Swimming Lessons

by Rohinton Mistry

  Rustomji’s one fervent wish was that some day Gajra’s breasts should slip out far enough from under her choli to reveal her nipples. “Dada Ormuzd, just once let me see them, only once,” he would yearn in his depths, trying to picture the nipples: now dark brown and the size of a gram but with the hidden power to swell; now uncontrollably aroused and black, large and pointed.

  While waiting for his wish to come true, Rustomji enjoyed watching Gajra modify her sari each morning before she started work: she hauled it up between her thighs and tucked it in around the waist so it would not get wet in the mori. When altered like this, the layers produced a very large, very masculine lump over the crotch. But her movements while she, steatopygic, completed her daily transformation — bending her knees, thighs apart, patting her behind to smooth down the fabric — were extremely erotic for Rustomji.

  Mehroo was usually present when this went on, so he would have to pretend to read the Times of India, looking surreptitiously from behind or over or under and taking his chances. Sometimes, he remembered a little Marathi rhyme he had picked up as a boy. It formed part of a song which was sung at every boisterous, rollicking party his father used to give for his Parsi colleagues from Central Bank. At that time, little Rustom had not understood the meaning, but it went:

  Sakubai la zaoli

  Dadra chi khalti…

  After many years and many parties, as Rustom grew up, he was allowed to sit with the guests instead of being sent out to play in the compound. The day came when he was allowed his first sip of Scotch and soda from his father’s glass. Mother had protested that he was too young, but father had said, “What is there in one sip, you think he will become a drunkard?” Rustom had enjoyed that first sip and had wanted more, to the delight of the guests. “Takes after his father, really likes his peg!” they had guffawed.

  It was also around this time that Rustom started to understand the meaning of the rhyme and the song: it was about the encounter of a Parsi gentleman with a gunga he caught napping under a dark stairwell — he seduces her quite easily, then goes his merry way. Later, Rustom had sung it to his friends in St Xavier’s, the song which he remembered today, on Behram roje, in his easy chair with the Times of India. He hoped Gajra would arrive before Mehroo finished using Hirabai’s telephone. He could then ogle brazenly, unhindered.

  But even as Rustomji thought his impure thoughts and relished them all, Mehroo returned; the office had promised to send the plumber right away. “I told him ‘Bawa, you are a Parsi too, you know how very important Behram roje is’ and he said he understands, he will have the WC repaired today.”

  “The bloody swine understands? Hah! Now he knows it, he will purposely delay, to make you miserable. Go, be frank with the whole world; go, be unhappy.” And Mehroo went, to make his tea.

  The doorbell rang. Rustomji knew it must be Gajra. But even as he hurried to answer it, he sensed he was walking towards another zone of frustration, that his concupiscence would be thwarted as rudely as his bowels.

  His instinct proved accurate. Mehroo rushed out from the kitchen as fast as her flopping slippers would allow, scolding and shooing Gajra away to do only the sweeping — the rest could wait till tomorrow — and leave Sulking, Rustomji returned to the Times of India.

  Mehroo then hurriedly made chalk designs at the entrance, not half as elaborate or colourful as planned. Time was running out; she had to get to the fire-temple by eleven. Dreading the inauspiciousness of a delay, she hung a tohrun over each doorway (the flowers, languishing since six A.M., luckily retained a spark of life) and went to dress.

  When she was ready to leave, Rustomji was still coaxing his bowels with tea. Disgruntled over Gajra’s abrupt departure, he nursed his loss silently, blaming Mehroo. “You go ahead,” he said, “I will meet you at the fire-temple.”

  Mehroo took the H route bus. She looked radiant in her white sari, worn the Parsi way, across the right shoulder and over the forehead. The H route bus meandered through narrow streets of squalor once it left the Firozsha Baag neighbourhood. It went via Bhindi Bazaar, through Lohar Chawl and Crawford Market, crawling painfully amidst the traffic of cars and people, handcarts and trucks.

