Bombay Time

by Thrity Umrigar

  Despite Rusi’s disinterest and absentmindedness, a tattered hope fluttered in Coomi’s heart, like a piece of paper blowing along the sands of Chowpatty Beach. In their middle age, perhaps she and Rusi could finally learn to be man and wife. Nobody stood between them now. No longer did she have to feel as if a pair of eyes was watching her every move, waiting for her to fail. She could—would—rescue Rusi from the whirlpool of grief he had been drowning in since his mother’s death. Coomi knew better than to console her husband with the easy patter of professional mourners: She was old. At least she didn’t suffer. She died a peaceful death. All of us have to go sometime. She noticed how Rusi gritted his teeth when well-meaning neighbors recited these rehearsed lines. No, she would not say those words, because she understood that death at any age is still an insult to life, an affront to those who must keep living. Instead, she would rescue Rusi a day at a time, until someday he would have a treacherous thought: Is this how it would have been? Could marriage have really been this wonderful, this smooth, happy ride, if Mamma had never been in the picture?

  Once Rusi had time to come to terms with his mother’s death, perhaps they would patch things up. Start life again, just the two of them, in a way that had never been possible until now. Maybe they could go to Khandala or some nearby place for a few days, just to get away from the hurt and grief that hung like lanterns from the walls of their flat. Something like a honeymoon period. After all, despite all his faults, Rusi was a good man. As much as Coomi had resented her husband’s devotion to his mother, she also admired it. Not too many of the men she knew would have taken care of an elderly parent the way Rusi had. Her own brothers, for example, loved their mother, but they were not above yelling at the old woman to shut up when she got on their nerves. And now, with Khorshed out of the way, maybe Rusi could learn to transfer all his love and caring to her. God knows, she had prayed for that long enough.

  So Coomi went to work. At night, she held Rusi in her arms, trying to ignore the fact that he moved stiffly away from her the first chance he got. Using Khorshed’s old recipes, she cooked Rusi’s favorite dishes, despite the fact that he ate little. Within his earshot, she described her dead mother-in-law in affectionate, nostalgic tones, trying to ignore the look of amazement on the face of the person she was talking to. On Khorshed’s first-month death anniversary, she got up early in the morning and silently accompanied Rusi to the fire temple. She tried not to notice, willed her eyes not to click on the picture of Rusi sitting on the wooden bench, as far away from her as he could. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to pray for her husband to thaw toward her. Please, God, she thought. Please, please, please, please. Coomi even tried to fight against her chronic tardiness, so that when they went out, Rusi had to wait only a half hour for her to get dressed, instead of the usual hour or two. This last change was dramatic enough that several of their friends commented on it.

  But there was a harsh fact to be faced: They had forgotten how to be a couple. There was no longer any shared intimacy between Rusi and her. No matter how hard she tried, Rusi was as stiff as a marble statue around her. All his responses to her were forced, his words stilted and abrupt. “Rusi,” she said one afternoon. “I bought some fresh pomfret today. A good price, it was. What dish would you like for dinner?” He looked at her disinterestedly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said with a shrug. “You cook whatever you’re fond of. I can eat anything.”

  For weeks after Khorshed’s funeral, Coomi sifted through the sands of time to rediscover the fierce young man she had loved and married, but the tide had washed him away. In his place was a gray-haired man with eyes that were unbearably sad. She had to look away from those eyes because of the piercing knowledge that she was at least in part responsible for that sadness.

  “Yahoo!”

  Rusi and Coomi both turned toward the stage to watch the singer. As they turned, their eyes met and, for an unrecognizable moment, they smiled at each other. Coomi knew that she and her husband were briefly united by the same happy thought: Binny. “Yahoo! Chaye koye muje jungalee kahe.” “So what if someone calls me crazy.” The middle-aged singer with the thinning hair sang the popular movie hit from the 1960s with a desperate stab at exuberance that normally would have made Coomi turn away in embarrassment. That was the trouble with Parsi weddings, Coomi often railed. Everybody concentrated so much on the menu that nobody paid the slightest attention to which musicians they hired. Even a man as sophisticated as Jimmy Kanga had hired a two-bit band for his only son’s wedding.

