Dada

By Morli Dharam

1.

As he went up the stairs he felt the old fear return. There was a dryness in his throat and his hand sliding
along the banisters left wet imprints on the polished wood.
He had not wanted to come. There was that leaden weight within him when his mother had said he
was well enough now to meet his uncle. He had thought up evasions, had put up various subterfuges,
and when therse did not avail him, had pitted stolid stubborn front against his mother’s nagging
insistence. But she had been equally stubborn. Through the years he did not remember a time in which
she had not had her way with him. However headstrong he might have been she always won her point,
always routed his resistence so that in the end his will was broken, the fortress of his desire battered
down, and a cold shuddering sensation forced him to say the one conciliatory word that stopped his
torment. Such scenes with his mother left him shaken. That cold shuddering sensation would be the
precursor to a strangling fit that turned him in one staggering moment into mute. And when under such
a fit the need to speak arose because his mother, unaware of his anguish, had spoken to him and he must
needs answer her, the words would come limping out of his mouth in the gaspy stuttering whine of an
imbecile. At such times his mother’s eyes narrowed to a steely glare and with her strong thin arms
akimbo she would taunt him with her strident: “Idiot! Can’t you talk straight?” and she would bring
about his utter annihilation with her grotesque mimicry of his splintered speech: “Ah-ah-ah-ah-!” until he
became so loaded with htred for her that the explosive desire to wreak violence would stir his hands to
trembling.
“Don’t be a baby.” His mother whispered to him as she followed him up the stairs. “Speak up to
him and tell him outright the things I told you to say. Make him listen to you. You’re old enough now to
demand his attention. Talk straight and don’t be a baby.”
At the top of the stairs he wiped his sweating hands, moistened collar, heard her emphatic whisper
in his ear: “Do as I told you.”
From where she was playing with her paper dolls on the Persian rug, his cousin Silawahnti looked
up, staring at them in calm wonder her round eyes black buttons on the thin fabric of her face.
“Mummee-e-e, Mummee-e-e,” the little girl rose and ran into the kitchen. “Luisa is here with Rama.”
His Aunt Jhamna came out of the kitchen wiping her floury hands on a towel. Among the Hindu
women he had known she was the most nearly Caucasian in coloring and features. She was tall, slender,
upright as a reed, had auburn hair which she wore in fat twin plaits behind her, hazel eyes, a spray of
freckles on her face and arms which deepened her complexion to a most becoming beige. Draped around
her shoulders and trailing to the floor was a large white cambric stole which when the moment called for
it became the characteristic veil, the symbol of reverence all Hindu women wore in the presence of their
menfolk. One side of her beak-like nose was pierced. (The tiny eyelet was at the moment bared of its
diamond stud which if she were dressed up would lie embedded there, small and glittering.) On her
wrist she wore a loose cluster of thin gold bangles.
She bade them be seated on the low capacious chairs grouped about a glass-top table on the center
of the huge red Persian carpet that covered the living roon floor. When his Aunt Jhamna sat down she
drew up a trousered leg, rested the ball of her foot on the chair’s edge, leaned an elbow on the apex of her
drawn-up knee, and in the course of their conversation, gently swung her sandal that hung by a thing on
her big right toe.
He noticed that his Aunt Jhamna drew up her veil over her head as she sat opposite him, and the
full import of her actions as it swiftly dawned on him caused a sharp flicker of shyness, inferiority,
selfconsciousness, to clutch at his already suffering ego so that he felt constrained to lower his eyes and
fix his gaze vacantly on the folded newspaper lying on the glass-top table. She had never before covered
her head solely in his presence, had never before looked at him with this new intentness, this utterly
confusing attention, this new respect as from one adult to another, and she had never before addressed
him by his full name Ramchand as she did now. So that there was that one second of stupefied awarenes
when his Aunt Jhamna in her high hoarsy voice had said: “Are . . . Ramchand, how are you?”
He shifted his gaze from the table to his aunt’s smiling face now framed like a madonna’s in the thin
white veil, swallowed, and gave her a sly, lank smile. “Fine,” he said.
