Friend of My Youth

by Amit Chaudhuri

  ‘He’s out of town.’

  Janardhan erases his smile.

  ‘Very nice man.’

  Yes, he’d grown fond of him. And was entertained to see Ramu hanging out with me – like he was. He with a purpose, Ramu without. There was bound to be empathy between the two. The way they stood together at Crossword’s.

  ‘Mineral water?’ asks a waiter, pausing adroitly in the middle of zipping around.

  ‘Fresh lime soda,’ I tell him. I’m tempted to have a Pallonji Raspberry for its ruby-red colour.

  Janardhan looks conflicted. ‘Plain water.’

  Our silliness. Ramu’s and mine. Janardhan an onlooker. Our lapsing into Baldy’s voice. Baldy said things with a quaver; frequently underlined observations with ‘C’mon yaar!’ Baldy was a fantasist; he wanted things constantly. ‘C’mon yaar!’ He was from an incredibly rich family, but they couldn’t give him what he craved: girlfriends; lavish parties; sporting glory; good grades to mark his true intellectual level. All these he fitfully fantasized about. Those who knew him also knew he was a dedicated masturbator. He discovered porn – the small Danish magazines – quite early. Money helped. The word for masturbation was ‘shagging’ – a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these. You had to be despo to shag; yet all the boys did. The girls weren’t privy to this ecology, this single-minded pursuit. I never saw Baldy after leaving school. He had to exit early, after failing his prelims. We must have chatted on the phone, because he told me he’d joined a tutorial school called Cambridge. (All tutorial colleges for dropouts had names like Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.) He was excited, because it was air conditioned: ‘It’s AC yaar!’ By then I was bored of him. I speak of him in the past tense as he died in his twenties of cocaine abuse. Ramu and I have no memory of when we began to use Baldy’s persona to address each other. It’s wholly unconscious. Sometimes the spell is broken; we see what we’re doing. ‘Shit,’ says Ramu. ‘Poor guy.’ Because Baldy was lovely. In his urgent way, he wanted everything. We say a few words as a requiem. At what point we resume speaking with that quaver we don’t know. We no longer think of it as Baldy’s. It’s a primordial voice; goes way back into our past together. Very Bombay; couldn’t possibly sound right elsewhere. Janardhan saw a bit of that tomfoolery and smiled.

  ‘Order?’ The man in white has made his routine stop.

  ‘Vegetarian berry pulao?’ I say to Janardhan.

  He’s vegetarian. Daal roti is his staple.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  He shakes his head and looks terribly shy.

  ‘I’ll have a mutton berry pulao. And fried bombil.’

  Bombil is a late discovery. When I lived here, I knew the sundried version, flattened strips of Bombay Duck, which you can smell a mile away. We called it shutki and ate it to a searing East Bengali recipe. I saw what bombil really looks like when Adil Jussawalla introduced me to my first Parsi restaurant three years ago. Jimmy Boy. He took me to lunch. I’d read Missing Person as a teenager. He ordered fried bombil. I ordered saas nu machhi. I’d last eaten it two decades ago at a wedding. When the food came, I became transfixed by Adil’s bombil. Slim, browned, crisp – I ascertained casually that this was the fish I’d known as Bombay Duck. I couldn’t focus on the pomfret in the translucent sauce. But I wasn’t brave enough to ask Adil for a morsel.

  Later, stomachs full, we walked towards Horniman Circle. I was unhappy. I didn’t know when I’d be in Bombay next, or see bombil again. I thought I was familiar with Horniman Circle, but hadn’t heard of the name. Who was Horniman? Adil said he was a Jewish benefactor. Skirting the curve of the garden, we began to talk about Parsis. The dwindling numbers; the choice they were presented with, of marrying one another or opening up to other communities and diluting themselves. Either way, they’d go. When I was a child, they were a given. Their pale skins, the surnames denoting professions, their musicality of speech, their skill with Mozart and Brahms. ‘Frankly, I don’t care,’ said Adil. ‘Sorry?’ ‘I don’t care if they vanish.’ It was as if he were speaking of a brand of chocolate, or a railway route. I noticed his use of the ‘they’: as if being a poet had freed him. We headed towards Strand Book Stall – where I’m due again today.

