle, but the offender was immediately shushed into silence by the rest. Zarin looked mortified.

Jimmy turned to Zarin. “Zarin darling. Love of my life, apple of my eye. I humbly beg you to make me the happiest man on earth by marrying me. If you say, ‘I do,’ I promise to love and cherish you till … till … the cows come home,” Jimmy finished lamely. It was a surprisingly inarticulate speech for a lawyer.

There was a snicker at the table. Jimmy did not dare meet anybody’s eye. Zarin felt, rather than saw, the smirks and shuffling of the people around her. She could not imagine what had possessed Jimmy to propose to her in such a public way. For a moment, she thought he was pulling her leg. But Jimmy’s raised, glistening face, his flared nostrils, and his trembling body told her this was no joke.

With a start, Zarin realized they were all waiting for her to say something. More than anything, she wanted to cut the tension that was building. “Okay, Jimmy, I’ll marry you. On one condition,” she added quickly. “You see that little pig running around in the court-yard? You catch that little
dookar
and bring him to me. If you succeed, I’ll marry you.”

Slowly, Jimmy got to his feet. He stared at Zarin, aghast, while the others exploded in hoots of laughter. Zarin obviously has a well-concealed streak of meanness in her, Jimmy thought. Here she was, treating a man with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court someday as if he were a common coolie.

Bomi Mistry leaned over the table to congratulate Zarin. “Well said, Zarin, well said,” he cried.

“Why are you still standing here, Jimmy?” asked another boy, laughing. “Your fat little piggy is waiting for you.”

“Ae,
if Zarin won’t marry you, maybe the pig will,” Sheroo hooted.

Jimmy caught Rusi’s sympathetic gaze, but Rusi turned away in embarrassment. A red-faced Jimmy turned to Zarin. “Consider your wish to be my command,” he said in a stiff, pinched voice. He stepped off the veranda and into the courtyard. He looked evaluatingly at the resting pig for a second and decided that a swift offense would be his best strategy. When the pig saw the tall, intent-looking youth rushing straight toward him, he gave a squeal of surprise and moved hastily away, shaking his behind as he ran. Jimmy gnashed his teeth. The damn thing moved fast for something that looked like a coffee table on wheels. He tried again. And failed. Tried again. Lunged toward it. But he stumbled and the pig moved away again. But this time, it gave a grunt of annoyance rather than a squeal of surprise. Angry at being disturbed from his afternoon siesta, the pig rushed toward Jimmy, charging like a miniature bull.

Perspiration rolled down Jimmy’s face. He’d have to marry Zarin from a hospital bed if that monster got hold of him. Abandoning all pride, he lifted his baggy pants from the waist and ran for the safety of the veranda. The pig followed at his heels, then stopped a few feet before the veranda, frightened by the noise coming from it.

“C’mon, Jimmy, run,” his friends cried. “Watch out. That little
soovar
looks really mean.”

At the veranda, Jimmy had a few minutes to consider whether he really wanted to marryZarin after all. Any woman with such a cruel sense of humor was dangerous. But then he saw the bemused way in which she was looking at him, and his pride stirred. If, for centuries, men had hunted wild animals to feed their families, surely he could capture a stupid pig for Zarin.

“Where you going, Jimmy?” the people on the veranda asked in wonder.

“You all go in. I won’t stop until I catch that
madaarchot
pig.”

All that afternoon, Jimmy chased that pig. When he got tired and took a break, the pig chased him. At one point, he actually got his hands around the pig’s rump. But the animal felt so fat and greasy that Jimmy loosened his grip in a gesture of involuntary recoil.

For an hour or so, the others sat watching the show, until one by one they left to take a nap. Each time someone left, they’d say,
“Chal ne,
Jimmy. Enough now. Just come in,
yaar.”
But it was no use. He was determined not to quit. Besides, Zarin never once asked him to quit, Jimmy observed. Rather, she gave him an intense, glistening look that made Jimmy go weak in the knees. It was a look of pure sexual desire. He wondered if the others noticed. But soon, there was no one left on the veranda to watch Jimmy’s strange courtship of Zarin.

Later, Rusi offered to take the others for a drive. They urged Jimmy to accompany them, but he only looked at Zarin, a wild, primitive expression on his face. Zarin looked back at him coolly. Rusi got the distinct impression that if Zarin had at that moment asked him to quit, he would have. But Zarin said nothing, and Jimmy returned to his task.

