The Crow Eaters (19 page)

THEY were invited to visit the Easymoney residence on Wednesday, 15th September, at four o’clock in the afternoon – just two days away.

The 15th arrived and Putli was as flushed and excited as a bride. She spent hours deliberating on her choice of sari. Mrs Toddywalla, unable to withstand her dithering, finally selected a cream-coloured Chinese silk with a blue and yellow border worked in petit-point. Putli had to tie her sari three times before she got it right. She pinned the border to her hair with trembling fingers and gave her face a shaky daub of talcum powder.

‘You look wonderful!’ exclaimed Mrs Toddywalla reassuringly on beholding her ghost-like house guest, and Putli cracked a feeble smile. Jerbanoo too was edgy, though she valiantly disguised her symptoms in a brusque manner. One of them would need to keep her head!

Billy was the most nervous of them all. He was already boiling in the mustard and green pin-striped suit that hugged his skeletal frame. His high collar chafed him, but he dared not poke his finger in for fear of upsetting the fashionable knot in his tie.

Mrs Toddywalla’s two-horse victoria carriage was announced. She gave each of them a good luck peck, deposited them in the carriage, and waved goodbye.

Billy sat between his mother and grandmother, stretching his neck and gulping to ease the irritation beneath his adam’s apple. Noticing his nervousness, both women wrapped protective arms round his jumpy bones.

None of the passengers had eyes for the teeming life of the city, for the graceful sweep of the sea-framed Marine Drive. Each was immersed in his or her dreams and fears.

Jerbanoo was the first to notice that they were in a very quiet, very wealthy quarter. High walls partially hid a profusion of verdure and here and there they caught a flashing glimpse of a stately, deep-set mansion.

The coachman, high on his perch up front, twisted around to tell them they were almost there. He stretched out his whip to indicate a turn and they entered the Easymoney portals. It was a short drive through a cool green haze of coconut palms and large-leafed creepers clinging to flaming gulmohur trees. They had an impression of fountains and white Grecian statues and suddenly they saw the house. ‘Monument’ would be more apt a word to describe the massive, pink-stone and marble structure with its stout pillars and small, fly-screened windows.

The passengers disembarked, Billy all but undoing Jerbanoo’s sari when he stepped on it. They smoothed their clothes and stood facing a lordly flight of grey and white marble steps.

A smiling servant ran down to give Jerbanoo a hand. He sported a stiff white turban and a red and gold cummerbund. His manner was so informal and deferentially friendly that Jerbanoo felt her assurance return. They ascended to the vast semi-circular verandah supported by pillars, and they were half-way across the marble floor when a small, sari-clad form shot out at them from a carved doorway. The lady of the house was all smiles and flutter and welcoming dimples. Putli, expecting to see the stalwart Amazon who had produced twenty-two children, was astonished to behold this little thing.

Lady Rodabai Easymoney embraced Jerbanoo and held Putli, thudding heart to thudding heart, in a warm embrace. They were both of the same build and stature. It was a case of love at first sight!

It took an anxious eye to observe all that Putli had seen in the few seconds it took her Ladyship to bustle up to them
with outstretched arms. Each particle of attire, every curve of her form, imprinted itself on her mind. The blue georgette sari, the three strands of grey pearls, the six-inch band of gold on either hand, the crystalline twinkle of diamonds in her ears and the diamond, ruby and emerald rings. Her hair was pulled back in a knot as stern as Putli’s and Putli knew, instinctively, that here was a woman just like herself. She knew her Ladyship’s beginnings, like her own, were poor. That her husband was not born to the wealth and laurels that were now his. And she also knew from her glimpse of the stringy, hard-worked hands with their blue, bulging veins, that she would be as tidy and meticulous as herself. More likely than not, her Ladyship washed tomatoes with soap.

Holding Putli’s and Jerbanoo’s hands, casting birdlike, approving glances at Billy, Rodabai led them into a handsome drawing room. It was a vast, cool room, lighted by crystal lamps and the sunlight that filtered through brocade curtains. One wall was hung with a huge French tapestry, and the dull gold furniture was of Louis XIV style. Carpets spread out beneath their feet a soft garden of Persian hunting scenes and flowers.

Jerbanoo and Putli exchanged significant glances and gingerly occupied their embroidered chairs. Their hostess hovered about them with a fluttery and anxious hospitality that put them at ease even in the overwhelming elegance of the room. What would they have? Could she get them some wine?

Jerbanoo, behaving with a dignity and restraint that became the nature of their mission, favoured her suggestion. Fundamentally, Jerbanoo’s role was that of observer and assessor. She had accompanied Putli to lend her imposing and corpulent support; very like the accompaniment of the double-bass to a band.

