Thrity Umrigar Read online

  he begins. ‘Some money, please. Sister and mother are both sick at home. Please, kind seth. Bhagwan will bless you.’

  Dad looks at the boy and then looks at me. ‘See this?’ he says to me, as if the boy cannot hear him. ‘This is what is keeping our country backward. An able-bodied, active boy, begging for a living.’

  Traffic moves a bit and the boy holds on to the window, trotting beside the car. He has heard my dad talk about him and maybe this makes him hopeful because as every beggar knows, the worst customers are the ones who ignore your presence, who stare through you as if you are made of air. At least this Parsi seth has acknowledged his existence.

  Dad moves so swiftly that the boy jumps back a foot.

  Twisting in his seat, he reaches for the handle of the car’s back door and opens it a few inches. The car to our right lets out a startled beep to make sure the ajar door doesn’t hit it but dad has already calculated the distance and ignores the driver.

  ‘C’mon,’ he says to the bewildered boy. ‘Get in. You can come to our house and work there. We are looking for a nice servant boy. You will get three square meals a day, decent clothes to wear. I will even send you to school. You can make something of yourself. C’mon, what do you say?’

  The boy takes another step back, staring intently at my father. ‘Daddy, please, for heaven’s sake,’ I say but he is still talking to the beggar boy.

  ‘What is it? Don’t want to work? Want to stay a beggar your whole life? Is there any future in this? At my house you can learn English, go to school. Perhaps be a peon or clerk in my office someday…’

  The little boy looks at my father with wide eyes. Suddenly, he lets out a yelp and begins to run away from the car, twisting his way between the closely-packed vehicles. He looks over his shoulder once, to make sure that the strange man is not following him.

  My dad sits back in his seat, disappointed yet satisfied. ‘You see?’ he says. ‘They are just lazy. Prefer a free handout to working. That’s why I never encourage these children by giving them money.’

  I am not sure if this whole episode has been for my benefit but at the moment I’m too angry to wonder. ‘Daddy, he was eight years old,’ I say. ‘What about his mother, father, sisters?

  You think a child can just leave his entire family and get into a car with a perfect stranger?’

  He doesn’t get it. ‘You know we would’ve treated him well.

  You know he would’ve been safe with us,’ his voice hurt, as if I have been accusing him of mistreating the boy.

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is, how does he know that?

  Dad, he’s a child. And he has a family…’

  ‘Yah, a family which makes him beg for a living,’ he cuts me off.

  I am seething but I control myself. ‘Dad, you know how when I was young you always told me never to get into a car with a stranger? What if his parents told him the same thing?’

  Something clicks. I can see the struggle on his face as he tries to grapple with the seeming contradiction of parents who let their children beg for a living telling that child to beware of strangers. Dad sighs heavily. ‘Maybe. Maybe so. But one thing I know—India’s problems will not be solved by begging.

  Something has to be done.’

  (And as if some twisted God had heard my father, something was done just a year later, in the dark years of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, when police routinely swept the streets clean of the homeless beggars. It was as if someone had taken my childhood dream of rounding up the poor and altered it, so that instead of providing them with shelter in my school basement, the beggars were discarded outside the city limits or warehoused in government barracks under terrible conditions.)

  We drive home the rest of the way in an uneasy truce, both of us cocooned in the righteousness of what we believe. But in the coming months dad will talk about the incident at parties—how he had offered this able-bodied youngster a chance at a better life and how the lazy fellow had run away rather than take him up on his offer. And the other adults will nod their heads solemnly and shake their heads from side-to-side in expressions of dismay for where the country is headed.

  Sometimes I speak up and argue with them and risk the humiliation of their adult condescension as they tell me that this is the idealism of youth talking and that soon I will grow up and realize the errors of my ways.

