So, then, quit! said the wicked angel on his left shoulder. Nobody cares but you.
The wicked angel on his left shoulder was the shadow. But on his right shoulder sat the cherub of the light, cheering him, urging him on, refusing self-pity. The sun still rose every day. He still had determination, energy, and the habit of work. He took heart from the great Muhammad Ali regaining his crown after the long wilderness years, defeating George Foreman in Zaire. He, too, could hope for a rumble in some welcoming jungle. Sam DuChamp, bomaye. Kill him, Sam the Sham.
And so to Quichotte’s birthplace, which was also his own, to examine certain intimate matters which were at once extremely close and impossibly distant. The technical term for such matters was family. A good enough starting point for a tale about obsessional love.
* * *
—
MANY, MANY YEARS AGO, when the sea was clean and the night was safe, there was a road called Warden Road (not called that anymore) in a neighborhood called Breach Candy (still called that, more or less) in a city called Bombay (not called that now). Everything started there and even though his story and Quichotte’s were both travelers’ tales, journeying through many places and arriving in this strange and fantastic land, America, all their roads led back to Bombay if you ran the movie backwards. The origin point of Brother’s whole world was a little group of maybe a dozen houses on a low hill served by a nameless dead-end lane (nameless no longer; Shakari Bhandari Lane, the maps now called it, even though nobody knew where that was), dwarfed by the megacity that now surrounded them. He closed his eyes and walked backwards across continents and years, twirling his cane like Raj Kapoor’s imitation-Chaplin tramp, only in reverse. Backwards up the nameless-but-now-named lane he went, past the (real) apartment building where the (fictional) Smile family once lived, called Dil Pazir, which is to say, acceptable to the heart…and arrived at a similar building (also real) named Noor Ville, the city of light, and inside it on an upper floor a long-balconied apartment filled with soft cushions, sharp cactus plants, and the unmistakable yodelings of the famous golden-voiced sisters Lata and Asha singing the latest hit songs from the movies on the Binaca Geetmala, the weekend chart show sponsored by a toothpaste brand, emanating every Sunday from the walnut-marquetry Art Deco Telefunken radiogram in the living room. And in the middle of the living room’s large Persian rug, martini glasses in their hands, here were his Ma and Pa, in backwards slow motion, dancing.
(That Breach Candy was a tiny, lost world, long gone, preserved in the amber of memory like a prehistoric insect. Or: a miniature universe, the past captured under a glass dome, like a tropical snow globe without snow, and in it the tiny people of the past leading their microscopic lives. If the glass broke and they escaped into the great world beyond their boundary, how terrified they would be of the giants all around them, as terrified as he had been when he encountered the titans of his adult world! Yet, minute as they were, the whole future flowed from them. The little tropical snow globe without snow was the birthplace of everything Brother had been and done.)
His parents’ favorite LP was Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Ma, always more up-to-the-minute than her husband, liked some of the quiffed Americans. Ricky Nelson. Bobby Darin. But not only the white boys. Also Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters singing “Money Honey.” Not Elvis! She was scornful about the truck driver from Tupelo. Who cared about his pelvis or his curling upper lip? Who wanted to step on his blue suede shoes, which were Carl Perkins’s footwear first, anyway?
He let the film behind his closed eyes run forward now. His father owned and ran a celebrated jewelry store called Zayvar Brother on Warden Road, at the foot of the hill where they lived. Brother’s grandfather, his father’s father, had opened it long ago, and Pa had proved to be an even finer designer and maker of beautiful things than his dad. Zévar meant “ornamentation” in Urdu and Zayvar was the Anglophile patriarch’s Englishing of the word. He had been an only child, the old man, but he thought Brothers was a businesslike name, and if he couldn’t use the plural, the singular would do just as well. Thus, Zayvar Brother, a brother without a brother. People had started calling the whiskered old gentleman Brother Sahib, Mr. Brother, and the name stuck. After grandfather had taken his leave, Pa became Mr. Brother Junior, and so, in time, Brother would be Mr. Brother too. Mr. Brother the Third.
