At last, it was their turn to cut the goats. Farhan’s was first. It was agreed that Farhan would make the initial quick slice and then pray from the Quran as the butcher finished. Taheem stood anxiously beside Shahzad as his father made the cut. Then Farhan began praying, and Shahzad and Taheem held the goat down, their knees on the animal’s chest. The thin, wiry butcher cut the goat’s neck as it writhed. Blood streamed onto Shahzad’s sandals and Taheem’s shorts, and then down an open drain. The killing was done quickly. Taheem allowed himself to look at the goat’s eyes, which were rolled back in its head, its neck turned out at an unnatural angle. And then he quickly looked away. On one side, an already-cut and skinned goat’s body parts were being divided into buckets. On the other, a live goat was bleating as he was led to the tarp. Taheem did not allow himself to cry.
Upstairs, Mahala watched from a window. She could see only a sliver of what was happening: a hoof, a tarp. But she knew. After their goat was cut, she cried in her bedroom. She took out her father’s cell phone, on which she’d taken a picture of the goat, and kissed the photo. “I love you, I love you,” she told the goat, clutching the cell phone tight.
While Mahala thought of the goat, Shahzad thought of his father, who used to eat the goat’s eyeballs every Bakri Eid. He said it gave him better eyesight. Shahzad laughed at the memory as he walked upstairs with the butcher. Shahzad had never liked the taste of eyeballs, with their long, thin tissue of retina the consistency of chewing gum. But the memory made him miss his father. Meanwhile Sabeena, who was sitting on her haunches before a spit in the apartment, preparing to cook the first pieces of liver, thought of her own father. Out of all the people she distributed meat to, she had always enjoyed bringing it to her father most. These days, she only gave it to her sister and brother and his children. Bakri Eid had never felt the same.
Taheem had changed clothes after the cutting. Now, he wore a T-shirt with American-brand motorcycles on it and acid-washed pants, free of blood. He ran up to Shahzad and said, “Hey, baba, I held the feet,” though Shahzad had been there to see it. “Ah, very good,” Shahzad said, and patted him on the shoulder.
It was a few minutes before anyone noticed the young street girl standing at the door, looking around nervously. The women were busy making packages of meat in the kitchen to distribute to family, neighbors, and the poor. “Is auntie here?” the girl finally called into the living room, her voice high and tentative. She had a sad, round face and a purple and pink–colored veil over her burqa.
“Andar,” Shahzad said and pointed to the kitchen. The girl tiptoed inside. After a minute, she came out, grasping a few rupees and a package of meat. She tiptoed back toward the door. “Hey,” Shahzad said in a friendly voice. “I think I saw you before in the mosque. No?” The girl giggled and nodded. Her nervousness disappeared. “Very good,” Shahzad said, and smiled at her. The little girl skipped out, bag swinging, the first of many street children who would visit them that day.
* * *
In the days after Bakri Eid and the Ganpati festival, a thick smoke descended over the city, a by-product of the pollution and festival fires. The weather forecast did not say “rainy” or “foggy” or “clear,” just “smoke.” It often rained so hard during Ganpati that the streets began to flood—what some in Mumbai called “haathi kabana,” or “elephant rainfall.” But this year, there had been no thud of rain on roofs. In the late September heat, the taxi and bus drivers began to fight with customers over rigged prices and where they would or would not go. Or they fought with each other. “Madarchod,” motherfucker, “bhenchod,” sisterfucker, they called back and forth, Hindu driver to Muslim driver, or one religion against itself, while the high-pitched playback singers on their radios wailed in the background. Anger did not always discriminate. Not always. On the television, there was news of a Muslim man who had been lynched by a Hindu mob in northern India after rumors spread that he had eaten beef. Afterward, journalists, artists, actors, and even politicians spoke out about the growing intolerance in the country. Modi himself said nothing for a week, until he finally made a speech saying the lynching was dukhad. But though it was sad, he said, he was not to blame. “What is the role of the central government in these incidents?” he asked. When Modi talked like this, Shahzad switched off the TV.
