Mozelle didn’t wait for Trilochan’s answer but took off running for the corner building, and Trilochan ran after her. In a matter of seconds they were inside the building. Next to the stairs, Trilochan gasped for breath, but Mozelle was just fine.
‘Which floor?’ she asked.
Trilochan ran his tongue over his dry lips. ‘The second.’
‘Let’s go.’
Then she clambered up the stairs, and Trilochan followed her. Blood stained the stairs, and seeing this, Trilochan went numb.
Once he reached the second floor, Trilochan went down the corridor, stopped in front of a door, and quietly knocked. Mozelle remained next to the stairs. He knocked again, put his mouth to the door. ‘Mahanga Singhji! Mahanga Singhji!’
‘Who is it?’ a faint voice said from inside.
‘Trilochan.’
The door opened slowly. Trilochan signalled to Mozelle. She came quickly, and both went inside. Mozelle found herself standing next to a skinny, terrified girl, and for a moment Mozelle stared at her. She was very slight and her nose was very beautiful, but she seemed to be suffering from a cold. Mozelle hugged her against her broad chest and wiped Kirpal Kaur’s nose with the hem of her loose gown.
Trilochan blushed.
Mozelle spoke tenderly to Kirpal Kaur, ‘Don’t be scared. Trilochan’s here.’
Kirpal Kaur looked at Trilochan with terrified eyes and then separated herself from Mozelle.
‘Tell your father to get ready quickly, and your mother, too,’ Trilochan instructed her.
Then, from the floor above they heard loud voices and someone crying out as though mixed up in a fracas.
Kirpal Kaur emitted a stifled cry from her throat, ‘They took her.’
‘Who?’ Trilochan asked.
Kirpal Kaur was about to answer when Mozelle grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into a corner. ‘Good for her,’ she said. ‘Now take off your clothes.’
Kirpal Kaur hadn’t had time to react before Mozelle quickly pulled off the girl’s blouse and put it aside. Mortified, Kirpal Kaur tried to hide herself behind her arms. Trilochan looked away. Mozelle took off her loose gown and put it on Kirpal Kaur. Now Mozelle was completely nude. Very quickly, she loosened the drawstring of Kirpal Kaur’s pants, took them off, and then said to Trilochan, ‘Go, get her out of here! No, wait!’ She unfastened Kirpal Kaur’s hair and then said, ‘Go. Get out of here.’
‘Come on,’ Trilochan said. But then he suddenly stopped and turned toward Mozelle, who was standing shamelessly naked. The hairs on her arms were standing on end from the cold.
‘Why aren’t you going?’ Mozelle asked with irritation.
‘What about her parents?’
‘To hell with them. Get her out of here.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m coming.’
Suddenly from the floor above them, a bunch of men clambered down the stairs. They came up to the door and began to pound on it as if they were going to break it down.
Kirpal Kaur’s blind mother and paralysed father lay moaning in the next room.
Mozelle thought for a moment, gave her hair a light toss and said to Trilochan, ‘Listen. I can think of only one thing. I’m going to open the door.’
A stifled cry fell from Kirpal Kaur’s lips, ‘Door!’
Mozelle instructed Trilochan, ‘I’m going to open the door and go out. Run after me. I’m going to run up the stairs and you come too. Whoever’s at the door will forget everything and follow us.’
‘Then?’
‘Your what’s-her-name—this is her chance to escape. No one will say anything to her dressed like that.’
Trilochan quickly explained everything to Kirpal Kaur. Mozelle yelled loudly, opened the door, and rushed out. She fell among the men outside. They were so startled they didn’t react, and she immediately got up and climbed up the staircase. Trilochan ran after her, and the men gave way.
Mozelle blindly raced up the staircase. She was still wearing her wooden sandals. The men regained their composure and set off after them. Mozelle slipped. She fell down the staircase, hitting each hard stair and ramming against the iron railing. She landed in the corridor below.
Trilochan immediately came back down the stairs. He bent down and saw blood running from her nose, mouth, and ears. The men gathered around them, but none of them asked what had happened. Everyone was quiet, as they looked at Mozelle’s pale, naked body, cut up everywhere.
