Sheroo Mistry was saying something to Coomi, but she did not hear her. She was still watching her husband. Bomi had whispered something to Rusi and Coomi watched as Rusi threw back his head and laughed his familiar high-pitched laugh. It was a sound she heard so rarely these days. For a moment, she saw the outline of Rusi’s head—the broad, glistening forehead, the big Roman nose, the prominent Adam’s apple—framed against the black canvas of the sky. Quick as a breath, Coomi blinked. Click. She would save this picture, sharing it with neither Binny nor Dosamai. Something about the way Rusi looked right then reminded her of a younger, brighter face, and the memory made her smile.
But the next moment, her smile faded. Rusi had caught her staring at him, and the laughter that had bubbled in him like a spring froze as abruptly as a stream in winter. His face closed like a door and Coomi watched as the wary, guarded expression she hated took over.
Rusi was looking at her, a look of studied indifference on his face. Coomi turned her camera on herself. Click. She watched herself dissolve into nothingness.
Five
All through the evening, Soli Contractor had waited impatiently for Rusi Bilimoria to arrive. “Please God,” he murmured. “Just for today, let that slow coach Coomi be dressed on time.” But it was not to be. By the time Rusi and Coomi finally walked in, Soli felt as if the letter had burned a hole in his pocket and would at any minute drop to the floor.
Soli was a short walnut-colored man with twinkling light gray eyes that would’ve been more appropriate on a schoolboy’s face, rather than on his own wizened one. Someone had once told Soli that his smile was wider than the distance between Bombay and Calcutta, and sometimes when Soli caught himself smiling, he told himself, I am bridging an entire subcontinent with one smile.
But Soli was not smiling today. Throughout the wedding reception, old friends had teased him for not following his usual practice of eating dinner in the first shift and then going home for his “beauty sleep.” Soli’s rigid habits caused much merriment among his friends. “A pucca bachelor, you are, Soli,” a neighborhood wag once told him. “You’ve successfully managed to resist the demands of a wife, and you know what? You’ve instead succumbed to the tyranny of an alarm clock.”
Bomi Mistry was among those surprised to see Soli still at the reception. “What happened, Soli?” he boomed. “Bad case of diarrhea? Never heard of you refusing lagan-nu-bhonu. Or did you already eat at home?”
“Who said anything about refusing? Everybody is a joker today. If you are wanting the truth, Mr. Charlie Chaplin, I have decided to wait for my good friend Rusi, who is as always fashionably late. Arre, if I’d had dinner, I would be belching so loud, they’d hear it from here to Chembur.”
Bomi winked conspiratorially. “No use waiting for the Bilimorias. Mehernosh will be a grandfather before they show up. You know that Coomi.”
“Right you are, bossie,”
But Soli could not prevent his head from shooting up every time there was a movement near the entrance to the reception hall. The other guests exchanged quizzical looks. “Baap re, Soli,” Sheroo Mistry said. “Who are you expecting to roll in through those gates? Queen Victoria? Or some secret Juliet?” She laughed at her own joke, her flabby, sleeveless arms flapping at her side. Soli scowled.
When he finally saw Rusi and Coomi walk in through the big iron gates, Soli heaved a sigh of relief. He intended to corner Rusi soon after he sat down, but then Jimmy walked Rusi back to get a drink and the opportunity was lost. Throughout the evening, he kept waiting for a chance to pull Rusi aside, but there never seemed to be a moment when the two of them were alone. Soli was beginning to think he would have to return home without having shown Rusi the letter.
Finally, he got his chance. As the remaining guests rose to dine in the third and final paath, Soli got Rusi’s attention. “Bossie, just one minute,” Soli said, casually pulling Rusi aside and letting the other guests walk past them. “Before we sit down to eat, something I have been wanting to share. Been troubling me for days now. Read this and tell me what I am to think about it.”
Rusi put on his reading glasses. It was a short, neatly typed letter.
Dear Soli:
It is with some trepidation I write. I know you still live at the same address because I checked with a mutual friend. It’s interesting—you have stayed at the same address all your life and I have moved so much. Strange how life has treated both of us so differently. Still, all circles must come to a close. Which is why I am writing my first letter to you in almost forty years.
