The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  ‘I should be going now.’

  ‘Well, we never had a chance to look at your pictures.’

  ‘Next time?’

  She said nothing to encourage him to believe they might meet again.

  On the way down the narrow spiral staircase Rhea missed a step and Karan bucked forward to steady her. But the force of her pushed him down and she found herself on him. She hurriedly stood, turned, faced him, asked him if he was okay. Karan nodded before reaching to touch her ear lobe, the gentle, perfect thing. When his hand was on her sternum, she gasped, unsettled by his audacity. The touch was warm, assured, and she shook her head, as if to say no. But it was larger than either of them, desire as deep as a canyon.

  Neither did a thing, yet it happened, effortless as a breath.

  Rolling on the landing, they fought for and off each other, unhaunted by either shame or guilt.

  His tongue slid over her long neck, her elegant fingers. Her hands pulled off his white tee-shirt, revealing lean, firm flesh, perfect shoulders, a flat stomach. He relieved her off her cigarette pants, leaving her only in what was so obviously one of her husband’s office shirts. Parting her legs, he dove his head between her thighs. His tongue, moist and thick and interested, was like fingers parting the petals of a reluctant rose. She blamed herself for unbuttoning his jeans, but restraint seemed impossible. Flexing her hands over his legs, she was surprised to find his thighs muscled: from walking Bombay for miles, she imagined. She lay back on the landing, his tee-shirt bunched under her head, their bodies suffused in the dusk dribbling over them through a skylight. His movements were athletic, confident, and, once in her, he moved his pelvis gently, in small circles, as if he was stirring her. Grabbing his hips, she pulled him in, then out, halting the head of his organ at the onset of her hidden thing.

  She allowed him to lunge in.

  Her legs, wrapped around him until now, were freed to either side of her.

  She was in beautiful shock, unsure how any of this had happened. She avoided his eyes, held her face firmly down to one side. He continued to buck, her loins holding him captive, even as her mind floated over the innocuous details of her house, the painting on the wall, the useless curio on the desk, motes of dust banished under the door. When she came back, when her mind was shoved to its senses, to who she was, a married woman, he was about to climax—and she caught it expertly, the thick rain of an angry storm.

  6

  After an exhausting day of filming for a shampoo commercial at Film City, Zaira was counting on an evening out. She was dithering over her choice of earrings when the phone rang—again.

  She sounded so irritated as she answered, that Karan, who was at the other end, feared he had got the wrong number.

  ‘Swear I was going to hang up, Zaira,’ he said, wondering what had got into her.

  ‘If only you could see my room right now,’ she said in her defence. ‘There are mountains of skirts and piles of jackets; there are four shawls and two gowns and one halter-neck top on the floor. My room looks like a football stadium. I just cannot decide what to wear; it’s brought me to the conclusion that one of the finest uses for a man is having him choose what to wear for the night.’

  ‘Most guys are awful with such things, you know.’

  ‘Not Samar; I’d wear a sackcloth he put his fingers on.’ There was silence for a moment and then she gave a long, troubled sigh.

  ‘Something on your mind, Zaira?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been getting some cheap calls over the last hour.’ She tried to press the anxiety out of her voice. ‘Nothing to worry about, yaar.’

  ‘Okay, but who was it?’

  ‘Don’t bleed over it…’

  ‘If you say that, it’s precisely what I’m going to do.’

  ‘I mean it, Karan. Just forget it.’ She slammed a tube of mascara on the dressing table.

  ‘Hey, Zaira, cool it.’

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped…’ She admired Karan’s decision to stand up to her; his voice was gentle but firm. ‘I’m having a difficult day.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s been a rough day; I hope it improves now.’

  ‘It will—after I decide what I’m wearing for Samar’s party tonight.’

  ‘And I’m calling about the party; will you write me off as a total rat if I cancel on dinner plans this evening?’

  ‘Not a total rat. But I’ll certainly file you under “Mouse”. What happened?’

