Mohan repeated, ‘Come on, let’s do something! How about a trip to Kanheri?’ He imagined the park’s fresh smell after the morning rain.
His wife merely looked at him, then went back to her paper. Ashish said, ‘Don’t be funny, Mohan mama, imagine sliding around the caves in this weather.’
Nothing could be done with people like this. Mohan retreated to his chair to fume. He cleared his throat. ‘Ashish,’ he reminded his nephew, ‘don’t forget to call Professor Narayan this week.’
‘Mmh,’ said Ashish. He had assumed his preferred Sunday morning pose, stretched out in front of the television with apparently only his upper back still in contact with the chair.
‘And sit properly, you’ll get a back problem.’
‘Hmh.’
A month later, after the Ganesh festival, it was time to think about clearing up Satish’s flat. They didn’t yet know what was to happen with his things, or what the procedure would be about the flat, which might revert to the housing society. But the dusty, untidy room had been on Mohan’s mind. It was partly to resolve this discomfort that he told his wife, on Friday night, that he would go and make a start the next day.
Lakshmi, sitting on the bed and plaiting her hair, was silent. Her expressions these days were bruised, as though she existed under a perpetual affront.
‘Will you come with me?’ he asked.
She shook her head, and began to tie a thread round the end of the plait. He noticed, incongruously, the grey hairs at the side of her head, and that she looked like a little girl in her printed nightdress.
‘Don’t throw anything away,’ she said.
He was stung. ‘What makes you think I want to go and destroy your brother’s possessions?’ But he reminded himself to be calm. ‘I’ll just go and clean out the cupboards, tidy up a little, and put things in order. Then you can look through his things when you want to, and decide what’s to be done,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from the lawyer?’
It was likely that Satish would have left his things to Lakshmi, but he had little to leave.
‘No, I called the office once, but they said that the man he dealt with is away. They said there is a recent copy of the thing,’ she said. She put her comb down, swung her legs onto the bed and began to unfold her sheet.
‘The will?’
‘Yes, from a month or two ago. You are an executor. They said if there’s no hurry we can have the will read in a couple of weeks when this fellow comes back, he handled all of Satish’s affairs. I don’t care, it doesn’t make any difference, it’s not going to bring him back.’
And she turned onto her side, her back to him.
Mohan stood there, a half-unfolded clean kurta in his hand, feeling unhappy for a variety of reasons: one was that she was so obviously unhappy; another was that she had become sentimental about her brother in a way that was unbounded, impossible to reason with. He sighed, and turned out the light.
The next day, he took a train, changing at Kurla and then at Dadar, and went to Satish’s flat. It was odd to leave the station, pass the smiling Pardhi children playing in a puddle next to their tarpaulin shelter, and walk up the same street, where now the gulmohar’s red flowers were pasted like frail paper toys against the glistening wet macadam and tiny, petal-like leaves fell onto him. It was stranger still to walk up the same concrete staircase – no children played ball in the corridor today – and past the neighbours’ house. He wondered if he should stop and say hello. But their flat was quiet in the fresh, washed morning; they were working young people and probably wanted to sleep late.
Satish’s room wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. The sheets and blanket lay neatly folded at the foot of the bed. Who had remembered to do that? Maybe Ashish, in an effort to tidy up? Mohan walked around, looking for a cloth to clean with, and picked up things that had rolled onto the floor: a bottle of pills, the case for Satish’s spectacles. There was a coating of dust on everything and he began to clean, absent-mindedly, first with the duster and then with the jhadu. He swept up the furry pile of black dust that he garnered from whisking the broom all over the small apartment; he found a pail and the bottle of phenyl and washed the floor, until the familiar chemical smell took over. He opened the windows: the damp, intimate scent of the rain came in; it felt better.
A jar of the health tonic Chyawanaprash stood on the shelf above the electric ring. Mohan unscrewed the lid, brought the bottle near his nose and winced: the chocolatey-looking paste had turned. An old envelope inside the chest of drawers was filled with neatly clipped money-off coupons, in which Satish had written his name and address in his beautiful hand. In the cupboard, the birthday alarm clock, still in its clear packaging, now a little dusty, was ticking away.
