INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Such a Long Journey
“Mistry is a writer of considerable achievement.… Patiently and with loving humour, [he] develops a portrait and draws his people with such care and understanding that their trials become our tragedies.”
—Time
“A seamless, gracefully written trek through a rocky period in one man’s life.… A rewarding literary excursion.”
— Maclean’s
“This fine first novel demonstrates the bright-hard reality of India’s middle class.… Mistry is a singular pleasure to read, and his description of India is a lucid, living account.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“A passionate embracing of life in all its manifestations.”
—Books in Canada
“A rich, humane work, undoubtedly one of the best novels about India in recent years.”
— The Spectator (U.K.)
“The world of Such a Long Journey is vivid, lively, and comic – a rich and richly recreated setting.”
Winnipeg Free Press
“Fascinating … Mistry manages to convey a vivid picture of India through sharp affectionate sketches of Indian family life and a gift for erotic satire.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A highly poised and accomplished work.”
—The Observer (U.K.)
BOOKS BY ROHINTON MISTRY
Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987)
Such a Long Journey (1991)
A Fine Balance (1995)
Family Matters (2002)
Copyright © 1991 by Rohinton Mistry
Published in trade paperback with flaps by McClelland & Stewart 1991
Trade paperback edition first published 1997
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mistry, Rohinton, 1952-
Such a long journey
eISBN: 978-1-55199-440-6
I. Title.
PS8576.1853S79 2001 C813′.54 C2001-901849-5
PR9199.3.M48S79 2001
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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v3.1
For Freny
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
About the Author
He assembled the aged priests and put questions to them concerning the kings who had once possessed the world. ‘How did they,’ he inquired, ‘hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has been left to us in such a sorry state? And how was it that they were able to live free of care during the days of their heroic labours?’
Firdausi, Shah-Nama
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey …
T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’
And when old words die out on the tongue, new
melodies break forth from the heart; and where the
old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
ONE
i
The first light of morning barely illumined the sky as Gustad Noble faced eastward to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound’s solitary tree the sparrows began to call. Gustad listened to their chirping every morning while reciting his kusti prayers. There was something reassuring about it. Always, the sparrows were first; the cawing of crows came later.
From a few flats away, the metallic clatter of pots and pans began nibbling at the edges of stillness. The bhaiya sat on his haunches beside the tall aluminium can and dispensed milk into the vessels of housewives. His little measure with its long, hooked handle dipped into the container and emerged, dipped and emerged, rapidly, with scarcely a drip. After each customer was served, he let the dipper hang in the milk can, adjusted his dhoti, and rubbed his bare knees while waiting to be paid. Flakes of dry dead skin fell from his fingers. The women blenched with disgust, but the tranquil hour and early light preserved the peace.
Gustad Noble eased his prayer cap slightly, away from the wide forehead with its numerous lines, until it settled comfortably on his grey-white hair. The black velvet of the cap contrasted starkly with his cinereous sideburns, but his thick, groomed moustache was just as black and velvety. Tall and broad-shouldered, Gustad was the envy and admiration of friends and relatives whenever health or sickness was being discussed. For a man swimming the tidewater of his fifth decade of life, they said, he looked so solid. Especially for one who had suffered a serious accident just a few years ago; and even that left him with nothing graver than a slight limp. His wife hated this kind of talk. Touch wood, Dilnavaz would say to herself, and look around for a suitable table or chair to make surreptitious contact with her fingers. But Gustad did not mind telling about his accident, about the day he had risked his own life to save his eldest.
Over the busy clatter of the milk container, he heard a screech: ‘Muà thief! In the hands of the police only we should put you! When they break your arms we will see how you add water!’ The voice was Miss Kutpitia’s, and the peace of dawn reluctantly made way for a frenetic new day.
Miss Kutpitia’s threats lacked any real conviction. She never bought the bhaiya’s milk herself but firmly believed that periodic berating kept him in line, and was in the interest of the others. Somebody had to let these crooks know that there were no fools living here, in Khodadad Building. She was a wizened woman of seventy, and seldom went out these days, she said, since her bones got stiffer day by day.
But there were not many in the building she could talk to about her bones, or anything else, for that matter, because of the reputation she had acquired over the years, of being mean and cranky and abusive. To children, Miss Kutpitia was the ubiquitous witch of their fairy stories come to life. They would flee past her door, screaming, ‘Run from the daaken! Run from the daaken!’ as much from fear as to provoke her to mutter and curse, and shake her fist. Stiff bones or not, she could be seen moving with astonishing alacrity when she
wanted to, darting from window to balcony to stairs if there were events taking place in the outside world that she wished to observe.
