This was Aringdham’s wedding party, his way of celebrating a higher love, of crowning his reputation as the Gatsby of Bombay. He had prepared for it weeks in advance.
“THE LIGHTS? NO, NOT THESE; something more subdued please. I’d go for warmth, subtlety, and the moonlight. Yes, let’s work with the elements. Let’s not forget it is outdoors! What, no valet parking? Rot! I want six at least: two at each entrance. And while we are on about parking, could someone look at how the traffic will exit? I don’t want the guests getting stuck in a traffic jam, honking away in a drunken frenzy. Timing? No, there should be no limit on how long the party would last. Pay off the cops, if necessary. Work it into my bill, and if they still hassle, slip them a bottle of Black Label.”
Aringdham’s bride, the lovely, exquisite Ritika Trilok, was sure that the club manager—a bald, red-faced, billowy-whiskered Anglo-Indian by the name of Keith Rosario—was going to throw his hands up, make some excuse not to rent them the premises, no matter that Aringdham was a privilege-class member, that he’d forked out half a million in cash to acquire his membership and had conveniently forgotten to take a receipt, knowing full well that some of the money would be diverted into individual pockets. Sitting in Rosario’s office while Aringdham mulled over the arrangements, Ritika could sense the growing peevishness of the manager.
As Aringdham considered the cuisine, he couldn’t choose between Punjabi, Goan, Hyderabadi, or Continental, so he decided to have them all, on separate serving tables. Chinese and Thai couldn’t be ignored. The first was bound to go down well if delivered in the Cantonese style; the other had the scope to spring forth surprises and provide the exotica essential to maintaining the reputation of the host. The danger in these Oriental menus was that the flavors could coincide, could appear repetitive, so two whole days were spent deciding on the dishes, just in case the guests decided to try both. On the third day he went through some turmoil wondering whether skipping Mangalorean seafood would create a serious gap in the menu. A dinner without Haryali clams, butter-and-garlic squid, black pepper pomfret, and tandoori crab was, well, slipshod. But, as Ritika pointed out, half the gourmet set lived off dinners at joints like Mahesh and Trishna when they weren’t into their fit-for-life diets and their Spartan yogic obsessions, so he decided he could live with the omission.
Aringdham wanted the chefs to preside at each table. Many of the guests were devotees of fine food. They’d be curious about the ingredients. They’d want to know how the dishes were prepared as a matter of form or courtesy and surely as a conversation piece for the next social gathering, which would probably be the day after or, at the most, a week later. If they didn’t ask, the press surely would, especially that freeloading critic Anna Paul Singh—with her loud laughter, her garish clothes, her false smile, and her social-climbing ways. But she wrote at length, covered space, and said some nice things in the hope of being reinvited, so all in all it was worth enduring her.
Those who served had to wear costumes that looked their part; otherwise what difference would there be between this bash and any other, between this level of refinement and that of the cursory weekend do? It was decided that the Punjabi chefs would wear bushy black beards, flowing kurtas, and fiery sun-gold turbans studded at the crest. These would be hired from the fathomless trove of Shabbirbhai Dresswalla, Costumers, Disguisers, & Fabricators Since 1927. The Goans would be in cloudy white vests and checked cotton lungis rolled up to look like those worn by fisherfolk; later they would change into three-piece suits with spotted bow ties and pink flowers stapled to the breast, and some decent money would be spent on getting them tailored at the Best of Fonseca Tailors, Byculla.
The Hyderabadi chefs posed a problem: what could they wear that was traditional? After much debate Aringdham decided on Pathani suits. “Dark blue, not black,” Ritika cautioned, revealing a childhood superstition about black. The chefs of the continent were fitted with buccaneer trousers, white button-down shirts, and suede waistcoats; their mustaches would be trimmed, their hair jelled, and they would apply no coconut oil lest it interfere with the aromas of the fine food.
Before leaving the manager’s office, Aringdham suggested a rehearsal: two days before the event the chefs would make a mock presentation. There was no avoiding this if they wanted the party to rock. They? Keith Rosario checked himself from raising his eyebrows. He nodded instead and said, “Why not? Good idea!” But under his snow-white whiskers he simmered and made up his mind to speed up his retirement plans; the congested hills of Nainital were preferable to the vagaries of the Bombay elite.
