Dahanu Road: A novel (5 page)

It had made her father go to Shapur seth for money. If her husband was given money, he would grant her a divorce. But she knew the truth. Laxman would not have left her even then. He would have taken the money and kept her.

Into a thicket of trees Kusum went, until she reached the banks of a stream. The monsoon season was a while away, so the stream was dry. She tested the texture of the soil with the shovel. Satisfied, she started digging. When the soil suddenly became hard, she stood on the shovel until it no longer offered any resistance.

In the distance, the hills of Dahanu rose and fell like the very hopes of her people, the Warlis—the Kings of the Jungle. At least that was what the folk tales proclaimed her people to be. That was what the witch doctors, high on daru, always called themselves. If only they had seen her father hanging from a chickoo tree, the folk tales would be revised.

But it had to happen.

The noose had tightened around her father’s neck years ago. It was because Ganpat, like his father Vithal before him, was the keeper of his people’s stories. Stories whose weight he was not strong enough to bear.

Ever since she could remember, he had been a witness.

It had prevented him from being what a father should be, strong and unafraid.

It confused her, terrified her even, when her father woke in the middle of the night screaming.

She was only a child.

She could not understand why there was so much sweat on her father’s face. In the dark, his cheeks had the shine of a rich man who had dipped himself in oil.

Upon waking, upon screaming, he would grab her, touch her, just to make sure she was alive. Then he would cradle her in his arms and rock back and forth, back and forth, until he finally fell asleep again. But the hastiness of his breath, the panic of chattering teeth, the jowls losing colour, all of it would seep into her, create an unnatural music, a steady growl.

Kusum would crawl out of his embrace and go to her mother Kamla, who would say to her, “Your father has visited the time of the screams again.”

That was all her mother told her.

She would have to fall asleep listening to the wild dogs outside. Her father’s hysteria always got the dogs going. They would stand at the entrance to the hut, the drool hanging from their snarling teeth.

It was only years later that Kusum found out why her father had nightmares.

Now it was almost fifty years since that incident, when the landlords’ men had attacked a Warli hamlet. The Warli men, in hundreds, had gone to the beach with red flags in their hands to attend a political rally that promised to put an end to their slavery. Only the women, children, and the very old remained at home.

Ganpat was staying away from the farm he lived on, in a witch doctor’s hut, along with his mother and newborn sister. The newborn had a violent cough and the witch doctor had treated her with herbs. Ganpat was only five years old. The witch doctor’s wife was asleep in one corner, her eyes half open so that only the whites could be seen like the whites of eggs. Ganpat’s mother was asleep in a similar position with the infant next to her on the ground.

The thatched ground was warm. Ganpat loved placing his palms on the warm mud floor, and he felt the slight rumble on the floor caused by the approaching horses.

The infant must have felt a slight tingle in her back, but all she must have done was wiggle her toes in excitement. She must have opened her eyes slowly, seen the sack of grain, the earthen pots, the witch doctor’s sorcery paraphernalia, and wiggled her toes once more and drifted back to sleep. Only the witch doctor’s wife sensed that something was wrong. But by the time she got to her feet, the landlords’ men had entered the hut and begun destroying everything.

Ganpat’s mother started screaming because where there should have been her child, there was a sack of grain. Where there should have been her child, there was an earthen pot.

She continued to shriek long after the men left, unable to go near the body, and Ganpat, who was unsure why his mother was screaming so hard, went near the sack of grain and saw his sister’s tiny wrist, her curled fingers …

It was at this point that he always woke up, covered in sweat.

It did not matter who the men were. It did not matter which landlords sent them—Hindu, Muslim, or Zoroastrian. They were all responsible for her father’s death.

With a start like this, what else could her father do but take his own life?

Shovel in hand, she walked back to her father’s hut. His body had not yet arrived because the sun was still high. He had to
be brought to her after sundown, under the cover of darkness, as though he were something shameful.

But the young Irani seth was made that way.

Just as her back was strong from walking miles, from bending down, from climbing trees, digging holes, and carrying wood, a seth’s back was weak from sitting all day, eating chicken and inhaling snuff, counting money and issuing orders. Men who gave orders did not have strong backs.

This was the first time she had seen him in years. She had no idea what kind of man he had turned out to be. She had noticed some trace of kindness on his face when she got into the tractor. Only a trace, faint as a mote of dust. But even that could be a foolish notion.

It did not matter. What mattered was that the sun was still up. She would have to wait.

She stared at the hut she had grown up in. There were eleven other huts like it in the hamlet. They all looked the same except for the one opposite her father’s, which sold rice, chana, and peppermints. A black goat rested under its shade, raising its head, then slumping back into the heat.

She would have to go inside the hut at some point.

Her father’s rubber slippers were at the entrance, one on top of the other, the blue forked straps wobbly and loose.

Bending her head, she went through the shady mouth of the hut.

Inside, on a clothesline, her father’s clothes, some still damp.

She ran her fingers along the line, felt its tautness. One by one, she started taking things down: a pair of khaki shorts, a brown cotton shirt, a red T-shirt.

She was seized by a sudden emptiness, the sharpness of a toothache.

