‘Merci,’ he says, but I don’t think my answer is what he’d hoped.
In the shower room, I can’t get the hot water on; I assume there isn’t hot water here, in the cavernous bath of this public facility. So I take a quick cold shower. As I’m toweling off, a female lifeguard enters the male shower room. ‘C’est chaud, ou non?’ she asks, with neither prelude nor apology.
I’m pretty naked. I shake my head. ‘Non.’
‘Froid? Seulement?’
I nod.
She shakes her head in frustration, maybe disgust. Just as abruptly as she arrived, she hurries away.
V.
‘Maintenant,’ one of the movers says, ‘on attend le camion.’ He watches through the window as the last load of our rental furniture and furnishings descends on his crane, then he pops a cigarette in his mouth, and walks out the door of the apartment.
The elevator in our small building is minuscule, and off-limits for moving. As apparently are nearly all the elevators in this country. So movers come equipped with their own little cranes, sort of like cherry-pickers, on which everything comes in and goes out, through the windows.
Our four-year-old twins are at school, a miniature version of England called St George’s International School, presided over by silver-haired British Islanders. My wife is in the full-sized version for a few days, working in London. Her job is what has brought us here, to live in Europe, for an indefinite period.
So I am doing what the mover instructed – waiting for the truck – while sitting on the floor of the almost entirely empty apartment, on the cheap Ikea rug that sheds like a sickly cat, spewing red tumbleweeds all over the place. Up a flight of stairs, then down a hallway, then around a corner, and under the bathroom vanity, I find red fur.
It was just a month earlier that I was sitting on the floor in New York City, watching the last of our furniture go out the door of our loft. I seem to spend a lot of time alone, on the floor of my empty apartments. It’s a melancholy pastime.
I pick up the children from school, in a swarm of other expat parents, 99 percent of them women. The boys and I hurry back to the centre ville to rendezvous with the orange container arriving to rue de l’Eau. The big metal box was released in the late morning from customs at the port of Antwerp, a city which I didn’t even realize was on water.
The massive trailer is slowly negotiated into our narrow curving street. Then an unmistakable mood of disappointment settles as the movers discover that the container is padlocked.
‘Avez-vous le clef ?’ one asks me.
I try to smile, probably unsuccessfully, and put my hands in the ‘what are you, kidding?’ gesture, combined with a beseeching ‘please don’t tell me you can’t open this goddamned thing, because I have two children and NO furniture here’ look on my face. He shrugs.
That’s how it comes to pass that the police show up. Because at that point, the four movers start taking turns beating on the lock with wrenches, with hammers, with pry-bars. They’re making an unbearable racket – and to all appearances committing a crime – right here beside the grand duke’s palace, the monarch’s residence. A motorcycle cop stops by to investigate – a woman, unexpectedly, shaking her hair out of her helmet – and starts asking questions, but without much apparent concern or conviction. Then she lights a cigarette and watches, half-amused.
The lock finally falls apart, clattering impotently to the ground, a sound greatly disproportionate to the god-awful racket that preceded. The container is pulled open, the crane restarted, and the furniture – our furniture – begins coming through the window at 4:30.
At 5:59 and 59 seconds, the movers leave. Everything has managed to make it into the apartment. Nothing – nothing – is unpacked. Couches are standing on end, boxes are piled to the ceiling. It is anarchic and dark, and surprisingly awful.
We go out to a restaurant for dinner, the boys and I. We come home, and I set up their beds, and kiss my tired children goodnight. Then I sit on the cold floor, alone in the dark, and cry.
VI.
In the morning I drive the kids to school. In the hallway I smile and shake hands and chat with a few acquaintances. I still have no proper friends in this country, but not everyone is a total stranger, now.
I go to my French class – three times per week, studying every day – where I feel decent about my progress. I no longer begin every single interaction with the humiliating ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’
I return to the spectacularly messy apartment. But in the light of day, it’s not nearly as bad as it was last night. I begin to unpack, box by box, day after day, until all our vases and pillows and pans, clothes and bureaus and toys, are where they should be. Then I look around with satisfaction, at this duplex apartment across the street from the grand duke’s grand palace, in the middle of Western Europe.
