Thrity Umrigar Read online

  The kamdar looked mortified. ‘Praise be to Allah and please to forgive, seth. All these years I’ve known your family, I should’ve known. Mehroobai is lucky to have a brother like you. God Bless all three of you. Your old father will be proud of you even in Heaven.’

  We are all chuckling as my father finishes telling this story.

  ‘Shame on you, Mehroo,’ mummy says. ‘Getting my poor husband in trouble like that.’ I tense for a moment, waiting to detect an edge in mummy’s tone but there is none.

  Mehroo smiles self-consciously and offers a light shrug.

  I relax and allow myself to enjoy the moment. If only every family meal could be like this.

  It happens.

  I haven’t tasted a scone yet and I know now that my many neuroses, my fear of heights, will never allow me to be a carefree tomboy like Georgina, but at least one of my Enid Blyton dreams has come true.

  I am now the proud companion of a golden cocker spaniel who looks exactly like Scamper from the Secret Seven.

  I come home from a party one evening and our street is shrouded in darkness. The power is out in the entire neighbourhood. Dad meets me at the bottom of the stairs with a flashlight in his hand. When we arrive at our apartment, the entire family is waiting for me at the front door. There are candles in the passageway in the apartment. ‘Come,’ dad says. ‘There’s somebody waiting for you in the living room.’

  So my first look at my puppy is in the glow of a flashlight.

  He is curled up and lying in a lined box, his eyes shut tight.

  His golden ears are almost as big as his body, his tail is absurdly short and his cute-as-a-button nose shines like black leather. He is fat and tiny enough that dad can hold him in one hand.

  There is a kind of happiness so strong, a gratitude so pro-found, that there are no words for it. I look at dad and then at the puppy, who is now awake. Although it is dark, I take in the expectant look on the faces of all the adults. They are all waiting for me to say something but there are no words to express what I feel. No, nothing will do except this whoop of joy and this mad dance that I am performing, hopping from foot to foot. The adults are grinning now and I go on dancing my happiness until the puppy gets scared by all the noise I’m making and begins to whimper. I stop immediately.

  I have waited so many years for this dog, have shed so many tears for him while I pleaded and begged for a pet, have seen him in my dreams so often, that it does not occur to me that he will be named anything other than Scamper. From the first moment that I hold this wriggling, sniffing, squirming piece of golden fur in my hands, I think of him as Scamper. ‘Hello, Scamp’ I whisper. ‘Hello, boy.’

  But the next morning, Mehroo pulls me aside. ‘You have to think of a different name for the puppy,’ she says.

  I am aghast. ‘But why? I have always wanted to name a dog Scamper. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Well, there is a problem. You know, the servants won’t be able to pronounce his name. Better think of a less complicated name.’

  In the end, we name him Ronnie. So much for East meets West. The gap between the life I lead in my head and the life I actually live, yawns wide. The Enid Blyton dream lies forgotten in the pages of a Secret Seven book.

  Eight

  TWO EARTH-SHATTERING REVELATIONS IN two days. This is almost more than I can bear.

  The first revelation involves Mehroo. Dad and I are on our way to Crawford Market to buy some fruit when he lets slip about Mehroo’s dead fiancé. The world stops for a moment. I had not even known that Mehroo had ever been in love, much less that she was once engaged to be married. I am twelve years old, I want to say to dad. How come nobody ever told me about this until now? But instead, I simply listen as he relates the whole sad story.

  A few years after her mother’s death from TB, Mehroo herself contracted the dreaded—and often fatal—disease. After her recovery, my distraught grandfather sent her away to a sanitarium in the hill-station resort of Panchgani to recuperate. My dad was heart-broken. Since their mother’s death, Mehroo had become both mother and sister to him. And more—often, she was the only one who could reach their father, whose grief had made him as distant as a star. My grandfather, a gentle, scholarly man, found his boisterous, active sons too much to take. Without knowing it, he grew resentful of their loudness, their jokes, their laughter, because it felt like a disturbance, a violation of the silent world he had built for himself. And so, dreading the long silences of the house, my father didn’t want his sister to leave.

