The early days with Samar always reminded Zaira of the monsoon: moist and savage gales that burst open the bolted doors of her soul in a great and transformative ravage. She bloomed, for she had met a man who could tap dance and fry up a frittata and had arms wide enough to make her feel safe. Spending more time with him, often waking on his beat-up old couch, she found that her relief sank deep into her bones.
One morning, over coffee and eggs, she said theatrically, ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘You’re pregnant?’
‘Yes!’ She laughed, tossing a Bollywood formula line: ‘I’m going to be the mother of your child!’
‘Oh, hon!’ Samar slapped his thigh. ‘I’ve said that to a dozen guys already and it hasn’t stopped even one of them from leaving.’
‘I’m a kleptomaniac, Samar.’
Her confession left him unfazed.
‘I like to steal flowers, only flowers,’ she disclosed. ‘At night. From gardens, public or private.’
‘Heard of Dubash House?’ She stole a glance at him; he looked perfectly serious.
The giant fortress-like abode on Napean Sea Road was rumoured to have wild jasmine, an orchard of frangipani and giant gulmohars. ‘I’ve wanted to break into their garden from the time I set foot in Bombay!’
On the night they stole flowers from Dubash House, she kissed him.
‘That’s really hetero-erotic,’ Samar said, pulling away. ‘But I’m not into that shit.’
At the door to his cottage, Samar reminded her that just because he had no boyfriend didn’t mean he was looking for a girlfriend. Her face tore up like fine lace.
They were in his kitchen; on the floor lay frangipani, long, mottled branches, some of which had grazed her luscious arms.
‘We can be more than lovers,’ Samar said. ‘If you like.’
She started to tidy the table, as if enacting gestures of domesticity might allow her to claim it.
‘The price of tomatoes has gone up,’ he said, watching her every move.
‘What does sex have to do with the price of tomatoes?’
‘Good point!’ he said. ‘What does sex have to do with anything?’
She threw a plate in his direction.
‘I’m glad it’s not my Limoges,’ Samar responded calmly, although he was impossibly relieved that she had missed. ‘But that still doesn’t mean you can trash my crockery just because we won’t fuck in this lifetime.’
‘This is not about fucking!’ The scream in her voice couldn’t match the scream in her head.
‘Actually, it is. And I’d rather have a man, as would you. We’re in the same boat, sunshine: so, you can either go down shit creek with me or you can row solo.’
She left him.
She returned to acting. Her directors were frazzled to see the number of retakes she needed to get one scene right; a producer went as far as to replace her.
After the rage in her despair calmed, she recognized how she had insulted Samar.
She showed up at his place one night, so late even the moon had sunk. ‘Let’s go down shit creek together,’ she said as he opened the door.
‘Too late: I’ve pulled in my canoe.’
‘Don’t be a spoilsport.’
‘I thought of stealing flowers,’ Samar said, ‘but it wouldn’t have been the same without you.’ Acknowledging it made him realize he had missed her with a sharp, stabbing pain. ‘You ever wonder why you’re so hooked on to this idiot pianist?’
‘Low blood sugar? Early stage dementia? Compulsive Pianist Disorder?’
‘All of those can cloud your judgement, for sure.’
When he said something to the effect that perhaps she was inherently suspicious of straight men, she sat up.
Her father had walked out on her, he reminded her.
Zaira replied that she had never taken it to heart. After a moment, she added, ‘Don’t ever use anything I trust you with against me.’
‘In the larger scheme of things,’ Samar said, ‘I used it against myself.’
That summer a fan showed up on the set of Zaira’s film with a litter of whippets and asked her to choose one. Picking out a fragile white puppy, she took it over to Samar’s.
He was overjoyed. ‘I want to call him Mr Ward-Davies.’
‘Cool name.’
‘Mr Ward-Davies was my favourite piano teacher in New York; a Brit who introduced me to the pleasures of drinking absinthe.’
‘Glad you like the pup, Samar.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want him with you full-time?’
