Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  He had his hand on the door, and he swung himself into the van. I couldn’t see him anymore. “He died,” he said. “It happens.”

  The door clanked shut, and the van swung away. From where I sat there was only the sea in front of me, but still the glow from the city fell across the water, and I could see the rocks far below, and the waves.

  *

  On the afternoon of the party the house was full of the smell of food. Lalit made himself sick eating the bhajiyas the bai was cooking up, and then I had to keep him from feeding bhajiyas to the fishes. He didn’t believe that the bhajiyas would make the fish sick, but he did believe, with certainty, that they would make the fishes crazy and they would start eating each other. He helped me lay out paper napkins on the table in the drawing room, arranging them in a circular pattern exactly and with great care. At seven Sandhya came in, drying her hair with a towel.

  “Crash,” she said.

  “Bad one?” I said. I stood up, and the side of my head throbbed.

  “Terminal freeze, but the server didn’t lock. I told them we would come over to the factory tomorrow morning to pick up the backup tapes.” She had them backing up every two hours, so that we could look at the data files immediately before and after a crash.

  “I’ll go now,” I said.

  “It’ll take you an hour and a half to get there, same to get back. It’s late, Iqbal.” She looked up at me, her head tilted to one side. I had told her my ear was swollen because I had stumbled in the crowd on a railway platform and had fallen against a pillar.

  “No, really, I want to,” I said. “One day left only.” That Monday was when Das would pull our plug. To this there was no answer, and so I went. Really I wanted to get out of the house, to travel. I had felt sick all day, the smell of the frying had drifted into my clothes, I could feel it on my tongue. It was actually an hour that it took, and when I arrived the factory was dark. The gateman shone a torch into my face, and let me in with what I thought was a look of sympathy. I had a feeling that plugs had already been pulled.

  I went around to the back, and the door to the raw material shed was ajar. I pushed it in, stepped into darkness lit only by the glow from the door of the accounting office. As I stepped up to the door Raunak-ji rose from his desk, his face alarmed.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Just came to pick up the tapes.”

  “Ah, my boy,” Raunak-ji said, a hand on his heart.

  “He’s very nervous always,” Manishi-ji said, shrugging. “Go ahead, Iqbal.” He waved a hand at me.

  “What’s wrong?” Raunak-ji said, pointing at my head as I turned.

  “I fell,” I said.

  “You young fellows. So careless.”

  I smiled, and felt my way to the server closet. There was a light switch on the inside of the door that flared up a single bare bulb above my head. As the circles floated in front of my eyes I squinted at the machine and fumbled at the front of it for the tape, and in that dazzle of colour there was still the image of Raunak-ji and Manishi-ji, and their room, the rows and rows of ledgers and the safe. Then I froze, my fingers aching on the cold metal. Then I could make myself move and I went through the door and back to theirs. I leaned against the side of the door.

  “Manishi-ji,” I said. “I have to run a backup, it’ll take a few minutes, but I was wondering … Some of that chai, perhaps? And something to eat?”

  “Of course, of course,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” Raunak-ji said, getting up.

  “Raju’s not here?”

  “Never mind that,” Raunak-ji said. “You do your work, young fellow.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I nodded, and then backed away from the door. I had looked at Raunak-ji and Manishi-ji, and I had tried not to look at the safe, but as I went back to the server room I carried an image of it, a slightly blurry painting in my head. There were the two of them, then the ledgers, the desks, an uncapped fountain pen, a long grey pad, the safe with its covering of gods and goddesses, and in the middle of it all, an empty space, a shape outlined by everything else, by all the others, something gone, an absence, a hole with a form, wings. I closed the door behind me, stood jammed up against the machines, which stood against the other locked door to the accounting office. I leaned over and looked at the front of the server, tried to look behind the computer, but it stood less than an inch away from the wall and I could see nothing. There was no question of moving it, because it stood, steady and firmly set, in the special exactly fitting table with half-inch flanges that we had ordered the factory mistri to build. I reached over to the top of the tower, tiptoeing, and ran my hand over the edge I couldn’t see, over the other side of the computer, between metal and wood. My fingers passed over something, roundly pointed and smooth. I traced back and felt the shape, hooked it between my middle finger and forefinger and pulled. It came slowly, sticking to the metal, pulling towards it, clinging to it. But finally it came away and I held it in my hand: silvery, its wings outstretched in hungry flight, nosing through my fingers, the big Jumbo from the safe, with the Air India maharaja bowing at me. I turned it over, and the dark strips of magnet on the belly of the plane, and on the wings, gathered up the light, dense as empty space against the white.

