Breathless in Bombay

by Murzban Shroff

  A week later, Simran was brought to Bombay, to its red-light district, where she was put to work servicing migrant workers. Coolies, dockhands, factory workers, milkmen, rickshawwallas, taxi drivers, truck drivers: night after night, they came and unloaded their fatigue into her. They punished her for the crimes of the city, which she knew nothing about. Night after night, she thought of her family—her parents, brothers, sisters, all so unaware of what was happening. She wondered what her uncle would have told them. Would he spin tales of her well-being, and would they believe him—the trusting fools?

  After a while, she began to see it differently. She said to Chacha there was no point dwelling on things that were out of reach. Even if she were rescued, what fate would she have? The villagers wouldn’t accept her. Their family name would be in ruins. Her brothers and sisters would remain unmarried. Such was the shame she’d bring onto them.

  To brace herself against yearnings of home, Simran took to black opium, which she kept, at all times, below her gums. Slowly, the village began to appear like a make-believe world, a transient place imagined by a child. Slowly, she began to forget. “It took time, but it was better this way,” she said to Chacha. Better she accept her fate once and for all, better—for all.

  Three years after she arrived at the adda, Simran developed a funny sickness. Waking one morning, she found the ground began to wobble; she could barely stand, barely hold herself upright. She was reminded of a mela she had attended as a child, a Ferris wheel that refused to stop, which went faster and faster, threatening to mash her brains out till, in one relieving whoop, she had thrown up, and the liquid had curled and slapped itself like exuberant paint onto the faces of others below. There was screaming and shouting, and her baba, who was standing below, had looked up and, seeing her slumped, had leapt onto the dashboard. He had said something to the operator that made him pull at a lever, and the next thing she remembered was being carried away, safe in her baba’s arms. But here there was no one to lean on. So she tried clinging to a bedpost or to a door, whatever was at hand.

  When the madam of the adda saw Simran throw up her morning tea she told her to go easy on the opium. She swore that Yaqub Qureshi, that bastard pusher, was mixing gard into the opium. Simran checked with girls from other addas. They said that Qureshi’s stuff wasn’t as good as before, the nasha wore out too soon, but there were no side effects to complain about. She went to the doctor, who told her what the problem was—she was carrying a child.

  She received the news with trepidation. What would she do with a child? How would she handle it? How should she prepare? She knew nothing about babies and how they grew.

  For a while, Simran didn’t tell her friends at the adda, for she did not know how the madam would react. During her free time, in the mornings, she began to slip away, befriending mothers from other addas. From them she wrenched details about childbirth and child care. The first four months she’d have to be careful, and later, if her stomach got too big, it would have to be cut open. She learned that injections were necessary for the child; otherwise it could develop a strange handicap in the legs. She’d seen children like that—one leg slimmer than the other, one leg frail and useless—they were the children who were unable to work but made good money begging. Most important, from now on, she’d have to insist her clients wear condoms. No condom, no sex—it was that simple, that straightforward. All this made sense to her. She began to feel grown-up and responsible. “I feel trusted,” she said to Chacha, while he was grooming Badshah, rubbing his coat and tail. “Trusted to take charge, to give life and protect it.” And Chacha had smiled, knowing full well what she meant.

  As the weeks flew by, Simran began to feel a change in herself. She felt the cracking of a hard layer of topsoil, and below that she felt a tributary stir. It started as a trickle, drop by drop, then a flow gentle and clear, and soon, with consistent awareness, she felt a flood of emotions sweep through her. She felt she wanted to live again. She felt she wanted to fuss, feel, and belong, and what better than to a part of her? In a desert of longing, she would sprout her own plant, her own sweet little baby. She’d hold it to the sun and say, “Let it grow! Let it thrive! Give it a chance better than what you gave me. This is a wonderful, feeling part of me. Only if it grows can I feel hope. Only if it lives can I breathe again. Without it I am dead—dead like before.”

