Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  One stall over: wooden crosses, painted angels in soaring postures, bars strung with rosaries of every color.

  —It’s funny, but I’d be a little sad if he were to get engaged again too quickly, Sangita said softly. —For him — and even for me.

  —Sangita. Do you actually like like Deepak?

  —I do like Deepak. And like matters a lot — it’s a little less conditional than love can be, na? We’ve been through so much together, undoing this wedding, isn’t it?

  She smiled mischievously now. —Plus, he’s got certain … skills.

  —Such as?

  —Dimple! Read between the sheets!

  I gasped.

  —Sangita! What the frock? You’ve been tessellating your—

  —Yes, fiancé. How scandalous!

  —Where?

  —During our wedding errands, sometimes, she giggled. —When his folks are in Delhi. Sometimes … even at the studio at J.J. And, by the way: Thanks again for the last five-star luxury shag.

  She looked at me slyly. —Sorry, Dimple. Also, I nicked a couple of your condoms. Been meaning to tell you. I’d run out and no way I could be seen around Shoppers Stop or my paint supplies haunts — or anywhere! — scoring those.

  This was perhaps the biggest whammy of all.

  —You did what? When?

  —Just maybe … two? That first day.

  So Karsh hadn’t taken them? They’d been missing since before he’d even arrived. It was true: You see what’s in your head.

  —Deepak’s got a case of blue balls at the moment — literally! she went on. —And … figuratively! Serves him right for getting down with a blue girl.

  I grinned.

  —Frock, Sangita! You like him. You lust him. So why not marry him?

  She paused telepathically now so I could photograph the view through the entry gates, the basilica exuding a dusky hue in this bluest hour.

  —If he can’t stand up for what he wants to do now, it’s not a good start, she said finally. —But I have faith he’ll figure it out in his own time. Anyway, all that pent-up angst sure makes him … energetic, let’s just say.

  —So you haven’t broken up?

  —Considering we were never technically going out — just engaged — I don’t think there’s any way of really breaking up. Just breaking off the engagement. Which we did between the two of us pretty soon after you got here.

  —Frock. That man can keep a secret.

  —And so can I, she said gently, gazing into my eyes. I got the feeling she didn’t mean her own, but who knew what else the evidently innately suspicious perspective from inside my own head was skewing?

  In any case, I didn’t say anything.

  She didn’t ask.

  —And so can she, murmured Sangita. And through the gate, ever closer to Mary, we stepped.

  Outside, before the bright blued portal: Nikes, chappals, sandals, Crocs. We added our own to the mass — stepping past a buttress erected by a Mr. Fernandes and family from … Chuim Village — and entered.

  —Between you and me, Sangita confided now, —I think Mummy was afraid of what might be happening … but was more afraid your mother wouldn’t come if she knew. But I’ll make up the flight tickets to all of you one day, promise.

  —Are you kidding? I don’t regret coming here. I doubt my parents do either. We were all just looking for an excuse — though now I wonder why we needed an excuse to come home.

  But I knew the answer. The fear of not finding it where it was supposed to be. That despite a journey of miles after miles, years upon years, it would have inched just out of reach yet again when we got here.

  It was the time, not the place, my mother had once sighed to me, that they were seeking.

  The anxiety at discovering: Home is not a place.

  Stone and wood, teak and glass. A nave into which panes over the four side entrances poured light like slaking water. Breathtaking windows: a central flower composed of eight circling blooms in alternating gold and blue, glass peacocking to the sides.

  Our eyes ascended a seven-stepped marble altar to land upon a halo-up radiating Mary with gildingly giddy toddler Jesus. I tipped my head back; this view of the ceiling sanctuary arches was astonishingly like that supine one of the Star Chamber.

  Another mural’d Mary, appearing very high-melanin to my NR eyes. Peeking out from below her gold-trim robe, brown chappaled feet tread gingerly across the caption Joseph discovers Mary’s pregnancy. Below that, a much longer Devanagari script I imagined said the same thing … but one could never be too sure one was saying the same thing. Na?

  —She looks Indian, I whispered. —Or at least, Anglo-Indian. Parsi?

  A row ahead of us a woman knelt, head wrapped in a sari powdered blue, bleeding orange.

