Dahanu Road: A novel (3 page)

Shapur Irani’s eyes were closed.

Even though he was ninety now, he was still a big man. Over six feet five, he did not have the hunched look of a person who carried his ninety years in a dhobi sack on his head. He had his teeth, his strong legs and bushy eyebrows, the hair on his chest was white and long, and he shaved every morning at five, even though he never went anywhere.

“Pa,” said Zairos as he sat on the porch steps.

Shapur Irani did not respond. His eyes were still closed and his lips revealed the faintest quiver, a ghost language of sorts, which only the dead could decipher. Zairos stared at his grandfather’s thick head of hair—slicked back and silver.

“Pa,” he said again.

Shapur Irani opened his eyes slowly. If there was one thing that unnerved him, it was light. He did not want the light of the sun to gain entry through his eyes and illuminate the parts of him that were dead and gone. “To look at the past,” he once told Zairos, “is like shining a flashlight on a dead body.”

Zairos heard the familiar rattle of cup and saucer. His tea arrived magically, as it always did. Lakhu, the male servant who had served his grandfather for years, had strange powers. Perhaps Lakhu heard the cracking of pebbles under Zairos’ feet as he walked to the bungalow each morning, and he took it as a sign to boil the tea. It did not matter how Lakhu knew that Zairos was coming. He succeeded in not making Zairos wait for more than a minute.

Zairos took a sip and relished the taste of Brooke Bond, mint, cardamom, and ginger. Ants crawled around his grandfather’s feet carrying biscuit crumbs on their backs.

“It’s time you visit them,” said Shapur Irani.

He was talking about his chickoo trees. They were his children, just as real, and loved, as his three sons, Khodi, Sohrab, and Aspi. Their breathing had kept him alive all these years. Every morning he walked through his fifty-acre farm, with gusto, without a cane, to let them know he was still around. He wanted Zairos to do the same.

“Go meet them,” said Shapur Irani.

When the last of the ginger tea was gone, Zairos walked across the gravel and into the farm. The branches brushed against his arm and left their mark. Each day it was a new scratch or two, sometimes on the forearm, sometimes on the wrist, always gentle.

Zairos recalled that the chickoo had been brought to India in the mid-1500s by the Portuguese, and it continued to thrive in its new home long after the invaders had gone. But when Zairos was little, his father had told him that a Mexican gnome named Rose—called that because he had a deformed ear shaped like the flower—walked all the way from Mexico to Dahanu with a chickoo in his hand and, upon arrival, dug a hole and buried the shiny black diamond seed of a chickoo, and himself, in the earth. That was why chickoo trees did not grow as tall as pine trees. They had to restrict their height in deference to the gnome. When Zairos asked his father why the gnome walked all the way to India, Aspi Irani had replied, “He got lost.”

Zairos went past the papaya trees that had long ago ceased giving fruit, and over the thick black pipes that ran through the farm like oversized pythons. He took the same route every single time, until he reached the well. It was one of the deepest wells in Dahanu, more than seventy feet deep, with large boulders jutting out from its inner walls, but it gave no water. Old and dry, it was part of the furniture.

He plucked a blade of dry grass from the ground, put it in his mouth, and sat on the parapet of the well. There was an unusual number of crows in the sky. He looked up, tracing the concentric circles they flew in; they were gliding towards something to his left.

Barely had Zairos turned when he saw what the crows were after.

A man was hanging from a chickoo tree. His head was bent to the side, his arms dangling, his eyes wide open.

He resembled a dark puppet.

“GANPAT,” WHISPERED ZAIROS.

There was no movement from Ganpat at all, not a single twitch or half breath.

The rope, thick and strong, had done its job. But its grip around Ganpat’s neck was still fierce. It pulled Zairos towards the body. He lightly placed his palm under the sole of Ganpat’s muddy, cracked foot.

The smell made him recoil.

He was surprised, ashamed even, at how easily the dead body repelled him. After all, Ganpat was a Warli who had lived and worked on the farm since he was a child. A tribal of the region, he used to be one of Shapur Irani’s most trusted workers.

