Bombay Time (23 page)

But even love couldn’t wash away fate. Toward morning, a feeling of dark foreboding lingered. Twice that morning, she almost asked Cyrus not to go to work that day; twice, she told herself she was being silly and that Cyloo deserved better than a crazy woman for a wife. Finally, to shake herself out of the bleak mood the dream had placed her in, she impulsively told Cyrus that she had decided to go spend the day at his parents’ house. He could pick her up there after he left work. Dinabai stood at her window and waved to them as they left the apartment together to catch the same bus. She got off at the Fort bus stop and turned around, to catch him waving to her, his sweet face divided into three parts by the iron bars on the bus window. Then the bus was gone.

She had hoped that her mother-in-law’s bustling, good-natured presence would help her snap out of the foul mood she was in. But fear lingered in her heart that morning, like a kiss on the cheek. It was April 14, I960.

The explosion that shattered Tehmi’s life happened a few hours later. An hour earlier, the Engineers had sat down to a late lunch. Afterward, Tehmi was in the kitchen, preparing to wash dishes. It was warm in the kitchen, and Tehmi opened the large window behind the sink to let in some air. Naju was in the adjoining dining room, cleaning up the table and chatting to Tehmi about a mutual friend. “Anyway, like I was saying, Tehmi. That Shirin doesn’t know how lucky she is to have someone as nice as Behram chase after her. The only offers I get are from gents like Pesi
Pipyoo,
you know, men who need their mummies to chase after them with their bibs and milk bottles.” Tehmi opened her mouth to laugh and then felt her teeth rattle. As the deafening explosion assaulted her ears and made her heart thump furiously, her eyes widened with disbelief. A stream of objects—matchboxes, keys, the severed leg of a doll, a battered frying pan—flew into the kitchen from the outside, like small meteorites hurtling through space. The glass panes in the window she had just opened blew out like candles on a birthday cake. In the far right corner of the kitchen, a lightbulb shattered. Panic engulfed Tehmi. Oh Dadaji, it’s an earthquake, she thought. We are all dead ducks. Beneath her, she felt her knees wobble, as if body parts once made of bone and muscle had given way to cotton wool. She could taste blood in her mouth, but her panicked mind had still not registered that she was biting down hard on her lower lip. From a distance, she heard Naju screaming.
“Mart gai, mart gai, mart gai.
Oh God, what is happening? Is Pakistan attacking us, or what?”

Then, Tehmi could hear Dali Engineer’s voice over Naju’s. “Naju,
deekra.
Calm down. Control your fear, I say. Get down on the floor, both you girls. If this is an air raid, better to be close to the floor.” Despite her confusion, Tehmi could hear the struggle in Dali’s voice as he sought to quell his own fear with calm authority. “Tehmi. Mani,” he called. “Gather together now, everybody. But be close to the ground.”

Following the last command was easy because Tehmi’s trembling legs could no longer support her weight. She had no idea how much time had lapsed from when she had first felt the earth tremble. But a few minutes after she had made her way into the dining room, there was another explosion, louder than the first. More windowpanes shattered. Dali reached over and pushed her head down while his wife tried to console their hysterical daughter. But Naju was uncontrollable.
“Mara baap,”
she screamed. “If the Pakistanis are attacking, where can we go? Daddy, we should get out of this
city, fatta-faat.”

Tehmi was forcing herself to think. “But if this is an air raid, why is there no air-raid signal?” she said. “This is an earthquake, not an attack.”

Mani spoke up then, in a voice so thick with fear that it took Tehmi a second to place it. “But if it’s an earthquake, where is my Cyloo? Oh my Lord, if even a
baal
on my Cyrus’s head is affected, I will go mad.”

And then Tehmi saw the white tiger again. He stood before her, as real as the matchboxes that had hurtled past her a short while ago. And for a moment, she knew the truth—that Cyrus was dead. But then denial, fear, and a stout loyalty to Cyrus took over. She was repulsed by the momentary betrayal of her own mind, took it as a sign of wavering faith. “Cyrus is okay,” she said more fiercely than she intended. “My Cyrus is a king, a survivor. Nobody can touch him, not even God.”

