Love and Longing in Bombay

by Chandra, Vikram

  Afterwards, we walked down the street to the corner, stepping through the pools of light under the streetlamps, turned left to the highway, and waved down a rickshaw amidst the headlong rush of trucks. As we got in, a black Ambassador pulled to a halt behind us. It was Das, on his way back to the factory after a day of meetings in the city Sandhya told him what had happened. “Sir,” she said. “We are working on it day and night. We will solve it, never fear.”

  “Yes,” he said, and sat back in the seat. The car crunched off in a swirl of dust, and I was sadder still. He had the look of a man going to his execution, a man who has accepted that this unbelievable thing is going to happen, and is now settling accounts in his mind. I think he was quite past fear.

  *

  On the second day I gave in to panic. I mean on the second day that Rajesh was gone I gave up all hope of indignation and frankly drowned in dread. At exactly ten-thirty I was unable to work anymore, and I turned in my chair and looked at the back of Sandhya’s head. She was writing code in quick little flurries of keytaps. I picked up the phone and dialled a number that Rajesh had told me never to call, and listened to thirty-four rings. Personal calls are not allowed, Rajesh had said, and anyway they’re a nosy lot, those fellows who work at the Post Office, they would ask too many questions. I listened to the shrill ringing and counted. Finally, a voice said, “Chembur Post Office.”

  “Parcel Office,” I said, and waited. There was a longer ring now, insistent. I lost count but I held the receiver hard against my head and waited.

  “Yes?” a woman said.

  “Parcels?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Rajesh Pawar there?”

  “No.”

  I knew I had another question, but I was silenced by stories that appeared abruptly in my head, complete tales of disaster and horror. She hung up.

  I concentrated on my finger, the finger that tapped the bar on top of the phone, brown against black, the finger that pressed the keys. I made each movement deliberate and then again waited. This time I asked for the supervisor. “You are who?” the woman said.

  “Supervisor, please,” I said.

  I had to tell her my name, and also that it was about a missing registered letter, and the line was cut off once and I had to call back, but finally he came on and I asked about Rajesh.

  “Your good name?” he said.

  “Iqbal Akbar,” I said.

  “And you are who?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “Of Rajesh.”

  “A friend of Rajesh.”

  He said that with some satisfaction, as if he understood everything. Whatever he did understand, it persuaded him. “But this is very strange, if you are a friend,” he said. “Rajesh Pawar hasn’t worked here in eight months. He just walked out one afternoon. He was sorting parcels and then he just got up and left. No resignation letter, nothing. Very improper. But how is it you do not know?”

  I put the phone down. I pressed my temples with my knuckles as hard as I could and tried to squeeze it all away.

  “Listen, Sandhya,” I said.

  But she was away, deep into the machine. I put my hand on her shoulder and waited, my heart tightening like a fist.

  “Haan?” she said, jerking out of her trance. “What? What?”

  But suddenly I didn’t want to talk about Rajesh. A question about him, now, would give shape to my fear, put it in the world and make it real. “How did you meet Anubhav?” I said.

  A moment passed, and another, I asked again, and then she said in a drugged voice, wrapped around silences like a call from the other side of the moon, “He helped me buy a book at Crossword.”

  “What book?” I knew the answer, but I wanted something, a word, a story, a plank or two to prop against my collapse.

  “Picasso book,” she said. “It was a book about Picasso.”

  “But what did you like about him?” I think there was something in my voice, a sob, and she swivelled in her chair, bumping against my knees, and looked at me, blinking.

  “What is it?” she said.

  So I told her. She took charge then. She shut down her compiler, and sent me outside to put on my shoes and wait by the front door. I watched Anubhav paint. When Sandhya stuck her head in his door to say that we were going out for a while, he didn’t turn his head to say his “Haan, okay, see you later.” He was painting rural scenes. In a canvas leaning against the wall, there was a mud hut and a pile of hay and a hard yellow sky. And a bony, elongated cow peered at me from an easel to the side. I thought, he’s been working hard. Sandhya waved at his back and I blinked at the cow and we left.

