Jump Cut

by Krishna Shastri

  ‘Ray?’ said the voice. It was Shobha, sounding restrained.

  ‘Yeah, Shobha,’ he said, ‘all okay?’

  ‘I’m sorry, da, but…’ she said, her voice taut, ‘Mama passed away.’

  ‘When?’ was all he could come up with.

  ‘About ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  There was no reply. Ray held the phone to his ear for what felt like an entire minute. From the dressing table mirror the half of his face that was lit by the cold glow of the mobile phone stared stupidly at him.

  ‘Shobhs, you there?’ he said.

  There was the tiniest sob on the other side.

  ‘You better come quick,’ she said before hanging up.

  Ray looked at the time on his phone. It said 2:17. That meant it must have happened at 2:06 or 2:07. In San Jose, he would be having lunch. A veggie sub and black coffee.

  Breathing slowly, he sat on his bed and stared at the screen of his phone till its glow died. He tried to figure out how he felt.

  Don’t forget the underwear.

  He put his hand under the pillow and pulled out his crumpled jocks. He hadn’t changed into his nightclothes before sleeping. He had been so tired, he had taken his undies off and stuffed them under his pillow. He took his already half-unzipped trousers off, pulled his underwear back on, zipped up his trousers, went into the bathroom and fumbled around for the light switch. He couldn’t find it immediately. Five years was a long time.

  He switched the light on and looked at the puffy face in the mirror and ran a finger along its stubbled chin. The thought of a quick shave entered his mind and disappeared. That’s what his father would have done. Instead, he pulled out the toothpaste from the white ceramic holder, looked around for his toothbrush, realized it was still in his bag and squeezed a translucent red blob onto his finger. He hated the over-strong taste of tooth gels. But that was the only thing in the bathroom. As soon as he put it in his mouth, he gagged. Fumes of the Black Label he had drunk a few hours ago with Abie leapt out of him. He controlled the need to retch and spat out the red-and-white froth, rinsed his mouth thoroughly and walked out of the bathroom. Without switching on the light in the bedroom, he picked up his mobile phone and dialled Shobha’s number, changed his mind, and cut it off quickly.

  Appa is dead.

  The clock said 2:21. He walked out of what had been his bedroom as a child and closed the door, keeping the click to a minimum. The two Crate & Barrel whisky glasses from the set he had got for his father the last time, and the three-quarter-empty bottle of Scotch on the dining table caught the stingy glow of the zero-watt. He looked around for his loafers and found them on top of the shoe rack. Velu’s wife, Andal, who helped around the house, must have put them there. He slipped them on and opened the door to the staircase. Something warm and wet touched his hand. He stifled a curse. It was Dog Raj. He had forgotten all about him.

  ‘If you’re home, I’ll leave him here for the night, saar. He prefers it,’ Velu had said.

  Ray put his hand under its upturned face and scratched it.

  ‘Good boy. Thanks for not barking,’ he whispered. The Labrador whined. Ray wondered if the dog knew. He made a note to call Velu later and ask him to collect the dog.

  The street was dark. He saw a couple of autos parked where the street met the main road. He walked up to one of them. The khaki-clad driver was asleep in an impossible position on the back seat. He touched the man as unthreateningly as he could on his shoulder. The driver continued to sleep, his face lolling in a small pool of saliva on the Rexine seat.

  ‘Driver!’ he said, shaking his shoulder.

  The driver sat bolt upright.

  ‘Engay, saar?’ he said, getting right down to business.

  ‘Life-Smile Hospital, know where it is?’

  The driver nodded, still not fully awake. ‘Untime, saar,’ he said, ‘two hundred rupees.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The auto puttered along the relatively empty East Coast Road. ‘Untime’ – a word so typical of Madras. Not the best of times.

  ‘Why hospital at this time, saar,’ said the driver, ‘not well?’

  ‘No,’ said Ray, finding himself unable yet again to say anything other than the truth to a complete stranger. ‘My father’s dead.’

  The auto driver turned around so suddenly that the vehicle veered and nearly went off the road.