  In all the years that I knew Mehroo, she never once talked about the months in Panchgani. But my father recalled not recognizing his sister when the family went to visit her a few months later. Looking at the young woman with thick brown, braided hair, with cheeks red as strawberries and smooth as cream, he mistook her for an Englishwoman. So he watched with astonishment when my grandfather enveloped this stranger in a hug. ‘Hello, pappaji,’ she said. Oh my God, it’s Mehroo, my father thought.

  The glow on her cheeks was from more than the good food and the clean hillside air, the family soon found out. Mehroo was in love. At the sanitarium, she had met and fallen in love with another TB patient. His name was Rumi and he was twenty-five and an engineer in the airforce. He lived in Karachi, hundreds of miles north of Bombay. Decades later, I saw an old Technicolor photograph of the two of them together. Rumi is tall and slender and has a lush dark moustache over full lips.

  He is wearing a dark suit. Mehroo is shorter but her eyes are ablaze with youthfulness. Neither one is smiling in the picture but despite the formality of the studio portrait, there is a closeness between the couple that is palpable. They look very much in love.

  For the first few days that Mehroo was home, my father felt shy and awkward around his sister. The familiar older sister who, after their mother died, had bathed him, cooked for him, later, dressed him for school before she herself got ready for school, had been replaced by this serene, slightly mystical stranger. Mehroo herself marvelled at the change in her brothers. ‘Look how big you two got while I was gone,’ she’d say almost to herself. But after a few days, as Mehroo took over the household responsibilities again, after she resumed care of him from the older aunts who’d been keeping an eye on the boys, it was as if she had never left.

  But the three males in the house felt another loss approaching and feared that this time it would be permanent. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ my dad said fiercely after Mehroo had explained the situation to him. ‘If your Rumi is so great, he can move to Bombay and live with us.’

  ‘Try to understand, brother,’ Mehroo said mildly. But he was inconsolable.

  My grandfather was equally adamant. He feared for his daughter’s health and the separation from her family. His mind was made up by the time Rumi’s maternal aunt, Perin, came to press Rumi’s case for marriage. ‘A good boy from a good family, he is, Hormazdji,’ Perin said. ‘Your Mehroo will be like a queen in our family, I tell you.’

  But Hormazd was not convinced. ‘Two TB patients marrying each other,’ he demurred. ‘Any doctor would advise against it. What if there are problems later on, God forbid?’

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense, Hormazdji. Both children are healthy now, by the grace of God. I have faith Ahura Mazda will keep them safe and sound.’

  Hormazd tried a different track. ‘Mehroo has run this family since my dear wife’s demise. I am a widower, with two young sons to raise. With my bank job, how will I manage on my own? Karachi is so far away, the other end of the country. Who knows when I’ll see my Mehroo again?’

  Perin was ready for him this time. ‘Rumi has told me to inform you that he personally will bring Mehroo to Bombay at least once a year. He is having a large family in Bombay; they can stay with us—or with you,’ she added hastily.

  But the fear of tuberculosis haunted my grandfather. It was bad enough that his only daughter had come down with the same disease that had killed his young wife. He couldn’t allow her to marry a man who carried th
e same dreaded germs. He refused to allow Mehroo to marry Rumi. Mehroo was heart-broken but marrying against her father’s wishes did not occur to her.

  But for two years, she corresponded secretly with Rumi.

  Letters addressed to her from Karachi would arrive at her best friend’s home and be delivered to her at college. She would reply to the letters before she got home from college that evening. Her brothers knew about this exchange and conspired to keep the secret from their father.

  I am not sure how my grandfather ultimately found out about the letters. But that night, father and daughter talked.

  Nobody knows what they said to each other. But after two years of breaking his daughter’s heart, Hormazd suddenly caved. Mehroo was free to marry Rumi.

  The preparations for the wedding, which was to be held in Bombay, began immediately. Perin aunty helped Mehroo pick out saris for her wedding and her engagement. Clothes were purchased for the groom’s family. My dad and uncle also got into the act, almost delirious with excitement at the thought of a wedding in the family. Despite the shadow of the imminent separation, a rare sense of joy and fun engulfed them all.

