Tales From Firozsha Baag

  “People slapped him on the back and shook his hand vigorously, over and over, right through the evening. They said: ‘Telling the truth, you made the right decision, look how happy your mother is to live to see this day;’ or they asked: ‘Well, bossy, what changed your mind?’ Sarosh smiled and nodded his way through it all, passing around Canadian currency at the insistence of some of the curious ones who, egged on by his mother, also pestered him to display his Canadian passport and citizenship card. She had been badgering him since his arrival to tell her the real reason: ‘Saachoo kahé, what brought you back?’ and was hoping that tonight, among his friends, he might raise his glass and reveal something. But she remained disappointed.

  “Weeks went by and Sarosh found himself desperately searching for his old place in the pattern of life he had vacated ten years ago. Friends who had organized the welcome-home party gradually disappeared. He went walking in the evenings along Marine Drive, by the sea-wall, where the old crowd used to congregate. But the people who sat on the parapet while waves crashed behind their backs were strangers. The tetrapods were still there, staunchly protecting the reclaimed land from the fury of the sea. He had watched as a kid when cranes had lowered these cement and concrete hulks of respectable grey into the water. They were grimy black now, and from their angularities rose the distinct stench of human excrement. The old pattern was never found by Sarosh; he searched in vain. Patterns of life are selfish and unforgiving.

  “Then one day, as I was driving past Marine Drive, I saw someone sitting alone. He looked familiar, so I stopped. For a moment I did not recognize Sarosh, so forlorn and woebegone was his countenance. I parked the apple of my eye and went to him, saying, ‘Hullo, Sid, what are you doing here on your lonesome?’ And he said, ‘No no! No more Sid, please, that name reminds me of all my troubles.’ Then, on the parapet at Marine Drive, he told me his unhappy and wretched tale, with the waves battering away at the tetrapods, and around us the hawkers screaming about coconut-water and sugar-cane juice and paan.

  “When he finished, he said that he had related to me the whole sad saga because he knew how I told stories to boys in the Baag, and he wanted me to tell this one, especially to those who were planning to go abroad. ‘Tell them,’ said Sarosh, ‘that the world can be a bewildering place, and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps.’ As he spoke, I could see that Sarosh was somewhere far away, perhaps in New Delhi at his immigration interview, seeing himself as he was then, with what he thought was a life of hope and promise stretching endlessly before him. Poor Sarosh. Then he was back beside me on the parapet.

  “ ‘I pray you, in your stories,’ said Sarosh, his old sense of humour returning as he deepened his voice for his favourite Othello lines” – and here, Nariman produced a basso profundo of his own – “ ‘When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice: tell them that in Toronto once there lived a Parsi boy as best as he could. Set you down this; and say, besides, that for some it was good and for some it was bad, but for me life in the land of milk and honey was just a pain in the posterior.’ ”

  And now, Nariman allowed his low-pitched rumbles to turn into chuckles. The boys broke into cheers and loud applause and cries of “Encore!” and “More!” Finally, Nariman had to silence them by pointing warningly at Rustomji-the-curmudgeon’s door.

  While Kersi and Viraf were joking and wondering what to make of it all, Jehangir edged forward and told Nariman this was the best story he had ever told. Nariman patted his shoulder and smiled. Jehangir left, wondering if Nariman would have been as popular if Dr. Mody was still alive. Probably, since the two were liked for different reasons: Dr. Mody used to be constantly jovial, whereas Nariman had his periodic story-telling urges.

  Now the group of boys who had really enjoyed the Savukshaw story during the previous week spoke up. Capitalizing on Nariman’s extraordinarily good mood, they began clamouring for more Savukshaw: “Nariman Uncle, tell the one about Savukshaw the hunter, the one you had started that day.”

  “What hunter? I don’t know which one you mean.” He refused to be reminded of it, and got up to leave. But there was loud protest, and the boys started chanting, “We-want-Savukshaw! We-want-Savukshaw!”

