Low

by Jeet Thayil

  “What about me?” said Niranjan.

  The dancer in the diaphanous green chiffon and a tall bald man came to the table. Niranjan waved at them to sit and turned back to Ullis.

  “What?” he said. “I don’t get?”

  He made a strange gesture to the bouncer. Cupping his hand in the air, he rotated his fingers as if he were changing a light bulb. Then he nodded at the only other table that was occupied, three men quietly drinking beer and eating kebabs. The bouncer said something to them and they left the room. Niranjan stretched out a hand, his fat beringed fingers spread wide, and Ullis gave him the baggie with his depleted stash. He winced as the last of the cocaine was crushed and snorted in a mighty sniff. The bald man watched impassively as Niranjan flung the mirror on the table and clapped his hands.

  “More,” he said. “More!”

  Waiters brought brandy in a snifter and a jug of orange juice. Niranjan put ice in the brandy and half filled the snifter with juice. He drank without touching his lips to the glass.

  “Niranjan seth,” said the dancer teasingly. “You always want more. Isn’t it true?”

  Niranjan shrugged and straightened the rings on his fingers.

  “Who is the friend you brought to see me?” said the dancer.

  “This is Ullis, Englishwallah hain,” he said apologetically, as if Ullis’s language relegated him to a remote and disagreeable region of hell. “Ullis, this is the great Meena Kumari.”

  “Meena?” said Ullis, politely shaking hands. He tried to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “Meena Kumari?”

  “Mummy daddy fans thi,” she said and went back to her phone.

  “And this is Sub-Inspector Dhabolkar,” said Niranjan.

  He made his fingers into a pistol and pointed at the stocky bald man, who nodded and said nothing. Dhabolkar’s shirt was loose over his jeans and he wore a baseball cap to hide his eyes. Reaching into his hip pocket, he retrieved a thick office envelope held together with a rubber band. He offered the envelope with both hands. Niranjan put it away without looking inside.

  “Dhabolkar used to be theatre actor on Marathi stage,” said Niranjan. “I convinced him to join second most dramatic of all the professions, police.”

  “Which is most dramatic, Niranjan sir?” asked Meena Kumari.

  “Politics is most!” said Niranjan. “Even more than dancing.”

  He downed the rest of his brandy and orange juice in his finicky way, by holding the snifter some distance from his lips and letting the drink fall into his mouth. Then he stood up and shook hands with Ullis.

  “You can stay as long as you want,” he said as he left, followed obediently by Dhabolkar. “I will see you, Widow Boy! Meena, walk with me to my transportation.”

  Ullis was sorry to see Niranjan leave, which made him wonder at his new sentimentality. Was this what happened to someone who came home one day to find his wife hanging from a ceiling fan, who tried to breathe life into her lungs and failed? Did such a person begin to see the living as brief and wondrous apparitions, each worthy of affection and attention, whether a chance acquaintance on an airplane, or a stranger dancing in a bar, or an endearingly incompetent criminal president?

  Meena returned a few minutes later and took her seat and snapped her fingers. A waiter appeared, looking frightened.

  “Chivas Regal,” she announced without looking up from her phone, and the waiter hurried away. When he returned with her drink she told him to fill the glass with ice and top it up with Coca-Cola.

  “The name of this cocktail is highball,” she said as she took a first sip. “Did you know that?”

  Her English was fluent and unaccented, as if she had picked it up by watching television shows beamed from far-flung corners of the globe.

  “I think I did know that,” said Ullis.

  “If this is a highball what is a lowball?”

  “Indian whisky and Thums Up?”

  Meena Kumari graced him with a small bored smile. Clearly she didn’t think it was much of a joke.

  “When Niranjan seth is here, girls do not drink in front of him,” she said. “He does not like it. Actually he hates it.”

  “What does he like?” asked Ullis.

  “What does he like?” and Meena Kumari laughed, a low-pitched sound that issued hesitantly and briefly from her wonderful mouth. “He likes Sati Savitris. Even girls in the bar line, he wants them to act like Mother India. I don’t know why he calls me Meena Kumari. No, not true, I know why. He likes to say her name. I never saw a movie by her in my life. My friend told me she was a drunkard and her life was fully tragic. I think I look more like Manisha Koirala than Meena Kumari. What do you think?”

