Thrity Umrigar Read online

  Rumour has it that Jesse had been in love with a Muslim classmate and her scandalized parents had packed her off to her grandmother’s house in Bombay but if Jesse knows about the rumours floating around her like a dark horde of bees, she does nothing to refute them.

  Instead, she speaks with great affection about the small town that she grew up in and the liberal, progressive coed school that she had attended. And in doing so, she pisses off the folks in the neighbourhood even more. Most of the Parsi families who can afford it send their children to Catholic schools, where we flatter ourselves that we are receiving a great education at the hands of the Irish and British nuns. But Jesse pokes fun at our arcane, private school ways—how we are divided into different ‘houses’ or groups named after different saints, how we fight so zealously at the annual inter-school athletic meets, as if winning medals for our school is the ultimate expression of our purpose on earth. At her school, she tells us, her frumpy but brilliant principal gave a prize to every student who participated in a sport. And the prize itself was revealing—instead of the militaristic gold and silver medals that we receive, the kids at Jesse’s school each received a ribbon. While we pay lip service to homilies like, ‘It’s not what you win, it’s how you win,’ Jesse’s school puts that in action.

  But the greatest insult is that Jesse doesn’t seem as fawningly grateful about being in Bombay as we want her to be. After all, we are Bombayites, residents of the greatest city in India.

  In our pride in our city, in our pity for anybody who is not from it, we are as arrogant and insular as New Yorkers. We want all newcomers to be cognizant of their good fortune at being in Bombay, want them to pay homage to that fact. But Jesse insists on continuing to talk about her sleepy little hometown—as we see her small but bustling city—as if it was something to be proud of.

  I am thirteen when Jesse comes to live with her grandmother in the apartment next door to ours. But we have known each other for years before Jesse moved permanently to Bombay because she and her younger sister had spent every summer with their grandmother. Our apartment and her grandmother’s flat shared a connecting door at the balcony. Jesse’s sister, Perin, was only two years older than me and we spent most of our summer holidays being shunted from one apartment to another while the older girls—Jesse, Roshan and the third floor neighbours—ganged up against the two of us and avoided us as if we had leprosy.

  It is Lust for Life that makes us friends.

  A few months after she has moved to Bombay, I run into Jesse at the bakery across the street from our apartment building. She waits until I purchase the bread and we stroll home together. It has rained earlier and the streets are slick and orange from the twilight evening. ‘It’s a beautiful evening,’

  I say, almost under my breath.

  ‘Yes it is. Reminds me of that Moody Blues song,Voices inthe Sky . Do you know it?’

  I shake my head no and Jesse begins to sing softly, in a beautiful, wistful voice that runs through me like a chill.

  Bluebird, flying high

  Tell me what you sing

  If you could talk to me

  What news would you bring?

  I suddenly feel absurdly, insanely happy. The song and Jesse’s sorrow-tinged voice echo perfectly the liquidy, lone-wolf feeling that has gripped me at dusk for as long as I can remember.

  We have reached the front entrance to my side of the building. Jesse stops singing and stares at me for a second. Then she says, ‘I notice when I come home from college each evening, you’re usually on that rocking chair on the balcony. What do you do? Homework or something?’

  ‘I write,’ I mumble.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ she says, with her fake South Indian accent.

  ‘I write…poetry,’ I say, feeling my face flush.

  But Jesse doesn’t do anything cringe-making, like calling me a poet or asking me to show her some of my poems. Instead, she says, ‘I just bought a 45 that I think you may like. Would you like to stop by after dinner this evening and listen to it?’

  There are some raised eyebrows at home when I say I am going over to Jesse’s apartment for a few minutes. I notice that Roshan looks startled, as if the closeness in their age makes it much more logical that she should be the one invited over. I pretend not to notice the hurt and embarrassment on her face.

  The song is Don McLean’sVincent . I know who he is becauseAmerican Pie is one of Sister Hillary’s favourite songs but I’ve never heardVincent . From the first, ‘Starry, starry night,’ I am hooked, mesmerized by Don McLean’s clean, silky voice, the stark melody and the impressionistic, powerful lyrics.Framelessheads on nameless walls …how can someone come up with a line like that? In that moment, my own pathetic poems shrivel and die anonymous deaths, buried in the notebooks they have been born in.

  The record ends. ‘Again,’ I say in a choked voice. ‘Can you play it again?’ It is my intention to memorize the lyrics before I leave this evening. Despite the dark—Jesse has turned off all the lights in the living room, so that we can listen to the record in total peace—I think I see a look of approval on Jesse’s face.

  We play the song seven times in a row. When the last note dies away, I say in my usual, overly dramatic way, ‘I pray to God that someday before I die I write a poem half as good as this song.’

  To my surprise, Jesse snickers. ‘Don’t pray to God about it.

  If you want to write a good poem, read some great poets.

  What’s God going to do, write the poem for you?’

  ‘Don’t you…believe in God?’ I ask, not wanting to hear the answer.

