Tales From Firozsha Baag

Lend Me Your Light

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.

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 neighbours 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?”

“What, Nariman Uncle?”

“He was deported on the very next plane, of course. Never did find out where the girls were.”

Good old Nariman Uncle. He would never stop telling his tales. We finally parted, and as he pulled out of the compound in his old Mercedes-Benz, someone called my name from the ground floor of A Block. It was Rustomji-the-curmudgeon, skulking in the shadows and waiting for Nariman to leave. He shook my hand and gruffly wished me well.

But as I slept on my last night in Bombay a searing pain in my eyes woke me up. It was one o’clock. I bathed my eyes and tried to get back to sleep. Half-jokingly, I saw myself as someone out of a Greek tragedy, guilty of the sin of hubris for seeking emigration out of the land of my birth, and paying the price in burnt-out eyes: I, Tiresias, blind and throbbing between two lives, the one in Bombay and the one to come in Toronto …

In the morning, Dr. Sidhwa arrived and said it was conjunctivitis, nothing very serious. But I would need some drops every four hours and protective dark glasses till the infection was gone. No charge, he said, because he was going to drop by anyway to say goodbye and good luck.

Just before noon came Najamai. She must have been saving herself for an auspicious chogeryoo. She sympathized about my eyes before bringing forth her portable celebration kit: a small silver thaali holding a garland, and a tiny cup for the vermilion. They were miniatures of her regular apparatus which was too heavy to lug around. She put the garland round my neck, made a large, bright red teelo on my forehead and hugged me several times: “Lots and lots of years you must live, see lots of life, study lots, earn lots, make us all very proud of you.”

Then Najamai succumbed to reminiscing: “Remember when you used to come upstairs with the meat? Such a good boy, always helping your mother. And remember how you used to kill rats, with your bat, even for me? I always used to think, how brave for such a small boy to kill rats with a bat. And one day you even ran after Francis with it! Oh, I’ll never forget that!”

She left, and Daddy found me a pair of dark glasses. And thus was spent my last day in Bombay, the city of all my days till then. The last glimpses of my bed, my broken cricket bat, the cracks in the plaster, the chest of drawers I shared with Percy till he went away to the small village, came through dark glasses; the neighbourhood I grew up in, with the chemist’s store (“Open Twenty-Four Hours”), the Irani restaurant, the sugar-cane juice vendor, the fruit-and-vegetable stall in Tar Gully, all of these I surveyed through dark glasses; the huddle of relatives at the airport, by the final barrier through which only ticket holders can pass, I waved to and saw one last time through dark glasses.

Tense with excitement I walked across the tarmac. The slight chill I felt was due to the gusting night winds, I convinced myself.

Then, eyes red with conjunctivitis, pocket bulging with the ridiculously large bottle of eye-drops, and mind confused by a thousand half formed thoughts and doubts, I boarded the aircraft sitting white and roaring upon the concrete. I tried to imagine Mummy and Daddy on the visitors’ gallery, watching me being swallowed up into its belly, I imagined them consoling each other and fighting back the tears (as they had promised me they would) while I vanished into the night.

After almost a year in Toronto I received a letter from Jamshed. From New York — a very neat missive, with an elegant little label showing his name and address. He wrote that he’d been to Bombay the previous month because in every single letter his mother had been pestering him to visit: “While there, I went to Firozsha Baag and saw your folks. Glad to hear you left India. But what about Percy? Can’t understand what keeps him in that dismal place. He refuses to accept reality. All his efforts to help the farmers will be in vain. Nothing ever improves, just too much corruption. It’s all part of the ghati mentality. I offered to help him immigrate if he ever changes his mind. I’ve got a lot of contacts now, in New York. But it’s up to him to make up his mind,” and on and on.

Finally: “Bombay is horrible. Seems dirtier than ever, and the whole trip just made me sick. I had my fill of it in two weeks and was happy to leave!” He ended with a cordial invitation to New York.

What I read was only the kind of stuff I would have expected in a letter from Jamshed. That was the way we all used to talk in Bombay. Still, it irritated me. It was puzzling that he could express so much disdain and discontentment even when he was no longer living under those conditions. Was it himself he was angry with, for not being able to come to terms with matters as Percy had? Was it because of the powerlessness that all of us experience who, mistaking weakness for strength, walk away from one thing or another?

