On any given day in Jasmine, if we stand on our toes and crane our necks past the balcony, we can see the borders of the slum where Gulshan lives. The slum stretches along the great river Sabarmati, and where it ends marks the borderland between Khanpur and the neighbouring Shahpur. Small pockets of working-class Hindus and Muslims cohabit in these borderlands. We often buy weekly vegetables from the street market there. In a single evening, these pockets transform into tinderboxes.
Gulshan has lost most of her teeth to chewing tobacco. She has a deep brown face with wrinkles lining every inch. I like to think the lines on her face come from smirking constantly behind Dadi’s back. The hatred is mutual with those two: the servant–mandam relationship just barely upends the mother-in-law–daughter-in-law hostility between Amma and Dadi. Gulshan has taught Amma to find humour in it. With sarcasm and twinkle-eyed mischief, she survives in this home eight storeys above her own, all day every day.
She is younger than Amma, but she’s had an earlier start in domestication: married at fourteen, mother of two by nineteen, after which she got her tubes tied, unlike Amma, who waits to have two abortions before she says “Enough”. Gulshan is clearly the smarter of the two women actively raising us in this household. She’s also implacable. You should see her every year when head lice season rolls in. She finishes her evening cleaning, orders us to lie on our bellies on the cot in the laundry room, our heads of silky black hair lolling over the edge, and she squats on the tiles and starts to pull out little critters with ruthless efficiency. If we whine about her tugging too hard at a strand, she thwacks our heads and says, “Phir ghumo sar mein joowaan leke.” She laughs at her own joke. Run around with lice then. See if I care! Dadi stands at a safe distance by the door watching. Gulshan holds up a wriggling mother louse between her fingers and shows her.
“Dekho, Mummy. Bachchon ka khoon pee-pee ke kitne mote ho gaye.” I giggle into the mattress. Without punctuation or context, Gulshan is saying more than one thing through her darkened teeth. Look, Mother. So fat from sucking the blood of these poor children.
But this evening as Gulshan watches news on the television with us, the fiery images leave her shaken. She looks at Amma and asks if she can leave early.
“Bhabhi main zaraa jaldi jaaoon aaj?”
Amma nods, replies, “Haan haan,” and quickly pulls a few notes from her wallet, crushing them into Gulshan’s hand. “Tum bhi jaake samaan khareed lo,” she says, urging Gulshan to get her groceries.
As Gulshan leaves, Asha-ma, Dadi’s spinster sister who lives farther north from us, calls. Dadi and Asha-ma speak in hushed croaks, wondering how bad it will possibly get this time. They have lived through the Partition, the textile workers’ riots in the sixties, the anti-affirmative action rioting in the eighties, the violence after the Babri Mosque demolition in the nineties. Neither sister is easily perturbed. Their iron-clip curls hardly move out of place – whether the city erupts or their sons do.
But Dadi loves drama. She clutches the cordless phone now, hand cupped over the speaker, sounding alarmed and urgent. I hover around, unable to tell if they’re discussing the train burning or the fact that the store down the street has run out of Godrej hair dye. Dadi would die without the latter.
After Asha-ma, Shah Sahab calls again, this time with even more dire and cryptic warnings to keep any friends in the police on standby. Papa hangs up and declares Shah Sahab is “just like all these bloody maulvis as usual. Overdramatic.”
Phupu, my father’s younger sister, calls next. An argument ensues between her, Dadi, and Papa. The cordless phone is a godsend for these family standoffs. One on the old telephone, another on the cordless and the third across the river are all shouting at one another, no one being heard. Papa predicts it will be safest for everyone to stay put. People moving around in the open will be targets. Dadi is worried about her daughter and granddaughter, alone in an apartment across the river. She insists they move back in temporarily. Phupu counters, as always, that she can handle it. Plus – they each shout at the other – this will be over in a day or two. At the most. It always is. Papa is the most optimistic.
“Arre kuchh nahin hoga. Sab natak hai,” he says, proclaiming like he often does with zero context that nothing will happen. It’s all an act.
After his death, I will often wonder if that’s how Papa thought of his life in its entire passive emptiness.
But for now, his staunch belief in the meaninglessness of our existence confounds my riotous sixteen-year-old mind. I want to believe everything has a purpose. I have a purpose.
I can’t sleep that night. Yes, we have grown up seeing occasional rioting outside our windows over a stolen bike. We have heard swords and knives clash in the chowk behind our building over a game of gully cricket, but that was then, when enough Hindus and Muslims lived cheek by jowl here to fight it out. In the last few years, Ahmedabad has parted along the banks of the Sabarmati like the Red Sea. Most of ‘them’ live on the west, and ‘we’ live on the east. Call me as dramatic as Dadi, but through this divide of hate and confusion, I sense something terrible approaching.
I lie awake in the dead silence, glancing towards a door in Dadi’s bedroom that leads out to the balcony. I wonder if we should bolt it. I close my eyes, chant my prayers under my breath, and lie there pretending to sleep. That’s when I realise why I’m so unnerved. Dadi’s thunderous snores usually rattle our bed. So does Papa’s obesity-induced sleep apnea from across the hall. No sounds tonight.
All of us are pretending to sleep.
Excerpted with permission from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary, Westland.
