Happy Birthday! And Other Stories Part 10

*Why you are staring at food? It is not looking good?' says a voice to me. This voice, all the other noises, they start becoming distant till I am not able to listen to them any more.

All I can hear now are the voices from my past.

*I will cut open my stomach if I have to, but my son will go to America,' said Baba grimly.

Earlier that morning Biji's voice rang through the fields informing Baba and me that I had been accepted to study at *Ill-o-no' University. After I had topped the state and national exams, my junior college princ.i.p.al had entered my name in a government programme that granted a full scholarship to one below-poverty-line student per year to attend college in the US. My name had been selected this year.

*I don't want to go,' I said quietly, placing a plastic bucket below the leak from our kacchi chatt. There was so much for me to do in Charuri. The dung patties would be crisp the next week, ready to be taken to sell for fuel in the market. My sister Sarita's history exam was next week and I still had to teach her about Gandhiji's a.s.sa.s.sination. And I'd promised to help Baba in the harvest season. But my voice did not rise above the pounding rain.

I didn't get too concerned though and even slept soundly knowing that Baba did not have the twentythousand rupees needed for my airline ticket, clothes and books.

When I woke up the next morning at four a.m. to plough the fields, Baba was still sitting on the straw mat, looking at me.

*I will take a loan against the land,' he declared in a thin voice, as if the weight of the decision had sapped him of all strength. Our farmland was p.a.w.ned off that very day to the local moneylender, as was, I deemed, my life.

I left India at the age of seventeen, angry with my father for always pushing me to be the man of the house; the man of the school; the man of the farms; and now, without his hand on my back, the man of the world.

I felt orphaned and exiled.

My anger frothed with humiliation on my first day in America. It coalesced into ambition: I would prove myself to America and to Baba.

My experiences became mine to keep, undeserving of Baba's rustic a.n.a.lysis. I switched my degree from agricultural to aeronautical engineering, abandoning the original plan to go back to India to expand our farm. The monthly letters from my parents took me months to answer. Because of the expense, we didn't speak on the phone, and later, when I could afford it, I rang them only once or twice a year, the surprise of the calls giving our conversations so much gravity that they became dull. I didn't seek their blessings before getting married or after having a son.

Over the years, I kept making excuses to avoid moving back or visiting-expensive tickets, demanding boss, son's exams or wife's sinus operation. I didn't invite my parents or sister to visit, ashamed of how they would look to my American wife, half-American child, American neighbours and American friends. The squalor I came from ensured that I didn't take my wife or son to India, despite their eagerness.

My parents did not persist either, as though their memory of me was enough for them. They told me that the farm was doing well-they bought buffaloes every few years and then an automatic tilling machine. When I offered to pay back the loan, Baba refused, saying it had already been repaid, and declined my offers to send money home, insisting that it was of no use to them.

*Brahma does not forgive the father who takes from his son,' he wrote.

Nothing that they did made me feel needed, and so I needed them less.

In the little correspondence I had with them, I exaggerated my life's grandeur and pace. I waited for my award-a word from Baba to say that I had proved my worth, that he was proud of me. It never came.

And it never would, for he died soon after, and a few weeks later, so did Biji. Sarita called-for the very first time-and begged me to come. I almost didn't go, cancelling my ticket twice, gripped by this premonition of dread. But, then I went, alone. And when I arrived in India it felt like I'd left nothing behind in America, as if my life had simply been on pause and all I had to do was resume it from where I'd last left it.

On reaching my childhood home, I saw thirty-eight years of change in one moment. It loomed before me, this house of hay, rope, mud and hope. Inhaling deeply, like I used to as a child, I tried to gather the familiar smell of animal manure and compost, but it was hot and airless, stinging my nostrils.

An old lemon and chilli thread hung in the porch. I remembered how Biji used to make a new one every week, running her threaded needle through three green chillies, a juicy lemon, and three more chillies. I used to watch the thread cavort in the wind, keeping the evil spirits out of our lives. But this one was beaten and withered, as if it had fought spirits for years. I touched it. It disintegrated in my hand.