Only one piece of clothing remained on the line, a white vest stretched out of shape. She brought it down, and with it, the clothesline.

When she put the vest against her face, the smell of her father rushed to her, warm and familiar. Soon this smell would disappear, just like her mother’s did all those years ago.

Kusum did not want to stay awake.

On the thatched ground she lay, curled into a ball, begging to go back to the womb.

Zairos had to make sure that Damu was not drunk. On most evenings, as soon as the farm labour ended, the workers’ drinking began. By sundown, every cell of theirs was soaked in country liquor.

Tonight, Damu needed to be alert.

Ganpat’s body was in the back of the tractor, sending out a whiff strong enough to make the stars change positions. The tractor went down the slope, its feeble headlights barely lighting the gravel path.

For Zairos, the day was not over yet.

No matter how late it was he always went to wish his grandfather good night. It was a ritual, a tribute to the nocturnal. For Shapur Irani never slept. He was always in an in-between state, a man who constantly travelled between two continents, except that in Shapur Irani’s case those continents were sleep and wakefulness.

The white tube light on his porch was on, surrounded by a swarm of moths. There were days when Shapur Irani sat in his rocking chair with stillness only the dead could possess. But men like Shapur Irani did not die in their sleep. Before going, he would shake the earth, rattle it with all his might to announce his arrival to the heavens.

“I shall warn the angels not to come in my way,” he once told Zairos. “Once I have taken flight, I shall go straight to Banu.”

When Zairos was little, it was not hard for him to imagine his grandfather flying. To Zairos, he was indeed a superhero, much like the great warrior Rostam in the
Shahnameh,
the Persian Book of Kings, who covered himself in leopard skin, wore a cast-iron helmet, battled dragons and witches, and cut out a demon’s heart and liver with his knife.

Zairos would walk about the farm and transform from a boy to a man of six feet five inches and pretend that he was choking enormous snakes with his fist. He would scream, roar, bang his knuckles into the soil, pull out white-haired demons, hold enemy horses by the tail and throw them into orbit until they were singed by the sun.

But what he loved doing most was digging holes beneath chickoo trees because Shapur Irani had told him that’s where he used to hide whiskey bottles.

Mithoo would chide her father-in-law: “Why do you tell him these stories? You want him to be a drunkard?” And Shapur Irani would reply, “They are not stories.”

At the time Zairos did not understand what that meant, but he did now. Those were not just tales. By sharing his past, his grandfather was sharing blood.

“Pa,” said Zairos, “I want to ask you something. It’s about Ganpat. His daughter told me that he was on his way to see you this morning.”

“He did see me,” replied Shapur Irani. “A couple of hours or so before you found him.”

“What did he want?”

“Money,” said Shapur Irani. “What else do these Warlis want besides money, so they can drink and destroy their livers?”

“But after all these years what made him think that you would give him any? And why did he kill himself after that?”

“Zairos, it is impossible to know the Warli heart.”

Zairos wanted his grandfather to go on, but the man did not say more.

Even though Zairos did not have to, he wanted to offer Kusum some sort of explanation. Perhaps he had not done the right thing by letting the body remain hanging from the tree until Kusum got there. But if he had brought the body down, he could have been accused of foul play.

He needed her to know that he was not being callous.

His grandfather would never approve. Masters did not explain things.

Shapur Irani slowly rubbed his right knee through his white pyjamas. Memories were stored in every part of his body, and when they erupted, they had to be soothed. Zairos wondered how his grandfather managed to sit in that chair all day, alone in this bungalow with his male servant. He took a regular morning walk and talked to his trees, and he shared something beautiful with them, but that would never be enough for Zairos.

“In a way, Ganpat is lucky,” said Shapur Irani. “I don’t think I’m ever going to die. I have the worst luck in the world.”

It was strange that he thought of Ganpat’s suicide as luck. It reduced Ganpat to a creature with no power at all.

“Zairos, after I am dead, you must never sell this land. Without this land, we are nothing. Even when the British were tearing this country apart, this land was mine. This land was my own country. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“There is a tree not far away from here. A mango tree. Do you know which one I am talking about? I was standing under that tree when my first son, your Khodi kaka, was born. Now my son is dead but that tree is still alive. Do you see what I mean? Trees do not get heart attacks. They simply get old, and the older they are, the stronger they get and the deeper their roots go, and the more difficult it is to move them.”

Zairos could tell that his grandfather was about to launch into a story.

It always started with the rubbing of knees. Then Shapur Irani would shut his eyes tight, as he was doing now, as though by sheer willpower he would be able to transport his grandson into the past. Slowly the tightness in Shapur Irani’s eyelids increased, until they fluttered like the wings of an injured bird, and he took Zairos with him to an older, more promising time.

SHAPUR IRANI STARED
at the hole he made in the ground. He was satisfied that it was large enough to hide a whiskey bottle. The tool he used for digging was forked like a cobra’s tongue. He put it in the pocket of his white trousers and looked to the sky for warplanes. The war was on and India was just a rabbit. It could be shot down at any time by an irate hunter. Even though the country had no role in the war, it was a fear he had, that a great demon would descend from the sky and breathe fire on all his chickoo trees, and his beloved fruit orchard would turn to smouldering ash.