Leeya Mehta
Friday, July 17, 2020
Short Story: The Woman Who Willed Her Son to Die
Published in ‘The Reader’, No. 14. http://www.thereader.org.uk/magazine.aspx
The first time I met Mrs
Feroza Jamshed Karkaria I stared quite hard. She had brown hair that sat in
perfect static curls on her shoulders and dangerous eyes. I had heard the hair
was a wig, like Dev Anand’s. Mummy would have been appalled by my stare. She
would have ticked me off, “Don’t be appalling, Lizzy!” I loved big words like
that, they made me sound like I was a grand bad sort.
Mrs Scary-face stared back
at me. She had beady eyes and well plucked eyebrows which were housed within
the weight of her starched wig. She looked like a mean Womble. Wombles were
creatures I had read about. They were not given to meanness though. So in a way
you can’t be a real mean Womble. There were no stray hairs on her chin. She
obviously went to the parlour often. Even mummy who rubs her chin probingly
with her fingers and tweezers her hairs has a couple of stray pokies.
We were in the corridor of
her family’s apartment that overlooked the railway tracks and it was a dark,
sooty space. I was nine, going on ten. I had finished the Famous Five, Nancy
Drew and had sneaked a bit of ‘Endless Love’. I had read all of my Pramilla
Aunty’s Mills and Boons on the sly on the pot earlier that year while on
holiday in Delhi. Mrs-horror was old enough to be my grandmother, about sixty.
I asked for her sister-in-law, who I had come to visit. My mother was parking
our Herald downstairs and would be at my side to rescue me any minute. I had to
be brave. I said, “Feroza Aunty may I go in and see Sheroo Aunty?”
My mother appeared. Feroza Aunty’s plan
to swallow me, Bata shoes and JB Petit blue school uniform included, if she was
short on time, was foiled. I squeezed past her as mummy said, “Hello Aunty, kem cheo? All well?” Mummy fled too,
into an inner room, not waiting for her to speak.
Once in the cool space of Sheroo
Aunty’s room I ignored the faint smell of Mrs Feroza Jamshed Karkaria’s shadow
as it filtered through the door hinges. As a Parsee I was another generation of
gatekeepers of oddball stories and half-demented souls. I knew about weirdoes.
We Parsees were small in number and fast depleting. “Soon we’ll be bred in
zoos,” says mummy. “Visitors will say, ‘Oh there’s a Parsee next to the emus
and giraffes,’ and we will perform our daily rituals behind a glass screen.
‘9am to 10 am – Sadra-kusti hour at
the Zoo’, the sign will say. ‘So cute, no!’ the children-visitors will
exclaim.”
My mummy doesn’t want to have my Navjote or thread ceremony, like most
Parsees have by the age of eleven. “I don’t believe in ritual,” she says,
“Rituals give you the chance to be bad and then get away with it by praying and
putting sukhar, sandalwood, in the
fire. To be a true Parsee all you need is good thoughts, good words and good
deeds.” My real dad wants me to be a real Parsee, do my sadra-kusti in the morning, wear my sadra vest and tie the string or kusti the way a good Parsee is supposed to. But my real dad won’t
pay for the ceremony and the banquet after. Even for the sake of it mummy can’t
do it because she has no money for it.
“Have something cold? Duke’s lemonade?”
I am asked. Duke’s lemonade was the ultimate Parsee drink. Some grownups drink
Parsee Cinzano. That is Duke’s lemonade with Goan red wine.
I looked at mummy anxiously, she
nodded, I said, “Yes, please, can I help myself?”
“No, the fridge is locked. I’ll get
it.” Sheroo Aunty said.
The refrigerator was at the door of the
room, in the passageway, and it had been locked to keep Lady Feroza, as mummy
called her, out of the food. She loved poisoning it. I stood behind Sheroo
Aunty as she unlocked the ancient white door which had been fitted with a metal
latch from which hung an enormous lock. I knew that the Lady was lurking behind
her daisy-printed curtains. Her feet, in English Scholl’s, were visible below
the hem. Parsee ladies love wearing Dr Scholl’s. Mummy has a pair too that her
Pappa gave her; she looks beautiful in her cotton dresses with her wavy brown hair
tied up in a bun and her Scholl’s on her feet. I can’t imagine anyone liking me
when I grow up. The minute they see my beautiful mummy, I’ll be forgotten.
