Chinni naively relented, sending her parents a one-anna plea for money, penned by a letter-writer who sat under pigeon-shit-streaked canvas roof near the General Post Office with a blackened tin box of sealing wax, kerosene, a wick lamp, and matches. She could very well have written the letter herself but needed to borrow his anonymous return address as her own. Namaste Amma and Baba, she dictated to the felt-capped man who unhurriedly plucked at the skeletal Remington typewriter, adjusting his half-moon spectacles at each new mark to scrutinize the paper for accuracy. Husband has died, please send money. Will visit soon with baby. She signed it, your loving daughter, Chinta, using her given name, not the name it had been changed to in the brothel: Chinni, meaning sugar. Her parents never wrote back.
Gulu used to frequent the Nepali whores, most of whom had been kidnapped from their homes, when he was a shoe-shine boy at VT because they were the only ones he could afford. After securing his job with Maji, however, he gladly left them behind, choosing to move up a class, to the lower-middle-class prostitutes. He had imagined himself one day trying out the Eurasian whores in the most expensive brothels, gated establishments set off the main street and run by French-speaking madams, but he had never possessed the money or courage. He had started seeing Chinni the very first time he visited 24 Falkland Road, spying her in the window as another girl plaited her hair, though she was not the most attractive woman in the brothels. In fact, as he passed by, looking upward to consider the wares, she had spat a blob of reddish saliva at him.
When he entered her quarters that first time, Chinni didn’t toss off her clothes like the prostitutes he was used to, immediately baring her breasts and inviting him to squeeze them as if they were guavas at the market. Gulu had simply tipped her onto her back and gone about his business. Sex with Chinni was slow, predictable, almost boring. But after his childhood in poverty, living in the streets and then in the train station, never knowing where his next meal would come from, he took pleasure in her familiarity and even in the reluctance with which she surrendered her body to him.
Now that so many years had passed, she had begun her decline, one that happened with alarming speed on Falkner Road. She was twenty-eight and frequently suffered from high fevers. Most prostitutes, he knew, did not live past thirty: victims of filth, violation, disease, and malnutrition. Gulu continued to visit Chinni, less for pleasure these days and more out of an intense need to discharge accumulated tension from his body into hers. Meanwhile, Chinni continued to be teased by the other girls for her relentless ire, Oi, Chinni, your name is sugar but the men still can taste your bitterness. Even so, she tempered her wrath when she was with Gulu. He had been her most loyal and longest customer, their relationship was almost like that of husband and wife. After their lovemaking, they often went to a popular local eatery and shared a bowl of trotters, pigs feet stewed in chili-pepper soup.
“You usually come on Tuesdays,” Chinni now said as she pulled the dirty sheet across the doorway to enclose them in her cubicle which was only big enough for the bed upon which they sat.
Gulu clasped his hands in his lap, not looking at her, not touching her.
“Tell me what happened to your hand, nah?”
“I’m responsible for someone’s death,” Gulu finally said.
The brothel’s clientele included gangsters, hit-men, and criminals, so Chinni was not alarmed. But she was surprised that Gulu was involved in such an activity. She knew that he assiduously followed rules, believing that they kept him out of trouble since breaking them had kept him on the run during his shoe-shine days. As far as Chinni was aware, she was his only vice.
“You’re no longer a driver?”
“No,” Gulu said, tightness in his chest threatening to overwhelm as he thought of his small living quarters in the back of Maji’s bungalow, his extra dhoti hanging from the clothesline, his Cherry Blossom poster on the wall and the dried marigold tucked under his mattress. “Not after today.” He told his whore about the girl he had once been in love with. “I had went to Colaba to search for Avni’s mother, Janibai. I had to find out if Avni had returned to Bombay. Against Maji’s orders I went.”
“And?”
“And she told me about a morning thirteen years ago, the morning just after the monsoon season ended. Nariyal Poornima Day. She had gone to VT to sell her wares, arriving later than usual. She saw Avni, standing there by the tracks and went to her. And that’s when she jumped.”
