Seeing Banu at her husband’s funeral made grief rise like bile in Dosa. She was on the verge of lashing out, of somehow blaming Sorab’s death on Banu, but Shenaz Framrose restrained her. “Deekra, don’t defile the memory of your saintly husband,” she murmured. “This is a time for family to be together. You are suffering enough dookh. No need to spread it further.”
After Sorab’s death, Dosa became obsessed with her son. “You are now my son and my sun, the only light in my life,” she would say to the bewildered boy, who was torn between wishing to protect his mother and wanting to run from her omnipresence.
Until Sorab’s death, Dosa had showered her son with books, so that some of Zubin’s earliest memories were of reading in the living room while the cries of the neighborhood children playing outdoors at dusk wafted in through his window. If he felt a pang of loneliness then, the novels and textbooks that he read more than compensated for it. Zubin had turned into a bookish, cautious young boy, more at home in a library or classroom than on a cricket field.
But now, Dosa wanted to talk to her son in the evenings, rather than have him bury his nose in a book. All day long, while Zubin was at school, Dosa would scour the neighborhood for nuggets of gossip, which she would then hoard and offer to Zubin at the end of the day. If the boy showed his boredom at the comings and goings of the adults around him, Dosa would chide him. “Just like the rest of them you’re becoming, Zubin,” she would say. “Not a care for your poor widowed mother.” It was both Dosa’s fortune and ill fortune that between Sorab’s pension and investments and Darius Popat’s generosity, she did not have to work for a living. Darius Popat had announced at his son’s funeral that he would die before he would let his daughter-in-law get a job. Dosa was happy with that. After years of relative quiet, her apartment once again hummed with the sound of gossiping visitors. While Zubin was away at school, Dosa sat on her couch like royalty and made her pronouncements while her visitors brought her the juiciest tidbits of information.
A year after Sorab’s death, Dosa found Zubin in the kitchen, taking apart a dead cockroach, a look of fierce concentration on his face. “My goodness, Zubin. What are you doing, looking like a murderer? Drop that dirty thing and go wash your hands, fatta-faat.”
“Is okay, Mamma,” the boy said importantly. “I’m just practicing for my biology class. If I’m going to be a brilliant doctor, my teacher, Mr. Pinto, says I have to get over my soog and be ready to cut up people and all. But first, I start with insects.”
This was the first Dosa had heard about Zubin’s desire to be a doctor. The boy’s words stirred up the envy that lived right below the surface of Dosa’s skin. And on the heels of that envy came fear. Fear that her son would burn with the same ambition she had and then get destroyed by the fire of that ambition when it was snuffed out, as Dosa superstitiously believed it invariably would be. The envy alone, she would have been able to conquer, because Dosa genuinely loved her little boy. But the combination of fear and envy was toxic. She convinced herself that Zubin was about to make the same mistake she had, that his dreams were too large for his puny, middle-class life to hold. Her heart ached for her son, as if the disappointments she believed awaited him had already occurred.
In a panic, Dosa called Yasmin Shroff at work. Yasmin was now a secretary at Tata Industries and worldly in a way that Dosa admired. “Yasmin? Dosamai here. Sorry to disturb you at work, but I am having a problem. No, no, everybody is fine. It’s just that—Zubin told me today he is wanting to be a doctor.”
Yasmin sounded bewildered. “That’s great, Dosa. But what about your problem?”
Dosa was impatient. “But that is the problem, stupid. At one time, I also was wanting to be a doctor. But my dear departed father had other ideas. Instead, I married Sorab. I don’t want my Zubin to go through the same disappointment that I did.”
“Well, Dosamai, it’s not as if you will marry Zubin off against his wishes. Also, children want to be different things at different ages. But if Zubin is serious, I think it would be so wonderful if he could actually live out your dream. In a way, Zubin could keep your dream alive. See what I mean?”
Dosa hung up from the conversation angry at herself for having called Yasmin. “That stupid Yasmin,” she said out loud. “Has scrambled eggs for brains. Thinks because she works for Tata, she is as smart as Mr. Tata himself. Stupid fool.”
