Under the priestly garb of Dhunjisha, protested Rustomji, lurked a salacious old man taking advantage of his venerable image: “Loves to touch and feel women, the old goat — the younger and fleshier, the more fun he has hugging and squeezing them.” Mehroo did not believe it for a moment. She was always pleading with him not to say nasty things about such a holy figure.
But this was not all. Rustomji swore that Dhunjisha and his ilk had been known to exchange lewd remarks between lines of prayer, to slip them in amidst scripture recitals, especially on days of ceremony when sleek nubile women in their colourful finery attended in large numbers. The oft-repeated Ashem Vahoo was his favourite example:
Ashem Vahoo,
See the tits on that chickie-boo …
This version was a popular joke among the less religious, and Mehroo dismissed it as more of Rustomji’s irreverence. He assured her they did it very skilfully and thus went undetected. Besides, the white kerchief all dustoors were required to wear over the nose and mouth, like masked bandits, to keep their breath from polluting the sacred fire, made it difficult to hear their muttering in the first place. Rustomji claimed it took a trained ear to sift through their mumbles and separate the prayers from the obscenities.
The H route bus stopped at Marine Lines. Mehroo alighted and walked down Princess Street, wondering about the heavy traffic. Cars and buses were backed up all the way on the flyover from Princess Street to Marine Drive.
She neared the fire-temple and saw parked outside its locked gates two police cars and a police van. Her step quickened. The last time the gates had been closed, as far as she knew, was during the Hindu-Muslim riots following partition; she was afraid to think what calamity had now come to pass. Parsis and non-Parsis were craning and peering through the bars of the gates; the same human curiosity had touched them all. A policeman was trying to persuade them to disperse.
Mehroo lingered on the periphery of the crowd, irresolute, then plunged into it. She saw Dustoor Kotwal leave the temple building and walk purposefully towards the gate. Jostling her way through the milling people, she attempted to get his attention. He was, like Dustoor Dhunjisha, a resident temple priest, and knew her well.
Dustoor Kotwal had an announcement for the Parsis: “All prayers and ceremonies scheduled for today have been cancelled, except the prayers for the dead.” He was gone before Mehroo could reach the gate.
She now began to pick up alarming words in the crowd: “ … murdered last night … stabbed in the back … police and CID ….” Her spirits faltered. All this on Behram roje which she had done everything to make perfect? Why were things being so cruelly wrenched out of her control? She made up her mind to stay till she could speak to someone who knew what had happened.
Rustomji finished his cup of tea as Mehroo left. He decided to wait awhile before his bath, to give his obdurate bowels one more chance.
But after another ten minutes of the Times of India and not a murmur from his depths, he gave up. Getting things ready for the bath, he arched his back till his bottom stuck out, then raised one foot slightly and tensed. Nothing happened. Not even a little fart. He inspected his dugli and trousers: the starch was just right — not too limp, not too stiff. He rubbed his stomach and hoped he would not have to go later at the fire-temple; the WC there was horrid, with urine usually spattered outside the toilet bowl or excrement not flushed away. To look at it, it was not Parsis who used the WC, he felt, but uneducated, filthy, ignorant barbarians.
Rustomji performed his ablutions, trying to forget the disgusting leak from above while he had squatted below. Fortunately, with every mugful of hot water he scooped from the bucket and poured down his back, splashed on his face, and felt trickle down his crotch and thighs, that foul leak was reduced to a memory growing dimmer by the moment; the cleansing water which flowed down the drain swept away what remained of that memory to a distant remove; and once he had dried himself, it was blotted out completely. Rustomji was whole again.
Now all that lingered was the fresh refreshing scent, as the advertisement proclaimed, of lifegiving Lifebuoy Soap. Lifebuoy Soap and Johnnie Walker Scotch were the only two items which endured in the sumptuary laws passed down to Rustomji through three generations, and he relished them both. The one change wrought by the passing years was that Johnnie Walker Scotch, freely available under the British, could now be obtained only on the black market, and was responsible for Rustomji’s continuing grief over the British departure.
Emerging from the bathroom, he was pleased to discover his bowels no longer bothered him. The desultoriness plaguing his morning hours had fled, and a new alacrity took charge of his actions. The bows on the dugli gave him some trouble as he dressed, usually it was Mehroo who tied these. But in his present mood he was more than a match for them. With a last brush to his brilliantined hair he perched the pheytoe on it, gave a final tug of encouragement to the bows and surveyed himself in the mirror. Pleased with what he saw, he was ready for the fire-temple.
The H route bus stop was his destination as he stepped out buoyantly. The compound was deserted, the boys were all at school. In the evening, their noisy games would fill it with rowdiness and nuisance that he would have to combat if he was to enjoy peace and quiet. Confident of his control over them, he decided to pass the H route bus stop and walk further, to the A-1 Express, past Tar Gully and its menacing mouth. His starchy whiteness aroused in him feelings of resplendence and invincibility, and he had no objection to the viewing of his progress by the street.
There was a long queue at the A-1 bus stop. Rustomji disregarded the entire twisting, curving length and stationed himself at the head. He stared benignly into space, deaf to the protests of the queue’s serpentine windings, and pondered the options of upper deck and lower deck. He decided on the lower — it might prove difficult to negotiate the steep flight of steps to the upper with as much poise as befitted his attire.
The bus arrived and the conductor was yelling out, even before it came to a standstill, “Upper deck upper deck! Everybody upper deck!” Rustomji, of course, had already settled the question. Ignoring the conductor, he grasped the overhead railing and stood jauntily on the lower deck. The usually belligerent conductor said nothing.
The bus approached Marine Lines, and Rustomji moved towards the door to prepare for his descent. He managed quite well despite the rough and bumpy passage of the bus. Without bruising his mien or his attire, he reached the door and waited.
But unbeknownst to Rustomji, on the upper deck sat fate in the form of a mouth chewing tobacco and betel nut, a mouth with a surfeit of juice and aching jaws crying for relief. And when the bus halted at Marine Lines, fate leaned out the window to release a generous quantity of sticky, viscous, dark red stuff.
Dugli gleaming in the midday sun, Rustomji emerged and stepped to the pavement. The squirt of tobacco juice caught him between the shoulder blades: blood red on sparkling white.
Rustomji felt it and whirled around. Looking up, he saw a face with crimson lips trickling juice, mouth chewing contentedly, and in an instant knew what had happened. He roared in agony, helpless, screaming as painfully as though it was a knife in the back, while the bus slowly pulled away.