Vertigo

by Ashok Banker

  This is a blow. All this, this fucking job which he secretly hates, this hand-to-mouth existence which is draining him of the juice of life, this crushing guilt resulting from his self-perceived ‘betrayal’ of his mother, these years of loneliness and sexual frustration as he fought temptation to remain faithful to her, all this is bullshit if she doesn't care. And how can she say she loves him if she can't remember the one day in the year that is his, really his? On her birthday, last October, he sent roses to her flat (with a discreetly worded card to escape her parents’ censure), took her out to an expensive lunch which he could hardly afford (Copper Chimney), and gave her a silver ring which cost him the price of two new sets of clothes which he needed badly.

  And what had she done in return? Not even allowed him to kiss her. Oh, all right, so it was the lane on which she lived and anybody might have seen them, but then how do you explain the ring? She lost the ring barely a month later. Took it off to wash her hands after changing a sanitary pad in her college toilet, left it on the enamel sink, and forgot about it until the next day—when he happened to notice its absence—by which time it was gone of course. Tick. One movement marked off on the clock of anger.

  Then there were the months during which he had hardly known if she was still in love with him or not—the time which culminated with her terrifying (for him) visit to Ahmedabad after his dismissal from DM . Tick-tick-tock. The years she made him wait before she permitted the progress of his affectionate embraces below her neckline. Tick-tock. Before that ... oh, before that ... an endless line of petty and not-so-petty grievances stretched into the horizon like a line of picketeers in a morcha. TICK TICK TICK TOCK.

  But this time he is really angry. Mad as hell. Jayesh Mehta wants to stick his head out of the window and scream to the world: ‘I'M MAD

  AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY MORE!’

  like that guy in the movie Network. Or better still, he felt like going out into the streets and busting a few heads like Sunny Deol does in Arjun. Kill somebody.

  ‘What's the fucking point? The fucking point? Point point point,’ he sobs, slamming his head against the washbasin mirror over and over again, until the mirror cracks and splinters and cuts his forehead and blood runs down into the washbasin and a silver of glass descends in fascinating slow motion to imbed itself in the drain-hole, a tapering spear of rough-edged glass gleaming dangerously in the dull pale light of the tubelight on the gate of the opposite building (he’s not yet switched on any of the lights in the flat), and he grips this splinter now in a trembling fist and raises it to his neck where he holds it against his pulsing artery for five long minutes, minutes in which his future flashes before his eyes and a deep sadness seeps into his bones, settling in his marrow like sediment at the bottom of a glass of tap-water during the monsoon. He smiles miserably at his reflection in the shattered mirror and says loudly in the silence of the empty flat: ‘Just you and me, kid. Just you and me.’

  This is how he ‘celebrates’ his twenty-third birthday.

  He washes the blood off his forehead and hands by taking a cold shower. The crimson spattering on the black granite tiled floor turns into ribbons of scarlet which wind and unwind like a squirming serpent into the drain. He imagines his blood seeping down into the gutters under the streets, travelling through the bowels of the city, rushing to meet the saline spume of sea-water at the end of the rusty iron pipeline.

  His shoe clangs hollowly on an iron manhole cover marked ‘Ashok Iron’ and he thinks: ‘Now I am blood-brothers with you, bitch.’ The bitch is, of course, Bombay.Who else?

  He buys not one or two but four bottles of Kingfisher beer at the wine store, which is also the medical store where he has been buying his medicines this past week. The bottles are cold and frosted with condensation, inserted into thick black polythene bags which swing slowly from the clawed fingers of his fists as he crosses the road to Sardar’s Tandoor. He buys 100 grams fried prawns, 100 grams fried rawas and a chicken liver masala with three tandoori naans. He has already stopped off at the video library, the one with the mispelled

  ‘Vedeo-TV for hire’ sign outside, and now when he enters, the man raises his hand in greeting and tells him it’s all fixed up, he can pay the money now and where would he like it delivered? He writes down the address with a ball pen that keeps starting and stopping; finally the man says it's okay he knows the building, first floor did he say?, be there in ten minutes.

