automatic smile. Delivering threats and dire warnings while smiling pleasantly, he discovered, was not a good strategy. If he could have modified it to a menacing smile, that would have been perfect. But the muscles in question were beyond his control. The occasions when he had to express regrets over repairs delayed, or convey condolences for a death in a tenant’s family, were equally difficult. Before long, the burdensome dental display earned him an undeserved reputation for being callous, crude, incompetent, retarded, even demonic.
So he smiled his hapless way through three buckram folders, all umber like the first, and added twenty-four years to his own frame. Twenty-four years of drudgery and deprivation during which his youth disappeared, and the bright ambition of his golden season became tainted by bitterness. Desperate, and scarred by the certain knowledge that he no longer had any prospects, he watched his wife, two sons, and two daughters still believing in him and thereby increasing his anguish. He asked himself what it was he had done to deserve a life so stale, so empty of hope. Or was this the way all humans were meant to feel? Did the Master of the Universe take no interest in levelling the scales — was there no such thing as. a fair measure?
There no longer seemed any point in going to the masjid as often as he did. His attendance at Friday prayers became irregular. And he began seeking guidance in ways he had once despised as the preserve of the ignorant.
He found the jyotshis and fortune-tellers in the marketplace most comforting. They offered solutions to his money problems, and advice on improving his future, which was becoming his past at an alarming velocity. He discovered their confident pronouncements to be a soothing drug.
Nor did he restrict himself to palmists and astrologers. Seeking stronger drugs, he turned to less orthodox messengers: card-picking doves, chart-reading parrots, communicating cows, diagram-divining snakes. Always worried that an acquaintance would spot him during one of his questionable excursions, he decided, with great reluctance, to leave behind his distinctive fez. It was like abandoning a dear friend. The only other time he had forsaken this fixture of daily wear was during Partition, back in 1947, when communal slaughter at the brand-new border had ignited riots everywhere, and sporting a fez in a Hindu neighbourhood was as fatal as possessing a foreskin in a Muslim one. In certain areas it was wisest to go bareheaded, for choosing incorrectly from among fez, white cap, and turban could mean losing one’s head.
Fortunately, his sittings at the avian auguries were relatively private. He could crouch unnoticed on a pavement corner with the creature’s keeper, ask the question, and the dove or parrot would hop out of its cage to enlighten him.
The cow session, on the other hand, was a major performance that collected large crowds. The cow, caparisoned in colourful brocaded fabrics, a string of tiny silver bells round her neck, was led into the ring of spectators by a man with a drum. Though the fellow’s shirt and turban were bright-hued, he seemed quite drab compared to the richly bedizened cow. The two walked the circle: once, twice, thrice — however long it took him to recite the cow’s curriculum vitae, with special emphasis on prophecies and forecasts accurately completed to date. His voice was deafeningly raucous, his eyes bloodshot, his gestures manic, and all this frenzy was calculated as a masterly counterpoint to the cow’s calm demeanour. After the brief biography was narrated, the drum that had silently hung from his shoulder came to life. It was a drum meant not for beating but for rubbing. He continued to walk the cow in a circle, rubbing the drumskin with a stick, producing a horrible bleating, a groaning, a wailing. It was a sound to wake the dead and stun the living, it was eldritch, it was a summons to spirits and forces not of this world, a summons to descend, witness, and assist bovine divination.
When the drum ceased, the man shouted the paying customer’s question into the cow’s ear, loud enough for the entire ring of humans to hear. And she answered with a nod or shake of her intricately made-up head, tinkling the tiny silver bells round her neck. The crowd applauded in wonder and admiration. Then the drum-rubbing resumed while donations were collected.
One day, after Ibrahim’s question was bellowed into the soft, brown, unprotected ear, there was no response. The man repeated it, louder. This time the cow reacted. Whether it was the annoying drum that she had put up with for years, or the boorish bellowing in her ear day after day, she gored her keeper with her vermilioned horns.
