“I’m sorry, sir, so sorry. Hope madam is not badly hurt. What to do, hard to know what mischief someone is doing from the outside. …”
“You bastard, you’re not nearly as sorry as you’re going to be tomorrow. You better not show your face here again. First thing in the morning, I’m going to call the hall people and make sure they fire you. Your incompetence has caused one of my guests to be seriously injured and has ruined our evening. I know your type—probably were drinking on the job. Now, go make yourself useful and see that everything is under control while we board the minibus.”
“Oh seth, maaf karo. Please to forgive, sahib. Just one more chance, sir. I’m a poor man, with wife and children to support. Nothing I could’ve done to prevent this, sir.”
Jimmy spoke as if addressing a courtroom. “That’s the trouble with this country. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for their actions.” And ignoring the chowkidar’s pleas, he strode away.
The chowkidar pulled nervously at his mustache as he walked back to the gate. He could scarcely believe what had just happened. For the past five months, he had been able to feed his family on a regular basis. His salary was meager, but often he carried a couple of leftover dinners home to his eager children. He had worked so hard to land this job, ingratiating himself with the Parsi gentlemen who ran the reception hall. He had run last-minute errands for them, helped them decorate the hall before the guests arrived, helped the band unload its instruments. And all this for naught. A rock thrown by an anonymous hand had landed in the middle of the reception and destroyed his life. Just like that. He thought of his two years of unemployment before he got this job and his heart froze at the thought of returning to the desultory laziness of those years. He had spent his days looking for odd jobs or sitting at home playing cards with the other unemployed slum dwellers. Day had followed day. He had felt his limbs get weak and lazy with lack of exercise. He took to beating his wife for entertainment, to break the monotony of his days. His children began to avoid him. But all that had changed in the last few months. Every evening, he dressed in his khaki security guard’s uniform, slipped his baton into his leather holster, and left the slum with a swagger in his step. Some nights, he returned home with enough leftovers to feed not only his own family but also some of the neighborhood children. How good that made him feel! But now, those days were over. The Parsi seth did not look as if he would change his mind. He wondered if they would ask him to return his uniform when they told him he was fired.
He had been back at his post for a second, when he heard it. A giggle. Someone was giggling at what had transpired between the chowkidar and the Parsi seth. Someone was laughing at his misfortune. He looked at the ragged crowd standing behind the iron gates, but their faces were impassive and serious. Still, he had heard it, distinctly. One of these bastards had taunted him with his heartless laughter. Probably the same bastard who had thrown the rock. He was in this crowd, then, the culprit. If he could just nab him and teach him a lesson, perhaps he could redeem himself in the eyes of the Parsi sahib. Perhaps they would even allow him to keep his job if he caught the stone thrower.
But who? He ran his eyes over the crowd and they stared back at him. His eyes narrowed as they focused on the face of a youth of about nineteen. The youth was holding on to the bar of the iron gate and staring at him. He imagined that he saw a look of insolence on the youth’s face, a certain smirk on his lips. Look at you, the youth’s expression seemed to say. You’re no better than any of us suckers waiting out here. Even your khaki uniform couldn’t save you from being stripped naked by the Parsi bawa’s tongue-lashing. We all heard his threats and we all saw you, even our women and children, standing naked, with your dingdong hanging helplessly in front of you.
He let out a low, guttural sound and rushed to his feet. Swinging open the iron gate, he thrust his hand into the surprised crowd and plucked the smirking youth from it. He pulled the youth inside, slammed the gate shut, and slapped his stunned face, all in the same swift motion. “Chalo jao,” he screamed at the crowd, wielding his baton in a menacing way. “Sahib has already called the police. Disperse immediately or there will be hell to pay. Each one of you will pay for that hurled rock, ten times over. Now, get lost.” He made a movement toward opening the gates again, and that was all it took. The authority in his voice, the crazed look in his eyes told them that he meant business. The crowd melted into the night that it had earlier sprung from.
