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‘What is it? Don't want to work? Want
to stay a beggar your whole life? Is there any future in this? At my
house you can learn English, go to school. Perhaps be a peon or clerk
in my office someday…'

The little boy looks at my father with wide eyes.
Suddenly, he lets out a yelp and begins to run away from the car,
twisting his way between the closely-packed vehicles. He looks over
his shoulder once, to make sure that the strange man is not following
him.

My dad sits back in his seat, disappointed yet
satisfied. ‘You see?' he says. ‘They are just lazy.
Prefer a free handout to working. That's why I never encourage
these children by giving them money.'

I am not sure if this whole episode has been for
my benefit but at the moment I'm too angry to wonder. ‘Daddy,
he was eight years old,' I say. ‘What about his mother,
father, sisters?

You think a child can just leave his entire family
and get into a car with a perfect stranger?'

He doesn't get it. ‘You know we
would've treated him well.

You know he would've been safe with us,'
his voice hurt, as if I have been accusing him of mistreating the
boy.

‘That's not the point. The point is,
how does he know that?

Dad, he's a child. And he has a family…'

‘Yah, a family which makes him beg for a
living,' he cuts me off.

I am seething but I control myself. ‘Dad,
you know how when I was young you always told me never to get into a
car with a stranger? What if his parents told him the same thing?'

Something clicks. I can see the struggle on his
face as he tries to grapple with the seeming contradiction of parents
who let their children beg for a living telling that child to beware
of strangers. Dad sighs heavily. ‘Maybe. Maybe so. But one
thing I know—India's problems will not be solved by
begging.

Something has to be done.'

(And as if some twisted God had heard my father,
something was done just a year later, in the dark years of Indira
Gandhi's Emergency, when police routinely swept the streets
clean of the homeless beggars. It was as if someone had taken my
childhood dream of rounding up the poor and altered it, so that
instead of providing them with shelter in my school basement, the
beggars were discarded outside the city limits or warehoused in
government barracks under terrible conditions.)

We drive home the rest of the way in an uneasy
truce, both of us cocooned in the righteousness of what we believe.
But in the coming months dad will talk about the incident at
parties—how he had offered this able-bodied youngster a chance
at a better life and how the lazy fellow had run away rather than
take him up on his offer. And the other adults will nod their heads
solemnly and shake their heads from side-to-side in expressions of
dismay for where the country is headed.

Sometimes I speak up and argue with them and risk
the humiliation of their adult condescension as they tell me that
this is the idealism of youth talking and that soon I will grow up
and realize the errors of my ways.

But most of the time I keep quiet and instead help
myself surreptitiously to the whisky and beer, downing the last of
our guest's glasses as I carry them to the kitchen, taking a
swallow directly from the bottle when no one is watching, so that I
float through these parties in a blind haze. All that the adults see
is a teenager who is extraordinarily helpful, who offers to mix their
drinks for them and carry their empty glasses away for them. But the
more I smile at them, the more hollow I feel on the inside, as if
there is a bomb ticking inside of me. And in my drunken haze I
imagine that there is such a bomb hidden inside all of the city's
poor and that it is ticking all the time—while they arrange
their faces into pitiful caricatures for our benefit, while they tell
us that God will bless us even while they think that if there is a
God surely he will destroy us for our blithe indifference, for our
sinful self-absorption. I wonder how the adults can remain so blind
to their precarious place on the top of the mountain. Occasionally
someone brings up a news item about a particularly heinous attack on
the Untouchables or Harijans by an upper-caste Hindu mob and then
they all speak contemptuously about the damn caste system and how
backward some of these rural Hindus are, to follow its ancient
prejudices. The unspoken text is that we are lucky to be Parsis,
lucky to be ‘Bombay born and bred', and therefore free of
the oppressive bigotries of people less civilized than us. ‘What
barbarians these people are,' a woman guest will say. ‘Just
imagine—burning someone alive in this day and age just because
he is an Untouchable. After all, a human being is a human being.'
And later that night, on her way home from the party, the woman will
have her fleshy arm touched by a twelve-year-old beggar boy insistent
on coaxing a few coins out of this kindly-looking woman and she,
aghast at this violation by a filthy urchin, will shriek and take two
full steps back, hereby losing her balance a bit and this sight will
make the young boy lose his professional beggar's demeanour for
a split second, so that he will let out a giggle before twisting his
face into its usual pleading, piteous expression again. But it will
be too late because the woman's husband will have noticed the
touch and the grin and his manly pride will have been bruised and he
will cry, ‘Wicked pervert,' and raise his right hand as
if to go after the boy, who, realizing that the inopportune giggle
has cost him his coins, will flee into the dark night…

