Dahanu Road: A novel (32 page)

“The night you came and took me away from him.”

After years of trying, perhaps nature had played a final joke on Laxman and Kusum. Conception, and then an hour later, bloodshed and separation, perfect conditions, normal conditions, for the birth of a Warli child.

“I’m not ready to be a father,” he said again.

“No man is. Men are cowards. Men are of no use in bringing up a child anyway. Don’t worry, seth. I don’t want anything from you.”

When she said that he wanted to pull her by the hair, choke the viper in her so only the deer remained. He preferred the deer. When she was the deer, the spear stayed in his hand. He left her among the trees and climbed the stairs to his room. But he would rather climb the stars, be far away from this earth, from this woman.

She was right. Men are cowards.

“You should abort,” said Hosi. “But Mother Teresa was against abortion. What will your fellow nuns think?”

“The Vatican will be pissed,” said Bumble.

The three of them were at the Big Boss Hair Salon, and Hosi was getting a body massage. He was lying on his stomach. His sides were expanding from all the beer and whiskey, and Sharmaji was working on his buttocks.

“Papaya,” said Hosi. “All you need is papaya. Papaya can cause a miscarriage. Keep feeding her papaya spoon by spoon like a lovesick Romeo.”

It would never work. That was Hosi’s specialty. He came up with things that could never be put to use. He was currently making a list of names least likely to be used for women’s perfume. The one he was most proud of: Taliban. “It sounds so French,” he said. “So exotic.”

“If not papaya, then you need to visit Dara Atom,” said Hosi.

“Now
that’s
an idea,” said Bumble.

Zairos protested, but they shoved him into the car. Hosi did not even let Sharmaji wipe the oil off. “My ass feels so smooth,” he said.

Before Zairos knew it, they were by the beach, walking under coconut trees on the tiled pathway that led to a wooden door with a large iron handle on it, sketches of which Zairos remembered seeing as a child in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The waiting room was large enough to accommodate at least thirty people. The cracks in the wall were so prominent they looked like they had been chiselled. A painting of a dead horse lying on its back adorned one wall. Men, women, and children sat on wooden benches that were lined against the walls, all the patients facing the centre of the room like spectators around a boxing ring. The people there had maladies of every conceivable kind, from arthritis to conjunctivitis, and they sought a cure from Dara Atom. He was no doctor, he was the god man of Dahanu, and the people on the benches were here because they had faith in him.

“What a con man,” said Hosi. “I idolize him. It’s one thing to cheat the rich. But to cheat the poor, that requires a special kind of being.”

“An Irani god man,” said Bumble. “I find the concept weird.”

The man himself appeared from his inner sanctum. He had put on even more weight since the last time Zairos had seen him at the beach. He was now fatter than Merwan Mota. He trundled along, adjusted the black bandana on his head, breathed heavily, and smeared ash on his forehead with both palms. A child started to cry. Dara Atom wiggled his fingers and scanned the room. This was his way of choosing the next patient. It did not matter how long one had waited. Dara Atom
worked on instinct. And ganja. He had a Muslim friend who sat in the mosque next to Anna’s all day and made balls of ganja, which he administered to all his patients as medicine. No wonder they swore by him. Just as he was about to pick an old man with a mammoth boil on his nose, Hosi walked up to Dara Atom and spoke in his ear.

The Atom then went into his chamber and came out again with a small plastic bag, which he handed to Hosi. Then he turned to the very child who was crying and said, “I will cure you.” He took out a small ganja pill from his shirt pocket and forced it down the child’s throat. He then placed his palm on the child’s forehead and muttered some prayers.

“The pills he’s given you,” said Hosi once they were outside, “are not ganja pills. They will cause a miscarriage in no time. I’ve used them before. It’s not a big deal.”

“It
is
a big deal,” replied Zairos. “This could be my child.”

“So what? Do you know how many Iranis have made their servants get abortions? It’s common, boss. It’s common.”

“She doesn’t want an abortion. She wants to keep it.”

“Who is
she
to keep it?”

Zairos did not know how to answer that.

She was not just another Warli. She could be the mother of his child. And even if she was not, she was something. She was not a mosquito, she was not a pig or horse, she was a woman with a past, present, and future.

All he had to do was crush the white pills and sprinkle the powder in the bottle of ginger marmalade.

He stared at the pills, at the tiny murderers.

She had told him that when the time came, he would not have the guts to claim the child: “Even if it is yours, it will
mean nothing. When the time comes, you will not want it. What I don’t understand is, if life is about to enter this world, how can you be afraid of it?”

At night, he sat alone on his porch and looked into the wasteland opposite his house. The night insects were out at play, and it was a grand night for them, an opera of sweeping rhythms, dives, and freefalls. He stared into those bushes, into the darkness, and emptied his packet of pills into the cavernous, singing mouths of night creatures.

If only she could tell him whose child it was. A mother would know. Mothers had special radars. They could spot their unborn children among the stars without a telescope.

So Zairos rode towards her hut, not caring if Rami was there.

The motorcycle picked up speed and a beetle hit his face so hard it could have been a suicide attempt. A car approached from the opposite direction, the driver flashing his headlights, afraid that Zairos was a drunken rider. To some extent, he was. He had gulped down three pegs of whiskey at home.

But Zairos was no beetle. He knew exactly where he was going.

She was cooking over a fire, fanning the flames with a paper fan. Rami was not around. Maybe she had gone to relieve herself, far away in the darkness of a paddy field. Zairos took the fan from Kusum and started fanning her face instead. She smiled, but it was a tired smile, a smile that had run thousands of miles.

