A Fine Family: A Novel

by Das, Gurcharan

  At the mention of ‘Muslim’ Bauji’s face suddenly twitched. He rarely mentioned that word.

  ‘If they want to have a road named after Bose, they ought to build a new one and so name it. But why rewrite history by changing the name of an existing road?’

  ‘It is an alien name “Lawrence”, Bauji,’ said Arjun.

  ‘Do they know who Lawrence was?’

  ‘Lord Lawrence, the Governor-General, wasn’t it?’ said Arjun, remembering his history text.

  ‘No, this one was his brother, Henry Lawrence, who was the first Resident in the Punjab and who was very fond of India and Indians.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen, Bauji?’

  ‘They are bringing a procession here this evening to persuade me to change my mind.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Why, something might happen,’ said Arjun.

  ‘Bhabo is afraid, and she’s not even sympathetic to my point of view,’ said Bauji.

  The procession of students came and it went. It was led by the same dark-haired beauty who had the complexion of ‘freshly made butter’. Bauji openly flirted with her, and it unsettled her considerably. He was charming and conciliatory, but he told her and the others the same things that he had told Arjun that morning. He recited the life of Lawrence and sent them to the college library. She and theothers were amused, but they remained unconvinced. Bauji too knew that he was in the minority and that it was a losing battle, but he enjoyed himself. The students were disciplined by and large and there was no serious incident, except when they were dispersing: one of them threw a stone which broke Bhabo’s bathroom window.

  Bauji consoled Bhabo saying that it was a small price to pay for one’s convictions.

  A month later came the twenty-sixth of January, a holiday, to celebrate India’s becoming a Republic. In Hoshiarpur, Bauji, as the President of the Municipal Committee, was asked to speak at a flag unfurling organized by the local Lions Club, and Arjun agreed to accompany him.

  Arjun watched with pleasure as Bauji sprinkled scent on his handkerchief, a signal that he was almost dressed. He pulled down his starched cuffs, inserted gold cuff links, and deliberately fastened his gold watch with its double chain to his pocket. It was one of the few possessions he had brought from the old Punjab. Feeling clean and fragrant, he took his old, carved walking stick, and with a swinging gait went towards the waiting car.

  The trees are different from Lyallpur,’ said Bauji, pointing to the tall simbal trees, which produced silk-cotton for soft pillows. ‘During the monsoon they are covered with brilliant red flowers. And the chutney from their blossoms is delicious!’

  As they passed the Hoshiarpur Club, a frown came over Bauji’s forehead. With distaste he looked at the crumbling, betel-juice-stained walls of the sprawling old club which had been lovingly built by the English, and which had now been completely taken over by the new rich class of traders and small industrialists. He could still remember the time (soon after ’47) when the same walls were impeccably white-washed and always covered with masses of bougainvillaea. Now they seemed to spend more money on the club, but on the wrong things invariably.

  Bauji told Arjun, ‘I rarely go there because so few speak any language except money. They play bad bridge, with stakes that are too high. They sit at the bar, flashing hundred-rupee notes, speaking loudly, and drinking too much whisky. The rule that you never paid cash (because your credit was good) is observed in the exception, because the new rich want to spend their black money as rapidly as possible. The last thing they want is a receipt lest the income-tax officer gets wise to their real income. You were never allowed to tip in the old days, but now you can’t hope to get a bearer’s attention unless you tip in advance. You are surrounded by ‘Hello-ji! How-are-you-ji?’ They can’t speak one language properly and insist on mixing two. It’s much too depressing, my boy.’

  ‘I know, the telephone operator is Exchange-ji,’ said Arjun.

  ‘The other night on the bridge table an aggressive lady suddenly switched to English and shouted ‘I am demanding you. I am demanding you.’ When her partner gently corrected her (inserting the “from” in the sentence) she screamed an obscenity that would have made a Sikh truck driver stand up.’

