by Ashok Banker
‘I suppose Chris has sacked me.’
‘Jay, don’t bother about—’
‘I suppose that’s for the best anyway.’
‘I have an ETC card, Jay. The automatic teller machine thing. I can withdraw some cash.’
‘I can manage.’
‘Jay, stop being so silly. I’m not saying this to be polite or something.
I want to help you. I feel responsible.’
‘It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. Except maybe my father’s. And he doesn’t give a damn.’ In the same controlled monotone: I have some money at home.’
‘Look, I'm coming with you whether you like it or not.’ She stares at him fiercely, daring him to challenge her.
He smiles bitterly, shrugs. ‘Okay.’ After a moment: ‘Let's go.’ He stubs out the cigarette. She pays the cheque. They leave.
chapter eighteen
SuzanneVega’s langurous voice wafts around Jay’s head, lulling him.
The bellyful of beer and lobster, glaring afternoon sun and lazy midday traffic pull him down into a well of sleep.
He opens his eyes again when the car stops. A wasp floats a few inches from his face on the other side of the windshield. Nothing seems to move. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. He belches and tastes lobster and beer. His head throbs steadily. He shuts his eyes again.
Finally, he wakes to the sound of a loud argument in Marathi, Bruce Springsteen’s Brilliant Disguise and Meera’s voice saying softly,
‘Hey? Hey?’
The hawaldar points to a stocky inspector with beefy forearms and a stiff clipped moustache sitting at a desk with a blackboard behind him. The blackboard has been dusted badly; the few words chalked in Marathi are incomprehensible to him. His throat hurts. He is glad to have Meera with him. He feels like a man dragged out of the wrecked remains of a highway truck accident.
The inspector remains seated while Jay explains his business, examines both of them closely, points with a wooden nightstick at Meera: ‘She is your wife?’
‘A colleague. From my office.’
The inspector looks at an adjoining room. Jay is struck speechless by the sight of his mother, partly visible, sitting on a bench, slumped forward, staring at her palms. Her hair is Medusan, her nightdress so painfully familiar to him—he bought it from a pavement stall on Linking Road along with two others for a hundred rupees a few months ago—tattered and bloodstained. Her left cheek is stained with something dark-brownish, not blood. She is barefoot. Her lips move softly. She is talking to herself. She has not seen him yet. He moves a half-step to the left, out of her line of vision; a green wall slides between them.
He talks, talks, talks; listens, listens, listens. He is used to explaining about his mother. The inspector is joined by the sub-inspector who answered the call from DM. Beneath the natural bellicosity, the Marathi swagger, Jay clearly sees the pity generated in these calloused hearts, the ‘poor boy what a fucked-up life’ response.
They repeatedly insist on his calling his father, he repeatedly explains that it would be pointless, that his father has absolved himself of all responsibility. This argument is clinched the moment Jay mentions his father's second marriage. Ah, now they understand.
Bullshit. They understand bullshit. Jay insists he does not want to consult a psychiatrist, that he has consulted psychiatrists by the dozen, recounts her expensive stints at various hospitals and nursing homes; how she used to bribe the orderlies to get her booze in the last place.
He relates anecdotes, incidents, reels off statistics, psychiatric jargon, vomits out an entire life to two strange men in khaki uniforms who have the power to incarcerate his mother for life in Thane Mental Hospital on grounds of insanity. Eventually, he realizes, this is what they are suggesting, no, recommending. They imply it would take the burden off his shoulders. He swallows, hesitates, but shakes his head.
Meera watches him silently, chain-smoking, wide-eyed, nodding along with him at times, putting in a word occasionally to support his arguments. He grows frantic, desperate to free his mother from the indignity of this world of thieves, murderers, rapists, drug-runners. A man brought in on some petty offence is being questioned by a sub-inspector at another desk. A hawaldar steps behind the man and brutally claps both his ears after every question or two. The cuffing seems to have no relation to whether the answer just given is honest or not, as far as Jay can tell. Finally, they look at him and ask him for the last time if he's sure. He says he's sure. But he isn't.
