Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

Enjoy your bath while the water is hot.

      Still no answer. He was talking to himself. For Yash, the summer’s sunshine, an endless tide of gold-white light, was darker than night. He couldn’t stand another such burning hour, whereas once Sanjay started on his feet no force on earth could stop him declaring himself like a rooster. It wasn’t clear where such a tremendous quantity of joy originated. The Naidoos, and even the Naickers on his side, were fatalists, pessimists, cynics who distrusted other people and would slander and betray them. The only answer was that Sanjay came from the void whence the greatest tunes came.

      Finally Yash picked him out of the cot. He held the boy close to his shoulder and felt that Sanjay wanted to escape from pretending. His heart strained at its line, one of the space-age balloons sold at the beachfront and filled with helium until it snapped into the air. In a township dominated by such Naidoos and Naickers, by the million-armed Govenders and the incense-burning Govindsamys who knew everybody’s business and the Singhs who controlled a fleet of trucks, it was only the hot and soft touch of his son’s nape that produced this sensation in Yash’s soul. He had been surrounded and crowded, nagged and harassed to the point of exhaustion, until he wanted to kill himself in protest.

      Yash carried his son out of the house and put him down beside the tub. Sanjay unbuttoned his top. He left it on the cement steps and washed his face in hot water without opening his eyes. He submerged himself in the tub, blew out bubbles, came up to rest on his elbows, stayed up and examined his skin.

      If you let him stay there, Sanjay would look at his thin chicken-brown body for fifteen minutes at a stretch, show it off on one side and then the other, display his body to his mother with the utmost confidence. His girlish looks weren’t the same as either of his parents’. The boy was a foundling. It occurred to Yash that his son had the manners of an imperiously beautiful woman, one drawn in the lavish colour of a Hindi film poster.

      The routine asserted itself. While Sanjay balanced in the tub, Yash swiftly dried him from head to toe.

      —You promised we could sleep late today.

      —Did I say that?

      —You promised.

      —I might have. Sometimes a promise is what you hope will happen.

      Yash hung the towel on the side of the tub. He pulled the shirt over his son’s head in stages. He held up the trousers for Sanjay to put his legs into, and buckled the rhinestone-speckled white vinyl belt which had been his Christmas present.

      —Your mother changed the plan. She needs to prepare for tonight. Do you know all who are coming? Your grandparents will be here, your cousins, and Verachia, who should live right next door before he emigrated to Australia. We are going to be in town so long. Don’t forget how lucky you are.

      —I’m not lucky. Last year I was the only one in school to have chickenpox.

      —That’s not enough to take away from your good fortune.

      Sanjay had been kept out of school for fear that the other children would contract chickenpox and had lost the year. Since then the boy had started to complain that he had been left out of something important. He thought that something could happen when he wasn’t around to enjoy it. Whereas, for Yash, nothing in Durban promised genuine adventure, neither the swan boat nor the bumper cars, hardly the Star Trek on Betamax which people brought through customs. He had guitar heroes, like Yngwie Malmsteen and Keith Richards, but they were far away. Their pale imitators played in Durban’s surf-and-turf restaurants, policeman pubs, and motorcycle steakhouses. And Yash was even beneath the imitators.

      Sanjay was his last true pleasure. Sometimes Yash thought that there was a piece of dry ice in his chest, smoking in its own coldness beneath the layers of flesh and blood. He wanted to tear it out, see it smoking in front of him. He needed to go and see Christiaan Barnard, the international heart surgeon.

      Yash had been planning to kill himself for almost a year. He dated the decision to the Diwali before last, soon after the start of television, when his cousin Logan bought a dozen boxes of fireworks from Singapore Retailers. They had orange fuses and flaking green paper sides, smelled of the bitter black pepper of gunpowder when you held them in your hand, and shone with an alien light in the sky above that Logan’s uncle’s house. There had been a Catherine wheel turning back and forth like a hosepipe full of sparks and yet its brilliant white revolutions struck him as unendurably sad. Yash had been unable to stop his eyes filling with tears.

      On the same evening, the Pioneer sound system had been stolen out of Logan’s car while the guests were in the yard. Although Logan’s uncle had immediately identified the thief, who lived across the road and subsequently played his own music on the stolen speakers, it was impossible to have his cousin’s property returned because the miscreant was the nineteen-year-old, ne’er-do-well son of a sergeant in the police force. He and his father could make life difficult for Logan and his uncle, teachers in the same government school, if they went to lay a complaint.

      Logan wasn’t the type to forget an injury. Under the proper conditions he was prepared to take action. When the school boycotts came here to Phoenix, Logan had promised to march up to the sergeant’s door, ring the buzzer until they were forced to let him in, and take back his speakers and graphic equaliser.

      Yash thought that he wouldn’t live to see the day this Logan put his speakers back in the sockets in the doors of his car. In the meantime, they remained empty to remind Logan of the theft, also because he couldn’t afford to replace the system on his junior teacher’s salary. Yash had an idea that Logan was one person who was capable of bringing about a revolution.

      In a way none of them were good for him. Logan and Sanjay and even this Kastoori made claims on life far stronger than his own. Could they know that this difference in their intensities, the sum of their wills to survive subtracted from his own, reduced him to thoughts of suicide? He was at less than zero.

      Kastoori waited to talk to him until Sanjay had eaten and gone to the neighbour’s boy. She was unsympathetic to the change in his fortunes and his state of mind. Nevertheless, she was careful concerning certain points of etiquette. In public, for example, she didn’t instigate.

      —Yashwin, did I hear you correctly? Didn’t you play last week this time with your European friends when we stayed for the night by Sea Cow Lake? Was it that Richard and Jeff I hear so much about? I am not starting with you, but I want to know which one still has to pay you out.

      —You have it wrong. Colin collects the money. Peter is the leader of the band. Jeff is his brother. Sometimes, like last week, Jeff comes with the bass guitar and also a vibraharp. It sounds a lot like a xylophone. People are going mad for it.