The sprightly gleam in her mother’s eye warns Ruby. She knows from past experience that Serabai will keep the house awake unless she is permitted to have her say.

Verve presents an extract from author, Bapsi Sidhwa’s unpublished work, titled Serabai’s Story, where she describes an evocative exchange between a wizened old mother and her weary daughter

Late one December evening, when Ruby wheels her mother from the living room to her bedroom, Serabai is in a chirpy mood. Ruby is exhausted. They’ve just watched Fawlty Towers. It has been Serabai’s favourite show ever since it suddenly popped up on Pakistani TV screens in the 1980s. Tonight they watched John Cleese stomp his wacky way through a roomful of befuddled guests in the hotel he runs with such lunatic abandon. Alternately supporting her stomach and wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, Serabai hooted with laughter. She is not ready for bed. “I want to talk for a bit,” she says, when Ruby removes her headscarf and shawl. “I know I won’t be able to sleep.” The night nurse has already placed her hot-water bag in her bed and is turning down the comforter.

Ruby stands before her mother’s wheelchair, her hands hanging helplessly down her sides. “Can we talk tomorrow? I’m ready to drop.”

“Nonsense,” says Serabai. “Wait till you hear what I’ve to say; it’ll refresh you, I promise! Please?” she pleads.

The sprightly gleam in her mother’s eye warns Ruby. She knows from past experience that Serabai will keep the house awake unless she is permitted to have her say. The night nurse turns from stacking and smoothing the pillows to raise resigned eyebrows. She shrugs her trim shoulders and throws Ruby an amused glance.

Ruby capitulates. “Oh, all right,” she says, wearily, as if indulging a capricious child and wraps the old shahtoosh shawl back around Serabai’s legs. She sits down on her mother’s bed and the nurse positions the wheelchair closer to her. The bed is raised on bricks to make it easier for them to lay her down. “So? What do we talk about?” Ruby asks, as the nurse quietly leaves the room and shuts the door behind her.

Pointy chin and toothless mouth parodying the prim grave expression of her youth, Serabai tells her daughter, “Whenever I went to the Central Bank in Nila Gumbad, it was ‘pens down’ time. You never knew that, did you?”

Ruby is puzzled. The Parsees, the tiny community she belongs to, have a tedious reputation for loyalty and hard work. This was especially so during the days of the British Raj that her mother is harking back to.

Because of their small numbers in Lahore, the bank could employ only a sprinkling of Parsees in key positions. Stern exemplars of a favoured community, the Parsee bankers were hardly the type to abandon their duty or their loyalty and lay down their pens. Nor were the Hindu and Sikh bankers who fled Lahore at Partition likely to; or the staff of Muslims who replaced them after 1947.

Ruby recalls childhood visits with her mother to the cavernous, neon-lit Central Bank hall, segmented like a hive by shallow mahogany panelling, with legions of brown men bent over enormous ledgers like so many drones. In summer their shirt pockets bore ink stains and were stuffed with pens and pencil stubs. Was her mother some kind of covert and slickly-packaged labour activist in her youth? Fomenting sedition in the shape of a pens down strike among the dependable colony of bank accountants? It was fashionable in Serabai’s days to be a Marxist. But that was a preserve of intellectuals. Although Ruby has become adept at pouring her mother into different moulds to correspond with Serabai’s images of her past, she finds she cannot accommodate this image. Serabai was intelligent, yes. At times formidably so. But there was little impulse in her towards intellectualism or Communism. “Pens down time?” Ruby asks, frowning over the rim of her glasses, peering suspiciously into her mother’s sanguine, gimlet eye.

“Yes,” says Serabai, girlishly prim, exactly as she would have spoken at that time she refers to as her ‘heyday’. “Jal Jeriwalla gave them the permission to... Pesi Cooper too, when he became bank manager. Whenever I walked into the bank, the men were permitted to put down their pens!”

“But what on earth for?” Ruby asks, feigning astonishment, although by this time she’s cottoned on to her mother’s drift.

“So they could stop working to look at me! What else!”

And, eyes twinkling, flung-back face all lit-up in a mischievously breaking series of magical smiles and silent laughter, that ignited sparks of unruly joy in their hearts and eyes and kept attracting her children and grandchildren to Serabai’s bedside like expectant honeybees, she added, “I freshened their eyes.”

“O, Mumm, you’re too much,” says Ruby, laughing despite her earlier inclination to remain indifferent. She bends forward to nuzzle her face against her mother’s headscarf. Serabai has married her daughter’s earlier contention about being ‘too tired’ to her own contrary assertion that what she has to say will ‘refresh’ her and given them narrative context. That’s sharper than anything Ruby could ever conjure up at such short notice.

“I told you I’d freshen you up,” says Serabai gleefully, and her conceited smile stretches her mouth until it breaks in a triumphant chortle.

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