Family Matters (11 page)

He shook his head. If he had a photograph of Lucy, he would have asked them to include it. But they had all been burnt, every single one, by Yasmin. Over red hot coals, in the same silver thurible that she used for loban during her evening prayers.

Perhaps that hadn’t been such a bad thing. It had made him rely on memory. Lucy’s image was beyond burning.

To help with the journey, Coomy gave him an extra painkiller next morning while she went through a mental checklist, wondering if she had missed anything. “Jal, did you pack the glass in which Pappa keeps his dentures?”

“It does not matter,” said Nariman. “Roxana won’t grudge me a tumbler to soak my thirty-two.”

“If something is missing we can take it later,” said Jal to curb her excitement, which was embarrassing him.

“I better make sure or Roxana will say I don’t look after you.” She hurried to the bathroom. The glass she detested was on the shelf. She shook out the drops of water and put it in a brown paper bag. “Okay, Pappa, all set now.”

“The ambulance is here,” announced Jal at the window.

Poor children, thought Nariman, it was difficult for them to disguise their eagerness. And he couldn’t blame them. The blame lay with the ones thirty-six years ago, the marriage arrangers, the wilful manufacturers of misery. He could still hear his parents’ voices after the wedding benediction, Now you are settled in life, and we can die in peace. Which they had, a year later. They had survived long enough to perform their duty but not to witness the misfortune it would foster.

Two men in ill-fitting white uniforms and floppy leather chappals entered with a stretcher. The driver made Jal sign an invoice with the job starting time, and the destination address was confirmed.

The ambulancemen moved Nariman to one side of the bed to make room for the stretcher. They slid him expertly onto it and tucked in the sheet, advising him it was best to keep his eyes closed. They emerged from the bedroom, carefully negotiating the turn through the door, with Jal and Coomy following behind.

As they marched down the passageway, Nariman opened his eyes. From his supine position he saw the glum portraits of his forefathers on the walls. Strange, how their eyes looked at him – as though they were the living and he the dead.

The slight up-and-down motion of the stretcher, like a boat bobbing on the sea, made his ancestors seem to nod. Nodding to concur with his fate, with his departure from this flat.

He wondered if he was seeing the familiar faces for the last time. He wanted to tell the ambulancemen to make a tour of each room so he could examine everything, fix it in his mind before the door closed behind him.

A
DIATONIC SCALE EXECUTED
in perfect legato drifted upwards from the ground floor of Pleasant Villa. How sweet a simple do re mi can sound, thought Roxana on the third floor, humming along with the violin.

The octave was completed, and she called out from the kitchen, “Get ready, Jehangir, the water’s hot!”

The violin pursued the major scale into the next key. He ignored his mother, absorbed by the jigsaw piece in his hand. To locate its place in the world of his puzzle was all he wanted at the moment.

“Almost boiling now, Jehangir. And so am I, I’m warning you.”

“It’s not my turn today.”

“Don’t try your tricks – Murad had his bath yesterday. Hurry, the water is turning to useless steam!”

A shadow fell upon the incomplete Lake Como. He looked up and saw his father standing over him. “You can’t hear Mummy? Go at once, don’t make her shout.”

Roxana felt tender towards her husband. She could never predict if he was going to side with the children or support her.

Jehangir relinquished the jigsaw, and Yezad took over. “Your son is completely addicted. The way he concentrates, you’d think he was looking for his own place in the world.”

He picked up the blue piece that had defied Jehangir and tried it in various parts of Lake Como before giving up. “Not yet time to fit this piece. You have to build some more.”

“I know,” said Jehangir, pulling his towel off the line that stretched across the front room between his bed and Murad’s. On rainy days, when washing couldn’t be hung on the balcony, the line became a fragrant curtain of wet clothes, and he preferred the room like that, in two compartments. Then he pretended to be one of the Famous Five, or the Five Find-Outers, who all had their own rooms and lived in England where everything was beautiful. His imagination transported the clothes-curtained room to the English countryside, into a house with a lovely garden where robins sang and roses bloomed, and to which he could return after having an adventure or solving a mystery. How perfectly he would fit in that world, he thought.

His school uniform was in the pile of clothes stacked on the clothes horse. The towel was damp with the monsoon’s humid breath. As far as he was concerned, the bath time would be better spent piecing together more of Lake Como, its tranquil shores, its blue skies …

Murad demanded a bath as well, and Roxana said she had enough on her hands in the morning without his new nonsense. “First, even alternate days was too much for you. Now you want it daily.”

“Your boy is growing up,” said Yezad, “and growing sensible. For that we should celebrate, Roxie.”

