Waiting for the Monsoon Page 23

  “Good day,” says Mister Patel.

  “Yes. What is it?” the man says. His voice is raspy from smoking.

  “This is my house.”

  “Your house? No it isn’t. It’s my house.”

  “But it was my house.”

  “Maybe it was, but now I live here. I pay rent and I have a lease.”

  “Then perhaps you know where my furniture is?”

  “Furniture? The place was empty when we moved in.” Behind him, they hear a shrill female voice. The woman wants to know who’s at the door.

  “No one!” the man calls back.

  “Then maybe you know what they did with my things? My books?”

  “I don’t read. Ask the neighbours.” And before Mister Patel can open his mouth again, the door is slammed in his face.

  MISTER PATEL DIDN’T ask the neighbours. He walks slowly back to the stairs. Madan knows that he’s crying, just as he often cried in the prison, when he thought no one was looking. They cross the courtyard, go out the gate and back through the alleyway. Madan senses that Mister Patel doesn’t know what to do next. They have no money, and the crevice where Abbas is lying is too narrow for Mister Patel to squeeze through. When they reach the street, Mister Patel takes hold of the boy’s hand again and starts walking. Madan realizes that there is a big difference between being a beggar and walking hand in hand with an old man. People are much friendlier and some even say hello. Mister Patel stops in front of a greengrocery. Madan sees the huge pile of apples and mangoes. Would Mister Patel mind if he quickly grabbed an apple?

  “Uncle!” cries a surprised voice from behind the counter. “It’s been a long time! Where have you been?”

  Mister Patel pulls Madan into the shop. The smell of fresh fruit and vegetables makes his mouth water. With a deep sigh, the old man sits down on a rickety stool. Madan can’t take his eyes off the apples. “Go ahead and take one,” the nephew says.

  Madan gazes at the apples. He can already taste the sweetness in his mouth. Never before has he been able to look around before making a choice: he always grabbed the first one he could get hold of. His hand hovers over the crate. Then he picks up the biggest, reddest apple he’s ever seen. He holds it in his hands, turning it over and over. Suddenly he takes a bite. The sweet juice runs over his lips, and the cool, firm flesh dissolves between his teeth. At each chew, the juice spouts against the inside of his mouth. As if he’s in paradise.

  “No house?” There is surprise in the nephew’s voice. Mister Patel explains what happened and where he’s been. His nephew looks at him in disbelief, occasionally uttering a cry of disgust, especially when Mister Patel tells him about the bucket behind the curtain and the quirks and moods of Ibrahim the murderer.

  Madan doesn’t hear any of it. He is aware only of the taste and smell of the apple, more heavenly than the most delicious fruit he has ever tasted or even dreamt of.

  Mister Patel drops his hands into his lap, heaves another sigh, and asks if his nephew has a place for them to sleep.

  “Here?”

  “You’re my only relative in Bombay.”

  The nephew looks askance at Madan, who is smacking his lips. “But not for him.”

  “Just for one night? Tomorrow I’ll see if I can find something for him.”

  “Does he have lice?”

  “I’m afraid we both have lice.”

  The nephew tries to disguise his aversion, and Mister Patel looks away in shame.

  “If you can lend me a little money, we’ll go to a barbershop and have our heads shaved.”

  “And have your nails cut, too,” says the nephew, glancing at their hands.

  THE SHIRT IS too big and the pants too long, but Madan feels like a prince. He and Mister Patel both have a cloth wound around their head. Madan smells of soap and isn’t hungry. People greet them as they walk down the street, even more than yesterday. Mister Patel seems to know everyone, and when they pass a fruit stand where Madan and Abbas more than once stole fruit, the owner proves to be an old friend.

  “Your face looks familiar,” the owner says to Madan.

  “Impossible,” says Mister Patel. “He’s not from around here.”

  “I could swear . . .”

  Although he’s not hungry — he had a real breakfast for the first time in ages — Madan cannot keep his eyes off the shiny apples.

