First published by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland Publications

Private Limited in 2019

1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Infocity, Dr MGR Salai,
Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096

Westland, the Westland logo, Tranquebar and the Tranquebar logo are
the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

Copyright © Jane Borges, 2019

Jane Borges asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this
work.

ISBN: 9789388754750

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places,

events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or
used fictitiously.
All rights reserved

Book design by Jojy Philip, New Delhi 110 015

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written
permission of the publisher.
To Dada, Mamma and my brothers, Saby and Steven. Thank you for the
gift of family.
 CONTENTS

1 PAPER HEARTS
2 THE DANCE OF LOVE
3 THE EXORCISM OF MICHAEL COUTINHO
4 A PENCIL DISAPPEARED
5 THE WEDDING AT CAVEL
6 A FRIEND CALLED JOE
7 THE WATER FIASCO
8 DEAREST BUTTERFLY, WITH LOVE
9 KING OF THE CROSSWORD
10 LETTING GO
11 TO LIVE IN THE SKY
12 BOMBAY BALCHÃO
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 1

PAPER HEARTS
December 2015

W
e never saw snowflakes on Christmas. Not in my neighbourhood
at least. Even if they were to fall from our winter sky, they’d
melt into drops of dew, nervously resting on pink-petalled
flowers. Yet, each year, when the cold months set in, we’d secretly wish
for a white Christmas so that we could build ourselves a portly snowman
with button eyes and a carrot nose. But that sweltering December from
seventy years ago dashed any such hopes.
Before we begin, you must know where you are. Sandwiched
between two bustling bazaars in the south of Mumbai is a winding
stretch of road, broken on the edges and pockmarked from years of
neglect. From dawn to twilight, hurried feet trample over this uneven
strip, while handcarts crush and pound it further, making its presence
unsightly. At the mouth of the lane, hanging perilously from a wrought
iron pole is a plaque the colour of midnight blue. The inconspicuous sans
serif font in waning white reads: Dr D’Lima Street, Cavel.
Back in 1945, there was no signboard to welcome you. There was
instead, a dirt track that opened into our street, dotted by villas and
surrounded by gulmohar and chiku trees.
Winter evenings here were always cold and pleasant, if not biting.
The raucous hawkers who lined our street would escape early to avoid
the nip, and those who stayed built a fire to keep themselves warm. This
is why the Christmas Eve from that year stood out like a sore thumb. The
light mist that would otherwise float aimlessly under the incandescent
glow of the streetlights had not made an appearance. Neither had the
shimmering constellation—Orion, a result of stars crisscrossing to create
a bow-and-arrow wielding hunter, had been shadowed by a flock of dark,
grey clouds. It was a strange night, compounded by stranger happenings
inside our church.
The four-hundred-odd parishioners of Our Lady of Hope, who
between carolling and prayer had witnessed one of these incidents,
would remember it to their dying breath. For years to come, the tale
would be discussed at every social gathering in Cavel, often laced with
Goan recheado and balchão masala. It wasn’t long before the marinated
apocrypha began to vary from household to household. The characters
and plot changed with every story, but the residents of Cavel continued
to listen to it with the same curiosity and anticipation with which they
had heard it the first time around.
I never felt the need to contribute to these stories. Mine would only
meld into this clutter, and I did not want that to happen. There was
another reason. Not only did I have an entirely different account of the
incident that set the rumour mills turning, I had also been witness to
something that I had deliberately never spoken about. For some reason, I
buried this part of my life so deep that even if I wanted to summon it, the
memory would be so hazy that it wouldn’t cause me an ounce of pain.
Our minds are surprisingly gifted with this innate ability to omit
events that we do not to wish to revisit. But a slight trigger and the mind
retrieves them for us, playing them out in technicolour.
The weather tonight is so much like it was that night in 1945 that
the very thought hurts my heart. The air is withdrawn and the clouds
heavy just like that day when I—a gangly-looking, awkward teenager of
fourteen—sat in church as Fr Augustine Fernandez led the midnight
mass.
Cavel had its own swing during this season, drawing residents into
crazy merriment. The houses in our lane would be lit up with candles,
and even the trees abutting them were decorated to shine like the sun.
After midnight mass, everyone would throng the compound below my
building, 193-A, Bosco Mansion at Pope’s Colony, for a Christmas party
that saw revellers arrive from as far as Mahim, the last stop of the island
city before Bombay spilled into the suburbs. Each parishioner had
unspoken duties here. While the boys would take care of the bonfire,
burning logs of deadwood and stacks of hay picked up from the nearby
Crawford Market to light up the grounds, the older men would be
immersed in creating potent concoctions of home-brewed alcohol that
would be served only after the night got younger. The women, on the
other hand, would play kind hosts, first feeding the famished coffee and
plum cakes before tempting them with the more delicious mutton and
pork chops. But what they all contributed to separately, they
compensated together in celebration as they flirted and danced and even
broke into solemn singing—the home favourites being Silent Night and
Hark the Herald Angels Sing —leaving only after the sun had ambushed
the dark so that they could prepare for the feasting in their homes
through Christmas Day.
On that night too, a get-together had been planned. And so, hoping
in earnest that the weather would not prick our happy bubble, we tried to
put our best foot forward. By 11.30 p.m., most of the homes on the street
had been abandoned. The click-clack of heavily heeled boots could be
heard on the stretch—usually noiseless at that hour—as the men and
women made a beeline to church for midnight mass.
My mother had got Francis, the tailor from John D’souza & Sons, to
make her a long yellow silk gown, which swept the road as she walked
to church. Her gold-laced mantilla, a head covering worn by the women,
compulsorily for mass, hid her heavily powdered face and the crimson
lips that she had painted with cheap lipstick, and my father was grateful
for that. She looked ugly in make-up, he felt, but he could never muster
the courage to tell her. He’d rather shut up than incur her stony silence
once she’d been told.
Meanwhile, the Hindus, only a handful on our street, sneakily
peered from the gaps between the iron rods of their windows, gawking at
the dressy Christian women. It was an annual ritual. This was a time
when even the radio was a rarity and people sought entertainment in the
most bizarre places.
As members of the Hindu family gathered at the windowsill and
gaped in awe, the patriarch of the house would break into the much-
anticipated spiel about the ‘converts’ who had sold their souls to the gori
chamdi. Their brazen act of aping the Europeans at a time when freedom
fighters were warring against the ‘gore log’ for independence and
demanding that their brethren wear only hand-spun Indian cloth clearly
showed which side of the battle the Christians were on, he argued.
‘Mark my words, when the time arrives, they will be the first ones
to leave with their sahibs and memsahibs. And if they don’t, we’ll drive
them away.’
But the male libido had been sparked. In the darkness, numbed by
furious lovemaking, he would latch onto his wife’s waist, and in between
suckling her breasts ask if she would wear one of those dresses, just for
him. She would agree coyly, but as an afterthought dredge up the same
repulsed feeling her husband had exposed in front of the family when he
saw the Christian women strut on the roads. Was that how he would feel
when he saw his wife in a dress? She couldn’t tell.
At Our Lady of Hope, the crowd was slowly thickening. The church
had once been the private chapel of a Portuguese merchant named
Benito Pedro De Moura. He built it not very far from the temple of
Mumbadevi, the Goddess the city owes its name to. It was a simple
structure of stone with a lofty wooden roof which no man—at least,
that’s what we kids were told—could reach without the help of God. The
rectangular nave, which boasted intricate, hand-made floral patterns on
its red-oxide flooring, could accommodate a congregation of not more
than three hundred people. Fortunately, since Cavel delivered more
choristers than babies, every year for whom separate seating
arrangements were made on a sturdy balcony right above the entrance,
everyone was assured room.
But humidity levels spiralled inside the church that day, making it
uncomfortable for everyone. To allow the heat to swim out, the huge
arched windows had been left wide open, but there was still no respite.
The ladies saw this as the perfect occasion to bring out the cloth fans
they had been desperately waiting to flaunt since after summer. The
striking paintings of lands unknown on their fans notwithstanding, their
eyes still wore the glint of envy as they observed with awe the
handiwork of different tailors on other women. The richer among them
had come in gowns embroidered with sequins and accessorised with
rows of gold necklaces encrusted with coral or pearl. It was as if they
had emptied their jewellery boxes to flaunt their family wealth when the
church always harped about frugality. The men who had come in three-
piece hand-me-down suits that had long fallen out of favour with
fashion, settled for their kerchiefs or made do with the faint warm air
that passed their sides as their wives and daughters fanned their own
faces. They were distracted too, but only the bachelors seated right at the
back dared to make a show of their roving eyes.
Standing in front on a semi-circular raised pulpit, facing the altar
and leading this pack into prayer was Fr Augustine Fernandez, whose
white vestment glowed in the light of a candle chandelier, making him
appear the most hallowed within this sea of humanity. Having served
him in close and unsecure quarters as an altar boy, I found something
comical about his personality. Always fidgety and nervous, with his
round face suspended from his short and portly body like that of a
Kuchipudi dancing doll, Fr Augustine’s demeanour forever perplexed
me. Everyone else, however, including my own family, was smitten by
him and described his reticent nature as the trait of a true servant of God.
The uncomfortable weather seemed to have aggravated his anxiety,
especially while he was reading the Gospel of Luke from the Bible. Part
of the mass was in Latin, the language of the Gods, which only a few
understood. But I, for long, had been a keen student of Latin, and on the
insistence of my father, was being schooled separately in order to read
and learn the Bible. It was how I realised that Fr Augustine wasn’t
focussing; something about the passage he was reading didn’t sound
quite right.
The place where he stood was indeed a furnace, and the huge
candle that had been strategically placed near the pulpit wasn’t doing
him any good. He continued reading, occasionally wiping the beads of
sweat that brushed his lips.
This was just the build-up to the drama that was to unfold. Because,
five minutes later, when Fr Augustine had completed the gospel and had
moved his hands upwards to join his palms in prayer, the elbow of his
left arm accidentally hit the candle beside him. The wax cylinder
dropped onto the floor, but not before lighting up the back of the gold-
embroidered chasuble which he wore over his vestment.
‘Fr Augustine is on fire,’ a man screamed from among the crowd.
The congregation was suddenly alerted. The priest himself wasn’t aware
of the fire, but the cries of the man who had alarmed him and the others
had been so petrifying that, without thinking, he hurried down the steps
of the pulpit and rushed towards the backyard garden, where a water
tank was located. The churchgoers scurried after him; the collective
clicking of their shoes on the floor left a loud and disturbing echo in the
church.
To Fr Augustine’s luck, his escape had been greeted with a blast of
thunder. By the time he reached the water tank, the clouds had torn apart,
exploding into a heavy shower that instantly doused his burning
chasuble. ‘December rain,’ somebody yelled. ‘This is a miracle. This is
God’s Christmas miracle.’
For the many hundreds of parishioners who had followed their
beloved Fr Augustine in a bid to save him, the rain was indeed a
blessing. The men snuggled their priest in a warm embrace. The rest
broke out in prayer and someone started the opening lines of a rosary as
the downpour continued.
‘God cast out the devil that had tried to attack his servant,’ is what
they would later make of the incident.
Nobody, not even the priest, realised that it was just a few
centimetres of the thin satin lining of his chasuble that had attracted the
flames.
But just like that, this story from Christmas Eve came to be
regarded as a legend in the Catholic neighbourhood of Cavel. The last
story I heard spelt out in detail how Fr Augustine resembled a ball of
flame when he ran out of the church, his arms flailing as if begging for
succour. No one wanted to know how he had escaped the incident
unscathed and went on to live for another thirty-six years, ripening till
eighty, without marks of the burns that had sent him scampering like a
mad man. Fr Augustine remained mum about the incident. The ludicrous
stories that did the rounds soon after would trouble him throughout his
life.
When I met him a few years after he left our parish, he admitted he
was guilty of not having shut down those rambling stories. ‘I wasn’t sure
what happened,’ he confessed.
He, however, claimed to have figured out why he had been
handpicked for this public humiliation. ‘I haven’t told this to anyone,
son,’ he whispered. I guided my ears to listen to him, wondering if there
was another side to this story and if he had been the victim of some foul
play. ‘The sweat had glazed my eyes,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I … I … I
don’t know how I skipped the two most important passages of the gospel
during the reading.’
A prolonged silence followed before he muttered, ‘I distorted God’s
word. I was the devil. I had to be punished.’
As he said this, he heaved a sigh of relief, grateful that he had
finally unburdened himself. I looked at him with pity but chuckled
inwardly, resisting the urge to laugh out loud. God would have too.
While this tale enshrined itself in the collective receding memory of
my neighbourhood, another one, which occurred on the same night and
at the same place, was forgotten. In the beginning, it would affect me no
end to think that an entire bunch of people had conveniently chosen to
erase the incident from their minds, and all for a miracle that never really
was. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that some lies
are often only said so that a few truths are concealed. The bigger the lie,
the more painful the truth.
The second incident took place right after the congregation had
started the rosary near the tank. While I had joined the crowd, my
mother had sent me back inside to be with my grandmother Maria Lorna
Coutinho, who was having trouble with her joints. I was meant to watch
over her, but shamai, as we fondly called her, was not one to spare
herself all the fun. When I told her of the prayer that had begun outside,
she shut her eyes and started mumbling the rosary too.
Apart from shamai’s frantic lip movements, it was peaceful in here.
The walls of the church blocked off the commotion outside, and I liked it
that way. From the looks of it, the midnight service wouldn’t resume
anytime soon. Disinterested and sleepy, I rested my head on the top rail
of the pew to catch a quick nap when someone whispered into my ear,
‘Michael.’
The soft timbre of her voice had a soothing effect on me. Instead of
waking me up, it pushed me deeper into the crevices of a beautiful
dream.
When this person called out to me again—this time, a few decibels
louder—an odd sensation kicked in and stirred me out of my slumber.
That’s when I realised I wasn’t dreaming. My eyes opened to stare right
into hers, even as my lips nervously curled into a sheepish smile, leaving
two tiny depressions on either cheek.
Tracey, who was born the same year as me and was my ground-
floor neighbour at Bosco Mansion, had been sitting several rows behind
me, somewhere at the far corner of the church. I hadn’t noticed that she
had not gone with her mother to join the parishioners outside. This was
not something I should have missed. In fact, she was the only reason I
came to church. The one advantage of being an altar server, whose tasks
involved assisting the priest with the mass proceedings, was that you got
a ringside view of the crowd. Standing there, I always looked for Tracey.
Now that I no longer served, combing through the crowd for her took a
bit more effort, but it was still worth it.
The first time I met Tracey was when we were five years old. She
had dressed as a flower girl during a celebration at church that we called
the Eucharistic Adoration, which, in our church, went on for thirteen
hours at a stretch. On this day, Christians from every street in Cavel
would take turns venerating the Holy Eucharist that comprised the bread
and wine symbolic of Jesus’ body and blood. In the final hour, the
Eucharist would be taken in a grand procession led by the parish priest,
of parishioners and a musical band, from the church to the ground at
Pope’s Colony—the compound served the dual purpose of party and
prayer ground—and later back to the church. Sweet, sweet Tracey was
part of this procession, swaying in a pretty white dress and red velvet
sash, dropping the rose petals she carried with her in a straw basket.
There was a certain delicateness to how she let those petals fall—she
only picked one petal each time, never holding them together in a bunch
like other girls—tossing it gently to the ground. I had been standing right
beside her, but I am not sure if we spoke.
A year later, when Tracey’s family moved into our building, she
would join me and my other friends, including Ellena Gomes and the da
Cunha boys from the neighbouring Lobo Mansion, to play hopscotch
and hide-and-seek. But Tracey loved the games we played on rainy days
the most, and if I didn’t show up, she’d knock on our door and beg
mother to allow me to come down with her.
 ‘Aunty, aunty, Michael promised to sail paper boats with me. Please
let him come,’ she’d say. My mother would agree, though reluctantly.
She knew that I would catch a fever soon after, but ‘if the rains bring you
both closer,’ she’d tell me, ‘let the fever be the sacrifice.’
‘Lady, stop messing with my son’s head,’ my father, Alfred
Coutinho, would butt in. ‘The D’Lima queen would never allow such a
union. Over her dead body.’
But you couldn’t tell mama to choose her dreams wisely.
You see, Tracey’s grandfather, the venerable Dr Ralph Norman
D’Lima, son of Goan educator Norman D’Lima, was among those who
fell just short of having a shrine in his memory. Until the late 1930s, the
D’Limas owned a bungalow on a sprawling expanse of land that
boasted, among many other things, a dairy farm. When Norman wasn’t
teaching English and arithmetic at the fledgeling Catholic School run by
the Society of Jesus in the same lane, he was busy milking his cows. It
wasn’t long before Gaiwadi, as his farm was called, started supplying
milk to all and sundry, making this passion enterprise a hit. But it was
his son, Dr Ralph, who changed the fortunes of the family. Tales of his
compassion for the sickly were told to children as bedtime stories.
Dr Ralph was our local hero, just like Dr Acacio Gabriel Viegas, the
celebrated doctor from the neighbouring Dhobi Talao area, whose
resplendent statue outside the Parsi library, Cowasji Framjee Hall
(though fallen into neglect today with pigeon droppings sullying him
from head to toe) has forever made Goans gloat with pride. When
Bombay was diseased with the bubonic plague of 1896, it was Dr Viegas
who had stemmed the burgeoning death toll by detecting the first case in
Mandvi. From there on, he doggedly spearheaded the movement to fight
the epidemic, personally inoculating over eighteen thousand residents.
His efforts eventually secured him the prized presidential berth in the
Bombay Municipal Corporation. His contemporaries, including Dr
D’Lima, had also helped see the plague through. They later took a leaf
out of his phenomenal legacy and worked towards uplifting the city’s
health scene in the early 1900s. Efforts were made to convince the
Bombay municipality to install a stone bust of Dr D’Lima at the mouth
of our street, which led into Cavel. But as a piecemeal offering, the
nameless road where his family resided was renamed Dr D’Lima Street
nearly a decade after his death in 1939.
Mama never let a day go by without reminding me of how Dr
D’Lima had fought tooth and nail to save her grandfather, Antao
D’Costa, who had also been a victim of the plague. ‘He died in the arms
of Dr D’Lima. It was such a good death,’ she claimed.
Dr D’Lima’s daughter-in-law Linda Mary, on the other hand, was
Cavel’s anti-hero. She did not let go of any opportunity to remind her
neighbours that she belonged to the crème de la crème of the Goan
community. After a financial crisis, when the family was forced to tear
down the D’Lima bungalow and move lock, stock and barrel to our
building, Linda was said to have been most ruffled by the turn of events.
Having lost her privacy, both inside—she no longer had her own piano
room—and outside, she had become peevish and restless. She mostly
kept to herself and never once indulged in empty conversations with the
residents of Pope’s Colony. The only time she spoke to my mother was
to reprimand her when she thought I had kissed her daughter Tracey.
‘Keep his filthy lips off my daughter’s,’ she had warned after she had
seen Tracey scribble something in her maths book. ‘Michael + Tracey =
Kiss,’ she had written.
‘Is this what you teach your son, Mrs Coutinho?’ Linda had asked
mother.
My mother was unaffected. In fact, she considered it a personal
victory and later gave me a chocolate bar for hastening her plans to make
me the son-in-law of such an illustrious family.
‘But I didn’t kiss her,’ I clarified.
‘Aye, son, let Lady Linda believe you did, men,’ she said.
After that incident, I saw very little of Tracey except during the
monsoon when her mother escaped for a break to her hometown in Goa.
That’s when her father, an architect and a lovely soul just like Dr
D’Lima, allowed her to play with me.
I have fond memories of those days. When the rain splattered into
our compound and was no longer welcomed by the ever-relenting and
absorbing earth, it broke into tiny, snaky rivulets that sought no direction
or home. We sailed paper boats in these streams, and Tracey always
won. My boat would drown mid-way somewhere, causing her to break
into peals of laughter.
‘Loser!’ she’d say. I said nothing in retort. All I did was muster a
stupid smile which I knew kept her from teasing me further. But she’d
get so nervous that she’d quickly add, ‘Stop smiling, will you? I hate that
smile.’
She couldn’t even lie with a straight face.
Once her mother returned, Tracey and I behaved like we didn’t
know each other. When our eyes locked briefly in church during Sunday
service, she’d put her head down immediately. Whom were we
appeasing? Linda, I presume.
A year before that Christmas, everything stopped. Tracey no longer
came to sail paper boats with me. In fact, she barely came out of her
home. She’d come to church occasionally and when that happened, I
would be overjoyed. Unfortunately, I saw no signs of similar happiness
on her face. Our chance meetings got rarer by the day, until that
Christmas Eve, when she came to mass in a lime-coloured frock. Though
I had not seen her in months, my heart skipped a beat. But in the
aftermath of the chaos, I had briefly overlooked her presence.
‘Tracey,’ I said now, as she stood next to me. I was trying hard to
keep a straight face, even though my tiny dimples and reddened cheeks
gave too much away. It would be a lie if I said my heart wasn’t racing
when she called out to me. I was also sweating profusely, but I wouldn’t
want to romanticise that part, because it had a lot to do with the heat.
‘Hello,’ I stammered.
‘Can I sit here?’ she asked, seemingly short of breath.
I threw a glance at shamai and seeing her still immersed in prayer,
softly responded, ‘Of course.’
She sat down at once beside me—there was a distance of just a few
inches between us. It was only when Tracey was close enough that I
noticed how pale she had become. Her cheeks were sunken, and her
once gleaming eyes now wore the dullness of poor health. Her hands too
had shrivelled. She was all skin and bone.
‘Are you well?’ I asked.
‘Why do you ask?’ Her voice had also thinned.
 ‘No, no, just,’ I lied. ‘Where have you been? I hardly see you
around these days.’
‘Does it matter? You never came looking for me anyway.’
Even in her teasing, I could sense the tone of accusation. ‘I didn’t
know where you were.’
‘Don’t lie, Michael,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘You could have just
asked dada. He would have told you. But you never even came.’ She
spoke haltingly, as if measuring her words.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Dada told me,’ she said, sounding hurt.
I wish I had the courage to tell her that she was wrong. But when
you love someone dearly, you allow their truth to take precedence over
yours.
My truth was very different from hers. I had gone once too often to
her home to enquire after her, only to be shooed away by both her
parents, right at the door. Her father, in particular, had been ignoring me,
choosing not to respond even to plain greetings when our paths crossed
in the compound. When my mother learnt of it, she was so livid that she
warned me against going there again. It was then that I started dropping
letters into the mailbox at Tracey’s door—at last count, ten—but all of
them went unanswered. One day, out of sheer desperation, I even did my
school homework on the steps of her ground-floor home, sitting there till
dusk in the hope that she’d appear in front of me. Had I shared all of this
with Tracey then, she’d have been disappointed and hurt with her parents
—the people she most trusted. How could I have let that happen? And
so, instead of responding or reacting to the lies, I just sat quietly with
her, staring vacantly at the altar.
‘I think I am very ill,’ she finally said, breaking the silence between
us.
I looked at her uncertainly, wondering if she was teasing me again.
‘The doctors told me I have tuberculosis,’ she said. I was shocked
of course, but I don’t remember showing any sign of that. By now,
shamai was on the final part of her rosary, far too engrossed to even be
rattled by what Tracey had just said.
‘Are you better now?’
 ‘I think so. I have stopped coughing at least,’ she said. ‘You know
where I was all this time?’
‘At home?’
‘No.’
‘Then?’
‘I was kept in a special room at a hospital. I was all alone,’ she said,
speaking slowly.
‘Why?’
‘Because my parents didn’t want me to die.’
In those days, tuberculosis was far deadlier than it is now. Patients
were quarantined in open-air sanatoriums outside the city to prevent the
rapid spread of the infection. It made sense that Tracey’s parents
wouldn’t have wanted the neighbours to know what their daughter was
suffering from lest they panicked. It was, after all, hard to keep a
dangerous secret in Cavel.
‘But you are back now,’ I said. ‘You will be alright soon.’
She looked at me, listlessly. Sensing her unease, I changed the
topic. ‘It’s raining in December. Isn’t that funny?’
‘Do you think we can sail paper boats, Michael?’ she asked.
‘Now?’
She nodded. I smiled.
You know that feeling when a wish comes true, even if for a few
fleeting seconds? And just when you think you could hold on to it for a
lifetime, it disappears? We did make a paper boat that night with one of
the carol sheets in our pew. But we couldn’t set it sailing. Instead, a few
minutes later, I rushed out to call Linda and her husband. The church
was full again and a limp Tracey was taken to the hospital on a stretcher.
The next day, on Christmas, the bell rang ceaselessly in church,
overwhelming Cavel with its ominous clanging. Her mother, humbled by
the incident, came home twice to enquire about what had transpired
between us, probably worried that her daughter had told me of her
illness. I was never forthcoming.
Months later, the D’Lima couple moved to Goa for good. With their
departure, this story found its end, never to be discussed again.
Now, as my eyes drift over our compound—its dry earth waiting to
be parched by the heavy, overbearing clouds—I go and stand near my
balcony, searching longingly for her. When she appears, I pull out my
wooden walking stick and bearing my weight on it, head down and wait
patiently below the sky.
For when it rains, I will take out our crumpled paper boat, yellowed
and torn at the edges, and sail it through the narrow, muddy stream. If it
stops mid-way, Tracey will laugh. Then I will do what I always did best
and she will hold my hands and say, ‘I hate that smile of yours.’
 2

