Outside, Khorshedbai was delighted with the results. Had it dried up completely, it would not have stuck. But this was perfect. She crumpled up the newspaper and turned to leave, then stopped. Another afterthought – she raised her eyes heavenward in thanks and shredded the pages of
The Indian Express
into tiny pieces. She scattered them, tossed them, hither and thither, little paper medallions gently falling, to decorate the floor and window ledge and door. Traces of prance and glee crept into her step; she became a little girl indulging in forbidden
fun. Strewing to the left and to the right, and up to the ceiling to watch it all float downward. The sari slipped off her head (she
always
kept her head covered) and the left shoulder (she deftly restored the fabric), and her bangles, having escaped the forearms to the freedom of the wrists, sounded louder, the fragile tinkles now a solid row of jingle-jangles.
From behind the locked door it sounded as though Khorshedbai had finally entered that long-feared state of frenzy, and Kashmira was worried. Khorshedbai could usually be controlled by Ardesar with his gentle voice of reason. She had heard him before, speaking so calmly and tenderly to his wife; it always brought a lump to Kashmira’s throat.
Ardesar had tried to dissuade Khorshedbai every day since she conceived of this scheme four weeks ago. That first morning, after tasting victory in the court case in which they had faced eviction, she woke up and said that Pestonji had given her a gift in the night. Whistling with his little red beak and fluttering his bright green wings in her dream, she said, he had revealed how to teach next door a lesson they would never forget. Ardesar had pleaded with her, but forty years of marriage should have taught him better. When Khorshed was resolved for fight and revenge nothing could stop her.
Now Ardesar could watch no more, after that nasty thing she hurled. Away, away from the door, away from this, this insane and filthy behaviour, he turned. Wringing his hands, he formed four words with his lips, over and over, in urgent supplication:
Dada Ormuzd
, forgive her. He paced the room in distress, stopping now and then to straighten and re-straighten the photoframes on the shelf. What was he to do? He could not question Pestonji’s dream-dictums without hurting his beloved Khotty. No, he could never do that. Besides, who was to say what dreams were all about, even scientists still knew so very little about the universe and its mysterious forces. He pulled out a chair as if to sit, then continued to pace. He repeatedly touched the bald spot on his head, fingered its peripheral strands, and tried to push the glasses (which had not strayed) up on his nose.
Khorshedbai curbed her frolic. She came in as the last little pieces of
The Indian Express
floated to the floor behind her. Ardesar took her arm, murmuring: “O Khotty my life, what have you done, that thing
you threw. We will have to answer one day to The One Up There. This must stop before …”
She pulled away her arm and went to the empty parrot cage. With hands clasped before her chest and eyes closed she stood before it for a few moments, then turned to Ardesar. “They started it, why should we stop? Six months of court-and-lawyer nonsense. Eviction notices! Ha! He gives me eviction notices! With his ties and jackets, trying to be a
sahib
, and his good-mornings and good-evenings, thinks he is better than me.” Her hardness disappeared for a moment as she appealed to him pleadingly: “I was never this way before, was I?”
“But Khotty my life, that, that thing you threw! And you know it is their flat, they have a right to …”
“A right to what? Put us on the street? Don’t we have rights? At last to have a roof, eat a little
daar-roteli
, and finish our days in peace? No one will peck me to pieces, they better learn.”
“But we leave soon as the other place is vacant. Tell them, they are good people.”
“For you the whole world is good people.” Her gesture to encompass humanity tinkled the bangles again. She pushed them towards the elbows. “The other place is not ready. Might never be. Nothing is certain in life. Only birth, marriage, and death, my poor mother used to say. At our age you want to go begging again for rooms in
dharmsaalas?”
“But that dirty, that thing …”
“That thing, that thing, that thing! Trembling in your pyjamas every day instead of helping. And if He did not want me to throw it, then why was it on the pavement outside the
agyaari?
. And why did He give me the idea? It is not easy to …”
Ardesar stopped listening. He did not mind Khorshedbai’s scolding. The uncertainty of things was worrying her. That was all. Besides, he was far away from this room now as he fed the pigeons flocking the wide pavements along Chaupatty beach, cooing to them as they played and nibbled in his hand, while the sound of the tide coming in offered a continuo to the occasional whirr of their gentle wings.
