A Fine Balance Part 21

Mountains

WHEN MANECK KOHLAH FINISHED moving his belongings from the college hostel to Dinas flat, he was soaking with sweat. Fine strong arms, she thought, watching him carry his suitcase and boxes noiselessly, setting things down with care. moving his belongings from the college hostel to Dinas flat, he was soaking with sweat. Fine strong arms, she thought, watching him carry his suitcase and boxes noiselessly, setting things down with care.

"It's so humid," he said, wiping his forehead. "I'll take a bath now, Mrs. Dalai."

"At this time of the evening? You must be joking. There's no water, you have to wait till morning. And what's this Mrs. Dalai again?"

"Sorry Dina Aunty."

Such a good-looking boy, she thought, and dimples when he smiles. But she felt he should get rid of the few hairs at his upper lip that were trying so hard to be a moustache. "Shall I call you Mac?"

"I hate that name."

He unpacked, changed his shirt, and they had dinner. He looked up from his plate once, meeting her eye and smiling sadly. He ate little; she asked if the food was all right.

"Oh yes, very tasty, thank you, Aunty."

"If Nusswan my brother saw your plate, he would say that even his pet sparrow would go hungry with that quant.i.ty."

"It's too hot to eat more," he murmured apologetically.

"Yes, I suppose compared to your healthy mountain air it's boiling here." She decided he needed putting at ease. "And how is college?"

"Fine, thank you."

"But you didn't like the hostel?"

"No, it's a very rowdy place. Impossible to study."

There was silence again through several morsels, the next attempt at conversation coming from him. "Those two tailors I met last month they still work for you?"

"Yes," she said. "They'll be here in the morning."

"Oh good, it will be nice to see them again."

"Will it?"

He didn't hear the edge in it, and tried to nod pleasantly while she began clearing the table. "Let me help," he said, pushing back his chair.

"No, it's okay."

She soaked the dishes in the kitchen for the morning, and he watched. The flat depressed him, the way it had when he had come to inspect the room. He would be gone in less than a year, he thought, thank G.o.d for that. But for Dina Aunty this was home. Everywhere there was evidence of her struggle to stay ahead of squalor, to mitigate with neatness and order the shabbiness of poverty. He saw it in the chicken wire on the broken windowpanes, in the blackened kitchen wall and ceiling, in the flaking plaster, in the repairs on her blouse collar and sleeves.

"If you are tired you can go to bed, dont wait for me," she said.

Taking it to be a polite dismissal, he withdrew to his room her room, he thought guiltily and sat listening to the noises from the back, trying to guess what she was doing.

Before going to bed herself, Dina remembered to turn on the kitchen tap in order to be roused by its patter at first flow. She lay awake for a long while, thinking about her boarder. The first impression was good. He didn't seem fussy at all, polite, with fine manners, and so quiet. But maybe he was just tired today, might be more talkative tomorrow.

Maneck did not sleep well. A window kept banging in the wind, and he felt unsure about rising to investigate, afraid of stumbling in the dark, disturbing Mrs. Dalai. He tossed and turned, haunted by the college hostel. Finally escaped, he thought. But it would have been much better to go straight home...

He was up early; the open tap turned out to be his alarm clock as well. After cleaning his teeth he returned to his room and did pushups in his underwear, unaware that Dina, having finished in the kitchen, was watching through the half-open door.

She admired the horseshoe of his triceps as they formed and dissolved with his ascent and descent. I was right last night, she thought, nice strong arms. And such a handsome body. Then she blushed confusedly Aban in school with me...young enough to be my son. She turned away from the door.

"Good morning, Aunty."

She turned around cautiously, relieved to see he was wearing his clothes. "Good morning, Maneck. Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thank you."

She acquainted him with the bathroom and the working of the immersion water heater, then left. He shut the door to undress, moving carefully in the small, unfamiliar s.p.a.ce. Hot water steamed, ebullient in the bucket. He tested it with the fingertips, then plunged his hand past the wrist, exulting in the warmth. He realized it was only the dank monsoon day making the steam threaten and cloud so thick, no more scalding than the dreamy mist that would be hugging the mountains at home now.

