by Ashok Banker
But he didn't go to see her. Those were the days when Chamatkar was being launched, when it was poised on the knife-edge of success and failure, and when he had made his magnificent stock market fortune and was eating in a different luxury restaurant every second day with or withoutTuli. But more recently, in the months since Tuli and he stopped seeing each other, he had plenty of time to come to see her. Yet he never did. He remembers the three times he came up to the building and went away without seeing her.
That night, sleeping in the visitor's room in the hospital—lying on a thin cotton sheet on an old Hindi newspaper, with his briefcase for a pillow—he tortures himself with thoughts of his mother suffering alone those last few weeks and days. He imagines her vomiting blood, too weak to even call for help or crawl to the door, haemorrhaging in the brain, from virtually every orifice, sinking into a coma from which, the doctor says, there is very little chance of her recovering.
He tosses and turns miserably. The next morning, the chowkidar comes in, raps his nightstick on the walls to wake them up, like tramps being turned out ofa railway station. Jay finds a tap where he washes his greasy face without soap and drinks tap water with his hands, slurping greedily.
Although his mind has inflicted more guilt and remorse than any court of law could have dreamed up, Dr Chattopadhyay is harsh and loud in his criticism. He mutters furious comments on the younger generation, on their lack of responsibility and respect for elders, on sons who leave their mothers to be rescued from near death by strangers while they go about making hay, and would make Jay burst into tears if he wasn’t so drained and dry already. Rather than defend himself by explaining the specific details of his case, of the long painful years of adolescence and youth when he nursed his mother back from nervous breakdowns, brain-damaging shock treatments administered by doctors more ‘responsible’ than Dr Chattopadhyay, Jay keeps his eyes lowered and when the tirade ends he lets the bitterness wash over him like astringent on a shaving cut.
He camps in the hospital, after returning home the second day to collect a tote bag of clothes and toilet articles. He constantly hovers around the nurses’ station, waiting to be asked to go out and bring medicines, glucose powder, cotton wool, disposable syringes, drugs, whatever is needed for his mother. His meals he takes at any of the two or three small cheap restaurants in the vicinity. The food is pathetic and too spicy for his taste, but he cannot bring himself to step into one of the air-conditioned restaurants on Hill Road or Linking Road. As the days pass, he doesn’t run back after buying the nurses’ list of provisions, but walks back slowly through the crowded streets, taking in the sidewalk clothes stalls, the chat-wallahs, the gleaming glass-fronted clothes stores, theTV sets flickering in the windows of the electronics shops.A Chamatkar window display contest is on and he stops to examine one particularly elaborate display of Chamatkar packs arranged to form the silhouette of a woman. The arrangement is helped by a skilfully painted backdrop which completes the missing curves which the square-edged packets cannot provide. Jay buys a packet of biscuits from this store only to get an excuse to compliment the owner on this display. He mentions that he works for the manufacturer, but the owner only nods and turns to serve another customer, probably mistaking Jay for a salesman of some sort.
Once, while sitting in an Irani restaurant, drinking cream-flecked tea, he hears the owner talking to another man about companies:
‘Arrey , sab chor hain’ he says, and points at the glass-enclosed shelves full of detergents, biscuits, soft drinks, tea, coffee, tomato sauce, jelly, custard, and other assorted packaged products. Chamatkar is not on these shelves, but a brand of tea and a jar of churan sweets made by Synergetics is among the products included in the sweeping gesture.
Jay doesn’t return to this restaurant.
After a week, his mother emerges from the coma. He is overcome with wonder at the sight of her moving after nearly nine days of total immobility. But the doctors warn him that this almost certainly is a temporary recovery. She has haemorrhaged severely in the brain; irreparable damage. It is only a matter of days.
Jay goes down to the public phone at the corner and calls his father.
‘Hello, Daddy?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me. Jay.’
‘Yes?’
‘Daddy, it’s about Mama.’
‘What about her?’
‘She’s in hospital.Very serious.’
