Vertigo

by Ashok Banker

  Aloud he says, ‘Nothing. Let's go.'

  They cross the road together.

  chapter four

  The Sea Lounge. A window seat. The Gateway of India, brown chunk of history looming over motor launches put-putting crowds of lower-middle-class families out within sight of aircraft carriers and container-pregnant freight ships. Sunlight slanting on the polluted water; an explosion of pigeons rising from the wheat-showered sidewalk; couples nestling on the sea-face wall; balloon man trailing a cloud of blue, red, yellow, green blurs; quiet conversation; the vapours of beer, wine, pizza wafting past; Meera’s face momentarily concealed by a brushstroke of hair as it turns towards the window; she feels the intense scrutiny, glances sideways, hides a brief smile with the lip of a beer glass hurriedly raised; you realize you’re staring, break off, gulp your own chilled brew, smile nervously, break the silence.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘Where did you do your MBA?’

  ‘Ahmedabad.’ Another glance out of the window. ‘Boring.’

  ‘Really?’ Having held products of IIM Ahmedabad in awe for years, it shakes one’s foundations to be told so casually that the Mecca of Indian management was ‘boring’.

  ‘Yeah. What I really wanted to do was English literature. But I got such a good percentage in my CBSE, it seemed a shame not to use it.

  Besides, I wanted to get out of my father’s house.’

  ‘Uh, how are they? Your family, I mean. You had two sisters, right?’

  ‘One sister, one brother. Radha got married in ’77. Shyam in ’79.’

  ‘And you?’

  She looks into her glass. Refracted light casts circles on her face. ‘I fucked around.’ Her eyes meet his before he can react. ‘It’s much more fun, don’t you think?’

  She watches him squirm. The waiter hovers beside his elbow. He buries himself in the menu.

  ‘I’ll have the Cheesy Fish Fingers with tartar sauce,’ she says. ‘And bring us another bottle of beer.’

  Jay fumbles wretchedly with the large menu. ‘Uh, I guess I’ll have the same.’

  ‘It’ll be too boring. Why don’t you try the Grilled Open Sandwich.’

  To the waiter: ‘Chicken.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Jay looks up and realizes the waiter’s waiting to get the menu back; he relinquishes it with relief. Meera is looking out the window again. A seagull flies past, its shadow passing across her face. Just one glass of mild beer. Already feels light-headed. The truth-he hardly gets a chance to drink. An alcoholic mother—drinking all day at home—isn’t conducive to the pleasures of intoxication. Right now he’s worried about those vouchers he wanted Chris to sign tomorrow.

  If he goes along with Meera’s weekend-celebration idea, he’ll be dead broke tomorrow. And if Chris flies to Delhi as planned...

  The piano-player returns from his tea break or toilet break or whatever and launches morosely into a maddeningly familiar theme.

  A group of red-faced Americans come in. One of the women has on an oversized white cotton tee shirt without a bra underneath; Jay can see her erect nipples pushing through the soft fabric. Jay can’t take his eyes off her. Then he remembers Meera, glances back at her guiltily; she’s looking at the piano, listening intently.

  ‘Weak bass.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s playing the left hand too softly. They always do that in restaurants. I hate it.’

  He listens. The sound of ice tinkling carries across the room from three tables away. A toddler, mouth smeared with Black Forest pastry, stumbles on the thick-pile carpet and bawls. A harried mother picks him up, drags him back. Jay tries to identify the tune.

  ‘Mozart?’

  Meera laughs. ‘You’re joking! That’s from Chariots of Fire.’

  ‘Is it a musical?’

  ‘Of course not. Don’t you have a video?’

  ‘Uh. Not yet.’ He can’t admit that all he has is an old Televista b/w set, probably full of valves and tubes. Sure, he gets a take-home of Rs 2,320 every month; but that has to cover his expenses, his mother’s expenses—and, of course, her booze bill. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘What? Piano? Ah, a little.’

  ‘How did you learn?’

  ‘Oh, in school. ‘Waves a hand disparagingly as if she’s fanning herself.

  ‘Won a couple of prizes.’

  ‘That’s great. Why didn’t you take it up professionally?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I’d have ended up over there, on that stool.’ She points at the piano-player, presently performing a heartfelt version of Love Story.

