Thrity Umrigar Read online

  I sit in the living room thinking evil thoughts about myself, knowing that I am berating myself at least in part out of clear-eyed calculation. Because I want to feel something and if I can’t cry for Babu perhaps I can shed tears of self-pity. But the ruse doesn’t work.

  The tears didn’t come that day and they didn’t come until years later on a cold winter’s day in Columbus, Ohio, about eight thousand miles away from the hot, foetid city in which Babu had spent most of his life. The tears finally came that day because I was homesick and I suddenly thought of Babu, all alone in the England of the early 1950s, studying for his Merchant Navy exams and failing. And suddenly I was weeping for that disappointed young man who came back to Bombay having labelled himself a failure and for how lonely and scared and alone he must’ve been in England. I was crying because I realized that Babu never talked about his year in England because the stench of failure was too strong. And I wondered what he would’ve thought of me, the second member of the family to venture out in the big wide world. Would he have been proud? Nervous? Even a little jealous? And then it hits me that I’ll never know because Babu stopped knowing me at the age of fifteen and I remember how his death changed my family forever, made us all grow up and grow old before our time and then I’m crying, crying, crying for the years that Babu never had with his beloved Freny and crying for my father whose youth ended that day in April 1977 and above all, I’m crying for me, finally, I’m crying for me, for that frightened, lost kid who tried her best to hold her unravelling family together, for that poor, miserable fifteen-year-old who was charged with fighting with the moon, and for that ugly, awkward, skinny girl who would never be anyone’s first darling of the morning any more.

  Twenty

  IT’S BEGINNING TO UNRAVEL. I can tell by the way they won’t look me in the eye.

  It begins as a trickle and at first they have the decency to look away, their faces pinched with embarrassment, but after awhile the trickle grows into a regular stream and now they are simply looking through me, ignoring me as if I am a pebble in their way.

  I look around frantically for Vinny but he has gone to fetch us some battatawadas and bread for lunch. I have been on my feet in the hallway outside the college admission office for four hours and I am tired.

  This is my second year of college. After years of mouthing empty platitudes about youth revolution while in high school, I finally have a chance to make it happen.

  We had launched the fee boycott campaign six weeks ago to protest Bombay University’s plan to hike tuition by twenty per cent, thereby making a university education inaccessible to thousands of low-income students.

  For weeks now, I have been standing at the same spot each day begging, pleading, and arguing with my fellow students to return home without paying their fees for the upcoming semester. And Vinny and I have been successful beyond all wildest dreams. Many of the students have travelled to college from their faraway homes in the suburbs during the summer-break to enrol for the following term. But I have looked them in the eye, slapped their backs, read them statistics about how many students would have to

  drop out if the fee hike goes through, beseeched them, appealed to their sense of justice, laughingly told them that I would pay their return bus fare home, and amazingly, miraculously, I have succeeded in getting most of them to turn back.

  The clerk at the office window scowls at me each time I am victorious, each time I convince another student to continue the fee boycott. I smile at him on occasion, an appeasing smile as if to say, We’re really on the same side, brother, but he looks away. Principal Singha frequently walks by the ground floor office where Vinny and I have stood guard for the last six weeks. Most of the time he ignores us, simply sweeps past us, but sometimes he shakes his head and stops to talk to us, as if his curiosity is greater than his contempt for us. ‘What do think you’re achieving with this, Red?’ he says to me in his gravel-like voice, using his favourite moniker for me. ‘Wasting both your time and the college’s time. You think the chancellor of Bombay University is going to be scared of your little tactics?’

  In his usual earnest way Vinny steps forward to argue with Mr Singha. He pulls out his little fact sheet about the number of students affected by the hike but the principal shakes his head impatiently, grunts, and resumes walking.

  I go home each day shaking with fatigue and excitement.

