Thrity Umrigar Read online

  Dad leaves the room and when he comes back he announces that he has just consulted with Dr Sethna on the phone and it is decided—we are shifting Babu to Jaslok Hospital. None of us have ever been to Jaslok but have often driven by the tall skyscraper in the posh side of town. Jaslok is where the movie-stars and politicians go when they’re ill but it also has the best facilities for kidney failure in town. If dad is worried about the cost, he does not let on.

  Now that a decision has been made we are all anxious to get going. Masina Hospital, with its lemon-coloured whitewashed walls suddenly seems incredibly two-bitty and small-time. Of course they can’t figure out what’s wrong with Babu here. But the specialists at Jaslok, why, one look at him and they’ll be able to tell us what’s going wrong. And then they’ll fix it. Optimism courses through my veins like a drug, so that when Babu is lifted and placed in the ambulance, I feel relief rather than apprehension.

  None of us is prepared for the curt, remote, inaccessibility of Jaslok Hospital. Babu has already been whisked away into the Intensive Care Unit by the time we get to the hospital. We are not even given time to say goodbye or to reassure him that we are all nearby. Unlike Masina Hospital, where we could crowd in his room and be participants in his illness—some one rubbing his hands, someone applying massage oil on his hands, someone else soothing his brow—we are mere spectators, as the high-powered doctors hook Babu up to metallic machines and rubber tubes, rendering him unrecognizable. We have to beg to even be let into the lobby of the ICU and then we are reduced to going up in twos to gaze at him through a glass partition. It is as if Babu no longer belongs to us, as if the hospital has now taken over his care, as if Jaslok has usurped all the vital relationships in his life, as if it has now become his surrogate brother and wife and child.

  All of a sudden, Babu seems far away and remote to us, in a way that he wasn’t at Masina. I have a sudden, terrifying thought that this is a dress rehearsal and Jaslok is readying us for the final, awful separation; the hospital is telling us,This ishow it will be when he dies—he will feel close enough to touch andyet, you will not be able to .

  Hours go by and we fall into a routine. The entire family has gathered in the waiting room on the seventeenth floor but every half hour two of us take the elevator to the ICU on the fifteenth floor, stare at Babu from behind the glass partitions for a few minutes and then take the sad ride up back to the waiting room. Already, it seems as if we’ve been doing this for years, as if all life on the outside has ceased to exist, that the hospital is the only life we’ve ever known. Already, it seems to us as if the world outside has been drained of life and colour, like the colour has drained from Babu’s face.

  As the miserable afternoon wears on, we try to be judicious of our time in the ICU lobby, considerate about giving each family member a turn to go to the fifteenth floor. As his wife, Freny has first rights to as many visits as she wants but there are so many people in this room who love Babu—my aunt Mehroo, who has practically raised him; my dad, who is walking around as if he’s the one attached to a ventilator; my cousin Roshan, who, at nineteen, is too young to watch her father like this. So we take turns.

  At about eight p.m., it is my and dad’s turn. Shankar, the young man who operates the elevator, has started his shift a while back and already he is familiar with my family and seems to understand our growing fear and grief. Mani, with characteristic generosity, has already pressed a ten-rupee note in his hand and now we tip him every time we ride the elevator. As the doors of the lift close, my father suddenly doubles over, as if someone has struck him hard in the stomach. His shoulders heave and tears stream down his cheeks as he cries wordlessly. Shankar looks aghast. Clucking his tongue in sympathy, he murmurs, ‘No, no, sahib. Bas, bas.’ I put my arms around my father. Suddenly, I remember the other time that I have watched my dad break down hard.

  It was three years earlier, a day in 1974, at a time when the global oil crisis of 1973 had snaked a long, tortured and unlikely path toward my father’s business and driven him to the point of bankruptcy. The optimism of the late 1960s had affected my father—he had broadened his line of work to become a developer and had successfully bid for a large government contract to build low-income housing. But the oil crisis struck; the cost of raw materials doubled, then trebled; and the small print on the contract held the contractors responsible for the rise in prices. Along with several other developers, my father lost his shirt on the deal.

  All that day, the mood at home had been tense and subdued.

