Khorshedbai curbed her frolic. She came in as the last little pieces of The Indian Express floated to the floor behind her. Ardesar took her arm, murmuring: “O Khotty my life, what have you done, that thing you threw. We will have to answer one day to The One Up There. This must stop before …”
She pulled away her arm and went to the empty parrot cage. With hands clasped before her chest and eyes closed she stood before it for a few moments, then turned to Ardesar. “They started it, why should we stop? Six months of court-and-lawyer nonsense. Eviction notices! Ha! He gives me eviction notices! With his ties and jackets, trying to be a sahib, and his good-mornings and good-evenings, thinks he is better than me.” Her hardness disappeared for a moment as she appealed to him pleadingly: “I was never this way before, was I?”
“But Khotty my life, that, that thing you threw! And you know it is their flat, they have a right to …”
“A right to what? Put us on the street? Don’t we have rights? At last to have a roof, eat a little daar-roteli, and finish our days in peace? No one will peck me to pieces, they better learn.”
“But we leave soon as the other place is vacant. Tell them, they are good people.”
“For you the whole world is good people.” Her gesture to encompass humanity tinkled the bangles again. She pushed them towards the elbows. “The other place is not ready. Might never be. Nothing is certain in life. Only birth, marriage, and death, my poor mother used to say. At our age you want to go begging again for rooms in dharmsaalas?”
“But that dirty, that thing …”
“That thing, that thing, that thing! Trembling in your pyjamas every day instead of helping. And if He did not want me to throw it, then why was it on the pavement outside the agyaari?. And why did He give me the idea? It is not easy to …”
Ardesar stopped listening. He did not mind Khorshedbai’s scolding. The uncertainty of things was worrying her. That was all. Besides, he was far away from this room now as he fed the pigeons flocking the wide pavements along Chaupatty beach, cooing to them as they played and nibbled in his hand, while the sound of the tide coming in offered a continuo to the occasional whirr of their gentle wings. Locked inside her room with little Adil, Kashmira heard the drone of Khorshedbai’s determined voice and Ardesar’s soft one for a long time. Sometimes she wished she could eavesdrop with greater clarity. After Boman came home she would unlock her door, they would clean up the mess as usual, then relax outside.
Kashmira needed at least one hour every evening on the veranda before going to bed. She said it felt like someone was choking her, after being cooped all day inside the one room where they had to cook and eat and sleep. But that was their own choice, made two years ago. They had given up the kitchen and decided to keep this room with its attached bathroom — the kitchen went with the other to the paying guests, in a natural division of the flat. She and Boman had agreed the bathroom was more important, what with little Adil’s soosoo problem at nights, and the second baby they had been planning. A kitchen they could do without, by partitioning and using one side of their room for cooking and dining. The veranda was common because the only entrance to the flat was through it.
The arrangement was awkward. But Boman said that no wife of his would go out to work while there was breath in his lungs. The paying guests would be temporary, two years at best, till he got his raises and they could again afford the full rent. That was Boman’s plan.
He laid it before Mr. Karani one evening in the compound when they were both returning from work. Boman admired the chartered accountant on the third floor immensely. He always took his advice in all manner of things. Not that he lacked confidence in himself, he just enjoyed discussions with a man who was a CA; there was something about those two letters, especially since Boman’s own studies had come to a halt after B.Com., when his father’s fortunes had failed.
Mr. Karani was full of dire forebodings. He warned that it was easier to get rid of a poisonous kaankhajuro which had crawled through your ear and nibbled its way to your brain than to evict a paying guest who had been allowed into your flat.
Boman was in a quandary. He had been looking for confirmation and support. Instead, he had run full tilt into contradiction and discouragement, and wished he had never spoken to Mr. Karani. This was the problem in taking the CA’S advice. If you disagreed with it, it sat inside you like a lump of incongenial food, noisily belligerent and causing indigestion.
For a few days, Mr. Karani’s warnings rumbled and growled and gnawed away at his plan, threatening it with disintegration, while Boman vacillated and went from extremes of confidence to extremes of uncertainty. Eventually, however, it turned out to be one of those rare instances when Boman ignored the CA’S advice. He went ahead with his plan and told Kashmira he had inserted an ad in the Jam-E-Jamshed.
It was soon answered. An appointment was made, the flat was shown, and both parties were agreeable.
Then followed one and a half years of cordial coexistence with the paying guests. Boman began to feel that, for once, Mr. Karani had been exaggerating. He was tempted to pull out the pedestal from under Mr. Karani.
But the year and a half of cordial coexistence sped by and concluded abruptly when Ardesar and Khorshedbai received the notice to vacate. This notice to vacate would have far-reaching effects. It would bring new experiences into all their lives: courts and courtrooms, sleepless nights filled with paeans to the rising sun, a sadistic nose-digging lawyer for Boman, veranda-sweeping for Kashmira, signs and portents in dreams for Khorshedbai, pigeons (real and imagined) for Ardesar, thick and suffocating incense clouds for Boman and Kashmira, and finally, a taxi for Ardesar and an ambulance for Khorshedbai.
Its immediate result, however, was to make Khorshedbai emphatically declare to Ardesar that no one would peck her to pieces. For most of her life, Khorshedbai had carried at the back of her mind an image. It was a flock of crows pecking and tearing to shreds some dead creature lying in a gutter. At times the corpse was a kitten, at other times a puppy; sometimes it was even another crow. Whether she ever witnessed something of this sort or whether the image just grew out of various life experiences into a guiding metaphor, during times of adversity she would clench her teeth and repeat to herself that no one was going to peck her to pieces, she would fight back.
It was a year and a half ago that the paying guests had moved in with their meagre possessions: two trunks, one holdall, a hefty parrot cage (empty and still bearing the former occupant’s name: Pestonji Poputt), a wind-up gramophone, and one record: Sukhi Sooraj, a song of praise for the morning sun, its brittle 78-rpm shellac protected between soft sari layers in one of the trunks.
In those days, the two rooms did not stay locked. Khorshedbai would peek inside, wave to little Adil, and inquire how he was getting along. Sometimes Kashmira looked in on the elderly couple to ask if they needed anything. She noticed that two second-hand chairs and a small folding table had been added. On the table stood the cage of the deceased or disappeared Pestonji. Once, she saw Khorshedbai before the empty cage, gazing at the little swing inside. She felt a pang of compassion for the dear grey-haired lady, and imagined the burden of memories weighing heavily upon Khorshedbai’s old shoulders as she stood and remembered her beloved pet. Khorshedbai beckoned her in, viced her arm in bony fingers, and said; “So sweet, Pestonji’s whistle was, and so true.” He still appeared in her dreams when there was trouble, she said, and communicated the future in whistles she alone could interpret.