'This place is nothing less than a black hole. It is totally beneath my dignity to be staying here, but just for the sake of you two, I will endure this humiliation till I get a proper job. Listen, I don't want any of the street boys to enter the house. God knows what hell holes they have come from. There are two right next to us. Rascals of the highest order, I think. And Gudiya, if I catch you talking to any boy in the chawl, you will receive a hiding with my leather belt, understood?' he thunders. I drop the cup in panic.
* * *
Over the next couple of weeks, I hardly see Shantaram and I never see his wife or daughter. She probably goes to college every day, but by the time I return home from the foundry, she is inside her house and the door is always firmly shut.
Salim doesn't even notice that we have new neighbours. He hardly gets any spare time from his work as a tiffin delivery boy. He wakes up at seven in the morning and gets dressed. He wears a loose white shirt, cotton pyjamas and puts a white Nehru cap on his head. The cap is the badge of identification of all dabbawallahs in Mumbai, and there are nearly five thousand of them. Over the next two hours he collects home-cooked meals in lunch boxes from approximately twenty-five flats. Then he takes them to the Ghatkopar local train station. Here the tiffins are sorted according to their destination, each with colour-coded dots, dashes and crosses on the lids, and then loaded on to special trains to be delivered promptly at lunch time to middle-class executives and blue-collar workers all over Mumbai. Salim himself receives tiffins by another train, which he delivers in the Ghatkopar area after deciphering the dots and dashes which constitute the address. He has to be very careful, because one mistake could cost him his job. He dare not hand over a container with beef to a Hindu, or one with pork to a Muslim or one with garlic and onions to a Jain vegetarian.
* * *
It is nine at night. Salim is flipping through the pages of a film magazine. I am kneeling on my bed with my left ear inside a stainless-steel cup held to the wall. I hear Shantaram speaking to his daughter. 'Here, Gudiya, see through the eyepiece. I have adjusted the telescope now. Can you see the bright-red object in the middle? That is Mars.'
I whisper to Salim, 'Quick, get a cup. You must hear this.'
Salim also glues his ear to the wall. Over the next thirty minutes, we listen to a running commentary on the state of the sky. We hear about stellar constellations and galaxies and comets. We hear about the Great Bear and the Little Bear. We hear of something called the Milky Way and the Pole Star. We learn about the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.
Listening to Shantaram, I am filled with a strange longing. I wish I too had a father who would teach me about stars and planets. The night sky, which till now was just a big black mass to me, suddenly becomes a place of meaning and wonder. As soon as Shantaram's tutorial ends, Salim and I crane our necks out of our first-floor window and try to find the celestial landmarks pointed out by him. Without the aid of a telescope we see only little white dots in the dark sky, but we squeal with delight when we recognize the seven stars of the Great Bear, and even the knowledge that the dark patches on the moon are not blemishes but craters and seas fills us with a sense of satisfaction, as though we have unlocked the mysteries of the universe.
That night I don't dream about a woman in a fluttering white sari. I dream about rings around Saturn and moons around Jupiter.
* * *
A week later, I am alerted by a totally new sound coming from Shantaram's room. 'Meow!' I scramble to the wall with my stainless-steel listening device in hand.
I hear Gudiya speaking. 'Papa, look, I've got a cat. Isn't he lovely? My friend Rohini gave him to me from her cat's new litter. Can I keep him?'
'I am not in favour of any pets,' Mrs Shantaram grumbles. 'There's hardly space in this room for humans – where will we keep an animal?'
'Please, Mummy, he is such a tiny thing. Papa, please agree,' she pleads.
'OK, Gudiya,' says Shantaram. 'You can keep him. But what will you call him?'
'Oh, thank you, Papa. I was thinking of calling him Tommy.'
'No, that is such a commonplace name. This cat is going to live in an astronomer's family, so it should be named after one of the planets.'
'Which one? Should we call him Jupiter?'
'No. He is the smallest in the family, so he can only be called Pluto.'
'Great, I love the name, Papa. Here, Pluto! Pluto, come and have some milk.'
'Meow!' says Pluto.
* * *
These little snippets force me to reconsider my opinion of Shantaram. Perhaps he is not so bad after all. But, once again, I learn that appearances can be deceptive and the dividing line between good and bad is very thin indeed.
I see Shantaram come home one evening, completely drunk. His breath stinks of whisky. He walks with unsteady steps and needs help to climb up the flight of stairs. This happens the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon it is common knowledge in the chawl that Mr Shantaram is a drunkard.
Drunkards in Hindi films are invariably funny characters. Think of Keshto Mukherjee with a bottle and you cannot help bursting out laughing. But drunkards in real life are not funny, they are frightening. Whenever Shantaram comes home in a stupor, we don't need listening devices.
He hurls abuses at the top of his voice and Salim and I quiver with fear in our room as if we are the ones being shouted at. His swearing becomes such a ritual that we actually wait for the sound of his snoring before falling asleep ourselves. We come to dread the interval between Shantaram's return from work and his crashing out in bed. This interval is, for us, the zone of fear.
We think this is a passing phase and that Shantaram will eventually recover. But it actually gets worse. Shantaram begins drinking even more and then he starts throwing things. He begins with plastic cups and books, which he throws at the wall in disgust. Then he starts breaking pots and pans. The ruckus he creates makes living next door very difficult. But we know complaining to Mr Ramakrishna is out of the question. The voices of a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year old habitual rent offender do not carry much weight. So we simply duck in bed whenever an object thuds on to our common wall and cringe in fear whenever we hear the sound of a plate crashing or china breaking.
Even this phase does not last long. Pretty soon, Shantaram starts throwing objects at people.
Mainly his family members. He reserves maximum ire for his wife. 'You bloody bitch! You are the one who has brought me down in life. I could be writing research papers on black holes, and instead I am showing blouse pieces and saris to wretched housewives. I hate you! Why don't you die?' he would holler, and throw a peppershaker, a glass, a plate. At his wife, his daughter, her cat.
One night he exceeds all limits and throws a piping-hot cup of tea at his wife. Gudiya tries to shield her mother and the burning liquid falls on her instead, scalding her face. She shrieks in agony. Shantaram is so drunk he doesn't even realize what he has done. I rush out to get a taxi for Mrs Shantaram to take her daughter to hospital. Two days later, she comes to me and asks whether I will go with her to visit Gudiya. 'She gets very lonely. Perhaps you can talk to her.'
So I accompany Mrs Shantaram on my first-ever visit to a hospital.
* * *
The first thing that assails your senses when you enter a hospital is the smell. I feel nauseated by the cloying, antiseptic smell of disinfectant, which permeates every corner of the dirty wards.
The second thing that strikes you is that you don't see any happy people. The patients lying on their green beds are moaning and groaning and even the nurses and doctors seem grim. But the worst thing is the indifference. No one is really bothered about you. I had imagined there would be doctors and nurses swarming all over Gudiya, but I find her lying all alone on a bed inside the Burns Unit with not a single nurse on duty. Her face is completely bandaged; only her black eyes can be seen.