Dahanu Road: A novel (17 page)

“Did you tell the sarpanch that you pay more attention to the cow than your own husband?”

Now was the time to not answer.

Now was the time to clean. As the evening light all but disappeared, she picked up a straw broom that she had made from the leaves of the date palm. She started sweeping the floor, a flat mixture of brown mud and cow dung. She focused on the floor of the hut, swept it clean of ants and dead mosquitoes.

“I can get any woman I want,” he said.

He swayed a bit, but regained his balance.

She would rather not know when the first blow would come. The anticipation troubled her. This was better, cleaning was better.

“I can get any woman I want,” he repeated.

She wished she had paid attention to what Rami had told her about the leaves of a special tree. Ifplaced in one’s mouth, stuffed to the brim so that the leaves stuck out like feathers, a person’s enemy would lose the ability to speak. At the moment, the name of that special tree escaped her.

How did it come to this?

There had been happy days too. On Divali, the festival of lights, the entire hamlet was covered in lamps, and they flickered outside the huts, and somewhere firecrackers burst, which the wind carried as though the sound were its own child, and finally the tarpa was heard, the Warli pipe large as the winding trunk of an elephant, a call to the young couples of the village to hold hands and dance in a ring, a promise of almost-eternity, at least that is what she felt that night.

But the good days were rare. They came in between beatings, gasps of air that were allowed if one were forced to stay underwater for too long.

The first blow came.

The broom fell to the ground.

Somehow she did not feel the pain so much. Maybe it was because she had called out to Vaghai, the Tiger God of the Warlis, for strength. If her husband had the sinewy arms of a jungle cat, only the Tiger God could counter that.

As she crouched on the floor to protect herself, she looked at the walls of her hut, made of karvi leaves, bamboo, and cow dung, and coughed out of pain, but smiled as well, because if the walls of her home were held together by cow dung, a shit life was all she would get.

She had accepted the blacks and blues on her skin with fortitude so far, but now, after her father’s death, something needed to be done. And she would not have expected a landlord to come to her aid had it not been for that blue cycle and the white lily on her head.

Zairos waited for Kusum for over two hours.

The cigarettes he smoked did not help him understand what he was supposed to do. He inhaled deeply, making sure his lungs were awake, but the smoke gave him no direction.

After more time passed, he felt she was not going to show up. Maybe she was scared and had changed her mind. Or after a long day’s work, she was just too tired to walk. The worn, leather-thick soles of her feet were so cracked and cheated of youth, unlike the rest of her body.

But her legs had not given way.

Kusum appeared from the darkness, from near a barren patch of land where once red roses had been planted. She mounted the motorcycle like a man. The silver silencer burned her leg and she let out a hiss. She was not used to machines. She did not place her hands around his waist like he wanted her to. Instead she held on to the metal carrier at the back.

The headlight of his motorcycle illuminated the bumps in the road and once they reached the beach, took the pine trees by surprise. The sea brought in a comforting breeze that nursed Zairos’ forehead. The stars were out in clusters, but one star stood on its own, confident of its light.

He needed a quiet spot, one where no one could be seen for a mile. He slowed down when he approached the fishing village. The moon made parts of the water turn silver, and fishing trawlers rested on the shore, their blue and green lights blinking like magical insects.

The headlight kept on capturing dust until he finally reached a wasteland where stunted shrubs and cacti sprouted from the ground. A baby snake crossed the road in the light of the moon. He stared at the date palm trees, so jagged their trunks.

Zairos looked up at the sky. Its vastness did not comfort him at all. She was at ease in the wilderness. She needed no protection, and it made him feel weak.

Her power was deserved, but his felt unearned.

“Seth,” she said. “I need your help.”

“With what?” he asked.

“I want to leave my husband.”

“So leave him.”

“It’s not that easy, seth. I have to pay my husband whatever he gave my father on my wedding,” she said. “Money, grains, beans, two goats.”

She stopped at goats, at an animal that was designed for slaughter.

“I will give you the money,” he said.

“He will still not let me go. He is a mad man. Even the village elders do nothing. They are afraid of him. Only you can help me.”

“Where is he now?”

“At home. He beat me tonight. But he is unconscious now. Drunk …”

Zairos looked up at the sky. This was not something he wanted to be involved in.

“Will you help me?” she asked. “Why me?”

“Because you are not like the rest of them.”

He was exactly like the rest of them.

All he wanted to do was lick every inch of her skin, and he did not know if it was a hunger that a man has for a woman, or a master for a slave, but he did not care. He was exactly like them.

“I will see what I can do,” he said.

He did not know if she wanted him to kiss her.

A kiss, at the moment, would be like a handshake, an agreement to move forward. He wanted to kiss her so that his mouth would be unable to make any more promises, ones that he might not be able to keep, and he was about to back out, he was about to offer her money again, when his own name rushed into him like a bull.

