Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  He laughed, nodding.

  —And sometimes, once you name it, I went on, —you’re stuck. It can be tricky feeling free when you’re pegged down by all these coordinates.

  I didn’t know where all this was coming from, but here it was … and it felt like a revelation to be uttering it. Especially to such rapt, wide-brimmed attention.

  —You’re a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, a slacker, I said. —You’re your job, your project, your major. Immature for your age, too old for your years … You know, it’s so wonderful being anonymous today.

  —I’ve been having that kind of day, that kind of stay, as well, Cowboy replied. —It’s not a desire that’s easy to explain to —

  —… those who know your name, address, e-mail. Three-digit security code. Your parents, your family, your friends.

  For some reason, I didn’t say boyfriend.

  —Does anyone know you’re here right now? he asked me now.

  —Like, existentially speaking, or meaning at the train station?

  —Same thing, we both said. We both laughed then. It felt good to laugh.

  When was the last time Karsh and I had laughed?

  —No, I replied. —I guess not. I mean, even I didn’t know I’d be here.

  I didn’t mention my parents would be very nervous indeed about my proximity to the sites of any kind of attacks, however long ago; it didn’t seem very Indie Girl. And nobody could know I’d braved a Bombay train. Especially Karsh.

  —And it feels?

  —Kind of cool, I admitted. He nodded, kicked a pebble from a Birk, tilted his hat.

  —I got an idea, he said. —How long are you here?

  —Not long.

  —Okay. For not long. If you’re looking for a new way to see yourself, to redefine your place … maybe you have to —

  —Change the address?

  —Exactly. Let’s make a deal, Indie Girl.

  I could feel where he was headed, and it was thrilling.

  —Yeah. Let’s.

  Freeing …

  —You’re Indie Girl.

  —You’re Cowboy.

  —We don’t worry about who we are, what our names are, what they call us —

  —Where we’re from, where we’re going —

  —What we’re doing next —

  —What we did before —

  —Unaccountable —

  —I’m not counting —

  —Accountable to no one —

  —Even ourselves.

  He offered his hand. —For the next however many not-long days, you and me, we live in the now —

  I stuck my own out and shook his. —The out of frame.

  A warm grip, a stronghold. He hesitated.

  —Listen. I guess I don’t know where I’m off to in the big picture anymore … and I’m kind of in between places at the moment … but I was going to jump in a cab to Cuffe Parade now. Part of my running into those rooms project.

  He stepped off the curb to hail one now, but his eyes were on me.

  —Not to break the rule already, but a technical question, he said then. —Were you on your way somewhere?

  And I don’t know why, but I only wanted to be on my way to where he was going. And what could happen in a licensed taxicab anyway?

  I pulled my ticket out of my pocket, tore it in half — in two. I handed him one.

  Fast train, slow; 9-car, 12. We’d gone further without them.

  I told him, —You know. I dropped the map.

  He opened the door of the taxi, gesturing me in. Once seated, he looked me steady in the eyes.

  —I’m so glad you did, he said.

  While Cowboy instructed the driver, I turned back windowward … and was bowled over. I’d been so busy exploring the inside of the terminus, I’d forgotten it had an outside at all.

  In one lingering glance, this:

  The entire incredible edifice was bathed in a rosy, nearly brick-and-cobble Tribeca light, a Pink City glow from the settling day. It appeared an arched and angled, friezed and reliefed, boisterously balustraded birthday cake bursting forth from all its sandstoned, limestoned, marble-wood-brass-iron facades with elegant last-minute restraint. Wishing-candle-lit from within, the station called to mind Jaipur palaces, the Gothic and even Gotham, a meld of influences, human and even animal. Stone emboldened the walls, gargoyled, monkeyed, rammed, elephantined, owled, chameleoned — an inquisitive jungle marveling down at the manic migratory human zoo below.

  Out of frame. I could barely take the whole thing in.

  The entrance gate we’d exited from was crowned by a lion. Tiger. Peacock … windows: Oh my.

