Then the letters stopped coming.
As his jet cut through the city’s smoggy cloud cover, Karan’s mind remembered Bombay for its kindnesses. And what were they exactly? A stranger had once gifted him a black umbrella during a storm. His first monsoon in the city. His landlady, Miss Mango, had given him a slice of apple pie. A retired nurse had written to him to say she had cut out his photographs from the India Chronicle and pasted them on the pages of a scrapbook. Anonymous kindnesses coalesced around him, keeping him warm. For what lay outside its parameter pushed him to believe mercy had no stock in Bombay.
Mercy lay elsewhere. On the peripheries. Some place dark. Anywhere but here.
By the time he had landed in London, the scent of a charred arm had roughened his sleep too many times to keep count.
In the early part of the year, when Hindu–Muslim riots had broken out across Bombay, Iqbal had gone out to cover a scuffle in a lane that was a holler away from Mutton Street, where Karan had first met Rhea. The mob had stripped Iqbal, found him circumcised, doused him with kerosene, thrown a match to his face. Saala mussalman.
Karan had accompanied Iqbal’s mother to the morgue, left her shaking on a bench at the entrance and gone in himself.
‘Is this Iqbal Syed?’ the morgue inspector had asked Karan.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure? I mean…’ His face said it all. This body is toast. ‘There have been so many such accidents. I don’t want you to claim the wrong body.’
‘His death was not an accident.’
‘No one can say for sure if it was an accident or if he was a victim of the riots.’
‘He was set on fire.’
‘The police report has yet to establish that. Please keep your personal suspicions to yourself in such communally sensitive times. How can you be sure that this man is Iqbal Syed?’
Karan controlled an urge to throw up. ‘I know it is Iqbal Syed because I recognize his fingers.’ He examined the fingers closely, remembering the bony metacarpus, now without either skin or flesh, the ashen architecture of burned biology.
‘He worked for the India Chronicle?’ The morgue inspector was keen for Karan to leave now.
‘He was my boss there.’
‘Will you tell his mother? She’s waiting outside, right?’
Karan had held Iqbal’s mother as she fainted. Then he had taken her home.
That night, guzzling whisky under dirty starlight, he had decided it was time to leave Bombay.
A week later, an advertisement in the paper caught his eye: a school in London was looking for teachers. Once Karan had clinched the job, he gave notice to his landlady, sold all his Bombay photographs to a raddiwalla under the flyover at Kemps Corner and used the money to buy a new suitcase.
‘Can you keep this chair?’ he requested Miss Mango.
‘Will you need it back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If I’m alive when you come back, it’s yours; I’m holding it for you for now.’
‘Thank you.’ He noticed Miss Mango stroke the wooden arm of the Bombay Fornicator. ‘For the apple pie. It was delicious.’
‘What apple pie?’
‘Last year, in June, you gave me a slice of apple pie. Your son had brought you some and you had left me a slice.’
‘Did I leave you a slice?’ Her face evaporated into a fuzzy question mark.
In the taxi to the airport he stared at his ticket, cattle class, aisle seat, because he did not want to look out. He just needed to get up for a piss now and again. Or to throw up if the stink of a burnt arm came back in a hurry.
In the flight, he read again the letter Rhea had given him on his birthday.
I’m awkward with letters; I have had no one to write them to in years.
When I met you, I was bowled away by your guts; you had a will to do what I believed impossible. To tell Bombay’s stories through pictures. You were mad and raffish, on the wild side of audacious. But the more I saw of your work, the more I grew convinced you had the skill and vision to do exactly that, and your pictures of Bombay celebrate its gaiety and its irony. Your gaze is hard and mesmeric, and it has been my great luck to serve it in some small way. I never thought I would meet the hero of my imagination.
I admire you. You stood by Samar. Like a rock. You weathered the storm when everyone else was asking for their coats. Zaira would be so proud; she knows you honoured her heart. Maybe that’s why I feel so lucky to have met you in Chor Bazaar, hunting for a chair I hope you will sit on as you read this letter.
