Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “Pukka?” said Meenu, her neighbour, her voice a little breathless, because brick would cost more, and everyone knew that Ganga worked so much that she must have money, but nobody knew how much.

  “Yes,” Ganga said. “Ten thousand for the land, five for the construction.”

  “Fifteen,” Meenu said.

  “Yes,” Ganga said. “I don’t have it.”

  “How will you manage?”

  Ganga shrugged. She didn’t tell them what she planned, because she wasn’t sure she would get the money and she didn’t want to sound sure before she was. That afternoon it had occurred to her to ask Sheila for a loan. Sheila had said that the lunch had gone well, but the concentrated expression on her face, the set of her shoulders as she sat among her books was not that of a happy woman. Looking at her then, Ganga had realized that this was after all a woman of business, somebody who wanted things from the world, and had realized that she should ask Sheila for the money. She wanted to wait for a few days, let the thought sit in her stomach, because she had learnt from the world to be careful when one could, since often there was no time for care. Now she had a month from the owner of the plot to come up with the money, and so she waited for a week. It still made sense, so one day after lunch she asked Sheila, and Sheila said, “Of course,” went into the bedroom for a few minutes and came back with a stack of notes. It was no fuss. They talked terms, and it was decided that Ganga was to pay it back monthly over six years.

  But leaving was a fuss. They had lived in that nameless lane for a long time, Asha since she was born, and Meenu organized the people up and down the street to give them a send-off. They rented a television set and a video player and they watched films all night long, and it was very very late when Asha finally fell asleep with her head in her mother’s lap. Ganga sat in the darkness, an arm over her daughter, and felt the loss as a tightness in the stomach, a kind of relentless wrenching, and the coloured light from the screen flickered on her face as she wept. But the next day, when they loaded up their belongings into a handcart, she was crisp and organized, and she led the way, holding Asha with one hand and a bundle with the other and tireless in her stride, until the men pushing the handcart leaned against it and begged for mercy.

  *

  Their new kholi was small, but during the rains it was dry, and Ganga kept it in good repair. There were some two-storied houses on their street, built very narrow on tiny plots, and at the end of the lane there was a grocery shop built like a cupboard into a gap between two walls. Also there was a paan seller who sold cigarettes and matches and played a radio from morning till night. Their years in this street were ordinary, and Ganga continued her work as before, coming and going with a regularity that her neighbours began to depend on.

  Finally, what disturbed their life was Asha’s beauty. When she was fifteen a local bootlegging tapori fell in love with her. He was at least ten years older than she was, a grown man with some reputation in his chosen trade of gangsterism and with some style, he wore tailored black shirts always, and he fell in love with her ripeness. She was not tall, but there was a certain weight about her body, a youthful heaviness that she made a great show of hiding. She was a student of the movies, and always had flowers in her hair, white or yellow ones. His name was Girish, and he fell in love with a glance that she threw at him coming out of a morning show of Coolie. After that he spent his time sitting on the raised platform at the end of their lane, waiting for her to pass, polishing his dark glasses on his shirt. When she did, she never looked at him, but the force of his yearning caused her to duck her head down and blush darkly, amazed and a little frightened and feeling something that was not quite happiness.

  Ganga knew nothing about this until the neighbours told her. She had seen him sitting on the platform, spreading out a handkerchief before he sat down, but she had paid no attention, because it had nothing to do with her. The evening when she found out, she sat in her doorway for a long time. When she shut the door, she came in and found Asha sitting on her charpai, reading a film magazine. As she watched, a wisp of hair fell across Asha’s cheek, and the girl pushed it back behind her ear, only to have it fall forward again. Idly, Asha flicked it away, the hair was heavy and thick and dark brown, and as Ganga watched her daughter’s fingers move across her cheek and linger, the danger of it all pressed her heart like a sudden weight. She knew instantly and completely the violent allure of the black glasses, the coiled stance that projected danger, the infinitely dark and attractive air of tragedy.

