by Tony D'Souza
At the bus stand, Peter showed the bottle to the ticket wallah in his uniform. He’d had enough of this cook’s drunkenness, he explained, was sending the man home to his family in Mangalore. Then he handed over the fare.
“I’m going to put some money in the pocket of his shirt,” Peter said as he looked at the ticket wallah’s steel badge. “Tell him it’s in there when he wakes up. Then he can’t say that I don’t have a heart. But why should I have to stand for this sort of drunkenness?”
Peter carried the cook’s body up the steps of the idling bus to Mangalore. There was a half hour yet before it departed, plenty of time for a drunk old man to have a heart attack in his sleep. He arranged the cook’s face against the window, set the bottle against the wall of the bus beside him, put two fifty-rupee notes in the pocket of his shirt. The ticket wallah had that money in his own pocket moments after Peter left, just as Peter had known he would. The ticket wallah tilted his hat on his head, smoothed down the creases of his shirt, and his mustache twitched under his nose as he thought about his luck. Then he sat back down at his desk in the office, and his mind went on to other things.
Back at the house, my mother was throwing up in the latrine, Lenore was drinking and smoking, and Peter went into his room and began a letter to his father in Virginia. Dad, the letter opened, India is the most fucked-up place on earth.
Over at the bus stand, the 7:00 A.M. to Mangalore began to fill with people. Fat women in orange saris pulled children in trains through the aisle, looking for their seats. Old men in Congress hats clutched their folded umbrellas and sat up front. Three young men with pomade in their hair were on their way to Goa. A middle-aged man in a worn-out suit looked at his wristwatch to see about the time. Parcels and rice sacks and chickens in crates surrounded the bus on every side. Four bicycles. Hands of green bananas in a pile. Even a full-size refrigerator. Every single one of those things would be lifted to the top of the bus. The men who would do the lifting were bare-chested harijans, their hair thick and woolly, their bodies lean and black. They themselves would ride to Mangalore perched on top of the bus for their labor and half the fare.
People were traveling for all sorts of reasons, for weddings and funerals, of course, but also to place land-rights claims before a magistrate, to have a hemorrhoid looked at by a specialist, to search for an overdue husband, and the cook was traveling because he was dead. The woman who sat down beside the body of the cook chose to sit there precisely because the young men traveling to Goa had held up a rum bottle and hissed at her to come back to them. She was still nursing her very first child, and her breasts were swollen with milk. Next to the body of the cook, she pulled her green sari tightly around herself, sighed and settled her sleeping child on her lap. She looked out the window. A yellow dog humped a black bitch in the yard. Wasn’t that the way of this world? Another one was growing inside her, too. But it would be nice to sit beside her mother in the kitchen eating jackfruit in Mangalore, pomegranates fresh from the tree, as it had come again time to do. Her cousin would take her on his motorbike to set her feet in the ocean.
The refrigerator was lashed on the middle of the roof, the last packages were lifted up and lashed down around it, the harijans sat in a pile at the end, and the thin driver came aboard and switched on the music. The music was Hindi and loud and would play all through the nine-hour ride. They would make two stops to piss and eat. Then the well-to-do would announce themselves from the poor, because the well-to-do would eat curries with their fingers in the roadside restaurants, while the poor would crouch under trees outside and not eat. The bus lurched out of the station crammed with human beings inside and out, ten of them lactating, almost all of them breathing, and a beautiful young mother with one child on her lap, another in her womb, and the biggest set of cans in Hassan became instantly drowsy from the motion of the bus. When she woke with a start, she found she’d been sleeping on the shoulder of a kind old man who alone among these people didn’t seem to mind.
Peter spent two nights in the Hassan jail. Neither my mother nor Lenore brought him any food, which meant something real, since prisoners at that time in India weren’t fed by the state, but by their families. Then Peter was transferred in handcuffs to Bangalore. A crowd formed from the gate of the jail to the police car, a black Ambassador with a blue light whirling on top of it. The police led Peter through the gauntlet of the crowd, and the people spat at his feet, and somebody got him across the face with a banana peel. But mostly they had come only to look. What kind of man put a dead body on a bus like a piece of trash? Here was the man. A man like this.