If he shut his eyes he could picture it: at this hour it would be swirling fancifully, encircling the snow-covered peaks. Just after dawn was the best time to observe the slow dance, before the sun was strong enough to s.n.a.t.c.h away the veil. And he would stand at the window, watch the pink and orange of sunrise, imagine the mist tickling the mountain's ear or chucking it under the chin or weaving a cap for it.

Soon he would hear the familiar sounds from downstairs as his father opened up the store and stepped outside to sweep the porch. First, his father would greet the dogs who had spent the night on the porch. There was never any trouble with the strays; Daddy had an arrangement with them: they could sleep here and feed on sc.r.a.ps so long as they left in the morning. And they always went obediently at first light, albeit with reluctance, after nuzzling his ankles. In the kitchen Mummy would stoke the boiler with shiny black coal, fill the tea kettle, slice the bread, and keep an eye on the stove.

At this hour, as the pan hissed and sputtered, the aroma of fried eggs would begin to travel upstairs and to the porch. The appetizing emissary would deliver wordless messages to Maneck and his father. Then Maneck would leave the moving-mist panorama and hurry to breakfast, hugging his parents, whispering good morning to each before sitting down at his place. His father had a special big cup, from which he took great gulps of tea while still standing. He always drank his first cup standing, moving around the kitchen, gazing out the window at the early-morning valley. When Maneck was sick with a cold or had exams at school, he was allowed to drink from his father's cup, with its bowl so huge that Maneck thought he would never finish, never drain its depths, and yet he had to keep drinking if he was to triumph and reveal the star-shaped design at the bottom, changing colour through the final trace of liquid, appearing and disappearing as he sloshed it around...

Shaking water off his wet forearm, Maneck tried to shut the leaking tap a bad washer and gazed abstractedly at the steamy swirls haloing his bucket of hot water. His homesick imagination made him see the hills float through the fog again, pa.s.sing from nimbus to nothing. He sighed, stood on the high step enclosing the bathing area, and hung his clothes on the empty nail next to his towel. The third nail was occupied by a bra.s.siere, with something else behind it knitted from strong, rough yarn, like a thumbless glove. Curious, he pulled it out to examine. A bath mitt, he decided, and stepped off the ledge, picking up the mug to splash himself with water from the bucket.

Then he saw the worms. Phylum Annelida Phylum Annelida, he remembered from biology cla.s.s. They were crawling out of the drain in formidable numbers, stringy and dark red, glistening on the grey stone floor, advancing with their mesmeric glide. Maneck froze for an instant before leaping back to the safety of the ledge.

Weeks earlier, when Dina had first heard that the boarder found for her by Zen.o.bia was the son of a girl who had gone to school with them, her memory could not leap back across the years to pluck out the face in question.

"She had a beauty spot on her chin," reminded Zen.o.bia, "and her nose was slightly crooked. Though I think it made her look quite cute."

Dina shook her head, still unable to remember.

"Do you have the cla.s.s photo for...let's see," and Zen.o.bia counted on her fingers, "1946, '47, '48, '49 that's it, 1949."

"Nusswan would not give me the money to buy it. Have you forgotten how my brother was, after Daddy died?"

"Yes, I know. Such a wretch. Making you wear those ridiculous long uniforms and those heavy, ugly shoes. You poor thing. Makes me mad even after all these years."

"And because of him I lost touch with everyone. Except you."

"Yes, I know. He didn't allow you to stay for choir or dramatics or ballet or anything."

All that evening they enjoyed the pleasures of reminiscing, laughing at the follies and tragedies of their pasts. Very often there was a little sadness in their laughter, for these memories were of their youth. They remembered their favourite teachers, and Miss Lamb, the princ.i.p.al, who was called Lambretta because she was always scooting up and down the halls. They calculated how old they would have been in the sixth standard, when they had started French, and the French teacher, who they had nicknamed Mademoiselle Bouledogue, began terrorizing their lives three times a week. Everyone a.s.sumed the name was an example of the cruelty of schoolgirls, but it had been bestowed as much for her heavy jowls as for her pugnacious approach to irregular verbs and conjugations.

