Tales From Firozsha Baag

The Paying Guests

Khorshedbai emerged from her room with a loosely newspapered package cradled in her arms. Then, as she had been doing every morning at eleven o’clock for the past four weeks, she began strewing its smelly contents over the veranda.

The veranda sat in the L of the flat’s two rooms. She was careful to let nothing fall by the door to her room. That she was on the ground floor of B Block, exposed to curious eyes passing in the compound, had not discouraged her for four weeks and did not discourage her now. None of the neighbours would interfere. Why, she did not know for certain. Perhaps out of respect for her grey hair. She also had the vague notion that praying every day at the agyaari had something to do with it.

Her work was methodical and thorough. She commenced with the window and its parapet, tossing onion skin, coconut husk, egg shells trailing gluey white, potato peelings, one strip of a banana skin, cauliflower leaves, and orange rind, all along the inside ledge. An eggshell rolled off. She picked it up and cracked it — there, that would keep it from falling — and replaced it on the parapet, between the coconut husk and potato peelings.

Pleased with her arrangement, Khorshedbai stepped to the door leading to the other room. Locked from the inside, as usual. The cowards. She draped the balance of the banana skin over the door handle, hung an elongated shred of fatty gristle from the knob, and scattered the remaining assorted peels and skins over the doorstep. The several bangles on her bony wrists tinkled softly: a delicate accompaniment while she worked over the veranda. Gentle though the sound was, it always annoyed her, announcing her presence like a cowbell. She pushed the bangles higher. Tight, around the forearms. To get rid of them without offending Ardesar would be such a comfort. The gold wedding bangle, encircling her wrist for forty years now, was the only one she cared for.

Khorshedbai reversed three paces and regarded her handiwork with satisfaction. Especially the length of gristle, which was pendulating gently with the weight of the bone at its extremity. Only one thing remained now. Collected from the pavement as an afterthought while returning from the agyaari, she hurled it against the locked door.

Dog faeces spattered the lower panel with a smack. Bits of it clung, the rest fell on the step. Behind the locked door Kashmira puzzled over the soft thud. She was alone with little Adil. The sound was quite different from the rustle and tinkle of the past four weeks, but she stayed where she was, behind the safety of the locked door. She could wait to find out what it was till Boman came home from work. Four weeks of calm and restrained littering had still not alleviated her fear that Khorshedbai would one day explode into an uncontrollable, shrieking madwoman. Or she could collapse into a whimpering mass of helplessness. If it did happen, Kashmira hoped it would be the latter.

Outside, Khorshedbai was delighted with the results. Had it dried up completely, it would not have stuck. But this was perfect. She crumpled up the newspaper and turned to leave, then stopped. Another afterthought — she raised her eyes heavenward in thanks and shredded the pages of The Indian Express into tiny pieces. She scattered them, tossed them, hither and thither, little paper medallions gently falling, to decorate the floor and window ledge and door. Traces of prance and glee crept into her step; she became a little girl indulging in forbidden fun. Strewing to the left and to the right, and up to the ceiling to watch it all float downward. The sari slipped off her head (she always kept her head covered) and the left shoulder (she deftly restored the fabric), and her bangles, having escaped the forearms to the freedom of the wrists, sounded louder, the fragile tinkles now a solid row of jingle-jangles.

From behind the locked door it sounded as though Khorshedbai had finally entered that long-feared state of frenzy, and Kashmira was worried. Khorshedbai could usually be controlled by Ardesar with his gentle voice of reason. She had heard him before, speaking so calmly and tenderly to his wife; it always brought a lump to Kashmira’s throat.

Ardesar had tried to dissuade Khorshedbai every day since she conceived of this scheme four weeks ago. That first morning, after tasting victory in the court case in which they had faced eviction, she woke up and said that Pestonji had given her a gift in the night. Whistling with his little red beak and fluttering his bright green wings in her dream, she said, he had revealed how to teach next door a lesson they would never forget. Ardesar had pleaded with her, but forty years of marriage should have taught him better. When Khorshed was resolved for fight and revenge nothing could stop her.

Now Ardesar could watch no more, after that nasty thing she hurled. Away, away from the door, away from this, this insane and filthy behaviour, he turned. Wringing his hands, he formed four words with his lips, over and over, in urgent supplication: Dada Ormuzd, forgive her. He paced the room in distress, stopping now and then to straighten and re-straighten the photoframes on the shelf. What was he to do? He could not question Pestonji’s dream-dictums without hurting his beloved Khotty. No, he could never do that. Besides, who was to say what dreams were all about, even scientists still knew so very little about the universe and its mysterious forces. He pulled out a chair as if to sit, then continued to pace. He repeatedly touched the bald spot on his head, fingered its peripheral strands, and tried to push the glasses (which had not strayed) up on his nose.

