The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  Rising, Karan started to walk. He was angry, but the anger was mute, terrified of its own might, and it soon turned inward. The murder, the trial, the verdict—all of it had coalesced into a big, burly blur in Karan’s head, or perhaps he was the blur in them all. He was not yet ready to ‘forgive’ Malik but he sensed that what lay beyond the bitterness he harboured for the criminal could be deeply affecting, and toward this mythic port his ship now steered. Seeking neither redress nor truth, Karan wanted only to be touched briefly by the unhappiness that had made Malik so inanely cruel; if he could know this unhappiness and its root, then he might see the way out of the maze of questions he often found himself wandering through like the last soldier on the battlefield. In the end, he thought, the only justice we seek is justice for ourselves. As he walked further down the shore, the waves came up at his calves. He laughed silently. For epiphanies were only plastic trophies, handed out for winning the race that all but busted your legs.

  Oh, how he’d much rather experience a full-on apocalypse now.

  Standing in the warm, soothing water, he turned and noticed the building where Zaira had lived, in Janaki Kutir. Memories of pleasant, spontaneous dinners flooded him. He thought of the Sunday afternoons spent in her balcony, looking out at the string of hand-rowed boats. He missed Zaira with an ache that rang through him like an aria. She would know exactly why he had left Claire and returned to Bombay, why he had agreed to go through with the accent neutralization course for his new job. She had known his idiot heart better than anyone else. They had never walked on the beach together—the threat of being mobbed was persistent with Zaira around. But if they had gone for a stroll, he was sure she, like him, would have searched for the silence under the din, and on finding none return home all the richer with disappointment. He had no way of knowing she had stood in the same sea only hours before she had been killed.

  He thought of the time she had tried to explain the disorder and profusion of her love for Samar; she had said that souls got caught in bodies, that the body wanted one thing and the soul quite another, and ultimately this strife had left her feeling small and disembodied. As he pictured her perfect, discerning forehead, the abrupt, frazzled beauty of her eyes, he felt that the strife had now left her and she would never be pulled one way or another again. He could sense, somehow, that her bold, eccentric soul had found its place, that her tenderness for ideas and curiosity about love, which had been larger than her, were now here, safe from all men, safe from the gods.

  The water pulled away, the sand started to slip from below his feet, drawing him in.

  But no, he told himself, he would not go in, not yet, not here.

  On his way home, Karan stopped outside the Jain stepwell on the road near his house. Turtles swam through its dark emerald waters, unleashing ripples as their ugly conical heads jutted up for air. Samar had once come here with him, and they had stood here, looking into the water, at a thick clutch of white aromatic flowers that had bloomed defiantly on the callused boughs of a dwarf frangipani. He thought of Samar walking Mr Ward-Davies on the promenade in Worli; he thought of Samar swimming, his long arms executing precise, powerful strokes. Where was Samar now, Karan wondered. He had read about the new medicines available now to manage AIDS. Perhaps this would have allowed both Leo and Samar to tide through safely.

  Invariably, his thoughts returned to Zaira. If he missed her with such shooting, livid pain, then it was likely that Samar had grown almost incoherent with longing. Karan found that over time he had not come to forget Zaira, as conventional wisdom would have him believe; rather, he had come to remember her better. Her particulars were now sharp and resplendent, like the head of a spear. Countless details fretted in the air like disturbed motes before they slowly congealed to form something composite and solid, a thing that stood in direct, cavalier opposition to the haze of memory.

  Reluctantly, sadly, he had come to accept that a human being was composed not only of everything that he possessed but also of all that he had lost.

  30

  Two years passed.

  Karan often visited Chor Bazaar, but he did not find either the plantation chair Rhea had given him or the brass monkey she had forgotten there.

  One lazy Sunday evening, he had spread out the papers on the floor to catch up on the news; the light in his room was wavering, the light of an aquarium. An odd little item in the gossip column of the Bombay Times caught his eye.

