How About a Sin Tonight?

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  Of whatever Shahraan earned, sixty percent went to Bheem. It was a good proposition since the lodging and food issues were taken care of by Bheem for all his boys. Apart from his necessary expenditures, he used to buy popular film magazines, got stitched cheaper versions of the kind of clothes his contemporary crop of heroes wore then, or collected cheap audio cassettes of his favourite movies. His second home was the tenth seat of the third row in Regal Cinema at Churchgate. And the little money that was left went inside a small tin box kept under the taxi’s back seat.

  One afternoon, a harried looking man got into his taxi during lunch time.

  ‘It’s twenty past one by my watch. If you can take me to my destination by two, I will give you double the amount your meter asks.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Madh Island.’

  ‘It’s not possible. I need to have my lunch also.’

  ‘Arrey bhai, the whole film crew is waiting for me there.’

  The mention of a film crew was enough to make Shahraan turn his head around swiftly. The man had a my-entire-dowrycheque-bounced expression on his face.

  During the formula-one-inspired drive, the man said he was from the production team sent urgently to the main office to bring extra film reels since the on-set ones had finished because of the heroine’s innumerable retakes.

  It was two minutes past two in the man’s watch when Shahraan stopped his taxi. Good enough! Paying him double the amount as promised, the man, with the fluidity of an idea, disappeared into a dense and noisy crowd. Shahraan parked the taxi a little ahead and stepped out.

  As he approached the crowd, Shahraan heard a few abrupt whistles and claps. It took him some muscle power to pierce through and reach the front. At a distance he saw superstar Shekhar Rai being explained something by a restless looking person. The bouts of whistles and claps happened whenever Rukmani, the heroine, waved at the crowd. The restless looking man went behind the camera and screamed, ‘Start sound, camera, and action!’ on a mic, his voice booming over the loudspeaker. Minutes later, the man cried, ‘Cut!’ voice beaming on the Shahraan remained in awe of everything around; the camera, the ambience, the stars, and the overall process. It seemed like a different zone all together. Before he knew it, the director called for a pack up.

  It was only after reaching the biryani centre that Shahraan realized his mistake. He should have requested someone in the crew to give him a chance as well.

  Next morning, he put on his best attire—a blue shirt and black bell-bottoms which were his first buy with his savings—and reached the place early, waiting all afternoon under the scorching sun. But there was no sign of any film crew and by dusk, he drove back with hundreds of knots in his stomach.

  He told Krishna about it who in turn relayed it to Bheem later in the evening.

  ‘Our bachcha wants to be a film star,’ said Krishna, watching his boss kick start his Bajaj scooter.

  ‘Every second boy in Bombay wants that,’ said Bheem and he was gone.

  ‘Don’t worry, dost.’ said Krishna earnestly. ‘One day the scent of your success will be more intoxicating than that of my mutton biryani.’

  Shahraan tried hard but couldn’t smile.

  Almost three weeks later, Bheem surprised everyone by arriving at the biryani centre during day, bellowing from his scooter, ‘Bachcha, quick.’

  Shahraan, who was in the middle of eating lunch, gave him a confused look.

  ‘Let’s make you a phillam-isstar,’ Bheem added.

  Shahraan swallowed the bolus he had in his mouth, got up, and hastily washed his hands under the nearby tap. He came running to Bheem.

  ‘Don’t I need to change?’

  ‘Idiot, we have only two minutes. Get your ass behind!’

  If Madh Island was a five-storey building, then this one was a skyscraper. Bheem and Shahraan kept walking past faces with an ascending blotch of tension on them. Finally, they reached a group of four sitting on red plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Bheem raised his hand to announce his attendance to a particular man wearing a half shirt, shorts, and a cap. The director, Shahraan concluded.

  Nothing happened for five minutes. Then suddenly the group stood up and dispersed with a nervous energy. Bheem pushed himself forward. So did Shahraan.

  ‘Sir, this is the kid I was talking about a few hours back.’