My son, Moshe, and I are planning a trip to Bombay in the next few months. Hard to believe, but my son is now older than you and I were when my family lived in Bombay. Moshe is a serious young man and recently he has gotten it in his head that he wants to visit his mother’s birthplace. He wishes for me to accompany him. My husband, Nizzim, died last year of heart failure and I am ready for a vacation. Besides, it has been too many years since I have visited the city that I still think of with much affection.
But I’m rambling. The fact is that of all out old friends in Bombay, Soli, you are the one I would like to see the most. In fact, being in Bombay and not visiting you seems absurd. But that must be your decision, too, and if you would prefer not to disturb the sleep of the past years, I will understand.
If you do wish to get together, drop me a line. We can finalize plans.
Best wishes,
Mariam
Rusi looked up from the letter. Soli and he had not talked about Mariam in decades. There was a moment’s silence as he tried to figure out what response Soli wanted from him. “It’s a nice letter,” he said lamely.
Soli looked incredulous. “Nice? ‘Nice letter’?” he cried. “This letter is costing me four nights of sleep. As soon as I saw who it was from, I should have torn it up. Like a ghost, she is entering my life after all these years. I tell you, Rusi, a letter is like a bhoot. It enters your home silently, slipping in through the mail slot of a closed door. And then it haunts you and haunts you. Four nights, and I tell you, bossie, not a wink of sleep.”
“But Soli, why? You can ignore it if you don’t want to see Mariam again. Though it may be good to see her again.”
“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because this letter is like walking through a graveyard and opening all the graves. Do you know what’s inside these graves? Coffins filled with memories. Memories, all buried and sleeping for years and years. Then what happens? Some woman in Israel is deciding to open up some graves in Bombay. Next thing, all the memories that were so nice and quiet begin to rattle around like bones. And the noise of their rattling is keeping me awake all night.”
Rusi had never seen Soli this upset—except for one other time. That time, too, it was Mariam who had been responsible. “But Soli, surely you’re not in love with her after so many years?”
“Love? Who’s talking of love? I’m talking about hate. Is the lion at Victoria Gardens loving the zookeeper? Are the fish at Tata Aquarium loving their tanks? Why, then, should I be loving the woman who trapped me years ago? No, I am older and wiser now, Rusi. Then, I was still a baccha, compared to what I am knowing now.”
Rusi blinked. He suddenly saw another, younger face transposed over Soli’s old wrinkled one. It was the face of a young man with disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes. A face from that night, so many years ago. They had all been so damn young then, he even younger than Soli. Still, he had been able to help his friend that night. Involuntarily, he sighed. So much pain in this world, he thought. So much damn pain.
Soli must have seen the look in Rusi’s eyes, because he said, “Rusi, do you remember that time I came to you after Mariam had left me?”
Rusi nodded. As for Soli, he remembered the day as if it were yesterday.
After Mariam left, Soli turned from the window to face Jamshed and Mehroo Katpitia’s suddenly shabby-looking room. The evening shadows on the wall reminded him of the way in which Mariam’s hair had fallen across her tear-streaked face.
A clock ticked tormentingly; flies buzzed around the untouched tandoori chicken; the fizz in the raspberry drink sank into impotence. Slowly, heavily, Soli made his way across the room and sat at the edge of Jamshed’s bed. It was still warm from where Mariam had sat on it minutes earlier. He could still smell her perfume in the air, so that if he shut his eyes, it would be easy to pretend that Mariam was still here, that the world still spun as reliably and faithfully on its axis as it had an hour earlier. That nothing had changed. But the cold, empty feeling in his stomach told him differently. Fear and grief rose like vomit in him as a dark loneliness fell over him. He felt completely and utterly alone in that room, as if he were the only living being on the planet. As though if he never left that room, nobody in the outside world would miss him. For a long moment, he thought of that outside world—a sunlit world of jokes and love and hope—with something approaching nostalgia, the way an amputee misses a leg he no longer has.
