Bombay Blues

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Bombay Blues Page 32

by Tanuja Desai Hidier


  And now we were in India, of all places the very one that had first connected us, surrounded by other lovers linking, where a boy had once upon a time met a girl forever, my father shyly greeting my mother’s song with his lips.

  And no kiss to be had.

  Just a girl. Just a boy. Just a beach.

  On another beach, not so long ago, not so far away, awaiting his arrival with bated breath, I’d drawn a line from my heart to his, pointing seaward. Little had I known that, no matter my, his, best intentions, our innocent hopes, any line could become a border, a barrier waiting to happen.

  There was so much to say that there was nothing to say. Full circle.

  The waves broke. The laundry dried. The boy on the mission had vanished, the couples as well.

  As we crossed back through the parking area, a new blue-jeaned child keened with disappointment, prematurely and parentally forced to dismount perhaps the same blindered pony I’d seen here that last time with my father, still being led in lethargic circles around the Marutis, the Tatas, the Hyundais. An Ambassador.

  I sent the missed call.

  Once we’d crossed over into Laxman’s car, Karsh put on his headphones, leaned his head against the window. I slipped my shades off my own head and over my eyes, rested against my own pane, camera in my lap.

  On the ride back, even Laxman was silent.

  Karsh had to head back to Juhu. I couldn’t bear being in the car any longer — could I simply jump out with a Coca-Cola bottle and make a run for it, too? I was struggling to come up with an excuse to exit, when I realized no one was asking me to stay, and Laxman was already dropping me back at Lands End.

  —Well, then, I said to Karsh, awkwardly. —Goodbye, I guess.

  —I guess, he said, and he didn’t look my way.

  I stood by the Centauride entrance, the ever-attentive, yet obliviously smiling staff already opening the door to nod me in. I turned and walked away, back down the slope.

  The image of that little girl blueprinted on a nearby Union Park portal possessed me then.

  Somehow, it seemed, seeing once and for all whether that wee sea maiden was in fact drowning upon door frame might supply a kind of answer for me.

  Often a photograph could serve as an entry point into a place, a space. But it could also freeze a moment, fetter it firmly to the past, ironically allow an amnesia for the total experience by containing it within a single frame.

  Stop motion.

  I decided to photograph her, free myself. From him? Me? In any case, in ten to fifteen minutes, I could be walking the edge, the frame, of Chuim Village. And step out of it — this time keeping my head above water. Both feet on the ground.

  I was in a rick when I felt a slight tremor as my phone caught up to my whereabouts, no longer suspensing over water.

  A missed call from Cowboy.

  I’d leave him missed.

  But, fourteen minutes later, when I approached that door, all thought of that little blue girl vanished. For that door was ajar.

  And he was just stepping out of frame.

  I stood very still, as if that would make him not see me. He saw me.

  Then, as he had at the airport, he took a slightly stumbling step backwards, eyes still fixed on me.

  I took one forward. Carried me over that threshold.

  —I need to forget Unbombay, I told him, a quiet urgency.

  —Amnesia, he said.

  —And I need to remember, I added, —Bombay.

  —Heptanesia.

  And then we were in that room, and I couldn’t remember what I needed to forget, only what I would never forget, and that was the space we were mapping, unmapping, he, we, reminding me.

  Hours later, he explained that name to me. Heptanesia.

  —It’s what the ancient Greeks called the islands that became Bombay. A cluster of seven isles.

  Seven steps to undock bedrock, unkey wedlock; a black horse kala ghoda loping away, no white horse nickering in. Blue roan, blue ruin — a consuming unclaiming oblivion was what that word evoked for me.

  And now, in that afterglowed bungalow, in the aftermath of he plus me: a new low, a slow blue. I knew then it couldn’t go on. I said I had to go, and I meant it both immediately and indefinitely. He said he would drop me off. I said he couldn’t, no. He didn’t ask why, told me he’d take a quick shower, walk me to a rick.

  He left, gathering his shadow with him.

  I lay in its lack. Adrift, a dead man’s float.

  The room was bathed in blue.