Khorshedbai curbed her frolic. She came in as the last little pieces of The Indian Express floated to the floor behind her. Ardesar took her arm, murmuring: “O Khotty my life, what have you done, that thing you threw. We will have to answer one day to The One Up There. This must stop before …”

She pulled away her arm and went to the empty parrot cage. With hands clasped before her chest and eyes closed she stood before it for a few moments, then turned to Ardesar. “They started it, why should we stop? Six months of court-and-lawyer nonsense. Eviction notices! Ha! He gives me eviction notices! With his ties and jackets, trying to be a sahib, and his good-mornings and good-evenings, thinks he is better than me.” Her hardness disappeared for a moment as she appealed to him pleadingly: “I was never this way before, was I?”

“But Khotty my life, that, that thing you threw! And you know it is their flat, they have a right to …”

“A right to what? Put us on the street? Don’t we have rights? At last to have a roof, eat a little daar-roteli, and finish our days in peace? No one will peck me to pieces, they better learn.”

“But we leave soon as the other place is vacant. Tell them, they are good people.”

“For you the whole world is good people.” Her gesture to encompass humanity tinkled the bangles again. She pushed them towards the elbows. “The other place is not ready. Might never be. Nothing is certain in life. Only birth, marriage, and death, my poor mother used to say. At our age you want to go begging again for rooms in dharmsaalas?”

“But that dirty, that thing …”

“That thing, that thing, that thing! Trembling in your pyjamas every day instead of helping. And if He did not want me to throw it, then why was it on the pavement outside the agyaari?. And why did He give me the idea? It is not easy to …”

Ardesar stopped listening. He did not mind Khorshedbai’s scolding. The uncertainty of things was worrying her. That was all. Besides, he was far away from this room now as he fed the pigeons flocking the wide pavements along Chaupatty beach, cooing to them as they played and nibbled in his hand, while the sound of the tide coming in offered a continuo to the occasional whirr of their gentle wings. Locked inside her room with little Adil, Kashmira heard the drone of Khorshedbai’s determined voice and Ardesar’s soft one for a long time. Sometimes she wished she could eavesdrop with greater clarity. After Boman came home she would unlock her door, they would clean up the mess as usual, then relax outside.

Kashmira needed at least one hour every evening on the veranda before going to bed. She said it felt like someone was choking her, after being cooped all day inside the one room where they had to cook and eat and sleep. But that was their own choice, made two years ago. They had given up the kitchen and decided to keep this room with its attached bathroom — the kitchen went with the other to the paying guests, in a natural division of the flat. She and Boman had agreed the bathroom was more important, what with little Adil’s soosoo problem at nights, and the second baby they had been planning. A kitchen they could do without, by partitioning and using one side of their room for cooking and dining. The veranda was common because the only entrance to the flat was through it.

The arrangement was awkward. But Boman said that no wife of his would go out to work while there was breath in his lungs. The paying guests would be temporary, two years at best, till he got his raises and they could again afford the full rent. That was Boman’s plan.

He laid it before Mr. Karani one evening in the compound when they were both returning from work. Boman admired the chartered accountant on the third floor immensely. He always took his advice in all manner of things. Not that he lacked confidence in himself, he just enjoyed discussions with a man who was a CA; there was something about those two letters, especially since Boman’s own studies had come to a halt after B.Com., when his father’s fortunes had failed.

Mr. Karani was full of dire forebodings. He warned that it was easier to get rid of a poisonous kaankhajuro which had crawled through your ear and nibbled its way to your brain than to evict a paying guest who had been allowed into your flat.

Boman was in a quandary. He had been looking for confirmation and support. Instead, he had run full tilt into contradiction and discouragement, and wished he had never spoken to Mr. Karani. This was the problem in taking the CA’S advice. If you disagreed with it, it sat inside you like a lump of incongenial food, noisily belligerent and causing indigestion.

For a few days, Mr. Karani’s warnings rumbled and growled and gnawed away at his plan, threatening it with disintegration, while Boman vacillated and went from extremes of confidence to extremes of uncertainty. Eventually, however, it turned out to be one of those rare instances when Boman ignored the CA’S advice. He went ahead with his plan and told Kashmira he had inserted an ad in the Jam-E-Jamshed.

