Dilnavaz was grateful for the concern after her night of lonely anguish. ‘My mind refuses to work when I try to understand. Makes no sense at all.’
‘You are saying that suddenly he does not want to study at this IIT place?’ Miss Kutpitia narrowed her eyes as Dilnavaz nodded. ‘And up to now he wanted to go, no one forced him?’
‘No one. I am trying to remember, but I think it was his own idea, when he was just a young boy in school.’
Miss Kutpitia’s eyes became thin slits. ‘In that case, only one thing is possible. Somebody has fed him something bad. In his food, or in a drink. Definitely jaadu-mantar.’
Dilnavaz politely masked her scepticism; and yet, she thought, how tempting, to believe in magic — how quickly it simplifies and explains.
Miss Kutpitia looked grim. ‘Do you know someone who would profit by Sohrab’s failure? Who would like to steal his brains for their own son, maybe?’
‘I cannot think of anyone.’ Dilnavaz shivered suddenly in spite of herself.
‘It could even be an evil mixture he stepped on in the street. Many ways exist to do such black things.’ Her eyes blazed wide with warning now. Big as meatballs, thought Dilnavaz. ‘But don’t worry, there are also ways to fight it. You can start with a lime.’ She explained the process, and the precise gestures required. ‘Do it for a few days. Before the sun sets. Then come to me again.’ Turning to go inside, she said, ‘By the way, you saw how right my lizard’s tail was.’
‘How?’
‘Your dinner. All spoilt by quarrelling. And the power also went off. Chicken slaughtered in your house was very unlucky. The curse of the death-scream stayed under your roof.’
‘It was Gustad’s idea,’ said Dilnavaz. On her way home, there floated in her sleepy mind a droll parallel between the chicken and Darius’s revenant, pneumonia-inflicting fishes and birds. Poor Miss Kutpitia, such a sad life.
In her eagerness to get back to bed, the letters on Gustad’s desk went unnoticed.
ii
She was still asleep when Sohrab awoke and found his father’s writing implements abandoned after the long night of rumination and reverie. The vigil for dead days and dying hopes had ended when the early, bleary hours of morning crept upon Gustad, the rum-beer exacting its toll.
Sohrab picked up the holder-steel, wondering why his father had been using that fossil. He, too, had lain awake, agonizing over the hurt, the confusion, the harsh words — was he to blame for all of it? The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing. The seed of Sohrab’s troubles had germinated long ago, long before last night, when his parents discovered how easily things came to their first-born, at home, in school, at work or play. There seemed to be nothing Sohrab could not do, and do well. Whether it was arithmetic, or arts and crafts, or moral science, he bagged several prizes each year on Prize Distribution Day. Regularly, there were awards for elocution and debating. In the interschool drama competition, the play he acted in walked away with the trophy. His exhibits in the school science fair finished first. And before long, Gustad and Dilnavaz were convinced their son was very special.
Thus, it was inevitable that when Sohrab showed an interest in model airplanes, Gustad was sure he would grow up to be an aeronautical engineer. Replicas of famous buildings, made to scale, brought forth predictions of brilliant architecture. And tinkering with mechanical things like can-openers could only mean one thing: a budding inventor. Of course, Sohrab’s lot could have been much worse, for the love and adulation of parents for their firstling have been guilty of far more terrible things.
Sohrab’s only perceptible failure during his school years befell his flirtation with insects. In the eighth standard he was awarded a prize for general proficiency, a book called Learning About Entomology. He read it, pondered the contents over a few days, then started catching butterflies and moths with a home-made net. He killed them in a tin containing wads of petrol-soaked cotton. When the fluttering ceased, he opened the tin and unfolded the wings gently. The wings were always clenched tight over the legs and proboscis, folded in the reverse of their natural direction, as if, in extremis, the butterfly had tried to fend off the noxious fumes by covering its head. In a race with rigor mortis, he stretched the four membranous wings symmetrically on a spreading board (also home-made). A few days later, dry and light as tissue paper, the butterfly would be ready for mounting.
Everyone praised his beautiful work. They admired the lovely colours and patterns on the wings as if he had had a personal hand in designing them. The specimens were pinned through their thoraxes and neatly mounted in the display case which he made from plywood with his great-grandfather’s tools. This was Gustad’s greatest source of joy: to see Sohrab use those tools. He repeated what he said so often, that it must be in the blood, this love of carpentry.
Then the moths and butterflies began to fall apart. Soon, maggots were crawling inside the case, and it was a nauseating sight. Day after day, Sohrab could do nothing but watch, paralysed. When the maggots finished their work, they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived, and Sohrab threw the butterfly case on the dark shelf in the WC chawl.
But this failure, instead of scotching rumours of his genius, was not allowed to be his failure. Gustad was only too glad to shoulder the blame. ‘It was my fault,’ he said, ‘for getting petrol instead of carbon tetrachloride, and for not obtaining the proper drying agent Sohrab wanted.’
Sohrab chased no more after butterflies. To be the world’s premier insect scientist was deleted from Gustad’s catalogue of careers for his son. Afterwards, Sohrab focused only on mechanical things and things of the imagination. He dismantled and reassembled the alarm clock, repaired his mother’s mincer, and fashioned a still-projector with a magnifying glass found in Gustad’s desk. He projected on the front-room wall the frames from comics that came with the Sunday paper: Dagwood Bumstead’s family, or a life-size Phantom. Major Bilimoria was always there for the show, rising often to pose beside the image — imitating the Phantom by swinging a fist and uttering sounds like thud! pow! or wham! Then it would be time for the Sunday dhansak lunch.
Gustad’s and Dilnavaz’s proudest moment in Khodadad Building came when Sohrab put on a home-made production of King Lear, pressing Darius into service, plus a host of school and Building friends. The performance was held at the far end of the compound, and the audience brought their own chairs. Sohrab, of course, was Lear, producer, director, costume designer and set designer. He also wrote an abridged version of the play, wisely accepting that even an audience of doting parents could become catatonic if confronted by more than an hour’s worth of ultra-amateurish Shakespeare. But it was not till Sohrab was in college that it struck him curiously: Daddy never made pronouncements or dreamed dreams of an artist-son. It was never: my son will paint, my son will act, he will write poetry. No, it was always: my son will be a doctor, he will be an engineer, he will be a research scientist.
Now, as he wiped the nib and screwed on the bottle cap, he remembered that Daddy had showed him the holder-steel once, when the age of pencils was ending. With the age of ink came plans for the future. The dream of IIT took shape, then took hold of their imaginations. And the Indian Institute of Technology became the promised land. It was El Dorado and Shangri-La, it was Atlantis and Camelot, it was Xanadu and Oz. It was the home of the Holy Grail. And all things would be given and all things would be possible and all things would come to pass for he who journeyed there and emerged with the sacred chalice.