And tonight Zaira lay beside Karan Seth, whose bumbling, sweet air she cherished more than his strange, lamenting photographs of Bombay.
‘Did you ever see Sahil again?’
‘He came to see me on a film set once,’ she said, sounding bored. ‘He had a wife and two kids. They looked like the people you see in mutual fund advertisements.’
‘You must be glad you got away.’
‘Sometimes I am.’
Clamour from the party below distracted Karan. He got up to see why people were cheering loudly and his eyes zoned in on the pool. ‘Samar’s cummerbund,’ he remarked, ‘makes for a curious bathing suit accessory.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
Below, in the evaporating crowd, a champagne flute fell to the floor. She imagined the pieces, jagged yet elegant; she knew the flute was useless now, but in her mind the shards held a peculiar, terrified beauty, scattered in the darkness, reflecting moonlight and the textured silk of dry, uneven laughter.
7
‘There are some churches in the Bandra villages I want you to see.’
‘I’m not religious,’ Karan said, casting admiring glances at Rhea’s flowing grey dress, which accented her body’s angular, stark lines.
She changed the gear, slowing down as they approached a traffic light. ‘Then it’s time you were converted.’
He felt she was talking about more than their visit to Bandra.
At Carter Road, she stopped outside a chapel and pointed at the ancient fretwork balconies. However, the chapel did not interest Karan. He turned around and crossed the road; he had spotted a derelict mansion with an out-of-use fire exit of arabesque beauty, a metal helix that seemed to end in the air, abruptly. She heard the quick, excited clicks of the shutter release. When he was done, Karan turned to Rhea. ‘I’m not particularly taken by beauty.’
‘Then what are you after?’
‘Truth.’
Gazing at the conviction in his eyes she found herself transported back to her past, to an industrious afternoon in the studio at college, where she was working on the wheel, throwing, glazing. The extravagant words of her tutor’s praise reverberated in her head like the concentric swathe of music from a gong that has just been struck; she remembered the leathery-skinned Parsi gallerist who had approached her to exhibit her graduation project, ‘Sight, Unseen’. Most of all, she remembered herself possessed with steely focus, with secret curiosity for the impressions of her art.
Having forsaken that determined young woman on the day she married, Rhea was now heartened to meet the echo of those qualities in Karan; secretly she wished the ingenious mayhem of art’s single-minded pursuit of itself would never leave him, as it had her. Emerging from the haze of recollection, she said, ‘But beauty is truth.’
‘I try to see things for what they are.’ He sounded defiant.
‘That’s impossible; nothing is what it seems.’
‘Well, what about this fire exit? What else could it be but a captive to its ruin?’
‘In its early years beautiful people would have thundered down its curves. Lovers would have waited below it, drenched in rain or moonlight. Drunks could have slipped and fallen down the steps to their death.’
‘But right now it is what it is,’ he argued. ‘And that’s what I’m keen to capture in my pictures.’
She didn’t know which was larger, his talent or his earnestness; the former she found admirable, the latter forgivable. ‘It would be quite cricket to die in Bandra, amid the wreckage and splendour.’
‘All of Bandra has an air of impermanence; I’ve come here before, dozens of times, but you’ve shown me Bandra in another light, Rhea.’
‘You came alone?’
‘Most of the time. But twice Zaira brought me here, late at night.’
‘You have quite a soft spot for her.’
He hunted for jealousy in Rhea’s voice, but worryingly found none. ‘She’s been a great friend.’
‘She seems to trust you immensely.’
‘The first time we met, she was in crisis mode. A stalker had rammed her trailer to pieces. She had come up to see Samar in a panic. Unfortunately, I was there to do a shoot with him and she was paranoid I was going to photograph her during a meltdown. No such thing happened; the media never learned of her breakdown in Samar’s arms. She was grateful for my discretion.’
‘But you would have been like that with anyone,’ Rhea said.
