A Matter of Geography

by Jasmine D'Costa

  Shirlen, the prettier of the two, with full lips softened with light pink lipstick and large eyes that sat on a very soft face, was the more popular. Most of the men that hung around the Marchon household and at the bottom of our stairs were hung on her. While Miriam had her own following, she did not have the same charms as Shirlen, nor could she match the number of young puppies that wooed Shirlen.

  Mr. Fernandes did not like this development. He had Susan and Anna to consider. His daughters should not have to pass, as they went about their daily business, a bevy of hot males who were in all states of arousal. But nothing could be done and no known laws seemed to have been broken. The Fernandeses added this to their petitions in their daily family Rosary: ‘God, please let Shirlen and Miriam find a good match.’

  Prayers of the faithful never go unanswered…my mother and Mr. Fernandes would vociferously testify to that! And indeed, it was not much later that the Fernandeses’ petition was heard. Amit happened. A sailor, first engineer on a shipping line, tall and handsome as most Punjabi men are wont to be, he seemed like the answer to the prayers of the Fernandes family.

  Amit’s family lived in the North of India; how easy to be tempted in a city where you find yourself young, handsome, rich and alone! Mother, of course, expressed her view on why young men should live with their parents till they are formally introduced to the young women they are to consider for marriage—preferably by the parents. Young men were susceptible to the temptation of a woman. This poor boy did not have his parents’ guidance when he most needed it… I must admit we did of course imagine the part of rich and plump in the pocket, more our own building up of an imaginary story with lack of adequate information about this very happy stranger who had become part of the wall decor in our passage near the stairs.

  “She is perfect. She is all the woman I want,” Amit told Dad one day when he encountered the puppy standing against the wall in the passage and nodded politely, saying, “Waiting for someone?”

  We watched, every day, Amit blow kisses from across the street. Amit dismal. Amit ecstatic. Amit in every stage of emotion, completely in thrall to Shirlen’s favours. She frowned, she laughed, she smiled, she blew kisses; any amateur lip reader could see him say, I love you: A veritable romantic silent movie. Shirlen, for her part, was smitten, flattered, delighted, thrilled, charmed; the attention from someone with the presence of Amit had moved her upwards on the social scale. From the small-time Romeos that hung around the entrance of our building waiting for her to grace them with a glance here, a smile there, a pout, and sometimes a kiss, to this very well employed, educated and good-looking young engineer, she had indeed moved up. Up until now, sex had ruled high with her admirers; this was different.

  We had to put up with the endless, “He is so handsome, so clever!”

  Nothing makes a woman more attractive than when she is on the arm of another man. The courting of Shirlen revved up. Desperate puppies knelt when she passed them on the stairs, some offering rings, others just pleading for a glance.

  Any young man who finds himself competing with an assortment of other suitors pre-empts their pretensions with a proposal. Amit knew this. Shirlen was so flattered into saying yes that she waited for nothing. Amit wanted to marry her, thus raising his attraction in her eyes. No details were asked of Amit, no meeting with his family, no background checks, none of the safeguards mother would have subjected me to, nor the Fernandes children, under similar circumstances. Besides, with her kind of background, what did she really need to check? Amit was so obviously not an axe murderer…

  The news of Shirlen’s marriage caused a lot of excitement in Billimoria Building, but Mr. Fernandes was the happiest of us all. “At least now the disappointed buggers will go home to their mothers,” he said, adding, “Hope that Miriam gets lucky too.”

  Amit was not destined to have the extended honeymoon he had expected; summoned back to join the ship he worked on, he had to sail out in less than a week after the wedding.

  “Women do not live alone in India; you will have to stay with my mother or yours, but I will soon take up a shore job,” he promised, “and we can have our own home.”

  So Shirlen chose, like any woman given the option, to stay with her mother rather than leave Bombay and live in Chandigarh with her mother-in-law, a stranger she had never met.

