The Turning - Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

The day after her birthday, Dina awoke feeling hung over. She had taken rather more than her normal dose of sedatives the night before, after tossing and turning in bed for a couple of hours.

Her birthday luncheon party had depressed her more than cheered her. She had almost been sorry to see Prakash leave for Poona. Almost but not quite. She smiled, remembering.

She was to meet Khurshed today. Distance and the lapse of time had served to diminish his shortcomings in her mind, and enhance his attractions. Expediency had now become Dina's God, at the altar of which was served her memory, as well as her conscience.

She tossed off her bed clothes and got up. And then fell back, feeling slightly dizzy. She rang for Fatima, asked for coffee in bed, and ordered her to get the cordless telephone to her.
She'd call Khurshed over to the house since Prakash was away, instead of going to the Club to meet him. She dialled her ex-husband's number. Then she dragged herself out of bed and had a leisurely shower.

Seated before the mirror in her choli and petticoat, Dina grimaced at her pale face and opened a pot of rouge. She had not really made up her face for a long, long time. She touched up her eyelashes and darkened her lips with lipstick. Deep maroon: her favourite shade. It was ironical, she acknowledged to herself, that she should be making up her face to receive her divorced husband.

She changed into a saree, reached for the bottle of 'Joy' Prakash had presented to her, unscrewed the top and dabbed on the perfume liberally all over. Perfume was one of her great weaknesses. Then she powdered her nose finally and went to the drawing room to await her guest. Her ex-husband.

* * * *


Khurshed sipped the mint tea brought in on a tray by Fatima. One glance at him was sufficient to assure Dina that he was not his usual self. He seemed to have something weighing heavily on his mind.

His birthday greeting to her was almost perfunctory, his replies to her questions hardly less so. He cast several speculative glances at Dina when he thought she wasn't looking at him, averting his eyes quickly, if she was! Ultimately, he appeared to come to some sort of a decision, and met her eyes squarely, his own unusually grave. Almost judgmental.

"Dina, I hate to bring this up, especially when I've come to wish you for your birthday; but tell me, have you been going to the Fire Temple lately?" the words came out in a slight rush. As though he wanted to get something unpleasant off his chest rather quickly.

Dina set down the milk jug heavily on the tea tray. "Who told you?" she asked him sharply, realizing that a denial would be useless. Khurshed knew her too well for her to be able to lie successfully to him.

"Aftab saw you at the Fire Temple at Bandra," he replied quietly.

Dina swallowed her vexation. After all the trouble she had taken, to choose a Fire Temple at Bandra, far from Cuffe Parade! Far away from her relations, all of whom lived South of Worli. To have been seen by Aftab, of all the people!

Aftab Dastoor was Khurshed's nephew, his elder sister Meher's son. A practising priest, he was rabidly orthodox, violently opposed to inter-caste marriages. Well aware of Dina's conversion and her second marriage, he had been livid to see her at the Fire Temple. She had no right to be there. No right at all! He had gone ranting to Khurshed and warned him to warn her. Failing which, he threatened, he, Aftab, would be forced to take matters into his own hands! He had also muttered something about informing Fredun, and warning him to control Dina.

Khurshed had been alarmed enough to now convey a muted version of the warning to Dina. He looked rather pityingly at his ex-wife as he did so. That ruffled Dina's temper even more than Aftab's officiousness. She couldn't bear to see pity in Khurshed's eyes. Not directed towards her! About to say something cutting, she was interrupted by the doorbell ringing imperatively. From the lobby came the sound of an angry male voice. Khurshed held his breath, suddenly arrested by that voice.

After a moment, they heard the front door bang shut, and Fatima entered the drawing room. Looking at Khurshed, she said hesitantly, "A gents to see you, Sahib."

"Let him come in," bade Khurshed before Dina could react. After Fatima had gone away to do his bidding, Khurshed turned to Dina. "From the sound of his voice, appears to be Porus! My younger brother. But he's supposed to be in Hong Kong. What he's doing here, I don't know." He did not quite succeed in keeping the apprehension from his voice.

Khurshed, in fact, was badly shaken. Because of the break-up of their marriage, Porus had developed an unreasoning hatred for Dina, resenting her for what he imagined she had done to his brother. When Porus came to learn from their sister Meher that Khurshed had started seeing Dina again and that her second marriage too was almost on the rocks, he had become violently abusive of Dina over the telephone to Khurshed.

"Hasn't that bitch done you enough harm? You stay away from her, understand? Ask her to leave you alone. If you can't, I will!" Porus had almost shrieked into the receiver, causing Khurshed to shift his own set an inch away from his ear. Khurshed, shaking with rage and suppressed frustration, had coldly asked Porus to mind his own business.

Porus had banged the phone down, at that. Even as a child, he had been prey to ungovernable rages. Which was why Khurshed was extremely uneasy at the thought of Porus landing up so suddenly, not only in Bombay, but here, on Dina's doorstep.

