by Manil Suri
But I learned to restrain myself and accept your need for solitude. Perhaps these bouts were necessary to maintain your peace with the loss you had sustained. Perhaps they were indicative of a Tagore or an Einstein inside, developing unseen, like in a chrysalis. Didn’t you usually bounce back by bedtime, and want to cuddle with me again?
SOMETIMES, WHEN YOUR mood didn’t lift so readily, I took you to the beach at Juhu. Although Chowpatty was much closer, its waves were too sedate, the water increasingly polluted. We rode the train to Santa Cruz, stopping along the way at the park with the concrete Air India plane. The sight of the beach instantly cured your spirits—you raced across the sand to jump into the water, shirt and all. I remembered how your father had done the same, the first time we came to the sea after moving to Bombay.
The tide flattened you repeatedly, but you quickly got to your feet, pounding your chest for the next onslaught. I knotted my dupatta around my neck and waded in as well. You liked me to stand behind you. Each time a wave came thundering in, you raised your arms at the last instant for me to lift you above the crest. Sometimes, I underestimated the tide and got knocked over myself. Then we rolled together in the foam, a mass of arms and bodies and legs.
Afterwards, I bought you an ice gola from the cart parked next to the Sun ’n Sand hotel. We watched the man grate the ice into a pan, and then form it into a ball around a stick. You agonized endlessly over the color of the syrup, even though they all tasted the same. When it was very hot, I bought one for myself as well. We sat on a bench and licked our golas as the sun dried us off.
One Sunday, a girl got carried out to sea. The parents had equipped her with an inflatable life ring decorated with cartoon characters, clearly imported from abroad. All the children looked at it in longing as she paraded up and down the beach, rotating the ring slowly around her midriff, to show off the cartoons equally. The wave that took her wasn’t even particularly big—one second she was clambering onto the ring, and the next instant she was rolling away, as serenely as a coconut. She ended up a few hundred yards from shore, a colorful shape bobbing in the whitecaps, waving invitingly, it seemed, to the onlookers on the beach. While her parents ran around and pointed frantically, some of the children waved back, and asked if they, too, could venture out like that. By the time a fisherman was recruited to negotiate the waves to fetch her, the girl had slipped out from the ring and appeared to be beckoning people into the water instead. She was carried glassy-eyed and ringless to a spot where the sand was dry, and a crowd gathered around to watch if any water would come out as her chest was pressed.
I held you to myself, imagining you swept away from my life while I watched as helplessly from shore as the girl’s parents had. After that incident, I never felt at ease taking you to Juhu again.
THE INSURANCE MONEY for Dev finally came. Paji delayed it as much as possible. “I can’t find the papers—who knows where your mother has misplaced them?” “The death certificate you sent must be lost in the mail—could you get another one made?” “They’ve found a misspelling in Ace’s name—I’ll have to start all over again.” I deposited the check immediately, before Paji could dream up some reason for recalling it, then went to the shops at Opera House selling TV sets. The broadcasts had finally started in Bombay at the end of last year, even though television had been inaugurated in Delhi twelve years ago. For months now, you had been sighing each time we passed an electronics store, and making wistful references to shows like Here’s Lucy and The Count of Monte Cristo, which the children at school all talked about.
I settled on Televista, an Indian brand (since foreign ones smuggled into the country started at ten thousand rupees on the black market). It blew a valve on the very first day—in the coming months, we got to know the repairman quite well. The only channel, the government-operated Doordarshan, broadcast endless hours of propaganda films. Each night, the news slavishly detailed the prime minister’s day—following her around as she visited hospitals or greeted foreign dignitaries. The shortages and strikes due to a second failed monsoon could have been plaguing a different country. “Even if the Soviets and Americans launched a nuclear attack,” Zaida said, “they’d still show Indira cutting the ribbon to a fertilizer factory.”
