She gulped. ‘I liked to hear him hear me; his listening was like being held by a strong pair of arms.’
He looked at her face; she was still in love with the man. But his envy rolled aside; there was no fire in it. She could sense him withdrawing, but also his indifference; she remained silent. Twenty minutes passed before she said, ‘Well, here we are, back at Sewri.’
‘Lost, lovely birds.’ A flamingo flew into the air, squawking; its dull pink wings thrashed about.
‘It’s been a while.’
The same sickening stench of mudflats. Old factories in the backdrop. A shiny city in the foreground.
‘Have you noticed how the birds are almost all gone?’
‘Most of them leave as early as April,’ Rhea said. Their shoulders touched under her huge, sturdy umbrella. ‘I hear they fly to Africa.’
‘The last time we came here there were at least fifty thousand birds. Aren’t you amazed that this lot’—he pointed to the skimpy cluster of a thousand-odd birds—‘is still around?’
This flock did not possess the dramatic presence of the one seen years ago, but their tentative tranquillity had a certain dignified strength.
‘You’re right. They could have left.’ A wet, desultory wind rippled the hem of her widow-black dress. ‘But they’re still here. I guess we always underestimate staying power.’
The wind picked up intensity. Sporadic trellises of lightning streaked the sky. They turned, strode urgently to the car as rain of uncommon might approached in the distance like a miasma. ‘We should get back to the car.’
‘I read in the papers that Samar and you took up in the end.’
‘It was nothing like that.’
‘Why didn’t you rubbish the rumours?’
‘They were so flattering!’ He held the door open for her to climb in, he smiled. ‘I’m susceptible to certain kinds of vanity.’
She started the car. ‘What made you return to photography?’
‘Samar asked me to.’ He looked around her car. A trinket was suspended from the rear-view mirror. There were old copies of Art India and Tehelka on the back seat.
‘He asked you?’
‘Not in so many words.’ Karan recounted his visit with Samar to Dr Taraporevala, who had found in Samar’s recitals salve for personal loss. The subtle, startling ways art could repair an individual. The solitary pursuit of one artist could serve a stranger with companionship, knowledge, truth. He told Rhea what Samar had said to him at Gatsby: One day you will discover only the end of the world is the end of the world. ‘What he left unsaid saw me through.’
‘That’s why The Brass Monkey is dedicated to him.’ Her face was like a key that has finally found the lock it fits into.
‘I miss him so much,’ he said. ‘So much.’ He shook his head.
There was no consolation for such longing, she knew from experience. Her eyes briefly examined the daunting sky. ‘It’ll take us ages to get to Juhu; would you care to sleep over at my place?’
‘Thanks for the offer, but I don’t want to overstay my welcome.’
‘It’s obnoxious,’ she said, heading north. ‘To have to be so polite.’ Tightening the grip on her steering wheel, she added, ‘Do you have any idea how much I loved your photographs?’
‘You saw them?’
‘I missed the exhibition in Bombay. A year later, I caught it in a gallery in Los Angeles. I have a copy of The Brass Monkey.’
‘The photographs must seem like familiar ground to you.’
‘Not at all. You see things differently now. Will there be more?’
‘I really don’t know.’ He had come to believe his work was concerned less with extracting meaning out of life and more with keeping the whole intact; art was not what he took away but what he left untouched, as it were, complete in itself. ‘I’m still unsure if the pictures were a result of an old ambition or a freak occurrence. Have you ever sat by a lake and seen a series of bubbles rise to the surface and pop? The pictures were a little like that, I guess.’
‘The prologue was generous.’
‘Was there a photograph you liked in particular?’
‘The one of an old man standing in a balcony with his hands on the railing. Right in front of him is an underwear hung out to dry.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the underwear has a little hole.’
‘I took that picture in Kurla, where I worked at the call centre.’
‘It was as if he was gazing out at the world through a hole in an underwear on the washing line outside his window. You took what was wounded and forgotten, and you made it almost joyous. But,’ she said, ‘it was never trite.’
