“They’ve been there for thirty years, Sandhya,” I said.
“That’s no damn excuse. Things change. Everything changes.”
I shrugged. The receiver burbled into her ear, and she began to speak. She told Das. For some reason I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I went out into the corridor, into Lalit’s room, and I sat on his bed and watched the fishes circle in the water and dash through the wreck at the bottom. Half an hour later I heard the office door open, and Sandhya came in.
“He says he’ll look into it,” she said. “He was pretty angry.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I think he’s going to throw them out.”
“He’ll have to.”
“At least we got a better program out of it.”
“Better?”
“Come look.”
We went into the office, and she booted it up, and I sat at her desk and ran it through its paces. It was better, it was leaner, faster, more elegant looking. Where screens had scrolled, they now snapped, lookups happened in a flash, every process was twice or three times as fast. It was beautiful. She had gone close to the metal and come out with a kind of perfection.
“Beauty,” I said. “Really, beauty, man.”
“Shit, Iqbal,” she said, and I turned around. She was sitting in my chair, chewing on her collar, twisted with remorse. “I mean, they weren’t bad guys. They were probably just scared.”
“Yes,” I said. “Quite scared.”
“Maybe I can tell Das we’ll retrain them,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have to fire them.” She picked up the phone and dialled. “Maybe they just did us a service, you know, made us work harder. We don’t have to be like that …” As she was talking I watched her face. She spoke and she listened to herself speak. The words got slower and slower. “We don’t have to be like that …” Then she was absolutely still. I saw something happen in her, like a change in the light when the sun moves. She put down the receiver, carefully, deliberately. She looked at me straight. “Fuck them, yaar” she said. “Let them burn.”
Then she got up, marched down the corridor, went into Anubhav’s studio, picked up the Rural Cow and threw it out of the window. Then she threw him out. I mean she told him to get the hell out of her house and not come back. He started to argue, but meanwhile the Rural Cow had landed on the bonnet of somebody’s car, and so people were shouting from underneath, and Anubhav went running down to save his cow. While he and the car owners were shouting at each other, Sandhya was pacing up and down the room, leaning out of the window now and then to tell him a thing or two, with Ma-ji egging her on. After a while she grabbed the Rural Mud Hut and threw it out of the window too, and then Anubhav began shouting at her from below. By now all the neighbours were out, leaning on their balconies, and from the ground floor the Khan twins came out in their identical red tracksuits, to tell Anubhav that they had known Sandhya didi since they were this high and they weren’t going to stand for any damn bastard shouting at her. So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other. Then, and I tell you I’m not making this up, Vasant suddenly came rumbling down the street on his motorcycle, and of course began taking the part of the injured ex-husband and scattering abuse this way and that, and soon enough he threw a punch at Anubhav, and then Sandhya ran down too and the confusion was general. I was watching the circles swirl below, and then Ma-ji appeared under my elbow. She was trembling all over, every part and limb of her, and her face was a furious blotchy pink, and she was smiling.
“Here,” she said. “Help me pick this up.”
It was an earlier painting, not one of the rural series. I helped her get it onto the windowsill. With a huge peal of laughter she heaved it over. So then I helped her throw out his Sennelier paper and Schmincke crayons and tubes of oil paint, and drawings and paintings and glossy art magazines, all of which I remembered well because I had written the cheques for every last thing, and the crowd below was clapping now each time some art came falling out of the sky. I saw a portly havaldar heaving his way down the street, his mouth wide open. I leaned out of the window and saw Anubhav looking up.
“Ma-ji,” I said, “ask Anubhav where the Picasso book is.”
“Who?”
“Picasso.”