It was soon answered. An appointment was made, the flat was shown, and both parties were agreeable.

Then followed one and a half years of cordial coexistence with the paying guests. Boman began to feel that, for once, Mr. Karani had been exaggerating. He was tempted to pull out the pedestal from under Mr. Karani.

But the year and a half of cordial coexistence sped by and concluded abruptly when Ardesar and Khorshedbai received the notice to vacate. This notice to vacate would have far-reaching effects. It would bring new experiences into all their lives: courts and courtrooms, sleepless nights filled with paeans to the rising sun, a sadistic nose-digging lawyer for Boman, veranda-sweeping for Kashmira, signs and portents in dreams for Khorshedbai, pigeons (real and imagined) for Ardesar, thick and suffocating incense clouds for Boman and Kashmira, and finally, a taxi for Ardesar and an ambulance for Khorshedbai.

Its immediate result, however, was to make Khorshedbai emphatically declare to Ardesar that no one would peck her to pieces. For most of her life, Khorshedbai had carried at the back of her mind an image. It was a flock of crows pecking and tearing to shreds some dead creature lying in a gutter. At times the corpse was a kitten, at other times a puppy; sometimes it was even another crow. Whether she ever witnessed something of this sort or whether the image just grew out of various life experiences into a guiding metaphor, during times of adversity she would clench her teeth and repeat to herself that no one was going to peck her to pieces, she would fight back.

It was a year and a half ago that the paying guests had moved in with their meagre possessions: two trunks, one holdall, a hefty parrot cage (empty and still bearing the former occupant’s name: Pestonji Poputt), a wind-up gramophone, and one record: Sukhi Sooraj, a song of praise for the morning sun, its brittle 78-rpm shellac protected between soft sari layers in one of the trunks.

In those days, the two rooms did not stay locked. Khorshedbai would peek inside, wave to little Adil, and inquire how he was getting along. Sometimes Kashmira looked in on the elderly couple to ask if they needed anything. She noticed that two second-hand chairs and a small folding table had been added. On the table stood the cage of the deceased or disappeared Pestonji. Once, she saw Khorshedbai before the empty cage, gazing at the little swing inside. She felt a pang of compassion for the dear grey-haired lady, and imagined the burden of memories weighing heavily upon Khorshedbai’s old shoulders as she stood and remembered her beloved pet. Khorshedbai beckoned her in, viced her arm in bony fingers, and said; “So sweet, Pestonji’s whistle was, and so true.” He still appeared in her dreams when there was trouble, she said, and communicated the future in whistles she alone could interpret.

That night when Kashmira told Boman all about it, he said the old lady definitely had at least one loose screw somewhere in the upper storey.

Minor irritants between the two parties were easily taken care of. Khorshedbai requested sole use of the veranda for her morning prayers. And she did not want Kashmira to emerge during her monthly. Boman and Kashmira agreed amusedly. Khorshedbai rose at five A.M. each day and, after brushing her teeth, unmuzzled her gramophone for Sukhi Sooraj, the fervent tribute to sunrise. As part of the mutual consideration pact, Boman and Kashmira requested that it not be played till after seven o’clock.

Khorshedbai soon became a familiar sight in the building. To and from her way to the agyaari or the bazaar, and sometimes, hand in hand with Ardesar, off to feed the pigeons at Chaupatty beach. Gradually, stories reached Kashmira’s ears about the elderly couple, and how they came to be homeless at their age. Najamai from C Block stopped by whenever she uncovered something new from her numerous sources. She was concerned that Boman and Kashmira had taken strangers into their flat. So what if they too were Parsis, these days you could trust no one. It was one lesson she had learned, she said, after the murder in the fire-temple, when the dustoorji had been stabbed to death by a chasniwalla employed there. Thus Najamai made it her bounden responsibility to make known the truth, but was not really successful.

In one version, it was the result of a family feud; many years ago Ardesar had sworn never to set foot in his father’s house as long as a certain person lived there. Although soft-spoken Ardesar swearing to do or not do anything was highly improbable.

Another story went that something quite shameful had come to pass between Khorshedbai and one unnamed male occupant, a relative of Ardesar’s, and they had had no choice but to pack up and leave after the affair. But here again it was impossible to imagine prim, agyaari-going Khorshedbai with sari-covered head in any kind of liaison.

