Cracking India (18 page)

The relish in her voice is ghoulish. I feel so upset at the awful fate awaiting Mr. Rogers's mutilated carcass that I collapse on a stool. I cannot face the curry. I recall the police inspector's chilly blue eyes that so narrowly escaped mutilation by Mr. Singh's fork and the spit-polished ears of his orphaned children.

I start sobbing. Godmother sits up in bed and calls: “Hey! What's the matter?”

“Mr. Rogers is dead,” I say, choking on the words. “He will burn in hell forever!”

“Who said that?” demands Godmother, knowing very well who.

“Mini Aunty.” (That's Slavesister's pet name. I've never heard her real name.)

“I know who's going to roast forever if they don't watch out!” says Godmother. “Don't listen to Mini. She has no more sense than a twit!”

“After the Mountbatten plan to tear up the Punjab... how can you...,” mumbles Slavesister, shaking her head at the stove and looking martyred.

“If your mutilated body was discovered in the gutter, then you'd know how it feels! Badmouthing a dead man!”

Slavesister clicks her tongue and peers into a steaming pan and extra sweetly smiles because she is on the verge of tears. Her pale brown lips, that despite their clear outline and generous width are flat, flatten further and stretch moistly.

“Will they put Mr. Rogers into the Tower of Silence?” I ask, coming to the slave's rescue—and attempting to get the derailed conversation back on track.

“He's Christian. They'll bury him,” says Godmother.

It occurs to me that I don't know enough about the Tower. Perhaps I was too young when I first heard of it... The shock of Mr. Rogers's demise makes me curious about all aspects of dying. “What is the Tower of Silence?” I ask.

“We call it
Dungarwadi,
not Tower of Silence. The English have given it that funny name... Actually it is quite a simple structure: just a big round wall without any roof,” says Godmother.

“So?” I persist.

“So nothing!” interjects the ungrateful slave crankily. “When little girls ask too many questions their tongues drop off!”

“I wasn't asking you,” I retort, and poking my tongue at her, pointedly turn to Godmother. Godmother never talks down to me like that.

“The dead body is put inside the
Dungarwadi,”
explains Godmother. “The vultures pick it clean and the sun dries out the bones.”

I must look frightful because Godmother pats the bed and says, “Come here.”

I sit down, facing her, and drawing me close she says: “Mind you... It's only the body that's dead. Instead of polluting the earth by burying it, or wasting fuel by burning it, we feed God's creatures. The soul's in heaven, chatting with God in any case... Or broiling in hell like Mini's will.”

I feel curiously deprived. Here's an architectural wonder created exclusively by the charitable Parsees to feed God's creatures and I haven't even seen it. And I don't want to wait until I'm dead! Mr. Rogers's murdered and mutilated body is forgotten and my eyes stop tearing.

“I want to see it,” I demand.

“We don't have one in Lahore,” says Godmother. “There are too few Parsees: the vultures would starve. But when you go to Karachi or Bombay you can see it from the outside. Only pall-bearers can go in... We have a graveyard in Lahore.”

“Thank God!” says Mini Aunty so emphatically that Godmother—who views all emphatic statements from Mini Aunty as direct challenges to her authority—rears up from her pillows demanding: “Why? What's there to thank God for?”

“I prefer to be buried.”

“Oh? Why?”

“You know why! It gives me the creeps... The thought of
vultures smacking their beaks over my eyeballs!”

“You'd rather have your eyeballs riddled by maggots? Would you like me to post a sign over your body stating, Maggots only. No vultures allowed?”

“Really, Rodabai! I don't want to talk or think about it. Please forget I ever...”

“I don't know what you have against the poor vultures... favoring the maggots and worms over them! I'd be ashamed to call myself a Zoroastrian if I were you.”

