Thrity Umrigar Read online

  We are driving down Marine Drive, on our way to Nariman Point, and my father is humming a mournful, sad song. Next, he starts singing although he inevitably does not know more than six lines to any song. His voice is slightly nasal and rich and deep. It is a beautiful voice although he is totally unaware of the fact for the simple reason that no one has ever told him so. Because my father mainly sings in the car, as if he needs movement in order to free his voice. He never asks me to join him in the singing and even if he had, I wouldn’t. I have a terrible voice and am deeply ashamed of the fact. Also, I am too shy to sing out loud. This is one of the things that amazes me about him—how easily and unselfconsciously he sings, as if it is merely an extension of speech. I am used to school outings and birthday parties where the girls who are good singers have to be coaxed and cajoled into singing. Even then, there is much squirming and giggling and general embarrassment.

  ‘I, I, I, I love you very much…I, I, I, I think you are grand,’ my father now sings. It is one of two cheerful songs that he sings. The other is, ‘It’s a hap, hap, happy day.’ But I am not satisfied until he sings my favourite, a slow, soft lullaby in Hindi, a song in which the singer asks sleep to come gently.

  When I was younger, my dad used to sing the lullaby to me on nights when I’d lie awake soaked in sweat, running a high fever. Invariably, he would run his hands through my hair when he sang and the rhythmic stroking and the timbre of his voice would create a nest in which I could sleep. Now, I beg him to sing that song and he readily obliges. As always when he sings this song, he pulls me closer to him, so that one of his hands rests on the steering wheel while the other cradles me in the crook of his arm. His voice gets more nasal and plaintive and he stretches out each note to give it even more of its sad power. I feel the inevitable goosebumps on my arm. If he notices, he doesn’t say.

  Luckily, this lullaby does not affect me as strangely as the other songs do. From the time I was an infant, I have reacted violently to certain songs and sounds. There was an old woman who used to wander through our neighbourhood each morning with her emaciated cow and a bag of hay. Passers-by and folks from the nearby apartment buildings gave her coins for feeding the cow. That was how she earned a meagre living. But it was not the appearance of the rail-thin woman or her bony animal that aroused my pity. As an infant, I saw neither. Rather, it was the long, lingering, trembling wail with which she asked folks to feed her cow, that upset me dreadfully. Every morning she passed from under our balcony, her thin voice floating two storeys upward. Every morning, I lay in my crib and burst into tears when I heard that voice. This continued for months until Mehroo hit upon an idea. She approached the cow-owner and promised her a fixed monthly sum of money in exchange for her not wailing under our window.

  The cow-woman’s wail is just the first of a series of sounds that fill me with dread and sadness. Certain songs that everyone else thinks are happy and cheerful elicit the same response in me because of a certain minor key. My response to them is so strong that listening to those songs becomes unbearable.

  ‘Turn off the radio,’ I beg my cousin Roshan but she just looks at me strangely. ‘It’s a hit song,’ she says. ‘It’s my favourite.

  Leave the radio alone.’

  Sometimes, I leave the room in tears. Other times, I grit my teeth and try and get through the song. Occasionally, I try to explain my feelings to Roshan or one of my mother’s students, who are listening to the radio during lunch. ‘It makes me feel all bad, this song,’ I say. Almost all of them are older than me and already, they have that uncomprehending look that adults get on their faces when you’re trying to tell them something really important. ‘If you don’t like the song, just leave the room,’ one of them says. Mostly, they just laugh. ‘Mad, che mad,’ I once overhear one of them say to the other. And they turn the volume up.

  My dad and I reach Nariman Point and he finds a small spot into which he confidently backs the car. This is one of the rare occasions when we have not stopped on our way to pick up a chicken roll or a tandoori chicken to eat in the car while we stare at the water. I am old enough to realize that my father is a spendthrift and that this habit causes problems at home.

