One afternoon, a couple of weeks after the last time that he and Sunder had spoken, the old electric doorbell coughed, then trilled. Ashish was lying on his bed, in a small sea of biscuit crumbs, reading an Amar Chitra Katha comic about the life of Bhagat Singh. His aunt had gone out; he thought about ignoring the bell. It rang again. He sighed loudly, ‘Yes, yes, coming at once, heaven forbid you should have to wait’, and headed towards the door. At this time of day it was probably someone selling bananas or something.
He opened the door. Madhavi Gogate stood there. ‘Hi,’ she said cheerfully. She had all the assurance of a married woman in her thirties, he noticed; an aunty-style bearing that it was hard to resist.
‘Hello?’ he said doubtfully.
‘Let me in, donkey.’
‘Oh, right.’ He opened the outer door. ‘My aunt’s gone out,’ he said. He was aware of how saggy he felt; his shoulders slumped, his chest seemed to have caved in, and he wasn’t sure whether he had biscuit crumbs around his mouth. He couldn’t imagine what she wanted but doubtless she would now get lost decently.
‘No, I came to see you.’
He stared at her. A terrible suspicion was forming in his mind.
Madhavi came into the house. ‘Now,’ she said pleasantly, as one instructing an idiot, ‘you ask me to sit down and offer me something to eat and drink.’
‘Look, I don’t even know what there is. What do you want?’
She sighed and walked into the living room, where she sat down on the divan. ‘Some juice, or sherbet. Anything cold. And could you put on the fan?’
Ashish hurried to the kitchen. He opened a cupboard and started to rummage: here was an old bottle of Roohafza, and a packet of orange squash crystals.
‘Ashish!’
He returned to the living room. Was she leaving?
Madhavi was still seated; she waved a plump forearm. ‘The fan.’
He turned it on, stared at her, and returned to the kitchen, where he mixed a glass of Roohafza and a glass of squash and put them on a tray with a plate of chaklis.
‘Mm, thanks!’ Madhavi reached out and helped herself to a chakli and the squash. She crunched, then took a sip of the orangeade. Ashish plonked the glass of Roohafza down on the low table. It immediately began to perspire. He glanced at it sympathetically.
‘So, Ashish, what do you do when you’re not studying?’
‘Well –’ he looked towards the window, which was smeared with rain, as though for inspiration. ‘I have various projects,’ he said repressively. ‘In fact, I’m slightly busy just now. So –’
Madhavi leaned towards him. Her face was kind. ‘No friends, huh? Don’t worry, we can hang out, do stuff together sometimes.’
Ashish was outraged. ‘That’s not what I meant. I have several friends – at college. It’s just that I used to live in town, so –’
She beamed at him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’re friends now.’ Then her eye fell on his glass. ‘You’re not having your Roohafza?’
Obediently he lifted it to his mouth; as he drank, the condensation piddled onto his trousers.
‘Oh-oh,’ said Madhavi sympathetically. And then, ‘Well, it’s just water, after all.’
Chapter Ten
Noises came differently today to the man in the cramped room. He heard his younger sister’s voice, clear and plaintive; the cry of a knife sharpener; then voices in the corridor of the old tenement. What was all the racket? He tried to go to the window, but halfway there, he began to feel lightheaded; he stopped and laughed. The base of his skull throbbed. He put up his left hand – his right seemed to have gone dead – and rubbed his nape. He felt unusual, almost euphoric; tired, too.
