Tales From Firozsha Baag (19 page)

“Boman
dikra
, what shall I tell you?” said Mr. Karani, shaking his head sorrowfully, “whatever advice can I give? If there was a
kaankhajuro
inside your skull, gnawing through your brain, I could say: hold a smelly chunk of mutton beside your ear, that will tempt it to come racing out on its one hundred legs. But what can I tell you about paying guests? To get rid of that problem there is no remedy except death.”

Mr. Karani went on in this way for a while, and when he felt that Boman had suffered enough, suggested he go to see the trustees of Firozsha Baag.

But there was to be no help from that quarter.

Boman sought out the one to whom he had slipped an expensive envelope one and a half years ago for the favour of turning the trustees’ collective blind eye (a delicate organ, but nurtured to operate without hindrance of ruth or compassion) upon the arrival of paying guests in the ground floor of B Block. Impossible, the oily man said. He spoke without relinquishing the look of grave concern (practised for several years) that proclaimed: here I stand, a pillar of the community, ready to help the poor and the needy at any hour of the day or night. Impossible, he repeated, there could not be paying guests living in any flat of Firozsha Baag, it was against the policy, Boman had to be mistaken; either that, or Boman had broken the rules.

Boman left. He turned to his brother-in-law Rustomji in A Block. Rustomji was a lawyer, he would have something sensible to say for
sure. Boman had always sized up Kashmira’s brother as a tough, no-nonsense kind of person, and surely that was the individual to talk to in this tricky situation.

“Saala ghéla!”
vociferated Rustomji. “Worst bloody thing you have done, taking paying guests. Where had your brain gone, committing such foolishness? You should have asked me before taking them in, now what is the use. First you are setting a fire, then running to dig the well.” Boman waited meekly, murmuring: “That’s true, that’s true.” The impassioned outburst had to be suffered patiently when you wanted tough, no-nonsense advice for free.

Then Boman told him about his meeting with the trustee. It gave Rustomji the appropriate opportunity for some harmless spleen-venting. “Arre, those rascals won’t give a glass of water to a thirsty man. In their office, their chairs don’t need cushions because they have piles of trust money squeezed under their arses.” Rustomji thrust his hands behind and upwards, and Boman, laughing appreciatively, said: “That’s too good,
yaar
, too good!”

Rustomji enjoyed compliments; he continued.

“Four years ago when my
WC
was leaking,
saala
thieves took five weeks to repair it. Every day my poor Mehroo would phone, and some bloody bugger would say, today or tomorrow, for sure. For five weeks I had to go next door to Hirabai Hansotia every morning. Finally I sent them such a stiff letter, it must have sizzled their arses. Repairing was done double-quick.” Boman gave him one of his awe-and-admiration looks.

It paid off. Rustomji now came to what Boman was waiting for. “Legal channels are what you should follow, make the court work for you,” said he. “It will not be easy, mark my words, tenancy laws are such. But if you are lucky it will not get that far. A lawyer’s letter might be enough to scare them out. Sometimes a lawyer’s letter gives the best laxative.” He wrote down the name of one who specialized in tenancy law.

When Kashmira learned of the procedure they would follow, she did not like it at all. She wanted to invite the paying guests for tea, announce the good news, then discuss the room. The baby would not be here for another seven months. She could look in the
Jam-E-Jamshed
columns and help them find another place. As Boman himself had
said, between the two they must have easily scored more than a century. It would be hard moving again at their age, they could use her assistance.

Once, Kashmira’s devout ambition was to do some kind of social work. Rustomji had been able to indulge a similar desire years ago by joining the Social Service League at St. Xavier’s College, and had eventually worked it out of his system. In recent times he had laboured hard to build up his reputation for hard-heartedness and apathy which, he made no bones about expressing, were essential for survival. But when her time came, Kashmira was not allowed to join the
SSL
because boys and girls went on work-camps together, and all kinds of stories were told about what went on there between the sexes. She had to repeatedly listen to her parents and her brother say things like: charity begins at home, or: self-help is the best help, which made no sense to her then or now.

Boman said inviting the paying guests to tea was out of the question. These days human nature was such that courtesy was usually misinterpreted as weakness. Better to do it firmly and officially, through proper channels, with a lawyer’s letter telling them to vacate in two months.

