Karan’s face looked stilted; he wanted to return to the refuge of his studio apartment in London.
‘They’ll love you,’ she promised with a peck on his cheek, and added ‘Especially me mum,’ in an accent generally associated with wags.
They entered through the kitchen door, where Claire’s mother was stirring a pot on the fire. After the introduction, Karan said, ‘Thank you for having me over.’ He handed her a bottle of wine and she thanked him and said, ‘We’re delighted to have you! Can I get you a slice of fruit cake?’ Her voice was a bright ball of enthusiasm with streaks of undisguised emotion; it made him warm to her instantly.
‘I’d love some.’ Karan turned to Claire, who was busy fixing herself a drink. As he ate the cake and made small talk with Mrs Soames, Claire went off with her drink to the drawing room and sat by the fire on a chair so large she almost vanished into it.
Lunch on Boxing Day turned out to be a civil, wonderfully elaborate affair.
Mrs Soames had cooked variously, efficiently, baking a thick scaled fish in an unaromatic, viscous white sauce, adorned with the leaves of a strange green herb with serrated leaves.
Claire’s father, genteel and unassuming, sat across from Karan and asked polite questions.
Karan replied briefly, correctly; he felt that saying too much would not only indicate his own intelligence—or the lack thereof—but also establish that he was an awful, stammering ambassador of his nation.
Claire, wildly drunk by midday, was twirling her hair between her fingers, eyes glazed with sexual hunger. At one point, when Karan reached forward to refill her glass, she placed her hand on the rim of her glass and slurred, ‘Girls from good English families like to be asked,’ before dissolving into a fit of giggles that made Mrs Soames blush. Before a gawky silence might set between them like aspic, Claire’s father quickly embarked on the topic of Indian novels; much to his disappointment, he discovered that his daughter’s inamorata was hardly an expert on the subject.
To summon a shard of opinion, Karan’s mind rifled back to a past conversation.
On a hot summer day, at Zaira’s house, Leo, Samar and Karan had been reclining on a cream rug in the travertine balcony, below which an old laburnum bloomed audaciously. Samar chanced to mention a novel, The Ochre Remains, which had recently been awarded an important British prize. Written by a curly-haired siren from Hyderabad, the novel traced a Muslim family’s breakdown following the dissolution of the Raj. The book had excited inconsequential cliques of embittered Bengali critics and intrigued legions of readers.
Opinion on the novel, among the jury of four in Juhu, was divided.
Leo complained that the prose was lurid and self-conscious. ‘It’s a creative-writing workshop in overdrive.’
Zaira commented that the writer was exploitative, having relearned the alphabet during a crash course in Exotica 101. A for Arranged Marriage. B for Battered Wife. C for Colonization.
Samar, suddenly animated, remarked sweepingly that Indian novels were no good. ‘It’s like they’ve come gushing from the almost-a-pussy of a drag queen called Lady Epic.’
Leo added his own thoughts to Samar’s dismissive remark, but Zaira was quick to disregard Leo’s point that such literary tomes on ethnicity, multiculturalism and colonization went so far as to mollify that dubious entity: white guilt.
‘You need to explain yourself,’ Leo told her, a hint of confrontation in his voice.
In her defence, Zaira said she did not believe that the colonizers really gave a rat’s ass about what their ancestors had raped, pillaged or burnt to cinders. ‘So, to assume that they give a shit now is only a flattering self-delusion.’
Karan had had nothing to add as he had not read the book, and also because he secretly regarded novels as quaint, irrelevant oddities—complex, imaginative enterprises produced by people who needed to dignify the interminability of their idleness.
As the conversation replayed in his head, Karan was struck not only by the almost magical safety of the afternoon—those languid times never failed to convince him that they could go on forever—but also by his inability to articulate its essence to Claire’s father. After all this time he was unable to speak of what he had once known intimately; this was how the trial’s failure had eventually registered in him, vandalizing his facility with language, forcing him back to the world of images, to the colour of Zaira’s hair and the way Samar had laughed when he had said Lady Epic. He nodded politely in the direction of Mr Soames, and even laughed a little when the old man winked and said that English novels were such sodding failures it was damned good they could be ‘outsourced to India’. Karan had lived long enough in the white country to recognize that such a show of self-effacement was only a parade of modesty.
