Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “Yes,” Sheila said. “Of course.”

  “Bring Sanjeev Baba, too.”

  “Yes, I will.” Sanjeev hadn’t left the house for days, even weeks now, and Sheila was sure she couldn’t get him to come out of the edifice of his grief, she had already stopped asking him, but she said, “We’ll all come.”

  Ganga nodded. “Come,” she said to Asha, who smiled over her shoulder at Sheila. She ran down the hall to keep up with her mother, the silver payals at her ankles tinkling with every step. Sheila sat down slowly at her desk. The girl’s eagerness hurt her, the small musical sound pressed against her abdomen and gave her a feeling of discovering a new emptiness. She remembered—remembered driving in a bus with the other hostesses in the early morning, to the airport, the red lights far away in the cool blue dawn, a plane thundering overhead with its running lights twinkling, and the glad feeling that it was all an invitation, a promise. They used to sing together, sometimes, Hindi film songs, from Marine Drive to Bandra, and sometimes in Paris on the road to Orly, with the French drivers smiling at them.

  Now Sheila waited, with her hand on the phone, collecting herself before the next call. There were a lot of calls to make. The takeover was not going as planned. The Boatwallas had conducted the sort of political manoeuvring that had been expected, and that was easily countered—in fact it was welcome, because it revealed their connections and their understanding of their own predicament. It had become clear as the weeks passed that Boatwalla International was even more overextended than T.T. and she had thought. The interest on their debt alone was barely within the Boatwallas’ means. But when it seemed that they must surrender or be reduced, there had come a sudden influx of cash. Like a transfusion, it had revitalized them, fleshed them out and made them capable of resistance: Freddie appeared on “Business Plus,” pink and ruddy under the studio lights, and declared that it was all over, they were safe. Sheila knew they had borrowed money, lots of it at unheard-of rates of interest, but when she tried to find out who had lent it there was no answer. Her intelligence sources all over Bombay and beyond dried up like the city reservoirs in May, there was no information to be had. She and T.T. called in their favours and doled out some more, but still, nothing. If they could get a name, everything would be possible: politics could be made to interfere with the vital flow of money, fine legal quibbles could bring down the whole ponderous sickly-white elephant. Once in a similar situation they had even purchased outright and cleanly the entire lending corporation. But without a name, without that vital secret, they could do nothing, everything was meaningless.

  So now she picked up the phone and looked at it, at the numbers on the keypad. There was a time when she had handled it like a fine instrument, her fingers used to fly over the keys without her looking, it had been her delight, her sitar and her stiletto. Now she just stared at it. I can’t remember people’s numbers anymore, she noted with a kind of dull surprise. Then she opened her book and began dialing.

  *

  When they drove out to the Vivekananda School Hall a month later, the problem was still with them. Boatwalla International stayed perversely healthy, like a patient sprung from the deathbed and made up with rouge. And for Sheila and T.T. the outcome was not quite a draw. In the eyes of the market, the stalemate was their defeat. It was not only for this that Bijlani was silent and distraught; his uneasiness was the trouble of a man whose life has lost its accustomed centre. Sheila knew that her own doldrums becalmed him even more than her, but her best attempts at revitalization seemed false to her. She could feel the muscles of her mouth when she smiled. There seemed to be no way out, so she endured from day to day, and he with her. Now they sat, apart, in the back seat behind the driver, Gurinder Singh, who besides having been with them for a long time was also a friend of Ganga’s.

  When the car drew up outside the Vivekananda School, Ganga was waiting outside for them. She welcomed them in the midst of a jostling crowd. As they walked in, a pack of children in their shiny best raced around them, staring unabashedly. The hall had been done up with ribbons, and there was a mandap at the middle, with chairs arranged in untidy rows around it. “Sanjeev was busy,” Sheila was saying as they walked up to two ornate chairs, thrones of a sort, really, all gilt and huge armrests, that had been placed in front of the mandap. They sat down and Ganga took her place by her daughter, who was sitting cross-legged next to the man who was becoming her husband. The priests were chanting one by one and in chorus, and throwing handfuls of rice into the fire. Asha smiled up at them with her head down, looking somehow very pretty and plump and satisfied. Sheila nodded at her, thinking of Sanjeev. He was not at all busy, in fact he had been sitting on their roof with his feet up on a table, but he had said he was tired.

