House of the Sun (6 page)

He had slept on this bed first with his brothers. The girls had not been allowed the privilege of the bed unless they were ill; they slept on the floor. The only privacy his parents had was an old sari pegged up on a washing line around their bed. The screen was new and had come in his absence, since his father was ill. The old sari had been no barrier to the noises that so often issued from behind it, that the listening children pretended not to hear. And afterwards had come Lakshmi and Padma and Veena, and two more born before their time. His thoughts were disturbed by his father’s coughing, and resentment flooded him again. Why make children when you could not afford to keep them? Other men after the chaos of Partition had learned to make money again. Why not his father? Why had he settled so quickly for his meagre living, of coaching the children of Sadhbela in their after-school hours? Many who had studied in his school, and in whom once his name drew awe, waited then for his easy sleep and into his open mouth dropped flies, pencil shavings or chillies. He never reproached his charges or their parents, who always paid less than promised on one pretext or another.

Such gentleness was no virtue. It was hard not to blame him for their suffering. He aspired to the
middle-class
standards of his birth; to the rewards of education and good marriages for his daughters, while submitting to squalor and whimpering babies, to a pot of watery rice gruel, to darned handed-down clothes or charitable cast-offs. The list went on and on. Sham swung himself off the bed.

‘Where are you going? To spend money you are hiding from us?’ Meena screeched as he opened the door.

‘You will be back soon, son?’ Rekha asked, peering
anxiously round the screen. His father coughed again. Sham slammed the door upon them all, unable to answer.

Mrs Watumal was bounced about uncomfortably as the taxi rattled over potholes. ‘You want to shake the teeth from my head?’ she chastised the driver. Her daughters wedged her tightly upon the seat,
perspiration
flowed between them.

‘It is too far,’ grumbled Lata, the youngest daughter.

‘Now we are near, here is Sion already,’ said Sunita, the elder, looking out of the window. Soon they drew up before a grimy block of flats in a quiet road, lined by dusty trees.

‘Wait,’ Mrs Watumal ordered the taxi. She had fixed the fare for the return journey before they left Sadhbela. She heaved herself out of the vehicle. Sweat plastered her petticoat to the backs of her legs. She pulled it free and rearranged her sari. Her daughters each offered an arm and she hobbled forward on short, rheumaticky legs.

There was no lift. With difficulty Mrs Watumal arrived at last upon the third floor. There was a fetid smell of damp cement, Burmawalla’s door stood open. A plate on the wall outside said,
S.
D.
R.
Burmawalla.
Horoscope.
Clairvoyance.
Special
powers.
Mrs Watumal and her daughters entered.

At the end of a short corridor a lavatory door gaped open. The stench of urine was overpowering. The white tiled floor of the toilet was wet, and covered with muddy footprints. To one side of the corridor was a waiting room, filled with metal chairs. On the walls were pictures of Nehru, Mrs Gandhi, and the King of Burma, adorned with a topknot and gold earrings. Several framed Urdu scripts hung beside them. The
room was crowded with people. Two assistants, a small swarthy man in a yellow checked shirt, and a muscular ayah with a pockmarked face, appeared frequently in the waiting room to scrutinize clients. Each time they passed the lavatory they slammed the door shut. It opened again immediately. Since they passed often there was a constant banging noise.

Mrs Watumal hobbled to the swing door of the
consulting
room. ‘We also are waiting,’ came cries from the other room. The assistant in the checked shirt appeared at the commotion. The swing doors bulged and released the ayah, who raised a muscular arm. Mrs Watumal retreated before the menacing limb. She did not sit down in the waiting room, but stood defiantly.

‘Who are these people?’ she demanded of Sunita, glaring at the crowd. Only a fat man with a briefcase, a skeletal man in a green suit, and a Parsi mother and son appeared worthy of note.

‘Ssh. Let us sit down,’ Sunita whispered. Lata had already taken a seat and tugged at her mother’s sari.

Mrs Watumal fixed her gaze upon the Parsi couple. The ironed folds were still crisply apparent on the boy’s white shirt, his eyes were earnest above a pubescent moustache. His mother blinked anxiously behind her heavy spectacles. A short, pink, frilly dress revealed her bare arms, and a neck scraggy as a fledgling’s.

‘What are you here for?’ Mrs Watumal demanded. Her daughters exchanged a glance and looked at their feet. They were thickset and no longer young. They had their mother’s protruding eyes, Sunita her father’s heavy jaw and Lata his wide-set teeth. Both had straight, shoulder-length hair. Lata’s was black, but Sunita took pride in the auburn glory of henna.

‘His shadow has become fat,’ the Parsi woman replied in a small, bleating voice, looking at her son. ‘At the same time worms have entered his stomach.’
The boy shifted nervously under Mrs Watumal’s
scrutiny
. She sat squarely on the chair, her legs wide apart beneath her sari. She clicked her tongue impatiently.

