Vertigo

by Ashok Banker

  ‘Here,’ coming from the kitchen, wrapped in smells of hot food, minced meat, fried onions, setting a saucepan down on the dining table, swiping away assorted junk to make place for a plate. The clattering of a spoon on the steel plate, the steam rising from the hissing pan, make Jay’s mouth salivate. She stands and wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her nightdress. He can’t believe how...

  normal... she seems. So coherent and polite and clean-mouthed.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘have it while it’s hot. Here,’ breaking off a piece of bread and dipping it in the gravy, then bringing the piece to his mouth.

  ‘It’s okay, Mama, I’ll help myself,’ but her hand swoops down on his mouth and her forehead puckers in a frown: ‘Come on, Jay. Open.’

  So he opens his mouth and lets her push the piece in. And he’s pleasantly shocked. ‘It’s lovely,’ he says. ‘Really, Mama. It’s very good. Did you really make this yourself?’

  She sighs and goes over to the sofa to pour herself a drink. He watches her add the booze to the water bottle directly, shake the bottle twice to mix the stuff, and take a swig. He gets up and goes to the dining table. The mince is still sizzling in the pan and he takes the spoon and serves some in the plate. He feels her watching him as he takes the leaven bread and breaks off a piece. He dips it in the rich brown gravy and eats. ‘It’s great.’

  She smiles, a big broad smile that reveals her missing incisor: the one she lost when she fought with a drug addict in the Hospital Psychiatric Ward and fell on the corner of an iron hospital bed. It hurts him just to look at it—he was there when it happened. But her smile is wonderful, the first time he’s seen her smile so naturally in years. He's happy making her happy. He loads a piece of bread with mince and a small potato bit and eats with genuine relish. He can't understand how she never learned to make such delicious mince before, but since he can detect the flavour of ready-made masala, assumes that for once she simply took the time and trouble to follow the recipe correctly. After all, this is the first time he's come to visit her in three months; and the first time he's eaten anything under this roof since he shifted out over a year and a half ago. He eats another spoonful, bites into something crisp and crunchy and stops, his eyes widening as he stares at her in disbelief and horror.

  ‘Augh!' he spits out the mouthful and stares at the half-chewed food.

  ‘What? What is it? Too much chilli?' She gets up and walks over to the table—she's grown a little pot belly since he saw her last fan expression of almost pathetic anxiety on her worn face. He stares down at the plate, at the little half-cockroach with the crushed belly oozing white pus, mingled with the mince and tomatoes and potatoes and garlic and bread, almost invisible in the brown gravy, except for those unmistakable feelers, so disgusting, so unbelievable that even nausea seems suspended, unable to accept that this thing, this vile insect has actually been in his mouth, has entered his body for even a few seconds, released its poisonous fluids into his mouth, been bitten in half by his teeth.

  When he returns from the bathroom, having literally washed his mouth out with soap twice—although the part that really needs washing is his memory: that hair-raising crunching sound and that unmistakable taste—he finds his mother digging at the saucepan with the spoon, extracting little spoonfuls of something which she's putting into a piece of newspaper on the table.

  What are you doing, Mama?’ he comes closer and recoils: the saucepan is full of them. Dozens of little cockroaches, some of them almost too tiny to be distinguishable from the clumps of beef mince.

  She is taking them out and putting them in the newspaper. ‘Oh my god, Mama. How did this happen? How could you have—’

  ‘Shut up!’ she screeches, all her politeness and niceness evaporated.

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Do you think I would give you cockroaches to eat? My own son!’

  ‘But then how—’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she screams.

  He goes into the kitchen and looks around for some sign, some clue to the disaster, for disaster it is, and a pathetic one at that. The mince was really very delicious; the best thing she’d cooked in years.

  And mince is his favourite dish, as she knows... well, perhaps not any more.

  He looks around the grease-coated double burner gas stove, the marble-topped platform, the sagging wooden shelves burderned with polystyrene jars of dals and stuff. He finds a cardboard box on one shelf, open. Mutton Masala, says the label. He looks inside: a brown grainy powder masala. He shakes the box, and like colours in a kaleidoscope, the roaches appear, a number of tiny ones and even one or two of those brown roach ‘eggs’! He takes the box to his mother.

  She looks at it.

