Dahanu Road: A novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Santa cap flopped out of his pants pocket, but his black aviator Ray-Bans balanced perfectly on the ridge of his nose. He parkedhis motorcycle and walked over to the blue car outside Anna’s in which the gamblers of Dahanu were indulging in their favourite, most sacred activity—rummy. Men whose bodies were 70 per cent cards, not water: Aspi Irani looked over his silver reading glasses each time he threw a card on the black suitcase that served as the card table, Kavas Undie left the car, went into the bushes, and returned with his undies worn inside out to bring about a change in luck, and Bumble’s father, the left-handed Sohrab Irani, shuffled cards with fervour and dedication that would put any religious man to shame. This hallowed vehicle was known throughout Dahanu as the Mobile Casino.
    “How did the party go?” Sohrab Irani asked his son.
    “It was good,” replied Bumble, “until the children started pulling my beard.”
    Bumble’s nephew was suffering from jaundice, so to cheer the boy up Bumble had thrown an early-morning Christmas party. Christmas was months away, but as Bumble put it, “The children don’t know.” As he took off his Ray-Bans—an affectation that made him look like a B Division football club owner from Naples—he asked Anna for some chai.
    Zairos wished his grandfather would come to Anna’s.
    Every once in a while, Zairos would ask Shapur Irani to sit with him on the rickety benches, even if he remained silent and just listened to the frying of eggs in Anna’s kitchen. Shapur Irani always politely declined. Maybe he thought of Anna’s as an aberration, something frivolous.
    But on days like this, when Zairos had found a Warli man hanging from a tree, Anna’s provided a strange balm, and he could appreciate the lunacy of it all—the humongous MerwanMota, highly diabetic, eating strawberry ice cream in dollops; Behrooz scratching his bald skull, gripped by a Hindi graphic novel called
The Day My Wife Bled to Death;
Keki the Italian telling him to read a real writer like Tolstoy, and Behrooz, upon hearing that extraterrestrial name, giving Keki a disgusted look.
    Anna’s was Zairos’ cocoon, and while he sat there, cozy in its extravagance, he thought of Kusum in the back of a tractor with only an old fatigued woman to help her cope with the loss of her father. There was no sugary chai in her world, no air-conditioned car where gamblers hugged their cards tighter than their wives, and certainly no leather wallet, fat with cash, to serve as a cushion when she sat down. As she went home, all she had was the burn of daylight and the roar of a tractor to aggravate the strain on an anguished, racing heart.

    Kusum picked up a shovel from outside her neighbour’s hut. It felt heavy, the iron handle rusted, extra nails hammered at the base to keep it from coming loose. The sun gave the rust an orange sparkle as though the shovel were at the kiln instead of at the end of its life.
    It was only fitting that Kusum was the one who would dig her father’s grave.
    It was her fault that he killed himself. She had failed to hide the marks on her body from him, ones her husband had made. Perhaps it was the way she walked that had given her away. Or the manner in which her ribs caved when she sat down.
    It had made her father go to Shapur seth for money. If her husband was given money, he would grant her a divorce. But she knew the truth. Laxman would not have left her even then. He would have taken the money and kept her.
    Into a thicket of trees Kusum went, until she reached the banks of a stream. The monsoon season was a while away, so the stream was dry. She tested the texture of the soil with the shovel. Satisfied, she started digging. When the soil suddenly became hard, she stood on the shovel until it no longer offered any resistance.
    In the distance, the hills of Dahanu rose and fell like the very hopes of her people, the Warlis—the Kings of the Jungle. At least that was what the folk