Gustad finished retying the kusti round his waist and noted with satisfaction that the two ends, as usual, were of equal length. He raised and lowered his shoulders to let his sudra settle comfortably around him. The vest slid from under the kusti in response to the movement, providing the slack he liked to feel around his stomach. A draught crept across his lower back. It reminded him of the vertical tear. Most of his sudras had rents in them, and Dilnavaz kept fretting that a new batch was needed. Mending was useless – no sooner was one tear sewn up than another appeared because the mulmul itself was worn. He told her not to worry: ‘A little air-conditioning does no harm,’ laughing away, as usual, the signs of their straitened circumstances.
He turned his face to the sky, eyes closed, and began reciting the Sarosh Baaj, silently, forming the words with his lips, when the domestic sounds of the building were drowned by the roar of a diesel engine. A lorry? The engine idled for a few moments, and he resisted turning around to see. There was nothing he disliked more than to permit a break in his morning prayers. Bad manners, that’s what it was. He would not rudely interrupt when talking to another human being, so why do it with Dada Ormuzd? Especially today, when there was so much to be grateful for, with Sohrab’s admission to IIT which, with one wonderful, blessed stroke redeemed all his efforts, all the hardships.
The thundering lorry pulled away, leaving a cloud of diesel fumes to linger at the gate. By and by, the morning air carried in the acrid smell. Gustad wrinkled his nostrils and continued with the Sarosh Baaj.
By the time he finished, the lorry was quite forgotten. He went to the two bushes growing in the small patch of dusty earth under his window, opposite the black stone wall, and performed his daily bit of gardening. There were scraps of paper tangled in the leaves. Every morning he tended both bushes, although the vinca was the only one he had planted – the mint had begun to sprout of its own accord one day. Assuming it was a weed, he had almost uprooted it. But Miss Kutpitia, watching from her balcony upstairs, had deftly elucidated the medicinal uses of this particular variety. ‘That is a very rare subjo, very rare!’ she shouted down. ‘The fragrance controls high blood-pressure!’ And the tiny two-lipped white flowers, growing in spikes, contained seeds which, soaked in water and ingested, cured numerous maladies of the stomach. So Dilnavaz insisted that he let the plant stay, to please the old woman if for nothing else. Word of the newly discovered medicine had spread quickly, however, and people stopped by to ask for its leaves or the magic seeds. The daily demand for subjo kept in check its vigorous growth, which threatened to overwhelm the vinca and its five-petalled pink blooms that gave Gustad such joy.
He cleared away the paper scraps, cellophane sweet-wrappers, a Kwality ice-cream stick, and attended next to his rose plant. He had secured its pot by thick picture-hanging wire to a post within the entrance-way, with several complicated loops and knots, so that anyone with mischief in mind would have to spend hours undoing the intricacies. He picked up the petals of a faded rose. Then the smell of diesel fumes came again, and drew him to the gate.
A notice was pasted to the pillar, while a shining black oil puddle marked the spot where the lorry had stopped. The official document from the municipality bulged in places with glue and air bubbles. He did some quick calculations after reading it. The bloody bastards were out of their minds. What was the need to widen the road? He measured the ground with hurried strides. The compound would shrink to less than half its present width, and the black stone wall would loom like a mountain before the ground-floor tenants. More a prison camp than a building, all cooped up like sheep or chickens. With the road noise and nuisance so much closer. The flies, the mosquitoes, the horrible stink, with bloody shameless people pissing, squatting alongside the wall. Late at night it became like a wholesale public latrine.
But it was just a proposal, nothing would come of it. Surely the landlord would not give away half his compound for the ‘fair market value’ that the municipality offered. It was hard to find anything these days more unfair than the government’s fair market value. The landlord would certainly go to court.
The diesel smell persisted, following him through the compound as he returned home. It reminded him of the day of his accident, nine years ago, when such a smell had been present, also strong and undiminishing, while he lay in the road with his shattered hip, in the path of oncoming cars. He wrinkled his nose and wished the wind would change. His hip, the one which made him limp, began to hurt a little as he entered the flat.