  Once again, as when Amit courted her, we encountered the heavy petting in the passageway as we made little sorties to and fro with reports back to the others. All kinds of scenes were being played out there: “I will miss you,” muahhh, “I will be back, darling,” muaaahh, and so on and so forth; the kissing, loud muaahs, silent explorations of Shirlen’s throat, hands groping under her blouse, squeezing her breasts unashamedly, all were conducted in full view of those passing up and down the stairway. And in between, curious young eyes peeped hungrily, an education in boy-girl relationships. None of this was part of our lives except in the occasional English film screened in the St. Mary’s auditorium as part of the summer holiday club for children. Shocking though it was for us, we were all secretly excited. I think in some way we all formed our ideas of love from this performance in the passageway.

  Finally, the black and yellow cab drove up to the entrance of the building. All the windows along the curve of Billimoria Building were filled. Leaning over the sill, we followed carefully the ensuing farewell. Across the street, even the old cobbler put down his awl and peered through his glasses at the spectacle.

  The cab driver got out and took one small suitcase that contained Amit’s belongings (none of the wedding gifts that were perhaps slowly dwindling with Sammy in the same house). Shirlen, sniffing loudly, clung to him like a limpet in the rain, as if afraid of being washed off. If Shirlen looked like hell, Amit was an epitome of pity. Squealing, his body shuddered in spasms as if in some forgotten Chinese torture.

  Finally, the cabbie, who had spent the last fifteen minutes polishing his rear view mirror, honked several times to get their attention. He had made sure to turn down the meter the moment he had set out from home on being summoned by one of the Marchon boys. Amit, ever the well-trained shippee, saw Shirlen into the cab first then climbed in himself. The cab set off toward the docks, where they’d say their final goodbye. Only when the driver turned into St. Mary’s Road did all heads abandon their posts at the windows. Once again the hammering of leather interspersed with honking traffic and loud music from the B.I.T. chawls resumed, bringing us back from our reverie of love, babies, and the happy-ever-after.

  As far back as Hippocrates, and even as early as biblical times, the recognition that the blood is the carrier of chemical messages that affect mental and physical health is evident: Julius Caesar felt its influence when he distributed land to Cleopatra’s children. Romeo felt it with his Juliet, driving them to death. All lovers, both those who made it into history and those who didn’t, were probably programmed by the same kinds of hormones coursing through their blood as those that directed the next few hours of our own much-smitten Amit.

  Saying his goodbyes to his new bride, he boarded the ship. Shirlen’s tears were now dried and she turned on her heels, seeing that there was nothing much left for her to do there. Amit high-fived a few colleagues, set his bag on the deck, and looked out onto shore till he could no longer see Shirlen’s back retreating down the road in the low light. He turned, picked up his bag, and proceeded to put it in his cabin. He spent the next two hours trying very hard to get into the swing of things. Not unlike our own detested Mondays, spending so many months on shore had made him a bit averse to the long days at sea that he faced before him. The Arabian sea, once blue and appealing, now looked muddied and rough, and the stars in the sky were obscured by the glow of the city lights. The changed situation in his personal life made this scene even more depressing, and anxiety sped into a rousing sense of need, his testosterone activated by his new marriage. It is amazing how one can be single with no one to love and never feel lonely. But the arrival of a loved one on the
scene of one’s heart makes loneliness feel like a part of one’s body is being torn off.

  An hour before they could set sail, the love-stricken puppy grabbed his duffle bag and ran ashore, his hormones shouting, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t …my heart won’t let me…

  Amit took a cab back to Billimoria Building, where he expected to be reunited with his wife of very few days. As the cab cruised down Carnac Bunder, he did not notice its blocked streets, nor that the cabbie had taken a circuitous route. So strongly was he in the grip of his hormones that he noticed nothing beyond his nervous excitement the entire journey. The cab stopped short of the entrance, and within seconds, he was running down the street to Billimoria Building.

  He ran up the wooden stairs two at a time, turned in the passage and pushed open the door. But Shirlen was not there. We heard through the thin walls his troubled, disappointed voice asking, “Where is she, Mum?”

  “Colaba Causeway, shopping,” we heard her reply.

  “Oh, oh,” Isabel, privy to most details provided by Dad, said knowingly, “this is not good.”

