I complimented her on the tea and expressed my thanks, but Mummy told me not to offer empty praise. She said to Chaddah, ‘Dinner’s ready. I made it because I knew that if I didn’t, you’d come at the last minute and make my life hell.’
Chaddah hugged Mummy. ‘You’re a jewel, Mummy! Let’s eat!’
‘What? No, you won’t!’ Mummy said, startled.
‘But we left Mrs Manto in Parbhat Nagar,’ Chaddah explained.
‘May God strike you down!’ Mummy yelled. ‘Why the hell did you do that?’
‘Because of the party!’ Chaddah laughed.
‘But I cancelled it when I saw Mrs Manto in the tonga,’ Mummy said.
Chaddah was crestfallen. ‘No, how could you! We made all these plans just for the party!’ He sat down dejectedly in a chair and addressed everyone, ‘Well, all our dreams are shattered! The platinum blonde whose hair is the colour of a snake’s belly’s delicate scales …’ He got up and grabbed Mummy’s arms. ‘You cancelled it! You cancelled it in your heart. Here, I’m going to reverse it—I’m going to write “swad” on your heart.’ Then he made the Urdu letter ‘swad’ on Mummy’s heart and shouted, ‘Hurray!’
Mummy had just said the party was cancelled, but I could tell she didn’t want to disappoint Chaddah. She patted his cheek affectionately and said over her shoulder, ‘Okay, General Vankatre, go bring the cannons in from headquarters.’
Vankatre saluted and left to carry out his orders. Sayeedah Cottage was very close, and in under ten minutes he returned with not just the liquor bottles but also Chaddah’s servant. Chaddah welcomed him, ‘Come here—come here—Prince of the Caucusus—that—that girl whose hair is the colour of snake’s scales is coming. You, too, should try your luck!’
Ranjit Kumar and Gharib Nawaz did not like the way Chaddah was opening up the competition for the platinum blonde, and they both told me how Chaddah often got out of line in this way. As usual, Chaddah kept bragging about himself while the two of them sat quietly in the corner, sipping their rum and enumerating their sorrows.
I kept thinking about Mummy. Gharib Nawaz, Ranjit Kumar, and Chaddah were sitting in the living room like small children waiting for their mother to come back with toys. Chaddah was confident he would get the best toy because he was the oldest and also his mother’s favourite, and Ranjit Kumar and Gharib Nawaz sympathized with each other because their problems were the same. Liquor was like milk in that setting, and the image of the platinum blonde was like a little doll. If every place and time has its own melody, then the melody that night was rather flat—Mummy was the mother, the others were the boys, and that was that.
My aesthetic taste had suffered a shocking blow earlier when I had seen Mummy with Chaddah in the tonga. I was sorry I had had such bad thoughts about them, but it troubled me over and over why she used so much ugly make-up. It demeaned her—it ridiculed her maternal feelings for Chaddah, Gharib Nawaz, and Vankatre and God knows who else.
I asked Chaddah, ‘Hey, why does your Mummy use so much flashy make-up?’
Chaddah answered, ‘Because people like bright things. It’s very rare to find simpletons like us, people who like soft music and muted colours, people who don’t want to be young again and who don’t try to trick old age by acting young. People who call themselves artists are fools. I’ll tell you an interesting anecdote. It was during the Baisakhi fair in your Amritsar, in Ram Bagh where the prostitutes live. Some farmers were passing by. A strong young man raised on pure milk and butter and whose new shoes were dangling on his staff looked up at a whorehouse and saw a dark-skinned whore. She was wearing wild-coloured make-up and her oil-soaked hair was grotesquely pasted onto her forehead. Elbowing the ribcage of his friend, he said, “Hey, Lehna Sayyan, look up on the fifth floor—there’s—” ’ God knows why Chaddah didn’t go ahead and finish his sentence because he usually didn’t have any reservation about swearing. He laughed, filled my glass with rum, and said, ‘For this farmer, this witch was a fairy from Mount Caucasus, and the beautiful girls of his village were like clumsy buffaloes. We’re all fools—mediocre fools—mediocre fools because nothing in this world is high class—it’s second or third class—but—but—Phyllis is very special—like a snake’s scales—’
Vankatre raised his glass, poured rum on Chaddah’s head and said, ‘Scales, grails—you’re out of your mind.’
