by Avni Doshi
It was the middle of the afternoon. Reza was taking pictures of the damage done to shops and homes, photographing families that had lost loved ones, widows and orphans. He didn’t ask their permission; the living resembled the deceased, they took on the hues of their fallen kin. And one cannot speak to the dead.
He heard screams behind him, and a mob of men came running, waving sticks. Fearful, he hid behind a bus parked in front of a building. He tried to take pictures of the approaching mob, but his hands shook. Then he ran. He ran into the dark entrance of the building, up the stairs, hitting walls, knocking on doors as he went along.
A young woman was standing on the third floor, about to go inside her home. Reza was breathless, shaking.
‘What’s wrong?’
He could not tell her, could not speak, but she heard the men’s voices in the stairwell. She pulled him in through the door, bolted it shut.
He heard the locks. One. Two. Three.
He didn’t tell her he had seen locks like those before. He had seen them snap in half when a door was kicked in. He had seen them still intact when everything around them had burnt down. Instead, he clutched her arm and thanked her.
Then he looked around. Men, women and children looked back at him.
The girl’s name was Rukhsana. The others were aunts, uncles, cousins. Her grandmother sat in a chair by the window, deaf and blind, oblivious to the scene below. Her young brothers were bent down on their knees and whispering to one another, their bodies coiled.
The family’s last name was Shah. He stayed with them, slept beside them. Sometimes, at night, they sat together and listened to screams and gunshots. They peered out at the deserted streets below. Every day, they prayed that the phone would work and the power would return, but nothing changed.
Days and nights unhinged from dates and hours, and time was only recognizable by the passage of the moon in the sky.
When calamity is so near, one must never speak of it.
Reza felt a gratitude that anyone could have mistaken for love. The mob would have killed him if the Shahs hadn’t taken him in. He ate their food, lived off their kindness. They were generous, but he knew there was mistrust in their eyes. Everything was different then. Each day felt like a lifetime. He wondered if he would ever leave that place alive. There was a danger in being locked up in a house like that. Rubbing shoulders shaved nerves down into delicate strands. A single pull and they would snap. The sound of Rukhsana’s prayers made him want to sob.
So he married her.
Her family acted as witnesses.
They created a happy little world in that house.
There was little to eat and nothing to do. He thought it would be terrible, but they slowly learned to ignore the sounds from the outside, and everything became bearable. More than bearable. A pleasure. Some days were nothing less than a celebration.
When he finally came out, his mother was pleased he’d found a devout Muslim girl. She said everything happens for a reason.
*
‘Where is Rukhsana now?’
‘She lives with my mother.’
‘And you?’
‘I move around.’
The questions began after he developed the film. Images of death and destruction were interspersed with quiet interior spaces, the smiles and awkward poses of a family. And the wedding portraits. They were austere and serious. Reza had taken them on a timer. He told his editor about his experience. Pogroms, death and destruction, but love still appeared in glimmers.
Mr Chaudhury, whom Reza reported to, said he wanted to meet this Rukhsana. She came to the office the following week but was too shy to look anyone in the face. She wasn’t educated, and this room where words and images came together to tell a story of the day was mysterious to her. She nodded when the bespectacled man asked questions, and she corroborated what her new husband had said.
‘It might have a very interesting human perspective,’ Mr Chaudhury said, ‘but we have to handle it in the right way.’ He knew how to sell a paper.
Underneath her dupatta, Rukhsana had hair as curly as corkscrews. Not many people knew that secret. Some days, Reza wanted to tell someone, anyone, even a stranger on a crowded bus, so they might look at her, imagine her hair, but never know what it really was. Sometimes when he was with her, he realized his absolute authority. The pleasure this knowledge brought scared him.
Reza never wanted to be a human-interest story, packaged and sold. He was an auteur, a maker of images. The next day, he showed up at an art gallery in Colaba without an appointment, carrying a paper envelope full of negatives.
The gallerist asked him to repeat his name and said she wasn’t interested in taking on new artists.
He persisted every day for twelve days. His job had always required stamina, standing in inhospitable weather and enduring long breaks in activity. If there was one quality he had in abundance, it was patience. After day five, he was not permitted to enter the gallery and he sat outside, borrowing a folding chair from a man who sold out-of-date magazines. He started chewing tobacco, a habit which lasted until the end of the week. He abruptly spat out his last mouthful when the gallerist swung open the door and crossed her arms.
‘I only have ten minutes,’ she said.
The show came together slowly. There was the political climate to consider. The gallerist didn’t want to be a target. The concept for the exhibition also took time to reveal itself. The photographs, though powerful, felt incomplete, and Reza resorted to charcoal. He drew on large pieces of paper, and cut board into the shapes of furniture. The gallery became the Shahs’ apartment, not as it was during that endless fortnight, but as Reza remembered it. Chairs were indicated only by their shadows on the ground. Windows were frames draped in fabric, obscuring the scene outside. It was a room not of objects but excesses, not of space but of claustrophobia. The photographs were interspersed throughout, and the opening was quiet but well attended.
