No Presents Please

by Jayant Kaikini

  By and by, the bar began to attract a large number of younger customers. The boys who used to hang around at the street corner began to come in with the rich Gujarati fellows. These rich boys came in chewing Pan Parag and holding video cassettes, while the chawl boys were in their rubber slippers, tucking the hair behind their ears, pulling their shirts down as they huddled into a corner. They would catch their reflections in a nearby mirror and get frightened. These were the same boys who had grown up in front of Mogri – Cycle Kaka’s son, Yamuna’s kid brother, the carrom-playing boy from the next building. To see that they had already joined the tribe of two-legged animals hurt her. One day she went into their houses and scolded all of them.

  They yelled back at her, saying, ‘Get out, you! We know all about you. Are we drinking with your money then?’ Today they had deliberately come to the bar in a big group. They went up to the manager and said something. Then a fellow chewing his Pan Parag came up to Mogri, held her, shook her hard, shouting at her. Then her sari pallu fell. Blinking at her chest, the creature said ‘Wah’ appreciatively. In a flash, Mogri had slapped him hard on the cheek. At that very second, she lost her job.

  Staying at home, Mogri felt convinced that what she had done was right. No one has the right to do anything to my body without my consent, she thought, as she pounded her thigh with her fist. The boys did not appear in front of her now. Her friend Yamuna had taken up with a young man in the hospital where she worked. ‘I’m get married,’ she told Mogri.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Mogri. ‘I’m not coming to Pearl Centre with you again.’

  ‘Cheh, cheh,’ said Yamuna, ‘this is love.’

  Mogri guffawed. ‘Oh, then this is petty change from that secret treasure.’ She thought pleasurably of the Shetty boy who had opened her secret treasure without wasting words like love.

  A number of families came to occupy the flats in the building in which she and the boy used to go on their treasure hunt. Everywhere you looked, there were clothes drying, vessels being washed, the smell of cooking, women recovering from childbirth. In all the rooms of all the houses were hidden – under the carpet – the stolen pleasures of her friends and herself. Why do these people need so much space? thought Mogri. Her own home was so small. They had a wooden cupboard, some utensils and a mattress – that was all. Perhaps these people had a lot of things to hide. And who knows what they hid in all those rooms. Her mother had stopped going to work in those houses now.

  One afternoon as she sat looking through the employment columns of the newspaper, she heard a huge noise outside the building. People came running. The Shah woman from the fifth floor had jumped. Her skull was cracked. Until the Shiv Sena ambulance came, she kept mumbling, ‘My husband, my husband’. This too must be a secret treasure problem, thought Mogri. She had seen for herself that the woman’s husband, Shahbhai, was one of those two-legged animals. Stupid of the woman to try killing herself for that reason. And there was that colleague of hers from the bar who had an abortion when she was three months pregnant for fear of losing her job. All idiots.

  Yamuna’s wedding date got fixed. While discussing what kind of sari she should buy, embracing Mogri and wiping her eyes, Yamuna finally said, ‘Mogri, a request. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want you to come to the wedding’.

  Mogri was filled with anger, not sadness. ‘Your fate!’ she exclaimed, as she bought a steel vessel as a wedding gift, and sent it to Yamuna without an inscription on it. Mogri’s mother grumbled that she too should have found a nice ‘house’.

  ‘And what does that mean?’ asked Mogri, as she rubbed her mother’s feet with pain-relieving oil. Two trunks. One cupboard, one kerosene stove, a plastic wire to hang clothes on, a range of utensils nestling comfortably on three shelves each about two and a half feet long, a folded dhurrie, a vessel for drinking water, a balti, a mirror hanging on a single nail, bangles hanging from that same nail, the bindis stuck on the mirror bottom. That was all. A home.

  Now what had Yamuna done? She would go from just one such home to another exactly like it with pomp and ceremony. Like Dagadu from the chawl below them, maybe Yamuna’s groom would also come riding on a horse. Wah! What an adventure for Yamuna. And in just such a tiny hut, in the shadows thrown by a kerosene lamp, he would ride her like a thief and then send her to her mother’s for the delivery, with demands for a new steel balti, a new stove and a piece of shirting. What great choice had Yamuna made?