  The hired VCR and colour TV arrive in thirty, not ten minutes. He tells the men to set it up on the floor in the bedroom. They realize they need a different plug from the one they have and one of them goes back to get it while Jay waits impatiently, thinking of the beer growing warm in the kitchen, unopened. Finally, the equipment is set up, they put on a cassette to make sure it's working fine, and leave, telling him they'll be back at the same time a.m., since he's only hired the stuff for twelve hours. The video and TV hire cost him a hundred bucks for this length of time, the beer Rs 48, the food Rs 34.

  A total of ... no, wait, he also has to count the videotapes. He's taken ten of them—although he knows he can't see that many but simply because he's afraid of at least two or three turning out to be bad prints, as usually happens (he's done this before) —so that comes to another Rs 40 for the eight regular movies and Rs 20 (double rate) for the two triple-X movies. That's a grand total of Rs 242 . About as much as he would have spent on lunch and taxi fare with Tuli. He rewinds all the cassettes first, so that he won't have to interrupt the flow of entertainment later, slips in The Dead Pool, a Dirty Harry movie, tracks the print to get a reasonably clear picture, pauses the VCR, opens a bottle of beer, takes a long deep swig which depletes a third of the bottle, wipes a trickle of beer off his neck and punches the Pause button with his toe.

  The hours blur past. Laughing, shooting, dancing, romancing, gunslinging, one-liner-tossing, raping, loving, seducing, stock-car-speeding, horsebreaking. .. all churn in his mind like sliced fruits in the rattling mixer of a pavement juice-stall outside Churchgate station.

  Three empty dark-green bottles roll lazily in the breeze from the window; the fourth lies clutched loosely between his thighs. He blinks at a defecatory retort from Eddie Murphy, blinks and finds himself staring at Casablanca. ‘ Play it, Sam. Play As time goes by. If she can take it, so can I.’ Heart-wrenching misery sweeps across Jay, wrinkling his face into a crumpled sheet of remorse and self-pity. He punches the Eject button, pulls out the colourized print of Casablanca, plugs in a triple-X—5 to 9 and concentrates on the synthetic copulation, masturbating furiously, slugging down the beer until the room reels and warps around him and the first light of dawn seems to come in through the window from a great distance away, down at the far end of a long tunnel which he knows he can never breach.

  chapter thirty-five

  He promises himself he won’t be the one to call Tuli this time . Enough is enough, as Donna Summer says on her new album, is enough is enough is enough. On Sunday, he opens the door and Conrad and Yogesh bear down on him like grizzlies on a honeycomb.

  ‘Arrey!’ Conrad exclaims, stretching the word out like a rubber-band then letting go of the end with a snap: ‘Arrrrreeeeeey! Devdas!’

  Referring to Jay’s unshaven face with its ten-day growth. Yogesh gapes up at him from his five-foot-six diminature: ‘What man? What the heck are you up to? Gone crazy or what?’

  Jay grins despite himself, using rusty smile muscles. ‘How come?

  What happened? You guys got sacked or something? Bunked work?’

  Hey, dumbo! It’s Sunday, don’t you know?’ Conrad to Yogesh: He must be lovesick. He doesn’t even know what day it is! ’They come in and look around. Both are amused rather than surprised at the austerity of the flat. ‘He’s a miser,’ Conrad tells Yogesh, winking at Jay: ‘ Kanjoos.’

  Jay feels embarrassed at this uninvited excoriation of his personal life. He resents their intrusion into his privacy, but this is only a silent irritation which he’s careful
not to reveal. The truth is he feels grateful for some company, any company. Except for that brief conversation with Nagaraj, this is the first time in over a week he’s talking, actually talking to anybody. He makes tea for them and they stand on the balcony, leaning over the railing, keeping an eye on the neighbourhood girls, sipping over-brewed tea from small plain glasses. Conrad and Yogesh get into a conversation about flats on rent versus flats bought on instalments and seem to forget about Jay for a while; he drinks his tea in the open air and sunshine and consumes the sound of friendly voices raised in banter; a warm feeling of camaraderie passes through him, rustling his nerves, making the hairs on the backs of his hands prickle with pleasure. It occurs to him that he is now twenty-three years old and he doesn’t have a single real friend in the whole wide world. He remembers a fat bespectacled boy he used to hang around with when he was eleven or twelve. He fights to remember his name, but is still straining when Conrad turns to him and says, ‘So, what’s up, pal? Don’t want to work?’

