Soli followed Abe into the living room. For a moment, he was disappointed. In his imagination, he had pictured a fairy-tale apartment straight out of Arabian Nights, exotic and sensual, with velvet couches and silken drapes and Persian carpets. He had heard that the Jews were rich people, and he was ready to be dazzled by an apartment that he thought would be as foreign to him as the people living in it. The soulful music that wafted onto the street, the way Abe’s daughter spoke with her hands, these things had accentuated their strangeness, their difference. He thought of himself as cotton and of the girl as satin, and he expected an apartment that exaggerated those differences. But the Rubins’ apartment looked fairly similar to the apartments in Wadia Baug, other than the fact that it had more artwork on the walls and two built-in bookshelves that were filled with Abe’s record collection.
And there was one other vital, happy difference between this apartment and the ones in Wadia Baug. The woman he would marry lived in this one. She was in the living room, reading, her feet up on a coffee table. She had on a blue cotton dress and her thick hair was free from the braids he had first seen her in. She looked up when he came in, her face echoing the mildly curious expression on her mother’s face from a moment ago.
“Mariam, this is Soli Engineer. This is my daughter, Mariam.”
“Contractor. My surname is Contractor, sir. Soli Contractor.”
“Pardon me. I stand corrected,” Abe said, a slight, ironic smile on his face, which left Soli feeling flushed and confused. Should I not have corrected the man? he wondered. Was it some breach of etiquette he knew nothing about? He felt small and lost among these people. But then he thought to himself, If this girl is to marry me, she better learn my correct name right now. After all, that will be her name someday. Mrs. Mariam Contractor. He swirled the name in his mouth like rock candy.
Mariam had risen from the couch and was holding out her hand to him, a quizzical expression on her face. They shook hands. Mariana’s hand was smooth and small, and Soli was suddenly ashamed of his big coarse hands. He wished he knew what she was thinking, what impression he had made on her. He wished that Abe Uncle would disappear and leave the two of them alone to talk. He wished that he had met Mariam years ago. For a moment, he felt a pang of regret at the years spent with his pimply-faced school friends, playing aimless card games and holding spitting contests. And all that time, this girl had been alive, had lived in the same city. And he had not known her. Now, Soli searched her face for some sign of interest or friendliness, but he saw nothing there except a formal politeness. She was treating him as if he were her father’s friend, and his heart dropped at the realization. He stood there blinking at her, wishing he could make her laugh as easily as he could his friends, but after a second, Mariam turned her attention away from him and to her book. He was suddenly as jealous of the book as if it were a rival vying for Mariam’s attention. Soli came to life again when he saw Abe’s eclectic record collection. Hundreds of records. How did he find the time to listen to all this music? Soli did not even own a phonograph. All he had at home was an old radio. The idea of choosing what music one wanted to listen to at a particular moment was a new and wonderful one.
The next two hours were a blur. When Soli finally staggered down the steps of Norman Building, he felt breathless and spent. When he had rung that doorbell, he had entered a magic kingdom. He had heard of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin. Now he could pluck the fruits of their genius. Abe Uncle had whispered the magic password to him and let him into an exclusive, secret club. A club whose membership merely required an open, vulnerable heart. The way Abe explained it, music belonged to everyone. Beethoven was merely a man, a man who apparently felt the same whirling joy and the same sweet, exquisite grief that was running up and down Soli’s body like mercury.
Out on the street, he felt like skipping, shouting, singing at the top of his lungs. If a friend had told him just then that his mother had died in the time he had been away, Soli would’ve been hard-pressed to return to his apartment, which suddenly seemed dull, dark, and boring. He felt as if someone had parted a curtain and revealed a shiny world that had always existed but had been kept from him. His ears ringing with the holy sounds of the music he had heard and with Abe’s erudite explication of that music, Soli walked the streets for an hour that night before his racing heart slowed down enough to allow him to go home and face his worried mother.
He was a regular visitor to the Rubin household from that evening on. It was ironic—he had mustered up the courage to enter that apartment to seek out Mariam, but it was Abe with whom he spent most of his time. Instead of speaking his love to Mariam, he had to be content with learning another kind of love—the love for beauty, art, books, music. It was Abe who took him to his first classical music concert. From the moment the crisply dressed musicians tuned their finely honed instruments until the rousing finale, Soli sat transfixed, the music alternately breaking his heart and making it turn cartwheels. When the concert was over and the others got up to leave, Soli sat still, staring at the now-empty wooden stage, discreetly wiping away the tears from his eyes. “Ahem,” Abe said. “That was a pretty amazing evening, eh? Looks like the music got to you.” Soli’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. Abe chuckled, a soft, knowing sound. “I’ll wait in the lobby for you, son,” he said. “Give you a few minutes by yourself.”
On the way home that evening, Soli told Abe that he had decided to buy a gramophone. He would need Abe’s help in starting his own record collection. And while he was at it, perhaps Abe would recommend some books for him to read.
