Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “You know, old boy, you ought to resubmit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your application, I mean,” Freddie said. “At the Gym. I’m sure that whole business was a mistake. Error. Lapse. Awful. Happens. Resubmit. We’ll take care of it.” And with that he was gone.

  When Bijlani told Sheila about this conversation, she sat very still for a moment, so immobile that she might have been frozen. Then only her eyes moved, and she looked up at Bijlani. “How interesting,” she said at last. “Let’s go down to dinner.”

  That Freddie and T.T. had talked was known by everyone half an hour after it happened, and there was much speculation about what had actually been said. It was clear that some sort of deal had been made, that negotiations had happened, and now Dolly-watching took on a strange, fresh piquancy. When she received her white envelope, what would she do? Would she say something casually about the Shanghai Club at a lunch? Would she now hear the words that had rendered her deaf and blind? Everyone wanted to be there at the event itself, whatever and whenever it was, because it was completely unprecedented and sure to be delicious in many ways. But nothing happened. Dolly remained casually unaware and went about her business, and the days passed. It was now awfully close to the Shanghai opening and everybody was wound tight, what with fittings and appointments and plans. In those last few days you only had to say to someone, “Has anything happened?” and they’d know what you were talking about.

  But of course nothing did happen. Sheila told no one anything either, she was infuriatingly and politely private and unrelenting. Only Mani Mennon knew, because she had been there on the afternoon of the twenty-third, in Sheila’s study, looking through a list as Sheila worked with a calculator and her endless files. “Memsahib.” Ganga came in, picked up her half-pay from the desk, and paused long enough to watch Sheila make a notation in a long list of her installments. As Ganga left, Sheila smiled at her. The phone rang, and Sheila picked it up and said, as she had many times that afternoon, “Sheila Bijlani.” Then there was a moment of silence, and Sheila stared at the receiver as the silence went on, from awkwardness into significance, and she looked at Mani Mennon and both of them knew instantly who it was.

  “Hello,” the phone finally said, a little staticky and hissy. “This is Dolly Boatwalla.”

  “How are you, Dolly?”

  “Very well, thank you. How are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  There was another little moment there, and then Dolly cleared her throat. “I’ve been very busy, what with the children being at home. Trying to keep them amused is so trying. Freddie told me he saw T.T. at the pool.”

  “Did he? Yes, he did.”

  “Keeping fit, that’s good. I have to practically send Freddie out with his clubs. Listen”—now a little laugh—“have you heard anything about this Shanghai affair?”

  Sheila took a deep breath. One by one, she relaxed her fingers on the receiver and settled back into her big leather chair. She wriggled her shoulders a little. Then, completely calm, she slowly said the word she had been saving for so long: “No.”

  “Ah.”

  Mani Mennon began to laugh into a pillow, holding it to her chest and shaking violently.

  “Well, it was nice talking to you,” Dolly said. “I hear the children coming in. I should go.”

  “It was nice,” Sheila said. “Namaste.”

  *

  Mr. Fong stood at the door of the Shanghai Club in a dinner jacket and a bow tie, his hair solid black and with a sheen, looking dashing and mysterious and exactly right. Inside, if you looked closely, you could see that the club was really a little too small, that the tables were the same kind that Bhendi Bazaar furniture-makers copied from Danish catalogues, that the drinks were a little diminutive for so much money, that everything was quite ordinary. But it was all transformed that night by an extraordinary electricity, a current of excitement that made everyone beautiful, a kind of light that came not from the dim lamps but from the air itself. Ramani Ranjan Das wore all white, white mogra in her hair and a white garara suit and a silver nose ring, and she came with a film director twenty years younger. The Deputy Commissioner of Police wore slacks and turned out to be quite charmingly shy. Sheila wore a green sari and came a little late. She and T.T. sat in the middle of the crowded, smoky room and the air was filled with a pleasant chatter against the faint strains of music, and though it was photographed and written about, nothing ever really caught that feeling. It felt new, as if something was starting, and it was somehow oddly sexy, at least six new affairs and two engagements started that night, but that wasn’t all of it. It was the certainty of it, the feeling that for a few hours there was nowhere else in the world to be and nothing else to do, it was that cusping of time and place and history and power and effort that lifted the Shanghai Club that night into romance and made it unutterably golden.