The house seemed to be empty. The front door stood open. I stepped inside. My home had aged faster than I had. While it had never been well furnished, now it was threadbare, with a charpai, a kerosene stove, a broken plastic chair, and some empty utensils. The paint on the wall was peeling. Nothing adorned these walls save for a tattered poster of a G.o.d and the only photo of me with Karen and Rahul that I had sent to my parents, almost fifteen years back. The photo was wrapped in cellophane, probably to preserve it.

The heat in the house stifled me; I unknotted my tie and wished I hadn't worn a suit.

I heard a soft voice behind me say in Pahari, *Welcome home, brother.'

I turned around slowly, taking a moment to let the words form. It was my sister, Sarita; wizened and unsmiling. She had always carried an air of contained sensibility; now she looked plagued by it.

*What happened to you?' I asked, shocked.

*I am unable to smile, brother, but I am happy to see you,' she replied in rasps, tears forming in her eyes. I went over and hugged her, needing just one arm to wrap around her body.

*I called you here to show you the truth,' she said.

I had seen it before she even told me. Yet, I listened to the price my family paid for my education.

Baba didn't antic.i.p.ate that I wouldn't return or that the errant monsoons would yield low crops for years. The high-interest loan acc.u.mulated, forcing him to forfeit our farmland to the moneylender. Left with no livelihood, he took up any job that came his way-carpentry, labour, plumbing-and Biji sold their belongings, one by one. They took to eating one meal a day, living-sometimes for days on end-only on wild grains, and later in their lives-when Baba became too old to work-they ate only boiled seeds of wild gra.s.s and fungus-ridden mango kernel. Sarita's facial muscles became weak and she was unable to marry well; her husband, now dead, had been a poor widower, three times her age, with children older than her. The marriage had saved her from starvation but nothing could save my parents. My father developed an acute digestive problem and couldn't eat for weeks before his death, and my mother died of dysentery.

*Why didn't anyone tell me all this? I could have helped. I could have come back,' I cried out-my guilt lay open like a corpse.

*Great pain cannot be expressed in the simple economy of words, Bhaiya. Baba was a proud man, so proud that even in the end he refused to admit that he was starving. He thought you'd be ashamed of him. And he didn't let anyone tell you. You'd come back if we told you, he knew, come back to nothing. Maybe, it was all an excuse, and he wanted to protect you, and maybe himself, from what he had become. A proud man's poverty is his bane, isn't it?'

I couldn't speak for what seemed as long as the time I'd been away from this home.

*I was such a bad son. You all must've hated me,' I finally said, more as a conclusion than a question.

*You were Baba's wish come true. How could we hate you?'

*So Baba'-I took a sharp breath in-*was proud of me?'

*More and more, every day.'

I cried out, in spite of myself. My sister walked up to me and laid her head against my heart.

*You will have to learn to forgive yourself.'

I never did.

I came back to the US and searched the attic for my family's old letters: they smelled earthy and full of love, and I lay among them, as if they were Baba and Biji's last embrace. An embrace I had never been able to relay; such was my love, tarnished by ego and pride. How foolish I had been-how petty and selfish-to have let my family go.

My shame became a vantage point from which I looked down upon my life. The success that defined my house, my car and pantry seemed like a sham. Every bite of food I tried to eat reminded me of what I'd deprived my parents. I thought of the sunken shoulder blades that held my sister's body together, and searched desperately, unsuccessfully, in the mirror for my own.

I took four hundred dollars-equivalent to the loan Baba had taken-and burned the notes. I put the remains in a copper urn and dispersed them in the Hudson; the ashes of family, of strife, and of tallying up your life's score and realizing that you came to naught.

I look down at the food Mrs Gupta has laid in front of me now, reminiscent of the last meal I had with my parents; a feast in my honour, fed to me with my mother's hands, with my Baba sitting beside me-not eating. Slung across his shoulder is a white cotton cloth with which he alternately dabs his tears and covers his laughing mouth. *Can you believe a poor farmer's son is going to America?' he says every other minute. *I can't explain how happy I am, for great joy cannot be expressed in the simple economy of words, can it, son?'