  Jay smiles, caught offguard. ‘Man?’

  ‘Relax, man. I know what happened. Your stomach was out, right?’

  ‘How did you—’

  ‘Obviously, man.We all ate at the same place, remember?’

  ‘You mean ... you all had stomach upsets too?’

  Yogesh nods. ‘All of us. I just started back at office this Friday.’

  Jay stares at them with an expression close to wonder. ‘I don’t believe it. Serious?’

  ‘Of course, pal.What do you think? You’re the only human in the group?’

  ‘Oh god. And I thought it must have been something I had for lunch that day. I never thought that—’

  ‘I know. We eat at Alps all the time. Never happened before. I went over on Friday and bawled out the guy.’

  Yogesh chuckles. ‘Connie really chewed his balls.’

  ‘And he apologized. Like, he practically kissed my feet. Seems there was something wrong with the pork that day.’

  ‘The sausages!’ Jay remembers a strange pungency in the sausages which he took less note of then—having drunk all that beer.

  ‘Right. So everybody who had mixed grill sizzlers that day had the same problem.’

  Yogesh slaps Conrad’s beefy shoulder. ‘Connie told him he was going to sue him for ten lakhs! No, Connie?’

  Conrad grins. ‘I think each of us deserve two lakhs apiece for the suffering.’ He winks at Jay. Conrad winks a lot. ‘How many times a day?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The loo. Five times a day?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I suppose so.’ He adds: ‘The doctor told me it was food poisoning first. That’s what he thought. He put me on antibiotics. That knocked me out for another two days. By which time it was Friday, and it happened to be my birthday, so...’

  ‘Whoo!’ Conrad whoops. ‘Birthday boy! Hey, Yogi, we have to give him birthday bumps.’

  ‘Uh, guys ...’

  Yogesh steps behind Jay, grinning mischievously. ‘How many years, Jay?’

  ‘Twenty-three, but really, fellows—’

  But they grab hold of him anyway, Conrad his arms,Yogesh his legs, and they heave him like a sack of onions and give him all of twenty-three bumps, yelling each number out as Jay’s buttocks bump the floor. One tea-glass tips over and gets stamped on (by Conrad) and smashed, and the next few minutes are spent clearing away the broken glass and laughing over trivialities. Jay is disappointed when Conrad glances at his watch and announces it’s ten past noon. Jay has hardly been aware of the passing of the last two hours.

  ‘We’re going for a drive. Coming?’ Conrad says.

  ‘How? On your bike? No thanks!’

  ‘No, yaar. Boss has finally managed to get hold of his father’s van,’

  Conrad says, punching Yogesh’s back. Yogesh dangles a key chain shaped like a Vat 69 bottle before Jay. Conrad grabs it and leaps for the door.

  Yogesh goes after him: ‘Hey! No, yaar. My father will kill me. Let me drive, man. Connie!’ But Connie is long gone, pounding down the stairs. Yogesh thud-thuds after him, and Jay anxiously strips off his shorts and pulls on his jeans without any underwear. The waistband of the jeans is slightly damp, but the wet denim feels cool and soothing against his skin. He pulls on a black tee shirt with Sylvester Stallone on the front and exits, locking the door with fumbling fingers, running his hands hurriedly through his hair as he takes the steps two at a time.

  The sunshine slams into his face as he emerges to see the van wheeling around the mud compound of the building, Conrad at the wheel with Yogesh half-laughing half-pleading beside him, and Jay thinks they're going-going-gone, but then the van swings around with a hair-raising grinding of rubber which makes people look out their windows, and the white Maruti van lurches towards jay, raising a cloud of brown dry dust, lunging at him with frightening velocity, causing him to step back and raise his palms reflexively, screeching to a halt inches away from his toes, Conrad's face cracked in a teeth-flashing laugh that forces Jay to grin back happily. He gets in the rear seat of the van, slamming the sliding door thrice before he gets it shut,Yogesh leaning back and pressing the door-lock down for him; then he is thrown back as Conrad hits the accelerator and takes them around the compound in a tilting curve that has Yogesh crying for mercy. Jay sees oily haired housewives and young men in banians and vertical-striped shorts standing in balconies watching these young Turks burn their excess joules, and he feels good, a part of things.Who needs you,Tuli. Look at me. I can live without you, girl. Look at me.