  “Manisha Koirala definitely.”

  “Manisha also drinks, but not as much as Meena. My real name is Tamanna.”

  “Tamanna.”

  “Yes. It is the name I gave myself. Isn’t it nice?”

  “Very nice,” said Ullis.

  She looked at him doubtfully and went back to her phone. Which reminded Ullis that he had an urgent text to send because Niranjan had unilaterally annexed his cocaine. He typed: “Need to see u. ASAP?” Putting the phone away, he patted his inner jacket pocket to check that the h-dash-in was still there. His phone vibrated. It was Danny with a quick reply: “Now m busy bru. Lucky’s at 6 a.m.?” Ullis texted: “OK”.

  And since he had his phone out, he sent a text to his wife: “Trying to 4give but ur not helping. Nothing helps. M not sure why.”

  Waiters arrived bearing platters of kebabs and onions with fresh mint and hot rotis and cut watermelon. They placed plates on the table and started to serve the food but Tamanna waved them away. She wanted to serve him with her own hands. As she piled his plate with choice pieces of fruit and meat, she helped herself to small morsels. Prettily she wiped watermelon juice from her lips. Like Meena Kumari and Manisha Koirala, courtesans of the highest temperament, Tamanna’s eyes were large and liquid and doomed. They were her most prominent feature, followed closely by tragedienne’s cheekbones. She looked as if she might expire at any moment from a forgotten nineteenth-century ailment.

  “Excuse me,” she said as she squeezed lime on a morsel of lamb. “I think you must be a poet?”

  “I’m really not,” he said, recoiling. “Why do you say such a thing?”

  “You are beautiful and sorrowful like all the poets,” she said. “My favourite beautiful poet is the great Sahir Ludhianvi. He was born in Punjab like me.”

  “I’m sorry that I don’t know his work.”

  “Do you know the song ‘Main Pal Do Pal Ka Shayar’?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said, surprised. “Is that Sahir Ludhianvi?”

  Tamanna nodded happily. And a memory came to him: Guru Dutt’s accursed poet standing in a narrow doorway as the light streamed around his shoulders, his arms spread in the pose of the crucified Christ. It was a false memory, the wrong Hindi melodrama and the wrong actor. But he remembered the words clearly enough to translate: “I am the poet who will last for a moment or two.”

  “I knew it,” she said, her great eyes shining. “You are a poet. But why did Niranjan sir call you widow boy?”

  “I’m sure he has his reasons,” said Ullis. “Niranjan is a man of means and mystery.”

  “He mentioned that you lost your wife.”

  “Lost implies a possibility of finding.”

  “How did she expire?”

  “Milk expires. My wife died.”

  “It was natural causes or susside?”

  “Forgive me, I’ll be back in a moment,” said Ullis, getting up.

  He went in search of a bathroom. Fortification was surely in order – if not now then never again. Tamanna’s questions were too insistent and too close to the bone in his current state of sudden unintended sobriety. And now that Niranjan was no longer around, he wasn’t comfortable taking drugs in a dance bar full of cops and crooks. He tripped over a wooden partition and found the bathroom at the end of a corridor s
creened by a filthy floral curtain. It was crowded with young men primping at the mirrors. He found an empty cubicle and shut the door and carefully spilled a spot of heroin on his phone. He would have chased it with a spot of cocaine if there was any left.

  Thanks, Ninja, for finishing my C.

  Back at the table he ordered more whisky. Some of the other tables were filling up again. Tamanna gestured to a small dance floor where three women in gagra cholis danced slowly to the hit song ‘Kajra Re’. Unlike Tamanna, they used hand gestures borrowed from hip-hop and Bharata Natyam. Unlike Tamanna, they made lots of eye contact with the men in the room. One got up with a garland of five hundred-rupee notes which he placed around the neck of the main dancer, who, in Ullis’s opinion, was nowhere close to Tamanna’s level of hauteur.

  “You’re so much better,” he said.

  “I think so,” she said. “This is your first time at Jungle Beats, no?”

  “So it is,” he said, remembering banter as something he’d been good at. “Have you been dancing here a long time?”

  She regarded him speculatively.