Later, she was haunted by that statement. She wondered over and over again about the conceit of that belief, whether she had not challenged and tempted the fates with her arrogance. Perhaps the white tiger had been a test, a test of her humility, of her faith. Perhaps, until she had uttered those words, Cyrus had been alive, injured maybe, but alive, waiting for someone or something to tip the scales of fate in his favor. Perhaps she had sealed his fate with those contemptuous words, banished him to a place where even God could not save him.

A chastised Mani Engineer stared at her daughter-in-law in shame and awe. “Right you are, Tehmi,” she said at last. “My Cyrus will return home safe and sound this evening. I will light a
diva
in the
agyari
for seven days to celebrate his safe arrival.”

Tehmi knew she needed to go downstairs and use the phone at the Irani restaurant to call someone to go tell her mother that she was okay. But she was strangely reluctant to move, to change this configuration on the floor that she was part of. As long as they did not let the outside world in through the front door, they were safe. Safe in their illusions maybe, safe in the cocoon of denial, but safe nevertheless. Outside lay reality, with teeth and claws as sharp as those of the white tiger from her dreams. Outside lay news that had the potential to destroy lives, news of Cyrus’s fate.

But eventually, reality rang the doorbell and Dali Engineer got up from the floor to answer its call. It was Cyrus’s boyhood friend Percy, who lived around the corner from the Engineers. “Dali Uncle, oh, please, I’m so sorry. Oh, Dali Uncle, please, give me some good news. Tell me Cyrus has not gone to work today.”

Dali looked confused. “I’m sorry,
deekra.
If you are needing to talk to Cyrus, you’ll have to wait until he returns this evening. Of course he’s at work right now. Hope your problem can wait till evening.”

Percy stared at Dali in mortification. “Dali Uncle … what are you saying? Cyrus at work? Then you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what, Percy?” Dali said, an edge to his voice.

But Percy had spotted Tehmi behind Dali, and he lurched toward her, as if hoping that the same question asked twice would produce a different answer. “Tehmi, hi. Listen, Cyrus didn’t go to work today, did he?”

But then Dali’s legendary temper flared. “Percy, would you stop this nonsense and tell me what’s going on? All of us have had enough excitement for today, what with the earthquake and all. We’ve already said that Cyrus is at work. Now, what’s the problem?”

Percy raised his voice to match Dali’s, but his had the thin string of hysteria running through it. “That wasn’t an earthquake at all. That was a massive explosion at Bombay Chemicals. Most of the plant is destroyed. If Cyrus is at the factory, he’s dead.”

Dimly, Tehmi heard the shouting and then the sound of a scuffle. Mani had heard the last part of Percy’s words, and before she could stop herself, she slapped the messenger. There were raised voices, screams, the muffled sounds of women crying. But Tehmi didn’t care. She felt removed from the theater of grief around her, as if she were a visitor from some sunny, magical planet, untouched by the tyrannies of mortal flesh. Leaning against a wall, she felt herself sinking slowly toward the floor.

Percy caught her just before she hit the floor.

They had to wait four days before they got Cyrus’s body. And when they finally did, it was scarcely worth the effort, because this ravaged, charred body was not Cyrus. Tehmi’s mother had fought with her tooth and nail about not looking at the body, but Tehmi would not hear of it. “I looked at him while he was alive and I will not send him from this world without looking at his face again,” she said. But she miscalculated. It did not occur to her that she would feel nothing but revulsion for the hideous black face before her, that she would fail to find a trace of the man she loved in the object she saw. The Cyrus she knew and loved had skin kissed by the sun and not lashed by fire. Cyrus had soft curly hair, but the body before her had burned hair stiff as paper. The Cyrus she had married smelled of roses and lavender, but the stranger before her emitted a smell that made her gag. Instead of pity or sorrow, she felt hate. She was unprepared for the sudden blinding anger she felt toward Cyrus for putting himself in this position, for allowing himself to die such an ugly, gruesome, unresisting death. “You let me down, Cyloo,” she whispered as she flinched away from the shriveled piece of flesh before her. “You were supposed to teach me how to laugh, feel joy. Now you have stuck the sharpest knife into my heart. Less than three years of marriage and you have left. How do I laugh now? Now that the teacher has gone away, what is the student to do?”

They had already started the funeral ceremonies before they were given the body. Tehmi had wanted to wait, holding on to a vain hope that Cyrus was injured but alive, but the elders prevailed. “It’s our Parsi custom,
beta”
Dali Engineer intoned. “Without the proper ceremonies, my Cyrus’s soul will be left to linger, not reaching its final resting place. Besides, the newspapers say there is no chance that anyone could have survived the blast.”