  ‘You must have left the box open, Mama. They’ve been breeding in it.’

  She takes the box from him with a quick rough movement that causes some of the masala—and two baby roaches—to spill out on the table’s vinyl cover. Then she goes back to extracting the insects from the saucepan.

  ‘Mama, what are you doing?’

  Her voice is the low growl of a lioness trapped with her back to a cave wall: ‘It’s good mince. I paid good money for it. I’m cleaning it and then you can eat it. I made it for you, damnit.’

  He backs away, his throat belching bile: ‘Mama, are you crazy? I can’t eat that.’

  But she has finished her gruesome task and is wrapping up the newspaper, screwing up the corners as if to make sure that the little dead creatures don’t attempt to escape. She carries it past him, along with his plate—the sight of the mouthful he spat out causes a fresh eruption in his belly—into the kitchen. He follows her and sees her throw the tightly scrunched-up newspaper not into the wastepaper basket but out of the window.Wham, goodbye all you little meddlers, don’t you dare to come back again when I’m feeding my son. And to his growing horror, she takes a clean plate to the hall, serves another helping of de-roached mince in it, adds a fresh loaf of bread, places a thick, white and blue slice of raw onion on the side and sets it down in the same place he was sitting in earlier. He backs away, moving to the door.

  ‘Come on, Jay. Don’t make me warm it up again. It’s getting cold.

  You digest your food better when it’s hot. Come on, son. I’ve cleaned it properly this time. Don’t worry. Just a few insects. If you like I could give it another boil to kill any germs, although if you ask me, they’re much cleaner than the cunts you’ve been fucking lately, especially that Hindu clitoris what’s-her-name Tulip.’

  ‘Mama, I’m going.’

  ‘Jay, but you haven’t had your dinner. You promised me you were going to stay for dinner.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You have to eat. These are your growing years.’

  ‘I’ll have something outside.’ Yeah, sure. Like maybe next year, or the year after, and definitely not mince, not ever.

  ‘Jay, don’t disappoint me,’ picking up the saucepan and coming towards him, ‘don’t make me suffer any more.’

  ‘Mama, I’ll do anything for you. But I can’t eat that. You know I can’t. Even you shouldn’t eat it.’

  ‘It’s that whore who’s doing this. That witch. If I ever get my hands on her,’ tightening her fist in a gesture of frustrated fury, spilling a little gravy on the tiled floor and on her foot and blue rubber slipper.

  He backs away all the way to the door. She approaches him until the saucepan is only inches from his waist. She dabs a piece of bread in the gravy and holds it to his lips, a pitiful desperation in her eyes.

  ‘Please,’ she pleads, ‘for my sake. For your mother.’ ‘No, Mama, I—’

  ‘Just one mouth, come on.’ ‘Mama, no. Don’t touch that to my—‘

  ‘One mouth won’t kill you.’ ‘Mama, please—’ ‘Come on, open your mouth. Open.’ ‘Mama, move back, I can’t—’ ‘Open your mouth, son, come on, I used to feed you like this till you were eight years old, you never used to complain then.’ ‘Mama, it’s contaminated, please, Mama, MA
MA, PLEASE!’ striking her hand sideways to force away the mouthful of poisoned food she’s trying to push violently into his mouth, striking the saucepan accidently with his other hand, splattering mince all over her face, her neck, her clothes, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, the saucepan clattering on the floor, her nightie drenched in brown gravy; opening the door, stepping out, slamming it shut after him, running down the steps two and three at time, not stopping until he’s nearly a mile away from the building, never looking back once.

  chapter thirty-eight

  Steaming hot puffed-up puris; a teaspoonful of pure ghee smeared over each one; a large round steel container with about twenty little katoris of different sweet pickles; sour pickles; spicy pickles; undhiya; a platter heaped high with large-grained boiled rice; whiter than cotton; three different varieties of vegetable, including two made with jaggery; a steel katori of pure ghee beside his thali; assorted burfis; jalebis; ladoos; pedas and other sweetmeats in a Chhappan Bhog five-kilo box; a steel pot full of chaas; condensation trickling down the side of the sweating steel; the gleam of more silver and steel than visible on any one counter of a jeweller's store. Just looking at all this food; rich; heavy; ghee-laden; sickeningly sweet; makes Jay want to get up and run. He hates Gujarati food; he hates Gujaratis.