The youth was still cradling his face, a bewildered look in his eyes. This only infuriated the chowkidar more. “Madaarchot, let’s hear you giggle now,” he said softly. The youth opened his mouth to protest, but before a word could escape his lips, the chowkidar had brought his knee into the youth’s stomach. As the boy fell, the sentry brought the savage baton down on him over and over again. “Come on, let’s see your balls now. Come on, you coward, no words left in you now, eh?” The youth was down, trying to protect his head with his hands. The chowkidar’s, heart sang with each satisfying thud of the baton. He had found his rhythm. The first sight of drawn blood only excited him more. As the youth writhed on the dusty ground, the chowkidar felt as if he were stomping on a snake, like he used to do in the village of his youth. “I’ll kill you,” he said in a low voice, as if speaking to himself. “Giggling like that. Think my children starving is funny, do you? Well, here’s something to laugh about. And this. And this.” His hands and feet flew, happy each time they found their target.
“Put that baton away! Stop it right this minute. My God, man, have you gone mad?” Rusi came as close to the chowkidar as he could without getting caught in the centrifugal force caused by the baton. Jimmy stood a few paces behind him. At a distance, Soli sat down heavily on a chair next to the injured Sheroo, his face covered with perspiration.
The chowkidar flew out of the nest of his fury as suddenly as he had entered it. The baton hung limply by his side as the madness slowly drained out of his body. He stared at the torn, broken body at his feet as if he had just come upon it. The servile look came back on his face. “That’s the culprit, sahibs” he said as he gasped for breath. “I found him myself and gave him such a pasting, he’ll never pick up another rock again. So sorry about all this, sahibs.”
Rusi turned to look at Jimmy for direction and thought he was staring at a ghost. All color had drained from Jimmy’s face and, for a second, Jimmy looked as lost as the nine-year-old orphan who had attended Rusi’s birthday party decades ago. Jimmy was transfixed, unable to take his eyes off the youth’s bloody body. “The bastard has bashed his head in,” Jimmy murmured to no one in particular. “Blood spilled, and on such an auspicious occasion. A bad omen. My poor Mehernosh. What on earth happened here? And what do we do now?”
The youth was fluttering on the ground, like a dying fish washed to the shore. Rusi saw his bloody face, his bruised, blackened fingers, his hideously swollen feet and he felt sick to his stomach. The savagery of the attack took his breath away. What the chowkidar had done was ten times worse than what had been inflicted on poor Sheroo. The youth was saying something, and Rusi rested on his haunches to hear him. He was amazed the boy could still speak. “Janne do, sahib, janne do. Let me go. Please, maaf karo,” the youth said. Rusi stood up in disbelief. The fellow actually thought Rusi and Jimmy were going to beat him some more. Pity welled up in Rusi. “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore,” he said. “Understand?”
He turned to confer with Jimmy about whether to call the police, but one look at Jimmy’s horrified face told him it was useless. Jimmy seemed broken, a look on his face that tore at Rusi’s heart. Glancing back, Rusi saw Mehernosh standing at a distance, holding Sharon’s sobbing face to his chest. The rest of the group looked like sleep-walkers, dazed and confused. He searched for Coomi and found her sitting next to Sheroo, holding a bag of ice on Sheroo’s arm. She looked at him inquiringly and he shrugged his shoulders. He was glad that Coomi had not come here, had not seen the youth’s beaten, swollen face or heard his low moans.
A slight movement outside the gates caught his eye. Something moved out there, he thought. The hair on the nape of his neck stood up in anticipation. Suddenly, he had a vision of the invisible outsiders tearing open the iron gates and pouring into the reception hall, seeking to avenge what had been wrought upon the man on the ground. We would be mincemeat in half a minute, he thought. They could destroy us in the blink of an eye. The precariousness of their situation dawned on him then and this helped focus his mind on the problem at hand. They had to leave the reception hall immediately. There was no time to call the police. No point even. What the chowkidar had done, however despicable, was justice, Bombay-style. Involving the police would just muddy the waters. What was done was done.