  Mehroo often bemoans the fact that there is not even enough money at home to pay the butcher, who keeps a daily tab. Dad promises her household expenses as soon as he receives a certain cheque. If Mehroo complains to Babu, he will tell her to speak to my dad. But then Babu approachs his wife, Freny, who is the only family member who has a job outside of the family business. Usually, Freny will help out.

  Regardless of his financial situation, my father finds it hard to refuse me anything. Often, as we head for the seaside, I see him remove the last notes from his pocket to buy me a treat. But I am too old now to be able to enjoy the treat without realizing its cost to the other family members.

  Tonight, unhappy that I’ve refused his offers to buy me dinner, he coaxes me to buy something from the various seaside vendors who approach our car. I refuse and begin to lecture him about the value of saving money, in much the same way that I have heard Mehroo do. He listens silently.

  ‘Daddy,’ I say. ‘Save just two rupees a day. Remember that piggy bank I bought you for your birthday? It was so you could save a little bit everyday. Please. Two rupees only. That’s what the nuns at school also say—doesn’t matter how much you save, just save a little.’

  He shakes his head then. ‘No, Thritu, don’t ask me for that.

  I’m not the kind of man who can save a little-little everyday.

  When I save, it will be phaat!—all in one stroke.’

  Seven

  THE BELL RINGS, SIGNALLING IT’S time for composition class—my favourite class of the day. My classroom teacher, Miss D’Silva, walks in with today’s assignment. Just last week Miss D’Silva had read my essay out loud to the whole class. I had sat in my seat, my head bobbing with pride while Miss D’Silva drew the class’s attention to certain lines in my essay.

  She was particularly enamoured by the one that read, ‘Mr Brown stood in the middle of the room disguised as Santa Claus.’ My teacher claimed that that sentence revealed a sophistication beyond my years. ‘This is the result of reading voraciously,’ she said and then asked if we knew what voracious meant. All heads turned to look at me but my hand stayed where it was on top of my desk and I kept my eyes cast downward, afraid to reveal that I had no idea what the word meant and hoping that everyone would mistake my downcast gaze for modesty.

  But now it is time to shine again. I am ungainly, unathletic, uncoordinated, lousy at math and mediocre at almost everything else. Writing is one of the few areas where I am indisputably good and so I look forward to the two hours of composition class each week the way most kids look forward to chocolate. Before Miss D’Silva has finished writing today’s topic on the blackboard I am already holding my pencil tightly in my hand, raring to go. But just before the lead in my pencil kisses the blank white sheet of paper in front of me, Miss D’Silva says something that turns my world upside down.

  ‘Now listen girls,’ she says. ‘For once in your life, do not make your characters blond and blue-eyed.

  And for heaven’s sake give them real names, that is, Indian names, not names like Mr Jones and Mr Henderson.’

  I freeze. My mind goes blank. The pencil in my hands, so charged with possibility a minute ago, suddenly feels limp and heavy. For the first time in my young life, I am experiencing something akin to writer’s block. I have no idea how to create characters who look and talk in ways other than the ones in the books I have grown up reading. I try to give my characters an Indian name, but all I can think of is Colin and Jack and Susan. I try to imagine what an Indian character might look like but I don’t know how to create someone who doesn’t have curly red hair or straight, sandy-brown hair. As for making up a character who talks the way we do—who says,

  ‘yaar’ and ‘men’ instead of ‘I say, old chap’ and ‘Jolly good, old man’—I don’t have a clue where to st
art. Until now, my characters have eaten scones and blueberry tarts instead of chutney sandwiches and bhel puri, and to make that culinary and cultural leap seems impossible and daunting and upsetting of the world order.

  For even more than I am the child of my parents, I am the child of Enid Blyton.

  Like all my peers, I have grown up reading Enid Blyton’s books, memorized entire passages from them, escaped in them.

  I have solved mysteries with the Secret Seven, I have had great adventures with the Famous Five. I have outwitted bumbling British Bobbies with the Five Find-Outers. I have travelled to boarding school with the girls at Malory Towers as they’ve snuck into each other’s dorm rooms for midnight snacks and tromps through the British countryside. I have had crushes on both, the silent, curly-haired Colin and the extrovertish tomboy Georgina. I have lived vicariously in the world of secret pass-words and fraternal clubs, in the world of childhood camaraderie and adventure and mystery.

