Such A Long Journey (3 page)

But three years later, the Pakistanis attacked to try to get a piece of Kashmir as they had done right after Partition, and blackout was declared once again. Then Gustad triumphantly pointed out to her the wisdom of his decision.

iii

He left his sleeping children and returned to read the rest of the paper. It was not yet time for his prayers: light had not yet broken on the horizon. He followed Dilnavaz to the kitchen and read the headline for her benefit: ‘Reign of Terror in East Pakistan’.

‘Wait, I am filling the
matloo,
’ she said, unable to hear over the gush of running water. The water pressure was low today, the drums took longer to fill. She wondered why, washing the square of lawn cloth to strain and store the day’s drinking water. She tossed the soggy cloth flat over the open mouth of the earthen pot. It landed with a sharp, wet slap. She bore downwards expertly at its centre, with her fingers, to create a cloth funnel.

‘It says that the Republic of Bangladesh has been proclaimed by the Awami League,’ Gustad continued when the tap was turned off. ‘In the canteen at lunch-time I told all the fellows this is exactly what would happen. They were saying that General Yahya would allow Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to form the government. My right hand I will cut off and give you, I said, if those fanatics and dictators respect the election results.’

‘What will happen now?’ He ignored her question and read silently, about Bengali refugees streaming over the border with tales of terror and bestiality, of torture and killings and mutilations; of women in ditches with their breasts sliced off, babies impaled on bayonets, charred bodies everywhere, whole villages razed.

The earthen pot was full to the brim. Dilnavaz measured six drops of the dark crimson solution. It never stopped nagging her that they did not boil the water. But Gustad said that straining and adding potassium permanganate was precaution enough. She tried to wring dry a soaked corner of her faded floral nightgown. The veins, prominently blue on her much-too-rapidly ageing hands, swelled with the effort. The lid of the boiling kettle jiggled and rattled.

‘I wonder what Major Bilimoria would have thought,’ she said, scooping in three spoons of Brooke Bond. The kettle’s noisy gurgles became soft murmurs. She hated making tea directly in the kettle, but the dark brown English teapot they had used for more than twenty years had cracked. The frayed tea cozy, spilling mildewy stuffing, also needed to be replaced.

‘Major Bilimoria? Thought of what?’ He wondered if she suspected anything about the hidden letter, and tried to sound indifferent.

‘About this trouble in Pakistan, people saying there will be war. With his army background he would have inside information.’

Major Jimmy Bilimoria had lived in Khodadad Building for almost as long as the Nobles. Gustad always pointed him out to the children as a good example, urging them to walk erect, with chest out and stomach in, like Major Uncle. The retired major loved to regale Sohrab and Darius with tales from his glorious days of army and battle. For his young listeners, the stories quickly acquired the stature of legend, with their Major Uncle the legendary hero, as he told of the cowardly Pakistanis who turned tail and ran in 1948, when confronted by Indian soldiers in Kashmir, or about the fiasco of the dreaded tribesmen from the North-West Frontier, who had been the scourge of the mighty British Army in the days of Empire. To the wild and ferocious tribesmen, said Major Uncle, fighting and killing was no more than a favourite game. Turned loose by the Pakistanis, they got drunk and began to loot the first village they passed through, instead of pushing on to attack the capital. The hours went by as they hacked up their victims and went from house to house in search of money and jewels and women. All their fun and games, said Major Uncle, provided precious time for Indian reinforcements to arrive. Kashmir was safe, the battle was won. Then the children would heave a sigh of relief and applaud. His stories, as he described the various episodes—the crossing of Banihal Pass, the battle for Baramullah, the siege of Srinagar—were so fascinating that Gustad and Dilnavaz too would listen, enthralled.

Last year, Major Bilimoria vanished from Khodadad Building. He left without a word to anyone, and no one could guess as to his whereabouts. Shortly after, a lorry had arrived with a key to his flat and instructions to take away his belongings. Hand-painted on its rear fender was a message in letters heavily ornate with curlicues:
Trust In God—Horn Please To Pass.
When questioned by the neighbours, the driver and his helper would say nothing:
Humko kuch nahin maaloom,
we don’t know anything, was all that could be got out of them.

The Major’s abrupt departure had wounded Gustad Noble more than he allowed anyone to see. Only Dilnavaz could sense the depth of his pain. ‘To leave like this, after being neighbours for so many years, is a shameful way of behaving. Bloody bad manners.’ He said no more than that on the subject.