  ‘Some work. Came up last minute.’ Iqbal had asked him to cover an awards function at the Taj.

  ‘Come afterward,’ she encouraged.

  Karan considered her offer. Although he would have been happy to head home and hit the sack, the prospect of spending time with Zaira was not without its charms. He was interested by her but not in her; she felt the same way about him. Both were aware of this, and found it remarkably liberating. ‘Okay if I show up around midnight?’

  ‘Expect me to be totally toasted by midnight. But then, sobriety is so overrated.’ She put down the phone and studied the lipsticks on her dressing table, her fingers carefully inspecting each tube before deciding on a dazzling shade of rogue red.

  By the time Karan ankled it over to Samar’s party, it was swinging despite a power cut.

  The velvet, whispering darkness, punctuated by fickle-flamed candles, revealed exuberant revellers milling about on the lawn. No sooner had he entered the gate than a soft, warm hand gripped his arm, led him across the green, down the terrazzo, into the living room with its stark, white walls and up the staircase to the terrace.

  Zaira lay back on the stone tiles, plonked a bottle of bubbly between them and stared at a jumble of stars without so much as a word. The crowds roiled on below.

  ‘How’re you?’ He was catching his breath as he sat beside her.

  ‘I’m overwhelmed,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m working my way toward whelmed.’

  Music, electronic, low bass, electric and gritty, rose up like a gauze of sexual memory.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘I ate after the awards ceremony; thanks for asking, Zaira. Why do you like to hang out on the roof?’

  ‘That’s the only way I can enjoy a party: drinking alone. All the slick chatter inaudible, and so far away. Years ago, Samar put the idea into my head and I’ve been hooked ever since. When Samar and I did it people said we were nutcases or fussy, but how else do you deal with the screwball jitters?’

  ‘Parties make me nervous too. I avoid them as much as possible.’

  ‘In that case, I owe you double thanks for coming, Karan.’ She touched his shoulder. His company enlivened her; she felt safe and suddenly content. Looking up at the big, dirty sky she felt there was no place she would rather be.

  ‘Well, being up here makes it a lot easier for me. Do Samar and you still do your rooftop rendezvous?’

  ‘Not any longer. Leo caught us one time and said it was too dangerous. I guess,’ she said without conviction, ‘Leo does have a point. By the way, I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier today.’

  ‘Who was calling you all day?’

  ‘Have you heard the phrase “asshole’s asshole”?’

  Malik had been calling her repeatedly, she told him, proposing marriage. After she had slammed the phone on him for the fifth time, he had called back, sounding manic, ranting about picking out her guts with a butcher’s blade.

  ‘Aha, that’s a new one,’ Karan said, ‘but it’s custom cut for the creature at hand.’ Now he knew why she had sounded so cheesed off when he had called her.

  ‘Why doesn’t Malik just give up? I’ve tried everything, you know.’

  ‘You should report him to the police. Samar was right all along.’

  ‘I’ve complained before…And where has it got me? You know the police in this city. You could buy them off for a few thousand, and Minister Prasad has more than that to play with.’ She said she could hear so much booze in Malik’s voice that he could pass for a bar.

&nbs
p; ‘That’s not just booze you hear in his voice; apparently the minister’s munda likes his coke by the ball.’

  The hair on Zaira’s neck stiffened. ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘A stringer at the magazine was going to run a story on the neta lot who get high as a kite every other night. Delhi’s teeming with scumbags who get off on group sex in farmhouses, where heroin comes on the same platter as pakoras. And now this same lot has landed up in Bombay…’

  ‘Did India Chronicle ever run the story?’

  ‘Minister Prasad got wind of the piece and got higher-ups to scrap it.’

  ‘See what I mean? That man can do whatever he likes.’ Her rage was amputated by helplessness.

  ‘You really should tell the police, Zaira. They should have Malik on file.’

  An awkward, jittery silence followed. Zaira turned toward him, her head on her elbow. ‘How’s your love life?’

