Love and Longing in Bombay

by Chandra, Vikram

Sartaj was thinking of the plaster Apsara, bobbing in the water near the Narayan Housing Colony, west and north of Andheri West, Bombay. He thought of her sinking and then rising a thousand years later to confound some historian’s calculations, and he laughed. He thought of the curve of her shoulder and the drops fell through the leaves above him. His eyes closed. He thought of Megha, and he tried to answer the question, Rahul’s question, his own, and he said what happened to us was that we loved each other, and we were unkind to each other, and impatient, and unfaithful, and disappointed, and yet we wanted it for forever, but these are only words, and then came a flowing stream of images, dense with colour and the perfume of her hair, and it carried him. He felt himself floating and it felt easy, but then a moment of wild fear, he was sinking, he clutched and held on to himself, tightly, tightly, but then he felt his pride quicken, the word reverberated suddenly, alacktaka, and he made himself, he let himself go, and he was plummeting, down, into darkness.

  *

  The Rolex slid easily between Sartaj’s fingers. There was pleasure, distinct and unmistakable and undiluted, in the silky fall of it against his skin, in its weight, substantial and unexpected. Under his hands there was Chetanbhai’s case file, closed. It was over, according to the file, and there was a murderer who had died in the hospital. Kshitij had left that morning, walking slowly to his friends at the front of the station, and they had watched Sartaj with careful regard as he watched them.

  Sartaj picked up the phone and dialled. He swung around in the chair as he listened to the steady ringing, half a dozen rings, then ten. In the glass of the map case he could see the shape of his turban.

  “Hello, Ma,” he said. “Peri pauna.” She had walked painfully across the drawing room, holding her hip, he knew this.

  “Jite raho, beta. Where have you been?”

  “Casework,” he said. As she spoke he reached back far in memory‚ trying to find the earliest fleeting fragment of her. He remembered her in Dalhousie, a cold mountain day, her white sari in a white chair on a patio in the sunlight, the rising mountains behind, the cold white peaks far ahead. He running up to her. How old had she been then? Young, younger than Megha.

  “Ma,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He wanted to say something to her about his father. Something about the two of them together, what they had said to each other as they walked behind him down a twisting mountain road, under the unfamiliar hill trees, leaning towards each other.

  “What, Sartaj?”

  He swallowed. “Nothing, Ma.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, not at all, Ma.”

  After he put the receiver down, Sartaj turned back to his desk, gathered up the file. As he stood up, the watch warming in his fist, he remembered suddenly his mother getting up from the kitchen table, walking behind his father, who bent over a newspaper and a cup of tea, and her hand as it brushed over the heavy shoulder, touching for a moment her husband’s cheek. The small swing of the woman’s hair as she walked away. And the small smile that flickered on the man’s face.

  *

  There was a doorway in Sophia College Lane, across from Megha’s building, where he used to wait when they had first met each other. He was hiding in it again, now, in a new uniform, and that other long-ago self felt foreign somehow, another Sartaj, faintly puzzling. There was music drifting down from a window above, a ghazal‚ ye dhuan sa kahaan se uthta hai, and the swirling rush of cars below on Warden Road. He listened to the music, and when Megha first came out of the building he didn’t recognize her. Her hair was cut short, above the shoulders, and she was wearing dark glasses and she looked very stylish and young. She paused with her hand on the door of the Mercedes, raised her head up, looked about as if she had heard something. Sartaj stepped back into the shadows. Then she got in, the door shut, and the car moved off quickly, past Sartaj. He had a glimpse of her profile, and then it was gone.

  He straightened up. He walked across the road, to the gate where the same gatemen waited. The first time he had visited her in her home, in what he thought were his best and dazzling jeans, they had stopped him and made him wait while they checked upstairs.

  “Sahib‚” one said. “You haven’t come for a long time.”

  “Yes,” Sartaj said. “Will you give this upstairs? In Memsahib’s house?” This was the divorce papers, each page initialled, the last signed and dated and witnessed.

  “Of course.” As Sartaj walked away the gateman called, “Will you wait for a reply?”