  “Tomorrow I will take you to your grandfather’s,” Ganga said, louder than she had intended.

  “What?” Asha said. “In the village?”

  “Don’t argue,” Ganga said. “You’re going.”

  But Asha wasn’t arguing, she was silent, caught somewhere between heartbreak and relief. Her sobs that night in her bed weren’t full of grief, or even of sorrow, but of the tension of weeks. She left quietly and obediently with her mother, and in the train she smiled at the mountains and the zigzagging ascent of the tracks and the birds floating in the valley below. But in the village—called Saswadi—she grew sulky at the endless quiet of the long afternoon. Ganga was in no mood for sulks, having spent an unexpected two hundred rupees on the tickets and travel, and she put Asha to work straightaway, in the kitchen and with the cows in the back. Ganga’s father was small and very lean, as if every last superfluity of flesh had been burnt away by season after season of a farmer’s sun. She had brought him two shirts from Bombay, which he would wear on very special occasions. She spent two days in the village, straightening out the house and seeing to the repair of a waterway that came down the hill into their land. When she left, she hugged Asha briefly, and she felt the youthful sigh more than she heard it. “Don’t be silly,” Ganga said. “What have you seen of suffering yet?”

  It was afternoon when she opened her door in Bombay. She went in and put down her bundle, smoothed her hair once in a single movement, tucking back and tightening all at once, and then she reached forward for the jhadoo. She was sweeping under the bed with it when she heard the voice: “What have you done with her?”

  When she turned he was looming in the doorway, tall and silhouetted. The sunlight was blinding behind him, and she could see the glint of the perpetual dark glasses at the sides of his face.

  “What?” she began, and then her throat closed up from the fear. She stood holding the jhadoo in front of her with both hands, handle up, clutching it.

  “If you married her to someone else,” he said hoarsely. “If you married her.” He moved in the doorway slightly and Ganga’s head reeled, her eyes dazzled. “If you married her I’ll kill you and her. And myself.”

  He came in, closer to her, and now she could see him clearly. “Where is she?” he said. “Where?” But his head was moving from side to side and she understood that it was very dark in the kholi for him. He reached up and took off the glasses and she saw his eyes, red-rimmed. He was very young, and under the sleeve of his black shirt his wrist was thin and bony

  She spoke: “Don’t you have a mother?”

  A tear formed slowly and inexorably on his eyelid and rolled down his cheek, and she knew he could do exactly what he had said. She looked at him, into his eyes, and the seconds passed.

  “Go home,” she said.

  Another moment, and then he turned and stumbled out of the doorway. She stood still, holding her jhadoo, for a long time, looking towards the door, until the light changed outside and evening came.

  *

  On the hill, it was generally agreed that the Shanghai Club was Sheila’s masterstroke. There was a whole faction that insisted that Mr. Fong was only a front man, that the money behind Shanghai was actually some of the Bijlanis’ industrial lucre, that, having diversified from mixies into plastics and transportation and pharmaceuticals, they had resources to spare. Of course, there was no proof for any of this, but what was clear and needed no proof was that the whole thing started when the Bijlanis we
re blackballed at the Malabar Gym. Sheila and Dolly had conducted a ruthless but fiercely polite war for years, in which the victories were counted in receptions given and famous writers annexed and huge sums collected for causes, and the casualties were the bruised egos of the partisans of either side, who cut each other in Derby boxes and flicked razor-sharp looks over shoulders at openings. But there were some rules, a certain code of conduct that kept it all civilized until the incident of the blackball.

