Family Matters (9 page)

“Have you gone stark-raving mad? I know you don’t care for me, but what about the world? What about the children? And our baby?”

He continued calmly on his way, crossed the road, and joined Lucy on the footpath. Without any greeting, he told her this was their final meeting. He would not abet her in wasting her life. He would stay away from now on. But as he reminded her of her sense of dignity and self-respect, he felt he was uttering platitudes that were persuading neither one.

She waited till he stopped talking. “I love your outfit, Nari.”

He smiled in spite of himself.

Then, with mischief in her eyes, she made as if to pull the towel off, and he jumped backwards.

She laughed at his panic and offered him her hand. He took it. She covered it with her left, grasping tight so he couldn’t withdraw it.

Her behaviour was disgraceful, he continued, she must not loiter here any longer. Yes, she’d made her point about staring at the window, but to keep it up for so long was absurd. He repeated that this was the last time he had come downstairs to see her. This time, he meant it.

She listened in silence, caressing the back of his hand.

He finished speaking and gently extricated his hand: “Bye, Lucy. And good luck.”

As he started back, some children on the ground floor of Chateau Felicity began yelling from the window, “Hai, naryal-paanivala! What price is your naryal?”

He nodded at them and their teasing he knew his garb was strikingly similar to the knee-length loongi worn by the beachside vendors of coconut water. When he was back upstairs, Yasmin threw the cupboard key at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no choice. But it’s over now.”

“Yes,” she said softly, “it is over,” while Jal and Coomy, who were sitting beside her, glared at him.

Four more times that day they helped him to the commode, and reached the end of their stamina. Towards evening he fell into a troubled slumber. Grateful for the respite, they sat on the balcony.

As the street lights came on, Jal said he was no longer young, he did not have the strength for this kind of labour. “My hernia and appendix, and God knows what else down there, will explode at this rate.”

“What about me, my back is in pieces.”

“I think you made a big mistake.”

“What?”

“With the commode. Bedpan would have been much easier.”

“Rubbish. The only mistake was to let the urine sit collecting in the pot.”

For time had deepened the malodour. Holding her nose after the fourth usage, she had emptied the pot in the wc, swished some water around to rinse, and put it back in the commode.

They could not rest long on the balcony. Soon it was the dinner hour, and they pushed extra pillows behind Nariman to let him sit up.

“Too high,” he said, and Jal removed one.

Now it was too low, he needed something in between, but did not dare say it. He ate little, anxious to lie down again.

“Did you like it?”

“Delicious, thank you.”

Coomy held the basin under his chin while Jal waited with soap and water. Nariman washed his mouth, had a quick little gargle, and blew his nose. Little gobs of mucus floated in the shallow water; Coomy looked away. Then a light spray fell upon her fingers along the rim.

“Oh God!” she recoiled. Jal put aside the soap and water to take the basin. She fled to wash her hands.

The seagreen snot. The nosetightening snot, thought Nariman.

“What?” asked Jal.

“Nothing.” More accurately, he thought, the colour was jade.

In preparation for bedtime Jal placed a copper frying pan and spoon on the night table. “If you need something, use this to wake us.”

He demonstrated, and Coomy put her hands over her ears. “Louder than Edul Munshi’s hammer,” she said. “The whole building will run to your bedside.”

Like the ones before, this feeble attempt at humour was a failure. Then, as though on cue, the hammering began again in the flat under them.

“The fellow is shameless,” she said. “Even a sick man is not allowed to rest.”

“I forgot my teeth,” said Nariman, letting his dentures protrude to remind her.

She fetched the glass from the bathroom and held it under his mouth.

“That water has not been changed,” he sucked the teeth back in.

“I’ll change it tomorrow, I’m exhausted.”

He released his dentures into the stale water. There was a slight splash, and they sank to the bottom, grinning silently.

Three times during the night they were summoned by the spoon and frying pan. And the final gong was for the bowel movement they had been encouraging all day. They helped their stepfather onto the commode and the stench filled the room.

Jal pushed open the window and turned the ceiling fan to
FAST.
Prescriptions and papers on the dresser were sent fluttering into a corner. Nariman shivered in the sudden draft.

Cleaning him was something they had not considered clearly. Placing a pail of water and a mug beside the commode, they hoped his left hand could wash himself as usual.