  It was the first time that Sheila had ever seen Ganga sitting absolutely still. She seemed at rest, her knees drawn up and her hands held in front of her. The priests droned on. Meanwhile, nobody paid attention to the ceremony at all. Children ran about in all directions. Their parents sat in the chairs around the mandap and talked, nodding and laughing. Occasionally somebody would come and stand in front of the thrones and stare frankly at Sheila and T.T., whispering to friends. Sheila had her chin in one hand and she was lost in the fire and the chant. Then suddenly the ceremony was over and the couple were sitting on a dais at the end of the hall, on thrones of exactly the same magnificence as those provided for the Bijlanis. Sheila and T.T. were first to go through the reception line, and Sheila hugged Asha, and T.T. shook hands with her husband, whose name was Rakesh. Then Sheila and T.T. sat on their thrones, which had been moved to face the dais, and food was served. Everyone was eating around them. Sheila ate the puri bhaji and the biryani and the sticky jalebis, and watched as Ganga moved among her seated guests, serving them herself from trays carried by her relatives behind her. She gave Sheila and T.T. huge second helpings, and they ate it all.

  After the food, Ganga gave gifts to the women at the wedding. She walked around again and gave saris to her nieces and aunts and other relatives. She came up to Sheila, who said without thinking, “Ganga, you don’t have to give me anything.”

  Ganga looked at her, her face expressionless. “It is our custom,” she said. Sheila blushed and reached up quickly and took the sari. She held it on her lap with both hands, her throat tight. She felt perilously close to tears. But there were two girls, sisters, seven and eight, leaning on her knees, looking up at her. She talked to them and it passed, and finally she was sitting on one side of the room, away from the lights, not on a throne but on a folding chair, tired and pleasantly sleepy. T.T. was on the other side of the room, talking about the stock-market scandals with a circle of men. Ganga’s father sat beside him, quiet but listening intently. Sheila thought drowsily that T.T. looked animated for the first time in months.

  Then Ganga walked up. She paused for a moment and then sat beside Sheila, on a brown chair. They looked at each other frankly. They had known each other for a long time and they liked each other well enough, but between them there was no question of love or hate.

  “How did you manage this, Ganga?”

  “I sold my kholi.”

  “You sold it?”

  “For thirty thousand rupees.”

  Sheila looked around the hall. A song was ringing out, and a group of children were dancing, holding their arms up like Amitabh Bachchan in Muqaddar ka Sikandar.

  “Thank you,” Sheila said in English, gesturing awkwardly at the sari that she held in her lap.

  For a moment there was no reaction, and then Ganga smiled with a flash of very white teeth. “We got them at wholesale,” she said. “I know someone.” She pointed with her chin at a man Sheila had noticed earlier bustling about, herding people from here to there. “Him.”

  “That’s good,” Sheila said.

  “You speak English well,” Ganga said.

  “I learned it as a child.”

  Ganga settled herself in her chair with the motion of someone who is very
tired. “I have heard that Boatwalla speak English.”

  “You work for her, too?”

  “For longer than for you.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “I didn’t tell you. I wash dishes and clean the kitchen. Their other people don’t do that. I never see her.”

  “I see.”

  “Except now and then, once or twice every year, when she comes into the kitchen for something.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she never sees me.”

  “You mean you’re hiding?”

  “No, I’m right there in front of her.’

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I mean that she doesn’t see me. If she’s talking to someone she keeps on talking. To such high people the rest of the world is invisible. People like me she cannot see. It’s not that she is being rude. It’s just that she cannot see me. So she keeps on talking about things that she would never talk about in front of you or somebody else. Once she saw me, but it was because she wanted to get water from the fridge and I was mopping the floor and she had to step over my hand.”

