‘Very well, then,’ he said with his slow smile. ‘Shall we spend some time on the article that started it all?’ He took my piece from his cluttered desk and over the next forty-five minutes wielded an ancient, broad-nibbed Mont Blanc pen like a scalpel, editing, moulding, shaping, querying, until the article was unrecognizable to me. It was still mine, but it was immeasurably better, I could see that.
‘I’m so pleased you investigated the case of Raju,’ he said, bringing his pen down to cut out an irrelevant phrase. ‘Nothing will illustrate better to our readers what these messengers of hate are trying to do.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, feeling a little guilty that I had no idea where Raju was and that some of the information in the piece had been concocted. What would I say to Mr Sorabjee if he enquired about my sources? I didn’t have long to wait.
‘Is all the information in the piece verifiable?’ he asked me.
I was tempted to try and finesse my way out of the situation, but decided it wasn’t worth it. ‘No sir,’ I admitted. ‘I have no idea where Raju is and some of the facts are speculative.’
‘Umm, can’t have that; let’s have another go at it, shall we?’ He went over the piece again, and by the time he’d finished, it was a mere quarter of its length.
‘We have to be truthful and factual whenever we can, Vijay, because we’re fighting lies, half-truths, beliefs, don’t ever forget that.’
‘I won’t, sir,’ I said, relieved that it hadn’t gone too badly.
‘Very well, then, you must be anxious to get acquainted with your new colleagues, so let’s go and meet them.’ He levered himself out of his chair, grimacing with pain, took hold of a walking stick made of some silvery metal, and limped out of the office.
The three other members of The Indian Secularist’s editorial team worked in a large room, their view brightened by an avenue of flowering gulmohur trees, frothy confections of red, green and gold. The assistant editor was a cheerful woman called Sakshi Vaidya; she was assisted by the copy-editor, an elderly man called Mr Desai whose editing skills I would discover were, if anything, even more exacting than Mr Sorabjee’s, and a young intern, a recent graduate of Sophia College called Meher, the granddaughter of a friend of Mr Sorabjee’s who was spending a year at the magazine before taking off to Columbia University. Once introductions were made, Mr Sorabjee took me back to Mrs Dastur, shook hands with me formally, said goodbye and hobbled back to his room.
Mrs Dastur asked to see my train tickets, which I had fortunately remembered to bring with me, then efficiently counted out a small stack of rupee notes as reimbursement. She then added 400 rupees to the pile.
‘It’s your first time in Bombay, isn’t it?’
When I nodded, she said, ‘Mr Sorabjee thought you should have a little extra money to go out and enjoy yourself.’
~
An antiquated lift, manually operated by an old man in a Gandhi topi and khaki uniform, serviced the five floors of Jehangir Mansion. You could hear it coming from a long way off, the sound of its iron gate being opened and shut echoing through the lift shaft as it rose, slow as melting tar, towards you. That afternoon it was much too slow for me. I took the wide, shallow stairs, one, two at a time, and rushed out on to the road, anxious to share my good fortune with someone. I smiled and nodded and tried to make eye contact with passers-by and was not put off in the least by the fact that nobody in this most indifferent of cities would return my smiles or my desire to establish a bond. I was free of K— that was the most important thing. Bombay belonged to me, whether anyone cared or not. At the bus stop, waiting for the bus to Chowpatty and Marine Drive, I gave a legless beggar perched on a low wheeled platform fifty rupees, much more than I could afford, but it didn’t matter, and I was beside myself with delight to see his warty, sour countenance soften with pleasure for just an instant.
At Chowpatty, I merged into the crowds milling about the beach, bought sweet and frothy sugar-cane juice from a man who fed the purple sticks of cane into an enormous hand-operated juicer, ate pav bhaji and bhel puri and walked until I was exhausted. Night was falling when I took my place on the sea wall among amorous couples, retired people and other solitary men like myself, all looking out to the horizon where the colour was fading from the sky. Behind us Marine Drive circled the bay in a necklace of light and over to the east more lights began to come on in the tall buildings of Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade. Night fell abruptly and the massive promontory of the city that extended into the sea began to resemble nothing so much as a great ocean liner ploughing steadily through the black water. My journey, I thought, had finally begun.