Dosa did not want to realize her own aborted dreams through Zubin’s achievements. Rather, she saw her role as protecting Zubin from future heartbreak. And if that meant she had to be the one to break his heart now, she was willing to pay the price. That evening, for the first time, she pushed Zubin outdoors to play cricket with the other neighborhood kids. “Enough of this mugging and studying. A real bookworm you are becoming. Sitting home all day and tearing apart poor little cockroaches. How you think the baby cockroaches’ mummies and daddies must be feeling?”
Zubin, who had grown up hearing his mother curse daily the roaches that infested their kitchen, stared at his mother openmouthed. He had never so much as owned a cricket bat and had no idea what he would do among the tough, tanned, muscled neighborhood kids he was now being encouraged to socialize with. He put his mom’s strange behavior down to her ongoing grief at his father’s death.
From then on, Dosa embarked on a plan to save Zubin from his own intelligence. In a total reversal of her former behavior, she now encouraged him to do less homework. She extolled the virtues of humility, praised the holiness of small things. Why, working as a clerk with other Parsis at the Central Bank of India was as good a job as any other. A steady paycheck, good benefits, job security, long lunch breaks. She took to scanning the newspapers for any accounts of doctors who had killed patients through negligence, conducted weird experiments on them, stabbed their wives, or been involved in scandals. Any such nugget, she placed where Zubin would be sure to see it.
One day, she opened her front door to call Zubin in for dinner and saw that he was in an animated conversation with Rusi Bilimoria, who lived one floor above them. Rusi was already a legend among the neighborhood kids because he had a part-time job and was talking about buying a motorcycle with his own money. “When I buy a big house at Worli or Marine Drive, you can come visit me,” Rusi was saying to Zubin. “Should be in a few years, bossie. What I say is, if you are willing to work hard, anything is possible, na? The sky is the limit, then.”
His words frightened Dosa. She could see Rusi’s self-confidence unravel all of her careful plans to ensure that Zubin grew into a modest, cautious man who did not aim too high. For six months now, she had worked to suppress her son’s natural curiosity and native intelligence. And now, a young neighborhood show-off was about to wreck her scheme by instigating her son to dare to dream his way out of his middle-class existence.
She flew toward Rusi like a mother lion protecting her cub. “Be-sharam, stop filling my son’s ears with all your dhaaps,” she cried. “Wadia Baug is good enough for us simple folks. You can go to your Worli and live with those Gujus and Sindhis, if that’s what you want. We are happy being with our own kind.”
“Mummy, Mummy, stop it,” Zubin whispered. “We were only talking, that’s all.”
Rusi looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Dosamai,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He fled up the stairs.
From that day on, Dosa made it her business to know Rusi’s business. For years, she watched him because she was afraid he would contaminate her son, who, with each passing year, was becoming the dull, mild man she wanted him to be. She often told Zubin to be thankful that she had saved him from Rusi’s seductive but foolish dreams, especially in light of the fact that Rusi’s business never quite took off the way he had predicted. “Remember what I told you years ago, beta?’ she said when Zubin became an officer at Central Bank at age twenty-nine. “Look at the hours Rusi works, dragging himself home late at night, looking as tired as a mouse chased by a cat. And look at you, coming home by six-thirty sharp, in tip-top conditi
on. And what for Rusi works so hard? Still stuck in Wadia Baug he is, same as us plain folk.”
Dosa’s victory was complete a few years later, when Zubin came home and recounted a conversation he had had with Rusi earlier in the day. Rusi had applied for another loan from Central Bank and Zubin’s boss had just turned him down.
A teary Rusi poked his head into Zubin’s office on his way out. “Arre, bossie, what’s wrong?” Zubin said, rising to his feet. “What brings you here? Come in, come in.”
