Bombay Time (5 page)

Rusi gazed up at the starless sky, as if searching for an answer. We are all living on top of a ticking bomb, the Bomb in Bombay, he thought. Waiting for it to detonate. Our lives spent waiting. I wait two hours for my wife to get dressed. Then I wait for a cabdriver who will agree to bring me here. The beggars outside are waiting for us to leave, so they can feast on our leftovers. Like the vultures wait, patiently, at the Tower of Silence to feast on our remains. And all of us here, we are waiting for something to happen. For someone to light the first match. For someone to set off the bomb. For something that will either save us or destroy us.

The whiskey was transporting him, taking him far away. For a moment, he felt like a stranger, a detached observer among people who were his lifelong friends. But the next second, he felt a terrible mix of pity and affection and fear for them all. He wanted to gather them up in his arms and keep them safe and young. He wanted to ask someone’s forgiveness and he wanted to absolve someone. He just didn’t know who. He wanted to evoke a prayer for them all. He looked up at the moonless sky and felt a strong desire to sing a mournful, plaintive song. A dirge that the wind would carry all the way back to the waiting sea. But he just sat there, saying nothing.

Dosa Popat turned off the light in her living room and scuttled in her bare feet across the tiled floor. Crossing the dark, cluttered room, she headed for the window overlooking the street. Parting the curtains with practiced ease, she poked her head out, surreptitiously as a mole. Her nose twitched with excitement.

Dosa had raced across her room as soon as she heard Rusi and Coomi Bilimoria’s footsteps descending the wooden steps of Wadia Baug. As she peered from the slightly parted curtain, she saw the couple step into the street. Instinctively, Dosa held up her left hand to her face and squinted at her watch. A few minutes before eight. As always, Coomi had taken her own sweet time getting ready. As always, Rusi must be seething with anger. A swift, experienced glance at the couple confirmed her suspicions. Dosa noticed the space between Rusi and Coomi as they walked down the street and the stiff, starched way in which Rusi was carrying himself. Coomi was taking small half steps, trying to keep up with her husband’s stride, as if to appease his clenched anger by advertising the fact that she was hurrying up at last.

On their way to Mehernosh Kanga’s wedding they were, Dosa knew. Tomorrow morning, she would
get
a full report about the wedding from the many foot soldiers in the army of gossip Dosa had carefully built over the years. From their reports, she would be able to piece together not only how much money Jimmy and Zarin Kanga had spent on their only son’s wedding but who had gotten drunk and made a perfect fool of himself and who was not on speaking terms with whom. Dosa’s pulse quickened at the thought of the pleasures that awaited her tomorrow. Most of the morning would be spent on the phone, she knew, and then the stream of neighbors would arrive, mostly housewives eager to strew their resentments and outrages like roses at Dosa’s feet.

But that would be tomorrow. Tonight, Dosa felt a pang of loneliness and hunger at the thought of the festivities and the food the Bilimorias would soon partake of. In the last three years, Dosa’s arthritis had gotten severe enough that she left her home only to attend an occasional funeral. Prior to that, she used to make it a point to attend the weddings of close friends and relatives. But as age drew her away from the pains and pleasures of married life and closer to the seductions of death, Dosa had given up celebrating marriage in favor of paying tribute to death. On more than one occasion, mourners had seen Dosa in her plain white sari at the Tower of Silence, seen the hunched figure with the beaklike nose and the cunning, darting eyes, and they had involuntarily shuddered at the resemblance between Dosa and the patient big vultures who would soon devour the body of the dead person. Even Dosa’s last name, Popat, or Parrot, had a fowl-like association that was eerie.

Dosa had waited all day for her doorbell to ring, announcing the delivery of an order of the wedding dinner to her home. But the food never arrived, and now Dosa reconciled herself to making a scrambled egg for dinner. If old man Hosi Kanga, Jimmy’s uncle, were still living, he would’ve definitely sent a
lagan-nu-bhonu
over today, Dosa thought. But Jimmy Kanga was like the rest of them—money minus manners.

