Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  ‘Mr Baumgartner? This is Gala von Roth. I am afraid my husband made a mistake at the Turf Club this evening. He was not aware of my guest list. I already have one unattached gentleman to make up my table, and cannot have two since only one unattached lady is coming, the Maharani of Bitnore who is here on a visit. I regret very much – I feel so ashamed – but you will understand. Another time, of course. Very soon perhaps.’

  Baumgartner was smiling to himself, listening to Lily’s voice. He was remembering that cold, tuneless voice singing, at Prince’s, with such abandon, such determination:

  ‘Lola and Lily

  Are fifteen and free,

  O Lola and Lily –’

  and suddenly burst into a laugh he could not help.

  It made her break off her polite nonsense and gasp at his audacity. But it had startled her, prevented her from slamming down the telephone, and in that moment of shocked silence Baumgartner laughed, ‘Ach, Lily, it was nice to see you today at the Turf Club. It does not matter about tonight, of course. But when I saw you, I wanted to ask you something. You know perhaps where is your old friend from Calcutta, our Lotte?’

  The silence grew and thickened. Baumgartner half-expected her to slam down the telephone but the shock seemed to have made Lily clasp it as if she were paralysed. He smiled, thinking of her frozen face, her eyes half-closed in torment, the black kohl gleaming wildly around them. Painted hussy, he thought, chuckling, Shanghai Lily, that is who you are and I know it, when she said, in a clipped cold tone, ‘You have a pencil and paper? This is the address. Take it down, please . . .’

  ‘Hugo, mein Geliebter?’

  ‘Lotte, Liebchen, where are you?’

  She told him and he groaned to find it was only down the road from his flat, at the other end of Colaba Causeway. ‘I can come on my feet, running,’ he said, ‘is so near, Lotte, so near, and we did not even know.’ ‘Come, come,’ Lotte shouted over the telephone. ‘I am waiting, my Hugo.’

  There she was, in a cotton dress with red and pink and violet flowers all over it, her red hair even redder now with a generous dyeing with henna, her toenails and fingernails painted a livid pink, all beckoning him eagerly as he came up the stairs to find her standing at the door, laughing. They embraced with a warmth that had no hesitation and no embarrassment about it, was made ardent by their long separation and by all they had shared in pre-war Calcutta. Lotte patted Baumgartner’s cheeks, held him by his shoulders and laughed with joy as she looked at him.

  ‘So long since I see ein Deutscher, a German. So long since I see anyone in this prison house Kanti keeps me in,’ she explained, drawing him in.

  ‘Very nice prison house,’ he teased her, looking around. Flowered curtains flapped wildly in the sea breeze, a servant boy came in on silent bare feet and put a tray with glasses on a brass table by a set of cane chairs on which cushions and magazines lay carelessly scattered. ‘Kanti is kind.’

  ‘Kind, he says! Mein Gott, you call that kind? To keep a woman locked up alone and waiting for him?’

  ‘It saved you from the prison camp, Lotte,’ Baumgartner reminded her, standing by the table, waiting to be asked to sit down.

  She did not ask him; she grabbed his wrist and pulled him down on the sofa beside her. ‘Tell me, tell me, Hugo,’ she begged, ‘and I will make you a gimlet like I make for Kanti –’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Ach, don’t ask me where he is. He leaves me here like a widow and lives in Calcutta himself – he has business there, you know,’ she said vaguely as she leant over the table to mix drinks. ‘You met him there? He told you where I was?’

  Baumgartner explained how he came by her address after more than five years in Bombay. She clapped her hand over her mouth and giggled till her eyes ran with bright tears.

  ‘Gala – Gala von Roth!’ she choked. ‘Is it not too fine! Is it not wonderful!’

  ‘He was only Julius Roth when I knew him in the camp,’ Baumgartner smiled.