I want to tell our guests about an experiment that
some of my friends have been conducting. One of my friends has made a
brilliant observation about the rigid, stylized postures that beggars
and donors both affect when money is changing hands.

Middle-class Bombayites invariably plop their
coins into the cupped hands of the beggars from a height, making sure
that they never accidentally brush against what they imagine are
hands contaminated with germs and disease. So, a bunch of us have
taken to changing the rules of the transaction. Instead of holding
the coin gingerly between two fingers and then quickly dropping it
into the beggar's outstretched hand, I now hold the coin on the
flat palm of my hand, silently urging the beggar to pick it up. This
simple gesture reverses the social order, so that it is my hand that
is now at the bottom. It also violates an unspoken, almost
unrecognized taboo—in order to pick up the coin, the beggar's
fingers must surely touch my palm, no matter how lightly. And an
amazing thing happens: children as young as three are already so
conditioned by omnipresent class distinctions that they freeze at
this reversal of position. They stare at me with eyes wide open with
confusion, apprehension, even fear. Something is wrong, unnatural,
and you can almost see their young, uncomprehending brains churning,
trying to figure out what is wrong and how to set it right. In the
meantime, the offered coin rests on my palm, untouched. Moments pass.
We lock glances, and I watch a caravan of emotions move across their
bewildered faces. Occasionally, one of the bolder youngsters screws
up her courage and grabs the coin quickly. But more often, they walk
away, all the time staring at me as if trying to figure out this new
perversion that they have encountered.

I know what will happen if I tell the adults about
this experiment—they will look horrified and lecture me about
how I, of all people, with all my health problems, should be
extra-careful about not coming in contact with germs and did I wash
my hands after these silly encounters?

At times like these, I look at the crystal beer
mugs the guests are drinking from, the fine whisky glasses they are
sipping from and I feel as though the whole world is made of glass,
that it is fragile and tenuous and will shatter the moment someone
from the outside casts the first stone. Somedays, the thought
frightens me because, after all, I love these flawed, self-absorbed,
well-meaning, sporadically kind human beings who are in this room
with me. On other days I long for that moment of destruction, I can't
wait for this facade to end, when the seemingly powerless display
their strength and those who think of themselves as powerful realize
how puny and small they really are…

Right then, Sheroo Nayak interrupts my murderous
reverie.

‘What about some music?' she says,
gaily. ‘What is that song I like, about a blue-eyed boy or
something?'

I get up and put on
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna
Fall
. The adults laugh and talk over the song, oblivious to its
apocalyptic message.

W
ATERGATE.

The word is exactly as complicated and bewildering
as the word ‘sex' was a few years earlier. ‘Sex'
was a word I saw in print all the time—
Stardust
would
interview movie stars about what they liked about it,
The
Illustrated Weekly of India
would have articles on the repressed
attitudes of Indian men toward it—but no one would ever come
right out and explain what the word meant. Somehow I knew enough to
know that the word made people embarrassed and squirmy and that it
was better not to ask adults about it but to figure it out for
yourself, a little bit at a time. In sixth-grade the nuns had
explained about the birds and the bees but the discussions were so
clinical that I had failed to connect what they told us to the
mysterious, magical three-letter word that was everywhere but still
remained an enigma. In fact, my rudest awaking had come sitting on
the marble steps of the school building during lunch recess one
afternoon. ‘Anita,' I said ponderously. ‘One thing
I don't understand about what Sister Ignatius told us. How does
the sperm get to the egg from inside all the clothes?'