  ‘Enna, saar, you are taking so casually!’

  Ray didn’t have an answer. He shrugged.

  In the traffic-less dark, they made it to Life-Smile in fifteen minutes.

  The hospital was quiet. Without its criss-crossing colonies of nurses, doctors and hapless next-of-kin rubbing antennae before moving on to the next misery, the building had none of its formidable daylight air.

  He walked quickly through the car park, past the twenty-four-hour pharmacy that was shut, and was reminded of why he had left the country in the first place. India, land of fractured queues, jumped signals, ignored rules, where anything went. Where your word meant nothing. Where promises were broken like temple coconuts.

  There was a lone man standing in the shadows at the foot of the stairs. Even from that distance, Ray could make out he wasn’t the maharaja on duty. The man started walking towards him and stopped under the glow of the sodium-vapour light.

  It was his father.

  Ray stopped, too. It was as if the soles of his loafers had stepped on quick-drying glue. He tried to say ‘Appa’, but the glue seemed to have spread to his mouth as well. The man who was his father, but couldn’t be, continued to walk towards him with that unhurried gait Ray had known all his life. As he crossed Ray, he gave him a barely discernible nod, the beginnings of a smile on his face. Ray wrenched himself free from his temporary paralysis like a man breaking out of a full body-cast. When he spun around, he was alone.

  From one of the trees in the compound, a lone crow cawed.

  For an entire minute, Ray stood in the sprawling empty premises of the hospital wondering if he had gone mad. He touched the left side of his chest and realized he was completely drenched in sweat.

  Upstairs, Shobha took one look at him, hugged him, and wept. They remained that way for a long time.

  ‘I should have let you stay, then you’d have been here when he…’ she said. ‘Stupid of me. I thought you’d be tired after your journey.’

  ‘No, Shobhs. I’m glad it was you. After all, you were the one taking care of him.’

  When Ray let go, he saw that her kurta was stained with his sweat. He gave her cheek a pat and walked into Room 311.

  His first reaction was relief. Not that his father was dead, but that he was there. Minus the hospital tubes and wires, he looked calmer than Ray could ever remember. Only the lone strand of salt-and-pepper hair which fell across his forehead looked out of place. Ray lifted it gently off his father’s cool skin and tucked it back where it belonged. Then he sat down and looked at the unmoving folds on his father’s sheets.

  The mountains had found their shapes.

  4

  He took out the last blob of Aavin ghee from the can with his forefinger, shook it onto his father’s chest and wiped his hand clean on the cloth they had wrapped him in. The Arya Samaj priest read out the mantras, his eyes closed. Ray found his voice soothing. This is what his father would have liked. A no-frills send-off for a no-frills man.

  He looked at Abie, fake hater of Brahmins, walking around the stone slab on which his father was resting. Putting a piece of sandalwood here, moving it a bit, putting another, meticulous, getting it just right. He was reminded of a Christmas long ago at Abie’s place. He had seen him exactly this way then, decorating the tree.

  Lakshmi, who had arrived a few hours ago from Portland, stood hand in hand with Shobha. His father’s neighbour, Divesh Patel, dressed in a spotless white kurta-pyjama, was the only other person in the hall. He sat alone on the blackened cement bench running along the side of the funeral hall.

&nb
sp; Had it been just a little over forty-eight hours since he had landed in Madras? It had happened so fast. He wondered if he should have put in a bigger announcement in the obituary section of the Hindu. Did anyone read it any more? Maybe he should have put in similar announcements in the Times and the Express. Then more people would have come. But there had been so little time.

  ‘It’s done,’ said the priest.

  As if on cue, two young men appeared, the same ones he had seen earlier, playing cricket in the expansive front yard of the Besant Nagar crematorium. A jagged piece of firewood served as their bat, and, though Ray couldn’t be certain, their ball looked like the remains of a skull. Unremitting coats of soot had turned their skin and clothes an indefinable shade of grey. But the teeth in their smiling mouths were snow-white. Ray looked at their cheerful faces and wondered what their lungs looked like.

