by Ashok Banker
He never knew any stereo could cost that much, and even if they did, that anybody could afford to pay that much for them. He starts taking a keen interest in Lobo, wondering how this man who looks like a nervous wreck made so much money. What does Mr Lobo do for a living, by the way? Mr Lobo smiles. Business, comes the cryptic answer.
The magic word.
And, coming down to business, Mr Lobo asks Jay if he would be interested in selling his flat. Jay is flummoxed. His mother’s flat?
‘Yes,’ Lobo says, ‘this is a very good time to sell, and I would be willing to pay a very good price.’
Jay shakes his head, smiles. ‘There must be some mistake. My mother and I have no plans to sell.’
‘Your mother was the one who told me she wanted to sell,’ Lobo says, surprising him again. Today seems to be a day for surprises.
‘I don’t understand. My mother?’
‘Yes, she said she wanted to sell this flat so she could buy two flats with the money.’
‘Two flats?’
‘One for you and one for her. You have a fiancee, don’t you?’
‘Er... yes.’ Jay suddenly recalls his mother saying something bitterly sarcastic about her moving out of the house so he andTuli could take over. He can’t believe she actually came here and spoke to this man about him andTuli.
‘So what do you say?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Lobo, but I had no idea about this. Maybe I could talk to my mother, and then—’
‘You do know the going rate, don ’t you?’
‘Uh, yes, yes. Around fifteen hundred rupees a square foot, isn’t it?’
Lobo smiles. ‘That was five years ago.’
‘How much is it now?’ Jay really has no idea.
‘About three thousand five hundred. . .’
Jay looks at his neighbour. ‘Three thousand five hundred rupees a square foot?’
‘...And your flat is about one thousand feet, super built-up. That comes to about—’
‘Thirty-five lakhs?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’
‘Of course, since your flat is westerly facing and well-situated, I might offer a little more.’
‘Well-situated?’
‘Hasn’t your mother told you? My plan is to knock down the dividing wall between our flats and make it one large six-bedroom hall. My sons are coming back from the US next year and I need the extra space. So what do you say? I could go up to thirty-seven.’
Thirty-seven lakhs? ‘Er, well. .. let me think about it and get back to you, Mr Lobo. Basically, the flat is in my mother’s name, so she has to make the decision. Maybe when she gets better, I’ll try to discuss it.’
‘I hope she gets better soon.’
‘Thank you very much. And thanks for the coffee.’
‘Come over sometimes. I have a big music collection. Do you like jazz?’
‘Uh, sort of. Okay then.’
‘Goodbye. Nice meeting you, Jayesh.’
‘Same here. Bye.’
Whew. Thirty-seven lakhs? Jay had no idea the flat was worth that much. He had assumed it was in the region of fifteen lakh or so. The figure blows him out of his mind. He starts fantasizing about all the things he can do if he has thirty-seven lakhs in hand. Then it occurs to him that if he gets those thirty-seven lakhs in hand, he won’t have a place to stay. But he will. He has the rental flat in Lokhandwala. But this is absurd. Mama’s never going to sell the flat, and even if she does, she’ll have to buy another place. They can’t both stay in rented flats. Then Jay realizes it’s already 11.40 and it’s his mother’s bath-day, and forgets about Mr Lobo and the thirty-seven lakhs and the Rs 5-lakh stereo system. For the moment.
Sometimes, in the evenings when he goes shopping for vegetables or groceries, he takes detours, walking along unfamiliar back roads and side lanes. He discovers a quaint old cottage with bougainvillea dripping down its face and a sign proclaiming it to be Happy Hours Playschool.
Another time, when he passes it in the morning, it’s filled with children, little tots falling over one another, bawling, eating mud, clambering over a hobby horse and a slide and a four-seater merry-go-round. He stops and watches the children play. He loses track of time, and from that day on, he makes it a point to stop by everytime he can and watch the children play. Happy Hours. He likes the name. Maybe someday when he and Tuli have their first baby...
