The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER II

From where he stood in that tiny veranda-cum-balcony before the door to their house opened, he could listen to the rain drumming rhythmically on the metal roofs, pooling into the lowland by forming a brown, chocolaty, mushy pool. The day was darker, clouds happening as merely as breathing or eating. When the wind blew in unknowing directions, a chunk of the rain turned it's route towards that veranda and got Rumi partly soaked- barely wet.

"Rumi!" His mother yelled, her voice cowering under the bellows of the sky crying, letting itself flow like life, like a river, like nothing else. "Go inside! What are you doing here, getting wet? You'll fall ill again!"

Rumi turned around with fresh water dripping down his small set of hair and his face with an expression of guilt, his body setting off goosebumps like the detonation of a slow bomb, creeping and lingering and alarming enough due to the cold, stifling Bombay rains. His mother began to pull clothes off the ropes that hung hooked from one wall to the other- diagonally, pinching out clips that held them in the wind. She collected them in a bucket and pulled Rumi inside and told him to stand at the door while she went and brought back a dry, fluffy towel that smelled of soap. She then gave him a change of clothes and made him sit tightly on the couch, asked him if he'd completed his homework and went in the kitchen to continue cooking whatever was simmering in the pot on the stove.

After the dining table was clear of dishes and a glass of milk was forced down his itchy throat, he was sent to bed on time, but of course, he didn't sleep. The sun was drowned, the sky was covered, the earth was filling up, and while the world around him slept in that noisy night, he waited patiently, looking outside the window: only a moment to escape from the rush of that day, to flush that day off, to undo what had been done that day- to summon it all and pile it behind his stuffy mind as storage, a library perhaps.

He looked beside his bed in that small room where he laid alone, to the even smaller shelf of books he had borrowed from his father and the cafeteria. Rustom Cafe. He was fourteen, but whatever he read were astounding- Midnight's Children, Bye-Bye Blackbird, The Old Man, and The Sea, The Mandarins, and if he scored well this time, his father said that he'd be inherited with The Great Gatsby and Clear Light Of Day.

He loved the sight of books that stood steadily right before his eyes. He'd read every one of them (he'd only get another book if he were done reading the first one) and hence, when he watched those books, it gave him a sense of pride, a sense of confidence and authority, ownership and possession; as if he had been blessed with the independence of his life. They weren't just books he owned and read; they were places he'd already been to. Hawaii, Delhi, London, and Paris.

From a very young age, his father made sure that Rumi read. If anything, while the world sped through life like a wheel, Rustom wanted to inherit a habit of not traditions, a culture born out of human nature- to read is to love- he thought.

•~•~•~•

1974

Rumi was nine.

The children that lived within the lane had gathered that summer afternoon of still air to play hide and seek. In that arid time of day, when the sun stood firm at the center of the sky as if providing spotlight to everyone, not even a single life wanted to move in the breathtaking humidity of rising Bombay.

They squeaked, then cheered and then screamed in joy because their plan to somehow run from their confinements had worked out, and now, they all could play peacefully- not so much. There was only one ground rule: no getting out of that entire lane; towards the main road of the busy city. Of course, they'd agreed. At that point- they'd agree to anything. To keep the children's body temperature at normal, they were forced to chug on a glass of cold milk or chaas so that nobody had to bother about a sunstroke at least.