She looked at the doctor defiantly. ‘We’ll see.’
‘I wish you luck.’
Raat Rani had switched off the TV in her room. If it took superhuman effort to live without it, she was not about to show it. She cradled the Prince all night long and sang lullabies to him when he had difficulty breathing; she bathed him and applied hot and cold compresses to help ease his blood circulation. She massaged his limbs with Ayurvedic unguents and oils to loosen them and forced him to take herbal inhalations thrice a day so that his vocal cords would regain their strength; she cooked his favourite dishes and fed him.
The paralysis eased somewhat but H.H. now became infinitely more cantankerous than he was before the fall. His one and only weapon against Raat Rani was obstinacy. He would refuse to do the exercises the doctor had recommended; he flung the food she brought him; he mulishly refused to take the inhalations; he let forth strings of what sounded like gibberish though she knew that they were the choicest of swear words. Her response was to dismiss his tantrums with gusts of laughter. She made it a point to converse with him and tell him stories about how her father had been cheated by his partner and had had a stroke and she had to work at all kinds of jobs to feed him and her siblings. That was not all. She moved on to other hilarious escapades of princes and industrialists vying for her attention. One of them even chased her in the nude while the man’s wife and servants watched the farce. But there was worse to come. Sometimes the wives developed a crush on her.
Sangram Singh was party to everything she did since he alone could lift the Prince any time he wanted to turn on his side, move or sit up in bed, when he had to be taken to the toilet or when he became overexcited and had to be physically restrained. It was curious – the moment Sangram Singh appeared on the scene in the morning, the Prince became uncontrollable. His gobbledygook emerged in a flash flood. His blood pressure shot up and a look of intense loathing and hatred shone in his eyes. Raat Rani worried that H.H. might burst an artery and get another paralytic attack. ‘Why does he get apoplectic when he sees you?’ she enquired.
‘I’m his punching bag. He knows he can bully me, say or do anything he wants and I won’t take offence.’
Raat Rani didn’t appear to be convinced. She thought there was something more to it than met the eye. Then one day, she accosted Sangram Singh in the corridor outside the Prince’s and her bedroom. ‘I know what happened that night.’
‘Which night?’
‘You know the night I’m referring to. You pushed His Highness’s wheelchair over the stairs.’
‘Really? You saw me do it? What other horror stories are you going to invent to cover up the fact that you pushed him over the stairs after you had pestered him night and day for months to write a new will and leave all his property in your name? I am going to tell the police exactly what you did when I fell ill and couldn’t get out of bed. Vahidullah will vouch that I am telling the truth.’
She smiled. ‘He won’t. H.H. will.’
‘You made damn sure that he’ll never recover. Even the doctor said his case was hopeless.’
‘You better believe me, the doctor was wrong. H.H.’s on the mend,’ the mistress retorted.
Sangram Singh had to admit that the bitch had wrought something of a miracle through her persistence. It was evident now that she could decode the Prince’s gibberish.
One day, while lifting the Prince in his bed, Sangram Singh accidentally touched a tiny spot just above His Highness’s sixth lumbar vertebra. It reduced him to tears. The pain was so great that the Prince could not talk for some minutes. That discovery resolved many a problem for Sangram Singh. Any time H.H. became difficult or obstreperous, he would ask him, ‘May I ease your pain, Huzoor?’ and Parbat Singh would immediately quieten down. As a matter of fact, Sangram Singh had to merely look at the Prince and he would immediately be on his best behaviour.
A few days later, Raat Rani knocked on Sangram Singh’s door.
‘Please come in.’
‘No, thank you. Have you got my keys?’
‘Your keys? Do please come in.’
‘I’m fine where I am.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘The keys, have you got my bunch of keys? I can’t find them anywhere. As a matter of fact, I can’t locate His Highness’s keys to the safe either.’
‘Those I have.’ Sangram Singh turned his back on her and pulled out something from a drawer in his cupboard. ‘Here they are.’
Raat Rani walked in, her hand outstretched. A heavy black blanket came down on her head and she was hauled in and the door closed.
