Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  At the breakfast table, Savita was complaining as usual to Jaginder. “There were mosquitoes hovering over my head last night on top of your snoring! I tell you, it’s a conspiracy to keep me awake!”

  It was true. Entire mosquito clans gathered in frenetic funnels over Savita’s hair whenever she went out for her social engagements. Sometimes, a few devoted ones came home with her while the rest pressed forward on their feverish pilgrimage for other, equally perfumed buns. Kuntal sporadically unrolled her mat in Savita’s room in order to rub away their detrimental effects and generally provide a sympathetic ear to her litany of ongoing afflictions.

  Jaginder grunted.

  “Oh, Parvati,” Savita called out, spotting her in the hallway, “did the darjee drop off my Kanjeevaram sari for today?”

  “Yes, it came this morning. I put it in your room,” Parvati answered, making a quick escape. She found her sister cleaning the bathroom. “Oh ho! That Savita drives me crazy. Did you know that she and Jaginder had a big fight last night?”

  “Achha? ” Kuntal was busy arranging a cup of frayed toothbrushes and the dented tube of Kolynos Dental Cream upon the marble sink counter. The bathroom tiles gleamed.

  “I knew it the moment he came back with the Ambassador. Not five minutes afterwards, I heard her screaming all the way from my quarters.”

  “Poor Savita-di.”

  “What ‘poor Savita’?” Parvati pointed a finger at Kuntal menacingly. “Have you ever seen her squatting down to do laundry even once, hahn? She doesn’t have to lift a finger all day. Now she can’t even lift her petticoat at night?”

  Cook Kanj was clattering breakfast dishes in the sink while, just outside the kitchen window, Gulu was loudly whistling as he readied the Mercedes for its afternoon outing. The twins were in various stages of undress, pretending to deshum-deshum each other like the heroes in their favorite movies. Jaginder Uncle stood restlessly in the hallway, resenting social obligations, especially those that had to do with his wife’s family. Savita ran around the bungalow shouting orders, simultaneously cajoling and threatening the numerous members of the household while expertly trying on a sapphire and diamond-drop necklace.

  “Hai-hai, Nimish. Do you call those shoes? At least have the decency to clean your spectacles.”

  “Dheer, are your ears working? I said cream kurta with the brown vest, not brown kurta with cream vest.”

  “Tufan, stop your whining-shmining! You’re REQUIRED to go. You want me to tell your father?”

  “Jaginder? JAGINDER? Where are you? Better get your youngest son in order, he’s Eating-My-Head!”

  Jaginder caught Tufan by the scruff of his neck as he streaked through the hallway in his underwear, delivering a blow that merely grazed the side of his head. Tufan deftly ducked—deshum-deshum!

  — and raced away. “You have exactly three bloody seconds to get dressed before I come after you!” Jaginder bellowed.

  “Mummy, but I don’t want to wear the cream kurta . . .” Dheer began to whine as he exited his room but stopped short when he saw his father standing in the hallway with upraised arm.

  Nimish sidled past his father unconcernedly, eyes firmly in Sir Edwin Arnold’s India Revisited. ‘“A drive next day about the cantonments and a walk through the native bazaars,’” he read out loud, ‘“serve to disclose how little India changes amidst all the alterations, embellishments and ameliorations which have come with the British reign. ’”

  “Don’t think I won’t give you a slap!” Jaginder roared at Nimish, vaguely aware that he might have been insulted.

  “Jaginder? JAGINDER?” Savita called out.

  He muttered under his breath as he trundled out of the hallway.

  Heated words erupted from their bedroom followed by several high-pitched shrieks that sent the boys diving for cover. Pinky edged away from her hiding place and ran her grandmother’s room. Maji was slowly donning a new white blouse that had been recently dropped off by the tailor. Her extra flesh hung around her. The blouse swelled, trying to hold back the two-fisted blows of her bosom. Fat puffed out at the end of the tightened sleeves as if it had just come up for air. Her enormous hips had just burst one entire seam of her petticoat. Parvati, who had been shaking out the nine yards of white, paisley-bordered sari, quickly unclipped a safety pin from her bra strap and, pinning it to the torn petticoat, restored order. Maji exhaled.

