Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  The boy laughed at that, spitting out the laugh coarsely, insultingly. He did not bother to answer, it was eloquent enough.

  Baumgartner sagged. He was so tired, it was so hot, he wanted only to get home. ‘Perhaps I better take you to my home,’ he sighed sadly.

  Immediately he felt Farrokh’s large heavy hand clap him on his back with approval and heard him boom, ‘Very good, Bommgarter sahib, very good. Maybe you spick same language. Maybe he tell you all his trouble. You help him, eh? You take him, eh?’

  The boy struggled to raise his eyelids a millimetre or so and glare from under them at Baumgartner, again with the yellow flash of a sick cat. Baumgartner glared back. ‘Come with me. It’s not far,’ he growled, in German.

  When they stepped out of the café, Baumgartner lifted his head and sniffed a bit. The magic moment had come: it was four o’clock and at last the sea, the invisible sea of Bombay, had stirred, woken from its heavy, lethargic afternoon siesta and given off a faint wavering evening breeze. Although the heat still stood solid and livid between the walls of the buildings and on the soft, muddy tar, there was a quiver in the air, a scent of salt and freshness, and it was bearable again. One could look forward now to the whipping wind of evening and then the soft, muzzy night, and darkness.

  Most of all, Baumgartner looked forward to coming home, and to bringing his cats some food. What had made him spend the whole day away from them? Such a fool. To sleep like that in Lotte’s house, in Lotte’s bed, all afternoon, he must be getting old, stupid. He shuffled forwards with the plastic bag of scraps he had been given hitting against his leg – Farrokh had filled it to the brim – and emitting odours that made passers-by stare. The boy plodded behind him, breathing heavily as though he were struggling up a mountain, and keeping his eyes on the ground and on his bare feet.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. Entschuldigen bitte,’ Baumgartner apologised, stopping for him. ‘Did not see – you have no shoes – the feet must hurt.’

  The boy did not make an answer or look at Baumgartner but lifted his arms to adjust the rucksack on his back. Although he was tall and big-built, with the heavy square bones of an ox or a sportsman, he was clearly in very bad shape so that every movement caused him more effort than it should. Baumgartner found he had to slow down his shuffle in order to keep step with him. He found himself babbling, ‘Just down the road – we turn the corner – we come to Hira Niwas. My flat is small – no sea-view like Bombay millionaires have – but is all right. So many years now it is my home, and I have place for everything, my cats including –’

  The boy made no answer and eventually Baumgartner’s babble ran out. In silence he trudged beside him, only putting out his hand to make him turn at the corner. The family that lived on the pavement outside Hira Niwas had gathered for the evening and looked at Baumgartner returning with a stranger. The boy seemed not to notice they were in his way and Baumgartner was terrified that he might knock over one of their pots and pans or trip over and break one of the strings that held up their shack. He drew himself in, tried to shrivel up and take the least amount of living space away from them who had already so little. As always, he felt his hair stand up on the back of his neck, and sweat break out as he passed them.

  The mother was as usual washing her tin pots and pans in the thickly moving water of the gutter, with her sari twitched up over her knees and the knees jutting up over the ears as she squatted on the pavement. The child with the pot-belly of malnutrition and the light hair that stood up in twists, was beside her, sucking something brown and slippery in its hand. The flies crawled over the lip as well as the stuff and Baumgartner wondered if she had not swallowed a few. She flung it down in a fit and began to cry. At once the mother raised her hand and struck her across her head, screaming in the language Baumgartner had never learnt to understand. Now the child shrieked in outrage and the father, who had been sitting or sleeping inside the rag shack, pushed two of the rags aside and stuck his head out. From the inflamed pupils of his eyes and his dishevelled hair it was clear he had already started the evening’s drinking. He flung some oaths at his wife in the language that was like pieces of stone, like gravel to Baumgartner’s ear. She screamed back at him but also grabbed the child by its arm, pulled her over to her side and rapidly wiped her streaming eyes and nose with the end of the sari. Then she picked up the brown lump from the pavement and popped it back in the child’s mouth. The man gave a roar and came out on his knees to jerk the child over to him and dig the lump out of its mouth and fling it away again.