  Usually, during a bus ride to the fire-temple, Mehroo attentively watched the scenes unfolding as the bus made its creeping way, wondering at the resilient ingenuity with which life was made liveable inside dingy little holes and inhospitable, frightful structures. Now, however, Mehroo sat oblivious to the bustle and meanness of lives on these narrow streets. None of it pierced the serenity with which she anticipated the perfect peace and calm she would soon be a part of inside the fire-temple.

  She looked with pleasure at the white sari draping her person, and adjusted the border over her forehead. When she returned home, the sari would be full of the fragrance of sandalwood, absorbed from the smoke of the sacred fire. She would hang it up beside her bed instead of washing it, to savour the fragrance as long as it lasted. She remembered how, as a child, she would wait for her mother to return from the fire-temple so she could bury her face in her lap and breathe in the sandalwood smell. Her father’s dugli gave off the same perfume, but her mother’s white sari was better, it felt so soft. Then there was the ritual of chasni: all the brothers and sisters wearing their prayer caps would eagerly sit around the dining-table to partake of the fruit and sweets blessed during the day’s prayer ceremonies.

  Mehroo was a little saddened when she thought of her own children, who did not give a second thought to these things; she had to coax them to finish the chasni or it would sit for days, unnoticed and untouched.

  Even as a child, Mehroo had adored going to the fire-temple She loved its smells, its tranquillity, its priests in white performing their elegant, mystical rituals. Best of all she loved the inner sanctuary, the sanctum sanctorum, dark and mysterious, with marble floor and marble walls, which only the officiating priest could enter, to tend to the sacred fire burning in the huge, shining silver afargaan on its marble pedestal. She felt she could sit for hours outside the sanctuary, watching the flames in their dance of life, seeing the sparks fly up the enormous dark dome resembling the sky. It was her own private key to the universe, somehow making less frightening the notions of eternity and infinity.

  In high school she would visit the fire-temple before exam week. Her offering of a sandalwood stick would be deposited in the silver tray at the door of the inner sanctuary, and she would reverently smear her forehead and throat with the grey ash left in the tray for this purpose. Dustoor Dhunjisha, in his flowing white robe, would always be there to greet her with a hug, always addressing her as his dear daughter. The smell of his robe would remind her of mother’s sari fragrant with sandalwood. Serene and fortified, she would go to write her exam.

  Dustoor Dhunjisha was now almost seventy-five, and was not always around when Mehroo went to the fire-temple. Some days, when he did not feel well, he stayed in his room and let a younger priest look after the business of prayer and worship. But today she hoped he would be present; she wanted to see that gentle face from her childhood, the long white beard, the reassuring paunch.

  After marrying Rustomji and moving into Firozsha Baag, Mehroo had continued to go to Dustoor Dhunjisha for all ceremonies. In this, she risked the ire of the dustoorji who lived in their own block on the second floor. The latter believed that he had first claim to the business of Firozsha Baag tenants, that they should all patronize his nearby agyaari as long as he could accommodate them. But Mehroo persisted in her loyalty to Dhunjisha. She paid no attention to the high dudgeon the A Block priest directed at her, or to Rustomji’s charges.

  Under the priestly garb of Dhunjisha, protested Rustomji, lurked a salacious old man taking advantage of his venerable image: “Loves to touch and feel women, the old goat — the younger and fleshier, the more fun he has hugging and squeezing them.” Mehroo did not believe it for a moment. She was always pleading with him not to say nas
ty things about such a holy figure.

  But this was not all. Rustomji swore that Dhunjisha and his ilk had been known to exchange lewd remarks between lines of prayer, to slip them in amidst scripture recitals, especially on days of ceremony when sleek nubile women in their colourful finery attended in large numbers. The oft-repeated Ashem Vahoo was his favourite example:

  Ashem Vahoo,

  See the tits on that chickie-boo…

  This version was a popular joke among the less religious, and Mehroo dismissed it as more of Rustomji’s irreverence. He assured her they did it very skilfully and thus went undetected. Besides, the white kerchief all dustoors were required to wear over the nose and mouth, like masked bandits, to keep their breath from polluting the sacred fire, made it difficult to hear their muttering in the first place. Rustomji claimed it took a trained ear to sift through their mumbles and separate the prayers from the obscenities.