But although Gustad would not admit it, Jimmy Bilimoria had been more than just a neighbour. At the very least, he had been like a loving brother. Almost one of the family, a second father to the children. Gustad had even considered appointing him as their guardian in his will, should something untimely happen to himself and Dilnavaz. A year after the disappearance, he still could not think of Jimmy without the old hurt returning. He wished Dilnavaz had not brought up his name. Receiving that letter had been bad enough. And such a letter—makes my blood boil, every time I think of it.

Trying to maintain his posture of indifference, he overdid the sarcasm: ‘How would I know what Jimmy would think about Pakistan? He didn’t leave us his new address, did he? Or we could have written and asked for his expert opinion.’

‘You are still upset,’ said Dilnavaz. ‘But I still believe that without a good reason he would not have left like that. One day we will find out why. He was a good man.’ She nodded meditatively, stirring the tea in the aluminium kettle. The colour seemed right, and she poured two cups. From the icebox, she fetched the bit of milk left over from yesterday: the
bhaiya
had not yet arrived but this would do for now. Gustad filled his saucer and blew on it. By the time he finished the newspaper, it was almost prayer time, so he fetched his black velvet prayer cap and stepped outside. The sparrows were twittering reassuringly in the solitary tree in the compound.

And when he reached halfway into the
kusti
recitation and the radio started somewhere, first in Hindi, and then mingled with the BBC World Service, he was not distracted because he already knew all the news.

iv

The Hindi broadcast ended, and the radio began a series of jingles and ads: Amul Butter (‘…utterly, butterly delicious…’), Hamam Soap, Cherry Blossom Shoe Polish. The other set, tuned to the rasping, crackling BBC, was switched off.

Gustad finished retying the
kusti
round his waist and noted with satisfaction that the two ends, as usual, were of equal length. He raised and lowered his shoulders to let his
sudra
settle comfortably around him. The vest slid from under the
kusti
in response to the movement, providing the slack he liked to feel around his stomach. A draught crept across his lower back. It reminded him of the vertical tear. Most of his
sudras
had rents in them, and Dilnavaz kept fretting that a new batch was needed. Mending was useless—no sooner was one tear sewn up than another appeared because the mulmul itself was worn. He told her not to worry: ‘A little air-conditioning does no harm,’ laughing away, as usual, the signs of their straitened circumstances.

He turned his face to the sky, eyes closed, and began reciting the Sarosh Baaj, silently, forming the words with his lips, when the domestic sounds of the building were drowned by the roar of a diesel engine. A lorry? The engine idled for a few moments, and he resisted turning around to see. There was nothing he disliked more than to permit a break in his morning prayers. Bad manners, that’s what it was. He would not rudely interrupt when talking to another human being, so why do it with Dada Ormuzd? Especially today, when there was so much to be grateful for, with Sohrab’s admission to IIT which, with one wonderful, blessed stroke redeemed all his efforts, all the hardships.

The thundering lorry pulled away, leaving a cloud of diesel fumes to linger at the gate. By and by, the morning air carried in the acrid smell. Gustad wrinkled his nostrils and continued with the Sarosh Baaj.

By the time he finished, the lorry was quite forgotten. He went to the two bushes growing in the small patch of dusty earth under his window, opposite the black stone wall, and performed his daily bit of gardening. There were scraps of paper tangled in the leaves. Every morning he tended both bushes, although the vinca was the only one he had planted—the mint had begun to sprout of its own accord one day. Assuming it was a weed, he had almost uprooted it. But Miss Kutpitia, watching from her balcony upstairs, had deftly elucidated the medicinal uses of this particular variety. ‘That is a very rare
subjo,
very rare!’ she shouted down. ‘The fragrance controls high blood-pressure!’ And the tiny two-lipped white flowers, growing in spikes, contained seeds which, soaked in water and ingested, cured numerous maladies of the stomach. So Dilnavaz insisted that he let the plant stay, to please the old woman if for nothing else. Word of the newly discovered medicine had spread quickly, however, and people stopped by to ask for its leaves or the magic seeds. The daily demand for
subjo
kept in check its vigorous growth, which threatened to overwhelm the vinca and its five-petalled pink blooms that gave Gustad such joy.

He cleared away the paper scraps, cellophane sweet-wrappers, a Kwality ice-cream stick, and attended next to his rose plant. He had secured its pot by thick picture-hanging wire to a post within the entrance-way, with several complicated loops and knots, so that anyone with mischief in mind would have to spend hours undoing the intricacies. He picked up the petals of a faded rose. Then the smell of diesel fumes came again, and drew him to the gate.

