‘Yes, sir.’ He studies me; pauses, apologetic.
‘I see …’ I fall silent. ‘So that’s why— But you’ve worked here for a long time. I’ve seen you before.’
‘Thirty years.’ He explains: ‘I was not here that day.’
*
When I’m leaving, he’s standing by the macaroons.
‘Sir,’ he says.
I stop.
‘I too feel I’ve seen you before.’
I nod but say nothing. The pianist’s at it.
He continues shyly: ‘Are you in the High Court?’
I shake my head. Then add: ‘My father used to come here a lot many years ago.’
He appears pained, groping – till something alters. His eyes widening, he asks: ‘Mr Chaudhuri?’
I’m disbelieving, as if I’ve glimpsed a ghost. These are the last vestiges of our life here.
‘Yes. He’s my father.’
‘Very good people,’ he says, unexpected with this belated certificate. ‘Sir and madam.’
*
I go to the other side of the road and face Elephanta. From the sea came the world. At least, that’s how the song put it: ‘Prima in Indis, Gateway of India / Door of the East with its face to the West’ – words we sang at assembly but never understood. With the armed men having alighted at two different spots from dinghies, the sea hems in the city. It’s ineluctable. The city isn’t sure what to do with it.
On my right, far away, the Radio Club glows with a wedding. I walk towards it slowly.
The area comes with a history for me. On the one hand, it figured in my father’s life. Then, by the time I was fifteen, it begins to unravel. After school, my friend Zainul and I go into the Taj, enter the Shamiana, order cold coffee. When the bill’s presented to us, we find we have no money. As I sit, observed warily by waiters, Zainul runs to Arun, whose father lives in a Port Trust flat on this very road, to borrow the necessary sum. He returns after an eternity. When I’m nineteen – not long before going to England – I frequent the sea-front looking for love or a fuck, and never get either. When I’m reacquainted with Ramu in 1985, I become aware of Apollo Bunder’s proximity to his house. I see it’s dotted with his doubtful landmarks. A small part of it nourishes him – like the overrated kebabs at Bade Mian’s. Otherwise, it poisons him: the pushers are here. The arcade adjoining the erstwhile Nanking restaurant is where junkies sit and droop. Opposite Elphinstone College, and especially in front of the Prince of Wales (or Chhatrapati Shivaji) Museum, is where smack – evidently of very poor quality – is supplied at all hours. Parallel to Apollo Bunder, on Colaba Causeway, not far from Electric House is a small church in which there are daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings which Ramu used to deride as being fit for the slow-witted only. Everything Ramu needs and doesn’t need is here. He’s often complained to me about how he wants to leave Colaba, but can’t. Where could he go?
So, in a way, it must be good that he’s been extricated, and exiled to – is imprisoned in – Alibag. Maybe I’ll hear his side of the story when I see him. I could have walked to his place right now. Enlisted him for tomorrow’s reading. I always enlist him. The last time I spoke to him was at the end of 2008, when the city was running amok with terrorists and commandos. (‘Terrorist’ is one of those terms that, through sheer repetition, has lost all meaning. That is, it could refer to anyone.) Everything was happening incredibly close to his building. ‘It’s crazy yaar!’ he said. ‘City’s very quiet, and neighbours are telling me smoke’s coming out from the Taj. P-police are turning people back when they’re coming up Marine Drive!’
I haven’t spoken to him since. When I called him in March, his sister picked up the phone: ‘It’s a rehab place in Alibag, Amit. He can only speak once a month to immediate family. Yes, he’s well. He says he’ll be out in a year or two. Yes, a year or two. Thank you for calling, Amit. Your parents are OK? Family? Drop in when you’re in Bombay, OK? God bless. Pray for him, he’ll be fine.’ Ramu’s mother was Roman Catholic. The lay expressions of faith underlie his family’s blandishments, as they do the Narcotics Anonymous sessions. I recall this; I went to a couple (in the same way Ramu comes to my readings).
