Mumbai Noir

by Altaf Tyrewala

  Her mother-in-law’s voice softened: “At least ask my permission next time you want to do something like this. We could have thought of something that would not go against anyone’s feelings, na?”

  Anita did not look up. She heard the word feelings and drew in. When she did look up, she saw Suman lurking behind the kitchen door, watching the scene.

  She took an extra pill that day. She did not dare bring up the incident with Mitesh. All she told him was that the maharaj had left and her husband smiled and said, “Well, you didn’t like him much anyway, no? But he was a good cook. Ask Parul-behn to help you find a new one.”

  It was true. Anita was not entirely unhappy that the maharaj was gone. She had never liked this man who tyrannized her kitchen with his overbearing disgruntled manner. She abhorred his rasping voice and the little gold studs in his ears. She hated the way she could see his striped shorts under his white kurta and dhoti. She used to find him muttering to himself while kneading dough, a strange smile on his sunburned face. He terrorized her. Once, he dared to sneak up to the bedroom door and saw her holding an unlit cigarette. He stared at her as if he had caught her naked and she spent the rest of the day hiding in her bedroom. She was convinced he would tell her mother-in-law or discuss it with the other cooks when they gathered in the evening at the street corner. She had meant to talk to Mitesh about the evil maharaj, but by the time he came home, she would slowly be entering her pink cave. She would only remember again in the morning when the maharaj asked her to order the food for the day, staring at her breasts while she gave her instructions: chana daal, doodhi, thepla, and your chopped-up penis, you son of a bitch. After a while, she let him decide what to make so that they didn’t have to interact.

  The phone rang. Anita’s sister-in-law Parul said that the new maharaj could only come the next day. Anita felt despondent and desperately wanted to call her mother. But her mother was dead. Anita put on her black tights and a new white kurti with silver crochet at the end of the sleeves. She slipped on a diamond bangle. She then picked a pair of wedge heels and walked down the stairs. She hated the lift; its doors shut with a metallic clang, leaving her in a digital conundrum as it heaved up and down. She was always afraid that she would get trapped inside and the oxygen would run out.

  In the building foyer, she ran into her neighbor Arti, and they hugged each other. They occasionally met for tea. Arti was always busy, going here and there with her Amway products, peddling enormous jars of vitamins, detergent, and protein supplements. She hardly ever had the time to sit and listen to Anita’s nonstories.

  “So I heard about your maharaj,” Arti said with a smile. “And my maharaj told me that after he left your home, he was caught urinating on the road next to the governor’s bungalow. He got into a fight with the police constable who caught him and spent a night in the Malabar Hill station lock-up. He has told everyone that it was all because of the egg that you brought into the house. He said you were cursed. What to say! These people will never change.”

  “I always knew he was trouble. I’m happy he has gone,” said Anita. “The only problem is that we have to go downstairs and eat dinner with the monster these days.”

  They both laughed and walked out of the building together.

  “See you at Gold’s Gym tomorrow,” Anita said.

  “If I’m back in time, I’ll come in the evening for tea. I want to see that new crystal Swarovski Ganesh you bought at the exhibition,” Arti said. “And I’ll bring you a fresh stock of hand sanitizer.” She waved and walked off with her big bag slung on her shoulder.

  Anita got into a taxi and directed it to Dr. Jain’s clinic on the other side of Napean Sea Road, in a building called Doctor Center. It had been three years since she started going to him, after someone in their Lion’s Club recommended him for migraines. He had diagnosed her with something that she didn’t understand. And she had blindly started taking the pills he prescribed, never paying attention to what they were, never discussing them with anyone else. All she knew was that they made her feel better. Sometimes they slowed her down. Or they hyperaccentuated what was happening around her, making her feel like she was a part of one of the reality television shows she loved to watch, filled with drama and intrigue and dangerous people. They took her away from herself. They worked.