  —I never thought of it before. But you’re right.

  —Even baby Jesus looks Indian, or at least of multicultural diasporic origin. Like, Latino.

  —Well, everyone comes to Mount Mary, Sangita hush-toned back. —Every religion, even those without. In fact, this church also has darshan, almost every day.

  She nodded upwards. Above the marble pulpit, on a stone arch splitting nave from sanctuary, an oceanic canvas of orbed Mary and Jesus, sea of saints surrounding them:

  ALL GENERATIONS SHALL CALL ME BLESSED.

  We sat in silence then. Something about the church looked inside out, like it had widened its cathedral belly, quaffed a loch of rain, a dose of dust, a mellowed wield of light, wood, wind, a paned stained-glass garden rainbowing up from this heady masala.

  The confession booth, I saw now, was totally exposed. In fact, no booth, to speak of (or in), curtainless; just a wooden barrier with latticed window.

  An open-air secret.

  Sangita’s eyes were on the sanctum sanctorum before us.

  —She’s beautiful, I said now.

  —She is, Sangita replied. —But she’s not the one I meant.

  Outside, we shod up. And I noticed then the sign just above the teeming footgear:

  ENTER WITH YOUR FOOTWEAR ON. DON’T LEAVE YOUR FOOTWEAR AT THE ENTRANCE.

  All I did, anyone did here, it seemed, was break the rules. And break them long enough, a new (dis)order’s in place.

  Across the wide way Sangita led me, past the Road Cross center street, the nave’s baby here incarnated in an older petal-strung thread-spun cross-hung Jesus slung off peeling painted wood. We continued past farther flying Christs, nosegiggling garlands, to yet more steps mounting still higher upon hillock, blue-titled with ascending-descending words: prayer penance meditation. Peace, rosary, reparation. Sacrifice.

  At their apex, an open-air chapel. Exposure, no enclosure: Our Lady of Fatima. Shoeless clusters gathered before this mistily celestial blue marie, a dreaming beauty in vertical glass box. Flaming wicks burned directly onto coals in lieu of candles. The fence before her supporting block was strung with blooms and missives, rosaries and rudrakshas, diminutive images of Jesus — and even Hindu gods. Chica Tikka snapped: the bared soles of this praying public caught in a private moment, blossoms crushed below toes, some pedicured, one hangnailed, sari ends skimming the ground, skinny jeans just missing it. The wicks unspurled smoke signals to the cirrus.

  —During my more challenging moments, I’d just park here at night, and look up to the chapel, emptying my mind, Sangita told me.

  She pointed. This way: Mahim Creek. That way: Sharukh Khan’s house.

  But I knew another set of landmarks, other places, other stories that had unfolded — were unfolding — not so far from where we were now. And at last, here on Mary Hill, by the doubled sky of these double blue-girl goddesses, I felt I’d finally found the place for a full confession. It was also a prayer, and a thank-you, and a wish you were here, and a wish I am, too.

  O sisters who art in Bandra, understand me, whether I sink or swim:

  I wasn’t sorry. Until eternity, I would do it all again.

  Back at Bandstand, Flip texted me the maid had
arrived late and he was still on a Skype call, so I should catch up with him at his place a little later. Sangita was hailing a rick from the brood swarming the foot of the hilled drive leading up to the hotel.

  —Andheri bound? I asked her. —I have a meeting tonight in Bandra and have to pick up Flip in Khar West in an hour.

  But my sister-cousin wasn’t done with the tone tour quite yet.

  —No issues. I can drop you near your meeting after, she told me as we got into a tuk-tuk. —But if you’ve got an hour — you did say you wanted to see my portfolio, na?

  —Did you bring it? I asked her, confused. She just smiled at me.

  —It’s on the way. Waroda Road, she told the driver, which I guessed was where her studio was. —Chappal Road. Amitabh Bachchan landmark.

  Chappal Road was in fact Chapel Road, and was not a street lined with toe-hook-sandal sellers by Linking Road as I’d originally thought. Nor, when we quit rick and walked a little ways, was Amitabh Bachchan pacing the street waiting, live bait, for our arrival.

