Free Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar

himself. Stupid fool.”
    Dosa did not want to realize her own aborted dreams through Zubin’s achievements. Rather, she saw her role as protecting Zubin from future heartbreak. And if that meant she had to be the one to break his heart now, she was willing to pay the price. That evening, for the first time, she pushed Zubin outdoors to play cricket with the other neighborhood kids. “Enough of this mugging and studying. A real bookworm you are becoming. Sitting home all day and tearing apart poor little cockroaches. How you think the baby cockroaches’ mummies and daddies must be feeling?”
    Zubin, who had grown up hearing his mother curse daily the roaches that infested their kitchen, stared at his mother openmouthed. He had never so much as owned a cricket bat and had no idea what he would do among the tough, tanned, muscled neighborhood kids he was now being encouraged to socialize with. He put his mom’s strange behavior down to her ongoing grief at his father’s death.
    From then on, Dosa embarked on a plan to save Zubin from his own intelligence. In a total reversal of her former behavior, she now encouraged him to do less homework. She extolled the virtues of humility, praised the holiness of small things. Why, working as a clerk with other Parsis at the Central Bank of India was as good a job as any other. A steady paycheck, good benefits, job security, long lunch breaks. She took to scanning the newspapers for any accounts of doctors who had killed patients through negligence, conducted weird experiments on them, stabbed their wives, or been involved in scandals. Any such nugget, she placed where Zubin would be sure to see it.
    One day, she opened her front door to call Zubin in for dinner and saw that he was in an animated conversation with Rusi Bilimoria, who lived one floor above them. Rusi was already a legend among the neighborhood kids because he had a part-time job and was talking about buying a motorcycle with his own money. “When I buy a big house at Worli or Marine Drive, you can come visit me,” Rusi was saying to Zubin. “Should be in a few years,
bossie.
What I say is, if you are willing to work hard, anything is possible,
na?
The sky is the limit, then.”
    His words frightened Dosa. She could see Rusi’s self-confidence unravel all of her careful plans to ensure that Zubin grew into a modest, cautious man who did not aim too high. For six months now, she had worked to suppress her son’s natural curiosity and native intelligence. And now, a young neighborhood show-off was about to wreck her scheme by instigating her son to dare to dream his way out of his middle-class existence.
    She flew toward Rusi like a mother lion protecting her cub.
“Be-sharam,
stop filling my son’s ears with all your
dhaaps,”
she cried. “Wadia Baug is good enough for us simple folks. You can go to your Worli and live with those Gujus and Sindhis, if that’s what you want. We are happy being with our own kind.”
    “Mummy, Mummy, stop it,” Zubin whispered. “We were only talking, that’s all.”
    Rusi looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Dosamai,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He fled up the stairs.
    From that day on, Dosa made it her business to know Rusi’s business. For years, she watched him because she was afraid he would contaminate her son, who, with each passing year, was becoming the dull, mild man she wanted him to be. She often told Zubin to be thankful that she had saved him from Rusi’s seductive but foolish dreams, especially in light of the fact that Rusi’s business never quite took off the way he had predicted. “Remember what I told you years ago,
beta?’
she said when Zubin became an officer at Central Bank at age twenty-nine. “Look at the hours Rusi works, dragging himself home late at night, looking as tired as a mouse chased by a cat. And look at you, coming home by six-thirty sharp, in tip-top condition. And what for Rusi works so hard? Still stuck in Wadia