From time to time his mother reminded him about the stamps: “Do something Jehangoo, do something with them.” He said he would when he felt like it and had the time; he wasn’t interested for now.
Then, after several months, he pulled out the trunk again from under his bed. Mrs. Bulsara watched eagerly from a distance, not daring to interrupt with any kind of advice or encouragement: her Jehangoo was at that difficult age, she knew, when boys automatically did the exact reverse of what their parents said.
But the night before Jehangir’s sleep had been disturbed by a faint and peculiar rustling sound seeming to come from inside the trunk. His reasons for dragging it out into daylight soon became apparent to Mrs. Bulsara.
The lid was thrown back to reveal clusters of cockroaches. They tried to scuttle to safety, and he killed a few with his slipper. His mother ran up now, adding a few blows of her own chappal, as the creatures began quickly to disperse. Some ran under the bed into hard-to-reach corners; others sought out the trunk’s deeper recesses.
A cursory examination showed that besides cockroaches, the trunk was also infested with white ants. All the albums had been ravaged. Most of the stamps which had not been destroyed outright were damaged in one way or another. They bore haphazard perforations and brown stains of the type associated with insects and household pests.
Jehangir picked up an album at random and opened it. Almost immediately, the pages started to fall to pieces in his hands. He remembered what Dr. Mody used to say: “This is my retirement hobby. I will spend my retirement with my stamps.” He allowed the tattered remains of Burjor Uncle’s beloved pastime to drop back slowly into the trunk.
He crouched beside the dented, rusted metal, curious that he felt no loss or pain. Why, he wondered. If anything, there was a slight sense of relief. He let his hands stray through the contents, through worthless paper scraps, through shreds of the work of so many Sunday mornings, stopping now and then to regard with detachment the bizarre patterns created by the mandibles of the insects who had feasted night after night under his bed, while he slept.
With an almost imperceptible shrug, he arose and closed the lid. It was doubtful if anything of value remained in the trunk.
Of White Hairs and Cricket
The white hair was trapped in the tweezers. I pulled it taut to see if it was gripped tightly, then plucked it.
“Aaah!” grimaced Daddy. “Careful, only one at a time.” He continued to read the Times Of India, spreading it on the table.
“It is only one,” I said, holding out the tweezers, but my annoyance did not register. Engrossed in the classifieds, he barely looked my way. The naked bulb overhead glanced off the stainless steel tweezers, making a splotch of light dart across the Murphy Radio calendar. It danced over the cherubic features of the Murphy Baby, in step with the tweezers’ progress on Daddy’s scalp. He sighed, turned a page, and went on scrutinizing the columns.
Each Sunday, the elimination of white hairs took longer than the last time. I’m sure Daddy noticed it too, but joked bravely that laziness was slowing me down. Percy was always excused from this task. And if I pointed it out, the answer was: your brother’s college studies are more important.
Daddy relied on my nimble fourteen-year-old fingers to uproot the signposts of mortality sprouting week after week. It was unappetizing work, combing through his hair greasy with day-old pomade, isolating the white ones, or the ones just beginning to turn — half black and half white, and somehow more repulsive. It was always difficult to decide whether to remove those or let them go till next Sunday, when the whiteness would have spread upward to their tips.
The Sunday edition of the Times Of India came with a tabloid of comics: Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, and Maggie and Jiggs in “Bringing Up Father.” The drab yellow tablecloth looked festive with the vivid colours of the comics, as though specially decorated for Sunday. The plastic cloth smelled stale and musty. It was impossible to clean perfectly because of the floral design embossed upon its surface. The swirly grooves were ideal for trapping all kinds of dirt.
Daddy reached up to scratch a spot on his scalp. His aaah surprised me. He had taught me to be tough, always. One morning when we had come home after cricket, he told Mummy and Mamaiji, “Today my son did a brave thing, as I would have done. A powerful shot was going to the boundary, like a cannonball, and he blocked it with his bare shin.” Those were his exact words. The ball’s shiny red fury, and the audible crack — at least, I think it was audible — had sent pain racing through me that nearly made my eyes overflow. Daddy had clapped and said, “Well-fielded, sir, well-fielded.” So I waited to rub the agonized bone until attention was no longer upon me. I wish Percy had not lost interest in cricket, and had been there. My best friend, Viraf from A Block, was immensely impressed. But that was all a long time ago, many months ago, now Daddy did not take us for cricket on Sunday mornings.
I paused in my search. Daddy had found something in the classifieds and did not notice. By angling the tweezers I could aim the bulb’s light upon various spots on the Murphy Radio calendar: the edges of the picture, worn and turned inward; the threadbare loop of braid sharing the colour of rust with the rusty nail it hung by; a corroded staple clutching twelve thin strips — the perforated residue of months ripped summarily over a decade ago when their days and weeks were played out. The baby’s smile, posed with finger to chin, was all that had fully endured the years. Mummy and Daddy called it so innocent and joyous. That baby would now be the same age as me. The ragged perimeter of the patch of crumbled wall it tried to hide strayed outward from behind, forming a kind of dark and jagged halo around the baby. The picture grew less adequate, daily, as the wall kept losing plaster and the edges continued to curl and tatter.
Other calendars in the room performed similar enshroudings: the Cement Corporation skyscraper; the Lifebuoy Soap towel-wrapped woman with long black hair; the Parsi calendar, pictureless but showing the English and Parsi names for the months, and the roje in Gujarati beside each date, which Mummy and Mamaiji consulted when reciting their prayers. All these hung well past their designated time span in the world of months and years, covering up the broken promises of the Firozsha Baag building management.
“Yes, this is it,” said Daddy, tapping the paper, “get me the scissors.”
Mamaiji came out and settled in her chair on the veranda. Seated, there was no trace of the infirmity that caused her to walk doubled over. Doctors said it was due to a weak spine that could not erect against the now inordinate weight of her stomach. From photographs of Mummy’s childhood, I knew Mamaiji had been a big handsome woman, with a majestic countenance. She opened her bag of spinning things, although she had been told to rest her eyes after the recent cataract operation. Then she spied me with the tweezers.
“Sunday dawns and he makes the child do that duleendar thing again. It will only bring bad luck.” She spoke under her breath, arranging her spindle and wool; she was not looking for a direct confrontation. “Plucking out hair as if it was a slaughtered chicken. An ill-omened thing, I’m warning you, Sunday after Sunday. But no one listens. Is this anything to make a child do, he should be out playing, or learning how to do bajaar, how to bargain with butcher and bunya” She mumbled softly, to allow Daddy to pretend he hadn’t heard a thing.