  ‘Hey, I know that one,’ Jay says. ‘Ta-da-da-da-dah! I cried during that one.’

  Meera stares at him. ‘You cried during a movie? God, I don’t believe you, Jay.’

  He shrugs. The beer is getting to him now. He feels it envelop him in its own private universe where everything seems soft-focussed and benign. At a table diagonally opposite theirs, a vaguely familiar Hindi film actor is gesturing extravagantly to a bald man with a beard.

  The bald man is eating pani puri. Jay blinks. Do people really come to a five-star hotel to eat pani puri? Outside the window, dusk has arrived, smoking the bay. Gulls rise from a mound of floating garbage. A street urchin runs, chased by several others, white teeth flashing in a grimy black face, scattering pigeons. The pigeons rise, starting on an enormous circle that takes them right through the arch of the Gateway of India. Floodlights come on, throwing the towering brownstone gateway into relief. A plateful of finger-shaped golden-brown objects, a bowl of creamy-looking sauce, an immense sandwich which it seems the chef forgot to close, arrive. He eats hungrily.

  Half his sandwich over, he realizes she's using a knife and fork while he's eating with his fingers. But how does one eat a sandwich with a knife and fork? She wields her instruments with elegance and precision; slicing, skewering, carving, raising, inserting, dipping. Then she puts them down and dips a finger into the tartar sauce and sucks the finger. ‘Terrific,’ she says. ‘Try some.’

  7.47 p.m. She hops down the stairs, briefcase swinging, hair bouncing like a shampoo ad. He grips the banister, negotiating a curve.

  Beer sloshes in his belly. The opulence of the hotel makes him feel inferior, shabby. She reaches the bottom of the stairs, turns left, pushes open a door. Taj Art Gallery. Where is she going? In there?

  What for? She keeps her palm on the door until he catches up with her, lets him take the weight of the door. He struggles with it, then exerts himself and follows her. Bright white light smashes into his beer-dimmed consciousness.

  Only two persons in the gallery. At the far end, a woman sits talking to two men. Jay pauses to look at a board displaying newspaper clippings and recognizes the artist, the woman at the table, from a grainy photocopied picture, turning several times to compare the real with the xeroxed.

  Meera's hand on his arm, pulling. He follows her past three giant canvases: a startling glimpse of horses with luminescent female breasts, an even more shocking full frontal view of a male nude, Grecian-style flaccid penis, large testicles, the right one hanging lower than the other.

  ‘Here.’ Meera points him at a square canvas, titled Symbiosis. A bizarre-coloured nightmare of hollow eyes in an androgynous face, horse’s ears and mane, ingeniously blended equestrian-human anatomy fused in passionate reds, hot yellows, burning browns. Again the vividly realized genitalia: female this time. The vulva, thighs parted, seen from a low angle (corresponding to the elevation at which the work is strategically hung), the tangerine rust copper maroon burnt sienna burnished bronze lips of the mutant vagina, glistening.

  Meera speaking softly, eyes gleaming, about a marriage of Husain and Anjali Ela Menon, names only names to his culture-malnourished ears. Behind them, the artist at the desk says to the two journalists,

  ‘—and then Dubai. The children are grown up now. They don't need me. Nobody needs anyone any more in Bombay. But just a housewife, between the kitchen and the bedroom, a few dabs of paint on a canvas, you
read Borges? Then maybe Australia, because after the first performance, depending on the weather—' Jay finds himself staring at another canvas. Another gross male nude.

  ‘I think,’ he says, then claps a hand over his mouth, horrified.

  Meera clicks her tongue, tries to turn him away from the painting.

  Too late. Out, out, out, from the pit of his belly, the beer, Open Grilled Chicken Sandwich, Cheesy Fish Fingers, tartar sauce, tomato sauce, the pav bhaji he had at 11.30, even a whiff of the chapatis and dal he had gulped at lunchtime from Mittal's dabba, the puran poli he took from Christine's dabba, all this bilious mix, assorted shades from the palette of his metabolism, spew up with heroic gusto, spatter the canvas titled G12 Jorges Luis Borges: A Tribute, behind him cries of alarm and disgust from the artist and two reporters, Meera holding his arm, a few drops on her sleeve, the canvas a riot of vomit and colour, the marriage of Husain and Ela Menon offered this debatable tribute, how will Indian art survive this unprecedented assault, give it time, pretentiousness absorbs all; Pritish Nandy, get your camera, editor's choice, lunch on a male nude; cream walls blurring, rolling, floor heaving; jute carpet rising and falling in waves; tight close-up of a shapely calf below a grey business suit, a very sexy knee; Meera did you call Chris, we forgot to call Chris about the new account, had to call my mother before 7 to tell her I'll be late late late. Ranjit Hoskote Adil Jussawalla borges borges the borg the borg. ..