  We stood at the window watching him run out on the street, hail a cab and heard him shout, “Colaba,” to the driver, almost like he was kicking a spur into the sides of a horse. We could hear every expletive and every impatient inflection in his voice as we prayed silently for Shirlen. Damn, every red light is on today, faster, faster, where is she... went swirling in our heads as we mentally followed his path. As the taxi drew near the roundabout opposite the Regal Theatre, he saw her. God, she is beautiful. She looks sexy dressed like that… Hello, hello, what is happening here… what the hell is that man doing with her… why won’t she let him go…?

  He stopped the cab in front of the Regal, handed over fifty rupees—“Keep the change,” he said—and darted across the road, dodging the traffic. The rest of the story is from Shirlen’s own account of that evening. Walking up to her, he silently took her hand. Shirlen, who had been very accustomed to living as she pleased without question, felt the initial small flutter of panic die quickly.

  “Come home,” he said gently. They caught another taxi outside the Regal Theatre.

  “Mazagaon,” he told the taxi driver.

  “Which way would you like to go, sir?”

  “Any way you wish to take but just get us home,” he said distractedly. He held her close in the taxi, then drew her head onto his shoulder while he stroked her hair silently. But instead of heading home, he took her to a friend’s apartment. His friend had sailed that day on the very ship he had abandoned. Despite his scramble to get off the ship, Amit had thought to borrow his key in anticipation of his need for private time with Shirlen.

  He ushered her in gently and took her in his arms… kissed her passionately…licked the mole under the lobe of her left ear. “Take this off,” he said, tugging at her clothes. She unbuttoned her dress, as she seductively jiggled her breasts at him. (Shyness not being Shirlen’s domain, she jiggled her breasts as she recounted the events to us). Amit walked around switching on the lights, quite unfamiliar with the switches; he turned on every switch in the room as he watched her undress.

  “Lie back on the couch,” he said gently.

  She lay there a long while, looking at him.

  “Amit, you have switched the iron on.”

  “Why yes.” He switched it off, unplugged it, and began to coil the wire round the handle, slowly matching his step with the action.

  “I love you,” he said in a quiet voice, walking towards her. He sat down beside her, stroked her left breast gently and then, with an equally gentle movement, he took the iron and singed her breast with it.

  She screamed in agony while he repeated the motion with the other breast … and then her right thigh and then her left. She could now only whimper with shock but soon the horror of the scars that it would leave overrode the horror of his actions; searing more than the burn itself.

  He put the iron down, took a bottle of coconut oil and tenderly applied it on her burns.

  “I love you,” he said.

  When they returned home, a hysterical Shirlen recounted the episode to her brothers Bruno and Oswald. Much turmoil resounded through the second floor of Billimoria Building. Banging, clanging of pots and pans, loud noises, yelps, and screams emanated from the Marchon household for the next hour. Finally, at the end of the hour Bruno and Oswald dragged a bruised Amit by the collar out into the passage, screaming, “If we see you anywhere in Bombay, you will have to change your name to Bob; yes, because that is what you will be doing—bobbing in the sea without your hands and legs.”

  Chapter Twelve

  That was no empty threat from Bruno and Oswald. Early in January 1982, about eight years prior to Shirlen’s disastrous marriage, when I had just turned ten, shocked disbelief hit the good God-fearing Catholics in Bombay. It would not be exaggerating to add horror and fear to the emotions felt upon hearing that Fr. Justin D’Mello, the parish priest at a small church in Igatpuri, a small town on the outskirts of Bombay was found murdered, his head battered, left to die in the aisle of the church. It hit the headlines, and all Catholics, hardly believing any crime could happen to, or be committed by, them, talked of nothing else: “Can you imagine, men…Catholics?” “…that, too, a Catholic priest, men...” “The world is not safe anymore, men...” Men being used in the same way man is used in colloquial English spoken in some of the colonies.

