Dahanu Road: A novel Read Online Free PDF

rupees, the collector’s office, the furniture shop that sold only mustard benches, the lumber mills with the creepy echo of sparrows, until he hit the main road, which was a dusty, rocky mess. It had been dug up, and bullock carts, trucks, vans, cars, and cycles wove through it, spraying rock debris from under their tires.
    After Zairos passed Alan’s petrol pump with its wilted array of coconut trees, he turned left and almost ran over Pinky, a six-year-old orphan with an eternally runny nose, who had perched herself close to Anna Purna’s to secure her daily dose of Tiger biscuits.
    Anna, the owner of the chai stall, was an Indian ClarkGable: thin moustache, clean skin, hair always set in the most well-behaved manner. No one knew his real name so he was called Anna, or Elder Brother, the title given to any South Indian man who wore a lungi and ran a chai stall. Anna had an old Hollywood charm, but his wife was quite the opposite—dusky, and full enough to be on the cover of
Debonair.
    To the Iranis, Anna’s chai stall was one of Dahanu’s most prized possessions. It was a beloved meeting place—its hard wooden benches had seated many an overweight Irani over the years—a dingy hole beautifully suited to the hirsute features of the men that frequented the joint. At Anna’s, they were like beasts in a cave where they could fart, joke, smoke, abuse, and pontificate. Of course, they did this
anywhere,
but Anna’s was the home ground. Each morning, after making a round of their chickoo farms, the Iranis would gather here and drink tea, coffee, or Pepsi. Cigarette smoke gave the place a sinister haze, like fog in a cemetery. Yet the place was alive, full of joy and horniness, and credit had to be given to Anna’s steaming chai and his steamy wife.
    Anna stood under the sharp white glow of tube lights and poured chai from one steel jug into the other to cool it down. It was quite a show, this hot waterfall of milky tea, and Anna was always guaranteed an audience. There was Merwan Mota, the fattest man in Dahanu, who polished off three omelettes at a time, his little blue diabetes bag by his side; Behrooz, the smoothest bald head in town, who owned the spare-parts shop next door; Keki the Italian, who smoked beedis in a corner and brooded over Camus and Turgenev; and Dara Atom, the town’s official god-man-cum-healer, who was only a few chicken breasts away from being just as huge as Merwan Mota.
    At its peak, which was from nine till eleven in the morning, Anna’s chai stall offered a heady cocktail of languages. Anna spoke softly in Tulu to his wife and loudly in Hindi to the balloon-factory owners; some of the Iranis conversed in Dari just to remind the ones who didn’t that they were inferior and had been polluted by India, and the inferior Iranis, who spoke Gujarati, spoke it in a crass manner to make the actual Gujaratis, the Indian ones, feel infuriated that their language was being bastardized in the cheapest way. But in the end, if one kept some distance, one could see the beauty of Anna’s, that brothel of languages. All languages knew each other well, were familiar with the twists and turns of each other’s bodies, and were not afraid to inhale the pungent smell of each other’s underarms.
    Zairos heard a sound in the distance, a motorcycle zooming at full speed. Soon, one passed by on the tarmac. It was his dearest first cousin, Bumble. Bumble was his father’s brother’s son, two years older than Zairos. Bumble’s real name was Farhad, but he was called Bumble, as in bumblebee, because he whizzed around on his motorcycle, zigzag-zigzag, without any aim at all. He often overshot his destination because he was going too fast to stop, but he would never admit this. However, he was an expert rider and his bike was a beauty, a red BMW.
    This morning, Bumble was dressed in a Santa Claus costume.
    And he did, once again, miss his destination. He returned, his cotton-white beard hanging to one side. His