Out of India (26 page)

                
Which seed was cast but did not

                
sprout?

                
And why should it be otherwise for

                
the seed of man?

                
Which bucket went down but

                
came not up full of water?”

Then it seemed to him that everything had become suffused in purity and brightness—yes, even this bazaar where people haggled and made money and passed away the time in idle, worldly pursuits. He walked slowly home and up the wooden stairs, which were so dark (he often reproached the landlady) that one could fall and break one's neck. He went past the common lavatory and the door of the paralytic landlady, which was left open so that she could look out. He sat by the open window in his room, looking at the bright stars above and the bright street below, and couldn't sleep for hours because of feeling so good.

In the Paniwala house, it always seemed to be mealtime. A great deal of food was cooked. Paniwala himself could only eat very bland boiled food, on account of his weak digestion. Khorshed had a taste for continental food masked in cheese sauces, while for Pilla a meal was not a meal if it was not rice with various curries of fish and meat and a great number of spicy side dishes. Servants passed around the
table with dishes catering to all these various tastes. The sideboard that ran the length of the wall carried more dishes under silver covers, and there were pyramids of fruits, bought fresh every morning, that were so polished and immaculate that they appeared artificial. The meals lasted for hours. Plates kept getting changed and everyone chewed very slowly, and it got hotter and hotter, so that the Uncle, eating all he could, felt as if he were in a fever. The sisters talked endlessly, but their conversation seemed an activity indistinguishable from masticating. By the time the meal was over, the Uncle felt his mind and body bathed in perspiration, and in this state he had to retire with them into the drawing room, where sleep overtook everyone except Nargis and himself. The afternoon light that filtered through the slatted blinds made the room green and dim like an ocean bed; and uncle and niece sat staring at each other among the marble busts and potted plants, while the snores of the sleeping family lapped around them.

Once, as they sat like that, the Uncle saw tears oozing out of Nargis's eyes. It took him some time to realize they
were
tears—he stared at her as they dropped—and then he said in exasperation, “But what do you want?”

“Come and live here.”

“No!” he cried like a drowning man.

All that had been a long time ago, before Rusi was born. After that event, although the Uncle continued to live in his slum house and the Paniwala family continued to eat their succession of meals, there was a change in both establishments. During one very heavy Bombay monsoon, an upper balcony of the Uncle's house collapsed and the whole tenement suffered a severe shock, so that the cracks on the staircase walls gaped wider and plaster fell in flakes from the ceilings. What remained of the colored windowpanes dropped out, and some were replaced with plain glass and some with cardboard and some were simply forgotten till more rain came. Also, in the same year as this heavy monsoon, the Uncle's skin began to discolor. This was not unexpected; leukoderma was a family disease and, indeed, very prevalent in the Parsi community. The Uncle first noticed the small telltale spot on his thumb. Of course, the affliction continued to spread and then the spots broke out all over him like mildew, so that within a few years he was completely discolored. It was neither a painful nor a dangerous disease, only disfiguring.

The change in the Paniwala family was both more positive and more far-reaching. Somehow no one had expected any offspring, so that when Rusi nevertheless appeared, everyone was too excited to notice that his head was rather big or that it took him a long time to sit up. He was three before he could walk. “Let him take his time,” they all said, and his slowness became a virtue, like the growth of a very special flower that one must wait upon to unfold. Only the Uncle did not much like to look at him. Rusi was always the center around which the rest of the family was, quite literally, grouped. With his big head shaking, he tottered around on the carpet making guttural sounds, while they formed a smiling circle around him, encouraging him, calling his name, reciting long-forgotten baby rhymes, holding out loving fingers for him to steady himself on. They nodded at each other, and their soft, yellow, middle-aged faces beamed. And Nargis was one of them. The Uncle did not, as far as he could help it, look at the child; he looked at her. She had changed. Motherhood had ripened and extended her, and she was almost fat. But it suited her, and her eyes, which had once been tender and misty and shining as if through a veil, were now luminous with fulfillment. They never looked at the Uncle—only at her son.