At the same time that my mother had been crying out the story to the police captain, who demanded, “Is that right? Is that right?” as his eyes widened, a girl on the morning bus to Mangalore had covered her head with a fold of her green sari, pulled out her left breast in the tent she had made, and guided her long nipple into the mouth of her restless child. The bus turned a corner, following the road down out of the mountains, and she leaned heavily against the shoulder of the old man as it did. “Excuse, Uncle,” she whispered to him, not loud enough to wake him if he was asleep, and not so quietly that she wouldn’t be heard if he wasn’t. In front, the driver took a swallow from his vodka bottle to clear his head, set it back down by his boot. Then he stomped the brake and wheeled the bus hard into the next curve. The dead body flopped onto the girl’s lap, knocked her child to the floor, looked at her with one eyelid flapped up and its mouth wide-open beneath her fat breast, which dribbled milk into it. But even that wasn’t enough. The girl jumped up screaming so her breasts flopped out from her sari, up and down, and the boys going to Goa thanked Jesus, and everyone on the bus, even the driver, turned their heads to see what was going on. But the ones who suffered most were, as always, the harijans up top, who neither got to see that girl’s incredible breasts, nor understand why they were flying through the air as the driver slammed the brakes at the edge of the ravine, which the bus did not go over, but the refrigerator did, taking all those chickens and bananas and rice sacks and wedding and funeral gifts with it, and leaving behind it on the slope it tore down sixteen shirtless brown men without an ounce of body fat between them but plenty, now, of broken bones.
On the bus, the man in the suit stood up and said, “My fridge!”
The Peace Corps would foot the bill for that one. And gladly. Because the only man who died that day, as my mother sobbed to the police, had been dead the night before.
The U.S. ambassador, along with the Peace Corps country director, decided to let Peter spend two more days in the Bangalore prison. Then the ambassador made the necessary phone calls, and Peter flew home to Richmond. My mother and Lenore were pulled from Hassan because its residents had taken to throwing stones at their house as they passed. But not before my mother traveled with the cook’s body, in a coffin she had paid for, to cremate him in his home village in the mountains in Kerala. She also paid for the wood of the funeral pyre, as well as for the Brahmin to come from the local temple and consecrate it. Once the Brahmin had left, she watched the cook’s body blacken and burn in the heat of the flame, and his wife made one symbolic suttee rush to the pyre herself, only to be restrained by a touch of the cook’s sister’s hand.
“Rama would be honored to know that you came,” the wife said to my mother in Malayalam through a man who spoke English, and the man wagged his eyebrows at my mother, smiled in a happy way, and said, “Because you are white.”
Lenore never did sleep with Peter Merchant. “I hope they let us stay together,” Lenore said to my mother as they sat on the bench in Bombay in their blouses and jeans outside the Peace Corps country director’s office. Then the director came out with a clipboard, and he waved my mother in.
“Where do you think you should be stationed next, Denise?”
“Somewhere where there are no Americans.”
The Jews of India
During the Raj, the British gave my grandfather certificates of service, pieces o
f parchment that conveyed the gratitude of King George VI on behalf of his subjects, and my grandfather framed the first of these and hung it on the wall of the central room of the house, next to his diploma from the Britishers’ police training academy in Bombay, and below the wooden cross of his god. The central room was where family life occurred: an uncovered cement floor, blue-painted walls with the occasional crack in them, the odd territory of black mold along the edges of the ceiling. Pushed against the wall was the heavy rosewood table they’d laid my grandfather on after he’d been shot. The servants pulled it away from the wall for lunch and dinner, and on Sunday after church, when my grandfather would receive and feed guests. The room’s major adornment was an ivory-and-agate-inlaid teak hutch like a dresser with a sealed and dusty bottle of Beefeater standing on it. His father’s second brother had given the bottle to him for his wedding. While the Portuguese drank port in their little Goa, the British drank gin in the rest of India. My grandfather was in a British uniform now, so why not have a bottle handy in case a British officer dropped by?
Upstairs were three rooms, my grandparents’ bedroom, another for the children to sleep in on mats, and the third slept in by my great-grandmother, who had lost her wits after her husband’s death, and haunted the house and the room as though she wasn’t even alive in it. On the wall were a cross with a blue rosary hanging from it and a picture of my great-grandfather’s face, his hair trimmed, his mustache neat, not smiling, the photo black and white. When my father was four, the old woman died. Then that room became his. Everyone called it Babu’s Room.
All around them lived Konkans in tidy houses, the Britishers’ Konkan police officers, yes, but merchants and advocates and transportation managers, too, and their quarter was called the Christian Colony. The families’ pigs slopped in its gutters, the children played rag ball in the streets. Whenever possible, the Konkans of Chikmagalur did business among themselves, and the wealthy families of the Christian Colony brought in poor Konkans from the coast to keep house. These servants were usually very young girls, who slept on mats in the kitchens, working for some years to help their fathers pay their eventual dowries. These girls would in fact grow up there. The Konkan wife’s main duty, aside from having sons, was to scold her useless servants, or so it would seem from the amount of yelling to be heard in the neighborhood, especially around dinnertime.
The town itself was a bustling, commercial center just off the road between Mangalore on the coast and sprawling Bangalore in the interior, and all day railcars laden with goods passed through the district in the exchange between those two great cities. From the port of Mangalore came British steel, cement, paper, textiles, engines, and machines of every sort, and from Bangalore came the wealth of south India: hardwoods, coffee, gemstones, cardamom, pepper, silver, rubber, silk. Chikmagalur sat on that rich route like a mosquito tapped into a vein. All of that commerce was what had drawn Konkan merchants to the town from the coast centuries before, and when the British showed up, the established families collaborated and ran it.
