At first, Jehangir had refused to go. But: “You had double pneumonia when you were eight,” Father had reminded him, “and even the doctor was despairing. I came to Bhagwan Baba and your health returned.”
And Mother added, “After Father lost his job, who do you think helped, his friends, our relatives, who? Bhagwan Baba, and we have enough to eat and wear, thanks to him.”
Thus it went, although the examples were dredged with difficulty out of the past. Due to the passage of time they had relinquished the greater part of their preternatural lustre, and appeared in a disappointingly mundane light. But when Jehangir was younger, he used to think it wonderful that there was a Baba who aided his mother and father with blessings and advice and kind words. Life was hard, always full of want and worry, and assistance from any quarter was welcome. The little boy who used to sit on the steps of C Block to watch the others at play, and who used to spend Sunday mornings with Dr. Mody and his stamps, would ask God every night to help his father and mother.
The boy was now nineteen and in his third year at university, but he still carried the distinct memories of poverty and anxiety, memories of envelopes labelled Rent, School Fees, Ration, Kerosene, Light, and Water, envelopes which were forever examined and shuffled and re-examined because there was never enough money in them (and never would be), and were worn ragged and tattered along the edges due to such constant handling and scrutinizing, as if the shuffling and sorting and re-examining would lead to some discovery that would make the money last longer.
So in the end Jehangir agreed to consult the holy man of the suburbs and let him exercise his tenuous infallibility. He looked out of the train window. What he had not realized, till the moment of boarding, was the full baseness of it all. It struck suddenly, in the pit of his stomach, like nausea. Cringing inwardly, he wondered what she would say if she knew about the act of betrayal he was shortly to perpetrate. Probably despise him forever, and he would deserve it.
The suburban local was at the outskirts of Bombay; they would arrive at their destination in forty-five minutes. The “17 Standees Allowed” by the scratched and peeling sign had already been exceeded by the crush of Sunday morning commuters, but not to the extent of a weekday train: as yet, there were no roof-riders or window-clingers. In the sky the sun was higher than when the train left Bombay Central. The heat began to strengthen rapidly now, seeming to feed on itself, growing more oppressive with every breath. From metal straps hung the standees, listless, upraised arms revealing identical damp patches under sleeves of shirts and blouses. Overhead, the fans turned ineffectively, whirring and rattling, their blades labouring with feeble rotations, trying to chop the air thick with heat and odour, scattering it around uselessly in the compartment.
In fitful sleep his parents leaned against each other. They swayed as one with the train’s motion, on the wooden bench that constituted third-class seats. The bench, and the compartment in general, was randomly adorned with red stains of paan: the oral effluences of past passengers, relics of journeys done and gone. Time and dust had done their work, too, aging and dulling the tobacco-betel-nut juices to varying degrees of redness.
Mother held a brown paper bag in her lap. It contained three oranges and three bananas for Bhagwan Baba. Offerings were not compulsory but people brought gifts out of gratitude, she had explained to Jehangir: “And Bhagwan Baba usually gives back half after blessing it. Very rich people bring expensive gifts, boxes of almonds and pistachios, large cartons of mithat, whole baskets of prime alphonso mango, sometimes even jewellery. But the beautiful thing is, he does no more for them than he does for the poorest. It is one of the signs of his saintliness.”
All in the compartment were now asleep or trying to attain that envious state. Even the ones hanging from the straps like drowsy trapeze artists, lost in a swaying, somnolent exercise. Occasionally a new set of people entered when the train stopped. They were noisy and fidgety at first. But the contagion of lethargy quickly subdued them. They fell silent under the spell of the whirring fans which swivelled jerkily from side to side. With a nervous tic, twitching like victims of a heat-induced malady.
Sleep was one way to escape the discomfort; Jehangir shut his eyes to see if he could. He ceased bracing himself against the movement of the train, allowed the head and shoulders to droop forward to sway, and let his whole body sway with the train, unresisting. Like his parents’ opposite him, his movement became one with the movement of the compartment. Rolling to and fro, swaying side to side, as the train decreed. Surrendering to the torridity of the air and the hypnotic drone of the fans, the close click-click of the standees’ metal straps and the seemingly remote clackety-clack of the rails, he was ready to cross over from the edge of torpor into slumber, succumbing slowly to the swaying, swaying slowly.
The train stopped, and Jehangir straightened with a start. Did I really fall asleep? He anxiously scanned the platform for the station’s name. No, this was not the one. The compartment lurched into motion. The train resumed its journey, and the possibility of sleep was now crowded out by thoughts of Bhagwan Baba, his parents, and her; but mainly of her.
She was the first girl he had ever gone out with.
Jehangir’s school years had been devoid of girls. His parents could not afford the exorbitant fees which, for some peculiar reason, were common to all coeducational high schools, and from whence issued rumours, periodically, about students being “dismissed for attempting sexual intercourse on school property.” The rumours, vicariously relished and savoured when they reached the boys’ schools, fuelled and stoked high the envy and frustration rife within those walls. Their occupants had a heavy study load. Besides the regular subjects, they learned to forgo things taken for granted by their wealthy counterparts in coeducational schools — things such as music lessons, camping trips, and guided tours to Jammu and Kashmir. But they discovered ways to make up for it. They learned how to use their eyes to undress their female teacher and gaze longingly at the outline of her bra, drop erasers or pencils and linger at floor level to retrieve them while she sat at her desk on an elevated platform (the days when she wore a sari were barren, black days), and carry home unforgettable images of flowery panties.
These pursuits went a long way in honing imaginations and developing agility and suppleness in tight places. Unfortunately, the supply of female teachers dwindled drastically in the higher grades, when their need was greatest. But the students believed that within the egalitarianism of university life all wrongs would be righted, and continued to believe until they arrived, bright-eyed and optimistic despite their awkwardness, to discover their faith had been groundless.
Jehangir had been trapped in St. Xavier’s Boys School; its effects lingered, and even in college his first two years had been fallow. He lacked the sophistication of the chaps from coeducational schools, in their Levi’s and other imported clothes, who took pleasure in flaunting the ease with which they mingled and joked in the college canteen before the gawky ones from boys’ schools or the “vernacs” from non-English medium schools (at the bottom of the sophistication hierarchy) who continued shamefacedly to clothe themselves in old school uniforms at their parents’ insistence to get the frill wear out of them.
Jehangir suffered the superciliousness of the boys from coeducational schools with a silent rage. Sometimes he was consumed by bouts of inferiority which he palliated by trying to accept with calm resignation that the gulf between them and him was no wider than the one between him and the dolts in Firozsha Baag. But such fatalism did not make things less embittering. He despised their sardonic comments to the innocent ones who kept using ‘periods’ instead of ‘lectures’: “Periods, my friend, occur for menstruating females and schoolboys. In college we attend lectures.” He envied their long and loud laughter laden with confidence, their clearly forceful and distinct speech during class discussions, which he could not help but compare to the diffident mumbles of the others.