Bombay Time

by Thrity Umrigar

  Suddenly, it came to him, what he wanted to say to Mehernosh, as clearly as if the words were typed on a sheet of paper. “Mehernosh,” he said. “I have already made enough of a fool of myself for one evening. But because you are like my son, I will try once again. What I want to say is very simple: Be happy. In many places, that is easy to do. In America, they tell me, they even have those words written in their Constitution. But not in India. Not in our Parsi com. Here, people are always telling you not to laugh too loudly, not to dream too big, not to fly too high. Pride comes before a fall, they tell us from the time we are children. But Mehernosh, a man who dives for fish catches fish. One who aims for the stars catches a star. So a man who owns fish can only share fish with others, not stars. Nobody can share what they don’t possess, you see? All these old folks—all our lives, they told us God does not like proud people, that God clips the wings of those who fly too high. But I say, nobody has seen the yardstick of God. Too many people in this community of ours who will try to pull you down, who will tell you you have no right to your own laughter. They will point out all the misery of the world to you, to make their point. But listen carefully to me: You have not only a right but a responsibility to be happy. What I’m saying to you, I would say to my own Binny. All of us gathered here are like your own family. Most of us saw you the day you were born. We need you to be happy, beta. For us. For all of us. It’s the only way to make sense of all this—this city that’s hell on earth, this life where we’ve all sacrificed so much, the losses and disappointments we’ve all suffered. Our chance has come and gone. Some of us fared better than others. But young ones, like you and Sharon and my Binny, you are our hope and promise. We wish all success and happiness to you. More important, we need this for you. And from you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He stopped abruptly, exhausted and suddenly mortified. A thick shyness descended on him, forcing his gaze to the ground. He prayed for someone to shatter the unbearable silence that gathered like smoke around him. He felt Coomi’s eyes on him but was afraid to look up, for fear of what he’d see on her face.

  “I do.” The words rang out like a shot into the embarrassed silence. “I know what you mean, exactly. Exactly.”

  It was Coomi. He turned around to face her, slowly, like a sleep-walker waking up. Coomi’s face was shiny and there was a fierce, protective expression on her face that challenged the others not to destroy her fragile, sentimental husband with their words or laughter. Rusi dimly remembered that expression from years past. It was a look that used to make him feel omnipotent, that shielded him from his own weaknesses and made him feel capable of laying the world’s riches at Coomi’s feet. He did not know what he had said or done to resurrect that look, but he was grateful. Suddenly, he remembered how she had tried making up with him in the days after his mother’s death and how he had rebuffed her. Now he wondered if that had been a mistake, and he felt a piercing pain at the thought of the wasted, barren years that lay behind and ahead of them.

  Then he heard the sound. They were cheering him. Strangely, inexplicably, they were cheering him. Clapping, slowly at first and then vigorously, as if they were at a concert. “Hear, hear,” one of them said. “Well said, laddie, well said,” another voice responded.

  Mehernosh had risen from his chair and was now pulling Rusi up from his. The younger man embraced Rusi in a bear hug. “Wow, Rusi Uncle. If I’d known you were so good at speechifying, Dad and I would’ve made you a law partner years ago.”

  Everybody laughed. Rusi’s words had suddenly made them see Mehernosh in a different way. Whereas Mehernosh had always been part of their past, they suddenly saw him as their future, and this cheered them up.

  “Rusi’s right. You must always keep our collar up, Mehernosh. I say, someday you will be attorney general of India,” Sheroo said.

  Jimmy laughed. “It’s not that easy, my dear Sheroo,” he said lightly.

  They turned on him like angry bees because he was interfering with their new dream of Mehernosh. Rusi’s words had anointed Mehernosh as the custodian of their future and they swarmed to that vision.

  “If anybody can do it, our Mehernosh can.”

  “Our Parsi boys need to rise again. It’s not like the old days, when we ran this city. Now even those paan-chewing Maharashtrians are better educated than we are.”

  “Arre, in a few years, even the Central Bank won’t have a single Parsi department head.”

  “Yah, the Bank of America now probably has more Parsis than Central Bank.”

  “Don’t talk to me of America. Remember that story of the old woman with the gunny sack filled with cockroaches, the one our parents used to frighten us with? These days, I’m thinking of America as that woman, kidnapping all our children.”

  “Arre, baba, it’s hard for anybody to resist the riches of America. Not for nothing they call it ‘the land of opportunity.’ “

  “All except our Mehernosh. He came back to us.”

  “Those Americans must’ve been dumbfounded. Imagine, an Indian turning down America?”

  “And why not, indeed? After all, his daddy has built an empire for him here.”

  “Three cheers for Mehernosh and Sharon,” Bomi said. “Hip hip …”

  “Hooray.”

  “Hip hip …”

  “Hooray!”

  They were being watched. Thirty pairs of eyes followed their every move—every flash of a jeweled hand, every rustle of an expensive embroidered sari, every turn of a gold-clad neck. Thirty pairs of ears heard their tinsel laughter, the deep baritone of the male voices, the glassy tinkle of female giggles. Thirty pairs of nostrils breathed in the lingering scent of their imported perfumes as it commingled with the glorious smell of the leftover dinners being packed for distribution.

