Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  And that was stupid. Baumgartner slapped himself on the wrist, hard. Stupid, stupid, to talk of blood, thinking it was blood he had in common with this ruffian. It was not so. And he would turn the boy out to prove it was not so. Give him some food, then turn him out. What, at night? But why not? The boy was evidently used to living in the streets, would feel at home on them, would not need Baumgartner or the domesticity which he had insulted – so why suffer him?

  The cats stirred at the sound of spoons and plates, some set up a plaintive miaowing as though they had not been fed already, complaining in the calculated tones of street beggars, or spoilt children. Baumgartner only smiled fondly at these sounds he loved, but they made the boy on the divan stir. After throwing himself around for a while, with grunts of protest, he finally sat up on the edge of the divan, his head hanging down on to his lap, rubbing his eyes ferociously.

  After watching for a while, Baumgartner ventured to ask, ‘Had a little rest? You would like to eat something now? I have a little food here ready –’

  The boy made a grinding sound with his teeth, ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it in strands. ‘Is a bathroom here?’ he asked.

  Baumgartner pointed at the door in the corner by the divan and the boy stumbled off. Then re-emerged to pick up his rucksack which he carried in, to Baumgartner’s astonishment. After a while, he came out once more and asked for a box of matches in a low, distracted mumble. Snatching it from Baumgartner, he returned to what seemed to be turning into his fortress. Baumgartner was a little puzzled, then felt impatient, knowing his pish-pash to be drying up to a point beyond the stage when it would still be edible. He busied himself like a housewife, adding bits of butter to it, going around opening windows, turning on lights, smoothing out the coverlet on the divan, but still the boy would not appear.

  He tried to ignore the ominous silence that grew and expanded in the bathroom. He sat down at the table with the dish of pish-pash and the bottle of beer, clasping his hands together and determined to be firm and get rid of the boy as soon as he appeared. ‘Ja, raus, raus,’ he was muttering to himself and to the cats, when the door was flung open and the boy strode out, seeming somehow a foot or two taller, his shoulders broader, his hair and eyes flashing, in every way increased, grown more vivid and insistent. He seemed lit up, electrified, so that whatever had been dormant now seemed awake – and screaming.

  Baumgartner had lifted the beer bottle when he heard the door open, ready to pour out, but now he put it down and gaped in astonishment as the boy swung himself over to the table, laughing, his arms flapping on either side, then threw himself on to a stool across from Baumgartner and sprawled there in all directions.

  ‘Ah-ha, so is the old man’s dinner party, eh?’ he snickered, slurring his words as though he had been drinking behind the door, and yet there was no odour of liquor and Baumgartner had to conclude that was not what it was. He smiled uncertainly, reached out for the boy’s plate and filled it, apologising, ‘A little pish-pash only. It will do? I have some more – and beer.’

  The boy lunged forward and snatched the bottle from Baumgartner’s hands, then – to his dismay – slammed it down on the table so hard that froth spewed from it and flew everywhere over the table like suds. His hand remained clenched around the bottle as though he wanted to crush it into a handful of splinters.

  ‘Nah, none of dis – dis beer,’ he roared, in a voice that was not only enlarged but also raised to an unnatural pitch, both shrill and resonant. ‘Is rubbish only. Make the stomach sick. Sick. Throw away,’ he screamed and, when Baumgartner was sure the bottle would be hurled at his head, he turned it upside down so that the yellow liquid streamed out in jets, flooding the table and falling to the floor where the cats scattered in indignation. Letting the bottle fall on its side, he brought the flat of his hand down on the table-top and swept the flood off, throwing it about like a naughty child playing with mud, in a puddle. ‘Hah, that is how to do wiz beer – wiz dirty zings,’ he bellowed.

  Baumgartner sat upon his chair, paralysed and devastated, both hands holding the sides as though he himself were being shaken and scattered. Up to now he had imagined he was entirely in charge of this lifeless boy flung down limp upon his divan; now he felt himself taken up and threatened, violently.

  The boy was laughing at the dismay on his face, laughing and laughing. His own face was very pale under the dirt – he had certainly not washed while in the bathroom; he still looked as though he had picked himself off a railway platform, an Indian railway platform, and his eyes were concentrated and pinpointed with an animal ferocity.

