by Anosh Irani
As my neighbour did this morning. I was emptying my trash into the garbageman’s cane basket, and she asked me, “Do you like it there?”—meaning my other home, Vancouver—and I said, “Sure, sure,” and she said, “It must be so clean,” and I said, “Yes, yes,” and just as I was about to re-enter my apartment, she asked, “So, are you happy there?” and the truth is a resounding no, but then I’m not happy here either, because there is no here, here was, it no longer is, and it’s questions like these that keep pharmaceutical companies in business. Am I happy anywhere? Was I ever happy? Is there such a thing as happy? I don’t think so, and if there is, I don’t want it. I want to combust in such a powerful way that the effects are felt deep in the oceans; I want craniates to read my work and get my meaning, and that’s about it. It won’t make me happy, but it will give my combustion the distance it deserves.
While I’m feeling all this, my neighbour tells me that she went over to Dr. Hansotia’s place and rang the doorbell but he didn’t answer. What if he’s dead? What if he’s had a stroke and is just lying there on the kitchen floor? But then, upon further investigation, she discovered that he has been opening the door for the garbageman, and has also hired a new maid to help cook, clean, and get groceries. So he has every intention to live. My neighbour seems a bit disappointed by this. Just as I’m disappointed by my constant need to make sense of a decision I made twenty years ago—to leave. I can feel my body turning dark; I can feel an eclipse occurring within me, the light being blocked.
Over the next few days, I keep one eye on Dr. Hansotia’s window as I do my regular Bombay things—I visit friends’ homes, try to partake of the natural rhythms of their daily lives: their morning jogs, afternoon naps, shopping trips (oh, how the malls have grown; they are the Great Barrier Reefs of our age), domestic arguments, laughter that I hear and remember from long ago, lovers who have aged and seem “happy,” money flowing in and out of wallets and cards, and me, reaching into my wallet to pay for dinners only to be scoffed at, but in the most affectionate way, because I am an artist, an adorable pye-dog. So many natural, daily rhythms that seem completely unnatural to me, such as sharing space with another human being; waking up next to one; having a miniature version of oneself and then holding it, scolding it, cuddling it, cleaning it. Once in a while, someone hands me their baby, hoping it will change me, hoping that some of its babyness will redeem my soul, make me less grouchy, or whatever it is they think I need. This obsession with happiness—to me it’s just a new-car smell that one day disappears without warning. I try to partake of daily life, but I find natural rhythms only when I am writing. But I cannot write all the time. So I think.
It’s 2 a.m. A peaceful time to be awake in Bombay. I still call the city Bombay when I speak, but I’ve started using Mumbai when I write. Mumbai is creeping into my work. Those seven islands are speaking up, telling me it’s time to acknowledge the name change. If it’s only a name change, I tell those islands (when you’re up four days in a row, you can communicate with islands), why is it so difficult for me to say it? Is it because when I say Mumbai I don’t know where to go? Or is it because Mumbai has no use for me, doesn’t need me the way I need it? On my previous trip, a year ago, I went to Chowpatty beach at night and dipped my feet in the sea. And just as I started to feel the warmth of the water, the water tightened its grip around my ankles and I realized that water, that eternal truth-teller, was back at work. You did not leave Bombay, the water said. It spat you out. Remember this, each time you hold that new passport of yours. When I returned to Vancouver, I dipped my feet in the waters of English Bay, thinking I would spite the Arabian Sea. But the Pacific had a message for me as well. Not so much in words, but in its cold, steely silence.