Trilochan shook her arm. ‘Mozelle! Mozelle!’
Mozelle opened her big Jewish eyes, red with blood, and smiled.
Trilochan took off his turban, unwrapped it, and covered her naked body. Mozelle smiled and winked at Trilochan as blood bubbled from her mouth.
‘Go, find out whether my underwear is there, I mean …’
Trilochan understood, but he didn’t want to get up. This angered Mozelle, and she said, ‘You’re a real Sikh! Go and see.’
Trilochan got up and returned to Kirpal Kaur’s apartment. Through her dimming eyes, Mozelle looked at the crowd and said, ‘He’s a Muslim, but because he’s so tough, I call him a Sikh.’
Trilochan came back, and his look told Mozelle that Kirpal Kaur had already left. Mozelle sighed in relief, and a tide of blood gushed from her mouth.
‘Oh, damn it!’ she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. Then she turned to Trilochan. ‘All right, darling—bye bye …’
Trilochan wanted to say something, but the words stuck in his throat.
Mozelle removed Trilochan’s turban. ‘Take it away—this religion of yours,’ she said, and her arm fell dead across her powerful chest.
MAMMAD BHAI
IF you walked from Faras Road down what people called White Alley, you would find some restaurants at its end. Restaurants are everywhere in Bombay, but these ones were special because the area is known for prostitutes.
Times have changed. It was almost twenty years ago that I used to frequent those restaurants. If you went past White Alley, you would come to the Playhouse where movies were shown all day. Lively crowds swarmed outside its four theatres, and men rounded up customers by ringing bells in an ear-splitting fashion and yelling, ‘Come in—come in—two annas—a first-class film—two annas!’ Sometimes these bell ringers would even forcibly push people inside.
There were masseurs, too, who knocked their customers’ heads around with what they claimed was a very scientific method. Getting a massage is all fine and well, but I don’t understand why people in Bombay are so enamoured of it, why all day and night they feel the need for an oil massage. If you want, you can easily find a masseur at even three o’clock in the morning, and all night you can be sure to hear someone calling out from this or that street corner, ‘Pi—pi—pi’, which is Bombay shorthand for ‘massage’.
Faras Road was really a road’s name but it was used for the entire neighbourhood where prostitutes lived. It was a large area. There were many alleys with their own names, and yet for the sake of convenience they were all called Faras Road or White Alley. There were hundreds of shops with cage façades in which women of all different ages and complexions sold themselves. They were available from eight annas to a hundred rupees and were of every sort—Jewish, Punjabi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Anglo-Indian, French, Chinese, Japanese; you could get whatever sort you wanted. Just don’t ask me what they were like. All I know is that somehow they always had customers.
A lot of Chinese lived in the neighbourhood, and though I don’t know what they all did for business some had restaurants with signboards covered in insect-like up-and-down script advertising God knows what. In fact all different sorts of people lived and did business there. There was one alley called Arab Sen although the people who lived there called it Arab Alley, and probably between twenty and twenty-five Arabs lived there working as pearl merchants. The rest of the alley’s residents were Punjabis or were from Rampur.
I rented a room there for nine and a half rupees a month. The room got no nat
ural light, and so I always had to keep a lamp on.
If you haven’t been to Bombay, you might not believe that no one takes any interest in anyone else. But the truth is that if you are busy dying in your room, no one will interfere. Even if one of your neighbours is murdered, you can be assured you won’t hear about it. In all of Arab Alley there was only one man who took an interest in everyone else, and that was Mammad Bhai.
Mammad Bhai was from Rampur. There wasn’t anyone better in the martial arts—fighting with clubs, wooden sticks, or swords. I often overheard his name mentioned in the restaurants of Arab Alley, but for the longest time I never got to meet him.
In those days I left my room at daybreak and didn’t get back till very late, but I very much wanted to meet him. In the neighbourhood, he was a legend and there were countless stories about him. People said that when billy-club-carrying gangs, twenty or twenty-five strong, jumped him, he would dispose of the assailants in under a minute, then walk away without even one hair out of place. There were also stories about his unsurpassed skill with a knife. He was the quickest in all of Bombay, so quick in fact that his victim wouldn’t realize he had just been stabbed but would walk ahead for a hundred steps before suddenly collapsing. People knew this could be the work of only Mammad Bhai.