  But most of the time I keep quiet and instead help myself surreptitiously to the whisky and beer, downing the last of our guest’s glasses as I carry them to the kitchen, taking a swallow directly from the bottle when no one is watching, so that I float through these parties in a blind haze. All that the adults see is a teenager who is extraordinarily helpful, who offers to mix their drinks for them and carry their empty glasses away for them. But the more I smile at them, the more hollow I feel on the inside, as if there is a bomb ticking inside of me. And in my drunken haze I imagine that there is such a bomb hidden inside all of the city’s poor and that it is ticking all the time—while they arrange their faces into pitiful caricatures for our benefit, while they tell us that God will bless us even while they think that if there is a God surely he will destroy us for our blithe indifference, for our sinful self-absorption. I wonder how the adults can remain so blind to their precarious place on the top of the mountain. Occasionally someone brings up a news item about a particularly heinous attack on the Untouchables or Harijans by an upper-caste Hindu mob and then they all speak contemptuously about the damn caste system and how backward some of these rural Hindus are, to follow its ancient prejudices. The unspoken text is that we are lucky to be Parsis, lucky to be ‘Bombay born and bred’, and therefore free of the oppressive bigotries of people less civilized than us. ‘What barbarians these people are,’ a woman guest will say. ‘Just imagine—burning someone alive in this day and age just because he is an Untouchable. After all, a human being is a human being.’ And later that night, on her way home from the party, the woman will have her fleshy arm touched by a twelve-year-old beggar boy insistent on coaxing a few coins out of this kindly-looking woman and she, aghast at this violation by a filthy urchin, will shriek and take two full steps back, hereby losing her balance a bit and this sight will make the young boy lose his professional beggar’s demeanour for a split second, so that he will let out a giggle before twisting his face into its usual pleading, piteous expression again. But it will be too late because the woman’s husband will have noticed the touch and the grin and his manly pride will have been bruised and he will cry, ‘Wicked pervert,’ and raise his right hand as if to go after the boy, who, realizing that the inopportune giggle has cost him his coins, will flee into the dark night…

  I want to tell our guests about an experiment that some of my friends have been conducting. One of my friends has made a brilliant observation about the rigid, stylized postures that beggars and donors both affect when money is changing hands.

  Middle-class Bombayites invariably plop their coins into the cupped hands of the beggars from a height, making sure that they never accidentally brush against what they imagine are hands contaminated with germs and disease. So, a bunch of us have taken to changing the rules of the transaction. Instead of holding the coin gingerly between two fingers and then quickly dropping it into the beggar’s outstretched hand, I now hold the coin on the flat palm of my hand, silently urging the beggar to pick it up. This simple gesture reverses the social order, so that it is my hand that is now at the bottom. It also violates an unspoken, almost unrecognized taboo—in order to pick up the coin, the beggar’s fingers must surely touch my palm, no matter how lightly. And an amazing thing happens: children as young as three are already so conditioned by omnipresent class distinctions that they freeze at this reversal of position. They stare at me with eyes wide open with confusion, apprehension, even fear. Something is wrong, unnatural, and you can almost see their young, uncomprehending brains churning, trying to figure out what is wrong and how to set it right. In the meantime, the offered coin rests on
my palm, untouched. Moments pass. We lock glances, and I watch a caravan of emotions move across their bewildered faces. Occasionally, one of the bolder youngsters screws up her courage and grabs the coin quickly. But more often, they walk away, all the time staring at me as if trying to figure out this new perversion that they have encountered.

  I know what will happen if I tell the adults about this experiment—they will look horrified and lecture me about how I, of all people, with all my health problems, should be extra-careful about not coming in contact with germs and did I wash my hands after these silly encounters?

  At times like these, I look at the crystal beer mugs the guests are drinking from, the fine whisky glasses they are sipping from and I feel as though the whole world is made of glass, that it is fragile and tenuous and will shatter the moment someone from the outside casts the first stone. Somedays, the thought frightens me because, after all, I love these flawed, self-absorbed, well-meaning, sporadically kind human beings who are in this room with me. On other days I long for that moment of destruction, I can’t wait for this facade to end, when the seemingly powerless display their strength and those who think of themselves as powerful realize how puny and small they really are…

  Right then, Sheroo Nayak interrupts my murderous reverie.