  The Bijlanis had applied for membership to the Malabar Gymkhana, a little belatedly but they were busy people, this was understood, and their son was now old enough to want to play tennis and rugby at the Gym, and the passing of the application was a foregone conclusion. And then came the blackball, which was actually not a black ball but a little slip of blue paper at the quarterly meeting of the membership committee, and the blue paper had on it the single word “No.” Everyone looked at each other, astounded, but they all avoided looking at Freddie Boatwalla, because the process was of course anonymous but of course who could it be but him? There was nothing to be done about it, the rules were clear and ancient and unamendable, a blackball was a blackball, if you weren’t in you were out, there was no middle ground. The chairman burnt the slips according to rule, but those who saw it said the letters were blocked out and firm, and even before the meeting was over the members were talking about the indisputable fact that Freddie had after thirty years of membership suddenly put himself up for the committee—why now unless there was a plot, a plan—and that this was an unprecedented escalation. Freddie left the meeting without talking to anyone and afterwards he was seen drinking a stiff whisky-and-soda downstairs in the Jockey Bar. The bartender said he had come in and made a phone call first and then asked for his drink. Sitting outside on the long patio with the lazy ceiling fans and the field beyond, the commentators related this and said no more, the implications were clear.

  Now everyone waited for the inevitable response from Sheila, and nothing happened. It was unbelievable that she had accepted defeat, and yet this was what some believed, and others insisted that it was merely a tactical feint, this doing nothing, watch and wait. The months passed, and in the fullness of time a Mr. Fong announced that he was going to start a place called the Shanghai Club, and nobody noticed. No one knew who Mr. Fong was, and there was no reason for anyone to ask, and nobody was interested in his club. Then it was known—nobody knew where this came from—that the Shanghai Club would admit only women as members, and furthermore only by invitation. That to do the inviting there was a committee of ten prominent women who were to remain anonymous—and suddenly the phones started ringing all over Bombay. Who was the committee? Nobody knew. Then the first invitation arrived, in a plain white envelope without a stamp, hand delivered at the house of Bubbles Kapadia, of the Ganesha Mills Kapadias. “We are pleased to offer you a charter subscription to the Shanghai Club,” it said. “We request the pleasure of your company at the opening on January 26th.” At about the same time, in what must have been a sublimely managed leak, it became known—seemingly in the exact same minute—from Nepean Sea Road to Bandra that Sheila Bijlani and Mani Mennon were one-fifth of the committee, and that only a hundred memberships were to be offered. Now there was wild conjecture, endless lists were drawn up and debated, memories were searched for histories of friendship and betrayal, and suddenly that plain white envelope was the most coveted thing in the city. Mr. Fong received so many calls that he changed his home number seven times, and still he was woken up in the middle of the night by desperate pleas from councilmen and captains of commerce. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about it” was his standard reply. “I don’t control the committee. They tell me what to do.” The Chief Minister himself made a resigned call to Mr. Fong on behalf of the Storrow toothpaste heiress, who sent a hundred and fourteen baskets of fruit to various houses in a scattershot attempt to flush out the committee. Nothing worked.

  The white envelopes came in a trickle through October and November, and nobody could tell where one would show up next, and the exact count was tabulated and maintained with increasing tension as the months passed. Those who got one let it slip casually: “Oh, guess what was under the door today!” And those who didn’t affected not to care: “I can’t believe everyone’s so crazy about this stupid Mr. Fong’s club.” Some pretended to sniff at the kind of people who were getting invitations: a policewoman—a deputy commissioner, but still; a documentary filmmaker; several journalists, some of them of the television variety. And when Ramani Ranjan Das, the erotic poetess, was invited, a whole faction of the Gym set, at the very north end of the patio, declared very dramatically and at great length that they were withdrawing from the Shanghai race, until Bubbles Kapadia asked how they knew they were in it. In the dead silence that followed, Bubbles flicked her ashes onto the table, drew long and at great leisure on her green cigarette holder, then got up and turned and disappeared in a great white cloud of triumphant smoke.

