“Came to see Santa Kapur in action again.”
“Good. Great. I have a Christmas present for you. Had it ready yesterday, but in all the excitement I forgot.”
They went to his office, and Mr. Kapur unlocked his desk to get the gift. Its wrapping paper had bells and holly.
Yezad smiled, examining both sides of the flat package that felt like a cardboard rectangle. “So what is it?”
“Open it, go on.”
Yezad removed the paper and found a folder in which there were three cellophane sleeves. They held the three photographs of Hughes Road.
He looked at Mr. Kapur. “But … these are —”
“I hope you still like them.”
“Yes, but I … they’re so valuable, your collection …”
“But I want you to have them.”
Yezad swallowed, running his finger along the edges. “Thank you, Vikram. It’s too much, it’s …”
“You’re welcome, Yezad,” said Mr. Kapur, putting an arm around him, relieving him of the need for words. “I’m so happy I could give you something meaningful. And now I must wear my costume.”
While he got ready, Husain brought in two steaming cups, set them on the desk, and went to the front to prepare for visitors.
“Sahab, there are two people who want to talk to you.”
Mr. Kapur clicked his tongue. “I’m not dressed yet. Didn’t you show them the sign, Santa Claus begins at ten o’clock?”
“Sahab, they are two men, not children. I don’t think they came for sweets.”
“Then you should have said the shop is closed today.”
“You want me to talk to them?” asked Yezad.
“But they mentioned Kapur sahab’s name only,” said Husain, hesitating.
“Okay, I’ll see what they want.” In his socks and partial Santa outfit he went into the shop, followed by Yezad.
The visitors grinned, delighted by his attire. “Good morning, sir.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Sorry for disturbing, sir, but we saw your signboard.”
“Look,” said Mr. Kapur, “in the first place, we open at ten. And in the second place, Santa Claus is giving free sweets to children only. I don’t think you are children, are you?”
The young men smiled at the misunderstanding. “Not that sign, sir. Your shop sign. The one which is saying Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium.”
“Sporting Gods, actually.”
“Yes, sir,” they smiled. “We saw O is out of order.”
Mr. Kapur wondered if they were tradesmen soliciting work. “You want to fix my sign? How much will you charge?”
They smiled again. “No, no, sir, we are not electrical. We are coming from our local Shiv Sena shakha to kindly inform that sign should be saying Mumbai Sporting Goods Emporium, it’s a new rule for —”
“Oh, that. Yes, I know all about that.” Mr. Kapur’s face had gone dark, and he glanced at Yezad as though to say, Here they are finally.
Blood drained from Yezad’s face. What kind of crazy coincidence was this? He ran his cold hand over his mouth, trying to stay calm. At least the money was back in the drawer. Dizziness overcame him as he imagined Mr. Kapur asking for it, and him unable to produce it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kapur’s annoyance was making him hot in the red jacket. He unbuckled the wide black belt and flung it on a chair. The young men smiled, waiting patiently.
“I’ve been through that discussion already. If you’ve come to collect the money, why don’t you say so?”
The two looked puzzled while he told Yezad to bring the envelope.
“But these are not the fellows who came the first time,” whispered Yezad in his ear. “We shouldn’t —”
“Just give it and get rid of them!”
Yezad unlocked his desk and passed the envelope to Mr. Kapur, who hurled it on the counter, towards the men.
“Here’s the full payment. As arranged with Balaji and Gopinath.”
“Please, sir, we are not understanding.”
“Oh, you are not understanding?” he sneered. “Go and check with your shakha! What game are you two bastards trying to play?”
“Please, sir, do not be so abusive. We are not asking for money. We are just requesting to change your sign to Mumbai.”
Yezad forcibly took Mr. Kapur aside, urging him not to lose his temper, it wouldn’t help matters. Mr. Kapur brushed him away: enough was enough, he had reached his limit with these thugs.
“Thirty-five thousand is the price for special exemption! And I agreed to it, to keep Bombay!”
