‘Because your real parents were Christian!’ Mother broke into a fresh burst of sobs, and began rocking back and forth again. ‘We adopted you, son, and took you up into our way.’
‘They were…Christian?’ whispered Arzee, and it was as if a hundred spirits had invaded him, for the expression on his face changed with every second. He looked dumbly at the floor and then at his feet, and then slowly he raised his head again.
‘And Mobin?’ he asked.
‘What about Mobin, son?’
‘Is he also adopted?’
‘How could he be adopted, son? What are you saying?’
‘So it’s only me!’ shouted Arzee. ‘It’s only me!’
He sank down on his haunches, trembling, and began to gather up the broken pieces of china. He didn’t know how long he took to gather them, because some were small as breadcrumbs. And yet Arzee picked them up piece by piece, watering them with his tears, and then he stood up and wiped his face several times upon his sleeves. He saw that Mother was staring at him. And she looked strange too – she didn’t look like Mother. It was as if they had become strangers once again, as they must have once been in the deeps of time.
‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault,’ she whispered, and her eyes were big. She pointed to the sky. ‘It’s all destiny, son, and no one can run away from his destiny. Arzee! I wouldn’t have told you, son, but I couldn’t bear the burden any more, because I’m the only one left in the world who knows. The truth always comes out one day, that’s what the holy books say. Say something, Arzee. Say you forgive me! Say you forgive us all!’
Arzee turned away, trembling.
‘Say something, son! Say whatever you like! Arzoo!’
‘I always told you,’ said Arzee, in a flat, stony voice. ‘I always told you it’s not your fault that I’m a dwarf.’
And then, without another word, he turned and left.
Slowly he went down the stairs, more falling than walking, clinging blindly to the railing. A bell was pealing loudly nearby. It seemed as if a storm was rising – a storm was rising that would carry him away, back past all these years he had lived, back to the very beginning, when he knew nothing at all and could only make sounds. As he walked out onto the street and stood there, exposed, the bell stopped ringing.
And now the gate of the school compound burst open and the children came charging out in a fighting, boisterous mass, their schoolbags bumping on their backs like humps, squirting ink and shooting paper pellets and whipping and slashing with their unloosened ties. They came running down the street, and soon they were all around Arzee. The life force emanated from them in waves. Arzee moved back to let them pass, and turned his face the other way so that they would not see he was crying. But a fat boy, already bigger and heavier than he, ran straight into him, and Arzee was bumped over. As he lay flat on the ground, dust streamed into Arzee’s eyes and nostrils, and as he tried to rise someone else ran right over his chest and knocked the breath out of him. A tumult of legs, socks and shoes flew over him for an eternity. When it had passed, leaving behind only a few stragglers, Arzee found himself looking up into a grey sky as empty as his own self.
He was not Arzee. ‘Arzee’ was just a story he’d been told about himself.
He was not his mother’s real son.
His real parents had drowned at sea.
And he was a dwarf. Not even Arzee the dwarf. Just no one the dwarf.
Was there anybody else in the world like he?
No! It was only him.
Who was he?
What was he?
Why was he?
TWELVE
The Body’s Secret Grief
Who in Bombay stays at home on Saturday evenings? As the red sun lowered itself into the sea, the battered sands of Chowpatty beach were host to a carnival for what seemed like a tenth of the city’s numbers. And somewhere in the middle of lovers furtively holding and letting go of hands, families struggling to keep their fold together, old people discussing the difference between old and new times, students taking a break, the unemployed killing time, touts fixing deals, small-towners marvelling wide-eyed, children building castles, dogs digging hollows, balloons dilating, and bubbles bursting, there sat a small figure with his knees drawn up to his chin and his head bowed, and he was a dissident from all the chatter and laughter, horn-blowing and whistle-tooting, eating and drinking, staring and winking, around him, for there was a great churning inside his own head that consumed him.
That was why – that was why – that was why!
