Their Language of Love (16 page)

Consumed by curiosity, hanging on to the megaphone and the little Samsonite attaché case in which he kept his amplifiers, the preacher had moved closer with his props. His brown eyes bulging, he craned his neck and danced from foot to foot to peek over the heads of the small crowd.

Once he grasped what had happened, the man of God waved his Bible, moulded his fiery features into a righteous glower and, putting his megaphone to his mouth, bellowed: ‘The wages of sin are death! Glory to the Lord. Thou shalt not gamble! Vengeance is the Lord’s! Amen! Repent! The end of the world is coming! Hallelujah!’

The policemen winced at the onslaught on their ears and raised their capped heads. The burlier of the two cops took a few menacing steps towards the preacher. The preacher hastily turned away and belted out God’s Word with his back to the crowd. But one could tell from the wobbly note in his thunder that his aggrieved heart was no longer in his sermon.

As they rode the succession of buses to the seminary, Nav remarked: ‘Well, my dear, one lives and learns. Remember, one never gets something for nothing in America, and if you’re stupid enough to expect to, you’ll get ripped off. I hope it’s been a lesson to you.’

Roshni, who had maintained a suitably sympathetic silence
as she observed her husband’s bruised face slowly discolour and grow puffy, gave his arm a squeeze. She lay her head on his shoulder, and said: ‘I’m glad you stood up to that horrible bully!’

The next morning Nav told Roshni that he was taking her out for lunch to a very special place.

She was still in bed. ‘Let me see your face first,’ she said, and propped herself on an elbow to examine it.

Nav promptly moved his face to within an inch of hers and grabbed her amorously.

But Roshni’s alarm for his wounds was too great to allow for amorous shenanigans. She pushed Nav away with a strength and vehemence that surprised him, and shouted, ‘I want to see your face. Not your damn cock!’

Nav, shocked by the unexpected words that issued from the naive lips of his bride from Bulsar, let go of Roshni. He stood up, looking dazed. Was there to be no end to the surprises this unusual girl was to awe him with?

Roshni got out of bed and, holding Nav at a suitable distance by his pajama-suit front, much as the Three-Card-Monte dealer had held him the day before, scrutinized his face. It appeared to be even more puffy and swollen. But in the dingy room with light coming in only from a narrow curtained window, the colours appeared less strident.

Roshni took pains to get all dressed up and added the finishing touch by putting on the delicately dangling ruby earrings given to her by Nav’s mother. After grabbing a quick cup of coffee and some doughnuts in the Seminary hall at noon, they rushed off to catch a bus.

Nav followed Roshni through the impressive glass doors of the towering World Trade Center. He had not seen Roshni in the navy silk sari with a magenta border (that matched her earrings) before. She was glowing duskily and Nav felt she was growing more beautiful by the moment. Nav was glad he had decked himself out in brown trousers and a brown tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.

They stood in line for the elevator. When the doors opened to receive them, Roshni gingerly stepped into the curved glass cocoon as if she was stepping into the next century.

Although her senses were awash with wonder, Roshni stared impassively at the rapidly receding marble floor and the dwindling green incandescence of the atrium. Nav had cautioned her not to gawk and gush like a tourist: she’d stand a good chance of being mugged if she did.

It seemed to Roshni that every day she discovered something to enchant her in her new country. Mindful of her husband’s tuition, she absorbed the enchantment discreetly, hoarding the throb of her heart like a secret treasure. As she shot into the sky in the glass and aluminium missile Roshni could scarcely believe that she, the ugly duckling of her family in Bulsar, had stumbled somehow into this magical new world with its blazing lights, rocketing elevators and incandescent indoor gardens with huge overhanging trees. How gladly she’d show off all this splendour to her relatives when they visited. She yearned to see the expressions of wonderment on their faces.

The captain led them to a small table. They sat across each other as the restaurant rotated centimetre by centimetre
to give them a privileged bird’s-eye view of New York. But Roshni only looked through the glass when Nav pointed out a landmark that was familiar to them. Otherwise the fringed darkness of her eyes, soft with unfathomable emotion, remained on her husband’s abused face.

In the harsh light pouring in from the sky Nav’s battered skin displayed all the colours of the rainbow. And lit also by happiness from within, Nav was radiant. ‘Do you know,’ he said, the sweep of his arm embracing Manhattan, as his eyes caressed Roshni, ‘more money changes hands in New York in one hour than in a whole year in Bombay?’

‘Really?’ Roshni said, leaning forward in her chair and placing her arms, folded one upon the other, on the table. Surrendering to the moment of bliss she looked at her young husband tenderly. ‘God, you really know so much! You’re quite amazing.’

