Arriving in Bhachau

(Editing Credits: My good friend, lawyer and writer, Sai Vadhan. He would probably sue me if I didn't put this up.)

White ribbons swam into the air and the hungry winter ate them up. Firoz sliced a finger through them, hoping to know something of the temperature of the cup they arose from. The water on his finger felt lukewarm.

He couldn’t do it.

He looked over to the other side of the table where a glass cup lay half-finished next to his father’s newspaper. With a jealous nonchalance, he looked at his own cup with deep concentration. He extended fingers testily towards the rim and let two fingertips sit. It stung! Instinctively, he jerked four fingers into his mouth, only dimly aware that it made no sense to do so.

Father looked up from his study of the paper and knew what had occurred in that tradition of fathers who always know when you want to simultaneously confess and not confess. He requested the owner of the ramshackle establishment for an extra glass cup in a raw dialect of Gujarati Firoz never grew tired of hearing. He did not use it at home. Hearing it was a special experience and Firoz would absorb it like water on sand.

They had arrived in the morning train on a platform seven inches too low for Firoz’s liking. It didn't take them too much time to locate the eatery out of the gate since it was, quite literally, the only building dominating an empty landscape of tar roads and thorny shrubs. Their luggage was sprawled lazily on the elevated floor as if it too had become exhausted by a night of rickety-rackety travel from Mumbai. A single, large plate of fafdas arrived, the oil on its surface disappearing into its yellow flesh even as Firoz looked upon it. Father made it a point to impress upon Firoz that fafdas are extremely tasty with tea. Firoz looked down at his plate and back at him, slightly confused. He told himself that fafdas are extremely tasty with tea.

Father was wearing a cream-coloured pinstriped shirt with a pocket that meant business. On any given day, it would carry a ballpoint pen (whose nib was concealed by a clever rotating mechanism), a Nokia handset (that would outlive the establishment) and a mini-folder of papers (that seemed extremely important to Firoz for no reason except that it was in his pocket). He always dressed business, even on vacations. (The first time he wore a t-shirt in public, Firoz was positively scandalized. Since then, he had made his peace but still preferred this version of his father better.) The lack of walls around them framed him against a clean powder-blue sky. It was one of those moments when Firoz felt particularly impressed with Father without fully understanding why.

The second glass cup had arrived and Father was already juggling the contents of the first cup into the second from an impressive height. Steam escaped the long red-brown current in great waves. It reminded Firoz of Angel Falls in Venezuela, the tallest waterfall in the world; he considered this an essential bit of information and would look down upon those who did not know it. Father did not know this fact but he was an exception. Firoz did not feel a need to explain the grounds for this exception.

This wasn't the first time they had visited their native village but this was the first time that Firoz was old enough to register the personality of the place Father grew up in. Bhachau was a place of austere beauty: not a single high-rise or vehicle was in sight; men were few and far in between on roads that seemed to stretch to nowhere in particular and the thermometer played between several degrees in a single day. Even as the day grew into noon around them, life was confined to the thousands of ants scurrying over the thin plastic bags and a lone cow grazing at the obstinate grass on the roadside. Firoz found her horns annoyingly asymmetrical and fought back an unnatural urge to twist them straight.

Father was reading the newspaper again. Firoz put a twisted strip of the hot farsan in his mouth, munched twice to break it into manageable pieces and lowered his lips to his cup with all the trust one could give to something that had violated it a minute ago. The tea was delicious. The fafda was underwhelming. He decided he wasn't old enough to appreciate the Delectable Mysteries of the Fafda. 

Lost in his precocious rumination on the philosophy of taste, he did not notice Father get up until his gruff voice broke the silence from behind. "The poor things. Can you imagine going hungry for days on end and that too in this cold a season?"

Firoz stared at him and then at his hand. Father was cupping the head of a golden-brown mutt, his fingers busy rubbing its neck. The dog let out of a low purr with closed eyes, its entire body steady while the tail radiated the excess energy like a windshield-viper on overdrive. Father cocked his head to his left, looking behind at the shopkeeper and shouted, "Give me two packets of Parle-G biscuits!" He motioned Firoz to fetch them from the counter, who dutifully tore open one of them along the extruding strip. This had become a family tradition a few years ago; it upsetted Firoz, mostly, to imagine himself on the roads without food for ‘days on end’ but if Father could do it, so could he. Besides, he loved how happy Father looked after having fed an animal so much that it could do little except lick his hand. Firoz threw some biscuits at the floor like gunpowder and bolted behind the granite counter as an extremely slimy tongue leapt at the now-broken biscuits. Father was kneeling and busy picking up some of the pieces from a corner and positioning them in the center, sometimes feeding whole rectangles to an eager mouth with his fingers.

Firoz stared at him and then at his hand.

“Disgusting!”

Father smiled and said nothing.
A full minute later, feeling a little left out of the activity, Firoz shuffled lightly to the front and extended a palm over the hungry form whose chest heaved visible. The hand froze in the air as if in benediction.

"It's OK. You can pet her. She won't bite."

"How do you know it's a she?"

He pointed at her elongated teats.

"She is a mother. Those are how her puppies get their milk. She needs to eat to produce milk or they will all die hungry."

The statement had an effect on Firoz. He vaguely imagined small, emaciated golden-brown bodies, lying in a gutter close to their home back in Mumbai. He mentally corrected the picture so that the dead puppies were now heaped against the steps where the dog was lapping up the crumbs. Geographical accuracy gave the scene a fierce morbidity. Firoz wasn’t one to shy away from duty and stomaching the truth was an important part of growing up. Everyone knows that.

"Go ask uncle for two more packets. Look at how she gobbles up several pieces at a time. Poor thing has been starving for a while now."

He did as he was told, this time kneeling next to her and carefully releasing the biscuits from the pack, careful to not let them break. Firoz was determined to give her whole biscuits because, he reasoned, whole biscuits are better than broken biscuits. She licked the back of his hand. He stood up and ran behind the counter. Father chuckled without turning back, shook his head and said nothing.