Dahanu Road: A novel (33 page)

Bitterness had entered Mithoo’s sweet voice, turned it sour. Nothing seemed to help her. Not even the warm, love-drenched tongues of stray dogs against her arms.

The only person who remained unaffected by all this was Shapur Irani, but he was so far away from this planet even death could not touch him, or at the most it could move the hair on his eyebrows out of place.

When Zairos went to meet his grandfather, for the first time Shapur Irani got up from his rocking chair, causing the mosquitoes that were around him to break their formation. The flicker of the lantern darted across his cheek as he opened his wooden cupboard. Shapur Irani rarely put on the tube lights in his house. He preferred lanterns. There was no electricity when he lived with Banu so perhaps it was out of habit. He was comfortable with a natural flame because it lit only certain parts of the house, not the whole. Banu lived on in the darkness.

When Shapur Irani was visible again, he had a whiskey bottle in his hand.

“I’ve not had a drink in very long,” he said. “It just shows that what you think you cannot do without in your youth has very little power later on in life.”

“Shall I fetch the glasses?” asked Zairos.

“No, you sit.”

Zairos sat at the table and watched his grandfather’s back—one giant shadow, that’s what he was. That’s what one
became with age. He had also become a collection of sounds: the clink of whiskey glasses as he removed them from the cabinet, the flip-flop of his rubber slippers against the cement floor, the grunt that the old emit when performing the simplest of tasks.

Shapur Irani picked up the whiskey bottle and placed it in Zairos’ hands.

“Hold this bottle,” said Shapur Irani. “Feel it.”

The bottle was quite magnificent, if one could call it that. The glass had a green tinge to it, and its shape was not perfect, it was a bit uneven, as though it was made by a glass blower whose cheerless breath had left it that way. It had no label, just the year engraved on the glass: 1942. The initials RB were engraved in black on the cork.

“When the British occupied India, this is what they drank. At one point, I had thirty bottles of RB whiskey hidden under chickoo trees,” said Shapur Irani. “This is the last one left.”

“Is there something we are celebrating?” asked Zairos.

“No,” said Shapur Irani. “To celebrate anything is to invite trouble, to beg misfortune to come and punch you in the guts. We are drinking this tonight because this bottle existed at a time when your grandmother was alive and all this time I couldn’t bear to finish it because it would mean … I don’t know what it would mean. But perhaps now, with all that is going on, it would be as good a time as any.”

He twisted the cork, opened it with his large hands. As he poured the whiskey in the glass, Zairos thought of his grandmother, how this golden stream of alcohol was bottled when she was a young woman.

“Did my grandmother ever drink?” asked Zairos.

“No … only brandy when she had fever. I always hoped that someday she would drink with me and in that hope I had kept two bottles of RB whiskey with me, but the other one was lost. I’m sure it was stolen because I never forgot where I hid these things.”

“There’s one more bottle out there somewhere?”

“The day Banu died, I drank from that bottle, the lost one. That bottle is full of grief.”

When Zairos got home, his mother was awake,
The ABC of English
lying in her lap. The book was open to a sketch of a little girl and her dog, the sun shining in the sky, the little girl trying to catch the sun.

Mithoo did not react when Zairos came in. She continued to stare at the open book with a soldier’s erect back, and it reminded Zairos of Banumai sitting in a similar position, the pages of her books fluttering about on the floor.

He sat next to his mother on the sofa, hoping that she would talk. Even a scream would do. Clemency could come in the form of screams, ripping through her throat, into his ears, his drums accepting that he had caused her pain. By loving Kusum, he had brought his mother’s demons to her.

“You know I never liked Dahanu,” she said suddenly.

Her cheeks had become softer in recent days, looser, wider.

“I always wanted to stay in Bombay but your father loved the farm because it was his life … It was
his
life, not mine,” she said. “I used to feel a crushing sadness on the farm. I don’t know what it was, call it depression, call it anything … I used
to stare at the chickoo trees and wished they would die. I wanted something to come and destroy it all, and I hated myself for feeling that way because the farm was what your father loved. One day, I was travelling alone to Bombay by train. I was to pick you up from school and bring you back to the farm. I thought of getting off that train and never coming back. Not to you, not to your father, not to anyone. I saw an opening and I almost took it.”

At breakfast, the crack of the egg against the rim of the bowl made Zairos wonder how long the silence would last. He had lost track of the weeks. They had evaporated in front of his eyes, and it had been ages since Aspi Irani had sprayed mosquito repellent in his room. The mosquitoes had taken over every corner of the house, but even they knew the victory was hollow.