  Ray, Abie and the two boys lifted the surprisingly heavy stretcher of bamboo and rope and carried it into the inner room. Shobha and Lakshmi followed, but were stopped by Divesh.

  ‘Don’t, ma,’ he said.

  Inside the room, a giant incinerator sat open-mouthed, waiting to turn life into time. The four men placed the stretcher on the rails that led into it. The priest stood by with folded hands.

  ‘Ready?’ said the bigger of the grey boys.

  He nodded.

  The younger boy hit a switch and the stretcher rattled away on its final journey into the glowing oven. Before its doors closed, Ray saw his father for the last time before he turned to fire.

  Ray walked out and stood next to the women. Divesh put his hand on Ray’s shoulder.

  ‘If you need anything, we are right next door,’ he said, ‘don’t forget.’

  ‘I won’t. Thank you,’ said Ray.

  ~

  The sea breeze seemed to have set in early. In the distance, Ray could see Dog Raj’s ears flapping in the wind. As he walked back towards the road, the dog stuck his head out of the car’s window and whined.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ said Ray. Sand and wet clothes didn’t exactly assist haste.

  Like everything else, the Kottivakkam beach, too, had changed from the last time. For one, a row of concrete benches ran along the entire one-kilometre stretch of road at regular intervals, their embossed inscriptions for all to see – from so-and-so to Father, with respect; from so-and-so to Mother, with love. Evidently, gifts from NRIs like himself, for parents left behind. There was also a brand-new walker’s path with its own parapet of stone. Ideal to sit on and stare at the waves, his father had said. The beach morning glory looked a lot thicker and shabbier, too. And the fishing village to the south seemed to have prospered as well, with its new houses of brick. Ray wondered how the new IT money had trickled down to the hamlet. It had to be via real estate. Everyone was a broker these days. What was it they called it – inclusive growth?

  These weren’t the only changes, though. From the small group of fishermen who had materialized next to the car, it was evident that so had the rates for immersion.

  ‘Two thousand rupees, saar,’ their leader had said. ‘For NRI like you, only forty dollars, very cheap, boss.’

  Ray remembered the time they had immersed a distant uncle long ago at the Marina (it had cost them a hundred rupees) but he didn’t bother arguing. If the lungi-clad man with the raffish air had figured his residential status with one look, he would also have known that he wasn’t good at haggling.

  ‘Payment on completion,’ said Abie, stopping Ray just as he was reaching for his wallet.

  ‘No problem, saar,’ said the fisherman.

  The fisherman had swum out into the sea using only one hand while holding aloft the pot containing his father’s remains with the other. Ray had waded knee-deep into the warm waves and watched while a boat with a bright blue sail drifted southward and a couple with no place to go carried on unmindful of the midday sun.

  In the car, Dog Raj greeted Ray like he hadn’t seen him for a year. Ray tickled him under his chin. The Labrador gurgled.

  How could the dog invest so much in a person he had met just a couple of days ago? What was going on in his mind? Did he know his master was dead? Or, heaven forbid, was the poor thing mistakenly handing over the leash of his pethood to the wrong master?

  ~

  She was the last person he had been expecting to see. He couldn’t say the same for Dog Raj though. The Labrador jumped on her as though it was the next item on the programme sheet, his entire rear-end swaying along with his tail.

  ‘Ennada, Raju,’ she said, holding the dog’s lugubrious face with both her hands, ‘why the sad face when your bum looks so happy?’

  Dog Raj responded by covering her face with an even coat of saliva. She made a perfect target, sitting on the low moda in the living room.

  One way or another, they would have met. Ray knew there was no escaping that. It was just that he didn’t like surprises. And it wasn’t as if these were the best of circumstances for awkward reunions. What made him even more uncomfortable, judging by Dog Raj’s welcome, was that it was obvious that she had been visiting his father in the last couple of years. Though why it made him uncomfortable he couldn’t say.

  Now here she was, looking at him as he stood in wet trousers folded up to the knee, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Lakshmi and Shobha sitting on the sofa, coffee cups in their hands, and Abie looming behind him didn’t exactly help things.

