The Crow Eaters (23 page)

A BIG surprise awaited Billy at Lahore. The returning honeymooners were welcomed and hugged and driven straight from the station to a new house in one of the better localities of Lahore, across the poplar-lined canal.

The house was a gift to the newlyweds from Faredoon!

Billy gaped as they trotted up the drive. There was a sunken oblong lawn between the driveways leading to a burnt brick bungalow with a projecting portico. The frontage on either side of the portico was flanked by two doors which led left, to the bathroom and right, to the kitchen. It was a deep house with a narrow façade. Faredoon had selected it more on account of its shape than for any other consideration. Such houses, Gopal Krishan had told him, were dynamic and lucky. They were known as ‘tiger faced’ and were governed by the challenging and powerful spirit of these beasts. Its occupants would amass wealth and power as secret and secure as the hidden depth of the house.

Secret?

Because secrecy in good fortune, riches, health or happiness, is a virtue in India – to flaunt either is to invite the evil-eye of the envious.

Had Faredoon wanted a house for himself, Gopal Krishan would have advised him to choose one of the broad-fronted elevations patronised by the spirit of the cow. ‘Cow faced’ houses were also lucky; they conferred peace and content upon the inmates – attributes that did not count for much
with an ambitious bridegroom who had yet to make his mark on the world.

Small square houses, with neither depth nor width, were for small square people.

A staff had already been engaged. The cook, bearer, gardener, washer-man and sweeper salaamed welcome as soon as the tonga came to a halt in the portico.

Billy had tears of gratitude in his eyes. His face was stretched in an indelible and quivering grimace.

Putli performed the honours on the verandah. Tanya and Billy bowed as she swung a silver tray containing water and uncooked rice round their heads. She tipped its contents at their feet. She sacrificed an egg. Circling it seven times over their heads she broke it on the floor. Then a fresh coconut: she whacked it vigorously until it cracked and spilled its water.

Having propitiated the spirits, and having done whatever was humanly possible to ensure the couple’s happiness, Putli stained their foreheads with vermilion and led them through the freshly garlanded portals.

The verandah opened into the sitting and dining rooms. Behind these were the two bedrooms, and behind these a receding hive of rooms that Faredoon prudently had locked up. Billy could divide them into two independent flats and rent them out at his convenience.

The house was furnished with essentials. Putli had thoughtfully left the selection of those things a woman likes to choose for herself to Tanya. Tanya’s luggage had been unpacked and arranged, and ornamental articles from her dower had been placed on show in the drawing room.

The bearer, tall, crisp-turbaned, and smiling, bowed. Lunch was ready.

Tanya played at housekeeping with enthusiasm. She embarked on wild shopping sprees, bringing home tonga-loads of drapes and furnishings. She bought lamps and lampshades, figurines of china, vases, coir-mats and carpets.

She spread bolts of velvet and brocade in a blaze of colour on sofas and chairs for Billy’s selection. She climbed up on stools and hung lengths of silk from pelmets for Billy’s approval.

‘Such rich materials don’t quite suit our house,’ explained Billy, frantically tactful, ‘simpler fabrics would be in better taste.’

Tanya obediently returned the rejects and brought home simpler materials. Billy selected the cheapest.

The moment Tanya caught on to Billy’s enthusiasm for the least expensive, she accosted him point blank.

‘Billy! Don’t say the brown goes with the purple only because it’s cheap!’

Billy grinned wickedly.

They were in love, and they compromised. Tanya was given a reasonable sum to furnish the house. She could do as she pleased so long as she did not exceed it. But money simply drained through the gaps in her stubby, broad-knuckled fingers.

Novelty fascinated Tanya. She had an engineer’s passion for acquiring unusual things and experimenting with them. Gadgets, knick-knacks, an imaginative fly-swat, egg-whisk or can opener, would enthral her as much as fancy cars and costly electrical equipment. She was like a child with a new toy – like a scientist at a discovery.

She was to carry this enthusiasm into widowhood and old age, never losing her attraction for the marvels of technology. They were for her part of the wonder of life.

‘Old? Old?’ she rebuked Jerbanoo once, when Jerbanoo entertained her to a soliloquy on the worthlessness and misery of her great age. Tanya was thirty at the time.

‘You’re not old!’ she protested. ‘What is eighty years in the span of millennia? A hundred years of life is nothing, a snap of the fingers – like that – over in a second. If I live three hundred years then, maybe, I will get fed up with life and feel old. You are young!’

What is it to be as enamoured of life, vulnerable to its
charms and extraordinariness at seventy as at seven? Tanya, ninety-three when she died, retained her capacity for enchantment to the last breath.