  Nariman looked fearfully towards Rustomji’s door and held up his hands placatingly: “All right, all right! Next time it will be Savukshaw again. Savukshaw the artist. The story of the Parsi Picasso.”

  Lend Me Your Light

  … your lights are all lit – then where do you go with your lamp?

  My house is all dark and lonesome, – lend me your light.

  – Rabindranath Tagore

  Gitanjali

  We both left Bombay the same year. Jamshed first, for New York, then I, for Toronto. As immigrants in North America, sharing this common experience should have salvaged something from our acquaintanceship. It went back such a long way, to our school days at St. Xavier’s.

  To sustain an acquaintance does not take very much. A friendship, that’s another thing. Strange, then, that it has ended so completely, that he has erased himself out of our lives, mine and Percy’s; now I cannot imagine him even as a mere bit player who fills out the action or swells a procession.

  Jamshed was my brother’s friend. The three of us went to the same school. Jamshed and my brother, Percy, both four years older than I, were in the same class, and spent their time together. They had to part company during lunch, though, because Jamshed did not eat where Percy and I did, in the school’s drillhall-cum-lunchroom.

  The tiffin carriers would stagger into the school compound with their long, narrow rickety crates balanced on their heads, each with fifty tiffin boxes, delivering lunches from homes in all corners of the city. When the boxes were unpacked, the drillhall would be filled with a smell that is hard to forget, thick as swill, while the individual aromas of four hundred steaming lunches started to mingle. The smell must have soaked into the very walls and ceiling, there to age and rancidify. No matter what the hour of the day, that hot and dank grotto of a drillhall smelled stale and sickly, the way a vomit-splashed room does even after it is cleaned up.

  Jamshed did not eat in this crammed and cavernous interior. Not for him the air redolent of nauseous odours. His food arrived precisely at one o’clock in the chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned family car, and was eaten in the leather-upholstered luxury of the back seat, amid this collection of hyphenated lavishness.

  In the snug dining-room where chauffeur doubled as waiter, Jamshed lunched through his school-days, safe from the vicissitudes of climate. The monsoon might drench the tiffin carriers to the bone and turn cold the boxes of four hundred waiting schoolboys, but it could not touch Jamshed or his lunch. The tiffin carriers might arrive glistening and stinking of sweat in the hot season, with scorching hot tiffin boxes, hotter than they’d left the kitchens of Bombay, but Jamshed’s lunch remained unaffected.

  During the years of high school, my brother, Percy, began spending many weekend afternoons at his friend’s house at Malabar Hill. Formerly, these were the afternoons when we used to join Pesi paadmaroo and the others for our most riotous times in the compound, the afternoons that the adults of Firozsha Baag would await with dread, not knowing what new terrors Pesi had devised to unleash upon the innocent and the unsuspecting.

  But Percy dropped all this for Jamshed’s company. And when he returned from his visits, Mummy would commence the questioning. What did they eat? Was Jamshed’s mother home? What did the two do all afternoon? Did they go out anywhere? And so on.

  Percy did not confide in me very much in those days. Our lives intersected during the lunch routine only, which counted for very little. For a short while we had played cricket together with the boys of Firozsha Baag. Then he lost interest in that too. He refused to come when Daddy would take the whole gang to the Marine Drive maidaan on Sunday mornings. And soon, like all younger brothers, I was seen mainly as a nuisance.
r />   But my curiosity about Percy and Jamshed was satisfied by Mummy’s interrogations. I knew that the afternoons were usually spent making model airplanes and listening to music. The airplanes were simple gliders in the early years; the records, mostly Mantovani and from Broadway shows. Later came more complex models with gasoline engines and remote control, and classical music from Bach to Poulenc.

  The model-airplane kits were gifts from Jamshed’s itinerant aunties and uncles, purchased during business trips to England or the U.S. Everyone except my brother and I seemed to have uncles and aunties smitten by wanderlust, and Jamshed’s supply line from the western world guaranteed for him a steady diet of foreign clothes, shoes, and records.

