Cracking India (8 page)

A shout, a couple of curses, a laugh, break away from the hum of voices coming from the kitchen. And then a receding patter of bare feet.

They are after the gardener's dhoti.

Ayah and I jump up from the grass and following the pattering feet run along the side of the house and past Gita's window.

“What's happening?” Gita calls from within.

“They're after Hari's dhoti!” I shout.

We approach the servants' yard and, sure enough, see the ragged scuffle around Hari. Hari's spare, dark body is almost hidden. Ayah stops to one side and I dive into the tangle of limbs yelling for all I'm worth, contributing my mite of rowdyism to the general row.

Yousaf the odd-job man, Greek-profiled, curly-haired, towers mischievously over Hari. Everybody towers over the gardener—even the sweeper Moti. I, of course, am still far from towering. As is Papoo, the sweeper's daughter, who comes galloping and whooping from the servants' courtyard, an infant wobbling dangerously on her hip, and brandishing a long broom. Her wide, bold mouth flashing a handsome smile she plunges herself, the insouciant babe, and the fluffy broom into the scuffle.

Yousaf has a grip on Hari's hand—which is hanging on to the knot at his waist. Yousaf casually shakes and pulls the hand, trying to loosen its hold on the loincloth, and Hari's slight, taut body rocks back and forth and from side to side.

Imam Din, genial-faced, massive, towers behind Hari. He is our cook. His dusty feet, shod in curly-toed leather slippers, are placed flat apart. He drums his chest, flexes his muscles and emits the fierce
barruk
cries with which Punjabi village warriors bluff,
intimidate and challenge each other.
“O vay
!
”
he roars. “I'll chew you up and I won't even burp!” Majestically, good-naturedly, he lunges at the cloth between the gardener's legs.

Hari is having a hard time fending off the cook's hand with his spare arm, and also coping with Moti's sly attacks, and Papoo's tickling broom. The washerman, who has brought our laundry for the week, has also joined the melee. We are like a pack of puppies, worrying and attacking each other in a high-spirited gambol.

But we play to rules. Hari plays the jester—and he and I and they know he will not be hurt or denuded. His dhoti might come apart partially—perhaps expose a flash of black buttock to spice the sport—but this happens only rarely.

It is a good-natured romp until suddenly three shrill and familiar screeches blast my ears. “Bitch!
Haramzadi!
May you die!” And Muccho's grasping hand reaches for the root of her daughter's braid. The gaunt, bitter fingers close on the hair, yanking cruelly, and Papoo bows back and staggers backwards at an improbable angle. She falls sitting on her small buttocks, her legs straight out; still holding the jolted and blinking infant on her hip and the broom in her hand.

“Haram-khor!
Slut! Work-shirker! Move my eyes from you, and off you go!” shrieks Muccho in ungovernable rage, raining sharp, hard slaps on Papoo's head and back.

Ayah swoops down to snatch the infant to safety, and with an outstretched leg tries to fend off the blows. We abandon Hari. And the men, Hari included, group around Papoo, setting up a protective barrier of arms and hands, and muttering: “Forgive her, Muccho, she's just a child...You're too hard on her... ”

They cannot physically restrain Muccho. Handling a woman not related to them would be an impropriety. Her husband, Moti, dares not interfere either. Muccho would make his life intolerable. Submissive in all other respects, Muccho's murderous hatred of their daughter makes her irrational.

Despite the intervening arms, Muccho manages to pound her daughter with her fists and with swift vicious kicks. Her hands
protecting her head Papoo roils in a ragged ball in the dust, screaming, “Hai, I'm dead.”

I hate Muccho. I cannot understand her cruelty to her own daughter. I know that someday she will kill her. From the improbable angle of Papoo's twisted limbs, I'm sure she has already done so.

Papoo lies deathly still, crumpled in a dusty heap. Ayah, holding Muccho's son on her hip, dips her
palloo
into a mug of water and sponges the dust from Papoo's lifeless face. “I don't know what jinn gets into her every time she sees Papoo,” she declares. “Even a stepmother would be kinder... After all, what's the innocent child done that's so terrible?”

“What do you know?” Muccho screams. “She's no innocent! She's a curse-of-a-daughter... Disobedient, bone lazy, loose charactered... she'll shame us. She'll be the death of me, the whore!”

“How can she be your death? You've already killed her!” says Imam Din.

