“I don’t want any,” he muttered. Dina returned wordlessly to the kitchen for her own cup.
“Delicious,” said Ishvar when she was back. He slurped noisily, making sounds to tempt his nephew. “Much better than Vishram Vegetarian Hotel.”
“They must be letting it boil-all day,” said Dina. “That spoils it. Nothing like fresh tea when you are tired.”
“Very true.” He took another sip and sighed invitingly again. Omprakash reached for his cup. The other two pretended not to notice. He gulped down the tea thirstily without displacing his angry pout.
Two hours of sewing were left in the day, and he filled them with crooked seams and grumbling. Ishvar was grateful to the clock when it indicated six. Keeping the peace between his nephew and Dinabai was becoming difficult.
Morning was striding towards noon as Ibrahim, the rent-collector, plodding slowly down the pavement, prepared to visit Dina Dalai and demand a reply to the letter he had delivered yesterday. Dignified in his maroon fez and black sherwani, he smiled at tenants he met along the way, saying “Salaam” and “How are you?” He was blessed with an automatic smile; it formed whenever he opened his mouth to speak. This felicitous buccal trick was a liability, though, if the occasion of his message warranted something more in the line of a solemn visage – a touch of frowning, perhaps, for overdue rents.
Ibrahim was an elderly man but looked old beyond his years. In his left hand, still sore from pounding the door yesterday, he carried a plastic folder secured by two large rubber bands. It contained rent receipts, bills, orders for repairs, records of disputes and court cases pertaining to the six buildings he looked after. Some of those disputes dated back to when he was a young man of nineteen, just starting in service with the father of the present landlord. Other cases were more ancient, inherited from Ibrahim’s predecessor.
So thoroughly was everything documented, Ibrahim sometimes felt he was lugging the very buildings around with him. The folder handed down almost half a century ago by the retiring rent-collector had not been of plastic, but rudely fashioned out of two wooden boards bound by a strip of morocco. It had carried with it the previous owner’s smell. A fraying cotton tape, sewn to the leather, went around to secure the contents. The dark, cracked boards had warped badly; when opened, they creaked and released a sweaty tobacco odour.
Young and ambitious as Ibrahim then was, he was ashamed of being seen with this relic. Though it contained nothing but respectable rent receipts, he knew that people would judge it by its cover, which resembled the filthy binders carried by disreputable marketplace jyotshis and fortune-tellers to shelter their quack charts and fake diagrams. That he might be mistaken for one of those odious mountebanks mortified him. He began to harbour grave doubts about this job which forced him to carry around a questionable folder – he felt shortchanged, as though a bazaar vendor had fiddled the weights and tipped the scales unfairly.
Then, on one lucky day, the morocco spine broke. He displayed the wreck at the landlord’s office. The clerk examined it, confirmed its demise from natural causes, and filled out the appropriate requisition form. Ibrahim was given a length of string to make do while the paperwork was processed.
After a fortnight’s delay, the new folder arrived. It was built of buckramed cardboard, very smart and modern-looking, in colour a dignified umber. Ibrahim was delighted. He began to feel optimistic about his prospects in this job.
With the new folder under his arm, he could hold his head high and strut as importantly as a solicitor while making his rounds. It was far more sophisticated than the old one, with generous pouches and compartments. Briefs, complaints, correspondences could now be organized methodically. Which was just as well, because around this time Ibrahim’s duties increased, both at work and domestically.
Ibrahim, the son of ageing parents, became a husband, then a father. And the role of rent-collector began to sprout branches too. He was appointed the landlord’s spy, blackmailer, deliverer of threats, and all-round harasser of tenants. His job now included the uncovering of hidden dirt in his six buildings, secrets like extramarital affairs, and he was taught by his employer how to convert adultery into rent increases – the guilty parties would never protest or dare to mention the Rent Act. When the situation demanded, Ibrahim could also play the pleader and cajoler, if the landlord went too far and there was legalistic retaliation. The rent-collector’s tears would convince the tenant to back down, to have mercy on the poor beleaguered landlord, a martyr to modern-day housing, who had never meant any harm in the first place.