“Please use her correct name, my mother is not a cinema house,” said Jehangir, imitating his grandfather’s tone, for he knew it would amuse Daddy.

“Listen to him – making fun of Grandpa. Next time we meet the chief, you’re in trouble, you rascal.” Then he put his hands around Roxana’s face. “I can see the whole world in these eyes. Better than any cinema.”

The ground-floor violin continued its practice, dispatching major scales like sunbeams. Jehangir and Murad laughed, it made them happy when their parents were this way, because the darker days filled with shouting and fighting occurred more often than they cared to remember.

“Can you see
Jurassic Park
in Mummy’s eyes?” asked Murad.

“No
Jurassic Park
and no dinosaurs,” said his father. “But I can see
Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing.”

They laughed again, and Roxana said that was enough gayla-gaanda for one morning, these three lazys would be late if they didn’t look sharp. “Come on, push your bed in,” she told Murad. “Breakfast is coming.”

Grumbling that he was the only one among his friends who still hadn’t seen
Jurassic Park,
he slid his low cot under the settee that was Jehangir’s bed. It disappeared from sight with a protesting groan. The dining table, flush against the wall, was pulled into the newly created space. Now there was just enough room around it for four chairs.

Jehangir wondered whether he would ever feel about bathing as Murad did. Daddy was the only one with the privilege of bathing every day because he had to go to work and meet customers. He followed a careful ritual with soap and talcum powder and pomade. He had a Turkish towel, soft and fluffy. The rest of them had coarse plain ones.

He had once asked Mummy why that was. She said Daddy worked so hard at the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, and had such a difficult job, anything special she could do to pamper him, she would. It was very important that he left the house each morning feeling tiptop, she said. She often asked Daddy, Are you happy, Yezdaa, is everything okay? This question Mummy asked Murad and him too, she wanted happiness for all of them, needed to check it constantly. And he always answered yes, even when he was feeling very sad.

A nagging doubt brought him back to the jigsaw puzzle for another look. “Murad can have my turn,” he tried again. “I don’t need it today.”

“Don’t need?” His mother lifted his arm and sniffed under it. “You stink like a goat.”

“Ah, the armpit test,” said his father. “From Mummy’s face, looks like you failed.”

“Be that as it may, you should also sniff Murad,” said Jehangir. “See who smells worse.”

“Time you learned a new phrase,” said his father. “We should visit Grandpa again.”

“It’s your turn today, and that’s final,” said his mother. “If Murad wants a daily bath he must get out of bed before the tap goes dry. At six, like me.”

When no one was looking Jehangir checked his own armpit, and smelt the usual interesting odour. The water was boiling now; his mother took a rag in each hand and lifted the pot off the stove.

“Out of my way,” she called repeatedly, like a ship’s horn in a fog, “move aside, move aside,” staggering to the bathroom in a cloud of steam, where she emptied the vessel in the bucket half filled with cold water. Her great fear was colliding and scalding someone in the morning bustle. She wouldn’t let Yezad carry the hot water either, God forbid, if he burnt himself and was laid up, they would …

But she refused to allow herself to complete that thought. “Scrub yourself properly, don’t forget to use the soap, and – now where are you off to?”

“Toilet.”

“Again? Hurry, the water will get cold. And Yezdaa, the clock in the kitchen has stopped.”

“Can I wind it, Daddy?” asked Murad.

“I’ve told you a hundred times how special that clock is, and how delicate. You’ll wind it when you’re older.”

Murad muttered that everything had to wait till he was older, and at this rate there would be so much piled up for him to do, there would be no time for it all.

Dissatisfied with the knot, Jehangir pulled the Nehru House tie off his neck, smoothed the creases, and made another attempt. He tried a new type that he had learned at school, a bulbous variation on the samosa, called the pakora knot.

“Stop playing with the tie and eat your food,” said Roxana. “Bath, breakfast, uniform – constantly I’ve to be after this boy.”

Halfway through the buttered toast, his stomach felt wobbly again. He tried to slip away unnoticed, to avoid the cross-examination he knew would follow.

But his mother was keeping count. “Third one? What’s wrong? And your brother has sneezed seven times since he woke up.”

He shrugged and continued to the wc while his father teased her about her score-card. Passing by the shelves with the kitchen supplies, Jehangir ran his fingers over the glazed surfaces of the three earthen jars. The large, dark brown one, shaped like an amphora, held the ration-shop rice; the ochre cylindrical jar was filled with ration-shop wheat; and the smallest one, reddish brown, squat, and stout, contained the expensive basmati rice, reserved for special days like Pateti and Navroze and birthdays.

