A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

  “Actually speaking, you have: two old beggars. This is a perfect prima facie case. The murdered beggars’ hair was chopped off and stolen. Now the hair is in your possession. It tells the whole story.”

  “But we just found it here! You saw us open the box!”

  “Actually speaking, I didn’t see anything.”

  “You have no evidence of murder! How do you know it’s the same hair?”

  “Don’t worry about that. As you were saying earlier, silly things like evidence are not necessary anymore. Nowadays, we have nice things like the Emergency and MISA.”

  “What’s MISA?” asked Dina.

  “Maintenance of Internal Security Act, madam. Very convenient. Allows detention without trial, up to two years. Extensions also available on request.” He smiled sweetly and turned to the goondas again. “I almost forgot to tell you – you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.”

  The two were made to squat with their handcuffed hands draped over their heads. Sergeant Kesar was not yet ready to take them in. He stuffed the hair back in the box. “Exhibit A,” he said to Dina. “Don’t worry, madam, I’m waiting here till your truck comes. Who knows how many of your possessions will vanish if I leave. Once you are safely on your way, I’ll take these dogs to the station.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Dina.

  “No, thank you. You have made my day.” He checked if his holster flap was secure. “You like Clint Eastwood films, madam? Dirty Harry?”

  “I’ve never seen them. Are they good?”

  “Very thrilling. Highly action-packed dramas.” He added with a wistful smile, “Dirty Harry is a top-notch detective. He delivers justice even when the law makes it impossible.” Lowering to a whisper, he asked, “By the way, madam, how did the hair come to your verandah?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. There were two tailors working for me, and they had a friend, a hair-collector, and – I’m not sure, they’ve all disappeared.”

  “Lots of people have disappeared in the Emergency,” he said, shaking his head. “But you know, you may have been unknowingly mixed up with homicidal maniacs. Thank your stars, madam, that you escaped unharmed.”

  “But then, these two goondas are not really guilty, are they?”

  “Actually speaking, they are – of other crimes. They definitely deserve jail, madam. It’s like debit and credit, double-entry bookkeeping. In a way, Dirty Harry is also an accountant. The final balance is what’s important to him.”

  She nodded, watching a flock of crows rooting in the congealed gutter across the street. They jostled and squabbled over tidbits. Then the truck arrived.

  “You have children?” she asked Sergeant Kesar, while Nusswan’s men loaded the furniture.

  “Oh yes,” he said proudly, pleased by her question. “Two daughters. One is five years, other is nine.”

  “They go to school?”

  “Oh yes. The older one is taking sitar lessons also, once a week after school. Very expensive, but I do overtime for her sake. Children are our only treasure, no?”

  When the truck was ready, she climbed in beside the driver and thanked Sergeant Kesar again for his help. “My pleasure,” he said. “All the best, madam.”

  “The same to you. I hope your ulcer operation goes well.”

  The driver took a while to reverse the truck, for the way was narrow. Emerging through the gate, she saw Ibrahim behind the pillar, holding out his tin can to passersby.

  As the truck passed, he tried to lift his hand to his fez in farewell. But the pain in his shoulder stopped him. He tugged at the collar of his sherwani instead, and waved.

  Sorry I’m late,” said Nusswan, kissing Ruby’s cheek and then hugging his sister. “These never-ending meetings.” He rubbed his brow. “The truck brought everything safely?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Dina.

  “I suppose your beggars and tailors and paying guest have all wished you Au Revoir.” He laughed at his joke.

  “Stop it, Nusswan,” said Ruby. “Be nice to her, she has been through a lot.”

  “I’m only teasing. I can’t tell you how happy I am that Dina is back.”

  His voice grew softer, and filled with emotion. “For years and years I have prayed to God to bring you home. It hurt me so much, you choosing to live alone. In the end, only family will be of help – when the rest of the world turns its back on you.”