  *

  We thought then that Sheila was invincible, but we had forgotten that even the strongest will in the world is easily defeated by its own progeny. Inevitably, Sheila’s son came back to Bombay a poet. Sanjeev had been gone a long time, first to school at Doon and then to the States—he went not to his father’s college but to Yale, where he took many classes in photography and art history, and broke many hearts with a dark curl of hair on his forehead that gave him a look of sad nostalgia. He had learned to ski, and had an easy physical grace that was quite different from his mother’s nervous energy, her focus, and his father’s thumping walk. He was indolent and he had a little smile just a little tinged with arrogance, but we all forgave him that because he wrote such lovely poetry. Mani Mennon was the first one outside the family to meet him that summer, and she watched him for a long time, and then she said to nobody in particular, in a tone of wonder, “You know he looks always like he’s just gotten off a horse.” When she said that, she had said everything. Bijlani said to Sheila, “I don’t know what to say to him, and he’s not quite what I expected, but he’s very wonderful.” Sheila nodded, overwhelmed by her love. She treated her son like a jewel, standing between him and the world, willing not only to give him anything but to take whatever he wanted to give, a poem if that was it. She already understood that getting what you wanted from the world meant that your own struggles became grubby and irrelevant to your children, which was as it should be, that was after all why you gave them what you didn’t have. But like all parents she never really believed he would fall in love.

  This is how it happened. A week after coming home, Sanjeev wandered away from the house, feeling rested in the body but exhausted by loneliness. He said later that he was discovering the strange terror of coming back to a familiar city and not knowing anyone, and he thought that seeing the playing fields of his childhood, the streets and the corners, would fill the gap in his heart. So he wandered off the hill and down to Pastry Palace, and as he crossed the flyover bridge he was trying to recall the excitement that once had really made the place a palace, that teenage feeling of seeing a cluster of friends and knowing that everything was possible. But now it just looked ordinary. It was disappointment that made him trudge on into the Palace, a bitter determination to see it all through.

  So there are opinions and opinions about what happened next. Some say it was just this—that he needed a way to reconnect, you see, to hold on to something. Others contend contemptuously that it was just the narrative force of history that pushed them into their headlong affair, that it was the ferocity of the feud that made them long for each other. “What a bloody cliche,” we heard on the balcony of the Gym. “What atrocious Hindi-movie taste to allow themselves.” The best of us believe that it was merely love. But, of course, nobody really knows what happened, except the essential facts, and they tell us precisely nothing: that afternoon, seated at Pastry Palace with her friends, was Dolly’s daughter Roxanne, eighteen years old, finishing at Cathedral that year. She was a fair girl, with that milky Boatwalla complexion, dark straight hair, dark eyes, a little plump,
sweet and quiet and a little shy, very charming but nothing spectacular, you understand. She and Sanjeev had known each other by sight before, but the last time he had seen her was when she had just turned thirteen. They talked, we know this for certain, but nobody knows what happened next—did they meet again at Pastry, how did they call each other, was it at a friend’s house, what exactly went on? Certainly Sheila didn’t know. What she did know was that three months later, at the end of the summer, Sanjeev told her that he wanted to marry.

  When she heard who it was, Sheila didn’t flinch. She asked calmly, “Did Roxanne tell her mother yet?”

  “Yes,” Sanjeev said. “We thought she should.”

  Looking at his face, Sheila suddenly felt old. He was confident of the future. He knew there was a problem, but of course he had the essential belief that the wars of the past were fought because of benighted ignorance, that good sense would after all prevail. She wanted to tell him that the past was responsible for him, for his beauty, but of course there was nothing to say, no possible way to explain. After a few minutes of her silence, he asked, “Are you angry?”