My grandfather stole from the British and the Hindus equally, though through different methods. The British had the guns, so with them my grandfather had to nip and pluck. With the Hindus, who had no guns at all, it was simply a matter of taking.
My grandfather was a tough man. He cuffed adults as casually as he did his wife and children. Laundry washers, rickshaw drivers, fishmongers, everyone knew not to transgress against my grandfather during the Raj. And when the British left, the Hindus came to his house in the Christian Colony to kill him.
Because there was that story my uncle Sam would tell me. Of the sandalwood poachers. That my grandfather and his men had waited for the poachers, hidden in the shadows of the forest where the sandalwood trees grew. Their uniforms were wet and heavy from the mugginess of the forest, flies worried their ears, their eyes, red leeches thin as threads inched all the way up to latch on and suckle on the backs of their necks until they were as fat as slugs. Then they’d drop off to the leaf litter, leaving behind a trickle of blood, and the eventual pocklike scar. For days they did this, my grandfather and his men, four Konkans, as well as two young Hindus, because high-caste Hindus collaborated, too. The light of the morning came down through the forest in shafts. Somehow, even when it wasn’t raining, rain fell in that forest. It was a world of secrets and confinement, and they knew that somewhere in it were tigers. Not one of them liked that place, but first they knew there were men in it, cutting down the precious sandalwood trees, and if they let these men cut the trees down, there would soon be no trees left.
Sandalwood never relinquishes its scent. For all the purple extravagance of freshly cut plum, as with nearly every other wood, plum smells like nothing once it dries. But sandalwood is the smell of India, and as anyone who owns a carved box of it knows, to sniff it is to step into a postcard of that place, to open the lid is to be enveloped in the land of the dancing gods. But also from my mother I knew that my grandfather and his men were not in the forest to save the rare trees from ever being cut, but only from being cut by the poachers. The sandalwood trees of India are turned into boxes, are burned in the world’s incense sticks. My grandfather and his men were there to save those trees for themselves.
In the night at their camp, the Hindus boiled their rice, and the Konkans boiled theirs. They slept apart from each other in that way, too. For the Hindus, there were rigors of spiritual cleanliness. The Konkans didn’t have that, but they did have their language, which belonged just to them. They sat about their fire and spoke it. The Hindus built their own fire and spoke their Kannada. The Konkans’ fire leaped up in the dark of the forest, blotting out the stars, making a room for them with its light against the trees. The shadows of my grandfather’s men gestured like giants against the walls of that room as they talked.
“They say these Bombay mutineers killed their white officers.”
“Why didn’t the British kill them when they had the chance?”
“The Muslims and Hindus will slaughter each other in Hyderabad now.”
“They will slaughter each other in Kashmir.”
“If the Muslims are given their own country, then we deserve our own country as well.”
“We do deserve our own country. But we don’t have a Jinnah.”
“Jinnah is the ruin of India.”
“Jinnah is a greedy Muslim bastard.”
“It’s different for us. Safer. The Portuguese will never leave Goa.”
“Everything is madness now.”
“The Sardars will kill the Muslims in Punjab until they run out of bullets.”
“Or until they run out of Muslims.”
“The Sardars have been sharpening their swords and waiting for this.”
“Those lucky Sardars.”
“At least there will always be the Portuguese.”
“Those sailors in Bombay are Hindus. Nehru sees he has a navy now.”
“We can always go to Goa.”
“Maybe nothing will happen at all.”
“Why did they ever let Gandhi come here and start all of this? Why couldn’t they have simply killed him when they had the chance?”
“They say they shot their white officers.”
“They should have killed him and sent him back the very first day.”
“Life has become a rumor.”
“We could have all thrown rocks at his body.”
“It’s rumored they were shot at first.”
“It is too late to stop any of it now.”
“What will we do if the British leave?”
“I will go to Goa.”
“I say, what will we do if the British leave?”
“I have everything here. Everything that belongs to me is here.”
“Have you heard this talk about a reckoning?”
“Nehru is the brain. He laughs at the old man behind his back now.”
“Listen to me. What will we do if the British leave us?”
“I will go t
o Goa.”
“Gandhi talks his foolishness. But the others know this life. The first thing they will do is close the banks.”
“Don’t talk all these things.”
“Then they will take our guns.”
“Don’t talk all these things.”
“I will go to Goa.”
“There will be nowhere we can go.”
“They will put up checkpoints.”
“They will look for us in our homes.”
“They will wait for us outside our churches.”
“They will burn us in our churches as we kneel to say our Mass.”
“I will take off my uniform and take the bus to Goa.”
“They will know you by your Catholic name.”
“Your neighbors will denounce you.”
“They will pull down your pants and look at your dick.”
“They will make you step on a crucifix.”
“They will make you curse the Virgin.”
“They will cut off your dick, stuff it in your mouth.”