In Bombay, once I’m done holding other people’s babies and shopping, once I’m done catching up with friends or watching a Hindi movie in Phoenix Mills, I do something strange—strange to others but not to me. I take late-night taxi rides alone. Even though people offer to drop me home after our nights out, I prefer cabs. There’s a bridge in the city, the JJ Bridge, which connects Byculla, the place where I live, to Colaba in South Bombay. At night, when there’s no traffic, it’s just a ten-minute ride between those areas, and I use that bridge to stare into homes, into people’s apartments, to catch a glimpse of the smallness of their movements, to see complete strangers perform mundane acts such as reaching for a newspaper, or to watch an old woman fanning herself. The bridge allows me to be so close to their windows that I can literally smell their lives. This is an essential part of my Bombay visit. As my taxi climbs up that bridge, I feel a kind of exhilaration—perhaps that’s too grand a word: a release, you might say. I become an eagle who swoops in and out of lives, of narratives, without the slightest regard for plot or character development. I collect snapshots, take photographs in the mind with eye blinks, in order to find the thing behind the thing, which I hope will enlarge my world; and when I do find that moment, I don’t know what to do with it. The second I begin to feel complete, to fill up with something, a sense of loss pervades me. Then I stop looking into apartments, I look below the bridge, at Mohammed Ali Road, at its mosques and minarets, its greenness, its lights sending out signals into the sky, and it feels like an ancient place, a place that contains the breath of centuries, warm and stale. I fill my nights with domes in the sky, and minarets, with roundness and erectness, and this says a lot about how I feel about Earth itself—that I am stuck in its roundness, when all I long for is upward movement, a minaret that will take me so high…And my thoughts stop as soon as I descend the bridge and pass by my old school—or, specifically, the petrol pump behind my school. When childhood memories take over, it’s time for me to leave.
It took me many visits to India, many taxi rides across the JJ Bridge, before Canada made its appearance, before it intercepted me, the way a train switches tracks and suddenly you are off course, or so you think—but you’re really going where you were headed all along. There’s something about the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver that has always bothered me, but I didn’t understand what it was until one night on the JJ Bridge. I’m always being told by people who visit Vancouver how stunning it is, how lucky I am to live here/there. When people from India come here, they say, “It’s jannat.” This is heaven, this is paradise. For a second, I am filled with some sort of pride, but this quickly goes away. I digress. And I digress because that’s what the Lions Gate Bridge is: a digression. The opposite of focus. If the JJ Bridge in Mumbai allows me to focus, to stare into windows, into tiny lives, the two lions at the mouth of the bridge in Vancouver tell me that something regal is at hand, something majestic—and at first, you buy it. You stare at the North Shore Mountains, at those homes in North and West Vancouver that almost seem to touch the sky and the water and the clouds all at once, and you take a deep breath, and it’s invigorating. And that’s what I did, too, until one day I looked down below, and realized: I don’t know a thing about these people. And by “these people” I mean the people whose land this actually is, these people who live on reserves below the bridge, underneath the bridge, as life passes them by above, as we move above them, in machines, full throttle, so fast that we fail to pay attention, fast because we don’t want to pay attention, or have been trained not to. Shouldn’t these reserves below the bridge be in the sky—not to elevate them to the status of legend and myth, because that would once again diminish the real history—but so that we notice them?
In 2003, I took an oath to become a Canadian citizen. I went to the ceremony alone, on a weekday, and stood with another group of people, most of them recent immigrants, I assumed, and listened to a judge talk about Canada. I still remember parts of what he said. How Canada was this great mosaic, this tapestry of cloth made up of different peoples, and now I was being asked to contribute to it, become part of it. And then, this particular phrase: “I invite you to insert your thread into the Canadian tapestry.” For some reason, I got the giggles. I would love to insert my thre
ad, I thought. I looked at those next to me to see if anyone else found these words funny. Not so. There was an Asian woman looking directly at the judge as though she was worried she would be thrown out of the country if she did not behave; there was, to my left, someone whose face I cannot remember, because I kept asking myself, as I looked left and right, Where are those people from under the bridge? Why aren’t they here, as representatives of this great land, to welcome, to educate, to allow us passage into our new home, which was once entirely theirs, and theirs alone? And I knew that if these people under the bridge had been asked to whom the land belonged, some might have said, “The land.” Who else? Who else could land belong to, but to land itself?