*
Well before I’d written or published a book, and got Ramu to tag along to my events, I was following him – in the late eighties, whenever I was in Bombay – to his NA meetings. There’s something to be said for encroaching on bits of a friend’s life. You meet new people. There are misunderstandings – someone could accuse you of being there on false pretences. On the first floor of a school in Mahim, an educated-looking man (clearly a recovering addict) making social chit-chat asked me: ‘How long have you been clean?’ I was cocky. ‘I was never on it,’ I said. His face darkened, and he moved swiftly on. When I told Ramu later, we both laughed. Such memories! The NA meeting – like the book reading – may not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t mind it, but Ramu couldn’t abide many of the features – the ‘sharing’, the self-conscious applause, the fist-pumping resolutions, delivered like threats: ‘Every day I get better and better.’ About the readings he accompanies me to he’s more tolerant. To me, the NA meetings were claustrophobic but informal. Ramu finds the questions and answers at book events fairly absorbing. He doesn’t mind the droning, self-important recitation of certain passages.
*
Benjamin’s words – ‘the first friend from my schooldays’ – are inaccurate here. My first friend was Jehangir, the gentle Parsi boy who consoled me in the first standard when he saw me crying. I was missing home, which was a short walk away. And there was Shailesh. No one was sure if he’d had polio, but his legs were bent and he wore steel braces and huge shoes; he was smaller than me, but had an ominously large forehead. He claimed the shoes could crush my tormentors. I lost contact with him after he withdrew from school, presumably for his condition. He lived in a building on Malabar Hill not far from where I was growing up – not far from the club I’m staying in on this trip.
*
I’ve lost touch with my first friends. But Ramu’s the school friend who goes back the longest, to the sixth standard, after he flunked twice and joined us juniors. He became my neighbour in class. The other school friend I see, Anil, has run a series of companies in Britain and lives in Hampstead. I never called Ramu by his first name till we were full-fledged adults; in school, he was ‘Reddy’. The word possessed, by association, a certain intractability. His sporting skills encompassed gymnastics and boxing. I remember him springing from parallel bars in front of assembly one morning. Even then he was literally, unhappily, going through the motions. He was short but good-looking; no one could have predicted he’d be six feet tall when he turned seventeen. He soon became better known in school as a flunker and refusenik. He wouldn’t be co-opted into sporting activities for the glory of his House. He was quickly demystified for me when we sat next to each other. I regularly beat him at arm wrestling. Others failed in school because they were mentally negligent or disturbed. For Ramu, failure in those days was a bit like a sport. It was the one thing he grew better at. He detested school; being seen to fail gave him authority. He was intransigent, though the teachers heckled him.
*
‘But when I awoke it became clear that what despair had brought to light like a detonation was the corpse of that boy, who had been immured as a warning: that whoever one day lives here may in no respect resemble him.’
‘Lives here’ – is ‘here’ the city? Or is it the nation? Who’s the person who ‘may in no respect resemble him’, the friend? Is it someone with a new, or different, relationship with the past?
*
I killed Ramu once. It was in school, after the finals. I killed him in a story. After keeping my literary endeavours to myself, and having them go unnoticed, I had success after the boards. A poem came out in the school magazine, and two stories. The poem was a pastiche of Tagore, called ‘Gramercy’. One story was a mystery written in a Wodehousian mode. The other was a tragedy, with
an O. Henry-style comeuppance. My doomed protagonist was a boy with a ‘coconut-shaped head’, and my mother recognized who it was at once. ‘Is it Ramu?’ I can’t recall what the ironic twist was, but the boy was accidentally electrocuted. An end engineered by fate. It was the pinnacle of my literary career.
People getting out of cars at the Radio Club are in each other’s way: thin young men in sherwanis, women in Banarasis. I turn back. I walk past the Taj and the Yacht Club and knock on the window of one of the taxis by the petrol pump. The CD player’s on and the man is staring at the taxi before him.
I don’t return to Malabar Hill; I go to the Bombay Gymkhana. The long promenade is empty. Any members here are in the bar. I wave to the one waiter. I order a chicken and vegetable clear soup. My stomach rumbles, but not with hunger; it must be the sandwich I had on the plane. I only eat soup.
