by Manil Suri
Did he somehow rig the flag that was still hanging over the platform at Bombay Central even though we arrived more than three months after Republic Day? As we circled around the station’s manicured gardens, I noticed more flags affixed to the lampposts outside. I looked at the colored stripes fluttering in the gaslight, amazed that only a year and a quarter had elapsed since I had met Dev. How many lifetimes had I aged since that day?
But I had not aged, I reminded myself—I was young and healthy, as Paji had correctly declared. My body had pulled through the assault on it, the pills Dr. Mishra had given me had made my fever go away. “It’s going to be a new city, a new beginning—forget what’s happened here,” Paji had said at the station. “You’re only eighteen—just go to Bombay and pretend you’re newly wed.”
The taxi drove past the tall iron gates and merged with the traffic on the road. I stared at the women with saris tied in unfamiliar ways, the urchins drumming the backs of their brushes against their shoe polish stands, the hawkers vending peanuts and gram and sugarcane, the men balancing crates of tiffin boxes on their heads. Everywhere, people spilled from the pavements and swarmed towards the station like convoys of purposeful ants. A double-decker bus roared up threateningly behind a horse-drawn victoria, a burst of overhead sparks showered down as an electric tram rumbled along on its tracks. Was this the allure of the city, then, the therapeutic hubbub with which I was supposed to regenerate myself?
We turned into a road lined with apartment blocks—not the one-or two-story structures of Nizamuddin, but buildings that towered four and five and six times as tall. They were built so close that they looked glued to each other, like in a hurriedly assembled collage. Occasionally a temple entrance would emerge, decked with carvings and flowers, or a movie palace, moored by the side of the road like a glittering ocean liner. There were blinking lights and neon signs, and a billboard for cigarettes that changed into a cough syrup advertisement before my eyes. Despite all the cars, the atmosphere was clear, unlike the perpetual haze that hung over Delhi. Instead of dung, it was salt that I smelled in the air.
The flat Paji had bought us (from the brother of one of his qawwali friends, who sold it and migrated to Pakistan) was in Tardeo. Dev had been hoping for something in one of the more posh areas, like Malabar Hill or Breach Candy, perhaps even in one of the buildings facing the sea along Marine Drive, the jewels in “the Queen’s Necklace,” as he had heard them called. Not only did Paji purchase the cheapest place he could find, but he also left it in his name, to ensure I didn’t stray. That I went to college and (a condition for which Dev assured me he would take nightly precautions) didn’t have another child.
The taxi stopped in front of a building with an exterior so dark it looked charred. At first, I thought it might have been damage suffered during the riots in January. Nehru had announced Bombay would be centrally governed in order to develop it as the commercial capital of the country. Mobs of Marathi-speaking locals had rampaged across the city to protest it being wrested from their control. A front-page photograph had even made the Delhi Times of India, showing thousands of policemen battling the crowds on the worst day of the rioting.
As it turned out, our building had not been one of the victims of the public wrath. The burnt-looking exterior was actually a protective undercoating, painted on right before the monsoon one year. The rains had come early that season, and the project abandoned, without the surface layer of white ever being applied. When we stepped inside, the walls in the hallway, though cracked and peeling, were fortunately painted a less unsettling color.
Upstairs, the living room was cramped, the bathroom tiny, the furniture old and dusty. The balcony was so decrepit that it looked ready to shear off into the street two floors below. There was a filthy sink in the kitchen—when I tried to turn on the water, a cockroach crawled out from the tap. Dev carried his suitcase from room to room, as if searching for the door to a hidden, more commodious wing of the flat. He finally placed his bag on the bed and sat down next to it. “If I’d known this was all your father was offering, I would’ve moved us to Bombay myself long ago.”
THE FIRST MORNING, after Dev left to meet a musician contact, I took my tea to the living room. The blare of horns rose from the road downstairs, and over it the call of a man going door to door sharpening knives. Dust streamed in through the open window, giving the sunlight a granular look. This would be my world from now on, I told myself as I sipped my tea—these rooms, these walls, this curiously humid heat. The village-like atmosphere of Nizamuddin dispelled by all the activity, the whistles of trains replaced by the sounds of traffic in the street.