  Mehroo had told me that morning that today was a vitally important day, that daddy had a big meeting with his bankers, who would decide whether to loan him more money so that he could try saving the business. At nine p.m. that night we heard the fumbling of the key and dad let himself into the house and to the dining room, where we were gathered. He looked haggard and tired and, I don’t know defeated —in a way I’d never seen before. I think we all knew the answer to our silent inquiry before he even spoke.

  When he did, he looked directly at his brother. ‘Bhai, we’re finished,’ he said quietly. ‘They refused any more loans. We have nothing left. I don’t know where the money will come from for food tomorrow. I don’t know what to do next—if I’m very lucky, maybe I’ll be able to drive a taxi for someone.’

  If dad had said he was going to become a coolie at Victoria Terminus station, he couldn’t have shocked me more. Nobody we knew in our social circle drove a cab. Driving a taxi was somethingthey did—they being the illiterate, uneducated, working-class, paan-chewing, kurta-pyjama-wearing, non-Parsi men, with whom we had nothing in common. I don’t know what shocked me most—the uncharacteristic pessimism with which my father spoke or his bewildering choice of profession or the fact that he suddenly burst into tears in front of the entire family. His sobbing was the sound of a man at the end of his rope, a man on the verge of—bankruptcy? suicide?

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Then, there was a rustle and then a roar. It was Babu. ‘Nonsense, Burjor,’ he shouted. ‘This is no time to lose your courage, bhai. Cab-fab, nothing. We have our factory and we will rise again. We are not dead yet.

  Tomorrow morning, first thing, I will make the rounds of the market and get us some credit. Even if we have to pay twenty-five per cent interest, so be it. You concentrate on getting the outside orders, bossie. I’ll get the work done. We will pay the workers from our house money, if we have to. Freny will turn over her entire pay cheque to us if we need it. Now, saala, stop your chicken-shit crying.’

  It was a reversal of roles. Babu was usually the nervous, cautious sort. Dad was the dreamer, the visionary, the one who dared to cast a wider net. But that was the secret to their success—one of them was always there to pick up the other. So that I know what dad is saying as he sobs in the elevator. ‘He was—is—more than my brother. He’s my partner, my best friend.’

  We reach the ICU in time to see one of Babu’s doctors coming out of his room. As he walks past us, dad reaches over to stop him and introduce himself. Then, his eyes fill with tears again.

  ‘Doctor, this man is very important to us,’ he begins. ‘Please, spare no expense in looking after him. You have no idea what he means…’

  The doctor’s lips tighten. ‘Please, sir,’ he says curtly. ‘Pull yourself together. We have no time for such sentimental theatrics in here. I am too busy and have many other patients to worry about. You people bring your relatives here after it’s too late and expect us to pull a miracle.’ Then, he turns on his heel and walks away, leaving us standing open-mouthed. A ward boy who has heard the whole exchange tsk-tsks in sympathy and disapproval. ‘Badmaash doctor,’ he says to us in low, confidential tones. ‘No heart in this man. Treating everybody badly. You don’t worry, saar. He got bad manner but he’s a top-class doctor. Your patient will be A-OK.’

  But dad is not appeased. I see the blood rising from his neck to his face and his eyes have a murderous look in them I have never seen before. ‘I should kill him,’ he
mutters. ‘If I was half a man I would just go get a knife and kill the bastard.’ But even as he talks, the anger leaves his eyes and is replaced by a kind of bewildered hurt.

  We walk back into the waiting room defeated. The doctor’s rudeness has shattered the last bit of hope that I was still feeling. Babu is not going to make it, I know that now. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to put Babu together again.

  Slowly, the hours pass. Most of the families of the other patients have left, so that as the hours crawl toward dawn, it is only my family that waits in that large waiting room.

  But we may as well be stranded on the moon, given how isolated from the rest of the world we already feel. We walk around in a daze, we talk in fragmented whispers. From the picture windows we can see the distant streets but even Bombay is quiet and subdued and unrecognizable at this late hour.

  From this height, we are closer to the sky than to the forlorn city streets. I keep waiting for the sun to rise, trying to trick myself in to believing that if Babu survives another day, lives to see another dawn, he will make it. That he will turn a corner.

