by Bapsi Sidhwa
We are directed to sit on a narrow backless bench. Opposite us Ice-candy-man drapes his lank and flexible length on another bench, and leaning across the table ogles Ayah. He straightens somewhat when an urchin-apprentice plonks down three tin plates heaped with rice and a bowl of vegetable curry. The rice is steaming and fragrant. We fall to it silently. Ayah’s chocolate fingers mold the rice into small golf balls which she pops into her mouth. She eats with her right hand while her left hand reposes in her lap.
Halfway through the meal I sense a familiar tension and a small flurry of movement. Ice-candy-man’s toes are invisibly busy. I glance up just as a supplicating smile on his face dissolves into a painful grimace: and I know Ayah’s hand is engaged in an equally heroic struggle.
Meanwhile the mounds of rice steadily diminish. Outwardly calm, systematically popping golf balls, Ayah signals the proprietor for another helping.
After the meal, as we descend the rickety wooden steps into the crowded gully, Ayah tries, tactfully, to get rid of Ice-candy-man. But he hoists Adi onto the seat of his bicycle and persists in walking with us to Warris Road.
At the gate of our house, less tactfully, Ayah says: “You’d better go. I have chores.”
“What chores?” asks Ice-candy-man, reluctant to let Ayah go.
“A ton of washing... And I haven’t even dusted Baijee’s room!”
“Let me help you,” says Ice-candy-man.
“You gone crazy?” Ayah asks.
Imagine Ice-candy-man working alongside Ayah in our house. Mother’d throw a fit! He’s not the kind of fellow who’s permitted inside. With his thuggish way of inhaling from the stinking cigarettes clenched in his fist, his flashy scarves and reek of jasmine attar, he represents a shady, almost disreputable type.
“Okay, I’ll go,” Ice-candy-man temporizes reluctantly, “but only if you’ll come to the cinema later.”
“I told you I’ve work to do,” says Ayah, close to losing patience. “And I dare not ask Baijee for another evening off.”
“Talk to me for a while ... Just a little while,” pleads Ice-candy-man so piteously that Ayah, whose heart is as easily inclined to melt as Ice-candy-man’s popsicles, bunches her fingers and says, “Only ten minutes.”
Aware of the impropriety of entertaining her guest on the front lawn Ayah leads us to settle on a bald patch of grass at the back near the servants’ quarters. The winter sun is diffused by the dust and a crimson bank of clouds streaks the horizon. It is getting uncomfortably chilly and my hair already feels damp. Ayah notices it and, drawing me to her, covers my head with her sari palloo.
“Now talk,” she says to Ice-candy-man. “Since you’re so anxious to talk, talk!”
Ice-candy-man talks. News and gossip flow off his glib tongue like a torrent. He reads Urdu newspapers and the Urdu Digest. He can, when he applies himself, read the headlines in the Civil and Military Gazette, the English daily.
Characteristically, Ice-candy-man starts by giving us news of the world. The Germans, he informs us, have developed a deadly weapon called the V-bomb that will turn the British into powdered ash. A little later, drifting close to home, he tells us of Subas Chandra Bose, a Hindu patriot who has defected to the Japanese side in Burma. “Bose says the Japanese will help us liberate India from the Angrez,” Ice-candy-man says. “If we want India back we must take pride in our customs, our clothes, our languages ... And not go mouthing the got-pit sot-pit of the English!”
Obviously he’s quoting this Bose. (Sometimes he quotes Gandhi, or Nehru or Jinnah, but I’m fed up with hearing about them. Mother, Father and their friends are always saying: Gandhi said this, Nehru said that. Gandhi did this, Jinnah did that. What’s the point of talking so much about people we don’t know?)
Finally, narrowing his focus to our immediate surroundings, he says to Ayah, “Shanta bibi, you’re Punjabi, aren’t you?”
“For the most part,” Ayah agrees warily.
“Then why don’t you wear Punjabi clothes? I’ve never seen you in shalwar-kamize.”
Though it has never struck me as strange before—I’m so accustomed to Ayah only in a sari—I see the logic of his question and wonder about it.
“Arrey baba,” says Ayah spreading her hands in a fetching gesture, “do you know what salary ayahs who wear Punjabi clothes get? Half the salary of the Goan ayahs who wear saris! I’m not so simple!”