You sat rapt through everything—even the shows in Marathi and Gujarati, which you didn’t understand. The TV remained on from the wailing sign-on tune at six-thirty until ten o’clock, when, with a final flash of the snail-like Doordarshan logo, the transmission went off the air. The most popular show was the Hindi movie on Sunday evening—when shops closed early and even public buses mysteriously vanished from the streets. Wild rumors circulated all week about the next telecast being a recent hit like Guddi, or Amar Prem—the films actually shown had either flopped or were quite old.
It hardly mattered. Viewers streamed into our living room on Sundays—Zaida and Pinky and Mrs. Dugal and Mrs. Hussain—even the ganga, who squatted on her favorite spot by the door. I found myself transported back to my youth, when movies formed such a big part of my life—the familiar tales of doomed love, of twins separated at birth, of prostitutes with hearts of gold.
One Sunday, they showed the classic Mother India. The heroine, Nargis, had caused quite a scandal by falling in love during the filming with Sunil Dutt, the actor playing her son. In the movie, Nargis shoots her son for bringing dishonor to her family—the mother goddess Kali killing off her offspring, a reviewer said. In real life, much to everyone’s shock, Nargis had married him. The fact that he was a Hindu and she a Muslim only fanned the controversy.
I felt a strangely familiar, yet almost forgotten pressure behind my eyes when Nargis’s husband died, leaving her alone with two young sons and a mound of debt threatening their very lives. “Go ahead,” Zaida said. “What’s the use of watching a movie if you don’t let it out?” So when Nargis tied herself to a plow to till the land and feed her children, I let the tears wet my cheeks. And when Sunil Dutt lay bleeding in her arms and called her “Mother” for the last time, I allowed the deluge to come.
After that, I let myself cry every Sunday—a weekly amnesty of sorts from my pledge of so long ago. When Madhubala sang “When One Has Loved, Why Should One Be Afraid?” before being bricked up in a wall; when Meena Kumari was murdered and buried under the floor by her drunkard husband’s family in Sahib, Bibi, aur Ghulam. Tragedies revolving around maternal love made me weep the most. Movies like Aurat, where the mother, like another Kali incarnation, is also forced to kill her criminal son after a lifetime of sacrifices for him. Or Aradhana, where she confesses to the murder committed by her boy and emerges from jail to find he has grown to look exactly like the father she loved.
Even though I knew how overheated these stories were, I couldn’t help falling under their spell. A part of me wanted to suffer like the heroines, to be tempered by the same fiery tests of motherhood they underwent. What would it feel like to yoke myself to a plow and fight the unyielding earth for food to put in your mouth? The dirt mingling with my sweat, the muscles straining in my neck, the rope marks burning proudly on my chest? I watched Nargis and Sharmila Tagore and lost myself in fantasy—of hardship and survival, of tribulation and self-denial. Opportunities for sacrifice burst forth to rise like mountains around me, waiting to be scaled, step by arduous step, as proof of my love for you, my devotion, my all-encompassing passion.
WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY about those first few years after I was left alone with you? The section they inaugurated in my album of memories was the happiest I had ever known. It was like the first chapter of a book I couldn’t wait to read, the trailer of a movie starring the two of us destined to be a masterpiece. I held on to your hand as you let me accompany you through the landscape of your childhood.
It became my second childhood as well—or perhaps my first, since I was always discontented with the one I had lived before. All the toys Roopa got to choose and play with first, all the comics of which Paji disapproved. All the foods Biji deemed too arousing—the
sour candy drops and the jamun berries—even the coffee. I now had the power to indulge you with everything (and myself, simultaneously). To concentrate all my attention on you and have it all reflect back only on me.
Perhaps this had been my deepest unfulfilled craving—to have more attention lavished on me. Now I felt this need being slaked, through all the things you did for me. You peppered my egg every morning, sprinkling enough to completely cover the yolk the way I liked. At night, you checked that I had taken my vitamins, and filled a glass with cold water for my bedside. Each time I wore a salwar kameez, you found the right dupatta from the cupboard; for saris, you laid out the matching blouse. You always made sure I kept enough for myself when I tried to heap your plate with the last of the kheer.