  *

  Plates plonked before us without warning. Munificent brown rice; berries shot through it like pomegranate seeds.

  Just ahead of me, on the right, is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The proprietor (I see him floating around the tables) is a fan. He’s been ninety for years. He’ll soon be at our table to confirm that we’ve ordered, and address us as ‘Young man!’ Wiry; restive. All who eat here will be treated to his love of the royal family. They’ll hear him out, be charmed – by him, if not the memory of Empire. Then they’ll go back to their plates.

  ‘Interview was OK?’ Janardhan scoops up rice. He has the distant air of a matchmaker who’s brought together two parties and is interested only if there was any acrimony between them.

  ‘I think so.’

  My concern has to do with how it will be transcribed. There was a time when journalists had you say what they wanted you to say. You winced, but no one else noticed. People only remember the picture.

  ‘What’s the photographer’s name?’

  Janardhan hesitates, his spoon half-raised. Light doesn’t dawn.

  ‘Ashwin!’ I say after two seconds. We return to the berry pulao. I’m not sure if I should stalk him, and ask him to consult me before he sends off a photo for publication. I have – I feel – been historically too hands off about the angles at which I’ve been shot.

  Bombil! On a small plastic plate.

  ‘You don’t eat fish?’ I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.

  He shakes his head.

  The backbone is almost as soft as the flesh. I attempt to separate the two. Ever since I confronted those biscuit-gold specimens in Jimmy Boy, I make certain I don’t leave without tasting the white flesh. I’ve noticed it’s covered by a film of slime which in another fish would be repugnant. They’re gone very quickly.

  By the time we reach Strand Book Stall, I never want to think of food again. This is not a book signing; it’s an impromptu visit organized by Janardhan. Nevertheless, they’ve placed a stack of The Immortals on a table. I start signing, my back receiving a blast of cold air.

  Shanbhag died two years ago. I met him here when Afternoon Raag was published. I had no idea he was a legend or even who he was. I realized I was being presented. ‘He created the bookshop,’ a distributor whispered. I turned into the schoolboy who used to come here once. School didn’t seem very long ago in 1993. Afternoon Raag was my second novel; I didn’t feel like a writer, though I wanted to be treated like one. ‘You like Chinese food?’ said Shanbhag. ‘You eat lobster?’ He took my wife to the Captain’s Bar at the Taj and ordered lobster salt and pepper. The bar was dark.

  Signing done, I’m drawn to the titles around me. It’s difficult to manoeuvre within; books take up most of the space.

  But I’m sensing a petering out. Is it to do with a change of direction? Next to my novel is piled a book on the Buddha I’ve never heard of, and next to that a pile of horoscopes.

  I have, at home, an anthology that I bought from Strand Book Stall when I was eighteen. Renée and T. Weiss’s Contemporary Poetry. I remember eyeing it, picking it up, coveting it. I wanted it for the names: C. P. Cavafy, A. R. Ammons, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. I let a year pass before parting with whatever the equivalent of seven dollars fifty was that year. It was a magical time. You read what you pleased.

  ‘Finding any good books, sir?’ asks Janardhan at my shoulder.

  ‘Some. When I was fifteen, I came here for James Hadley Chase.’ I can’t say if Janardhan knows Hadley Chase. We read him to be grown up. It was the sex that marked him as a serious writer, as it had Nick Carter. At fifteen, I had no inkling of Cavafy and poetry. That would
come the following year.

  ‘You came often, sir?’

  ‘Almost every day after school. It’s ten minutes away. Cathedral.’ He nods, sombre.

  I turn to the passage at the back, linger before sociology texts and a smattering of recent Indian novels, and come out onto the other side of the small room. The location of the poetry section is still the bottom shelves on the right. There’s a steel chair here.