  So this is what it means to keep a death watch, I think. I think of Babu lying all alone in a strange room, covered in a confetti of tubes and hoses, and for the first time I don’t feel pity for him. After all, all of us gathered here are surely as alone as he is, lonely planets orbiting around each other in our own fog of confusion and pain and regrets.

  Regrets. I am choking on my own. So many moments to trip over, to feel guilty about. A few weeks before he went into the hospital he had asked me to join the family for a Hindi movie.

  And I had said no. Such contempt in my voice. Because by now, I hated the song-and-dance, formulaic, masala Hindi movies. The pretensions of being an intellectual so strong now and what easier way to shorthand that change to the family than by expressing contempt for the commercial movies that they so loved? The cracks in the facade, the faultlines already appearing now—I only want to see small, low-budget movies by Shyam Benegal and Satyajit Ray, I’d said to him and Babu had looked at me with confusion and hurt. Roshan had piped in, the contempt in her voice matching mine: ‘Yah, you want to see films where the camera focuses for fifteen minutes on a fly sitting on a chappati. So booooring, those movies. I go to movies to be entertained, not to be put to sleep.’ I shut up then, the gap between the two of us too enormous to bridge, the gap between where I come from and where

  I want to go, too immense to fathom. But the hurt look in Babu’s eyes as the rest of them left for the movie had taken away all the pleasure at having said no.

  The truth is, he was beginning to embarrass me. All the things about him that had thrilled me as a child—the loud laugh that always ended in a coughing fit, the casual dropping of four-letter words in his conversations, the abandon with which he farted—now made my toes curl with embarrassment.

  When Pervez, the slim, delicate-looking man who used to come to the house to tutor me in math and science, would express amazement at the liberal sprinkling of four-letter words in Babu’s conversations, I would not hear the obvious delight and affection in Pervez’s voice. Instead, I would fume inwardly at Babu’s lack of sophistication and manners. What I had once seen as lack of pretension, now appeared to be crudity.

  And he knew it too. Could see the distance in my eyes. Was too hurt to mention it directly because after all, what could he say? That he didn’t feel my love as strongly as he once did?

  That he had always loved me as faithfully as he had loved his own daughter, Roshan? Remind me of those childhood years when I would sit by myself and try and decide once and for all, who I loved more, Babu or daddy? Remind me that he had held me in his arms the day that I was born before my father even made it to the hospital? Remind me of that wonderful day when I was seven and cuddling with him one evening when he said to me, unexpectedly, ‘You are my first darling of the morning.’ I turned that phrase over in my mouth like toffee, toyed with it with my tongue. ‘What does that mean?’

  I finally asked, not wanting to ask, afraid that the explanation may be more prosaic than the tingling feeling the words con-jured up for me. He shrugged, laughing. ‘Nothing. Just what it says. I just made it up. You decide what it means.’ I wore the words like a silver medal the rest of the day.

  Two memories from the week before he went into the hospital: Joan Baez’Come from the Shadows was playing on the stereo in the living room. I was lying on my stomach on Freny’s bed and hanging from my waist, my hands dangling toward the floor. ‘And we’ll raze, raze the prisons to the ground,’ Baez sang and I pondered the seeming contradiction: how do you raise something to the ground, I wondered? Must be poetic licence, I finally decided. To my left, Babu and Freny were leaning on the railing of the balcony, talking to each other in soft, low voices. They were relaxed and leaning into each other, a stark contrast to the stiff, cautious way in which my parents carried themselves around each other. I was suddenly filled with an insane happiness. So that when Babu asked me a little later if I want to go with them to seeWitness for the Prosecution , I immediately said yes. On the way to the theatre, Babu talked about what a classic the movie was, how brilliant Charles Laughton was in the main role. And Tyrone Power, he breathed, the admiration for the actor he must’ve felt as a young man still coming through. At his side, Freny smiled.

  Soon, they were talking about the other Hollywood movie-stars they grew up with. Cary Grant. James Stewart. Ethel Merman. Humphrey Bogart. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The names tumbled off their silver tongues, like beads of mercury. I sat in the backseat with Roshan, warm and drowsy from this replay of their youth.

