Authors: Altaf Tyrewala
After the women left, I examined the cassettes I had been forced to buy. They had bizarre covers with outlandish words printed on them: Nirvana, Radiohead, Secret Samadhi and so on. English music, unfortunately.
That was the last day of Ramazan. The next day was to be Eid. I was to put on laundered clothes and go to the mosque for the morning namaaz. At the mosque no one was to give me the three hugs that Muslim men are meant to
exchange on auspicious occasions. I was to come home with a dry mouth, jerk my wife out of her sleep, open the cabinet in my hall, insert one of the English cassettes into my old player, and rewind it all the way to the start. I was to depress the Play button.
I didn’t know I was to rattle with sorrow for the next thirty minutes.
I did. Like a laboratory skeleton dangling in an earthquake, like a skeptic to whom a saint had revealed his sainthood, I shook and wept tearlessly. The music that bled from the speakers matched the cacophony of unborn-baby voices in my head—discordant and raw and numbing. It consisted of singular strands of guitars so exquisite that they unfolded your leaden heart inside out and scraped away the pain and rage coagulating on its inner walls.
But these singular strands weren’t what overwhelmed me. Beauty had stopped seeming beautiful to me a long time ago. It was the collective din of ten, hundred, millions of strands of guitars playing together that made my body convulse and my gaze still. Afsana, my wife, stood in a corner of the hall and watched me. Side A reached its end and the speakers bled silence.
I haven’t played any of those cassettes again. It was enough that I had come across an analog to the unborn-baby voices. I wasn’t going to allow a new cacophony to compete with them. It was the least I could do to keep alive the
memory of my dead mother. I can still hear her voice sometimes amidst the uproar in my head.
And the least I can do for my father?
To let him be. He threw out Afsana and me the day Ma’s death washed up on our jagged beach. Having never opposed my occupation until then, he had called me a sister-fucking abortionist and told us to vacate in an hour. My wife and I now live in a building nearby. I haven’t spoken to my father since. He too works in Colaba; has been a salesman at a shoe shop for thirty years. I see him sometimes.
I saw him this morning. From the time he arrived at Dockyard Road station till he got off the train at VT, I watched him. I lost him in the morning rush at VT. He is young and walks much faster than me. Had he looked around Dockyard Road or turned his head in the train or lingered at VT for a moment, he would have spotted me in the crowd—the old man in the corner, the one who fathered him. But my son didn’t see me because he doesn’t look for me. In the train, amidst noisy fellow passengers, Akbar stood still and quiet, gazing at his nursing home’s flier pasted on the concave part of the compartment where the ceiling meets the wall. For the twenty minutes the train ride lasted, I gawked at him secretly, watching every eye-blink, every twitch of his jawbone. Akbar has grown slimmer. He looks somewhat like me, but mostly his features have gone on his mother. His lower lip was red as usual. He has a habit of chewing it till the blood clots and tiny bruises appear.
As Akbar studied the flier, his lips suddenly plunged into a fleeting smile. And for that brief moment, the lump in my throat disappeared.
When I reach the shoe shop it is not yet ten-thirty. Only Amin-bhai is there. The two salesmen are invariably late: they saunter in by eleven or eleven-fifteen, wearing bright shirts and ugly jeans, talking gaudily. I find Amin-bhai, the owner, praying as usual in front of the Aga Khan’s photograph. Jutting from three walls of the shop are shelves and shelves of shoes, sandals, stilettos, sneakers and slippers. The fourth wall is the entrance. Beneath is the floor. Above is the false ceiling, and in its center is a dark square hole. I climb on top of the sofa for the customers. I reach up into the hole in the ceiling and pull down the ladder. I climb its uneven steps every day to get to my place up there, between the shop’s false ceiling and real ceiling, the mezzanine, where boxes and boxes of footwear are stocked.
I have sat up there for thirty years.
I clamber into the mezzanine and pull up the ladder.
With my legs still dangling into the shop below, I grope around for the switch. Thirty years and I haven’t yet memorized the geography of the mezzanine. When I go home, I don’t remember where the switch is or where the ladder rests after I pull it up. I only recall the heady smell of polished leather and brand new rubber soles. I don’t remember my
wife’s face either, only her delicate smell.