  I sit and peer below. Chaucer. W. H. Auden. The three shelves are full, but the range is curtailed. I see some friends and acquaintances. Ranjit Hoskote. Anand Thakore. Arundhathi Subramaniam. The last two were in the group that accompanied me to dinner a year and a half ago. After a reading. Ramu was there; he made no secret of the fact that he felt uncomfortable with the poets. We went into the back streets of Kala Ghoda to dine at Trishna. Naturally, no tables were available. Ramu dissuaded us from waiting outside and plugged Apurva. So we had that celebratory meal at Apurva, and Ramu didn’t let me order pomfret because he claimed rawas is a better fish – this is quite expected. I don’t eat pomfret when I’m with Ramu because he prefers rawas and surmai. He hardly eats out. I seldom eat pomfret these days because you don’t get good pomfret in Calcutta. People think I must love fish because I’m a Bengali, but the truth is that, having grown up in Bombay, I only eat sea fish – I generally abhor the freshwater fish you get in Calcutta. In Bombay, I order pomfret when I can. But Ramu won’t let me; he’s convinced I’m going to be converted to rawas, which is what we ordered that night at Apurva – flat grilled pieces like bits of wood.

  I step out, book in one hand. It’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books – the way you know from the first page that it’s going to end.

  ‘So I’ll see you at six fifteen?’

  The reading is at six thirty. We’ve been speculating on the possible size of the audience. It’s hard to shepherd people into readings in Bombay.

  Janardhan shakes his head in agreement. It’s half past three.

  I cross the road. Stacks of sugarcane being pulped by an old flecked grinder. Three flattened bouquets. Pale green juice. High risk of jaundice if you drink a glass.

  That meal at Apurva. I haven’t seen Ramu since. I’ve often thought of my last sighting of him, in front of the Yacht Club at night. It’s only occurred to me now that – of course – it was after the reading, that abortive jaunt to Trishna, the rawas at Apurva. A long table; Ramu making semi-serious conversation with Arundhathi; Arundhathi’s steely indifference when Anand burst into a raga; Anand and Menaka suddenly talking to each other, mildly combative, in French. Later, the contingent began to walk to Regal Cinema. Not that late: eleven o’clock. Through the dark arcade. Anand following one demonstration of a raga with another. We lost Ramu and a young short story writer called Sumit. For seven or eight minutes, they were absent. Then, as we came to the wide angles of Kala Ghoda, they emerged from a back street, sheepish and triumphant. Fair weather friends. I couldn’t tell if they’d had a joint, or if Ramu was still ‘clean’.

  People began to get into the silently lined and watching taxis. It’s odd how unself-conscious and at home people are in this part of the city, but how, come midnight, they’ll start returning to Juhu and Bandra, an hour away. Waves and farewells. Yet two or three of us decided to catch a final glimpse of Apollo Bunder. Ramu was terribly tired and opted out. I suspected he’d had enough of the writers. ‘Fuck, it was an effort to lift one foot after another,’ he told me on the phone the next day. ‘It was as if the distance from Rhythm House to Regal was a mile! I was wondering when it would end.’ He’d parked his scooter at the Yacht Club; we said bye to him there. A part of me felt bad – don’t know why – leaving him. As if I were deserting him. Ramu, prodding the pedal repeatedly with one foot till the familiar racket began. Under a gothic arch. I thought I’d see him again, somehow.

  *

  The uncertainty I feel – about whether I’ll see Ramu again – came to me once before. Of course, I know the formulation is absurd. It’s not whether I’ll see him, but when. According to his sister, it will be another year. What I feel isn’t so much like parental anxiety. With the prolonged absence of a child, say, the irrational part of the parent’s brain will rush to the possibility of never seeing the child again. This isn’t what I feel. I know I’ll see Ramu again. But it’s as if I won’t see him again. I’m thrown off-balance – but also surprised. I didn’t know I’d react like this. Ramu isn’t the only close friend I have. But it’s as if my sojourn in Bombay depends on him. ‘Depends’ is the wrong word: I haven’t come here because of him, to delve into his whereabouts. But the surprise I’ve mentioned is related to my astonishment at being here. ‘Astonishment’ denotes how you might start seeing things you hadn’t noticed earlier, but it could also mean becoming aware that you won’t see them again. As I turn into Pherozeshah Mehta Road and then left into the long stretch of DN Road, I know I won’t see Bombay again. That is, I will see Bombay again, but not the Bombay I’m looking at now.