‘If you stick around with me you’ll become pretty amazing too,’ he teased. ‘It’s only because I’ve been here longer. You’ll soon have trivia of your own to share with your family when they visit.’

Roshni smiled. She knew him well enough by now to decode his speech.

This was their language of love.

Sehra-bai suffered a stroke two years ago. She goes through phases of intense reminiscence. She is aware that her mind is reliving an old memory, yet the memory is so immediate that all the emotions that accompanied her then, are with her now. Sometimes unbearable hurt surfaces, and her poor forehead crinkles up with her inability to cope with the rage, or guilt, or sadness that swamps her.

When Ruby notices this, and she is not unduly rushed, she holds her mother’s wasted body. Often she rubs her face against Sehra-bai’s and strokes her chest beneath the collarbone to calm her as she listens to her mother. At such times Sehra-bai might unburden an old pain her mind brutally resurrected, and they discuss the episode as if it has present currency. They structure new strategies to cope with the situation, until Sehra-bai feels more in control of the events that had rendered her so helpless then.

And, almost as often, she preens—gloating at her wit in putting down some past rival, or her charm in vanquishing an ancient foe. At such times, like a geisha expertly flipping open a delicately wrought fan, Sehra-bai audaciously unfurls
the radiant spectrum of her vanished beauty. It is unbearably poignant—this seventy-two-year-old woman, propped up with pillows, pinned by paralysis to her bed, recalling the sunlit moments that peaked amidst the darkened hollows of her life like snow-capped mountains.

Late one December evening, when Ruby wheels her mother from the living room to her bedroom, Sehra-bai is in a chirpy mood. Ruby is exhausted. They’ve watched
Fawlty Towers
. It has been Sehra-bai’s favourite show ever since it suddenly popped up on Pakistan TV screens in the 1980s. Tonight they watched John Cleese stomp his wacky way through a roomful of befuddled guests in the hotel he runs with such lunatic abandon. Alternately supporting her stomach and wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, Sehra-bai hooted with laughter. She is not ready for bed. ‘I want to talk for a bit,’ she says when Ruby removes her headscarf and shawl. ‘I know I won’t be able to sleep.’ The night nurse has already placed her hot-water-bag in her bed and is turning down the comforter.

Ruby stands before her mother’s wheelchair, her hands hanging helplessly down her sides. ‘Can we talk tomorrow? I’m ready to drop.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Sehra-bai. ‘Wait till you hear what I’ve to say; it’ll refresh you, I promise! Please?’ she pleads.

The sprightly gleam in her mother’s eye warns Ruby. She knows from experience that Sehra-bai will keep the house awake unless she is permitted to have her say. The nurse turns
from stacking and smoothing the pillows to raise resigned eyebrows. She shrugs her plump shoulders and throws Ruby an amused glance.

Ruby capitulates. ‘Oh, all right,’ she says, wearily, as if indulging a capricious child, and wraps the fine old cashmere shawl back around Sehra-bai’s legs. She sits down on her mother’s bed and the nurse positions the wheelchair closer to her. The bed is raised on bricks to make it easier for them to lay her down. ‘So? What do we talk about?’ Ruby asks as the nurse quietly leaves the room and shuts the door behind her.

Pointy chin and toothless mouth parodying the prim, grave expression of her youth, Sehra-bai tells her daughter: ‘Whenever I went to the Central Bank in Nila Gumbad, it was ‘pens-down’ time. You never knew that, did you?’

Ruby is puzzled. The tiny Parsee community she belongs to has a tedious reputation for loyalty and hard work. And Parsee bankers were hardly the type to abandon their duty or loyalty and lay down their pens in a seditious labour strike. Nor were the Hindu and Sikh bankers who fled Lahore at Partition likely to; or the staff of Muslims who replaced them after 1947. This was especially so during the days of the British Raj that her mother is harking back to.

Ruby recalls childhood visits with her mother to the cavernous, neon-lit Central Bank hall, segmented like a hive by shallow mahogany panelling, with legions of brown men bent over enormous ledgers like so many drones. In summer their shirt pockets bore ink stains and were stuffed with pens and pencil stubs.

‘Pens-down time?’ Ruby asks, frowning over the rim of
her glasses, peering suspiciously into her mother’s sanguine, gimlet eye.

‘Yes,’ says Sehra-bai, girlishly prim, exactly as she would have spoken at that time she refers to as her ‘heyday’. ‘Jal Jariwalla gave them the permission to. Pesi Cooper too, when he became bank manager. Whenever I walked into the bank, the men were permitted to put down their pens!’

