In the middle of all that stories about Mast Ram began to reach the Ras: how a live flowering bush had withered and died moments after Mast Ram touched it; how Abusa’s famous pumpkins, each one the size of a fattened sheep, were opened and found to be as hollow as footballs after Mast Ram had watered them.
None of it was Mast Ram’s fault. He was as bewildered as everyone else by the death which surrounded him. In the end Abusa, fearing for his job, had to put him to laying paving stones so that the garden would be safe from his hands.
Then people began to notice a change in Mast Ram. He saw how every living thing flourished and grew under Abusa’s hands and he was filled with admiration, even love. He took to following Abusa wherever he went, inside the house and outside, staring up at him with dog’s eyes. Abusa for his part was always kind to him, like a stern brother.
Mast Ram began to do everything he could to earn Abusa’s respect. Abusa had a few rabbits which he kept in a cage in the courtyard. He looked after them well and they bred faster than they could be eaten. One day Mast Ram decided to feed the rabbits. Next morning there was a dead rabbit in the cage. Everybody in the house saw it, but nobody said a word, not even Abusa. The next day Mast Ram fed the rabbits again. Again, the morning after, they found a dead rabbit. That evening, when Mast Ram went to feed the rabbits yet again, Abusa stopped him and quietly, in their own language, half signs, half words, he told him not to feed the rabbits again.
Mast Ram said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes.
After that Mast Ram’s behaviour became even stranger. At that time Abusa had taken a great liking to Kulfi. He spent a lot of time looking at her and sometimes he even bought her presents. Kulfi used to toss her head and pretend not to care, but of course she was pleased, for like everyone else she liked Abusa.
Then one morning Chunni said: Mast Ram has fallen in love with Kulfi. And soon it was clear that she was right. He was just a boy after all. His eyes never left Kulfi. He took to sitting in the courtyard, waiting for her to pass by. He even tried to talk to her, but Kulfi, like most people, shuddered whenever she saw him and ran into her room.
And then one morning Mast Ram rose very early and hid himself in the courtyard. He knew Kulfi was the first to get up in the morning. He lay flat behind the rabbits’ cage and when she came out of the room he leapt out. In his hands he held half of all the money he had saved in his time in al-Ghazira. That was how desperate he was.
Think of Kulfi: on her way to her morning shit, half-awake, when this man with snake’s eyes jumps out from behind the rabbits and flings money at her feet. She screamed and flung her tin of water right into his face and, while he was still hopping around spitting out water, she locked herself safely into the shithouse.
After that there was no sleep for Mast Ram. He spent his nights squatting in a corner, brooding. Abu Fahl said he should be watched, so for a while he was never left alone; but then people forgot him again, for that was when the Professor was arrested.
The day we heard everyone was stunned. How? How did it happen? Had he talked about queues again, at his new job, even after everyone had sat around him at night and told him not to, at least a hundred times?
No. It was something else altogether.
The Professor had a fine job in those days: the best in the house, and one of the best anyone in the Ras could hope for. He was a manager’s assistant in a huge supermarket in Hurreyya Avenue. He spent his days wrapped in air-conditioning and the smells of freshly frozen Australian lamb and Danish mutton, French cauliflowers and Egyptian cabbages, Thai rice and Canadian wheat, English cod and Japanese sardines, prawns and shrimps and lobster from the world over … All that and nothing to do but sit at a desk and add up numbers. It was just luck, getting that job. Of course, it made good sense for them, for they paid him less than they should have because he had no work permit.
The morning he was arrested the Professor left the house in a great hurry. He had been told to get to the shop early, but when he woke up he found that he had no clean trousers to wear. So, neat as ever, he tied on a starched white lungi and went off. Nobody noticed on the bus and, since he was early that day, no one saw him go into the shop. Once he was behind his desk all they could see of him was his spotless white shirt.
At about eleven o’clock, when most of the other people in the shop were drinking tea in a back room, a rich and beautiful Ghaziri woman came into the shop. Seeing no one, she wandered about until she spotted Professor Samuel at his desk at the far end and she went up to him and asked in Arabic: Please, can you tell me where the prawns are kept?
Now, the Professor had been working hard since morning, staring at figures, adding them, dividing them, and he was just a little confused. The moment he saw her he stood up. She was very beautifuclass="underline" no burqa for her; she was dressed in the most expensive of European clothes and her hair was piled high on her head.
She asked him again, and this time he was even more confused. He heard the word gambari and knew that he had heard it before but couldn’t remember what it meant. Scratching his head, blinking distractedly, he stared straight into her face and tried to speak.
The woman had been just a little alarmed when the Professor first stood up. Now, with him staring at her, mouth open, a tiny chill of fright crept up her spine. She looked quickly over her shoulder, wondering whether to call out. As it happened, the Professor’s desk was at one end of a long, deserted corridor of shelves. It was the darkest and gloomiest part of the shop. When she saw that she was really scared.
The Professor was still thinking, half about gambari and half about his accounts and figures, so absent-mindedly he did something he would never otherwise have done in public: he reached down, pulled his lungi up over his knees and tied it up at his waist, as people do when they’re at home.
The rich woman saw this blinking, staring man suddenly pulling his clothes up. She saw him baring his stout, hairy legs, and in terror she cowered back into the shelves.
Just then the Professor remembered. Gambari! Oh, gambari! he cried, flinging his arms open and rushing towards her. Come, Madam, come, I will show you gambaris like you’ve never seen …
The woman leapt backwards with the strength of the terror-stricken, right into the shelves. The Professor shrieked — No, Madam, that’s the tomato sauce! — and lunged forward to save her. She swooned into the shelves, the Professor fell upon her and five hundred bottles of American tomato sauce fell upon them.
When the other attendants arrived after the crash they saw the Professor sprawled on an unconscious rich lady, lying in a small blood-red lake. When the Professor stood up and tried to explain they fled, too, right into the street, where they screamed and screamed till the police arrived.
Abu Fahl and Alu had to spend a lot of money to get him out of gaol, and there’s at least one shop in Hurreyya now which will never hire an Indian again. After that the Professor had to be content with the job Jeevanbhai gave him, so that was another person in the house who’d lost a good job.