House of the Sun (4 page)

Once, Tunda Maharaj had fallen ill. During his visits to Bombay he stayed not with Lokumal, but in the Mahalaxmi temple. Mrs Hathiramani had gone there with Lokumal and Jyoti to see him. Tunda Maharaj always occupied the same place in the temple, a hut with walls of chipped, white tiles, with an uneven earthen floor, a small barred window and no door. Through the middle of the room grew a tree, a few knots upon its trunk providing resting places for Tunda Maharaj’s jute bag of belongings and his shawl. The branches of the tree spread out above the roof, full of noisy crows.

It had been monsoon time. The floor of the hut, knobbly with tree roots, had also been sticky with mud. Rain spat through a piece of oilcloth Tunda Maharaj had draped across his door, and poured through the holes in the roof on to his shawl and jute bag. A
calendar
showing Krishna playing his pipe was soaked. It was dark and evil-smelling in the hut; a wick burned weakly in a bowl of oil. Tunda Maharaj was delirious. Lokumal and Mrs Hathiramani had carried him out and sat him beside the driver in Jyoti’s car. They had taken him home, and ordered the servants to clear out the broom cupboard. They laid him on a blanket and called the doctor to him. He soon recovered and went back to the Mahalaxmi temple, but Mrs Hathiramani had never forgotten the sight of the bony stalks of his withered limbs. Half of each foot was eaten away, and tight balls of newspaper were stuffed into the fronts of his black rubber shoes. As she remembered these things, Mrs Hathiramani felt the light pressure of the old man’s claw. He mumbled through his gums; it needed Lokumal to interpret.

‘He says Bhai Sahib is revealing properly,’ Lokumal explained. ‘During these months you must do nothing
to anger Saturn. Give to the poor and feed the cow with a wheatcake.’ Lokumal looked up at Mrs
Hathiramani
, his expression severe. ‘Tunda Maharaj will also perform some rites for you, for he says that already, under the influence of Saturn, the evil eye of someone close is upon you.’

‘Aiee,’ Mrs Hathiramani inhaled a frightened sob. ‘Why did Bhai Sahib not say anything of this to me?’

‘Perhaps he did not wish to alarm you,’ Lokumal suggested.

‘No, he could not see it. He is only a fool. Even his own grandchildren he cannot control,’ Mrs
Hathiramani
complained.

‘Now cease all this worry,’ Lokumal ordered. ‘You have commanded us; Bhai Sahib also you have
commanded
. No harm will come to you.’ Beside Lokumal, Tunda Maharaj opened his eyes and nodded.

*

When Mrs Hathiramani had gone, Lokumal leaned closer to Tunda Maharaj. ‘So, what have you deduced? Have you found the day?’ he asked, his voice low and urgent.

‘I have consulted the books. I have deduced the day. It will be the day of the commencement of the anniversary of Varsharambha. That is the exact
moment
when the sun returns to the same position it was at the time of birth.’ Maharaj shut his eyes and relapsed into prayer, his lips moving silently.

‘But only say,
Baba,
what is the day?’ Lokumal sighed impatiently.

‘The moon is the lord of the year. The sun is lord of the tenth house and occupies the ninth. It is in
conjunction
with Mercury, lord of the eighth house. It has been given the power of death.’ Marahaj closed his eyes.

‘The day,
Baba
.’

‘The eleventh of June.’

‘Hari
Om
,’ Lokumal sighed and sat back. Three months was all he had left. He had worked to know his own death day many weeks, pouring over intricate charts of ancient invention with Marahaj. To know the exact day was a great advantage. He could make sure it was a perfect death, as dictated by holy books. He turned his head to look out the window at the sea he loved. He never tired of its changing colours and moods, the glassy stillness of the early morning, or the thunder of waves in the blackness of night. He ached at the thought that he would see it no more; no longer watch the flocks of parakeets rise like a green cloud out of the trees in the gardens of nearby buildings.

He had wanted trees in the compound of Sadhbela. He had mentioned it at the blueprint stage but the numerous additions demanded by the co-operative society during the planning soon diminished the
compound
to a narrow patch before the building. In
compensation
a cactus was planted beside the entrance. Even this was ripped up when mothers complained of its prickly hazard to young children. Lokumal missed a view of trees.