In that great, gabled country home with its Flemish brick façade and trimmed privet, Karan lay on a giant, soft bed beside Claire, agitated and sleepless. His fingertips explored the distinguished line of her neck; her chin; her nose; her eyes. He kissed her hair, remembering a word he had come across in an American yoga magazine to which Claire subscribed: closure. He gathered it meant the conclusion to a worrying situation or a peaceable resolution of the past. The infinite possibilities of the word enthralled him, but its reality, difficult and gangly, left him disappointed. He had abandoned Shimla and come to Bombay to be rid of the past. In the big city, he had fallen in love, and in friendship. When the world had exploded in his face, he had fled to England, to grow anew a skin that had been peeled by what he had secretly come to think of as ‘those strange events in Bombay’. Now he lay listening to the glacial wind hammer the leafless fretwork of ivy against the window and the greyhounds snore outside the bedroom door. This life was entirely unlike that which he had known, but its unfamiliarity did not divest him of the affinity he continued to feel for Bombay; in fact, if anything, it seemed to solidify his resolve to return.
He tilted himself on his side, closer toward Claire, moved a strand of hair off her face, unable still to feel for this angular-minded, lissome woman the emotion he knew as love. Knowing this broke his heart. Shutting his eyes, he could see the flamingoes beating their great, stoic wings against the Sewri smog, he could see the Ban Ganga pond, marigolds and terracotta lanterns floating upon its dirty, chartreuse waters; he could hear aluminium canisters rattle on Atlas cycles manned by absurdly athletic milkmen; he could see a piebald horse at the racecourse buckle and swish its frothy tail throwing angry curlicues of brown dust into the air. He believed he could now go back to Bombay although it was nothing more than a catalogue of his failures in art and amity. Because some people were meant to shepherd you to different shores, and some people brought you back to familiar ones. He kissed Claire’s neck, feeling grateful; her skin had the sharp, fresh scent of citrus, and he thought of the big oval soap made from pomelo skin lying on a dish in her bath. He felt lucky that she had been his shelter in the cold country.
Claire woke with daybreak and nuzzled him.
He kissed her mouth, she responded—sleepily at first, till fervour lit her touch. Her tongue moved from his mouth to his neck, travelling down his chest, his navel, hipbone, seeking scholarship of his body. But if she knew he was thinking of leaving her, of returning to India, to Bombay, what would she say? Would she strangle him? Would she turn away and pull the blanket between them? Or would she laugh and then fall back to sleep?
Perhaps Rhea had been the same way, committing treacheries within kisses, and so now he passed on the deceptions he had received.
Karan lay on his back, his legs spreadeagled. Claire’s lips were around his penis. Desire obscured the past, and Karan felt himself oscillate back to the present moment, excited, alert.
Outside, Mr Soames was cleaning the head of his rifle with a square of cream muslin. Rabbits frolicked in the garden, innocent flashes of white in the mist.
She licked under the head, in the place where the pleats of skin parted, tongue flicking along the ridges.
Mr Soames opene
d his bedroom window and positioned the rifle on the ledge at the same moment that Karan turned Claire so she was on all fours. She looked out at the garden, at the rabbits in the mist. When Karan entered her predictably, she pulled away.
Girls from good English families. It was unusual for him, a mysterious pleasure, like the rooks crying out from their perch of fence posts. Like to be. Tightness, a certain forbidden fruit, and the knowledge that nobody could banish either Claire or him from the garden. They were of the garden. But the little rabbits on the green were not, and as Claire wiggled her hips in pain, as she felt herself relax and let him enter all the way, he grunted and held her down. Assed. The shot was clean and the rabbit writhed briefly before one of the greyhounds went racing for it.
Claire’s muscles clenched around Karan as the dark, slender beast picked up the rabbit. Red, red beads dripped from its neck, a glazed eye stared at her through the icy morning haze, from the far side of death.
And Karan felt free, as never before.