But Soli’s body never let him forget the true reason he had entered the Rubin household. When Mariam was at home during his visits, he was as achingly conscious of her presence as he had been that very first night. From Abe, Soli learned the second-greatest passion of his life—music. From his own untrustworthy postadolescent body, he learned his greatest passion: Mariam. The sight of her never failed to tug at his heart, made him aspire toward a life that was pure and fine.
And yet …
She was so young. Just a child really. And he was barely a man himself, still in college. And Abe and Emma Rubin were so good to him. In them, Soli had found the kind of surrogate parents that he would have killed for as a boy, if only he had known that people like them existed. Soli was terrified of making any move toward Mariam, for fear of offending either her or Abe and thereby being banished from the Eden he had stumbled upon. And Mariam never gave any indication that she liked him. Not enough for him to hang a hat on anyway. One day, he arrived at the Rubins’ flat, to find Mariam home alone. “Daddy just phoned,” she said. “He and Mummy are running just a tad late and asked you to wait.” He thought she meant for him to wait outside the apartment, and so his heart flipped like an omelette when she held the door open for him to enter. He immediately wished that Abe would be held up for hours, so that he could finally spend some time alone with Mariam. He was determined to make the most of his sudden good fortune. “There’s a good concert next Friday,” he began, and was glad that his voice came out smooth and steady. “All Cole Porter songs, they are playing. I was planning on going, and I was wondering if you would be …” But here his nerve gave out. “But you must be busy,” he added vaguely. “Sorry to keep you from your work.” Mariam looked as uncomfortable as he felt. She stared at him for a full moment, an expression on her face that he could not read. “Actually, I do have an exam tomorrow that I’m studying for,” she said. “But please feel free to sit here and wait for Daddy. I’ll be in my room, if you need anything.” She was almost out of the room when she turned to look back over her shoulder. “And thanks for that … half-baked invitation,” she added, making a sound that was part snort and part laugh.
“Mariam, wait,” he called after her, knowing now that she was angry at him, but not exactly sure why. But she did not look back. “Stupid donkey,” Soli said, pinching himself hard on his left arm. “One chance, and you had to make a total idiot of yourself.”
Thus, in this way, Soli spent the next seven years of his life. In those years, he went out with a few other girls, nice Parsi girls from good families, the kind of girls his mamma approved of. At his mother’s urging, he reluctantly allowed a matchmaker to introduce him to a few girls. But he was adamant about one thing—he would not say yes to marrying a girl until he had spent some time with her. Most of the time, the girl’s parents would refuse, afraid of ruining their daughter’s reputation by allowing her to consort with a young man who made no promises of marriage. But a few agreed, and Soli went out with them. He also dated a few of the women he worked with. There was nothing wrong with these girls, except for one thing. They were not Mariam. They didn’t have the kindest eyes in the world. Their smiles did not carry the sun. They did not talk with their hands—hands that he imagined covering with silver bracelets—like Mariam did.
And without Soli’s ever having to say so, the girls he dated realized that something was missing, a certain ardor that they needed. Soli was kind to them, affectionate even. But he did not look at them the way a lover should. Some of them accepted this; others tried to arouse his passion with every trick that they knew. But they were young and inexperienced and, of course, didn’t have a clue about his obsession with Mariam. “Baap re, Soli,” one of them once said. “I used to think you were a thorough gentleman, but now I’m thinking you’re more like a pitcher of cold water. You are more passionate about your precious record collection than about me.”
As the years passed, Soli stopped visiting the Rubins as much as he used to. The silence that he had built around Mariam threatened to choke him. Also, his job in an accounting firm kept him busy and his own record collection was fast catching up with Abe’s. He joined a musical society and found friends his own age to go to concerts with. Still, as a sign of appreciation for everything the older man had taught him, Soli would go over every Christmas with a brand-new record for Abe. For weeks, he would search for some obscure recording he was sure Abe would not have, and on Christmas morning, he would ring their doorbell and drop off the gift. Abe and Emma, as gracious as ever, would insist he come in and take a cup of tea with them. The couple seemed to accept the fact that Soli’s new life did not permit him to visit them as often as he once had. If, while looking around the living room for Mariam, Soli noticed that the apartment was bereft of a Christmas tree, it never occurred to him to question it. Soli knew all about Christmas trees and Santa Claus and mistletoe from the books he had read as a child. But he knew nothing about Judaism, and to him, Jews were just another kind of Christians. And Abe and Emma, touched as they were by Soli’s annual gift, never had the heart to tell him that in some parts of the world, his innocent gesture would be enough to ignite a neighborhood.
Eventually, Mariam went from being a sharp stab to a dull ache in Soli’s heart. When his mother begged for a daughter-in-law, “so that I can rest these old bones and die in peace knowing someone will take care of my son,” he would smile and give her a quick hug. “Find me a beautiful gori-gori girl like you and I’ll marry her this minute,” he would say, and then quickly turn away before she could answer.
Or he would joke, “Why khaali-pili you are wanting to invite trouble into our house, Mamma? You know the Mahabharata wars that a daughter-in-law can create. What’s the saying? No wife, no strife in life.”
After a few years, he came to believe his own words.