There were some things on the bed. He swept them onto the floor and lay down. The light bulb was behaving oddly, moving like a kaleidoscope, the ones they used to have as children. You shook them and the pattern altered but the components remained the same, rearranging themselves as you turned the barrel. He saw a particular corner of the house in Tardeo, always people around, Lakshmi, and their youngest brother, Ravindra, who’d died at a few years old – he’d been a sweet little boy. He felt only happiness now, in bubbles, and smiled watching the blurred, tessellate forms of the light. Again the sounds melted into one humming, but beautifully, with a drum beat – he fancied he heard his own name being called; then it stopped. He started to laugh, then wondered if he would vomit. Not yet. The light was different, like midday, but it was the electric lamp. But how wonderful: it was like sunshine in the courtyard where he played badminton with his sister, the shuttlecock flying into the brightness. You ran, blindly, in what you thought was the right direction, then it came down; you couldn’t see it, white falling through white and the sun; finally you lashed out and there was laughter all around if you had missed it. An odd sense of humiliation. He began to shiver. With his toes he felt for the blanket at the foot of the bed. He was shaking as he tore it open; it was heavy, and his fingers slipped on the satin edging. At last he crawled under it. Now, if the light could have been turned off, for it hurt his eyes; but it was a great exertion to envisage this, and instead he drew the blanket over his face; that well-known woolly smell, it smelled of him, ah, who else?
The headache was back; he didn’t feel, after all, so well, and the humming from outside and inside resumed, congealed, heard as through a tunnel, or as though the sounds themselves had weight and flight: they rose, then fell, just out of reach.
Lakshmi put the receiver down. ‘There’s no answer.’
Mohan turned. ‘I’ll go there,’ he said. He tried to feel irritated with Satish, but his own guilt about the moment of ill temper had been poisoning his mood for days now. First there had been the argument with his wife, and then this morning he had had an idiotic dream that he couldn’t quite remember, about looking for but not finding his brother-in-law in a library; he had woken feeling strangely wistful.
‘Shall I ring him one more time?’
‘What’s the point?’ He went to the bedroom to put on his sandals. When he came out she was holding the receiver again. ‘There’s no answer,’ she repeated.
Mohan pocketed his wallet. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, and made for the door.
All the way to Grant Road he didn’t have a good feeling. But, he reasoned to himself, there’d been other times when he’d been more worried. Once, Satish had been supposed to turn up at their house, but hadn’t – this was years earlier, before mobile phones and the like existed – and Mohan had gone to look for him, in exasperation, because Lakshmi was beginning to panic. Eventually he’d found Satish sitting on a bench on the platform at Grant Road station. ‘Satish!’ he’d said accusingly, but also with relief.
‘Oh, Mohan,’ his brother-in-law had greeted him. ‘What are you doing here?’ and he’d shifted along on the bench to make room. Later he’d explained that the afternoon trains had been full; he’d tried to get on and been pushed out again by the crowd in the second class compartment, so he’d simply sat down to wait for a quieter time. Mohan hadn’t recriminated about the lack of even a phone call; it occurred to him that his brother-in-law wasn’t used to people worrying about him.
It was a slow train that Mohan took from Dadar. A pair of crows sat in the open door of the compartment, quarrelling over what might have been a piece of fish. They made him smile; they were more human, these Bombay crows, than many Bombayites remembered to be. The elder, fatter one poked his beak reprovingly at the younger, who pretended to turn his back and sulk. Then, inch by inch, the thinner crow wheedled his way back into the affair, and the elder, despite his frock-coated pomposity, made a few gurgling sounds of acceptance.
Mohan was facing the wrong way, next to the window, so that he could watch the crows. In a few stations’ time the smell of the sea grew stronger and he jumped off the train at Grant Road, which was quiet today. He looked up and down the platform, but Satish wasn’t there.
It was perhaps a fifteen-minute walk from the station. He pas
sed the shacks of a group of Pardhis, those startlingly beautiful tribals who came from elsewhere in the state and always seemed to end up as beggars; they wouldn’t settle down for long enough to go to schools or keep jobs, and had a reputation, unfairly, for being thieves. Two children sat outside one of the shacks, which were really just bits of canvas tied against the station fence; they looked up at him with their enormous, inky black eyes and smiled, and he waved to them. But what a life. Something made him walk faster as he neared the road where Satish lived. Whatever it was, it would be good to get the episode over with. He’d been a fool to have that argument with his wife, even though now, as he considered the usual course of a day spent with his brother-in-law, he remembered why he’d been surly about the invitation. But Satish was family; they were all he had. As a young man he had very much admired Satish – he was more brilliant and educated than anyone Mohan had known. How would Mohan have felt, for example, if his own brother had happened to be in a similar position – alone like Satish? Being obliged to spend large amounts of time with Vivek would, in many ways, have been worse. You only saw yourself truly when you met your siblings, was that true or merely half true? It was in any case an exasperating affair, this unavoidable recognition.
