Salesman

Fiction

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“Mother died,” Lily said without any introduction as soon as her sister answered the call.

“Good for her,” Rose said after a sigh. “When was it?”

“Last night. Pop saw her in the morning lying dead in her bed.”

“How did you know?”

“Daisy rang up.”

Daisy was their younger sister. She still has connections with some people in their hometown in the fishing coasts of Kochi.

They were four sisters: Lily, Rose, Daisy and Zinnia, in that order, the last two being twins and the youngest. When their mother was pregnant with the twins, father was very certain that it was going to be a boy. “Big tummy. Means boy,” he said looking at Ma’s belly. Ma told them later about it when they were grown up enough to understand the dark underbelly of relationships.

When father was told that it was twins, and that too girls, he refused to see them. He walked out, spat out angrily and contemptuously on the way to the local joint where he got drunk on illicit country liquor. He never stopped drinking after that.

Mother tried to compensate for the father’s lack of love by being tender towards the girls. The names she gave them were a sign of that intended tenderness.

Father never spoke to the girls. He did not even look at them. He never missed an opportunity to blame mother for not “producing” a son. Ma’s failure to “produce” a boy became the professed cause of father’s alcoholism.

Father was what he called “a salesman” at the fishing harbour. In fact, he was a broker or, more correctly, a tout.

The day Lily turned 17, father’s sense of paternal duty emerged as if from nowhere. He came home that evening with a middle-aged man whose face resembled that of a devil in one of the catechism books of the twins. His bald head and protruding belly accentuated the resemblance. The man took only a brief glance at Lily who had just returned from her tailoring class. “It’s good,” he said to father as if Lily were a piece of furniture that he was buying. He was a wholesale dealer of fish at Munnar. He bought fish from Kochi.

 “Your father is a good salesman,” Ma said when father announced Lily’s marriage with that man. His wife had died a year back. Thus Lily became a mother of two children, not much younger than her, even before her marriage.

*

As the bus rolled down the rollicking hills of Munnar, Lily considered herself luckier than Rose though she had to go alone for her mother’s funeral.  

Lily did not take the children with her for her mother’s funeral. Her husband’s children were as indifferent as a dead fish to the news about the death. Her own children were already at school when Daisy’s call came. “Why to disturb them?” The Fish Dealer asked. “Their annual exams are round the corner.” Anyway, they hardly had any association with their grandmother.

“What about you?” Lily asked the Fish Dealer.

“How can I leave the fish market? What will the fish do? They’re as dead as your mother.”

The analogy made her wince. Mother as dead as a fish. The fish will be embalmed with formalin to prevent their decay. Mother is not as valuable.

Mother was the Lady of Sorrows. She was the Valley of Tears. Her salesman husband was her perpetual sorrow. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. I was her supplementary sorrow when my adolescent hymen was sold to an ageing Fish Dealer, Lily thought with some perverse amusement. Rose was her deepest sorrow, perhaps.

Rose was gambled away by salesman father. In one of his drunken 3-card poker games, when he lost everything including the house, an offer was made to him by the Poker Master.

“Want to play once more, one last chance?”

“What more have I got to stake?” Father asked.

“Rose,” said Poker Master staring deep into Father’s shallow, shrunken eyes sodden with inebriation.

“What if I stake Rose?” Father asked daring Poker Master.

“I take Rose and you get your house back,” Poker Master said with a generous sweep of his hands. “I’ll add some money too for the wedding.”

Father shook hands on the deal.

Your father is a good salesman.

Lily visited Rose once, a year after her marriage to Poker Master. She smelled of Tiger Balm which was given to her by a generous neighbourhood nurse who had come home for holiday from Dubai. There were scars on her face and arms. The image of Poker Master’s belt swishing in the air with the steel buckle glistening against Rose’s tender flesh did not leave Lily’s nightmares for long. Rose was the Daughter of Sorrows. Rose was the Periyar of Tears.

Daisy was the lucky one. She eloped with a fisherman when Father Salesman sold Zinnia to an old Arab in what had become quite popular in those days under the name of Arabi Kalyanam, Arab Marriage. The old Arabs came to Kerala to buy young brides in order to rejuvenate their senile erections.

Nobody ever heard of Zinnia after her marriage. Her Arab buyer had renamed her Zeenat for the wedding which was an indeterminate ceremony conducted by a local mullah. Zeenat must have beautified one of the infinite harems in the Arab land as long as the Master of the Harem found sap in the tender zinnia stalk.

*

Daisy and her husband, Martin, had made all arrangements for mother’s funeral when Lily reached. Rose was there too with some new scars on her neck and arms and the tang of Tiger Balm on her body.

Father was sober enough during the sombre funeral ceremony. When it was all over, the three sisters stood in the church yard trying to bid farewell to each other. Martin stood nearby with some of his friends.

Father approached Martin and said something. Martin pulled out a few currency notes from his pocket and gave to father.

“After my marriage,” said Daisy, “Ma must have had fish every day. I hope so. Pop extracted that from Martin, my price.”