‘I would prefer something cold, please,’ said Putli, adding, ‘The same for my Behram, please. Touch wood, he hasn’t learnt to touch spirits yet.’

‘My Roshan will be thrilled to hear that. She’s the same,’
said Rodabai, rewarding Behram with a smile. She scurried from the room, a servant in tow, to see to their drinks.

‘You noticed something? None of the “bearer get this” and “bearer fetch that” nonsense about her. Seems to be as straightforward and simple as we are!’ remarked Jerbanoo, kindly, of their absent hostess.

Putli accepted her mother’s observations with starry eyes.

The room filled up unobtrusively. There were two dour-faced, gummy-mouthed aunts, six or seven married elder sisters, and a smattering of children. Each scrutinised the groom.

Billy gurgled, gulped on his adam’s apple, stretched his neck like a swan disentangling a crick, and squared his jaws right up to his ears. He was sweating profusely beneath the Brilliantine-slicked waves of his hair. What if he began to smell? What if a brilliant, oily trickle crawled down his forehead? His hands turned clammy.

The eldest sister brought in the girl. Roshan looked pathetically anaemic and flat-chested in a welter of gold ornaments and a yellow sari. She glanced at them shyly and at once they saw, even in the dim light, that she was pock-marked. Keeping Freddy’s doubts in mind, Putli had at times anticipated much worse. Her imagination had presented her with a string of hobbling, hunched-back, hare-lipped monsters. This wasn’t too bad. In fact she found the girl’s expression pleasant and her features well-proportioned beneath her passable disfigurement. Her subconscious ruminated on the dowry.

The girl was introduced to Putli and Jerbanoo, and led to a carved chair next to Billy. She sat with bowed head, demurely raising her eyes to answer the polite questions put to her by the visitors. She had a lilting, barely audible voice.

After an initial twinge of disappointment Billy found himself approving of her subdued deportment, and when she gave him a shy, slant-eyed look his pulse drummed.

Trollies were wheeled into the room. They were loaded with pastries, Indian sweets and caviar sandwiches. Billy
raised his eyes from the carpet to these invitations to his stomach, and his heart skipped a beat …

He had noticed a pair of smooth, well-rounded calves that curved with exquisite feminity into a pair of white tennis-shoes. He looked up and beheld the most beautiful girl he had ever seen or imagined. She wore a white sporting outfit that outlined the firm globules of her behind and the tiny, Coca Cola-bottle pinch of her waist. Above her waist protruded the most heavily gorgeous, upthrust pair of brassiered bosoms he ever hoped to see.

The girl smiled at Billy, and Billy, not trusting himself, slid his glance past her. His eyes confusedly sought the carpet like a homing pigeon’s. But his vision was full of the perfect oval face, the swing of black, bobbed hair and the ingenuous, innocent eyes smiling at him from behind a pair of rimless glasses.

‘That is my Tanya. She’s just come in from tennis,’ said Rodabai, explaining the girl’s informal attire. She sighed, ‘It will be her turn next, I imagine – but I’m in no hurry – she’s only sixteen.’

‘Quite the modern little miss, isn’t she?’ said Putli with affectionate indulgence.

‘Oh yes! And how!’ Her Ladyship pulled a droll and helpless face.

Tanya floated lightly on her wondrous, cream-brown legs and bent to kiss her mother and then Jerbanoo and Putli, before Billy’s spellbound gaze. She swayed up to Billy and made room for herself beside her sister. Roshan sat back accommodatingly and Tanya perched sideways on the edge of the chair. She placed a negligent hand on Roshan’s thigh and subjected Billy to a frankly inquisitive and impersonal scrutiny.

Billy’s heart flew into his mouth and knocked at his teeth.

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling once again.

‘Hello,’ croaked Billy, gulping. Never had he seen such a sparkling set of teeth – such a bewitching smile – such a pair of lips!

He could scarcely breathe and the thought flashed through his mind: just as well. What if his mouth smelled? In any case, to breathe in her presence was to pollute the air.

‘So, you are to be my new brother-in-law!’ exclaimed the girl conversationally.

Billy glanced at Roshan. She blushed and he could feel colour blaze in his own swarthy skin.

‘You’ve been playing something?’ he countered, pleased to have side-tracked the embarrassing demands of her statement. He marvelled at himself for being able to say anything at all.

Tanya’s round, puzzled eyes lit up. ‘Oh, you mean this?’ she asked, flicking her skirt. ‘I’ve just been through six sets of tennis! We have four courts at the back of the house. We have a swimming pool also. You must get Roshan to show it to you. It’s lined with green marble. Do you swim?’