*
By the time I get back, Parsi Nite is ebbing. No accordion to be heard. But people are hovering round the buffet in the dining room. Two men emerge; it takes me a second to realize who they are. Milind Somani, stocky, Savage House, essentially unchanged. The other’s more difficult to place, taller, larger, but I know him – Ali Naqvi – from his smile and light eyes.
‘Amit?’
I nod and smile at Milind. The night’s not quite ended. A woman in a shoulderless dress comes out of the door.
‘My God, it’s been years, right?’
It occurs to me that Ramu would remember them, because he remembers everyone in school.
‘Amit’s a writer,’ says Milind to Ali, who unostentatiously claims he’s aware of this.
They’re prosperous, dependable. I envy them. I’m a bit surprised they know what I do. Not because I don’t think Milind reads, but because your closest circles generally hear what you do last of all: your family, your childhood friends, your city, your country. In reverse order.
*
At night, in the sealed dark of my room, I dream of going to the Hanging Gardens.
The morning is washed by light. Most of the waiters on the ground-floor verandah are already bored. But two or three look keyed up with fresh purpose. I order toast and tea. ‘Pudina chai,’ I say.
He reappears in a little while with a lavish number of slices wrapped in tissue. The toast is already buttered, and in the clutter of spoons and plates is a tiny container of jam.
I lift the lid off the pot and peer in. There’s a shrub with mint leaves swimming inside.
‘I have an interview at eleven,’ I say, cradling the mobile phone to my ear. I mention the name of the paper. ‘I’m bored,’ I say. I stir the tea with my other hand.
‘Why?’ asks my wife, incredulous. She thinks that being in Bombay is enough to make me bubble with excitement, that I don’t have a moment to think. But I find this time that – not having planned in advance, and discounting the interview, the bookshop visit arranged by the publishing rep, and the reading – if Ramu and Arjun are both absent, I have little to do with my day.
‘Where’s Arjun?’
‘He’s in Delhi to speak about genes,’ I say morosely.
*
I decide to walk up the stairs to my room and glimpse, through the latticed wall, the building in which I grew up. It isn’t as if I’d forgotten it; it’s just that I see no point in looking at it directly. I know it exists at the back of the club, but it’s a surprise to chance this morning on its continuance. The time’s ten fifteen. The journalist will be here soon. It’s that dead time, when you’re waiting for something that’s neither entirely productive nor significant, but is supposed to be necessary. While you wait, you can neither write, nor think of writing, nor of the last book or the one you’re embarked on, nor go shopping. I defer returning to the room.
I step out into the driveway. Lazily, I let my eyes go over that familiar width and height. It needs a coat of paint. It’s never departed its first colour scheme: white and mustard. I was eight when we moved there. I looked down from the balcony every day, in times of boredom or unhappiness or those long stretches when I was liberated from unhappiness. To look down is unlike looking up. You encompass what you see. You can make a journey – as I did, with my eyes, to Nariman Point, where my father’s office was. To look is to dream. Or it’s to relive with dread a physical journey, as I did on Sundays, tracing with my eyes the curve of the Marine Drive to Churchgate – my daily school route. The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free – not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it’s gazing upon something it’s unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing.
Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted. I’m free of Bombay. I have no home here. Looking up is hard work; before long, you encounter an intolerable brightness, or emptiness. I squint and count the floors. ‘One, two, three, four …’ I was on the twelfth. ‘Six, seven …’ I think I counted the same floor twice. I start again. Then my gaze alights on a balcony. I’m not sure it’s the right one. Anyway, there’s no mark to identify it with. I strain to see. My home.
This area subdued the terror of the world by ensconcing me, and imparting a terror of its own. The terror of education. The kindergarten I went to is down the road, a two-minute walk. It’s been converted into an enigmatic fortification that has no immediate use. I lived then not in the building opposite, but in another one five minutes away, in a corner adjoining the far end of Hanging Gardens. Tenerife. In kindergarten, I stood all morning by the entrance and waited for my mother to walk back.