Chaddah licked the rum dripping off his forehead and said to Vankatre, ‘Now tell me, bastard, how much did your daddy love you? You’ve cooled me off, so tell me how much!’
Vankatre turned serious and said to me, ‘By God, he loved me a lot. I was fifteen when he arranged my marriage.’
Chaddah laughed loudly, ‘He made you into a cartoon, that bastard! May God give him a kaserail ki peti in heaven so that he can woo a beautiful bride for you!’
Vankatre became even more serious. ‘Manto, I don’t lie—my wife is truly beautiful. In our family …’
‘Your family be damned. Talk about Phyllis,’ Chaddah said. ‘No one can be more beautiful than her.’ Chaddah looked toward the corner where Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar were sitting. He yelled at them, ‘Founders of the Gunpowder Plot! Listen, no conspiracy on your part will work! Chaddah’s going to win!’ Then he turned to his servant. ‘Hey, isn’t that right, the Prince of Wales?’
The Prince of Wales was looking yearningly at the fast-emptying rum bottle. Chaddah erupted in laughter, poured half a glass and gave it to him. Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar were whispering to each other about Phyllis and secretly scheming against each other.
The lights were now on in the living room, as the light had faded outside. I was telling Chaddah the latest news from the Bombay film industry when we heard Mummy’s shrill voice on the verandah. He shouted out in excitement and went outside, and Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar exchanged suggestive glances and looked toward the door. Mummy entered the room chatting with the five Anglo-Indian girls accompanying her, each one different from the others—Polly, Dolly, Kitty, Elma, and Thelma—and the boy Chaddah called Sissy because he looked like a eunuch. Phyllis came in last, accompanied by Chaddah who had his arm wrapped around the thin waist of the platinum blonde—a conquering display that Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar didn’t like.
With the arrival of the girls, the party broke into full swing. All of a sudden everyone was talking English so quickly that Vankatre couldn’t keep up, and yet he did the best he could. When none of the girls paid any attention to him, he sat down on a sofa next to Elma’s older sister, Thelma, and asked her how many more Indian dance steps she had learnt. He started explaining Dhani, and as he kept time out loud—‘one, two, three!’—he choreographed some steps. On the other side of the room, the other girls were gathered around Chaddah as he recited dirty English limericks from his trove of thousands. Mummy was ordering some soda and snacks, Ranjit Kumar smoked and stared intently at Phyllis, and Gharib Nawaz kept saying to Mummy that if she needed any money, she should just ask.
The Scotch was opened and the first round of drinking began. When Phyllis was called in, she gave her platinum blonde hair a light shake and then said that she didn’t drink whisky. Everyone insisted, but she didn’t listen. Chaddah pouted, and so Mummy poured Phyllis a small drink and raised it to her lips saying sweetly, ‘Be a brave girl and drink it up.’
Phyllis couldn’t refuse. This made Chaddah happy, and in his good mood he raced through another few dozen risque limericks.
Everyone was having a good time. Suddenly it occurred to me that people must have started wearing clothes all those millennia ago when they got sick of their nakedness, and similarly, people run to nakedness nowadays when they get sick of their clothes. Modesty and debauchery reach a balance, and debauchery has at least one virtue in that it momentarily frees people from the boredom of routine. I looked toward Mummy sitting arm in arm with the young girls and laughing at Chaddah’s limericks. She was wearing the same trashy make-up beneath which you could still see her wrinkles, and yet she was happy.
I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.
Polly was standing in a corner talking with Ranjit Kumar about her new dress, telling him how it was due to her cleverness alone that she had got herself something so nice for so cheap, as she had transformed two worthless pieces of cloth into a beautiful dress. And Ranjit Kumar replied in earnest, promising to have two new dresses made for her despite the fact that he worked for a film company and so could never hope to receive the needed money in one single payment. Dolly was trying to get Gharib Nawaz to lend her some money, promising him that once she got her salary from the office she would repay him, and while Gharib Nawaz knew that this wouldn’t happen just as it hadn’t in the past, he nonetheless accepted her promises. Thelma was trying to learn the very difficult steps of Tandau dancing, and while Vankatre knew she would never succeed, he kept instructing her. Thelma, too, knew she was wasting their time, and yet she was memorizing the lesson with passionate concentration. Elma and Kitty were quickly getting drunk and talking about some Ivy who last time at the racecourse had placed a bad bet on their behalf in order to take revenge for God knows what. Chaddah was putting Phyllis’s blonde hair in the golden Scotch and drinking the liquor. Sissy kept digging a comb out of his pocket to tend to his hair. Mummy went around the room, talking here and there, ordering a soda bottle to be opened or broken glasses picked up from the floor, and she was watching over everyone like a dozing cat that keeps track of her five kittens through half-opened eyes, always knowing where they are and what mischief they are up to.