Bridges are not connectors, they do not join, they are simply ways to pass over—and what we pass over will come back to haunt us.
* * *
—
(Please follow the bridge, or pass over, until you arrive at Translated from the Gibberish, Part Two, on this page.)
When Ulrich’s brother told him that he should read a short story by an American named John Cheever, Ulrich immediately thought of better ways to spend the evening. He could gather the two- and five-rupee coins scattered in the corners of his room and go downstairs to the Irani restaurant and exchange them for paper currency. He could go to the laundromat across the street and collect his socks and underwear.
Or he could just stay put. Why do anything? His smallest movement would only add to the mayhem around him. Clare Road was a gaudy mix of hair salons, coffin makers, churches, cheap boutiques, and—worst of all—schools. Screaming brats had managed to hijack Clare Road, and now everyone and everything in the area had that unbearable quality most children possess.
“Just read the Cheever,” said Moses. His brother was still looking for the key to his motorcycle. Ulrich knew, but did not say, that it was lying on the floor, at the foot of the table. “This guy, this loser American rich type, he’s at a pool party, and he suddenly decides to swim all the way home through people’s backyards.”
“How the hell do you swim through a backyard?”
“Through their pools, yaar. He’s tipsy and decides to go pool-hopping. But that’s not what the story’s about…”
“What do I care what it’s about?”
“You’re a swimmer, so I just thought…”
Moses had finally spotted his key. It was on a terrible keychain for a motorcycle, one engraved with Moses’s fiancée’s name.
Ulrich pulled up his white T-shirt, revealing his round belly. “Do I look like a swimmer to you?” Ulrich slapped his belly; it felt hard. That was the strange thing about his belly: it looked like fat but felt like muscle. Today it was extra firm—he’d been constipated for two days. “I’m a coach, man,” said Ulrich. “Very different from a swimmer. Swimmers swim, coaches sit and watch.”
“Then just sit there for the rest of your life. Just sit there and stare out the window.”
“Why does it bother you so much?”
“Because that’s all you do. It’s embarrassing.”
“So is your fucking key chain.”
Cussing always got to Moses. His brother had always been more polite than Ulrich, had been the darling pupil at school, whereas Ulrich’s brain retained nothing; every line that he read passed through it, the way hot chai passes through a strainer. The only thing Ulrich excelled at was sport.
“I’ll be back late,” said Moses.
“So why are you telling me? I’m not your mother.”
As soon as he said this, Ulrich regretted his words. Moses was trying to bridge the distance between the two of them with simple gestures; by asking Ulrich to read a story, he no doubt hoped the brothers would have something to talk about at night.
FROM THE VERANDA, ULRICH STARED out at Mongini’s, the cake shop opposite. He envisioned his mother buying sponge cakes there. He could still see her, eight years after her death, wiping the edges of her mouth with her small white handkerchief, two dabs on the left and two dabs on the right. It was as if the white handkerchief and the dabbing had ensured that nothing cruel ever came out of her mouth. Unlike what came out of his own mouth.
Below, Ulrich could see Moses wiping the seat of his RX 100. Why did he wipe the seat five times? It was not a baby’s bottom. It was a goddamn bike. Ulrich fought the urge to spit on it.
A year ago, he wouldn’t have stopped himself. At thirty-nine, spitting would have made sense. But turning forty had changed things, forced a reckoning. He had lost almost all of his hair now, except for a meaningless tuft, an apologetic afterthought, at the back of his head, for which he still had to pay barbers’ fees. And he was now a man with a moustache, a look he had always despised.
As he walked back into the living room, he spotted the book by John Cheever lying on the sofa. What the hell, he thought. Cheever’s company in the bathroom might do his bowels some royal good.
* * *
—
ULRICH READ THE STORY THROUGH and through, but he did not know what to make of it. There was a distinct tempo to it, and each time he thought of closing the book, he found himself turning the page instead. His bowels were now empty, but his mind would not stop racing. For one thing, he could not understand why the man in the story, after completing a marathon swim through countless private pools (and a noisy public one), and even crossing a highway on foot, ended up standing outside his own home, which was locked, peering into it through a window, thinking his wife was waiting for him when the home was empty and deserted.
