Their Language of Love (15 page)

Roshni lowered her thickly fringed lids and glanced at her spouse from the corners of her dark eyes. At this moment Nav sounded as insufferably stuffy and patronizing as Roshni’s family had been at pains to point out to her in Bulsar.

But how could they determine, in a few hectic days, the finer aspects of a personality she was herself only just discovering? The tender, passionate and vulnerable facets that were beginning to shimmer for her like the diamonds cut by the famous artisans of Gujrat.

Meanwhile, the man of God appeared to be in a frenzy.
The muscles in his brown face were bunched in tight knots that jumped as he yelled: ‘Jesus Saves! I’ve found the Lord! Amen! I’m a genuine Holy Ghost. I got the Holy Ghost power! Hallelujah! Repent sinners, repent. The end of the world is coming! Now is the time! The end of the world is coming.’

Roshni stared at him, fascinated. People were ambling past them and except for a few children and a young, well-dressed couple who looked like European tourists, nobody paid him much attention. The preacher’s fierce oratory and obsessive style reminded Roshni of an eccentric priest who occasionally visited Bulsar to exhort the twenty-odd bewildered Parsee males gathered at Kharegat Hall—for want of anything better to do—to march straight to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and wrest back Iran, the land the Parsees had fled fourteen hundred years ago, with their importunate demands.

‘Jesus saves! Glory to the Lord! Hallelujah! The end of the world is coming!’ roared the preacher, ‘The Jesus people are coming!’

‘He
is
funny,’ Nav said, and Roshni, smiling, concurred.

‘Repent! I have found the Lord,’ bellowed the preacher. ‘The Lord will find you, sinner!’

And the proselytizer made a smart little turn on patent leather heels and unexpectedly pointed a long and rebuking finger at Nav.

Believing that the condemning finger was directed at some unfortunate sinner behind him, Nav glanced swiftly over his shoulder. No one stood behind him.

Nav turned his scarlet face to the preacher and said—with commendable calm considering his shock—‘I’m not a sinner.’

‘Everyone’s a sinner. The Lord knows. Repent! The Lord will show you the Way. Accept Jesus into your heart. He died for your sins. Amen. Glory, thank the Lord. Repent!’ And since great truths bear reiterating, the preacher, tirelessly repeating himself, exhorted: ‘The end of the world is coming! The Lord Saves! Amen!’

‘Zarathushtra will take care of my sins, my good man. I’m a Parsee. I believe in my Prophet Zarathushtra!’

Nav sounded very like a fabled uncle mentioned by Roshni’s father. The uncle had irritated a New Yorker some years ago with his sermon that Zoroastrians didn’t smoke because they venerated fire, and thus couldn’t give him the cigarette money he had asked for. The aggravated New Yorker had snarled: ‘O yeah?’ pulled out a knife and relieved the uncle of his wallet, and nicked his testicles.

‘Thou shall not place false Gods before me!’ thundered the preacher, who had by now turned a swarthy red. ‘There is only one path to our Lord. Hallelujah! Turn to the Saviour or you’ll burn in everlasting hell. Repent before it’s too late! The end of the world is coming! Glory to the Lord!’

Nav made a slight, reflexive movement that rippled through his muscles, readying him for combat, and Roshni let go of his arm.

‘It’s fundamentalists like you who are causing all the trouble and violence in our world,’ Nav shouted in a voice as terrible as the proselytizer’s and, swiftly glancing at Roshni
for approval, continued, ‘If you did a decent day’s work we’d all be better off.’

‘I work in the vineyard of the Lord! I seek lost sheep to return them to the fold. I’m a genuine Holy Ghost—I got the Holy Ghost power! Hallelujah! Glory, thank the Lord. Repent. The end of the world is coming!’ boomed the twin speakers.

Thinking up a storm of responses, Nav waited for a pause in the preacher’s prattle—and became vaguely conscious of a quiet but somehow menacing presence near them. At the periphery of his distracted vision Nav got the impression that the presence had an abnormally bulky scarf wrapped round its neck and shoulders.

And then, saying ‘Ho!’, Nav staggered back. He tripped over a stone and his legs flying out from under him, fell on his scant buttocks. Roshni shuffled reflexively to help her husband, but was startled at once by the same sight that had sent Nav to the ground.