Above all, my time with you has been abundant fun; you were an ally to my solitude. Thank you for coming to Sewri, for standing with me under the birds. We were standing so close I could hear the beating of your heart. It was like the sound of a flag flapping in the wind.
Part 3
27
In the fifth month of her pregnancy, Rhea felt strange and looked ravishing, as if something larger than her—the principle of continuity, perhaps—had taken possession of her. Walking through a lush green park in Singapore, she felt powerfully connected to the wiry arms of jacaranda trees, to the clean, crisp air, to the blue blanket of sky. Frequently tired, annoyed for no reason, she was given to incomprehensible impulses: she ate salt, cried flagrantly, scratched her arms until they were bloody. She dreamed profoundly, in troubling, precise particulars. She saw herself in a cold, barren room, redolent of a torture chamber, where she was surrounded by beings, minor deities, spirits that were mostly benevolent and unspeakably old, angels who scattered dust from their wings when no one was looking and then sighed at the mess they had made. But the most recurrent image in her dreams was of a small brown beast, hairy, with a long, restless tail and large mad eyes, hissing feverishly at her. Waking from these horrifying visions, she craved for the clarifying genius of her father’s words: If Dr Thacker had been alive, he would have cast an illuminating and deft narrative over the hazy, terrifying clutch of images that seized her mind. The sadness she had experienced at her father’s death competed with the loneliness she battled following Karan’s eviction from her life. She recognized that just as her father had lit the lamp of her imagination, she had done the same for Karan; now, remembering both men in private was a habit that made her sleepy with exhaustion.
But the sublime pleasures of uncomplicated sleep remained out of reach.
Almost every night, Adi, restored to the stamina of their courting days, met her with bestial lust. After a long day of nostalgic recollection Rhea relished the carnal distraction, and she asked Adi to fuck her harder, without restraint, tear her apart—for in that moment of rupture, the unlit aspect of her soul would escape and gallop back to where it had arisen.
Adi suspected she was occasionally withdrawn and given to whims because she missed her home city.
‘Would you like to return to Bombay?’ he asked her one day.
‘You mean for the delivery?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like that very much. Adi, you don’t listen to jazz these days.’
‘I know.’
‘Or drink bourbon.’
‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ He smiled uncontrollably; he was counting the days and hours before the birth of his child. ‘I’ll arrange for us to leave shortly.’
They arrived in Bombay in March; summer heat lorded over the city like a lioness, one thick, violent paw resting on the other.
Rhea stood on the terrace at sunset as a copper-winged black cuckoo unleashed a plangent, hypnotic cry from the overladen branches of a dusty mango tree. In the distance below, a row of ugly cars looked like canker in a dog’s ear. Adi came up from behind Rhea and pulled her into his arms; she caught her breath, more startled than reassured.
Ever since Adi had got to know of Rhea’s pregnancy he had insisted their child should be born in the same private maternity clinic where he had been born, and his father before him.
‘It’s a tradition in the Dalal family,’ he had explained.
&
nbsp; ‘But you’re not a traditional man, Adi!’
‘I will have to be now. I’m going to be a father, and some traditions have to be passed from one generation to the next.’
‘Does that include your ability to snore like a steam engine?’
‘Laugh all you want, but our child will be born in the same clinic as I was, Rhea.’
‘Fine, fine’ she had said, waving her hands in the air.
Increasingly, though, Rhea had become apprehensive. ‘Does the place have everything we might need, just in case…?’ she asked him now as he nuzzled her neck.
‘It’s perfect, Rhea. Don’t worry, the delivery is going to be a cakewalk.’
‘I want to go and see the clinic.’ She was afraid the clinic might offer neither specialized neonatal care nor the cutting-edge medical resources a larger facility would have at hand.
‘Very well. I will take you tomorrow morning.’
