Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  It was Chimanlal who made it possible for him to stay, who provided the mooring – instantly, generously, sympathetically. He had had Habibullah’s letter, he said, but did not seem to require anyone’s recommendation; he acted according to his own instincts which were large, free, always hospitable. Putting aside his work, he took Baumgartner out to lunch. Himself eating only rice and yoghurt, he ordered for Baumgartner an excellent Parsi dish of mutton and dal at the Victory Club that looked out at the sandstone arch of the Gateway of India and the islands floating in the sea like upturned bowls of tan and ochre ceramic. The ships stood still on the sea, metallic and dart-shaped, but the boats bobbed lightheartedly up and down along the quay. There were still British soldiers in khaki swarming everywhere but Chimanlal said, with a clap of his hands, ‘Like this – they will go. Soon all will go and we will be left alone.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Of course.’ Chimanlal bounced up and down in his chair with confidence. ‘You should have seen – if you had been here in February, you would have seen – the naval strike. Here, Mr Bommgarter, right here, on the HMS Talwar. The ratings went on strike because British officers were insulting them and giving them poor food also. Next day, twenty-two more ships in the harbour went on strike, and the men in the Castle and Fort barracks also. They flew our tricolour on their masts, Mr Bommgarter, I wish you could have seen, it was so fine. Then the army arrived, and there was fighting in the barracks, and the ships were providing artillery, and bombers were going to destroy the fleet. All of us brought food for the brave ratings, Mr Bommgarter. I offered them everything I had. But the strike spread all over the city – CPI called for a general strike – and there was fighting in the streets. Nearby, Mr Bommgarter, in Parel and de Lisle Road. Oh, we were winning, we would have won – but what did the Congress do?’ He made a disgusted face. ‘Gandhi-ji in his white cap – he came and said, “No fighting, no violence.” And the ratings had to surrender, and it came to an end, our glorious revolt.’

  Baumgartner made a vague, sympathetic gesture of his hands over the empty trays of food; he knew it was not for him, an outsider and a foreigner, to comment.

  He did not need to; Chimanlal was ebullient again. ‘But they will have to go – soon, soon. Now they themselves are saying they will go, they cannot stay. So you will see our flag flying soon, Mr Bommgarter – British flag will go, Union Jack will go, our flag will fly instead from the top of the Red Fort, and we will not sing ‘God Save the King’, we will sing our own anthem written by our great poet Rabindranath. In Calcutta you must have heard of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore?’

  Baumgartner nodded, but at the mention of Calcutta could not refrain from asking, ‘And the Muslims, Mr Chimanlal?’

  Chimanlal gave him a surprised look. The delight on his face became tempered. ‘You are worrying about the Muslims, Mr Bommgarter?’

  ‘I am worried about Habibullah,’ Baumgartner admitted to that, no more. ‘He was so good, so kind to me. He gave me much business – before the war, before I went to the camp. But last time I went to the office – he was gone. The office was burnt – I think looted. Where did he go?’

  ‘Ah, my friend, you don’t need to worry about Habibullah. Habibullah is much cleverer than Hindu goondas, Hindu thugs. He will have taken all his wealth with him – he must be in Dacca now, the home of his ancestors, happy and safe.’

  ‘You think so?’ Baumgartner looked doubtful. He had no reason to believe in such fairy-tale escapes. ‘And his family?’

  ‘His family also,’ Chimanlal assured him in his sunny manner. He did not allow any cloud near him, repelled them by his warmth and the sunshine of his optimism, as Baumgartner was to learn over the years. Now he dipped his fingers in a bowl of water and wiped them desultorily. ‘And Habibullah sent you to me, eh? We are going to do business together, eh?’