What part—what colour or what line—was wrong with this picturesque scene? Even Mummy’s make-up seemed like a necessary part of the whole. Ghalib says, ‘The prison of life and the chains of grief are one. / How can people escape grief before death?’ If the prison of life and the chains of grief are truly one, what law prevents people from trying to escape a little suffering? Who wants to wait around for the Angel of Death? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to play the interesting game of self-deception?
Mummy was praising everybody profusely, and she had a motherly affection for everyone. It occurred to me that perhaps she wore so much make-up so people won’t know the truth about her—that she couldn’t be a mother to everyone and so had chosen just a handful of people to lavish her affection on while leaving the rest to fend for themselves.
Mummy went into the kitchen to fry some potato chips and so wasn’t around to see Chaddah give Phyllis a strong shot of liquor right in front of everyone. Phyllis became drunk, stumbling drunk.
Midnight passed. Vankatre moved on from teaching Thelma how to dance to telling her how much his father loved him—while he was still a child, his father had arranged his marriage, his wife was very beautiful and so on. Gharib Nawaz had already forgotten about the money he’d just loaned to Dolly, and Ranjit Kumar had taken Polly somewhere outside. Having exhausted their topics of gossip, Elma and Kitty were tired and wanted to lie down. Mummy, Phyllis and Sissy were sitting near a stool, and next to them sat a subdued Chaddah. It was the first time Phyllis had ever been drunk and Chaddah was eyeing her as though he wanted to eat her up, and yet Mummy didn’t notice.
A little while later, Sissy got up and stretched out on the sofa where after combing his hair for a minute, he fell asleep. Gharib Nawaz and Dolly got up and went off together. Elma and Kitty were talking about some Margaret when they said goodbye to Mummy and left. For the last time Vankatre mentioned his wife’s beauty, cast an amourous glance first at Phyllis and then at Thelma, who was sitting next to him. Without further ado, he grabbed Thelma’s arm and took her out to the lawn to show her the moon.
God knows why, but suddenly Mummy and Chaddah were yelling at each other. Chaddah’s speech was slurred, and like a rebellious son, he started to curse her. Phyllis tried gently to calm them down but Chaddah was too worked up to listen. He wanted to take Phyllis with him to Sayeedah Cottage but Mummy was against this. She tried to get him to understand why he shouldn’t do this but he wouldn’t listen. He said over and over, ‘You’re crazy! You old bitch—Phyllis is mine—ask her!’
Mummy withstood his curses and then explained what was what, ‘Chaddah, my son, why don’t you understand? She’s young. She’s very young.’ Her voice quavered with both entreaty and rebuke. It was a frightening scene but Chaddah just didn’t understand. He was thinking only about Phyllis and how to get his hands on her. I looked at Phyllis and for the first time realized how young she was—not more than fifteen. Now she seemed upset, and her fair face trembled.
Chaddah grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. He clutched her to his chest like a film star, and Mummy screamed in protest, ‘Chaddah, let go of her! For God’s sake, let her go!’
When Chaddah didn’t release Phyllis, Mummy slapped him on the face. ‘Get out! Get out!’ she yelled.
Chaddah was stunned. He pushed Phyllis away, stared furiously at Mummy and then left. I got up, said my goodbyes and followed Chaddah.
When I got to Sayeedah Cottage, Chaddah was lying face down on his bed with all of his clothes on. I didn’t say anything but went into another room and fell asleep on a big desk.
I woke up at ten o’clock. Chaddah had gotten up early and gone out though no one knew where. Coming out of the bathroom, I heard his voice coming from the garage. I stopped. He was saying to someone, ‘She’s beyond compare. I swear to God, she’s beyond compare. Pray that when you reach her age, you’ll be that great.’