  Aloud he says: ‘Just one more; Foiba. Last one.’

  His father's elder sister smiles above her horn-rimmed spectacles and puts three puris on his thali; smearing ghee liberally on each one.

  Jay groans silently. ‘Enough; Foiba. Really; I'm full.’

  Foiba sits down in the chair opposite; beside his grandmother. She chuckles at Jay's protests when her husband Siddharth adds more rice and undhiya to Jay's thali before taking another helping for himselff his third. ‘He doesn't eat properly; that's why he is become so thin; no? Pathlo lage chche, na? ’

  Her husband grunts and slurps his rice and und.hiya; adding another four teaspoons of ghee to the mess in his thali. Jay plucks a bit of puri, dips it lightly in the chana masala and chews on it slowly. His grandmother and aunt watch him with beatific smiles on their lined fat faces. They will eat after the men, another Gujarati custom Jay hates bitterly. He returns their smiles uncomfortably, wishing he could just push his thali away and get the hell out of here; just the smell—of ghee and jaggery—makes him feel five years old. He can't forget that these two women were partly responsible for the destruction of his mother's marriage and her life. He wants to tell all the people who pointed to his mother's drinking habits to come here, to this five-bedroom hall duplex flat on Pedder Road, to his aunt's house, and to talk to these two women (his grandfather is long dead).

  They are part of his mother's problem. They and his father, who said he would be here by 1 , but hasn't shown up yet (it's ten past two). Jay struggles through the three puris and gets up before his aunt can re-load his thali again. The bathroom is remodelled in large ceramic tiles with bright-green seraglio patterns. Even the toilet bowl and washbasin are bright green.Why do Gujaratis love green? The Punjabis have a good reason—they're a farming community. The Gujaratis are mainly occupied in trading. Maybe their love for green is a sign of their worship of another ‘greenbacks'. He wipes his hands on the green Bombay Dyeing towel and slides open the bathroom door, pausing a moment in the air-conditioned coolness of his cousin Anil's bedroom.

  A few books lean against a portable colourTV. He reads the names on the spines; all school texts. One large hardcover book doesn't have any name on the spine and looks impressive enough to be a classic or something of that sort, so he slides it out of its space. It turns out to be a textbook on book-keeping and accountancy. Putting it back, he encounters some obstruction and pulls out the object blocking the way: a little book. He opens it and finds himself looking at the very first 3-D porn photobook he’s seen in his life. Heavy Swedish-looking blondes doing it with horses, Dobermanns, and, of course, men. One particular picture of a girl being fucked from behind by an Alsatian is particularly disgusting and exciting at the same time. It gives him the start of an erection. He quickly puts the book back behind the textbooks and goes back to the living room.

  ‘So you like this girl very much, no?’ his aunt asks, settling her bulk on a leather and chrome sofa beside Dadiji.

  ‘Yes, Foiba.’

  ‘Why don’t you bring her here?’ his grandmother says in her wheezing voice. ‘You should have brought her with you today, no?’

  ‘Hah.We want to meet her. Your uncle would like to meet her, su Siddharthbhai?’

  His uncle, sitting with his feet up on a diwan, dialling one of three telephones, grunts noncommittally. Jay’s foiba goes on: ‘she is pretty?

  Very pretty? Or just handsome?’

  ‘If our Jayesh selected her then she must be most beautiful, yes bete?’ says his grandmother before he can think of a reply. His uncle speaks into the phone so softly Jay can’t even make out which language he’s speaking, although he’s sitting right next to the diwan. This is how his uncle does business; sitting on his diwan in his white dhoti and kurta, speaking very softly on the phone, making huge deals in commodities like sugar, grain, cotton, sometimes silver and gold, consuming one large tin of paan masala powder and three and a half dozen thimble-sized cups of nauseatingly sweet tea every day. Jay finds it surprising that his uncle is considerably less overweight than his aunt and grandmother. Probably due to the exercise he gets dialling numbers on his phones, which is more work than they do in a day.

  ‘Her father is a diamond merchant,’ Jay says, thinking this information will be of interest to the parties present. It is.

  ‘Umm,’ his grandmother says, nodding several times. Foiba looks at her and a uniquely feminine look passes between them. Both turn their expressionless fish-eyes on him again.