  Investigations led to the sacristan, who had disappeared with the box of offerings and some of the artefacts of the church. The police traced most of the artefacts: the monstrance was discovered in a house down Nesbit Road and the chalice in the Marchon household. Oswald and Bruno were taken into custody one night as the building slept. Despite the thin walls that separated the rooms, nobody heard the proceedings. Mr. Fernandes showed Isabel the report the next morning in the Times of India. Buried inside the paper on page five, a two-inch column gave the barest details of the arrest. Isabel already knew of this, of course, from Dad. So now she nodded her head too and fro and made pretence of hearing it for the first time. “Yes, Mr. Fernandes?” “Oh my God, Mr. Fernandes!” She even giggled at the revelation that she was living next door to all the action… Mother’s sense of humour triumphed over her conscience. She hmm, hmmed and ah, ah, ahed as he spoke. A chalice in the House of Sin…maybe they will be converted…or they will offer curry instead of wine—she continued to giggle, quite amused by her own joke, till Mr. Fernandes, who had been looking self-righteous as he showed her the paper, soon saw the humour in the situation, too.

  Of course, with the typical cruelty of children, “So where is Oswald?” we asked Miriam when she came to play with us that day. “He’s gone abroad,” she promptly replied. Talented! Yes, talented actors they were, the Marchons. We sniggered when they were not with us, and I suppose they knew. But they had developed a coat that was impenetrable, knowing that this was their lot.

  Oswald and Bruno were released with a light sentence for robbery, while the sacristan was given life imprisonment. The Marchon boys remained undeterred, but they grew more careful and more polished as they continued their life of petty crime.

  Chickpea—as Joe lovingly called his wife, Mili—only stepped out of the apartment once a week, when the light was low and no one could see her; then, she stood leaning on the railing looking across the expanse of the compound at the road. She was taller and much larger than Joe and, apparently, had been the beauty about town before she married Joe. In the words of Mr. Fernandes, she was “a Queen Bee, surrounded by all these drones hanging around, languishing, waiting for her. They buzzed around her,” Mr. Fernandes added and gave a short laugh, satisfied he had said something quite witty.

  Mili was ahead of her time. She dared. She dared to raise a bold eye at the young men in Mazagaon…She dared to look good, though she was not a classical beauty. She dared to flirt, when women were demure. She dared to walk unchaperoned…she dared everything. She was available—that certainly was her greate
st attraction. Young men hung around the corner of the street at 7.00 each morning waiting for her to pass, wondering who she would look at that day. Who would she favour, they wondered, as they adjusted their bow ties, and carefully patted the stiff, coiffed puff in their hair.

  Her life as a young girl seemed no different from Shirlen’s or Miriam’s. I suppose those girls never had a chance, born to Mili, who never knew any different; their destinies were defined far before they were born. Mill’s upbringing with a single mother of very modest means combined her attractions with pragmatism. Alighting on a plastic flower and dipping into its depths to extract honey she eventually married Joe, who, much like Shirlen’s erstwhile beau, when faced with competition wasted no time merely dating, and instead proposed marriage to her.

  Watching Mili wordlessly look out into the night, I sometimes wondered about her. Did she deliberately avoid company? What did she think of, as she looked out into the silence? Was she unhappy, did she want a different life? Did she consider that her life could have been very different if she had not married Joe? Did she long for the days when men danced around her, or had she found her home with Joe? These were all unanswered questions, because she never confided in anyone—at least no one we knew But one has to say that she ruled that household. Joe and the children never dared to cross her. It is difficult to know what hold she had over them—perhaps just being mother was powerful enough.

  That was all we knew of Mli except for one very intimate detail. One summer afternoon on a Sunday, like every Sunday after a heavy lunch, our parents ordered us outside the house: “It is the only day in the week we can have a siesta, so don’t disturb us.” We, as usual, met in the passage near the stairs. Carlton, the youngest Marchon, joined us with little pieces of coloured paper cut out of old greeting cards and magazine covers; he sold them as tickets for twenty-five paise to any kid who had saved or could produce the fere. He escorted the ticket holders into his house one by one, to see Joe and Chickpea snoring in bed, with Joe’s hand inside her dress, cupping her breast.