A notice was pasted to the pillar, while a shining black oil puddle marked the spot where the lorry had stopped. The official document from the municipality bulged in places with glue and air bubbles. He did some quick calculations after reading it. The bloody bastards were out of their minds. What was the need to widen the road? He measured the ground with hurried strides. The compound would shrink to less than half its present width, and the black stone wall would loom like a mountain before the ground-floor tenants. More a prison camp than a building, all cooped up like sheep or chickens. With the road noise and nuisance so much closer. The flies, the mosquitoes, the horrible stink, with bloody shameless people pissing, squatting alongside the wall. Late at night it became like a wholesale public latrine.

But it was just a proposal, nothing would come of it. Surely the landlord would not give away half his compound for the ‘fair market value’ that the municipality offered. It was hard to find anything these days more unfair than the government’s fair market value. The landlord would certainly go to court.

The diesel smell persisted, following him through the compound as he returned home. It reminded him of the day of his accident, nine years ago, when such a smell had been present, also strong and undiminishing, while he lay in the road with his shattered hip, in the path of oncoming cars. He wrinkled his nose and wished the wind would change. His hip, the one which made him limp, began to hurt a little as he entered the flat.

Chapter Two

i

Dilnavaz decided to be of no help to Gustad, not while he was embarked on his mad and wholly impractical scheme. A live chicken in the house! Whatever next? Never had he meddled like this in her kitchen. It was true he came sometimes and sniffed in her pots or, especially on Sundays, cajoled her to make a
kutchoomber
of onions, coriander and hot green chillies to go with the
dhansak
simmering on the stove. But in twenty-one years this was the first time he was interfering in kitchen-and-cookery in a very fundamental manner, and she was not sure what it meant or where it was leading.

‘Where did we get this basket from anyway?’ asked Gustad, covering the chicken with the wide wicker basket that had hung for ages on a nail near the kitchen ceiling. He did not really care to know, just wanting words to flow again between them, get rid of the chill she had been exuding since he got back from Crawford Market with the throbbing, unquiet bulge in his shopping bag.

‘I don’t know where the basket came from.’ Curt and frigid was her reply.

He suspected that Miss Kutpitia may have been advising her about omens, but prudence made him return to his peace-making voice. ‘At last we have a use for this basket. Good thing we did not throw it away. Where did it come from, I wonder.’

‘I told you once, I don’t know.’

‘Yes, yes, you did, Dilnoo-darling,’ he said soothingly. ‘Now, for two days it will be a roof over the chicken’s head. They relax and sleep quietly, put on more weight, if they are covered with a basket.’

‘How would I know? In my family a chicken was always brought home slaughtered.’

‘You will taste the difference, trust me, when it is swimming in your brown sauce in two days. With onions and potatoes. Ah ha ha, that brown sauce! So perfect you make it, Dilnoo.’ He smacked his lips.

The entire plan had come to Gustad yesterday. He had dreamt of his childhood the previous night, and remembered the dream in detail on waking: it was a day of great gaiety and celebration, of laughter ringing through the house, flowers filling up the rooms—in vases, in strands of
tohrun
over doorways—and music, music all day long: ‘Tales From the Vienna Woods’, ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’, ‘Skater’s Waltz’, ‘Voices of Spring’, the overture to
Die Fledermaus,
and much, much more, playing non-stop on the gramophone, playing in his dream, while his grandmother sent the servants out repeatedly to buy special herbs and
masala
for the feast cooking under her supervision.

There was such excitement and happiness filling his beloved childhood home, the sadness in his heart was acute when he awoke. He could not remember the exact occasion being celebrated in the dream—probably some birthday or anniversary. But live chickens had been brought home from the market by his father, and fattened for two days before the feast. And what a feast it had been.

When Gustad was a little boy, live chickens were standard procedure in his father’s house. Grandma would have it no other way. Not for her the scraggy fowl brought home slaughtered and plucked and gutted. Gustad remembered them arriving in a covered basket balanced on the head of the servant who walked behind his father, sometimes two, sometimes four, or eight, depending on how many guests were invited. Grandma would inspect the birds, invariably applauding her son’s choice selections as they clucked away, then check off the packets of spices and ingredients against her list.