The normal way, however, was unmanageable for him. Immobilized by the plaster mass, he did not have the strength to manipulate on the commode.

Still, no harm in trying, they suggested. Jal wished they had thought of purchasing toilet paper, it would have been easier for Pappa.

“But I have some,” said Coomy. “I bought a few rolls last year during the water shortage. Luckily, we never had to use them.” She ran to fetch one from the storage cabinet at the end of the hallway, and tore off several panels.

Gripping the paper carefully, Nariman made a valiant effort to wipe himself. He pivoted on one buttock to reach behind, and almost fell off the commode.

“Forget it,” said Jal, scared by the narrow escape. He put his hands under his stepfather’s armpits and eased him off the seat. “Hurry, I can’t hold him for long.”

Coomy conducted a few cursory passes with paper, gagging in the process. “It’s done.”

They resumed positions to get him back in bed. Nariman clenched his jaw; pain had filled his eyes again. They saw the tears as they wished him good night.

“The pot,” Jal reminded her.

“Your turn. I emptied it last time.”

“That was number one, it doesn’t count. And this commode was your idea.”

“So if the shit was in a bedpan you’d be happy to handle it?”

He grabbed the pot and stormed off to the wc. She followed him there and back, saying it was just the first day but already she couldn’t take any more, and they better find a solution instead of fighting.

“We’ll discuss it tomorrow,” he said testily, dropping the pot into the seat. “It’s three a.m. and I am dead.”

“You were not lifting him alone. My plight is the same.”

There was no attempt to keep their voices low. The fan was still at
FAST
, making the bedsheet flap busily where it hung over the side.

“Before you go,” said Nariman.

“What?”

“Could you please turn the fan down?”

Jal rotated the knob to
SLOW
, and the flapping sheet settled into gentle swaying.

A
T SEVEN A.M.,
the doorbell invaded Coomy’s sleep, and she woke resentfully from a lovely dream. She was dancing in the ballroom of the Taj Hotel, a band was playing old-time favourites: “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Tea For Two” in Latin rhythm, “Green, Green Grass of Home.” Gliding through a foxtrot in her partner’s expert arms, she raised her eyes upwards and saw the chandeliers, the crystals glittering like precious jewels. She could smell the cakes and sandwiches and coffee being readied in the ballroom’s antechamber. But she never saw the face of her partner, all she knew was his masterly hand on her back, guiding her without a misstep.

The doorbell made her groan and turn to a fresh area where the sheet was cooler. She waited, hoping Jal would go to the door. The house remained still. Then the ringing tore through the quiet again.

She jumped out of the four-poster bed, her heart beating fast, and let in the servant for her three hours of cleaning.

“Listen, Phoola, sweep my room first,” she instructed. “I have a headache, I’m going back to sleep.”

She watched Phoola leave her chappals by the door and pad soundlessly through the darkened flat. Her presence was slight, and went unnoticed. But when illness or indisposition kept her away, she was seen everywhere: in the dirty cups and saucers, upon the dusty furniture, in the sheets of unmade beds.

Coomy lay down again as Phoola returned from the kitchen with the short whisk broom, hunched and wrinkle-faced, looking much older than her fifty-three years. She moved with quick, small steps, knees permanently bent, her bright green sari hitched high and tucked into the waist.

She lowered herself to her haunches, and the careless whispers between broom and floor reached Coomy’s ears. Her eyelids opened a crack. For a moment she thought she was back in her dream where things had changed drastically: her dance partner had altered into a green, froglike creature, moving low across the floor with a gliding-swaying combination.

The broom grew loud, swooshing and rustling in a special display of industry, particularly under the bed, and Phoola’s head even bumped against the slats a few times. Coomy knew it was for her benefit. She was glad to see her finish and go on to Jal’s room. Nothing would disturb him, she knew, he would snore through the sweeping, she could hear him all the way here in her room.

She turned again to her interrupted dream, and the vague yearnings it had provoked. It made her think about the dance classes she and Jal used to attend in their teens. Pappa had paid for their lessons … so generous despite everything that had happened with Mamma and Lucy, never grudging them a thing. And sometimes they took little Roxie along, she loved to sit in a corner and watch them practise …

“Bai,” said Phoola from the doorway.

