Bombay Blues

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

  And then Karsh was one with io, screen beaming my shots from Heptanesia, Mesh’s as well. Onstage now, the Martian boy slithering his strings, the swampthing spacegirl up there singing:

  —Home is not a place that we can hold on to … still I thought I saw it in your eyes … could you light the way ’cause I keep trying to … seems I’m only at home under unfamiliar skies….

  Home. Flight. My own approached, and I was diving into my Train Dance, my goodbye to them. But when Flip walked over now and tapped my watch, I couldn’t say it.

  —Lala. You can’t go yet. I mean, did you even find the real Bombay?

  —Work in progress, I said. —Besides, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not in Bombay.

  He forced a smile onto his sadness.

  —Yeah. Screw Bombay! he said fervidly. Then, trouper that he was, —There’s always Chennai….

  He glanced down.

  —Chandigarh … he said softly.

  —I love you, Pinto, I told him, and it was true. —It meant the world to me to have a fellow philosopunk in Bombay.

  Not even an aphorism from my favorite punkosophe. Flip just looked at me now and said nothing. I love you, too was what I heard him not say, bell clear — that’s often how it was said, after all — and I gave him a hug to last till we’d meet again.

  It’s what none of us was saying; it was what all of us were saying.

  And up there was the one I wasn’t saying it to the loudest: my little boy blue. Gokulanandini grinningly absconded with Flip now, who cast me a mock terrorized back glance. And I squeezed forward for a better look.

  On deck, Karsh was visible for a moment again, head just shadowing with hair, goatee just beginning to grow back. He passed a nod to Shy to take over. And now the home homes were melding, marrying another word soaring off vinyl, as the io girl stepped off the mic and let the LP speak: an urgent impassioned call to ride that racked me with an astounding sense of déjà vu, though it sounded alien in this context.

  Karsh dipped from view, adieu. Vocals arrivederci’d out, followed by the strings bis-balding, annyeonging guitar, sayonara sitar, the see-you didgeridoo. Bass palaam-na next, then drum kit do-svidaniya, until all that was left was a shivery shuddery tribal beat — dha dhin dhin dha — a sound soaked in sweat and concentration to the point I knew it had to be happening now, live.

  Aloha, halohead: I pushed forth to find Karsh sitting cross-legged on the raised platform, baby talc at the ready to flour-mill his palms, drumming out his doubled heart on those stretched skins. He seemed to be levitating. Not a drop in the dance energy, though now the crowd’s movements went duggi-shruggy-drugged, like everyone was immersed in some primordial ritual their bodies had never forgotten, turntablist table-turning in a tablatastic twist.

  … dha dhin dhin dha/dha dhin dhin dha/na tin tin ta/ta dhin dhin dha …

  Scuddering thuds thundered up to join Karsh’s conjurist talc-swift hands, drawing song from goatskin, as he’d done in other ways so many times from my own. The higher-pitched baby drum, the larger bass reunited: dayan with bayan, leaping into the tala, strokes outlining the circle of rhythm: three claps, one wave in teentaal, sixteen beats split 4/4 — a hot-blood smooth-gait pace. Reveling in revaal, the four-beat footing of a Marwari horse.

  Tali/khali: Clap clap wave clap. He glanced up, scanned the room. I knew for whom. I moved closer still.

  And that vinyl vocal rising, riding, leaping off the beat.

  I knew that voice. And when I heard the word, if there’d been any doubt, I also knew: This was for me.

  Patti Smith. Hi hi’s ho ho’s gone home homes gone ommms come horses. Horses. Horses. And as the word clarified, the multilimbed gods and goddesses of the room began chanting along:

  —Horses! Horses!

  Immaculate reception. Karsh caught my eye then; I caught his sound. I was saying a sort of farewell, and he held my gaze steady, then slowly, surely lowered his lids and opened his eyes into mine again.

  Clap clap. Wave. It was an aarti, an embrace, a blessing. A heart thump from him; one from me, too. A We Are Good.

  Clap. If I stayed till the end, there would be an end. So I had to leave then. No goodbyes to be uttered. For any of them.