  I—after a while, a few moments, I don’t know how long—I put the plane back, slid it down behind the tower where I had found it. The magnets kissed the metal with a small sucking sound, and as I leaned close to the machine I could feel their pull, and I thought I felt it in my fingertips, the random destruction, the corruption of our files on the hard disk, particles moving on metal and twenty rupees and twenty paise gone. I stood up straight, swallowed. Then I started my backup, and went outside to the accounting office, and I sat in a chair. Then Raunak-ji came in with a glass of tea and a plate of bhajiyas, and I drank and ate. I made myself sick with eating.

  “How long have you worked here?” I said.

  “Twenty-nine years,” Manishi-ji said. “I have one year seniority.”

  “Eight months,” Raunak-ji said. “Seven-and-a-half, actually.”

  Manishi-ji laughed, shaking his head, and I laughed with him. “Are you married, Manishi-ji?” I said.

  “Of course I’m married,” he said. “You young people are absurd. You’re not married, Iqbal?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, at which they both looked perturbed. “Children, Manishi-ji?”

  I had never seen them before, not really. That evening, I learnt about Manishi-ji’s son, who had a shop at the airport in Dubai, and his daughter, who was married to an engineer in the PWD, and the death of Raunak-ji’s wife the year before of cardiovascular congestion. I ate with greasy fingers, and in that room stacked with ledgers I listened to their lives, and laughed with them, and found that I loved them. When I said, I must go, they said they would leave with me. I waited as they locked up the accounting office, and then waited again outside as they struggled with the lock on the raw material shed.

  “Ooof,” Manishi-ji said. “Here, let me try.”

  “Go ahead and try,” Raunak-ji said. “You after all are the lock expert.”

  “Move, no, a little.”

  They were standing shoulder to shoulder, peering at the huge lock, turning the key back and forth. I was standing behind them. Over us, on the wall, a tubelight flickered on and off. In that blue light I looked at their bent backs, their shoulders, and I saw how even their necks were the same, stubbled and slight, with greying hair above, and shiny pates. I saw how the human head is made, the little hollow at the top of the neck, where the skull rests on the body. Is that the place? Is that where the flesh is vulnerable? Is it so easy? Do you just raise the pistol, point it up into that hollow? Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  “There,” Manishi-ji said. “What’s so difficult about that?”

  “If you’re so good at it,” Raunak-ji said, “you do it from tomorrow.”

  They walked with me to the gate, each with a hand on one of my shoulders.

  “Take some rest,”
Raunak-ji said.

  “Relax,” Manishi-ji said. “Everything will be okay.”

  As I walked down the lane towards the highway they both waved. When I turned the corner their hands were still raised.

  *

  I could hear the party as the lift came up the shaft, the clink of glasses and that enticing hum of voices behind closed doors. I let myself in and squeezed my way through the crush in the corridor. There was a familiar face here and there, Anubhav’s arty friends, but many I hadn’t seen before. In the kitchen Ma-ji and Amba bai were standing in front of sizzling karhais, tossing bhajiyas onto plates.

  “Did you see how they eat?” Ma-ji said. “Hungry as dogs.”

  “Who are all these people?”

  She shook her head and threw handfuls of vegetables slathered in besan into the burning oil. I turned, went to the office, where I left the tapes on a shelf, checked on Lalit, who was sleeping the uneasy stomach-clutching sleep of the greedy, and finally found Sandhya in the drawing room. She turned sideways to get through two painters, raising a tray high above her head, and whispered fiercely into my ear, “We’re going to run out of Scotch.” It was true: on the table where I had put out the drinks three bottles were empty. Even as I watched a documentary filmmaker emptied a fourth. I tried to get back to the door, but found myself working my way around the back wall, near Sandhya’s blue painting, where Anubhav was sitting on the sofa and talking to a man dressed in a white bush shirt.

