Swimming Lessons

by Rohinton Mistry

  And Tehmina, too, using the occasion to let bygones be bygones with Mummy and Daddy, arrived sucking cloves and shuffling in slippers and duster-coat. Her cataracts were still a problem, refusing to ripen, she said.

  Then one morning Nariman Hansotia stopped me in the compound. He was on his way to the Cawasji Framji Memorial Library, and I to the airline office for a final confirmation of my seat.

  “Well, well,” he said, “so you were serious when you used to tell everyone that you would go abroad. Who would have thought of it! Who would have imagined that Silloo Boyce’s little Kersi would one day go to Canada. Knee high I had seen you, running around in the compound with your brother, trying to do everything he did. Well, lead a good life, do nothing to bring shame to you or the Parsi community. And don’t just land there and say, where are the girls? like this other chap had done. Did I ever tell you that story?”

  And Nariman launched into an anecdote: “A sex-crazy young fellow was going to California. For weeks he used to tell his friends about how the women there went around on the beaches with hardly any clothes on, and how easy it was to find women who would go with you for a little bit of this and that, and what a wonderful time he was going to have as soon as he got there. Well, when he landed at Los Angeles, he tried to joke with the immigration officer and asked him, ‘Where are the girls?’ What do you think happened then?”

  “What, Nariman Uncle?”

  “He was deported on the very next plane, of course. Never did find out where the girls were.”

  Good old Nariman Uncle. He would never stop telling his tales. We finally parted, and as he pulled out of the compound in his old Mercedes-Benz, someone called my name from the ground floor of A Block. It was Rustomji-the-curmudgeon, skulking in the shadows and waiting for Nariman to leave. He shook my hand and gruffly wished me well.

  But as I slept on my last night in Bombay a searing pain in my eyes woke me up. It was one o’clock. I bathed my eyes and tried to get back to sleep. Half-jokingly, I saw myself as someone out of a Greek tragedy, guilty of the sin of hubris for seeking emigration out of the land of my birth, and paying the price in burnt-out eyes: I, Tiresias, blind and throbbing between two lives, the one in Bombay and the one to come in Toronto…

  In the morning, Dr Sidhwa arrived and said it was conjunctivitis, nothing very serious. But I would need some drops every four hours and protective dark glasses till the infection was gone. No charge, he said, because he was going to drop by anyway to say goodbye and good luck.

  Just before noon came Najamai. She must have been saving herself for an auspicious chogeryooṅ. She sympathized about my eyes before bringing forth her portable celebration kit: a small silver thaali holding a garland, and a tiny cup for the vermilion. They were miniatures of her regular apparatus which was too heavy to lug around. She put the garland round my neck, made a large, bright red teelo on my forehead and hugged me several times: “Lots and lots of years you must live, see lots of life, study lots, earn lots, make us all very proud of you.”

  Then Najamai succumbed to reminiscing: “Remember when you used to come upstairs with the meat? Such a good boy, always helping your mother. And remember how you used to kill rats, with your bat, even for me? I always used to think, how brave for such a small boy to kill rats with a bat. And one day you even ran after Francis with it! Oh, I’ll never forget that!”

  She left, and Daddy found me a pair of dark glasses. And thus was spent my last day in Bombay, the city of all my days till then. The last glimpses of my bed, my broken cricket bat, the cracks in the plaster, the chest of drawers I shared with Percy till he went away to the small village, came through dark glasses; the neighbourhood I grew up in, with the chemist’s store (“Open Twenty-Four Hours”), the Irani restaurant, the sugar-cane juice vendor, the fruit-and-vegetable stall in Tar Gully, all of these I surveyed through dark glasses; the huddle of relatives at the airport, by the final barrier through which only ticket holders can pass, I waved to and saw one last time through dark glasses.

  Tense with excitement I walked across the tarmac The slight chill I felt was due to the gusting night winds, I convinced myself.

