Cracking India (12 page)

My hands feel weak. I cannot stir out of my crouched position. I force my mind to be rational. Hundreds of thousands of people steal...

Suddenly my brain clicks. My eyes locate the fireplace. My hands spring to life, deft and obedient, and I bury the jars in a bed of ashes. It is almost summer. No one will kindle a fire for months. I can leave the jars there till Rosy forgets they ever existed.

. Rosy returns bearing a saucer and my heart sinks. On the saucer are small mounds of sugar, rice and red pepper. It is an offering. A maneuver to shore up my shaky allegiance; and a silent testimony of her worth. She knows I love filling the jars, like their enormous counterparts in the kitchen, with sugar and rice.

There is no help for it. While Rosy fills the toy teapot with water from the bathroom I pry out the jars from the ashes and fill them with rice and sugar.

I could weep. Any time I maneuver a set of circumstances to suit me this happens. Fate intervenes. There is no other word for it. Fated! Doomed! No wonder I have such a scary-puss of a conscience.

Ayah has acquired two new admirers: a Chinaman and the Pathan.

Mother wonders why we are suddenly swamped with such a persistent display of embroidered bosky-silk and linen tea cozies, tray-cloths, trolley sets, tablecloths, counterpanes, pillowcases and bedsheets.

Twice a week the Chinaman cycles up our drive, rattling and bumping over the stones, a huge khaki bundle strapped to the carrier.

Our drive is made of packed earth. Every year, worn by traffic
and eroded by monsoons, the drive lays bare patches of brick rubble.

The Chinaman is dapper, thin, brusque and rude. He parks his bicycle in the porch, removes the cycle-clips from his khaki trousers and heaves his bundle to the veranda. “Comeon, comeon, Chinaman come!” he shouts, squatting before his bundle and sorting out his wares for display. “Comeon Memsahib, comeon Ayah. Comeon, comeon, Chinaman come!”

Mother yells from inside: “Tell him to get out! What is this nonsense? Coming every day! Ayah? Yousaf? Is anyone there?”

Ayah comes to the veranda. “Go, go!” she says in tart English. (Besides Cantonese, the Chinaman speaks only a smattering of English.) “Memsahib no want. Go, Go!”

But the Chinaman has sprung his trap with cunning. Ayah's attention is snared by the shimmering colors. Her eyes wander to the silks.

“Comeon, comeon,” he coaxes, getting up. He reaches for Ayah's arm and pulls her to his silks. “See?” he says, stroking his free hand over the bosky and then over her arm. “It silky like your skin. See? See?” he says burying her hand in the soft heap.

Ayah knows well how to handle his bold tilted eyes and his alien rudeness. “Oh-ho,” she says, all singsongy. “I have no munneeey—how I buy?”

“You sit,” coaxes the Chinaman, pulling Ayah to squat beside him and, retaining his hold, engages her in a staccato and desultory conversation. When Ayah's restiveness becomes uncontrollable he introduces a bribe: “Now, what I can give you?” he muses. “Let me see ... Sit, sit,” he says and Ayah's restiveness succumbs to the dual restraints of hand and promises.

Although Ayah has been allotted quarters, she dwells and sleeps in our house. Soon the tabletops, mantelpieces, sideboards and shelves in our rooms blossom with embroidered, bosky-silk doilies.

 

The attentions of Ayah's Pathan admirer also benefit our household. All our kitchen knives, table knives, Mother's scissors and paper-knife and Hari's garden shears and Adi's blunt penknife
suddenly develop glittering razor edges. And it is not only our household the Pathan services. Gita Shankar's, Rosy-Peter's, Electric-aunt's and Godmother's houses also flash with sharp and efficient cutting implements. Even the worn, stubby knives in the servants' quarters acquire redoubtable edges, for the Pathan is a knife-sharpener.

I have often noticed him in the bazaar, plying his trade before streetside shops. He pushes a pedal on his machine and a large and slender wheel turns dizzily round and round. With great dexterity and judgment he brings the knife blades to the wheel, and in the ensuing conflagration of sparks and swift steel-screeches, the knives are honed to jewel edges. He wraps the loose end of his floppy turban about his mouth like a thug—to filter out the fine steel and whetstone dust.

It is only when I see him in a sidewalk brawl with the restaurant-wrestler, looking bewildered and furious, his face no longer covered like a thug's, that I recognize the face and connect it to the pink and tingly bottom we cycled past on our way to Imam Din's village.

The Pathan's name is Sharbat Khan. He too cycles up our long drive, steel clattering and wheels wobbling over the rubble that sticks out of the mud. The cycle looks like a toy beneath the man from the mountains and involuntarily Adi and I grow tense, expecting the pistol-shot-like report of a punctured tire. It is late in the afternoon and we stand on the veranda, hypnotized by his approach.

Sharbat Khan wears drawstring pantaloons so baggy they put to shame Masseur's shalwar—and over them a flared tunic that flaunts ten yards of coarse white homespun. He cycles past our bedroom and Gita Shankar's rooms to the back of the house. Adi and I scoot after him.

Sharbat Khan parks his cycle against a tree and squatting by it waits for Ayah.

 

Ayah comes.

Ayah is nervous in his presence, given to sudden movement; her goddess-like calm replaced by breath-stopping shyness. They
don't touch. He leans across his bicycle, talking, and she shifts from foot to foot, smiling, ducking and twisting spherically. She has taken to sticking a flower in her hair, plucked from our garden. They don't need to touch. His presence radiates a warmth that is different from the dark heat generated by Masseur's fingers—the lightning strikes of Ice-candy-man's toes.