Rusi’s eyes were bloodshot and his usually neat hair looked disheveled, as if he had run his hand through it one too many times. “I’m sunk, Zubin,” he whispered. “My boat is sunk. I have creditors in the market from whom I’ve borrowed money for the business. Twenty-eight to thirty-one percent interest they’re charging me, boss. I came to see your branch manager for a loan at a regular interest rate, so I can get these bloodsuckers off my back. I’m expecting a big order soon from Sharma Enterprise. Big concern. With one order, I can wipe out my debts. But what to do? Your boss says he won’t loan me another paisa. I don’t even have the money to buy some inventory.”
“But Rusi, are you mad? Doing business with these loan sharks? They’ll bleed you dry. Plus, you owe us money. But how did you get yourself in this mess anyway?”
Rusi’s lower lip moved, but his eyes were steady. “Just years and years of problems catching up with me. Always trying to stay one step ahead of failure. I started my business with no capital, Zubin. Do you understand? Nobody to back me up, nobody to teach or guide me. Every mistake I made, I paid for it myself. All by trial and error. I was a young man and impatient. Those American books I read, like Think and Grow Rich, made it look so easy. It wasn’t. And trying to remain honest in business in this corrupt country … But forget it. I myself don’t know what went wrong. Whatever it is, here I am now. With a young child and a wife and mother to support. I tell you, Zubin, if I don’t get this loan, I’ll have to close the business down. Don’t know what I’ll do then—probably drive a taxi or something.”
“So what did you say?” Dosamai asked her son eagerly.
“Say? Nothing,” Zubin said with a shrug. “He went back in to see Mr. D’Souza, the branch manager.” He did not tell his mother that he had personally implored his boss to extend Rusi another loan. And that D’Souza had reluctantly agreed.
And he did not tell Dosamai when D’Souza came into his office sixteen months later, all smiles. “That Bilimoria chap. Amazing fellow. Came in earlier today with the last payment on the loan. We were pretty sure he was putting some money aside, y’know, taking his cut before paying us back. So we did an audit on him, and guess what? Came back clean as a whistle. Turns out he was paying us back every penny he owed. Damn honest bugger. Guess I wouldn’t be too happy if I were his wife. But since I’m his banker, I’m delighted.”
Zubin’s heart swelled with pride. “Yah, he’s a good man, that Rusi. Known him my whole life, sir.” But part of him also thought Rusi was foolish. So he’s averted one crisis, Zubin thought. But without any money put aside, he’ll be in the same boat next time. He’s still living from one contract to another.
Dosamai did not share her son’s affection for Rusi. When, after years of tracking him, she was convinced that Rusi would never be the success he had predicted, that his star did not burn as brightly as it had once seemed, she continued to watch him out of habit. And when Rusi’s wife, Coomi, began to visit her with her litany of complaints against her husband, she became the jewel in Dosa’s crown. Now, Dosa had an inroad into the innermost chambers of Rusi’s red heart.
Dosa shuffled into the small dingy kitchen to take out an old battered frying pan in which to make her scrambled egg. She wished Zubin would call her tonight from Pune. With so many of the neighbors at the Kanga wedding tonight, the apartment building felt uncharacteristically empty and silent. Even that recluse Tehmi had decided to attend the wedding. I wonder if that drunken Adi is at home, she thought to herself. Or did Jimmy also invite him? I wish Bapsi had married him instead and left my darling Zubin alone.
Zubin’s decision to marry at thirty-five had shocked Dosa, who had been lulled by the long years of living alone with her only son. Dosa immediately told her son he was too old and too bald to marry, but for once, Zubin would not listen. He was head over heels in love with the jovial, hardworking bank teller who had just been transferred to his branch. When Dosa met the strong, vibrant, buxom woman her son brought home, she regretted the many times she had talked her son out of marrying the insipid, pale, unthreatening women he had previously expressed an interest in. Those women, Dosa would have been able to control; one look at Bapsi told Dosa that she had met her match. Bapsi charged into Dosa’s wiliness and guile with the open honesty and the head-on innocence of a young bull. All of Dosa’s surreptitious ways, her slyness and penchant for troublemaking, now lay naked under Bapsi’s unwavering gaze. Her new daughter-in-law blew Dosa’s cover with alarming regularity. “Mamma, come away from that window,” she would say in a loud voice as Dosa would discreetly part the curtains to spy on someone. “None of our business what others are doing.” For Dosa, whose business was other people’s business, Bapsi’s words were blasphemy. To make matters worse, her daughter-in-law also refused to nurse Dosa’s lifelong sense of injury at the cruel trick fate had played on her. “Come on, na, Mamma,” Bapsi would boom in her good-natured way. “Who even knows if you really would have been a doctor? Anyway, you had a good man for a husband and your Zubin is a sweetie pie, and now you have a daughter who takes care of your every need. What else are you wanting? Let bygones be bygones.”