What I longed for, though, were not the sights or surroundings I remembered from Nizamuddin, but the people I had left behind. For days, Sandhya and Mataji had taken care of me with such tenderness that in my delirium, I was never sure if it was my own mother ministering to me or one of them. Even Hema had attempted to sit awake next to my bed for a whole night (finally dozing off, still sitting I was told, at 3 a.m.). There had been so little time with them afterwards, so few opportunities to express how strong a bond I felt towards them. Barely had I recovered, it seemed, before I was being bundled up into the train—the compartment waiting to whisk me away to another life, like a second doli.
I closed my eyes and tried to transport myself back to Nizamuddin. There was the house in the railway colony, with the scraggly hibiscus bush growing outside. There were Hema and Mataji and Sandhya in the courtyard, their features slowly blossoming into color from black and white. Perhaps I had just walked in as well, because the three of them gathered close around me, as if in greeting. I saw the sun dappling our hair, smelled the hibiscus in the air, tried to get a snatch of what was being said. Then Sandhya turned, her hands streaked with red, her screams muffled as if coming through a windowpane, and behind her I glimpsed my bloodstained sari.
I went to the balcony to calm myself. Paji’s words sounded in my ears—not to allow myself to think of Nizamuddin, not to regret what I had forever left behind. How meticulously I had followed his advice for a change. Pulling myself back from the brink whenever I felt tempted to relive the visit to the woman with the paan-stained teeth. Disengaging my remorse, my guilt, my shame, each time it began to clump around the part of me wrapped up and carried away that day by Dev. I had taken pains to stick with the story he and Paji advanced. Everyone from Hema to Biji believed I had miscarried.
My throat seized up. These days, it was the closest I came to crying. Even the sight of a newborn infant in its mother’s arms could only coax up the tears so far. “Don’t keep things bottled up,” Biji had said. “You’ll get eaten up from inside.” But there was nothing I could do. I had lost the language of sorrow—even Dev singing “Light the Fire of Your Heart” couldn’t wring anything from me now.
Below me, a man and woman were ascending slowly through the air. Their cheeks were afire in pink, their lips engorged in lurid pouts, their pupils floated up dreamily from milky seas of white. It was a film poster, hoisted for a rather seedy-looking movie theater called the Diana opposite our building. I watched as the edges were fastened to a metal framework, as the name of the film, Love in Kashmir, was inked onto the marquee. What a quaint notion, I thought, to be in love and frolic about in the snow in Kulu or Srinagar. I spotted the same poster in miniature clamped around a whole line of lampposts running along the sidewalk. Love blossomed improbably over and over again down the street.
DEV RETURNED AT TWO in the afternoon. “The water’s as beautiful as they say it is. I caught a glimpse of it from the bus. Come, let’s go take a look.” He hurried me downstairs into a taxi as if the sea was in danger of evaporating.
It wasn’t a very long ride. The water revealed its presence even before we got to it—the sunshine reflecting off its surface created a shimmer in the air. Suddenly the buildings parted to reveal an expanse of gleaming sand. Beyond lay the bay, the sea stretching to the horizon, the waves sweeping in gracefully to garland the l
and.
“Do you recognize it?” Dev asked excitedly. “It’s Chowpatty Beach. From the postcard I had framed up in Delhi.” He paid the driver and we got out of the cab. “See those tall buildings with the palm trees?—that’s Marine Drive, where I had been hoping Paji would buy us a flat.”
The beach was as lustrous as the floor of a marble temple in sunlight—I unhooked my sandals before stepping on it. When I looked up, Dev was already running towards the water. Perhaps he tripped, perhaps he flung himself down on purpose, but the next instant, he was tumbling on the ground, clouds of sand rising and cascading around his body.
“Look at this,” he yelled, scooping up the sand by the handful and throwing it into the air. It landed on his arms, his chest, his face, but he didn’t seem to care. “Isn’t it wonderful?” I stared at the rivulets running down his head—tiny particles—mica, perhaps—sparkled in his hair.
