Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  Air hostessing in those times didn’t mean tossing dinners at drunks on the way back from Dubai or the smell of a Boeing bathroom after a sixteen-hour one-stop from New York. Remember, travelling abroad was rare then, and so all the air hostesses were killingly beautiful and St. Xavier’s graduates, and they all had this perfume of foreign airs which they wafted about wherever they went, and Sheila was the most chic of them all. It could break your heart, the way she smoked a True, placing it ever so delicately between her lips and leaving just a touch of deep deep red on the very tip. And the men came around, the princes and the Jamsahebs in their convertibles, promising adventure, the cricketing knights in their blue blazers of glory, the actors’ sons offering dreams of immortality. We used to see Sheila then in a flash as a car roared around the curve on Teen Batti, and we would sigh because somewhere there was a life that was perfect and wonderful.

  So we were expecting a prince for Sheila—at least, a flashing star of some sort—but she disappointed us all when she married Bijlani. He was U.S.A.-returned and all, but from some place called Utah and what was electrical engineering anyway when you had Oxford cricketing royalty on the phone—but Sheila liked Bijlani and nobody knew why. He was square and, later, fat and mostly quiet and he told everyone he wanted to make appliances, which was all very well and good, but four-speed electric mixies weren’t exactly dashing, dammit. They met at a party at Cyrus Readymoney’s and Bijlani was sitting quiet in a corner looking uncomfortable, and Sheila watched him for a long time, and when she asked, Readymoney said, “That’s Bijlani, he used to be in school with us but nobody knows his first name. He wants to make mixies.” Then Readymoney, who was dressed in black, snapped his fingers and said, “Let’s boogie, baby,” but Sheila looked up her nose at him—what I mean is she was a foot shorter than him but she somehow managed to look him up and down like he was a worm—and she said, “Why don’t you go into a corner and squeeze your pimples, Cyrus?” and then she went and took charge of Bijlani. Now, you must understand that when nowadays you see old Bijlani looking hugely regal in a black silk jacket it all started that night when Sheila took him out of his corner and tucked in his shirt at the back and took him around, never mind his sweating, and kept him by her side the whole evening. I don’t think he ever tried to understand the whats and whys of what happened, I think Bijlani just took his blessings gratefully into his bosom and built mixies for Sheila. Everyone made fun of him at the start, but they went and got married, and people rolled their eyes, and a year passed and then another and another, and then they suddenly reappeared with an enormous flat on Malabar Hill, and there was a huge intake of breath clear down to Bandra, and now the story was that she had married him for his money. If you tried to tell someone that the first mixie was built with Sheila’s money from a thousand trips up and down an Air France aisle, the next thing you heard was that she was paying you in cash and kind, and more, to say nice things about her. Her success drew out the venom up and down the coast of Bombay, let me tell you, it’s a wonder the sea didn’t curdle and turn yellow.

  *

  So now Sheila was on the hill, not quite on the top but not quite at the bottom either, and from this base camp she began her steady ascent, not quickly—she had patience and steadiness. It was done over years, it cost money, and the hill resisted, it fought back right from the start. In that first year Sheila threw cocktail parties and lunches and Derby breakfasts, and it became clear to her that the top of the hill was the Boatwalla mansion, which stood on a ridge surrounded by crumbling walls, overlooked by the frame of a new apartment building coming up just above. The mansion wasn’t really on top of the hill, and it was dingy and damp, but Sheila knew it was where she had to go to get to the real top, the only one that mattered. For that first year Sheila sent invitations to Dolly Boatwalla every other week and received typed regrets one after the other, she saw Dolly Boatwalla at parties, and finally she was introduced under an enormous chandelier at a plastics tycoon’s birthday party. Dolly Boatwalla was long and horsy-looking, she looked down an enormous nose and murmured, “Ha-aaloo,” and looked away into the middle distance. Sheila understood that this was part of the rules of current diplomacy and was happy all the same, and even when the next weekend at the racecourse somebody by mistake introduced them again and Dolly said “Ha-aaloo” as if for the first time, Sheila didn’t mind a bit and took it as part of her education. Sheila smiled and said, “You look wonderful, what a lovely scarf.” She was willing to let Dolly have her way, and if Dolly had been a little less Boatwalla and a little more sagacious, she could have adopted Sheila and taught her and patronized her in a thousand little ways, but Dolly saw only a little upstart, which Sheila was, Dolly didn’t see the ferocious political will, that hidden glint. This is how wars start.