His Aunt Jhamna turned to his mother and there was a gently teasing humor in her cold-husky
voice when she spoke, “Are, Luisa, now you have big boy. Soon he marry, then what you do? You like
him marry Indian girl? Or you like him marry Filipino girl? What you like?”
His mother suggested that his Aunt Jhamna ask him the question herself and determine his
preference.
His Aunt Jhamna turned to him again, and in the scant English ahe had managed to learn from her
husband, his Uncle Vassanmal, she said, her gold bangles jingling thinly as she swept her arm out in a
large gesture of admonition: “Filipino girl no good. Talk too much. Go out alone. Maybe fight with
mother-in-law. Maybe fight with husband. But Indian girl good. She no talk too much. No fight mother-
in-law. No fight husband. Can sew. Can cook. She bring you big dowry. Then you have money to open
store. What you say?”
Both his Aunt Jhamna and his mother turned on him the combined barrage of their appraisal
awaiting his answer, his Aunt’s with that new attention and respect he so found disturbing, his mother’s
with her possessive proprietary air that always made him squirm and that always loosed within him a
hot swift tide of resentment against her.
“I don’t know,” he finally said, flushing under their probing stares. His Aunt Jhamna’s freckles
stood out clearly in the tiny mounds of her cheeks now raised in a smile of amusement which suddenly
widened and broke into a gale of wheezy mirth. The little girl Silawahnti, barefoot and in red silk trousers
and yellow tunic, leaned inside the parenthesis of his Aunt Jahmna’s thighs looking at him with dark
wondering eyes, her lips convolved about a dirty thumb. Amused tolerance softened hs mother’s eyes
but there lingered about her family set mouth the taint of smug triumph.
Then his mother snapped open her fan and while she employed it she launched in broken English so
his Aunt would readily understand into a spirited account of his recent almost fatal bout with
pneumonia. His mother was a large spare-boned woman with small restless eyes and a firmly set mouth
sharp like an old knife grown thin with use. Her face had gone slack with the encroachment of age, and
her neck was long and flabby like the pitiable obscene throats of unfledged birds. She wore her hair
bobbed, allowed herself the illusion of make-up which somehow was not incongruous with her thighs
and legs which were well preserved and had remained through the years firm and rounded and virginal.
His Aunt Jhamna listened, asked questions, from time to time glanced at him. Meanwhile, he had
opened the folded newspaper on the glass-top table and had desperately tried to engross himself in its
contents.
“You no more sick?” his Aunt Jhamna saked him, her hazel eyes soft like a doe’s.
He was startled when his mother jarred with her fan the paper he was reading and in dialect
snapped at him: “Pay attention when you’re spoken to!”
He lowered his paper and hastily smoothed out the consternation from his face.
His Aunt Jhamna’s hazel eyes slanted, crinkled in their corners as she laughingly repeated her
question.
“I’m all right now,” he said, the words coming out low, depleted of their vocal force from squeezing
past a parched, constricted throat. Catching the grim look in his mother’s eyes, he lowered his gaze to the
paper on his lap.
His mother snapped her fan in a weary, impatient gesture of disgust and said, her voice shrill with
held-in anger: “He’s very stubborn. Very hard-headed. Only likes reading. Always, always, reading.” Her
face worked with exasperation and folding her fan with a snap, exclaimed: “I don’t know what more to
do with him!”
His Aunt Jhamna lowered her foot from the edge of her chair and discovering that Silawahnti was
sucing her thumb, slapped the child’s hand away and hoarsely chided her daughter: “How many times I
tell you no put finger in mouth?” You also hard-headed like Ramchand? Hala, go! Go take bath now! Tell
Felisa give you bath.”
Silawahnti wriggled her toes on the Persian rug and made no move to go.
 “If you no take bath,” his Aunt continued, “Dada get angry and Dada no take you in auto to Luneta
this afternoon.”
Silawahnti considered this, then quickly turning on her heels, she scampered toward the kitchen
shouting as she ran: “Felisa, you give me bath now. I go Luneta this afternoon.”
“Foolish child!” his Aunt Jhamna told his mother. “Also very hard-headed. Even i beat her
sometimes she still hard-headed.”