  Dr. Jain’s clinic was on the first floor, a small room with fake wood paneling that ran all around. She stared at the wood; a faint brown powder had begun to trickle down from it. It was exactly like the powder that had been forming a regular trail under the wood panel that ran the length of her living room, swept off every day by Rajkiran, only to return again and again. She was overwhelmed by the thought of termites taking over her entire flat, leaving only a sea of fine powder. She had spoken to the Tirupati Towers manager about it, but the society did not permit pest control treatment because it went against the community’s religious beliefs. We do not kill living things, she was told. She tried to argue with the manager, saying that the entire building could eventually collapse, but he called her a blasphemer and suggested that she stay out of men’s business. What would he do if he found out that she had been secretly bringing eggs into their pristine society with its big marble statue-cum-fountain of Krishna in the foyer?

  She was back home with a new vial of pills, staring at the wood powder for a long time, she didn’t even know how long.

  She had already forgotten about the dhotis and the pencils.

  The bell rang and the photograph in the hallway lit up.

  “Mummy has sent the food, bhabhi,” said Suman, bringing three hot plastic cases and a tiffin to the dining table.

  Ever since the cook had left, her mother-in-law had been sending food upstairs. One daal, two vegetables, and a dozen thin rotis slathered with ghee to keep them soft and smooth. Suman boiled rice, which was easy enough. At dinnertime, they went down to the floor below and ate with Mitesh’s parents. The two men would sit on one side of the room and analyze the market’s movements. Mitesh’s mother would come out of her evening meditation and then try and coax her granddaughter to start attending Saturday-morning pathshala lessons at the temple. Anita would try and focus on Tarini’s homework: Contour maps. English spelling. Marathi.

  Anita continued to sit on her living room sofa, staring at the invisible termites. She felt them crawling all over her body. Suman spoke to her softly.

  “Bhabhi, while you were out, the maharaj came to finish the hisaab and collect his dues …” She paused. “Bhabhi, he wanted to meet you this morning too …” Suman faltered. She looked at her employer, a little concerned. “He said it’s urgent. He said he wants to travel to his village and needs the money.”

  “Get ready to go to the bus stop, it’s almost time for Tarini.”

  Anita headed to the bathroom, swallowed one of the new pills Dr. Jain had given her, and lit up a cigarette. As she stood at the window, waving out the smoke, she looked down and saw him. He was sitting on his haunches below the mango tree near the building gate, talking to the watchman. He had a cloth bag slung on his arm and his gold earring glinted in the sun as he abruptly turned around and looked up. She shrank back. But the wispy white smoke that had already wound its way out of the window could not be stopped.

  Anita was fraught. She picked up the phone and called Mitesh. He told her he was in a meeting and couldn’t talk. She went back into the bedroom and lay down on the embroidered pink comforter, growing more fearful. The room was closing in on her. She didn’t know what to do. She picked up one of her daughter’s coloring books on the bedside table, reached for a box of color pencils, and started filling the empty picture furiously, indiscriminately, the hair red, the shoes green. It kept her focused and she felt strangely intimate with the picture of the girl carrying a bucket down a hill. She thought she saw Rajkiran’s shadow outside, entering her daughter’s room. But he had long left, so who was it? She put down the book and dialed Mitesh, but it rang incessantly, bleating the Gayatri Mantra over and over. She
tried again; there was no answer. After the seventh attempt, she knew that something was terribly wrong. Bring madam a cup of tea. The words reeled in her head, almost like a record playing on a low speed. She stormed into the bathroom and washed down one more pill with tap water. Diarrhea? Cholera? She didn’t care. She didn’t care what, where, when, how, who. She just needed Mitesh to … The doorbell rang. Anita rushed out and stood near her bedroom door while Suman went to see who it was.

  The three people in the picture lit up and, for that brief moment, there was a happy family. Then Anita heard the familiar rasping voice: it was her previous maharaj.

  “Please call bhabhi,” he was saying to Suman, in some distant drama down the corridor.

  Anita sat on her bed, letting him spray his spittle on the world and flay his antennae. The commotion outside grew louder.