After Zen.o.bia left, Dina measured out half a cup of rice, picked out the pebbles from the grain, and boiled the water. The last drop of daylight was used up, and the kitchen light had to be switched on. Through the open window she heard a mother calling her children in from play. Then the smell of frying onions swooped in. Everywhere the cooking hour had begun.

As the rice cooked, she thought how pleasant it had been to remember her school-days better than the brooding and daydreaming she had been doing lately about Nusswan and Ruby; her father's house; her nephews, Xerxes and Zarir, grown men now at twenty-two and nineteen, whom she seldom met more than once a year.

After dinner, she sat at the window, watching the balloonman across the road tempt the pa.s.sing children. Somewhere, a radio began blaring the signature tune for "Choice of the People." Eight o'clock, thought Dina, as Vijay Correas voice introduced the first song. She worked on her quilt for an hour or so. Before going to bed she soaped her clothes and left them in the bucket, ready for the morning wash.

Zen.o.bia stopped by again the next evening on her way home from the Venus Beauty Salon and took a large envelope out of her purse. "Go on, open it," she said.

"Oh, it's the cla.s.s photograph," Dina exclaimed with delight.

"Look at us all," said Zen.o.bia wistfully. "We must have been about fifteen." She pointed out the girl in the second row.

"Yes, I remember her now. Aban Sodawalla. Though you can't see her beauty spot in this picture."

"How the girls teased her about it. And that mean poem someone made up, remember? Aban Sodawalla has no grace, needs a soda to clean her face."

"See the spot upon her chin, pick it out with a pointy pin," completed Dina. "How stupid we were then, chanting such nonsense."

"I know. And by sixteen, the whole jing-bang lot of us was trying to copy the beauty spot. Weren't we silly, trying to paint it on."

Dina studied the photograph again for a moment. "I remember her most clearly in the fourth standard. Eight or nine years old. The three of us were always together then. She was the one very good at skipping rope, wasn't she?"

"Yes, exactly." Zen.o.bia was pleased that at last a firm connection was made. "Trouble with a capital t, the teacher called us, remember?"

They picked up the trail of nostalgia where they had left it the day before: the games they had played during the short and long recess, and the fun of plaiting one another's hair, comparing ribbons, exchanging hairclips. And when their b.r.e.a.s.t.s began to grow, how they would stoop their shoulders to try to reduce the embarra.s.sing protuberances, or wear cardigans to disguise them, even in sweltering heat, and discuss their first periods, walking oddly while they got used to sanitary pads. And then the teasing about imagined boyfriends and kisses, and fantasies of moonlight walks in romantic gardens.

Most of all, Dina and Zen.o.bia marvelled at how, during those years of their terrible innocence, all the girls had known practically everything about one another's lives. "Then your father pa.s.sed away," said Zen.o.bia. "And that brother of yours wouldn't allow you to have any friends. But you know, you didn't miss that much after the final year most of us lost contact with the gang anyway."

With high school completed, some of their companions had had to go to work because their families were poor; others went on to college, and some were not allowed to, because college could be harmful to the lives of soon-to-be wives and mothers they were kept home to help in the kitchen. If there were no younger sisters to wear the blouse and pinafore of the school uniform, it was cut into kitchen cloths, to wipe the stoves or carry hot pots and pans. Then the ex-schoolgirls were vague, even secretive, when they chanced to meet. There was an air of embarra.s.sment about how they were spending their days, as though they had colluded in a collective betrayal of their youth and childhood. Most of them knew practically nothing about one another's lives.

"You were the only one I kept in touch with you and Aban Sodawalla, of course," said Zen.o.bia.

She continued with the rest of their schoolmate's story: soon after matriculation, Aban had been introduced by family friends to a certain Farokh Kohlah, who was visiting the city, and who had a business in the north, far away, in a hill-station. The Sodawalla family immediately approved of him. How tall and straight stood the young Parsi gentleman, Mr. Sodawalla had said, such a fine bearing, thanks to the healthy life in the mountains. Mrs. Sodawalla was most impressed by the young gentleman's light pigmentation. Not white like a European ghost, she told her friends, but fair and golden.