The new arrival had a name now. Kishen. He was growing but everything he did took time. It was as if there was a hiatus between what he saw or felt and how he reacted. Even when Pawan pinched him, it took almost a minute for him to start bawling though the skin had already turned purple. It was difficult to tell whether he was happy or in pain. You could give him a two-day old chapati or feed him a pink-and-green pastry, which Pawan sometimes got when he had had a particularly good day, but the expression on Kishen’s face rarely changed. Sometimes Jasoda wondered if good and bad, tasteless and delicious made no difference to him.
All these months, Jasoda had been worried about Sameer, who would wander off awake or in his sleep without telling his mother, but of late it was Pawan who was the source of most of her anxieties. He had always been a charmer. The boy had an irresistible smile and when he set his mind to it, he could flirt even with his mother. Of late he had got something called a cellphone and within days he had become an expert at it. He could call anybody with the phone and he got calls on it too. Oddly enough, when his phone rang he took care to move away so that no one knew who he was talking to or what about. He played with the phone for hours on end and every once in a while he would try to teach his mother how it worked. But Jasoda could never get the hang of it, nor could she fathom how such a small device could do all the things Pawan said it did.
In the last few months he was the only one in the family who had put on weight and his dress sense had developed to the point where he was on par with the latest fashions. Unlike his brothers who had two pairs of clothes that had been repaired and re-repaired and patched up, he had four pairs of long shorts, the type that reached below his knees, three checked shirts and a pair of trousers. Jasoda had enquired where he had got them from and he had a pat answer. ‘Where do you think I got them from? They are third-generation hand-me-downs.’
‘No, they are not. They are brand new.’
‘If you say so. Then obviously they were a size too small for the boy the parents had bought them for.’
Jasoda had begun to grasp that her second son was a slippery customer. To talk to him was to try and hold a skidding soap in your hands. Where was he getting the money from? Every now and then he offhandedly, or maybe deliberately, let on that he had gone to see a film. He had even taken Himmat to see one. Of her three sons, (the fourth was far too young), he was the one who had erased all traces of Kantagiri. Mumbai had become his city. If you took his pulse, you would hear the city’s heartbeat. You could feel it in his loping, jaunty step and the way his body moved. He loved the mad monsoons and the feral energy coiled in them. They gave the city a good lashing and scrubbing and cleaned it up. And the sea went wild trying to grab whole chunks of sky. He didn’t mind the smog either. It made the place more mysterious – now you saw the city, now you didn’t.
She was feeding little Kishen late one night when Pawan stumbled home. The spring in his step, which rocked to the sound and song of Mumbai, was gone. He was battered and there was a purple sheen to his bruises. The left eye was swollen closed and the bones in his face had been rearranged. He was limping and his lower lip was torn. The act of breathing seemed to cause him excruciating pain. It was obvious he had a few broken ribs.
Jasoda put the baby down in a hurry and rushed to take care of her second son. ‘What happened?’ she kept asking him.
‘What happened?’
Pawan flung the question back at his mother when she wouldn’t stop asking. ‘Nothing. Got into a fight. That’s all.’
‘That’s all?’ Jasoda wanted to pick up the broom or anything she could lay her hands on and bash him senseless. She had suspected for some time now that Pawan had fallen into bad company and had tried several times to find out what he was up to. There were occasions when he was away half or three-quarters of the night and she had sat up waiting for him, convinced that she would never see him again. But he always came back and offered a flippant excuse or an outrageous lie to explain his absence. And every time Jasoda had been so relieved that the boy was alive, she had let him off the hook after making him swear on Prathama Devi that he would be back home, come what may, by seven in the evening. No, the broom would not do. It would be far better if she carved him up with the onion-knife. At least that way she wouldn’t go berserk with fear and anxiety.
Jasoda had been expecting the surly man. Come the first of the month, he was always there to collect the money, or rent, as he called it. He made it a point to turn up late at night. She was sure he had been counting the days and was keeping a watch on her. After all, he had been waiting for Kishen’s arrival more eagerly than her.
