Thrity Umrigar Read online

  And I am tired of it all.

  In the dream, Villoo opens the door with a mask on her face.

  ‘Hello, Villoo aunty,’ I say but she pretends to be someone else and says she’s never met me before and could I please introduce myself. I play along for a few minutes but as the charade continues, I grow more and more frustrated. ‘I know it’s you, Villoo aunty,’ I shout. ‘Please, just listen to me for a change.’

  Just then my grandmother walks in, an uncharacteristically solicitous look on her face. ‘What is it, deekra?’ she says in a kindly manner. ‘Come here, let me console you.’ She takes my head in her hand, as if she is about to hold me to her bosom but then she moves and bangs my head against the wall. I am stunned, reeling from pain. ‘Breaking a coconut,’ she says and the room fills with laughter. I suddenly realize there are other people in the room.

  Villoo ducks into the dining room and then reappears with a bottle. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Here’s a gift for you.’ I reach out for the bottle, thinking it is iodine for my bruised head but she pulls it away from me and opens it herself. I hear a sizzling sound, like the sizzle of tandoori chicken when they serve it to you in a restaurant, and the next instant I feel something wet and hot and burning on my face. It is acid. She has flung acid in my face. I touch my hand to my face in disbelief and stare at the layer of skin that pulls away. Even in the dream, I marvel at the fact that the acid has not

  penetrated my eyes and that I can still see. But thankfulness is mixed with terror and I begin to scream in panic. But the more I scream, the more Villoo and my grandmother laugh, until both sounds merge into one and I can’t tell if I’m laughing or screaming.

  I wake up with a start, shaking in bed. To calm myself, I do what I always do after a bad dream—I try to connect the dots, think of real-life events that may have wandered their way into my dreams. The acid-throwing, I know, is probably the result of a reading about a recent incident where a group of Muslim boys threw acid on the faces of two college-going Hindu girls who had turned down their overtures. The mask imagery probably came from having read a Phantom comic strip before going to bed. But as for the rest of it…even if I can logically trace the incidents in the dream, I can’t explain away the sad, shaky, desperate residual feeling that is left over and that leaves me tossing and turning in bed.

  Twenty-two

  AMERICA.

  The word comes to me as I am dozing off to sleep, comes accompanied by an electric charge that jolts me awake.

  America. A way out. If I am to get away from my dead-end life, I will have to find my way to America, land of self-invention. This is the only place I know where one can start anew and I desperately need to start afresh, because my life in Bombay feels chewed up, used up and I am only twenty years old. I am close to graduating from college and even my lifelong dream of getting a job atThe Times of India , has suddenly lost its sheen. As long as I am unmarried, I know that economics and social convention will dictate that I continue to live at home and that if I do that much longer, I will end up in a crazy asylum. Because I just can’t deal with the shit at home any more. My nerves are shot; each time there’s a fight at home, I begin to drop things, like I’m in a fucking Groucho Marx movie.

  I’m twenty years old and I’m tired. All the things that I thought would save me—music, books, politics—have be-friended me for a while but ultimately, I’ve had to come back and face myself. After years of looking forward to a job and the independence it would give me, I’m facing up to the facts: I do not feel prepared to enter the work world and as long as I’m living at home, I will never be truly free. Dad will continue setting curfews for me, Mehroo and Freny will continue cooking and cleaning for me, Kamala will wait on me, mummy will alternate between pulling me towards her and pushing me away. Nothing will change. I will never find out who I am, who I could be without all these people around me.

  It is not in my nature to flee into the dark night, to slip out without leaving a forwarding address the way Amy has done.

  Nor will I be able to settle in nearby Pune or in New Delhi without embarrassing my family, without setting the neighbours’ tongues wagging. There will be rumours that I have fled home because I am pregnant or because of a falling out with my family. After all, Bombay is the glittering jewel in India’s crown, Bombay is the place where the rest of India mi-grates towards. To leave the city and settle in one of the lesser places would be a slap in my father’s face, a repudiation of the life that I have here.

