Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  I zoomed. The woman was in fact not in a sari, but blue jeans and yellow tee, torso to hips mostly covered by a decussating scarf. She leaned back as if pulling a rein, her dreaming face lifted to a bolt of sun in the glinting compartment. Suddenly, she opened her eyes, met mine. I expected irritation to rent her face, but she just smiled slowly, luxuriously at me, held still for the camera.

  I clicked. She nodded, opening and closing her eyes in sync: a catlike benediction. Something about her soporific movements (and the fact she hadn’t yelled at me) slowed my senses; I sank into my relief, closing my eyes as well, breath rhythming up with the rattle and roose of wheels to tracks….

  Before I knew what was happening, the train had pulled to a stop and I was inelegantly ejected onto the platform on a wave of human commuters.

  I was also (and a little absurdly, in terms of timing) doing the Train Dance: shuffle scuffle — shebam! pow! blop! whiz? I desisted, stood eye-of-the-storming in the swirl of rushing Bombayites. When it all settled, train doors sealing, I saw the blue-and-white-etched sketch indicating I had indeed been in the Ladies’ Coach.

  And now, I realized two beats too late, having surely tumbled out my camera-cradling grasp: so was my Spleen-screened map.

  I felt the first pulse of panic, glanced around to get my bearings.

  Neon-lettered signs called out KURLA, GHATKOPAR. Others declared: THANE, DOMBIVLI, KALYAN, AMBARNATH, BADLAPUR, KARJAT, KHOPOLI, ASANGAON. Another: SLOWFROM THANE. What the frock was slowfrom?

  Other panels bilingually filled in the details: 9-car, 12-car, some fast some slow — which took me a minute to realize meant local and express, wasn’t a weigh-in on which one to bet on.

  Was I going to be late?

  For what? I went slowfrom as well, my somewhat pointlessly resumed mantra consoling me about what had seemed a traumatic loss of locus as I realized: Not only did I have nowhere to be at any particular time, but I had no idea how to get nowhere, anyway.

  Which meant …

  I could go anywhere! I could be anywhere — nobody knew where I was! (Me included!)

  I decided to explore.

  Wandering this way — maundering among the multitude, holding my own pace and simply reading the signs — itself felt like traveling. I loved that sensation at Grand Central as well, with its dome of indoor stars. I wondered now if I could find a visual angle, a link between the two stations. Track Bombay and New York together.

  I passed through an area where a zillion commuters were all camped out on makeshift mats, crunching papadums and chevda, slurping cola and chai. They seemed to be slowfrom as well. The outdoorsy picknicky vibe reminded me of staying up all night with Gwyn for Arcade Fire tickets that summer before college, singing “Deep Blue” to keep awake.

  My Grant-ra was immediately replaced by another loved number from that epic band:

  Strange how the half-light … can make a place new …

  The station was inhabiting this half-light on a grand scale.

  Exhale: a witting sinking to swimming pool bottom. A cathedraling sense of the candlelit, the sacred.

  It was difficult picturing the brilliance of the day outside. Though it wasn’t exactly cool here (despite the whirring of a few precariously placed fans), it appeared cool, and my perspiration eased off.

  Were these the train lines my parents had taken to med school back in the day? Where my mother’s rain-lengthened sari had once been trapped by the door, and my father — who’d been working up the nerve to declare his love wonderfully too soon that monsoon afternoon — watched from the platform, dismayed as it disappeared into the distance, an emerald flag to a seemingly unattainable land?

  My practical mind kicked in. Unsure whether I could leap back on a train — and unclear as to which unattainable land I longed to attain — I figured I’d see if I needed to buy a new pass.

  In the north wing, I got in line. I was up next, when I realized: I didn’t want to go anywhere.

  This was my destined destination, the station itself.

  And I also realized: Today I loved being on my own.

  So I turned away from the booth, took in the ticketing area. And suddenly recognized the space.

  I was in VT, Bombay’s Victoria Terminus. Well, now CST: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as the overhead sign proclaimed. In Mumbai.