  “No need,” Sartaj said. He had Katekar and the jeep waiting below, at Breach Candy, but he wanted to walk for a while. A van passed with that ugly throbbing American music that Sartaj could feel in his chest. A school bus passed, and three girls in blue uniforms smiled toothily at him from the rear window. Sartaj laughed. He twirled his moustache. In the blaring evening rush he could feel the size of the city, its millions upon millions, its huge life and all its unsolved dead. A double-decker bus ground to a halt at the stop across the street, and people jostled in and out. On the side of the bus a poster for a new movie proclaimed: “Love, Love, Love.” Somewhere, also in the city, there was Kshitij and his partymen, with their building full of weapons and their dreams of the past, and Sartaj knew that nothing was finished, that they remembered him as much as he thought of them. A light changed just as Sartaj was about to cross the road, and the stream of cars jerked ahead madly, causing him to jump back, and the sidewalk vendors and their customers smiled at him. He smiled also, waiting his moment. Then he plunged in.

  Artha

  “NOW WHERE EXACTLY is it that you go?” said Ayesha one evening in April. Ayesha I’ve known since college, and she knows me well, and when I told her, she said, “A dingy bar that far away, a bunch of old guys, and one oldie telling stories? Stop phenko-ing, yaar.” She thought I had a woman hidden away somewhere, otherwise why would I leave her and the Crimson Cheetah and the overpriced beer for some ghati bar. She had been working for one of the new cable TV companies for almost a year, so her new friends were all models and account executives and what she called “personalities,” and sometimes they were so hip I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other.

  “It’s true, a few old guys,” I said. “Really.” So she came with me. Ayesha, once she gets curious about something, telling her no just makes her believe you have something she needs to know about. And anyway it pissed her off, the idea that somewhere in the city there might be a club that didn’t want her, so I think she was actually a little disappointed when Subramaniam made a place for her at the table and lit her cigarette. By the end of the evening she was calling him Uncle Sub and teasing him about why he never brought Mrs. Subramaniam to the bar. I hadn’t even known that there was a Mrs. Subramaniam. Ayesha came back two days later, and she brought two of her friends with her, both television-types in very high heels. They said they were going to produce a men’s talk show on Zee TV.

  So we had a sudden new crowd at the old bar. The balcony filled up with journos full of horrific election-time tales from the interior, and the younger Maruti 1000 kind of stockbrokers, and also a certain hotel-trainee group who always said, “Hamara group has the most fun, man,” and Subramaniam still sat in his corner, and the rest of us grumbled, and I muttered about how they were going to sell the place to some fucking dairy farmer’s son who would give it some maha-groovy name like The Purple Ant Farm and drive us all out with beer prices only foreign-bank imperialist-choosoing scum could afford. But really we all enjoyed it quite a bit, the free papad suddenly got better, and one day we came in and the tables were covered with pink plasticky tablecloths that squeaked under our elbows. It was all quite dazzling.

  Now, that evening, Subramaniam had been telling Ayesha that she must get married.

  “But, Uncle,” she said, “suppose I do get married to somebody.” She said “somebody” as two separate, very long words and rolled her eyes up to the fan. “Suppose I do, where are we going to l
ive? Outer Kandivli?” I knew for a fact she had never been to Kandivli. “As it is,” she said tragically, “the only half-decent PG one could get was in bloody Bandra.”

  “People live,” Subramaniam said. “Somehow.”

  “How?” Ayesha said. “How?”

  I had been watching him for weeks, him in his corner, watching us and all the others, and so I filled his glass again. “Yes,” I said. “How?”

  He laughed at me, his shoulders shaking. He picked up the glass and drank.

  “All right,” he said. “Listen.”