  I belch and release the ghost of bombil. I need this walk. The first time I had that hunch – that my sighting of Ramu when I said bye to him had a finality that neither he nor I was fully aware of, though in a way both of us were – was at GT Hospital, the psychiatric wing. He’d almost died, but – as the doctor said – had returned to life, against medical logic. I was in Bombay, again, for a cultural festival. Again, I was in the Yacht Club. (If the hosts won’t put me up in a good hotel, I’ll ask to stay in a club that’s well located.) The event was in Bandra; later, I, Arjun, Ramu, and Amrita (whom Ramu and I knew from college, and were seeing after twenty years) thought we’d go to a seafood restaurant. But Ramu broke away early, reminding us it took an hour to get to Colaba. I was headed there too, but not yet. He set out on his scooter and at some point must have changed his mind and decided to check out the entrance of the Prince of Wales Museum for pushers at midnight. He overdosed there on dodgy heroin, and, when a constable discovered him at 3 a.m., his blood pressure was near zero. This nameless constable found a friend’s number on a piece of paper in Ramu’s wallet; called him; the friend phoned Ramu’s father. Ramu’s father had to run down Colaba Causeway because there were no taxis to be seen at 3.30. He got his (unconscious) son to GT Hospital. The rooms at the Yacht Club are cavernous, but the skylights have no curtains; I was woken by an orange glow above me. Thankfully, day begins late in Bombay. By and by, I called Ramu. A maid with no Hindi kept picking up the phone. She instructed me in Marathi that Ramu was in the hospital. I wondered if his father had fallen ill; he was then eighty years old. In the evening, at long last, I spoke to Ramu’s father. He related the sequence to me. I said I’d go to GT Hospital the next day. I didn’t know where GT Hospital was. I was told it was next to Crawford Market. I’d been to Crawford Market as a child, a willing accomplice in my parents’ expeditions to gather alphonso mangoes or track down Bombay Duck, or to go from there in the heat to the alleys of Zaveri Bazaar to browse gold jewellery. In the morning, I found GT Hospital in the midst of this: I hadn’t known. I went into a driveway. I confronted an unostentatious colonial structure. Bombay doesn’t know me, but, also, there’s so much of Bombay I’ve just begun to know. Through the corridors I went to ICU 2; families on a bench outside; a girl in a salwar kameez reading the Bible, the page open at Samuel. He’d come back from the dead, the young doctor – an intern from a small town – told me; it defied reason. I loved the hospital – its resolute calm, its ability to accommodate, even in the bustling main stairways, droves of family members and well-wishers. When he got better, Ramu showed the doctor an interview with me that had appeared the previous day in the Times of India – with a photo of me, squinting in the sunlight on Carter Road. ‘This is very good,’ said the doctor, moving his head in consternation, as if he’d examined something infinitely stranger than a medical report, ‘very good.’ They moved Ramu two days later to the psychiatric ward – compulsory, b
ecause of the overdose. All free of charge. I marvelled at these easy, unimpeded transitions from ward to ward. Every room there had the depth and width inherent in rooms in buildings the British left behind. Most people in the ward were labouring people and workers. When I went to see Ramu, they were all quietly eating lunch. Not Ramu; he was awaiting a tiffin carrier from home. We sat on his bed, talked and, strangest of all, treated the surroundings as normal: strange for us, ordinarily so intolerant. Yet I was astonished, coming face to face with the obvious and unimaginable. Everyone was in a gown that came down to the calves. I stayed for twenty minutes; I had a flight that afternoon. When Ramu stood up, the incongruity of the gown became painfully clear. I ignored it and we never mentioned the hospital clothing. We said bye very easily, too easily, as if, for the first time, we’d weighed the notion of not setting eyes on each other again, that this moment in the ridiculous gown would be the last one we’d share – and dismissed the thought at once.

  DN Road! Some of the buildings are a century old. On the pavement and in the arcade, hawkers. The imitation Longines watches and cheap sunglasses and faux-leather wallets. The purveyors of VHS tapes and audio cassettes have been ousted by cell phone repair shops. On the pavement, far below me, are misshapen figures: a girl on a cycle traversing a wire, one end to another; a green boy doing back flips. Toys. The dark eyes of the kneeling vendor who’s just released the spring and given them jerky life make contact with mine.

  Suddenly, light and noise flood in. I’m at Hutatma Chowk. Flora Fountain is before me. I wait to cross.