Uhuru Street Read Online Free Page B

grandmother, then the knickers, and the dresses on the rack.
    ‘How would it look,’ Mother asked, her finger on the pattern, ‘if this line of buttons was removed, and instead you put a bow here – a chocolate-coloured bow?’
    ‘Not bad, Mama. I’ve used a lace before, but a bow would look as good. Yes!’
    With this piece of tact she won a place to sit. Aloo and I were asked to disappear – to play outside or study upstairs – and Alzira sat down on the vacated bench, throwing a sly grin of sympathy at us as we went out.
    It became her regular place, this bench, in the late afternoons. Sitting, legs crossed and hunched over some material, needling away, chatting with Mother, or gossiping with Mehroon and Razia when they were back from school. Alzira’s afternoon news – unlike Mrs Daya’s morning bulletin – merely supplied merriment.
    We learnt that Baby, who lived in the low tin-roofed house across the street, had been ordered by her husband to touch her toes one hundred times before dinner. Poor Baby couldn’t even see her toes standing up. Alzira had simply listened in to the passionate quarrel taking place downstairs from her window. Nextwe received confirmation of what had long been suspected. That Roshan Mattress, who owned the third store from ours, entertained a Punjabi police inspector as lover. He came around ten o’clock in the morning pretending to look for stolen goods. The two would disappear into the shadowy interior of the store, ostensibly searching piles of mattresses and diligently prodding stacks of stuffing as they inched their way behind them. They emerged noticeably chipper, ordering tea and snacks. The inspector would leave brushing lint from his uniform and swinging his baton.
    Alzira cheered us up. Her company was a boon to Mother, and she made the girls blush and giggle. Only as the afternoon drew to a close, after a cup of tea from the thermos that stood by Mother’s feet, or having been treated to bhajias from Khatibai’s Saidi who came around on a bicycle, would she gather up her things and take her leave.
    What we learnt of her own family we also found out through gossip and observation. Her father was a retired civil servant, a big morose man, flushed and balding, whom we usually saw in khaki shorts and hanging shirt tails. Except on Sundays he rarely ventured out for long, going only for a paper or, it was rumoured, a bottle. The mother was a thin sickly creature, prematurely old and with dark uneven teeth, who came out on even rarer occasions. Alzira had a brother and sister, both younger and educated. Pius worked in customs at the harbour, and Maria – small, dark, vivacious – was a secretary with a law firm. They were regulars at the Goan Institute, these two, where jazz trumpets blared on Saturday nights and boys with Elvis hairstyles and girls in cancans did the rock ‘n’ roll. On Sundays Alzira walked to church with her mother and father, curbing her naturally long strides to allow them to keep pace. Maria usually got a ride, and Pius went off with some friend on his scooter.
    I dreaded being sent to Alzira on errands. Her mother invariably answered the door, her black teeth and bad mood giving herthe look of a snarling witch. Motioning me to wait she would go back in, while I stood outside in the littered landing for her daughter to come and see to me.
    A long and dark passageway led inside, into whose mysteries I could not see and was not let in to see. But I discovered my own access: our second-storey window looked down into their three rooms facing the street. And sometimes, with nothing else to occupy me I would be drawn to that window. I looked on, unashamedly, observing the uneventful workings of that other home; long minutes of staring deep into that gloom, temple pressed against the cool metal bars. Scene after scene of silent, meaningless activity, as if carried out by phantoms. Lights on in one room; a newspaper fetched, a dress material picked up from