So I pulled up a chair, helped her onto it, and she leaned over the balcony railing and boomed in an unbelievably loud voice, “Pee-kasso kahan hai, maderchod?” The havaldar, who was arresting everyone below, looked up at this question, momentarily paralysed by the sheer power of the voice. “Pee-kasso kahan hai, maderchod?” Vasant took this opportunity to try and run, and the havaldar plunged after him, and meanwhile, above, “Pee-kasso kahan hai, maderchod?” I tried for a minute to explain to Ma-ji that the question she was supposed to be asking was not exactly “Where’s Picasso, motherfucker?,” but she was standing on the chair with such fierce exultation in her arms, having so much fun, and now the kids below were chanting with her, that it seemed beside the point, and maybe that was the question after all. “Pee-kasso kahan hai, maderchod?”
Afterwards, as we tried to calm ourselves down, and Ma-ji moaned from a backache, Sandhya put down her cup of tea and said to me, a little teary still, “Why is everything so low, lqbal? Why is everything made of money?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe money is made of everything.” She looked at me, puzzled. I didn’t quite know what I meant, myself, so finally I had to admit, “I don’t know what that means.”
“Maybe you’re just trying to make a me-ta-phor,” she said, and we both burst out laughing.
*
Look, there are the lights of Surat station. Who can tell what will happen? But perhaps tomorrow you and I will pull into Bombay Central. Then, on the platform I will raise my hand in farewell, and we will not see each other again. I will go straight to Sandhya’s house to drop off these contracts, which are for a big project in Delhi. It turned out, once we got the system stabilized, and money no longer disappeared from the ledgers of Sridhar and Sons, that Das was quite a complicated fellow, with contacts here and there, so now we’ve expanded a little, and we have a new office, not very big really, two more people working for us, perhaps one more soon. I travel to Delhi often. We are not quite mega yet, but we are bigger.
What happened to Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji, you want to know, of course. When Das confronted them they first denied and denied and denied everything. When Das got angry and threatening, Raunak-ji broke down and confessed, and then they both begged forgiveness, and said they only wanted to serve the company He had them both out of there that afternoon, and a week later they both filed suit against the company, saying they had been framed, hoodwinked out of wages and pensions, discriminated against because they were trying to expose fraud and deception and embezzlement. It drags on.
Also Anubhav drags on. Yes, I wish I could tell you that Sandhya never saw him again, that he was exiled forever. But you know life never does the things it should. He had a big show at the Pushkara Gallery, and a grand opening. We hear Miss Viveka got a new haircut for the event. Mahatre gave Anubhav’s paintings a review that I can only call a rave. He said Anubhav had created a searing vision of the realities of rural India. On that first night alone, Ratnani bought five paintings. Since then, in the last month, Sandhya has had lunch with Anubhav twice. She says to talk things over. Both you and I know what’s really happening. The trouble with beauty is you can’t give it up, not ever. So I know tomorrow she’ll tell me about another lunch, trying not to look guilty. I’ll try to be nice, and we’ll take Lalit for a walk, and he’ll stroll between us, skipping, holding both our hands.
When I’ll get home it’ll be late. I won’t switch on the light, because my brother and his wife will be asleep on the draw
ing room floor. I’ll edge around them, holding my suitcase to the side. I’ll hear my father’s snores from the bedroom, perhaps my mother’s sleepless shiftings. I’ll find the two steps up to my room without effort, and once I’ve shut the door I’ll switch on the light. This used to be a balcony once, so it’s oddly shaped, long and narrow. I’ll take my clothes off and lie on the less-than-single bed, with the light on. I’ll think of Anubhav. A man named Vidyarthi told me that Anubhav got that good review from Mahatre because Anubhav even serviced Mrs. Mahatre. Vidyarthi used that word, “service.” I tell you this not because I believe it, but in the interests of showing you the world of art as I know it, a certain aesthetic completeness, you see, and to tell you what I do not believe. Anubhav Rajadhakshya is surely a whore, a leech, and a liar, but there is something I owe him. I owe him for his talent. I believe this. As I lie on my bed, I will look to the foot of the bed, and on the small table at the end I will see a painting in a frame. The frame is mine, the painting is Anubhav’s. After I had helped Ma-ji throw out his paintings and his materials, the next day, I helped her clean out the room. Behind a cupboard, rolled up and forgotten, I found a painting of a young man leaning on a wall, in front of a poster for Deewar. The painting had a swirl of yellow and red at the top, a pavement in pencil, but Anubhav had worked on the man a little since I had last seen the painting, on the swirl of smoke from his cigarette, on his face. I saw that it was Rajesh. So I took it. I took it, not paying the high prices that Ratnani gave, but I told myself I had given enough to Anubhav. Maybe not enough but something, a service here and there.