  How it all really began was this: finally Dolly accepted one of Sheila’s invitations. Actually she had no choice but to accept, which may be why she went from being coolly condescending to openly sarcastic. And it started. What happened was that Sheila had finally been able to join the Lunch Club. Not many people in Bombay knew that the Lunch Club existed. Most of the people who knew what it was also knew that they couldn’t be in it. The women in the Lunch Club met once a month for lunch at one of the members’ houses. After lunch they played cards. Then they had tea and went home. That was it, nothing very exciting on the face of it, but if you knew anything you knew that that was where marriages were arranged and sometimes destroyed, deals were made, casually business was felt out, talk went on about this minister in Delhi and So-and-So’s son who was school captain at Mayo. It was the real stuff, you know, masala-grinding, how the world works. So Sheila’s name came up, naturally, several times, and, every time, Dolly sniffed and said, Not our type, really, and that finished off Sheila’s chances. But then Sheila made friends, fast ones, and they pushed it, they liked her, for her money, for her nippy wit, for her snap, and maybe it was also that some of them were tired of Dolly, of her Boatwalla sandwiches served soggy but with absolute confidence, of her pronouncements and the delicate way she patted her pursed lips with a napkin after she ate pastries. So they insisted, and it was clear there would be either agreement or a direct struggle, and Dolly decided that it wasn’t worth risking defeat, so finally she flung an eyebrow towards the roof, sighed, and said, “All right, if you must, can we talk about something else, this is really so boring.”

  So this was how they all gathered at Sheila’s home. Her new house, that is. It was a white two-storied mansion, really, with a bit of lawn in front and a little behind, and of course even though it was big money for the time it was nothing on the sprawling Boatwalla jungles from colonial times, when you could buy land on the hill for nothing. Still, a house was something, actually it was a lot, and the Lunch Club oohed and exclaimed as they came up the short flight of stairs and into the front room, Sheila had it absolutely right, there were the big double doors inlaid with brass and then a carved wooden elephant’s foot with walking sticks in it and a Ganesha that was chipped and old and grey stone and it had to be some major antique, two huge plants on either side, and a diffused white gleam through a skylight, and in the halo, changeless and eternal as the day that Bijlani threw his future kingdom at her feet, was Sheila, her skin glowing, her hair as dark as a Malabar wave on a moonless night. She welcomed them silently, smiling as they chattered around her, she led them through a long hall, past a study with a huge brown desk and a brass lamp, past a room full of leather-bound books and brown-and-red Kashmiri rugs, and finally into the dining room, where on a stone-topped dining table gleamed twelve place settings in silver. Here, finally, Sheila spoke her first words of the afternoon, “My son,” because a young boy was standing near the table peering at the fantastic ikebana flower arrangement at its centre. Sheila ruffled his hair, and he turned his head to look at her, and the ladies murmured. He was certainly very good-looking. Bijlani’s stolid bulk had passed into a sort of slow, unblinking expressiveness in his eyes, a kind of silence
, and he had Sheila’s sharp features. “Say hello,” Sheila said, and he did, shaking hands with each one of them. Mani Mennon laughed over her shoulder as he gravely bowed over her hand, and she said, “Better watch out for this one.” Meanwhile Sheila leaned into the corridor and called, “Ganga! Take Sanjeev to his room, will you?”

