Reading Rooms

I used to read in rickshaws and use taxi rides to get through great chunks of novels. But since lockdown began, journeys are the thrillers. If I could have ordered a rickshaw with a broken-off door on Uber, I would have, so I am delighted when Faraz shows up with one door missing: bigger vistas. The trip to the clinic is epic. I follow the streets like sentences, each house a word, each corner a colon: what will follow? It starts domestic. On one side of a road, an old lady who never leaves the house opens the gate a shy Eid moon sliver for the milk man to squeeze the neck of his steel tank through and fill her pan to the brim. We see no smile. Opposite, children lay down a cricket bat and carry off makeshift wickets to fling wide the gates for their father's car as if at the start of a great ceremonial procession. I look back to see if they've got their bugles out.

Passages of great lyricism unfold as we drive past parks with jasmine-dotted railings, laburnum trees pouring down clusters of yellow blooms and creating arbours for lovers who enter forbidden places. 

Moments of suspense: will the electricians survive their ascent up the pole, unharnessed, helmet-free and dodging sparks? Will the beggars going from car to car get out of the road before before the lights turn green? Will the perpendicular pane of glass on the back of the glazier's motorbike shatter? The tension is razor sharp.

New chapters unfurl with every new neighbourhood we enter. Into the shops of the fancy fabric bazaar swan ladies whose lighter-than-air dupattas flutter behind them and hint at well-cooled houses in which there is no sweat but teams of laundresses labouring.

But this novel, 'a veritable tour de force', as the blurb would have it, is peopled by all strata of society. Here is the slow part where labourers come and sit in the middle of the road to wait to be hired. Man after man brandishes his tool of trade as small as the classifieds at the back of a newspaper. I am a painter, I have a brush; I, a bricklayer, see my trowel. I have a hammer, that's what I do. I, a saw; I saw. The characterisation can be pretty basic.

That is the problem. I read between the lines: the gates, walls and facades of every kind. I surmise, I make conjectures, but really, it would be nice now to have some dialogue, to meet a main character whose life I could follow. No more walk-on parts, no more crowd scenes, no more masks.

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Back at home, lockdown lets me live as our baby will, learning the world one room at a time. Great slabs of sunlight lie hot on floor, like an exhausted pet, albeit an oblong one, first here at the front of the house then in the afternoon, at the back. The fans make everything flutter and flap and the baby will be delighted by the way the pot plant sways, bringing on a kicking of onesie feet and happy jiggling of arms. What an exciting place to live! The breeze on an open book, in mummy's hair and on a draped towel fills everything with life. Indeed every rotation of the fan will be worth watching. Round and round and round again! It just gets better and better and the gurgling will give voice to the great joy in motion. 

And now the windows darken and our own home quietens as the older children sleep. But it's time for the percussion of next door's kitchen to crescendo. The nursling will pull away, peek out from my dupatta and strain to catch a glimpse of what is jangling. Something shiny no doubt, something being stirred (round and round again!), something that smells good. Baby, I have tried these couple of months to see through neighbours' walls and yearned to be friendly, to taste what I can smell, and to talk. But now is the time to nestle in the bosom of family and learn your life limb by limb, sibling by smiling sibling, parent by parent, room by room. One day we will go out.