  And when I heard the bathroom door click … I photographed it. Lying on my back, Chica Tikka buoyed me, zoomed up to garner into her gaze the trio of white flowers entwined on the mast of this bed, the twilit shafts of azure and ochre of the street outside, viewed through that small grilled porthole.

  The water was running down the hazy hall, surely from that spigot hosed to tiled wall. I slipped into the front room.

  Jalousie here rendered the space dusky, dreamlike. I ran my finger along its sill, dust sinking behind index nail, steeping it slate. No maid, kamwali, came today? I took in the nooks, craning, felt I was searching for clues. Maybe as much to myself as to who this person was.

  No pricey art gallery offerings or five-fixture separate-tub-and-showers or twenty-four-hour front desk — but all the better. A sofa that evoked the hitchka Dadaji used to sit on on the front porch of that first house in Powai, flat cushions tied together with triple bows, chimes hanging off the frame’s underside. A compact collection of instruments in the room’s right-hand corner: a banjo (bandurra?), bongo, and … bong. Oh.

  I plucked a string, the bright sound bell clear.

  Atop the surprisingly small-screen TV, on the right-hand shelves: an unlabeled, uncased cassette. CD: Histoire de Melody Nelson. Piled up beside a thick bound book, a smart dovetail shuffle of sundry business cards, topped with a single Shanker Arora, Cinematographer, address in microscopic print below, also Chuim Village. A neighbor, colleague?

  Tome open to the tale of another Cinématographe: the Lumière brothers birthing cinema in India, a still shot of that train pulling up. A flyer for a blues night at the Blue Frog. Box of safety matches. I turned, nearly tripped over: burgundy throw pillows, thrown. Also, rather recklessly down there: a laptop with a frazzled Arsenal sticker on it. I longed to set it safely on the coffeetea table, but dared not touch.

  Upon that table: notepad struck with doodles — the type you scrawl while feigning attention to someone on the phone. Near-empty bottle of Sula red, candle stuck in it, a slurp of wax southbound to tallowed table. Something sparkled there: a silver hoop earring, viridian baubles strung along it.

  Only one. Earring.

  My stomach clutched; I didn’t want to know. Cowboy had had a life before me; I had, too. He had a life even during me — and I supposed I did as well. And who knew what lay ahead — if we even had a fate line at all?

  I sure as frock didn’t.

  I pressed forth with my visual tour, and promptly felt better sighting, across the room, upper shelves housing many, mostly English language, books — A Tale of Two Cities. Serenade. Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter. An entire series of Blueberry graphic novels. Several volumes on photographic, cinematographic — and cooking! — techniques. DVDs: Persona. Manhattan. Double Vie de Véronique.

  And — c’était possible? Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris.

  I was beginning to wonder if it was art that had truly linked us, bridged us, together. Had we been shooting our way towards each other all along? Straight from the hip? Shot in the dark?

  A long shot no longer: My senior year at Lenne Lenape High, I’d read Plato’s Symposium, where all these philosophers define love. I was most taken with Aristophanes’s view that we were once all eight-limbed, globular beings, later split in half, destined to cartwheel the world in search of our missing hemispheres.

  Was this how you landed up on that half-moon, once in a blue moon?

  Here, a low e
nd table, with what looked like a makeshift shrine upon it, but no Hindu deities to be found. Bust of a goddess, something Athena-esque, a pair of headphones slung around her neck. String of lapis lazuli. A rattle of keys hung off a shoelace. iPod dock. And a framed black-and-white of a saried woman, face down-dipped, hallowed with tenderness, gazing into the near-new-moon mien of an infant snugged in her arms, the tip of its nose just visible, swerving up wavelike from silk.

  I lifted it up for a closer view. Baby Cowboy? Precursor to the screensaver child? She’d let her baby grow up to be … ?

  Well, maybe so’d my mama. I set the photo down, lining it up exactly with the dust-free triangle that had held it.

  How had I never seen any of these things? Had I been so wrapped up in my head, in him?

  I reloaded. I knew the photos might be tricky to explain, but at least there was no one in them; anyway, I didn’t have to share them. Maybe not even with myself.