  Baumgartner had his doubts, his uncertainties, but Chimanlal never entertained any. Baumgartner could not discover why he took up a homeless foreigner, not even one with the prestige of having been an erstwhile ruler, a part of the colonial might and power, but simply a stray, a pariah in the eyes of the raj, clearly the most powerless of all. Perhaps Chimanlal had a sense of history after all and felt it morally just to support someone who had been on the right side during the war, a fellow-enemy of the British. But such a motivation crumbled when Baumgartner learnt how hazy an interest Chimanlal really had in politics and history. Chimanlal had made his first fortune, he confessed, in the family’s jewellery business, through another Jew, a Russian who had fled from the Bolsheviks by way of China and, landing in a small port on the coast of Gujarat where Chimanlal’s family had its base, sold that family the gems he had brought in the linings of his jacket, gems he said had belonged to the Czar and Czarina of his abandoned land, and that Chimanlal was able to sell, on his behalf, to the Nizam of Hyderabad, earning a considerable commission for himself. Baumgartner wondered briefly if the fact that he had made this fortune through a Jew had influenced his generous behaviour towards Baumgartner, but found out later that Chimanlal’s thinking was of a much more ignorant, uninformed and mercenary order. Who was that Russian Jew? Baumgartner questioned. Where had he come from, how did he come into the possession of the Czar’s jewels? Chimanlal was embarrassed, could not answer. He thought the man’s name was Gin – Gin – Bug, something like that. Ginzburg? Baumgartner asked. Yes, yes, Ginzburg, came from Russia. Where in Russia? Chimanlal smiled, spread his hands, showed that they were empty of information. ‘I am not educated much,’ he told Baumgartner.

  The freedom movement certainly had stirred something in his soft, pendulous breast under the crisp white cotton kurta, even if he had made much of his money by supporting the British war effort and supplying the British army. He told Baumgartner with pride that both Gandhi and Sardar Patel came from Gujarat, that he had heard Patel speak, when he was a young man, in his village, before he came to Bombay to run the family’s jewellery business. And now the business had grown so much – jewellery was only one of his interests, timber another, but he also traded in leather, in bauxite, in iron ore, chemicals, aluminium, paper, spices – a whole empire of business, it seemed, and of course he could accommodate Baumgartner, quite easily.

  He began, that blistering afternoon with the light coming off the sea like metal that had melted in it and was being drawn off in shivering silver sheets, by taking Baumgartner to a house, Hira Niwas, a tall stucco four-storeyed building in a dark lane behind the grandiose pile of the Taj Hotel, which was owned by a relation of his – he could have been merely a friend, but Chimanlal called every man ‘brother’. He arranged for Baumgartner to rent a small flat in it for a price that was reasonable considering its location (he seemed to feel that as a foreigner Baumgartner could live nowhere but in the vicinity of the Taj). When Baumgartner had deposited his bag there, checked to see if water ran from the taps in the sink, if the shutters in the window opened and shut and if the door locked, he took him back again to his office which was in the more noisy and bustling quarter of Kalbadevi, near the huge Eros cinema and the Gothic walls of St Xavier’s College, the Parsi fire temple and the Parsi shops for little black caps, white vests and sticks of sandalwood, the Parsi dairy and sweet and confectionery shops, tattered secondhand bookshops, crowded tea stalls with glittering mirrors. Here he had a single office room, scarcely bigger than a cubicle, off a staircase in a seedy building that housed an Irani restaurant at street level, a tailoring establishment above it, a school for typing and shorthand, a dentist, a polyclinic and a dozen other small business establishments like his own.

  He lowered himself on to a low divan spread with spotless white sheets, lounged aginst a white bolster under a lithograph of his patron goddess, freshly garlanded with marigolds and wreathed in spirals of richly sweet smoke from perfumed joss sticks. Perhaps she was the reason, Baumgartner thought, for Chimanlal’s bland, imperturbable optimism and confidence and the good humour that he exuded like glistening perspirat
ion (the office had no cooling arrangement other than the old and decrepit electric ceiling fan). Several times in the course of their talk he bowed to the oleograph on the wall, clasped his hands in prayer and murmured, ‘If Lakshmi wills it, it will succeed. Everything is in Lakshmi’s hands.’

