Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014

‘Cyrus Mistry has long been known as perhaps the best writer of his generation.’ —Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

THE RADIANCE OF ASHES

Also by Cyrus Mistry fiction Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer Passion Flower: Stories plays Doongaji House The Legacy of Rage

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THE RADIANCE OF ASHES

CYRUS MISTRY

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India Published by Aleph Book Company 2014 Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 Copyright © Cyrus Mistry 2005, 2014 All rights reserved First published by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd 2005 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company. ISBN: 978-93-83064-74-8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed at Repro Knowledgecast Limited, Thane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

To my mother and Ikeda Sensei, both of whom taught me never to give up

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent —Dionysius of Halicarnassus

CONTENTS Prologue xi PART I Highrise 3 Kanara Lunch Home 34 Slumming 62 Haircut 86 Earrings 105 Squall 119 PART 2 Post-Partum 127 Schooldays 150 PART 3 Bitterness 173 Destitute 187 Mira 202 Vada-pao 212 Victoria Gardens 225 PART 4 Night 249 Ambavali Again 269 Postscript 304 Acknowledgements 322

PROLOGUE I have always lived with a strong sense of unreality. (Lived…? Not quite the word, surely. Endured? Survived?… One is flushed by a strong sense of reality, I suppose, when one truly lives.) Events that were shaping my life, or deflecting it off the course I thought it was running, often passed me by unnoticed. I was undisturbed by this in earlier days. In later life, there were moments when I raged against the randomness of it all… But always, on the tattered fringes of experience, that powdery haze of insubstantiality. As though it was all happening to someone else, not me. I dare not attempt this narration in the first person. Too many selves are involved, too many ‘I’s. And I’m not sure ‘I’ can tackle any of them with honesty or insight. My best chance is to tell it like a story. I have a secret hope, though—should I disclose it?—that in its telling at least a few of these selves will make peace and merge. Perhaps later generations will be better placed to judge whether the story that follows is an aberration of a life, peculiar only to its author, or symptomatic of a post-colonial turmoil that ravaged individual lives as much as it did entire societies. The problem is, I’m not sure I’ll be able to carry it off. Or even bring it to any sort of completion. I have no choice but to try, though. My very survival depends on it. Over the years, a sporadic journal helped bring the blurred edges of life into sharper focus. Occasionally, I reproduce bits of this journal alongside the main narrative with the intention of making the fare more intelligible to the reader. But then again, I’m not at all certain whether such intervention will aid perspicuity or further obfuscate it. I should begin at the beginning… A muddy golden sun slunk out from a chink in the overcast sky. Heaps of great grey clouds parted momentously, momentarily, flashing bright beams of yellow light that refracted in the wet surfaces of tarred roads, xi

on the hoods of cars and buses hedge in by, or twisting in choked traffic, on the bemused gargantuan faces of heroes, heroines and bloodthirsty villains staring out of gaily coloured cinema hoardings. Clutching his bag against a damp shirt, Jingo shut his umbrella. Then he referred to the slip of paper in his pocket. The ink had smudged, but there was no mistaking the address. He stared in dismay at the grimy dilapidated structure that loomed above him. A concrete carcass. A house on stilts. Manoeuvring through a maze of wooden beams that supported the entrance to the crumbling edifice, Jingo came to a narrow staircase, soggy and steep. Some of the steps had splintered or given in. But when he had ascended the first flight and crossed the landing, he found he could climb no further. The stairway was barricaded by a plank of wood, and a crudely painted sign on the wall read: DO NOT USE— BY ORDER. Staring dully at this peremptory placard, he became aware of two men conferring in low voices a short distance away. The older of the two, thin and grey-haired and stooped, suddenly raised his voice. ‘Every day, every day she goes to him for injection?’ he cried shrilly. ‘Shows him her bum, and he pokes it for her! Taking a full course, it seems.’ ‘Easy, boss, easy…’ his friend soothed him, caressing his back. The two men saw Jingo approach and glowered at him with brazen inquisition. Jingo nodded vaguely at them and continued down the corridor. When he had turned the bend, he found the passage suddenly bustling with people. Ignoring the curious glances, not slowing to glimpse into the gloomy interiors of people’s homes, Jingo walked past a fat man in a rocking chair reading a newspaper, a thin woman cleaning rice on a plate, a young boy holding a puppy over the balcony by the scruff of its neck, the puppy yelping piteously. Several of the tenants seemed to have their radios tuned to the same station. Every time the rambunctious Hindi film song that was playing began to waft into diminuendo, it would suddenly blare up again from yet another of the tenements. At last he came to another staircase, this one wider and brighter xii