  The act was the record, the experience its grooves.

  Water stopped.

  I fled back to the bedroom, readying to pack my camera away. But not before I fell to my knees on the edge of the bed. Zoomed to the rippled sheet below me.

  Where the truth lies: Click on a contour map of a half-imagined but all-real place. Face.

  And then I tucked Chica Tikka away and lay on my back, gazing up at that flower-fret sky, learning it by heart just in case.

  (His steps approaching …)

  I figured I wouldn’t ever be back here again, would never step in that eddying river twice. Thrice.

  (… followed by that smile …)

  The next day, I returned to Andheri to the great relief of my aunt and uncle. I couldn’t risk any surprise visitors at the hotel after that whammy of finding Karsh at the door. Plus, Kavita had the key, and she and Sabz could be using it at the drop of a dupatta.

  —Dimple, you’re very quiet, my aunt remarked at dinner.

  —No quieter than us, Sangita said quickly, meeting my eyes with the tiniest nod. —It’s just that kind of day, I suppose.

  —Sorry, Maasi, I replied. —I think the time difference is catching up to me.

  —It takes the same number of days as time zones you travel across to catch up to yourself, Akasha informed me. —So you should be arriving any minute now.

  To catch up to yourself. Like I had in that bungalow — only to wriggle out of my own grasp as soon as I got ahold of me. The one that got away.

  My uncle and Sangita went for a walk afterward, around the gardens of the complex. I excused myself early to sleep. But sleep, as usual, excused itself from me.

  Another missed call from my parents. Then I remembered: It was a day for celebrating, and I called to wish them a happy anniversary.

  They were back at the hotel. Had seen the Taj, at sunrise and sunset, and Baby Taj, too, with a thick-spectacled tour guide sporting a huge red bindi that turned heart-shaped as he furrowed his brow over the course of the day.

  In between oohs and aahs, my mother had apparently advised the grateful guide on how to better his relationship with his daughter-in-law, now a member of their joint family household (do not knock on their door first thing for your tea, and, baapray, let the couple go to bed early once in a while — arranged marriage; they’re still figuring out how it works). My father just then returned from distributing the pain aux raisins purchased from the hotel’s French patisserie to the street kids hawking postcards outside the gates, though they’d partaken not without a sale first: He was obstensibly now bearing a fat booklet of Fatehpur Sikri shots.

  —But tomorrow we will be going there, my mother sighed, I supposed to both of us.

  —For the first time since our honeymoon! my father added from close proximity, chewing on something, possibly a mille-feuille.

  —The famous thread? I ventured. I could already picture them in that shrine, sankalping away in deep concentration. And since I’d currently taken up residence (gazing) in my navel, might as well go all the way: Surely they’d be wishing they hadn’t spawned such a delinquent daughter.

  We love-you’d and clicked off, and I slipped under the sheet, wondering how the hell people stayed together so long.

  A soft breath upon my face, a scuffling beside me. The mattress sunk ever so slightly as a small weight deposited itself upon it.

  I opened my eyes.

  In the half-light, Akasha’s wide wise irises drew into focus now, scrutinizing mine. They were overcast, bluescreened.

  —Wait … don’t blink, she whispered, eyes widening further. —I’ve never seen this before!

  —What? What is it?

  —Wow, Maasi, she exhaled, dropping back onto haunches and resting her hands on her knees. She shook her head, incredulous. —I see zeros. Your eyes are full of zeros!

  Zero. A day for adieus. And so the next, my avast went ahoy. I gave my family the slip, took that last ship, akinship to Chuim Village. Left the banks of sense for the undercurrent. He beckoned, but I reckoned from some depth, I’d called.

  Dip into the possibility …

  Filibusting, but gut trusting; and then it’s all in the now: He reaches for my hand; I forsake dry land, dive on into the squall.

  Jumping ship, a little death.

  I wait for regret; why doesn’t it come?

  Land legs are found, reached for, pulled on.

  And just like that, in a breath, it was done. Out the flying fish door, blue girl drowned, lost to shore.