“I’ve no quarrel with your saris,” says Ice-candy-man disarmingly demure, “I was only asking out of curiosity.”
And, catching us unawares, his ingenuous toe darts beneath Ayah’s sari. Ayah gives a start. Angrily smacking his leg and smoothing her sari, she stands up. “Duffa ho! Go!” she says. “Or I’ll get Baijee to V-bomb you into ash!” Applying all his strength, Adi restrains Ice-candy-man’s irrepressibly twitching toe.
“Arrrrey!” says Ice-candy-man holding his hands up as if to stave off Ayah’s assault. “Are you angry?”
“Then what?” Ayah retorts. “You have no sense and no shame!”
Grinning sheepishly, groveling and wriggling in the grass to touch the hem of Ayah’s sari, he says, “I’m sorry, forgive me. I won’t do it again ... Forgive me.”
“What for?” snaps Ayah. “You’ll never change!”
Ice-candy-man coils forward to squat and, threading his supple arms through his calves from the back, latches on to his earlobes. It is a punishing posture called “the cock,” used in lower-class schools to discipline urchins. He looks so ridiculous that Ayah and I laugh.
But Adi, his face grim, dispenses a totally mirthless and vicious kick to his ankle.
Ice-candy-man stands up so abruptly that his movements are a blur.
And, my eyes popping, I stare at Adi dangling in the air at the end of his rangy arm. Ice-candy-man has a firm grip on the waistband of Adi’s woolen trousers and Adi looks like an astonished and stocky spider plucked out of his web and suspended above the level of my eyes.
“I’m going to drop him,” Ice-candy-man says calmly. He takes a loping step and, holding Adi directly above the brick paving skirting the grass, raises his arm. “If you don’t go to the cinema with me I’ll drop him.”
I can’t believe he means it.
But Adi does. His face scarlet, he lets out a terrified yell and howls: “He’ll drop me! Save me ... someone save me!”
“I’m going to drop him,” repeats Ice-candy-man.
Ayah’s round mouth opens in an “O,” her eyes stare. Seeing her expression, my wiggly hair curls tighter. I look in horror upon the distance separating Adi from the brick. Adi kicks, crawls and squirms in the air and yells: “Save me! Save me! Bachao! Bachao!”
And Ayah shouts: “Put him down at once, oye, badmash! I will go to the cinema.”
Ice-candy-man carefully lowers Adi—face down and dribbling spit—on the grass.
Ayah deftly pulls off a sandal and, lunging wildly, strikes Ice-candy-man wherever she can. Ice-candy-man cowers; and gathering his lungi above his knees, snatching up his slippers, manages to move out of her reach. Ayah chases him right out of the gate.
Chapter 5
Rich men’s wives and children soar to the Simla or Kashmir Hills in summer. We also soar, but to the lesser Murree Hills at the foot of the Himalayas.
Adi is perched on a tall pony. I am on a donkey. My donkey trots alongside and I perceive just how short it is. My legs stick out beneath the safety ring on the saddle. I grip the ring resentfully. The donkey-man holds the reins. I am not spared even this indignity ! My donkey perch is ludicrous.
I am about to shake heaven and earth to set things right when an astonishing tidal wave of relief and frivolity barrels over the world. Shopkeepers on the Murree Mall have picked out a few words from the static of their 1944 radios and happiness strikes all hearts. Men, women, beast, mountain, tall pony and short donkey all exult. Simultaneously we know that the war is over. We have won! Victory! The war is over! Faces around me are wreathed in smiles. Incredibly Father is blowing a whis
tle that uncoils a foot-long paper tongue. God! I have never been so happy. I who have subversively hoped that the defector Bose and the Japanese enemy win the war. All the same I am swept by a sense of relief so unburdening that I realize I was born with an awareness of the war: and I recall the dim, faraway fear of bombs that tinged with bitterness my mother’s milk. No wonder I was a colicky baby.
The gaiety on people’s faces is infectious. My mother’s face swims up with a smile I never again see; and plucking paper cups, streamers and whistles from the air she gives them to Adi and me.
Father seldom visits Murree for more than two or three days at a time. He returns to Lahore. A week later we catch a bus and follow him down into the plains which the sun has scorched and pulverized into a dusty hell. We pant under ceiling fans. And now the temperatures soar.
Our stay in Murree has been cut short because the Parsees of Lahore are holding a Jashan prayer to celebrate the British victory.