‘But what on earth for?’ Ruby asks, feigning astonishment, although by this time she’s cottoned on to her mother’s drift.

‘So they could stop working to look at me! What else!’

Eyes twinkling, face flung back and lit up in a series of mischievously breaking smiles and silent laughter—the kind that ignites sparks of unruly joy in the hearts and eyes of Sehra-bai’s children and grandchildren, whom she keeps attracting to her bedside like expectant honeybees—she adds, ‘I freshened their eyes.’

‘Oh, Mum, you’re too much,’ says Ruby, laughing despite her earlier inclination to remain indifferent. She bends forward to nuzzle her face against her mother’s headscarf. Sehra-bai has merged her daughter’s earlier contention about being ‘too tired’ with her own assertion that what she has to say will ‘refresh’ her, and given them narrative context. That’s sharper than anything Ruby could ever conjure up at such short notice.

‘I told you I’d freshen you up,’ says Sehra-bai gleefully, and her conceited smile stretches her mouth until it breaks in a triumphant chortle.

Ruby kisses the top of her head. ‘You did,’ she says, ‘I’m so freshened I won’t be able to sleep.’ They chat for almost
an hour until, finally, Ruby calls the nurse and together they lift Sehra-bai onto the bed.

‘How many boyfriends did you have, Grannums?’ Perin asks. She is besotted by her grandmother.

Ruby sits back with an affectionate half-smile. She enjoys these exchanges between her daughter and her mother.

‘None. We didn’t have boyfriends in my days,’ says Grannums firmly. ‘Your grandfather was my first boyfriend. Not even kissy-cuddly allowed before marriage.’ A touch of mischief lifts her tone and she adds: ‘But when the family went to the cinema, and it was dark, he would hold my hand.’

‘And after marriage? How many boyfriends did you kissy-cuddly with?’

Although Sehra-bai indulges her granddaughter brazenly, there is a limit to the familiarity she will permit. She stops short of allowing it to undermine her authority as grandmother. Perin frequently skirts the periphery, and tests the limits of her grandparent’s tolerance. This mixture of devotion and teasing, obedience and indulgence, has forged an inextricable bond between them.

‘I had no boyfriends! Not the way you mean boyfriend … silly girl,’ says Sehra-bai, tartly. ‘But I had admirers. Many.’

‘Really Grannums? Tell us! Who?’

‘I’ll only name the ones who’re dead.’

‘They must all be dead by now,’ declares Perin heartlessly. But Perin’s voice is mellow with affection. No matter what her grandmother says, or how truculently she frequently behaves,
Perin’s demeanour and tone are consistently indulgent. Otherwise impatient, often short with her parents, Perin has a limitless store of patience where it concerns Sehra-bai. She loves to engage her easily distracted grandmother in little chats, and has become expert at ferreting out family secrets.

‘A lot you know!’ says Sehra-bai, affronted. ‘The older I grew, the younger my admirers became.’ But her bravado is fragile, and Sehra-bai looks uncertain. She’s not sure they believe her.

Ruby signals her daughter with her eyes, and Perin immediately changes her tack. She leans over to tenderly smooth the wounded crevices that have formed between Sehra-bai’s eyes.

‘It must feel like the touch of dove-down,’ thinks Ruby, covertly observing her daughter through a thick fringe of lashes. She is suddenly suffused by a curiously satisfying sense of well-being. It is somehow appropriate that they should switch roles—the granddaughter as nurturer. Only the very young possess that surfeit of tenderness to lavish on the very old.

Holding her grandmother’s hands captive in hers, Perin extracts the names of Grannums’s dead admirers. Sehra-bai’s memory somewhat blurs the distinction between the dead and the still alive. But Ruby knows them all.

At cricket matches and dinner parties Ruby still runs into her mother’s ‘younger’ admirers—who are by now old codgers. A healthy assortment of Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, they ruminate aloud—respectfully, of course—with remarks like, ‘We were all in love with your
mother,’ or, as G. Moinuddeen recently told her, ‘When Mrs Edulji and Mrs Kandawalla promenaded up and down the Mall in Murree, the entire male population of the hill-station turned up to look at them.’

Even in her heyday, before age and respectability turned Sehra into Sehra-bai, her mother couldn’t possibly have been aware of all her admirers.

Ruby’s was a manically isolated and angular adolescence and there was a stage when, prickly with complexes, she resented her mother’s relentless allure. The more accessible her mother became to others, the more confoundingly distanced from herself she appeared to grow. In an explosive mixture of indignation and envy she blamed Sehra-bai’s attraction on a conspiracy of duplicitous ruses and heartless depravity, and ached to expose her mother as artful.

