Dahanu Road: A novel (30 page)

All he had was pain, and it was forcing him to tell a story.

He had no idea what good it would do. He might not be able to make even a tiny leaf flutter. “I must tell a story that has been forgotten,” he told Rami. “Father used to say that the greatest stories are the ones that have been forgotten.”

For the next few days, he wondered what his father wanted him to tell.

A tale that would empower him, give him the strength to curl his hand into a fist and bang it on the ground so that whoever walked the earth was made to jump and cry out for justice.

But nothing came.

Defeated, he lay on the ground outside his hut and closed his eyes.

The dry grass poked his back and he smiled because the grass was dead and it still had the power to trouble him. He lay completely still on the ground, as ripe for dying as a human fruit could be.

That was when Rami found him.

She had found him in exactly the same position many years ago, when he was only five years old. She felt she had to tell him about that time.

“If I remembered all the things that I made myself forget, I would not be alive today,” she said. “By remembering, I have gone back to some terrible times. But maybe some good will come of this, brother. Long ago, I found you in this same position on the ground.”

He was just a boy then—small, thin, full of ribs. He had vomited. He was unconscious, ready to depart this world. Rami picked him up, did not know what to do, so she splashed water on his face. His mouth smelled of liquor, but it could not be, for he was only five years old. Some evil spirit must have entered his mouth.

After an hour, he came to the world of the living again. In that half state, in the world of neither the living nor the dead, he told her a story.

“Maybe it is wrong to call it a story,” said Rami. “Because all you said was, ‘Shapur seth … the well … Shapur seth … the well …’”

“That is all?” asked Ganpat. He wondered if his sister was mocking him.

“That is all you said,” replied Rami. “But the way you said it made me feel you had seen something. You were shaking the way a goat shakes when it sees the blade.”

There was one more thing.

“That day, you held a bottle cork in your fist. I thought that the cork had a spell on it so I kept it with me all these years in the hope that the spell would come on me and kill me instead,” she said. “But I am still alive.”

Rami reached out towards Ganpat, her thin black arm jingling with red bangles, and placed a bottle cork in his palm.

“You had seen something,” she said. “I am sure of it.”

Ganpat held that bottle cork for hours, but he had no idea what his sister was talking about. This cork was alien to him. It could be anything. It could be the eye of an injured god. He took it with him everywhere. Down a hill, up a date palm tree, around his hut, he walked backwards, sideways, he rolled on the ground, did everything possible to make the eye talk.

Nothing.

Then, the night before his death, he heard a scream so loud he thought Vaghai the Tiger God was having his teeth pulled out. Ganpat had gone to sleep with the cork in his fist, and now the cork was trying to tell him something. It was helping him remember.

Slowly, images came to him. Shapur seth standing near a well. And Ganpat, five years old, watching through the chickoo
trees. The images repeated themselves. Shapur seth near the well, through the tangle of chickoo trees. There was a whiskey bottle in his hand.

When Ganpat woke up the next morning, he remembered everything. He had never felt younger or more powerful in his life. He was a coiled snake ready to strike.

“If it is money Laxman wants, he shall have it,” he said to Rami. “They think we are invisible!”

“Who?” asked Rami.

“The landlords! The landlords think we are invisible!”

He held the cork high above his head. “The bottle may have destroyed our people. But today, the bottle shall save us. The bottle shall save my daughter.”

He handed the cork back to Rami. “This will give us our life back.”

“What do you mean, brother?” asked Rami.

“Rami, you are right,” he said. “Many years ago, I saw Shapur seth do something terrible.”

But he did not tell her what. There was no time. He had been transformed by night into something wild. He could not afford to waste this wildness. He could not afford to let it cool down.

“They think they can take our land and we will remain silent. They think they can take our women and we will remain silent. They think they can take our forests and we will remain silent. I will hurt them. I will hurt the landlord. I will hurt him just to remind him that I am alive. I am coming for you, Shapur seth. I am coming for you,” he chanted.

Then he stormed out of the hut.

“I want to know what this story means,” Kusum told Zairos.

She had tried to remain calm in the telling of it, but her voice broke at certain points, and her mouth gave forth the aroma of defeat. They had started off with his head on her bosom, but now it was her head on his chest, her long black hair spreading out like a pool of black water, like something that should not be spreading.

She lifted her head and looked straight at him.

It was hard for her to do. The ropes of labour were tugging at her, reminding her to lower her gaze because she was still a labourer on his farm.

Zairos did not question her intentions. Her intentions were good and solid, but he doubted Rami’s. Her teeth were too crooked, there were too many lines on her face, lines that were taking her off the path, leading her astray.

And Shapur Irani would give Zairos the same explanation about the Warli heart—it was impossible to fathom, the tribals were nothing more than a mixture of bitterness and folk tales, and this ludicrous, nonsensical yarn was proof of that.

Zairos did not want to abandon his own people, spin away from them on a romantic whim. He did not want to be a champion to a tribal woman. He did not want to be a champion at all.

There was nothing he could offer her. No answer, no promise.

They slept, close but not touching. The mention of his grandfather’s name again had drawn a line between Zairos and Kusum, and he did not want to cross over yet. Her side of the line might have quicksand in it. He wanted to wait.

In the middle of the night, he woke up and went upstairs. He had had enough of the floor. He left her there. He became a landlord in his bed again, a floor above.

Hours later, the light made him notice a crack in the window.

The light was too strange, too harsh for it to be early morning. How had he not woken up with the sound of the Gujarat Express?

He heard noises downstairs. There was more than one person.

