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We were all marvelling at how well he was doing,
touchwood.'

‘Yes, well. Well, I know you're
anxious to see him. But please, I must warn you—don't be
shocked by his appearance.

As soon as the medication works, things should be
better.'

But we are shocked. Shocked speechless. The gas
has filled up Babu's belly to the point where we cannot see his
face from the foot of his bed. The white sheet covering him is like a
giant tent over him. And what's really upsetting is that it
seems to us that his belly is growing larger even as we watch.

Freny's eyes are red and I go up behind her
and give her a quick hug. ‘Don't worry,' I say.
‘We're all here now. He will be fine in a few hours.'

My dad and Mehroo are on either side of their
brother's bed.

‘Pesi? How are you, brother?' my dad
asks. ‘You don't worry at all, okay? Whatever has to be
done, you know we will do.

I will be by your side, night and day. I will take
you home myself in a few days.'

Babu's eyes flutter awake. He looks as if
he's trying to respond but all we can see is a wave of emotion
cross his face, like the sun's shadow across a field.

I am sitting by the foot of Babu's bed and
decide to rub his feet because he's forever asking me to
massage his feet. I reach under the blankets and my heart stops. His
feet are freezing cold, colder than ice, colder than the coldest
object on earth. I am fifteen years old and not acquainted with death
but even I can sense that there is something alien and dangerous
about this kind of coldness. It feels to me as if I'm touching
death itself, as if death is creeping up Babu's body. I tip
over the edge of the blanket to look at his feet and they are a
hideous shade of white. For the first time,

I am really afraid. Leaning over, I touch his
hands and they are cold, also. I take Babu's feet in my hands
and start rubbing furiously. In a few seconds, I'm in a trance.
If I can just keep this pace up, I think, I can make him well. My
hands move as fast as those of the shoeshine boys who polish my
father's shoes each morning.

A nurse comes into the room and says Freny's
younger sister, Mani, has just called the nurse's station to
ask one of us to stop by the house and pick up an ointment for Babu.
Freny mentions that Mani had been at the hospital earlier, just as
Babu was beginning to get bloated and had remembered an ayurvedic
ointment that apparently worked wonders with stomach pain.

I volunteer to make the short trip to Mani aunty's
house, anxious to get away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the
small hospital room. To my surprise, none of the adults protest. By
now it is 9:30 p.m. and although the Bombay streets are crowded and
well-lit, somebody would've normally stopped me from going out
alone at night. But tonight, nobody is paying me any attention. All
eyes are focused on Babu's stomach; all of our breathing
follows his rasping breath.

I half-run the few blocks from the hospital to
Mani aunty's house. She is waiting for me and answers the door
on the first ring. Mani aunty goes to the bathroom to get the small
tube of ointment and gives me instructions on how often to apply it.

‘How is he?' she asks and I start to
reply but suddenly I can't speak because I am heaving with
sobs. I want to tell her about how cold Babu's feet are and
how, touching them, I felt as if he were already dead. But no words
emerge. Mani watches me cry for a minute and then she speaks: ‘Stop
it. Stop your crying. This is not the time for tears. This is the
time to fight with God, to wrestle with Him for Pesi's sake.
Now come on, be brave. This is the time to be strong, not weak. If
you fall apart like this, who is going to take care of my Freny?'

Mani's words greet me like a slap in the
face. I stare at her open-mouthed, knowing instinctively that she has
said exactly the words I need to hear, realizing dimly that she has
selected for me, like a black woollen coat, the role that I must
wear. All I have to do now, is slip into this role of guardian and
protector.

Mani is absolutely right. This is the time to
wrestle with God, to use my youth and vitality to thaw the iciness
that is creeping up Babu's limbs, to combat the cold fear that
is growing in my own heart.

I feel myself straighten up. ‘I'm
sorry, Mani aunty,' I say, and my voice is firm. ‘I'll
take care of everybody, don't worry.

Thanks for the balm.' She pulls me toward
her in a quick, tight hug and then I'm running down the stairs
and into the night.

