You will never grow old,
While there’s love in your heart,
Time may silver your dark brown hair,
As you dream in an old rocking chair…
She loved it when Gustad changed the song’s words from ‘golden hair’, always breaking into a big smile at the third line.
Traces of yesterday’s milk lingered in the pan she was holding. The last drops had just been used by Gustad and herself in their tea, and she had not had time to wash it out. There would have been time enough, she felt, if she hadn’t sat for so long, listening to Gustad read to her from the newspaper. And before that, talking about their eldest, and how he would soon be studying at the Indian Institute of Technology. ‘Sohrab will make a name for himself, you see if he doesn’t,’ Gustad had said with a father’s just pride. ‘At last our sacrifices will prove worthwhile.’ What had come over her this morning, she could not say, sitting and chatting away, wasting time like that. But then, it wasn’t every day such good news arrived for their son.
Dilnavaz edged forward as some women left, her turn was approaching. Like the others, the Nobles were endlessly awaiting a milk ration card from the government office. In the meantime she had to patronize the bhaiya, whose thin, short tail of hair growing from the centre of his otherwise perfectly shaven head never ceased to amuse her. She knew it was a Hindu custom in some particular caste, she was not exactly sure, but couldn’t help thinking that it resembled a grey rat’s tail. On mornings when he oiled his scalp, the tail glistened.
She purchased his milk and remembered the days when ration cards were only for the poor or the servants, the days when she and Gustad could afford to buy the fine creamy product of Parsi Dairy Farm (for Miss Kutpitia it was still affordable), before the prices started to go up, up, up, and never came down. She wished Miss Kutpitia would stop screaming at the bhaiya. It did no good, only made him resent them more. God knows what he might do to the milk — as it was, these poor people in slum shacks and jhopadpattis in and around Bombay looked at you sometimes as if they wanted to throw you out of your home and move in with their own families.
She knew Miss Kutpitia’s intentions were good, despite the bizarre stories about the old woman that had circulated for years in the building. Gustad wanted to have as little as possible to do with Miss Kutpitia. He said her crazy rubbish could make even a sane brain somersault permanently. Dilnavaz was perhaps the only friend Miss Kutpitia had. Her childhood training to show unconditional respect for elders made it easy for her to accept Miss Kutpitia’s idiosyncrasies. She found nothing repugnant or irritating about them — sometimes amusing, sometimes tiresome, yes. But never offensive. After all, for the most part Miss Kutpitia only wanted to offer help and advice on matters unexplainable by the laws of nature. She claimed to know about curses and spells: both to cast and remove; about magic: black and white; about omens and auguries; about dreams and their interpretation. Most important of all, according to Miss Kutpitia, was the ability to understand the hidden meaning of mundane events and chance occurrences; and her fanciful, fantastical imagination could be entertaining at times.
Dilnavaz made sure never to unduly encourage her. But she realized that at Miss Kutpitia’s age, a patient ear was more important than anything else. Besides, was there a person anywhere who, at one time or another, had not found it difficult to disbelieve completely in things supernatural?
The clatter and chatter around the milkman seemed remote to Gustad Noble while he softly murmured his prayers under the neem tree, his handsome white-clad figure favoured by the morning light. He recited the appropriate sections and unknotted the kusti from around his waist. When he had unwound all nine feet of its slim, sacred, hand-woven length, he cracked it, whip-like: once, twice, thrice. And thus was Ahriman, the evil one, driven away — with that expert flip of the wrist, possessed only by those who performed their kusti regularly.
This part of the prayers Gustad enjoyed most, even as a child, when he used to imagine himself a mighty hunter plunging fearlessly into unexplored jungles, deep in uncharted lands, armed with nothing except his powerfully holy kusti. Lashing that sacred cord through the air, he would slice off the heads of behemoths, disembowel sabre-toothed tigers, lay waste to savage cannibal armies. One day, while exploring the shelves in his father’s bookstore, he found the story of England’s beloved dragon-slayer. From then on, whenever he said his prayers, Gustad was a Parsi Saint George, cleaving dragons with his trusty kusti wherever he found them: under the dining-table, in the cupboard, below his bed, even hiding behind the clothes-horse. From everywhere there tumbled the gory, dissevered heads of fire-breathing monsters.
Doors opened and slammed shut, money jingled, a voice called out with special instructions for the bhaiya’s next delivery. Someone joked with the man: ‘Arré bhaiya, why not sell the milk and water separately? Better for the customer, easier for you also — no mixing to do.’ This was followed by the bhaiya’s usual impassioned denial.
The early morning news on government-controlled All-India Radio emerged softly, cautiously, from an open window. The clear mellifluence of its Hindi vocables tested the morning air, and presently offered a confident counterpoint to the BBC World Service that brashly cut in from another flat, bristling with short-wave crackle and hiss.
Gustad’s prayers were not disturbed by the banter nor distracted by the radio. Today the news was powerless to tempt him into irreverence, for he had already seen The Times of India. Unable to sleep, he had risen earlier than usual. When he turned on the tap to gargle and brush his teeth, the water burst through in a loud wet explosion. It caught him by surprise. He jumped back, snatching away his hand. Air, he told himself, being discharged from the pipes empty since seven a.m. yesterday, when the municipality had ended the daily water quota. He felt foolish. Scared by a noisy tap. He turned off the water, then rotated the handle slowly, just a little. It continued to gurgle threateningly.
For Dilnavaz, that familiar hissing, spitting, blustering was a summons to waken. She sensed the empty bed beside her and smiled to herself, for she had expected Gustad to be up first today. She stared sleepily at the clock till it yielded the time, then turned over on to her stomach and closed her eyes.
ii
Long before the sun had risen that morning, before it was time to pray, Gustad had been waiting anxiously for The Times of India. It was pitch dark but he did not switch on the light, for the darkness made everything seem clear and well-ordered. He caressed the arms of the chair he sat in, thinking of the decades since his grandfather had lovingly crafted it in his furniture workshop. And this black desk. Gustad remembered the sign on the store, he could see it even now. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes: Noble & Sons, Makers Of Fine Furniture, and I also remember the first time I saw the sign — too young to read the words, but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words. A glass-fronted cabinet with gleaming cherry-coloured wood; an enormous four-postered canopy bed; chairs with carved backs and splendidly proportioned cabrioles; a profoundly dignified black desk: all of it like the furniture in my childhood home.