All over the city, funerals were being planned. The first blast had been followed by a second, deadlier one. The Engineers never found out if Cyrus had died in the first or second explosion. But for the rest of his days, Dali Engineer prayed that his son had been killed instantaneously, as had scores of other workers.

Tehmi walked through the week as in a dream. The Engineers insisted that both she and her mother stay at their home until they received news about Cyrus, and she agreed because she was too tired to care. Besides, the thought of facing the Wadia Baug apartment, to which Cyrus had brought so much laughter and sunlight, was unbearable. Friends from Wadia Baug whom Cyrus had collected like trophies came to visit, to stand vigil with Tehmi, but still, she felt utterly alone. “Tehmi,” fifteen-year-old Rusi Bilimoria whispered to her during that period. “You know, everyone always makes fun of me for being such a dreamer, but Cyrus doesn’t. He understands. Besides, I really believe in the power of hope, you know? I feel it in my bones that Cyrus is okay. You keep hoping and praying, promise?”

Somehow, Rusi’s words penetrated, probably because he referred to Cyrus in the present tense. That’s how she thought of Cyrus, too, and it irritated her no end that everybody else had switched to the past tense in talking about her husband. “That’s okay, Cyloo,” she whispered to herself then. “They may be ready to turn on you, but I’m not ready to give up yet. I’ll make those vultures fight with me for every piece of you, I promise.”

Of course, those were the good old days. That was before she knew how little flesh there would be left to fight over.

Looking at Rusi now, still lean and straight-backed, but with eyes that seemed heartbreakingly sad and old, Tehmi felt a gush of affection and gratitude for the gangly, dreamy teenager who had tried so hard to console her during that wretched week. She remembered overhearing what Rusi said to a friend on the day of Cyrus’s funeral. “We shouldn’t be talking of Cyrus’s death; we should be talking about his martyrdom. Our building has lost its crown prince today.” She never told Rusi, but that snippet of overheard conversation put starch in her back that day, helped her go through her twenty-five-year-old husband’s funeral with grace and dignity. Because his words so completely echoed what was in her own heart. She was just grateful that someone else knew the enormity of what was lost, that someone else understood that Cyrus’s was no ordinary death because Cyrus was no ordinary man.

She wanted to tell Rusi this today, wanted to thank him for his kindness from decades ago, but then she remembered the days that followed and all the things that had happened since. She forced herself to remember that by the first anniversary of Cyrus’s death, all the neighbors and friends disappeared, so that she and her mother were the only ones who left for the
agyari
at 5:30
A.M.
that morning to meet with the Engineers and listen to a half-sleepy
dastoor
pray for Cyrus’s soul. No one else came; no one visited. It was as if the happy times when Cyrus lived in Wadia Baug had never existed. The odor of her grief had chased them all away.

Three days after Cyrus’s funeral, she fell into a deep sleep. She had barely slept during the days that she kept vigil for her doomed husband, afraid to miss that dazzling moment when she would receive word that Cyrus was safe, that somehow he had charmed or tricked death into letting him go. But then she slept for eleven straight hours. When she awoke, it was 7:00 P.M., and for a moment, she thought it was early next morning. As her heavy eyes searched in the dark for the clock, she became aware of a terrible taste in her mouth. It was not the usual sour taste of sleep. Rather, this was the taste of burned flesh, a taste so pungent and sharp that she was afraid to swallow. Leaping out of bed, Tehmi headed for the bathroom sink. There, she vigorously brushed her teeth, using more toothpaste than ever before. She ran the toothbrush over her tongue, scrubbing so hard that she spat tiny traces of blood. Next, she gargled with warm salt water. But it was of no use. The taste of charred flesh would not leave her mouth.

Tehmi’s vigorous gargling attracted her mother’s attention.
“Su che, deekra?”
she asked. “Your throat is hurting or something? Put on some Vicks if it is. So much tension you’ve been under, no wonder you’re not well.”

Tehmi opened her mouth to correct her mother and the old woman flinched as if she had been slapped with a dead fish.
“Baap re,
Tehmi,” she gasped. “What is that smell from your mouth? What have you been eating,
beta?”