  My dad still remembers the day the bad news came. It was exactly two months before the wedding. The doorbell rang and Rumi’s aunt—the same woman who had a few weeks ago helped Mehroo pick out her wedding sari—came in hurriedly.

  ‘Where’s Mehroo?’ she asked my father. Then, before he could answer, she lurched toward the kitchen.

  Mehroo looked up from the kitchen counter, where she was chopping onions. Her eyes were red from the onions and her face flushed in the Bombay heat. ‘Su che, Perin aunty?’ she asked. ‘What is the matter?’

  The woman took a step toward her niece. ‘Mehroo, Rumi’s dead,’ she blurted. ‘He had pneumonia for two days only…’

  The rest, I have to imagine. Dad does not recall what followed after the awful moment when grief and death walked into their lives a second time. Scenario #1: For a second, Mehroo keeps chopping the onions, mechanically, much like those bodies that twitch and move even after they’ve been beheaded. Scenario #2: the knife falls from her shaking hands, so that she has to jump back to avoid its sharp descent. Then, she starts screaming, so that for a moment, Perin thinks that the knife has struck her foot. Scenario #3: Mehroo stares at Perin in mute horror. Her eyes widen as the words seep their poison through her body. Then, she drops wordlessly to the floor.

  Dad finishes telling the story. I’m not sure if he has any idea about how it affects me because I do what I always do when my heart is breaking: I rearrange my face to make it go blank.

  I don’t let the pain that I feel show in my eyes. I ask careful questions that show no hint of the turmoil and confusion I feel.

  I tell dad I’m going to wait in the car while he shops at Crawford Market. After he leaves, I allow my jaw to sag in disbelief, let my eyes well with unshed tears, permit myself to feel the sting of betrayal and shock

  Confession: At first, I mostly feel sorry for myself. As the youngest member of the family, as someone Mehroo has cared for from my days in the cradle, I had simply accepted as fact that Mehroo loved me more than anyone else in the world, that her life had basically started after my birth. Oh, I knew she doted on her brothers, knew how much she had adored her father, but that was different. Those people had always been part of my life, were known entities and therefore no threat to me. They were not competitors; they were family.

  Therefore, they didn’t count.

  But this strange man who has stepped from the mists of the past into the fields of reality, what am I to do with him? This man who has been created by my dad’s storytelling, this dead man who has been made alive again by the power of words, where do I bury him now? This man whom Mehroo had loved before I was even born, why do I think of him as a rival? Why do I feel as if Mehroo has cheated on me, betrayed me somehow? How am I now supposed to think of my small, spinster aunt, this one-dimensional, black-and-white figure I had believed existed only to love me? Now that she is suddenly restored to full colour, now that I have to recognize her full humanity, her right to love whoever she chooses without asking my permission, what am I to do with the cardboard image of her that lies tattered at my feet? And why am I jealous of a man who died years before I was even born? After all, he is dead and I am alive. Isn’t that revenge enough?

  And suddenly, I hear myself and my self-absorption dissolves and then I feel a pain so sharp, so piercing, it takes my breath away. Mehroo had suffered this magnificent wound and I had known nothing about it. I am living in the same home as a woman who has been felled twice by the death of love and yet she is the one tending to me, nurturing me. I am twelve and old enough to know what the end of love feels like, how it rises before you like a brick wall, cutting off all visions of the future.

  When we get home, I want to ask Mehroo questions about Rumi, want to tell her how sorry I am, want to at least tell her I know about Rumi. And that I understand. But I remain silent.

  I’m not sure why. There are no explanations for my silence.

  Except for maybe this self-serving explanation: For whatever reason, I had learned at a very young age to protect a certain deep part of myself, to not reveal even to those who loved me, a certain core, a certain nerve that was too raw and too vulnerable. The deeper and more intensely I felt things, the more guarded I became. The more silent and introspective I grew from the inside, the more smart-alecky and verbal I felt compelled to be. There was a white space inside me that I was too scared to share with anybody. The irony was that my wretched hypersensitivity, my thin skin, my terrifying capacity to be easily hurt, I knew I had inherited from Mehroo. I knew in the instinctive way that children know things that Mehroo’s eyes hid a raw sadness that echoed mine.

