Thrity Umrigar Read online

  ‘Well?’ the other girls asked me at the end of class. ‘Were we right or what?’

  ‘Or what,’ I answered automatically. But then it had to be acknowledged: ‘All of you were right. She’s fabulous.’

  By ninth grade, about the time when my grades are tumbling like Newton’s apple, Greta Duke and I have become best friends. She is the only shot of vigour and youth in a school where the nuns in their white habits and the invariably bespec-tacled teachers look more like fossils then live human beings.

  Unlike the other teachers—and even some of my more conventional classmates—Greta Duke is not scandalized or intimidated by my flights of fantasy and my talk about youth power.

  I keep threatening to come to school on a Saturday and paint yellow daisies all over the walls, talk about launching a coup against the nuns and taking over the school. Every chance I get, I organize signature petitions protesting all grievances big and small. The mad Parsi is alive and kicking and now she has added some political catchwords like ‘revolution’ and ‘sit-in strike’ to her vocabulary.

  Greta Duke’s response to all of my rantings is one of bemusement. One day, encouraged by my efforts to lead the entire class into signing yet another petition against a particularly cruel nun, I fling open the doors to the teachers lounge and burst in, my face flushed with excitement. Miss Duke is sitting at the long wooden desk while Mr Narayan is sitting at a corner desk. ‘The youth revolution is here,’ I yell and then wait for a response. Mr Narayan looks at me open-mouthed, his yellow eyes wide with anticipation.

  Miss Duke looks up slowly from the papers that she was grading. ‘Good. Let me know when it leaves,’ she says evenly.

  I exit the teachers’ lounge duly chastized.

  But now that my grades are tumbling like Jack and Jill, Miss Duke decides it is time to get serious. ‘You listen to me, you little brat,’ she says one evening. ‘You have a fine brain and you’re wasting it. I’m not like the other teachers—I’ve never had any problems with you being friends with Jenny and the rest of that lot. I know in many ways they’ve been good for you. But when all this business begins to interfere with your schoolwork, well, then it’s time for me to speak up. From now on, you are going to stay behind after school and sit in while I tutor the other girls. I want you to start showing up at the library after school.’

  I protest as the role calls for me to do but secretly I am thrilled. When I break the news to Patty and Jenny, they look surprised but then Jenny shrugs her shoulders and says she hopes I can still occasionally spend an evening with them.

  When I tell mummy about my conversation with Greta Duke, she looks startled and then worried. She comes to school the next day and talks to Miss Duke in hushed whispers about how dad’s business is not doing well and how we simply cannot afford another tutor.

  ‘But madam, Thrity must’ve misunderstood,’ Miss Duke protests. ‘I didn’t say anything about money. In fact, I’m not even going to spend much time on her. I know she will automatically pick up what she needs to just listening to me coach the paying students.’

  And so I spend my evenings in the school library sitting at the table and pretending to not listen while Miss Duke teaches and grills the assortment of six or seven students whom she tutors after school hours. Once, I am sure she sees me stuffing back the pack of Gold Flake that was sticking out of my uniform’s pocket but if she notices the cigarettes, she doesn’t acknowledge my smoking habit or lecture me about it. Jenny and Patty walk by sometimes and I know they’re headed to Yasmin’s home for a beer and sometimes I’m jealous but what surprises me even more is how often I’m not. Because I am enjoying this atmosphere of learning and despite my studied disinterest I am thrilled when after all the paying students can’t answer a question, Greta Duke turns to me with a silent, quizzical look and I casually blurt out the answer. On such days, if we are walking home together, she lights into me. ‘Did you see how you answered that question today when none of those other duffers could?’ she says in her deep voice. ‘You think I’m not watching you, girl, but I see everything. Even with you gazing out of the window all the time, even with half of you living in God-knows-what fantasy land, you still absorb more than any of them. Just think what you could do if you applied that mind of yours.’

  I say something self-effacing or smart-alecky but from the inside, I am singing. Greta Duke is the first adult I have ever known, who, even when she is criticizing me, makes me feel special and cared for. Unlike my mother’s criticisms, I never leave Miss Duke’s presence feeling small and ugly.