Imam Din rarely shows anger and his harshness intimidates Muccho. Afraid she might have gone too far, she shakes Papoo's shoulder roughly, as if to awaken her from sleep. “She'll be all right: don't carry on so,” she tells Imam Din.

“Oye, Papoooo ... Oye, doll,” she says with affected affection. “Come on, get up.”

She lays Papoo's head on her thigh and pinching her cheeks forces her mouth open. Papoo shows the whites of her eyes as Muccho pours water between her teeth from the mug Ayah brought.

Suddenly Muccho curses—and shies as if blinded. Papoo is spitting a fine spray of water straight into her face. As Muccho raises her hand to lash out Papoo leaps up, miraculously whole. Skipping nimbly from her mother's lunges, Papoo jerks her boyish hips and makes dark, grinning faces and rude and mocking sounds and gestures. All at once she pretends to go limp and, again rolling her eyes up to show their whites, crumples defenseless to the ground; and then spinning like a bundle of rags in a gale, flinging
her limbs about, twists away from Muccho's eager clutches; dodging, jeering, now tantalizingly close, now just out of reach. Papoo is not like any girl I know. Certainly not like the other servants' children, who are browbeaten into early submission. She is strong and high-spirited, and it's not easy to break her body... But there are subtler ways of breaking people.

“Wait till I fix you, you
shaitan!
You
choorail!”
Muccho screams vindictively. “You've got a jinn in you ... but I'll knock it out or I'm not your mother! Just you see what I have in store for you ... It'll put you right! You'll scream to the dead... May you die!”

We laugh at Papoo's feigning—and her funny faces and her mother's ranting. The men start to drift away and Papoo, followed by a cursing, shrieking Muccho aiming stones at her, imitates my limp—and lurching horribly, runs out on the road.

Papoo, recognizing the manipulative power of my limp—and perhaps empathizing with my condition, sometimes affects it. She never does so out of any malice. Besides she knows it aggravates Muccho to no end.

Ayah calls Imam Din the Catcher-in-the-kitchen. He sits in a corner on a wicker stool near the open pantry door and grabs anything soft that enters the kitchen. Sitting it, him, or her, on his lap he gently rocks. Ayah, I, Adi, Papoo, stray hens, pups, kittens and Rosy and Peter from next door have all had our turn. Rosy and I are bewildered by Imam Din's behavior. Adi and Peter, belonging perhaps to the same species, are less confused and more aggressive.

One day I come upon a dazed Rosy rocking dizzily on Imam Din's lap and I pull her off. “Don't do that, you damn fool!” I say, unleashing my bottled-up fury. “Why do you do that!”

Imam Din gives a sheepish grin, genially pulls us both squirming on his lap, offers us puffs from his hookah and proceeds to tell us we should not mind. It is what he playfully calls only a little “
masti
”—a bit of naughtiness.

And he tells me, “Lenny baby, don't swear—swearwords don't become you.”

I know. Adi can swear and it's a big joke. Rosy can curse and look cute. Papoo can let fly a string of invective, compared to which the tongawallah's invective sounds like a lullaby, and manages to appear stunningly roguish. And I cannot even say a damned “damn fool” without being told it does not suit me!

Imam Din possesses a sixth sense—a sensitive antenna that beams him a chart of our movements. And no matter how stealthily Ayah or I sneak into the kitchen, he is ready to pounce. He knows exactly who it is and he never pounces on Mother or Yousaf or Hari. Or us, if we are followed by any of them.

Imam Din is tolerated because of the gray bristles in his closely cropped hair. They permit him to get away with liberties that in a younger man would provoke, if not the wrath of God, at least dire consequences from Ayah. As it is, God looks the other
way and Ayah merely pulls away from him saying, “Have you no shame? Look at your gray hairs ... Fear God, at least!”

Imam Din is tall, big-bellied, barrel-chested, robust: he bicycles twenty miles to and from his village once a month to impregnate his fourth wife. Happily he is three times widowed and four times wed. He is the most respected elder in his village; and his benign temperament and wisdom have earned him a position of respect in our house and among the other servants on Warris Road. He is sixty-five years old. Now you see why he is allowed a certain latitude ? Indulged even, you might say?

Rocking apart, I like him and take my complaints to him. So does Ayah. He is a fair and imaginative arbitrator—and when Adi grows up a bit, and I grow, and Adi resolutely peeps through a crack in the bathroom door with a single-minded determination that is like an elemental force, Imam Din is the only one who can handle him.

