“Please use her correct name, my mother is not a cinema house,” said Jehangir, imitating his grandfather’s tone, for he knew it would amuse Daddy.
“Listen to him – making fun of Grandpa. Next time we meet the chief, you’re in trouble, you rascal.” Then he put his hands around Roxana’s face. “I can see the whole world in these eyes. Better than any cinema.”
The ground-floor violin continued its practice, dispatching major scales like sunbeams. Jehangir and Murad laughed, it made them happy when their parents were this way, because the darker days filled with shouting and fighting occurred more often than they cared to remember.
“Can you see Jurassic Park in Mummy’s eyes?” asked Murad.
“No Jurassic Park and no dinosaurs,” said his father. “But I can see Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing.”
They laughed again, and Roxana said that was enough gayla-gaanda for one morning, these three lazys would be late if they didn’t look sharp. “Come on, push your bed in,” she told Murad. “Breakfast is coming.”
Grumbling that he was the only one among his friends who still hadn’t seen Jurassic Park, he slid his low cot under the settee that was Jehangir’s bed. It disappeared from sight with a protesting groan. The dining table, flush against the wall, was pulled into the newly created space. Now there was just enough room around it for four chairs.
Jehangir wondered whether he would ever feel about bathing as Murad did. Daddy was the only one with the privilege of bathing every day because he had to go to work and meet customers. He followed a careful ritual with soap and talcum powder and pomade. He had a Turkish towel, soft and fluffy. The rest of them had coarse plain ones.
He had once asked Mummy why that was. She said Daddy worked so hard at the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, and had such a difficult job, anything special she could do to pamper him, she would. It was very important that he left the house each morning feeling tiptop, she said. She often asked Daddy, Are you happy, Yezdaa, is everything okay? This question Mummy asked Murad and him too, she wanted happiness for all of them, needed to check it constantly. And he always answered yes, even when he was feeling very sad.
A nagging doubt brought him back to the jigsaw puzzle for another look. “Murad can have my turn,” he tried again. “I don’t need it today.”
“Don’t need?” His mother lifted his arm and sniffed under it. “You stink like a goat.”
“Ah, the armpit test,” said his father. “From Mummy’s face, looks like you failed.”
“Be that as it may, you should also sniff Murad,” said Jehangir. “See who smells worse.”
“Time you learned a new phrase,” said his father. “We should visit Grandpa again.”
“It’s your turn today, and that’s final,” said his mother. “If Murad wants a daily bath he must get out of bed before the tap goes dry. At six, like me.”
When no one was looking Jehangir checked his own armpit, and smelt the usual interesting odour. The water was boiling now; his mother took a rag in each hand and lifted the pot off the stove.
“Out of my way,” she called repeatedly, like a ship’s horn in a fog, “move aside, move aside,” staggering to the bathroom in a cloud of steam, where she emptied the vessel in the bucket half filled with cold water. Her great fear was colliding and scalding someone in the morning bustle. She wouldn’t let Yezad carry the hot water either, God forbid, if he burnt himself and was laid up, they would …
But she refused to allow herself to complete that thought. “Scrub yourself properly, don’t forget to use the soap, and – now where are you off to?”
“Toilet.”
“Again? Hurry, the water will get cold. And Yezdaa, the clock in the kitchen has stopped.”
“Can I wind it, Daddy?” asked Murad.
“I’ve told you a hundred times how special that clock is, and how delicate. You’ll wind it when you’re older.”
Murad muttered that everything had to wait till he was older, and at this rate there would be so much piled up for him to do, there would be no time for it all.
Dissatisfied with the knot, Jehangir pulled the Nehru House tie off his neck, smoothed the creases, and made another attempt. He tried a new type that he had learned at school, a bulbous variation on the samosa, called the pakora knot.
“Stop playing with the tie and eat your food,” said Roxana. “Bath, breakfast, uniform – constantly I’ve to be after this boy.”
Halfway through the buttered toast, his stomach felt wobbly again. He tried to slip away unnoticed, to avoid the cross-examination he knew would follow.
