Thrity Umrigar Read online

  Now I am at the first floor landing and I stand there debating what to do next. I know that I am here on borrowed time because any minute now the first-floor apartment door will be flung open and one of the neighbours will join me on the landing, watching me with eyes made narrow with inquisitiveness, trying to gauge my reaction, storing up the information so that a nugget of gossip can be dropped at the appropriate time into the jaws of salivating, news-hungry neighbours.

  Worse, the woman may say something to me, either something flippant and snarky about the daily fights, or worse, something meant to be kind and understanding that might bring a tear to my eye, which in turn will also be duly reported to the other neighbours.

  I suddenly feel claustrophobic, as if I am trapped on this tiny strip of space where I am standing, unable to continue standing here and reluctant to climb the flight of stairs that will take me into my apartment and face-to-face with the hysterical, raging woman who has given birth to me. I feel a hatred that rises from my stomach into my mouth and tastes like sour milk. For a moment, I flirt with the idea of turning around and racing down the stairs and into the freedom of the streets, of walking around Bombay until dusk gives way to night and my feet grow heavy and tired from walking. I want to run away from the misery of prying neighbours and the red-hot embarrassment that flows through my limbs like lava, at the thought of everybody around us knowing every intimate detail of what goes on within our apartment because of my mother’s bullhorn voice. But while I am fantasizing about flight, I also fantasize about rushing into the house and cupping my mother’s open mouth with my hand and pushing her torrent of hateful words back down her throat, my hands rougher on her mouth than they need to be. I feel a blinding fury then, at the thought of this reception that I am receiving at the end of a long day in college.

  I continue standing on the landing, unable to move, paralysed with indecision. Part of me wants to rush out without a look back and never return again, to lose myself in the crowds of Bombay. Part of me wants to rush upstairs and throttle my mother, silence her, cause the buffalo sounds coming from her throat to stop. And all this time, while I debate what to do next, I am aware that any minute now the first floor apartment door will fly open and then I will have a third dilemma to deal with.

  I want to lay myself down on the cold stone floor of the landing, curl up within myself, cover myself with a warm blanket knitted from silence, and fall asleep. This, of course, is not an option. There is a decision to be made.

  When I was nine years old I stood in the bathroom one day with the sharp, pointed edge of a steel compass in my inner ear. I had learned that a punctured eardrum could cause deafness and it was deafness that I craved, the white, snowy silence that would block off my mother’s voice. I wanted to lose myself in silence, wanted to occupy a world where adults did not scream their hate at each other, where mothers did not dissolve in gut-wrenching, soul-searing sobs, where beloved aunts did not cry to the heavens for help.

  The compass was part of a geometry set that my aunt Freny had bought for me that year. The pale yellow metal box also contained a six-inch plastic ruler and a protractor.

  I stood in the bathroom for the longest time that day, trying to picture what a world of silence would feel like, trying to imagine the pain that would invariably follow a pierced eardrum. Would there be blood? If so, how much? Would it trickle out of my ear in a thin stream or would it gush out?

  What explanation would I give the adults when they asked what I was doing with a compass in the bathroom? Would I be able to fool them into believing that it was an accident? And most important, once I felt the pain and saw the blood, would I have the guts to follow through by piercing the second eardrum, also? What if I chickened out?

  What good would one deaf ear do?

  In the end, I didn’t have the guts to go through with it. Because just as my fingers tightened around the cold metal of the compass I realized that deafness would mean more than escaping from the sound of my mother’s shrieks and curses.

  It would also mean never hearing music again or the sound of the birds or the roar of the ocean or my father’s humming as we drove along Marine Drive. Indeed, I would be losing an entire world in order to gain the escape from angry words that I was seeking and bad as I was at math, even I could figure out that the gain was not greater than the loss.

