Tales From Firozsha Baag (26 page)
After a few such copiously educational evenings, I knew what the odds were of my luggage getting lost if I travelled airline A. The best food was served on airline B. Departures were always delayed with airline C (the company had a
ghati
sense of time and punctuality, they said). The washrooms were filthy and blocked up on airline D (no fault of airline D, they explained, it was the low class of public that travelled on it).
Of Bombay itself the conversation was restricted to the shopping they’d done. They brought back tales of villainous shopkeepers who tried to cheat them because they sensed that here was the affluence of foreign exchange: “Very cunning, they all are. God knows how, but they are able to smell your dollars before you even open your wallet. Then they try to fool you in the way they fool all the other tourists. I used to tell them” – this, in broken Hindi – “ ‘go, go, what you thinking, I someone new in Mumbai? I living here thirty years, yes thirty, before going phoren.’ Then they would bargain sensibly.”
Others told of the way they had made a shrewd deal with shopkeepers who did not know the true value of brass and copper artifacts and knick-knacks, what did bloody
ghatis
know about such things anyway. These collectors of bric-a-brac, self-appointed connoisseurs of art and antiques, must have acquired their fancies along with their immigration visas.
But their number was small. And though they were as earnest about their hobbies as the others were, they never quite succeeded in holding the gathering transfixed the way the airline clique managed to. Art was not as popular as airlines were at these evenings.
Six months after Jamshed’s trip to Bombay, I received a letter from my brother Percy. Among other things, he wrote about his commitment in the small village:
Our work with the farmers started successfully. They got interest-free loans in the form of seed and fertilizer, which we purchased wholesale, and for the first time in years they did not have to borrow from those bloodthirsty money-lenders.
Ever since we got there the money-lenders hated us. They tried to persuade us to leave, saying that what we were doing was wrong because it was upsetting the delicate balance of village life and destroying tradition. We in turn pointed out things like exploitation, usury, inhumanity, and other abominations whose time was now up. We may have sounded like bold knights-errant, but they turned to threats and said it would soon become so unhealthy for us that we would leave quickly enough.
One day when we were out visiting a loan applicant, a farmer brought news that a gang of thugs wielding sticks and cudgels was waiting at the hut – our office and residence. So we stayed the night with the loan applicant and, in the morning, escorted by a band of villagers who insisted on coming along, started for our hut. But all we found were smouldering embers. It had been razed to the ground during the night, and no one had dared interfere.
Now we’re back in Bombay, and Navjeet and I are working on a plan for our return. We’ve spoken to several reporters, and the work is getting much publicity. We’re also collecting fresh donations, so that when we go back we won’t fail for lack of funds.
Having read this far, I put down the letter for a moment. There you were, my brother, waging battles against corruption and evil, while I was watching sitcoms on my rented Granada
TV.
Or attending dinner parties at Parsi homes to listen to chit-chat about airlines and trinkets. And it was no use wishing that we had talked more to each other about our hopes and visions and dreams. I thought of our schooldays, trying to locate the point when the gulf had appeared between us. Did it grow bit by bit or suddenly happen one morning? I cannot remember, but it did throw everything into silence and secrecy.
The rest of the letter concerned Jamshed’s visit to Bombay six months ago:
I wish he’d stayed away, if not from Bombay then at least from me. At best, the time I spent with him was a waste. I expected that we would look at things differently, but was not prepared for the crassly materialistic boor that he’s turned into. To think he was my “best friend” in school.
No doubt he believes the highlight of his visit came when he took some of us to dinner at the Rendezvous – nothing but the most expensive, of course. It was a spectacle to surpass anything he’d done so far. He reminded us to eat and drink all we wanted without minding the prices and enjoy ourselves as much as we could, because we wouldn’t get such a chance again, at least, not until his next visit.
When the soup came he scolded the waiter that it was cold and sent it back. The rest of us sat silent and embarrassed. He looked at us nonchalantly, explaining that this was the only way to handle incompetence; Indians were too meek and docile, and should learn to stand up for their rights the way people do in the States.