  I didn’t need to see this night through. I could see it already: The party would wind down, they’d throng around Karsh, show him the love, stoking the faith. Pull out their litigous John Terry smokes, their pocketful of Manali. Longboarding plans would be made: drum circle meets on Carter Road, browsing around the Farmers’ Market. Road trip to Nashik. Those with evening alibis would squirt drops in their eyes, blink flutterbye wide. They’d bundle into cars — chauffeured ones, hired-for-the-nights, taxis, a few own-owned — cross that bridge, then split up into ricks. A few would sneak into their parents’ homes; others would fumble for keys to shared apartments from Santa Cruz to Khar to Versova, tumbling over each other’s bodies in late-night-euphoria hookups that would lead to dodged eyes in broad daylight, sometimes full-on love touchdowns.

  A new commissioner would come to town and hopefully bring back the night. It was here now, whether he did or didn’t.

  Some might not be here the next time I came. One tying another kind of knot, a self-lassoing slip through a circle aswung in a no-room-for-all Bandra flat gone pool bottom. The catch: unMeshed — a quest for reinvention dead-ending so he’d close the circuit, flow out of the manhole, leaving behind the very first, and empty, ebbing origami wallet. In fact from by-then-tearful Toronto, still a Bandra boy through, through. Was that why he’d looped me in before he’d gone? Even into channeling along?

  A creative soul moved on. And a destroyer’s as well. A boy attired in designer tee and AK-47 who’d bloodbathed the masses would go the way of that flesh, give up the ghost through a noose.

  Vamoose: Thackeray pass on. Six thousand Darjeeling guitars strum “Imagine” for a much-missed girl gone too brutally, too young, so many miles from home. A dreamer’s dying declaration (echoing from the New York Dakota pavement): Would we someday live as one?

  But others here, now: visas expired, jobs calling from Singapore, Dubai. London and the laylines at Portobello, Lancaster. NYU acceptances. Those tagged walls, the rainbow-ribalded streets of Bandra. By next time, the flying fish might be faded, flecked — painted over. And these landmarks, they’d all have changed — a creakling around Amitabh’s fingertips and furious smile — or gone forever.

  Pages petering out from photocopied magazines sold by a hungry little girl on Haji Ali Road. The flour mill. Dadaji’s hill — oldest bulge of Bombay. The welcoming bungalows of Matharpacady.

  And nearby Worli Fort, a 1675 tourist-less laundry-ramparted blue ruin, embanked by the fishindigens and built by the British to keep an eye out for moonshone Mahim Bay marauders. Atop this fort, perplexingly, tonight: stacks of pavers, city streets broke down into their individual units. Jesus. A beached dinghy with prowed garland, surreally stranded upon the edifice itself. And within a starklit opening in this alluring wreck: the concrete walls and floor of a bodybuilding gym. (A vyayamshala — largely bench-pressing fisherfolk.)

  With a temple in it.

  A national heritage site nonexistent on a current Existing Land Use Plan.

  If numbered, their days: How high could we count?

  And the landmark cow? Hopefully, she’d still be there — the traffic-stopping sacred — on the street.

  Karsh was still playing, but our eyes remained locked … then loosened. I lifted my hand in a little wave. A beat, or 4/4, and Karsh now raised a palm towards mine. And then it fell, his eyes back on bayan and dayan. Though they remained downcast, the nod he gave was a nod for me.

  Tonight, I was a woozy-maned Rapunzel, hair flying up, not down, a just-past-limping two-bootlegging Cinderella, no lost slipper, an unsleeping insomniac Beauty. A brown-blue-skinned girl, maybe goddess — who knew? But what I did know: Your happily-ever-after is a once-upon-a-time.

  We end where we begin.

  And o
nce upon a time, I’d climbed a ladder to deliver a lost sneaker to a downtown diaspora prince. I had danced towards him, his beats had reined me in. But today, they were letting me go. Tonight, they were propelling me lovingly, happily ever afterly away.

  On this day of an unwedding, no groomsman riding in, no horse-drawn carriage — rather, a drum-skinned stallion accompanying me out of this unhitched space, my departure disguised as a dance.

  Or my dance as an até-a-vista. To door. Through vestibule.

  All that was left in the sonic mix: my breath. Sign over exit: PAVAN. Air. I stepped from the actual four rooms of this house-party home, the four chambers of my heart, the crowd call of Horses! galloping along with me — into the true fifth.