Yet another tale, and the saddest of them all, had it that the couple, after a long and arduous life of working and scrimping and saving, had managed to educate and send their only son to Canada. Some years later he sponsored them. So they got rid of their flat and went, only to find he was not the son they once knew; after a period of misery and ill-treatment at his hands they returned to Bombay, homeless and heartbroken.

Kashmira did not pay much attention to these stories. But sometimes, when she picked up the mail dropped on the veranda by the postman, she would see a letter for Ardesar and Khorshedbai from Canada. The cruel son? The return address had the same last name. But if they were mistreated in Canada, returning to Bombay made no sense. Especially since there was no flat. Sons could be ungrateful, yes, but you could not run away from it. Better to remain where at least the food and air and water were good.

Kashmira would hand over the letter with a remark about the pretty foreign stamp, hoping to elicit a comment, perhaps a clue to the writer’s identity. All Khorshedbai ever said was thanks, then she took her arm and led her in beside the cage, to tell more about the life of Pestonji.

When the doctor said yes, Kashmira was pregnant, Boman thought it was time to use the whole flat again. With two children they would need both rooms.

One day, soon after the glad tidings, he stopped Mr. Karani in the compound. More out of habit than anything else, he wanted to discuss the best way of making the paying guests leave.

“Boman dikra, what shall I tell you?” said Mr. Karani, shaking his head sorrowfully, “whatever advice can I give? If there was a kaankhajuro inside your skull, gnawing through your brain, I could say: hold a smelly chunk of mutton beside your ear, that will tempt it to come racing out on its one hundred legs. But what can I tell you about paying guests? To get rid of that problem there is no remedy except death.”

Mr. Karani went on in this way for a while, and when he felt that Boman had suffered enough, suggested he go to see the trustees of Firozsha Baag.

But there was to be no help from that quarter.

Boman sought out the one to whom he had slipped an expensive envelope one and a half years ago for the favour of turning the trustees’ collective blind eye (a delicate organ, but nurtured to operate without hindrance of ruth or compassion) upon the arrival of paying guests in the ground floor of B Block. Impossible, the oily man said. He spoke without relinquishing the look of grave concern (practised for several years) that proclaimed: here I stand, a pillar of the community, ready to help the poor and the needy at any hour of the day or night. Impossible, he repeated, there could not be paying guests living in any flat of Firozsha Baag, it was against the policy, Boman had to be mistaken; either that, or Boman had broken the rules.

Boman left. He turned to his brother-in-law Rustomji in A Block. Rustomji was a lawyer, he would have something sensible to say for sure. Boman had always sized up Kashmira’s brother as a tough, no-nonsense kind of person, and surely that was the individual to talk to in this tricky situation.

“Saala ghéla!” vociferated Rustomji. “Worst bloody thing you have done, taking paying guests. Where had your brain gone, committing such foolishness? You should have asked me before taking them in, now what is the use. First you are setting a fire, then running to dig the well.” Boman waited meekly, murmuring: “That’s true, that’s true.” The impassioned outburst had to be suffered patiently when you wanted tough, no-nonsense advice for free.

Then Boman told him about his meeting with the trustee. It gave Rustomji the appropriate opportunity for some harmless spleen-venting. “Arre, those rascals won’t give a glass of water to a thirsty man. In their office, their chairs don’t need cushions because they have piles of trust money squeezed under their arses.” Rustomji thrust his hands behind and upwards, and Boman, laughing appreciatively, said: “That’s too good, yaar, too good!”

Rustomji enjoyed compliments; he continued.

“Four years ago when my WC was leaking, saala thieves took five weeks to repair it. Every day my poor Mehroo would phone, and some bloody bugger would say, today or tomorrow, for sure. For five weeks I had to go next door to Hirabai Hansotia every morning. Finally I sent them such a stiff letter, it must have sizzled their arses. Repairing was done double-quick.” Boman gave him one of his awe-and-admiration looks.

It paid off. Rustomji now came to what Boman was waiting for. “Legal channels are what you should follow, make the court work for you,” said he. “It will not be easy, mark my words, tenancy laws are such. But if you are lucky it will not get that far. A lawyer’s letter might be enough to scare them out. Sometimes a lawyer’s letter gives the best laxative.” He wrote down the name of one who specialized in tenancy law.

When Kashmira learned of the procedure they would follow, she did not like it at all. She wanted to invite the paying guests for tea, announce the good news, then discuss the room. The baby would not be here for another seven months. She could look in the Jam-E-Jamshed columns and help them find another place. As Boman himself had said, between the two they must have easily scored more than a century. It would be hard moving again at their age, they could use her assistance.