  We caught the local from VT to Sion. In the train, which was mostly empty because of the hour, I turned my head and leaned my head against the bars on the window and cried. The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably. I had a plea in my throat, a half-formed call for mercy. A supplication, my mother would have called it. Then, filling my head, a roar as the train went through a station without stopping, faces only a few feet away dimmed by the ferocious speed.

  At Sion station we got into an autorickshaw. I had Rajesh’s address written out in my diary, but I had never been to his house before, so we went slowly, stopping now and then to ask directions. “All the way around to the back of the Rupam Cinema Hall,” a man driving a DHL van told us. “Then you go straight, Dharavi side.” So we went around Rupam, which was crowded for a matinee of Zanjeer. A revival, I thought, Rajesh will be angry he missed it. We drove on, and the road became narrow, and finally we stopped. Sandhya paid off the autorickshaw and then we walked. The lane was actually a road, but the stalls had pushed out from the shops on either side, so that you could only walk in the very centre, brushing shoulders. They were selling suit pieces, baby clothes, kitchen utensils, plastic hair bands. After a while we left the bazaar behind and turned right, into a road lined with chawls, great greyish buildings continuing forever. Sandhya was wearing a black suit, and she began to walk faster as people turned to look at her. I stopped one of them, a thin grandfatherly man with white handlebar moustaches, and asked for the Saraswati Shinde Chawl. He looked at Sandhya, shading his eyes, and said to me, “Come, I’ll show you.” He turned and led us up the road, around a curve, and to it. “Here,” he said, gesturing with a tilt of his head. “Here.”

  It was a four-storied building, enormous, built around a central courtyard, balconies running all the way around on the inside. There was a small tree in the centre of the courtyard, a patch of unexpected green. The sun came down hard into the land, and I was trembling.

  *

  Rajesh’s father was short, heavyset. He came eagerly to the open door of No. 312 when we knocked, tugging his banian down over his belly. He slumped into stillness while Sandhya told him that we were friends of Rajesh, and watching his stubbled, disappointed face, I thought he looked much smaller than I had imagined him from Rajesh’s stories. His wife came out through a narrow door behind him then, wrapping a blue pallu around her shoulders. She sent him away to put on a shirt, and seated us on a takath that almost filled the shallow breadth of the room.

  “Dilip has gone to the police station,” she said in Marathi-accented Hindi. “We have reported this yesterday.”

  I was looking at the calendar on the wall behind her, at a picture of the pristine arc of Marine Drive, hidden by her shoulder. She was looking at me, and I tried to speak but found that I could say nothing. There was a battered black table fan perched in a niche in the wall next to the takath, and I could feel the streaming air moving slowly across my back.

  “I’m sure there will be some news soon,” Sandhya said.

  “You, you know Rajesh for very long?” Rajesh’s father said to Sandhya. His shoulders filled the d
oorway as he buttoned a striped shirt. He looked uncomfortable asking the question, and I coughed and forced myself into speech.

  “No, actually, I’m Rajesh’s friend. For the last two years. A little more, maybe. Mrs. Gore is my boss and has met him also. We saw him on Tuesday night.” I realized I didn’t know the Hindi for art opening. “He came to a painting show with us.”

  “For what?” Rajesh’s father said.

  “A show of paintings.”

  “Iqbal is Rajesh’s best friend,” Sandhya said suddenly, her eyes moist. “They are, they are old friends.” She stopped abruptly.

  They were puzzled by me, by their son’s unexpected Muslim friend who talked about paintings. But I knew about them. I knew that his name was Shivraj and hers Sharda, that they had an elder son named Dilip who worked as a clerk in a cooperative bank, and I knew that the young woman who emerged now with a rattle of cups and glasses was Dilip’s wife Mamta, that she was tiny in size and meek in appearance but had a tongue as sharp as a fish-knife, that Dilip and Mamta went every Saturday afternoon to Juhu beach, that she had a yearning for blazing spices.

