Or could it be that…?
It could be!
PHIROZ! So the old man still had his wits about him after all. The effect had outpaced the cause – it was all the other way round from what he suspected it to be! Phiroz’s large, weathered ears, tuned in to whispers in a thousand places, had picked up the news from somewhere, and he’d put in his papers – he’d spoken before he could be spoken to. Not for Phiroz the ignominy of the dismissal from service, such as the one he’d just received himself. He’d put the gun to his own head, and gone out triumphant – old, doddering, and yet unbeaten. There would be no more head projectionists of the Noor – Phiroz was packing up his post and station with him. He’d not told anybody either – he’d kept the news to himself, like the canny old Parsi that he was under that air of senility and absent-mindedness.
Phiroz! At least the old man could have warned him! Did all these years that they’d been working in concert count for nothing? Granted, many days they didn’t talk at all, or if they did, it was of the same humdrum matters. It was true that, although Phiroz knew about Mother and Mobin, and had met Mother on occasion, and Arzee knew that Phiroz’s wife was long gone, and that the only family he had was a daughter, the subject of family never came up between the two projectionists. They shared work, shared space, shared time, but did not share confidences. But that was how it was in Bombay – everybody was like that! And a gap of more than forty years separated them in age, so their relationship was naturally somewhat formal. Yet they were linked together by ties of profession, by the sharing of the projection room and the Babur, by the fact of one generation being succeeded by another. If in such circumstances the older didn’t look after the younger – it was a kind of treachery, simple as that. Phiroz had thought only of himself – he’d decided to mind his own business and consolidate his own position, and leave the world to find out for itself and take care of itself. Rajneesh Sharma, Abjani, Phiroz – all the people at the Noor had turned out to be such small and selfish men.
Phiroz! ‘He never said anything to me, but I’ll say plenty to him!’ thought Arzee, as he leapt to his feet and hurried out of the deserted balcony. He went past the gallery of women without a sideways glance, and flew through the door to the projection room and then up. From halfway up the stairs that he conquered two at a time, he could smell Phiroz – the smell of sandalwood soap, of meekness and innocence. He hissed and scooted up ever faster, the blood pounding in his head. He’d catch old Phiroz, hector him till he pleaded guilty.
Up in the high-ceilinged room with the pitted stone floor, at its centre the big black Babur now silent and still, the cabinets around its perimeter full of reels, the mouldy walls plastered with pictures, calendars, and a poster of Tendulkar with his knee bent over a straight-drive, and the dog sprawled in a corner, Arzee found the head projectionist bent over like a tree in a storm, his back towards him. Phiroz had opened the gate of the Babur, and was peering into the interiors of the machinery. Above his head a pantheon of deities installed on a shelf, their realm encircled and hallowed by a garland of twinkling blue lights, were looking down upon the Parsi with sad, pious eyes. Ahura Mazda, Ganesha, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Mother Mary… Phiroz respected all gods equally, and by putting them shoulder to shoulder he made sure they had no choice but to respect each other as well. Three clocks were ticking away on the walls, and one of them was set two hours back to Iranian time, because that was where Phiroz’s late wife was from. On a stove in the far corner milk was being warmed. Smoke from an incense stick wafted across the room and out of the window, where on the wide sill a dozen ruby-eyed pigeons had stopped to stare at Arzee. This was the room – this was the room to which Phiroz had given thirty years of his life, and Arzee almost ten, and which would soon be only a memory.
The old projectionist shut the gate of the Babur now, and turned and saw Arzee. He stared at him goggle-eyed from behind his glasses. It seemed to take him a few seconds to figure out who he was.
‘Why are you late?’ he asked, his upper lip rising and falling peevishly beneath his moustache. ‘Is this a whorehouse, that you come and go as you please?’
Phiroz wiped his greasy hands on a dirty cloth and came forward, hobbling. He burped and mumbled ‘Beans’ to himself before asking again, ‘Eh? Why do you come so late?’