We ate lovely chocolate cake and Sheroo
Aunty and Framroze Uncle made me feel like their granddaughter and I was
allowed to sit on the cot bed and shake my legs. We wished Sheroo Aunty happy
birthday and mummy gave her the box of prunes. I wanted to touch the soft
smooth skin on her nose. She had knowing eyes, that shone like a teddy bear’s.
Her hair was short and she was slightly hunched, though she wore her little
sleeveless dress with an air of clean elegance.
The Lady was Sheroo Aunty’s sister in
law – her husband’s brother’s wife. She was as different from Sheroo Aunty as a
crow is from a pigeon. Pigeons, you see, are the vermin of the air and crows
are Parsees reborn as crows. Pigeons are for shot-guns and poison-seed and
crows are for choicest titbits of malai-soaked-rotli
or bread soaked with cream. The doorbell had rung and we could hear voices in
the Lady’s room. Her only son, Ratan, ‘dayo,
obedient, good Ratan’ had returned from a flight. He was a purser.
“Aré
muo! You are back again! You son of a devil. Why didn’t you die on the
aeroplane?”
“Mama, aren’t you happy to see me? Look
I brought you cheese and chocolates from Switzerland.”
The packet must have been handed over,
because there was a moment’s silence, when she must have looked into her bag of
goodies.
Then suddenly “Chal, ja ja,” she said,
screaming, “Shoo! GO away! Next time I hope your plane crashes.”
Mummy was embarrassed for Sheroo Aunty
because of this bad fight between the Lady and her son and she said we were to
go home. I said thank you and jumped off the cot and made my way past the daisy
curtains. I tried hard not to look inside. In the kitchen, a meal was being
prepared on a kerosene stove. Smoked chicken livers in onion sauce, fried gharab or fish eggs. Sheroo Aunty was a
cook. My grandfather said of her, “She is no ordinary stirrer of vegetables and
broiler of chickens but a sensual keeper of culinary magic – a chef!” I could
taste the liver, fresh and succulent. It made me drool just like a packet of
tomato Chipnick wafers or a Marmite sandwich did. The only others who drooled
like this were dogs and Kalu, the crow who visited our kitchen every day. “Greed, my dear, greed,”
that was what mummy said.
But
we had to go and that was that. Sheroo Aunty would send us food on my birthday,
or anytime she felt like, she was a doer of good deeds, a keeper of gracious
ways and kindnesses, a giver, a pickler of mangoes. Those who pickle know the
soul of food, and if you know that, well, you know a lot. Mummy didn’t say
that, but I read it in granny’s recipe book. I’ll ask granny if she made it up.
Granny writes poetry and paints. She has a great rhyme about monkeys:
As mamma fries purees
Fat and round
From the coconut tree
The monkey jumps down –
In from the window
Out through the gate
He snatches the purees,
Empty plate!
The monkey sits
On a Gulmohar tree
And strips off the flowers
So wicked is he!
Into his mouth he pops them
One by one,
Till the mali shouts
And makes him run!*
Sheroo
Aunty was saying to us as we waited for the lift, “Sorry, ah, really sorry. She
does that every time he visits. I don’t know why he comes. She should be put
away, but her husband loves her so much, he won’t allow it. He worships her. Su kariye, what can we do? This is their
house also. Sorry darling, sorry.”
We went on to Lohar Chawl
to buy panties – you got them on the pavement, three for twenty-five rupees.
Nice soft cotton panties. We also bought a small blue bucket to soak socks in.
On our way home we decided to buy two
little spring chickens for dinner. I think we were inspired by Sheroo Aunty. It
was a rare treat, a break from mummy’s cabbage and chappati. It was five in the evening. Fortunately Francois Maison, the butcher’s place,
opened after his afternoon siesta at four. He weighed two chickens and it came
to seven hundred and fifty grams for both of them.
We roasted the chickens and ate one
each, listening to a cassette of ‘Camelot’ on the stereo. It was my favourite
tape and I sang along.
