Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “All balls, Anu,” I said. “Don’t try to be so cool and careless. You look like you want to kill somebody in the paper. What’s the deal?”

  “Fuck you also, Iqbal,” he said, and settled back on his heels. “All right. Listen to this. ‘Mr. Vidyarthi’s installation is a succinct comment on the restricted imaginative life and the repressed, bubbling anger of the lumpen. He artfully uses elements of Bombay street kitsch to achieve a nearly absolute expression of spatial nullification and emotional withdrawal. A series of incisions on the rear wall leak sheets of water—a potent psycho-symbolic image of unconscious energy leaking into and through artistic expression, yet unnoticed by the installation’s absent inhabitants. His project is the crystallization of emptiness.’ Now look at this.” This was a grainy, shadowy picture of a room filled with pieces of wood, brass utensils, a sagging charpai, a torn mattress, torn movie posters, and framed pictures of gods and goddesses, and some other stuff hanging from the roof that I couldn’t quite make out. There was a wall with cracks running across it.

  “And so?” Anubhav said. “Succinct comment, you think?”

  “If it’s in The Times of India‚” I said, “it must be true.”

  “Maderchod‚” Anubhav burst out. “Why do I even try with people like you? It’s the most silly, the most facile, easy bullshit I’ve ever seen. It’s, it’s completely lacking in talent. That fucking Mahatre is so impressed by the simple fact that it’s an installation that he thinks it must be really mod and good. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” By now he was shredding The Times and tossing the pieces about as he walked back and forth, and I was trying to hide my smile as I edged carefully out of the room. Anu’s habit of thinking he was smarter and better than everybody else always made it easy to fuck with his trip. Or maybe it was that he thought that the rest of us were a little more stupid than him. Either way he was sexy when he was all angry and running about giving speeches about art and life.

  In the long corridor outside Sandhya’s mother was shuffling her slippers along. I sang, “Namaste, Ma-ji,” and she threw a glance over her shoulder and crept on, holding her sari carefully an inch above the gleaming stone. She didn’t like me very much, and I knew that not very behind my back she called me kalua and musalta and kattu, which was true enough, my skin was blacker than theirs, not by a little but much, and I was Muslim, and I was very definitely circumcised, and they were very exalted Brahmins of the green-eyed Maharashtrian variety and so very pure. I suppose I should have hated Ma-ji for thinking of me quite straightforwardly as low-caste in Muslim disguise, but then there was my father every evening going on about “kafirs” and “dirty Hindu buggers,” which last made Rajesh laugh always, because dear father knew not what he said.

  Ma-ji turned the corner slowly, into the kitchen where she liked to harass Amba bai about her cooking. She went, whispering prayers under her breath, mixed, I could swear, with occasional curses directed at Anubhav. She looked at me usually with a kind of vague distaste, but she detested him truly, and I could see why, because I had said much the same things to Sandhya—he was a shifty painter with uncertain income and slippery intentions—but Sandhya thought he was Bohemian, and so now he used one of the rooms in her house as his studio. When she first used that word, “Bohemian,” she explained it to me, but pretty much as I could work it out it meant somebody who lived with his parents and didn’t have a place to hang his brushes and didn’t want to get married, which made me a Bohemian also, but she didn’t find that very funny. She told me I was ignorant and uncultured. She—under Anubhav’s supervision—had been buying art books at Crossword also, big glossy affairs, each of which cost more than a dozen management texts put together. This is the trouble with people who get their first good sex when they’re thirty. You tell them the truth and they talk about culture.

  Now, though, she wasn’t thinking of culture. She was leaning into the bluish-white glow from a seventeen-inch monitor, motionless as a stalking crane and as acutely alive, fingers lightly on the keys. I shut the door to her office behind me, said her name once, then again, and it wasn’t the jet-like roar of the old air conditioner that kept her from hearing me.

  “Sandhya,” I said again, a little louder. I had learnt not to tap her on the shoulder—it was like waking a sleepwalker, and scarier for me than for her, that sudden strangled sound she made, and the absence in her eyes. “Sandhya.”