  Although we are on summer-break, I am working eight-hour days. I get to college a few minutes before the tuition window opens, stay on through lunch and leave only after I make sure that the fee clerk has left for the day. But after the ambitionless years spent with Jenny and Patty, after years of self-absorption and navel-gazing, after all the high-school talk of youth power and youth revolution, I feel as if I have discovered my life’s work. Each evening I knock on the door that connects our apartment to Jesse’s and give her the day’s report. ‘You know what’s really great about this?’ I say to her one day. ‘I feel as if I am using my very body in the service of people I do not even know. I mean, it’s one thing to sit in endless political meetings at Elphinstone College or somewhere, smoking cigarettes and sipping glass after glass of chai, but this is something else. This is like actually using your body, standing when you are dying to sit down, talking when you don’t feel like saying another word, looking and touching and talking to people. I don’t know—this feels more real to me, I guess.’

  Jesse nods. I can see a look of almost maternal pride in her eyes.

  But now it is just a few days before the term starts again and the kids are panicking. The first few ones mumble their apologies to me, explain that their parents will skin them alive if they miss any classes, brush aside my explanations of how we could win this thing if we only stuck together, and go ahead and pay their fees. ‘C’mon, yaar,’ Anand says. ‘God only knows how many classes I’ve bunked last term. You know that Mr Singha is just waiting for a chance to kick me out of here. I just can’t risk that, yaar.’

  Once a few of them pay, the others follow, until Vinny and I are floundering like fish on the shore. They are not listening to us now, the mesmerizing, magical hold that we had on them until a few days ago, has been broken.

  I glance at the face of the clerk. He is grinning at me, a victorious, gleeful smile. I look away. Weeks of fatigue are catching up with me, making me teary. We had been so close.

  A few more days of unity and we could have defeated the system. For a split-second I ask myself if I was wrong to have refused Pranab’s offer from a week ago and then I hate myself for my moment of weakness.

  Pranab is an overweight, burly guy whom we jokingly refer to as a professional student. At twenty-six, he is considerably older than the rest of us but seems to have no intention of graduating from college, content to spend his time cruising down the streets of South Bombay on his

  Yamaha motorcycle. Pranab belonged to the youth division of the Congress Party and I knew that he and his ilk looked upon student activists like Vinny and me as idealistic idiots. So I was reluctant to go when I heard that Pranab wanted to meet with us in the college cafeteria for a chat. But Vinny convinced me otherwise.

  ‘Arré, Vishnu, bring two more glasses of tea, fatta-faat,’ he yelled to the young server when we showed up. I was irritated by his presumption at ordering tea for me without even a cursory inquiry, but I didn’t show it. After all, Pranab had many other qualities, which irritated me even more greatly.

  He smiled at us, and I noticed that his teeth were beginning to yellow from the constant cigarette smoking. ‘Hey, yaar, thanks for coming,’ he said, shaking hands with Vinny and nodding at me. ‘I’ve been watching both of you for days, keeping the students from paying their fees and all. Not a bad job, yaar, considering and all. Most days you get what? Ten-twenty students to turn back? And maybe two-three cowards go ahead and pay anyway? If I had my way, I’d kill those bleddy bastards.’

  We listened to him cautiously, silently, unsure of where this was heading. Pranab kept talk
ing. ‘Yah, men, two of you are giving all of us student activists a good name.’ I bristled at that, at his presumption at equating his thuggery with the kind of work we were doing but Vinny kicked me gently under the table and I held my silence.

  ‘So here’s what I have to offer,’ Pranab was saying. ‘Me and my boys can get this whole college shut down in two hours flat. Nobody will dare set foot in it to pay any tuition-fuition.

  You two can go home, relax, or take in a flick or two. In exchange, all I ask is that you don’t challenge me in the next student election.’

  Vinny and I exchanged a quick look, unsure of whether to laugh or be offended. This bloody idiot with his bristly moustache and shifty eyes actually thought that we would waste our time running for a meaningless college election.

