by Farahad Zama
Her mother did not reply but started muttering to herself. Aruna ignored her and tested the coriander paste between her forefinger and thumb. Deciding that it had reached the right consistency, she scooped it out into a bowl and washed the mortar and pestle. She brought her hand to her nose and breathed in the fresh smell of the coriander. Her mother took the bowl and took it to the hob to saute it. Aruna heard her talking under her breath.
“I thought she was the sensible one in the family but what did I know? Silly girl.”
“What did you say?” asked Aruna.
“Nothing. Rouse Vani. Otherwise she will only start stirring when the sun is halfway up the horizon, as if she is Lady Curzon.”
An hour later, they had finished their breakfast and Aruna decided to go for a bath. Despite her mother’s protests that it was not winter, she heated a vessel of water and mixed it with cold water in a bucket. She closed the bathroom door and looked around in the resulting gloom. It was a tiny room, perhaps four feet by five feet, with an old, tall, plastic bin in a corner that held their soiled linen. A pipe stuck out of the wall; the builder of the house had very optimistically put it in, but no water had ever flowed out of it. The brass tap at the end of the pipe must have been removed a long time ago and sold for scrap. The door was a tin sheet over a wooden frame. Two feet of the sheet near the floor had rusted away and a previous tenant had nailed up a plywood plank to cover the hole. The bottom of the wooden frame had been eaten away by the water like the fingers on a leper’s hands. The walls had not been painted in years. Aruna sighed and thought about her airy, marble-tiled bathroom with its wonderful hot shower.
She reached into the bucket and took out the mug. Its handle was broken and the sharp edge almost cut her finger. “Oww!” she said and examined her hand carefully in the dim light to see if it bled. How expensive were mugs? Time to get a new one, she muttered with a frown, pouring water over herself.
She didn’t feel like lingering and quickly finished her bath. As she dried herself and started putting on her clothes, she heard a male voice outside the living room saying, “I didn’t realise it was already the month of Aashaadam.”
“Aashaada Maasam is still two months away,” said her father.
“That’s what I thought, but since you are the scholar, I thought maybe I was mistaken.”
Aruna pulled the drawstring of her salwar tight round her waist and tied it with a shoelace knot, listening to the conversation in the other room. She recognised the voice of one of their neighbours talking to her father.
“It’s just that I noticed your daughter has come home, so I thought, Mr Somayajulu is a pundit, a man who knows our traditions and customs. He won’t suffer his daughter coming home without a reason and, as she is not pregnant, it must be that month in which all newly married women leave their in-laws’ houses and come back to their parents.”
Aruna pulled the kameez over her head and missed what her father said in reply. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her actions were affecting the people she loved most. She untied her hair and shook it loose. When she heard the man leave, she opened the bathroom door and went out. The sky suddenly burst open and heavy rain started falling as if somebody up there had opened a spigot. Water splashed off the ground and on to her legs. Aruna yelped at how suddenly it had gone from dry to pouring and she closed the back door. She hoped the interfering neighbour had got soaked.
Aruna took advantage of a break in the rain and made her way to Mr Ali’s house. She was really annoyed – trying to avoid a dog on the way, she had stepped into a puddle and at the same time a passing motorcycle had splashed her. She dabbed ineffectually at the brown mud stains on her dress with her handkerchief. She had hoped to wear the dress again but she would have to wash it now. She hadn’t taken that many clothes with her when she left her husband’s house and it was difficult to wash and get clothes dry with the constant rain.
She gave up on the stains and turned to her work. She needed to prepare the list of Christian bridegrooms – at least she could type it on the PC now, rather than on that old mechanical typewriter. She switched on the computer and started typing the list. Soon Mr Ali joined her and went through the morning post.
About half an hour later, a thin, middle-aged woman rang the bell and came in. “Is this the marriage bureau?” she asked. She talked in clipped tones and walked with bird-like movements.
Aruna looked up and nodded. “Please take a seat,” she said.
The woman was very fair, almost pale, with grey hair, and she wore an old-fashioned, light-cream chiffon sari. Dark, squarish glasses sat on the bridge of a prominent nose. Her handbag was of fine leather but looked faded from years of use. Aruna thought she looked like a dowager, except that she was still wearing the black-bead necklace that signified a married Muslim woman.
“How can we help you?” said Mr Ali.
“My son’s wedding is in exactly four weeks,” she said.
“Thank you for coming and telling us,” said Mr Ali. “Not everybody does, you know. However, I don’t believe I’ve seen you before. Please give us your membership number and we can look up your details.”
“I am not a member of your marriage bureau,” said the lady.
“I see,” said Mr Ali and glanced at Aruna. She met his eyes and shook her head slightly. It was clear that he was as mystified as herself. Mr Ali turned back to the woman and said, “How can we help you?”
“I want you to help me find a bride for my son,” she said.
“Find a bride…” said Mr Ali. “But didn’t you just say that his wedding is in a month’s time?”
“Maybe the lady has another son,” said Aruna.
“No,” said the lady, “I have fixed my son’s marriage date and booked the wedding hall. I’ve arranged for the cook, the priest and the videographer. I just need to find the bride.”