Three days later, I returned from
school at one o’clock as usual in my carpool and decided to play a practical
joke on mummy. The front door was open. I wrote a ransom note and stuck it on
the floor and hid in the toilet. Time passed, I think maybe about five minutes.
There was no sound of panic. I waited and waited, maybe five more minutes and
finally, hungry, I was too impatient to wait any more. I emerged to find mummy
making my daily lunch of cabbage and chappati.
“Mummy!” I said, “Look I
was kidnapped, see, here’s the ransom note. I escaped just in time.”
She laughed and hugged me. Then I sat
in her lap and she cuddled me. “Would you like mushrooms for dinner?” she
asked, “To celebrate your escape?”
“Yes, please,” I said, mushrooms were
my favourite, made with white-sauce and pepper.
I ate my lunch. I washed up the dishes
and went and played with my Lego. I built a house, for the hundredth time. Mummy
was sleeping and I kept it aside to show her. Then I took out my small blue
uniform for ironing. The ironing board was in a cupboard built by Bachubhai,
the best carpenter in the world. He was six foot five inches tall and very
gentle. When mummy fell off a stool and broke her jaw he was so upset by the
blood that he fainted. I ironed my uniform and sat on my cane chair at my desk
and did my homework. I was glad that we had five days to ourselves. Mummy and
me.
The phone rang and I ran to it,
barefoot. When daddy, my stepdad, was at home I was not allowed to run to the
phone, I was not allowed to walk barefoot, he would come home from the office
and examine the top of the fridge for dust and scold mummy if there was any to
be seen, he would check if anyone else had used his bathroom. His bathroom
always smelt of anti-dandruff shampoo, Selsun.
“Mummy,” I shouted, “It’s Sheroo
Aunty.”
Mummy didn’t like being woken up from
her nap. It gave her a headache. She came into the hall and sat down with the
phone in her hand.
She was silent after the phonecall. She
didn’t say, “Oh how inconsiderate people are to call at three in the afternoon.
Such bad manners.”
I went into my room, and finished
illustrating my composition book. We had been asked to write about aliens and
draw our own alien. Mine was purple with many arms. Mummy says, “You are what
you eat.” They ate only brinjals on the alien’s planet.
Mummy
came in after making a few phonecalls. She sat down on my bed and said,
“Sometimes it’s good to have a TV. We could see what was happening on the news.
There was an Air India plane crash. Ratan, Feroza Aunty’s son, was on the
plane.”
-The
End-
Note:
*From
the unpublished poems of A.S. Shroff, the author’s grandmother.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Monday, March 23, 2020
Column: Conversations with Myself
The latest edition of my column, The Company We Keep, is a reflection on isolation, as I strive for perspective during the COVID-19 outbreak.
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/conversations-with-myself
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/conversations-with-myself
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Upcoming Readings
If you are up for a little literary distraction, grab a cup
of tea (and toast, if you must) and join me for a reading from my short
story "How Does One Make a
Woman Like That Happy?"
Jamie and Julia met at Oxford. “Through that first Winter holiday away
from her he had regretted it—it was too new, too much—but back at school, she
had taken control of his free fall and said, stop by for toast if you want, and
he had.”
They
lived a dream life.
But will Jamie's jealousy get the better of him?
As they swim out into the Delaware Bay, what will happen?
Read my story in Furious
Gravity, an anthology of Washington-area writers.
Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/mhj8jGa4qVk
Book Events: I will be reading virtually @
Readings on the Pike: May 14th at 7:30 pm.
Event details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/233099917744353/
I'm overwhelmed by the number of people who put this book
together, and so many thanks to the ship's captain, Melissa Scholes Young.
With gratitude,
Leeya
Follow, repost, comment, and share our good news:
Book Website for more events: https://graceandgravitydc.com
Book Orders: https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781624292699
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Lay Your Troubles Down
A new edition of my column appears in The Independent:
Thanks to friends and family who gave me ideas for this one - it meant a lot!
Monday, October 28, 2019
But, tell me, where do the children play?
The latest edition of my column, The Company We Keep:
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/but-tell-me-where-do-the-children-play
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/but-tell-me-where-do-the-children-play
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