Love and Longing in Bombay

by Chandra, Vikram

  He pushed ahead, moving aside the matted stalks with his hands. His face was covered with moisture and the breath burned in his chest. Something buzzed against his cheek and then he saw a flash of white to his left. He tried to turn and something gave way under him and he fell full length into the water. As he came closer he saw that the white was a smooth form, like stone, that came out of the liquid, and as he struggled he tried to place it in his memory, he was sure that he had seen it before, and then it turned over in his vision and took on a new form, like a cloud, and he saw that it was the Apsara’s shoulder, and that she lay face down in the water, almost covered but held up by the criss-crossing reeds and the thrust of the swamp itself. He reached her and panted as he strained to turn her over. Her smile was eternal and untouched by what she had come to. He looked around for the buildings and the pathway, but could see nothing, and then he tried to imagine Chetanbhai’s wife bringing out the Apsara and throwing her into the muck. It was impossible and improbable, but he could see without any effort Kshitij dragging out the white form, like a corpse, in the darkness of the early morning, not looking at the Apsara’s eyes, her swollen lips, and tipping her into the water. What he couldn’t form within himself was a logic for it, a first cause, a reason why. Not yet, he said, yet, and then he began to look for a way out.

  *

  “You smell,” Kshitij said when he opened the door to Sartaj’s urgent knocking.

  “Of shit, yes,” Sartaj said, walking into the apartment, which was clean now, neatened and stripped of its gaudiness. The paintings were gone, and the books on the shelf were a different lot, thicker with gold writing on the spines.

  “Did you fall into a gutter or something?” Kshitij said, looking at the puddles of water on his floor. “Hope you didn’t swallow anything. You need medical attention if you did.”

  “Not quite. Not quite.” The swamp was used as a gutter by the labourers who built the apartment buildings, and some of the servants who worked in them, and Sartaj understood Kshitij’s pained look of distaste, but he was reading the titles on the shelf. “A History of the Indian People,” Sartaj said. “Was your father a great reader?”

  “Not really, no,” Kshitij said.

  “Your mother?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “I see. And you?”

  “Yes, I read. But is something wrong?”

  “I’d like to see that chequebook I gave to you. If I may.”

  “What is this? I thought you had the man.”

  “I have the man. Where is it?”

  There was a moment then in which Sartaj saw the possibilities clicking in Kshitij’s eyes, and fear, and then Kshitij shrugged and laughed. “All right. No problem.”

  When he had it, a minute later, Sartaj held the chequebook by his fingertips, away from his body, and flicked through the pages. “I’ll keep this,” he said.

  “Sure. But why?”

  Sartaj looked at him, considering. Then he leaned forward and said deliberately, “I’m very interested in your father’s reading habits.”

  *

  The Jankidas Publishing Company turned out to be a man, a woman, and two computers in a garage. The garage was at the rear of an old four-storied building in a lane near Bandra station. Lines of fresh clothes hung from every balcony above the garage, and as Sartaj, now dry and no longer fetid, unlaced his shoes he was aware that at least three women were watching him from different homes above, their laundry forgotten. He had called Katekar from home, while he was changing, and had him waiting outside Chetanbhai’s building in plain clothes, ready to shadow Kshitij. There was an excitement in his blood now, a hunter’s prickling on his forearms. As he tugged at the lace on his left shoe there was again that darkened stirring in his mind, something falling into shape, barely recognizable yet. But moving. The “Remove Shoes Please” sign had been done in a fancy curled typeface on red paper, and inside Mr. Jankidas was eating his lunch near his computer, under a purple sign that announced, “We Believe in God and Cash. No Credit Please.” Mrs. Jankidas, who wore steel-rimmed spectacles like her husband and looked very much like him except for her full head of hair, held a tiffin from which she occasionally served out puris and bhaji. Mr. Jankidas sat cross-legged in his chair, quite content, and it was as perfect a scene of domestic tranquillity as Sartaj had ever seen. He broke it with some satisfaction.

  “I am aware of some transactions between you and a certain Mr. Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel,” he said. “Who is unfortunately in the position of being the deceased in a very serious case of murder.”