“Did…Has a prior engagement…ahh…broken down?” said Mr Ali. Aruna smiled at how delicately her boss was asking the question. She quickly suppressed the smile when she realised that the lady might take offence. A broken engagement was no laughing matter even on the boy’s side. On the girl’s side, of course, it would be a disaster.
“No,” said the lady. “There was no engagement.” Aruna and Mr Ali were speechless and, after a moment, the lady continued, “Both my husband and I are from noble families.”
She looked at them with a flash in her eyes and they both nodded – that was not difficult to believe at all.
“My husband is a much older man than me and very weak. I have to make all the arrangements myself.” She looked at the wall. “When we were young and strong, we had retainers to do our bidding but now that we don’t have the strength, we have to run around ourselves.”
She shrugged and looked back at them. Her voice became stronger again.
“People tell me that my son has a good job in Mumbai and I did not expect any trouble finding a bride for him, so I went ahead and made all the arrangements. Everybody knows the date and if the wedding doesn’t take place on the day, then my nose will be cut off – my family’s pride will be ground into the dust.”
“I see,” said Mr Ali. “What about your son? Does he know the date too?”
“Of course he knows,” said the lady, looking at him over the top of her glasses like a schoolteacher. “How can he apply for leave otherwise?”
Aruna almost grinned. The lady was the first person, apart from Madam, who spoke to Sir like that.
“Why don’t you complete one of our forms?” said Mr Ali.
“I don’t fill out forms,” said the lady. “Let me tell you what I want.”
Mr Ali looked at Aruna and shrugged. He took out a form and a pen. “Yes, lady,” he said. “Let’s start with your name…”
Ten minutes later, they had all the details. “It all seems straightforward. Your son is a vice-president in a multinational company, earning a very good salary, and your family is second to none,” said Mr Ali, putting the cap on his pen.
> “I have answered all your questions but I haven’t told you the most important condition yet.”
“What is it?” said Mr Ali, unscrewing the cap again.
“Society is not what it used to be,” said the lady. “People like us have to manage with one or two servants instead of fifteen or twenty as before. My son sells soap.”
“Your son is a top executive, madam,” said Mr Ali.
“Whatever,” she said. “He is still selling soap to ordinary people. If my father or my husband’s father had seen this day, they wouldn’t have believed it. Anyway, what I am saying is that families like ours have lost a lot over the years. What we haven’t lost is our pride and our pride is in our noses.”
So is your snot, thought Aruna, who was feeling uncharitable because of her own problems. She didn’t say it aloud.
“Noses, madam?” said Mr Ali.
“All our family members, for as long back as we have records, have had prominent noses.” The lady touched her beak-like proboscis, almost stroking it. “I want to make sure that continues. The girl I find should have a long nose too. Otherwise my grandchildren might be stub-nosed and that would be unbearable. Do you have any long-nosed girls on your books?”
Mr Ali shrugged. “Unfortunately, we don’t record that information,” he said. “So while we can search for girls of less than twenty-eight years of age or those studying economics, we cannot ask the computer to give us a list of girls with three-inch-long noses.”
Just then, the door opened and Pari came in. “Salaam, chaacha,” she said gaily and walked through came the house, her ponytail swinging behind her.
The lady stared after the young woman. “Who is that?” she asked.
“That’s my niece,” said Mr Ali, shading the relationship a bit.
“Does she have any royal blood in her? She has a fantastic nose.”
Mr Ali laughed. “I doubt it very much. She was adopted from a poor couple who had six other children and couldn’t afford to feed them all. Her father was a manual labourer.”
Aruna looked at Mr Ali in surprise. She hadn’t known that.
“There must be some noble blood in her ancestry. You cannot hide that sort of thing. She didn’t appear to be married. Do you think I can talk to her parents?”
“Her parents are dead,” said Mr Ali. “And she is a widow.”
“Oh!” said the lady. “That’s a shame.”
Mr Ali turned to Aruna. “Take out the all photographs we have for Muslim brides. That’s the only way the lady will find girls with long noses.”
♦
Rehman rode his motorcycle down a plank laid across the muddy slope and parked the bike under cover. Three unfinished floors had been built on pillars, all in grey concrete. It would be another two floors taller by the time construction finished.
Rehman got out of his wet raincoat and handed it to a wiry man in his fifties. It had been pouring for five days now and the entrance to the construction site was a quagmire.
“Soori, is everything OK?” Rehman asked. He was enjoying his job much more now that the actual construction had started.
“Yes, sir. We had a delivery of sand earlier today. The lorry driver said that we may not get another load for a few days.”
“I was expecting that because of the rains,” said Rehman. “That’s why I ordered it even though we don’t need the sand for almost a week. Where is it?”
“I got them to put it in the back where the water won’t get into it,” said Soori.
“That’s very good. Has the maestri, the foreman, come in?”
Soori hung Rehman’s coat on a nail that had been driven into a nearby pillar. His wife, a thin, dark woman with a silver nose ring and a tattooed band round her upper arms, brought him a steaming glass of tea. Rehman took the steel tumbler with a grateful smile and took a sip.