To sort out the multiple roles in Ibrahim’s repertoire, the folder’s pouches and compartments were indispensable. At this stage in his career, however, he began to feel the increasing hindrance of his sweet automatic smile. Delivering threats and dire warnings while smiling pleasantly, he discovered, was not a good strategy. If he could have modified it to a menacing smile, that would have been perfect. But the muscles in question were beyond his control. The occasions when he had to express regrets over repairs delayed, or convey condolences for a death in a tenant’s family, were equally difficult. Before long, the burdensome dental display earned him an undeserved reputation for being callous, crude, incompetent, retarded, even demonic.
So he smiled his hapless way through three buckram folders, all umber like the first, and added twenty-four years to his own frame. Twenty-four years of drudgery and deprivation during which his youth disappeared, and the bright ambition of his golden season became tainted by bitterness. Desperate, and scarred by the certain knowledge that he no longer had any prospects, he watched his wife, two sons, and two daughters still believing in him and thereby increasing his anguish. He asked himself what it was he had done to deserve a life so stale, so empty of hope. Or was this the way all humans were meant to feel? Did the Master of the Universe take no interest in levelling the scales – was there no such thing as. a fair measure?
There no longer seemed any point in going to the masjid as often as he did. His attendance at Friday prayers became irregular. And he began seeking guidance in ways he had once despised as the preserve of the ignorant.
He found the jyotshis and fortune-tellers in the marketplace most comforting. They offered solutions to his money problems, and advice on improving his future, which was becoming his past at an alarming velocity. He discovered their confident pronouncements to be a soothing drug.
Nor did he restrict himself to palmists and astrologers. Seeking stronger drugs, he turned to less orthodox messengers: card-picking doves, chart-reading parrots, communicating cows, diagram-divining snakes. Always worried that an acquaintance would spot him during one of his questionable excursions, he decided, with great reluctance, to leave behind his distinctive fez. It was like abandoning a dear friend. The only other time he had forsaken this fixture of daily wear was during Partition, back in 1947, when communal slaughter at the brand-new border had ignited riots everywhere, and sporting a fez in a Hindu neighbourhood was as fatal as possessing a foreskin in a Muslim one. In certain areas it was wisest to go bareheaded, for choosing incorrectly from among fez, white cap, and turban could mean losing one’s head.
Fortunately, his sittings at the avian auguries were relatively private. He could crouch unnoticed on a pavement corner with the creature’s keeper, ask the question, and the dove or parrot would hop out of its cage to enlighten him.
The cow session, on the other hand, was a major performance that collected large crowds. The cow, caparisoned in colourful brocaded fabrics, a string of tiny silver bells round her neck, was led into the ring of spectators by a man with a drum. Though the fellow’s shirt and turban were bright-hued, he seemed quite drab compared to the richly bedizened cow. The two walked the circle: once, twice, thrice – however long it took him to recite the cow’s curriculum vitae, with special emphasis on prophecies and forecasts accurately completed to date. His voice was deafeningly raucous, his eyes bloodshot, his gestures manic, and all this frenzy was calculated as a mast
erly counterpoint to the cow’s calm demeanour. After the brief biography was narrated, the drum that had silently hung from his shoulder came to life. It was a drum meant not for beating but for rubbing. He continued to walk the cow in a circle, rubbing the drumskin with a stick, producing a horrible bleating, a groaning, a wailing. It was a sound to wake the dead and stun the living, it was eldritch, it was a summons to spirits and forces not of this world, a summons to descend, witness, and assist bovine divination.
When the drum ceased, the man shouted the paying customer’s question into the cow’s ear, loud enough for the entire ring of humans to hear. And she answered with a nod or shake of her intricately made-up head, tinkling the tiny silver bells round her neck. The crowd applauded in wonder and admiration. Then the drum-rubbing resumed while donations were collected.
One day, after Ibrahim’s question was bellowed into the soft, brown, unprotected ear, there was no response. The man repeated it, louder. This time the cow reacted. Whether it was the annoying drum that she had put up with for years, or the boorish bellowing in her ear day after day, she gored her keeper with her vermilioned horns.