Dev stretched out his legs and swished his feet luxuriously this way and that. “Did they used to make a children’s beach for you at the Baisakhi fair like they did in Lahore? Trucked in all the way from Karachi, they would say. To wait all these years and finally feel the grains sliding between my toes again.” He burrowed a foot in, then watched the sand cascade off as he lifted it into the air.
Before I could sink down to the ground next to him, Dev was up and bounding towards the sea again. This time, he ran all the way to the water’s edge. He stretched out his arms and thrust his chest forward as if expanding the cavity within to take in the deepest possible breath. “The sea,” he shouted, twirling around towards me. “This is it. Finally.” He turned back to the water. “Finally,” he called out, and paused, as if waiting for an echo. He bent down to roll up his cuffs, but then simply kicked off his shoes and ran into the waves. “Come on in,” he yelled, waving to me, just as a swell crested around his knees.
I stood where I was. Following Dev into the water seemed too forgiving—I was not yet ready to share with him the intimacy of the sea. “My sari will get all wet,” I responded, but he was too absorbed in the waves to hear me.
I found a dry patch of sand to sit on. Dev frolicked around, falling backwards into the water, skimming the foam with his arms, tossing a coconut away from shore and then splashing over dog-like to retrieve it. The tide was not very strong, and the tallest of the waves rose lethargically only to his thighs. At one point, he disappeared headfirst into the water and I saw his legs rise and stick straight up towards the sky. Every once in a while he stood and cupped his hands over his mouth. I heard him call out something to the bay: “I love you,” or “Beautiful,” or “Finally.”
In spite of myself, I decided that I, too, liked the sea. The salt in the air smelled curiously familiar, like something I had been breathing in all my life. I felt as if I had reached the end of a pilgrimage—the shore I was sitting on a frontier of opportunity, the sweep of water ahead ready to forgive, to absorb all memory. I could lose myself in this city, be a new person, start a new life, as Paji had said. Fate seemed to insist I remain tied to Dev, that I subordinate my will to his. It had taught me a lesson on how reckless it could be to resist. Perhaps it was time now to try leading the life it had limned out for me. Surely in time the salt would heal the wound inside.
IT WAS ONE THING to make my resolution at the beach, quite another to resist being pulled back under by the past. What kept me afloat was the responsibility of running a household. Each time I felt myself slipping into the darkness, I found a chore to distract myself. I counted the clothes for the dhobi’s weekly wash and examined the floor for patches the ganga had missed in her cleaning. I haggled with vegetable sellers to squeeze out an extra apple or onion, and stood for hours to get our ration cards from the municipality. My resourcefulness surprised me, since nobody had ever advised me on how to perform such tasks. Each one completed made me feel more authentic in my newly assumed role as a housewife. Every hour I cooked or cleaned or shopped was another hour not spent wallowing in the disappointments and betrayals of my previous life.
The one area where my resourcefulness failed me was in the kitchen. For the first few weeks, I went through untold heads of cauliflower, since that happened to be the only vegetable Mataji had really taught me to cook. I was familiar with yellow moong, but the range of lentil colors at the bania’s shop unnerved me. I managed to burn mutton and leave it uncooked inside at the same time. The chappatis I rolled had such intricate borders that they could have been the maps of countries.
Fortunately, the ganga walked in on one of my chappati experiments. “You have to add less water to the flour, and knead it more,” she diagnosed, as she squatted to run her cloth over the floor. For mutton, she suggested mixing in yogurt to tenderize the more stubborn pieces. “Cauliflower is expensive,” she told me another time, “you can cook cabbage the same way, you know.” Although I could never summon the gleam of enthusiasm I saw in the ganga’s eyes, I did follow her advice, and little by little my cooking improved.
Biji sent me a scandalized letter (dictated out as usual in Sharmila’s handwriting) when I wrote to her about all the chores with which I was filling my time. “It’s bad enough that the granddaughter of a zamindar is callusing her hands with such menial work. But to learn from a ganga, the same person who cleans your floors? I hope you have a big bottle of Dettol at home, to disinfect your utensils each time she touches them.” This was in addition to her lament that Paji’s cheapness had landed us in the midst of a slew of Muslim neighbors. “Are there no Hindus left in Bombay, that he couldn’t have found a more suitable building for his own flesh and blood?”
