by Cyrus Mistry
While they attempted to keep this complex domestic routine under control, for quite a while apparently, without knowing it myself, I had made my parents very anxious—by refusing to speak. My eyes shone, possibly, with some spark of intelligence, and occasionally I bestowed upon some member of my family the most endearing smile. But talk I wouldn’t, nor even, like babies do, blow spittle or burble meaninglessly. I was already three, and they had begun to worry that I was a little backward, if not actually feeble-minded; well, certainly not as bright as my elder brother—of that there was no question.
However, all of a sudden, I capsized their disparaging beliefs. One day, I finally did say something—a recognizable word! My first word, though, was not Mama, or Papa, or Vispy. Rather, it was something that sounded like ‘muss-muss’. It took Hilla a while to decipher, until she observed that I was trying to attract the attention of the parrot, Hormaz.
When Hilla reported the incident to him that evening, Framroze was thrilled.
‘The first word that escapes his lips,’ he pronounced solemnly, ‘is the name of the Almighty Creator. I have always known that wonderful things are in store for this boy. He may have had a tardy start but, perhaps, Hilla, one day our Phiroze will become a great priest, or a renowned Zoroastrian scholar.’
But my interest in the parrot came to an abrupt and chilling end. My mother at least, I believe, was never able to forgive me for what I did. To the others, it only seemed to confirm what they had always suspected: that I was a dull and pig-headed child.
Whatever opinion my family may have had of me, it probably had little effect on me. For at the age of four or about then, I grew into quite a brat, still often unintelligible in my locution, but nevertheless, very voluble and self-confident. Often wide-eyed and dumbstruck by Vispy’s ability to carry out the most prodigious feats, I was cautioned never to attempt any of them until I was his age. Such as walking along the narrow parapet of the temple’s veranda, which was quite deserted in the evenings, or turning multiple somersaults on Papa’s large bed. I felt proud of Vispy, of all his achievements, especially those for which he was lauded at the school he went to for the better part of the day. These were sometimes mentioned or discussed over family dinner.
One of his skills, which I would often marvel at, was the ease with which, on a squally January evening, after school, he put a kite up in the sky. There was a narrow stairway that led up to the temple terrace, and I’d follow him there. Sometimes, there were dozens of kites already in the sky, controlled by other invisible strings—careening, swooping, wafting, bobbing, spinning out of control, gliding high on a gentle breeze, or soaring deep into a darkening sky. Once, but only once, after he had put his kite up very high in the sky, Vispy allowed me to hold the thread. It was the lightest moment of my life. I felt myself airborne, flying. And also, I felt a great and momentous responsibility, as though I had been temporarily put in charge of a planetary configuration or of one of the world’s rarest elements; as if the earth’s continued equilibrium was entwined in my fingers to maintain. But before I could savour the moment for any length of time, Vispy took the string away from me.
‘You’ll cut your hand, don’t fool around! There’s ground glass coating this twine. . .’
I didn’t understand what he meant by that. But my interrupted tryst with the sky may have inspired me to fly Hormaz.
Since I knew I could never put Vispy’s kite up in the sky by my own efforts, and would have left it hopelessly mangled had I tried, it seemed far easier to try and fly a bird. The very next afternoon, soon after he had left for school, I took down the reel of thread from where it lay atop Vispy’s cupboard, and approached Hormaz quietly. Since there was no question of my being able to take the bird up to the terrace, I thought I’d fly him right there in our front room. Mama and Papa were napping in the next one. With the trusting and slightly impatient indifference of an eighty-year-old, the parrot refused, at first, to react: perhaps, he thought, this little brat—how can he hurt me?
But when I had quickly wrapped the string thrice around his neck, he began to squawk in alarm. I hadn’t bargained for all this noise. I had just wanted to fly Hormaz around the room at the end of my string. Instead, he began to flutter and tremble and shriek, terrified. Flapping his wings madly, he would rise just a few inches, then descend again trembling, screaming his head off. I knew all this noise would wake up my parents. Before that happened, and they put an end to my experiment, I wanted Hormaz to fly up in the air just a bit and circumnavigate the room, maybe only a couple of times at the end of my string. So I tugged at the string, but he didn’t move. Then I tugged harder.
And this time, he did take off; Hormaz flew up with a great deal of force. And suddenly, there was blood everywhere. Not just on the feathers of the grey parrot lying on the floor, but everywhere, on my fingers and hands as well. And suddenly, I was shrieking louder than the parrot had been a minute ago.
Several cries and exclamations followed soon after—first concern, then horror—Mother rushed into the room and began shrieking, too. That was my first experience of death, though I was too young to know it by its name.
For many years after this, my parents were kind enough not to remind me of my stupidity, or blame me for this tragic mishap. It was tacitly accepted by my parents that I had been just too young, too foolish to fully understand what I had done. But even to my as yet underdeveloped ability to make inferences, the inescapable relation between the hard tug at the sharp kite-flying string, my own bloody fingers and the fallen parrot on the floor locked together with a terrifying logic. I couldn’t have put words to what had happened, but my guilt was enormous. Within myself, I was grieving silently for Hormaz and the whole episode only made me more taciturn than before.