  ‘ Dahej Kitlu? ’ his aunt says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Dowry. How much? Good, no?’

  Jay stares at her. ‘I don’t understand. Did you say dowry?’

  His grandmother is watching him closely. He turns his face slightly, catches her watching. She smiles coldly. He turns back to his aunt:

  ‘Dowry?’

  ‘You are handsome boy, good service, good family. Must get good dowry, no?’

  His grandmother says something to her in complicated Gujarati which he doesn’t catch a word of. She says ‘Ah!’ as if illuminated by some insight into Jay’s psyche, and nods. Jay waits uneasily, the excess food in his stomach making it uncomfortable to sit on the low-slung sofa. The leather upholstery keeps sticking to the undersides of his thighs; his underwear keeps getting caught in the crack between his buttocks. He is itching to reach behind and pull it out but can’t bring himself to do so while they’re watching him. On his diwan, his uncle digs his nose while talking soundlessly on the phone, brings out a piece of dried black mucus and rubs it on the sheet covering the diwan. Jay looks out the window at the overcast sky. A light drizzle coats the leaves of the trees with shiny wet. A pigeon sits huddled in cold misery on an aerial on the opposite building across the road.

  ‘A-ha-ha-ha,’ chuckles his father, coming in. Jay’s uncle raises a palm in greeting and continues talking on the phone. Jay’s father sits down on the sofa next to Jay; air hisses loudly out of the puffy upholstery. Jay smiles at his father in greeting, but he’s already chattering in Gujarati with his grandmother and aunt. This goes on long enough for Jay to get restless. His uncle puts down the phone and smiles at him, he smiles back. His uncle offers him his tin of paan masala. Jay starts to decline; his oral input has been so excessive, he wishes he could tape his mouth shut and not eat anything for the next week; but he takes a little to be polite. The powder with its lumps of supari melts in his mouth and causes a not unpleasant aching sensation in his chest; he likes it. His uncle smiles and asks him a question which he doesn’t catch because his aunt, grandmother and father are talking too loudly. He leans closer: ‘Beg your pardon?’

  In a husky supari-burnt voice: ‘How is your job?’

&n
bsp; ‘Very nice, thank you.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a product executive.’

  ‘Ah, executive.’

  ‘Yes. Marketing actually.’

  ‘You buy and sell?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m sort ofinvolved in launching new products.’

  ‘Ah, salesmanship.’

  ‘No, no. Decision-making. Everything from the product mix, branding, advertising, distribution, sales promotion.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ His uncle offers him the tin again. Jay takes a little more.

  The feeling in his chest is interesting; he can see why people get addicted to this stuff.

  ‘Why you don’t start some business?’ his uncle asks. Quite obviously, he’s not impressed with Jay’s job description.

  ‘I’m quite happy where I am.’

  ‘If you want to start some business, come to me. Yes? I give you advice.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jay isn’t sure what to call his uncle. ‘Uncle’ doesn’t seem right, and he has no idea what the Gujarati equivalent is. One of the phones rings and his uncle gets back to his dhando.

  ‘So? You had a good talk I hear.’ His father pats him on the shoulder, suddenly warmer and more relaxed than usual. Jay has been watching him talk the last few minutes and he sees the professional manager yielding to the Gujarati. His grandmother says something to his father.

  Jay hears the word ‘dowry’. His father nods and looks at him. ‘You don’t like the idea of dowry?’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I suggest you don’t worry about these matters.We will take care of everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ his aunt says brightly, ‘Leave it to your elders, yes? This is not matter for children to talk about.’

  Jay nods. He sits quietly and speaks only when specifically spoken to after that. The afternoon passes very slowly and by the time he and his father leave at 4.30, after consuming a heavy tea with sweetmeats and several different varieties of farsans, he hates himself for this. He feels, oddly, as if he is betraying his mother in some way; as if, by consorting with the persons who helped ruin her life, he is crossing over to their side. It is only a week since the mince incident and he still aches with guilt over the look on his mother’s face when she was trying to get all the roaches out of the saucepan. He knows he should visit her today, spend some time trying to dissipate the emotional tension caused by that ugly accident. But when his father asks him if he would like to be dropped someplace—he has his company car and chauffeur since he came over from his office—Jay says it’s all right, he’s going just around the corner.