Porus entered in Fatima's wake. His face was set and flushed, the nervous twitch at the side of his mouth working uncontrollably.

He looked at Khurshed and blurted out without preamble, "1 landed at Bombay this morning. I went to your place. And I was told by your servant that you had come here. Here!" His voice suddenly rose to a high, almost feminine pitch as he stood glaring at his brother. "Hasn't she done you enough harm? Don't you know enough to stay away from her?" He suddenly whirled on Dina, speaking now in a soft, almost normal tone, which somehow was the more menacing. "You stay away from my brother. Do you hear? You stay away from him. Otherwise I'll kill you. I swear I'll kill you!"
Then he turned and walked out of the house, as suddenly and abruptly as he had appeared, without a backward glance at either of them.

Khurshed sighed wearily and came towards Dina, his hands outstretched. "Looks like this meeting was not such a good idea, after all!" he said ruefully. "I apologize for Porus, my dear. At times he's a little imbalanced, as you know! I . . . I had no idea it was this bad! I'm sorry." He averted his eyes and said awkwardly, "I'd better go after him . . . make sure he's Okay."

"Sure," said Dina mechanically. She was seething underneath. "Make sure he's Okay," she repeated aloud to herself, after he had gone. "Who's to make sure I'm Okay?"

She was beginning to feel tired. Her head began to pound. Almost of their own volition, her feet dragged her to her bedroom. She undraped her saree, dumped it on one side of her large bed - too large for one person - and, feeling too listless and weary to remove her make-up or to change out of her choli and petticoat, lay down in those, pulled the bed sheet up to her chin and tried to sleep.

* * * *

Fatima let her mistress sleep undisturbed until lunch time. Till about 1 O'clock. Then, finding no response to her increasingly loud knocks on her door, she turned the handle and went in.

Dina had not locked the door. She was lying still on the bed. When she went up to her the maid realized, to her horror, that her mistress's eyes were open in a wide, unseeing stare.

"Bibiji, bibiji," a note of terror vibrated in the maid's upraised voice, as she shook Dina violently. There was no response from the flaccid body. Dina's face was white as chalk, her lipsticked lips outlined grotesquely in dark maroon. The lips were parted, the mouth open as though gasping for breath. The hands, suddenly seeming claw-like to the distraught maid, appeared to feebly clutch the bedsheet.

Fatima gave a sob of terror and ran from the room. She rushed to the telephone and with shaking hands dialled the number of Prakash's office. While the bell was ringing, she suddenly remembered that Sahib had gone to Poona. She rang off before anyone could pick up the telephone in Prakash's office, and dialled Banoo Maa's number, which Dina had drilled into her.

"Memsahib, Banoo Memsahib, come soon. Come quickly. The Bibiji, she. . . Allah! I think she be dead!"

* * * *

At the other end of the line, a stunned Banoo Maa pulled herself together sufficiently to order Fatima briskly to remain calm, promising to be there in the next half-hour. Then she called Fredun at his office and relayed to him Fatima's strange call, begging him to come over as quickly as possible, so that they could both go together to Dina's and see what had happened. She felt too shaken to go over alone.

A recent memory stirred in her mind, and she went over to the cupboard where she kept her valuables, opened the locker, took out a document carefully wrapped in cellophane and put it in her handbag.

Then she quickly donned a white saree, before giving way to tears.

Fredun did not keep her waiting long. The drive from his office at Nariman Point to Banoo Maa's roomy old tenanted flat at Marine Drive was accomplished in hardly ten minutes, at that hour. It was about fifteen minutes past one in the afternoon. Banoo Maa had caught him just as he had been on the point of leaving for a luncheon meeting. He had hurriedly instructed his secretary to cancel the meeting. All said and done, thought Fredun to himself, Dina was his sister! What the hell had happened?

Banoo Maa had seen his car turn into the gate from her balcony on the second floor, and had come down by the time Fredun pulled up. She got into the car and he turned and drove back swiftly towards Cuffe Parade.

* * * *

They were admitted by a hysterically weeping Fatima. Fredun rushed into Dina's bedroom. Banoo Maa followed more slowly. He shook his head at her when she reached the door of the bedroom. Dina was dead. No doubt about it.

Banoo Maa sat down by the edge of the bed, steeling herself consciously, drawing upon all her fortitude to see her through this ordeal. Dina's heavily made-up face was horrific in death. . . those staring, mascara'd eyes . . . that open mouth, the maroon lips affording a grotesque contrast to the pallor of death. Banoo Maa raised a hand, hesitated, then chiding herself, resolutely caressed the dead face, closing Dina's glassily staring eyes in the process. This was not Dina . . . her Dina!

Who was this woman? What had she become?

Fredun dragged his eyes from the bottle of sedatives on the bedside table and gave Banoo Maa's shoulder a slight squeeze. "I'd better call some Doctor," he muttered. Like most persons confronted by sudden death, he seemed uncertain what to do. "1 think we'll require a death certificate, won't we?" Then, as Banoo Maa remained silent, he asked, "Do you know whom she used to go to, in the past few years?"