Sharbat Khan tells her of his cousin who has a dry fruit and naswar (mixture of tobacco and opium) lean-to in Gowalmandi. It is a contact point for the many Pathans from his tribe around the Khyber working in Lahore. He gives Ayah news of the meat, vegetable, tea and kebab stall owners and of their families, whose knives he sharpens. He is doing well. And not only at sharpening knives.

Sharbat Khan cautions Ayah: “These are bad times—Allah knows what's in store. There is big trouble in Calcutta and Delhi: Hindu-Muslim trouble. The Congresswallahs are after Jinnah's blood...”

“What's it to us if Jinnah, Nehru and Patel fight? They are not fighting our fight,” says Ayah, lightly.

“That may be true,” says Sharbat Khan thoughtfully, “but they are stirring up trouble for us all.”

Sharbat Khan shifts forward, his aspect that of a man about to confess a secret. Ayah leans closer to him and I slide into her lap.

He glances at me dubiously, but at a reassuring nod from Ayah, says, “Funny things are happening inside the old city ... Stabbings ... Either the police can't do anything—or they don't want to. A body was stuffed into a manhole in my locality ... It was discovered this morning because of the smell: a young, good-looking man. Several bodies have been found in the gutters and gullies of the Kashmiri, Lahori and Bhatti Gates and Shalmi ... They must have been dumped there from different neighborhoods because no one knows who they are.”

“Are they Hindus?” asks Ayah, her carefree mood dispelled.

“Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. One can tell they are from prosperous, eating-drinking households... ”

“There have also been one or two fires ... I don't like it ... ”

We fall into a pensive silence.

Ayah sighs, “Arrey
Bhagwan.”
She pushes me off her lap and unties a knot in her sari that serves as her wallet. She holds out a small bundle of tightly folded notes. “Look,” she says, shaking her head to dispel the somber mood. “I've saved my whole salary this month ... forty rupees!”

Sharbat Khan takes the money from her and, removing his turban, tucks it inside its rancid-smelling interior. His hair, matted to his head, is brown and falls from a center parting to his ears.

Sharbat Khan loans money as a side business like most Pathans. He carries out transactions on Ayah's behalf and gives her the profits. Often he wears a gun. There are few defaulters.

I listen as Sharbat Khan talks to Ayah of the crops and sparse orchards in his mountain village. Now it is the apple season and the season for apricots. It is also time to cash the rice crop, the maize crop, and hoe the potatoes ... He is going to his tribal village for a month or so to help his folk wrest the harvest from the gritty, unyielding soil of his land. There are leopards in the granite ravines and stony summits surrounding his village. He has encountered them on mountain trails, their eyes gleaming emerald by night, their spots camouflaged by the filtered sunlight dappling the underbrush by day.

“Hai Ram!” exclaims Ayah, her lips trembling with concern. “Don't they attack?”

“Only if they're shown disrespect,” says Sharbat Khan. “We mountain folk know what to do. We touch our foreheads and courteously say
”Salaam-alekum mamajee
[uncle]” and they let us alone.”

“I'd never have the nerve to say that!” says Ayah. “I'd faint right away!”

“Then he'd think you very rude and eat you up!”

“Arrey baba, I'd never go to your village,” says Ayah firmly.

Sharbat Khan grins, his eyes shining with love. “Then I must bring the mountains to you! What would you like?” he asks Ayah. “Almonds? Pistachios? Walnuts? Dried apricots?” Sharbat Khan wears silver rings on his fingers roughly embedded with turquoise
and uncut rubies. “Ah, the taste of those nuts!” he sighs, raising his fingers to his lips and smacking them, and sliding his warm tiger-eyes in a way that leaves Ayah so short of breath that she can barely say, “Bring me pistachios.”

Sharbat Khan leans forward. “What?” he asks, aware of his effect on her. “I didn't hear you.”

Ayah shuffles her bare feet and fidgets with her sari. Her eyes are shy, full of messages. “Bring me pistachios,” she says again. “And almonds: they are good for the brain.”

“And what are pistachios good for?” asks Sharbat Khan knowingly, and Ayah lowers her head and fiddles with the scarlet rose anchored to the tight knot in her hair and says, “How should I know?” And Sharbat Khan sighs again, and his eyes turn so radiant they shine like amber between his bushy lashes.

Something happens within me. Though outwardly I remain as thin as ever, I can feel my stomach muscles retract to create a warm hollow. “Take me for a ride—take me for a ride,” I beg and Sharbat Khan, tearing away his eyes from Ayah, places me on the cycle shaft. He gives me a turn round the backyard, grazing past the buffalo, the servants' quarters and the Shankars' veranda. He smells of tobacco, burnt whetstone and sweat. He brings me back and offers Ayah a ride.

“Sit in front: it's safer,” he says.

“Aiiii-yo!”
she says in a long-drawn way, as if he has made an improper suggestion, and turning her face away covers her head with her sari.

Sharbat Khan coaxes her again, and with a great show of alarm Ayah wiggles on to the shaft in front and Sharbat Khan takes her off on a circuit of the backyard. He pretends to lose his balance: and as the front wheel swings wildly,
“Hai,
I'll die!” cries Ayah. The inhabitants of the servants' quarters pop out to watch the
tamasha
and applaud. Adi laughs and claps. Laughing, Sharbat Khan releases Ayah back under the trees.

He gives Adi a ride, and depositing him outside the kitchen, cycles down the drive like a mountain receding.

I hear the metallic peal of Father's cycle bell and rush out to welcome him. Mother rushes out of another door. It is almost three in the afternoon: Father is late for lunch. Together we slobber all over him as Father, with a phony frown and a tight little twist of a smile beneath his moustache, places the cycle on its stand and removes the ledgers clamped to the carrier.