17, Morris Road

by Parul Sharma

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Sometimes, home is a place between longings for the past and the allure of the future...



Soon-to-be empty-nester Gayatri Trivedi has found herself at a crossroads: her only son is off to the land of excessive pizza and cola, her husband remains indifferent to her feelings, and the object of her teenage affection is inviting her to Dehradun. But Dehradun has changed a lot, and so has Arbour House, the colonial-era bungalow that still has a piece of her heart. Now as she returns, she also returns in time, reminiscing about the memories she made with people who changed her life when she was sixteen.



As the cloud of nostalgia clears and her future comes into view, Gayatri must decide if she's ready to let go of what-ifs. Equal parts charming and delightful 17, Morris Road weaves together a heartfelt story of times past and emotions buried, and most of all, of eventually finding one's place in an ever-changing world.

Release date: May 24, 2024

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

The Birthday Party

We are having a party. I dread parties. Sanjay is making his way to me, tall and lanky and bespectacled, hair falling in waves on his forehead, looking absent-minded. This is the way I must have appeared to the world all my life, as if not quite sure whether my last turn was in the right direction.

‘Mum, where is the controller for the PlayStation?’

‘Eh, yes, very good.’

‘Mum, you are not listening.’

‘I am trying to remember where I have kept the ice cream. Check the oven, won’t you, darling.’

‘Mum!’

‘Oh, all right, okay. The controller is wedged between the sofa cushions where you last hid it from Bulbul.’

He looks at me and smiles and walks away. There has to be a mistake, see. This bundle just fell out of my uterus three seconds ago. And yes, the years felt like decades, aeons, yug and yugantar in Mummy’s words, when we were living through them, but they did rush by, and now you tell me he is eighteen. Worse, you tell me he’s off to live on his own in a land far, far away, where there will be drugs and guns and he will, no doubt, try to dodge them by eating pizza all the bloody time, washed down by gallons and gallons of cola.

‘He will be fine,’ I hear his father telling me. I would take him seriously, but he is wearing a pink birthday hat – Happy 18th Sanjay! It’s all downhill from here! – over his now nearly all-grey mass of curls and holding a pink gin cocktail with a jolly-looking umbrella sticking out.

‘What would you know?’ I claim of this gangly man, who was once a gangly youth much like the one now in the throes of merriment with other young devotees of some obscure video game. This is my husband, Adil. Adil looks like a professor – he always has. Professors and cops – you can pick them out of a line-up.

‘What would I know, she asks,’ he grumbles but looks happy. He begins to serve the ice cream, soft dollops tumbling expertly into glass bowls. The house is too full; I can feel the walls bulging outwards. The pink gin cocktails have taken the edge off most conversations, and people are leaning against the bookshelves and sitting on our various quilted chairs, eating the mango ice cream sourced from the Parsi dairy in the neighbourhood. Bulbul, in charge of the party décor as she always is, has draped fairy lights everywhere. Popcorn has been spilt. I look at the crushed pieces on the carpets, and a lump threatens to erupt in sudden, sentimental tears again. It’s been quite the theme, this spilt popcorn, right from the parties where toddlers would scream their heads off and I would slip the hassled, grateful mothers wine in paper cups and the middle-school years, where no matter how much we cooked, the food would just never be enough, and then most recently, when the high schoolers would zap the popcorn in the microwave and eat it straight from the greasy packets while I muttered helplessly in the background about how terrible this must be for their collective health. Someone brushes against me, and I come out of my reverie and look around sheepishly.

Sanjay and the other gangloids have decided to go out after this party. The real party, he winks at me. Bulbul is arguing with him to be taken along. I can see he is resisting half-heartedly; he wants her to come. Adil is being pushed for a later curfew. He is acting quite the disciplinarian, looking sideways at me for approval, and quite drunk now, holding his hands up in defence. Some of the parents are calling it a day, joking about old bones and heading out of our apartment now. Only a few remain. I suddenly find myself with nothing to do, and the emptiness of my hands is unbearable. I pour myself a drink and sit down, sighing like my grandmother used to, the one bad knee calling out for attention like it always does on long days like this one. I am only forty-five, I keep reminding myself.

It’s the kids that age you, Gaya. Sukh’s voice is in my head like it’s been all these years. He didn’t get to age though. Frozen in time at the ripe old age of twenty-eight. Bulbul was only one when he went, and Jo, well, she never quite recovered. None of us did, but it got better when Jo and Bulbul moved to be close to us. Sukhbir was that quintessential – what a self-conscious word that is – army man; his defined biceps and aviators were as real as they were an act. A Top Gun hangover that never quite faded, I would tell him. He didn’t stick around long enough for me to tease him about a middle-aged gut and all of, well, everything that was supposed to have come along with these advancing years.