I sort of like it here. Which is a good thing, because I live here. And little by little, challenge by challenge, this semi-permanent travel is turning into home.
Mumbai: Before the Monsoon
BY STEPHEN KELMAN
Stephen Kelman was born in Luton, England, in 1976. Pigeon English, his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. He lives with his wife, Uzma, in St Albans, England, where he is currently working on his second book.
Ask anyone who’s been there about Mumbai and they’ll all tell you the same thing: that it’s a City of Contrasts. They’ll most likely be using capital letters when they say this, and their eyes will probably be glazed over, recalling some profound event or other that befell them on their visit, one of those clay-baked epiphanies that tumble from the shelves of tourist souvenir stands like bloated monsoon raindrops, something prone to rouse a latent spiritual yearning or to recalibrate a person’s sense of what’s important or just or worthwhile in the world. Their stories will probably include a combination of the following: blind children playing cricket in the acrid trickles from a crumbling sewage pipe, beggars outside the Bentley showroom, dough-eyed babies hanging from toothpick hips, the smear of kohl on saffron robes.
Orchids shivering in the shadow of a McDonald’s billboard. Waiters with white smiles and white tunics, doormen with blunted ceremonial swords, auto rickshaw drivers with dreams of making a splash on India’s Got Talent. An elephant in chains. Food that tastes like weather. A bomb scare and funny toilets and gratitude for a life lived in the lap of literacy.
I thought all these things were just for the brochure or the coffee table, a bright thread to be unpicked over grey Western mornings, a way for travellers to stretch out the myth of having been somewhere that can change how a human heart works, somewhere you can carry with you long after the bump and squeal of tyres on cool Heathrow asphalt.
Then I saw for myself and it all turned out to be true.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I went to India to meet a man I was going to write about, a man whose life I’ll summarize in my next book. He lives in Navi Mumbai, a satellite colony separated from Old Bombay by a creek bridged by two strips of clean highway and a proactive city planning policy, and as well as freelancing as a newspaper sports reporter and martial-arts instructor, he enjoys breaking concrete slabs over his genitals with a sledgehammer. More on him later. I spent ten days holed up in a business-class hotel in Vashi, Navi Mumbai’s commercial centre, compiling research notes and trying to decide if I could go on living without the love of a good woman, and in between I took bashful meals with my new friend and his family, wandered around Vashi’s two malls – one dishevelled and sparse, one all new and populated by aspiring Hilfiger models, both guarded by x-ray machines and body-scanners, unfortunate legacy of the terror attacks of 2008 – and accompanied my host on his assignments, covering amateur power-lifting trials and regional cricket matches, trekking into the hills to interview ping pong-playing monks. But it’s my one night in Old Bombay that I remember most vividly, that I turn to in my quiet moments as proof that the wo
rld is as weird and sad and beautiful as I would have it be, and that my place in it is as inevitable as the wind in the trees.
It starts with a near-death experience, one that lasts the length of my journey into the city: Bibhuti, my new friend, drives like Mr Magoo on happy pills. He wrestles his mid-segment – it’s what they call a hatchback – through the skittish traffic, often taking both hands from the wheel to clap gleefully at the retelling of a funny story, laughing with his whole body while I gouge fingernail furrows in the dashboard and mumble silent prayers for the stray dogs skipping the lights, the sunglasses-sellers three-deep at every intersection, rolling with the punches as we nose our way to the coast, the dusk streaking our windows like oil. The rear ends of every jam-packed fruit truck and weekend jalopy bear the hand-painted slogan ‘Horn OK Please’, an invitation that everyone is all too happy to accept, a cluster bombing of indiscriminate parps chasing us through the dust until we make the affluent suburb of Worli, the streets widen and the air slows, the naked children crossing the road have tidy hair and there are fruits hanging from the trees that look like lanterns.