  And it was as if the heavens heard her, for though she could feel the seed become a shape, and though she could feel a warmth and a movement, and imagine in her daydreams the eyes, nose, ears, lips, fingers, and toes forming, though she could see all this and exult in it, her stomach stayed noncommittal, and with the help of loose cotton gowns she could keep the news a secret from the madam. By the time the swell began to show, it was too late. All the madam could do was curse and say, “Bah, another mouth to feed! Now make sure you work twice as hard.”

  So Simran had given birth to Zulfi, eight pounds of warm, thrashing humanity, sometimes cringing wormlike and sometimes eager and flitting, mothlike. Frail little Zulfi—when she cried it seemed her world was coming down, and when she was happy she beamed and spread sunlight all over. You could see the happiness in the eyes and smiles of the confined women. You could hear it in their laughter, warm, joyous, and rippling through the bars on the doors.

  But how long would that continue? How long would the laughter remain bright and infectious? How long would Simran endure the loud, drunken men who came staggering in the dead of night, clawing at the half-shut doors? How long could she see her child woken to harsh banging, to heinous laughter, to the sudden onslaught of lights, to cigarette smoke in cheerless rooms, with no windows, no ventilation? If not that, then the clinking of beer bottles and glasses, loud bragging, slurred words, and songs delivered with lewd intent? Often Simran would confess her fears to Chacha, who’d fall silent, thinking it would be much worse when the child grew up, when she’d be made aware of her mother’s trade. It is an unfair life, Chacha thought, that does not give a child the right to start afresh, with hope and with promise, like other children.

  From Simran Chacha learned of the conditions in the adda.

  A tiny, decrepit hovel, the adda reeked of poverty and dissolution. The sweat of laborers embedded in mattresses. The smell of onions left from dinner. Stale beedi smoke that hung like a cloud, coiling itself in the throat and nostrils.

  Sometimes there was a urine smell from the toilet, the clogged toilet with a broken flush tank and moldy green pipes. Sometimes there was puke, stinking up the place from under the bed.

  Sometimes there’d be disconcerting sounds: rats, scuffling below or scraping at the asbestos above. Or sometimes there’d be rows and rows of ants, crawling over spilt food and beer, and sometimes, actually, a centipede in bed.

  The brothel was a few feet away from the stable where Chacha parked his victoria and lived with Badshah. The entrance to the stable was guarded by tall, heavy teak doors that creaked when they opened, and they opened to two thousand square feet of dazzling brown space.

  The walls were of wood. The ground was bare, hard, and rocky. The roof was at a distance of twenty-five feet from the ground. Just below the roof was an open loft that ran all around the stable. The loft was aired by a bent, rusted wire mesh, coated with dark, moist cobwebs.

  Zigzag wheel marks indicated where the victoria was parked—in the center. On the right side of the stable was a wooden cupboard, in which Chacha kept his clothes and linen. Next to the cupboard were two old chairs. On one chair was a pile of unwashed clothes, on the other a bunch of old newspapers, yellow and frayed and carrying reports of Badshah’s victories.

  In line with the furniture was an old dining table with a greasy two-burner stove. On this Chacha cooked his dal, rice, and vegetables. He’d yearn for a little chicken, but he barely had any money left after paying for Badshah’s feed, the oats and bran his champion was used to.

  On the left side of the stable were stacks of hay and some ground cleared to define Badshah
’s eating-sleeping-stomping space. There were chairs stacked along the wall, one on top of the other, sleek, black chairs with curved legs and backs, the kind found in Irani restaurants. An old red jukebox lent the only bit of color to the place; it leaned on three legs, a performer silenced by age. It had been discarded by the owner from whom Chacha had rented the stable.

  In a remote corner, at the end, was the washing area, separated from the rest of the stable by a cement parapet. The washing area had an overhead tank and a brass tap around which was coiled a hose. This was Badshah’s shower, long enough to reach him, and although he’d hate this weekly ritual, he’d endure it bravely. Once a week, Chacha would grin, tease, and run around Badshah, spraying him from side to side, like a schoolboy gone mad on holi. “Arrey, Badshah,” he would say. “Which race do you want to win now? The Poonawala Millions, or the St. Ledger, or the Derby itself you will take? Don’t come home without the prize money, huh, or Chacha will have nothing to do with you.” And Badshah would neigh and rear excitedly, for these were not mere names to him but memories of an age when he had sprouted wings, when he had set pace and flown, king of the turf and king of all he surveyed, seeing nothing but the finishing line and Chacha’s raised fist.