  “True, true, too true,” Anubhav was saying. “Mahatre-ji, that is just so much commodity fetishism.”

  Mahatre took a mighty gulp of his drink and said, nodding, “Mere decoration.”

  On Mahatre’s left there was a woman in a white sari talking to Miss Viveka. The ponytailed fellow was leaning on the back of Miss Viveka’s chair, talking to two men in long kurtas. The blue of the painting was reflected in all of Miss Viveka’s mirrors, and the colour seemed to stain the dim lamplight. I gave up trying to get back to the door, and went instead to the table, where I found a bottle and poured myself a double peg. My stomach was heaving from all the grease I had eaten, and I drank the Scotch with hope, feeling it burn down like an elixir. I took another sip, and saw Sandhya again, bringing more food to the table.

  “Do you think I would make a good killer, Sandhya?” I said to her.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. What’s wrong?” I said. Normally she enjoyed this rattle and roll, all this laughter and welcoming people into her house. Das’s deadline was on us and as far as she knew on Monday we were dead, unless a miracle happened on the Sunday, but there was no joy in her at all, nothing. She was putting plates from the tray on the table, slamming each one down. “Tell me,” I said.

  She pulled me close to her, and whispered with astonished hatred, “He’s screwing her. He’s screwing her.” She jabbed with her head over her right shoulder towards the far corner of the room, through the crowd, and I knew exactly who she meant. I went back, holding my glass high up, and now Anubhav was standing near the wall, leaning back with his legs apart. To his left Miss Viveka was talking to Mahatre, smiling up at him. Anubhav and Miss Viveka weren’t facing each other, actually they were facing away from each other, not back to back but angled a little, outwards and away, but there it was, it was true. I knew it was because of the precise three inches between them, not touching but not exactly far, because of the laughter in their conversations and their occasional glances back at each other, their happiness and that feeling of safety in their now-and-then glancing shoulders. I knew it because they weren’t looking at each other. It was exactly how Rajesh and I used to stand.

  So I stood in the blue light and emptied my glass. Then I had another. Afterwards I went out into the building compound below and vomited all over somebody’s Maruti Zen.

  *

  I woke up with a Jumbo jet roaring through my head. I sat on the edge of my bed, with my hands over my eyes, and decided I had to tell Sandhya about Raunak-ji and Manishi-ji, tell her now. But the phone was dead, so I pulled on some clothes and staggered out into the sun. As I went down the street each step went through my heels to the top of my head, and I was heavy with regret. I thought of their lives, and their children, their years and years of work, and I stopped in the middle of the road and turned back once, but then I went on. At the Grand Video Store I asked to use their phone, but Ahmed Raza, whom I had known all my life, said, “Iqbal, all the phones are dead. Go home.” I didn’t move. My legs ached. “There’s some trouble in the city. We’re going to close the shop.”

