Thrity Umrigar Read online

  In response, I handed her the petition. She read it, once, twice, but when she looked up she seemed as confused as ever.

  ‘That’s what all this is about? Because your class was not allowed to sing?’

  I heard the incredulity in her voice and felt embarrassed by the theatrics of my classmates. Our cause suddenly seemed puny and silly to me. But I banished these treacherous thoughts and when I spoke, my voice was calm and steady. ‘It’s not just that, Mother. There are so many other problems. The seniors always seemed to end up with the best of everything and we are made to feel like…’

  Then I lost my train of thought because just then I had glanced sideways to look at Patty for support and to my amazement I noticed that her shoulders were shaking. She was standing with her head bowed and her hands crossed in front of her and for a moment I thought that she was laughing and then I realized that Patty—unsentimental, tough-assed Patty—was also crying. I lost it then. I tried to go on and list our grievances but now I was caught in the sea of adolescent grief and resentments that were swirling around me and I felt myself going down. To my mortification, I realized that there were tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Mother Ignatius did me the favour of looking away. ‘All right, I think I’ve heard enough to know what the problem is,’ she said. ‘Now all of you have to trust me to fix it. I will place a phone call to the principal at St Agnes and invite her students to a return visit and you can sing your song then. Now, go back to your class and compose yourselves.’

  But there was still one unfinished business. Minutes after we returned to our classroom, Mother Ignatius followed us in.

  ‘Come here, Mary,’ she said and Mary got up from her seat in the last row and walked to the front of the class. ‘I’m sorry for hitting you, my child,’ Mother Ignatius said. ‘I just lost my temper and I was wrong.’ Then, she did a classy thing. First, she kissed Mary on the forehead. Then, she made a small sign of the cross on her forehead.

  A thrill ran through all of us. Mary beamed.

  But Mother Ignatius was not yet done. Her eyes fixed on me and narrowed slightly. ‘The next time you decide to bring forty girls into my tiny office, please ask permission first,’ she said icily.

  ‘But Mother,’ I protested. ‘I did ask…’

  But she was walking away and did not hear me. Shit, I thought to myself. How do I end up in these situations?

  ‘That’s absolutely not fair, yaar,’ said Zarina, the girl who sat in front of me. ‘I’m solid sure you asked her permission.

  These adults are half-deaf, I tell you.’

  I smiled weakly at Zarina. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was suddenly on Mother Ignatius’ blacklist through no fault of mine.

  Less than two weeks have gone by since the song incident and now I am actively courting more trouble. We are close enough to the teachers’ lounge now that I suspect they can hear us.

  The crowd following me has shrunk to four intrepid girls. But now that we are moments away from the glass doors, they are wavering also.

  ‘Thrity, men, this is stupid,’ Kajal says. ‘Let’s just forget about this.’

  I am in two minds. Part of me is scared at seeing this through but I am equally scared at the prospect of word getting around that the Mad Parsi had chickened out from under a dare.

  Reputations are like pets—you have to groom them, feed them, and not abandon them. Besides, I notice that Anita Khalsa, my main rival and the girl who started this whole thing, has not spoken a word yet.

  But the next moment, Anita speaks up. We are at the door of the teachers’ lounge and several of them are peering at us curiously from the glass doors. ‘Okay, I withdraw,’ Anita says hastily. ‘Kajal is right. I don’t want to get you thrown out of school or something. These teachers are so unsporting, you know?’

  This is my chance to stage a graceful exit with no loss of face.

  In fact, I have stared Anita Khalsa down and she has blinked first. I even have two witnesses to this moment of supreme victory. And yet, I hesitate, my right hand beginning to reach for the doorknob.

  ‘But what about my four albums?’

  Anita looks exasperated. She knows she has given me an out that I am too obstinate to take. ‘Screw the albums,’ she says. Then, seeing the determined look on my face, she blinks some more. ‘Okay, tell you what. We will give you a free album just for not doing anything.’

  I think fast, trying to size up the situation. ‘No, yaar, that’s not good enough. Tell you what, let’s compromise on two albums and I’ll give up right now.’

