Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  “Jolly!” the wife called out, beaming from the benedictions. “Bring one of the dowry saris.”

  The hijras beat their drum louder, singing, taunting, and dancing, until Jolly finally appeared and, muttering curses, threw an expensive wedding sari at them. Flashing him a smile, the hijras then politely thanked the wife and undulated down the street.

  “Why must they see the baby like that?” Pinky asked.

  “You have to see something with your own eyes to believe it,” Nimish said, shrugging his shoulders as if the answer were obvious“Otherwise there will always be doubt.”

  Dheer let out a loud burp, Tufan ordered another cola, and Nimish paid the bill.

  Gulu drove up with the car. “Once I saw the hijras take away an unfortunate child,” he said as they climbed in. “It was in the slums of Dharavi. The parents were devastated. There’s no law to prevent the hijras from taking away these children. After all, they don’t belong anywhere else.”

  DRINKING MOONBEAMS

  Savita sat at her dressing table in the still of the night, holding the photo of her daughter to her eyes, and remembered that she had not seen her just after she was born. She had not known if it was a boy or a girl. She had not witnessed her umbilical cord being snipped. She had not heard her first cry. She had not held her bloodied, beating body against her chest. She had fallen unconscious just after her last push and had not woken up until Maji came in with the baby hours later, washed and tightly swaddled, ready to be fed.

  I did not behold her coming into the world, Savita thought, beginning to weep, and I did not behold her leaving it.

  She paused as the approaching storm rumbled in the sky. The thunder came in increasingly frequent intervals; the lightning imprinted the sky with phosphorescent bolts, yet the rains still did not come. The delay made her feel irritated, powerless. She wiped away her tears and tenderly tucked the photo back into the silver bindi box.

  Jaginder had been so affectionate during Savita’s pregnancy, convinced she carried a daughter after birthing three sons.

  My raka, he had teased her, calling her a full-moon night as was prescribed by the prenatal scriptures, our daughter will have the most princely dowry in all of Bombay—modern furniture, diamond jewelry, imported refrigerators—sab kuch!

  How delicious! Savita had smiled, feeling satisfied, indulgently contented with her life.

  And we’ll name her Chakori.

  Chakori? Savita had been surprised at this unusual choice. The mythological bird?

  Yes, Jaginder had said in a rare reflective moment, gazing affectionately upon her. The most heavenly of birds.

  Who drinks moonbeams, Savita added, remembering the lore. It was at that moment that she finally fell in love with her husband.

  Until then, their arrangement had been suitable. He was, after all, handsome with fair skin, of tallish frame, and just enough fat on him to appear imposing. He was dutiful, too, confidently taking responsibility for the family’s shipbreaking business when his father Omanan-dlal passed away, giving Savita enough purse money to buy little treats of jewelry, and ensuring (thrice a week) that one son would be followed by another. Her worst fear was that she might have to wear a widow’s white sari like her mother-in-law, Maji. As long as Jaginder was around, Savita would always be a leading contender amongst her friends for the Most-Number-One-First-Class-Life.

  Or so she thought. When Lord Yama whisked away her newborn daughter, Savita was shocked. Not just at the irrefutability of her daughter’s death, but that the tragedy had happened to her, in her world buffered by money and connections. She passed the mourning period alone while ancient superstitions effloresced in her mind. She called upon a tantrik who confirmed her belief that an evil influence had befallen their home and provided her with turmeric stones to hang above her children’s beds.

  She even decided to go on pilgrimage to Mehndipur, claiming that a witch had killed her baby with its evil eye. Remember that female beggar that came to our gate, hahn? she shouted at Jaginder, Remember I was five months pregnant and the beggar would not be shooed away by Gulu until your mother gave her one of my old saris, hahn? Remember how Parvati swept up her footprints and burned them while you sat back and laughed? She was a witch, I’m telling you, she put a curse on my sari and killed my baby!

  Jaginder had unsuccessfully tried to reason with her, insisting that it had been a negligent accident. Maji chalked up the tragedy to fate. But Savita would not let herself be persuaded, declaring that the baby’s ayah was to blame. She’s a witch! She’s a witch! she ranted, delving more and more into the world of secret charms and potent remedies, until her closest friends began politely to avoid her. We’ll give you some time, nah? Tell us when you’re ready, okay?

