Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  A Pavlovian lovelorn dog, my body nevertheless began to stretch towards him of its own accord, as it would have in recent days of old — to drape a leg over his knee, lay a cheek on his shoulder, interwine his hand and pluck gently on his pinky nail, plectrum like.

  But the fact that my body knew that map — the terrain of Karsh’s body — belied the fact it had so intimately, so barely learned another, too. And that magnetism of old wasn’t quite the same; Karsh felt more estranged brother to me than once boyfriend. Maybe I could only be attracted to one person at a time (or was forcing myself to be); did that make me not a two-timer?

  In any case, where to lean, to touch, was not up to us; the rick bounced us relentlessly on and off each other as it navigated Bandra’s potholed streets.

  All I could manage, weakly, was a vague imitation of Gokulanandini’s comment:

  —So … do you want to go to frocking Versova?

  —Still sarcastic, I see, he replied coolly. —Well, good to know some things never change.

  It was a needling comment, yet no rancor in his voice.

  —I’m not being sarcastic. I’m quoting.

  He just glanced at me, and it was a weary regard. He looked the same but different — like when you see a waitress from your local diner on the N/R and you can’t quite place how you know her, but know her, you know you do. Karsh looked a lot like somebody that I used to know, as the song went. Or more like someone I still knew and had to act like I didn’t know.

  —Well, in reply to your wonderfully phrased question, he said, turning to gaze out the front windshield, —I wouldn’t mind calling it a night, no.

  —I wouldn’t either, I admitted. Suddenly hiding under a bedsheet, willing myself into a coma seemed like the best party in town.

  —Back into Bandra?

  I nodded. He leaned forward and told the driver to turn around.

  —You’re in Bandra, too? I asked him.

  —Staying with a friend, he said, not meeting my eyes. I didn’t ask, but wondered if this was connected to Gopi girl’s move to this suburb. —I’ll drop you off first. Where to?

  —I’m still deciding.

  —Deciding where you’re staying?

  —I might … go for a walk, I said. —You go ahead and get out first. I’m not a baby, Karsh. I can drop you off and go on myself.

  —What does that have to do with being a baby?

  —I mean, maybe if I weren’t so protected all the time …

  —Look. I get it. You go your way. I go mine. Sharing the rick is a technicality. Boss —

  He was speaking to the driver again, and now uttered something completely confounding though the coal-fire eyes in the rearview blinked not twice.

  —… 29th Road, next to Grand Hotel, near Tava Restaurant, on Turner Road, near Basilico, on Pali Naka, by Eat Around the Corner …

  —That made no sense, I informed Karsh when he’d completed this incomprehensible set of directions. —Are you staying with a friend — or ten friends? In twenty places?

  —That was all one place. What, you’re a Bandra specialist now?

  —West not East, I replied. —It’s just … you can’t be on Pali Naka and 29th Road and Turner Road at the same time.

  —We’ll see about that. So where are you staying?

  —Um. Ambedkar Road, Khar West … near Hanuman Mandir near Hotel Samudra by lots of dentists and brown people and an undercover cigarette vendor next to Chuim Village, I replied, simultaneously realizing, without Flip, I had no keys.

  —Right. That’s straightforward. Anyway, why aren’t you at the hotel? It’s still paid up.

  Because even though you’re gone, they keep leaving two bathrobes for us, and it makes my heart climb my throat and nest there, sob-swallowing like a forsaken choking chaklee?

  —The Parsi Youth Congress is making too much noise. They trashed the seventeenth floor. Plus, they think I’m one of them.

  —Still having trouble sleeping? he asked, with a moment’s old-school concern. But he caught himself and turned away.

  —Not that there’s anything wrong with being Parsi, I added now, to ease the pain of that turnaway.

  It was all wrong. The conversation felt so stilted, the pauses abyssed with ditches, hairpin curves. We used to be able to talk without speaking, silence just another form of communication, connection. Now it slid down between us.