  To have ended up here, I must have been on the Harbour Line, the blue line, rather than the Western. And I felt tangled up in that hue now, realizing the deeper reason I’d recognized the terminus. I didn’t want to think about death when all around me was Life. But who hadn’t seen that image of the young rucksacked gunman in cargo pants and Versace T-shirt striding in that ’08 day and gunning down all those passengers, those would-be passengers — who could never have foreseen the journey they’d be forced on, fated to. Blood on these marble floors.

  But once red, the room was now, I noticed, cast in a bluish haze — a spirit fog.

  A blue room. I was in a blue room. Was it my gaze tinting the space, worldviewed through a deep blueshift? But just the hue the doctor ordered, and this one steeped in such beauty it spun my sadness round to something softer, more wistfully alive.

  I sunk myself in that shade and found myself experiencing a surprisingly serene moment in the midst of the symphonically human hustle-bustle. Stone swerved, embellished with flora and fauna. Pillars plumed up to the domed sky, flowering into arches in a symmetrical arboreal flow. A Roman-numeraled clock echoed the spidery script of the ceiling architecture, time uttered in an outlier’s tongue.

  I craned my neck farther — to be met by an astronomical ceiling beaming heavenly-body bigness back down at me.

  I kept craning … nearly back-bending now, to meet that sky with my eyes. Though a sense of blue pervaded the space, upon a closer look, it felt as if other hues had swallowed blue. Neelkanth.

  The stars were faded — chartreuse nearly, awash in sea green.

  Oh, so quiet. I unlidded Chica Tikka. This was the shot I wanted of Victoria Terminus. Something huge had happened here — the wished-upons and the wasted, the blink of the dead emitted in this celestial haze, time-traveling back to us through the light-years.

  And this was my link to Grand Central. What I’d wished for — sankalp: the starry night of the terminus ceiling bridging two great cities. Prone seemed the only way to catch these stars. But I wasn’t sure what would happen if you lay down in a train station. Especially this station. Would they call in the medics? Or would you get trampled alive when a particularly popular train began boarding?

  Or arrested?

  Only one way to find out.

  I dropped to a squat … then lay flat on my back.

  Lifted Chica Tikka to eye …

  Something about the roof softened from this angle, evoked bedding, plush-studded mattressing to sky-sink into. The greenish haze went bluer. Free-falling — but upwards into upended hull, the cupped hand of that constellation.

  Shifting the frame opened a portal. Hillbacked hours cloudspotting with Gwyn rushed back to me, stargazing backyard sleepovers. Childhood afternoons on the shag rug, tipping the room upside down in our collective imagination: tiptoeing cross-ceiling, a chandelier’s cavalier flip, a somersault of bonsais balancing clay pots on tentacled bottoms.

  I was swept by a piercing longing for that feeling again: the company of a kindred spirit. My commonsensical mind told me I had Karsh, family, friends galore. And hadn’t I just been singing the praises of solitude? But there’d been such a familial freedom, an ease and meld, thrill as well — a discovering, and instinctive scripting of the world we were living — in a childhood friendship that simply wasn’t comparable to anything since.

  I ached for Gwyn. Someone who’d shared that childhood sky. With whom, beneath it, enveloped by it, she’d, we’d grown — flown the unknown. She who could see what I saw, and show me a thing or two, too.

  And this sky, here. Now. Wow.

  Frock, it’s beautiful….

  —Very, I
ndie Girl.

  The voice, near familiar, entered me like steam on a blustery day, instantly launching a kindled tingle up my spine.

  I turned. I only needed lower my gaze a touch, as the bearer of that warming, wondering accordance was quite tall, tawnily brawned.

  Even at a nanoglance, I knew that wide-brimmed silhouette. He tipped the hat at me now. Then, eyes uncovered — those blue-brown grey-green eyes the shade of stirred-up sea — he stepped towards me.

  Cowboy donned not boots but Birks. My mouth foolishly agogged, and I was struggling to rise when he fell-swooped beside me, his own SLR in hand, and lay down.

  —All alight in the Star Chamber, he said now, and smiled. —So you’ve found one of my favorite places in this city.

  A languidly commanding near-British Indian boarding school accent, like some of Mallika’s crowd had — except his was sonorously shot through with twang. I hadn’t noticed at the airport.