  “Please take,” Rajesh’s mother said hoarsely. She leaned forward, and still standing, handed the teacups to us. They were in fear, but they were certain about their hospitality, and so we drank the water out of little steel cups, and then the tea. There was a blue plate piled high with chiwda, and Rajesh’s mother held it out to us. “Please take,” she said. A group of children had followed us up the stairs, and I could hear their feet on the floor outside, their whispering. I put a palmful of chiwda into my mouth, and looked at the strip of wall between Rajesh’s mother and father. We sat in silence. I knew that Rajesh slept on the takath that we were sitting on, and that his father slept on a mattress on the floor next to him. Since their marriage, Dilip and Mamta had the one room inside, and Rajesh’s mother the passageway next to the kitchen. I had imagined the room and it was exactly as I had imagined it, but I hadn’t known about the calendar, or the steel cups.

  Dilip came back from the police station an hour later, and to his mother’s eager questions he said, only, “Nothing.” And then he walked with us to the train station. I said goodbye to Rajesh’s parents, to the narrow length of the room and its muted light, to Mamta, and then we walked down the staircases, around and back on the balconies, past the dozens and scores of identical rooms, with the children following behind us. I stumbled after Dilip, staring at the blue check on his shirt collar, wondering how with his thick glasses and his retreating air of meekness he could be Rajesh’s brother. On the street Sandhya walked between us, and finally she looked up at him and asked, “Did you know Rajesh hasn’t been to the Post Office for work in many months?”

  Dilip looked away, then back. “Yes. Only now we found out. I have not told my mother yet. Also …”

  “Also?” Sandhya said.

  “Today one sub-inspector said they had received information that he was involved with some bad people. Bhai log he worked with.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Yes, bhai log.” He grimaced as he repeated the phrase. In my mouth I tasted the small cleverness of the words, the mean wit with which the city’s gangsters described themselves: the fraternity, the band of brothers.

  “How much I didn’t know about my own brother,” Dilip said. “How much more don’t I know?”

  Sandhya said nothing, and I stared straight ahead, and we walked on, through that road dense with other people and a thick haze of unreality. I stared at the gouts of red paan stain at the foot of a wall, and forgot how I had come to be there. Time passed, and I was paralysed by an ecstasy of wonder. I was filled with a glory of questions like a blinding blue light. I could not tell you how much of the day stumbled past us. Finally, outside the train station, Dilip and Sandhya and I stood near a long yellow wall, leaning towards each other against the ceaseless flow of faces. He held me by the elbow, and shouted over the afternoon rush. “How did you meet Rajesh?”

  “I met him while we were exercising,” I said. The lie came easily. I had a certain fluency at lies.

  “Of course. He was always building his body,” Dilip said with pride. “He was second in a competition last year, you know.”

  I knew. We said goodbye to Dilip and bought tickets. On the platform, we waited, and I tried to remember the truth of meeting Rajesh. I had met him, as I remembered, on a New Year’s Eve when I had eight hundred and twenty rupees in my pocket from a birthday envelope from my grandmother. It was in a bar called the Ramanand behind the Taj, which during the day was crowded with office workers eating bheja curry and faluda, but by evening was taken over by men, only men. I had had one Hayward’s Ale, and when I noticed him standing in the crush, I gathered all my beery courage and motioned to the empty chair across the table. I had one more beer, and bought him one. When we told each other our full names we looked at each other for a moment and noted and dismissed the difference in our religions in one smile, that was all. Afterwards we walked outside on the waterfront, drifting happily with the holiday thousands. The charge at Vertigo was fifty rupees each, and the wait was half an hour, but inside there was the happiness of a beat that I could feel in my chest, choli ke peechay kya hai, and bodies and bodies, a mirrored ceiling in which danced the happy faces of men. We danced, and I bought another beer and leaned against the wall, and Rajesh stood in front of me and was pressed against me by the delirious jostle. He was very sure of himself. He held his beer with one hand and rested the other on my belt buckle. My stomach trembled, and he grinned, his eyes blue in the disco light, and he said, “Dandi mein current hia?”That was wrong, I stuttered, because you can’t have current in wood, it was a wrong manner of speech, it couldn’t be true, but he grinned even more widely and let his hand move, and I was wrong, and maybe there was current in the dandi after all. We passed the next year in meetings and quarrels and separations and phone calls. We argued about cricket and movies and broken promises and faithlessness and disease and death, but on the next New Year’s we were together again, against the same wall in Vertigo. I leaned my forehead against his shoulder, against the curving-in from the chest and the tight bulk of the biceps, and he whispered into my ear, “Bastard, you like me just for my Maharashtrian muscle.” I thought of what he had done a year ago, at his blunt roughness, and laughed at him. But what he said was true, and a little more than true, and much less than true. I pinched the tendon under his shoulder. “And you?” I said. “Why do you like me?” “For your beauty,” he said, and cupped my cheek in his hand. I wanted to believe it and couldn’t. “It’s true,” he said, and kissed me.

