The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  ‘Seems like you got a lot out of Claire, which has me wondering why you gave up a good thing.’

  Karan folded his hands and settled back in his chair. He glanced to his right; a young couple was sitting with a bottle of wine between them. Their inexperienced, smiling faces were flat with pleasure; they looked like a pair of romantic fillets on a night out. His mind turned to the woman he had left behind in England.

  Karan and Claire had parted company at a Greek restaurant in Hoxton.

  They had been out for dinner with Claire’s friend Aly Khan, who ran an art institute on Brick Lane, and Aly’s assistant, Sara. Aly had talked passionately about an artist whose work he was exhibiting, Shazia Alam. He said she was ‘smack out of Damien Hirst’s Southall hellhole’. Claire asked him to tell them a bit more about his show, which Aly had seemed desperate to do. He rubbed his palms gleefully and began. Shazia’s installation, he told them, involved women of varying ethnicities standing in wooden cubicles, almost entirely hidden save for a peephole at their crotch. Visitors at the exhibition would be invited to poke their noses into the peephole and guess the woman’s nationality—Pakistani, American, Ukrainian, and so forth—from the scent. The idea, Aly said, was to propose an ‘exploration of multicultural Britain through the pussy’. Karan had tried to keep himself out of the conversation, having quite often come across the word ‘multicultural’, used as it was with blustery awe by newspapers and magazines. Brown people, outside of running corner shops, nursed rages, wrestled insanity, talked to mirrors, ate in silence, cheated on their lovers, danced like you wouldn’t believe and sang silly on the sixth octave: this information had been recently released with fantastic velocity, startling British minds blanched over innumerable generations by bad weather, tepid tea and freezing water on all sides. The conversation had soon started to nosedive into a search for names for the exhibit and as Claire and Sara gave their suggestions Karan felt himself blacking out, floating away. Emerging from himself, his physical being looked down at the table he was seated at, playacting the humble brown schoolteacher, socially inept, privately outraged, seduced by the dazzling white curator. It occurred to him that every role in his life came with its modest particulars and its vulgar banalities, and what was deemed daringly authentic at one moment was proved false in the next, subject to scrutiny or revision—all because time had picked up her skirt and run forward.

  Karan was drawn out of his musings when Aly and Sara applauded the name Claire had suggested for the installation: The Bush Empire. Karan had excused himself to use the restroom and when he returned to the table he did not take his seat, saying he was feeling unwell and wished to go home. Claire stood then, and they looked at each other like leopards in the delta, unsure if they should tear each other apart or pass by regally, without a second look.

  When Karan had called her the following week, they chatted like old friends, each recognizing that the shape of their relationship had changed inexplicably, irrevocably. They decided to meet at Hampstead Heath, where he told her he was going back to Bombay; he could not be a photographer in London.

  She reminded him that he was not a photographer in London; he was, by his own choice, a schoolteacher.

  He smiled and said that she might have missed his point.

  A giant oak, devastated by lightning, lay gravely in their path and a blackbird had perched on its last living branch. After a moment, Claire turned to him and said that he was really leaving London because the food had got to him in the end. He smiled and told her she was right, that he had been found out. Authenticity, she remarked, could be terribly pretentious, and he had to agree with her. Then it had started to rain and they had taken shelter under a tree, standing away from each other, shivering a little.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know, Claire, but you should come and visit me in India.’

  She did not respond to his offer; she felt her heart cave.

  The shower soon passed. Instinctively, she reached forward to dry his hair with her hanky. ‘Thank you,’ he said, touched.

  In the end, as they went their own ways, she expressed regret: ‘The terrible thing about an English romance is there’s just no accounting for the weather.’

  ‘She was good to you, right?’ Samar asked him.

  ‘In ways I’m discovering only now.’

  ‘I guess just as we never understand why we fall in love, we never know why we leave someone.’ Samar’s mind swung back to the evening he had met Leo on the steps in Grace’s Garden, for the last time. Samar was asking Karan why he had split with Claire because he was trying to figure out what had gone all pear-shaped in his own life. Yet, part of his journey had been the process of accepting that there were always reasons for such unexpected, drastic departures, but the reasons did not add up to anything concrete.