The distracting presence had a thick, eight-foot-long boa constrictor wrapped round his neck and shoulders, and for all Nav had shouted ‘Ho!’ and fallen flat, the lean man with the boa remained as still and detached as a statue of Buddha, if one could imagine a six-foot four-inch African American Buddha with freckles, a pencil mustache and running shoes.

The crowd that had gathered round Nav and the preacher during their spirited exchange at once shifted their attention to the stationary figure with the huge constrictor wreathing, pleating and slithering round his chest and arms. The boa, as thick as a man’s arm, as splendid in its sophisticated designer
coat as a model, raised its sleek head, flicked out its forked tongue to examine the man’s moustache, and curled around sinuously to explore what was going on in the back.

The preacher, looking distraught at having the rug pulled out from under his act by the reptile, shifted his attention. Grasping the opportunity to beat a retreat, Nav and Roshni stumbled headlong into the welcoming centre of a Three-Card-Monte card game.

A burly black dealer, displaying a fuzz of cropped hair and a flattened nose, was bent over the three cards he was expertly sliding on an improvised table made up of two cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other. He was slick, fast, intent, and as he juggled the cards he talked up a storm to attract an audience. ‘Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar—which is the Ace of Spades, pick out the Ace of Spades. Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar—watch the Ace of Spades, pick out the right card.’

A player, so thin and tall and young that he appeared to have outgrown his jeans, fixedly followed the movements of the dealer’s quick hands which were, for all their size, as supple as a conjurer’s. The skinny young player rubbed his chin and deliberated for some seconds; then he hesitantly picked out a card.

It was the Ace of Spades.

Shouting, ‘O’rrright!’ the youthful winner jubilantly twirled around and waved a little wad of twenty dollar bills high above their heads. His victoriously whirling head was shaved above the ears and abruptly crowned by a flat disk of thick hair.

An alert and admiring spectator, sporting an old-fashioned Afro and a scar that ran from cheek to lip across his otherwise handsome face, shook the winner’s hand and thumped his back. The excited young man had obviously had a run of luck and was about to try again.

Nav and Roshni watched the dealer juggle the three cards on the cardboard table. Every once in a short while he would lift up the Ace of Spades to show its position and busily start sliding the cards face down on the table again.

Out of the three games they watched, the skinny youth picked out the Ace of Spades thrice.

It looked reasonably simple and clearly it was above board. The dealer wasn’t wearing a jacket, and he had his shirt sleeves rolled up over his bulging forearms. He couldn’t very well slip a card up his sleeve or indulge in chicanery without being detected. Or so Nav thought. All one needed to do was to carefully watch the dealer’s clever hands and outwit his fat fingers.

Nav moved closer.

The dealer glanced at him briefly out of surprisingly light eyes, and pretending indifference, shouted: ‘Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar, watch the Ace of Spades.’

Exhilarated by his bout with the proselytizer, and shaken by his humiliating encounter with the boa constrictor and his subsequent fall, Nav felt compelled to match his discerning eye against the dealer’s skill.

‘Ten dollars,’ Nav said, astutely bargaining. He glanced swiftly at Roshni to ascertain that he had impressed her with his shrewdness. ‘I don’t have any more money. Ten dollars.’

‘Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar, pick out the ace of spades,’ the dealer said, ignoring Nav and the ten-dollar bill he held between his index and middle fingers.

Meanwhile the Protestant proselytizer had set up house near them.

‘Gambling paves the way to hell!’ he boomed through his microphone, and to Nav it felt as though the deceptively innocent-looking amplifiers had singled out his ears for their assault.

‘Thou shalt not gamble! The end of the world is coming! Repent. Jesus saves!’

‘Ten dollars,’ Nav said speaking more assertively, and also loud enough to be heard above the din. He wagged his two joined fingers back and forth making the ten-dollar bill flutter.

The dealer glanced about. The excited young winner had turned his long and narrow back on the game and was busy talking to the admiring spectator with the scar and the old-fashioned Afro. Nav appeared to be the only candidate.

The dealer unravelled his massive beige palm saying, ‘Okay, just this once,’ and pocketed the bill Nav handed him as swiftly as a lizard snapping up a fly on a whitewashed Bulsar wall.

Roshni observed the gesture and was struck by its significance. There was as little hope of the bill being recovered by Nav as of the metaphorical fly being stuck back on a wall.

Not too perturbed at the possibility of her boastfully savvy and perennially instructive husband being diddled out of ten dollars, Roshni observed her spouse with interest.

