Read Online Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar - Free Book Online Page B

with books, so that some of Zubin’s earliest memories were of reading in the living room while the cries of the neighborhood children playing outdoors at dusk wafted in through his window. If he felt a pang of loneliness then, the novels and textbooks that he read more than compensated for it. Zubin had turned into a bookish, cautious young boy, more at home in a library or classroom than on a cricket field.
    But now, Dosa wanted to talk to her son in the evenings, rather than have him bury his nose in a book. All day long, while Zubin was at school, Dosa would scour the neighborhood for nuggets of gossip, which she would then hoard and offer to Zubin at the end of the day. If the boy showed his boredom at the comings and goings of the adults around him, Dosa would chide him. “Just like the rest of them you’re becoming, Zubin,” she would say. “Not a care for your poor widowed mother.” It was both Dosa’s fortune and ill fortune that between Sorab’s pension and investments and Darius Popat’s generosity, she did not have to work for a living. Darius Popat had announced at his son’s funeral that he would die before he would let his daughter-in-law
get
a job. Dosa was happy with that. After years of relative quiet, her apartment once again hummed with the sound of gossiping visitors. While Zubin was away at school, Dosa sat on her couch like royalty and made her pronouncements while her visitors brought her the juiciest tidbits of information.
    A year after Sorab’s death, Dosa found Zubin in the kitchen, taking apart a dead cockroach, a look of fierce concentration on his face. “My goodness, Zubin. What are you doing, looking like a murderer? Drop that dirty thing and go wash your hands,
fatta-faat.”
    “Is okay, Mamma,” the boy said importantly. “I’m just practicing for my biology class. If I’m going to be a brilliant doctor, my teacher, Mr. Pinto, says I have to get over my
soog
and be ready to cut up people and all. But first, I start with insects.”
    This was the first Dosa had heard about Zubin’s desire to be a doctor. The boy’s words stirred up the envy that lived right below the surface of Dosa’s skin. And on the heels of that envy came fear. Fear that her son would burn with the same ambition she had and then get destroyed by the fire of that ambition when it was snuffed out, as Dosa superstitiously believed it invariably would be. The envy alone, she would have been able to conquer, because Dosa genuinely loved her little boy. But the combination of fear and envy was toxic. She convinced herself that Zubin was about to make the same mistake she had, that his dreams were too large for his puny, middle-class life to hold. Her heart ached for her son, as if the disappointments she believed awaited him had already occurred.
    In a panic, Dosa called Yasmin Shroff at work. Yasmin was now a secretary at Tata Industries and worldly in a way that Dosa admired. “Yasmin? Dosamai here. Sorry to disturb you at work, but I am having a problem. No, no, everybody is fine. It’s just that—Zubin told me today he is wanting to be a doctor.”
    Yasmin sounded bewildered. “That’s great, Dosa. But what about your problem?”
    Dosa was impatient. “But that is the problem, stupid. At one time, I also was wanting to be a doctor. But my dear departed father had other ideas. Instead, I married Sorab. I don’t want my Zubin to go through the same disappointment that I did.”
    “Well, Dosamai, it’s not as if you will marry Zubin off against his wishes. Also, children want to be different things at different ages. But if Zubin is serious, I think it would be so wonderful if he could actually live out your dream. In a way, Zubin could keep your dream alive. See what I mean?”
    Dosa hung up from the conversation angry at herself for having called Yasmin. “That stupid Yasmin,” she said out loud. “Has scrambled eggs for brains. Thinks because she works for Tata, she is as smart as Mr. Tata