The bhaiya was accustomed to hearing that faceless voice. He mumbled for the benefit of his customers: ‘As if I make the milk. Cow does that. The malik says go, sell the milk, and that is all I do. What good comes from harassing a poor man like me?’
The women’s resigned and weary faces, in the undecided early light, were transformed fleetingly into visages of gentle dignity. They were anxious to purchase the sickly, watered-down white fluid and return to their chores. Dilnavaz also waited, aluminium pan in one hand and money in the other. A slight woman, she had had her dark brown hair bobbed for their daughter Roshan’s first birthday party, eight years ago, and still wore it that way. She was not sure if it suited her now, although Gustad said it certainly did. She never could trust his taste. When mini-skirts came into fashion, just for a joke she had hiked up her dress and sashayed across the room, making little Roshan burst into laughter. But he thought she should seriously consider it – imagine, a woman of forty-four, mini-skirted. ‘Fashions are for the young,’ she had said, a little flustered. Then he began singing that Nat King Cole song, in his deep voice:
You will never grow old,
While there’s love in your heart,
Time may silver your dark brown hair,
As you dream in an old rocking chair …
She loved it when Gustad changed the song’s words from ‘golden hair’, always breaking into a big smile at the third line.
Traces of yesterday’s milk lingered in the pan she was holding. The last drops had just been used by Gustad and herself in their tea, and she had not had time to wash it out. There would have been time enough, she felt, if she hadn’t sat for so long, listening to Gustad read to her from the newspaper. And before that, talking about their eldest, and how he would soon be studying at the Indian Institute of Technology. ‘Sohrab will make a name for himself, you see if he doesn’t,’ Gustad had said with a father’s just pride. ‘At last our sacrifices will prove worthwhile.’ What had come over her this morning, she could not say, sitting and chatting away, wasting time like that. But then, it wasn’t every day such good news arrived for their son.
Dilnavaz edged forward as some women left, her turn was approaching. Like the others, the Nobles were endlessly awaiting a milk ration card from the government office. In the meantime she had to patronize the bhaiya, whose thin, short tail of hair growing from the centre of his otherwise perfectly shaven head never ceased to amuse her. She knew it was a Hindu custom in some particular caste, she was not exactly sure, but couldn’t help thinking that it resembled a grey rat’s tail. On mornings when he oiled his scalp, the tail glistened.
She purchased his milk and remembered the days when ration cards were only for the poor or the servants, the days when she and Gustad could afford to buy the fine creamy product of Parsi Dairy Farm (for Miss Kutpitia it was still affordable), before the prices started to go up, up, up, and never came down. She wished Miss Kutpitia would stop screaming at the bhaiya. It did no good, only made him resent them more. God knows what he might do to the milk – as it was, these poor people in slum shacks and jhopadpattis in and around Bombay looked at you sometimes as if they wanted to throw you out of your home and move in with their own families.
She knew Miss Kutpitia’s intentions were good, despite the bizarre stories about the old woman that had circulated for years in the building. Gustad wanted to have as little as possible to do with Miss Kutpitia. He said her crazy rubbish could make even a sane brain somersault permanently. Dilnavaz was perhaps the only friend Miss Kutpitia had. Her childhood training to show unconditional respect for elders made it easy for her to accept Miss Kutpitia’s idiosyncrasies. She found nothing repugnant or irritating about them – sometimes amusing, sometimes tiresome, yes. But never offensive. After all, for the most part Miss Kutpitia only wanted to offer help and advice on matters unexplainable by the laws of nature. She claimed to know about curses and spells: both to cast and remove; about magic: black and white; about omens and auguries; about dreams and their interpretation. Most important of all, according to Miss Kutpitia, was the ability to understand the hidden meaning of mundane events and chance occurrences; and her fanciful, fantastical imagination could be entertaining at times.
Dilnavaz made sure never to unduly encourage her. But she realized that at Miss Kutpitia’s age, a patient ear was more important than anything else. Besides, was there a person anywhere who, at one time or another, had not found it difficult to disbelieve completely in things supernatural?
The clatter and chatter around the milkman seemed remote to Gustad Noble while he softly murmured his prayers under the neem tree, his handsome white-clad figure favoured by the morning light. He recited the appropriate sections and unknotted the kusti from around his waist. When he had unwound all nine feet of its slim, sacred, hand-woven length, he cracked it, whip-like: once, twice, thrice. And thus was Ahriman, the evil one, driven away – with that expert flip of the wrist, possessed only by those who performed their kusti regularly.