  “Why aren’t you dressed yet, beti?”

  “Oh, my head—” Pinky dropped onto the hard surface of Maji’s bed. She felt exhausted.

  “Hai-hai,” Maji pressed her hand to Pinky’s forehead. “Okay, lie down here. See how you feel when we’re ready to go.”

  Pinky gratefully closed her eyes.

  Jaginder was pacing in his bedroom feeling sorry for himself. He wanted nothing more than to escape to his office where he could give orders with impunity. The shipbreaking yards at Reti Bunder and the trading yards at Darukhana were like a worn-in pair of chappals that he could slip on without having to worry about washing his feet first.

  Even the name Darukhana, referring to the gunpowder that the British used to store there after importing it via the main Alexandra Docks along the city’s eastern coastline, felt potent, powerful. This despite the fact that the area, owned by the Bombay Port Trust, was packed with ramshackle corrugated-tin sheds housing merchants such as himself and hundreds of hovels where the impoverished workers, many migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, lived without proper sanitation. This, also despite the fact that the yard’s impossibly narrow bylanes teemed with lorries and handcarts during the day and looters at night. Jaginder was not troubled by any of this, however, simply paying for access to one of the limited water taps and factoring the persistent thievery into his selling costs. In Darukhana, sitting at his desk with its constantly ringing black phone, Laloo scurrying nearby with notepad in hand, Jaginder felt important. In charge.

  Social obligations coupled with Savita in her shimmering saris, however, made him feel acutely out of place. Jaginder coped with his discomfort by keeping his conversations to a minimum or to business-related topics, wary of Savita’s unforgiving glare if he were to slip up. Now he stood dully as Savita ticked off a long list of instructions.

  “And remember, don’t say unnecessary things.”

  “I don’t say unnecessary things.”

  “Remember at the Narayan’s party,” Savita huffed, “how you told my friend Mumta that Nimish wasn’t interested in the shipeaking business.”

  “I was just telling the truth!” Jaginder yelled. A rush of blood shot through his body as if he were a wild animal suddenly ensnared.

  “Truth?” Savita shouted at the image of her husband reflected in the mirror. “Since when has that been a priority? What will people say when they hear that Nimish is not interested in the family business?”

  She could hear Mumta gleefully repeating the tidbit to the rest of her friends, adding on irrelevant and inaccurate details for effect, so that Savita would slip behind in that week’s tally for Most-Number-One-First-Class-Life.

  “So what, it’s just a matter of time before he’ll have to accept his fate. Let him jiggle a few more brain cells in the meantime.”

  “You just don’t understand,” Savita said, piqued. There was no winning these fights, she had learned the hard way, when Jaginder pounced on her, reduced her to a quivering, tearful mess. Her best offense was to deny Jaginder the pleasure of the kill. Play dead. “That’s all I have to say. End of discussion.”

  “I’m not done discussing,” Jaginder roared. He was just getting started. He stretched his limbs, and cracked his neck in three places.

  Already, his stress began melting away, a solid showing of blood throbbed to his groin.

  Savita remained silent, totally absorbed in the process of sticking a gem bindi to her forehead.

  “And why do you care what your bloody friends think anyway?”

  Jaginder circled again. “Don’t you have anything better to do
?”

  Savita deliberated on the bindi, then deciding against it, stuck it amongst the collection of red round ones that dotted the mirror like summer rash.

  “Answer me!” Jaginder roared. But Savita remained silent. She had won this round, bloody hell.

  Jaginder headed for the Mercedes that Gulu had tenderly polished and tucked back into the garage to keep it cool, and retrieved the aging Johnnie Walker from its trunk. On his way out, he noted the sparseness of Gulu’s quarters. Aside from the jute cot on which he slept and a stray clothesline, the only other personal object was a poster advertising Cherry Blossom brand shoe polish with two kittens, one yellow, one slightly bluish, cozying up in a pair shiny black boots that hovered over the words For Shoe Comfort.

  Jaginder studied the poster for a moment, briefly considering where Gulu disappeared to on his day off, once every two weeks, only to return late into the night usually singing a film tune as he swaggered into the gate. Bloody low-caste inebriate, Jaginder thought, curling his lip in disgust, probably gets himself a whore on Falkland Road.