‘Exactly. But I was also drawn to her. Once I was caught in a mad crowd at the premiere of her film and she sent her publicist in her car to ensure I was treated by a doctor. And she’s had genuine regard for my work on Bombay; if you recall, I went to Chor Bazaar because she insisted on it. Once or twice she even drove me around Bombay to suggest the places she thought would work for the project.’
‘So I have a predecessor?’ Now she sounded jealous.
‘Yes. But she had to drive me after midnight, for reasons of anonymity. There was little I could photograph in the dark. And when I returned to the same places at daytime, I did not find them half as inspiring. Besides,’ he said loyally, ‘your aesthetic and hers are entirely different.’
‘Shall we go and light a few candles at the shrine of Mount Mary?’
‘Why not? We’re in the neighbourhood, in any event.’
‘I used to come to Mount Mary very often when I was in my twenties. Oh, how much I’ve prayed here!’ She halted, her hand cupping her mouth, regret lodged in her eyes like shrapnel.
‘What did you pray for, Rhea?’
She walked ahead without replying and bought a dozen candles from a bright-eyed, legless, adolescent vendor in a Coca-Cola emblazoned tee-shirt. As they ascended the steps leading to the shrine, she enquired, ‘So did Samar ever come with you on the nights Zaira and you drove around Bombay?’
‘No; I’m not all that chummy with him. Zaira had suggested that he come along but I wanted to do the trip only with her.’
Lighting a clutch of thin white tapers, she placed them to burn before the idol of Mother Mary. ‘It’s strange that you would not ask Samar to join you even though you know Zaira because of him.’ She wiped her hands clean and gestured to him to light the candles she had handed to him.
‘I guess…I guess Samar and I have no common interests.’
Witch-fingers of candles burned bravely against the rapid wind, melting into sooty, gnarled heaps on a metal tray.
She said, ‘Samar has a boyfriend…’
The candles lurched out of Karan’s hands and he sat on his haunches to gather them.
‘Yes, I know. I have met him.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘No…no…not at all. To each his own.’
‘Are you cool with Leo?’
‘Well…’ He grew red-faced. ‘What are you insinuating?’
‘Well, to be blunt, I think you’re not comfortable with Samar because he has a boyfriend.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ he said, more loudly than he had intended. ‘Samar is not someone I think about very much.’
‘Although you don’t mind going to his house for dinners?’
‘That’s only when Zaira invites me there; I don’t hang out with him one on one.’
She looked at him, disbelieving.
He tried to explain his unease around Samar. ‘He’s too loud, Rhea. He’s always seeking attention. When he’s not tap dancing on a bar he’s standing in the pool in a tux. He’s always being funny and clever; he’s trying too hard.’
‘Too hard to win some gold stars from you?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Wow; someone should send Samar a news flash that he just doesn’t make your grade.’
‘Are you taking me on about something?’
‘What I pity is that I’ve got to take you on about this. You probably think he squats to take a leak.’
‘I didn’t think you could be so coarse.’ He was breathing through his mouth; rage was filling his head but he didn’t want it to show on hi
s face. ‘Anyway, where shall we go next? Another village in Bandra?’
‘As far as I’m concerned we’ve covered too much ground for one day.’ It was as if she had slammed a door on his face.
‘Are you pissed off with me, Rhea?’
‘I’m not anything with you.’
‘I don’t hate Samar or anything like that.’
‘And certainly not because he’s got a boyfriend.’
‘Are you getting a kick out of this?’
‘Out of what?’
‘Making me feel small about myself?’
‘Am I making you feel small about yourself or are you too lazy to confront your own prejudice?’
‘Whatever.’
He tried to keep calm by telling himself she had got up at dawn and taken him to Sewri; she had sat him down and talked to him about the ways to use colour; she had introduced him to the best photo lab in Bombay.
