‘Leo had wanted to write a book about Zaira’s death.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes. And I asked him not to write about her, the murder, the trial.’
‘You never told me.’ Karan suddenly had a better picture of why Leo had made tracks. ‘Is that why he moved to New York?’
‘He feared being owned, above all things. He didn’t want to be told what to write.’
‘So he resented you for forcing him not to write about Zaira,’ Karan surmised.
‘We need the most irrelevant of things to remind us we are not in love any longer, and his exit clause was in small print.’
‘I always had a doubt…he was jealous of Zaira…she had a hold over you.’
‘You could be right.’
Karan looked at him with a dazed expression. ‘I don’t know how you survived the last few years in San Francisco.’
‘With a little practice, you get used to any sort of hell.’ Samar yawned, cupping his right hand over his mouth. ‘Love is bizarre, I’ll give you that. Some days I get nosebleeds missing Leo and on other days I’d like him fisted by a gorilla. But then, knowing him, he’d probably like a bit of animal kink. That’s the awful thing,’ he said, ‘knowing someone, all that bloody knowing. When they up and quit, you’re left with a whole heap of information you just don’t know how to shelve.’
Karan assumed that Samar meant the gracious minutiae of his shared times with Leo, vivid, witty snatches of arbitrary conversation, amorous walks on a foggy pier, extravagant meals in restaurants where candles hoisted atop empty bottles of cognac melted to resemble an octopus. But Karan was mistaken. What Leo had said to Samar could never be repeated, for such accusations did not fall within the parameters of intimacy, and the phrase professional moralizer had stuck to Samar like a stain.
‘So once he felt better he took off for Brooklyn. He did say, before he left, that our relationship had come to have the stink of death.’
Karan curled his lips in disgust. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean that.’
‘I wanted to ask him whose death he was referring to.’
‘Why didn’t you stay on in San Francisco?’
‘Most of our friends had died, and hanging out by the pretty little gravestones loses its shine after a while. Everywhere I looked I was reminded of Leo. Not only his love but also his anger. Mostly, though, I was hankering for Saku-bai’s meals. I wanted homemade dal–chawal. Aloo paratha. Cucumber raita. I wanted it all, and I wanted out.’
‘I’m glad you came back. Are you?’
‘I suppose,’ Samar said. ‘But there were photographs of Zaira on my piano. Photographs you’d taken on the first day we had met. And I had forgotten to get rid of Mr Ward-Davies’s leash.’
In the first few days of his return to Bombay, Samar was shocked by how the past had risen from the stillness of the house and punched him cold in the face.
‘Bombay felt far lonelier than San Francisco, where I’d come to count on wild parrots.’
Karan looked surprised: how could Samar, who had known so many folks in Bombay, feel lonely?
Samar touched his chin with his index finger. ‘I came back slim and bruised, so I wasn’t exactly an oil painting. Besides, my tap dancing was rusty on rhythm, and there was nobody to go out to steal flowers with.’
‘But you have friends here.’
‘I never confused my drinking buddies for friends, although there were exceptions. But Diya had hitched up with a painter and taken off for the countryside up north. And Mantra was teaching writing at a university in London. So I’d come home to a ghost town.’ Hesitantly he admitted that some people had swung by a time or two before they had drifted, afraid the bug was catching or because a sparkling, raucous shindig, somewhere out in the muggy lanes of Colaba, was calling out their name. ‘As you can imagine, I’m real glad you showed up. I hope dinner made the grade?’
‘Wish I’d known earlier, I’d have come sooner. Dinner was super, as always, thanks.’
Both men rose from the table; they were grateful for each other’s company but reluctant to squeeze the evening dry of its shambling charm. Saku-bai was duly, extravagantly complimented on the sumptuous meal. Creamy scoops of chiku ice cream from Naturals made for a quick, quiet dessert. As Samar accompanied Karan to the door, they paused in the living room. Karan’s eyes fell on the beat-up white couch, the wicker chair, the tropical palms, the tea lights throwing shadows on the ceiling; the room felt warm and familiar, but the familiarity was distrustful and brittle.