“Being devoured by vultures has nothing to do with the religion... Surely Zarathustra had more important messages to deliver.... ”

“Since when have you become an authority on Zarathustra?” demands Godmother. “Haven't you heard of Parsee charity? Only last month Sir Eduljee Adenwalla had his leg amputated in Bombay. Sick as he was, he sat in a wheelchair all through the ceremonies and had his leg deposited in the
Dungarwadi!
And what do you think happens when Parsee diabetics' toes are cut off? Do you think they discard them in the wastebasket and deprive the vultures?”

Holding the dripping ladle aloft Mini Aunty covers her ears with her plump and muscular arms and says, “I don't want to know!”

Even I'm feeling queasy. Godmother looks at me and holds her peace; and Mini Aunty, pressing her advantage, says, “I must say, you can be ghoulish sometimes. I wish you wouldn't talk such nonsense before the child...”

“What do you mean, nonsense?” challenges Godmother. “Who was the one talking about eternal roastings in hell?”

“You know what I mean, Roda... Now don't...”

“Who's Roda? Who's permitted you to call me Roda? Since when have you become my elder sister?”

“You know I didn't mean it that way.”

“Which way did you mean it, then?”

Slavesister, almost on tiptoe, hovers quietly over the stove. Her wet smile is flattening. Her eyes do not dare to shift from the
bubbling contents of the pan she is stirring.

“Some people are getting too big for their boots... Some people are becoming quite airy-fairy!”

Slavesister mumbles, “Only my bunion's getting too big... I'll cut it off and mail it to the
Dungarwadi.”

“What?” queries Godmother. “What is your Highness mumbling?”

“Oh! All right, all right! Carry on... you must have everything your way, Rodabai... filling the child's mind with such notions... mumble, mumble.”

“Don't you all right, all right me! I'll have your carcass flown straight to the vultures!”

Slavesister doesn't answer. Only shakes her head and mutters. She will not answer back now. She too has learned from experience.

“Small mouth, big talk!” grumbles Godmother as if to herself, but loud enough for Slavesister to hear. “Little minds should not attempt to weigh in big fish!”

Still poised for attack, eyes bright, Godmother waits to see if Slavesister will respond.

But Slavesister's insurgence has been effectively squashed. She maintains a strategic silence, suppressing even her mumbles.

Godmother makes a magically triumphant face. She holds her pointy fingers in a “V” for victory, winks at me and leans back on her concrete pillows.

I go into the kitchen to finish my curry but I cannot eat. Mr. Rogers's English toes and kidneys float before my disembodied eyeballs...

And the vision of a torn Punjab. Will the earth bleed? And what about the sundered rivers? Won't their water drain into the jagged cracks? Not satisfied by breaking India, they now want to tear the Punjab.

 

Yousaf comes to fetch me. The sun has had time to warm the afternoon. It is balmy. “Let's go through the Lawrence Gardens,” I urge, and Yousaf, unable to deny anyone, makes the detour
through the gardens. We stop along a trimmed gardenia hedge to look at the sunken rose garden; and we clamber up the slopes of artificial hills and run down bougainvillea valleys ablaze with winter flowers. Casting long shadows we take a path leading to where Yousaf has parked his cycle.

Our shadow glides over a Brahmin Pandit. Sitting cross-legged on the grass he is eating out of a leaf-bowl. He looks at Yousaf—and at me—and his face expresses the full range of terror, passion and pain expected of a violated virgin. Our shadow has violated his virtue. The Pandit cringes. His features shrivel into arid little shrimps and his body retracts. The vermillion caste-mark on his forehead glows like an accusing eye. He looks at his food as if it is infected with maggots. Squeamishly picking up the leaf, he tips its contents behind a bush and throws away the leaf.

I am a diseased maggot. I look at Yousaf. His face is drained of joy, bleak, furious. I know he too feels himself composed of shit, crawling with maggots.

Now I know surely. One man's religion is another man's poison.

I experience this feeling of utter degradation, of being an untouchable excrescence, an outcast again, years later when I hold out my hand to a Parsee priest at a wedding and he, thinking I am menstruating beneath my facade of diamonds and a sequined sari, cringes.