  By then Baumgartner had steered his guest past them and safely into the doorway of the building – one step lifted them from anarchy to security. As he led him in, he gave a furtive look over his shoulder to see who was responsible for the new screams that seemed to slash along the whole length of his back and enter the sensitive point in the back of his head: was it the outraged child or the infuriated mother? He hoped they had not noticed him or his guest. Although he barely acknowledged this to himself, it was true that he had fears – nightmares – of their coming after him one night. Why should they not? They saw him bring bags of food, knew he had a wallet in his pocket, wore a watch on his wrist, good shoes on his feet – old, patched, yes, but still shoes, more than they had or ever could buy – and he wondered what prevented them from grabbing him by his neck and stripping him in the dark. The nakedness of their street lives made him feel overloaded with belongings, and he felt their accusation whenever he passed.

  Now he had to manoeuvre his guest past the watchman who looked on insultingly and refused to move his legs out of the way, and then guide him up the narrow wooden stairs with their uneven surface to which he was accustomed but others were not, and stumbled. ‘On the third floor is my flat,’ Baumgartner apologised. ‘Quite high. Very dark here. You can see?’

  The boy made no answer, might have been both deaf and dumb, but followed Baumgartner stolidly up the stairs, taking harsh, deep breaths as he negotiated the climb. What could the young man have been doing to be in such bad shape? Baumgartner wondered, and alternatives trooped up the stairs and into his mind, noisily. Drugs, drugs, drugs, they all said. Baumgartner shook his head. One should not say till one knew.

  The cats knew his step. They seemed to hear it on the bottom step in the entrance hall, began springing off their chairs and beds and various roosts and by the time he was on the first landing, outside the Parsi family’s flat with its daily renewed string of marigolds and its ricepowder picture of twinned fish on its doorstep, they began thudding against the door and yowling through its cracks in a frenzy. It was the sound of a welcome he so enjoyed that he began to smile and to hurry, but bumped into his leaden guest, apologised and forced himself to mount the last flight of stairs slowly.

  The boy seemed sunk too deep in his private world, enclosed and stony, to react to the eager scratching and miaowing at the door while Baumgartner fumbled with a bunch of keys, but he could hardly ignore the furred, fighting presences that burst out as Baumgartner opened the door a crack and hurled themselves at all the legs and feet they could find.

  Baumgartner was bent over them, crooning in German, ‘Fritzi, du alte Fritzi, komm, Fritzi,’ and ‘Miess, Miess, let me go – I give you, Miess –’ and ‘Ach, Liebchen, Lise, Lise,’ and only after a moment of confusion became aware that they were spitting and snarling and the boy was kicking them off like so many fur slippers. ‘Pliss, pliss,’ Baumgartner protested, getting off his knees to take the boy’s arm. ‘No need to be frightened – they only welcome us – you do not like them?’

  The boy spat out a vicious ‘No!’ and reached down to scoop up the most obstreperous of them, the battle-scarred Fritz, and hurl him away violently.

  Baumgartner felt inside him the somersault of fear, of alarm. The cats, too, were like a swarm of pigeons in a feathery flutter. All of them milled around, trying to get at Baumgartner’s bag of scraps and at the same time scramble out of the young man’s way. Baumgartner was hard put to it to keep them s
eparated. Distractedly, he put the bag down on the kitchen table, then swung around in an effort to be hospitable, saying, ‘Sit down, please – if you like, lie down a moment – I will – I will have some tea ready – please excuse – first my cats must dine –’ and then swung around again to tend to their feeding.

  He emptied the contents of the bag across the table, got out the kitchen knife and began to separate the curried fish from the mutton fat and bones, the bread crusts from the rice and chapatis, flustered by their impatience and by his guest’s sullen attitude in the middle of the riotous floor.

  ‘Ugh,’ spat the boy, ‘it is – stinking.’