  Rather, she makes me feel as if all of my shortcomings are born out of choices I have made so that I don’t have that doomed, desperate feeling around her. After all, if I’ve made wrong choices, I can also unmake them. Even when she is exasperated with me, I can tell Miss Duke likes me, is amused by me and that takes the sting out of her words.

  And then there is this: For all my declarations about not caring about grades and reputations, deep down I do. Years of lectures by my parents have done the trick and the thought of repeating a grade is so shameful, so unthinkable, that I know that flunking high school is not really an option. And I know that Greta Duke knows that I know this. That’s why she’s not ready to give up on me. One day, in an attempt to encourage myself to study, I copy lines from a Dylan song on a sheet of lined paper, fold the paper and hide it in my chemistry textbook. ‘She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all,’ Dylan sings and I think I know what he means. I know that Greta Duke is throwing me a lifeline, pulling me out of the dangers of the world that I am being seduced by. Even though I publicly pretend to disdain it, I hold on to this lifeline, sometimes fiercely, sometimes half-heartedly, but I hold on just the same.

  After all, I may be the Mad Parsi. But I’m not crazy.

  Twelve

  THE CHILDHOOD DREAM ABOUT THE city’s poor has stopped visiting me. But the poor are still with me. Like ghosts, like shadows, they are everywhere and their presence exposes the contradictions and follies and hypocrisies of middle-class life, cracks it open like a rotten egg.

  Going to Chowpatty Beach has become agony for me. Dad often takes us to the food booths that line the beach, where we eat bhel and mango kulfi and drink lassi or sugarcane juice.

  We are inevitably followed by a procession of half-naked children with distended bellies and snot-filled noses and young women with wild, uncombed hair, with a baby hoisted on one hip and another child at their side. Arms extended and palms turned upward for the coins of charity, the procession follows us from booth to booth, stares at us hungrily as we open our mouths to insert a puri, drowns out our conversation with a non-stop chorus of ‘Arré, sahib. Child is hungry. No food for two days, sahib. Show some heart.’ When the chorus gets too loud or aggressive, the irritated bhaiya who runs the booth steps out toward the mob, his hand raised in a menacing way.

  ‘Chalo, move,’ he yells. ‘Let the poor people eat in peace.

  Shameless animals, making a nuisance of yourself.’ As in a time-agreed ritual, the small crowd scatters but moves only a few feet away and within minutes they are back, one wary eye on the bhaiya, their mouths still curled downward in a piteous expression, their right hands (or the left hand, if there is no right hand) stretched outward. The older children sometimes kick the sand with feet made swift with impatience and desperation but are subdued by a quick look from the adults. Some of the bolder ones inch forward and touch us, pull on our sleeves with their dirty fingers and we cringe and take a step back, like in those horror movies when the monster approaches the virginal, golden-haired damsel in distress. If we linger at a particular booth for too long, with dad ordering a second round of kulfi say, some of the younger children sit down on the sand, bending their legs and turning their cracked, hardened bare feet toward their faces and pulling out splints or small pieces of glass or other debris from them. The middle-class people who flock to these food booths—the ones who vow to do a special pooja if
Baby or Baba gets into Bombay Scottish or Cathedral school and who attend cocktail parties at Juhu and Breach Candy where they lament that the country is going down the toilet—watch these children and then look away.

  I cannot eat at Chowpatty any more. The contradictions, the inequities that I live with everyday in Bombay, are too much in my face at Chowpatty. At home it is easy to ignore them but here, out in the open, there is no turning away from these dark and hungry eyes and from the questions about the accidents of birth and the randomness of privilege that they arouse in me. Guilt rises in me like bile, so that I lose my appetite and would like nothing better than to take my lassi and puris and kulfi and hand it to the children staring greedily at them. But I know that such a gesture will surely backfire, will arouse the lioness-like protectiveness that mummy feels for me when it comes to food, so that she will insist that I finish her dish of whatever it is she is eating, which in turn will compel dad to insist on buying something else for her and which gesture will make me feel even more guilty. So I make myself swallow whatever it is I am eating, trying to alternately ignore and smile at the children staring back at me. I somehow want to distinguish myself from the world that I belong to, want to silently plead my case to the ragged group that stands like a jury around me, want them to understand that I am not like my parents, that I understand their hunger and the resentment and fury that it must arouse in them. So I smile at the women carrying the dazed-looking children on their hips and sometimes they smile back at me, a quick, silver flash of startlingly white teeth and sometimes they stare back at me blankly, their faces a nylon mask that hide an entire world.