There is a moon in the sky and it follows me like
a dribbling basketball as I walk fast toward the hospital. I look at
the moon and begin my quarrel with God, fighting so desperately for
Babu's life, talking to the moon with such intensity, that I
feel the sweat running down my face. People look at me strangely and
I realize I'm talking out loud but I don't stop. ‘I'm
not giving in to You,' I say to the moon. ‘We need Babu
in our family—you know the role he plays. We need him more than
you do, God. Please, please, please God. I'll give up drinking
beer for six months—for a year—if you let him live.'

Later that night, Roshan and I are standing in the
hallway of the hospital, looking out over the gardens. I tell her
what Mani aunty had said to me and urge her to do the same. She looks
at me and nods but doesn't say anything. Instead, we both look
up at the moon, so serene, so aloof, it seems to mock our
desperation. We stand there, utterly alone and yet silently leaning
into each other, first cousins who are more like sisters, thanks to
the generosity and love of the man who, across the hallway from us,
is battling for his very life.

I am back at the hospital by ten a.m. the next
day. Mummy has made omelette sandwiches for dad, Mehroo and Freny,
all of whom have spent the night at the hospital. I hand each of them
a sandwich but they just glance at it and put it away.

I quickly figure out why.

Babu's stomach has grown even more than last
night. It is hard to believe and for a second I'm tempted to
think that this is just another of Babu's many practical jokes,
like the way he wriggles his ears and turns his eyelids upside down.
But this is no joke. Babu's face is pale and puffy and his
fingers and toes are a greyish white. Dr Sethna has already been by
earlier this morning and pronounced that my uncle has kidney failure
though he has no idea why.

Dad leaves the room and when he comes back he
announces that he has just consulted with Dr Sethna on the phone and
it is decided—we are shifting Babu to Jaslok Hospital. None of
us have ever been to Jaslok but have often driven by the tall
skyscraper in the posh side of town. Jaslok is where the movie-stars
and politicians go when they're ill but it also has the best
facilities for kidney failure in town. If dad is worried about the
cost, he does not let on.

Now that a decision has been made we are all
anxious to get going. Masina Hospital, with its lemon-coloured
whitewashed walls suddenly seems incredibly two-bitty and small-time.
Of course they can't figure out what's wrong with Babu
here. But the specialists at Jaslok, why, one look at him and they'll
be able to tell us what's going wrong. And then they'll
fix it. Optimism courses through my veins like a drug, so that when
Babu is lifted and placed in the ambulance, I feel relief rather than
apprehension.

None of us is prepared for the curt, remote,
inaccessibility of Jaslok Hospital. Babu has already been whisked
away into the Intensive Care Unit by the time we get to the hospital.
We are not even given time to say goodbye or to reassure him that we
are all nearby. Unlike Masina Hospital, where we could crowd in his
room and be participants in his illness—some one rubbing his
hands, someone applying massage oil on his hands, someone else
soothing his brow—we are mere spectators, as the high-powered
doctors hook Babu up to metallic machines and rubber tubes, rendering
him unrecognizable. We have to beg to even be let into the lobby of
the ICU and then we are reduced to going up in twos to gaze at him
through a glass partition. It is as if Babu no longer belongs to us,
as if the hospital has now taken over his care, as if Jaslok has
usurped all the vital relationships in his life, as if it has now
become his surrogate brother and wife and child.

All of a sudden, Babu seems far away and remote to
us, in a way that he wasn't at Masina. I have a sudden,
terrifying thought that this is a dress rehearsal and Jaslok is
readying us for the final, awful separation; the hospital is telling
us,
This ishow it will be when he dies—he will feel close
enough to touch andyet, you will not be able to
.

Hours go by and we fall into a routine. The entire
family has gathered in the waiting room on the seventeenth floor but
every half hour two of us take the elevator to the ICU on the
fifteenth floor, stare at Babu from behind the glass partitions for a
few minutes and then take the sad ride up back to the waiting room.
Already, it seems as if we've been doing this for years, as if
all life on the outside has ceased to exist, that the hospital is the
only life we've ever known. Already, it seems to us as if the
world outside has been drained of life and colour, like the colour
has drained from Babu's face.