  I have shed hot tears yearning for a golden spaniel like Scamper, who is Peter’s dog in the Secret Seven.

  My obsession with Enid Blyton started a few years ago. Up to that point I was reading the Archie and Richie Rich comic books that my cousin Roshan brought home from Jaffer’s Lending Library. But one day, my aunt Freny came home with a Secret Seven book and told me she thought I was old enough to read real books now. I was petrified. I was convinced that I was not old enough to read novels, that I needed to stick to books with pictures as well as words. ‘Just try it,’ Freny said.

  ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll take it back.’ And so, with great trepidation, I flipped open the book. And found to my great surprise that the words were no more difficult than what I was used to. And that I was lost in the book by page four. And that reading a full story was infinitely more satisfying than reading a comic book. I finished the book the next evening and begged for more. That Saturday, Freny took me to Jaffer’s and got me my own membership. And so, at a humble lending library in the middle of a busy Bombay street, my love affair with books began.

  Indeed, I have lived so intensely in the fictional world of small-town England, that I know more about this world than the hot, crowded, equatorial city of dark-haired men and women that I dwell in. Nothing that I am reading either at school or at home reflects this world. At home, I read one Enid Blyton novel a day. In my English-medium school, Hindi is taught like a foreign language. My literature textbooks carry poems by Wordsworth and stories by Dickens. Nothing by an Indian writer. Except occasional passages from one of the Hindu epics, either the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. But these seem like ancient history and after all, both narratives are mythologies and it is hard to see how to adapt these tales with their inflated, dramatic language, to my own life. In some ways, the adventures of

  Enid Blyton’s blue-eyed, freckled young heroes in pastoral England seem more relevant to my life than the pursuits of the Mahabharata’s dark-skinned heroes who may look like me but whose world of chariots and archery and old-world chivalry means nothing to a city kid growing up in the Bombay of the early 1970s.

  My teacher seems oblivious to the semantic earthquake she has set off in my life with her words. But for the first time in my life, I am sweating a story, staring into space as I chew on my pencil, making a few feeble starts and then erasing them with my scented eraser, the one with the picture of Fred Flintstone on it. I rack my brains to think of some male Indian names. Raj? Ram? Even to my young ears, they sound prosaic and dull. I look around the room. Many of the girls in this class are Catholic with names like Susan and Brenda and Carol, so they’re no help. As for the ones who’re not Catholic, I’m suddenly confused about who has an ‘Indian’ name and who doesn’t. After all, haven’t I heard my family say that my name is a Persian one? Does that qualify as Indian? Is a ‘real’ Indian name only a Hindu name?

  That evening, at home, I want to ask my mother these questions but am at a loss as to how to frame them. And this leaves me feeling inadequate and uneasy. For the first time in my life, I realize that writing is not the easy, almost absent-minded outpouring of emotions that I had always thought it was. That there’s more to writing than making up a birthday poem you know your mother will like. Miss D’Silva’s words have unleashed something even though I don’t know what to call that something. But I dimly recognize that writing is—can be—a complicated and important thing. And that it is tied to other things, things like culture and nationality and history and where you live. This is a brand-new thought: that all writing is not the same and that where you live can define who you are and so change the way you write. I am both excited and confused by how a simple

  request to change the physical description of our characters is taking me down a new path, making me think about things that I had never thought of before. But I’m also achingly aware of how inadequate my thinking is, how, after a while, my brain simply stops skipping down this new path because I do not have the tools with which to navigate it. And in a flash, I understand something new: That just as reading and writing are linked, so are questions and answers. You have to know how to phrase a question in order to get the right answer. This insight dazzles me and I flip it around in my mind the rest of the evening.

  Dad and Mehroo come home from the factory that night and I can tell he is in a good mood.