He loved the feel of these bunnees, his fingers forever trying to steal the cool from their glaze. No matter what month of the year, calm and unruffled they sat like three gods in that ill-lit passage. During mango season the fruit was hidden in rice, where it ripened to gold, much better than in straw. And the grain felt silky, trickling over his burrowing fingers when he tried to find the fruit again to see if it was ready for eating.

The chain needed several tugs before the tank yielded its cleansing cascade. Alerted by the flush, Roxana waited for him to pass the kitchen.

“Maybe you should stay home today,” she said, frowning.

He did not touch the jars, or anything else, on the way back. It was his mother’s strict rule: after the toilet, hands had to be washed immediately, with soap, twice, before they could participate again in the world outside the wc.

The distant violin was now weaving mist and melancholy in minor scales. Jehangir’s third trip had condensed a cloud of worry upon Roxana’s face. Still frowning, she returned to the pan to scramble two eggs for her husband’s breakfast. She wanted him to give up eggs, or at least cut down, have them on alternate days.

“Please listen to me, Yezad, it’s not good for you,” she started for the umpteenth time. “There is so much in magazines and on TV about cholesterol and heart trouble.”

“All fads and fashions, Roxie. My father and my grandfather lived to eighty-two and ninety-one. Ate eggs every morning till the day they died.”

Then, mimicking a raucous waiter in a crowded Irani restaurant, he recited, “Fried, scrambled, akoori, omelette!” He made these words loud and guttural, deliberately mispronouncing omelette as armlet, which made Murad laugh and choke on his tea.

Jehangir smiled gratefully at his father. The week before, when his mother had pleaded the same thing, the response had been very different: “Good, the sooner I die of heart trouble, the better. You’ll be free to marry a rich man.” Then, Jehangir’s eyes had filled with tears, Mummy-Daddy were fighting about money, as usual, because it was not enough to pay for everything, and he had gone to stand on the balcony by himself.

He sniffed his twice-washed fingers to make sure they carried the soap fragrance: sometimes his mother demanded proof. But her inquiry now was about the stomach, not hands; she wanted to know if it was runny all three times, and was there any mucus.

He hated these bowel questions, they embarrassed him, made him feel like an infant in diapers. Ignoring them was impossible, Mummy would keep pestering. Best to get them over with quick answers.

“Second and third time runny, no mucus,” he said in a monotone, and rejoined the breakfast table.

Murad decided there wasn’t enough butter on his toast. He went to the refrigerator for the dish hidden behind the bread and milk. With the door open, the mechanical clanks and knocks from its innards sounded louder.

“What are you looking for?” asked Roxana.

“Butter.”

“You have enough. That packet has to last till Sunday. And get away from the fridge before you catch a chill.”

“Don’t worry so much, Roxie,” said Yezad. “The way you treat your sons, you’ll have to change their names to Namby and Pamby.”

She said making fun of her was easy, but without her alertness God knew what calamities would befall Jehangir with his weak stomach, and Murad with his tonsils that swelled like balloons at the slightest cold. And besides, she was the one who had to stay up all night holding their heads while they vomited, putting damp kerchiefs of eau de cologne on their fevered brows: “You never have to worry, I always make sure you sleep. And I am stuck with the problem of paying for doctor. Why don’t you do the budgeting, you’ll find out how little money there is, how difficult to buy both food and medicine.”

Jehangir listened, feeling depressed. The morning, which had started so nicely, was turning into a fight. Then, to his relief, his father took his mother’s arm and squeezed it.

“You’re right, Roxana, prevention is better than cure. But our Jehangla has too many absent days this term. His ground-floor disturbances will create top-floor deficiencies.”

Jehangir wondered if he’d get to miss school today. He preferred his father’s pet name for him to his mother’s because hers was Jehangoo, too much like goo-goo gaa-gaa baby talk.

His father turned to him. “Well, rascal, what have you eaten this time?”

“Nothing, I’m fine.” He knew Daddy was referring to the occasion when forbidden green mangoes had been consumed with friends at school.

“Why do you want to stay home? They have toilets in school.”

Jehangir stopped chewing; the masticated bits gathered at the front of his mouth in a rush of saliva, and his buttered toast threatened to redeposit itself in his plate. The lavatory at school was disgusting, it stank like railway-station toilets. The boys called it the bog. The first time he heard it, he was puzzled by the word. He had looked it up in Daddy’s dictionary, and found more than one meaning. Slang for lavatory, it said; also, wet spongy ground. He imagined wet spongy ground, imagined putting his foot in it, and agreed “bog” was the perfect word.

He didn’t have to answer his father’s question; his mother did: “It’s risky for Jehangoo to eat canteen food today. He must stay home, I’ll make soup-chaaval for him.”