‘I’ll borrow him on weekends. That’s if he’ll have me at all. I’m hardly around, so I’d rather he shack up with you.’ Neither of them knew it at the time, but Mr Ward-Davies became the love letter she sent to him and he opened the seal and read it with all his heart for all of hers.
‘He’s in the running for my main man.’
The same evening, over dinner at China Garden, Samar asked Zaira if she would introduce him to men.
She tried not to look upset by his request. ‘Surely you’ve met enough boys on your own?’
‘Most of them are from the city of New Dulli!’
‘Not all of them are that boring.’
‘True, true; but the ones who’re not are selfish, or they split their infinitives.’
‘I hardly ever meet men in Bombay who’re out of the closet.’
‘The few who are out and about are so ugly they should stay in their closets. In fact,’ he added wickedly, ‘they should be locked from the outside.’
‘What a mean thing to say!’
‘I’ll rot in hell for that,’ he said. ‘But I hear the bar up in Devilsville makes a martini to murder for. Are you going to get me a guy to groove with?’
‘I’ll try my best.’ Her voice suggested something in her had dried up forever. ‘But remember what I told you: I’m going to be the mother of your child.’
‘We’re on, girl!’
Zaira took his request seriously because Samar never asked her for anything. Although she met several men at work, all possible candidates—costume designers, stylists, film directors—none of the men seemed to fit the bill for Samar. She realized she had quite a task cut out for her when one ambitious architect told her that he only dated ‘straight-acting’ men. When she repeated the remark to Samar, he grimaced. ‘How straight-acting will he be when he’s got my dick in his mouth?’
Then, just when she thought she was running on empty, she met Leo at a party in Delhi.
Dumpy Roy, a literary critic with a certain distinctive presence, like mould on bread, introduced them.
‘Leo writes for the N________. It’s a magazine in America. Surely, you’ve heard of it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Zaira assured the literary critic. ‘America is south of Calcutta, right?’
‘I meant the N_______!’ Dumpy Roy had so many opinions she no longer had any room for common sense. ‘It’s, well, dare I say, legendary?’
‘I hear the cartoons are excellent.’
For a moment, Leo felt as if she might have been talking about more than the magazine that published his work. ‘I’ve been wanting to interview you for a long time,’ he admitted.
‘Do N_______ readers watch Bollywood films?’
‘I wouldn’t surrender to the stereotype.’
‘You’re right,’ she apologized. ‘I’m making no sense at all; I must be hopelessly sober. Why don’t we meet up in Bombay?’
When Leo and Zaira met up in Bombay, she unravelled his life story.
Leo had been drawn to India during his university days at Berkeley, not because of some corny new-age faith but because his thesis had been on contemporary Indian films. Zaira was impressed that Leo knew all about Yash Chopra’s romantic opuses, Rekha’s numerous lovers, the labour union the dance extras were struggling to form. He told her serious cinema was on the descending elevator in India; he knew that Bollywood posters were an art form unto themselves. Leo’s first book, Old Gul
lies, which had established his credentials as a writer, had been praised by critics for authorial acuity and a spry, unaffected facility with language.
Zaira was not sure if Samar and Leo were destined for long-term bliss but she suspected they would enjoy the cocktail hour.
‘He’s wonderfully erudite,’ she told Samar.
‘He’s from America!’ he retorted.
‘You’re so rude.’
‘He probably thinks the Middle East is Vermont.’
She laughed, then reached out and punched him gently. ‘Stop it! His book, Old Gullies, was nominated for the National Book Award. He’s one of the youngest recipients of a Guggenheim scholarship. His work has been translated into twelve languages!’
Samar listened intently, vaguely impressed. ‘And you’re sure he’s not the kind of fellow who’s going to tell me he loves “Indian culture” or that he’s just had his chakras tuned?’
‘I don’t know about Leo, but you could do with some tuning. Why don’t you just meet him and make up your mind for yourself?’