I started a most punctilious reply to his letter. Very properly, I thanked him for visiting my parents and his concern for Percy. Equally properly, I reciprocated his invitation to New York with one to Toronto. But I did not want to leave it at that. It sounded as if I was agreeing with him about Percy and his work, and about India.

So instead, I described the segment of Toronto’s Gerrard Street known as Little India. I promised that when he visited, we would go to all the little restaurants there and gorge ourselves with bhelpuri, panipuri, balata-wada, kulfi, as authentic as any in Bombay; then we could browse through the shops selling imported spices and Hindi records, and maybe even see a Hindi movie at the Naaz Cinema. I often went to Little India, I wrote; he would be certain to have a great time.

The truth is, I have been there just once. And on that occasion I fled the place in a very short time, feeling extremely ill at ease and ashamed, wondering why all this did not make me feel homesick or at least a little nostalgic. But Jamshed did not have to know any of it. My letter must have told him that whatever he suffered from, I did not share it. For a long time afterwards I did not hear from him.

My days were always full. I attended evening classes at the University of Toronto, desultorily gathering philosophy credits, and worked during the day. I became a member of the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario. Hoping to meet people from Bombay, I also went to the Parsi New Year celebrations and dinner.

The event was held at a community centre rented for the occasion. As the evening progressed it took on, at an alarming rate, the semblance of a wedding party at Bombay’s Cama Garden, with its attendant sights and sounds and smells, as we Parsis talked at the top of our voices, embraced heartily, drank heartily, and ate heartily. It was Cama Garden refurbished and modernized, Cama Garden without the cluster of beggars waiting by the entrance gate for the feast to end so they could come in and claim the dustbins.

My membership in the Society led to dinner invitations at Parsi homes. Many of the guests at these gatherings were not the type who would be regulars at Little India, but who might go there with the air of tourists, equipped with a supply of ohs and aahs for ejaculation at suitable moments, pretending to discover what they had always lived with.

These were people who knew all about the different airlines that flew to Bombay. These were the virtuosi of transatlantic travel. If someone inquired of the most recent traveller, “How was your trip to India?” another would be ready with “What airline?” The evening would then become a convention of travel agents expounding on the salient features of their preferred carriers.

After a few such copiously educational evenings, I knew what the odds were of my luggage getting lost if I travelled airline A. The best food was served on airline B. Departures were always delayed with airline C (the company had a ghati sense of time and punctuality, they said). The washrooms were filthy and blocked up on airline D (no fault of airline D, they explained, it was the low class of public that travelled on it).

Of Bombay itself the conversation was restricted to the shopping they’d done. They brought back tales of villainous shopkeepers who tried to cheat them because they sensed that here was the affluence of foreign exchange: “Very cunning, they all are. God knows how, but they are able to smell your dollars before you even open your wallet. Then they try to fool you in the way they fool all the other tourists. I used to tell them” — this, in broken Hindi — “ ‘go, go, what you thinking, I someone new in Mumbai? I living here thirty years, yes thirty, before going phoren.’ Then they would bargain sensibly.”

Others told of the way they had made a shrewd deal with shopkeepers who did not know the true value of brass and copper artifacts and knick-knacks, what did bloody ghatis know about such things anyway. These collectors of bric-a-brac, self-appointed connoisseurs of art and antiques, must have acquired their fancies along with their immigration visas.

But their number was small. And though they were as earnest about their hobbies as the others were, they never quite succeeded in holding the gathering transfixed the way the airline clique managed to. Art was not as popular as airlines were at these evenings.

Six months after Jamshed’s trip to Bombay, I received a letter from my brother Percy. Among other things, he wrote about his commitment in the small village:

Our work with the farmers started successfully. They got interest-free loans in the form of seed and fertilizer, which we purchased wholesale, and for the first time in years they did not have to borrow from those bloodthirsty money-lenders.