From Tenerife I was able to spectate on the bee-buzz of a playground of another school, the school I’d eventually go to. It’s almost diagonally opposite the kindergarten. It’s the infant section, and the smartness of its design means it must have arisen in the fifties. The Junior, Middle, and Senior schools near Flora Fountain are, in comparison, dour – they’re neo-gothic – and may go back to the nineteenth century. The playground is, of course, smaller than I imagined it as a child. Ramu and I went not long ago and peered through the gate in the evening, marvelling at the power it had over us.
*
I haven’t forgotten something that Ramu said as we paused, wonderstruck, at the main gate. There was not a sound within. Much of Malabar Hill, despite the incursion of vendors around the two parks, is an idyll. Little Gibbs Road especially so. At its core, the Infant School and the fairy-tale principal’s house next door – we nudged each other when we saw it – is an oasis, a continuum. Ramu was staring into the heart of the idyll.
‘It’s not for everyone,’ he concluded.
‘What?’ I asked.
We’d been slagging off teachers, sounding off without affection about people we’d known in school who’d gone on to become global managers or CEOs, or had married each other, or had simply given up and died (there were a few of those too); we were complaining about the false values emanating from our education. Then, staring, we fell silent – unusual with Ramu, because he’s incapable of keeping quiet. We were both, now, immune to school. Or were we? Did the playground and the long corridor running at a right angle to the empty front porch still exercise, as we stood looking, a kind of mastery? I was unsettled by memory but felt essentially grounded, and unmoved: I lived in another city; I’d married someone who wasn’t from these parts. My childhood had metamorphosed into something other than mere, logical adulthood and taken me out of Malabar Hill and Bombay. What of Ramu? I couldn’t second-guess his thinking.
‘What’s not for everyone?’
‘Life,’ he said, and this broke the spell. We turned, and walked into the lane going right, towards the steps to Hanging Gardens and Kamala Nehru Park. ‘It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.’
He was forty-eight years old, a recovering addict, and I suppose he had the right to strike a note of dissent. It isn’t one you hear frequently. Since there’s no choice in the matter, you automatically assume life must be an excellent thing: it’s your fault if it isn’t. Ramu’s words reminded me this is a dogma. We can�
�t declare at some point that we aren’t fully invested in life, because there’s no option but to be invested in it. During our time in the world – fifty or sixty or eighty years – we simply pretend we’ve decided to be exactly where we are.
I’m embraced by a smell. There’s an enormous kitchen in the basement. Curry leaves. I turn my back to the building and go back in.
I revisit my room, which is dark till I insert the key ring into its niche. The air conditioner starts to hum and the lights come on. Someone has made the bed and wiped the floor and pushed my sandals to the side of the dressing table. The Joy Shoes bag is where I put it last night – by the suitcase. I could part the curtains, let the light in, but there’s no view – just the edge of the pool.
I lie back in an amphibious posture, feet on the floor. Unable to read, I imagine the neighbourhood disperse around me. I’m waiting for the journalist. However, if I’m downstairs, seated in expectancy, it’ll be bad form; so I must either time my descent so that I come out when he’s in the lobby, or listen to the air conditioning till a text arrives. Where’s The Immortals? I think it’s in the suitcase. I don’t normally carry a copy because it takes up space. I borrow it from the display stack for sale, return it when the reading’s done. But distribution has been so erratic that I’ve had to be self-reliant. Should I glance at the pages? I baulk at what I might find. Besides, must I ready myself for interviews and readings by consulting the novel? Surely the onus should be on the journalist? There was a time, not long ago at all, when they’d arrive out of breath, and slip in, in the first minute or two, ‘Sorry, the book reached me very late, I couldn’t read it,’ or just ‘Sorry, I haven’t been able to read the novel,’ and you were meant to understand that, on the list of things to be surmounted in this person’s day, your book was near the bottom. You then had to describe the book from scratch – its characters; its impetus (or ‘inspiration’); its story. You found yourself under-performing. Not having read it, the person would circle round subjects you had no competence in: India’s new-found success; The God of Small Things; the recent rise of Indian writing. At day’s end, this poor man would mould the tête-à-tête into an account of India’s onward march.
Friend of My Youth Page 5