No God in Sight

  Mrs. Khwaja

  I used to be a poetess and would dwell on minute metaphors for days.

  Now all day long I cook for Ubaid and Minaz, spend the thousands their father earns every month, and contemplate television absentmindedly.

  I have nothing more to say.

  The hum of air-conditioned rooms and twenty-four-hour TV has silenced me.

  Mr. Khwaja

  Twenty-six years ago I married a mediocre poetess. She gave me two kids—a son who spends every waking hour online, and a daughter who’s never home.

  We live together and are still married, the woman and I.

  The poetry has escaped our lives. I don’t know her any more.

  Ubaid

  Home is where mom chases me with a plateful of food and frozen poems in her eyes. Where dad is vocal with his disapproval and where my sister Minaz, on witnessing the scenes, runs out the door like an anxious squirrel.

  My heart isn’t at home.

  All day long I roam desolate cyber landscapes and chat with disembodied strangers—in search of a home, a heart.

  Minaz

  I won’t be pregnant for too long now.

  After we park the car near Colaba Post Office, my ‘friend’ and I walk to Pasta Lane under the severe afternoon sun. I spot Shamma Nursing Home on the ground floor of a decrepit building.

  ‘We’re here,’ I say, and push open the clinic’s door. Kasim doesn’t follow me in. I come out to the footpath and give him my trademark tough stare—the look that has everyone fooled.

  ‘Okay?’ Kasim asks. I snort.

  In a tasteless display of chivalry, he lets me enter first into the nursing home’s dimly lit waiting room. It has the stench of a chloroform brewery.

  A man is gazing at the frosted pane of a closed window. There is no one else in the room. Distracted by our entry, the man turns to look at us.

  I can hear the gurgling in Kasim’s throat as he struggles to frame a sentence. He seems confused. He appears to have forgotten why we are here.

  ‘You… you are the doctor?’ Kasim finally asks.

  I snort again.

  The doctor nods. He removes a sheet of paper from a deskdrawer and holds it out. Which one of you wants this done most, his action implies. I hum my assent and take the sheet. It is a form.

  Ipshita never mentioned any freaking form! I widen my eyes at Kasim. He thinks I am asking for a pen and extends one in my direction. ‘Take.’

  It’s a form, I mime wordlessly.

  Kasim shrugs, Just fill it.

  Are you mad?

  Come on!

  No. I throw the form on the doctor’s desk and turn around and collide, violently and breast-to-breast, with a woman in a white sari.

  Her type exists in every clinic. Nurses.

  ‘Can’t stand little far away!’ I say.

  The nurse prevents me from walking past her. ‘Where you going? Why you acting so shy?’

  ‘Just shut up!’ I snap.

  She grabs my arm. I look to Kasim for assistance.

  ‘It’s just a form,’ the nurse says.

  I struggle to free myself. ‘Kasim…’ I squirm. ‘Kasim… Kasim…’

  ‘Come, I’ll fill it for you,’ the nurse says. Still gripping my arm tightly, she unsheathes a ball pen from her immense blouse. ‘Name?’ she asks, bending over the form on the doctor’s desk.

  ‘O-madam, name?’ the nurse looks up and repeats.

  ‘Deepti,’ Kasim says.

  I stop struggling. Deepti. Deepti. Deepti. Deepti.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ he says.

  ‘Your wife?’

  Kasim gulps. Unlike me, he doesn’t look a day older than his age of twenty. The nurse flares her nostrils sarcastically.

  The doctor places before us an unmarked receipt for three hundred rupees. Kasim reaches for his wallet. I make a limp attempt to yank his hand from his back pocket. ‘Just let me, okay,’ he whispers and reaches for his wallet again. He hands the doctor six fifty-rupee notes.

  The doctor locks the entrance to the nursing home. He nods at the nurse. She lets go of my arm and follows her boss into the adjoining room, leaving Kasim and me by ourselves.

  We stand like strangers in line for movie tickets.

  I wish…

  No, nothing. I don’t wish anything.

  ‘O-madam, you can come in now!’ the nurse calls out moments later. Kasim practically tears through his pant pockets. Such urgency. And his cell phone isn’t even ringing.