‘How long must we wait?’ she demanded.

‘Both are your daughters?’ the Parsi woman inquired, smiling at Lata and Sunita.

Mrs Watumal nodded. ‘I have also one son. Eldest child,’ she replied.

‘All must be married?’ questioned the woman. Mrs Watumal frowned.

‘Not yet,’ she answered and looked away.

‘Why are they not married?’ the woman insisted. ‘They are so old.’ Sunita and Lata lowered their heads.

Mrs Watumal gave a moan, and called upon God. ‘It is these modern times. They have been shown so many boys of good family but always, one is too fat, one his voice is too high, another his trousers are too baggy. Nowadays, they like smart boys who wear imported jeans.’

The Parsi woman observed the girls through thick lenses. ‘But your son, he of course is married?’ she encouraged.

Mrs Watumal shook her head, disinclined to
elaborate
. The state of non-alliance in her children’s lives was like a permanent hole within her which, at this moment, was filled with such fury that she had been driven to seek, upon a friend’s advice, the services of Burmawalla.

‘Very sorry indeed,’ the woman commiserated. Mrs Watumal accepted her condolence with a nod. ‘Both my daughters are married,’ the woman continued in a smug tone. ‘Now only this Sonny Jim is left and he is still young.’

‘You are lucky,’ Mrs Watumal answered. Her daughters lowered their heads further, the waiting room listened.

‘For my son it was almost arranged. Soon we would
have had the engagement,’ Mrs Watumal burst out in sudden distress, unable to contain herself. ‘We took him to the Sea Lounge of the Taj Mahal Hotel, to see the girl. She had been brought there to meet us by her parents. You have been to the Sea Lounge? It is very expensive. Only for an English sandwich without any taste and bread so thin there is nothing there, you must pay so many rupees. Anyway, for everything we paid happily, only to get Mohan married. And the girl was good; fair skinned and with a B.A. in domestic science. But suddenly, for no reason, we hear the family is not satisfied. They are stopping arrangements. This is not normal, someone is against us in this matter. Therefore, I have come here for consultation.’ Mrs Watumal nodded in the direction of the other room. ‘She is good?’

‘She is good. She knows everything,’ the Parsi woman answered.

An old man shuffled out of Burmawalla’s room. With sudden alacrity Mrs Watumal stood up and
presented
herself at the swing door. The ayah appeared too late to prevent her entering. ‘We too are waiting,’ came the cries from behind. Mrs Watumal took no notice. Sunita and Lata followed their mother sheepishly.

Burmawalla sat behind a large desk at one end of a small, bare room. She was an immense, ebony-skinned woman with a long, greasy plait and a turned-up nose, fleshy as dough. The whites of her eyes were clearly visible above and below the irises, and gave an unpleasant intensity to her stare.

Mrs Watumal sat down before the desk, her
daughters
stood behind her. She cleared her throat.
Burmawalla’s
eyes reminded her of two hardboiled eggs, she was unable to look away. She began to explain about Mohan, and the events in the Sea Lounge of the Taj Mahal Hotel. Burmawalla nodded.

‘Horoscope,’ she demanded. Mrs Watumal turned
to Sunita, who unwrapped the red booklet from a paper bag. Burmawalla shut her eyes, and held the book to her breast before she opened it. Upon a small slate she wrote in pink chalk the day, date and hour of Mohan’s birth in astrological shorthand. Mrs Watumal shifted nervously, unsettled by the intensity and the silence. She looked inquiringly at her daughters.

‘Why should I speak until I have words?’
Burmawalla
said suddenly, as if answering Mrs Watumal’s unspoken question. Mrs Watumal drew back with a frightened gasp, opened her mouth, then shut it.

‘L.S.H.B.’ Burmawalla announced. ‘These are the initials of people against you.’ Her voice was powerful, Mrs Watumal began to tremble. Suddenly
Burmawalla’s
hand shot across the desk top and imprisoned her wrist. Mrs Watumal drew back, breathing hard.

‘Hold still,’ Burmawalla growled in a deep, resonant tone. Mrs Watumal obeyed, unable to move in her grasp. A great throb seemed to ripple through her at the woman’s touch.

‘In you also there is magic. I can feel it,’ Burmawalla hissed, her eyes closed in concentration.

‘What to do?’ Mrs Watumal whispered in terror.

‘I will give a potion. It is to be drunk. This magic must pass out. It cannot be vomited up.’ Burmawalla called to the ayah who appeared with a small bottle of clear liquid. Burmawalla held it near her lips,
muttering
and blowing fiercely into it. Then she corked the bottle and handed it to Mrs Watumal.

‘It is only water,’ she said, ‘but now the spell is within it. Give it to the boy. When it is empty, you too will be empty.’ Burmawalla gave a nod to indicate the termination of the consultation. Mrs Watumal backed quickly from the room.

