Rohinton Mistry - Tales From Firozsha Baag

Hushed voices came from the flat, the door was open. I looked into the dining-room where some A Block neighbours had gathered around Viraf’s mother. “How about Ludo or Snakes-and-Ladders?” I tried. If he shrugged again I planned to leave. What else could I do?

“Okay,” he said, “but stay quiet. If Mumma sees us she’ll send us out.”

No one saw as we tiptoed inside, they were absorbed in whatever the discussion was about. “Puppa is very sick,” whispered Viraf, as we passed the sickroom. I stopped and looked inside. It was dark. The smell of sickness and medicines made it stink like the waiting room of Dr. Sidhwa’s dispensary. Viraf’s father was in bed, lying on his back, with a tube through his nose. There was a long needle stuck into his right arm, and it glinted cruelly in a thin shaft of sunlight that had suddenly slunk inside the darkened room. I shivered. The needle was connected by a tube to a large bottle which hung upside down from a dark metal stand towering over the bed.

Viraf’s mother was talking softly to the neighbours in the dining-room. “ … in his chest got worse when he came home last night. So many times I’ve told him, three floors to climb is not easy at your age with your big body, climb one, take rest for a few minutes, then climb again. But he won’t listen, does not want people to think it is too much for him. Now this is the result, and what I will do I don’t know. Poor little Viraf, being so brave when the doctor…”

Supine, his rotundity had spread into a flatness denying the huge bulk. I remembered calling Viraf a cry-baby, and my face flushed with shame. I swore I would apologize. Daddy was slim and wiry, although there were the beginnings of a small pot, as Mummy called it. He used to run and field with us at cricket. Viraf’s father had sat on the grass the one time he took us. The breath came loud and rasping. His mouth was a bit open. It resembled a person snoring, but was uneven, and the sound suggested pain. I noticed the lines on his brow, like Daddy’s, only Daddy’s were less deep.

Over the rasp of his breath came the voice of Viraf’s mother. “ … to exchange with someone on the ground floor, but that also is no. Says I won’t give up my third-floor paradise for all the smell and noise of a ground-floor flat. Which is true, up here even B.E.S.T. bus rattle and rumble does not come. But what use of paradise if you are not alive in good health to enjoy it? Now doctor says intensive care but Parsi General Hospital has no place. Better to stay here than other hospitals, only…”

My eyes fixed on the stone-grey face of Viraf’s father, I backed out of the sickroom, unseen. The hallway was empty. Viraf was waiting for me in the back room with the boards for Ludo and Snakes-and-Ladders. But I sneaked through the veranda and down the stairs without a word.

The compound was flooded in sunshine as I returned to the other end. On the way I passed the three white stumps we had once chalked on the compound wall’s black stone. The lines were very faint, and could barely be seen, lost amongst more recent scribbles and abandoned games of noughts and crosses.

Mummy was in the kitchen, I could hear the roaring of the Primus stove. Mamaiji , sinister in her dark glasses, sat by the veranda window, sunlight reflecting off the thick, black lenses with leather blinders at the sides; after her cataract operation the doctor had told her to wear these for a few months.

Daddy was still reading the Times at the dining-table. Through the gloom of the light bulb I saw the Murphy Baby’s innocent and joyous smile. I wondered what he looked like now. When I was two years old, there was a Murphy Baby Contest, and according to Mummy and Daddy my photograph, which had been entered, should have won. They said that in those days my smile had been just as, if not more, innocent and joyous.

The tweezers were lying on the table. I picked them up. They glinted pitilessly, like that long needle in Viraf’s father. I dropped them with a shudder, and they clattered against the table.

Daddy looked up questioningly. His hair was dishevelled as I had left it, and I waited, hoping he would ask me to continue. To offer to do it was beyond me, but I wanted desperately that he should ask me now. I glanced at his face discreetly, from the corner of my eye. The lines on his forehead stood out all too clearly, and the stubble flecked with white, which by this hour should have disappeared down the drain with the shaving water. I swore to myself that never again would I begrudge him my help; I would get all the white hairs, one by one, if he would only ask me; I would concentrate on the tweezers as never before, I would do it as if all our lives were riding on the efficacy of the tweezers, yes, I would continue to do it Sunday after Sunday, no matter how long it took.

Daddy put down the newspaper and removed his glasses. He rubbed his eyes, then went to the bathroom. How tired he looked, and how his shoulders drooped; his gait lacked confidence, and I’d never noticed that before. He did not speak to me even though I was praying hard that he would. Something inside me grew very heavy, and I tried to swallow, to dissolve that heaviness in saliva, but swallowing wasn’t easy either, the heaviness was blocking my throat.

I heard the sound of running water. Daddy was preparing to shave. I wanted to go and watch him, talk to him, laugh with him at the funny faces he made to get at all the tricky places with the razor, especially the cleft in his chin.

Instead, I threw myself on the bed. I felt like crying, and buried my face in the pillow. I wanted to cry for the way I had treated Viraf, and for his sick father with the long, cold needle in his arm and his rasping breath; for Mamaiji and her tired, darkened eyes spinning thread for our kustis , and for Mummy growing old in the dingy kitchen smelling of kerosene, where the Primus roared and her dreams were extinguished; I wanted to weep for myself, for not being able to hug Daddy when I wanted to, and for not ever saying thank you for cricket in the morning, and pigeons and bicycles and dreams; and for all the white hairs that I was powerless to stop.

Khorshedbai emerged from her room with a loosely newspapered package cradled in her arms. Then, as she had been doing every morning at eleven o’clock for the past four weeks, she began strewing its smelly contents over the veranda.

The veranda sat in the L of the flat’s two rooms. She was careful to let nothing fall by the door to her room. That she was on the ground floor of B Block, exposed to curious eyes passing in the compound, had not discouraged her for four weeks and did not discourage her now. None of the neighbours would interfere. Why, she did not know for certain. Perhaps out of respect for her grey hair. She also had the vague notion that praying every day at the agyaari had something to do with it.

Her work was methodical and thorough. She commenced with the window and its parapet, tossing onion skin, coconut husk, egg shells trailing gluey white, potato peelings, one strip of a banana skin, cauliflower leaves, and orange rind, all along the inside ledge. An eggshell rolled off. She picked it up and cracked it — there, that would keep it from falling — and replaced it on the parapet, between the coconut husk and potato peelings.

Pleased with her arrangement, Khorshedbai stepped to the door leading to the other room. Locked from the inside, as usual. The cowards. She draped the balance of the banana skin over the door handle, hung an elongated shred of fatty gristle from the knob, and scattered the remaining assorted peels and skins over the doorstep. The several bangles on her bony wrists tinkled softly: a delicate accompaniment while she worked over the veranda. Gentle though the sound was, it always annoyed her, announcing her presence like a cowbell. She pushed the bangles higher. Tight, around the forearms. To get rid of them without offending Ardesar would be such a comfort. The gold wedding bangle, encircling her wrist for forty years now, was the only one she cared for.