September yielded to October, and Sabeena’s birthday came. She was turning fifty-two. At her request, they didn’t celebrate much, but as a birthday gift Shahzad gave her seventy-five thousand rupees, a large sum, to get new gold bangles made. It was money he would have spent on the new Colaba office.
People said that Mumbai was at its worst this time of year, after several of the major holidays were over but before winter and its festivals came, including Diwali and the Prophet’s birthday. It was the time when the city felt heaviest. Even the new apartment felt stuffy. And that month a poor Muslim man in their building—a man with ten children and little money to feed them but who all his neighbors said was doing “so well”—announced to Shahzad that his wife was pregnant again.
With the holidays over, Shahzad went to visit the family doctor, who knew him almost better than anyone. Recently, Shahzad had begun seeing a sexologist, who had put him on another medication. He now took five different pills every day—pills he had begun to worry weren’t actually helping. He still washed his hands too much, still felt anxious at night, and still sometimes thought obsessively about having a child. He hoped the family doctor would give him some kind of conclusive answer as to why the medications weren’t working.
Shahzad spent a long time in the waiting room of the private hospital, amid people with broken legs and boils. When the doctor finally let him in, Shahzad was surprised to find the man had white-gray hair, just like Shahzad did beneath his henna. They had grown old together, though it seemed no time had passed since that first visit, when Shahzad had just gotten married.
“Oy, don’t come and see me when you are healthy,” the doctor said, as Shahzad walked in. “But, Doctor, I’m not,” Shahzad said. The doctor peered at Shahzad over his glasses and waited for him to continue.
Shahzad told the doctor what he already knew: that he was still childless, and that he could not perform, despite all the medications. But he also told him he was worried about all the pills he was on. He asked for a list of them, which the doctor wrote down carefully, from memory: one pill for blood pressure, one antidepressant, one to help him sleep, two for anxiety, plus the pill for erectile dysfunction. It was a lot, the doctor said, but they were not to blame for his problems.
“Then?” Shahzad asked.
The doctor was quiet. He looked Shahzad in the eye. “Just . . . try to relax. You have so much anxiety,” he said. “It is common in joint families.”
More people, more stress. He had seen this in many of his patients.
Shahzad was not satisfied. “But—”
“Sabeena, she is still very cool about everything, yes?”
“Yes,” said Shahzad.
“Then?”
Shahzad nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say. He looked down at the list of medications, which seemed like evidence of all his problems, and put it in his bag.
On the rickshaw ride back to the train, Shahzad thought about what the family doctor said. Sabeena was cool, Sabeena was kind, Sabeena never judged him. It wasn’t about the pills or his inability to have a child. It was about him and his anxiety and bimari, just like his father, and perhaps his grandfather before that. It was about the domino effect of pain and hurt in families, until someone made it stop. Until someone stood up straight.
In the weeks after the visit to the family doctor, Shahzad’s father came to him in his dreams. They were vague dreams, hard to pin down or remember. Shahzad was unsettled and told his mother about them. “What to do?” he asked.
“Pray for him,” she said, and also urged him to go feed the poor, the way his father used to do when no one was looking. Shahzad remembered how his father would always feed
the beggar, street boy, or madman on the road. “Feed on his behalf, and then God will be happy,” she said.
Shahzad nodded, and walked down the road to a cheap hotel. Out front, he found many hungry people. Some were sitting on their haunches begging, hands outstretched. Others had that gauntness in their cheeks or vacant look in their eyes. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed them before; he knew half the country was hungry. He gave them each fifty rupees. And for the first time, as he thought of his father, he felt good.