Locked inside her room with little Adil, Kashmira heard the drone of Khorshedbai’s determined voice and Ardesar’s soft one for a long time. Sometimes she wished she could eavesdrop with greater clarity. After Boman came home she would unlock her door, they would clean up the mess as usual, then relax outside.
Kashmira needed at least one hour every evening on the veranda before going to bed. She said it felt like someone was choking her, after being cooped all day inside the one room where they had to cook and eat and sleep. But that was their own choice, made two years ago. They had given up the kitchen and decided to keep this room with its attached bathroom – the kitchen went with the other to the paying guests, in a natural division of the flat. She and Boman had agreed the bathroom was more important, what with little Adil’s
soosoo
problem at nights, and the second baby they had been planning. A kitchen they could do without, by partitioning and using one side of their room for cooking and dining. The veranda was common because the only entrance to the flat was through it.
The arrangement was awkward. But Boman said that no wife of his would go out to work while there was breath in
his
lungs. The paying guests would be temporary, two years at best, till he got his raises and they could again afford the full rent. That was Boman’s plan.
He laid it before Mr. Karani one evening in the compound when they were both returning from work. Boman admired the chartered accountant on the third floor immensely. He always took his advice in all manner of things. Not that he lacked confidence in himself, he just enjoyed discussions with a man who was a
CA;
there was something about those two letters, especially since Boman’s own studies had come to a halt after B.Com., when his father’s fortunes had failed.
Mr. Karani was full of dire forebodings. He warned that it was easier to get rid of a poisonous
kaankhajuro
which had crawled through your ear and nibbled its way to your brain than to evict a paying guest who had been allowed into your flat.
Boman was in a quandary. He had been looking for confirmation and support. Instead, he had run full tilt into contradiction and discouragement, and wished he had never spoken to Mr. Karani. This was the problem in taking the
CA’S
advice. If you disagreed with it, it
sat inside you like a lump of incongenial food, noisily belligerent and causing indigestion.
For a few days, Mr. Karani’s warnings rumbled and growled and gnawed away at his plan, threatening it with disintegration, while Boman vacillated and went from extremes of confidence to extremes of uncertainty. Eventually, however, it turned out to be one of those rare instances when Boman ignored the
CA’S
advice. He went ahead with his plan and told Kashmira he had inserted an ad in the
Jam-E-Jamshed
.
It was soon answered. An appointment was made, the flat was shown, and both parties were agreeable.
Then followed one and a half years of cordial coexistence with the paying guests. Boman began to feel that, for once, Mr. Karani had been exaggerating. He was tempted to pull out the pedestal from under Mr. Karani.
But the year and a half of cordial coexistence sped by and concluded abruptly when Ardesar and Khorshedbai received the notice to vacate. This notice to vacate would have far-reaching effects. It would bring new experiences into all their lives: courts and courtrooms, sleepless nights filled with paeans to the rising sun, a sadistic nose-digging lawyer for Boman, veranda-sweeping for Kashmira, signs and portents in dreams for Khorshedbai, pigeons (real and imagined) for Ardesar, thick and suffocating incense clouds for Boman and Kashmira, and finally, a taxi for Ardesar and an ambulance for Khorshedbai.
Its immediate result, however, was to make Khorshedbai emphatically declare to Ardesar that no one would peck her to pieces. For most of her life, Khorshedbai had carried at the back of her mind an image. It was a flock of crows pecking and tearing to shreds some dead creature lying in a gutter. At times the corpse was a kitten, at other times a puppy; sometimes it was even another crow. Whether she ever witnessed something of this sort or whether the image just grew out of various life experiences into a guiding metaphor, during times of adversity she would clench her teeth and repeat to herself that no one was going to peck her to pieces, she would fight back.