  Bauji’s speech at the Lions Club was a great success. It was brief and witty. He could not resist a few jokes at the expense of the new-rich class, which was amply represented in the audience. But like all targets of such jokes, not one of them took exception, thinking that it was his neighbour who was the intended butt.

  There was a problem, however, when it came to unfurling the flag. Twice Bauji tried. He raised the flag, but it would not open. The Lions in the audience roared, insisting that the flag be opened, the flowers taken out, and the flag raised without the flowers. It was the practical and efficient thing to do, proclaimed the efficient businessmen. But Bauji politely insisted that it wasn’t the way to do things. He patiently untied the knot, and tied a new knot. Then he raised the flag, pulled the string, and the flag unfurled, showering hundreds of marigold petals to the ground.

  Next on the agenda was a speech by a local politician which predictably was long and windy, and the Lions started to get fidgety and embarrassed; the Chief Lion on the dais first hinted, then gestured, and finally tried to pinch the politician to make him sit down. At this point Bauji intervened and gently pointed out to the gathering that it was after all Republic Day; it was a celebration of democracy; and a central idea of democracy was the right of free speech; therefore, the politician should be allowed to speak for as long as he wished.

  Eventually the function ended. The restless crowd started to disperse quickly. As they were leaving, Bauji noticed a little girl crying. Someone had accidentally bumped into her, and her string of beads was broken. The beads had scattered in the crowd. Bauji, with Arjun’s help, bent down and began to pick them up. The Lions, seeing what their Chief Guest was doing, also started to help. And as soon as the beads were gathered, the Lions handed them to the young girl and smugly went on their way. But Bauji and Arjun stayed behind till they had beaded the string. Eventually they put the necklace on the little girl, who wiped her tears, and gave them a smile.

  As the days went by, Arjun felt that little by little the confusion in his mind was clearing up, and the shame and the discontent were passing away. In the company of Bauji and Bhabo, he began to feel himself again. He discovered that it was not necessary to be anyone else. He decided that he would never allow himself to come under the complete influence of another person. All he wanted now was to be himself. If that meant that he would have to give up hopes of an extraordinary happiness, so it had to be.

  Part Three

  BOMBAY

  1

  Arjun’s first and most enduring impression of Bombay was of water. He arrived on the island on a monsoon day. The damp streets shone from the rain and the city’s air was dense with wetness. The yellow and black taxi from Bombay Central station drove him through soggy quarters, carelessly bouncing over puddles, splattering water over the roadside. It was an early evening in August and the streetlights glistened on the moist asphalt. That night he saw fifteen-foot-tall waves of the Arabian Sea shatter thunderously against the rocks below his window. The southwest wind whistled through the tiny cracks between the shutters. The rain advanced from the deep sea like the disciplined forward line of an army.

  The monsoon went away in September but the smell and feel of the Arabian Sea stayed. Arjun settled down in a ‘paying guest’ flat in Colaba at the southern tip of the narrow island city, near an ancient fishing village of the Kolis. From his window Arjun could see the nets of the Kolis spread out in the sun, their brightly coloured sails fluttering on their beached boats, their huts of thatch and woven matting surrounded by the smell of ageing Bombay Duck. Sometimes in the evenings he would watch the boats, many of them equipped with motors, go out floating with the tide as the full-breasted Koli women waved fro
m the shore. His cleaning woman was a Koli. She had an attractive, dark body which she adorned with gold jewellery, and she wore her colourful sari tightly hitched up to the knees, twisted around her thighs, and pulled tautly between the cheeks of her buttocks.

  Arjun had come to Bombay to make his fortune. After completing school in Simla, he spent four years in college in Delhi, where he read a great deal, mainly history and economics. But his academic results were not distinguished. He was not unintelligent, it was just that he could not get excited by the rote method of exam preparation. After college both Tara and Seva Ram wanted him to sit for the civil service exam. If he got in, they argued, he would be set for life with a secure career ahead of him. In the 1960s, a government career was still a part of the Punjabi middle class dream.