  Baumgartner’s consternation amused his guest as a fairground might amuse a high-spirited child: he laughed, giggled, pointed his finger and chuckled helplessly, then suddenly stopped, looking over the top of Baumgartner’s head at the shelf behind him.

  ‘What is dat?’ he asked, jabbing his finger at what he saw.

  Baumgartner stared at the finger that jabbed. Then slowly and carefully he withdrew his eyes, turned to the shelf. What could have caught this extraordinary fellow’s attention? On the shelf Baumgartner heaped all the objects he did not immediately want – empty matchboxes, some photographs, an egg-cup, pencils and, yes, a row of tarnished silver trophies. Sadly tarnished – they had been left undusted and unpolished for so long. Embarrassed, Baumgartner turned to face his guest again. ‘These trophies?’

  ‘Ja, ja,’ the boy jerked his chin up and down so that the uncut hair tumbled on his forehead and into his eyes. ‘They are silber, man?’

  Baumgartner nodded a modest nod. ‘I think. I had a horse once – many races he won. A fine horse, Tiffin Time. It was in the year – let me think now –’

  ‘You – you had a racehorse?’ The boy’s face was contorted with disbelief. He could scarcely control his jaw, it wobbled with amazement.

  Baumgartner scratched the back of his neck in embarrassment: he was aware he did not look as if he were a racing man, as though he owned or ever had a racehorse. He chuckled to think of the days when he used to spend Sundays on the Mahaluxmi racecourse in the company of old Chimanlal, mingling with the Bombay society ladies in their silks and chiffons and pearls and the gentlemen in their white suits and field-glasses and gold cigarette-cases. He rubbed his feet together, under the table, chuckling. ‘Ja, it was so,’ he admitted. ‘Once I was in business, had also a business partner, a very good man –’

  ‘But the trophies?’ the boy snapped impatiently. ‘Dese – silver cups – you won, your horse won?’ It seemed a struggle for him to put together such disparate elements in his head.

  ‘Together we had this fine horse, Tiffin Time. For two-three-four years he won many races, race after race. It was wonderful,’ Baumgartner remembered, laughing. ‘And my partner, he gave me the trophies to keep – he said I should have them –’

  ‘Pure silber?’ the boy pursued.

  ‘Ach, I don’t know, I can’t say,’ Baumgartner mumbled, embarrassed by the unlikely wealth piled up and gleaming on the dusty shelf along the dusty wall.

  The boy shot up, throwing back his chair so that it fell on its side, and went round the table, supporting himself with one hand on its edge, to the shelf behind Baumgartner. He picked up the trophies, one by one, turned them about in his hands, turned them upside down, examined them. His lower lip was pushed out so that it looked thick and swollen and moist. He slammed them back on the shelf so that the pencils flew off and the egg cup rattled. He seemed furious now.

  ‘Ja, ja, silber,’ he shouted accusingly. ‘Here, in dis house – all dese silber mugs. It is – fantastic!’

  Baumgartner picked up a spoon, trying to distract his attention. ‘Pliss, eat now before it is all cold,’ he pleaded.

  The boy would not eat anything. He walked up and down beside the table, his arms folded about him as if he were cold.

  ‘You have no appetite?’ Baumgartner asked sadly, looking at his dinner, shrivelled and dry, uneaten on the beer-washed table like wreckag
e in a flood. ‘You have been sick perhaps? In – Goa?’

  ‘Sick, in Goa?’ the boy spat at him, ‘Yes, sick in Goa. Sick in Benares. Sick in Katmandu. Sick in Sarnath, sick, sick everywhere. Oh, I am krank – furchtbar krank,’ he broke into German. It was like a crack in a poorly built dyke and now the flood poured out, streaming over Baumgartner and the cats and the dinner and the whole of the shabby dark room, filling it and setting it afloat on visions of places and people that had never entered before, even in nightmares.

  In Benares he had lived with the doms in the burning ghat. With them, he had piled logs of wood on the funeral pyres. Listened to them haggle and bargain with the families over the prices of wood, then the price of fire – even the fire was not given unless a price was paid. In the heat of the flames he had dried his clothes wet from bathing in the river. From the pyres he had taken the embers to light his cooking fire and make his food. When the fires died down, he helped to scatter the ashes and spear the bits of flesh and bone that remained and fling them down the steps to the river bank where the dogs fell upon the pieces and ate, growling with hunger and greed and possession. He had plunged into the river and bathed there amongst the remains of the carcasses, the buffaloes that came to drink, the widows who bathed in their white shrouds. At night he had slept in the courtyard of the palace of the dom raja, the head of the doms who was grateful to him for coming because no Hindu, no Indian would visit him or invite him or speak to him. He was rich, powerful; tigers of plaster and papier mâché guarded his palace by the river, but he had no friends on earth. Only he, he was a friend of the doms, of the dom raja himself.

