Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “What if they do something, Frankie? What if you lose your job?”

  “All to the good, my friend. I shall be free.” In the moonlight Frankie threw his head back. They stood arm in arm, with fields and bunds stretching away on all sides. Frankie was humming something, a song that faded gently under the chit-tering of the crickets. When the headlights appeared to the east, appeared and disappeared, Shiv said, “Thanks, yaar.”

  “Yaars don’t say thanks,” Frankie said. Then the bus roared up to them, heavingly full of passengers, and luggage, and a half dozen goats. Frankie found a place for Shiv’s suitcase on the roof, and a space for him to squat in the doorwell. Shiv hugged him, hard, and Frankie held him close.

  “Go,” Frankie said.

  “Frankie, come to Bombay,” Shiv said as the bus pulled away. Frankie raised a hand, and that was the last Shiv saw of him, in a silvery swirl of dust and a fading light.

  Now Shiv looked down at the head on his knee, at the rich thickness of the dark hair. It occurred to him that they hadn’t kissed yet. After they had signed the register they had both paused, and then Shiv had thanked the registrar. Then they had gone to the station, awkward in the tonga, each keeping to one side of the cracked leather seat. Shiv had seen kisses in the movies, but he hadn’t ever kissed anyone. He looked around the compartment, and then, with the very tips of his fingers, he touched Shanti’s cheek. It was very soft, and he was overcome by a knowledge of complete unfamiliarity, of wonderment, and complete tenderness. “Shanti,” he whispered under his breath. “Shanti.” How strange it was, how unknown. How unknowable.

  Shiv’s fingers moved over her cheekbone, and now she stirred. He watched her come awake, the small stirrings. Then she tried to stretch, and found the hardness of his hip, and the end of the berth, and woke up. He could see memory coming back, shiverings of happiness and loss. She sat up, rubbed her face. He smiled.

  “Do you have a photo of yourself?” she said.

  “What?”

  “A photo. Of yourself.”

  “You woke up thinking about this?”

  “I went to sleep thinking I don’t have one.”

  Shiv leaned back, raised his hip with a curl of pain through his back, and found his wallet. Under the four hundred and twenty-two rupees and behind Frankie’s cousin’s address he found a creased snapshot.

  “Here,” he said. “Actually it’s Hari. But it doesn’t matter. We’re identical.”

  She was looking down at the photo, smoothing away the ridges. “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “No, really, you look different. Very different. See?”

  He looked, and there was the well-known twist of the torso, the smile. He knew exactly and well the leaves behind the hair, the tree, and the garden.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “It is,” she said, certain. “You are.” She took the photo from him and opened her purse, found a small black diary and put the picture away.

  “How about one of yourself?” he said.

  She hesitated, then opened the diary to the back. In the picture she gave him she was laughing, leaning towards the lense. But in front of her, there was a smiling man, very handsome, dark hair and keen pilot’s eyes, and her hand rested on the epaulettes of his jacket.

  “You’re different, too,” Shiv said.

  “I was younger, yes,” Shanti said.

  “More beautiful now, I meant,” Shiv said, and she smiled at him, and he wanted very much to kiss her but the compartment was stirring now. They sat back and away from each other as the travellers awakened themselves with thunderous yawns. Shiv put the photo in his shirt pocket, and raised the shutter on the window. He leaned into the fresh wash of air, the glad early grey of the land. You are changed, Shiv thought, and I am, and we are all something new now. And then he looked up, and saw the red sun on a ridge, and he was filled with excitement and foreboding. The mountains here were unfamiliar to him, different in their age, their ridges, and the shape of their rivers.

  “We must be near Bombay,” he said.

  One of the salesmen leaned over to the window, scratched at an armpit, looked about with the certainty of a professional traveller, and shook his head. “No, not quite,” he said. “Not yet, beta.”

  Shiv laughed. He looked at Shanti. She was laughing with him. “We’ll get there,” he said.

  *

  Now there was night outside. In the dark I wiped at my face, and listened to the clear clink of ice in Subramaniam’s glass. There was something I wanted to say, but it seemed impossible to speak. Then I heard a key turning in the door.

  “That must be my wife,” he said, and got up. “She and her friends have a Ladies’ Tea on Sundays. Where they drink anything but tea.” A light came on in the corridor.

  “Are you sitting in the dark?” she called, and another light flickered, a lamp just inside the room. She had the same white hair as him, and round gold-rimmed glasses, and she was wearing a dark red sari.

  “This is young Ranjit Sharma,” Subramaniam said. “From the bar, you remember.”

  “Namaste, namaste, Ranjit,” she said in answer to me. “Sit, sit. And you, you’ve been giving him those horrible chips? Has he been eating them, Ranjit? And drinking? He’s not supposed to, you know. And did you go to Dr. Mehdi’s for the medicine?”

  He hadn’t, and so she shooed him out, and I made her a drink. She drank Scotch and water and talked about horses. Also about a long vacation that they were to take, and their reservations.

  “You’re feeling better, then?” I said.

  “Me? Me? Oh, I see. You mustn’t believe a word he says, you know.” She took off her glasses. Her eyes were a lovely flecked brown in the lamplight. He had said nothing about her eyes. “The medicine is for him, not for me.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged, just like him, and I thought they looked exactly like each other, transformed by the years together, and I tried to smile.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said. “We’ve had our life, our Bombay life. Come on, you’ll stay for dinner. But you’ll cut onions before.”

  *

  It is night, and I am walking in my city. After dinner, Subramaniam came down to the road with me, and walked a little way. What happened to Frankie, I asked. Did he come to Bombay and become a movie star? For a long moment Subramaniam said nothing, and we walked together. No, he said, no, to tell you the truth, Frankie died. He was killed. Those were bad times. But there was somebody else who came to Mumbai and became a movie star. When I come back from vacation, he said, I’ll tell you that one. You had better, I said. At the naka he shook my hand. Goodbye, chief, I said.

  I am walking in my city. The island sleeps, and I can feel the jostling of its dreams. I know they are out there, Mahalaxmi, Mazagaon, Umerkhadi, Pydhuni, and the grand melodrama of Marine Drive. I have music in my head, the jingle of those old names, Wadala, Matunga, Koliwada, Sakinaka, and as I cross the causeway I can hear the steady, eternal beat of the sea, and I am filled with a terrible longing. I know I am walking to Bandra, and I know I am looking for Ayesha. I will stand before her building, and when it is morning I will call up to her. I might ask her to go for a walk, I might ask her to marry me. If we search together, I think, we may find in Andheri, in Colaba, in Bhuleshwar, perhaps not heaven, or its opposite, but only life itself.

  About the Author

  Born in New Delhi, India, in 1961, Vikram Chandra now divides his time between Bombay and Washington D.C., where he teaches at George Washington University. He is a graduate of Pomona College, Los Angeles and Columbia University Film School in New York. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. His debut novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was awarded the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Published Book. His collection of stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 and won the Co
mmonwealth Writers Prize for the Eurasia region. It was also shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was included in the New York Times Book Review’s ‘Notable Books of the Year’, and also in both the Guardian and Independent’s ‘Books of the Year’ round-ups. His most recent novel, Sacred Games, was published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Encore Awards.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2010

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Vikram Chandra, 1997

  The right of Vikram Chandra to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26716–3