3
In Bombay
Bombay is not an attractive city. It has few tourist sights, its architecture is functional for the most part, the salt air from the Arabian Sea takes its toll on the most expensive buildings, and slums, noise, dense crowds, humidity, crime and pollution further deplete its charms. But it is one of the world’s great cities with a vitality that defies belief, derived from the fourteen million people who call it home. I felt that charge from the minute my train deposited me in the early hours of the morning at VT station; all about me lay what looked like sheeted corpses, transients who slept on the railway platforms because they had nowhere else to go. I took a taxi to the hostel, an expensive luxury but unavoidable because of the enormous suitcase I was carrying, peering out of the window at the people who swarmed the streets, although it was barely light. These were my people, I thought; I was a Bombayite now. I could hardly wait to take the city by its throat. That didn’t happen of course because, as I soon discovered, Bombay’s sense of possibility and adventure was largely an illusion—none of the pretty girls who waited for the buses or the trains showed the least interest in me, no strangers walked up to me on the street and revealed mysterious worlds, but even as I scaled down my expectations the thrill of living in the city did not leave me.
And I had my own niche, the magazine I worked for, without which I might have felt the indifference of the city more keenly. Every morning at 8.15 I would take the bus from Colaba Causeway to Tardeo, which was a short walk from the office. And every day, even when it was very hot or traffic was slow or the queues for the communal bathrooms at the hostel had been very long, the sight of Jehangir Mansion never failed to lift my spirits. Just a few hundred feet away was the unceasing roar of Warden Road, but in this blessed corner of the city there was peace—the squirrels flickering their tails as they raced up the trunks of the gulmohar trees, the harsh cries of crows clattering down on the delicate gold tracery of fallen leaves and the passage of the occasional car were the only things that disturbed the tranquillity of the place. The creaking lift would deposit me on the fifth floor and I would make my way to the office, where I was usually the first to arrive. I would head straight to my desk to read through the thick files bulging with government reports or newspaper clippings that Mr Sorabjee or Mr Desai had cut out and marked for my attention as one of my jobs was to put together a brief digest of sectarian violence in India and around the world.
Once a month I was expected to put the magazine to bed. On press nights I would eat supper at Olympia, a local restaurant famous for its brain masala, perfectly cooked and soaked in rich gravy. I had only begun to eat meat in Bombay, because it wasn’t cooked at home, but I had developed a liking for it very quickly. Finishing my meal with a paan that I would purchase from a vendor across the street from the restaurant, I would leave at about ten for the press, which was located just behind the paper merchants’ quarter in the Fort area. During the day the place heaved with noise and activity—squadrons of businessmen and clerks and secretaries scurried to and from the cliffs of office buildings that surrounded the open square on three sides, while traffic flowed slowly and noisily through the clogged streets—but at this hour it was usually deserted. I would walk in through the loading dock at the back of the building, nodding to the chowkidar, who no longer bothered to check my pass, and negotiate my way carefu
lly up a rickety wooden staircase to the compositors’ room where the typesetting machines clattered away, lead filings drifting down like silver rain. The press where the magazine was composed and printed was one of the very few that had survived the onslaught of computerized phototypesetting, and it had about it an almost prehistoric air. The typesetters, dressed in shorts and banians because of the oppressive heat of the room, their eyes protuberant and enormous behind the thick lenses of their spectacles, would pound furiously at their keyboards and small boys would run off long sheets of coarse paper on which the proofs were printed, and bring them damp with ink and sweat to a long ink-splotched table at which I would read them. At around two in the morning I would finish up and go home, passing through the colonnaded archways of Flora Fountain as the city swooned in a half-sleep, deserted except for a few freelance whores who were either too ugly or too old to have a pimp or room of their own, and other people of the night—homeless petty criminals and those whose shifts started early. I was entitled to the day off when I was on press duty, but I couldn’t bear to sit around in my room at the hostel so I would doze off for a few hours and then make my way to Jehangir Mansion at noon.