  He brings it out and starts punching keys frantically.

  The nurse reappears. ‘Aye! You want to wait nine more months or what?’

  Kasim stops punching. He doesn’t look up. He just stands there, looking down at his cell phone.

  I touch his elbow. ‘Listen, if something goes wrong, just don’t call my parents, okay?’

  Then I leave him with his Nokia pacifier and follow the nurse into a hot, unventilated room.

  The doctor seals its doors behind me.

  The Doctor

  I am an abortionist. I run a nursing home in a seedy by-lane of Colaba. On the steely innards of trains crawling along the Harbour Line, you will find badly spelled fliers advertising my services. I get one or two customers every day. Sad cases, angry faces, embarrassed women, careless men, swelling tummies, a cut, tears, and we all go home happy. Yes, happy. I spread relief.

  I save families, lives, marriages.

  Now I need to be saved—from all the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  This afternoon a client walked into my nursing home with her companion. Her stomach had just started to stick out. I could see through her expensive cotton T-shirt. Three more weeks and it would have been obvious. But she was safe now. I handed her a form asking for personal information. The nurse filled it out for her and handed it back to me. I don’t talk to my clients. I don’t bother to read the forms either. They always lie.

  I locked the entrance to my nursing home and nodded at the nurse. We went into the adjoining room to prepare for the operation. It was over in half an hour. Don’t. Don’t ask me about the fetuses. They stopped registering after the third abortion. Now, I only see them as knots of blood and gore. Abdominal tumors that threaten to wreck the lives of decent, god-fearing people.

  I am married. She has the mentality of a farmer. Won’t let me touch her willingly. I am violent with her every night. She says she won’t give herself to me willingly till I stop harvesting the wombs of mothers. She even has the rhetoric of a farmer. If only my wife could see the gratitude in my clients’ eyes. Like the girl this afternoon, the one in the expensive cotton T-shirt. She kissed my hand before I administered the anaesthesia. When she regained consciousness she wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl, she wanted to know if it was fair or dark, she wanted to know if it was normal or deformed, she wanted to know… ‘Or is it too early to tell? Can you tell? This soon? Tell me doctor! Am I right? Can you tell this soon?’

  I didn’t answer her. I don’t talk to my clients.

  I too will have a child someday. I will have several children, several. The collective cries of my children will hopefully drown out the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  This is how my flier reads. Yes, it is badly spelled, unimaginative, but it gets the message across:

  GET RID OF UNWANTED PREGNUNCY IN 1 HOUR

  RUPEE 300 ABSOLUTELY SECRATIVE

  SHAMMA NURSING HOME

  OPP. JANVI MANZIL (BAHIND COLABA POST OFICE)

  I composed it. My ‘nun’ pun makes me burst into amused hiccups every time I spot one of my fliers in a train. It is the only comic relief in my life. The family dramas that are occasionally staged in my nursing home don’t amuse me any more. Their horrible echoes don’t die
for days: daughters pleading with incensed fathers, husbands kneeling before heartless wives, brides begging with misogynist mothers-in-law to overlook the damning sonogram.

  I have read that in America abortion is a source of perennial controversy. If you are ‘pro’ you are a murderer, cruel, careless. If you are ‘anti’ you are stupid, religious, but still careless.

  I am neither.

  And I am never careless. You can be either qualified or careful. I am very, very careful. That is why I get repeat business. Mostly from slim, college-going girls. There was one who visited me six times in two years. I haven’t seen her for three years, now; doubt if I ever will again. Also, married women with their husbands. The first time is shameful and painful. The second time on, a routine sets in. Like visiting a dentist to fill a recurring cavity in a sweet tooth.

  In a willful attempt to decay and self-destruct, I have started smoking. Never in the nursing home. Always on the street outside the entrance. I never carry matches or a lighter. Asking for a light is my only excuse to talk to others. Unfortunately, the only people in the by-lanes of Colaba are pimps or German tourists in search of Aryan India—they first want to know if you are Brahmin. The man next door, the one who owns a souvenir shop, doesn’t talk to me. He is a Jain, the epitome of nonviolence. Won’t even eat potatoes because their extraction deprives and kills underground insects.