Once, Kashmira’s devout ambition was to do some kind of social work. Rustomji had been able to indulge a similar desire years ago by joining the Social Service League at St. Xavier’s College, and had eventually worked it out of his system. In recent times he had laboured hard to build up his reputation for hard-heartedness and apathy which, he made no bones about expressing, were essential for survival. But when her time came, Kashmira was not allowed to join the SSL because boys and girls went on work-camps together, and all kinds of stories were told about what went on there between the sexes. She had to repeatedly listen to her parents and her brother say things like: charity begins at home, or: self-help is the best help, which made no sense to her then or now.

Boman said inviting the paying guests to tea was out of the question. These days human nature was such that courtesy was usually misinterpreted as weakness. Better to do it firmly and officially, through proper channels, with a lawyer’s letter telling them to vacate in two months.

When the paying guests received the notice, Khorshedbai immediately and emphatically declared that no one would peck her to pieces. Then she told Ardesar that it was no surprise, she knew it was coming. Pestonji had recently appeared in a dream, and his cage had been nowhere in sight. Frantically beating his clipped wings, he had flopped around the veranda from corner to corner, squawking pitifully, and it had taken a long time to comfort him.

Ardesar wanted to tell Boman there was no need for lawyers and notices. They just needed a little time. But Khorshedbai forbade him. She saw beaks getting ready to peck, and was going to give them a fight, that was all. Standing before the cage, she set the swing going with her finger. “Prayerful people like us have nothing to fear,” she said, and swayed with the to-and-fro rocking of the swing.

Six months of futile and wearying procedures then began. The lawyer Rustomji had recommended was a sadistic little tub of a fellow who dug his nose insolently in the presence of his clients. It delighted him to see Boman writhe in anxiety as he told him about the laws regarding tenancy and sub-tenancy, and how difficult it was to prove extreme hardship and evict someone.

“There are laws to protect the poor,” Boman said bitterly after he got home, “and laws to protect the rich. But middle-class people like us get the bamboo, all the way.”

“Chhee! Don’t talk like that!” said Kashmira, intolerant of dirty speech. Clothes and language were two things in which she insisted on cleanliness. In other matters she let Boman have his way. During happier times, she had allowed him to do things which would have horrified her had they been described in words. How Boman yearned for those nights again. When he would reach out his hand in the darkness after little Adil had fallen asleep, and she would turn her soft, warm body towards him, and know exactly what to do. Darkness was all she required, and silence: silence of words — other sounds, such as moans and whimpers, she did not mind, in fact they even excited her, of that he was certain.

Kashmira continued with bitterness: “If you had let me get a job instead, none of this would ever have happened.” Boman, turning over those night-time moments of ecstasy within his memory, smiled wistfully, and she did not understand why.

The weeks during which Khorshedbai littered in the morning and Kashmira swept in the evening commenced following the day of the final courthouse appearance. That day saw Kashmira enter the eighth month of her pregnancy. It saw Pestonji flutter his way again into Khorshedbai’s dreams. And it saw the end of Boman’s futile and wearying procedures to secure the eviction.

Boman had not foreseen a complete defeat. At most, on grounds of compassion, a longer notice period. He had spent the last few weeks returning utmost courtesy for Khorshedbai’s daily vituperation, displaying the grace and generosity only the victor can afford, and which, in his mind, he already was.

When the verdict came it crushed him. And to see Boman humbled emboldened Khorshedbai. A brave front might have kept her vengeance within reasonable limits of decency, but brave fronts were now beyond Boman.

That day, Khorshedbai and Ardesar went directly from the courthouse to the agyaari, and made an offering of a ten-rupee sandalwood log instead of the regular fifty-paise stick. She was ebullient by the time they reached home. She washed and wiped the photoframes containing the moustached and pugreed countenances of her forefathers on the Other Side, as well as the cage, and filled fresh water in the drinking pan. Then, all evening long she lit sticks of agarbatti before the photoframes and cage, wreathing her departed ones in a fog thicker than the one they must have encountered when crossing Chinvad Bridge to the Other Side.

The heavy incense began to spread. It strayed into the other room and nauseated Kashmira and Boman. It filled their pots and pans and destroyed their appetites; lingered over bedsheets and slunk inside pillowcases; slipped through the slats and squatted under their bed. The relentless and pungent scent insinuated itself into their eyes and noses, and swam boldly through their skulls, muddling their minds and curdling their senses, until Khorshedbai had taken possession of their flat and their beings. Little Adil complained about the smell too. They calmed him down and put him to bed early, then retired, nursing headaches and shame and disappointment.