  Ganga came in, a short wiry woman with her hands still wet from dishes. She had her red sari pulled between her legs and she pushed back a strand of loose hair with one hand. As Sheila walked Sanjeev to the door, Ganga took his other hand, and they smiled at each other over his head. “Isn’t he so cute?” Mani Mennon said, and as she did, Sheila turned and saw the look on Dolly’s face, a kind of absurd pursing of the nostrils, an unmistakable look of offense, as if she had just begun to smell something bad. As everyone went towards the table, Mani Mennon hung back and whispered at Sheila, “She has French maids.” It was true. They weren’t actually French, usually Keralans, but all the same the petits fours at the Boatwalla mansion were served by maids in black dresses and those frilly things around their heads. Mani Mennon rolled her eyes. She was Sheila’s main supporter in the Lunch Club, her sponsor, and she hated Dolly Boatwalla but was absolutely silenced by her, robbed of speech and presence of mind by Dolly’s height and ruthlessness and way of commanding a room. Mani Mennon was short and funny and plump and couldn’t think of any reasons why she should be silenced by Dolly, but always was anyway “Boatwalla bitch,” Mani Mennon hissed. Sheila shrugged and took her calmly by the elbow and led her to the others.

  “Have some quail,” she said. The food was unusual, small and spicy, made by a Lucknow cook from a Nawabi family. The tastes were light and chased each other across their palates with such foreign essences that they had to exclaim that it was all perfect, because they had never tasted anything like it before. Dolly held a silver fork at an angle and sawed at a tiny wing, and even she was puzzled and pleased, you could see that. Afterwards they sat on the sofas, luxuriously sunk in the pillows and lingering over the sweet dish, a concoction of almonds and cream so light you barely felt it on the tongue. Dolly began to be funny. She sat on a couch by herself, one leg bent over the other, in her cream pants suit, all long lines from the silk sheen of her leg to the nose, which was a little bony but very elegant. She told cruel little stories about people they all knew. All the stories were about people doing silly things or embarrassing themselves or just being stupid and not knowing about something that everybody knew. Dolly had a great sense of timing and was a good mimic and it was impossible not to laugh at her stories. The women sat in a little semicircle around her and laughed. Sheila laughed, and Mani Mennon laughed. Mani Mennon whispered to Sheila, “She must tell stories about me, too,” and then she laughed at a story about a Punjabi woman at the club who pronounced “pizza” the way it was written and who dressed her daughters in too much gold.

  Finally everyone grew quiet in an afternoon haze of contentment. There was no doubt it had been an enormously successful lunch, and Dolly had been allowed to dominate it completely. Now it was almost over, and there was a quietness in the air as everyone relaxed with the thought that it would actually finish without any horrendous tension, and as they walked towards the front door everyone was exhausted from the relief and strange disappointment of it all. Then Mani Mennon startled everyone by squeaking, “Hussain!” They were passing by the room with the bookshelves, and what Mani Mennon had noticed on the wall opposite the hallway was a large canvas, the chariot of the sun, gold and red. She went fluttering into the room with her arms held out, and stood swaying in front of the painting. It was quite overwhelming, with its rich swirl of colour and the horses as if they would burst from the canvas, and everyone clustered in front of it. Dolly hung back in the hallway, but then everyone crowded forward and she was alone, so she came forward reluctantly and stood behind them all. “It’s your second one, isn’t it, Sheila?” said Mani Mennon. “It’s wonderful. Look at those yellows.” And then, seeing Dolly behind the others, she said, smiling, “It’s a Hussain, Dolly.”

  Dolly tilted her head back. “Is it?” she said. Her head tilted further. “Oh. Is that what it is?” She smiled. “Freddie has a few of those at his office.”

  Sheila was standing next to her. Without a word, Sheila turned and walked back into the hallway. They followed her, and she walked to the door, opened it, and held it open. They walked past, saying thank yous, and she smiled, but her eyes were opaque and she never took her hand off the doorknob. Dolly walked past and murmured, “Thank you so much, darling.” Sheila shut the door and the click was very firm and crisp and everyone knew then that something had started.