  Then, eyes red with conjunctivitis, pocket bulging with the ridiculously large bottle of eye-drops, and mind confused by a thousand half-formed thoughts and doubts, I boarded the aircraft sitting white and roaring upon the concrete. I tried to imagine Mummy and Daddy on the visitors’ gallery, watching me being swallowed up into its belly, I imagined them consoling each other and fighting back the tears (as they had promised me they would) while I vanished into the night.

  After almost a year in Toronto I received a letter from Jamshed. From New York — a very neat missive, with an elegant little label showing his name and address. He wrote that he’d been to Bombay the previous month because in every single letter his mother had been pestering him to visit: “While there, I went to Firozsha Baag and saw your folks. Glad to hear you left India. But what about Percy? Can’t understand what keeps him in that dismal place. He refuses to accept reality. All his efforts to help the farmers will be in vain. Nothing ever improves, just too much corruption. It’s all part of the ghati mentality. I offered to help him immigrate if he ever changes his mind. I’ve got a lot of contacts now, in New York. But it’s up to him to make up his mind,” and on and on.

  Finally: “Bombay is horrible. Seems dirtier than ever, and the whole trip just made me sick. I had my fill of it in two weeks and was happy to leave.” He ended with a cordial invitation to New York.

  What I read was only the kind of stuff I would have expected in a letter from Jamshed. That was the way we all used to talk in Bombay. Still, it irritated me. It was puzzling that he could express so much disdain and discontentment even when he was no longer living under those conditions. Was it himself he was angry with, for not being able to come to terms with matters as Percy had? Was it because of the powerlessness that all of us experience who, mistaking weakness for strength, walk away from one thing or another?

  I started a most punctilious reply to his letter. Very properly, I thanked him for visiting my parents and his concern for Percy. Equally properly, I reciprocated his invitation to New York with one to Toronto. But I did not want to leave it at that. It sounded as if I was agreeing with him about Percy and his work, and about India.

  So instead, I described the segment of Toronto’s Gerrard Street known as Little India. I promised that when he visited, we would go to all the little restaurants there and gorge ourselves with bhelpuri, panipuri, batata-wada, kulfi, as authentic as any in Bombay; then we could browse through the shops selling imported spices and Hindi records, and maybe even see a Hindi movie at the Naaz Cinema. I often went to Little India, I wrote; he would be certain to have a great time.

  The truth is, I have been there just once. And on that occasion I fled the place in a very short time, feeling extremely ill at ease and ashamed, wondering why all this did not make me feel homesick or at least a little nostalgic. But Jamshed did not have to know any of it. My letter must have told him that whatever he suffered from, I did not share it. For a long time afterwards I did not hear from him.

  My days were always full. I attended evening classes at the University of Toronto, desultorily gathering philosophy credits, and worked during the day. I became a member of the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario. Hoping to meet people from Bombay, I also went to the Parsi New Year celebrations and dinner.

  The event was held at a community centre rented for the occasion. As the evening progressed it took on, at an alarming rate, the semblance of a wedding party at Bombay’s Cama Garden, with its attendant sights and sounds and smells, as we Parsis talked at the top of our voices, embraced heartily, drank heartily, and ate heartily. It was Cama Garden refurbished and modernized, Cama Garden without the cluster of beggars waiting by the entrance gate for the feast to end so they could come in and claim the dustbins.

  My membership in th
e Society led to dinner invitations at Parsi homes. Many of the guests at these gatherings were not the type who would be regulars at Little India, but who might go there with the air of tourists, equipped with a supply of ohs and aahs for ejaculation at suitable moments, pretending to discover what they had always lived with.

  These were people who knew all about the different airlines that flew to Bombay. These were the virtuosi of transatlantic travel. If someone inquired of the most recent traveller, “How was your trip to India?” another would be ready with “What airline?” The evening would then become a convention of travel agents expounding on the salient features of their preferred carriers.