‘You remember I had said to you once: what you love you can save,’ Samar told Karan at the door.
‘Yes. Didn’t your grandmother tell you that?’
Samar opened the door. ‘She did. But,’ he said, his face falling, ‘I think she was horribly off the mark.’
‘Please don’t believe that, Samar.’
‘All my beliefs—’
Karan’s finger gripped the edge of the front door. ‘Don’t let them take that away from you.’
‘What did they add up to anyway?’
‘Samar—’
The wind shook the raat ki rani creeping up the wall beside the door, freeing a mutiny of tiny, dry leaves, some of which drifted past Karan and his host. A car honked on the road outside. After a moment, Samar said brightly, ‘I’d like very much to go and sit by the sea in the evenings. Will you come with me?’
‘Anything for you, champ; anything at all.’
Neither Karan nor Samar would hazard Worli Seaface ever again, so the next option was Marine Drive. Before long, a routine was set. Karan would pick Samar up every Saturday evening and the taxi would deposit the two men on the noisy promenade. Corncob sellers roasted heads of pale yellow maize on a black furnace; each time they fanned the coals, embers whooshed out, cloudy crumbs with smouldering orange hearts. Amid a swirl of gossiping housewives, muscular athletes, lovers walking arm in arm and peanut sellers, the two of them sat on a bench, audience to a mundane but deeply moving play that seemed to convey the meaning of their lives but fell short of capturing the common, unknown errors that had maimed them. The success of this play depended on its portrayal of life as a bearable thing, as something that happened to other people, like a harelip or a lottery bounty.
‘Sir, you want?’ A peanut seller extended a paper cone topped with warm peanuts.
‘What for?’ Samar asked with an amused look on his face.
The peanut seller wore a serious look. ‘Timepass, sir.’
As Samar chewed on a deliciously warm peanut before he handed the paper cone to Karan, he felt glad for the present company; he also regretted having walked out on their friendship many years ago at the racecourse. In San Francisco, Karan’s absence in his life had registered in vital, delicate corners; grudges were not only a waste of time, Samar had come to accept, but they also discouraged love from blooming in illicit, unpredictable ways.
‘Thank you for coming here with me, Karan.’
‘I’m having the time of my life,’ Karan said, and meant every word.
Their evenings on Marine Drive did not signal the resumption of an old friendship—both men were big enough to recognize what had passed. But the loss of what had once been deep and peculiar did not dishearten them from starting anew, buoyed by the simple fact that a life without friends was possible but not entirely elegant.
While returning to Worli one evening, Karan broached the subject of Samar’s health. What could they do to make him better?
‘I should’ve been more careful,’ Samar told him. ‘I never took my pills on time. I was careless.’
‘Well, now you’re in Bombay. We should go and see a doctor.’
They were in a taxi at Mahalaxmi. They had passed a plush showroom of imported cars, and a temple where hundreds of pigeons crowded a chaotic courtyard.
‘You want me to see a doctor?’ Samar asked in a serious tone.
‘Yes, I…’
‘But I’m not looking to date anyone these days.’ He t
humped his thighs, laughing freely.
The taxi driver turned to glare at the defiant, chuckling skeleton in the back seat.
Adamant on getting a professional opinion, Karan made an appointment with a specialist at Breach Candy Hospital.
‘What’s the damn point?’ Samar said even as they walked down the hospital’s colourless corridor.
‘There’s no point.’ Karan stepped back to make way for a nurse with a face as featureless as a boiled egg and an insolent stride. ‘We’re here for the scenery.’
‘Well, the scenery stinks.’
‘Sshhh!’
They sat on a rexine sofa in the dreary waiting room.
After a brief, polite consultation, Dr Taraporevala, who had a jockey’s slight, windswept build, offered her prognosis. Trying her best to sweep the despair out of her voice she told them that by failing to take the medicines that could have extended his life, possibly indefinitely, Samar had scuppered the chances of his survival.