On the day of the Jashan the temperature is 116°F in the shade. A tonga waits in the porch. Hollow-eyed and dazed with heat we pile perspiring into the tonga. Mother and Ayah in the back and Adi and I up front with the tongaman. We sit back to back on a bench divided by a quilted backrest. A flimsy canvas canopy shelters us from the sun. The tonga is held together by two enormous wooden wheels on either side of the shaft and is balanced by the harnessed horse. Up front we are more secure—unless the horse falls.
Scarcely out of our gate, the horse falls. Adi and I shoot over the guard and spill onto Warris Road. Mother and Ayah are suspended high in the air, clinging for all they are worth to the other end of the seesaw. Adi and I get up and scamper to one side. The tongaman picks himself off the horse cursing: and the Birdwood Barracks’ sepoy abandons his post and runs forward to render help. Ayah’s presence galvanizes men to mad sprints in the noon heat. It is a pity she has no such effect on animals though.
The tongaman and the sepoy lift the shafts and assist the harnessed horse to stand upright. Adi pats the horse’s rump. The animal swishes his bristly tail and blows wind in our faces. The sepoy makes an encouraging sucking noise with his tongue and pushes one of the enormous wooden wheels to start the tonga. Straining and quivering under the dual burden of passengers and heat, the shaken animal drags us past the barracks, the barricading walls of the Lucy Harrison School for girls next to it, up Queens Road, past the pretty pink spread of the Punjab High Court and behind the small-causes court to the Fire Temple.
We leave the tongaman and Ayah to gossip and doze beneath whatever shade they can find.
The main hall of the temple is already full of smoke. Two priests, sitting cross-legged and swaying slightly, face each other across a fire altar. They are robed in a swollen froth of starched white muslin. They wear cloth masks like the one Colonel Bharucha wore in the hospital. Their chanting voices rise and boom in fierce competition and the mask prevents specks of spittle from profaning the fire. They sit on a white sheet amidst silver trays heaped with fruit—grape, mango, papaya—and flowers. And the malida cooked by the priest’s wife. Adi and I join the children sitting patiently on a wooden bench—our collective mouths drooling.
The priests cannot be hurried. They go through a ritual established a millennium ago. They stoke the fire with silver tongs and feed it with sandalwood and frankincense.
It is comparatively cool beneath the high ceiling. My eyes are getting accustomed to the dark but smart with smoke. Mother has found a seat in the front row. There is an empty chair between her and Colonel Bharucha. He must have grown taller, because his pink scalp thrusts higher above his hairline than before. Godmother sits next to him, fanning herself and the doctor with a slow, rotary motion of her palm-leaf punkah. She catches my watering eye and winks. Only I ever see her wink. Her dignified bearing and noble features preclude winking. She only relaxes her guard with me. No one sees her as I do. Slavesister is snatching a few blessed minutes of sleep in the last row. Godmother knows she’s asleep. She knows everything. Slavesister sleeps peacefully because she knows Godmother will not mind. Godmother, after all, is not unreasonable.
Both priests stand up, smoothing their beards and garments. Chairs squeak as the ladies greet each other and gradually converge on the fruit trays. Slavesister waddles plumply forward on painful bunions, smiling her patient, obliging smile, securing her sari border to her hair. The women shoo us from the benches and sit down to peel and cut the fruit.
Mother stands talking to Colonel Bharucha. She is tense, alert, anxious to please. Electric-aunt joins them, also tense. Her quick, intelligent eyes scan the room. I know she is looking for me. Godmother releases me and I run up to them.
“What is this?” says Colonel Bharucha. Copying and exaggerating my limp he lurches halfway across the room like a tipsy giraffe. “Put your heel down! You must remember to.”
Mother purses her shapely mouth and looks at me sternly. Electric-aunt frowns, her thin lips a tight, anxious line beneath her sharp nose.
Colonel Bharucha stoops and pushing down on the contracted tendon presses my heel to the floor. “Massage the back of her leg down: like this,” he says, kneading and stretching my stubborn tendon.
He straightens, pats my back and dismisses me. I know they are beaming behind my back, pleased with my progress since the operation. Cousin is waiting for me to be free of the grown-ups.
“I want to show you something,” he says, drawing me to a window in the wings. He reaches into the pockets of his shorts and pulls out scraps of cardboard. He lifts off one layer and reveals a pressed butterfly, its colors turned to powder, its wings awry.