  They hesitate, reluctant to shell out all those bucks for nothing. For a moment I think I have aimed too high and that Anita will call my bluff. I tighten my grip on the golden door handle. Seeing this, Anita folds completely. ‘Okay, you bloody Shylock, you damn bloodsucker,’ she says. ‘We will give you two albums if you stop right now.’

  And so, the following Saturday, a bunch of them take me to Rhythm House and watch silently as I pick out Elton John’s Greatest Hits and Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night . I pay the difference in price because the second is a double album.

  For the next few weeks, I listen everyday to Candle in theWind andSong Sung Blue . When Elton John sings, ‘Daniel my brother, you are older than me/Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal,’ I invariably think of my cousin Roshan and my complicated relationship with her and my eyes fill with tears. At the next school social, I carry the album to school and Mother Ignatius teaches some of us how to tango to Crocodile Rock .

  And Mrs D’Mello sleeps well at night, undisturbed by nightmares of vengeful students breaking into the teachers’ lounge with knives hidden in newspaper, who expect her to smile even while she is being told that they are about to kill her.

  Sixteen

  BY BUYING ALCOHOL AND CIGARETTES while underage, I break the law many times during my high school years. I also commit at least two sins during my junior year.

  The first sin is winning first prize at a government-sponsored essay-writing contest extolling the virtues of family planning during Indira Gandhi’s draconian Emergency. Of course, this was in the still-innocent period of early 1976, when news that the government’s birth control campaign had run amok, had not yet reached us in Bombay. We didn’t know about the roving vans that cruised the streets of New Delhi, looking for men—and boys as young as fourteen—to forcibly sterilize them. I had grown up watching adults screw up their noses when they talked about how the lower-classes repeated their endless cycles of poverty by reproducing like rabbits, had read textbooks blaming overpopulation for all of India’s ills. So when a group of bureaucrats show up at school one day and the nuns fawn over them and then hastily organize the essay-writing contest, I write a composition that would’ve gladdened the hearts of the snip-snipping thugs who were prowling the streets of Delhi even as I wrote.

  But that was a sin born of ignorance and therefore pardon-able. What I do to Jaya is deliberately cruel.

  Jaya is the only classmate I ever have who scores higher than me in composition class. That alone is enough to make me notice her and to fear her as a competitor. She is a tall, pencil-thin Catholic girl with bad skin and long, skinny legs.

  She is also bitingly witty, though she is so shy and mousy-looking, that it takes me months to appreciate her caustic humour although she sits at the desk next to mine. I have an uneasy, complicated friendship with Jaya—on the one hand, I am attracted to her obvious intelligence and political awareness. On the other, I know that she thinks I am wasting my time hanging out with Jenny and the others and this unspoken judgment makes me prickly and awkward around her. It also doesn’t help matters that she dotes on me and talks to me in a manner that assumes we share similar values and sensibilities. There is an air of intellectual superiority to her that makes me bristle, even while I understand that the circle of superiority is large enough to include me. I know that my other friends feel patronized by her and that is enough to make me align myse
lf with them. But I also take in the thin lips that tremble with emotion when she recites a Shakespearean sonnet, I know that Jaya’s thick, Catwoman glasses hide eyes that are kind and that the sarcastic wit makes up for a deeply sensitive nature. The truth is that Jaya and I are alike in that we are both thin-skinned and hypersensitive and we both have a secret desire to be writers. She knows this and assumes a friendship based on that unspoken knowledge. But I do not want to align myself with someone who is so vulnerable and shy because I am exposing myself. After all, I have a reputation to uphold and my personality is larger and more extroverted than hers.

  Then too, Jaya gives off enough of a whiff of possessiveness that it makes me feel constricted being in her company, so that when I am around her my jokes get cruder and I am louder, more expansive and boisterous. Sometimes, she laughs with the others at one of my jokes. Most of the time she just peers at me from behind those thick glasses, her thin lips stretched in a line that I take to mean disapproval. Like many of the adults around me, Jaya seems to think that I am better than who I am spending my time being, and

  there is always a faint air of disapproval around her that sets my teeth on edge.