Five
The notion that I was the stupid one in the family caught on.
To be sure, I did many foolish things when I was small—the unfortunate near-decapitation of Hormaz being only the first. That all my family believed I was endowed with an inferior intelligence was evident in the way they spoke to me, and of me. There may have been some degree of genuine concern underlying the tacit complicity they shared over my alleged mental deficiencies; but it was annoying to me that my mother, father and brother—all seemed bonded in a conspiracy of nervous apprehension, as though continually watching for further signs of my dull-wittedness. Rather than reassure them that their fears were misguided, I found it more gratifying to confound them with further evidences of my idiocy.
No, even that’s not completely true. My cussed disposition may have ensured that I felt perversely contrary, antipathetic to their bewildered suspicions. But I never deliberately postured, or projected myself as someone, or something I wasn’t. If my folks saw me as doltish, it was because their minds were already predisposed on that score.
And, perhaps, the biggest reason for this prejudice had its root somewhere in my own undeniable light-headedness: every now and then, for no apparent rhyme or reason, I would burst into bouts of irrepressible giggling. No matter how ostentatious or forbidding an occasion might be, no matter how dignified, exalted or solemn—if I sensed that some kind of formality was being called for, in itself this condition was sufficient to set me giggling.
Until the age of five or six, I suppose this is generally tolerated and may even seem cute. But the older I grew the more absurd any requirement of pomposity or piety seemed; immediately and automatically—irrespective of context—it evoked in me a burst of unstoppable and hearty rejoicing. Naturally, eyebrows were raised at this kind of compulsive, brazenly disrespectful, side-splitting risibility. To this day, I have to make a special effort to exercise control over this aspect of my reflexes. The mere knowledge that a part of me is telling me to restrain myself is enough to unfasten the lid on my irreverence.
I had grown up in the rear of a fire temple which was revered and visited by scores of people daily. At all times of day and night, every nook and corner of the temple was sanitized by the
cleansing perfume of sandal and incense. In our tiny quarters at the back as well, the air was redolent with the smell of piousness; and our lives tangled in an elaborate network of rules and proscriptions that had been instilled in us from a very young age. Everything was sanctified and respect-worthy. No room here for fatuity, or impiety.
There were procedures for everything—for eating a meal, for pissing, for taking a crap, for washing one’s arse, for how to wash one’s hands after doing that, for taking a bath; and above all, for when and how frequently one must recite the prayers which would restore some measure of wholesomeness to one’s sullied, contaminated self.
Personal hygiene and purity—the rules of which, according to my father, were clearly laid down in our ancient texts—were essential prerequisites to spiritual progress. Naturally, I could not help being amused by the overblown logic or lack of it in some of these injunctions, which may have had good reason for being enjoined upon primitive pastoral tribes some three thousand or five thousand years ago, but didn’t need to be glorified into obsessive, all-embracing moral codes. Their obvious rationale at the time would have been sanitary—it seemed evident even to me—not mystical, or ‘scientific’, as my father would have us believe.
‘Why do you think there are so many strange, new, incurable diseases in the world? Why do people no longer live to be a hundred, or a hundred and fifty, or two hundred years old as they used to in the olden days? Why do you think evil has been able to tighten its stranglehold on humankind?’ Framroze would rage, if he ever he saw Vispy or me slip up in our routines.
‘It’s because people have forgotten the conjunction between hygiene and spirituality,’ he would continue, answering his own question. ‘Or because they presume it is inconsequential. No wonder the world has become such a bedevilled place!’
Nevertheless, of all my family members, it was my father I was closest to. His capacity for softness and indulgence towards me seemed limitless. There were times, I remember, during my fits of endless giggling—even while scolding me to stop being an ass—I could discern in his eyes and in the lines on his face, despite the thick camouflage of a riotous salt-and-pepper beard, the disallowed flicker of an impulse of love, the suppressed urge to join in my infectious giggling. Or did I imagine it?
In fact, until the time he completely disowned me, and never wanted to see my face again, my father was the only one in the family who refused to believe there was anything deficient with my intelligence. Unlike Mother, whose love for me was fraught with unspoken fears that she had perhaps given birth to a completely obtuse and moronic second child, I felt deep down that Father was actually proud of me; that, secretly, he continued to nurture hopes that once I had run through my juvenile frivolities, and stopped playing the fool, I would emerge a brilliant religious scholar, if not a respected high priest like himself.
My performance at school, however, was disappointingly below par, and far below the record established by my brother before me. Having cleared his matriculation exam with an impressively high score, Vispy was the recipient of a scholarship from a Parsi charitable fund for boys from underprivileged families. Already, he had joined a commercial institute where he was learning typing and shorthand, as well as bookkeeping and accountancy. Now that he had grown up, he travelled to the institute and back on the city’s public transport buses and trams, sometimes returning late in the evening only just in time for dinner. I envied Vispy his new-found freedom, but was constantly reminded by my parents that he had earned it.