It’s not just me and Bibhuti in the car, his wife and son are along for the ride – she silent and placid like a lake, he chirruping away in dogleg English, reading aloud the brand names from the billboards, Cadbury’s and Rolls Royce and Wayne Rooney, sucking on the words like he’s gently tearing mango pulp from peel, hounding his father with plaintive requests for ‘A/C, A/C!’ We’ve already bonded over soccer and my groundless fear of snakes, and when our eyes meet in the wing mirror it’s always my own ghost I see, that part of myself that’s long lost and buried in the ash of living.
We pass a clapperboard church wedged between peeling mansion houses; the sign outside reads ‘People are so often lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.’ I feel like crying. I tell myself it’s jetlag, but I’m not fooling anyone.
Travel isn’t something to be done alone if you can help it, at least that’s true in my case. This far from home I thought I could be anyone, but my own peculiar loneliness has followed me across the continents and sits patiently on my shoulder, a crow picking at a kerbside rubbish fire. I don’t like myself enough to make leaps into the unknown, I can’t forget who I am long enough to relax into a spirit of adventure, but Bibhuti is all smiles and I think that maybe I shouldn’t leave the world before I’ve worn a moustache like his, that there are more flavours still left to be tasted. He points out the sights to me as we drive: colonial statues on roundabouts prodding at the sky in obscene salute to an imagined past, bereft citizens sleeping top to tail on the manicured lawn opposite Victoria Terminus, safely corralled behind wrought-iron spikes and the empty promises of progress. Then the lights all come on at once, and we hit festival traffic, a trail of pilgrims as far as I can see all shuffling, shuffling towards a temple guarded by machine-gun nests. We park and get out of the car to graft ourselves onto the limbs of the devoted. I see my first holy cow quietly shitting by the side of the road as a restless convoy of buses disgorges more souls into the mix.
So many people all waiting to give thanks, to pay homage to something invisible. All stepping softly around the toes of their neighbours, careful not to disturb the sleeping dogs. The elephant-headed one or the monkey one or the one that rides a chariot of flames, whatever it is that inspires a multitude to swarm so sweetly I can’t argue with it; there’s a force that compels me to breathe in, to alm myself with something lowlier than a tourist’s silver dollar. I may not want to believe in what they believe, but I’m gripped by a sudden immutable desire to believe in something, and when I spot a baby sleeping soundly among the sidewalk dogs, cradled in a garland from the flowerseller’s castoffs, her mother entrusting her to the benevolence of this sea of strangers, I feel protected. I think India is finally working its stuff on me, and I’ve got little choice but to go along with it.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I spoke before of loneliness, and of love. I’d left a woman behind in England, a woman for whom I was falling but had for various reasons been unable to tell. Looking back, I think my trip to India was in part an attempt to cleanse myself of the need for her, to find an alternative route to peace or else a definitive reason to give up the search. This was a tall order, and it didn’t work, thank God – that woman is now my wife. But at the time, May of 2010, in the middle of a heat wave that was killing people, awaiting the cooling release of a monsoon that I wouldn’t be around for, I was convinced that life and death – my life and death – hung on the discovery of answers to questions I’d never dared ask before, if only because to ask them would be to admit that I was just as hungry for happiness as anyone else, and that I’d probably take it any way it came. No, it’s really not a good idea to travel alone when you’re as weighed down by the pale blues as I was then.
So to epiphanies.
A sleeping baby and a man who derives the purest of pleasure from being kicked in the testicles by his friends.