In view of the possibilities, the Sodawalla family took a tactical vacation the following year at the hill-station. And, in time, the strategy produced the desired results. Aban fell in love with Farokh Kohlah and the natural beauty of the place. Then she married and settled there.

"She still writes to me once a year, without fail," said Zen.o.bia. "That's how I knew she was looking for a room for her son."

"Which was very lucky for me," said Dina. "Thanks for all your help."

"Don't mention it. But G.o.d only knows how Aban has managed to live all these years in some tiny hill town. Especially after being born and brought up in our lovely city. To be honest, I would go crazy."

"If they have their own business, they must be rich people," said Dina.

Zen.o.bia was doubtful. "How wealthy can you get these days, with a small shop in some little hill place?"

Once, though, Maneck's family had been extremely wealthy. Fields of grain, orchards of apple and peach, a lucrative contract to supply provisions to cantonments along the frontier all this was among the inheritance of Farokh Kohlah, and he tended it well, making it increase and multiply for the wife he was to marry and the son who would be born.

But long before that eagerly awaited birth, there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.

Ten years later, when Maneck was born, Farokh Kohlah, trapped by history, was still travelling regularly to courthouses in the capital, snared in the coils of the government's compensation scheme, while files were shuffled and diplomats shuttled from this country to the other. Between journeys he helped his wife to run their old-fashioned general store in town. The shop was all that remained from his vast fortune, having escaped the cartographic changes by being located on the right side of that magic line.

For years the shop had languished, more a hobby or a social club than a business. The real income had come from those other, lost, sources. Now it needed to be nurtured for all it was worth.

Aban Kohlah turned out to be a natural manager in the General Store. "I can easily handle all this," she said to her husband. "You have more important things to do."

A cradle was set up behind the counter to ensure that she was not separated from her child. She ordered the goods, kept accounts, stocked shelves, served customers, and, in her free moments, revelled in the magnificent view of the valley from the back of the shop. Life in the hills suited her perfectly.

Farokh Kohlah had worried at first that his wife would miss the city and her relatives. He feared that once the novelty of the exotic locale had worn off, the complaining would begin. His worries turned out to be needless; her love for the place only increased with the pa.s.sage of time.

The cradle was soon outgrown, and Maneck was crawling round and about the counter, then toddling among the shelves. Mrs. Kohlah's vigilance was now strained to the limit. She was afraid that the boy might bring things crashing down on his head. But whenever her back had to be turned, the customers took over, helping to keep him safely busy, playing with him, amusing him with coins and keyrings, or the brilliant hues of their handmade scarves and shawls. "h.e.l.lo, baba! Ting-ting! Baba, ak-koo!"

By the time he was five, Maneck was proudly a.s.sisting his parents in the shop. He stood behind the counter, his black hair barely visible over the edge, waiting to hear the customer's request. "I know where it is! I'll get it!" he would say, and run to fetch the item under the fond glances of Mrs. Kohlah and the customer.

After starting school the following year, he continued to help out in the evening. He devised his own system for the regulars, keeping their everyday purchases three eggs, loaf of bread, small b.u.t.ter packet, biscuits ready and waiting on the counter at their expected time.

"Look at that son of mine," said Mr. Kohlah proudly. "Just six, and what initiative, what organizational skill." He savoured the pleasure of watching Maneck greet the shoppers and chat with them, describe the aggressive pack of langurs he had seen from the schoolbus that morning, or join in the discussion about a dried-up waterfall. The easygoing manner of the townspeople came naturally to Maneck, having been born and brought up here, and it delighted his father that he mixed so well with everyone.

Sometimes, at dusk, in the bustle of the shop, Mr. Kohlah, surrounded by his wife and son and the customers, who were also friends and neighbours, almost forgot the losses he had suffered. Yes, he would think then, yes, life was still good.

