1st December, 1990
Late, around midnight, Dad pulled out the typewriter, a Remington he bought along with a Pitman’s manual when I was ten. He’d ordered us to practise typing — “a very good skill to have.” It was “steel grey,” Dad every so often corrected our notion that the colour of the typewriter was black.
Tonight, Dad set two buff colour sheets into the carriage of the typewriter and inserted a carbon paper in between.
Earlier, around eight p.m., Isabel D’Souza, our neighbour and the wife of Inspector Joseph D’Souza of the Byculla Police station, had slipped down the dark stairs and hurt her ankle. “Good thing she did not break her back,” Dad said, hammering at the stubborn ‘a’ with his right index finger as he pounded out a letter to the residents of the building calling for a meeting to discuss installing a light on the stairs.
Nothing could really break the back of Isabel D’Souza, I was sure. She lived in room no.18 with her husband and their son Peter, our brother and friend. Inspector Joseph worked long shifts, most of them at night, so much of Isabel’s time was spent in our home. Big, tall, sturdily built, Isabel moved to and fro from our home to hers at all times of the day or late evenings to pass her time. She kept an eye on us when Mother was at work, and Mum, eternally grateful to her, said, “I can go to work only because of Isabel. I know she watches out for you.”
Sometimes she arrived at dinnertime. Our dining table was too small for the entire family and so Dad and Mum ate after we four children finished. Francis, my little brother, watched for Isabel. He hated the vegetables that Dad insisted he eat, and as soon as Isabel came in, he’d plead with her to eat them. If she hesitated, he stood on his chair and stuffed vegetables into her mouth. Isabel, laughing and protesting weakly, would eat them and then give Francis a kiss before she went to the living room to see Dad.
But that day she limped as she went in.
“What happened, Isabel bai, sister?”
“I twisted my ankle, bhovoji, brother-in-law. If there were lights on the stairs I would have seen the banana peel, but the passage is so dark and so are the stairs. I don’t know why the landlord won’t clean the building or install lights!”
“Isabel bai, I will take up the matter,” said Dad, who was ever ready to embrace a cause.
‘What I don’t understand is, why throw a banana peel on the stairs,”Mother interjected.
“Joseph comes home late too. I worry for him. And if Peter should fall and have an emergency, what would I do? I have only one son.”
“Bai, if you have a problem and Joseph is not at home, you can call me.”
“Thanks, bhovoji.”
Isabel was indeed our second mother, bound to us not by blood but love.
One of the few graduates of her day, vocal, presentable, yet a stay-at-home wife, Isabel, my dear mother, seemed to challenge logic. While Mrs Fernandes, simple, unambitious, worked in an office in the city as a stenographer, mother, educated, trained as a teacher, stayed at home. Another of life’s contradictions: Mrs. Fernandes, four children to mind—reason enough to stay home; on the other hand, four children to feed. Dad, liberal man of the world, would have loved Mother to work to occupy herself while he worked long hours; while Mr. Fernandes, conservative, would have loved to have been the sole provider. But life has its way of dodging expectations.
With Mother, I think it was about me… or perhaps Janet, the sister I lost. I suppose lost does not describe it. To lose someone or something you first have to have it. I never did meet my sister. Her death happened before my parents conceived me, or even conceived of me. Isabel, then a teacher at St. Mary’s High School not far from where we lived, had gone to school as usual. It was the school that all of us in Billimoria Building—i.e., the boys—would attend. Or, I guess I should say, all the Catholic boys; Ali, our Muslim neighbour, went to Anjuman Islam, though it was twice as far from us as St. Mary’s. The Surve boys from the Hindu family on the first floor went to the municipal school a few steps away; finances, I suppose, being the uppermost concern of Mr. Surve; and the Marchon boys did not go to school at all.