We were supposed to be impressed by his performance, for we were in an expensive restaurant where only foreign tourists eat on the strength of their U.S. dollars. And here was one of our own, not intimidated within the walls of the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel. In our school-days we could only stand outside and watch the foreigners come and go, wondering what opulent secrets lay inside, what comforts these fair-skinned superior beings enjoyed. Here was one of our own showing us how to handle it all without feeling a trace of inferiority, and now we were ashamed of him.
We spent the evening watching Jamshed in disbelief, in silence, which he probably thought was due to the awesome splendour of our surroundings.
I was determined not to see him again, not even when he came to say goodbye on the day of his departure, and I don’t intend to meet him when he visits Bombay the next time …
As I finished reading, I felt that my brother had been as irritated by Jamshed’s presence as I had been by Jamshed’s letter six months ago.
But I did not write this to Percy. After all, I was planning to be in Bombay in four or five months. We could talk then. In just four months I would complete two years in Canada – long enough a separation, I supposed with a naive pomposity, to have developed a lucidity of thought which I would carry back with me and bring to bear on all of India’s problems.
Soon it was time to go shopping for gifts. I packed chocolates, cheeses, jams, jellies, puddings, cake mixes, panty hose, stainless steel razor blades – all the items I used to see displayed in the stalls of the smugglers along Flora Fountain, always priced out of reach. I felt like one of those soldiers who, in wartime, accumulates strange things to use as currency for barter. What was I hoping to barter them for? Attention? Gratitude? Balm to soothe guilt or some other malady of the conscience? I wonder now. And I wonder more that I did not wonder then about it.
The suitcase I had come with proved insufficient. And although I bought a new one, an extra leather strap around each seemed wise, for they were both swelled to threatening dimensions.
Then, arms still sore from the typhoid and cholera inoculations, luggage bursting at the seams with a portable grocery store, and mind suffused with groundless optimism, I boarded the plane.
The aircraft was losing height in preparation for landing. The hard afternoon sun revealed the city I was coming back to after two years. When the plane had taken off two years ago, it had been in the dark of night, and all I saw from the sky through shaded and infected eyes were the airport lights of Santa Cruz. But now it was daytime, and I was not wearing dark glasses. I could see the parched land: brown, weary, and unhappy.
A few hours earlier the aircraft had made its scheduled landing in London, and the view from the air had been lush, everywhere green and hopeful. It enraged me as I contrasted it with what I was now seeing. Gone was the clearness with which I’d promised myself I would
look at things. All that was left was a childish and helpless reaction. “It’s not fair!” I wanted to stamp my foot and shout, “it’s just not fair!”
Construction work was under way at the airport. The van transporting passengers from the aircraft to the terminal building passed improvised dwellings of corrugated metal, cardboard, packing crates, plastic sheets, even newspaper.
The van was reduced to a crawl in the construction zone. A few naked children emerged from the corrugated metal and cardboard and ran to keep up with us, screaming for money. When they came dangerously close to the van, the driver screamed back. On board was a group of four businessmen, and three of them tossed some change out the window. They sounded Australian. The fourth was the seasoned traveller, and the others hung on every word he said. He warned them, “If you try that when you’re on the street, you’ll create something like a bloody feeding frenzy of sharks.” The children fell far behind when the construction zone ended and the van picked up speed.
Bombay seemed dirtier than ever. I remembered what Jamshed had written in his letter, and how it had annoyed me, but now I couldn’t help thinking he was right. Hostility and tension seemed to be perpetually present in buses, shops, trains. It was disconcerting to discover I’d become unused to it. Now I knew what soldiers must experience in the trenches after a respite far behind the lines.
As if enacting a scene for my benefit with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play, a crowd clawed its way into a local train. All the players were there: Fate and Reality, and the latter’s offspring, the New Reality, and also Poverty and Hunger, Virtue and Vice, Apathy and Corruption.