But ask Aringdham that—ask him to confess to his eccentricities—and you’d be met by stiff, sullen silence. To his mind he was a perfectionist, a man who saw to minutiae. He couldn’t bear the idea that others might find him lacking. What if the upper echelons of society, to whose comfort and opinion he was catering, dismissed him as unfinished? What if they discovered his origins, which were not like theirs? The planning and precision camouflaged the reality; it threw a deft security blanket over his past, the shame of being born poor, of having led a life of grim, unyielding misery.
THROUGHOUT HIS CHILDHOOD AND TEENS, Aringdham had brooded about how he’d been raised. In the decrepit chawl where he grew up, he cried out against the penury and misery many times over—mostly at night—in the silence of his mind. Against the severity and squalor of the one-room apartment in which he lived he learned to shut his eyes, hoping that when he opened them the harshness and poverty would have disappeared. Against the loneliness—in the company of a sullen, overworked mother and an aloof, traveling father—Aringdham turned inward and pensive, determined that one day people would seek him out, that one day he’d attract them in hordes and unreservedly receive their admiration.
To numb himself against the loud quarrels that erupted from neighboring rooms and poured poison into his childhood, Aringdham buried himself in his books. Math, science, history, geography, general knowledge, any knowledge. Most times it worked like a mantra, gave him hope that there was a wider world outside. But there was an equal number of times that his hopes collapsed before an invading tirade of domestic violence, before fights more emotionally than physically brutal, before the indignity of waiting outside a common toilet, can in hand and fighting to keep your place in the queue, then, coming face-to-face with someone else’s shit.
The feuds of the next-door neighbors that spilled through thin plaster walls taught Aringdham about life, about a world where relationships did not survive, nor niceness, nor dignity, where all that was good was forgotten in a daze of myopic blindness and where limits were crossed with unpardonable ease. From the prison of his childhood Aringdham learned how money, or the lack of it, could shatter families, how husbands could turn into wife-pounding savages, how wives could cheat and run out on husbands, how brothers could arrange to have sisters felt up, how sons could take to easy money and daughters to lives of easy virtue. He vowed that he’d never let that happen to his children; he’d build a wall high and solid till he could no longer see the squalor, no longer hear the shouts, the curses, and the screams of denial. Eventually he’d forget their existence altogether.
To make sure he achieved what he wanted, Aringdham worked as if he were possessed. On reaching college he took a part-time job with a consumer research company, and with the money earned he moved out of his parents’ home and took a room in a hostel. He went without meals, shut himself to the temptations of parties, pubs, and girlfriends, and spent more time in libraries than in the canteen. He worked at his grades and received them, too: the As and A pluses, good enough to secure a seat at the Indian Institute of Management, where he procured a rank at the end of two years and was recruited off the campus for a salary that made his head spin. He chose an Indian company over the multinationals, an old Gujarati group with a global presence. He thought he would rise faster there, attain more respect, and learn about privately held wealth, which was always cumulative and enormous.
By then he
had distanced himself from his parents almost completely. It was not that he turned overly proud; it was just that he ceased to have anything in common with them. They had no clue about his work; they never asked, and he never volunteered. He felt his relationship to them was a pure accident. He was comfortable in this opinion and saw no reason to change it.
From an early age he had felt contempt for his mother, but he learned to tolerate her whining ways, her stories of deprivation, and her sagas of life’s extended betrayals. She’d grumble away while stirring the veal in the pot, or the liver, which was just as bad, for it filled the room with pungent smoke and made his eyes water. “Too young I was when I married your father. Didn’t know then what I was doing, what I was getting into. And how was I to know he was married to the bottle? That’s all he cares for, over you and me. Now, in my family, no one was even allowed to take a drop. If any of your uncles came home that way, you know what your grandpa would do?”