  The we was gone.

  Nightfell. Daybroke. And later, yet one more last backstroke — and, yes, something had changed. He’d hinted I couldn’t come around here no more. Maybe my hesitation that time, this. The fact I was leaving soon. Or none of these things, it occurred to me, watching his profile in the driver’s seat as we worked our way out through Union Park.

  A seasick quease, sharp tumult in the belly like when you’re just about to slip. Though I’d never been in this situation before, somehow I still knew this feeling.

  Me and Cowboy, we had no proof, only projection. Maybe I’d been projecting this entire love story; maybe he’d been, too. But did it matter — as long as we’d shared the same projector?

  —We can’t go to the hotel, I said, and didn’t say because that room was precisely the shape of Karsh’s absence — and another pair of lovers was perhaps reuniting there even now. He didn’t ask.

  We couldn’t go to that other side where he lived in theory though not always in reality.

  —They need protection, was all he’d said, but somewhere inside, I’d already known there was someone at home for him, a someone or ones who meant enough that he didn’t, couldn’t, create that kind of superfluous pain.

  Passing the scores of little shops and stalls, the tree-shade sleeper, the small boy swerving out of the way in the nick of time …

  —And me? I’d asked, feeling petty and unevolved even as I did.

  —You don’t need protection, he smiled, steering back around the rushing child. Going where, this little creature? Why so fast? —And thank god for that.

  I contemplated this, unable to identify how it made me feel. A just-detectable lift.

  —And the bungalow … ? I asked.

  —Shanker flies back tonight.

  —Shanker?

  —It’s his place. I just have the keys — given my situation.

  The name from that business card on the dusky shelf floated up into my mind. So that wasn’t Cowboy’s boat, the hull and hold we’d rocked so many hours in Chuim Village — but the cinematographer’s place? All the connections I’d felt photographing those scattered objects of desire — the thin-skinned bandurra, a broken-consort pandora, album spines, book binds, undrunk wine … not him?

  Was that my (if you’re reading this right now) fucking soul mate? Shanker Arora?

  —I think we’ll always meet in unconventional spaces, Cowboy was saying now. Was a bungalow unconventional? A glimmer of coastline at road’s end, an illusory horizon.

  —I’
ve got my life, you’ve got yours, he continued, as if talking to himself. —And this … this has been a gift, an extra — something that should propel us forward in those lives. You’ve got a lot of things to do; I want you to do them. And same goes for me. We’re both at a beginning….

  What the frock? I bit back the question of whether we’d meet again. It felt against the rules we’d laid out that first day after the Star Chamber, and I’d be damned if I’d ask something so cliché.

  —Will we meet again? I blurted immediately, damned.

  Nearly past the strew of shops, a backwards ride, inevitable rewind.

  —As Coelho says, if the desire is there, truly there, the universe conspires with you to realize it, he said slowly. —Because it’s what you put out there to begin with — in the blueprint you wrote in the sky when you chose to come to earth. But it is you, in this human avatar you’ve willed yourself into, who must think it. Ink it.

  Right. I’d note that on my calendar.

  —So I’ll take that as a definite maybe, I said. His phone rang. He didn’t answer it, but that screensaver, that little boy. The irrational thought it was the same child whose life he’d just spared, rushing away down that road.

  Catching up to himself?

  He glanced at the message, set the cell down. It could have been him, such was the resemblance; I’d thought it was.

  —I’m in a complicated situation. Thank you for taking me out of it for a little while.

  —I am, too, I said, not adding: Now.

  —I’m happy to be with you, he said. —But I’ll be happy also when I’m not.

  —You’re one happy guy, I said glumly.

  —That’s not what I meant. I’ll be happy about us. I’ll always be happy there’s an us.

  Out of habit — how quickly they form! — I reached over to take his free, nonsteering hand. A rush of sad gratitude, a feeble attempt to hold on to something.

  —Sorry, he said, removing it gently and glancing at me briefly, sidelong. —I need it to shift.

  And that hand moved to the gears; mine, to my lap.

 

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