  When Chacha lost his job at the racecourse and he heard that Badshah, too, was to be retired, he had dipped into his savings, bought him, and brought him here under a roof big enough for the two of them. In this there was no confusion, for there was no value for retired runners. They would end up in Matheran, trotting up dusty slopes, or at Juhu Beach, where the pebbled sand was bad for their legs. Worse, they’d be sold to horsemen who’d whip them, forget to feed them, and work them to the bone. But Chacha was different. He loved horses. He loved them more than human beings, and Badshah to him was nothing less than royalty, a winged creature who saw, absorbed, and understood everything, who deserved to be treated like a family member.

  From what was left of his savings Chacha bought an old victoria. He oiled it, polished it, and hammered the harness in place. He tightened the spokes on the wheels and changed the seat and the footboard, and he fixed new reins and scrubbed the lamp at the side till it shone. Then he rented the stable from Hausangbhai Irani, broad-faced owner of A-1 Bakery and Restaurant.

  Hausangbhai was a good man to know. His heart was stout, like the rest of him, and he was forever giving credit to his customers, much to the distress of his wife, Havovi. Haola, as he called her in moments of affection, was a plump-faced woman with the pink of Iran frozen in her cheeks. Years younger than Hausangbhai, she had borne him four proud sons, all broad and stocky like him, and shrewdly she had sent them to a school in the hills and then to a college in Pune, thereby avoiding interaction with the area. Haola would total up the money Hausangbhai was owed in terms of shoes sacrificed or saris bypassed in showroom windows or jewelry seen and admired but not bought. “But don’t you understand, my dear Haola?” Hausangbhai would say. “A little debt gets people back. It is like the cycle of birth and rebirth. You keep doing wrong, and you keep coming back. Don’t you see it is to our benefit only?”

  Everyone knew and liked Hausangbhai, for he was always nice to people. He was never impolite, not to the whores who appeared in a sullen mood mistreated by some customer, or to the customers who walked in late bellowing for beer, or to the pimps who had been cheated by some madam or shortchanged by some customer and needed to drink and drown their anger. Times like this, Hausangbhai would nod to a waiter, and invariably something free would go from the counter, something to make up for life’s harshness. Hausangbhai understood the ways of the area; he understood its burden and its sorrows, and yet its necessity to the order of things.

  Hausangbhai had inherited the restaurant from his father, Meherwanji, who had arrived from Iran in 1948, a year after Independence. Meherwanji had landed off a steamer with four large trunks, his wife, Sera, and the world’s finest recipes for berry biryani, Persian kheema, and confectioneries like butter cookies, cream puffs, and mawa cakes. There was also an African parrot, one-eyed Kaikaus, who sat unapproachably proud in a cage that Meherwanji carried. Later Kaikaus was uncaged and allowed to take his place beside Meherwanji, at the counter, where he remained alert and glaring, looking more like the owner than Meherwanji himself.

  Renting the restaurant at first, then buying it, Meherwanji made an instant hit with his recipes. People would flock early morning, in hordes, for his kheema pav, and later, in the afternoon and evening, for his melt-in-the-mouth butter cookies, cream puffs, and mawa cakes. As the restaurant prospered, Meherwanji built four cozy rooms on top, where his son Hausang, and his two daughters, Arnaz and Farnaz, were born. For his first son, Kaikaus, Meherwanji could afford the finest almonds bought at ten rupees a kilo from Crawford Market.

  When Hausangbhai was barely twenty, his father passed away. Two days later, Kaikaus died of a broken heart, and Hausangbhai, as a mark of respect, kept the restaurant shut for a week and had the funeral prayers recited twice: once for his father and once for dear Kaikaus.