The Radiance of Ashes

than the first, though just as rickety. Treading gingerly, he continued his ascent to the top floor. That was a rule with the agency. Always start at the top and work your way down. At the next landing he was greeted by a small signboard that read LONDON HOTEL. The hotel’s name was painted in red. Below it, a blue plastic arrow directed prospective clients, presumably to their rooms, or to the reception desk. But there was no one in sight and every door in the passageway was shut. Suddenly it had grown dark again. Outside, a soft steady rain began to patter. Jingo continued to climb. A little girl was playing hopscotch on the landing at the top of the stairs. The first door on his right was bolted and a forbiddingly large padlock hung from it. He consulted his call sheet, marked a cross on it and moved on to the next. ‘Who do you want?’ the little girl sang in a high-pitched voice. Her stringy hair was tied in bunches by two shreds of ribbon. Her frock was crumpled and buttonless. The next door was ajar. A slight shove, and it yielded with a creak. He caught a glimpse of a darkened living room in obvious disuse. A chair with a missing leg and a broken back lay on its side in the middle of the floor. A spider scuttled out from under it and froze, mesmerized. He tasted dust in his throat. ‘No one stays here! No one stays here!’ shrieked the child, hopping ferociously from square to square, legs apart, on the chalk-drawn pattern. Jingo walked past the next two doors making a mental note that these, too, wore padlocks. ‘And anyone stay here?’ he asked the girl. ‘No one, no one, no one stays here at all,’ she cried, triumphantly making an about turn mid-hop and landing on the next set of squares with her back to Jingo. Suddenly the door at the end of the corridor flew open and a strange, harried creature rushed out. It was an old woman, clothed in an astonishing number of woollens—socks, mittens, a flannel longshirt and pyjamas, a moth-eaten red coatee, a knitted scarf that covered her ears and was knotted under her chin—all ragged and sooty and patched. Her feet were swaddled in a tiny pair of checked canvas shoes. Her Prologue

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sharply hooked nose pinned down a pair of excruciatingly thin lips, above which the faint outline of a moustache could be seen. ‘Deceitful heartless horrible horrible wench!’ The muscles in her scrawny neck stood out, but she seemed able to produce no more than a hoarse fierce whisper. ‘Who stays here then if no one stays here, if no one’s here who am I? Who am I?’ she demanded, using a mysterious, pained logic. ‘Liar! O you horrible!’ The little girl danced away and down the stairs gurgling a shrill and merry laugh. ‘And you?’ The woman turned to Jingo. ‘Who are you and what’ll you want?’ But before Jingo could reply, the nastiness in her expression dissolved and in its place, in her beady bird-eyes, flashed a glimmer of hope, and something of sadness. She clutched his shirt with her small, mitten-clad fingers and drew his face closer to her own. Jingo gaped foolishly at a mole on her chin from which two long hairs grew. Oh no, he thought, limp in her grip, she’s mistaken me for somebody else. ‘You have news—you have some news of him? How is he? Where is he?’ ‘No, no! I’m sorry…’ What have I got into now, wondered Jingo. The woman’s eyes darted from his face to the clipboard and papers in his hand, to the bag slung on his shoulder, and back to his face again. Now they were shrewd and hard. ‘Oh, oh. From the tax-wallahs, are you? Come round to snoop a bit, ask a few questions? Don’t deny it. I can see you’re from the Tax!’ She turned and flung open her door which she had left ajar. ‘Look!’ she gestured. ‘See for yourself. Paupered, everything gone…’ Now she was bawling in a gruff, frightened voice. ‘Nothing left, I tell you. Everything gone!’ ‘I’m not! I’m not from the Tax!’ Jingo shouted back, excitedly. ‘I’m from market research.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘Yes. I’m doing a product survey for some advertisers.’ ‘Ah, market research!’ She pronounced the words solemnly, as though weighing their import. ‘That’s different,’ she said, having thought it over. ‘Come in, then. Come in, boy. Why didn’t you open your mouth and say so in the first place?’ xiv