‘I watched him every day. He was always there. An odd little sentinel. My running mate in an election for Men Going Nowhere.’
She waited for the rumbles of thunder to clear. ‘You took him and made his loneliness so real it was like a river or a tree, and you took the pain away just enough for me to see it. And to see him.’
In the seclusion of the car, Rhea spoke to him of the last few years of her life, serene, without incident, unmaimed by the glamour of public success, the sort that had vandalized Karan, driven him underground. Lila-bai, her maid, had left two years ago. Miss Cooper, the neighbour on the floor below hers, had relocated to Toronto after a psychic had told her all of India would be destroyed in an earthquake. She had tried to embark on a few tentative friendships but had retraced her steps from the periphery of meaningful intimacy; there was so much of her past she could not explain to herself that the task of explaining it to someone else seemed cumbersome. The animal shelter had a new dispensary, built in part with a donation she had made. She felt the need to explain how she continued to live her life uninterrupted, although her husband was no longer around. ‘Adi left me enough. Once a month I meet this wonderful person, my “financial adviser”, who manages my funds and plans how to reinvest my dividends or lock my profits. It’s only catching up with me now, how far ahead Adi had thought for me. Oh,’ she touched her forehead, ‘and I removed the tiger skin in the living room. I had it burnt.’
‘But it was a sight to behold!’
‘Yes, it was. But all life had gone out of it. When I used to sit on the chaise below it I often felt it was going to come crashing down on me. It was beautiful but empty, and dead.’
The Alibaug house, whose walls she had recently got painted a pale pistachio green, continued to bring her renewal, and she returned there every month. In the house by the sea, she would read voraciously the novels Adi had enjoyed, finding companionship in their pages, silken ruminations, tragic detours, the sullen, aching resonance of an imagined life. She would pause during certain scenes, finding that something of Adi was revealed in the reading of the novel, a particular passage he would have re-read, a line that would have seduced his admiration.
She looked gingerly at Karan. Almost everything she had said was utterly mundane. Yet, she found him enrapt, as if he had heard the most fascinating story ever. His own life, altered dramatically after his return to Bombay, to photography, paled before the story of her’s.
After they passed Worli, when it seemed as if Juhu was not an impossibility in spite of the deluge, he asked her casually what was uppermost on his mind: the identity of her son’s father. The muscles in her jaw clenched, she said nothing, and he pressed on. ‘I wish you would tell me.’
‘Is this why you agreed to meet me?’ Her tone was one of extreme disappointment.
‘I need to know my losses, if only to let go of them.’
‘A child died, Karan, does it matter if it was yours or Adi’s?’
‘Yes.’
Her face chalked up with a sorrow too wide to be wept.
‘I guess the north of the city took a nasty blow.’
An hour passed.
At Mahim, greeted by the daunting sight of flooded roads and traffic jams, he suggested, ‘We’d be better off taking the gullies of Bandra.’
‘But the gullies are bou
nd to be flooded.’
‘The main road will have massive back-ups.’
‘I suppose the lanes will be less crowded.’
In the lanes of Bandra, water had risen ankle-high. Rhea’s car soldiered forward, past big-boughed trees that had snapped like cocktail picks. The lightning in the sky was like the flashing mane of a runaway stallion. Frequently, thunder reverberated so loudly they had to repeat themselves.
‘Why don’t you turn around and go back, Rhea? I’ll just walk it to Juhu.’
‘No!’ There was something crazed in her need to reach him home, as if the gesture was a means of restoring his trust in her or to express a kindness she had been incapable of in the past.
‘There has to have been a cloudburst here,’ he said, astounded by the volume of water outside the car.
‘I’ll keep driving until I can.’
‘And when you no longer can?’
‘We will walk. Or swim. But I will get you home. You will drink a cup of tea. Tomorrow morning, you will read the paper. You will be all right.’