When they finally got back at 7:30
P.M.,
a strange sight greeted them. Jimmy was stretched out on the long wooden bench on the veranda, his face streaked with dirt and gray with fatigue. His crumpled white shirt was as brown as the earth and hung over his torn pants. Jimmy was fast asleep and breathing so hard that even their start of surprise did not awaken him.

The reason for their cry of surprise was the pig. He lay on the first step of the veranda, a few feet away from his would-be captor. Like Jimmy’s, the pig’s face was streaked with dirt. Like Jimmy, he, too, was fast asleep.

Zarin went up to the sleeping man and kissed his forehead. “Wake up, my Oxford-returned
bevakoof.
You are a crazy man, but pig or no pig, I’ll marry you.”

Mehernosh Kanga was laughing as heartily as the old men and women surrounding him. “Wow, that was quite a narrow escape I had,” he said. “If Mummy hadn’t taken pity on Dad, I wouldn’t be here today.”

“Hats off to your mummy,” Coomi Bilimoria said. “She knew how to handle your daddy from the start.” Everybody in the crowd picked up on the implied dig at Rusi.

Looking at Rusi’s flushed face, Jimmy felt a rush of pity. And amazement at his good fortune. In the old days, all the bets were on Rusi to be Wadia Baug’s most successful resident someday. When Jimmy and the other neighborhood boys were spending endless hours standing at street corners, Rusi was already reading books on how to start a small business. While Jimmy couldn’t remember whether he had even bathed that day, Rusi was begging his mother to buy him a business suit. While Jimmy was lost, bitter, and trying to decide what to do about the chip on his shoulder, Rusi was single-minded, focused, and determined to succeed by his own efforts. When they were younger, Jimmy had felt that he and Rusi were in some kind of invisible race, and now he wondered if Rusi had felt that way, too. Of course, Jimmy had stopped thinking that years ago, after he had left his opponent in the dust. Jimmy remembered a conversation with Rusi a few days before he left for Oxford. “You go and study everything that you can,
bossie.
By the time you come back, who knows? If my business is successful,
Inshallah,
maybe you won’t need too many clients other than me. We could even form some kind of a partnership, maybe.” Jimmy had wanted to laugh at the thought of an Oxford-trained lawyer being on exclusive retainer to a small businessman, but the look on Rusi’s face stopped him. He realized that Rusi was not being funny.

Still, even after he’d returned from Oxford, it was far from clear that Jimmy would be the more successful of the two. Rusi, after all, had his paper factory by then. Both their lives had taken sharp, divergent turns. Jimmy had attended one of the most distinguished universities in the world. Rusi, on the other hand, had refused to go to college because he was much too eager to jump-start his destiny.

Now, Jimmy wondered if Rusi’s life would have been different if he’d had a mentor. Someone who could have helped him realize what was possible for a middle-class Parsi boy and what was not. Instead of looking to multimillionaires like the Tatas and Birlas for inspiration, perhaps Rusi should have lowered his sights a bit, Jimmy thought. He had always believed that Rusi had made a mistake by not going to college or working for someone else before he launched his own business. All the things that the rest of the gang had learned in college or at someone else’s expense, Rusi had had to learn the hard way. Jimmy remembered the first time he had an inkling that Rusi’s business was in trouble. Rusi had approached him to ask him a simple accounting question.
“Saala,
this is the kind of thing that a professional would know like the back of his hand,” Jimmy said. “Why don’t you hire someone to do the books? I can get you some good names.” He was unprepared for the sheepish look that crossed Rusi’s face. “Jimmy, to be honest, I don’t even know what I should know and what I’m expected not to know. I’m so afraid an accountant will swindle me if he knows how ignorant I am about financial matters. Besides, who has the money to hire someone like that? No, I’m just going to have to teach myself this, like everything else.”

