Such A Long Journey (2 page)

ii

Long before the sun had risen that morning, before it was time to pray, Gustad had been waiting anxiously for
The Times of India.
It was pitch dark but he did not switch on the light, for the darkness made everything seem clear and well-ordered. He caressed the arms of the chair he sat in, thinking of the decades since his grandfather had lovingly crafted it in his furniture workshop. And this black desk. Gustad remembered the sign on the store, he could see it even now. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes:
Noble & Sons, Makers Of Fine Furniture,
and I also remember the first time I saw the sign—too young to read the words, but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words. A glass-fronted cabinet with gleaming cherry-coloured wood; an enormous four-postered canopy bed; chairs with carved backs and splendidly proportioned cabrioles; a profoundly dignified black desk: all of it like the furniture in my childhood home.

Some of it now here, in my house. Saved from the clutches of bankruptcy—the word cold as a chisel. The sound cruel and sharp and relentless as the metal cleats on the bailiff’s shoes. The cleats had sounded their malicious clatter on the stone tiles. Bastard bailiff—seized whatever he could get his filthy hands on. My poor father. Lost everything. Except the few pieces I rescued. With Malcolm’s help, in the old van. Bailiff never found out. What a good friend was Malcolm Saldanha. Sad, he and I did not keep in touch. A true friend. Like Major Bilimoria used to be.

The last name made Gustad shake his head. That bloody Bilimoria. After the shameless way he behaved, he had a nerve, writing now to ask for a favour, as though nothing had happened. He could wait till his dying day for a reply. Gustad pushed the Major’s audacious letter out of his mind, it threatened to disrupt the well-ordered darkness. Once again, the furniture from his childhood gathered comfortingly about him. The pieces stood like parentheses around his entire life, the sentinels of his sanity.

He heard the metal flap of the mail slot lift and, almost simultaneously, discerned the white outline of the newspaper as it slid into the room. Still he sat, unmoving: let the man pass, no need for him to know I am waiting. Why he did this, he could not say.

When the bicycle pedalled away, all was quiet again. Gustad switched on the light and put on his glasses. He ignored the grim headlines about Pakistan, barely glanced at the half-naked mother weeping with a dead child in her arms. The photo caption, which he did not stop to read because the picture looked the same as the others that had appeared regularly in the past few weeks, was about soldiers using Bengali babies for bayonet practice. He turned to the inside page, the one which listed the Indian Institute of Technology’s entrance exam results. He laid the page flat on the dining-table. From the sideboard he fetched the little piece of paper with Sohrab’s roll number, checked, and went to wake Dilnavaz.

‘Come on, get up! He got admission!’ He stroked her shoulder. There was affection and impatience. Also some guilt: that letter. He had hidden Major Bilimoria’s letter from her.

Dilnavaz rolled over and smiled. ‘I told you he would. Simply at all you kept worrying.’ She went to the bathroom and connected the transparent plastic hose to fill the water drums, even though today there was time enough to brush her teeth first, and make tea. It was only five o’clock—two whole hours before the taps went dry. She turned the brass handle, and the head of water surged through the hose. A long tail of air bubbles followed close behind. Like the bubbles that used to gush in her younger son’s little fish tank. How fond Darius had been of the tiny colourful creatures with the pretty names he proudly recited when showing them off: guppy, black molly, angelfish, neon tetra, kissing gourami—for a little while they had been the centre of his universe.

But the tank was empty now. And the birdcages. They lay covered in dust and cobwebs on the dark shelf in the
chawl
beside the WC, along with Sohrab’s butterfly display case. And that silly book he won long ago on Prize Distribution Day.
Learning About Entomo
…something-or-other. There had been such an argument just because she said it was cruel to kill the colourful little things. But Gustad said that Sohrab should be encouraged—if he persevered and took it up in college, doing research and all that, he could make a world-famous name for himself.

The rusted mounting pins still held a few thoraxes in place, but little else. An assortment of wings, like fallen petals of exotic flowers, littered the bottom of the case, mingled with broken antennae and tiny heads which did not resemble heads after they separated from the thoraxes. They had once made Dilnavaz wonder, briefly, how whole black pepper had found its way inside, till she realized with a shudder what the round things were.

