by Bapsi Sidhwa
The cords on Sehra-bai’s neck thicken and grow rigid. She turns away her angry face.
‘What’s the matter with my friend?’ Aunty Tamy inquires affectionately and at the same time casts a concerned glance at the others.
‘We’ve had visitors all day,’ explains Ruby. ‘She’s exhausted, I guess.’
‘I don’t like you,’ says Sehra-bai sternly to Aunty Tamy. ‘You say one thing but you mean another. You were making fun of me. You are cruel.’
‘Arrey Sehroo, you know I’d never tease you if I thought it angered you,’ says Aunty Tamy, matching her friend’s solemn demeanour.
‘You think I can go dancing? You think anyone will look at me?’ Sehra-bai’s tone is scathing.
‘My poor, poor baby,’ coos Aunty Tamy and leans over to embrace her friend. ‘I’ve hurt my Sehro-veroo’s feelings … I’m velly velly sorry.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ says Sehra-bai, glaring at her friend. ‘Don’t talk to me as if I’m a baby.’
‘You know I’m joking,’ says Aunty Tamy. ‘If I can’t joke with my friend, who can I joke with?’
Sehra-bai’s eyes become sly slits. She makes a sudden grab at the pashmina shawl wrapped round Aunty Tamy’s shoulders and tries to snatch it away. In doing so she has gotten hold also of the silk sari beneath it. As Aunty Tamy almost topples on her friend, her arms shoot out and she grabs the wheelchair just in time to prevent an injury to herself or Sehra-bai.
Seizing her unexpected advantage as her friend teeters inches from her face, Sehra-bai hisses: ‘Give it back to me … you slimy conniver!’
Ruby and Perin rush to intervene, but regaining her balance Aunty Tamy tidies her sari with slightly trembling fingers and at the same time assists her friend to unwrap the shawl. Clutched triumphantly by Sehra-bai, the shawl lies in a heap on her lap.
‘It is your shawl,’ says Aunty Tamy. ‘You gave it to me in Murree Hills years ago, remember?’
‘I know I gave it to you,’ says Sehra-bai. ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten? I want it back.’
‘Keep it,’ says Aunt Tamy.
‘Mum, you can’t take it back,’ says Ruby trying to pry the shawl loose from her mother’s talon-like grip. ‘You gave it to her.’
‘I can,’ says Sehra-bai, hanging on to the shawl as if her life depended on it.
‘Let Grannums keep it,’ intercedes Perin protectively, and winks at Aunty Tamy behind Sehra-bai’s back.
‘Yes,’ agrees Sehra-bai promptly. ‘Your daughter has more sense than you … If you mind so much, give the Currenty one of yours,’ she adds, using the unpardonable and obnoxious pejorative applied to Indian-Christians and Anglo-Indians.
‘Mumma! How can you say that,’ cries Ruby, almost ill with embarrassment. ‘I’ll bring you another shawl, Aunty Tamy,’ she says apologetically. ‘You’ll freeze.’
‘Let the whore freeze,’ says Sehra-bai.
Aunty Tamy leaves. Ruby and Perin see her to her car. It is dark outside and the mercury has dropped below freezing. Aunty Tamy has covered her head with Ruby’s Kashmiri shawl and wrapped it round her throat and overcoat. ‘I’m sorry this happened,’ says Ruby. ‘It’s these Halcyon tablets the doctor’s given her. Instead of tranquillizing her they make her abusive.’
‘Don’t worry. I don’t mind,’ says Aunty Tamy. ‘My poor friend, I know how she feels; she’s trapped by her sickness.’
A few months after her stroke, when she was still herself and her personality had not changed so much, Sehra-bai had said: ‘I’m in a cage … caged like a canary.’ Another time she’d fretted: ‘My body has become my jail … I want to be free.’ Ruby had assured her the daily physiotherapy would soon restore her control over her body.
‘You’re so right,’ says Ruby gratefully. ‘She’s trapped in her body. You understand her so well.’
‘We’ve been through a lot together,’ says Aunty Tamy, getting into her little Suzuki, for once serious. ‘Shared a lot of good-times bad-times. She knows everything about me … and I know everything about her.’
Ruby shuts the car door and as Perin moves to one side, the light from the porch ignites the wetness on Aunty Tamy’s cheeks. ‘My God, you’re crying,’ says Ruby, wiping the tears with icy fingers. ‘I’m so sorry … She can be horrid but she doesn’t mean it … She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t bother me,’ says Aunty Tamy. ‘My friend can say anything she wants, to me. But I can’t bear to see her like this … God should have spared my friend this … she’s so beautiful.’
