The principal plaintiffs against the two sisters were the other servants. Each floor had a servants’ bathroom on one side and a servants’ toilet on the other; by accident the bathroom came to be on our side, while the toilet was on the side of our neighbours’ flat. Our neighbour, a wealthy Sindhi widow, a simple, tall, hard lady, was specially sensitive to the insult of the toilet’s proximity to her flat, a flat which, with money her son sent from Dubai, had been turned into a small palace of mirrors and marble. This situation was aggravated by Chhaya and Maya, who always went about with the privileged air of outsiders, and paid no attention to the state of that toilet. The servants complained; and, from time to time, the Sindhi lady emerged to let the two sisters know what she thought of them, and then retreated into her palace. Never have I seen people to whom a scolding mattered less than Chhaya, Maya, and their mother; only Chhaya would pretend to argue, purely for the pleasure of it, while her mother’s way of showing she harboured no hurt was to, on the next day, ask for an advance on her wages.
The widow lived in the flat with her two granddaughters. While she wore her widow’s white sari with a strange pride, as if it conferred on her some special distinction, the two girls wore light, flowing dresses with elegant hems and collars and button-patterns. The girls bore no resemblance to their grandmother; their faces were soft and creamy and showed signs of neither anxiety nor contentment, maturity nor innocence. They were living in that formless dream-world before marriage, where nothing was required of them but to look pretty and, in some subtle, not immediately obvious way, to prepare themselves for the future. I preferred the widow’s hard masculinity. She was a bundle of insecurities, domineering and shy by turns, and, absented from her husband and son, a man and a woman in one. While her granddaughters watched American films on video all day, and spoke the little English they did with an American accent — a sign of both ignorance and confidence — the widow spoke no English at all; and this both put her at an imagined disadvantage and gave her a conscious uprightness of bearing in that building, where everyone was a master of Bombay English. Her face gave as little relief to the eye as the landscape of Sindh from which she came. One felt she would be leading exactly this life wherever she was, whether in her village or in New York. And yet in no way did she belong to the past.
Sometimes, in the afternoon, wearing a kurta and pyjamas, I would walk down the lane and turn into the main road. The pleasure of taking a stroll in light, loose-fitting costume, without either drawing attention to myself or catching a chill, was a luxury never permitted to me in England. The sense of time on the main road, where Ambassadors passed by, and small, silent Marutis with spiteful ease, was different from that in the lane, where minutes and hours were connected to the conclusions and beginnings of phases of domestic routine. On the main road, which was only one among a family of such main roads that had joined hands to create Bombay — not the Bombay people lived in, but the one into which people emerged every day from their houses — there were cake-shops, video ‘parlours’, ‘burger inns’. The names of these shops suggested the coming of age of a generation who were on breezy, unawed, and first-name terms with the English language. In the midst of all this, there was a bit of unexpected picturesque detail, an intrusion of rural India, in the magazine-stall, bamboo poles holding up a canopy of cloth, which sheltered a long sloping table whose entire surface was covered with magazines, the newest of which hung from a jute string that had been tied from one pole to another. The hawker was not Maharashtrian, but a North Indian in vest and dhoti, and, judging by his looks (though I do not recall his sacred thread) quite probably a brahmin. If there had been a magazine-seller sub-caste, as there was a priest sub-caste, a landowner sub-caste, and a cook sub-caste, he would have belonged to it, so completely and immemorially did he seem to be in possession of the lineaments of his trade. In the evening, he lit a hurricane lamp to illuminate the magazine covers, though there was enough light coming from the air-conditioned cake-shops to brighten the rest of the road. The magazines were filled with speculations about politicians who looked a little like the magazine seller, but lacked his sense of time and place. Together, they composed an unending Hindu epic, torn apart by incest and strife and philosophy. While the political magazines were like minutely detailed family histories, there was another kind of magazine that spoke exclusively of individuals, and described a happy secular life of evening parties and personalities that seemed as remote from government as the woodfire-lit lives of villagers. But, from time to time, the two kinds of magazine would merge into one another.
14
While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is admiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings. On important days, Laxman occupies a large square in the centre of the newspaper, which he fills with curved or straight lines that strangely look like prime ministers and politicians, pursued by hairy, allegorical monsters called Communalism and Corruption. On the right hand corner of the page, there is a smaller square, in which small-scale absurdities and destinies are enacted, witnessed through a window by a passer-by, hapless, moustached, bespectacled, child-like, in a dhoti and chequered jacket, he little knowing that millions regard him daily through this other wonderfully simple window around his world.
My parents knew each other from childhood; both were born in undivided Bengal, in Sylhet, which is now in Bangladesh. In the late forties, my father went to England, and six years later, my mother; there, in London, they were married. In those days, Indian women were still a rare sight in England, and often, as the newly-married couple walked down the road, they would be stopped by an Englishman who would politely request the young man’s permission to take his wife’s picture. The young man would then, as he still does so often to so many things, give his good-natured and gentle assent. Prying but harmless old women would enquire, at lonely bus-stops, what the red dot on my mother’s forehead signified; and for many months, a picture of her hung among other photos at a studio on Regent Street. Such a good cook was she, and such an inspired purchaser of herring and stewing lamb, that my poor father, neglected and underfed for six years, rapidly gained weight and happiness after marriage. While my mother took up a full-time clerical job, my father sat for and, at last, passed his professional exams. It was while working at the India Office, and making conversation with the large fish-monger, who called her ‘love’ and ‘dear’, and saved the pieces of turbot and halibut most precious to her, that she picked up spoken English. Like most Bengalis, she pronounces ‘hurt’ as ‘heart’, and ‘ship’ as ‘sheep’, for she belongs to a culture with a more spacious concept of time, which deliberately allows one to naively and clearly expand the vowels; and yet her speech is dotted with English proverbs, and delicate, un-Indian constructions like, ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’ where most Indians would say, straightforwardly, ‘It’s a nice day, no?’ Many of her sentences are plain translations from Bengali, and have a lovable homely melody, while a few retain their English inflections, and are sweet and foreign as the sound of whistling.