BY RUI PERES

Growing up poor, the narrator realises there isn’t much difference between the classes… in death.

I HAD always thought of writing a story, a story that was real, like life, perhaps, more real than life. When I was barely five (how long ago that seems now!) I urged to tell my father:

“Father, you invent stories about wolves and jackals. Why don’t you tell me something that really happened?…. Something about you.”

But I was scared. Father was imposing and hot-tempered and mad when angry. Even whilst relating the anecdote about the tiger and the lamb, he would raise his voice so loud, that mother had often to scurry from the kitchen with her hands smeared from kneading chapattis to see what was wrong. But she would sprint back to her work as if nothing had disturbed her. She cowered before him. One day when she did request father to lower his voice, he spurted forth such a roar that it sounded like a bursting cracker and mother turned pallid. Father was not the sort of man you could talk to at night.

His chest bulged with muscles; his arms were as strong as the branches of a mango tree; only they were dark with the sun. Moreover, as he never wore a shirt except on Sundays when he went for Mass, anybody could be instilled with fear at the sight of them.

During the day he toiled in the landlord’s fields and every evening he brought some money home which he gave to mother after setting aside a few coins for himself. Mother, too, was out for the better part of the day as she went daily to the master’s house in order to draw water, and wash clothes. At ten in the morning she would cook the rice, prepare fish curry and carry along with her a portion of the food.

When they returned at sunset they were both tired. ‘Mai’ was usually back by six-thirty chewing tobacco which she stored inside the furrow of her gaudy folds and whenever she extracted a fresh particle it appeared she was deliberately loosening her baggy wraps in order to display her navel. Her teeth were becoming brown due to the leaves she consumed but father never said anything to her. Probably because he knew when to leave her alone and when to say what, that is, so long as she didn’t disturb his evening moods; he was too jolly to notice the little kinks in her character.

Carrying me in his arms he then sang and told me stories about wolves and jackals preying on weaker creatures, and how they always killed but were seldom killed themselves. There was not a day he did not swear. Very often he uttered words that I could not comprehend; they were bad words, I learned later. He swore them so naturally that they seemed as innocent as the lambs and rabbits, as profuse as the copper bangles that jingled on mother’s arms and as meaningless, besides.

Ours was a simple way of life, without dates, and so uneventful that it is difficult to remember incidents except in terms of unorganised pictures as the years rolled by.

One day mother had no money for rice. Father had been kicked from the landlord’s house for back-answering his wife. He came straight home and went to sleep. He was drunk. Without an anna in his pocket, and today, Mai was saying, was Saturday, that means, an empty stomach tomorrow.

Mother was worried. I thought and thought and suddenly I hit upon a novel idea. “Mother, why don’t you sell one of your bangles? You have so many.”

She smiled with irritation: “Are you out of your mind?”- I was preparing for Holy Communion then, nearing the age of eight, and consequently was expected to have some sense.

That evening mother went to the landlord’s house to beg for his forgiveness. He was kind enough to give her a measure of rice and a few rupees, but asked her to return the next day in order to mop the “sala” and clean the house as his daughter’s birthday was approaching.

She came home happy and sermonised that Anton had to change his ways, or else he would he cursed by God and men. I could not but agree, for father had lately increased his consumption of spirits.

Luckily, father wasn’t eavesdropping, or he might have landed me a blow on the head or a slap. I was no longer his pet now. Three more children had adorned our home. The days of stories were over; instead I had to look after my brothers and sisters, and work during the day; helping mother with her cooking in the morning, and whenever father fell senseless on the streets, or came home fuzzled I was expected to chafe salt against his hands and feet, and ignore the bad words he unwittingly railed at me.

The third of December feast of St. Francis Xavier is a great day in Goa….That morning I was decked in a crumpled white frock with long sleeves (the first time I wore a frock) and prepared myself to receive God. As I knelt before the communion rails, what struck me was my awkwardness compared to the graceful gestures of the other girls in white. They were younger than me but so primly dressed! Their frocks shone white like the veil of the Virgin, and every movement of their feet seemed to remind me of dolls, the kind of expensive dolls I once saw displayed at a fair. One of them was pink in complexion, brown-eyed and had long hair falling in cascades behind her ears, which were delicate as wax-petals. She had a flowered ribbon on her head decorated with white trinkets.

After mass father, who wore a clean red shirt and a brown pant, pulled me by the hand. He was taking me home, but mother said: “Wait, I want to take her to “bai’s” house.”

“For what?” Father was usually quick tempered in the mornings. But he permitted.

She lived in a big house cemented from the entrance to the passage which led to the back door, and its ceiling rested so high that it could easily engulf four huts one on top of the other and hardly fill a room. How tiny our hut seemed compared to this mansion!

Mother led me inside holding hard my right hand as if she feared I might be lost in those tunnel-like, winding corridors. A lady met us on the way. She was tall and fair, and though she looked old, she wore a gold brooch and an elegant maroon dress. She smiled affably, adding: “Is this the mischief-maker?” Mother mumbled blushing; the colour of the red trinkets in her necklace was reflected on her face, while I stood mute, not knowing what to say, but at the same time experiencing a sense of tingling elation in her remark.
While I was thus engrossed I suddenly noticed in the lady’s face an approaching cloud of apprehension. “Look out” she shrieked staring beyond me, “The dog.” But there was no time.