He counted the money carefully. ‘You’ve given me twentyfive rupees less.’
‘No, I’ve not. Count again.’
‘Don’t teach me how to count. Your rent has gone up.’
‘Why? Next month you will tell me to cough up fifty rupees more.’
‘I will, too, if you deliver twins next month. This is Mumbai. Nothing comes free, least of all space. As if the pavement was not crowded enough, you’ve added another child to the lot.’
‘Where am I going to get the money from?’
‘If you don’t have the money to pay the rent, you are welcome to vacate the place and leave. I’ll get much more from the next lot.’ He waited for a response from her, knowing well that there would be none. ‘That’s settled then. Keep the money ready.’
He was gone then.
Jasoda heaved a sigh of relief but knew he would be back.
She was into her third dream at night when she smelt the man. Initially, she thought the dream was reproducing his smells faithfully. He had a soggy, rancid smell as if neither he nor his clothes had been aired for the past few years. But there was something worse, a cloying stink that almost cut off her air supply. Clammy and rotting, that’s how she thought of Mumbai and its people, putrefying from the day they were born. She and her family had been unable to bathe for weeks, months actually, in Kantagiri and yet the desert air and sand ensured that you were dry and odourless.
She was awake now. He was under the sheet covering her and his teeth had sunk into her left breast and he was sucking the thin milk. He was squeezing the other breast now with his right hand and licking the oozing liquid every now and then. Kishen would have to go hungry for his next feed.
‘You are hurting me,’ she said softly. She didn’t want to be humiliated in front of her mother-in-law all over again. He ignored her. Perhaps he had not heard her. She told him again, ‘Please stop. You’re hurting me.’ Is this what sucking the nipples did, made people deaf?
The old lady had her eyes shut tightly and turned her back on Jasoda and the surly man. Jasoda slipped her left hand into the man’s loose cotton trousers and after a bit of a struggle undid the string and pulled them down. The elastic of his underwear had gone slack so it slipped down without much effort. Slowly she started to massage his member. In no time the man had become short of breath and was moaning and biting further into her breasts.
Jasoda’s right hand stretched back to the aluminium platter and threw off the cotton cloth covering it. She grabbed a handful of the finely cut green chillies and played with them. The man was in a hurry to get inside her. ‘Easy, easy.’ Her right hand was back under the sheet now, the palm of her hand holding his member tightly.
His eyes glazed over with unbearable pleasure and then he was screaming, ‘Fire. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What did you do to me?’ He was rubbing his penis to assuage the burning and the pain but that only seemed to make matters worse. He tried to stand up but got entangled in his underwear and fell over. His trousers had fallen off and he was running helter-skelter, sobbing and screaming. ‘Oh God, I’m on fire. Water please, water, water.’ The yelling and screeching had woken up his tenants on the pavement and after the initial shock of seeing their landlord naked waist down, they were mesmerized by the red lobster that kept swelling up in front of their eyes. Jasoda picked up the two-litre bottle Himmat had brought over a week ago and poured the water on the man’s belly and the fork of his legs. The men on the pavement whooped with laughter and the women sniggered and wondered how capacious Jasoda’s innards were to accommodate such a swollen creature inside herself. The man’s voice gave out and he was writhing in pain and whimpering. ‘Oh God, let me die. Someone please kill me, I beg you. I can’t take this burning.’
There was no teacher anymore but Himmat still had his books. He knew them by heart, not because he had memorized them but because he had read them over and over again. Come evening, he would go to the garden with Heera and sit on the same bench where Cawas Batliwala had taught him. Batliwala Sir had told him that tuitions were free but not the books. It was a lot of money but Himmat had been able to set aside small amounts over the months. He wished he knew where Batliwala Sir stayed, so he could have handed them over to him.
He practised his English on Heera. He read to her from his books. She was a parrot and repeated whatever he said word for word. It had become something of a comic routine for Ratna or their neighbours to ask Heera who she was going to marry. And the parrot would instantly repeat the words Pawan had taught her: ‘I’m going to marry my childhood sweetheart, Himmat.’