In Sind, the garden of his home had been abundant in its vegetation and flowered with jasmine, gul-mohr, oleander, cassia and jacaranda. Each evening, in a cane chair upon his verandah, Lokumal had surveyed in their seasons the beauty of these blooms, treasuring the gentle perfumes. Through them, in the gathering dusk, he found that deep peace within himself that he valued above all else. He tried never to think of that garden, nor his violent departure from it. But now he
remembered
again the sweating bodies, the wild eyes, the feet that trampled down the flower beds and the flash of knives that had slashed and slashed, stabbing, killing, disgorging indiscriminately the innards of men, sofas or down pillows. He had run with his wife, clutching his children. His youngest brother lay dead in that
garden behind them, stabbed to a pulp, forty-six times. He ran until he reached Bombay.

The Indus river still flowed through Sind, and the great ruins of Mohenjo Daro still stood as proud proof of ancestry, but to Lokumal and the other residents of Sadhbela, that land had now faded to the substance of dreams. Those like Lokumal who remembered, spoke of it to their children in a Biblical way, as a land of milk and honey, lost and gone forever. Their faces grew sad when they spoke of Sind, but their children shrugged and laughed. They knew nothing but Bombay, sinful, lusty and full of excitements desired by the young. They yawned in the face of Sind.

To these young people Sadhbela was their only
history
. They knew little of those early, desperate days when, by different routes and with different
experiences
, they had all made their way south from Sind, to the mythical gold of Bombay. There, they made contact again with each other from the places where, crammed into niches and the corners of rooms, they lived on the kindness of friends. Then Lokumal,
energetic
and respected, mobilized a group of his exiled compatriots in a rehabilitation effort. Precious money was pooled for land and a contractor ordered to build. But, having erected with their money an apartment large enough to house himself and his family, the
contractor
refused to work any more. He too was a Sindhi of incorrigible genes. There was no money for legal dispute, so Lokumal had gone himself, taken the evil man by the collar and thrown him out, and after him his wife, his children and his cooking utensils. Then Lokumal and Mr Bhagwandas had occupied the empty rooms and not left them until a new contractor was found, and work was in progress again. They named the building Sadhbela, after an island in the Indus River between Rohri and Sukkur. The island had a famous saint, a white marble temple, gardens of
peacocks
and rare flowers. It had loomed in their minds as a symbol of all they had lost.

Sadhbela stood on a quiet sea road of palm trees, mango trees and government bungalows, at the lesser end of Malabar Hill. The surrounding buildings had large, airy rooms, but at Sadhbela they had been forced, by the desperation of so many, to divide the apartments again and again. The numbers on doors ran into the hundreds. In the cramped quarters behind were stowed away a multitude of people living huddled, but grateful, in a couple of rooms.

None of it then had seemed to matter. And since already they knew one another, they left their doors open and lived as one family. Without thought of
imposition
they entered each others’ homes, to help in crisis and in quarrel, to tend sick neighbours, nurse fractious babies or stir imprudent schemes. In time most found their grip again, reasserting their claim to a heritage of irrepressible merchant genes. Children were born who knew nothing of Sind. The gold of Bombay became no longer a myth, but something solid in their hands. Many moved out of Sadhbela, selling their tenements to neighbours anxious to expand. Those who stayed on and made enough money moved upwards, and to the front of the building with its fine view of the sea. A new hierarchy established itself, different from the one they had known in Sind. There, the discrimination of profession, not mercenary values, had divided them into
Amil
or
Bhaibund.
Hardworking
Bhaibund
merchants
and rich landowners, whatever their worth, were looked down upon by superior
Amils
, employed in
professions
, education or the civil services.

In Bombay, the comfort of this past superiority
vanished
overnight; each did what he must to live. The once-wealthy landowner’s son, Murli Murjani from Rohri, quickly learned the common
Bhaibund
trade of shopkeeper, his family forced to forget easy past
income. Murli developed instead a rare relish for money that in Bombay, vulgar city of vulgar business, propelled him swiftly to new heights. But there were accidents amongst the cultured
Amils
. The respected headmaster from Sukkur, Kishin Pumnani, whose
erudite
reputation once drew to his school the cream of local offspring, failed both in trade and the schools of Bombay. It was not easy to support nine small children on the proceeds of part-time tutoring. Soon tattered clothes were no longer replaced, and handouts of pulses and grain were accepted at last by proud Pumnani. He and those like him, dismissed by luck and dexterity, fell quickly to low status. They were forced by small bribes of money to move to the tenements that faced into the sunless, odoriferous wells of the building, rife with rubbish and rodents. There, with their families, they remained refugees. The rest of Sadhbela adopted Bombay.