The gush of water, the effervescent upstream rush, the quickening of the hose, always engaged her senses. Then the flow became regular, and it might have been an empty piece of tubing but for the slight throb felt in her palm where she held the hose to keep it from slipping out of the drum.

Gustad wanted to wake Sohrab. Dilnavaz stopped him. ‘Let him sleep. His admission result is not going to change if he knows it one hour later.’

He agreed readily. All the same, he went to the back room. In the darkness he could see the slatted frame-door he had hinged to the side of the bed fifteen years ago for Sohrab, who had been a turbulent little sleeper, as though his mischievous daytime games were continuing into the night. The nightly barricade they used to form alongside the bed with dining chairs did not work, he always pushed the chairs away. So the slatted door it had to be. Sohrab promptly named it the bed-with-the-door, and found the addition a useful appendage when he constructed a bed-house out of all the bolsters and blankets and pillows he could gather.

The bed-with-the-door now belonged to Roshan. One of her skinny arms, having found its way out between the door slats, hung over the side. It would soon be her ninth birthday. Took after her mother, thought Gustad, gazing upon her fragile figure. He turned his eyes to where Sohrab slept, on the narrow
dholni
which was rolled away under Darius’s bed during the day. Gustad had always wanted to get a proper third bed, but there was no place for it in the small room.

Looking upon his son, his eyes filled with joyful pride, and he was reassured: the face of nineteen years was still untroubled, as it used to be during the childhood nights in the bed-with-the-door. He wondered if time would put an end to it. For himself, the day had come, he knew, when his father’s bookstore had been treacherously despoiled and ruined. The shock, the shame of it had made his mother ill. How swiftly moved the finger of poverty, soiling and contaminating. Soon afterwards, his mother had died. Sleep was no longer a happy thing for him then, but a time when all anxieties intensified, and anger grew—a strange, unfocused anger—and helplessness; and he would wake up exhausted to curse the day that was dawning.

And so, as he watched Sohrab sleep his innocent sleep, with the face that seemed on the verge of a smile; and Darius, at fifteen a younger, shorter reflection of his father’s muscular frame; and little Roshan, who filled such a small part of the bed-with-the-door, her two plaits sidelong on the pillow: as Gustad observed them silently, in turn, he wished for all the nights in his sons’ and daughter’s lives to be filled with peace and tranquillity. Very, very softly, he hummed the wartime song he had adapted to sing them to sleep when they were little:

Bless them all, bless them all,

Bless my Sohrab and Darius and all,

Bless my Sohrab and Darius

And Roshan and…

Sohrab turned in his sleep, and Gustad stopped humming. The room was dark like the others in the flat, with blackout paper taped over the glass panes of the windows and ventilators. Gustad had put it up nine years ago, the year of the war with China. How much happened that year, he thought. Roshan’s birth, and then my terrible accident. What luck. In bed for twelve weeks, with the broken hip between Madhiwalla Bonesetter’s sandbags. And riots in the city—curfews and lathi charges and burning buses everywhere. What a dreadful year 1962 had been. And such a humiliating defeat, everywhere people talking of nothing but the way the Chinese had advanced, as though the Indian Army consisted of tin soldiers. To think that till the very end both sides had been proclaiming peace and brotherhood. Especially Jawaharlal Nehru, with his favourite slogan, ‘Hindi-Chinee
bhai-bhai’,
insisting that Chou En-lai was a brother, the two nations were great friends. And refusing to believe any talk of war, even though the Chinese had earlier invaded Tibet, positioning several divisions along the border. ‘Hindi-Chinee
bhai-bhai’,
all the time, as though repeating it often enough would verily make them brothers.

And when the Chinese came pouring over the mountains, everyone said it confirmed the treacherous nature of the yellow race. Chinese restaurants and Chinese hair salons lost their clientele, and the Chinaman quickly became the number one bogeyman. Dilnavaz used to caution Darius, ‘The wicked Chino will carry you off if you don’t finish your food.’ But Darius would defy her, he was not afraid. He had made his plans after discussions with his first-standard classmates about the yellow fellows who collected children to make a stew, along with rats, cats, and puppy dogs. He said he would get his Diwali cap pistol, put a roll of
toati
in it and bang-bang, kill the Chino if he ever dared come near their flat.