  I watched as he slammed down the shutters. “Go home, Iqbal,” he said. But I thought of Sandhya spending another day, a Sunday, teary-eyed at her computer, and so I went on. Even that was an evasion. I went on mainly because I wanted to give what I knew to somebody else, get rid of it. Around me the city’s Sunday emptied. Have you ever been at the beginning of a riot? You feel it coming, gathering in silence. There was the bazaar hustle of a holiday morning, and then suddenly all the shops were closed. The street was blank and yawning, and a woman’s slipper lay at a crossroad. I looked up and all the windows were vacant. I walked on. The road dipped between plots covered with bricks and coils of steel cable which towered above my head. I could feel the fear, the terror in the empty lanes and the sky overhead. I was not afraid, but I was not brave. I felt that I had a question. I thought I would turn a corner, and I would see Rajesh swaggering down the road towards me, an iron rod in his hand. I wanted to ask: will you kill me, Rajesh? Will you kill my Muslim mother and my Muslim father? Will you take our land then, our needle-point of land in this wilderness? Will you live happily in it then? Could you? Tell me, tell me, I said. Tell me. Across a creek filled with black, sludgy water, a line of buildings extended a serrated edge across the horizon. Now there was a quick flurry of barks, a howling that echoed back and forth among the walls and the buildings and then vanished, sunk in the silence. I walked on. A sudden cluster of shacks spilled down from the road to an unseen precipice, twisted together like some memory of a village, obscenely tiny and squeezed against each other. The road was fearsome because I had never been able to look to its end as it stretched far away, endless and quiet. I had never seen how long it led. I walked. Over the rooftops a column of smoke stretched into the sky. In my heart I saw flames, and Guru-ji face down in the middle of his akhara, stretched across the fine sand. My mouth worked, open and shut, open and shut. I turned a corner and saw a dog. He turned in the middle of the road and looked at me over his shoulder. He was yellow in colour, ugly and lean, filthy, and I could hear his breathing. I went past him and then he began to walk next to me. I stopped, bent down as if to pick up a stone, raised my hand, and he cringed and lowered his head to the ground, but didn’t run. I turned, and stumbled away, and he came with me. The sun was overhead now, and I didn’t know where I was. I remembered my mother’s Allah and Ma-ji’s Parameshwar and thought, tell me, lord, tell me, master. The dog stopped short and looked over his shoulder again at me. I laughed. The city curved away from us, stretching like hills as I put a hand to my eyes, valley after valley, always higher.

  It must have been afternoon when I saw the blood. My body felt as light as air, and I floated now from shadow to shadow. All the time there was the harsh huffing of the dog, and his trotting pace next to me. I thought first that it, the blood, was a smear of oil on the ground. Then as I came closer the sun tilted and I saw the colour, going from red to black. It was quite large, a shape like something had exploded on the ground, and droplets leading away There were rivulets where it still ran shiny. I hung above it, feeling a sensation of dropping. The dog mewled uneasily behind me. I looked around and it was another nondescript street, the same buildings and the same shuttered shops. The huge shadows came towards me and I felt my heart turn in bitterness. I stepped away but now I could no longer see where I was going. I felt my way to a wall and keeping a hand on it I pushed myself forward. Finally I could walk no more and I crouched with my back against con
crete. The dog stopped, then came forward and circled me, moving his head back and forth. Finally he dropped to his haunches and sat in front of me, close, facing away. I could hear the breath sliding in and out of his throat, and also my own, insistent and unstoppable. The fur on his back was dirty and matted, and underneath I could see the pinkish flesh. The sight of it filled me with disgust but I was finally able to raise a hand, to let it down slowly on his shoulder, and his ears pricked but he kept still, and we stayed like that, next to each other. Under my fingers I could feel his heart beating.

  *

  It was night when I awoke, and the dog was gone. I pushed myself up, and as I tried to calculate where I was, going a little way down this street and then that, I was picked up by a police van. I pointed at my head and told them I was staggering because I had been assaulted and injured by a stranger. They cursed me much, cuffed me about a little, but on the whole they were quite generous—they dropped me right at the head of my lane and told me to stay home and not get into trouble. The next day the newspapers said that the situation was normal, that absolutely nobody had been killed, only a few scattered injuries, and so I went to work.

  “I asked him,” Sandhya said as soon as I came into the office. She looked at me, her eyes enormous in her face. “I asked him and he said yes, they had made love. He said it happened. Then he just went back to work.” When I had passed by the studio Anubhav had been leaning into a canvas, his brush busy, intent and focussed. Sandhya here, on the other hand, looked as if she were about to curl over and collapse.

  “Listen,” I said. “I have something to tell you also.”

  So I told her. I told her about Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji and the safe and the magnets and the Jumbo jet. She jumped up, sat down twice, walked around the room, and then she picked up the phone and called Das. He was already in his meeting, and she insisted and shouted on the phone, and then we waited.

  “What assholes,” she said. Her face was flushed. “What did they think? We weren’t trying to get rid of them. It wasn’t as if they were to be cancelled.”