Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  So many tales. On the NGMA sidewalk, just past the charcoal portrait artist, his sketches of Ash stuck up to the wall behind him, implying the Bollywood star sat and posed for him numerous times on this very patch … Listen: the slivered whisper of names writ on a single grain of rice by the man with the handlebar mustache just beyond. Here, the rice writer — turning literal the saying that every grain you intake has your name upon it. With magnifying glass and thin-tipped brushes, he appellates the basmati, enclosing each one in a tiny hyperbolizing water-filled capsule to render it legible. Zoom on the sheet of paper by his tools: a list of names, many paired, painstakingly spelled out so he makes no mistake. On that ink-swirled sheet, I hear a love song, Karsh — not ours, but theirs … though perhaps all love songs are still ours, even if we’re not in love anymore.

  Are we?

  I can even hear what I won’t see. That little ways down the road day, as you accompany your own eyes, follow your own nose: near Fountain Akbar Ally, Saint Thomas Cathedral, a thick sweet scent of bread just baked kneading your stomach-rumbling path thataway. Flip’s favorite bakery, once a wartime Japanese bank, walls flexed with vintage pictures of Parsi bodybuilders …

  —Imagine, Dimple — me eating so much in Bombay! Each bite of butter-limned brun maska a panacea, each sip of sweet lime juice elixoreal, of Irani milk tea, ambrosiac. Thus baked Zarathrustra by day; rafters reverberating with dreaming bakers by night: a Parsi café begun by a father in 1951, run by three brothers and a son …

  And, today, frequented by two new friends, breaking bread as one. And that evening, that midnight, you’re with this friend, our friend, on your wary to Dharavi.

  —First rick since our night, Dimple. After you go back. Back to our other city.

  Your feet padding down dusty paths, a scent of something burning …

  —… to an upper-floor kitchen converted to a cramped rehearsal, recording space … and here’s what I know your eyes would fall upon first: that South Indian newspaper upon which their laptop sits, faucet dripping into nowhere, a perilous inch away.

  Yes, Karsh. And in that space: one mic stand, three boys, baseball capped, wide-midnight-eyed, rapping in Tamil, Hindi, English about their block, this hood. Is this electronica?

  —Excuse me, Dimple, but it’s actually an electro-experimental-dubstep-hip-hop crew. Dimple, are you laughing?

  Yes. That’s so like you! Like us. A relief.

  —Dimple, I’ll think of you on the walk out when I see, wedged between two slum homes, and atop a mountainous rubbish pile, a dog of scrawn and scruff scrooning a silhouetted serenade to that crescent moon….

  I’ll see that same moon, Karsh. From a Manhattan street. And I also know you’ll wander around Kala Ghoda, near Dhobi Talao Market, slip into Furtados — selling wares part religious, part musical.

  —Same thing.

  You’re tuning a guitar?

  —From a rack of electric Gibsons tippling on each other in holy spirit camaraderie, and — a mere shelf above — flocks of angels, beseeching Jesuses, and an errant digital tuner beside a munificent Mary. But the part you’ll love most? The cracked glass on that huge portrait of Mother Teresa by a brilliant red fire extinguisher. You’ll photograph it as if the sheer force of her’s star-splintered that border.

  And you’ll go to that chawl they told us about that first night, Karsh? That simply dressed, shadow-bearded man in the tenement house in Pydhonie — “a place where feet are bathed” — the tiny flat expanding with the grooved shooting radii of vinyl, vinyl everywhere. A house made of music.

  —Yes. Flip will take me. I’ll even take the train. Then a taxi. Then a short walk, stepping from brilliant day into corridor night. A moment for our pupils to widen: cracked pista-hued wood on the hallway ceiling, long sodden pink walls. We’ll take off our shoes, leave them by a table at the threshold; the flat’s so small, the vendor’s wife, smiling eyes peering out from burka, will step out to allow us in. And in that minuscule room, a shirt hanging to dry by the fridge (vinyl above it), wall smoldering with sockets (vinyl below them), kitchen cupboards ajar (vinyl inside them), he’ll offer us water.

  You’re drinking it, Karsh? Bombay immersion at last? No more hypochondria? I hear a whirring?