“Beating is good for children.” His mother’s tone was firmly authoritative. “They never behave
unless you beat them. Look at Rama. When he makes me very angry, I still beat him.”
“Yes?” A husky chuckle burbled in his Aunt Jhamna’s throat. “Suppose he have wife, you still beat
him?”
“Why not?” His mother’s voice bristled with righteousness. “Even if he has wife, he’s still my son.”
“Oh, yes.” Then leaning toward him, her bangles again jingling thinly in her series of admonitory
gestures, his Aunt Jhamna said, “Are, Ramchand! You always obey mother. You be good boy. Mother
make sacrifice for you. Many sacrifice she make. When your father die she no marry again because she
afraid maybe new husband no love you same like true son. She afraid maybe new husband beat you.
Always happen. Even in India. So your mother make sacrifice . . . no more money . . . always take good
care of you . . . make many sacrifice when you sick . . .”
“That’s true.” His mother’s voice went crumbly with tears. “He never will know all the suffering
I’ve gone through bringing him up after his father died . . . when he was barely six months old. I always
tell him: Even if his body were cut into a thousand pieces he never will be able to repay what it cost me to
bear him and raise him into a decent boy.”
“So you must love mother. You always be good boy.” his Aunt Jhamna said. Then as an
afterthought she asked, “You love mother?”
He was accutely ill at ease. His stomach was hot, tight with embarrassment. It was all he could do to
manage a soft “Of course” from a throat and mouth arid with shame.
As hhis mother further related the details of his illness her voice became by turns whining with self-
pity, petulant with grief, somber with martyrdom.
Try as he would he could not avoid hearing all that was said, and what he heard brought a faint
roaring in his ears, hot flushes racing through his body. He was sick with shame at his mother’s volubly
remembered instances of his obstinacy and her consequent distress on their account. He raised the
newspaper he was reading so that it hid him from the two women in the room.
“Now he’s well.” His mother’s voice contained a contrary note of hopeless resignation as if his being
well were not all what she had wished. “Doctor said give him special kind of food. To make him strong.
He is thin, you see. And still he takes injections. And that cost money. We have not as yet paid the doctor.
And the hospital.” Over the rim of his paper he saw his mother: the turned down corners of her sharp
mouth gave her careworn face a tragic cast.
His Aunt Jhamna became bothered with her snuffles and searching for a corner of her cambric stole,
she blew her nose on it.
“What time will Dada come?”
“Maybe twelve. Maybe one o’clock. Today Sunday. They fixing store, putting new estante. Maybe
new goods come this afternoon.” His Aunt Jhamna rose from her chair, adjusted the cambric stole about
her shoulders, hunted for one sandal that had somehow wedged itself under her chair. She pulled it out
with her foot, slipped it on and turning to his mother said, “Better I finish making pan now. By and by
Dada vome. If pan not yet make he angry.” Her hazel eyes took on a glint of mischef. “Maybe he beat me
also, no Ramchand?” She arched her neck back, snuffling out her rustling laughter at him. “Come, Luisa.
I have buttermilk in ice box. I give you for Ramchand.” She approached him at the same time pulling the
veil over her head so that when, feeling her close presence, he looked up at her he saw her head entirely
covered with that symbol of reverence as if he were a man fully grown and in accordance with the strict
dictates of her caste she must needs defer to his superior position. “You like buttermilk, Ramchand?”
Slightly flushing, he met her gaze, softly said, “Yes, Jhamna.”
She turned and while she walked to the kitchen, she said, “You be good. No make mother angry.
She make many sacrifice for you,” she added, her voice coming to him, remote, from the kitchen.
 2.

He had drunk his buttermilk, eaten pakhorra and drunk ice water copiously to relieve his mouth of its
peppery sting, read and yawned many times through the one newspaper on the glass-top table when at
precisely a quarter of two o’clock he heard the car arrive, heard the metallic slam of its door, the noisy
babel in Sindhi floatng up the stairwell, the leathery scrape of shoes on the stair treads.
He had a moment of quick terror until he remembered to hold the newspaper spread before his
panic-stricken face and spare himself the cold impact of greeting any of the arrivals. He felt them enter
the room, felt their actual bodily nearness slap at his senses, felt the room saturated with their oily
pungent foreign talk.
