That night when Kashmira told Boman all about it, he said the old lady definitely had at least one loose screw somewhere in the upper storey.
Minor irritants between the two parties were easily taken care of. Khorshedbai requested sole use of the veranda for her morning prayers. And she did not want Kashmira to emerge during her monthly. Boman and Kashmira agreed amusedly. Khorshedbai rose at five A.M. each day and, after brushing her teeth, unmuzzled her gramophone for Sukhi Sooraj, the fervent tribute to sunrise. As part of the mutual consideration pact, Boman and Kashmira requested that it not be played till after seven o’clock.
Khorshedbai soon became a familiar sight in the building. To and from her way to the agyaari or the bazaar, and sometimes, hand in hand with Ardesar, off to feed the pigeons at Chaupatty beach. Gradually, stories reached Kashmira’s ears about the elderly couple, and how they came to be homeless at their age. Najamai from C Block stopped by whenever she uncovered something new from her numerous sources. She was concerned that Boman and Kashmira had taken strangers into their flat. So what if they too were Parsis, these days you could trust no one. It was one lesson she had learned, she said, after the murder in the fire-temple, when the dustoorji had been stabbed to death by a chasniwalla employed there. Thus Najamai made it her bounden responsibility to make known the truth, but was not really successful.
In one version, it was the result of a family feud; many years ago Ardesar had sworn never to set foot in his father’s house as long as a certain person lived there. Although soft-spoken Ardesar swearing to do or not do anything was highly improbable.
Another story went that something quite shameful had come to pass between Khorshedbai and one unnamed male occupant, a relative of Ardesar’s, and they had had no choice but to pack up and leave after the affair. But here again it was impossible to imagine prim, agyaari-going Khorshedbai with sari-covered head in any kind of liaison.
Yet another tale, and the saddest of them all, had it that the couple, after a long and arduous life of working and scrimping and saving, had managed to educate and send their only son to Canada. Some years later he sponsored them. So they got rid of their flat and went, only to find he was not the son they once knew; after a period of misery and ill-treatment at his hands they returned to Bombay, homeless and heartbroken.
Kashmira did not pay much attention to these stories. But sometimes, when she picked up the mail dropped on the veranda by the postman, she would see a letter for Ardesar and Khorshedbai from Canada. The cruel son? The return address had the same last name. But if they were mistreated in Canada, returning to Bombay made no sense. Especially since there was no flat. Sons could be ungrateful, yes, but you could not run away from it. Better to remain where at least the food and air and water were good.
Kashmira would hand over the letter with a remark about the pretty foreign stamp, hoping to elicit a comment, perhaps a clue to the writer’s identity. All Khorshedbai ever said was thanks, then she took her arm and led her in beside the cage, to tell more about the life of Pestonji.
When the doctor said yes, Kashmira was pregnant, Boman thought it was time to use the whole flat again. With two children they would need both rooms.
One day, soon after the glad tidings, he stopped Mr. Karani in the compound. More out of habit than anything else, he wanted to discuss the best way of making the paying guests leave.
“Boman dikra, what shall I tell you?” said Mr. Karani, shaking his head sorrowfully, “whatever advice can I give? If there was a kaankhajuro inside your skull, gnawing through your brain, I could say: hold a smelly chunk of mutton beside your ear, that will tempt it to come racing out on its one hundred legs. But what can I tell you about paying guests? To get rid of that problem there is no remedy except death.”
Mr. Karani went on in this way for a while, and when he felt that Boman had suffered enough, suggested he go to see the trustees of Firozsha Baag.
But there was to be no help from that quarter.
Boman sought out the one to whom he had slipped an expensive envelope one and a half years ago for the favour of turning the trustees’ collective blind eye (a delicate organ, but nurtured to operate without hindrance of ruth or compassion) upon the arrival of paying guests in the ground floor of B Block. Impossible, the oily man said. He spoke without relinquishing the look of grave concern (practised for several years) that proclaimed: here I stand, a pillar of the community, ready to help the poor and the needy at any hour of the day or night. Impossible, he repeated, there could not be paying guests living in any flat of Firozsha Baag, it was against the policy, Boman had to be mistaken; either that, or Boman had broken the rules.
Boman left. He turned to his brother-in-law Rustomji in A Block. Rustomji was a lawyer, he would have something sensible to say for sure. Boman had always sized up Kashmira’s brother as a tough, no-nonsense kind of person, and surely that was the individual to talk to in this tricky situation.
“Saala ghéla!” vociferated Rustomji. “Worst bloody thing you have done, taking paying guests. Where had your brain gone, committing such foolishness? You should have asked me before taking them in, now what is the use. First you are setting a fire, then running to dig the well.” Boman waited meekly, murmuring: “That’s true, that’s true.” The impassioned outburst had to be suffered patiently when you wanted tough, no-nonsense advice for free.
Then Boman told him about his meeting with the trustee. It gave Rustomji the appropriate opportunity for some harmless spleen-venting. “Arre, those rascals won’t give a glass of water to a thirsty man. In their office, their chairs don’t need cushions because they have piles of trust money squeezed under their arses.” Rustomji thrust his hands behind and upwards, and Boman, laughing appreciatively, said: “That’s too good, yaar, too good!”
Rustomji enjoyed compliments; he continued.
“Four years ago when my WC was leaking, saala thieves took five weeks to repair it. Every day my poor Mehroo would phone, and some bloody bugger would say, today or tomorrow, for sure. For five weeks I had to go next door to Hirabai Hansotia every morning. Finally I sent them such a stiff letter, it must have sizzled their arses. Repairing was done double-quick.” Boman gave him one of his awe-and-admiration looks.
It paid off. Rustomji now came to what Boman was waiting for. “Legal channels are what you should follow, make the court work for you,” said he. “It will not be easy, mark my words, tenancy laws are such. But if you are lucky it will not get that far. A lawyer’s letter might be enough to scare them out. Sometimes a lawyer’s letter gives the best laxative.” He wrote down the name of one who specialized in tenancy law.
When Kashmira learned of the procedure they would follow, she did not like it at all. She wanted to invite the paying guests for tea, announce the good news, then discuss the room. The baby would not be here for another seven months. She could look in the Jam-E-Jamshed columns and help them find another place. As Boman himself had said, between the two they must have easily scored more than a century. It would be hard moving again at their age, they could use her assistance.
Once, Kashmira’s devout ambition was to do some kind of social work. Rustomji had been able to indulge a similar desire years ago by joining the Social Service League at St. Xavier’s College, and had eventually worked it out of his system. In recent times he had laboured hard to build up his reputation for hard-heartedness and apathy which, he made no bones about expressing, were essential for survival. But when her time came, Kashmira was not allowed to join the SSL because boys and girls went on work-camps together, and all kinds of stories were told about what went on there between the sexes. She had to repeatedly listen to her parents and her brother say things like: charity begins at home, or: self-help is the best help, which made no sense to her then or now.