TWO
i
Dilnavaz decided to be of no help to Gustad, not while he was embarked on his mad and wholly impractical scheme. A live chicken in the house! Whatever next? Never had he meddled like this in her kitchen. It was true he came sometimes and sniffed in her pots or, especially on Sundays, cajoled her to make a kutchoomber of onions, coriander and hot green chillies to go with the dhansak simmering on the stove. But in twenty-one years this was the first time he was interfering in kitchen-and-cookery in a very fundamental manner, and she was not sure what it meant or where it was leading.
‘Where did we get this basket from anyway?’ asked Gustad, covering the chicken with the wide wicker basket that had hung for ages on a nail near the kitchen ceiling. He did not really care to know, just wanting words to flow again between them, get rid of the chill she had been exuding since he got back from Crawford Market with the throbbing, unquiet bulge in his shopping bag.
‘I don’t know where the basket came from.’ Curt and frigid was her reply.
He suspected that Miss Kutpitia may have been advising her about omens, but prudence made him return to his peace-making voice. ‘At last we have a use for this basket. Good thing we did not throw it away. Where did it come from, I wonder.’
‘I told you once, I don’t know.’
‘Yes, yes, you did, Dilnoo-darling,’ he said soothingly. ‘Now, for two days it will be a roof over the chicken’s head. They relax and sleep quietly, put on more weight, if they are covered with a basket.’
‘How would I know? In my family a chicken was always brought home slaughtered.’
‘You will taste the difference, trust me, when it is swimming in your brown sauce in two days. With onions and potatoes. Ah ha ha, that brown sauce! So perfect you make it, Dilnoo.’ He smacked his lips.
The entire plan had come to Gustad yesterday. He had dreamt of his childhood the previous night, and remembered the dream in detail on waking: it was a day of great gaiety and celebration, of laughter ringing through the house, flowers filling up the rooms – in vases, in strands of tohrun over doorways – and music, music all day long: ‘Tales From the Vienna Woods’, ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’, ‘Skater’s Waltz’, ‘Voices of Spring’, the overture to Die Fledermaus, and much, much more, playing non-stop on the gramophone, playing in his dream, while his grandmother sent the servants out repeatedly to buy special herbs and masala for the feast cooking under her supervision.
There was such excitement and happiness filling his beloved childhood home, the sadness in his heart was acute when he awoke. He could not remember the exact occasion being celebrated in the dream – probably some birthday or anniversary. But live chickens had been brought home from the market by his father, and fattened for two days before the feast. And what a feast it had been.
When Gustad was a little boy, live chickens were standard procedure in his father’s house. Grandma would have it no other way. Not for her the scraggy fowl brought home slaughtered and plucked and gutted. Gustad remembered them arriving in a covered basket balanced on the head of the servant who walked behind his father, sometimes two, sometimes four, or eight, depending on how many guests were invited. Grandma would inspect the birds, invariably applauding her son’s choice selections as they clucked away, then check off the packets of spices and ingredients against her list.
But spices, ingredients, were only half the secret. ‘Chicken if you buy,’ she would say when praised for her delicious cooking, ‘then you must bu
y alive and squawking, jeevti-jaagti, or don’t buy at all. First feed it for two days, less will not do. And always feed best grain, the very best. Always remember: what goes in chicken-stomach, at the end comes back to our stomach. After two days prepare the pot, light the stove, get masala ready. Then slaughter, clean, and cook. Quick-quick-quick, no wasting time.’ And what a difference that made to the taste of the meat, she would claim, juicy and fresh and sweet, and so much more than the stringy scraps which clad the bones of the scrawny, market-fed birds two days ago.
Gustad’s dream about those blissful, long-ago times stayed with him all through the day. For once, he was determined, just once – for one day at least, this humble flat would fill with the happiness and merriment that used to reside in his childhood home. And that day, he decided, would be Saturday. Invite one or two people from the bank for dinner – my old friend Dinshawji for sure – just a small party. With chicken, never mind the extra expense. To celebrate Roshan’s birthday and Sohrab’s admission to IIT.