THE DANCE OF LOVE

August 1958

O
n her twenty-first birthday, Annette Coutinho—daughter of Karen
and Alfred Sebastiano Coutinho and sister of Michael—the most
sought-after belle in Cavel, was finally getting engaged to her
beau of three years, Joe Crasto.
Every living person in the neighbourhood, those known to the
family and even otherwise, had been invited to join the celebrations at
the famed Goan Catholic Club of Pius House, not very far from Pope’s
Colony. Annette’s parents, though, weren’t convinced about their
daughter’s choice of husband. Reason: Joe was from Mangalore, in
Mysore state, which was later renamed Karnataka. Aside from sharing a
border with Portuguese-ruled Goa, as well as what the Coutinhos
considered a ‘lamentable’ version of Konkani, the Catholics of
Mangalore had nothing in common with Goans.
The Catholics of Bombay, for all practical purposes, were a team.
They belonged to the same church, were blessed by the same Pope and
worshipped the same Lord. What separated them was community—each
one with its own history. In pockets like Cavel, community also
determined where you stood in the realm of class.
Here, it was the East Indian Catholics, the sons and daughters of the
city’s soil, who were the self-appointed cream of the neighbourhood.
Most East Indians traced their ancestry to the earliest settlers who
dwelled on the islands of Bombay and neighbouring Salsette. The arrival
of the Portuguese and their evangelical brigade had led to the
proliferation of a new group of native converts, who settled in rural
pockets like Cavel where churches were being erected. One doesn’t
know how and when this village was christened Cavel, but the
inspiration for the name is said to have come from the local fisherfolk,
the Kolis, who fished in the expansive seas not too far from here. When
the British gained control of the islands of Bombay, the economy
boomed and thousands of Christian immigrants from the Portuguese
state of Goa started making in roads here and in other neighbourhoods,
in search of jobs. Overwhelmed by this massive wave of immigrants
who often shared the same surnames as them, the native Christians
across the islands chose to call themselves East Indians. This new
identity had little to do with geography—Bombay was on the western
belt of India—and more with polity. Naming themselves after the British
East India Company perhaps associated them with the Europeans.
For a very long time, the East Indians of Cavel discouraged
marriages outside their community. In the church, the first few rows
were always reserved for the East Indians and if a Goan dared to sit there
during mass, they’d throw them ugly stares before complaining to the
parish priest. Things took a turn for the better when Ursula, the daughter
of the Misquittas, the richest and proudest East Indians, lost her heart to
a Goan baker in the area and eloped with him. This act of defiance may
have earned her a bad name, making her a recurring figure in Cavel
folklore even sixty years after her death, but the walls had crumbled, and
it wasn’t long before Goan–East Indian marriages had started becoming
commonplace.
Newer walls were built when Mangalorean Catholic families, just a
handful, moved into Cavel. Now it was time for the Goans to make the
most of their new-found snobbery. Most Mangaloreans, as history
documented, had once shared the same land as the Christian Goans.
Their partition story went back centuries ago, to the time when the
Catholic missionaries forced them to adopt a new god. While many
Goan natives hadn’t shown resistance to conversion, some were still
deeply entrenched in Hindu customs. And so, when the Tribunal of
Inquisition was set up by the Portuguese in Goa in 1560, its autocratic
policy of discouraging the Hindu way of life and the persecution that
followed thereafter, along with the high taxes that were being arbitrarily
imposed, didn’t win favour among several locals. Worried that they were
getting a raw deal, several Christians and Hindus fled southwards,
resettling in regions like Mangalore. The epidemics that plagued Goa
during this time, only emboldened them.
The price they paid for that flight of freedom had been brutal,
especially after Tipu Sultan gained control of South Canara in the late
1700s and issued orders to seize the estates of the Mangalorean
Catholics and hold the people captive. Thousands were killed during this
time. But the Goans were too preoccupied with their own lives to
concern themselves with those who had ‘abandoned’ them. They had
started absorbing foreignness into their system—dressing, eating and
sounding like the Latins. The Mangaloreans, proud rebels that they were,
saw this life of convenience that their cousins had chosen for themselves
as far too easy. Even centuries on, this back-story forgotten, the
resentment continued.
In Bombay, Mangaloreans—the Mangis—had earned themselves
the distinction of being too shrewd for their own good, while the Goans
—the susegaads—became infamous for their laid-back attitude. None of
this was true. This pigeonholing was the machination of part love, part
hate and a lot of envy.
Like many others, Karen and Alfred weren’t aware of this shared,
complicated history that went back over four hundred years. All they
knew was that the two most prominently represented Catholic
communities in Bombay—apart from the East Indians—had separated,
never to come together again.
‘But he’s Roman Catholic, mama,’ Annette had argued, when
Karen had bluntly refused to consider the alliance.
‘Are you nuts, Anna? Do you think there’s a short supply of good-
looking boys in Cavel or what?’ Karen asked.
‘Yes! Name one decent man in Cavel.’
‘Aye, I can name a hundred, including that Benjamin boy. Why
don’t you fall in love with him, Anna?’ her mum pleaded. ‘Your Joe and
his family are different from us, men.’
‘But Joe loves sorpotel and chorizo, just like us,’ said Annette.
‘He’s still Mangalorean,’ Alfred echoed his wife’s sentiments.
‘What’s the difference, papa?’ Annette asked.
 To this, the Coutinhos could never supply a good answer.
‘Mangaloreans, I tell you, cunning people,’ Karen pointed out.
Her engineer husband, whose education under the Jesuits had
landed him the privilege of refined articulation, was more robust in his
description. ‘Darling, these Mangaloreans are quite calculating. It comes
naturally to these folks. It is just better that we stay away from them.’
But Karen, who wouldn’t let her husband have the last word, butted
in, ‘They also can’t jive like Goans. Ask who is Chic Chocolate, and
they don’t know about Bombay’s best trumpeter, men. Only want to
make money all the time. Shee! Such an insult to us Catholics, I tell you.
And their English! What’s that word you taught me, Alfi?’
‘Appalling,’ he said.
‘Ha, same … appall and all.’
‘Mama, Joe speaks English, jives, parties and plays in a jazz band,
like any other Goan boy,’ Annette said. ‘You both are so orthodox.’
‘Shut up, Anna,’ Karen said. ‘Oversmart you have become.
Answering us back now, huh?’
‘If you don’t allow me to marry Joe, I will run away like that Ursula
Misquitta,’ Annette threatened.
The name brought on a cold silence as Annette’s parents stared at
their daughter, stunned. It was a while before Karen yelled, ‘What you
said?’
‘I will run away like Ursula,’ Annette repeated. She made sure that
every word that tumbled out of her mouth was louder than the other.
‘Open your big mouth, and I will spank you.’
That’s how the arguments mostly progressed each time the topic
came up. This went on until the Coutinhos attended the annual Western
music festival at the Catholic Gymkhana in Marine Lines and saw Joe
Crasto perform a Jim Reeves number. He bagged the best singer award,
trumping the local star Benjamin da Cunha, the guitar and banjo legend
who Karen had set eyes on for her daughter.
With Joe, the young lad from Mazagaon—another quaint Christian
pocket in the city—rising to overnight fame in south Bombay, nobody in
the Goan community saw him as Mangalorean anymore. He had become
one of their kind.
 Karen and Alfred, who for long feared that their daughter would
pull an Ursula on them, saw this as the perfect occasion to switch tables
and start flaunting him as their future son-in-law. They were still not
happy with the connection, but at least socially, it seemed more
acceptable. The big day was set for November, but before people from
their neighbourhood forgot who Joe Crasto—the star singer of the
Catholic Gymkhana—was, they decided to get their daughter engaged to
him. Annette’s birthday on 5 August seemed like a good occasion.
The days preceding the celebrations were hectic. Karen and her six
sisters were going to prepare the snacks for the brunch. This meant a
series of heated discussions on items to be included in the final menu.
When it came to food, the Rosario sisters loved one-upping each other.
A dish chosen by one had to be disliked by at least four others, bringing
all the planning to a standstill. The sisters found a strange bonhomie in
these kitchen wars. It was only when the disinterested party of husbands,
in-laws, nieces, nephews and cousins was dragged in for suggestions that
a solution was found.
A final menu was drawn up, with chutney sandwiches, mutton
cutlets, pork sausages, chicken fry, homemade sponge cake, boiled
chickpeas, fruit punch and potato chips from Ideal Wafers at Khotachi
Wadi making it to the busy list.
Around two hundred people were invited to the engagement party,
including select relatives of Joe who made up more than half of the
guests. Joe’s immediate family was reasonably large. He was the seventh
among thirteen children. His mother had died a few hours after the birth
of her youngest daughter, Mary.
‘Not surprised,’ Karen said, when Annette told her about Joe’s
family. ‘Who wouldn’t die, men, after starting a baby factory like that,
huh? This is why I warned you about that Joe boy. You want to die soon,
na Anna?’ she asked.
‘Mama, don’t forget, you come from a big family too.’
‘But we were just eight,’ Karen said.
‘Just eight? Mama, you can’t even defend yourself properly,’
Annette said.
‘Aye, mind that language, Anna. Don’t act so smart. Show some
respect to me.’
 ‘You don’t deserve any respect,’ Annette scoffed.
Smack! The back of her mother’s hand landed so hard on her cheek
that it left both of them bruised.
During those trying days, it was Michael who played mediator. His
sole task was to remind his parents that their daughter was going to be in
safe hands. Joe, he told them, was negotiating a plum contract with a
jazz band from Calcutta that was performing at The Taj Mahal Hotel.
‘He is on his way to becoming one of Bombay’s biggest singing
sensations.’
As Joe’s best friend, this was the least he could do. Michael and Joe
had met at St Xavier’s College in Dhobi Talao. They were among a tiny
group of boys pursuing humanities amidst a swarm of women.
Friendship was inevitable. Joe was introduced to Annette during one of
his many visits to Bosco Mansion. She was his first music student. He
tried teaching her to play the guitar, but she was so terrible at it that he
stopped within a few weeks. By then, her violent strums had damaged all
the strings on Joe’s guitar. To make things worse, she had also clawed
into his fretboard with her long, sharp nails, leaving several gashes.
‘Your sister is the worst enemy of my music,’ a miffed Joe had told
his friend.
Michael had been relieved. He had known of Annette’s flirtatious
ways and was glad his friend had not fallen for any of it.
But love happened and accidentally—somewhere between chance
meetings at Marine Drive, a place they both visited to watch the sunset.
Nobody knew that Annette and Joe had started meeting more often
except Michael’s wife, Merlyn. On Sundays, Annette would leave with
Merlyn for Chira Bazaar fish market—ostensibly to give her sister-in-
law company—but would then make a detour and rush to Joe’s aunt
Lucy’s home in Sonapur Galli. Aunty Lucy, who lived within shouting
distance of Dr D’Lima Street, was privy to their romance. Here, Annette
would spend the next hour or so, either watching Joe practice with his
musician friends or gossiping with his aunt.
Annette would join her sister-in-law outside the fish market an hour
later, and the two would go back home together. The century-old market
was like any other squalid bazaar, its broken tiles, open drains and
rotting stench making it hard on anyone manoeuvring its narrow gullies.
But Merlyn found the market warm and welcoming. The cacophony of
fisherwomen haggling with customers, convincing them of their good
catch, the endless chit-chat and the continuous replenishing of baskets
with fresh stock of pomfret, prawn, mackerel and Bombay duck—it
reminded her of her village in Goa. Here she never felt homesick, and so
she was never irritated if Annette showed up late. She didn’t even
grudge Annette those private moments with her boyfriend. After all,
most great love stories, including her own, had begun as a dirty secret.
But Joe and Annette never enjoyed a private moment. Their only
time alone was the last five minutes of that prized weekly meeting when
Joe would drop Annette back to the market. He would try to sneak in a
kiss, but she would reciprocate grudgingly with a peck on his cheek.
‘After we get married,’ she would say.
‘You play so hard to get, my lovely Anna,’ he’d say.
Annette would look at him disinterestedly, and then go on her usual
trip about how Catholics were supposed to abstain from all pleasures
until the right time. She had grown tired of telling him off repeatedly.
One day, when on an impulse Joe reached for her hand on the
staircase of Aunt Lucy’s home to draw her closer to his face, she dug her
nails deep into his flesh and said, ‘The day I am ready to kiss, you would
just know.’
Her voice was cold and distant.
‘Really! How?’ Joe was in terrible pain, but stayed calm, refusing
to let Annette have the upper hand in the argument.
‘You’d just know,’ she said and loosened her grip. Joe bemoaned
his fate as that of any Catholic boy of his time.
When Michael eventually learnt of the affair, he wasn’t very happy.
It was not that he didn’t trust his friend with his sister; he just thought
Joe deserved better. And his fears weren’t unfounded, considering his
sister’s wavering conduct in the past. She always fought hard to get the
things she wanted, and when they were hers, she abandoned them like
they had never mattered at all. The last time Annette had brought the
house down was when she applied for admission to a medical school. A
reluctant Alfred Coutinho gave in and sold his property in Panjim to
fund his daughter’s education. But Annette had backed out within the
second year, shocking everyone except Michael. The same thing
happened when she learned to play the guitar, took a typing course at
Davar’s College in Fort and studied for a teacher’s degree. Nothing had
been completed. Michael had seen the development of a disturbing
pattern that was incredibly hard to ignore.
Joe had been warned of his fate, but try telling a lover that love is
not good for him. If you get a smile in return for your unsolicited advice,
be assured that even though you were heard by the tiniest germ that
swam the air at that moment, the pair of ears that the advice was meant
for had cut out the disturbing sound frequencies before you had even
emitted them. Love makes you dreamy, deaf and dumb—a mute, floaty,
gullible victim to the cruelties of that head-spinning feeling.
When the day of the engagement arrived, Michael thought it was
finally time he let go of his anxieties and fears concerning his sister, for
his own sanity and that of his friend.
The hall at the Goan Catholic Club had not seen a busier afternoon
in a while. Cavel had had a dry spell with not a single wedding taking
place in over two years. Joe and Annette were hopefully going to break
that jinx. When not used to celebrate community parties, the club
functioned as a makeshift Bible reading room and an in-house sporting
den for table-tennis and carrom aficionados. Today, the boards and tables
had been neatly stacked in one corner of the hall, and the bookshelves
had been covered with white cloth.
The guests occupied every inch of space in the hall. But here’s the
thing about people from different communities coming together—the
results are never flattering. Just as the Coutinhos had predicted, the
crowd had marked their territories with the Goans and East Indians
choosing to occupy the right side of the hall and the Mangaloreans
making themselves comfortable at the other end.
It wasn’t impossible to identify one from the other. The Goan and
East Indian women came in their Sunday best, flaunting floral dresses
and skirts that matched their printed blouses, with their hair pinned up in
a bob-shaped bouffant—the work of Cavel’s most popular hairstylist,
Sylvia Menezes, who had not eaten a morsel since morning because of
her back-to-back appointments. The Mangalorean women, on the other
hand, were decked out in heavy embroidered sarees. Some of the older
aunties even had tiny jasmine garlands knotted in their hair buns. The
men looked just like each other, more or less: plain white cotton shirts
with black trousers. Karen, however, identified the quieter ones, those
with a permanent deadpan expression on their face, as members of Joe’s
family.
‘Aye, they look like they’ve come for a funeral, men,’ she told
Alfred.
‘Shush,’ her husband said, hoping that nobody had overheard her.
‘This is not the right time or place to grieve about not getting a Goan
son-in-law.’
‘I am just telling you a fact, Alfi,’ she said. ‘My poor daughter. So
innocent she is, men. She doesn’t know what these Mangaloreans are.’
‘Our daughter isn’t innocent. She knows how to find herself a
groom; I am sure she will manage better than you think,’ he said.
‘What sad people, men,’ Karen went on.
‘We cannot help this anymore,’ he whispered.
‘But you can’t stop me from talking….’
‘Not here, please,’ he said curtly and shut her up.
Today, Annette was the cynosure of all eyes. The young woman
understood fashion like the French their wine. Whether Indian or
western wear, her style, inspired by movies and magazines, was always
sharp and never lazy. For the engagement function, Joe had insisted she
wore a saree given by his family. Annette had agreed, but only if she
were allowed to select one herself. She ended up buying a cream tussar
silk with a plain red border from Dadar market. It had been too
minimalistic in choice and taste for the Crasto family. But Annette, who
wore the sari over a puffed sleeve blouse, like the Hindi film actresses of
her time, complemented it with a gorgeous pair of gold earrings and a
choker. Her customised pair of closed heels had been styled from pure
leather by the famed Chinese shoemaker Charlie Bhang, of S Bhang &
Company in Colaba.
The Bhangs had moved to Bombay from Calcutta twenty years
earlier, venturing into the restaurant business with a Chinese eatery. But
the lack of patrons for their cuisine led Charlie’s father Peng to switch
businesses. The shoemaking skills that Peng had acquired while working
for a tannery in Calcutta salvaged the Bhangs’ sinking fortunes, and they
opened a shoe store and workshop not very far from the Taj Hotel. Pan
SuLeh, christened Charlie, hopped into the trade in the 1940s as a
twelve-year-old, drawing customers from far and wide and turning
around the family’s fortunes for good. In Charlie, Annette had found a
great accomplice who enjoyed her taste in design and style. It was
because of his shoes that she could carry her saree with such regal
confidence.
When the couple entered the hall, the guests gave their metal chairs
a breather. Joe’s band performed an electrifying medley, which left the
birthday girl beaming from ear to ear.
Sashaying like a queen, she walked past her guests towards the two-
tier cake that adorned the centre of the hall. She had left her hair loose
and had generously coloured her thin lips in a dark shade of maroon,
making them looker fuller than usual. Twenty-one suited her. No man
there could take his eyes off her. Joe, the superstar, had suddenly become
secondary for the celebration.
When they reached the table, Joe handed his girlfriend the knife and
affectionately held her by her slender waist—much to the disapproval of
all his relatives.
The band immediately broke into the ‘Happy Birthday’ song, joined
by the crowd. Even before they had finished singing, Annette, who was
basking in all the attention, cut the cake with the precision of a surgeon,
drawing a thunderous applause from the guests. This was possibly the
closest she had ever come to putting her brief surgical practice at
medical school to use.
After the cake-cutting, Alfred Coutinho announced the November
wedding, which was followed by Fr Mathais Dias blessing the couple.
Though rings were exchanged, the official wedding banns were to be
announced a couple of months later. While the Crastos weren’t too keen
on having an engagement, the Coutinhos had pressed for it, assuring
them that they’d not take a paisa from the boy’s side for the ceremony. It
was well known that the Coutinhos loved to celebrate in style.
The afternoon party got wilder as the men hit the floor with their
partners. Alcohol wasn’t served as the threat of Prohibition lingered
despite having been revoked a few years ago. Both Karen and Alfred
were particular about not paying the cops for anything. That didn’t stop
the young boys from sneaking in country whisky in Duke cola bottles.
They distributed it among the men who had paid in advance for the
alcohol from Tresa aunty’s drinking joint in the nearby lane, a popular
haunt for the wasted.
Twenty-five-year-old Benjamin da Cunha, the boy who Karen had
wanted for her daughter and who was known to play the banjo with
carefree abandon, drank a little too much at the engagement. He was
beside himself, and everyone could see that. Because when Joe’s band
played the Elvis Presley number Blue Suede Shoes , Benjamin took to
the floor as if he owned it—first flapping his arms like a bird, then
wriggling the palms of his hands and his body as if a powerful stream of
current were coursing through his veins. You couldn’t ignore him, as his
head rapidly drew shapes in the air as the lyrics of the song played out
for him. The crowd actually thought that Benjamin had had a stroke as
he pitched his head up towards the right side when the band singer sang,
‘Well, you can knock me down,’ and then swung it down when the
singer followed up with ‘Step in my face;’ he continued by moving his
head towards the left to repeat the same motions as the song went on,
‘Slander my name, all over the place.’
If that wasn’t dizzying enough, Benjamin broke into a rather vulgar
swing which resembled a series of pelvic thrusts, even as the lines
continued on a loop. ‘Blue, blue, blue suede shoes. Blue, blue, blue
suede shoes, yeah! Blue, blue, blue, suede shoes, baby.’ Here, he
improvised a little, keying in a twist, bending his knees down slowly
while twirling his waist, before lifting himself to show off his power-
packed thrusts once again. His entire body seemed to have been
possessed by some irrepressible energy which was both amusing and off-
putting at the same time.
Repulsed by the performance, the crowd scattered and allowed
Benjamin to take complete control of the dance floor. The Mangalorean
aunties who until then had only been gossiping about poor Joe’s fate
now silently prayed harder to keep drunk, silly Goan men away from
their daughters.
But Benjamin’s obnoxious dexterity on the dance floor hadn’t been
triggered by the peppy Presley number or the alcohol. In fact, there was
a long history of crushed hopes and desires that had led to this manic fit.
Benjamin, who was popularly known as Banjo Man in Cavel, had been
in love with the girl who was now engaged to Joe. And while Annette
hadn’t done a thing to set his heart aflutter, her mother Karen was partly
responsible for his condition, having sown tiny seeds of love in
Benjamin’s heart ever since he could remember. Each time she met him,
she’d address him as her future zhaavei. The sound of it had worked like
magic. He had started swimming in the idea of being Annette’s husband.
Benjamin had secretly harboured dreams of winning Annette’s heart
since he was eighteen. On several occasions, he had deliberately bumped
into Annette in the compound so that he could strike up a conversation
with her. That he was incredibly nervous and failed to prolong it beyond
the niceties of ‘hi’ and ‘hello’ was a shame. But he was confident that he
would someday be hers, and she his—all thanks to the blessings he had
already secured from his future mother-in-law. He was surprised how
one dramatic loss at the Catholic Gymkhana music fest had changed his
fortunes. If only Karen had told him that his fate was clinging to that
win, he would have braved all odds to snatch the trophy from Joe. Alas,
things were not meant to be the way he had planned. And now here he
was, fighting his grief on the dance floor, drunk beyond redemption,
making a spectacle of himself in front of his friends and family.
Joe cornered an amused Michael, asking if anything could be done
to get the lad off the dance floor.
‘He has lost his marbles, hasn’t he?’ Joe enquired. ‘My family will
walk off any moment. You know how they are. They already warned me
about those drunk, susegaad Goans and now Benjamin is giving them
proof.’
‘Let the song end, we will take him aside,’ Michael suggested.
Meanwhile, Karen hung her head in shame, embarrassed that she
had once even considered Benjamin for Annette. ‘This is what you
wanted our daughter to marry?’ Alfred asked as he saw Benjamin
wiggle.
‘He is drunk, men, Alfi,’ Karen said innocently.
‘That’s not the point. Did you know he danced like that?’
Among the mortified people in the hall, one person watched
Benjamin intently. Her gaze remained fixed in his direction, observing
how he moved his body in perfect rhythm to the song. It was Annette’s
favourite rock ’n’ roll number, and she hadn’t seen anyone encapsulate
the energy of this particular song the way she imagined Elvis would
have.
Watching Benjamin was like seeing Elvis on the floor. Annette
revelled in her unexpected fan girl moment and drank it up one dance
move at a time. She didn’t realise when this excitement transformed into
something entirely different. How it all happened within a matter of
seconds, one cannot say.
But as Annette kept ogling Benjamin, a nervous chill ran down her
spine, filling her insides with a tingling sensation—something she had
never experienced before. She could feel her body unravel as Benjamin’s
every twist released an inexplicable spark inside her.
She continued sizing him up, her eyes frozen in his direction as if
everything else around had never existed. It was only when the music
stopped, and Benjamin’s friends quickly moved him to the side of the
room that she snapped out of her trance.
By then, Annette was gasping for breath. To regain composure, she
asked Julian, her sixteen-year-old cousin, if he would oblige her with a
sip of his cola. ‘My throat feels dry.’
Julian didn’t dare mention that he was drinking whisky for fear that
his cousin would tell on him. Assuming that she wouldn’t know the
difference, he gave her the bottle anyway. She downed the entire drink in
a gulp. ‘What did you do, you fool? You finished my cola,’ Julian
snapped.
Annette stared at him blankly, her eyes going hazy, her legs
faltering and her head twirling in loops. Julian snatched the bottle from
her and sped away as she found a place to sit.
She plonked on the chair and gently massaged her head with her
fingers, trying to battle the confusion plaguing her brain. Not able to
make any sense of the trick that her mind was playing, she continued to
rub her forehead, curling and uncurling her fingers as she moved them
on the taut skin of her face.
The guests were so busy in their own merriment that they didn’t
notice how hearts were slowly breaking away from each other,
galvanising some to change their course of action. Was it the music, was
it the dance or was it the drink? Was it everything, and love? A
tumultuous flood of incomprehensible emotions zoomed through
Annette, refusing to vanish. She could recall nothing now, apart from the
body she was aching for.
Sitting across from Annette was Benjamin, slumped against the
metal chair. The humiliation he had brought upon himself was
discernible as he sat heavily with his head hanging down in shame. He
was probably wondering how he had got himself here and how he could
rescue himself from the situation. Annette searched for his face, now
buried in the palms of his hands.
A few minutes later, she got up from her seat and sashaying like a
queen—albeit a tipsy one—gift-wrapped in tussar silk, she walked past
the guests, swung towards Benjamin, and pulled him up by the hand to
lead him outside the hall.
Nobody knew why the young lady had suddenly disappeared from
the party. Nobody, except Joe Crasto, the boy from Mazagaon and the
star singer of the Catholic Gymkhana, who had just lost his love and
promised kiss to Blue Suede Shoes .
 3

THE EXORCISM OF MICHAEL

COUTINHO
March 1997

M
erlyn Coutinho’s life turned on its head the day she found several
half-eaten chikus strewn around her backyard. From then on,
fallen fruits had become a common sight in her garden.
Once every week, on a Monday, the maali came to help her trim the
shrubs that she reared behind her ground-floor home at Bosco Mansion.
He’d pile them up in his lopsided garden cart and dump them at the
nearby municipal garbage dump for an extra twenty rupees. The state of
her fruits broke Merlyn’s heart.
Only a fortunate few in Pope’s Colony had a backyard to call their
own and Merlyn made sure she used hers to the hilt, converting it into an
ornamental green lung where rose mallows, petunias and periwinkles
grew alongside potted tomatoes, brinjals and chillies. Her most prized
plant, however, was the waywardly growing gigantic chiku tree, an
heirloom which had now become a sore point between Merlyn and her
husband Michael, who she suspected had a role to play in the gruesome
murder of her fruits.
‘You ate my chikus, na? Tell me … tell me, re. Give me an answer,’
Merlyn would say.
‘Foolish lady, you have gone mad,’ was how her scowling husband
responded, mostly.
 Merlyn’s suspicions had first taken root when she caught her
husband red-handed, plucking fruits from the tree. In his defence,
Michael had only interfered in his wife’s gardening chores because a
particular bunch of over-ripe chikus had overwhelmed the house with its
unpleasant, fermenting scent. He had always been allergic to rotting
smells and hated this one the most. The only reason he chose to keep this
from his wife was because he found it too silly an issue to bother her
with.
So when the irritation in his nostrils got extremely severe, he
decided it was time to nip it in the bud. Sometime after the couple had
eaten lunch and Merlyn had gone to her room to take a nap, he went to
the backyard to trace the source of the rot. Little did he know that his
wife, who was hell-bent on getting hold of the culprit behind the killing
of her fruits, had followed him out and was surreptitiously watching him
from the kitchen that overlooked the backyard.
After going around in circles for several minutes, Michael had
found the problematic cluster. Hanging loosely from a branch that bent
towards the kitchen window, this squashed bunch of chikus had been
infested by a horde of flies.
He got hold of a creaky wooden ladder and carefully climbed up
one step at a time. When he was close enough, he knifed the bunch and
let the fruits drop. He had wanted to throw the chikus away, but Merlyn
had rushed out by then. She had found a culprit for the fruits that were
disappearing from her tree and falling to the ground.
‘I knew it. I knew it … haav zannam,’ she yelled as Michael
clambered down the ladder.
‘Knew what?’ he asked, surprised.
‘That you are killing my chikus,’ she said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said brusquely.
Though he had flatly denied any involvement, from that day on his
wife had turned into an annoying nag—reminding him every day of how
he had ruined her backyard by first wantonly biting into her ‘precious’
chikus and then throwing them back into the garden. One night, she tried
picking a fight with him while he was struggling to sleep. That was
when Michael lost his cool. He refused to play to his wife’s whims and
fancies, packed his clothes into his black VIP suitcase and immediately
left for his parents’ home. The house was on the floor right above theirs,
so logistically at least, it seemed like a very sound move for that hour of
the night.

It had been fourteen weeks since he moved out. Since his parents had
long passed away, Michael now lived with his widowed sister Annette in
their family home. The two had never got along, even as kids, and
Michael’s return had made things worse. Their squabbles could be heard
all through the day. Every resident in 193-A, Bosco Mansion was privy
to their fights—thanks to the building’s wooden exterior, which did not
allow for any sound-proofing.
But the full-blown arguments with his sister aside, Michael didn’t
consider going back to his wife of forty-five years anytime soon. He was
tired, not with her as much as with the idea of living with her. Over the
last ten years or so, especially after their kids had moved to Canada,
Merlyn’s universe had shrunk considerably. Her life now revolved only
around her garden, husband and home. She had no friends, except for her
neighbour Ellena and his sister Annette, both of whom he detested. This
insular life that she found comfort in had made her so myopic that she
could no longer see things for what they were.
His children, Ryan and Sarah, were aghast that their parents had
even considered separation at this age, and that too, over a chiku tree.
‘Please don’t embarrass us,’ Ryan told his dad over the phone.
‘Take your mum to Canada, live with her for forty-five years and
then do all this patronising talk,’ Michael said, irritated.
Merlyn too had made zero attempts to mend the broken ties, more
because even after he had left home, the half-eaten chikus hadn’t stopped
popping down from her tree.
She vented to Laxmi, her maid, in broken Hindi saying, ‘ Hamara
aadmi still nikalos chikus upar se. You know, he eats them thoda and
throws them neeche. Mere ko bahut trouble karta. ’
Merlyn had invented this ingenious mish mash of Hindi and English
—two languages she was not comfortable speaking—to converse with
her maid. Though mostly incomprehensible, it helped communicate the
little details that mattered and got the job done. ‘Khana cook karne ko
hain.’ ‘Do the jhadoo.’ ‘Hamara tea banao.’ ‘Kapda saabun main dip
karo please.’ ‘Water bageecha main pheko.’ The list was endless.
Sometimes Merlyn stretched her absurd language experiments
slightly, using fuller, longer sentences. But Laxmi had smartened up.
Today, for instance, she was able to conclude that Michael saab had been
up to some mischief. She pacified her memsaab by suggesting, once
again, that her husband be taken to a tantrik who would exorcise him.
In an ideal situation, Merlyn would never have considered a witch
doctor. But Michael’s twisted and unforgivable chiku-eating habits had
left many a knot in her mind. Why did he steal the fruits when he could
simply ask Merlyn to pluck them for him? Why did he only gnaw at half
the fruit? Why did he throw the half-eaten chikus in the backyard when
there was a garbage bin at home?
All these questions tormented Merlyn night and day. These were the
same questions that Michael saw as glaring evidence to absolve him of
the crime. But his wife had been blinded by a bizarre theory.
For some reason, Merlyn believed that her husband was haunted by
the ghost of his mother, Karen, who had died twenty years ago. She had
loved biting into the soft and pulpy flesh of the chiku fruit.
Merlyn recalled how in the early years of her marriage, when they
lived on the upper floor with the rest of the family, Karen would hand-
pick the ripe fruits from a huge branch that could be accessed from her
balcony and eat them all alone. Sometimes, if she got a few extra, she’d
make a chiku milkshake which she grudgingly shared with the rest of the
family.
At the time, the house Merlyn and Michael currently lived in was
unoccupied. But the chiku tree that had been left by the previous owners
—the D’Lima family—flourished under Karen’s care. The tree, which
was a few inches taller than Bosco Mansion and wide enough to cover
half the building, was watered each day through a hosepipe that ran from
Karen’s house down to the lawn.
Years later, even after Karen had taken ill due to dementia, she
continued plucking and eating the fruits. By then Michael and Merlyn
had bought the flat on the ground-floor and were the proud owners of a
house with a backyard. While the old lady was happy for her son, it
affected her a great deal to imagine that her daughter-in-law now owned
the tree which she had nurtured for so long.
Embittered, she found weird ways to harass Merlyn. Every once in
a while, a half-eaten chiku would drop into the backyard from the first
floor. When her daughter-in-law questioned her, Karen would feign
innocence.
‘It has to be sasumai’s kaam,’ Merlyn told Laxmi.
The thought seemed bizarre, but the circumstances did not allow
her to think differently. Also, her capricious husband and silly maid
weren’t helping. In fact, by giving in to her fantastical logic—one by
refusing to explain himself, and the other by suggesting exorcism—they
only ensured that the crazy thoughts thrived and prevailed. To add to
that, Merlyn’s children, the only souls with the capacity to reason, didn’t
live close by. There was practically nobody to drive sense into the mind
of the sixty-three-year-old woman.
Michael used the brief estrangement to ponder upon his life—how
it was now and how it had been. He had married Merlyn very young. At
twenty-two, when he was still struggling to make it as a firebrand
journalist, he had met his future wife at the Church of the Holy Name in
Colaba, which over a decade later would be elevated to the status of a
cathedral. This was the first time he had entered a church in eight years
—the last being the midnight mass of Christmas Eve, 1945. He had
made this exception for an exclusive interview with the Archbishop of
Bombay on the seething issue of the harassment of the Christian
minority in the city. It turned out that the Cardinal was not in his office,
but in church, overseeing preparations for a huge celebratory mass. His
staff was with him, and that was how Michael happened to meet Merlyn
Ermelinda Mascarenhas, an eighteen-year-old from Calapor, Goa, who
had completed her final school exam in Portuguese and had only
recently secured a job as a typist at a shipping company in Bombay. She
had come with her father Pedro, who worked at the Archdiocese’s office,
to take the Cardinal’s blessings for her new journey.
Four years before this, Pedro, a widower, had married an East
Indian woman from Khotachi Wadi, an East Indian village in Girgaum
which was just a kilometre away from Cavel, and had moved into her
gorgeous bungalow. He had lost his first wife when Merlyn was only
five years old. Hoping to secure a good life for his child, he had left her
in the care of his mother and come to Bombay where he found the job of
a clerk at the Archdiocese’s office. He had befriended his future wife,
Coleen Ferreira, a music conductor and choir singer, at St Francis
Xavier’s Church in Dabul where he attended mass every Sunday. The
truth was that he only went for mass to listen to her sing those Latin
hymns in her operatic voice. Several years into these musical
indulgences, he had finally found the courage to tell Coleen how much
he liked listening to her. Soon he had joined the choir himself and spent
most of his free time at Coleen’s house, where she lived with her mother.
She had lost her father and two brothers in a ship blast nearly a decade
ago, and her four sisters had long married and settled comfortably into
the routines of family life.
Seeing their friendship blossom, Coleen’s mother suggested Pedro
marry her daughter, who was forty and by this time had lost any hope of
finding herself a groom. Pedro had been lonely too, and his fondness for
Coleen wasn’t a secret. They had married in a private ceremony in the
presence of a priest, Coleen’s mother and a few other relatives, including
Merlyn, who was just fourteen years old and was visiting Bombay for
the first time.
While Pedro had thought it would be a nice idea to let Merlyn stay
in Goa, Coleen had insisted that he bring her back so that they could live
as a family. Pedro waited another three years for Merlyn to complete her
schooling before bringing her back to Bombay. Under Coleen’s
guidance, Merlyn had learnt to rustle up two square meals a day. She
was also learning to play the piano and had been initiated into English
when, eight months later, Coleen, who felt that her step-daughter had
turned into a confident young woman, found her a job so she could
experience life outside her home.
Michael vividly remembered the moment he set eyes on Merlyn
Ermelinda. She had been sitting quietly in church, waiting for her turn to
meet the head priest. The gold and bronze hue of the intricately painted
frescoes which decorated the ceilings of the church, and the bright
colours of the stained-glass artwork on the altar, magnified by the
filtering light of the sun, appeared to have captivated the girl. He had
snapped her out of her reverie when he introduced himself. At least for
her, it was love at first sight.
Their courtship spanned about five months. Michael would sneak a
meeting during her lunch break, spending time with her over keema pav
and raspberry soda at the Irani cafe, Yazdani, in Fort, before heading to
his office near the fishing port of Sassoon Docks in Colaba. What
Michael found most appealing about Merlyn was that she wasn’t
pretentious. She struggled with English and made no bones about it as
she conversed with him in Konkani. Unfortunately, he barely understood
the language thanks to his parents, who believed that living in Cavel
meant following in the light of the East Indians and Goans of their town
—the Anglicised lot. Whenever they met, which was thrice a week,
they’d exchange notes. He bought her books so she could pick up the
English she needed to get by at work, and he’d plead with her to teach
him how to say ‘I love you’ in Konkani.
Their romantic rendezvous suffered a small setback when Merlyn’s
father found out about their dates. He told Michael straight off: ‘Either
you make her your bride now or forget her for good.’
Michael and Merlyn had tied the knot in November 1953, six
months after they first met. Merlyn continued working but quit her job
two years later when their daughter Sarah was born. Marriage, however,
had not been a walk in the park. The couple experienced the initial strain
in their relationship when they observed their first season of Lent
together. Michael was to learn that his demure Konkani-speaking wife—
staunch and conservative Goan Catholic that she was—survived only on
pez (the humble rice gruel), during the forty days of fasting observed by
Christians to remember Christ’s journey into the arid desert and the
sacrifices he made before he was crucified. Worse, she had plans to
impose the practice on every member of the family and even threatened
to leave home if the custom was not taken seriously.
Mama Karen had never been pleased with this union. After her
dreams of marrying her son to the D’Lima heiress had come to nought,
she had shortlisted other lucrative prospects from Cavel and the
neighbouring lane, Dabul. One could only imagine her disappointment
when Michael found himself a bride who couldn’t even string together a
sentence in English. That she was related, even if not directly, to the elite
Ferreiras of Khotachi Wadi had helped Karen keep face.
Nothing, however, had caused Karen more stress than when her
daughter-in-law threatened to bring the house down with her ludicrous
demand that pez be cooked daily.
Fearing that Merlyn would abandon the home over the issue and
bring much shame to the family, Karen convinced all the meat-eating
members to pay heed. Michael, a self-proclaimed agnostic, was
perturbed by his wife’s determination to convert the Coutinho family
that loved their sorpotel and mutton xacuti even during Lent into
hardcore rice and pickle eaters.
The tradition had continued to date, but with every passing season
of Lent, Michael observed how his love for his wife was losing its sheen.
For a long time, he blamed it on Lent. When his relationship with
Merlyn was beyond help, ten years into their marriage, his now-dead
friend Joe had claimed that abandoning copulation for forty days every
year had played a significant role in the slow decay of their love.
‘This is a big sin. No shame only you have re,’ Merlyn would tell
Michael and make the sign of the cross when he drew closer to her in
bed. The couple didn’t realise when the forty-day abstinence from sex
extended to indefinite physical asceticism. Once that happened, neither
party made the first move, shamed mostly by age—a sagacious reminder
of the carnal tidings of their youth.
Looking back, Michael could tell where he and his wife had failed
as a couple, and why Merlyn had turned into the empty-headed monster
that she now was. She acted without much thought and often too quickly.
It would pass, he assured himself. Until then, Michael Coutinho would
have to survive under the same roof as his sister, the one person he
blamed for the untimely death of his only best friend, Joe.
‘It has to be the ghost of sasumai,’ Merlyn thought to herself again.
But she knew her parish priest, Fr Eugene D’Souza, wouldn’t buy this.
She also feared speaking about exorcism to him because she had learnt
from a fellow parishioner that a priest from a nearby church who prayed
over the so-called possessed had recently been packed off to a village in
Thane. It was a controversial subject, and no priest would entertain her.
That was why she conceded to Laxmi’s suggestion to have the tantrik
come over. The issue at hand, however, was convincing Michael to be
exorcised.
Would the old man believe that he was possessed by the ghost of his
mother? ‘I don’t think so,’ Annette told Merlyn over the phone. She even
wondered aloud if her mama loved chikus so much that she’d haunt her
son twenty years after her death.
But Annette would give her hands and legs to have Michael out of
her house. This was why she agreed to her sister-in-law’s ridiculous
plan.
‘Come to think of it, mama did love chikus,’ she informed Merlyn
the next time she called. ‘These days I see her in my dreams too. What if
mama wants to take baba with her?’
Her sister-in-law’s suspicion drove Merlyn to the edge. No way
would she allow that to happen. Her mother-in-law had troubled her
enough in the last few years before she died. If she had plans to take
Michael, Merlyn was ready to put up a fight.
‘I want my Mike back,’ she said between sobs.
‘Yes, yes, we have to do something,’ Annette repeated, feigning
concern.
When her fears got too unbearable, Merlyn punctured her ego and
went to meet her husband at his house one Sunday afternoon. Annette
opened the door for Merlyn, who was carrying a stainless steel dabba in
one hand and four laadis of brun pao, wrapped in an old newspaper, in
the other.
As soon as she walked in, Merlyn started searching for Michael.
‘Where’s Michael re?’ she asked.
‘He is in the bedroom, watching a movie.’
‘He ate food?’
‘You’re just in time,’ Annette assured her.
‘You think he will eat my khana?’ Merlyn asked her sister-in-law.
‘I am sure. Your plan is good,’ Annette winked.
Merlyn headed to the dining table and laid out the food and
chinaware. When she was done, she went to placate her husband.
The Coutinho home, like the other flats in Bosco Mansion, was an
architectural marvel. It had a warren of rooms, each with two large doors
—one that led to the bathroom or balcony and another to the drawing
room or a bedroom. It was a maze that took some time to get accustomed
to. Space was never wanting here, and the sprawling arched windows,
two for every room, ensured that the house was bathed in light during
the day. The furniture was vintage, dating back to when the father of
Alfred Coutinho, Sebastiano Marcus, had moved into this newly built
structure in 1913 with his wife Maria and their four children after
arriving on a steamboat from Goa. He had rented the space from the
Catholic Fellowship Trust, giving a substantial down payment for the
tenancy rights. It had been their home from that day on. The arched
wooden three-seater sofa set, the mahogany bookshelf and the teak
cupboards had withstood the wear and tear of time. Annette had added
nothing new to the flat, except for littering it with her magazines and
books. She had been shoddy with its upkeep.
When Michael had come here three months ago, he had moved into
his old bedroom, the one that he and his wife had lived in for nearly a
decade. The room had an old television set which was also Michael’s.
He had left it here after his daughter, Sarah, had bought her parents a
new one from Vijay Sales during a visit last year.
The Hindi film Sholay was playing on television today—not that
Michael was watching. He was fast asleep, snoring loudly, as the song
Mehbooba blared in the room. Watching Helen gyrate to the song,
Merlyn remembered the days of her youth when she too had a curvy
waist like the one the actress was rhythmically swaying on television.
She remembered how Michael had once lovingly called her ‘my Helen’.
Today, her nicknames oscillated between devil, fool, monster, and
sometimes just Merlyn. None of them reminded her of the actress.
She went closer to him and tried waking him up as she had aeons
ago, gently stroking the loose folds of skin on his forehead. It had been
so long since she last touched him so affectionately. She noticed how
quickly he had aged in the last few weeks of being away from her. The
movement of her light fingers on his head was enough to stir him from
his slumber.
‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.
‘ Jevon haadla … it’s on the table,’ she said partly in Konkani.
‘Come eat,’ she added.
‘I don’t want your pez.’ Michael rebuffed her immediately.
 ‘I made sorpotel.’ And without waiting for a reaction from him,
Merlyn walked out of the room quietly.
Michael’s mouth was wide open. He could barely believe what he
had just heard. Sorpotel during Lent! Was this the miracle of a brief
separation, he wondered.
The trio sat through the meal quietly. Sholay ’s villain, Gabbar,
whose voice boomed from the other room, made up for the silence with
his heavy-handed dialogues. It was Annette who finally spoke. ‘Michael,
you should go back home. See what Merlyn did today. Isn’t this enough
proof of how much she loves you?’
‘Then tell the woman to stop accusing me of things I haven’t done,’
Michael said, without looking at Merlyn. His voice bore the obduracy of
a child.
‘So you didn’t eat the chikus?’ Annette asked.
‘Don’t be silly.’
Merlyn was angry but decided not to show it. She slowly lifted her
ageing body from the chair and went to pick up her husband’s plate
which he had wiped clean, licking up the vinegary gravy and crumbs of
pao. She could feel her stomach churn and twist, having broken her fast
which she had held on to steadfastly ever since she had been a child,
making an exception only during one of her pregnancies when she
suffered from an iron deficiency. In return for the transgression, she
would light a candle at each and every church in Mumbai, she promised
God.
‘Okay, I am sorry re,’ said Merlyn. ‘ Ghara yo … please.’
Six hours later, Michael was in his own bed with Merlyn lying
beside him. Another Lenten vow had been broken. The old woman was
blushing with embarrassment even as her fingers toyed with her
husband’s scanty chest hair. They were both exhausted by the ravages of
love. Their last time seemed so long ago in history that this now felt like
a first, but in another time and place.
‘I missed you,’ he told her.
Merlyn smiled, but at the back of her mind she was panicking. Had
she just made love to the soul of her sasumai?
The next couple of days, however, were so dreamy that Merlyn did
not dare mention her plans of calling the tantrik. She only panicked
again when she found a few half-eaten chikus in their bedroom.
‘The saitaan has become powerful. Something has to be done re,’
she told Annette and her maid.
At Laxmi’s behest, the tantrik agreed to show up on Saturday
afternoon. Merlyn checked her calendar; they just had a day to break it
to Michael. At the last minute, Annette came up with a solution. ‘Drop a
few sleeping tablets into his tea in the morning. He will sleep through all
of this.’
That was the plan. And it seemed to be working well. Michael had
fallen asleep on their sofa while reading his newspaper. The tantrik, who
wore his long dreadlocks down, sat on the floor with his witchcraft
wares evenly spread out in a circle around the furniture.
The baba had come in a long black robe, just like in the B-grade
movies, and was covered with mystical chains that had tiny skull heads
for pendants. The only thing Merlyn recognised was the string of prayer
beads in his hand which she had seen a Hindu pujari carry. His eccentric
attire had kept Merlyn distracted through the ritual. But an hour later—
after the tantrik had finished chanting his prayers and the effect of the
pills was expected to wane—when Michael did not wake up, Merlyn
began to worry. They splashed cold water on his face, but Michael still
would not move. She checked his pulse, and it was slowing steadily.
Call it divine intervention or Mother Nature’s biggest joke on the
Coutinhos: the very next moment, a storm broke. Strong winds began
blowing, and the branches of the chiku tree in the backyard swayed from
corner to corner.
The tantrik had found another purpose. ‘Your mother-in-law is
taking him,’ he said. Suddenly he began moving his eyeballs rapidly in
odd directions and hollered, ‘I can see her … I can see her.’
All hell broke loose in the Coutinho home. Merlyn began wailing in
despair; Annette, who had come to witness the exorcism, started
panicking too.
‘Should we call the doctor?’ Annette asked.
‘No. Cut down the tree. Cut it right now,’ the tantrik ordered. ‘The
bhoot is attached to the tree, not to your brother. It’s your last chance to
save him.’
 Merlyn was determined not to let her mother-in-law take her
husband away. In her head, she had already declared war on the ghost.
Her knees had been giving her a hard time of late. Despite how
much it hurt, she limped to the backyard—now a quagmire because of
the shower that had accompanied the storm—and dug out her garden
tools. She brought out a hatchet and two chisels and asked her sister-in-
law and maid to give her a hand, as they started chopping the tree down.
Merlyn’s energy belied her age as she thumped her hatchet with great
fury right into the heart of the trunk.
Heavy winds continued to blow. For the next ten minutes, the trio
kept their delicate, frail arms occupied in the futile task. Despite their
grave efforts, they had only managed to make small dents. Nonetheless,
the repeated stabbing, along with the wind, was good enough to rattle the
branches of the chiku tree.
That was when Laxmi saw a big, dangerous creature with chikus in
its mouth jump down from the tree. It was large enough for the other two
women to take notice. They froze in their places, and their faces quickly
changed colour—from utter shock and dismay to collective
mortification. Meryln sucked in a mouthful of air, gulping her folly
down one deep breath at a time.
Right then, they heard Michael’s screams from within the house. He
had regained consciousness and was cussing the tantrik out, baffled as to
why a man who looked like he was at a fancy-dress party was swirling
around him and not allowing him to escape.
‘Who the hell is he?’ he asked his wife, when she rushed in. She
stood helplessly, not knowing what to say.
But outside, the injured tree made a sudden, unanticipated fall.
Knocked down by a strong gust of wind, the tree broke through their
kitchen window and damaged the side of their house. The thud quieted
all of them. The silence was broken moments later when the tantrik
announced, ‘His mother’s spirit has left him. Your husband has been
rescued from the snares of death.’
It took Michael a moment to make sense of the entire spectacle.
Horrified, he made a lunge for the tantrik and holding him by his
hair, began to throw weak punches at his face.
‘Maar naka,’ Merlyn pleaded.
 Michael looked pointedly at his wife, his voice seething with rage.
‘Merlyn, you idiot, you fool. How could you not figure out that this was
the work of a damn rat?’
 4

