The Crow Eaters (27 page)

IT was a fierce day in June. The heat already had killed all the flies and mosquitoes in Lahore, and it took a daily toll in scores of human lives. Temperatures ranged between 118 and 119 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. It required an effort to stir and people moved their limbs as little as possible, sitting up or reaching for a glass of water carefully and calculatingly, like misers who have to pay for their indulgence in hard cash. Mostly they slouched in darkened rooms, panting like fish expiring in shallow waters.

The roads were deserted between noon and three o’clock.

Afternoon sunlight pierced a slit in the curtains and stabbed Faredoon. He awoke and turned his face from the glaring shaft of sunlight, gaudy with inflamed particles of dust. He got up to secure the curtains, and he lingered a moment to look at the sun-dazzled road. Although it was past four o’clock, car bumpers, cycles, hoardings, tonga shafts, and even the asphalt on the road flashed and reflected the implacable fury of the sun.

Faredoon felt a weariness in his flesh. He adjusted the curtains and went back to bed. He felt a hot, dry fever in his bones, a brittle, aching fatigue that was not of the June heat – and he knew the end was near.

It was 1940. Faredoon Junglewalla was sixty-five years old.

In the evening Freddy forced himself to the supper table and then to the sitting room. He was distracted and listless. Hutoxi, Ruby and Ardishir had dined with him. Katy and her husband (she was married to a boy from Amritsar who had established a successful hardware business in Lahore)
dropped in later for the usual after-dinner assembly. Seeing that Faredoon was weary and unanimated, they talked among themselves and left early.

Faredoon spent the next day in bed. Putli took his temperature. It was 99 degrees. She sent for the doctor. ‘It’s nothing, just a touch of heat,’ said the doctor.

Faredoon had been in bed a week. Late in the morning, seizing an opportunity to be alone with him, Jerbanoo popped in.

‘How long is this circus going to carry on? It’s all very well to lie flat on your bed with everyone waiting on you hand and foot, but let me tell you something; if you don’t use your limbs, your hinges will get all jammed up!’

Freddy looked at her equably. ‘I am dying.’

‘Dying? Bah!’ snorted Jerbanoo. She moved closer and peered sharply into Faredoon’s face. ‘Nonsense!’ she said, ‘You look like a healthy beetroot!’

‘Nevertheless, I am dying.’

‘So what!’ said Jerbanoo. ‘So am I! So is Putli! So is everybody! We all have to go sometime!’

Faredoon propped himself on his elbows and stared at Jerbanoo with a curiously dispassionate and enigmatic intensity.

‘What are you looking at me like that for!’

‘Know something? I give up. Congratulations! You have won. You will outlive me,’ said Freddy quietly.

‘What does it matter – you go first, or I go first? No one lives for ever!’

‘Yes … but you look so indestructible – so devilishly pink-cheeked and healthy – I don’t think you will ever go.’

Jerbanoo was sorely grieved. Faredoon knew better: to tell someone at her age that they looked as if they would live for ever was to tempt providence – to cast an evil eye.

‘Oh God, oh God. Does no one know how I suffer? How sick I really am? No! And that’s because I suffer in silence! But my days are numbered. I feel it! I feel it! Oh, I’ll be gone before you,’ she cried, squeezing out a tear or two. She
groaned and moaned piteously, endeavouring to counteract the ominous effect of Faredoon’s envious words.

‘Seems to me we’ve been through all this before,’ sighed Freddy wearily. ‘You ought to have gone ten times by now.’

Jerbanoo was enraged. Her glowering old head wobbled from side to side as if palsied. ‘All right. All right. If that’s what you want, I’ll bury you first!’ she cried. Turning her copiously rounded back on Faredoon, she stalked from the room.

Faredoon wondered at himself. It was strange for a man who had lived as zestfully as he to be resigned to the cessation of life. There was a curious langour on him. Every moment in his last days passed lucidly and bright as in slow motion scenes. A sense of fulfilment and content settled deeper on him and he no longer feared death. He had lived, he had savoured all the surprises, joys and sorrows that fell to his share, and it now did not matter if he died. Faredoon knew he would continue to exist – in his children – in a prosperous dynasty of future Junglewallas!

And yet Faredoon felt an urge to leave a greater part of himself behind. Not in their memories; he knew few would remember even in a year that a man called Faredoon Junglewalla ever existed, but he meant to linger in his influence on their minds. He proceeded to reiterate inexhaustibly his rough and ready views on the benign motivation of
needs
and
wants
. He talked to each of his children at length, in his bedroom, subtly injecting the lessons of his experiences and the rich fruit of his reflection. ‘It has taken me a long time to comprehend Evil – and Good – and a lifetime to catch just a glimpse of the Path of Asha, God’s grand plan for man and the Cosmos. Yes, the strength of God comes to the man of good action, and such a man is gifted, progressively, with the Good Mind, the
Vahu Mana
, God’s own mind … Thus spake Zarathustra!’

