Dahanu Road: A novel (25 page)

But soon Aspi Irani was cocooned inside the Mobile Casino with his brother and other devoted gamblers. The car was running and the AC was on. There had been complaints about the Mobile Casino from the residents of the apartments above Anna’s, as well as from the nursing home, and in response to the complaints Aspi Irani had installed a “buffalo horn” inside the Mobile Casino. With the precision of Big Ben he pressed the horn every hour, the loud grunt of a buffalo a reminder to the residents that the Mobile Casino would not budge. If anything, it had found a voice.

Zairos was playing carrom with Behrooz, who was scratching his back with a screwdriver from his spare-parts shop next door. The blue ivory striker slid across the board, delicately cut the Queen, and she fell, gently, into the pocket. Each time Behrooz missed a shot, which was often, he spat out an abuse in Farsi, a language so sweet even curse words sounded like blessings.

An old black Fiat pulled up at Anna’s. Manu, who had been resting against the overturned auto rickshaw, quickly got up. He assumed the car was in need of repair. A woman in a green salwar kameez got out of the car and walked straight up to the carrom board.

“Who is Zairos?” she asked.

Zairos was sure she knew who he was. They had never spoken, but in Dahanu everyone knew each other. Havovi was from Bangalore, and she had married a promising lawyer from Bombay. They had come to Dahanu on their honeymoon, and by the time the honeymoon had ended, she had filed for divorce. The owner of the Pearl Line Resort had said that she had caught her husband with a tribal. After that, she stayed in Dahanu, the very place that had destroyed her marriage even before it had begun.

“Who is Zairos?” she asked again.

“That’s me.”

“My name is Havovi,” she said, wiping the perspiration from her upper lip.

“I know who you are.”

“Good. Then you know that I belong to an organization for Warli rights.”

“Yes,” said Zairos. “You’re famous.”

Havovi must have been an attractive woman at one time, but now she had too many veins on her neck and forehead, the result of the anger she must have felt when she saw a tribal woman coiled around her husband.

“A case is being filed against you,” she said. “By a man named Laxman. Do you know him?”

“I know him.”

“He said that you and some others attacked him in his hut at night. You beat him and then took his wife away.”

Behrooz looked at Zairos, puzzled. He took his screwdriver and scratched his neck with it.

“Well, did you assault him?” asked Havovi.

“I don’t need to answer you,” said Zairos.

“A police case is being registered. I am taking Laxman with me to the police station. Now do you have anything to say?”

The man was a wife beater and it was time someone thrashed him to a pulp. This was not a matter for the courts to settle because it was not about Warli rights. It was about preventing a woman from turning black and blue.

But Zairos kept silent.

Merwan Mota, however, had something to say.

It came in the form of a strange sound, of him sucking on a one-litre bottle of Pepsi. He sucked with much love and craving as though the bottle contained oxygen. After finishing it, he crushed the bottle and threw it on the floor.

Then Bumble changed the angle of his Ray-Bans and placed his hands on his hips, a pose he had been trying to perfect since he was eleven. He blew cigarette smoke all over the carrom board. He was constipated and had smoked ten cigarettes in two hours in the hope that it would ease his condition.

“Havovi,” he said. “Do the Warlis have a remedy for constipation?”

“You think this is a joke,” she said.

“No,” said Zairos. “I am on the same side as you. You are protecting the man. I am protecting the woman.”

But then he checked himself.

This was not a matter of sides, of right and wrong. This woman could create trouble for him. He welcomed it. Sometimes the Bedouin in the desert longed for the sand to blind him.

The next day at Anna’s, as flies pushed their way through cigarette smoke like fighter planes through clouds, Zairos waited for the police to show up. He would rather they found him at Anna’s than Aspi Villa, as it would surely disturb his mother. So he stayed at Anna’s for as long as he could.

The stray dogs that made their home at Anna’s were nowhere in sight. Their sudden disappearance meant one thing—the circus was in town. Lions and tigers had to be fed, and at night the stray dogs were kidnapped by locals who freelanced as meat suppliers.

Keki the Italian brandished a copy of a new book, Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
“It has nothing to do with our prophet,” he said. But the title got everyone excited, especially Aspi Irani, who read a few pages, drove off in his car, and returned with a Sony two-in-one. He pressed Play, and as Anna fried vadas in a sea of oil, classical music was heard for the first time within those walls. “It’s by a composer named Strauss,” he said. “It’s called ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’ and even
this
has nothing to do with our prophet.”

Then another song followed, a rock number by Queen, whose lead singer, Freddie Mercury aka Farrokh Bulsara, was Parsi. “Now this man sings the truth,” said Aspi Irani as he joined his fellow Zoroastrian in singing “Fat Bottomed Girls.”

But the mention of bottoms had no effect on Anna, who was not his usual self. The Clark Gable smile had disappeared because his wife had gone back to Udipi to nurse her dying mother. When Anna poured tea for Zairos from his tall steel jug, it was without zest. Even the tea tasted different; it had absorbed his longing.