He picked up the envelope from the counter and thrust it at them, whacking one across the chest with it. Bewildered, they looked inside, and exchanged glances. “Sir, if you are wanting to give donation to Shiv Sena, that is fine. But shop name must definitely change to Mumbai.”
“See that?” roared Mr. Kapur, snatching the envelope from their hands. “Donation! They want to have their cake and eat it too! Fucking crooks!”
“We are not crooks, sir. We are working most vigorously for social welfare, looking after interests of local people. We are working for upliftment of the poor and —”
“I’ll work on your downliftment if you don’t shut up! Your bogus history lecture doesn’t interest me.”
“Sir, you must not threaten us. We are simply stating the rule, your signboard must change. If this is not taking place in one week, it will be very bad.”
Now Mr. Kapur advanced on them, shoving them back. The men staggered, and he shoved again, pushing them towards the door.
“You think you can scare me, you fucking grass-eating ghatis? You know who I am? I have drunk the milk of Punjab! Saalay bhonsdi kay bharve, I’ll break your faces if you act smart with me!”
He kept pushing, till they were at the entrance. A final push, and the two went stumbling down the steps to the pavement.
“You will be sorry for your abusive behaviour!” they hissed.
Slamming shut the door, Mr. Kapur cursed them for spoiling his morning. He put the envelope back in Yezad’s desk, then retrieved the black belt for his Santa suit and returned to the office with Yezad. Husain, quite shaken by the incident, followed them.
“Are you all right, sahab?”
“Yes, fine,” said Mr. Kapur gruffly, the anger still afflicting his voice.
“More tea, sahab?”
“How much tea you want to give me? Tea doesn’t solve every problem.” He looked closely at Yezad, whose ashen face was just regaining colour. “Dont tell me even you are scared.”
“Not scared. Worried. Maybe there’s some mix-up at their shakha.”
“Sahab, please …” Husain shuffled his feet, to indicate he wanted to speak. “Sahab, I wanted to say it’s not good to fight with Shiv Sena. With them you can never win.”
“I know about Shiv Sena. You needn’t worry.”
“No, sahab,” he was in tears now. “You know when Babri Mosque was destroyed and all the riots were flaming, these bad people killed so many innocents, with my own eyes I saw it, sahab, they locked them in their houses and set fire to them, they attacked people with swords and axes …”
Mr. Kapur put an arm around the peon’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Husain miyan, you don’t have to fear. They only attack poor people, weak people. Like all bullies, they are cowards at heart. Isn’t that right, Yezad?”
“Yes, that is right,” repeated Yezad, still in a daze.
Shaking his head, Husain left the office while Mr. Kapur asked Yezad to help him tie the wrist bells. Their tinkling began to restore his spirit.
They opened the entrance door cautiously to check if those characters were hanging around or if they had summoned reinforcements. But the street wore its normal air of benign frenzy, the footpaths packed with crowds, the road loud with traffic.
Soon it was ten o’clock, and Husain took his place on the pavement. The first visitors entered with their children, and Mr. Kapur’s hearty ho-ho-ho’s filled th
e shop again.
“Good morning, Coomy! Merry Christmas!”
Edul Munshi sailed past her into the passageway with a song on his lips: “I saw two ghatis come walk-ing up, come walk-ing up,” he syncopated his modified carol. “I saw two ghatis come walk-ing up on Christmas day in the mor-ning.”
“What nonsense are you singing?” Irritated and depressed this morning, Coomy was not willing to tolerate anyone’s foolishness. Always, on Christmas, memories of her convent school, a happy time in her truncated childhood, haunted her, and she would have gladly renounced the pleasures of remembering, were it possible to get rid of the pain as well.
Six weeks before Christmas her school choir would start practising for the concert to which parents were invited. During the second week of December the tree went up. And decorating it was a special treat reserved for the girls in the choir. Like most non-Christian families, Coomy’s parents too questioned from time to time if this school was the best place for their child. They were not worried about Jal, he was safe in Bharda New High School, but they wondered if there might not be too much of a Catholic flavour in Coomy’s education, especially since there was so little Zoroastrian influence to countervail it. They felt their Parsi customs were seriously handicapped by the lack of any entertaining Santa Claus type of figure.
