A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
He encouraged the driver to keep talking: “What’s your opinion about the Golden Temple?”
The man was pleased at being asked. He turned off the highway near the outskirts of the capital. They passed the burned-out carcass of a vehicle, its wheels in the air. “I will have to take a longer way to the station, sahab. Some roads are better avoided.” Then he came back to Maneck’s question. “The Prime Minister said Sikh terrorists were hiding inside the Golden Temple. The army’s attack was only a few months ago. But the important thing to ask is how the problem started many years ago, no?”
“Yes. How?”
“Same way all her problems started. With her own mischief-making. Just like in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Assam, Tamil Nadu. In Punjab, she was helping one group to make trouble for state government. Afterwards the group became so powerful, fighting for separation and Khalistan, they made trouble for her only. She gave her blessing to the guns and bombs, and then these wicked, violent instruments began hitting her own government. How do they say in English – all her chickens came home for roasting, isn’t it?”
“Came home to roost,” murmured Maneck.
“Yes, exactly,” said the driver. “And then she made the problem worse and worse, telling the army to attack the Golden Temple and capture the terrorists. With tanks and what-all big guns they charged inside, like hooligans. How much damage to the shrine. It is the most sacred place for Sikhs, and everybody’s feelings were hurt.”
Maneck was touched by the poignant understatement. “She created a monster,” the driver went on, “and the monster swallowed her. Now it swallows innocents. Such terrible butchery for three days.” His fingers clenched the steering wheel, and his voice was shaking. “They are pouring kerosene on Sikhs and setting them on fire. They catch men, tear the hair from their faces or hack it with swords, then kill them. Whole families burnt to death in their homes.”
He drew a hand across his mouth, took a deep breath, and continued to describe the slaughter he had witnessed. “And all this, sahab, in our nations capital. All this while police do their shameless acting, and the politicians say the people are upset, they are just avenging their leader’s murder, what can we do. This is what I say to the stinking dogs-phthoo!” He spat through the window.
“But I thought the Prime Minister was not much liked by the people. Why are they so upset?”
“It’s true, sahab, she was not liked by ordinary people, even though she went about like a devi in a white sari. But let’s suppose she was beloved – do you think ordinary people will behave in this way? Aray, it’s the work of criminal gangs paid by her party. Some ministers are even helping the gangs, providing official lists of Sikh homes and businesses. Otherwise, it’s not possible for the killers to work so efficiently, so accurately, in such a big city.”
They were passing through streets now where smouldering ruins and piles of rubble lined the road. Women and children sat amid the debris, dazed or weeping. The driver’s face contorted, and Maneck thought it was fear. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There will be no trouble because of my beard. If we are stopped, they’ll at once know I’m a Parsi – I’ll show them the sudra and kusti I am wearing.”
“Yes, but they might want to check my licence.”
“So?”
“You haven’t guessed? I am a Sikh – I shaved off my beard and cut my hair two days ago. But I’m still wearing my kara.” He held up his hand, displaying the iron bangle round his wrist.
Maneck studied the driver’s face, and suddenly the evidence became plain: his skin, unused to the razor’s scrape, had been cut in several places. Suddenly, all the incidents narrated by the man – of mutilation and bludgeoning and decapitation, the numerous ways that mobs had of breaking bones, piercing flesh, and spilling blood – everything that Maneck had been listening to with detachment now achieved a stark reality in the razor’s nicks. The coagulated specks of red on the chin and jowls might have been rivers of blood, so intense was their effect against the pale, newly shaven skin.
Maneck was nauseated, his face felt cold and sweaty. “The bastards!” he choked. “I hope they are all caught and hanged!”
“The real murderers will never be punished. For votes and power they play with human lives. Today it is Sikhs. Last year it was Muslims; before that, Harijans. One day, your sudra and kusti might not be enough to protect you.”
The taxi drew up to the railway station. Maneck checked the meter and counted out twice the amount from his wallet, but the driver refused to take more than the actual fare. “Please,” said Maneck, “please take it.” He pressed the money on him, as though that would help him survive the terror, and the driver finally accepted.
“Listen,” said Maneck, “why don’t you remove your kara and hide it for the time being?”
“It won’t come off.” He held up his wrist and pulled hard at the iron bangle. “I was planning to have it cut. But I have to find a reliable Lohar, one who won’t tell the wrong people.”
“Let me try.” Maneck grasped the driver’s hand, tugging and twisting the kara. It would not budge past the base of the thumb.
The driver smiled. “Solid as a handcuff. I am manacled to my religion – a happy prisoner.”
“At least wear long sleeves, then. Cover it up, keep your wrist hidden.”
“But sometimes I have to stick my hand out, to signal my turns. Or the traffic police will catch me for bad driving.”
Maneck gave up, releasing the kara. The driver took Maneck’s hand in both of his and clasped it tight. “Go safely,” he said.
Ab an Kohlah began to weep when her son arrived. How wonderful it was to see him again, she said, but why had he stayed away for eight years, was he angry about something, did he feel he was not wanted? She hugged him and patted his cheeks and stroked his hair while speaking.