  Remember Samar Arora? The snippet began. The pianist who was also a witness in the murder trial of the late actor Zaira? Well, guess what, kids? The old floozy is back in town, looking like a meth addict. Rumour goes he left America after he got no mileage in San Francisco. So now the has-been who never was is back in our social circuit. He’s busy ringing up every society hostess in town, but no one seems to be taking his calls. Maybe someone should tell the poor thing that in Bombay out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is history.

  Karan put down the paper; reading further would have been like bathing in vomit.

  The next morning, he showed up at Samar’s cottage. Saku-bai, leaner now, opened the door. She saw Karan and wept instantly, freely.

  When she took him up to Samar’s room, he understood the pain in her eyes.

  ‘Samar…It’s me, Karan.’

  The man in the bed, all bones and a rag of a spirit, lay tucked under a maroon patchwork quilt. ‘Karan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The bed was littered with paperbacks, pencils, a hardbound journal, a cowhide spectacle case. Samar sat up with great difficulty. ‘Karan Seth?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Oh, doll,’ he whispered. ‘Where’ve you been all this while?’

  ‘Working in London.’ Almost involuntarily, Karan started to tremble as he looked at Samar, slim enough to slide into an envelope: his bones protruded awkwardly from his body, his skin was creased and of a leathery texture, and the hair on his bony skull was wispy and dull.

  ‘When’d you get back?’

  ‘A few years ago. I work at a call centre now.’

  ‘That’s got to be rough.’ Samar’s eyes sparkled with anguish.

  ‘I had to take an accent neutralization course.’

  ‘Ouch!’ He smiled and patted his bed, gesturing Karan to his side.

  Karan sat beside Samar. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m super,’ he said, before adding, ‘I don’t dress for dinner, that’s all…I was thinking of you, just today.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘I found an old photo you had taken of Zaira and me. She’d given it to me saying it was her favourite picture.’ Slowly turning on to his side, Samar pulled out a photograph from between the pages of one of the books on his bed. Zaira was sitting by the poolside, her head on Samar’s shoulder: the photograph had been cropped to an uneven close-up, making it difficult to tell who they were. In itself the photograph was regular but the depth of its intimacy was startling. Karan picked it up, a misleading memento from a past that had been nearly perfect; its splintered excellence ridiculed the present moment with a distant, hyena laughter. He gulped. ‘Why did she say it was her favourite?’

  ‘She never explained. But…turn it around.’

  On the back of the picture Zaira had scribbled, I know I’m only a matinee but you make me feel like a sold-out show.

  Karan put the photograph aside.

  ‘Why’d you stop by after such a long spell?’ Samar asked.

  ‘I read in the papers you were back in Bombay.’ Karan rested his hand delicately on Samar’s lap; he was afraid his hand would go through Samar and reach the mattress. Samar reminded him of a cut flower, blooming disobediently long after it had been plucked. ‘And I couldn’t forget what you had promised years ago.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That you’d get us some fizzy water and make it all better.’

  Later that week, Karan dropped by for dinner.

  As he was relishing Saku-bai’s classic amti and rice, he
found that the house was suffused with a heavy, holy quietness, a cold, ruminating light, and the peace was volatile and resentful of itself. Outside, on Worli Seaface, the city remained embattled and heroic, wrapped in a dark smog of noise and neurosis; growling and screeching with supreme honesty.

  ‘You like living in Juhu?’ Samar asked.

  ‘It’s nice. I’m just down the road from Zaira’s place.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The beach is a short walk away. There’s a vegetable market outside. All that noise!’ Karan said, waving his hand. ‘Keeps you company after a while.’

  ‘And all this silence,’ Samar said dejectedly. ‘So large it could only ever be empty.’

  Karan noticed that Saku-bai had left the kitchen; a strong scent of mixed spices wafted out from a saucepan on the stove. The room had grown hot, and he remembered that the first time he had come here it had been cool, tropical, like an orchid farm.

  He said, ‘I wrote to you.’

  ‘I kept all your letters, Karan.’ Samar ladled another spoon of amti over an uneven mound of rice.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did.’

  ‘I’m sure you never meant it.’

  Karan took a deep breath. He made a fist of his right hand and then rolled it over his chest in even circles. ‘I even learned it in sign language.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t apologize.’