‘Yes,’ answered Billy, and shifted his eyes. He recalled his two spirited attempts in the shoddy university swimming tank in Lahore. He had threshed wildly and had almost drowned.

A damp inferiority descended on him.

But Tanya prattled easily, plying Billy with questions and teasing him in her exuberant, forthright manner. He soon felt quite at ease and exhilarated, entertaining the girls with witty snorts and a talented display of comical facial contortions.

Billy was overwhelmed by a ferocious urge to impress these rich, adorable girls. He hinted at his father’s influence, at his family’s wealth and position with a subtlety that quite surprised him. And when he got a bit carried away and boasted, ‘My father is the uncrowned king of Lahore!’ he promptly defused the bombast by adding, with a prim sideways simper, ‘and I’m the queen!’

The girls roared. His timing was perfect and he kept on being funny.

At the end of it Tanya said, ‘Oh, you’re a scream! I never would have thought it to look at you.’

Billy beamed across his wide mouth to the tips of his ears. He looked like a rather attractive, swaggering gnome.

‘Tim, what is your favourite colour?’ he asked suddenly (they were by now calling each other Tim and Billy).

Tim stretched her picturesque legs and looked at the ceiling as if for inspiration. Abruptly she fixed her guileless eyes on Billy. ‘Blue,’ she said definitely. ‘I like blue best!’

‘Blue is my favourite too,’ said Billy seriously, coming to a decision right there. Truth to tell, Billy had never thought about the subject.

Jerbanoo, in her function as double-bass to the band, had conducted herself creditably. She added the most impressive touch at the end when she slipped five gold Queen Victoria sovereigns into Roshan’s palm.

When the time of departure came, Billy hugged his prospective mother-in-law, shook hands with all the sisters and aunts, and waved at them airily from the carriage. For all he knew, Jerbanoo and Putli were his fairy godmothers and the carriage Cinderella’s pumpkin.

DURING the ride home Putli’s and Jerbanoo’s enthusiastic comments and conjectures passed over Billy’s head, and next morning he mooned about the house calling everyone Tanya.

‘What’s this? Tanya, Tanya, Tanya! You’re marrying Roshan and don’t you forget it!’

Jerbanoo was exasperated.

‘No. I’m marrying Tanya,’ announced Billy, prancing forward on his buttock-less frame and kissing Jerbanoo. He flitted over to his mother. ‘I’m marrying Tanya, aren’t I?’ he asked, bending impishly over her as she scooped coconut from a shell.

‘Don’t be silly,’ snapped Putli, choking on the coconut, hoping he was only teasing her.

‘You’re being silly, Mama! You don’t seriously expect me to marry that dried-up, pock-marked, dying Bombay-duck.’

Bedlam.

Billy’s statement triggered a wild and confused controversy. He was lectured, reasoned with and admonished. He was wheedled, coaxed and intimidated. Even Mrs Minoo Toddywalla pitched into the fray. Billy grinned, and Mrs Toddywalla, not yet acclimatised to his disconcerting habit, was irritated beyond endurance.

‘Yes! And that’s another bad habit you have!’ thundered Jerbanoo. ‘No one in their right senses would marry you – and here is a perfectly lovely, well-brought up child who is agreeable, and you call her a dying Bombay-duck? Aren’t you ashamed? Go have a look at your own monkey-grin in the mirror!’

‘He can’t help it. He doesn’t mean to be rude,’ said Putli in defence of her grimacing son. She knew the more he was scolded the harder he grinned. Then she put what her heart so fervently hoped into words:

‘Oh Billy, you don’t know your mind! It’s just an absurd whimsy – you meet Roshan again and it will pass. “Phut” – like that.’

But it was not a whimsy and at the end of two hours she realised Billy was in earnest. He was stricken. He was in love. And he behaved like a cross between a bemused, bucking fawn and an obstinate billy-goat. Prancing and sighing and trilling and declaring his intent. If marry he must, it must be Tanya!

‘Oh God,’ groaned Putli clutching her forehead. ‘What shall I say to them? How can I show my face to Rodabai? What will she think of me?’

‘She will think your conduct disgraceful. She will think you ungrateful for kicking her golden offer. She will think Billy an ill-bred boob and you a spineless, witless mother … And she will never agree to any other proposal after this insult!’

The party broke up on Jerbanoo’s analysis of the situation and our dauntless hero sailed away on a shopping spree.

He returned loaded with parcels, all containing articles of apparel in varying shades of blue.

His extravagance, his stupid prancing about and trilling, were so uncharacteristic of Billy that Putli began to be afraid. She recalled harrowing incidents of suicide, of love-languished sicknesses and madness in her own family. Some of them she’d heard about, some she had witnessed, and she feared for her son’s sanity.

