Dahanu Road: A novel (27 page)

The waiter approached them again with a tray that had two bottles of lemonade and two glasses full of ice. He put the glasses down and poured lemonade into them. At that moment, Zairos reached out and held Kusum’s hand. When he did that, he felt her entire body go rigid.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered the moment the waiter left.

“What are you trying to prove?”

“I am not trying to prove anything,” he said. I am just trying to start a dance.

Zairos finally heard from the police the next day. Instead of their showing up personally, he got a phone call at Anna’s. But it was not the Dahanu police who got in touch. The call was from Gholvad, the next town.

Havovi was a shrewd tactician. She knew that Shapur Irani would have close connections with the Dahanu police, so she lodged Laxman’s complaint with the Gholvad police, stating that her organization had an office in Gholvad as well.

The main cop, a Maharashtrian named Mhatre, asked Zairos to come by at six o’clock. It was an odd telephone conversation—formal, matter-of-fact—and Zairos felt like he was talking to a receptionist at a doctor’s office, fixing an appointment for a checkup.

“You’ve come with an army,” said the bald, pigeon-chested Mhatre as he shook Zairos’ hand.

Bumble had come along for support, and Hosi insisted on joining them as well because he liked police stations. He had a fondness for prisons, asylums, and hospitals.

“Any place that is more hopeless than I am,” he had said.

Mhatre escorted them through brown saloon doors. The wooden chair Mhatre sat on had a rib missing. He rolled a cream hand towel and used it to support his lower back. The faint trace of a beedi was on its way out of the room. The
brown cardboard files on Mhatre’s desk were piled on top of each other, neatly aligned.

“These power cuts will one day lead to rioting,” said Mhatre, looking up at the dead fan. “There will be bloodshed in Maharashtra, you mark my words. You leave people at the mercy of heat, what else can they do but boil?”

He removed a white handkerchief from the pocket of his cream trousers and slapped it on the back of his neck. He dabbed here and there, like a burlesque dancer readying herself for stage. He had the thinnest lips Zairos had seen on a man. When he spoke, his lips converged into a diamond-shaped pout for the briefest of moments.

“As I was saying on the phone,” said Mhatre to Zairos, “you have a complaint against you. And let me be very frank, it is the end of the day, so I am not in a mood to
register
this complaint.”

“I’m grateful for that,” replied Zairos. “Ten thousand times grateful.”

Mhatre smiled. He seemed to appreciate Zairos’ tact, his manners. A bribe, a generous one, had been offered with the grace of a wedding invitation.

“And a bottle of Scotch,” added Bumble. “Black Dog.”

“I’ve never tried it,” said Mhatre.

“It will make your insides bark.”

Mhatre chuckled. His pigeon chest went inwards even more. He rang the silver bell on his desk three times. Zairos and Bumble waited for a constable to appear with a cup of chai, or dirty tap water, but nothing of the sort happened.

“Oh,” said Mhatre, seeing the bewilderment on their faces. “It’s a habit. Like a nervous tic.”

“Mhatre saab,” said Hosi, who spotted something strange. “This notice board is unique.”

Hosi was staring at a yellow board with sketches of a bear with a chain around its neck, a snake charmer, a monkey with a pink cap on its head, a dog lying on its back, and other animals. Below the sketches, painted in black ink, were the following points:

1. You cannot do bear shows.
   

2. No catching snakes. Or charming them.
   

3. No taming monkeys.
   

4. No killing cows. They are holy.
   

There were other charismatic lines, but Mhatre interrupted. “This board has been here for many years.”

But by then, Hosi had lost interest. He yawned, raised his hand as both apology and goodbye, and walked through the brown swinging doors. The police station had not appealed to him. There were no screams of torture from an inside chamber, no lowlifes begging for mercy.

Bumble got up from his chair, shook Mhatre’s hand vigorously, and went to the car for the bottle of Black Dog and the ten thousand rupees. Suddenly, the fan came on. It announced itself with a few
wong-wong-wongs
and then calmed down.

“It’s interesting that he mentioned this board,” said Mhatre. “It was here during your grandmother’s time.”

“You mean my grandfather,” said Zairos.

“No,” said Mhatre, “your grandmother.”

Mhatre was mistaking his grandmother for someone else. Zairos had never heard anyone speak about his grandmother,
especially a non-Irani like Mhatre. Mhatre was in his fifties, too young to know his grandmother.

“Banu Irani,” said Mhatre. “That was her name.”

Zairos did not like hearing her name from Mhatre’s lips. He was not sure why this made him uneasy. A motorcycle went past the station. Zairos could tell it was an Enfield from the guttural sound the engine made as though it were doing a salt-water gargle.

“How do you know her name?” he asked.

“She came here one day,” said Mhatre. “Fifty-two years ago. I was only five years old. I was sitting on the stairs outside with my father. My father was a policeman like me. No, forgive me … I am a policeman like him.”

Instead of extracting information, which was what cops excelled at, Mhatre was giving Zairos something, and he found it unnerving.

“She came here in a horse carriage all by herself,” he said. “Her hair was wild, all over the place. I will never forget that day. Your grandmother was like a fierce huntress. She said something was after her. It terrified me.”

This was the first time he had heard someone speak of his grandmother in that way. His idea of her was that she was a gentle woman, a loving woman, so timid that she was haunted by shadows. Mhatre was dipping his thin lips in ink and writing his grandmother’s story in the finest calligraphy.

“Why did she come to this police station?” asked Zairos.

“To seek protection,” said Mhatre.