  ‘No,’ Jesse answeres shortly. ‘And I don’t believe in all the Lord Zoroaster this and Jesus Christ that, mumbo-jumbo either.’

  I gulp hard. The pink jeans I can defend Jesse for. Not believing in God is a different story.

  But then I think of how Jesse had sungVoices In the Sky earlier in the evening, purely, achingly, and how she has sat with her eyes closed while Don McLean sangVincent , an expression on her face like she was in church, and I know that although she is an atheist, Jesse still believes in something large and beautiful. I realize for the first time that it is possible to pray without believing in God, that it is possible to be so in love with the heartbreaking beauty of the world that that alone becomes some kind of a religion.

  ‘You know, Van Gogh didn’t believe in God either,’ Jesse is saying and I make my way back to the present.

  ‘Van who? Who’s that?’

  ‘Van Gogh? He’s the painter that he’s singing about inVincent . Haven’t you heard of the Impressionists?’

  I shake my head mutely, despair climbing up my limbs like a fever. I had never realized how much there is to know in the world and how little I knew of it. I had not even considered that Don McLean was singing about a real person. I am sure Jesse will now turn away from me in disgust.

  Instead, she goes leaping out of the room and returns with a heavy, glossy book. It is a book of paintings titledVincent .

  She hands it to me and I turn the pages as reverently as any Pope ever handled a Bible.

  These are the paintings of a madman. This much is obvious to me as soon as I start turning the pages. A laugh of shocked delight escapes my lips. I gasp in pleasure as I turn each page, feeling a whirling, crazy joy as I take in the enormous, fiery suns, the swirling skies, the crazy crooked lines, the mad, passionate brush strokes.

  Jesse sits next to me while I look, pulling on her eyebrows.

  Her face is expectant as she searches mine and it occurs to me that she is willing me to love this book as much as she does, that she is seeking me out, just as I am seeking out her friendship. The thought surprises, scares and delights me.

  ‘The mark of Cain,’ she murmurs, after she has stopped scanning my face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. Nothing. Just a line from a book I love, calledDamien . It’s by a German writer called Hermann Hesse.’

  I nod. I have given up trying to keep
up with this strange, brilliant girl, who is this unexpected blend of loudmouthed confidence and vulnerable sensitivity.

  The next evening, I am sitting on my rocking chair on the balcony, trying to write a poem that will capture the gold of the evening sky, when Jesse pounds on the connecting door.

  ‘Open up,’ she yells, when I look up from my notebook.

  She has two gifts for me, the first in a long row of gifts. The first is a copy of the art book I had looked at yesterday. The second is a book calledLust for Life . It is a thick book, serious looking, the kind of book a grown-up would read and Jesse explains that it is a biography of Van Gogh. My heart drops at the word ‘biography’. I am mostly reading Mills and Boon romance novels. I am not sure that I can handle a book like this.

  But after making the usual protestations that nice Parsi girls from good families make each time someone gives them a gift, (‘Oh, you shouldn’t have wasted your hard-earned money on me, really’) I accept the two books.

  Later, it hits me that I have never before received a book as a gift. I am used to getting gifts of clothes and shoes from my family.

  Equally unfamiliar is the fact that Jesse has written an inscription inside the book. I know that if I were ever to give a friend a book, mummy or Mehroo would ask me to leave it blank, in case my friend wanted to return the book.

  The fact that Jesse has written in the book and made it unre-turnable, is an act of such bold self-confidence that it adds to the novelty of the whole experience.

  I read the inscription:To Thrity , it says.For the love of colourand light .

  So the game is up. This strange, brash, eccentric girl knows me better than my own parents. We are going to be friends, after all. I am doomed to defend her, protect her, fight for her right to wear pink jeans. I know this friendship will exact a price, that I will no longer be able to pretend to be the nice, quiet good girl whom all the neighbours love. Jesse will require me to choose sides.

  For the love of colour and light. But there is no real choice, is there? Jesse has seen through me, seen through my humble, goody-two-shoes act, to a soul that is as restless and defiant as her own. For years now, I have secretly divided all the people I knew into two camps—the earth-dwellers and the sky-dwellers. Jesse is definitely a sky-dweller.

  Lust for Life. That’s what I suddenly have, all right.

  I read Van Gogh’s biography in two days.

  And learn more about the mysteries of my own life than about his. All the things that have never made sense to me before—why I never feel comfortable when I’m with the ‘in’

  crowd, why I always stick up for the underdog, why I don’t lust after the things that make most of my friends happy, why the evening sky has made me feel melancholy and lonely for as long as I can remember, why certain songs have a heart-tearing effect on me—all of these suddenly become clearer.

  I have been a misfit for a long time. Now I have a companion in a crazy Dutch painter who was dead long before I was born.Lust for Life affects me in peculiar ways. I suddenly develop a slight stutter when I speak and tear my hands through my hair in what I imagine is an eccentric, erratic gesture. I begin to eye family functions and glittery events like weddings with great suspicion, holding myself apart from the gaiety and superficiality that such occasions demand. For a brief while, I carry a notebook at all times, pretending to write poems even when no poem suggests itself. I refuse to accept rides to school from my father, preferring to walk or ride the bus, trying to reject the small privileges of affluence, in much the same way the young Vincent turned his back on his wealthy family of art dealers.