  ‘Padmini, good of you to come,’ Ray said.

  ‘How could I not?’ she said, still absently scratching Raju behind his ears.

  ‘Can I get you some coffee or something?’

  Padmini didn’t answer. Instead, she got up, walked up to Ray and hugged him tight. He hugged her back, forgetting the consequences for a moment, like a reformed alcoholic falling off the wagon. One arm encircled her waist while the other snaked under her dupatta and held her neck.

  He broke free of her just as quickly.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’m not bathed as yet. After the … sorry.’

  ‘I’m sure you smelt worse at school,’ said Abie from the back. ‘Didn’t stop you then, did it?’

  Padmini waved away Ray’s explanation.

  ‘Abie, Abie, thank god some things never change,’ she said, ‘anyway, I’ve got to go.’

  A flurry of goodbyes, a not-so-playful slap on Abie’s shoulder, and she was out of the door.

  ‘We’ll meet again one of these evenings. You’ll be here, won’t you?’ she said from the gate.

  Ray nodded and she was gone.

  ‘Strange girl,’ said Shobha, ‘waits over an hour for Ray and leaves as soon as he comes…’

  ‘But not before hugging him,’ said Abie.

  A little later, Ray looked at the sand he had brought in from the beach in spite of his best efforts. It was all over the bathroom floor. Even the sand in India seemed more stubborn. He turned to look at the stingy flow from the hot water tap and thought of Padmini’s embrace.

  Damn woman.

  He picked up the shirt he had hung up on the hook behind the bathroom door and smelt it. What was he hoping for, that he would pick up the scent of their last night together in Madras all those years ago? When they had slow danced the entire evening (even to the fast numbers) at the farewell party they had had for him at Abie’s.

  All he got was the smell of soot and dying roses.

  That was why he was here, he reminded himself. Because his father was dead. He had things to do, affairs to settle, and a job and a life – solid, fruitful, planned for, worked at, achieved – to get back to. Quickly! And here he was, standing semi-naked in his bathroom, smelling his shirt for traces of Padmini like some pervert loser.

  He shampooed his head violently and wondered what was happening to him. He hadn’t shed a single tear. He had seen his dead father walk casually by.

  Children cried when fathers died. If her swollen face was anything to go by, Lakshmi had cried right through her journey from Portland.
The tears had doubled when she saw him, and become a flood with Shobha. She had stopped only now, after there was no more water left in her body. Shobha had cried and so had Abie. Even Velu had cried.

  Was he that cold?

  What would people say if they knew of all the strange stuff going on in his head?

  Abie’s response was easy enough to predict: ‘That’s some powerful shit you’re smoking, dude,’ or something along those lines.

  But what would normal folk think?

  He found the warm water he poured on his head, with the same red mug with the broken handle that had been there the last time, dissatisfying. He needed the jet of precision pinpricks from the heavy-duty Kohler shower at his place, set at 107°F for a full ten minutes, just the way he liked it. One of the benefits (even in Sunny California, which was prone to droughts) of living in a country with inordinate fresh water reserves. Still, this was better than nothing. For instance, what if the water lorry hadn’t arrived a few hours ago to replenish their near-dry sump?

  Satisfactory or not, the bath cleared his head. The mistake of the hasty obituary had to be undone. He would have a memorial meeting for his father a week from now with a proper announcement in all three major papers. That way, the few relatives who didn’t know and his father’s friends and colleagues from the film industry could turn up.

  His father deserved that at least.

  He wondered where his father’s mobile phone was. It would have made things easier. But it had been missing from the time he had arrived. His periodic attempts at getting through had been met with a remorseless female voice telling him that this phone was currently switched off and could he please try again later.

  5

  Ray got off the auto as the treetops caught the last of the evening light. This was when the crows were at their noisiest, closing their books before they downed the shutters for the day. The cawing brought back memories of his schooldays, when Padmini, PK, he and the gang would cycle back to Abie’s place after school at about this time to gorge on the best damned salami sandwiches in the world before trickling back home.