But his mother was keeping count. “Third one? What’s wrong? And your brother has sneezed seven times since he woke up.”
He shrugged and continued to the wc while his father teased her about her score-card. Passing by the shelves with the kitchen supplies, Jehangir ran his fingers over the glazed surfaces of the three earthen jars. The large, dark brown one, shaped like an amphora, held the ration-shop rice; the ochre cylindrical jar was filled with ration-shop wheat; and the smallest one, reddish brown, squat, and stout, contained the expensive basmati rice, reserved for special days like Pateti and Navroze and birthdays.
He loved the feel of these bunnees, his fingers forever trying to steal the cool from their glaze. No matter what month of the year, calm and unruffled they sat like three gods in that ill-lit passage. During mango season the fruit was hidden in rice, where it ripened to gold, much better than in straw. And the grain felt silky, trickling over his burrowing fingers when he tried to find the fruit again to see if it was ready for eating.
The chain needed several tugs before the tank yielded its cleansing cascade. Alerted by the flush, Roxana waited for him to pass the kitchen.
“Maybe you should stay home today,” she said, frowning.
He did not touch the jars, or anything else, on the way back. It was his mother’s strict rule: after the toilet, hands had to be washed immediately, with soap, twice, before they could participate again in the world outside the wc.
The distant violin was now weaving mist and melancholy in minor scales. Jehangir’s third trip had condensed a cloud of worry upon Roxana’s face. Still frowning, she returned to the pan to scramble two eggs for her husband’s breakfast. She wanted him to give up eggs, or at least cut down, have them on alternate days.
“Please listen to me, Yezad, it’s not good for you,” she started for the umpteenth time. “There is so much in magazines and on TV about cholesterol and heart trouble.”
“All fads and fashions, Roxie. My father and my grandfather lived to eighty-two and ninety-one. Ate eggs every morning till the day they died.”
Then, mimicking a raucous waiter in a crowded Irani restaurant, he recited, “Fried, scrambled, akoori, omelette!” He made these words loud and guttural, deliberately mispronouncing omelette as armlet, which made Murad laugh and choke on his tea.
Jehangir smiled gratefully at his father. The week before, when his mother had pleaded the same thing, the response had been very different: “Good, the sooner I die of heart trouble, the better. You’ll be free to marry a rich man.” Then, Jehangir’s eyes had filled with tears, Mummy-Daddy were fighting about money, as usual, because it was not enough to pay for everything, and he had gone to stand on the balcony by himself.
He sniffed his twice-washed fingers to make sure they carried the soap fragrance: sometimes his mother demanded proof. But her inquiry now was about the stomach, not hands; she wanted to know if it was runny all three times, and was there any mucus.
He hated these bowel questions, they embarrassed him, made him feel like an infant in diapers. Ignoring them was impossible, Mummy would keep pestering. Best to get them over with quick answers.
“Second and third time runny, no mucus,” he said in a monotone, and rejoined the breakfast table.
Murad decided there wasn’t enough butter on his toast. He went to the refrigerator for the dish hidden behind the bread and milk. With the door open, the
mechanical clanks and knocks from its innards sounded louder.
“What are you looking for?” asked Roxana.
“Butter.”
“You have enough. That packet has to last till Sunday. And get away from the fridge before you catch a chill.”
“Don’t worry so much, Roxie,” said Yezad. “The way you treat your sons, you’ll have to change their names to Namby and Pamby.”
She said making fun of her was easy, but without her alertness God knew what calamities would befall Jehangir with his weak stomach, and Murad with his tonsils that swelled like balloons at the slightest cold. And besides, she was the one who had to stay up all night holding their heads while they vomited, putting damp kerchiefs of eau de cologne on their fevered brows: “You never have to worry, I always make sure you sleep. And I am stuck with the problem of paying for doctor. Why don’t you do the budgeting, you’ll find out how little money there is, how difficult to buy both food and medicine.”
Jehangir listened, feeling depressed. The morning, which had started so nicely, was turning into a fight. Then, to his relief, his father took his mother’s arm and squeezed it.