Rhea believed that Karan’s explanation for resisting Samar because he was ‘too loud’ was cheesy; she would much rather he own up to his prejudice than flit around it. ‘Grow up,’ she said. ‘And make it quick: from the sound of it, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Oh, please, Rhea, give it a rest,’ he barked. ‘You shouldn’t be giving me a hard time over some flashy fag.’
‘You shouldn’t try so hard to prove my point.’ She started to walk toward her car. ‘And I will take your advice: I’ll give it a rest.’
With astonishing alacrity, Karan found himself consigned to the last drawer of Rhea’s memory. On several occasions, he picked up the phone to call her, but pride came in the way. Three weeks of intolerable isolation ensued. Karan resumed his work on the photographs but when he printed the shots he found the decisive link between his taking pictures and understanding them now missing; Rhea’s language had come to illuminate his pictures, restrained excess and egged him forward. He felt restless and angry, like a caged animal, captive to a personal isolation even as the city continued to breathe its toxic, black fumes down his neck. Finally, desperate for chit-chat, Karan called Zaira a little after midnight.
‘Am I interrupting?’
‘Not at all.’ Zaira was delighted to hear from Karan. ‘You are only interjecting in the conversation I was having with myself. The terrible thing about talking to yourself is not having a third person for a second opinion.’
‘So we can call you schizo?’ He knew he could trust Zaira to cheer him up.
‘Schizophrenic? I’ve been in two minds about that forever.’
He laughed. Then he whispered, ‘Are you alone? Can you talk?’ He wanted to tell Zaira about his row with Rhea.
Zaira said Samar was meant to come for dinner but had cancelled at the last minute as Leo had plans for them to be elsewhere. ‘So, sure, I can talk. Why are you up so late?’
‘To keep tabs on your debauched existence.’
‘I wish!’ She lay down on her bed. ‘You give me way too much credit.’
‘Are you put off that Samar bailed on dinner at the last minute?’
‘Not at all.’ Her voice aimed for nonchalance but got only as far as the glums. ‘I wish I’d been told in time; at least then I wouldn’t have cooked a seven-course meal.’
‘You cooked seven courses!’
‘See what I mean? You give me way too much credit.’ She giggled. ‘Actually, it’s biryani I bought and a salad I threw together but maybe that explains why Samar’s been a no-show.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I was waiting for you to drop in for some nosh.’
On his way to Zaira’s house, Karan found himself growing more resentful of Samar. Zaira, he thought, had moulded her life around Samar’s so they could talk till dawn, steal flowers at midnight, lunch late in the afternoon and, every now and again, come home to the profound silence of the other. However, when Samar had found love—a love sponsored by conventions of desire—he had coolly turned his back on her. Maybe Samar was not entirely to blame: for Leo, threatened by Zaira’s intimacy with Samar, had kept them apart. As soon as Zaira had spotted the flicker of Leo’s insecurity she had backed off. But wasn’t greater allegiance expected from Samar?
Karan thought of the night Zaira had led him by the hand to the roof of Samar’s house, where they had talked and talked while the pianist got drunk with his dandy buddies and then walked into the pool, standing in water all the way up to his cummerbund. He recalled her face, its banished, immaculate loveliness. In the room Zaira now occupied in his head, perhaps permanently, he worried over the embarrassed, stilted loneliness in Zaira’s voice as she had disclosed to him earlier that day that she was alone at home on a Friday night. Although Zaira had the choice of allowing the city’s vibrant nightlife to consume her—she had only to swirl the dial on her phone and men would materialize out of thin air, powerless slaves to her ravishing charm—she adhered to a code of dignified privacy, the kind only the very famous can truly guard. Samar should have known that, he thought; he should not have been irresponsible and let her be alone.
As his taxi went by Juhu Chowpatty, driving past a bright orgy of billboards that hacked up the tender night with neon blinkering, a part of him wished Zaira would find the loyalty of a man who would respond to her ably, with shy intelligence and an appreciation of her solemn moods. He found it ridiculous that she was still single; she had looks, money, independence, fame, character, yet she was stuck in the dusty alcove of an almost-romance, unable to wrestle free of her past and lunge headlong into life’s grand panic of possibilities.