  The director glanced at Shahraan once and shouted aloud, ‘Someone explain this chokra how to operate the clapper.’

  He then walked away.

  ‘What is a clapper, Bheem bhai?’ asked Shahraan.

  It took him two days to realize what a clapper boy was. His job was diametrically opposite to what he had come to Bombay for; to be in front of the camera from action to cut. When Shahraan complained of the same to Bheem, the latter advised him: ‘Bombay pehle leti hai, phir mood mein aaye toh deti hai. Bombay jeetna hai toh lage raho bachcha.’

  Those words became Shahraan’s primary religion for the next few months. He kept driving his four-wheeler acting school to earn a living and whenever a chance beckoned, he alternately played the role of a spot boy, clapper boy, errand boy, and the likes. He soon realized that the difference between a normal being and an artist is that the latter has two lives: one where he only exists, the other where he lives. Cinema for Shahraan was the other life he was striving for.

  As days and nights kept switching their roles in a hurry, a fear, with all its sharp canines, started digging deep into the flesh of his hope; what if time, which supposedly was performing a striptease in front of his destiny, finally finished doffing every bit of its clothing? For in that nakedness, his fears convinced him, might lay his worst nightmare: that he had grown old by a decade and was still driving a taxi.

  The year was finally ready to shed its final leaf named December. After dropping one of the passengers for the night, Shahraan parked his taxi by Juhu Chowpattty and looked around. There were people everywhere to celebrate the arrival of the new year with balloons and crackers.

  ‘Bombay is a blank cheque. Everyday thousands of people fill it up with their aspirations. Most of them bounce.’ Shahraan, consuming the on-going pandemonium, sighed. He could feel how pregnant the sigh was with the twins of dejection and loneliness. This was the first time he wasn’t going to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his younger siblings—Chotu and Golu.

  ‘We shall wait to see you doing dhishoom-dhishoom with the villains,’ they’d stated together.

  Then suddenly the same thought that occurred when he first arrived in Bombay seven months back restated itself. What the hell was he doing here? This time it happened with all its nosy and manipulative relatives.

  What if the rest of my life goes the way the last seven months did? Baba was right. After graduation he could have helped me with a job in the school. I would have lived a traditional life with a wife and children. What’s so wrong in it? That’s the best bet for people like me who are born to exist like cockroaches with our energies directed towards survival all the time. I’ll go back. Yes! Baba shall forgive me. I shall re-enter college, complete graduation, and then…that’s final!

  Following his impulse to eject himself out from the bowels of the city he climbed back into his taxi. He was about to start the engine when, out of the blue, came a girl and boarded the taxi.

  ‘Please drive. I am in deep trouble,’ she said.

  Shahraan switched on the small bulb inside his taxi, turned around, and saw her face for the first time.

  1:00 p.m.

  I woke up that night to something unprecedentedly special.

  I open my eyes. A crow is cawing by the window. I need to shoo it off. I do. I stand by the dusty window frame alert about the crow’s reappearance. How interesting it would have been, I wonder hypnotized by nostalgia, if I could have shooed time away too with the snap of a finger. Especially the time that separates us. When a woman leaves a man after gifting him the kind of filters that Mehfil has given me to look at the world, he has no choi
ce but to turn weak.

  What would have happened had she not come into my life that night? Maybe, I wouldn’t have travelled the world nineten times over, wouldn’t have private villas in Bombay, Dubai, Cannes, Atlanta, or Sydney. I would have been a nobody to the universe, wouldn’t have inspired a single soul to be like me, no eyeballs would have cared to get a glimpse of me, wouldn’t have…her nervous face when she boarded the taxi flashes in front of me. A woman, trust me on this, is not an object. She is an experience. If you are lucky, that is.

  At first glance, her face resembled an unsolicited manuscript. But with a bit of patience I realized her face was the actually the omnibus of a celebrated author. Everything was there, if you were interested, else not a trace of anything. Facing someone with such a visage either makes you listen to her intently, thanking time, or you unveil your heart and prattle, forgetting time. That night, her presence made me hear a song. And I was desperate to know all such songs nested within her soul.