Over the top of his newspaper he discerned his Uncle Vassanmal’s swarthy round head pass by, and
remembering his mother’s stern injuctions, he manfully surmounted his panic and threw in his Uncle’s
direction what he intended to be a casually affectionate “Hello Dada” but what instead came out as an
inaudible abortive croak like mumble. Almost at once he saw himself impaled on the cold hard edge of
his terror, felt his stomach contract in a series of shuddery tremors.
“Are, Mister Ramchand, how are you?”
The voice was deep, throaty, bland with the spurious geniality of the subtly obsequious Indian
salesman who comes to a customer with a silky smile and a “What can I do for you, Miss? Is there
anything I can show you in the wy of rayon, silk, satin?” The boy looked up into the droll beaming face of
Mr. Krishinchand Lalchand seated beside Mr. Sehwani Bhagwani on the sofa opposite him, the two of
them accompanied by their wives, having come with his Uncle Vassanmal obviously for Sunday dinner.
They were large portly men with paunchy middles, dark-visaged, thick-necked and their wives, big
handsome women swathed in yards and yards of silk sari, were likewise sleek and fat. The two men
visitors owned the two Indian bazars adjoining his Uncle’s Taj Mahal Silk Emporium on the Escolta. The
arrivals, aside from the two couples who were guests, included the three Indian salemen apprenticed to
his Uncle’s store, his cousin Shewakram who was a young man of twenty, and Arjhani, his Uncle
Vassanmals only son, aged five.
He knew tham all and they in turn remembered him from the small chubby boy they had been
seeing through the years lagging behind the heels of a large spare-boned dour-faced woman who jerked
him out front whenever he had the tendency in the presence of strangers to disappear behind her skirt.
They had twitted the small boy with the round dark eyes that looked at you as if he might at any moment
burst into tears, had tweaked his nose, waggled his cheeks, balanced bits of a broken toothpick on his
long upcurving lashes, swung him up in the air by his armpits until he fairly shrieked with terror, stuffed
him with candies, a bit of money, and mechanical toys during christmas, inveigled him to stay with them
(Are, Rami! Better you stay with us. No more go home to Luisa. You stay and we take you to India. You like go
India?) teased his mother by hiding him behind showcases, behind bales of goods, inside empty crates,
until he gave himself away by bawling out loud, “Mama! Mama!”
He could feel them all lookinf at him, seeing a pale thin slat of a boy, his dark eyes rounder than
ever but no longer seeming at any moment to burst into tears, now inscrutable rather and deep, only a
trace of his boyhood chubbiness remaining on his lean hard cheeks now blotched with the eruptions of
adolescent acne.
“What you do? You big boy now. You open store or you study more? Maybe you have sweetheart
now, ha? When you marry?”
Mr. Krishinchand Lalchand enjoyed his joke hugely, and the fat smirk across his shiny face gave him
the aspect of a coarse billiken. The others in the room snickered deliciously like a pack of dark horses
whinnying.
At dinner the two men visitors continued to discuss him with his Uncle Vassanmal. As was
customary the men sat down to dinner first, his Uncle at the head of the table, the two men visitors next,
then the three Indian salesmen, his Uncle’s nephew Shewakram, himself, and at the foot of the table, the
little boy Arjhani (perched on his high chair) whom his mother was trying to feed. His Aunt Jhamna with
the maid Felisa in her wake shuttled back and forth between the kitchen and the table ladling out platters
of the spicefragrant thick-gravied foods, passing around bottles of ice water, replenishing the rapidly
emptied bread platters with stacks of the pipinghot lard-dripping pan. He watched the diners tear small
chunks of pan, shape these into tiny cornucopias, dip these into the gravy saucers before them, scoop up
gravy and pieces of goat meat, and plop the whole succulent morsel into their mouths: and the moist
tongue-lapping sounds of their eating–ptak-ptchak, ptak-ptchak, ptak-ptchak–were, he though, kin to the
splashy gustatory sounds in a sty.