  She turned to me finally, slowly and reluctantly. When she hadn’t slept much, her skin became translucent somehow, so that you saw how small she really was, and how her will and velocity pushed always against the delicacy of her body, and also the cost.

  “Trains ran late this morning,” I said. It was necessary to talk of exactly nothing for the first minute or two, until she had left the shimmering world where wisps of code slid noiselessly against each other, until she inhabited firmly the person in the chair in front of me. “Also there was an accident near the Pedder Road flyover.”

  Her regard was square-on but dispassionate, cool and uninterested. “Budget will be presented tomorrow in Parliament,” I said, and finally her eyes narrowed and she saw me, saw me really, I mean.

  “Iqbal,” she said. “Kaisa hai?”

  “I’m alive,” I said. “But you’re looking a little hard-labour this morning, dear. When did you sleep?”

  “Four,” she said, passing a hand over her face. “Don’t be mean.” This meant she had perhaps slept at four and woken up at six to get Lalit ready and off to school, or had maybe not slept at all, but tossed about on the double bed for a while, twisting some function or procedure inside out as the sky lightened outside.

  “Go take a bath,” I said, and dragged her chair towards the door.

  “Iq-bal,” she said.

  “Tihar Jail is not a good look during the day, Sandhya. And think of what the worshipper-of-beauty would say.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s not a beauty-worshipper, Iqbal,” she said wearily. “He’s a serious artist.” She slumped out of the door. I spun her chair back against her desk and began to clean, starting with her keyboard, which as always was muddy with tea stains. The room was jammed with hardware—we ran a Novell server with four terminals, all the way from an old XT to a Pentium 166, and we had two printers, one ancient wide-carriage Epson dot matrix, and a LaserJet that had recently started to vibrate violently every thirty pages or so. We had a reed chick over the window to keep out the heat, but in the afternoons the air conditioner roared alarmingly, and my toes near the grey computer chassis under my desk would start to get warm. Then there were the manuals stacked above the desks to the roof, and boxes of disks and tapes, and accordion-like thicknesses of printouts, and the chairs back to back. Even if we could have afforded two more coders for our free terminals we had nowhere to put them, because we understood completely that two in that room was already one too much, and four would lead to murder. I did my best with the manuals and the printouts, stacking them evenly against the wall, and put pens in cups and threw away crumpled pieces of paper. Then I straightened out our steno pads and cleaned the phones with an old towel. Finally I wiped off our screens. When I finished with the room I had something that wasn’t quite order, and far from beauty, but a place where you could live one more day. Then I got to work.

  Sandhya came in with her hair in a towel, wearing a white kurta and jeans. She sat at her desk and the keys started clicking, and meanwhile I opened envelopes and wrote up invoices and typed out cheques. The minutes passed, and when I turned my head, I could see, over Sandhya’s shoulder, the lines of black letters moving up and down the white screen, too fast for me to read. She had a bad habit, when she was debugging, of also polishing up, snipping here and there to make everything tighter, and now she sat wrapped in the glorious mantle of her concentration, her cheekbones purified by her devotion. Elegance, elegance, she said to me always. My code was patchy and twisty and knotted together, like MTNL phone wiring, and if it worked I didn
’t really care if it was creaky, but that was the difference between us, and one reason why I loved her so.

  “All right, genius,” I said, rubbing her shoulders. “Time for a break.”

  I kept rubbing, and finally she leaned back, away from the keyboard.

  “Shit,” she said. “How long has it been?”

  “Hour and fifteen minutes.”

  “Went like a flash.”

  It always did. We had an arrangement that I would stop her every hour for a ten-minute rest period, which she had agreed to only when she had started getting cramps in her arms and shoulders so bad that it would stop her working for half a day at a time. She was still peering at the monitor, though.

  “Why’s this thing crashing, Iqbal?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and spun her chair around. She tilted her head back and drew her knees up to her chest and made a tight little smile.

  “He came yesterday evening,” she said. “After you had left.”

  I recognized the grimace and I knew who he was. He was her ex-husband, Vasant, who behaved as if he were even now not only her husband but still her all-holy Parameshwar, with the resulting godly duties of visiting suffering and pain upon her. “What the hell did he want?”