Meera doesn't visit for a while. He still has plenty of books to get through, but the classics are beginning to get too much for him. He finds a little library around the corner. Bharat Circulating Library. It doesn't have much, but it does have Stephen King. He also finds some Ed McBains. And, to his surprise, some old issues of Batman. He always liked Batman as a child. Superman was nifty, but he had superpowers and that always made things too easy for him. Batman was flesh-and-blood; lonely, brooding, haunted and haunting. And, most interesting of all, people in Batman actually died. One of the issues Jay finds is the one in which Robin dies—not the original Robin, Dick Grayson—
but the second one, Jason Todd. That single comic gives Jay a kick in the head that fifty pages of War and Peace can't match. In the editor's page of the same issue, he reads about some Hollywood scriptwriter called Sam Hamm having written a great movie treatment for Batman : The Movie. That's one he won't miss.
Then, thirteen days after he brought his mother home from the police station, he calls Tuli's home and is informed by a maidservant that the entire family are in Ahmedabad for Tuli's engagement.
chapter twenty
That one there? The good-looking one in the Michael Jackson tee shirt and baggies? He smiles tentatively at her. She sniffs and turns away, striding down the slope. He grimaces.What the hell does she look like?
He’s seen her only once before, when Tuli came out of college to tell him she had extra classes that day and couldn’t go for a movie with him.
And she can’t have been good-looking or he’d have noticed. No, she was on the heavy side, fair, and with a grin that showed a lot of teeth.Why did good-looking girls always pick plain Janes for friends?
Between two nuns in white habits, books clutched to their chests, he glimpses a girl in a black-and-white polka-dotted blouse and long black skirt mincing her way down the slope. As she approaches, he comes forward. She still doesn’t look up, is about to walk past.
‘Er. .. Jyoti?’
A quick glance, pursed lips, ready to repel the enemy. Then a widening of the eyes, parting of thin dark lips: ‘ Jay? ’
‘We met once before, you two had extra psycho classes.. ’
‘Yes, yes. Hi. How are you?’
‘I’m cool. You?’
‘Okay.’
Then silence. Is she embarrassed about something or is he just imagining that? ‘Jyoti. .. about Tuli. . .’
‘She mustbe in class.We have a 9.30 lecture.’
‘She’s inAhmedabad I heard.’
There, an unmistakable averted look, flash of guilt. ‘ Ahmedabad?’
‘I called her house. They said she’s in Ahmedabad, getting engaged.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jyoti, what’s happening? I’ve been trying to get in touch with her for two weeks.When did you last see her?’
‘Jyoti hesitates, wrestling with something. Finally she looks at him, comes to a decision: ‘Yesterday.’
‘Yesterday? You saw Tuli yesterday? But that’s impossible.’
She doesn’t reply, shifts her books from the crook of the right elbow to the crook of the left.
‘Jyoti?’
‘Jay, I don’t know anything. I’m getting late for class.’
‘But I have to know.We were supposed to get married. How could she go get engaged to someone else?’
Looking away, waving to a bunch of girls tramping down, hair bobbing, smiles exploding like camera flashes.A chorus of‘HI, JYOTI HAVING FLIN?’. Jay knows the latter part of the sentence is for his benefit. Jyoti blushes, starts to walk away. Jay clenches and unclenche
s his fists, resists the urge to place his hands on her shoulders, shake her, instead speaks in a desperately controlled voice: ‘Jyoti, please.Where is she?’
Without turning, walking on towards the now-waiting group of classmates: ‘Home.’ Then she is swallowed up by the crowd ofgirls milling at the gate, disappears.
Jay walks back to Ramnik Stores. He’s hungry, hasn’t had breakfast, his mother was still sleeping at 7.40 when he left, doesn’t like leaving her alone for so long, hopes she doesn’t go out the front door. He could have locked her in, but the idea is distasteful to him, the act of taking away somebody’s freedom even for a few hours, even if the person is an alcohol psychotic suffering a nervous breakdown. He starts to buy a samosa and coffee, then changes the coffee to aThums Up. Hot and cold. Biting into the samosa, tasting a too-large piece of ginger, he is filled with a sense of deja vu. The number of times Tuli and he stopped here to eat samosas. By the time he finishes the samosa, his eyes are blurry with tears.
He wonders whether to wait outside the gate on the off chance that Tuli might come by, then realizes that she might already be in class. He walks down Sophia College Lane, feeling a terrible desolation as he walks away from the college. Girls pass him, going in the opposite direction. He feels like a student who’s just been expelled. He remembers the time he tried to kiss Tuli here at this very spot. They were going to a play—Pearl Padamsee's Noises Off—and Jay met Tuli at the beginning of the lane, next to the new Raymond's showroom.