“Hold out your hand,” he commands. I withhold my hand. There are certain things I’ll hold and certain things I won’t. Cousin gropes for my hand and, “No,” I say. “Don’t!”
“But it’s for you,” says Cousin.
“I don’t want it!”
Cousin is, for once, confounded.
There is a drift now towards the inner sanctum. Electric-aunt beckons Cousin and Mother signals me. We step into the inner room and I can see through two barred windows and an open archway the main fire altar. It is like a gigantic silver eggcup and the flames are dancing above a bed of white ashes.
I kneel before the altar and touch my forehead to the cool marble step beyond which I cannot go. Except for the priests who tend the fire and see that it never goes out, no one can enter the inner sanctum. Mother kneels beside me. I ask God to bless our family and Godmother and all our servants and Masseur and Ice-candy-man ... until Mother says, “That’s enough! The meeting’s about to start. Hurry!”
And Adi hisses, “Don’t hog God!”
We enter the main hall. The chairs have been rearranged. Colonel Bharucha is standing before the mike, testing it with practiced snaps of his fingers. “Hello hello,” he says, and knocks on it with his knuckles. He struggles with both hands to stretch the rod. Mr. Bankwalla, an officer at the Central Bank of India, his slight body crisp and dependable in sweatless white shirt and white trousers, rushes up obligingly. Between them they adjust the mike to suit the colonel’s height.
The banker moves back, fleet and unobtrusive beneath his maroon skullcap, to his seat in the aisle next to his jolly wife. (His wife is so indefatigably jolly that it is said after the initial burst of grief she even wisecracked at her son’s funeral. Later I heard she cracked jokes on her deathbed and prepared to meet Ahura Mazda with jests, and sly winks at the mourners, whose appreciative laughter turned to inconsolable grief when the will was read. She left everything to the Tower of Silence in Karachi.)
By the time Colonel Bharucha clears his throat, and it is an impressive throat-clearing, we are all settled in our chairs.
Colonel Bharucha tells us: “We are gathered here, etc., etc. To thank God Almighty, etc., etc.”
The mike has transformed him from a plain-speaking doctor into a resounding orator. But his rhetoric has a cadence that makes my mind wander.
Suddenly I hear him declare: “Gandhi s
ays, we must stop buying salt. We should only eat salt manufactured from the Indian Ocean!”
The colonel pauses, dramatically, and my loafing mind becomes attentive. The pause, shrewdly timed to permit just that tiny license so dear to a Parsee audience, is snapped up. “Who does this Gandhi think he is?” shouts an obliging wag promptly from somewhere in the middle. “Is it his grandfather’s ocean?”
Colonel Bharucha, smiling amiably, explains that the British government is charging an unfair salt tax and, as a protest, we should not buy it. Gandhijee plans to walk a hundred miles to the ocean to make salt for us. He is even prepared to go to jail to make his point!
“And what do we do while he’s in jail? Walk around with goiters for lack of salt?” shouts the wag.
“Go to jail for us!” snorts Dr. Manek Mody. (He is Godmother’s brother-in-law, and is here on one of his periodic visits from Rawalpindi.) “Big deal!” he booms. “There’s such a demand for A-class in jails that there’s no room left for folk like us!”
(Even though I cannot see him I can tell it’s Dr. Mody by the amazing volume of his voice. He is a short, chubby man, with a totally bald and brown head.)
“Yes,” chimes in the first wag. “The Congress gangsters provoke the police and get rewarded with free board and lodging. It’s a shame! I propose that the Parsee Anjuman lodge a formal protest with the Inspector General of Police. Why should we be left out of everything?”
“Hear! Hear!” agrees the congregation, and thumps the armrests of its chairs and wooden benches.
“Let us march to jail now!” the wag says, jumping to his feet. He is a paunchy man with very dark skin.
Colonel Bharucha raises a restraining hand. “No doubt the men in jail are acquiring political glory... But this shortcut to fame and fortune is not for us. It is no longer just a struggle for Home Rule. It is a struggle for power. Who’s going to rule once we get Swaraj? Not you,” says the colonel, pointing a long and accusing finger at us as if we are harboring sinful thoughts. “Hindus, Muslims and even the Sikhs are going to jockey for power: and if you jokers jump into the middle you’ll be mangled into chutney!”