  I am an abortionist, and a Muslim to boot.

  I have grown used to people avoiding me. Friends and relatives have gradually forsaken me over the years. They avoid me at the mosque. My wife and I are invited to marriages only out of formality. Even then we are ignored. Treated like well-dressed gate-crashers who can’t be ejected (because you never know), but are watched from a distance.

  Two years ago, my mother went to Mecca for Haj. For my sake. Just before boarding her flight, right there in the crowded departure lounge, Ma had looked at a point about two feet above my head and said, ‘Oh Allah, I am undertaking this journey to your home so you may forgive my son and cause a change of heart in him so he may stop taking lives of children and find a cleaner occupation so when he has a child of his own he can love the child with all his heart and realize what a wondrous thing it is to nurture life…’

  When I am in an irreverent mood, I like to believe that Ma paid with her life for such convoluted appeals to Allah. She was trampled while rushing to stone the Satan’s pillar during Haj.

  Of all the physical metaphors that thrive under an otherwise abstract Islam, the Satan’s pillar—Jamarah Al-Aqabah—is most potent. After trekking back to Mina from Muzdalifa on the morning of the fourth day, as per tradition, two million pilgrims made a dash toward the Satan’s pillar. They all wanted to be the first to stone it.

  A woman who had been with Ma told me that Ma ran the fastest that morning. She pushed at the burgeoning crowds the hardest. She cursed the devil the loudest. Like some hysterical lioness whose cub was being snatched away. But in that crowd, there were people far more desperate than Ma. People whose sons were worse than abortionists. They, too, wanted to vanquish the devil with all their might. Those very people—those wretched, god-fearing fathers and mothers of sinners—ran over Ma and pounded her body into the Holy Ground.

  Of the seventy thousand Indians who had gone to perform Haj that year, Ma was the only one who died in the stampede. She, and three Nigerians. My father, my wife, and I got the news a day later. By then, they had already buried Ma’s two-dimensional remains on the outskirts of Mecca.

  When I try to imagine how she died that day in the Holy City, I stop believing in Allah. But only for a short while. I can’t afford to remain godless for too long. The only way I can hide from myself is by being religious—or delusional. Call it whatever the hell you want. Ma’s voice is now a part of the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  Noise.

  ‘Buy the cassettes. For fuck’s sake, man, I need the cash. My whole collection for a hundred rupees only. Come on, dude, buy the friggin’ cassettes!’

  I didn’t say no. I had bought all five audio cassettes from the drunk American who had barged into my nursing home six months ago. I didn’t ask what kind of music it was. I didn’t care. I wanted him out of my nursing home. He was making my nervous customers (two women) even more nervous. This happens all the time: cash-starved foreign tourists randomly barge into business establishments in Colaba to sell their personal belongings.

  After the women left, I examined the cassettes I had been forced to buy. They had bizarre covers with outlandish words printed on them: Nirvana, Radiohead, Secret Samadhi and so on. English music, unfortunately.

  That was the last day of Ramazan. The next day was to be Eid. I was to put on laundered clothes and go to the mosque for the morning namaaz. At the mosque no one was to give me the three hugs that Muslim men are meant to exchange on auspicious occasions. I was to come home with a dry mouth, jerk my wife out of her sleep, open the cabinet in my hall, insert one of the English cassettes into my old player, and rewind it all the way to the start. I was to depress the Play button.

  I didn’t know I was to rattle with sorrow for the next thirty minutes.

  I did. Like a laboratory skeleton dangling in an earthquake, like a skeptic to whom a saint had revealed his sainthood, I shook and wept tearlessly. The music that bled from the speakers matched the cacophony of unborn-baby voices in my head—discordant and raw and numbing. It consisted of singular strands of guitars so exquisite that they unfolded your leaden heart inside out and scraped away the pain and rage coagulating on its inner walls.