The drama began when the train, Reality, rolled into the station. It was overcrowded because everyone wanted to get on it: Virtue, Vice, Apathy, Corruption, all of them. Someone, probably Poverty, dropped his plastic lunch bag amidst the stampede, nudged on by Fate. Then Reality rolled out of the station with a gnashing and clanking of its metal, leaving in its wake the New Reality. And someone else, probably Hunger, matter-of-factly picked up Poverty’s mangled lunch, dusted off a
chapan
which had slipped out of the trampled bag, and went his
way. In all of this, was there a lesson for me? To trim my expectations and reactions to things, trim them down to the proper proportions?
I wasn’t sure, but when I missed my bus an old instinctive impulse returned: to dash after it, to leap and join the crowd already hanging from the door rail. In the old days I would have been off and running. I used to pride my agility at this manoeuvre. After all, during rush hour it was the only way to catch a bus, or you’d be left at the bus-stop with the old and the feeble.
But while the first flush of confidence flowed through me, the bus had moved well into the stream of traffic. My momentary hesitation gave the game away. With the old and feeble was my place, as long as I was a tourist here, and not committed to life in the combat zone.
In Firozsha Baag things were still roughly the same, but Mrs. Mody had died, and no one knew what Pesi was doing now. In fact, ever since he had been sent away to boarding-school some years ago, Pesi’s doings were not spoken of at all. My friend Viraf of A Block, whom I had been unable to say goodbye to two years ago because he was away in Kharagpur studying at the Indian Institute of Technology, was absent for my hello as well. He did not return to Bombay because he had found a job in nearby Calcutta.
Tehmina had at last rid herself of the cataracts. She was suddenly very spry, very sure of herself in all she did. Along with her cataracts she had also jettisoned her old slippers and duster-coat. Her new ensemble consisted of a long, flowing floral-patterned kaftan and a smart pair of
chappals
with little heels that rang out her presence on the stairs and in the hallway.
But Najamai had aged considerably. She kept asking me why I had not yet been to see her daughters even though she had given me their addresses: Vera was somewhere in Alberta, and Dolly in British Columbia.
My brother, Percy, wrote from the small village that he wanted to meet me, but: “I cannot come to Bombay right now because I’ve received a letter from Jamshed. He’s flying in from New York, and has written about reunions and great times for all the old crowd. That’s out of the question as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to see him again.”
I wrote back saying I understood.
Our parents were disappointed. They had been so happy that the whole family would be together again for a while. And now this. They could not understand why Percy did not like Jamshed any more, and I’m sure at the back of their minds they thought their son envied his friend because of the fine success he’d made of himself in America. But who was I to explain things, and would they understand even if I tried? They truly believed that Jamshed was the smart young fellow, and Percy the idealist who forgot that charity begins at home.
This trip was not turning out to be anything I’d hoped it would. Jamshed was coming and Percy wasn’t, our parents were disappointed with Percy, I was disappointed with them, and in a week I would be flying out of Bombay, confused and miserable. I could feel it already.
Without any destination in mind I left the house and took the first empty bus to come along. It went to Flora Fountain. The offices were now closing for the day. The dirty, yellow-grey buildings would soon spill out typists and clerks and peons into a swelling stream surging towards bus-stops and train stations.
Roadside stalls were open for business. This would be their busy hour. They were lined up along the edge of the pavement, displaying their merchandise. Here a profusion of towels and napkins from shocking pink to peacock green; there, the clatter and gleam of pots and pans; further down, a refreshment stall selling sizzling
sarnosas
and ice-cold sherbet.
The pavement across the road was the domain of the smugglers with their stalls of foreign goods. But they did not interest me, I stayed where I was. One man was peddling an assortment of toys. He demonstrated them all in turn, calling out, “Baba play and baby play! Daddy play and Mummy play!” Another, with fiendish vigour, was throwing glass bowls to the ground, yelling: “Un-ber-rakable! Un-ber-rakable!”
Sunlight began to fade as I listened to the hawkers singing their tunes. Kerosene lamps were lit in some of the stalls, punctuating at random the rows on both sides of the street.