 

Twice Imam Din has taken me to his village. I have only a vague recollection of pleasurable sensations. I was too young then.

It is not yet winter. I have been badgering Imam Din for the past week to take me on his next junket to his village home.

“Lenny baby, I'm not going to my village,” he says, sighing heavily. “I need to go to my grandson, Dost Mohammad's, village. It's too far... Pir Pindo is way beyond Amritsar ... Forty miles from Lahore as the crow flies!”

“It may be too far for a little crow; but it's not too far for a strong old ox like you,” says Ayah. She is toasting
phulkas
(miniature chapatties) on the glowing coal fire and deftly flipping them with tongs. “Poor child,” she says. “She wants so much to go ... It won't break your back to take her.”

“Not only my back, my legs too!” says Imam Din. “I'm not so young anymore ... I'll have a heart attack merely conveying myself there.”

“Go on with you!” says Ayah. “You should talk of growing old! I'll know that when I know that!”

“I'll never be too old to bother you,” murmurs Imam Din,
sighing, pushing his hubble-bubble away and advancing from his corner on Ayah.

Ayah whirls, tong-handed, glowing iron pointed at Imam Din.

“Arrey baba...,”
says Imam Din hunching his shoulders and holding his hands out defensively in front. “I still haven't recovered from the last time you scarred me. Aren't you ashamed... burning and maiming a harmless old man like me?”

“I know who's harmless and who isn't! Go on, sit down!” she commands.

Imam Din collapses meekly in his comer and drawing deeply on the hookah, causing the water in the smoke filter to gurgle, offers her a puff.

But Ayah is in a determined mood. “Will you take her with you or not?” she demands, tongs in hand: and Imam Din capitulates.

“Arrey baba, you're a Hitler! I'll take her. Even though my back snaps in two! Even though my legs fall off! I'll take her.”

“She weighs less than this
phulka
,” says Ayah turning her back on us and tossing a thin disk of wheat on the fire until it is swollen with trapped air.

The next morning Ayah wakes me up when it is still night. She helps me to dress quietly: wrestling my arms into last year's coat and my ears into a horrible pink peaked cap Electric-aunt knitted me two years ago. Imam Din and Ayah have a small altercation in the kitchen. Rather, Ayah scolds and Imam Din only protests and pacifies affably. I don't know what the argument is about, but I can guess. Imam Din must have attempted with some part of his anatomy the seduction Ice-candy-man conducts with his toes—with less audacity perhaps, and perhaps with less ingenuity—but, at last, Ayah is appeased—and properly apologized to—and we cycle down our drive with the first faint smudge of dawn diluting the night.

I sit on a small seat attached to the bar in front of Imam Din and his legs, like sturdy pistons, propel us at a staid and unaltering pace through the gullies and huddled bazaars behind Queens Road, then along the Mall past the stately pink sprawl of the High Court,
and the constricted alleys running on one side of Father's shop. It is an illuminating experience—my first glimpse of the awakening metropolis of two million bestirring itself to face a new day.

At the crack of dawn, Lahore, the city known as the garden of the Moguls, turns into a toilet. Creeping sleepily out of sagging tenements and hovels the populace squats along alleyways and unpaved street edges facing crumbling brick walls—and thin dark stains trickle between their feet halfway down the alleys.

Cycle bell ringing, Imam Din and I perambulate through the profusion of bared Lahori bottoms. I hang on to the handlebars as we wobble imperturbably over potholes past a view of backsides the dark hue of Punjabi soil—and the smooth, plump spheres of young women who hide their faces in their veils and bare their bottoms. The early risers squat before their mugs, lost in the private contemplative world of their ablutions, and only the children face the street unabashed, turning their heads and bright eyes to look at us.

Past Data Sahib's shrine, past the enormous marble domes of the Badshahi mosque floating in a gray mist, and just before we cross the Ravi bridge we rattle through the small Pathan section of town. Now I see only fierce tribesmen from the northern frontiers around the Khyber and Babusar Passes who descend to the plains in search of work. They leave their families behind in flinty impoverished valleys concealed in the arid and massive tumult of the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. They can afford to visit them only every two or three years. The tribesmen's broad, bared backsides are much paler, and splotched with red, and strong dark hair grows down their backs. In place of mugs there are small mounds of stone and scraps of newspaper and Imam Din sniffs: “What manner of people are these who don't clean their arses with water?”