But then love’s clichéd preconditions were hardly a guarantee for its attainment.
The complications of relationships, lately exfoliated in his eyes in the light of his recent row with Rhea, made him wonder if it were better to be alone than to be wishing for aloneness. He wondered if he too would be better off without Rhea, and if a reunion was really worth the bother.
But, could he write her off so easily? Longing for Rhea came in spasms, with an almost physical acuity, and he took deep breaths to wait out the pain. He thought of the time they had stood under the flamingoes at Sewri; for days after, the advent of love had heightened the colours around him, made any music he heard more distinguished, deepened the experience of existence. Every now and again, through the window of the taxi, he looked out at the city, which seemed to be chuckling at him. The taxi’s headlights finally lit up the road to Janaki Kutir, a private estate famous for housing the Prithvi Theatre, where deadbeat communists, lovelorn playwrights, aspiring actors congregated under the bamboo shade of Prithvi Café.
‘End of the lane,’ Karan told the taxi driver.
He emerged, and the watchman on duty at Zaira’s apartment complex eyed Karan suspiciously, then buzzed the intercom to ask Zaira if she was expecting any visitors. When she said she was, the man looked crestfallen, unable to entertain the possibility of her having an affair with a complete nobody.
‘You made it in one piece!’ She embraced him.
‘Got a taxi. Roads were empty.’ He pulled away and handed her a big, bold bunch of traffic-signal roses—long-stemmed, thorny, fifty rupees to the dozen.
‘You and your courtly ways! I bet that’s how you won over Mrs Dalal, rascal!’
‘I have an update on the Dalal Chronicles.’
‘I can’t wait! Wine?’
She touched his wrist lightly.
He smiled. The relief they experienced in each other’s company was so pure it could manifest only as silence: food would follow, as would wine and talk, but in this moment some deep, inexpressible need had already been met.
‘The salad is super,’ he exulted at the dining table. ‘You’re a great cook, Zaira.’
‘You have a thing for home-cooked meals.’
‘That I do.’ Miss Mango, his landlady at Ban Ganga, did not allow him to cook at home and his hankering had intensified since moving there. ‘I can never forget my mother’s cooking.’
‘Why don’t you go back and see your dad?�
��
‘There’s nothing there, Zaira, between him and me.’ He paused. ‘Actually, what is there keeps me here.’
‘You’ve never told me about your childhood.’
‘I’ve told no one. It was not a happy time.’
‘Childhoods are messy affairs; I don’t know why people talk of them as wonderful and innocent. Mine was corrupt and painful, and each day of my adulthood has been an effort to recover from its disappointment.’
After a long silence, in the course of which they ate biryani and drank wine, Karan said, ‘My father was a colonel. When he walked into a landmine, his left leg had to be replaced with a Jaipur foot.’
‘Oh God, Karan,’ Zaira cried. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s only the start.’ Wine had loosened his tongue; he decided to tell Zaira everything.
To escape the ignominy of his war injury, Colonel Seth moved his family to Shimla, wishing for a quiet, forgettable life in a small town; instead, the embittered man unwittingly steered his wife toward sexual boredom and himself in the direction of whisky. So Karan grew up under the ugly attention of a full-blown alcoholic father and a mother who flirted greedily with the adolescent grocer.
‘When I was sixteen I understood why my father yelled at my mother all the time.’
During an ugly confrontation one evening it was revealed that Karan’s mother had fallen into the habit of watching him bathe through the keyhole of the bathroom door, kneeling on the floor, her hand on the jamb. Karan thought his father was a vile drunk to accuse her of such things but he was scandalized to discover that the allegation met no refutation from his mother. ‘I decided to leave Shimla; I’d never go back home. My own mother…’ Tears slipped down his face and rested at the edge of his jaw.
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 10