  I smile. Who said exploring the dry yet beatific grassland of memory—even for the thousandth time—isn’t a selfrealizing journey in itself?

  ‘I dropped her on Faras Road.’ Shahraan said.

  Krishna was busy transferring rice from a jute bag into a container with his back to him. Now he was staring at him, half-turned.

  ‘Are you sure it was Faras Road where you dropped her?’

  ‘Yes, why? What’s in Faras Road?’ Shahraan asked.

  ‘The bar girls live there. It’s near Kamathipura; Bombay’s famous red light area. Bachcha, stay away from her,’ said Krishna and turned back to work.

  ‘But, I love her.’

  ‘You said she was young, beautiful, and stays somewhere on Faras Road. She is either a bar girl or worse; a prostitute. So stay away and fly off now. It’s an hour past your lunch time.’ Shahraan suddenly jumped down from the bench he’d perched on, wore his slippers, and moved out in a rush.

  Driving his taxi towards Faras Road, Shahraan was all consumed in the conversation he had with her the previous night.

  ‘I am in deep trouble.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was here with my friends. Somehow I lost them and then that old, horny man…’

  Shahraan looked into his rear-view mirror, only to see the girl put her hands against her eyes.

  ‘Please don’t cry. I’ll drop you wherever you want me to and you don’t even have to pay me.’

  ‘Why? If I have boarded your taxi, I’ll pay. I don’t take anybody’s charity.’ The girl was still busy rubbing her eyes. The road was empty of beings and lights except for one street light under which Shahraan stopped the taxi presuming she was crying. For someone standing afar, the entire scene would have looked like a dark stage with a golden spotlight bathing the protagonists.

  Shahraan got down and was about to approach the girl when the sky lit up with all kinds of spectacular rockets. The New Year had arrived. Both Shahraan and the girl looked up at the sky in admiration. It made them go into a collective trance. When the sparkles ended, Shahraan glanced at the girl. Put all the jewels of the world on her and still nobody will care about the jewels, he thought. Standing beside her, his real purpose of nurturing a dream all these years, and later coming to Bombay following it, lay crystal clear. They were destined to meet.

  When the girl looked at him, he realized one of her eyes was shut, making it seem like she was winking. His smile dried.

  ‘Why are you winking at me?’

  ‘Uffo! Neither was I crying nor am I winking. There’s something in my eye.’ She brought her handkerchief near her mouth, blew air on it, and put it on her left eye for relief.

  ‘Now get in and drive. I am already late for the night.’ The girl blew some more air on her handkerchief.

  ‘If you allow me, I can help you,’ said Shahraan cautiously.

  The girl paused and looked at him with her hand over her left eye.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Please come out. It’s clearer here.’

  There was another spectacular blast in the sky as the girl stepped out, waiting for further directions from her seemingly different taxi driver. It was then that she noticed behind the dusty and torn-at-places uniform, a person who had a boyish charm about him—something ineffably genuine.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Hold your left eye between your fingers and spread it… like this.’ Shahraan showed her. She started laughing. Realizing he was looking funny, Shahraan stood in an attention position, feeling awkward.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the girl and did as asked, with the hangover of laughter still evident in the twitch of her cheeks. Shahraan came closer and looked deep into her left eye. Alert that his skin mustn’t touch hers or else she could misinterpret his intentions, Shahraan almost had an epiphany.

  ‘Eyelash!’ he said. ‘Wait, don’t move. Give me your handkerchief.’

  Shahraan took the handkerchief from her, draped its edge around his finger with the tip pointing out and moved even closer. The girl’s body went slightly taut. Within the space of a few small steps, both seemed to have made a leap across seasons. The girl was experiencing a summer within, as she saw their shadows on the road by the taxi from two heads and one body.