  Our heads aligned, lying down.

  —It’s already one of mine, too, I said. —Cowboy.

  —At your service. Almost didn’t recognize you with the new ’do.

  I touched my head: still slick. Asha and that Ayurvedic experience seemed miles of moments away….

  Camera balanced on belly now, he crossed his arms behind his head — as if he were recumbent in a lazy-day field instead of on the floor of one of the busiest train stations in Asia.

  He pointed up with a mischievous grin. —On a clear night, they say you can see Orion…. I’d lie like this in Ooty. Years ago. The stars were so many there …

  —… was barely room for sky, I said, nodding as I recalled a hill station visit many years ago with my family.

  His grin expanded, gaze still up. I tried to keep mine there, too, but kept sneaking a side peek at the way the little parentheticals wrinkled gleefully around his mouth when he smiled.

  —Far preferable to queuing for tickets, no? A whole other kind of superdensecrushload.

  —Superdensewhat?

  —The term invented to describe the sheer numbers of people here during rush hour.

  —Superdensecrushload — I love that! I cried. —So cosmic. Romantic. Maybe people who fall madly in love in train stations should get their star charts checked against this sky.

  —Absolutely. Love’s like transit, isn’t it? So much of it’s anticipation, and the traveling’s the point — sometimes it’s even best when you never get there, or don’t even know where you’re going. Just the direction …

  It seemed perfectly natural we were already discussing the locomotion of love. Conversations got intimate fast when you were lying down.

  I tapped my camera bag. —I was just making flying saucers a minute ago. Letting my flash hit those glinty bits. It’s so amazing up there….

  —You know what’s just as amazing? What’s below our feet. Well, backs. Somewhere just about here, on the site of Bori Bunder, lie the remains of the temple of Mumbadevi, the city’s patron saint, goddess of the Koli fisherfolk, Bombay’s first inhabitants — for whom the metropolis is named. Mumbai.

  —Frock, I whispered. —So the beginnings of Bombay itself lie just beneath us?

  —Yes, ma’am. Legend has it the temple was built by Mumbaraka, a giant who ransacked the city at the time. The Kolis prayed to Brahma; he birthed from his own body an eight-armed goddess who knocked the giant for the punch. Mumbaraka built the temple for her, begged her to take his name. Mumbadevi symbolizes Mother Earth; some say she has no mouth.

  —Mother Earth. Well, I suppose so, if she’s down there.

  —No longer. Except her energy. They’ve got the goddess in a new temple in Bhuleshwar, by Zaveri Bazaar — the diamond market. New being a relative term in this town, of course.

  He lay there with an athletic ease, a sinewy lion at rest, hat half-tipped across his forehead. Space seemed to give, make room for him. I usually felt I was bumping up against it. Both inner and outer.

  But not at the moment. At the moment, everything fit.

  Cowboy was tall for an Indian. White, pink, noise — a colonialist interference in his geneaology? But his burnished skin belied that … and then his hazy eyes belied that skin. In fact, every layer I arrived at seemed undone by the next.

  A spectacular perfectly circular birthmark bobbed above his left nostril. My right. I suddenly felt like touching it.

  I guess I liked examining things so closely … because I was a photographer? My sidelong was getting a little full-on, though, so I swung my eyes back up. But not before he’d met my gaze for one rimple in time.

  —They say the goddess will grant your heart’s desire if you ask her sincerely, Cowboy whispered now.

  —Even if you lie on your back?

  —As long as you tell the truth on your stomach.

  That open-prairie sand dune Doon School type accent rendered his comment even more … cheeky.

  He was staring at me. I wondered if he was mind reading.

  He nodded, sideways. —Go on. I won’t watch.

  —Wha—?!

  —Make your wish.

  Ah.

  —You’re covered, he added. —If the goddess is out, you’ve got all those stars as backup.

  Your heart’s desire.

  Stargazing upon a goddess in a station built for a queen …

  I wanted to roll onto my side and face him, my unexpected accomplice.

