Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  Pinky could not bring herself to answer, to pretend nothing had happened to keep up appearances. Had he erased everything that transpired between them last night? She felt strangely relieved, and perhaps a little foolish too. She slid into a chair and began sipping from a cup of tea.

  “Nimi, darling,” Savita said sweetly, popping a fresh, spongy almond into her son’s mouth to nourish his brain. “Read something from your book so I won’t have to listen to that slurping.”

  Nimish chewed quickly and swallowed.

  “It’s written by an Englishman named Ackerley who recorded his stay with an Indian maharaja,” Nimish said with a blush having just completed a passage that morning in which Ackerley noted that, for Indians, a kiss on the mouth was considered a complete sexual act.

  “Read something from it,” Savita encouraged while Tufan held his ears and Dheer sucked on a mango pit.

  Nimish obediently opened the book. “The other guests left this morning, and just before starting Mrs. Montgomery gave me final advice. ‘You’ll never understand the dark and tortuous minds of the natives,’ she said, ‘and if you do I shan’t like you—you won’t be healthy. ’”

  Savita glared disapprovingly and popped another almond into Nimish’s mouth for good measure.

  “Come now Pinky-di, Maji’s already done with her bath,” Kuntal said, meeting her in the hallway with a bundle of the previous day’s wash to take next door where the unruffable ironing-wallah set up his stand in the shade, servicing the entire street.

  He started at dawn, lighting a fire to heat the coals before transferring them, red-hot, into the iron itself. Then spreading the material onto a covered table, he flicked water at it and began ironing with fast methodical movements, all the while placating Mrs. Garg from down the lane who blamed his errant ironing for the mysterious lipstick-colored spots on her husband’s shirt collars.

  Kuntal steered Pinky to the children’s bathroom. For a moment, Pinky hesitated, remembering her terror from the night before, but now everything felt so normal, dull even, that she almost laughed. All these years, they had been bolting that door. Nothing terrible had happened last night after she had opened it. Nothing.

  She sat on a low wooden stool, reflecting upon Nimish, her long hair heaped on top of her head in a froth of bubbles, eyes shut. The ache in her chest grew stronger. She thought about the way he told her to go, his voice empty of affection, cold even. Slowly, she became aware of feeling chilled and reached for the lota to rinse off the shampoo. Down, down, her hand continued into the depths of the brass bucket. But instead of feeling water, she touched dry bottom. Although the low wooden stool she was crouching on had already begun to swell with the day’s heat, she shivered as she reached for the faucet. Blindly, she pushed the bucket underneath, hearing the whoosh of the water as it surged through the pipe, the hollowness of the bucket’s changing tones as it filled.

  The bathroom was a source of constant irritation due to its faulty piping and strange metallic odor. That, along with the pile of fermenting clothes in the corner, lent the space a certain unsavory quality which the four children had to endure each morning, Pinky most of all since she was the last to use it.

  The chill grew sharper.

  Pinky wondered if she had simply forgotten to latch the door and Kuntal had sneaked in to grab her unwashed clothes, letting in a draft of air.

  Cautiously, she reached into the bucket again but, though she distinctly heard the faucet spewing, there was not a drop of liquid at the bottom.

  She knocked the bucket over with her foot and opened her eyes, frantically trying to wipe the shampoo from her face. Her eyes burned, her vision blurred.

  As far as she could tell, the door was securely latched. The walls held not a single window. Then she looked over to the overturned bucket, drawing back in shock as she saw water gushing out of it, overflowing, flooding.

  Hurling herself at the door, she yanked her top down over her head and began to pull at the handle.

  It would not open.

  She felt something damp rise up behind her.

  “Kuntal!” Pinky yelled, fists banging on the door. “Kuntal! Kuntal!”

  Her voice reverberated against the walls as if she were sealed in an underwater tomb.

  “Parvati!” she cried out to the sharp-eared servant who was always waiting to catch the children in some indiscretion so she could complain to Maji and gain importance in her eyes.

  Pinky banged on the door with all her might but still no one came.

  “Maji!” she screamed. “Anyone, help!”

  Suddenly, and with an unearthly wheeze, the door swung open.

  “Why all this shouting? I’m not deaf.”