  But this craving for oblivion did not end on that day. For years, I fantasized about killing myself and leaving behind a note that simply said, ‘Let there be peace at home.’ I was sure that this was the only way to make the adults end their daily bickering. A few years after the compass incident, when I was fourteen, I snuck into the medicine cabinet and stole the bottle of iodine that stood next to the bottle of mercurochrome. Each time Mehroo applied iodine on my bruised knees or scraped elbows, I’d noticed the line on the bottle’s label that said the product was poisonous if consumed orally. It was not that I planned on killing myself on this day—I just wanted to taste the bitter iodine to see if I could go through with drinking the entire bottle if I ever needed to. I wanted to test how foul the taste would be in case I ever needed to down it in a hurry, to know if I needed to come up with a better plan. I screwed open the black plastic top to the small, thin glass bottle and touched the opening of the bottle to my tongue, which immediately went numb from where the drop of iodine landed on it.

  I was satisfied. It tasted awful but if things ever got so bad at home that I needed to kill myself, I knew that I could force myself to consume the entire bottle.

  I climb the last flight of stairs and ring the doorbell to the apartment. Nothing happens. Mummy continues to scream at Mehroo, who is doing her best to respond in between coughing fits. I hear Mehroo coughing from where I stand outside the front door and as always, I fight the urge to beat on my ears with the open palm of my hands so that the sound of her cough gets fragmented and chopped up. I have been doing this since I was a child, whenever the house erupted in fighting and yelling and swearing. By beating on my ears I could manipulate sound, slice up words until they sounded funny and meaningless, could drain the poison out of them. Mehroo’s coughing scares me, reminds me of how terribly frail and sick she is, and produces in me a rush of protectiveness that I want to wrap like a woollen coat around her. I ring the doorbell again, more insistently this time. The indecisiveness of a few minutes ago, the desire to run away and never return, is gone now, replaced by the urge to pull Mehroo away from the fighting that is surely sapping her strength and numbering her days.

  Mehroo’s health has declined a lot these past few years. The treatments for TB that she received in her childhood have damaged her lungs, so that her cough has become a part of her now, a feature every bit as much her as her voice or her laugh. But no matter how much Mehroo coughs, I can’t get used to it. Her painful coughing has a visceral effect on me, just as the old cowherd’s wailing did when I was an infant.

  When Mehroo has one of her long coughing fits, I want to cover my ears, run out of the room, smash something. My violent reaction stems from my inability to see her suffer and her coughing brings me face-to-face with the realization that all the love in my heart cannot help her even the tiniest bit. Of course, I don’t say any of this to Mehroo because she is already so ashamed of her coughing, haunted as she is by childhood memories of being shunned when she had TB. She will no longer kiss me and when I try to grab her face and forcibly kiss her cheek, she turns her head away so that the kiss misfires and lands on her head. She acts as if she has TB again, although she doesn’t.

  Mehroo has stopped going to the factory almost completely now because the sawdust makes her condition worse. She still looks over the cloth-bound business ledgers at home but dad has hired an accountant at the factory. Mostly, she is confined to the house and that means that there are more fights between mummy and her. Whereas she could once escape to the factory during the day, she is now trapped in the house with a nemesis who seems unable to go beyond a day without a fight.

 
Between the coughing fits and the fighting, Mehroo’s strength is being sapped, daily.

  As soon as mummy opens the door I take in her flushed, sweaty face, the heaving of her bosom, the mad, bloodthirsty glint in her eye. I decide to go on the offensive before she tries to suck me into her world of ancient resentments and enmities.

  ‘I could hear every word that you were screaming from two floors down,’ I say. ‘All the neighbours are gathered downstairs listening to your bhea-bhea-bhea. For God’s sake, keep your loud voice down.’

  She turns on me with the manic energy of a young bull. ‘Not even home for a minute and already siding with her, are you?

  Only my voice you hear, is that it? Why don’t you say something to your beloved Mehroo with all her screaming and shouting? This is my reward for carrying you in my stomach for nine months, feeding you, taking care of you when you are sick, so that you side with everybody except your mother. But that’s what happens when you give birth to a snake instead of a daughter.’

  ‘Toba, toba, toba,’ Mehroo says, tapping her cheeks three times in the ritualistic way. ‘What kind of mother talks like this to her own daughter? God forgive you.’

