Family Matters Read online

  “You’re welcome to stay, chief – your house, after all.”

  Nariman turned his face away. “Never say that, please. Notwithstanding my barging in today, this flat is yours and Roxana’s. Your wedding gift. It ill behooves anyone to suggest, after fifteen years, that I am attempting to commandeer these premises.”

  The stiff and formal turn of Nariman’s diction told Yezad he had offended him. “Sorry, chief, didn’t mean that.”

  “We’ll manage fine, Pappa,” said Roxana. “Three weeks will fly before we know it.”

  “Exactly,” said Yezad. “And Murad and Jehangir will help their mother with the extra work. You promise, boys? We’ll soon have the chief good as new.”

  Jehangir pulled the urinal and bedpan out from under the cot. “That’s Grandpa’s soo-soo bottle,” he explained to his father, “and that’s for kakka.”

  “Don’t touch those things,” said Yezad, suddenly angry. “Wash your hands at once.”

  With Roxana’s and Nariman’s worried eyes following him, he stalked out to the balcony where he stood till she announced dinner was ready.

  Jehangir claimed he was expert now at feeding Grandpa, and helped him with the French beans. Yezad remarked that the chief not only had his private nursing home but also his own butler – what more could he want?

  Nariman wondered if resentment was concealed behind the words. “I’m truly blessed to have such a family. Makes up for all other deficiencies.”

  “We should decide about the bedding,” said Roxana. The kitchen was not an option, she felt, mice and cockroaches persisted despite the poison she spread regularly. The passage between kitchen and wc would be unhygienic. And the floor near the front door had a perpetual damp patch whose origins had yet to be traced. Which left the balcony.

  “Yippee!” said Jehangir. “Simply smashing! I’ll make a tent and have a midnight feast in it.”

  “Sorry,” said Murad, “Squadron Leader Bigglesworth needs it for a base to conduct secret operations.”

  “Only one way to settle this,” said Yezad. “You’ll have to share. Grandpa is here for three weeks – let’s say twenty days. So ten days each.”

  Their father tossed a coin to see who would be first. Murad called tails and won. The two thin mattresses on the cot parted company: one remained behind for Jehangir, the other went outside, upon a plastic sheet.

  “Hope it rains heavily,” said Murad. “It will be just like the Biggies adventure when his Hurricane crash-landed in Sumatra in the middle of a storm.”

  “Silly boy!” scolded his mother. “Pray to God it remains dry! What will we do if your mattress is soaked? Once again your medicine bottles that we can’t afford will rule my life.”

  Yezad tried to placate her fears: there was very little chance of rain tonight, tomorrow he would rig something up on the balcony for protection. But she was not willing to take the risk.

  “It’s only the beginning of September. If Murad falls sick it will be impossible for me, now that I have Pappa to look after.” She threatened to sleep on the balcony herself if it wasn’t one hundred per cent rainproof.

  Now Murad worried his adventure was about to slip out of his grasp. “It’s okay, Mummy,” he reassured her. “Daddy and I will dress the balcony in a raincoat and gumboots and cap.”

  Rummaging among the shelves outside the kitchen, they found two small plastic sheets, enough to cover the spaces in the wrought-iron railings but nothing large enough to make a roof.

  “Ask Villie,” suggested Yezad to Roxana. “She might lend us a tarpaulin or something.”

  “You go. I can’t stand her, with her dear and darling, and her gambling.”

  Villie Cardmaster, or the Matka Queen, as Yezad called her, was about his age, and lived with her mother in the next flat. She had taken to professing preference for her single state, declaring she had no use for a groaning-moaning fellow keeping her up all night with his demands. Sometimes, though, she looked wistfully at men, as though sizing them up for herself.

  Her days were occupied with housework and caring for her ailing mother, who had shrunk to the size of a six-year-old. Villie was able to lift her without much effort as she took her from the bed to the bathroom, and to her easy chair on the balcony, or to the dining table, carrying her around like a wrinkled doll.