Soori, the watchman, lived on site with his wife in a small shack that had been thrown together with palm leaves and opened-up cement sacks, plus other bits and pieces of construction materials. His sons were also watchmen in nearby construction sites and they all lived a peripatetic life, moving to a new building once each was completed.
Rehman had sorted out the paperwork necessary to send Soori’s three grandchildren to a local government school and since then Soori and his wife were devoted to him. Rehman was discovering just how much help it was to have a man he trusted on location twenty-four hours a day. Soori and his wife had lived on building sites for over twenty-five years and even though they had never been to school, they had a vast fund of knowledge about the practice, if not the theory, of civil engineering.
Rehman finished the tea and handed it back to Soori’s wife, saying to her, “We don’t need to water anything today because the air is moist, so take another worker with you and move the bricks up to the second floor. We’ll start building the walls there tomorrow.”
She nodded and left. She earned extra money by working on the site and providing lunches and teas to the workers. He turned to Soori and said, “Let’s meet the maestri.”
The foreman was on the second floor with a gang of workers. Retail, they say, is detail, but this is even truer for construction. A hundred things must happen simultaneously. Rehman was soon busy making sure that the plumber did not interfere with the electrician and that they both finished their piece of work before the plasterers; that there was enough iron for the wire-benders and sufficient cement for the brickies; and while it was easy to remember that carpenters needed wood, he also had to make sure they had screws, dowels and glue.
A couple of hours later, he was pointing out to the maestri that one of his workers was not laying the wall straight when Soori came running up.
“The owner has come,” he said.
Rehman asked the foreman to continue and went with Soori down to the ground floor. A short, sleek-looking man, in a white cotton shirt and dark trousers and black, stout platform shoes, was sitting on a folding metal chair, waiting for him. His nephew, a young man in his twenties, stood behind him, holding a tattered, sorry-looking bag that no thief would pay any attention to. Rehman knew that it contained chequebooks and tens of thousands of rupees in cash.
“Good morning, Mr Bhargav,” said Rehman to the older man and nodded to his nephew.
Mr Bhargav was not actually the owner of the site. The land once belonged to an old man who had lived on the plot all his life, along with his four sons and their families, in a small house with a big garden all round it. When he died, his four sons had inherited the land but could not decide what to do. Because of the lie of the land, it could not be divided into four similar-sized parts of equal value, and none of the brothers had enough money to buy out the others. With their father gone, relations had soured between the siblings until they were barely talking to each other. Their wives were even more antagonistic to one another.
Mr Bhargav had come across one of the brothers, who had told him about the land and their situation. He struck a deal with all four that he would demolish the old house and put up the new building at his own cost, and they would get a share of the profits after the building was finally sold. The brothers could have retained a bigger portion of the final building if they negotiated as one entity, but Mr Bhargav had sealed the deal by putting them up in flats in different parts of the city.
The builder, in a rare moment of candour, had once told Rehman, “If the brothers won’t even talk to each other, how can they complain that I am short-changing them?”
Soori brought another chair and Rehman sat down.
“Has the new plastering maestri come yet?” said Mr Bhargav.
“No, sir,” said Rehman. “I’ve split the existing team into two, so the work is proceeding on both sides of the building but obviously it has slowed down.” Rehman looked at his watch. “Oh! I didn’t realise it was already eleven. He should have been here well before now.”
“Hmm,” said Mr Bhargav. “I got a call from the sand supplier. He said he delivered a load today:
I thought we had enough for another week?”
Rehman nodded. “It becomes difficult to dig sand out of the ground when it is raining like this. So, I decided to keep some in stock.”
“Good idea,” said Mr Bhargav. He turned to his nephew. “See, that’s the kind of thing you need to learn. Anybody can shout at the workers and make them run around, but you need to keep thinking ahead to make sure that the work doesn’t stop.” Mr Bhargav turned back to Rehman. “Keep up the good work. It is very important because we are running out of time.”
The agreement with the owners specified that the building should be complete in eighteen months, or there would be penalties to pay, but the work had not started on time because of various delays and now there were less than six months left until the deadline. Rehman was sure that the brothers would not come together and enforce the contract but Mr Bhargav kept reminding him of the time limit every time they met.
A man in his late twenties, wearing a rough shirt and trousers, walked on to the construction site. His fingers were grey with cement and he held a brick trowel and a plumb line.
“Namaste, saar,” he said to them.
“What time did you say you would come? And what time is it now?” said Mr Bhargav.
“Sorry, saar. My little one had diarrhoea because of all these rains. My wife was really worried so I had to take him to the doctor.”
“I don’t care,” said Mr Bhargav. “We don’t need you. I hate unreliable people. Get out of here.”
“That’s not fair, saar. I had a good reason.” He looked at Rehman who averted his gaze, embarrassed and unable to meet the worker’s eyes.
“What are you looking at the engineer for?” said Mr Bhargav. “Everybody here works for me. I am telling you that I don’t have time for unreliable people. Go.”
“I am really sorry, sir. But the young one is not well and I really need the job. The medicines are so expensive and I won’t get another job straight away in these rains. Please show some mercy. I will come on time in future.”