Ever since we got there the money-lenders hated us. They tried to persuade us to leave, saying that what we were doing was wrong because it was upsetting the delicate balance of village life and destroying tradition. We in turn pointed out things like exploitation, usury, inhumanity, and other abominations whose time was now up. We may have sounded like bold knights-errant, but they turned to threats and said it would soon become so unhealthy for us that we would leave quickly enough.

One day when we were out visiting a loan applicant, a farmer brought news that a gang of thugs wielding sticks and cudgels was waiting at the hut — our office and residence. So we stayed the night with the loan applicant and, in the morning, escorted by a band of villagers who insisted on coming along, started for our hut. But all we found were smouldering embers. It had been razed to the ground during the night, and no one had dared interfere.

Now we’re back in Bombay, and Navjeet and I are working on a plan for our return. We’ve spoken to several reporters, and the work is getting much publicity. We’re also collecting fresh donations, so that when we go back we won’t fail for lack of funds.

Having read this far, I put down the letter for a moment. There you were, my brother, waging battles against corruption and evil, while I was watching sitcoms on my rented Granada TV. Or attending dinner parties at Parsi homes to listen to chit-chat about airlines and trinkets. And it was no use wishing that we had talked more to each other about our hopes and visions and dreams. I thought of our schooldays, trying to locate the point when the gulf had appeared between us. Did it grow bit by bit or suddenly happen one morning? I cannot remember, but it did throw everything into silence and secrecy.

The rest of the letter concerned Jamshed’s visit to Bombay six months ago:

I wish he’d stayed away, if not from Bombay then at least from me. At best, the time I spent with him was a waste. I expected that we would look at things differently, but was not prepared for the crassly materialistic boor that he’s turned into. To think he was my “best friend” in school.

No doubt he believes the highlight of his visit came when he took some of us to dinner at the Rendezvous — nothing but the most expensive, of course. It was a spectacle to surpass anything he’d done so far. He reminded us to eat and drink all we wanted without minding the prices and enjoy ourselves as much as we could, because we wouldn’t get such a chance again, at least, not until his next visit.

When the soup came he scolded the waiter that it was cold and sent it back. The rest of us sat silent and embarrassed. He looked at us nonchalantly, explaining that this was the only way to handle incompetence; Indians were too meek and docile, and should learn to stand up for their rights the way people do in the States.

We were supposed to be impressed by his performance, for we were in an expensive restaurant where only foreign tourists eat on the strength of their U.S. dollars. And here was one of our own, not intimidated within the walls of the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel. In our school-days we could only stand outside and watch the foreigners come and go, wondering what opulent secrets lay inside, what comforts these fair-skinned superior beings enjoyed. Here was one of our own showing us how to handle it all without feeling a trace of inferiority, and now we were ashamed of him.

We spent the evening watching Jamshed in disbelief, in silence, which he probably thought was due to the awesome splendour of our surroundings.

I was determined not to see him again, not even when he came to say goodbye on the day of his departure, and I don’t intend to meet him when he visits Bombay the next time …

As I finished reading, I felt that my brother had been as irritated by Jamshed’s presence as I had been by Jamshed’s letter six months ago. But I did not write this to Percy. After all, I was planning to be in Bombay in four or five months. We could talk then. In just four months I would complete two years in Canada — long enough a separation, I supposed with a naive pomposity, to have developed a lucidity of thought which I would carry back with me and bring to bear on all of India’s problems.

Soon it was time to go shopping for gifts. I packed chocolates, cheeses, jams, jellies, puddings, cake mixes, panty hose, stainless steel razor blades — all the items I used to see displayed in the stalls of the smugglers along Flora Fountain, always priced out of reach. I felt like one of those soldiers who, in wartime, accumulates strange things to use as currency for barter. What was I hoping to barter them for? Attention? Gratitude? Balm to soothe guilt or some other malady of the conscience? I wonder now. And I wonder more that I did not wonder then about it.

The suitcase I had come with proved insufficient. And although I bought a new one, an extra leather strap around each seemed wise, for they were both swelled to threatening dimensions.

Then, arms still sore from the typhoid and cholera inoculations, luggage bursting at the seams with a portable grocery store, and mind suffused with groundless optimism, I boarded the plane.