  ‘And – the bodies? Did you – also eat?’

  ‘I was a tantric then – I was with the tantrics. With them, yes, I ate. I ate. Why? Why do you look like that? Is only flesh, only meat. For eating. For becoming strong. Strong.’

  The tantrics he had met in the ashram in Bihar where he had lived on a rock, learnt yoga, meditated till one night the devil came to him, dressed only in white ashes, and shaken those ashes on his head. They had danced together on the rock, such a dance, to such music – the beating of drums, the ringing of bells that hung from the devil’s neck – that the swamis who lived in the ashram had rushed out to see what was happening and begun to scream with fear at the sight. They had driven him out, with sticks and slippers, as an emissary of the devil.

  ‘And you did learn yoga?’

  ‘Yoga, yes. I learnt. And many more things. To become strong. To be like the devil.’

  In Kathmandu he had loved a temple priest’s boy, a boy whose skin was like honey and whose tongue was like a hibiscus petal, and grew his nails so long they were like knives. But he had stolen all his money, this boy, his belongings, shoes, clothes, even passport, and told the priest of their love so that he was beaten with iron rods, his bones broken, his blood made to run. In Kathmandu’s dust was mingled his blood. From that blood, a special plant grew, like a sword with a cockerel’s head. The cockerel crowed at dawn, it crowed the name of that boy.

  ‘So one must be strong and destroy that love and I cut it down.’

  In Tibet, in Lhasa, he saw the sight no man was meant to see. The corpses laid on the rocks under the sky, being cut into quarters with knives, into quarters and then into fragments, and the bones hammered till they were dust. When the men who performed this ceremony for the waiting birds saw that he was watching, they drew clouds into the clear sky, lightning out of those clouds, and made the thunder roll. Out of the cloudless blue sky they had loosed a storm upon Lhasa, hailstones the size of eggs, rain in sheets. He had danced in the rain and the hail. When he had turned to thank the magicians for this joy, he had seen them fly into the sky on a streak of lightning and vanish in flames.

  ‘What are you saying? It is all dreams, my friend, mad dreams.’

  ‘No, no dreams. No mad. Is true, true.’

  In Calcutta he had lived with the lepers. They lived together on a refuse tip and lived off what they could scavenge from it. It gave off warmth at night and that kept them alive through a winter, the heat of that refuse decaying under their bodies. By day they fought with the stray dogs for bones, rags, bits of paper on which a little blood, a little egg, a little food was smeared. A leper girl had loved him – he was so white, she thought him pure – but, when her lip began to rot, he left.

  ‘Ach, the poor – poor – poor –’

  ‘Poor? Is not poor! Is great! Is wonderful!’

  In Goa – hah, in Goa what had he not done? In Goa he had lived on the beach in a hut made of coconut tree fronds. In Goa he had bought and sold and lived on opium, on marijuana, on cannabis, on heroin – it was as plentiful as the sand upon the shore, and he had been as rich and as poor as a man can be on earth. He had lived with nudists, posed for tourists’ cameras, sailed with fishermen, swum in the sea with dolphins and sea serpents. During the carnival he had not slept day or night, danced and drunk, drunk till the police had rounded him up with his friends and thrown them into prison.

  ‘In a prison also you have been?’

  ‘No prison for me – I am free wherever I go.’

  In Delhi he had lived on the steps of the mosque, to sell the tourists cannabis and ivory as they came to take photographs. At Id, he had gone down into the bazaar to help slaughter the sacrificial goats and sheep, hundreds and hundreds of goats and lambs and sheep slaughtered for the feast, so that he had stood with his feet in blood, his hands in blood, all of him covered with blood.

  In Lucknow he had walked in the procession at Mohurrum, beating his bare body with a whip, a whip with knotted thongs and slivers of blades inserted into the knots, chanting, ‘Hassan – Hosain – Hassan – Hosain’, while he cut and lashed his body till the blood ran.

