Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  She uncrossed her thighs and her eyes looked glassy, either with gin or the glare from a crack between the coloured curtains at the window. ‘But what was the use of all that fashion here?’ she cried, throwing down her cigarette. ‘I had forgotten I was living in India!’ she laughed. ‘India – the land of the sari – of veiled women – what did they know about hats? Such an idiot I was, I really thought they would wear my hats. Hats – on top of a sari?’ she spluttered. ‘And all the time Mother Braganza was telling me, “Madam, no one wear this kind hat. No make this hat, madam. Make for church, for wedding, confirmation, funeral, then you sell. Make with orange blossom, white net, paper flower, my girls will make, Cecilia and Rosalie will make.” But did I listen? Of course not! I, make little girls’ veils to wear at confirmation?’ She shook with laughter, splashing gin and water all over her lap as she refilled her glass, quite ignoring Baumgartner who held out his towards her. ‘How could I do that, coming from a Europe where people knew about fashion and elegance? I couldn’t make church outfits for the Braganzas and the Lobos and the Lopezes of Bombay, it was too much. And so I kept on with feathers and beads – and all those hats just lay there in this room, rotting. You know how this climate rots everything – the damp, the dust, the insects. When I moved out of Napoli and came here to live, no more the memsahib, no more the designer, just poor old woman, me, I had to sweep out all the feathers and the dead moths and the silverfish. So much rubbish. Ach, it made me sad,’ she ended with a scream of laughter, and actually let Baumgartner have a bit of gin in his glass. ‘And Mother Braganza put her daughters on the street. From making hats, they became prostitutes,’ Lotte sighed, plucking at the tattered lace on her slip. ‘And now they and their clients and their children – all living up on the roof – they abuse me. They throw rotten fish at me. They call the police – the police –’ Lotte’s lip began to shake.

  ‘Not a good idea, the hats,’ Baumgartner summed up, sinking back with his glass.

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘much better to stay in bed, drink gin and forget all this – this banging, this shouting, this madhouse –’ she pressed her hand to her head because down in the courtyard the mechanics were guiding a lorry down the lane on to their premises, bellowing orders and racing the engine as they did so. ‘At least I had this place to come to – when they took Napoli away from me, Kanti’s sons. Those boys – I knew them when they were little. If they were sick, I made them porridge. At night I sat holding ice to their foreheads. I kept away the priest, called the doctor. Not even a thermometer they had in the house till I went and got one. If they wanted to dress smart, I went and chose their clothes. But when Kanti was dead, then they said, “Who is this woman? We don’t know this woman. Throw her out.” Gave me my money and put me out on the street. Ja, Hugo, that’s how it was.’

  She leaned forward, tilting out of her chair at the table, her tangled hair falling on her freckled shoulders that were cut by the dirty satin straps of her slip. For a while she brooded, then poured out some more gin, lit another cigarette and threw herself back, facing the silent man in the cane bucket chair. ‘Ja,’ she said in her brassiest voice, ‘that is the sad story of Lola of Prince’s, eh, Hugo, mein Liebchen?’ She gave him a wink, remembering that shared experience – surely he remembered that? ‘You remember the old Lola, don’t you, Hugo?’ To refresh his failing memory, she stretched out her leg, pointing her toes, trying to flex the calf muscle and tighten it into an elegant line. ‘Lola, sweet Lola, of Prince’s, ah-ha,’ she sang.

  Baumgartner found himself smiling too. That was a period of Lotte’s multicoloured history that he had known more intimately than her later incarnation as a memsahib. Nor was he averse to being reminded of Calcutta, of Prince’s, his own youth, the days of cabaret and Scotch, of Tommies and GIs, profiteering and wealth, the guns of war at a safe distance and yet close enough to edge the scene with a certain hysteria, the unforgettable hysteria like a drunkenness, a fever bordering on delirium.

  ‘And can Lola still do the can-can?’ he teased her.

  She stretched out her leg again and jabbed him with her toe. ‘To which era you think I belong, eh? To your grandmother’s?’ Banging down her glass, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Can you remember nothing?’ Putting out her arm, she bent her back and swung around with an unexpected agility. ‘Can’t you remember Gisela and I in our blue satin gowns with red bows – like this?’ She pranced about in her slip, holding up one tattered corner of it as she did so, the other hand on her hip, humming:

  ‘Tea for two and two for tea,

  Me for you and you for me . . .’