Jo is here now. She looks the same, wispy and frail, though she’s strong as a horse. Sharp, too. Her latest documentary about tadgola – ice apple – sellers in Mumbai has been picked for a film festival in Berlin; she wants to take Bulbul along. Jo was the kind of mother who made working with a child look so smooth. She used to nurse Bulbul under her sari pallu while she gave talks to film students at her old institute, holding everyone in thrall. She’s talking animatedly now to one of Adil’s professor friends, her words trying to keep up with the speed of her thoughts, her too-big ikat dress billowing now and then with the gusts of wind flowing in from the open windows. Mumbai is almost bearable today.

‘Jo, the plates,’ Adil is calling out to her. She picks up the plates but doesn’t stop talking. She needs words to make sense of the world. Every thought must be verbalized and shared. Sometimes, in the days after Sukh’s death, she would call me at four in the morning, having spent the night with a sleeping Bulbul, the words collected overnight threatening to spill out of her. She talked through her grief, and we listened to her, Adil and I. That’s all we did, listened and listened as she talked and put together another world for herself and Bulbul.

But we have been through that, I tell myself. That part of our life, our collective lives, is over. Bulbul is now almost seventeen, and she is confident in a way that breaks your heart, in a way that makes you want to protect her and set her free all at once. Jo’s words have splashed all over her, all her life, and she has become quiet as a result, a discerning, incisive listener.

This, right here, is my world.

Sanjay and the others are headed out now. Bulbul has applied lip gloss, I notice. Even so, how much like Sukh she sometimes looks, tall and stately, strong-legged and athletic. She already towers over Jo, who is now wearing a determined expression and looking for me.

‘I’ll help clean up,’ she offers. We smile at each other. We know she is no good at this. Her home is a tumbling mess of books and carpets and lamps. Bulbul is the one who creates order. Adil overhears and laughs, too. Jo leaves, and soon, there is only the aftermath of the gathering.

Adil and I begin a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up, stopping often to talk about the guests, complaining about what they said and what they wore and how they treated us – old, comfortable habits and patterns of much-married people.

‘Will you stay up for Sanjay?’ Adil asks. He has already changed into his striped shorts and his Hustle Hard T-shirt, holding a book and looking ready to collapse.

‘I will.’ Of course, I will. I always have. The boy has been the only stable success I have had in an obvious sort of way. All my other attempts at a career – and there has been a whole series of them – were always mild and short-lived, like a delicate houseplant that I couldn’t quite grow. I tried my hand at baking, but the old ladies of Bandra are old hands at that game, and honestly, the lemon drizzle cake was just not cutting it. I tried supplying organic laundry detergent (100 per cent vegan), too, sourced from a freethinking plant-based company. I thought the hipster crowd would be all over it but turns out, even hipsters like squeaky-clean laundry that we couldn’t quite deliver. Plant oils had to bow out to the commercial giants. The ‘Detergent Days’, as we now call them, were quite, quite depressing for me, and even now, the aroma of lemon and lavender brings on waves of nausea. I had to stay quiet and lie low for some time to recover from that. Till Rama Aunty’s Original Rice Flakes Namkeen came along, but let me not get into that now.

All this to say that mothering Sanjay is pretty much all I have done by way of a job well done. I found it relatively easy to tune into that instinct that guides parents with not too many false steps along the way. He is secure in a manner that belies his age. Even Bulbul, not given to idolizing anyone except her dead father maybe, looks up to him.

It’s been a while since the young people stepped out. I look at the time; only forty-five minutes have passed.

Now the phone will ring, I am sure of it. It will be the police, informing me of the accident. They were speeding, madam ji, too many drinks.

I shake my head and try to focus on the book I have picked up, but anxiety is a tougher nut than that. Adil dying, Sanjay dying, my mother dying – these are the currents of fear I have learnt to live with. I try to blame Sukh, of course, dying as he did, suddenly and heroically, but I know that it runs even deeper than that.

I must have dozed off in the chair but wake up when the key turns in the lock. Sanjay is asking Bulbul to be soft as she heads to her apartment. Bulbul and Jo live on the same floor as us, separated only by six terracotta planters in the hallway. I smile at Sanjay drowsily and head to the bedroom to sleep till the milkman rings the bell at six the next morning.

2

The Phone Call

The next morning, I called Jigna ben, supplier of theplas to youth headed to foreign lands since time immemorial. Or the past twenty years, at any rate. Jigna ben comes highly recommended by mothers more knowledgeable in the rites and rituals of sending offspring abroad than I, a mere rookie at the game.

‘Gayatri ben, shu tame Gujarati bolo chho?’

I understand enough of the language to understand that I am being quizzed on my Gujarati proficiency.

‘Oh, no,’ I reply, a little ashamed.

‘Koi nahin, never mind,’ she consoles me, but her disappointment is evident. I decide to quickly march to matters of business.