  Mogri had shouted and screamed when her father took two of her faded childhood frocks to Jogeshwari to his other family. When her mother said, ‘It’s all right, the child’s young,’ and packed the frocks herself, Mogri was stunned into silence. She thought of how her father, like the Shetty boy, was conducting his life quietly, without any fuss. Finally, she managed to get herself a job in the Light of India Irani restaurant at Flora Fountain, after begging everyone she knew to find her work.

  Light of India was so different from Sunder Bar that Mogri felt like she had been born again. It was so different from that hole in the wall bar near the vegetable market. Every day, the restaurant filled her with new breath. The small, round marble tables and the wooden chairs, the ancient, winged fans, the clean, white-washed walls, the three brothers who took turns at the cash counter and who carefully explained the tasks to Mogri in great detail. Keeping an account of how many soft drinks, bread and eggs were consumed every day, checking the stocks in the kitchen, preparing bills, going to the bank from time to time, keeping track of staff salaries and leaves taken, Mogri became the assistant to the ageing owners. Her last task of the day was to wind the old clock with its Roman numerals.

  In the kitchen, Thambi and Badebhai, both past forty, still engaged in constant banter, keeping everyone’s spirits high.

  ‘Badebhai should have been working in the Taj Mahal Hotel. By mistake he’s ended up here, making omelettes,’ Thambi would say.

  ‘Thambi fell into a barrel of tar one day. That’s why he’s this colour,’ Badebhai would needle him.

  When their taunts got too loud, the owner would shout at them. When the scolding was too harsh, the cooks would puff out their faces. Badebhai would sing ‘ Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan’. Thambi’s omelettes fluffed up nicely. Even when he revealed his secret formula – adding a bit of water while beating the egg – Badebhai’s omelettes always came out flat. So it was Thambi who always ended up making them. Mogri would go into the kitchen once in a while to hurry them up.

  The three waiter kakas were well past fifty, and Mogri used to feel bad seeing these old men working in a restaurant. In their white cotton pants and coat uniform, they looked like railway ticket collectors. They moved with ease around the restaurant, wiping down a table as soon as the customers had left. When there were no customers, the waiters stood like silent pillars in a corner. When Mogri first came to work there, the three waiters seemed a little irritated, but they soon responded to her simple ways and became quite friendly.

  Once, the restaurant used to serve only biscuits, cakes, omelettes and tea. But since this did not make ends meet, they had also started serving beer some years ago. In the airy atmosphere of Light of India, the same beer bottles that looked like terrifying objects in Sunder Bar were filled with sparkling yellow liquid. Mogri’s eye gladdened at the sight of a mug filled with beer. Before Mogri had come to the restaurant, it had been always one of the waiters who opened the beer bottle for a customer. Now that task fell to Mogri. If one of the kakas was on leave, she took the order herself. The younger brother who sat behind the counter used to keep the top button of his shirt open, but after Mogri arrived, he began to fasten it. In the four hundred square feet of the Light of India, the light played hide and seek. The knots in Mogri’s mind loosened. She felt her anxieties melting away in spite of not talking to anybody about them.

  Soon after she joined, the three kakas began to speak to her. She didn’t understand what explanations lay behind some of the details they shared. She didn’t know where they lived, what they
did with their salaries. But if Mogri didn’t come to work, they all missed her. If she patted one of them even slightly on the back, the waiter’s eyes sparkled. These old men, who probably slept under a ladder or a cot somewhere in the armpit of this inhuman city, waited every morning to see Mogri’s happy and healthy face. Before starting work they all drank a cup of kadak chai together, and then started wiping the tables with the enthusiasm of small children.