  But right now, Coomi approved of the choice of song. Although Rusi was currently standing a few feet away from her and talking to a tall, handsome-looking woman whom Coomi did not recognize, she knew that the exuberant chorus of the song had transported her husband to a happier time. It also connected Rusi to her, no matter how briefly. They had exchanged a look, a smile of recognition, had both thought of Binny at the same moment. That made her glad, so much so that she forgot to blink and take a snapshot of Rusi talking to a strange, attractive woman.

  It was a nice song, a little manic, brimming with energy. Sort of like Rusi in his younger days. Coomi remembered that a young Binny had pleaded with them to take her to see a rerun Junglee, the movie the song was from. Binny loved the old song, would stand in front of the mirror wriggling her hips and singing the words in her broken Hindi. And when Rusi came home from work, Binny hurled herself at her father, letting out a bloodcurdling cry of “Yahoo.” No matter how often Rusi pretended to jump and quiver with fright, the joy of scaring her unsuspecting father never dimmed for Binny.

  In the movie theater, Coomi and Rusi laughed in delight, watching Binny bop her head and sing along to the song. Throughout the movie, which Rusi and Coomi had first seen years ago, Rusi kept a restraining hand on Binny’s knee. It was Rusi’s job to make sure Binny stayed in her seat during a movie. She was at the age where she took movies literally, believed that the actors were flesh-and-blood people up on a stage. If a screen character said, “Let’s dance,” that was all the invitation Binny needed. She would turn to her father, tug at his tie, and say loudly, “Come on, Daddy. He’s asking us to dance.”

  It was worse during the barroom fight scenes. Binny tried valiantly to help the good guys. Turning around in her movie seat, she tried to pry it loose, so that she could hurl her chair at the bad guys, as everybody in the bar seemed to be doing. Binny never understood why her parents did not do the same.

  Coomi’s task was even more demanding. Binny could not distinguish one actor from another. However, she did understand that most movies had a good guy and a bad guy, and since Rusi mostly wanted to see Westerns or World War II movies, that was a helpful insight. Problem was, the good guys and the bad guys looked the same to Binny. If the bad guy had a mustache or an evil scar, that helped. But the war movies were perplexing. To Binny’s undiscriminating eyes, the Germans didn’t look any different from the Americans. The adults understood that the Germans were the ones who mostly said just one word, “Ja.” And sometimes, when they were really pushed, ‘‘Ja, ja.” But to Binny’s unsophisticated ears, all foreign accents sounded strange.

  For Coomi, this lack of discrimination was an unhappy state of affairs. Minutes into a movie, Binny fixed her big unblinking eyes on her mother. Then the dreaded question rolled off her tongue. “Mummy, is this a good man or a bad man?”

  “Good man,” Coomi answered, hoping to nip it in the bud. “Can’t you see, beta, he’s the hero?”

  A second or two passed.

  “And this man, Mummy. Who’s he? The good man or the bad man?”

  “Same man, Binny. The hero, I told you. Be quiet now and watch the picture.”

  A moment of blissful silence. Then the little voice again, insistent as a hammer at dawn. “Who is this man, Mummy? Good or bad?”

  Rusi leaned over. “So sorry. Tell you what, Coomi. If you just answer her questions today, I promise we’ll come back next week to see the film again. I’ll talk to Mamma about keepi
ng Binny for a few hours.”

  And so Coomi spent the movie saying alternately, “Good man. … Bad man. … Bad—no—good man. … Good man.”

  After awhile, they stumbled upon a cure. Coomi figured out that if she kept an endless supply of potato chips ready, she could intercept Binny’s merciless questioning. Carrying a handbag with bags of chips in it, Coomi waited for the movie to start and then handed Binny the first bag. The more chips she popped in her mouth, the fewer questions popped our. When Binny was done with one bag, Coomi swiftly took the empty bag away and handed her a new one. A few weeks later, Coomi read a magazine article about Chinese peasant women who drugged their infants with opium while they worked in the fields. She felt a twinge of guilt before she could even remember why.

  Wish I could get those years back, Coomi now thought. No matter what kind of a husband Rusi had been, he was a good father. And Binny had been a lovely child, not a trace of the sullen teenager she would become. How close she felt to Rusi the day Binny was born. How shimmeringly fragile and sweet that moment when Rusi lay beside her in her hospital bed and they looked at their strange, beautiful daughter in awe.