Further inside, within an old cigar box, there was a bundle of letters wrapped in a piece of rose-coloured silk that seemed to have come from a wedding sari. Some of them began ‘Dearest S’ and had the signature ‘Vikram’. Mohan wrapped them up without reading more. More researches in the cupboard found Satish’s clothes: six white shirts and a raw-silk bush shirt he wore on special occasions; four ordinary pairs of trousers and one good pair; socks and underwear; a stack of handkerchiefs that were much like Mohan’s but bare of initials.
Mohan also found the deeds to the flat, which had, after all, belonged to Satish. The apartment, despite its dinginess, was a thing of value: it was in south Bombay, not even far from the sea. It was entirely possible, knowing his brother-in-law, that he had left it to someone they’d never heard of: an ex-student, or some association; all that would become clear only later, when they heard the will.
Chapter Twelve
The voice was soft, almost elegantly weary. ‘Hell-o.’
‘Um, hello?’ Ashish said. ‘Professor Narayan?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Uh, this is Ashish Datye. I’m calling, ah, it’s, you know Professor Chitale? Who just passed away? I’m his sister’s husband’s nephew, he might have mentioned me. I’m studying in –’
‘He passed away?’
‘Yes, three weeks ago. There was a notice in the paper,’ Ashish said.
‘Oh, I didn’t know. I haven’t been in touch with him for a little while. I’m very sorry. Was he unwell?’
‘No, it was sudden.’
There was a pause. Ashish was home alone; it was about seven in the evening. He regarded one leg of the table, which was beginning to be veiled in shadow. Above him, the gecko that lived in the drawing room darted across the wall with a little rustle.
‘So Ashish, tell me,’ said the voice, slightly impatient now.
‘Well, Professor Chitale, Satish uncle, he suggested you might be able to give me some tuition. I’m studying English, final year BA.’
‘I see.’
Another pause. Ashish felt ridiculous; he glared accusingly at the gecko, which froze in the middle of an old water stain. It may have believed that, here, it was invisible.
A small sigh from the other end of the line. ‘Why don’t you come and see me one evening and then we can discuss it,’ the voice suggested quietly.
‘Okay sir, but,’ Ashish was beginning. He had no idea what these tuitions were supposed to achieve, or how much they might cost; it seemed gauche to go into all this now, though.
‘Take down the address. 17a, it’s the top-floor flat, Sadanand Society, Lane number 3, Kalina village. You want to go to Santa Cruz station then take a bus: ask for the Jama Masjid.’
‘Okay sir, what time should I?’
‘Shall we say Thursday, five o’clock?’
‘Yes, I’ll –’
‘See you then,’ murmured the voice, and the call was disconnected.
It had been a strange few weeks, Ashish reflected, when he woke the next morning to the usual pealing of Dr Gogate’s car alarm. After the whole nightmarish happening with Sunder, Ashish had had to endure college: for almost a week, people pointed him out to their friends and giggled; some story or other was doing the rounds. Ridicu
le wasn’t a new experience, but it was worse because he was bothering to attend lectures, and had to face it in person. Then there’d been Satish uncle’s death and the unnamed dark cloud that hung, after it, over his aunt and uncle.
He felt very sorry for his aunt and tried, in his own way, to make her feel better: he talked to her nicely in the morning, and started conversations with her about her favourite television programmes. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, he saw; so he removed himself and left her to it. Mohan mama had also been in a funny mood. Yesterday, for example, he had insisted on leaving early, at the same time as Ashish. ‘We’ll walk to the station together,’ he’d said. Ashish, his heart sinking, had agreed.
Mohan wouldn’t take the shortest route; whenever he and Ashish went together, the boy found himself following, at a crab-like tangent, his own shadow up the congested little lanes, winding right then straight then right then straight then left, until the junction arrived as if by surprise.
‘Can’t we take the main road, Mohan mama?’ he muttered.