  ‘Oh, one moment – one moment – I open the window,’ Baumgartner put down the knife and turned to the window and undid all the rusty, difficult bolts and swung it open on to the lane which did not smell very much better. Then returned to his work, energetically cutting and chopping with the long knife while the boy stared angrily. At last the bagful of scraps was separated into small piles and Baumgartner could pick them up in his hands and put them on to the plates. The cats wound themselves around his legs, arching and rubbing and making small, scolding sounds, then gradually settling down to nosing through it all till they arrived at the delicacies they decided to accept.

  The boy watched with a kind of stern disapproval. ‘Something like I saw in the burning ghats of Benares,’ he finally said from a corner of his unsmiling mouth.

  Baumgartner looked up, puzzled, not comprehending such an allusion. Unlike the youths who came from the West now, Baumgartner had been to none of the tourist spots, not even Benares, never been drawn to temples or ashrams, an alien world to him, something he had walked past quickly, not entered, not even glanced at. So he could not understand the boy’s reference but sensed in it hostility and censure.

  ‘When the fires died, the man in charge of the burning, he took up a big stick – this big – and pushed it in the fire – and took out bits of meat – human meat – that was not ash and threw it down to the riverside. All the dogs waited there – and pounced – and fought – and ate these meats – these human meats – like that,’ the boy laughed, jerking a finger at the cats. His laughter spluttered from lips that were out of control, were trembling. ‘And in the temples – where the priests fed the beggars – you could see some fun. I have seen even a leper with no legs, no hands, fighting a woman with his teeth – that was fun!’

  Baumgartner turned away. He carried Mimi back to her corner, laid her carefully in the nest made of his old shirt. He spent a long time arranging its folds around her so that they supported her chin, her head, and made her comfortable. Then he turned back to his guest, as to a bitter duty. ‘Pliss, give me that rucksack. And sit down. I will cook a meal. You will have? Something to eat?’

  ‘Eat?’ the boy exploded. ‘In the middle of dis – dis stinking –’ he gestured at the room, the mess spread and heaped everywhere.

  Baumgartner was struck into silence. He was not unaware of the smell: other guests had shown uneasiness and an eagerness to leave, at a time when he still had guests. Now, no one came any more. Still, he had not thought of it as repellent, unfit for the acts of life. Rather, it was to him a kind of fertiliser, with a fertilising action upon human behaviour. At least, it helped him to be comfortable, to survive, live, enjoy companionship. He felt his cats glide around his feet, wind themselves about his legs, heard their murmurs of recrimination, welcome, questioning, communicating, and wondered why he had introduced this lunatic into their midst, polluting it, threatening its rich, warm, natural life.

  The boy was pulling off his rucksack. Flinging it on to the floor, he looked around the small room, almost dark with all but one of the shutters closed against the afternoon light, saw the divan with the faded print coverlet, and threw himself on to it. He lay there on his stomach, his legs sticking out at one end. Baumgartner could smell his body in its unwashed rankness; the cats sniffed, too, delicately, the small triangles of their noses creasing with distaste, perhaps mistrust.

  There was no further movement, or sound from the visitor. Baumgartner stood waiting for a while, then turned around with a sigh and went to the kitchen end of the room. He began to clear away the remains of the cats’ meals, rolling them all up in a paper bag and carrying them over to a plastic bucket under the sink where he dropped them. Immediately, the livelier of his cats – a scrawny rascal called Leo, and his black rival, Teufel, ran to the bucket, stood on their hind legs, dropped in their noses and pulled out the fish tails and strips of raw lights that he had bundled away. Spreading them on the floor, they ate with greater gusto than they would from china saucers. Ach, such naughty ones, Baumgartner smiled indulgently.

  He washed the steel knife and put it back in its place on the breadboard. He wiped the table-top with a damp napkin. The familiar labour calmed him, and he glanced at the sleeping boy, thinking he must be overwrought: if he had been walking barefoot through India and seeing such sights as the one he described in Benares, then it was only to be expected. The boy needed sleep, a bath, and then perhaps he would want to eat. After all, the room was not stinking so badly as to keep him from sleeping in it, Baumgartner noted wryly, and went across to a cupboard made of wire-netting in which he kept his own foodstuff free from the cats and the flies. He rummaged around in a basket of vegetables to see what he had. Ah-ha. Yes, some bits of vegetables left from his last effort at marketing, and in the tins – he picked them up and shook them – a little rice and lentils rustled reassuringly: enough, perhaps, for two plates of food. He would wash them and cook them and be very quiet so the boy would not be disturbed but sleep and get all the rest he wanted.