  He was, however, glowering down at us off a time-traveling wall, his younger and several-times-more-gigantesque self starbursting forth from a pinwheel of teal and saffron rays, thumbs hooked through belt loops of rugged blue jeans.

  A worn-around-the-edges, old-time Bollywood poster? But no: The Man himself was painted directly onto the wall. Sangita, leaning now against his King Kong groin, appeared a lewd Lilliputian as I gathered the pair in frame.

  —An artist named Ranjit painted this, she told me. —His work’s a great bridge in bringing awareness of street art to the masses, especially those who find graffiti less palatable.

  That made sense. After all, classic Bollywood icons spoke to the older generation as well as the young.

  —Tour of the neighborhood as we go? she suggested. Out of film, I swapped to my digital. She nodded at it. —I think she’ll like it, too.

  Who were we to resist?

  Sangita led me through the twisty tangling village lane. It soon became clear, as the street itself transformed into kaleidoscopic canvas, that we weren’t going to any studio. This tour was to photograph the gaga glorious stretches splashed upon the walls and doorways, from the shutters to the gutters, of this art chapel road.

  A wallow of dwelling veneered with a blue-robed girl, back to us, a matching heart-shaped balloon sweeping off into the distance, turning wall to window with its fluttering impression of depth. Rainbow-striped shuttergate rolled down to street edge, peace sign pigmented upon it. Just beyond: a chubby bumblebee, bubble-beaming Make someone smile.

  Upper half of next low building: a faded sepia. But lower half: green as neon just-hatched primordial slime. Before the house: a Kinetic Honda, dollhouse-size crosses with teeny Jes-i. Sangita hovered, pointing to a paint splosh on an unpotholed patch of pavement here — which turned out to be, upon closer lens look, a series of funny funky little fish with swooping butterfly-blue wings. They were stupefyingly near-real, however miniature, as if freshly flung from a fisherwoman’s basket. A couple of the sleek sea creatures even appeared to be gasping for breath.

  —Rawas, Sangita informed me. —The Indian salmon.

  —Awe-salmon, I replied, unable to help myself. —The English raw-awesome.

  The uneven gritgrime of the surroundings made it appear these paintings had been unearthed, that the true story lay beneath the surface — yet this was a time-torsioning archaeology, a something old excavating a something new.

  Sangita paused by another dribble, all the way downwall to pool at the bottom, where carefully crafted merpeople congregated, winged as those other fish, slipping right onto pavement, one even bending where the wall caught it. No serendipitous spill, this. Nothing was an accident, a mistake, when examined closely.

  —The smooth patches are best for miniatures, and the bylanes if you’re working by day. They’re narrow, stay shaded longer so you don’t dehydrate as fast.

  I dropped to a squat to snap the mermaids’ peregrination.

  —Pouring off the wall onto the road like that, I breathed. —Like a bridge between the real and unreal …

  —As mermaids always are.

  Next vision: Fatma Villa. Triple Optics. A wall visaged with a stunned sweat-beaded bespectacled man caught in fiery concentric rings — a spec over a literal third eye in bindi position, this one looking the other way.

  —Poch Rock, I believe. They’re from France.

  Bulging kidlike letters spelling out BAN/DRA, split into dual balloon syllables on grey wall. Another fish, very different from the mini winged ones we’d seen: big, bold, multihued, and toothy, skimming the painted pink-swathed head of an enormous-eyed girl who resembled the child face in profile on Mount Mary’s steps.

  —Seth’s work, Sangita told me as I focused. —He paints the world over with characters who look like the native people. He’s from France as well. Miss Van, too. How I long to go there one day — it’s my dream!

  —Me, too! I said. —Cartier-Bresson. Sophie Calle. Rimbaud, Baudelaire …

  —Paris Spleen, she roosed. —You know, everyone hoped, believed mine were wedding dreams. But me, I’m dreaming different reds, blues, hues. I want to go to Amsterdam, see the streets there. ROA’s horses in the UK. And Blu’s work — around Bethlehem, an image tearing down the watchtower, the border. Ride Swoon’s Swimming Cities wherever the tide takes us …

  Here: a faceless cop. There: a sunglassed dude with smoke-spurl hair and a squiggle of a figure, like ink had merely dripped in a bodily direction. —And Os Gemeos, these break-dancing twins from Brazil. They were even invited to paint the trains! They did this spot near the Police Gymkhana on Marine Drive, but it was whited out.