When the paying guests received the notice, Khorshedbai immediately and emphatically declared that no one would peck her to pieces. Then she told Ardesar that it was no surprise, she knew it was coming. Pestonji had recently appeared in a dream, and his cage had been nowhere in sight. Frantically beating his clipped wings, he had flopped around the veranda from corner to corner, squawking pitifully, and it had taken a long time to comfort him.

Ardesar wanted to tell Boman there was no need for lawyers and notices. They just needed a little time. But Khorshedbai forbade him. She saw beaks getting ready to peck, and was going to give them a fight, that was all. Standing before the cage, she set the swing going with her finger. “Prayerful people like us have nothing to fear,” she said, and swayed with the to-and-fro rocking of the swing.

Six months of futile and wearying procedures then began. The lawyer Rustomji had recommended was a sadistic little tub of a fellow who dug his nose insolently in the presence of his clients. It delighted
him to see Boman writhe in anxiety as he told him about the laws regarding tenancy and sub-tenancy, and how difficult it was to prove extreme hardship and evict someone.

“There are laws to protect the poor,” Boman said bitterly after he got home, “and laws to protect the rich. But middle-class people like us get the bamboo, all the way.”

“Chhee! Don’t talk like that!” said Kashmira, intolerant of dirty speech. Clothes and language were two things in which she insisted on cleanliness. In other matters she let Boman have his way. During happier times, she had allowed him to do things which would have horrified her had they been described in words. How Boman yearned for those nights again. When he would reach out his hand in the darkness after little Adil had fallen asleep, and she would turn her soft, warm body towards him, and know exactly what to do. Darkness was all she required, and silence: silence of words – other sounds, such as moans and whimpers, she did not mind, in fact they even excited her, of that he was certain.

Kashmira continued with bitterness: “If you had let me get a job instead, none of this would ever have happened.” Boman, turning over those night-time moments of ecstasy within his memory, smiled wistfully, and she did not understand why.

The weeks during which Khorshedbai littered in the morning and Kashmira swept in the evening commenced following the day of the final courthouse appearance. That day saw Kashmira enter the eighth month of her pregnancy. It saw Pestonji flutter his way again into Khorshedbai’s dreams. And it saw the end of Boman’s futile and wearying procedures to secure the eviction.

Boman had not foreseen a complete defeat. At most, on grounds of compassion, a longer notice period. He had spent the last few weeks returning utmost courtesy for Khorshedbai’s daily vituperation, displaying the grace and generosity only the victor can afford, and which, in his mind, he already was.

When the verdict came it crushed him. And to see Boman humbled
emboldened Khorshedbai. A brave front might have kept her vengeance within reasonable limits of decency, but brave fronts were now beyond Boman.

That day, Khorshedbai and Ardesar went directly from the courthouse to the
agyaari
, and made an offering of a ten-rupee sandalwood log instead of the regular fifty-paise stick. She was ebullient by the time they reached home. She washed and wiped the photoframes containing the moustached and pugreed countenances of her forefathers on the Other Side, as well as the cage, and filled fresh water in the drinking pan. Then, all evening long she lit sticks of
agarbatti
before the photoframes and cage, wreathing her departed ones in a fog thicker than the one they must have encountered when crossing Chinvad Bridge to the Other Side.

The heavy incense began to spread. It strayed into the other room and nauseated Kashmira and Boman. It filled their pots and pans and destroyed their appetites; lingered over bedsheets and slunk inside pillowcases; slipped through the slats and squatted under their bed. The relentless and pungent scent insinuated itself into their eyes and noses, and swam boldly through their skulls, muddling their minds and curdling their senses, until Khorshedbai had taken possession of their flat and their beings. Little Adil complained about the smell too. They calmed him down and put him to bed early, then retired, nursing headaches and shame and disappointment.