He did not understand Sindhi very well but occasionally he was able to grasp the gist of a sentence,
the essence of their talk about him, and what he heard turned the food in his mouth into wads of thick
fuzzy wool. It was a pity, the two men visitors said, clucking their tongues, that his Uncle Vassanmal had
sadly neglected his upbringing. With the proper coaching in Sindhi reading and writing and fattening
him up a bit he would undoubtedly turn out into as fine a specimen of young Hindu manhood as any
young buck born and raised in India and would command no less a handsome dowry in the Indian
marriage mart.
He became aware of the three Indian salesmen teasing him with their eyes like black velvet swatches
in the thin pasteboard of their faces. Across the table from him his cousin Shewakram sniggered
salaciously and ground a shoe on his foot under the table. Violently, he swung his leg in a vicious kick
stubbing his toes on the hard edge of the other’s chair, and as he chafed at his futile retaliation, he saw
Shewakram lifting the corners of his grease-coated lips in a grin of triumph.
The diners gorge themselves, and he saw a beatific expression spread over his Uncle’s face like a
brooding Buddha’s as he hoisted his mammoth potbelly, shifted his weight on one buttock and loudly,
casually, matter-of-factly, broke wind. The others exhaled fat zestful belches and rose from the table.
At the lavatory he waited until everybody had finished washing their hands, rinsing their mouths,
before he moved toward it, and as he did so he saw Shewa deliberately taking his own sweet time about
soaping his hands. He stood to one side of Shewa prepared to wait patiently for his turn and was indeed
startled when Shewa by inserting a finger in the tap nozzle directed a taut squirt of water at him catching
him pointblank on the belly. Facing him, Shewa smiled wickedly, and hurrying past him, flicked the
drops of water from his still wet hands into the boy’s pale, astonished face. As Rama washed his hands
clean of their goaty smell his thwarted anger stirred them to trembling, twitched his jaws in a quivery
spasm.
“Now,” his mother said over his shoulder as he dried his hands on a towel hung on a nail above the
washbowl. “There he goes into his room. Follow him, plant yourself squarely before him, so he’ll have no
reason to ignore you. Tell him outright the things I told you to say. Catch his attention for he’ll soon be
sitting down at the card table and you know that once he’s there not even cannon shot can dislodge him.
Make him understand, talk straight, and don’t be a baby. Get results or you’d better take care when we
return home. Better take care!” She left him then, for his Aunt Jhamna was calling her to come to dinner.
He walked into the living room, saw that Krishinchand Lalchand and Sehwani Bhagwani were
setting up the card table, that Lhadu, the eldest of the three Indian salesmen, was mixing brandy and
soda at the cellarette beside the cabinet radio, while the other two sprawled on chairs leisurely picking
their teeth. Shewakram, with one leg flung over the arm of his chair, was intent on the movie page of the
one newspaper on the glass-top table, now and then rooting into the inner corner of his thigh where
apparently the soft plump worm of his sex in that outflung position of his leg was snagged upon the
crotch of his tight trousers. He waited until he was sure no one was paying him the least attention and
then, swiftly crossing the living room, entered his Uncle Vassanmal’s room.

3.

As he paused on the threshold he felt his stomach tighten like a drumhead. His Uncle Vassanmal sot on
his bed like a gross idol, one leg bent and raised upon, a knee slowly, his Uncle leaned forward and
unlaced a shoe which he dropped on the floor. He raised his other foot and in the same laborious manner
unlaced and shucked the shoe off thumping it on the floor. He then emitted a faint belch after which he
rested his hands on his hammy thighs as he worked his toes up and down inside their brown silk socks. It
was then his Uncle noticed him leaning there by the doorjamb and his Uncle spoke across the room to
him in a neutral perfunctory tone: “Are, Rama, how’re you?”
With marked diffidence, the boy walked into the room, stopped by a chair beside a round table with
a crocheted lace tablecloth, watched his Uncle wheeze while he pressed his enormous potbelly on the
bed’s edge and leaned down to peel off his socks, tenderly rub his bunions. He was of middle height but
enormously fat so that his bloated torso and mammoth potbelly were in grotesque contrast to his rather
small-calved spindly legs. Still discernible on his swarthy face were the ravages of smallpox he once had
many years ago, the pockmarks no longer distinct but shallow and blurred by time. His black slick hair
austerely brushed down hugged his head in the round clasp of a skullcap, fringed the edge of his narrow
brow with a tiny fluted curl. His face was broad, the mouth wide, and the high ridge of his nose
dominated the landscape of his like a mountain peak.