Aunty Tamy reverses down the drive. She does not require glasses even at night. Perin, standing hunched in the cold, scoots inside the moment the Suzuki’s out of the gate. Ruby walks slowly back. Aunty Tamy’s husband died about eight months back. Uncle Ahmed was a Muslim and Aunty Tamy, although distantly related to him, was Christian. They had sidestepped the hurdles of their marriage—raised by both sets of relatives—by eloping. Uncle Ahmed belonged to an old land-owning family with deep tentacles in politics. They had not been very kind to Aunty Tamy, who belonged to a distinguished Brahmin Christian family that had stocked Lahore’s colleges with a sturdy brood of professors. Many in her family had moved to England and some to Canada. Uncle Ahmed had insisted on visiting Sehra-bai even while he was recovering from his heart attack and his doctor had advised him to stay home and rest. Aunt Tamy must miss him, thought Ruby. She doesn’t show it, so they think she’s over it and we don’t consider her feelings.
Instead of the low-key day of respite Ruby had hoped for, the next day starts on a disconcertingly unruly note. Early that morning Sehra-bai slapped her night-nurse. Had Ruby not nimbly stepped back, she would’ve been slapped too. After a lunch calculated to neutralize the excess of the previous day—a mishmash of chicken soup and rice followed by banana and Jell-O—Sehra-bai’s mood switches direction and she shifts into a state of agitated dejection. She is restless. She wants to be taken out. When she’s out she wants to be brought in. She wants to visit her friend Najamai. Najamai is one of the few remaining friends who still welcomes her. Najamai is out. Sehra-bai wishes to visit friends in Laxmi Mansions: her friends in Laxmi Mansions are dead. She wants to go to Anarkali, which is thronged with jostling shoppers, and to Temple Road. ‘Why Temple Road?’ asks Ruby, surprised. ‘You don’t know anyone on Temple Road.’
‘I have my reasons,’ says Sehra-bai fiercely. ‘Who are you to question me?’
And when, exhausted, Ruby flees to her room, Sehra-bai’s insistent cry pursues her up the stairs: ‘Ruby! Come here! Ruby! Ruby! Ruby!’
Ruby covers her ears with her pillows. She recalls an old fable. A kind youth offers to carry a feeble old man home, but when they get there the old man’s grip grows supernaturally strong and he never lets go. Ruby feels like that. Sehra-bai has climbed on to her back and she’ll never be rid of her burden. Ruby wishes fervently she were back in America.
One of the more poignant dilemmas of migration is the care of the people one leaves behind. ‘Abandons,’ Ruby had thought, when her conflict between her concern for her mother and her responsibility to her family in America had made a yo-yo of her. Ruby’s brothers had migrated to Canada. As devoted to Sehra-bai as Ruby was, they visited alternately, but men were not expected to stay away from their responsibilities to nurse a sick woman. Perin, who had just finished high school, had elected to stay with her grandmother. That still left two of her younger children in Houston. Ruby had flown back and forth, dizzily covering the 20,000 miles that yawned between her dual responsibilities. She was spending almost nine months of the year in Lahore.
By the time they settle down to watch I Love Lucy in the living room at the end of the day, Sehra-bai has quieted. In fact she becomes unusually contrite and compliant. Twice she has caught hold of Ruby’s arm at opportune moments and, pulling her closer, whispered: ‘Please forgive me.’
‘What for? What’s there to forgive,’ Ruby is perplexed and mildly embarrassed.
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br /> ‘A lot. I’ve been very wicked in the past. Please say it. Say you forgive me.’
Whatever her mother might have done it could not have been unforgivable. ‘Okay, if it makes you feel better,’ says Ruby with an abashed smile, ‘I forgive you.’
The second time she forgives her mother, for she knows not what reason, Sehra-bai’s eyes cling to hers in such a helpless, bewildered way that Ruby’s heart gives a lurch. After they prepare her for the night and help her lie down in her bed Ruby signals the nurse to leave them alone. She sits on the bed and, leaning forward, stroking Sehra-bai’s hair back, asks: ‘What is it, Mum? Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?’
Sehra-bai raises her head to mutely indicate she wants another pillow. The confused tumult of her thoughts has creased her brow and her eyes wander distractedly. Ruby feels her mother has decamped to some agonizing corner of her life that excludes her as of old.