  ‘What, you mean you can shut down the college in two hours?’ Vinny asked, although we both knew what Pranab meant.

  ‘Oh, come off it, yaar,’ Pranab said. ‘You know I have good contacts. A few stones thrown, a few windows broken, maybe one or two beatings and this college won’t open until we want it to.’

  We were wasting our time. I got up. ‘That’s not how we operate,’ I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as he did. ‘Any goonda can close something down with violence. We are trying to appeal to student’s sense of justice and solidarity.’

  Pranab raised his right eyebrow. ‘Sense of justice?’ he repeated, snickering a bit. ‘Sister, just wait till it’s time for college to start. Then you’ll see them all lining up at the front office, baaing like sheep. Even your best friends won’t know your name when they’re in that queue, paying their fees.’

  Well, he was right. As I watch them lining up behind the open window and averting their faces from where we stand, Pranab suddenly seems to be a genius in human psychology.

  ‘Sheep,’ I mutter to myself. ‘Disgusting, fucking sheep.’

  So much has happened since I impulsively participated in my first demonstration. The Emergency ended on March 20, 1977 with Indira Gandhi’s ignoble defeat. I received the final grades for my high school board exams the next day. (When Greta Duke saw that despite all predictions, I had actually done well in my exams, she shook her head and said, ‘You have the devil’s luck, Umrigar. The devil’s luck. Never forget that.’) Indira’s nemesis, the doddering Morarji Desai, became Prime Minister at the age of eighty-one. Babu died in April of that year. Three years later, a repentant, desperate India brought back Indira Gandhi in a landslide. By then, I had finished three years of college.

  College: Steam and smoke rise from endless cups of tea and cigarettes while we sit in cafeterias discussing how to build a student movement; afternoons spent sitting cross-legged on the grass at the Bombay University campus, debating politics and ‘the Indian condition’, with members of opposing civil liberties organizations; counting the money from selling mimeographed booklets to the rush of sweaty factory workers that pours out of the textile mills after twelve-hour shifts; looking over my shoulder constantly to make sure I don’t run into any of my father’s business friends who might let slip that they spotted me half-way across the city from where I’m supposed to be.

  College: Requesting the office clerk to fix up the attendance rolls to masquerade the fact that I have not attended classes in months; mornings spent gossiping and eating tomato-chutney sandwiches on the marble steps outside of college; writing and directing plays for the All-Bombay Intercollegiate competition; going to Jehangir Art Gallery to take in the latest art shows and then stopping at nearby Rhythm House; skipping class to sit in the rain at Nariman Point, gazing out at the sea while Vinny lights cigarette after cigarette and lets me take deep drags off them.

  College: Coming close,this close, to doing my bit to shut my college down to protest the tuition hikes and then watching the tide turn, watching it fall out of my grasp like sand out of a fist, watching them pull away from me, as relentlessly, as remorselessly, as the ocean pulling away from the sand. It’s one thing, at age eighteen, to talk about how we will work for the revolution even though ‘we won’t see it during our own lifetime’. It’s another thing to experience the truth of that.

  The tuition hike went through. Our predictions about the number of students who wouldn’t be able to afford college came true. Nobody seemed to notice. Thus hope yellows into cynicism.

  But that’s not the full story either. There are other disillusionments.

  There is the day in my final year of college when the whole gang is sitting on the marble steps and Abbas says he needs to go home to study.

  We protest but Abbas is already on his way. ‘Okay, see you, then, John Travolta,’ Hanif yells after him.

  We call Abbas John Travolta, because several years ago he had walked into the theatre to seeSaturday Night Fever as plain old Abbas Hakim and strutted out as John Travolta, swinging his hips and walking on his toes, the way the Tony Manero character does in the movie. He also began to talk in a faux New York accent, pronouncing coffee askofee instead ofcawfee , as we did.

  Now, Abbas swings around. ‘You all should be studying too, yaar. Final exams are less than two weeks away.’