Tucked away in a sleepy Walkeshwar gully, the clinic was an old colonial building with a dusty metal Victorian dome, a spiral wooden staircase with a gothic banister and an inlay of Venetian tiles that ran the length of the corridor. She ascended the circular staircase like a child in a fairy tale wandering through a haunted castle. Standing outside the peaceful nursery, she was enraptured by the light perforating the giant glazed windows. ‘It’s lovely, but strange.’ She looked out at an expansive jamun tree; something rustled in its branches, but she could not tell what it was.
‘I know,’ Adi said. ‘It’s almost frozen in time.’
Two days before she was due to deliver, Rhea sensed a stirring inside her. Before she could call out to Adi, she felt a stream of liquid running down the inside of her thigh.
‘We need to get to the clinic.’ She grasped his shoulder.
He looked at his watch. It was 2.00 a.m. ‘Has the water bag burst?’
‘I guess so,’ she said anxiously. ‘We should hurry.’
At four a.m., before violent spasms overtook her body, she was grateful for the safe span of her pregnancy. The birth pains resembled the description of a spiritual experience: she felt flung out of herself and she saw herself scream, sweat, draw deep breaths, time her contractions, and then watched life emerge from between her legs. As a part of her died quietly, another part was born with a baffled cry of relief. Rhea was desperate to have the child out of her, not because she wanted to hold it, suckle it, rock it—or for any other maternal impulses—but because she wanted her body back, its solitude restored to its original sanctity, her womb free of the fidgety presence.
At twelve forty-four the following afternoon, she discovered that another human being, before acquiring the particularities of age, was only a composite of physical banalities.
Her son weighed eight pounds, had pink, nearly transparent toes. Wispy sprouts of black down on his soft skull.
Adi’s face was delirious with joy. ‘Rhea,’ Adi said as he cradled his son, ‘he’s perfect.’
‘His nose is too big.’
‘How can you say that!’
‘Oh, Adi…’
The nurse looked away when Adi leaned over and kissed Rhea.
Later, when Rhea was alone with the infant, she studied it furtively, carefully. It looked very much like Adi’s baby. Maybe it was Adi’s baby…She sighed with relief and leaned back against the headboard. Having given Adi a child, sating his deepest desire, she felt as if she had done whatever she possibly could to restore their marriage to its original vitality. Now they could embark on that odd, annoying entity: ‘family’. She pictured clutching her son’s hand on his first day at school, a water bottle slung on his shoulder, his innocent face distraught at the impending abandonment. She pictured Adi taking his little boy for swimming lessons to the Bombay Gymkhana. She imagined hectic, memorable, dyspeptic holidays to Florida. A great change was sweeping over her like a typhoon, and she was almost ready for it.
‘Are you happy, Rhea?’ Adi asked her on the day before she was to be discharged from the clinic.
‘I’m over the moon.’
‘Thank you; I’m sorry if I walk around with this big goofy grin on my face but our new recruit has an uncanny effect on me.’
‘It’ll wear,’ she warned. ‘After you change the four hundredth nappy, the novelty is bound to wear off.’
‘We’re going home tomorrow. I can’t wait to see how he’ll sleep on his first night in the nursery.’
‘He’ll love it,’ she said. ‘You did such a splendid job with the nursery, Adi; it reminded me of the hard work you had put into creating the studio for me. It’s my greatest refuge, and now our baby will have a shelter of his own.’
‘Did you like the blue clouds I got painted on the ceiling?’
‘Yes. And I love those old silver toys; I didn’t even know you’d hidden them away.’
‘I have silver rattles, bells, a wind chime to hang over his crib…God, I’m so excited I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight!’
‘I hope you do, Adi. I slept badly last night.’
‘Were you up for his feeds?’
‘Actually, I couldn’t sleep because when I took my afternoon nap I dreamt of my father. He looked straight at me and said: “Don’t worry. Everything is just right.”’
‘But what he said was so apt, Rhea.’