Everything was becoming clear to Arzee; all the truths of his life that were actually misunderstandings were now falling to the ground. ‘That was whys’ were fizzing inside his head like fireworks in a night sky, and as each one lit up a separate truth, revelation attached itself to the most trivial details, and the city of his own life slowly changed colour and form.
That was why there were no baby photographs of himself in the family albums, when there were baby photographs with Mobin – of Father and Mother with Mobin. It wasn’t because photography was too expensive at the beginning of the eighties, as he’d always been told. It was because he hadn’t been around!
And that was why his nose wasn’t like either Father’s or Mother’s, when the noses of all children invariably took after those of their parents. How could it be? Names could be changed with a change in family, but not noses.
And that was why Mother had always been so solicitous of his health and happiness, and took fright even if he came down with a cold. On meat days she always let him eat both legs of the chicken, and on other days the larger share of all other good things. All through his childhood he only had to stamp his foot, or shed a few tears, and Mother would give in to his demands, while Mobin had to whine for hours before he had his way.
And Mobin – Arzee saw now what his relationship with Mobin – Mobin whose nose took after Father’s – really was. Clearly the truth had always lived just below the surface of the fiction, for all their lives they had never really behaved as blood brothers. They never told each other their secrets, nor did they fight with each other and compete for everything as other brothers did. From the beginning they scarcely had any friends or interests in common; they stuck to their own orbits. In a way Phiroz was more his brother than Mobin, and for good reason. You couldn’t make brothers by decree, any more that you could get the sun and the moon to rise at the same time.
And was that why he could never believe in God, never feel the caress of faith and divinity – not just because he was a dwarf, as he’d always thought, and in a class and school of his own, and not just because he was from a home of mixed faith. He’d never been told his true faith either, because the entire edifice of his life depended on such things being concealed. And now it was too late, and he was too mixed up.
Joseph! Where was Joseph? Was he just the surface, and Joseph the core? He the visible shell, and Joseph the kernel in the dark? Arzee felt a presence screaming inside him, kicking, as if he were with child! It was as if he’d been torn up from the roots, the roots that all children naturally and with good reason take for granted. He was two beings within one, two names, three religions, four parents – he was a piece of patchwork made with the wildest needle! For all the years that he’d been shuttling stories out onto the screen through the Babur, on the wings of the great beam, he’d been living a story too, playing the part of Arzee with the greatest conviction! And he’d thought he couldn’t be harried, buffeted, debilitated, any more than he was, but all his troubles of the last year were just the rising winds leading up to this mortal storm! He wasn’t just Arzee the dwarf, besieged by troubles – his very Arzee-ness was now a ramshackle building, just like the Noor! His life, his self were a vast work of the imagination – of Father’s, of Mother’s, his own – and that was the only way in which it had been made livable, bearable. He was not Arzee, and yet he couldn’t be anyone but Arzee – the graft had been in place far too long.
‘And my real pare
nts?’ he thought. ‘What were their names? Were their faces beautiful? How did they drown…in the sea, in the very sea I’m facing! Where were they buried? Have they been speaking to me in secret all my life…do they live on through me somehow, as parents do?’
And Mother and Father? Mother’s revelations had just scratched the surface. There was so much that he still had to know! What was that day like when he was orphaned, when he cried for his mother and she did not come? What was his first night like in his new home? He wished he could remember – it seemed to Arzee he could dimly recall something. And if they hadn’t taken him in, where would he have grown up? In an orphanage, wearing hand-me-downs, eating watery and greasy meals, growing wild on the charity of society. It seemed then to Arzee that it was better to be the Arzee that he was instead of the Joseph he could have been. ‘It’s not right this way, but it’s not right the other way either. It’s not right at all…but it isn’t my fault.’ That’s what Mother had said, and she was right. How she must have suffered all these years! How she must have trembled when she saw him looking at himself in the mirror! Did she still lie awake at night after he came home from the cinema, thinking of him looking in resentment at his small bed before he lay down to sleep? Ever since it turned out he was a dwarf, their relationship had changed for good, when the truth was that his miserable body had nothing to do with her. That unfortunate stuntedness had its roots in another womb, and then his real mother was gone, leaving him to face the jests of the world.