AWAY of life was imposed upon Tanya and Billy by the locality in which they lived, by their independent bungalow, and by their new possessions. They made friends with modern couples equally determined to break with tradition. It amounted to no more than a fanatical faith in the ways of English society in India, and a disciple’s knack at imitation. They were not of the masses, this young crowd. If their wealth did not set them apart, their ability to converse in English certainly did. They were utterly ashamed of traditional habits and considered British customs, however superficially observed, however trivial, exemplary. They entertained continuously at small, intimate, ‘mixed’ parties where married couples laughed and danced decorously with other married couples. ‘Mixed’ parties were as revolutionary a departure from Freddy’s all-male get-togethers at the Hira Mandi, and Putli’s rigid female sessions, as is a discotheque from a Victorian family dinner. The parties were fashionably cosmopolitan, including the various religious sects of India: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, the Europeans, and the Anglo-Indians.

The Behram Junglewallas acquired a large circle of friends, many of whom later were invited chiefly to further Billy’s business ambitions.

Tanya was born to this life, eager to socialise and an adept hostess. Billy, inferiority complex and all, eagerly accepted the social challenge.

But there were pitfalls.

Billy plunged into the social revolution with the blithe confidence of the uninitiated, confident that the rules of the game would adhere to the British concept of ‘fair play’. He was not prepared for the competition Tanya unwittingly generated.

Billy, who no more expected his friends to covet his wife than to covet his soul, was bewildered by the extraordinary attention Tanya received. He was hurt. This, he thought confusedly, was not ‘cricket’. He studiously avoided looking at his friends’ wives, never addressing them in preference to their husbands, who had no such scruples. They ogled Tanya unabashedly. They took her side if she ventured the mildest contradiction, and they fawned on her until Billy bristled.

Secure in her love, firm in her loyalty, Tanya revelled in the attention. She blossomed in poise and bloomed in beauty. She became daring in her attire and tied her sari in a way that accentuated the perfection of her body. She took to wearing a little make-up and outlined the astonishing loveliness of her lips … and Billy could not understand why.

‘Tanya,’ he said one day, ‘don’t look straight into people’s eyes. I know you don’t mean anything – but men misunderstand. They get bad ideas.’

Tanya made a valiant effort to accommodate his wishes.

A year later, when Billy said, ‘Look Tanya, I’ve explained all this before. Don’t look so directly into men’s eyes,’ Tanya protested.

‘But I can’t help it darling. I have to look at them sometimes! Look, I have small eyes, and I wear glasses – they can hardly see them!’

And yet another year later, when Billy once again expressed concern, she retorted: ‘O.K., so you don’t want me to look at their eyes! So where do you want me to look? At their balls?’

By some quirk of nature Tanya was still childless. It was a source of great anxiety to all the Junglewallas.

But the single fact that racked Tim and Billy out of their infantile honeymoon gaucheries, and plunged them into the headier commitments of matrimonial maturity was money!
Never was a man so parsimonious – or a woman more extravagant.

They had momentous scenes when a refrigerator, or gadget, or piece of jewellery was to be returned. Billy could not forgive Tanya’s impulsive spending. He brooded over it. It lacerated his sensitivities. It aroused a gigantic conflict between his passion for his wife and his passion for money. Money, being his first love, triumphed.

It was as impossible for Tanya to curtail her spending as it is for a person with hay fever to stop sneezing.

Jerbanoo, ever ready for battle and finding things too dull at the flat, jumped into the fray. She had an unerring instinct for quarrels, and as soon as she sensed a juicy one brewing, she hauled herself off to spend a weekend with the couple. She took up for Billy. She added fuel to the fire and toasted her boisterous little heart in the glow. She couldn’t for the life of her understand the wilful and wanton desire to throw away money. It was sinful the way modern wives let things go in the kitchen … they gave the cook whatever money he demanded as if they had no more sense than sheep. Thank goodness she had trained her own grand-daughters herself! Even now, though they were married, she wouldn’t hesitate to whack the demons of wastefulness and laziness out of them.

At the flat she worked upon Putli: ‘Do you know what that dumb, senseless daughter-in-law of yours is up to now?’ she began. And though Putli made excuses for the girl to Jerbanoo, she couldn’t help chiming in herself with an occasional criticism.

Tanya could not stand it. Her life was being dominated by a bunch of foul-mouthed misers! She threatened to write to her father of her misery; and Billy had a hard time pacifying her after Jerbanoo’s turbulent visits. Tanya became abusive. She dredged out a rather anaemic vocabulary of swear words, senseless and droll in themselves, but uttered with such vehemence that Billy was shocked.

‘Don’t you dare say such things about my mother!’ he
thundered sanctimoniously, once, during the heat of battle. They fought in English, with an odd Gujarati word or sentence thrown in.

‘O.K. I won’t say anything about that silly fool. But what about that damn daughter-of-a-mule grandmother of yours? Even if you shut my mouth by force I will say what I have to about her! Look what they’ve turned you into – a little cheap-skate! And she has the cheek to criticise my upbringing! I will not stand for it!’

‘Cheapskate? I’m a cheapskate? and may I tell you what you are? You are a spoilt brat! So pampered that you weren’t even potty trained! You still wet your bed! Imagine a full-grown donkey like you wetting her bed!’

