“Stop fooling with the trunk there,” said Ishvar.
“Okay, okay.” They took a handful of pads into the front room and continued clowning.
“What’s this?” said Maneck, holding two above his head.
“Horns?”
“No,” he waggled them. “Donkey’s ears.”
Om held one behind him. “Rabbit’s tail.”
They held them at their crotches like phalluses and pranced around the room, making large masturbatory gestures. The knot at the end of Maneck’s pad came undone. The stuffing fell out, leaving the casing flopping in his hand.
“Look at that!” laughed Om. “Your lund has already gone to sleep, yaar!”
Maneck took a firm new pad and struck Om’s with it. A duel ensued but the weapons collapsed quickly, scattering fabric snippets around the room. They picked up two more and began rushing at each other in a gallop, like jousters on horseback, their sanitary lances sticking out at their flies.
“Tan-tanna tan-tanna tan-tanna!” they trumpeted and attacked. Backing up to their corners, they adjusted the pads at their crotches while Om reared and neighed like a charger champing at the bit.
Just as they were ready to tilt again, Dina opened the front door and entered through the verandah. The fanfare died in mid-flourish. She got as far as the sofa, then froze. The scene left her speechless: the floor littered with the scraps of her carefully prepared sanitary pads, the two boys standing guiltily, clutching their embarrassing toys.
They dropped their hands and started to hide the pads behind their backs, then realized the gesture was as futile as it was silly. They lowered their heads.
“You shameless boys!” she managed to utter. “You shameless boys!”
She ran to the back room where Ishvar was still ploughing away at his machine, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the front room. “Stop!” she said, her voice trembling. “Come and see what those two have been doing!”
Om and Maneck had put aside the pads, but Dina thrust one each into their hands. “Go on!” she said. “Do it for him, let him see your shameless behaviour!”
Ishvar did not need to see. He gathered that something filthy had been going on, especially if she was so upset. He went to Om and slapped him across the face. “You I cannot slap,” he said to Maneck. “But someone should. For your own good.”
He led Om into the back room and flung him upon his stool. “I don’t want another word from you, now or ever. Just do your work quietly till it’s time to leave.”
Dinner was a silent meal; only the knives and forks spoke. Dina cleared up quickly, then went into the sewing room and bolted her door.
As if I was a sex maniac or something, thought Maneck, feeling miserable. He waited for a while in the front room, hoping she would come out, give him a chance to apologize. His ears picked up the opening and closing of a drawer. The creaking of her bed. A clatter that could be her hairbrush. The thud of the tailors’ stools being pushed aside. He heard the sound of the trunk lid, and his face burned with shame. Then the bright line under her door went dark, and his wretchedness engulfed him.
Would she write to his parents and complain? Surely he deserved it. For almost two months now, she had treated him so well in her flat, and he had behaved disgustingly. For the first time since leaving home, he had felt at peace, unthreatened, thanks to Dina Aunty. Rescued from the hostel that had made him ill, with that tightness in the chest, that nauseated feeling every morning.
Now he had brought it all back, through his own doing. He switched off the light beside the sofa and dragged himself to his room.
Morning could not alleviate Maneck’s shame from last night. To help keep it burning, Dina slammed the plate of two fried eggs before him at breakfast. When it was time to leave for college and he called out “Bye, Aunty,” she would not come to wave. Woefully, he shut the door upon the empty, accusing verandah.
The first hint of forgiveness quivered in the air after dinner. Like the night before, she retreated to the back room instead of bringing the quilt to the sofa; however, she kept her door ajar.
Waiting hopefully in the front room, he passed the time listening to the neighbours. Someone screamed retributive warnings — at a daughter, he presumed. “Mui bitch!” came a man’s voice. “Behaving like a slut, staying out so late at night! You think eighteen years is too old to get a thrashing? I’ll show you! When we say back by ten o’clock, we mean ten o’clock!”
Maneck glanced at his watch: ten-twenty. Still Dina Aunty did not emerge. Neither did the light go off. At their usual bedtime of ten-thirty, he decided to peek in and say good night.
She was in her nightgown, her back to the door. He changed his mind and tried to retreat, but she saw him through the crack. Oh God, he thought, panicking — now she would assume he was spying.
“Yes?” she said sharply.
“Excuse me, Aunty, I was just coming to say good night.”
“Yes. Good night.” Her stiffness persisted.
He re-echoed the words and began edging away, then stopped. He cleared his throat. “Also…”
“Also what?”
“Also, I wanted to say sorry… for yesterday…”
“Don’t mumble from outside the room. Come in and say what you have to say.”
He entered shyly. Her bare arms in the nightgown looked so lovely, and through the light cotton, the shape of… but he dared not let his eyes linger. Mummy’s friend was the unsummoned thought that terrified him as he finished his apology.
“I want you to understand,” she said. “I was not angry with your shameful act because of any harm to me. I was ashamed for you, to see you behaving like a loafer. Like a roadside mavali. From Omprakash I cannot expect better. But you, from a good Parsi family. And I left you to watch after them, I trusted you.”
“I’m sorry,” he hung his head. She raised her hands to her hair, reinserting a clip that had become ineffective. He found the fuzz in her armpits extremely erotic.
“Go to bed now,” she said. “Next time, use better judgement.”
As he fell asleep, thinking of Dina Aunty in the nightgown, she began to merge with the woman on the train, in the upper berth.
VII. On the Move
AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH THE SANITARY pads, Dina was certain that neither Ishvar nor Om would dare follow through with a dinner for Maneck at their house. And even if they did, he would refuse, for fear of offending her.
In a few days, however, the invitation was indeed renewed, and acceptance seemed to linger close at hand. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered angrily to Maneck. “After what you did that day, isn’t it enough? Haven’t you upset me enough?”
“But I apologized for that, Aunty. And Om was also very sorry. What’s the connection between the two things?”
“You think sorry makes it all right. You don’t understand the problem. I have nothing against them, but they are tailors — my employees. A distance has to be maintained. You are the son of Farokh and Aban Kohlah. There is a difference, and you cannot pretend there isn’t — their community, their background.”
“But Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t mind,” he said, trying to explain he hadn’t been brought up to think this way, that his parents encouraged him to mix with everyone.