  Any spare time that Villie squeezed out of her day was devoted to analyzing dreams. She assigned numeric values to objects and events from a dream, which were then used to play Matka. The illegal numbers game was the thread upon which the beads of her hours were strung. She interrogated friends, neighbours, neighbours’ servants, and those who shared their dreams were rewarded with the fruits of her analysis. She had a little Matka flutter almost every day, placing the bets when she went for her daily shopping to the bunya, who was also a bookie.

  “Hallo, Yezadji!” she exclaimed, delighted to have a visitor. She used the honorific suffix with every male, regardless of age or station.

  “Sorry to bother you, Villie.”

  “What use are neighbours if you can’t bother them? Come in, my dear, bother me all you want.”

  He followed her smelly housecoated figure inside. The full-length garment, loose and buttoned along the front, disguised her form efficiently. She wore it from one bath to the next, which meant three or four days. She slept in it, cooked in it, and conducted her daily shopping in it, the last with a significant modification: she wrapped a sari over the housecoat, draping it rather uniquely – half-a-dozen safety pins held it in place, for there was no petticoat waistband into which it could be tucked. She called the housecoat her all-purpose gown.

  He realized why the flirting depressed him: it was the gulf between her coquettish words and slovenly appearance. Without too many details he explained why he had come, but Villie had seen the ambulance in the morning and heard the row.

  “I understand, Yezadji,” she said with a wink. “In-law troubles make the strongest into helpless kittens. Come, let’s see what we can find.”

  She led the way, expressing regret for Nariman’s predicament. His tragic life, she called it, and recounted some of the sordid details. Her familiarity with the facts did not surprise Yezad – there were many in the Parsi community who could recall the scandal with Villie’s mix of sympathy and satisfaction.

  She stopped before an old dresser crammed with odds and ends. “Make yourself at home, my darling, look freely through these drawers.”

  Noticing his reluctance, she knelt to help him get started. “By the way, I have a strong Matka number for tonight. A dream so powerful, so numerically forceful I haven’t had in months.”

  “Good luck, Villie, hope you crack it.”

  Despite his lack of curiosity, she dramatically lowered her voice to preserve the dream’s numinous power and continued, with reverent cadence, “A cat is what I saw. A cat beside a large saucer of milk.”

  “And it discussed numbers with you?”

  With a pitying smile she pulled things out of the drawers for his inspection. “The message of cat and saucer was so strong, Yezadji, there was no need for discussion.”

  “So the two of you communicated by telepathy?”

  Villie shook her head. “The cat was sitting up straight, looking at me. Her head and body formed a perfect eight. And on her left side, the saucer of milk, round, like a zero. So tomorrow’s number is eighty.”

  He was not through with teasing. “But, Villie, did you dream in English or Gujarati?”

  “I’m not sure. What’s the difference?”

  “Huge difference. Gujarati number eight” – he drew it in the air with his finger – “does not look like a cat sitting up straight.”

  “Big joker you are, Yezadji.” She laughed, but the seed of doubt was planted.

  They found some squares of oilskin and a four-by-six section of canvas, not sufficient to roof the balcony. Then, from the last drawer, he pulled out a large leathery sheet that was packed inside a shopping bag. “What’s this?�
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  “Oh, the old tablecloth. For our family dining table.”

  “Must be huge.”

  “It is. It was. So huge, sixteen could sit comfortably.”

  They each took hold of an end; the layers, stuck together, separated with a sound like fabric rending. As the dark green rexine unfolded, Villie let her memories unfold with it.

  “Such happy times, Yezadji, we had around this tablecloth. Every Sunday afternoon, the whole family together, for dhansak lunch. Bavaji was fanatic about it – curry-rice okay for Saturday, but try to cook anything except dhansak on Sunday and heaven help you. So Maiji never argued. And at one o’clock uncles, aunties, cousins would arrive and start chattering as though we hadn’t met for months.”

  Yezad thought about the balcony waiting to be fixed, but he did not have the heart to interrupt. Villie’s face was aglow with happiness.

  “Always Bavaji made me sit at his right hand, and my brother, Dali, at his left. And for Sunday lunch the rexine tablecloth was topped with another, of Belgian lace. Bavaji did not allow knick-knacks or vases upon it, saying it was a crime to cover up a work of art.