A PENCIL DISAPPEARED
April 1944

T
he morning of 14 April had been a surreal one for Mario Lawrence.
His father David had come into the room twice, tapping him gently
on his shoulder, then pulling down his chador and even sprinkling
water on his face to whisk him off the straw mat on which he had been
sleeping. None of it had worked. He continued to feign sleep.
Waking up Mario for school was always a ceremony in itself.
Sometimes, when repeatedly calling his name elicited no response,
David would carry the boy on his shoulder and take him to the
bathroom. His wife Tresa would then get Mario to sit on the stool,
balancing him on it with the help of her husband before splashing mugs
of warm water on their son’s head. Only then would the boy open his
eyes, which he had deliberately shut tight. Mario hated school. He did
not like being around other children, detested talking to them, and most
importantly, loathed studying.
But 14 April had been different. Years later, while narrating to his
wife how events had unfolded on that particular day, Michael Coutinho
would describe it as the ‘happiest morning of Mario’s life.’
That day too, Mario had pretended to be fast asleep. But the charade
ended when his father bent down and whispered, ‘Wake up, baba. See
your gift.’
The mention of a gift stirred him. As soon as his father had left the
room, Mario opened his eyes and combed through his bedding,
searching under the sheet and the mat when a red cardboard box caught
his attention. The box was sitting on the edge of his pillow with a note
attached to it: ‘Happy Birthday, baba!’
He grabbed the box, moved his fingers and nimbly opened it.
Twelve sharpened graphite points stared back at him. When he pulled
them out all at once, he could no longer contain his excitement. Nobody
in his class had ever owned pencils with eraser tips.
He ran out of the room to his parents, who were in the kitchen and
broke into a happy jig while flaunting his new pencils. David and Tresa
were overwhelmed; they couldn’t remember the last time their seven-
year-old son looked so happy.
Mario wasn’t a problem child, but he lacked the predictability and
enthusiasm of kids his age. He was timid by nature and rarely spoke,
except to his parents and their thirteen-year-old neighbour, Michael. That
too needed some effort and prodding, as Mario’s answers were often
monosyllabic. He preferred being a recluse, living in his bubble.
His parents were protective of him, and but naturally. Mario’s birth
had been nothing short of a miracle. Tresa had suffered four miscarriages
and had given up all hope of having a child when Mario was conceived
ten years into her marriage. Those nine months after conception had
been excruciating—the fear of another miscarriage looming every day.
When he was finally born, and Tresa had become a mother, everything
else had felt like a bad dream.
But the years following Mario’s birth hadn’t been as reassuring,
because his oddities began to surface slowly. For starters, he didn’t like
being around people; it made him nervous and edgy and sometimes even
aggressive. In Cavel, people found his behaviour nothing short of
obnoxious.
Dr Ralph McGowan, the Anglo-Indian physician who ran a clinic in
Chira Bazaar, described him as an over-sensitive and anti-social child.
While he hadn’t been able to diagnose Mario’s condition from his
readings on the behavioural sciences, Dr McGowan was able to conclude
that Mario was susceptible to emotional instability. His parents had been
warned against admonishing him or indulging in any form of corporal
punishment.
‘Shield his nerves,’ the doctor had advised.
 But Mario’s self-inflicted isolation had not come without
advantages. The boy was extraordinarily gifted. If he wasn’t studying or
playing with kids his age, it was also because he had found himself a
healthy preoccupation. He spent hours sketching the faces of people on
paper. Some of these portraits were too good to be true. To encourage his
son’s passion, David had requested his friend Pedro, a tarvotti (sailor) on
a steamer that sailed between Great Britain and Calcutta, to get his son a
set of drawing pencils from London. He had heard that they made
pencils only for sketching. The timing had been just right, with Pedro
bringing the gift a few weeks before Mario’s birthday. The box of
drawing pencils had cost David, who made a modest salary as a fireman
with the Bombay Fire Brigade, a fortune. But he knew how happy it
would make his son, and that was all that mattered.
‘Pai, I take pencils to school?’ Mario asked his father in broken
English. The fact that Mario had even cared to string a sentence together
proved that the pencils meant a great deal to him.
‘Yes, but only take one,’ David told his son. ‘You see, baba, these
pencils are very dear, so use it carefully. Don’t sharpen it. I will do it for
you. Okay?’
‘Thank you, pai.’
An hour later, Mario was in front of Michael’s house, knocking
incessantly till Perpetual, the Coutinhos’, housemaid answered the door.
‘Kaun ha tinga?’ Perpetual asked in Konkani.
Mario didn’t respond. The boy came down to Michael’s house
every morning, from where they’d walk to school together. Perpetual
knew who would be at the door because her queries always went
unanswered. But with Mario she’d try anyway, hoping that someday
he’d talk to her. Today, he had come almost half an hour earlier than
usual.
‘Wait, Mario baba,’ she said, lifting the latch.
When Perpetual opened the door, the boy trotted into the house.
There seemed to be a spring in his step, and for a change, he smiled at
her.
‘Michael baba is taking a bath. Go sit,’ she said.
Mario plopped himself on the cane chair even as Karen and Alfred,
who had seen him come in, went about their usual chores. The
Coutinhos were so used to Mario’s soundless presence that it never
struck them as unusual that he did not speak to them. Today though,
Mario had no apprehensions about treating his neighbours to some small
talk.
‘Good morning, aunty, good morning, uncle,’ he said.
Karen, who was occupied with sewing a floral pattern on a piece of
linen, stared at the boy suspiciously. She wasn’t sure if she had heard
him right.
‘Aye, morning, son,’ she said, as an afterthought.
Alfred, who was engrossed in the Bible, was also distracted
momentarily. He smiled at the kid and went back to reading the Book of
Psalms. Mario didn’t greet them otherwise, so his thoughtful gesture left
the couple perplexed.
As soon as he had made himself comfortable, Mario flashed his box
at them. ‘See, pai gave me,’ he said.
‘A new pencil set, that’s lovely, men,’ Karen replied. By then,
Michael had come out from his bath. ‘Mario, how come you are here so
early?’
‘Mike, see, pencils.’ Mario got a pencil out of the red box and
showed off the rubber tip to his friend.
‘This is wonderful. Who bought?’ Michael asked.
‘Pai, for birthday.’
‘Oh, yes! I completely forgot. Mama, it is Mario’s birthday today.’
Karen figured that the birthday and the gift had breathed some life
into the boy. If only every day could be like today, Mario wouldn’t come
across as strange, Karen thought to herself.
‘How old are you now, baba?’ she enquired.
‘Seven,’ he blushed.
‘Aye, that’s wonderful! Wait one minute, I shall get you some
candies, huh,’ she said, calling out to Perpetual to fetch the jar of sweets
from the kitchen.
Sometime later, Mario returned home with a fistful of colourful
peppermints and jujubes. He handed them to his mother disinterestedly
and rushed to put the pencil box in his parents’ almirah, only pulling out
one from the set to place between the pages of his notebook. He then left
for school with Michael.
 It was Tresa who had requested Michael to walk her son to school
every morning. It was convenient because both of them studied at the
same school—St Sebastian Goan High School—which was just a few
miles away from Dr D’Lima Street. That Mario only got along with
Michael helped.
The boys from Cavel had to cross Chira Bazaar to reach the school.
Negotiating the market’s early morning bustle of tongas, crawling trams,
clinking cycles and swiftly moving feet could sometimes be frightening.
Your body had to act faster than your mind, so that you could steer clear
of being hit by something unexpected. Michael knew of Mario’s
wandering mind and always held his hand tightly.
Even today, Mario was indulging in his fantasies. He was walking
with Michael, but his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking of the
drawing book, and how he’d go back home and draw his teacher
Glenda’s face. She was the only person he liked at school.
For a newly seven-year-old, he had a shockingly observant eye and
a great photographic memory. The hollow of Glenda’s eyes, her broad
forehead and pointed nose which curved like a hook at the base were
accurately embedded in his memory. He had been waiting for the right
moment to draw her picture. Now that he had been given these pencils, it
felt like the perfect time to start on his project.
‘So what will you do with your new pencils?’ Michael asked Mario,
interrupting his friend’s reverie.
‘A face,’ Mario said.
‘Whose face?’ Michael asked, but noticing Mario flush with
embarrassment, he simply added, ‘Show me once it is done, okay?’
The kid nodded.
Mario appeared more willing to engage in conversation today, so
Michael kept going with more questions. That was how he assured
himself that the boy wasn’t the weird child that everyone said he was.
‘What are you going to do for your birthday?’ he asked.
But Mario had drifted off once again, and replied by half-rotating
his fingers to convey that he didn’t really know. Though, minutes later,
he did reply, as if he himself had been trying to find an answer to
Michael’s question. ‘I will go garden.’
 It was a relatively quiet day. The afternoon sun had peaked early,
enveloping Cavel in a coat of warmth. The summer of April was still
bearable. It was May that was wretched and ruthless. At the Lawrences’
home, preparations for a small birthday celebration were underway.
David had taken leave that Friday. He had told his son that he
would pick him up from St Sebastian’s in the evening but hadn’t
revealed his plans to take him to a nearby garden after that. It was meant
to be a surprise. Tresa had already prepared the batter for baath, a Goan
delicacy made with coconut and semolina. Since they didn’t have an
oven of their own, she had to take it to the bakery in Cross Gully, where
baker Lasario Pementa, a friend of the family, would cook it in his brick
oven along with other nankhatais they sold at the bakery. ‘I will make
the softest cake for my Mario baba,’ he told her.
For dinner, Tresa planned to rustle up a scrumptious chicken stew,
and even sent David to pick up broiler chicken from the market.
Around 1 p.m., while David was on his way back, he was accosted
by his co-worker Dilipbhai Patel at the entrance of Pope’s Colony. ‘Oh,
good I met you here. I was coming to your house only,’ Dilipbhai said,
struggling to catch his breath. ‘Chalo jaldi.’
‘Where?’
‘To Victoria Dock.’
‘What happened?’
‘Arre, they saw some smoke.’
‘But I am on leave.’
‘What are you saying, David bhai? This is the time to fight. I heard
something very bad happened there, but nobody is telling us anything.
All holidays have been cancelled. My gut says that they have dropped
that bomb,’ Dilipbhai said, his fingers moving restlessly.
As soon as David heard that, alarm bells rang in his head.
‘Wait here. I am coming,’ he said.
‘No, no, head directly to the station. I will meet you there.’
David had an inkling of what could have happened. He was sure
that this wasn’t any regular fire. If the entire squad had been asked to
show up, it had to be something huge. This was wartime, and though the
English had distanced Bombay from the Second World War, the threat
loomed large. Rumours of Japan sweeping down on Britain’s most
favoured port city via air or sea had been doing the rounds for a very
long time now. The imagined attack, in fact, had become part of
Bombay’s paranoia. Rumours spread like wildfire in the brigade and for
all their ability to douse flames, the firemen couldn’t quell this one.
Every day there was a new prophecy about possible bombings in
Bombay.
David quickened his pace as he walked towards Bosco Mansion. As
he took the wooden staircase, he couldn’t rid himself of a heavy feeling
that left his stomach in knots.
His job had always kept him on tenterhooks. It was like going to
war. Only here, he was not fighting people, but fire. At least people were
predictable. Very target oriented. They either wanted to kill you or they
didn’t. But fire, it didn’t have a mind of its own. It just raged like a mad
man, spreading rapidly and engulfing everything around it. Your only
weapon was water—which was so harmless otherwise that you couldn’t
even trust if it would be enough to calm the fiery blaze.
David didn’t speak of the dangers of his job at home as it would
worry his wife. With nobody except him to fend for his family, he had
wished for another life—that of a bread maker. Being a fireman, after all,
was not something that he had chosen for himself. David was a victim of
circumstances, both good and bad.
Orphaned as a child, twelve-year-old David had come to Bombay
from the village of Parra in Goa with just ten annas in hand. He had
lived in a kudd in Jer Mahal, Dhobi Talao, which he shared with fellow
villagers for nearly eleven years while working at Cavel’s Costa Bakery,
which had opened after the unceremonious shut down of Padaria de
Cavel in the 1900s, following the death of its owner.
The kudds of Bombay—chummeries started by the ingenious
Goans in the mid-nineteenth century—were the mainstay of many
migrants, especially the bachelors. The humble lodgings assured at least
a roof above their heads, while they tottered and struggled in the new
city. Run by Goan clubs, each attached to a village back home, they
offered membership for just a few annas. The amenities were basic. A
bed, a metal box for your clothes, and a common dining table and toilet,
all crammed on one floor. But the goodwill that existed among the
members compensated for everything else. Work was distributed equally
—David had to share the tasks of cooking, cleaning and maintaining the
quarters with the other sailors, cooks and musicians lodged at the kudd.
Life here was never a bore. On weekends, there was free-flowing alcohol
with chakna, music and carrom to keep them entertained. They also tided
over hard times together. There was a common kitty to which they all
contributed and which came to their rescue when jobs were scarce and
money nil.
David’s marriage to Tresa, also an orphan, had been arranged. She
had been a cook with a family of Goan Bammons—the Catholic
Brahmins of Goa. He had met her on the insistence of the Sisters of the
Sacred Heart Children’s Home in Goa which had looked after the two
orphans when they were younger. He had been eighteen and she a shy
fourteen-year-old when they tied the knot.
But he had had no plans to bring Tresa to Bombay; not until he
found himself a home. It was a dog’s life here, and if he were to bring
her to the city, it had to be worth it. Fortunately for him, his boss Leon
Feleciano daCosta, an ailing unmarried man whose bakery David had
taken care of as his own, surreptitiously transferred the tenancy rights of
his house to David just before he had died.
The good news brought some bad tidings for the young man as
well, because Leon’s second cousin, Baptista, co-owner of Costa Bakery,
could not reconcile with the fact that his relative had given away his
grand home in Cavel to an absolute stranger, and worse, to someone with
a dubious ancestry. Not only did he think that David was undeserving,
but he also strongly felt that a man worthy of living in a kudd shouldn’t
be granted such a prized property. First, he fired David from the job.
Next, he dragged him to court. But the foolhardy Baptista daCosta, who
had accused the innocent David of brainwashing his cousin, lost the
battle without a good fight. The documents were proof: Leon trusted
David more than Baptista.
David’s problems, however, had just begun. A year of joblessness
followed with David doing menial labour, including working in a garage
and selling bread from door to door in Cavel. He had become the butt of
jokes in the neighbourhood, for though he had inherited a fine fortune,
he was living like a pauper.
 Months of hopelessness followed. In a fit of desperation, David
decided to give up on the only property he had ever had to his name
when he chanced upon an advertisement in the newspaper for vacancies
in the Bombay Fire Brigade. Five months later, he brought Tresa to the
big, bad city of Bombay—the place where some of his dreams had been
broken and new ones made.
When Tresa opened the door, she sensed something amiss. But
David appeared too flustered to be barraged with questions. He quickly
dumped the market bag on the table and changed into his spare uniform.
It was only when he was getting ready to leave that Tresa asked,
‘What?’
‘Something at the docks.’
‘And baba? What to tell him?’
David, who was sitting on the stool to put on his boots, locked eyes
with his wife briefly before going back to the task. When he had
completed it, he rested both his hands on his thighs for a few seconds
and gently said, ‘I will be back.’
As he rose to leave, Tresa caught hold of him and gave him a long,
tight hug. She was shaking nervously. David had been in the same spot
before, but it had never moved her enough to react. He responded with a
firm kiss on her lips before letting her go.
She spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the chicken curry. She
even went and picked up the baath from Pementa’s bakery. It smelled of
burnt bricks and coconut. There was still time before Mario came back
from school. Tresa hoped that David would be back by early evening so
that he could take their son to the garden.
At 4.40 p.m., when there was still no news from her husband, a
restless Tresa went out to her balcony. The sky was an amorphous blue-
grey. The compound was still—almost frozen. The trees weren’t
rustling; the gentle, warm afternoon breeze was long dead. She stood
there for a while and then went back to the kitchen to boil milk for her
son, who was going to be home soon.
Barely had she placed the vessel on the kerosene stove when the
floor beneath her shook with such determined force that it threw her to
the ground. A huge deafening sound followed, numbing her ears for a
few grave minutes. Even months after she recovered from the impact,
Tresa could still not decide what had been more terrifying—the
explosion that had rattled the very foundation of her kitchen or the ear-
splitting noise that came with it.
At school, Mario had already packed his bag. He was holding onto
his pencil, waiting for the closing bell, when instead of the jingling ring,
a loud thud alarmed the children. Everyone ran helter-skelter, including
the teachers, who for a change had absolutely no control over their
students.
A peon screamed, ‘We have been bombed. The Japani have bombed
us.’
Everyone thought this to be a fact. Michael, whose classroom was
two floors above Mario’s, scampered down to get the boy so that he
could take him home safely. To his luck, Mario was waiting outside his
class even as the rest of the kids were making a dash for the exit. Tears
were rolling down the boy’s cheeks.
‘Shushh, don’t cry. I am taking you home. Let’s go.’
‘Pai,’ Mario asked between sobs, ‘Where is pai?’
‘He must be at home, waiting for you. Let us go.’
‘No, pai taking me home.’
‘Mario, no time to argue, we have to go.’
‘No,’ he said, his hands shaking uncontrollably.
‘Mario, please understand. If you don’t come with me now, your
father will get worried.’
After much persuasion, Mario reached for Michael’s hand and the
two ran out of school.
Outside, the sky had turned a bright orange as if the sun had
exploded and melded into the blue. Bombay was burning. Smoke
engulfed Chira Bazaar, tormenting the cotton clouds.
The duo juggled their way through the busy by-lane that opened
onto the main road. A sea of people spilt onto the road with little
direction, looking for a haven that would shield them from the over-lit,
smoky sky. The word ‘bomb’ was oft-repeated by the harrowed crowd.
A thundering explosion could once again be heard somewhere in the
distance. ‘Another bomb,’ someone yelled.
Michael had broken into a cold sweat and his clammy palm was
losing grip of Mario’s hand even as the kid tried hard to hold on. They
were struggling to make their way forward, when they bumped into
Perpetual.
‘Thank God, Oh, Jesus! Oh, Mother Mary! Thank God. You boys
safe,’ the maid blurted out. ‘Come! Come! We go home.’
She placed her heavy arms on their lean shoulders, leading them
through the terror-stricken crowd. It was only when they were halfway
home that Mario realised his pencil had disappeared from his hands.
‘My pencil,’ he cried. ‘I lost pencil.’
His eyes turned moist. ‘I want pencil,’ he said, and collapsed onto
the ground, determined not to go on.
Perpetual and Michael had no idea why the pencil meant so much to
him.
‘We have to go, Mario baba. We will come back to look for it.’
But Mario wouldn’t stir. The two had to lug him home, dragging
him through the maddened crowd.
Pope’s Colony was in a state of panic too. Everyone—the
Coutinhos, D’Limas, Crastos, da Cunhas, D’Souzas and D’Costas—had
made their way to the compound. They didn’t have the courage to step
out of their colony but hovered around the gate to make sense of what
was happening.
Karen and her husband Alfred, who had returned early from his
workplace in Ballard Estate after he had heard of some steamer catching
fire at the dock nearby, were very anxious. They had sent Perpetual to
fetch the boys but were appalled that Tresa and David had not even
shown concern. It was only when Tresa emerged sometime after the
second explosion that they realised she had been injured. She was a
relatively tall woman—her narrow waist and long, slender hands
accentuated her height. She was wearing a collared dress, one that she
had worn two Christmases ago to mass, and her hair was tied in a neat
pleat. The colour of her outfit was the same disconcerting shade as the
sky. She had dressed with the hope that she would accompany David and
her son to the garden.
Her arms were closely locked to her chest, her fingers clutching the
elbow of her right arm.
‘What happened?’ Karen enquired.
 ‘My arm broke.’ Tresa was barely audible. The shouting and crying
on the road drowned her voice. ‘Where Michael baba and Mario?’ she
asked, worried.
‘Perpetual has gone to bring the boys. Don’t worry,’ Alfred said.
‘Are you okay?’ he added.
‘Uh … kitchen floor shake and I fall down,’ Tresa said. She was
struggling with her English, but she tried.
‘Aye. Even I fell off the bed with a thud, men,’ Karen said. ‘God
knows what happened. I hope it’s not the Japanese.’
‘Where is David? Wasn’t he on holiday?’ Alfred asked, noticing
suddenly that Tresa had come down alone.
‘He go to Victoria Dock.’
‘Oh no!’ Alfred said. He seemed worried.
‘Why?’ she asked.
He said nothing.
When Mario finally came, he looked bedraggled. His white uniform
had turned a dull brown. ‘We had to drag him, aunty. He refused to come
with us,’ Michael said to Tresa, justifying the boy’s messy appearance. ‘I
think he lost his pencil.’
Tresa gave Michael a comforting smile. ‘Sorry, so much trouble,
baba.’
‘It is no trouble at all, aunty.’
Once they were home, Mario ran into his parent’s room, and
crouched in a corner, crying hysterically. Tresa went to her son, and
nestled him in her embrace, though her arm hurt badly.
‘What happen, baba? No scared, okay?’
‘Pencil,’ he cried, ‘I lost.’
‘You have more, na. Pai no getting angry.’
‘Where pai?’ Mario asked, between sobs.
‘He coming. He gone out.’
‘I have gift for pai,’ Mario said.
‘Arre … nice. What you got?’ Tresa asked curiously.
Mario opened the flap of his khadi bag and took out a notebook. On
the last page of the book, he had sketched the face of the man who had
made his morning sparkle.
 Tresa moved her delicate fingers on the thin sheet of paper. She
observed the features closely. The round eyes partly rimmed by the thick
eyebrows, the chiselled jaw-line that led to the handsome cleft chin, and
the prominent cupid’s bow of the lips veiled by the handlebar moustache
that had brushed against her lips earlier in the day. How beautiful he is,
she thought.
Three days later, while pensively staring at the same sketch, her
yearning for her husband would manifold into a kind of desperation that
she found extremely hard to reveal.
‘When pai come?’ Mario asked her again.
‘Very soon, baba, very soon,’ Tresa repeated calmly. The stoic
expression on her face was unnerving and paralysing at the same time.
 5

THE WEDDING AT CAVEL

November 1953

T
he bell at the Church of Our Lady of Hope swung slowly, ringing a
sound so beautiful that those who heard it wouldn’t forget it for
aeons. It had music, it had rhythm and it had strength. It had
everything a church bell could boast of; such was the sway of the
enormous clapper that when it struck the rim of its brass container, its
thud pervaded through all of Cavel in a divine, ceremonious hum.
A recent addition to the two-hundred-and-thirty-five-year-old
church—after the last bell had died a painful death when it accidentally
fell off the frame and was crushed beyond recognition—this instrument
played for the first time at Michael Coutinho and Merlyn Ermelinda
Mascarenhas’ wedding.
The new bell was a restored eighteenth-century war-time relic from
the Battle of Bassein, now Vasai, a suburban town nearly seventy
kilometres from Bombay. In the 1730s, when the Marathas decided to
wage war against the Portuguese who helmed Bassein, they first started
by conquering their territories and forts in the vicinity. By the time the
Portuguese surrendered in Bassein, the Marathas had already destroyed
eighty churches, including those in Chaul, Daman and Diu, and
Revdanda. The bell now sitting in Cavel had been given as a gift to one
of the Maratha army officials as a victory symbol from that war. After
ringing at a temple in Raigad for over two and a half centuries, a
sarpanch of the village noticed the crucifix embossed on it and decided
to return it to the church. It travelled over eighty-five kilometres to the
Archdiocese of Bombay, where it was repaired and refurbished to its
former glory. After deliberations, the priests decided that the church at
Cavel should be the rightful recipient of this ancient instrument, because
its own history was so closely enmeshed with a Portuguese feudal lord
who had once owned the chapel. That said, nobody had been able as yet
to accurately confirm the ancestry of the bell. Its ‘history’ was all
conjecture.
‘We have a surprise for you,’ Fr Augustine Fernandez, the priest
officiating at the wedding, said to the newly married couple after they
had taken their vows. Michael and Merlyn were in the midst of
unriddling the priest’s cryptic declaration when the bell suddenly
chimed. The groom broke into a happy smile. The bride blushed. The
congregation listened with rapt attention. On Dr D’Lima Street, passers-
by stopped in their places to listen to it.
In Cavel and the many churches nearby, it was a time-honoured
tradition to ring the bell daily at dawn. If the bell rang at any other time,
it was either to announce the death of a parishioner or to make known
that the sacrament of matrimony had just been bestowed upon a couple.
Today, it rang only for happy reasons.
The sweet-sounding bell worked its magic on Merlyn in particular.
Still far from polishing her apologetic English, Merlyn was aware that
the elite Cavelites would try and make conversation with her today. Her
fear was that she would give herself away and that she’d be mocked for
landing such a good catch—a writer husband, who spoke impeccable
English. She was aware that even her in-laws, especially her mum-in-
law, Karen, joked about how she was an embarrassment to the Goans.
While Michael had been encouraging, it was only the harmonious music
from the bell that calmed her anxious nerves.
On that wintry day of 15 November 1953, when the wedding party
was still reeling from the aftereffects of that resounding church bell, the
Goan Catholic Club at Pius House, where the reception was to take
place, was also swept off its foundations by the sound.
With a guest list of over five hundred people, boundless food and
wine, and a live band to keep all and sundry occupied, the wedding was
expected to be the grandest Cavel and its neighbouring Catholic hamlets
had ever witnessed.
 The icing on the cake was the arrival of a heavyweight guest, who
was the subject of discussion even before the wedding invitations were
out. Anxious mothers and loveless daughters had never waited so
eagerly to receive an invitation to the reception as they did now—all so
they could feast their eyes on Merlyn’s hockey-player cousin, Lester
Fernandes. He was the son of her step-mum Coleen Ferreira’s eldest
sister.
A wink shy of making it to the Indian national hockey team, Lester,
whose distinguished and charming good looks were much talked about
from Colaba to Cuffe Parade, had reluctantly agreed to grace his cousin’s
celebration at the club. He was too proud a man to be seen among the
ordinary, but the Ferreiras loved to show off the men of their family.
They declared that Lester would raise the toast at the wedding. That way
the Coutinhos were assured that the sports hero would be present at the
function, even if for a while.
It was also common knowledge that the family was desperately
looking for a wife for the twenty-nine-year-old sports hero. Lester,
people said, had not once looked at a girl with the roving eye of a man
hungry for female attention. Which parent would dare forego a chance to
marry their daughter to a man of such fine distinction?
Families invited to the reception saw to it that their daughters were
dressed as gorgeously as the bride. When the mass came to an end, you
could see the pretty lasses head for the reception at Pius House. Marlene
D’Silva was dressed like a canary. The yellow of her dress and the white
of her shoes, accessorised with glistening pearl jewellery and imbued
with the richness of the steely-grey sea, made her the brightest prospect
among the gold-diggers’ club. Thelma D’Costa was a close second. She
was a piano virtuoso, whose gifted fingers were as much the talk of the
town as Lester’s hockey stick. She had turned into a fine beauty, but it
was her teal-blue knee-length cotton skirt teamed with an off-white silk
blouse that was the distraction today. Her only drawback was her pallid
face that, despite bearing the features of a beautiful young lady, lacked
the grace to warm a man’s heart. Even if she smiled, you could never
tell; even if she cried, you would never know. That was how plastic her
face was—unmoved and non-malleable to the swings and slides of
human emotions.
 Michael’s sister, Annette, too was making heads turn as Merlyn’s
dainty bridesmaid. But sound mind had prevailed for a change. All of
sixteen, Annette thought herself too young to pursue her sister-in-law’s
‘handsomely old’ cousin.
Meanwhile, Ellena Gomes was also dragged into this pantomime to
forage in newer pastures. It would be abominable to roam with a sullen
heart and grieve the loss of love when she was a step closer to meeting
an outstanding man of great talent, Ellena’s mother Giselle had told her.
‘You must move on, child,’ she said. ‘When one door closes, another one
opens. Grab hold of this Lester boy.’
Ellena wasn’t stirred by her mother’s persuasive spirit and however
hard she tried, she would never fall in love with another man again.
At the Goan Catholic Club, chairs had been rented to accommodate
the guests. Neatly arranged in four or five rows across the hall, the
arrangement gave ample room for people to hit the floor and shake a leg.
Five tables were closely put together at one end of the club to stock the
rich buffet, which had been prepared in full earnest by the women from
the Coutinho, Ferreira and Mascarenhas households. Almost all of them
were still recovering from the stupor of tirelessly working overnight in
their home kitchens. But the ladies knew how to put up a show of
infallible elegance. If you saw them, you wouldn’t say they had been
overspent by the rigours of endless cooking or darkened by the soot
emerging from their coal stoves.
One table had been kept aside specifically for Karen’s ceramic jars
that bore the fruit of her ancestral wine-making wisdom. Karen’s wine
had always been the most sought after in the neighbourhood, especially
during Christmas. Of late, though, her neighbour Tresa had been giving
her stiff competition.
In the last few months, Tresa aunty cho add’do had begun selling
wine fermented to unmatched perfection. This was not the case a few
years ago, when Tresa served only insipid country liquor to her
customers, making her drinking stable very unpopular in Chira Bazaar.
Thank God for the lady’s ingenuity; her homemade wine and the bangda
(mackerel) fry stuffed with recheado masala came to her rescue and
helped her keep her dhando afloat.
 The bangda fry was tedious to prepare. First, Tresa had to clean the
innards of the mackerel, and then slit it horizontally from both sides
before stuffing it with the recheado, which she made using dry Kashmiri
chilli, vinegar, a pinch of sugar, garlic, ginger and a combination of
spices picked up from the recipe book of the family in Goa, where she
had worked as a maid for several years. She squeezed a dash of lemon
over it, serving it hot out of the frying pan. Her wines ranged from
beetroot, rice and ginger to the fruitier options like grape, pineapple and
orange.
But the rivalry to produce the best wine in Cavel really had nothing
to do with why Karen had left out Tresa’s name from the guest list today.
Despite Michael’s insistence on having Mario’s mother at his wedding,
the senior Coutinhos had maintained that inviting a lady who made a
living by drowning men in the terrible vice of alcohol would tarnish the
reputation that their family had so carefully nurtured. Even if she were
driven to terrible circumstances following her husband’s death, she
shouldn’t have chosen this line to keep her home running, Karen had
argued.
‘Aye, this lady is spoiling our name, men. Staying in Bosco and
making daaru. One day the pandus will pick her up and throw her in jail.
Chee. That David died with honour and see his wife,’ she had said.
David Lawrence had died a hero on 14 April 1944, when the
freighter SS Fort Stikine—carrying a highly inflammable cargo of cotton
bales, one million pounds sterling in gold ingots, and around twelve
hundred tonnes of explosives—that had arrived from Karachi a day
earlier and was stationed at Bombay’s Victoria Dock No. 1, caught fire,
leading to two shattering explosions. Around thirteen hundred people
who lived in the vicinity of the harbour, were killed. Of these, sixty-six
were firemen. Over eighty thousand people were rendered homeless. The
British-Indian censors relayed the true story behind the events of the day
only a month later.
Needless to say, Tresa was ostracised by the rest of her neighbours
too. That did not stop the men of Cavel—even those who never
approved of her business—from making a pitstop at her joint. When they
arrived at the add’do, their pretence would at once cease with the smell
of alcohol. They’d drink their troubles down and pour out their worries
to the same woman who, in the outside world, they made a show of
hating. They hoped she would understand. And for some reason, she
actually did. Because to Tresa, these men were not just her customers,
but also her prodigal fathers, brothers and sons. They only kept up their
act of contempt to please their wives and mothers. As long as they knew
when to get rid of their masks and reach out to the reality that Tresa’s
nest promised, it did not affect her.
By early noon, all the guests had made themselves comfortable in
the club, except for one. The sports star strutted into the hall just a few
minutes before the wedding entourage was expected to show up. A pin-
drop silence followed, and then a collective sigh. The excitement at the
club was palpable. It was amusing how the crowd reacted together like a
flock of geese, experiencing the same crazy turbulence, sparked by their
fantasies.
Lester was devastatingly handsome and nobody in the hall could
deny this. He was broad-shouldered, with the bulk of his chest, chiselled
arms and slim waist revealed from within his fitted turtleneck shirt,
making him look nothing short of a Greek God. The good looks were an
added bonus, especially the pointed nose that gave his face the sharp
edge that could stir unholy cravings within women. Having deliberately
delayed his entry to avoid becoming the centre of attention, Lester
dragged up a chair and sat in a corner, next to the table of half-full wine
glasses, beyond everybody’s line of vision. Here, he hoped he could hide
from the prying eyes of leering young girls and older women.
A musical bell, great wine and most importantly, an eligible
bachelor—this celebration had all the ingredients to turn out an excellent
dish. But alas, what can be said of anything that holds great promise?
Can it ever match up to the aromas that teased your taste buds?
Sometime after Lester entered the hall and Michael and Merlyn
started walking up the stairs of Pius House, the bell struck once again,
this time without good reason.
Days later, when the priest questioned the bell-keeper about it, he
apologised profusely for getting carried away by its music. ‘I was
tempted to strike it again,’ he said.
Unfortunately, bigger apologies were in the offing because when
the bell echoed through the lanes and by-lanes of Cavel again, Pius
House, which was already on shaky ground, was directly hit by the
bullet of its sound. Blame it on the weak foundation of the century-old
stone structure or its inability to carry the weight of humanity that had
poured all at once into its den, but the building started vibrating.
The couple and their party of best men and bridesmaids, who were
still walking up the stairs of the building, paused for a moment. The
crowd gathered at the Goan Club also felt their chairs rattle. But the
tremor barely lasted for a couple of seconds, and nobody thought it
significant enough to ponder upon. The guests continued to busy
themselves with merriment, unperturbed by what they had just
experienced. Yet, faint murmurs were audible.
‘Did you just feel the ground shake? Or was it something I
imagined?’
This moment of disquieting calm wouldn’t last long. Less than a
minute after the building exposed its vulnerability, a violent thump
followed by the thunderous sound of crashing glasses and the breaking
of something rock solid sent the crowd into an absolute frenzy.
Then, out of the blue, Thelma D’Costa screeched out loud as if her
heart had just been pierced with a sharp dagger.
‘He’s gone! He’s gone!’ she cried desperately.
‘Who?’ somebody asked.
Her panic-stricken face turned towards where the table with the
glasses of wine and the ceramic jars had once been placed. There was
nothing there anymore. No table. No wine. No jars. And no Lester either.
Instead, there was a gaping hole so wide that everyone’s eyes widened in
horror. Part of the floor of the Goan Catholic Club had just caved in, and
it had taken along with it the best part of this celebration.
Everybody knew where Lester was, but they feared going close,
worried that the rest of the floor would also split apart. They all
scrambled towards the only door in the hall in the hope of saving their
own skin.
Amidst this chaos, one of the guests stopped Michael and Merlyn,
who had almost made it to the club, and told them what had happened.
Their immediate concern was obviously Lester. The hockey player had
fallen into the spacious flat owned by the Fernandes family, who had
vacated the house a few years earlier when they shifted to a bungalow in
Bandra. Michael immediately rushed to the floor below the club. A
heavy brass lock held the wooden door in its place; it would take a few
more men than Michael to break it open. After a few strikes of a hammer
and saw, they finally managed to make it inside.
The room where the ceiling had caved in was a mess. Shards of
glass and broken ceramic pieces were lying alongside scattered bricks of
concrete, all of which were faintly dyed in the red of the wine that was
now snaking out from the debris. Fortunately, two broken planks of
wood had fallen over the rubble and shielded Lester from grave damage.
He was sandwiched between the planks, caked in dust and bleeding
profusely. It was hard to tell what was wine and what blood. But
somebody was already down there, cleaning his wounds with a piece of
cloth torn from her teal-blue skirt. The sight was bitter-sweet.
Thelma’s daredevilry could put any man to shame. She had jumped
into the cavity to rescue Lester, unconcerned about the harm she would
be putting herself to. The gap between the ceiling and the floor wasn’t
huge, and so, apart from a few minor gashes, Thelma barely had any
injuries at all.
Lester, however, looked like he had suffered many a broken bone
and had to be taken to the nearby Bombay Hospital. He was breathing,
talking, and surprisingly, smiling. And maybe he was already in love.
Why else would he insist that only Thelma accompany him?
As the injured Lester was being rushed to the hospital in the
ambulance, the guests gathered at the compound of Bosco Mansion
pondered upon their fate. Would there be a celebration, or if not, would
they at least get some food and wine?
The Mascarenhas were, however, quick with their planning and
decided to shift the venue to their villa in Girgaum. The band’s
instruments and the food were still lying at the Goan Club, because apart
from the huge chunk of flooring that had taken Lester and the wine
down, everything else was left intact and undisturbed. But the building
was vacated and nobody was allowed to enter until the firemen showed
up.
Karen, though, was still in shock. She was wallowing in the grief of
losing wine that had taken three long months of relentless fermenting
and straining. It had drained into the debris and sweetened Lester’s pain,
but there was no telling how much hurt and humiliation it caused Karen.
‘How can you have a wedding without wine? This is a bad omen,’
she overheard one of her Rosario sisters say. ‘Call off the wedding! I
always told you that Merlyn is not good enough for our Mike,’ another
one said.
Her husband and the Mascarenhas family were more understanding
of her plight. With Prohibition tightening the screws on the sale of
alcohol in the city, it was next to impossible to procure wine at such
short notice.
‘Somebody broke some bones, and we lost some good wine … that
is all. Just thank God it didn’t get any worse. Everyone is alive. We will
still feast and dance,’ Alfred said to placate Karen. ‘We will toast with
cola,’ Michael said.
An hour later, the guests were making their way to Ferriera House,
a flashy home near the small village of Khotachi Wadi, hidden in the
busy market area of Girgaum. Freshly painted in a deep colour of
mustard, the house was veiled with Mangalore tiles and embellished
with white doors, bringing Goa alive in the south of Bombay. Apart from
its airy and wide rooms, it also boasted a sprawling garden full of chiku
and jackfruit trees and a stable that had now been converted into a
storage house.
Unfortunately, despite the magnanimity of Merlyn’s family, not
everybody could be accommodated here. The band was asked to leave,
but only after they were paid for their unsung labour. To make up for the
lack of music, Merlyn’s father shifted his wife’s gramophone to the
centre of the drawing room.
But a Goan wedding without a toastmaster and wine is as good as a
Goan wedding without a bride and groom. It took some coaxing before
Michael’s groomsman Joe Crasto agreed to raise the toast. ‘I will keep it
very short. You know how nervous I get when I have to speak in front of
people,’ he told Michael. The fact that he had agreed to raise the toast
was reassuring enough for Michael, who was still reeling from the wreck
that this celebration had been through.
For now, he was glad that his bride wasn’t panicking like his
mother. Merlyn had been sincerely composed through the drama.
Despite her cousin having taken a beating in the mess, she did not let it
show. Merlyn would later claim that the bell had done the trick, leaving
her in a trance for days. The irony of her misplaced love for a bell that
had single-handedly spearheaded the destruction of her wedding
reception wasn’t lost on Michael.