  Rumor had it unicorns were around. And I sure as hell could ride my blue mare now.

  Giddyup. And giddily out.

  Outside Crosstreet, nada but me. No chauffeurs, valets. Not a fisherperson to be found.

  I wasn’t one for goodbyes. And there was one more person I had to not say it to. Nigh the pumpkin hour, and my horse drew up in the body of a Meru taxicab, dropping off another set of revelers to alight in love with Karsh.

  I was just getting into it when my phone beeped: sankalp. Message in a bottle.

  A return from Unknown:

  Bandra. Over there. You.

  Well, only one way to join here to there, as I’d learned. And I was already digging out the purchy, crossing that bridge, my horse not scaring, merely looking to land, Karsh on the other side of where I was headed, Cowboy mirror-shoring where I’d just been, me barebacking that hyphen, no lady-in-waiting but a cowgirl fate-gaiting, skippering, too, car lights sliding the many-cabled sails of this splurge of a surge of a bridge, as if it were sensuously blinking up and down, knowing if I were to bait it with my photographic tackle, snap it from this fast-speed pane, all I’d get’d be black backdrop skirred with neon squidges, skywriting hieroglyphically hippocamping, a neo-mythic X-ray lightning bugged with birds drugged, flying fish glug, zeppelins unplugged … now gazing into another set of rearview driver eyes (mappleblack, piquant), my re-return message to him, that bay-roving buckaroo, (sub)urban picaroon, just capriolistically hop-skipping-sent as that steeded sea-riding gangplanking swanimal of a finished yet incomplete — or was it unfinished yet complete? — bridge wiped out my signal, his.

  Link.

  I thought about how it had all come to pass, all the way from 14th Street to 14th Road, Union Square to Union Park. Out of the blue and into my life, I’d dropped the map and found him by my side. And what we’d inhabited, incarnated, had been so out of bounds on any other hitherto charted terrain … yet turned out to be somehow still so very within reach. All those streets named for saints hadn’t kept me in line. But I suppose I’d never been trying for a straight line, after all.

  We’d come together, and I’d fallen apart a little. As had many aspects of my life as I’d known it. But what a relief it was still beating, my heart. Harder and stronger, huger and steadier than ever. And now I’d be leaving, but cupping that spark in my hand, that little thing we’d ignited into a great blue flame. Smoke signals: Maybe it would always be just that tiny sparkler I’d pinch between two fingers; maybe it would never be his hand again in mine. No fixer, for if we held too tight, crushed those scant luminous wings as Caravaggio had done to light up his own darkness, we’d lose even that.

  What you caught you can’t keep: a strange situation. We stood there, the two of us, at Lands End. There is no l’Inde. Bombay was water punctuated by islands, I thought then, not islands surrounded by sea. Cowboy didn’t need me, not the way Karsh had, maybe even still did — but maybe that’s what I’d needed. He couldn’t deceive me, because there had never been any specific boxed-in thing he’d let me believe. All that had been true were the moments spent, and whatever we’d trusted those to be. And even that — those meanings — could transform, even transcend the moment itself, with time.

  With Karsh, it was geography and history: everything said, shared that had built up our connection. With Cowboy, biology, metronomy: all we hadn’t said, wouldn’t have time to say. In a way, the two bridged each other — as if they were continuations of the same being.

  Actually, I realized, it wasn’t either of them. It was me. My shift. Perhaps I was both sides but also the link that could turn fraught waters into a smooth sail, ride the past and future together on the wave of the now. And I was going to need space to figure that one out.

  A sole double-hearted D on tiding Juhu sand …

  Cowboy was humming now.

  —Busted flat in Baton Rouge …

  —Waitin’ for a train, I serenaded back. But I was singing Janis; he was singing Kris.

  —The blues, he said quietly. —You sort out yours, I’ll sort mine. And we will meet again. In a new space and time.

  It wasn’t a lyric, or now it was.

  —This life or the next, I added.

  —Same thing, we replied. I guess he had no need for a traditional way to stay in touch. But then again, I supposed I didn’t either. I just didn’t stop surprising myself — and the most surprising thing of all was the calm that accompanied these revelations. I didn’t feel a certain kind of sorrow when it was called for, it seemed, nor guilt when it was most required — or when I supposed it was. My melancholy so piercing it released a sort of joy from that pinprick. I was getting better at happiness, though. And ambiguity.