After eating his scrambled eggs, Zairos was about to go to his room when he heard his mother say something, but he was not sure if he had heard right. But then she said it again, as she put the cut onions and tomatoes aside and cleaned her hands with a towel.

“I want to go hunting,” she said.

Even Aspi Irani tried to make sense of this odd combination of words from his wife’s mouth.

“These people should not shit in the bushes,” she said. “If they want to shit in the bushes, they should do it near their own homes. These bhaiyyas should learn from the Warlis. The Warlis never perform their ablutions out in the open.”

She strode into the storage room where Aspi Irani’s record collection was gathering spiders, and came out with his slingshot.

Sensing what she was doing, sensing that by indulging in people-shooting, a most abnormal activity, she was trying to make things normal again, Aspi Irani rose from his chair with such energy that the chair flipped over.

“Come on,” said Mithoo.

She left the door open, not caring who went in. Perhaps their lives had already been invaded in such a personal manner that thief, animal, or wind could do little else. Mithoo walked ahead, fast and purposeful.

The three of them took their position in the bushes and waited. There was no one yet. The defecators were still selling coconuts at the train station. Aspi Irani was showing his wife how to use the slingshot, adjusting the angle of her right hand, telling her to keep her back straight.

“The last time you used it was on our honeymoon, remember?” he said to her.

Zairos did not bother to find out why.

While Mithoo was fidgeting with the slingshot, taking aim and getting accustomed to crouching in the bushes, Zairos began to have minor reservations.

“What if she
does
hit someone?” he whispered to his father.

“That’s the point.”

“I mean, what if she blinds him?”

“Have faith, son. We live next to a church.”

Soon the target appeared, a bald, rotund fellow with his tin can full of water. He took his dhoti off and squatted in the bushes. Mithoo was nervous, but what disturbed Zairos was that when
she put that stone in the leather pouch and pulled the black rubber strand back, stretching it to its maximum, her tongue came out of her mouth a little, finding this whole thing very tasty.

“You know many years ago I had written a letter to Indira Gandhi about public defecation,” said Aspi Irani. “But she got assassinated before she read it.”

Mithoo’s hand was now shaking, she was giggling the way schoolgirls giggled on see-saws, except that her giggle was darker. As soon as the man passed one enormous bowel movement, Mithoo let go. He got up, but he was hurt, confused, messy. Mithoo dropped the slingshot. She jumped up and ran, and as she ran, she laughed, and so did Aspi Irani, his chuckle had returned, the imp was back.

In all these weeks, Zairos had not made love to Kusum.

It had happened in stages. First, he had stopped entering her, then a few days later he stopped licking her belly, then the kissing, the holding of hands, even a simple touch or three, and finally distance came, a few breaths, a few days, a few weeks.

She had become a woman near the bathtubs again.

But now Mithoo had propelled her son towards something, and he did not know what that was until he found himself standing outside the Zoroastrian fire temple at midnight.

He parked his motorcycle outside the large cast-iron gate and entered through a smaller one. If he had come during the day, he would have been greeted by red shoe flowers and pink bougainvilleas, but in the darkness only the tall ashokas made their presence felt as they stood grand and respectful.

Two strong pillars on each end of the fire temple had images of afarganyus embedded into the cement, strong flames of faith emerging from the fire holders. But it was the fravashi in the centre of the structure that always welcomed believers, his wings keeping him afloat.

ZOROASTRIAN FIRE TEMPLE. FOR ZOROASTRIANS ONLY.

The moon provided a soft reading light for the sign, which was in English as well as Hindi. Zairos walked up the seven marble steps, each one twenty feet wide, giving the impression that the fire temple was an imposing library.

He took a jug of water from a metal container that was kept outside and washed his hands to free himself of any impurities. Upon entering, he saw the portraits of the dead, the patrons who had built this fire temple, the frames adorned by garlands, angling towards the worshippers. There was a large mirror with the image of Zarathushtra embossed on it, representing the day of his revelation at the age of thirty when he was standing at the edge of a river, and Ahura Mazda and six other Amesha Spentas appeared before him. The light that emanated from Ahura Mazda was so dazzling that Zarathushtra could not see his own shadow on the ground.

In the main hall, long brass chains hung from the ceiling, at the ends of which oil lamps hovered in glass containers. There were at least seventy of these divas, motionless in the air, content with their own light, present not for themselves but for all to behold.