To Zaira’s amazement, Samar took to Leo like a duck to water. In a couple of weeks Samar dropped off Mr Ward-Davies in her care for a month because he was accompanying Leo on his trek through rural Gujarat. Zaira was glad Samar was going on holiday but she worried that his impulsive affections were, in fact, inspired by an extended season of sexual loneliness. Later, on his return, Samar furnished a full account of the adventure she concluded was a honeymoon that came before the marriage that could never be. The two men had slept on charpoys in villages with outdoor lavatories and woken with roosters crowing against the taut cheek of a crimson dawn. Savouring blood-red berries with no names and arguing about books they had read in their adolescence, they formed a kinship larger than the sum of the differences between them.
‘I told Zaira I didn’t want to meet an American bimbo who came here in search of mantras.’
Leo grinned. ‘Aren’t I lucky you thought so highly of me.’
‘When did you know India was your subject?’ Samar asked; they were on their way to a lion reserve.
‘From my early twenties. Every writer has a sense where his big book is coming from; I’ve always known mine would be a gift from India.’
‘Will the book be travel writing, or a novel, or essays?’
‘I don’t know, Samar; I just know India will give me the book that will be savoured. And remembered.’
Two days later, in the forests of Gir, they huddled in a beige canvas tent, trembling in each other’s arms: a lioness had killed a calf near their campsite and was devouring it noisily with her pride only inches away from them.
They spent the last week of their travels on the terrace of a lost castle, swimming at midnight in a monsoon-green pond on the rambling estate. Samar was ecstatic. How beautiful their bodies tasted, how free was the wind against their faces, how sweet the daybreak music of a brook running wild.
‘Come with me to San Francisco,’ Leo said on the last day of their trip.
‘I’d love to,’ Samar replied.
When Samar told Zaira he was going away with Leo she heard a deafening sound in her head, as if bats, thousands of them, were thundering out of a cave into a milky violet sky before nightfall.
‘I’ll be gone only for two months.’
‘You’ll miss this city.’
‘And you.’
‘Why are you going?’
‘Leo spends much of his year in Bombay; it’s only fair I go along with him when he’s on his turf.’
‘Mr Ward-Davies will miss you,’ she said. ‘He’ll die without you.’
This is San Francisco, Samar wrote to Zaira from Leo’s apartment. You can smell sex in the air: the gangbangs in warehouses in Portero Hill, the fisting seminars in the Castro, three black men in nuns’ habits rollerblading on Market Street ‘for love’, the woman who slept with all the firemen and built them a monument, a white tower I can see from my bedroom window. Hands lunge at you at parties; sex feels like someone peeling the skin over a wound. But there are also marches in this city, demonstrations, protests, vital public introspection. At the end of the day, when love and politics collide, who is left standing?
A few days after he wrote the letter, Samar called Zaira and told her he was restless. He wanted to come back.
‘Then why don’t you?’ Zaira’s old greed for Samar twisted brightly with hope.
‘I don’t want to abandon Leo.’
‘Doesn’t he want to come back too?’
‘He needs to be here right now.’
‘I feel there’s something you’re keeping from me.’
A long sigh unfurled. ‘Perhaps Leo doesn’t want me around.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He’s lived alone all his adult life. I’m in his space, and feel like an intrusion.’
‘I’m sure he’ll get over it. Teething troubles are part of every relationship, Samar.’
‘How is Mr Ward-Davies?’
‘He misses you so much,’ she said. ‘He sulks in the corner. I have to force him to eat. I’m afraid he’s decided to up and quit without you.’
‘Then I’d better come back and see him soon.’
Samar decided to confront Leo one night, about how he felt he had gatecrashed Leo’s life.
‘You’re right. I feel the need to be alone,’ Leo said when he saw Samar sit up in bed, sleepless, grumpy.
‘Then you should have told me.’
‘I wasn’t conscious of my need for independence myself; I didn’t have reason to be.’
Four months had passed since Samar’s move to San Francisco. Limerance having worn, they were weary of each other.
‘But don’t you like that I’m here with you?’
‘Of course I do…But you’re not your usual self.’
‘I guess I’m missing Mr Ward-Davies.’
‘Do you want to go and see him?’
‘Yes. But if I leave, it would also be because I feel like I have intruded into your life, Leo.’
‘I haven’t lived with anyone before you; I don’t know how to roll it as it plays.’