  “How’s your back these days?” Mister Patel inquires. “Still lugging those crates around?”

  The man mutters something under his breath.

  “He’s a very bright kid,” Mister Patel says, “even if he can’t talk.”

  Blandly, the fruit seller studies the small, thin boy. “You mean he’s . . .” The man pointed to his own mouth.

  “Can he have an apple?” Mister Patel sees the longing in Madan’s eyes.

  “Sure, go ahead,” the owner says affably, in the hope that an apple will enable him to say no to his friend’s request.

  Madan is impressed by the prosperity of Mister Patel’s friends. They all have stands full of vegetables and fruit, which they simply give away!

  “He’s strong,” Mister Patel adds.

  The owner has no intention of taking on a boy who can’t talk. He doesn’t understand why his friend is going to so much trouble for the child. He isn’t even a relative of Patel’s.

  “Ramdas. He’s looking for someone,” the fruit seller says. He is visibly relieved.

  “But they only hire adults. You know that.”

  Madan is eating his apple and getting used to the idea that he’s arrived in paradise.

  The men sit there, side by side, in silence.

  “Chandan Chandran!” the man suddenly calls out.

  “Who?”

  “Chandan Chandran, the man with the ponytail who comes by here every morning.”

  “Him?”

  THE BUILDING NEXT to the bookstore has dingy grey walls. The windows are narrow and the door opening is so low that Mister Patel has to bend down to enter. It’s a building that everyone walks straight past. It does not inspire pride, but there is nothing repugnant about it: people simply don’t notice it. Mister Patel and Madan walk by it four times before finally asking for directions to Chandan Chandran’s workshop. They enter a low, narrow hallway filled with the heavy odour of oil and iron. It’s hard to tell where the smell is coming from, since there are no workplaces to be seen, but they are also aware of a barely perceptible vibration throughout the building.

  At the end of the long, dark hall, they come to a flight of stairs. A bare bulb hangs under the wooden staircase, and a man with a ponytail is seated at an old, broken-down wooden loom. Madan is already on his way up the stairs, but Mister Patel just manages to grab him by his shirttail. He points to the man sitting at the loom. Madan shakes his head. Mister Patel, who also regards Chandan Chandran as somewhat eccentric, gives Madan a smile and whispers that the man is a master craftsman. He hopes that Madan doesn’t realize how little he actually knows about the man.

  Chandan Chandran pulls the set-up comb toward him, to anchor the new thread. Of course, he’s aware of the man standing next to him, who is fidgeting nervously, and the boy on the stairs, who’s stubbornly shaking his head no. Chandran doesn’t like visitors breathing down his neck. He prefers to be alone with his loom, in the security of the small, dark space underneath the stairs.

  A portly woman with her arms full of umbrellas appears at the top of the stairs. Madan has to press himself against the wall to let her pass.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chandran.”

  “Good morning , Mrs. Gutta.” He glances up at the woman as she goes by, but immediately returns to his work.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chandran,” says Mister Patel in turn, although his voice is somewhat uncertain.

  Cha
ndan Chandran looks up as if he has just noticed him. “Good morning” is his reply.

  “My name is Patel.”

  Chandan Chandran calmly continues his weaving. Mister Patel is conscious of the vibration of the floor, and he notices how the bulb under the stairs swings gently back and forth. The weaver’s shadow is like some ghostly apparition that is about to pounce on the man with the ponytail but doesn’t quite dare.

  His nephew’s words that morning echo through his head: “You can come back, but only if you come alone.” Mister Patel understands his nephew’s position. The space inside the shop — where the three of them spent the night surrounded by crates of vegetables and fruit — is indeed limited. They’d had more space per person in prison. His nephew slept in his regular spot, against the door, Madan lay down with his feet on a bunch of turnips and his head on a pile of radishes, while Mister Patel spent the night sitting on a crate of eggplants. Around eleven o’clock the crates in front of the store were brought inside and piled on top of each other. The stool and the moneybox found a place on top of the potatoes. The narrow plank that served as a counter during the day became a bed for his nephew, and also ensured that the door could not be opened.