I will lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll wonder what it is on the canvas that is Rajesh. Yes, I wish I could tell you we found him, that we knew what had happened. But life never does what it should. After eight-and-a-half months we know that he worked with some bhai log. I now know the name of the moustached man at the gym, and that he is known to Ratnani. This we know. But only this. In this life, the sub-inspector said, some people just vanish. I said: I know. These facts, and the theories that I made up to explain it all to myself, those plots that gave me comfort and a comfortable kind of terror, they’ve been bleached white by the ferocity of my attention. They rattle around in my head with a dry clicking noise. But the painting is life itself. So I’ll lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll look at the curve of the hip, the shirt sleeves rolled up on the swell of the biceps. At the shadowed eyes in black, and the curl of hair on the brown forehead. I will lie in my long narrow room and look at the strong fingers holding the white cigarette and wonder what it is in the shapes that is Rajesh.
When I wake it’ll be dark in the room, the lights will be off, and I’ll know that my mother has come into the room, drawn a sheet to my chest, sat next to me with a hand on my forehead for a while. Alone, I’ll look for the painting in the dim shifting light. Now I’ll see only a glimmering in the dark, a white that comes out of the shadow. I’ll know that Rajesh is not in the lines, that the body is not in the colour. But there is that colour that moves through the body, rang ek sharir ka. There is that glow. I know what it is. It is the absence in my heart.
Shanti
I HATE SUNDAY EVENINGS. It’s that slow descent into the dusk that oppresses me, that endless end with its under-taste of death. Not so long ago, one Sunday evening, I flipped the television off and on a dozen times, walked around my room three times, sat on the floor and tried to read a thriller, switched on the television again, and the relentless chatty joyousness finally drove me out of the house. I walked aimlessly through the streets, listening to the long echoes of children’s games, tormented by a nostalgia that settled lightly over me. I had not the slightest idea of what I was looking for, but only that I was suddenly aware of my age, and it seemed cruel that time should pass so gently and leave behind long swathes of unremembered years. I walked, then, along the long curve of the seawall at Haji Ali, and came along towards the white shape of the mosque floating on the waters.
Then, at the intersection, I didn’t know what to do. I stood, too tired for another long journey and too restless still to go home, and I was swaying a little from side to side. Then I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. It was Subramaniam.
“Come along,” he said. “I’ll give you a drink.”
He was carrying a tattered thela, and we stopped along the way to fill it with bread, marmalade, and bottles of soda. He lived in an old, shabby building near Tardeo, and we went up four flights of stone stairs worn thin in the centre. Inside the door marked “Subramaniam” in brass letters, I bent to take off my shoes, and I could see the space was cool and large. There were those old high ceilings, and walls hung with prints. I sat in the drawing room on a heavy teak couch, on worn cushions, and wriggled my toes on the cold marble. Subramaniam came in carrying a bowl of chips.
“New brand,” he said, smiling, and he put the bowl down on the table at my elbow. Then he poured me a drink. He sat in an armchair that creaked slightly, and raised his glass at me.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately my wife has been unwell.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”
He raised his shoulders in that awkward little shrug of his. “At a certain age everything is serious, and nothing is serious.” He drank, and then put down his glass on the table with a crisp click. He looked keenly at me. “How is that Ayesha?”
