Khorshedbai watched with satisfaction through the crack in the door. The beaks lifted against her had been humbled and turned away without a single peck. She said to Ardesar, “Look at him standing chingo-mingo in his fancy dress, making his pregnant wife clean it.” Ardesar barely heard her. The pigeons were cooing and feeding from his hands, the occasional flutter of their wings fanning his face.
Days went by, then weeks. The veranda littering entered its second month, and Kashmira approached her ninth. She said, “What is going to happen now, Bomsi, how much longer?” He reassured her that he was making a plan.
“Not like the plan you made that time, I hope. Talking big, that you would scare them with a lawyer.”
“Don’t worry, Kashoo darling,” he soothed, “this one will be perfect.” He blamed her bitter reproach on the pregnancy. But the truth smarted.
That night he lay in bed unable to sleep. The paying guests were on his mind. Nowadays, it was the only thing he thought about. What was going to happen? He couldn’t admit there wasn’t a plan and upset her. He turned over on his right side and stretched out his legs. A few moments later he folded them up into his stomach. Still not comfortable. He straightened them again. It was no use. He turned over on his left side, rose on one elbow, and adjusted the pillow. Kashmira said to please lie quietly if he couldn’t sleep, and at least let her, she was worn out with the housework and the extra sweeping every evening, and it wouldn’t be long before five o’clock struck and Khorshedbai wound up her gramophone.
What Boman did not have a shred of before the case concluded, he now had in abundance: evidence to evict the paying guests. On grounds of extreme hardship, harassment, harmful influences, something like that — the odious lawyer had quoted sections and paragraphs, finger in nose. Now he needed some way to package it for presenting to the court. Witnesses, of course. Hardly anyone in Firozsha Baag was unaware of Khorshedbai’s doings on the veranda. Those who had not seen had at least heard of them. Those who wanted to see could walk past B Block at eleven o’clock.
He spoke to Mr. Karani first. Boman had expected more support from him during these difficult months. But each time they met, Mr. Karani, clutching his brief case and leaning on his umbrella, stood in the compound and droned on about the black market or the latest government swindle. The closest he let himself get to Boman’s domestic dilemma was when he politely inquired about Kashmira’s health.
Now Boman confronted him with his proposal.
“There is one principle in my life, Boman dikra,” said Mr. Karani, “which I never transgress: the three-monkeys principle.” He mimed, placing his hands over his eyes, ears, and mouth. “Besides,” he said, “the Mrs. would never let me be a witness. Ever since that tamaasha in the Baag about Jaakaylee and the ghost they saw, and the rubbish that people were talking about crazy ayah and crazy bai, she pinched her ears and swore, and made me do the same, to have nothing to do with these lowbreds and churls in Firozsha Baag.” Realizing what he’d just said, he embarrassedly patted Boman’s shoulder: “She didn’t mean you, of course, but it is a principle, you understand.” He winked and gave him the from-one-man-to-another look: “Always obey the Mrs. My motto is: be cowardly and be happy, try to be brave and you’re soon in the grave.”
Boman was bitterly disappointed. What bloody nonsense about the three-monkeys principle. Where did the monkeys go when he did his income tax, or helped his clients with theirs? Henpecked hypocrite. And selfish. But still a smart man, that Boman could not deny.
Next he tried Rustomji, who gruffly dismissed the suggestion as impossible: “Sorry, but enough time I spend in courtrooms, as it is.”
And Najamai said: “Me, a widow, living all alone, how can I go falling in the middle of a court lufraa?. And at my age making unnecessary enemies. No bawa, please forgive me, you will have to find someone else.” This refusal hurt the most. She had shown so much concern all along. And now this blunt answer.
It might have tempered Boman’s bitterness had he known that it would not be long now before Najamai would, in fact, become their saviour; that Najamai, with a beckon of her arm, would deliver them from the paying guests, from the fate worse than a brain-devouring kaankhajuro.
But in the meantime he spent his days exhausting the list of possible witnesses in the Baag. When he began making petitions to those who were as good as strangers, he realized he was reaching the end of hope. The one man who would have helped him, as surely as there was earth beneath and sky above, who had been worth more than all of B Block put together, and who had more goodness in his dried scabs of psoriasis than in the hearts of all these others, was long dead: the kind and noble Dr. Mody. And Mrs. Mody now lived a cloistered life, spending her days in prayer and seclusion. He had gone to see her a few times, but on each occasion she came to the door with her prayer book in her hands and beckoned him away, making vague sounds from behind tightly shut lips: parting them for profane speech would have rendered everything prayed up to that point useless.
There was someone who would be willing to speak in court, Boman knew: the Muslim who lived in the next flat. But desperate as Boman was, he would not stoop to that, to ask him to testify against a fellow Parsi.
The time for Kashmira’s confinement came. She checked into the Awabai Petit Lying-in Hospital. Khorshedbai continued with her eleven o’clock routine, dancing her dance of disorder to the tinkling of bangles. Now Boman would clean up each night after visiting Kashmira at the hospital, and to see him crouching with broom and dustpan made Khorshedbai wild with delight. She could not hold still at the crack of her door, and kept dragging Ardesar up to make him look, against his will, at how low the mighty had to bend despite tie and jacket.
Poor Ardesar cowered inside, ashamed, and worried for her soul. His happiest moments came when he fed the pigeons at Chaupatty beach. He spent a lot of time there these days, alone: now Khotty refused to go. They waddled around his feet as he moved into their midst. He stopped every now and then, standing perfectly still, to let them pick playfully at his shoelaces. It made him sigh contentedly to see the way their throats trembled when they made their soft cooing sounds. The pigeons were the best part of living in this flat near Chaupatty beach. In the end, the neighbours were willing to testify against the paying guests. There were so many volunteers that Boman could have picked and chosen. Even Mrs. Karani assured him that she would make Mr. Karani be a witness, whether he wanted to or not, three monkeys or no three monkeys, so outraged was she about what had happened.
But as it turned out, there was no need. The paying guests went quietly: Khorshedbai first, by ambulance, everyone knew where; then Ardesar, no one knew where, by taxi.
It happened soon after Kashmira returned from her confinement, determined not to spend her days behind locked doors with the new baby. Parturition had endowed her with fresh courage and strength. So she strolled out on the veranda whenever her legs felt like stretching or her lungs longed for fresh air. Even at eleven o’clock she emerged undaunted.
Khorshedbai was not impressed by this new show of defiance. She continued to scatter and toss and sprinkle; the veranda, after all, was for common use as per the sub-tenancy agreement. But she was careful to skirt Kashmira’s immediate vicinity.