  Mister Patel clears his throat diffidently, hoping to catch the attention of the man under the stairs. “I’m working on a dissertation about the cross-fertilization of native urban plants,” he says. “I studied biology.” Mister Patel cannot understand why he doesn’t simply ask the weaver if he has a job for Madan, but the right words refuse to come. “Even as a child I was fascinated by plants, indoor and outdoor, and I knew I didn’t want to live in Bombay. But it was clear that that was the best place for my studies.”

  Again Chandan Chandran pulls the set-up comb toward him, adding another thread to the fabric.

  “One day I’ll go back to Hyderabad, where I was born, but there aren’t nearly as many native urban plants there as there are here. I used to have boxes full of books with specimens, but they’ve all been lost.”

  Madan doesn’t understand why Mister Patel is telling the weaver all this. He can’t wait to go upstairs and find out where the humming sound is coming from. Surreptitiously, he moves up to the next step.

  “Some of my books were quite rare specimens. Not that anyone would pay a penny for them . . . far too specialized. But irreplaceable, especially my own book, Genetic Metamorphosis in Single-Celled Organisms.”

  Another step. Madan taps Mister Patel on the shoulder and beckons him to come. The story peters out. Chandan Chandran looks up.

  “Is that the boy?”

  Mister Patel nods.

  “He can start by unpicking that piece of cloth.” He points to a tightly folded length of red and white cotton lying behind the loom. Mister Patel smiles in relief. Then he picks up the piece of cloth and shoves it into Madan’s hands.

  The little boy believes that Mister Patel is his friend, and he is astounded when the old man raises his hand, wishes him good luck, and walks down the corridor to the door. Why is he leaving him? He doesn’t want to be alone again. Mister Patel has to go down to the harbour with him. He’s afraid to go alone. And he doesn’t want to work for this weaver with strange hair, underneath the dark stairs. Mister Patel! he tries to shout. Mister Patel! Madan watches as Mister Patel walks down the long corridor, wishes them all the best, and, with a wave of his hand, disappears from sight. He’s leaving me behind!

  OUTSIDE, THE OLD man hears the boy’s bestial, high-pitched screech. He stops in his tracks. He cannot leave him behind, all on his own. He must find something else, something for the two of them. He turns on his heels and is about to call out when he notices the display in the window of the bookstore: there, alongside several other books, lies Genetic Metamorphosis in Single-Celled Organisms. He sees the brown binding and the illustration of the egg-shaped planctomycetes, and the cell wall made of glycoprotein. Mister Patel’s skin begins to tingle and suddenly his mouth goes dry. The brown book, dry as dust, seems to reach out to him. It’s as if Madan never existed. As if he never spent months in prison unjustly or went to see the weaver under the staircase. As if he has never had a landlord who cheated him, or an unsympathetic nephew. He forgets everything and pushes open the door to the bookshop.

  1966 Rampur ~~~

  THE MEN WATCH in silence as the hospital brothers place the unconscious man on the stretcher. The ambulance drives off with the siren at full tilt. Charlotte runs to her father’s car, but just as she is about to get in, she remembers that he keeps the car keys in his pants pocket, and that they are probably in the same sorry state as he is. She jumps out of the car and hails a rickshaw. The men start to load the pipes back onto the truck. On some of them there are spots of blood, which are already drying in the heat of the sun and will soon be unnoticeable on the rusty iron.

  “Faster!” Charlotte urges the rickshaw driver on. The two-tone siren has stopped, and with it the hope that her father is still alive. She sees her world collapsing around her. The houses along the road crumble as they race by. The paving bricks sink into deep craters and the water seller drops dead as soon as she has passed him. The sound of clanging steel and the shouting that gradually died away are repeated over and over in her head. The silence that followed the deafening roar swells and swells. She no longer hears the cars that pass them, the milkman’s shout, the barking of a dog: everything fades away in the face of the deathly silence within which she searches for that one liberating word, the watchword that tells her it’s over, that it isn’t true, that it never happened.