“Yesterday, she was very bitter about a patriotic movie she saw,” I said. “She is in despair about the state of the country. What are we, she said. For a cynic she despairs a lot. She’s my friend, but I don’t understand her, not really.”
He nodded. “Listen,” he said. “I want to tell you a story.”
*
A train drifting across a field of yellow grass. This is what he saw first. A plume of black smoke turning slowly in the white glare. He had gone up the long slope in front of the station, across the three tracks, and then up the rise, to the ridge which had turned out to be much, much further than he had thought. When he had reached it, and gone across, he had found himself on an endless plateau, a plain dotted with scrubby bushes, an endless flatness that vanished into the sky. So he had turned around and come back. He had already forgotten what he had hoped to find on the other side of the ridge, but for two months he had looked at it curling in the distance, and finally he had taken a walk to see the other side of it. Now the sun burnt on his shoulders. Now he came back over the ridge and saw the train drifting across a field of yellow grass.
It was 1945 and he was twenty years old. His name was Shiv, and he had a twin who was dead, killed in Delhi the year before when a Hindu procession had gone the wrong way. The newspapers had regretted the continued communal violence in the city, but had reported with relief that on this day there were only six dead. One of the six was his, one body identical down to the strangely short fifth toe on the left foot. He had never known the bitterness of small statistics, but now he carried it everywhere in his mouth. He had it now, as he stumbled with aching calves, back from his walk of no purpose. The day yawned before him. He lived with his sister and her husband in a large bungalow a minute and a half’s walk from the station. In the house there were a dozen novels he had read already, his B.Sc. degree framed on a wall, and two small children he could not bear to play with. He had come to live with his sister and her station-master husband after his silences had frightened his parents. His sister had loved him most, had loved him and his brother best after their birth at her eight years, and even now, grief-stricken, she found happiness and generosity enough in the safety of her home to comfort him. But the day, and life itself, stretched on forever like a bleak plain of yellow grass, and he felt himself walking, and the train drifted with its fantastic uncurling of smoke.
The train slowed imperceptibly as he walked. It must have, because he became aware that it was paused, halted at the station. But even then it moved, shimmering in the heat haze, a lon
g red blur. Then, again, it was stirring, drifting across the yellow. He had no sense of his own movement, only of the shuffling of his feet and the sweat trickling down his back, and somehow the train was drawing away from him. Then he was at the station. He crossed the tracks and climbed onto the main platform. He went past the sign that proclaimed “Leharia” and its elevation of seven hundred and eighteen feet, past the station master’s office and the second class waiting room, past the door to the ticketing office and the passengers sprawled on the green benches, and to the arched white entrance to the station. There he stopped, unsure. He looked out across the tracks and there was the slow slope and the faraway rim. He had gone to the edge of his world and come back and he didn’t know what was next. The train was now a single oblong to the west. He looked down along the tracks to the west and then back to the east and the thought occurred to him suddenly that he could wait for the next train, and it was a short step off the platform onto the black rails, a drop of three feet. The train would be moving very slowly but it had a great momentum. It could not be stopped. He recognized the melodrama of the thought, and was also surprised that he had not had it before. There was a certain relief in it. It seemed now inevitable, at least as an idea, and he determined that he would wait for the next train to see what happened. That would be the three-thirty from Lucknow.
Now that there was a plan he was released from lethargy. He was suddenly full of energy and very thirsty. There was a matka of water in the first class waiting room. He walked now with a snap, and he waved smartly at Frankie Furtado the assistant station master, who was looking, from a barred window, after the receding smudge on the western sky with an expression that was usually taken for commendable railway concentration and proper seriousness. He was actually—Shiv knew—dreaming of Bombay, and now Frankie returned the wave with but a slow raising of the fingers of one elegant hand that rested on an iron bar. There was an entire matinee’s worth of tragedy in the single motion, and Shiv smiled a little as he drank the lovely clayey water. It was crisp and cold and the ladle made a deep belling sound as it dipped under the dark surface.
Love and Longing in Bombay Page 22