  And then Jaginder underwent his metamorphosis, from butterfly into bug. He had been a strict vegetarian and teetotaler all his life, not even indulging in those alcohol-filled chocolates brought from abroad by visiting international friends. He had been refined, a true gentleman like his father, with never a rough word emerging from his mouth. He had been attentive, kind, and content in all areas of his life except for his longing for a daughter.

  When she finally arrived, she had not lived long enough for them to have held a proper naming ceremony so she died without one. However, in Jaginder and Savita’s hearts she was forever Chakori, their elusive little moon bird. After her sudden death, Savita had seen not grief in Jaginder’s eyes, but confusion. As if the brevity of the baby’s life had been an affront to his authority, to his uncanny ability to always make things go his way. Taking refuge in a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue that had been tucked away in one of their locked metal cabinets, Jaginder lost his wings and cocooned himself, larvalike, in guilt, remorse, and blame.

  He no longer wanted to make love with her, as if afraid of creating another little being who could be so suddenly lost. He was swayed by those ubiquitous billboards urging Use The Loop, and had insisted that Savita get fitted with the coil-shaped intrauterine device. Didn’t you hear, Savita had retaliated, refusing such measures, that it gives the husbands an electric shock?

  Parvati had suggested soaking rock salt in oil or orally taking the seeds of sarshapa soaked in a white rice-wash for birth control. Maji had even taken Savita to an Ayurvedic physician (after her son had desperately approached her to intercede) who prescribed a concoction of japa flowers and tanduliyaka roots for sterility. Savita had refused it all. You don’t want me to get pregnant? she had fumed at Jaginder. Then YOU drink haridra powder mixed with goat’s urine every morning. It’s supposed to be an excellent contraceptive for men.

  Defeated, Jaginder began to withdraw from Savita altogether, looking upon her with horror, as if she were to blame for what had happened to their daughter. He brooded in the privacy of their bedroom, anger turning his language sour. Nips soon led to swigs. Swigs to chugs. Chugs to whole nights spent away from her.

  Savita wanted nothing more than to squash him.

  Her mother, visiting from Goa, provided little relief from the grief that surrounded the Mittal household like June heat.

  Chin up, darling, she had advised, delicately sipping her tea. Really, you must get on with it.

  But Savita did not possess her mother’s whimsical callousness, choosing instead to retreat into her own little world of darkness, vowing never to emerge again. And then came the news that her sister-in-law, Yamuna, had died somewhere near the Indo-Pak border and the household was thrown into mourning once more. Weeks later Maji returned with the infant Pinky, and her permanent addition to their family became a mocking reminder of Savita’s own loss.

  By then Savita had had enough of her self-imposed sequestration. She wiped the tears from her face, bought a stunning 22-carat gold jewelry set enameled with strutting peacocks, and invited her friends to lunch. She was all smiles. What a lovely necklace. Kiss. Kiss. Jaginder bought it for me. So sweet he is, I tell you. As if nothing had happened. Ten points for Savita.

  What she kept
suppressed inside her was fear. She did not believe that her daughter’s death was a mere accident.

  Wicked spirits were responsible.

  So she ordered the bathroom door to be bolted at night, deathly afraid that whatever evil had killed her baby might still lurk within.

  Gulu disembarked in front of a dive that served only masala cholay, curried chickpeas, and fried bread and was known unofficially as Lucky Dhaba. Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar’s popular playback duet, “Yeh Raatein, Yeh Mausam,” blared intermittently from inside, its reception entirely dependent on the fickle electrical services which most often shorted out during the oppressive hours of the premonsoon nights. He first approached the paanwallah’s cart next to the eatery, hedged about by a group of men, some waiting for a paan, others lighting their cigarettes from a smoldering rope attached to the cart, most of them gup-shupping, catching up on the day’s news. They gave Gulu a familiar nod.

  “Hahn-hahn,” one was saying, the tuft of hair on his shaven head declaring him to be of a high-born caste. “The whole of electricity in the city was gone except at the minister’s daughter’s wedding.”