But Sehra’s attraction was unselfconscious and effortless. The beautiful are no more accountable for the extravagance of their allure than the brilliant stellar objects for the cosmic flotsam they attract.

In the photographs of her teens, and in her marriage photographs, Sehra is beautiful in the willowy way of a Botticelli virgin. And later, past her middle years, she again achieved the pliant gravity of Botticelli’s modest Madonnas.

In her heyday, though, she had the needy, vampy, vulnerable quality that was so achingly captivating in Marilyn Monroe. Also a Gemini, Sehra had the same breathless
innocence and anxiety to please that characterized the American icon; and, attached to that wishful, defenceless face, the erotic mould of a Hindu goddess.

Sehra favoured filmy chiffon saris. Arranged at the shoulder in neat pleats and held by a gold pin, the adhesive drape of the material veiled a velvet span of beige midriff. The substantial tilt above her ribs, sculpted by the wicked fit of her bra and the seam of her short sari-blouse, drew male eyes like bedazzled beacons. And although her impulse to please was egalitarian, Sehra placed her trust only in impeccable men of formidable restraint.

A more or less permanent entourage of distinguished men befriended Sehra over the years, and God knows she needed befriending. But Ruby doesn’t think her mother was ever adulterous. Her upbringing and the prevailing mores precluded that.

Born under the sign of the twins, Sehra’s dual nature allowed her to be pleasing even to women. In the spring evenings the Jariwallas, the Coopers, the Bharuchas, the Adenwallas, and the Kings chugged up in their fifties autos to the Lahore Gymkhana Club and congregated at one of the benches in the Lawrence Gardens. Since a bench held at most five persons, they brought along canvas chairs and, for lightweights like Mr Jariwalla and Mr Cooper, folding stools. Ruby ran between the flower beds with the other children, and lay or sat on the grass when she was done with playing.

Ten years younger than her husband Rustom, Sehra was the youngest in their group. Cast in the role of the quintessential ingénue, she was petted, teased and indulged.
Sehra was also the recipient of much avuncular and ‘aunt-ly’ advice. Originally from Calcutta, she had arrived in Lahore after her wedding. Full of trepidation as a young transplant, she had played by the rules, and adopted the role assigned to her—that of the perpetual youngster who never overstepped her bounds or trod on another’s turf.

Sehra revelled in the resulting acceptance, and the Parsee men and women, elevated by the evening scents of mown grass and sweetpeas and the abundance of roses for which Lahore is famous, took Sehra under their wing. When the creation of Pakistan in 1947 left her family behind in India, the embrace of their wings grew more protective.

The Jariwallas arrive in the early afternoon in a chauffeur-driven, locally-assembled 1994 Toyota and are escorted to Sehra-bai’s bedroom. Hirabai Jariwalla’s constant hilarity and the old-goatish glint in Mr Jariwalla’s dissembling eyes lift Sehra-bai’s spirits. In their company she is more like her old self, gracious and hospitable, and less contrary. The Jariwallas are persuaded to stay to lunch and Sehra-bai is brought to sit at the head of the table.

Ruby believes Mr Jariwalla was one of her mother’s earliest admirers, and like most of that elite coterie, her confidant.

Mr Jariwalla has always carried his integrity in the fixed contours of his boyish face. Well into his eighties by now, the retired banker still retains his trim form and straight bearing, and his precise and soft-spoken ways.

Hirabai, his plump consort, as loosely fleshed as he is
tightly wrought, is his laughing-Buddha, his lucky talisman. Originally from Bombay, she shimmied through her years in Lahore like an even-keeled boat, and has arrived at the calm shore of an arthritic and liver-spotted old age without rancour. She is helped to the other end of the table by Ruby and sits there in her flame-red sari, cracking jokes and giggling like a palsied strawberry set in a Jell-O of infectious merriment—a contagion that has induced a goatish and incurable twinkle in her spouse’s adoring eye ever since the day Jal J first met his thirteen-year-old fiancée at their engagement ceremony in Bombay.

‘He plucked the words right off her lips … he granted her littlest wish,’ says Sehra-bai after they leave. ‘When your husband is that good to you, you don’t care about anything else … you don’t care what goes on in the rest of your life.’ And later that evening when they gather round her bed, she is still in a philosophical mood. ‘He kept her so happy, Hirabai didn’t even fret all that much when her only son died.’ Sehra-bai’s eyes become glazed and ruminative, and she sighs. ‘That is how it is when your husband is devoted to you. It cushions life’s blows.’