The aircraft was losing height in preparation for landing. The hard afternoon sun revealed the city I was coming back to after two years. When the plane had taken off two years ago, it had been in the dark of night, and all I saw from the sky through shaded and infected eyes were the airport lights of Santa Cruz. But now it was daytime, and I was not wearing dark glasses. I could see the parched land: brown, weary, and unhappy.

A few hours earlier the aircraft had made its scheduled landing in London, and the view from the air had been lush, everywhere green and hopeful. It enraged me as I contrasted it with what I was now seeing. Gone was the clearness with which I’d promised myself I would look at things. All that was left was a childish and helpless reaction. “It’s not fair!” I wanted to stamp my foot and shout, “it’s just not fair!”

Construction work was under way at the airport. The van transporting passengers from the aircraft to the terminal building passed improvised dwellings of corrugated metal, cardboard, packing crates, plastic sheets, even newspaper.

The van was reduced to a crawl in the construction zone. A few naked children emerged from the corrugated metal and cardboard and ran to keep up with us, screaming for money. When they came dangerously close to the van, the driver screamed back. On board was a group of four businessmen, and three of them tossed some change out the window. They sounded Australian. The fourth was the seasoned traveller, and the others hung on every word he said. He warned them, “If you try that when you’re on the street, you’ll create something like a bloody feeding frenzy of sharks.” The children fell far behind when the construction zone ended and the van picked up speed.

Bombay seemed dirtier than ever. I remembered what Jamshed had written in his letter, and how it had annoyed me, but now I couldn’t help thinking he was right. Hostility and tension seemed to be perpetually present in buses, shops, trains. It was disconcerting to discover I’d become unused to it. Now I knew what soldiers must experience in the trenches after a respite far behind the lines.

As if enacting a scene for my benefit with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play, a crowd clawed its way into a local train. All the players were there: Fate and Reality, and the latter’s offspring, the New Reality, and also Poverty and Hunger, Virtue and Vice, Apathy and Corruption.

The drama began when the train, Reality, rolled into the station. It was overcrowded because everyone wanted to get on it: Virtue, Vice, Apathy, Corruption, all of them. Someone, probably Poverty, dropped his plastic lunch bag amidst the stampede, nudged on by Fate. Then Reality rolled out of the station with a gnashing and clanking of its metal, leaving in its wake the New Reality. And someone else, probably Hunger, matter-of-factly picked up Poverty’s mangled lunch, dusted off a chapan which had slipped out of the trampled bag, and went his way. In all of this, was there a lesson for me? To trim my expectations and reactions to things, trim them down to the proper proportions?

I wasn’t sure, but when I missed my bus an old instinctive impulse returned: to dash after it, to leap and join the crowd already hanging from the door rail. In the old days I would have been off and running. I used to pride my agility at this manoeuvre. After all, during rush hour it was the only way to catch a bus, or you’d be left at the bus-stop with the old and the feeble.

But while the first flush of confidence flowed through me, the bus had moved well into the stream of traffic. My momentary hesitation gave the game away. With the old and feeble was my place, as long as I was a tourist here, and not committed to life in the combat zone.

In Firozsha Baag things were still roughly the same, but Mrs. Mody had died, and no one knew what Pesi was doing now. In fact, ever since he had been sent away to boarding-school some years ago, Pesi’s doings were not spoken of at all. My friend Viraf of A Block, whom I had been unable to say goodbye to two years ago because he was away in Kharagpur studying at the Indian Institute of Technology, was absent for my hello as well. He did not return to Bombay because he had found a job in nearby Calcutta.

Tehmina had at last rid herself of the cataracts. She was suddenly very spry, very sure of herself in all she did. Along with her cataracts she had also jettisoned her old slippers and duster-coat. Her new ensemble consisted of a long, flowing floral-patterned kaftan and a smart pair of chappals with little heels that rang out her presence on the stairs and in the hallway.

But Najamai had aged considerably. She kept asking me why I had not yet been to see her daughters even though she had given me their addresses: Vera was somewhere in Alberta, and Dolly in British Columbia.

