The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  Malik had married a sloe-eyed pilot from Chandigarh and gone on to father a plump, plucky daughter. For a fancy dress competition recently held at her school, Malik had wanted his daughter to dress as Snow White. The poor girl, dark as petroleum, had valiantly dipped her face in a can of white flour before setting out to perform her number. She won the second prize, which was really an appreciation of her terrifying tenacity, her complete lack of self-consciousness, her devastating focus. Once her face had been whitened, she saw no discrepancy between who she was and who she was impersonating and, like her grandfather, believed that you became what you believed you were. The parents in the auditorium had given Malik the double take, unsure if he was a criminal or a celebrity, the distinctions between the two fast blurring in India’s tabloid imagination.

  ‘I also caught Tara Chopra’s show on the same programme. The broadcaster said that the Chopra line now retails all over the Middle East; she’s got quite a career.’

  Samar did not know that Tara Chopra had struck a false note when she had showed, a few years back, the infamous ‘Z Line’. Couture inspired by a dear and beloved leading lady of yesteryear, said the show catalogue. The clothes—copper-sheeted dresses, embroidered strapless tent dresses, organza evening robes with matted yokes—were difficult to fault, and the stunning reproduction of the backless silver gown Zaira had worn on the night she had been murdered was particularly accurate. But perhaps the music had been inappropriate: a hip, tormented remix of the song ‘I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight’ the music was like an imp that had come out of the trunk and hidden in a corner, chuckling contemptuously. Fashion editor Diya Sen, wearing tributaries of silver earrings that flashed arcs of fury, caused a bit of a stir when she stormed out of the showing even as it was in progress. As a result of Sen’s public denunciation of Tara Chopra’s show, applause had been vague and arbitrary. Recognizing the error of her ways, Tara had jumped into damage control mode, breathlessly telling the Indian Express’s fashion correspondent that her collection was only a means ‘to come to terms’ with Zaira’s murder, which, she added, had affected her profoundly, destabilizing her faith in the world forever. After a lot of work with my Guru-ji, she said in a muted tone, I am finally ready to put it all behind me. The press lapped up her repentant rampster number and she landed herself acres of column inches in the fashion press. Tara Chopra managed to do what her mother had achieved with an altogether different kind of finesse, entirely unexpected from the kohl-lined Maharani of Racoons.

  Meanwhile, Tara’s mother, Nalini Chopra had carved herself a niche in the media as a national martyr.

  On talk show after talk show, she repeated that she had been the only witness in the trial who had had the guts to tell the police that she had seen Malik Prasad at Maya Bar that night. No one asked her why she could not have said this clearly when she was in the witness box, perhaps because she managed to leak a little emotionally manipulative teardrop before an accusation could well up in anyone’s throat. She also wore a scarf around her head, like a woman who had emerged from some distant repressive regime, hazarding mine fields and polygamous ass-humping men, simply to speak the truth. In very careful whispers, enunciating each vowel perfectly, Nalini Chopra let on that she had now dedicated her life to the uplift of women and the education of street children and, in her spare time, was chairing the first Indian Commission on Global Warming. After spending two years in Pondicherry, in relative isolation, she had recently emerged with an inspirational memoir, The Truth Shall Set You Free, which her literary agent at the William Morris Agency in New York was shopping around with top editors at big publishing houses.

  ‘It’s amazing how the media never took her to task. She had hosted a party without a liquor licence. She never even hired a bouncer,’ Karan said. ‘And I read the other day that she’s now hustling a memoir.’

  ‘The media needed a spokesperson. They needed a face. A professional suffragette. They needed someone who was out there that night, in the thick of Zaira’s blood. But I wish she’d picked a better title for her book. Perhaps, Every Woman’s Handbook to Looking like a Drag Queen.’

  Karan laughed. ‘You know, I read the other day that Minister Chander Prasad had a heart attack.’

  ‘Yes, his third one! And I bet he could take three more, and chug right along. He’s built like a brick shithouse.’ They walked around the pool; the rat continued to float on the water amid a maudlin wreath of dry leaves. The beautiful pool was now a glorified sewer. ‘Nothing shakes him.’