  ‘Ach, it is wonderful – von Roth! And he is not any more Julius – too Jewish – so he is Julian. Very English, you see. Not a bad thing to be English here in India, you know, Hugo. And first he started with an antique shop in a hotel lobby, and that Gisela, she went around saying it was her collection of Chinese art they were selling, that those plates and dishes were left to her by her father, a collector in China he was supposed to be. Of course I knew she bought it all in auction houses in Calcutta, on Russell Street and Middleton Row. All those English people leaving the country, in forty-seven, the auction shops were full of fine furniture, fine china, everything selling real cheap, and our Gisi, clever Gisi, buying and buying. Clever she is, that one. Then she and Julian – that is how she calls him, Julian – they sold it all in the hotel lobby. And the profits went into an art gallery – that is what they call it: “art gallery”. All these new young Indian painters – no one knew any Indian painters, before, eh, Hugo? There was that crazy Margarethe Bumuller who painted all the politicians in Delhi, made them look like Roman emperors, and there was Fritz Langheim up in Darjeeling, painting monks and monasteries – but where were the Indian painters? But now they are there, you know, and they like hanging up their pictures in a foreigner’s gallery, that makes their art so international, like they are artists of the world. And Gisi tells me Julian is selling a lot – Indian people are buying Indian art now like they used to import from Europe before. So they are making money – the von Roths.’ She bent over with giggling. ‘One day let us go together, Hugo. We will go and have coffee in the hotel lounge, eh, and just stroll by the gallery, eh? If Gisi won’t let you come to the house and have you talk with him, no matter, we will have our talk in the gallery. I think he will like it better – if she is not there. Most of the time of course Gisi keeps a sharp eye on her Julian – and on the sales. Let us go and see them both. What can she do? She cannot throw us out, can she, with all her young Indian painters watching? She likes to be their patron, pats them on the heads and calls them by nicknames, and tells me, “Ach, Lola, they love me, these Indian painters, they know how much I help them, they know I can make them famous internationally.” “Famous where?” I asked her,’ Lotte cackled, ‘in Shanghai?’ She swilled her drink about the glass so that the ice cubes clinked and the gin splashed. In her delight at gossiping, her delight at having such trusted and familiar company as Baumgartner, she swung her bare legs on to the sofa and over on to his lap, wriggling her toes luxuriously. ‘We will make a nice pair in the von Roths’ gallery, you and I, Hugo,’ she drawled. ‘Let us go tomorrow, eh?’

  ‘When will Kanti come again?’ Baumgartner asked her, eyeing her feet in his lap and wishing she would remove them. So many years of seeing women who were clothed from head to foot and who even drew their garments over their faces rather than look at him directly or be looked at by him had had their effect on him, he found. He now found Lotte’s behaviour bizarre.

  ‘Kanti?’ she huffed. ‘Who knows when he comes? Business, business, nothing else matters to the man. Then he gets tired, then he needs a change. Then he wants a little song and dance, a little drink with Lola, and one fine day he turns up at my door and wants me to go down on my knees and touch his feet, so grateful I am supposed to be for his visits.’

  ‘You, on your knees?’ Baumgartner chuckled at the unlikely picture.

  ‘Yes, yes, but not so often. Mostly I am alone. All, all alone. Ach, Hugo, but now I have you.’ She leant over and nibbled at his ear. ‘Never did I think I would see my Hugo again – and here he is, here he is,’ she cried with such genuine, such open delight that Baumgartner put his hands over her toes and squeezed them in silent response.

  The tenants of Hira Niwas received notice to quit. The landlord, a choleric old gentleman whose face expressed an animal frenzy at being thwarted in his aim of pulling down the old, four-storeyed house to build a new twenty-storeyed structure and so become a millionaire, tramped from flat to flat, waving the notice he had received from the corporation, s
tating that the building was unsafe and must be vacated before the next monsoon.

  No one paid the slightest attention. Monsoon after monsoon washed over Hira Niwas, leaving it more slimy, green, decayed and odorous but still standing – even if propped up with a forest of bamboo poles on the ground floor. The family that lived there had the bamboo poles growing out of the chipped terrazzo floor of their living-room, their bedrooms, and weaved their way in and out between them nonchalantly; the sweeper swept around them, the children raced their pedal cars and scooters amongst them. Sometimes a little plaster fell, occasionally a whole brick, but miraculously – not more.