  ‘But you have no scars? No wounds?’

  ‘No. I am whole. I make myself whole again and again.’

  In Mathura he had done the parikrama, walked barefoot from temple to temple, bathed in the ponds, drunk from the wells, sung and danced the Krishna songs. At Holi, he and the pilgrims had pelted each other with coloured powders and coloured waters, till they were pink and indigo and purple. They had drunk opium in milk, eaten opium in sweets, smoked opium in pipes.

  ‘So much drugs – what it will do to you?’

  ‘It will make me – ach, great, and happy and great!’

  In Rajasthan he had smuggled cases of opium on camelback, chased by the police across the desert sands. He had been lost in the dunes, he had met other smugglers – men carrying drugs, guns, gold. They had banded together, fought, parted, fled. Only the stars could steer you in the desert.

  ‘Is not safe, such life.’

  ‘But is fine, this life, very fine.’

  In the Himalayas, in the snows beyond the monastery where he stayed, he had met and grappled with a yeti. The yeti had picked him up by his ears, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him down into the icy blue lake of Mansarovar. Pilgrims on the shore had saved him, helped him through the blizzard and brought him back to safety – to become a pilgrim like them, a worshipper. He was seeking now for other temples, other idols, other pilgrimages –

  Stuttering to the end of his inspired recital, he began to run his fingers through his hair distractedly. Now and then he gave an uncontrollable shiver. He shot a furious, scornful look at Baumgartner. ‘And you,’ he sneered. ‘So many years away – what have you seen? Where have you been?’

  Baumgartner looked sheepish, felt confused, shy. ‘Once – when I was a young fellow – many years ago – I was in Venice. Ja, seven days I have in Venice once. Ah, Venice.’ He laid his finger beside his nose and his watery eyes gleamed. ‘It was wonderful. Es war prima.’

  The boy snorted. ‘Venice,’ he sneered, ‘Venice is only drains.’

  Baumgartner tried to protest but the boy was not listening, he was circling the table in a kind of frenzy. The cats hissed and sprang out of his way, sat on ledges and window-seats out of his reach, fastidiously tucking their paws under them an
d staring at him with eyes made huge by apprehension and disapproval.

  ‘It will be all right,’ Baumgartner tried to calm them, and him. ‘I will see what is to do – it will become all right.’

  The boy shouted ‘Dummkopf! Idiot! You think you will lock me up – in hospital? In prison? Police even cannot lock me up. I will run and become free –’

  Baumgartner stumbled to his feet and tried to catch him by his arm, hold him, but was thrown off and nearly struck in the face.

  ‘I go out – and come in, see? I am free, always. I can go out – and come in – then go out – like that, how I want. Now I say I go out – I have to –’ he stood for a moment, swaying, even put his hand out towards Baumgartner, but then pushed him away and made for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Baumgartner called.

  ‘Outside – I must – I have to –’ the boy gasped, groping at the lock. Baumgartner set him free. He leapt away, shouting, ‘I come back later.’ Baumgartner watched as he hurtled down the stairs, crashing from one flight to another. He leant over the banisters and called, ‘And what is your name?’

  ‘Kurt,’ he heard the boy call – he thought he heard the boy call. Or some such name – abrupt, like a blow, or a slash.

  Eventually Baumgartner shuffled back to his room, shutting the door behind him, feeling drained by all the madness. Mad, that was what the boy was, quite mad. In Germany he would have been a delinquent, a criminal. In India he was mad.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IF THE WAR was said to be over in the camp, there was no truce in Calcutta. War raged in its streets every night and when Baumgartner returned to pick his way through them, he blinked uncomprehendingly at what he saw. The streets were black with litter, the lights broken, the odour of decay strong. At Howrah Station, he found himself shrinking, unwilling to step into it. The city made the internment camp seem privileged, an area of order and comfort. In a panic, he wished he could flee, return to that enclosed world, the neat barracks, the vegetable fields, the fixed hours for baths, meals, lectures, drill, the release from the pressures of the outer world. They had listened only to the overseas news on their secret radios, he had not followed what was happening in the immediate environs. What was it – a carnival that had ended in disaster? Riots? Warfare? What could have blighted and blackened this city so that its grim visage lowered out of the smoke and the smog at him so threateningly?