  Baumgartner found it disquieting to begin with – he had never left anything in the hands of the gods, and would not have known which ones to chose from the plethora available in India – or which of their many hands for that matter – but he found that if he were to work for Chimanlal, he would have to humour Chimanlal’s beliefs and ways. Chimanlal showed him the ways in which he could be of use to him and how he could earn a reasonable commission, and he came and went with his orders and transactions, always doubtful if Lakshmi would guide him as well while he conducted Chimanlal’s latest ventures – transporting bauxite down Goa’s rivers to its ports on the Arabian Sea, setting up a factory for aluminium pots and pans in the hinterland of Gujarat – and was surprised to find he could secure orders and get business done so satisfactorily as to make Chimanlal smile broadly and turn around and bow to his garlanded goddess in thanksgiving so profound, so humble that it made Baumgartner look away in embarrassment.

  On one of these business trips, Baumgartner found he had to change trains at a small junction out in the flat, red-soiled barren country where he would have to waste nearly a whole day. The train from Bombay deposited him there on a blazing morning with the sun pouring on to the corrugated iron roof like smelt from a foundry, then drew away, leaving him on a wooden bench, mopping his neck with a handkerchief that grew quickly soiled and grubby, and idly watching a miserable pair of rhesus monkeys in a small pipal tree that they had stripped of leaves, grooming each other with dissatisfied expressions on their small pinched faces. Other travellers lay on mats or bedrolls spread out on the station platform, only once in a while raising a hand to brush away flies or languidly wave a palm leaf fan. Coolies in their red shirts sat on their haunches smoking bidis and waiting for the next train to arrive. A station-master in a white uniform badly in need of washing, ironing and mending, came out of his office to advise Baumgartner to eat. ‘It is not good to sit for so long without food,’ he reprimanded Baumgartner who was surprised: surely the station-master ought to know his timetable and understand the reason why Baumgartner had such a long wait. To placate the man – perhaps he was preventing him from going off to enjoy his own lunch – he got up and went to a food barrow where a vendor served him with some potato fritters in a leaf cup. Afraid that the station-master might be watching, Baumgartner tried to eat them but the chillies defeated him and he let them drop under the bench. Instantly a stray dog dashed up and snatched it as though a whole horde were after it, and some crows did soon alight to try and get a share. Baumgartner took a cup of sweet milky tea from the vendor and drank that although it made him mop his face even more frequently. The afternoon slowly dragged itself over the breadth of the corrugated iron roof, then finally began to fall westwards. There were still some hours to wait – Baumgartner’s train did not arrive till late in the evening. Why had no one warned him? He felt anger at being sent off uninformed and unprepared but, as usual, the anger rebounded on him, its ultimate cause.

  It made him get to his feet and walk down the length of the platform and out of the station. Behind the station sheds and yards there was a township of a sort – some stucco houses with doors painted green and blue and pink, several shacks of tin and rag and cardboard. Open gutters ran outside them along which children squatted, women washed and dogs lapped. They looked up in suspicious amazement to see him pass but he tried not to meet their eyes, to walk on. The vendors of cigarettes and soft drinks called to him from their barrows but he wanted neither. There were grain and oil stores, the usual workshop with lathes and sparkling welding machines. String cots were dragged out into the dust of lanes, and cooking fires lit. When he had walked past and left behind these habitations, he came upon some cattle foraging for fodder in the dry, friable soil of the barren land, a herdsboy sitting on a stone, whistling. He walked on, leaving them behind too.

  The road petered out into the stony dirt. There was no sign of fields, of agriculture, or irrigation or habitation. There was the red sandy dust, and the black volcanic rocks. The dumb unrelenting flatness of the iron earth at last gave way to a slight swell. Baumgartner, unable to face the walk back through the township again, decided to climb that low hill, if such a name could be given it. Who knows, he sighed, perhaps on the other side there was something to see – golden valley, flowering grove or still pool. He had to laugh at his own stupidity. No, of course, there would be nothing but this red dust, this black stone, sun and barren space. But perhaps the hilltop offered something – at least there was a tumble of rocks to be seen on it, crouching like a beast for protection from heights, views, space. He would go up and sit there for a while. The dust crept into his shoes, lay in a red film on his socks and trouser cuffs, and the stones stubbed against his toes. Still, a little movement could be felt in the air – not exactly a breeze, but at least a stir, and it gave him the energy to complete that climb.