Reza spoke to a group that gathered around him, reciting the order of events that led up to the show. There were questions and conversation when he finished, and Reza was confident about the beginnings of his career. He didn’t read the reviews that came out in the paper – who read reviews anyway? – and was surprised to receive a folder from the gallery with some magazine cut-outs.
The show, the critics had agreed, was troubling to say the least, full of ethical problems that the artist had been unable to explain. The story, they said, of how the pictures were obtained was questionable, punctured with holes, and made the work immediately unappealing. He had invaded the space of a family, photographed them without explaining his intent and seized their identities for his own purposes. And then he had married one of their daughters so his foul appropriation could be sanctified. The violence against Rukhsana, in both image and person, was unacceptable. All this during one of the most heinous moments in the history of his city. One review called for the show to be taken down, asking, ‘Haven’t the Shahs been through enough already? Must their terror, suffering and ignorance be commodified and distributed by a man who lacks moral fibre?’
The gallerist took down the show ten days before schedule.
Reza collected his work three months later. Nothing had sold. The gallerist said this experience had damaged her reputation and was an utter disaster.
Reza shrugged. He told her he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
Ma was holding his hand by the time Reza finished his story. Her other hand was on her breasts. Kali Mata breathed deeply, and I realized she had been moved as well. As for me, I wasn’t sure I’d heard or understood the story in full. I vaguely recall a sense of discomfort, not with my surroundings but with what was inside of me. I had been taught for most of my life that the moment for living was yet to come, that the phase I was living in, a perpetual state of childhood, was a time for waiting. And so I waited, impatiently, resentfully, longing for this period of incapacitation to pass. And in that interim, I listened less than
I should have, and felt no need to engage.
I believed that this want to be older meant that age would answer all my questions, that my desires would be fulfilled at a later date, but as the years pass and I wish for youth once more, the habit of waiting has already been instilled. It’s deeply ingrained, something I can’t seem to unlearn. I wonder if, when I’m old and frail and can see the shape of my end in front of me, I will still be waiting for the future to roll in.
1996
Reza moved into our flat. One morning, I found him sharing the bed with my mother. The pockmarks that covered his body were savage in the early light. I thought he looked repulsive and told him so.
‘You’re no beauty queen,’ he said with a laugh.
I was told to keep quiet, but soon the neighbours caught on and whispered about it at the Club. Ma scolded me for telling her secret. ‘How could you do this?’ she said. Reza seemed less bothered. He poured some whisky into a glass and offered me a taste. I touched the surface of the liquid with my tongue. It recoiled of its own volition.
On the street below, cars were honking as they shuffled along. Our neighbours had gathered for a meeting in plain sight. Every so often they looked up at us, at me and Reza leaning over the edge of the balcony. He let some saliva drip out of his mouth and sucked it up again.
I laughed. Reza took a sip from his glass.
I noticed a scar near his temple, one that dipped down and cut through the hair.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Reza touched his forehead. ‘I got into a fight at school.’
‘What kind of a fight?’
‘The kind that makes you realize how many piss-heads there are in this world.’
Piss-heads. Piss-eds. Piss. Head. I wanted to ask him more about this word, ask him if it was one word or two, and if he could use it in a sentence again. I looked at the sharp angle of his jaw and the blue under his eyes. He touched the area around his crotch, reached into his pocket and took out a handmade paper boat. I held the little thing in my palms. It was made of smudged newspaper, crushed from being inside his clothes.
I thanked him, even though I thought it was a little bit stupid. He nodded. ‘Don’t put it in water.’
The neighbours were still below us. Mr Kamakhya, a plump and balding father of four, was glaring up at us with his hands crossed in front of his stomach.
Without a word, Reza released the glass in his hand. The neighbours scattered with Mr Kamakhya’s warning. The glass fell two storeys, shattering on impact. Fragments flew in every direction like flecks of shimmering confetti.
My mother and Reza would go for walks when the sun was mellow. Sometimes they’d let me tag along. He carried paint and charcoal everywhere, and we would watch him mark up walls, the sides of buildings, private property. He would leave behind poems with simple alliteration. They were mostly senseless and sometimes funny. I rolled the words around on my tongue afterwards, and stored them away in the back of my mind.
He left his writing without a name. ‘I’m not into being an author any more,’ he said. Weeks later, on one of our walks, he returned to the places he had been before and covered the words he had written. He painted them over with white, and they dried like a spot of milk against the yellowed city. Sometimes he would kiss my mother as we walked, reach into her blouse to tug at her breasts. He would look at her while he did it, hold her gaze, and she always smiled and moved further into his hand.
Reza mapped corners of Pune in his mind. It was how he knew where he could belong one day. He hated the crowded thoroughfares, the shops and markets, the wealthy and the poor searching for space to stand side by side. Reza searched for crevices, the cracks that others had fallen through, that the city itself never knew of. They were points of rest, he told us as we walked, where everything stopped. In those places, the city was silent.