“But I like your beard,” she said dutifully. “Makes you look very handsome. You should have sent us a photo, Daddy could also have seen it. But never mind, I am sure he is watching from above.”
Maneck listened silently. Not one day had passed during his long exile that he did not think about his home and his parents. In Dubai, he had felt trapped. Trapped, he thought, as surely as that young woman he had met during one of his domestic maintenance calls to service a refrigerator. She had come to the Gulf as a maidservant because the money promised had seemed so good.
“What is it, Maneck?” pleaded Mrs. Kohlah. “Don’t you want to live here in the hills anymore – is that it? Do you find this place too dull?”
“No, it’s beautiful,” he said, patting her hand absently. He could not stop wondering what had become of that maidservant. Overworked, molested repeatedly by the men of the house, locked up in her room at night, her passport confiscated, she had begged him for help, speaking in Hindi so her employer would not understand. But she had been called away from the kitchen before Maneck could say anything. Uneasy about intervening, all he had done was anonymously telephone the Indian Consulate.
How fortunate he was compared to that poor woman, he thought. Why, then, did he feel as helpless as she was, even here, at home?
And now, as his mother wept, he wished he had answers to her questions. But he was unable to explain, either to her or to himself. All he could offer were the trite, customary excuses: a demanding job, pressures at work, lack of time – a repeat of the empty words he would scribble in his annual letter to her.
“No, tell me the real reason,” she said. “Never mind, we will talk later, after you have rested. Poor Daddy, how much he missed you, and yet he never, ever complained. But I knew that inside it was eating him up.”
“So now you are blaming the cancer on me.”
“No! I didn’t mean it like that! I didn’t!” His mother held his face in her hands, repeating the denial till she was certain he believed her. “You know, Daddy once told me it was the worst day of his life when he let Brigadier Grewal persuade him that a job in the Gulf would be a good thing for you.”
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“How narrow-minded these people are,” she said, shaking her head. “Of course, we are cremating because it was Daddy’s wish, but what about people who cannot afford to transport the body? Would these priests deny them the prayers?”
It wasn’t going to be an open-air pyre, she explained. The electric crematorium had been booked in the valley – it would be more decorous. And Daddy wasn’t really specific on this point, so it didn’t matter.
The General Store had remained closed since his death. She meant to reopen it next week and continue as usual. “Are you planning to settle back here?” she ventured timidly, afraid of appearing to pry into his affairs.
“I haven’t thought about it yet.”
Daylight was starting to fade about them. He watched a lizard, motionless upon the stone wall. Every now and then, its thin body shot forward like an arrow to catch a fly.
“Are you happy in Dubai? Is your job interesting?”
“It’s okay.”
“Tell me more about it. You wrote that you are a manager now?”
“Supervisor. Looking after a maintenance team – central air-conditioning.”
She nodded. “And what is Dubai like?”
“It’s okay.” He searched his mind for things to add, and realized he did not know the place, didn’t want to. The people, their customs, the language – it was all as alien to him now as it had been when he had landed there eight years ago. His uprooting never seemed to end. “Lots of big hotels. And hundreds of shops selling gold jewellery and stereos and TVS.”
She nodded again. “Must be a very beautiful place.” His unhappiness afflicted her like something palpable. She felt the moment was right to talk again about his returning home. “The shop is yours, you know that. If you want to come back and run it, modernize it. Whatever you like. If you prefer to sell it and use the money to start your own refrigeration and air-conditioning business, that’s also possible.”
He heard the diffident note in her voice and felt miserable. A mother scared to talk to her own son – was he really so intimidating? “I haven’t thought about all that,” he repeated.
“Take your time, there is no rush. Whatever you wish.”
He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn’t she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent, superficial letters? And if she did say it – would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.
“I was thinking,” said Mrs. Kohlah, shifting to a less risky subject. “Since you have come after so many years, maybe you should take the chance and visit our relatives. Everyone in the Sodawalla family is dying to see you again.”
“It’s too far to go, I don’t have time.”
“Not even two-three days? You could also say hello to the lady you lived with when you were in college. She would be so happy to see you.
“She’s forgotten me after all this time, for sure.”
“I don’t think so. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t have finished your certificate. You didn’t like the college hostel, you wanted to come straight back home, remember? You owe your success to Dina Dalai and her accommodation.”
“Yes, I remember.” Hearing his mother say “success” made him cringe.
Dusk fell, and the lizard he had been watching began melting into the stone wall. When it moved, it became sharply visible again. But the creature’s appetite must have been sated, he thought, for it no longer darted at flies – its belly seemed distinctly bloated.
“Maneck.” She waited till he turned his head towards her. “Maneck, why are you so far away?”
He narrowed his eyes to examine her face – his mother was not usually given to such inanities. “It’s because my job is in Dubai.”
“I wasn’t referring to that distance, Maneck.”
Her answer made him feel foolish. Gently touching his shoulder, she said, “Time to start dinner,” and went inside.