He felt as though, on a whim, some cruel God had revoked his citizenship from that golden world. That he had been deported to a land of frigid temperatures and long, dark evenings, spent endlessly alone. That alone could explain the manner in which he was shaking, rustling like a piece of paper in the wind. But then a great sob rose like a black bubble inside him, started deep in his stomach and floated upward to his chest, and then the sob was in his throat, so that when he tried to swallow, he could not; pain was lodged in his throat like a pebble. Now the dark bubble was in his mouth, a sob so big, it felt like an extra tongue, so big that it forced his mouth open and then he had to let it out, a black apparition pouring out of him, like the water bubbles that gather at the mouth of a drowning man. It was then that he knew that the shaking of his body had been a prelude to the bubbling grief that was now spilling like sour milk from him.
With amazement, he listened to the wild, guttural noises he was making—he had never suspected that he, Soli Contractor, neighborhood clown, was capable of so much emotion. And he had never known that human misery could so much resemble animal pain, that howling at the moon was not merely the domain of the animal kingdom.
But as his initial wonderment passed, Soli began to wonder whether these strange animal sounds would ever cease, how he would ever reenter the world of human beings. He felt a moment of panic at the thought of that world. He had left it only a few hours ago and yet it already felt distant and strange, like a country he had not visited since childhood. What citizen from the outside world could he reach out to? Which friend would reach into this cold room and pluck him out of the darkness? Jamshed and Mehroo Katpitia were in Udwada, members of the outer world.
Rusi, he thought suddenly. Soli felt a moment’s hesitation at the thought of confiding in someone so much younger than him, but his desperation overrode his hesitancy. Rusi was sensitive and mature for his years. Besides, Rusi had lost his father at a young age. He knew what it was like to watch love vanish from your life. Yes, Rusi would be much more sympathetic than someone like, say, Bomi. He could not risk that buffoon Bomi making one of his koila jokes at a time like this.
As he made his way toward Wadia Baug, Soli prayed he would not run into his mother. Creeping past his own flat, he reached the Bili-moria apartment at 9:00 P.M. His shiny round face was smudged with tears, his hair wild and uncombed, and his eyes red and unnaturally large, as if the tears had forced them wide open, had made him see things he did not particularly want to see. When Rusi answered the persistent rings of his doorbell, he saw a small hunched figure leaning against the wall, as if he hoped the wall would hold him up.
Rusi, who was nursing a cold, had fallen asleep listening to the radio. The persistent bell jarred his sleep and he sat up in bed for a full moment, with a strange icy feeling in his stomach, before he recognized the source of the sound. Rusi’s knees were weak as he slipped out of bed and into his slippers. Who the hell can it be? he wondered as he walked to the front door, trying to get there before his mother did.
It was a moment before he recognized Soli, and when he saw the tearful face, his stomach lurched, so that he thought the flu was making him nauseous. “Soli,” he cried. “Su che? What’s wrong, boss? Is your mamma sick?” And then, in a flash of blind panic, he remembered Jamshed and Mehroo were out of town. “Is it Jamshed? An accident?” he cried.
“No, no, nothing like that, Rusi. Please, sorry, I was not meaning to upset you. I was not knowing it is so late at night. Khorshed Auntie, my apologies. I just wanted to see Rusi.”
Khorshed Bilimoria had come to the front door to see what the commotion was about. She gazed at the distraught young man quietly. “No harm done. I was just reading in bed. Would you like to come in, Soli? I was saying to your mother only today that I haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”
Soli smiled in gratitude. “No thanks, Auntie. And Khorshed Auntie, please to not say anything to Mamma about this. But please, may I disturb Rusi a little more and go get a cup of tea somewhere? Just for a short time only? It’s urgent, Auntie. I am needing to talk with a friend,” he added, his eyes filling up again.
“Ja,” Khorshed said to Rusi. “Go get dressed, beta. But you boys don’t walk the streets at night. I will give you money. Go take a taxi and find a restaurant that’s open. Get something to eat. Dosas or sa-mosas or sandwiches. Both of you have red noses, all congested. Get some good food. It’s my treat.”