He tasted the forbidden fruit when they came under a defunct streetlight next to the unfinished structure of the notorious Pratibha Building—the one whose top six floors had to be demolished after an FSI investigation. He turned to her in mid-sentence, caught her by the waist, sliding his hands up until his thumbs were on the gold roses on her dress over her breasts, the crepe grainy and crackling with static electricity on that monsoon night, the gold embroidery rough and prickly; and he'd pressed his body and lips to hers. She took the kiss, responded to the nipple-thumbing, bent herself to his strong grip even though her spine stayed tense and stiff. But then a pair of headlights caught them squarely in their beam, and she'd immediately shoved him away with unexpected force. Someone delivered a wolf-whistle from the passing car as it swung around the corner, and Tuli hissed: ‘Behave yourself.’
Now, he thinks: maybe he’d behaved himself too well. Four years they've been seeing each other, written hundreds of love letters proclaiming undying affection, hundreds of hours spent together discussing marriage, children, politics, psychology, money, money, money, and he'd behaved himself so well that here he was now, still a virgin, left high and dry, while she was somewhere getting engaged to be married to another man, some stranger she'd probably never met before, some rich scion who would give her five children, a car and chauffeur, a credit card, gold jewellery on her birthday, maybe one orgasm in twenty years, and a surname which would open doors for her and her children wherever she went: Mrs Somebody.
He buys a cigarette, his first in two weeks, and lights it from a burning rope-end hanging from a wall. The choking smoke of the rope nauseates him, but after he takes a few drags he feels better. The smoke gives him a pleasant high and his eyes ache less. Then he makes the mistake of having a second cigarette and feels lousy after the first puff. He drops the cigarette on the ground and crushes it thoroughly beneath his Keds. As he walks away, he looks back and can see the large grey-black smear on the ground, at almost exactly the spot where he'd kissed Tuli, or where she'd shoved him away, depending on which way you choose to remember it.
The woman who opens the door is dressed in a brown silk saree. The pallu of the saree is draped over her head. She is fair and short and doesn't resemble Tuli at all, but Jay looks at her closely and sees that they have the same eyes and nose. She holds the door partially ajar, keeping half her body behind it, and says in Gujarati: ‘ Siddharth nathi chche. ’
Jay says, ‘Is Tuli here?’
She looks at him expressionlessly, then shuts the door.
He stares at the ornate brass nameplate on the intricately carved teak door. He can see his mouth reflected in the shiny brass plaque. The corridor smells of ghee and Gujarati dal. A boy in a white churidar kurta, with hair falling over his eyes, comes out of the flat next door, slamming the door, and jabs the button for the lift over and over again.
When the lift arrives, he calls the liftman a donkey in Gujarati and goes down. Jay thumbs the doorbell again. Tuli's door opens again.
‘Tuli is not home today,’ her mother says and begins to shut the door. Jay leaps forward, his hand hitting the door with a loud thump: Wait! Mrs Jhaveri? I have to talk to her. Tell her it's Jay.' She keeps the pressure on the door, and calls out, ‘Maharaj!’ The cook, a grossly fat fair man in a white lungi, joins her at the door. Jay lets go. The door slams shut in his face again, almost taking two of his fingers. He stands there, breathing heavily, staring at the nameplate, the door, the rangoli pattern on the floor, the peephole which is shut from inside.
After several minutes, he goes slowly down the stairs and takes a bus home.
The next morning he tells the cleaning woman he'll tip her twenty rupees if she stays with his mother for the day. She grumbles about her otherjobs and about cleaning up his mother's messes, so he raises the tip to thirty rupees and tells her not to bother cleaning up if his mother makes any mess. He'll do it when he gets back. Then he takes an 81 Ltd to Breach Candy, walks over to the mouth of Tuli's lane and parks himself at a bus stop. It's 9.10 when he reaches there. Three hours and thirty-eight minutes later, at 12.48 , he's still sitting there when Mr Jhaveri's car comes down the lane. The chauffeur is driving and Tuli's father, mother and Tuli are in the back, with her brother in front. They are dressed in formal clothes, silk sarees and silk churidar kurtas. Tuli's father never wears trousers or shirts. Jay takes a step towards the car but the glasses are tinted and the air conditioning is on so he knows he can't be heard. But when the car slows down to wait for a break in traffic to turn off on to the main road, he swallows and begins walking to it, heart pounding, eyes dry and itching, armpits damp with sweat. Tuli is sitting on the side nearest to him and as he comes closer, she happens to look his way. She freezes. He freezes.
