'Gudiya, look who has come to see you,' Mrs Shantaram says, beaming at me.
I feel diffident approaching the girl. She is obviously much older than me. I am just a voyeur who has heard some snippets from her life; I hardly know her. I don't see her lips, but I can see from her eyes that she is smiling at me and that breaks the ice between us.
I sit with her for three hours, talking about this and that. Gudiya asks me, 'How did you get such an unusual name – Ram Mohammad Thomas?'
'It is a very long story. I will tell you when you are well.'
She tells me about herself. I learn that she is about to finish her Intermediate and start University.
Her ambition is to become a doctor. She asks me about myself. I don't tell her anything about Father Timothy or what happened to me later, but I recount my experiences in the chawl. I tell her about life as a foundry worker. She listens to me with rapt attention and makes me feel very important and wanted.
A doctor comes and tells Mrs Shantaram that her daughter is lucky. She has received only first-degree burns and will not have any permanent scars. She will be discharged within a week.
The three hours that I spend with Gudiya enable me to learn a lot about her father. Mrs
Shantaram tells me, 'My husband is a famous space scientist. Rather, he was a scientist. He used to work in the Aryabhatta Space Research Institute, where he investigated stars with the help of huge telescopes. We used to live in a big bungalow on the Institute's campus. Three years ago he discovered a new star. It was a very important scientific discovery but one of his fellow astronomers took credit for it. This shattered my husband completely. He started drinking. He started having fights with his colleagues and one day he got so angry with the director of the Institute he almost beat him to death. He was thrown out of the Institute immediately and I had to beg the director not to have him arrested by the police. After leaving the Institute, my husband got a job as a physics teacher in a good school, but he could not keep his drinking and his violent temper in check. He would thrash boys for minor lapses and was kicked out in just six months.
Since then he has been doing odd jobs, working as a canteen manager in an office, as an
accountant in a factory, and now as a sales assistant in a clothes showroom. And because we have exhausted all our savings, we are forced to live in a chawl.'
'Can't Mr Shantaram stop drinking?' I ask her.
'My husband swore to me he would not touch alcohol again and I had begun to hope that the worst was over. But he couldn't stick to his promise, and look what has happened.'
'Do me a favour, Ram Mohammad Thomas,' Gudiya says. 'Please look after Pluto till I return home.'
'Definitely,' I promise.
Suddenly she stretches out her arm and takes my hand in hers. 'You are the brother I never had.
Isn't he, Mummy?' she says. Mrs Shantaram nods her head.
I do not know what to say. This is a new relationship for me. In the past, I have imagined myself as someone's son, but never as someone's brother. So I just hold Gudiya's hand and sense an unspoken bond pass between us.
That night I dream of a woman in a white sari holding a baby in her arms. The wind howls behind her, making her hair fly across her face, obscuring it. She places the baby in a laundry bin and leaves. Just then, another woman arrives. She is also tall and graceful, but her face is swathed in bandages. She plucks the baby from the bin and smothers him with kisses. 'My little brother,' she says. 'S-i-s-t-e-r,' the baby gurgles back. 'Meeeow!' A strangled cry from a cat suddenly pierces the night. I wake up and try to figure whether the cry I heard came from the dream or the adjacent room.
I discover Pluto's limp and mangled body the next morning, lying in the same dustbin in which Mr Barve disposes of his copy of the Maharashtra Times. The cat's neck has been broken and I can smell whisky on his furry body. Shantaram tells his wife that Pluto has run away. I know the truth, but it is pointless mentioning it. Pluto has indeed run away. To another, better world, I think.
'I like Gudiya very much,' I tell Salim. 'I have to ensure that Shantaram does not repeat what he did to her.'
'But what can you do? It is his family.' 'It is our business as well. After all, we are neighbours.'
'Don't you remember what you told me once? That it's not a good idea to poke your nose into other people's affairs, or make other people's troubles your own, Mohammad?'
I have no response to this.
* * *
Gudiya comes home, but I don't get to see her because Shantaram will not permit a boy to enter his house. Mrs Shantaram tells me that her husband has realized what he has done and will now reform, even though in her heart of hearts she knows that Shantaram is beyond redemption. But even she did not know the depths to which her husband could descend.
Barely a week after Gudiya returns from the hospital, he does something to her again. He tries to touch her. But not like a father. At first, I don't understand. All I hear is some references to Gudiya being his moon and then Mrs Shantaram crying, and Gudiya screaming, 'Papa, don't touch me! Papa, please don't touch me!'
Something snaps in my brain when I hear Gudiya's plaintive cry. I want to rush into Shantaram's room and kill him with my bare hands. But even before I can gather my courage, I hear Shantaram's loud snores. He has crashed out. Gudiya is still weeping. I don't need a glass to hear her sobbing.
Her crying affects me in a strange way. I don't know how a brother should react on listening to his sister's sorrow, because I have no experience of being a brother. But I know that somehow I have to comfort her. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to comfort someone when there is a wall, howsoever thin, between you. I notice then that right at the bottom of the wall, where the water pipes go into the other flat, there is a small circular opening, large enough to thrust an arm through. I jump down from the bed and, lying spreadeagled on the ground, push my hand through the opening. 'Sister, don't weep. Here, hold my hand,' I cry. And someone does grasp my hand. I feel fingers caress my arm, my elbow, my wrist, like a blind man feeling someone's face.
Then fingers interlock with mine and I feel a magical transference of power, energy, love, call it what you will; the fact is that in that instant I become one with Gudiya and I feel her pain as if it is my own.
Salim, meanwhile, is still sitting on his bed, watching the scene in amazement. 'Are you mad, Mohammad? Do you realize what you are doing?' he admonishes me. 'This hole through which you have pushed your hand is the same hole through which rats and cockroaches come into our room.'
But I am oblivious to Salim and to everything else. I don't know how long I hold Gudiya's hand, but when I wake up the next morning I find myself lying on the ground with my hand still thrust through the hole and a family of cockroaches sleeping peacefully inside my shirt pocket.
* * *
The next night, Shantaram again comes home in a drunken stupor and tries to molest Gudiya.
'You are more beautiful than all the stars and planets. You are my moon. You are my Gudiya, my doll. Yesterday you evaded me, but today I will not let you leave me,' he says.
'Stop behaving like this!' Mrs Shantaram cries, but her husband takes no notice.
'Don't worry, Gudiya, there is nothing wrong in my love for you. Even Shahjahan, the great emperor, fell in love with his own daughter, Jahan Ara. And who can deny a man the privilege of gathering fruit from a tree he himself has planted.'
'You are a demon,' Mrs Shantaram yells, and Shantaram hits her. I hear a bottle break.
'No!' I hear Gudiya scream.
I feel as though an oxyacetylene torch has pierced my brain and molten metal has been poured over my heart. I can tolerate it no more. I run to Mr Ramakrishna's room and tell him that Shantaram is doing something terrible to his own wife and daughter. But Ramakrishna behaves as if I am talking about the weather.