  No, if I want to get away I will have to move to the Big En-chilada, I will have to seek out a life that is so clearly superior and dazzling compared to what I have here, that it will arouse no suspicions. I have to run away to America.

  One thing I am sure of: I do not want to take the route that Amy chose. Like Amy, I want to run away from home but I want to do it legitimately and not under the cover of anonymity. Nor do I want to leave a trail of unanswered questions in my wake, like Amy has.

  Amy is a distant cousin who lived two buildings down from us. Despite the differences in our age—she was almost eleven years older than me—we were close. She was a shy, soft-spoken, highly sensitive young woman, with a mind as sharp as a knife. As far as I knew, she never had a boyfriend. Our bond was our love of stories—I loved listening to them and Amy was a born storyteller. In fact, I fancy that it is storytelling that helped Amy get away, that she learned how to escape by becoming a character in one of her own stories.

  From the time that I was a kid, Amy would spend every evening at our home, not returning to her parents’ home until it was night-time. Each evening we had to beg her to eat dinner with us because she would protest and lie and say she’d already eaten. ‘Come on, Amy, be sporting, please,’ dad would insist and she would demur and finally consent.

  But before we’d sit down for dinner, Amy and I would spend an hour or so together, with me sitting on her lap in the wooden rocking-chair on the balcony. ‘Hey, Amy, tell me about Kirin,’

  I’d say and she would launch into a story about the little boy that she used to tutor who lived halfway across the city from us but whose life came alive for me because of Amy’s stories.

  It took me years to figure out that Kirin always seemed to be facing the same dilemmas and struggles that I was facing at any given moment. Like many shy people, Amy was a good observer; like many masterful storytellers, Amy knew how to weave the strings of my life into whatever tale she was spinning that day.

  Those sessions on the balcony, when it was just the two of us, were different from the stories Amy would tell the adults.

  With me, she was vulnerable, intuitive, unfailingly kind. But when she entertained the adults with her hilarious descriptions of her job at the bank and how she was forever making a fool out of her dim-witted branch manager, Amy was cutting, biting, sarcastic, outrageous. Babu, dad, and the rest of them would roar with laughter at some of her tales and gasp with disbelief when she went too far at spinning circles around her clueless boss. ‘Careful, Amy,’ dad would sometimes feel compelled to say. ‘It’s not good to make fools of people all the time. Sometimes one gets caught in one’s own web.’

  So in retrospect, there was plenty of warning about how secretive and manipulative Amy could be. Still, the whole family was in shock when Amy simply disappeared one day. She called one of her relatives a few days later to say that she was okay but it was useless looking for her, as she was going far away. She did not explain her reasons for leaving as stealthily as she had. Occasionally, she would phone our house and ask to speak with dad or Mehroo but when they asked for her whereabouts, she would get evasive although she once said she was in an ashram in the Himalayas. Sometimes when she called, she spoke in different accents. One time she told Mehroo to please only speak with her in English because she had forgotten Gujarati.

  Amy has become an enigma, a puzzle, a gaping wound in all of our lives. She has walked away from us without an explanation and we don’t know why. Although I’d already outgrown o
ur evening storytelling sessions by the time she ran away, I still miss her. I see how the adults miss her on special occasions, how someone mentions her name during a Navroze dinner and how Freny still sends over a gift to Amy’s parents on her birthday. I resolve that when I run away from home I will do it in broad daylight and with the blessings of my elders.