  The tuk-tuk bopped over potholes, the motor’s judder skiddering up my legs, sometimes knocking us a bit hip to hip. I wedged my camera bag between us, knapsack between my feet. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Karsh, but in peripheral vision could see his profile going stop motion with the rick’s jerks.

  We were retracing our route, repassing Manhole.

  And then, so quietly I nearly missed it:

  —So. You really wouldn’t change a thing?

  —No, I wouldn’t, I replied, just as softly. For a moment, he looked like I’d slapped him.

  —Well, I’m glad things are working out for you, Dimple.

  —That’s not what I meant, I began, but stopped short. How could I explain it? I couldn’t wish to undo what I, we’d done, could I? Because wouldn’t that undo the beautiful parts that had come before, too — ending us up with list of opening credits and no story to tell?

  —Well, what about you? I asked defensively. —Would you change everything?

  —Yes, he said, adamant. —I know how you are about trying to banish regret. Nietzsche. All that. But I don’t think lack of regret means you’re more evolved. Sometimes you need to feel it to realize you’ve learned something, to make change. And there are a lot of things I’m changing now. But I guess what’s done is done.

  —It’s not just what’s done is done. If we changed any of it, all of it would change, wouldn’t it? Even the stuff you’d want to stay the same?

  I would rather have gotten to be with you and go through this pain now, I thought but did not say, than not have had the great fortune of knowing someone like you, of being with you at all.

  He said nothing. How could we — we! — have nothing to say?

  So I said, —It’s strange … having nothing to say to each other. Isn’t it?

  He shrugged. I tried again.

  —I mean … it’s like I don’t even know you anymore….

  —It happens, Dimple.

  —What does?

  —People move on. They do what they have to do.

  At that precise moment, I almost wished I’d never come to India, taken this trip — that I could have stopped time when all was still good between us. But if this growing apart was writ in our destiny — mightn’t it have happened anywhere? In New York, too?

  Or was destiny geographically specific, I wondered as the rick nicely missed a little lobo-like canine by about an inch, tuttering down Waterfield Road.

  —Maybe our time was just up, Karsh was saying now.

  Ouch.

  —If you say so, I told him. I kept my focus fixed forward; if our eyes met, I’d surely see blurry in an instant.

  The streets were relatively empty at this hour, except for a taxi pulling up to a red at the intersection of Waterfield and Turner roads. I gazed at our own signal, willing it to stay green so our rick could just hurry up and separate us physically — to match the psychic split that had evidently already taken place.

  It did. Stay green. But the taxi didn’t slow for its red —

  And the rick didn’t brake at our green —

  Someone’s got to stop, I thought.

  The taxi continuing to jet forward across our path, the rick lunging straight for it —

  The rest must have happened in a couple seconds. But we undertowed into the time warp: My body tensed for the collision that was surely, incredibly about to occur.

  This? I thought. This is how it ends? In a rickshaw in Bandra? I mean, bloody hell!

  Followed by: My parents will kill me. I love my parents.

  And then: Save Karsh. Save me —

  O
h god oh god oh please oh please oh hare hare …

  Karsh screamed Noooooo! — or maybe he’d been screaming all along.

  BANG! Cartoon slam; taxi wham. The entire rick jumped. But time’d tongued a tab, gone all helixy, spiraling in and out of itself, longest journey inwarding out, and a nanosecond before that bang, Karsh flung his arm out to protect me. Almost simultaneously, I threw mine across him, result being we whacked each other, he catching my right shoulder, me thugging his chin. Our bodies catapulted forward against the half partition, knees slamming into this dividing wall.

  And the driver — for whom I’d had no prayer — was launched in the air and out the rickshaw.

  I think I howled. My mouth was open — but the sound seemed to be swirling at us, from the world into it, rather than the other way around.

  The rick, driverless, continued to pitch forward. The driver was hanging on to tuk-tuk bottom for dear life. I had no clue what to do. I wanted to reach down and haul him up but couldn’t unsink my grip on the partition. Everything was too fast, too fuzzy.

  Approaching: a bank of curbside ricks.

  And, with a far less violent thump, our own rick now whomped a parked tuk-tuk … and finally walloped to a stop.