Look! Look how he’d cleverly gone on the attack before he could be pinned down himself! Arzee had to search for a few moments before he could find a reply that dragged Phiroz back where he wanted him.
‘So, Phirozbhai,’ he said, drawing out every word, ‘how are you doing today?’
‘All right,’ said Phiroz, folding a plastic packet into a very small square and putting it in his pocket. ‘Got a bit of pain here – right here. Indigestion, I think. I’ve been searching for a sprocket that’s been making a scratching sound in the machine, but I can’t find it. Strange. You try.’
‘Indigestion?’ repeated Arzee. ‘O-ho. O-ho. Is indigestion your only problem, Phirozbhai? Aren’t you feeling a pain anywhere else?’
‘Only problem? What are you saying? I have problems upon problems.’
‘O-ho! Problems upon problems. I see. And what is your biggest problem, Phirozbhai? The one that’s troubling you the most?’
‘Right now it’s gold,’ declared Phiroz. ‘The old gold’ll have to be melted down.’
‘Gold? What gold?’
‘The old gold. Those ornaments can’t be worn any more. And then there’s the caterers, and the presents for the other side.’
‘Caterers? What for?’
‘For the wedding.’
‘Whose wedding?’
‘My daughter’s wedding.’
‘Your daughter’s getting married?!’
‘On Monday the twenty-seventh,’ said Phiroz, peering at a wall calendar gifted to him by the neighbourhood pharmacy as if to confirm that the day matched with the date. ‘It’s outside my home – in the Old Wadia Chawl. Come, and also bring your mother and brother. Now – I’ll take a look at this later. The caterers told me to come at three. And before that I have to go to the bank.’ He turned the gas off and poured Tyson his milk, which the dog began to lap up eagerly, sloshing it over the sides of the bowl.
So Phiroz was getting his daughter married – it was news upon news today! Realizing that soon he wouldn’t have an income any longer, the old man was crossing off his liabilities before he retired. It was all right for Phiroz to be thinking of his daughter, of feasts, of gold, but all this was coming at somebody’s expense – Arzee’s! His future wife, combing her hair or cooking lunch in Nasik, was dropping out of his sight like the sun falling into the sea, while on the other side girls like Phiroz’s daughter were being presented with husbands. It was all connected, just as Deepak had said that day – no, only two hours ago! Arzee saw the pattern – saw how he was being edged out of the picture.
‘And do you know what I was thinking, Phirozbhai?’ he said with a harsh laugh. ‘Foolish me. Foolish me! I was thinking that –’
‘It’s time for me to be going,’ declared Phiroz. ‘Everybody is waiting.’ He approached the gods and flicked a switch, and the lights around them went out. He put his tiffin box into the jute bag lying on the chair, and slung the bag onto his shoulder.
‘Phirozbhai! Wait!’
‘Tomorrow – we’ll talk tomorrow. It’s time for the show to begin. So get to work on the show.’
‘But we’re going to be – I’m going to be –’
‘Tomorrow!’ insisted Phiroz. ‘My daughter’s only going to get married once. Try and understand. And look at the clock! It’s already past three. People are waiting, and you’ve only just arrived. Any other projectionist would be ashamed, but not you.’
‘I –’
‘Goodbye.’
Phiroz went down the stairs slowly, putting the same foot forward each time like a statue who’d just learnt how to walk. Legs, torso, head: bit by bit he disappeared from view. Tyson, having downed his milk, went loping down aft
er the old man, who had taken him off the streets many years ago. As he descended, a flake of paint from the peeling wall came floating down and landed upon his back, and he carried it out with him gracefully. Arzee kicked his empty bowl over.
