Bombay Time

by Thrity Umrigar

  It was the first of many beatings. But the alcohol seemed to harden Adi’s flesh as well as his heart, so that it was the father’s hand that ached after the whippings, his voice that trembled with emotion, and his gaze that faltered. And soon, the old man realized the futility of the beatings. It was increasingly clear that if things did not change, Adi would not live to see his twenty-third birthday. More than once, the Patels heard stories about their drunken son deliberately walking into the path of a scooter or an autorickshaw or about Adi getting into fights with men he would have normally avoided locking glances with. Finally, unable to bear his wife’s quiet sobbing any longer, Adi’s father called his brother-in-law in Bombay and discussed the possibility of his son living with him and his wife. Two afternoons later, he found his son loitering in a toddy bar, lifted him by the back of his shirt like a wet rat, and told him to pack his bags. The train to Bombay left in two hours. Pillamai was heartbroken, but she consoled herself by thinking that after a few months in Bombay, her son would return to her, recovered and healed from whatever it was that was tormenting him.

  In his first month in Bombay, gratitude, relief, and excitement made him stay away from the bottle. But one evening, on his way home from picking up a college application form, he saw Saraswati again. She walked by him, her sweaty arm brushing against his shirt-sleeve. He spun around to look for her, but she had melted into the multiheaded crowd. His insides dropped; he felt weak. Only the momentum of the crowd kept him moving. Passersby cast strange looks at the young man talking to himself, but he didn’t notice. So she had followed him all the way to Bombay. Even her death couldn’t keep her away from him. Which meant there was no getting away from her. Which meant there was no safe hiding place. Which meant she was a germ, a virus that had entered his blood and would travel with him wherever he went. And the only way to check this virus, to keep it from entering his brain, dominating his thoughts, destroying his heart, was to medicate against it. Before he knew it, he was in a restaurant, ordering a beer.

  To support the drinking, he needed a job. Which meant no college. His uncle, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him not to throw his life away, got him a desk job at the Life Insurance Corporation. For a boy who had spent his entire life working in the aromatic open spaces of a chikoo farm, being locked up in a dingy office was a kind of death. But soon he discovered that the afternoons went faster if he secretly sipped on a bottle of brandy during lunch. He told himself that his coworkers did not suspect a thing, but the fact was that Adi exuded an air of hurt and vulnerability that made strangers want to protect him. He was oblivious to the fact that his bosses usually gave him the more challenging assignments in the morning, and Sushma, the kindly lady who sat beside him, usually went over his reports before they were turned in for the day.

  His elderly uncle and aunt were happy for the company of their unassuming, if strange, nephew. But whenever they were in Adi’s presence, they felt an inexplicable sadness, as if they were talking to a man doing his best impression of being alive. Their good-natured attempts to draw him out of his shell were usually met with a slow, sad smile that showed them the futility of their efforts. Pretty soon, the three of them slipped into a routine. Adi came home late in the evening with a slightly unsteady gait and ate a quick dinner, listening in silence while the two elders carried on a prattling conversation. Then he washed the dishes and retired to his room. Late at night, his relatives often heard the clinking of a glass bottle.

  Each summer, Pillamai, who had finally made her peace with the fact that Adi would never return to the farm, visited her son for two weeks. Her husband refused to accompany her on those trips. “It’s the law of nature that the young visit their elders, Pilla,” he would say. “If he wants to see his old baap’s face again, let him come to me.”

  Pillamai, who had years ago learned not to contradict her head-strong husband, now spoke up, desperately attempting to bridge the divide that had sprung up between the two men she loved the most. “Why are you standing on such ceremony? What difference does it make who comes to whom? Adi’s your only son. He’s young and busy at work; he has limited vacation time. He’s not his own boss, like you are. Come with me. He’s so anxious to see you.”