  They were being watched. The rumblings of thirty stomachs grew louder and louder, until this ragtag group of street people who stood outside the iron gates dissolved into one giant stomach, until it became hunger itself, a vacuous ache, a heavy groan. With increasing restlessness, they watched a tall man in a brown suit distributing individual boxes to the small group of old men and women sitting in a circle. They watched them pull books out of those boxes. They gritted their teeth as they noticed how the old men and women settled back into their chairs before they started flipping through the books. As if they had all the time in the world. With sinking hearts, they watched the tall man signal to someone to bring out another bottle of alcohol, watched as the man poured fresh drinks into their glasses. Old as they were, it seemed as if this band of revelers was in no hurry to go home. Silently, they watched the glassy look that many of the guests got in their eyes, cursed the fair-skinned man who suddenly started to speak and looked like he never would stop.

  Still, they were patient. They had not come this far without learning patience. Like a dog who must wait for scraps from his master’s table, they had mastered the art of patience. Sooner or later, these well-dressed old men and women must rise and go home. Sooner or later, they will get bogged down from the weight of their heavy jewelry, will get drowsy from the weight of their filled stomachs, will get burdened by the weight of their guilt. Sooner or later, something will happen that will send them home. Won’t it? Won’t it? Or is it possible that they will stay so long that the caterer may get tired and irritable, may decide to call it a day without going through the nightly ritual of distributing the leftovers to them, they who had waited so patiently, so silently? They had walked several kilometers, some of them, for their daily bread. They had come, with infants on their hips and holding their other children by the hand. They had come, leaving grandmothers at home, promising them a full meal when they returned. When they returned to the strip of pavement that they called home.

  “How much longer, Baba?” Bhima asked, tugging at her father’s shirtsleeve. He had just wiped his nose on that shirtsleeve a minute ago. He had woken up this morning with a sore throat and a fever that left him so tired, he had even thought about ski
pping dinner tonight. Only the crushed look on his seven-year-old daughter’s face had made him change his mind.

  “Should be soon,” he replied. “See that? That’s the bus that’s going to take them home. Can’t be much longer.”

  But he was wrong. A minute later, the tall man in the brown suit rose to his feet and signaled his driver. Now there were new glasses. And a different kind of bottle. The driver poured small quantities of a creamy light brown liquid into each glass. “Thank you all for being here for the happiest day of my life,” the tall man said. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers, cheers,” the rest of them replied.

  He hated them then. Hated their stupidity and their silly indulgences. Hated their indifference to him, their oblivion. His body ached with fever and hatred. He wanted to smash their glasses over each of their heads, wanted to tear their happy smiles from their fat, light-skinned faces. Without thinking, he ran his fingers over his own face, a canvas of taut skin under a foundation of bone. He thought of Bhima’s thin, weary face, caked with dirt and sadness, and the thought of her lighted a fire under his simmering anger. Since Bhima’s mother died of pneumonia two years ago, she was all he had. The village that he had left as a teenager now seemed as remote as a dream. Fueled by the rags-to-riches fantasies of Hindi movies, he had come to Bombay with great hopes. “City of dreams,” they called Bombay in his village, and indeed, some of the men who had left had returned with enough money to buy their own land and build their own homes. But somehow, things had not worked out for him that way. In the beginning, he used to return to the village at least once a year, regardless of whether he had money for a train ticket. But once, they caught him. Unable to pay the fine, he served three months in jail. The experience broke his confidence and the visits home became less frequent. Also, he could not face the bewildered disillusionment in his old mother’s face. It was impossible to convince the old woman that money did not grow on trees in Bombay. After Bhima was born, he stopped going home altogether. Now he was one of the millions of ghosts who walked Bombay, a man without a past or a future. He lived everywhere and nowhere, just like air.

  But he was a father, nevertheless. He reached over to pat his daughter’s head and draw her closer to his side, but his hand touched space where she had been a second ago. He turned around to look for her. But she was gone.

  When he saw her again, he recognized her by her small hand. Unable to wait any longer, losing faith in his empty promises of deliverance, Bhima had crossed the street to where a large city Dumpster lay. Yesterday, her baba had come home and told her that they would eat well tonight, had made her mouth water with descriptions of fish baked in green chutney and yellowed rice with big pieces of chicken in it. But pangs of hunger had driven that vision out of Bhima’s head. She could not wait any longer. She climbed the tall Dumpster with practiced ease and then foraged around. The Dumpster didn’t look too picked over. Maybe if she was lucky she would find a half-eaten banana or a piece of chicken with some meat still left on the bone.