Mother went every morning to teach at the school and came home at lunch break. Grandmother, who lived with my parents then, looked after Janet, who had turned four that year. My understanding and knowledge of the episode came, strangely, from Joe Marchon, our neighbour. Mother and Dad never spoke about it, neither to me nor between themselves, at least as far as I was aware. But I knew it grieved her still. In the corner of our living room stood a tall armoire of Burma teak wood, carved in a rose design by hand and finished with melamine polish. The armoire, though large, held only mother’s clothes and private treasures. In the three drawers on one half of the inside, never left unlocked, she kept a part of herself away from both Dad and me, claiming privacy in our little apartment that could ill afford to allow exclusive domains. In one of these drawers, she kept locked Janet’s photographs, and on occasion, I have chanced upon her, sitting in the armchair beside it, gently stroking the pictures as she flipped through the pages. She would shut the album and never let me look at them. Isabel could not always be understood, but I believe that locked in those memories were an unshakeable sadness and guilt that she bestowed upon herself, and which jostled with each other to surface in quiet moments of solitude.
Joe, of course, had no such reservations toward silence. Ever ready to tell a story, truth or fiction, he recounted how Janet, sitting on a chair, quite inexplicably slid down and fell one morning, hitting her head on the floor. She lay there bleeding profusely. Those were the days when telephones were for the wealthy: for those who could afford to pay a deposit to the telephone company, and then some more to a lowly clerk in the telephone office, and then to his boss, or the minister of communications, and then to the wireman and electrician, to connect the instrument to your home. Though Dad was a police inspector and was expected to make money on the side, his Catholic conscience stood firmly in the way. So Grandmother did what the rest of the world does without a telephone. Desperate, and panic-stricken because of all the blood, she rushed to Joe Marchon next door. Joe, also without telephone, ran down the street to get mother from school.
Cutting out Joe’s embellishment of the story, his emotions as he ran, the heroic dodging of traffic, and so on and so forth, Mother rushed back and took Janet by taxi to the J.J. Hospital on Mohammed Ali road, about 3 km away. Janet came home bandaged, and when she woke from her sleep the next day Mother realized that she had lost sight in one eye. Isabel gave up her teaching career to take care of her daughter. She blamed her ambition for her daughter’s loss of sight. But that did not help; as if that was not enough, we lost Janet the next year very suddenly and unexpectedly from a blood clot that travelled to her brain. Apparently, her concussion had gone undetected. It sent Mother into shock. She descended, I am told, from sorrow and guilt to shocked sorrow, guilt, and painful depression.
Guilt is a strange thing. It gets hold of you and eats up little bits of you every time you pay attention to it. It stands out there, a hungry carnivore, ready to crawl through your insides, gnawing and nipping at every opportunity, irrespective of the event. Though I make it sound like something external, it really is personal; it cannot be verified or proved scientifically, nor can its dimensions be quantified or standardised into formulaic equations across random populations. It is just the freedom we have as humans to choose how we experience within ourselves the events in our lives or how we accept our histories. Mother’s guilt, really, was her own freedom to choose what she experienced. The responsibility of actions or her failure to act and her choice of guilt to cope with the loss was purely hers. No one really blamed her. In a very Freudian way—and may it be recorded here that I have no qualifications to judge or analyse her, but nevertheless will—she carried “survivor’s guilt,” the guilt of being alive after Janet’s death. Dad’s choice of experience, on the other hand, was one of sorrow, but also one of practicality. How did he deal with Isabel? How does a man deal w
ith a depressed wife, how does he liberate her from guilt? He could not resort to psychoanalysis, which was as yet not very popular. This was not a neurotic guilt but tied in with a choice she made. How could a psychologist answer the question on the meaning of life, of living and dying? Perhaps they could bring things to consciousness, but would that help her forgive herself?
A man of action, Dad came home more regularly, took Isabel to church whenever he could, and then did what Dad did when he solved our problems. He replaced my favourite teddy with a new one when I, on losing him, was inconsolable; if mother complained of a tear in her dress, he went out and bought a new one: fuzzier, cuter, more expensive. And therein lies the story of my birth a year later. Perhaps Dad had a point there. It saved mother from going into deep depression.