But Khorshedbai denied them the balm of sleep. When silence had fallen beyond the wall, she wound up her gramophone. She pointed the horn towards the region where the beds would be on the other side, and played the only record that she possessed. The only record, as she told Ardesar whenever he wanted to augment the collection, that anyone need possess. The strains of Sukhi Sooraj, the stridulant paean to the rising sun, borne on the vocal cords of the shrill woman buried in the crackling, hissing grooves of the 78’s shellac, journeyed beyond the wall and into the darkness where Boman and Kashmira had sought refuge. They clung together, helpless, soothing each other’s pain through repeated playings.

Then the horn was folded away. The last sticks of agarbatti smouldered into diminutive tapers. And when Khorshedbai finally felt sleep overpowering her, she struggled against it, unwilling to let the day’s blessed events cease their circuit of her mind. Such were her stars, though, that when sleep did triumph, it only brought more joy. Pestonji visited, and whistled, and fluttered through her sleeping hours.

In the morning she remembered the dream distinctly: Pestonji was sitting in his large rectangular custom-built cage which, for some reason, was out on the veranda. She brought him peanuts. Pestonji proceeded to crack them methodically and thoroughly, then tossed the shells and nuts out of the cage. He threw them all out. Very surprising, because Pestonji had always been a neat and tidy parrot, he even did his potty in one corner of the cage only, never let fly haphazardly like others. Maybe he was not in the mood for peanuts. So she gave him two peppers. Long green ones. He did the same thing again. Tore them into little pieces, threw them across the length and breadth of the veranda.

It was only then that she understood Pestonji’s message.

And while she was preparing the first of her veranda parcels, guided by the divine afflatus from Pestonji, Boman awoke, his confidence renewed. He told Kashmira there was no need to worry, he would get rid of the paying guests one way or another. He whistled as he lingered over the selection of a tie. When the knot turned out perfect at the first attempt, his self-assurance was fully restored. He kissed Kashmira and left for work, urging her to continue with their locked-door policy. And in the evening he discovered Khorshedbai’s revenge scattered over the veranda.

Boman and Kashmira decided to pretend that nothing was wrong. They went out with a broom and dustpan. She swept away the garbage. He whistled as insouciantly as he could. She hummed along. He maintained a protective stance in the doorway. His tie and jacket gleamed like talismans of civility amidst Khorshedbai’s manufactured squalor. He always returned from work as crisp and neat as he left in the morning. Kashmira loved this about him, she used to say he made their room classy the minute he walked in; at night he would delay changing into pyjamas for as long as possible.

Khorshedbai watched with satisfaction through the crack in the door. The beaks lifted against her had been humbled and turned away without a single peck. She said to Ardesar, “Look at him standing chingo-mingo in his fancy dress, making his pregnant wife clean it.” Ardesar barely heard her. The pigeons were cooing and feeding from his hands, the occasional flutter of their wings fanning his face.

Days went by, then weeks. The veranda littering entered its second month, and Kashmira approached her ninth. She said, “What is going to happen now, Bomsi, how much longer?” He reassured her that he was making a plan.

“Not like the plan you made that time, I hope. Talking big, that you would scare them with a lawyer.”

“Don’t worry, Kashoo darling,” he soothed, “this one will be perfect.” He blamed her bitter reproach on the pregnancy. But the truth smarted.

That night he lay in bed unable to sleep. The paying guests were on his mind. Nowadays, it was the only thing he thought about. What was going to happen? He couldn’t admit there wasn’t a plan and upset her. He turned over on his right side and stretched out his legs. A few moments later he folded them up into his stomach. Still not comfortable. He straightened them again. It was no use. He turned over on his left side, rose on one elbow, and adjusted the pillow. Kashmira said to please lie quietly if he couldn’t sleep, and at least let her, she was worn out with the housework and the extra sweeping every evening, and it wouldn’t be long before five o’clock struck and Khorshedbai wound up her gramophone.

What Boman did not have a shred of before the case concluded, he now had in abundance: evidence to evict the paying guests. On grounds of extreme hardship, harassment, harmful influences, something like that — the odious lawyer had quoted sections and paragraphs, finger in nose. Now he needed some way to package it for presenting to the court. Witnesses, of course. Hardly anyone in Firozsha Baag was unaware of Khorshedbai’s doings on the veranda. Those who had not seen had at least heard of them. Those who wanted to see could walk past B Block at eleven o’clock.