“From my grandfather?”

Zairos was shocked at the words that came out of his mouth. The burning of his grandmother’s books was fresh in
his memory. A carpet was being pulled from under him and he was somersaulting in the air, a novice circus hand, unsure and dizzy.

“Why would it be from your grandfather?” asked Mhatre.

“I … What did she want protection from?”

Zairos had come here to offer a bribe. That was all. Information about his grandmother was not what he had bargained for. There was a tingling sensation in his right hand.

Mhatre wiped his face with his handkerchief again. Zairos wanted to do the same. But it was not sweat he wanted to wipe. It was the remark he had made about his grandfather.

“Have a closer look at the board,” said Mhatre. “Below the last point.”

Zairos got up from his chair and walked to the board. His steps had never been so quiet, so careful. He had the walk of a man who did not want to wake anyone up.

He faced the board, the dizzying caricatures of animals. Cobras, cows, monkeys, donkeys, bears, and dogs vied for his attention. It was too much for him. All those animals hissing, roaring, braying, and barking at the same time.

“Below the last point,” Mhatre had to remind him.

Something had been deeply scratched into the wood. Only a hundred claws feverishly working as one could have that effect.

“When my father asked Banumai what was after her, she remained quiet,” said Mhatre. “She took a long nail that was lying on the ground and started etching this on the board. ‘I am a lady,’ she said. ‘You will not stop me.’”

It was all so illogical. His grandmother had charged into a police station an entire town away in a horse carriage.

“What is the beard?” asked Zairos.

“I don’t know,” said Mhatre. “To this day her face is before my eyes. Some faces, you see them once, you remember them for life.”

Mhatre got up from his chair. Again, he rang the desk bell thrice. This time it was not done with nonchalance. Mhatre was jolting himself out of the past, into the world of the Black Dog Scotch that Bumble now placed on the table with much aplomb.

The only image that floated before Zairos’ eyes that night was that of Banumai with her hair loose, flying through the streets on a horse carriage. It made no sense at all.

So when he woke up the next morning to the words “Hundreds have died,” he thought he was still in a dream. But it was Aspi Irani being his usual stirring self, examining the mosquitoes that had perished in great numbers on the stairs. He was collecting them in a dustpan, while Mithoo, cream headscarf on, was trying to ignore the mosquitoes because she was cooking.

“I ambushed them,” said Aspi Irani. “For a few days, I did not spray the stairs at all. Then …” The mosquitoes had indeed been slaughtered. Aspi Irani examined the carnage— this was his Vietnam.

Once he had emptied the dead in the garbage can, he sat at the dinner table. The churchgoers next door had started
wailing again, so he put on his wife’s thick black headphones and spoke loudly over the French recording.

“Je suis allé au mail acheter des boucles d’oreilles. Je vais aller au mail acheter des boucles d’oreilles.”

Then he took the headphones off and asked Mithoo, “What did I just say?”

“You said, ‘I went to the mall to buy earrings.’”

“Oh,” he said. “How do I say, ‘If it were not illegal to kill people, I’d stab those churchgoers, every single one of them’?”

“That sentence is too advanced for me,” said Mithoo, placing a cup of tea on the table. “Maybe next year.”

Zairos noticed that the large vessel Mithoo was cooking in was brimming with enough beef to feed ten sweaty men.

“Why are you cooking so much?” he asked.

“Our servant has quit,” she said. “And I’m cooking more so you can freeze it and eat. We’re going to Bombay. For a
wedding.”

“You mean funeral,” said Zairos.

“Just see,” said Mithoo to her husband. “Not at all concerned about his future. He’s going to die old and miserable.”

Aspi Irani, however, could not be bothered. When he had his morning tea, nothing could come in the way. He had a funny way of drinking his tea. It was the Irani way—he liked his tea piping hot, so hot that any tongue would sing songs of torture, and he never drank from the cup. He poured the tea into the saucer and drank in loud slurps.

“Do me a favour,” said Zairos to his mother. “Enlarge my photograph, a glossy one, and put it on the stage, just behind the couple, so all the guests can see. Then announce on the mike that I am available.”

Mithoo shook her head and said, “We’ll be gone for a week.”

Zairos wanted his parents to leave. He wanted light to leave as well and allow night to descend, swoop down on him with all its hubris, searing enough to lead him to hidden places.

He waited until it was late, until Shapur Irani was an explorer ready to traverse the plains and deserts of his own past.

“Pa,” asked Zairos. “What did Banumai mean by the beard?”

“Candy floss,” said Shapur Irani.

Lakhu burned a mixture of cow dung, coconut coir, and dry grass a few feet away from Shapur Irani’s rocking chair. The strong odour of cow dung kept the mosquitoes at bay. They were always more ferocious at night. After all, they were bloodsuckers, miniature vampires.

“When Banu was small she called candy floss the old man’s beard.”

“That makes no sense, Pa.”

Back then, it made no sense to Shapur Irani either. When his wife spoke about the beard, she became a doll with a scary face whose features changed without warning. The madness of a hundred asylums had entered her.

“Why did she go to the police station, Pa?”

Shapur Irani had a bottle of brandy by his side. He poured some brandy in his palm and applied it to the soles of his feet. He had a slight fever and this was his wife’s remedy.

“Banu was ill,” he said as he wiped his palms on his white pyjama pants. “When she was pregnant with your father, she started getting high fevers. In her delirium, she would talk about a beard. The connection to candy floss was the only connection I could make. Sometimes, the happy memories of our childhood develop fangs and attack us later on in life.”