29
After Karan quit London, he returned to Bombay, put up in a dingy hostel in Irla and worked as a schoolteacher in Juhu.
Mrs Pal, the school’s principal, was a crafty woman with a dignified, scowling face, and an ass that looked as if it had been blown up with a cycle pump. The first time they met she remarked he had extremely long fingers; the strict, ambivalent tone of her voice was such that he felt she was telling him to prune their length. On a lavatory wall in the school, Mrs Pal had been depicted by a rather creative student as a dominatrix, an elephant-sized woman clad in oily black spandex lashing a mean black whip across the ass of a helpless man on all fours. When he first noticed it, Karan smiled at the rough, strident sketch because the mockery identified correctly what it disdained, and the identification was more cruel than the mockery itself.
The principal harassed the children with devious zeal. Two boys with hair longer than what she deemed the correct length were forced to stand on stools as coconut oil was poured all over them and their hair tied up in thin, sticky plaits. Another victim was made to wash the toilet bowls with his bare hands. Eventually, when Mrs Pal caned a twelve-year-old girl until the poor thing bled, Karan reported the principal to the police. The parents were brought in for interrogation. They denied the incident altogether, fearing their child would be expelled from the school described in a glossy brochure as ‘a prestigious learning institution’.
A few weeks later, Karan resigned. There was no point in standing up for anything; he should have learned his lesson years ago, he told himself. Mrs Pal refused him a reference letter.
Smugness blasted out of her face like a fart as Karan collected his papers on his last day at work.
Over the next few days Karan scoured the newspapers.
In the Indian Express he spotted advertisements for call centre operators. Recent graduates were encouraged to apply, but Karan gave it a shot nonetheless. He was picked for the job because, his interviewer said in an impressed tone, he spoke ‘pitch-perfect English’. Before he could join work, however, Karan’s twenty-two-year-old boss insisted on an accent neutralization course. ‘We don’t want to give our clients the wrong impression,’ he said. Karan agreed.
Course complete, he joined work. He felt like a fish being scaled before being sliced, out of his depth in more ways than one. With the money from his new job Karan moved out of the roach-ridden hostel and rented a small, tidy room in a decrepit house in Juhu Gaothan, close to where Zaira’s apartment had been. He worked the graveyard shift, sleeping through the day and rising at 5.00 p.m. to attend to household chores. At six, he went to the beach for a long, brisk walk, passing en route the Mukteshwar temple, the slightly seedy Anand Hotel, an ancient Jain stepwell, a row of flashy buildings guarded by durwans with haggard, lifeless expressions.
On the beach, after his walk, he sometimes sat under a coconut tree after checking the soft beige sand for secret deposits of oil or random shards of glass; he would never feel completely at ease in the city. The sea breeze felt warm against his skin; he took a deep breath. He could see Bollywood stunt extras performing their dives and chops at the end of the beach. A football game was in progress right outside the Sun-n-Sand Hotel. A few old men sat on red plastic chairs, sipping fresh coconut water. Young, perspiring lovers wrestled lust and shame as they sat with their backs against a crumbling embankment.
Bombay was going through a rough patch. The name of the city had been changed. The HPP continued to wield its own brand of institutionalized despotism. Karan had witnessed fresh attacks on ‘foreigners’—not South Indians, as it had been in the sixties, but those from the northern states. Ram Babu Kamat, the Bihari shopkeeper from whom Karan bought his groceries, had been beaten up one night. Ram Babu had fractured his arm and fled the city. A new law too had been put in place, forcing businesses to display signage in the local Devanagari script.
But when he was at the beach Karan tried not to think of the political mess the city was embroiled in. He did not think of Ram Babu’s face on the morning after he had been attacked by HPP workers. He refused to consider the signage of his local dairy in Devanagari. Instead, he focussed on the immediate particulars, a perfect seashell, the warm taste of salty peanuts on sale on Juhu beach. In spite of the crowds, in spite of the mess and the whirring heat, the mean and the hustle, he was never happier than when audacious slabs of golden light unevenly lit the sky and silver waves paused over a winter sea. Once the sun retreated from the horizon and into a strengthening night, the hurt of the world boldly invaded him through the wound in him, scaring away his loneliness.