  And now, a week later, this man whose eyes had lit up with pleasure when I told him how much I had lovedWitness forthe Prosecution , who had bought us chicken rolls and potato chips during intermission, who had taken us out to dinner after the movie, was lying in an isolated hospital bed, dying? dead?

  I must’ve dozed off because the noise of the elevator doors opening makes my eyes fly open and I’m just in time to see Shankar the elevator operator step out of his steel cage and go toward where Mani aunty is sitting. She looks up at him silently, questioningly and he simply shakes his head from side-to-side, once. But his meaning is awfully clear.

  Shankar is the angel of death, the messenger of doom. He has come to bring us bad news from the ICU two floors above us.

  Babu is dead.

  Mehroo, noticing the silent exchange between Mani and the elevator boy, jumps up from her chair. ‘What?…Is he…?’ she asks Shankar and he nods, averting his eyes, gazing at his feet.

  Sobbing hard, Mehroo heads over to Freny. The sound of sobbing fills the room. My dad is standing by himself at one of the windows, his shoulders shaking. His older brother is dead. He is now the only surviving male in the family.

  And just then, there is a flash of dazzling light flooding the room. It is the sun, red and angry as a chilli pepper. And it is immense, a red cannonball in the sky. Despite the immense grief that I feel, I am distracted and mesmerized by the close beauty of the sun, as seen from this height. People who live in skyscrapers must know the sun so much more intimately than the rest of us, I think.

  But today, the rising of the sun, the dawning of a new day, feels like an insult, rather than a thing of hope. Or rather, it feels like a burden, this new day, because it is the first day that Babu will not be alive to share with us. This is the first day of a new life that we will all have to get used to but right now, living, the simple act of putting one foot in front of another, seems impossible. I feel like those astronauts walking in space, clumsy, heavy, everything in slow motion.

  I look at the sun until my eyes smart from its red sparks.

  The long night of waiting is over and so is praying to the moon.

  A new morning of horror has replaced the waiting and I now change allegiances and pray to the sun. But instead of wrestling for Babu’s life, I now pray for death.

  A lon
g sleep. Oblivion. Because to be awake is to be stabbed a million times a second with the pinprick realization of Babu’s death and how it will change our lives forever. ‘Please God,’

  I pray. ‘Just give us all an injection, something that will just let us sleep for forty-eight hours, past the point of having to deal with this. Because none of us is ready.’ For an absurd moment, I flirt with the fantasy of rushing up to the nurse’s station and stealing some drugs that will spare us this long, horrific day that is dawning.

  Because I know sure as anything, that my role as the baby of the family is about to end. Has ended. A freight train has roared into our lives and has flattened everything in its path, including my childhood.

  It’s growing up time. I will not cry. I will not lend my voice to the sobbing in this room. I am no longer a child. I have responsibilities, several broken people that I have to put back together. All the king’s horses…All the lonely people where do they all come from?…No one was saved…But I must. Save them all, these people that I love. Repent for all the ugly thoughts I ever had about any of them. Fighting with the moon.

  And losing. Empty-handed.

  I am no longer a child. I will not cry.

  Nineteen

  WHITE. THE FUNERAL IS ALL white. The women in their white, cotton saris. The men in white daaglis. The white of the sheet that is covering Babu’s body as it rests on a simple wooden platform on the ground. The white robes of the priests and the white masks that cover their mouths as they sit mumbling their prayers for the departed soul. The white of the sandwiches that some thoughtful relative has brought for us to the Tower of Silence and that lie untouched. The whites of Babu’s eyes, eyes that have been donated to another human being somewhere across this miserable city where blindness is so common. The white of Babu’s feet, so cold and hard when I touched and kissed them one last time at the hospital. The whiteness of fury, the pure rage that I feel at this aborting of life, the obscene haste with which Babu’s body is removed from the hospital, the surreal absurdity of finding ourselves in a funeral home, praying over Babu,Babu , who was so alive, so vibrant, so attuned to the world. The whiteness of the world, this blurry white world that grief creates, where everything loses colour and taste and shape.