Bombay Time (28 page)

Pillamai looked at her son’s marked face as if she were waking from a dream.
“Maaf kaar,
Adi,
maaf kaar,”
she pleaded with her impassive son. “Forgive me, my darling. May God punish these hands that have struck you. But in my worst nightmares, I was not thinking my loving son would come home drunk like a common farm boy.”

He looked at her in all his unsteady, drunken, imperial glory, for a full moment. Then, as if she were a fellow passenger on a bus, he walked by her silently and went to his room.

But that night, he lay awake in bed and knew he had to get out of the village, knew he had to leave the farm. He thought back to Pillamai’s reaction at seeing him drunk and knew he had to get away from the shadow of bewildered pain that darkened his mother’s face, get away from the knowledge that he was responsible for that shadow. That it was his lust, the tyranny of his howling body, that had smeared the sun. Above all, he needed to get away from Nari and his lewd, salacious suggestions, his assumption that Adi shared his heart of darkness. Adi had always assumed that he would live his life in the village of his birth, in much the same way that his forefathers had. But the lush greenness of the farm, the loamy brown soil, the splendid blue sky, all the things that had made him feel united with this land from the day he was born, all of this merely tortured him now, made him acutely aware of his disinheritance. Nari had sucked the green out of the earth and the blue out of the sky, leaving in their place a dark void.

Bombay. The word came to him like a beacon of light, like a shimmering jewel from out of the void. Bombay. A new city, a fresh start, a place to rest his head without the torment of dreams. He could live with his aunt and uncle, whom he visited every year and who loved him like a son. And why not? he thought excitedly. If ordinary
begaaris
and laborers can go to this city and become millionaires, why will I not be successful and happy there?

He was so caught up in the excitement of his new plan that it came as a shock when his father refused to let him go, saying that he needed his only son to work in the family business. “But I want to attend college there,” Adi said, surprising himself as much as his father. He had never seriously considered college before. But the old man was unmoved. “Don’t need a professor to teach you the price of
chikoos,”
he said flatly. “A boy like you doesn’t need college. You have the farm.” That night, Adi sat in one of the illicit country bars, downing glass after glass of cheap
daru,
denouncing his father to whoever would listen. A week later, as he stumbled home from yet another drinking binge, he passed out on the side of the road. When he came to, the morning sun was poking daggers into his eyes. When he got home, his father was standing by the door, his hefty body blocking most of the doorway.
“Saala
drunkard,” the furious old man cursed. “Treating this house like a brothel, you are. You’ve made a laughingstock of us among the lowest of the low. For weeks, your mother has been crying at night and I haven’t been able to understand why. Now I know. Your turn to cry now, you
besharam.”
Too late, Adi saw the whip in the old man’s hand.

It was the first of many beatings. But the alcohol seemed to harden Adi’s flesh as well as his heart, so that it was the father’s hand that ached after the whippings, his voice that trembled with emotion, and his gaze that faltered. And soon, the old man realized the futility of the beatings. It was increasingly clear that if things did not change, Adi would not live to see his twenty-third birthday. More than once, the Patels heard stories about their drunken son deliberately walking into the path of a scooter or an autorickshaw or about Adi getting into fights with men he would have normally avoided locking glances with. Finally, unable to bear his wife’s quiet sobbing any longer, Adi’s father called his brother-in-law in Bombay and discussed the possibility of his son living with him and his wife. Two afternoons later, he found his son loitering in a toddy bar, lifted him by the back of his shirt like a wet rat, and told him to pack his bags. The train to Bombay left in two hours. Pillamai was heartbroken, but she consoled herself by thinking that after a few months in Bombay, her son would return to her, recovered and healed from whatever it was that was tormenting him.

In his first month in Bombay, gratitude, relief, and excitement made him stay away from the bottle. But one evening, on his way home from picking up a college application form, he saw Saraswati again. She walked by him, her sweaty arm brushing against his shirt-sleeve. He spun around to look for her, but she had melted into the multiheaded crowd. His insides dropped; he felt weak. Only the momentum of the crowd kept him moving. Passersby cast strange looks at the young man talking to himself, but he didn’t notice. So she had followed him all the way to Bombay. Even her death couldn’t keep her away from him. Which meant there was no getting away from her. Which meant there was no safe hiding place. Which meant she was a germ, a virus that had entered his blood and would travel with him wherever he went. And the only way to check this virus, to keep it from entering his brain, dominating his thoughts, destroying his heart, was to medicate against it. Before he knew it, he was in a restaurant, ordering a beer.