A few doors down from the jewelers was Ma’s own little enterprise, the idiosyncratic Cakes & Antiques, a front room boasting the best patisserie in the city and a back room in which treasures from all over South Asia could be found: Chola bronzes in perfect condition, lively Company School paintings, enigmatic seals from Mohenjo-daro, nineteenth-century embroidered shawls from Kashmir. When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, “Because these are the things I love.”
The quality and originality of the two establishments, combined with Pa’s and Ma’s inescapable charisma, turned both Zayvar Brother and Cakes & Antiques into Places Where Everybody Went. Amitabh Bachchan bought emerald necklaces for his wife, Jaya, at Zayvar, Mario Miranda and R. K. Laxman offered Ma their original cartoons in return for her chocolate cakes, and “Busybee,” Behram Contractor, the chronicler of everyday life for le tout Bombay, loitered around both stores watching the cream of the city come and go, listening for the latest gossip.
Ma and Pa’s home, too, was full of the artistic and famous. Creative people of all sorts passed through their storied drawing room. The great playback singers Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle were there in person (though never at the same time!). Also cricketers—Vinoo Mankad and Pankaj Roy, the heroes who in January 1956 shared a world-record opening partnership of 413 runs against New Zealand in Madras! The poet Nissim Ezekiel came to call—the bard of Bombay, the island city he deemed “unsuitable for song as well as sense.” Even the great painter Aurora Zogoiby herself came over, along with that no-talent buffoon hanger-on of hers, Vasco Miranda, but that’s another story. And, it being Bombay, also movie people, inevitably. Talent, talent everywhere, lubricated by whisky-sodas and lust. There were political arguments, aesthetic disputes, sexual hijinks, and martinis. And towering over it all like the still-mostly-in-the-future skyscrapers that would arrive soon enough to change the city forever, were tall Ma and even taller Pa, twirling together slowly, sipping their drinks, she so graceful, he so handsome, and both of them deeply in love.
And because of such intensive and prolonged childhood overexposure to creative genius of all types, Brother too, like his incipiently crazy Quichotte, fell victim to a rare form of mental disorder—his first, paranoia being the second—in the grip of which the boundary between art and life became blurred and permeable, so that at times he was incapable of distinguishing where one ended and the other began, and, even worse, was possessed of the fool’s conviction that the imaginings of creative people could spill over beyond the boundaries of the works themselves, that they possessed the power to enter and transform and even improve the real world. Most of his fellow humans, past and present, treated this proposition with scorn and continued down their personal paths in the pragmatic, ideological, religious, self-serving, venal spheres in which, for the most part, the real life of the world was lived. Brother, however—thanks to his parents’ circle—was incurable. Even though he afterwards grew up to earn a living in the lowbrow world of genre fiction, his respect for those with higher foreheads remained undimmed. Many years later, the writing of Quichotte would be his belated, end-of-life attempt to cross the frontier separating low culture from high.
He stopped the film. That wasn’t true. That was a fairy tale. That culture- and love-blessed boho infancy. Parents like his were mysteries to their children in those days. They didn’t spend much time with their offspring, they employed domestic staff to do that, and they didn’t tell the little creatures much about their lives or answer any how or why questions, and only a few inquiries
that began what, when, or where. The how and why questions were the big ones, and on those matters their lips were sealed. They married young and had two children: Brother and Sister, whom Pa nicknamed Tweety Pie because she was the canary of the family, the only one who could sing. Then—this was where the fairy tale broke down—when Brother was ten years old and Sister was five, Ma and Pa separated. Ma was the one to move out, and after that there was a second apartment in the children’s lives, in Soona Mahal (real name), on the corner of Marine Drive and Churchgate (now officially Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Road and Veer Nariman Road, or VN Road). It was rumored that both Ma and Pa had been multiply unfaithful to each other—oh, the lives of the bohemians, those wild, crazy folks!—but the children never saw any Other Woman in Pa’s bedroom, nor, at Ma’s new place, where Brother and Sister mostly lived during the Separation, did they meet any Other Man. If the parents had committed or were committing the bruited indiscretions, they did so in the most discreet fashion. Pa continued to do his work at Zayvar Brother, and Ma was a few steps away at Cake & Antiques, and life went on as normal, in spite of the crackle of things unsaid, audible to all who visited either location, in spite of the hum of the little wall-hung electric fans. And then, almost ten years later, just like that!, they reunited, and the Soona Mahal apartment went poof! even though it had come to feel like home to both children, and then they were back in Noor Ville, and the parents resumed their martini-hour dancing, as if the long years of the Separation were the fantasy, and not this reinvented idyll.
