A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Om replaced the makings of the quilt and pointed to the trunk on the trestle in the corner. Maneck raised his eyebrows at the daring suggestion. They opened it, and discovered her supply of homemade sanitary pads.
“You know what those are for?” whispered Om.
“Little pillows,” said Maneck, grinning, picking up a couple of the lumpy pads. “Little pillows for little people.”
“My little man can rest his head on it.” Om slung one between his legs.
“Stop fooling with the trunk there,” said Ishvar.
“Okay, okay.” They took a handful of pads into the front room and continued clowning.
“What’s this?” said Maneck, holding two above his head.
“Horns?”
“No,” he waggled them. “Donkey’s ears.”
Om held one behind him. “Rabbit’s tail.”
They held them at their crotches like phalluses and pranced around the room, making large masturbatory gestures. The knot at the end of Maneck’s pad came undone. The stuffing fell out, leaving the casing flopping in his hand.
“Look at that!” laughed Om. “Your lund has already gone to sleep, yaar!”
Maneck took a firm new pad and struck Om’s with it. A duel ensued but the weapons collapsed quickly, scattering fabric snippets around the room. They picked up two more and began rushing at each other in a gallop, like jousters on horseback, their sanitary lances sticking out at their flies.
“Tan-tanna tan-tanna tan-tanna!” they trumpeted and attacked. Backing up to their corners, they adjusted the pads at their crotches while Om reared and neighed like a charger champing at the bit.
Just as they were ready to tilt again, Dina opened the front door and entered through the verandah. The fanfare died in mid-flourish. She got as far as the sofa, then froze. The scene left her speechless: the floor littered with the scraps of her carefully prepared sanitary pads, the two boys standing guiltily, clutching their embarrassing toys.
They dropped their hands and started to hide the pads behind their backs, then realized the gesture was as futile as it was silly. They lowered their heads.
“You shameless boys!” she managed to utter. “You shameless boys!”
She ran to the back room where Ishvar was still ploughing away at his machine, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the front room. “Stop!” she said, her voice trembling. “Come and see what those two have been doing!”
Om and Maneck had put aside the pads, but Dina thrust one each into their hands. “Go on!” she said. “Do it for him, let him see your shameless behaviour!”
Ishvar did not need to see. He gathered that something filthy had been going on, especially if she was so upset. He went to Om and slapped him across the face. “You I cannot slap,” he said to Maneck. “But someone should. For your own good.”
He led Om into the back room and flung him upon his stool. “I don’t want another word from you, now or ever. Just do your work quietly till it’s time to leave.”
Dinner was a silent meal; only the knives and forks spoke. Dina cleared up quickly, then went into the sewing room and bolted her door.
As if I was a sex maniac or something, thought Maneck, feeling miserable. He waited for a while in the front room, hoping she would come out, give him a chance to apologize. His ears picked up the opening and closing of a drawer. The creaking of her bed. A clatter that could be her hairbrush. The thud of the tailors’ stools being pushed aside. He heard the sound of the trunk lid, and his face burned with shame. Then the bright line under her door went dark, and his wretchedness engulfed him.
Would she write to his parents and complain? Surely he deserved it. For almost two months now, she had treated him so well in her flat, and he had behaved disgustingly. For the first time since leaving home, he had felt at peace, unthreatened, thanks to Dina Aunty. Rescued from the hostel that had made him ill, with that tightness in the chest, that nauseated feeling every morning.
Now he had brought it all back, through his own doing. He switched off the light beside the sofa and dragged himself to his room.
Morning could not alleviate Maneck’s shame from last night. To help keep it burning, Dina slammed the plate of two fried eggs before him at breakfast. When it was time to leave for college and he called out “Bye, Aunty,” she would not come to wave. Woefully, he shut the door upon the empty, accusing verandah.
The first hint of forgiveness quivered in the air after dinner. Like the night before, she retreated to the back room instead of bringing the quilt to the sofa; however, she kept her door ajar.
Waiting hopefully in the front room, he passed the time listening to the neighbours. Someone screamed retributive warnings – at a daughter, he presumed. “Mui bitch!” came a man’s voice. “Behaving like a slut, staying out so late at night! You think eighteen years is too old to get a thrashing? I’ll show you! When we say back by ten o’clock, we mean ten o’clock!”
Maneck glanced at his watch: ten-twenty. Still Dina Aunty did not emerge. Neither did the light go off. At their usual bedtime of ten-thirty, he decided to peek in and say good night.
She was in her nightgown, her back to the door. He changed his mind and tried to retreat, but she saw him through the crack. Oh God, he thought, panicking – now she would assume he was spying.
“Yes?” she said sharply.
“Excuse me, Aunty, I was just coming to say good night.”
“Yes. Good night.” Her stiffness persisted.
He re-echoed the words and began edging away, then stopped. He cleared his throat. “Also…”
“Also what?”
“Also, I wanted to say sorry… for yesterday…”
“Don’t mumble from outside the room. Come in and say what you have to say.”