As he watched his Uncle wipe his socks between his toes, he felt his desire to speak erupt within
him like a shooting geyser. He must have spluttered an involuntary mumble, for his Uncle looked up at
him and said, still quite perfunctorily: “You go school?”
The boy’s tenseness, like boiling liquid when the heat is lessened, ebbed a little and he was glad for
this release of tension; for this brief respite from the fear that his Uncle, as he had habitually done in the
past, would leave to him the sole burden of their conversation while maintaining, as he struggled and
suffered the damnation of the chronic stutterer, a cold stoic silence. Hs fear of meeting his Uncle had
stemmed from those excruciating moments in the past when he had stood before him mute and tongue-
tied, a welter of words stillborn on the threshold of his lips, while the other regarded him with an
impassive stare and did not by so much as a gesture, a look, a word, ease the torment that clotted in his
belly like tangled twine. Now his Uncle had spoken to him first, wanted to know if he went to school, was
kind, was generous, was altogether not the hard, mean, avaricious bogeyman of his childhood fancy: oh,
he’d been wrong, now all that would be past, his Uncle would speak to him, would be kind, would have
symphaty, wold above all understand how it was, how it is with a chronic stutterer who every waking
moment of his day must strain and struggle and try to break away from the crippling tenacious strands of
shyness, inferiority, self-consciousness that have strung him and made of him a suffering prisoner.
He managed a clumsy smile and when he replied his voice, at first unsteady and quavering, became
more natural, normal, even warm, towards the end of his little speech. “No, Dada, we have no school. We
are on vacation since March. School will open in June, next month. Then I’ll . . . I’ll be fourth year. I got 92
average. That is second highest. The first is 94. She’s a girl. Teacher said maybe if I study more i can be
first in class.”
He watched his Uncle wheeze again as he leaned over and tried to hunt for his slippers under the
bed. “You find slippers, Rama. I think they go there . . . in corner, there.”
The boy was glad for this preoccupation. He had long wanted to move, his standing there by the
chair was making him feel absurd, only he didn’t quite know how to manage any movement without
attracting attention, without appearing awkward. He always felt glad whenever he could be of use to
anybody even if it were only in doing the least little things. If only people kept asking him to do
something for them instead of, as often happened, staring at him and what was most intolerable, trying to
make fun of him and speaking to him as if he were a dimwit or a child! He walked over to the bed,
reached for the slippers that lay there against the wall. He dropped the sandals before his Uncle’s feet and
shyly sat himself on the edge of the bed. Now that he was closer to his Uncle his fear was no longer as
potent as before, in fact, it had almost completely disappeared, and he was only hoping that their relation
could stay forever thus, without terror, closer, more congenial.
His Uncle rose from the bed and the sudden release of his enormous weight shot the bedsprings
upward into position bouncing the boy on his back. He laughed, scrambling to his feet, and quickly
looked at his Uncle to see if he noticed his momentary discomtiture. Apparently he hadn’t for he was at
the moment standing before his clothes bureau rummaging in its drawers. His Uncle pulled out pyjama
trousers and a house shirt, slung these over one shoulder, started unbuckling his belt. He dropped his
trousers to the floor, shook loose the silk pyjamas and stooped over to step into these. His Uncle wore no
underwear and the sight of his swollen half-nudity maid the boy turn away and study the linear pattern
on the chenille bedspread. When he looked up again his Uncle was clad in wide loose silk pyjamas over
which his pin stripe silk house shirt hung to his knees. He watched his Uncle grunt and stoop over to pick
up his trousers and empty the pockets of balled dirty handkerchiefs, keys, loose bills, coins, reciepts,
swatches of men’s suiting, a button, string, a checkbook which he tossed on the lace-covered round table.