“What, what?” Coomy turned, making the bed creak in sympathy. “I told you to leave when the work is finished.”

“The work is not finished, bai. The work can’t be finished.”

Coomy threw off the sheet and sat up to look at the servant gone crazy. “I don’t understand what you are saying.”

“Come see for yourself, bai.”

The fetor was ripe as they reached the room. Nariman had closed his eyes again, pretending to be asleep.

“But how can it smell?” whispered Coomy, more to herself than to Phoola. “Jal emptied it last night.”

Had her lazy brother been sloppy, had he left something stinky behind in the commode? Holding her nose, she lifted the lid; the container was spotless.

Nariman decided: he would open his eyes and come clean. He smiled the next instant, amused by the thought – clean was a state much to be desired in his present condition.

“I’m sorry, Coomy, I assumed it was just gas and … I tried to pass it …”

“Oh God!”

She fled the room, followed by Phoola, who seemed pleased with the dramatic effect of her discovery. “You see, bai? I cannot work in that smell. I am not a mahetrani who cleans toilets and goo-mooter.”

“Yes, Phoola, you—”

“Just give me my salary, I will leave now. There is lots of work available in other houses, without a smell that turns my nose into a sewer.”

“Okay, Phoola, forget sweeping today, just scrub the pots and pans. There is no smell in the kitchen.”

“Bai, it is best if I leave. I will come tomorrow for my money.”

Coomy followed Phoola to the door, trying to mollify her without success. When the front door closed she was certain another one was opening, on the calamity of servantless days, and she felt crushed. She went to wake Jal.

“Get up!” she shook him by the shoulder. “See what Pappa has done!”

He fumbled for his slippers. “Am I not allowed even two hours’ sleep?”

She ignored the protest and dragged him to Nariman’s room. The smell made comment unnecessary. He leaned against the door frame, shoulders sagging, all optimism spent.

“And to top it off,” said Coomy, almost in tears, “when I found him in his mess he was smiling. Smiling! As though this is something funny!”

“No, Coomy, you misunderstand,” said Nariman, and hastened to explain the accidental pun that had amused him. “Now you see why I smiled?”

“Enough, please, I see what I see.”

For a moment Jal too, like his sister, was defeated. The fouled bed was the last straw. His Waterloo, he thought, feeling not a flicker of amusement at his own pun, too disheartened to say it aloud. The time for attempts at humour was long past.

To set about the clean-up, they needed Nariman off the bed and temporarily on the commode, but he pleaded that the ankle was hurting too much. “I don’t mind the smell, the damp is very slight. Please leave me on this mattress.”

“Impossible,” said Jal. “It will only get worse, the stuffing will rot. And God knows what it will do to your skin. Ready, Coomy? One, two, three, up —”

Nariman cried out softly, like a forgotten door moaning in the wind.

They took away the soiled sheets and surveyed the mess. Coomy said it would have been less severe if only she had remembered the rubber sheet. “We still have it. I should have put it under him, the way Mamma used to do for Roxana when she was a baby.”

“The mattress must be removed,” said Jal. “We’ll give him the one from Mamma’s room.”

It was hung over the balcony railing and given a brief wash, then left in the sun, while Jal muttered it was obvious: this extra trouble was the result of the commode.

“What do you mean?”

“Pappa’s pain is so intense when he gets up for the commode, he preferred taking a chance with his gas.”

“I don’t believe it. A little bit might slip out with gas, not such a huge puddle.”

The next instant, she broke down weeping, saying it was too much for her, she no longer knew what to do, how to take care of Pappa, and now with Phoola gone, the burden of the housework was on her head as well. Looking after Pappa had been hard enough when he was not bedridden, and the things she had to deal with, the spatters in the toilet bowl, the mess in the bathroom sink, his dentures staring at her every morning and every night.

“No one has helped me all this time, not you, not Roxana, not Yezad. Now … I don’t know … it’s so depressing, and difficult …”

Her sobbing frightened Jal. She was supposed to be the solid pillar, he the crumbling type. He tried to correct the reversal right away.

“You’re just tired, Coomy,” he soothed her. “Come, sit down.” He took her hand and led her to the sofa. “This work is new to us, and new for Pappa too. But it will get easier as we get used to it.”