He turned his back on the chowkidar and hoped that the man did not see him pull out a hundred-rupee note from his wallet. Bending down, he pushed the note into the front pocket of the youth’s torn shirt. He knew that the note would be stained red within moments, but he couldn’t help that. “We’re letting you go,” he whispered to the youth. “We don’t want to make this a police ka mamala. As soon as I say the word, just try to get up and go. Understand?” Straightening up, he yelled at the chowkidar. “Open these gates. Now. Come on, move.” And to the youth, he said, “Cbalo, try to pull yourself out of here. Walk, crawl, fly—do whatever you need to do, but leave. No telling what will happen if you don’t leave.”
Fear attached itself like wings to the youth. Half-crawling, half-sliding, one foot hanging limply behind him, he pulled himself out of the iron gates and into the anonymous night, Rusi could hear him as he moved his body painfully across the street. He waited until the youth melted into the night, until he could no longer hear the hissing and heaving of his broken body. Then, with a heavy heart, Rusi walked back into the hall.
The dusty ground near the entrance of the hall still bote the imprint of the youth’s body. There was blood smeared into the dust where he had lain broken and from where he had crawled away into the waiting night.
They were mostly quiet during the bus ride home. They had boarded the bus tired and subdued as schoolchildren after a field trip. Rusi had hurried them onto the bus. “There may be more trouble tonight,” he mumbled as he gathered them in. “Best if we get out of here, jaldi-Jaldi.” While the others were boarding the bus, Jimmy Kanga turned to Rusi. Jimmy’s usually dignified, wise face had been rearranged, so that now he looked confused and lost. “Rusi,” he said, his eyes flickering uncertainly. “What just happened here?”
Rusi gazed at the frightened face in front of him and wondeted why he had ever been jealous of Jimmy. Why, he is nothing but a little boy, he thought. For all his wisdom and all his degrees, he is scared. Years of wealth and comfort have softened Jimmy. He may argue cases before the Supreme Court, but he knows nothing about the city he lives in. He just sees it from the inside of his car window.
Then Rusi’s basic sense of fair play took over. And who understands this time bomb of a city? You certainly don’t, he scolded himself. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I really don’t know. It all happened so fast. … But we’d better make a move, bossie. There will be time to talk later.” He felt embarrassed as he climbed onto the bus.
There was an awful moment when they were all aboard and Sheroo remembered that she had left behind her photo album. Bomi hesitated for a split second before volunteering to go get it, but it was long enough for the others to realize they were afraid to linger. They felt a burning shame at their fearful retreat and hurried departure. How relaxed, how expansive they had felt only an hour ago. And now they were fleeing like common criminals, fleeing from the imaginary and nonimaginary demons of the night. Rusi suddenly remembered those photographs of helicopters hovering nervously over the American embassy in Saigon in 1975 and the tight, shameful expressions on the faces of the evacuees. The fall of Saigon. Now he felt as if he had traded places with those evacuees. At least the Americans had been at war with another country. But he and his friends were fleeing their own people. There was no safety even in the city they had all been born in. This city, which their forefathers had helped build with their industry and their capital, was being stolen from them, large parts of it cut out from under them by knives that gleamed and flashed in the still of the night. He remembered the story about Kashmira that Bomi had told earlier in the evening and felt as though that ominous story had foreshadowed what had happened later. A strange feeling had gripped him earlier and he wondered now whether it had been a premonition. All evening long, he had been achingly aware of his own mortality, had felt a fraternity with his Wadia Baug neighbors that he rarely felt. He wondered about the compulsion he had felt to share his life lessons with Mehernosh, to pass on to the younger generation all that he knew. Had that been a premonition of the violence to follow? Had the rock been meant for him and had he somehow twisted out of fate’s grasp one more time? If so, what did that mean? Should he feel relief or guilt at the thought?
He glanced at Mehernosh, who was sitting a few seats ahead of them, saw the back of the boy’s big proud head, and for a second, he questioned Mehernosh’s wisdom in returning to Bombay. Binny made the better choice, he told himself, even though she made it for the wrong reasons. Binny, he knew, had not fled Bombay because of the menace lurking in its streets, but because of the grief that dripped like candle wax from the walls of Wadia Baug. Binny’s demons lived in the Bilimoria flat and not the streets around it. But whatever the reason, Binny had fled this graveyard of a city, where women got struck with rocks and young men lay writhing in their own blood. And he was glad for her escape.