It was 2.30 p.m. by the time the gathering settled into the simple
comforts of the home reception. All the doors and windows were left
open to allow the flow of light and air so that the place didn’t feel
claustrophobic. The guests occupied every inch of space inside the many
rooms of the house as well as the garden, where wooden chairs—
borrowed from neighbouring villas—kept the tired and restless
comfortably glued and numb.
This celebration was already moving in no particular order. A
typical Goan wedding reception wouldn’t have begun before the toast.
But the guests were so famished that the hosts decided otherwise. Wafers
and cutlets were being distributed plate by plate—both the families had
ensured that they were generously stocked in that department. A handful
of men and women took to the floor of the drawing room, jiving to
music that played on the gramophone. The music wasn’t loud enough to
liven up the occasion, but it kept everyone light and merry on their feet.
Annette, who thought herself the most striking beauty in the crowd,
tried to seek the attention of many a man. She even flirted with
Michael’s groomsman, Joe Crasto, from whom she was taking guitar
lessons, and teased him like a schoolgirl when he confessed that he had
two left feet and wouldn’t be able to dance with her.
‘What kind of man says no to a gorgeous girl like me?’
Joe threw her an amused look. He was still annoyed with her for
causing gashes on the fretboard of his guitar.
‘A man who loves his guitar too much,’ he sneered. ‘Also, I am
preparing for my speech right now, Annette. So please go disturb
somebody else.’
‘Uff! You are such a bore, Joe. No wonder you have no girlfriend.’
 Joe took the jibe personally. He would have continued to argue with
her, but Benjamin da Cunha swooped in on them, like a watchful hawk,
and swung Annette to the floor, looping her arms around him as they
glided to a jive number. Benjamin may not have had the confidence to
talk to her, but he could still win her over with his dancing skills.
It was here that he took a not-so-innocent chance and grabbed her
buttocks to pull her close to his body so that she could feel how his
manhood swelled for her. Her body lingered against his for a few
seconds, but Annette instantly pulled herself away. She stayed for
another dance, however, unsure if the discomfort she had just
experienced had been an accident or the intentional doing of a wild
heart. A few years later, on the day of her own engagement, the strange
stirrings she felt when their bodies pressed against each other would race
through her mind and entrap her.
When the bride and groom primped themselves up, Joe Crasto took
centre-stage in the garden. The Mascarenhases got their servants to
distribute glasses of cola to everybody present. The male guests stood up
grudgingly to keep up the show of a toast that really wasn’t.
Joe’s speech was to be brief. He kept re-reading the paper on which
he had written the line that he found so difficult to memorise. ‘I love my
friend Michael and wish him a very happy married life’ was all he
planned to say before raising his glass to toast the wedding. Public
speeches were definitely not his cup of tea.
But when Joe got out there, nervously stuttered that line aloud and
took a sip of the cola, something unbelievable happened. All the guests
who had taken a swig of the soft drink right after him felt the same
unexplainable energy.
To convince himself, Joe took another sip and then gulped down the
whole glass. ‘I haven’t finished,’ he informed the guests. ‘There is so
much more I have to say about my dear friend Michael and his
wonderful wife Merlyn …’ And Joe went on for the next fifteen minutes,
unruffled by the number of people staring at him while listening to him
share amusing vignettes about the couple.
This was the day when the seeds of ‘the superstar’ were first sown
in Joe. From managing a classy and confident toast at Michael’s
wedding to becoming a rising music artist, this was going to be a journey
that none had predicted for the lad.
Michael was stunned by what he saw. Everyone was so jubilant and
content. The mishaps from early that afternoon seemed to have all been
forgotten. He had been so exhausted that he hadn’t bothered to drink to
his own toast. But the party was fuelled with a sense of joie de vivre that
was so infectious that he eventually did place his mouth to the glass.
And when he did, he couldn’t stop drinking. He looked at his wife, who
shared the same confused but relieved expression, unlike his mother.
Karen seemed irritated after sipping the drink.
And then it struck Michael that she should have been here too. He
scanned the sea of people for her face. A woman of her height could
definitely not have gone unnoticed. His eyes jumped quickly past the
happy faces of men and women who were downing the cola with
surprising relish, until he found her standing against a wall. She had
been watching him all along, with the anxiety of a woman wanting to
please.
She was the same woman who was rejected by many. But today, if
not for her timely intervention, this party wouldn’t be redeemed from the
same scorn and disdain that kept her away from the people she had once
thought to be her own.
Michael got hold of another glass from the tray that was doing the
rounds. This time, he toasted Jesus and regaled the crowd with the story
of Christ’s first miracle at the wedding at Cana. ‘… and thus, it goes that
he transformed water into wine,’ Michael said as he ended his story,
before winking at aunty Tresa.
She returned his gesture with a knowing smile, her eyes glinting
with joy. In his silence, he had communicated a promise: he would
always be grateful.
 6

A FRIEND CALLED JOE

September 1972

I
t was past 3 a.m. when Rose Maria Crasto woke from her slumber.
She switched on the electric light at her bedside, but couldn’t
distinguish grey from black. The room was still pitch dark; the faint
red glow that created a mystical halo around the small bulb on the side
table didn’t reveal anything except for the warmth of colour. She
switched it off and went back to sleep. Had she known that her husband
wasn’t in the room, she wouldn’t have been fooled by the peace of that
night. But Rose assumed that Joe had been with her all along. Truly, the
night reveals nothing. Not sorrow. Not joy. It only ferments dreams. And
in her dreams, Joe was sleeping by her side, with his head resting on the
palm of her left hand. She sang him a song and lulled him to sleep. And
they lived happily ever after.
Who would have thought that Joe Crasto, Michael Coutinho’s best
friend and the star singer of the Catholic Gymkhana, would return to the
very same building that had housed all his miseries? It was a fact that
Joe’s marriage to Rose Maria—the sole heiress of an eighteen-hundred-
square-foot home on the ground-floor of Bosco Mansion—had been a
matter of settling old scores.
Fourteen years his senior, Rose Maria, the widow of architect
Gerard D’Costa, was wooed into love. So madly had she fallen for the
singer that better sense had failed to prevail. That she was fifty-four and
he forty had gnawed at her in the beginning, but Joe managed to quell
those misgivings.
 ‘What will our relatives think?’ she had asked when Joe broached
marriage.
‘My brothers and sisters are too busy raising their kids to care about
me. And you’d know about your family more than I will. But think about
it. Have they even bothered to keep in touch with you after Gerard
passed away? See, Rose, we have a chance to start again. We got lucky;
we found each other. I am not going to force you to marry me, but I can
promise you one thing. If you do say yes, I will do everything I can to
make this work,’ he said persuasively.
Rose Maria paused to reflect on what he had said. She was
infatuated with him, but as soon as you added numbers to their
relationship, it felt like a botched-up sum. No formula could help crack
it. ‘Joe, if only I had been born twenty years later, we would still stand a
chance,’ she said.
The two went back and forth for a while. But one afternoon in May
1969, under the sweltering blanket of Bombay’s summer, when Joe had
filled her with his hard and unyielding manhood, arousing her dormant
sex, she knew that this was all she had longed for since her husband had
died, uncoupling her from one of the sweetest pleasures of life. This
physicality had been so intense that it stirred her to change her mind
overnight. She married Joe a few days later, and her bed flourished again
with lust and love. For her, it was equal parts of both. To Joe, it meant
nothing at all.
Over a decade earlier, when Annette had eloped with Benjamin on
her birthday, returning as a married woman, Joe’s life had been blown to
smithereens.
His mind turned into a wasteland, occupied vacuously by thoughts
of the fiancée who had abandoned him. He wouldn’t eat a morsel of
food, not even his favourite bhendi aani sungta chi kuddy (okra-prawn
curry) that his sister-in-law prepared daily for nearly a month, in the
hope that he’d put an end to this starvation. But all he wanted to do was
wallow in his grief. Each morning when he woke up, the haunting image
of Annette walking out of the Goan Catholic Club with a smashed
Benjamin would cripple his senses. During this time, he also suffered a
professional setback. Unable to think straight, he had turned down the
contract to perform with the band at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. The
lover got his comeuppance for doing nothing but loving.
He felt alive only when he was fast asleep or after downing the
many neat pegs of aunty Tresa’s country liquor, which brought on that
sleep. But Joe’s drunken sprees were so damaging that his family feared
he was becoming a bad influence on his young nieces and nephews, all
of whom lived in the same house.
That’s how he found himself a bed at the dormitory of the Young
Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) on Lamington Road, two bus
stops from D’Lima Street.
Michael tried convincing his friend to move someplace else,
possibly to another country. Of late, people were going to Oman and
Kuwait in droves. Maybe the distance would do him some good. He was
worried that living in such close proximity to D’Lima Street would not
help Joe heal. He saw Joe deteriorate with each passing day, even as his
sister revelled in the joys of her girlish fantasies, indifferent to the pain
of her ex-fiancé.
Not once did Annette bother to ask her brother the questions that
should have plagued the mind of any lover, present or past.
‘Is Joe doing well?’ ‘Has he taken this very badly?’ ‘How can I
help?’ ‘I am sorry.’ ‘It was a mistake.’ No, none of those words was
said. No apologies. No regrets.
Instead of being remorseful, Annette escaped to Goa with Benjamin
for a few weeks and only returned when her parents forgave their
prodigal daughter for the public humiliation.
Annette was certain that her parents would not hold a grudge
against her for too long; this was but what her mama had always wished.
‘Mama, you were right! Benji is the true love of my life. Only
mothers know what is good for their daughters. I am sorry for not
listening to you earlier,’ she said, trying to massage her mum’s ego.
It was easy-breezy. ‘Aye, my baby has become a woman. Come
give your mama a hug, men,’ her mum responded, teary-eyed. All this
drama made Michael sick to the pit of his stomach.
The mother and daughter turned to the new chapter very quickly.
They forgot that they were characters in a novel, not a short story. In this
novel, every chapter was connected to the others. And retribution was
not too far away.
Alfred was on Michael’s side. He hadn’t yet recovered from the
repulsive pelvic thrusts that Benjamin had shown off in the name of
dance moves. After he learnt that his daughter had married Benjamin in
Goa, he had had a moment too many of imagining a naked Benjamin
dancing to Blue Suede Shoes in front of his daughter. When this
happened, he would run to the kitchen and splash cold water on his face.
It would freeze the thoughts for a few seconds before the unforgivable
thrusts addled his mind again.
Benjamin da Cunha’s family, who lived in Lobo Mansion, the
building sharing a compound with Bosco, warmed to Karen
immediately. They knew how much Benji himself had wanted this. But
the da Cunhas were already a big family, and their flat was bursting at
the seams with four brothers, their wives and their children. The space
crunch led Benjamin, the fifth and youngest, to station himself with his
in-laws. The arrival of this new crazy member of the family hastened
Michael’s plans of finding a new house for himself and his immediate
family.
The D’Limas’ flat had been on Michael’s mind for a very long time.
It held a lot of memories of the girl who had once taught him to drink in
the small joys of rain. He wrote to Tracey’s mother in Goa, and she gave
him her word that the flat would be his, allaying all his fears of the
D’Limas giving their home to a rich Goan buyer. That the landlord of
Bosco Mansion didn’t allow the tenants to transfer the rights to anyone
outside the community meant that several lucrative options were closed
for Linda in any case.
‘I am doing this just for my Tracey,’ Linda assured Michael in a
letter. ‘She would have wanted you to have this home. Perhaps, if she
were alive, you wouldn’t even have had to buy it from me,’ Linda wrote,
hinting about a union that she had found unfavourable during Tracey’s
lifetime.
But Linda was up to her old chicanery, only trying to trap Michael
into an emotional decision. After all that sugary talk, she told him that he
could have her tenancy rights for a sum of seventy thousand rupees. It
was a huge amount for a man who earned the meagre salary of six
hundred rupees per month at The Express newspaper. But the shrewd and
hard-hearted Linda knew that Michael would buy that flat even if it
meant putting himself at financial risk. If she was destined to become
rich because some foolish man was still obsessed with her dead
daughter, she didn’t mind waiting till eternity.
After Joe moved to Lamington Road, Michael’s concerns only
grew. In between managing his job, running a family and gathering
funds to buy a new home, he busied himself in a mission to keep Joe at a
distance from Cavel. He was partly successful.
The first task was to wean Joe off alcohol. The bait was Meryln’s
masala tea. For an extra salary of five rupees, Michael’s maid would
deliver a flask of the tea at Joe’s dorm every morning, before he could
wake up and take a swig of his country liquor. The alcohol didn’t stand a
chance against well-brewed chai.
When there was a vacancy for a guitarist at a hotel in Churchgate, it
was Michael who accompanied Joe to the trials. Joe got the job at the
first strum. The two became very tight after that.
There were no invitations to D’Lima Street though, not even when
Michael finally bought the house on the ground-floor opposite Rose
Maria’s apartment. Joe was even more conspicuous by his absence at the
housewarming party.
They hung out instead at Joe’s aunt Lucy’s place in Sonapur Galli
every Sunday afternoon, where they would discuss music, food and Joe’s
numerous flings. Over time, Joe turned into a serial dater, breaking many
hearts on his way. Annette was never mentioned in these conversations.
Time heals the broken. Sometimes, the healing is slow. Sometimes,
it is slower. You cannot predict how long it will take before one forgets
what it all felt like—heartbreak, the pain, the anguish, and that
emptiness. Years could roll by, and you’d have done ten million different
things to keep yourself from thinking, and yet, the mind would
remember that moment when your life fell apart and crushed you whole.
Then one day, while lying on your bed, the fan whirring above you
in circles, you’d try and dredge up that old feeling, simply out of
boredom, but find you couldn’t. Joe was almost there. Maybe.
Meanwhile, at the Coutinho household, the Beatles and the Jackson
5 had started giving company to Benjamin and his bottle. Benjamin
found no use for his skills; the strings of the banjo, as brilliant as they
were, could not be employed in a band. The failure was reinforced when
he started working as a bank clerk, keeping records of accounts, loans
and god knows what, but all so poorly that he should have been thankful
that he had the job if not a promotion. He rewarded his incompetence
with alcohol, which stoked the mindless work of his hands as he
assaulted his wife. Alfred Coutinho died a sad man, just a few months
shy of sixty, of a massive cardiac arrest. He had seen his daughter being
thrashed in his own house by his drunk son-in-law, and it had affected
him badly.
Michael had insulated himself from the madness in the house above
his. The sounds of the quick movement of feet and the slamming of
furniture escaped the floorboards of his parents’ pare home into his own
home very often. He never intervened.
When Annette, who had struggled to become a mother for nearly
ten years, announced that she had conceived, Michael hoped that this
added responsibility would save the couple. Sixty-five-year-old Karen,
whose cerebral functions had taken a beating with the early onset of
dementia, proclaimed that her dead husband, Alfred, was coming home
again.
‘Nobody is there to fight with him in heaven,’ she claimed. ‘I told
that man not to leave without me. See now what happened, men. He is
coming back as my grandchild.’
Amidst the multiple tragedies that had struck the Coutinhos,
Michael’s sister’s pregnancy came as a silver lining.
But one night, in Annette’s seventh month of pregnancy, while she
was dragging her drunk husband from the sofa to their bedroom, she lost
her balance and landed face down on her stomach. Michael rushed her to
Bombay Hospital, but the child could not be saved.
That was the first time in many years that a troubled Michael
opened up to his best friend about Annette’s disastrous marriage. It was,
of course, an unwise move on Michael’s part because suddenly,
everything Joe had forgotten beneath the whirr of that fan came rushing
back to him. Joe didn’t say it, but he took it upon himself to rescue his
lost love from clutches of an imbecile.
 Not very long after that, Joe started making trips to Bosco Mansion.
In the beginning, Michael didn’t think much of it and would entertain his
friend at his ground-floor residence almost every weekend. But when Joe
began making brief trips to see Annette on the pretext of meeting the
ailing Karen, Merlyn warned her husband that nothing good was going
to come of it.
One afternoon, a frightened Annette came rushing down to call her
brother.
‘Come up, quick,’ she said, agitated.
‘Is it another one of mama’s bouts?’ Michael enquired.
‘No, no, Joe is trying to strangle Benji. He will kill him, baba.’
Michael arrived just in time to secure an inebriated Benjamin from
his executioner’s hands. Apparently, when Benjamin had strutted into
the house after his evening fix at the Kit Kat bar near Metro Cinema and
saw Joe lounging on his sofa, he had thrown a huge fit. After yelling
cuss words at his nemesis, he called out to Annette, who he learnt was
making rotis for Joe in the kitchen. Appalled, he hit her hard in front of
her ex-fiancé. Unable to tolerate the intoxicated impudence, Joe reached
for Benjamin and, sealing his fingers around his neck, swore to kill him.
Had Michael arrived a few minutes later, Benjamin would probably have
been in the mortuary and Joe rotting at the police station.
That evening, Michael and Merlyn sat Joe down and requested him
to keep away from Cavel. They didn’t realise that they were shouting in
the middle of the ocean. Two weeks later, their friend was gallivanting in
their compound, cooing sweet nothings into Rose Maria’s ears as she
watered the plants in her garden.
The next thing they knew, he was helping Rose Maria with her
garden, trimming the branches and clearing the fallen leaves. Both angry
and irritated, Michael refrained from exchanging anything beyond
regular pleasantries with his friend.
Then one Sunday evening, Joe caught Michael off-guard when he
arrived at the Coutinhos’ door.
‘I thought you had made a new best friend,’ Michael told him
sarcastically.
‘Will you not ask me to come in? Is it that bad between us now?’
Joe asked, as he waited patiently in the passage.
 ‘Ryan and Sarah have their exams tomorrow, so maybe another day,
Joe?’ Michael said, ‘You anyway seem to be spending more time here.’
‘It’s okay, Michael. You don’t have to lie to me, I understand. But I
just wanted to share a piece of news with you before it got around the
parish.’
‘What news?’
‘I am getting married to Rose next month.’
Michael lost his bearings. It was as if somebody had sucked out a
mouthful of air from his lungs and shoved it back inside immediately,
stopping his breathing for a few seconds.
He dragged his friend inside and pulled him into the drawing room,
where Merlyn was busy teaching the children.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he yelled.
‘No, not at all. I am doing what I think is right.’
‘But you don’t even love her.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Stop lying to me, you fool.’ Michael’s decibel levels could have
shattered glass.
Merlyn and the children stared awkwardly, not sure whether it was
right to stay put. Michael understood his wife’s predicament and raised
his eyebrows, hinting to her to leave. Merlyn took the kids to the
bedroom and locked the door behind her.
‘You don’t love her,’ Michael continued as soon as his family had
left.
‘Mike, I slept with her yesterday afternoon,’ Joe said softly.
Michael turned red. ‘I didn’t have to know that.’
‘You are my best friend. You are supposed to know everything
about me.’
‘So you’re marrying her because you slept with her?’
‘No, in fact, I slept with her so I could marry her.’
‘Why are you doing this, Joe?’ Michael asked.
‘What do you mean? Aren’t you happy that I am finally settling
down? I know you are jealous. You can’t believe that I could land myself
such a good catch, isn’t it so, Mike?’
‘Whom are you doing this for?’ Michael asked again, ignoring the
rant.
 ‘What kind of question …’ Joe bit his lips in frustration. His eyes
were fixed on his friend’s. He knew that Michael knew, and that it would
be impossible to keep up the farce anymore.
He muttered her name under his breath and stormed out. Before he
left the house, he once again said the name aloud. If it had been repeated
for dramatic effect, Michael couldn’t tell, but irreparable damage had
been done. Joe was either losing his mind or plotting something more
sinister. Either way, Michael realised that forty-year-old Joe Crasto had
jumped into a pit that nobody could pull him out of anymore.
After that argument, Michael chose to give Joe the silent treatment.
He even skipped Joe’s nuptials in church.
From being best friends to almost becoming brothers-in-law and
now neighbours living on either side of the ground floor, Michael and
Joe’s friendship had witnessed three lives in one short lifetime of just
over twenty-four years.
For once, Michael and Joe were within touching distance of each
other. But never had they been so very, very distant.
Each afternoon when Michael left for work, he would see Joe attend
to Rose Maria’s garden. He appeared to be obsessively engaged in
cleaning each and every leaf that had been soiled by layers of dust and
cobwebs knitted closely by resolute spiders. Joe had given up his job at
the hotel and now tutored kids at home, training them to play the guitar
and the piano. He made a pittance as earnings, but having married the
sole heir to such a huge house, money didn’t seem like an issue of great
consequence.
Almost each night was spent pleasuring Rose Maria, whom Joe had
crippled and consumed with his love. Her quirks in bed—like the strange
high-pitched sound she made when she was aroused, or how she would
grind her teeth and keep her eyes wide open when he got himself in, her
eye sockets threatening to pop out during that moment of climax—were
so comical that Joe was itching to share them with Michael. But he knew
his friend wouldn’t entertain him anymore. Joe didn’t push his luck
either. The most they’d done to keep up the show of their friendship was
give each other a hug after the Christmas midnight mass of 1969. The
smiles they had dabbed on their faces were so forced that everyone
around them could tell that something had gone wrong. While paeans are
sung about lovers—the star-crossed ones and those whose stories
sometimes end abruptly—of how their souls had once entwined and how
they had carried inside them mirrors to each other’s heart, even the best
of friendships rarely inspires verse. Maybe because it’s not romantic. But
what is friendship, if not two people loving each other fiercely and
unconditionally.
This stalemate hurt Michael greatly. He had become sluggish at
work and an uninterested participant in domestic life. He was mourning
the absence of his best friend. Joe was an irreplaceable piece of his heart.
The distance ruffled Joe too. But somewhere on the first floor was
his lady love, for whom he had made this discomfiting comeback to
D’Lima Street, and he was willing to give it his all. Anette’s growing
interest in him made him believe that he was on the right track.
On the sly, the two would head to the market daily, first her, and
then twenty minutes later, him. They would meet at the Sonapur sabzi
bazaar, where they’d plonk themselves on the parapet behind the roofed
structure where hawkers lined up in rows, selling fresh veggies procured
from remote Vasai and sometimes even beyond. Here, Annette would
whine endlessly about her drunk husband; Joe had become her sounding
board and confidante.
What was strange was that the two never spoke of their past.
Annette shamelessly rattled on about how Benjamin and she had decided
to get married, while behaving as if Joe had never happened to her. Only
on one occasion did she hint at their shared past. While they were
discussing their unhappy marriages, Annette caught Joe unawares when
she asked, ‘Do you miss me sometimes?’
‘No,’ he replied, curtly.
Joe could feel a nerve twitch within her. She had the same
expression on her face as when she was upset about something.
Before she turned blue, he took her hand in his. ‘Anna,’ he said.
‘That’s such a stupid question to ask me, sweetheart, because I don’t
remember a moment when I stopped thinking about you.’
He drew closer to her, singing into her ears: You were always on my
mind. You were …
She blushed.
Tell me, oh tell me … that your sweet love hasn’t died.
 The glint of happiness in Annette’s eyes was sincere, and only Joe
could tell.
These clandestine meetings went on for nearly a year. They
reminded Joe of their brief courtship, when the bazaar had been their
ruse to be in each other’s company.
Annette enjoyed these sneaky moments away from home. Yet, she
refused to acknowledge Joe’s presence in the building. When Joe sought
an explanation from her, she said that she didn’t want to irk Benji. Then,
as an afterthought, she mentioned how she feared that her husband
would kill Joe, and losing her dear friend wasn’t something she could
live to see. It made Joe feel good, though he didn’t realise that the
thought had struck her only later. Benjamin, despite being the mess he
was, had always been Annette’s priority.
Their platonic affair was gratifying, and Joe would not have wanted
it to go any other way. Those stolen hours of conversation each day
brought momentary relief to him and calmed his longing for her.
His love for Annette had never really been a physical one. What he
felt for her was out of the ordinary. He could see the difference between
what he shared with Rose Maria and what he had with Annette. With the
former, his carnal needs were well taken care of. He was having more
than his fair share of sex daily, and he would be lying if he said that he
didn’t enjoy it.
With Annette, he did not feel the need to cross that bridge. The fact
that she never tormented him in his dark, erotic fantasies was reason
enough for him to believe that his love for her had transcended the
material. And maybe Rose Maria covered so much ground in that
department that those desires, though lurking, did not crop up when he
met Annette.
But that same year, on the night of 15 September, everything he had
pieced together disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Joe was fast asleep, wrapped in the arms of Rose Maria, when a bad
dream woke him up at around 2.30 a.m. With beads of sweat caking his
freckled face, Joe headed to the kitchen to drink water. He was fiddling
with the lid of the matka where they stored water, when he heard faint
sobs from above. Bosco’s wooden structure had always made it possible
for neighbours to snoop into the lives of each other, but the silence of the
night made it far easier for voices to travel.
This particular sound was so distinct that Joe knew immediately
where it was coming from. He was closing in towards the kitchen
window to find out what was going on, when the noise of a bottle
crashing to the floor alarmed him. The cries got louder after that.
Without much thought, Joe Crasto walked out of his home and
hurriedly climbed up the wooden stairs to ring his neighbour’s doorbell.
A distraught Annette opened the door.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, between sobs.
‘I heard you cry. Is he beating you up again?’
‘Leave now, Joe. It’s just one of his crazy moods.’
‘Where’s he? Let me deal with him.’
‘No. He’s my husband, and only I will handle him,’ Annette
choked.
‘Don’t be crazy, Anna,’ he reproached.
‘Joe, leave now,’ she repeated. ‘You will get both of us killed,’ she
said, worried that if he stood there any longer, a storm would definitely
brew.
Watching the love of his life cry made Joe feel more powerless and
miserable than ever. He wanted to hold her, wrap her in his arms and
protect her. Joe didn’t know what came upon him then, but all at once he
grabbed Annette by the waist and pulled her closer to place a long hard
kiss on her lips. Despite the unexplainable joy it brought him, this had
definitely not been part of the plan.
The slap that followed was not something he saw coming. Another
one hit him right across the face, and now Annette was howling loudly,
punching him in his chest.
‘How dare you?’ she asked, shocked. ‘How dare you take
advantage of my situation?’
Right then, she heard Benjamin approach them. ‘Never, ever show
that face of yours to me again. I hate you, Joe. I hate you,’ she said, and
without even giving Joe a moment to clarify his behaviour, she slammed
the door on him.
Joe stood there for a while, cold as a zombie. Inside, he heard
Annette shriek. Somebody had slapped someone, he wasn’t sure who.
He heard the thud of a door, the breaking of a chair and the crashing of
another bottle, and then suddenly, nothing else.
When everything around him had turned silent, he walked
downstairs slowly. With each step, his feet came down heavier. His eyes
had welled up, but the tears did not roll down. He tried and tried, but he
couldn’t shed a drop. Only his eyes grew hazy and fogged his vision.
When he reached home, he could feel his body turn to stone. He
forced himself to sit down on the sofa as every nerve within him shut
down one heartbeat at a time. Joe had come undone, exhausted by one
woman’s brazen indifference to his fate. He loved, but had never been
loved. He lived, but never really lived.
Before his eyes finally curled to a close, Joe yelped one last time.
The sound was so agonising that it echoed through the house. It woke up
Mrs Rose Maria Crasto, but the darkness revealed nothing. Not even
Joe’s death.
 7