Do all mothers get to be such close friends with their sons, or was this a blessing only for me? The way our family album brimmed with so many images of shared activity? The time after I had taught you to ride a bicycle and the shopkeeper suggested I also rent one for myself. It felt a little low, but I managed to remain astride, taking care to wrap my dupatta several times around my neck so that it did not get entangled in the spokes. We rode up and down the side streets, going by the back way almost as far as Gowallia Tank. Then we spotted Mrs. Dugal emerging from the Sai Baba temple, aimed our bikes at her, and pedaled furiously. She screamed not once, but twice—first when you buzzed her, then when she was buzzed by me.
Or the visit to Hanging Gardens when you discovered your first keri, nestling in the shrubs under a mango tree. “Is it a real mango?” you asked, holding it in your palms like something newly hatched, the sap still oozing out of its navel.
“Yes,” I replied. “It just fell before it was ripe. It’s sour, but taste it, go ahead.”
You took a tentative bite, and I saw the stars in your eyes—suddenly I wanted some myself. “Come, let’s gather a few more. Mummy will show you what she used to do with them in Rawalpindi.”
At home, I found an empty jam jar into which I chopped the keris. By now the pungent raw mango aroma had intoxicated you as well, so I let you mix in the salt. “It takes a few days for the skin to turn dark,” I warned, and you shook the jar to hurry things along.
By the next evening, you had agitated the jar so frequently that the keris were suspended in a thick white froth. I knew you wouldn’t be able to last another day, so I let you open it. “They’re maha-tastic,” you pronounced, your highest compliment, and I nodded in agreement as I felt the tickle in my throat. We sat at the table and fed the pieces to each other until the acid turned our teeth numb.
That week, you seemed to notice the boughs of the old mango tree in your school grounds for the first time. They carried so much fruit that parrots fluttered around constantly, trying to peck at it with their red beaks. You started spending both your short and long recess rooting for keris in the plant beds underneath.
On Friday, I found you moping when I came to pick you up after your cub scout meeting. Too many other boys had heard about the treasure hunt and the day had gone by without finding a single keri. I remembered the guava tree that grew in the compound of our Darya Ganj house—the ripest, most tantalizing pieces always seemed to be out of reach. I had often been tempted to lob stones at one of the clusters, but the time Roopa tried it, she ended up hitting a neighbor, and Biji gave us both a beating. The guavas had mocked me all through adolescence, until one year the tree was cut down.
I’m not sure what prompted this nostalgia to translate itself into action, but suddenly I found myself taking aim at a mango with a stone in my hand. Before I could sober myself with responsibility or consequences, I felt a satisfying ripple in my arm muscles, saw the stone arcing through the air. A lime green parrot flew squawking out of the tree, and a mango, plump and heavy, dropped to the ground. “Did you see that?” I shouted as you ran to retrieve it. “If the wind doesn’t knock them down, your mummy can.”
Within a few minutes, there was a fusillade of stones bombarding the tree. The boys who were your rivals, the servants who had come to pick them up, even some of the hawkers selling candy in the compound, all joined in. Keris started raining down one after the other, turning the shrubs underneath into a free-for-all. Then the inevitable happened—a rock strayed far from its course and crashed through a window in the rectory behind, where the principal and the other fathers lived.
I ran with you, as my instincts urged—not pausing to worry about principles or propriety. By the time the vice principal, Father Bernard, charged down looking for someone to cane, we were crouched safely behind the wall at the edge of the grounds. “I can see everything from up there,” he yelled, wielding his stick, his white robes billowing around his shoes. You giggled together with the boys hiding next to you, and I began to giggle as well. On the bus home, you reached into your pockets and laid six keris, fat and fragrant, in my lap.
Afterwards, I felt uneasy. Why I had been so quick to set a bad example, so reckless in my determination to be your friend? Could this have been something I imagined fathers would do—something, perhaps, to make a bolder man out of you? You had come a long way in the past three years, but there was still something amiss. The way you took out the box under the bed on Sundays to touch each implement in your father’s shaving kit. The long silent prayers in front of the pantheon, the continuing pilgrimages to Chowpatty to immerse pooja flowers. There was a gap in your life, I could see, a hole I knew I would never feel adequate enough to fill. Did Dev make me launch my stone, his absence for which I had tried to compensate?