  “I know she is inside. Call her!” He ordered Suman the way he used to when he still worked in this home. Anita heard Mitesh’s voice echoing in the middle of the maharaj’s commands. Bring madam a cup of tea. She picked up a pink pencil and jabbed it on the bedside table. The nib broke. She tried calling her husband again but the phone was switched off. No Gayatri Mantra. No Mitesh. No Tarini. No Arti. Just a long empty beach with a priest walking toward her, his dhoti billowing, never managing to reach her. And the seashore littered with thousands of broken eggshells.

  Anita went back into her pink cave and let out a long low wail. She got up. She was walking on eggshells toward the kitchen, away from the priest, her gaze set on the distant horizon of her kitchen countertop. She picked up an eggshell shaped like a vegetable knife with a brown handle. Was it a knife or was it a dead crab? She looked around the kitchen. Where did the priest go? Call madam a cup of tea, bhabhi. Bring madam a bhabhi. Madam is a cup of tea. Holding the knifeshaped eggshell in her trembling hand, Anita tried to trace her footsteps on the shore back to her bedroom. Left? Right? She wandered out of her home, past the giant photograph of her family, into the darkness of the corridor.

  A spray of blood flew onto the faces in the photograph. She stabbed him a second time, straight into his soft belly. Suman screamed. The maharaj managed to grab Anita’s arm, push her down, and then fell on top of her. The seashore vanished. The priest disappeared too. As Anita lay beneath the cook’s writhing body, her white kurti soaking in his blood, she could smell his fresh Lifebuoy soap. He was howling with pain and cursing in guttural Rajasthani. Suman didn’t stop screaming.

  The cook let out a bark like an angry animal and bit at the bhabhi’s nipple. Anita did not flinch. She heard the lift door open. She peered at the spray-painted photograph above her, the crimson tide forming at the little girl’s feet. Anita shut her eyes. The priest had brought madam tea. In a broken eggshell …

  COOK COOKS OWN SOUP

  by Staff Reporter

  In a shocking incident, a Teenbatti housewife, one Anita Mitesh Shah, was attacked by her former cook yesterday afternoon at her flat. Police investigations revealed that the cook, Ratilal Rathod, was upset about being thrown out. He returned and first attempted to molest the maid, Suman, who hails from Jharkhand. When Mrs. Shah tried to save her, the cook created a ruckus, attacked his former boss, and bit her breast. In self-defense, she stabbed him. Rathod, who is originally from Rajasthan, is in critical condition at J.J. Hospital, and criminal proceedings will be initiated against him after his recuperation. Mrs. Shah, who is married to a subbroker, lives in Tirupati Towers, a Jain society at Walkeshwar Road. Her condition is said to be stable.

  The newspaper lay unopened on the dining table. Anita sat there nursing her bandaged breast. In front of her stood an empty glass of water with a pale pink lip mark on the rim. The bell rang and rang but the picture did not light up. A gust of wind blew into the room and a half-empty pillbox rolled out from under the table, the little black pills scattered around it like so many dead flies.

  AT LEOPOLD CAFÉ

  BY KALPISH RATNA

  Colaba Causeway

  When Ratan Oak looked up, the man he was expecting had arrived. He sat down against the mirror, a bullet hole above each shoulder. A third, between them, would have drilled right through his heart.

  At half past nine thirteen days ago two men had lobbed a grenade in here, then stepped in and let loose with AK-47s.

  Everyone at Leopold’s this morning stared at those bullet holes, and the man got in the way. He tipped back his chair and considered their stares with polite disdain.

  Ratan seemed to know why he was here—but dimly—and only in the dark looking-glass of his mind.

  * * *

  Ratan hadn’t meant to step into Leopold Café. The signboard had caught his eye. A ’50s blue-and-white Coca-Cola “good times” poster that said Since 1871. He’d never noticed that before. The old one had been white, with squat black letters. It was something of a memorial to Prema. Their first quarrel had erupted over that sign.

  She wanted to go in. He didn’t.

  “I’m not eating in a place named for a butcher,” he said.

  “How do you know that? Maybe Leopold’s the owner. Maybe Leopold’s his uncle?”

  “It’s Irani, Prema. They don’t have Leopolds in Yazd. It’s named for Leopold of Belgium, butcher of the Congo.”