  “I’ll tell you one story,” she said. “You are a poet. You will understand. Once I was on a bus. I was wearing a simple sari, not like this dinchak green chiffon. I was a simple girl wearing simple sari going to simple job. The bus was crowded and I had to push. I was in the entryway when the bus started to move and then a man pushed in behind me. He was standing so close I could feel his entire body. I tried to move ahead but he stayed stuck. This man is a scoundrel, I thought. He is a rascal. I turned around and slapped him. Loudly, I slapped. The whole bus turned to look. The man’s sunglasses fell off and he started to cry. Then I saw he was blind. He was carrying a cane and everything. I felt bad but not too much. Blind or not, he deserved the slap. After all, he was a man. Now the other people on the bus started shouting at me. He’s blind, they said. Why did you slap a blind man? He doesn’t know anything, poor fellow. They shouted at me and I shouted back. But I was not confident in those days. I was a schoolteacher. I got down at the next stop and walked all the way to my work. I promised to myself I will never take the bus again. Soon after that I came to Jungle Beats for a job.”

  “Who wouldn’t,” said Ullis. “Dancing is a better option. At least you can take taxis.”

  “I don’t take taxis, no thank you. I have my own car and driver.”

  “But that’s even better,” said Ullis.

  Tamanna smiled and dreamily nodded. Her fringed gold earrings swung back and forth like miniature sun umbrellas.

  “Bilkul,” she said, “but this line is only good for a short time. It is good to make money when a girl is young. Later when she is older there’s no future.” She got up and smoothed the waist of her salvaar. She took a small sip of her drink and yawned delicately. Her mouth made a perfect O. “Now I dance. It is my last shift. You will wait for me?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Really? You’re really going?”

  “Yes,” he said, also getting up.

  “You don’t want to stay with me?”

  “I’d like to, but I have to meet my friend Danny.”

  Tamanna shook her head. She looked unblinkingly at him with her doomed beseeching eyes. Between her brows was a red-and-black bindi in the shape of a young tree. He noticed that her upper lip was fuller than her lower lip and both her lips were red, though she did not wear lipstick.

  Chastely, carefully, he shook her hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On his way out, the man at the counter refused to give him a bill. “Nahi, nahi,” he said, putting up his hands like someone showing his wounds. At least he didn’t try to touch Ullis’s feet. Instead he bowed and said, “Niranjan sahib,” as if he were taking the name of the Lord of the Meeting Rivers. When the security man pulled the shutter closed, the noise of the bar faded in an instant. From the outside Jungle Beats offered a bland and innocent facade. You might think it was a clothing boutique. Only if you listened carefully did you hear the ribald folk percussion of ‘Kajra Re’ playing repeatedly through the evening because it was a favourite of the bar girls. Only if you stood under the dark awning of that jewellery store across the street did you see the young men emerge drunk, their hearts hollowed out by devotion, every last hundred-rupee note showered on a distant dancer. He would have liked to see Tamanna ply her skills once more, but what was the point? Watching her dance was pleasure and pain in equal measure. At the moment and for the foreseeable future, he was only in the market for pain and its periodic alleviation by the judicious use of synthetic painkillers.

  He set off along the deserted street in what he hoped was the direction of the main road. As always when walking in South Bombay, past buildings constructed more than two hundred years earlier, he felt a sense of continuity and serenity that was absent in the daytime when the air was full of noise and confusion. In the quiet hours before dawn, it was possible to believe that the city was a site of human history rather than the history of commerce, a place created for the movement of people rather than the movement of money.

  He passed an entire joint family on the narrow sidewalk. Old people and small children lay unguarded in sleep, their wide-open arms indicating trust or foolhardiness. There was a sleeping dog curled into a tight bundle. There were clothes hanging from a railing. There was scattered bedding and blackened pots and a plastic bucket with a piece missing from the rim. He saw the smoking remnants of a cook fire. Against a slender tree, a pile of school clothes and a lean-to made of discarded tin. He passed taxis and handcarts parked haphazardly, as if their owners had left in a great hurry. In the middle of the road was a single leather shoe. Somewhere close, dogs were barking. Where was he, Tardeo or Opera House or Ballard Estate? Or an abandoned neighbourhood in a town hit by catastrophe?