As the basket descended over the bird, it peered curiously through the narrow slits in the wickerwork. Safe under the protective dome, it began to cluck intermittently. ‘A little rice now,’ said Gustad.
‘I’m not going to touch the chicken,’ snapped Dilnavaz. If he thought she could be tricked into looking after the creature, he was sadly mistaken.
‘Boarding and lodging is my department,’ he had joked earlier, to win her over. But there was an edge in his voice now. ‘Who is asking you to touch? Just put a little rice in a small pan and give me.’ His peace-making voice was flagging in its efforts. He had gone straight from work to Crawford Market, and was still in his office clothes: tie, white shirt, white trousers. White except for where the chicken soiled it while he was tying it to the kitchen table-leg with a yard of bristly coir twist. It had been a long day, and he was tired.
Besides, Crawford Market was a place he despised at the best of times. Unlike his father before him, who used to relish the trip and looked on it as a challenge: to venture boldly into the den of scoundrels, as he called it; then to badger and bargain with the shopkeepers, tease and mock them, their produce, their habits, but always preserving the correct tone that trod the narrow line between badinage and belligerence; and finally, to emerge unscathed and triumphant, banner held high, having got the better of the rogues. Unlike his father, who enjoyed this game, Gustad felt intimidated by Crawford Market.
Perhaps it was due to their different circumstances: his father always accompanied by at least one servant, arriving and leaving by taxi; Gustad alone, with his meagre wallet and worn basket lined with newspaper to soak up meat juices that could start dripping in the bus, causing embarrassment or, worse still, angry protests from vegetarian passengers. Throughout the trip he felt anxious and guilty – felt that in his basket was something deadlier than a bomb. For was he not carrying the potential source of Hindu-Muslim riots? Riots which often started due to offences of the flesh, usually of porcine or bovine origins?
For Gustad, Crawford Market held no charms. It was a dirty, smelly, overcrowded place where the floors were slippery with animal ooze and vegetable waste, where the cavernous hall of meat was dark and forbidding, with huge, wicked-looking meat hooks hanging from the ceiling (some empty, some with sides of beef – the empty ones more threatening) and the butchers trying various tacks to snare a customer – now importuning or wheedling, then boasting of the excellence of their meat while issuing dire warnings about the taintedness of their rivals’, and always at the top of their voices. In the dim light and smelly air abuzz with bold and bellicose flies, everything acquired a menacing edge: the butchers’ voices, hoarse from their incessant bellowings; the runnels of sweat streaming down their faces and bare arms on to their sticky, crimson-stained vests and loongis; the sight and smell of blood (sometimes trickling, sometimes coagulated) and bone (gory, or stripped to whiteness); and the constant, sinister flash of a meat cleaver or butcher’s knife which, more often than not, was brandished in the vendor’s wild hand as he bargained and gesticulated.
Gustad knew his fear of Crawford Market had its origins in his grandmother’s warnings about butchers. ‘Never argue with a goaswalla,’ she would caution. ‘If he loses his temper, then bhup! he will stick you with his knife. Won’t stop to even think about it.’ Then, in milder tones, less terror-striking but more pedagogic, she revealed the underpinnings from whence this wise dictum rose. ‘Remember, the goaswalla’s whole life, his training, his occupation, is about butchering. Second nature. Bismillah, he says, that is all, and the knife descends.’
If she was teased about it, Grandma would staunchly claim to have witnessed a situation where a goaswalla had gone bhup! With his knife into flesh of the human sort. Gustad had relished the gruesome tale in those days, and when he began shopping at Crawford Market, he would remember her words with a nervous amusement. He never could feel quite at ease in that place.
He tried to select a chicken for Roshan’s birthday. It was hard for him to tell under all those feathers, as the shopkeeper held up bird after bird for inspection. ‘Look at this one, seth, good one, this. See under wing. Spread it, spread it, does not hurt the murgi, not to worry. See, poke here. How thick, how much meat.’ He did this with one chicken after another, holding its legs and dangling it upside-down, hefting it to emphasize the weight.