  ‘Artistic differences. Is that ground enough for breaking up?’

  ‘If you want it to be,’ Samar said quietly. ‘Will you go back to photography now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You had told Claire that you couldn’t work on your stuff in London, so it’s been on your mind; surely, now that you’re back, you’re going to give it another shot?’

  Slowly, tediously, Karan explained that after returning to Bombay, and particularly after quitting work at the school in Juhu, he had tried to pick up his Leica again. But some sort of nameless, terrific inertia had chewed at him. He said he did not want to put the blame for the failure of his will on anything or anyone; it had nothing to do with Zaira’s death, or Rhea, or the murder trial, or his time in London. At this point, Samar’s eyes started to glaze with disinterest. ‘Should I order some cheese?’

  ‘Cheese? Why?’ Karan asked.

  ‘I thought it’ll go wonderfully with the whine.’

  Karan blushed. ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about but sometimes a photograph is not just a photograph.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be flippant.’ Samar straightened his posture. ‘But one day you will discover that only the end of the world is the end of the world.’

  Karan put down his fork and looked hard at Samar, memorizing his face, the crow’s feet on the sides of his eyes, delicate and wise, like the lines on a map detailing a minor arm of a great river—now, the most beautiful thing he had ever beheld.

  The waiter presented the bill.

  They stood up to leave after putting down a generous tip. Gatsby was throbbing by now. They had to squeeze through the crowd at the bar to make it to the doorway where Samar paused for one last glance. The woman in the off-shoulder pewter gown with her electric presence was now flanked by two debonair, muscular men. One of the men was visibly drunk: he was threatening to pour champagne over the fashionable mess of her hair and she was urging him to stop, her expression as scandalized as it was wicked, her hands in the air, trying to stave off his rakish excess.

  Samar turned. He did not want to see the beautiful woman bathed in champagne. ‘They’ve still got those lamps. Someone could knock his head against them and that might mess him up for life.’

  The image of Samar tap dancing on the bar top soared up in Karan’s mind.

  ‘You were wearing a grungy white tee-shirt that night, Karan.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘And blue jeans. I don’t think you know this, but I’d been watching you long before you ever laid eyes on me.’

  As they were leaving the restaurant, Samar stopped on the last wooden step; he said that it had not occurred to him, until now, that the marvellous perfume inside had belonged to the lilies.

  Karan looked up at the moon, a sliver of itself. It was tricky to tell if it was waxing or waning. But, oh, what a pretty little moon it was.

  33

  2001

  The week Rhea turned fifty, the city was agog with excitement over an exhibition of photographs. The series of black-and-white images of Bombay had been commended by the Times of India as ‘technically flawless, emotionally compelling, sharp and tender
, underscored by a vision honed over years’. A few of the images were printed alongside the review; she thought they were like a beautiful sadness thrown to the great blue skies. A black cat walked elegantly over an open, untidy crate of mangoes, a feline ballet dancer, the alfonso connoisseur of Crawford Market. A dead body—a track accident fatality—lay on the platform of Andheri station, a white sheet drawn up to its neck, while a black dog with a predatory look in its eyes sniffed at it with interest. Rhea smiled as she saw the photograph of an ageing potter in Kumbharwada, his face creased by the sun, his eyes yellow and wraith-like, a hard, fine man, perfectly at home with his mortality. She tried to remember if she had seen the potter during her own jaunts to Kumbharwada, and wondered what had sent Karan to her old ilaka.

  The show, which opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, was critically admired and widely discussed, more so because of the media’s acute interest in the photographer. Rumours smouldered like coals on fire. Some said the photographer was a bright young drifter with a drinking problem. The Bombay Times quoted ‘a source’ who had stated that Karan Seth was a former lover of a once-famous pianist. Preeti Modi, a prominent socialite and art collector, insisted that Karan had hit pay dirt thanks to the backing of a powerful curator in London. The most scandalous nugget of all revealed that the photographer had once worked in a call centre. The Mumbai Mirror had interviewed Karan’s ex-colleagues who described him as ‘A bit of a shy bugger’ and, most tellingly, ‘He, like, didn’t know how to send a text message!’