  “He was angry about Anubhav again.”

  I looked at her keenly, checking, and she turned her face away. Vasant had hit her only once after the divorce, but the Anubhav thing made him rage, and he was capable of anything. “And?”

  “He said he would go to court to show that I was an immoral woman. Of loose character. Not fit to raise Lalit.”

  “Please. He should be the last one to talk. If we went to court what-all we could show.”

  “Yes. That’s what he said anyway. He was very abusive.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Yes. Anyway. Back to work.”

  She spun her chair around and a moment passed and then slowly the keyboard began to click. I listened to it, waiting for the usual headlong swiftness. Parameshwar is a word I heard in real life for the first time from Ma-ji, when I first started to work for Sandhya. Until then I had heard it only in movies, but Ma-ji wanted Sandhya to stay with Vasant, in spite of everything, she really said it, because he was Parameshwar. You must learn to endure, Ma-ji had said to her own daughter, and although I was the new employee and everything, I had wanted to scream at her, endure how much, for what? I never did, though, all the way through the complications of the divorce, through Vasant’s threats, his attempts to snatch the flat from her, to drive her away from her own father’s property, her loneliness, her fear for her son being taken away from her. I had never asked my mother either, my mother who taught me eternal patience and sabr in the name of another saviour. Endure. How much, for what?

  *

  The next evening we all went to an arty party. The party was actually called an opening, for someone who was a friend of Anubhav’s whose name I didn’t recognize. This was on day two of our countdown, eleven days left and the bug still hiding somewhere, flitting elusively just beyond Sandhya’s grasp. Sandhya was wearing a black power suit and a new silk scarf, bright red, and her hair swept over her cheek and to her shoulder in a long elegant line. Rajesh and I clapped when she model-walked out into the drawing room and twirled for us. But she slept in the cab, despite the heat and the blaring traffic jam, her head swaying on the back of the seat. When her mouth lolled open, Rajesh reached over and gently nudged it shut. “Mad girl,” he said, grinning, and for the rest of the ride he held her by the shoulder and kept her steady. Despite all his grumbling about my hours and my late-coming, during her trouble he had offered to put out supari on Vasant. Five thousand rupees only, he had said, making a pistol barrel with his fingers, tap-tap, two in the back of the head and you won’t even hear of the maderchod’s memory again. I’d laughed at him, and had told him he was cute when he was dangerous.

  At the Pushkara Gallery we woke Sandhya, which was no easy task, because in the three kilometres and forty minutes of the ride she had fallen deep into sleep. She woke up with a start, paid the cabbie, checked herself in the rearview mirror, stepped out onto the pavement with her little black purse held in front of her, and then we followed as she marched in, past the gleaming glass door held open by a durban, her shoulders moving smartly in time with the clipping of her heels. Rajesh and I looked at each other as we trotted behind, because normally we would have been a little scared of going into a place like that, but with Sandhya leading we were afraid of nothing, not even the very little look a woman gave us as we came in, a woman dressed in a Rajasthani ghagra and choli with mirrors all over, and a black rural-type bindi on her forehead. It’s the little looks that rule the world. But we, despite our sweat-stained fifty-percent-rayon shirts, were in past the durban and his door, and so Rajesh and I, we found our usual place at these things, with our backs to a wall and not very far from the bar. Sandhya was off looking for Anubhav in the crowd, which was floating from here to there and laughing and trilling, and, I have to say, smelling really good. Soon we had glasses of champagne, which was our very new vice, with its thin little taste of foreign wickedness. We drank it fast.

  “What’s that one looking like a calendar for?” Rajesh said, turning his eyes towards the mirrored one, who was still giving us those deadly looks now and then. I think maybe she owned the place.

  “It’s Rajasthani, idiot,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Means ethnic, you know.”

  “I don’t. Ethnic manjhe?”

  “Ethnic means real. Like from a village.”