Further corrections: By the time of his parents’ reunion Brother was twenty and at university in Cambridge, so he wasn’t around to watch them begin to dance again. And neither Soona Mahal nor Noor Ville felt like home anymore to a young man intoxicated by the sixties in the West. Meanwhile Sister, at fifteen, stayed in Bombay. At first, the siblings tried to preserve some sort of relationship by playing long-distance chess with each other like good smart Indian children, sending postcards with their moves written in the old descriptive notation, P-K4, P-K4, P-Q4, PxP. But eventually a rift cracked open between the two of them. He was older but she was better than him, and he, a bad loser, stopped wanting to play. Meanwhile Sister, stuck at home watching the nightly parental twirling, grew resentful, understanding that in spite of her academic brilliance Ma and Pa were not inclined to lavish a foreign education on her. Feeling (quite rightly) like the less-loved child, she saw Brother (quite rightly) as the unjustly favored son, and her rage at her parents expanded like an exploding star to engulf her sibling as well. The rift deepened and by now had lasted a lifetime. They had fought, stopped speaking, lived in different cities—he in New York, she in London (after she fought her way out of the cage of her family)—and no longer met. Decades passed. They were trapped in the drama from which their parents had escaped. Pa and Ma performed The Grand Reconciliation until the end of their lives. That was their happy-ending script. Sister and Brother, silently, and far apart, enacted The Death of Love.
Seventeen years ago, their mother had died peacefully in her sleep after a last day in which she drove her car, visited friends, and dined out. She came home from her perfect day, lay down, and flew away. Sister had caught a plane home immediately, but by the time her flight landed Pa was dead as well, unable to live without Ma. There was an empty bottle of sleeping pills on his nightstand by the bed in which he had been slain by her unbearable absence. Sister called Brother in New York to tell him about the double tragedy. After that there was only one further telephone conversation, a conversation which killed whatever sibling affection remained.
Then, nothing. An empty cloud filled the space where family should have been. Brother hadn’t met Sister’s fashionista daughter, Daughter; she hadn’t met his dropout son, Son. Son was his lost child. His only child, who had broken up with him, too, who had broken up with both his parents, and disappeared. (And now here was Quichotte, his invention, inventing a child for himself and bringing him to life. There wasn’t much doubt about where that idea had originated.) There were times when Brother thought of himself as an only child as well. No doubt Sister often felt the same way. But only children don’t have, in the shadows of their souls, a deep wound where once there had been a younger sister’s kiss, an older brother’s safe embrace. Only children don’t, in their old age, have to listen to their inner voice asking accusatory questions, how can you treat your sister like this, your own sister, don’t you want to fix things, don’t you see that you should. So he had been thinking about her, about everyone he had lost but mainly about her, weighing the benefits of putting down the burden of their quarrel and making peace before it was too late against the risk of triggering one of her nuclear rages, and unsure if he possessed the courage to make some sort of approach. If he was honest with himself he knew it was up to him to make the first move, because she had a deeper grievance than he did. In a quarrel that had lasted for decades neither party could claim to be innocent. But the simple truth was that, in plain language, he had done her wrong.
* This is partly because his relationship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on this page.
Miss Salma R, the exceptional woman (and total stranger) to whom Quichotte had declared his undying devotion, came from a dynasty of adored ladies. Think of her family this way: Granny R was Greta Garbo, a great actress who for unexplained reasons abruptly retreated from the world, declaring that she disliked people and open spaces and wanted to be alone. Mummy R was Marilyn Monroe, very sexy and very fragile, and she stole the sportsman prince (a real honest-to-goodness prince) whom Grace Kelly wanted to marry and that became Daddy, who left Mummy for an English photographer smack in the middle of her last movie shoot, and after that Mummy entered a long decline and was eventually found dead in her bedroom, fatally echoing Marilyn’s destiny with bottles of pills lying open and empty on her nightstand. And Miss Salma R? She did not inherit Granny’s acting genius or Mummy’s super sexiness, everyone agreed on that, but her genes did grant her considerable beauty, ease in front of the cameras, as well as violent mood swings and a fondness for recreational and mind-soothing painkillers. As a result, unsurprisingly, she ended up in Hollywood.