  Near the awning of a second-hand newspaper shop he saw two figures crouched under a bed sheet. Around them the paraphernalia of the dragon chaser: burnt strips of tin foil and guttered candles and Gold Flake packets cut into strips. One of the men had an open matchbox under his big toe. From time to time he would extract a matchstick, scrape it along the box and heat a length of silver foil. He wore the aura of heroin like armour, oblivious to everything but the task at hand even as the city swarmed around him. Taking in the scene, Dominic Ullis experienced a jolt of nostalgia so powerful he felt pain in his sinuses. It struck him that the word nostalgia was indicative of pain, like neuralgia or myalgia. Not pain in the nerves or muscles or joints, but pain in the memory, a condition as draining as any other.

  “May I sit here?” he said.

  One of the men had nodded out, spectacularly, his forehead touching the road, his upper body curved into an improbable yoga. He wore high-waisted blue jeans and a mullet. The other man pulled a new matchstick from the box under his toe. The foil-covered tube in his mouth moved over a trace of sticky brown liquid. He inhaled with a hiss and there was no smoke. Ullis took a seat on the kerb and dug for the vial in his pocket. When he took it out a miracle occurred. Both men came awake, ever alert to the presence of good, possibly free gear.

  “Kaunsa maal hai, bhai?” said the guy with the mullet.

  “Ekdum first-class maal,” said Ullis, without irony. “Aapka foil use kar saktha?”

  “Hah, kyon nahi? Apne ko bhi dena, yaar!”

  It wasn’t exactly a fair exchange, good heroin for the use of some foil and a few matchsticks. But who was Ullis to demand satisfaction? The only satisfaction on offer was a streak of dirty brown melting on a strip of silver. He borrowed the toker and turned it around to the unused side and offered a silent prayer against communicable diseases. Putting a small hillock of powder on the foil, he lit a match and chased the wisp of smoke that ensued. He held the smoke in his lungs for long enough that nothing emerged when he exhaled. Then he repeated the procedure. He was showing off, for it had been a long time since he had chased the magic dragon.

  The Genet formulation came to mind, as it sometimes did during heroin
ated or meowian moments. What was it exactly? That one was never reluctant to display one’s underground skills in respectable company, even if one had long stopped using said skills. Or something along those lines – Genet of The Thief’s Journal, taking pride rather than shame in the tube of K-Y jelly among his possessions displayed on a policeman’s desk. Ullis was not among the respectable at the moment, he was among the low. Not that low company was any less deserving of attention than high society, or any less appreciative of the skills one acquired in the pursuit of vice. He took some pride in wiping the foil clean and tapping out another careful mound of powder.

  Passing the strip of silver to the man with the improbable hair, Ullis leaned against a handcart, its back at the exact angle an armchair would take. How comfortable it was, how smooth and welcoming the worn panels of wood against his head, how fine a resting place for a man with an infinitely renewable reserve of sleeplessness. All around him the crowded night glimmered like velvet among the angels and ghosts. His eyelids slammed shut and melted with images. The nod arrived heavy, rapturous. Aki in the sari she wore to the City Clerk’s office in Manhattan, smiling at him on the day of their wedding, witnessed by random City Hall bureaucrats and unknown other brides and grooms. He remembered the weather vividly. A brilliant day in April and the smell of spring already in the air, the sky as blue as island water. As for this morning’s weather, don’t ask. He didn’t have a clue.

  *

  He has so many questions for her.

  “Did you like being married to me?”

  “There was no question of liking,” she says, shaking her finger at him. “I couldn’t imagine not being married to you. I liked marrying you.”

  “You were so beautiful. You wore your sari with such attitude it made City Hall glamorous. I looked at you, the way you were glowing, and it crushed me. I thought: in thirty years I’ll be old and creaky. She’ll only be old. Why did she marry me?”

  “I married you because men my own age bore me to tears. I wasn’t interested in working so hard. I wanted the work already done, or at least half done. I wanted the rough edges nicely rounded. I didn’t think twice. We didn’t think twice. We jumped into it like it was a pool on a summer afternoon in Delhi. I was so happy. Until the last day, I was happy. Then it got out of hand a little bit. Didn’t it?”