THE WATER FIASCO

October 2003

I
n this old, rickety building comprising six flats over three floors, new
neighbours arrived. A family of six: a couple with three boys and a
baby girl. After a decade in Dubai’s arid but abundant landscape, they
had shifted to Mumbai, occupying the flat on the second floor of 193-A,
Bosco Mansion.
The news thrilled all the residents of Cavel, considering how
swiftly its Catholic population had dwindled. The neighbourhood was
overrun by enterprising Gujaratis and Marwaris, who were buying
properties at dirt-cheap rates in the hope of spinning real-estate magic.
But the excitement aside, nothing disturbed the occupants of Bosco more
than the thought of how the municipal water would now be distributed in
the houses.
The other residents, all ageing, totalled only six, with an old woman
—either widowed or single—in each flat. There was the two-time widow
Rose Maria, aged eighty-seven, who lived on the ground floor. The first-
floor flats were occupied by sexagenarian Ellena Gomes and sixty-five-
year-old Annette da Cunha. The second floor had had only one resident
for a very long time, the nonagenarian Tresa Lawrence. The only
married pair was the Coutinhos who, like the others, were riding into the
sunset, and whose children, much to their displeasure, refused to return
to India. Merlyn Coutinho’s happiness knew no bounds when she learnt
that a family, and a very young one at that, was moving in.
 ‘ Kitté munta re? Kids in our building. It will be like the good old
days again, na Michael?’ Merlyn told her husband, as her neighbour and
the building’s secretary, Ellena, who sat at the other end of the
Coutinhos’ drawing room, rambled about the hubbub they were to
expect, now that the building was going to be home to four young
children.
At five feet and seven inches, Ellena was taller than most women
Michael had ever known. Her broad shoulders and oddly
compartmentalised body fat made her look even bigger, while her thick-
rimmed glasses, which magnified her deep-set eyes and aquiline nose,
added to her intimidating personality. She usually wore loose-fitting
cotton dresses in different shades of blue that covered her from head to
knee, exposing her swollen feet. A car had run over her legs in an
accident that crushed her bones and caused a temporary disfigurement.
After years of walking with the help of crutches, she was slowly
regaining strength, but any extra effort would cause her feet to swell.
Ellena was to Bosco Mansion what antique furniture was to a home.
Sixty-nine, unmarried, with no family to tend to and nobody to call her
own, the former librarian occupied her retirement years prying into other
people’s lives, mostly those of her immediate neighbours. Always privy
to the gossip in Cavel thanks to Laxmi, the maid she shared with Merlyn,
Ellena never gave up an opportunity to condescendingly comment about
people in her parish, or even those beyond her line of vision. She had an
opinion, mostly an intelligent one, about every soul who had ever lived
and breathed, even the celebrities and politicians whose names showed
up in the newspapers. Residents of the neighbourhood dreaded her
courtesy visits to their homes. Those who refused to open the door to her
often became the butt of spurious gossip. A few patronised her by
agreeing with every word she said, treating her as the final authority on
Dr D’Lima Street. But one couldn’t take away the fact that she was the
most well-informed and knowledgeable person in the area, generously
parting with trivia on Cavel in some dear hope that the residents would
feel the same pride she did in being associated with this quaint locality.
She knew its history down pat—one building, for instance, had seen
three mayors of Bombay within thirty years; in the 1870s, Padaria de
Cavel (Bakery of Cavel) that had been started by baker Salvador Patricio
de Souza of Assagao, Goa, had been one of the greatest depots of bread
the city had ever seen, hiring several Maharashtrian women and men to
pound, knead and sweat under the glow of the fire-lit ovens and to
distribute thousands of loaves of bread daily; an educational institution,
set up even before the Catholic School of Cavel, was among the oldest in
South Mumbai, having opened first in 1782. ‘We are living on a gold
mine,’ she’d say.
What, however, made her unpopular was her loathing of children.
She disliked them from the bottom of her resentful heart. When she
wasn’t staring down the kids who came to play in the compound, she
was finding newer ways to get rid of them. People claimed that Ellena’s
cold demeanour had a lot to do with her own disciplined childhood,
which involved little play and long hours invested in studies and music.
She was a gifted pianist. Ellena expected children to be regimented into
the rigours of academics and taught how to excel in the arts, instead of
being allowed to create a racket playing hockey, football or that
dangerous game of cricket, where balls as hard as stone would
dramatically crash into the windows of homes.
But how much she had looked forward to playing with Michael as a
child, when her father would allow her only thirty minutes of playtime
on Sundays, and how she eventually ended up earning such a devilish
distinction for herself were still not known. Because as weird as it
sounds, Ellena had once loved everything she had now come to hate. At
the top of this list was Michael.
Only Ellena knew how dear Michael had been to her. She had a few
forgettable relationships in her life, one with a married man twice her
age, but nothing felt real, at least compared to what she imagined would
have happened with Michael. Ellena got so tired of this failed pursuit of
love that she eventually decided against marrying; she couldn’t think of
allowing anybody else into the space she had once carved out for this
man. Unfortunately, she loved Michael at a time when his mind was
occupied by thoughts of Tracey. When he snapped out of it, he—to
everyone’s shock—married Merlyn from Khotachi Wadi. Ellena never
stood a chance.
Her mother Giselle suspected that her daughter was obsessed with
Michael. It could have been true then, but it was another story today.
Ellena hated Michael’s impertinence as much as he hated her guts. They
wouldn’t have made a happy couple, that much Ellena was sure of. The
only thing tolerable about him now was Merlyn, his wife.
‘It’s been so long since we’ve had children here. I think almost
fifteen years,’ Ellena said, trying to distract the couple. ‘I think the last
kid at Bosco was Ryan. Good thing that he followed Sarah and went to
Canada. There has been so much peace after that. Bosco feels like a
great retirement home. I don’t know how I am going to cope with having
a family around.’
She would have continued, but Merlyn cut her short. ‘What do you
mean re, Ellena? My kids were bad?’
‘No, no, no, no,’ Ellena said nervously. ‘That is not what I meant,
darling. You raised such sweethearts; they still send me Christmas cards
every year. They were so well-mannered and talented. But children
today …’ She sighed.
‘Don’t fall for that, Merlyn. She is humouring you. You know the
tough time she gave us when Ryan was around,’ Michael snickered and
went back to his eveninger.
By nature, Michael was loud-mouthed, and with Ellena, more so.
When he was around her, he didn’t bother filtering his conversations, not
realising that though she was such a tough nut, she had a heart too. Even
now, as the words tumbled out of his mouth, they dropped a sour echo in
Ellena’s ears, bringing back painful memories.
As a ten-year-old, Ryan had once accidentally rammed into Ellena
while chasing his friend during a cat-and-mouse game in their building
compound. Ellena’s market bags fell, and her vegetables scattered. A
terrified Ryan apologised, but Ellena grabbed the teary-eyed boy by his
collar and dragged him to his home to dole out advice to his father on
good parenting.
She was hardly prepared for what was to come. After patiently
listening to Ellena, Michael, who was struggling very hard to contain his
anger as he watched her hold Ryan like a ready-to-butcher chicken,
pulled his son to his side and punched the door Ellena was standing
against. He also lifted his hand to slap her, but Merlyn and the kids
managed to intervene. It didn’t end there. Michael hurled horrid abuses
that singed Ellena’s nerves like hot iron on skin, and warned her against
stepping into his house again. Poor Ellena stood quiet through the
showdown, both horrified and hurt.
On that very day, Ellena stopped moping about unrequited love.
Michael had lost his special place in her heart. Love begets love. Hate
begets hate. But this hate caused Ellena to act recklessly. Or so her
mother thought. Until then, Ellena had shown little interest in the men
who fawned over her. At thirty-six, she had not had a single affair, and
her spinsterhood became a matter of pride. She was obviously not your
run-of-the-mill woman. Her beauty came from her intelligence, and she
wore it on her sleeve with confidence. But suddenly, she stopped
ignoring the overtures of fifty-eight-year-old Haider Ali, a history
professor who visited the library where she worked and who spoke less
to her and more to her breasts. What had initially repelled her suddenly
seemed attractive and tempting. She had to give in before he lost interest
and so, one day when he as usual claimed to have not found a book that
he needed—an excuse he gave often so that she’d come with him to a
secluded corner of the library, and he could get an eyeful of her breasts
as she searched between books—she went with him. She undid a few
buttons of her shirt and allowed him to cop a feel that day, and the next
and the next. Ali was a married man, with seven children; his oldest
daughter was Ellena’s age. A future together seemed bleak. So when a
few weeks later he suggested they spend a weekend in a hotel room, she
called time on their affair.
Ellena had never been more ashamed of herself. This was never
about love. It was not about lust either. It was pure hate. And it had
turned her into her own enemy. From there on, she was careful with her
choices. But neither of the two other romances she had, both arranged by
her mum, lasted beyond a few months.
Meanwhile, Ellena’s indifference made Michael more resolute.
When she snubbed him at a dinner party some days after the fight, he
returned the favour by not inviting her for any celebrations thereon. He
even ensured that Christmas sweets from his home never went to hers; a
tradition started by their parents thus came to an end. The gulf became
so wide that the two wouldn’t speak to each other for the next seven
years or so.
 It all changed after Ellena’s mum took ill. When aunty Giselle was
on life support, it was Michael, and not Ellena’s siblings, who stayed at
the hospital with her. When her mum died a few days later, he made
arrangements for the funeral, leaving Ellena to grieve. The kindness
warmed Ellena’s heart, and she extended the olive branch by sending
across cake and chips for the family. Yet, nobody apologised for the
incident involving Ryan. They continued with their lives, only this time
behaving as if that fight had never occurred.
‘It was a case of selective amnesia,’ Michael later said.
Now, having been reminded of that incident, Ellena stood up to
leave, feeling upset and humiliated. It was cruel of Michael to bring it up
again, yet how could he have known how much had changed for her
after that silly fight?
‘I need to be back home. I am expecting a few guests,’ she lied.
Merlyn realised Ellena was hurt and tried to make up for her
husband’s snarky behaviour. ‘Forget all this, Ellena. You know how he is
re,’ she said, as she led her neighbour to the door.
‘Merlyn, I have always wondered how such a sweet woman made it
into this man’s life,’ Ellena replied.
‘He’s not so bad re.’
‘You give your husband too much credit.’
Merlyn mustered a smile. ‘Bye, Ellena, thank you for the good
news.’
‘Merlyn darling, I am not sure it will be such good news once you
begin to consider how the water is going to be distributed in the
building. Remember they are six and we are six,’ Ellena said as she
stepped out, leaving Merlyn with a lot to fret about.
Having convinced the Coutinhos of their impending doom, Ellena
Gomes’ job became easier. She went on to spread the bad news from one
neighbour to the next, leaving a pall of gloom in the already as-good-as-
dead mansion.
The problem was that of water. In the burgeoning city of Mumbai,
where the ratio between the hourly-increasing population and the
available basic amenities was skewed and stank of poor town planning,
water was scarce and had to be rationed, just like kerosene, rice and
sugar.
 Like most people who lived in old buildings where water was
stocked not in big tanks installed on terraces, but in buckets and water
drums at home, the residents of Bosco Mansion felt the crunch.
One municipal pipeline was channelled to six flats and fed water
daily for around forty-five minutes, starting at 4.30 a.m. every day. In the
early years, when Dr D’Lima Street wasn’t so crowded, water flushed
out of the taps like heavy rain. These days, with houses around the
corner illegally installing booster pumps, each flat barely managed to fill
five to seven buckets. Top-floor residents suffered the most. The taps
choked, splayed and stilled at their own will, and the water that made its
way upwards from the rust-ridden, corroded municipal pipes brought to
mind a dehydrated body relieving itself. The force of the water was so
abysmal during the summer months that if you turned on the taps, tiny
drops would beat languidly into the hungry steel buckets creating a lazy
rhythm that brought joy to no one.
A solution was found when Michael’s plumber Jeevan installed
pumps in all homes above the ground floor. Yet, that did not mean that
water could be used to one’s heart’s content. Until now, a mutual
understanding among the residents of the five occupied flats had ensured
six buckets full for each household, with the Coutinhos bargaining for an
extra bucket so they could water the plants in the garden, and Annette da
Cunha, who lived above them, requesting half a bucket more because of
her embarrassing diarrhoea problem that resurfaced every two days.
Until some years ago, Merlyn had needed at least three buckets for
her garden. On the insistence of the residents of the building, she had got
rid of most of her plants. The chiku tree had fallen down, so the problem
was partly taken care of.
It was to this water-starved building that the Braganzas came to
make a new home for themselves. New neighbours meant a bucket less
for each home, but after so much compromise already, no one was
willing to make that sacrifice. None warned the family of their imminent
troubles, not even the landlord who had given them the flat, which had
been vacant for over thirty-five years. When the Braganzas settled down,
Ellena Gomes and their other neighbours expected a huge uproar. They
were prepared for it and unwilling to budge on the earmarked water
distribution.
 But day one passed, and there was not a single complaint from
anyone. Day two and the water arrangement continued to remain
unaffected, despite the presence of the family of six. Day three: apart
from the commotion created by the kids running up and down the
wooden stairs—which brought great misery to Ellena—all was normal.
Everyone was feeling apprehensive, but nobody dared to talk about it,
scared that the Braganzas would demand a bucket or two more.
‘Let us not jinx our own happiness,’ the widowed Annette da Cunha
told Ellena over the phone when the latter suggested that the issue be
discussed in a residents’ meeting.
On day four, the Coutinho couple dropped by at Ellena’s house after
paying a visit to the Braganzas.
‘Great mannered kids,’ Merlyn informed Ellena. ‘Go meet them re.’
‘Oh! Well. Forget that. Did they grumble about the water problem
in the building? After all, they have come from Dubai. I don’t think they
are used to having no water,’ Ellena said, her curiosity in full spate.
‘Naa, nothing they said re.’
‘Strange, don’t you think, Merlyn?’ Ellena asked. ‘Do they even
take a bath? I mean, were the children clean? You know, I am just
checking. Anything is possible these days … all talcum powder, no
soap,’ she said, breaking into a laugh.
‘What you saying, simply. They looked very clean re.’
‘Aah! Then I need to go and check how much water they have been
using.’
Michael, who was quietly observing Ellena trying to stoke a fire,
interrupted. ‘Come on, Ellena, spare them your grief. You need to stop
behaving like an old cat. They are happy, so are we. Leave them alone,
will you?’ he said bluntly.
That rude remark from her arch-nemesis did not stop Ellena from
prying into the lives of the Braganzas. As a daily practice, she would
peek through the curtains of her balcony to see Shane Braganza leave for
work in his car, followed by his wife Christabell, who’d drop her three
young boys to the school bus. They all looked impeccably tidy, and it
didn’t look like the trick of some scented powder for sure.
Similarly, in the evenings when the boys came down to play, their
mother would join them, a wet towel turbaned around her head. It meant
that she was having a head bath daily. From where did she get all that
water, Ellena wondered.
After a month had passed without a single complaint from the
Braganzas, Ellena decided to check on the family herself. She couldn’t
fathom why her new neighbours hadn’t raised a stink when the rest of
the building had not had a good night’s sleep in years over the water
issue.
Christabell, who was at home with her young daughter, greeted her
at the door.
‘It’s so lovely to see you. I’ve heard so much about you from
everyone here,’ said Christabell. She was a tall and heavy woman; her
shoulders drooped from the weight of her year-old daughter whom she
had strapped to her chest in a carrier.
‘I hope you’ve heard good things, darling,’ Ellena said. ‘Generally,
people around here hate me.’
‘Well. That’s not true,’ Christabell lied, remembering how just the
other day, Michael had warned her to keep away from that ‘old cat of
Bosco’ when the family had gone to the Coutinhos’ home for dinner.
The Braganzas’ home smelled of fresh paint. There were interesting
embellishments in the flat—the miracle of Gulf money, Ellena thought.
The modern-day light fixtures, for instance. The huge flat-screen
television. A massive leather couch. The red Persian rug. Faux-wood
flooring in the drawing room, which gave the home a classy touch.
‘I presume you sweep and mop your house daily?’ Ellena enquired,
as she made herself comfortable on a chair.
Christabell nodded, not knowing what to say. ‘Should I get you
some tea?’
‘Oh! Don’t bother with that,’ Ellena said. ‘I like your home. Clean
and spotless,’ she went on.
‘Thank you, Ellena.’
That Christabell wasn’t parting with any information was driving
Ellena up the wall. After a brief pause and a lot of deliberation on how
best to get information out of her, Ellena asked, ‘Christabell darling, I
hope I am not prying too much, but could you tell me how much water
you use to mop the floor of your home?’
 When she saw a look of amusement on the woman’s face, she
thought she needed to explain herself better. ‘You know, my maid Laxmi
uses very little water to mop the floor. And then the floor looks dirtier
than before.’ She didn’t tell Christabell that because of the water
situation, she only mopped her floor once a month.
‘Oh! My maid uses two buckets, Ellena. One with plain water and
another with phenyl.’
Two! The figure hit Ellena’s head like a hammer. And that too for
cleaning the floors while she barely got six buckets daily! What a waste!
she thought to herself.
Observing the old woman break into a cold sweat, Christabell
asked, ‘Ellena, are you okay? You look off. Should I get you some
water?’
‘No, I am okay. Just a little flustered. I think my blood pressure just
shot up. Can I use your bathroom, dear?’
‘Yes, sure,’ Christabell said and led Ellena inside.
To Ellena’s shock, the faucet in the bathroom was running at full
force. It was 11 a.m., and municipal water never came at this time. There
was also a Western toilet. When Ellena tried using it, it sprayed what she
quantified as almost half a bucket of water. She hurried out and decided
to ask Christabell the source of the unlimited water in her home.
‘Christabell, do you get continuous water supply?’ she asked,
throwing her an accusatory glance.
‘No, Ellena, of course not, it’s the municipal water.’
‘Then how is your faucet running even now?’
Slightly taken aback, Christabell said, ‘I don’t understand what you
mean. It’s the municipal water, stored in a tank.’
‘Tank! There’s a tank in this building?’ Ellena was shocked beyond
belief.
‘There is one on the roof.’
‘You have a tank! When did you install it? Who gave you the
permission?’ Ellena asked, shaking with fury.
‘Ellena, please calm down. We did not install anything. There was
one when we came here.’
Unable to calm her nerves, Ellena said, ‘Take me to the tank.’
 Only the Braganzas and ninety-year-old Tresa Lawrence, both of
whom lived on the top floor, had access to the roof. But considering
Tresa’s age and deteriorating health, it seemed unlikely that she’d ever
consider trips to the roof unless she desired to ascend higher above, to
God’s home.
After struggling up the unsteady wooden ladder with Christabell
carefully trailing behind her, when Ellena finally reached the flat surface
of the roof, she saw what she had so badly wanted all these years: a
black water tank.
As she tried to keep her balance, her eyes caught three pipelines
jutting out of the tank. She went and peered down at the rear of the
building. What she saw was a work of genius. While one pipeline was
directed to the Braganzas, the next ended at the home of Annette, who
lived right below them, and the last stopped at the Coutinho residence.
Ellena climbed down the ladder and thanked Christabell before
leaving.
That evening, a note was dropped into the mailboxes of the
Coutinhos. Michael had the ill-fortune of reading it first:

The secretary of Bosco Association has decided to re-work the

water distribution system in Bosco Mansion. In light of the
recent developments—that of the arrival of our new
neighbours and a newly discovered water connection created
for the convenience of a handful of residents—our previous
agreement on water distribution stands nullified. Beneficiaries
of this new water arrangement will now have to look for
alternative sources to manage their gardens and survive bouts
of diarrhoea as their old water pipelines will soon be plugged.
For the record, the municipality has agreed to intervene and
has promised to act on my complaint at the soonest. No
meetings will be held to negotiate terms and conditions. No
regret for any inconvenience caused.
Regards, Ellena G.
 Michael rushed to the phone. He dialled his sister’s number.
‘Annette! The old cat found the tank. We are busted.’
 8

DEAREST BUTTERFLY, WITH LOVE

June–November 2007

Michael Coutinho,
193-A, Bosco Mansion, Flat No 1,
Dr D’Lima Street, Chira Bazaar,
Mumbai 4000002

18 June 2007

Dear Michael,
I met Patrick and Joana Misquitta from Pius House at church
this morning. They are down for a short vacation in Goa; we
later caught up for lunch at my home. It’s been months since I
met someone from Cavel. Living where I do, I am practically
isolated from the rest of the world.
It’s from them that I learnt about Merlyn. I am sorry, but I
wasn’t aware. Please accept my heartfelt condolences. Pat told
me everything, and I am yet to come to terms with it myself.
My loss is not as huge as yours, but it pains me to know that
she is not around anymore. She was the life and soul of Bosco
Mansion, and I can’t even imagine that place without her. A
deep sadness fills me, but I want to speak little of it as it
comes at the cost of compounding your own grief.
I know this letter of mine may take you by surprise since
we haven’t spoken in four years. But this tragedy is too huge
for us to hold grudges. Let’s just forget and forgive. What
happened, happened in the past, and I’d appreciate a fresh
start. Give my regards to Ryan and Sarah when you speak with
them next. Tell them I miss their mother too.

Warm regards,
Ellena G.

Ellena Gomes,
Casa Gomes, SocoilloWaddo,
Pernem, Goa

29 June 2007

Dear Ellena G.,

Your last letter was very vague. Do you mean that we are back
to being friends again? If so, then there is so much to tell you.
And since I don’t want to waste time waiting for your
response, I am going with my gut and writing to you as only
an old friend would.
To begin with, thank you for your letter. It’s very kind of
you to have written. I really do miss Merlyn every single
second of the minute of the hour of the day. She was my life
and soul as much as she was Bosco’s. But it has been two
months, and I know I cannot continue like the living dead.
Sarah and Ryan suggested that I join them in Montreal.
But I absolutely hate the winters there. People get so excited
about white Christmases. I used to be that way too. But
nobody tells you how lonely it can get. Also, to be honest, I
would rather die alone in the home that Merlyn and I built
together than on foreign soil. The kids eventually gave up and
left last month, though I must mention that they didn’t try too
hard.
 They always had Merlyn to take their side. I doubt they’d
find a good replacement in me. The idea of kids moving too
far away from parents has always discomfited me. I know
that’s life and all, but still. Imagine if I had abandoned them
when they were younger.
You do remember that time when I had a chance to take up
an offer at a newspaper in London? It’s another thing that the
role was of a junior staff reporter when I had fifteen years of
experience on my side. I should have gone anyway. It was
London. But I didn’t because of mama. Dad died too soon.
How could I leave her alone with Annette and her drunk better
half?
Do children think that way anymore? I tell you all this
knowing very well how much you loved and adored your own
mother. You stayed with aunty Giselle right till the end, when
your six and counting family escaped to the States and
Canada. Need I say, I respected you for that. Sorry, I am
whining. I will end this letter right here, right now.

Regards,
Michael

P.S. Amused at how you insist on keeping the first letter of

your surname even now. Old habits die hard. Don’t they?

5 July 2007

Dear Michael,
I wasn’t vague. We have always been friends, but of course,
there have been rough days. I think they have finally passed. It
was so nice hearing from you. I was drying clothes on the
lawn when our postman, Roy D’Costa, came around with your
letter. He said, ‘Do people still write letters?’ I gave him an
encouraging smile.
Then I left everything I was doing and read your letter.
Nobody writes to me, especially none of my ‘six and
counting’ family. So you can imagine my excitement on
hearing from you.
My mother always told me that having a family around
was important. She believed that they were the only ones who
stuck with you through thick and thin. I wasn’t lucky in that
department. When mother died, my brothers said that they
were too old to even manage a walk in their own lawns, let
alone fly down for the funeral. I knew it was too much for
them to spend on flight tickets, so I kept quiet. How would I
have even managed without you and Merlyn? But I am sure
your children are trying. At least they come and visit you once
in a while. Consider yourself in a better place.
How do you spend your time now? I can proudly say that I
am improving. I now find kids tolerable. I teach my maid
Lorna’s young girls for two hours in the afternoon. Yesterday,
we read Jane Austen. But I think they prefer Ruskin Bond. So
I am reading Bond these days, but he writes a lot about ghosts.
The maid doesn’t charge me for her work, and I don’t charge
her for mine. It works well for both of us.

Regards,
Ellena

P.S. Note: The G has vanished.

15 July 2007

Dear Michael,
No news from you yet. Did I offend you with my uncalled-for
advice? Did I whine too much? Forgive this lonely woman.
It’s hard to be good.

Regards,
Ellena

P.S. Note, the G has ‘really’ vanished.

4 August 2007

Dear Ellena,
Your letters are funny. You helped me sail through the last
month. I read and re-read them to feel better. It was Merlyn’s
birthday on 10 July, and try as I did, I could not bring myself
to do anything. She would have turned seventy-two. I was
actually doing fine that day. I woke up, had tea with bun-
maska and sat to read the newspaper, following it up with your
letter, which had been sitting on my table from the day before.
Then Sarah called from Montreal. She said, ‘Dada, mom was
still too young to die. Don’t you think?’
I knew in my heart of hearts that Sarah was right. If only I
had not taken her mild headaches lightly, I could have saved
her. After that, I just lost the will to do anything till I sat down
to write this letter today.
Can you imagine a life filled with anxious days and
sleepless nights? Well, that’s how I spend my time. She was
not too old. Was she?
I am glad you are becoming a better person, Ellena. And
you know this is not personal. I always thought there was hope
for you! It’s just that you were too tough for your own good.
That never made you a bad person; it just made you a terrible
human being. Okay, jokes apart, I still admired you.
 The caterpillar is evolving. Getting rid of the letter ‘G’ is a
good start. Be more affectionate to the kids; they will love you
more than any of your ‘six and counting’ family ever could.

Regards,
Me, Mike

P.S. Note: Caterpillar still has the old ‘cat’ hiding within.
When will you turn into a butterfly?

15 September 2007

Dear Michael,
What was so funny about my letters? Is it the fact that a
terrible human being is trying to turn over a new leaf? You
haven’t changed, have you? Honestly, your last letter left me
fuming. I had half a mind not to reply to you. And I was doing
quite well. I also burnt the letter, so that I never had to read it
again. Then yesterday, you called on my landline. I heard the
‘hello’ and instantly knew it was you. I was still angry and did
not want to speak, so I thought I would write and clear up the
differences instead.
Mind you, I am still angry. I am only forgiving you
because Merlyn is not around. I don’t want a lonely man to
feel lonelier. And clearly, your children aren’t helping either.
Spend your time doing better things, Michael. Stop being so
snarky all the time. Go to church and talk to God instead of
wallowing in your sorrows. It helps.

Regards,
Ellena G.
P.S. People like you cut my wings every time I try to fly. How
can I ever turn into a butterfly?

20 September 2007

Dear Ellena,
You are a strange woman. You take offence at everything. I
really don’t know what to filter anymore. When I said you
were funny, I was referring to your postscripts. You are free to
not believe me, but I am anyway attaching copies of your
letters so that you re-read them to know what I am talking
about. Since you have burnt my previous letter, I am sending a
copy of that too. Please go back to it and highlight what part
seemed offensive and ‘snarky’. We can discuss it in the next
letter.
As a habit, I always keep an extra copy of what I write for
myself. Merlyn always found it funny. If she were alive, she
would finally know why I did it. I am, however, glad you
forgave me. I don’t think I can wait for another tragedy before
we start talking again. The only tragedies waiting to happen
now are our own funerals. Let us not push it.

Regards,
Michael

P.S. I see that the ‘G’ has re-appeared. Looks like the
‘cat’erpillar will have to wait before it tries to fly again. Also,
I did not call you. It’s scary to know that there are people who
sound just like me. Merlyn loved my voice. She said it was
one of a kind. Thank God, she never heard this man. I
wouldn’t rule out adultery. See what he made you do. You are
writing to me again. I had also mentioned that your letters
helped me sail through my worst moments, but you ignored
that completely.

30 September 2007

Dear Ellena,
I reiterate, ‘you are a strange woman’. You only sent me a
copy of my letter with highlighted portions without
mentioning what really irked you. What explanation do you
want? Okay, I agree I called you terrible, but that was meant to
be a joke. If it hurt you, I apologise. In your words, I don’t
want a lonely woman to feel any lonelier. Also, why exactly
have you highlighted the cat in caterpillar, when I already put
it in single quotes for you? I have called you that for decades.
Do you want me to call you something else? Like, say,
‘Butterfly’? Would that get you to talk to me again?
I was, however, most amused with your efficiency in
tracing the phone-call details from the state telephone
company. Yes, it was me on the other end. I presumed that you
were not happy with my last letter, and so I called. Can’t this
old man play tricks? Also, I am not a fan of the silent
treatment.

Regards,
Me, Mike

P.S. Fly, fly, fly. I lost my scissors; I can’t cut your wings,
pretty little butterfly.

4 October 2007
Dear Mike,
Wasn’t that what I called you when we were kids? I still
remember. Now that we are done talking business, I feel much
better and less slighted.
My postman Roy is pleased that I use his services. Nobody
in the area uses him for real letters anymore, only drafts and
money orders.
He knows very little English, and only speaks Konkani.
Oh, how I miss Merlyn on these occasions. She was excellent
at it. You know how bad my Konkani is, right? Roy and I
struggle to communicate, yet I enjoy meeting him. He comes
by to have tea in the mornings (sometimes with your letters)
and teaches me some simple Konkani words. I tutor him in
English. He thinks I have a lover in Bombay. It’s hard to
convince people, so I told him that you call me an old cat and
think I am terrible with people. Now he tells me that I am
writing to a horrible person and fighting for a good word when
I am already such a wonderful human being. I like this
concocted story. We should keep it that way.

Regards,
Elle

P.S. That’s what Mike called me.

11 October 2007

Dearest Butterfly,
Congratulations, you finally have wings. Dainty, petite, and
colourful, like the Elle from many years ago. You are
hobnobbing with kind people. You should have let him believe
that we are lovers. Why make me such a horrible man? On
your advice, I go to church every morning. Then I go to the
fish market and buy something new. Today, we made jhinga
masala fry. I also asked the maid to make me some prawn
balchão so I can have it with pao for breakfast. Remember
your mum made it during the monsoon? She’d always keep an
extra bottle for me.
Laxmi grumbles, but she makes it anyway. She feels sorry
for me. I don’t mind this sympathy because I get my way.
Christabell’s daughter, Sharon, comes down to the compound
in the evenings, and I teach her to cycle. Things are getting
better here. Also, I don’t speak to the kids these days. When
they call, I get Laxmi to talk to them. I won’t have them rub
salt into my wounds when they walked out of our lives nearly
twenty years ago. Annette comes in the evening for tea. Do
you realise we never spoke of her even once in our letters?
The good news is that she has been bearable of late. Or maybe
she is feeling sorry for me too. At least tea times go without an
argument.
Now that we are back to being friends, I think it is time I
clear up the issues we had regarding the water pipeline.
Remember when you were in Goa for a year after that
accident? We got the municipality to sanction us a pipeline
then. According to the civic rules, we were eligible for another
line to our building. Nothing was illegal. I am sorry we hid it
from you. It was completely Annette’s and my idea. For once,
she and I were on the same page. But to be fair to the rest of
the neighbours, we never filled the seven buckets of water that
we said we did. We just took three buckets that Merlyn used
for her garden. It was still wrong on our part, and I am sorry
for that.
I see you don’t ask about Cavel. Are you cheating on me?
Is someone else feeding you with gossip on the town, or is the
butterfly soaring towards the sky?

With love,
Mike
P.S. Try writing to me in Konkani the next time.

15 October 2007

Dear Mike,
I am not cheating on you. I don’t need to know anything more
now that the man who is teaching me to fly is around. I am in
the sky, and the view is stunning from up here. Thanks to you.
Can I be honest? Your letters make me happy. This is all I
look forward to now. Does that worry you?
My Konkani is bad; Roy gave up in two days. He is
picking up English quite well though. I am glad to know
Annette and you are getting along. The building must be
restful now. It’s a nice time to live in Bosco. I was thinking of
coming to Bombay next month. I need to air my house too. It
has been years. Do you think it’s a nice idea?

Yours,
Butterfly

P.S. Roy is back to assuming that we are lovers. Don’t ask me

how! Also, the pipeline issue—consider it forgotten. My
memory isn’t helping either.

20 October 2007

Dear Ellena,
Yes, there’s a nervous calm in Bosco Mansion. I doubt it has
anything to do with Annette and me not fighting anymore. It’s
Merlyn. The building is missing her as much as I do. And you
gave up on learning Konkani too soon. Bad learner you’ve
become. What happened to the St Anne’s School topper of
1949?

Regards,
Michael

30 October 2007

Dear Ellena,
I like how you use my own tricks on me. I received a copy of
your letter of 15 October, highlighting what I hadn’t answered
in my last mail. I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind
to respond to your questions. I was probably missing Merlyn
too much. But it is only fair that you have your answers.
No, it doesn’t worry me that you, of all the people I have
known, look forward to my letters. It is a privilege earned only
by a few. But I am not sure whether it is right to make it the
‘only’ thing you look forward to now, especially at this point
in your life. What about your tea sessions with Roy and
classes with your maid’s kids? You are being too kind to an
undeserving man. About coming to Mumbai, you definitely
must visit. Annette is looking forward to meeting you. She
will be happy to have company that suits her taste. She calls
me a compromise that she made for the lack of friends in her
life. Can you believe it? I need to go and buy some fish.
Laxmi has promised to make bangda curry. Goodbye for now.

Regards,
Michael

30 November 2007
Michael,
Many years ago, way before you were married, I asked my
mother if it was fine to fall in love. She said, ‘Yes, of course.
One must never give up on an opportunity to trip, fall and
break a leg in love.’ Then, as a rider, she added, ‘Though,
make sure that the one you lose your heart to isn’t indifferent
to your fall.’
Incidentally, that very same evening, you and I were
climbing up the stairs to head to our respective homes after a
game of badminton when I sprained my ankle. I was in deep
pain, but you didn’t reach out to help me. Instead, you stood
there helplessly for a while, before rushing to call my mother.
My mother came right away. It was she who held me in her
arms, lifted me and took me back home. You didn’t even
bother to come along. You were probably in your room, lying
on your bed, sore after that game. But so smitten was I that I
foolishly believed you would come over afterwards and check
on me. You didn’t.
The next evening, you were already in the compound,
playing badminton with Annette. You had forgotten all about
me, and so conveniently.
The timing of that incident was purely coincidental, but I
took it as a sign to stop pining for you. Five years later, you
got married to Merlyn. Thank God for that fall on the stairs, I
learned to cope with heartbreak.
When I read your letter last month, a similar feeling came
to me. Was it plain indifference on your part, or was it an
innocent oversight? Unfortunately, I know the answer. Only
this time, I don’t know whether to feel bad for myself or
stupid for having allowed this to happen to me again. Michael,
you have none of the charms that once caught my attention.
But there—I just fell for you again.
I am returning the originals of all the letters you sent me. I
don’t have the copies (yes, I burned them) and neither do I
need them. Do not re-send them or reply to this letter. It’s time
you got back to missing Merlyn.
Warm regards,
Ellena G.