When she was so far gone on self-pity, it didn’t matter that Aringdham was trying to study, to imbibe a store of knowledge that was real and absorbing. Her diatribes would end with some stricture—against his freedom, her perception of it. “Stay away from those Jhunjhunwallas. Their mother’s into black magic.” Or: “If ever I catch you with those Lobo boys, I will break your skull. Don’t think I don’t know. All sorts of drugs they are taking.”
Toward his father he felt plain, rising anger: his was a life steeped in despair. Money had always been a problem that remained unresolved. He worked for the Indian Railways as an assistant driver, which meant that as soon as he took his place in front he stripped to his waist, took three swigs from his hip flask, and began to feed the engine with heaps of coal. Only when the train exited from the city, only when the fresh air and the smell of plowed earth would cool his senses would he feel he’d left his demons behind—demons of poverty, failure, and regret—and to make sure, he’d fling in some more coal, urging the train to go faster, to burn away the tracks, and his past, till the driver would curse him for his foolishness and remind him that they still had a long way to cover.
Strange was the life his father had chosen. It was as if he dreaded coming home. Just after returning he’d often say he was going to the station to check the work charts, and then he’d slip away. He’d drink till nightfall, check the matka closing results, and, if enriched by a few hundred rupees, walk along the railway tracks singing the songs of his childhood. He’d make it a point to get home when Aringdham and his mother were asleep. Otherwise their faces would remind him of his poverty; the gray, crumbling walls would crush in on his consciousness; his wife’s demands for extra income would infuriate and torture him; the scream of a passing train would mock him, its tremor reminding him of the frailty of his own life;and the news on Doordarshan, relayed in black-and-white, would reinforce those feelings. Nevertheless, he’d eat his dinner before the television set, and then before the tiny sink in the passage he’d gargle ferociously as if to flush the booze out of his system, as if to eject the bitterness he felt at not being a part of them. The bitterness would follow him to his pillow and leave faint green dribble stains for the next morning, reminding him that the bile was part of his history, his routine, and, inadvertently, theirs.
What did his father know of success? What did he know about what went into achieving it: the sweat, the strife, and the struggle? Every so often Aringdham would ask himself those questions. To succeed one had to make hefty sacrifices, abandon an entire youth to fulfill a dream, which was what he did.
For six years Aringdham worked for the Gujarati group. He handled their garment export business and whipped it into a 480-million-rupee cash cow. Traveling frequently, living in hotel rooms, out of a suitcase, he developed markets, launched collections, appointed franchises, and envisaged trade shows and events that put the company’s brands center stage. His work came to be recognized, and he was spoken of as a rising star in the field, the man with the golden touch. At twenty-eight he served as a consultant to the Ministry of Textiles, helping to shape trade policies. At twenty-nine he represented India at global forums. At thirty he was cut down to size by the Gujaratis, who felt he was rising too fast for their liking. They transferred him to another division, loss-making retail, which was in shambles.
Aringdham called their bluff and resigned. He took some buyers with him and used his goodwill to persuade others to defect. He started his own company, Banwagon, and the first deal he negotiated was with Woolcot of Spain, worth four hundred thousand U.S. dollars. Three years later he was supplying to some of the biggest houses in the world: Texspin of Holland, Spindles of the United States, and Viva Mariola of France. He opened three factories: two in the south, in Coimbatore, and one in the north, in Gurgaon. He had twelve hundred people working for him—three shifts daily, holidays included—and branches in nine countries worldwide.
Eventually he got where he wanted: a world where the stars shone warmly, where everything appeared brilliant and perfect, where achievement had no limit, beauty no boundaries, and poverty and coarseness no place whatsoever. Like his party and its enchanting guests, everything shone for him and for him alone.
Yet he had to make a painful decision. His past had to be buried with resolute deftness. While he housed himself in a six-bedroom bungalow at Carmichael Road in the upper end of Bombay and placed himself in the care of one cook, three other servants, and two drivers, his mother was left to spend her days in a one-bedroom flat in Borivali, a distant suburb. There she sat in a wheelchair, thumping her knees every so often, hoping to beat out the arthritis that had taken root. Her only companion was the bai, a derelict servant with buck teeth and gray hair, who jabbered non-stop in Marathi and whose words she lapped up because she was amazed that someone so old had so much to report and share.
