‘Driver, ask them to move on,’ he said in a kind of low rasp. He couldn’t bring up his arm to mime ‘Go away’ to the beggar.
The driver lowered his window and barked, ‘Ei, buzz off.’
The man paid no heed; the begging from both creatures continued. Presumably at another signal from the man, the bear nodded, then grinned. Where it met the teeth, the gum was a bright pink but further up the colour of cooked liver with a violet tinge. There were sticky threads of saliva gleaming whitely against all that dirty ivory and raw flesh. Then the animal started shaking, as if it was having a malarial fit. The boy screamed, once, twice.
He shouted, ‘Driver, why isn’t he going? Ask him again, now. Ask!’
The driver complied, his command issuing more forcefully this time. The traffic unclotted. As the car moved to life, the pinning gaze of those scaly eyes receding backwards seemed to have become a solid, unfrayable rope. Then motion and the gathering dark severed it.
The boy coughed all night and kept him awake. Occasionally, he cried out in his sleep loudly enough for him to turn on his bedside lamp, get out of his bed and go to his son’s to see what was wrong, to soothe his nightmares away.
Towards the end of the night, the child woke up with what he could only call a howl and continued to cry with an abandonment that brought back to mind the inexplicable and seemingly endless runs of crying during infancy. He couldn’t establish now if the boy was still lodged in his world of dreams during this fit or whether something in the real world, colic or feeling ill or an onset of some sickness, was making him scream like this. Questions had yielded nothing.
Should he ring for room service and ask for a doctor? Surely a hotel of this class would have access to one? The boy’s forehead and neck were not hot.
‘What is it? Tell me, what is it?’ he asked over and over again, reaching the edge of anger on the other side of his helplessness.
Then, a tiny chink in this wall of repetition: ‘I feel afraid,’ the boy managed to articulate.
He bobbed afloat on a swell of relief. ‘Afraid?’ he asked. ‘Afraid of what? There’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m here with you. Here, I’ll sleep in your bed, my arms around you. Everything will be all right.’
But the child wouldn’t stop. He caught something in his son’s gaze, a brief focusing of his eyes on something behind his shoulder, as if he had seen something behind his father, something that made him wail louder, before the focus dissolved.
He turned his head to look. There could be nothing outside the wall of windows – they were on the sixteenth floor of the hotel. The dark glass reflected back at him a dramatically lit-and-shadowed scene of his staring face, twisted around on the stalk of his neck; his son lying on the bed with his mouth open in a rictus of horror and pain; the white bed linen twisted and roped and peaked in the great turbulence that was being enacted upon it; the whole tableau shading off into the darkness that framed it. As his vision moved away from that sharp chiaroscuro foreground of the reflection, he could see, in the refracted light from the hotel grounds, the skeleton of the skyscraper on the other side of the road. On the very top few floors, he could make out the scaffolding – was it still the bamboo-and-coir-rope of his childhood or had they moved on to something more reliable and advanced nowadays? – and the billowing pieces of sackcloth or plastic or whatever it was that the workers had set up there. He wondered, not for the first time, what purpose those sheets served. A safety net, perhaps? They had certainly not prevented one of them from meeting a terrible end yesterday.
By the early hours, not far off from dawn, his son exhausted himself to sleep. He drifted off too, one arm around the boy. The light woke him; he had forgotten to draw the curtains in the night. Next to him, the child was dead.
II
When I think of her – not often, admittedly, before I decided to write this – the first image is always from an evening in July. The night before, it had rained like I had always imagined it must have done during prehistoric eras, the Pleistocene or the Triassic, say. It brought back my boyhood, lying awake, listening to the sound of relentless sheets of water coming down, imagining a low, red, early-era sky, and strange vegetation and fearful creatures and dangerous landscapes pelted by a downpour that must have been untempered, closer to a natural cataclysm than just simple, heavy rainfall. It even brought back the memory of Bible classes in school, of how all the fountains of the great deep woke up and the windows of heaven opened and it rained upon the face of the earth for forty days and forty nights.