‘I see.’
‘The doctors say there’s ... there’s no hope.They’ve asked me to call all relatives.’
‘I see.’
‘Daddy, she’s really in a bad state. Can’t you ... come ... and see her?’
‘Jay, you’ve caught me at a bad time. I’m leaving for Jaipur on Friday night. I’ll only be back nextTuesday.’
‘But today’s only Monday.’
‘And even after I get back, I’ve got a lot of things to catch up with.
I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I may be taking up that job in Hong Kong after all.’
‘That’s very... excellent for you. Can’t you come over just for a few minutes? Just to talk to her? She can’t see. Her eyes are taped shut because of some infection she caught in the coma, but she can hear a bit. I think she understands what I’m saying.’
‘I see. I’m afraid it’s very difficult, Jay.’
‘Oh.’ So how are things with you?’
‘I told you what happened about Tuli. She and her mother finally left last—’
‘Jay, my other line’s buzzing. I’ ll call you later. Let’s meet for lunch, say, week after next. Bye.’
He sits by her side and talks to her softly for hours. She has been shifted to the general ward, the general women’s ward, and the difference is jarring. This ward has none of the hushed air-conditioned solemnity of the ICU. Emaciated, ugly women in dirty white hospital gowns made of coarse cotton sit or stand on aluminium beds and bicker, abuse, rant, scream, chatter hysterically. His mother’s wrists have been tied to the bedposts to prevent her scratching at her eyes in her delirium. When he goes to the toilet, someone steals her packet of glucose. He stares furiously around the ward, but beady rat-like eyes stare back at him emptily, like the glass windows of an abandoned warehouse.
The nurses permit her fruit juices and coconut water now, since she can use her mouth. He brings far more than she is able to consume, and usually has to give the excess to the patients in the neighbouring beds. The one to his mother’s left is an old woman who clicks her tongue sympathetically when his mother turns her head away and seems to be totally unaware of his presence. She rambles in Marathi to Jay for hours. He stares out the window at the sky and sees monsoon clouds approaching from the West. But it never rains, not that night or the next.
On the fourth night of her stay in the general ward, he goes down to bring her coconut water. Standing at the narial-wallah’s stall outside New Talkies cinema, he sees a glimpse of a tall dark man at the wheel of a blue Maruti Gypsy sweeping past and almost calls out Chris’s name. The Gypsy stops at the signal up ahead and as he walks back with the plastic bag full of coconut water he toys with the idea of looking into the driver's window and saying hello. But loud pop music —Madonna's True Blue— blares from the car and a girl is sitting beside Chris. At first, Jay thinks he knows the girl—that junior executive at DM whom Chris always had his eye on—but as he comes closer he realizes it's Meera.
The signal changes as he comes abreast of the Gypsy. Chris turns and looks at him by chance as he puts the vehicle into gear and their eyes meet. Without reacting, with hardly any time to react, Chris drives on. He accelerates loudly and roars up the road, far ahead of two Fiats and an Ambassador, the Maruti's faster pick-up taking him around the far corner almost before the other cars are out of the signal.
The door to the women's ward is shut and when Jay knocks, a nurse puts her head out to say that his mother has begun bleeding profusely again and the doctors are in with her. He sits down on the visitor's chai
r, still holding the transparent bag of coconut water. A woman and her son to his left recognize him from his daily vigil and begin speaking to him in Hindi, asking questions about his mother. He answers mechanically, irritated at having to talk at all. They make sympathetic comments in Marathi-inflected Hindi about children of alcoholic parents and the son announces that they too are here because his alcoholic father tried to kill himself. The mother informs Jay that her husband used a pair of scissors to try and pierce his heart; the scissors slipped and went into his throat. After nearly half an hour of this patter, Jay gets up while the son is in the middle of a sentence and walks over to the window. He looks out at the dark night. He tries to find familiar constellations in the sky, but the smog is too thick. He isn't even sure of Venus.