And here something flashed across Arzee’s eyes and seemed to pounce at his throat, and he was so startled that he threw himself face-down into the sand and lay there wild-eyed, panting.
It was clear now that Mother was not responsible for his dwarfhood. His real mother was.
But what if his real mother wasn’t responsible either?
What if…what if it was the trauma of losing his parents that had stunned his limbs? What if the dwarfhood that defined him, imprisoned him, tormented him, been acquired between mothers, in that turbulence of his infant life? It could be. No – it was probable! No, it was true!
And in that case Arzee hadn’t been a dwarf to begin with, needn’t have been a dwarf – it was circumstances that had made him so! He could have been as tall as any other, enjoyed full citizenship in the world of the fives and the sixes. But even though he had no memory of the death of his real parents, the memory had lived on in his body.
The memory was in his body! It was speaking, to this day, whenever he broke bread and counted out change with his small fingers or loaded the reel with his little hands. It was present in every step he took with his two bunty legs. It was in his upward gaze at the rest of humanity, and in the striving of all his half-grown limbs. And until today he’d not had the ears to hear this speaking! Losing one’s parents was a fact of life. But when other people lost their parents, they were bereaved for a month, two months, at most a year, and then they moved on. But he was still grieving for his real parents to this very day – was condemned always to grieve, with every breath that his stunted heart took. And as his very being was soaked from top to toe in a secret grief, was it any surprise that his waking life was so perilous and so troubled? No one could have ever had a life like this. It was only him.
That was what had been wracking Mother all these years, and now Arzee saw it too, and he fell over on the sand and wept as if at a friend’s funeral – wept for what he was, and what he could have been. For the second time in two days he broke down in the midst of strangers, and once again people gathered around him and asked him what the matter was, and offered him water and words, and inquired if there was a family member they could call – a family member! And Arzee didn’t – couldn’t – say a word in reply, but jumped up and went running, running into the night on his ever-mourning legs, in search of a place where no one would trouble him with their belated, useless, wretched sympathy, a sympathy that could never grasp even a sliver of all that he had suffered.
Night fell upon him in that quiet place, among rocks, and at last he curled up in the sand with his hands beneath his head and took his leave of the bitter day.
It was Sunday morning. Most of Bombay was still in bed. But at the church of St. Stephen near Grant Road, mass had been in session for nearly an hour. The faithful had read from their books, and were now fitfully following a sermon delivered in a serene monotone by a cassocked priest at the pew. The priest seemed to have found peace, light, and truth long ago and never been troubled by a doubt thereafter; if he stopped, it was only to polish his glasses on his sleeve. The rays of the sun streaming in through the high stained-glass windows illuminated motes of dust trembling above the heads of the congregation.
The sermon suddenly came to an end. With a snapping shut of Bibles and a clearing of throats and a stretching of limbs most of the faithful began to file out of church, while a few hung around to rest before the priest their troubles, questions, and confessions. Some of the people cast curious glances upon a very short man sitting all by himself on a bench right at the back, and two girls tittered over a joke aimed at him. But Arzee ignored them steadfastly, for they knew not what they were doing.
Why was Arzee here? Not to commune with the spirit of Jesus, as he had on that other world-ending day two weeks ago, but in memory of his long-departed parents, the parents for whom he had once upon a time been their son Joseph, and who, if they were alive, might have been one of the many elderly couples here this morning. Just as he occasionally entered a temple in memory of Father, or spent a few minutes in the mosque in deference to Mother’s sentiments, so it seemed meet to Arzee, in these hours of stillness and numbness after his long night of burning and torments, that he should be here in this church – for this one morning at least, even if twenty-six years too late. He watched and listened to everything with a new curiosity, seeing and hearing as his real parents might have. And perhaps now that he had paid this tribute, the souls of those departed and denied ones would finally rest in peace. He had so many parents to look after!
