A Matter of Geography Read online

  At my destination station, I rushed past the crowds on the street and up my apartment building stairs. I turned the key in the lock, stumbled into the room and finally breathed—not being the first man, nor the last, to sink into the comfort of home. Premibai had made the chai with a dash of ginger and put it in a flask to keep it hot, a habit with her, to save me making tea for myself. Stretching out on an armchair after a hand bath from a bucket of hot water mixed with savlon, antiseptic, to take off the fingerprints of the city, I settled down with chai and Anna. Flicking through the pages, I searched for the page where I last stopped, then picked up the delicate china cup Mother had given me from her collection and sipped my chai—a man who had earned his comfort.

  Dad had called a meeting: Billimoria Building must have a tenants’ association. The leaky roof, the waste disposal, the water supply, the dark passages and stairs, the dirty common facilities and nooks—all to be dealt with by the landlord. Oh, and the outside of the building, last painted long before I was born.

  “Dad, how about Joe Marchon?” Ivan asked, still waiting around for more instructions.

  “Leave him out. I will tell him myself.”

  Joe Marchon lived in No. 19 with his family. Dark, dapper, with very white teeth, he always bounced when he walked, trying to seem taller than he really was. He was forty? Fifty? Sixty? We did not know. We knew he was old enough to have fifteen children. Did he really have fifteen kids? He said so.

  Waiting for Joe on a summer evening, we did a head count: Sammy the chor, the thief; Shirlen, Carlton, Miriam… We only got to twelve. The other three were dead, Joe explained. But none of us, not even our parents, knew anything about them.

  Peter said, “Fifteen? Poof. Just another Gangabowdi tale.”

  When we were not visiting our grandfather on summer holidays, we often spent our nights after dinner huddling outside No. 19 waiting for Joe. Today was another such day. Dinner done, we converged onto the balcony where the summer night breeze had cooled the stone of the balcony floor. Eight of us—Peter, my brothers Ivan and Francis, my sister Susan, Carlton and Miriam Marchon, huddled together in a tight ring. Ali, who hardly ever played with us but always came to listen to Joe, sat outside our circle. We giggled in anticipation. We also shivered slightly, wondering about the Gangabowdi ghost.

  Gangabowdi was a dark shadow in our minds. We clutched each other as we walked through eerie shadows and abandoned houses on either side of the road that had unpainted wooden awnings and wooden steps. No living soul walked there. Its only sounds were the whisper of the wind and the rustling of leaves. A large well—bowdi—marked the end of the street like a sinkhole from nowhere. Bowing over it, a fig tree wailed like a tormented woman in the rain, her tears mingling in the eternal spring of the water down below. Sunlight could not find its way here and in its perpetual dusk, the spirits of lost souls wandered aimlessly through the houses and the shadows of the street.

  We heard quick footsteps on the wooden stair as Joe made his way up to the second floor where we sat on the verandah outside his apartment.

  Joe looked happy. He loved his waiting audience. Of many a night, he whispered dramatically about the Gangabowdi ghost, and ‘let the cretins have nightmares.’ We, on the other hand, giggled and nudged each other, asking questions, looking scared at appropriate moments, urging him at others. The younger ones quivered and clutched each other in a show of fear; the older ones quivered with irreverence. Many hours were spent in disbelief and laughter, but we were nevertheless a captive audience and came back night after night for more.

  Today, Joe crouched low, looking into our eyes as we sat on the floor.

  “I was walking at midnight down Gangabowdi road…”He rubbed his palms together, a smirk on his face. Unhurried, he waited a few seconds before he went on. “It was misty but warm… I could feel a chill pass through my stomach…” He hissed at this point, with his finger travelling in circles around his stomach. “And then…”—a long pause, as he looked at us one by one around the circle—“I heard it.”

  Our fists clenched in our laps.

  “A woman selling toffee.” He held his nose and let out a shrill nasal cry. “Tof-fee, tof-fee.”

  Our hearts turned to ice as we sweated in the sultry evening air.

