“You are back very fast,” observed Mrs. Grewal. “Young people, strong legs. And you managed all right with the ashes?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You are sure you did it properly, Maneck?” inquired his mother.
“Yes.”
There was another little silence.
“And what have you been doing in Dubai?” asked Mrs. Grewal.
“Besides growing a beard?”
He smiled in reply.
“Very secretive. Making lots of money, I hope.”
He smiled again. She left a few minutes later, saying there was no need for her to stay any longer. “You can look after your mother now,” she added meaningfully.
Maneck checked the ice pack, then offered to make cheese sandwiches for lunch.
“My son visits after eight years and I can’t even prepare his food,” lamented his mother.
“What difference is it who makes the sandwiches?”
She took the warning in his voice and retreated, then tried again. “Maneck, please don’t get angry. Won’t you tell me the reason you are so unhappy?”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“We are both sad because of Daddy’s death. But that cannot be the only reason. We were expecting it ever since his colon cancer was diagnosed. There is something different about your sadness, I can sense it.”
She waited, watching him as he cut the bread, but his face remained impassive. “Is it because you did not visit while he was still alive? You shouldn’t feel bad. Daddy understood that it was difficult for you to come.”
He put down the bread knife and turned. “You really want to know why?”
“Yes.”
He picked up the knife again, slicing the loaf carefully while keeping his voice level. “You sent me away, you and Daddy. And then I couldn’t come back. You lost me, and I lost — everything.”
She limped to his side and took his arm. “Look at me, Maneck!” she said tearfully. “What you think is not true, you are everything to me and Daddy! Whatever we did, we did for you! Please, believe me!”
He withdrew his arm gently, and continued with the sandwiches.
“How can you say something so hurtful and then become silent? You always used to complain that Daddy was fond of dramatics. But now you are doing just that.”
He refused to discuss it further. She followed him around the kitchen, hobbling, pleading with him.
“What’s the point of me making the sandwiches if you are going to keep marching with that knee?” he said, exasperated.
She sat down compliantly till he finished and lunch was on the table. While they ate, she studied his face in snatches, when she was sure he wasn’t looking. The sky started to darken in earnest. He washed their plates and put them on the rack to dry. The rumble of thunder rolled over the valley.
“We were so lucky this morning,” she said as the drizzle commenced. “I’m going up to rest now. Will you shut the windows if the rain comes in?”
He nodded, and helped her climb the stairs. She smiled through the pain, leaning with pleasure on her son’s shoulder, taking pride in its strength and firmness.
After his mother was in bed, Maneck returned downstairs and stood at the window to watch the display of lightning, to revel in the thunderclaps. He had missed the rains in Dubai. The valley was disappearing under a blanket of fog. He strode restlessly about the house, then went into the shop.
He examined the shelves, savouring the brand names on the jars and boxes that he had not seen for years. But how small, how shabby the shop was, he thought. The shop that was once the centre of his universe. And now he had moved so far away from it. So far that it felt impossible to return. He wondered what was keeping him away. Not clean and gleaming Dubai, for sure.
He descended the steps into the cellar where the bottling machinery slept. Cobwebs had taken over, shrouding the defeated apparatus. Demand for Kohlah’s Cola had almost vanished in recent times, his parents had written — just half a dozen bottles a day, to loyal friends and neighbours.
He pottered around amid the empty bottles and wooden crates. In a corner of the cellar stood a stack of mouldering newspapers, partially hidden by a bundle of gunnys. He stroked the coarse jute sacking, feeling the bite of the fibre, breathing in its extravagant green smell of wood and vegetation. The newspaper dates went back ten years, and jumped haphazardly over the decade. Strange, he thought, because Daddy used them up regularly in the store, for wrapping parcels or padding packages. These must have been overlooked.
He decided to take them upstairs and browse through them. Reading old newspapers seemed a fitting way to spend the gloomy, rain-filled afternoon.
He settled in a chair by the window and opened the yellow, dusty sheets of the first issue in the pile. It was from the period after the post-Emergency elections that the Prime Minister lost to the opposition coalition. There were articles about abuses during the Emergency, testimony of torture victims, outrage over the countless deaths in police custody. Editorials that had been silenced during her regime called for a special commission to investigate the wrongdoings and punish the guilty.
He skipped to another paper, impatient with the repetitious reportage. The new government’s dithering over how to deal with the ex-Prime Minister did not make stimulating reading either, except for one article which quoted a cabinet minister as saying: “She must be punished, she is a terrible woman, wicked as Cleopatra.” And the only unanimous decision of the paralysed government was to expel Coca-Cola from the country, for refusing to relinquish its secret formula and its managing interest; with a little twisting and turning, the action suited all ideologies in the coalition brew.
Not many newspapers later, the coalition had vaporized in endless squabbles, and fresh elections were to be held. The ex-Prime Minister was poised to shed her prefix and return to power. The editorials now reined in their rhetoric against her, adopting the obsequious tone reminiscent of the Emergency. One grovelling scribe had written: “Can the Prime Minister have incarnated at least some of the gods in herself? Beyond doubt, she possesses a dormant power, lying coiled at the base of her spine, the Kundalini Shakti which is now awakening and carrying her into transcendence.” There was no sarcasm intended, it being part of a longer panegyric.
Fed up, Maneck looked for the sports pages. There were pictures from cricket matches, and the statement by the Australian captain about a “bunch of Third World beggars who think they can play cricket.” And then the jubilation and fireworks and celebration when the bunch of beggars defeated Australia in the Test Series.
He began going more rapidly through the newspapers. After a while even the pictures looked the same. Train derailment, monsoon floods, bridge collapse; ministers being garlanded, ministers making speeches, ministers visiting areas of natural and man-made disasters. He flipped the pages between glances out the window, at the theatre of weather — the lashing rain, windswept deodars, bolts of lightning.
Then something in the paper caught his eye. He turned back for a second look. It was a photograph of three young women. Dressed in cholis and petticoats, they were hanging from a ceiling fan. One end of each of their saris was tied to the fan hook, the other round their necks. Their heads were tilted. The arms hung limp, like the limbs of rag dolls.
He read the accompanying story, his eyes straying repeatedly to the scene that floated like a ghastly tableau. The three were sisters, aged fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen, and had hanged themselves while their parents were out of the house. They had written a note to explain their conduct. They knew that their father was unhappy at not being able to afford dowries for them. After much debate and anxiety, they had decided to take this step, to spare their mother and father the shame of three unmarried daughters. They begged their parents’ forgiveness for this action which would cause them grief; they could see no alternative.