For a moment, the spectators thought the cow was just responding a bit more energetically than usual to the question. Then she tossed him to the ground, trampling him thoroughly. Now they realized it was not part of the prophecy procedure, especially when the man’s blood started to flow.
With cries of mad cow! mad cow! the crowd scattered. But once her tormentor had been dealt with, she stood placidly, blinking her gentle, long-lashed eyes, swishing away the udder-seeking flies with her tail.
The man’s bizarre death convinced Ibrahim that this was no longer a reliable method of obtaining divine advice. Some days later a new team of cow and drum-rubber took over the corner, but Ibrahim avoided the performances. There were other, safer systems for procuring preternatural help.
While the mad-cow incident was still fresh in his mind, however, he witnessed another death. This time it was the handler of a sortilegious serpent whose venom ducts had become overdue for milking. Ever after, Ibrahim shivered when picturing the scene: it could have been into him that the cobra sank its fangs, for he had been crouching close to observe its oracular movements.
Shocked by the two fatalities, the rent-collector abandoned all fortune-telling fauna. As though waking from a nightmare, he re-donned his forsaken fez and set out to recover his lost self. How much money had been diverted from his family’s needs with his blasphemous addiction, he realized, as he sat beside the sea while the setting sun’s ocean light bathed the masjid, floating at the end of the long causeway. He gazed out upon the receding tide that lay bare the secrets beneath the waves, and he shuddered. His own dark secrets swam up again from their murky depths of confusion and despair. He tried to push them back, to hold them under, to drown them. But they kept slipping away like eels, resurfacing to haunt him. There was only one way to vanquish them — he returned penitent to the masjid, ready to accept whatever fate had in store for him.
Among other things, it was the plastic folder. Twenty-four years of buckram had passed, and now it was the age of plastic in the landlord’s office. Ibrahim no longer cared. He had learned that dignity could not be acquired from accoutrements and accessories; it came unasked, it grew from one’s ability to endure. If the office had handed him a coolie’s basket to carry the documents around on his head, he would have complied now without complaint.
But the plastic folder did have an advantage — it kept the monsoon at bay. Now he seldom had to recopy documents on which the ink had decided to frolic with the rain in lunatic swirls. At a time when his hands had started to shake, this was a blessing. Also, one pass with a wet rag, and all sneezes and snuff stains, pea green or brown, were wiped clean, no longer embarrassing him during audiences with the landlord.
And at home, too, there were changes he accepted with submission. After all, what other options were there? His older daughter died of tuberculosis, followed by his wife. Then his sons disappeared into the underworld, returning periodically to abuse him. The remaining daughter, just when he was beginning to think she would redeem everything, left to become a prostitute. His life, he thought, had become the plot of a bad Hindi movie minus the happy ending.
Why, he wondered, did he keep working now, making his rounds of the six buildings and collecting rent? Why did he not jump off the top of one of them? Why did he not make a bonfire of the receipts and the cash, and throw himself onto it drenched in kerosene? How was it that his heart kept beating instead of bursting, his sanity intact instead of shattering like a dropped mirror? Was it all made of tough synthetic material, like the indestructible plastic folder? And why was time, the great vandal, now being neglectful?
But plastic, too, had its allotted span of days and years. It could rip and tear and crack like buckram, he discovered. Like skin and bone, he realized with relief. It was simply a matter of patience. Thus the present folder was the third of its kind in twenty-one years.
He examined it from time to time, and saw reflected in its tired covers the furrows inflicted in his brow. The plastic divisions inside were starting to tear, and the neat compartments seemed ready to rebel; within his bodily compartments the rebellion had already begun. Which one would win this ridiculous race between plastic and flesh, he wondered, as he arrived at the flat, wiped the snuff off his nostrils and fingers, and rang the doorbell.
Spotting his maroon fez through the peephole, Dina silenced the tailors. “Not a sound while he is here,” she whispered.
“How are you?” smiled the rent-collector, baring heavily stained teeth and two gaps: the sweet, innocent smile of an aged angel.
Without acknowledging his greeting, she said, “Yes? The rent is not yet due.”