  Over dinner, he tells us a story. ‘I got shouted at the factory by the kamdar today,’ he says with a grin. ‘All of it was Mehroo’s fault.’

  The kamdar was a tall, grey-bearded, distinguished-looking Muslim who had been my dad’s foreman for years. Always dressed in a white kurta-pyjama that stayed spotlessly clean even while my dad’s starched white shirts came home covered with grease and sawdust, the kamdar was a soft-spoken but stern-faced man who never hesitated to speak his mind before my father, whom he treated like a brilliant but not very worldly younger brother. Mostly, my father was amused by his foreman’s treatment of him. Occasionally, he would mutter about the kamdar getting too big for his breeches and forgetting who was boss. But he also appreciated the fierce, almost familial loyalty the foreman showed toward the business. The kamdar ran the workshop with a kind of patriarchal, proprietary air.

  He referred to the factory in terms that made you believe that it was his grandfather who had started it. It was he who scolded and kept an eye on the younger, unworldly workers who had left their Northern villages and moved to Bombay and had ended up at my father’s factory. The timber market in which the factory was located became more than a place of employment for these men; it became home. They slept under the stars on their narrow rope cots; they cooked their aromatic evening meals on tiny kerosene stoves that glowed in the dying light of the day; they bathed outside the factory before my dad showed up in the morning; they procured water for drinking and toiletries from God knows where.

  The kamdar was especially fond of Mehroo. He kept a pa-ternal, protective eye on her because she was the only woman who showed up to work daily in a place that was exclusively male. Most of the timber merchants in the market were old-fashioned Muslims, who went home to wives who covered their faces in purdah when they left their homes. As the only female—and single, to boot—Mehroo should have been the object of much gossip and derision but she wasn’t. The flip side of Muslim conservatism is a kind of quintessentially Indian chivalry and respect toward women. Perhaps it was some notion of gallantry that sheltered her. Or perhaps it was the openly protective stance both of her brothers took toward her that deflected any attempt at flirting or innuendo. Certainly, Mehroo herself, with her serious face, her obvious devotion to her two brothers, her doggedness and hard work, did not invite any sexual advances. Anyway, by the time I was old enough to be awed at the fact that my domestic, mild aunt was a pioneer when it came to infiltrating an all-male industry, Mehroo had been my father’s business partner for so long that most of the other merchants had long since accepted her.

  My dad was still grinning. ‘Saala, what curses that kamdar was directing at me. All because o
f your Mehroofui.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The kamdar had stood outside the door of my dad’s air-conditioned office and eavesdropped on my father yelling at my aunt. ‘New clothes,’ he heard my dad yell. He leaned closer to the door to hear more snippets of their conversation,

  ‘Nice, expensive clothes…Spending money,’ he heard my dad say. ‘Please, Burjor,’ he heard my aunt reply. ‘This time, just forgive me. Just ignore it…’

  The kamdar was livid. He paced on the dirt floor until my father left his office. Then, he lit into him. ‘Burjor seth, God forgive you for what I heard today,’ he cried. ‘All these years I am working for you and never thought this day would come.

  Arré, seth, this woman has been like a mother to you. Raised you the way a cow raises a calf. And this is how you repay her? Shame, shame, even Allah would find this hard to pardon.’

  My father looked confused. ‘What did I do wrong? I was only trying…’

  ‘Wrong, seth? What you did wrong? Yelling at your poor sister because she bought some expensive clothes? I say, sir, what’s wrong if she spent some money on herself? Womenfolk, they have their shauk and desires. Business is going good, In-shallah. And all because she keeps the books for you. And you yell at her for spending some of her own money…’

  My father began to laugh. ‘Saala, bevakoof,’ he said. ‘I was yelling at her to go buy some new clothes, idiot, not because she went shopping. See the same rags she wears everyday? I was angry because she refuses to take some money to go shopping. I was telling her the same thing you are saying, that this is her money too and she must spend some. You don’t believe me, go back in and ask her.’