The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  A few days later, as Rhea descended the stairs after many hours of tinkering around in her studio, she saw Adi on his chocolate-coloured recliner, his legs propped up on an ottoman, a glass of bourbon on a three-legged table by his side.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ she enquired. They were scheduled to catch a show at Regal, the latest Ram Gopal Verma film.

  ‘Can we take a rain check?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m just not feeling up to it.’

  ‘Oh Adi, I’ve spent the whole day in the studio and I’d like to get out for a bit.’

  ‘Why don’t you go alone?’

  Anger seized her by her ankles and threatened to tilt her over. ‘I think I’d rather go to bed.’

  Jazz music unravelled in a soft, sweet whisper; eyes closed, Adi seemed to be drowning in the melancholic strains from a saxophone and the delicate tinkle of a voice that was like a pebble skipping across the taut skin of a lake. Rhea stood still, watching him.

  Adi opened his eyes, looked into hers. ‘Did you get good work done?’

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Some.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can be so brave, Rhea.’

  ‘Me neither.’ He did not know that her calm resulted from her acceptance that her son’s death was punishment for her betrayal. ‘I try not to take life too personally.’

  ‘But life is anything but impersonal!’

  Rhea felt like she was speaking to Karan again. ‘Maybe you should get treatment for your depression, Adi. Drinking has taken a toll on you. I don’t know why you started again after giving it up in the months when I was carrying.’

  ‘You mean my drinking has taken a toll on us?’ He lowered the volume of the music before he stood up and faced her.

  ‘I can’t stand to see you suffer like this.’

  ‘Give me your hand.’

  She extended her hand reluctantly; he held it against his cheek.

  ‘I made your favourite—Devil’s Food Cake. Shall I get you a slice before I go to bed?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not very hungry.’

  ‘I spent an entire afternoon baking it for you.’

  ‘I’ll help myself later.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Do you know why this happened to us, Rhea?’

  ‘No.’

  Looking at her serene face, stark as winter, he searched for the woman he had married. ‘Do you think it would have been different if we had gone to a different hospital? Perhaps I should not have insisted on going to that small clinic.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have gone to Breach Candy Hospital.’

  ‘Do you hold me responsible for this?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Adi; there’s no point in playing the blame game.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rhea, I don’t know how to deal with this.’

  ‘Perhaps counselling will help.’

  ‘Please don’t take your hand away.’

  ‘I’m uncomfortable, Adi.’ He let go, and Rhea retreated.

  He sat down on the recliner.

  ‘Well, good night.’

  ‘Sleep tight, Rhea.’

  ‘Will you be long?’

  ‘I want to finish this last drink.’

  ‘Remember to turn off the bathroom light.’

  She was barely within earshot when he murmured, ‘I miss you, Rhea.’

  ‘I miss you too,’ she said, turning around. She went back to him and took his hand in hers, kissed the teal tributaries on his wrist. After drying her tears, and his too, she left him in the custody of unhurried piano bars picking up a tune, an elegiac, intoxicating composition that reminded her of the crushed petals of moonlight.

  Adi continued to listen to music well into the night. Bats glided outside the window. City lights burned bright and brutal. He remembered one evening, years ago, when he had gone to fetch Rhea from the animal shelter. He had found the howling of the stray dogs and mewing of dirty kittens revolting, and he had been desperate to leave as soon as possible. The young veterinarian, who directed him to the shed where Rhea was sequestered with a litter of puppies, had neglected to add that the puppies had been administered a lethal injection. When Adi neared the tin shed, the strains of a lullaby sung with tender feeling made him pause and turn around. But Rhea had heard him shuffle his feet and looked up, glaring so violently he felt chastised. In the car, neither spoke about the incident, but months later Rhea had admitted the puppies were dying and a lullaby was the least she could have offered them.

  But today, he thought, she looks indestructible, unfathomable, stoic.

  She was no longer the woman he had married one December on a barge they had hired outside the Taj Mahal Hotel.

  In the weeks that followed, Rhea’s impatience intensified the longer Adi stayed at home. ‘I really wish you would play your music on your headphones.’

  ‘I had no idea it was bothering you; I thought you enjoyed jazz.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but not first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry we’re not both coping with your kind of cool.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, Adi? I’ve offered to come with you to the psychiatrist. I’ve asked you repeatedly if you wanted to go to Alibaug for the weekend. I bake cakes for you and ensure there are flowers on your bedside table…and you make me out to be some kind of a bitch…’

  ‘You’re not a bitch.’

  She frowned; his tone was so flat it was as if he was mocking her.

  She decided to try harder. She took him to dinner at the Thai Pavilion the next evening. The following day she ordered tickets for the new Naseeruddin Shah flick. From Rhythm House she bought newly issued Billie Holiday records. They took a walk in Priyadarshini Park.

  ‘Thank you, Rhea,’ he said to her at the end of the week. ‘I feel so much better.’

  They were in bed. He had not had a drink.

  ‘I’m glad. I’ve got tickets to the play you wanted to see.’

  ‘Next Friday, right? At Rang Sharda?’

