A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
It took a day or two for his equilibrium to return. Then he began to feel again that yes, it had been the right decision not to leave his home in the hills, it was still a good place for his family. “The air and water is so pure, the mountains so beautiful, and the business is doing very well,” wrote he and Mrs. Kohlah to the relatives who periodically beseeched them to leave. “Nowhere else can Maneck have better expectations for his future.”
If Maneck had been consulted he would have agreed completely; and never mind the future, the present would have been reason enough for him, for his happy childhood universe. His days were rich and full – school in the morning and afternoon, the General Store after that, followed by a walk with his father, late in the evening, when he would stride manfully alongside to keep up, or else Daddy would tease him that slow coaches got left behind.
But Sundays were the best days. On Sundays a gaddi man called Bhanu came to tidy the garden behind the house. Maneck looked forward all week to being outdoors with Bhanu, wandering around the property and doing chores under his direction. The area beyond the first fifty yards, where it began to slope downhill, wild with shrubs and trees and thick undergrowth, was the most interesting. There, Bhanu taught him the names of strange flowers and herbs, things which did not grow near the front of the house with the roses and lilies and marigolds. He pointed out the deadly datura plant and the one that was its antidote, and leaves that mitigated the poison of certain snakes, others which cured stomach ailments, and the stems whose pulp healed cuts and wounds. He showed Maneck how to squeeze a snapdragon to make its jaws open. Late in the year, when the weather turned chilly, they gathered dead twigs and branches as the afternoon drew to a close, and made a small fire.
Sometimes Bhanu brought along his daughter, Suraiya, who was the same age as Maneck. Then Maneck divided his time between chores and play. At noon, Mrs. Kohlah called the children in for lunch. Suraiya was shy about eating at the table; there were no chairs in her house. It was a few visits before she would run in with Maneck and readily take her place. Bhanu continued to eat his food outside.
One afternoon, Suraiya squatted on the far slope among the bushes. Maneck waited out of sight for a moment, then followed her curiously. She smiled as he approached. He heard the soft hiss, and bent over to look. Her little stream had made a frothy puddle.
He unbuttoned his pants beside her and produced a fluid arc. “I can do soo-soo standing,” he said.
Laughing, she finished and pulled up her underpants. “So can my brother, he also has a small soosoti like yours.”
It became a ritual from then on to go in the bushes every time Suraiya came to work with her father. Gradually, their curiosity led them to closer anatomical examinations.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Kohlah when they came in to tea. “Why are you two giggling all the time?”
Over the next few Sundays she began watching from the kitchen window, and saw them go repeatedly down the slope, where her eyes could not follow. Her attempt to sneak up on them failed. They heard her footsteps before she was anywhere near, and ran out laughing.
Later, she confided her suspicions to Mr. Kohlah. “Farokh, I think you need to keep an eye on Maneck. While Suraiya is here.”
“Why, what has he done?”
“Well, they go in the bushes and –” she blushed. “I haven’t actually seen anything, but…”
“The little rascal,” smiled Mr. Kohlah. The following Sunday he stayed out in the garden, supervising Bhanu’s work and patrolling the periphery of the slope. It became part of his routine for the rest of that year. The children had to exercise all their cunning to evade the adult’s watchful eye.
When Maneck completed the fourth standard, Mr. Kohlah began to investigate the possibility of sending him to a boarding school. The quality of instruction available in the local day school had become quite appalling, Brigadier Grewal and everyone else agreed. “A good education is the most important thing,” they said.
The boarding school they selected was eight hours away by bus. Maneck detested the decision. The thought of leaving the hill-station – his entire universe – brought him to a state of panic. “I like my school here,” he pleaded. “And how will I work in the shop in the evening if you send me away?”
“Stop worrying about work, you’re only eleven,” laughed Mr. Kohlah. “You have to enjoy your boyhood first. It will be great fun, living with fellows your own age. You will love the school. And the store will still be here when you come home for holidays.”
Maneck learned to tolerate boarding school but not to love it. He felt an ache of betrayal. Not one day passed without his remembering the house, his parents, the shop, the mountains. He found his classmates very different from the boys he had known. They behaved as though they were better than he. The older boys talked about girls, and touched the younger boys. Someone showed him a deck of playing cards that had pictures of naked women. The dark patches between their legs horrified him. It couldn’t be, the pictures had to be fake, he thought, remembering the smooth, sweetly whispering hole of Suraiya.
“That’s hair – that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” said the older boy. “These are genuine photographs. Look, I’ll show you.” He undid his pants to display his pubic hair, also releasing his tumescent penis from its confines.
“But you’re a boy, it doesn’t prove anything about girls,” said Maneck. He wanted a closer look at the cards. The fellow would not let him unless he did him a favour. He held Maneck very close, rubbing against him and moaning. It was a strange sound, thought Maneck, as though he was trying to do kakka. The cards were handed over after the fellow had spurted.
Maneck returned home for the Divali vacation, let two days pass, then tried to convince his parents not to send him back. He kept it up till Mr. Kohlah got annoyed. “There will be no more talk on this subject,” he said.