“You’re right, Roxana, prevention is better than cure. But our Jehangla has too many absent days this term. His ground-floor disturbances will create top-floor deficiencies.”
Jehangir wondered if he’d get to miss school today. He preferred his father’s pet name for him to his mother’s because hers was Jehangoo, too much like goo-goo gaa-gaa baby talk.
His father turned to him. “Well, rascal, what have you eaten this time?”
“Nothing, I’m fine.” He knew Daddy was referring to the occasion when forbidden green mangoes had been consumed with friends at school.
“Why do you want to stay home? They have toilets in school.”
Jehangir stopped chewing; the masticated bits gathered at the front of his mouth in a rush of saliva, and his buttered toast threatened to redeposit itself in his plate. The lavatory at school was disgusting, it stank like railway-station toilets. The boys called it the bog. The first time he heard it, he was puzzled by the word. He had looked it up in Daddy’s dictionary, and found more than one meaning. Slang for lavatory, it said; also, wet spongy ground. He imagined wet spongy ground, imagined putting his foot in it, and agreed “bog” was the perfect word.
He didn’t have to answer his father’s question; his mother did: “It’s risky for Jehangoo to eat canteen food today. He must stay home, I’ll make soup-chaaval for him.”
The soup of boiled mutton ladled over white rice was Jehangir’s favourite. He looked forward to a cosy day: reading in the comfort of Mummy and Daddy’s big bed, making his Lake Como jigsaw puzzle, lunch, a little afternoon sleep, more reading.
“So what will you do at home?” asked his father.
“He’ll rest, and do some lessons,” his mother answered.
“And read the Famous Five,” added Jehangir.
Yezad shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know why they still keep that rubbish in the school library.”
“But Enid Blyton is fun for children,” said Roxana. “It doesn’t do any harm.”
Yezad said it did immense harm, it encouraged children to grow up without attachment to the place where they belonged, made them hate themselves for being who they were, created confusion about their identity. He said he had read the same books when he was small, and they had made him yearn to become a little Englishman of a type that even England did not have.
Unheralded by a siren, the ambulance waded through the traffic swamping the lane and sputtered to a halt at the entrance of Pleasant Villa. Meanwhile, Roxana finished attending to her pressure cooker. French beans for dinner in the first compartment, mutton soup for Jehangir’s lunch in the second, plain white rice in the third. The weighted valve was perched upon the vent. She watched it jiggle to the song of steam, then went to hang out the washing on the balcony.
In the years immediately after it was built, four-storeyed Pleasant Villa was indeed a pleasant place to live. But rent control and the landlord’s determined neglect had reduced it to the state of most buildings in Bombay, with crumbling plaster, perforated water tanks, and broken drain pipes. Its exterior, once peach in colour, now resembled the outcome of an emetic. Electrical wiring had badly deteriorated, made a meal of by sewer rats. And the wrought-iron balcony railings, the building’s finest feature, were also being eaten, by corrosion.
On the balcony, Roxana thought again of Yezad. She had waved to him from up here when he left for work – their goodbyes always consisted of a kiss at the door plus a wave from the balcony – and her little outburst was quite forgotten. But it still worried her, his refusal to get his cholesterol checked, or to cut down on eggs.
Like a bad omen, the white animal bulk of the ambulance caught her eye. Wet garments heavy in her hands, she glanced over the railing. The sun was back after three days of cloud and rain. Her ears remained alert to hissing from the kitchen: the cooker was building up a good head of steam. She began pegging the washing to the line.
One by one she shook out the wet clothes, enjoying the fine cold spray that flew when she snapped them, and imagined with pleasure the fragrant sunshine her arms would hold in the evening while taking in the dry things. She remembered when Jehangir was four or five, he had hugged her as she was bringing in the washing, buried his face in it and said, “You smell like the sun, Mummy.”
He didn’t do that any more, hug so spontaneously, nor did Murad. Nowadays it was more stiff, mandated by the occasion. Part of growing up, she thought sadly. Then the cooker released a burst of steam, a shriek that made her hasten to the kitchen.