Late that evening there is a familiar pattern of sound.

Again they're after Hari's dhoti. But instead of the light, quick patter of bare feet there is the harsh scrape and drag of leather on frozen earth.

It doesn't seem quite right to toy with a man's dhoti when it is so cold. It is a summer sport.

Someone shouts, “Get him before he gets into his quarters!” I hear Imam Din's bullying, bluff barruk as he bellows:
“Aha-hurrr!
A-
vaaaaaaay!”
And, closer to his quarry, Yousaf's provocative bubbly
“Vo-vo-vo-vo-vo-vo,”
as running he taps his mouth in quick succession. Curses! Hair all over my body creeps aslant as I hear Hari's alarmed cry.

Snatching me up and straddling me on her hip Ayah flings open the bathroom door and runs out. I am struck by the cold, and the approach of night casts uneasy shadows over a scene I have witnessed only in daylight. Something else too is incongruous. The winter shawl wrapped around Hari.

Yousaf is twirling his plume of hair and tugging at it as if he's trying to lift him. I feel a great swell of fear for Hari, and a surge of loathing for his
bodhi
. Why must he persist in growing it? And flaunt his Hinduism? And invite ridicule?

And that preposterous and obscene dhoti! Worn like a diaper between his stringy legs—just begging to be taken off!

My dread assuming a violent and cruel shape, I tear away from Ayah and fling myself on the human tangle and fight to claw at Hari's dhoti.

Someone pulls off his shawl and it is trampled underfoot. Hands stretch and pull his unraveling mauve lady's cardigan (Mother's hand-me-down) and rip off his shirt. His dhoti is hanging in ragged edges and, suddenly, it's off!

Like a withered tree frozen in a winter landscape Hari stands isolated in the bleak center of our violence: prickly with goose bumps, sooty genitals on display.

With heavy, old-man's movements, Imam Din wrenches the shawl from under our feet and throws it at the gardener, and the tattered rag that was his dhoti. “Cover up, you shameless bugger,” he says, attempting his usual bantering manner, but there is a gruff uncontrollable edge to his voice. He is not at ease with cruelty.

I look back. The Shankars stand on their veranda like fat shadows. Ayah has turned her face away. I run to her. I dig my face in her sari and stretch up my hands. Ayah tries to lift me but her fluid strength is gone. Her grip is weak. I hug her fiercely. Her heart beneath her springy breasts is fluttering like Ice-candy-man's nervous sparrows. She raises frightened eyes from my face and, turning to follow her gaze, I see an obscured shape standing by the
compound wall. Stirred by a breeze, the shadows cast by a eucalyptus tree shift and splinter, and define the still figure of a man.

The man moves out of the darkness, and as he approaches I am relieved. It is only Ice-candy-man.

Ayah is seeing more of Masseur. So, so am I. When Ayah's work is done, and she stretches out in the afternoon sun, massaging butter into her calves and smooth shins, she hums a new tune and sighs: “
Siski hawa ne lee: Har pati Kanp oothi.
The breeze sucked in his breath... The leaves trembled, breathless.” It's Masseur's song. He sings it in a rumbling, soulful baritone, and he sings often.

I am seeing more of Lahore, too. Ayah and I roam on foot and by bus: from Emperor Jehangir's tomb at Shahdara to Shahjehan's Shalimar Gardens. From the outskirts of the slaughterhouse to the banks of the Ravi in low flood. We amble through the tall pampas grass—purposefully purposeless—and sniffing the attar of roses, happen upon Masseur: his creamy bosky-silk shirt, his strong forearms and broad ankles stretched out on a dhurrie on the gray sand.

His cruet set of oils beside him, Masseur turns, making room for Ayah, and his eyes, full of honey, shower her with his maddening dreams. They lie, side by side, a stalk of grass stuck at a thoughtful angle between Masseur's teeth as he traces with a skill-full finger Ayah's parted lips.