P.S. Do you know that the average life of a butterfly is

approximately one month? I didn’t. I learned it the hard way.
 9

KING OF THE CROSSWORD

May 1987

M
any would call him manic, others a man possessed, but Mario
Lawrence, who turned fifty in the April of 1987, did what he did
only because he enjoyed solving a good crossword puzzle. If that
earned him a poor reputation in Cavel, he’d say, ‘so be it’.
In all these years, Mario had never had a job or drawn a salary. For
a man with intelligence so exceptional, many in the township, including
Michael Coutinho, considered this a pity. He did, however, manage to
make at least two hundred and fifty rupees a month—it was the token
prize money he received from hours of poring over riddles to fill empty
square grids in newspapers. There were months when he also made an
extra thirty or fifty rupees when he had solved more than his usual quota
of crosswords.
Such days, however, were few and far between and didn’t change
anything for him or his mother, Tresa, because everything Mario ever
won was invested back into honing his game. This included buying more
newspapers and books that, while heavy on the pocket, helped him pack
enough ammo to become the best crossword player in the city. To
achieve this, Mario followed a disciplined routine.
Every morning around 7 a.m., after the paperwallah had left a pile
of twenty newspapers—four copies each of three broadsheets and two
tabloids—at Tresa Lawrence’s home in Bosco Mansion, Mario would
collect the stack from the doorstep and leave for the dingy room in the
centuries-old Hari Om Niwas building, which was situated along the
main road of Chira Bazaar. ‘Mario saab, aaj kitna puzzle solve karega,’
the paanwallah at the entrance of the building would ask on seeing him.
Mario detested small talk; he would just smile and climb the flight
of stairs quietly.
Until the mid-seventies, this room had been the liveliest den in
town. Tresa aunty cho add’do, as it was infamously known, on the first
floor of the four-storeyed, dilapidated structure, was the place where
young men from the area were first initiated into the wasting joys of
drinking everything from hooch to country to port wines from Goa and
home-made experiments.
When Prohibition was finally abolished in 1972, the add’do, as
predicted, failed to draw revellers. After years of failed attempts to
tighten the noose around the sale of booze, the Maharashtra government
softened its stand and introduced a permit system that allowed each
person to consume a fixed amount of alcohol. The average Joe was
allowed a few pints of whisky and a dozen-odd bottles of beer per month
for an annual permit of one rupee and sixty-five paise. While the
excitement of drinking clandestinely could never match the kind of
intoxication that had the approval of the authorities, people chose the
latter as it was both convenient and legal.
Despite falling on hard times, Tresa managed the business for
another four years, sustaining it on her bangda and jhinga masala fry and
smooth wines, one of which was a potent cocktail of grape, orange,
pineapple and ginger. It’s true that she had had plans to shut down the
drinking den long before Prohibition was lifted. And had her son Mario
followed the script she had written for him, the taint of running this
add’do would have been replaced by something more phenomenal and
historic.
A year after his father, David Lawrence, died, Mario had been sent
to a boarding school in Panchgani, a hill station not very far from the
city, where kids of the rich and famous, especially British officers,
studied. Tresa enrolled her son with the fat compensation money she had
received from the shipping company following her husband’s death—his
body had never really come home. The intent was to keep Mario away
from the gruelling life of the city and the tormenting memories of his
father. She assumed that the steady pension she got each month from the
Bombay Fire Brigade would help cover the exorbitant school fees. Far
from it. She was soon drowning in debt. When nothing worked, Nancy,
her friend from Goa who now lived in Mazagaon, introduced her to
Natraja Mudaliar of Sion Koliwada.
The moment the shrewd yet affable Natraja met Tresa, he knew
she’d leave no stone unturned to do this job right. He offered her a large
sum of money to sell the hooch liquor that he was brewing at his
distillery.
Aware that her stuck-up neighbours, who considered themselves
nonpareil in Bombay’s Catholic community, would not entertain her
damaging enterprise, a desperate Tresa rented a tiny space a stone’s
throw from Cavel and made it the base for her liquor haven. There were
several road-blocks, but her presence of mind helped her avoid them.
On Natraja’s suggestion, she collected her hooch in a rubber tyre
tube that she’d strap around her waist and shield under a flowing,
umbrella dress to pull off the pregnant look. She managed it well until
one day, Rajesh Pyaare, the driver of the BEST bus that she took for her
trips between Wadala—where Natraja’s man sold her the supply—and
Chira Bazaar, noticed that she had been pregnant for over eighteen
months. When he confronted her, Tresa bribed him with free drinks at
her den. Some time after that, Rajesh asked her to enlist the help of his
cop friend, who would dress in plain clothes and accompany her to
Bombay Central, forewarning her of any bandobast ahead. He was
rewarded with a monthly hafta of two rupees. Soon, Tresa developed a
tight network of cops and informants who worked with and for her.
In Chira Bazaar, she earned the moniker of Chikni aunty; her pretty
face gave her this distinction. Most men from Cavel, though, continued
to address her only as Tresa aunty, scared that their wives would take
offence.
Twelve years into the business, when Mario was at Sir JJ School of
Arts, Tresa finally bought the room for a few thousand rupees from the
profits she had accrued. She had done so assuming that her son, who was
studying to become a sculptor, would most likely need a space to work.
Her plan was to shut shop as soon as he graduated. Mario was aware of
the ridicule his mum had suffered, but he never held it against her and
also promised her a way out of it soon.
 ‘This will end, mama. I promise,’ he told her.
Indeed, Mario had turned into a fine, handsome man, very much in
the likeness of his father. Despite hanging around with the rich brats
from school, many of whom were his close friends, he never dared to
smoke or take a fancy to the bottle. Instead, he invested all his free time
engaging in the arts. Apart from sketching, he also had the rare talent of
transforming a canvas with his bare hands. Where most people used a
brush, he painted with his fingers, achieving the same, if not better,
finesse in his strokes. After bagging several awards in high school for his
drawings, he won a scholarship to JJ, which stood grandly opposite the
regal Gothic-style station, Victoria Terminus and returned to Bombay,
where Tresa had foreseen a bright career for him.
Despite shielding Mario from hardship, Tresa couldn’t prevent the
fate that awaited the young man, when he befriended Ranjana Banerjee,
the girl he would loose his heart and mind to.
When the gorgeous Ranjana met Mario in college, her agenda was
clear—she wanted a new Marxist disciple to fuel her Communist cause.
Mario’s shy and sensitive spirit quickly warmed to the literature she was
espousing. By the time they were in the final year, love happened, and
their politically charged sculpting sessions quickly extended into
passionate nights of revelry in the Colaba home where she lived, with
her grandmum’s visually challenged sister. The old lady was oblivious to
the affair, as the sharpness of her mind had been obstructed by her lack
of sight.
‘You should come and meet my mama,’ Mario told Ranjana one
night while they were in bed. ‘You know, she fooled the cops all her
life,’ he sniggered.
‘Really! How?’ Ranjana asked, taking a sip of the brandy she had
poured for herself. She placed the glass to Mario’s lips, but he pushed it
aside. ‘I don’t drink. How many times have I told you, Ranji?’
‘Arre … just one sip.’
‘No, please.’ His irritation showed.
‘Achcha, forget that. You were telling me how your mother fooled
the cops,’ she said, placing the glass on his chest, the soft hair on his
skin twirling in loops around it.
 ‘For that you have to come home. I know you will love her. By the
way, did I tell you she makes the best wine in the world?’
‘You don’t drink, how would you know?’ she mocked.
‘Ranji, my house is like a wine cellar. It certainly smells like one,’
he said. ‘I can tell you when the fermenting has gone bad, and when it
hasn’t. I know the difference just from that smell.’
‘No wonder you don’t drink. You are tired of breathing it daily.’
They laughed together; the sudden movement of his chest caused
the drink to spill all over Mario’s skin, stinging him slightly. ‘I am not
wasting any of that alcohol,’ Ranjana said, her warm tongue already
gliding through the wiry strands of hair on his chest. They went back to
making love, this time more passionately.
But Ranjana had a past that was also very much her present. She
had kept Mario in the dark about having being married as a child to a
man thirteen years older than her. The bespectacled and righteous Sreejit
Banerjee, who lived in Durgapur, had been an ardent supporter of
women’s rights. When Ranjana had expressed her interest to study in
Bombay, he had encouraged her to follow her dreams, provided she
returned home after graduating to start a family with him. She was
ashamed of how easily she had let her fluttering heart blind her to the
reality that waited back home—the one that she owed this new life to.
Torn between her lover and her husband, Ranjana was forced to
make a choice before things got serious. She dropped out of college
barely two months before the finals, leaving the city forever. Mario
never knew. He spent several days wandering about in Colaba, only to
later learn from Ranjana’s grand-aunt that she had moved lock, stock and
barrel to her hometown and settled down with her husband of ten years.
Many years ago, when Mario was still a child, Dr Ralph McGowan,
the Anglo-Indian doctor from Chira Bazaar, had urged his parents to
‘shield his nerves’. Tresa had never not taken those warnings seriously.
Mario, after all, was the centre of her universe, and he wasn’t just any
ordinary centre. He was the fulcrum of her existence, the only reason
why she had chosen to live when dying had seemed so much easier.
But in Mario’s life, there had been two centres—his art and his
heart—and both of them were so close to each other that he possibly
mistook them as being one significant whole. And so, when he lost one,
he lost everything, including his universe.
For weeks on end after Ranjana left, Mario didn’t come out of his
bedroom, and when he finally did, he announced that he was leaving
college. A week later, he stopped speaking. On Michael’s insistence,
Tresa took him to a psychiatrist at Masina Hospital in Byculla. His poor
state—the doctor termed it a nervous shock—called for immediate
admission. Tresa had never known of Ranjana and wasn’t able to
comprehend what exactly had gone wrong with her son.
Call it the convenience of memory, but when Mario recovered four
weeks later, he could not remember anything about the woman he had
loved. But the wound was so grave that at the age of twenty-two, he was
no longer the same spirited young man who had returned to Bombay to
pursue a career in the arts. With Ranjana’s sudden exit, he lost two
centres, and without them, the geometry of his life was completely awry.
He forgot how to make magic with his fingers.
Thirty years on, Mario was a different person. He invested his
intelligence in solving puzzles and crosswords. At 7.15 a.m. sharp, he
would unlock the door of his room at Hari Om Nivas and switch on the
tiny bulb that hung tenaciously from the ceiling right below the fan.
There was only one small window in the tiffin-box-like space, and the
sunlight that peered through the iron grille painted the room in just
enough light to see the objects that occupied it. The wall adjacent to the
door was stacked with dust-layered books, many of which were
dictionaries and thesauruses. Think of the best names in the industry, and
you’d find the hardbound copies here—Collins, Oxford, Cambridge,
Merriam-Webster, Longman, Macmillan. Even the recently published
American edition of Reader’s Digest’s Success With Words had made its
way into Mario’s collection. Right next to these books was another
haphazard pile of crossword guides—Mario’s most treasured posession
among these was the 1949 edition of The Complete Crossword Reference
Book, which he had purchased from Suleman Botawala, owner of
Smoker’s Corner, one of the most unassuming bookstores in the city.
Suleman had started his passion project in 1953 in the foyer of the
family-owned Botawala Chambers on Sir Pherozeshah Mehta Road,
Fort. Soon, the store became the haunt of bibliophiles looking for rare,
unusual reads. The most purchased were the DC and Dell comics,
American and British magazines, the romances of Mills & Boon and
popular pulp fiction, with James Hadley Chase and Surender Mohan
Pathak’s books topping the list.
Mario, who went about the city as and where his feet took him, first
read about Smoker’s Corner in the Illustrated Weekly magazine in the
late seventies. As soon as he went there, he struck up an unlikely
friendship with Suleman.
The latter was senior to him by a decade or more, but their shared
interest in books made the age gap irrelevant. Mario would visit the store
every Saturday afternoon, and the two would enjoy endless chats on the
edge of the lofty spiral staircase inside the building over a cup of cutting
chai, before discussing the new books that Suleman had procured for the
store. Mario was also a patron of Smoker’s Corner’s lending library,
where one could borrow books for as minimal a fee as three rupees.
‘Don’t even pay a paisa. Saab won’t like it,’ Suleman’s staffer told
Mario when he tried paying upfront. ‘You are Suleman saab’s dost first,
customer baad mein.’
If the books in his room were a gift of the benevolence of his friend
at Smoker’s Corner, the several empty whisky bottles that were strewn
around were the vestiges of Tresa’s past. It had been over ten years since
she shut shop. When Mario started using the room for reading and his
puzzle-solving pastime, Tresa asked him to give all the bottles to the
raddiwallah.
‘You take extra money from bottles, baba. Buy books,’ she said.
One would think that Mario was too lazy to dump them, or never really
cared. But the bottles had stories written all over them, some of which
read like his own. After Mario had recovered from his illness, he decided
to help his mum for want of anything better to do. He sat in the den most
evenings, relishing the banter of the drunk, whiny men. Heartbreak.
Unemployment. Debts. The list of problems was endless. Listening to
them helped keep away the dark cloud that hovered above him and
threatened to burst inside his head.
Mario was a fighter. He was aware of his manic-depressive cycles
that, among the happy highs and loathful lows, often drove him to the
edge and made him feel suicidal. But he had a mother to take care of, so
he struggled. He had never taken to drinking, and now avoided it more
ferociously, because his doctors had told him it could aggravate his
condition. Comfort, however, came from watching others intoxicate
themselves. These broken objects of memory now reminded him of the
people who had once been broken like him.
As soon as Mario entered the room, he would dump the papers on
the table, pull over the unsteady wooden stool from the corner and,
chewing on the tip of his pen, begin wracking his brain. Every two
hours, Ramesh chaiwallah would quietly walk in, place a glass of cutting
chai on the table and hurry off. Of late, cryptic crosswords had become
quite popular among word-puzzle enthusiasts. Cryptics were tricky
because each clue was a puzzle in itself. The cryptic clue, in fact, was
just an attempt at misguiding you, because it didn’t ever lead you
directly to the solution.
‘You have to solve the cryptic clue first to find the clue,’ Mario
once explained to Michael.
Once you finished the puzzle, you were also expected to coin a
‘cryptic clue’ for a word that was suggested in the crossword. Mario had
a reserve of cryptic clues and so was always a step ahead of the game.
It was an isolating hobby, this puzzle. And a vexing one too. The
unusual map of white and black squares that owed its symmetry only to
words stared at you almost mockingly, teasing you while you struggled
and strained your brain for that right combination of letters to fill the
grid. It was created to challenge the brain. One gone. Fifty-nine more to
go. Horizontal. Vertical. Criss-cross. Even one empty square could pull
your entire game down.
When he successfully finished a crossword, Mario would fill the
same answers in the other three copies of the newspaper he purchased.
The cycle would be repeated with the other newspapers as well. By two
in the afternoon, or sometimes even before that, his first task was done.
He’d then go to the post office and mail multiple entries, marking them
from the addresses of the residents at Bosco or Lobo Mansions. Most
newspapers decided the winner based on lots, so it made sense to send as
many entries as possible. The Coutinhos, Ellena Gomes, Rose Maria and
Annette da Cunha were in the know about Mario’s obsession, and were
happy to oblige. If and when their names popped up in the winners’ list,
which was very often, Mario would collect the prize money on their
behalf. When he won a little extra, he would buy a packet of mava cake
from the Irani bakery, Kyani & Co., for his neighbours. ‘You are lucky
for me again,’ he’d inform them.
Sometime during the second week of May 1987, Merlyn Coutinho
received a mail from a city tabloid, Bombay Beats , where Mario had
sent many an entry in her name. The letter read:

Dear Mrs Merlyn Coutinho,

We have noticed that you are a regular contributor to our
crossword section. Your knack with cryptics and the jumbo
crosswords has left all of us in the editorial department
impressed. If you are keen and currently unoccupied on the
job front, we’d like to discuss a business proposition that we
think would benefit both you and our newspaper. Irrespective,
our editor, Naresh Swaminathan Raman, is keen on meeting
you on the 25th of this month, at 4 p.m. at our Tardeo office.
We look forward to seeing you.

Regards,
Rita Rodrigues,
Secretary to Mr Naresh Swaminathan Raman,
Editor, Bombay Beats

Merlyn showed the letter to her husband when he came home later
that night after a long day at work. Michael had a few more years to go
before retirement, and had been recently promoted to news editor. His
tasks now oscillated between thinking of fresh story ideas and delegating
them to the reporters, and writing daily editorials.
When he read the letter, his lips curved in a thin smile. Why hadn’t
he bothered to promote Mario’s talent like this, he thought to himself?
Naresh had been an acquaintance during Michael’s early years at The
Express . Like him, Naresh covered politics, though for The Free Press .
When they met at press briefings or events, they’d always chat.
 ‘Naresh is quite a gentleman,’ he told his wife. ‘My gut says this is
going to be good for Mario,’ he added, sensing an opportunity here.
The next morning, Michael rang up Naresh to tell him of the real
genius behind the crosswords. After Naresh heard the entire story, he
was even more impressed. ‘What are you saying, Michael? Bring this
man to me now,’ he said.
It took some effort and cajoling, but Michael managed to drag
Mario to Bombay Beats that very evening.
The newsroom was a delight to observe. The clickety-clack of noisy
typewriters, created by the speedy punching and lifting of keys, gave the
office a rhythm of its own. A couple of scribes, mostly uppity sub-
editors who were yet to get their daily stream of copy to edit, circled
around a table and were engrossed in a heated debate.
Apart from a few scattered words, Michael and Mario, who were
waiting outside Naresh’s office, couldn’t make head or tail of the
conversation.
‘Armchair journalism,’ Michael said wistfully. ‘This happens in the
newsroom all the time. Just give these subs a stage, and they think they
can change the world with their opinions,’ he added, as if he was duty-
bound to explain the strange ways of his ilk.
Mario smirked, unsure whether his opinion on the subject would
even count. He had never worked in an office and wasn’t sure if he was
cut out for it. The only time he had held a real job was when he used to
give maths and science tuition to Michael’s children Sarah and Ryan.
They were both adults now, and working professionals like their father.
Ryan already had his migration documents in place; he was moving to
Canada very soon. His sister had only recently moved there, after
marriage.
‘Mike, what do you think he has in mind?’ Mario asked after a long
silence.
‘Well, he didn’t tell me either.’
‘If it’s a job or something, you already know my views.’
‘I am not going to push you into anything, Mario, and you know
that. But we should at least know what this business proposition is about.
If you aren’t comfortable, you can always say no.’
‘Hmm …’
 Naresh was a pleasant-looking, amiable man from Madras. He may
have been very scholarly, and his political pieces always reflected that,
but he was also easy-going, drawn mostly to the ideas of youngsters, and
understood the pulse of Bombay like nobody else. It made him the
perfect candidate to lead a tabloid.
Michael and he were meeting after many years, but he didn’t look
very different from the last time they had met. The only thing heavy
about his tall and lean frame was his beige suit, which immediately made
him look like a man of position. Michael was almost embarrassed to sit
down for fear that the bulk of his belly would show.
When Michael commented about how fit he looked, Naresh joked,
‘Arre yaar, we are idli-sambar people. Never ate an animal in our life.
Where is the scope for fat?’
The joviality continued, making the meeting seem less formal.
The offer was simple: ‘We want indigenous crosswords.’
Two years after its launch in 1979, Bombay Beats was the only
paper in the city to offer giant crosswords, which were clear winners
among readers. The crossword supply came from an award-winning
crossword-maker in London, whose services were also enlisted by
several newspapers abroad.
‘But we are a Bombay paper, yaar, and we need local flavour to win
more fans like you,’ Naresh told Mario. ‘I want Sridevi, Shiv Sena and
vada pav in my crossword. I need someone to dig out names of things,
places and people from the gullies of Bombay and fit them into these
square grids. It should be about our culture, people and food, yaar, not
about the Big Ben and the Queen or that English breakfast. Forty years
since Independence, and we are still not decolonised. You know what I
mean?’ He spoke on the subject with the same passion that Mario had
for playing the game.
When he had finished with his over-enthusiastic spiel, Naresh said,
‘I think you can make these puzzles. You have it in you, Mario.’ He
offered Mario an upfront salary of two thousand five hundred rupees. It
wasn’t a paltry sum for generating one crossword puzzle five days a
week.
But while the offer was great, Mario had his doubts, and there were
many.
 ‘Mr Raman, I have never made a crossword before. I am a
crossword solver, not a creator,’ he said.
‘Correct me if I am wrong, but haven’t you studied it to the tee?’
Naresh asked.
‘Yes, maybe.’
‘Then why do you doubt yourself, mister?’ Naresh asked.
‘Can I be honest, Mr Raman? I am not cut out for an office set up.
And at fifty, it feels like a late start for me,’ Mario said earnestly, hoping
that Naresh would change his mind.
‘Better late than never, boy,’ Naresh said. ‘And wait, you are fifty?
You look like you’re in the late-thirties. Tell me, do you have kids?’
‘No,’ Mario replied hesitantly. He wanted to mention that he wasn’t
married either, but held back.
‘Aah, no wonder. Do you see these grey strands on my head? They
are a gift from my teenage son,’ Naresh joked. Mario chuckled. The ice
had thawed.
Tresa Lawrence could barely contain herself when Michael broke
the news to her. At seventy-five, she had settled for happiness in the little
things—like when her son helped her make wine, now distributed to
wedding caterers, or when they’d go to his favourite garden in the
evenings so she could exercise her muscles, or the last time, five years
ago, when they went to Goa together. While she had once wished he had
a job, and that he was married and had children, she had resigned to this
fate as her own doing.
‘You saying, my baba got job?’ she asked Michael again, to be
doubly sure.
‘Yes, aunty, and now he is going to work in a newspaper like me.’
‘But it is safe, no?’ she enquired. ‘No goonda will be after him?’
Tresa remembered an incident from five years ago when Michael had
written about the rise of underworld goons from Bhendi Bazaar, and how
they had all the politicians in their pockets. A few days later, the same
goons came looking for Michael at Bosco Mansion and threatened all the
residents with dire consequences if they did not turn him in. But none of
them gave in. They said he had moved out a long time ago.
Michael had been holidaying with his family in Goa then, and had
been unaware of what happened. When they returned, he sought police
protection, which he was granted for a while. To save himself more
trouble, he grew a beard, and the disguise served him well. It was only a
matter of time before he became too fond of his facial hair and refused to
let go of it.
‘No, no, aunty, don’t worry. Mario is not writing about the mafia.
He is only going to make crosswords.’
On 20 May, instead of going into his dungeon at Hari Om Niwas,
Mario left for work at 8.30 a.m. sharp. Tresa had woken up early that
day and walked all the way to Cross Maidan, nearly a kilometre from
home, to light a candle at the cross that came to the aid of many in their
hour of need. She returned home right on time to pack her son the dabba
his father had been most fond of: dal—she called it dol—and rice with
dried bombil pickle.
Excited as she was, she couldn’t believe that after all these years,
her son, like many other men his age, would have a nine-to-five job. She
had aged quickly after downing the shutters on her add’do and withered
further when her son developed an unhealthy obsession for solving
puzzles. Now, if only Mario would settle down and give her a grandchild
soon, she’d be able to go to heaven and show her husband her face.
Wishful thinking, after all, felt like the order of the day.
Mario had found his raison d’être. He had initially requested a few
weeks of preparation before the crosswords went live. Once he was
ready and Naresh, a cross-enthusiast himself, was satisfied with the
product Mario had created, the order came: ‘Let’s go to print.’
In the span of a few months, the ‘Bombay Jumbo Crossword by
Mario Lawrence’ became a super hit. Mario’s perspicacity with word
puzzles and his own interest in the history of the city made his job
effortless. On average, the tabloid received over one hundred and fifty
entries. And despite balancing two tasks—that of creating the
crosswords and sifting three winners daily—Mario remained
imperturbable.
Tresa was basking in his success. As she walked through D’Lima
Street, her market bags in hand, she could hear everyone say aloud,
‘Chikni aunty’s son is now the King of Crosswords.’
 10

LETTING GO
February 1976

B
enjamin da Cunha had to die. He was plain evil. The man had the
same effect on the Coutinho family as Amjad Khan’s character
Gabbar Singh had on the villagers of Ramgarh in Sholay . Michael
Coutinho had watched the film thirteen times already, twice with his son
Ryan and on many occasions alone at Liberty Cinema—a grand theatre
built in the Art Deco style—near Marine Lines, so he could witness
Gabbar’s death play out on the seventy-mm screen.
The beard apart, Gabbar’s swollen eye bags, protruding belly and
villainous disposition called to mind his brother-in-law. Not to mention
that cruel, rolling laughter that engulfed Bosco Mansion every night after
Benjamin got drunk. Michael truly wanted him dead. And considering
the number of times he had attended Benjamin’s funeral in his dreams,
one could only imagine how desperately he had wished for the reality.
That wait ended on 14 February 1976, on the feast of St Valentine.
Decades later, this day took on an unholy life of its own when men from
a saffron brigade in Bombay went about trampling over the hearts of the
city’s romantics. They couldn’t fathom how a Western idea had won
favour among the youth when it was the greatness of their Maratha
warrior king, whose birthday followed a few days later, that should have
been celebrated. In their politics of hate, they spared no one. They
destroyed shops, crushed roses, pulled the cotton out of heart-shaped
cushions, and ripped apart cards filled with moving verse. Lovers
suffered the most. At Marine Drive, where they sat perilously within the
open gaps of the cemented tetra-pods, hanging between life and death to
enjoy a private moment of sweetness, they were pulled from each other’s
embrace abruptly, dragged onto the promenade and beaten to pulp until
they swore to never repeat this ‘vulgar’ show of love again.
V-Day in the city became synonymous with Violence Day. Michael
described the slew of unfortunate events as ‘the curse of Benjamin’, who
had chosen to die on this very day.
Death came quietly. Benjamin succumbed to a massive cardiac
arrest, just like his enemy, Joe. Only, he had been in a drunken stupor,
fast asleep.
Dr Pravin Desai had always thought his patient’s ruptured liver
would kill him. All the alcohol Benjamin had flushed into his system had
done irreparable harm to that organ. The doctor had warned that it could
get worse if he did not give up the vice. But Benjamin’s life, marriage
and upsetting musical career had mostly veered in unpredictable
directions. His death wasn’t going to be different.
On the morning when Benjamin was found lying motionless in bed,
a hysterical Annette had come running down to her brother’s flat to
break the news. Her relationship with Michael had hit a new low after
Joe’s death, and they barely spoke. Yet today wasn’t the kind of day to
hold grudges. To her shock, Michael remained unmoved.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, indifferent to her sobbing.
‘He is dead,’ she broke down. ‘My husband is dead, and you are
asking me what to do. How can you be so stone-hearted?’
‘See, I don’t know how I can help,’ Michael lied. ‘If it’s money you
want, I will have Merlyn send it. I am sure the daCunhas will want to
handle the funeral arrangements.’
Michael didn’t mean a single word of what he had said, but hate
and anger had been festering within him since Joe’s death six years ago.
He didn’t want to let go of an opportunity to remind his sister that her
moment of comeuppance had finally arrived. He succeeded. Annette
hadn’t expected her brother to react the way he did; she hurled a string of
abuses at him and stormed out of his home, banging the door behind her.
‘What a bitch!’ he murmured. ‘Husband has died, but she will still
go about banging things in my house.’
 ‘You gone mad re?’ Merlyn reprimanded her husband. It was a
Saturday; Sarah had gone to work—she was training as an accountant at
a bank—and their son had left for college just a few minutes earlier.
Worried for her imprudent sister-in-law, she rushed to the kitchen, turned
off the fire on the stove and hurried after Annette, who was howling like
a madwoman.
While the mood in the Coutinho home had turned sombre, the rest
of Cavel was feeling celebratory. It was the seventy-fifth birthday of
their dearest priest Fr Augustine Fernandez, who thirty-one years ago
had miraculously escaped from the ‘fires of hell’.
Fr Augustine had long ceased to be the parish priest of Our Lady of
Hope. In 1955, he was transferred to another parish. In the next two
decades, he moved three churches between Colaba and Anderi—most
Goan Catholics in the city were oblivious to the ‘H’ in Andheri, just as
they were to the ‘Ra’ in Bandra, choosing to call the suburb Bandruh.
‘The parishioners in Anderi keep hoping that he repeats the miracle
there,’ Joana Misquitta told her friend Ellena during one of their tea-time
gossip sessions. ‘You know what they did? They kept two huge candles
in front of him during the Easter vigil.’
‘You aren’t telling me they did it deliberately, are you? But wait!
Who told you that?’
‘Don’t you remember Alan Vaz? He is married to a girl from that
parish in Marol in Anderi.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember. But, oh! That’s so horrible,’ said Ellena.
‘I know, Elle. Imagine putting the priest at risk just for a miracle!’
Fr Augustine was now living in a far-flung village in Vasai. He was
spending his retirement years learning Marathi from the local East
Indian villagers, while penning a memoir on the life of a priest, who had
experienced Jesus’ miracle. This, he confessed to Michael, was being
written on the insistence of fellow priests who had heard the marvellous
Christmas story of 1945.
‘It’s going to be a tell-all book,’ he told Michael, with whom he had
shared a close rapport over the years. ‘I am going to narrate the truth and
put an end to all those rumours. You will edit it, son, won’t you?’
What truth? Michael wondered. Fr Augustine himself believed he
had been saved from the demon and was on a guilt trip for years because
he had skipped a few verses during the Bible reading. If Michael were to
edit the book, he would re-write the story entirely. But the lie was too
deeply embedded in Cavel’s memory to be edited or re-written.
Now that Fr Augustine was turning seventy-five—an extraordinary
feat for someone the Cavelites thought should have been dead years ago
—he was invited to the church of that little miracle to celebrate a
thanksgiving mass. It was to be followed by a get-together of all the
parishioners in the compound of Pope’s Colony.
The Goan Catholic Club had long been rendered unusable for
parties or social gatherings. Though the building was repaired twice,
people were too scared to put themselves and their guests at risk. So it
now served as a space for Bible sessions, and not more than ten people
thronged the hall at any given time. Benjamin da Cunha’s Parsi sister-in-
law, Perin da Cunha, led the sessions here. She had converted to
Catholicism before marrying Hubert fifteen years ago.
When Perin Irani, the fair lady from Dadar Parsi Colony, moved to
Cavel, a lot of hearts had skipped multiple beats. She was quite literally
a beauty from another world. The obsession with white skin—paklos, as
fair-skinned people were called in Konkani—was a trait that came with
being Indian and most importantly, Goan. It wouldn’t have otherwise
taken the Portuguese four hundred years to leave the Indian Catholic
heartland.
But Perin was not just white, she was also a looker. It felt as if the
gods had worked on every bit of her face very patiently. One could
drown in those almond-shaped grey eyes and sink in the long, endless
river of her eyebrows and still find a reason to rise and brush against her
soft pink lips. And she had to only smile for those cheeks to glow a rosy
pink. Then, of course, there was her hourglass figure, never once
compromised in her embroidered gara sarees, which she wore only with
sleeveless blouses.
Perin no longer drew that kind of attention when she walked down
D’Lima Street. Though still pretty, she made little effort now to impress.
She ditched those sarees for cotton dresses to hide her thick waist. And
she didn’t even bother painting her lips anymore. The aristocracy of her
past had vanished from her face.
 In Cavel, she was now described as the most pious person in the
neighbourhood. She made it a point to attend mass each morning on
weekdays. On Sundays, she’d spend the entire day in church, teaching
the kids at catechism class, attending the Legion of Mary meeting, and
practising with the choir for next Sunday’s mass.
But this piety took a backseat in the evenings because Perin, like
her brother-in-law, had a drinking problem. She had a deep sorrow from
which she would only find escape in the bottle. There were days when
she’d join Benjamin at the Kit Kat bar, setting rumour mills turning. The
possibility of an affair was highly improbable. She enjoyed Benjamin’s
company because he was the only person who admired her holy ways
while also encouraging her recklessness with liquor.
It was Perin who came to Annette’s mind when she ran out of her
brother’s home. Like everyone else, Annette too had believed that her
husband and Perin were having an affair. The couple had spent many
nights arguing, fighting and screaming their lungs out over this. But in
his death, all this was forgiven and forgotten. If Perin really loved him,
she would know of her pain, Annette told herself. What she needed right
now was a friend to share her grief with, not a brother to mock her
choice of husband.
She made a dash for the second floor of Lobo Mansion to meet the
da Cunhas, Merlyn a few steps behind her.
Only Perin and Hubert lived in this once over-populated home.
Benjamin’s parents had died a few years earlier, just six months apart,
and the other brothers, over the course of the last ten years, had moved
to the suburbs for want of space.
Perin had no children and this was often blamed on her drunken
escapades. Nobody, however, knew that her husband was the cause of
her distress, not even the parish priest to whom she religiously went for
confession every week, unburdening herself and discussing her
hundredth failed attempt to abstain from alcohol. Hubert, she had found
out, was having an affair with his boss’ wife. Hotel rooms were booked
weekend after weekend. Perin, who had abandoned both family and faith
for this man, was forced to find solace in God first, and when that didn’t
help, in alcohol.
 The two women seemed to have caught Perin at the wrong time.
She was busy making chutney sandwiches for Fr Augustine’s birthday
celebrations in the evening. Around three hundred chicken puffs and
chocolate-walnut cake slices were already on their way from her father’s
Irani bakery. She couldn’t conceal her excitement about the evening and
was prancing from the dining table to the kitchen, with the butter knife
and jar of chutney, unaware of the visitors waiting for her in the drawing
room. Shanti, her housemaid, came to call her. ‘Annette tai is crying.’
This was routine. Annette had on several occasions in the past come
to Lobo Mansion with a litany of complaints about the ‘devil-of-a-child’
they had raised. Perin assumed that Benjamin had beaten up his wife
again. Though annoyed that Annette had disturbed her sandwich-
making, Perin rehearsed words of comfort as she made her way out.
What she saw in front of her was a heap of misery. Annette was on
the rocking chair, her hair dishevelled and eyes puffed up. Merlyn was
on the floor, plying her with platitudes in Konkani.
‘Good heavens, what happened? Is that Benji boy drinking in the
mornings now?’ Perin asked. Even as she said this, she realised she had
been complicit in the crime and held back, half embarrassed.
But at least she didn’t drink in the mornings, she assured herself.
‘He is dead. Our Benji is dead,’ Annette cried out, breaking Perin’s
chain of thought.
‘What!’ she said, shocked.
‘Cardiac arrest,’ Merlyn replied.
It took a while before the news could sink in.
‘Let me … let me call Hubert,’ Perin said.
But suddenly she remembered that her husband was in Lonavla
with his lady love and would only arrive in time for Fr Augustine’s
birthday party. So she added, as if speaking to herself, ‘First, I will
inform the rest.’
Perin calmly reached for the telephone and swivelled the dial to call
Benji’s older brother, Anthony. As she spoke with him, Annette couldn’t
help but notice that Perin didn’t seem very affected.
When she put the receiver down, Annette dared to ask, ‘Aren’t you
devastated, Peru? We lost our Benji.’
 ‘I … I am, of course,’ Perin said hesitantly, unsure of what to say.
‘But your loss is greater.’
By now Annette had lost all her ability to think straight. ‘What do
you mean, bitch?’ she hollered. ‘Wasn’t it into your drunken arms that he
would fall each night? Didn’t he spend all of yesterday making love to
you while Hubert was away? And now you can’t grieve? You can’t cry?’
Perin’s ears were singeing. Merlyn was aware of the rumours, but
never gave them much credence. She was probably as appalled as Perin.
‘Oh saiba!’ she muttered under her breath.
‘I won’t tolerate such accusations,’ Perin said, her body shaking.
‘This is the truth, you bitch,’ Annette said. She was all set to jump
at Perin but Merlyn held her tight, and with the help of Shanti, dragged
her out of the house.
When they left, Perin slumped to the floor. The glass jar of chutney
she had been holding fell down and cracked, rolling and spilling a
mixture of green all over the ground. The air silently mingled with the
pungent smell of a mélange of freshly ground coriander leaves, mint
leaves and green chillies. Perin tried to save the chutney from spreading,
but a shard of glass from the broken jar pierced the flesh of her ring
finger. She let herself bleed, and when she was tired, she took a mound
of the spicy paste, now mixed with her own blood, and started to dab it
all over her body. Her white skin was flushed and burning.
Her eyes turned moist, but she didn’t cry. A few minutes later, she
picked herself up, washed and cleaned her wound and went back into the
kitchen. She was going to miss Benji, but first she had to make fresh
chutney.
The rest of the da Cunha family, which was in any case heading to
town for the priest’s birthday, thought it made sense to wrap up the
funeral as soon as possible so that it didn’t affect the momentous
celebrations of the evening.
Anthony da Cunha made a quick call to Michael and requested him
to reach out to the undertaker in the neighbouring lane of Dabul to make
arrangements for the coffin.
‘We can’t waste time or everything will get delayed,’ Anthony told
him. Before Michael could hang up, another request came in. ‘Could you
please also arrange for the obituary in an afternoon paper? Since you are
a journalist, it would be easier.’
‘See, this is proof. Everybody wants to get rid of that bloody man,’
Michael told his wife as he hung up.
‘Baba, you don’t start re, please,’ Merlyn said. She was still
recovering from what had happened with Perin. When she told her
husband about it, he cursed the life out of his sister.
‘Huh! That woman is dragging Perin down now,’ he said. ‘And who
the hell is she to say that? Didn’t you see her romping around with Joe in
the bazaar?’
‘Forget it re …’
‘I am warning you, Merlyn, keep away from her. She is bad
company.’
Whenever strange things happened in Cavel, Fr Augustine had been
at the centre of it. Here he was now in the place of that haunting memory
from over three decades ago, where, along with his birthday, a plan for a
funeral was underway.
Barely had his driver parked his Padmini outside Our Lady of Hope
when he saw Michael come out of the church office.
‘Son, long time,’ he called out from inside the car. Fourteen years
had passed since Michael had last met the priest in person.
The vastness of time had shown itself. Fr Augustine had shrivelled;
the creases on his face were stronger and more pronounced.
Their conversations had suffered the blow of distance with letters
that were few and far between. Michael’s mails were mostly about work
and the political events unfolding in the city. For years, Fr Augustine
served as an insider to the community, offering Michael a steady supply
of news about the goings-on inside the Archdiocese. It was strange that
Michael trusted him with information, considering he was convinced
that Fr Augustine’s miracle was a figment of his own imagination.
Of late though, working for the press had become drab, especially
after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. It had been
months since Michael had reported on politics or religion because
everything he wrote was brutally censored anyway. He had even got his
bosses at The Express to shift him back to the news desk. Editing
meaningless copy made work at the newspaper seem bearable. It was
better than reporting about all that great work being done by Mrs Gandhi
sans criticism and about her changing taste in sarees.
The two exchanged quick pleasantries, after which Michael shared
the news that had brought him to church.
‘That banjo player, you mean? He died? Oh son! I am so sorry for
your loss,’ the priest said.
Michael nodded, struggling to not give away the immense joy this
development had brought him. ‘When’s the mass?’ Fr Augustine asked.
It so happened that on the day that the parish invited Fr Augustine
to celebrate the mass, Fr Jeremy Pereira, the parish priest of Our Lady of
Hope, had to urgently leave for Nagpur to see his mother who had taken
ill. It was unlikely then that there would be more than one mass in
church that day, unless they could make a last-minute arrangement for
another priest. The gracious and accommodating Fr Augustine offered to
hold the funeral mass at 4 p.m.—the same time as his mass had been
scheduled.
News spread like wildfire in Cavel. Parish members were livid that
Fr Augustine had thrown cold water on their preparations by deciding to
hold a funeral service when they had been planning this thanksgiving
mass for months on end.
The choir was trained by Thelma D’Costa, the piano virtuoso who
had once given her heart to the hockey superstar Lester Ferreira. Their
love story turned into one of the most passionate romances Cavel had
ever seen. The pair was inseparable once Lester was discharged from the
hospital. People would see them cuddling and kissing in every private
corner of the neighbourhood, especially at the foot of the stairs of 185,
Monte Building, where Thelma lived. She would sneak out of home late
at night and fall into the arms of her lover. He’d fondle her with his large
hands, moving his lips frantically all over her body as though he was
famished. When Thelma’s father, Gabriel Antao D’Costa, caught them
red-handed, he plucked his daughter out of this dreamy feasting and
locked her in her room for days together.
When tempers cooled, Gabriel’s wife urged him to meet Lester and
tell him to marry their daughter. ‘Before she brings us more shame,’ she
begged. Lester’s response turned Gabriel raving mad.
 ‘I don’t believe in the institution of marriage, sir,’ Lester
maintained.
A heartbroken Thelma never saw Lester again. She decided to give
herself completely to music, training young children to discover the
magic in their tiny fingers. When Lester’s wedding card was delivered to
her home a year later, she burnt it along with the many love notes he had
written to her, and scattered the ashes in the sea at Marine Drive.
Thelma never married, but she did spend much of her youth
building one of the most sonorous choirs in Bombay, comprising a
melodic mix of sopranos, altos, bassists and tenors. They called
themselves The Jubilants. When not singing in churches across Bombay,
they performed at the gymkhanas—the equivalent to sophisticated clubs
in other cities—in Marine Lines and Bandra.
For this particular mass, she had chosen some of the finest hymns
her choir had ever sung, including one of her own liturgical
compositions that she hadn’t played before. The news of the change in
service upset her plans greatly, as hers wasn’t a choir that sang for
funerals.
But if Lester hadn’t died of leukaemia three months earlier—a
relatively new disease then—Thelma would have been far from prepared
today. In his last days, Lester wrote to her and requested that she play for
him at his funeral.
‘There has never been a woman I have loved and cared for more,’
he wrote. He never offered an explanation for why he had chosen a life
with Valencia Borges, the daughter of one of the leading gynaecologists
in the city, over Thelma. But then, Thelma never wanted the answer. She
attended Lester’s funeral, and The Jubilants sang, giving a fitting tribute
to one of Bombay’s greatest sporting legends.
‘We will sing the same hymns again,’ she informed her choir.
‘That Benji bugger doesn’t deserve us,’ Tony, the lead singer, spoke
up.
‘Neither did Lester,’ Thelma pointed out. Tony knew better than to
argue.
How does one explain how the notorious look when dead? Placed
in a plywood coffin in a grey-striped suit that he had had made in the
prime of his youth when he performed only for Bombay’s glitziest,
Benjamin alias Benji alias Banjo Man shared no resemblance to the evil
and ugly soul that he had been yesterday. He looked peaceful. But if you
looked closely, you’d notice that his lips had a faint curl to them from
the shock of dying, as if even to him, death had come by surprise.
Benji didn’t have a pleasant face. He could have once been
considered charming, but years of insobriety had stolen that spark from
his eyes, leaving them permanently swollen, red and menacing. The
binge drinking also led to an odd disfigurement, and as he lay still in his
coffin, his shape looked even more revolting. Force fitted into the suit,
the tyres of his belly strained against the fabric and threatened to burst
out any moment.
As Annette fitted a rosary into the tiny depression of her husband’s
intertwined fingers, she couldn’t fathom that this was the man she had
shared her first kiss with. He who had promised her the stars and the
moon, had taught her only what it was to be in hell every day. Yet, there
was nobody else her heart felt so much compassion and affection for.
What would her life have been like if she had married Joe instead?
Could she have thus saved the living from dying and the dying from
death? She knew nothing now. A widow of fate and her own choices, it
would be a long time before Annette would reconcile herself to the fact
that she had killed two men with one impulsive decision. She drew
closer to Benjamin’s swollen face, which had not had a shave in weeks,
wanting to leave him with a kiss on his lips, but she left a peck on his
chin instead. Benjamin’s mouth was still stinking from the previous
night’s binge.
The church hadn’t seen such a huge congregation in decades. The
balcony, which was otherwise locked as the choir now sang from near
the altar, had to be thrown open. Many Cavelites who had moved to the
suburbs and even Goa had returned to celebrate the glorious symbol of
God’s miracle. People had turned out in their best clothes. Red, blue,
ochre, pink. Bell-bottoms, polka-dot shirts, miniskirts and satin flairs.
These colours and cuts were meant for a feast. Only now, in an unlikely
turn of events, the congregation was forced to sit through a funeral
service instead. If they were sad, it was for Fr Augustine, who they
believed didn’t deserve this fate. ‘The devil always tries to have his
way,’ they told each other.
 After mass, people grudgingly queued up to give their condolences
to the Coutinhos and da Cunhas before joining another line to greet their
beloved priest. By the time the family members had placed the coffin in
the hearse and prepared to leave for St Peter’s Cemetery in Haines Road,
Worli, it was already 5.30 p.m. Most of the parishioners were making
their way to the compound for the festivities.
The priest too excused himself from attending the burial, having
surmised that the majority of the congregation had been unhappy with
his decision to hold the funeral service during the thanksgiving mass.
‘I am sorry, son,’ he told Michael. ‘But you will understand, I
hope.’
There were many who, out of sheer goodwill, joined the family in
the bus that was to go to the cemetery.
While getting into the vehicle, Michael noticed Perin, her Bible in
hand, walk ahead towards the compound. Hubert, who had returned from
Lonavla just in time for the mass, followed her hastily. From this
distance, he could see Hubert reach for her arm, and pull Perin towards
the bus. A scuffle ensued and Perin shoved her elbow into Hubert’s
chest. Michael hoped nobody else had seen this spectacle.
When Hubert returned, a curious Michael went to his seat and asked
if all was well.
‘Peru won’t be joining us,’ Hubert said, ashen-faced.
‘Why?’
‘She has to distribute chutney sandwiches,’ he said, embarrassed,
and turned his head towards the window.
Two hours later, when the bus rolled back into the narrow lane of
Dr D’Lima Street and parked outside the compound, the celebration was
in full swing. It was a mega carnival of a kind that Cavel had never seen.
You couldn’t tell that, only a few hours ago, a funeral had taken place
here.
Mama Karen, whose mind had, for some time now, been playing
tricks, seemed rather sober today. She, along with Merlyn and her
grandkids, caught hold of the grieving Annette and walked her through
the milling crowd that made a sudden show of empathy.
‘Sorry for your loss,’ people kept repeating. Michael remained to
chat with a few old-time residents.
 Not very far away, somebody was yelling out numbers in a housie
game.
‘Ulta-pulta sixty-nine.’ ‘Two fat ladies eighty-eight.’ ‘Just pass
thirty-five.’ ‘Sweet sixteen.’
Oohs and aahs followed. A ten-year-old had ticked the first
numbers and was cheering loudly for herself.
‘Jaldi five taken,’ the caller said after checking the little girl’s
ticket. ‘Now watch your ticket for the top line, bottom line, middle row
and full-house. Big prizes follow,’ he went on.
‘C’mon, shake the numbers up,’ a man yelled. Everyone broke into
laughs.
At the steps of Bosco Mansion, the mourning family was obstructed
by a group of female performers invited from South Goa for the event.
They were decked in gold jewellery and dressed in the traditional pano
bhaju, the Goan outfit comprising a long garment wrapped like a sarong
(pano) and worn with a loose gold-embroidered blouse (bhaju) and a
stole called tuvalo in Konkani. The outfit went back several centuries to
a time when the Portuguese insisted that converts adapt to the European
style of dressing. The orthodox Brahmin women had found a middle
ground, incorporating a few Western sensibilities into their own. The
dolled-up ladies were rehearsing Goan mandos, popular Konkani songs
of love and longing, which they would soon perform in the middle of the
compound. When they saw the family approach, they apologised for
blocking the stairs and scattered. Once the Coutinhos had taken the
stairs, they regrouped and started singing again.
Up ahead, on a makeshift stage, the Cavel band led by Peter
Rodrigues and friends was playing the neighbourhood’s most popular
jingle: ‘Cavel, Cavel such a lovely smell. In the corner rings the church
bell, and the crowd begins to swell. Oh! Cavel, Cavel and its beautiful
belles …’
Folks had gathered to join the baan dance, which was
quintessentially Cavel. The neighbourhood invented it in the late 1930s
or so, after one of its residents attended a ballroom class in London and
found inspiration for a new choreography.
Some twenty-odd couples filed into two lines—the ladies in one
row and the men in the other—to face each other. As Peter’s song picked
up pace, the first pair held hands and then separated to go around in
circles, twisting, shaking and circling around the others in the line,
before returning to each other at the farthest end. The next pair followed
them.
Hubert found himself in the thick of this party. He swayed and
danced alone.
 11