When he came to the building he looked up at Satish’s window and thought for a moment that he saw movement; he was reassured. But this wasn’t the window; Satish’s was at the end of the corridor.
At the foot of the stairs two breathless young children were squealing and chasing each other for a red rubber ball that they bounced off the walls of the open corridor. When he reached the first floor he saw a tall young man and a woman he vaguely recognized as the neighbour standing near Satish’s door, which was closed. Mohan approached them; they looked relieved.
‘Is he here?’ the woman asked.
Mohan was bewildered. ‘Where else would he be?’
‘We thought he might be with you,’ she said. ‘We knocked earlier and there was no answer. I was a little worried.’
He looked from one to the other of their young, blank faces, and realized that they expected him to have a solution. He went to the door, tried, knocked, and then called Satish’s name.
‘It’s me, Mohan,’ he added, feeling foolish; it was a detail for the benefit of the audience. ‘Open the door, re,’ he said more gruffly.
Still silence in the golden-lit passage, where the early evening light warmed the concrete and stone chip floor tiles and the cement parapet of the open corridor that ran next to all the flats.
The young man spoke. ‘Do you think we’d better try to get in?’
Mohan knocked on the door, rattled the bolt again, and called out Satish’s name. Despite the noise of a television from somewhere else, they seemed to hear the fan whirr inside the silent flat.
‘Yes,’ he said.
He and the young man threw their shoulders against the door, and tried kicking it; the bolts were quite solid, though, and Mohan kept imagining the acid remarks his brother-in-law would make when he returned. Finally the young man charged against the door, and there was a tearing sound. They pushed it open.
The tiny apartment was brightly lit and smelled fusty. Mohan went in, and the back of his mind registered that the young man was telling his wife not to follow them. In the electric light, it took Mohan’s eyes a moment to travel between the cupboard, the window, the floor, and then the bed, where there was a bundle in a blanket. He heard himself say something and went to pull away the blanket. Then he knelt, listening to see if he could feel a pulse or any breath.
The young man took out his mobile. ‘Should I call an ambulance?’
Mohan took off his glasses. ‘Yes,’ he said. He squatted next to the bed, looking at his brother-in-law’s face, which was a strange colour; he was contorted, and part of his gums showed. The ear Mohan could see, though, looked quite normal, and this sight somehow made him feel terrible, and indecent. He was perplexed to find a tear rolling down his face.
The young man was dictating the address to the ambulance service. ‘After the post office, take a right – looks like it might have been a stroke. No. No.’
Mohan took out his mobile phone from his pocket. He never used it, and had resisted acquiring it for a long time. He dialled his own number. Ashish picked up.
‘Hello?’
‘Ashish, I’m going to need you to come here with your aunt. Make sure she’s okay.’
‘What –’
‘Now give her the phone,’ Mohan said gently.
His wife came on the line. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
Mohan rubbed his forehead, between his eyes. ‘There’s been an accident,’ he heard himself say, as tiredly and resignedly as though he’d been confessing to something.
Chapter Eleven
‘He was my brother, my only remaining sibling,’ Lakshmi said.
It was the first non-functional sentence she’d uttered in days; it had been two and a half weeks since Satish’s death. Mohan was in his pyjamas. He paused on the threshold of their room and waited for more, but it didn’t come.
‘I know,’ he said eventually. Still silence, and he resumed the journey into the bathroom. He passed a hand over his recently shaven head; the gesture had become a habit. The new hair, quite grizzled, was surprisingly soft.