  Baumgartner learnt to confront the landlord, now severely handicapped by a stroke, with the same sneering equanimity that the other tenants displayed, and did nothing to find himself another flat. How could he, in Bombay, where the rents were fixed by racketeers, smugglers and film stars? It was out of the question. He shrugged at the landlord’s shrill hysteria and turned back into his room before the old man caught a glimpse of the family of cats that stirred and pullulated in its damp green confines like a blanket of living grey mildew. Baumgartner could contemplate homelessness for himself but not for his cats. ‘Mein Kätzchen,’ he crooned, picking one up and gazing ardently into its face.

  His room filled and overflowed with them, with their scrawny progeny; daily he made the rounds of nearby cafés and restaurants where the kitchen staff got to know him and kept aside scraps for him, making faces at each other behind his back and sniggering, ‘Pagal sahib, billé-wallah sahib,’ for Baumgartner grew shabbier as he grew older, no longer noticing if his shoes had soles that flapped or if the buttons on his shirt were missing or even if they were clean and washed any more; after all, the cats greeted him exuberantly whether they were or not.

  Lotte sometimes wrinkled her nose and tugged at a torn collar, saying, ‘Ach, Hugo, can’t you buy a new shirt sometimes?’

  It was not that he could not, but he had simply got out of the way of shopping, of spending money. And although the years were jogging by now at a comfortable pace and with an evenness that he had not known at any other stage of his life, it was partly because he did so little business for Chimanlal now. It was not only that he disliked leaving his cats to go on business trips but also because Chimanlal’s son was growing up and spending more time in his father’s office, learning the business, and there did not seem much for Baumgartner to do any more. Baumgartner marvelled that such a youngster should be trusted with so much work already but Chimanlal sighed, ‘If I do not trust my own son, Hugo bhai, who can I trust?’ Baumgartner noted that he did not sound as if he meant the words – they were wrenched from him. Chimanlal was not well. He had a bad colour and Baumgartner told him he should see a doctor whereupon Chimanlal turned to the oleograph on the wall, still hung with a fresh garland and wreathed in clouds of incense, and said, ‘This is my doctor, Hugo bhai, it is Lakshmi alone who will look after me.’

  He went away frequently on pilgrimages, taking his wife, daughters and daughter-in-law, to visit temples and saints in distant caves or mountain-tops and in ashrams. He returned small, starved, wretchedly ill but ecstatic – he had had the darshan of yet another deity, yet another holy man, and how could that not have a good, a benign effect on him, he asked Baumgartner whose expression stated grave doubt. Chimanlal expressed regret that he had never been able to make any dent in Baumgartner’s wary agnosticism. Baumgartner’s fumbled, embarrassed replies to Chimanlal’s questions about Judaism, about how a Jew could believe in the same Moses, Abraham or Jacob that the Christians did, had brought about an early end to anything like the theological discussions in which Indians revel – and he never went so far as to ask Baumgartner to accompany him to a temple or on a pilgrimage – to his profound relief.

  He was also immensely relieved when Chimanlal told him that he was seeing a doctor and taking medicine, but the relief was momentary for he went on to learn that the doctors were sometimes homeopaths, sometimes ayurvedic doctors who treated him with nameless pills and powders, herbs and roots that seemed to do him no good. ‘But I am much better now,’ Chimanlal insisted, ‘and much stronger.’

  For some time they kept up their Sunday visits to the Turf Club, laying their bets with an ever greater caution and discretion.

  It was at a race meeting that, one afternoon, Chimanlal collapsed against a fence and fainted. Baumgartner held his head in his lap till an ambulance came and removed him to hospital. He fetched the son who threw furious looks at him as if he were responsible and then turned him out of the ward, insisting that he be left alone with his father. Chimanlal was operated on for a tumour that night and did not regain consciousness. Baumgartner joined the mourners at the cremation, standing at the edge of the crowd, all of whom shrank away from him, horrified by the presence of a foreigner, a firanghi, at such an intensely private rite. Hearing the babbling chant of the priests, seeing the confusion around the pyre, smelling the odours of burnt flesh and charred wood under the noontime sun, Baumgartner too wished he had not come, and shuffled away.