  I guess.

  Mostly, I felt, in myself — as I’d sensed throughout this trip, perhaps even before: that island beneath, making itself known. A little breeze carrying meward a scent from somewhere else, foreign hues.

  And now that scent clarified itself, that shade: my own skin.

  I pinched it.

  I looked towards that bridge.

  Cowboy followed my gaze.

  —I’m not good at goodbyes, he said softly. —Are you?

  —I don’t know, I replied truthfully. —I haven’t had to say too many.

  Bom Bahia. Good-bay. Mum-bye. Bye-bye. He didn’t say anything then. The silence filled with the chugging swirl of approaching ricks.

  —Well, then, I said, trying to sound cheerful. —Hello?

  I stuck out my hand. My name was on my lips … but I left it there.

  His own lips parted … and then he said it:

  —Hello.

  Things got a little blurry then, but: There was a squeeze that was long but not so long to crush, and a kiss on the head that was too tender to take (yet too quick to heartbreak), a deeper one on lips that returned the mouths we’d exchanged in Chuim back to their rightful faces — goddess with a by the time we broke the bond, but secured the connection. An unweaving of hands, and a turning from those eyes …

  It would never be enough. The unfinished, even unbegun, nature of our business left me a-tumult with desire. But maybe that was okay; longing for something could be beautiful, too, couldn’t it? It was a pull and a momentum, a propulsion towards the heart.

  A rick pulled up then, and I got in. But just before I drew my foot off ground and into the tuk-tuk — the signal to the highly-engrossed-in-us driver to hit the sputtering gas — I dipped my head down and looked back up at him.

  —Cowboy?

  —Indie Girl? he said, almost a whisper. I was in, I was out.

  —We’ll always have Unbombay, I said, and managed a true smile. And then I gathered my one foot up off the ground of Lands End, and was in. He smiled back, eyes softer than I’d ever seen them, but a steely resolve, too, nodding.

  The driver pulled the lever down on the meter.

  Back to zero.

  Horse in motion: And they’re off! I wanted to keep that last smile in my mind’s eye, the perfect arc of a mouth I already missed.

  This time, I didn’t look back.

  I looked towards Juhu, Andheri.

  I looked towards New York.

  Andheri, the wee hours. Illumined as Diwali, darkness bayed at our windows, entire household up,
chai a-brewing, and a simmer to the air as on the dawn of an auspicious event.

  I guess any day could be. You had to live it to know it, had to know it to auspicate it. Sabz was over as well, was staying next door at Vipin Uncle and Vinanti Aunty’s (who hopefully weren’t growing too optimistic for their Silicon Valley son).

  At the table, my aunt and uncle were teary-eyed. Meera Maasi was organizing the stainless steel thali before her: valiant wick, tiny silver pot, marigold petals.

  —Are you sure you don’t want company for the ride, beta? my uncle asked again. I’d insisted I leave with Arvind alone, for I knew how weeped up it would get the closer we got to the airport. We were just that kind of family, separation anxiety even when someone hit the loo. After much hesitation and debate, they’d finally agreed.

  —Thank you, Kaka, I said. —But no need. You’re all up so early, this way you can get some sleep and make the most of the rest of your day.

  —Are you sure you’ll be okay? my aunt asked anxiously.

  —She’ll be with Arvind, Kavita sighed. My uncle nodded.

  —After all, he conceded, —I suppose Dimple seems to get around this town more than any of us.

  You could say that again.

  —Beta, be sure you come see us again soon, he added. —The house felt so lovely with you in it.

  My aunt nodded, too fervently.

  —The entire city felt lovelier, she said.

  I heard a sudden stifled snort, and turned to take in my father, burying face in handkerchief.

  —Daddy! We’ll be together again in a couple of weeks!

  My parents had decided to extend their stay; my mother wanted to be around for her sister and, after having taken so long to get here, felt it made no sense to be in such a rush to get there.

  —Obviously, we know our own flight details, my mother scoffed, but she looked a touch quiverlipped as well.

  I’d see Sabz and Kavita in a matter of days, too — and Sangita and her own parents had promised to visit us, perhaps by this time next year. So why was I getting so emotional? Could I still blame it on jet lag?