by Ashok Banker
‘Jayesh,' he says softly, drawing his chair over to the table where Jay is seated alone: ‘ Once in a while, there comes along a professional who rises above the crowd, whose achievements make the world stop and take notice. In the past, there were men like J.R.D. Tata, Freddy Mehta, Dhirubhai Ambani, each cast from a different mould, each in his own image, but all having one thing in common: the burning desire to excel. Some day, I believe,’ touching his chest with all four fingers of his right hand, ‘there might be a Jayesh Mehta.' And he hands Jay a thick white company envelope. Inside the envelope, Jay finds a letter complimenting him on his promotion to the post of product group supervisor, effective from the 1st ofApril, along with a raise in salary to Rs 6,500, and the MD's best wishes for the continuance of a promising career. Jay swallows several times and looks at Dave beaming widely with his thumbs under the straps of his suspenders, and can't think of a single thing to say.
The second thing that happens in the wake of the assassination is the news thatTuli's father is agreeable to the match.
‘What?’ Jay says on the phone. ‘What? What? What?’ The engagement is fixed for the following month. The marriage will take place less than a month later; that being the last auspicious date of the season. Jay puts down the phone and looks at a pack of Chamatkar on his desk. ‘ Yeh to Chamatkar ho gaya,’ he says, which is the ad slogan for the launch.
chapter forty-five
But the auspicious date for the engagement comes and goes and no engagement takes place. The person responsible for this cancellation is an income tax deputy commissioner called M.K. Bhalla, who has his sights firmly fixed on Tuli's father's alleged lakhs of black money.
With the zeal and tenacity of Kevin Costner in The Untouchables, M.K. Bhalla raids MrJhaveri's Pedder Road flat, ancestral house in Ahmedabad, godown in Masjid Bunder, and trading office in Bazar Gate Street, Fort, all within twelve hours. And he is triumphant. The newspaper photo on Page 6 of a city daily tabloid shows Bhalla standing beside a dining table in Tuli's flat—the same table at which Jay ate lunch—on which is arrayed an assortment of banknotes and jewellery, all looking like some exotic buffet spread in the grainy black-and-white photo.
Deputy Commissioner of Income Tax, Shri M.K. Bhalla, with over Rs 1.35 crore in “black money” and gold jewellery seized from the flat of a prominent city diamond merchant yesterday,’ says the caption. Jay reads every word of the article thrice, and learns that Tuli's father is ‘allegedly’ involved in illegal foreign exchange transactions, hoarding of essential commodities and black marketing of the same, and of course, avoidance of income tax.
Tuli is shaken but stoic on the phone—she calls him at office the next day and tells him she's staying with her uncle—but there's no question of the engagement or marriage going ahead as scheduled.
‘That bastard,’ she says, and Jay thinks she’s referring to Bhalla, but she means someone else; a former partner of her father who harboured a grudge against him for some old business dispute. How long will this take to blow over? Never,Tuli says, on the precipice of tears. Jay doesn’t believe that, of course, but he worries about their marriage. On the other hand,Tuli seems unconcerned about that particular matter; if anything, she seems glad that this happened before the wedding because her father needs all the support he can get.
‘He’s shattered, Jay. You don’t know what this means. He’s humiliated.
Everybody will laugh at him now. He doesn’t have any face left to show.’ Jay, innocently: ‘You mean because he’s lost all his money?’ She:
‘No, you idiot. Because he’s being treated like some sort of criminal.
Just look at these fellows, arresting him as if he’s a gangster or something. You think they would have the guts to arrest Haji Mastan or Dawood or any of those guys? Never. But my father they arrest very proudly like he’s a big goonda.’
‘Well, you know, don’t get me wrong, but after all, he did do some mischief, didn’t he?’
‘Come on. Everybody does a little idhar-udhar in business. That’s what business is all about.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Oh, you think you’re so high and mighty. Didn’t you just make so much money?’
‘By speculation. Not black marketing. Or contravening FERA.’
‘Jay, don’t pretend. Nobody can make one and a half lakh in a few months honestly.’
‘What do you think I did? Stole it?’
‘I don’t want to discuss this. I have to go.’