  ‘Excellent!’ he replied. ‘Non-existent. Almost.’

  ‘You said her name was Rhea Dalal?’

  ‘Yes—and I met her thanks to you.’

  Zaira gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘You sent me to Chor Bazaar; that’s where I met her.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, I doubt it’s going anywhere; she’s married and all that.’

  ‘Like that’s stopped anyone before.’

  ‘We went up to Sewri to shoot the flamingoes. We’ve been around Bombay scouting subjects for my project. She’s got one cunning eye.’

  ‘Hope her eye is the only cunning thing about her. I’ve met one too many kaminis in a kurti, and you’d never ever guess.’

  ‘You sound suspicious.’

  ‘I am; don’t you think it’s strange that she’s chosen to help you in this manner?’

  ‘Maybe she’s foolish enough to believe in my work.’

  ‘Anyone would believe in your work, Karan. It’s singular and exceptional, and it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out you’re going to go places. What’s with the husband?’

  ‘He lives away for part of the month, in Singapore. He manages a hedge fund there.’

  ‘So she’s a lonely housewife…’

  ‘She’s not lonely; she likes alone. I gather the arrangement with her husband works for both of them…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They need time apart to stay together.’

  ‘But if she likes to be alone then why does she want to hang out with you?’

  After a minute he said, ‘Because she was once an artist on the verge of something special…But she surrendered it for domesticity.’

  Zaira closed her eyes. ‘So that’s what’s going on. She met you in the bazaar and loved your work. Her life allows her the time to take you around Bombay. A part of her believes she can fulfil through you now what she gave up in her younger days.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Zaira,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Has it occurred to you that she might be attracted to me?’

  ‘Why does every man assume that just because a woman might enjoy his company she’s wet in her panties each time she sees him?’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘I’m sure she has the hots for you,’ she said warmly. ‘Who wouldn’t? But what I’m trying to get a handle on is, if she’s happy in her marriage then why would she mess around?’

  ‘Are you asking me to be careful?’

  ‘I’m asking you if you know your stop. If it’s a fling, treat it like one; if it’s more, figure out what’s more. And you should do it quick; you sound like you’re really into her.’

  Karan had grown to relish the arbitrary, opaque charms of Rhea Dalal, and the conversation made him uneasy. He decided to move on from the topic. ‘Were you ever wound up around someone?’

  ‘Like you are around Rhea?’ Zaira said with a grin.

  He blushed so deeply it could have shown even in the darkness.

  ‘Yes, when I was younger,’ she said. ‘Sahil and I were engaged during my last year in college. He wanted me to settle down, play wife, breed like a bunny. Would you believe it if I told you I was totally game?’

  ‘What did your folks have to say about Sahil?’

  ‘Folks? My mother died at childbirth. When I was three my father remarried and then decided to return me to my grandmother. She was a seamstress with the nawab in Hyderabad; I grew up in this rambling old royal pad with hundreds of doves in the courtyard. When I was twenty, my grandmother died of a stroke.’

  ‘Did you like your grandmother?’

  ‘No, I loved her. She made the best biryani ever. She was there for me when I had nightmares.’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘Nightmares plagued my adolescence; I’d wake screaming.’

  ‘What was your scariest nightmare?’

  Zaira thought for a while, then said, ‘I was in a noisy, crowded room. A man was chasing me. No one seemed to notice us. I felt invisible; my screams were heard by no one. Only he could see me. He cornered me and came so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. Then he said, I am afraid of love, and his words were loud as thunder. I would wake at this point in a cold sweat. My grandmother was always there, holding my hand when I bolted up. She was everything to me…until Samar came along and snapped me up for four rupees and fifty paise.’

  ‘I’d say Samar got a steal. And your grandmother sounds like an empress.’

  ‘She was only a seamstress but her ordinary circumstances didn’t prevent her heart from being extraordinary.’

  ‘How did you cope with her passing?’