TO LIVE IN THE SKY

January 2010

S
ome things never changed in Cavel, just like the clinking of the
cycle bell every evening at 5.45, heralding the arrival of Mr
Paowallah from Daanish’s 5 Star Bakery in Girgaum. He brought
with him an assortment of breads, khaaris and nankhatais in tarpaulin
bags balanced on the handlebar, emptying them one at a time as he
knocked on the doors of his patrons.
Since a new person was tasked with this job every few years or so,
the residents of Cavel did not feel the need to learn the names of
Daanish’s breadmen. Rather, very unimaginatively, they gave them the
title of Mr Paowallah. Pao was, in fact, an unpopular sobriquet the
Goans had earned for themselves among the locals because of their
obsession with the soft, chewy buns they ate each morning for breakfast,
with everything from butter to marinated curries from the night before—
kal chi kodi, as they called them.
When Mr Paowallah arrived this evening, Michael Coutinho was
still asleep on his rocking chair. On most days, his afternoon siesta did
not extend beyond the stipulated twenty minutes. But the nippy weather
had permitted the transgression this time.
On the first day of the New Year, Pope’s Colony, once buzzing
during the festive season, was dead silent. After Lobo Mansion was
brought down last November, and its residents moved to a cushy high-
rise in suburban Malad, life in the compound reached a lull. The
remaining residents of Cavel, some of whom continued to occupy flats
in Bosco, were either absent in flesh and blood, or as good as not around.
No one, for instance, had heard from Ellena in a while. She lived in
Goa, but had cut all contact with Cavel. Even her close friends, the
Misquittas, only received a greeting card once every year for Christmas,
in which she grudgingly shared details of the idyllic life she enjoyed in
her village.
Mario, now a sexy septuagenarian, was travelling the world; the
money continued to come in from the crosswords he made for an
international magazine and the puzzle workshops he conducted globally
for enthusiasts. He had last written to Michael a few months earlier, after
his thirty-something girlfriend in London had left him for a ‘filthy-rich
English bugger’.
‘F**k her! I’ve found another doll in Athens. You’ll like her too.
Wink, wink!’ Mario had scrawled on a postcard that showed off the
picturesque Greek island of Poros, with its white-washed homes and
cerulean sea.
The only other family at Bosco, the Braganzas, whose four children
had once driven Ellena stark raving mad with the ruckus they created at
playtime, had now sobered. The kids were all grown up and studious,
spending fewer hours getting their hands and feet dirty in the
playground. Biology had taken precedence over football for Christabell’s
twins Shanon and Sherwin, both of whom were keen on a career in
medicine. Thirteen-year-old Shawn was a professional chess player. And
little Sharon, whom Michael had taught to cycle, found herself in the
thick of a tight activity schedule, shuttling between French, ballet and
piano classes.
Michael himself, just a year shy of eighty but still not crippled by
age, once again became a family man, thanks to his sister Annette, who
moved into his home two Christmases earlier, after being psyched by the
quarrelling ghosts of her husband, Benji, and former lover, Joe.
‘These men have taken over my home, men. I don’t have a moment
of relief. You turn left, they are there. You turn right, and, Jesus, they are
still there. Oh God, baba! What do I do?’ she asked Michael over the
phone.
 The spirits, Annette believed, had started bothering her after she
stopped visiting their graves. ‘I think they got very upset,’ she said. ‘But
they should also understand. How can they expect an old lady to travel
all the way to that cemetery in Mahalaxmi? And these taxis, how much
they charge, men. They should also understand, no?’ she continued,
though Michael clearly wasn’t listening.
The haunting first began in her bedroom, when Annette woke up
one sunny morning to find the ghosts jostling for space on her bed. She
even hurt herself during the struggle, as one of them—she couldn’t be
sure which—tried to push her off the bed.
Next, she saw them in the kitchen, where they attempted to dunk
each other’s face in the vessel of milk that she had set to boil. Her most
humiliating experience, however, was when they came after her in the
toilet and fought to catch a glimpse of her bum as she squatted on her
haunches. She clutched the skirt that she had lifted to her waist for dear
life, watching the drama play out one punch at a time, even as she
continued to shit loose bricks out of fear. When she finally found the
courage to wash up and run out, the men came after her into the drawing
room and wouldn’t leave until she promised to choose between the two
of them.
‘Imagine! I had to say which bhoot is best,’ she said. That day, she
slept on the sofa and fortunately, they spared her in her dreams.
‘Delusional hag,’ her brother told her.
‘For Christ’s sake, believe me for once, baba!’
‘Believe you? You do realise that right now you sound just as stupid
as my dead wife?’ he said, having been reminded of the tantrik episode
from over twelve years ago. ‘Better go and visit some shrink. Don’t
chew my brains.’
‘Don’t you dare say that, okay? Your wife may have been crazy.
Not me,’ Annette snapped.
Michael realised that the remark had stung. To avoid an argument
he had zero patience for, he tried to switch topics, but the blood was
already racing through his sister’s veins; she cut him short and began
blasting him over the phone. ‘What would you do without me, huh?
Your kids don’t give a damn about you. The only one who felt sorry for
you, poor dear Laxmi … you drove her away. It was I … it was I.’ She
paused. ‘… Who took care of you all this while. Now it’s time for you to
look after me.’
‘Wait, what?’ Michael asked, confused.
Before he could make sense of the conversation, she said, ‘I’m
coming down to live with you.’
Michael mumbled something in feeble protest, but she had already
slammed the receiver down. And so, just like that, Annette moved into
her brother’s home on the ground floor, two suitcases in tow. She never
left again.
The hallucinations continued, and Michael would often find his
sister talking to three men, including himself, at the dining table. It was
disturbing when she’d tell him how Joe had undone the drawstrings of
his pants when Michael had been fast asleep—and it was true, somebody
had loosened them, though he suspected it was his fibbing sister—or
how Benji had sipped some whisky from his glass when he wasn’t
looking. Each time, when recalling these exchanges with her dead
lovers, she’d guffaw psychotically, so hard that Michael feared she’d gag
on her words. He contemplated getting her psychiatric help, but living
off the measly stipend that he made from writing political columns for
newspapers, he didn’t think it was wise to spend anything on his
ungrateful sister. Also, though he hated to admit it, he was enjoying this
delusionary company that Annette had brought along with her. His flat
felt like a madhouse again.
Tring, tring, tring, trinnnnng. Mr Paowallah was outside the
Coutinho residence, merrily going at their doorbell.
Michael, woken by the buzz, hollered at his sister. ‘That bloody
Paowallah. I’m going to get rid of him along with you very soon.’
Unperturbed by his vacuous threats, which were now routine,
Annette, who had started imagining herself as the boss of the house,
calmly put down the book she was reading. Throwing a nasty look at her
groggy brother, she headed for the door.
The steel latch at the Coutinhos’ home was perennially jammed,
and only Michael knew his way around its rusted lock. Annette always
struggled for a few minutes, and this annoyed her to the hilt.
‘ Kitne baar bola not to ring that bell, Mr Paowallah! Do it again
and Michael uncle will come out with his dandi and bhagao you,’ she
told the person on the other side of the door as she fiddled with the knob.
When she managed to open the door, a young man in his late teens
was standing in front of her. He was wearing an oversized black T-shirt
over a pair of distressed denims, with every strand of his hair
meticulously gelled to stand upright. The anomaly was the loaf of sliced
bread and slabs of kadak pao he was holding in both hands.
‘And who are you, my child?’ Annette asked, surprised.
‘Ramesh Paowallah’s son,’ he said, his mouth twisting and turning
as he chewed on gum. He showed absolutely no sign of remorse for
having disturbed the old lady by ringing the bell incessantly.
‘Where’s Mr Paowallah?’ Annette enquired.
‘Village,’ he responded indifferently.
‘Achcha. Next time, no ringing the bell, okay? Or Michael uncle
…’
‘… will bhagao me with the dandi. I got it, aunty. Chill pill,’ the
boy said, trying to imitate her accent, and broke into a laugh, before
handing over the bread and running to the top floor.
‘These young boys today. No manners only!’ Annette muttered,
infuriated, and slammed the door.
‘Did you warn that bugger?’ Michael asked, when he saw her come
in with the bread.
‘Arre, you’re going nuts, men, and you will make me mad with
you!’ Annette barked. Michael was amused that such a statement had
come from her.
‘I can’t go picking fights with these paowallahs. Anyway, his son
came today. I told him not to ring that doorbell again, and you know
what he did—he laughed at me, men. Idiot! What does that oversmart
kid think of himself? Let Mr Paowallah return, see what I will do.’
There were days when Annette sounded just like her mum. Her
mannerisms, her opinions, how she quibbled and the way she spoke,
ending sometimes with ‘men’—a word that has been part of the Goan
lexicon since time immemorial and used for punctuating effect instead of
a comma, full-stop, exclamation or question mark—and the way she
looked down at people from the pedestal of perfection, everything
reminded Michael of his mother. And now, here she was, losing her
mind, just like Karen.
 ‘Nice kid. I already like him,’ Michael sniggered, recalling how his
father would respond to his mum’s eccentricities—mostly amused, but
always with derision.
Irritated, Annette chucked the newspaper-wrapped pao on the side
table and was about to make a dash for the kitchen when she noticed a
brightly coloured photograph on the newsprint.
In the picture was an ultra-modern rectangular balcony jutting out
of a glass tower, which showed off the stunning view of a vast patch of
green land. Standing at the edge, with one hand resting on the glass
railing and the other holding a mug of coffee, was a seventy-something
woman soaking in the sprawling landscape in front of her. Below this
picture, in a curly font, were the words: ‘Live in the sky before it’s time.’
Had it not been for the subject of the picture, Annette would have
ignored this hyperbolic newspaper advertisement, which was trying very
hard to be affecting and moving at the cost of being insensitive to a
woman her age. But how could she ignore the face of this woman? She
looked eerily familiar.
Annette picked up the sheet of paper and took it to Michael, who
was still slightly woozy from the long nap.
‘What happened now?’ he asked, as he saw her pale face.
She handed him the newspaper and pointed to the picture. ‘Is this
her?’
Michael didn’t need more than a few seconds to recognise the
person in the photograph.
‘Peru,’ he whispered.
Residents of Pope’s Colony had last seen Perin before Benjamin’s
funeral on the evening of 14 February 1976. Rumour was that she was so
traumatised by the news of her lover’s death that she decided to leave
Cavel all at once. Her husband, Hubert, who couldn’t believe she would
abandon him, and sister-in-law Annette, who thought Perin had been
sharing her husband and bed, only added fuel to the fire. Thirty-four
years later, here she was, happily staring into the abyss like nothing had
ever happened.
‘I must say … this lady has aged gracefully,’ said Michael, gazing
at the photograph in awe.
 Perin looked plumper than he could recall, but neither time nor age
had robbed her of that smile he could see on her face. If there were a few
creases on the milk-white skin of her face, they were hidden by the pink
of her cheeks. She seemed content. Even her gold-rimmed spectacles
couldn’t contain the gleam in her eyes. She was flaunting one of those
gara sarees that harked back to the days before she married into the da
Cunha household. She was deliberately under-dressed to look like an old
Parsi granny, and the ad said so too: ‘At 74, Meher Irani, a grandma of
two, is finally living her dream.’
‘How can she look so happy?’ Annette demanded as she pored over
the ad.
‘What do you mean?’ Michael said.
‘She has no right to be happy. See what she did to that poor Hubert,
men. He died alone because of her,’ Annette said. ‘And now she’s
showing off … granny and all.’
‘Oh, please! We all know what that Hubert was up to. Bloody
romping around with his boss’ wife till she had no use for him.’
‘That’s not true. You know Benji was having an affair with her?’
‘In your dreams, he was, yes. Peru had standards, mind you,’
Michael growled.
‘Oh! Peru and all, huh? I won’t be surprised if she gave you a good
time too. Did your woman know?’
That was when Michael lost his cool. ‘Bitch, you are crossing the
line,’ he hollered.
‘Do me a favour. Stop opening that foul mouth of yours,’ Annette
snapped and dashed straight for the bedroom, locking it from the inside.
Michael could hear her howl. He knew that the photograph of Peru
looking so outrageously happy had sparked feelings of inadequacy and
insecurity in Annette. He couldn’t care less. He was glad Perin had saved
herself from a hopeless marriage and had chosen to live in the sky, even
if it was for a print advertisement.
Annette didn’t come out of the room that entire evening. At half
past nine, when the door to his son’s room still remained shut, Michael,
who wasn’t going to allow his sister’s tantrums to cause a hunger crisis
at home, called up Custodio D’Silva and ordered a fish curry.
 Custodio lived in the lane across from Bosco Mansion, in 181 Cross
Gully, which continued to house a chunk of Cavel’s Goan Catholic
population. The families there lived in cramped quarters, with no well-
defined space for a kitchen, bathroom or even a bed in which to make
love. It was this absence of basic comforts that made them seek a better
life more aggressively. This explained why the most enterprising and
hardworking of the lot from Cavel—the teachers at some of the best
convent schools, the mechanics at the high-end garages and cooks at the
city’s finest caterers and hotels—hailed from here. Yet, despite their best
efforts to rescue themselves from the small life, Michael remembered
how, in the early years, the elders at Pope’s Colony would look down
upon the people from Cross Gully, discouraging any kind of friendship
—romance in particular—with them. In her lifetime, aunty Tresa was
punched into this category, stigmatised by so many, including his mum,
much to Michael’s irritation. ‘A woman of the chawls,’ Karen called
Tresa, unimpressed by her attempts to find a ‘decent’ livelihood to
survive.
Michael had always disdained the classists from Bosco and Lobo
Mansions, who considered themselves to be of another breed of
humanity just because their homes were larger and their ancestors
wealthier or famous. What most of them ended up doing with their lives,
Benji and his sister included, was pure tragedy.
It was no surprise then that Michael had more friends from Cross
Gully than Pope’s Colony. Among the people whose company he
enjoyed was Custodio. The sixty-five-year-old used to be the head chef
on a cruise ship and retired a few years ago to start a food service out of
his home, preparing a variety of piquant Goan fish curries, mutton stews
and pork vindaloos each morning that went to people across South
Mumbai. Though he stopped taking orders by 6 p.m., he’d never refuse
Michael’s request to send him some leftover ambotik, a Goan fish curry
made with red chillies and tamarind juice, always adding an extra piece
or two of the head of the mackerel, which Michael savoured most.
When the food parcel arrived at 10 p.m., Michael was too hungry to
worry about anything else in the world, especially his sister. He got out a
plate from the kitchen and sat at the table. He tore into his kadak pav and
had started soaking it in the tangy fish curry when he heard the bedroom
door open. Annette crept into the dining hall, her eyes bloodshot from all
the crying.
‘Eat something,’ Michael said, trying hard to sound courteous, but
actually irritated that he’d now have to share his fish. She didn’t say no
—as expected—and sat down next to him. That night, they enjoyed their
meal quietly. Annette’s ghost friends didn’t interrupt for a change.
Michael had to admit that it was one of the most peaceful dinners he had
had in a while.
The following morning, frantic sounds from Annette’s room stirred
Michael from his slumber. It was 6 a.m., too early for visitors to be
bothering them. He climbed out of bed and tiptoed out, inching closer to
the door of her room to eavesdrop on the conversation. When he was
within earshot, he could hear his sister’s voice loud and clear: ‘Benji, are
you sure?’
She paused, as if to listen to someone, and then spoke again, ‘Yes,
even I don’t agree with Joe. But don’t you think we should wait?’
Again, there was a brief silence before she continued, ‘You are
actually right, men. I get you. Let me speak to baba.’
Of course, the ghosts had returned, Michael thought to himself as
he walked back to his room, sleep-deprived. He was already dreading
what was to follow. What were the two idiots planning together? Why
did the mad couple not agree with Joe, he wondered as he rested his head
on the pillow. Before his mind could spin more questions, he fell asleep.
Three hours later, Annette came into his room with a hand-written
sheet of paper in her hand. He had woken up sometime earlier and was
lying in bed, staring at the fan whirring slowly above him. On seeing her,
he remembered the conversation he had overheard in the morning and
decided not to encourage her. Behaving as if she wasn’t in his line of
vision, Michael lifted himself out of bed and took slow steps out of the
room, heading for the toilet. She followed him closely as his ageing feet
staggered through the hallway. He considered himself lucky to still not
need a stick.
‘Baba … baba, we have to talk,’ she said, walking behind him.
‘What’s it about?’ he asked, refusing to stop.
‘We have something to discuss,’ she said.
‘Who is we?’
 ‘Me and Benji,’ she responded, as if the existence of her dead
husband was the most normal thing in the world.
‘It’s about this building,’ she continued, even though Michael
hadn’t asked her to.
‘Hmm …’
‘I feel we should move out.’
‘Who is this we again?’ he asked, wary of what she was about to
say.
‘You and I, and everyone else in this building. We should go and
stay in a tall building. You know, like how everyone at Lobo’s did!’
‘And you have decided that for all of us?’ he questioned
nonplussed.
‘No, Benji and I.’
‘You know who really needs to move out?’
She didn’t respond. She knew what was coming.
‘You and your bloody Benji. Your idiot husband, he makes me want
to fart. Now get out of my way. I need to shit,’ Michael said and shut the
toilet door.
The century-old Bosco Mansion had been in the eye of a storm ever
since the residents of Lobo, afraid that their decrepit building would
soon give away, agreed with their landlord to sell the property to a
developer—a notorious goon. They settled amicably, but for peanuts.
While a massive forty-storey building was expected to come up where
Lobo Mansion used to be, the former residents accepted homes half the
size of their original flats in the suburban area of Malad, nearly thirty
kilometres from Cavel. Malad boasted a church with tens of thousands
of parishioners, making the shift out of shrinking Cavel more lucrative.
The ten residents of Lobo, convinced about the bright future that
awaited them, quietly left for their new abodes, leaving friends at Bosco
stranded. But Michael and Mario, and Christabell’s husband Shane
Braganza, the new secretary of the association formed by the Bosco
residents, were determined to not be short-changed by the greedy
developer or pressured by the landlord, who’d been harassing them ever
since Lobo Mansion was sold.
It’s true that 193-A, Bosco Mansion was withering away—the
Burma teak rotting from years of neglect. Only a few years earlier, in
2005, on the day the city had drowned in a horrifying deluge, Annette’s
kitchen window fell into Michael’s garden. Some days later, during
another downpour, part of a beam supporting her balcony collapsed and
crushed the windshield of eighty-nine-year-old widow Rose Maria’s Fiat
Padmini. The sky-blue car had been out of use for nearly fourteen years,
but Rose, who had purchased it for Joe immediately after they were
married, didn’t have the heart to sell or get rid of it. Annette apologised
to her and also promised to have the car repaired. But two days later,
Rose died of a sudden bout of fever. It was as if her soul had clung to the
car all this while.
Rose didn’t have anyone to call family. So the Catholic trust
decided to seal her property till they found a new tenant with whom
they’d sign a contract, giving them possession rights under the Rent
Control Act. One had to be foolish to put one’s money in such an old
home. No tenant came. Meanwhile, the car remained for many, many
months—rotting, rusting and changing from blue to grey to dull brown,
becoming another spooky source of entertainment in the locality.
The Braganza kids first fanned the rumour that the ghost of Rose
had taken her car for a spin inside the compound late at night. Children
from Lobo Mansion joined in the fun. Soon, other youngsters from the
nearby Pius and Monte buildings, as well as Cross Gully, began
spreading their own stories. Late one night, when nobody was watching,
a bunch of naughty teens from Cross Gully sneaked into Pope’s Colony
and spray-painted the car with the words: ‘If you touch it, my ghost will
kill you.’
One of the more artistically inclined boys even painted a danger
sign with a skeleton that looked eerily like Rose. Michael had had
enough. He called the raddiwallah and paid him one thousand rupees to
dump the car.
‘What you doing re, Mike … you paying the fellow money for the
car. He must pay you, na? He will get so much money from this raddi,’
Merlyn said, upset with his generosity.
‘If I don’t get rid of this car, Bosco will become a bhoot bangla,’ he
chided her.
But a few years later, Bosco did turn into a ghost town of sorts,
where not even the residue of its glorious years lingered.
 When Michael got out of the toilet twenty minutes later, his sister
was still waiting patiently for him near the door.
‘What’s your problem?’ he asked as he ambled out.
‘Listen to me,’ she pleaded.
Because he didn’t react, she continued, ‘You know, Benji was very
sad this morning. He came to tell me sorry about having that affair with
Perin. He is a changed man now, baba, and has promised to make up for
all the hurt he caused me and his brother.’
Michael rolled his eyes.
‘He said, “Ann, you also have the right to be happy like Perin,”’ she
continued.
‘Aah!’ Michael interrupted. ‘And he told you to shift to a high-rise.’
She nodded. ‘But this Joe doesn’t agree, men. He thinks we are too
old to relocate. Benji gave him a good scolding. One is never really too
old for anything, no?’
‘So go! Who is stopping you? Give up your flat and leave,’ Michael
said indifferently as he made his way to the kitchen to pour himself some
of the tea Annette made each morning.
‘No tea today?’ he asked when he saw an empty pot on the gas
stove.
Choosing not to respond to that, Annette went on, ‘Baba, who will
buy the house now? It’s so old. I think we should just tell that developer
that we want to move. He will find us a good home in Malad.’
‘I am not going anywhere.’
She ignored him. ‘I called your kids in the morning. They think I
am right.’
‘Who are they to decide what’s good for me?’ he asked.
‘Don’t forget, baba, their names are in your will and mine, too.
They have equal say.’
‘Done your homework, have you?’
‘More than you think,’ she taunted. ‘I also met Shane and
Christabell in the morning.’
‘That’s why you didn’t make tea today?’ Michael asked.
‘I am not your servant,’ she said. ‘I told them that we should at least
consider any offer the developer makes us. Shane told me he’d fix a
meeting with the landlord and developer if you are keen too.’
 ‘No way,’ Michael barked.
‘Most of us want it, baba. I have your kids, Benji and the Braganzas
on my side. You just have Joe,’ Annette said confidently. ‘Shane will
convince the rest.’
‘Benji and Joe are dead, you stupid lady,’ Michael snapped.
She obviously needed to get her head examined, Michael thought to
himself. But before that, he had a lot of work on his hands, including
getting more people on his side. This meant reaching out to Mario and
Ellena. Nobody would know where Mario was until the arrival of his
next postcard. Michael owned a second-hand Macbook, one that his son,
Ryan, had left behind for him the last time he visited. When he learnt
that his father still typed out his columns and couriered them, Ryan
warned him that he’d soon run out of a good occupation unless he kept
up with the times. This was the only occasion when Michael listened to
Ryan, having previously refused his son’s offer to help improve his bank
balance.
The laptop had since then only existed for the purpose of shooting
columns to editors. He wasn’t sure if Mario had an email ID of his own.
It was likely that he did, and if so, Shane would try and reach out to him
to let him know of the development.
Michael had heard of the big secrets of Google but was always
averse to digging into the web. Today, he risked its use, searching for
‘Mario “King” Lawrence, The London Times ’.
Mario had acquired the title during his heyday as a crossword-
maker; it became a permanent fixture when he got himself a passport.
Google threw up interesting results. Fortunately, the newspaper Michael
worked for had created for him a contributor’s email ID for reader
feedback. He immediately shot off a mail to Mario. The subject was very
pointed: ‘We need to save Bosco, come back.’
It had been six years since Mario returned to Mumbai. The last time
was for his mother’s funeral. Michael wasn’t sure when he’d hear from
him last, but right now, he had a bigger hurdle to overcome—that of
convincing Ellena Gomes to return.
It wasn’t like he had not tried to reconnect with her. But not with
another letter, because he wasn’t sure what he could say. Instead, he tried
calling her. But her landline number from over two-and-a-half years ago
was disconnected. Michael even contemplated going all the way to Goa
to meet her in the hope that they’d reconcile. He really missed the
friendship they had shared in those months of exchanging letters. And he
really missed her. The letters—none of their kind had ever been written
to him by any woman, not even his wife—meant something to him.
They were a collection of loving memories, arguments, reconciliations
and confessions he didn’t have the courage to part with. Yet, there was
also his wife, Merlyn, the woman he had spent a significant time of his
life loving and knowing and who meant so much more to him than
Ellena could. He could tell the difference, and so he had held himself
back in his letters to Ellena each time.
Michael found out from their neighbours that Ellena hadn’t moved
to a new place yet. She still lived in her family home in Pernem. Maybe
he should write to her. But what could he say without sounding like he
was once again being selfish, reaching out to her only in his time of
need? He twiddled his fingers the entire day, catching flashes of his
sister swinging from one room to another like she had bagged an
Olympic gold. It was only later that night, after Annette had gone to
sleep, that he picked up his pen for the first time in many years to write
to Ellena.
Dearest Butterfly, he wrote, and suddenly realising that it was
highly inappropriate, scratched it out. Dearest Ellena. No, not working
either, he told himself. Dear Ellena would be better. He took out a fresh
sheet of paper and wrote, Hi Ellena …
Hours turned into days and days into weeks, but Michael didn’t
hear from her. Meanwhile, Mario had written back almost immediately,
spelling out clearly in his email, which was copied to Shane as well as
the trustees, that he would use all his ‘might and money’ to ensure that
the building didn’t ‘go to the dogs’. Two emails followed soon after—
again copied to all the parties concerned—one announcing that he was to
land in Mumbai on 28 January, and the other that he had already found a
lawyer who would be representing Michael and him.
Shane, who, until then, was only mulling the idea of redevelopment,
was suddenly emboldened to pursue the issue. He hated the guts of these
‘two old wily men’, and decided to take them head-on. In a nasty email,
he said, ‘In the event of you planning to go to court, I have my own
posse of lawyers and officials who will show you your rightful place.’
The landlord, only too happy to sell this old property, fanned the
flames further, claiming that as per law, the final decision would rest
with the majority.
Team Shane and Team Michael were ready for battle. The former
comprised Annette, the Braganzas and Michael’s kids. The latter was too
insignificant to even be considered a spot of bother. Desperate to save
his home, Michael wrote to his kids, threatening to write them out of his
will. He didn’t mean it, but if push came to shove, he planned to use this
threat very seriously. How could they deny him the one thing he
expected of them—his happiness?
Michael wasn’t averse to change, but he also believed in the
permanence of some things, especially his hearth and home. Yet, his
stubbornness had kept him from enjoying and exploring the small
pleasures of newness, like his beautiful friendship with Ellena.
There was another reason he held on to this home so steadfastly.
Every person he had loved—his parents, his childhood sweetheart, his
best friend, his wife—had been connected to this building in some way
or the other. He could feel the residual energy of their souls, the
lingering of their warmth and conversations within the confines of
Bosco’s walls. It brought him comfort when everything else around him
seemed to be crumbling. He saw no reason to rot in a high-rise
apartment just because his crazy sister wanted to prove to another lady
that she could be as happy as she.
Mario arrived from London on the morning of 28 January, just three
days before the fate of the residents of Bosco was to be sealed at a
meeting in the landlord’s office. While Michael suggested that Mario
stay at his place—as his home needed cleaning—within a few hours, it
became apparent that Mario would flee sooner than planned. Annette
was yapping away at full volume with her ghost friends, bitching about
having to cook for the nuisance-of-a-guest, which made him feel very
unwelcome.
By dinner time, Mario was already tired of her antics, and he
stepped out with Michael to the compound to catch some fresh air. It had
been a while since Michael had dared to go out in the dark, but he
needed some quiet time just as much as Mario did.
The two walked under the white glow of the tube-light installed at
the entrance of the building. ‘Ann is super crazy,’ Mario said as they
walked towards the gate at Pope’s Colony. ‘And I thought I was the only
person who had a problem,’ he chuckled. After a brief pause, he added,
‘You know, some years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.’
Michael looked at him, slightly clueless.
‘I have these … how do I explain … bouts of highs and lows,’
Mario explained.
‘Like a mood disorder?’ Michael asked.
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘But didn’t you always have it?’
‘It was never diagnosed correctly,’ Mario said. ‘This is more severe.
There are days when I feel like I am sinking in a wormhole. And then,
on other days, I am alive, flying. You can’t catch me. Today in London,
tomorrow in Ukraine …’
‘So the good days are very good, isn’t it?’ Michael asked.
‘Naa… there is nothing great about living life in such extremes.’
‘I am sorry, this is all new to me, Mario.’
‘Aah, no. I don’t care too much about it.’
‘You think Annette… she has this polar thing also?’ Michael
enquired.
‘Bipolar …’ Mario corrected.
‘Yes, bipolar.’
‘Oh no! Your sister is just real mad.’ They both broke into a fit of
laughter.
‘Have you heard from Ellena? My lawyer says she is our only
hope,’ Mario said when they had covered a considerable distance.
‘No,’ Michael responded dejectedly.
‘That woman has never been helpful.’
Michael chose not to respond to that and continued to walk quietly
—the silence between the two was not awkward, just companionable.
While skirting the edge of the compound that directly faced their
building, Mario noticed something strange about Bosco Mansion. The
light bulb on the balcony of the first floor was flickering nonstop. As
they inched closer to the building, they saw someone slowly come out
from inside the house and switch off the light before going swiftly back
in.
‘Are you sure these ghosts are only in Annette’s head?’ Mario
asked, surprised.
‘It can’t be … it can’t be,’ Michael said, shocked. ‘Butterfly is
back.’
 12