‘You are late, Himmat, a full four minutes late.’ It must have been five weeks, maybe more, since he had seen Batliwala Sir. He was sitting at his old place with another man. Sir had lost at least ten kilos and was a paler version of his Parsi white complexion. He had obviously been sick.
‘I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.’ Batliwala Sir was about to say something when Himmat interrupted him. ‘Have you been ill, sir? Very ill?’
‘I survived and here I am.’
‘I … I … I missed you.’
‘I missed you too but I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. This is my friend, Dr Suyog Gadgil. He’s a famous mathematician. And this is Himmat, the boy I was telling you about. And that little girl there in the grass is his sister Heera.’
‘Hello, Himmat. I’ve heard so much about you.’
Himmat did a namaskar to the new man and stood silently. He had no idea what was expected of him.
‘Himmat, why don’t you run home and fetch your algebra and other exercise books? Mr Gadgil’s going to help you with the maths.’
Himmat didn’t seem too happy at the request. He looked at Heera to rescue him but she was busy playing with her collection of sticks and broken twigs.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on little Heera,’ Cawas Batliwala said.
Himmat had no choice now but to fetch his books.
‘Why don’t you show the algebra exercise book to Mr Gadgil? It’s his subject. He is one of the world’s great authorities on advanced algebra and has won many international prizes for his work.’
Himmat was reluctant to part with the books.
‘You don’t have to be so worried, Himmat. There’s no better teacher than him. Once he teaches you, you’ll whizz through algebra without any problem.’ Batliwala Sir laughed heartily. ‘And he won’t shout at you the way I did.’
Professor Suyog Gadgil checked the algebra textbook and then went over the pages of the exercise book slowly, looking more and more perplexed, till he came to the end. ‘Your student, Mr Batliwala, may have had problems in the beginning but he’s managed to solve all the equations in the book.’
‘Must have just copied the answers,’ Cawas B
atliwala replied confidently.
‘What you see are not just the answers. You can see how he’s worked his way through every one of them.’
‘Did you take anybody’s help, Himmat?’
Himmat was quiet.
‘I asked you a question, Himmat. No one’s going to get angry if you did.’
‘I did them on my own, sir. It took me about three weeks to get the first one right. Then it was okay.’
Early mornings were hectic for Jasoda. She was up by five and slipped into the park through a tiny gap in the fence and went on to the rocky shoreline where she could brush her teeth, go to the toilet and finish her bucket-bath without anyone watching her. That done, she got the kerosene stove working and put the potatoes to boil, then moved to chopping the ten kilos of onions and half a basket of chillies. The work demanded concentration. Some months back her attention had wandered and she had lost the tip of her left index finger.
She was busy peeling the potatoes and turning them to mash when her eyes glided over her sleeping family. Heera was snuggling up to Himmat and pulling his ear to wake him up and, as usual, her mother-in-law had her mouth open and was snoring heavily. There was a knot in the potato in her hand and she flicked it out with the end of the knife. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, though she couldn’t figure out what it was. She glanced at her sleeping family again. Seemed the same as always, as far as she could make out. No, there was an empty space between Himmat and Pawan. For a moment she could not figure out who slept there. Sameer. Where was he? Had someone kidnapped him when she had gone for her morning ablutions? Everybody in the family knew he wandered off at night in his sleep but there was one reliable thing about sleepwalking. He was invisibly tethered to his bed and he always came back.
Himmat picked up Heera and went to look for him on the rocks and Pawan ran all the way to the flyover at Kemps Corner and up Peddar Road and circled back. Ratna combed the by-lanes on their road and her husband was sent off to Nepean Sea Road. At ten a.m., Jasoda and Ratna went to the Gamdevi Police Station. The police were reluctant to register a missing-person report and tried to convince Jasoda that many a child came back within twenty-four hours. Jasoda shook her head. She was sure her son had been kidnapped. She even knew who had stolen her boy, though she had no proof, and the police warned her that making unfounded accusations could get her into serious trouble.