  Baumgartner leant back in his chair, clapping. ‘Bravo! Ja, I remember it, Lotte. And Gisela with her hair just out of those curlers – she always had a shampoo before a performance – and then each of you did a piece separately – what was it?’

  Lotte pulled away the chair from the table, lifted one leg and rested her foot on it. One hand on her hip, with the other she held an imaginary cigarette to her lips. Then, flinging her hair out of her eyes with an equine gesture, she sang out of the corner of her mouth, down-turned:

  ‘Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate,

  Darling, I remember the way you used to wait . . .’

  ‘“Lilli Marlene”,’ shouted Baumgartner, clapping his hands. ‘Bravo, “Lilli Marlene”!’

  She bowed with a great grandeur of manner but it made her lose her balance and with it her flair for impersonation. Throwing herself on to the chair, she planted her hands on her knees, looking both pleased and ruffled. ‘But that Gisela,’ she said when she got back her breath, ‘that Gisela, she went to that fat little manager – Om Sahni, you remember him, Hugo – and told him, “I come from Russia. I am from the Ballet Russe. I was prima ballerina. I danced Odette, Odile, Giselle . . .” What was she not star of, that Gisela? Never corps de ballet, always from birth prima ballerina! And Om Sahni who had been making soda water and bottling it in the shed behind the hotel before he became manager, he believed every word she said. How could a memsahib, a blonde lady with a white skin, tell a lie? And he would put on a shiny satiny suit and wear a tie made of sofa material, you know, and sit very close to the dance floor and watch her leaping around in satin slippers with chicken feathers coming down over her ears with tears in his eyes. Ach, if Pavlova could have seen Gisela dance the Dying Swan in the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, she would have risen out of her grave and hit her on the head with hammer and sickle, I think – a Bolshevist it would have made of her.’

  ‘Show how Gisela did the Dying Swan, Lotte,’ Baumgartner encouraged her but Lotte would not. It was not that Lotte admitted to any limitations of her own but it was now the stifling peak of noon, she had already drunk enough gin to feel waterlogged, and talking made for less perspiration than dancing.

  ‘Clever she was, Gisela, and Om Sahni was not the first man she made a fool of – there had been enough in Shanghai. That was where I first heard of her – never met her of course, my family moved in different circles, had nothing to do with cabaret – but there used to be these posters, I saw them myself, of The Lily of Shanghai. And before that Singapore, before that Macao, before that – she said Russia.’ Lotte sputtered with laughter. ‘Grew her hair long, dyed it dark red like a beetroot, painted her cheeks blue to look hollow, and began to speak like a Russian. Quite an actress, that one,’ Lotte chuckled admiringly. ‘She even said she was a refugee, a czarina I suppose, fled from the Reds. Where were her jewels, her furs? One day I called that Russian I knew – that Besauloff who used to travel in the Himalayas, you remember? He was from a good family in Russia – his mother came to see him once and she was a countess, I think. So I asked him to come and meet Gisela, ask her some questions, but when she heard – she ran away! She had appointments – doctors, dentists, everybody was waiting for her – and she could not stay to lunch and she could not meet him. Of course not!’ Lotte laughed and laughed, so that Baumgartner had to join in although he had heard the story often
enough. ‘But it did not matter to Gisela. If she had not brought her Russian furs and jewels with her, she found people like Om Sahni to buy them for her in Calcutta, temperature fifty degrees Celsius, and he bought furs from Kashmir that he said were beaver and fox but I think just jackal. Yes, yes, jackal – that piece she wore round her neck with two eyes and four paws and a little tail hanging down. But that was only the beginning for our Gisela, wasn’t it? After that, that Raja of – of what, Hugo? – he came to Prince’s, saw her in her ballet slippers, asked her to teach his wives and daughters ballet and off she went to the jungles with him. To collect some real furs and diamonds, she said, and you know how her eyes gleamed to think of that.’ Lotte laughed raucously, as if in approval of her friend’s greed and cunning and success. ‘Everyone was like that in the war, was it not so, Hugo? People made money, made fortunes – then vanished – phut – like that. Only we stayed, like fools. Here, amongst the thieves, the cholera, the mosquitoes –’ she slapped her arms in rage.

  ‘Where could we go, Lotte? Where could you and I have gone?’ Baumgartner had taken out his handkerchief again and sat twisting and crumpling it.