But at the restaurant, the sandwiches remained untouched as Soli recounted the details of his five-month love affair with Mariam. He ended the story by telling Rusi about his breakup with her earlier in the day. Concern for Madam’s reputation made Soli skip over the part about their lovemaking.
“Israel? Why are the Rubins moving there?” asked a bewildered Rusi as he picked at a pimple. “Arre, those Arabs will make mincemeat out of all of them.”
“She said all the Jews were her people,” Soli said in a choking voice. “That Israel was where her home was.”
“How can her home be where she has never even been?” Rusi cried. This time, he was genuinely puzzled. “Mariam is like us—Bombay-born and -raised. Forget Israel—if I had a chance to go to America or England even, I would not go. And Israel is like a newborn bachcha— who knows if she will walk or fall? I tell you, Abe Uncle’s brains must be getting all scrambled.”
“Rusi, you are saying word for word what I said to Mariam. But she is acting so strange—nothing I can say except ‘Yes, madam. Yes, madam.’ She was not listening to me whatsoever. I think even if I had said, ‘I am killing myself, Mariam,’ she would still be talking about Israel and Germany and that bastard Hitler and I don’t know what all.” And Soli felt the horrible shaking start again, so that he set down the teaspoon he had been holding.
Rusi reached over and firmly clasped Soli’s cold, quivering hand. Absently, he remembered Miss Desai, his fourth-grade science teacher, saying in her prim, high-pitched voice, “Heat flows from bodies with high temperature to bodies with low temperature.” He hoped his warm hands could warm up the hand that shook like a rattle inside his. But he knew that it was more than just Soli’s hands that had to be warmed up, that some essential fire had gone out of his friend, that this shaking was the outer manifestation of something thin and icy that moaned like the wind inside Soli. He remembered how he had felt when his father died and bis heart ached at the memory.
Soli had seen the pity in Rusi’s eyes. “I must be catching a cold,” he said self-consciously, trying to explain away the wretched shaking. He started to say something but then stopped, a look of mortification on his face. He stared at the object of his shame, at the large silver tear that glistened on Rusi’s hands as they lay covering Soli’s. “It’s … something … water leaking … ceiling,” Soli stuttered.
“Soli. Bossie, You listen to me. Nothing wrong with how you are feeling. In your shoes, I would be the same way. That Mariam treated you badly. You are upset, that’s all. Better to cry than to keep it all inside. Tomorrow, it will be fifty percent bettet, you’ll see. My mamma says tears are the
jewels of God. Arre, even a he-man like Bogart would cry if his girl were to leave him.”
His reward was the tiniest of smiles. “Rusi. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Thank you, bossie.” And without warning, Soli’s body heaved with sobs. A waiter rushed up to the table, but Rusi fixed a fierce gaze on him and nodded for him to leave them alone. “Cry away Soli,” he murmured. “Good for the soul. Clears those sinuses also. But don’t worry, bossie. Tomorrow, you will wake up feeling like a new man, you’ll see. No shame among friends, Soli, no one here to hear, keep crying.”
Rusi gazed at the bald old man standing next to him in his starched white dagli and wondered what had happened to the slender, grief-stricken man he consoled at that restaurant decades ago. Time had kidnapped that youth and the years disguised him, stolen his hair, bent his back, yellowed his teeth.
But as if that were not mischief enough, time left the inside of this old man intact, so that the mischievous gray eyes contradicted the yellow teeth; so that the constant jokes that bubbled like a hot spring inside Soli were at odds with the slow, careful way in which he walked. Most of the time, Rusi noticed only his friend’s irrepressible spirit, admired how time had not dulled the wit and the humor. But today, he noticed how much Soli had aged and realized with a start that the same criminal who had stolen Soli’s youth was beginning to steal his own. Despite the fact that Soli was older, Rusi suddenly and acutely felt his own years.
Rusi knew Soli was waiting for him to say something. “So what are you going to do, Soli?”
Bombay Time Page 14