To support the drinking, he needed a job. Which meant no college. His uncle, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him not to throw his life away, got him a desk job at the Life Insurance Corporation. For a boy who had spent his entire life working in the aromatic open spaces of a
chikoo
farm, being locked up in a dingy office was a kind of death. But soon he discovered that the afternoons went faster if he secretly sipped on a bottle of brandy during lunch. He told himself that his coworkers did not suspect a thing, but the fact was that Adi exuded an air of hurt and vulnerability that made strangers want to protect him. He was oblivious to the fact that his bosses usually gave him the more challenging assignments in the morning, and Sushma, the kindly lady who sat beside him, usually went over his reports before they were turned in for the day.

His elderly uncle and aunt were happy for the company of their unassuming, if strange, nephew. But whenever they were in Adi’s presence, they felt an inexplicable sadness, as if they were talking to a man doing his best impression of being alive. Their good-natured attempts to draw him out of his shell were usually met with a slow, sad smile that showed them the futility of their efforts. Pretty soon, the three of them slipped into a routine. Adi came home late in the evening with a slightly unsteady gait and ate a quick dinner, listening in silence while the two elders carried on a prattling conversation. Then he washed the dishes and retired to his room. Late at night, his relatives often heard the clinking of a glass bottle.

Each summer, Pillamai, who had finally made her peace with the fact that Adi would never return to the farm, visited her son for two weeks. Her husband refused to accompany her on those trips. “It’s the law of nature that the young visit their elders, Pilla,” he would say. “If he wants to see his old
baap’s
face again, let him come to me.”

Pillamai, who had years ago learned not to contradict her head-strong husband, now spoke up, desperately attempting to bridge the divide that had sprung up between the two men she loved the most. “Why are you standing on such ceremony? What difference does it make who comes to whom? Adi’s your only son. He’s young and busy at work; he has limited vacation time. He’s not his own boss, like you are. Come with me. He’s so anxious to see you.”

But in the end, Adi’s father won their silent battle. Four years after he had left the village, Adi returned to his father’s sickbed. The phone call from Pillamai told him that his father was critically ill with pneumonia. At first, he thought it was a ploy, a trick to get him to come home, but he immediately banished the thought. His mother was too honorable a woman to stoop to that. Besides, the fear in her voice was only too real. During the train trip home, he prayed that he was not too late to see his father alive. Regret swarmed around him like summer flies. He resolved to come clean to his father, to make him understand where and why his only son had gone wrong. Let my father live, he bargained with God, and I will give up drinking. I’ll persuade Mummy and Daddy to sell the
chikoo
farm and buy a flat in Bombay. I’ll change my ways, please God, I promise I will. All the way there, he rehearsed what he would say to his father, how much he would reveal about Nari’s role in his dissolution, how much blame he would assign and how much responsibility he would assume.

But the man he found on his deathbed was not the hearty, stocky man he had left behind. This man was timid and weak and had eyes that brimmed with tears every time he saw his prodigal son by his side. Adi knew immediately that he had arrived too late, that instead of saving his father, he would be bidding him good-bye. There was to be no movielike reconciliation scene, no rising from the dead. Instead, Adi sat for hours by the old man’s side, mutely holding his hand, trying to keep it warm with his own. Once or twice, the old man tried to speak, but a coughing fit interrupted his words. “Is okay, Daddy, is okay,” Adi whispered. “You rest now. Nothing to say now. Just sleep.”

They must have both dozed for a few hours, because Adi was suddenly awakened by the sound of his father whispering his name. “Adi,” the old man whispered urgently. “Adi,
maaf kaar.
Forgive me, forgive.” Adi knew immediately the old man was referring to the whippings. “Nothing to forgive,” he said. “I deserved all that and more. No forgiveness needed at all.” But the old man’s eyes were still cloudy, his brow furrowed and his breathing labored. At last, Adi realized that his father needed absolution before he could die. “Daddy,” he cried, his own eyes red now. “I forgive you. I forgive you, so that you may forgive me. I’m just—I … I never stopped loving you, ever.” His reward was a tired smile. The old man turned his face to the wall. A few minutes later, he stopped breathing.