  After a few such copiously educational evenings, I knew what the odds were of my luggage getting lost if I travelled airline A. The best food was served on airline B. Departures were always delayed with airline C (the company had a ghati sense of time and punctuality, they said). The washrooms were filthy and blocked up on airline D (no fault of airline D, they explained, it was the low class of public that travelled on it).

  Of Bombay itself the conversation was restricted to the shopping they’d done. They brought back tales of villainous shopkeepers who tried to cheat them because they sensed that here was the affluence of foreign exchange: “Very cunning, they all are. God knows how, but they are able to smell your dollars before you even open your wallet. Then they try to fool you in the way they fool all the other tourists. I used to tell them” — this, in broken Hindi — “ ‘go, go, what you thinking, I someone new in Mumbai? I living here thirty years, yes thirty, before going phoren.’ Then they would bargain sensibly.”

  Others told of the way they had made a shrewd deal with shopkeepers who did not know the true value of brass and copper artifacts and knick-knacks, what did bloody ghatis know about such things anyway. These collectors of bric-a-brac, self-appointed connoisseurs of art and antiques, must have acquired their fancies along with their immigration visas.

  But their number was small. And though they were as earnest about their hobbies as the others were, they never quite succeeded in holding the gathering transfixed the way the airline clique managed to. Art was not as popular as airlines were at these evenings.

  Six months after Jamshed’s trip to Bombay, I received a letter from my brother Percy. Among other things, he wrote about his commitment in the small village:

  Our work with the farmers started successfully. They got interest-free loans in the form of seed and fertilizer, which we purchased wholesale, and for the first time in years they did not have to borrow from those bloodthirsty money-lenders.

  Ever since we got there the money-lenders hated us. They tried to persuade us to leave, saying that what we were doing was wrong because it was upsetting the delicate balance of village life and destroying tradition. We in turn pointed out things like exploitation, usury, inhumanity, and other abominations whose time was now up. We may have sounded like bold knights-errant, but they turned to threats and said it would soon become so unhealthy for us that we would leave quickly enough.

  One day when we were out visiting a loan applicant, a farmer brought news that a gang of thugs wielding sticks and cudgels was waiting at the hut — our office and residence. So we stayed the night with the loan applicant and, in the morning, escorted by a band of villagers who insisted on coming along, started for our hut. But all we found were smouldering embers. It had been razed to the ground during the night, and no one had dared interfere.

  Now we’re back in Bombay, and Navjeet and I are working on a plan for our return. We’ve spoken to several reporters, and the work is getting much publicity. We’re also collecting fresh donations, so that when we go back we won’t fail for lack of funds.

  Having read this far, I put down the letter for a moment. There you were, my brother, waging battles against corruption and evil, while I was watching sitcoms on my rented Granada TV. Or attending dinner parties at Parsi homes to listen to chit-chat about airlines and trinkets. And it was no use wishing that we had talked more to each other about our hopes and visions and dreams. I thought of our school-days, trying to locate the point when the gulf had appeared between us. Did it grow bit by bit or suddenly happen one morning? I cannot remember, but it did throw everything into silence and secrecy.

  The rest of the letter concerned Jamshed’s visit to Bombay six months ago:

  I wish he’d stayed away, if not from Bombay then at least from me. At best, the time I spent with him was a waste. I expected that we would look at things differently, but was not prepared for the crassly materialistic boor that he’s turned into. To think he was my “best friend” in school.

  No doubt he believes the highlight of his visit came when he took some of us to dinner at the Rendezvous — nothing but the most expensive, of course. It was a spectacle to surpass anything he’d done so far. He reminded us to eat and drink all we wanted without minding the prices and enjoy ourselves as much as we could, because we wouldn’t get such a chance again, at least, not until his next visit.

  When the soup came he scolded the waiter that it was cold and sent it back. The rest of us sat silent and embarrassed. He looked at us nonchalantly, explaining that this was the only way to handle incompetence; Indians were too meek and docile, and should learn to stand up for their rights the way people do in the States.