  But in the end, Adi’s father won their silent battle. Four years after he had left the village, Adi returned to his father’s sickbed. The phone call from Pillamai told him that his father was critically ill with pneumonia. At first, he thought it was a ploy, a trick to get him to come home, but he immediately banished the thought. His mother was too honorable a woman to stoop to that. Besides, the fear in her voice was only too real. During the train trip home, he prayed that he was not too late to see his father alive. Regret swarmed around him like summer flies. He resolved to come clean to his father, to make him understand where and why his only son had gone wrong. Let my father live, he bargained with God, and I will give up drinking. I’ll persuade Mummy and Daddy to sell the chikoo farm and buy a flat in Bombay. I’ll change my ways, please God, I promise I will. All the way there, he rehearsed what he would say to his father, how much he would reveal about Nari’s role in his dissolution, how much blame he would assign and how much responsibility he would assume.

  But the man he found on his deathbed was not the hearty, stocky man he had left behind. This man was timid and weak and had eyes that brimmed with tears every time he saw his prodigal son by his side. Adi knew immediately that he had arrived too late, that instead of saving his father, he would be bidding him good-bye. There was to be no movielike reconciliation scene, no rising from the dead. Instead, Adi sat for hours by the old man’s side, mutely holding his hand, trying to keep it warm with his own. Once or twice, the old man tried to speak, but a coughing fit interrupted his words. “Is okay, Daddy, is okay,” Adi whispered. “You rest now. Nothing to say now. Just sleep.”

  They must have both dozed for a few hours, because Adi was suddenly awakened by the sound of his father whispering his name. “Adi,” the old man whispered urgently. “Adi, maaf kaar. Forgive me, forgive.” Adi knew immediately the old man was referring to the whippings. “Nothing to forgive,” he said. “I deserved all that and more. No forgiveness needed at all.” But the old man’s eyes were still cloudy, his brow furrowed and his breathing labored. At last, Adi realized that his father needed absolution before he could die. “Daddy,” he cried, his own eyes red now. “I forgive you. I forgive you, so that you may forgive me. I’m just—I … I never stopped loving you, ever.” His reward was a tired smile. The old man turned his face to the wall. A few minutes later, he stopped breathing.

  Suddenly, Adi was the head of the household, responsible for the farm and for his mother’s financial security. Pillamai begged him to take over the farm, which had been in the family for generations, told him she would help him run it. He was amazed at her faith in him and annoyed at how little she knew of the man he had become. For several days after the funeral, he kept coming up with reasons why his taking over the farm was a bad idea, but she wouldn’t let up. “Mummy,” he said to her finally, hoping to shut her up. “If I have the farm, I’ll drink up all the profits in six months flat.” He knew he had hurt her, but she was quiet after that, as if she couldn’t argue with the veracity of his statement. A few evenings later, he was walking around the farm. It was a warm, still evening and the dying sun had left a splatter of red in the sky. All around him, the world was bathed in gold, so that the treetops burned like candles. The last birds were chattering to one another, their voices sad and plaintive. He realized with an ache how much he missed the land of his forefathers, its deep silences and its simple beauty. In contrast, Bombay seemed like a heavily made-up tart—loud, brash, gaudy. Suddenly, the enormity of what he had lost, the full price of his disinheritance, hit him. He had lost not only this holy land but also the respect of his father, the bond with his mother. He looked around him and everything felt rooted—the tall trees that had dug their feet solidly into the earth, the vagabond birds who had come ho
me to their nests, the dependable, darkening sky that covered him like a blanket. He alone was rootless, homeless. Instinctively, his hand reached into his pants pocket for the silver flask containing the golden liquid. But tonight, his loneliness was too deep for the alcohol to bore holes in it. Tonight, the loneliness engulfed him, tightened its coils around him. Adi felt as if he were in a movie running backward. He heard his father’s piteous plea for forgiveness, felt the grip of his father’s hand on his neck as he told him to go pack his bags for Bombay, saw the look on his mother’s face the first day he came home drunk, remembered the first time he had tasted whiskey and thrown up immediately after. Memory upon sad memory, piling up like playing cards. He was sobbing out loud now, waiting for the movie to end, but inevitably, his mind raced down its familiar paths—Nari’s debauched face loomed near his eyes; he recalled the fateful walk from Nari’s home to the hut where Sara-swati waited; he felt again the icy feeling that had lodged in his stomach upon hearing about Saraswati’s death. And then, as if in response to his own sobbing, he heard that sound that Saraswati had made in her throat after he had finished raping her.