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Inside it was dark and unventilated. The air was damp and carried a faint smell of faeces in it, and that other sourly fetid odour, not easy to describe, that hangs about the habitats of the sick and the aged. The roof was leaking in two places. Two copper pots on the floor collected a steady drip of rainwater, but they were overflowing, and there were small puddles around both. The room was cluttered with the unaccountable accumulations of a long past. Six chairs were lined up in a row against the wall, their cane seats mostly ruptured. A large cupboard with an inset mirror leaned forward at a jaunty angle, one of its front legs broken. In a dark mahogany chest of drawers, a black rectangular slot nestled, where one drawer was missing. About a dozen empty and half-empty bottles of physician’s mixture stood on the chest’s flat top. A four-poster bed sprawled in the centre of the room, a thin mattress rolled to one side of it. On the bare planks of the other half, over a lining of old newspapers, stood a blackened wick stove, a cutting board, a large kitchen knife. Under the bed, the empty concave of a sewing machine lid. Beside it, a small table heaped with all sorts of odds and ends: a Petromax, a chipped porcelain cup, a screwdriver, a large screw, a set of dentures in a jar of water, a tattered prayer book, a big ball of thread, a baby’s red shoe and something in a saucer that was green with fungus, probably a piece of cheese. On the wall, an ancient pendulum clock was ticking loudly. Jingo noted with some surprise that it showed the correct time. Next to it, slightly askew, hung an old calendar print of Nehru holding a lurid red rose to his nose. On being invited to take a seat, Jingo chose an oddly ornate wooden stool; as soon as he had settled on it, a queasy suspicion awoke in him that he was occupying the shuttered top of an old-fashioned chamber pot. He wanted to move. But none of the other chairs in the room looked like they would hold his weight, and the old woman didn’t seem to care about where he sat. Hastily, she had clambered on to her bed and was waiting with breathless anticipation for Jingo to begin. Jilla Gorimar—for that was her name—appeared to have considerable experience answering market research questionnaires. No sooner had Jingo noted it down and her age, she began to volunteer a flood of information. After a while, Jingo gave up trying to control the Prologue

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‘[A] master story-teller.’—TimeOut Drifter, dropout, dreamer…Jingo believes he has rejected any form of class privilege in a ‘hideously unequal society’. Making a meagre living as a part-time door-to-door market researcher, he jots down notes on characters and insights for a novel. Is he serious about his self-professed vocation? Or just too laid-back, just too fond of getting high? As the story moves effortlessly from a middle-class Parsi housing colony to a far-flung slum on the outskirts of the city, memories of a bitter love affair continue to haunt Jingo, but it’s only when his other romance— with the city—erupts in a nightmare of horror that he realizes he’d better wake up before it’s too late. The Radiance of Ashes is a beautifully described tale of desire, duty and dreams. It is also a story about families, about the truths we hold and the lies we tell, about the fires that burn in each of us—what is left once the flames have died away. ‘Part portrait-of-the-young-Parsi-as-artist, part diatribe against the forces that felled a tolerant, cosmopolitan society and part honest account of a love affair with Bombay and its people, this is a good book for digging deep into the entrails of a city.’—India Today ‘Finally, a mature novel that breathes life into a genre done to death by over-rated first-timers....What Mistry attempts here is quite ambitious—and he pulls it off with the cool assurance of a veteran at his peak.’—DNA

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