Aringdham’s father had become an alcoholic by this point. After numerous ins and outs with Alcoholics Anonymous, he finally succumbed to a liver infection and died, vomiting, one summer afternoon, on the floor of the general ward at the Vinesh Gandhi Hospital. Although they’d cleaned him up, trussed and wrapped him in a white sheet so that only his jaundiced face showed, it had taken days for Aringdham to clear his nostrils of the stench of a puke that had been building up since God knows when.
At the funeral his mother whimpered like a hurt pet dog, which angered Aringdham. What was she crying about? What had she lost? Her husband had brought her no joy; he had, in fact, denied the woman in her. He had denied her a life, if all that she’d moaned and whined about when he was alive were to be believed. And her arthritis had begun long back, a stiffening of the heart and soul, for which he was responsible. She should have buried him years ago.
Try as he did Aringdham could not offer the right consolations; he could not find the right thoughts, let alone the right words. Eventually it was the old bai who consoled his mother. She’d come with her two sons and daughter, and together they’d wailed and sobbed like professional mourners. This made Aringdham suspicious:Were they doing this in the hope of a settlement? Or did they have designs on the flat? After the funeral it was the bai who took his mother home. Aringdham noticed how his mother gripped the bai’s hand and how the bai cupped his mother’s head helping her into the taxi. Of course he provided the fare, but found it strange that the bai’s two sons and daughter climbed into the taxi as well. It was the wrong time to say anything, but he made a mental note to keep an eye on them. Right now their support suited him well. He had a wedding coming up—the wedding of the season. He had to excel. And deliver.
HE LOOKED OVER THE LAWNS. The guests—somewhere between their third and fifth drinks—were hearty and relaxed; the snacks circulated and disappeared; the lights, as he had instructed, had been dimmed; and the music, which had turned to dance music, engaged the younger guests. People everywhere immersed themselves in conversation. Everything was bright and sparkling; it was a feast of success, a power bash getting livelier by the minute. The stars shone overhead, and he felt warm and happy.<
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Over the buzz of voices, Aringdham heard a light, rippling laugh that chimed and tumbled across the lawn and touched him in the center of his heart: that sacred space reserved for only one. The voice belonged to Ritika, his darling bride, in whose honor he had arranged this party. Well, not quite. The fete was for their union, their love, higher than the Himalayas, purer than its peaks.
THEY HAD MET LAST NOVEMBER at the National Convention for Wool Exports in New Delhi. She had no business being there, but she was. She had come to ask for daan, for charity, as he’d later joked. She had begged her way into his life and heart. She said it wasn’t like that. She could think of no better place to make her point than the convention. She needed the woolens to clothe her orphans in Kashmir. Their plight was miserable, so very miserable. He believed her, for she looked miserable when she said that.
It was on the second day of the convention, toward the end, that she made her entrance. She sprang onto the stage, grabbed the mic, and urged conventioneers to stay and listen. He had just left the podium, which he’d shared with the minister of textiles, the minister of industries, and the commissioner of exports. “Wait, please . . . ,” she said, and they turned to face her, a slim, animated woman in her mid-twenties. “Please wait and hear me. Even while you plan great progress in exports, forays into new world markets, I urge you to look at those who are losing their lives.”
Another of those damn animal conservationists, Aringdham thought, and was about to call for security when she held up pictures of children frozen to death, their faces blue and stiff with neglect.
“We are trying to do all we can, but it’s obviously not enough,” she announced in a discernibly cracking voice. She introduced herself as working for Sahayta, a non-governmental, non-profit organization that focused on rehabilitating children in Kashmir whose parents had been killed in terrorist attacks. And, she explained, because they could not accept foreign funding (being in a war-sensitive zone, they did not wish to invite allegations of alignment), they were lean on cash. She requested that the wool manufacturers pitch in—with clothes and blankets, whatever surplus was available. Anything more would be an act of kindness.
Breathless in Bombay Page 32
