A few days later Samar had passed away in his sleep, the red patchwork quilt tucked around his neck.
Karan was living at Samar’s house at the time. At 7.00 a.m., he went up to Samar’s room. Even before he entered it, Karan felt an electric jolt reach up from his calves to the very top of his head; he knew, then, he would never hear Samar’s voice again. When he stepped into the room he felt trapped in its sepulchral hush; there was a strange, cold, forbidding odour. He went up to the bed and stood by it. Samar’s eyes were closed; he was so thin, even the quilt seemed to have more body than him. Karan pulled off the quilt and sat by Samar, studying the tragic wasteland of his body. An inexplicable desire impelled him to touch every part of his friend’s inert body. Softly, slowly, his fingers caressed Samar’s eyelids first before travelling down to his toes, passing along the way his collarbone, ribs, hipbone, kneecaps, the pronounced bone at his ankle. This is Samar, he thought. This is where he begins. And here is where he ends. Then he touched himself. This is me. The cartography of remembrance. He looked out of the window and saw a gleaming rectangle of sea, the dusty branches of an almond tree. After a few minutes he rose to go downstairs to inform Saku-bai but before he reached the landing, he fell to his knees and doubled over. This is not me. The strange racking and hollow sound sent Saku-bai racing up the stairs and she found Karan there, on the landing, in a gasping, ruined, inconsolable heap.
‘Let’s go up to the bench.’
‘It’s not important, really. Besides, it’s a bit of a walk from here.’
‘I can leave, if you’d much rather be alone.’
‘No,’ he said. And again: ‘No.’ He was disappointed to experience no fury toward Rhea; the affinity between them had only ripened over time, its devastating power undiminished. ‘Let’s go and see it. You took me to see so many places in this city, it’s now my turn to return the favour.’
Walking side by side along the promenade, Rhea was immutably consoled by Karan’s presence, as though he were an apparition summoned by the demented force of her terrific longing. Sunlight spilled through the thick, smog-suffused clouds, smothering them in a smooth and buttery light. Wind, swift and strong, concealed the accumulating anger of the bruise-blue sky: the monsoon, which had unravelled this season with erratic, gritty strength, was preparing to burst upon the earth with catastrophic force.
‘I see it!’ He crinkled his eyes.
The bench was at the end of the promenade, battered by sunlight, bloated with rain, scratched and spat on; it was perfect. ‘Here it is.’ When he extended his arms, pride and sadness came through.
‘What a good place to rest. Samar must have suffered terribly.’
‘His liver had failed. His last bout with tuberculosis was nasty; I would put a napkin to his mouth and it would come away red.’
‘Didn’t he take the medicines to manage the infection?’
‘He wasn’t careful when he first found out. When Leo left him he couldn’t hang on in San Francisco alone. He came back to Bombay, to his cottage, to Zaira’s photographs, to Mr Ward-Davies’s leash.’ Karan sighed. ‘He complained that his beliefs had failed him, that his conviction had not been worth rickshaw change. But I wanted him to live long enough to see one thing.’ He looked at her, head tilted. ‘Even if he couldn’t save what he had loved, loving them had saved him.’
She placed her hand on the bench. ‘Was it a good death?’
Karan shook his head. ‘But he dreamed of flamingoes. He spoke of them all the time, though he’d never seen them. I promised to take him to Sewri but then I never got around to it. Before I knew it, he was gone.’
‘We should go and see them, then.’ Her whisper was as quiet as a little fish coming up for a gulp of air. ‘For Samar’s sake.’
‘A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think of him.’ He covered his mouth lightly with his palms.
‘You stayed with him all the way to the end?’
He drew his hand back. ‘I carried him around the house. I’d show him his piano, the roof, the terrace. I’d show him the sea. He loved the sea, Rhea, he just loved the sea. He was so…’ Grief slammed against his voice, and her eyes filled up. ‘I cleaned his crap. He threw up on me. I sang to him and held him close. We went for walks on Marine Drive and for dinner to Gatsby.’
‘You cleaned his sheets too?’
‘I cleaned his sheets.’
‘And you held him?’
‘As hard as he asked.’
‘And you rocked him?’
‘I rocked him.’ His voice broke into so many little pieces it seemed impossible that it would be whole again. ‘He was my friend.’ Locking his arms around himself, Karan swayed back and forth. ‘He was my friend. He was…my friend.’
35
For several days after meeting Karan at Marine Drive, Rhea drifted in the dark, still pond of Karan’s remembering gaze, imagining what he had seen: svelte black kittens in a dusty howdah, an abandoned stone mermaid, wizened faces of old women, midnight squares in an old city, the gossamer wings of night insects whirring rapidly with an eerie fever. Her visions soon grew bolder, macabre; she felt a great flapping against the darkness and she rose out of it to meet the ghosts he had summoned by name. She saw a raven on a fence post; she saw a spire; she saw a cold, wet street; she saw the deep, resplendent green of a moonlit pasture. In bed, recalling the comfort of walking down the promenade with Karan, she felt his quiet, destroyed voice conflate and cover her like a mantilla.
