Dahanu Road: A novel (28 page)

“Do you think it could be something else?”

“No.”

His “no” had the surety of a knife.

Shapur Irani’s face was covered in sweat. He was shivering, but tried not to show it. Zairos went inside to fetch a shawl. He draped it round his grandfather and bade him goodnight. But by the time Zairos had walked a few steps, Shapur Irani had thrown the shawl to the ground.

Zairos heard the rattle of machine guns.
Rat-tat-tat
fell the rain on the tiled roof of Aspi Villa. He walked to the porch, leaned into the night, and let a spray of water hit him. The first rains of the season had come, and they had come hard. Leaves were being battered, the bark of trees lashed. The ferns in the garden below acquired a darker, wetter green.

“Each time it rains I think of my father,” Shapur Irani once told Zairos. “As a child he was afraid of rain. The Arabs used to force the Zoroastrians to stay indoors. If even a drop of rainwater touched a Zoroastrian body and fell on the soil, the land was polluted. So my father used to huddle close to his mother and wait for the rain to end.”

For Shapur Irani, everything had meaning.

The past kept intervening, contaminating things.

Zairos closed his eyes and let the rain do as it pleased. He wished he were an octopus, so he could stretch out eight arms instead of two, that reached far into the night and partook in the celebration of the first rains: he would help old-timers by holding silver snuff containers under their noses, enabling them to
go into a trance. He would pull a large banana leaf with Pinky the orphan on it and let her float away from Anna’s all the way to the sea and continue on and on. And the rest of his tentacles would slide into the circus tent and offer pats of assurance to the performers—clowns, acrobats, a tired old announcer—who wished they had chosen safe jobs, anything to escape the lonely uncertainty of what they were doing right now. Most of all, he wanted eight arms to put around Kusum, wrap her in an embrace so tight and complete, unlike any woman had experienced before, covering her from all sides, so if she were to come under attack again, he would be the only one to get harpooned.

In the morning Zairos raced to Kusum’s hut on his motorcycle, the rain striking his chest mercilessly as though it were looking for a confession. The skies had been ripped open and there was water everywhere—trickling, gurgling, angry, and energetic. At the railway station, auto rickshaws swallowed customers. By the time Zairos reached Kusum’s hamlet, the sky had gathered the anger of a religious fanatic.

As soon as the Warli children saw the motorcycle, they ran and hid. That was always the case whenever they saw any vehicle. The children played with cycle tires, but a vehicle was too alien for them. Once the children disappeared, Zairos saw a man lying on the ground. It was the same man he had seen the night he had walked with Kusum to her hut, after Laxman’s beating. The man had passed out again, and the water hit his face and bare chest.

When Zairos entered Kusum’s hut, there were chickens. At least ten of them flapping madly, with Rami in the middle. In the darkness of the hut they had the menace of bats. Zairos quickly walked out. All that clucking, all those wings.

“Why are there chickens in your hut?” he asked.

“It’s raining,” replied Kusum. “Where can they go? You see that hut opposite? That’s where the goats are.”

She held him by the hand and took him underneath a large banyan tree. The trunk of the tree had fat veins going up and down, snakes that were either trying to reach the heavens or stick their heads inside the earth. They stood there for a while, and she smiled and watched the rain come down. It made sense not to speak, to listen to the torrent.

The man who had passed out on the ground suddenly woke up. He took a few steps and crashed, nose first, into the ground. A chicken ran out of the hut, darted around as if possessed, and made a futile attempt to take flight. Then it went back into the hut and was greeted by applause—the clucking and the flutter of wings.

Inspired by the chicken and drunken man, Zairos ran out into the rain, but once there, did not know what to do. He quickly got on his motorcycle and started it. He kept revving the engine and realized that this was even more absurd. Fortunately for him Kusum ran too and got on.

When they got to the fishing village, Kusum pointed to a group of children who were creating a commotion. They had surrounded a man who held a large fish in each hand, and his red vest was rolled up to reveal a fat belly, and the rain bounced off his belly while he kept raising the fish higher and higher out of the children’s reach. Kusum was learning to enjoy speed, the machine was leaving everything behind— coconut trees, palm trees, barbed wire, telephone poles, old men, fishing nets, bullock carts, transport trucks—
she
was leaving everything behind.

But when they reached Zairos’ house, he could feel her body tense up behind him.

“The house is empty,” he said to reassure her. “My parents are in Bombay.”

When he opened the main door, she stood at the entrance and stared at the brown sofa, the TV, the cane chair, the family photographs, and the calendar on the wall. She had entered homes before, she had seen their clocks and carpets, but it was never as lover. As lover, she was forced to look up and address the walls and the house’s trappings.

“Come in,” he said. “It’s okay.”

She scrunched the end of the grey cloth she wore into a ball and wrung out the water. Her feet were muddy and droplets of water hung from her nose. Zairos had to hold her hand and pull her in. She did not welcome his touch. She stood in the centre of the room and did not move.

Then she sat on the floor.

She was not used to the hardness of floors.

“Don’t be scared,” Zairos told her.

“It means Mahadev, god of the gods, is angry,” she replied.

Her voice was heavy. It was the voice of a woman trying to get some invisible weight off her chest.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“When rain falls with so much anger, it means Mahadev is throwing the water down with his fists, spraying it from between his teeth. Mahadev is angry with me.”