He entered shyly. Her bare arms in the nightgown looked so lovely, and through the light cotton, the shape of… but he dared not let his eyes linger. Mummy’s friend was the unsummoned thought that terrified him as he finished his apology.
“I want you to understand,” she said. “I was not angry with your shameful act because of any harm to me. I was ashamed for you, to see you behaving like a loafer. Like a roadside mavali. From Omprakash I cannot expect better. But you, from a good Parsi family. And I left you to watch after them, I trusted you.”
“I’m sorry,” he hung his head. She raised her hands to her hair, reinserting a clip that had become ineffective. He found the fuzz in her armpits extremely erotic.
“Go to bed now,” she said. “Next time, use better judgement.”
As he fell asleep, thinking of Dina Aunty in the nightgown, she began to merge with the woman on the train, in the upper berth.
VII
On the Move
AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH THE SANITARY pads, Dina was certain that neither Ishvar nor Om would dare follow through with a dinner for Maneck at their house. And even if they did, he would refuse, for fear of offending her.
In a few days, however, the invitation was indeed renewed, and acceptance seemed to linger close at hand. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered angrily to Maneck. “After what you did that day, isn’t it enough? Haven’t you upset me enough?”
“But I apologized for that, Aunty. And Om was also very sorry. What’s the connection between the two things?”
“You think sorry makes it all right. You don’t understand the problem. I have nothing against them, but they are tailors – my employees. A distance has to be maintained. You are the son of Farokh and Aban Kohlah. There is a difference, and you cannot pretend there isn’t – their community, their background.”
“But Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t mind,” he said, trying to explain he hadn’t been brought up to think this way, that his parents encouraged him to mix with everyone.
“So you are saying I am narrow-minded, and your parents are broad-minded, modern people?”
He grew tired of arguing. Sometimes she seemed to him on the verge of being reasonable, only to make another absurd statement:
“I just want to visit once. It feels rude to keep refusing. They think I’m too big to go to their house.”
“And have you thought of the consequences of one visit? Good manners is all very well, but what about health and hygiene? How do they prepare their food? Can they afford proper cooking oil? Or do they buy cheap adulterated vanaspati, like most poor people?”
“I don’t know. They haven’t fallen sick and died as yet.”
“Because their stomachs are accustomed to it, you foolish boy, and yours is not.”
Maneck pictured the hideous canteen food his own stomach had endured, and the roadside snacks devoured for weeks on end. He wondered if mentioning that would make her modify her culinary theories.
“And what about water?” she continued “Is there a clean supply in their neighbourhood, or is it contaminated?”
“I’ll be careful, I won’t drink any water.” His mind was made up, he was going. She was getting too bossy. Even Mummy never controlled his life the way Dina Aunty was trying to.
“Fine, do as you please. But if you catch something, don’t think I’ll be your nurse for one moment. You’ll be sent back by express delivery to your parents.”
“That’s all right with me.”
The next time Ishvar and Om asked him, he said yes. She flushed, and ground her teeth. Maneck smiled innocently.
“Tomorrow then, okay?” said Ishvar with delight. “We’ll leave together at six o’clock.” He inquired what he would like to eat. “Rice or chapati? And which is your favourite vegetable, hahn?”
“Anything,” answered Maneck to all questions. The tailors spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the menu, planning their humble feast.
Ishvar was first to notice that the smoke from cooking fires did not linger over the hutment colony. He tripped on the crumbling pavement, his eyes searching the horizon. At this hour the haze should have been clouding thick. “Everyone fasting or what?”
“Forget worrying about everyone – I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving. Do you have worms?”
Om did not laugh; the joke was growing stale. The absence of smoke bothered Ishvar. In its place a dull roar, as of heavy machinery, hung in the distance. “Repairing the roads at night?” he wondered, as the noise rose with their approach. Then, thinking about Maneck’s dinner, he said, “Tomorrow we will shop in the morning, keep everything ready. We shouldn’t waste time after work. Now if you were married, your wife would have the food cooked and waiting for our guest.”
“Why don’t you get married?”
“I’m too old.” But, he thought, teasing aside, it really was high time for Om – not wise to delay these things.
“But I’ve even selected a wife for you,” said Om.
“Who?”
“Dinabai. I know you like her, you’re always taking her side. You should give her a poke.”
“Shameless boy,” said Ishvar, thumping him lightly as they turned the corner into the slum lane.
The rumbling ball of sound that had been rolling towards them, slow and placid in the dusk, grew larger, louder. Then it detonated. The air was suddenly filled with noises of pain and terror and anger.
“Hai Ram! What’s going on?” They ran the final distance and came upon a battle in progress.
The hutment dwellers were massed on the road, fighting to return to their shacks, their cries mingling with the sirens of ambulances that couldn’t get through. The police had lost control for the moment. The residents surged forward, gaining the advantage. Then the police rallied and beat them back. People fell, were trampled, and the ambulances supplemented their siren skirls with blaring horns while children screamed, terrified at being separated from their parents.