The boy continued sitting on the bed with his knees crossed, swinging one foot in an attempt at
nonchalane while deep down tiny licking tongues of panic crept inward from the outer fringe of his well-
being. Between his Uncle and himself there had been silence perhaps for the better part of five minutes,
and the thought that if he didn’t quickly think of something to say next, this silence would rise like a
flood and submerge him completely into a vortex of speechlessness, tormented him because he now
knew as well as if the other had explicitly told that his Uncle had nothing more to say to him, would not
attempt anything else to say to him, was in fact, as was his habit in the past, ignoring him, snubbing him,
as a Brahmin a pariah. The simmer of anger in him clove his tounge to the roof of his parched mouth.
Words started seething inside him clamoring for release, for utterance, for spitting out against an injustice
he felt was being done him. He started taking deep breaths to still his violently agitated heart and retain a
measure of calm in which to speak out his mind clearly, lay out his plea coherently, manfully. He was no
longer a child. His Aunt Jhamna had covered her head in his presence, the Messrs. Krishinchand
Lalchand and Sehwani Bhagwani, including their wives, thought him mature enough to warrant
marriage speculations, his mother was now even more hysterically careful about his making
acquaintances with girls; no, he was no longer a child. His Uncle had better realized the fact here now at
once.
He watched his Uncle seated at the lace-covered round table appearing to balance the stubs in his
checkbook. After several false starts in his mind, he managed to blurt out: “Dada, I–I–I’ve been sick. I’ve
been sick with pneumonia. I stayed in hospital for three weeks. Doctor said my illness serious.” He
paused to lick his dry lips, and suddenly frightened at the lengthening silence, hurtled on, impelled with
the notion to let the momentum of his excitement push out everything he had to say. “D–d–doctor said if
I not carefull I’ll have p–p–pleurisy. I’m all right now but I take injections. We have n–n–not yet paid the
doctor and the hospital. Mama said you please give me the money including the thirty pesos for tuition
and books I need next month. So next month I no bother you again. That makes a total of one hundred
twenty pesos in all. Mama said you please give me more because doctor is waiting and she is ashamed.”
Halfway in his speech his Uncle looked up, turned to him, hitching his armpit over the back of his
chair. “Are, Rama,” his Uncle said in a voice only a little less loud than a shout. The tone made the boy
wince for he did not wich the people in the living room to know the nature of his talk with his Uncle. “I
have idea for you . . . Nice idea i have for you. What grade you now, ha?”
“I just finished third year. Next month, in June, I’ll start the fourth year.”
“No use going back school. I have better idea for you. You stop school. You work for me. I send you
Zamboanga with Lhadu. I open branch there. You have nice house, nice food, nice clothes. You no more
sick. I tell Lhadu give you small money for cinema, for ice cream. Luisa stay here. She can go here every
month, get small money. What you say?”
All the food he had eaten turned into a grey blubbery lump that weighted him down, inclined him
on the brink of nausea. He sat dumbfounded staring at his Uncle who stared back at him sitting sidewise
on his chair, his mammoth potbelly resting between his thighs, looking now more than ever like a toad.
When he was a child he had regarded his Uncle’s belly with awe, remembering remark heard from his
mother that if you pierced his Uncle’s stomach and slashed a hole therein the money his Uncle had seized
from his father when the latter died would come tumbling out like pennies from a slot machine.
“B–b–but i can’t stop now. This is my last year. I have to finish high school to go to college.”
“Study? Study? Why you always study? What you like? Become Governor-General of Philippines?”
“I must go to college to study medicine. I–I–I want to be a doctor.”
“why you want to be doctor? That crazy idea. Like Filipino idea. Always doctor, always lawyer. No
attend to business. What I do with doctor? Many doctors poor people, no make money. Why you want be
like that?”
The boy squirmed on the bed, cast his eyes down, toyed with his fingers, snapping them one by one.
“I no study,” his Uncle continued. “I finished only third grade in India. I make good business. I
work hard. Why you no do the same? In Zamboanga you learn little Sindhi. The nlater you go India.
Learn some more reading, writing. Then you marry. I arrange for you. Maybe you get ten thousand,
fifteen thousand rupees dowry. I keep money for you. Maybe I make you partner in business. What more
you like? You own half store, half mine. You have money, you live nice. What more you want?”
He was sick, miserable, and it was a struggle to say this: “D–d–doctors also get to make a lot of
money.”