His mother laughs when she sees him; raises both her arms in an air-hugging gesture, tells the bai sitting at her feet—some cleaning woman—‘ Maaza pora maaza pora,’ in Marathi, thumping her chest proudly. Meera hangs back but Jay can see her face without seeing her face. ‘Come, Mama,’ he says simply and offers his arms to her.
She laughs again, semi-hysterically, tries to get up, and collapses, unconscious, on the floor. Meera says something. Jay shakes his head meaninglessly, bends and gathers his mother in his arms. She is surprisingly light. He asks Meera to adjust his mother's nightie, then turns and carries her out of the police station. Policemen stop to watch him. The hawaldar behind the man being interrogated stops to watch Jay pass, then jabs the man's kidneys. The man doubles up in agony. Jay glances back and sees Meera tipping the bai who was sitting with his mother.
He carries her out into the afternoon sunlight. This bundle of bones and sagging liquor-rotted flesh, smelling of urine, vomit, bad breath, bananas and coconut hair oil, this thing that lies so limp and cold in his arms, this mute creature with a livid scratch on her forehead... this is his mother? The woman whose womb bore him for nine months? The pivot around which his life whirls. The madness at the centre of his deceptively sane intellect. The source of his existence.
And of his destruction.
chapter nineteen
Catatonia. Staring out of the window for hours and days. Rubbing her palms with her thumbs until the skin turns lobster-red, peels. Licking her lips. Sipping water endlessly. Five, six bottles a day. He boils steel hundees full of water twice, sometimes thrice a day. But no booze.
The first day she points at the pile of labels peeled off government country liquor bottles; a five-inch stack of stiff, discoloured, cheaply printed line-illustrated labels. He shakes his head. She stares at him.
He stares her down.
She gets up and goes to the cupboard where she always keeps her month’s stock. He watches her.When she finds the bottles gone, she comes back and sits down on the bed, licking her lips. She stares up at him, down at her palms, laying one over the other, back at him; still without speaking.
He shakes his head again: ‘No drinking, Mama. I'm sorry.’
She looks down again, then makes a drinking motion with her right hand. He brings her a plastic bottle of boiled drinking water and a glass.
She puts the bottle to her lips and takes a sip. The sipping goes on all day, and even in the nights he hears the plastic squeak of the bottle being uncapped. Sometimes he comes in to check on her and finds her sitting on the bed staring out at the square black canvas of the window. He tries often to draw her into conversation, but she looks right through him.
She regresses. Has to be fed by hand, told when to chew, when to swallow, cajoled into taking each mouthful. Toilet matters are the most frustrating. After he brings her home from the police station, she is constipated for three days. Finally, he crushes a purgative tablet and mixes the powder with her drinking water. The next day, she gets up from her seat and goes to the bathroom herself, without his assistance. After that, she goes daily, but he has to help her take her panties off, and has to wash her behind when she finishes. He also has to bathe her. He sponges her daily, uses the tub every second day.
Once, he forgets that the water stops at noon and is stuck with a tub full of suds and her with shampoo in her hair. He has to ask the neighbours for a bucket of water.
He cooks. Mostly egg-based meals, with lots of Maggi
noodles. He makes sure she gets enough dal and green vegetables. Since he doesn't know how to cook meat, he buys two plates of chicken masala and tandoori rotis once a week, on Sunday nights, from Neelam restaurant, off Linking Road. At those meals, she finishes everything on her plate. But he still has to feed her. The only thing she does on her own is drink water. And, after a week, urinate.
Meera comes twice more to visit. He tells her the same thing he said on the day she drove them home from the police station: ‘I can handle it.’ And he can. She wants to help. The reason she'd stopped off at her flat en route to Colaba Police Station that day, he learns later, was to collect as much money as she had at home. When saying goodbye to Jay, she hands him a brown paper envelope full of cash.
He doesn't take it. She puts it on the table and leaves quickly. He puts it in his cupboard. The next time she comes, he gives it back to her.
She still doesn't take it. She has spoken to Chris in the meanwhile. He was furious at first, wanted to sue, but she talked and talked and he saw the futility of making an issue of it. Still, Jay stands fired. Chris wanted to retain Jay's provident fund, gratuity, family pension, leave travel allowance, encashable leave, and his salary for the current month to pay for the damages his mother had inflicted on his cabin.