I wasn’t interested in witnessing his knife-wielding expertise so much, but I had heard so many stories about him that I couldn’t help but want to see him up close. His presence overshadowed the entire neighbourhood. He was a gangster, and yet people said he was a resolute bachelor and never looked at anyone’s wife or daughter. He sympathized with the poor and often gave a little money to the destitute prostitutes not just in Arab Alley but in all the alleys in the vicinity. Nonetheless, he never visited these women himself but sent a young apprentice to bring back whatever news they had.
I don’t know how he made a living. He ate well and wore nice clothes, and he owned a small horse-drawn cart to which he yoked a strong pony. He drove the cart himself and was accompanied by two or three loyal apprentices. He would take the cart out for a tour of Bhindi Bazaar or go to a saint’s shrine and then return to Arab Alley and go to an Iranian restaurant where he would sit with his apprentices and energetically discuss hand-to-hand combat.
A Marwari Muslim dancer lived next to me, and he told me hundreds of stories about Mammad Bhai, including how he was worth a 100,000 rupees. One time this man got cholera, and when Mammad Bhai found out, he called all the doctors of Arab Alley into his room and said, ‘Look, if anything happens to Ashiq Husain, I’m going to kill every one of you.’ In a reverential manner, Ashiq Husain told me, ‘Manto Sahib, Mammad Bhai is an angel! An angel! When he threatened the doctors, they shook in fear. They looked after me so well that I was better in two days!’
In the dives of Arab Alley, I heard more stories about Mammad Bhai. One young man—an aspiring martial artist and so probably one of Mammad Bhai’s apprentices—told me Mammad Bhai kept a dagger tucked in his waistband that was so sharp he could shave with it. He kept it without a scabbard, the knife’s cold metal pressed against his belly, and the blade was so sharp that if he bent just a little wrong he would become old news fast.
You can imagine how each day my desire to meet him only increased. I don’t remember what exactly he looked like, but after so many years I can still recall anticipating that he must be enormous, the kind of man Hercules bicycles would use as a model in their advertising.
Those days I left for work early in the morning and didn’t return until ten at night, and when I got back I would quickly eat and go straight to bed. Living like this, how could I meet Mammad Bhai? I often resolved to skip work and stay in Arab Alley looking for him, but work heaped up and I couldn’t carry out this plan.
I was thinking about how I might meet him when suddenly I got the flu so bad I began to fear for my health. One Arab Alley doctor told me there was a danger it would worsen into pneumonia. I was all alone. The man living next door had got a job in Pune and wasn’t around. My fever was roasting me alive, and despite how I drank water continuously, my thirst never slackened.
I am a very tough person. Usually I don’t need anyone to take care of me, but I didn’t know what kind of fever it was—the flu, malaria, or something else. It crushed me flat. It was the first time in my life I wished for someone to comfort me, or if not that then just to show his face for a moment so that I would know that at least someone cared.
For two days I lay in bed tossing and turning, but no one came. And who could have? How many friends did I have? Just a handful, and they lived so far away that they wouldn’t even know if I had died. Like I said, who in Bombay cares about anyone? No one gives a damn if you live or die.
I was in a very bad state. The hotel’s tea boy told me Ashiq Husain’s wife was sick and that he had left for home. Who could I call? I was very weak. While I was thinking about dragging myself down to a doctor’s, there was a knock at the door. I thought it was the tea boy, the ‘bahar vala’ in Bombay slang. In a lifeless voice, I said, ‘Come in.’
The door opened, and a thin man entered. I noticed his moustache first. In fact the moustache was what distinguished him, and without it no one was likely to notice him at all.
Adjusting his Kaiser Wilhelm adornment with one finger, he came up to my cot. Several men followed him in. I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine who they were or why they were visiting me.