  “No,” she said. It was true; she was baffled. She had no idea what to do next. But as the afternoon passed, as she and Sanjeev sat together in her office, she couldn’t endure doing nothing. She picked up her phone and began to make calls. After the first few it became clear that Dolly did know what to do: she had left the city with Roxanne. They had left by the four-o’clock flight for London. They had been seen being driven to the airport, and the report was that Roxanne had looked tearfully out of the window all the way, but this, Sheila was sure, was dramatic value added on as the story passed from phone to phone. In any case, they were gone.

  Now Sanjeev looked stunned and wanted to go to London. “Don’t be silly,” Sheila said. “How do you know you’ll find them there? And what’ll you do when you find them, tear her away?” Dolly had two other daughters, one married in London, one in Chicago—Roxanne could be anywhere in the world.

  So they waited. Sheila was sure that Dolly wouldn’t leave Freddie alone for too long, not at this time, she would return soon. Sheila had no idea what she would do when Dolly did return, she thought about it often but could come up with no satisfactory plan. In the meantime she looked after Sanjeev, who was causing havoc as he suffered. He grew thinner, and, with the dark circles under his eyes, his forelock of hair was completely irresistible, women old and young pined after him, they left him notes and waited for him in the pubs he was known to frequent, and they pursued convoluted paths to introductions to him, but it was all useless, he forgot them a minute after meeting them. He saw nothing and heard nothing except the memory of his Roxanne. Sheila understood that every minute he spent apart from Roxanne bound him more irrevocably to her, and she also understood that if she as a mother told him to forget her, Roxanne would become as unforgettable to him as his own childhood. Sheila had to keep quiet. It was a trap finely honed for her by the years of victory. Even now she had to appreciate the justice of its bitterness.

  After sixty days, Dolly returned. Bijlani had friends at customs, so they knew even before she was through the green channel that she was back, that she had come alone on a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt. Sheila let forty-eight hours pass, and then on a Saturday afternoon she asked for the car. She sat by herself in the back as it went through a couple of turns, up a long slope to the left, and arrived at the Boatwalla mansion. She could have walked in about ten minutes, but in all the years they had lived so close to each other, she had never actually seen the mansion. The lane that ran up to the gate was shadowed with branches that came over high walls, so that when you actually got to the gate you were surprised by the expanse of lawn beyond. The gate itself was wrought iron, with some kind of coat of arms at the centre, but Sheila noticed with a quick forward leaning of surprise that the marble on the left gatepost was unmistakably cracked. The car went by the gateman, who saluted the Mercedes and let it through without question, and as it swept around the circular drive she saw the whole place clearly for the first time—the white columns, the ornate windows, the facade with its grand curls and flourishes, all of it stained and patchy. The front door was opened, incredibly, by a maid in a black uniform, and suddenly Sheila had to hold back a laugh, but then she noticed that the woman had a head of white, very fine white hair, and that she was peering at her with a concentration that was absolute and unwavering.

  “Please tell Mrs. Boatwalla that Mrs. Bijlani is here,” Sheila said, stepping past her. The woman’s stare held for a moment, her hand stiff on the doorknob, and then she turned and shuffled away. “Mrs. Bijlani,” Sheila called after her curved shoulders, but the maid did not turn her head. The only light came through the open front door, catching a myriad of motes that barely moved. In the dim dark, Sheila could see two ottomans against the wall, under a picture of workmen toiling on a dock. The carpet was worn and, near the door, stained with patches of deep brown. There was a very slight smell of damp. There was no light switch that Sheila could see, and so she waited near the door. Finally a sibilant scraping came close and the maid appeared out of the darkness.

  “Madame is not in.”

  “It’s very important,” Sheila said. “Tell her that it’s very important.”

  “Madame is not in.”