‘Mum, please tell me,’ she pleads. She continues to stroke her forehead. ‘What is it, Mum, can’t you tell me?’
‘I can’t,’ Sehra-bai whispers. Her panicky eyes shift about the room and at last focus weakly on Ruby. And as if strengthened by the sympathetic contact, like a dormant volcano locating a vent, Sehra-bai’s choked voice releases her pent-up anguish in an inchoate geyser of words.
‘It hurts too much. I don’t know what to do—I don’t know who to turn to …’ she is all but crying. ‘I know … I know it all happened a long time ago, but I feel it’s just happened—as it was then—just yesterday. Oh, God, I feel sick. Sick with jealousy, physically ill. I wish I could rip this jealousy, this monster, out of me and throw it away.’ She yanks at her nightdress near the throat, and in frustration throws out her hand as if emptying it of something. Her defences have all crumbled and in her distress Sehra-bai clutches her daughter’s arm and half rising off her pillow, breathlessly asks: ‘What shall I do? Should I call Dr Dinshaw?’
By taking inordinately long to come when summoned, Dr Dinshaw has made it plain that they should not call him unless there’s a life-threatening emergency. He has enormous affection and respect for Sehra-bai. He visited almost daily after she came home from the hospital, and then weekly. But in the two years since Sehra-bai had her stroke his patience has worn thin. The affection of her friends, too, has frayed. It saddens Ruby. Only some members of the Parsee Anjuman board visit regularly. Sehra-bai is still president of the board. The community refuses to let her relinquish her position. They hold the quarterly meetings in her sitting room and, propped upright in her wheelchair, she contributes her increasingly futile presence. Soon tired and bored, she asks to be withdrawn.
‘What can Dr Dinshaw do?’ says Ruby leaning closer, her sympathetic tone inviting confidence. ‘You know he doesn’t show up unless there’s an emergency, and even then we can’t rely on him. Talk to me … we’ll discuss it. It will take the edge off your hurt.’
Perin, alerted by the nurse, has quietly entered to find out what’s happening.
Sehra-bai spots her. ‘Tell her to leave,’ she says anxiously, and Perin withdraws, softly pulling the door to behind her.
Sehra-bai’s eyes again cling to Ruby’s. ‘O God. It is exactly as I felt then … I phoned Dr Bharucha. I was crying. He came at once. It relieved me to talk to him. He was so kind. He said: “You’ll become really sick. If you allow your jealousy to take over like this it will become a monster and swallow you up. It will make you ill. You’ll sink into depression.”’ She mimics Dr Bharucha’s speech so accurately that Ruby, startled, almost believes her mother has conjured up the doctor’s spirit. ‘He gave me medicine. It had opium. Nothing mattered after that … I was at peace.’ As Sehra-bai’s speech reverts to normalcy the eerie grip of the spell is broken. Her mother has always been an extraordinary mimic. ‘Maybe Dr Dinshaw will help me … give me opium, too?’
‘Of course he will,’ says Ruby, gauging the full breadth of her misery. She is prepared to agree with anything to comfort Sehra-bai. ‘Tell me all about it … what happened?’ She continues to stroke Sehra-bai’s forehead, caressing her cropped grey hair, which has grown thicker and prettier since the stroke.
‘I waited and waited for your father to come home,’ says Sehra-bai. ‘I always waited up for him, no matter what time he came.’ She pauses, and her grip on Ruby’s arm grows so tight that Ruby wonders at the strength in that frail body. ‘In the middle of the night the phone rang. I thought it was Rustom. It wasn’t your father … It was a stranger; a man.’ Sehra-bai’s voice grows hard and gruff as it catches the venomous essence of that moment. ‘How are you Sehra-bai-ji? Why is the light still on in your bedroom? Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning! You’re still awake?’
‘Who are you?’ Arching over the span of years, her mother’s harsh voice recreates her fear and loathing of that moment.
‘It doesn’t matter who I am. Let’s say I am a well-wisher … I don’t want you to wait up for that scoundrel night after night. Your precious “Janoo” doesn’t deserve you.’
‘Who are you? Tell me your name … Show yourself! Coward!’ she says. The use of ‘Janoo’, the endearment she uses to address Rustom, indicates it is someone they know.
‘The man laughs.’ Sehra-bai mimics his guttural laugh. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.’
‘At this time of night?’ the stranger says. ‘What will the neighbours say?’