  ‘Yes.’ She kissed him on the lips. ‘It’s an Urdu adaptation of Love Letters starring Farouque Shaikh and Shabana Azmi.’ She slid her hand down his chest and played with his nipples.

  He drew back. ‘I just don’t feel…’

  She remembered how he would make love to her when she had been pregnant, the exquisite and brutal force, the dexterity of his motions, the diabolic greed of his body for hers. ‘It’s been many months now, Adi. I miss it.’

  ‘I don’t believe I can…not yet.’

  She longed for his touch, its excitement and gentleness, but he had closed himself to all physical affinities, and she now felt ugly in his company.

  On Friday night Adi said he had misplaced the theatre tickets.

  ‘Where did you put them?’ she asked, waving her hands angrily.

  ‘They were in the top drawer.’ He felt her rage lunge toward him like a javelin.

  ‘Then they should be right there. Maybe Lila-bai put them somewhere?’ She yelled out for Lila-bai but the maid had left for the day.

  ‘Why’re you so crabby, Rhea? It’s only a play.’

  ‘But I’ve been wanting to see it with you.’ She tugged at her hair.

  ‘I’m sorry I lost the tickets, but we can always go another time.’

  ‘And what shall we do this evening? Listen to enough jazz to make me feel like a saxophone’s been shoved up my pussy?’ she spat.

  Unexpectedly, Adi started to cry.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Adi!’ she shouted. ‘Now you’ve really turned into a girl.’

  She left him on the chaise below the tiger skin, a weeping heap.

  She went up to her studio and broke everything in sight, bowls of slip, bottles of glaze, vases and plates.

  Two days later she apologized profusely. ‘I had no business behaving the way I did. What can I say or do for you to forgive me?’

  ‘Please leave me alone.’

  ‘I’m deeply, deeply sorry.’ She reached for his
hand, placed it against her cheek.

  He yanked his hand away. ‘Leave me alone, Rhea.’

  ‘Look, I’m prepared to do anything you say if you will let me off the hook this time. I just want to…’

  But his face was stony and cold, and she felt she could bear it no longer. Rage swelled within her like a sleeper wave and she blurted out, ‘Get over it, Adi. I’m not even sure the baby was yours.’

  She turned to abandon the room but he grabbed her roughly by the arm and swivelled her around so she faced him.

  ‘Aargh!’ she cried. ‘Please…please don’t do that, Adi!’

  A peculiar, impudent strength animated his touch. ‘Did you mean what you just said, Rhea?’

  The words had left her mouth; now there was nothing for her to do but tell Adi about Karan.

  He did not ask for details, but she gave them anyway.

  She told him how she had taken Karan under her wing because she admired his brilliant work, lit with wry humour and a daring, mordant vision. She told him Karan was thoughtful, with powerful arms, a quiet, ferocious intelligence—a far cry from the cliché of the crazed stalker she had earlier made him out to be.

  She tried to assure Adi that Karan was no longer a part of her life.

  He heard her out in complete silence.

  Finally he said, ‘You’ve hurt me to the quick, Rhea.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Her apology sounded so amazingly incompetent to her own ears that she feared uttering another word.

  ‘What’s hurt me most is the extent to which you went to cover up your betrayal. Every lie you’ve spoken over the last few months to cover your tracks, to keep this from me, will haunt me for as long as I live.’ He rubbed his chest with his left hand.

  ‘There are certain things you do for love that seem to be the work of evil.’

  ‘You’re being arcane again, Rhea, and I’m afraid its charm is lost on me now.’

  ‘I never loved Karan the way I have loved you.’

  ‘Which only means that you did love him.’

  ‘Adi…’ She had been expecting him to explode; instead, he had drawn back into himself like a snail.

  ‘How will I ever trust you again? Why’d you do it?’

  She sighed. ‘We were both unhappy. There were no children; the marriage felt deserted.’

  ‘I was sad that we couldn’t have children but that was my sadness. I don’t believe I ever imposed it on you.’ He stood erect now, scratching his chin, a gesture that reminded her again of Karan.

  ‘Not knowingly. Not all the time.’

  ‘And so what if I did? We’re allowed to share our sorrows; that’s part and parcel of a marriage.’

  ‘I was only trying to make you happy…’

  ‘By sleeping with some random guy you picked up from the streets of Bombay?’

  She stood by the window sill and took a great gulp of dirty air.

  ‘A marriage ends when one person betrays the trust of the other.’

  ‘Please!’ She turned, raised her hand firmly in the air. ‘Save me that self-help manual mush.’

  ‘Rhea!’

  She bit her lower lip. He looked like he was ready to punch her. Her voice was an awkward whisper when she said, ‘I need more time to explain things to you.’

  ‘You will only end up serving me more of your dirty lies. What a fool I was to fall for your wiles in the first place!’

  Her cheeks burned.

  ‘I can’t believe you brought Karan in here.’

  She put her thumb between her teeth.

  ‘In my house. On our bed…’

  She felt her throat go dry.

  ‘On our bed…’

  She covered her face.

  ‘You took what was at the core of us and you mangled it out of recognition.’

  He came up beside her.

  She was gripped by an impulse to run, but she stayed her ground. ‘A marriage is not based only on trust, Adi; there is something to be said of love.’