Rusi turned to where Sheroo was sitting behind him. Even in the dark of the bus, he could see Sheroo’s face, which looked tired and unimaginably old. She was looking out the window, watching the deserted city streets flit by. “How is the arm?” he whispered, but she only nodded noncommittally. Now he could see that Sheroo was crying softly to herself, and he felt a sharp stab of anger on her behalf. Sheroo was legendary for her generosity, for buying ice candy for the street children who played outside Wadia Baug, for donating her used bedsheets to their parents each winter. The bastard who had hurled the rock had no idea whom he was hurting. It was the random savagery of the attack that angered Rusi. Just earlier that evening, he had thought about how all of them were sitting precariously on top of a bomb that could go off at any moment. And it had. Not as explosively as it was capable of, but enough to tell him that he was right. The purple bruise on Sheroo’s ample upper arm was proof, an apocalyptic warning, the writing on the wall written by an anonymous graffiti artist.
But then he remembered the bloated head of the youth as he lay tossing on the dirt. He, too, had been a victim of random violence. Despite the chowkidar’s protestations, Rusi was sure the man had no way of telling whether the youth had hurled the stone or not. And they had all stood quietly watching as the chowkidar had yanked the youth in, pulled the baton from his holster, and yelled at the crowd to disperse. It was true that none of them had foreseen the savagery of his attack. It was true that the brutality of his attack had paralyzed them, so that Rusi had not intervened until it was much too late. But was it also not true that they had expected the chowkidar to rough up the youth a bit, to slap him a few times, to make an example of him? Had they not felt better at the fact that the chowkidar was acting as their emissary, that he was evening the score on their behalf? And if that was true, did they not all have blood on their hands? At least the man who had thrown the stone had done the foul deed himself, had risked getting caught and punished. What had they risked? They had simply hired somebody else to do their dirty work for them.
Victim upon victim. Hadn’t the chowkidar himself been a victim of Jimmy’s unreasonable wrath? How had they expected that one poor man to protect them from the jealousy and hatred their sheer presence aroused among those waiting outside the gates? Why had he, Rusi, not intervened when he heard Jimmy threatening to fire the sentry? Why had he not pulled Jimmy aside and appealed t
o his sense of fair play? Admit it, Rusi said to himself. As far as we’re concerned, these people are interchangeable and replaceable. So we hire and fire them at our will. Already, he could not remember what the chowkidar looked like. The next time he and Coomi attended a function at the same reception hall, there would be another man at the gate, perhaps wearing the same frayed khaki uniform. And once again, he would look through him, barely glancing in his direction as they walked in.
Beside him, Coomi stirred. “I keep thinking, What will happen to that chowkidar?” she said to him in a low voice. “We got on the bus and left, but he’s got to stay behind to face the music.”
She had done it again. She had read his mind, tapped into his thoughts, and said something that made him realize how well she understood him. She was reading him like an X ray. Was this some new trick she had developed? And if so, when? He had never noticed this uncanny ability before. Had she always been like this? Or was this sudden compatibility part of the strangeness of this entire evening? After all, he had felt his usual distance from her when they had walked into the reception hours earlier. He tried now to call up that protective distance, but the memory of her sticking up for him earlier in the evening made that difficult. What had Coomi said? “I know what you mean, exactly. Exactly.” How warm, how safe he had felt in the glow of those words. And now she was doing it again. Rusi knew without a shadow of a doubt that none of their fellow passengers were worried about their culpability in what had happened. Jimmy would most likely make good on his threat to have the security guard fired. Mehernosh and Sharon would busy themselves with preparations for their honeymoon. Sheroo and Bomi would occupy themselves with Sheroo’s injured arm. Tehmi and Adi would crawl back into the cocoon of solitude they each occupied. And Soli, poor Soli would spend the next few days agonizing over Mariam’s letter. Coomi, he knew, would probably stay up half the night worrying about the chotckidar’s fate.
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