I even gave wrestling another shot—this time, better prepared, I managed to keep awkwardness at bay. But I was too apprehensive of causing you hurt. You wore the disappointment plainly on your face—the bout hadn’t matched up to your encounters with Dev.
So we replaced the wrestling with games of tickling. You lay down first, pretending to be asleep, as I started on your sides, just above the hips. I moved gradually, teasing you with bare hints of pressure, until my fingers had inched up and were poised at your armpits. There I let them linger, grazing occasionally against your skin, until your eyelids began trembling and the suspense fluttered across your face. Just as your eyes popped open, I lunged in—tickling you until you bucked and flailed on the bed and the room filled with your shrieks. We switched roles once you were spent—it didn’t take long for you to learn that my ears were the most sensitive, not my armpits.
One May afternoon before your ninth birthday, I took you to Chowpatty to fling your final milk tooth into the sea. On the way back, we ran into a giant procession at Nana Chowk. At first, I thought it was a demonstration by railway workers. Over a million of them had gone on a national strike, paralyzing transport for a fortnight, spreading food shortages everywhere, bringing the country to a standstill. But then I saw people dancing, flashes of firecracker bursts, plumes of colored powder rising into the air. It was a celebration, not a protest—India had just tested an underground atomic bomb in Rajasthan. We watched the national flag being waved, large tricolors with the central wheel replaced by the prime minister’s face. From the chaos of all the domestic problems confronting her, Indira had managed to give rebirth to herself as Durga again.
All that evening, one could feel an elation, as galvanizing as electricity, crackling through the air. We would be rubbing shoulders with superpowers now—no longer would Pakistan dare make its territorial forays. Zaida, the Dugals, the Hussains, even the ganga came to crowd around the TV set—it could have been Sunday movie time again. The blast came on, the ground shook in Rajasthan, and a cheer went up in the room. “Boom!” Pinky went, “Maha-boom!” you shouted. You threw your arms up together, and jumped in unison off the bed.
chapter twenty-eight
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO PULL ME OUT OF THE idyllic routine into which we had settled. To remind me there existed a far crueler world outside our front door. Most disquieting was Zaida’s news, the afternoon you kept trying to coax her into dancing. “It’s Anw
ar,” she finally said. “He’s announced he’s going to take a second wife. At age sixty-nine.”
Unbeknownst to her, he had been seeing a woman every Saturday for all these years—each time, in fact, that he had claimed to go visit his brother in Sewri. “And here I was, thinking he was in such poor health, trying to tiptoe around him while he rested in the afternoons. Now I know why he took all those naps—it was to build up his energy for the end of the week.”
At first, it had seemed so unbelievable as to be almost amusing. “Suddenly the mouse who’s not even peeked once down the mousehole for all these years decides he’s a tiger after all.” But she had soon realized the seriousness of her situation. “It’s his right, he tells me, to marry again. Not just once, but three more times if he wants. He says he’s going to bring her here, that he wants me to take all my things and move into a corner of the living room. And if I make any trouble, he can throw me out—he says the law is clear.”
The law was, indeed, clear. For Hindus, it was so difficult to get a divorce once married that people had been known to change their religion to prove the clear grounds they needed for dissolution. Zaida, though, had been wed under Muslim personal law, for which the rules were different. Not only was Anwar legally allowed four wives, but he could divorce Zaida for any reason, simply by repeating the word “talaq” three times. “Everywhere, even in Pakistan, they’re getting rid of this instant talaq divorce, but here the mullahs just won’t let it go. Even Indira, can you believe it, is too scared of them to touch the issue.”
In fact, all Anwar had to do to be free was to support Zaida for three months in return for the twenty-five years she had spent with him. “Not even three months, mind you, but three menstrual cycles, the way the rule is framed. I told him if he was so worried about the money, he could keep track of what I did in the toilet to make sure he didn’t overpay.”