Gustad watched, thoroughly confused, squeezing and prodding to pretend he knew what he was doing. But each chicken was very much like the next. When he finally approved one, it was the vocal protestations of the bird, seemingly louder than the others, that made him decide. He would have been the first to admit his inexperience with poultry. The number of times he had been able to afford chicken for his family in the last twenty years, he could count on the fingertips of one hand without using up the digits. Chicken was definitely not his area of expertise.
But beef was a different matter. Beef was Gustad’s speciality. Years ago, his college friend, Malcolm Saldanha, had taught him all about cows and buffaloes. It was around the same time that Malcolm had helped him hide the furniture from the clutches of the vulturous bankruptcy bailiff.
The loss of the bookstore had turned Gustad’s father into a broken and dispirited man, no longer interested in those weekly expeditions to Crawford Market. When his beloved books and his business disappeared, his appetite was also misplaced, somewhere in the labyrinth of legal proceedings. Gustad worried deeply as his father visibly shrank. He did the best he could now as breadwinner, with his meagre income from private tuitions to schoolchildren. But under Malcolm’s advice and guidance, the rupees were stretched further than he had imagined possible.
Malcolm was tall and exceedingly fair-skinned for a Goan. He was fond of explaining his colour by telling about the blood of Portuguese colonizers that had mingled with the local stuff. He had thick red lips and slick, gleaming black hair, always parted on the left, brushed back. Malcolm’s father, whom Malcolm closely resembled in looks and talents, taught piano and violin, and prepared his students for the examinations periodically held in Bombay by the Royal School of Music and Trinity College. Malcolm’s mother played first violin with the Bombay Chamber Orchestra, and his elder brother, the oboe. Malcolm played the piano for the college choir’s practices and performances. He was going to be a professional musician, he said, but his father insisted on the BA to round out his education.
Gustad admired Malcolm, even slightly envied him, wishing he, too, could play some instrument. For all the music that had filled his home in happier times – his father’s huge radiogram in its dark cabinet of polished seesum, the records lining row upon row of shelves – there was not a single musical instrument in the house. The closest Gustad came to one was in a photograph of his mother as a child, posing with her mandolin. The photograph intrigued him, and sometimes, her eyes far away, she would describe the mandolin for Gustad, telling him about the songs she used to play, in her gentle, accepting voice which lacked the necessary force to inf
luence things in the Noble household.
Though he was the odd one out, Gustad was always welcomed at Malcolm’s home. Sometimes, Mr Saldanha performed a piece for solo violin, or Malcolm accompanied his father, and Gustad forgot his troubles for a while. In those extremely lean days, when every anna, every paisa counted, Malcolm the musician taught him to eat beef and mitigate the strain on his pocket-book. ‘Lucky for us,’ Malcolm always said, ‘that we are minorities in a nation of Hindus. Let them eat pulses and grams and beans, spiced with their stinky asafoetida – what they call hing. Let them fart their lives away. The modernized Hindus eat mutton. Or chicken, if they want to be more fashionable. But we will get our protein from their sacred cow.’ At other times he would say, mimicking their economics professor, ‘Law of supply and demand, always remember. That’s the key. Keeps down the price of beef. And it is healthier because it is holier.’
On Sunday mornings, Gustad would set off with Malcolm for Crawford Market, but their first stop was always the church where Malcolm attended Mass. Gustad went in with him, dipping his fingers in the font of holy water and crossing himself, imitating his friend closely, to fit in and not give offence to anyone.
The first time, Gustad was quite intrigued by the church and its rituals, so different from what went on in the fire-temple. But he was on his guard, conditioned as he had been from childhood to resist the call of other faiths. All religions were equal, he was taught; nevertheless, one had to remain true to one’s own because religions were not like garment styles that could be changed at whim or to follow fashion. His parents had been painstaking on this point, conversion and apostasy being as rife as it was, and rooted in the very history of the land.
So Gustad quickly decided that while the music was good and the glittering icons and sumptuous vestments were highly impressive, he preferred the sense of peaceful mystery and individual serenity that prevailed in the fire-temple. Sometimes it made him wonder, though, if Malcolm was not making an amateurish, half-hearted attempt at proselytism.