It was like two continents clashing. And Zubin soon became the territory they each wanted to colonize, so that he was increasingly torn between the two strong women in his life. He spent years trying to build bridges between the two of them, to get them to speak a common language, but to no avail. Bapsi resented the fact that while she and Zubin were at work all day, Dosa invited a steady stream of neighborhood women into their home for hours of gossip and conversation. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” she would say. “Why don’t they do some social work or something instead of spying on one another and poking their noses in other people’s business? Some people have too much time on their hands.” Dosa saw this as a challenge to her life’s work and reacted with the ferocity of a businessman whose lease has just been canceled. “You’d think she was president of the bank instead of just a common clerk,” she’d complain to her many admirers. “The Queen of Sheba, my son has married.”
The situation at home reached a point where when his branch manager offered Zubin a transfer to Pune, Zubin had to stop himself from kissing the man on both cheeks in gratitude. “Sir, I accept,” he said. “No, no, nothing to think about. As long as Bapsi gets a transfer also, I accept.”
Still, leaving Wadia Baug was not easy. On his way to the railway station, Zubin encountered Rusi Bilimoria coming up the stairs, and he thought back to a conversation from decades ago. Strange it is, he thought. For all his talk, Rusi never left Wadia Baug. And here I am, the one who is leaving. “Best of luck with the business, Rusi,” he said, surprised at the tremor in his voice. “Thank you for all your help,” Rusi replied, taking Zubin’s hand in both of his. “You’re a good man, and the building people will miss you. Good luck in your new life.”
As he stepped out of the building, Zubin had felt a pang of fear and guilt at leaving behind the woman he loved and hated more than any other. But then he glanced at his wife, saw the gray streaming through her hair and how her mouth now curved downward, and he knew he had to give her a chance. Bapsi had put up with so much for his sake. Now it was his turn to make her happy. His mother would be safe, buffeted by the friends, neighbors, and even the foes that she had cultivated over the years. Out of fear, gratitude, admiration, boredom, and even love, they would flock to Dosa’s home, seeking her advice on things, picking up the herbal tinctures that she brewed, dropping off an occasional box of
sweets or a plate of mutton chops or biryani for her.
But tonight, there was only a scrambled egg and a slice of Modern bread for dinner. Dosa chewed slowly as she ate directly from the pan she had fried the egg in. Then she hobbled into the living room and turned on the TV, not bothering to flip channels. It would help kill the evening, pass the time. She intended to stay up until all the neighbors returned home from the wedding, intended to mark what time each couple or family got in.
But within moments, there was an odd whistling sound in Dosa’s living room. She was in her shabby armchair, her feet curled up under her thin thighs, her head tilted back, her mouth open, a thin ribbon of drool curling on her chin. She was fast asleep.
Three
The wedding reception was going swimmingly well. Jimmy Kanga surveyed the bejeweled crowd before him, his chest sticking out with involuntary pride. Like a jadoogar, he, Jimmy, had turned the squalor of Bombay into something beautiful and refined. A shimmering refuge from the outside world. What were the lines from that song Camelot? Something about a brief shining moment? That is what he had created at his son’s wedding—Camelot. Unconsciously, he hummed the tune to himself. From the elegantly dressed women in their jewels and silk saris, to the twinkling lights on a stage decked in rose petals, to the food and drink that were flowing as freely as the Ganges, everything was perfect. Perfect. No hint of the menacing, shadowy city that lay outside the tall iron gates. Jimmy Kanga had, with one wave of his magic wand, made that world disappear.
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