Lokumal’s mind dwelt upon this past and the many changes of destiny so apparent in Sadhbela. He himself had been lucky. He already had business contacts in Bombay, and had re-established himself with
comparative
ease in his textile business. Even the sustenance of his tree view he exchanged happily for the sea, finding in it a familiar essence. His mind rolled now on its gentle swell. He sighed again at the thought of leaving it; a pain no less, in its way, than that long-ago
departure
from his garden in Sind. The afternoon sun was thick and mellow on the walls of his room, and molten on the waves. He halted his thoughts with an effort. Such nostalgia was attachment, an earthly tie he had broken with long before. He must clear his mind and think. June 11. He pondered the date again, the day before Mrs Hathiramani’s Saturn would move out of the House of the Sun.

‘A job?’ questioned Mr Bhagwandas, as if he
considered
the matter. Sham Pumnani nodded and looked down from a superior height upon Mr Bhagwandas’ head. He noticed the encroachment of white at the base of each ebony wave, the plump diamond-ringed hands, the dapper feet. He tried to smile, to fight down the anger that rose within him.

‘In my trade,’ answered Mr Bhagwandas, ‘our first requirement is trust. That requirement you cannot fulfil, since now you are known as a thief.’

‘I am not a thief—’ Sham began, there was a hot, choking feeling within him. Mr Bhagwandas speared him with a look. The sun beat down upon them before the entrance of the building.

‘But that is now your reputation. It will stick like the tail on a dog. I cannot help you.’ Mr Bhagwandas turned into Sadhbela, swallowed by its dinginess. In a corner of the courtyard, an old woman from one of the back tenements had spread a sheet. From an
aluminium
pot held on her hip, she ladled out spoonfuls of thin tapioca to dry in the sun to a crisp. She squinted up at Sham, a grandchild played at her feet. He glared at her and turned out of the gate. He crossed the road to sit upon a low wall opposite Sadhbela; behind him was the beach and the sea. He bought some roasted gram from a vendor and settled down to eat. On the beach a beggar squatted, defecating, nearby another fanned a fire beneath a pan of tea. Some children
surrounded
the corpse of a dog washed up on the tide, and poked at it with a stick.

Across the road the windows of Sadhbela looked
down like multiple eyes upon him. His own home was on the seventh and top floor. It did not face the sea, but looked into a dark inner well of the building,
white-washed
by pigeon droppings. The outer façade of Sadhbela was little cleaner than its inner walls. It was weathered by brine and humidity to a blotched and blackened appeaarance. The residents were
conditioned
to this grime; they saw it as stability, its layers gave them history. The broken guttering of the fifth floor was from the time Mr Watumal was flooded by a clogged pipe in a record monsoon. Everyone appeared to help in the crisis, sweeping the flood down the lift shaft. The burn on the ceiling of the entrance hall was where Mr Murjani’s son, at the age of four, had let off a Divali firecracker near an open drum of kerosene, and nearly killed himself. The building was streaked by remembrance. The patina of age was a comfort, nobody noticed the dirt.

He had returned from Japan two days ago, and
already
Sadhbela had reclaimed him more securely than before. Sham gazed at the building in fury. All the small balconies were strung with washing; some had plants in old cooking-oil tins, and rusted trunks crammed upon them. Many people had glassed-in their balconies, incorporating the extra space into the room behind. But, except for Mr Murjani’s apartment and Dada Lokumal’s, these glassed-in additions had
washing
lines or metal cupboards pushed up close against them still. Only Mr Murjani’s home, which stretched the entire front of the seventh floor, stood out,
dominating
the top of the building. Sham gazed at the wealth of Mr Murjani’s plate glass, agleam in the sun, and thought of the splendours behind. Of the chandeliers, reflective of sunlight and the movement of waves, of the soft fitted carpets and the crystal chairs from a Maharajah’s palace, worth millions of rupees. And he thought of his own home on the same floor, at the
back of the lift shaft, where a half-hearted light filtered through the small windows, netted against large insects. In those rooms now, his father lay dying. He finished the last of the gram and got up to cross the road again.

His mother, Rekha, opened the door and smiled at his return, but Meena frowned, looking up from a magazine, as he entered the room.

‘So he is back,’ she said. ‘For food he has returned. Where have you been? Loafing about as usual?’