As soon as he went down, he was greeted by his father’s singing. Aspi Irani was seated at the table, knife and apple in hand, sending out his song, purely in English today, which had the rhyme of “wedding” and “beheading.” Mithoo was at the stove telling Kusum to add red masala to the potatoes.

“What are you doing here?” asked Zairos.

“Your father is sick of attending weddings,” said Mithoo.

“I prefer funerals,” said Aspi Irani. “You can never attend someone’s funeral twice.”

“You are not happy to see us?” asked Mithoo.

“No … no, I’m happy,” said Zairos.

“How did you get a servant so fast? She was startled when we entered the house, poor thing. She had the marmalade bottle in her hand. I think she was about to eat it. We’ll have to keep an eye on her. No spoiling these people. Train them from day one.”

Mithoo went back to the stove and asked Kusum, “How much has my son agreed to pay you? Has he talked about payment?”

Kusum looked at Zairos, who did not know what to say.

He knew what Kusum was thinking. In the jungle, higher does not protect lower. Higher eats lower. He sat at the table and took a slice of apple.

With lowered head, Kusum started cleaning the bathroom.

“Something terrible …” said Shapur Irani, ruminating over Ganpat’s words. “By that time, Banu’s dementia had taken a hold of her completely. I did not have the strength to do anything terrible. I promise you, Zairos, apart from that one incident with Vithal, no Warli has ever been beaten on my land.”

It amazed Zairos how even decades later, just the thought of Banumai’s illness contorted Shapur Irani’s face. At the snap of a finger, pain made him lose his deadpan expression, showing the world that he was perhaps better off numb.

Zairos left his grandfather in his rocking chair, regretting that he had broached the subject.

At the farm, Kusum stood in line for her daily wage.

The chickoo was moodier than ever. It was turning bipolar, happy and giving one minute, dry and withdrawn the next. The chickoo was turning suicidal, throwing itselfto the ground without allowing itself to ripen.

With not enough fruit to pick, Zairos gave the workers a half day.

He noticed how Kusum counted her wages twice, then a third time. There was hope in her counting, that magic would occur due to repetition and an extra ten-rupee note would materialize in her hand.

After all the workers had left, she stayed on.

But they had nowhere to go. They walked into the thickness of trees, hoping to be enveloped, made safe, being touched by nothing other than themselves.

They lay on top of one another, their bodies madly singing.

Once they found each other, nothing mattered. Even if snow rose from beneath the ground or the chickoo buds started speaking, it would go unnoticed.

He liked the moments after, her hot breath on his skin.

“Seth,” she said. “Is this your god?”

She held the fravashi, the winged guardian spirit that hung from a gold chain around his neck. Each man had a fravashi who encouraged his soul to enter the physical world, gather experience, and choose asha over druj, the truth over the lie.

“Seth …”

“Yes,” he said. “This is my god. He looks after me. There is another one for my mother, father, and grandfather.”

“Is that because you are landlords?” She asked that question seriously.

To the Warlis, even guardian spirits could be bought. He did not blame her for thinking that way. She had been left unprotected. As a Zoroastrian, he had the power of centuries behind him. Zarathushtra was a pioneer, a star whose teachings had inspired an ancient Persian Empire; then, on that same soil, the Arabs called Zoroastrians infidels. When the humiliation got too hard to stomach, it was the magi who reminded the Zoroastrians of their lineage. With their sacred fires and texts, they came to India and the infidels rose once again, became doctors, lawyers, artists, businessmen, and landlords.

But Kusum’s magi had no such history. Her magi had let her down.

They were witch doctors she had no faith in. She could not get strength from men who believed in witch hunts, who demanded liquor and chickens in return for the simplest
advice, whose only solution seemed to be the practice of black magic.

“Seth,” she said, “I feel women are sent to this earth to become men.”

He understood what she meant. She was in a duel with her own husband, a man of her own tribe who should have protected and nurtured her.

“It is normally the men who climb coconut trees,” she said. “One day, my mother was ill. She needed coconut water. But my father was too drunk to climb. That day I decided to learn to climb a coconut tree.”

“You can climb a coconut tree?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

She got up and ran to the nearest one. Suddenly she had something she could show him, something he could not do, and the satisfaction on her face was palpable. She had found inspiration from her own past, which was unusual.

Soon she was thirty feet high and without a harness.

This a landlord could never do. For once Kusum was not making footprints on the soil. She was moving as far away as possible from land that had betrayed her, into air that was welcoming and without manacles.

Zairos wished he could be there with her, close to the sky.

He wanted to see through the blue, beyond it even, into space, where his fravashi lived. He had questions for his fravashi.

By listening to Kusum, was he was being unfaithful to his own people?

Each time he undid Kusum’s hair, hundreds of Warlis came cascading down, and he was listening to all their stories. He could see their faces, their long hair, their loincloths, he could
hear their screams. After Kusum and he made love, these men and women appeared out of nowhere, from decades ago, and down the torrents of her hair they slid until they rested on his chest. They spoke to him from strange places, like the man who was hanging upside down from a tree, his long hair on fire, and beneath the tree a Muslim landlord was striking more matches …

Zairos would tell these Warlis that he was Zoroastrian, not Muslim, not Hindu. He could not take responsibility for the actions of men taken ages ago, men belonging to other religions, and the moment he said that he knew he was wrong, and the Warlis retreated, went into hiding again in the dark night of Kusum’s hair.

Now that he had met them all, he was carrying them. He could feel them even when he rode with Kusum on his motorcycle; the engine sounded like it had no power, the strain showing in its voice as it went up the bridge.