  The people who came to the restaurant seemed to be there for the open air and the light. Some would sit for hours, with a bottle of beer and a book. Sometimes friends, and lovers, would sit there in silence, also for a long time, sipping endless cups of tea. Mogri felt fondly towards the friends who sat without speaking, merely spending time with each other. Those waiting for a lover, those tired after a shopping expedition, those on their way to their cave-like homes after having left their cave-like offices – they were all here for the calm light and the airy space of the restaurant. How gentle these desires were, she felt. Even the jeans-clad Malayali boys with their curly hair, selling electronic goods in their little booths outside, looked different when they came alone into the restaurant for a cup of tea. There was a sort of peace here beyond the bustle of the street, so much so that the few who came in intent on making a racket were taken aback at the quiet atmosphere and left as quickly as they could, to look for another restaurant.

  The moment Mogri stepped inside the restaurant, her chawl, her mother, Yamuna, the dirty vessels to be washed in people’s homes, the sweaty two-legged animals seemed to recede far away. Until she went home in the crowded train compartment, she didn’t remember a thing. Instead, she cherished the special moments of the day and was glad. The students of the nearby art school used to come to Light of India for tea. The moment she saw a beard and a cloth bag and a crooked smile, she knew this was an artist. If any of them came in wearing dirty clothes, Mogri and the oldest waiter felt irritated. Some sat in the restaurant and sketched the scenes outside. If someone was around to listen to them, the artists held forth with big words. Mogri used to wonder why even the best sketchers spoke so much. So as not to ruin their folders by carrying them in the crowded train, some students used to leave them in the café. Once she saw the old waiter looking into the folders with great interest.

  She found out that the old kaka used to draw publicity posters for Prabhat Theatres once upon a time. Then he became a pimp in Kamathipura, where he married one of the girls, who left him in due course. Mogri came to know these things in bits and pieces from the others in the restaurant. This kaka was also the one who always painted the restaurant walls. This time around, he applied whitewash on the walls as well as the pillars, both wooden and concrete, establishing in the eyes of everyone that both kinds were permanent. He was the waiter who spoke with more English words than the others. He always said to Mogri, ‘Take care, take care.’ When Thambi told her that the kaka had plied his trade with thousands of young girls, Mogri felt strange. She also heard that he used to tell stories that would arouse young men: what Nepali women are like; why there was so much demand for them; how young virgins were ‘inaugurated’; how to know if a woman had a disease; when to eat a palang-tod paan. Even now he would go over these stories with an old soldier’s enthusiasm, in front of Mogri too. Wearing his patched white cotton jacket, the waiter would wink as he said in English: ‘I am retired now. Retired hurt.’ Once he so completely forgot himself that he pinched Mogri on the chin, saying, ‘So tender! Too late. You should have come to me at sixteen. I would have made you a queen, a queen!’ Immediately after, he wept loudly, his thin hand shaking, muttering ‘Sorry, sorry.’ It was Mogri then who stroked his back affectionately and calmed him down.

  Around this time, Mogri’s father gave up his chowkidar job and sat at home. Mogri did not feel like saying anything. Her father and the Light-of-India kaka seemed the same to her now. She felt that their fatigue was identical. ‘What did you get out of setting up three families? Finally you have to live off my Baby,’ taunted Mogri’s mother. Annoyed, her father set off for Jogeshwari. He did not come back again. Maa used to keep a few chapatis and some rice for him every night, and then eat them herself the next day.

  One day Mogri heard that Yamuna was having trouble with her delivery. She rushed to the hospital instead of going to work. There was no one from Yamuna’s husband’s family. Her mother and elder brother grabbed Mogri’s hand and started weeping. Yamuna’s condition was serious. When the doctor said it would be difficult to save the child, no one had the courage to tell him to save Yamuna first. So Mogri took that task upon herself. Then Yamuna was taken into the operating theatre, and after a caesarean, she began to show signs of life but the infant could not be saved. Yamuna now held Mogri’s hand, crying: ‘My child, my child! They killed my child.’ Mogri was unwillingly reminded of Yamuna’s abortion at Pearl Centre. She wondered where the Shetty boy was, who had given her eighty rupees for the abortion. ‘My husband won’t take me back,’ wailed Yamuna. ‘Please get me a job. Even the bar will do.’

  The next day Mogri felt like telling the old kaka everything about the Shetty boy’s antics. She also told him about her father’s multiple families, and about the two-legged animals who tried to molest her from behind while she was washing their clothes in the bathroom. Smiling gently as though he knew it all, Kaka said, ‘Come with me this evening. Come and see where I live.’