  My opening salvo has re-energized mummy and she does not let up, directing her pent-up fury at me, following me from room to room, calling me names. I recoil from her words but I am also relieved that I am shielding Mehroo from mummy’s barrage of bullets by taking them myself. I see my body as a wall that I have erected between mummy and Mehroo, to protect the latter. I figure I can take it because when mummy attacks Mehroo or my dad, her curses carry more venom than a cobra. But even though she says terrible things to me, her attacks don’t devastate me as much because I tell myself that deep down she doesn’t mean it, that she is posturing, that despite her mad, hateful words, she really loves me.

  Still, I have had a long day at college and I am tired of her yelling. I want to end this fight right now. I raise my voice to cover up hers, like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water, but I am no match for her. Her voice gets thicker and thicker, like a soup that’s been simmering on the stove for too long, and then I can’t take it for another second. I rush towards her and grip her wrist in my hand and hiss at her to shut up, just shut up, to keep her damn voice down because all the neighbours have their windows open and they can all hear every word of what she is saying. I feel like a madwoman myself, completely out of control, but now she is once again turning the tables on me because she is inching towards the open window in her bedroom, dragging me along with her, and now she is screaming at the top of her lungs that I am hurting her, that I am holding her prisoner, and I am so stunned by her treachery, by the extent of her deceit, and so intent on wanting to keep her voice down that I try cupping her mouth with my other hand but now she calls forth some demon-like strength and in one swift stroke she is out of my grip and then I watch with horror as she turns her fingers into a claw and pulls them down the length of my right arm, taking with her flecks of my skin, leaving behind faint but long lines of bloody scratches.

  I yelp. You’re scratching me, I say, watching her handiwork in amazement. Then I look up to her face and there is such a look of controlled excitement, of deep satisfaction, of pure, unadulterated madness on her face that my heart begins to pound with fear. She is crazy. My mother is crazy. And right at this moment she looks as if she hates me even though I don’t want to believe that, despite everything that has just happened.

  I rush out of her room. Already, I can tell that there will be scars where her fingers have dug into my flesh and I hurry to put on a long-sleeved shirt so that none of the other adults can see what mummy has done. This will be another one of our many secrets.

  I wear long sleeves for the next several weeks. But one day Jesse somehow catches a glimpse of the scratches on my forearm. ‘How the hell did that happen?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, I was just playing around with Ronnie and he scratched me a few times, that’s all,’ I lie.

  She nods. She has no reason not to believe me.

  But others are less oblivious to what’s going on at home.

  Although it was years ago, I still smart from the memory of the conversation I’d had with Miss D’Silva, when I was in ninth-grade.

  Miss D’Silva was my elementary school teacher who lived a few houses down from us and had consequently known my family all her life. I continued to see her even after I graduated from her class because often, when I missed the school-bus because I’d overslept, Mehroo would wait downstairs with me and when Miss D’Silva would walk by on her way to the taxi-stand, Mehroo would request her to give me a ride to school. She always agreed and we’d spend the time in the cab chatting about school and other matters.

  ‘So, kiddo. Have a boyfriend yet?’ she’d always tease me.

  ‘What, no gora-gora nice Parsi young man yet?’ She had grown up around enough Parsis to know how much most of them prized light skin.

  ‘Even if I did have a boyfriend, he wouldn’t be a Parsi,’ I’d reply. ‘And he definitely wouldn’t be fair-skinned.’

  Miss D’Silva, who had the burnt chocolate coloured skin of a Goanese Catholic, would smile.

  But on this day, Miss D’Silva looked uncharacteristically serious. It was the first time I was visiting my old classroom and that too, because Greta Duke had sent me on an errand to pick up something from her class. Since I was now riding the B.E.S.T buses, I had not seen Miss D’Silva in a long time.

  I spent a few minutes chatting aimlessly with her and was about to return to where Miss Duke was tutoring the other kids in the library, when Miss D’Silva said quietly, ‘So, kiddo.

  How are things at home these days?’

  I looked confused. ‘At home? Fine,’ I said.