The last of the lovely cottages was swamped; cane chairs and dictionaries and paintings and lamps and books and paintings churned together in an indecipherable mass in the thick and furious rivulets of water. Plump, dark women hurried to salvage their belongings, white ovens and love seats, silk saris and potted ferns, great old gramophones too.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as they drove slowly past, ‘I behaved badly in the end. I kept calling you. I followed you. Showed up at your doorstep, wrangled with Adi. My conduct was appalling.’
‘Oh,’ she said, her brow crinkling, ‘I wish I were man enough to apologize for what I did to you, Karan.’
He was grateful that she had not, directly, asked him for his forgiveness; that would have made him feel incredibly awkward. ‘Something changed in you after the verdict, didn’t it?’ he asked.
‘You’re right.’ His perspicacity impressed her.
‘Was it the verdict?’
‘No. Outside, in the quad, I saw Malik briefly, right before he got in his car with his lawyers.’
‘Yes, I remember. You had told me you felt that he didn’t look to you like a murderer.’
‘I never understood why his face had upset me. And I’ve thought about that moment for years. A few weeks back, I was in the kitchen making tea when I realized something inside me had changed forever because,’ she said, her hand on his shoulder, ‘when I looked at Malik’s face I saw something of myself in it.’
Rain continued to hammer on the roof of the car.
Rhea said that all the men she had ever loved were now recognized only by their absence in her life. Her father had perished in a horrific car accident. Forbidden the dignity of a proper farewell, she continued to long for Dr Thacker, his patience, his acuity, his ability to read her dreams. Although there had never been the time to forge a meaningful attachment with her son, allegiances formed in the womb were hard to overcome. Adi, she had accepted in Shirdi, would never come back to her, and it was her greatest regret that she had failed to tell him that loving someone was not only a moral act but also an instinct for life. ‘The loneliness I live with today is so large that it billows out of me; occasionally, when I wake at night, I find myself walking into it. I don’t have it in me, any longer, to fight it, the emptiness. So I’ve been wondering, in the meantime—if we can do dinner now and again, or perhaps a walk in the morning, if you don’t mind very much.’
The request threw Karan.
Rhea, so ferociously protective of her solitude, was asking for his help to alleviate the loneliness in her life. Karan smiled inwardly, without enacting the gesture. The word irony could not accurately be applied in the context, but its spirit was engaging, democratic, broad enough to encompass all the things that darted around language but never within it. Malik’s mother, Mrs Prasad, had confirmed to Samar the suspicion he could never identify: that his loss was of a widower, and through his anger rang a lover’s dirge. Zaira, once infallibly ubiquitous, was now a footnote in public memory, hostage only to private remembrance. Adi, whom Rhea had trusted with and for her heart, had vanished without a word, defeating forever her faith in a loyalty she had once assumed invincible. Leo, who everyone had expected would perish without a trace, a statistical casualty, was at his desk in Brooklyn, writing away, dotting a sentence before he embarked on a fresh one. Likewise, Malik Prasad, former stalker, murderer, loon, was now a producer of soap operas, happily married, with a pretty, ambitious pilot for a wife and a daughter he doted on. Karan’s photography, which he believed had been soiled by the tar of politics, was now free to be itself, stupendous and light, witty and authentic. And now here was Rhea, muse, madness, subject of his lunatic love, asking for his hand in friendship.
‘The car’s battery has died.’
‘Oh.’ He appeared jolted by her pronouncement.
‘Are your feet also wet, Karan?’
‘Yes, the water’s come through.’
‘We should get out.’
‘May I look at your hands before that?’
She held them out to him.
He studied her veins, the elegant criss-crossing on her wrists.
She held her breath.
When he let go of her hands, she felt like an anchor crashing to the bed of the sea. I want love to leave me alone for a while.
‘I don’t know if I will last long in Bombay,’ he said, palming off his unavailability on geography. ‘I might move. Travel. Bombay has lost me, Rhea.’
‘The glitter wears, I suppose.’