  It is 1976. We are in ninth-grade, a year away from graduation. The Emergency is almost a year old when Jaya comes up to me one day and says she needs to talk to me in private.

  ‘What is it, men?’ I say immediately. ‘Can’t you just tell me here?’

  ‘No, I told you, it’s private. Let’s walk out in the hallway, okay?’

  Jaya has a boyfriend, I say to myself. Goddamn it, who would’ve thought? Old Jaya has a boyfriend. And still so serious and all, not even cracking a smile.

  I fly off my chair and follow her into the hallway. But she is still not smiling.

  ‘What is it?’ Then, seeing that she’s about to cry, ‘Jaya, what’s wrong, men?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that…nobody in school knows but…my mother’s in jail.’

  I freeze. In my middle-class brain, jail is forever associated with criminal behaviour. I don’t know Jaya’s mother well but the dark-haired, petite, smiling woman in a white kurta-and pants whom I’d seen at school on a few occasions, did not look like a criminal to me. Still, one never knew…

  ‘Wha—what did she do? What crime did she commit, girl?’

  Jaya looks shocked. ‘Crime? She committed no crime. She was the head of the teachers’ union. She was simply organizing the other teachers at her school. But under the Emergency, you know, the right to strike has been criminalized…’

  Jaya continues to talk but I stop listening. I am still in shock.

  I have never known anybody who has had a relative in jail.

  The concept of going to jail for one’s beliefs is alien to me. I come from a resolutely apolitical family, where the only ancestor who participated in the freedom struggle against the British, was an object of derision in family lore. I come from an ethnic community that has held itself aloft from the turmoil of its adopted country, a minority that has thrived by not choosing sides, by existing peacefully with its neighbours. All my history and civics textbooks tell me that India is a democracy where the rule of law prevails. When I was a kid, dad used to chuckle as I saluted every traffic cop we passed. The hair on my arms stands up involuntarily when I hear the national anthem and I love watching the Republic Day parade on TV. And now Jaya is trying to convince me that her mother is in jail just for trying to start a union. It makes no sense. Jamal tried to start a union, too, and nobody threw him in jail. No, Jaya is lying. Everybody knows how it goes: jail is for criminals.

  ‘I don’t know, baba, I don’t know,’ I interrupt her. ‘All I know is, people don’t go to jail if they haven’t done anything wrong. That’s just how the law works.’

  Jaya’s face crumbles as if I have landed a punch on her jaw.

  She stares at me open-mouthed. ‘But…I swear…’ she stammers.

  I can’t look Jaya in the eye. I am ashamed of myself but then self-righteousness smothers my embarrassment and makes me land the knockout blow. ‘If your mummy’s in jail, she probably deserves to be,’ I say and then walk away.

  I resolutely avoid looking at Jaya the rest of the day.

  Two weeks later, the edifice of my conformist, middle-class existence lies in ruins at my feet. It begins innocently enough with a bus ride to Homi Bhabha Auditorium to listen to a recital by a visiting German orchestra. As always, Jesse and me catch the double-decker bus from its terminal and scramble for the front seats on the top deck. This is our favourite seat and often, we stick our faces out of the

  window to feel the wind against our faces. As always, we talk about art, music, literature—or rather, Jesse talks and I listen, storing up all the information she so casually imparts, memorizing some of her funnier one-liners so that I can pass them off as my own in school the next day. My heart swells with joy and I feel the wild, mad, happy-drunk feeling that I always do when I am in Jesse’s company. Every conversation with Jesse affects me the same way—I feel as if my brain has received a good scrubbing, so that it is bright as brass. Nobody in my circle reads, knows or thinks as much as Jesse does and even now, after several years of being close friends, I am awed that she has overlooked the five years that separate us—I am fifteen, she is twenty—and sought out my friendship. I feel totally inadequate in this relationship, as if I am doing all the taking but when I tell Jesse this she always looks offended and tells me I am wrong.

