Fiction in f Minor - Post 5

[continued from <<Post - 4]

Yusuf uncle was an old friend of Ruksana’s late husband Irfaan, Alyssa’s father. Yusuf used to work at a merchant navy house on Strand Road when the Late Irfaan Ahmed had been a successful shipper of spices to the expatriate Indian populations in Burma and Singapore. Profession and business had brought the men together, and a mutual appreciation of music and chess had made them friends for life. Weekends they had been inseparable, either arguing politics over endless cups of tea or attending the occasional mujra in Haatibagan together. Alyssa remembered Yusuf uncle weeping like a child when Father had died -- a tragic complication of diabetes and high blood-pressure. She had been barely fifteen then, and Yusuf uncle fifty-eight. Now sixty-five, Yusuf lived with his wife Zohra in a small one-roomed flat in Karnani Mansions.

Karnani Mansions on Park Street was barely five minutes walk from the Alliance Français where Alyssa went for her French class. Ruksana’s request was an easy one to fulfill. Yet, Alyssa’s heart sank at the prospect. It wasn’t that she minded, or even thought of it as a chore. It just depressed her immensely to watch the perennially ill Yusuf uncle. Hardly able to take care of himself, he wasn’t much able to help to Zohra either, who herself suffered from a particularly painful form of gout.

Alyssa knew she would go. Yusuf uncle was the closest thing to Father, whom she sorely missed, and although it often afforded her more pain than solace, Alyssa was, unbidden, in the occasional habit of dropping in on the old couple, by herself.

Alyssa would have felt less concerned if Zohra and Yusuf could have afforded full-time live-in help, but Yusuf uncle’s job had been in the private sector and not the kind that came with a pension scheme. A small nest-egg in the government mandated Provident Fund and meager personal savings was all they had. Apart from paying someone to do the shopping for fresh vegetables, Yusuf and Zohra depended on the grocery store and the milkman to deliver their victuals. The dhobi from downstairs collected the washing each weekend, and delivered their cleaned linen every Tuesday.

“I’ll go look them up after class”, she promised.

[to be continued... ]

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