My brother, Percy, wrote from the small village that he wanted to meet me, but: “I cannot come to Bombay right now because I’ve received a letter from Jamshed. He’s flying in from New York, and has written about reunions and great times for all the old crowd. That’s out of the question as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to see him again.”

I wrote back saying I understood.

Our parents were disappointed. They had been so happy that the whole family would be together again for a while. And now this. They could not understand why Percy did not like Jamshed any more, and I’m sure at the back of their minds they thought their son envied his friend because of the fine success he’d made of himself in America. But who was I to explain things, and would they understand even if I tried? They truly believed that Jamshed was the smart young fellow, and Percy the idealist who forgot that charity begins at home.

This trip was not turning out to be anything I’d hoped it would. Jamshed was coming and Percy wasn’t, our parents were disappointed with Percy, I was disappointed with them, and in a week I would be flying out of Bombay, confused and miserable. I could feel it already.

Without any destination in mind I left the house and took the first empty bus to come along. It went to Flora Fountain. The offices were now closing for the day. The dirty, yellow-grey buildings would soon spill out typists and clerks and peons into a swelling stream surging towards bus-stops and train stations.

Roadside stalls were open for business. This would be their busy hour. They were lined up along the edge of the pavement, displaying their merchandise. Here a profusion of towels and napkins from shocking pink to peacock green; there, the clatter and gleam of pots and pans; further down, a refreshment stall selling sizzling sarnosas and ice-cold sherbet.

The pavement across the road was the domain of the smugglers with their stalls of foreign goods. But they did not interest me, I stayed where I was. One man was peddling an assortment of toys. He demonstrated them all in turn, calling out, “Baba play and baby play! Daddy play and Mummy play!” Another, with fiendish vigour, was throwing glass bowls to the ground, yelling: “Un-ber-rakable! Un-ber-rakable!”

Sunlight began to fade as I listened to the hawkers singing their tunes. Kerosene lamps were lit in some of the stalls, punctuating at random the rows on both sides of the street.

Serenely I stood and watched. The disappointment which had overcome me earlier began to ebb. All was fine and warm within this moment after sunset when the lanterns were lit, and I began to feel a part of the crowds which were now flowing down Flora Fountain. I walked with them.

Suddenly, a hand on my shoulder made me turn around. It was Jamshed. “Bet you weren’t expecting to see me in Bombay.”

“Actually, I was. Percy wrote you were coming.” Then I wished I hadn’t volunteered this bit of information.

But there was no need to worry about awkward questions regarding Percy. For Jamshed, in fine fettle, had other thoughts he was anxious to share.

“So what are you doing here? Come shopping?” he asked jokingly, indicating the little stalls with a disdainful sweep of his hand. “Terrible, isn’t it, the way these buggers think they own the streets — don’t even leave you enough room to walk. The police should drive them off, break up their bloody stalls, really.”

He paused. I wondered if I should say something. Something that Percy would love to hear me say. Like: these people were only trying to earn a meagre living by exercising, amidst a paucity of options, this one; at least they were not begging or stealing. But I didn’t have a chance.

“God, what a racket! Impossible to take even a quiet little walk in this place. I tell you, I’ll be happy when it’s time to catch my plane back to New York.”

It was hopeless. It was his letter all over again, the one he’d written the year before from New York. He had then temporarily disturbed the order I was trying to bring into my new life in Toronto, and I’d struck back with a letter of my own. But this time I just wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible. Before he made the peace of mind I was reaching out for dissipate, become forever unattainable.

Suddenly, I understood why Percy did not want to meet him again — he, too, sensed and feared Jamshed’s soul-sapping presence.

Around us, all the pavement stalls were immersed in a rich dusk. Each one was now lit by a flickering kerosene lantern. What could I say to Jamshed? What would it take, I wondered, to light the lantern in his soul?

He was waiting for me to speak. I asked, perfunctorily, how much longer he would be in Bombay.

“Another week. Seven whole days, and they’ll go so slowly. But I’ll be dropping in at Firozsha Baag in a couple of days, tell Percy.” We walked to my bus-stop. A beggar tugged at his sleeve and he mechanically reached in his pocket for change. Then we said good-night.