Mrs Gupta's voice wails through my reverie. *See this. I make it myself. Hear everyone in your village has this, no?'

I look at her hand. In it is a lemon and chilli thread.

THE MESSAGE.

Tanya is regretting her promise to take her son Maneesh to Kaizad's house.

*You promised,' Maneesh says when she complains that Kaizad's house is a forty-five-minute drive, one hour with traffic, and what is she supposed to do for the two hours that Maneesh wants to stay? *You promised,' Maneesh says, his nose flaring as he becomes impervious to reason.

To be fair, she had promised Maneesh. Promised him in the school playground after he'd won the 100-metre dash, and after Kaizad's mother, wearing a yellow dress and flashing an easy smile, had invited him to play Kaizad's new PlayStation the next Friday.

Tanya had been lured into making a promise that required no immediate action, was merely a possibility for sometime in the future. And she had liked Kaizad's mother (Daisy? Delnaz? What was her name?) because she didn't carry that awful expression of terror like the other mothers in Maneesh's school, as if they'd been asked to take a surprise test. Importantly though, for the first time since coming to India, Tanya had seen Maneesh relax, teaching his dap greeting to Kaizad, the only kid in school who looked past Maneesh's American accent and dust allergies. So she'd said yes to Kaizad's mother, as impulsively as she'd said yes to marrying *Aditya from New York', as thoughtlessly as she'd given up a career in journalism, as frivolously as she'd agreed to move from New York to Mumbai so that Aditya could be with his ailing mother. Stop and start. Start and stop. So many lifetimes in one life, none connected to the other, her inconsistency being the only common denominator.

*Keep the change,' she finds herself telling the surprised taxi driver, who isn't used to the American style of zealous tipping. Tanya could have used one of their two cars wasting away in the building's parking lot. But the car with the driver is on standby in case her mother-in-law, who suffers from an unidentified ailment everyone calls *old age', takes a turn for the worse. Driving herself is out of the question. Aditya had procured her a licence with a small bribe, but when she took the car out on Mumbai's narrow roads, with its carts, dogs, snarling drivers, hawkers, pedestrians, beggars, the ruthless honking, it was all too much. So she took her licence and put it away, in that dusty corner of her life where so many of her unused skills lay.

Tanya grabs Maneesh's wrist-which now fits within her grip since his grandmother has forbidden meat in the house-and looks around the Tardeo Parsi colony for Kaizad's apartment. The streets are paved and clean, unlike the rest of the city, and she can't tell the buildings apart, they all look the same. They walk around aimlessly for a few minutes and then stop to ask an elderly couple, sunning themselves near a Tata Indigo, for directions. The man points to the green block lettering of Hilla's Hair Salon and, as instructed, Tanya turns right to find the Soonawala building, where Kaizad lives.

But it's not Kaizad's yellow-dress mother waving at them from the first floor. Standing in a large balcony and partially hidden behind the clothesline is a man. A short, squat man with greased hair falling over his forehead. He is wearing a white sadra and denim shorts, really short shorts, held up-for no reason-by a belt. She finds it ridiculous-the abundant hair peeking out from below this man's clothes as though he's worn hair to cover his clothes. His face is foggy against the sun but she can make out fair skin, fairer than most here, and sharp features, though that could be the heat shining off his face. It is May.

She stands, grasping Maneesh's wrist, staring at the man holding Kaizad's hand-all of them looking like paper doll cutouts joined at the hand-when Kaizad yells *Maneesh!' Tanya pulls Maneesh along and walks up the wooden stairway of the building-the oldest building in the colony, Kaizad's mother had said-avoiding the dead roaches, the piles of dust swept into the corners, and holding on to the bal.u.s.trade with her other hand in case the stairway that's creaking underfoot gives way.