Before I could grasp the dark significance of her words, I felt my wrist being violently grabbed and shaken. Oh, what pain! I screamed falling back like a log. A huge black dog was over me, its bulging eyes emitting sparks of fury. There was a commotion; mother was wailing; I thought I must die. In my agony the saving words. “Mother” “God” “Virgin” which I learnt from mother and in the catechism classes dragged themselves out of my mouth.

Evidently Christ heard my piercing lamentations: Somebody came rushing towards me, kicked the dog and pulled it by the tail. I was free, thank God, but I lived watching my own blood on my palm and fingers dribbling like slaver out of an old man’s mouth. Only his was red and dark.

A slim girl bright-eyed and genial washed my lacerations and administered tincture. She was the landlord’s daughter. I divined it the moment she observed casting a glance over my dress, “Wasn’t this my frock, Mummy?” The elderly lady nodded her head benevolently, whilst suddenly reminding herself that she would be late for mass if she delayed any more. In a second she was gone admonishing behind her back: “Give them coffee and bread, Clara, will you?”

For the first time in my life I tasted butter; perhaps the last too. Because father was a poor man and like most poor men unreasonably concluded that all who ate butter became fat and dozed on arm-chairs. Take, for instance, the landlord. Is he not a walking barrel, and what work does he do?

Father had a grudge against the landlord. Under the slightest pretext he would invoke his name in order to explain his points and prove his generations. Oftentimes the latter were so absurd that the landlord himself would have laughed at hearing them.

But all that seems such a long time ago as I now think of it. Years have flown by swifter than pigeons. The bird of time has clipped a new badge on my breast. I am no longer a maid.

It happened in a flash. Mother announced one day that I would have to outgrow my childish ways to be a good mother; that I would have to teach my husband how to live in accordance with God’s Commandments.
I recollect that Sunday with a blush; when decked in a long white cloth wound around my body in luxuriant folds, I was escorted to the church, and how I hid my face because I was too shy to show it to my relatives, lest they might smile and crack silly jokes about me.

My husband was a healthy brown in complexion, young and striking; within less than a year he gave me a son, who is sprouting like a tender shoot. Someday, when little Francis grows up and comes out of school with a diploma in hand, and calls me to live with him, then, perhaps, we may live in a big house and taste butter everyday and remember that great day twinkling amidst the bleached leftovers of the past, the day I wore a white frock and went for First Holy Communion and taste Creamery in the Landlord’s house with my frock soiled and my hand still bloody from the bite.

I have hopes. So many of our children are now going to school. Newer and newer pigeons are coming and going, bringing with them the latest chippings of new hopes. But I wonder….the future is not, I think, like the past through which we can see clearly. Times are changing. Invisible to the pigeons are the dark clouds roving over our heads after each sunset. Every day somebody is lost in the wake of the approaching darkness, and a familiar face disappears without leaving behind a trace. Where is the landlord today and that tall lady who wore a gold brooch? And where is my father who once used to tell me stories? Who knows, a day might come when we’ll have to forget the folklore and start telling something about ourselves, of labour, hardships, liquor and peace. After all, are not our experiences also good enough to be clothed in stories?

That was why I had thought of reminding father to tell me a real story, although in that distant past, I never knew I would be following his footsteps. Destiny is so ironical!…Yes, every night Francis listens attentively, while I conceal myself behind my baggy folds. So I ever tell him about the tortures I underwent attending on father every night, my heart cracking with each gasp he uttered from the ulcer in his stomach and about mother not knowing what to do because there was no money to pay the doctor; reassuring herself that it was merely a stomach ache he had, a trivial illness. All she did, I thought then, was to chew tobacco and slur her teeth. But what else could she do? Did she have a hundred rupees to take father to Bombay or buy the quires of prescriptions the doctors would recommend?

Nobody knew, anyway, that father’s hour was drawing to a close until one day she decided to call in our village doctor. He was a short gentleman, old bulky, burdened with a pot-like paunch and showing a depressed face behind his thick glasses. He examined the emaciated body on the mat, washed his hands, and then when mother accompanied him to the door with a crumpled note in her hand, he remarked sullenly “It’s a pity. You dullards always wait till the last moment.” He refused to accept the money; and, what moved me and mother deeply, was his sudden gesture, like an avalanche of tenderness “Take this” he said flicking out two ten rupees notes from his pocket “Give him whatever he wants. It’s the end.”

That night I wept; realising that the world was not as bad as it seemed. There were some men, some angels sent by God; to relieve suffering. A few they were, but they were worth the name.

Year later, when the doctor died and I attended his funeral, contrary to the prevailing custom, I could see the black flap of his coffin being weighed down with every spade-ful of the murky earth, just as it had done over the concealed form of my father, so many, many, years ago. And I thought then how vain it was to live and be rich, and I prayed for his soul with eyes moist with memories. One day I too would be like them: a lump of hard clay whom only the grave embraces and claims as her children.

But who will write about this, the sad truth concerning man’s life and ours, poor as we are? Perhaps, Francis, someday, divining my thoughts will take the burden upon himself and write a real story, the story about the Lilliputians of the earth.

Like a hopeful mother I pin my faith in him, leaving the rest to God.

Courtesy: Goan Short Stories