Bombay Time (15 page)

Her need to talk to someone about the events of that night wrestled with her new resolution to attempt a reconciliation with Rusi. Ultimately, habit won over good intentions and drew her to Dosamai’s house a week after the funeral. It was Coomi’s first visit since Khor-shed’s death and Dosamai was eager to critique Rusi’s performance at the funeral. The old gossip was annoyed at Rusi because his eulogy for his mother had touched and silenced even his usual critics, depriving Dosamai of her favorite target. Just a few days before, Jiloo had cut Dosamai off by saying, “Say what you will, Dosamai, that Rusi is a good man. How many men you know who are loving their mothers so openly and proudly? Yes, his marriage may be a flop, but he’s not the
badmash
we make him out to be, I don’t believe.”

So Dosamai greeted Coomi eagerly, hoping for news she could use to counteract this new feeling of goodwill toward Rusi. “How are things at home?” the old woman asked.

“Fine. The house feels a little empty. Rusi’s been very quiet, so even when he’s home, I feel like I’m all alone all day.” Coomi knew better than to tell Dosamai her hopes of reconciling with Rusi.

“Speaking of Rusi, I was thinking, It’s good that Rusi loves his mummy and all, but it was a little too much at the funeral, no?” Dosamai said. “Meaning, why hire
dastoors
to pray if he was going to drown out their voices with his praying? Such a show-off, your husband.”

Coomi knew better than to contradict Dosamai. So, although her heart rebelled at this mischaracterization of Rusi’s motives, she remained silent. Besides, she needed to empty herself of the bubbling resentment she had carried to Dosamai’s flat.

“I keep thinking of the last night that Khorshed Mamma was alive,” Coomi said. “Being in the hospital with her, watching that respirator go up and down, up and down. The noise of that machine. Never will I forget it. And Dosamai, this part I haven’t told you about yet. Khorshed Mamma opened her eyes once at about three
A.M.
and groaned Rusi’s name. Just an hour before that, I had reasoned with Rusi, told him there was no need for both of us to be sitting up all night on those hard wooden chairs. You know what those rooms at Parsi General are like. Told him to go get some sleep on the bench in the hallway. And look at my
kismet
—an hour later, Khorshed Mamma asks for Rusi and I run to the hall and wake him up. But by the time we get back to the room, she has her eyes shut and is sleeping peaceful as a baby. Rusi calls her name several times, ‘Mammaji, my mamma,’ he calls, but she doesn’t open her eyes. And Rusi gives me a look of such
khoonas
and distrust that I wished I were the one dying instead of Khorshed Mamma. As if I did something deliberate to keep him away from his mother. He just sits up in that chair the rest of the night, not daring to leave his mother’s side. But she never opens her eyes again. And you mark my words, one of these days I’m going to be blamed for that, too.”

“What to do,
deekra,”
Dosamai said. “For some of us, it is just our lot to get blamed for other people’s mischief. Same thing with that cow that my son has married. Somehow, I only get blamed for everything that happens to her. Anyway, I have made some new mixtures. Take some with you; they’ll help you sleep better.”

Coomi left Dosamai’s flat that day carrying one of Dosamai’s herbal tinctures for anxiety and stress. But she also left without the usual satisfaction she got after letting the venom and anger seep out of her heart. She took that to be a sign of progress. If she were to make up with Rusi, Coomi knew, gossiping about her husband to Dosamai was a habit she would have to wean herself off. The fact that she felt dissatisfied after visiting Dosamai was a good sign. It was time to stop perfecting her outrage, polishing it like a stone, under Dosamai’s careful tutelage. She resolved to avoid visiting the old gossip for a few weeks.

Despite Rusi’s disinterest and absentmindedness, a tattered hope fluttered in Coomi’s heart, like a piece of paper blowing along the sands of Chowpatty Beach. In their middle age, perhaps she and Rusi could finally learn to be man and wife. Nobody stood between them now. No longer did she have to feel as if a pair of eyes was watching her every move, waiting for her to fail. She could—would—rescue Rusi from the whirlpool of grief he had been drowning in since his mother’s death. Coomi knew better than to console her husband with the easy patter of professional mourners: She was old. At least she didn’t suffer. She died a peaceful death. All of us have to go sometime. She noticed how Rusi gritted his teeth when well-meaning neighbors recited these rehearsed lines. No, she would not say those words, because she understood that death at any age is still an insult to life, an affront to those who must keep living. Instead, she would rescue Rusi a day at a time, until someday he would have a treacherous thought: Is this how it would have been? Could marriage have really been this wonderful, this smooth, happy ride, if Mamma had never been in the picture?