But Khorshedbai denied them the balm of sleep. When silence had fallen beyond the wall, she wound up her gramophone. She pointed the horn towards the region where the beds would be on the other side, and played the only record that she possessed. The only record, as she told Ardesar whenever he wanted to augment the collection, that anyone need possess. The strains of
Sukhi Sooraj
, the stridulant paean to the rising sun, borne on the vocal cords of the shrill woman buried in the crackling, hissing grooves of the 78’s shellac, journeyed beyond the wall and into the darkness where Boman and Kashmira had sought refuge. They clung together, helpless, soothing each other’s pain through repeated playings.

Then the horn was folded away. The last sticks of
agarbatti
smouldered into diminutive tapers. And when Khorshedbai finally felt sleep
overpowering her, she struggled against it, unwilling to let the day’s blessed events cease their circuit of her mind. Such were her stars, though, that when sleep did triumph, it only brought more joy. Pestonji visited, and whistled, and fluttered through her sleeping hours.

In the morning she remembered the dream distinctly: Pestonji was sitting in his large rectangular custom-built cage which, for some reason, was out on the veranda. She brought him peanuts. Pestonji proceeded to crack them methodically and thoroughly, then tossed the shells and nuts out of the cage. He threw them all out. Very surprising, because Pestonji had always been a neat and tidy parrot, he even did his potty in one corner of the cage only, never let fly haphazardly like others. Maybe he was not in the mood for peanuts. So she gave him two peppers. Long green ones. He did the same thing again. Tore them into little pieces, threw them across the length and breadth of the veranda.

It was only then that she understood Pestonji’s message.

And while she was preparing the first of her veranda parcels, guided by the divine afflatus from Pestonji, Boman awoke, his confidence renewed. He told Kashmira there was no need to worry, he would get rid of the paying guests one way or another. He whistled as he lingered over the selection of a tie. When the knot turned out perfect at the first attempt, his self-assurance was fully restored. He kissed Kashmira and left for work, urging her to continue with their locked-door policy. And in the evening he discovered Khorshedbai’s revenge scattered over the veranda.

Boman and Kashmira decided to pretend that nothing was wrong. They went out with a broom and dustpan. She swept away the garbage. He whistled as insouciantly as he could. She hummed along. He maintained a protective stance in the doorway. His tie and jacket gleamed like talismans of civility amidst Khorshedbai’s manufactured squalor. He always returned from work as crisp and neat as he left in the morning. Kashmira loved this about him, she used to say he made their room classy the minute he walked in; at night he would delay changing into pyjamas for as long as possible.

Khorshedbai watched with satisfaction through the crack in the door. The beaks lifted against her had been humbled and turned away
without a single peck. She said to Ardesar, “Look at him standing
chingo-mingo
in his fancy dress, making his pregnant wife clean it.” Ardesar barely heard her. The pigeons were cooing and feeding from his hands, the occasional flutter of their wings fanning his face.

Days went by, then weeks. The veranda littering entered its second month, and Kashmira approached her ninth. She said, “What is going to happen now, Bomsi, how much longer?” He reassured her that he was making a plan.

“Not like the plan you made that time, I hope. Talking big, that you would scare them with a lawyer.”

“Don’t worry, Kashoo darling,” he soothed, “this one will be perfect.” He blamed her bitter reproach on the pregnancy. But the truth smarted.

That night he lay in bed unable to sleep. The paying guests were on his mind. Nowadays, it was the only thing he thought about. What was going to happen? He couldn’t admit there wasn’t a plan and upset her. He turned over on his right side and stretched out his legs. A few moments later he folded them up into his stomach. Still not comfortable. He straightened them again. It was no use. He turned over on his left side, rose on one elbow, and adjusted the pillow. Kashmira said to please lie quietly if he couldn’t sleep, and at least let her, she was worn out with the housework and the extra sweeping every evening, and it wouldn’t be long before five o’clock struck and Khorshedbai wound up her gramophone.

What Boman did not have a shred of before the case concluded, he now had in abundance: evidence to evict the paying guests. On grounds of extreme hardship, harassment, harmful influences, something like that – the odious lawyer had quoted sections and paragraphs, finger in nose. Now he needed some way to package it for presenting to the court. Witnesses, of course. Hardly anyone in Firozsha Baag was unaware of Khorshedbai’s doings on the veranda. Those who had not seen had at least heard of them. Those who wanted to see could walk past B Block at eleven o’clock.