‘You will eat now, son?’ Rekha asked, ignoring her daughter’s scorn. Meena shrugged and returned her attention to a film magazine. At her feet her two
children
played five-stones. She had come home for the day on a visit; she was the eldest of Sham’s sisters. Behind her, Lakshmi massaged old Chachi’s short legs, stretched out beneath a loose tunic in a pair of striped pyjamas. Chachi pulled her veil over her face as soon as Sham entered the room. She had not spoken to him directly yet, to show her disapproval. She was his father’s widowed sister, and the eldest in the family; her anger could not be ignored. From a corner Padma giggled nervously. Veena looked up from where she was trimming lemon rinds, received that morning in charity from Mrs Bhagwandas, to make into pickles.

‘Your father is awake. See him first before you eat,’ Rekha urged. She took Sham’s hand and led him behind a curtained screen, pulling it back with a smile of encouragement. The shadow of a moustache stretched over her lips, a dimple puckered her cheek. Sham tried to imagine her as a young girl, but his mind could not manage the feat. She appeared to have been always as old and tired as his father.

Behind the screen, his father still lay as he had for some months, since a stroke half-paralysed him. Rekha bent towards him, and the old man turned his head. His skin was thin and papery, the bones beneath clearly
visible. His face was lopsided, one part dead and slack, the other twisted grotesquely with life. Spittle dribbled from his mouth, and Rekha wiped it with a muslin cloth. The old man stirred, his face began to jerk and at last some sounds issued up. Sham stepped forward, a lump in his throat. His father raised a hand, catching Sham’s fingertips. His voice was slurred.

‘You have come back from Japan on holiday? They are pleased with you, son, in that office? Any promotion yet?’ He had said the same thing the day before. Beneath distorted words there was still the old tone of whining insistence Sham remembered hearing all his life. The lump in his throat hardened, from distress into resentment. The old man grimaced, revealing long yellow teeth.

The day before his mother had ordered, ‘You will tell him you are here on holiday. God willing, he will never know the real shame.’ Beside him now she nodded and Sham stepped back into the room, relieved to get away. His heart was beating fast. Chachi drew her veil over her face again, twitching her sharp, thin nose, and gave an angry snort. Veena and Padma, his younger sisters, giggled. Meena looked up from her magazine and frowned.

‘You are the head of the family now. From
somewhere
you must get money,’ she hissed. ‘How is Ama to live now you have returned as a thief? Did she raise you for this shame?’

‘Where can I get money from?’ he protested, anger pumping through him. ‘I have nothing.’ He turned his head away. He understood his responsibility; he was the only surviving son. One brother had been killed in a bus accident, two more had died in childhood.

‘Why should you have anything?’ Meena scoffed. ‘When people go to foreign countries they only learn to spend money. They become selfish. They forget their own people at home, who must go without this and
that just to send their children to school. There are also some who cannot eat, who have no money for medicines.’ She looked at the screen about their father’s bed.

He leaned forward. ‘Is your head made of wood? How many times must I tell you that I was just a junior in the business there, and my salary was low. I sent all I could.’

She replied cockily; even in childhood she had never let him get the better of her. ‘Only shouting, shouting. How to give respect to elders you have also forgotten, there in Japan. Since you returned you have only once touched Chachi’s feet in respect.’ Chachi sniffed in agreement behind her veil.

Anger made him dizzy. ‘Do you think I am really a thief, that I wanted deliberately to steal? It was
you
who forced me to it.
All
of
you
.’ He turned, spitting out the words at last.

It had begun soon after he arrived in Japan. Letters and more letters. From sisters, aunts and cousins, from his father and his mother, filled with the memory of all he had escaped. Every letter asked for money, but each small amount he sent back only fuelled further demands. Lists of commodities and appliances were asked for, help for sickness, help for schooling. When his father had a stroke the letters hung upon him, heavy as a weight. Money was needed for medicine and doctors. He asked his employer for a loan and was refused. Desperation had suffused him.

At first it had been small amounts of cash he took, collecting slowly until he had enough to send to his family. No one seemed to notice. Then his mother’s letter, describing his father’s paralysis, stained with tearmarks, recalling events of his childhood, made him take a larger amount. This was soon missed and traced to him.

‘You forced me to do it,’ he repeated. Padma and
Veena clung together; Lakshmi stood transfixed with an expression that cut him deeply. He had no wish to hurt Lakshmi, she was his favourite sister. She started forward and laid a hand on his arm.

‘Calm yourself,’ she whispered. ‘Father will hear.’ But Meena was already off again, her eyes blazing.