  The H route bus stopped at Marine Lines. Mehroo alighted and walked down Princess Street, wondering about the heavy traffic Cars and buses were backed up all the way on the flyover from Princess Street to Marine Drive.

  She neared the fire-temple and saw parked outside its locked gates two police cars and a police van. Her step quickened. The last time the gates had been closed, as far as she knew, was during the Hindu-Muslim riots following partition; she was afraid to think what calamity had now come to pass. Parsis and non-Parsis were craning and peering through the bars of the gates; the same human curiosity had touched them all. A policeman was trying to persuade them to disperse.

  Mehroo lingered on the periphery of the crowd, irresolute, then plunged into it. She saw Dustoor Kotwal leave the temple building and walk purposefully towards the gate. Jostling her way through the milling people, she attempted to get his attention. He was, like Dustoor Dhunjisha, a resident temple priest, and knew her well.

  Dustoor Kotwal had an announcement for the Parsis: “All prayers and ceremonies scheduled for today have been cancelled, except the prayers for the dead.” He was gone before Mehroo could reach the gate.

  She now began to pick up alarming words in the crowd: “…murdered last night…stabbed in the back…police and CID….” Her spirits faltered. All this on Behram roje which she had done everything to make perfect? Why were things being so cruelly wrenched out of her control? She made up her mind to stay till she could speak to someone who knew what had happened.

  Rustomji finished his cup of tea as Mehroo left. He decided to wait awhile before his bath, to give his obdurate bowels one more chance.

  But after another ten minutes of the Times of India and not a murmur from his depths, he gave up. Getting things ready for the bath, he arched his back till his bottom stuck out, then raised one foot slightly and tensed. Nothing happened. Not even a little fart. He inspected his dugli and trousers: the starch was just right — not too limp, not too stiff. He rubbed his stomach and hoped he would not have to go later at the fire-temple; the WC there was horrid, with urine usually spattered outside the toilet bowl or excrement not flushed away. To look at it, it was not Parsis who used the WC, he felt, but uneducated, filthy, ignorant barbarians.

  Rustomji performed his ablutions, trying to forget the disgusting leak from above while he had squatted below. Fortunately, with every mugful of hot water he scooped from the bucket and poured down his back, splashed on his face, and felt trickle down his crotch and thighs, that foul leak was reduced to a memory growing dimmer by the moment; the cleansing water which flowed down the drain swept away what remained of that memory to a distant remove; and once he had dried himself, it was blotted out completely. Rustomji was whole again.

  Now all that lingered was the fresh refreshing scent, as the advertisement proclaimed, of lifegiving Lifebuoy Soap. Lifebuoy Soap and Johnnie Walker Scotch were the only two items which endured in the sumptuary laws passed down to Rustomji through three generations, and he relished them both. The one change wrought by the passing years was that Johnnie Walker Scotch, freely available under the British, could now be obtained only on the black market, and was responsible for Rustomji’s continuing grief over the British departure.

  Emerging from the bathroom, he was pleased to discover his bowels no longer bothered him. The desultoriness plaguing his morning hours had fled, and a new alacrity took charge of his actions. The bows on the dugli gave him some trouble as he dressed, usually it was Mehroo who tied these. But in his present mood he was more than a match for them. With a last brush to his brilliantined hair he perched the pheytoe on it, gave a final tug of encouragement to the bows and surveyed himself in the mirror. Pleased with what he saw, he was ready for the fire-temple.

  The H route bus stop was his destination as he stepped out buoyantly. The compound was deserted, the boys were all at school. In the evening, their noisy games would fill it with rowdiness and nuisance that he would have to combat if he was to enjoy peace and quiet. Confident of his control over them, he decided to pass the H route bus stop and walk further, to the A-1 Express, past Tar Gully and its menacing mouth. His starchy whiteness aroused in him feelings of resplendence and invincibility, and he had no objection to the viewing of his progress by the street.

