Dahanu Road: A novel (34 page)

Entranced by their presence, Zairos saw more lights in steel trays on the ground, tiny glasses huddled close to each other, exchanging warmth like it was the only thing that mattered. It was a vast sea of light, a sea that was singing, as if each wave
were a note and each note a flicker of light, and the sound was not silence, it was silence made deeper a thousand times by a thousand lights.

He walked between those hanging lights, each one of them lit for a different purpose, or by a different person, each one sending out its own prayer, its own sweet blessing, until he finally faced the Atash burning in a silver vase. He placed his head against the brass bars and longed to get closer, but only the priest could do that when he prayed over it and kept the fire alive.

The priest was in a corner of the temple, seated cross-legged on a white cloth on the floor, performing prayers for the dead. Even through his white mouth-veil, his voice buzzed and hummed with authority, but was still humble. His prayers, mysterious as a maze in a forest, yet gentle and soothing, floated through the room, feather-touching the walls, grazing the photographs of the dead, a gentle reminder to them not to forget the ones who remained.

The midnight oil lamps were a sign to anyone who entered of what was important in the darkness—light was all that was needed. It was all that would be noticed. It could be a small flicker of the diva, or the burning flames of the Atash.

Even a spark was significant.

Even a spark mattered in the afterlife, on the Chinvat Bridge that Zarathushtra said all men had to cross. Based on one’s conduct on earth, on how many sparks one had, a man got either a dazzling maiden as a guide or a demonic hag. Both were reflections of a man’s own conscience, and perhaps that was why Zairos was here tonight, to see what his conscience looked like, to find out what it wanted him to do.

Each time he tried to listen to his conscience, he heard the voice of both the maiden and the shrew, and he told himself that there might be many voices telling him what to do, but only one of them was true, and he would have to suss that voice out as one selected a single life-giving sprout from an array of weeds.

He needed to nurture that voice because it was the only one that would lead to a good deed. But then again it was ignorant of him to think of claiming his child as a good deed. It was not something that required careful consideration. It was his duty.

The next day, when he could not find Kusum near the bathtubs, he went to her hamlet. He found her by a stream not far from her hut. The buffaloes in the stream had their heads in the water, which had turned brown in parts because they were causing the mud to shift. On the other side of the stream, red bougainvilleas sprouted, tried to reach as high up as they could.

“You did not come for work today,” said Zairos.

He did not know where else to start. He sat by her side, ashamed that he had stayed away from her for so long. He plucked a strand of grass and put it in his mouth.

He glanced at her belly, now clearly swollen.

The unborn child had been unable to ignore the passage of time the way Zairos had.

The buffaloes had finished bathing. They strolled out of the water, went to the other side of the stream. One of them
walked into the bougainvilleas and let them brush against its skin.

“Seth, you must be hungry,” she said. “You are eating grass.” She took the blade of green out of his mouth and threw it away.

“Even tribals do not eat that,” she said.

She was still playful with him. He did not understand how this woman did not want to tear his gums, or break his knees into a thousand beautiful pieces.

She held his hand and led him towards her hut. He liked that it was she who initiated the touch. Maybe it was the child inside. Tired of being concealed, it was making its mother’s hands move, its unformed eyes and mouth not being able to see or speak, but its heart sensing with full intensity, the waves of its longing bringing its parents closer.

“Seth,” she said. “You had asked me whose child I thought it was.”

She swooped in from nowhere, without warning.

“Yes,” said Zairos.

She did not say more until they had entered the hut. From the blast of daylight to sudden shade and the smell of cow dung, she made him sit on the ground.

“It is Laxman’s child,” she said. “I told him that when he came to see me.”

“Laxman came near you?”

“He will not harm me. He wants a child. It makes him look like a man.”

“How do you know it is his?”

“Seth, it is better if it is his.”

She went to a corner of the hut, picked up a large earthen
bowl, and placed it near the hearth. Zairos stared at the sickle on the wall. It hung there at a slant, its arc facing the ground. There was nothing else to look at.

“Kusum,” he said. “If the child is mine, I will look after it. And you.”

“Seth,” she said. “I will not see you after today. I am with my husband again.”

She emptied the contents of the earthen bowl on the ground. There were all sorts of things. Bangles, nose rings, a hand mirror, a wristwatch with a leather strap, the twig of a neem tree.

“I want to give you something,” she said. “It is from a time when my mother and father were alive. I was happy then.”

She tried to keep things buoyant but he could see the pain in her face. Like an evening that knew it faced a losing fight with night.

“Kusum, I will take you with me … I will—”

“No. Even if you take me now, someday you will bring me back to this hut. Maybe now you will look after me, but one day you will meet an Irani woman and you will make her your wife … and you will realize that you love her, not me.”

She had no way of knowing that for sure. He could not promise her a lifetime of happiness, no one could, but he could promise her a morning, maybe a few afternoons, motorcycle rides that lasted miles, and his hand on her belly when she needed it.