Maneck went to bed without wishing them good night. The omission tormented him for a long time, leaving a hollow that sleep refused to fill. After midnight had struck, he considered going to his parents’ room and rectifying his foolish defiance. But pride, and the fear of angering Daddy again, kept him in his own bed.
Up at dawn, he hugged his mother by the stove and murmured good morning, then skirted his father at the kitchen window and slipped into his chair. “His little lordship is still sulking,” said Mr. Kohlah, smiling.
Maneck looked down at his cup, frowning into it. He did not want to lose control of his mouth and smile back.
It was Sunday, and Bhanu came as usual to work in the garden. Suraiya was not with him. Maneck tagged along for a while before asking about her.
“She is with her mother,” said Bhanu. “She will be with her from now on.”
Maneck felt another segment of his universe collapse. He did not return to the garden after lunch. Mrs. Kohlah took him aside and said it was not nice to be unkind to Daddy who loved him so much. “What he is doing, sending you to a fine school, is for your own good. You should not think of it as punishment.”
In the evening, Mr. Kohlah bade his son sit beside him on the sofa. “Boarding school is not forever,” he said. “Remember, Mummy and I miss you more than you miss us. But what is the choice? You don’t want to be ignorant, unable to read or write, like these poor gaddi people who go through their whole lives cold and hungry, with a few sheep or goats, struggling to survive. Remember, the slow coach gets left behind. Once you obtain the Secondary School Certificate in another six years, nobody is going to send you away. You will take charge of this business.”
Maneck allowed himself a smile as his father continued, “In fact, the sooner it is, the better for me. I can relax and go hiking all day.”
Next morning at breakfast, Mr. Kohlah gave him the special big cup to drink from. Then he let him sit behind the till to make change for their customers. Maneck cherished that day for the rest of the school year. Whenever the pain of banishment surfaced, he summoned the happy memory to counterbalance his despair
Despite his initial dread of the eternity that was six years, time chipped away three of them at its steady pace. Maneck turned fourteen, and came home for the May vacation.
That year, for the first time, his parents were going to leave him on his own for two days while they attended a wedding. Instead of closing down the place and sending him to a neighbour’s house, Mr. Kohlah decided, as a special treat, to let him run the shop alone.
“Just do things the way we do when I’m here,” he said. “Everything will go smoothly. Don’t forget to count the soft-drink crates taken by the driver. And phone for tomorrow’s milk – very, very important. If there is a problem, call Grewal Uncle. I’ve told him to check on you later on.” Mr. and Mrs. Kohlah went around the shop one more time with Maneck, reminding and pointing, then departed.
The day passed like any other. There were flurries of activity followed by periods of calm during which he wiped the glass cases, dusted the shelves, cleaned the counter. The regulars inquired about his parents’ absence, and praised his ability. “Look at the boy, keeping the barracks shipshape. Deserves a medal.”
“Farokh and Aban could retire tomorrow if they wanted to,” said Brigadier Grewal. “Nothing to worry about, with Field Marshal Maneck in charge of General Store.” Everyone present laughed heartily at that.
Late in the evening, quiet descended upon the square as daylight began to fade. Maneck went to switch on the porch lamp, feeling proud of his day’s work. It was almost time to close the store. All that remained was to empty the till, count the money, and enter the amount in the book. From the porch he saw the shop’s interior, and paused. That big glass case in the centre, with soaps and talcum powders – it would look much nicer in the front. And the old newspaper table near the entrance, scarred and wobbly – wouldn’t it be better off pushed to the side?
The idea pursued Maneck and seized his imagination while he warmed his food. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a smart rearrangement of the display. He could easily manage it alone, tonight. What a surprise for Mummy and Daddy when they came back.
After eating his dinner, he returned to the darkened shop, switched on the light, and dragged the old table out of the way. The glass case was more difficult, heavy and cumbersome. He emptied the merchandise and pushed it slowly to its new, prominent spot. Then he replaced the cans and cartons, but not in their boring old stacks – he arranged them in interesting pyramids and spirals. Perfect, he thought, standing back to admire the effect, and went to bed.
The next evening, Mr. Kohlah walked in and saw the alterations. Without pausing to greet Maneck or ask how things were, he told him to shut the door, hang out the Closed sign.
“But there’s still one hour left,” said Maneck, hungry for his father’s praise.
“I know. Shut it anyway.” Then his father ordered him to put everything back the way it was. His voice was barren of emotion.
Maneck would have preferred it if his father had scolded or slapped him, or punished him in any manner he wanted. But this contempt, this refusal to even talk about it, was horrid. The enthusiasm drained from his face, leaving behind a puzzled anguish, and he felt on the verge of tears.
His mother was moved to intervene. “But Farokh, don’t you think it looks nice, what Maneck has done?”
“The looks are irrelevant. What instructions did we give when we trusted him with the shop for two days? This is how he repays the trust. It’s a question of discipline and following orders, not of looking nice.”
Maneck returned the displays to their old places, but for the rest of his school vacation he refused to enter the shop. “Daddy doesn’t need me – I don’t want to be there,” he said bitterly to his mother. “He only wants a servant in the shop.”