  Freeze-frame after what felt like an overcranking fast-catch slow-playback eternal split-second unreeling of a year, a decade, a forever in the life — though it must have been a snip of a minute, all that. Time seizured back out into linearity.

  Hole in the record; hole in the camera: Karsh and I exchanged glances, every facial aperture open to hinge-bust — eyes, mouth, panting nostrils. And then, like magic, about fifteen men emerged from their sleeping vehicles — rick drivers, soon clustering round our little trio, gasping, shouting Bhanchod! and pointing towards where the taxi had hit and run. Warmly concerned faces, incendiary expressions, outraged and comforting voices, all organically familiar — as if we’d all been in it together at some point before.

  I thought: Not only do we carry our pasts forward with us into the future — baggage, memories, habits, dreams towed along in that wake — but the future also flows back to us, dippering up present and past in this tidal embrace. Our own hereafter had nearly been cut adrift, short. But our present had propelled me and Karsh: nettingly swooped it up and, with the weight of the gravitational past to pull against, hauled it safely over that threshold into port.

  In other words: We got lucky. Out my open door I could see, a few feet away, the driver supine in the street.

  I fell out of the rick, miraculously to my feet, followed by Karsh, who immediately fell to his knees by the driver’s side.

  A couple other rickwallahs squatted down there beside them. Our driver attempted with great difficulty to heave himself up on an elbow, wobbling slightly as his rescue team gripped him underarm and helped him rise.

  He collapsed against his battered rick, and in that instant, I saw his battered heart as well: The entire front windshield had shattered, the muzzle of the tuk-tuk smashed in. Had the driver not been thrown, he’d likely be dead.

  Had the timing been a split second off, and the taxi hit a few inches farther back, we could have all been dead.

  Dead dead dead. The word made me feel insurgently, almost self-indulgently, alive.

  —Paani? one driver offered.

  Another: —Chai?

  —I think we’re okay, Karsh replied, appreciatively side-to-siding. —Nahi, bhai. Thank you.

  I shook my head, too. The driver was finally upright, his weight on the wounded vehicle. Karsh leaned in to him. Automatic transmission: I knew he was asking if he was all right.

  In fact, weirdly, I understood everything everyone was saying at this moment, meaning and intent superceding language itself. Or maybe they were speaking English; it all sounded the same.

  The driver rolled his body against the rick, like he wanted to merge with it. For a moment, he was still. Then, taking a deep breath, he steadied himself, turning towards us with those coal-burning eyes.

  —Boss? he whispered, gazing soulfully at Karsh, and even at me. He then let flow a long phrase ending upwards in a question … and my mouth fell open, comprehending.

  —Wow, Karsh said under his breath. Laying a hand on the driver’s shoulder, he shook his head, jerking it towards the road behind us. Then he dug into his pocket and pulled out a couple hundred rupee notes. Now the driver shook his head, a simple strong gesture, but Karsh gently tucked the money in his upper pocket and patted it.

  Karsh turned to me with the most earnest eyes — strikingly similar to those of the driver, I saw now. He put an arm gently around me, and started walking us off, away from that clustering throng of concern. Glancing back, I saw the men tending to our man; even the parked ricks appeared to be huddling to comfort the stunned damaged sister-vehicle in their midst.

  —Wow, Karsh said again, shaking his head.

  —What? What happened, Karsh? What was he saying? I asked now, though I was sure I knew. Karsh stopped, turned to stare at me.

  —He stood up. Looked at us. And said: I’m very sorry, sir. Madame. Would you like me to get you another rickshaw?

  Yes. That.

  —I told him we’d go on by foot, Karsh went on. —It’s not far to where I’m staying. Then we can get you home safe. You okay to walk?

  I nodded. Oddly, I felt no physical pain. But Karsh’s arm stayed around me, mine around him. No loverly hug. But, after a ride that had been all wrong, it felt just right.

  In a matter of moments, Karsh stopped by a building.

  —Ravi’s place, he explained now, as the night watchman nodded us in. He punched the button. As we rode up, leaning against the elevator walls, I turned to him.