‘Hold on. You can’t accuse me like that.’
‘I’m not accusing you.’
‘Then what was that? A compliment to my financial acumen?’
‘I don’t want to argue. Got a headache. You men, all you talk about is money, money, money.’
‘And all you do is spend, spend, spend. Do you know how much that bedroom set you ordered cost us? Inclusive of taxes, modification cost, and delivery—’
‘Please, Jay.’
‘—it came to a total of fifty-two thousand rupees. You told me to get my suits stitched at Raymond’s, I did, and they’re costing me another three and a half thousands. This new flat at Khar is costing me two and a half grand a month rent, plus the thirty thousand I’ve sunk into the deposit. And the painting and stuff—’
‘Jay, I’m cutting off.’
‘Tuli, what am I supposed to do? How long do we have to wait?
Why do we have to wait?’
‘You expect us to have the wedding as if nothing happened?’
‘Why not? You admitted it yourself. They haven’t got hold of all his money—not even half, you said.’
‘So you think he can spend five lakhs on his daughter’s wedding when all his bank accounts are frozen? Jay, the IT officers will be standing with us on the stage and taking all the gifts as we get them.’
‘They can have the gifts. All I want is the bride.’
‘You’re hopeless.’
‘And I’m horny.’
‘How can you think of it at a time like this?’
‘Thinking has nothing to do with it.’
‘Jay, I have to go.’
‘Wait, give me your number.’
‘You can’t call me here. My uncle will get mad.’
‘But you said the whole family knows. I’m your prospective husband, damnit.’
‘They’re very conservative, Jay. They believe that the bride and bridegroom shouldn’t even see each other before the ceremony.’
‘Wait till they hear what all I’ve seen!’ ‘Oh-foh!’
‘Okay, okay. I have to go too. Meeting.’Work hard.’ ‘Saturday?’
‘Impossible.’ ‘Try.’
‘Let’s see.’ ‘10.30 sharp?’ ‘We’ll see.’ ‘I’ll be waiting.’ 11. And I can’t stay long.’ ‘It won ’t take long.’ ‘Dirty fellow.’ ‘Absolutely filthy. Love.’
‘Love.’
On Friday evening, half an hour before his usual departure time of 7, Jay is in the computer room, waiting for some printouts Dave asked for when the electricity fails. The humming of the PCs, the whirring of the air conditioners, the rattle-zzzing of the dot matrix printers, the ping-dong of the Mac SE2, all groan to a halt. Oohs, aahs, and assorted abuses sound from around the room. Jay and Yogesh let out a collective sigh. After a while, someone opens the door of the room and says into the darkness: ‘It’s gone everywhere, huh. City-wide, okay?’The door hisses shut.
Going to take time, yaar,’ Yogesh rises from his seat. ‘What a bore.’
Jay’s heart shrinks. Dave has to have these printouts, and Jay and Yogesh have to check them before taking them to Dave. And if the power doesn’t return soon, he’ll have to come in tomorrow. And tomorrow is Saturday. And Tuli is coming over to the flat, his new Khar flat, the flat with the new furniture—a magnificent queen-size bed which makes Jay ache with lust just to look at it.
An hour later, the power still hasn’t returned. The heavily accented voice, which announced the news earlier, returns. ‘Take time
, okay?
Maybe whole night, huh?’
‘ Chalo,yaar, let’s call it a day then.’
‘Yogi, listen. I have a problem. I can’t make it tomorrow.’
‘I know, yaar. I promised my kids I would take them to the zoo tomorrow. I’ve broken the promise six times already. Damn sad.’
‘Yaah, but what I’m saying is, uh, can’t we finish this on Monday? I mean, Dave said he’s not coming in tomorrow anyway.’
‘Come on, man. You know the situation. Dave will chew our balls if we don ’t finish this by tomorrow and courier it to Hong Kong.’
‘ Can’t we just ask Ravi to take a printout tomorrow morning and ask despatch to forward it? I mean, we’ve already checked the figures on the monitor.’
‘Hey, hey? Who said that about me? Huh? I’m not coming in on Saturday—sunday, okay? You guys sleep all month and then you expect me to work overtime to make up for your mistake. Forget it.’