  But Arjun had different ideas. He wanted to go far away, he wanted to see the world, and he did not want to work for the government. There were endless arguments. Tara was worried. Arjun sulked, and Seva Ram remained quiet. The truth was that Arjun did not know precisely what he wanted to do. Since he was idle for months, Tara had visions of an unemployed, unsettled son. She felt let down by Seva Ram, who did not seem to show particular interest in talking to the boy. Seva Ram answered her nagging with ‘Let the boy decide! He is grown up now.’

  Then one day Arjun surprised everyone. With a flourish he pulled out a letter from his pocket. It was a job offer from a firm in Bombay. Neither Tara nor Seva Ram knew quite what to think. But the pay was good. It transpired Arjun had quietly answered several advertisements, got himself interviewed in Delhi, and landed the job. He was excited, but Tara and Seva Ram were sad to see him go so far away.

  The company which Arjun joined made consumer products in a factory in a northern suburb of Bombay. It was part of a large diversified commercial house, which owned trading and manufacturing companies all over India, dealing in everything from tea, textiles, and jute to engineering and consumer goods. Arjun started out in the sales department as an ‘Officer-Trainee’ under the charge of a sales training officer. The particular company he was assigned to manufactured toilet articles, such as hair oil, talcum powder, a skin-whitening cream, and over-the-counter drugs—a pain balm, an antiseptic for cuts and wounds, etc.

  From the very first day on his job, Arjun had problems. His training officer, B. V. Rajan, a South Indian of the old school who had trained dozens of recruits, was an honest man, without any regional bias against Arjun. Yet he felt uncomfortable with him. As he explained to a colleague, ‘I think he asks too many questions.’

  Although Arjun knew practically nothing about the business world, he had an inquisitive mind. Other trainees might be willing to accept the way things were done, but Arjun wanted to know ‘why’. No one had ever questioned the basic rules and procedures in this manner and after three months the training officer was at his wit’s end. He reported to the company that as regards Arjun a mistake had been made. Reluctantly, the company agreed with his recommendation ‘not to confirm’ him.

  However, the Advertising Manager had watched Arjun and talked to him several times. He sensed that Arjun had something in him. When he learned about the company’s decision, he called in Arjun. He gave him a newspaper advertisement and asked him for his opinion. The headline of the advertisement said, ‘For headaches, cuts, insect bites and colds, use Bombay Balm.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I hate all advertising,’ replied Arjun.

  The Advertising Manager was taken aback. He began to understand why this boy was in trouble. Not wanting to be drawn into a discussion on the social value of advertising, he persisted with his original question.

  ‘But if you want to sell more Bombay Balm, how would you improve this?’

  Arjun thought for a while. ‘I would sell the balm for only one ailment, not for everything.’

  ‘But we would lose the customers who buy it for other problems.’

  ‘You would more than make up, I think, by having people believe that it really works for that one thing.’

  ‘Which problem would you sell it for?’

  ‘What do most people buy it for?’ asked Arjun.

  ‘I don’t know, but I think for aches and pains.’

  ‘What kind of aches?’

  ‘Headaches, I suppose.’

  ‘We could find that out by talking to a hundred customers.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we could.’

  ‘I think if I stood for a week at a chemist’s shop like Kemps, I could meet a hundred customers.’ After a pause Arjun asked, ‘For which sickness does it really work best?’

  ‘I suppose it works best for aches and pains, but it also relieves colds, and cuts and. . . ’

  ‘If it is best for aches and pains, let us sell it only for that.’ After another pause Arjun added, ‘Before we do so, shouldn’t we check with some doctor or medical person if it really works on pains?’

  ‘Young man, doctors don’t like us because we cut into their business. They’ll never give us proper advice.’

  ‘Then let’s try to find one doctor who is not biased. Let me try. I know of one. I’ll go and ask him.’

  That evening Arjun went to meet Dr Khanna. Tara had given him an introduction to the general practitioner on Malabar Hill. ‘You will be a stranger in the big city, son. Go and pay your respects to Dr Khanna; he will introduce you to people.’ Dr Khanna was a distant relative from Lyallpur, who had settled in Bombay after the partition and made good.