  The idea of how to avenge himself on Nari hit him so hard that he stopped crying. He would turn the farm over to the people who worked on it. Some of them, after all, had slaved on that land for generations, so that the farm had been in their family for generations also. The farm belonged to them as much as it did to him. Besides, it would serve Nari right to have the land adjoining his owned by men he thought were dumber than cattle. Adi remembered how much the landowners had feared labor unrest, how ruthlessly they had crushed any attempts by the farmhands to band together. He himself had been used by Nari to quell such unrest. He could make Nari’s worst fears come true, in an instant. Maybe he could gather up all the men whose wives and daughters had been humiliated by Nari and sell the land to them. The Society of People Fucked Over by Nari. Adi laughed out loud at the thought of Nari’s face when he broke the news to him. The dirty bastard would never have another night’s sleep, for fear that one of his new neighbors would slit his throat in the middle of the night. It would serve him right, this foul old man who had destroyed so many lives to feed his evil appetites.

  For two days, he played with this idea, touching it like a piece of velvet whenever he needed comforting. On the third day, he got mightily drunk and slipped into his usual state of fatalism. The cold fact was that executing his plan would take the kind of clear-eyed discipline that Adi was no longer capable of. For two days, alcoholism competed with vengeance; in the end, the bottle won. He was too weak a man to withstand the force of Nari’s fury, his mother’s bewildered sense of betrayal, or even the gratitude of the farmhands. To carry out his plan, he would need the strength to bear the lifelong enmity of the landowners and the lifelong gratitude of the disenfranchised. And Adi was too weary and too drunk to want either.

  It was also a shock to realize that, in a break with family tradition, Adi’s father had bequeathed the farm to his wife and not to his son. As far as Adi knew, this was a first in the annals of the Patel family. For generations, the farm had passed on to the oldest son, with an implicit understanding that he would provide for the womenfolk and his other brothers from the profits of the chikoo trade. Adi tried to muster up some outrage when he saw the will, to call up some remnant of bruised pride. The will was a slap in his face, he knew, the ultimate statement of how unworthy he was in his father’s eyes. But the fact was that he understood his father’s reasons for entrusting his wife, rather than his drunken son, with his legacy. It was Pillamai who was angry about the terms of the will, swearing to Adi that she had no idea when her husband had changed it. But she had more pressing things to think about. Within hours of her husband’s death, Nari had made Pillamai an offer to buy the farm. She had kept the news from Adi as long as there was any hope of her son agreeing to run the farm. Adi now understood the reason why his mother had been so desperate that he take over the family business—Pillamai detested Nari almost as much as he did. But Pillamai was a realist. When her son warned her that he would drink up the profits in six months, she believed him. Pillamai knew that Nari’s offer was far below the market value, but she also realized that none of the other landowners would bid on her land now that Nari had expressed an interest. Also, Nari had promised that she could live in her house as long as she was alive. And with Adi’s drinking, it would be nice to have some money to invest and bequeath to her prodigal son. God knows, he would need it to survive if the drinking ever got totally out of hand.

  In the end, the Patel farm was sold to Adi’s old tormentor. Both mother and son wept after the deed was signed. “Sorry, Mummy, sorry,” Adi said. “I wish there had been some way to keep the farm.” Pillamai opened her mouth to say the obvious but then thought the better of it. Besides, she could see that her weary son was ready to wash his hands of the whole matter and return to Bombay. Adi was relieved that the money from the sale would assure his mother a comfortable life. He had halfheartedly suggested to his mother that she move to Bombay, but she had refused. “This is your family home, deekra,” she said. “Even if the farm is no longer in the family, at least one Patel should still walk upon this land. After I’m dead and gone, it will be a different story. Besides, my beloved’s spirit is still here.”