  *

  A year or two ago (Subramaniam said) I travelled from Delhi to Bombay on the Rajdhani. This was a troubled time, we huddled in the half-empty train as it sped through the cities, watching for fires and crowds, and afraid of the rumours that flitted from one coach to the other. There was only one other person in my compartment, a thin young man in a white shirt and black pants. We had the lights off, so I saw his face illuminated in flashes by the lights that whipped by in the tearing wail of the wind. The angular shadows raced across his body, and I saw fragments of his face, tired eyes under thinning hair, unexpectedly rich lips, like a dark statue’s pout, and slim hands holding each other. All put together, there was a comforting everyday ordinariness in the person who sat across the aisle from me, knee to knee, as we yearned towards our homes through our country’s nocturnal madness. We were speaking—I admit it—of Beauty and Art. When I said that phrase, those words, “Beauty and Art,” he laughed shortly.

  “I could tell you a thing or two about that,” he said.

  “Do,” I said. “Please.” We went across a bridge then, with that sudden hollow mournful note to the train’s racheting, and he watched me.

  “Because I’ll never see you again,” he said. “My name is changed, and also the others, slightly. But everything else is true.”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said. “Please tell me.”

  And so he told me a story. On that train, that night. This is what he told me.

  *

  Twenty rupees and twenty paise is not so much (the young man said), but it’s exactly worth a man’s job, and his career, and so his life. We knew this that afternoon when Das called and told us we had thirteen days to find the problem and fix it. “Then I have to tell my bosses,” he said, and left it at that, which was very polite of him, considering that he had taken our bid for their inventory and accounting software against bigger companies, and that too in an organization where they thought calculators were flashy and unreliable compared to a good abacus.

  “They’ll throw him out, Iqbal,” Sandhya said.

  There was no use saying no for the sake of comfort, because it was obvious. “Not if we find the bug,” I said. Das had pushed our bid through, against all the old men who owned the company, and now if they found out this program written by a woman was not only crashing but losing money here and there, just disappearing it into outer space, they would have him out on the street before the quarterly meeting was over. Not to forget our payment, which was only a third in our pockets yet.

  “Shit, Iqbal,” Sandhya said. “Thirteen days.”

  “Let’s find it then. Twenty rupees and twenty paise.”

  “Right,” she said, straightening up in that torn and tattered chair she loved, and smiling at me. “Let’s find it.”

  She was trying to be a leader, like those people in the management books she kept buying from Crossword, but I could see she was tired to the bone. Putting in a new software application will do that to you, because something always goes wrong on the site, what works at home never works there, and the damn users always have one idea after another, and they tell you to change this and that, as if you can wave a wand and it’s all done, and you can’t even tell the bastards they okayed this exact design three months ago. Plus this was our first solo project, our first very own thing for Mega Computers, Ltd., and let me tell you, looking at Sandhya I could see that running your own company sounds fine until you actually run it. And besides I wasn’t much help.

  “What do you mean you aren’t any help?” Rajesh said later that night. He had been waiting for me as usual at the bus stop on the corner of Carter Road. “You’re there all day and most of the night, working for her.”

  It was past eleven, and most of the shops were shut. I could feel a swelling from the sea against my face, a hint of coolness. I put an arm around his shoulder.

  “But not all of the night,” I said, touching his hair with the tips of my fingers. He shrugged my arm off. We walked on, and I said, “I help with the kid, and the accounting, I pay the bills, I even keep the mother quiet, I make tea for the painter, but I can’t help her with what she does.”

  “You’re a programmer,” he said sullenly. “You said so.”

  Even our quarrels were familiar and shapely now. We fit each other snugly. I put my hand on the back of his hip, with a finger looped through a belt loop, and told him again that I coded high and she coded low, that when I cranked out my bread-and-butter xBase database rubbish I was shielded from the machine by layers and layers of metaphor, while she went down, down toward the hardware in hundreds of lines of C++ that made my head hurt just to look at them, and then there were the nuggets of assembly language strewn through the app, for speed when it was really important, she said, and in these critical sections it was all gone from me, away from any language I could even feel, into some cool place of razor-sharp instructions, “MOV BYTE PTR [BX],16.” But she skated in easy, like she had been born speaking a tongue one step away from binary.

  “Me-ta-phor?” Rajesh said. “You’ve been speaking to the painter.”