This part of the prayers Gustad enjoyed most, even as a child, when he used to imagine himself a mighty hunter plunging fearlessly into unexplored jungles, deep in uncharted lands, armed with nothing except his powerfully holy kusti. Lashing that sacred cord through the air, he would slice off the heads of behemoths, disembowel sabre-toothed tigers, lay waste to savage cannibal armies. One day, while exploring the shelves in his father’s bookstore, he found the story of England’s beloved dragon-slayer. From then on, whenever he said his prayers, Gustad was a Parsi Saint George, cleaving dragons with his trusty kusti wherever he found them: under the dining-table, in the cupboard, below his bed, even hiding behind the clothes-horse. From everywhere there tumbled the gory, dissevered heads of fire-breathing monsters.
Doors opened and slammed shut, money jingled, a voice called out with special instructions for the bhaiya’s next delivery. Someone joked with the man: ‘Arré bhaiya, why not sell the milk and water separately? Better for the customer, easier for you also – no mixing to do.’ This was followed by the bhaiya’s usual impassioned denial.
The early morning news on government-controlled All-India Radio emerged softly, cautiously, from an open window. The clear mellifluence of its Hindi vocables tested the morning air, and presently offered a confident counterpoint to the BBC World Service that brashly cut in from another flat, bristling with short-wave crackle and hiss.
Gustad’s prayers were not disturbed by the banter nor distracted by the radio. Today the news was powerless to tempt him into irreverence, for he had already seen The Times of India. Unable to sleep, he had risen earlier than usual. When he turned on the tap to gargle and brush his teeth, the water burst through in a loud wet explosion. It caught him by surprise. He jumped back, snatching away his hand. Air, he told himself, being discharged from the pipes empty since seven a.m. yesterday, when the municipality had ended the daily water quota. He felt foolish. Scared by a noisy tap. He turned off the water, then rotated the handle slowly, just a little. It continued to gurgle threateningly.
For Dilnavaz, that familiar hissing, spitting, blustering was a summons to waken. She sensed the empty bed beside her and smiled to herself, for she had expected Gustad to be up first today. She stared sleepily at the clock till it yielded the time, then turned over on to her stomach and closed her eyes.
ii
Long before the sun had risen that morning, before it was time to pray, Gustad had been waiting anxiously for The Times of India. It was pitch dark but he did not switch on the light, for the darkness made everything seem clear and well-ordered. He caressed the arms of the chair he sat in, thinking of the decades since his grandfather had lovingly crafted it in his furniture workshop. And this black desk. Gustad remembered the sign on the store, he could see it even now. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes: Noble & Sons, Makers Of Fine Furniture, and I also r
emember the first time I saw the sign – too young to read the words, but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words. A glass-fronted cabinet with gleaming cherry-coloured wood; an enormous four-postered canopy bed; chairs with carved backs and splendidly proportioned cabrioles; a profoundly dignified black desk: all of it like the furniture in my childhood home.
Some of it now here, in my house. Saved from the clutches of bankruptcy – the word cold as a chisel. The sound cruel and sharp and relentless as the metal cleats on the bailiff’s shoes. The cleats had sounded their malicious clatter on the stone tiles. Bastard bailiff – seized whatever he could get his filthy hands on. My poor father. Lost everything. Except the few pieces I rescued. With Malcolm’s help, in the old van. Bailiff never found out. What a good friend was Malcolm Saldanha. Sad, he and I did not keep in touch. A true friend. Like Major Bilimoria used to be.
The last name made Gustad shake his head. That bloody Bilimoria. After the shameless way he behaved, he had a nerve, writing now to ask for a favour, as though nothing had happened. He could wait till his dying day for a reply. Gustad pushed the Major’s audacious letter out of his mind, it threatened to disrupt the well-ordered darkness. Once again, the furniture from his childhood gathered comfortingly about him. The pieces stood like parentheses around his entire life, the sentinels of his sanity.
He heard the metal flap of the mail slot lift and, almost simultaneously, discerned the white outline of the newspaper as it slid into the room. Still he sat, unmoving: let the man pass, no need for him to know I am waiting. Why he did this, he could not say.
When the bicycle pedalled away, all was quiet again. Gustad switched on the light and put on his glasses. He ignored the grim headlines about Pakistan, barely glanced at the half-naked mother weeping with a dead child in her arms. The photo caption, which he did not stop to read because the picture looked the same as the others that had appeared regularly in the past few weeks, was about soldiers using Bengali babies for bayonet practice. He turned to the inside page, the one which listed the Indian Institute of Technology’s entrance exam results. He laid the page flat on the dining-table. From the sideboard he fetched the little piece of paper with Sohrab’s roll number, checked, and went to wake Dilnavaz.