Then it was concert day. They went to hear Coomy sing, and those worries were temporarily forgotten. Afterwards, her father would declare the choir sounded beautiful, but his Coomy was the best and loudest of all. The first time this pleased her tremendously; the following year, as she learned more, she protested, “Pappa, my voice is supposed to blend with the choir! If you hear it, it means I’m singing badly!”
And her father, laughing, insisted that even if it were blended to perfection with a thousand voices he could still hear his little angel’s voice. All this was during the happy years before he took to his bed and became, as their mother said, an angel himself.
Feeling fiercely protective of her good memories – the convent school, the choir, the Christmas tree, her father’s delight – Coomy glared at Edul. She found his perversity, inflicted upon one of her favourite carols, an act of pure barbarism. “Your words make no sense,” she told him.
“Oh yes, they do. You see, I’ve hired two ghatis from the ration shop to help me with the beam. They’ll be coming at eleven o’clock.” He sang again, “My gha-tis from the ra-tion shop, the ra-tion shop. My gha-tis from the ra-tion shop, on Christmas day in the mor-ning.”
“Stop that!” she lashed out.
Behind her back, Jal tried to hush him with gestures. He too was tense this morning, for the raising of the beam weighed on his mind.
“How about this one? Hark, the han-dyman is wor-king! Glory to the new cei-ling!”
As Jal despaired about keeping the peace, the doorbell rang and Coomy left to answer it. He didn’t like the way his sister was being teased; he understood how she was feeling today. But explaining to Edul would be almost impossible.
They heard her arguing with someone at the door, and went to see.
“Oh, there they are,” said Edul. “My two ghatis from the ration shop.”
“Yes,” said Coomy. “I’m trying to tell them it’s only nine o’clock, you wanted them at eleven.”
“I’ll explain it, my Marathi is much better than yours.”
Edul started with a little scolding: “Tumee lok aykat nai! Bai tumhala kai saangte?”
That was as far as his vocabulary took him before he lapsed into a helpless medley of Hindi, Gujarati, and English, with the occasional Marathi word thrown in for flavour. “Asaala kasaala karte? Maine tumko explain kiya, na, eleven o’clock ao. Abhi jao, ration shop ko jao. Paisa banao, later vapis ao.”
“It’s the Issa Massih holiday, seth,” they said. “No rations to carry today. We can help you with whatever you are doing.”
Edul was weakening, and Coomy stepped in to insist that they leave. “I don’t want them loitering in my house.”
He drew her aside and cautioned against it: risky to send them back – what if they found other work and did not return? The entire schedule with the girder would be ruined.
The girder had sat in the passage under the ancestral portraits for more than a week, tripping Coomy up and generally annoying her by its presence. She did not relish the prospect of another week or two of the nuisance. The men were allowed to stay.
“But I won’t pay you any extra,” warned Edul.
“Oh, we don’t want extra money. A little saucer of tea would earn you our sincere gratitude.”
“What nerve!” said Coomy. “They think I’m running a tea-stall?”
Edul cajoled her into putting the kettle on, saying it was Christmas, and she should think of them as two wise men come to honour her ceiling. He clinched it by promising not to sing any more if she made tea.
But while she was in the kitchen Edul sang another modified carol to the men: “Away in a ration shop, you work as a team. Today you will carry for me this steel beam.”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, they listened intently without understanding a word. When he finished, there was loud applause.
Jal studied the two men and thought they looked familiar. He remembered: they were the same duo, many months ago, who had carried Pappa home after his fall into the ditch.
“I’m worried about this, Edul,” he said. “Are you sure they are qualified for the work? They only know how to lift bags of grain on their head.”
“Don’t worry, Jal my son, I just need their brute strength. The skill and planning is supplied by yours truly.”