But when he was caught stealing money, he was asked to leave.

Zairos remembered that afternoon ten years ago. Ganpat’s eyes were red, and for once it was not the red of liquor but the red of tears, proof that he had betrayed his master. He had to
walk away from the farm he had grown up on and was never seen again. Until now.

Ganpat’s face had not changed much since that time. His eyebrows were extremely thin, mere lines that had been drawn above his eyes as an afterthought; his moustache was made of small wisps, so frugal, a perfect reflection of his poverty. Only his nose was bulbous, a contradiction to his entire being. His white vest and khaki shorts had small holes in them, the handiwork of rats’ teeth. The only thing of any worth on him was a wristwatch.

It was still ticking.

Zairos turned back towards his grandfather’s bungalow. Alongside him, water snaked its way on the ground through black pipes that faithfully fed each and every chickoo tree on the farm. A soft wind blew through the trees, waking up the leaves.

His pace was brisk, perhaps a result of the stench, the sheer nakedness of it all.

Soon Zairos was running past a line of cacti that formed the fence of the farm. He was not sure why he was running because nothing could be done to save the man. But it was the natural thing to do. A life had been lost. He could not mourn for Ganpat, but he could show some urgency.

By the time he reached the bungalow, Zairos was panting.

“Pa,” he said. “There’s … do you remember Ganpat?”

Shapur Irani’s eyes opened.

“Ganpat hung himself from a tree,” said Zairos. “He’s dead.”

Zairos should have slowed down and regained his composure. He did not want to alarm his grandfather. More than
anything, he did not want his grandfather to think he could not handle the situation.

“I’ll call the police,” said Zairos.

The moment he said it, he knew he had disappointed his grandfather. At a time like this, the police were of no help at all. They would conduct an inquiry and an autopsy, all in the name of securing a heavy bribe. They were cockroaches who had to be kept out.

Zairos waited for a response from his grandfather, but Shapur Irani’s face revealed nothing. He might as well be staring at a star in a faraway galaxy.

Then, with a wave of his hand, Shapur Irani said, “Get Damu.”

Damu was the Warli who managed the farm. He lived in a thatched hut just behind the bungalow. Only four feet tall, he could be mistaken for a small forest creature. But the workers respected him because he was fearless. He once pounced on a man twice his size and bit his neck.

Damu’s five-year-old son was playing outside his hut with the tube of a cycle tire. The moment he saw Zairos, he ran in to fetch his father. While Zairos waited, the aroma of cooking mixed unabashedly with the odour of cow dung. Two large papayas hung from the tree next to the hut. The swell of the papayas made Zairos look away. They reminded him of Ganpat’s eyes.

Zairos shuffled his feet, flicked his long hair off his face.

Damu was taking too much time.

A few strands of straw came loose from the roof of the hut. The breeze made a tangled mess of those strands, blew them towards Zairos.

A rooster with a bright red mane was pecking at the soil. It raised its head time and again, unsure and agitated. Zairos stomped the ground and drove it away.

Finally Damu emerged, his hair wet, water on his bare chest, as though he had been washing up.

“Come with me,” said Zairos.

Damu scratched his chin, the silver stubble on his cheeks making him look more important than he was. The farm workers always joked that Damu dove into salt pans all over Dahanu to give his stubble such shine.

Shapur Irani’s servant, Lakhu, joined them as well. Zairos led the two men to Ganpat’s body. He walked slowly this time. He did not want the workers to feel his anxiousness.

By now a crow had perched itself on Ganpat’s head. It seemed comfortable there, showing absolutely no respect for human heads. Lakhu was edgy in Ganpat’s presence. With no cup and saucer to hold, he did not know what to do with his hands. His knobbly fingers curled even more, but found nothing. After an initial glance, he looked away from the body.