  *

  Things settle and sink. I spent the next two days buying and setting up an aquarium. I learnt about air, and the lack of it, and what there is to know about food for fish. I learnt about which fish eat each other. Lalit and I cleared a place in his room, near his bed, moved aside his toys. After I carried in the aquarium, we laid in the gravel, siphoned the water in while Ma-ji stood in the doorway and talked about doom. Then the fishes, and then Lalit and I sat on the ground and watched them, their sudden turns, their cool black eyes. There was a sunken boat at the bottom of the sea, a shattered green hulk through which they flitted, in and out. This especially delighted Lalit. He made up stories about how it sank, terrible tales of storms and sea-monsters. Me, I allowed myself one phone call every evening to Dilip, just before I left to go home. I waited every day as they sent someone up from the tea-shop, feeling a constant motion at the bottom of my heart, deep where it had gone while the world went on. Dilip came on always and said, “Haan, Iqbal?” After he told me that there was no word of Rajesh, he talked often of other things. I think that, oddly, he was trying to comfort me. We spoke one day of cricket, and on another about a hit movie neither of us had seen. The next day Sandhya said we were to have a party on Saturday‚ two days away I said nothing, but I must have looked so poisonous that she began her defence immediately.

  “Don’t say anything,” she
said. “It’s very important to Anubhav. It’s Mahatre-ji’s birthday.”

  “Mahatre-ji?”

  “He’s the Times of India critic, you know. Anubhav’s already told him and invited some people.”

  “How many people?”

  “Forty-fifty he said. For dinner.”

  Forty, or maybe fifty, for dinner, in two days meant that I could have said a lot about Anubhav, a full day or two of dissection, but I wasn’t in the mood. My pleasures were gone from me. “I’ll get it done,” I said.

  “Thanks, Iqbal,” Sandhya said. She turned and walked down the corridor towards the office, stretching her shoulders.

  “Sandhya,” I said, and she stopped. “I never saw any Picasso book around here,” I said.

  “Anubhav has it at his parents’ house, I think,” she said.

  We looked at each other, down the dark hall, and we were both too tired for my customary shake of the head and her embarrassed little smile. I took the Amarson’s shopping bag from the kitchen and got to work on Anubhav’s party. The main dishes I would get catered from Bhaktawar’s down the street, but between Ma-ji and myself and Amba bai we would manage the snacks, and also the rice and chappatis and the sweet-dish, I went through the usual scrimping and saving out of habit. I started on the customary trek out to Abdullah’s in Mahim for the Scotch, mainly because I wanted the comfort of their reassurance that it was all actually real foreign whisky, not rebottled local stuff. I wanted to hear them say it again, as before, before the world changed. I must tell you that the city was for me full of Rajesh. This is I suppose commonplace, but for me it was astonishing that I saw him behind the pillar near the autorickshaw-queue at Mahim station, that he was in the car stuck in the traffic next to me at Mori Road. I thought I heard his voice in front of a stationery store and I whirled, violently, and two schoolboys in grey shorts watched me, their mouths open and red from the ice-golas they were eating. It was noon, and I shut my eyes and turned slowly through the heat. When I opened my eyes I felt as if I were looking at the road from a cavern deep inside my body, from a small place of shade far away. I thought, then, I cannot tell you why, that I would take an hour and go to Rajesh’s bhaiyya gym. I knew Dilip had been there, and everywhere else already‚ with all the proper questions, and I had no hope of finding out anything, but I remembered Rajesh whirling the huge joris behind his back, his grip on the wooden handles, his whistling breath and the sweat, the shiny colour of his skin under the tubelight.