And if Grandpa was a strong man, Grandma, in her own way, was a powerful woman. Had it not been for her knowledge of wrestling, she used to tell Gustad laughingly, there would have been no Noble family as he knew it. For Grandpa, timid and shy and indecisive, as men of his size and strength often are in such matters, kept putting off asking the crucial question. Till one day, when he was tying himself in knots as usual, hemming and hawing, she decided to take the initiative with a lightning-quick half-nelson to force him to his knees so he could propose.
Grandpa denied the entire story, but, she would laugh and say, what started out as discreet and circumspect matchmaking ended in an exciting wrestling match.
‘Yes sir,’ said Gustad, ‘one hundred push-ups and squats every morning. Best possible exercise. I said to Darius, my right hand I will cut off and give you if your biceps don’t increase by one inch in six months. And same guarantee I can give you, Dinshawji.’
‘No, no, forget it. At my age, only one muscle needs to be strong.’
Darius laughed knowingly, and Dinshawji said, ‘Naughty boy! I am talking about my brain!’ He reached out and gingerly touched Darius’s right arm. ‘O my God! Solid, yaar! Come on, let’s see it.’
Darius shook his head modestly and tugged his short sleeves, trying to stretch them towards the elbows. ‘Go ahead, don’t be so shy,’ said Gustad. ‘Look, I’ll show mine first.’ He rolled up his sleeve to flex in the classic fist-against-forehead pose.
Dinshawji clapped. ‘Like a big mango goteloo! Bravo, bravo! Your turn now, Mr. Body-builder. Come on, come on!’
Darius affected boredom with all this fuss about biceps, but was secretly quite pleased. Body-building was his latest hobby, and the only successful one. Before that, his fascination with living creatures used to take him to the pet shop at Crawford Market. He started with fish. But one evening, just a fortnight after they came home, his guppies, black mollies, kissing gouramis, and neon tetra died following a spell of leaping and thrashing against the glass, very much like the lizard’s tail on Miss Kutpitia’s breakfast table.
Over the next four years, the fish were succeeded by finches, sparrows, a squirrel, lovebirds, and a Nepali parrot, all of which succumbed to illnesses ranging from chest colds to mysterious growths in their craws that prevented eating and led to starvation. At each demise, Darius wept bitterly and buried his departed friends in the compound beside his father’s vinca bush. He spent long hours meditating on the wisdom of loving living things which invariably ended up dead. There was something patently ungrateful about the transaction, a lack of good taste in whoever was responsible for such a pointless, wasteful finish: beautiful, colourful creatures, full of life and fun, hidden under the drab soil of the compound. What sense did it make?
Over and over, the external world had let him down. Now it would be foolish, he decided, to invest any more time or energy on such a world, and turned his attention to himself. His physique became his hobby. Soon after he commenced his exercises, however, a severe case of pneumonia confined him to bed. Miss Kutpitia told Dilnavaz she was not surprised. The innocent little fish and birds in his custody had no doubt cursed him with their dying breaths, and here, for all to see, was the result of their curses.
She taught Dilnavaz how to appease the little creatures and put their spirits at rest. Dilnavaz listened good-naturedly, in one ear and out the other, till one day Miss Kutpitia arrived suddenly with the necessary ingredients to conduct the appeasement procedure. Certain herbs were burnt on hot coals while the patient inhaled the rising vapours.
Whether the birds and fish decided to forgive Darius, or whether Dr. Paymaster’s medicine overcame the illness was uncertain. But Darius resumed his exercise programme and was amply rewarded in muscles, to his father’s delight, and his own relief that finally he had succeeded at something.
‘Come on, come on! Show them!’ said Dinshawji.
‘Be a sport,’ said Gustad, and Darius displayed his biceps.
Dinshawji feigned fear and fell back in awe, hands folded over his chest: ‘Ohoho! Look at the size of that. Keep far away, baba. In mistake if you land one on me, I will be completely flattened and battened.’
‘Daddy, please!’ said Roshan. ‘The donkey song!’
This time, Dinshawji seconded the proposal. He was familiar with Gustad’s fine baritone. Sometimes, they had song sessions with friends in the bank canteen during lunch hour. ‘OK, Gustad,’ he said. ‘Time for “Donkey Serenade”. Let’s have it.’
Gustad cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and began:
There’s a song in the air,
But the fair señorita doesn’t seem to care
For the song in the air.
So I’ll sing to the mule,
If you’re sure she won’t think that I am just a fool
Serenading a mule…
When he came to the section that started with ‘Amigo mio, does she not have a dainty bray’, everyone tried to join in. They stayed with him till he reached ‘hee hee haw’, where the last note had to be held for so long that they all ran out of breath, while Roshan burst out laughing with the effort, and Gustad finished the song alone: ‘You’re the one for me! Olé!’
‘Encore! Encore!’ said Dinshawji. Everyone clapped, including Dilnavaz, who had appeared silently by the sideboard to listen. She loved to hear Gustad sing. She smiled at him and went back to the kitchen.
Dinshawji turned to Roshan. ‘Now it’s time for muscles again. How are your muscles today? Let us see, let us see!’ She raised her arm, imitating her father and Darius, then aimed a playful blow at Dinshawji’s shoulder.
‘Careful, careful!’ he moaned, ‘or it will be twelve o’clock for me.’ Reaching out with his bony, gangly fingers as though to test her muscle, he began tickling her. ‘Ohohoho! What muscles! Gilly gilly gilly! Here’s another muscle. And another one. Gilly gilly gilly!’ Roshan was out of breath, laughing wildly and rolling over the sofa.
Dilnavaz emerged from the kitchen and looked disapprovingly at Dinshawji. She said dinner was on the table.
ii
The chicken had been successfully divided into nine pieces. The absence of Miss Kutpitia and Dinshawji’s wife, thought Dilnavaz, was fortunate. Even if Dinshawji started by taking two pieces, it would leave something in the dish at the end. She made a polite gesture to the guest to begin.
‘Ladies first, ladies first!’ said Dinshawji, and Darius echoed him. ‘Naughty boy!’ Dinshawji pretended to chide him, winking broadly. ‘Slow with that beer, it can climb quickly to the head!’ The two had struck a rapport, and Gustad was pleased. He looked at Sohrab. Such a moody boy — if only he could be more friendly, like Darius.
The brown sauce, in which the chicken swam, was perfect, as Gustad had predicted. The aroma, said Dinshawji, could make even a corpse at the Tower of Silence sit up with an appetite, it was that wonderful. Whereupon Dilnavaz eyed him distastefully. Did the man have no sense of decency, mentioning such things at the dinner-table, on a birthday?
Besides chicken, there was a vegetable stew made of carrots, peas, potatoes and yam, liberally spiced with coriander, cumin, ginger, garlic, turmeric and whole green chillies. And there was rice, studded with cloves and cinnamon sticks: fragrant basmati rice that Dilnavaz had obtained from the black-market fellow for this special day, trading one week’s quota of fat, tasteless ration-shop rice for four cups of the slender, delicious grain.
They helped themselves to the stew first. There was a tacit understanding that the chicken would provide the climax. Said Gustad to Dinshawji, ‘You see this chicken waiting patiently for us? This morning it was anything but patient. What excitement! It escaped from the kitchen into the compound, and the goaswalla—’