  They drive down to Nepean Sea Road that day, Conrad giving Both Yogesh and Jay little heart attacks with his rough driving. After a while, Jay learns to relax and enjoy the reckless screeching around curves and vrooming down causeways. They make Nepean Sea Road in just under forty minutes, a record by any standards, even considering the reduced Sunday afternoon traffic. Their destination is the flat of a friend of Conrad; someone called Salim who’s having a ‘day party '.

  Salim turns out to be the only son of a notorious smuggler; ex-smuggler actually, since his father has long since turned to marginally more legitimate lines of business in the post-Emergency years—such as construction, turnkey project engineering and steel-making. Conrad regales them en route with stories of smugglers and the ingenious ways in which they evaded the Anti-Smuggling Bureau in the seventies.

  He tells them how a smuggler called Narang once buried three smuggled Mercedes Benzes in the garden of his bungalow, wrapped in plastic sheets. He tells them how Salim s father escaped being raided because he was a major contributor to Indira Gandhi's election fund. The topic quickly shifts to politicians and corruption which, to Jay, have always gone together as naturally as bread and butter. He is entertained by some of the tales of bureaucratic corruption and high-level manipulation but as the stories get more involved (and more credible) he shifts uneasily in his seat and stops laughing as often. A gradual feeling of disgust grows in him; a sense of inverted national pride; the exact opposite of what he supposes he is expected to feel when viewing the Red Fort parade on Republic Day. A sense of ‘what kind of shithole country was I born in anyway?’

  ‘Hey, what's up?’ Conrad asks, leaning back over the seat while doing ninety on Mahim causeway. ‘Feeling pukey?'

  I'm cool.’

  ‘ Kya? What's up, yaar?' Yogesh drones in his sleepy Bihari drawl.

  I think he doesn't like talking about corruption ,' Conrad says with surprising incisiveness. Jay glances up at him and gets—what else? —

  a wink: ‘Isn't that right?’

  ‘Sort of .'

  ‘ Come on, man. All politicians are corrupt. That's the name of the game, okay?’Yogesh has his right foot up on the seat and is smoking a joint which he passes to Jay.

  ‘I don’t know,Yogi,’ dragging on the joint, feeling the sweet thick smoke expanding his skull, opening up cracks in his bones: ‘I mean, are they really all that bad? Seriously?’

  ‘Look, my father’s in politics—’Yogesh’s father is a
n MLA or state-level minister back in Patna, Jay forgets which ‘—so I should know.

  It’s the system, yaar. You can fight it but you can’t beat it. Look at my dad. He could have been chief minister six years ago, in 1977, when the Opposition came to power. But he was too morally upright. So he’s still stuck with agriculture. And you know the worst thing? He actually thinks he’s happier this way! He believes he can do more good by helping farmers than by being chief minister.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right,’ Jay ventures cautiously, not well-enough acquainted with Yogesh to know what his touchy spots are.

  Conrad snorts. ‘Jay’“ an idealistic hero. Look, man, I’ll translate what Yogi Bear’s trying to get through to you.A chief minister can put away at least ten crores, minimum, in one term.A state-level minister can put away maybe fifty lakhs. That’s the only difference. All this helping-the-people bullshit is bullshit. Cow dung. Right,Yogi?’

  Yogi’s head bobs up and down enthusiastically like a doll with a spring-neck. Jay leans back and concentrates on the view out the window. He’s had arguments like this before. He’s always lost. He still isn’t convinced he’s wrong, but it hurts to be told he is, over and over again.

  The day party is an enormous bash. So is Salim’s ‘flat’.

  They ride up the elevator of a posh Malabar Hill apartment house not far from the chief minister’s bungalow, ‘Varsha’. On the tenth floor, they find an open door with music blaring out. A couple is leaning against the wall, engaged in what looks like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. They go into the flat, a lavishly decorated five-bedroom hall whose contents could fill a catalogue the size of a coffee-table book, of which there are several lying in appropriate places. Conrad leads them with an air of authority to a wrought-iron spiral staircase.