  “How lovely those days were, Yezadji. Wait a minute, let me show you something.”

  She returned with a framed photograph: a family of four, posed formally at one end of a long dining table. Mother, father, two well-behaved children, the boy scrubbed and shining in short trousers, shirt, and tie, the little girl in her ribbon-bedecked frock of pink organza.

  “My seventh birthday – which fell on a Sunday. Very special.” She sighed. “Why is it that when we grow up, suddenly the happy days are behind us?”

  Yezad had no answer. “What happened to that dining table?”

  “My brother took it to his new flat when he got married.”

  “Does he have big Sunday lunches, family tradition?”

  Villie twisted her mouth in answer. “He destroyed the table. It wouldn’t fit through his front door, so he got a carpenter to turn it into a sectional table. God knows what junglee wood he used for framing, but in two years it was eaten to bits by white ants.”

  She stroked the cloth and began folding. Yezad helped, wondering about the workings of a fate that had transformed Villie from the sweet little pink-frocked girl, sitting at her father’s right hand for Sunday dhansak, to the dream-obsessed, Matka-besotted woman with a rancid smell. What cruel trajectory had led from there to here?

  She did not replace the tablecloth in its bag. “I’m sure this will be large enough to cover the balcony.”

  Yezad was startled. “Don’t you want to save such an important memento?”

  “Memento-femento I don’t believe in. A big tablecloth without a big table, without guests to sit and laugh and talk, is no use. Cover the balcony before your little boy catches a chill.”

  “Thanks, Villie.”

  She pushed the odds and ends back into the drawers and slammed them shut. “You know, Yezadji, you’re right. If my dream was in Gujarati, I’d use a different method: the sound of the word. Cat would become bilaari – bey number for bilaari. Combined with zero for saucer, I should bet twenty. And you too, my dear, put some money on twenty and eighty, safe in both languages. You’ll win enough to build a pukka room on your balcony.”

  He said no need, he wanted to keep it as a balcony, the situation was temporary.

  “That means nothing,” said Villie, seeing him to the door. “Everything is temporary, Yezadji. Life itself is temporary.”

  Wasn’t it typical of that woman, said Roxana, to keep a man chatting for as long as possible with her dear-darling nonsense. And when she heard that Villie had shown him a photo, she asked what kind of new perversion was that woman up to, wasn’t Matka enough for her?

  “It was a family photo, when she was seven,” said Yezad, which made Roxana feel foolish, and then guilty about taking the tablecloth, as he told the story behind it, repeating Villie’s sad remembrances. “You know, she’s not a bad person. Just a little weird. And she offered to get your shopping from the bunya, she goes every morning.”

  He spread the rexine on the balcony and made holes at suitable distances along the edges, feeling a twinge at each perforation. He would buy metal eyelets tomorrow at the Bora’s hardware shop, reinforce the raw punctures, make it strong as tarpaulin. With short lengths of rope through each hole, he fastened the sheet to the balcony railing.

  Murad began equipping his rexine tent for the night. He took his toy binoculars, compass, and weapons: a paper knife and water pistol. He wanted to keep a candle and matches as well in his emergency hideout, deep in the darkest recesses of the Sumatran jungle, but his mother refused.

  “Mummy is right,” said Yezad. “It won’t be very pleasant if you burn down Pleasant Villa.”

  “Ha, ha, very funny. Mummy always imagines horrible things.”

  “Speaking of imagining, chief, what’s this about being depressed? Are Jal and Coomy imagining it? I can’t believe it of a philosopher like you.”

  “Depression is a red herring,” said Nariman. “I think a lot about the past, it’s true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.”

  “You’ve got many years left with us, Pappa.”

  “I wonder why Dr. Tarapore thought it was depression,” said Yezad.

  “The quack misdiagnosed based on what Coomy and Jal said. He has yet to learn not everything can be explained clinically. ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’ ”

  “That’s lovely,” said Roxana. “Shakespeare?”

  “Pascal.”