The door to the ward opens and the doctors come out. Over their shoulders, he can see a white sheet over a large lump where his mother used to be. The nurse comes to him and says, ‘You have to arrange for body to be taken away, huh? If you want body to kept in morgue, you have to pay charge at accounts office downstairs, huh?’
chapter forty-nine
One of the nurses, a Catholic, gives him the address of an undertaker on Hill Road. Jay goes over to the building and rings the bell. It's one of those birdy bells that go cheep-cheep-cheep. A fat dark woman in a flower-patterned dress opens the door. Jay asks for the undertaker, says it's about an urgent funeral. She shows him into a parlour with a beautiful cottage piano. Polished brown wood, gleaming flawlessly; bone-white and night-black keys; a music score set up on the stand—
someone has just been playing or is about to start. The score is handwritten in a superbly formed musical script with a fountain pen; the name at the top of the left hand page is Amazing grace. Jay vaguely remembers hearing the song or reading the name somewhere in one of those little green books he used to buy from Furtado's at Dhobitalao when he was fourteen and was learning to play the guitar.
The undertaker is a thin man of medium height with a neat moustache and a soft reassuring voice. He smells faintly of gin. Jay tells him his problem: the hospital will only keep his mother in their morgue until morning; then, he'll have to take the body away; and where can he take it? So he would like to have the funeral tomorrow itself. It is possible, isn't it? He's prepared to pay whatever it takes.
The undertaker listens to him without interrupting, then pulls his chair closer and explains all the formalities that will have to be gone through, the difficulty of getting the burial certificate so soon, the problem of carving a headstone. Jay listens.
‘But I have to do it. I mean, where can I take her? She's ... she's a jaundice case. The body. . .'
The undertaker nods his head sympathetically. All right, he can see the young man has a genuine problem, he'll do everything he can to help. But what about the family ? Will there be enough time to inform them? For them to arrive in time for the funeral?
‘There's no family. I am her family. There's nobody else.'
‘What about his father, her husband?
‘He's dead,' Jay says flatly. ‘Gone when I was a year old.'
The undertaker shakes his head sadly, tut-tutting.Well, he says, I think it can just be managed. If you can get the hospital death certifiate tonight, you can be at the municipal office first thing when it opens tomorrow at 10. You'll have to give them something extra to get the burial certificate out quickly. Meanwhile, you can go to St. Anne’s—
that would be her parish, I think—and ask the parish priest if he can come tomorrow to read services. I think you can tell him 11 to be on the safe side. No, make it 12. I can have a wooden cross painted with her name and dates on it by then. Then, if you like, I can have a stone or marble headstone carved in another day or two—say, two days.
But after getting the burial certificate from the Births and Deaths office, you'll have to go to St. Andrew’s—St. Anne’s doesn't have its own cemetery so its parishioners are buried at Andrew’s—and give them the burial certificate. Tell them I'm doing the funeral arrangements. They'll give you a grave. Give the grave-diggers something extra—about ten or fifteen rupees each should be sufficient—to get the grave ready by noon. Make sure they know it has to be ready. I won't be able to come myself, but my man will bring the coffin to the morgue first thing in the morning and he'll wait there until you come back with the receipt from St. Andrew's. Now, how fat is your mother?
‘Fat?’
‘I mean, is she large, medium, small?’
‘About medium height. Five feet six or seven, I think.’
‘That’s tall, for a woman. But medium. I think a medium coffin will be fine. Now, is she thick around the waist?’
‘No. She’s quite average. But-’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s very... bloated.’
‘I see. How much would you say would be the top of her stomach when she’s lying on her back? About a foot? A foot and a half?’
Jay stares at him, baffled. The undertaker uses his hands, palms apart, to indicate a distance. Jay swallows and tries to visualize his mother as he last saw her, dead on her bed in the general ward, her belly bloated with gases, the entire vicinity reeking with foecal, urinary and plasmic smells. ‘About that much, I think.’
