Some of it now here, in my house. Saved from the clutches of bankruptcy — the word cold as a chisel. The sound cruel and sharp and relentless as the metal cleats on the bailiff’s shoes. The cleats had sounded their malicious clatter on the stone tiles. Bastard bailiff — seized whatever he could get his filthy hands on. My poor father. Lost everything. Except the few pieces I rescued. With Malcolm’s help, in the old van. Bailiff never found out. What a good friend was Malcolm Saldanha. Sad, he and I did not keep in touch. A true friend. Like Major Bilimoria used to be.
The last name made Gustad shake his head. That bloody Bilimoria. After the shameless way he behaved, he had a nerve, writing now to ask for a favour, as though nothing had happened. He could wait till his dying day for a reply. Gustad pushed the Major’s audacious letter out of his mind, it threatened to disrupt the well-ordered darkness. Once again, the furniture from his childhood gathered comfortingly about him. The pieces stood like parentheses around his entire life, the sentinels of his sanity.
He heard the metal flap of the mail slot lift and, almost simultaneously, discerned the white outline of the newspaper as it slid into the room. Still he sat, unmoving: let the man pass, no need for him to know I am waiting. Why he did this, he could not say.
When the bicycle pedalled away, all was quiet again. Gustad switched on the light and put on his glasses. He ignored the grim headlines about Pakistan, barely glanced at the half-naked mother weeping with a dead child in her arms. The photo caption, which he did not stop to read because the picture looked the same as the others that had appeared regularly in the past few weeks, was about soldiers using Bengali babies for bayonet practice. He turned to the inside page, the one which listed the Indian Institute of Technology’s entrance exam results. He laid the page flat on the dining-table. From the sideboard he fetched the little piece of paper with Sohrab’s roll number, checked, and went to wake Dilnavaz.
‘Come on, get up! He got admission!’ He stroked her shoulder. There was affection and impatience. Also some guilt: that letter. He had hidden Major Bilimoria’s letter from her.
Dilnavaz rolled over and smiled. ‘I told you he would. Simply at all you kept worrying.’ She went to the bathroom and connected the transparent plastic hose to fill the water drums, even though today there was time enough to brush her teeth first, and make tea. It was only five o’clock — two whole hours before the taps went dry. She turned the brass handle, and the head of water surged through the hose. A long tail of air bubbles followed close behind. Like the bubbles that used to gush in her younger son’s little fish tank. How fond Darius had been of the tiny colourful creatures with the pretty names he proudly recited when showing them off: guppy, black molly, angelfish, neon tetra, kissing gourami — for a little while they had been the centre of his universe.
But the tank was empty now. And the birdcages. They lay covered in dust and cobwebs on the dark shelf in the chawl beside the WC, along with Sohrab’s butterfly display case. And that silly book he won long ago on Prize Distribution Day. Learning About Entomo…something-or-other. There had been such an argument just because she said it was cruel to kill the colourful little things. But Gustad said that Sohrab should be encouraged — if he persevered and took it up in college, doing research and all that, he could make a world-famous name for himself.
The rusted mounting pins still held a few thoraxes in place, but little else. An assortment of wings, like fallen petals of exotic flowers, littered the bottom of the case, mingled with broken antennae and tiny heads which did not resemble heads after they separated from the thoraxes. They had once made Dilnavaz wonder, briefly, how whole black pepper had found its way inside, till she realized with a shudder what the round things were.
The gush of water, the effervescent upstream rush, the quickening of the hose, always engaged her senses. Then the flow became regular, and it might have been an empty piece of tubing but for the slight throb felt in her palm where she held the hose to keep it from slipping out of the drum.
Gustad wanted to wake Sohrab. Dilnavaz stopped him. ‘Let him sleep. His admission result is not going to change if he knows it one hour later.’
He agreed readily. All the same, he went to the back room. In the darkness he could see the slatted frame-door he had hinged to the side of the bed fifteen years ago for Sohrab, who had been a turbulent little sleeper, as though his mischievous daytime games were continuing into the night. The nightly barricade they used to form alongside the bed with dining chairs did not work, he always pushed the chairs away. So the slatted door it had to be. Sohrab promptly named it the bed-with-the-door, and found the addition a useful appendage when he constructed a bed-house out of all the bolsters and blankets and pillows he could gather.
The bed-with-the-door now belonged to Roshan. One of her skinny arms, having found its way out between the door slats, hung over the side. It would soon be her ninth birthday. Took after her mother, thought Gustad, gazing upon her fragile figure. He turned his eyes to where Sohrab slept, on the narrow dholni which was rolled away under Darius’s bed during the day. Gustad had always wanted to get a proper third bed, but there was no place for it in the small room.
Looking upon his son, his eyes filled with joyful pride, and he was reassured: the face of nineteen years was still untroubled, as it used to be during the childhood nights in the bed-with-the-door. He wondered if time would put an end to it. For himself, the day had come, he knew, when his father’s bookstore had been treacherously despoiled and ruined. The shock, the shame of it had made his mother ill. How swiftly moved the finger of poverty, soiling and contaminating. Soon afterwards, his mother had died. Sleep was no longer a happy thing for him then, but a time when all anxieties intensified, and anger grew — a strange, unfocused anger — and helplessness; and he would wake up exhausted to curse the day that was dawning.
And so, as he watched Sohrab sleep his innocent sleep, with the face that seemed on the verge of a smile; and Darius, at fifteen a younger, shorter reflection of his father’s muscular frame; and little Roshan, who filled such a small part of the bed-with-the-door, her two plaits sidelong on the pillow: as Gustad observed them silently, in turn, he wished for all the nights in his sons’ and daughter’s lives to be filled with peace and tranquillity. Very, very softly, he hummed the wartime song he had adapted to sing them to sleep when they were little:
Bless them all, bless them all,
Bless my Sohrab and Darius and all,
Bless my Sohrab and Darius
And Roshan and…
Sohrab turned in his sleep, and Gustad stopped humming. The room was dark like the others in the flat, with blackout paper taped over the glass panes of the windows and ventilators. Gustad had put it up nine years ago, the year of the war with China. How much happened that year, he thought. Roshan’s birth, and then my terrible accident. What luck. In bed for twelve weeks, with the broken hip between Madhiwalla Bonesetter’s sandbags. And riots in the city — curfews and lathi charges and burning buses everywhere. What a dreadful year 1962 had been. And such a humiliating defeat, everywhere people talking of nothing but the way the Chinese had advanced, as though the Indian Army consisted of tin soldiers. To think that till the very end both sides had been proclaiming peace and brotherhood. Especially Jawaharlal Nehru, with his favourite slogan, ‘Hindi-Chinee bhai-bhai’, insisting that Chou En-lai was a brother, the two nations were great friends. And refusing to believe any talk of war, even though the Chinese had earlier invaded Tibet, positioning several divisions along the border. ‘Hindi-Chinee bhai-bhai’, all the time, as though repeating it often enough would verily make them brothers.