There were dark rain-clouds covering most of the sky next morning but at least the rain had let up for a while. My parents’ living room, on the first floor of a block of flats in Bombay, had an unimpeded view of the sea, which was no more than a few metres away, across the Band Stand in Bandra where, in British times, the band used to gather and play every afternoon. Now between the window and the sea was a road, forked at our end by a narrow, triangular sliver of green, at the vertex of which stood a pair of solid-looking, heavy metal statues, all chunky cuboids and rectangular masses and straight lines, some city council’s idea of cubist primitivism. The pedestal on which the figures stood bore the legend Time is/Too late for those who wait/Too swift for those who fear/Too long for those who grieve/Too short for those who rejoice/But for those who love/Time is eternity.
As if in response, Band Stand, and the mile-long seafront promenade, dotted with concrete benches and sea-poison trees at regular intervals, had become the focal point for romancing couples in the afternoons and evenings.
The Arabian Sea, a placid pond for most of the year, became ruffled and turbulent in its bathetic, minor-mode way during the monsoon, and this morning it looked wild by its standards, with white breakers crashing, one after another, on to the black, rocky shore, which was now totally submerged, the sea having swollen and reached the brim of the sea wall. The horizon was an inky bank of clouds. Far away, I could make out the painted red hull of a fishing boat. It looked like a child’s paper contraption that would soon unravel on the wild slate-grey surface which it rode, tossed almost rhythmically like a seesaw.
I had a meeting in Colaba at 10 a.m., which meant that I had to leave early in order to avoid the notorious morning traffic. These were the days before the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, so it could – and sometimes did – take two hours to travel a distance of twenty kilometres. In another couple of years the Sea Link would open, shocking everyone that something which had nominally been under construction for decades, with nothing except a few fist-like stubs rising from the surface of the sea across the Reclamation (as it was called) to show for it, could be finished so quickly. Who knew what kind of pressure the World Bank, which funded the majority of the project, had brought to bear on the stalled rusty machinery of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and construction companies to get it moving again?
Last night’s rain would mean flooded roads and waterlogging, so the prospect of a long, stop-start journey into town seemed almost inevitable. I left home just after eight. Amit, my father’s driver, usually reported for duty slightly later in the day but he had been asked to come early that morning. By the time the car reached Mahim, the skies opened again. Despite the windscreen wipers semaphoring furiously back and forth, I could barely see anything in front and nothing very much at all through the streaking wall of water which was the passenger window. The whole world seemed to be deliquescing. After twenty minutes or so, the strafing abated somewhat although the rainfall continued; a seen-through-streams-of-liquid kind of visibility was restored; the world became that of an Impressionist painting. At the obligatory traffic standstill at Haji Ali, I saw that the long walkway on the sea leading to the offshore mosque was nearly obliterated to the sight by the spray, so that the mosque, wreathed in low mist, looked as if it were floating in the air, untethered from its umbilical cord connecting it to land. Normally the walkway, a gauntlet of seriously maimed, crippled and diseased people begging, would be a seething corridor of people,
either making their way into or out of the mosque. I was too mesmerised by the fairytale dream-vision castle it had transformed into to pay much attention to the long-range view of plagued humanity seeking succour. Then the traffic lights changed, the boys selling pirated copies of bestsellers, self-help books and glossy magazines, out even in this weather, dispersed and the car left the scene of accidental enchantment.
It was that evening, around six o’clock, while Baba and I were debating whether to bring forward our routine pre-dinner drinking – a couple of whisky-and-sodas for each of us – by half an hour to six-thirty, that the doorbell rang.
‘Who could it be?’ Ma asked, almost to herself. ‘It’s too early for Renu …’ Renu was the cook.