  ‘—feeling better now ?'

  He opens his eyes again, discovers himself in a flawless Taj bathroom mirror, wet hair plastered over bloodshot eyes, shirt yellow-stained, daubed with colours rich as acrylics, Meera holding him steady, peering anxiously, offering a wad of paper napkins. How did she get in here?

  If this is the Gents’ how did she — or is this the Ladies’? No. Two other men and a male bathroom attendant, watching them. Grinning.

  Jay totters, losing his grip, grabs hold again, leans on the sides of the large gleaming white porcelain basin. Throat hurting, head full of the ocean, smell of death-breath. What day of the week is it? An image: the day he dumped his pants in class, in the second standard. The teacher, Miss Machado, a dragon who refused him permission to go to the toilet during a test; standing there with the heavy wet load in his underwear, burning with shame, self-disgust, fear, loathing, exactly the same feelings expanded to adult-size. Tears. Throat hurting. Meera stops scrubbing at his shirt with the bunched-up sodden, once-white paper towel.

  ‘Jay! Jay, it's okay. I'm with you.’

  The two spectators laugh aloud, the punchline received, talking In—what else—Gujarati. The bathroom attendant examines a tile between his feet; the flushes in the urinals discharge automatically.

  The only woman besides his mother who's ever washed his vomit, and all he can think of to say to her when he regains his voice is, ‘But this is the Gents’, you shouldn't be here.’ And she laughs. And he somehow finds himself smiling through the tears and the vomit and the shame.

  She tips the attendant twenty rupees when they leave. He remembers this. Even in this state, he notices the tip. He has never seen anybody tip twenty rupees before.

  Friday, it's Friday—as they go out of the door—and you haven't got Chris to sign your vouchers yet, you fool.

  chapter five

  Twenty years old and his mother still won’t let him have his own door key.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she says, arms folded, swollen-eyed from staying awake past her usual hour. She puts the chain back on its hook, drives the bolt home, twists the little knob on the Godrej door lock, and turns to look at him. He puts the briefcase down wearily, slumps on the lumpy Rexine-upholstered sofa. A spring twangs beneath him; his bowels churn; he passes wind. She shuffles to the middle of the room and stands there, arms tightly locked across her breasts, lips locked, mouth bolted shut, eyes sullen as NO ENTRY signs. For thirteen years she has been shutting him out; sitting here, hung over, sour-tongued, head thudding, he suddenly realizes why: She’s afraid I’m going to leave her too, like Daddy did, someday.

  ‘Did you bring my bottles at least?’ she says, almost without moving her lips. In his disoriented state, he imagines the voice to be coming from somewhere closer to the table: the battered Bush 2-in-1 maybe?

  ‘Mama,’ a sock in one hand, ‘I was. . . working late. .. I forgot.’

  Mention of work softens her. She sits on the edge of a chair, watching him take off his footwear, massage his feet. ‘I hope you’re charging overtime, those bloody cheats.’

  ‘Mama, I’m an executive. Executives don’t get overtime.’

  ‘Oh yes, they do,’ she barks promptly. ‘The managers pocket it.’

  Sighs. Feels guilty he forgot her bottles. ‘I’ll get them tomorrow.

  Definitely.’

  ‘Sure, sure. And until then I'll survive on water, no? No?’

  ‘But you had a whole bottle, plus there was about one-third left in—’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘You finished a bottle and a half today? Mama, you promised you'd stick to—'

  ‘Of course, of course. And who promised to come home by 7

  sharp with my bottles?’ Now the lips dance, the mottled drink-swollen face sneers, creases criss-cross.

  ‘I was working late, I told you. You—'

  ‘Yeah, yeah. And here I was supposed to do what? Die of thirst?

  What? Like Christ in the desert? And where's Mary Magdalene?’