  “Why Yazd? Why not Tehran? Maybe they don’t know he was a butcher, maybe they don’t even know where the Congo is. Why should they? All they need to know is bun maska and chai and that’s all I want. Not everyone bothers about useless stuff, like you.”

  That peripatetic quarrel had lasted nearly a decade. Their parting had done him good. He hadn’t heard from her since.

  They hadn’t gone into the café after all, that awful day. Twenty—good heavens—twenty-six years ago. A long while, to keep a quarrel going. And all she had wanted was bun maska and chai.

  Ratan entered Leopold’s with the feeling of walking into a mirage. He expected the restrained grief any house of death exhibits the week after—a quiet decency, with an attention to detail that marks the return to life. Leopold’s was nothing like that. It was—blasé. The cheery red-and-yellow checked tablecloth, the single rose, the slotted steel napkin holder, all disowned chaos.

  It was surprisingly crowded, considering the hour. European tourists at breakfast, with the relaxed air of having checked in at the oasis the night before. For all its tragic present, the café conveyed the comfort of a haven. It felt like the last stop on the Orient Express. Empire still lingered here, and not just in the naïve mural where pink ladies chatted brightly with gentlemen in sola hats and chocolate-brown waiters hovered, bearing trays.

  The backpacker consulting his Lonely Planet and the two French girls examining him furtively, the British couple intent on their sausages and the American woman writing postcards— they could all have been here since 1871.

  The rest, all Indian, were here because of November 26 and paying the uneasy homage of curiosity when the time for aid and condolence was past.

  This irritated Ratan. Ratan bristled when the waiter pointed out the bullet holes. Nonetheless, he looked. They were in the large mirror across the room. Four, each nested in a bright nebula of fracture lines, sucked deep into the black continuity of glass. The space beyond made the room around him shimmer. The tangible, the fungible and familiar, and the sentient lay beyond the glass.

  Something was still missing.

  It would come now, in the next ten minutes, before half past eight. Once settled in its expected place, it would alter this geometry of light and shadow. It would complete the picture, and make the place familiar again.

  It was not unusual for Ratan to experience the familiar in an unfamiliar place. It was useless telling himself he had never been inside Leopold Café before. All he had to do was wait.

  He looked away from the mirror, frowning. Fisticuffs pounded the inside of his skull. His other life, awakened, was clamoring for liberty.

  The pain no longer frightened him, but he still flinched from it. Sometimes, as now, he couldn�
��t be sure if it was pain— or excitement. Everything was heightened. Color grew more intense, smells stronger, and vision more acute. Conversations buzzed annoyingly about him. His skin was raw with anticipation, as if the lightest touch would unleash a convulsion. Time accelerated. He was about to enter his other life–––—the life of Ramratan Oak.

  All he had to do was wait. He gritted his teeth and waited for the man to arrive.

  That was it. There should be a man at the table by the mirror. But he wasn’t here yet.

  The waiter took Ratan’s order without comment. Why, what else had he expected?

  Sorry, sir. Europeans only.

  Ratan actually heard the words. But he couldn’t have. Here came his coffee.

  I must request that you move to the back of the room.

  Ratan turned, though the waiter hadn’t spoken at all. When he looked at the mirror, the picture was complete.

  The man was there now, sitting, as expected. He leaned forward a little and his back loomed in the mirror, drilled neatly with a bullet hole. The spidery cracks around it radiated brightness into the space beyond.

  There, in that dim interior, was Ratan’s table; and there he was, stealing a glance at the man; then quickly looking away and smoothing his mustache—

  His mustache?

  Perhaps it’s time I grew one, thought Ratan.

  Don’t. It is a—

  —plant of great cultivation, Ratan finished the sentence with irony.

  His own eyes twinkled back at him from the mirror as Ramratan Oak polished his spectacles to take a better look at the man. Next to Ramratan, Ernest Hanbury Hankin, shielded by a newspaper, was halfway through the man’s story.

  “He’s growing immortal just sitting there,” murmured Hankin. “Year by year by year every minute.”

  “How can he possibly do that?”

  How can he possibly do that? Had he just said it?