  Had I died and dropped to heaven?

  Humans were amazing. They could make things! I wanted to make things. Beautiful things.

  I wanted.

  It was only with this side, then backwards, glance, well after we’d stepped into this taxi now slooping south along Dadabhai Naoroji Road, that I realized: By my internal women’s compartment arrival here, I’d bypassed the outside entirely, gone straight to the heart — maybe for the first time in my life.

  Like Cowboy and I’d just done.

  I turned back to him, to the here.

  —I can’t believe we met again, I said.

  He smiled. —After eight hundred years. Believe it.

  We got out at Cuffe Parade. The day was on a downglow, and something in us had gone quiet as well.

  I wondered how it would feel to see the very unsuspecting shore where those young men had rowed up, oars gouging a near-silent rift through waves that would stretch, staggering and shuddering through the city for that eternal hellish night.

  I tried to remember where I was when it happened. Had I seen it first on the news, online? A roaring image of the Taj in flames, half dragon, half stone. The thought: not possible, not again, not there. But, tragically: possible, here, again. That deep hole that had sundered me as a smaller girl — when the double towers of my own city had crashed volcanically down …

  I braced myself to feel it all over again as we exited the taxi.

  And here we were, stepping off into that very space.

  The world was surprisingly muted here, just off the main road. Dusky hulks of beached fishing boats rose up before us, cuttering the view of the sea behind into slight moon-tipped swerves.

  —This way, Cowboy gestured, or said, I wasn’t sure. I followed him around the prow of a sand-dug dinghy, and we began to wind through the little fishing village.

  All was hazy with grain and rust, warping wood, and the shadowy skin of the Koli fisherfolk who wove in near silence through this shipped maze. It felt, as it often did from my plastic, price-tagged American perspective, that we’d stumbled upon a ghost town of sorts — though dredged up still evoking a sense of being under, currenting us gently in. Cowboy took out a lighter, thought better of it, then gestured for me to hand him my cell phone; I did, and he lit the way with it. We wound down a silty passage, prowed and sterned with the sides of sea vessels, a city built of boated walls and twists of tarp sky. Underwater sensation again, till suddenly round a curve, this amidships artery tillered out onto a scant stretch of beach.

  From the way Cowboy stopped and stared at the water, I knew it was here. Exactly here.

  Submerged scatterings of Koli conversation filtered through the air. A smattering of rocks pitched seaward. Upon these humps, here and there, fishermen sat. We sloped farther down the beach. Scrolls of nets tumbled on the sand to our side, straining with what looked like heavily luminous stones. Off to the right, the coast curved away, the lights of Nariman Point flicking like star shards in the distance.

  And before us: the sea. That sea.

  Rock the boats. All those little lights and buoys …

  I wondered what the fisherman just behind us — a ghostly Dadaji gazing towards that ever-elusive horizon — was thinking. Or maybe less thinking, more feeling. The sea must never leave his limbs, I imagined, like a surfer could likely discern
the roaring tug of reckless water, even on dry land.

  Earthed mermen and mermaids. I wondered if they dreamed seascapes, lungs still salt-blown, sleeping eyes flooded with water, flecked with silver scales, a dream that rocked slowly as it unreeled.

  Then again, maybe there were more practical concerns that animated their night visions than that. Money owed and borrowed, sick kids, dowries. Arguments, to-do lists.

  But still. To have found your sea self — in one of the most congested, peopled, urban centers of the world. Even I felt a kind of liquidizing in my own limbs; floaters — we all started that way, but it was pretty boggling to be only a couple minutes off an auto-buzzing Bombay street and to feel so cradled by water.

  Completely contrary to my expectations, standing here at Cuffe Parade, I felt no fear, no black hole in my gut, no doom-mongering sense of the sunk state of humanity.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught Cowboy’s slouchy but rapt ocean gaze, hands hanging loose at his sides.

  It hadn’t occurred to either of us to take a photograph here; it didn’t feel right, to the point I hadn’t thought of it at all. It felt funny to see us both cameraless — almost as if we were naked. Good naked.