  It was Parvati. She was followed by Dheer, cheeks bulging with Cadbury Gems, and Tufan with his jute-rope gun.

  “Why didn’t you come?” Pinky cried, heart pounding in chest.

  “Oh pho!” Parvati shouted, stepping into the bathroom. “Why have you left the faucet on? The whole room is flooded!”

  “I . . . I . . . I . . .” Pinky wept.

  “Pinky’s crying!” Tufan gleefully announced to the household. Bang, bang.

  “And why’s there still shampoo in your hair?”

  “Oi,” Maji’s voice boomed from the parlor as she struggled to propel herself from her seat. “Kya ho gaya ? Is Pinky okay?” Ignoring the surge of pain through her arthritic joints, she reached for her cane and made her way as hastily as she could to her granddaughter’s side.

  “The heat makes the door stick, nah?” Parvati said, sighing audibly.

  “Silly girl.”

  “But . . . but . . . the bucket,” Pinky sobbed in between hiccups, angry at herself for being overcome with emotion. Emotion had always been a bad word in the Mittal bungalow, spoken of in the same disapproving whispers reserved for the mentally ill. Too much of it led to a host of other afflictions such as insolence, disobedience, and the need for privacy, all which proved ruinous to girls and their future marriage prospects.

  “What’s going on now?” Savita asked out of the side of her mouth. The other side was full of bobby pins which she jammed, one by one, into the mammoth bun on the back of her head.

  “She got stuck,” Tufn answered.

  “Hai-hai,” Savita sighed, eyeing Pinky’s distress.

  “You must be coming down with a fever,” Maji declared, deciding that was the only plausible explanation. She pressed a palm to Pinky’s forehead.

  Dheer lumbered away. Tufan galloped after him as if he were a fleeing buffalo, pretending to fell him with two clean shots from his jute gun. Savita strolled off in the opposite direction, still loudly tsking. Maji and Pinky slowly shuffled towards the parlor. Parvati swung the bathroom door closed.

  It could have been the hinges, the warped swell of door against frame, but Pinky thought she heard a soft moan as the door pulled shut.

  CASCADING FOLIAGE

  Squinting against the bright sunlight, Pinky and Maji strolled across the back garden to pick flowers for the puja. Maji inhaled deeply as she walked past the shameless, carmine-colored hibiscus and coy, pink frangipani and stopped under a line of jute, the fresh smell of the hanging laundry an alluring promise to cleanse her body of any stray pollutants she might have missed during her morning bath. It was hot already, the sun’s unforgiving rays beat down with an intensity that burned.

  “I feel tired,” Pinky said, her voice still shaken.

  “The rains are in the air,” Maji said. “It makes everything feel lethargic. The lightning and thunder will start tonight, then the monsoons will come.” She stopped and eyed her granddaughter with concern. “That’s it, right? Nothing more?”

  Pinky shook her head.

  The mundane activities—the quick sweeps of Kuntal’s short-handled broom upon the back verandah, the gentle flapping of the wash on the jute line, the buzzing of the bees in the flowers—made her feel a little silly about her fright. She must have misplaced the bucket, putting it just to t
he side of the faucet instead of directly underneath. The tap had still been on, after all, when Parvati had come to the door and Pinky had not been able to see very well with the shampoo stinging her eyes. It was possible that she had misjudged things.

  And it was equally possible that Tufan had bolted the door from the outside. He had done that before, taking advantage of the outside lock, making her beg to be let out. He reminded her of the guavas sold on the roadside at Chowpatty Beach: sharply sliced with an overabundance of chili powder that made even the most ironclad stomachs churn. He had been named after the tsunami that hit Bombay in 1945, at the exact moment of his birth, sweeping away fishing boats and flooding the coastal communities. True to his name, Tufan left a path of destruction in his wake.

  In the puja sanctuary Maji painfully lowered herself onto a seat near the ground in front of the black marble altar adorned with brass and silver figurines of the gods. A huge carved stone lingam stood under a framed painting of Saraswati, Goddess of Knowledge, seated upon a white lotus, a brilliant peacock at her feet. Pinky placed the flowers next to a small silver bowl of sweetened halwa, and another one containing fresh apples, bananas, and a coconut. They lit the diyas and, with folded hands, chanted the Gayatri Mantra. Om bhoor bhuva suvah. O Creator of the Universe, the Giver of Life and Happiness. . . .

