by Meira Chand
Lata began to tremble with fury. ‘And if Sunita never marries, am I just to sit here like this, rotting all my life?’ she burst out.
‘Rotting?’ Mrs Watumal screamed. ‘How ungrateful are modern children? Everything we are doing for you, everything we are giving you. Oh God, it will kill me soon.’
Sunita began to sob. ‘That is a sister’s love,’ she cried. ‘She wishes me never to marry.’ She stood up and ran from the room, and slammed the bedroom door behind her.
‘The evil eye is upon this whole family,’ Mrs Watumal muttered, and hobbled from the room after Sunita.
‘See what you’ve done,’ Mohan remarked.
‘If you worked with Daddy properly, as other sons do, everything would be different,’ Lata replied. ‘All you do is take his money, and drink coffee with your friends in the Taj, and dream of business deals that never happen.’
‘Is it my fault the unions give trouble, and the market is dull?’ Mohan shouted back. He called a servant to clear his plate and left the table sullenly; Lata was alone with her father.
Mr Watumal looked down at the strip of Elastoplast before him, and at his knees through the glass table top, and sighed. ‘It is natural you feel as you do. It is not easy to see all your friends married, and still to be waiting. But your mother is also right, people will talk; already they say too much. And then who will marry you?’
‘What is the harm of work in a hotel? It is a good job, not a low-class one,’ Lata persisted.
‘Already it has been explained to you; say no more about it. Already your mother is ill with worry.’ Mr Watumal lapsed into silence. They sat side by side for some time, engrossed in their thoughts. Lata’s lunch lay uneaten before her.
‘I have an idea,’ Mr Watumal said suddenly. Lata looked up. ‘If you were working for your father, then people would not talk so much. All the time you would be under your father’s eye, unable to meet bad company or get independent ideas. Also, you would not be receiving money from outsiders, only from your father’s pocket. Nobody can then say your father cannot afford to keep you. This way you can work and people will talk, but not so much and not so bad.’ A smile of relief broke across Mr Watumal’s face.
‘But that is not like working at all,’ Lata protested.
‘What do you mean?’ her father replied, annoyed at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘It is not a bad thing to gain business knowledge. It will keep you occupied, as you wish.’ Lata nodded. It was not what she had imagined, but she seemed to have no choice.
‘From tomorrow you can come to the factory with me. I will treat you like a son,’ Mr Watumal announced in sudden generosity. Lata did not smile as brightly as he hoped.
5
Sham turned out of the gate, away from Sadhbela. He walked up the hill, past the servants’ quarters of the big government bungalows. Behind the wall chickens picked, old people smoked hookahs under the trees or searched for lice in each other’s hair. He passed the home of a famous film star, whose trellised roof garden crowned an apartment house, and the Jain temple of white marble, crusty with carving. Beneath a tamarind tree sweepers sat, with baskets of putrid rubbish. He skirted the nursing home, cool amongst the trees, and the lepers who squatted outside its gates. One without a nose pulled himself off his piece of sacking, and scrabbled abusively at Sham’s feet. He decided against turning down Napean Sea Road, and walked on up to the ridge of Malabar Hill. The road was steep, and lined with thick trees about which vines wound, like tenacious snakes. The trees moved with the wings of birds and at night, bats glided in and out. When he was a child it had been a quiet and mysterious road. He had walked in fear if alone and never at night, when it was known that ghouls, with their feet back to front, took the area as their own. This part of the hill was steeped in legend. Most of the old bungalows had been knocked down, and sheer obelisks of twelve or twenty stories stood in their place. But the trees still grew where they could and refused to release the road; it retained its atmosphere. He reached the crest of the hill and caught a bus; there was nothing better to do.
He found himself eventually at Dhobitalao. In a small restaurant he ate a cheap snack, and watched a crowd of servants stream up and down the steps of the Parsi Dairy carrying away milk, and ice cream flavoured with pistachio and cardamom. He had been to this restaurant before and sat idly, passive beneath the density of life flowing past him. Then, the city had seemed to wrap itself about him, moulding him to its shape. Now he felt it disowned him. The loss came upon him sharply.