‘He’s escaped,’ he thought. ‘Bastards! They’re all in this together! They’re old, and comfortable, so they don’t care for those who’re not. To not care…that’s why the world is where it is today! – No, this is a dream, I know, in which the worst fears come rising up. – No, it’s not a dream, any more than life is a dream! This is for real. What should I do now? What must I do? I…
‘I…
‘Shit, I can’t think a thing! My brain’s stuck! This is a room, this is the projector, these are the walls, that is the window… today’s the thirteenth, my birthday’s on the twenty-fourth of November. This headache’s drilling a hole through me!’
Hoots and whistles came floating up from the darkness below. He’d forgotten the show! But let it be late…what did he care? Let them all go out again swearing and shouting, and petition for a refund. Let Abjani fire him. He’d break everything – make little pieces of everything before he left.
But the reflex was too strong. A projectionist’s first cause, whether he was living or dying, was always that of the show. The show was not supposed to suffer, just as children were not supposed to suffer. Cursing himself, Arzee hurried to the slide projector and switched on the message written by Phiroz’s trembling hand in green sketch-pen that said ‘Please stand up for the national anthem’. He could hear the men below stand up, grumbling. Arzee turned on the tape of ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and all the power switches, and rushed over to the reel cabinet and hauled out the first reel of Saathi. The anthem began to play midway: some of its sentiments had been cut, and half the peoples and territories it described were gone. Phiroz hadn’t rewound the tape properly!
The Babur came to life with a shudder. Still cursing, Arzee jumped onto a stool beside one arm of the machine and loaded the reel, then closed the gate. The bright light of the xenon lamp flooded out of the projector at both ends, and with a humming and a clacking all the parts were set in motion. The boom of the soundtrack sounded in the auditorium. Arzee stuck his nose through the shutter in the front wall, and saw the beam being thrown out across the Noor’s vast vault. The picture was slightly out of focus. Muttering, he made some adjustments, then peered through the shutter again and was satisfied. He stood with his face pressed to the edge of the darkness for a long time, looking at the doomed motes of golden light flutter out like fireflies.
The great beam…what a miraculous thing it was! As he never tired of reminding those who thought movie projection was no different from selling soap or making entries in a ledger, the xenon lamps of the Babur were so powerful they took a picture the size of a passport photograph, and threw it out onto the screen magnified to three thousand times its original size! The Babur’s throw was a hundred and fifty feet – it was hard to throw a cricket ball that far, and here the thing being thrown was something weightless! The moving, talking figures of the big screen, brighter, sharper, more real than reality itself – they were actually nothing but light on a black ribbon! He loved the great machine – always had ever since the time he’d first come up into this room at the age of thirteen, on a special request from Mother on his behalf, and been initiated into its wonders by Phiroz. The sound of the reel coursing inside the Babur was like the sound of the thought inside his brain whenever his head grew warm.
‘Lost!’ he thought, shivering. ‘This time it’s all over! I’ve been robbed naked. And I was part of it – I set up my own fall by imagining it a victory! For two days I’ve been giddy with happiness, floating with pleasure! For what? For this!’
A sudden drop in the light outside drew him, over dry leaves, bird feathers, and snips of celluloid, to the window. Outside, the rain, which had been coming and going all day, had stopped, but a heavy cloud, like a black screen as big as the Noor’s white one, had taken over the centre of the sky. He could see the lips of people moving down in the street, talking about useless, unimportant things – they had no idea about the Noor! Over the last fortnight the leaves of the badam tree below had been turning red in twos and threes, and on a pair of red leaves two pigeons were necking. Inside, the Babur burned an even brighter gold.
‘And what will happen now to this machine?’ he wondered.
For thirty years the Babur had been standing in the same place in the same room, breathing out four shows a day, keeping time like the sun. And it was connected – Arzee was certain that it was connected up to the railway lines that, in the distance, hummed and rattled with traffic, and further out, to the tides that waxed and waned on Bombay’s winding shore – to the traffic signals that blinked their red and green eyes at the nodes of the city’s veins, to the masses that surged forward and back on the streets as if on the crest of waves. The Babur was part of the system – the great beam was one of the pillars and supports holding it all together. Nobody knew of it, no one thought about it, but it was there, and when it collapsed everything else would founder. They said that one day the sun would blow itself out, and all life on earth would end instantly. The day the great beam was blown out, he knew, would be such a world-ending day.