  After retiring from politics, Malik’s father had sequestered himself in his farmhouse in his native Haryana, the family acreage, where he had won his manhood from a buffalo. The HPP had all but forgotten him. Politics had a short memory, and politicians none at all; besides, the corrupt in India had so many heirs it was difficult to keep tabs on dethroned emperors.

  Minister Prasad’s wife had left him. The minister had no idea where she was but, at times, he missed her like a bad tooth. The heart formed alliances with the darnedest things. The minister often thought of visiting his son in Bombay, specifically to see his granddaughter, but Malik had no time for him, refusing to take his calls. Minister Prasad hated the fact that he had morphed into a sentimental old grandfather, but managed to convince himself that he was only desperate to see his granddaughter because Malik was denying him the right to do so. But he continued to send her extravagant presents on her birthday—gold necklaces, a lavish doll’s house—and displayed her photographs on the desk in his study.

  When, in private, he reflected on how he had masterminded his son’s acquittal, he registered no conceit; he had done what he had to out of love, and that was a lot more than others could say. As a young man, Minister Prasad had come to terms with the fact that the world was not his oyster; actually, it wasn’t even his clamshell. But that didn’t deter him from turning the world into the best little whorehouse in Delhi. And everyone who had done time at his joint, Bunty Oberoi, D.K. Mishra, Judge Kumar, had come through rapping to the tune of ‘Who’s your bhadva, baby?’

  All he wanted now was to spend some time with his granddaughter.

  ‘But it wasn’t all bad.’ The two men sat under the almond tree, leaning against the trunk. ‘There was also goodness, which I came to hoard like jewels.’

  Mrs Prasad—Malik’s mother, Minister Prasad’s AWOL wife—had come to see Samar soon after she had read of his sickness.

  ‘She had left her husband, she said. She’d had enough. He had kicked her and smashed her up. She had miscarried one time. He had broken her teeth, thumped her head against the wall. He called her mother a whore and her father a wild pig. She knew that her leaving her husband did not affect him in the least, but a whole new world had opened up for her; it was as if she had been reborn. She cried for what her son had done. Her own flesh and blood, she said, how could he have done what he had?

  ‘She would visit me sometimes, bringing with her a tiffin of dal and chawal, and sit quietly at the foot of the bed. She gave me talismans to ward off the evil eye. She prayed for me, this old, beat-up wife, this mother, this woman. I think she veiled her face with her pallu to hide her horror at my state; she felt she was looking at the road kill her son and husband had left for her to watch over. She’d assumed Zaira and I had been lovers, and treated me like I was her surviving kin, the widowed one. I don’t know from where she got this notion, but somehow I allowed her to believe it, and then believed it myself. She cried so purely sometimes that she released the pain in my heart with her tears. She pressed my feet. She said that she went to the temple and prayed for my health.’ Powered by the memory, Samar leaned forward. ‘She was simple, true. And brave as hell. There are all kinds of bravery, Karan, and what we knew was the least of it.

  Mrs Prasad returned to Delhi, only a month before you showed up. She works as a sales clerk at the Metropolitan Mall in Gurgaon. She knows me, Karan, and although it probably means nothing, she also knows the score.’

  32

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p; ‘Is this table to your satisfaction, sir?’ The mâitre d’ at Gatsby had seen Samar on several occasions before but never so startlingly skeletal. He added, ‘No smoking, as requested.’

  ‘It’s perfect!’ Samar said, settling into his chair. There was a painting on the wall of pears in a wooden bowl; there were lilies in small square vases of clear glass. ‘It’s always been perfect here.’

  ‘Thank you, sir; we’re always delighted to have you here.’

  ‘Oh, just one will be fine,’ Samar said, resisting when he was handed a copy of the menu.

  ‘You won’t be eating, then, sir?’

  ‘My friend here,’ he said, ‘will more than make up for me; he’s a closet glutton.’