Once Rusi had time to come to terms with his mother’s death, perhaps they would patch things up. Start life again, just the two of them, in a way that had never been possible until now. Maybe they could go to Khandala or some nearby place for a few days, just to get away from the hurt and grief that hung like lanterns from the walls of their flat. Something like a honeymoon period. After all, despite all his faults, Rusi was a good man. As much as Coomi had resented her husband’s devotion to his mother, she also admired it. Not too many of the men she knew would have taken care of an elderly parent the way Rusi had. Her own brothers, for example, loved their mother, but they were not above yelling at the old woman to shut up when she got on their nerves. And now, with Khorshed out of the way, maybe Rusi could learn to transfer all his love and caring to her. God knows, she had prayed for that long enough.

So Coomi went to work. At night, she held Rusi in her arms, trying to ignore the fact that he moved stiffly away from her the first chance he got. Using Khorshed’s old recipes, she cooked Rusi’s favorite dishes, despite the fact that he ate little. Within his earshot, she described her dead mother-in-law in affectionate, nostalgic tones, trying to ignore the look of amazement on the face of the person she was talking to. On Khorshed’s first-month death anniversary, she got up early in the morning and silently accompanied Rusi to the fire temple. She tried not to notice, willed her eyes not to click on the picture of Rusi sitting on the wooden bench, as far away from her as he could. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to pray for her husband to thaw toward her. Please, God, she thought. Please, please, please, please. Coomi even tried to fight against her chronic tardiness, so that when they went out, Rusi had to wait only a half hour for her to get dressed, instead of the usual hour or two. This last change was dramatic enough that several of their friends commented on it.

But there was a harsh fact to be faced: They had forgotten how to be a couple. There was no longer any shared intimacy between Rusi and her. No matter how hard she tried, Rusi was as stiff as a marble statue around her. All his responses to her were forced, his words stilted and abrupt. “Rusi,” she said one afternoon. “I bought some fresh pomfret today. A good price, it was. What dish would you like for dinner?” He looked at her disinterestedly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said with a shrug. “You cook whatever you’re fond of. I can eat anything.”

For weeks after Khorshed’s funeral, Coomi sifted through the sands of time to rediscover the fierce young man she had loved and married, but the tide had washed him away. In his place was a gray-haired man with eyes that were unbearably sad. She had to look away from those eyes because of the piercing knowledge that she was at least in part responsible for that sadness.

“Yahoo!”

Rusi and Coomi both turned toward the stage to watch the singer. As they turned, their eyes met and, for an unrecognizable moment, they smiled at each other. Coomi knew that she and her husband were briefly united by the same happy thought: Binny.
“Yahoo! Chaye koye muje jungalee kahe.”
“So what if someone calls me crazy.” The middle-aged singer with the thinning hair sang the popular movie hit from the 1960s with a desperate stab at exuberance that normally would have made Coomi turn away in embarrassment. That was the trouble with Parsi weddings, Coomi often railed. Everybody concentrated so much on the menu that nobody paid the slightest attention to which musicians they hired. Even a man as sophisticated as Jimmy Kanga had hired a two-bit band for his only son’s wedding.

But right now, Coomi approved of the choice of song. Although Rusi was currently standing a few feet away from her and talking to a tall, handsome-looking woman whom Coomi did not recognize, she knew that the exuberant chorus of the song had transported her husband to a happier time. It also connected Rusi to her, no matter how briefly. They had exchanged a look, a smile of recognition, had both thought of Binny at the same moment. That made her glad, so much so that she forgot to blink and take a snapshot of Rusi talking to a strange, attractive woman.

It was a nice song, a little manic, brimming with energy. Sort of like Rusi in his younger days. Coomi remembered that a young Binny had pleaded with them to take her to see a rerun
Junglee,
the movie the song was from. Binny loved the old song, would stand in front of the mirror wriggling her hips and singing the words in her broken Hindi. And when Rusi came home from work, Binny hurled herself at her father, letting out a bloodcurdling cry of
“Yahoo.”
No matter how often Rusi pretended to jump and quiver with fright, the joy of scaring her unsuspecting father never dimmed for Binny.