  She repeated the words to herself, silently, The heart has its reasons …

  Lying on his cot, Jehangir listened, attentive to the adults’ conversation, wondering what depression felt like. Was it the sad feeling when it kept raining for many days? He watched, envious, as Murad prepared for his night on the balcony. Then he heard Grandpa ask in a timid voice for the soo-soo bottle.

  “I’ll get it for you,” he said, jumping off the cot.

  His father crossed the room in two violent strides and stood in his path. “What did I say about that bottle?”

  Jehangir froze. He thought his father was going to hit him. He sounded angriest when his voice was so scarily quiet.

  “Answer me. What did I tell you?”

  Cowering, he replied, “Not to touch those things.”

  “So why did you try to get it?”

  “I forgot,” he said, his voice tiny. “I wanted to help.”

  Next moment the anger disappeared, and his father’s hand was on his shoulder. “You don’t have to help with this, Jehangla.”

  His father nudged him towards the cot. He watched his mother pick up the soo-soo bottle. She lifted the sheet and put Grandpa’s soosoti into it. It was small, not much bigger than his. But Grandpa’s balls were huge. Like onions in a sock, even bigger than Daddy’s, which he had seen many times when Daddy came out of the bathroom and took the towel off to put on his clothes. His own were like little marbles. He wondered if the size and weight of Grandpa’s made it uncomfortable.

  “Lie down, Jehangla,” said Daddy. “You don’t have to look at everything. Good night.”

  Then Mummy brought the basin for Grandpa to gargle and clean his mouth before going to sleep. He made that funny move with his jaw to push out his teeth. They slid into the glass, into their watery bed, before Jehangir closed his eyes.

  With her head next to Yezad’s on the pillow, Roxana thanked him for being so understanding.

  He suggested it might be best to hire a hospital ayah, running herself ragged was not the answer. “We’ll make Jal and Coomy pay the cost. Tell them it’s our condition for accommodating Pappa.”

  “After the way they behaved, I don’t want a thing from them. I don’t want to see their faces for three weeks, till Pappa is on his feet.”

  She assured him it wouldn’t be difficult, with a little patience and understanding. Then
she described how bad Pappa smelled when he’d arrived. “All it took was a napkin and water, and talcum, but Jal and Coomy hadn’t bothered. And you saw the stubble on his poor face – they packed his razor in the bag. As if he can do it himself.”

  “We’ll call a barber. But three weeks, and that’s it. I will accept no excuses from those two rascals.”

  “Oh I’m not going to let them push Pappa from his house for longer than that. Just watch me, I’ll straighten them out.”

  She came closer, hugged him, and kissed the ear into which she’d been whispering, nibbling it. He sighed. His fingers reached for the hem of her nightdress and pulled it up around her hips as she raised her bottom slightly. His hand moved under the soft fabric. She said better wait a little, the boys were asleep but she was not sure about Pappa.

  Nariman opened his eyes and wished Lucy’s large, sad eyes would stop haunting him. Turning his head, he looked for the familiar bars on his window, and saw his grandson’s cot instead. He was not in Chateau Felicity. He must stay quiet tonight, muzzle his memories, must not disturb Roxana and Yezad, and the children sleeping close by.

  Drowsy from the painkiller, he drifted on a cloud resembling slumber. Among the murmurs from the back room the word “ayah” caught his ear … and memory began its torments again. Lucy accepting employment as an ayah in Chateau Felicity – to be closer to him, she’d said. And the work was no hardship, she assured him, it was a great comfort to live and sleep in the same building.

  Even before she became a servant, heartache had etched lines of fatigue on her face, making it gaunt. Domestic drudgery was now worsening it. How outrageous, he thought, that she would do this to herself, go to such absurd lengths just to retaliate, to make his life miserable because he had refused to meet her on the footpath any more.

  Her employers were the ground-floor Arjanis. They knew who she was – they had often seen Lucy with him. The ground-floor Gestapo, he would joke with Lucy during the years when they were still going out, for Mr. and Mrs. Arjani were always at their window, keeping an eye on the comings and goings in Chateau Felicity. And later, they would watch her on those evenings when she stood like a lost child on the pavement, staring up at his window.