  And so, I go up to her that night while she sleeps on her single bed and kiss her forehead. She opens her liquidy, brown eyes. ‘What is it, Thrituma?’ she asks.

  I shake my head, trying to keep the lump in my throat at bay. ‘Nothing.’ But that doesn’t feel enough. So I pay her the highest compliment I know. ‘Your eyes remind me of an old horse. Kindest eyes I know.’

  She smiles.

  The second revelation comes the next day when dad and I take Ronnie, my golden cocker spaniel, to the vet. We pull into the large, spacious grounds of the animal hospital and despite my worry about Ronnie, I find myself breathing easier in this tranquil, beautiful place. But Vishnu, the assistant, informs us that our regular vet is away for a month and another vet is taking his place. We are a little annoyed by this but take our place on the hard wooden bench and await our turn.

  The door opens and the new vet introduces herself. My jaw drops. It is the Ovaltine lady come to life. The vet’s dark hair is tied in a bun and her cheeks are not dimpled but her gentleness, her soft, low voice, her graceful hands as she scratches Ronnie’s head, tell me it’s the Ovaltine lady just the same. She wears a light pink chiffon sari with silver earrings and she smiles at me tenderly, pats my head and tells me not to worry so much, my dog will be all right. I am enthralled. I want to tell her that she is my real, long-lost mother, I want to tell her that I am adopted and had been raised by wolves and had been awaiting her arrival all my life. But then I suddenly remember Mehroo and her devotion to me and the sad story I had heard yesterday, and I am confused. It occurs to me that I already have too many mothers and that one more, no matter how pretty and graceful and loving, will only complicate matters. I think of all the mothers I have and I know I should feel grateful and sated but I can’t shake this broken, empty, bereft feeling I have inside me.

  There is something else that’s confusing me and that’s the way the Ovaltine lady is talking to my dad. There is a searching, speculative look in her eyes that I recognize but do not yet understand. They are talking softly and she is patting my dog all the time that she is chatting with my dad. I hear him say, ‘Not his usual appetite,’ and ‘Did potty inside the house,’

  but I am barely listening to him. Be
cause what grabs my attention, what transfixes me, is the look on my dad’s face. He looks smitten and lonely and wistful and it takes me a minute to recognize his expression as mirroring my own. It takes me a full minute to realize that my dad and I are hungry for the same things—kindness and love and beauty and grace—and that neither of us has found these things in my mother. It makes my eyes sting with tears, this realization, so that I turn away and mumble something about going outside to play with the other animals.

  I don’t know how much time goes by but then dad is outside with Ronnie straining at the leash as usual. The Ovaltine lady is by his side and when she sees me, she smiles. Half crouching toward me so that our eyes are level, she tells me that Ronnie will be fine and not to worry at all. My dad smiles in gratitude and extends his hand toward her. ‘Thank you,’ he says softly.

  ‘No problem,’ she replies. ‘It was nice to meet both of you.’

  Dad puts his hand around my shoulder as we walk toward the car. As we pull away, the Ovaltine lady is walking back toward the clinic. Her pink sari glistens like a halo in the mid-morning sun.

  We are both quiet on the way home, lost in our own thoughts. Then, I hear my dad sigh, a long, heavy sigh and I feel compelled to say, ‘She was nice, wasn’t she? Actually, I liked her a lot better than our usual vet.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘she was very nice.’ Then, as if he cannot keep the words to himself any longer, he adds, ‘This is how I’d always dreamed it would be—that the woman I would marry would be like that, soft-spoken and caring.’ I wait for him to say more but he falls silent.

  I want to tell my father that I understand him—understand both, the dream and the betrayal of that dream. I want to tell him about my Ovaltine lady fantasy and how, today, for the first time, I saw the fantasy made flesh. I want to tell him that we want the same things, him and I, and that I understand how the not having it has left a hollow, numb spot in each of us. I want to tell him what mummy does and says to me when he is not around, how scared and alone I feel, I want him to turn around and drive back to the animal hospital and ask the Ovaltine lady to run away with us and I want the three of us to drive somewhere, drive far far away, away from the edge of our lives and into a freefall of dreams and possibilities.