* * *
At the end of the month, Shahzad went to Chor Bazaar, the so-called “thieves market” downtown, to find a DVD of Mughal-e-Azam. It had been a long time since he’d seen it, and he wanted to watch it now. On his way he stopped at Byculla Market, where most of the shopkeepers were still the same. “Where have you been all this time?” they asked. Shahzad told them about Dharavi, and they clapped him on the back, saying to one another, “See what has come of the landlord’s son?”
Shahzad continued on, feeling energized as he entered the inner bylanes of Chor Bazaar. He passed the skinny bidi-wallahs, hacking up a lung, and the old men selling broken shortwave radios. He passed the fake-antique sellers hawking what passed as old British snuffboxes, chalices, lanterns, ship relics, clocks, coins, and rotary phones. He passed the shops with the windup gramophones, printed with the image of the dog listening to His Master’s Voice. After this came the clusters of sitting Buddhas, standing Krishnas, rose petal rosaries, and imitation Mughal vases. Then came the rows and rows of rusty car parts and tailors with signs in bad English. He passed several women, who never used to come to Chor Bazaar, at least not dressed in clothes like that. Finally, he came upon the movie sellers. There, at a makeshift wooden stall, beside a motorcycle with a baby goat standing with wobbly legs on top, was a copy of Mughal-e-Azam.
After Shahzad got home, he asked to borrow Farhan’s speakers so that he could watch the movie in their bedroom on his laptop. He could recall every scene, song, and line of dialogue of the film, but still he looked forward to the moment that dinner was over and his mother had gone to bed.
The movie opened, as Shahzad remembered well, with Emperor Akbar walking through the desert to the tomb of a saint to beg for a son. Still, Shahzad leaned forward, entranced as if for the first time. “I have everything in life, but I don’t have a son,” the king said. Before long, the saint granted his wish, and the queen gave birth to a naughty but good-looking baby boy.
After a little while, Sabeena, who was in the living room watching her Pakistani serial, turned off the television. She came into the bedroom just as the court dancer, Anarkali—played by Madhubala—came on screen. “Oy, Madhubala,” Shahzad said to her, looking up from his spot on the bed. “Mmmm,” Sabeena said, without taking her eyes off the screen. This was the part where Anarkali appeared as a statue and came to life after the prince almost shot her with an arrow. Moving closer, Sabeena leaned on Shahzad’s shoulder and then drew up a chair beside him.
Almost three hours later, after the emperor had gone to war with the prince over his love of Anarkali, Shahzad and Sabeena watched as father and son confronted each other. It was the film’s most quoted scene. “I am bound by my empire,” the emperor told his son. “And I am bound by my love,” the prince responded. Shahzad inhaled sharply. Sabeena leaned in close. Neither of them spoke. The emperor would let Anarkali live, but she and the prince could never be together.
As the credits rolled, Sabeena lay down in bed, where she didn’t often sleep. Through the window, she could see the railway tracks, the Haj House, and the nearby trees where the two parrots sang to each other, as if they were in love. After a minute, Shahzad switched off the light and sat down close beside her in the dark.
The Family Line
Ashok and Parvati, 2014 to 2015
“I am a million, million births
Flushed with triumphant blood, each a growing
Thing . . .
I am a million, million silences
Strung like crystal beads
Onto someone else’s
Song.”
—Kamala Das, “Someone Else’s Song”
Diary, June 2014:
I have joined back to complete PhD. I feel daily log is not required. But now I can write my positive thoughts. I don’t want them to go to waste.
By June, when Parvati rejoined IIT Bombay, the city had become hot and sticky, and everyone said rain was on the way. The puppies in the lane had grown so big the building’s security guards now shooed them away with lathis. Their suburb was also growing, and getting richer, or so it seemed as the parade of residents in fancy saris and Western-style suits filed in and out of the Starbucks and tony Hiranandani apartments. Traffic into downtown Mumbai should have waned a little as overpasses, tunnels, and bridges were built and roads repaired. But people kept moving to the city, some five hundred a day at least, and so the traffic and road accidents only multiplied. There were twenty million people in the city now.