She stares at him expressionlessly. He tries to smile. Then she looks away and continues talking to her parents. At first he thinks she's telling them about him, that they will stop the car and she will speak to him, but when the chauffeur finds a break in the traffic, he swings the white and green Ambassador on to the main road and speeds away. Jay stands there watching the car disappear into the distance.
He thinks they must have gone out for lunch. Maybe they'll be back in the afternoon. He starts walking. The Raymond's window display is set up for a Christmas theme. He and Tuli always stop to look at and talk about these windows. Now he feels like throwing a brick through the window for all the memories it brings.
He looks at the rows of fruit vendors opposite the Breach Candy Swimming Pool: grapes, oranges, apples, figs, pomegranates. He feels like eating some as he walks. But the vendors are busy bargaining with women leaning out of the back seats of double-parked Toyotas and Contessas.
He walks on. Into Amarsons, where the air curtain at the doorway hits his sweaty collar like a tray of ice water. Packed as always, it's difficult to get around to the jewellery counter where she used to buy earrings to match her new dresses. She once told him that if she could afford it she would wear a new pair of earrings every day and never wear the same pair twice. He had laughed and told her that some day he would give her enough money to wear three pairs every day: at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, unable to help himself, he buys a pair of globular green and gold ones that he knows she doesn't have because the man at the counter assures him it's just come in today. He puts the little plastic envelope in his pocket and walks on.
He looks in at Snowman's and thinks of eating something. He has a mutton roll which he later regrets because it has too much cartilage an
d fatty pieces of meat. The milkshake is great: strawberry, and so chilled and thick he can barely suck it up through the straw. A lot of Sophia girls are in the joint and he sees some familiar faces from his hours of waiting at the gate. One or two of them seem to recognize him too because they whisper in one another’s ears and then say ‘Hi!’
boldly. One of them, a cute short girl with a wow body and beautiful grey eyes, even winks and asks him if he’s ‘waiting for her’. He shrugs, grinning. She winks and sidles past him, her skintight jeans brushing provocatively against him. He feels her eyes on him after that and realizes she’s giving him a come-on. He hurriedly goes out and finishes his milkshake while walking, although he hates doing that because the roads are so bad you can’t keep your eyes on the shake and the road at the same time. Still, it’s the only way he knows to respond to such an obvious flirtation: walk away.
Scandal Point, where they used to clamber over the rocks at low tide and sit holding hands by the sea, watching the sun set. Somewhere out there is a ring Tuli once dropped between two rocks. He was stroking her hand and the stone on the ring kept scratching his palm, so she took it off—and dropped it. He wonders if it’s still out there, in some dark crevice where crabs scuttle.
Warden Book House:Tuli is a member here. The guy knows Jay’s face. One of her patent excuses to her mother in the evenings was that she was going to the library. She ended up borrowing and returning unread books a lot, and the library always considered her a good customer. The guy recognizes Jay now, pulls Tuli’s membership card—
No. 1119—and starts laying out her usual authors: Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele, and, knowing Jay’s own tastes, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, John D. MacDonald, Robert Parker. Jay looks at the titles just to be polite, and finds a new Robert Parker. He pays cash for it and goes inside to look at the greeting cards. He finds one that echoes his present mood: A couple in a dreamy romantic pose on the cover with the calligraphed words ‘Thinking of you...’ and inside: ‘always keeps my heart in good shape’. Paying for it, he is struck by an idea. He starts walking back quickly, goes up Tuli’s lane, right into her building, checking to make sure her car isn’t in its reserved parking spot, goes up the four floors by the stairs to avoid being seen by the liftman, stops at the landing just below her floor, writes ‘Baby, talk to me, I love you’ inside the card, writes her name on the envelope, goes up to the door, looks around nervously to make sure nobody’s watching, and slips the card under Tuli's door. Coming down, he is terrified that he'll meet them entering the building, but doesn't. He goes back to the bus stop and continues his vigil.When they don't return by 6 in the evening, he goes home, miserable.