  “I saw the toffee stand and went to buy some. It was a large thali, flat plate, of aluminum, set atop a wicker stand in the shape of an hourglass. Do you know what I mean?” We did—the kind you see with the hawkers selling buddi-ka-bal, old woman’s hair, a kind of candy that came in white strands. “Know that?” he asked once again, waiting for our response.

  We nodded.

  “A cold breeze whistled near my ears…”Now he began to make long, low whistling, rasping sounds. The sound effects always enraptured us as much as the story.

  “I pulled down my cap to cover them and shut out the frightening sounds that seemed like a mixture of wind whistling and a baby crying, if you know what I mean.”

  We didn’t, because his rasping grated on our nerves, quite unlike the cry of a baby, but we kept silent, holding our breaths, waiting for him to go on with his story. He whistled through the gap in his teeth, looking at us one by one around the circle, then continued:

  “She stretched out one hand for the money as she handed me a packet. Her fingernails, long, discoloured, turning inside at the tips, made me push my cap back to look at her face.”

  He stopped once again for a good minute, making us shift uneasily. We knew the best, yet to come, would be some far-fetched unearthly fabrication, yet we shivered in fearful anticipation.

  “Suddenly the mists cleared…as if the wailing winds had lifted them to some unknown land.”A long pause once again and, standing upright now, his arms stretched apart over his head like the crucified Christ—or maybe Barabas would be a more appropriate simile. He turned and attempted to look at the far horizon, not very far, for it stopped at St. Mary’s Road, the buildings opposite limiting his view.

  “The stand was there, but there was nobody behind it…”He took a long look around the circle. Francis shivered and huddled closer to me.

  “I dropped the packet of toffee like the hot stuff it was and strolled away down the street, whistling like nothing had happened.” Joe rubbed his palms together, looking satisfied.

  “Why were you there in Gangabowdi on a dark and misty night, Joe?”Peter asked.

  “The spirits beckoned me,”he replied, never at loss for an answer. “You see, I was born in a veil.”

  Joe defied definition. He represented everything that we were brought up to despise or avoid. If there were only the Ten Commandments to keep, as we thought, they should be easy to remember. Joe broke every one of them like they did not exist in his memory. There was no good and no bad, so perhaps it was about quantity not quality. He lived his life without shame, without law or rules, just invented the day with each day.

  I feel reasonably sure he lied about his jobs as much as the number of children. His life was one bad novel. If the heart said, here is a bad story, evidence played out the truth. Most times he was away on a “business trip,” he actually spent it in an 8’ x 8’ cell in the Arthur Road jail. If not for Dad asking us to keep it quiet, we would have broadcast his secret in our very public sharing of all that happened within the precincts of Billimoria Building. But Joe was our story teller and as story tellers go, especially when television was not an option, he was most sought after by us. Our parents, on the other hand, kept their distance.

  The reasons were multiple and no secret to us. When I was little, every morning at about 6.00 am a cock crowed somewhere from the depths of the B.I.T. chawls a block away, waking all who must wake at that hour, and barely two minutes later the baker entered the premises of Billimoria Building to deliver fresh bread to our doors. He carried two deep straw baskets, a bit worn from use, strung on either shoulder. Barefoot, sprightly, each morning the first knock on our door was Abu. One basket weighed down with bread for all the tenants of Bill
imoria Building counterbalanced the other that held the daily bread supplement of the Marchon family, thus preventing him from tipping over.

  The butcher who visited us every morning with a basket made of straw, different from that of the baker—a curious huge V with handles on the top loaded with twenty-two pounds of beef—unloaded all twenty-two pounds at their door. The rest of us ate meat only on a Sunday, sometimes alternate Sundays, and bought ours from the butcher’s shop on St. Mary’s Road, very near the church. We just could not afford that luxury.