Everything seemed to be growing. The economy was expanding. Life expectancies were extending. And it was a young population and getting younger; most of the city’s inhabitants were now under thirty-five. In their suburb, there were more cars, more birds, more crocodiles along the lake, and more lovers walking hand in hand. The suburb seemed a new place to Parvati, and she told herself this year at school would be different.
Since rejoining IIT Bombay, Parvati had become a model student. She got up on time, cooked dal and rice and subzi for lunch, did laundry, and boiled the day’s water. When she walked out the door for school in her neatly ironed kurta, she said good-bye to Ashok with a smile. If her father called, she’d tell him in Malayalam: “It’s going fine, Appa.” She spent long hours at the lab. She hardly Gchatted Ashok now, because she was too busy. She even made friends on campus with a group of Malayali boys who reminded her of home. After school, she walked in the gardens, ate a light dinner, took the laundry off the line, and went to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. In the morning, she got up and did it all again.
Sometimes Parvati felt content following her new schedule and sometimes she felt ill at ease. Often, she thought of a Malayalam proverb she had always hated: What elders tell us and how gooseberries taste is similar. It’s all bitter in the beginning, but later, it tastes good.
She had wanted the chance to prove that her father had been wrong. But now it seemed he’d been right.
It was after Parvati went back to school that the pressure to produce a child also began. They had been married for over a year now and Parvati was approaching thirty, which meant that it was past time. When Parvati’s father visited them in Mumbai, he brought them a white figurine of Lord Krishna as a child and said, “I want a baby like this very soon.” They put the figurine on the pooja shelf with the other gods and goddesses but did not unwrap it from its plastic, as if to prevent its potency from escaping.
Mostly, the pressure came from Ashok’s dad. At first, his comments were innocuous, a friendly add-on to his phone conversations. “So, Ashok, where is my grandchild?” he’d say. Over time, the comments became more aggressive. “It’s time for the STORK,” he told Parvati, so loud he was almost shouting. The old belief was that a baby was needed to keep a new couple together. The new belief was that without live-in in-laws a baby was needed more than ever.
The most embarrassing moment came when Ashok’s father told her, “We’ll be really happy if one day you call and say you missed your period.” A father talking about a period. Parvati couldn’t imagine her father ever talking that way.
“I worry when you get old you’ll be eccentric like your dad,” she told Ashok.
“Then will you hate me?” he asked, raising his eyebrows a little.
“I won’t hate you,” she said, with a wry smile. “I have no choice.”
Parvati had always had a sharp tongue, and, with the increased confidence she gained from going back to school, her jabs became sharper and funnier. Often, they were directed at A
shok. If he bragged about his driving, which had improved somewhat since he started taking driving classes, she’d say, “Oh, wow, Ashok, you are suuuuper macho.” If he began to tell a story for which he didn’t have the facts, she’d catch him in his lie and say, squinting her left eye and raising her right eyebrow skeptically, “Ashok, you are talking just to talk.” Or she’d make fun of his poor Hindi—though in truth many Tam Brahms never learned it—and how he tried to cover it up by repeating himself.
Mostly he found her digs funny. But sometimes they seemed to have an edge to them, especially when she noticed he was acting like his father. “I really hope my child is not like you,” she said one day, her voice sharp, “because I can’t take more than one of you.” Ashok laughed at this nervously.
Not long after Parvati went back to school, Ashok was getting ready for work when there was a loud ghaddaghaddahat sound, like gunfire, outside their apartment. Ashok—still in the wrinkled button-up shirt and drawstring pants he wore to sleep, his hair unbrushed and ungelled—rushed into the bedroom and threw open the window. A car had burst into flames outside. Children from a nearby school—there were three in the vicinity—screamed and ran, their backpacks bouncing on their small backs. As smoke began to rise from the car, teachers shouted and hustled them away. Parvati had just left in a rickshaw for school. Ashok punched in numbers on his phone.