The Kohlahs sold newspapers, several varieties of tea, sugar, bread and b.u.t.ter; also candles and pickles, torches and lightbulbs, biscuits and blankets, brooms and chocolates, scarves and umbrellas; then there were toys, walking-sticks, soap, rope, and more. There was no grand system of inventory selection just basic groceries, household necessities, and a few luxuries.

The shop's casual approach to commerce made it the favourite with locals as well as with the neighbouring settlements. If someone could not afford a full packet of, say, biscuits, Mrs. Kohlah would think nothing of tearing it open and selling half; she had faith that someone else would come along for the other half. If an item was not in stock, Mr. Kohlah would gladly order it as long as the customer was not particular about the delivery date. Even if the delivery date was crucial, there was not much to be done because deliveries depended on the roads, and roads depended on the weather, and everyone knew weather depended on the One Up Above. The morning newspaper usually arrived by early evening, when the regulars gathered on the porch to smoke or sip tea and discuss the news as they read it, calling out the headlines to Mr. Kohlah if he was pottering around inside the shop.

For all the vast inventory it carried, the shop's backbone, ultimately, was a secret soft-drink formula handed down in the Kohlah family for four generations. There was a little factory in the cellar where the soft drinks were mixed, aerated, and bottled. An a.s.sistant washed and prepared the empties, and loaded the crates for delivery. To maintain the formula's secret, Mr. Kohlah did the actual mixing and manufacturing himself; his eyepatch testified to that, covering the hole created by a defective bottle exploding under the pressure of carbonation.

With a handkerchief covering the mess on his face, he had gone upstairs to his wife. Barely a year had pa.s.sed since their marriage, and it was their first crisis. Would she weep and wail, or faint, or stay composed? He was as curious about her reaction as he was concerned about his eye.

Seven months pregnant, Aban Kohlah was quite in control. "Farokh, would you first like a peg of brandy?" He said yes. She had a tiny sip herself, then drove him to the hospital down in the valley. The doctor said he was lucky to be alive his spectacles had broken the impact of the gla.s.s projectile, keeping it from reaching his brain. But it was impossible to save the eye.

Mr. Kohlah said that was all right. "One eye is sufficient for the things I am looking forward to seeing," he smiled, touching his wife's swollen belly. Whereas, he added, the ugliness of the world would now trouble him only half as much.

He refused to have a gla.s.s eye fitted after the socket had healed. An eyepatch became part of his daily attire. He wore it while working in the store, and at social occasions. On his long evening walks through the hillside forest, however, the patch occupied his pocket while he admired for the umpteenth time the beauty of the place and munched on a carrot.

The loss of his eye allowed him to indulge his fondness for carrots. It had been kept in check by Mrs. Kohlah, who said that though carrots were a good thing, any kind of mania was a bad thing. But now she had to allow his pa.s.sion full play: carrot juice, carrot salad, carrot-ma-gose, carrots in his pocket as walking companions.

"I need carrots," insisted Mr. Kohlah. "My one remaining eye must stay fitter than ever, it has to do double duty."

Their little son, growing quickly, soon learned about his father's craze. When he was scolded for misbehaving, he would steal a carrot from the kitchen and carry it to his father as a peace offering, risking a second scolding from his mother.

After the accident Mr. Kohlah was extra careful in the cellar. He allowed no one in the area while the tired old machines rattled and hissed, filling bottles with the fizz of Kohlah's Cola and the till with the tinkle of much-needed money.

His friends, fearing for his safety, showed their concern by joking about it. "Careful, Farokh, it can be dangerous when you go underground. Cola mining is as risky as coal mining." But he laughed with them and ignored their hints.

Sacrificing subtlety, they suggested he should seriously consider replacing the ancient equipment, give some thought to modernizing and expanding the operation. "Listen, Farokh, look at it rationally," they urged. "Kohlah's Cola is so good, it deserves to be known throughout the country, not just in our little corner."

But modernization and expansion were foreign ideas, incomprehensible to someone who refused even to advertise. Kohlah's Cola (or Kaycee, as it was known) was famous through all the little settlements perched on hillsides for miles around. Word of mouth had been good enough for his forefathers, he said, and it was good enough for him.