She listened gratefully to his comforting words; they were restoring her. She agreed to go to the commode shop tomorrow morning. “I’ll get a bedpan in exchange.”

He suggested she stop by the Chenoy place too, tell Roxana about the accident. Perhaps she and Yezad would be of some help if they knew.

She dismissed the idea. The help they’d give would be no help – just useless advice and criticism. She didn’t want a rush of Chenoys here, spending evening after evening telling her how to nurse Pappa, especially that Yezad. Besides, she had no energy to be their hostess, offering tea and cold drinks between bedpan and basin.

Jal missed another morning at the share bazaar. He spent the time praying Pappa would hold tight till Coomy returned. And when she did, he welcomed the bedpan and urinal as though they were the vessels of salvation.

But the optimism mustered around these new utensils was a meagre thing, ending abruptly at their first trial. While the back-breaking labour of lifting Nariman to the commode was eliminated, the rest remained as repelling as before.

It was ridiculous, said Coomy, that with so much technology, scientists and engineers still hadn’t invented a less disgusting thing than a bedpan. “Who needs mobile phones and Internet and all that rubbish? How about a high-tech gadget for doing number two in bed?”

They continued to cope, poorly, with the excretions and secretions of their stepfather’s body, moving from revulsion to pity to anger, and back to revulsion. They were bewildered, and indignant, that a human creature of blood and bone, so efficient in good health, could suddenly become so messy. Neither Nariman’s age nor his previous illnesses had served to warn them. Sometimes they took it personally, as though their stepfather had reduced himself to this state to harass them. And by nightfall, the air was again fraught with tension, thick with reproaches spoken and silent.

They took him his dinner on a tray and handed him his dentures in the glass. “Can you do one thing for me?” asked Nariman.

“We’re doing everything we can for you,” said Coomy.

“Yes,” he smiled appeasingly. “My dentures are smelling, I haven’t been able to clean them for five days.”

Snatching the glass from him, she went to the bathroom, gritting her teeth. She poured out the water, taking care that his teeth did not tip out, and threw in a few flakes of laundry soap, filled fresh water, swirled. She rinsed twice and returned, pleased to have managed without touching.

Nariman slipped the dentures gratefully into his mouth. Then his face turned bitter as he tasted the detergent.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jal.

“Nothing. Thank you for cleaning them. By the way, does Roxana know about me yet?”

“What do you think?” said Coomy. “Have I had one free moment since you went and broke your bones? I apologize if your lordship is not happy with the service.”

“Please don’t be upset, Coomy,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

Sleep was yet to come and salve his pain, but he let silence answer the “Good night, Pappa” that ventured from the hallway. A hand snaked around the door frame, groping for the switch, and the light went off.

Nariman blessed the darkness. He squirmed, feeling sticky all over, and tried to scratch his back, starving for a rub of talcum powder. Since his return from the hospital, neither Jal nor Coomy had thought about changing his clothes. Or offered him a wet towel, never mind a sponge bath. They would, if he asked, but he did not want to risk their clumsy hands.

Raising his right shoulder off the bed allowed the ceiling fan’s slow breath upon his sweaty back. He gazed at the window, its glass luminous in the street light. The bars, standing stark, were oddly comforting. Old friends, he knew them well, keeping him company in the hours he had spent holding them while looking out the window, waiting for Lucy. And the flaking paint, which sometimes he flicked off the bars with his fingernail … like the flakes of dandruff that he flicked, when he was younger, when he had hair. His floc-flicking fingernail … flicking the floc … and the frock Lucy wore … the clarinet frock he called it, because, he told her, it made her look slim as a clarinet … when they were young …

“ ‘One day when we were young,’ ” he half-hummed, half-imagined the words of the song, “ ‘one wonderful morning in May. You told me, you love me, when we were young one day …’ ”

Their song, his and Lucy’s, ever since they had seen the
The Great Waltz.
He remembered the Sunday-evening show at Metro cinema. The day he had named the yellow dress … and after the film he said she was as gorgeous as Miliza Korjus. They strolled to the Cooperage maidaan, found a bench, far from the crowds gathered around the military band playing energetic marches. He and Lucy were sheltered from the bandstand by trees and bushes.