  ‘Have to, Samar, have to.’

  ‘I should have written back, but those days in San Francisco, well, funeral season was never quite done.’

  ‘I can’t even imagine what that was like.’

  ‘Those days were ahead of my imagination, but not of reality.’ Samar’s mind whirled back to the first few months in San Francisco, settling into Leo’s little apartment on Telegraph Hill, nailing down the good local delis, getting a library membership, walking through Golden Gate Park on a cold Sunday afternoon, a captive bison gazing at him in stunted, diabolic rage. Running alongside such pedestrian nostalgia was the insurmountable horror of rushing Leo in a cab to San Francisco General Hospital, of waiting endlessly for blood reports in cold, ugly clinics, of cleaning soiled sheets. ‘I will never forget those days.’

  At the fourth memorial service Samar had attended, pelting rain could not keep away a feeble band of protesters. AIDS TURNS A FRUIT INTO A VEGETABLE. DIE. DIE. DIE. Placards throbbed with hatred. The protesters’ faces came alive with loathing.

  Inside the church, bathed in light filtered through large stained-glass windows, it was impossible not to be swept away by the affettuoso churn of the chorus, alert with sadness, thick with rage. Leo’s friend, Lance, an investment banker, had died, purple and crazy, in his bed. Lance was survived by his boyfriend, a poet of irredeemable mediocrity, and by a father who had refused to attend the service; his absence stood in between the pews like a plinth. An extravagance of drag queens—in long satin gowns and with enough paint on their faces for all of Bollywood—stood like gangly, exotic foxgloves in the wind; not only did they diminish any unnecessary gravitas, they also exposed death as the last word in camp. There was talk outside the church about medicines, soon to be released, which could turn the condition from Death Warrant to Long-Term Nightmare.

  Samar had seen Lance’s gravestone. Lance Nichols: Who Saw Heaven in a Wildflower. Samar had turned to Leo and said, ‘What a load of shit!’

  ‘I agree.’ Both men knew Lance had never cared for flowers, wild or otherwise, and heaven, from all conventional opinion, had no room for men like him. ‘I guess death turns every drama queen into an opera star.’

  Respite, during a season of unending calamities, came softly and suddenly. One morning, wild parrots, a shrill, audacious lot of feathered hooligans, stopped by on the wooden ledge of their balcony. Leo told him that years ago a flock of South American parrots had escaped a crazy collector’s aviary. They had bred in Golden Gate Park, and the subsequent generations were now perfectly at home in San Francisco. Samar was excited to feed the birds each morning, and no sooner had he placed a salver of chopped guavas or kumquats than the pack would emerge in broad, flamboyant sweeps.

  A few weeks later the birds could be seen hanging about on the railing, scratching their dainty feathers, squawking in protest; no food had been put out for them. The night before, Leo had been rushed to hospital, shivering so that his gums bled. Three bedsheets soaked up his sweat, almost convincing Samar that the human body was composed entirely of water. Having battled the shingles, diarrhoea and a lung infection, Leo was petrified by this new face-off with hell. But Dr Smith at the hospital was optimistic, setting him off on a promising regimen of drugs, one that would eventually lower the agonizing screech of plague to a barely discernible hum. Leo returned home that week, feeling better, finding it possible to stash aside dreams of gravestones and imagine that his life had gone on almost uninterrupted.

  ‘How did you cope, Samar?’ Karan asked, his voice tinged with awe.

  ‘Badly. I thought of writing to you.’

  ‘You should have called me.’

  ‘Well, I did call you once,’ he said. ‘But the operator at the India Chronicle office said you’d left work, moved out, with no forwarding address to speak of.’

  ‘I had moved to London by then, I suspect.’

  ‘Then I tried to get your details from Iqbal, but they wouldn’t put me through to him either.’

  ‘Iqbal was taken out during the riots, Samar,’ Karan said, his cheeks burning.

  ‘He was killed?’ Samar’s mouth fell open with shock.

  A wave of nausea swept through Karan as he remembered his visit to the morgue to identify his mentor’s remains. ‘Stripped, then doused with kerosene. Set on fire. A naked man in flames.’ Karan looked at his feet. ‘I went to get his body. His left arm was a heap of ash. His mother passed out in the morgue.’