He heard the door opening below. After a few moments there appeared the head of Sule, looking as if he expected to be ambushed any moment. Sule’s slippers made small flapping noises on the stone. He caught Arzee’s eye, and seemed to cower at his expression.
‘What is it? What’ve you come for?’
‘Just to check if you…needed…any help.’
‘I don’t need any help, and especially not from you. Get lost!’
Sule turned and left, as slowly and painfully as he had come. ‘Get lost, get lost, get lost’…the words of wrath seemed to echo in the silence. At the window the pigeons pecked and cooed, as if offering delicate commiseration for the revelation that now Arzee too, like Sule, was only a temporary projectionist at the Noor.
SIX
Mother and Other Elders
It was past midnight when Arzee left the Noor after the last, sparsely attended show and set out for home. This was his usual hour of return. Movie halls, bars, brothels, and police stations – these were the only establishments that stayed open past midnight. Of these cinemas were the most respectable: they closed first.
On the street of blots and shadows, Arzee was the only person still on his feet. People lay everywhere in the single condition and many poses of slumber. As he approached Grant Road Bridge he came across two bodies groaning and thrusting in the dark; he couldn’t even tell if they were man and woman, or some other combination. He spat to one side, and hurried away. Further on he came across one person who was still awake: an old man in a vest and shorts, shovelling food from a plastic carton into his maw as he gazed blankly into the distance. In two days it would be a full sixty years since Independence. And yet there were still so many poor, so many jobless, so many homeless. All the seams which held society together were fraying; the old world was being beaten, kicked, pounded by the new. If matters continued the way they were, he was sure that very soon there would be a great conflagration.
‘What a day it’s been!’ he thought. ‘I don’t know how I’ve seen it through.’
He had already retreated – retreated from life. At six o’clock he had not gone down for a cup of tea between shows as he always did, because he couldn’t bear to come face to face with the wretched world into which he was being dumped. Nor had he ordered anything up. He had stayed hungry all day. When dusk fell, he had not lit the candle in the corner that flooded the projection room with leaping and flickering shadows, and that allowed him to become a human Babur by making animal shapes on the walls with his fingers. He had not opened any cupboards or cabinets, from which all kinds of interesting objects and documents could be relied upon to emerge. Nor had he spent a single minute studying his face in the mirror, or flicking his hair into shape. He had no
t played any of his favourite music for the audience in the intervals, nor repeated, as he worked, any lines of dialogue freshly plucked from the show. He had not done anything. He did not feel like anything.
He’d taken fright, he saw – it was so easy to, on a worldending day such as this. He’d spun around all day in a whirlpool of imaginary conversations: with Abjani, Phiroz, himself, others from the past. But what were they worth? His accusations and reproaches were heard by no one but himself, sapped the strength and patience of no adversary of himself. And he had to stay alive, he had to take care of himself now! When trouble came calling, he knew from experience, it was never the pistol-shot, the hot instant, of disaster itself that menaced a man’s self-possession, but the way the mind went the same thing over and over again, crackling, smouldering, like a body on a pyre till it collapsed into ashes.
But this time he wasn’t the Arzee of old – he wasn’t to forget that! He couldn’t be shaken so easily – he gave as good as he got, matched hit with hit. He’d proved this that very morning with Deepak. Anything could happen in two months. So it would be foolish to go under before the time. The looming hour might be averted somehow, and then everything would be as it always was. How miraculous that would be! If that happened, if the old settings of his life were restored, he’d never complain or be miserable about anything again, no matter what happened. Even if Phiroz returned to the Noor, and kept the job of head projectionist till he was a hundred, he wouldn’t say a thing. What he possessed – what he had lost today – was enough.
Arzee the Dwarf Page 5