  ‘Hmm,’ she muttered, scratching her arms thoughtfully, brooding. ‘Yes, there was nowhere to go. Germany was gone – phut. Europe was gone, all of it. Let us face it, Liebchen, there is no home for us. So where can we go? Hah? Tell me.’

  ‘Venice,’ said Hugo unexpectedly, wiping his face and then raising it so that it shone above the soiled rag. ‘If I could go, if I could leave, then I would go to Venice.’

  Her jaw dropped. For a while it attempted to utter some sound, but hung emptily. ‘Venice, he says,’ she said at last. ‘Venezia – no less. As if he were a duke, or a count. You a millionaire, maybe, in your dreams?’

  Baumgartner laughed, shamefacedly. ‘Only an idea, Lotte,’ he apologised. ‘Once I was there – for seven days. I caught the boat to India from there. It was so strange – it was both East and West, both Europe and Asia. I thought – maybe, in such a place, I could be at home.’

  ‘At home – in Venice?’ she screamed, beginning to shake with volcanic laughter.

  Hurt, he retreated. ‘Let me be, Lotte,’ he muttered, and struggled out of the chair. He blundered about the room, bumping into furniture till he found the kitchen shelves and there he clattered about amongst the pots and pans, hoping vaguely to find a piece of bread or some fruit or cheese, anything that would give his stomach a little comfort, a little solidity so it would not ache from emptiness or slosh with fluids. In one pot he found a coating of cooked, yellow food and turned away in disgust: he was not hungry enough for that. Dropping it, he blundered his way to the divan and sank down on it like a large bag dropping and settling. ‘Is so late, Lotte,’ he complained, not quite knowing what he meant, and then pulled off his shoes and lay down, rolled over to face the wall, shut his eyes and after an initial swirl of giddiness, felt himself falling through layers of oblivion, grey upon grey, each darker than the last, thicker, blocking out colour and sound. ‘“Lilli Marlene”,’ he muttered, ‘I remember that, Lotte – “Lille Marlene”,’ but was too deeply embedded in grey felt to hear her reply.

  Eventually he felt something press against his back. He thought with sleepy affection that it was his cats who had come to lie on his chest or beside his pillow, and purr. He put out his arm to enfold Fritzi and Mimi, Miese and Lulu. Instead of their stifling, adhesive fur, he met only Lotte’s hairless smoothness and bareness. The human, womanly quality of her slack old skin, soft as flour, drew a groan of pleasure out of his empty stomach – it was good, like bread. He turned and put his arms around her, rubbing her back, again forgetting she was not a cat, murmuring ‘Wie geht’s dann, Lulu, eh? What is it you want?’ Like a cat she pressed upon him, nuzzling, nibbling, without speech. With small groans they made themselves comfortable against each other, finding concavities into which to press their convexities, and convexities into which to fit concavities, till at last they made one comfortable whole, two halves of a large misshapen bag of flesh, and then they were still and slept the heavy noontime sleep of the tropics, sighing and snoring less and less till they became totally immobile, silent.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GAP PAA.ORG

  IT HAD SEEMED bedlam when he disembarked and walked on to what he was assured was Indian soil – the crowds, of Indians, Britons, Americans, Gurkhas – coolies carrying their luggage – cabin trunks and bed-rolls – officers stiff with laundry starch and gleaming with Brasso and boot polish – hawkers and traders scurrying around with baskets and trays – memsahibs and blonde children with lopsided basin-shaped topis on their bleached hair – Indian women in shapeless garments squatting passively with their baskets or babies – and over it all, congealing them into one restless, heaving mass, the light from the sky and the sea, an invasion of light such as he had never known could exist – and heat like boiling oil tipped out of a cauldron on to their heads, running down their necks and into their collars and shirts.

  He stood for a long time, unsteady on his legs, so long used to the pitching of the ship, trying to find the courage to make his way through this tumult, find a hotel, the address he had in his pocket. The coolies did not trouble him – he had no luggage they could carry – he was left to himself. On that first day as on every other day, left to himself.

  He would have wanted, on that day, to have a hand settle on his wrist, lead him. Or at least a signboard. In a familiar language. A face with a familiar expression. He could not read these faces, or their expressions – joy? agony? panic? He felt his own panic going out, mingling with theirs. Then his paralysis gave way, he made a move – when the crowds stopped swirling and began to drain through the gates to the city. The crowd had thinned so there were empty spaces between the people through which he could see a way, so he picked up his duffel bag and moved at last.