I got up, went to the door and opened it. Renu was standing on the other side of the threshold. Or not exactly standing; she had one hand stretched out, holding on to the doorjamb to support herself, as she swayed on the balls of her feet. On her desiccated face her bloodshot eyes were swimming. Her hair, normally oiled and combed tightly on to her scalp and tied into a loose bun at the neck, was dry and frizzy, escaping in disobedient wisps all over.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked her, then turned my head to say to my mother, who was already halfway to the front door, ‘It’s cooking-aunty.’ I could never bring myself to call Renu by her name and add a suffix such as ‘di’, older sister, or ‘mashi’, aunty, either of which would have been the expected or normal thing to do.
‘I had no sleep last night,’ Renu began. ‘The police came in vans and asked us to get out of our rooms. The sea was rising because of the rain, they asked us to get out, they thought our jhopri was going to be swallowed under water.’
She could barely stand straight on her feet.
‘Not a wink of sleep,’ she said. ‘They chased us out at ten, then asked us to go back in around midnight, then they came at two again and drove us out. I’ve had to work all day after a night of no sleep … I can’t keep my eyes open. So I was thinking, I know it’s too early, but if I start now and cook something quickly, I … I could …’
Something about her unbending sense of duty pierced me. I said, ‘Nothing doing. You go home right now, there’s no need to cook tonight. You go get some sleep.’
Ma added her voice to this – ‘Yes, Renu, don’t worry about cooking this evening, you go back home.’
Renu hesitated. Even in this state of extreme exhaustion, she felt some compulsion to resist something so easily given – it wasn’t right, it wasn’t the normal order of things for families to intercept a servant’s unarticulated request and accede to it. And yet I could see on her face relief, so much stronger than professionalism.
Before she could make another weak attempt – not because she was insincere but because she did not have the necessary energy – I forestalled her and repeated, ‘Shush, not another word. We’ll see you tomorrow morning. You need to sleep. Go.’
She was not a person much given to smiling, or expressing any kind of pleasant emotion, but the imprint of gratitude beneath that wrung-out face was unmistakable, a silver-gelatin film beginning to take on the lineaments of the photographic negative in its chemical bath.
I asked, ‘Where did all of you go when you left your homes?’
‘We sat on the road, here, right here,’ she said, pointing in a vague westerly direction.
‘You mean in Band Stand? Just outside our house?’
‘Yes, there.’
‘But it was pouring …’
She inclined her head sideways, a way of saying yes that stoically dealt with her plight.
I said, ‘Listen, if it happens again, you come straight here and ring the bell. I’ll tell the guards downstairs that you may come in the middle of the night and they’re to let you in. You come and sleep here in the living room if you get thrown out of your home again.’
Ma said, ‘Or the kitchen. You can sleep in the kitchen.’
I was tempted to turn slightly sideways to give Ma a look, but I controlled myself. It was an old, old battle between us and it had just let me know, gently, that it was still there, deferred and waiting, waiting to be roused from its sleep.
Instead, I carried on looking at cooking-aunty and said emphatically, ‘There’s much more space in the living room. Come and sleep here if you need to.’ A bit too emphatically.
She gave a dismissive wave of her hand, a gesture that doubled as a goodbye, as she turned to take the stairs down – ‘Achha, achha, we’ll see, but there’s no need, they say that it’s not going to rain so much tonight.’ That was the closest she was going to get to a smile.
I wanted to ask her so much more: the layout of her living quarters in the slum, how many people had been dragged out of bed and made to stand out in the driving rain all night as a way of preventing death by flooding, how close the slum was to the sea … but she was gone.
It was the year before this incident that I first met cooking-aunty, on my regular January visit to Bombay.
It became obvious soon enough that she did not like me. She was my parents’ new cook and she’d been with them only a few months. A Bengali cook, they had wanted; stressing especially the cook’s origins, when the previous one, a Maharashtrian woman from the fishing community, the Koli, proved to be too limited – and, no doubt, too foreign – for their sophisticated Bengali palates. My father was nearing sixty, my mother nearly fifty-eight; too late for them to experiment with regional Indian cuisines, especially in view of the fact that they were Bengalis, a people not known to think that anything other than their own culture – be it culinary, literary, linguistic, artistic or anything else – was worth engaging with.