Dev had remarked on it while reading the residents’ names at the bottom of the steps one day. “…Azmi, Hamid, Khan. Dr. Kagalwalla could be either Muslim or Parsi. But Afzan, Karmali, Hussain…? All these people on all these floors—could we be the only Hindu family among them?”
There were even a few ladies in the building who dressed in burkhas. They glided down the steps in flurries of mauve or brown, their silk robes scenting the air with attars of jasmine and rose. Their veils were always drawn back over their heads and fastened in place, and sometimes I saw lipstick, even eye shadow on their faces. As I got to recognize them better, I realized they only donned burkhas for certain occasions, being perfectly comfortable at other times striding into the street like me in a salwar kameez.
Surely Arya, like Biji, would have bristled at being surrounded by so many Muslims. Dev didn’t seem to think that way, and neither did I. Still, it did make it harder to assimilate into the life of the building community. I felt self-conscious as the only woman to descend the steps wearing a bindi on my forehead. Every day I glanced at the banisters leading up to unexplored floors, and imagined meeting one of the apparitions I had seen, floating down in her billowing attire. My fantasy was that I would ring a doorbell at random, and boldly introduce myself. Perhaps I would even be rewarded with a bosom friend—someone to address my aloneness, quench the longing to unburden myself.
Except I had always been reticent while making friends, even worse at opening up to them. Now, it was not only my shyness that held me back, but also the religious differences that might confront me after pushing the doorbell. What if they were in the middle of their namaz, and the presence of a Hindu annulled their prayers? What if I interrupted a meal, and it turned out to be beef, which they invited me in to share? Paji’s secular guest list had not been enough to neutralize the years of wariness Biji had drilled in. I nodded at my neighbors and they nodded at me on the stairs, but months of such cordiality were not sufficient for us to progress from there.
Dev, unlike me, quickly tapped into a network of musician friends. I had little in common, and did not mix with them. It was good to be so isolated, I told myself—it would force me to appreciate Dev more when he returned in the evenings, make him easier to bear when he satisfied himself. Each morning, I turned on the radio to dispel the stillness that hung around the house, and waited for the ganga’s visit to fulfill any nee
d for company I had. When the cooking failed to ward off an impending attack of melancholy, a visit to Chowpatty helped. I considered a matinee at the Diana a few times, but the clientele looked too unsavory, and I always walked on to the sea instead.
My only significant contact with anyone other than Dev was through the mail. Biji sent me two letters a week, dictated to Sharmila, who always scribbled extra lines of her own at the end so as not to waste any of the blue inland sheet. Hema kept me apprised of all the news at Nizamuddin—a blanket of moroseness, she claimed, had descended over the entire colony due to my leaving. “Mataji is always irritable, and Babuji has started drinking so much that he’s passed out twice on the verandah already. Even the radiogram broke down the day before when I tried to play cheerful records in the evening. Nobody seems concerned about fixing it—all they say is to stop nagging them about it.” Compounding everything else, Pushpa’s family down the street had bought a fridge (a Kelvinator at that), and people were going around saying how the ice it made was a lot colder than that of their Godrej. “It’s getting so miserable that any day now I’m going to run away and come to live with you and Dev bhaiyya in Bombay. You can take me to the jewelry shops at Zhaveri Bazaar, show me the zoo.” In one corner of each letter, Sandhya always painstakingly wrote out her name. It was her presence I missed the most—I wished there were some way for us to directly communicate.
A long letter from Roopa arrived in June, filled with details about the newly built naval quarters in Visakhapatnam and the glorious birth of her twins. “It’s such an amazing feeling being a mother—to wake up with a glow every morning. You can’t imagine how beautiful they look—the two lives I’ve created, sleeping side by side.” I wondered whether she was gloating on purpose, or simply being her usual insensitive self. Dev pored over the letter all evening, holding it up against bulbs and lamps as if a secret love message, inscribed in invisible ink, would magically come to life.