As the miserable afternoon wears on, we try to be
judicious of our time in the ICU lobby, considerate about giving each
family member a turn to go to the fifteenth floor. As his wife, Freny
has first rights to as many visits as she wants but there are so many
people in this room who love Babu—my aunt Mehroo, who has
practically raised him; my dad, who is walking around as if he's
the one attached to a ventilator; my cousin Roshan, who, at nineteen,
is too young to watch her father like this. So we take turns.

At about eight p.m., it is my and dad's
turn. Shankar, the young man who operates the elevator, has started
his shift a while back and already he is familiar with my family and
seems to understand our growing fear and grief. Mani, with
characteristic generosity, has already pressed a ten-rupee note in
his hand and now we tip him every time we ride the elevator. As the
doors of the lift close, my father suddenly doubles over, as if
someone has struck him hard in the stomach. His shoulders heave and
tears stream down his cheeks as he cries wordlessly. Shankar looks
aghast. Clucking his tongue in sympathy, he murmurs, ‘No, no,
sahib. Bas, bas.' I put my arms around my father. Suddenly, I
remember the other time that I have watched my dad break down hard.

It was three years earlier, a day in 1974, at a
time when the global oil crisis of 1973 had snaked a long, tortured
and unlikely path toward my father's business and driven him to
the point of bankruptcy. The optimism of the late 1960s had affected
my father—he had broadened his line of work to become a
developer and had successfully bid for a large government contract to
build low-income housing. But the oil crisis struck; the cost of raw
materials doubled, then trebled; and the small print on the contract
held the contractors responsible for the rise in prices. Along with
several other developers, my father lost his shirt on the deal.

All that day, the mood at home had been tense and
subdued.

Mehroo had told me that morning that today was a
vitally important day, that daddy had a big meeting with his bankers,
who would decide whether to loan him more money so that he could try
saving the business. At nine p.m. that night we heard the fumbling of
the key and dad let himself into the house and to the dining room,
where we were gathered. He looked haggard and tired and, I don't
know
defeated
—in a way I'd never seen before. I
think we all knew the answer to our silent inquiry before he even
spoke.

When he did, he looked directly at his brother.
‘Bhai, we're finished,' he said quietly. ‘They
refused any more loans. We have nothing left. I don't know
where the money will come from for food tomorrow. I don't know
what to do next—if I'm very lucky, maybe I'll be
able to drive a taxi for someone.'

If dad had said he was going to become a coolie at
Victoria Terminus station, he couldn't have shocked me more.
Nobody we knew in our social circle drove a cab. Driving a taxi was
something
they
did—they being the illiterate, uneducated,
working-class, paan-chewing, kurta-pyjama-wearing, non-Parsi men,
with whom we had nothing in common. I don't know what shocked
me most—the uncharacteristic pessimism with which my father
spoke or his bewildering choice of profession or the fact that he
suddenly burst into tears in front of the entire family. His sobbing
was the sound of a man at the end of his rope, a man on the verge
of—bankruptcy? suicide?

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then, there was a
rustle and then a roar. It was Babu. ‘Nonsense, Burjor,'
he shouted. ‘This is no time to lose your courage, bhai.
Cab-fab, nothing. We have our factory and we will rise again. We are
not dead yet.

Tomorrow morning, first thing, I will make the
rounds of the market and get us some credit. Even if we have to pay
twenty-five per cent interest, so be it. You concentrate on getting
the outside orders, bossie. I'll get the work done. We will pay
the workers from our house money, if we have to. Freny will turn over
her entire pay cheque to us if we need it. Now, saala, stop your
chicken-shit crying.'

It was a reversal of roles. Babu was usually the
nervous, cautious sort. Dad was the dreamer, the visionary, the one
who dared to cast a wider net. But that was the secret to their
success—one of them was always there to pick up the other. So
that I know what dad is saying as he sobs in the elevator. ‘He
was—is—more than my brother. He's my partner, my
best friend.'