  Rhea visited the gallery twice, ascending the steps, only to reel on both occasions from the force of an invisible fist striking her. Over a decade had passed since she had met Karan, and her desperation to meet him again was so intense it forbade their reunion. When she finally mustered up the courage to enter the gallery, it was shut; the exhibition was being moved for a show in Tokyo. She stood outside, looking in through the glass windows with famished eyes and a black heart, at the large frames wrapped in sheets of wax paper, tied with rattan, secured with duct tape. A single picture lingered on the wall; she could see it only a few minutes before it too was set aside, to be readied for shipping.

  The photograph was of a rat trapper who had emerged from the sewers of Bombay, a battalion of bloodied bandicoots hanging lifelessly over his blood-streaked shoulder. The trapper’s lean arms were grazed, probably from the bandicoots biting him in resistance and dread, and he stood erect in the plum dawn, staring at a milk van. His expression was not so much one of exhaustion as of acceptance, one that seemed to convey that, sometimes, life came down to killing rats for five bucks apiece, and that was that. Rhea’s heart thrilled in the knowledge that, finally, Karan had got it. What she had tried to tell him when they had first met had now unravelled in him organically; he had, in fact, skipped backwards, fallen sideways, and stormed way ahead.

  Some months later she came across a book of Karan’s photographs at the Crossword Book Store at Kemps Corner. It was titled The Brass Monkey. The brief prologue explained the title of the book rather than setting into context any of the images splashed on its pages.

  Many years ago, he wrote in the prologue, he had gone to Chor Bazaar where a friend had found an antique brass talisman shaped like a monkey. The talisman was meant to protect what one loved. However, they had been so caught up in conversation at the time that his friend had forgotten the talisman in Chor Bazaar. Later, when she had expressed regret at losing the brass monkey, he had promised to find it for her again. He had then moved to England for a few years and, upon his return, had visited Chor Bazaar on numerous occasions and asked every dealer about the talisman, but had returned home empty-handed. Sadly, I never found my friend’s brass monkey. But these are some of the photographs I took as I searched for it, he wrote in conclusion. I’m still looking for the talisman. This is what I found in the meantime.

  Laying the book on her lap, Rhea splayed the pages open, touched each photograph slowly, gently, as if she were touching Karan, his face and neck and wrist. Within the pointillist brilliance of the images was a dismantled man. The splash of blood. A sigh of regret. In spite of how telling each picture was, she knew the images for what was missing in them: for Karan had painted around empty spaces, not in them. Reassigning her attention to the first few pages, she saw the dedication—For Samar Arora—and her mind harked back to the rumours of their coupling, which she had found impossible to believe. As she paid for her copy of the book, she recalled the serene, neat mound of her baby’s grave, she could hear the music in which Adi had tried to lose himself, a labyrinth whose secret, central chamber, when located, could have freed him forever. She stepped out of the bookstore into the big, brawny arms of the city: the hard rays of the sun came down in lustrous shafts from a pearly grey sky, making her dizzy.

  In her heart she heard Karan’s footsteps, walking toward her, and she knew she would have to wait for him.

  As she made her way up to the Sai Baba mandir on Forjett Street she thought about how foolish she had been, for failing to anticipate the hugeness of life, its detours, its cul-de-sacs. She turned a corner and went up a narrow, dirty slope where she stopped abruptly and rested her head against a moulded wall plastered with thick, peeling layers of gaudy film posters. An old woman with large holes in her ear lobes stopped to enquire if she was all right. But Rhea could not answer. She continued to cry helplessly, as if something were weeping through her. If only she could calm down she would tell the baffled old woman that if she was still here, browsing through bookstores and visiting temples, bargaining for fruit and attending concerts, it was because she wanted to meet Karan Seth, to tell him she was sorry; insanely, enormously, indisputably sorry for what she had done. If she had kept it at bay, the abomination of her losses, if she hadn’t been gulped down, chewed up, spat out on the same side of the street as Mr Ward-Davies with his cracked ribs and popping eye, it was because she was waiting for Karan Seth, a fellow soldier against the same angry and heinous night.