The tea came, in tin mugs for the two labourers, and regular china for Edul, and was consumed noisily with slurps of appreciation. Then Edul led his team into Nariman’s room. For the next couple of hours they could be heard preparing the supports for the beam-raising, securing the poles in place, and, at regular intervals, making sounds of mutual encouragement.
By noon, the posts and their braces were in position, lined up between the two facing walls. Jal examined them anxiously, and to set his mind at rest Edul demonstrated their worthiness by kicking a post and pushing his weight against it.
Half-expecting the assembly to tumble, Jal shielded his face, but it withstood the assault. “What happens now?”
“The main event.” Edul led his men to where the steel girder was resting. “Chaal, Ganpat,” he said, indicating one end of it, then turned to the other: “And what are you watching, Ganpat, haath lagao, take that side.” He positioned himself in the middle.
“They both have the same name?” asked Jal.
Edul grinned. “I call all ghatis Ganpat.”
The three men gripped the long dark steel and began manoeuvring the passageway into Nariman’s room. The space was not wide enough for a straight entry; they moved forward and reversed a number of times, while Edul called out frantic instructions in his khichri of languages. “Ai baba! Assa nako ghay! This way, not that way, sunta hai kya. Sadanter idiot chhe, saalo.”
Finally the men and the girder were in the room. Panting, they lowered it to the floor under the spot, twelve feet above, that was to be its final resting place.
“Okay, perfect,” said Edul. Mopping the sweat from his brow, he turned to Jal and Coomy. “Now I must request you both to leave the room, I need the area clear.” But he gave them permission to watch from the passageway.
After checking each brace and post once more, he stood well back and told the men to proceed. Jal and Coomy held their breath as they lifted the girder to the first stage, four feet off the floor, and rested it on the intermediary supports.
They paused, refreshing their lungs before climbing the stepladders to lift it to eight feet. This was a little trickier, for the two men needed a sure footing. Edul had secured the ladders to prevent wobbling, but it was still a difficult move.
Standing on the fourth step, they picked the girder up cleanly and got it as high as their shoulders. But in shifting the weight on
to the supports, one of the men staggered. His end of the girder missed its bracket.
“Hoi, careful!” shouted Edul. “Push higher! Jor lagao!”
The man recovered his balance and the girder was safe. He nodded to reassure Edul standing below.
“Assa kai, Ganpat!” he scolded. “No breakfast? No pao-bhaji?”
The last stage was the top of the two steel posts equipped with hydraulic jacks at their base. At Edul’s signal they completed the task in one powerful movement.
“Sabaash!” Edul congratulated them, and the praise made the men taller with pleasure. They posed proudly with their hands on the beam.
Now Edul positioned a third ladder and went up to secure the steel. Four pairs of nuts and bolts were fastened at each end through pre-drilled holes, then everyone came down from their ladders. Edul said he would continue the work after lunch.
“Is it okay to leave it like this?” asked Coomy.
“Absolutely. It’s solid as the tower of Pisa. I mean, the Eiffel Tower,” he corrected himself, and delivered a series of vigorous kicks to the post.
He paid the men, adding a bakshis of ten rupees to the agreed amount. “It’s Christmas,” he said to explain his impulse to Jal and Coomy.
The men were overwhelmed, and said as they were leaving that they’d be downstairs by the ration shop, in case there was more work.
Then Edul left too, promising to return from lunch in an hour, perhaps less, if Manizeh did not make a fuss.
In the empty room Jal took the opportunity to inspect the ceiling, and saw something he hadn’t noticed during all the excitement: a large gap, between the girder and the joists.
Hah, he thought, poor fellow had bungled, as usual. Thank God he’d spotted it before the whole thing was plastered over.
When Edul was back, he took him to task with relish. “Come here, Edul my son, look over there,” he said, retaliating for the jibes he had suffered. “At least four inches between the beam and the ceiling.”
“Jal my son,” laughed Edul. “Let me show you. See these things at the bottom of the posts? They are jacks. You know what a jack is?”