  That afternoon it poured in the Flora Fountain area. Standing inside the restaurant, Mogri and the three waiters looked out at the rain beating down. ‘Bewakoofs, you like seeing those art school children’s silly sketches? Look, imagine that the open door is a painting. Then see what an incredible scene you are seeing.’

  Mogri, who was staring at the door, felt as though she had been struck by lightning. The door did indeed look like a frame, and the colours mingled outside in astonishing combinations. At the upper edge of the frame was the green of the shoots on the tree, glistening wet in the rain; lower down were the balls and balloons sold at the footpath shop; the yellow-topped taxis that kept driving past; many-hued umbrellas; people’s wet clothes as they hurried by; a double-decker bus that suddenly painted the whole frame red. Kaka’s idea of the painting had so gripped Mogri that she began to see each window of Light of India as a living picture. As she sat watching the open door, she was startled when some customers came in through that door, taking off their raincoats and furling their umbrellas.

  That evening Mogri set out with the old kaka. His aged body swayed as he walked. He had taken off the white uniform and put on a pair of black pants and a striped blue shirt. He stopped on the way to buy a packet of biscuits. When they got off the bus, it was on a street with coloured lights. On either side were three-storeyed buildings with cages where women wearing skimpy blouses and short petticoats were calling out to customers. They chewed on betel nut as they made lewd gestures to the passers-by. In front of each cage was a man waiting to strike a bargain. When a customer entered the cage and sat down on a rickety cot, the chosen woman quickly drew a curtain and disappeared behind it with him. Mogri felt numb. Kaka said, ‘Don’t be afraid. There’s no one as sinless and helpless as these people. Remember the secret treasure you talked about? Do you know what their share is? Perhaps five rupees per customer. And several times a night.’

  Walking beside a rundown old shop and in between two cages, Kaka went ahead. Without being aware of it, Mogri had clutched his hand. On both sides, women were laughing loudly. They stroked Mogri and whistled. ‘Chacha ne aurat laaya, Chacha ne aurat laaya – Uncle’s brought a woman,’ they said, pounding on Kaka’s head.

  ‘Nahi re, woh meri poti hai, she’s my granddaughter,’ said Kaka, also in a teasing voice.

  When he opened a small wooden door and went inside, Mogri saw that it was a room of about ten square feet. Two metal trunks, a green plastic bucket, a kerosene stove, two pairs of pants and two shirts hanging on a peg. To one side a woman was sleeping with a sheet covering her. ‘This is Susheela,�
�� said Kaka. ‘From the neighbouring kothi. She’s pregnant. Right now is when the “business” begins over there. So she comes here to sleep. I don’t mind. If her back aches, I massage it for her. Her mother was a young girl when I was in the business.’

  Just then, Susheela turned over in her sleep. Mogri could see her fair Nepali face, which was slightly swollen. Mogri was reminded of Yamuna. ‘And how is this painting?’ asked Kaka. Outside the door of the cubbyhole, Mogri could see a row of lights. Kaka opened one of his trunks and showed her some brushes wrapped in paper and tied with a rubber band. ‘See, these are from my poster-painting days at Prabhat Studio.’ He put them back in the trunk. ‘Will you have some biscuits?’ he asked.

  Mogri felt something stirring inside her. A fat woman came in and checked Susheela’s temperature by touching her hand. ‘Chacha, have you given your guest some tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Chaandi, I haven’t made any yet. Aren’t you well today?’

  ‘My turn hasn’t come yet, Chacha. Only after midnight. I’m getting old, that’s why.’

  ‘Cheh, your lovely smile doesn’t age,’ said Kaka, and was thumped on the head in return.

  Laughing at Kaka, and lightly stroking Mogri as she passed, Chaandi left.

  Kaka patted the mute Mogri’s hand. ‘See, child, this is my family. Now you’re part of it too,’ he said, laughing heartily. As Kaka and Mogri left, all the women called out to the girl: ‘Phir aana, come again.’