  ‘What about some music?’ she says, gaily. ‘What is that song I like, about a blue-eyed boy or something?’

  I get up and put onA Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall . The adults laugh and talk over the song, oblivious to its apocalyptic message.

  Thirteen

  WATERGATE.

  The word is exactly as complicated and bewildering as the word ‘sex’ was a few years earlier. ‘Sex’ was a word I saw in print all the time—Stardust would interview movie stars about what they liked about it,The Illustrated Weekly of India would have articles on the repressed attitudes of Indian men toward it—but no one would ever come right out and explain what the word meant. Somehow I knew enough to know that the word made people embarrassed and squirmy and that it was better not to ask adults about it but to figure it out for yourself, a little bit at a time. In sixth-grade the nuns had explained about the birds and the bees but the discussions were so clinical that I had failed to connect what they told us to the mysterious, magical three-letter word that was everywhere but still remained an enigma. In fact, my rudest awaking had come sitting on the marble steps of the school building during lunch recess one afternoon. ‘Anita,’ I said ponderously. ‘One thing I don’t understand about what Sister Ignatius told us. How does the sperm get to the egg from inside all the clothes?’

  Anita stared at me for a long moment, delighted at this unexpected gift I had thrown her way. ‘There are no clothes,’ she said finally. ‘People do it naked.’

  I laughed. Anita was such a joker. ‘Yah, right.’

  ‘No joke. I swear, men, that’s how it is,’ Anita said, pinching her throat for emphasis. ‘You don’t believe me, ask Diana.’

  I turned five shades of white. Being naked before a boy seemed too impossible, too preposterous, too outside the limits of my imagination.

  The next day, Philomena D’Souza brought in a Viewfinder to school. All morning long, clumps of girls would peer surreptitiously through its square eye whenever the teacher was out of the room. Whatever they were looking at provoked much nervousness and giggling among Philomena and some of the older girls. Finally, just before lunch it was my turn. But instead of the usual slides of the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower, there were slides of naked men and women entangled with one another. It was hard to see exactly what was going on but the pictures looked red and raw. ‘Philo, what is it?’ I said finally. Looking at me contemptuously, Philomena had replied, ‘It’s sex, stupid.’

  But I was confused. Sex on the pages ofStardust had seemed sweet and harmless. Sex as described by the nuns seemed as boring as the snail races we used to organize in the playground behind the statue of the Virgin Mary. But sex as defined by Philomena seemed secretive and dangerous. How could one word have so many meanings?

  Same thing with Watergate. Once, dad told me that it was the name of a building in Washington. But I also knew that it was a scandal and had something to do with Richard Nixon.

  Most of the people I knew had hated Nixon ever since he sided with Pakistan in the 1971 war over Bangladesh. So I figured anything that kicked Nixon out of office was a good thing. But then why did the grown-ups keep saying it was a terrible thing that had happened?

  Pop culture comes to my rescue in 1976 in the form ofMad magazine’s spoof onAll the President’s Men . I read the magazine carefully, trying to read in between the lines and connecting the satire to what little I already know about Watergate. And finally it all comes together—the burglary, the secret slush funds, the role of Deep Throat. (Of course, one of the pitfalls of learning history fromMad magazine is that for many years I will think of poor Gerald Ford as Deep Throat, because the very last panel of ‘Gall of the President’sMen ’ shows Ford in a dark parking lot revealing shadowy secrets to Woodward.)