  One Saturday, Percy reported during question period that Jamshed had received the original soundtrack of My Fair Lady. This was sensational news. The LP was not available in Bombay, and a few privately imported or “smuggled” copies, brought in by people like Jamshed’s relatives, were selling in the black market for two hundred rupees. I had seen the records displayed side by side with foreign perfumes, chocolates, and cheeses at the pavement stalls of smugglers along Flora Fountain.

  Sometimes, these stalls were smashed up during police raids. I liked to imagine that one day a raid would occur as I was passing, and in the mêlée and chaos of the clash, My Fair Lady would fly through the air and land at my feet, unnoticed by anyone. Of course, there wasn’t much I could have done with it following the miracle, because our old gramophone played only 78 rpms.

  After strenuous negotiations in which Mummy, Percy, and I exhausted ourselves, Percy agreed to ask his friend if I could listen to the album. Arrangements were made. And the following Saturday we set off for Jamshed’s house. From Firozsha Baag, the direction of Malabar Hill was opposite to the one we took to go to school every morning, and I was not familiar with the roads the bus travelled. The building had a marble lobby, and the lift zoomed us up smoothly to the tenth floor before I had time to draw breath. I was about to tell Percy that we needed one like this in Firozsha Baag, but the door opened. Jamshed welcomed us graciously, then wasted no time in putting the record on the turntable. After all, that was what I had come for.

  The afternoon dragged by after the soundtrack finished. Bored, I watched them work on an airplane. The box said it was a Sopwith Camel. The name was familiar from the Biggies books Percy used to bring home. I picked up the lid and read dully that the aircraft had been designed by the British industrialist and aeronautical engineer, Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith, born 1888, and had been used during the First World War. Then followed a list of the parts.

  Later, we had lunch, and they talked. I was merely the kid brother, and nobody expected me to do much else but listen. They talked of school and the school library, of all the books that the library badly needed; and of the ghatis who were flooding the school of late.

  In the particular version of reality we inherited, ghatis were always flooding places, they never just went there. Ghatis were flooding the banks, desecrating the sanctity of institutions, and taking up all the coveted jobs. Ghatis were even flooding the colleges and universities, a thing unheard of. Wherever you turned, the bloody ghatis were flooding the place.

  With much shame I remember this word ghati. A suppurating sore of a word, oozing the stench of bigotry. It consigned a whole race to the mute roles of coolies and menials, forever unredeemable.

  During one of our rare vacations to Matheran, as a child, I watched with detachment while a straining coolie loaded the family’s baggage on his person. The big metal trunk was placed flat on his head, with the leather suitcase over it. The enormous hold-all was slung on his left arm, which he raised to steady the load on his head, and the remaining suitcase went in the right hand. It was all accomplished with much the same approach and consideration used in loading a cart or barrow – the main thing was balance, to avoid tipping over. This skeletal man then tottered off towards the train that would transport us to the little hill station. There, similar skeletal beings would be waiting with rickshaws. Automobiles were prohibited in Matheran, to preserve the pastoral purity of the place and the livelihood of the rickshawallas.

  Many years later I found myself at the same hill station, a member of my college hikers’ club, labouring up its slopes with a knapsack. Automobiles were still not permitted in Matheran, and every time a rickshaw sped by in a flurry of legs and wheels, we’d yell at the occupant ensconced within: “Capitalist pig! You bastard! Stop riding on your brother’s back!” The bewildered passenger would lean forward for a moment, not quite understanding, then fall back into the cushioned comfort of the rickshaw.

  But this kind of smug socialism did not come till much later. First we had to reckon with school, school uniforms, brown paper covers for textbooks and exercise books, and the mad morning rush for the school bus. I remember how Percy used to rage and shout at our scrawny ghaton if the pathetic creature ever got in his way as she swept and mopped the floors. Mummy would proudly observe, “He has a temper just like Grandpa’s.” She would also discreetly admonish Percy, since this was in the days when it was becoming quite difficult to find a new ghaton, especially if the first one quit due to abuse from the scion of the family and established her reasons for quitting among her colleagues.