BOMBAY BALCHÃO
June 2010

T
hey were home finally. Michael. Ellena. Annette. Mario. And the
ghosts of Joe and Benjamin. Isn’t this what you call the circle of
life? An infinite loop that carries people, their memories and
stories, and goes round and round before briefly making a halt at some
place familiar? In this case, it was 193-A, Bosco Mansion in Pope’s
Colony on Dr D’Lima Street.
Four months had passed since the day that Annette’s dreams of
living in the sky with the ghosts of her lovers came to nought. The
tenants of three houses opposed the decision to shift. ‘We are not giving
up our homes at any cost,’ Ellena Gomes had announced to the landlord,
Neal Pinto, at the meeting that took place at his office in Colaba in early
February.
‘I renewed my lease in the 1970s. I have occupancy rights like any
licensed tenant, and so do the residents of every flat here. I believe you
are quite taken by the idea of making money out of your old properties,
Mr Pinto, but what are you doing with all that rent we’ve been giving
your trust for donkey’s years? You probably have over a crore in your
kitty, but not once have you bothered to repair or restore this structure,’
Ellena said. ‘We can take you to court.’
The slight tremble in her voice had nothing to do with age. It was
anger.
Michael and Mario listened, their mouths agape. The lady had done
her homework.
 Like many homes in the city that were built in the early half of the
twentieth century, Bosco Mansion was governed by tenancy laws under
the Bombay Rents’ Hotel and Lodging House Rates Control Act, 1947,
popularly known as the Bombay Rent Act. This law froze rents to a bare
minimum. But as property prices began to escalate in the city,
maintenance costs spiralled too. With such low rents, it became
impossible for landlords to make any profits from these properties, let
alone repair them. Over the years, property owners made several appeals
in court to revoke the law, but the life of the act continued to be
extended. When the Maharashtra Rent Control Act of 1999 finally
replaced this archaic law, the rents of tenanted buildings were increased,
but by negligible amounts. This put off many owners from looking after
their properties. Their buildings would eventually give way, having
suffered the neglect of time and an ill-conceived law.
But Bosco Mansion was different. Thanks to its sturdy teakwood
foundation, the now hundred-and-five-year-old building had never
required maintenance, except once, when a few roof tiles had to be
changed. Problems only started emerging some years earlier when the
building developed minor cracks, causing a beam to collapse. The
landlord, however, turned a blind eye to the issue and the residents were
forced to spend money from their own pockets to undertake repair work.
It wasn’t a lie that the Catholic Fellowship Trust, which owned
nearly ten properties in South Mumbai, including Bosco Mansion, was
accumulating the rent in a fixed deposit for aeons, allowing it to slowly
multiply. Not even a fraction of it was used to maintain the building. If
the trust were to argue a case citing lack of funds for repair or
maintenance, it was bound to lose.
Pinto, a forty-five-year-old pot-bellied Goan, had taken over as
chairman of this trust—started by his great-grandfather in 1903—around
twelve years ago. Greed was second nature to him. For lack of a good
occupation, Neal was constantly eyeing newer ways to make money out
of his existing family wealth. But Ellena had caught him off-guard. He
gulped down a glass of water nervously.
‘Are you done, Ms Gomes?’ he asked when he had found his
bearings.
 ‘No, Mr Pinto. Not yet,’ she said curtly. ‘Now listen to me. You
were still in your chaddis when Bosco was the pride of Cavel. It still is.
Your father Joseph, God praise his good soul, would swear by this, were
he alive today. For years I have been asking you to register this property
as heritage. But you don’t care. You just don’t. You are plain greedy and
selfish, Mr Pinto.’
Ellena would have gone on had Shane not interjected, ‘Ms Gomes,
stop casting aspersions on him. He only has our interests at heart. If the
building collapses, and Christ, it looks like it soon will, we all are going
to go under. And you, Mr Coutinho and Mr Lawrence will be the ones to
blame,’ he said.
‘Shane, shut up!’ Michael barked. ‘If you had such a huge problem
with this building, why did you move here in the first place?’
‘I agree,’ Mario said. ‘The Braganzas have no clue about the history
of Bosco. It has reared several treasures. Bombay’s famous D’Lima
family, the most renowned architects, engineers, bakers, brave
firefighters like my father and newspaper editors came from this
building. It’s a jewel in the crown of the city. You think we will allow it
to disappear just like that?’
Neal listened patiently to all the arguments, his own vilification and
the endless blame game. He had taken on the role of the moderator of a
debate, feigning to be a neutral party, interrupting only to nudge one side
or ask pointed questions and, most importantly, prevent any party from
straying from the topic.
‘Mrs da Cunha, you haven’t spoken yet,’ he said, when tempers had
cooled and everyone was quiet.
She was a little low. Benji did not turn up for the meeting. He had
promised he’d be present and help her make her point. Instead of him,
she had the spirit of Joe sitting by her side and taunting her. ‘Didn’t I tell
you this would happen, my sweet Anna?’ she could hear him say. ‘Your
Benji has abandoned you.’ His menacing laugh split her head.
‘Are you okay?’ Neal asked, noticing how disheartened she looked.
‘I really have nothing to say,’ Annette mumbled.
‘What does that mean?’ he enquired. ‘Do you want to move or
not?’
‘Nothing matters anymore,’ she replied.
 Shane was mortified when he heard this. ‘What are you saying?’ he
asked her angrily. ‘It was you who pushed me to hold this meeting, and
now you’re telling us it doesn’t matter. Such a waste of time, Mrs da
Cunha.’
Neal was running out of patience. The residents of Lobo Mansion
were very easy to please, but not this lot. Having already suffered
enough humiliation at the hands of Ellena Gomes, who had taken a dig
at him by harping on his dead father’s competence, there was only one
thing on his mind—he wanted to prove that he was just as honourable as
his father. He closed the Bosco Mansion file that was sitting on his desk
and said emphatically, ‘Case closed then. You can all go back to your
homes. Bosco is going nowhere for now.’
Shane, who had been following up on the issue indefatigably for a
month, looked wistful. Annette put her head down, embarrassed that she
had acted so thoughtlessly on the insistence of her useless husband.
‘And what about the repairs?’ Ellena asked as they all got up to
leave.
‘Yes, I was just going to discuss that,’ Neal replied. He was lying.
The thought had not come to him until Ellena had broached it. ‘I will get
an engineer to carry out a structural audit of the building soon. I can
decide only after that. Until then, I would appreciate it if all the
residents, especially those who no longer live in Bosco, stay on. If you
want to save the building, you will have to be around to take care of it.
Otherwise, all this big talk makes no sense.’ He was pleased with his last
jibe.
Ellena left the office soon after. She didn’t wait to speak with
Michael or Mario. By the time the two old men took the lift down, she
had already left for home in a taxi.
‘She could have given us a lift. What’s this woman’s problem?’
Mario asked Michael.
‘I am not going to complain, Mario. She saved us.’
‘Aah! I see. Someone is impressed,’ Mario teased. Michael ignored
him.
This silence was long and painful. To be living so close to Ellena
and then to see her behave like he didn’t exist felt strange. In the few
months since her return, their paths had crossed several times. In fact,
every day in church. Michael wasn’t a regular church-goer at all. But
when he learnt from his sister that Ellena Gomes had started attending
the 6.30 weekday mass in the mornings, he quietly followed suit.
‘What’s wrong with you, men?’ Annette said when she saw her
brother, who hated early mornings, leave home impeccably dressed at
6.15 a.m. He still had a decent mop of grey hair on his head and unlike
many men his age, he hadn’t needed to come to terms with a bald patch.
Annette noticed him spending several minutes staring into the tiny
mirror that was placed on the windowsill of his drawing room, sliding
the teeth of his comb through his oiled hair till the strands had all slipped
back. ‘Joe is asking if you are going for mass or some fashion show?
You are turning eighty this year, don’t forget,’ she joked. She went on,
‘Benji also said something mean, but don’t worry, I am not listening to
him anymore. He’s out of my life.’
Michael ignored all of them.
Michael was ignoring everybody these days. And Ellena was
ignoring Michael.
In this game of ignoring and being ignored, the two found a silly
comfort. He remained persistent and she adamant.
At mass, Michael would sit in the same pew as she did, hoping
she’d at least turn to him when the priest asked the congregation to offer
the sign of peace to each other. But she’d fold her hands and bow to
everyone around her except him. There would be a moment when their
eyes met, but she would make no effort to hold his gaze longer than a
fraction of a second. But that moment was enough for Michael to get an
eyeful.
Five years of living away from the city had done Ellena Gomes
well. She still preferred only blue outfits but had switched to wearing
loose pants and floral shirts. ‘It’s the magic of this new yoga class she is
attending,’ Annette had offhandedly mentioned to her brother one day.
‘After all, you can’t stretch in skirts.’
In church, she wore her hair—a striking balance of black and steely
grey—in a tight bun on top of her head, which lifted her drooping
cheeks. It was, however, her kohl-rimmed eyes hidden behind her
glasses that took Michael some time getting used to. ‘At seventy-six,
who is she trying to please? Has she found herself a boyfriend in Goa?’
he wondered. There wasn’t a dearth of potential boyfriends. The singles,
the retired and the widowed—they were all there, looking for new
friends. As this thought came to his mind, he felt a tinge of jealousy
shoot through him.
After mass ended, Ellena would walk home at such a quick pace
that Michael would find himself panting halfway. He just couldn’t keep
up. He realised that to Ellena, he was just a ghost—both invisible and
unwanted.
Two years was a long time to have waited to apologise, and Michael
was aware of this. He had tried his best with his last letter, but then he
wasn’t sure why she was so upset with him. For not falling in love with
her? Until she had written to him, he had not even known of Ellena’s
affection for him. And because she had been so good at keeping up the
charade, there was no way that he could ever have found out otherwise.
What Michael didn’t understand was that Ellena never wanted an
apology. She didn’t want him to fall in love with her either. She just
wished he had acknowledged her feelings, and probably his own as well.
Ellena wasn’t a romantic. Or rather, she had outgrown romance in
the prime of her life. Her three relationships, all very brief, had drained
her because she felt absolutely nothing for the men involved. ‘I feel no
music,’ she had explained to her mum. After those failed attempts at
falling in love, Ellena became fiercely protective of her heart; she could
not let go of it anymore. But the ease with which her friendship with
Michael blossomed when they had started writing to each other three
years ago thawed her. Ellena was slowly able to let go—not just of her
heart, but her entire self.
Their romance was in the tiny details, like the quarter and eighth
notes of a musical composition that come softly but disappear even
before you can linger in their sounds. But Michael was listening and
even swaying to these notes. He latched onto Ellena’s words, ‘Go to
church and talk to God’—she had not meant the advice to be taken
literally, knowing very well that he was an agnostic, but he had. He read
and re-read her letters because they made him smile and helped him
fight the hours of loneliness. The effortless flirting was also the magic of
this song.
 Ellena, too, began singing the same tune. When Michael asked her
to be more patient with her maid’s kids, she gave them her all. Today,
one of them was a school topper. When he nudged her to learn Konkani,
she actually started going for professional classes—she hadn’t told him
about it. When he asked her to fly, she did come out of her cocoon. ‘You
are finally a butterfly,’ he said.
This friendship had great potential. They would have done a lot of
things that would have been good for each other. But perhaps it was a
fear of putting a label on a relationship that wasn’t a clear black and
white, but a grey in-between, that made Michael nervous. Ellena’s own
insistence on testing new waters so suddenly led her to act impulsively.
She used a full stop when a comma would have sufficed. The good thing
is that the universe doesn’t understand the rules of grammar. Punctuation
isn’t part of its lexicon.
The first week of June was aggressively warm and humid. Chira
Bazaar no longer wore the sheen of summer. The gulmohar trees that
grew between busy, broken pathways were axed to make way for larger
buildings. The area had transformed in the short span of five years.
Rows of tiny buildings and chawls were being demolished to make way
for high-rises that popped up haphazardly.
As Ellena Gomes trundled through the bustling market stretch, she
noticed that one such high-rise had already come up not very far from
the eighty-three-year-old Vanguard Art and Photo Studio. The studio,
she heard, was also going to bite the redevelopment bullet. Started in
1927 by an enterprising businessman named Jayantilal Chhabildas
Morvi from Gujarat’s Kathiawar, the studio had been the dugout of
several prominent nationalist leaders, including Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan and Babu Genu Said, Jawaharlal Nehru, his wife Kamla and
daughter Indira Gandhi. Here was preserved a bit of these people to be
revered later.
Ellena remembered her father telling her of the time when Subhash
Chandra Bose visited the studio in 1930. When the locals heard that
Bose was there, all of them, including her father, went in droves to catch
a glimpse of him. ‘Netaji ki jai,’ they chanted until police officers
cleared the crowd. An oil painting recreated from a photograph of Bose
taken on that day, in which he was wearing traditional Bengali attire,
now adorned the studio’s interiors. Ellena couldn’t believe that this two-
thousand-square-foot vintage space that boasted mahogany wood cabins,
antique light fittings and a hand-carved false ceiling—all of which she
was once in awe of—would soon be a thing of the past.
It took her another twenty minutes to reach the fish market. Sunday
mornings here were chaotic. The crowds were packed like sardines,
struggling to navigate the sea of human bodies as they searched for their
preferred fishmongers—the ones they could trust for a fine deal. It was
surprising how easy it had become for Ellena to crawl through this
bedlam. Earlier, when she lived in Mumbai, she was so unfit that it was
difficult for her to just climb up and down her building stairs. But yoga
had been kind to her body.
It had happened by accident. When her fixed deposits started
depleting, Ellena rented out a room in her cottage in Goa to a Malayali
yoga instructor, who wanted to hold classes there. The money was good
and allowed her an occasional splurge. The icing on the cake was that
she got to participate in the classes for free.
As soon as Ellena walked into the market, Pramila Gore, an old
vendor, well-known in the area for the last forty-five years, called out to
her excitedly from the stone parapet where she was sitting with the other
fishmongers.
‘ Aalana, madam!’ the Koli woman, who was more comfortable
speaking in Marathi, yelled in broken Hindi. ‘Kitna din hua?’
Ellena smiled when she spotted the familiar face. ‘Arre, hum Goa
main tha.’
‘Maloom hai, maloom hai … Michael saab ne bataya.’
His name gave Ellena a feeling of discomfort, but she didn’t show
it.
‘Jhinga kaise diya?’ she asked.
‘Do-sau rupay ek kilo ka, madam.’
‘Two hundred rupees? Make it less. Hum kitna purana customer hai
.’
‘Madam, rain coming,’ said another fisherwoman sitting beside
Pramila, trying to meddle in the bargaining. ‘All fish expensive now,’
she rattled away in the little English that she knew.
‘I don’t buy any fish in the monsoon,’ Ellena told the woman.
 ‘Why, madam?’
‘All very bad. Not fresh at all.’
‘So what you eat whole baarish season, madam?’
‘Prawn balchão,’ said Ellena.
‘Balchão?’ the fishmonger asked, surprised. ‘What this, madam?’
‘It’s a pickle. It’s a delicious prawn pickle.’
The making of balchão was an annual monsoon ritual in the
Gomes’ kitchen. Ellena’s mum Giselle had discouraged her kids from
eating seafood during the rainy months of June and July, as it was the
breeding season for most fish. Since fishing was restricted for the same
reason, Giselle Gomes suspected that the catch available in the markets
was either frozen or stale.
‘It’s unhealthy,’ she’d tell Ellena. ‘Not good for your stomach.’
While prawn balchão was a popular side dish—the making of
which the Goans learned from their Portuguese brethren—Giselle
reinvented her fish pickles with balchão masala.
Just a week or two before the monsoon, which usually began in
mid-June, Ellena’s mother would buy a large stock of prawns from the
market. The very same day, she’d get started—first cleaning and
deveining the prawns, and then marinating them. The pickle would be
ready by evening and stored in a ceramic jar.
It would be their go-to dish for seafood over the next few months,
enjoyed with dal and rice, or simply relished between slices of bread.
‘Mama, this is so delicious,’ Ellena would say each time she bit into the
sweet-pungent prawn.
After Giselle passed away, Ellena once attempted to make prawn
balchão from the hand-written recipe book—a family heirloom, which
had meticulous notes by her mum and nana. But Ellena couldn’t rustle
up a meal to save her life. She gave up after that first attempt, and
stopped eating seafood completely during the rainy season.
In Goa, though, there had been so much time at hand that she was
forced to nurture unknown interests—cooking, for instance. She began
with cutlets before trying her hand at fish curries, including the tangy
ambotik, and her mum’s peas pulao and vindaloo. Her maid, Lorna, was
always around to offer a hand and free advice, if and when she struggled.
Ellena, however, experienced a string of bad luck when preparing
balchão. The first batch came out very spicy. ‘You didn’t pick the right
chillies,’ her maid told her.
The following year, the pickle didn’t last even two days. ‘Did you
add water while grinding the masalas?’ her maid asked. When Ellena
nodded, the amused maid slapped her forehead. ‘Kitté re aunty. You
should only add vinegar. Water will kill your pickle.’
Unfortunately, in her next attempt, Ellena was more than generous
with the vinegar, and the balchão turned sour.
‘Where is your heart?’ Lorna asked. Ellena looked at her, confused.
‘Oho aunty, bring some love into your cooking … mog kar,’ the maid
suggested with a smile.
When Ellena arrived in the compound of Pope’s Colony with the
bag of fresh prawns, it was already 11.30 a.m. Mario and Michael were
outside, sitting on a wooden bench that the two had recently invested in,
so that the latter could spend some time away from Annette and her
ghosts. Since walking two floors up to Mario’s house daily was getting
incredibly difficult for Michael these days, they had settled for Michael’s
front garden. The bench was placed beneath a canopy made of wooden
sticks, which had several climbing vine plants growing above and under
it—ingeniously designed by Merlyn several years ago.
‘Taking a stroll in the morning sun, are you?’ Mario asked when
Ellena got to the building.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying to avoid small talk.
He could smell the salt of the sea in her bag. ‘Aha! You went to the
fish market.’
‘Yes,’ she said again. Michael sat quietly, looking the other way,
trying to show no interest in this conversation.
‘What did you get?’ Mario prodded.
‘Mario, I am sorry, but you must excuse me. I am really tired,’
Ellena said and took the stairs.
‘Seriously, what’s her problem?’ Mario asked Michael when she
had left. ‘She is treating us like rats. What have we done? Tell me, is she
still angry with you for getting that pipeline? That would be very petty.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Michael said.
‘Then what! I would have understood if she treated Shane or
Annette the same way, but she talks to them so nicely. What have we
done?’
‘It’s me, not you.’
After returning to Bombay, it took Ellena days to get her kitchen in
order. In the beginning, she showed no inclination to stay here. Pernem
was so comfortable and peaceful, she did not want to be anywhere else.
But following the structural audit last month, the landlord announced
that the building would be repaired sometime after the monsoon and that
the residents would need to be around. The auditor noticed some major
cracks on the top floors; the putty too had fallen out in chunks in several
places. ‘The building needs to be repaired on an urgent basis,’ the
auditor told the landlord. There was no telling how long it would take.
But given the age of the structure, repairs were going to be slow. ‘You
will all have to be patient,’ Neal told the residents.
Since Mario had a freelance job and could work out of any city, the
shift didn’t hit him much. His new girlfriend had apparently left him too,
so nobody would be missing him back in London. Michael was slowly
growing wary of some of Mario’s stories of the high life. It wasn’t that
he didn’t believe Mario, but the exaggerations were too hard to ignore.
But Ellena wasn’t happy with the development. It would mean
socialising more often with the folks in Cavel, and while she had loved
engaging in unwanted chit-chat at one point in time, she had zero
threshold for it now. Her most imminent concern, however, was the
dearth of blue dresses and pants in her wardrobe—she hadn’t carried
enough for this extended stay. When she resigned herself to her old life
at Bosco, she sent money to Lorna, requesting her to ship a carton with
all her clothes to Mumbai. To her tenant, the yoga instructor from
Kerala, who had also taught Ellena how to line her eyes, she wrote
saying that she could have the entire cottage for a year at least, for a very
small increase in rent.
Her kitchen in Goa boasted every kind of appliance and tool, and
was always well-stocked—a reflection of how much she cooked. The
one in Mumbai was basic. It harked back to a time when she only knew
how to make eggs and tea. The newly purchased bottles of whole spices
and ground masalas were placed inside a broken cabinet. Apart from
this, there was an old single stove, a grinder, and a mini Godrej
refrigerator that she had bought around fifteen years ago, which had only
enough place to store her veggies and fruits.
Sundays at home were lazy and quiet, like any other day. Except
that, Ellena’s best friend, Joana, who lived in the neighbourhood, would
drop by for tea in the late afternoons. Ellena wanted to finish making the
balchão before Joana visited and ambushed her with gossip.
She placed the prawns in a glass bowl and rinsed them thoroughly
in warm water. She then pulled up a wooden stool and, sitting on it,
quietly worked her way through each prawn, undressing it between her
thin, shrivelled fingers; first twisting its head and plucking it off, then
placing her right thumb beneath the prawn to peel off the shell gently,
before sliding her knife through the top of its slimy surface to clean out
the gooey black vein.
Ellena held the naked prawn between her fingers, its flesh soft and
translucent pink. This was her now, after all those years of hopelessly
loving, pining, seething and hurting. The wall she had built around
herself was slowly falling apart, exposing her to herself.
An hour later, when she had finally completed the chore, a mound
of hollow shells with pairs of black peppercorn eyes and loosely hanging
antennae sat on an old newspaper. She folded the edges of the paper
carefully, ensuring that all the waste she had collected was firmly locked
in. Lifting herself off the stool, she reached for the plate of cleaned
prawns and wrapped them in a kitchen towel to soak up all the excess
water, before letting the prawns settle in a marinade of turmeric and salt.
‘When you rub salt into an open wound, it’s likely to singe, but
turmeric has a cooling effect. That’s why we always use them together,’
Ellena recalled her mum telling her when she had enquired why Giselle
used the same marinade for all meat and fish. Her mum continued, ‘The
salt and haldi will let the fish heal. It needs to heal, otherwise eating it
won’t make you happy. How can you enjoy something that still holds a
grudge against you for having killed it?’
Ellena deep-fried her prawns in oil and removed them when they
were crunchy and golden brown. She then took a fistful of dried
Kashmiri chillies—carefully hand-picked from the bazaar as Lorna had
advised, to give the perfect combination of flavour and colour to the
pickle—and put it in the grinder. She added cumin, a dash of red chilli
powder, peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon sticks, soaked tamarind, whole
garlic cloves and diced ginger, mixing it all with copious amounts of
vinegar to make a thick paste.
‘Each time you prepare the balchão masala, think of the person you
want to feed it to. If it’s someone you dislike, you might end up being
too liberal with your spices. If this person is somebody you love, you
will be more careful, especially with your peppercorns and chillies. You
don’t want to burn the tongue that has been kind to you,’ Lorna had
advised in Konkani.
The pan sizzled as Ellena poured the oil, rather too generously. ‘The
balchão needs the oil, because it’s a pickle,’ her mum had said when
Ellena raised a stink about the amount of oil she was adding. ‘Why do
you worry about the oil? Pickles are anyway supposed to be relished
only in small portions. Life is like that, my baby. The best part cannot be
enjoyed whole, or it will become too much for you to digest.’
When the oil was hot enough, she added mustard seeds, curry
leaves, and some more garlic and ginger, sautéing them till the masala
became a golden brown. She transferred the ground masala into the pan
and added salt and a teaspoon of sugar, mixing it all.
‘How is it that the balchão lasts so long, mama?’ Ellena had asked.
‘It’s the vinegar. It not only adds a sharp flavour to the pickle but is
also a natural preservative. It will keep your balchão forever.’
‘But no food can last forever, mama,’ Ellena had exclaimed.
‘Nothing lasts forever, baby, but it also depends on what your
forever is. Is it a day? Is it a month? Is it a year? We make our own
forevers.’
When the pungent smell of the masala wafted through the kitchen,
Ellena added the prawns, tossing them well till they were cooked. She
turned off the gas, and let the pan cool. That’s when her doorbell rang.
The evening passed surprisingly fast. Joana didn’t indulge in too
much nonsense talk today and was discussing plans of moving back to
Goa by the end of next year.
‘Our lovely old Bombay has gone to the dogs,’ she said. ‘What a
tragedy this place has become. Construction everywhere, so much
traffic, and the pollution is unbearable.’
 ‘I never liked Bombay either, Jo. But when I first moved to Pernem,
I used to miss Cavel a lot,’ Ellena said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But what I realised after staying away from Cavel all these
years is that you end up taking a part of this place with you wherever
you go. And then you start another Cavel in your new home.’
‘Uhh! I don’t quite understand what you mean, Elle,’ Joana said,
confused.
‘Well, Cavel is not just a place, it’s also the sum total of its people
and their experiences,’ Ellena said. ‘And because its people are
everywhere, Cavel is everywhere.’
After Joana left, Ellena went back to the kitchen and checked on her
balchão. It was a fiery red. The pickle would taste best after it had
matured over a few weeks, but it looked too delicious to resist. She took
out a tasting spoon from her kitchen drawer and dipped it into the thick
masala, scooping out a very small portion. Ellena Gomes allowed her
tongue to savour every bit of it.
It was half past nine in the evening when Michael heard a faint
knock on his door. It was so light that if the trees hadn’t been so still
outside, he would probably have missed it altogether. Annette had hit the
sack early today. He was glad, because it gave him some time to
concentrate on other things.
When he opened the door, he found Mario, as expected, standing
outside. This was a weekend routine.
‘Care for a drink in the garden?’ Mario asked, flashing a thermos.
Mario’s idea of a drink was a good cup of hot coffee, since he had never
warmed to the bottle. ‘I’ve got some chakna too,’ he said, pulling out a
packet of peanuts from a plastic bag. ‘Freshly roasted.’
‘Ugh! I am not so sure, Mario. I have to send this column tonight.
It’s a bit urgent,’ Michael said. ‘But you can come in, I will give you
company.’
‘Naa. Not with your sister around. Let’s drink tomorrow instead?’
Michael had already known what Mario’s response was going to be.
He would do anything to stay away from Michael’s home, especially
after a major tiff with Annette some weeks ago.
‘Sure. That sounds good to me,’ Michael replied.
 On any another day, Michael would have told Mario that they could
enjoy their coffee and chakna at home as Annette was fast asleep, but not
today. He shut the door behind Mario and went back to the dining table,
where he had just served himself dinner.
Michael tore off a piece of pao and slathered it liberally with the
dollop of thick gravy that only a few minutes ago he had spooned out of
a glass jar. He put the bread in his mouth and chewed it slowly—the
juice of the ground spices bursting inside him, spinning his head into a
slow whirl.
He could feel his feet move lithely on the ground, her feet following
swiftly behind him. The two of them were running, chasing each other
from one tree to another building, negotiating tiny pebbles, fallen half-
eaten mangoes, broken bark, slippery ground moss and brown puddles,
until a cul-de-sac broke their game. He stopped. She stopped, and her
hands gently tapped his shoulders. ‘Caught you,’ she said and giggled
like a little girl.
But when he turned around, everything was a blur except for the
glass jar she was holding. He reached for it, opened the jar and dug out a
prawn. He bit into its flesh, licking the cooked, ground spices smeared
between his fingers. A tear trickled down his face. His balchão tasted of
pure love.
 EPILOGUE

Ellena Gomes,
Casa Gomes, Socoillo Waddo,
Pernem, Goa

2 January 2010

Hi Ellena,
I am not sure how to begin this letter, so I will start by asking
you the obvious: how are you? It has been a long time, yes.
And I have no excuse for not writing back. I wouldn’t be lying
if I said that I had tried writing once. But I gave up. I couldn’t
handle it. I feared you would burn my letter again.
Over the last two years, I have introspected often about
everything we shared in those letters. I can’t speak for you, but
I will for myself. I was so happy just writing to you and
hearing from you that I hadn’t noticed where all of this was
heading. When I did, I think I panicked. It wasn’t the right
time for me to make sense of anything. I had just lost my wife,
and I had just won a new friend. I should have been grateful,
but I wasn’t. First I said the wrong things, and then I remained
silent for a very long time. In the process, I hurt you badly. I
am sorry. I am really very sorry.
Ellena, I want to begin with you again. I cannot promise a
whole lot of things, especially love, of which at this age I have
become so wary. But this world is full of possibilities. If
nothing else, I will have won myself a best friend. Do tell me
if I can come and visit you.
Yours truly,
Michael Coutinho
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

C
avel is as real as it has been imagined. My familiarity with the
sights and sounds of this South Mumbai neighbourhood shaped
this novel in more ways than one. It would, however, be a lie to say
that the inspiration ended there. Its residents are gifted storytellers, and
sometimes, knowingly and even unknowingly, they shared snatches of
their memories around which I wove my fiction. The stories began with
Lulu Days in 2005—she passed away last year, at 102—and continued
with my dearest friend and veteran journalist, the late Ervell E. Menezes,
whose honest review of one of my initial drafts made me rethink the
entire project.
This book also owes a lot to my aunt Vivienne Gaudet, a former
hockey player for India, who now resides in Canada. When I reached out
to her for help, she readily parted with her memoir, meant only for her
son (my cousin) and granddaughter. It had beautiful and bitter-sweet
moments from Cavel, where she spent her childhood and youth. My
handsome uncle Patrick Crasto, who once lived there, shared many
amusing vignettes too. I’d also like to thank noted fashion designer and
Khotachi Wadi resident James Ferreira for welcoming me to his
gorgeous home on several occasions and introducing me to his lovely
neighbours. All these interactions helped me place my fictitious
characters and events in a world that had some semblance of reality.
Here, I can’t forget to mention my grandmother Anna Borges, who grew
up in a Christian pocket in Mazagaon. Even though mai’s mind plays
tricks on her these days, she continues to be a delicious raconteur.
Historicising some parts of the text also meant getting facts right. I
read late historian Teresa Albuquerque’s Goan Pioneers in Bombay to
understand the migration of Goans to Bombay, the proliferation of
Christian hamlets in the city and the medical genius that was Dr Acacio
Gabriel Viegas. A careful reading of fashion designer Wendell Rodricks’
book Moda Goa: History and Style gave me a sense of Goan fashion.
Jerry Pinto’s piece, ‘The Day it Rained Gold Bricks and a Horse Ran
Headless’, from the book Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai ,
was also part of my reading material to get timelines right for the story.
Noted Mumbai Police historian Deepak Rao helped throw light on
Prohibition in Bombay and Dr Fleur D’Souza, former HOD of History at
St Xavier’s College, took time out of her busy schedule one evening, to
have an extended telephonic chat on East Indian history. Over a series of
text messages, historian and author Dr Fatima da Silva Gracias explained
the shared histories of Goans and Mangaloreans. I also reached out to
chef and author Floyd Cardoz, who wrote to me about balchão—he
described the preserve as a ‘pickle like dish that is the pride of most
Goans’—and how much he relished it as a child. US-based Xanti Pinto,
who runs the recipe blog Xantilicious, shared essential tips for preparing
the prawn balchão pickle. Covering heritage and urban planning for the
Sunday mid-day in Mumbai brought me closer to many hidden stories
and gems from the city that I wasn’t aware of, and of which you will find
traces in my narrative.
A lot of friends also showed immense faith in this book, when I had
none. I’d like to begin with Arundhati Pattabhiraman, who has been the
force behind this novel. She read and re-read every draft from the day I
started writing it. Tess Joss, Dylan D’Silva and N.S. Abhayakumar read
the entire draft in record time and gave valuable feedback. Sajini
Sahadevan, Sébastien Lemaire, Sohini Mitter, Blessy Chettiar, Candice
Martins, Nishath Nizar and Kusumita Das had some kind words and
constructive feedback on chapters they read. To all of them, a big thank
you.
No success is complete without family. I started writing this book in
2015, when I briefly moved to Muscat and was living with my dad,
Johnny Borges. There were days when I wrote ferociously. During this
time, it was his silence that ensured I never lost rhythm. My mamma,
Sandra, who makes the best coffee in the world, made sure that I got
enough of it when I woke up during odd hours to write. My brother Saby
and she have also been subjected to some terrible drafts, and they’ve
rarely complained. Steven, my youngest brother, has brainstormed
everything from the characters to the title of the book, and to him I owe
its completion.
Finally, I would like to thank my literary agent, Anish Chandy of
Labyrinth Literary Agency, for showing confidence in a shelved project.
And most importantly, team Westland—my commissioning editor
Sanghamitra Biswas for her vision for this book and my publisher
Karthika V.K. She is an institution, and I have had the good fortune of
working with her.
There are also some amazing mentors, colleagues and friends who I
am blessed to have in my life. If I have missed names, I promise to make
up for it in person.