  “These bastard officials never think twice before they loot and plunder.”

  “Can’t digest their breakfast until they do.”

  “And the rest of the city was black as your face, not a single fan was working,” one of the men said, slapping Gulu on the back.

  “While rose petals lined the groom’s path for ten kilometers!” Gulu added.

  “You lying bastard,” the men accused laughingly, their red mouths glowing, even as they exclaimed at this extravagance.

  The paanwallah, a plump man with gleaming skin, kohl-rimmed eyes and a vertical tilak drawn from the arch of his nose all the way to his hairline, smoothed the chain of gold buttons on his kurta top. His fingers hovered over the moist red cloth in the steel dish that contained the paan leaves. He proceeded to snip the ends of the leaf, spreading it with lime before filling it with crushed betel-nut supari and cardamom, and a little tobacco. Folding the paan into a neat little packet, he pinned it with a clove.

  Gulu placed it in the side of his mouth, his teeth crushing the first sweet-sour-pungent flavor from the leaves. Satisfied, he nodded his head and walked over to Lucky Dhaba to meet with his childhood friend, Hari, now known infamously throughout the city as Hari Bhai, Big-Brother Hari. They sat at a table outside, just under black clouds that were spread thickly across the sky.

  “What’s going on in the chawl, Bhai?” he asked, referring to the slums where Hari lived and operated his bootlegging empire.

  “I tell you that bhenchod Renu seduced my neighbor’s wife. We had to call in Tantrik Baba. He cracked his whip, saying he was going to set a spirit upon Renu, right into his lungi to make his organ malfunction. Ha! That bhenchod fell to the ground begging to be forgiven!”

  Gulu laughed uneasily, and spat on the ground.

  “What?” Hari asked. “Missing that whore of yours, Chinni?”

  Gulu clicked his tongue. “Not her.”

  “Oh, the other one,” Hari smirked. “That fishergirl.”

  “I was young back then, Bhai, very handsome. People used to tell me all the time, ‘You should be in the pictures, Gulu,’ they’d say. If only I’d tried, maybe my fate would have been different.”

  “Fate is fate,” Hari said, pulling out a packet of bidis wrapped in newspaper and lighting one.

  “Was it her fate to come to the bungalow, to make me fall in love, to disappear without a trace?” Gulu wondered aloud, his brow furrowing. Though they had both been employed by Maji, their worlds had rarely intersected. The ayah lived and worked inside the bungalow, Gulu on the outside. In all those years, they never communicated but for the single red-orange marigold flower he bought for her every morning, which she pinned into her hair. One thousand blooms. One thousand gestures of his love.

  “Like a flame, yaar.”

  “I was going to marry her, Bhai. I was saving money. I kept telling myself another six months, now five, now four. And then—”

  Gulu remembered Maji’s low voice, her urgent call, Take her to the train station; give her this money.

  “At first when I was driving to the station, all I could think was, We’re alone together! How long had I been asking Lord Ganesh for this opportunity, I didn’t even know. I just knew that I wanted her to marry me! I knew something was wrong, I knew she had been sent away. But I didn’t want to ask. As long as I kept quiet, everything was the same. Like intermission at the cinema.”

  Hari grunted then ripped off a piece of greasy fried bread and dipped it into a plate of piping hot cholay.

  “Then when I was at the station, she only told me that the baby drowned. I didn’t know what to think, what to say. I don’t know how we reached VT Station. I felt death clutching at my heart. I wanted to go back to yesterday, rewind the day. Like a film.”

  Gulu stuffed some bread into his mouth. He remembered her eyes. They had been red, red like those of the Goddess Kali. “All I saw was red. And suddenly I felt so afraid. I felt engulfed by her mouth, by her red tongue, by the bloodied words she had spoken. O Destroyer of the Universe! She had destroyed the baby’s life, the family’s life, my life, I shouted at her.”

  “It was an accident, yaar,” Hari said, taking another bite. He had heard Gulu recount this story many times before but, like a good friend, patiently listened.