The skinny guy with the Kaiser Wilhelm addressed me in a tender voice, ‘Vamato Sahib, what have you done? Hell, why didn’t you tell me?’ Changing Manto to Vamato was nothing new, and I wasn’t in the mood to correct him. I weakly asked, ‘Who are you?’
‘Mammad Bhai.’
I shot up. ‘Mammad Bhai … so you’re Mammad Bhai … the notorious gangster!’
I immediately felt awkward and stopped. Mammad Bhai used his pinkie to press his stiff moustache hairs up and then smiled. ‘Yes, Vamato Bhai. I’m Mammad, the famous gangster. I learned from the hotel’s tea boy that you were sick. Hell, what were you trying to do by not telling me? It pisses Mammad Bhai off when people hide things.’
I was about to say something when Mammad Bhai addressed one of his companions, ‘Hey, you there—what’s your name? Go get that doctor, whatever-his-name-is, you know who I mean? Tell him Mammad Bhai needs him. Tell him to drop whatever he’s doing and come at once. And tell the bastard to bring all the medicine he has.’
The apprentice left immediately. I was looking at Mammad Bhai, and all the stories I had heard about him were swirling around in my feverish mind, but each time I looked at him these images got confused and all I could see was his moustache. It was intimidating but also very beautiful, and it seemed to me that he had grown it out expressly to make his naturally soft and elegant features threatening. I came to the conclusion in my feverish mind that he really wasn’t as tough as he made himself out to be.
As there wasn’t a chair in the room, I invited Mammad Bhai to sit on my bed, but he refused curtly, ‘We’re fine. We’ll stand.’
Then he began pacing, although there was hardly enough space in the room for that. He lifted his kurta’s hem and drew out his dagger from his pyjama’s waistband. The dagger must have been made of silver, and its dazzling blade was beyond description. He passed it over his wrist, cleanly shaving off the hairs there. He grunted with satisfaction and began to trim his fingernails.
His mere presence seemed to have reduced my fever by several degrees. Now with a steadier mind I said, ‘Mammad Bhai, your dagger’s so sharp. Aren’t you scared to keep it tucked next to your stomach?’
Mammad Bhai neatly cut back one of his nails, ‘Vamato Bhai, this knife’s for others. It knows this. It’s mine, for fuck’s sake. How could it hurt me?’
He spoke about his knife just as a mother would talk about her son, ‘How could he raise his hand against me?’
The doctor arrived. His name was Pinto, and mine was Vamato. He was Christian and greeted Mammad Bhai in keeping with his religion’s way
. He asked what the problem was. Mammad Bhai explained quickly, and his tone carried the threat that Dr Pinto should watch out if he couldn’t manage to cure me.
Dr Pinto did his work like an obedient boy. He took my pulse and used his stethoscope to examine my chest and back. He took my blood pressure and asked all about my sickness. Then he turned to Mammad Bhai and said, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. He has malaria. I’ll give him an injection.’
Mammad Bhai was standing nearby. He listened to what Dr Pinto had to say, and while shaving his wrist said, ‘I don’t want to know the details. If you have to give an injection, go ahead. But if anything happens to him …’
The doctor shook in fear. ‘No, Mammad Bhai, everything will be fine.’
Mammad Bhai tucked his dagger back into his waistband. ‘Okay, fine then.’
‘So I’m giving the injection,’ the doctor said, opening his bag and taking out a syringe.
‘Wait, wait,’ Mammad Bhai interrupted him. He was nervous. The doctor quickly replaced the syringe in the bag, and in a whiny voice asked, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s just that I can’t watch anyone getting stuck with a needle,’ Mammad Bhai said and then left with his companions in tow.
Dr Pinto gave me a quinine injection. He did it very skilfully, as otherwise a malaria injection is very painful. When he was done, I asked how much it was.
‘Ten rupees,’ he replied.
I took my wallet out from underneath my pillow and was giving him a ten-rupee note when Mammad Bhai walked in. He looked at us with a furious expression. ‘What’s going on?’ he thundered.
‘I’m paying him.’
‘What the hell! You’re charging us?’ Mammad Bhai asked the doctor.
Dr Pinto was terrified. ‘When did I ask for any money? He was giving it to me.’
Bombay Stories Page 20