  “It’s more serious than the average murder case?” Mr. Jankidas said. Sartaj liked him.

  “It appears to be,” Sartaj said. “It may turn out to be very complicated. Which is why I must appeal to you. This Mr. Patel was in the habit of writing cheques to you. Monthly, that is, as far as I can tell.”

  “He was our client,” Mr. Jankidas said.

  “Satisfied, no doubt. What did he purchase from you?”

  Mrs. Jankidas tilted her head slightly and Sartaj saw the look of command that passed between them.

  “We promise our clients confidentiality,” Mr. Jankidas said. “It is, you understand, part of the terms.”

  Sartaj leaned back in his chair. He was quite comfortable in the air conditioning. “Is this allowed, to operate a business in a garage in this building? According to the building society rules? What about municipal rules? I wonder.” He was addressing himself to Mrs. Jankidas. “I must remember to find out.” He turned his head to look at the other signs in the room. Mr. Jankidas was a believer in signs. Dust Is the Enemy of Efficiency. Customer Is our Joy. When Sartaj looked back Mr. Jankidas was ready to talk.

  “We provide multiple services. Brochures. Business cards. Company papers. Legal typing. Invitations. Wedding cards. If you need, please.”

  “And?”

  “Also we publish a magazine.”

  “Yes?”

  “We function as a stage, you see. For the exchange of information. Mutual communications.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Mr. Jankidas bent over in his chair and fished beneath the computer desk. He brought out a magazine with slick covers, all red and yellow, resplendent with many typefaces. On the front a young woman looked straight into the camera, under the title in green, The Metropolitan. Sartaj had seen it before, at railway book stalls, the pages stapled together securely. He took it from Mr. Jankidas and opened it and read, in the middle of a column, “R-346. (M) Bombay: I am 32 year old, Engineer man working as a Class-I Gazetted Officer in a Central Govt. Establishment. 168 cms, 72 kgs, heartily welcome be, cpn from frank, good-looking, bm ladies-couples l-nw, no bars. Cfndt assured-expected, pht appreciated. H: Games, nature, outing. LK: English, Hindi, Marathi.”

  “What’s a ‘bm’?” Sartaj said.

  “Broad-minded,” Mrs. Jankidas said suddenly. “H for Hobbies, LK for Languages Known.”

  “Languages. Of course,” Sartaj said. “I see, I see.” Of course he didn’t see at all, but he pushed on. “I take it Chetanbhai was a customer for this.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Jankidas said. “They ran one ordinary ad every month.”

  “They?”

  Mr. Jankidas picked up a ledger, ran a finger down a ruled page, and pronounced, “M-434.”

  Sartaj found M-434, towards the back of the magazine. “Bombay: In absence of true and loving friendship, life is nothing but one long process of getting tired. Let’s join up! Come together to explore the fascinating future. An educated, charming, very friendly couple is inviting like-minded singles/couples to make the life a colourful span of sweet surprises, tender thrills. Melodious moments, fabulous felicities and warm welcome are all waiting for you. What are you waiting for?”

  “It was the same ad every month,” Mr. Jankidas said.

  “It must have had results,” Sartaj said.

  Mr. Jankidas held up his hands. “We don’t know. We just forward the letters, for a
small fee of course.”

  “You see,” Mrs. Jankidas said. “Mutual communications.”

  *

  Sartaj drove his motorcycle to Colaba in a daze of wonder. He looked at the people passing by, at their faces, marvelling at their calm, their public banality. A woman in a red sari waited at a crossroad for a bus to pass, holding a netted bag full of potatoes. A taxi driver leaned on his cab, spilling tobacco into his palm. Noticing Sartaj’s stare, a girl in a green and white school uniform looked away. But Sartaj was asking merely if she, they, how many of them had colourful spans of sweet surprises. He knew he had finally heard Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel’s voice, and he felt revived and childlike, as if he knew nothing. “Melodious moments,” he said to himself. “Melodious moments.” After he parked he pulled the photograph of Chetanbhai and his family from the file, and sat looking at it, at Chetanbhai’s round face, the sweetness of the smile on his face, the pride in his wife’s eyes as she looked into the camera, secure in the thickness of her gold bangles and her family, confident of the future. And behind them Kshitij, unsmiling but earnest, and on the right of the picture, a flash of white just inside the frame, the curve of a soft hip.