“What for?”

“I have abandoned my own people to be with a seth. One of the village elders spat on me last night.”

The rain fell on the closed windows even harder, shattered them almost.

“Sit next to me,” she told him. “Please.”

She now had her knees drawn to her chest and she circled her arms around her shins. It reminded him of the day he first saw her, huddled in the back of the tractor like a frightened chicken. He did not want to see that woman again, a woman in a coma, with her eyes wide open, refusing to recognize anything.

The yellow refrigerator shivered all of a sudden.

Zairos came back from the cabinet beneath the television and sat beside her with a photo album in his hand.

“I want you to meet my family,” he said.

He did not know what it would accomplish, but he felt it was better not to touch her at the moment. He opened the purple album, the black-and-white photographs pasted on thick black paper. The tracing paper crackled as he lifted it, and slowly mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts came to life, some of their smiles ages old, yet ready to provide whatever warmth was needed. She needed to realize that these men and women were just like her, even if they were poles apart. They had tears, they had hearts, smiles, and wounds, oh they had wounds the size of craters in the moon.

He started with his father. “His name is Aspi,” he said, pointing to a photograph of his father leaning against a black Standard Herald, with his famous pointy boots that had stepped on his mother’s toes in Café Military, proof that boots could lead to marriage. Next, on a large silver chair, their wedding chair, Zairos showed Kusum his mother, Mithoo, whose name meant “Sweet” in Gujarati, and sweet she was with her love for
children and stray dogs, sweet she sure looked in a white dress with her hair as long as a princess’s in a fairy tale, and he told her how she oiled her hair every night, and when Zairos was little he asked her why she oiled her hair so much and she replied, “So that if anyone climbs up, they will slip and fall and eat brinjal,” an answer that amused and enthralled him, and in this manner the journey continued, up and down his family tree Kusum went, like the men who climbed the coconut trees at the farm, and she met the odd ones too, the odd dead ones such as Aderji, his father’s distant cousin who placed a piece of plastic shit, bought from a magic shop in Bombay, in the first-class compartment every time he travelled, making sure he sprinkled the right amount of water on the prop in order to make it look fresh from the oven, and, as a final touch, held a handkerchief to his nose with an expression so truthful he managed to ensure he had the whole cabin to himself, and this story and the photograph of Aderji holding the plastic turd brought a faint smile to her face, and it was exactly what Zairos was looking for so on he went, turned more pages, took her up different branches, and then Bumble showed up wearing his father’s Ray-Bans at age seven looking like a bug, and suddenly Kusum’s eyes lit up, or maybe Zairos imagined it, but she did hold his hand, she had stopped at a photograph of him, when he was maybe eleven or something like that, on a blue cycle, and she squeezed his hand hard, but when he asked her what happened she just asked him, “This is your cycle?” a strange question to which he nodded yes, and Kusum felt a gust of hope blow against her breast because it was that same magic cycle, it was the same boy who had placed a lily on her head, and if he could make her feel like that once, he could do it again.

When Kusum returned home, Rami was waiting for her.

“What do you think you are doing?” she asked. “He is an Irani seth. He will eat every bit of flesh on you.”

Kusum could tell that Rami had a headache because she was smoking the bark of a tree to clear her sinuses. Whenever she was upset, her head got heavy.

“Remember who the enemy is,” she said.

“What if he is not an enemy?” asked Kusum. “What if he is a friend?”

“He is not our friend. The man you are seeing is the cause of our illness. How can someone who causes illness be a friend?”

Rami coughed hard, the skin above her eyes sagging. Her hand was in a fist, circled around the tree bark, and she inhaled deeply and blew smoke rings, noose after noose, sending them out into the night, hoping they would land around a landlord’s neck or two.

“Do not forget your grandfather’s thumb,” she said.

Kusum could never forget. It was something she had been fed again and again. It was breast milk to her. Her grandfather, Vithal the storyteller, whose voice could boom mountains, whose voice made the orange flags on Mahalakshmi Hill flutter and awaken the goddess Mahalakshmi herself, how could Vithal’s thumb be forgotten when the sacred hill shook in remembrance?

“I have not forgotten,” said Kusum, deferential, loving.

“You have,” said Rami. “Take a moment and remember your ancestors. I can still see my father standing over the fire …”

Kusum could see him too, standing tall, the flames rising in a hiss, the villagers huddled around Vithal, holder of their wounds, emitter of their cries.

The night always began with the invocation of one name.

“The Breeteesh,” Vithal would say, letting the name hang in the air, over the fire. To the Warlis, the name was full of poison—they could tell from the way Vithal’s lips stretched to reveal gleaming teeth.

“The day the white demon came, things started turning black for our people,” he said. “The forests, they suddenly decided, belonged to them, the savkar. So the savkar appointed officers to prevent the felling of trees, even for the simple warmth of a fire.”

A hush fell upon the villagers. Some of them started swaying, unable to withstand the winds of the past. All of them knew too well how they were viewed by the white demon. Uneducated savages, only a stage more developed than gorillas.

Gorillas could not own land.

So the gorillas’ land was taken and given to Hindus, Muslims, and Zoroastrians. And these educated men swooped down on the land with the ravenousness of vultures, but, since they were educated, they gave the Warlis
some
land, land that was theirs to begin with. An inch’s worth, no more. But even the fetid scraps came at a cost.