Good thing the train wasn’t too crowded this morning. My son could stand comfortably. I know how much he hates others touching him, but it is unavoidable in trains on the Harbour Line. Once, when the compartment was crowded and Akbar was around, I had slipped my hand past torsos of fellow travellers, grabbed the shirt of the man farthest from me, and given it a hard yank. I am short, and remained undiscovered in the packed train. The men in between got dragged toward me; their collective weight crushed me against the metal wall, forcing me to hang out the door. I didn’t mind, and neither should they. Does their work require precision? Do their livelihoods demand a calm mind? Then what right did they have to crowd around Akbar, forcing him to lean back in obvious discomfort? The man whose shirt I yanked was inconveniencing my son the most.
‘Kaka, Woodland W71, size 6!’ Malik, the salesman, shouts.
I usually sit cross-legged at the edge of the mezzanine and peer at the customers below. They don’t realize I’m up here till one of the salesmen barks orders at me. When customers look up and see me, their eyes widen. Women adjust their clothes to conceal or downplay their cleavages. Men pat their hair furtively.
This morning I have been so lost in my thoughts that I haven’t noticed the arrival of the two salesmen or of the
customers. When Malik shouts at me, his customer looks up in horror. My startled eyes blunder past her upturned face to her low-cut blouse. ‘Eek, so sick!’ the girl shrieks and scrambles out of my range to the rear of the shop.
Malik looks up and sniggers, ‘Kaka, I’ll drag you down by your dick if you do that again. Didn’t you hear:
Woodland
W71, size 6? Get moving!’
Malik is twenty-four, and I, the man he calls Kaka, am sixty-five.
I uncross my feet and leap into a squat, and like a prawn I scuttle across the floor of the mezzanine to the far end, where the women’s Woodland shoes are kept. W71—‘W’ for women and design number 71. I pull out a size-6 box and lift the lid. My wife would have liked these shoes, close-toed and flat-soled, sensible through and through.
In her final years she stopped making sense and became a mad fool. When our son failed his final MBBS exam, my wife said, ‘Take it again.’ Out of the question. We had mortgaged all the jewelry in the house and I had borrowed two lakhs from Amin-bhai. Enough. The family couldn’t afford a student any more. A week later, without her knowledge, Akbar and I paid a quack in Colaba the deposit for the women’s clinic he ran. After saving enough to purchase a degree from the University, the so-called doctor was joining a respected polyclinic as a gynecologist. My son, shamed and
matured by his failure, quietly complied with what had come his way. He had studied enough to operate in that nursing home. We didn’t tell my wife. Akbar would leave every morning and return late. For three days my wife wondered where he had started going. On the fourth day she insisted on knowing. ‘He goes to work,’ I told her.
‘What? Our son has started working? Where?’
‘In three days he has already earned six hundred rupees,’ I said proudly.
‘Where does he work?’ my wife persisted.
‘At a rented clinic near my shoe shop.’
‘Doesn’t even have a degree! What does he do there?’
‘Abortions.’
‘You old rascal! Are you playing with yourself up there?’ Malik shouts again.
Too many thoughts! I replace the lid and scuttle back to the opening in the mezzanine floor. ‘Malik, take!’ I call out.
He stretches up for the shoebox. ‘Kaka, if you take this long again I swear I’ll tell Amin-bhai. Sitting up there like a sister-sleeping king. Come down, no! Deal with the customers!’
I can’t protest Malik’s behavior. Places of work flatten all differences between people. Malik and I are equals in this shop.
When I told my wife about our son’s new livelihood, her lips went white and she shook her head disbelievingly, chanting, ‘Ya Allah! Ya Allah! Ya Allah!’ I whacked her on the
back; she had become hysterical. ‘Stop this!’ I screamed at her. ‘Thank your Allah that Akbar has started earning! Better days are ahead!’
Religion killed my wife. We could have lived our futures as proud and comfortable parents. Instead, she was visited by paralyzing worries of sin and all that no-good dogmatic claptrap. First she begged me to stop Akbar from going to the nursing home—she called it the satanic butcher house. Then she attacked our son and threatened him with horrible visions of afterlife; the poor boy turned religious but didn’t stop going to work. After he married, she nagged and nagged our daughter-in-law who just kept quiet and stood by Akbar dutifully.
There is no Allah, no heaven, no hell. No life after death. No sense in wasting precious hours of life inside mosques and temples and churches. When the stomach buckles and the skin sizzles, money is the only god who can answer prayers. How to tell the idiots in the world this? How to have told the idiots in my family this?