  Shahraan skillfully pulled out the eyelash. In the process, her breath diffused into his, escalating both their heart beats.

  ‘Shukriya,’ the girl said in a soft voice, but in the silence it seemed heavy enough.

  Shahraan only smiled awkwardly. They slowly stepped away from each other and got back into the taxi. What they couldn’t walk away from was the vista of an alternate universe their chance proximity triggered within them.

  Tearing through massive traffic, Shahraan finally reached the place where he had dropped the girl the previous night. He parked his taxi nearby and stepped out. It was about seven in the evening.

  The place was busy with adults moving around, street children playing illogical games, and some of the shopkeepers—whose idea behind the rickety architecture of the shops was the same as a modern city’s take on relationships—were focused on their daily business. Though Shahraan saw a lot of people, he didn’t know what to ask and whom. He kept traipsing the place, looking around, hoping for the girl to appear suddenly in front of him the way she had the other night. In particular, he noticed some sick looking kids, anaemic girls, and a few women with a have-had-enough-of-life expression on their faces. As he paused by a crossroad, Shahraan felt a tap on his back. He turned in a flash.

  ‘Bheem bhai!’

  Shahraan noticed a pouch of country liquor in his hand and a bracelet of Jasmine around his left wrist.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it from the distance it’s our bachcha. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for…’ There was a pause and then it came out, ‘a friend.’

  ‘Friend? What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a she.’

  Bheem stared at him for few seconds trying to read him.

  ‘Okay. Follow me.’

  Shahraan followed Bheem through some identical lanes and bylanes, ahead of the crossroad. Finally they reached a house. It was difficult for Shahraan to guess the color of the house since there wasn’t any light nearby. It was a two-storey house, with the ground floor sporting an abandoned look while a thin ray of light was visible through the edges of the closed window frame above.

  ‘This is Neela Makaan. Nazakat Begum owns it. If your friend is from this area, she will know her,’ said Bheem. They climbed a narrow but clean cemented staircase and arrived at a passage where a tightly shut door was staring at them. Bheem knocked twice before it was opened by a young girl. Shahraan was glad she was not the one.

  ‘Salaam Walekum,’ said the girl and moved in.

  ‘Walekum Assalam,’ Bheem bent his head slightly and stepped inside. He paused and turned to gesture to Shahraan to come in as well. Shahraan did as instructed, noting that the door opened to a small mosaic corridor. He noticed Bheem take of
f his black leather sandals that were shining like a celebrity, in the corridor. Shahraan too did the same with his wretched ones.

  ‘Is Begum inside?’ Bheem asked the same girl who opened the door.

  ‘Jee,’ the girl said without looking up.

  The corridor gave way to a hall with a round solid pillar in the centre balancing it. All around it were neatly laid out mattresses covered with white cotton bed sheets, with cozy looking cylindrical pillows kept atop dressed in cheap white satin. There was a stifling silence all around.

  ‘Begum?’ Bheem had made himself comfortable on one of the mattresses by the side. Shahraan stood nearby trying hard not to think, judge, or presume anything.

  ‘Begum has fever. She is sleeping,’ said a delicate looking girl who came out in the hall.

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Bheem looked at Shahraan and said, ‘Tough luck, bachcha.’ Changing his pose a bit he said, ‘Could you prepare a hookah for me, Mehfil?’

  What he didn’t notice was that the girl and Shahraan were staring at each other. There was a bite mark beside her soft, supple lower lip, a small purplish blotch on the left eye while a bigger blotch present on the right of her forehead. None of it was there the other night.

  Looking deep into each other’s eyes, they realized, the near perfect alternate universe that they’d together glimpsed just a night before was experiencing acute tremors.

  4:00 p.m.

  I remember in the days following my encounter with Mehfil in Neela Makaan I found myself in a dilemma. One side kept asking me: How could I be in love with a prostitute? What would I tell my parents and friends? And then there was this adamant other side that said: She is only a woman, after all.