  Yes, there were rocks piled there on the bony spine of the hill. Baumgartner surmised that they had been placed together to form a kind of cave. It was clearly no temple of famed carvings and fabulous idols such as heaped the rest of the country with their artistic splendour – no, it was Baumgartner’s luck to have come to a part of the country that had been left out of such abundance – but he felt it must be something ancient and primitive anyway.

  He stood for a while on that mean summit, while a pair of kites wheeled in the colourless, featureless sky as if they had sighted him and were wondering if he was worthy prey before they swooped. Baumgartner remembered stories he had heard of eagles who were fed at a temple, who flew free and ranged everywhere but returned every evening to be fed by the temple priest. Where was that temple? Not this one, of course. No one could have heard of this one, there was nothing to say about it and it was probably nameless. He was, in fact, not quite certain that it was a temple at all. True, now that he had paused and looked about him, he could see that there was a path of sorts leading from the small town across the flat land to this hillock – he saw its grey trail through the rusty earth from this height. So it was used, people came here, to see – what?

  Finally he lowered himself to fit the crack that made an entrance into the rocks, and found that if he overcame his squeamishness about dark places, it was possible to enter. He edged his large bulk into the small space bravely and for a moment struggled with a vision of having his face clawed by escaping birds or – worse – bats. He could smell them, that rank urinary odour that one could expect in such dark caves. But he heard no squeak of bat voices or flap of bat wings; they had left only their odour here. Or was it that? Could it perhaps belong to something else – like an idol?

  Although his eyes were growing accustomed to the dark, he still could make out nothing in that inner chamber. There was no vent or shaft for light or air. Although it was so well sealed from the heat of the sun, it was not cool either; on the contrary, the heat seemed to thicken and congeal here, like spilt blood, into a dark clot.

  Very cautiously Baumgartner moved forwards, his feet feeling the uneven surface of the stone flooring. When he thought he was in the centre of the chamber, he stopped. Actually, it was something that stopped him, but he could not tell what. Neither his feet nor his outstretched hands struck anything. He had heard nothing. But he was certain there was an object there. Trying to stand still and breathe calmly, he told himself it could be an idol. What kind of idol? Could it be that black, engorged penis he had seen in roadside shrines, or an oxen hump, placid and bovine, some swollen udder of blood? He strained his eyes to see but his eyes had never met with such total blackness. The darkness itself was a presence. Abandoned the temple might be but he could swear it was not empty. Something was blocking the chamber, emanating a stench, and watching him, with an uncanny stea
lth, not betraying itself by the slightest sound or motion. The silence thundered in his ears. After listening to its beat for a long time, he finally lowered his head – he could hear the small bones of his neck grate against each other – and down by his foot he made out a flat slab of black stone and upon it a rounded projection, also of black stone. The reason he could make it out in that thick darkness was that someone had smeared it with red powder, or paste, which reflected some small trickle of light that came through the slit of the entrance. Something fragile and dry lay curved around it – perhaps a marigold garland, dried up. Perhaps a snake skin, or even a snake. What did this black stone profess to be that it was so honoured? Baumgartner would have liked to know. The chamber seemed to hold a secret. If Baumgartner could find out that secret –

  He swivelled his head slowly, listening to the bones creak. But there was no one to tell him – no priest, no pilgrim. No voice, no song, not even a dim inscription scratched into the black fur that coated the stones.

  He was certain now that there was nothing here but what he could dimly make out. Then what was it that was so stealthily watching him, breathing so malignly down his neck, raising the small hairs on his back as if he were faced with danger, with death? It had to be something, even if only a deadly spider, or scorpion. But it was not that kind of fear and Baumgartner knew it was not a spider or a scorpion. It was just a stone. A black blob, spat out by some disdainful god, to land at his feet and then solidify, blocking his way.