He spoke to Mr. Karani first. Boman had expected more support from him during these difficult months. But each time they met, Mr. Karani, clutching his brief case and leaning on his umbrella, stood in the compound and droned on about the black market or the latest government swindle. The closest he let himself get to Boman’s domestic dilemma was when he politely inquired about Kashmira’s health.

Now Boman confronted him with his proposal.

“There is one principle in my life, Boman dikra,” said Mr. Karani, “which I never transgress: the three-monkeys principle.” He mimed, placing his hands over his eyes, ears, and mouth. “Besides,” he said, “the Mrs. would never let me be a witness. Ever since that tamaasha in the Baag about Jaakaylee and the ghost they saw, and the rubbish that people were talking about crazy ayah and crazy bai, she pinched her ears and swore, and made me do the same, to have nothing to do with these lowbreds and churls in Firozsha Baag.” Realizing what he’d just said, he embarrassedly patted Boman’s shoulder: “She didn’t mean you, of course, but it is a principle, you understand.” He winked and gave him the from-one-man-to-another look: “Always obey the Mrs. My motto is: be cowardly and be happy, try to be brave and you’re soon in the grave.”

Boman was bitterly disappointed. What bloody nonsense about the three-monkeys principle. Where did the monkeys go when he did his income tax, or helped his clients with theirs? Henpecked hypocrite. And selfish. But still a smart man, that Boman could not deny.

Next he tried Rustomji, who gruffly dismissed the suggestion as impossible: “Sorry, but enough time I spend in courtrooms, as it is.”

And Najamai said: “Me, a widow, living all alone, how can I go falling in the middle of a court lufraa?. And at my age making unnecessary enemies. No bawa, please forgive me, you will have to find someone else.” This refusal hurt the most. She had shown so much concern all along. And now this blunt answer.

It might have tempered Boman’s bitterness had he known that it would not be long now before Najamai would, in fact, become their saviour; that Najamai, with a beckon of her arm, would deliver them from the paying guests, from the fate worse than a brain-devouring kaankhajuro.

But in the meantime he spent his days exhausting the list of possible witnesses in the Baag. When he began making petitions to those who were as good as strangers, he realized he was reaching the end of hope. The one man who would have helped him, as surely as there was earth beneath and sky above, who had been worth more than all of B Block put together, and who had more goodness in his dried scabs of psoriasis than in the hearts of all these others, was long dead: the kind and noble Dr. Mody. And Mrs. Mody now lived a cloistered life, spending her days in prayer and seclusion. He had gone to see her a few times, but on each occasion she came to the door with her prayer book in her hands and beckoned him away, making vague sounds from behind tightly shut lips: parting them for profane speech would have rendered everything prayed up to that point useless.

There was someone who would be willing to speak in court, Boman knew: the Muslim who lived in the next flat. But desperate as Boman was, he would not stoop to that, to ask him to testify against a fellow Parsi.

The time for Kashmira’s confinement came. She checked into the Awabai Petit Lying-in Hospital. Khorshedbai continued with her eleven o’clock routine, dancing her dance of disorder to the tinkling of bangles. Now Boman would clean up each night after visiting Kashmira at the hospital, and to see him crouching with broom and dustpan made Khorshedbai wild with delight. She could not hold still at the crack of her door, and kept dragging Ardesar up to make him look, against his will, at how low the mighty had to bend despite tie and jacket.

Poor Ardesar cowered inside, ashamed, and worried for her soul. His happiest moments came when he fed the pigeons at Chaupatty beach. He spent a lot of time there these days, alone: now Khotty refused to go. They waddled around his feet as he moved into their midst. He stopped every now and then, standing perfectly still, to let them pick playfully at his shoelaces. It made him sigh contentedly to see the way their throats trembled when they made their soft cooing sounds. The pigeons were the best part of living in this flat near Chaupatty beach. In the end, the neighbours were willing to testify against the paying guests. There were so many volunteers that Boman could have picked and chosen. Even Mrs. Karani assured him that she would make Mr. Karani be a witness, whether he wanted to or not, three monkeys or no three monkeys, so outraged was she about what had happened.

But as it turned out, there was no need. The paying guests went quietly: Khorshedbai first, by ambulance, everyone knew where; then Ardesar, no one knew where, by taxi.