“In front of the train?”
Gulu dropped his face. “All these years I hoped she would come back. I never knew that she had died. If I had known what she intended, I’d have never let her go.” For a grotesque moment, he envisioned the spectacle on a big screen, changing the ending to assuage his guilt. In his filmi version, he arrived at the platform at the last moment and pulled Avni from the metallic clutches of death as the music welled to an emotional crescendo.
“You loved her?”
“Yes.”
“Did she love you?”
Gulu paused. He hadn’t considered this before. Since Avni lived inside the bungalow and he on the outside, they had had very little interaction. In fact, aside from the few words they exchanged as he drove her to the train station, he had never spoken with her at all.
“She didn’t love you,” Chinni declared, waving her hand. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken her life. She would have asked you to take her away, to leave your job, to run away together.”
Gulu was stunned. His fantasies had never taken this into account.
“She chose death because she had no hope,” Chinni said, knowing that hope was what had foolishly prevented her from killing herself, keeping her chained to the brothel all these years. She had witnessed other, younger girls buy their freedom after sleeping with fifteen men each night, even during their menses, and mixing their menstrual blood into the food they served the most lucrative clients in order to bewitch them. But Chinni serviced three or four men a night at the most; her seething hostility scared most of them away. All these years, she had never saved enough to buy her freedom. And now her son had come to this very brothel, just a few weeks ago, a shiny shirt tucked into his girlish waistline, pimples dotting his adolescent face. Hope was no longer enough to sustain her after this latest, most bruising humiliation. Chinni touched the Rampuri knife tucked into the side of her cot. She wanted revenge.
“Yes,” Chinni reaffirmed almost gleefully. “She didn’t love you.”
“Chup kar! ” Gulu ordered. With a violent shove, he pinned her to the bed and poured his rage, guilt, and loss between her legs.
Afterwards, as usual, he tossed her his tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
Without looking at him, Chinni smoothed her petticoat over her legs and opened to a page.
‘“Perfect bliss grows only in the bosom tranquilized, the spirit passionless, purged from offence,’” she began and then hurled the book at Gulu’s head.
“Kya? ”
“Go,” Chinni said, eyes blazing.
“Listen—”
“Go! I don’t want you to come back ever again.”
“But how will you manage without—”
“Without you?” she snorted. “You think you’ve kept me in comfort all these years? Half my earnings go to Madam Ganga Bai, another percentage for rent and food, and then there is the hafta, to bribe the bhenchod police. You pay me just enough to survive, never enough to buy my freedom.”
Gulu looked away.
“You promised to take me away one day,” Chinni reminded him. “But all this time you’ve been in love with Avni. She’s dead but I’m the one who’s a ghost to you.”
“No, no,” Gulu insisted. “This time’s different. I can never go back to Malabar Hill. I’ll take you away from here. I promise.”
Chinni did not believe him but allowed herself to be pulled into his embrace, into a temporary illusion. Gulu rested his face in her hair, smelling the jasmine wreath that had been mangled during their encounter. It w
ould not be so easy to cut himself off from Cook Kanj, Parvati and Kuntal, even from the Mittal family. Malabar Hill was his home, more than the teeming slum of his childhood, more than at VT where he’d spent his transient years. It beckoned to him now, even as Chinni began to speak of the flat they would rent in the northeastern suburbs of Bombay.
“Brand-new Devidayal cooking utensils and a proper bathroom,” she recited. “And quiet all night, not even a dog passing by before the morning.”
Gulu nodded his head, “Yes, yes, everything.”
But his mind settled on something he had done that fateful drowning day so many years ago, after the sun had given way to night and the sky was black but for a thin sliver of moonlight. Shame, intense and unrelenting, had forced him to repress the memory, to forget that desire could lead him to such a dark place. Since then, he had clung to his foolish hope that Avni would one day return. But, now, now that he knew that she was dead, his shame gave way to anger. And a sickening fear. The thirteen-year-old memory loomed like a poison-tipped dagger.
“Kya? ” Chinni rankled. “You’re not even listening.”