Suddenly, Adi was the head of the household, responsible for the farm and for his mother’s financial security. Pillamai begged him to take over the farm, which had been in the family for generations, told him she would help him run it. He was amazed at her faith in him and annoyed at how little she knew of the man he had become. For several days after the funeral, he kept coming up with reasons why his taking over the farm was a bad idea, but she wouldn’t let up. “Mummy,” he said to her finally, hoping to shut her up. “If I have the farm, I’ll drink up all the profits in six months flat.” He knew he had hurt her, but she was quiet after that, as if she couldn’t argue with the veracity of his statement. A few evenings later, he was walking around the farm. It was a warm, still evening and the dying sun had left a splatter of red in the sky. All around him, the world was bathed in gold, so that the treetops burned like candles. The last birds were chattering to one another, their voices sad and plaintive. He realized with an ache how much he missed the land of his forefathers, its deep silences and its simple beauty. In contrast, Bombay seemed like a heavily made-up tart—loud, brash, gaudy. Suddenly, the enormity of what he had lost, the full price of his disinheritance, hit him. He had lost not only this holy land but also the respect of his father, the bond with his mother. He looked around him and everything felt rooted—the tall trees that had dug their feet solidly into the earth, the vagabond birds who had come home to their nests, the dependable, darkening sky that covered him like a blanket. He alone was rootless, homeless. Instinctively, his hand reached into his pants pocket for the silver flask containing the golden liquid. But tonight, his loneliness was too deep for the alcohol to bore holes in it. Tonight, the loneliness engulfed him, tightened its coils around him. Adi felt as if he were in a movie running backward. He heard his father’s piteous plea for forgiveness, felt the grip of his father’s hand on his neck as he told him to go pack his bags for Bombay, saw the look on his mother’s face the first day he came home drunk, remembered the first time he had tasted whiskey and thrown up immediately after. Memory upon sad memory, piling up like playing cards. He was sobbing out loud now, waiting for the movie to end, but inevitably, his mind raced down its familiar paths—Nari’s debauched face loomed near his eyes; he recalled the fateful walk from Nari’s home to the hut where Sara-swati waited; he felt again the icy feeling that had lodged in his stomach upon hearing about Saraswati’s death. And then, as if in response to his own sobbing, he heard that sound that Saraswati had made in her throat after he had finished raping her.

The idea of how to avenge himself on Nari hit him so hard that he stopped crying. He would turn the farm over to the people who worked on it. Some of them, after all, had slaved on that land for generations, so that the farm had been in their family for generations also. The farm belonged to them as much as it did to him. Besides, it would serve Nari right to have the land adjoining his owned by men he thought were dumber than cattle. Adi remembered how much the landowners had feared labor unrest, how ruthlessly they had crushed any attempts by the farmhands to band together. He himself had been used by Nari to quell such unrest. He could make Nari’s worst fears come true, in an instant. Maybe he could gather up all the men whose wives and daughters had been humiliated by Nari and sell the land to them. The Society of People Fucked Over by Nari. Adi laughed out loud at the thought of Nari’s face when he broke the news to him. The dirty bastard would never have another night’s sleep, for fear that one of his new neighbors would slit his throat in the middle of the night. It would serve him right, this foul old man who had destroyed so many lives to feed his evil appetites.

For two days, he played with this idea, touching it like a piece of velvet whenever he needed comforting. On the third day, he got mightily drunk and slipped into his usual state of fatalism. The cold fact was that executing his plan would take the kind of clear-eyed discipline that Adi was no longer capable of. For two days, alcoholism competed with vengeance; in the end, the bottle won. He was too weak a man to withstand the force of Nari’s fury, his mother’s bewildered sense of betrayal, or even the gratitude of the farmhands. To carry out his plan, he would need the strength to bear the lifelong enmity of the landowners and the lifelong gratitude of the disenfranchised. And Adi was too weary and too drunk to want either.