‘It was the expression on his face,’ she said. ‘I bolted up from my sleep as if an earthquake had struck.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Everything is just right.’
At dawn the next morning, before Rhea was to leave the clinic with her baby, the nurse was bringing him to her for a feed. As the nurse carried the infant in her arms and walked down the long, narrow corridor, she was unable to look away from the baby’s bold, clean, wistful face. Staring into his eyes, she felt she was peering down a mysterious burrow, and that if she stared deep enough for long enough she could travel through the warrens that criss-crossed the baby’s secret world. The little boy gazed up at the nurse in intense rumination, his liquid, almandine eyes gleaming with tender curiosity for all the terrible and fine things that lay beyond the parameters of his comprehension for now. So lost was the nurse in her thoughts that she did not hear the low but emphatic hiss a few metres behind her.
A monkey had entered the clinic.
With loops of spittle dribbling from its jowls, wide, red-streaked eyes and a bloodied neck, it clawed the air with wild, rabid gestures.
Scurrying after the nurse, it flung itself upon her like a curse.
Cold, sharp teeth sank into her flesh and she cried out hysterically.
From her room Rhea heard the scream and rushed for the door. Through the dawn haze of frantic shrieking, her eyes fell on her infant son, now on the edge of the staircase. She dashed forward to reach for the child, but she was too late, for he had started to whirl down the wooden spiral steps, tumbling from level to level, his thick cloth diaper unravelling, turning from white to red as his wailing evaporated with an air of frightening finality. Thundering down the stairwell, she reached her baby, picked him up and pressed him against her chest, finding it impossible, finally, not to tremble from the heft of maternal love, from which she had presumed immunity.
Looking up at the place she had left behind, she howled with such secular, focussed grief that all the minor deities and terrified angels of her dreams retreated into the sallow shafts of morning light.
For many months after the death of his son, Adi was vulnerable to sudden, intense headaches. The muscles in his arms felt raw. His back grew stiff. Small aches and pains developed spontaneously all through his body, vanishing as quickly as they had come, swiftly replaced by other quirks of physical agony. It was as if his body had stepped in to distract his mind, to make life possible. Although he had been spending short spells in Singapore, he desired most to stay at home. Finally, unable to attend to his tasks at work with any measure of competency, he decided to take a break.
His sabbatical, entirely unanticipated, took Rhea by
surprise.
‘How long will you stay at home?’ she asked cautiously.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you just take off from work without any idea of when you’ll go back?’
‘The firm sees it as a sabbatical; they’d much rather I work when my head is clear than that I bungle up on an investment. Will my being on leave bother you terribly?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said faintly, ‘not terribly, no.’
One afternoon, he noticed her draw out the umbrella from the closet. ‘Are you headed somewhere?’
‘I’ve decided to resume work at the animal shelter.’
He looked stunned. Seven months had passed since the death of their son.
‘I won’t be back for lunch,’ she said. ‘Ask Lila-bai to serve you some food when you’re hungry.’
When she returned from the shelter, she locked herself in her studio.
Late in the evening he knocked on the door and poked his head in. Her wheel came to a cranking halt. ‘Yes?’ she said, looking up, her brow creased.
‘Oh, nothing…I was wondering if you’d like to come down for dinner.’
‘Why don’t you go ahead? I need to work an hour longer.’
‘I get the feeling you’re avoiding me.’
‘Not at all, Adi.’
He exhaled loudly. ‘I know things haven’t been great between us. Why don’t we take a small break? Let’s go to Rome for a week.’
‘We went there on our honeymoon.’ She wiped a splodge of clay off her brow with the back of her hand.
‘Exactly.’
‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to go there; not even a year has gone by since…’ She looked away.
Adi wrung his wrists as he left the studio, convinced that nothing he did could thaw the ice between them now. Only after dinner did he realize that he was seething because of the tone of condescension that crept into her voice whenever she spoke to him now, as though he had some sort of a minor, manageable mental disorder.
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 26