  The hospital, a colonial edifice built more than two centuries ago, has the original entrance gate. She’s been here once before, when she arrived in Sita’s arms. She was five years old, and she’d fallen down the stairs. Her teeth went through her lip, and there was so much blood that her dress was completely red. Mother had tried to dry her tears, but Sita was the only one who could comfort her. It was also the one time that — with her father’s permission — the nursemaid was allowed to ride in the car. Just that once. Sita cuddled and kissed her. The scent of coconut and ginger that surrounded her had a calming effect. Mother remained standing in front of the house, since Sita had taken her place in the car and was holding the bleeding child in her arms. The chauffeur sped down the hill. Sita began to sing softly — in a warm, slightly nasal voice — and through her tears Charlotte could see how her nostrils vibrated and her lips strained to form the strange words. Listening to the dreamy tones that filled the car, Charlotte forgot about the wound and the blood. By the time they reached the hospital, the pain had disappeared.

  Charlotte touches her upper lip: the scar has faded, but the pain recurs more fiercely than she remembered it.

  THE SMELL OF disinfectant is overwhelming. “Nothing left,” she hears the duty nurse whisper to a colleague. The operating theatre is located behind olive-drab doors: the colour hasn’t changed in two hundred years. She once read that olive green is a soothing colour. But her heart is thumping, her ears are ringing, and there’s a pounding in her throat. She can’t sit down. She paces back and forth from one end of the corridor to the other. She intended to tell him at dinner that night that she was going to look for a place of her own. That plan now hangs over her head like an evil omen. He must never know. Not now. He must live. Get back on his feet . . . and back to his daily walks. He must not die. The large door opens and a nurse comes hurrying out. She has a worried look on her face. She avoids Charlotte’s pleading gaze and ducks into a room. Shortly afterwards she re-emerges carrying a fat book and disappears back into the operating room. Doesn’t the doctor know how to operate? They have assured her that he is the best surgeon in the area. She wonders how inexperienced the other doctors are. Peter’s last operation went wrong, too. His trembling hands could no longer do the work, no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t need a book. He knew exactly what to do, but the uncontrollable tremors made it impossible. Had this doct
or also served in Burma? The olive-drab doors have a forbidding quality. Is this the gate of death, the inconceivable world known as the hereafter, where Peter and Mother are supposed to be together, along with all those other dead soldiers and civilians? Have they found each other? It was a thought she has always shrugged off as absurd, but now, in this damp corridor, it besieges her. Is Father with them now, or is he still alive? If only the doctor can find what he’s looking for in that book. If only he doesn’t die. She doesn’t want to be left alone. Papa, don’t leave me alone. At the end of the corridor the doors fly open, and a nurse with a wheeled cart runs down the corridor. The steel instruments make a loud clanking noise. Without so much as a glance in Charlotte’s direction, she pushes open the olive-drab doors and heads for the operating room. The door at the other end of the corridor also flies open and a doctor with one arm in the sleeve of his white coat races into the operating room. He’s still alive, she thinks with a sense of relief. He must be. Otherwise they wouldn’t be running.

  THE DOOR OPENS and a doctor comes toward to her. She can tell he is exhausted by the expression on his face. After a perfunctory introduction, he informs her that the chances that her father will live are slim. Charlotte is about to faint, but she refuses to listen to her body. She wants to see him. Although it takes all her powers of persuasion, the man agrees to let her have just one minute with her father. He mutters that the last thing he needs now is foreign bacteria.

  All she can see of him is his undamaged face. The rest of his body is concealed within a white tunnel. He seems to be asleep.

  “He doesn’t look that bad,” she says in surprise.

  “Well, not his face. But the rest! Nothing’s in its normal place,” the doctor says. “As if he’s been through a meat grinder.”

  Speechless, Charlotte looks at the man. Only then does the doctor realize that the woman next to him is a relative.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he hastens to add, in an attempt to play down his words. Gently, he ushers her out of the room.