  By a chana and puri shop, a squatting sulkish fair-skinned kid multiple times bigger than we passersby. And just around a bend, hovering at eye level, zoom-viewable: a halo of interlinked mermaids. I gestured Sangita over.

  Street art, the art of the street; borders blurred. It was as if we’d stepped into the painting itself, the world a canvas, we like wee brushes tagging out our way: cartoonish pineapples rolling off an open cart. A juice center strung with triple lime garlands. Walls, windows began to disappear, the art upon them overriding them, as if in some kind of bristling hallucination, all these graphically splendid creatures were wandering along with us. Our little dance had shifted along the way, fin-seeking, wing-fishing. Another cluster of turquoise salt swimmers. These were fast becoming my favorites, like the spilt clues on a treasure hunt — to what, I wasn’t sure. Did they lead to the sea?

  —We’ve got Ranjit, who freestyles; Tyler, who stencils. Guru from Hyderabad. All superb, Sangita told me. —But here’s my favorite Bombay street artist —

  We stood now, past a little iron-pressing stall, before a black-and-white spiral-splash of tubes helixing the wall before us.

  —JAS. She also did the Horn Not OK Please by the Bagel Shop; ten-hour job minimum. Enamel. This one looks like it must’ve taken at least eight to ten hours. Latex, quick dry.

  Sangita nodded at the helix. —The longest journey is the journey inward.

  I guessed this was the title. But it was our story as well. We moved in unison now, without a word or glance pausing as we fell upon these brave new whirls of mergirls. Scattered across walls and window panels, the catch uncaught: fish after flying fish, some star studded as constellations, others invoked in the saris of wee Koli women. So real as to be ethereal, rising off the hard stretches of street, the surrounding sketched ships and fisherfolk slashes and swirls of rainbow abstraction. As if the fish-eye view were the real — all else a Piscean dream.

  Just out of frame, Sangita was examining the ragged edge of one of these mercreatures, expertly teasing it smooth with her fingernail.

  This treasure hunt led … to this treasure hunt. This was no roundabout route to Sangita’s studio, her portfolio. For we were walking within her without studio, immersed in, even part of, her portfolio.

  —We began that way, didn’t
we? I said now, wondering why she hadn’t just said it. —Gilled, underwater. Learning to breathe.

  —Sometimes remembering to breathe out of water’s the challenge, Sangita laughed softly. She rose up again, prying the bits of paint out from under her refining finger. —You know, in French, t’as le spleen means to have the blues….

  Bombay Spleen; Bombay blues. But spleen also meant guts. Maybe guts like your insides — the way all of Bombay seemed spleen-skinningly turned inside out, so much life laid out before you, and death, too. But perhaps as well guts as in: courage.

  —The blues. But that’s not the same as sadness, na? I replied, considering it. —Melancholy has a beauty, an energy to it. It’s not enervating, not static.

  —Yes. There’s movement. Depth. And that’s what I love about street art. It’s the weather, the hour; constantly changing, interacting with the passersby, the passerviewers, the neighborhood … transforming as it disintegrates. Like all of us, fading, altering with time. And inviting everyone in — democratic as cloud spotting. It’s a dialogue with the city we live in. A collaboration.

  We looked at each other, and what we knew was clear. Not a confession so much as a declaration.

  —Before I accepted the scholarship, Sangita said, —I thought: Well, even if I can’t go to school, no one can stop me from painting. This — street art — was my statement, I suppose. But once I made it, I realized no one could stop me from going to art school, either. It gave me strength to have a secret — albeit a rather public one.

  I could understand that, though my secret wasn’t quite so audience-friendly.

  —I feel so out of touch with this city I live in, in so many ways. And marriage right now feels like something that would just take me farther away — and not only in terms of the move.

  —Maybe you just wanted to touch it, I said. I could understand that, too. —This place. Bombay.

  —Yes. Actually touch it. I know it’s a small thing, in a small way. But I guess I was looking for a way in … by getting out into it.

  —How’d you even know where to begin? I asked her.