  Before this minute, I have never entertained the idea of going to America. The few times someone has suggested it to me, I have laughed because my odds of getting there are about as great as my odds of walking on the moon. But then again, I have never before experienced a surge of desire and longing as strong as I am experiencing right this minute. I have never wanted something so badly that it could make the sweat pour down my face, have never had my very eyelids forced back open with ambition and hunger. My heart has never whimpered the way it is doing now, my brain has never before wound itself around the maze of my life and figured a way out. Every cell of my body has never tilted in one direction before, every throb of my blood has never beat in unison, and my body has never tingled with fear and excitement the way it does now. In the middle of a hot Bombay night, surrounded by the snores and breathing of those I love most in the world, I have allowed my treacherous heart to dream of abandoning them all. I have

  allowed myself to wish for the impossible. And therefore, I must now make it possible.

  Dawn approaches and I’m still awake. I know this will not be easy. Even if I manage to convince my family to let me go, even if I can thrust the knife deep into their hearts, there are still a million obstacles—getting an American university to accept me despite my so-so grades, figuring out how to jump through a hundred bureaucratic hoops, filling out countless forms, going around to the various Parsi trusts trying to raise the thousands of dollars to pay for my education.

  It is too early in the morning to wake dad up and besides, I need to think about this for a few days before I breathe a word to anybody. But despite all the fears and doubts that are already beginning to settle on me like soot, I remind myself of one truth: When I went to bed last night, I was bitter, washed up, directionless and at the end of my rope—a basket case at twenty. This morning, I have woken up a new person—ener-getic, purposeful, ambitious. Someone who is looking forward to her life. Someone who cannot be counted out yet.

  And only one thing has made the difference: America.

  I’m sorry, Mehroo, for what I’m about to do, for the dagger I will be thrusting into your heart. I have always wanted to protect you but I guess I can’t protect you from myself, from this hot blood that flows through my veins, from this heart of desire that sings its songs of longing to me in the middle of the night. I will be your betrayer, your killer, the one whose name will be a permanent wound on your lips.

  Forgive me, daddy, for plotting to abandon you, less than five years after you’ve lost your brother. I know now that I cannot fill his place. I know that more than any of the others, you will understand because where did I learn to dream but in your lap, from where did I learn that happiness is not a four-letter word but from your valiant, if futile, stabs at it? Forgive me, my kind, generous father, for the loneliness I will leave in my wake, like the contrails of a jet plane. I know you will understand but even understanding will not reduce the pain.

  I have to turn away from you, Freny, for I cannot look you in the eye. My promise of being a son and a daughter to you, made not too long ago at Babu’s funeral—what of it now?

  Charred it is, from the newly ignited fire of my ambition and longing.

  Goodbye, Roshan, you should be pleased to see me go. All the indignities, the unfavourable comparisons that you have suffered all your life should vanish like a plane in the sky, as soon as I am gone. You can be the baby of the family again, you can be the object of all their hopes and desires, your old glory restored, untarnished. I am the thorn in your side—my going away will allow you to bloom.

  Sorry, mummy, sorry for a million fights, a million words said and a million left unsaid. I guess I know now that I’ll always love you and that I’ll never be able to save you. I never wanted it to be this way between us but this is how it is, this is the reality and I must accept, accept, accept it.

  Goodbye everybody, here’s a kiss from your Judas and a thousand apologies—as Peter Sellers would say—for the confusion, the bewilderment, the hurt, the bruised pride that I will cause. I know this is useless but here’s my explanation, here are my reasons why and perhaps you will understand and perhaps you will forgive…

  Because I am restless and I have reached a dead-end and my future in Bombay seems to lead to just two hellish places: jail or the asylum, and because I want to know what one moment of perfect silence, of a perfect peace, sounds like and because I am torn by paradox—I want to reject this adult role of peacemaker, of being the carrier of other people’s grief that has been my role for so long and because I want to be an adult, want to iron my own shirts and clean my own plates and make my own decisions—and because I want to know who I am away from all of you who have made me who I am and because I cannot bear the sound of Mehroo’s coughing and mummy’s screaming and daddy’s subdued silences and because I want to see what the world has to offer before I settle down atThe Times of India and because I yearn for privacy and freedom, for a room of one’s own and I know that none of these will be possible in Bombay, my Bombay of gossip-ad-dicted neighbours and crowded rooms and inquisitive relatives and although nothing in our culture encourages it, I want to discover who I am without the protective shell of your love, I want to taste freedom, I want to meet the Thrity who is not somebody’s daughter or niece or cousin, who is not the logical inheritor of a family business, who is not a card-carrying member of the middle-class, who is not fixed in time and place by the accident of her birth. I want to be fluid, like water, like the wind, I want to belong to nobody but myself, I want to belong to no place and everyplace. In my narrow, hard bed on a sweaty, hot Bombay night, I lie with my eyes wide open and dream of inheriting the world.