Meera convinced him that would seem vindictive and that, after all, insurance would cover the most expensive item—the PC terminal that Jay's mother had smashed with a chair. So when she comes, she brings with her a cheque for Rs 22,340 with Chris's scratchy signature on it. She tells Jay that if he wants he can apply for his share of PF and FP—about Rs 10,800—and can get it in two or three months. But since he will almost certainly be getting another job, it would be better to let the amount stay. Jay tells her he can 't leave his mother just yet.
She suggests he gets a nurse at home. After all, he has to work, doesn't he? He shrugs. She refuses to take back the cash envelope.
After she leaves it the second time, he opens it and counts the thick wad: there are ten thousand rupees there. The next time, he slips it into her purse when she goes to the loo. He tells her she doesn't have to keep visiting. She looks worried when she sees just how helpless his mother is, but he explains to her that he’s been through this before, he knows the pattern by heart. He shows her a diary he'd kept in an old ledger when he was fourteen. It covered a similar nervous breakdown his mother had suffered after she broke up with a friend who also had been a lover. The same cycle: Frustration, violence, catatonia, withdrawal, regression, and slowly, recovery. But how long can he go on like this— she asks—watching her almost twenty-four hours, not meeting anyone, not working, not living? He shrugs.
Actually, in some perverse way, he is enjoying it all. It is like a guiltless vacation. Guiltless because he isn't leaving his mother home to mope while he has a ball. He is doing all he can for her; more. So he is earning credits, building up a bank of privilege which he can draw on someday, when he needs it most. Also, it takes him out of the rat race, out of the train-catching, crowd-fighting, petty-politicking, ass-licking, bullshit-talking world of client servicing, and life in Bombay in general.
When Meera asks him about getting another job, about her setting up some interviews for him, he stalls for time. The thought of plunging back into rat-eat-rat is painful. He doesn't tell her that he's seriously thinking of changing careers, of doing something, anything, which gets him out of the ‘yessir' league, something with a little personal dignity, a job where he can think for a living—not bow and grovel—
maybe even copywriting.What the hell, he's written a few ads before; they were appreciated. Samuel, the freelance art director who does a lot of work for DM, told him that he had ‘an advertising head’, which was what counted. Maybe he'll start from scratch, apply for a job as a trainee copywriter at a good agency, work his way up.
But for now, he just stays home and takes care of Mama. Cooks, cleans, washes, feeds, bathes, and, when he can, reads. He asks Meera if she will bring him some books the first time she visits, when he realizes he is in for a long haul; she brings him something called Tristram Shandy which zooms over his head but is fun in parts, and two books by Theodore Dreiser. He likes the shorter one, Sister Carrie, a hell of a lot. He wonders if Meera identifies with the Carrie of the novel. He himselfidentifies a bit with Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy: doomed. He also wonders about the influence of Dreiser on the American horror novelist Stephen King; King’s first novel happens to be called Carrie too.When he says this aloud to Meera, she laughs.
Then she tells him that if he is going to get involved with literary criticism, he had better do some basic reading first. It sounds like a good idea. Only, her idea of‘basic reading’ is a list of about 200 classic texts: the Greeks, philosophy, history, biography, about fifty important novels, poetry, psychology, even math, science and of course, criticism.
He enjoys a guy called WalterAllen: The English Novel and Tradition and Dream, two books that give him a terrific overview of British and American authors and make him wonder now if he needs to actually read their books. Meera insists. And so he does. Or tries to. He battles War and Peace,guzzles Tom Jones, harpoons Moby Dick, and ravishes Tess before he starts on the real heavies: Descartes, Nietzche, Plato. He never does though, because ofTuli.
Tuli.
That problem starts from day one. It begins the moment she hears about the whole fiasco. Jay gets twenty seconds of silence on the phone after he tells her that his mother went to DM and was arrested and that he's been sacked. The line hums and whistles and he thinks he can make out a faint cross-connection, then finally Tuli asks him what he's done about the Lokhandwala flat. He doesn'tknow what to say to that. This is on Friday, the day after he brought his mother home from the police station, and the day before the deadline for paying the rest of the deposit and advance rent plus the balance brokerage. He hasn't even thought of them until this moment, until Tuli mentioned it. He tells her that. She repeats her question. He loses his temper a bit: What the fuck does she expect him to do? He's home taking care of his mother, he's just lost his job, and she's bothered about a rental flat that he can't afford! Fine, she says, then just forget about the marriage.