  My own gaze lost its askancity entirely and I just took him in. He was mostly shadow, but I detected a reverence in even his relaxed stance. My usual hunger to run and throw my arms around this world (begging forgiveness on some level) was replaced with a softer desire for a more subtle embrace: to sit beside a sleeping child — but not hearken too close lest you wake her.

  A gentle nod streetward: Chalo?

  I nodded back. Let us go then, you and I.

  As we turned, I reached towards one of the great glowing nets, wondering why someone had gone to such lengths to hook-line-sinker a bushel of stones. But when I touched it, the net gave easily, the rocks fell about like air.

  —Thermocol, said Cowboy quietly.

  —Huh? I said, and translated Hindi English with apparent fluency. —Styrofoam?

  I had to laugh. Nothing was as it seemed, was what you expected it to be here.

  —Thank you, Indie Girl, Cowboy said when we were back in a cab again, heading my way and his way, which for part of the path, he claimed, would be the same.

  —No. Thank you, I replied. —For sharing that with me. It couldn’t have been easy.

  —Are you kidding? It couldn’t have been easier.

  The experience, this day, was written all over my body: My thighs stuck together with sea air. A window gust flung a torrent of hair into my eyes. I could feel my curls had sprung back, knotting like netting themselves; this was going to take more than a hotel-size-bottle of conditioner to undo.

  Cowboy gently pushed the springy strands from my eyes. From the scalp, fingers pulling briefly along my roots. I shivered.

  —It’s pretty crazy, I said, meaning the hair.

  —Now, that’s the Indie Girl I remember, he replied, meaning the hair.

  Our eyes locked. Neither of us meant the hair.

  I turned abruptly, focused gaze through pane. We approached the Sea Link, its inverted-Y bones luminously uprearing a ghostly white mast skyward, multilaned traffic deck curving towards Bandra. My pane tautened with those cables, angling us into an open-air dream.

  Cowboy left me my space. But this time, the silence was awkward.

  Seahorse to Centauride: The taxi pulled up to Bandstand, to Lands End; a towering edifice. I was a little sad when it did. I thanked him and the driver.

  I was about to exit when Cowboy suddenly lay his hand on my arm, nodding his head in the direction whence we’d come.

  —Remember, he said. —I’m just on the other side.

  I wondered why he hadn’t pointed out his hood when we were in it.

  —I’ll wave to you, then, I said, trying on a clumsily cheery grin. —Look for me.

  —I have been, he said, so quietly I almost thought I’d misheard him. He lifted his hand from my arm; it stuck a moment to my skin.

  —Salt, we said, a unified whisper.

  Salt print. I felt strangely halved without his touch … though more whole having had it.

  —Well, thanks again for the ride, I said, door shut, speaking through the cracked window. —So … so long, I guess.

  He shook his head, still smiling.

  —We’ll meet again, he said.

  Before I could ask where, when, he was gone, I was gone.

  I lay down to sleep. Or, tried to. Hours later, eyes still peeled, alone in the more-than-queen, less-than-king new hotel bed, I realized I’d been unconsciously running the salt test, touching my skin off and on, a delicious but agonizing ache suffusing me after this intensely long, wide, deep day out.

  A trembling in my pocket.

  Nine missed calls from Karsh.

  And I hadn’t missed them.

  With a mite of misgiving, I showered off my day — all signs of salt, of sea. Then lay back down on the bed … and succumbed to insomnia.

  She was my most ardent follower, my loyalest companion, and now led me to a state that felt weirdly akin to euphoria — like when gut’s hollow but the hunger moves to your heart, decapitatingly levitating your head in the process.

  But I was me, of course, so a moment later, this feeling seamlessly dipped into an unmeandering melancholy, capsized me in the deepest blue. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation unless I named it, boxed it up, and judged it. So I named it, boxed it. Judged it.