In the movie theater, Coomi and Rusi laughed in delight, watching Binny bop her head and sing along to the song. Throughout the movie, which Rusi and Coomi had first seen years ago, Rusi kept a restraining hand on Binny’s knee. It was Rusi’s job to make sure Binny stayed in her seat during a movie. She was at the age where she took movies literally, believed that the actors were flesh-and-blood people up on a stage. If a screen character said, “Let’s dance,” that was all the invitation Binny needed. She would turn to her father, tug at his tie, and say loudly, “Come on, Daddy. He’s asking us to dance.”

It was worse during the barroom fight scenes. Binny tried valiantly to help the good guys. Turning around in her movie seat, she tried to pry it loose, so that she could hurl her chair at the bad guys, as everybody in the bar seemed to be doing. Binny never understood why her parents did not do the same.

Coomi’s task was even more demanding. Binny could not distinguish one actor from another. However, she did understand that most movies had a good guy and a bad guy, and since Rusi mostly wanted to see Westerns or World War II movies, that was a helpful insight. Problem was, the good guys and the bad guys looked the same to Binny. If the bad guy had a mustache or an evil scar, that helped. But the war movies were perplexing. To Binny’s undiscriminating eyes, the Germans didn’t look any different from the Americans. The adults understood that the Germans were the ones who mostly said just one word,
“Ja.”
And sometimes, when they were really pushed,
‘‘Ja, ja.”
But to Binny’s unsophisticated ears, all foreign accents sounded strange.

For Coomi, this lack of discrimination was an unhappy state of affairs. Minutes into a movie, Binny fixed her big unblinking eyes on her mother. Then the dreaded question rolled off her tongue. “Mummy, is this a good man or a bad man?”

“Good man,” Coomi answered, hoping to nip it in the bud. “Can’t you see,
beta,
he’s the hero?”

A second or two passed.

“And this man, Mummy. Who’s he? The good man or the bad man?”

“Same man, Binny. The hero, I told you. Be quiet now and watch the picture.”

A moment of blissful silence. Then the little voice again, insistent as a hammer at dawn. “Who is this man, Mummy? Good or bad?”

Rusi leaned over. “So sorry. Tell you what, Coomi. If you just answer her questions today, I promise we’ll come back next week to see the film again. I’ll talk to Mamma about keeping Binny for a few hours.”

And so Coomi spent the movie saying alternately, “Good man. … Bad man. … Bad—no—good man. … Good man.”

After awhile, they stumbled upon a cure. Coomi figured out that if she kept an endless supply of potato chips ready, she could intercept Binny’s merciless questioning. Carrying a handbag with bags of chips in it, Coomi waited for the movie to start and then handed Binny the first bag. The more chips she popped in her mouth, the fewer questions popped our. When Binny was done with one bag, Coomi swiftly took the empty bag away and handed her a new one. A few weeks later, Coomi read a magazine article about Chinese peasant women who drugged their infants with opium while they worked in the fields. She felt a twinge of guilt before she could even remember why.

Wish I could get those years back, Coomi now thought. No matter what kind of a husband Rusi had been, he was a good father. And Binny had been a lovely child, not a trace of the sullen teenager she would become. How close she felt to Rusi the day Binny was born. How shimmeringly fragile and sweet that moment when Rusi lay beside her in her hospital bed and they looked at their strange, beautiful daughter in awe.

No hair. That’s the first thing she noticed about Binny. Bald as a spinning top. Good lung power, too. Amazing what a din someone so small could make. With the nurse’s help, she held the baby to her breast for the first time and felt a tremor run through her. After the feeding, she insisted on holding her baby some more. Her daughter felt so good in her arms as she lay sleeping. And she was hers and Rusi’s. She had given birth to this healthy, pretty, greedy baby in her arms. That was the amazing part. She got to keep her. She was going to take her home.

Rusi was anxiously waiting for them in their hospital room when Coomi was finally wheeled in. She smiled at her husband as she entered the room. Rusi’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked as tired as Coomi felt. “Good job, Coomi,” he said inanely as he bent down to kiss her, and despite her fatigue, she felt an urge to laugh. For a second, they grinned at each other like conspirators. But Coomi could tell that Rusi was dying to hold the baby, so, reluctantly, she parted with her.