  Karan looked around the restaurant, nearly empty so early in the evening; the big-assed small fry of south Bombay were still on their goop call. The dinner plans, entirely spontaneous, had been hatched after an evening on the promenade by the sea; although shabbily incongruous in such refined environs, they had about them a slightly spooky, banished allure. He thought of the first time he had come here, on Iqbal’s urging, to photograph Samar, who had proceeded to tap dance on the bar top to an audience that had included an orange sarong-clad film-maker and a fashion editor standing in hot white knickers and pearls. The evening was from a distant past, he thought, but then the terrible thing about a photographic memory was the burden of scrupulous recall.

  ‘I’ve decided to love myself a bit,’ Samar said as he sipped on a glass of water. ‘Chiefly because no one else will. Tell me, who will do a better job than moi?’

  ‘You could be off the mark there.’

  ‘Anything on the menu catches your eye?’ His shins hurt; his chest was stuffy. ‘They’ve turned around the menu, I see.’

  Karan’s eyes darted over the listing, going from the lobster risotto and the asparagus and fennel salad, to the grilled chicken, unsure if it was kosher to eat when Samar could barely hold down a bowl of soup. However, on Samar’s insistence and selection, the food appeared on the table within twenty minutes, exquisitely presented and drool-worthy.

  ‘Your nosh any good?’

  ‘Nothing to write home about.’

  ‘Salad makes the grade?’

  ‘B-plus.’

  ‘You’re a bitch master; tell me about the risotto.’

  ‘I guess you could eat it and live.’

  ‘Living is not really the point of tonight’s dinner.’

  ‘I guess it never was the point of anything.’

  ‘They say the prospect of death turns you around, grows you up, makes you profound. I’m afraid,’ he continued with a twinkle in his eye, ‘it’s only made me shallower. Not only do I no longer worry about power and justice, or fate and mortality, I also find myself dreaming about the food I will never eat. The list grows longer by the hour, and I’m not counting on an epiphany to sit in for kick-ass pasta, so there we are. I wonder,’ he said, almost to himself now, ‘if I stuck it out with Zaira. Before and after, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘You went further than anyone else.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘You fought the case. Rallied around. And by the end of it, everyone knew they were dealing with steel.’

  ‘They knew I was steel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that never stopped them from snatching up my baby.’

  Karan gulped. ‘You were a good friend to Zaira.’

  ‘I’m telling you they snatched him up. They took him.’

  From the corner of his eye, the maître d’ looked at Samar; why was he speaking so agitatedly?

  ‘She could not have asked for anything more.’

  ‘They dragged him along the street.’

  Karan picked at the food on his plate.

  ‘And his left eye was in my hand!’

  ‘Samar.’ Karan bowed his head.

  Another song came on then, and in it was the DJ’s rousing, taut, unrealized lust; he had put his jism into it. Into semen music entered a woman in an off-shoulder pewter gown with a daring side slit, her shoulder blades like the outstretched wings of a bird; her lips were red, the red of pomegranate. Tilting her head, she regarded the crowd disdainfully. It was just as well, the hauteur of her face said, just as well. Having recorded her arrival, supremely aloof, at once diabolic and seraphic, the restaurant enveloped the woman into its sophisticated hurly-burly, and on it went.

  Samar was busy making a boat out of his napkin, folding and refolding the stiff cloth, creating a cloth origami of a sailboat. After a few minutes he placed the boat on the table, between Karan and himself.

  Karan took the boat in his hand. ‘You ever wish Leo was still around…by your side?’

  ‘I’ve never wanted anyone to hang around me for a second longer than they want,’ he said. ‘But I do wish I knew then what I’ve found out only recently: love no one so much that it seriously imperils your happiness.’

  ‘He was not a bad man, but perhaps he was afraid of death.’

  ‘Actually, I believe he was afraid of life.’

  ‘I’m sorry he made you so unhappy in the end.’