  *

  Sheila sat in her office among the books and tried to think about what she had felt in that moment. It hadn’t been anger, more a kind of recognition. In that instant she had felt suddenly outside of her body, standing somewhere else and looking at both of them. What she had seen was that she was herself perfect—she was petite, she had an acute sense of colour and line and so her clothes fell on her exactly and well, her features were small and sharp, her hair was thick, and her vivacity came from her intelligence. Dolly was not perfect, she was long everywhere, she was sallow, she wore old jewelry sometimes missing a link here and there, today she wore a tatty green scarf over her shirt, and that was just it. Sheila was perfect, and she knew that however hard she tried she could never achieve the level of careless imperfection that Dolly flaunted. It had nothing to do with perseverance or intelligence and it took generations. It couldn’t be learnt, only grown with the bone. It was absolutely confident and sure of itself and easy. Dolly had it and she didn’t: looking at it honestly, Sheila knew this. She knew it and she was absolutely determined that if it took her the rest of her life she would defeat Dolly. That it had come to open conflict she knew, and she would not stand losing.

  “Memsahib.” Ganga was standing in the doorway, leaning against the side, a hand cocked on her hip. She was wearing a dark red sari with a gold-stamped border. Ganga was dark and very thin, she flung herself at her work with such velocity that it was necessary to put the glassware by the side of the washbasin—otherwise, as she sped through the plates, crystal would inevitably crunch somewhere in the pile. Ganga had been recommended by Sheila’s next-door neighbour. She worked, as nearly as Sheila could tell, in another dozen houses up and down the hill, and she sped from one to another without a pause the entire day, after which she stood in a local train for an hour and fifteen minutes to get out to Andheri, where she lived. It had taken Sheila six months to get her to eat lunch, which she did squatting in a corner of the kitchen and holding a plate directly in front of her face for greater efficiency.

  “It was a good lunch?” Ganga said.

  “Yes,” Sheila said. For the first year they had known each other, Ganga had been courteous but dry, her face always expressionless and impossible to read. Then one day, on her way out, seeing Sheila sitting at her desk in the study as usual, she paused in the hallway, her whole body still pointed at the front door, to ask, What do you do in here? Accounts, Sheila had said, for our business, pointing at the ledgers piled up and the sheets of paper that folded out to cover half the room. Ganga had nodded silently and gone on her way, back up to her normal speed with the first step, but since then, she would stop in the doorway, one foot in front of the other, leaning sideways, one elbow angled out, and they would talk for a few minutes.

  “Well,” Sheila said. “It went well.”

  Then they talked about their children. Ganga had a daughter named Asha. Then Ganga tightened her dupatta about her waist and it was time for her to leave. “Going,” she said, clipping the word now, and she went.

  *

  When Ganga got home it was seven-thirty. She put down a small packet of jira and set about making dinner. There was a single light bulb in the single room, and Asha was sitting under it studying, or at least flipping the pages of a book. Asha was dressed in a flowered shirt and a skirt that reached to her ankles. He
r hair was pulled back and neatly oiled, and around her plait she wore a single string of white mogra flowers. She was sitting cross-legged with her spelling book in her lap, her chin in her hands, and now she darted a quick look from huge brown eyes at her mother.

  “All right, all right,” Ganga said. “Come eat.”

  They sat near the doorway and ate from steel plates, which were old but shiny. Outside, people were still passing, and occasionally somebody would say something to Ganga. The lane was narrow, and whoever walked by had to brush close to the door. Across the lane, there was a narrow gutter which flooded in the rains, and behind that more shacks made of wood, cloth, cardboard, and tin. Later, when it was dark, Ganga would sit in the doorway and talk to her neighbours. Most of them were from the same village in the Ghats near Poona, but to the left, where the lane curved, it became a mostly Malayalee locality. Today they mostly talked about a man in their own community who drank so much that he finally lost his watchman job. “He’s a fool,” Ganga said. “You always knew that.” It was true. They had all known him and they had always known that.

  Ganga had arrived in Bombay eleven years before with her husband, who had come back to his village to marry, and since then she had lived in the same place. Ramesh, the husband, had been a millworker in the days before the labour disputes and the big lockouts. He was a Marxist, and he was killed, stabbed, in a quarrel with another union the year after Asha was born. Ganga remembered him mostly as a melancholy sort of man who seemed to cultivate his own sadness. It was only in the month after his funeral that she found out that he was said to have killed two men himself in the same union fight. But anyway, now the mills were closed and the years had passed. Now it seemed that Ganga was going to move, and this was the news she had to give to her neighbours. Two stops up on the Western line she had found an empty plot, and she planned to build her kholi there.