It was at the magazine that I began to develop a real appreciation for my own faith and the other religions that had flowered in India. Sakshi, who was working towards a PhD in comparative religion, would spend hours talking to me about the evolution of Hinduism, the various reform movements that had swept in, the ways in which Islam and Christianity had become Indianized, the origins of Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. I even started to look upon K— a little more kindly when she told me that she would love to see the musical pillars at the temple. One of the rooms at Jehangir Mansion had been converted into a library. It was crammed full of books on religion, and under Sakshi’s tutelage I began reading translations and interpretations of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Koran and the Bible among others with greater insight than I had back in K— when I was preparing for my interview with Mr Sorabjee.
As the months passed and I became an integral part of the editorial team, I no longer had much time to read because there was always work to do, research for Sakshi and Mr Sorabjee, sub-editing under Mr Desai’s expert guidance, correspondence to be dealt with, phones to be answered and files to be kept up to date. As the two most junior people in the office, Meher and I quickly formed a bond. We would help each other out and often take a few minutes during the morning tea break, when Divakar the peon served us all tea and Marie biscuits, to chat and joke and trade harmless gossip. But even my liking for her and my appreciation of my other colleagues paled into insignificance when compared with the presence of Mr Sorabjee in my life.
I had never really had such a role model before, nobody in my family or my immediate environment had possessed the requisite stature, and I found myself craving his approval and attention. He dealt mainly with Sakshi and was otherwise well protected by Mrs Dastur, but it was enough for me just to have him around, and on the days he singled me out for praise I was exhilarated. If Sakshi had sparked my interest in religions it was through Mr Sorabjee that I began to understand just how insidiously faith was being politicized and perverted in the country. ‘We should consider ourselves fortunate that the two religions that have dominated India’s history, Buddhism and Hinduism, are two of the most benign and inclusive religions ever conceived by man. That is why, no matter what they do, the fundamentalists can never change the basic nature of our country. But they can do plenty of damage and that is why we must never stop speaking out,’ he said to me one afternoon while discussing the forthcoming issue’s cover story, a brilliant essay on Indian identity by a famous economist. That day, on my way home, thinking about the single-minded purpose that had informed his life, I wanted it for myself. And gradually, what had started as a desire to emulate Mr Sorabjee evolved into a genuine belief in the ideas and philosophy that motivated my mentor.
~
The seasons wheeled and turned in their heedless way, the brief spring was followed by summer and then a particularly severe monsoon. The city’s services broke down almost immediately. Gutters overflowed, houses and apartment buildings fell down, parts of the city flooded, drowning cars, lorries and the occasional drunk, and after a few weeks of this, my health began to give way. I had a cold or a mild fever almost constantly, and for the first time since I had arrived in the city I began to feel low. I found my night shifts especially trying. In the badly lit streets around the press it was impossible to avoid wading through stretches of stagnant water polluted by sewage, muck and industrial waste. One night on my way home, in weather so foul that even the most desperate whores and street people had been driven to find shelter, I was subjected to a final indignity: I fell through an open manhole, and was plunged up to my throat in foul-smelling sewage. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt in any way and managed to scramble out, but that night I caught a chill and was laid up for four days with a high fever.