  ‘Am I unhappy?’ Samar rapped his fingers on the table. ‘Some days. Most days, the pain in my body seems to wipe everything out of my head—and maybe that’s why we fall sick; so we start to loathe the life we crave so much. The older I grow, the less sure I am about anything at all. I don’t mean the validity of things like fate and love. I don’t mean the big things. I’m just not sure if buses will come on time, or if the flowers will bloom when they’re meant to, if my horoscope for the day will come true, and perhaps that’s something to surrender to.’ A smile lit up his face. ‘The odd thing about having these minor, meaningless arguments with yourself is never knowing which side to take.’

  ‘I’ve stopped taking sides; the only sides I stand up for are the ones around bread.’

  Samar dismantled the boat, folding the napkin along its original folds. ‘But I owe Leo. He let me love him, and that’s a lot. I guess what I got out of it was knowing that the more you fall apart, the less you fall apart. Now, would you like some dessert?’ he asked briskly.

  Karan said that he was quite full already. Samar insisted that he eat and for a moment Karan felt as if he was being asked to eat for the both of them. The waiter collected their dishes and presented the dessert menu. As he inspected the menu, Karan said that when they had first met he had never expected they would end up such good friends. Samar laughed and said that so many breeder boys had filed him under homo and junked him he had become immune to rejection. Karan looked at him with regret and said that he had not known better at the time.

  Samar took another sip of water. ‘You’re too hard on yourself; if I didn’t have my prejudices to hold on to, I’d fall off the ship too. You’d never have stayed for a Bellini if I had asked, so I’m real glad Zaira told you to hang on for a drink.’

  ‘I stayed that evening because Zaira asked, but I doubt if I’d have come back for dinner if it were only her.’

  Samar looked up from the menu and his eyes smiled. ‘Apple and rosemary pie looks kind of neat.’

  ‘Yes, it does; I’ll order a slice.’

  As Karan dug into his pudding, the restaurant came alive. Samar’s eyes moved from the usual suspects—the theatre artist with her big bold red bindi; ruddy expats clutching gin-and-tonics—to a small, noisy cluster of confident men seated around a circular table, exuding an energy that was flirtatious, wired, pulsating with the obscene confidence of a hard-on. It seemed as if they were from a different realm, untouched by either spite or contempt, held chaste in their worldly innocence, dumb with a privilege they never paid for. They reminded Samar of wildebeest crossing the river, the lot that safely makes it to the other side, with the plains before them in all their monsoonal luxuriance. There would be other rivers to cross, other plains to roam, but for now they had made it over. To the other side.

  He turned to Karan. ‘Have you met Mrs Dalal since you got back?’<
br />
  ‘She lives in Singapore now. With her husband and child.’

  ‘So she has a family.’ Samar tiptoed around the subject; in the last few months Karan had spoken of her sparingly, reluctantly. In contrast, his affection for Claire had been luminous with ardour.

  ‘Yeah, I guess. That’s what she always wanted.’

  ‘Did you hear from her when you were in London?’

  ‘What do you think, Samar?’

  Samar noticed Karan had clammed up at the mention of Rhea. ‘I doubt if you would have lasted in London as long as you did if it weren’t for Claire.’

  Karan was silent for a moment. He believed he had been slow in recognizing his feelings for Claire, mistaking his general indifference to love for a specific inability to love her; his handicap was certainly private but not personal. ‘She was a wild one. With vroom—six cylinders, all charged. Her cosmos, London’s art scene, was education for me; I learned what my life could have been were I working as a photographer, and I found I wasn’t missing a lot.’ His face grew tense; his ears alert, as if he had heard a faraway sound. Then he leaned forward. ‘It also showed me how art works here. In India. We don’t go looking for it in a museum; we don’t always call it by a name.’ Art was the fretwork of henna on a bride’s palm. A raga freed at dawn. Rangoli at the threshold. ‘At one point, I was with her at a party in Belgravia, when it occurred to me that I wasn’t interested in photography, but I wanted to look at things for a while.’ The long gaze, he had discovered to his delight, was a restful thing. ‘I did not want more than that.’