Dahanu Road: A novel (16 page)

“Seth, I know what you want,” she said. “But I am married.”

Her voice sounded unusual in the car. Zairos had only heard her speak amidst trees and water, birds and soil. All along she had been supported by nature, or perhaps fooled into thinking that she had a voice to begin with.

“It’s not like that,” said Zairos.

“I can see it in your eyes, seth.”

“What is your husband’s name?”

“Laxman.”

They stayed there and watched a buffalo enter the stream— the rip of its black muscles, its horns capable of piercing a bird in the stomach and yanking out the innards.

Zairos had driven so far only to be told her husband’s name. She kept rubbing her right ankle with the sole of her left foot, the dirt falling onto the black rubber mat.

There was nothing to do except put the car into gear. The buffalo turned towards them, disturbed by the gnashing of
wheels against the earth. The sudden movement of the car startled Kusum as well, but she said nothing.

When Zairos got close to home, a train pulled up at the station, and young boys sold mineral water from the train tracks. Someone threw a newspaper out of the train window. Passengers were packed close together, one collective mass of sweat, inhaling-exhaling at the same time. The sight was suffocating. The roof of the train was the only spot that offered solace.

When the car stopped outside his grandfather’s bungalow, Kusum got out without saying a word. Zairos felt deflated. Once again, he had been impulsive, weakened by the scent of Nouruz roses and jasmine. Kusum shut the door but did not walk away. She bent down and looked at Zairos through the open window.

“Seth,” she said. “Meet me here in the night.”

She walked away from him, the sweat on her exposed back making her skin glimmer, helping Zairos realize that his hunger for her was obvious. She saw it, she called it, and the muscles of her back were strong and inviting. And then slowly whip marks started to appear, one by one, and he felt ashamed that he wanted to lick that same back, because he would be licking her wounds, wounds that his own people had inflicted, and for now all he could do was wait for night.

If Anna’s chai stall catered to the stomach, the Big Boss Hair Salon catered to the head. The belly taken care of by Anna’s vada-pavs, nothing could help Zairos more right now, as he waited for evening to turn into night, than a head massage.

Big Boss was a unisex hair salon, but Zairos had never seen a single woman there. It was a small shop in Katy Nagar, one of the first apartment complexes to go up in Dahanu, in the early eighties. The salon had yellow walls—the pale yellow of teeth—that gave off a smell like morning breath. A poster on the wall displayed photos of male and female hair models along with a list of the different types of haircuts and beauty treatments available. There was the Clean Shave, the Semi-Shave, the After-Perm, the Face Mask, the Peel Off, the Body Massage, the Face Massage, the Bob Cut, and the Diana Cut.

Hosi sat in a blue swivel chair outside the salon. Sponge oozed out of its seat in abundance. Bumble, his curly hair rendered rock hard by the high speeds on his BMW, was getting a haircut from Sharmaji, the owner of the salon, with eyeglasses so large they could be magnifying glasses. Sharmaji was using a blade to shave the back of Bumble’s neck. Bumble’s friend Murtaza was present too. He was angry with his wife because she had failed to tell him that she had been wearing coloured contact lenses throughout their courtship. Upon discovering on his wedding night only two days ago that his wife’s eyes were not blue, the gangly Murtaza had wandered around looking shell-shocked.

Sharmaji’s son, a teenaged boy named Paresh with one earring and torn jeans, first spread a thick layer of Parachute coconut oil on his hands and then rubbed it into Zairos’ scalp. “Your scalp is too dry,” he said. Zairos knew the boy was right because he could feel his head sucking up all the coconut oil and thirsting for more. Then Paresh started his magic. He turned his fingers into claws and massaged Zairos’ head with the speed of a whirring fan. His massage was gentle at first, he was telling
the muscles in Zairos’ head to wake up from their slumber, and once they were up he was the conductor of an opera, powerful and glorious. Zairos’ head sang and sang, images came and went. Then his body went into a slump, and he kept slumping in his chair and Paresh kept pulling his neck up without ever disturbing that feeling of lazy magnificence.

In the tranquility of the massage, he heard Kusum’s voice, “Meet me here in the night,” and it excited him.

“What are you dreaming about?” asked Bumble.

“Nothing,” said Zairos.

“Why don’t you get a haircut? It’s too long. Not manly, boss.”

“I like it long.”

“You like looking like a woman?” asked Hosi. “Sharmaji, give him the Diana Cut.”

Hosi dug his finger into a hole in the seat of the chair and came out with sponge. Bumble looked in the mirror and dusted the white powder off the back of his neck. Murtaza stared in the mirror too, but he was talking to himself, perhaps questioning his decision to marry a woman who had not revealed the true colour of her eyes.

“I’m selling my farm,” said Hosi. “I’m done with farming. I’ve had it.”

“With what?” asked Zairos.

“It’s the end, boss. That chimney is killing our farms.”

He was talking about the thermal power plant that supplied electricity to Bombay, its chimney looming over the heads of all farm owners like a 900-foot curse. The chickoo, which used to be an all-season fruit, had become moody. On some winter mornings, instead of fresh dew, leaves were covered with black ash. The fruit vendors in Bombay were complaining that the
chickoos had pin-sized holes in them and no one wanted to buy fruit that had already been feasted upon by worms.