And it is not surprising that Billy, twenty years old, bewhiskered and full-grown, was acting like a wilful adolescent.

In the India of Billy’s days, girls, like jewels, were still being tucked away and zealously guarded by parents, brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Every one kept a sharp eye out. Even the innocent horse-play of children was savagely punished, and a baby boy caught with his hand there, was
promptly spanked on that hand. There were no salesgirls in shops and few women were to be seen on streets. There was but one co-educational school in Lahore and the only women a young man could talk to were those of his family.

In this repressed atmosphere love grows astonishingly on nothing. It sprouts in the oddest places at the oddest times and takes the most bizarre forms. You can see the dusty toe of a woman peeping from her sandal and fall in love, even though her face and figure are veiled in purdah. You can fall for the back of a man’s head, or for a voice across your wall. Mir-taki-mir, a doctor, examining a woman’s pulse, turned poet. All he saw was her hand – and he felt her pulse. Volumes, inspired and beautiful, describe her unseen face.

This is most so among the Muslims and among the majority of Hindus who keep their women in purdah. There is no purdah at all among the Parsis – but the generally repressed air of India envelopes them. Little wonder Putli was afraid.

In the evening the sun hung low and damp over the sea outside the Toddywalla bungalow, spraying the windows red. Putli sagged back on a stuffed sofa in their sitting room. Her face was puffy with anxiety and secret weeping. She ran a limp hand over her forehead murmuring, ‘Oh God, help me, help me … what am I to do?’

But instead of God it was Mr Minoo Toddywalla who finally put an end to her entreaties by declaring: ‘There is nothing for it but to do as the boy says. You can always try … the world won’t come to an end.’

‘But the girl will not have him. Behram, you saw how modern and beautiful she was … she wouldn’t want to go so far away. Lahore would look like a village after Bombay!’ she cried, appealing to her son’s reason.

Mr Toddywalla looked at Billy’s suddenly small and pinched face. His thin little neck sagged into his bony shoulders. The light was gone from his glasses, and Mr Toddywalla felt sorry for the youth.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained!’ he declaimed, very
much as Freddy would have, echoing the faint hope in Billy’s failing heart. ‘You’ll have to propose another offer, I’m afraid.’

Putli was aghast. She and Rodabai had got along so splendidly. They had so much in common. Her Ladyship had even confided in her upon the delicate matter of her chronic constipation. Would she have done so if she hadn’t felt as Putli did, that they were twin souls?

Putli, with a gasp of surprise, had admitted that she too was similarly afflicted. They had exchanged notes on purges, positions and potions and Rodabai had shown Putli her glycerine syringe, a huge injection-like glass contraption. The budding friendship was to be nipped because of Billy’s obduracy.

The next day Putli sat before a mahogany writing desk to pen the letter. She gazed dolefully out of a window at the steely horizon of sea, and then she closed her lids in prayer. Her soul was timorous and she wished Faredoon was with her. A humid little wind curled about the papers on the desk. They were pinned down with glass, brass and onyx paperweights. At last, with a protracted indrawn sigh, Putli licked the nib of her pen. She dipped it carefully in the blue ink-well provided by Billy. Her forehead furrowed intently as she wrote the first formal line on the blue-linen writing pad. The lettering was a bit shaky to begin with but it became well-rounded and firm as she progressed.

The letter started with apologies. So impressively humble, so imaginatively self-effacing were they, that anyone not knowing Rodabai would have thought her an ogre.

Putli joined her hands in supplication; she knelt at Rodabai’s feet; she was so mortified she wished to bury her face in ashes – she begged forgiveness. She had taken to the pock-marked girl at sight, she already loved her like a daughter – but what could she do? Her son had gone insane, he was enamoured of Rodabai’s younger daughter, Tanya. He refused to eat; he refused to drink; he wept, and raved, and she feared for him. So besotted was he for love of the
beauteous Tanya that he could not think of living without her. He threatened suicide. She had all but thrashed him.

Her eldest son, one of God’s most beautiful people, was dead. Her other son had abandoned them and gone – she knew not where. And now the life of her only remaining son was in Rodabai’s hands – at Tanya’s feet. She threw herself upon their mercy, begging for her son’s life; for her son’s happiness.

Behram wanted no dower. He wanted only the girl. And she would be welcomed though she came with nothing but the clothes on her back! God had been kind to Putli and she was in a position to smother the girl with jewels, and drown her in silks. She vowed to keep her forever beneath the vigilant care of her loving eyelids.

The letter was sealed in a matching blue envelope, addressed, and given to the coachman to deliver. Putli flung herself face down on her bed in an open-eyed swoon of exhaustion, to await her doom.