At the day’s end, Zairos had to go back to the farm to dispense the wages. He was disappointed that the police had not shown up. The wait was troubling, like a mosquito trapped in his ear.

When he saw Kusum missing from the line, Zairos left the money and ledger with Damu and went to her hut. Old Rami was on her haunches, smoking a beedi. When her lips closed, one diabolical tooth jutted out. A straw broom lay against the wall of the hut, its weak bristles unable to support its own weight.

“Where is Kusum?” he asked.

“At work,” said Rami.

“I just came from the farm. Why are you lying to me?”

“Seth, you have done enough for us.”

“Has something happened to her?”

Rami sucked on the beedi for a very long time. Then she pulled the beedi away from her, examined it at length. She wiped her brow with the palm of her hand. Her movements were slow and deliberate.

“She’s inside, isn’t she?” asked Zairos.

“Seth, you did not do a wise thing by beating up Laxman. Kusum is young and in time she will learn that what she asked you to do was wrong.”

“Did Laxman do something to her?”

Zairos should have listened to Kusum. She had warned him that Laxman would come for her and all he had done was buy her combs and clothes.

Two women from a neighbouring hut were staring at Zairos. Zairos could not tell if it was the setting sun that made them frown or his presence. They stood very still.

“Kusum,” he called out.

There was no reply. A dog panted its way towards Zairos, its tongue hanging out of its mouth with heaviness. An old man with powder hair ambled by, chewing on something.

“Did he touch her?” asked Zairos.

He had taken things too lightly. Now his negligence was churning inside him, bolting like a mad steed.

“What did you think he would do?” asked Rami. “Just sit and let you take his wife away? Just because you are a seth does not mean you are a god. You are not a god. Even the gods are not gods anymore.”

“Call her out now or I’m going in.”

But Zairos did not need to. Kusum stepped out of the hut.

There was a bald patch on the side of her head, red, the size of a large orange. The bastard had pulled out her hair.

Kusum slowly walked towards Zairos but stopped a few feet away.

Zairos could not bring himself to circle his arms around her. Rami was watching. The old man who chewed on something was watching. The two women from the neighbouring hut who did not move were watching.

For over an hour, Zairos waited among the bushes for Laxman to appear.

He understood how Ganpat must have felt. Laxman was painting his daughter’s body with his fists and there was nothing Ganpat could do. That is why he had droopy shoulders. They carried the shame of his daughter’s beatings.

At the other end of the hamlet, men sat in a circle and passed a pipe around. Laxman might be among them. It was hard to tell. But even if Zairos did spot Laxman, there was nothing Zairos could do. The fact that he was here was demeaning.

Laxman had an Irani seth hiding in the bushes.

If Zairos’ grandfather saw him now, he would get off that rocking chair and roar. He would set fire to the entire hamlet the way he did his wife’s books.

Maybe Chambal the dacoit was right. Wounding a man only added to the dragon breath, increased the fury tenfold. Zairos had not considered talking to Laxman. But it would have made no difference. With every strand of hair that Laxman pulled out, he was clutching in his hand the constellation of his own sickness, and if he could not see it, if he could not see the damage he had done when proof of it lay in his own fist, then no words could reach him, not even if they were distilled into the very liquor that he loved so much.

Even the wrath of the gods was something the Warlis did not seem to care about anymore. Zairos did not blame them. Just a few days ago, he had seen Damu walking through the farm with some sort of painted idol in his hand. Damu wanted to perform a religious ceremony in his hut, and had borrowed the idol from a neighbour.

It was as if the gods were scarce. There were not enough of them to go around, no one to keep count of misdeeds.

Finally, Laxman walked out of his hut. He was in a daze, so inebriated that he was unable to stand properly. Zairos was greeted by a foolish intoxication. He knew that it was beneath him to fight a Warli. It was unheard of.

In any case, violence had failed.

All he could do for now was hold Kusum’s body under the light of the moon and watch her bruises fade, like one season slowly moving into another.

That night Zairos did not feel like a seth. He was just another man with a whiskey glass in his hand, an impotent pawn. As he sat on his porch, the Rajdhani Express tore past Dahanu Road, a shrieking, piercing reptile. Fifty years ago, Zairos could have ordered Laxman to jump in front of the train and it would have been done. If there had been the slightest resistance, he would have been pushed and the matter settled. Today, Zairos might as well be the corpse, a well-dressed one, trying to pass as a landlord.

All he could think of was Laxman pulling out Kusum’s hair.

Zairos was unable to sleep. There were no dreams to haunt him. Everything was in front of him already, forcing him to lay in bed, wide-eyed with helplessness.

In the morning when he walked to his grandfather’s bungalow, his anger continued to rise, erupting like a land mine no matter where he placed his feet. His tea went cold, faster than usual, the cardamom and ginger failing to do anything as he waited for Kusum to show. He paced about the farm, the softness of the morning light unable to calm the trembling in his bones.