The blood drained from Tanya’s face. She slumped on the mattress, all exuberance gone and in a state of acute shock as if Billy had shot her. He had never let on that he knew of her nocturnal weakness. Now he had dealt the brutal trump!

Tanya buried her flushed, tear-ravaged face in the pillows. Her body was aquiver with sobs.

This quarrel, barely three years after their marriage, was a hallmark in their relations. It dealt quite a blow to the lingering honeymoon, and it was the first time Tanya wept.

Instantly, Billy was beside himself with concern. He could not bear to see her cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ he choked, ‘I didn’t mean to tell you ever. I never meant to throw it in your face like that … I promise you, I’m sorry. I will never say it again, it is your secret – no one will know. Please, please, forgive me.’

Tanya heard an unaccountable sound. When she ventured a tearful peep, she beheld Billy sobbing as heartbrokenly as herself.

Her tears dried up. She gaped at him open-mouthed.

Billy wiped his eyes. ‘Please don’t ever cry like that again,’ he pleaded brokenly. ‘I cannot see you cry. I will do anything you say – but don’t cry.’

Tanya determined to cry as often as possible.

All tempers subsided for a bit when they learnt that Tanya was at last expecting. The family was thrilled and Billy was
ecstatic. Tanya was inundated with kindly advice. Putli stuck pictures of chubby-cheeked English babies all over the house. A dozen blue eyes peered at Tanya whenever she swung open her cupboard doors. Framed photographs of dimpled infants in cute poses hung from walls. There were three in the bathroom alone. Nor could Tanya look into mirrors without observing the babies stuck in corners.

There was an endless repertoire of stories in which swarthy parents had produced European style offspring. Tanya, initiated into the secret since as long as she could remember – her sisters had undergone the same ritual – contemplated the pictures faithfully. Billy was sceptical.

‘The baby will look like me or Tanya. How can it look like an Englishman?’

Then Putli, or Jerbanoo, or Hutoxi, would ask: ‘You don’t believe me? You remember Bacchmai Mehta … how dark she was? And her husband was like charcoal! But she had faith. She looked at the pictures of beautiful babies and when her Keki was born I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was there. He had blue eyes, I tell you – blue eyes! His skin was white, his hair was like sawdust!’

Almost all the pictures were of infants who looked like little boys.

But Tanya produced a girl. After the initial disappointment everyone agreed it was most fortunate. It was a sign that Laxmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, sought to favour them.

She was a delicate, brown-skinned baby and Tanya, who was not too adept at managing her, came in for a deal of indignant and righteous criticism.

Everything she did was wrong. Putli’s criticism took the form of corrective advice, Jerbanoo’s was more directly expressed.

Life once again became intolerable for Tanya. Trouble came to a head when she bought a new layette for the baby when she was six months old.

The family bore down upon her. Couldn’t Putli knit? Couldn’t Jerbanoo, Hutoxi and Katy sew? Was Tanya so high
and mighty and hoity-toity that she preferred garments made by God knows what kind of dirty hands to their efforts? And the shame of it, throwing money away!

That sultry evening Tanya quietly sent for a hired tonga and rode off to visit Freddy. In his office she let herself go, and gave full expression to her hysteria. Freddy soothed his daughter-in-law and she returned home assured that her troubles were over.

And indeed they were – at least as far as interference from Putli and Jerbanoo was concerned. Freddy was genuinely fond of the girl. He knew the injustice she was being subjected to, and of course, the fact that Jerbanoo was so firmly against Tanya aligned him to her as nothing else could. He solved the problem with characteristic ingenuity.

He was very sentimental that night, almost tearful. He praised Putli, extolling her goodness, going into rhapsodies about the hard work she put in for the family. He choked, and managed to squeeze forth a convincing bit of tenderness and appreciation for his mother-in-law as well.

Jerbanoo grew wary. She looked at Faredoon with apprehension, wondering what he was up to now.

‘Both of you need a break,’ he announced sentimentally. ‘I’ve been thinking: what have I ever really done for you? I have been too busy – selfishly engrossed in work – and you have stood by me without a murmur! But at last, I am in a position to show my gratitude. The children are settled: Billy is looking after the business very well. The Theosophists are after me to give some lectures in London and I feel I can take six months off and take you for a holiday to England.’

Jerbanoo’s suspicions subsided at this grand declaration. She and Putli were all a-twitter with excitement. Had Faredoon broached the subject less tactfully, Putli would have refused. How could she possibly think of leaving the house alone for six months? Who would look after her grandchild? Tanya was totally incompetent. What about Katy? There were any number of excuses she might have produced.

‘Well, what do you think?’ inquired Faredoon, beaming like a benevolent sheikh.

Jerbanoo concurred whole-heartedly. To visit England! A misty and glorious fantasy! She couldn’t believe her ears!

Putli put forward a few half-hearted objections: what about Katy? They must think to settle her future first. But they could see Putli was taken by the idea, and Jerbanoo made short shrift of her objections.

The children helped them brush up their limited English vocabulary.

And that is how Jerbanoo came to be let loose upon an unsuspecting London.