  But these singular strands weren’t what overwhelmed me. Beauty had stopped seeming beautiful to me a long time ago. It was the collective din of ten, hundred, millions of strands of guitars playing together that made my body convulse and my gaze still. Afsana, my wife, stood in a corner of the hall and watched me. Side A reached its end and the speakers bled silence.

  I haven’t played any of those cassettes again. It was enough that I had come across an analog to the unborn-baby voices. I wasn’t going to allow a new cacophony to compete with them. It was the least I could do to keep alive the memory of my dead mother. I can still hear her voice sometimes amidst the uproar in my head.

  And the least I can do for my father?

  To let him be. He threw out Afsana and me the day Ma’s death washed up on our jagged beach. Having never opposed my occupation until then, he had called me a sister-fucking abortionist and told us to vacate in an hour. My wife and I now live in a building nearby. I haven’t spoken to my father since. He too works in Colaba; has been a salesman at a shoe shop for thirty years. I see him sometimes.

  Kaka

  I saw him this morning. From the time he arrived at Dockyard Road station till he got off the train at VT, I watched him. I lost him in the morning rush at VT. He is young and walks much faster than me. Had he looked around Dockyard Road or turned his head in the train or lingered at VT for a moment, he would have spotted me in the crowd—the old man in the corner, the one who fathered him. But my son didn’t see me because he doesn’t look for me. In the train, amidst noisy fellow passengers, Akbar stood still and quiet, gazing at his nursing home’s flier pasted on the concave part of the compartment where the ceiling meets the wall. For the twenty minutes the train ride lasted, I gawked at him secretly, watching every eye-blink, every twitch of his jawbone. Akbar has grown slimmer. He looks somewhat like me, but mostly his features have gone on his mother. His lower lip was red as usual. He has a habit of chewing it till the blood clots and tiny bruises appear.

  As Akbar studied the flier, his lips suddenly plunged into a fleeting smile. And for that brief moment, the lump in my throat disappeared.

  When I reach the shoe shop it is not yet ten-thirty. Only Amin-bhai is there. The two salesmen are invariably late: they saunter in by eleven or eleven-fifteen, wearing bright shirts and ugly jeans, talking gaudily. I find Amin-bhai, the owner, praying as usual in front of the Aga Khan’s photograph. Jutting from three walls o
f the shop are shelves and shelves of shoes, sandals, stilettos, sneakers and slippers. The fourth wall is the entrance. Beneath is the floor. Above is the false ceiling, and in its center is a dark square hole. I climb on top of the sofa for the customers. I reach up into the hole in the ceiling and pull down the ladder. I climb its uneven steps every day to get to my place up there, between the shop’s false ceiling and real ceiling, the mezzanine, where boxes and boxes of footwear are stocked.

  I have sat up there for thirty years.

  I clamber into the mezzanine and pull up the ladder.

  With my legs still dangling into the shop below, I grope around for the switch. Thirty years and I haven’t yet memorized the geography of the mezzanine. When I go home, I don’t remember where the switch is or where the ladder rests after I pull it up. I only recall the heady smell of polished leather and brand new rubber soles. I don’t remember my wife’s face either, only her delicate smell.

  Good thing the train wasn’t too crowded this morning. My son could stand comfortably. I know how much he hates others touching him, but it is unavoidable in trains on the Harbour Line. Once, when the compartment was crowded and Akbar was around, I had slipped my hand past torsos of fellow travellers, grabbed the shirt of the man farthest from me, and given it a hard yank. I am short, and remained undiscovered in the packed train. The men in between got dragged toward me; their collective weight crushed me against the metal wall, forcing me to hang out the door. I didn’t mind, and neither should they. Does their work require precision? Do their livelihoods demand a calm mind? Then what right did they have to crowd around Akbar, forcing him to lean back in obvious discomfort? The man whose shirt I yanked was inconveniencing my son the most.

  ‘Kaka, Woodland W71, size 6!’ Malik, the salesman, shouts.

  I usually sit cross-legged at the edge of the mezzanine and peer at the customers below. They don’t realize I’m up here till one of the salesmen barks orders at me. When customers look up and see me, their eyes widen. Women adjust their clothes to conceal or downplay their cleavages. Men pat their hair furtively.