A Real Durwan Quotes

In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.

“Have I mentioned that I crossed the border with just two bracelets on my wrist? Yet there was a day when my feet touched nothing but marble. Believe me, don’t believe me, such comforts you cannot even dream them.”

So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not so easy to dismiss her.

In short, over the years, Boori Ma’s services came to resemble those of a real durwan. Though under normal circumstances this was no job for a woman, she honored the responsibility, and maintained a vigil no less punctilious than if she were the gatekeeper of a house on Lower Circular Road, or Jodhpur Park, or any other fancy neighborhood.

Knowing not to sit on the furniture, she crouched, instead, in doorways and hallways, and observed gestures and manners in the same way a person tends to watch traffic in a foreign city.

To occupy the time, Boori Ma retired to the rooftop. She shuffled along the parapets, but her hips were sore from sleeping on newspapers.

Among the wives, however, resentment quickly brewed.

Her mornings were long, her afternoons longer. She could not remember her last glass of tea. Thinking neither of her hardships nor of earlier times, she wondered when the Dalals would return with her new bedding.

It was there, while she was standing in the shopping arcade surveying jackfruits and persimmons, that she felt something tugging on the free end of her sari. When she looked, the rest of her life savings and her skeleton keys were gone.

Though none of them spoke directly to Boori Ma, she replied, “Believe me, believe me. I did not inform the robbers.”

“For years we have put up with your lies,” they retorted. “You expect us, now, to believe you.”

“Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes. But that is nothing new. When is new is the face of this building. What a building like this needs is a real durwan.”

From the pile of belongings Boori Ma kept only her broom. “Believe me, believe me,” she said once more as her figure began to recede. She shook the free end of her sari, but nothing rattled.