He opened his mouth again, enough for just a purr of words to come through, but she had made up her mind. Something within her was hurrying her up, they were like two countries breaking off, floating away from each other.

She put her palm to his cheek. “Seth, please do not come here again.”

Zairos wanted that palm to stay with him forever. Nothing could match the warmth of her palm. But beneath that warmth, he detected something else. There was disappointment, and it was flailing its arms in his face, making it clear that he had let her down, he had failed to fight for her.

He told himself that he had fought, but perhaps it was too late.

She picked up a photograph from the earthen pot, of her as a little girl, standing next to a missionary. Its edges were frayed, as though singed by flames, and she had to pass it on to him before all of it was eaten.

“It is the only photo of me,” she said. “It was taken at a time when I used to pluck lilies at your farm, and once I saw you on a cycle …”

But Zairos had noticed an object on the thatched floor of the hut. His mind was trying to understand what that object had been doing in her earthen pot.

The cork of a whiskey bottle with the initials RB engraved in black.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“It belonged to my father.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “Where did you get it?” He squeezed her arm tight and was breathing hard. “Tell me where you got this from.”

“This is the cork I told you about. This is the cork Rami found in my father’s fist when he was unconscious as a boy.”

Zairos let go of her arm because his grandfather’s voice was so loud and clear, Shapur Irani might as well be in the hut himself.

The day Banu died, I drank from that bottle, the lost one. That bottle is full of grief.

After his grandfather, Ganpat appeared:
Many years ago I saw Shapur seth do something terrible.

And finally, Rami, raspy as ever:
That day, you held a bottle cork in your fist.

Zairos smelled the cork. It smelled of nothing. It was worn, but it held something.

“Kusum,” he said.

His voice contained it all—the pleading of a man who had finally realized he loved his woman, but he was late, like a clock with heavy hands that had failed to reach the mark on the designated hour. He moved towards her, but she did not let him touch her. She pushed his outstretched hand away.

He knew she had every right to, but she was making a mistake.

“Look at me,” he said.

If she would not allow him to get through to her by touch, he would do it through sight—the transparency of his eyes, everything she needed to know pouring out of them.

She stared at the ground.

“Please leave,” she said.

“Kusum, I …”

But the words would not come.

Maybe because what he was about to say to her did not exist.
There is nothing like love.
For years he had read it on his grandfather’s cupboard.

He walked away from the hut, from his woman, perhaps for good.

For the first time in his life he had lost something.

At the beach, Zairos watched an army of midnight fishermen. There were at least fifty of them, charging the sea during low tide. They walked through the sticky mud with torches in their hands. They were hunting for squid, directing the flames towards the mud, causing the squid to jump, an attraction for light that led to their capture.

The whiskey was now in him. It was coursing through his veins looking for the finish line. He was ready to face his grandfather. The fishermen went deeper and deeper into the sea, fifty pairs of feet squashing the wet mud, torches flickering in the wind.

Lakhu opened the door.

Shapur Irani was in bed. His bowels were troubling him again. Zairos went to the bed, the solid headboard spreading out behind his grandfather, a dark wall of wood.

“When Banu was alive there used to be a mosquito net around this bed,” said Shapur Irani. “After she died, the servant kept making that net until I tore it. After Banu was gone, what could a few mosquitoes do? I pray you never find the woman you love, Zairos.”

Each day Zairos heard his grandfather say something different. Each day, it came down to the same thing—the past. Tonight, he would get some answers.

“Pa, did you know that Banumai’s fever would eventually prove fatal?” he asked.

It was a starting point. From there, he could move forward, sideways, any way he wished—or was allowed to by his grandfather.

“No,” said Shapur Irani. “And even if I did, it would have made no difference. When it comes to the one you love, death is a sudden explosion.”

“Were you with her when she died?”

His grandfather nodded. He gave Zairos nothing more.

But Zairos needed to know: Did he hold Banumai’s hand as she shivered, covered in blankets, or did he wake up in the middle of the night with the dreaded feeling that even though there were two bodies in bed, only one of them was breathing?

“Pa, we have never spoken about Banumai’s death. Even my father does not know much, except that she died of a fever.”

“Some moments should be shared only between husband and wife,” said Shapur Irani. “Those last moments with Banu … it would be wrong of me to speak about them.”

“Did you drink a lot after her death?” asked Zairos.

“So much that I cannot remember my sons in the weeks and months after.”

“What about the day she died? Were you drunk on that day?”

“Zairos, you are my grandson, but do not think for a moment that you can cross lines.”

Zairos tried to soften his approach, but his nerves prevented him from doing so.

“Something happened on the day of her death.”

“What do you mean?” asked Shapur Irani. “What makes you think that?”

“This,” said Zairos.

He placed the bottle cork on his grandfather’s chest, just below his chin.

Shapur Irani narrowed his vision to take a look.

“What’s this? Why have you brought this here?”

“This cork belongs to the bottle you drank from the day she died,” said Zairos.

Shapur Irani slowly took his hand out from underneath the white sheet and held the cork between thumb and forefinger.