In this way he felt he had a stake in the direction of their future, a stake in endless generations of Junglewallas.

One evening, gathered around him in the bedroom, the
family found him animated as of old, yet perturbed by the trend of events in India. He was stirred by talk of rebellion, self-rule, and Independence from the British – and most of all by the role of a few Parsis in all this. He stated his opinions with a vigour and prophetic emphasis that infected his listeners. They saw in him not the white-haired, wasted, resigned old man, but the man he once was!

Yazdi had been telegrammed. They never knew if the message reached him. Faredoon leaned back on the pillows. A ceiling fan creaked round and round and ineffectually stirred air that the heat had congealed into a transparent glue. Billy, Ardishir and Bobby Katrak, who had arrived from Karachi with Yasmin, lounged at various angles on the bed, their sweating faces turned to Faredoon. Hutoxi, Ruby, Yasmin and Putli sat alert on chairs they had carried in from the dining room, ready to jump up if Faredoon required anything. Tanya and Katy talked softly on the balcony.

‘Do you know who is responsible for this mess?’ asked Faredoon, not expecting an answer, and his listeners waited for the rhetoric that usually followed. ‘I’ll tell you who: that misguided Parsi from Bombay, Dadabhoy Navroji! Things were going smoothly; there has always been talk of throwing off the British yoke – of Independence – but that fool of a Parsi starts something called the Congress, and shoots his bloody mouth off like a lunatic. “Quit India! Quit India!” You know what he has done? Stirred a hornet’s nest! I can see the repercussions.

‘What happens? He utters ideas. People like Gandhi pick them up – people like Valabhai Patel and Bose and Jinnah and Nehru … and that other stupid fool in Karachi, Rustom Sidhwa, also picks them up! What does he do? He sacrifices his business and abandons his family to the vicissitudes of chance and poverty. He wears a Gandhi cap, handloom shirt, and that transparent diaper they call a dhoti. He goes in and out of jail as if he were visiting a girl at the Hira Mandi! Where will it get him? Nowhere! If there are any rewards in all this, who will reap them? Not Sidhwa! Not Dadabhoy Navroji!
Making monkeys of themselves and of us! Biting the hand that feeds! I tell you we are betrayed by our own kind, by our own blood! The fools will break up the country. The Hindus will have one part, Muslims the other. Sikhs, Bengalis, Tamils and God knows who else will have their share; and they won’t want you!’

‘But where will we go? What will happen to us?’ asked Bobby Katrak in half-serious alarm. The question, in varying degrees of concern, was on all faces.

‘Nowhere, my children,’ said Faredoon sinking back in the pillows. He raised his gaunt, broad-wristed arms in a slow, controlled movement and rested them on the head-board. The bedsheet was crumpled at his feet. He was wearing loose cotton pyjamas and a sleeveless V-necked
sudreh
. His skin was a pale yellow-brown. The hair of his chest and armpits had turned white. His veins were prominent and blue-throbbing. An inward look of triumph and assurance suddenly veiled his eyes. Faredoon said softly, ‘We will stay where we are … let Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or whoever, rule. What does it matter? The sun will continue to rise – and the sun continue to set – in their arses …!’

Because of a deep-rooted admiration for my diminishing community—and an enormous affection for it—this work of fiction has been a labour of love. The nature of comedy being to exaggerate, the incidents in this book do not reflect at all upon the integrity of a community whose honesty and sense of honour—not to mention its tradition of humour as typified by the Parsi
natak
—are legend. The characters drawn in this piece of pure fantasy have no relation whatever to any existing people.

I take this opportunity to thank Dr Justice Javid Iqbal and Nasira, without whose encouragement I never would have published this book in Pakistan first, and who continue to be a source of inspiration and strength. Many thanks also to Nergis Sobani, to whom I am already eternally indebted, and Esa, ever gallant, for so generously sharing her time.

It is time I acknowledged my debt to Shahnaz Rasul for the poems
Yazdi
spouts; and so blithely distorts. And for this publication by Penguin (India) I thank my friends Khushwant Singh, David Davidar and Zamir Ansari.

I would also like to thank my long-suffering husband and children, my brother Minoo for his unflagging patience and support, and my mother for the spirit in which she has accepted my writing.

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First published by Jonathan Cape 1980

Published by Penguin Books India Ltd. 1990

www.penguinbooksindia.com

Copyright © Bapsi Sidhwa 1978, 1990

The title is borrowed from a idiom commonly used in the sub-continent Anyone who talks too much is said to have eaten crows.

Cover photograph and design by Jehangir Tarapore
Cover design by Santhosh Dutta

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-01-4014-812-1

This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-93-5118-159-0

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