‘What lies you tell. What you earned in Japan in a month would keep us here for a year. You have spent it all, on drinking, on gambling, on bad women. In Foreign these are the evil things that take men’s money and corrupt them. I know. I have read about it in magazines,’ Meena yelled.

Sham raised his arm to strike her, but Lakshmi pulled him off. He saw her face, wet with tears, and sat down on the floor, his head in his hands.

‘There was no money for medicines. He would
already
be dead without all that you sent,’ Lakshmi comforted. ‘For such reasons how can anybody be called a thief?’

‘I did not ask you for anything,’ Padma said,
kneeling
beside him.

‘I was lucky just to be sacked and sent back here,’ Sham replied in a low voice. Everyone had remarked on the goodness of his employer in this respect.

After three years away, he had been catapulted back to India in a way he had never dreamed of. There was no hiding the shame; his employer was a cousin of Mr Murjani. Before he returned the whole building knew the reason he was back. What work would he find to keep not only himself, but the crowd of them in this room? And Lakshmi was now eighteen and must be married soon. Where would he find the money for a dowry? Who would marry her if he did not? He had had no reliable job, even before he went to Japan. With a B.A. degree he had worked as a scribe and a typist, writing letters for the illiterate on a roadside stall. What good, he had wondered then, was his father’s brave
talk of education? And yet, without this education, Mr Murjani would not have invited Sham into his home one evening, three years ago.

He had eaten the savouries Mrs Murjani offered with a drink, and absorbed as discreetly as he could the effect of silken drapes and banks of glinting crystal. He had left in a daze, and described the place to his father. He told him of the possibility of a job with Mr
Murjani’s
cousin, a trader settled in Japan, who had asked for a reliable Indian boy to be found, to train for an executive post in his export office in Osaka.

His father did not appear impressed. A sad look settled on his face, a look Sham knew well, called up at talk of easy money or the lowering of men’s mind’s.

‘In the past young men left the villages for work in the towns. Now they leave our India for work abroad,’ sighed Kishin Pumnani.

‘Many have made a fortune,’ Sham said. ‘I shall live like the Murjanis one day.’ His father had looked up sharply. The hot feelings in Sham danced about. He made an effort to control his anger.

‘Do not compare yourself with them. They are people of money, we are people of learning.’ Kishin Pumnani’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, like a cork in his long thin throat. ‘Be content with a decent life and with honest, well-earned money. That has always been my rule.’ He frowned in concern, seeing his son slipping already into the Murjanis’ fat world.

The school he had run in Sind before Partition came suddenly into Kishin’s mind, as he listened to Sham. He saw again its great compound filled with boisterous boys, kicking balls and climbing trees. The school was a group of low buildings, verandahs entwined with flowering creeper. He saw again the infant Murli
Murjani
running about in shorts, and the eldest of the Bhagwandas boys fighting with Lokumal’s youngest brother, later murdered in Lokumal’s garden. Sind
Model High School. A blue board emblazoned the words in white, above the porch of the school. They had lived well in those days, each rupee earned by the power of the mind. He had taken only enough in salary to live with befitting dignity, everything else was ploughed back into the school, to provide the best. He had been able to employ an Englishman, a Mr Bigglesby, a sickly, bony, sallow-skinned man, but with a brain that outstripped his appearance. He had
improved
the standard of all modern subjects, while Kishin had maintained the quality of those subjects indigenous to Sind, and dearest to his heart. No boy left his school without fluent knowledge of his language, history and literature. ‘We put more of Sind into Sindhis,’ was Sind Model High School’s motto. It had not served Kishin well in Bombay.

He had taught many of Sadhbela’s residents, and they had approached him in those far-off days with an awe that vanished in Bombay. In this city of exile, in circumstances he refused to acknowledge as permanent, waiting always for a return to normal, he had not broken his back to educate Sham for him to earn
suspect
Bhaibund
money. But neither had he urged Sham towards a B.A. to be a scribe for the illiterate, on a pavement stall. The boy had tried hard for a good job, he was not to be blamed. Luck was against him, against all Pumnanis. Kishin sighed, resigned now to any fate. At least
Bhaibund
money would provide dowries for the youngest girls. He should not oppose the boy.

A decent life? Honest money? Sham looked at his father in disbelief. What decent life had they ever lived, and when had there been money, honest or not? He had no memory of Sind, he had been born in Bombay. Those days of plenty recalled by his father appeared the stuff of fairy tales, so distant were they from the familiarities of Sadhbela.