His tone was strangely bitter, but I couldn’t tell whether his bitterness was directed at himself or the person to whom he was talking. I didn’t think it was right to linger and so I went inside. I waited for about half an hour and when he didn’t come inside, I set off for Parbhat Nagar.
My wife was in a good mood. Harish was not at home, and when his wife asked about him, I said he was still sleeping at Chaddah’s. We had had a good time in Pune, and so I told Harish’s wife that I was ready to go back to Bombay. She made a show of trying to stop us, but in coming from Sayeedah Cottage I’d already decided that the night’s events had been more than enough for me.
We left and on the way to the station, we talked about Mummy. I told my wife exactly what had happened, and she suspected that Mummy had fought with Chaddah because Phyllis was either her relative or else she wanted to give her to a good customer. I didn’t say anything as I didn’t really know.
Several days later Chaddah sent a letter in which he mentioned the events of that night, and he had this to say for himself, ‘I turned into an animal that night—what an ass!’
Three months later, I had to go to Pune on some important business, and after getting there I went straight to Sayeedah Cottage. Chaddah wasn’t there, but I met Gharib Nawaz when he came out of the garage, playing with Shirin’s young boy as would an affectionate uncle. He greeted me very warmly and we went inside. A little while later Ranjit Kumar came walking in as slow as a turtle and sat down without saying a word. When I tried to make conversation, he barely responded, but I learned that Chaddah had not gone back to Mummy’s house and that Mummy had not come by Sayeedah Cottage. The day after the party, Mummy had sent Phyllis back to her parents. Ranjit Kumar was upset because he had been confident that if Phyllis had remained in Pune for a few more days, he would have won her over. Gharib Nawaz didn’t have any similar regret and was only sad that she had left.
Then I learned that Chaddah’s health had been poor for several days. He had a fever but hadn’t gone to the doctor and instead wandered pointlessly around town all day. When Gharib Nawaz began to tell me this, Ranjit Kumar got up and went outside and through the iron-barred windows I saw him head toward the garage.
I was just about to ask Gharib Nawaz about Shirin when Vankatre entered in an extremely agitated state. He told us Chaddah had just lost consciousness in the tonga as the two were coming back to Sayeedah Cottage. We all ran outside to see the
tonga driver propping him up. We lifted him out, carried him inside and laid him down. I put my hand to his forehead—his fever must have been at least 106 degrees.
I told Gharib Nawaz that we should immediately call a doctor. He discussed this with Vankatre and then took off, saying he’d be right back. Then he came back with Mummy who was huffing and puffing and trying to catch her breath. As soon as she entered, she looked at Chaddah and screamed, ‘What’s happened to my son?’
When Vankatre told her that Chaddah had been sick for several days, Mummy yelled, ‘What kind of people are you? Why didn’t you tell me?’ Then she gave us our orders: one had to rub Chaddah’s feet, another had to get some ice, and the third had to fan him. When Mummy saw how weak Chaddah was, she was beside herself with worry. But then she gathered her strength and went to get a doctor.
I don’t know how Ranjit Kumar found out in the garage, but he came back as soon as Mummy had left and asked what was going on. Vankatre recounted how Chaddah had fallen unconscious on the ride over and how Mummy had just left to get a doctor. Hearing this last bit of news, he visibly relaxed. In fact the three of them looked relieved, as though Mummy’s involvement had absolved them of their responsibility for Chaddah’s ill health.
They rubbed Chaddah’s feet and put ice packs on his forehead in accordance with Mummy’s instructions, and by the time she returned with the doctor, Chaddah had regained some degree of consciousness. The doctor took his time examining the patient, and his grave expression made it seem as though Chaddah’s life was in danger. Once he was done, the doctor motioned to Mummy and the two left the room. I turned to look out through the iron-barred windows and saw the garage’s sackcloth curtains swaying in the breeze.
A little while later, Mummy returned. One by one she told Gharib Nawaz, Vankatre, and Ranjit Kumar not to worry. Chaddah was listening with opened eyes, and when he saw Mummy, he didn’t react with surprise and yet he did seem confused. But when he realized why Mummy was there, he took her hand, squeezed it and said, ‘Mummy, you are great!’
Bombay Stories Page 15