  By this time, America has taken hold in my imagination as firmly as the world of midnight feasts and English bobbies once had. We have studied about America in geography class, learned the capitals to all fifty states and learned about its chief exports but all that is dry stuff compared to what I am rapidly learning. From the ads of music clubs on the back of comic books, I keep up with the latest rock-and-roll releases in America. That’s how I choose what records to request when dad makes a business trip to Dubai or Kuwait. I stand on the balcony for hours wondering what ‘Gee whiz,’ sounds like in real life. After all, Archie says it all the time. I beg for a pair of blue jeans and when I finally get my first pair, I ignore the fact that they are three sizes too big for me. I promptly try to fade my jeans by pouring hydrogen peroxide acid over them but nothing happens. To my disgust, they don’t even tear.

  From Simon and Garfunkel I learn about Bleeker Street and New York City winters bleeding people, from Neil Young I learn about Four Dead in Ohio, from Neil Diamond about Brooklyn Roads. Woody Allen teaches me about therapists and Manhattan. John Steinbeck teaches me about Salinas Valley and Oakies and Cannery Row; Fitzgerald teaches me about the moth-holes in the American Dream; Hemingway teaches me about stoic, heroic Midwesterners who are strong in the broken places. Martin Luther King’s Dream speech, which is included in one of our literature texts, has the amazing effect of making my hair stand on end every single time I read it. No teacher ever mentions that King had often mentioned India’s freedom struggle as an inspiration for his civil disobedience movement.

  Meanwhile, I struggle to learn Marathi, so that I can converse with the middle-aged woman who works as a servant in our home.

  Every once in a great while, it occurs to me that I lead a schizophrenic life: I am a Parsi teenager attending a Catholic school in the middle of a city that’s predominantly Hindu. I’m a middle-class girl living in the country that’s among the poorest in the world. I am growing up in the country that kicked out the British fourteen years before I was born but I have still never read a novel by an Indian writer.

  But this is what it means to be a secular Bombayite, I tell myself—to take all the contradictory parts of your life and to make a unified whole out of it; to know that you are a cultural mongrel, the bastard child of history and to learn to be amused, even proud of the fact.

  Because the alternative is unacceptable. If, instead of bemusement you allow yourself to feel rage at being the product of a colonial education system that scarcely prepares you for the realities of living in your own country, if you question why you know the words to every Bob Dylan song instead of the words to songs by—but there you see, that’s the problem, you don’t even know who your country’s Bob Dylan might be—then you are asking questions whose answers you will not be able to handle.

  And the story is complicated and it is hard to know who is implicated in it. The British, with their famous declaration of building an Indian elite who look
ed Indian but were English

  ‘in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect,’ yes, of course the British are implicated but that’s too easy. And then you examine the complicity of those Irish nuns whom you adored as a child and who left their green, fertile island to come to this dry, sunbaked subcontinent in order to educate the pagans and you are swept in a tidal wave of mixed feelings, resentment and good will battling each other for supremacy. But wait, the moving finger moves on and now it points at your community, the chauvinistic old women who kept framed photographs of ‘apri’ queen on their peeling walls, and the old Parsi men who carried parasols in order to protect their light skins so as to distinguish themselves from the Hindu hordes, and your parents, who insisted you take piano lessons instead of learning to play the sitar, as many of your Hindu friends did. And finally, you yourself are implicated because surely you could have sought out the novels of Tagore as you did those of Hemingway, surely you could prevent the others from teasing the Hindi teacher in ways you would not dream of teasing those who brought you the works of Shakespeare?

  The only hint of my childhood love affair with Britain now comes from adoring The Beatles and the Fabs are not really British any more, seeing how they now belong to the world and seeing how George Harrison himself was infatuated with India.

  I subscribe to a youth magazine calledJ.S ., which features full-size blow-ups of pop stars like Peter Frampton and Gary Glitter, that I paste on the walls and ceiling of my small study.

  A moment of reckoning arrives along with a huge, glossy poster that I have traded for a Queen album. The poster has the Jackson five on one side and the Osmonds on the other. I know that my decision to honour one or the other group on my wall will say something about my musical taste and sophistication and I know that in order to be considered cool and sophisticated, I must choose the Jacksons. But my heart belongs to Donny. Call it puppy love.