  When he visited Chimanlal’s office, he found the son installed at a new stainless steel desk, painted grey and provided with many shining locks. Baumgartner was somewhat reassured to see Lakshmi in the usual place, below the tube of neon lighting, but was soon to find that nothing else was. The boy peremptorily wound up the last bits of business Baumgartner still had with the office and more or less dismissed him with a curtness that betrayed years of pent-up resentment and jealousy. When Baumgartner thought to ask a question about the racehorse he and Chimanlal had jointly owned, the boy gave up his cool self-control and began to shout, ‘What are you talking about? What joint ownership? Show me one paper –’ he banged the table with the flat of his hand, making Baumgartner wince – ‘Show me one paper you have signed or my father has signed –’

  ‘No, no, there are no papers,’ Baumgartner told him, leaning forward to calm him. ‘Your father and I – we were friends – we didn’t draw up any legal papers – it was just an understanding, a friendship –’

  ‘My father is no more, Mr Baumgartner,’ the boy said stiffly. ‘He has left for his heavenly abode.’

  Baumgartner understood that with Chimanlal’s death all connection with the firm, formal or friendly, had ceased, and got up to leave. The boy did not wish him goodbye.

  The next time Lotte pulled at a thread dangling from his cuff and complained about his ancient shoes, Baumgartner told her, ‘But Lotte, I am not earning any more. I am retired, you know, old retired man now. So I can’t buy clothes and look like a fancy man still.’

  ‘Mein Gott, when were you ever a fancy man?’ she cried. ‘I am only asking that you don’t look like a beggar.’

  ‘Ach, a beggar,’ he said dismissively. ‘I have enough, don’t worry. More than many people, Lotte.’

  He meant the people who filled the streets of Bombay these days like so many rags or scraps of paper. There seemed to be a drought every year in the land and the pavement filled visibly with a migrant population from the fields and villages. One family had taken up the length of the pavement just outside Hira Niwas. Overnight their tins, rags, ropes, strings, papers and plastic bags had been set up to make a shelter and when the tenants woke next morning, they found a cooking fire burning, tin pots and pans being washed in the gutter and some were actually witnesses to the birth of a new baby on a piece of sacking in the street. The doorman, himself a migrant but an earlier one, driven here by an earlier calamity, now possessor of a job and an official status and therefore infinitely superior to them, yet not so superior as to run no risk of contamination from the starved and the luckless, cursed them from his safe perch in the doorway, and the tenants stopped on their way in or out to express their horror and contempt for the ragged creatures who hardly seemed human to the citizens of the urbis et prima of the west. The migrants seemed neither to hear nor speak but Baumgartner, for one, shuffled past with his head bowed and his eyes averted – not to avoid c
ontamination as the others did, but to hide his shame at being alive, fed, sheltered, privileged.

  Lotte clicked her tongue with displeasure whenever she had to pass them and told Baumgartner she preferred it if he visited her instead. She herself looked increasingly less affluent, even haggard, the henna dye no longer concealing the grey roots of her once carroty hair, while the printed cotton frocks she wore were faded and no longer replaced. She still had her long, fine legs and liked to pick up her skirts and point her toes and do a little pirouette to remind herself of her halcyon dancing days but – if she had had a few drinks – these were not so successful.

  Instead of going back to Hira Niwas after his morning gin with Lotte, Baumgartner took to staying on for the afternoon. They would sit at the round brass table and play card-games that were very boring since they were only two players, so boring that they found themselves yawning behind their hands till Lotte finally flung down her cards, pulled her skirts up over her thighs and flung her head back over the sofa, crying, ‘Oh I am so sleepy – these hot, hot afternoons – I am going to bed, Hugo,’ and would go off to her room where he heard her switching on the electric fan and throwing herself into bed with a great thud. He would shuffle off his shoes, lean his head against the sofa, fold his hands over his stomach, and have a nap himself.

  Then she called from the bedroom, ‘Don’t pretend you are sleeping there, Hugo, you old goose. Come along and lie down and be comfortable with Lottchen.’

  He stumbled to his feet and into the bedroom and gratefully lay down beside her in the darkened room. She flung her arm across his chest, murmuring, ‘Old goose, Hugo,’ and then edged her leg closer to his, finally rolling against him. He responded to her affection with some reluctance, he would have preferred to sleep chastely at one end of the big bed, feeling more as if they were brother and sister than anything else. Then the thought of having had Lotte as a sister, in that shining flat in Berlin, with Mutti as their mother, overcame him and made him snort with laughter into her grey and red curls and draw an arm around her.