Anita stared at me for a long moment, delighted at
this unexpected gift I had thrown her way. ‘There are no
clothes,' she said finally. ‘People do it naked.'

I laughed. Anita was such a joker. ‘Yah,
right.'

‘No joke. I swear, men, that's how it
is,' Anita said, pinching her throat for emphasis. ‘You
don't believe me, ask Diana.'

I turned five shades of white. Being naked before
a boy seemed too impossible, too preposterous, too outside the limits
of my imagination.

The next day, Philomena D'Souza brought in a
Viewfinder to school. All morning long, clumps of girls would peer
surreptitiously through its square eye whenever the teacher was out
of the room. Whatever they were looking at provoked much nervousness
and giggling among Philomena and some of the older girls. Finally,
just before lunch it was my turn. But instead of the usual slides of
the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower, there were slides of naked men
and women entangled with one another. It was hard to see exactly what
was going on but the pictures looked red and raw. ‘Philo, what
is it?' I said finally. Looking at me contemptuously, Philomena
had replied, ‘It's sex, stupid.'

But I was confused. Sex on the pages of
Stardust
had seemed sweet and harmless. Sex as described by the nuns seemed as
boring as the snail races we used to organize in the playground
behind the statue of the Virgin Mary. But sex as defined by Philomena
seemed secretive and dangerous. How could one word have so many
meanings?

Same thing with Watergate. Once, dad told me that
it was the name of a building in Washington. But I also knew that it
was a scandal and had something to do with Richard Nixon.

Most of the people I knew had hated Nixon ever
since he sided with Pakistan in the 1971 war over Bangladesh. So I
figured anything that kicked Nixon out of office was a good thing.
But then why did the grown-ups keep saying it was a terrible thing
that had happened?

Pop culture comes to my rescue in 1976 in the form
of
Mad
magazine's spoof on
All the President's
Men
. I read the magazine carefully, trying to read in between
the lines and connecting the satire to what little I already know
about Watergate. And finally it all comes together—the
burglary, the secret slush funds, the role of Deep Throat. (Of
course, one of the pitfalls of learning history from
Mad
magazine is that for many years I will think of poor Gerald Ford as
Deep Throat, because the very last panel of ‘
Gall of the
President'sMen
' shows Ford in a dark parking lot
revealing shadowy secrets to Woodward.)

By this time, America has taken hold in my
imagination as firmly as the world of midnight feasts and English
bobbies once had. We have studied about America in geography class,
learned the capitals to all fifty states and learned about its chief
exports but all that is dry stuff compared to what I am rapidly
learning. From the ads of music clubs on the back of comic books, I
keep up with the latest rock-and-roll releases in America. That's
how I choose what records to request when dad makes a business trip
to Dubai or Kuwait. I stand on the balcony for hours wondering what
‘Gee whiz,' sounds like in real life. After all, Archie
says it all the time. I beg for a pair of blue jeans and when I
finally get my first pair, I ignore the fact that they are three
sizes too big for me. I promptly try to fade my jeans by pouring
hydrogen peroxide acid over them but nothing happens. To my disgust,
they don't even tear.

From Simon and Garfunkel I learn about Bleeker
Street and New York City winters bleeding people, from Neil Young I
learn about Four Dead in Ohio, from Neil Diamond about Brooklyn
Roads. Woody Allen teaches me about therapists and Manhattan. John
Steinbeck teaches me about Salinas Valley and Oakies and Cannery Row;
Fitzgerald teaches me about the moth-holes in the American Dream;
Hemingway teaches me about stoic, heroic Midwesterners who are strong
in the broken places. Martin Luther King's Dream speech, which
is included in one of our literature texts, has the amazing effect of
making my hair stand on end every single time I read it. No teacher
ever mentions that King had often mentioned India's freedom
struggle as an inspiration for his civil disobedience movement.