The young man broke the spell. He reached out for the pugree and gently took it from Daulat’s hands.
“Come,” she smiled, and walked towards the bedroom, to the dressing-table.
“Excuse me,” he said to Najamai and Moti, who were glaring resentfully, and followed. He placed the pugree on his head and looked in the mirror.
“See, it fits perfectly,” said Daulat.
“Yes,” he answered, “it does fit perfectly.” He took it off, caressed it for a moment, then asked hesitantly, “How much …?”
Daulat held up her hand; she had prepared for this moment. Though she had dismissed very quickly the thought of selling it, she had considered asking for its return after the wedding. Now, however, she shook her head and took the pugree from the young man. Carefully, she placed it in the glass case and handed it back to him.
“It is yours, wear it in good health. And take good care of it for my Minocher.”
“I will, oh thank you,” said the young man. “Thank you very much.” He waited for a moment, then softly, shyly added, “And God bless you.”
Daulat smiled. “If you have a son, maybe he will wear it, too, on his wedding.” The young man nodded, smiling back.
She saw him to the door and returned to the living-room. Moti and Najamai were sipping half-heartedly at their tea, looking somewhat injured. The children had finished their cold drink. They were swishing the shrunken ice-cubes around in the forbidden final quarter inch of liquid, left in their glasses as they’d been warned to, to attest to their good breeding. An irretrievably mixed up and confusing bit of testimony.
A beggar was crying outside, “Firstfloorwalla bail Take pity on the poor! Secondfloorwalla bail Help the hungry!”
Presently, Najamai rose. “Have to leave now, Ramchandra must be ready with dinner.”
Moti took the opportunity to depart as well, offering the fidgetiness of the two little boys for an excuse.
Daulat was alone once more. Leaving the cups and glasses where they stood with their dregs of tea and Goldspot, she went into Minocher’s room. It was dark except for the glow of the oil lamp. The oil was low again and she reached for the bottle, then changed her mind.
From under one of the cups in the living-room she retrieved a saucer and returned to his room. She stood before the lamp for a moment, looking deep into the flame, then slid the saucer over the glass. She covered it up completely, the way his face had been covered with a white sheet ten days ago.
In a few seconds the lamp was doused, snuffed out. The afterglow of the wick persisted; then it, too, was gone. The room was in full darkness.
Daulat sat in the armchair. The first round, at least, was definitely hers.
The Collectors
I
When Dr. Burjor Mody was transferred from Mysore to assume the principalship of the Bombay Veterinary College, he moved into Firozsha Baag with his wife and son Pesi. They occupied the vacant flat on the third floor of C Block, next to the Bulsara family.
Dr. Mody did not know it then, but he would be seeing a lot of Jehangir, the Bulsara boy; the boy who sat silent and brooding, every evening, watching the others at play, and called chaarikhao by them — quite unfairly, since he never tattled or told tales — (Dr. Mody would call him, affectionately, the observer of C Block). And Dr. Mody did not know this, either, at the time of moving, that Jehangir Bulsara’s visits at ten A.M. every Sunday would become a source of profound joy for himself. Or that just when he would think he had found someone to share his hobby with, someone to mitigate the perpetual disappointment about his son Pesi, he would lose his precious Spanish dancing-lady stamp and renounce Jehangir’s friendship, both in quick succession. And then two years later, he himself would — but that is never knowable.
Soon after moving in, Dr. Burjor Mody became the pride of the Parsis in C Block. C Block, like the rest of Firozsha Baag, had a surfeit of low-paid bank clerks and bookkeepers, and the arrival of Dr. Mody permitted them to feel a little better about themselves. More importantly, in A Block lived a prominent priest, and B Block boasted a chartered accountant. Now C Block had a voice in Baag matters as important as the others did.
While C Block went about its routine business, confirming and authenticating the sturdiness of the object of their pride, the doctor’s big-boned son Pesi established himself as leader of the rowdier elements among the Baag’s ten-to-sixteen population. For Pesi, too, it was routine business; he was following a course he had mapped out for himself ever since the family began moving from city to city on the whims and megrims of his father’s employer, the government.
To account for Pesi’s success was the fact of his brutish strength. But he was also the practitioner of a number of minor talents which appealed to the crowd where he would be leader. The one no doubt complemented the other, the talents serving to dissemble the brutish qualifier of strength, and the brutish strength encouraging the crowd to perceive the appeal of his talents.
Hawking, for instance, was one of them. Pesi could summon up prodigious quantities of phlegm at will, accompanied by sounds such as the boys had seldom heard except in accomplished adults: deep, throaty, rasping, resonating rolls which culminated in a pthoo, with the impressive trophy landing in the dust at their feet, its size leaving them all slightly envious. Pesi could also break wind that sounded like questions, exclamations, fragments of the chromatic scale, and clarion calls, while the others sniffed and discussed the merits of pungency versus tonality. This ability earned him the appellation of Pesi paadmaroo, and he wore the sobriquet with pride.
Perhaps his single most important talent was his ability to improvise. The peculiarities of a locale were the raw material for his inventions. In Firozsha Baag, behind the three buildings, or blocks, as they were called, were spacious yards shared by all three blocks. These yards planted in Pesi’s fecund mind the seed from which grew a new game: stoning-the-cats.
Till the arrival of the Mody family the yards were home for stray and happy felines, well fed on scraps and leftovers disgorged regularly as clockwork, after mealtimes, by the three blocks. The ground floors were the only ones who refrained. They voiced their protests in a periodic cycle of reasoning, pleading, and screaming of obscenities, because the garbage collected outside their windows where the cats took up permanent residency, miaowing, feasting and caterwauling day and night. If the cascade of food was more than the cats could devour, the remainder fell to the fortune of the rats. Finally, flies and insects buzzed and hovered over the dregs, little pools of pulses and curries fermenting and frothing, till the kuchrawalli came next morning and swept it all away.
The backyards of Firozsha Baag constituted its squalid underbelly. And this would be the scenario for stoning-the-cats, Pesi decided. But there was one hitch: the backyards were off limits to the boys. The only way in was through the kuchrawalli’s little shack standing beyond A Block, where her huge ferocious dog, tied to the gate, kept the boys at bay. So Pesi decreed that the boys gather at the rear windows of their homes, preferably at a time of day when the adults were scarce, with the fathers away at work and the mothers not yet finished with their afternoon naps. Each boy brought a pile of small stones and took turns, chucking three stones each. The game could just as easily have been stoning-the-rats; but stoned rats quietly walked away to safety, whereas the yowls of cats provided primal satisfaction and verified direct hits: no yowl, no point.