The hutment dwellers straggled back from the pulse of the assault, spent, venting their anguish in helpless outrage. “Heartless animals! For the poor there is no justice, ever! We had next to nothing, now it’s less than nothing! What is our crime, where are we to go?”
During the lull, Ishvar and Om found Rajaram. “I was there when it all started,” he said, panting. “They went in and – just destroyed it. And just smashed – everything. Such crooks, such liars –”
“Who did it?” They tried to make him talk slowly.
“The men, the ones who said they were safety inspectors. They tricked us. Sent by the government, they said, to check the colony. At first the people were pleased, the authorities were taking some interest. Maybe improvements were coming – water, latrines, lights, like they kept promising at voting time. So we did as they told us, came out of the shacks. But once the colony was empty, the big machines went in.”
Most of the bulldozers were old jeeps and trucks, with steel plates and short wooden beams like battering rams affixed to the front bumpers. They had begun tearing into the structures of plywood, corrugated metal, and plastic. “And when we saw that, we rushed in to stop them. But the drivers kept going. People were crushed. Blood everywhere. And the police are protecting those murderers. Or the bastards would be dead by now.”
“But how can they destroy our homes, just like that?”
“They said it’s a new Emergency law. If shacks are illegal, they can remove them. The new law says the city must be made beautiful.”
“What about Navalkar? And his boss, Thokray? They collected this month’s rent only two days ago.”
“They are here.”
“And they’re not complaining to the police?”
“Complaining? Thokray is the one in charge of this. He is wearing a badge: Controller of Slums. And Navalkar is Assistant Controller. They won’t talk to anyone. If we try to go near them, their goondas threaten to beat us.”
“And all our property in the shacks?”
“Lost, looks like. We begged them to let us remove it, but they refused.”
Ishvar suddenly felt very tired. He moved away from the crowd and crossed the lane, where he sank to his haunches. Rajaram hitched up his pants and sat down beside him. “No sense crying for those rotten jhopdis. We’ll find somewhere else, it’s only a small obstacle. Right, Om? We’ll search together for a new house.”
Om nodded. “I’m going to take a closer look inside.”
“Don’t, it’s dangerous,” said Ishvar. “Stay here, with me.”
“I’m here only, yaar,” said Om, and wandered off to examine the demolition.
The evening was on the edge of darkness. A vigorous lathi-charge had finally cleared the area near the front of the colony. Slippers and sandals lost by the fleeing crowd littered the ground, strewn like the flotsam of a limbless human tide. The police cordon, now firmly in place, kept the rage of the residents smouldering at a safe distance.
The bulldozers finished flattening the rows of flimsy shacks and tackled the high-rental ones, reversing and crunching into the brick walls. Om felt nothing – the shack had meant nothing to him, he decided. Maybe now his uncle would agree to go back to Ashraf Chacha. He remembered Maneck, coming to visit tomorrow. He laughed mirthlessly about telling him the dinner was off – cancelled due to the unexpected disappearance of their house.
Sergeant Kesar’s megaphone blared in the dusk: “Work will be stopping for thirty minutes. Actually speaking, this is simply to give you a chance to collect your personal belongings. Then the machines will start again.”
In the crowd, the announcement was received with some scorn – a goodwill gesture from the police to avoid more trouble. But most were grateful for the opportunity to retrieve their few possessions. A desperate scramble commenced in the wreckage. It reminded Om of children on garbage heaps. He saw them every morning from the train. He rejoined his uncle to become part of the bustle among the ruins.
The machines had transformed the familiar field with its carefully ordered community into an alien place. There was much co
“My neighbours have become robbers,” he said tearfully. “Once, I sang for them, and they clapped for me.”
Ishvar offered him perfunctory solace, anxious about his own possessions. “At least our sewing-machines have a safe home with Dinabai,” he said to Om. “That’s our good fortune.”
They dragged aside the corrugated sheet that used to be the roof, and uncovered the trunk. The lid had sustained several deep dents. It swung open with a protesting squeal. Om aimed a kick at the biggest depression and the lid moved less stubbornly. They cleared more debris and came upon the small mirror they used for shaving. It was intact: the aluminium frying pan had fallen over it like a helmet.
“No bad luck for us,” said Om, stuffing both items into the trunk. The Primus stove was crushed beyond repair, and he tossed it back. Ishvar found a pencil, a candle, two enamel plates, and a polythene glass. Om found their razor, but not the packet of blades. By shifting more pieces of plywood they unearthed the copper water pot. Someone else spied it at the same moment, grabbed it, and ran.
“Thief!” shouted Om. Nobody paid attention. His uncle stopped him from chasing the man.
They pulled out their wicker mat, sheets, blankets, and the two towels used for pillows. Shaking out clouds of dust, Ishvar rolled it all into one neat bedding bundle and wrapped it with sackcloth.
Rajaram’s concern was solely for his hoard of hair. The stock was ravaged, the plastic sacks ripped, their contents spilled. “One month’s precious collection,” he grieved. “All scattered in the mud.” The allotted thirty minutes were running out. Ishvar and Om helped him gather what they could, concentrating on retrieving the longest specimens.