  —Two fans, Dimple. He’ll turn one on only when we enter; it spins its own tune. Above, a pink painted loft. I know you’d be up there right away — he’d let you, too — shooting the vinyl stacked in that loft sky, snapping down to the flat flower-fabric bed, oscillating with vinyl, too, Flip and me poring over the stuff. The mother lode.

  Aloft. Like you at HotPot, in that balconied booth. Encircled by music, gazing down at all of us, immersed in your spinning below.

  —And we’re immersed here, too, Dimple —we’ll sit six hours with this most patient, sweetly shy man. So reserved, he, for the noise coming off these LPs, even unplayed. He’d been warned by family, the community not to collect music, see, but kept on from his youth for the love of it. And now, with vinyl vanishing from so many places, he has — lives in — a total sonic treasure trove! Bollywood soundtracks, Indian classical. An LP, in its entirety, covered in Amitabh Bachchan images. Watch him whirl —

  Like a wall on Chapel Road.

  —Where?

  Waroda? Never mind. Go on. I’m listening.

  —So many records — look! But also: Top Instrumental Hits with “We Are the World,” “Hello” … Little Shop of Horrors. Fame. Motown.

  But that’s not what I hear playing….

  —No, Dimple. What you hear is that song my father so loved, “Light Years.” I found it. Here. In this chawl, in Pydhonie — so many miles from where he first played it to me. On an LP of blazing burning blue, blood-red round spindle hole. I can’t leave without it. And he’ll wrap the parcel so carefully, in today’s news, twine winding around it. And keep it a secret, Dimple: It’s for you. Dimple — are you still there?

  I’m here. I’m … so happy. You know, all this time I thought it was a Punjabi song you were seeking. Thank you. And funny thing is, I’ll be in New York that day, Karsh. Just landed. Standing on a manhole in the East Village and seeing, like a vision, the Made In India lid whirling into a blue spinning disc.

  —I know, Dimple. I see you.

  And I hear you. Even in the din of all my Broadway, your Bombay traffic. As I turn into Tompkins Square, read that sign for the first time — just behind our bench, remember? Where we’d been, all along. And also, where for over two reveling hours that exhilarated day — well before our births or even our families’ arrivals to this starred and striped land from that of spinning blue-godded consciousness — so many others, beneath the girthier of these two trees, had song-and-dancingly birthed an entire movement to a tambourine beat.

  —Allen Ginsberg included. That’s no trashfetti below your feet, Dimple … rather, raining from its garlanded trunk, crushed petals —

  Like a thrown bridal bouquet. No tambourine today. But that twelve-string busker, still here. As if he never went home.

  —Maybe he is home. Petals on the bedspread. For a moment, I’ll hear him rise up off the vinyl: Minutes seem like hours and hours seem like days … “The Celebrated Walkin’ Blues.” We’ll leave then. And when I bend to put my shoes back on, I’ll see that that chawl hall table is in fact no table … but beneath the cornflowered fabric, a stack of still more music.

  So the world on the outside’s made of music, too, Karsh.

  —Yes. Same as the in.

  The first strains of the muezzin. I was near Mohammed Ali Road, so close to the musical abode Karsh would visit in this amalgamating future. Before me, Hasanabad: marble mausoleum tipped with blue domes, as if the very sky had seeped into them to make way for eventide.

  There was one more place I had to see — for Karsh. His own eyes couldn’t yet bear it, so mine would bare it for them.

  That pale pink paper zipped into the outer pocket of my camera case.

  Unsure of my way, I found myself near Byculla Stat
ion. Followed Love Lane, Gunpowder Lane. And then a helix of bylanes, into the village of Matharpacady.

  A dreamer sleeping below peepul tree …

  Direct step into a time gone by. Off the heaving main roads, away from the encircling high-rises, street din dimmed into a sworn silence, as if even a whisper would break the reverie, the entire village delicate and defined as a reflection that could reverb into ever-widening circles, rumor and dissipate with the merest stone skip of a sound.

  The warren wound, uphill-down, with many-altared passages, Jesus-and-Marys lodestarring the tapered way.

  And houses — oh! No two alike. Houses with names: Sacred Heart Chummery; Keep Sake. Houses that immediately, inarguably, felt like homes.