Thoughts of the younger generation’s shabby ways put Dosa in a reflective mood. She had not heard from her son, Zubin, in over three weeks. Ten years ago, Zubin had been offered a posting in Pune and had, in Dosa’s estimation, accepted it all too eagerly. She always blamed her daughter-in-law, Bapsi, for the fact. Now, as she checked the calendar to see when she’d last received a letter from Zubin, she thought darkly about her daughter-in-law. That
daakan
has worked her
jadoo
to bewitch my poor Zubin, Dosa thought, not for the first time. Must be putting something in his food to make him forget his poor widowed mother.

Each Friday, Dosa wrote her son a long letter, brimming with the latest neighborhood gossip. Although she wrote mostly in English, Dosa lapsed into Gujarati whenever she was outraged about something or wanted to take a jab at Bapsi. When, during one of his visits, Zubin pointed out to her that he couldn’t read Gujarati, Dosa put down his inability to a defect in his character. “If you were wanting to know what was happening in your poor mother’s life, you’d be able to read not only Gujarati but German and Italian also.”

“Now, Mamma, be reasonable,” Zubin protested. “First, you send me to an English-medium school and then you expect me to read Gujarati. You think I’m Einstein, or what? And what does poor Bapsi have to do with this anyway?”

“Bas, has, deekra,”
Dosa intoned. “No need to put down your poor crippled mother for the sake of your wife. Big and strong as an ox, she is. But far be it from me to say anything against your fair princess. What they say is one hundred percent correct—a son is a son until he gets his wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life. But the good Lord didn’t see fit to give me a daughter, someone who would have loved her old mother in her old age.
Chalo,
we have to bear silently whatever life throws at us.”

Zubin stared at his mother with the same bewildered expression his father, Sorab, used to wear in his dealings with Dosa. Noticing the look, Dosa turned away with satisfaction.

Dosa had not had Zubin until she had been married for about eight years. This was not due to the whims of an unkind God or a defect of Sorab’s, as Dosa wordlessly intimated to the people around her. For a woman who made it her calling to know the neighborhood’s business, Dosa carried an astounding secret—in the first seven years of her marriage, she had had sex with her husband exactly three times. It had been her decision. It was the only way she knew to keep control over her life, to reclaim her body, which had been traded like a sack of flour.

From the day she entered St. Anne’s School for Girls as a kindergartner until the day she was pulled out of high school, Dosa was the brightest student in her class. Her short stature assured that she would never be a good athlete and her high-strung nature guaranteed she would never be popular with her classmates, but nobody could deny that behind the plain face lay a brain as sharp and lethal as a bomb. When anyone asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Dosa replied that she would be happy being a teacher or a housewife, but she secretly always believed she was destined to be a doctor—the first Parsi woman doctor. At a young age, Dosa learned that ambition was more unattractive in a girl than pimples, but that did not prevent her from working hard toward a secret goal.

It all changed in one evening, when she was twelve, though it would be several more years before the consequences of that evening caught up with her. Her parents had left Dosa to watch her younger siblings and gone over to have dinner with the Popat family. The Popats were old friends and they were celebrating their son Sorab’s eighteenth birthday. Fueled by the cheap whiskey he was consuming, Dosa’s father, Minoo Framrose, got progressively more sentimental and bombastic. “You are my oldest friend, Darius,” he said expansively, while his embarrassed wife tried to shush him. “So much we’ve been through together,
bossie.
Like a brother you are to me. Say the word, brother, and anything that’s mine is yours.”

Darius Popat looked at him steadily. “One shouldn’t say things one doesn’t mean, brother,” he said.

“No, no. I mean it. Anything that’s mine is yours. My word is as good as gold, Darius. You know that.”

The room suddenly grew quiet. “Okay, then,
salaa.
Promise me one thing. That when Dosa, your oldest, turns sixteen, you will give her hand in marriage to my Sorab. We are honorable folks, would not want dowry or anything. I know your money situation. After all, you are having four daughters to marry. We would not ask for any dowry for Dosa. In fact, you know that apartment I have in Wadia Baug? I’ll present that to Sorab and Dosa as a wedding gift. So what do you say,
bossie?”

For a split second, Minoo Framrose hesitated. Then he said, “Darius, you are indeed a great man, a true gentleman. My Dosa would be fortunate to be married into a good family like yours. I give you my word of honor,
bossie.
Now we will truly be brothers.”