The muscles on Karan’s neck tightened.
Samar smiled blandly; the doctor’s verdict, its polite vernacular of futility, was not new to him, but to be reminded of his mortality so plainly was like being slapped on the face.
‘I’m afraid for your liver,’ Dr Taraporevala said. She had a kind, perfect face; it was obvious that it had once been devastatingly attractive.
‘My liver is afraid for me, too.’
Dr Taraporevala looked intently at Samar. ‘Mr Arora,’ she said, ‘I have heard you play the piano. I attended a recital of yours quite by chance. You were playing in Santa Barbara; I was finishing a course there at the time, and I had gone for your recital with my cousin. I think you were fourteen years old at the time.’ The doctor added that she had forgotten the performance despite its almost impudent virtuosity, but had returned to his music years later—after losing her five-year-old daughter to cancer. Nothing had prepared her for the tragedy, and she had retreated into a graveyard silence. She lost her appetite. Her haemoglobin had fallen so low she had to be administered a blood transfusion. She turned into a melancholy insomniac. That’s when she had reached out for Samar’s music, its molten dexterity. Its fine shadows had not solved her grief, but it had been an able, shy companion of her solitude. An unanticipated solace. Dr Taraporevala rose, walked to the window and stood by it. Resuming her seat after a few seconds, she cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I could have been of greater help. I’m terribly sorry.’
But Samar had not heard the doctor’s heartfelt words; his face was fixed on Karan, whose eyes had a trembling gleam. A vein had been cut, and it occurred to him that perhaps there was no point to art, political or otherwise, and perhaps its point was its pointlessnes. But to extend to a lamenting mother a few fractured, imperfect moments of consolation was reason enough to put beauty to the service of truth. All that was corporal, photographs and statues and paintings—they could magnify sorrow in order to exorcize it and illuminate ecstasy, so it might be experienced in its entirety.
‘Please call me if you have any further questions.’ The doctor stood up to bid them farewell. ‘The card has my mobile number on it.’
All the things they could not say came up to the surface, where they struggled for release.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ Karan said, trying to dislodge the stone weighing down in his throat.
‘I just wish there was something I could have done.’
‘You have done more than I would have expected from you, doctor.’ Samar shook Dr Taraporevala’s hand. ‘You have told us the ride has been worth it.’
Dr Taraporevala looked puzzled.
Samar said warmly, ‘Thank you again.’
The doctor removed her glasses. ‘Your music, Mr Arora, I have really enjoyed it.’
‘Oddly enough,’ Samar said, reaching to embrace the doctor, ‘so have I.’
On the way back Karan asked the taxi driver to pause outside Silver Oaks Estate. ‘This is where Rhea used to live.’
‘At the end of this lane?’
‘Yes. She and her husband occupied the penthouse. There was a terrace with two rooms; her studio, his library.’
‘I saw her only once. On the day of the verdict. She reminded me of a bird; she had mysterious, heavy-lidded eyes, as if she had just woken from a dream of something tender and imperceptible. I wish I’d had a chance to meet her,’ he said, knowing he never would now. ‘Thank you for taking me to meet Dr Taraporevala.’
Karan’s hand was on the door handle of the taxi, as if he wanted to open it and rush out into the simmering heat of the city. ‘You should have taken the medicines when you knew, Samar; you shouldn’t have been so careless.’
‘I hope you can forgive me. My regret is that dying will take the fun out of missing you. I know you wonder why I give up on things, be it music, or our friendship, or cities. I no longer have the strength to tell you everything. But a few things will not leave me unless you know them. When I felt I was putting on a performance of being myself on stage, I walked away from the piano; it was like I was auditioning to be somebody else. The Pianist. I might be crazy and pretentious but I’m no phoney, Karan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to say all this without sounding vague or disorderly.’
‘Did you abandon the medicines because Leo left you?’ A wave of anger churned through Karan; his hand continued to remain on the door handle, pushing down ever so slightly.