  Then he caught himself: why did he bother about this stranger, unknown to him till this morning? He had felt no slightest stir of nostalgia when Farrokh had pointed out his fair head lolling helplessly on the table, or when he had glimpsed the blonde hairs gleaming on the wrists under the metal bracelet. He was not fair himself, nor had his mother been; only his father had had light hair of that kind. Baumgartner did not search out Europeans in Bombay for company. Why, he could not tell, but it was years since he had ceased to crave the sound of his own language, the feel of it on his tongue. Truth to tell, his years in confinement with fellow Germans in the internment camp had killed that need, or desire. Looking back, he saw that it was then he had decided that he would not wish to live in a pack, that he did not need the pack. Gradually, the language was slipping away from him, now almost as unfamiliar as the feel and taste of English words or the small vocabulary of bastardised Hindustani that he had picked up over the years. It was only Lotte who kept him in touch with the German tongue – but that was not why he went to see her. He saw Lotte not because she was from Germany but because she belonged to the India of his own experience; hers was different in many ways but still they shared enough to be comfortable with each other, prickly and quick-tempered but comfortable as brother and sister are together. But from other Europeans in Bombay – and there was a fair-sized population – he kept away, discreetly. He did not like their probing questions, their determination to discover his background, his circumstances, his past and present and future, before they accepted him. Why should Baumgartner be so secretive about his circumstances? He did not know – he shrugged – but it was so. He felt a fastidiousness about his private affairs and preferred to be either with someone who took it entirely for granted, as Lotte did, or else showed no comprehension and no curiosity, like his Indian friends – Indian acquaintances, he corrected himself, because – to be perfectly truthful – they stopped short of being ‘friends’. To be quite candid, had he any at all?

  The need to be candid made Baumgartner look down into his lap – he was sitting on a kitchen chair, waiting for the pish-pash to cook, and now he bent down and picked up the nearest cat – there was always one nearby. Holding its fur to his chest, he closed his eyes as a young man might with a photograph of his beloved held close. Here was all the friendship he needed – or wanted. �
��Mmm, mmm,’ he nuzzled into the grey fur, ‘du Alte, du Gute, du.’ The cat growled a little, then began to purr, kneading his thighs with its claws, eyes narrowed into slits, and Baumgartner, laughing because the claws tickled, rumpled his fur the way he liked, drawing out louder and louder purrs till they almost deafened.

  He sat there, quite contentedly, seeing the afternoon light at the kitchen window dim and withdraw, the building across the lane impress its shadow over it like a blind. The sound of the traffic rose to a crescendo as crowds left offices and went home in a cacophony of sound that entered the high room and reverberated.

  Baumgartner got up and began to lay the table. It seemed very unnatural to him to put down two plates, two spoons, search for napkins, for a bottle of beer and an opener. This was not how he lived, Baumgartner the solitary. He had had enough of communal living in that camp to last a lifetime, he explained to himself and the cats. And yet he had led home this unlikeable lout in the disgracefully short shorts and the frayed shirt he wore tied at the waist like a girl. He had even permitted him to lie down on the divan and cooked a meal for him. Not because he was German, no, but simply because he was in need. Well, the man on the pavement downstairs, the family that lived there, was in need too; did he think of asking them up here and cooking for them? Baumgartner, Baumgartner, he reproved himself, tired and hungry and sad at the way the day had gone, picking open a scab long formed, revealing the rawness, the ugliness underneath. Farrokh had taken the boy for a German – correctly – and taken it for granted that Baumgartner, another German, would volunteer to take care of him – again correctly, for Baumgartner had. Or had he? He did not remember volunteering, and yet the boy was here. Certainly he had not refused Farrokh or prevented the boy from entering. As he would have had the drunk in the street been concerned. Why? Baumgartner, Baumgartner, he sighed, ask your blood why it is so, only the blood knows.