  He swallowed a lump in his throat, and Dina was touched. She helped Ruby set the table, fetching the water jug and glasses. They were in their usual place in the sideboard. Nothing had changed here in these many years, thought Dina.

  “No more humiliation with tailors or beggars,” said Nusswan. “No need for them, you don’t have to worry about money anymore. Just make yourself useful in the house – that’s all I ask.”

  “Nusswan!” scolded Ruby. “Poor Dina always used to help me. One thing she is not is lazy.”

  “I know, I know,” he chuckled. “Stubborn is what she is, not lazy.”

  After dinner, they examined the household effects from the flat. Nusswan was appalled by it. “Where did you find this junk?”

  She shrugged. A verbal answer was not always necessary. That was one useful thing she had learned from Maneck.

  “Well, there is no room for it here. Look at that ugly little dining table. And that sofa must be from Bawa Adam’s time.” He promised to call a jaripuranawalla and dispose of it within a few days.

  She did not argue with him. She did not plead for the memories which fleshed the ribs of her meagre belongings.

  Nusswan wondered about the change in his sister. Dina was too docile, far too meek and quiet, not like her old self at all. It made him a little uneasy. Could she be pretending? Was it part of some plan which she would spring when he least expected it?

  They transferred the contents of her chest of drawers into the wardrobe standing in her old room. “It’s been waiting for you,” confided Ruby. “Your father’s cupboard. I’m really happy you’ve come back.”

  Dina smiled. She removed the cover from the mattress and stored it in the bottom of the wardrobe. In its place she draped her own quilt, folded, at the foot of the bed.

  “That is beautiful!” said Ruby, spreading it out to admire. “Absolutely gorgeous! But what happened in that one corner, why the gap?”

  “I ran out of cloth.”

  “What a pity.” She thought for a moment. “You know, I have some lovely material, it will provide the perfect finishing touch. You can complete it with that.”

  “Thank you.” But Dina had already decided there was nothing further to add.

  At night in bed, she covered herself with the quilt and took to recounting the abundance of events in the tightly knit family of patches, the fragments that she had fashioned with needle, thread, and affection. If she stumbled along the way, the quilt nudged her forward. The streetlight through the open window was just bright enough to identify the motley of its making. Her bedtime story.

  Once, after midnight, Nusswan and Ruby knocked on the door and barged in while she was halfway through the narrative. “Dina? Do you need something?”

  “No.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “We heard voices,” said Ruby. “We thought you were talking in your sleep, having a bad dream or something.”

  Then Dina knew she had slipped from a silent recitation into reading aloud. “I was only saying my prayers. Sorry I disturbed you.”

  “It’s all right,” said Nusswan. “But I couldn’t recognize the passage at all. You better take some lessons from Dustoor Daab-Chaab’s successor at the fire-temple.” They laughed at his joke and returned to bed.

  He whispered to Ruby, “Remember how she was, after Rustom’s death? How she would call out his name almost every night?”

  “Yes, but that was a long time ago. Why should she still be upset about that?”
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  “Maybe she never got over it.”

  “Yes. Maybe you never recover from certain things.”

  In her room, Dina folded up the quilt. The patchwork had transformed her silence into unbidden words; it had to be locked away now in the wardrobe. She was frightened of the strange magic it worked on her mind, frightened of where its terrain was leading her. She did not want to cross that border permanently.

  Nusswan gave up teasing Dina because it was no fun if she did not retaliate. There were times when he sat alone in his room, recalling the headstrong, indomitable sister, and regretted her fading. Well, he sighed to himself, that was what life did to those who refused to learn its lessons: it beat them down and broke their spirit. But at least her days of endless toil were behind her. Now she would be cared for, provided for by her own family.

  Not long afterwards, the servant who came in the mornings to sweep and swab and dust the furniture was dismissed. “Bloody woman wanted more money,” Nusswan offered by way of explanation. “Saying there was an extra person in the house, creating more work for her broom and mop. The excuses these rascals come up with.”