  Hausangbhai made every effort to keep alive the traditions of his father. He served berry biryani with berries brought from Iran. He served kheema made from minced lamb only. (Other restaurant owners preferred beef, which was a lot cheaper.) He served brun pav, with a lavish spread of butter. He also ensured that the cream for his puffs came from Parsi Dairy Farm, the butter was strictly Polsen, the oil strictly refined, and every customer could play two free songs on the jukebox. He did this for a number of years, till he realized that things were changing. He needed to cut costs; he needed to be cautious, if he was to educate his four sons, give them a life away from this neighborhood. Hausangbhai did not mind the pickpockets, the pimps, the whores, the touts, and the underworld characters who frequented the restaurant: them he could understand. What he did mind was the constables who ate for free every night, taking away huge meals for their families, the municipalitywallas who came for their bribes every month, and the food and the health inspectors who charged shamelessly to pass the facilities in the kitchen. With pressures like these, Hausangbhai found it difficult to make a profit. He also found it difficult to ask his customers to pay the long credit tabs they ran up, much to Haola’s distress. At the end of the month, things became tight for the Iranis. They had no option but to ration the electricity, to cut down on the original ingredients of their recipes, and to forget about things like holidays, shopping, and long phone calls to their sons.

  The stable had been bought by Meherwanji with the intention of starting a second restaurant. But a few months before he could do so, he had died, slumping over the counter, dropping a head full of rich white hair in full view of his customers, while Kaikaus looked on and squawked frantically. Sera, Meherwanji’s wife, said there was no point starting another restaurant, for Meherwanji’s spirit would linger at A-1. For many years thereafter the stable remained unoccupied; it was hired out occasionally as a warehouse to traders of cloth and then to workers from out of town as a lodging place. The workers used to smoke, drink, gamble, cook, and sleep there, and once in a while they’d sneak in some women for the night. Hausangbhai knew this and turned a blind eye. He said to Haola, “Boys will be boys, and that’s fine as long as they know when to be men.”

  One night, when the boys were drunk, when they’d passed out on a surfeit of country liquor, the place had caught fire. Hearing the commotion, Hausangbhai had rushed out in his pajamas. He’d collected the whores, the pimps, the customers, and forming a human chain had flung buckets of water on the flames. This was after he had dragged his lodgers to safety, carrying them on his shoulders, while they slurred their words and threatened him in their stupor. After that, Hausangbhai had avoided taking in anyone until he met Chacha, until he’d spoken to him and realized that the old horseman could be trusted for all the white hairs he carried in his beard.

  Hausangbhai agreed to rent the stable to Chacha at two hundred rupees a month, which could hardly be considered income. But, of late, an opportuni
ty had presented itself. A builder by the name of Riyaz Padamjee, a tall, sallow-faced man with shrewd eyes and a mildly unctuous air, had approached Hausangbhai. “Name your price!” he said to Hausangbhai, referring not to the restaurant but to the stable. And he quoted a figure that made Haola dream of chiffon dresses, jewelry sets, and holidays in fancy hotels with her family.

  In a low-lit corner of the restaurant, Riyaz Padamjee shared his plans with Hausangbhai. He said he wanted to tear down the stable and build in its place a three-star hotel. The location was ideal; the time was right; the licenses and sanctions he would get in a week. The hotel would send prices rocketing in the area, which would be good for the restaurant, too.

  Hausangbhai was not the kind to be lured by money. He liked antiquity; he liked charm. He liked the irony that the prostitutes and a horse should be neighbors. Both were low in the karmic order. Both, in a sense, were beasts of burden. They had no ability to protest or to change their destinies. On the other hand, he boiled at these builders who were changing the face of Bombay with their gaudy high-rise structures, who were buying out the city with the help of corrupt politicians and greedy civic officials.

  Stifling the snort of contempt rising in his throat, Hausangbhai told Padamjee he wasn’t interested. The builder said he should think about it; such offers didn’t come daily. “Besides,” Padamjee said, wearing a slight ironic smile, “the place is dangerous: it has burned once and can burn again, in which case the fire department will seal it permanently.”

  Hausangbhai sensed the threat. Although he didn’t say anything to Haola, he emptied out his heart to Chacha. “Bloody parasites,” he said. “These builders think they own this city; they can do anything in the name of progress.”

  “But weren’t you tempted?” Chacha asked. “I know, Hausangbhai, things aren’t easy for you. You have many difficulties.”