For a moment, the spectators thought the cow was just responding a bit more energetically than usual to the question. Then she tossed him to the ground, trampling him thoroughly. Now they realized it was not part of the prophecy procedure, especially when the man’s blood started to flow.
With cries of mad cow! mad cow! the crowd scattered. But once her tormentor had been dealt with, she stood placidly, blinking her gentle, long-lashed eyes, swishing away the udder-seeking flies with her tail.
The man’s bizarre death convinced Ibrahim that this was no longer a reliable method of obtaining divine advice. Some days later a new team of cow and drum-rubber took over the corner, but Ibrahim avoided the performances. There were other, safer systems for procuring preternatural help.
While the mad-cow incident was still fresh in his mind, however, he witnessed another death. This time it was the handler of a sortilegious serpent whose venom ducts had become overdue for milking. Ever after, Ibrahim shivered when picturing the scene: it could have been into him that the cobra sank its fangs, for he had been crouching close to observe its oracular movements.
Shocked by the two fatalities, the rent-collector abandoned all fortune-telling fauna. As though waking from a nightmare, he re-donned his forsaken fez and set out to recover his lost self. How much money had been diverted from his family’s needs with his blasphemous addiction, he realized, as he sat beside the sea while the setting sun’s ocean light bathed the masjid, floating at the end of the long causeway. He gazed out upon the receding tide that lay bare the secrets beneath the waves, and he shuddered. His own dark secrets swam up again from their murky depths of confusion and despair. He tried to push them back, to hold them under, to drown them. But they kept slipping away like eels, resurfacing to haunt him. There was only one way to vanquish them – he returned penitent to the masjid, ready to accept whatever fate had in store for him.
Among other things, it was the plastic folder. Twenty-four years of buckram had passed, and now it was the age of plastic in the landlord’s office. Ibrahim no longer cared. He had learned that dignity could not be acquired from accoutrements and accessories; it came unasked, it grew from one’s ability to endure. If the office had handed him a coolie’s basket to carry the documents around on his head, he would have complied now without complaint.
But the plastic folder did have an advantage – it kept the monsoon at bay. Now he seldom had to recopy documents on which the ink had decided to frolic with the rain in lunatic swirls. At a time when his hands had started to shake, this was a blessing. Also, one pass with a wet rag, and all sneezes and snuff stains, pea green or brown, were wiped clean, no longer embarrassing him during audiences with the landlord.
And at home, too, there were changes he accepted with submission. After all, what other options were there? His older daughter died of tuberculosis, followed by his wife. Then his sons disappeared into the underworld, returning periodically to abuse him. The remaining daughter, just when he was beginning to think she would redeem everything, left to become a prostitute. His life, he thought, had become the plot of a bad Hindi movie minus the happy ending.
Why, he wondered, did he keep working now, making his rounds of the six buildings and collecting rent? Why did he not jump off the top of one of them? Why did he not make a bonfire of the receipts and the cash, and throw himself onto it drenched in kerosene? How was it that his heart kept beating instead of bursting, his sanity intact instead of shattering like a dropped mirror? Was it all made of tough synthetic material, like the indestructible plastic folder? And why was time, the great vandal, now being neglectful?
But plastic, too, had its allotted span of days and years. It could rip and tear and crack like buckram, he discovered. Like skin and bone, he realized with relief. It was simply a matter of patience. Thus the present folder was the third of its kind in twenty-one years.
He examined it from time to time, and saw reflected in its tired covers the furrows inflicted in his brow. The plastic divisions inside were starting to tear, and the neat compartments seemed ready to rebel; within his bodily compartments the rebellion had already begun. Which one would win this ridiculous race between plastic and flesh, he wondered, as he arrived at the flat, wiped the snuff off his nostrils and fingers, and rang the doorbell.
Spotting his maroon fez through the peephole, Dina silenced the tailors. “Not a sound while he is here,” she whispered.
“How are you?” smiled the rent-collector, baring heavily stained teeth and two gaps: the sweet, innocent smile of an aged angel.