  I was never sure why some people called them ghatons and others, gungas. I supposed the latter was intended to placate – the collective conferment of the name of India’s sacred river balanced the occasions of harshness and ill-treatment. But the good old days, when you could scream at a ghaton that you would kick her and hurl her down the steps, and expect her to show up for work next morning, had definitely passed.

  After high school, Percy and Jamshed went to different colleges. If they met at all, it would be at concerts of the Bombay Chamber Orchestra. Along with a college friend, Navjeet, and some others, my brother organized a charitable agency that collected and distributed funds to destitute farmers in a small Maharashtrian village. The idea was to get as many of these wretched souls as possible out of the clutches of the village money-lenders.

  Jamshed showed a very superficial interest in what little he knew about Percy’s activities. Each time they met, he would start with how he was trying his best to get out of the country. “Absolutely no future in this stupid place,” he said. “Bloody corruption everywhere. And you can’t buy any of the things you want, don’t even get to see a decent English movie. First chance I get, I’m going abroad. Preferably the U.S.”

  After a while, Percy stopped talking about his small village, and they only discussed the concert program or the soloist’s performance that evening. Then their meetings at concerts ceased altogether because Percy now spent very little time in Bombay.

  Jamshed did manage to leave. One day, he came to say goodbye. But Percy was away working in the small village: his charitable agency had taken on the task full time. Jamshed spoke to those of us who were home, and we all agreed that he was doing the right thing. There just weren’t any prospects in this country; nothing could stop its downhill race towards despair and ruin.

  My parents announced that I, too, was trying to emigrate, but to Canada, not the U.S. “We will miss him if he gets to go,” they told Jamshed, “but for the sake of his own future, he must. There is a lot of opportunity in Toronto. We’ve seen advertisements in newspapers from England, where Canadian Immigration is encouraging people to go to Canada. Of course, they won’t advertise in a country like India – who would want these bloody ghatis to come charging into their fine land? – but the office in New Delhi is holding interviews and selecting highly qualified applicants.” In the clichés of our speech was reflected the cliché which the idea of emigration had turned into for so many. According to my parents, I would have no difficulty being approved, what with my education, and my westernized background, and my fluency in the English language.

  And they were right. A few months later things were ready for my departure to Toronto.

  Then the neighbou
rs began to arrive. Over the course of the last seven days, they came to confer their blessings and good wishes upon me. First was Bulsara Bookworm’s mother, her hair in a bun as usual and covered with the mathoobanoo. She said, “I know you and Jehangir were never very good friends, but that does not matter at a time like this. He says best of luck.” She put her arm over my shoulder in lieu of a hug and said, “Don’t forget your parents and all they did for you, maintain your good name at all times.”

  And Tehmina, too, using the occasion to let bygones be bygones with Mummy and Daddy, arrived sucking cloves and shuffling in slippers and duster-coat. Her cataracts were still a problem, refusing to ripen, she said.

  Then one morning Nariman Hansotia stopped me in the compound. He was on his way to the Cawasji Framji Memorial Library, and I to the airline office for a final confirmation of my seat.

  “Well, well,” he said, “so you were serious when you used to tell everyone that you would go abroad. Who would have thought of it! Who would have imagined that Silloo Boyce’s little Kersi would one day go to Canada. Knee high I had seen you, running around in the compound with your brother, trying to do everything he did. Well, lead a good life, do nothing to bring shame to you or the Parsi community. And don’t just land there and say, where are the girls? like this other chap had done. Did I ever tell you that story?”

  And Nariman launched into an anecdote: “A sex-crazy young fellow was going to California. For weeks he used to tell his friends about how the women there went around on the beaches with hardly any clothes on, and how easy it was to find women who would go with you for a little bit of this and that, and what a wonderful time he was going to have as soon as he got there. Well, when he landed at Los Angeles, he tried to joke with the immigration officer and asked him, ‘Where are the girls?’ What do you think happened then?”