Dahanu Road: A novel (22 page)

The shadows had a terrible smell. There was one in front of her right now.

It was near the grandfather clock, moving with the chimes. A shadow thick and heavy as a drunken man’s black winter coat, it had the stickiness of a leech, and the closer it came, the worse the stench got. It was even making Sohrab wail.

She rubbed her belly, hoping to comfort her child. There was one more on the way. It had come sooner than she had wanted it to, but she would find a way to protect it from these shadows.

“Banu,” said Shapur Irani.

Even he was panting, trying to catch the thieving shadows.

“Sohrab has dirtied himself,” he said. “He has been crying for a long time.”

The shadows were clever. She would have to find ways of trapping them. She needed a camera. Perhaps she could hire a photographer.

“Banu,” said Shapur Irani firmly. “You need to wash Sohrab.”

“Yes,” she said to her husband. “We need a photographer. A good one.”

For the first time, Shapur Irani wished Jeroo were with them. But she was in Bombay, helping deliver another child, and it would still be a month before she could come to Dahanu.

He went to the station master’s office and placed a trunk call to the home Jeroo was in. She was tending to the wife of a Parsi barrister, a man rich enough to enjoy the privileges of having his own telephone.

The crackle on the line was ominous, but she assured him that everything would be fine. She gave him instances of
women who experienced similar delusions before or after the birth of a child.

A young girl from Bombay, she said, only seventeen years old, had been forced to marry a much older man, a wealthy Parsi shipbuilder with bucked teeth. When she gave birth to a daughter, she asked Jeroo why the child had bucked teeth. When Jeroo explained to her that newborns do not have teeth, the girl flew into a rage and broke dishes and anything else she could get her hands on.

“What I mean to say is that it’s normal,” said Jeroo over the telephone. “Her behaviour will pass in the way floods or famines pass.”

On his way home, Shapur Irani wondered if he should have told Jeroo that Banu had stopped bathing. It had been more than a week, and she kept blaming the smell on the shadows, and he did not have the heart to tell her that she was the one sending out an odour.

When he got home, both Khodi and Sohrab were asleep. Banu was standing at the stove, boiling water for tea. For a moment she looked exactly the way she did the time he first met her, when she was sixteen. He remembered her blue frilled blouse and the long earrings she used to wear, at the ends of which were pearls, ivory raindrops hanging six inches below her ears.

“Is that for my bath?” he asked, knowing full well she was preparing tea. “I need to have a bath.”

She nodded, her pale cheeks showing a few red blood vessels.

He replaced the small container with a larger one. When the water was hot enough, he used a thick white towel to
protect his hands while he carried the copper container to the bathroom. He emptied the water into a green bucket.

He did not ask her permission. Slowly, carefully, he removed the strap of her pink nightgown, and was pleased when she stepped out of it herself. Her belly was white and large, and there was a child in there, and if there was anyone who could help Banu, it was this child. Someone from the inside.

She let him bathe her, but all throughout tears ran down her face along with the soapy hot water. She kept staring at the lantern, flinching each time it flickered. The dark stone walls of the bathroom were not helping her.

When he was done, he dried her with a towel and made her sit on a bath stool. He then went to her dressing table to fetch her hairbrush from the drawer. Her back was hunched by the time he returned, one leg placed ahead of the other, as though her body was trying to go somewhere but had suddenly forgotten how.

He propped her up and brushed her hair, felt long wet strands against his palm, let them slide off, then caught them again, and stood behind her, wordless.

Perhaps he needed to take her to Bombay for a few days.

Here, she was so close to slipping away into a fearsome solitude that even the single tick of a clock could provide that final push.

Against his will, he went.

Against his better judgment, he passed by the very building in which Daryoush the baker used to have his small shop.
Many Irani cafés had sprung up in the city now, the Yazdani Bakery and Kyani & Co. being the two most reputed. Most of the Iranis who had left Iran were creating a new kind of eatery in Bombay—the chaikhana. The moustachioed owners proudly walked on black-and-white-diamond-tiled floors, ensuring that their white marble tables were spotless, their wooden chairs had adequate nails hammered into them to hold customers of all shapes and sizes, while they dipped crusty brun bread, with a layer of butter thick as snakeskin, into hot chai. Apart from the buttered bread, pudding, and biscuits, they sold cigars, medicine, rosewater, soaps, anything one needed. One store, the K. R. Sassanian, was gaining fanfare for its three-tiered wedding cakes.

But no matter how successful these Irani restaurants got, for Shapur Irani there was one store that towered above the rest. It did not have a name, for it had no tables and chairs, just a large wood-fired oven and a glass showcase, and it supplied bread to the other Irani cafés—and anyone else—quietly, peacefully, as though that were its humble mission.

Someday, Shapur Irani would tell his sons about Daryoush.

He would tell them that the baker’s profession was just a camouflage.

To him, Daryoush was one of the Amesha Spentas, the holy immortals. The heat of his oven provided the warmth a young boy needed to forget his dead father. Or if not forget, to remember without collapsing.

His dough was, and would remain, a reminder of the simple goodness human beings were capable of. It was worth more than the treasury of Cyrus the Great, and was more powerful than the armies of Alexander.