  ‘Yah, okay,’ I say dismissively. ‘Two weeks, my foot.’

  Hanif turns to me. ‘No, he’s right about that. Imagine, two more weeks and we’ll never meet again like this. All of us will be out in the world.’

  My brain freezes. I realize that college life is drawing to a close. I suddenly feel woefully inadequate to tackle the working world. My lifelong dream to work atThe Times of India , slips off my shoulders like an ill-fitting cape. I am nowhere close to being ready to be anything but a college student. The world suddenly feels too big a place for me to navigate.

  Also, there is this…

  Reluctantly, hesitantly, at first in a whisper and then a little louder, is this voice that points out to me that our Utopian vision of what the world should look like does not match up with the personalities of the people trying to build that world.

  I want to ignore that disconnect, that gap that looms between the purity of our dreams and the narrowness of our daily lives.

  I have already lost so much—my faith in religion, the escapism that my druggie friends once offered, my faith in my ability to make things right between my parents—that giving up my belief in politics seems too unbearable a loss.

  But I am growing up. Dreams that used to once thrill me—like Natasha’s vision of a world that was a good place not just for humans but for animals too, which meant nobody would eat meat in a socialist paradise, or Shekhar’s imagined world where every person could afford to drive a Ca-dillac—have lost their hold on me. I notice instead the self-aggrandizing poses struck by the student leaders and the way activists from upper-caste, affluent Hindu families scorn the label ‘intellectual’ and instead refer to themselves as the working class; I notice that all the lefty kids dress and speak the same way, until we all have the same intonations when we speak about ‘the people’, and ‘the masses’. I notice how we write off former comrades whose politics differ even slightly from ours, I remember how, once when we were planning a women’s rights event, Suresh yelled at his girlfriend for forgetting to add sugar in his tea and how nobody commented on the irony.

  And then there is the fatigue. I am tired of sitting in endless meetings and study groups, discussing whether Lenin or Trotsky was correct. I am tired of constantly fighting everybody, from the police to the thirty-year-old thugs who masquerade as student leaders, to my own father, who is petrified that my political views are going to land me in jail.

  It is draining to sneak around behind his back, to constantly look over my shoulders, to always feel as if I am going to get caught. Also, I have the kind of personality that needs at least occasional successes to keep going. And in this line of work, there is no instant gratification, no tangible success. With every new student whom I talk into attending one of our meetings, joining our organization, it seems as if someone else has dropped out.

  The sour tast
e of disillusionment rises in my throat. I try to force it back down. But it keeps popping back up, like a tag-along younger sister who shows up at the wrong times and places.

  I also try to block my ears to an unmistakable sound. It is the sound of another door closing.

  Twenty-one

  IHAVE TO GET OUT of here no matter what it takes to do so.

  The thought is so clear in my head that it takes my breath away, so that I feel as if I have to sit down on the wooden steps that I am climbing. I am at the bottom of the stairs leading up to our second-floor apartment but even from here I can hear mummy’s voice, loud, hysterical, and thick with rage. It is this thickness that makes my stomach collapse, because it is the sound of madness and this is how she sounds when she is totally out of control. I have grown up hearing the same harshness in her younger sister’s voice, the sister who has fought her own lifelong demons. And now mummy has inherited this bellow and the ugliness of it makes my hair stand up on end.

  I know that mummy is having one of her daily fights with Mehroo. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, my head light with nervousness, my legs suddenly feeling as if they are made of hay and unable to carry me another step to the apartment.

  Occasionally, I can hear Mehroo’s voice, quivering and thin with frustration and emotion. Then, mummy’s voice rises again, covering up Mehroo’s in a torrent of words. Even from this distance I can make out the curses that she is hurling at Mehroo, cruel, poisonous words that land like darts in my heart. I automatically do what I’ve done all my life when mummy curses Mehroo.Please God , I say,whatever bad thingshe wishes for Mehroo, let it happen to me instead twice as strong .