  —Why didn’t you just say you were staying at Ravi’s?

  —I know you’re not such a big fan.

  —Oh, I said, feeling a little guilty. —It’s not that I’m not a fan….

  —Yeah, right! Karsh laughed. First smile all night. —But, you know, he really bailed me out, despite the fact those gigs didn’t quite work out. See, I never left Bombay. Gopal’s father took a turn for the worse….

  He hesitated. —He didn’t make it. We were at the hospital right until the end.

  —Oh god, Karsh. I’m so sorry….

  —It was a tough time. But it was cathartic for me in a way, being with him until nearly his last hour — something I never got to do with my own dad.

  He closed his eyes now.

  —And after he passed on, with Gopal going as well, the idea of ashram life felt a little lonely. Gopal was the one who told me to reach out to my old friends, make peace, try again. And Ravi, bless him, threw his doors wide open, no questions asked.

  I wondered why he hadn’t called me. But then, I hadn’t called him either.

  —In fact, we’ve just started working on a track together, Karsh told me, lids lifting. —I never knew it, but Ravi’s dream’s to produce. We’re looking for a lyric, but the rest’s coming together nicely.

  He got a distant look on his face.

  —Ravi and I connected on so many levels — much more than just music. He’s really my brother now.

  The two had become that close?

  —They’re probably asleep, he whispered as the elevator creaked to a stop.

  —They?

  —The family. His daughter’s home from Japalouppe this week — horseback riding camp. And his wife’s back, too.

  I let that sink in.

  —I haven’t heard from Mallika in a while, I whispered then.

  —She’s gone back already, Karsh said, and the entire love story we weren’t speaking, between the two of them, rang, reverbed. —To New York. She kind of didn’t want to be here for this part, you know?

  He glanced mischievously at me now.

  —Anyway, I’m sure they won’t mind you’re here. Ravi even told me to feel free to bring women up if I met any worthy ones.

  —And? Did you? I asked before I could help myself.

  —Fi
rst worthy one I’ve met, he replied as we arrived.

  The elevator opened right up into Ravi’s apartment. And that abode could have been a Greenwich, Connecticut, manor, such was the sense of space it evoked in this congested suburb: a generous open-plan kitchen with island bar, feeding off into a cushy living area with lots of brightly embroidered gaddas and swoodgy sofas, lights on dim. To the left a corridor disappeared, I supposed, towards the bedrooms and more.

  We stepped in — and I immediately knee-buckled, a quick shock of pain zapping up my leg.

  —Oh, man, Karsh said, reaching out to support me, faltering a little on his own knee as he did. —I guess we did get a little banged up.

  He flicked a set of wall switches, notched up the track lighting. We doddered over to the kitchen, supporting each other like an elderly couple still deeply in love, crazy after all these years.

  I’d always thought I’d grow old with Karsh. But then, maybe I just had.

  —Ice? he asked, ducking into the freezer. —And something to go with?

  He handed me several cubes wrapped in a napkin for my knees, then fixed us up a couple of three-cube stiff drinks. Clinking glasses, we moved past the laptopped table; one looked like Karsh’s outdated (but updated by him) seventeen-inch. Reams of papers and files covered that surface as well.

  —Looks like he’s been burning that candle. He’s been working on the Indian Idol deal all hours, trying to close it, Karsh said, pushing open a sliding glass door. —You sure you feel okay?

  —Better than okay, I said. We stepped out to the balcony running the length of the apartment, sat on the ledge by the railing. The air was a balm, and I relaxed against the bars.

  Karsh reached into his pocket — then pulled out a ziplock containing a little roll-up giving off a familiar Silly Putty whiff. I burst out laughing.

  —Manali in pocket? Now you’re a true Bandra-ite.

  —It might help us wind down after our … adventure, he smiled, lighting up.

  —Do the devotees know? I inquired cheekily, feeling a happy nostalgic inner twirl at that sweet sick smell. —How’s that working out for you?

  —I make it a point, he exhaled now, handing me the joint, —not to light up during darshan.