Boman said inviting the paying guests to tea was out of the question. These days human nature was such that courtesy was usually misinterpreted as weakness. Better to do it firmly and officially, through proper channels, with a lawyer’s letter telling them to vacate in two months.
When the paying guests received the notice, Khorshedbai immediately and emphatically declared that no one would peck her to pieces. Then she told Ardesar that it was no surprise, she knew it was coming. Pestonji had recently appeared in a dream, and his cage had been nowhere in sight. Frantically beating his clipped wings, he had flopped around the veranda from corner to corner, squawking pitifully, and it had taken a long time to comfort him.
Ardesar wanted to tell Boman there was no need for lawyers and notices. They just needed a little time. But Khorshedbai forbade him. She saw beaks getting ready to peck, and was going to give them a fight, that was all. Standing before the cage, she set the swing going with her finger. “Prayerful people like us have nothing to fear,” she said, and swayed with the to-and-fro rocking of the swing.
Six months of futile and wearying procedures then began. The lawyer Rustomji had recommended was a sadistic little tub of a fellow who dug his nose insolently in the presence of his clients. It delighted him to see Boman writhe in anxiety as he told him about the laws regarding tenancy and sub-tenancy, and how difficult it was to prove extreme hardship and evict someone.
“There are laws to protect the poor,” Boman said bitterly after he got home, “and laws to protect the rich. But middle-class people like us get the bamboo, all the way.”
“Chhee! Don’t talk like that!” said Kashmira, intolerant of dirty speech. Clothes and language were two things in which she insisted on cleanliness. In other matters she let Boman have his way. During happier times, she had allowed him to do things which would have horrified her had they been described in words. How Boman yearned for those nights again. When he would reach out his hand in the darkness after little Adil had fallen asleep, and she would turn her soft, warm body towards him, and know exactly what to do. Darkness was all she required, and silence: silence of words — other sounds, such as moans and whimpers, she did not mind, in fact they even excited her, of that he was certain.
Kashmira continued with bitterness: “If you had let me get a job instead, none of this would ever have happened.” Boman, turning over those night-time moments of ecstasy within his memory, smiled wistfully, and she did not understand why.
The weeks during which Khorshedbai littered in the morning and Kashmira swept in the evening commenced following the day of the final courthouse appearance. That day saw Kashmira enter the eighth month of her pregnancy. It saw Pestonji flutter his way again into Khorshedbai’s dreams. And it saw the end of Boman’s futile and wearying procedures to secure the eviction.
Boman had not foreseen a complete defeat. At most, on grounds of compassion, a longer notice period. He had spent the last few weeks returning utmost courtesy for Khorshedbai’s daily vituperation, displaying the grace and generosity only the victor can afford, and which, in his mind, he already was.
When the verdict came it crushed him. And to see Boman humbled emboldened Khorshedbai. A brave front might have kept her vengeance within reasonable limits of decency, but brave fronts were now beyond Boman.
That day, Khorshedbai and Ardesar went directly from the courthouse to the agyaari, and made an offering of a ten-rupee sandalwood log instead of the regular fifty-paise stick. She was ebullient by the time they reached home. She washed and wiped the photoframes containing the moustached and pugreed countenances of her forefathers on the Other Side, as well as the cage, and filled fresh water in the drinking pan. Then, all evening long she lit sticks of agarbatti before the photoframes and cage, wreathing her departed ones in a fog thicker than the one they must have encountered when crossing Chinvad Bridge to the Other Side.
The heavy incense began to spread. It strayed into the other room and nauseated Kashmira and Boman. It filled their pots and pans and destroyed their appetites; lingered over bedsheets and slunk inside pillowcases; slipped through the slats and squatted under their bed. The relentless and pungent scent insinuated itself into their eyes and noses, and swam boldly through their skulls, muddling their minds and curdling their senses, until Khorshedbai had taken possession of their flat and their beings. Little Adil complained about the smell too. They calmed him down and put him to bed early, then retired, nursing headaches and shame and disappointment.
But Khorshedbai denied them the balm of sleep. When silence had fallen beyond the wall, she wound up her gramophone. She pointed the horn towards the region where the beds would be on the other side, and played the only record that she possessed. The only record, as she told Ardesar whenever he wanted to augment the collection, that anyone need possess. The strains of Sukhi Sooraj, the stridulant paean to the rising sun, borne on the vocal cords of the shrill woman buried in the crackling, hissing grooves of the 78’s shellac, journeyed beyond the wall and into the darkness where Boman and Kashmira had sought refuge. They clung together, helpless, soothing each other’s pain through repeated playings.
Then the horn was folded away. The last sticks of agarbatti smouldered into diminutive tapers. And when Khorshedbai finally felt sleep overpowering her, she struggled against it, unwilling to let the day’s blessed events cease their circuit of her mind. Such were her stars, though, that when sleep did triumph, it only brought more joy. Pestonji visited, and whistled, and fluttered through her sleeping hours.
In the morning she remembered the dream distinctly: Pestonji was sitting in his large rectangular custom-built cage which, for some reason, was out on the veranda. She brought him peanuts. Pestonji proceeded to crack them methodically and thoroughly, then tossed the shells and nuts out of the cage. He threw them all out. Very surprising, because Pestonji had always been a neat and tidy parrot, he even did his potty in one corner of the cage only, never let fly haphazardly like others. Maybe he was not in the mood for peanuts. So she gave him two peppers. Long green ones. He did the same thing again. Tore them into little pieces, threw them across the length and breadth of the veranda.
It was only then that she understood Pestonji’s message.
And while she was preparing the first of her veranda parcels, guided by the divine afflatus from Pestonji, Boman awoke, his confidence renewed. He told Kashmira there was no need to worry, he would get rid of the paying guests one way or another. He whistled as he lingered over the selection of a tie. When the knot turned out perfect at the first attempt, his self-assurance was fully restored. He kissed Kashmira and left for work, urging her to continue with their locked-door policy. And in the evening he discovered Khorshedbai’s revenge scattered over the veranda.
Boman and Kashmira decided to pretend that nothing was wrong. They went out with a broom and dustpan. She swept away the garbage. He whistled as insouciantly as he could. She hummed along. He maintained a protective stance in the doorway. His tie and jacket gleamed like talismans of civility amidst Khorshedbai’s manufactured squalor. He always returned from work as crisp and neat as he left in the morning. Kashmira loved this about him, she used to say he made their room classy the minute he walked in; at night he would delay changing into pyjamas for as long as possible.