  “The palloo slipped from her shoulder when she opened the door. The red disappeared and she became mine again. My beloved. I felt sick. The car was spinning. I no longer knew anything. ‘Don’t go!’ I shouted. She tore the marigold from her hair and ran. I ran after her but she disappeared. It was like Goddess Bhoomdevi had opened up the earth and taken her in.”

  Gulu’s eyes were running. He wiped them on a dirty handkerchief and heartily blew his nose.

  “I beat my head against the steering wheel until it bled and then I beat it some more.” And when he was finished, when his head was pounding and blood running down his temple, he had turned and seen the marigold, a burst of red-orange upon the blackness of the backseat.

  “No woman is worth that much suffering,” Hari said with a loud belch.

  Gulu lit a bidi and took a long drag, nodding in agreement.

  But silently he thought about that marigold flower, tenderly pressed between pages of newspaper and hidden under his cot. He had loved her. He had committed an unimaginable, unspeakable act to get her back the night she disappeared. He pined for her with an intensity that left scars upon his heart. He prayed only for one thing at night as he fell asleep: to see her once more.

  Then, then, O Merciful Lord, he always ended his entreaty, I will be content to die.

  What he did not know, what he would never know was that she had not loved him.

  No, no, she had not, not at all.

  For she had already given herself to someone else in the bungalow.

  Jaginder piloted the Ambassador over the dark streets, sporadically lit by brilliant flashes from the sky, feeling more and more relaxed the further he got from his wife, his mother, the bungalow. Drinking dens peppered the Bombay coast at Mahim, Bandra, Pali Hill, Andheri, and right up to Versova, at least one surreptitiously nestled within each Christian fishing village. He had explored these addas in the thick of the night while Savita slept, thinking somehow that his shame was cloaked by the darkness. He was grateful that his dead father could not see how far he had sunk.

  After his daughter’s death and during the long years of prohibition, Jaginder had procured his own secret stash of Johnnie Walker and Chivas Regal. And, although his drinking was never openly discussed, Savita—ever conscious of status—carefully saw to it that the empty bottles of the most expensive brand, Royal Salut, were refilled with water, labels intact, and kept in the refrigerator. Others were sold off for decent prices to raddiwallas who, in turn, bartered them to bootleggers. Jaginder had obtained a necessary permit from their family physician, Dr. M. M. Iyer,
after a thick wad of rupees was stealthily slipped into the doctor’s shiny briefcase. Shall I declare you a confirmed alcoholic so you can have the maximum allotment? the doctor had asked, grinning conspiratorially.

  With the doctor’s statement in hand, Jaginder was able to procure bottles of Indian Made Foreign Liquor from a legal wine shop. But the domestic brand tasted no better than the ones that had been brewed in the sewers by bootleggers with rotten oranges, coconut shavings, dark lumps of raw sugar, and large doses of nausagar to speed up fermentation. Even for Jaginder’s addiction, this concoction was too much.

  He had fleetingly thought about frequenting the permit-rooms of the Wellington Turf Club or the Bombay Gymkhana where the Whites-only era had nostalgically, and somewhat reluctantly, faded into a grim acceptance of wealthy natives. But Jaginder did not want to risk dealing with the police subinspectors who stood stiffl y inside these private clubs, one hand on a register to record the buyer’s name, address, and number of pints and the other hand under his sleeve so that he could be persuaded to overlook the register. And besides, he didn’t feel comfortable drinking in such an atmosphere because although visiting white sahibs were expected—indeed exhorted—to drink in order to maintain their auras of authority, Jaginder had no such excuse for his habit.

  So he escaped to the addas in the middle of the night. He did not ask Gulu to drive him there. For one thing, Gulu was off that night. And secondly, Maji had always counseled him, You must always know how to make best use of your servants. Never subject them to your sudden whims.

  As he drove onwards, Jaginder’s thoughts turned to his daughter. Last night, when he returned from the adda, Savita had been wide awake, waiting for him in a state of rage.

  I’m done for, he had thought, throwing himself upon the bed in surrender. Let her yell at him, let her hit him, whatever it was, he deserved it. He knew that, even as he blamed Savita for their crippled relationship, he was at fault.