Bibhuti Nayak holds fourteen world records for various highly specialised feats of masochism: inflicting suffering upon himself is what keeps his powder dry. He broke his first record in 1998, when he enlisted four of his martial-arts students to kick him in the groin, forty-seven times in a minute and a half. No padding or protection, no numbing agents or anaesthetic solutions. There was no existing record at the time, so he could quite easily have elected to stop at one kick, but Bibhuti doesn’t do things by halves. He is a proud man – proud of his physique, which is wiry and whippet-lean, product of a harsh training regime which includes a thousand sit-ups a day and two hours’ sleep a night. Proud of his family, who tolerate his hare-brained pursuits with noble equanimity. Proud of his moustache and his lustrous head of hair, which he combs precisely eleven times a day, at regular intervals. What Bibhuti does, he does to promote a message of peace and love. It’s all for the good of his countrymen and of his eternal soul.
‘God is not one form, he is all around us,’ he tells me as we wander the park next to the temple, averting our eyes from the shyly courting couples strolling untouching beneath the benign canopy of the banyan trees. We’ve left his wife and son to pay their dues at the temple, something Bibhuti doesn’t feel the need of. ‘I give thanks to him by achieving peak physical condition. I feel his love by always being aware of the love in the people, be it my family and my friends, the children I teach or the new visitor who comes to me from across the seven seas.’ He means me. I think he’s saying he loves me, and when he invites me to kick him in the balls, I’m touched. I don’t share his philosophy or necessarily approve of the extreme methods by which he expresses it, but there’s something about being in the presence of someone who holds a conviction, really holds on to it like a parent to a child – with fingers splayed and supple, not so tight that the imprint he leaves is indelible yet not loose enough to risk a spill – that makes me want to give the world and everyone in it the benefit of the doubt.
India working its stuff again. Signs and wonders and all that jazz.
The place is warm and beautiful and later, when the pujas have ended and the darkness has bedded in, I’m taken to stand between the feet of the Gateway of India, a photo op for my hosts, the Arabian Sea whispering at my back and thoughts of scale predominating. What’s big and what’s small. I’m small and the world is big. I’m too small to make much of a mark in my departure and the world is too big to walk alone. It’s wedding season here. Marine Drive sparkles with white horses, their heads bowed under festive plumages, neon carriages pulling the laughing newly married; how happy and nervous they look, how heavy their investment in a future whose gifts and trials are guesses to be carried pebble-like in pockets, to be rubbed smooth in daily acts of faith and charity. I wish them the best of luck. Warm and beautiful mean nothing without a kindred flare to light them by.
The doormen at the Taj Mahal hotel really do wear swords and when you look carefully you can see the patches on the walls where holes from terrorist bullets have
been filled in. Bibhuti insists on paying the bill for supper, won’t take my money, and as the evening winds down and talk of the book to come fades into contented silence, I turn my mind to home and the woman who will bear witness to whatever changes my brief stay in Mumbai have wrought in me. Shortly after my return I’ll meet her for the first time in twenty-five years. A year later we’ll be married. When she asks me about Mumbai I’ll tell her it’s a City of Contrasts. A city with a heart, and big ideas. A city that makes you seek answers to those questions that pick at the stitches of lonely Western nights. I’ll tell her it was Mumbai that pushed me when I needed pushing, and that the leap of faith was her.
I never got to kick my friend in the balls. I politely declined the offer.
An Alpine Escape
BY ALIYA WHITELEY
Aliya Whiteley was born in North Devon, England, in 1974. After spending a few years living in Germany, she has returned to the UK and currently lives in Bedfordshire with her husband, daughter and dog. Her first two novels, the black comedies Light Reading and Three Things About Me, were published by Macmillan under their New Writing imprint, and she also writes short stories in many genres. Her first novella, Mean Mode Median, is available as an ebook.
The cheapest flight is to Munich, so that’s where we go. We withdraw some euros from a cash point and sit in one of the airport cafés, drinking coffee from small white cups, listing all the reasons why running away four days before our wedding is a really good idea: the alterations of the dress aren’t finished, the florist has lost our order, and our closest friends suddenly aren’t able to attend. Lots of little problems are coagulating to form a big puddle of mutual nerves. Being someplace else seems like the right choice. When we return, everything will have magically sorted itself out, we tell each other, as we hold hands over the table.
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