Kaizad is outside the door, waving a green plastic sword towards his house, like the aircraft runway men guiding planes in the right direction with their orange sticks. Tanya looks from the edge of the sword, which is rounded and blunt-safe for her son to play with-into the house, which is cluttered-as was obvious even from the street-but clean, airy and bright. She pushes Maneesh ahead of her so she can study this place. Her eyes rest on fish drawn in dotted outlines with chalk powder on the threshold and a delicate string of lilies and roses hanging from the door.

The man with Kaizad steps forward. He is holding a lit cigarette and offers Tanya his other hand, *Kem che? I'm Kaizu's dad, Porus.'

He says this with his eyes half-squinted, as though he's looking at the sun and not at her. Tanya wishes that she had worn the maroon lipstick lost somewhere in her purse, and put on something more appealing than a tiedye kurti and her old khaki pants.

He continues. *Dinaz says sorry she can't be here. Her boyfriend is down with food poisoning or something, so she had to rush to his house. She's called me in to babysit.'

So her name is Dinaz, she's divorced, has a boyfriend, and, apparently, civil relations with her ex-husband. Tanya adds all this like soiled patches to the clean yellow dress of the woman sitting under the yellow sun. In India, unlike the USA, this family situation feels inappropriate, unreal, scandalous-the stuff you read about in gossip magazines. She looks worriedly at Maneesh to see if he's overheard, but he's distracted, swinging his arms in an apparent sword fight with Kaizad.

*Well, it's nice to meet you,' she says, her voice firm and even to indicate that other people's private affairs are not hers to judge. *Thanks for having Maneesh over.'

The man scratches his right cheek, and she hears a dry grating sound as if his skin were a chalkboard. He needs to shave.

*It was Kaizu's idea,' he mumbles.

*Maneesh, have you wished Uncle?' Tanya says, her voice strict to tell Uncle that she has raised her child well.

Without looking back at his mother, Maneesh yells, *h.e.l.lo Uncle.'

*Maneesh!' Tanya says.

Maneesh drops his arms and grudgingly walks up to Porus. He extends his hand and says in a voice that sounds programmed, *Namaste, Uncle. Thank you for letting me come here and play with Kaizad.' He turns to Kaizad, eyeing him like candy.

Porus exhales a long puff of smoke from his lips, as if pushing Maneesh away with the sheer force of his lungs. *Why don't you go to Kaizu's room to play?'

Maneesh looks at his mother for further approval, and because she wants to delay the eventuality of him becoming a man and no longer caring for her opinion, she quickly nods her head. Kaizad grabs Maneesh's hand and pulls him out of sight. Tanya hears them shut the door to some room firmly behind them.

She's alone.

She is alone with a man.

When was the last time that she was alone with a man other than her husband? And that too a divorced man with a deep voice and sharp-cut features, who on closer observation is muscular, not stout. She panics. What will her mother-in-law say when she finds out? Or Aditya? And what is she supposed to talk to Porus about till Maneesh's play-date ends? How is she supposed to behave so that she is interesting without leading him on?

She is on the balcony now, shifting awkwardly on her feet, when Porus asks, *What would you like to drink? Whisky soda? Whisky lemon?'

What a surprise! Since her arrival here two months ago, Tanya's only been offered tea, nimbu paani and coconut water by the people she's visited, though all of them were Aditya's relatives. And there is no alcohol, not even beer, in their home since *Aditya from New York' has determined that his mother is too frail to find out that he and, even worse, his wife, drink.

*We have other drinks too. Foster's, Kingfisher, and yes, Bacardi Breezer. Blueberry flavour, since-Khodhai jaane-Dinu only drinks that,' he continues, in a monotonous voice. *I can make a Parsi peg if you like; it's the largest peg in the world.'

It strikes Tanya that there are no servants about, unlike all the other homes she's been to where they miraculously appear whenever the host asks what she wants.

Has Porus sent away the servants on purpose?

*I'll have cold water for now, thank you,' she says firmly.

*Chalo, then let me show you aapri rani no mehel.'