This mid-morning blast punctuated the continuing practice session of Roxana’s ground-floor neighbour. The scales had ended some time ago, and Daisy Ichhaporia’s fingers were now limbering up with double-stopping exercises that ascended Pleasant Villa muscularly from balcony to balcony, crossing paths with the steam whistle.
“Fair exchange,” said Daisy Ichhaporia once, when Roxana had apologized for the daily nuisance. “My noise for yours.” She played first violin in the Bombay Symphony Orchestra.
“Oh but I love to hear you practice. It’s just like going to a concert.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” Daisy had smiled graciously at the compliment and, in return, had shared with Roxana her knowledge about the perils of pressure cooking, perils with which she claimed firsthand acquaintance. She had spoken of explosions and fires, of lunches and dinners that went rocketing in defiance of gravity. She had a stockpile of stories about gastronomy gone awry, which she narrated with gusto: of someone’s papayta-noo-gose that had detonated, sending the potatoes flying like little cannonballs to mash against the ceiling, the chunks of meat shredded like shrapnel, and of so-and-so’s prawn curry that had turned into modern art upon the kitchen walls, worth putting a frame around, art that could satisfy at least four out of five senses. And the super-hot temperatures of pressure cooking made it impossible to clean up the mess, for the food welded to the plaster. Only a hammer and chisel could pry it off, said Daisy.
Roxana had had the privilege of viewing some ceiling stains in Daisy’s kitchen, which, the latter swore, were the remains of pork vindaloo. “The day it happened,” said the violinist, “I sold my pressure cooker for scrap metal.”
Roxana might have followed suit had the warnings come from someone other than a violinist who reputedly practised at home with her clothes off. During BSO performances she was clothed, of course – in a long black skirt, a black, long-sleeved blouse, and a string of pearls that just barely reached her bosom.
It was well known that Daisy Ichhaporia, in her heart of hearts, wanted to be a world-famous virtuoso. In Pleasant Villa they joked that she indulged in nude practice sessions to seduce the devil, make him appear and grant her satanic control over the instrument so she could play like a female Paganini. Daisy-ninny, they called her, behind her back.
Roxana herself had never
seen Daisy in anything less than a robust brassière and serviceable knickers, of a cut so generous they might as well have been blouse and skirt. The violinist had explained the occasional disrobing, that it got too hot while practising fully clothed because of the passion she poured into the music, passion which made her perspire so profusely that the salt-laden effusions dripping from brow and chin and neck threatened the health of her valuable instrument.
Sometimes, lost in rehearsing, Daisy forgot to draw her curtains as dusk fell and lights came on. Then a small crowd would gather outside the window to watch the bajavala woman. Eventually, someone from Pleasant Villa would bang on her door to draw her attention, the curtain would shut, the fans disperse.
The violinist’s absentmindedness was uppermost in Roxana’s mind when exploding pressure cookers had been discussed. She rather enjoyed the sense of danger with which Daisy’s descriptions had endowed the mundane appliance; she liked being the mistress who put the demon of steam into harness. It would be silly to take Daisy too seriously.
But it would be injudicious to ignore her entirely. Thus her curiosity about the ambulance took second place to the cooker’s warning whistle.
A recrudescence of doubt made Jal hesitate at the building entrance. What would happen afterwards, after Pappa came home again, how would it be between them? And between Roxana and them? How much bitterness was all this going to create?
He tried to look on the bright side – at least he could resume his mornings at the share bazaar.
“Go on, hurry,” said Coomy. “Talk to Roxie.”
He looked up at the Chenoy balcony and saw clothes drying on the line. “I have a feeling we are about to do a horrible thing.”
“That’s because we are such sensitive people. We need more sense and less sensitivity. Isn’t our plan the best choice for Pappa?”
“I hope so. But you come with me, I don’t want to go upstairs alone.”
“Stop worrying, Yezad is at work, and she’ll agree immediately.” Her words denoted confidence, though her tone shared his misgivings. “If I come up, will Pappa be all right, alone with the ambulancemen?”