That was her Bombay history briefly translated into American. The official version could be summarized in the following few words: “She had led a charmed life. She came from fame and money and made even more money and achieved even greater fame on her own, becoming the first Indian actress to make it big (very big) in America, to cross what might be called the -wood bridge from Bolly- to Holly-, and then transcended even Hollywood to become a brand, a television talk-show superstar and titanic cultural influencer, in America and India too.” The truth was more complex. So then, a longer version: Yes, she was Indian movie royalty, a third-generation member of a family of female legends. Her grandmother, Miss Dina R, had starred in half a dozen of the grand classic neorealist films made in the decade after independence. However, the great star mysteriously fell prey to a whole wolf pack of phobias and dark mental troubles, succumbing to long, silent bouts of the deep blues (which Winston Churchill called the black dog and Miss Holly Golightly would later rename the mean reds) and alternating spells of loud babbling hysteria. She retreated into her beachfront Juhu mansion, remaining behind a veil of secrecy for the rest of her life, never responding to the salacious speculation about her madness that bounced harmlessly off her property’s high walls, and until her dying day kept the lights on in her bedroom at night because she was afraid of cockroaches and lizards in the dark. She also broke off all contact with her husband, a well-known Bombay physician whom everyone called Babajan—Baba being an honorific title of respect and jan meaning “darling”—but they never divorced. They lived in separate suites of the Juhu mansion and went about their separate lives. When she ran into him in a corridor by chance, she recoiled as if he were a dangerous intruder, and often actually ran away. After her
death by suicide (an overdose of sleeping pills) Babajan told his few remaining friends mournfully that the balance of her mind had been long disturbed and the end was “inevitable.”
Her daughter, Miss Salma R’s mother, the renowned sexpot star Miss Anisa R, remained close to her father for a while, but even before her mother’s death Anisa and her father, too, were estranged. Not long after she stopped talking to Babajan she seduced the national cricket captain away from her best friend, Nargis Kumari, also an iconic movie actress. The cricketer was the dashing young raja of Bakwas Senior, popularly known as “the Raj,” the prince of a tiny central Indian state (on no account to be confused with the distinctly tinier and obviously much less important state of Bakwas Junior), whose ancestor had once considered employing as private secretary a homosexual Englishman named Forster who was thinking of writing a novel about a passage to India, and looking for a job. (He didn’t hire him. Another trivial princeling did.) Yes! A blueblood! But the Raj’s true aristocracy was to be seen not in his family tree but in the grace and power of his shot-making on the cricket field, his imperious square cuts, his graceful leg glances, his powerful cover drives and autocratic hook shots. He married Miss Salma R’s mother in a glamorous three-day wedding at the Taj Palace Hotel in Bombay (a daring, avant-garde affair, because Hindu-Muslim marriages were rare, then as now, even among the elite). Soon afterwards, in an accident described by his jilted ex-fiancée Nargis Kumari as “God’s will,” he lost the lower half of his right leg in a car crash on Marine Drive. However, defying divine judgment, he regained his place in the team, wooden leg and all, and became one of the sport’s true immortals. They had one daughter, whom he professed to love more than life, but that was before he was overwhelmed by the difficulty of dealing with his wife’s Technicolor depressions, the blues, blacks, and reds, and the intervening manias which came in different colors, most often green because during these upswings she went on insane spending sprees, acquiring precious antiquities on the black market at absurdly inflated prices. In the end he retired from cricket and abandoned Miss Anisa R, their daughter Miss Salma R, and his royal inheritance, and ran off to the UK—once again, the peg leg did not prove to be a hindrance—to set up house in a suite at Claridge’s hotel which he shared with the previously mentioned English photographer, Margaret Ellen Arnold, who had been sent to do a location story about the film-star wife and left with the husband instead.
Quichotte Page 4