  No hair. That’s the first thing she noticed about Binny. Bald as a spinning top. Good lung power, too. Amazing what a din someone so small could make. With the nurse’s help, she held the baby to her breast for the first time and felt a tremor run through her. After the feeding, she insisted on holding her baby some more. Her daughter felt so good in her arms as she lay sleeping. And she was hers and Rusi’s. She had given birth to this healthy, pretty, greedy baby in her arms. That was the amazing part. She got to keep her. She was going to take her home.

  Rusi was anxiously waiting for them in their hospital room when Coomi was finally wheeled in. She smiled at her husband as she entered the room. Rusi’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked as tired as Coomi felt. “Good job, Coomi,” he said inanely as he bent down to kiss her, and despite her fatigue, she felt an urge to laugh. For a second, they grinned at each other like conspirators. But Coomi could tell that Rusi was dying to hold the baby, so, reluctantly, she parted with her.

  For a moment, Rusi looked lost, as if he didn’t know what to do. Then instinct took over. He cooed at the baby as he paced the hospital room. Next, he tested all of the baby’s fingers one by one, wriggling them up and down. Then he tested the ears, clicking his fingers on each side. “She’s a perfectly put together baby,” he declared happily. “If she has her mother’s looks and her mother’s brains, she will be all right.”

  Later that day, with both of the baby’s grandmothers in the room, Rusi leaned over his daughter’s crib. He fished into his pocket and took out a bunch of keys. He jingled them near the baby’s right ear and then laid them down in the crib. “These are yours, sweetheart,” he whispered to her. “These are the keys to the house, to the factory. Everything I own now belongs to you. You already have the keys to my heart.”

  Coomi smiled now, thinking of those happy times. At that moment, they knew so little about what awaited them. No knowledge then about the fact that Coomi wouldn’t be able to have any more children. About how valiantly Rusi would try to fight his disappointment at the wilting away of yet another dream; about how miserably he would fail at hiding his disappointment at having no more children. No idea then that Khorshed, not content with having the devotion of her son, would also lay claim to Binny’s heart. No hint of the fact that the triad of Khorshed-Rusi-Binny would make her feel like a stranger, an outsider in her own house.

  It was Khorshed who named her first grandchild. During the ride home from the hospital, it was Khorshed who rode in the front seat with Binny, while Coomi alternately dozed and gazed out of the window in the backseat. Before Coomi and Rusi entered the flat with their precious cargo, it was Khorshed who performed the Parsi welcoming ceremony for Wadia Baug’s newest resident. Khorshed put a small red tikka on her granddaughter’s forehead. Then she took a raw egg and circled it around Binny’s tiny head before smashing it on the threshold. Next, she took a dried coconut and cracked it at the side of the door. Finally, the house was ready for Binny. “Enter with your right foot,” Khorshed told Coomi.

  In the euphoria of those early days, Coomi was expansive, generous, ready to share her daughter with her widowed mother-in-law. She welcomed the fact that Khorshed watched Binny when she and Rusi went out in the evenings; basked in the glow of Khorshed’s unabashed pride in her granddaughter. But as Binny got older, Coomi began to see the trinity of Khorshed, Rusi, and Binny as a threat, in collusion against her. If she threatened to whip Binny for bringing home a poor report card, the old woman would intervene. Would get emotional, right in front of the child. If Binny needed extra lunch money, she took to asking her grandmother. Khorshed complained about Coomi’s extravagant household budget, but she always had a rupee or two for Binny. But what really dismayed Coomi was that, like her father, Binny was also sensitive, moody, easily devastated by an unkind word. She tried to toughen up her daughter but came up against the raw power of genetics. She could not diminish Binny’s tendency to be hurt any more than she could change her own capacity to wound her daughter unwittingly with her words. Coomi deeply regretted her teenaged daughter’s growing estrangement from her. But to have acknowledged her role in that estrangement would have devastated her. It was less painful to blame Khorshed for the distance between them. She complained to whoever would listen that she had given birth to Binny and Khorshed had adopted her a few hours later. Just like that. Without asking for permission, without any words exchanged. No contract, no signature. Just the authority of blood. “They stole my only child away from me,” she hissed to Dosamai. “Mother and son, they stole my daughter, until she, too, acts like a stone statue in my presence. Even Binny’s husband, Jack, was reserved with me when they were visiting us here a few years back. Polite but reserved. Not jovial the way he is with Rusi. They think I don’t notice, but I notice everything.”