After the desolation of the night, Arzee was grateful for the presence of so many people all around him. This was his future: to be in the midst of people he did not know, in places where he had never been seen. He was not rooted in anything, and what little he had gained in his confused and ridiculous life he had automatically lost, like a fool to whom are entrusted riches. Itinerancy now beckoned him, would be his salvation. He felt as if he was falling away from persons, the faces and voices of his twenty-eight years, even the foster mother who had made some kind of man of him, and towards people, the nameless throng, the world of the anonymous and the rootless. He was going back home now, but if on the way he came across some other religious gathering, political rally, or streetside grouping, he’d join that crowd too. He’d absorb the looks on faces, and the things that were being said by eyes, and the fit of clothes over bodies; he’d search for the sentiments that ruffled the common air, and eavesdrop on the whispers that shuttled between person and person. He saw that his life was to be a journey, and that there was no home for him anywhere except in the hut of his own crooked self. Even before the day of revelation, everything had been building up to this – before the crash of the gong there had been a rising agitation, a hot whispering, that had puzzled him all these days and that puzzled him no more. The fall of the Noor! That appearance of Jesus! The questions of Deepak! The days in a bottle! The last defiant surge, in memory, of his days with Monique!
‘I’ll go far, far from here,’ he thought, his beady eyes sucked deep into a revelatory rumination. ‘I’ll be on my own, and I’ll be my own best company. I’ll keep moving – on foot, by bus, by train. I’ll live – I will! I’ll talk. I’ll answer when questioned. I’ll smile when someone smiles. But I won’t rage. I won’t cry. I won’t raise my voice. I’ll be of this world, and yet separate from it – nothing can trouble me any more, because I’ve already seen the worst. And I won’t be miserable either, because after this what hold can suffering have o
ver me? Yes…when I wake up at the foot of a mountain, when I round a bend on the road and see the sea before me, when I hear children laughing at play, when I share my meagre meal with someone worse off than me – that’s when I’ll know who I am and what my life is. I’ve lived so many lives already, I’ve seen incarnations! Now I’ll live another: I’ll be a new man. I was so miserable, so desperate, so abject! But now I’m at peace, now I’m strong, because I’ve left my make-believe life behind. I won’t fight my destiny, but embrace it, for the first time in all my years. To live with this truth, to live in truth – that’s what I must learn. And this time I won’t fear Mother, because I must do what I have to. I don’t fear anybody or anything any more. For twenty-eight years I dealt with the world from below. But now I’ll be above it all, and they won’t be able to touch me.’
As he approached his building, he saw the narrow passageway leading to the sanctuary where he had nurtured so many hopes and paraded so many resentments, and he turned in. The last time he had ventured out here the ground had been a squelchy slop, but after the rainless spell of the last two weeks the grass had dried up and the soil was cracking. The brown frogs that had been hopping about with such energy that day, as if they were his own thoughts given form, were nowhere to be seen, but the broken red plastic chair and discarded toilet seat were just as they were. Arzee arrived at the foot of the stone wall and clambered up, using the cracks as holds. Two crows were hopping about on the wall, cawing, but they didn’t fly off when he arrived, as if he was one of them. Arzee stood up on the wall and looked down. The murky waters, always changing and yet always the same, were flowing more softly than usual, but their acrid noseburn was just as intense. He saw his face looking back at him from the waters, and it seemed already a changed face, a face weathered by life, as if he had passed through an age in a day.
Only two weeks ago he had stood atop this very perch, fancying himself the king of the world – only two weeks ago! He’d been thinking about a wife, a promotion, the swelling of his power under two roofs and under the sky above the road that joined them. He laughed when he thought of how deluded he had been, and the crows took fright at this painwracked gurgle and flew off. A vague circle of rubbish floating upon the whispering black waters reminded him of the well near Phiroz’s. He’d always had such a strange relationship with water, as if he knew somewhere deep within that it was water that had made him what he was. Water was meant to be life, but it was death too. A curious feeling came over Arzee, and he teetered on the wall and almost fell over.
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