In bed at night she conveyed to Mr. Kohlah that Maneck’s feelings were badly hurt. “I am aware of that,” he said, facing away from her on the pillow. “But he must learn to walk before he can run. It’s not good for a boy to think he knows everything before his time.”
She persevered, and was successful just before the vacation came to an end. Peace was restored between father and son one morning when Mr. Kohlah started reorganizing one of the glass cases and called Maneck into the shop to ask his opinion. As school reopening day approached, they began working together again in the soft-drink factory in the cellar, Maneck taking down the cleaned empties, then carrying up the crates of freshly bottled Kaycee.
On the last night, Mr. Kohlah said, while switching off the machine, TU miss you when you leave tomorrow.” The motor’s dying throbs left his words clutching helplessly at the dank subterranean air. He hugged Maneck as they went up the stairs together.
Boarding school was the cause of Maneck’s second unwilling departure from the mountains. The first had come when he was six, when he and his mother went to visit her family in the city, travelling by train for two days. He had been fascinated by the towering buildings and palatial cinema houses, the avalanche of cars and buses and lorries, and the brightness of streets as the lights went on when night had fallen. But after the first few days, he had missed his father terribly. He was thrilled to return home when their holiday was over.
“I am never going to leave the mountains again,” he said. “Never, ever.”
Mrs. Kohlah whispered something in Mr. Kohlah’s ear, who was waiting on the station platform to receive them. He smiled, embraced Maneck, and said neither was he.
But the day soon came when the mountains began to leave them. It started with roads. Engineers in sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments and charted their designs on reams of paper. These were to be modern roads, they promised, roads that would hum with the swift passage of modern traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials.
One morning, at the worksite, a minister was garlanded as a band played. It was the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band: three brass winds, a pair of snares, and a bass drum. Their uniforms were white, with the letters BNMB in gold braid on their backs; on the bass drum, the initials were painted in red. The band’s specialty was wedding processions, and the ministerial programme included the paean of the bride’s mother, the lament of the bride’s mother-in-law, the bridegroom’s triumphal progress, an ode to the matchmaker, and a hymn to fertility. But the BNMB expertly adapted the repertoire for the occasion. The drums tattooed away militarily, heralding the march of progress, while the trombone eschewed its mournful matrimonial glissandi in favour of a sunburst staccato.
The audience of unemployed villagers cheered on cue, anxious to earn their attendance money. Speeches were delivered from a makeshift platform. The minister swung a golden pickaxe that missed its mark. He grinned at the crowd and swung again.
After the dignitaries left, the workers moved in. Progress was slow at first, so slow that Mr. Kohlah and all the inhabitants of the hills harboured an irrational hope: the work would never be completed, their little haven would remain unscathed. Meanwhile, Brigadier Grewal and he organized meetings for the townspeople where they condemned the flawed development policy, the shortsightedness, the greed that was sacrificing the country’s natural beauty to the demon of progress. They signed petitions, lodged their protest with the authorities, and waited.
But the road continued to inch upwards, swallowing everything in its path. The sides of their beautiful hills were becoming gashed and scarred. From high on the slopes, the advancing tracks looked like rivers of mud defying gravity, as though nature had gone mad. The distant thunder of blasting and the roar of earth-moving machines floated up early in the morning, and the dreaminess of the dawn mist turned to nightmare.
Mr. Kohlah watched helplessly as the asphalting began, changing the brown rivers into black, completing the transmogrification of his beloved birthplace where his forefathers had lived as in paradise. He watched powerlessly while, for the second time,
When the work was finished, the minister returned to cut the ribbon. In the years since the ground-breaking ceremony, he had grown more corpulent but not less clumsy. He shuffled up to the ribbon and dropped the golden scissors. Seven eager sycophants leapt to the rescue. A tussle ensued; the scissors were wrested away by the strongest of the seven and restored to the minister. He fixed them all with a fierce glare for calling so much attention to a simple slip, then smiled for the crowd and cut the ribbon with a flourish. The crowd applauded, the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band struck up, and in the off-key din of the brass winds no one noticed the minister struggling quietly to extricate his pudgy fingers from the scissors.
Then the promised rewards began rolling up the road into the mountains. Lorries big as houses transported goods from the cities and fouled the air with their exhaust. Service stations and eating places sprouted along the routes to provide for the machines and their men. And developers began to build luxury hotels.
That year, when Maneck came home for the holidays, he was puzzled (and later alarmed) to discover his father perpetually irritable. They found it impossible to get through the day without quarrelling, breaking into argument even in the presence of customers.
“What’s the matter with him?” Maneck asked his mother. “When I’m here, he ignores me or fights with me. When I’m at school, he writes letters saying how much he misses me.”
“You have to understand,” said Mrs. Kohlah, “people change when times change. It does not mean he doesn’t love you.”
For Mrs. Kohlah, this unhappy vacation would also be remembered as the one during which Maneck abandoned his habit of hugging his parents and whispering good morning. The first time that he came down and took his place silently, his mother waited with her back to the table till the pang of rejection had passed, before she would trust her hands with the hot frying pan. His father noticed nothing.