He waited in the crowd for the traffic lights to change, the sun burning down upon his head. The other side of the road, before a Parsi fire temple, a crowd of vendors squatted, their merchandise arrayed upon the pavement; socks and multicoloured underpants, sunglasses, belts and state lottery tickets. A mass of waiting cars packed the road, amongst them an antiquated horse-drawn carriage. It towered above the cars like a tall, hunch-shouldered insect. The driver sat on a high seat, as grizzled as his vehicle. His horse was a bony creature, with open sores upon its back.
The lights turned green, the cars revved their engines and pushed forward, but the carriage did not move. Horns crescendoed, people pushed their heads angrily out of car windows. The old man cursed and stood upon his seat, to thrash his horse the better. The animal raised its head, rolled its eyes, and let out a terrible scream. It crumpled suddenly between the shafts of the carriage, ropes tearing like ligaments as it fell. The vehicle tipped forward, throwing the old man into the road. People surged forward about the horse, and Sham was pushed with the crowd towards the animal. He tried to manoeuvre himself to the edge of the current, and felt a sudden tugging at his sleeve. He looked down at a girl with a broad, dark, pox-scarred face. She whined for money, pointing to a swaddled bundle over her shoulder, from which protruded two small, bare feet. He turned away, pushing back into the crowd, and found himself confronted by the fallen animal.
The horse lay upon its side in the middle of the road, the uptilted carriage beside it. The driver was immersed in angry argument with the trapped cars behind. Sham looked down at the creature. In contrast to its bony, moth-eaten back, its belly swelled gently, like a soft, pale egg. A shudder ran through it, and he met the terrified eyes of the animal staring up at him. Its lips were rolled back over long, yellow teeth; it was foaming at the mouth. He drew back quickly, feeling sick, pushing his way to the kerb. He leaned against a lamp-post and closed his eyes. He told himself it was only the yellow teeth that reminded him of his father, and then it was not his father but himself he saw, dying like this, surrounded by inane spectators, avid for blood and spectacle. He saw himself, old, bitter, foul-smelling, at the end of a miserable life, every small effort at dignity failed, dying in a gutter. He tried to shake off the vision. The images of himself and his father blurred, one into another.
He turned to cross the road in a new direction, and felt the tugging on his sleeve again. The beggarwoman’s gnarled hand clutched at his shirt – a shirt warm on his arm in the sun, still bearing the laundrymark of that other world, from which he had so recently been ejected. It was as if that world, like a last chance of escape, must be protected. And something he did not understand about the dying horse must also be protected. He saw again in his mind its pale, gentle belly. The festering, decrepit, many-tiered buildings, thick with grime and hoardings, encrusted with washing and balconies, seemed to close in about him, pressing down upon him. The blare of horns was constant now. The smell of hot, rancid fat from a roadside stall mixed with a stench of urine in his nostrils. And there was another smell, sweet and rotten, rising sickeningly from the woman at his side. She began to pull again at his sleeve and panic split through him.
He turned, and pushed her off him. She stumbled at the unexpected thrust and fell back, clinging to the lamp-post to save herself, and sinking into a sitting position against it. The baby, dislodged from her shoulder, rolled across her knees, its wrappings disturbed. Sham drew a breath; the baby lay face up upon the woman’s lap, un
moving. He saw it was an ancient, shrivelled manikin, its limbs and expression rigid as a carving. He saw it was already dead, hired out for begging until it smelled too bad. He turned away, rushing across the road in the midst of the moving traffic, narrowly missed by a truck, then a bicycle. As he ran the woman’s shrill abuse followed him.
A bus came up behind him, and he turned to jump upon it. He collapsed into a seat, his head and heart pounding. His hair burned upon his skull from the fierceness of the sun. At last, he saw upon the skyline the ferro-concrete tiara of the Taj Mahal Hotel.