‘So, Jigna ben, will five hundred theplas be enough for one semester? He will come back in the winter,’ I ask.

Someone is on call waiting. I pause the conversation with Jigna ben for a moment to look at the unfamiliar number. The phone intelligently informs me it’s from someone in Dehradun. The place still has a visceral pull on me, I rue to myself as Jigna ben drones on about her expertise at dehydrating bhindi and lauki and even parwal, for god’s sake.

‘Jigna ben, someone is at the door. Let me call you back?’ I try to get a word in.

‘… this is a busy season, I have several clients sending bachhas to Purdue, to Yale, to Columbia…’ Jigna ben, Dehydrator Extraordinaire, is more conversant with American universities than the average career counsellor.

I hang up and call the number. A woman’s sweet voice answers almost immediately.

‘Didi, pehchaana?’ I am immediately annoyed at this. How would I know who this is? I need a cup of coffee.

‘Uh, um, no.’

‘It’s me, didi, Shaili!’

Shaili? From all those years ago. I find myself unable to answer, immediately at a loss for words.

‘How are you, didi, how is everything? I got your number from Facebook. I saw Sanjay’s pictures also. How much like you he looks!’

My number is visible on Facebook? I realize I never changed the settings after my Rama Aunty’s Original Rice Flakes Namkeen phase, when I was actively soliciting namkeen-eaters on the internet. And now here is Shaili. I have a vision of her at sixteen, long-haired, ribboned braids falling below her slim waist, rake-thin body clad in hand-me-down salwar-kameez. Flowery prints on the dupatta tied around her waist. Working, always working. Tending to the dogs. Serving tea. Rubbing oil into Amma ji’s arthritic legs.

‘All well, Shaili, I… I can’t believe it’s you.’

‘Khee khee khee, didi, you forgot us all after you left, na. My dadi died, didi.’

Her grandmother, Mauna, the gardening woman. She had been one of the fixtures at 17, Morris Road. The old woman was pushing a hundred even then, or at least it had appeared so to my youthful eyes, so it was no surprise really that she had passed through the veil.

‘I am, uh, sorry to hear that, Shaili.’ I truly am sorry but only a little.

‘Oh no, she was fine, was working in the litchi baag right till the end. Bas, we found her dead in the morning, right under the tree. Best way to go for her.’

I would think so. She loved the trees more than life itself and had a corresponding dislike for all humankind. She had threatened to break my bones when she suspected me of picking the mogra flowers off the dwarf bushes, right outside the same litchi baag where she finally met her maker. Easy tears had flooded my eyes at her sharp words, the effortless self-pity of my years gushing through.

‘Best way indeed.’ I finally broke the awkward pause. I don’t know how to ask her why she is calling me. I think of Jo and how she would have prattled easily through this conversation.

‘Didi, the thing is, Shivendra Saab is in town. He asked about you.’

Now I really am speechless, the words stuck like marbles in my throat. I don’t want to hear any of this. She has no business barging into my life like this, calling me. I am forty-five now, and I want none of this.

‘He will be moving soon.’

‘Where to?’ I am curious despite myself.

‘To Canada. To be with Bubbles didi. He is not that well now.’

‘What happened to him?’ Sanjay will be back soon. I should get going with my day. I really have no time for these ghosts from the past. And yet, part of me has already regressed to sixteen again.

‘Wohi, same thing that happens to everyone in this family. They are cursed.’

I make a weak scoffing sound.

‘He is going to go live with Bubbles didi in Toronto. She also lives alone. She got divorced.’

I am silent once again, hearing Shaili leak out all the inner tales of the Rawat family to me, a veritable stranger now, a ghost myself.

‘Will you come to see him, didi? Koko… I mean Shivendra Saab would really like to meet you. He said so.’

‘What nonsense is this, Shaili? Why would I come to meet Koko now? I am busy. You know I… I have a son. He is going to America next month. I am just very busy.’

‘He doesn’t know I have called you, didi, but I know he wants to see you. It would be very good for him.’

‘I need to go now, Shaili.’ I hang up and catch sight of myself in the Bombay Blackwood glass cabinet holding our wine glasses. I look wistful but quite attractive, I decide, straightening up a little, ironing out the easy slouch that has come in unawares. How annoying to hear from that silly little Shaili. Always poking her nose where she shouldn’t. How would I just get up and leave to see Koko? That doesn’t happen, you know. Hmmm, Toronto. Roommates with his sister after all this time. Can’t be easy. Also, she said he is unwell. Poor Koko.

I instruct Sangam, the cook, on the lunch menu, expertly putting the party leftovers to use, not even having to think about it too much.

Imagine the audacity though. As if I have nothing better to do with my time. I have a lot of things to take care of, if you must know, Koko. I am busy, very busy. Swamped.