On the way home and all of the next morning, Shenaz Framrose berated her husband. She was more angry than Minoo had ever seen her. “What is my daughter, a pair of shoes, to be traded back and forth between two drunken idiots? You go right back to that shameless Darius and tell him it wasn’t you speaking; it was the alcohol. Giving away your twelve-year-old daughter as if she’s a prostitute. God will never forgive you if you do this, Minoo.”

As his hangover loosened its grip on him, Minoo himself was awaking to the enormity of what he had done. In his heart, he knew his wife was right, which is why he allowed her to vent her anger at him without saying a word back. He had made a terrible mistake, and it was his daughter who would have to pay for it. But he also knew that despite Shenaz’s protestations and his own doubts, he would never go back on his word to Darius. He had shaken his best friend’s hand over their agreement. Not paying a dowry for Dosa increased the marriage chances of the other three girls. Besides, Sorab was a good man from a good family. The way Shenaz was going on, you’d think he’d sold Dosa to a brothel or something.

When Shenaz understood that he would not change his mind, she turned away in disgust. “Somehow, whenever you men make a gentleman’s agreement, it is always us women who suffer,” she said bitterly. Later, she made her husband promise not to mention his deal with Darius to his daughter. Shenaz wanted her daughter to have a few more carefree years before her life changed irrevocably.

Dosa learned about the arrangement the day after her sixteenth birthday. Her first reaction was to blame her mother. Dosa adored her father, hero-worshiped him, and instinctively faulted her mother for what she imagined was an ill-fated attempt to domesticate her. But Minoo spoke up. “Dosa. Baby. This is all my doing. This was my promise to my old friend Darius. Mummy was not having anything to do with it. But I’ve given Darius Uncle my word. And Sorab is a nice young man, intelligent and hardworking. And darling, I’m also having three of your sisters to marry off, don’t forget.”

She had turned on him with a look that chilled his blood, a look he knew he would remember on his deathbed. Her mouth opened and he waited for the black gusts of fury and despair to burst out, but she made no sound. She opened and closed her mouth, fishlike, three times. Then, she turned around and locked herself in the bathroom. He could not meet his wife’s eyes.

When Mother Superior heard that Minoo was pulling her star student out of school to get married, she went ballistic. Just plain refused to let Dosa go. Threatened to visit Minoo at his office if he didn’t show up in her principal’s office right away.

When he went, he noticed that her face, usually so cheery, was flushed the color of a bruise. “Mr. Framrose, I want to hear for myself your reasons for pulling Dosa out of school in the middle of the year,” she began. “I have heard some rumors and, frankly, they are so preposterous that I can scarcely believe them.”

Before her intent gaze, Minoo felt the same quiver he used to when he had been hauled into the principal’s office as a young boy. But his voice was calm when he spoke. “Well, Mother, the rumors are true. Dosa is getting married. And her husband does not want her to carry on her education after marriage.”

Mother Superior’s composure broke. “But, good God, man. Do you not understand what you’re doing? Your daughter has a wonderful intellect and great curiosity. Dosa’s thirst for knowledge is a beautiful, rare thing to behold. Believe me, Mr. Framrose, I’ve taught students in many schools, and Dosa can hold her own against the best of them. Your daughter has a great future ahead of her.”

Guilt made him defensive. “With all due respect, Mother, my daughter is a
woman,”
he said, spitting out each word for effect. “Her choices are to become a nurse or a teacher—that is, cleaning up someone’s vomit or teaching children who don’t want to be educated. Instead, her husband can give her a life of comfort and ease. Besides, I have given her in-laws my word of honor.”

They went back and forth for half an hour. When Mother Superior knew she had lost Dosa, she tried another tactic. “Mr. Framrose, I’ve always considered you a modern, honorable man. I realize there is nothing I can say that will change your mind about Dosa. But you have three other daughters at this school. Before you leave, will you make me one promise? That you will let these three girls fly as high as they want to without bargaining away their futures?”

His face flushed. “I promise,” he said quietly. “The other three can study as much as they want to. I have always been a believer in girls’ education. I’m … I’m just sorry Dosa won’t have the same chance.”

He had been true to his word. All three of Dosa’s sisters went to college, a fact that gnawed at Dosa’s heart her entire life. On her wedding day, she turned to the sister closest to her in age and said, “I suppose Daddy has made me the sacrificial lamb so that the three of you can build your lives on my broken back. Think of your poor sister when you are studying in a beautiful college library.”