  ‘That makes for great copy,’ he said, looking into her eyes, ‘but it’s doing nothing for me in real time.’

  When he twisted her arm and yanked her toward him, the savage fury in his eyes took her back to the day of the verdict on Zaira’s trial. She thought again of Malik, and whom he had reminded her of.

  ‘I’m going to Alibaug.’ She jerked her arm free of his grip.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he shouted, ‘you can go to hell.’

  Before she could say a word Adi had left the room, and its emptiness crowded in on her.

  In Alibaug, a week of turmoil passed in a devastatingly slow rhythm.

  For the first time Rhea regretted the absence of women friends in her life. She regretted she had no one to whom she could confide the tumultuous events of recent vintage. After all, only another woman could truly understand the initial heady rush of pregnancy followed by the emotional disarray that shadowed the last few days preceding childbirth; only another woman would understand the rapier pain of losing a newborn son, the scathing bewilderment, the violent pathos, the sense of being peeled and exposed, the loud, solemn wailing that resounded in her head even in her sleep.

  She imagined she had one close friend, someone affectionate and thoughtful but also a little tormented, and that she had arranged to meet this friend at Willingdon Clubhouse where they would sit around a quiet table by the golf course, order a vegetarian club sandwich and cold coffee before she would reveal, in a low, defeated tone, that her marriage was failing. She would confess that her own infidelity had taken her by surprise, although she was fully conscious of its consequence. She would hold back her tears as she told her friend that what pained her more than losing her child was that the accidental disclosure of her affair had irrevocably wounded Adi. She would look at her friend ruefully and admit she wanted her marriage to survive, wanted it to flourish, discover again the excitement and depth of the initial years, and if that were no longer possible she would settle for Adi being whole again. At this point her friend would lean forward and touch her hand, and something indefinable and soothing would be exchanged between them. She would return home thinking what a stalwart her friend had been, how lucky she was to have had an honest, difficult conversation over lunch: the load on her mind now known, and divided.

  Instead, here she was, all alone in Alibaug as sea winds hammered against the windows like lovelorn, miscreant spectres formlessly floating about. Reaching for a diary, she tore out a piece of paper and scribbled on it: I want to cry. She wrote it repeatedly till the paper tore to shreds.

  Lying on an antique four-poster bed, she plotted her return, and her confession.

  She had bumped into Karan at Chor Bazaar, she would tell Adi. Karan bore such a remarkable resemblance to Adi that she had stared at him insolently, unsure if she was looking at a stranger or at Adi in his younger years. She worried over her words, their punishing inadequacy to convey the agony and purity of her twisted intentions. How would she convince Adi that she had planned the affair with Karan only to have a baby? Was that too weird—or too wicked—to be believed? Surely, if she could persuade Adi she was desperate to have a child to save their marriage, he would have to sympathize with her. But how would she explain what had happened between Karan and her; how an innocent, selfish seduction had turned into a game in which the cards were stacked against her—for she had fallen for Karan?

  No, she told herself; she would not disclose to Adi her descent into the ravine principally because she herself did not know why her attraction for Karan had been so potent, organic, rarefied, with a fate of its own, outside of the destiny of love she shared with Adi. There was no logical or reasonable way to tell Adi that Karan and she had merely become a venue for love to find itself, revel in itself; that love had been exchanged in the presence of each other, and like the very best of hurricanes it had been entirely out of their control. She struggled for the correct way to phrase her words, to make herself sound neither desperate nor indifferent. Adi wou
ld have to believe her once she told him that she had got rid of Karan as soon as she was pregnant, she told herself; there lay the proof that her affair had had only one specific purpose.

  Convinced that she had achieved a logical, credible arc to her confessional narrative, her mind tried to rest. But at midnight she sat up in bed, filled with a formidable, exhausting urge to cry, her face buried in the web of her fingers. I want to cry, she repeated to herself, then woke the next morning, as dry-eyed as when she had slept.

  The moment Rhea set foot in her apartment, its graveyard silence enfolded her, pulling her into an anxious vortex. Had Adi gone for a walk? Where was Lila-bai? Why was there no music rolling softly around the house like a bolt of aural silk? She went up to the library and waited there for Adi. In the evening she went into her studio, where, kneeling on the floor, she bent her head and took great gasps of air. The shards of what she had broken, pieces of glass and pottery, lay scattered around her like a jigsaw in which she was only another piece.

  Forever unwhole.

  Forever shattered.

  The most crucial piece—the one that would make her marriage whole—was nowhere to be seen or heard.

  Once the levee broke, the waters showed no sign of stopping. She cried until dawn flapped its burnished wing against the tall glass doors. A new day was upon her. She went downstairs and slept for two hours. When she rose she called Adi’s colleagues and friends, spoke to the neighbours, the durwan, the liftman. After two days, when it was apparent that Adi was not coming back and she had made no headway in locating him, she went to the police to do what she believed was her moral duty: report a missing man. As she sat before the inspector, she was restless with frustration. She had been allowed to report Adi’s physical absence, but to whom was she supposed to report the glaring, septic absence she had lived with for the last few years?