The Uncle tried staying away. At first he thought he liked it. He sat for hours outside the sweetmeat seller's and read and talked to everyone who had time. He also talked to the people who lived in the tenement with him—especially with the paralytic landlady. She had as much time as he did. She had spent over twenty years lying on her bed, looking out of the open door at the people going up and down on the stairs. Sometimes he went in and sat with her and listened to her reflections on the transient stream of humanity flowing past her door. She was a student of palmistry and astrology and was always keen to tell his fortune. She grasped his discolored hand and studied it very earnestly and ignored his jokes about how the only fortune still left to him was the further fading of his pigmentation. She traced the lines of his palm and said she still saw a lot of beautiful living left. Then he turned the joke and said, “What about you?” Quite seriously, she stretched out her palm and interpreted its lines, and they too, it seemed, were as full of promise as a freshly sown field.

However long he stayed away now, Nargis never came to visit him or sent him any messages. If he wanted to see her, he had to
present himself there. When he did, she rarely seemed pleased. His clothes were very shabby—he only possessed two shirts and two patched trousers, and never renewed them till they were past all wear—but whereas before Rusi's birth Nargis had taken his appearance entirely for granted, now she often asked him, “Why do you come like that? How do you think it looks?” He feigned surprise and looked down at himself with an innocent expression. She was not amused. Once she even lost her temper and shouted at him that if he did not have enough money to buy clothes, then please take it from her; she said she would be glad to give it to him. Of course, he did have enough, as she knew; his checks came in regularly. Suddenly she became more angry and pulled out some rupee notes and flung them at his feet and rushed out of the room. There was a moment's silence; everyone was surprised, for she was usually so calm. Then one of the sisters bent down to pick up the money, gently clicking her tongue as she did so.

“She is upset,” she said.

“Yes, because of Rusi,” said the other sister.

“He had a little tummy trouble last night.”

“Naturally, she is upset.”

“Naturally.”

“A mother . . .”

“Of course.”

They went on like that, like a purling, soothing stream. They did this partly to cover up for Nargis, and partly for him, so that he might have time to collect himself. Although he sat quite still and with his gaze lowered to the carpet, he was trembling from head to foot. After a time, ignoring the sisters, he got up to leave. He walked very slowly down the stairs and was about to let himself out when Nargis called to him. He looked up. She was leaning over the curved banister with Rusi, whom she was dancing up and down in her arms. “Ask Uncle to come up and play with us!” she told Rusi. “Say, ‘Please, Uncle! Please, Uncle dear!'” For reply, Rusi opened his mouth wide and screamed. The Uncle did not look up again but continued his way toward the front door, which a servant was holding open for him. Nargis called down loudly, “Where are you going?”

At that the child was beside himself. His face went purple and his mouth was stretched open as wide as it would go, but no screams came out. This made him more frantic, and he caught his fingers in
his mother's hair, pulling it out of its pins, and then flailed his hands against her breasts. He was only three years old but as strong as a demon. She fell to the floor with him on top of her. The Uncle ran up the stairs as fast as he could. He tried to help her up, tugging at her from under the child, who now began to flail his fists at the Uncle.

“Yes yes, I'm all right,” Nargis said, to reassure them both. She managed to sit up; her hair was about her shoulders and there were scratches on her face. “Where are you going?” she asked the Uncle.

“I'm not going,” he said. “I'm here. Can't you see?” he shouted, “I'm here! Here!” very loudly, in order to make himself heard above the child's screams.