On one of the fortnightly phone calls to my mother, she explained to me how difficult it was to get a good cook in Bombay but, after a month of looking, she thought she had found someone who met the requirements. ‘She works for six homes but she’s just lost one of them,’ Ma said. ‘She’ll be looking to fill that gap. I hope I get lucky enough to bag her.’
‘Six homes?’ I asked. ‘That’s a lot. How does she fit them all in? She must work at least twelve hours a day, if not fourteen.’
The next time I rang my mother, Renu was working for them. This, as far as I can remember, was in July or August, so it would be five or six months before I was to meet her.
My design job in London was flexible. I worked for a progressive, thinking-outside-the-box class of trendy outfit, the kind of place that was being talked of as the future of both working and the workplace, in publications such as Wallflower*, i-D, Wired, so it was possible for me to bunch together all my statutory leave in January and take off for the entire month to India.
Over the months preceding my visit, I had asked Ma a couple of times about their new cook and she had sounded cautiously pleased. I had never known Ma to be effusive about domestic staff, so I took it as a reasonably good sign when she had said – and I’m conflating several snatches of conversation here – ‘She’s all right. She’s lived most of her working life outside Bengal, so she’s either forgotten or doesn’t know traditional Bengali cooking. I have to tell her what to do. I caught her putting onions and garlic in a light fish stew. And she puts hing in everything, can you believe it? I don’t know where she picked up this kind of cooking. In non-Bengali households, clearly.’
And so it went; carping was a way of praise with my mother.
I need to say a little about my interest in food because it touches, if only glancingly, upon our story. I cooked for myself in London and entertained friends and work-people at home, of course, but my engagement with food ran deeper than the functional. I loved eating, I thought about cooking and recipes and different culinary cultures a lot of the time, and one of my current assignments, perhaps because this enthusiasm of mine was widely known, was to write and design a full-length book devoted entirely to regional Indian breakfasts, state by state. A young editor, at an imprint specialising in beautifully produced cookbooks, had spotted a blog on breakfasts across the wo
rld and mentioned it casually at a dinner with friends of friends. Someone in that serendipitous chain thought that I was some kind of authority on Indian food, and a project had been born – a lavish and substantial book, sitting on the intersection between food- and travel-writing. It was not an original or underexplored territory but we were enthusiastic and all agreed that what it lacked in novelty, it could make up for in content, visual feel and production values.
There was work that one did in a kind of professional, mandatory, bread-and-butter kind of way, and there was work that caught the tindery and flammable bits of one’s passion and began a long, slow, steady combustion; this book was the latter. The research and sourcing of recipes were the easy bits. I was continually asking my mother to give me recipes from classical Bengali cuisine, particularly those that had been handed down generations within families, each family tweaking a given dish in ways that made a new, different thing of it. For example, my mother, in the days when she used to cook, or at least instruct the several persons, over time, who were employed to cook, had only two ways of making kalai dal (called ‘biuli’ in our family; most of the rest of India call it ‘urid dal’): one in which the boiled lentils were spiced with fennel seeds and julienned ginger; the other where the lentils were toasted first, then boiled, and spiced with whole red chillies and hing spluttered in very hot oil. Both methods had been learned from her mother. But in my paternal grandparents’ home, my mother once said to me, they cooked the same lentils in a completely different style: lots of finely chopped garlic, whole dried red chillies and that quintessentially Bengali spice, panchphoron – a mixture of equal amounts of fennel, cumin, fenugreek, nigella and mustard seeds – were sizzled briefly in smoking-hot mustard oil, then added to the toasted and boiled lentils. ‘Some old Oriya cook’s influence, no doubt,’ Ma had dismissively added.
A State of Freedom Page 3