‘I want to go for Haj,’ my wife declared one day. I lifted my hand to slap her; my son held it back with just one word: ‘Never.’ He arranged everything for her; he also paid the Haj Committee at Crawford Market five thousand rupees extra for a special seat on the trip. What a waste of time and money and life. A week after she left, our telephone rang like an alarm bell at six in the morning. Akbar and I, startled out of our sleep, charged toward the phone from opposite directions.
I picked up the receiver and put it down two minutes later without saying a word. What was there to say? Who had sent her there? Who had encouraged her nonsense? And as the final, treacherous, cruel blow against my son in what was probably the darkest hour of his life, I demanded: Whose bastard livelihood had driven my wife to Mecca?
How he left home! A few angry words from me in that grief-stricken moment and he was off. As if he had been waiting to be offended so he could snap ties with the click of a suitcase and walk away in a huff. I wonder, do such people return? Can they come back and erase the paralyzing dot-dot-dots in the lives of those they have left behind?
Akbar has his wife. She loves him fully, and in time they will have children. He is not alone. The thought relieves me.
It is getting tougher to climb to the mezzanine; these knees have grown a mind of their own, sometimes pliant, sometimes resolutely unbendable. It is old age, of course, although my hair is still black and my teeth intact. It must be because of the dustless environment of the mezzanine; up here it is cool no matter what season reigns outside the shop. But beneath the sparsely wrinkled skin and black hair, this body is slowly and gradually winding up.
There is a closing-down sale in the shoe shop. Twenty to seventy percent off. Amin-bhai wants to move to America with
his wife and three-year-old twins. His father died years ago. It has been two months since his mother expired. Now Amin-bhai has no more ties to India. He says in America he will work at his elder brother’s grocery store. He has generously excused my debts and asked that in return I pray he and his family get visas. Prospective buyers and estate agents have already begun visiting the shoe shop. No new wares are being ordered.
I stopped praying years ago. I’m not going to start now for Amin-bhai’s visas.
Rukhshana and I had asked so many, many people to pray for us that I was certain when we arrived at the American embassy our visas would be awaiting us at the entrance. No waiting, no interview. Just a sealed envelope that said,
For the Bootwalas: Special Lifelong Visas Granted by Popular Demand to the Divine.
Ya, right.
First we have to stand in line for three hours on the footpath outside the embassy. Then we have to sit for two more hours inside. And through all this I have to apologize for having ridiculed Rukhshana’s mother’s (ridiculous) suggestion that we camp all night outside the embassy.
Sometime close to afternoon, after I have exhausted myself imagining the worst possible scenarios, our names are announced on the sound system: ‘Amin Bootwala and family, cubicle 7… Amin Bootwala and family…’
We gather our things and our wits together and get to our feet.
I follow my wife and twins into a tiny cubicle. It is cold and smells of mint, like the America I imagine. Behind a glass screen sits a stout foreigner. In a green shirt and grey tie he looks like a CNN anchor. For the first time since birth, my three-year-old twins don’t fidget. We all stand dwarfed and paralyzed in awe of the American embassy official—our saviour, our deliverer.
I hope he notes the subtle pinstripes on my five-thousand-rupee suit. I am not anxious about my wife’s lakh-a-piece diamond earrings—they are impossible to ignore. But I hope the interviewer knows how expensive denim dungarees for three-year-olds can get.
‘Hey,’ the interviewer says. He is flipping through our forms and passports.
‘How you doin’?’ I ask. That’s how American customers greet me at the shop.
Our interviewer looks up with raised eyebrows. ‘Not bad,’ he says, and looks down again.
A cold sweat breaks across my back. It is the first such moment since I graduated—when the rest of my life depended on the momentary whim of an unknown official correcting my papers or granting me admission. At least I can see this man’s pasty face.
‘So, Mr. Amin Bootwala,’ the American says, pronouncing my name like ‘amen,’ ‘your visa application says you own a shoe shop in Colaba…?’ He trails off.
I want to talk and never stop. I want to recount our life histories so this embassy man will believe we are the good ones, the ones who will come back, not the type who will wind up working at some grocery store in New Jersey. The good ones. Rukhshana looks at me anxiously. I say, ‘Right, sir, on Colaba Causeway. It’s called True Shoe, established by my father forty years ago. We are very well-known…’