In Bombay, the Iranis had gathered a reputation as honest, dedicated bakers and café owners because they had put all the gratefulness that came with survival into their tea and cakes. All the warmth that a new land had offered them was offered back to the inhabitants of that land. But while the owners sat at their counters and collected money, and their wives spread aromatic incense around pictures of Zarathushtra, their minds were in Iran, the sweetness of their pastries dissolving when they thought of the ones they had to leave behind.

To lose land, to be driven away from it, was like losing a loved one. No wonder it was called the motherland.

Shapur Irani knew what it was like to lose both—land and his mother. It was strange, but what he remembered most about his mother was not the taste of her saffron rice, the smell of her hair, or the way his heart found a rhythm so impossibly peaceful when he was in her embrace. What he remembered most about his mother was a sound.

A door knock.

Even though his parents’ home was made of modest mud bricks, the door was something to be proud of. “It’s so wide,” Vamog would say, “that even the warrior Rostam does not have to shrink his broad shoulders to enter.”

But the door had two door knockers.

The knocker on the left was used by women, and the one on the right by men. When men knocked, the sound had weight, and Shapur Irani loved to imagine all the things it could possibly contain: the batter of a mace, the slap of a thousand droplets of sweat, the power of a heavy forearm and thick fingers that circled around the knocker.

And when women knocked, it had a lilt, the secret strength that allowed man to exist in the first place, allowed him to have weight, inspired him to shed a thousand droplets of sweat. When little Shapur heard that sound, it meant that his mother’s friends had come to visit and suddenly the small house with a low roof transformed into a haven where laughter skipped across the room and songs through the air.

After his mother’s death, it was not Vamog’s subdued wails that made Shapur Irani truly understand that his mother was no more. Nor was it the cold food, or the heaviness of the low roof, or the dark circles under Vamog’s eyes as though Ahriman himself was darkening them with his charcoal spit.

It was only when the door knocks of women stopped that Shapur Irani knew his mother was truly gone. No women came to visit, the softness had vanished, and only the gloom of the weighty knocks of men remained, and neither son nor father wanted to answer those.

Shapur Irani knew what it was like to lose his land, to lose his mother, and now he was losing his wife. He held Banu’s hand, squeezed it hard to let her know that he was with her. After leaving Khodi and Sohrab at Banu’s mother’s house, Shapur Irani and Banu went to a movie at the Excelsior. It was a Chaplin film.

“Look at what he is doing,” Shapur Irani said to Banu. “That little man is fighting the rich, the ugly, the bullies of this world.”

He smiled as he watched Chaplin outwit the police. Shapur Irani loved the fact that people of authority were stupid giants and Chaplin got the better of them without really trying.

But there was no response from Banu. Not a smile, not even a crease of a smile.

At that moment, he wished he could read. If only he could read those thick books with hard, unyielding backs, he would be able to discuss stories with his wife, he would be worthy of being her husband. As of now, he was a man with land and a shotgun, and perhaps she regretted her decision to marry him. Maybe he was the problem.

Unlike the Parsis, who pondered over important papers under the glow of electric lamps, whose signatures meant something, whose voices could be heard on acting stages, who were sons of rich cotton traders, Shapur Irani sometimes felt like a heathen. That was why he hated Bombay. The city made him feel inadequate. At least on the farm, the trees depended on him. Each step on his farm was the equivalent of an ink signature on an important document.

In his heart he knew that maybe Banu was right, that the boys needed to read books. They might develop into mathematicians or accountants, but there was another part of him that told him his boys would be exactly like him, men of the soil. He had no education, but he had guts.

That was all one needed in the world. The courage to start.

He left his homeland on a donkey, but then he started his liquor stall and understood that land was gold, and now he was a landowner. If he were an accountant or a mathematician, what would he leave his sons? His knack for numbers, an explanation of the laws of the universe? Those were not things a man could bequeath. Those were things that evaporated, that were eaten up along with a man’s flesh.

He looked at his wife’s face again.

She was paying for his sins.

So much pain had unfolded before his chickoo trees and yet they continued to give fruit. It was the same with his wife. She continued to bear him children and he feared that she was now paying the price.

She was not even talking to him anymore. His wife’s mind was a place to which he no longer had entry. He envied those writers. She welcomed them in. But the books were almost capturing her, they were spreading all over the floor, contaminating it, some overturned, some pages fluttering in the breeze when the main door was open, Khodi glancing through them, Sohrab eating the edges of the lighter ones, Banu stepping over them, not allowing any of them to be moved.

When Banu was asleep Shapur Irani would hold a book in his hand and beg Ahura Mazda to help him read, and an hour or two after he had failed, all he could do was smell the pages and hope that their yellowed wisdom would somehow stay with him, help him heal his wife, make him understand, how, why, something had come over her.

She had stopped speaking about the shadows now, but something else had entered her world. Stillness.

He had never seen a living being go so still. After walking over her books, she would sit in one position for hours, with not even the slightest movement such as a flick of the wrist. At the most her nostrils would flare, or he would notice a twitch in her neck, and he would have to draw assurance from that.

He looked her way again, in the darkness, wondering what he had done to her.