My mother told him he was self-indulgent. He seemed to like this and kissed her again. I walked a little behind. He was a dirty brute, but in some recess I recognized what he said. His words hit me powerfully, an old lesson learned again.
Reza wanted to wear Ma’s clothes and suggested she wear his. She demurred at first, but later gave in. This was a common pattern for her in their time together. His jeans were salty, worn but stiff. His T-shirt was light. She said she felt naked in it.
‘How do I look?’ she asked me.
I laughed in spite of myself. She came to where I sat on the sofa and hugged me in his clothes. There was something comforting about the smell of him. I helped her tape the back of his jeans to keep them from falling.
He knew how to drape a dupatta and hold it easily on his shoulders. The pink fabric strained across his back. I covered my mouth at the sight of him. He grabbed me, mimicking a lady’s voice, said I was his sweet little daughter, and pretended to put me to his breast to feed me. Ma and I laughed until our ribs ached. I imagined his hands would feel wet, but they were as dry as stone. From the balcony, I watched them walk through the gate. A small number of people glanced at them. Most did not notice anything at all. I stayed where I was until I couldn’t see them any longer. My ribs still hurt from laughing, but I felt angry at the same time. They could be each other, but I was only myself.
Reza wanted to know what things felt like from the inside. Not because he cared about what I was feeling, but because he liked differentiating between me and himself. I felt the more I answered him, the more raw materials he had and the more difference he could manufacture.
I was fat and he was thin. I was dark and he was fair.
Food seemed to produce a drug-like ecstasy in me, whereas only illicit drugs could have that effect on him.
One day in my room, he found all my lists and didn’t hide the fact that he had been snooping around. He wanted to know what they were for, and laid them out on the bed, pages and pages of them. Reza handled them with reverence, as though they were some kind of evidence, and I felt proud and strange when I saw this.
He asked me directly about certain entries, what the letters and numbers meant. I evaded where I could but tried not to be rude. The more he asked, the more certainty he seemed to draw that we were unlike each other in our thoughts and interests. We were different, he seemed to conclude, opposites even. This seemed to fortify him, as though understanding me made him sure of himself. I didn’t feel the same, though I found the attention comforting at times.
It was pleasant to feel fascinating until I realized he was like a scientist taking notes, and each bullet point on his list punctured me a little, making me more porous every day.
‘You don’t want him to leave, do you?’ Ma said, when I asked her how long Reza would be with us. She seemed to look sad, and I felt a sudden responsibility to keep him so we all could be happy.
If I tried to draw the balance between us, a kind of triangulation, I found myself unable. Ma and I both understood that there was something Reza shared with me that he didn’t with her. Somehow it fell to me to make sure I kept it up, though I had not agreed to it.
‘I love him, you know?’ she said when we were alone. ‘If I have ever loved anyone, it’s him.’
We took the long road down to Goa once. I sat on the back of the bike. Reza knew the way. My mother sat between us. A satchel cut into my shoulder. I was fourteen and took up too much room. We passed eucalyptus forests, and the trees seemed to uproot themselves and fly away in the other direction. The view opened up into an endless stretch of farmland, with patches of gold and green, and browning hills in the distance.
The temperature dropped at the higher elevation. Like in Panchgani. Villages went by, and I looked for something familiar, but the trees were dense, with bulbous roots.
We didn’t stop until we saw a sign for Candolim House, and walked for a while before we found the entrance of the hotel. The proprietress spoke with a soft sway. Her bottom seemed to move even when she was still.
A small boy was lying sideways on a single bed, his legs up in the air, leaning against the curv
ed bars of iron that fitted together in a floral pattern over the window. I watched him from the front porch. He ignored us. I never understood why people liked children.
The print on the window dressing matched the hotel owner’s dress. The lady rummaged through a bag of metal, digging further and further into the pouch. Squinting, biting her lip, apologizing.
From the bag she produced a key and handed it to Reza. Then she hugged me.
‘My name is Pepper,’ she said, ‘and that’s my boy. The room is just here.’ She pointed to a door. ‘And the toilet is out there.’
I turned at the sound of a low roar, but there was only darkness.
In the room, a dull yellow light appeared from an exposed bulb over the bed.
The air was wet, and salt and sand were on everything. It was a tiny box, with a small sink attached to a pipe in the wall. Just like in Nani’s house. The ceiling slanted in the shape of the roof, and a rod hung down where the fan had once been.
We stayed up all night, the three of us on a vast bed. My mother remained in the middle, and in the morning we saw coconut trees and piles of plastic bottles. A dozen men wrapped cloth around the trunks and inched their way to the top. Fruit fell like bombs.
In the distance, between the dark gaggle of limbs, I saw the ocean.
For breakfast, Pepper made eggs and Goan sausages, and fried poi in butter on the stove. There was sour fish pickle with the bones gone soft and brittle. Beyond the bars of the window, the little boy fingered the trigger of a plastic gun while watching Tom and Jerry on a small television. He cheered every time Tom caught the mouse, and aimed his toy pistol at Jerry when he escaped. After firing, he brought the tip of the gun to his face and blew imaginary smoke away.