  Huge bags of clothes went to the dhobi from room no. 19. Huge bags of clean clothes came back each day. Our clothes were washed at home by a maid who worked for many homes, and we ironed them ourselves. We settled our bills every month, but the Marchon household, averse to maintaining a daily or monthly account, postponed their payments for some convenient date in the future. And oh boy, were they generous! Strangers, friends, their friends, all kinds of people constantly dropped by; some stayed the night, others spent the day or several days, and some stayed with them for months. Food flowed, and sometimes Miriam would bring out a plate of tomatoes stuffed with mince, since we were not allowed to enter the apartment. The food that came out from their kitchen was amazing to us who were used to traditional Mangalorean cooking–being immigrants to Bombay from Mangalore–and we hoped she would do it more often.

  “I am expecting my inheritance,” Joe explained to anyone who made immediate demands for payment. Like in the cigarette advertisement, the Marchon family lived life king-size. This carried on for many years, until the year Anna was born. The inheritance never came: at least not by then.

  Have you ever waited for a bus for a very long time in order to take it just a short distance away? Say a ten-minute walk away; you wait ten minutes for the bus and think, ‘Heck I should have walked.’ Now you have to make the decision whether to walk or to wait. You think, ‘Well, the bus has not come for ten minutes and so it may come shortly. If it comes within ten minutes I will still be ahead.’ So you wait the next ten minutes and think, ‘Now that I have invested twenty minutes in the wait, perhaps I should wait a bit longer…’ and you never hear about the accident on the road that has cancelled all services.

  The tradesmen, though now close to bankruptcy, were afraid to stop delivery and cut their chances of ever being paid, but bordering on panic, they began insistently demanding payment from the Marchon family. Soon, the butcher and the baker, who were the most affected, were no longer able to work on credit with their suppliers, and having no cash, they camped outside the Marchons’ door from morning till the street lights went on. This was both embarrassing and dangerous for Joe Marchon, who left home when the cock crowed over in the B.I.T chawls, and long before the sun peeped over the horizon. He returned only very late at night, treading lightly on the stair, not so much as not to disturb the neighbourhood, but in fear of lurking creatures or unpaid creditors. This cat and mouse game, as Mr. Fernandes later described it, carried on for over a week. Then one day, at about nine in the morning, we all converged on the verandah, drawn by the piercing din. The baker, sobbing loudly, was banging his head against the wall and the butcher was shouting profanities in Hindi, hitting the wall with his fist. It did not need much investigative skill to find out the reason for this commotion. The Marchon family had disappeared! In their home was Lulu, Joe’s eldest daughter, and her husband and their two sons. No, they did not know where the Marchons were…no, why the hell should they know? No, this is our home…who are you? We did not buy anything from you…we are not connected with the Marchon family…

  The baker, I am told, the more susceptible of the two, killed himself. The butcher, who worked on credit, had internalized a valuable lesson and disappeared too, leaving a trail of creditors looking for him. The Marchons stayed away for seven years, returning when I was twelve. By then the butcher, baker and all the other creditors had given up hope, killed themselves, disappeared or just started life afresh.

  Gordon and Conrad Cabral never came to story-telling nights. Though they were our playmates from No. 3 on the other side of the L, they were no longer allowed anywhere near the Marchon children. Two summers ago, as we usually did, we gathered to walk to Mazagaon Hill. The Hill, two blocks away near the old tram terminus, stood on top of a reservoir with several little gardens that were like a maze. Each little hedged garden had a gap for entry and exit. Our summer holidays started in April and went on till June, and we spent at least one day a week in the gardens. Every Thursday all the children from the buildings in the neighbourhood would run in the late afternoon to reserve one little garden to play in.

  Most days Shirlen and Miriam Marchon did not come with us. They were older and were more interested in boys their age and in dating. Susan and I, on the other hand, did not dream of dating, because Dad would throw a fit. “You will marry whom your Mother and I choose,” he reminded us at regular intervals.

  That summer Shirlen and Miriam decided to come to the gardens with us. We walked down Nesbitt Road with clusters of children racing to grab a garden for the evening. Gordon and Conrad ran ahead while we ambled along, knowing we did not need to rush—our advance party would secure our garden.

  Along the way, Shirlen and Miriam, whose dresses were too short and necklines too low, flirted with the boys from the building down the road. Miriam stuck out her tongue at them and slowly moved it over her lips, and Shirlen put both her palms under her boobs and shook them.