  Pinky sprinkled satiny orange petals before Lord Krishna and his divine consort, Radha. She loved this time inside the puja sanctuary with her grandmother. It was as if they were sealed away from the worries of the rest of the world. After they finished the prayers and tasted a little of the halwa, thick and buttery with almonds, Maji always recited a story from the great epics. She sat back, her eyes misting over.

  “Once there was a great king who yearned for a child. He prayed for many years and one day a daughter was born to him. She grew into a beautiful, intelligent woman but no man dared to ask for her hand so her father sent her on a journey, telling her to find a husband worthy of her brilliance.”

  Pinky knew the story of Savitri from the Mahabharata. In it, the princess meets a noble prince who is fated to die in one year. She nonetheless falls in love and marries him. On his last day on earth, they go to the forest where Yama, the God of Death, takes his soul from his body. Not ready to let him go, the princess follows Yama through the thickening bramble and desolate terrain, her determination never wavering. Finally, on the outskirts of his kingdom, Yama grants her any boon except for her husband’s life back. Please then grant me many children, she asks, and let their father be my husband.

  “Lord Yama smiled, knowing he had been outwitted,” Maji concluded. “Go, he told her, you have won back his life. She ran back to the forest and found her husband, waking up as if from a long rest. They returned to his kingdom and lived as king and queen for the rest of their days.”

  Pinky smiled distractedly.

  “So you see,” Maji added, her lessons these days always focusing on the topic of marriage, “a wife must always be courageous, especially when it comes to her husband’s well-being.”

  Pinky remembered her confession to Nimish, and how she had not considered his happiness that night, but her own. It had been her broken heart that compelled her to unbolt the door. “The bolt,” she blurted out. “Why, Maji, why’s that door bolted at night?”

  There was a flash of pain in Maji’s eyes. “There are some things best left alone.”

  Pinky hung her head. She could not bear to see her grandmother’s sorrow. It prevented her from pressing her further. It was the reason she rarely asked about her mother even though there was a lifetime of things she still wished to know.

  Maji touched Pinky’s cheek. “Now go, the darjee will be here in a little while with your new outfits. Take my keys and get money from the cabinet.”

  The heavy key holder, made of ornamented silver and tightly packed with two dozen keys, usually stuck out from Maji’s fleshy waist like an instrument of torture. As a safeguard in case they were ever robbed and to thwart temptation of the servants, anything of value in the bungalow was stashed behind locked doors, including clothing and aging, duty-free items from abroad. Every room had at least one row of cabinets, each with its own lock, and Maji rarely let her keys out of her sight except as needed by Pinky for errands. Maji even slept with her set tucked securely under her pillow at night.

  The chinoiserie cabinets creaked in protest before yielding to reveal their contents: old pants from the Raymond’s Shop, a box of clay diyas smelling slightly of mustard oil, yellowing aerograms bundled together with string, aftershave, a Japanese transistor radio still enclosed in its leather case, a row of bright Terylene shirts, and an assortment of silver figurines of Lord Ganesh encased in clear plastic to keep them from tarnishing.

  An elegant, richly cream-colored woolen coat too warm for Bombay’s tropical climate hung in one corner, loosely wrapped in a gauzy cloth and faintly smelling of Yardley’s talcum powder. It had silver buttons down the front and on the cuffs, each etched with a crest of two imperial-looking lions. It seemed so empty hanging alone there, devoid of a body to fill it. Pinky imagined that her mother might have worn it, picturing Yamuna sliding her slender arms into the sleeves, laughing at the unfamiliar wintry bite of her new home in Lahore, and thinking she had all the time in the world to get used to it.

  Pinky stroked the coat, touching the buttons that her mother might have once touched.

  “Come beti,” Maji said, entering the room with a tray of mixed nuts balanced against her hip, “come eat breakfast.”