  And then, something very strange happened. Though the adjacent trains tracked along my vertebrae and commuter footfalls thudded quietly in my belly, from above and below: a lush engulfing silence. And within that silence, an inner shift — a psychic wall sliding open to reveal a vault, a passage, another room. A shortcut to a long road.

  An opening.

  It struck me then I wasn’t wishing for anything, had been so lost in the moment, I wasn’t lost at all.

  And then I realized my wish had already been granted. In recalling Gwyn, hadn’t I also called upon someone to kin with?

  I turned now to stare at Cowboy. And caught him staring at me. The same way I’d once-upon fallen into that book of Ansel Adams photos, catalyzing, sparking the idea that this was what I wanted to do with my time, my life — an immersion so complete, I lost sight of page, image, printed word — a fall more like flight, a flight more like crash-landing in the very heart of the matter …

  In that way, I fell now into those eyes.

  In those eyes, a catch of tiny Dimples bobbed, unshored.

  I fell … towards myself?

  —Hey! Ye kya ker raha hain? Utho, utho!

  We both turned, startled, up to find we’d finally inspired a reaction. A somewhat official-looking man (upper pocket pens; pants and shirts same color) was wagging an admonishing finger windshield wiper–like over both our faces. It wasn’t clear whether the problem was the cameras, our position, or my train of thought — but it was clearly imperative we move.

  I got up first, glanced back at Cowboy. The stars etched on tile below him splintered out with a confident velocity, turning him into a kind of urban angel for a moment. I reached my hand back down to him, my coconspirator in supine single-reflex crime. He took it gently, but rose completely of his own accord.

  We exchanged complicit smiles — even with our chastiser’s glare upon us — then brushed off our jeans, kicked into our Birks, packed up our SLRs. Strangely dissimilar twins, we exited in a comfortable silence, wending our way through the crowd towards the entrance/exit. I could feel the heat from Cowboy’s palm hovering an inch off my back as he guided me.

  Out to the sidewalk, and a heavier, smoggier chaleur. Throngs, saried and suited, gathered by the red-lit sign hawking more destinations: Panvel, Titwala.

  Bandra!

  The day’s brightness struck us like a flashbulbed mirror; it was difficult to see in so much light, pupils shrunk to pinpoints. I turned to Cowboy now, a silhouette against the sun.

  —That was so beautiful…. It’s hard to imagine what happened here just a few years ago.

&
nbsp; He nodded. —’08. It was crazy. First they crept in through that little fishing village …

  —Cuffe Parade.

  —Exactly. Then they hit VT — this station — Café Leopold, two taxi explosions, at Vile Parle …

  —And … how do you say it? Wadi Bunder.

  —Yes. Why do you know so much about it?

  —I dunno, I said. —Why do you?

  —I was here.

  —You were in Bombay at the time?

  —I was here here. About to board a train, in fact. It was a very, very close call.

  I swallowed hard, digesting this.

  —And you’ve come back, I said finally. —Aren’t you terrified? I mean, you nearly died!

  —Yes, I nearly died, he quietly replied. —But, on the other hand, I completely lived.

  That was a way of looking at it.

  —You’re very brave, I said now. He shrugged.

  —I guess I’m revisiting some places that were very painful for me back then. I … things changed a lot after that. In a way, it’s my first time here with no agenda, no timetable. Unaccountable — nowhere to be, and perhaps no one to be with.

  Perhaps?

  —Have you been away long? I asked.

  —Feels it. I suppose I’m just trying to find my way back. Back to Bombay. And part of that’s … running into those rooms. I tend to step right into the fear, the pain — it becomes something different then.

  He glanced back at the terminus then again to me. —You can reenvision, rewrite it. Shift borders and move on. Look at you — you lay down for your art. You don’t have the usual bounds.

  My art. I liked how that sounded; that’s how it had felt.

  —I’ve been thinking a lot about borders, I told him. —Dichotomies. Especially now that I’m in India.

  —International borders? Cultural?

  —I thought that’s what it’d be about. But turns out it’s more … innerspatial. Intergalactic. Borders between people, art, life, past, present. It just seems so narrow to limit it to your ethnic background. Sure, it’s a part of it. But the number of times someone’s asked me where I’m from … as if that’s the answer to everything. Do you get that, too?