  “Sahib?”

  “Oi, Gulu.” Jaginder turned to face his driver who stood in the doorway. “Have a drink?”

  “No Sahib, Maji’s House Rules,” Gulu said deferentially.

  Jaginder shot him a look before taking a slug, deftly tucking the bottle back into the trunk.

  Things were not always this way, he thought, now pacing the driveway, waiting for his family to get ready for the engagement luncheon at the Taj, the grandest hotel in all of Bombay. Built in 1903, the Taj offered Turkish baths, an electric laundry, and even a resident doctor.

  It was where he and Savita, many years back, had celebrated their engagement, overlooking the Gateway of India.

  When he first had first seen her, she was so beautiful and vulnerable, like a tiny sunbird whose radiant plumage glittered as she flitted from person to person, the sunlight catching in her gems. He had declared that day, that come what may, he would protect her from harm.

  Now look at us.

  He was her fiercest predator.

  When had things changed? Jaginder asked himself, knowing full well when they had. After their daughter’s death, blame crept into their relationship like a scene from an American movie—cinematically, violently, and with special effects. They each were in thrall to it, hurting each other with abandon. And when the scene finally passed on to another, and the picture lost its initial thrill, they found that they were no longer even in the same theater. Jaginder sighed.

  Savita walked onto the driveway, clicking an evening purse.

  “You . . . look nice,” he managed.

  Savita’s stride faltered for a fraction of a second, eyes dropping to the ground.

  The rest of the family already stood assembled in the shade, each in their own world. Maji was worrying about Pinky’s headaches which had started soon after her diarrhea troubles, and wondered if she should call Dr. M. M. Iyer to ply her with various tablets sealed in foil. Tufan stood by the car door, arms crossed belligerently, because Parvati had finally appeared in his room and, menacingly tying her dupatta back to free up her hands, forced clothes on him. Dheer was sulking in his cream-colored kurta with the brown vest. Nimish was still engrossed in India Revisited.

  “Where’s Pinky?” Tufan asked.

  “Not well,” Maji replied, “she’ll be staying back.”

  A look of indignation arose in four pairs of eyes.

  Unfair! Unfair! The twins shot each other looks of disbelief. Pinky always received special treatment from Maji.

  What is she up to? Savita Auntie pondered icily as she dabbed at her lipstick.

  Why didn’t I think of that? Jaginder felt irritatingly one-upped by his niece. “Uh,” he began suddenly, buoyed by the thought of escape, “I just remembered, I have to stop by the shipbreaking yards.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Savita began, her voice betraying a tremor.

  “It’s close by to the Taj,” Jaginder countered, “so I’ll meet you there, what’s the bloody problem?”

  “Children, chalo, get in the car,” Maji ordered.

  “They’ll be expecting you,” Savita said, eyes hardening.

  “So I’ll be there for lunch,” Jaginder roared as he paced in front of her. “You take care of the bloody chitchat!”

  “Then go!” Savita yelled.

  Quickly, Nimish came to Savita’s side and, face darkened with anger at his father, gently settled her within the car.

  Jaginder watched them pile into the Mercedes, Maji first in the backseat, followed by Savita. Dheer and Tufan squished in between.

  Gulu and Nimish in front.

  He had won. Jaginder victoriously stretched his arms and let out a loud yawn to chase away the sudden sinking feeling. Damn, damn, damn, he thought. I did it again. Try as he might to be gentle with Savita, his anger at her bubbled up and turned him into an animal.

  He quietly fetched the keys to the Ambassador and drove himself to the shipbreaking yards at Reti Bunder along the eastern coastline where sand once used to be dredged from the sea for building construction.

  There was a buzz of activity when he pulled up in his shiny car. A chair, umbrella, and a cold drink were proffered. Jaginder gratefully took a seat and looked out upon his empire that he had inherited from his father and made even more successful with his sophisticated mind for business and money.