  We were embarrassed. Susan held my hand and pulled me ahead.

  “Don’t look back,”she said. “If anyone sees us with them they will think we are part of this.” We sped ahead, quite ashamed to be seen with them. We pulled down our skirts to make them longer, and Susan pushed up her t-shirt to cover the tiny V at the top.

  Meanwhile, the boys from the other building flirted with Shirlen and Miriam, and soon they caught up to us. The four of us walked up the hill to the garden Gordon and Conrad had ‘caught’ for us. That day we played langdi—lame woman. We split into two teams, there being so many of us. Gordon and Conrad were made captains of the two teams and they were given an opportunity alternately to choose their team. Shirlen and Miriam were the last to be chosen and they insisted in being in the same team so Gordon let go one player and took them both. Both teams stood in a circle. One team sent in a catcher and the other sent in two runners. The catcher hops on one leg, trying to tag a runner. If the hopper gets tired, another player from the team hops in. When all the members of a team finish hopping it’s the other team’s turn. The game ends when everyone gets tired.

  Miriam and Shirlen, however, were peeved. The boys from the other building kept booing them every time they were in the ring. Unfortunately Gordon’s team lost, and our silly cries of victory—“We won the game! You won the shame!”—did not help Shirlen’s and Miriam’s mood either. As dusk fell upon us we began to move towards home. Dad had some strict rules: “You must be home before it is dark.”

  We started down the winding path from the hill. The boys from the other building followed us, still booing Miriam and Shirlen.

  Shirlen, now sorely tried, turned on them and, rolling her fists in the air, said, “You have balls without gravy!”

  “Booooooo.”

  Miriam and Shirlen were now both planted in the middle of the path, fists in the air, shouting, “Balls without gravy!”

  “Booooooo.”

  “Balls without gravy.”

  “Booooooo.”

  “Ballswithoutgravyballswithoutgravyballswithoutgravy…..”

  “Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…”

  That night, Gordon and Conrad, fighting at home, kept shouting at each other, “You have balls without gravy!”

  “No. You have balls without gravy!”

  After which, Mrs. Cabral walked down the corridor knocking on all the doors, leaving out only No. 19, and recounting the events of the day, told all our parents never to let their children play with the Marchon children.

&n
bsp; Chapter Eleven

  That was far from the most damning reason we were not allowed to enter the Marchon household. Much more went on there, not all of it legal. To our very Catholic sensibilities it was the House of Sin. In the almost peaceful and quiet Mazagaon, the Marchons’ apartment seemed a hotbed of international crime. Pimps, drugs, highway robberies, strippers, and smaller crimes like dancing, when the rest of us were discouraged from such frivolity, abounded.

  Unbeknownst to most in the building—for our parents might have organized to kick them out—Mrs. Marchon and her daughters carried on a lucrative business. But their unsavoury reputation outside our awareness never deterred gullible young men from hanging around the girls and even proposing marriage. Perhaps it even enticed them. The result was a puppy fest. Boys hung around, crowding the stairway and the pavement in front of the building. There were occasional arguments and fisticuffs, presumably over the distribution of favours, but most of the time they were too absorbed in trying to look their attractive best for the girls.

  But it seemed these boys had no chance. The year I turned fifteen, every evening a sleek, racy car zoomed into our street that had, forever since I had known it, been trafficked only by trucks and horses at night. Honking loudly for Shirlen and Miriam, the car, its roof down, driven by a loud, flashy man with a huge crystal on his ring finger, several gold chains around his neck, and a printed silk shirt, blared loud music. Though the man always came by to pick them up at night, he wore shades on his eyes to complete the picture. The car seemed filled to the brim with young, beautiful women, necklines at their waist, a criss-cross of legs, arms, and breasts, voices laughing in gay tinkling tones, as they waited down there for Shirlen and Miriam, who took their time to doll up for the evening. We all hung out of our windows to watch this little tableau played out each evening, and on many an occasion had to put up with Shirlen and Miriam tittering about Bobby picking them up, Bobby this…and Bobby that!