It was a year and a half ago that the paying guests had moved in with their meagre possessions: two trunks, one holdall, a hefty parrot cage (empty and still bearing the former occupant’s name: Pestonji Poputt), a wind-up gramophone, and one record:
Sukhi Sooraj
, a song of praise for the morning sun, its brittle 78-rpm shellac protected between soft sari layers in one of the trunks.
In those days, the two rooms did not stay locked. Khorshedbai would peek inside, wave to little Adil, and inquire how he was getting along. Sometimes Kashmira looked in on the elderly couple to ask if they needed anything. She noticed that two second-hand chairs and a small folding table had been added. On the table stood the cage of the deceased or disappeared Pestonji. Once, she saw Khorshedbai before the empty cage, gazing at the little swing inside. She felt a pang of compassion for the dear grey-haired lady, and imagined the burden of memories weighing heavily upon Khorshedbai’s old shoulders as she stood and remembered her beloved pet. Khorshedbai beckoned her in, viced her arm in bony fingers, and said; “So sweet, Pestonji’s whistle was, and so true.” He still appeared in her dreams when there was trouble, she said, and communicated the future in whistles she alone could interpret.
That night when Kashmira told Boman all about it, he said the old lady definitely had at least one loose screw somewhere in the upper storey.
Minor irritants between the two parties were easily taken care of. Khorshedbai requested sole use of the veranda for her morning prayers. And she did not want Kashmira to emerge during her monthly. Boman and Kashmira agreed amusedly. Khorshedbai rose at five
A.M
. each day and, after brushing her teeth, unmuzzled her gramophone for
Sukhi Sooraj
, the fervent tribute to sunrise. As part of the mutual consideration pact, Boman and Kashmira requested that it not be played till after seven o’clock.
Khorshedbai soon became a familiar sight in the building. To and from her way to the
agyaari
or the bazaar, and sometimes, hand in hand with Ardesar, off to feed the pigeons at Chaupatty beach. Gradually, stories reached Kashmira’s ears about the elderly couple,
and how they came to be homeless at their age. Najamai from C Block stopped by whenever she uncovered something new from her numerous sources. She was concerned that Boman and Kashmira had taken strangers into their flat. So what if they too were Parsis, these days you could trust no one. It was one lesson she had learned, she said, after the murder in the fire-temple, when the
dustoorji
had been stabbed to death by a
chasniwalla
employed there. Thus Najamai made it her bounden responsibility to make known the truth, but was not really successful.
In one version, it was the result of a family feud; many years ago Ardesar had sworn never to set foot in his father’s house as long as a certain person lived there. Although soft-spoken Ardesar swearing to do or not do anything was highly improbable.
Another story went that something quite shameful had come to pass between Khorshedbai and one unnamed male occupant, a relative of Ardesar’s, and they had had no choice but to pack up and leave after the affair. But here again it was impossible to imagine prim,
agyaari-
going Khorshedbai with sari-covered head in any kind of liaison.
Yet another tale, and the saddest of them all, had it that the couple, after a long and arduous life of working and scrimping and saving, had managed to educate and send their only son to Canada. Some years later he sponsored them. So they got rid of their flat and went, only to find he was not the son they once knew; after a period of misery and ill-treatment at his hands they returned to Bombay, homeless and heartbroken.
Kashmira did not pay much attention to these stories. But sometimes, when she picked up the mail dropped on the veranda by the postman, she would see a letter for Ardesar and Khorshedbai from Canada. The cruel son? The return address had the same last name. But if they were mistreated in Canada, returning to Bombay made no sense. Especially since there was no flat. Sons could be ungrateful, yes, but you could not run away from it. Better to remain where at least the food and air and water were good.
Kashmira would hand over the letter with a remark about the pretty foreign stamp, hoping to elicit a comment, perhaps a clue to
the writer’s identity. All Khorshedbai ever said was thanks, then she took her arm and led her in beside the cage, to tell more about the life of Pestonji.
When the doctor said yes, Kashmira was pregnant, Boman thought it was time to use the whole flat again. With two children they would need both rooms.
One day, soon after the glad tidings, he stopped Mr. Karani in the compound. More out of habit than anything else, he wanted to discuss the best way of making the paying guests leave.