  ‘Mama, please.’

  ‘What? You don't like blasphemy? You think god is listening? Hah!

  He’s—’ she spews a string of blasphemous abuses that would make even Father Damien Karras, the priest in the Exorcist, flinch, then, with her hand on her hip, demands, ‘What do you get when you cross a Catholic with a—’

  ‘Mama, I'm really tired.’

  ‘—giraffe?'

  He wants to get up from the sofa, but there is a weight on his chest. In school, he borrowed a book from the school library— Vikram and the Vampire. Also made into aTV serial, Vikrar AurVetal. The story of a dethroned king who is given the task of pulling a vampire out of a tree in a cemetery and carrying him across a marsh. The vampire asks him a riddle en route; if he fails to answer, his head gets blown into a million fragments; if he answers correctly, the Vetal dematerializes off his back and returns magically to the tree. Catch-22. So it goes: The king makes endless trips to and fro, never getting to his ordained destination, always managing in the nick of time to keep from getting his head blown up.

  ‘What?’ he says wearily. ‘What do you get?’

  She cackles. What else can you call a laugh like that? And spits: ‘A Goan!’

  He frowns. 11.36 p.m., vomit on his shirt, and he’s thinking about answers to riddles? ‘But it doesn’t make sense, Mama. It just doesn’t make any sense!’

  Another spate of cackling, ending in a coughing fit; choking enough to turn her ghostly grey complexion scarlet; he is shamed into rising and rubbing her back ineffectually. ‘Mama, that answer...’

  ‘That’s. . .’ more coughing, clearing her throat, retching, spitting a gob of red-flecked phlegm straight down on the tiled floor, splat next to his left toe, like she always does, disgusting habit, treating the whole flat like one huge spittoon (and sometimes a toilet and sometimes a bidet and sometimes sometimes). ‘THAT’S THE POINT! ’ screeching with delight ‘THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT!’

  He swallows with difficulty; his throat hurts; a grain of rice comes loose from a cavity (but I didn’t eat any rice today, did I?); acidity burns his chest.

  Suddenly: ‘What’s her name?’ she says, cold, grating, a policewoman interrogating a suspect in custody. He swallows some toothpaste, startled, spits into the washbasin. The lower half of his pyjamas, the white ones with thick vertical green stripes, coming loose, the nada needs changing. She is holding up his shirt accusingly. He cranes his neck, squinting against the stark brightness of the naked bulb, toothpaste bubbling on his lips, maddened by the glare of w
hite tile (lichen in the cracks), her non-stop tirade, and peers at her finger pointing ominously to the smear of lipstick on the right shoulder of the shirt, clutched tightly in her white-knuckled fist, veins pulsing.

  Where did I get that from? Meera? When? How?

  ‘What? That? What is it?’ rinsing his mouth, gargling, undertaking the delicate act of cleaning a coated tongue with half a plastic tongue cleaner.

  ‘Have you been with a whore?’

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Did your father introduce you?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from Daddy in over a year, except for... in over a year. You know that.’ Almost let slip that he’d met his father for lunch a month ago. Taboo.

  ‘Have you fucked her?’

  ‘Oh god.’

  ‘Was she a virgin? Did she bleed?’

  ‘I’m tired, I just want—’

  ‘Is she a Catholic? Yes. Goan? Yes.’

  ‘—sleep. Got work tomorrow.’

  ‘Does her brother know you’re screwing her?’

  ‘Brother?’

  ‘Is she from Saligao? Yes . A Fernandes? Yes. I know.’

  ‘Mama, will you please listen—’

  ‘And you better wash your cock before you go to sleep. God knows what disease she has, cancer, gonorrhoea, lumbago,VD—’

  ‘—going on about—’

  ‘—typhoid, gangrene—does she have a sweet cunt? Did she suck your prick? Did you share her with your friends? I hope you used a condom, because if you didn’t, then I’m not responsible for anything that happens—you can go tell your grandmother to pay for your syphilis treatment, herpes, HIV syndrome—’

  ‘Mama, stop it. Just—’

  Foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling, snot bubbling out her hairy nostrils

  ‘—stop it.’

  Medusa in the bathroom, shudder my gargoyle lust barefoot on cold tiles (a poem he wrote) his hand reaching forward to... to...