Sehra bangs down the phone.
It rings again. This time the man’s voice is a cruel rasp. ‘If you want to know where your husband is, get into your car right now and drive to 22 Temple Road. You will see Janoo’s Morris parked right behind your good friend Begum Jalil Ahmed’s car in her house.’
Begum Jalil Ahmed is Aunty Tamy. The agony of that instant, the betrayal, is etched on Sehra-bai’s crushed face. Ruby is shocked. How can it be Aunty Tamy? Her mother’s staunchest friend? She and Uncle Jalil Ahmed were among the new lot of friends—landlords, lawyers, politicians, judges—her parents socialized with when her father suddenly burgeoned into a wealthy man and required a battery of lawyers to protect his interests. He also ventured briefly into politics. Along with most of the others the Jalil Ahmeds had remained lifelong friends.
‘Did you go?’ Ruby asks.
‘She was my best friend,’ Sehra-bai emits a strange series of guttural sounds. Misled for a moment, Ruby thinks she’s laughing sardonically. She’s not. She’s sobbing, her mouth wide open in a way Ruby has never seen her cry.
‘I’m so sorry to hear this, Mum. So sorry …’ Ruby gently runs her hand over Sehra-bai’s cheek to soothe and console her. The peculiar sobbing stops. ‘Did you go, Mum?’ she asks again.
‘My legs and hands were trembling. Still, I quickly-quickly tried to put on my sari … I couldn’t get the pleats right and I bunched the sari into the petticoat any-old-how. Ayah was sleeping in your room and the phone must have awakened her. She helped me dress.’ Breathless with the rush of words pouring from her, Sehra-bai is panting. ‘It was freezing that night. I ran to the car and Ayah ran out with the coat and made me put it on. “Should I come with you Bibi-ji?” she asked. I told her, “Stay with the children.”’
Sehra-bai is quiet for a stretch. Ruby remains silent—let her mother relay the experience at the pace that suits her. She wonders which ayah Sehra-bai is referring to. It must be that tall thin ayah with that narrow, delicate face they had when she was about seven. She was a refugee from across the border in India. One of the women who had been kidnapped and raped by the opposing religious group during the Partition riots. She had not been accepted back by her family because she had been dishonoured. The ayah told her stories about female giants with breasts as long and fat as Queens Road.
Sehra-bai starts speaking again and interrupts her thoughts. She appears to have come to terms with some of her feelings and her narration is more orderly. Although she is calmer, her words appear to well up from a cocoon of sadness that envelopes Ruby with its melancholy. ‘There was a thick fog tha
t night,’ Sehra-bai says, her voice again evoking the dread ambience of that night. ‘I couldn’t see the sidewalks or the rain-ditches … I was so hyper I could have driven through a stone wall. There was no traffic. I drove fast, like a madwoman. From Queens Road, through Mozang to Temple Road. I took the turns by instinct. The gate was open—it was one of those cheap corrugated tin-sheet gates—and I could see up the drive. Either there was less fog, or my vision suddenly became sharper. Tamy’s car was parked in the porch. Your father’s car was parked right behind it.’
Ruby lies down alongside her mother and gingerly wrapping an arm around her slack body presses as close to her as she can without making her uncomfortable. Whispering endearments and solace she presses her face against her mother’s. Sehra-bai’s old skin is still velvety and Ruby is loath to separate from its silk.
Sehra-bai’s expression is surprisingly composed, but her chest is heaving and tears are sliding down both sides of her face and into her ears. Ruby props herself on an elbow to open the buttons on Sehra-bai’s flannel nightgown. She strokes her chest beneath the collarbone and down between the sagging ruins of her breasts. She knows it will soothe her. She waits.
When Sehra-bai doesn’t say anything Ruby asks: ‘Did you recognize the man’s voice?’
‘No,’ Sehra-bai whispers. ‘I’d go to the Gymkhana Club tennis courts and I’d inspect all the men playing tennis, and wonder which one it was. I’d go to the Central Bank and imagine it was one of the bank clerks. It was terrible. I’d play bridge at the Cosmopolitan Club and think my partner could be the man, or my opponent, or a man playing rummy or flush at the other table. I never knew who he was: he had disguised his voice thoroughly.’
‘He must have been in love with you himself,’ says Ruby, attempting to tease Sehra-bai out of the grip of her malaise. ‘Otherwise why would he do a thing like that? Go to such lengths?’
‘No. People in love don’t hurt the people they love.’