  The woman was saying it without impatience, standing with her hands loosely holding each other in front of her white apron. Sheila had no doubt she would say it again. Sheila nodded and turned away. She heard the door click gently before she was halfway down the steps. As the car pulled away she looked back at the house, but there was no sign of life in any of the windows. Before the car went through the gate her strategy was clear in her head, fully formed. The thought came to her that way, precise and whole. She was going to buy the mansion. She would buy them out complete: lock, stock, ship, and house. Finally it came down to this vulgarity—that they had the pride and she had the money. She sat alertly in the back of the car that she had earned, paralysed no more, her mind moving quickly. It was, after all, she thought, only inevitable. It was time and history.

  *

  Sheila and T.T. sat together late that night, figuring the exact liquidity of their cash. That had always struck her as a strange phrase, because money was, if anything, hard, impersonal. But now she saw how it could be like a stream, unpredictable and underground, and she was going to turn it into a torrent that would flow up the hill instead of down, crumbling the bloody Boatwalla gate like paper. It was going to burst out of the hillside under the mansion like a fountain from the interior rock—surprise, surprise. It was two o’clock when they stared down at a figure at the bottom of a white pad, at the long string of zeros they had spent a lifetime accumulating.

  “Is it enough?” T.T. said, rubbing his eyes. “Is it enough?”

  “It’s enough,” Sheila said. “Let’s sleep.” They went up the stairs to the bedroom, and Sanjeev’s light was on under his door. She resisted the impulse to knock and went on, but when the lights were off she couldn’t sleep. She could see the shapes of the companies they owned, how they fit together, and she moved the segments against one another like the pieces on a chessboard, looking for the nuance that would give them the edge four moves down. She got up once to drink water and was shocked by the hour gleaming at her from the bedside table. Again she tried to sleep, but now it was only the zeros that spun before her, symmetrical and unchanging. Shunya shunya shunya, the words came to her in her father’s high voice teaching her some forgotten childhood lesson: shunya is zero and zero is shunya. She felt very tired.

  The exhaustion passed, but something else remained. As they began their bid, which Sheila insisted was not hostile but necessary, as they began their slow and audacious assault on Boatwalla Shipping International & Co. (since 1757), she found that all the pleasure was gone. The takeover was the most complicated puzzle that she had ever faced, and she was perfection itself, her memory was prodigious, her stamina unquenchable, and her charm
of course was gleaming and soft and unstoppable. But she felt the gears grinding inside her. She told herself to remember whom she was doing it for, after all; she looked at her son’s face and remembered the way he had learned to walk by clinging precariously to her sari and his jerky little steps, but still every morning she lay awake in bed gathering the vitality, a little from here a little from there, for the great effort to get up and war with the day. But the only true thing was that her taste for the game in itself was gone. Suddenly it felt like work, but even when it was over for the day she could only sit silently, staring sometimes at the television, feeling lost. She tried to hide it, and Sanjeev, who had begun to write page after page of poetry, never noticed, but T.T. was uneasy. He said nothing but he looked wary, as if he had smelled something dangerous in the shifting air but wasn’t quite sure what it was, where it came from, what it meant.

  It was now, in this, Sheila’s time of ashes, that Ganga came to her one Sunday. She was wearing a new, bright blue sari, and with her was Asha, also in a sari, a green one. It was a formal call: they stood in Sheila’s study, the mother a little in front.

  “How pretty you look, Asha,” Sheila said.

  As the girl blushed, Ganga spoke. “She finished her nurse training last week.”

  “Very good, Asha!” Sheila said, touching her on the shoulder.

  “She’s getting married next month,” Ganga said. “We came to give you the card. He’s a schoolteacher.”

  Sheila took the envelope, which was huge, a foot square. Inside, the card was red, with a gold vine that went around the borders. It invited the reader to a ceremony and reception at the Vivekananda School Hall, Andheri.

  “Will you come?” Ganga said.

  Sheila was looking at Asha. For some reason, she was thinking suddenly about her first flight on an Air France plane, the leap of her stomach when the machine had escaped the ground.