The sea stretched away before the hotel in an uninteresting harbour view, impeded by sand dredgers. The Gateway of India and the gardens about it were walled forlornly off. Along the road beside the Taj a conglomeration of stalls sold carvings, postcards, and stuffed set pieces of cobra and mongoose fights. Nearer the hotel a colony of beggars crouched in wait for guests and foreign tourists, waving crutches or the stubs of their amputated limbs. Taxis and chauffeured cars crowded one side of the road. The main entrance of the hotel was in the new wing, which soared up sheer above the town. Beside it the cumbersome grace of the old hotel stood like a crusty dowager, still of honourable use. The roof of the porch was ornate with lanterns and lattices of brass. Vehicles swarmed beneath, disgorging passengers upon marble steps. Turbanned doormen called into a microphone the numbers of cars and the names of drivers summoned by people leaving. Sham hurried up the steps and through the glass doors.
He drew a breath before the cavernous lobby, filled with sudden gratitude for its marble floors and marble walls, and steadfastly spouting fountain. He looked fondly at the murals of brass, and the deep pink sofas upon their carpeted island. Already the sweat in the small of his back had cooled in the air conditioning. He walked across the lobby to sit before the panorama. He closed his eyes and it seemed that at last, for a while, he could forget the horror of his return.
He had felt completely blank on the journey back from Japan, sitting huddled in his seat on the plane. Only when they began descending over the city in the early morning, had panic broken in him. He had looked down upon hutments and palm and banana trees. Between rose tall, blackened buildings, eroded by brine and humidity, standing like rows of sparse rotting teeth in old gums. Beside the runway a few men lethargically scythed long grass. Women and children mixed cement, and tramped up and down a ramp on a building site, loads balanced on their heads. On the road into town nothing had changed; everything was dry and grey and brown, bordered by a patchwork of ragged huts alive with bodies and animals, ripe with the stench of excrement. As the road drew nearer the city, the life of the pavement appeared to fall directly out of tiny shops and booths, into the crowded street. A weight seemed to settle upon him again.
In the past he had often sat in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel, upon these pink sofas. There, Sadhbela receded, and with it the roadside stall where he had typed for a pittance the letters of the illiterate, shouted up in a garbled stream of anxiety from the pavement a few feet below where he sat. In the Taj he had studied the foreign tourists, and an exotic breed of Indian, super-rich, travelled and worldly, who claimed the Taj as an exclusive playground. He was not the only spectator. Others also hung about the lobby, to devour those strange suns that shone on other lands, departing with a faltering knowledge, using a phrase or baring a limb in the current trend.
In Japan, he had sometimes imagined his return to the Taj, and how he would walk triumphantly past the pink sofas and enter instead the expensive restaurants, or the crows’ nest bar, high above the town, under the roof of the ferro-concrete tiara. Instead, his pockets were as empty as before and he sat again on the pew where he started.
He became aware of a large man the other end of the sofa, dressed in white flowing garments. He had kicked off his sandals and was scratching the big toe of one foot with the other. The heels of his feet were dirty and cracked. He had a round, bland face with closely set eyes, and his cheeks were rough with stubble. He stopped scratching his toes and stared at Sham in a shrewd, but uncritical way.
‘Foreign returned?’ the man asked suddenly.
Sham nodded, and continued to observe the lobby filled with people, all magnificently indifferent to the world outside. Rich Indians traversed the lobby with proprietorial disdain. Amongst the foreign female tourists, the trend towards nudity was blatant. Sham fixed his attention on a tall, blonde woman, whose small breasts were covered by a square of cloth no bigger than a handkerchief.
‘No headlights, no bumper. All bones,’ the man observed dispassionately, following his gaze. Sham clicked his tongue at such crudeness.
‘Still living in Foreign?’ the man persisted.
‘Japan,’ Sham replied.
‘I bring Japanese goods to India. Nylon saris, transistor radios, televisions.’ The man smiled good-naturedly. ‘I am looking for a smart boy. I can offer a good job and good money. My name is Akbar Ali. Many people call me Akbar the Great, as in our history.’ He gave a laugh.
Sham nodded, he knew of Akbar Ali. He was one of the big smugglers of Bombay. There was only one kind of job he would find with Akbar; it was all there was left for a thief to sink to.
‘But I already have a job,’ he lied. He had no wish to be drawn into Akbar’s world. He stood up.
Akbar shrugged. ‘Sorry you are no longer in Bombay, but I will give you my card.’ Sham took the card and put it in his pocket. He nodded to Akbar and walked across the lobby to the coffee shop.