Oh yeah? Oh yeah. Cool, if that's the way you see it. That's not the way I see it, it’s the way my parents are going to see it. Look,Tuli, don't give me any more bullshit about your parents. Why don't you just come straight out and admit that you are the one who’s making all these conditions, huh? That gets her all fired up. They have an argument. Jay gets so mad that when the owner of the grocery store he's calling from asks him to hurry up and disconnect, he almost bangs the phone down on the cradle. But this is the only public call booth within easy walking distance and he sees that there are a couple of people waiting to use the booth. Still, he returns home simmering. The next day, when Meera turns up with the cheque from DM, he takes an impulsive decision. He calls the Lokhandwala flat owner, Nagaraj, bypassing the broker. He explains that his mother is seriously ill and that he needs a few more days to pay the balance amount. Nagaraj astonishes him by offering an entire week more. Jay says, ‘Thank you very much, that's wonderful of you, sir, but I think I can manage to pay you by Wednesday latest.’
So when the cheque clears on Wednesday, he splurges on an autorickshaw ride all the way from Bandra to Andheri, pays Nagaraj the remaining money, goes over to Lokhandwala Complex, pays the broker too, and jets back home in time to feed his mother lunch, with the keys of the flat in his pocket. He hasn't called Tuli since their telephone fight last Friday. He calls her that evening. No reply. He figures she must have gone out with her parents for dinner. He tries again the next morning, when he knows she'll be getting ready to leave for college. But her elder brother picks up and growls suspiciously when Jay doesn't speak. He's always been a bit scared of Tuli's brother. Jay has this absurd fear that this is his competition: If he can't give Tuli what she wants, this is exactly the kind of guy she'll end up getting married to; the kind of groom her par
ents will select without even asking her.When he calls again that evening, her mother picks up. He finds the courage to ask for Tuli, and is told coldly that Tuli has gone to Ahmedabad, click, dial tone. Thank you so much for your cooperation, Mrs Robinson. He wants to call back, ask when Tuli went, when she'll be back, why she went, why she had to leave so suddenly, how come she went without the family, a dozen questions.
He buys a kilo of carrots, a kilo of green peas, Vi kg tomatoes, 2 kgs onions, 1 kg potatoes, Vi kg capsicum. Upset by Tuli's departure, he forgets to buy bread from the bakery and has to come down again to buy sliced bread from the grocer. He dials Tuli's number again. A girl picks up, not Tuli's mother. He frowns, pausing before replying, trying to figure out why the voice sounds so familiar. Then it strikes him like a heart attack: Meera! He's dialed Meera's home number. But he could have sworn he'd dialed Tuli's number. The Freudian implications of this error elude him; he hangs up without saying a word, shaken by the treachery of his own dial finger.
Being at home all the time, he starts noticing the neighbours. And vice versa. Ten days after the great fiasco, Mr Lobo in Flat 21 , the one adjoining his own, stops him in the lobby and asks him how his mother is. Jay says she’s not well but it’s nothing serious. Lobo is a thin bald man with a perpetually worried look on his face, and large hands with knobbly hairy knuckles; but he seems to be sincere. He invites Jay to come to visit him sometime when he has a little free time. Jay thanks him for the invitation but doesn’t take it up because he assumes Lobo’s just being polite. But a few days later, after Jay has called Tuli’s house again and learned that Tuli’s entire family has gone to Ahmedabad, Lobo meets him at the grocer’s, and asks him if he can come over for a minute to discuss something. His mind addled by confusion over Tuli’s Ahmedabad odyssey, Jay agrees without hearing his own voice speak the words. He goes straight to Lobo s flat with him, a tastefully furnished flat with imported wallpaper and a compact disc stereo which fascinates Jay. He’s only seen one this sophisticated in magazine ads before. Lobo informs him that the complete system, inclusive of Bose speakers, cost him Rs 5 lakh, more than half of which was spent on customs duty. Jay is flabbergasted.