  Ganga’s voice was steady, even. Sheila shifted the packet on her lap a little.

  “Even then she kept on talking. Once, I heard her say bad things about her elder daughter, the London one.”

  “Ganga, do you …” Sheila stopped.

  “Understand English? A little, I think. I’ve worked for you for twenty years, haven’t I?”

  “You have indeed.”

  “Last week, she came in to shout at the cook about the bowls he used for the sweet after lunch. Her husband lagging behind her. These people, she said. She sent the cook to get all the bowls in the house. She said something about meetings, and her husband wrote down something on a piece of paper. How she talks in English, chutter-chutter-chutter, like she’s everybody’s grandmother in the world, she asked something about the American business, then she said something about a Hong Kong bank, all the time going here and there in the kitchen.”

  “Bank?” said Sheila.

  Ganga straightened up at the sound of Sheila’s voice.

  “Yes. Bank.”

  “In Hong Kong?” Ganga said nothing in the face of Sheila’s sudden needlesharp focus. “Ganga. Did she say the name of the bank?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  Ganga threw back her head and laughed, and two children running by stopped to gawk at her. “It was Fugai Bank. Foo Ga. Foo Quay.”

  *

  In the car, Sheila reached out and took T.T.’s hand. She said nothing and looked out of the window as they went down the length of the city. Gurinder was playing cassettes of old songs, he was humming along with the music, his mood lightened by the food and the amiable chaos of the wedding. Bombay’s night hadn’t yet quieted down, and everywhere there were people, and at some intersections the cars and scooters honked at each other madly. As the car came around a curve, Sheila saw a family sitting by the side of the road, father and mother and two children around a small fire. There was a pot on the fire, and the flames lit up their faces as they looked up at the car going by.

  At home, Sheila walked ahead as T.T. gave Gurinder a couple of fifty-rupee notes. She could hear their voices murmuring behind her, a cricket chirping, and the rustle of the wind in leaves. She had said nothing to T.T., and the name of the bank balanced precariously in her stomach, not unpleasant but not quite welcome, there was something moving in her, something not fully born yet and still unknown. The anticipation kept her awake, and finally, much later, she left her bed and went up to the roof. Now everything was dark, it was a moonless night, and the scrape of her chappals against the cement was loud. She found a garden chair and sat in it, her hands held together in her lap. Sometimes a freshness billowed up against her face, barely a breeze but cool and moist. It came again, and she was remembering her father. She remembered him as a small, balding man with a potbelly, dressed always in chappals and black pants and a bush shirt in white or brown. He kept the shop open till late in the evening and opened it early, so that Sheila saw him usually at night, when he ate his dinner alone. When she was growing up she had always thought he was a simple man. But once a year he liked to take his family away from the city, to a resort or a hill station, for a week, two weeks. She remembered waking once while it was still dark. She was ten or eleven, they were in some place on the banks of a river, a small hotel, she couldn’t remember the name of the river. But she remembered the cold lifting off the water when she went outside and saw her father sitting in the sand on the river’s edge below. In the dark, she could see the white of his kurta and his head shining above. She walked through a garden with flowers and down the steps that led to the river, and sat beside him, her leg resting on his knee. He smiled at her, then looked away, across the river where the water melted into mist. She shivered a little. There was white speckled into his stubble, which she knew he would shave later with a Wilkinson razor. His name was Kishen Chand, and he was a small man. Later, after he was dead and she was older, she would remember his gaze over the water and think that nothing and nobody was simple. Later, she would remember the old story of schisms and horrors, how he had left half his family murdered in Lahore, two brothers, a sister, a father. They had a shop, which was burned. Partition threw him onto the streets of Bombay, but he still spoke of his Lahore, his beautiful Lahore. It was something of a family joke. She huddled beside him as the river emerged from the grey light. She remembered her geography lesson and whispered to her father, Is this a sacred river? It must be, he said. It is, he said. What is that smell? she said. He said, Wood smoke. She asked, Smoke? He said, Fire. What fire? she said. He said, Cooking fires, hearth fires, hay fires. Funeral fires. Ceremonial fires. Even the firing of refuse, of things that are thrown away. Home fires and factory fires. It’s starting to be day and there are fires everywhere. And she saw the white smoke drifting slowly across the surface of the water.