  It was her lucky day. She emerged from the Dumpster triumphant, with half of an overripe orange in her hand. Her father saw her little hand as she gripped the inside of the Dumpster and lifted herself over to the other side of it. “Baba, look,” she said excitedly. But he could not look, blinded as he was by guilt, shame, and rage. He knew she would eat the orange slowly, savoring the sharp trickle of the juice down the back of her throat. He knew she would then chew on the peel, unable to throw any part of her precious treasure away. Most days, he shared her excitement at the discovery of edible food. But tonight, it made him sick. Tonight was to have been different. He had found out yesterday that there was a big Parsi wedding on the next day. He had promised Bhima that they would dine well, eat the same food that the bara sahibs did. He had ignored the whimpers of his aching, fevered body to keep his promise to his girl. And now a bunch of bastards who did not know when it was time to exit had wrecked his plans. And the worst part of it was, they did so thoughtlessly, oblivious to his and Bhima’s existence. As if all of them who stood hunched and crowded outside these tall iron gates were simply an extension of the black night. Invisible. As if his daughter, his beautiful, serious, hungry daughter did not exist.

  Well, he would show them she existed. That he existed. If they refused to acknowledge his presence, he would acknowledge theirs. He would send them a present, a gift from the shadows. After all, it was a wedding. He was sure that the van that waited to take them away from here was already loaded down with fancy gifts. He would give them one more gift, unlike any that they already had. A slow grin formed on his lips. He shivered with fever and excitement.

  “Go to the number five bus stop and wait for me,” he said to Bhima.

  She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “But, Baba, the food. I’m still hungry.”

  “Forget the food,” he hissed. “Do what I say. Go now.” “But you promised,” she said. But already she was obeying him, whimpering as she walked away from the crowd. He waited until she turned the corner and then crossed the one-way street. Close to the Dumpster, there lay a pile of cut bricks and rocks. He ran his hand through the debris until his fingers closed around a rock that felt heavy and substantial in his hand. He looked quickly to his left and right. A man rode by on his bicycle, and he waited until he was gone. He looked again. Nobody was paying him any attention. Weak with hunger and anticipation, the huddled crowd at the entrance was transfixed by the antics on the other side of the gate. They did not wish to look away for a minute, for fear that they might miss some vital signal. For an instant, he felt contempt for them, for their naked hunger and their willingness to go to any lengths to appease that hunger. He felt free, as if he had severed the ties that bound him to their cowering servility.

  He stood on his toes and his right hand formed a perfect arc against the black Bombay sky. As the stone left his arm and sailed over the iron gates, he felt a minute’s pride, as if he had created a work of art. He heard the stone land with a satisfying thud, followed by a woman’s scream. The satisfaction that he got from hearing those two sounds, close enough together so as to be in unison, made him forget his hunger and the disappointment in his daughter’s eyes. Laughing out loud, he ran into the waiting arms of the warm Bombay night. For a moment, he felt strong and beautiful.

  Ten

  Jimmy Kanga saw it first, the black danger sailing toward them from the other side of the gate. He opened his mouth to warn his friends, but no words emerged. But Sharon saw the look of horror on Jimmy’s face, followed the line of his pointed finger, and deftly stepped out of the path of the descending object. She tried to pull Sheroo out of its way, but Sheroo was a large woman and moved slowly. There was a thud as the rock hit Sheroo on her upper arm and then fell to the ground.

  Sheroo screamed in fright and in pain. An ugly purple stain formed against her lemony skin almost immediately. Bomi, who was standing a couple of feet away from his wife, ran up to her. “Sheroo, my God. What happened? Oh God, look at her arm. Ice, somebody get some ice quickly.”

  They all spoke at once:

  “Here, Sheroo, sit down. Anybody have some eau de cologne? Sprinkle some on her forehead. She looks ready to faint. …”

  “Thank God it missed her shoulder by a few inches. Would’ve shattered the bone like glass. …”

  “Here, Sheroo, swallow this. Just some homeopathy pills I’m always carrying. Just Arnica. Good for shock and bruises. …”

  “Try moving your arm. …”

  “No, better not to move it yet. …”

  “I’m okay, really. Just the shock of it is worse than anything. …”

  “Baap re, look at the size of this rock. It’s a miracle she’s not dead. …”

  “Outside. It came from the outside. …”

  “Unbelievable. Someone threw a rock in here. …”

  “Barbarians. Uncivilized barbarians. What did we ever do to them? …”

  “Here we are, minding our own business. …”


  “Bombay has become unlivable, I tell you. We’ve been run over by slums and violence. Where will it all end? …”

  “It was probably one of these people at the gate. Have been staring at us like vultures all evening long. …”

  “A few more minutes and we would’ve been gone. But they couldn’t wait. …”

  “Look at them, even now. Staring at us like we’re bleddy animals in a zoo. …”

  “Where the hell was the chowkidar?” Jimmy roared. “Why the hell did I spend money getting a security guard if he can’t offer us basic protection?” He strode purposefully toward where the sentry stood at the gate. A thin, dark-skinned man of medium build, the chowkidar seemed transfixed by the events of the last few minutes. A resident of a nearby slum, he had landed this job five months back. At that time, the job had seemed like a gift from the gods. Now it seemed as if the gods were ready to snatch their gift back. Jimmy was signaling for him to leave his post by the gate and come to where Jimmy stood, but the chowkidar seemed paralyzed with fright. “Come here, you ma-daarchot,” Jimmy screamed, and finally the sentry managed to walk a few feet on his shaky legs.