Toward the end of July, after a particularly fierce shower of rain had calmed, she called him. Her offer to drive him to Sewri to see the flamingoes threw him.
To ward off any suspicion about her intentions, she added that the venture was in Samar’s memory.
He relented, not under any ruse of sentimentality—this was not to be a stroll down memory lane—but because he had questions to ask her.
‘When should I pick you up?’ She looked out of the window, at the thick, glowering sky.
‘I live in Juhu now—so I’ll take the train up.’
‘The famous photographer does not have a chauffeur?’
‘I rarely ever step out of my room in Juhu. I’ve been there so long I’m set like jelly.’
‘Very well, then, I’ll pick you up from the station.’
‘Thanks.’
‘If the need arises, I can always drop you back.’
‘I might take you up on your offer if the rain doesn’t let up.’
‘See you on Tuesday.’ As she put the phone down, the exhilarating anxiety that enveloped her was almost adolescent, though her experience of it was solemn.
No sooner had the train deposited Karan at the station than an announcement blared through the sodden air—all trains had been cancelled due to incessant flooding in the northern suburbs. Karan was caught off guard. When he had boarded, the rain was only the uncut diamond of a whisper, but within an hour the tracks had got flooded. Karan could not make up his mind whether to carry on or take a taxi back to Juhu.
As he stepped out of the station now, his black umbrella blown back by the unruly gale, he saw Rhea’s car pull up. He studied her profile, severe and elegant; it made him feel like he was walking on lit coals, and he recalled the first time she had come to fetch him at Ban Ganga, their subsequent drive to Sewri. The repeat of such an enterprise would not only insult the sorcery of the past, it would also mean that he had failed to garner the lessons fate had delivered at his doorstep. But his curiosity was larger than the memory of past scalding; he had to ask her about her child. And whether he was the father.
He opened the door and climbed in. ‘All the tracks in the suburbs are flooded. The trains have been called off.’
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘It hasn’t been raining so wildly here.’
‘When I left Juhu the storm was in the distance; I gather by the time I got here everything back north was swamped.’
‘That’s yet another reason to not live beyond Bandra.’
‘You�
�re such a south Bombay snob!’
‘I’m joking, Karan.’ Her face, rinsed in pain and age, held an angular, sombre quietness, like the last pew in a cathedral.
‘I should not have come today,’ he said. ‘How will I go back now?’
‘I’ll take you back. I had told you I would.’ She started to drive.
‘What if the roads are also flooded, as they most likely will be? How will you drive through so much water and then back again?’ He saw commuters tumble out of the station, looking lost and harried, unsure how they would reach home.
‘Rough waters and Rhea Dalal,’ she said, looping her middle finger over her index finger, ‘we go back a long way.’
He sat back as she drove on. ‘If the city has been so rude and cruel why did you stay on?’
‘Do you know why you came back?’
‘I’m a glutton for punishment but I expected you to know better.’
Rhea considered Karan’s question for a few minutes. There had been any number of times she had thought of leaving the city. She had considered moving to Pondicherry and working on her pottery amid the seaside town’s large community of potters; she had thought of moving to her house in Alibaug. But her heart could not free itself from Bombay.
She said, ‘A few years ago I was working the morning shift at the animal hospital when a Parsi woman in a black polka-dotted dress stopped by. She was around seventy. She had knotted a navy blue scarf around her thinning white hair and she was holding a cane basket.’ The woman explained to Rhea that she had been walking outside the Parsi colony in Dadar when she had seen a snake. A car had run over it, and it was writhing in pain when she had rescued it. She said she had no choice but to bring it to the animal shelter in the hope that it might be saved. Giving Rhea the snake in the basket, she said she had to leave as her husband was critically ill and she had to schlep it all the way to Bhatia Hospital, at the other end of town. Rhea peeked into the cane basket. The snake was already dead. She looked at the woman and assured her she would do her best to save the creature. ‘Promise me you will make it better,’ the old woman had said with uncommon solemnity and Rhea had taken her hand in her own and said, ‘I promise,’ before turning and walking away toward the dispensary. Filled with awe and revulsion, a strange humming in her head, she had stood in the dispensary where a veterinarian was injecting a stray puppy. If this toothless old woman in her black polka-dotted dress and navy blue scarf could leave her husband in a hospital to come to Parel to deliver a road kill of a snake, then something was all right about Bombay, she had thought. On the days the city smarted and ached, when it jabbed and sulked, Rhea had only to shut her eyes and picture the woman with a cane basket in her hand.
‘Did the woman ever come back to enquire after the snake?’
‘No, but she called me.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I said the snake had been saved. She told me her husband had died.’
‘Why did you tell her the snake survived?’
Rhea did not reply.
In the silence between them, he saw her more clearly than ever before, understanding that what attracted him to her was her temperament: the temperament of an artist, endlessly curious, frighteningly detached, essentially unfathomable, brooding yet childlike, transient, abstract, of ample, generous spirit. He knew her better now because he finally knew himself; perhaps that was why they had met, to be revealed to each other in the silvered mirror of their souls.
As she navigated through deadly sheets of rain, he asked her about her child.