  We were supposed to be impressed by his performance, for we were in an expensive restaurant where only foreign tourists eat on the strength of their U.S. dollars. And here was one of our own, not intimidated within the walls of the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel. In our school-days we could only stand outside and watch the foreigners come and go, wondering what opulent secrets lay inside, what comforts these fair-skinned superior beings enjoyed. Here was one of our own showing us how to handle it all without feeling a trace of inferiority, and now we were ashamed of him.

  We spent the evening watching Jamshed in disbelief, in silence, which he probably thought was due to the awesome splendour of our surroundings.

  I was determined not to see him again, not even when he came to say goodbye on the day of his departure, and I don’t intend to meet him when he visits Bombay the next time…

  As I finished reading I felt that my brother had been as irritated by Jamshed’s presence as I had been by Jamshed’s letter six months ago. But I did not write this to Percy. After all, I was planning to be in Bombay in four or five months. We could talk then. In just four months I would complete two years in Canada — long enough a separation, I supposed with a naive pomposity, to have developed a lucidity of thought which I would carry back with me and bring to bear on all of India’s problems.

  Soon it was time to go shopping for gifts. I packed chocolates, cheeses, jams, jellies, puddings, cake mixes, panty hose, stainless steel razor blades — all the items I used to see displayed in the stalls of the smugglers along Flora Fountain, always priced out of reach. I felt like one of those soldiers who, in wartime, accumulates strange things to use as currency for barter. What was I hoping to barter them for? Attention? Gratitude? Balm to soothe guilt or some other malady of the conscience? I wonder now. And I wonder more that I did not wonder then about it.

  The suitcase I had come with proved insufficient. And although I bought a new one, an extra leather strap around each seemed wise, for they were both swelled to threatening dimensions.

  Then, arms still sore from the typhoid and cholera inoculations, luggage bursting at the seams with a portable grocery store, and mind suffused with groundless optimism, I boarded the plane.

  The aircraft was losing height in preparation for landing. The hard afternoon sun revealed the city I was coming back to after two years. When the plane had taken off two years ago, it had been in the dark of night, and all I saw from the sky through shaded and infected eyes were the airport lights of Santa Cruz. But now it was daytime, and I was not wearing dark glasses. I could see the parched land: brow
n, weary, and unhappy.

  A few hours earlier the aircraft had made its scheduled landing in London, and the view from the air had been lush, everywhere green and hopeful. It enraged me as I contrasted it with what I was now seeing. Gone was the clearness with which I’d promised myself I would look at things. All that was left was a childish and helpless reaction. “It’s not fair!” I wanted to stamp my foot and shout, “it’s just not fair!”

  Construction work was under way at the airport. The van transporting passengers from the aircraft to the terminal building passed improvised dwellings of corrugated metal, cardboard, packing crates, plastic sheets, even newspaper.

  The van was reduced to a crawl in the construction zone. A few naked children emerged from the corrugated metal and cardboard and ran to keep up with us, screaming for money. When they came dangerously close to the van, the driver screamed back. On board was a group of four businessmen, and three of them tossed some change out the window. They sounded Australian. The fourth was the seasoned traveller, and the others hung on every word he said. He warned them, “If you try that when you’re on the street, you’ll create something like a bloody feeding frenzy of sharks.” The children fell far behind when the construction zone ended and the van picked up speed.

  Bombay seemed dirtier than ever. I remembered what Jamshed had written in his letter, and how it had annoyed me, but now I couldn’t help thinking he was right. Hostility and tension seemed to be perpetually present in buses, shops, trains. It was disconcerting to discover I’d become unused to it. Now I knew what soldiers must experience in the trenches after a respite far behind the lines.

  As if enacting a scene for my benefit with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play, a crowd clawed its way into a local train. All the players were there: Fate and Reality, and the latter’s offspring, the New Reality, and also Poverty and Hunger, Virtue and Vice, Apathy and Corruption.