This hurt shimmered in his eyes, animating him briefly.
Sitting under the arc of the wind-bent coconut tree, Karan sometimes remembered Claire. He had ended things, giving her vague reasons, perhaps because he had been anticipating the end of their union from the hour of its commencement. Claire’s absence from his life neither stoked longing nor aroused regret; if anything, it widened the rift that Rhea had originally made. The wound of first love was lasting; it raked so deep that its repair felt impossible, and the anticipation of its recurrence—its sublime and vivifying charge—rendered subsequent collisions with love devoid of its lightness, its mitigation. Karan slipped his hand into the soft, soft sand and thousands of grains cascaded through the spaces between his fingers. Nothing stayed. Every grain passed through. He stood and walked toward the water, toward the sun that was now slipping behind the stark line of the horizon, leaving an extravagant orange spray over a flat indigo sky.
One day he rang Miss Mango, formerly his landlady at Ban Ganga. A woman answered. ‘Miss Mango died two years ago. Her son sold her place to us. Can I help you?’
‘Oh, I’m one of her former paying guests. I’d given her a plantation chair to keep in holding while I was in London. I was wondering if I could come and collect it.’
‘I believe her son sold all her furniture to a dealer in Chor Bazaar,’ the woman said.
Karan decided to venture out to Chor Bazaar, once again in search of a Bombay Fornicator.
He found the old market changed. Its noise was frenetic and ugly; the antiques looked new; he saw tourist guides accompanying rich Indian families who hoped to take back an exotic slice of the motherland for their four-bedroom houses in Hounslow and Journal Square. They shopped avidly, bargaining on cue, returning home with prized junk.
He walked on, surprised by some of the stores, unchanged from his last visit years ago; it was as if they had been waiting for him. He went up to the store where he had first met Rhea: it was still the same. He could almost see the talisman she had laid down on the carved Chinese bench; he could see her watching him with that quiet, devouring gaze of infinite cunning. He paused before a familiar piece, an ancient armoire, gazed at the silvered mirror, afraid that in the reflection he would see her standing behind him. A black cat emerged from behind the armoire, brushed against his leg, then vanished. He wondered if Rhea had known then what he did now: that love was la
rgely a matter of luck. Maybe that’s why she had been out hunting for talismans, the brass monkey. He looked around for the Bombay Fornicator but there were none on display. He saw a man talking to his pet rooster with a pronounced red wattle. He asked a dealer about the brass monkey; the dealer showed him, instead, a faded silver amulet created in honour of Chekkh Mata, the Goddess of Sneezes. ‘If you wear it,’ the dealer assured Karan, ‘you will never sneeze again.’
On the bus back to Juhu, he thought about his earlier agonizing assumption that Rhea had seduced him, abandoned him, and then gone on with her life. But he reflected now that her offence, in the grand scheme of things, was inconsequential. Malik Prasad had killed a woman, and got on with his life just fabulously; such violations were not as uncommon as believed though their pain might be uncommonly experienced.
One evening Karan was sitting under a coconut tree on the beach reading the Hindustan Times, when his eyes landed on an article on famous trials that had been botched up due to some reason or the other. Zaira’s figured prominently in it. The article outlined the course her murder trial had taken—and the subsequent reinvestigation—and bemoaned the fact that all efforts to get justice had come to naught. The journalist mentioned that Minister Prasad had won another election but was now forced to consider retirement because of failing health. Malik Prasad, the key accused, had recently got married. D.K. Mishra had constructed a palatial, centrally air-conditioned home in Gurgaon, and his last vacation had been spent in Thailand. At the bottom of the page were photographs of Nalini and Tara Chopra, at a party to celebrate the arrival of the first Armani store in Bombay; their teeth were picket-fence white and their hair had a strained, artificial luxuriance. There was a small, sober mention of Samar who, the journalist admitted, could not be traced. Karan’s own name was fleetingly stated as a witness. He put down the paper, his hands trembling with a feeling of sorrow shot through with disbelief. The wind chose this moment to pick up the paper and it was gone before he could make a grab for it to read the last few lines that remained.
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 29