‘Mm. About a foot and a quarter. I think we can fit her into a medium coffin. Now, come over here.’ He leads him to a table on which lie two large photo albums. They are full of pictures of coffins, headstones and floral arrangements. ‘Would you prefer purple or red? Some people use black still, but purple is more in fashion.’
‘I don’t know.What do you say?’
‘I recommend purple. It looks much better in the morning. With gold piping?’
‘Anything.’
‘You said you don’t have a budget problem?’
‘Within reason. How much would purple with gold piping and all the other things—flowers or whatever—come to. So I can arrange for the money.’
‘A small wreath, like this one, or a larger one? We have some nice designs, heart shapes, RIPs. This one is very popular.’
‘Okay. How much?’
‘Along with a wooden headstone—You’ll want a stone one later?
Or marble?’
‘Do me a favour, Mr-’
‘Rodriguez.With a z.’
‘Mr Rodriguez, I’m giving you five thousand on account right now.
Give me a bill and I’ll settle the rest when your man brings the coffin.’
‘Oh, but five thousand is too much. It won’t come to more than three thousand maximum, including the headstone. Of course, if you want a more expensive coffin...’
Jay gives him Rs 3,000 cash, takes a receipt, two visiting cards with notes written on the back—for St. Anne’s and for St. Andrew’s—
and leaves.
He has difficulty getting an auto to St.Anne’s. The autos don’t like Pali Hill this late at night—it’s after 11—because they don’t get a return fare. He pays an auto double fare to get up to St.Anne’s, and even then the driver refuses to go down the steep slope to the church building. Jay hands him a ten-rupee note, almost three times the normal fare, and stalks off without waiting for the change. The fellow calls out an abusive word as he goes, implying he’s drunk or crazy.
The church is dark. It takes him nearly twenty minutes to find a way in. Even then, he is stopped by a locked door. He goes back outside, shoes crunching on the gravel courtyard and calls out to a light burning on the first floor. ‘Excuse me? Excuse me? Is the parish priest there?’
A window is opened and a partly bald head looks out. This is a priest, but not the parish priest. Jay tells him his problem, and the priest reluctantly allows himself to be persuaded to inform Father Guisseppe when he returns from a private mass nearby. Jay repeats the time of the funeral several times, as well as the name of the undertaker. The window is shut, and he walks back up the steep dark slope to the Pali Hill road; from there, he walks almost all the way back to Bhabha Hospital before he gets an auto. Then
there is nothing for him to do but wait. He thinks of going home—either to his rental flat or to his mother's place—but then decides that he owes her at least a night's vigil. The clerks at the morgue are playing cards and drinking tea, and take ten minutes to answer his simple query: Has the body been brought down. —Yes, comes the answer finally, muttured over a beedi and followed by a sardonic comment in Marathi which causes the other clerk to snigger and glance at Jay.
He goes out of the morgue office and sits on the steps. The morgue is behind the hospital, out of sight of the main road. It is quiet here, and the night air is cool. He looks up at the stars.Walking out to the corner paan shop to get cigarettes, he realizes he hasn't eaten anything since morning, and even then all he had was a bun maska and tea. But the sight of a little Muslim restaurant where he ate half- cooked mutton masala some nights ago turns his stomach, and he buys a pack of glucose biscuits which he eats, dipping each one into first one, then another cup of tea. He orders a third cup and smokes a cigarette with it, pulling so hard on it that the ash falls off into the tea. He pays the bill and leaves.
Twice during the night, the morgue clerks get tea for themselves without offering him. He offers to pay for a cup, but they shrug and ignore him. He sits with his knees drawn against the cold, on the steps, back to the cold concrete wall, smoking without tasting the cigarette. It isn't even his usual brand. When asking for the pack, he forgot his brand—as if just that one trivial point in his brain had burned out—and now he isn't even sure which brand this is, except that the pack is white and red; but then, most cigarette packs are white and red; consumer research has proved conclusively that white and red is the most eye-catching colour scheme in a store; what the consumer behaviourists call ‘optimum shelf appeal’.