But the question that really burned him was this: What the fuck was Moses trying to tell him?
In the time since his brother had left, two hours ago, Ulrich had guzzled five beers. He was tipsy now, like Cheever’s swimmer. A thought occurred to him: Had his brother finally learned to fight, to spit back? Suddenly, Ulrich circled the flat, a man on the verge of an important discovery. But when nothing came, and there was only the lazy grey of dusk to contend with, he had a sixth beer and went to sleep.
An hour later, he woke up with a start. He sprang out of bed with the liveliness of a sudden hard-on and rushed to the mirror. “I’m Ulrich!” he shouted at himself. That bastard is messing with me; I’ll show him.
The name Ulrich, he knew well, was a distinctive one. Even in the Catholic community in Bombay—the Macs, as they were affectionately called—no one shared his name. His mother had named him after Saint Ulrich, and whenever he said his name out loud, as he had done just now, it seemed even more German than ever. Germans were tough. They did not shy away from confrontation. And Germany had his favourite football team. Its players had the precision of machines—machines that could produce sweat and were made of blood. As a swimmer, too, one had to be the perfect combination of human and machine. That had always been his belief.
Ulrich found he was perspiring, even though the ceiling fan was at full zoom. He took off his T-shirt and threw it on the bed, but this wasn’t enough to cool him down. He took his shorts off too, and stood stark naked before the mirror. Then he put his Speedos on, stuffed some money in the side, and walked out the door.
On his way down the stairs, he passed his next-door neighbour, Sunita, who let out a shriek. Or maybe it was a squeal. Her husband was a scrawny man with toothpicks for legs. Clearly, Ulrich had done her a favour by showing off his muscular thighs.
With an air of confidence, he stepped into the street.
* * *
—
IT DID NOT MATTER THAT PEOPLE were staring at him. What did these morons know anyway? Cheever’s swimmer had enjoyed the advantage of limpid pools and soft lawns and the occasional fancy drink to help him along his journey; he had not contended with the mocking stares of the Bombaywala. When a Bombaywala showed disapproval, you felt it in the very marrow of your being. Tonight, vowed Ulrich, he would use those waves of disapproval to build muscle.
The hot shoplights along the footpath made his dark skin shine as he took a left towards the fire station. Soon he was walking t
hrough Madanpura, a cocoon for the underworld and its contract killers and loan sharks. Yet Ulrich found the darkness of the streets soothing. If he were to walk here, dressed as he was, in broad daylight, he’d be sure to get a nice tight slap from someone. But now everyone was busy buying sweets or getting their beards shaved, and he strode along undisturbed. It was only near the Salvation Army that a lady in a burka gasped at him. He did not falter but hurried on towards the YMCA.
“I lost my keys,” he said to the man at reception, and walked past him.
“But coach…” said the man, leaping up to follow him.
“Just chill, yaar,” said Ulrich. “I’m doing only one lap.”
“But…I thought you are here because you lost your keys.”
“I lost them in the pool, man.”
Ulrich dove in with perfect technique. When his large belly hit the water, it slid in smoothly, along with the rest of him, with minimum fuss. In his enthusiasm, he had forgotten to remove his rubber chappals and the money that was tucked into his Speedos. The chappals he let go after the first few strokes. They rose to the surface and stayed there, lolling about, as Ulrich reached the other end. Just like Cheever’s swimmer, he refused to use the ladder to get out of the pool.
He remembered the fat kid whom he had trained that very morning, and how upset he’d been when the kid struggled to get out of the pool even with the use of the ladder. It was pathetic how this kid’s pudgy arms had no strength; full of milk and butter and biscuits, his body did not deserve to be in the pool. “What will help my son?” the kid’s mother asked Ulrich after the private training session.