  We were on the rocks now, under the seawall, and I made a big show of finding my footfalls in the darkness, even though I knew each jagged outcrop a little better than the steps to my room in my house, my parents’ house. The rocks bulked up above us, and in the darkness there were the huddled shapes of bodies, couples in the niches and the shadows.

  “Of course I’ve been speaking to the painter,” I said, facing out to the sea. “I can hardly help it if he’s in the flat all the time. Sandhya is madly in love with him.”

  “He’s in all the time, is he? Talking about me-ta-phors?” He pulled me back so that I settled against him, as always with the lovely surprise of the taut muscles of his chest and thighs, shaped and solid. His eyelashes moved like feathers against the rim of my ear. “You like the painter when he talks about me-ta-phors?”

  I laughed quietly, and turned my face for a kiss, for his lips a little bitter with the day but welcome and hungry and supple. “Not only then,” I said, still laughing, and then gasped from his hand scooping roughly under my belt. “Not only. But so do you like him.” Rajesh wasn’t talking then, but touching with careful tenderness the contour of my collarbone, and I was starting to move in a tight frenzy under the distant movement of the tide, with a sound caught in my throat, and as long as I could, a glance and another for the top of the seawall, where sometimes the policemen strolled.

  Afterwards, Rajesh was depressed. He slouched down the road, and I walked behind, watching the shape of his back. Rajesh worked out at a bhaiyya gym near his house in Sion, in a pit of fine sand surrounded by gleaming wrestlers. I had gone there and watched him once, the dense chocolate length of his body under the buzzing tubelights, and the white langot pulled tightly between his buttocks. I watched the whirl of the weights and told the wrestlers he was my best friend.

  “I’m sick of this,” Rajesh said.

  “What?” I said, but I knew.

  “Screwing on the rocks,” he said. “I’m thirty-two years old. I want to fuck in my flat.”

  His flat wasn’t his flat, but a flat that he wanted, in a building off Yari Road. It was a rectangular yellow building, with a staircase that ran around the insides, and red doors every few yards along the long dim corridors. Rajesh’s flat was a narrow entrance passageway, a bathroom to the left, a kitchen ahead, and a single twelve-by-twelve-foot room to
the right.

  “So how much is it today?” I said.

  “Twenty-two lakhs,” he said, and added hopelessly, “and sixty-five thousand.”

  He checked Bombay prices every week, with a kind of grim pride as they climbed and spiralled away.

  “The most expensive real estate in the world,” he said expansively. “Pricier than Tokyo and New York.”

  So there might be a room in Tokyo or New York for a programmer and a postal clerk, or at least a better fantasy—this is what I wanted to say, but I reached for his hand and held it until we got to the bus stop with its quiet row of exhausted shopworkers and drivers and cooks. We sat there, hand in hand, looking just like two best friends, until the bus came, with its despairing midnight grinding of gears, and then I couldn’t stand anymore the look on his face and reached forward and crushed him as hard as I could into my arms, and found his stubbled kiss for a moment amidst the sudden jostle of the passengers on and off. He shook his head at me, but with a tiny bit of a smile. Then the bus pulled away and I was alone.

  *

  The painter was crouched on the floor of his room, clutching at the spread-out sheets of a newspaper, when I reached Sandhya’s house the next morning. Rajesh and I always called him the painter, mainly because neither of us had ever met a painter before, but his name was Anubhav Rajadhakshya, and he was tearing at The Times of India.

  “Bastard,” he said, his face an inch away from the newsprint. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.”

  “What’s wrong, Anu?” I said. I stepped over the scattered sheets, to the back of the room where he had a canvas tilted up on an old desk, in front of the big window that went across the whole length of the wall.

  “What? Iqbal … Nothing, it’s nothing.”

  The long canvas had colour in it at the top, a wash of red and yellows and black. In the painting, in the background, there was a poster for Deewar, that one, you know, Amitabh Bachchan with the coolie’s rope around his neck and legs wide apart. In front of it there was a man, a real young man with a cigarette, leaning against the wall, not coloured in yet.