  These houses breathed; I nearly felt their breath, a must-sweet exhalation of history, memory. Bygone souls, these homes: sloping roofs, teak-hatted, a modest beckoning — not quite on the coy side of quaint. Dream-lidded eyes insinuated in awnings fawning over doors, windows, balconies. Dwelling skins wearing weathered wood well, sapphire and scarlet shuttered extremities felicitously applauding their panes, some gussied up in stained glass. Double-storied, stairwayed bodies, with trellising expressions. Bloom-brooched and fern-fanned, mouthed with sublimely magnetic verandahs, upon a few of which neighbors gathered — elderly, not so, and a child, too, silhouetted against a glowing open door.

  Inviting. And as I rambled through this slope-shadowed, petal-flecked, trashfetti-speckled landscape, I came upon one that unquestionably invited me most. One look at this place, in shades similar to the blue domes I’d just seen, and — before even laying eyes upon its name — I knew.

  I ventured towards that house of longing. Through that wrought gate, up the potted-plant path, to the double front doors: latched. But beside them: a luminous, white-barred rectangle of window drew me mothlike. Its curtain blew askance, allowing a sneak peek into a cozy room: paintings of places, photographs of people, both clearly loved, framed upon the walls. Teakwood floor; grandfather clock; end tables with voluptuously shaded lamps. A statue of Mary; a brindled horse. Rocking chair piled with folded blankets. Near it, a round table enticed with a tea service. Set for two.

  By the far wall: a piano, sheet music fluttering slightly, as if a phantom were page-flicking. Something pinkish upon the instrument’s top.

  Suddenly, a face peered back at my own, inquisitive but calm. An elderly woman with a finely lined, heart-shaped visage. She wore a blossom-pink nightgown, her long hair silver from the roots nearly to the ends, which hued gradually to black, a youth spent measurably behind her in inches of tresses.

  Her skin was a honey hue in the light of the room she stood in. She could have been from anywhere.

  —I’m … sorry, I whispered.

  —Are you lost, daughter? she asked me.

  —I’m not sure, I replied, though I was quite sure I wasn’t. Around her neck, a small gold cross, like the one that had been mailed to Karsh. I showed her the address on the envelope then, and after a moment’s hesitation, the note within: He left this.

  She stared at me a long moment, mouth set, eyes sparking.

  —But this is the one, she said softly. Despite my gut hunch, I was mystified; I didn’t know what I’d expected to see here — him? Yes, in fact, what I’d awaited: him. Tucked away in an auricle-like pouch off the heart, sidestepping the time-space grid, still alive, still possible. And so I asked an absurd question.

  —But are you sure you live here?

  The old woman didn’t appear startled by this query. One day, I thought, I’d be old, too, and probably wouldn’t consider this so.

  —I was born in this home. More than eighty-five years ago, eighty-six soon. The house is still older. A century, nearly.

  As she spoke, from somewhere within its previous walls, the deafening wail of a mother, her mother. The firm reassuring voice of the midwife. The singing, the sweets, the clamoring communal joy of the neighbors.

  —Did only your family live here? I asked. —Blood family?

  —Blood family, bone family. Blood’s relative, after all, she said, and now her eyes went woeful. —Someone did live here for a time. A young person. Too young.

  I had no idea how Karsh’s father had stumbled upon this home, the one he would make his last in this world. A wrong turn off Love Lane, Gunpowder Lane? A drawing towards the light? Eyes dilated by a kind of faith in the blue domes — or blinded by the neon lure of that other nearby red-lit district?

  Had he come upon this door just as I had, seeking someone lost?

  The woman stepped slightly to the side now, drawing the curtain with her. A rounder view: The room was bathed in pink light. And the clock, the photographs, the piano were still there. Except the clocks were counterclocking, the photos unfading, the piano keys slipping in a dip-jut dance …

  My camera was frocking with me. Except. I wasn’t holding my camera.

  In that other camera, kamra, chamber: chimera. I saw now a young girl, entire ringleted head of ebony, wasp waist whooshed in a very different sort of dress — rose with blue love knots, many of which had been snipped off, shipped off — singing to a savior, a homeland, a lost soul, hands floating over the keys. As she sang, a hymn of birth turned dirge, an oratory of silver to black (or perhaps black to silver) … and back again. The song was a familiar one, though I was sure at the same time that I didn’t know it.