  Now she is talking about some obscure Pacific island and suddenly, I can’t wait another minute. ‘But Jesse,’ I interrupt.

  ‘How do youknow so much?’ There is a lifetime of deprivation, awe and admiration in the question but Jesse shakes her head impatiently, brushing off my overly-eager, fawning question as if it were a fly. She looks embarrassed and then mumbles something about my talking nonsense.

  We talk about other things, poke fun at the strange business names—Rassiwalla Rope Company; Chimneywalla and Sons—and signs—Stick No Labels Here; Horn OK Please; No Spitting or Sitting on Grass—that we pass. We also go past several of the giant billboards that have sprung up overnight during the Emergency: Work More, Talk Less; Indira is India, and the omnipresent family planning slogan, Hum Do, Hamare Do: We two, Our two.

  And then Jesse mentions a name I’ve heard before: Karl Marx. I vaguely know that Marx was a Communist and that Communists are enemies of the state and silly people to boot, because everybody knows that without a profit motive people will never work.

  ‘Yeah, he was a Communist, right?’ I say. ‘Like those people in China? Ae, did you know that those Chinamen don’t get to vote or anything? That’s why Nehru went to war with them—they hated us for our freedom.’

  I am blithely repeating what I’ve always heard and so I’m unprepared for Jesse’s reaction. ‘Don’t talk shit,’ she says abruptly, in a tone harsher than any she has ever used. ‘Who do you think is free in our country? The people living in the slums?

  The servants in our houses? And we all see what freedom of speech even we actually have, with all the media cowards running scared of the Emergency.’

  I stare at Jesse in amazed silence. This is a side of her I have never seen before. What was she getting so angry about? And was she angry atme ?

  ‘Well, anyway, the Communists want to distribute money equally,’ I attempted, repeating what I’d heard at school. ‘But if everybody makes the same, what is the incentive for people to work? It sounds nice but it would never work, na, if people could just sit at home and all?’

  She looks at me directly for the first time since we’ve started on this subject. ‘Do you know what the basic principle of Communism—rather, I should say, Socialism is?’ she says rhetorically. ‘It’s, “To each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Do you understand what that means?’

  I don’t. She explains. I ask more questions. She answers them. She tells me about Mao in China and Lenin in the Soviet Union and the various grassroots
movements that she claims are going on in India.

  While Jesse is talking, I think back on those childhood dreams about the city’s poor. After years of being told by the adults that the poor would always be with us, that the poor were poor because they were lazy and didn’t want to work, that nothing could be done about poverty so it was better not to think about it—at last someone is telling me something different. And to hear Jesse say it, entire countries had reorganized themselves according to these revolutionary principles. To each according to his need. It is the most life-affirming thing I’ve ever heard. Everything that I’ve always believed about people—that people usually only did mean things when they were deprived, that given a choice they’d do the right thing—all of those beliefs are boiled into that line.

  The adults around me are wrong, wrong, wrong.

  I had boarded the B.E.S.T bus that day an ordinary schoolgirl, self-indulgent and self-absorbed, occupied with my own changing body and its pleasures. When I threw around words like youth revolution and revolution, I was thinking Wood-stock, not Russia.

  I disembark from the bus that day, baptized in a new faith.

  I feel as if I had been given a pair of X-ray glasses because I can suddenly see the inside structure of things. ‘Distribution, not production, is the problem,’ Jesse had said and isn’t she right? Can’t I see evidence of that all around me—the skyscrapers growing up from the armpits of the slums, the hungry children sleeping on the pavement in front of the dazzling jewellery stores, the belching Share Bazaar traders ignoring the one-eyed beggar at their side? Bombay does not seem depressing any more. I will no longer be able to see it as a dirty, crowded, bankrupt city on the brink, on the edge of falling into the void. Instead, every beggar, every impoverished worker, every domestic servant, every new immigrant suddenly seems made of stardust, bursting with unrealized power, untapped potential and infinite possibility. Brother, I want to say to the next person I see, if only we could see what we are truly made of…