He could tell that she was disappointed in him. He had withdrawn from her, the days now long and plodding, the sweat on her back heavier than usual.

“My aunt was right,” she said. “She said you would lose interest.”

But he had not lost interest. He was pausing, slowing down. He was young, and so was she, and something even younger, more fragile, was about to come into this world, and he could not tell if he wanted it to be his or not.

He was lying to himself. He did not want it. He wanted her.

The child would be him
and
her, a mixture that would find it very hard to grow, let alone flourish. He had seen such mixtures before, and none of them were claimed by the Iranis. They were left with their mothers, and the initial lightness of their skin was darkened by the sun, and by the realization that they had been left unclaimed.

Zairos made Kusum sleep on the ground, on her earth, so that its warmth might somehow reach her heart. The earth, in a way, was like tea—it went down your throat and found places nothing else could reach. Soon, he was on top of her and the flames were making them sweat. Her eyes were closed, but he was taking it all in. The brown walls of the hut, the sickle on the wall, the clothesline with Rami’s blouses hanging, an earthen pot full of water, and a hand mirror on the ground. His palms were on the thatched floor, and he felt that at any minute the heat would melt the floor and the two of them would sink deep into the earth itself.

“Whose child do you think it is?” he asked.

She opened her eyes, looked directly into his, and the tears came.

For the first time, tears came. But there was no sound.

He got off her. The flames of the cooking fire died down and there was a hiss and crackle, but he was not sure if it was Kusum or the flames. Zairos caught a glimpse of his face in the hand mirror that was on the ground. He could barely recognize himself.

ROXANNE THE TOWN GOSSIP
was the one who started it. Zairos could tell from her beaming face. On the beach, while Aspi Irani added ice cubes to his whiskey glass, TG added something else. A tinge of the truth for flavour, nothing more.

Along the sand it went, through the pine trees, it circled the white canopy of the Crazy Crab where Zairos and Kusum had eaten, rattled the iron latch on the wooden door of Dara Atom’s ganja clinic, created its own language at Anna’s, travelled through the telephone line to Anna’s wife in Udipi, then came back rejuvenated and hopped and skipped all over the carrom board outside Behrooz’s spare-parts shop, on and on it went, a wound-up toy vibrating with an unnatural frenzy, sending a shiver of disgust and excitement through unmarried Irani women, yet managing to tickle their panties, until it finally rested, heavy as a log, stiff as the steel brace on a polio-afflicted leg, smelly as a sock recovered from a swamp, on Aspi Irani’s writing table, which had a broken leg that
made things slant towards him, so he had no choice but to take notice of what had slid from the table into his hands, this niggling truth, this massive shipwreck, and the juice of the matter was not that Zairos was having an affair with a Warli woman, no, that was not it, what was so tasty was that there was a child involved and that Zairos had bought Atoms from Dara to demolish the poor fucker, just like that, and Zairos, that handsome prick who thought he was too good for Roxanne or any other Irani girl for that matter was nothing new, in time he would be a hirsute creature just like everyone else, and now that this angel was falling from the skies, nose down, the only place he had was the low-life arms of a pregnant Warli.

By bringing this affair, this travesty, out in the open, the Irani women had found their punching bag at last. For years they had tolerated the steaminess of the tribal women, for years they had accepted the fact that no matter how much eyeliner they put on or how smooth they waxed their inner thighs, the Warli women always looked more inviting without even trying. And their husbands went after those women like hungry dogs, but not once did they have the decency to display that same hunger in their own bedrooms, not once did they pant and moan like they were dying, not once did they tear off their wives’ clothes with their bare teeth, not once did they writhe in agony like the worms they were when their wives withheld sex from them. Zairos knew he was the poster boy, the crucifixion boy, the molester, the baby killer, he was anything they wanted him to be, and their darts were aimed not only at him but at Aspi Irani as well: now how does he feel, always pretending to be superior, always mocking us, how does that grand patriarch Shapur Irani
feel, god only knows how his wife died, he never talks about her death, and what about Mithoo, is she “sweet” now, does she still feel clean as a sparrow, she pretends her marriage is happy, is she clean as a sparrow now?

At home, Aspi Irani had stopped singing. No matter how much the churchgoers wailed, his wail was louder, but silent, something Zairos could not fathom. Even when Aspi Irani cut his apple, it was as though the apple was a dead fruit and he was putting it in his own dead mouth. Mithoo, who in all these years had rarely been anything but chipper, now cooked in silence, her tea was hot but lacked warmth, and when she sat on the swing outside, her cream skirt failed to flow or flutter even a tiny bit.

Aspi Irani put an empty cigarette in his mouth but accidentally bit it and spat out the tobacco. All his habits were becoming clumsy, or disappearing, and somewhere Zairos understood what this meant. His habits were breaking down because Aspi Irani was ashamed of an older habit, the habit of every Irani man, of keeping Warli flesh on the table in the early stages of his marriage. This thought ran through Zairos’ mind like a shark streaming through murky waters, biting, flashing the edges of its teeth, then disappearing into the darkness, but one day, after a month of rumours and silences and forks and knives being the only dinner-table conversation at home, Mithoo came out with it, Mithoo, of all people, turned to her son and said in a calm voice, “You have the same disease your father had,” and the only consolation Zairos could find in his mother’s words was the fact that she used the word had, that whatever Aspi Irani had done, he had done in the past and it was dead, or Mithoo thought it was dead until
Zairos reminded her of it like that bastard child whose name was on everyone’s lips.