‘Ravi, look; we couldn’t help it.We thought these figures weren’t due until next month. Dave just told us yesterday.What could we do?’
‘Jay, Jay. No way, man. Dave will chew our balls off. Ravi, there’s no ifs and buts, yaar. You have to come in tomorrow. 9 sharp. This packet has to reach Hong Kong by tomorrow night.’
‘Yogi, come on.’
‘No way, Jay. Use your head, man.’
‘You two guys go to hell. I’m going to tell Panchal. I’ve worked every weekend since the beginning of the year. It’s too much.’
‘Go tell Panchal. But, Ravi, listen, Ravi? Tell him that this is for Chamatkar, okay?Then see what he says.’
‘Fuck you, man. Fuck your Chamatkar.’ Ravi leaves the room. Jay tries to see Yogesh’s face in the faint light coming in through the open doorway. All he can make out is a wide fleshy face with a moustache and the wet whites of two large eyes. ‘Yogi, yaar. Give me a break.’
‘Jay, don’t be nuts. It’s not my decision.’
‘Come on.’
‘Look, if you want to commit suicide, you can go talk to Dave.
Don’t hang me, okay?’
‘If I ask Dave—’
‘That’s your problem, yaar.’
‘But do you think—'
‘Not in a million years.’
Jay gives it a shot anyway. And gets shot. Dave gives him the old one-two routine, the usual which-is-more-important-your-weekends-or-your-career bullshit that Jay knows by heart now. And the worst thing is, he knows just how insignificant this damn printout is. It's a formality all the branch offices indulge in, sending out information about sales and stuff in the event that some office inVenezuela might find hidden wisdom in the quarterly sales chart of a detergent in Madhya Pradesh, India. Still, it’s a formality that the MD wants them to adhere to strictly. As Conrad quips later: ‘When it can't be done, it must be done.’ Find out what's insignificant, irrelevant and impossible, and break your balls doing it.
The power still hasn't come on when Jay leaves office around 7 .40. He toys with the idea of hanging around town for an hour or so in case the lights come on soon and then return to office to finish the work. But Ravi will have gone home, and the computer room will have been locked. He kicks a broken soft drink bottle and it clatters against the rusty iron of a drain grating. The streets are less dark than the windowless office. He looks up and stops still, stunned by the sight of a million stars he never knew existed—not above Bombay at least.
He traces familiar constellations learned from an astronomical buff in school—a thin short boy called Porus who claimed he wanted to be an astrophysicist, though Jay later heard that he became a smack addict, then got rehabilitated, and now works as the assistant manager of a large department store at Santa Cruz. The Great Bear, Little Bear—
Ursa Major and Minor, Jay recalls with a thrill of pleasure—the upside down W which is Cassiopei's Chair,Venus of course, Mars, and what the hell are those bright white lights which don't blink but are too large to be planets. Ah, satellites. Arthur C. Clarke's futuristic vision come true: a web of communication satellites criss-crossing the sky, beaming invisible information across continents, around the globe.
He doesn't feel like going home. He doesn't feel like doing anything.
What he feels like doing maybe is getting out of this damn city, out of this smog-infested forest, away from all these people, these sounds, smells, sights. Staring at a computer screen all day, boxed into an artificially lit tomb without even a barred window to look out from, the mind rages, rebels. The eye rolls across these dark star-strewn skies, unable to comprehend such limitless freedom . The body, trained to restrict itself to two or three rigid postures for a dozen waking hours, creaks, shambles, shivers when set loose in this unconfined universe.Walking across Oval Maidan becomes a mystical experience.
Wind on your eyelashes is a precious reward. The scent of night jasmine on the air is an unbelievable luxury.
He walks on, behind people like him, before people like him, people who spend their days in similar tombs, sell their days and freedom for an envelope with a cheque in it and a little slip with words like IT, PF, PP, LTA on it. Is this what it's all about? Is this as good as it gets? Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life, Jay?