‘Dunce!’
‘Donkey!’
‘Dullard!’
Some of the elderly teachers at school, I couldn’t help notice, reserved their angriest invective for me. On the verge of retirement themselves, they made it a point to recall the years they had spent giving instruction to my brother with exaggerated nostalgia and yearning. My own family members thought it, frankly, improper and nonsensical to even draw such comparisons between us.
The truth was I had no real interest in school, or in enforced learning. Nevertheless, goaded and punished, threatened and yelled at, often the butt of the practical jokes of my classmates— I suspect they saw me as a simpleton, too, but I didn’t mind—I stumbled slowly up the ladder through high school; but, alas, I failed to clear my final matriculation exam.
Father was disappointed. On a number of occasions during the last two years, he had been urging me to study hard, and see if I could possibly even improve on Vispy’s score. He was hoping that a healthy spirit of competition between the brothers might serve to uncover the depths of dormant potential in me. When he heard I had failed, he was as supportive as he could bear to be.
‘Start studying right away for the second attempt!’ he said to me sternly.
All those who failed were given a second chance by the Board to reappear for the exam in eight months’ time.
‘This time make sure that you not only pass, but do so with flying colours! Of course, I will do what I can, to help. . .’
He muttered that last line sotto voce, as if reminding himself of something he had undertaken to do. I understood that he was making me a promise. Father had a great belief in the miraculous power of our ancient liturgy. In that respect, he was a worthy successor to his mentor, the great Dastoorji Eruchsah Kookadaroo. In the latter’s small bedroom, now occupied by my father (my mother, Vispy and I shared the other larger room, so as not to disturb Father during his odd hours of sleep), the venerable Eruchsah had preserved, in a wooden cabinet, some arcane handwritten manuscripts in the forgotten Avestan language.
Before he passed on, he had bequeathed this rare heritage to my father. The pages of these manuscripts were so old that they practically crumbled on touch; the writing on them faded, but nevertheless legible. One afternoon, while mother was getting our dinner ready in the kitchen, I discovered Father alone with a roll of brown-gum tape repairing one of these long, loose-sheaved notebooks whose parchment-like pages were coming apart. Abstractedly, as though speaking only to himself, he said:
‘Hidden in these sacraments are vibrations so powerful that when recited aloud, they can make the impossible come true: the mortally ill healthy again, the impoverished discover untold wealth and the foolish find it in them to utter words that command respect from the wise! Only, strong faith is demanded in their recitation; the kind of faith that can manifest a towering blaze on sodden earth.’
I understood that Father, busy as he was, intended to unleash the power of these ancient formulae to help me pass my matriculation exam. I was touched, and promised myself I would reciprocate his faith in me by doing my very best.
Despite my staunchest resolve, I found myself unequal to the task of competing with Vispy; indeed, of applying myself to any form of concerted study.
Every time I tried to focus on reading, or cramming, I encountered an immense rock-like barrier in my head which made me wonder if I wasn’t really the dunce and fathead my family had always made me out to be. On the other hand, it was also true that left to my own resources I was pretty certain this was no infirmity—a weakness of sorts, perhaps—but what I really craved was something more robust than books. To find myself out-of-doors, unconfined by Father’s fire temple with its holy smoke, salutary fragrances and workaday miracles: to be adult, free to go out and earn money, make my way in the world. . .
By the time I was in my teens, I intensely hated the feeling of being hemmed in by the norms of temple living, of being controlled in the myriad subtle ways a family employs to augment dependence and prolong childhood. But I knew that so long as I continued to live with my parents, nothing would change, my day-to-day routine remaining as invariable as the hoarsely stentorian chanting of the priests through the morning in the prayer hall, in a language that nobody had spoken or understood for the last three thousand years.
The real disappointment, though, that irked my father was not so much my dismal performance at school as the fact that though I was already sixteen I was not even a naavar yet. This
is the first test one negotiates on the road to full-fledged priesthood— being ordained a novitiate priest. Not that my father wanted either of his sons to become full-time priests like himself: he knew only too well how low his profession had slumped in our burgeoning city of commerce. There was no money in it and not much respect either. Nevertheless, in those days, every family of the priestly caste deemed it necessary and appropriate for their sons to go through at least this first stage of ritual training and initiation.
Vispy had already acquired a reasonable fluency in the scriptural passages one has to commit to memory in order to become a naavar. For most people, I suppose, this isn’t a very difficult task. In fact he had easily cleared that milestone while still in his fifth form and, since then, had been qualified and fully authorized to participate in certain of the less abstruse liturgical services.
(In those days, students matriculated in their seventh year of school. By the time I reached my seventh year, however, an augmented curriculum compelled the education board to move the final exam up, so that I had already been attending school for eight whole years when I failed my matric. During his final year of school, not wanting to distract him from his studies, my parents had denied Vispy permission to participate in the Mukhtaad ceremonies. Otherwise, for two consecutive years prior to that, the young naavar had donned the robes of a priest and joined in the jamboree of prayer.)