One Sunday morning, Soli heard a horn toot under his window at 6:00 A.M. Grabbing the plastic bag that held the mutton cutlets his mother had prepared, he kissed her and quickly ran down the stairs. Two carloads of friends had stopped to pick up Soli on their way to Juhu Beach. He opened the front door of the second car and got into the passenger seat. His friend Dinu was squeezed in between Soli and the driver of the car. As the car took off, Soli turned around, careful not to knock Dinu’s glasses off by making any fast moves. As he recognized the woman sitting between the two others, he gave a start of surprise.
“Oh, Mariam,” he said. “You coming with us to Juhu?”
“No, Soli,” Dinu said with a sarcastic laugh. “Mariam will drop us off and continue to Paris.”
Still, his surprise was understandable. Mariam did not really hang out with his crowd. What Soli did not know was that Mehroo Kat-pitia, who had recently married his friend Jamshed, had struck up a friendship with Mariam in the last two years. It was Mehroo who had invited Mariam to the picnic. Mehroo had thought nothing of it when Mariam had casually inquired if Soli would be there.
Soli spent as much time around Mariam as he could that day without making the rest of them suspicious. He knew that if his friends got a whiff of the fact that he was interested in Mariam, they would be merciless in their teasing. He glanced at her every chance he got and realized that she was even more beautiful than when he’d first known her. Time had burned the puppy fat off her face, leaving behind something sad and authentic, and the dark circles under her eyes gave her a haunting beauty she had not had before. He noticed that her hands were as lovely as ever, the rich blue vein running like a river down its length. He longed to speak to her alone but didn’t know how. Impatience made him restless and he shifted on the sand until one of his friends asked, “Su che. Soli? You need to do soo-soo?”
His chance came in the afternoon, when the others were napping under the shade of the coconut trees that lined the beach. Mariam got up and declared she was going to walk the length of the beach. Soli rose casually to his feet. “Can’t let you walk alone,” he said lightly. “Sea may come and kidnap you. Then Abe Uncle will be after my boti.”
They had barely moved away from the sight of the others when Mariam turned to him. “So you’ve forgotten the Rubins, eh? We don’t see you much anymore. Mommy and Daddy still miss you, men. But you must be busy now, what with working and all.”
Soli looked away to where the thrashing Arabian Sea seemed to be imitating the turmoil he felt. He didn’t quite know how to answer Mariam’s half question, half accusation. Suddenly, he remembered the first time he had seen her. He had visualized a similar scene, the two of them walking side by side on a beach, their bare feet leaving small dust clouds behind them, the sound of the waves a soft lullaby. But wait—he had imagined her walking closer to him than she now was, and the arm that should have been affectionately around Mariam’s waist was instead hanging miserably by his side. He remembered, too, his foolish optimism of seven years ago, when he had believed that he would marry her someday. Well, life had certainly played referee to that fantasy, had sent him back to his corner, empty-handed.
But then he asked himself, What does this mean, her sudden appearance at this beach, in my life? Have the past several years merely been a detour and is this really the path of my true destiny? In his confusion, he started walking faster. “Soli, wait up,” he heard her say. “Are you angry with me? I wasn’t trying to offend you. I just wanted you to know that you were … that I … missed you.”
His laugh sounded more bitter than he intended. “How can you miss me?” he cried. “You were barely noticing me all these years.”
She looked at him appraisingly for a full moment, as if trying to decide how honestly to answer his accusation. “Oh, I noticed you all right,” she said finally. And then, in a voice so soft that he had to strain to hear, she added, “I noticed you the very first time you came over.”
“Ha-ha. That’s a laugh. Very funny, Mariam.”
“Except I’m not joking.”
Now he was confused. “Are you saying … You couldn’t possibly be … Why, you never even looked up from your books when I came over. And there I was, dre
aming of you each and every night.” He stopped, mortified, waiting for her to react with shock or anger, but her face was gentle and wistful, and it gave him the nerve to go on. “Now you are knowing the truth. All these years, I’ve been in love with you.”
She was silent again. Then came a torrent of words. “I know. I just kept waiting for you to say something. It was awkward. You being Daddy’s friend and all. Besides, I wasn’t sure. I mean, you never said anything. How could I know? And I was shy. Don’t think I haven’t regretted it all these years. Anyway, I really didn’t know. Whether you felt anything, I mean. I mean, I suspected. But hard to know for sure, you know? First time I knew one hundred percent was today. From the way you kept plotting to sit next to me. But even now, I could be wrong. You’re probably over it by now anyway. Seven years is a long time. In which case, I’ll feel very, very foolish by the time this day’s over.”
Her words reached him from a great distance, a solitary beam of blue light that pierced a hole into his heart of darkness. The light spread through his body, so that his face lit up like the sun and Soli Contractor smiled his Bombay-to-Calcutta smile.
“Mariam,” he said. “How I have missed you, I can never tell. Just imagine … Imagine America without the Statue of Liberty. India without the Taj Mahal.” Hearing her giggle, he went on. “Louis Armstrong without his trumpet. Tarzan without his Jane. That’s how much I have missed you.”
Bombay Time Page 16