  Part of the reason I so want to distinguish myself—and God, this is hard to admit—is because sometimes I feel the same cheated fury towards the beggars that my parents do. Sometimes I feel a wave of self-pity sweep over me:Dammit, all wewant to do is have an outdoor family outing at Chowpatty, have somefun and some food and how can we do that with these people circlingus like vultures? It’s so unfair, we can’t ever go anywhere withouthaving to think about the poor and dealing with the guilt their verypresence elicits. I wish I was in London or somewhere, where I couldwalk down the street eating an ice-cream cone without someonewanting to snatch it away from me . And then I hear myself and feel angry and embarrassed at how shallow my complaining self-pity seems when measured against the weight of their hunger and suffering. And so, as penance, I smile at the women and children.

  And at around this time, as if this is part of the script, an old man and woman—he, leaning on a thick stick and wearing a long, white beard, she, with eyes grey and milky with age (or is it blindness?) and teeth red-brown with paan stains—walk slowly toward us. ‘Arré baba, some change,’ they say to my father in a pathetic sing-song voice. ‘God will bless you, my son, some change for the poor.’ The old man begins to cough but he needn’t have bothered because my father has already dug his hand in his pant pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. ‘God bless you, seth,’ the couple sings, surprised and gratified at how easy the exchange is. They move away and one of the children—a boy of ten—chases after them, angry at their intrusion and their unexpected success at wheedling some coins out of my father.

  The old man picks up his stick threateningly at him and he backs away. But now the crowd of young mothers and children is tense and excited, knowing that their instincts are right, that this Parsi gentleman who has spent the last twenty minutes ignoring them, is a soft touch after all. They do not know what I know: that for whatever reason—perhaps because he lost his mother when he was four, perhaps because he loved and respected his father—dad can never turn away without giving alms to the elderly. The young mothers he will give money to unwillingly, the children he will adamantly refuse to give money to, instead keeping packets of Glucose biscuits in his car for distribution. ‘Cannot spoil the next generation. They should be encouraged to work, not to beg,’ he says, blithely ignoring the fact that there are Ph.D.s in this country who work as peons in small offices because there are no jobs. But the old men and women, he cannot say no to. To them, he feels a certain responsibility that borders on reverence. In his car, he keeps a stack of silver coins and if, while sitting in a traffic jam, he spots an old beggar a couple of cars down, he actually rolls down his window and calls her to his car.

  Now our private processional is stirring, knowing that our food expedition is drawing to an end and having already seen proof of my father’s generosity. Their cries for alms get louder and more dramatic. My stomach muscles clench and I feel my toes curl with guilt and embarrassment. ‘Please, seth, memsahib,’ one of the women cries. ‘Children have not eaten in several days. Some money for food tonight.’ She pushes forward one of the more pathetic looking children, a four-year-old boy with tousled hair and the liquidy, grey eyes that spell blindness. Having been thrust in the spotlight, the boy goes through his lines: ‘Please, baba,’ he says.

  ‘Stomach is empty. God will grant all your wishes, seth. Please, something.’ His small hand thrusts forward, and accidentally hits the bottom of my glass, spilling a bit of my lassi.

  The bhaiya stirs, twirling his handlebar moustache angrily.

  ‘Saala, badmaash. Sisterfuckers. Parasites. Get going all of you before I give you a good pasting. Harassing my best-of-best good customers.’ This time the bhaiya looks serious and gauging this, the crowd makes to run. But just then, dad speaks up.