 His Uncle looked at him keenly. “Where you get money for study?” His tone was low, packed with
muffled thunder.
Inside the boy’s head his thoughts ran like frightened mice. He had a desperate time of it trying to
collect them, to align them, in one convincing rebuttal. “I–I–I get money from you. Bef–bef–before you
promised you send me through school.”
“I no have money.” His Uncle rose from the chair, lumbered toward the clothes bureau where he
tossed the checkbook inside a drawer. “What you think I am, millionaire?”
“But–but Dada, I need one hundred twenty pesos now for doctor and school–“
“I no have money. I give you twenty pesos, that enough. When you go home you get from Jhamna. I
tell her give you twenty pesos. I no millionaire.”
From the living room the bland throaty voice of mr. Krishinchand Lalchand rose in a shout for his
Uncle. “Are, Vassu,” –the boy caught the gist of the Sindhi words– “you hurry up if we are going to play.
Also bring a new deck of cards, will you?”
Now panic gripped him. In a moment his Uncle would waddle out of the room, leaving him and his
plea for money washed dry like wreckage in the tide of their argument. He had to think fast, speak fast,
try to hold his Uncle’s attention a little longer. Words hurled themselves against the gates of his mind,
and he became frantic with worry, fear, panic, that he would never be able to use them, unleash them to
assist him, avenge him. But his throat and mouth were again dry and speeh became an effort, strenuous
and tiring.
“But-but-but Dada, I need the money b-b-badly. This is my last-last-last year in school. I have to
finish that.”
“You hard-headed,” his Uncle said rummaging in his bureau drawers for a pack of cards. “Luisa
spoil you. She teach you wrong things. I give you nice idea but you hard-headed. I no have money to
give you. I have many expense. I pay house rent, store rent. I pay salary. Why I give you money? Why I
always give you?”
“Be-beb-because-because-“ His heart was thumping faster. He was wondering whether he had the
nerve to say what was in his mind, what his mother had coached him to say if his Uncle proved difficult.
“Be-beb-because it’s much more mine than it is yours. It’s my father’s money!”
His Uncle slowly turned and fixed him across the room with a black flashing glare.
His audacity surprised him and curiously enough, it gave him a pervading sense of calm. As from
afar he heard his voice say, slowly, distinctly, with dreamy languor, “It’s my . . . father’s . . . money . . .
you . . . stole . . . it . . . when . . . he . . . died.” A compulsive impulse cranked him to say like a record
needle caught in a groove, softly, dreamily – “s-s-stole it . . . s-s-stole it . . . s-s-stole . . .”
The slap jarred his head back. His cheeks burned and his head rang with the force of the blow.
His mind screamed: You hog! You toad! You thief! It’s true! You took over Papa’s store when he died, took
his money that’s why you promised the lawyer you’d support us . . . send me through school . . .” But his mouth
said: “Mh . . . mh . . . mh . . . mh . . .” the whimpery syllables borne on shuddery gusts of breath that
emerged through locked teeth.
His Uncle towered over him, huddled there on the bed, one hand raised to his cheek now radiating
heat like a flat iron. For a minute his Uncle looked at him with scorn, then turned and walked away.
Halfway across the room his Uncle whirled, spat at him an Indian obscenity, thrust toward him a beefy
hand with the fingers stretched apart, the thumb pointed downward, the whole brown hand seeming
there like a fat obscene spider dangling in the air. His Uncle regarded him once more, then picking up a
deck of cards from the bureau drawer, slowly walked out of the room.
Huddled there on the bed he felt cld perspiration break out on his brow, felt his blood roar and
recede and scamper innerward to a cold leaden core somewhere in his belly. The sensation was like a foot
going to sleep, only, this time, magnified to the height and breadth of his whole body. The palms of his
hands itched and he felt a bowel movement coming on.
When his mother entered the room and confronted him with her “Well what did he say? What did
he say?” he swung his stricken face to her and as his bleary senses made out her sharp features thrust
before him like a blade, there dropped out of his mouth, like the whir of an unraveled spring in a
snapped mechanical toy, the dry, gaspy splintered whine of idiots syllables.