  There was a long queue at the A-1 bus stop. Rustomji disregarded the entire twisting, curving length and stationed himself at the head. He stared benignly into space, deaf to the protests of the queue’s serpentine windings, and pondered the options of upper deck and lower deck. He decided on the lower — it might prove difficult to negotiate the steep flight of steps to the upper with as much poise as befitted his attire.

  The bus arrived and the conductor was yelling out, even before it came to a standstill, “Upper deck upper deck! Everybody upper deck!” Rustomji, of course, had already settled the question. Ignoring the conductor, he grasped the overhead railing and stood jauntily on the lower deck. The usually belligerent conductor said nothing.

  The bus approached Marine Lines, and Rustomji moved towards the door to prepare for his descent. He managed quite well despite the rough and bumpy passage of the bus. Without bruising his mien or his attire, he reached the door and waited.

  But unbeknownst to Rustomji, on the upper deck sat fate in the form of a mouth chewing tobacco and betel nut, a mouth with a surfeit of juice and aching jaws crying for relief. And when the bus halted at Marine Lines, fate leaned out the window to release a generous quantity of sticky, viscous, dark red stuff.

  Dugli gleaming in the midday sun, Rustomji emerged and stepped to the pavement. The squirt of tobacco juice caught him between the shoulder blades: blood red on sparkling white.

  Rustomji felt it and whirled around. Looking up, he saw a face with crimson lips trickling juice, mouth chewing contentedly, and in an instant knew what had happened. He roared in agony, helpless, screaming as painfully as though it was a knife in the back, while the bus slowly pulled away.

  “Saala gandoo! Filthy son of a whore! Shameless animal — spitting paan from the bus! Smash your face I will, you pimp…”

  A small crowd gathered around Rustomji. Some were curious, a few sympathetic; but most were enjoying themselves.

  “What happened? Who hurt the…”

  “Tch tch, someone spat paan on his dugli…”

  “Heh heh heh! Bawaji got paan pichkari right on his white dugli…”

  “Bawaji bawaji, dugli looks very nice now, red and white, just like in technicolor…”

  The taunting and teasing added to the outrage of tobacco juice made Rustomji do something dangerously foolish. He diverted his anger from the harmlessly receding bus to the crowd, overlooking the fact that unlike the bus, it was close enough to answer his vituperation with fury of its own.

  “Arré you sisterfucking ghatis, what are you laughing for? Have you no shame? Saala chootia spat paan on my dugli and you think that is fun?”

  A ripple of tension went through the crowd. It displaced the former lighthea
rted teasing they were indulging in at the spectacle of the paan-drenched bawaji.

  “Arré who does he think he is, abusing us, giving such bad-bad ghali?” Someone pushed Rustomji from behind.

  “Bawaji, we’ll break all your bones. Maaro saala bawajiko!” Beat up the bloody bawaji.

  “Arré your arse we’ll tear to shreds!” People were jostling him from every side. The pheytoe was plucked from his head, and they tugged at the bows of the dugli.

  All anger forgotten, Rustomji feared for his person. He knew he was in serious trouble. Not one friendly face in this group which was now looking for fun of a different sort. In panic he tried to undo the hostility: “Arré please yaar, why harass an old man? Jaané dé, yaar.” Let me go, friends.

  Then his desperate search for a way out was rewarded — a sudden inspiration which just might work. He reached his fingers into his mouth, dislodged the dentures, and spat them out onto his palm. Two filaments of saliva, sparkling in the midday sun, momentarily connected the dentures to his gums. They finally broke and dribbled down his chin. With much effort and spittle, he sputtered: “Look, such an old man, no teeth even,” and held out his hand for viewing.

  The collapsed mouth and flapping lips appeased everyone. A general tittering spread through the assembly. Rustomji the clown was triumphant. He has restored to himself the harmlessness of the original entertaining spectacle, pheytoe back on head, teeth back in mouth.

  Then, under the amused gaze of the crowd, Rustomji undid the bows of the dugli and removed it. Going to the fire-temple was out of the question. Tears of shame and rage welled in his eyes, and through the mist he saw the blood-red blotch. With the dugli off he still felt a little damp on the back — the juice had penetrated his shirt and sudra as well. For the second time that day he had been soiled in a most repulsive way.