‘There’s no open space. Buildings everywhere. I don’t know where to look, except at the sky.’
She was amazed; a few years ago the same man had sat at the end of her lane to catch a glimpse of her, had fought her husband to the ground, and here he was today, looking for exit routes. What could attract a man could, eventually, revolt him; she knew this from experience that was not restricted to Karan. ‘Where does your wagon head after that?’
‘Shimla, perhaps.’
‘Ah,’ she cried. ‘So Karan Seth comes full circle.’
‘Is there any other way?’ he asked. ‘My father died, left me the house. I might fix it up and hang out there for a bit.’
‘I can see you living in the mountains, Karan. I think you’ll be happy there. But what will you do there?’
‘Prepare to become an unmotivational speaker; I believe there’s a market out there,’ he said with a smile.
‘Whatever you do, in the end, you will be fine, and things will work out. Perhaps not as you had wanted, but they will.’
‘Oddly enough, I’ve come to believe in that more than ever before. But you, Rhea, what will you do? Where will you go?’
‘Here is where I’ve been headed all along.’ She knew Karan had his entire life ahead of him, extravagant with possibilities; her life, in stark contrast, reminded her of a train that had gone off its tracks. ‘Even if I never knew it, even if I was lost all along, Bombay is where I belong.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘If you believe that,’ she said, her husky laugh flashing like a rapier, ‘then you’ll believe anything.’ She turned the key in the ignition, but the car would not start. ‘Thing is, when you fell, you did it with all your strength. I, on the other hand, crashed without fanfare. And the downside of being a car wreck is there’s no entertainment value in it after a while.’
His heart bolted. Did she really feel like a car wreck? But an act of tenderness he committed now would be misleading, he knew. ‘You are a brave woman.’
‘Not a good one, though. But I suppose bravery will see me through the long rains.’
‘We’re going to have to leave the car here,’ he observed. But why was he finding it so impossible to open the door and jump out?
‘Yes. We’ll have to walk.’ She too found herself holding on to the steering wheel. Let me wait a few minutes longer, she thought. Perhaps he will change his mind.
‘I’ll w
alk to Juhu. You don’t need to take me back.’
‘I’m sorry I failed you. I had promised to get you home.’
‘It was not in your hands, Rhea. You never failed me.’
Silver arrows of rain struck the earth with sinister anger. They saw a calf floating away helplessly in the torrent.
‘You will have to wade through the water all the way to Juhu. Swim, even.’
‘As will you, back to Breach Candy.’ He marvelled. ‘How far we live from each other.’
‘In the storm it doesn’t matter where you live. It’s about getting back safely. I’d promised to get you back home.’
‘You told me once that storms were tricky.’
‘But I didn’t say they were impossible.’
‘Well, I never knew whether to believe you.’
‘That might have been a problem in more ways than one.’
‘You’ll make it back home safely.’
‘It’ll be one hell of a trek,’ she said, ‘and I’ll make it home. But there are worse things than that.’ She jumped out of the car like a cat.
He opened the door, stepped into the water.
Joining thousands of others, they entered the monsoon, its delirium and purgatory. There were women in saris and girls in jeans; bankers in suits and dabbawallas in dhotis; there were rowdy boys and baffled old men; there were dogs, mice, a white cow. Some faces were scared; others were undaunted, almost thrilled; everyone seemed intent only on surviving the storm. Karan held Rhea’s hand briefly but the rain would not allow them to stay together for very long; they were soon separated by daggers of water. They managed to walk into a cul-de-sac which, oddly enough, was more or less abandoned. He turned and walked back to the crowd of people he had left behind. She waited where she was. Over the din, she shouted, ‘It never meant anything.’ The water came up to her hips now and she struggled to stand upright in its currents. ‘The kindness. And the cruelties.’
‘Then what was true, Rhea?’ His hand was shielding his eyes when he turned to look at her. ‘What was true in all of it?’
‘Years ago, in Dadar market, the madwoman you had photographed.’
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 35