Gulu involuntarily shivered.
“Tell me.”
“Something I saw long time ago on the day of Avni’s death,” Gulu said. “A secret I’ve kept for all these years.”
“What?” Chinni said, eyes gleaming with this tidbit, “You have some dirty-dirty secret about your boss-sahib? Or something about the other servants?”
Gulu lowered his face to hide the sudden wetness in his eyes.
“Tears?” Chinni asked, surprised. “So don’t tell your precious secret, nah, ask them for money to keep quiet.”
“Blackmail?”
“This is our chance,” Chinni insisted, turning to face him. “A little extra money from your boss-sahib or the other servants is all we need to set up our new home. Better if the secret is about Mr. Boss, then you can ask for a lakh.”
“No, no, no,” Gulu cried out, tasting the salt on his lips. “You don’t understand.” Unwanted memories floated in his head: the eerie quiet of an abandoned cargo hold at VT, a crackling fire smelling of death, a dank breeze against his sweating skin.
“What’s to understand?” Chinni demanded, swatting at his face. “You think you are big-big movie hero but you’re too cowardly to even kill a fly.”
Gulu pushed Chinni away with rough hands, his expression hardening.
“Didn’t your madam throw you out?” She laughed cruelly. “You have no one now, except for me.”
Gulu felt himself shaking.
“Go,” Chinni ordered, whipping the nine-inch knife from its hiding place. “I don’t care what your little secret is. Go bring the money. If not, I’ll kill myself.”
“What?”
“I will kill myself,” Chinni said more slowly, pressing the blade’s pointed tip against her heart. “And, I swear, my ghost will haunt you till the day you die.”
Seeing a startling line of crimson appear at her breast, Gulu hastily retrieved his Bhagavad Gita and ran out, wondering what unfortunate alignment of stars had befallen him that day. He had not stopped Avni from killing herself, would he now also turn a blind eye to Chinni? How could he live with one more death on his soul? As he stood amidst the filth on Falkland Road watching a caged girl unclasp the first eyelet of her straining blouse, the wails of Kamathipura’s inconsolable phantoms rose all around him. His shameful secret, if told, would not only land him in jail but surely would tear the Mittal family apart, felling Maji’s grand bungalow to the ground.
PHANTASMAL FOG
That first night, Maji barred herself in the puja room while the boys raced around the bungalow with rags in their hands, eliminating every trace of water. Tufan had never had so much fun in his life, pouncing on drips with the verve of his favorite khustiwallah, Dara Singh, India’s very own Wrestling World Champion.
“Dekko!” Tufan yelled gleefully, bounding from one sofa to another, flattening a puddle with a towel tied to his chest. “I got another one!”
“What’s there to be proud of, you idiot!” Jaginder said, glancing up from his newspaper. “Unless you want to be a bloody bhangi, sweeping toilets all day long.”
“But I’m Dara Singh,” Tufan protested.
“He drinks milk with honey and crushed almonds every morning for breakfast,” Dheer chipped in, having memorized the famous wrestler’s diet.
All the wet rags were deposited in the back of the bungalow, just outside Parvati and Kanj’s living quarters. There the boys stood shivering under umbrellas, while they drank their boiled buffalo milk and lined up to use the latrine, a smelly box that contained nothing but two ridged, shoe-shaped ceramic footrests astride a cavernous hole and a recalcitrant faucet dripping into a plastic cup.
Savita exited the latrine looking faint, a white cotton handkerchief held to her nose. As she stepped inside the bungalow, enraged by this fresh humiliation, a scheme for seizing control of it finally crystallized. She threw the handkerchief, hand-embroidered by herself in the days before her wedding with her and Jaginder’s initials delicately entwined, and watched as it soaked up the brown liquid from the ground. As pure as she appears, Savita thought of Maji, still she can be sullied.
Savita noticed Cook Kanj hunched just outside his garage smoking a bidi. He had been watching her and only dropped his gaze when Savita met his eyes. But it was Savita who was more embarrassed, thinking that somehow he had read her rebellious plan on her face. They both stared at the dirtied handkerchief. Finally, Kanj stood up with a grunt and plucked it from the puddle.