‘The monkey, it was rabid. It got into the clinic through an open window. The nurse carrying my son was the beast’s third victim. She dropped my baby.’
‘Dropped?’ His expression was like a page ripped in half.
‘On the edge of a stairwell. He tumbled down six floors.’ The sight of her son, wrapped in a white cloth, tumbling down the stairwell, sprung to her mind; she felt a tightening in her throat.
Karan closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’d always assumed you needed to know someone before you might care for them,’ she said, pausing to marvel at the intensity of her longing for her infant son. ‘For the life of me I didn’t know that certain kinds of love are a knowledge unto themselves.’
She spoke of the days after the baby’s death; Adi’s depression, her icy reserve, their confrontation. But she kept one key question of the narrative unanswered: the identity of the baby’s father.
‘Adi must have had a fit when he found out about you and me.’
‘He was quite calm. On the face of it.’
‘Poor chap. How is he now?’
She told him about her final fight with Adi. ‘I left for Alibaug to gather my thoughts. I had decided to tell him everything on my return. I spent the week thinking of how to break the news to him. I worried over words. I drove back believing I would find a way to make things all right. But I came back,’ she said, her sigh like the final breath escaping a slaughtered bird, ‘to an empty house.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘After so many years?’
‘He just,’ she said, slicing the air with her hand, ‘took off.’ Although years had passed since she had seen Adi, as she talked about him now love flooded up the back of her mouth like a taste.
‘Did you look for him?’
She nodded her head. ‘Sometimes in the late evenings, when I’m not expecting anyone and the doorbell rings, my heart jumps.’ Human memory, its scalding recall, terrorized her: the darnedest little flashbacks, the broken, masculine hum of an Ellington ditty, an untidily squeezed tube of Tom’s of Maine, could dismantle her. ‘But it’s never him. He’s never at the door.’
Karan felt suddenly that the well of Rhea’s loneliness was deep enough to drown him.
‘I thought he had left because I had cheated on him,’ she said under her breath. ‘But perhaps he left because he felt as if he had not loved me enough to keep me to himself.’
‘You’re hard, Rhea.’
‘Soft is for sponge cakes…so what’s your point?’
‘You haven’t come undone.’
‘Actually, they put the stitches in so small that you can’t see them at all.’
After Adi’s disappearance, Rhea had employed a private detective agency to trace him. The investigators had combed all of Bombay, then the rest of the state and, eventually, much of the country. Every few months she would receive a call saying that a man ‘just like Adi’ had been spotted and she would fly out to wherever it was. The fifth false alarm had sent her to Delhi, but she had returned disappointed.
In the flight back she had reflected on the fact that the man who had been spotted at Khan Market had been mad and homeless; why had he been mistaken for Adi?
‘Then, four years ago,’ she said, ‘I got a call saying he was seen at Shirdi.’
She had got into her car, driven maniacally, devouring distance with dangerous haste. She arrived before dawn and waited outside the fortress-like enclosure around Sai Baba’s crypt. In the thickening swell of flower sellers, limbless devotees, fakir impersonators, cobblers and sundry politicians, she had stood in anticipation, sweating profusely in the bestial heat of the plateau. At dusk, after scanning almost every face present, she went up to the shrine, prayed, then made her way out. She was walking down the noisy lane outside the temple when she suddenly felt helpless with rage; she wanted to grab her life and tear out its hair, punch it in the guts, gouge out its eyes, throw it to the floor and sit on its chest till the darned monster let her be. Instead, she fell on her knees, then drew them up to her chest, curling up like an alarmed centipede. Devotees who saw her thought she had been seized by a divine presence; in fact, she was motionless with an anger too large for her.
Unfit to drive back to Bombay she checked into the Sun-n-Sand Hotel.
Lying on the double bed, she surveyed the room: the chairs were upholstered in green chintz;
the curtains were thick; a sketch of Sai Baba was pegged on the wall. Although there was nothing particularly repugnant about the room, she felt it was exactly the sort of place one might choose to die in, a room without any redeeming detail or aspiration for beauty that might tempt one to stay back, to hold on. My entire life has failed me, she thought. Everyone is gone.
In a while, her despair dissipating, Rhea sat up in bed. She drew the curtains to allow the dying night to tumble around her room like a kitten playing with a ball of wool. She saw a maize field ripple under the sigh of a wind; she heard bells tolling in the foreground, the kakad aarti. Her thoughts turned to Karan, the last in the quartet, without a role as neat as of the other three, the only one who was still around, somewhere. Light emerged on the horizon and bounced boldly into the featureless hotel room, making her shudder in anticipation. The belief that she would meet Karan again gave her the resolve to return to Bombay; she would meet him, then ask him for forgiveness. She would tell him how much she missed their conversations, she would thank him for the photograph, a sweet scribble on its flip side.
‘You knew we would meet again?’
‘I did.’
‘How?’
‘Mother’s instinct?’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t know. I just did. I was looking for you long before I ever met you in Chor Bazaar.’
‘I hope Adi is safe.’ His tight whorl of anger for Adi melted, vanished; kindness and respect took its place. ‘I hope he’s all right.’
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 34