“I’m barely breaking even,” said Hosi. “I’d prefer to put the money in a bank. It’s a safer bet.”

“You mean horses are safer,” said Bumble.

“Either the trees will kill me or the horses will kill me,” said Hosi. “Rather be killed by something I love.”

At the mention of love, high up in a tree, egrets nuzzled their beaks into the soft white of their skin, cleaning their feathers, preparing themselves for breeding. They glowed like evening moons trapped among the leaves. When the egrets started chattering, no other sound could be heard, such was their ardour.

Slowly, dusk began to cast its veil on the Dahanu sky. The lights of Hotel Sagar came on, a gaudy necklace of green and red on crumbling walls. Housewives stepped out of Video King with rentals in their hands, not satisfied with the soap operas of their own lives. A young boy delivered chai in small steel cups to the shop owners in Katy Nagar, and a cyclist made his way up the bridge with a bagful of leather slippers on the carrier. A vendor approached the salon, his whole shop slung around his body—combs, brushes, hand mirrors, bindis, mousetraps, matches, and rubber balloons—combinations that made no sense at all. Resigned to fate, he carried whatever his body could support.

Zairos felt frozen in a similar manner. Dusk was the worst time to be alive in Dahanu. He could not understand his fear of dusk. The air became cooler and lights came on in two-storeyed apartment buildings, a sudden snap, a reminder that the sun had left.

Zairos could sense a sound rising above the celebration of the egrets, a heavy growl, a meanness, and he felt it was the thermal power plant breathing, eating coal and throwing up smoke, its ash covering the chickoo trees like a cloth placed over a corpse.

As fog filled the sky and smothered the date palm trees, Kusum tended to a sick cow. It had not been eating for three days, and when she opened its mouth, it was full of sores. Molasses was all the cow could eat until the sores healed.

Inside her hut, a small bulb spread its light apologetically.

Her husband had hooked a piece of tar around the wire of a nearby electric pole and had attached the other end to the bulb. A neighbour of hers ran a black-and-white television in this manner, but it came at a cost. One of her sons had been electrocuted while trying to steal a connection.

She saw Laxman approach, and was glad that the food was ready.

He had white dust all over his face from the hours spent digging up roads and carrying stones in a metal container on his head. On some days, he walked with the swagger of a foreman, while on others he trudged along in search of better days. On some days, he was a decent man. He had the straightforward eyes of a man who had a wife and a hut, a cow, some utensils, a clothesline, a watch, shorts, long pants, sandals, vests, and two green shirts.

He even made her laugh by telling her folk tales that always included rain, a python, and a baby. Sometimes he
stood up and enacted the whole thing for her. He would become the rain, the python, the baby, the trees, the soil, the sky, everything, and that is what she thought a man should be, everything.

It was her father who had chosen Laxman for her.

He came home one day and said to her, “You will be married soon.”

She was only twelve. She was about to ask why, but her father provided the answer: “He is giving us two goats.”

She looked at her mother, but all her mother said was, “It is time.”

At her first meeting with Laxman, she had clung to her mother’s leg. She held on to that leg with all her might and begged her mother to take her home. Slowly, the boy came towards her and angled his head this way and that way to take a look at her face.

That very day, the boy took her home.

He looked at her closely, followed her every move, as though she was something valuable. Kusum kept hoping her father would come and fetch her. This boy had torn her away from her mother’s leg, and her mother had allowed him to.

It was unlike the pain she had felt when she fell down, or the time she had banged her head against the earthen pot.

So when the boy was not looking, she ran.

She found a bush and hid there all night. From now on, she would never cling to her mother’s leg again. All she heard that night, apart from the insects and creatures whose bush it was, were her father’s words, “He is giving us two goats.”

In the morning, she came out of the bush. She had to—she was pulled out by the boy himself. He slapped her hard, his
hand hit her ear, and there was a deep ringing, like once when she had stood outside a landlord’s house with her father and a steel vessel had fallen to the floor.

He took her home and stared at her again.

This time he did not let her out of his sight. He was older and stronger than her; he was not a boy, he was a man.

He told her to stop shaking. So she remained very still.

He was breathing like a boar in the wild, the ones her father had taught her to be so careful of.

After he was done, he pushed himself off her.

She had started crying by then and he did not know how to calm her down, so he gave her a green comb. Then another one, black. Finally, an orange comb. One by one, he put three combs in her hand. When her tears still did not stop, he took one comb from her hand, the orange one, and started to comb her hair.

That was many years ago.

Laxman had never combed her hair since then.

Now, as he approached the hut, she saw the strength in his limbs. Although thin, they were sinewy, like a jungle cat’s, and energetic veins lined his biceps.

“I heard you spoke to the council chairman,” he said to her. “Again.”

When he was drunk, he lost his sense of distance. He came too close to her, his lips touched her ear when he spoke. “Yes,” she said.

It was always better to answer him. The thing that made Laxman livid was no answer.

“The village council is
my
friend,” he said. “They will not grant you a divorce, do you understand?”

She knew it was a mistake to go to the sarpanch. It was his job to settle relationship disputes, but the chairman was not going to support her, even though she had just lost her father. It was like asking an old weak man to carry a fort on his back.

But she did it for another reason.

She did it to humiliate Laxman. Even though they were married for so many years, there was no child. She felt there had been a child once, but it disappeared because he used to box her in the gut so often.