Banoo Maa shook her head, her eyes still on Dina's face. "1 don't think she had any regular family Doctor, ever since. . ." her voice cracked. At last she looked up at Fredun, and clutched his arm. "You'd better call our old Dr. Dhondy, dear. At least he knew her well in her childhood and youth. But Fredun," she got up abruptly, suddenly her old brisk self, reaching out for her handbag lying on the bed. "You'd better have a look at this, first."

"What's this?" he asked, rather gingerly accepting the cellophanewrapped package she held out to him.

"Dina's Will."

"When did she make this?" he asked sharply.

"Just a couple of days ago. She had telephoned me and called me over here."

Fredun read the Will through, a slight frown in his eyes. Then he handed it back to Banoo Maa, his eyes going again to the bottle of sedatives. "Better not say anything about this to old Dhondy. Let's get all this over and done with, as quickly as we can."

* * * *

Dr. Dhondy arrived, round and rubicund, his kindly face looking shocked as he gazed at Dina. His eyes wandered round the bedroom curiously.

"Well, well, well! This is rather sudden, hmmn?" he asked chattily, glancing up at Fredun over the top of his spectacles. His bedside manner was too deeply ingrained to desert him even when confronted with a corpse instead of a patient. "What's happened?" He looked around inquiringly, expecting explanations.

Fredun replied, unable to keep a tinge of unease out of his voice, "We really don't know, Doctor. We'd had lunch with her yesterday. She seemed quite all right then. Today, there was no one in the house except her maid. She. . . this seems to have happened in her sleep! Maybe she had a sudden stroke, or something." He shrugged. "I . . . we've not had much contact with her, these last few years. But 1 believe she's not been keeping too well. And not bothering about her health, either," he added.

Dr. Dhondy looked thoughtful. Then he turned an inquiring look at Banoo Maa, who avoided his glance. Dhondy stroked his straggly toothbrush moustache, shaking his head as he went over to the bed and pulled the bedclothes off Dina's dead body.

Banoo Maa averted an embarrassed gaze from the exposed midriff between the choli and the petticoat. The plunging choli looked almost indecent without the drape of the saree pallo. Had Banoo Maa but known it, death had been particularly remorseless to both of Prakash Shahane Sattar's wives, stripping them of dignity in more ways than the obvious.

Banoo Maa forced herself to speak. To tell the doctor what he wanted to hear. "She has not been keeping too well of late," she said evenly. "She's often complained of pains in the chest, insomnia, breathlessness. She's been living under tremendous strain."

"Quite, quite," murmured the Doctor, wrinkling both nose and moustache. "She seems to have changed a lot from the young woman I knew," he added, looking at Fredun curiously. The fellow appeared to be strangely ill at ease! Then Dhondy's eyes went to the almost empty bottle of sedatives on the bedside table, and back to Fredun's anxious gaze.

"How long has she been like this?" he asked whilst making a quick examination, opening her eyelids and shining his torch into her eyes.

"We're not sure." It was Banoo Maa who replied. "Her maid Fatima called me at around 1 O'clock in the afternoon. Apparently, she had found her. . . like this when she tried to awaken her for lunch. She had retired to her room earlier, at around 11.30."

"What about her ..er husband? Isn't he here?"

"He's at Poona. I've left a message for him," said Fredun quickly. "It'll take him quite some time to get here," he added. Banoo Maa looked up at him sharply, her eyes thoughtful. Fredun had made no telephone calls, except to the Doctor! But she said nothing.

The Doctor finished his examination, straightened, and closed his medical bag with a snap. "It appears to be a case of apoplexy, resulting in death. Maybe if treatment were given to her in time. . . " he left it at that. Then he coughed discreetly and asked, "Won't her husband like her to be seen to by his own Doctor?"

"I don't think that is at all necessary, Doctor," said Fredun quickly. Too quickly. "It'll only prolong things. After all, you've known Dina, treated her in the past."

"But not for many years," demurred Dr. Dhondy.

"Well," muttered Fredun awkwardly, "It's not as though anyone could do anything for her. If you would be so good enough as to certify her death, Doctor. . ."

Dr. Dhondy looked at Banoo Maa and read the entreaty in the faded old eyes. She was one of his oldest patients. And not just a patient! He and his wife had enjoyed many a delicious Dhanshak dinner at her table.

Tut-tutting a bit, Dr. Dhondy wrote out a death certificate, certifying death by natural causes, evidently due to apoplexy. He then took his leave, shaking his head.

As soon as the Doctor had left, Fredun opened the telephone directory, found the number he was looking for and dialled, without consulting Banoo Maa. She seemed to divine whom he was telephoning, and seemed to approve.

"Hello," spoke Fredun into the telephone. "JJ Hospital? . . . . . ."