As he brushed his teeth in the bathroom’s unsympathetic fluorescent light, he considered the cremation. It had been a depressing occasion. Not that these things were ever pleasant, but the continual, drizzling rain hadn’t helped. They had had to have it at an actual burning ground, at Banganga, because there were no slots at the electric crematorium. They hadn’t been many: the three of them, including Ashish; Vivek and his wife; and the young neighbours, who looked mildly embarrassed. Later, Lakshmi had decided to put a small notice in the afternoon paper and have an informal gathering after the eleventh day. About a dozen people appeared for this; they were elderly men and women, several of them Satish’s ex-students. He turned out to have been popular, in his way: he had been the kind of teacher, and certainly the kind of individual, whom few people forgot.
Mohan had found himself offering tea, squash, and snacks to the ageing bachelors and bachelorettes in his house. They in turn proffered their reminiscences.
‘He was so witty. Strict, but also fair,’ one woman said. She was plump, short and slight, with grey hair and spectacles; she wore a modestly cut salwar kameez. He imagined her, years earlier, slim, with long hair in a neat plait: she would have been one of the keen students. Perhaps she had had a special affection for Satish. There were others, too: a high court judge who’d studied under Satish (his driver and police escort waited downstairs next to a white Ambassador); a neighbour’s son whom he’d helped to prepare for the civil service exam; and an earnest, middle-aged woman who had come to Satish for help in writing letters to the municipality about the garden in front of her tenement – a nearby block of apartments was trying to turn it into a parking lot.
Mohan now gargled, spat, used the tongue cleaner and washed his face. He turned out the light and returned to the bedroom, where his wife was a silent mass under the sheet. He shook out his own top sheet, got into bed, and lay quietly for a while, thinking about Ashish. The boy had insisted on shaving his head too. ‘You really needn’t,’ Mohan had pointed out; after all, Satish had been no direct relation of his. ‘No, I’m coming with you,’ Ashish said. Perhaps it had been a sign of loyalty to his aunt. He’d been odd, a little down in the mouth lately, but that could have been anything: the season, worries about his studies, a quarrel with a friend – they hadn’t again seen that rather bovine young man who’d come for dinner. Mohan didn’t want to pry. He’d noticed though that Ashish had been good at the condolence meeting; he’d gone about handing out drinks and introducing people to each other as though shyness was the last thing in the world he’d ever suffered from. He was a funny child, not a child at all, really; they should do something for him. Mohan would remind him again t
o go and see that professor, the one Satish had mentioned, who might give the boy extra tuitions.
Something else went through his mind – something he’d been supposed to do – he didn’t remember, but it would come back.
The fan’s rhythm, the rotating blades and the swinging orbit of the hub, hit a groove that seemed inevitable, as though the appliance were repeating the last phrase uttered in a conversation and the sleepy listener was simply trying to grasp this one remark, over and over.
The rain had been uncertain for a while; it began again. Long, cool showers soaked everything in their reach; while they lasted, the only thing to do was take shelter and wait. One morning, in the damp porch of their block, Mohan stared glumly at the weather. The ground floor stairwell had been hollowed out by an earlier genius; it filled with water whenever there was heavy rain. At the far end of the lane, just after the watchman’s hut, a patch of sunlight gleamed on newly washed leaves. But Mohan remained stuck where he was – it made no sense to rush through the remaining fifty yards of shower, he’d be drenched.
Ashish went off joylessly every day to college; he returned by early evening. When Mohan asked him if he didn’t want to meet his friends any more he just shrugged and carried on drying his head with a towel. His satchel, dripping, was kicked into a corner of his room. ‘I have tea with Mayank from school, sometimes, but otherwise what’s the point of hanging around in town after classes end? May as well come home,’ he said, sounding put-upon in the manner of a much older man.
Mohan tried, in his own way, to cheer Ashish and Lakshmi up. On Sunday morning after breakfast he said robustly, ‘What should we do today?’
No one even glanced up. Lakshmi was reading a section of the paper, her morning cup of instant coffee beside her, and Ashish was wandering towards the television. The flat was damp and gloomy, the electric lights were on; outside it was raining steadily.
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