But spices, ingredients, were only half the secret. ‘Chicken if you buy,’ she would say when praised for her delicious cooking, ‘then you must buy alive and squawking,
jeevti-jaagti,
or don’t buy at all. First feed it for two days, less will not do. And always feed best grain, the very best. Always remember: what goes in chicken-stomach, at the end comes back to our stomach. After two days prepare the pot, light the stove, get
masala
ready. Then slaughter, clean, and cook. Quick-quick-quick, no wasting time.’ And what a difference that made to the taste of the meat, she would claim, juicy and fresh and sweet, and so much more than the stringy scraps which clad the bones of the scrawny, market-fed birds two days ago.

Gustad’s dream about those blissful, long-ago times stayed with him all through the day. For once, he was determined, just once—for one day at least, this humble flat would fill with the happiness and merriment that used to reside in his childhood home. And that day, he decided, would be Saturday. Invite one or two people from the bank for dinner—my old friend Dinshawji for sure—just a small party. With chicken, never mind the extra expense. To celebrate Roshan’s birthday and Sohrab’s admission to IIT.

As the basket descended over the bird, it peered curiously through the narrow slits in the wickerwork. Safe under the protective dome, it began to cluck intermittently. ‘A little rice now,’ said Gustad.

‘I’m not going to touch the chicken,’ snapped Dilnavaz. If he thought she could be tricked into looking after the creature, he was sadly mistaken.

‘Boarding and lodging is my department,’ he had joked earlier, to win her over. But there was an edge in his voice now. ‘Who is asking you to touch? Just put a little rice in a small pan and give me.’ His peace-making voice was flagging in its efforts. He had gone straight from work to Crawford Market, and was still in his office clothes: tie, white shirt, white trousers. White except for where the chicken soiled it while he was tying it to the kitchen table-leg with a yard of bristly coir twist. It had been a long day, and he was tired.

Besides, Crawford Market was a place he despised at the best of times. Unlike his father before him, who used to relish the trip and looked on it as a challenge: to venture boldly into the den of scoundrels, as he called it; then to badger and bargain with the shopkeepers, tease and mock them, their produce, their habits, but always preserving the correct tone that trod the narrow line between badinage and belligerence; and finally, to emerge unscathed and triumphant, banner held high, having got the better of the rogues. Unlike his father, who enjoyed this game, Gustad felt intimidated by Crawford Market.

Perhaps it was due to their different circumstances: his father always accompanied by at least one servant, arriving and leaving by taxi; Gustad alone, with his meagre wallet and worn basket lined with newspaper to soak up meat juices that could start dripping in the bus, causing embarrassment or, worse still, angry protests from vegetarian passengers. Throughout the trip he felt anxious and guilty—felt that in his basket was something deadlier than a bomb. For was he not carrying the potential source of Hindu-Muslim riots? Riots which often started due to offences of the flesh, usually of porcine or bovine origins?

For Gustad, Crawford Market held no charms. It was a dirty, smelly, overcrowded place where the floors were slippery with animal ooze and vegetable waste, where the cavernous hall of meat was dark and forbidding, with huge, wicked-looking meat hooks hanging from the ceiling (some empty, some with sides of beef—the empty ones more threatening) and the butchers trying various tacks to snare a customer—now importuning or wheedling, then boasting of the excellence of their meat while issuing dire warnings about the taintedness of their rivals’, and always at the top of their voices. In the dim light and smelly air abuzz with bold and bellicose flies, everything acquired a menacing edge: the butchers’ voices, hoarse from their incessant bellowings; the runnels of sweat streaming down their faces and bare arms on to their sticky, crimson-stained vests and loongis; the sight and smell of blood (sometimes trickling, sometimes coagulated) and bone (gory, or stripped to whiteness); and the constant, sinister flash of a meat cleaver or butcher’s knife which, more often than not, was brandished in the vendor’s wild hand as he bargained and gesticulated.

Gustad knew his fear of Crawford Market had its origins in his grandmother’s warnings about butchers. ‘Never argue with a
goaswalla,
’ she would caution. ‘If he loses his temper, then bhup! he will stick you with his knife. Won’t stop to even think about it.’ Then, in milder tones, less terror-striking but more pedagogic, she revealed the underpinnings from whence this wise dictum rose. ‘Remember, the
goaswalla
’s whole life, his training, his occupation, is about butchering. Second nature.
Bismillah,
he says, that is all, and the knife descends.’

If she was teased about it, Grandma would staunchly claim to have witnessed a situation where a
goaswalla
had gone bhup! with his knife into flesh of the human sort. Gustad had relished the gruesome tale in those days, and when he began shopping at Crawford Market, he would remember her words with a nervous amusement. He never could feel quite at ease in that place.