  Time ticked on. I tried breathing Om, which made me miss my family, then Now I wanna be your dog, which made me miss New York. Thus I found myself chanting Grant Road. But the latter resulted in my inner focal point being a pair of sea-haze eyes, which I then struggled to oust from mind’s gaze, to replace with another pair of honeyed ones.

  This unmeditative tug-of-war was highly unrelaxing.

  I tried focusing on my breath. Unfortunately, instead of having a soothing effect, this freaked me out — sounded like the creepy in-ex-halations of another person lying in wait inside my own body.

  Click of a key swipe. I dropped decoy lids over my wide eyes, registered Karsh’s quiet return to the room. He showered … and this time crawled into bed beside me. Had he been back to the ashram? Out with the DJs? Both? Tonight, I found, with my own secret excursion securely spiraling its way into my mystifying DNA, I wasn’t really so interested in the answer.

  I used to love to watch him sleeping. Dusky mornings at NYU, roommates out of town (or in someone else’s bed), as the light fell stripingly from the venetians and he lay there lambent, we lay there entangled, our limbs and scents and breaths indiscernible. Me gazing at him; he’d open his eyes, fill mine with his smile. The opposite, too; me waking to his face, cheek propped in hand propped on elbow, just watching me, enveloping me in the love that great pop songs were made of. Major chords: heart-swelling chorus. True rhyming with blue and you in the most poetic of manners.

  And now?

  Lying here alone moments before hadn’t felt that different from when he was here beside me.

  So when the hour came, he still in the depths of rapid eye movement, I slipped out from under the sheets, got changed, and headed down to breakfast.

  When I returned to the room, Karsh was up and at ’em, head still wet from the multiple-jet-spray showerheads. He glanced up when I walked in.

  —Where were you, Dimple? he asked. It wasn’t an accusation, which made me feel guilty.

  —At breakfast?

  —No. I mean yesterday, and last night. I tried you six times.

  Nine. Probably best not correct him.

  —Oh, sorry, I didn’t see…. Signals go down around the Sea Link?

  He turned to the window, taking in a bit of that bridge now, as if it might nod in confirmation.

  —I figured it was high time to get on with my photography, I added truthfully. Then, partially (unpluraled person) truthfully, —So I took a ride around South Bombay …

  He drew the room-length curtain wider. K
ingfishers, kites swooped in tilting halos, just missing the glazing as inch by inch the paned wall turned all Link, and that distorted echo of seaface across the bay. I looked away.

  —Great. Show me? Your pics?

  When was the last time he’d asked me that?

  —Um, they’re all on film. Not digital. Anyway, sorry I missed your calls, I repeated. —What was up?

  —I just called … he began, and then suddenly turned back towards the bridge. I busied myself with picking at my cuticles, which I was pretty sure had evolved precisely for moments like these. His Linkward gaze made me feel he knew … something. But then he sat on the wide inner sill and faced me. —I wanted to apologize. I’ve been really … touchy. Out of sorts. Not myself lately. It’s like I’ve been on drugs or something.

  —You kind of have been, I pointed out. I sat down beside him but a slight distance away. It happened too naturally.

  I dared peek through that window now: a stunned silver sky, slowly steeping in lightning sun. Stories below, the Sea Link eased widely awake, swarming with traffic, hoisting its cabled sail into the winging day, and Karsh spoke as it did.

  —I’ve just had a lot on my mind. I guess I didn’t realize how much baggage I’ve been carrying around about India, about my dad. I just need another chance….

  Was he asking me for one? I softened at this plea.

  —And Ravi’s going to meet with me later today — maybe give me that chance. Seems those French dubsteppers dropped out. Some kind of visa issue, so there may be an opening coming up at this really happening place in those renovated mills.

  —Oh.

  —And, he added, —I convinced him to give you another chance as well. So if you want to come down with me to have a look, shoot the venue, you’re more than welcome.

  A little out of fear, truth be told, I wanted to see if a chance was all it took. But I couldn’t forget my vow: to my work, this city. Myself.