‘I blame no one except myself. One morning, after I’d fed the wild parrots, I sat on a bench. It was frightfully cold, fog was reeling off the pine tops, and I was beat. Leo had left for good by then. I did not miss him although his conduct had astounded me; instead, I was relieved at his absence.
‘But the space Leo’s leaving had left in me slowly filled up with the awful, belated realization that the only person I ever truly cared about was someone else entirely. Early on, Zaira had recognized something permanent, not in me but in us. I’d grown up believing sexual honesty was more important than anything else; I chucked my mother when she tried to “cure” me. In my conviction, I failed to hear something that cut deep and stayed quiet: the heart adheres to the calling of neither body nor age. The arrow swivels on its own compass. What cut me in half and laid me down was my inability to recognize a love affair in its bloom.’
He sighed and adjusted his collar. ‘I told you the first time we met after we came back to Bombay. I knew I wasn’t going to win a lottery in this lifetime but, doll, I never even made the bloody raffle. Or maybe I did. Maybe they even called out my number. I just never heard, and now my meter’s running out and I’m all out of dimes.’ His voice was like a drop at the end of an icicle right before it falls to the ground. ‘I guess it’s what I told you the time you came to see me: My grandmother was wrong. What you love, you can save. I couldn’t and, what’s worse, it wasn’t the only belief that failed. Or, perhaps, I failed them all.’ He stroked his neck as he looked away.
‘I don’t know what to say to make you feel better about Zaira,’ Karan said quietly. ‘She had once told me she believed that when it came to love she was card sharp but out of case money. I told her she was wrong, and she had laughed.
‘I guess the trouble with an almost-romance is not knowing when it starts and knowing that it will never end. Perhaps it’s true what my mother wrote to me in a letter before she died: People love people in such strange ways that it will take you more than a lifetime to figure that one out.’
Samar looked out of the window. A woman was selling strawberries at the traffic light. A crow sat on the telephone pylon, a sinister silhouette against a brazenly blue sky. He thought he wanted nothing more now than to be home, in his room, tucked in his bed.
31
One night, after dinner, Samar and Karan took a walk through the garden in the cottage. The pool was a mess; leaves and small twigs twirled about in the rippling blue nets of balmy water. A rat had drowned in the pool. Its fat brown body floated on the surface, the tail distended, tiny, menacing white teeth visibl
e.
The two men walked up to Mr Ward-Davies’s grave; it was easy to miss as there was neither marker nor stone, and grass had grown all over it. Yet both knew exactly where it was, the imperfect, wretched rectangle.
‘After I moved back I wanted to know what happened to all the others in the trial,’ Samar said.
‘Did you find out?’
‘At the end of my first month here I accidentally caught Bunty Oberoi on the telly. It was on a repeat telecast of a fashion show that closed the Delhi Fashion Week.’ Handsome as ever, his face pared to a glossy gauntness by years of charlie, Bunty Oberoi was working the ramp after his acting career had failed to go anywhere. He strutted down the runway with a look of studied ennui, gazing blandly at the same set of posh, painted faces that had been with him at Maya Bar one summer night, many moons ago.
‘But I don’t really blame him for getting on with things.’ Samar sat on the grass cross-legged, his hands on his lap.
‘You don’t?’ Karan was puzzled by the detachment in Samar’s voice.
‘God, no. Sure he was a stinker to start with, but he was only a bit player in an amazingly twisted galaxy.’
‘Well, what do you know about Malik?’
‘He’s given up his event management company.’
‘So what does he do now?’
‘He runs a production studio called Shree Durga Telefilms; he produces soap operas.’ Samar could not help smiling.
Malik’s production house churned out a glossy series of hugely successful soap operas, soppy sari sagas with housewives who were adorned like Christmas trees and had more affairs than their orifices might realistically accommodate. Malik had been dubbed the ‘TRP Maharaja’ after several of his shows on Zee and Star TV shot up to the top of the ratings charts. Television was an unexpected foray, and he had done splendidly for himself; he came up with the storylines and his flock of writers developed them for him, complete with flimsy, filmy dialogue.
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 31