  I made to move away but Miss D’Silva put her hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer to her. ‘No, I mean, really. How are things between your mom and your aunties? And between your mom and your dad?’

  I suddenly knew what she meant and felt a wave of embarrassment so thick, it could’ve knocked me off my feet. ‘Fine, everybody is fine,’ I mumbled.

  But to my mortification, Miss D’Silva was not done. ‘Look, kiddo, you can talk to me. You think I don’t know what you’ve been going through all these years? Wasn’t that long ago when you were in this class. I remember, I used to stand at this window and look out on the playground every evening, when you were taking on—what was it?

  Five? Eight?—of the girls at one time and fighting them.’

  ‘Ten,’ I murmured automatically. ‘The all-time record was ten. I beat ten of them this one day.’

  Miss D’Silva went on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘Heck, why do you think I allowed you to fight all those girls? By the time you got on the school-bus, you’d be all banged up and bruised, looking like Muhammad Ali or something. Sometimes I wanted to intervene but I never did because you had to get rid of all that anger you had stored up inside you. I knew what kind of home life you had.’

  I stood before Miss D’Silva as if before an X-ray machine, feeling totally naked and exposed. I wanted to say something light and playful, wanted to deny her charges, but nothing came to mind.

  She helped me out. ‘Listen, you Mad Parsi,’ she said playfully. ‘I know you’re plenty tough. But I only wanted to say that if you ever want to talk to an adult, I’m here.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks,’ I said, my voice sounding brittle even to my own ears. ‘Well, Miss Duke is waiting, so I need to get going.’

  I rushed out of her class, not looking back. I was determined never to run into Miss D’Silva again. By the time I reached the library, I had worked myself up into a fury. ‘What the hell is she poking her nose into my business for,’ I fumed to myself.

  ‘Nothing wrong with my home life. As for fighting with those girls, hell, I just enjoyed fighting. Just like an adult to make more out of it than what it was. Making me out like I was a charity case or something.’

  But today, thinking back on the encounter with Miss D’S
ilva, I wish I’d known how to ask for help. It is my own special curse that I don’t know how to confide in anybody about how rapidly things are going downhill between mummy and me, how she tortures me with her words and sometimes, with her hands.

  For years, when mummy was saying something particularly hurtful to me, I’d repeat to myself, ‘Turn your heart into stone, turn your heart into stone.’

  It occurs to me now that I have succeeded beyond my wildest imagination.

  Fuck.

  What a dream.

  I wake up from it in a sweat and my bed feels so damp that for a confused second I think I have slipped back into my old habit and wet my bed.

  In the dream, I have gone to Villoo aunty’s home to plead my case. Villoo is my mother’s older sister, the one who used to scare me when I was little, with threats of how she would tie me up in a dark gunny sack with roaches and rats, if I didn’t do everything she asked. I used to dread the times when mummy would drop me off at Villoo’s home because I knew that even if I told mummy about Villoo’s threats, she’d never believe me. Luckily, dad was against my spending too much time there because it was well known that the entire family yelled and screamed at each other and he wanted to protect me from this. I was the battlefield upon which my parents waged their private wars.

  ‘I don’t want you dropping her off at your family’s,’ he’d say. ‘You can spend your whole life there, if you want. But all that screaming and fighting. I don’t want any of that poison to land on my daughter’s ears.’

  ‘Yah, if you had your way, you’d never want her to see any of my family members again. First you tried keeping me away, now her. Well, I’m the one who carried her in my stomach for nine months, not you. I’ll take her wherever I want.’

  In the dream, I have gone to Villoo aunty’s home to plead my case. My plea is simple: I want my mummy returned to me. I want to explain to Villoo and my grandmother that their neediness, their manipulative helplessness at not being able to function in the world unless my mother helps them, has done untold damage to my family. It has left my father without a wife; it has left me without the attentions of a mother. All her energy is focused away from our home; her moods rise and fall depending on what is happening in the lives of her brothers and sisters. We bear the brunt of all her frustrations. Time after time, she walks out on a fight with her younger sister and comes home and picks a fight with Mehroo.