  She caught sight of the coat and an old, persistent ache rose up inside her. It had been a gift from her daughter soon after her marriage. Come visit in the winter time, Yamuna had written in a letter which Jaginder had to read out loud since Maji had never been schooled long enough to read or write. But Maji had not visited, not wanting to be a guest of Yamuna’s mother-in-law, who had postnuptially, proven herself to be a petty and cruel woman. Come here instead, Maji had asked her son to write back, for the holidays. Before they could solidify plans, however, there were outbreaks of Hindu–Muslim violence. Get out now, while you have the chance, Maji had urgently warned, relocate somewhere safer, to a Hindu-majority area.

  But this is our home, Yamuna’s husband had insisted.

  And then the unthinkable came to pass: the partitioning of India into three separate geographic areas, the forcible separation of Hindus and Muslims. Suddenly, Yamuna found herself a refugee. She was one of the many, the too many, who never made it across the border.

  In the parlour Lata Mangeshkar’s melodic voice emanated unreliably from the brand new Victrola.

  “Oi,” Maji said with a dignified burp to the darjee as he arrived, “while you’re here, measure me for a new blouse and petticoat. My best white blouse was ruined with those chutney-leaking samosas at the Mahajan’s wedding.”

  The tailor circled around her, attempting to take her measurements. He was a lanky little man with thick black nose hair, whose thin arms and fraying tape measure combined were not quite long enough to encircle Maji’s massive hips.

  Jaginder lumbered into the room, kurta pajamas tied loosely around his substantial paunch. He preferred not to reach his office until well after breakfast, and spent the morning situated at a small corner table in the parlor simultaneously talking into three phones at once. He managed this feat while delicately drinking a cup of piping hot chai, his arms, mouth, and chin working in fluid motion like a modern avatar of Lord Shiva. “So what if the lorry toppled over,” he said into the first phone. “The payment is due today.”And to the second, “Do I bloody pay you to lose money for me?”And then to Laloo, the ratlike manager at the shipbreaking yard, “Idiot! Dimaag kharab ho gaya hai, kya? Has the heat affected your brain?”

  On the occasions Jaginder later required something at his office in Darukhana along the city’s eastern docks—legal documents, a forgotten briefcase, or a box of sweets from Ghasitaram’s shop—the driver was dispatched immediately. If Pinky and the t
wins were done with their schoolwork, they sometimes joined Gulu on his trip. From the backseat, they listened to him weave intricate tales that bore marked similarity to the latest Hindi films, except they starred Gulu himself as the drama’s handsome hero. Just last week it had been him as Rajendra “Jubilee” Kumar in Kanoon, forced to investigate his own father-in-law for murder.

  Savita fluttered in, holding yards of pomegranate-colored Kanjeevaram silk in her hands. “I changed my mind, I need this one done in two days,” she said to the tailor.

  He hobbled over and fingered the costly material with gasps of pleasure. “Measurements,” he squeaked, artfully lowering his eyes from Savita’s voluptuous body.

  “Oh pho,” Savita complained, setting down the sari, “you just took them last time.”

  Slowly, lingeringly, he pressed his tape measure against her slender waist, delicate neck, bare shoulders. And then, satisfied, he pulled the pencil stub from his mouth and scratched some incoherent numbers upon a scrap of paper.

  That afternoon, seventeen-year-old Lovely Lawate arrived from the bungalow next door in a sapphire-colored salvar kameez with the golden dupatta that she wore with almost every outfit, draping it across her chest and shoulders where it fluttered like the wings of an apsara, a celestial goddess.

  Savita had initially teased her about it, Oi, Lovely darling, what is this same-same dupatta all the time? But Lovely had only smiled and pulled the scarf tighter. She had spotted it when she had gone shopping with her mother along Colaba Causeway, the intricate hand-sewn pattern of cascading foliage glittering in the boutique’s window. One superb miniature bird, an image of the fire-breasted phoolchuki, no bigger in real life than a thumb, was embroidered in dark gold with a red breast. The restless flowerpecker, India’s smallest bird, was caught in a thick cluster of emerald petals as if lost, trapped, crying out—chick-chick-chick—for its crimson-hearted mate.

  Lovely had begged her mother for the dupatta. I’ll buy it for your dowry, Vimla had promised. Such an extravagant thing is only meant for a new bride. But Lovely had insisted, and softhearted Vimla relented. Since then, Lovely was rarely seen without it.