Mother, I think, secretly replaced Janet with Anna, as Janet became a shadow in her mind; I think it is in the playing with dolls, dressing them up and combing their hair, that lies the root of a woman’s longing for daughters. Sons, on the other hand, are messy, and they wear the same kind of clothes daily, sport short hair, no ribbons and frills. So as much as Mrs. Fernandes was thankful to Mother for babysitting her children, Mother bonded with the Fernandes children like her own, especially with Anna. It fulfilled a mutual need. We, Mother and I, spent most of our spare hours with the Fernandeses, till we really were just one big family. And though mother called Mr. Fernandes “brother-in-law,” we were not blood relatives. Dad’s job as a police inspector took most of his time and his hours were uncertain. Mother depended on Mr. Fernandes to help her with men’s jobs when Dad was away. Dad appreciated this arrangement with very little jealousy, if any; it took the pressure off him. Mr. Fernandes was too Catholic and very in love with his wife—Dad saw no threat. Besides, how does one have an affair in such a public neighbourhood?
I spent all my play hours with Ivan, Susan, Anna and Francis. Growing up with them perhaps was the real formation of my sense of self worth. They adored me and looked for wisdom from me. I was older than all of them, just two years older than Ivan, but five years older than Anna.
Amazing how age differences narrow as one grows older. Anna, who was half my age when I was ten, is now thirty-one. By the time she left for Canada, she was sixteen; a woman, an equal, enough for me to be furious with her, and furious still. But for a long time she was just a little sister, an adoring puppy I took for granted.
“We should put lights on the passages and stairs so that one can see where one is going,”Mum suggested.
“It is the landlord’s duty,”Dad insisted.
“You know Billy will do no such thing, and this will carry on till someone is seriously hurt. Besides, I want a light so that I don’t feel scared when the children come home late.”
“Well, I will take on Billy,” Dad said, turning sideways and banging his right index finger on the typewriter. I guess he ran into an ‘a.’
“I just want a light on the stairs,” Mum said.
At this point, Anna shifted gears and moved over to talk about Billy.
Since I was often unwell, I spent many a school day at home, standing on the balcony, bored and watching the street like today. Though it was mid-morning, the light was low on this monsoon day. My chin resting on crossed hands on the balustrade, my eyes followed Billy as he got off the bus with an unhurried gait. He wore white pyjama trousers and a loose shirt that he took off as he entered his little den.
A bald Parsee, Billy, the landlord, came every day to the room he retained for himself on the first floor. He filled the room with books, comics, and piles of newspapers. I never understood why. Peter said, tongue in cheek, that he had stealthily decentralized an archive, but of course the truth being Billy needed to hide them from his wife. Some piles touched the ceiling.
I went down to the first floor and sat across from him. He was clothed in only a jabba, a white muslin undergarment, with a thread running across his chest and neck and under one arm, almost like the sash beauty queens wear, if a sash could be a thread.
“Hello, my child. Didn’t go to school again?”
“No, I’m not well.”
“Well enough to sit here, though?”
“Yes. I just took my medicines, but I spent the night awake. My asthma comes only at nights.” Then I plunged into saying,
“Billy, you can be a better landlord.”
He gave an indulgent half smile and continued to read his newspaper.
“Billy, why don’t you clean up the compound? It’s so dirty. We could play there if it was clean.”
“I don’t dirty it, child.”
“Yes, but we have no waste disposal. How can we do it?”He didn’t look up from his paper.
“How about the toilets?” I persisted.
“What about the toilets?”
“The roof leaks and we have to take an umbrella to the toilet. It’s quite a balancing act to hold the umbrella and squat and do all we have to do.”
“You’re young, child, it shouldn’t be so difficult for you.”
How about the others?”
“For now we’ll just talk about you. If they’ve a problem and talk to me I’ll discuss it.”
“Billy, you are very mean!”
“OK. I’ll show you I’m not mean.”He hobbled to the balcony outside his den, leaned on his walking stick and shouted, “Bar-wallah!”