On the bus I thought about what to say if he asked me, two days later, why I hadn’t mentioned that Percy was not coming.

As it turned out, I did not have to say anything.

Late next evening, Percy came home unexpectedly. I rushed to greet him, but his face revealed that he was not returning in this manner to give us a pleasant surprise. Something was dreadfully wrong. His colour was ashen. He was frightened and shaken, and struggled to retain his composure. He tried to smile as he shook my hand limply, but could not muster the effort to return my hug.

“What’s the matter?” said Mother. “You don’t look well.”

Silently, Percy sat down and began to remove his shoes and socks. After a while he looked up and said, “They killed Navjeet.”

No one spoke for the next few minutes. Percy sat with his socks dangling from his hands, looking sad, tired, defeated.

Then Mummy rose and said she would make tea. Over tea, he told us what had happened. Slowly, reluctantly at first, then faster, in a rush, to get the remembering and telling over with as soon as possible. “The money-lenders were ready to make trouble for us again. We didn’t think they’d do anything as serious as the last time. The press was following our progress and had reported the arson in many newspapers. Yesterday we were out at the wholesaler’s. Ordering seed for next year. But Navjeet had stayed behind. He was working on the accounts. When we returned he was lying unconscious. On the floor. His face and head were bleeding badly. We carried him to the makeshift clinic in the village — there is no hospital. The doctor said there was severe internal damage — massive head injuries — a few hours later he was dead.”

There was silence again. Perhaps when we were together later, sharing our old room again, Percy would talk to me. But he lay on his bed in the darkness, wide awake, staring silently at the ceiling, tracing its old familiar cracks as I was, by the hints of streetlights straying through the worn curtains. Was there nothing to say? There had to be something I could do to help.

Strangely enough, it was Jamshed who provided this something the next day.

When he arrived in the evening, he presented Mummy with a box of chocolates and some cheese triangles. She asked him how he’d been enjoying his trip so far. He replied, true to form, “Oh Auntie, I’m tired of this place, really. The dust and heat and crowds — I’ve had enough of it.” And Mummy nodded sympathetically.

Soon, the moment Percy had been dreading was at hand. Mummy asked him to narrate, for Jamshed’s benefit, the events which had brought him home so suddenly. But Percy just shook his head, so she told the story herself.

When she finished, we shifted uneasily. What was next? But Jamshed could not contain himself. He heaved the sigh of the worldly-wise: “I told you from the beginning, all this was a waste of time and nothing would come of it, remember? Every time we met we would talk about it, and you used to make fun of me wanting to go abroad. But I still think the best thing for you is to move to the States. There is so much you could achieve there. There, if you are good at something, you are appreciated, and you get ahead. Not like here, where everything is controlled by uncle-auntie, and ….”

When Jamshed concluded his harangue, Percy calmly turned to Mummy and said in his quiet voice, “Could we have dinner right away? I have to meet my friends at eight o’clock. To decide our next move in the village!”

Five days later I was back in Toronto. I unpacked my suitcases, which were quite flat on the return trip and had not required the extra leather straps. I put my things away and displayed in the apartment the little knick-knacks bought in handicraft places and the Cottage Industries store.

Gradually, I discovered I’d brought back with me my entire burden of riddles and puzzles, unsolved. The whole sorry package was there, not lightened at all. The epiphany would have to wait for another time, another trip.

I mused, I gave way to whimsy: I Tiresias, throbbing between two lives, humbled by the ambiguities and dichotomies confronting me…

I thought of Jamshed and his adamant refusal to enjoy his trips to India, his way of seeing the worst in everything. Was he, too, waiting for some epiphany and growing impatient because, without it, life in America was bewildering? Perhaps the contempt and disdain which he shed was only his way of lightening his own load.

That Christmas, I received a card from Jamshed. The Christmas seal, postage stamp, address label were all neatly and correctly in place upon the envelope, like everything else about his surface existence. I put it down without opening it, wondering if this innocuous outer shell concealed more of his confusion, disdain, arrogance.

Later, I walked out of the apartment and down the hallway, and dropped the envelope down the chute of the garbage incinerator.