  Back home, after taking a hot shower, Rhea wore a thin off-shoulder black dress and lounged in bed. Her nails, painted earlier that same week a colour as dark as ox blood, had a grim allure. Lying on her bed, under a spell of music, she thought of the roses Adi gave her on her birthday; she thought of the concerts they had attended; she thought of his face lighting up as he dug into a slice of the cake she had baked to welcome him home after a fortnight in Singapore. Those were the charmed days, even without talismans. Love, she thought, is good luck. Her eyes now fell on the photograph Karan had given her the first time he had come over to her house. Mounted and framed, it now hung above her bed. The birds in the picture were in flight, shunning the sky and the sun, dazzling the two of them beneath; there was a powerful, ineffable sense of the infinite about their movement. On the back of the photograph was Karan’s lazy scrawl, The lost flamingoes of Bombay, words that had flagged off the beginning of the end of their lives as they had known it.

  34

  2005

  One fine morning in July, Karan was out on Marine Drive making his way toward a particular bench when the figure approaching him made his heart stall.

  ‘There you are!’

  ‘Rhea?’

  ‘What a wonderful morning it is.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I could ask you the same thing.’

  ‘I’m looking for a bench.’

  ‘The one that you had got installed for Samar?’

  ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘I chanced upon it many months ago.’ Rhea had noticed the metal plaque behind it, bearing Samar’s name, and she remembered Samar’s obituary, written by Diya Sen. It had read like a vein, freshly cut. ‘I always loved how you remembered people.’

  ‘And I always envied how you forgot them.’

  ‘More than ten years have passed since we last met; I’m not counting on a brass band but do I have to settle for a putdown?’

  ‘You never asked anyone before deciding on what
you would settle for…Why bother now?’

  ‘I decided to give civility a chance.’

  He thought he heard a hint of nocturnal regret in the familiar, dangerous laughter. ‘Ah, well, civility doesn’t suit your personality one bit.’

  ‘The perils of ageing, I suppose. Won’t you sit for a bit? We might have words to share.’

  As he walked toward her, he noticed a hint of aluminium in her raven-black hair. ‘Words to share?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, I wanted to ask you why you chose to install a bench for Samar. Here, of all places.’

  ‘This was the place…This was where he was happy.’ He looked out at the sea, surprised by his unhesitating disclosure.

  ‘And you came here with him?’ She thought his face, its youthful angularity, had been sandpapered by time; a river stone now, smooth, timeless.

  ‘Many, many times.’

  Karan had only to shut his eyes to go back to the days when Samar and he came to Marine Drive at dusk.

  One Thursday evening, after a long walk, they had sat on a bench, gazing at the serene sky veined with smouldering orange; the sea had been inexplicably calm. Joggers panted past hunchbacked old men on cement benches. A one-eyed woman was selling a cluster of balloons. A gaggle of housewives, flesh oozing out on their sides, marched with alarming confidence. Cars, ugly metal ribbons, streamed down the main road. With only double-digit T-cells to his name, Samar was so thin a gusty wind could fling him over. Sitting next to Karan, his voice soft but broken, he had said, ‘I could bear everything. Everything. Save for the loneliness. I couldn’t rock it away or pray it down or scare it off. I don’t know when it grew larger than me.’ He paused, rubbed his shins; his mouth was open, as if the pain were smoking the words out of him. ‘Because I have known Bombay, the tolling bells of Babulnath, the tigerish dawns and monsoon’s ravage, because I have shopped in its bazaars, left its parties unsteady on my feet and walked at sundown by the sea, I wonder if it’s too much to ask to be remembered in some small way. No, not a gravestone; that’s too much fuss. Something quiet. And simple. A heap of stones. Far from all things.’