  Some part of him understood what his mother was saying. Also, perversely, he appreciated the awful logic of this final capitulation to Nari. He had fled the family farm because of Nari, had been driven from it because of events set in motion by the old man. The sale only legitimized that fact, brought out in the open what had happened years ago. Nari had owned his soul for years; now he would also own the soil that had nourished that soul. The trees that his ancestors had proudly planted had yielded bitter fruit for Adi; maybe it would take Nari’s foul seed to make them sweet again.

  He returned to Bombay even more quiet and inward-looking than before. The past engulfed him like a fire. He had daily conversations with Saraswati, angrily asking her to leave him alone or pleading with her to forgive him. He imagined Nari stalking across the farm, uprooting the trees he and his father had so lovingly planted. He tried hard not to think of his mother, living alone in that big house, surrounded by ghosts and the fragments of her former life.

  It took Philomena Pinto to drag him into the present.

  Philomena was the new clerk, whose desk sat diagonally across from his. She was everything he was not—gregarious, boisterous, sensual, assertive. The first time he saw her, he was filled with a lust that shook him to the bottom of his feet. He felt amazement and gratitude at the knowledge that he was capable of so much feeling. That the unholy trinity of Nari, Saraswati, and alcohol had not destroyed every nerve ending, every ounce of emotion in him. For days, he watched her out of the corner of his eye, followed the line of her legs to where it melted into her hemline, thrilled to the sound of her sudden spurts of laughter, noticed how she talked in the same breezy way to everyone, from the bosses to the teenaged boy who delivered tea to the office. He knew he had to talk to her, get to know her, but each time she glanced at him, he looked away hastily. For the first time, he wished he had a close friend in Bombay, someone who could advise him on the best way to endear himself to this girl who was driving him mad.

  She saved him the trouble. One afternoon, when most of his colleagues were on their lunch break and he was chewing a dry batatawada at his desk, she approached him and stood in front of him with a hand on her right hip. “Say, men, whatcha staring at me all day long for? You want to talk to me, why don’t you just come up and say hello, straight off, like a regular gent?”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but no words came. She held his gaze and he was the one who looked away first.

  Two days later, while waiting in line for the BEST bus to take him to his favorite after-work bar, he spotted her standing about twelve people behind him. Stiffly, he raised his hand in greeting and then immediately turned back around. Seconds later, he felt her tug at his shirt
sleeve. “Move over, men. Why should I wait back there when I have a friend ahead in the queue?” When the man behind them muttered about people breaking the queue, she silenced him with a look.

  “I’m sorry about the staring,” he said to her after they had boarded the bus and he had paid for their tickets. “I meant no harm, I assure you.”

  She pinched his arm. “I know that, silly fellow. Okay, I meant to tell you, I’m sorry about my little lecture the other day. I don’t mind you staring at me. Kind of flattering, even. You see, I just wanted to say hello, that’s all. Didn’t know how else to talk to you.”

  He laughed and then, amazed at the unfamiliar sound of his laughter, he laughed some more. He felt bewitched and out of his element, like a man breathing underwater. He was simply not used to a woman this warm, so disarmingly honest. When they first started going out, he was so paranoid about anybody at the office finding out that he would concoct elaborate schemes to throw them off. After years of secrecy, of living in the shadows, he was not ready to be pulled out into the blinding sunlight. At the office picnic, which he attended for the first time ever because Philomena was going, he refused to sit beside her, for fear that someone would read on his face how he felt about this woman. He did not trust himself to sit next to her without glowing. Philomena indulged his desire for secrecy for about two months. Then one day, she refused to speak to him at all. When he looked up from his paperwork to glance at her, she resolutely looked away. He went half-mad with apprehension, terrified that she would not show up at the Chinese restaurant they had planned on meeting at after work. But when he got there, she was waiting for him. The waiter had barely taken their order when she lit into him. “I’m telling you, men, I don’t know how much longer I can take this. You act as if you’re ashamed of me or something, like I’m some disease that has to be hidden. I’d rather die than go on like this. You make me feel like a common whore.”