As Rusi grew up, it was decided that he was too brilliant. He did too much thinking. His mother and aunts were disturbed to see him sitting scowling and hunched in an armchair, sunk in deep processes of thought. Occasionally he would emerge with some fragment dredged up from that profundity. “There will be a series of natural disasters due to the explosion of hitherto undiscovered minerals from under the earth's surface,” he might say. He would fix his aunts with his brooding eyes and say, “You look out.” Then they became very disturbed—not because of his prophecy but because they feared the damage so much mental activity might do his brain. They would try to bring him some distraction—share some exciting piece of news with him regarding a wedding or a tea party, or feed him some sweet thing that he liked. Sometimes he accepted their offering graciously, sometimes not. He was unpredictable, though very passionate in his likes and dislikes.

The person to whom Rusi took the deepest dislike was the Uncle. He baited him mercilessly and had all sorts of unpleasant names for him. The one he used most frequently was the Leper, on account of the Uncle's skin disease. Sometimes he said he could not bear to be in the house with him and that either the Uncle or he himself must leave. Then the Uncle would leave. Next time he came, Rusi might be quite friendly to him—it was impossible to tell. The Uncle tried not to mind either way, and the rest of the family did all they could to make it up to him. At least Paniwala and his sisters did; Nargis was more unpredictable. Sometimes, when Rusi had been very harsh, she would follow the Uncle to the door and be very nice to him, but other times she would encourage Rusi and clap her hands
and laugh loudly in applause and then jeer when the Uncle got up to go away. On such occasions, the Uncle did not take the train or bus but walked all the way home through the city in the hope of tiring himself out. He never did, though, but lay awake half the night, saying to himself over and over, “Now enough, now enough.” Then he thought of the landlady downstairs eagerly reading in his palm that great things were still in store for him. It made him laugh, for he was in his seventies now.

Rusi ordered a lot of books, though he did not do much reading. His aunts said he didn't have to, because he had it all in his head already. For the same reason, there was not much point in his going to school; he only quarreled with the teachers, who were very ignorant and not at all up to his standards. In all the schools he tried, everyone eventually agreed that it would be better for him to leave. Then came a succession of private tutors, but here too there was the same trouble—there was just no one who knew as much as he did. Those who did not leave quite soon of their own accord had to be told to go, because their inferior qualities made him take such a dislike to them. Once he got so angry with one of them that he stabbed him with a penknife. Although everyone was disturbed by this incident, still no one said anything beyond what they always said: the boy was too highly strung. It came, his aunts explained, from having too active a mind. They recommended more protein in his diet and some supplementary vitamin pills. Nargis listened to them eagerly and went out to buy the pills. The three women tried to coax him to take them, but he laughed in derision and told them how he had a method, evolved by himself, of storing extra energy in his body through his own mineral deposits. He had plans to patent this method and expected to make a large fortune out of it. The aunts shook their heads behind his back and tapped their foreheads to indicate that he had too much brilliance for his own good. When he looked at them, they changed their expression, to appear as interested and intelligent as possible. He said that they were a couple of foolish old women who understood nothing, so what was the use of talking to them; the only person in the house who might understand something of what he was saying was his father, who was going to put up the money for the project.

His father was not seen very much in the house nowadays. It seemed he was very busy in the office and spent almost all his time there. Weeks passed when the Uncle did not meet him at all. When
he did, he found him more gentle than ever, but there was something furtive about him now and he did not like to meet anyone's eye. If he was present while Rusi was baiting the Uncle, he tried to remonstrate. He said, “Rusi, Rusi,” but so softly that his son probably failed to hear him. After a while, he would get up and quietly leave the room and not come back. Once, though, when this happened, the Uncle found him waiting for him downstairs by the door. “One moment,” Paniwala said and drew him into his study; he pressed the Uncle's hand as he did so. The Uncle wondered what he was going to say, and he waited and Paniwala also waited. A gold clock could be heard ticking in a very refined way.

When Paniwala at last did speak, it was on an unexpected subject. He informed the Uncle that the oil painting on the wall above his desk—it was of the Paniwala ancestor who had founded their fortune—was not done from life but had been copied from a photograph. Even the photograph was the only one of him known to be in existence; he had not been a man who could be induced to pose very often in a photographer's studio.