  That melody Karsh had called out, sung out, in that child voice?

  The story fell into place as the vision of the girl at the piano aged before my eyes, growing ever closer to that of the old woman in this opening.

  I knew then how he’d happened upon her: a night in nearby Kamathipura, the brothel district, set up in the ninteenth century to glut the lust of British troops during the Raj. The bordellos of White Lane. The Devadasis, those servant-of-god girls from the South in their red and white beads — poor children illegally wedded off to Yellamma, goddess of fertility, destined to never marry a mortal, but to serve her by, traditionally, vending their virginity to the highest bidder.

  Inside, in preparation for their night’s clients, the girls had bleached their skin, combed their hair, donned their saris. Outside, they stood on offer, upon a street littered with condom boxes, beedi stubs, drunken drugged men in search of a quenchless sating.

  But it was another sort of compulsion that had overtaken him. Nearly nothing left to his name, he bet on luck one last time, found himself doused in an evening of gambling on Falkland Road. Swollen with shame and self-loathing, he’d been unable to stop, to kick the addiction that had cost him over time his very home, his very family.

  That night, it had all skewed horribly wrong. Die gone demonic, though he’d managed to buy some time. When he’d emerged, quietly fearful, shakily resigned, from the den of his disquietude, all lost but for the clothes on his back and a something swirling and sea-drunk in his arms — the one object he would not wager away, the symbol of the last spurl of his fast diminishing faith, desire to be — the cacaphony of the red light district quelled as his ears had keened to this same song: the melody I’d heard just now, on that ghostly piano. Ringing as the midnight masses once sung on these bylanes, his ear strangely, bionically attuned, as when one hears the voice of the gods.

  But he was agnostic at best, Karsh’s father, and what he heard was, in fact, the voices of another hearing the voice of God. He realized he wanted his final exit to be wombed in this aura of love, of faith. The aura he’d inhabited only once, his newborn son’s baby toes tickling his treasuring hands, two decades ago.

  He realized this might be the closest he’d ever get to something divine again.

  And all we can get is close.

  Stinking of blue ruin, he exited Kamathipura, stalking that sound. It was the sound of something longed for, and he filled his ears till all that hummed within, without, was this seashell song swellingly telling of another place, a shore hopefully within reach — and for him, a boy across that ocean, and the mother of that b
oy as well.

  As if possessed, like me tonight, Karsh’s father found himself, suddenly but not suddenly in the little bylanes of Matharpacady.

  Silhouette of a pani puri vendor pushing his precious pram of snacks up an incline; the yellowing alcove of the brightly blue-doored mochi shop, cobbler seated on the floor, soling a slipper. In the pink pearled light of his own laden arms, he trailed his haze towards the Holy Cross Oratory, built long ago when Bombay was hit by bubonic plague. After praying to Saint Roque for protection, it was said no resident of this village fell ill. But for Karsh’s father, the plague began on the inside, not the out, and even a saint couldn’t enter that space.

  It would have to be a person. At least for a little while.

  Carefully clutching that moonstrike of spiraling pink dusk, he made his way down another incline, fell upon this home.

  It was one woman, this chorus. She, Catarina Henriqueta, had been singing, a voice spherical with the so many she’d lost.

  Like my own face tonight, his had appeared in this window. A mendicant of sorts, he’d begun to hum along.

  Something about him — his boyish self light-yeared beneath the grizzle and grief, the childlike treble of his humming — had reminded her of the ones who had not come, the children who would have been about and beyond his age by now.

  The two called and responsed through these bars, past the song itself.

  —Lightning struck us to the ground … and now I’m waiting for the sound … to catch up and come around, he’d sung.

  —So many years of hanging on … how could we know they were long gone … all the stars we wished upon, she’d sung back. The doors unlatched, and he was inside — and then they were both dancing in that unchronicled room: thawed by connection, together out of time, conjuring a fifth chamber to the heart, a fifth element where all that had been lost to them perhaps still beat on.

  For the woman, it had been the unborn daughters, sons. Heirs.