She follows him into the living room muddled with antique furniture, most of it chipped and broken. There is a dark brown rocking chair and a marble table-too tall to be a coffee table-in the middle of the room. Porus walks to a large gla.s.s-panelled wooden cabinet that contains white chinaware and a row of miniature ceramic doves. He removes two gla.s.ses and sets them next to a desktop computer with missing keys.

Tanya catches a whiff of sandalwood and says, *What a lovely aroma.'

Porus doesn't turn around but points to a long narrow stool covered with a red velvet cloth. On top of it is a silver vase filled with pieces of sandalwood. *It's coming from the sukhar. Dinu says she lights it for religious purposes but-don't tell her I said this-she only does it when I'm around, old habit, so I think it's to hide my cigarette smoke from Kaizu.'

Porus walks ahead to a room where everything is covered with white cotton cloth. Tanya makes out the shape of a large dining table fit for a family of ten, some cabinets which she wonders what they fill with, and a giant white G.o.drej refrigerator with a bulky steel handle that Porus pulls with a grunt.

*Looks like there's no cold water,' Porus says, and when Tanya peers into the fridge she sees rows of beer cans, more variety than the Foster's and Kingfisher he'd offered, as well as a few drink mixes and some curdled milk in a transparent Amul packet. What did they feed Kaizad?

*The boys? Maybe they'd like to eat something?' she asks, tentatively.

*Oh, don't worry about them. We have another fridge in Kaizu's room that is filled with food. They're probably having raspberry soda and bhakra right now.' He turns to her and says, *There's some kaleji papeto if you're hungry.'

She doesn't know what that is and it must show on her face because he explains, *It's a masala liver dish, a Parsi speciality, very tasty.'

She gags. She misses meat, even more now that she can't have it at home, but liver is something that, as a Hindu, she's never thought of eating. So when Porus brings out a steel dish to reveal blackish grey meat with a fried egg on top, she says *No!' rather loudly.

*Fine,' he says, his eyes widen, taken aback. *There's also some tamota ma bhejoo, a tomato dish with goat brain, but I guess you won't like that either. Your loss.'

With his bare fingers Porus picks a piece from the dish and chews it with his eyes closed.

The sight of the grey meat reminds Tanya of the time Aditya and she went to see the one-horned Indian rhino. It was before Maneesh was born, when their permanent return to India was a remote-if not impossible-prospect and she had therefore wanted to see more of it. They visited Darjeeling, Gangtok, Guwahati-all tea estates, yaks, rice-millet drinks, Nepalese-Tibetan-Hindi dialects-and at the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, they made an impulsive stopover at the famous Rhino Sanctuary of Jaldapara. It was their first elephant safari and they woke up at five in the morning, climbed the steps of an elephant mount, took their seats on a set of precarious cushions, and hung on to the lone bar that stopped them from toppling off Madhubala, their elephant.

It was a magical trip-the tranquillity of early dawn silencing the lodge, the Malangi river gurgling in the far distance, a pair of bison tongues licking a mound of salt. Tanya sat back to back with Aditya, facing the rear end, seeing everything a moment after him. Hypnotized, they dared not break the silence even when a Bengal florican screeched and partridges scampered beneath their feet. The only human sound was that of the mahout-Hrrr ... Hrrr ... Hrr ...-goading Madhubala at each turn and incline.

Knowing that nothing could go wrong in Madhubala's world, Tanya let go of the bar. Her feet sc.r.a.ped the tall gra.s.s, leaves gently brushed her face, her outstretched hands mingled with the dewy forest breeze. She watched the fan of a peac.o.c.k's feathers dancing in glory of the day to come; a still owl on a bare branch. About an hour later, when the sun began to break through the treetops, lifting the darkness and delivering it to the infinite sky, Aditya complained to the mahout, *Why haven't we seen a rhino yet?'

Tanya's spell broke. She t.i.ttered. It wouldn't be long before she discovered that this was typical of Aditya, this breaking of idyllic dreams and thrusting them into the humidity of daily disappointments.