Without acknowledging his greeting, she said, “Yes? The rent is not yet due.”
He shifted the folder to the other hand. “No, sister, it isn’t. I have come for your reply to the landlord’s letter.”
“I see. Wait one minute.” She shut the door and went to look for the unopened envelope. “Where did I put it?” she whispered to the tailors.
The three searched through the jumble of things on the table. She found herself watching Omprakash, the way his fingers clutched and his hands moved. His bony angularity no longer disturbed her. She was discovering a rare birdlike beauty in him.
Ishvar came upon the envelope under a stack of cloth. She tore it open and read – quickly, the first time, then slowly, to penetrate the legal jargon. The gist of it soon became clear: the running of a business was prohibited on residential premises, she must cease her commercial activities immediately or face eviction.
Cheeks flushing, she raced to the door. “What kind of nonsense is this? Tell your landlord his harassment won’t work!”
Ibrahim sighed, lifted his shoulders and raised his voice. “You have been warned, Mrs. Dalai! Breaking the rules will not be tolerated! Next time there will be no nice letter but a notice to vacate! Don’t think that-”
She slammed the door. He stopped shouting immediately, relieved to be spared the full speech. Panting, he wiped his brow and left.
Dina read the letter again, dismayed. Barely three weeks with the tailors and trouble already with the landlord. She wondered if she should show it to Nusswan, ask his advice. No, she decided, he would make too much of it. Better to ignore it and continue discreetly.
She had no choice now but to take the tailors further into her confidence, impress on them how essential it was to keep the sewing a secret. She discussed the matter with Ishvar.
They agreed on the fiction to be used if the rent-collector ever confronted the two coming to or going from the flat. They would tell him that they came to do her cooking and cleaning.
Omprakash was insulted. “I am a tailor, not her maaderchod servant who sweeps and mops,” he said after they left work that evening.
“Don’t be childish, Om. It’s just a story to prevent trouble with the landlord.”
“Trouble for whom? For her. Why should I worry? We don’t even get a fair rate fr
om her. If we are dead tomorrow, she will get two new tailors.”
“Will you forever speak without thinking? If she is kicked out of her flat, we have no place to work. What’s the matter with you? This is our first decent job since we came to the city.”
“And I should rejoice for that? Is this job going to make everything all right for us?”
“But it’s only been three weeks. Patience, Om. There is lots of opportunity in the city, you can make your dreams come true.”
“I am sick of the city. Nothing but misery ever since we came. I wish I had died in our village. I wish I had also burned to death like the rest of my family.”
Ishvar’s face clouded, his disfigured cheek quivering with his nephew’s pain. He put his arm around his shoulder. “It will get better, Om,” he pleaded. “Believe me, it will get better. And we’ll soon go back to our village.”
III
In a Village by a River
IN THEIR VILLAGE, THE TAILORS used to be cobblers; that is, their family belonged to the Chamaar caste of tanners and leather-workers. But long ago, long before Omprakash was born, when his father, Narayan, and his uncle, Ishvar, were still young boys of ten and twelve, the two were sent by their father to be apprenticed as tailors.
Their father’s friends feared for the family. “Dukhi Mochi has gone mad,” they lamented. “With wide-open eyes he is bringing destruction upon his household.” And consternation was general throughout the village: someone had dared to break the timeless chain of caste, retribution was bound to be swift.
Dukhi Mochi’s decision to turn his sons into tailors was indeed courageous, considering that the prime of his own life had been spent in obedient compliance with the traditions of the caste system. Like his forefathers before him, he had accepted from childhood the occupation preordained for his present incarnation.
Dukhi Mochi was five years old when he had begun to learn the Chamaar vocation at his father’s side. With a very small Muslim population in the area, there was no slaughterhouse nearby where the Chamaars could obtain hides. They had to wait until a cow or buffalo died a natural death in the village. Then the Chamaars would be summoned to remove the carcass. Sometimes the carcass was given free, sometimes they had to pay, depending on whether or not the animal’s upper-caste owner had been able to extract enough free labour from the Chamaars during the year.