  An end-of-life ship, weighing less than five-thousand deadweight tons and past its usefulness after twenty-five years on the open oceans, loomed before him, a hulking skeleton. A hive of sturdy fitters and cutters dismantled the ship as the heat soaked into the heavy, asbestos-laden steel plates, and stripped away each plate, nail, and screw with torch cutters and bare hands.

  Semiskilled lifters, wearing only dhotis across their hips and scarves around their heads to protect themselves from the blaze of the sun, carted the metal scraps on their backs like ants on a carcass, their barefoot march synchronized to the rhythmic call of a singer-worker.

  Loaders conveyed the unwieldy cargo into mud-splattered lorries, garishly painted in reds and oranges, filling them with rusted metal to be resold, reused, recycled, and reincarnated into drainage pipes or perhaps, the frame of a new Ambassador car.

  Most of the unskilled workers lived on the edges of the shipbreaking yards in shanties that stood unsteadily on stilts, amidst the graveyard of leaking barrels, open fires, and hazardous waste that possessed the coastline.

  “Everything theek-thak, Boss-Sahib?”

  Jaginder grunted his approval.

  Yes, at least at work, everything was as it should be.

  THE BRASS BUCKET

  Back at the bungalow, Pinky let sleep overtake her. The family had left and the housemaids went to the market soon afterwards. Cook Kanj resentfully arrived and placed a stainless steel plate of moong dal marinated in lime, soup with chunks of bright green gia squash, and steaming roti upon the dresser. Then, back in the kitchen, he quickly unrolled his mat for a much anticipated longer-than-usual nap. He calculated at least three hot, fly-filled hours before the family’s noisy return.

  Pinky woke sometime later and halfheartedly picked at the food. She cut across the parlor, stopping to dig her toes into the lush carpeting. It was strange, the hush of a room that usually burst with clamor and clatter. She stepped into the hallway where Cook Kanj’s dry, raspy snores echoed off the walls.

  The door to the bathroom was open and Pinky stood just outside it for a long time staring at the brass bucket, a lota hooked onto its rim. She noticed for the first time the water stains streaking from the pipe that encircled the room like a snake, and the patches of white lime that dusted the wall. The green-tiled room felt aged. A cracked wooden paddle rested on the pipe, warped and abandoned. A thin river of rheumy liquid lay in the joint where the wall met the floor, little dots of mold tenaciously adhering to its surface. Even with Kuntal’s daily scrubbings, the bathroom never felt clean, never sparkled like the rest of the
bungalow, as if no amount of detergents could wash away its internal decay or the burden of what it had witnessed long years ago.

  Pinky pulled a small, hand-carved chair from the parlor and propped the door open.

  “I’m sorry you died,” she said, tentatively stepping inside the bathroom. She thought of the photo. Seeing the baby had cast some verifiable flesh onto the ghost’s intangible presence, somehow making her more real, more human.

  “I know what you look like,” she said, edging nearer to the bucket. “Gulu says that ghosts come back to make things right.”

  She turned around; the door was still reassuringly open.

  “Or to warn others,” Pinky continued. “Is it Savita Auntie? Is she making you do this?”

  Pinky peered into the bucket without touching it.

  Nothing. It was completely empty.

  “Why only me?” Pinky whispered.

  Without warning, her head was thrust into the bucket.

  It began to fill with water.

  Pinky thrashed, unable to lift her head. Her breath turned frosty. The water drew closer and closer to her nostrils. She kicked her legs, turning her head from side to side, gasping. With horror, she realized that there was no one in the household to help, no one but the sleeping cook.

  “Cook Kanj!” she screamed.

  The susurration of the pipes as they gurgled and hissed was the only response.

  Instinctively, she began to recite the Mrityunjaya Mantra, the life-giving prayer that Maji had taught her, saying, “It is powerful enough to conquer Death.”

  “Om Tryambakam Yajaamahe . . .” Pinky coughed as the water began filling her nose.

  The bucket began to wobble back and forth. Pinky pushed at it with her arms.

  “Sugandhim Pushti Vardhanam.”

  Suddenly it turned over and crashed to the floor, water flowing out of it like a river.

  Pinky raced to the open door and across the parlor, throwing herself under the covers of Maji’s bed. She remained there, shivering, until she heard the blessed sound of the Mercedes’s engine turning into the gate.