  ‘Is that why you left for London?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Karan said. He added after a moment, ‘Actually, I wanted a killer tan, and East London came highly recommended.’ A whorled, crazed laughter followed. ‘And your stay in San Francisco? What happened after Leo started to feel better?’

  ‘Pretty times,’ he said. ‘I learned to trade when the market rallied.’

  One summer, Samar and Leo had rented a cottage in a little town on the coast, regarded for its uninterrupted views of the ocean. The cottage, set on a hill, had a thick grove of timeless redwoods. Deer roamed about in the unruly garden, feeding on dew-struck grass; a hummingbird whirred in mid-air, like a dream caught in tender panic, peeking into honeysuckle the colour of butter. On the second night, they heard a bear pawing at the back door, then raiding the garbage bin. At daybreak, Leo made coffee for them both and they laughed over the bear attack. Samar noticed that Leo was looking better than ever before. After breakfast they trekked up to the top of a hill and sat under a redwood, gazing out at the view below: a majestic spread of blue water, fine, faint sky flecked with oyster-coloured clouds. The local homes, made almost entirely from timber and glass, were camouflaged against the topography; now and again, between patches of serrated black rocks, were velvet carpets of purple flowers, with thick, glossy leaves which, when crushed, gave off the refreshing scent of fennel.

  After a week in the country, Leo and Samar started back for the city.

  Leo fell asleep within half an hour of the journey back, leaving Samar to enjoy the sights. He saw a derelict white shed overrun by a trailer of profuse red blossoms; a family of young seals frolicking in the bay; a beach, flat, smooth, beige, almost abandoned. The wind was swift but balmy and ocean-rinsed, and a vein of sulphurous scent ran through it. Fragments from this clean, magnificent vista played out against the music filling the car. Some songs were from a soundtrack to the film in which Zaira had acted. In solitary, opaque moments Samar recalled her with a jarring flash of pain. Her last moments often replayed in his mind, and he could see her in his lap, blood oozing out of the bullet wound in her temple, he
r sultry eyes straining to remain open, the trembling words that had left her mouth. Running under the sheath of this anguished memory was the delirium of his longing. He thought of how he had always been free to call her and rant about politics or gush over a film or run down a book; he had stolen flowers with her at midnight and downed Bellinis on the rooftop; they had grown to become the fearless arbiters of each other’s eccentricities. And Zaira had encouraged Samar to believe that his life, which had always possessed an elusive, surreal quality, was real and blazing, not a sly, ethereal figment of his prolific imagination. Without her, the laughter had gone out of the evening; he was forced to accept that time was how one spent love, and everything else was only scenery.

  ‘It was odd how much I came to miss Zaira,’ Samar said after dinner. His tongue rested on her name like a mother’s palm over a sleeping baby’s brow.

  ‘How did you get over her?’

  ‘I didn’t. Do you remember her often?’

  ‘Early on, she believed in my work so implicitly it allowed me to believe in myself. That’s a fine gift for a young man whose self-doubt is big enough to eat him up. I never had to wear a face around her; she was open to my gallows humour and my useless tirades against love. She was funny and clear-minded and out there.’ There was a catch in his voice. ‘Not only do you have to bear her loss but you have to cope with Leo’s death too.’

  ‘His life, actually.’

  Karan sat up on the dining chair. He had assumed the disease had slowly and cruelly destroyed Leo. ‘I don’t follow you, Samar.’

  ‘Leo didn’t kick the bucket; he just moved east.’ Not only was Leo alive, he was busy working on a biography of New York in a fine brownstone in Brooklyn. ‘Loving someone,’ Samar said quietly, ‘does not insure against their leaving you.’ Samar and Leo had met for the last time on the wooden steps of Grace’s Garden, near the house they had shared for almost five years. Leo had said, ‘I’m bad at death,’ and Samar had said, ‘I’m bad at life, but that never stopped me from trying.’ Then Leo had looked away, unsayable things oscillating between irony and fury.