  Dina took the hint and assumed the chores. She absorbed everything like a capacious sponge. During her private moments she wrung herself out and then was ready to blot up more.

  Ruby was gone most of the day now. But before leaving, she always inquired if she could help. Dina encouraged her to run along, preferring to be alone.

  “It’s thanks to Dina that I am at last able to use my Willingdon Club membership,” she told Nusswan in the evening. “Previously the fees were all going to waste.”

  “Dina is one in a million,” he agreed. “I have always said that. We had many fights and arguments, right, Dina? Especially about marriage. But I’ve always admired your strength and determination. I’11 never forget how bravely you behaved when poor Rustom passed away on your third anniversary.”

  “Nusswan! Do you have to remind us at dinner and upset poor Dina?”

  “Sorry, very sorry.” He obediently changed the topic, to the Emergency. “Problem is, the excitement has gone out of it. The initial fear which disciplined people, made them punctual and hardworking – that fear is gone. Government should do something to give a boost to the programme.”

  The subject of marriage was no longer brought up in their dinner conversations. At forty-three the matter was exhausted and the goods quite shopworn, he confided to Ruby.

  On Sunday evenings they played cards. “Come on, everybody,” Nusswan summoned them promptly at five o’clock. “Time for cards.”

  He observed the session religiously. It breathed a feeble reality into his dream of a close family. Sometimes, if a visiting friend made a fourth, they played bridge. More often, though, it was just the three of them, and Nusswan steered the hours through round after round of rummy, doggedly enthusiastic in his pursuit of familial happiness.

  “Did you know that playing cards originated in India?” he asked.

  “Really?” said Ruby. Such items from Nusswan always impressed her very much.

  “Oh yes, and so did chess. In fact, the theory is that playing cards were derived from chess. And they did not make their way to Europe till the thirteenth century, via the Middle East.”

  “Imagine that,” said Ruby.

  He rearranged his hand, discarded a card face-down and announced, “Rummy!”

  After presenting his completed sequences, he analysed the errors the others had made. “You should never have thrown away the knave of hearts,” he told Dina. “That’s why you lost.”

  “I took a chance.”

  He gathered up the cards and started shuffling. “Okay, whose deal is it?”

  “Mine,” said Dina, and accepted the deck.

  Epilogue: 1984

  IT WAS MORNING WHEN THE GULF flight bringing Maneck home landed in the capital after a delayed departure. He had tried to sleep on the plane but the annoying flicker of a movie being shown in the economy cabin kept buzzing before his eyelids like malfunctioning fluorescent lights. Bleary-eyed, he stood in line for customs inspection.

  An airport expansion scheme was in progress, and the passengers were packed into a temporary corrugated-iron structure. Construction was just beginning when he had left for Dubai eight years ago, he remembered. Waves of heat ricocheted off the shimmering sun-soaked metal, buffeting the crowds. The smell of sweat, cigarette smoke, stale perfume, and disinfectant roamed the air. People fanned themselves with passports and customs declaration forms. Someone fainted. Two peons tried to revive the man by arranging him in the stream of a customs officer’s table fan. Water was sent for.

  The baggage searches resumed after the interruption. A passenger behind Maneck grumbled about the slowness, and Maneck shrugged his shoulders: “Maybe they received a tip that a big smuggler is coming today from Dubai.”

  “No, it’s like this all the time,” said the man. “With all flights from the Middle East. What they are looking for is jewellery, gold biscuits, electronic goods.” He explained that customs had become more zealous because of a recent government directive, which offered special bonuses – a percentage of each officer’s seizures. “So they are harassing us more than ever now.”

  “All my carefully folded saris will get crumpled,” complained the maris wife.

  The officer looking through Maneck’s suitcase pushed his fingers under the clothes and felt about. Maneck wondered if there would be a penalty for setting a mousetrap inside one’s luggage. After much groping, the officer withdrew his hands and let him through grudgingly.