  If Jesse notices these changes, she does not say. Instead, she plies me with other books, until the words, Monet, Dali, Turner and Degas roll off my tongue as effortlessly as the names of classmates. On weekends, we visit the booksellers who have set up shop on the pavement at Flora Fountain and I dig into my own pockets to buy art books. Someday, I hope to have a collection to rival Jesse’s.

  These books give way to other books. Jesse introduces me to Shaw, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Chekov, Steinbeck. I lose myself in the world of books, revel in Shaw’s biting wit, the morality of the Russians, the brash confidence of the Americans. I read so much that at times I have a hard time concentrating on and remembering my own life. My head swims with words and dialogues and the names of characters. At night, I dream strange dreams in which waterfalls of words pour out of me, an endless, easy stream of beautiful language, held together like beads on a string. I get up the next day and I write. I write poems, stories, essays. At times I feel as if I have no body, no knit of flesh and bones that holds me together. Instead, I am held together by words, a phantom body that will disappear if the words do, like a line drawing that can be erased.

  I give up wearing pink, printed blouses for white kurtas and refuse to smile in photographs, assuming instead a serious, studious look. But some of my posturing is genuine—Jesse has unleashed in me a desire for knowledge that no teacher, nun or textbook was ever able to do. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to take the easy, lazy way out.

  Every evening Jesse and I stand on our respective apartments, lean on the railing of the balcony and talk until the sky turns orange and then indigo and then black. We talk about music and art and books and comment often on the changing light of the day. I feel completely fulfilled and energized by these conversations, as if they fill a void that I hadn’t even known existed. I hunger after every morsel of knowledge that Jesse drops, storing it away like a dog his bone. Mehroo comes out repeatedly and calls me to dinner but I ignore her calls.

  The hunger for the world is bigger than the world itself and no dinner of mutton cutlets and okra is going to feed it. Often times, I wonder where my life would’ve led if Jesse hadn’t moved next door to me when she did and then I could weep with gratitude at this twist of fate. I ask myself if I would’ve ended up being one of the countless bland, docile, conventional girls that the neighbourhood is filled with and once I even suggest this to Jesse but she shakes her head impatiently. ‘What bloody rot,’ she says. ‘You would’ve discovered all this whether I was here or not. You have too much intelligence to have ended up like Dolly Dollhouse or Polly Pollyanna.’

  I laugh at that but I’m not so sure.

  Things have been different for me at school since the last few years. Now, I am one of the undisputed group leaders, known for my outrageous stunts, defiance of authority and general extrovertishness.

  It was not always so.

  Years ago, I was the kid who was the butt of other children’s jokes, the silly, amiable, star-struck kid who tagged along behind the other, more popular girls, who were faster, louder, bolder. Handicapped by my wretched sensitivity, I would pretend to laugh at jokes that had me as the punch line even while I was dying from inside. I would read the Charles Atlas ads on the back pages of the Archie comic books, would identify with the ninety-nine-pound weakling who had sand thrown in his face, and would fantasize about the day when I would turn into somebody confident and assertive. But in the meantime, I laughed as loudly as the rest of them when somebody cracked a joke at my expense.

  ‘Hey, girlie,’ Olga would say. ‘How come your one eye is smaller than the other? It makes you look like a cockeyed crow or something.’

  ‘A cockeyed crow?’ someone else would repeat. ‘Olga, men, you are too much sometimes.’ And I would swallow the hatred for Olga that lodged like a pebble in my throat and smile appreciatively at Olga’s wit.

  And then one day, I decided to change. I stood before the bathroom sink at home and decided it was time to put an end to the jokes. I wasn’t exactly sure how to shatter this mould, this role of the good-natured buffoon that I was getting typecast as, but I knew that if I were to maintain a shred of self-respect it had to end.

  So I did a revolutionary thing. The next time Olga made a wisecrack about my legs being so short that God should’ve thrown in a ladder for free, here’s what I did: Nothing. I did not join the others
in their laughter. I did not join in the chorus of praise of how clever and funny Olga was. Instead, I simply stood there looking at her unsmilingly, my face as blank as chalkboard.

  And Olga panicked. The ground beneath her feet had shifted, some small, as yet invisible, cracks had appeared where she stood, but she could not detect what had changed. She knew that something was different, that the balance of power had somehow seesawed away from her but she could not put a finger on it. She looked at me uneasily, as if it was dawning on her for the first time that she needed my complicity, my fawning affability, for her to hold on to her position of power. Actually, watching the various emotions—unease, distrust, embarrassment, fear—flit across Olga’s round face, it dawned on me for the first time how much Olga needed me to build her up. I felt something akin to the heroin rush of power.

  ‘What’s up, men?’ Olga said, in a desperate attempt to stop the transfer of this invisible force from her to me. ‘Why are you scowling like some dirty fisherwoman?’