“Throw it away,” Savita ordered before walking back inside and locking herself in her bedroom. She retrieved a bottle of Royal Salut from inside one of the cabinets, the only one that had been overlooked during the purging of the bungalow. Savita hadn’t known why she had held onto it then but now, as she undid the cap, she realized that she wanted to discover its secrets, to understand why it possessed her husband so.
She tipped the bottle to her lips, wetting them, allowing the fumes to assault her nostrils. Then, more bravely, she took a sip. The liquor burned in her mouth and throat, filling her belly with fire. So this is its power. She took another sip, allowing her unspoken desires to take hold of her. She was tired of being a daughter-in-law, an outsider even now. She wanted to sit upon Maji’s regal dais, issuing commands and receiving visitors.
She had been the one, after all, who had warned her family about the otherworld’s presence while Maji had written off ghosts as madness. Now look at her, Savita thought savagely. Suddenly she’s following the tantrik like a fool. It would not be much of a stretch to insinuate that her mother-in-law had finally lost her mind, nurturing a rumor among the servants and then, more cautiously, among her children and husband. And once Maji’s powerful grip on the household began to slip, Savita would make her bid for absolute power.
She drank several more capfuls before hiding the Royal Salut in the cabinet again. She realized that she needed to reclaim her husband’s loyalty first. In the early years of their marriage, Jaginder had always taken Savita’s side during conflicts with Maji. But slowly, slowly, as their relationship disintegrated, Jaginder began to cater to his mother as if he were once again her little boy, becoming so intertwined that it blinded them to the other’s faults. I need to win Jaggi back, Savita decided, thinking of those four days when the monsoons first burst in which they had come together, she seducing him, he forgoing Rosie’s adda. Feeling the alcohol’s unfamiliar tingling in the back of her head, the sudden rush of daring in her heart, Savita steeled herself for what she would do next. She would repress her loathing and surrender herself to her husband. She would raise him up so that he would no longer crave his mother’s approval. She would make him hers.
She lay down on her bed, pulling a thin cotton sheet over her body. Her head had begun to spin pleasantly as she remembered that there was one more thing she needed to do to ensure the stability of the household. She thought about Nimish, he
r first and favorite son. He had always been a quiet, reflective child, delving into books, never causing any trouble. It was he, rather than Jaginder, who had taken care of her after the baby died, wiping away her tears with his little hands, reading her stories in his sweet little voice. Even though he was only four back then, he had accepted the burden of tending to Savita in her fragile state, viewing his own needs, desires, and wishes as less important.
I can’t live without my Nimi.
Though she loved her younger sons as well, she found them lacking, especially when it came to potential to take over the family business. Dheer was always sniffing her perfumes like a girl and hovering around the kitchen as if it were he who needed to learn cooking to please his future spouse. And she had little patience for his softness, his big, droopy eyes peeking out from behind chubby cheeks-begging for her attention. Savita had no doubt that if Dheer were to lead Mittal Shipbreaking Enterprises, he would be cheated in broad daylight by Laloo and the entire bhenchod lot. Tufan, on the other hand, would most certainly know how to bully the sniveling sycophants that flocked around Jaginder like flies. Even as a little boy, he had been cunning, able to manipulate the servants to his advantage. But still, Savita feared that her youngest would make decisions on impulse rather than after deliberation, squandering their family fortune in the process.
Yes, yes, our future hinges on Nimish.
She recalled the wild look in Nimish eyes, panicking that she had lost him when he ran from the bungalow into the night, shouting about Lovely. Lovely? The realization that the seventeen-year old girl had usurped Nimish’s affections dawned on Savita with crushing force. She had raced into the street to hold him back, her good will towards their lifelong neighbors vanishing in an instant. That shameless girl, driving off in the middle of the night to meet God-knows-what kind of boys, and trying to corrupt my innocent son!
Haunting Bombay Page 30