Damu, on the other hand, was studying Ganpat with intensity. Even though they were not related, he saw himself in Ganpat. They both belonged to the same tribe. Their ancestors had stayed at the foothills of the Sahyadri Mountains for generations, and it was a mistake to come down to the plains because the plains had deceived them. The plains had promised a better life, but were full of crevasses, and hundreds of Warlis had fallen through, and Ganpat was the latest casualty.

“Zairos seth,” said Damu. “Ganpat has a daughter.”

“Where does she live?” asked Zairos, irritated that he had not thought of it himself.

“Not far. Should I get her?”

“Take the tractor.”

Even if Ganpat’s daughter lived in a nearby hamlet, it would take her too long to walk. Zairos could not change what her father had done, but he could prevent her feet from getting tired.

“Make sure none of the workers come to this side of the farm,” he told Damu. “Give them work on the other side only.”

Zairos did not want the workers or their children to surround the body and see their tribesman dead in daylight, without explanation. But he was not comfortable with letting the body remain amongst the trees either. Maybe he was being superstitious, but he felt that the trees would suffer. Some force might suck the life out of the trees as well.

It was time for another cigarette. This cigarette would be different from the one he had smoked earlier. There would be nothing celebratory about it. No smoke-kiss to the chickoo trees, no carefree humming to serve as musical accompaniment.

The smoke would be sombre. It would be the smoke of waiting.

The old red Mitsubishi tractor roared on its way up the path that led to the bungalow. More a power tiller than a tractor, it sounded impressive, but was small in size and battered beyond recognition. It had a strange shape—it looked like a jet ski with an open box behind it to transport chickoos to Dahanu station.

Damu stood at the helm, his dark muscles straining to keep the forked handle of the tractor at bay. Behind Damu, two women were huddled together in the open container. They had enough room, but sat close to each other like frightened chickens.

Damu drove the tractor right up to where Zairos was, and the tractor coughed and sputtered. From the blank expression on Damu’s face, it was evident that he had not told the two women about Ganpat’s death. In fact, all he must have said was, “My master wants to see you,” and if an Irani seth wanted to see two Warli women, no explanation was needed. The women must have obediently sat in the tractor with no idea of the sight that awaited them.

When the tractor finally went silent, an old, withered woman with crooked teeth got off first. Her green blouse failed to cover her weary, black skin. Zairos’ attention went back to her teeth. They angled in all directions, but with such certainty that they could tear the flesh off bats. One long tooth hung out of her mouth like a hook. If Zairos had seen her as a child he would have thought her a witch. The other woman, however, was a vision. Not a day older than twenty, surely, she got down from the tractor, her waist sliding inwards to provide the most magnificent curve to her hips. Zairos quickly looked away.

Faced with the task of bearing bad news, he went cold.

He had never done this before. Words raced through his mind, but he could not think of a single thing to say. The natural thing to do was to go towards the chickoo trees where the body was placed. Perhaps it was cruel, to give them the news raw and hard, but he could think of no other option.

A stray dog walked with them and Zairos was grateful for the support.

The old woman stepped on the black pipes with an unusual amount of energy, as though the pipes were veins that supplied blood to an enemy.

In a few seconds, the young woman would see her father hanging from a tree.

Initially, neither woman said a word.

Zairos waited for a reaction, but there was nothing. Perhaps it was the sight of Ganpat’s bloated face. Or his thin frame suspended in the air like the carcass of a charred bird.

The silence was forcing Zairos to notice the body in more detail. The spittle at the corner of Ganpat’s lips. The dark red cut on his right shin, perhaps acquired when he climbed the tree. Even the reek was more pronounced, attacking.

He suddenly felt light-headed, the kick of a hundred cigarettes.

It was the old woman who broke first. Tears streamed down her cheeks, two perfectly shaped drops navigating the crevices on her sagging skin. She took two steps forward, scraping her feet along the soil, and placed her hand on the younger one’s shoulder. The moment she did that, the younger one shook. Her mouth opened, she let out a wail, but it broke off midway. On her neck, thick veins throbbed.