  He looked baffled, but then Sandhya came leaning through the crowd, dragging Anubhav behind her. Anubhav was wearing a white silk kurta, very traditional, with a black shawl draped over one shoulder, and if someone tells you beauty doesn’t matter, they’ve never been to an arty party. Anubhav wasn’t good-looking exactly, but he had curly black hair cut in a thick halo around his head, a fine long nose, lovely brown eyes, good height, and as I looked around, squinting through a silvery champagne haze, I saw how everyone looked longingly at him, at the comeliness of his expensive English-medium arrogance, at the impervious grandeur of his self-regard. Standing next to him, we were peasants.

  He nodded at us. I raised my glass, and he ever so slightly gave us his shoulder and began to talk to some people on the other side of Sandhya. A feeling passed like a shadow over Rajesh’s face, not disappointment or resentment but a single flicker of hope. I wasn’t jealous—it wasn’t desire, not that at all—no, I felt it also, the eternal dazzlement of the outsider. I touched Rajesh’s hand and raised my glass at him and we drank. Then a man passed us. He was a small man, dressed all in white, but when he walked through the crowd it drew apart for him. His gaze passed impersonally over me as he went.

  “You know him?” It was Anubhav, raising an eyebrow at Rajesh. “I saw him look at you.”

  “Who was he?” I said.

  “That was Ratnani,” Rajesh said. I shook my head. “Ratnani, Ratnani Construction. Really, Iqbal, sometimes you’re so stupid. Ratnani’s built half the big buildings in the city.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Of course.”

  “So how do you know him?” Anubhav said. “Tell me, yaar.” He was standing next to Rajesh now, a hand on his shoulder. Rajesh shrugged and made a show of emptying his glass. But I could see he was pleased.

  “I work for him,” Rajesh said.

  “I thought you worked for the Post Office,” Anubhav said.

  “No,” Rajesh said. “I work for Mr. Ratnani.”

  I laughed, and snorted a gulp of champagne into my nose. Anubhav watched me splutter and dab at myself. “You’re a liar,” he said to Rajesh. And he turned away.

  “No, I’m not,” Rajesh said. He said it quietly, but he was angry, and I believed him. I put a hand on his arm. What he was saying, what I suddenly believed, made no sense. But he was looking past me, at Anubhav.

  “Hundreds of people in Bombay work for Ratnani,” Anubhav said. “So
maybe you did something for somebody who works for him.”

  “Not like that,” Rajesh said. “I work for him directly. Even to his house I’ve been. I could introduce you.”

  “Sure,” Anubhav said in English, smiling. “Sure.”

  “Come on,” Rajesh said, and he shrugged me away. He took Anubhav by the arm and led him through the crowd. I followed, frantic now, I don’t know why, pushing through and leaving a trail of outraged glances and whispers. Rajesh and Anubhav moved in a half-circle through the room, but Ratnani was nowhere to be seen. They stood in a corner now, craning their heads. I was staring at Rajesh, trying to catch his eye, and past him I saw Ratnani shoving open a black door. Rajesh followed my glance and saw the white shoulder and white pants, and then the door closed.

  Inside the bathroom Ratnani’s whites were overpowering. The walls were black marble, the floors were black, the urinals were black, even the mirrors somehow had a black tinge to them. I could see Anubhav’s reflection repeated again and again in the glass. The room was so large and cool and luxurious I would have been afraid to piss in there. But Ratnani was standing in front of one of the urinals, his legs spread wide, his head thrown back. He looked as if he were thinking of something very important. The sound of his urination was loud.

  “Salaam‚ sahib” Rajesh said.

  Ratnani turned his head, looked at Rajesh for a moment, then turned back to his reflection in the wall. “Salaam,” he said.

  “I’m Rajesh Pawar, sir.”

  The tinkling slowed and stopped. Ratnani hunched his shoulders, and I heard the sound of his zipper. He turned to the row of washbasins. “Good,” he said. His face was wide and dark and heavy, and his hair receded on both sides of his forehead, leaving a narrow peak.

  Rajesh stepped forward, turned a tap on. Ratnani leaned forward, soaped and washed his hands. When he finished, Rajesh handed him a small white towel. “I work for you, sir.”