But much to Darius’s disappointment, no Chinese soldiers approached Khodadad Building. Instead, teams of fund-raising politicians toured the neighbourhood. Depending on which party they belonged to, they made speeches praising the Congress government’s heroic stance or denouncing its incompetency for sending brave Indian Jawans, with outdated weapons and summer clothing, to die in the Himalayas at Chinese hands. Every political party unleashed flag-emblazoned lorries to crisscross the city with banners that were paradigms of ingenuity: weaving together support for the party and support for the soldiers, while the fund raisers shouted themselves hoarse through megaphones, exhorting people to be as selfless as the Jawans who were reddening the Himalayan snow with their precious blood to defend Bharat Mata.

And the people were moved to staunch the flow of yellow invaders. They threw blankets and sweaters and scarves out of their windows into the open lorries that passed below. In some wealthy localities, the collection drive turned into a competition, with neighbours trying to outdo one another in their attempts to simultaneously seem rich, patriotic and compassionate. Women removed gold bangles and earrings and finger rings from their persons and gave them away. Money—notes and loose change—was wrapped in handkerchiefs and tossed into the fund-raisers’ grateful hands. Men tore shirts and jackets off their backs, yanked shoes off their feet, belts off their waists, and flung them into the lorries. What a time it was, and it brought tears of pride and joy into the eyes of everyone to see such solidarity, such generosity. Afterwards, it was said that some of the donated goods had turned up for sale in Chor Bazaar and Nul Bazaar, and in the stalls of roadside hawkers everywhere, though not much attention was paid to that nasty allegation; the glow of national unity was still warm and comforting.

But everyone knew that the war with China froze Jawaharlal Nehru’s heart, then broke it. He never recovered from what he perceived to be Chou En-lai’s betrayal. The country’s beloved Panditji, everyone’s Chacha Nehru, the unflinching humanist, the great visionary, turned bitter and rancorous. From now on, he would brook no criticism, take no advice. With his appetite for philosophy and dreams lost for ever, he resigned himself to political intrigues and internal squabbles, although signs of his tyrannical ill temper and petulance had emerged even before the China war. His feud with his son-in-law, the thorn in his political side, was well known. Nehru never forgave Feroze Gandhi for exposing scandals in the government; he no longer had any use for defenders of the downtrodden and champions of the poor, roles he had himself once played with great gusto and tremendous success. His one overwhelming obsession now was, how to ensure that his darling daughter Indira, the only one, he claimed, who loved him truly, who had even abandoned her worthless husband in order to be with her father—how to ensure that she would become Prime Minister after him. This monomaniacal fixation occupied his days and nights, days and nights which the treachery of Chou En-lai had blighted for ever, darkened permanently, unlike the blacked-out cities, which returned to light after the conflict ended and people uncovered their doors and windows.

Gustad, however, left his blackout paper undisturbed. He said it helped the children to sleep better. Dilnavaz thought the idea was ridiculous, but she did not argue because his father had passed away recently in the nursing home. Perhaps, she thought, he found the darkness soothing after death’s recent visitation.

‘Remove the black paper whenever you are ready, baba. Far be it from me to force you,’ she said, but registered pointed observations at regular intervals: the paper collected dust and was difficult to clean; it gave spiders ideal places to spin their webs; it provided perfect cover for cockroaches to lay their eggs; and it made the whole house dark and depressing.

Weeks went by, then months, with paper restricting the ingress of all forms of light, earthly and celestial. ‘In this house, the morning never seems to come,’ Dilnavaz continued to complain. By and by, she learned new ways to deal with dust, webs, and household pests. The family grew accustomed to living in less light, as if blackout paper had always covered the windows. Occasionally, though, when Dilnavaz was feeling particularly harassed by quotidian matters, the paper became the target of her frustration: ‘Very nice this is. Son collects butterflies and moths, father collects spiders and cockroaches. Soon Khodadad Building will become one big insect museum.’