What makes you think I have a choice?
chapter forty-six
Rs 62,534.80. That's the last figure on his Bank of lndia passbook as he turns away from the counter, frowning at the list of withdrawals over the last two months. Not long ago, if someone had told him he would acquire and spend nearly a lakh in a few months, he would have laughed. Now, he grimaces. After Rajiv Gandhi entered office as prime minister, the stock market has been jumping. Enforge has shot up to Rs 125 a share and Conrad asserts smugly that it will go on to touch 200 before the year is up. He is implying that Jay was a fool for selling early, and that irks Jay. Everything irks, irritates, frustrates or maddens Jay these days. Except for the things which disappoint, dishearten, dismay and disgust him. Since winning his stock market lottery, his frustration has become more intense, not less. Earlier, he had no hope of any other life except that which diligent application of his efforts to his Synergetics job could make possible. Having been struck by lightning, he cannot imagine how or why he can live without it. He has taken to scanning all the financial papers and magazines, searching for a stock which could win him a prize of the magnitude of Enforge. But some vital piece eludes him. He lacks the aptitude to make money through speculation. ln fact, he finds it impossible to believe that he has really earned this money. Which is why Tuli's comments stung him. This isn't earning; this is gambling.
But who cares—as long as the money keeps rolling in. And perhaps If he can build a sizeable enough fortune, he can get out of this whole rat race altogether. Unlike Conrad and Yogesh, Jay is unable to accept selling detergents as his lifelong occupation. The other day, glancing through the Oxford Book of English Poetry Volume III—one of his extravagant purchases in that exhilarated post-windfall shopping spree—he came across a line from a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins:
‘What I do is me: for that I came.’
The idea that one can choose one's way oflife, that an occupation is more than a means of earning a living; it is an expression of oneself, a fulfilment of one's life’s urge, a justification for existence. ‘What I do is me.’ Ah, if each of us could do whatever he pleases, what would we be? Surely that would be the most one could expect from life?
‘For that I came.'Why else?
And if one accepts this—he thinks as he gets down dreamily from the empty train at Churchgate—then surely the corollary would be that not to do what one truly desires would be... a crime? A sin? A tragedy? Pick any one. Jay feels a flash of heat scorch his chest; he smiles at a trio of college girls in tight ass-hugging jeans; they smile back; one even winks boldly. He walks all the way to office before he realizes he's forgotten to catch a cab as usual. He hardly feels he's walked so much. He wants to walk around the city, down the sunny streets, browsing t
he rows of second-hand books on the pavement, stopping to look at the publicity pictures in the marquees of cinema halls, watching old Parsi women feed pigeons in the parks, scanning the rows ofcheap shoes for sale on the pavement stalls, watching the firemen drill at the fire station near Metro, just walk, walk, until his feet ache and his throat itches for a cold glass of soda with fresh lime, cubes of ice rolling in the bubbling froth, condensation trickling thickly down the side of the glass.
But of course all this is just fantasy. How could he give up his job?
And his career? How would he survive? Never mind surviving, how would he be able to give Tuli the life she’s dreamed of? How would he build the castle of love and trust he’s desired ever since, as a boy of nine, he saw his best friend Bobby loved and cherished by two parents?
Our greatest needs are the simplest; but often, they are the most impossible to attain.
On an impulse, filled by an angst directed generally at the world, he decides to bunk work today. Fuck Dave. Fuck those damn printouts.
Standing at the edge of the curb across the street from the Synergetics office, he takes his foot off the tarred road and puts it back on the tiled pavement. Then he turns and starts walking. His back breaks out with drops of perspiration and the nape of his neck tingles with the anticipation of a familiar voice calling his name: ‘Jay! Hi, yaar! ’ but no voice calls out, no recognizable face confronts his as he turns the corner and is out of sight of the office, safe, free, free, FREE!
Tuli is still at her uncle’s flat. ‘Just about to leave.What is it?’ Come here and meet me.’
‘I’m coming, baba.’
‘No, not there. In town.’
‘Town? Where are you calling from?’
‘Fountain.’
‘Fountain? Oh, god. Office?’
‘No, no. Meet me in front of Sterling. Okay?’
‘Confused. ‘Sterling?’
‘You wanted to see Rocky, right?’
‘ Rocky III.’
‘Whatever. How soon can you make it? It’s an 11 o’clock show.’
‘I’ll be there by 11.’