  Finding the parking lot that Chetanbhai had used was simple. Getting the two brothers who sat shifts in the wooden booth, handing out tickets and change, to remember the Patels was simple: they were excited by the thought of being part of an investigation, and the elder, who worked Saturday days, remembered, instantly, the red Contessa.

  “That’s them,” he said, when Sartaj showed them the photograph. “Them two.”

  “Which way did they go?” Sartaj said.

  “Always there,” the man said, pointing with a rigid finger. “There.”

  Sartaj had a general direction, and so he started. The shopkeepers were busy with tourists, and there was commerce everywhere, from the stacked statues of Krishna and the men leaning in doorways muttering prices for illegal substances barely out of Sartaj’s hearing. “Who has time to look nowadays, baba?” one stallkeeper said, wrapping a pair of chappals for a Japanese couple. “People come and go.” But then he looked at the photograph and remembered them. They had never bought anything but they had been walking by for years. They had become familiar to him because of their regularity.

  Around the corner from the chappal-seller, from his rows of footwear, there was an alley’s length of beer bars. Sartaj went into the first, into the air-conditioned darkness, and found a patient line of women in shiny green and red churidars. They shook their heads at the photograph deliberately, back and forth and back again, and their lack of expression was complete and carefully maintained. Sartaj nodded, thanked them, and went on to the next bar. Finally, at the end of the road, near the seafront, there was a hotel used mainly by visiting Arabs. In the lobby, the men standing by the ceiling-high picture of an emir knew nothing, had seen nothing, weren’t interested. “We are guides, you see,” the oldest one said, as if that were a scientific explanation for not seeing anything. “Guides for the Arabs.” He straightened his red tie and looked very serious. Sartaj smiled at the gentle mockery, nodded, and went on to the desk clerk, who knew nothing, but the durban outside remembered the Patels. He had always thought they lived somewhere nearby.

  By late afternoon Sartaj knew he was getting close to the destination. He overshot the trail only once, when they took a left, and it took him an hour to come back and find the direction again. Now he was striding briskly, along a back street lined with faded four-storied apartment buildings. Though the road was crowded with parked cars, it was quiet, shaded with trees, so that Sartaj could feel the lost elegance in the names of the buildings and in the circular balconies that must have been all the rage. To the left, in the shadow of a neem tree, behind a gate with a plaque—“Seaside Villa”—a man with white hair knelt among flowers. Sartaj walked by him, then turned and came back.

  “You,” he said, crooking his finger.

  The man pushed himself up and came to the gate, dusting his hands on old khaki shorts.

  “Your good name, please,” Sartaj said.

  “A. M. Khare, IFS retired.” Despite his torn banian there was the assurance of having travelled the world.

  “Mr. Khare, have you seen these persons?”

  “Not once but many times. He talked to me about my flowers.”

  “What kind of flowers are those?”

  “Orchids. They are very hard to grow.”

  “Did he know anything about flowers?”

  “No, but he complimented me particularly.”

  “Did you observe where they went after they talked to you?”

  Khare shrugged. He seemed embarrassed. “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “To the building there”—pointing with his chin—“called Daman.”

  *

  On the second floor of Daman, Sartaj found a boarding house, which was really a large flat, with thin partitions making tiny rooms let out mostly to trainees at the Taj. But, Mrs. Khanna said, there was a deluxe suite, on the floor above, next to her own rooms, which she hired out very rarely and only to people known to her. Mrs. Khanna wore a green caftan and smoked rapidly, and spoke in a no-nonsense style designed to intimidate tenants. She nodded at the photograph.

  “Known them for years,” she said. “Regulars. Nice people. Paid in cash, advance.”

  “For what?” Sartaj said. “Who came to see them?”