Perhaps if Rusi’s father had lived, it would have all turned out differently, Jimmy now thought. He would have insisted that Rusi go to college. And with his bank experience, he could have guided his son in the business. After all, Khorshed Auntie could not be expected to have played both roles. She adored her only son too much to deny him anything. Jimmy felt a rush of compassion toward his neighbor, although he knew that Rusi believed that Jimmy had usurped his destiny, that Jimmy was somehow living Rusi’s life. Don’t ask how Jimmy knew that. He just picked up some dissonance, some envy, on the finely tuned radar developed by the very successful. Still, Jimmy had a reservoir of good feeling for Rusi. After all, it was Rusi’s mamma who had first befriended the little orphan boy. Rusi had a birthday party a month after Jimmy arrived at Wadia Baug, and Khor-shed Bilimoria had personally come to Hormazd’s flat to invite the building’s newest resident. Jimmy had been painfully shy during that meeting, speaking only in monosyllables, but Khorshed had bribed him with gifts of marbles and a spinning top. Before she left, she made him promise that he would attend the gathering. And he was glad he went. It was at Rusi’s birthday party that Jimmy had begun to make the friendships that had lasted a lifetime.

Remembering Coomi’s snide comment from a moment ago, Jimmy felt a renewed sense of gratitude toward Zarin. I’ve had two great people in my life, Jimmy thought. Zarin and Cyrus Engineer. At the thought of Cyrus, Jimmy’s probing eyes searched the crowd to look for Cyrus’s widow, Tehmi. He was surprised but glad that the reclusive Tehmi had accepted their invitation to Mehernosh’s wedding. Perhaps this event would draw Tehmi out of her shell, much as Cyrus had once drawn him out of his. Cyrus had cracked open the shell that covered a sullen, moody boy. Jimmy could count on one hand the number of actual conversations he had had with Cyrus. But as a teen-ager, Jimmy observed how infectious Cyrus’s enthusiasm and zest for life was. He noticed how people lighted up around Cyrus, and it made him want to be like the older boy. What a lawyer Cyrus would have made, Jimmy now thought. It was Cyrus who had persuaded Jimmy not to quit school, and he had been helpless against Cyrus’s charm offensive. And once Jimmy made the decision not to quit, a funny thing happened. He realized that he really enjoyed learning. And that he enjoyed succeeding, being on the top of every list.

But God, it hadn’t been easy. Losing his parents like that. More than three hundred passengers died in that train crash, but all he could do was feel the enormity of his own loss. He could still recall the screams of his ayah when the policeman came to the door with the news. And the first time he heard someone use the word
orphan
and realized with a thud that they were talking about
him.
And those awful three months when he was moved from the home of one relative to another, like a parcel.
“Dhobi ka kutta na ghar ka na ghaat ka,”
one of his older cousins said about him. “The washerman’s dog belongs neither in the house nor outside.” Which was pretty much how he felt. Uprooted. Even after Hormazd Uncle brought him to Wadia Baug, it wasn’t easy. Grief had crystallized into anger by then. Hormazd was a bachelor and had no experience with children, let alone an angry, brooding nine-year-old nephew whom he barely knew. You had to give Hormazd credit for trying, but God, the poor man was so out of his element. While his uncle was at work, Jimmy spent the day on the streets. When the other Wadia Baug boys refused to skip school, he mocked them and then hung out with the street kids. The boy who had grown up in a genteel, solidly middle-class home in Hyderabad now came home bloodied from yet another street fight. Hormazd was beside himself, threatening to beat Jimmy, threatening to turn him out of the house. But he was constrained by the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen his nephew. And whatever his flaws, Hormazd provided Jimmy with the stability that the boy had so badly needed. No matter how far Jimmy wandered, he always had a home to return to.

During his visits to America, Jimmy was always struck by the proliferation of therapists. “A child falls on a playground in America and the parents rush her first to her therapist, then to her lawyer, and last to her doctor,” he often joked. But he was also envious. There had been no counseling or any other help for him when he was growing up. He had wasted precious years acting out his anger on the streets, punishing others for his parents’ death. No adult ever sat him down and asked him to tell them how he felt. Instead, they lectured him on how he ought to be feeling and behaving. “Be a good boy now, Jimmy,” they said. “Poor Hormazd has been very good to you. Don’t make him regret his kindness.” He’d felt a murderous rage then, felt like spitting on their scrubbed, righteous faces, felt like annihilating them. Instead, he rushed back out on the street and tried to annihilate himself. Cyrus had entered his life at exactly the right time. Saved him from self-annihilation. Cyrus, too, had never talked to him about his feelings. But he could tell that Cyrus knew how he felt. While the adults seemed oblivious to the fact that rage can be as comforting as a blanket, Cyrus understood. He never tried to talk Jimmy out of his anger. He just urged him to rechannel it, use it to his advantage.