He listened to the kitchen noises travelling to the porch, timid as his mother’s words. Pots and pans, and then the knife – a flurry of taps against the board while she chopped something. Water running in the sink. A thud, and a bolt rattling into place, as she shut the window to keep out the evening cold.
Maneck shifted uneasily in his chair. The cooking sounds, the twilight chill, the fog rising from the valley began escorting a host of memories through his troubled mind. Childhood mornings, waking, standing at the enormous picture window of his room, watching the snow-covered peaks as the sun rose and the mountain mists commenced their dance, while Mummy started breakfast and Daddy got ready to open the shop. Then the smell of toast and fried eggs made him hungry, so he pushed his warm feet into the cold slippers, enjoying the shiver that shot through him, brushed his teeth, and hurried downstairs, gave Mummy a good-morning hug and snuggled into his chair. Soon, Daddy came in rubbing his hands, and took great gulps of tea from his special cup while standing, gazing out upon the valley before sitting to eat his breakfast and drink more tea, and Mummy said…
“Maneck, it’s getting chilly outside. Do you want a pullover?”
The intrusion jolted the elbow of memory; his thoughts collapsed like a house of cards. “No, I’ll be in soon,” he called back, irritated by the interruption, as though he could have recaptured, reconstructed, redeemed those happy times if only he had been given long enough.
The lizard still clung to the stone wall, camouflaged within the stone colouring. Maneck decided he would go inside when the fading light made the creature disappear completely. He hated its shape, its colour, its ugly snout. The manner in which it flicked its evil tongue. Its ruthless way of swallowing flies. The way time swallowed human efforts and joy. Time, the ultimate grandmaster that could never be checkmated. There was no way out of its distended belly. He wanted to destroy the loathsome creature.
He took a walking-stick leaning in the corner of the porch, crept forward, and swung at the lizard. The stick made a flat thwack upon the stone. He stepped back quickly, examining the ground at his feet, ready to deliver a second blow if required. But there was nothing there. He looked at the wall. Nothing. He had swung at thin air.
Now he felt relief that he had not killed the lizard. He wondered at what point it had departed, leaving him to conjure up its saurian presence. He looked closely at the wall’s texture. He ran his fingers over the surface to find the spot. There must be some curious marking in the stone, a bump or crack or hollow that had tricked his eyes.
But the outline had vanished. Try as he might, he could not bring back the picture. The imagined lizard had escaped as cleanly as the real one.
The morning after the cremation, Maneck and his mother set off with the wooden box to scatter his father’s ashes on the mountainside where he had loved to walk. He had wanted to be strewn throughout these vistas, as far and wide within the panorama as human effort could accomplish. Hire a Sherpa if you have to, he had joked. Dont dump me in one spot.
“I think Daddy is forcing me to take at least one long walk with him,” said Mrs. Kohlah, brushing away her tears with the back of her hand, keeping her fingers dry for the ashes.
Maneck wished he had accompanied his father more often on his outings. He wished the delight, the eagerness he had shown as a child could have endured in later years, when his father needed him most. Instead, he had succumbed to embarrassment in the face of his
The air was calm this morning. There was no breeze to help disperse the ashes. Maneck and his mother took turns dipping into the box and sprinkling the grey powder.
When half the ashes were gone, Aban Kohlah felt a pang of guilt, felt they were not doing it as thoroughly as her husband would have liked. She ventured into more difficult places, trying to throw a fistful in a hesitant waterfall, mingle some in an inaccessible clump of wildflowers, spread a little around a tree that grew out of an overhang.
“This was Daddy’s favourite spot,” she said. “He often described this tree, how strangely it grew.”
“Be careful, Mummy,” warned Maneck. “Tell me where you want to scatter it, don’t lean so much over the edge.”
But that would not be the same thing, she thought, and persevered in her precarious clamberings down steep paths. Finally, what Maneck had feared came to pass. She lost her footing and slipped down a slope.
He ran to where she crouched, rubbing her knee. “Ohhh!” she said, rising and trying to walk.
“Don’t,” he said. “Just wait here, I’ll get help.”
“No, it’s okay, I can climb up.” She took two steps and sank to the ground again.
He tucked the box of ashes safely behind a boulder, then hurried to regain the road, shouting to someone going by that his mother was injured. Within thirty minutes, a group of friends and neighbours came to the rescue, headed by the formidable Mrs. Grewal.
The wife of Brigadier Grewal had become more and more leaderly in her demeanour since her husband’s death. Wherever she found herself, she automatically took control of things. Most of her friends welcomed this, for it meant less work for them, whether it was planning a dinner party or arranging an outing.
Sizing up Mrs. Kohlah’s predicament, Mrs. Grewal sent for two porters who now worked as waiters in a five-star hotel. In the old days, the duo would carry elderly or infirm tourists in a long-armed viewing chair along the mountain paths and trails to enjoy the scenery. When the new road was built, wide enough to accommodate sightseeing buses, it put the porters out of business.