  ‘Okay, you are hungry? No money from me. I don’t believe in encouraging beggary. But Dilbar,’ he says turning to the bhaiya. ‘Give each of them a plate of bhel. I’ll pay for the lot.’

  A murmur goes through the crowd, as the women try quickly to calculate whether they should hold out for money or accept the offer. The offer for food is irresistible but accepting it would mean taking home less money to pay the local dada who owns them. But before they can act, Dilbar speaks, his mouth twisted in distaste. ‘Please, saar,’ he says. ‘You are my good customer but these people are a nuisance. Bad for business, saar, if other customer sees them eating at my stall. Hope you understand, saar.’

  Dilbar has made up their minds for them. The beggars turn on him, several of them speaking together.

  ‘Bara seth said he would pay. Why you saying no?’

  ‘You heard what the seth said. Give us our bhel.’

  ‘God will bless seth for his generosity but He will curse you for your pride, you evil man. Treating us like we are animals.’

  But Dilbar is adamant. He folds his hands across his hefty chest and shakes his head no.

  The commotion has attracted the attention of the man who runs the bhelpuri booth two spaces down from Dilbar. He is a thin, ingratiating man with red, paan-streaked lips.

  Now, he comes running up to us. ‘What’s the problem, what’s the problem?’ he says, in a thin, high-pitched voice. ‘Dilbar, how can you send the Parsi seth away like this, unhappy in his heart? For shame, for shame. Tell you what, sir, I’ll feed these poor, unhappy folks for you. Just move to my stall, sir, two steps away, sir, closeby only.’

  Dilbar grunts. Dad is now anxious to be done with the whole scene. We move to the new booth, the urchins following us like a wedding procession. Dad pulls out his wallet and takes out some bills. ‘There. This should be enough,’ he says.

  The thin man smiles a thin smile. ‘Just a minute, saar, if you please. Er, need some extra baksheesh, saar.’ He lowers his voice. ‘Doing this as a favour to you, saar. You know how these people are, dirty and all. Will have to wash the dishes extra well, which is costing extra water, saar.’ He points to the dirty metal bucket in which he washes the glass bowls.

  Dad looks disgusted though I’m not sure if it’s at the sight of the filthy water bucket or the man’s avarice. He takes out another two rupees. ‘There. And if that’s not enough, we’ll take our business somewhere else.’ He turns on his heels and begins to leave, with mummy and I following. Mummy says something about wanting to stay long enough to see that the man actually feeds the crowd but d
ad has had enough. ‘Coming to Chowpatty is no longer a pleasure,’ he says to no one in particular. ‘Fewer and fewer places in Bombay that one can go.’

  I leave on that day, full of good will and affection for my dad. He is idiosyncratic in his beliefs, yes, but he tries to do the right thing.

  But as I get older, I notice how my father’s middle-class values rise to the surface at the oddest of times. By the time I am thirteen, we are both encased in our own ideologies and my simplistic dreams of feeding and housing the city’s entire homeless population have hardened into a bitter contempt for well-meaning middle-class people who pretend to know what is in the best interest of a people they encounter daily but know nothing about. People like my father. Actually, people like myself, though I would’ve jumped into a vat of boiling oil before admitting this to myself.

  We are in the old, bulky Ambassador, just him and me in the huge front seat, making our way home from a business meeting that I had accompanied him to. The meeting has gone well and dad is in a cheerful, expansive mood. We are at Bori Bunder and the bumper-to-bumper traffic has crawled to a halt. Normally, this would bother him but today he sits patiently, not even getting angry when the cab driver behind us blows his horn for no apparent reason since there is nowhere else we can go. We roll down the windows, knowing we will be assaul-ted by the exhaust fumes of the old B.E.S.T buses but needing some air to combat the muggy, humid mid-afternoon heat.

  Just then, a healthy-looking, bright-eyed boy of about eight races to the car and swiftly approaches my dad. His hair is cropped close, his face is long and thin and this makes his toothy smile seem even more wide and infectious. ‘Eh, seth,’