It happened soon after Kashmira returned from her confinement, determined not to spend her days behind locked doors with the new baby. Parturition had endowed her with fresh courage and strength. So she strolled out on the veranda whenever her legs felt like stretching or her lungs longed for fresh air. Even at eleven o’clock she emerged undaunted.

Khorshedbai was not impressed by this new show of defiance. She continued to scatter and toss and sprinkle; the veranda, after all, was for common use as per the sub-tenancy agreement. But she was careful to skirt Kashmira’s immediate vicinity.

One morning, after Boman had left for work, Kashmira heard the soft, single flap of envelopes alighting on the veranda. The postman. She went to pick up the letters and stood scanning them: the ones for the paying guests landed back on the floor.

Then Najamai passed by in the compound and beckoned her out.

It was this gesture of Najamai’s, innocent and friendly, that was responsible for changing the tide of the neighbours’ apathy. Hers was the credit for the events now to follow, which would make them all eager to bear witness, but for which there would be no need because that single beckon in itself would get rid of the paying guests.

The gesture, potent as it turned out to be, would have been useless if Kashmira had elected not to go outside. Or if she had gone outside but returned quickly. Or if she had gone outside with the baby. Fortunately, none of these things happened.

Was there any little item, Najamai asked, that she could get for her while she was out shopping? Kashmira said thanks, but Boman usually got all they needed on his way home from work in the evening. What a good husband, said Najamai, then inquired about the new baby, and if there was any change in the madwoman’s behaviour because of the baby. None, said Kashmira, and she would rather die than let the lunatic’s shadow even fall upon the little one.

They stood by the steps of B Block, talking thus for some minutes: the precise number of minutes, as it turned out, that were required for the events (triggered by the beckoning arm) to gather momentum.

When Kashmira returned inside, the first thing she saw was the baby’s cot: empty. A vague fear of this sort of thing always used to lurk inside her. But she had managed to keep it bottled away under control in a remote part of her mind.

Now it escaped its bounds and pounded in her head, pumped through her veins and arteries, filled her lungs and the pit of her stomach. It felt ice-cold as it made its way. Call Boman, call the police, call for help, the fear screamed inside her, while the place where it used to be bottled up said stay calm, think clearly, take a deep breath. She rushed out to the veranda, willing to consider absurd possibilities: maybe the baby was precocious, already knew how to crawl, had crawled away, swaddling clothes and all, and was hiding somewhere.

While she dashed from room to veranda and veranda to room, a soft whimpering penetrated her panic. It came from Khorshedbai’s quarters. The door was ajar, and she peered inside. Uncertain of what she was seeing, she opened the door to let in more light from the veranda, then screamed, just once: a loud piercing scream. Behind it was gathered the combined force of the ice-cold fear and the place where the fear used to be bottled up.

Unaware of what her beckoning arm had precipitated, Najamai was almost at the end of the compound. She heard the scream and retrieved her steps. By then, Kashmira was yelling for assistance to any kind soul who could hear to come and save her child. Najamai repeated the cry for help outside C Block as she hurried towards B.

And help arrived within seconds. Later, Najamai would go over the list with Kashmira; from this day forward, in Najamai’s eyes the Baag had only two kinds of Parsis: the ones who had been shameless enough to ignore the call for help and the ones who had responded. Among the latter were retired Nariman Hansotia who was just stepping out to drive to the library, his wife Hirabai, Mrs. Karani from upstairs with Jaakaylee in tow, Mrs. Bulsara wearing her mathoobanoo, Mrs. Boyce, the spinster Tehmina in slippers and duster-coat, the watchman from his post at the compound gate — Najamai would remember them all, what they said, how they behaved, what they were wearing.

The hastily marshalled column entered the veranda with Najamai at its head, and stopped at the paying guests’ door. The screaming had emptied Kashmira of all words. She pointed within, propping herself up against the doorjamb.

Inside, Khorshedbai was leaning over the locked parrot cage. She seemed to have noticed no part of the commotion. The neighbours looked with curiosity that turned to horror as soon as their eyes adjusted to Khorshedbai’s dim room. There was a lull in the noise and confusion, a stunned silence for moments, during which the bangles on Khorshedbai’s wrists could be heard tinkling.

Ardesar sat on a chair with his face hidden in his hands. He was shaking visibly. The baby, liberated from the swaddling clothes, was inside the cage. Intermittent whistling came from Khorshedbai, mixed with soft kissing sounds or a series of rapid little clicks with tongue against palate. From her fingers she teasingly dangled two green peppers, long and thin, over the baby’s face.