  Do you understand? Or are you offended? I know that by offering understanding, I must risk causing offence. But that is not my intention. I know you are not used to hearing me speak this openly, this candidly, about myself. In our house, we talk of each other—we complain about or declare our love for—each other. We do not begin too many sentences with ‘I’.

  I guess I am breaking all the rules, all the old taboos at one time. I want perfect communication, I want to hurdle over the glassy walls of silence that I’ve

  built around myself, I want self-revelation, I want confession, I want therapeutic healing, I want absolution.

  Not even a step into America yet, and already I’m sounding like an American.

  Twenty-three

  THE IMMIGRATION OFFICER AT THE American Embassy is young, blond, and brash. He has cold blue eyes and sports a goatee whose yellow hairs are made invisible on a face that has been broiled pink by the hot Bombay sun. He and his fellow officers sit behind a thick glass panel that’s obviously meant to protect them from the Indian hordes that stand before them, desperate for a visa to the Promised Land.

  I watch him as he rejects the visa application of the man in front of him. ‘Next,’ he calls, already looking past the applicant.

  ‘But, sir,’ the man blubbers. ‘Only a three-month visa I am wanting. Please sir, show some heart. My brother in New York is very sick and is desperately needing me.’

  The American fixes him a cold, hard gaze. ‘Everyday at least ten of you fellas have a brother in New York who is sick,’ he says. He looks away. ‘Next,’ he calls impatiently.

  A few more people and then it’s my turn to face the immigration officer. All the folks in line ahead of me have been lower middle-class, the kind of men more likely to work at menial jobs in Dubai or Kuwait than to go to America for graduate school. Their English is not great, they have oily, badly cut hair and their polyester pants are ill-fitting and worn. They are nervous and this makes them look shifty; they do not exude t
he understated confidence of upper-class professionals. Instead, they cower before this young S.O.B.; it is obvious that they have never been in the company of a white man before.

  I feel a rush of emotions—disgust at the servility of my compatriots; red-hot anger at the arrogance of the American.

  In that moment, I do not care if I don’t get to go to America, do not care if this blond weasel blocks my path on the road that I have been carefully laying for almost a year. I will not be treated with the dismissive contempt with which he is treating the people ahead of me.

  We have already stood in line for almost four hours. Every morning, the line for a visa begins to form on the streets outside the embassy gates at Breach Candy. The crowds begin to gather at six a.m., hours before the metal gates swing open, so that by the time we are let in, we are ready to collapse in pools of sweat and anxiety, baked by the mid-morning sun. As if the indignity of waiting on the street is not enough, the local sentries at the embassy have taken on the prejudices of their American masters, so that they talk to the visa applicants in the same disdainful, abrupt manner as the latter.

  I have not waited in line as long as some of the others. Dad had sent Kishan, one of the workers from the factory, to stand in as proxy for me at six a.m. Dad, Roshan, and I arrived two hours later and I relieved Kishan while dad and Roshan went back to the car to wait. There was some half-hearted grumbling by those who had been standing in line since dawn but I could tell their heart wasn’t in it. After all, they were used to a system where middle-class people like myself always managed to bend the rules enough to suit our purpose. And for all my sensitivity about middle-class privilege, I was not above asserting it when I needed to.