  Arjun told Dr Khanna about Bombay Balm and asked him if it was effective for headaches. The doctor laughed. ‘All your patent remedies are useless.’ But Arjun was not disheartened. He showed the good doctor the balm’s label and asked him to explain to him what each ingredient did. The doctor looked at the formula. He became serious suddenly and he said, ‘Yes, yes, I think it has some good ingredients. Yes, yes, it could help a headache. Yes, yes, it also has camphor and menthol, both useful counter-irritants. But you could improve this formula, you know, by adding another analgesic, yes, yes.’

  Dr Khanna and his wife insisted that Arjun stay on for dinner.

  ‘Yes, yes, Bombay is the only real city in India!’ Dr Khanna told Arjun over dinner. ‘Delhi has too many bureaucrats, politicians and Punjabis. Calcutta, despite its boxwallas, is essentially a Bengali town. Madras belongs to the orthodox Hindu South, yes, yes. But Bombay belongs to no one. Muslims, Parsees, Hindus and the British—all of them made it into what it is today. And now people from all over India come to make their fortunes here. We all have a ‘native place’, as we Bombaywallas say, and we all dream of returning to our homes in the heartland. But the city mesmerizes us and we never return. Yes, yes, ancestral attachments fade away and we begin to call Bombay our home.’

  The Khanna noticed that the boy’s mind seemed to run along a single track. He kept coming back to Bombay Balm. But the doctor admired Arjun’s inquisitive nature. It did not escape them either that he was an eligible bachelor, from a good family in their community, who was earning twelve hundred rupees a month in an established company. The visit set off a stream of letters to the Punjab to relatives with marriageable daughters.

  Arjun sat down in bed that night and wrote out a dozen different advertisements for Bombay Balm. He also wrote out a short proposal on what was needed to be done to improve the product, its image, its advertising, and its sales. In it he suggested that the product be called ‘Bombay Pain Balm for Headaches’ rather than merely Bombay Balm.

  The next morning Arjun arrived early at the office and left his proposal on the desk of the Advertising Manager. At eleven o’clock he was called in by the Sales Training Officer. As he walked into Rajan’s cubicle, he noticed that his boss looked uncomfortable. Rajan stared at the fluorescent light overhead and then at his olive-coloured steel desk. Finally he asked Arjun to sit down. He cleared his throat and began to speak mournfully. It took him a long time to get to the point that Arjun was being fired.

  ‘But why?’ asked Arjun.

&
nbsp; ‘Well, eh. . . you don’t seem to fit here.’

  ‘What have I done wrong?’

  ‘Ah, nothing wrong, you just don’t seem to fit.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘There you go. You are always asking questions,’ he said with annoyance. ‘It’s ah, your attitude. You can collect, ah, one month’s salary this afternoon with your other dues. And you, ah. . .need not come in tomorrow.’

  When Arjun went back into the hall, he thought all the clerks were staring at him. It seemed everyone knew that he was fired. He could not stand it, and instead of going back to his desk he went out into the street.

  He felt incalculably sad and defeated as he walked towards the harbour. He looked at the gritty, impossible city. He passed by a row of warehouses and soon reached the great natural harbour, with its miles upon miles of deep, sheltered water. Scores of merchant ships were moored there, waiting to unload. It was a clear day and the mainland of India was visible in the distance. The vast scene was coloured by his unhappiness. He shivered as a flush of wind blew past, and he looked up at the hot midday sky. His thoughts returned link by link along the chain of memory to the two brief months in which he had inhabited the callous city. How could he have mistaken it for a careless, happy place? He felt wounded in his body, and in his mouth he detected the taste of camphor.

  In the afternoon he returned to the office and immediately went to the cashier on the third floor to collect his wages. As he waited at the cash window, the Managing Director brushed past him with his nose buried in a file. Since the corridor was narrow, the Managing Director almost tripped over Arjun.