Sanjay comes home looking perturbed, raking his hands through his hair. I make a mental note to ask him about this at the right time, namely once he is fed. He hasn’t changed much since he was a toddler if you ask me, the same temper when he skips meals. Oh lord, how will he cope in Georgetown? I trace the line in my mind from Mumbai to Georgetown, the miles stretching endlessly.

And also, Koko, I don’t think I am brave enough to go back in time.

Adil comes home. Jo drops in for a while. We sit and talk about Bulbul’s school and all that it is doing wrong. She stays back for dinner, and everyone complains copiously about Sangam’s cooking while tucking in with great enthusiasm.

This is my life now, these domestic conversations, this food, this planning of the next meal. I have no time for you.

My capacity for inner dialogue is apparently endless.

‘You’ve been so preoccupied, Gaya,’ Adil finally points out after dinner. Jo and Bulbul have left, and we are watching an absurd show. I put down the coaster I’ve been fiddling with and realize I know nothing of the show and the story that is being quickly done away with to make way for some action.

‘I know. It’s that idiot Shaili, calling me out of the blue.’

‘Shaili… Shaili… oh, from Dehradun.’ Adil has heard all the stories. Well, not all.

‘She was asking me to visit.’ I look at Adil. He leans back and smiles at me, his clear eyes unblinking behind his glasses.

‘Do you want to?’

‘I… no, of course not. I have so much to do. Sanjay will need so much done before he leaves.’

‘All right then.’ His voice is gentle, and he turns to the screen immediately. How he loves these mindless action shows.

I feel a headache coming on. I hardly ever get headaches. I decide to go to bed. Sanjay is still up. I knock at his door and go in. He is sitting at his desk and has his headphones on but takes them off when he sees me.

‘Come in, Mum.’

‘Are you planning to stay up late again, Sanjay? You know it’s so bad for your nerves.’ He has had a minor nerve disorder since childhood. It was as if the world had come crashing down when we had first found out about it. The doctor had advised against surgery. Even that seems like yesterday.

‘God, Mum, stop worrying so much.’

‘I am sorry, but that’s an occupational hazard.’

He is now fidgeting with his Rubik’s cube.

‘What is it, Sanjay? What’s bothering you?’

‘Mum,’ he looks up from the cube, ‘here’s the thing. Do you think we can fly out from Delhi? You know, I could look up Quasi, and then we can take off. I know we have booked the tickets and all but still. She’d like that.’

I am silent for a moment. This is one of those big parenting moments that one is supposed to be prepared for. Sanjay and Quasi. I didn’t see that one coming.

‘It’s an additional flight from here to Delhi then, Sanj.’

His face immediately shutters.

‘Yeah, okay, all good. Thanks.’

I feel unsure. This needs Adil.

‘I am going to check with Dad, okay? Let me see if we can change the flights. Is Qasima… Quasi... has she decided on DU as her final choice?’

‘Well, she did have a perfect score, so she will get any college.’ The pride in his voice is unmistakable.

‘All right, Sanj, I am going to check with Dad. We will try and change the flights. Should be okay.’

I go back to the living room and ask Adil. He is quite unsurprised and unfazed.

‘Ah, yes, okay. I will change the flights tomorrow.’

‘Adil, do you think it’s serious? This thing with Quasi.’

‘To him, it might be.’

‘What does that mean?’

Adil laughs as he turns off the light.

‘It means that we have no control over it. Good night, Gaya.’

See how much turmoil and change there is, Koko? Do you see it? Asking me to come visit. As if.

3

The Long Flight Away

Adil Karachiwala hates goodbyes. That’s just how it is. This means that I am entrusted with the task of heading to Delhi with Sanjay and setting him on his journey into the world. To be fair, it is not too much to ask for. He has handled the torturous process of helping Sanjay apply to the schools, the essays, the online seminars, the calls to alumni… Adil has done it all. But now, he is spent. And temporarily depressed. And uncharacteristically unshaven.

‘Do you remember the time you went to see him off at playschool, Adil?’ I ask him as I pack some last bits and pieces. Adil is comatose in bed. It would be quite funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking. I have to be brave enough for both of us.

‘You have never let me forget. In my defence, I was not the only dad who cried that day. Dr Hemnani wailed much louder.’

I laugh and choke a little at that memory.

‘Gaya, we should take a vacation after all this,’ he says, rubbing his eyes. ‘It’s been a lot. And we should lift our spirits a bit, right before we become empty nesters.’

Empty nesters.

‘I told you we should have a fuller nest.’

He smiles and says nothing. I cannot bear to be serious about this now.

‘Jigna ben came through with the five hundred theplas and whatnot. I think Sanjay’s curried origins will be smelt a long way off.’

‘He might sell them for spending money.’

I. . .