  ‘I was with Sahil at the time. He tried to comfort me. But I needed to be alone; I left for Kashmir. An odd thing happened in Srinagar. A director spotted me in a rose garden, and he asked me if I wanted to act. I said yes, not because his offer was particularly appealing but I was ready to do anything to get the sorrow out of my head. And if it meant dancing around trees, I was sold.’

  ‘So you said yes.’

  ‘When I did, Sahil had a duck fit. He ordered me to call the director and back out on the acting job in Bombay. Saala, control freak! I called off the engagement on principle; I was ready to be married but not to be owned.’

  ‘Did the break-up take you out?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I moved to Bombay. Put up as a PG in Goregaon. My first film was such a spectacular bore even I couldn’t bear to sit through it.’

  ‘But your second film, Murad, more than made up.’ Karan had watched Murad in Shimla, amid a clamour of catcalls and wolf whistles; one man was thrown out of the hall after he was caught masturbating into a popcorn bag. ‘The film was, as the trade press calls it, a Super Hit. You looked like you could start a forest fire.’

  ‘Forest fire?’ she repeated, embarrassed by his compliment. ‘Most days I can’t even get the stove going.’

  ‘Your life must have really taken off after Murad.’

  ‘And how! I travelled the world. I attended obscure film festivals and sat through difficult, oddball French flicks. I read reviews, tossed even the most flattering ones in the bin. The film was screened in so many countries I couldn’t even identify the language some of my fan mail came in.’

  ‘I remember, at one point one couldn’t drive a mile without seeing your face plastered on a billboard or pick up a magazine that didn’t have you on its cover.’

  ‘I’m sorry. When fame crosses over into ubiquity, it makes one obnoxious. And ubiquity was never my intention; it just became an occupational hazard.’ She stroked her neck. ‘I did seven films over the next four years and then I felt like the flashbulbs were going to bust my eyeballs. I took off for a year.’

  In her gap year, Zaira travelled through Mexico, spent a month in Sienna learning how to cook, conducted a short, smutty affair with a Cuban dancer, following which she made a beeline for Bombay because there was no other place she would rather call home. In the autumn of her idleness, at a party in Bandra, she stumbled upon a man in a roguish red turban, black tee-shirt and slim-fit indigo jeans hiding under a gia
nt palm leaf, sipping a Bellini all by himself.

  She asked the little imp if she might join him. He nodded.

  ‘When you look at people from this angle, they all seem wonderfully unique,’ Samar had observed, raising his glass to the crowd before them. ‘As if God hand-picks each and every bottom.’

  ‘I for one have never believed that eyes were the window to the soul.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call the ass a window to the soul,’ he hurried to clarify. ‘Although some asses are profoundly soulful in their own way.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she complained, ‘I haven’t seen one like that tonight.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  They spent the evening conjuring up the lives of the guests before them, ascribing fictional fates to each one. The model in the slinky black dress was actually a man, he told her; he had worked as a pearl diver in Sri Lanka and had his toes bitten off by a maneating turtle. She pointed to the painter in the head wrap, claiming he was going to die the following Thursday, collapsing face down on his last and most significant canvas; they sighed together at the loss of an extraordinary painting, destroyed by the painter’s untimely, inelegant death. She added that the most attractive woman in the party had the blood of a demon in her veins. He promptly confirmed her suspicions, saying that on full-moon nights she sported a forked tail and prowled in wait for weedy waifs on Grant Road.

  The hour before dawn arrived while the city’s well-heeled were still downing martinis and shooting up. He asked her if she would go for the morning prayers at the Babulnath temple. They fled in stealth, and got to the temple in time for the dawn aarti. Bells tolled; the pandit recited shlokas; devotees poured milk over an obsidian black lingam.

  On the way out, Zaira’s booze buzz wearing out, she burbled, ‘Will you…be my friend?’

  Samar hooted aloud. ‘No one’s asked me that since the fourth standard!’

  ‘You must have had bad breath a long time,’ she retorted, thrilled she had inspired in this goofy, adorable man laughter as loud as applause.