  “I don’t ask questions. Not my business.”

  “But you notice things.”

  She shook her head, deliberately. “Not my business.”

  “Let’s see the room.”

  There was a long passageway from Mrs. Khanna’s flat to the suite, with a locked door on either end. The inner door opened into a small room filled up by a coffee table and four old chairs. On the wall there was a painting, ruins on a cliff, over a river.

  “See,” Mrs. Khanna said. “With attached bathroom. Very nice.”

  Sartaj followed her into the bedroom. The green curtains were drawn and it was very dark, and Sartaj felt his head swim in the sudden quiet. Over the bed, a village belle flashed dark eyes at him over the edge of her stylized yellow dupatta. He reached down to the cassette player perched on the headboard and popped out the tape. There was no label. Sartaj put it back in the player and pressed a button. Mehdi Hassan sang: Ranjish hi sahi…

  “Is this his tape?” Sartaj said.

  “Yes. Mr. Patel’s tape.”

  “And the paintings?”

  “Also his. He said the room was very sparse.” She looked around the room, gesturing with a cigarette. “He was, he was a very shaukeen type of person, you see.”

  “Yes, a lover of the fabulous felicities.”

  “What?”

  But Sartaj was drawing back the curtains. Mrs. Khanna watched keenly as he went through the bedroom and into the small bathroom, which was sparkling clean. She was clearly amused as he bent over to look behind the commode.

  “It’s cleaned every day. Or when it’s used,” she said. “Nothing left over. Nothing to find.”

  “Very commendable,” Sartaj said. “Are you sure you never saw any visitors?”

  “No. Separate door there, opens out in front of the lift. They come and they go.”

  “And this boy in the picture? Mr. Patel’s son? Have you ever seen him? Did he ever come here?”

  “No.”

  “He’s dead, you know. Mr. Patel is murdered. You know?”

  “I read the paper.”

  “What is your idea about it?”

  Mrs. Khanna was holding her cigarette carefully in two extended fingers. Nothing moved except the smoke. “I’m not curious,” she said. “Not my business. Don’t want to know.”

  Sartaj searched the room. The mattress was clean, the floor underneath swept, every surface was clean and polished, and the rubbish bin empty. Mrs. Khanna was a good housekeeper. In a drawer in the bureau next to the bed there was an opened packet of Trojan condoms, “Ultra-Fin
e.”

  “These? Mr. Patel’s?”

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Khanna said.

  “American. Very expensive.”

  “He was shaukeen.”

  Sartaj looked at the bureau, under it. He peered behind the headboard of the bed, then to the left, behind the bureau. It was close up to the wall. He put the tips of three fingers behind the wood and tugged. Then with a flicker of pain his fingers came away and the bureau sat, battered and unmoving. He squatted, gripped low by its legs and pulled. A grunt, another one, and it shifted. Now he was able to get behind it, to look. There was something between the green wood and the baseboard. He reached down into the crack, searched with his fingertips. He brought it up and saw that it was a photograph, a Polaroid. He wiped away the dust, and the colours in it formed an image, and he turned it this way and that, and saw then that it was a woman’s body, naked but blurred, the brown of the skin hidden in parts by a moving smear of white, as if a sheet had been pulled off and she had turned away, all the frame filled with fast motion. Her face was hidden by a hand, an upflung arm, the chin barely visible as a suggestion, but there was her hair, long and thick and luxuriant. And the curve of a naked hip.

  “Do you know who this is?” Sartaj said.

  Mrs. Khanna considered the matter. “No,” she said. She was bored. There was much in the world she didn’t want to know about, and the naked body was no news to her.

  “Did you ever see Mr. Patel with a camera?”

  “No.”

  Sartaj was looking at the picture, trying to read what he could see of the forehead, the chin. Was it protest? Or laughter? Mrs. Khanna watched him, and he saw that she was faintly amused by his attention to the picture. He held up the family photo of the Patels. “Are you sure you never saw this boy?”

  “Told you, I didn’t.”

  “This is a dangerous position you’re in, you realize? Running a house of prostitution without license?”