  Coomi watched as Bomi Mistry slid up to where Rusi was talking to the unknown woman. Before she could check herself, she felt glad that Bomi had interrupted Rusi’s conversation. Rusi had been standing a little too close to the woman for her liking. That sudden spurt of jealousy did not take Coomi by surprise. She wished she could feel toward Rusi the same frosty indifference he exhibited toward her, but she couldn’t. Whether she was blaming him or praising him, loving him or hating him, Coomi was still very aware of her husband’s presence in her life. She often prayed to be blessed with the kind of dead-ness that Rusi showed in her presence, but her prayers were not answered. Coomi needed to feel something—even if only self-pity and bitterness and a sense of being aggrieved—in order to stay alive. Years ago, she had come across the phrase “a strange and tangled love” and had immediately thought how well it described her feelings toward Rusi. She’d grimaced, knowing how startled Rusi would be to hear that his wife felt any kind of love toward him. But then, Rusi had never understood her, never appreciated the red-hot blood that pumped through her heart. That thought made her feel superior.

  Another thing Rusi didn’t know about her: that she watched everything. Took pictures with her eyes. For instance, Rusi did not know that she had been watching his face while Bomi told that horrible story about poor Kashmira being robbed. She had read every expression on Rusi’s face—his disgust at the savagery of the robbery, his loathing of a city where such events occurred daily, his sudden, awful gladness that Binny had escaped Bombay. She could read him like a book. All the while she had been talking to “Killer Breath” Tehmi, trying not to breathe while Tehmi talked, she had been following Rusi with her eyes. She had seen him glance up at the pitiless sky as if asking for help, had known from the bright, wet, expansive look in his eyes that he was slightly drunk. Rusi always got sentimental when he was drunk. She was sure he didn’t know that about himself.

  Khorshed had been dead for six years now. Binny had been gone for eight. It was just Rusi and Coomi in the house. Her prayers about wanting to be alone
with her husband had been answered, but they had been answered by a God with a twisted sense of humor. Coomi had never been more angry at Rusi than in the weeks following Khor-shed’s death. She had really tried to win him over, but Rusi had rebuffed every overture. A missed opportunity. And now, a gap that stretched between them, wide as the Arabian Sea. And in the middle of this gap, a question mark: Why had things gone so horribly wrong? If dolts like Bomi and Sheroo could have a happy marriage, why not them? For all her faults, Khorshed had not been mean or tyrannical, the way so many Parsi mother-in-laws could be. Binny had been a beautiful child—curious, brimming with zest and laughter. Rusi was basically a kind, decent man. And she, Coomi, had come to this marriage with so much hope and expectation. She had been given so much. Why had she ended up with so little?

  A few weeks earlier, Coomi had visited the fire temple in the afternoon. There was no one else there. Something about the thick old walls darkened from years of smoke, the tranquil silence that hung over the place, and the steady flame of the eternal fire that burned in the large urn made her acutely aware of how alone she was. Before she knew it, she was sobbing hard. “Please, Dadaji,” she prayed. “Help me. Forgive me for all the times I wished Khorshed dead. I would give anything just to have her company again. Living with Rusi is like living alone, almost.” It was true. The business still took so much of Rusi’s time. Rusi still spent an average of ten hours a day at the factory. Coomi knew that part of the reason Rusi worked so hard was simply to stay away from home. With Khorshed gone, Coomi now blamed Rusi’s business for the breakup of her marriage. She believed that Rusi brought the frustrations of his business home with him. Rusi believed just the opposite—that he took the frustrations of his marriage to work with him. “If I had just had a little encouragement at home, who knows where I could have been today?” Coomi once overheard him say to Soli Contractor. “In England, they have a saying—ninety percent of your success depends on whom you marry. So true, so true.” As always, Coomi had felt revulsion. She hated to heat Rusi admit to any weakness. The men she had grown up around remained stoic and bindaas, no matter what setbacks they faced.