‘There’s more shade here,’ said his uncle doggedly. And they wound their way on. Mohan seemed to like to read the well-known lanes and notice the changes in their life: the gates of metal tubing whose paint flaked and carried a spore of rust, the overgrown small compounds, the cluttered culverts outside bungalows and low apartment blocks, the weeds that sprang up, bright and green, next to the drains. The lanes smelled leafy, but also dank, the early freshness of the rains long gone.
Mohan passed on small facts to Ashish: ‘Look, that house has been sold.’ A few yards later: ‘Son of the man who lives there is getting married, to a dental hygienist. Girl is from Chennai.’
Ashish grunted. The information, he guessed, came from the dosa man, who heard everything that went on in Saraswati Park.
‘So, which classes do you have today?’
‘French, Shakespeare, history of English literature.’ Ashish hated it when adults quarrelled: it was just then that they decided to take an interest in the junior members of the household, as if to prove to themselves that they were indeed good and kind. He remembered a few occasions in his childhood when, after his parents argued, his father had taken him out to play cricket on the maidan. Ashish wanted to bat endlessly; his father had soon tired of bowling him underarm balls. ‘Enough,’ he’d said irritably after ten or fifteen minutes, ‘time to go home.’
They trudged on in silence for a while. Ashish suddenly stopped and began to brush at his shirt pocket. There was a small green caterpillar on it; the animal curled and writhed on the khaki cotton, which seemed to have confused it. In the light and shade under a tree, he tried to get the caterpillar off.
‘Here.’ Mohan reached out and removed the creature, which continued to wind and unwind; he manoeuvred it onto the pad of his thumb, bent down and put his hand next to a small plant near the rusty gate of a dilapidated house. With the point of his index finger, while Ashish watched, he encouraged the worm onto a leaf. As soon as it attained the familiar surface it hurried away, the shirt experience left behind like a bad dream.
They walked on, Mohan a little straighter, and his eyes brighter than before. Ashish shuffled beside his uncle, breathing in the damp, slightly fetid air. He allowed his satchel to slap against his hip, making a sequence of unpleasing thuds, and remembered the sullen quiet of the morning, with virtually no conversation between his aunt and uncle.
On Thursday, after college, Ashish got off a Western Line train at Santa Cruz. Peanut shells littered the floor; a breeze drifted unhindered through the near-empty compartment; outside, he saw palm trees. The small boy who’d begged assiduously all the way till Bandra now sat quietly at the door, his legs hanging into space.
Ashish waited near the station for a bus to the market. He asked for directions to the Jama Masjid and there asked again; he wandered into the network of back lanes where the city forgot itself and became a village. Here was the rich, unwanted smell of cow dung in a small square. Ashish looked around. A concrete bench, painted a violent mint green, encircled a banyan tree. Next to the tree was a small cigarette kiosk. He approached the man behind it.
‘Sadanand Society?’
The man jerked his hand behind him and to the left. ‘Go down that gully and take the second right.’ Ashish, sweating, obeyed. He was beginning to feel exhausted, and thinking that he’d return after all to the Jama Masjid, get a bus and go home, when finally he turned down what he was convinced was the wrong road and saw it: a crackled blue building, five storeys high, labelled on the gatepost: Sadanand Society, Lane 3. He walked past the geriatric watchman, checked the name boards at the bottom of the stairs and began to climb up. In the square stairwell, light and smells of bleach gathered; he watched his feet on each red cement step.
There was a plant in a terracotta pot outside the dark wooden door of apartment 17. Ashish pressed the bell, heard an electronic ding-dong inside, and watched water trickle from the bottom of the pot to fill the pattern of an existing stain. Behind the door footsteps came towards him; inside, there was the sound of a small, practised scuffle with the door catch.
A slim, fair man opened the door and smiled a wide smile. ‘Ashish,’ he said. He held the door open further and stepped back. ‘Come in.’ He laughed. ‘Oh, I’m Narayan by the way.’