*

Mr Watumal scratched his chest and stretched upon the sofa. A smell of frying came from the kitchen.
Through the open door he watched Lata turn potato patties in a pan. She wore a faded flowered kurta and loose, matching trousers. The angle of the light made her double chin even more pronounced than usual. She was twenty-nine and looked middle-aged; she was the younger of his daughters.

Sunita lay on the floor at his feet, absorbed in a magazine; next week she would be thirty-one. A sudden panic filled him, as it did often nowadays when he thought of his daughters. Soon both girls would have no choice but to marry widowers, or divorcees. Mr Watumal passed a hand over his brow in distress. If there had been money for plentiful dowries, both girls would have been married already. They were good natured; they knew how to cook and sew. They should be thickening with children and contentment, instead they swelled with frustration. They tended to fussiness in the selection of husbands, and fussiness was not possible for plain girls without substantial dowries. Mr Watumal sighed, his heart bled when he looked at them both.

Things had been good in the beginning; Mr
Watumal
had done well at first in Bombay. His wife had dreamed of dowries then, and diamonds and opulent interiors, and indulged herself as she could. In Sukkur Mr Watumal had been an importer of glass and
chinaware
, sold from a small shop above which he lived with his family. When business was slow he left the shop to his brother, loaded a cart with boxes behind a horse, and travelled the area about Rohri and Sukkur, selling from door to door. In his younger days he was a tall, fleshily handsome man, who joked familiarly with the women before whom he spread his wares; bone china from England, Irish crystal, painted glass from Italy and France.

Warehouses of fine goods all over Sind were left to looters at the time of Partition, but Mr Watumal had
been lucky. As a travelling salesman he had an ear to the ground, and profitable entry into both Hindu and Muslim homes. He became aware early on of the approaching cataclysm, sold out to a Muslim colleague, and was one of the first to leave Sukkur. He had always wanted to go to Bombay. Many laughed in his face. Lokumal Devnani refused to believe Mr Watumal’s warnings, and even bought a smallholding of land from him, certain Partition would never come. Mr Watumal had time to wire his money to Bombay, and follow it there with his family. He suffered none of the distress that accompanied other departures.

In Bombay, Mr Watumal decided to enter industry. The title Industrialist had a ring to it that the common term Trader could not match. He invested his money in a pen nib factory, and prospered quickly from the start. Hoardings for his pen nibs appeared on bus
shelters
and bridges in Bombay. He also invested in a home in Sadhbela, happy to settle amongst his old acquaintances. His only disappointment was to
discover
that the people before whom he had once spread his chinaware still thought of him as a trader. They refused to show the appropriate respect, and this cut Mrs Watumal deeply.

It was difficult to say when or why things
deteriorated
. As blight hits a fine crop, it hit Mr Watumal’s factory. No doctoring or blood-letting could slow its decline. On the sofa, waiting now for his lunch, Mr Watumal sighed and scratched his chest. He watched Lata dish out some rice in the kitchen; the potato cakes were piled on a plate. To lose a fortune to the ravages of war seemed a more bearable destiny to Mr Watumal than shameful obliteration by bad luck. He sighed again and turned his head to observe his son Mohan, crouching beneath the glass-topped table, immersed in a work of repair. He blamed himself sometimes for his son’s lethargy; the boy might feel stimulated if business
was thriving. Instead, it was difficult to coax him to the factory. A deep shame overwhelmed Mr Watumal. His own bad luck had erased bright futures for his daughters, and a career for his son. The weight of these thoughts sat heavily upon him, as he waited for his lunch.

Mohan crawled out from beneath the dining table. ‘I think it will hold now,’ he said, standing up to view a long crack in the glass top that he had strengthened with a wide strip of pink Elastoplast.

The glass-topped table had been an impractical
decision
at a time of prosperity years ago. Mrs Watumal had insisted that their home be redecorated in the style of Mrs Murjani, and Mr Watumal had been glad to indulge her. She had secretly ascertained the design of the Murjanis’ furniture, the colour of coverings, and the pattern of their moulded ceilings. She had avoided the expensive place in Churchgate Mrs Murjani patronized, and had found instead a cheap
cabinet-maker
in Chor Bazaar. His wood was inferior but his effect was good, which had seemed to Mrs Watumal the more important thing.

Mrs Murjani had not been pleased with this close imitation of her taste, and refused for months to speak to Mrs Watumal. But since that time Mrs Murjani had changed her interiors twice, and had reached such a peak of extravagance with the Maharajah’s crystal chairs that she had placed herself in a league beyond all mimicry. And Mrs Watumal had had no further opportunity to develop her decorative skills. Her
husband’s
fortunes had swiftly declined. His factory had union troubles, and problems with supplies of steel. Mr Watumal turned to the business of money-lending to provide for his family. Had he had more to lend, he might have done better.