  Maneck squeezed the bag shut, rushed outside to a taxi and asked to be driven to the railway station. The driver was unwilling to make the journey. “It’s right in the middle of the rioting. Too dangerous.”

  “What rioting?”

  “Don’t you know? People are being beaten and butchered and burnt alive.”

  Rather than argue with him, Maneck tried elsewhere. But every taxi driver he approached refused the fare with the same warning. Some advised him to check into a hotel near the airport till things quietened.

  In frustration, he decided to offer an incentive to the next one. “You’ll get double of what is on the meter, okay? I have to get home, my father has passed away. If I miss the train I will miss my father’s funeral.”

  “It’s not the meter I am worried about, sahab. Your life and mine are worth much more. But get in, I’ll try my best.” He reached for the meter, flipping the FOR HIRE indicator upside-down with a clang.

  The taxi extricated itself from the swarm of vehicles that throttled the airport lanes, and soon they were on the highway. In between checking for traffic, the driver observed his passenger through the rearview mirror. Maneck could feel the man’s eyes on him.

  “You should think about shaving off your beard, sahab,” the driver spoke. “You might be mistaken for a Sikh.”

  Maneck was very proud of his beard; and so what if people thought he was a Sikh? He had started growing it two years ago, grooming it carefully to its present state. “How can I be mistaken for a Sikh? I don’t have a turban.”

  “Lots of Sikhs don’t wear turban, sahab. But I think clean-shaven would be much safer for you.”

  “Safer? Meaning what?”

  “You are saying you don’t know? Sikhs are the ones being massacred in the riots. For three days they have been burning Sikh shops and homes, chopping up Sikh boys and men. And the police are just running about here and there, pretending to protect the neighbourhoods.”

  He pulled over to the extreme left of the road as a convoy of army lorries approached the taxi from behind. He shouted to Maneck over his shoulder, over the thunder of the vehicles. “That’s the Border Security Force! The newspaper said it was being sent in today!”

  The convoy passed, and his voice returned to normal. “Our best soldiers, the BSF. First line of defence against enemy invasion. Now they must guard borderlines within our cities. How shameful for the whole country.”


  “But why Sikhs only?”

  “Sahab?”

  “You said only Sikhs are being attacked.”

  The driver gazed into the rearview mirror with disbelief. Was the passenger feigning ignorance? He decided the question was indeed asked in earnest. “It started when the Prime Minister was killed three days ago. She was shot by her Sikh bodyguards. So this is supposed to be revenge.”

  Now he turned and looked directly at Maneck. “Where have you been, sahab, you didn’t hear anything of what has happened?”

  “I knew about the assassination but not the riots.” He studied the cracks in the vinyl seat in front of him and the driver’s frayed collar visible above the seatback. Small boils, not yet ready to burst, shone upon the man’s neck. “I’ve been very busy, trying to come back in time for my father’s funeral.”

  “Yes,” said the driver sympathetically. “Must be very difficult for you.” He swerved to avoid a dog in the road, a yellow mongrel, mangy and skeletal.

  Maneck glanced through the rear window to see if the animal made it to safety. A lorry behind them squashed it. “The problem is, I’ve been out of the country for eight years,” he offered as a further excuse.

  “That’s a very long time, sahab. That means you left before the Emergency ended – before the elections. Of course, for ordinary people, nothing has changed. Government still keeps breaking poor people’s homes and jhopadpattis. In villages, they say they will dig wells only if so many sterilizations are done. They tell farmers they will get fertilizer only after nussbandhi is performed. Living each day is to face one emergency or another.” He beeped a warning to someone trudging along the shoulder. “You heard about the attack on the Golden Temple, no?”

  “Yes. Things like that are hard to miss,” said Maneck. Where did the fellow think he was returning from, the moon? In the silence that followed, he realized that in fact he knew very little about the years he had been away. He wondered what other tragedies and farces had unfolded in the country while he was supervising the refrigeration of the hot desert air.