  This was his entry into India.

  To the tonga-wallah, on climbing into the creaking carriage that stank of horsedung, he said, ‘To the Taj Hotel, pliss,’ because it had been described to him as an eastern palace. Having also been told that the engineers had mistakenly built it with its entrance to the city bazaar, its back to the ravishing sea-front, thus driving the architect, an Italian, to suicide, he was not perturbed when the tonga ambled through the bazaar, its horse narrowly escaping death a hundred times, its driver screaming abuse and directions till blood ran from his mouth – Baumgartner took it to be blood, but in the East colours were not, he knew, the colours they were in the West – and deposited him on the steps of the dingy green front of a multi-storeyed but narrow house of rusty iron and stucco in a lane filled with vehicles of a greater variety than Baumgartner had imagined were possible. This was the famous, or infamous, back-to-front, he told himself and climbed out. He carried in his own bag since there was no porter at the door as might have been expected from the lyrical descriptions of Eastern luxury he had heard from his fellow voyagers. On entering the lobby that was just a narrow passage, reeking of food and streaked with the red that the alarmed Baumgartner took to be blood from a gun battle, he found himself in a seedy house with no lighting and was shaken by grave doubt. He would have fled if it had not occurred to him that this was a place he could better afford than a suite in a luxury hotel. After standing around helplessly, he finally cleared his throat – and found it hurt. A germ? A deadly illness? All seemed possible, too possible, in this setting. Eventually a woman appeared, seemingly from the cracks of the floor above, sidling down the staircase, adjusting her hair and her cotton garments as she did so, with a wet, dripping hand.

  ‘Wanting room?’ she screamed at Baumgartner, aggressively thrusting out her chin in a challenge. ‘One upstairs – room fourteen free.’

  Following her up the wooden stairs, Baumgartner cleared his throat again, this time to ask, hesitantly, ‘This Taj Hotel?’

  She turned upon him like a jungle cat, spitting. ‘Yaiss,’ she screamed, ‘this Taj Hotel. Why not Taj Hotel, heh? Only one
can be Taj Hotel? Ten, twenty Taj Hotels in Bombay – no one can tell me this no Taj Hotel, this Bombay Hotel, Goa Hotel, Hindu Hotel, I no listen!’ she screamed. ‘I say Taj Hotel, then this Taj Hotel,’ and she marched on down the dark passage to a door at the end that she flung open. ‘Wanting?’ she challenged him, crossing her arms to wait for an answer.

  Baumgartner meekly bent his head and walked in past her, too exhausted and too nervous to argue. He had had trouble recognising her language as English; it had seemed to him more like the seeds of a red hot chilli exploding out of its pod into his face. He mopped his face and turned to ask her some necessary questions but she disappeared, banging the door shut. It took him a while to get used to the dark. Not only did the single window look out on a concrete wall some six feet away, preventing all light and air from entering, but the excessive dirt that coated every surface from the light bulb to the cotton mattress and the floor added to the gloom.

  He stood by the window, studying the scene with great seriousness, knowing himself to be tricked. It was the first of India’s tricks. But was it a trick?

  Was it not India’s way of revealing the world that lay on the other side of the mirror? India flashed the mirror in your face, with a brightness and laughter as raucous as a street band. You could be blinded by it. But if you refused to look into it, if you insisted on walking around to the back, then India stood aside, admitting you where you had not thought you could go. India was two worlds, or ten. She stood before him, hands on her hips, laughing that blood-stained laugh: Choose! Choose!

  The man behind the office desk, fanning his face with a folded newspaper, was not what Baumgartner had been told to expect. At least, he declared he was not. ‘No, no, quite wrong, quite wrong,’ he kept repeating, as Baumgartner tried to question him, in his new and hesitant English, about the business the Gentleman from Hamburg had assured him existed in Bombay. The man behind the desk seemed puzzled at the mention of Hamburg, timber, shipping . . . every word that Baumgartner managed to summon out of his new language, dragging it off his tongue with a reluctance bordering on paralysis, the bald, dark man in the long white cotton shirt with small gold buttons shook his head at in mystified denial. On the wall behind him hung a picture of an eleven-armed goddess, and over its frame was draped a garland of tinsel. Baumgartner found himself staring at it in his frustration – it drew and held his attention and seemed increasingly weird, foreign, exotic and inscrutable to him.