My room-mate, an advertising executive called Rao who spent most of his nights out drinking and sleeping with an assortment of girlfriends, could only care for me in an abstracted way; his assistance, for which I was not ungrateful, consisted of buying me some strips of Crocin from a local pharmacy and bringing me tea and a couple of slices of toast from the mess in the morning. Thankfully I was befriended by Deepak, my next-door neighbour, who I discovered was originally from a town not far from K—. He would look in twice a day, once in the morning before he set off for work, and once in the evening when he returned, usually bearing a packet of food—baida rotis from Bade Mian, uppuma from the Udipi on the corner or mutton korma from the Afghan restaurant behind the Taj. I usually wouldn’t have the appetite to eat anything, especially when I was running a fever, but I was glad to have Deepak’s company. He worked for a large engineering firm located in the western suburbs and was saving up to buy a flat when he turned thirty a year from now; at this time he intended to marry one of the young women that his mother kept throwing at him, have two children and then concentrate on his career and his family. A short man with skin so dark that his thick bristly moustache hardly showed up against it, Deepak had lived in Bombay for eight years and loved every aspect of it. He promised to take me out with him in the evenings when I got better.
My illness underlined the fact that I was friendless, alone in the city and had little but my work to keep me going. It was while I was in this fragile emotional state that I began to think more about Meher. She had continued to be friendly and perhaps even mildly flirtatious with me in the confident way that seemed to come naturally to rich, attractive Bombay girls, but it was still an office friendship, nothing more. Then, one day, during our lunch hour, she suggested that we walk over to a trendy restaurant by the Kemps Corner flyover for a cold coffee. She had heard that morning she had been granted a partial scholarship by Columbia, and was in a mood to celebrate. That little excursion outside the office was when my feelings towards her changed from friendship into a mild infatuation. I suppose I should be able to recount every aspect of the drink we had, after all it was the first time I had ever gone out with a girl, but unfortunately over time most of the details have thinned away. What I do remember is the unconscious habit she had of flicking back her straight, glossy hair every time she leant forward to sip from her glass. She was intensely pretty in the way petite women can be, and I can recall her even today as she bent over her drink in the dimly lit restaurant, her long slender fingers tucking wayward strands of hair behind her ear, from the lobe of which a single oval of lapis glowed a mineral shade of blue.
On our way back to the office it began to rain fitfully—it was still the middle of the monsoon season—and she playfully grabbed hold of my arm and suggested we make a run for it. I am sure she meant nothing by the gesture, but the touch of her fingers burned their way into my senses. Although I realized the impossibility of my infatuation—the difference in our status was much too great and she was due to leave for the States in a little over a month—a lifetime
of deprivation, when it came to women, distorted my sense of reason. I fantasized about her, intensely, purely, but I did not reveal my feelings to her; I was both too intimidated as well as too proud to lay myself open to rejection.
And so what began as an infatuation quickly turned into an obsession, in the way that only a first love can. My world turned brown and desolate when the workday ended, and brightened again the next morning. On the days she didn’t turn up at the office I would rage with jealousy at the thought that she might be with someone else, although she had never mentioned a boyfriend. If I were a poet I might have plaited my longings into creative work—after all great art often springs from the chasm that lies between longing and fulfilment—but I was no artist, and so I passed day after day morose and angry for the most part, cheering up when our eyes met or she laughed at something I said. Was she aware of my passionate longing? I think she must have been; I believe beautiful women are always able to sense when men are interested in them. But whether Meher knew or not she gave no outward indication that anything between us had changed. And then the day came for her to leave. We bought a chocolate cake from a patisserie on Nepean Sea Road for her farewell party, Mr Sorabjee made a short speech to thank her for everything she had done and to wish her well in life, Meher giggled prettily through her own speech, and then she was gone, and my loneliness deepened, grew immense.
I took to leaving the office exactly at closing time and boarding buses to various parts of the city—Bandra, Khar, Malabar Hill, Chowpatty, Juhu—where I would spend an hour or two aimlessly wandering among the crowds, nursing my unhappiness, eating fried foods from the hawkers’ stalls, eyeing women more beautiful than I’d ever seen, with the sole exception of Meher, as they made their way self-consciously and skilfully through great swells of male attention. But unrequited love is usually not a fatal affliction, and gradually I began to grow more positive in my outlook. I immersed myself in my work, and reasoned to myself that somewhere in this city of endless possibility there would be a woman for me.
The Solitude of Emperors Page 4