  *

  Sheila heard a footstep and lifted a hand to her face. It was wet with tears. She wiped it with her sleeve and when she looked up she saw that the sea, far below, was gold. She stood up and felt the light hot on her face. Sanjeev came up beside her and subsided lankily into the chair. She smiled down at him. He had a book in his hand and looked very handsome in a kind of tragic way.

  “You were out late last night,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You went on to one of your parties?” His mouth was pouty with disdain.

  Sheila laughed. As she looked down she could see on his T-shirt a blond, scruffy-looking man and the single word “Nirvana.” She said, “Sanju, you’re my son, but it would take a lifetime, two lifetimes, to tell you all the things you don’t know about the world.” As she walked away, she ruffled his hair.

  In her bedroom, she laughed to see the mountainous bulk of her husband under the bedclothes. She pulled at his toe. “Come on. We have work to do.” He followed her down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, to the office. He sat in front of her as she leaned back in her chair and picked up the phone.

  “What are we doing?” he said.

  She put her feet in his lap. He rubbed them, smiling, because in her flowered nightgown and with her hair pulled back she looked like a child, and she looked at him sideways from lowered eyes, naughty and a little dangerous. Her fingers moved so quickly over the keys of the telephone that the beepings came out as a kind of music. She grinned. “Ah,” she said. “I thought we might make a few calls to Hong Kong.”

  *

  What we remembered from the wedding was not the scale of it and not the celebration, not even how beautiful the couple was or the speculations about their honeymoon in France. It wasn’t even the sight of Sheila and Dolly walking hand in hand into the reception. It wasn’t the sight of Tiger Pataudi and a very boozy Freddie re-creating their second innings so that T.T. and Mani Mennon could judge wheth
er there had indeed been a flannelled Pataudi leg before the wicket. It wasn’t at all the news that Ganga had bought a large shed in Dharavi, where she was going to put in a cloth-reclamation factory. After it was all over, what stayed in the mind was a strange moment, before the double ceremony (one for each religion), when the two families had moved into the centre of the huge shamiana. On one side we could see Sheila’s aunts, large women in pink and red saris with bands of diamonds around their wrists and necks, and, on the other, Dolly’s relatives, in particular one frail, tall old lady in a white sari and a pair of pince-nez glasses, with pearls at her neck, and all these people looking at each other. Then all the talking died away, there was a curious moment of silence, it was absolute and total, even the birds stopped chirping in the trees. Then two of the children ran through the shamiana, it was Roxanne’s second cousin who was chasing Sheila’s niece, both squealing, and the moment was broken and everyone was talking. Yet there had been that strange silence, maybe it was just that nobody knew what to do with each other. But I think of that moment of silence whenever I realize how much changed because of that marriage. What I mean is the formation of the Bijlani-Boatwalla Bombay International Trading Group, then the Agarwal loan scandal, the successes of the B.B.B.I., the fall of the Yashwant Rao Ghatge government, and the meteoric rise of Gagganbhai Patel, and what happened after that we all know. But that’s another story. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another evening.

  Kama

  THAT SUMMER I was heartbroken. I was weary of myself, of the endless details like prickly heat, and the smell of hopelessness in my armpits. It was after all very boring, nothing but something that someone else and I had thought would go on forever, and it had come apart savagely and with finality. It seemed so ordinary, so average in its particulars that I found it sordid to think about, and yet I could do nothing but think about it. I knew I was supposed to drink it away, but liquor just made me even more tired and sleep eluded me anyway. I went slouching sullenly about the city and waited for the monsoon to break, without faith, without belief in its powers, waiting only for something to change.