He wondered again, sitting at a table by a window, at the extravagance of the Taj and how it could remake him, replenishing him with its illusions. Beyond the window and a few pretty shrubs, Bombay pressed like a wild beast at the base of a tree he had managed to climb up. Across the road, an old woman squatted like a nesting crow upon a pile of rubbish, poking about for a meal amongst newspapers, filth and banana skins. Sham touched the cool glass between them. The magic of the Taj was like the effect of the best narcotic, a heightening of the inner life and a disassociation from the outer. The woman was not real, and the city was a fantasy.
Above him the ceiling of the room was draped in fabric with bright, appliquéd motifs, like the cupola of a tent. There was the clatter of china, the hum of conversation, and the bare limbs of the tourist women again. The rich of Bombay sat in nonchalant groups: affluent wives, suave businessmen, nubile college girls and boys. He belonged to none of these castes, thought Sham, observing them in sudden discomfort. Perhaps the Taj too would eject him.
He looked down at the menu, a waiter standing beside him. He had forgotten the shocking scale of prices in this rarefied world – he should never have entered the place. The waiter cleared his throat, Sham ordered a coffee.
A group of young people sat a few tables away, talking and laughing. They were not poor students who had to think of the change in their pockets, thought Sham; the boys wore Rolex watches.
‘Waiter. Five more capuccinos.’ One of the boys clapped his hands authoritatively. A waiter turned in his tracks at the summons.
‘I told you I don’t want another. Ooph! Look at me, I’m getting fat,’ said a girl in tight jeans and a red shirt. Her skin was a translucent bronze, and her hair fell in a single thick plait down her back.
‘Men don’t like thin women, isn’t that so, Girish?’ giggled the other girl at the table, sallow-faced and with a mass of frizzy hair. She grinned at the boy beside her.
‘Better watch out,’ said Girish. ‘They’ll marry you off as soon as you get your B.A. Just like Iqbal’s sister.’
‘One baby and you’ll start to spread. What’s the matter with Indian women?’ said Iqbal, who had a narrow beard.
‘Unless they’re poor, as far as I can see, they sit around and eat sweetmeats and gossip and buy jewellery,’ said an older boy, who spoke with a broad American accent.
‘Not me, Kamal. I promise you. I’m going to have a career,’ protested the girl with the plait.
‘You stick to that. Don’t let them marry
you off,’ said Kamal. ‘Follow Pinky’s example, she’s going to study law at Oxford.’
The frizzy-haired girl gave a laugh. ‘Yes, it’s all fixed up. I’m in no imminent danger. It’s Rani we’ve got to worry about.’
‘You wait and see. I’m also going to have a career,’ insisted the girl with the plait. ‘I shall refuse to marry.’
Sham recognized her now. Rani Murjani had grown up in the three years he had been away; she must be eighteen. He tried to remember what she had looked like before, but could recall only an insignificant child in a short skirt and ankle socks. Now foreign men looked at her, passing her table. She turned suddenly, catching Sham’s eye, and recognized him.
‘Come and join us,’ she called. Sham picked up his coffee and made his way towards her.
‘Pinky and I are with such boringly juvenile company – except, of course, for Kamal,’ Rani announced to provoke the younger boys, and grinned at Pinky and Kamal. ‘Oh, this is Iqbal Shah, Girish Jain and my friend, Pinky Lalwani. And this is Kamal, Pinky’s cousin, who is visiting from the States. He lives there; he’s just finished at Harvard Law School.’ Kamal shook hands with Sham.
Sham could feel the younger boys trying to place him; they glanced at his Seiko watch for clues as to his social status. Rani offered them no help, only saying he lived in Sadhbela and had worked in Japan. Kamal sat forward and asked intelligent questions about Japan. Sham felt new confidence in himself. He was good with words and had always known how to put them across, and the hard edge of experience only protected him the better as he spoke to them about life in Japan.
‘Are you going straight home?’ Rani asked, when they got up to go. ‘I can drop you. The car and driver are waiting outside.’ Sham hesitated, wondering what Mr Murjani would think of this plan. He was hardly in a good position with Rani’s father at the moment.