He tried to select a chicken for Roshan’s birthday. It was hard for him to tell under all those feathers, as the shopkeeper held up bird after bird for inspection. ‘Look at this one,
seth,
good one, this. See under wing. Spread it, spread it, does not hurt the
murgi,
not to worry. See, poke here. How thick, how much meat.’ He did this with one chicken after another, holding its legs and dangling it upside-down, hefting it to emphasize the weight.

Gustad watched, thoroughly confused, squeezing and prodding to pretend he knew what he was doing. But each chicken was very much like the next. When he finally approved one, it was the vocal protestations of the bird, seemingly louder than the others, that made him decide. He would have been the first to admit his inexperience with poultry. The number of times he had been able to afford chicken for his family in the last twenty years, he could count on the fingertips of one hand without using up the digits. Chicken was definitely not his area of expertise.

But beef was a different matter. Beef was Gustad’s speciality. Years ago, his college friend, Malcolm Saldanha, had taught him all about cows and buffaloes. It was around the same time that Malcolm had helped him hide the furniture from the clutches of the vulturous bankruptcy bailiff.

The loss of the bookstore had turned Gustad’s father into a broken and dispirited man, no longer interested in those weekly expeditions to Crawford Market. When his beloved books and his business disappeared, his appetite was also misplaced, somewhere in the labyrinth of legal proceedings. Gustad worried deeply as his father visibly shrank. He did the best he could now as breadwinner, with his meagre income from private tuitions to schoolchildren. But under Malcolm’s advice and guidance, the rupees were stretched further than he had imagined possible.

Malcolm was tall and exceedingly fair-skinned for a Goan. He was fond of explaining his colour by telling about the blood of Portuguese colonizers that had mingled with the local stuff. He had thick red lips and slick, gleaming black hair, always parted on the left, brushed back. Malcolm’s father, whom Malcolm closely resembled in looks and talents, taught piano and violin, and prepared his students for the examinations periodically held in Bombay by the Royal School of Music and Trinity College. Malcolm’s mother played first violin with the Bombay Chamber Orchestra, and his elder brother, the oboe. Malcolm played the piano for the college choir’s practices and performances. He was going to be a professional musician, he said, but his father insisted on the BA to round out his education.

Gustad admired Malcolm, even slightly envied him, wishing he, too, could play some instrument. For all the music that had filled his home in happier times—his father’s huge radiogram in its dark cabinet of polished
seesum,
the records lining row upon row of shelves—there was not a single musical instrument in the house. The closest Gustad came to one was in a photograph of his mother as a child, posing with her mandolin. The photograph intrigued him, and sometimes, her eyes far away, she would describe the mandolin for Gustad, telling him about the songs she used to play, in her gentle, accepting voice which lacked the necessary force to influence things in the Noble household.

Though he was the odd one out, Gustad was always welcomed at Malcolm’s home. Sometimes, Mr. Saldanha performed a piece for solo violin, or Malcolm accompanied his father, and Gustad forgot his troubles for a while. In those extremely lean days, when every anna, every paisa counted, Malcolm the musician taught him to eat beef and mitigate the strain on his pocket-book. ‘Lucky for us,’ Malcolm always said, ‘that we are minorities in a nation of Hindus. Let them eat pulses and grams and beans, spiced with their stinky asafoetida—what they call
hing.
Let them fart their lives away. The modernized Hindus eat mutton. Or chicken, if they want to be more fashionable. But we will get our protein from their sacred cow.’ At other times he would say, mimicking their economics professor, ‘Law of supply and demand, always remember. That’s the key. Keeps down the price of beef. And it is healthier because it is holier.’

On Sunday mornings, Gustad would set off with Malcolm for Crawford Market, but their first stop was always the church where Malcolm attended Mass. Gustad went in with him, dipping his fingers in the font of holy water and crossing himself, imitating his friend closely, to fit in and not give offence to anyone.

The first time, Gustad was quite intrigued by the church and its rituals, so different from what went on in the fire-temple. But he was on his guard, conditioned as he had been from childhood to resist the call of other faiths. All religions were equal, he was taught; nevertheless, one had to remain true to one’s own because religions were not like garment styles that could be changed at whim or to follow fashion. His parents had been painstaking on this point, conversion and apostasy being as rife as it was, and rooted in the very history of the land.