Ashish found himself smiling too, and a little startled. He hadn’t expected the other man to be so young. There was something nice about his face, he thought disconcertedly, an openness: in fact he looked more boyish than Ashish himself, although most of his curly hair was grey, and his skin wasn’t unlined. Yet his gaze was direct, almost challenging. It was as though he was asking a question of Ashish: probably, the boy thought, ‘Are you serious about this?’
He wasn’t, but he was prepared to say out of politeness that he was. When unsure how things were going, he typically went along to see where they would take him. He wasn’t sure if it was curiosity, a lack of confidence, passivity; at this point he nearly smirked because his thoughts were running away with him and the professor was still saying something; they stood between the hall and the living room. Narayan spoke softly, without emphasis, as though he expected to be listened to. Now he paused, looked at Ashish, smiled a little derisively, and raised his eyebrows.
Ashish heard the fan turn in the living room and a crow arguing outside.
Narayan laughed again. ‘So, Ashish? Tell me. What is it you want?’
What a question! Hot and cold running boyfriends, a subscription to satellite television, air conditioning everywhere you could think of and some places you probably couldn’t, self-assurance, expensive shoes, to be famous, to be left alone, to be approved of.
Ashish also laughed, but apologetically; he hoped to convey that he was a foolish student, but one with enough self-awareness to recognize the fact. ‘Well,’ he began, then wondered if he should be more deferential, ‘Sir – my mami’s uncle thought that you might be able to help me ensure that I –’
‘You don’t have to call me sir. Call me Narayan.’ The other man saw the astonishment in Ashish’s face and smiled. His smile was catlike. ‘Or if that embarrasses you, don’t call me anything at all.’ His eyes raked Ashish over.
‘Look,’ the professor went on. ‘I know what your uncle, or your mami’s uncle, or whatever the relationship is, I know what he said. But you, I’d like to know what you think about this. Are you interested in reading and talking about books?’ Once again, his eyes challenged Ashish, asking a question that didn’t seem to be the one he’d spoken aloud.
Narayan repeated, ‘Are you interested in that?’
‘Yes,’ said Ashish quickly.
They remained looking at each other. Then Narayan smiled. Is he going to tell me to leave right now? Ashish wondered.
‘Good,’ Narayan said casually. ‘Then we understand each other. Go, sit, I’ll make some tea.’
The light was dim and ill-tempered: one of those monsoon days when the sun is in hiding. Ashish drifted about the
living room, while small, methodical noises came out of the kitchen. He didn’t want to appear to be snooping, but felt too jittery to sit quietly and wait: instead, he examined the bookshelves, and, conscious of the moment when Narayan would re-enter the room, tried to maintain a critical yet interested expression.
There was a divan, covered in a striped bedspread that seemed deeply familiar. It fitted with the tenor of the room: handloom textiles, terracotta whatnots, a skinny, peculiarly elongated brass figurine made by a canny tribal somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. Ashish was scanning a shelf of DVDs when Narayan came back with two cups; his tread was almost soundless. ‘Here,’ he said quietly, handing Ashish a red mug without a handle. Ashish looked at it with interest: what was this? But the tea smelled good, with a hint of spice.
Narayan stood right next to Ashish; he was nearly as slim as the boy, and slightly taller.
‘Do you like French films?’ he asked. He considered his own shelf intently. Ashish got lost studying the grey hairs at the side of Narayan’s head, and a small wrinkle in the fair skin behind his ear. He realized he was supposed to make some response. ‘Yes,’ he said. He began to babble, ‘Actually I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a French film. No, wait, I saw that one about the girl that came out a few years –’
‘This one is fabulous,’ said Narayan, removing a DVD of La Belle et la Bête. He regarded the cover with nostalgia.
Ashish looked, dubiously, at the image of a horned beast and a feral man. The professor turned. ‘I think you’d like it,’ he remarked. He replaced the DVD with care and, slightly theatrically, went and sat down. Ashish felt obliged to do the same. It was strange, the feeling he laboured under here. It was like a thing seen underwater, which seems to keep moving because of the way the light refracts; he was both indulged and dismissed, pulled and pushed. He found himself behaving oddly, as though enacting a simulacrum of what natural behaviour in this situation would have been.
Saraswati Park Page 12