Nav was intent and alert. His keen eyes followed the dealer’s shuffle and a smug aspect spread over the spare flesh covering his sharply defined features.

Nav’s arm suddenly shot out, and his hand, like a serpent striking, picked out the middle card.

It was the five of hearts. The wrong card.

But hope is an indestructible part of human nature and Roshni could almost feel Nav being suckered into thinking the next time he’d win his money back.

Roshni moved closer to warn her husband, but before she could express her misgiving Nav gave the dealer another ten dollar bill. Roshni stared at Nav as he watched the deft conjurer’s hands with hypnotic intensity. The smug aspect was no longer in evidence; it had been replaced by a perplexed frown.

Nav abruptly and triumphantly pounced on the card to the left of the centre—and picked out the seven of clubs. He gawked at it in disbelief.

Almost absently Nav took out another ten dollar bill from the new lizard-skin wallet Roshni had brought for him as a gift. Again he pounced. Again he lost.

All at once it dawned on Nav that it was real money he was dishing out and losing so fast. The suspicion that had had no time to manifest itself, now shot into his mind like a dart. He had followed the dealer’s hands exactly and knew exactly where the ace of spades should have been. Nav was sure the man had somehow changed the card.

‘You’re cheating,’ he shouted, mortified and indignant.

The dealer’s startling yellow eyes turned muddy and locked
on Nav’s with a dirty look calculated to turn his feet cold. Nav’s toes shrivelled into little frozen shrimps inside his woollen socks and gym shoes.

The tall youth in the outgrown jeans who had won so spectacularly earlier, scoffed and said ‘Ha!’ in an intolerably superior way.

‘Call on the Lord for salvation!’ the preacher bawled in the course of his own fiery discourse, and inadvertently ignited further sparks in the little scene going on between Nav and the Three Card Monte set-up.

‘I’ll call the cops for salvation!’ yelled Nav, unconsciously echoing the preacher. ‘You can’t cheat me!’

Nav noticed that the euphoric winner and the admiring spectator with the scar had closed ranks with the dealer. Too late, he realized they were the shills. He was abashed and outraged at having been so easily taken in.

Now the three men combined to glower down on Nav with malignant looks calculated to chill his bones.

Nav’s body responded to the glares, and he felt the sweat begin to form on his forehead.

But thirty dollars is thirty dollars, and it constituted a substantial chunk of his scarce resources as a junior computer analyst in upstate New York.

‘Give my money back, you bunch of crooks, or I’ll have you locked up!’ Nav threatened ominously, but the icy shiver that zipped through his spine made his voice quaver.

Not to be outdone, the proselytizer, in the course of his unwitting discourse hollered: ‘The only salvation is the Lord! Lightning shall strike the sinner!’

‘Why you dirty little squealer,’ the dealer hissed. He grabbed hold of Nav by the V-neck of his blue hand-knitted cardigan, and Nav’s Adam’s apple bobbed up a notch higher.

As if in a nightmarish trance, Roshni saw Nav teetering almost on the tips of his gym-shoed toes. She noticed with a sense of shock how extraordinarily elongated and narrow he looked with the clothes on his chest all crunched up in the dealer’s giant hand.

Their fists clenched, the two shills moved on Nav like lightning striking.

Roshni suddenly and instinctively let out a shrill, long, bloodcurdling screech and then, certain that her husband was being maimed and murdered, screamed, ‘Police, help police! Murder! Murder!’

The dealer lifted his cropped head in surprise, and observing the foreign woman in a sari screaming like a demented trumpet, quickly cast his eyes about. He must have seen something that agitated him because he abruptly let go of Nav and snatched up his cards.

The youthful shill who had scoffed at Nav with such wounding superiority, dismantled the table with a swift kick that sent the cardboard flying.

The dealer and his partners ran in three diametrically different directions and evaporated among the skateboard acrobats and Frisbee enthusiasts before the two cops in navy uniforms sauntered up to the scene of the crime.

His cardigan askew, his shirt half out of his trousers, Nav was too embarrassed to give an account of the scam to the complacent cops.

When Roshni hysterically told them of her husband’s losses and how close he had come to being murdered, one of them looked her up and down in her sari and laconically remarked, ‘Everybody knows those guys always rip you off. Y’guys must be from someplace else. He’s lucky he didn’t get his pockets picked.’