Zairos the Great.

Great men did not offer money. They offered protection.

After dropping Kusum a short distance from her hamlet, Zairos bumped into Lucky Lips outside Alan’s petrol pump. His lips eaten up by years of tobacco use, he communicated in grunts and moans, which the Iranis of Dahanu had learned to decipher. Tonight, however, the sounds took a back seat and made way for mime: his uncle Gustad had passed away a few hours ago. Why, then, Lucky Lips was chewing tobacco in the middle of the road on an Atlas cycle was an enigma.

When Zairos reached his grandfather’s bungalow, he switched off his motorcycle before the headlights came too close to Shapur Irani. Shapur Irani sat in his chair, his white chest hair sprouting out leisurely from over the throat of his sudreh. He was letting the mosquitoes suck his blood. He was giving them his memories. The mosquitoes were the fools, the ones being outfoxed.

“Pa,” said Zairos. “Gustad Mirza is dead.”

His grandfather’s black eyes acquired a mad flavour. Dozens of birds were furiously flapping their wings somewhere, and their image was being caught in his eyes.

“How did he die?” asked Shapur Irani.

“In his sleep,” replied Zairos.

“Too gentle a death for that bastard.”

After learning about Gustad’s role in the War of the Warlis, Zairos could finally understand his grandfather’s boiling hatred for this man. But it was a hatred he never cared to explain. Perhaps Shapur Irani believed that by speaking about it, it might lessen, and that was not what he wanted at all. He wanted to keep his hatred alive, a small animal that had to be fed every single day, drop by drop.

“I saw him only a few days ago in the bazaar,” said Zairos. “He was so thin … carrying a cane.”

“Even the devil carries a walking stick.”

SHAPUR IRANI STOOD
by the window and looked at the chickoo trees, their branches heavy with fruit. It was a sight that always made him happy. But lately, no matter how many baskets of chickoos were packed, he was not satisfied. He had been up all night, walking around the house.

Banu was rubbing her elbows because it was winter and the house was chilly. Khodi, more than three now, was a strong child, big in size for his age, snuggled in a grey blanket.

“Look at how deep his sleep is,” she said. “He must be talking to angels right now.”

“Forget angels.”

“What’s bothering you, Shapur? You’ve been behaving so strange lately.”

The night before, she had caught him standing at the stove, deep in thought, staring at the chai bubbling out of its container. Instead of switching the stove off, he did nothing. Even his face had changed. He had become sterner, more rigid.

“Come, Shapur,” she said. “Lie down next to me.” Instead of going to the bed, he went to his cupboard and took out his shotgun. He lay in bed with the shotgun by his side.

“Shapur, what are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“With the gun?”

“Yes.”

She lay next to him, the shotgun between them. He reached out for her and touched her cheek. She held his hand while his other hand held on to his gun.

“Shapur, what are you afraid of? The Warlis will not attack us. The attacks have stopped. Everything is back to normal again.”

“It’s not the Warlis I am scared of.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

It was her. It was her that he was scared of losing.

She had told him about their second child on the worst possible day—soon after the landlords’ disgraceful act on Dahanu beach. It was the unborn child who had made her speak on that very day, to let its father know that it too had witnessed the bloodshed.

The child was here on a mission. To take its mother away from men like Shapur Irani.

He closed his eyes and held on to his gun.

“The mind plays tricks,” Vamog used to tell his son. “Ahriman enters through the mind and makes you doubt things, especially the gifts Ahura Mazda has given you.”

These were the words Shapur Irani woke up with. He would not let Ahriman win.

Jeroo was in the kitchen, sipping her morning tea in a pink sweater. Her silver hair was so stern. Military hair, not a strand out of line. A complete contrast to her fingers—her knuckles curled inwards more and more with each passing day.

“Come, my football,” said Shapur Irani to Banu. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Banu smiled. At least he was joking again. “I can’t walk. What if the water bursts?”

“So let it burst. I will carry you back here in a minute.”

Banu put on a white sweater over her housecoat. She asked Jeroo to look after Khodi. Banu enjoyed having Jeroo around. The house was less lonely. Jeroo’s big hips always ensured that she bumped into the edge of a table or the back of a chair, and Banu liked the floral dresses Jeroo wore—she was some kind of walking garden inside the house. Even Khodi was comfortable with her. The two did not interact much; they were more like two old people sitting on a park bench, not having anything to say, but still cherishing each other’s company.

“Look how soft the sun is,” said Banu.

“Soft?” asked Shapur Irani. “What do you mean, ‘soft’?”

“My grandmother used to say that there are different suns. In the morning, the baby sun shines. Then, in the afternoon, the mother sun comes, strong and powerful.”

“When does the father sun come?”