‘You think I’m having a blast playing “The Couple”?’
Outside their window, thick curtains of fog were melting under the first sallow shafts of sunlight.
‘I haven’t spent a whole night with anyone except the tricks I used to pull; anonymity is comforting.’
‘I can’t sleep with someone in my bed either.’ He thought of Zaira, of how she crashed on his couch, a thoughtfulness he’d always taken for granted.
‘I love you, Samar.’ Leo struggled with the intricate, mercurial force of his feelings: although he enjoyed Samar’s company in San Francisco he liked his lair to himself.
‘Don’t say it unless you mean it.’
They decided it was more sensible to split up their time between San Francisco and Bombay, an amicable middle path. Early on, Leo had cut out monogamy from their relationship on the grounds that he wasn’t about to go ‘all hetero’ on them. Samar had retorted that he really had to give breeders the benefit of the doubt, forcing Leo to admit that he just wasn’t wired for fidelity. At this point Samar had decided that sometimes you took what you could get and made the best of it; after all, a man’s a man, and there were any number of old queens who had waited for the whole samosa and had ended up, instead, with a collection of butt plugs they took along to heaven.
He returned to Bombay.
A few weeks later a postcard arrived, with three words on it: I mean it.
‘I guess there are all kinds of love stories,’ Karan told Zaira now.
She smiled in the liquid darkness. ‘And the most important ones are also incredibly difficult.’
‘I had no idea about the nature of your feelings for Samar.’
‘Neither did I! But then he’s a small guy with a huge heart, and his generosity makes him my hero in a one-act nonsense play I could watch every night for the rest of my life.’
&nbs
p; ‘You stepped back. You let him go with Leo.’
‘He was never mine for me to let go.’ She felt a chill and tightened her arms around herself. ‘Souls get stuck in bodies. What the soul needs is one thing and what the body desires is quite another, and what a lot of love is lost in the space between the two.’
‘Did you ever look for someone after Samar?’
She lingered on Karan’s words: after Samar. But, she wanted to tell him, she was not ahead of him, he was not behind her, she did not believe that love affairs ended simply because lovers took on other lovers. Although conventional wisdom prompted her to ‘move on’, she had no say in the matter: for love rushed through her like a river, touching and transforming everything in its path but keeping its eye only on its final destination. ‘Samar tried hard to hook me up with all the guys he knew,’ she said after a pause. ‘He was happy, he said; so now it was my turn.’
‘Did you meet any interesting candidates?’
‘Interesting candidates?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I met half the single guys in Bombay, and they sent me straight into therapy, yaar!’
Zaira told him about Leo’s friend, the music composer who on their first date savaged her with a full-on six-hour session of Punjabi hip-hop compositions. Then there was Samar’s friend, the chef who assaulted Zaira with the worst pickup line: ‘Baby, let’s Kama Sutra!’ She came home singing, You can’t curry love, no, you just can’t curry love, and declared that Samar’s selection in men would put her off sex forever.
But she could not blame Samar because she had already met every kind of man in Bombay: the Bollywood producer with a belly so big he hadn’t seen his wee-wee in years, who dropped his pants before every bucolic bimbette with romance-novel boobs; the hunk on the cover of Stardust who owned a museum-sized collection of tit clamps; the fan who inscribed her name in his blood and sent her such letters with abiding regularity. She had met men who liked to wear elegant silk saris and be called Miss Maharani and others who howled at the moon because they had been dispossessed by the women they never imagined could abandon them. Men with fake accents and big mouths; men with a strut in their walk and a shake in their voice; men with far too much moolah and men without a chavanni to their name (these men wrote poems, were often drunk, and died before turning forty, unmourned, anonymous). Men, short and thick, who reminded her of whale blubber; men so thin you could use them as bookmarks; men with eyes that seldom blinked, like geckoes in business suits. Artists, bankers, directors, spot boys, journalists, animal trainers, plumbers, intellectuals—men of every colour, stripe and odour had passed her gaze, and she had learnt to acknowledge them with both respect and aloofness, to accept their flaws and fête their transitory virtues.
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 9