  Of course Dolly behaved as if the Shanghai Club did not exist and never would. It was at the Gym, at lunch, that somebody first brought up the subject in front of her. The words dropped, and suddenly silence spread around the table like a ripple. Everyone waited, but Dolly was staring into the middle distance, her eyes calm and genial, absolutely imperturbable, as if she were suddenly a stone-deaf idol, elegantly dressed. She had not heard it, even though the softly spoken words were heard from one end of the oak table to the other. After a while she picked up her knife and fork and cut a tiny little piece of quiche and ate it slowly and with pleasure. As the weeks passed and the hysteria mounted and the rumours flew and everyone talked about nothing but the Shanghai Club, she continued not to hear anything. She was absolute and unshakable. The commentators argued: she must really be upset, some said, she must go home and cry in the bathroom. Nonsense, said the other, stronger, school of thought, it is all truly beneath her, she doesn’t care a whit. As January the twenty-six drew nearer, she grew more and more to resemble a kind of stately ship in sail, constant and beautiful, unmoved by choppy waters, and her supporters grew delirious with admiration. It was true: she was magnificent in her dignity. One of the north-patio commentators said, in a tone that mingled exactly equal amounts of envy and quiet pride, “After all, she is a Boatwalla.”

  All this was true until the evening of January the fifteenth. Bijlani came home, drew Sheila into their bedroom, locked the door, and related a strange and wondrous tale. He had been sitting, as was his custom, on the balcony of the Napier Bar above the Dolphin Club swimming pool, sipping at his nightly martini. He did this every evening after his fifteen laps and massage, with the cane chair creaking gently under his bulk and the breeze in his hair. On this evening, he was startled out of his meditation by a man’s voice: “Hello, T.T.” Bijlani had acquired, over the years, with his increasing financial weight, with his famous and many-faceted magnitude, a name and a dense, magisterial composure. So his quick turn of the head, his spilling of his drink, was unprecedented but understandable—the man who stood uncomfortably over him, shifting from leg to leg, was Freddie Boatwalla.

  Bijlani waved him into a chair, and when he sat Bijlani could see his face clearly in the light from the door. Freddie had always been thin, but now, in the single light against the darkness, he looked like a paper cutout, one of those black shadow figures from another century, nineteenth or maybe eighteenth or something. Bijlani knew the Boatwalla shipping company had been through some ups and downs, but who hadn’t, it was no cause for this kind of deterioration. Bijlani waved to a bearer. “Drink?” Bijlani said.

  “Thanks, old boy,” Freddie said. “Gin and tonic.” He crossed his legs, and Bijlani had a moment of hideous, bilelike envy: Freddie’s crease above the knee was absolutely straight, without needing a tuck or pull or even a pat. The white pants fell just so, like everything else. His name was actually Faredoon Rustam Jamshed Dara Boatwalla, but he had always been Freddie, son of Percy Boatwalla, grandson of Billy. There had
been a great-grandfather, whose name Bijlani could never remember but who stood in full life-size glory in a niche near Crawford Market, haughtily ignoring the pigeons swarming around his feet.

  “Nice evening, isn’t it?” Freddie said.

  “Very.” Bijlani was remembering the story about Freddie that everyone told again and again, that he had in the golden days of his youth bowled out Tiger Pataudi twice in two consecutive innings during a match at Cambridge.

  “Heard about your pharmaceutical deal with the French. Good show,” Freddie said.

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ve been thinking in that direction ourselves. International hookups. Collaborations.”

  “Yes.”

  “Negotiating with an American party, ourselves. Difficult.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, very. Arrogant sods. Full of themselves. But really it’s the only way.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Change, you know. Adaptation.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Freddie’s drink came and they sipped in a silence that was not exactly companionable but at least businesslike. Above them the lights of the tall buildings made a rising mosaic, and a swimmer’s slow splashing in the pool beat a sleepy rhythm to and fro. Freddie put his glass down.

  “Thanks for the drink. Have to be getting along. Dinner, you know.” He stood up. “Can’t stay away. Family. You know how these women are.” He laughed.

  Bijlani tilted his head back, but Freddie was against the door now and it was hard to make out his face. “Family,” Bijlani said. “Of course.”