The waiter in the restaurant on the main floor, right below his office, stepped out on the pavement and shouted back, “Kya mangta hai, saab—what do you want, saab?”
“One chai and one plate kebabs.”
When the tea and kebabs arrived, Billy poured tea into a saucer and gave me the rest in the cup. We sat eating the kebabs and I sipped my tea silently. The silence was soon broken with loud bubbling sounds of Billy slurping his tea. He put down the saucer and said,
“We Parsees are very generous. Even in death, we give our bodies to the birds.”
Chapter Six
Leaning back, I pushed my head on the couch and stretched my legs in front of me, knocking down a cup under the centre of the table. Did I place it there? Above me, near the ceiling, a fly struggled in the spider web. With a sigh, I changed my spot; going into the spare bedroom that doubles as my study, I sat where I could not be distracted by the odd cobweb. I kept my books here, lining all the walls: Blaise Pascal, Descartes, Hans Kung, books on the Holocaust, Mathematics, the complete leather-bound set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and of course, P.G. Wodehouse. My writing desk, my collection of music CDs, long-playing records, spools of tapes, and art work kept me company. I sat on the rocking armchair that my grandmother left me, ancient, but Mother’s meticulous preservation was reflected in the shiny polish of the lotus carved on the back rest. Anna’s book lay open on my lap and I looked around with a sense of self…A man without a wife can take much pleasure in his hobbies and the things he owns.
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Billimoria Building was not the cleanest of apartment buildings. The exterior paint was long since gone with the monsoons lashing over decades of unchanged weather; the balustrade, wrought iron, looked as wrought iron should, but the floors outside the general areas had dirt of the ages embedded, such that one could not see the black and white stone under. The ceiling, high, wooden, unpainted and with occasional spider nests that escaped the agile lizards’ tongues, had here and there a pigeon’s nest, some abandoned and some renewed. The toilets we shared with our neighbours quite increased our intimacy—standing in queues if the toilet was occupied by your neighbour, discussing the length of time they took or the kinds of sounds that emanated from behind the locked door, giggling, laughing, unconcerned that we may have embarrassed the occupant; yes indeed we were very intimate, almost a lifting of the seventh veil. It was also where I learnt relativity—i.e., the length of a minute was relative to which side of the door you were on. Sometimes our conversations and sense of fun descended to the level of Anthony’s flatulence—a detail that is ordinarily kept private, only to be aired in one’s
marriage. Though I must say, nothing in Anthony Vaz’s married life was much of a secret. The thin walls between room no. 15 where he lived and room no. 16, the apartment of the Fernandes family, ensured that privacy remained an elusive concept.
In a meeting on the second floor—one of several meetings we frequently held—it was decided that Anthony Vaz’s family, the Fernandeses, and us would share one toilet. The Marchon family, the Olivera family, and Mimosa shared the next, and it went down the line, three families in a row to the next. Ours was the cleanest. Mr. Fernandes tiled the toilet with white glazed tiles and we contributed and paid Soni, the methrani—sweeper—to clean the toilet daily. The others in the building did not have a tiled toilet and the floor was coarse concrete, which became black over time. The landlord had no hand in cleanliness, maintenance, or waste disposal. Billy, so disliked by the tenants, cared nothing about his popularity. He came to his office and collected the rent, which I must admit was small and absolutely impossible to raise each year since, I suppose, as far back as from when the building was built. Our rents never did catch up with inflation, and Billy self-righteously pointed this out whenever anyone was indecent enough to complain.
Anna was the only one of us who shared private time with Billy. Well, what can I say but that it was so like Anna? She had a trick of viewing the world through her own lens and placing it in some Anna logic.
I remember a time I was fourteen—Anna would have been about nine—and I came home from school, running up the wooden stairs two at a time, reaching the top a little out of breath. There was Anna, hanging upside down from the door frame of the passage, her feet wedged between the bars, using them as a hook. She had blocked the passage and I had to stop.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at the world.”
“What world?”
“The world, the air, the people in it, my thoughts.”
“Why upside down?”
A Matter of Geography Page 4