He took a big glug of tea, noticed how damp the air was, and felt tired, thinking of the journey home and how long it would take; he would be exhausted, in the train.
‘So how was it? How did it go?’ his uncle asked as soon as he came through the door.
‘Well, it was good,’ Ashish said. ‘He’s very educated,’ he added.
‘Of course he is,’ his aunt said. ‘He’s a college professor.’
If I have children, Ashish determined silently, I’m going to tell them every obvious thing that comes into my head. He went to take off his shoes and wash his hands.
When he returned his aunt and uncle were at the table. A plate piled with perfectly round, gold-gleaming puris sat in the middle.
He was hungry and it was good to be home. As he chewed, without noticing the taste of the food, he thought again about the way the professor, or Narayan (Narayan, he told himself), had examined him while they sat talking.
‘So do you think it’ll be useful?’ his uncle asked. ‘Seeing the professor? Do you think it’ll help?’
‘He’s very nice,’ Ashish said. He tried not to consider how they had had a long and varied conversation in which Narayan had talked about a range of books and films that Ashish didn’t know, and, of course, about himself. Now, in the bright pool of light at the dining table, his aunt and uncle asked questions and he, automatically, his mind elsewhere, gave answers. Narayan had said they’d work out the cost of the tuitions later, it would be a belated favour to Satish uncle, who’d been his teacher; he, Narayan, had been teaching at the university, yes, but he had left a couple of years ago, to concentrate on his own research; he didn’t know if Narayan gave other tuitions; he didn’t think so but he wasn’t sure.
Ashish blinked; it seemed unreal to be at home as though nothing had happened in the evening. But nothing had happened, he reminded himself.
‘Tired?’ said his aunt.
‘Don’t stay up late studying,’ Mohan mama said. ‘You need your sleep too.’
Ashish smiled and put down his spoon. He was tired, it was true. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said sleepily. He felt very happy. My luck is changing, he thought, and he left the table, brushed his teeth and went to sleep without even checking to see if the owls were there.
Two days after Ashish’s first visit to Narayan, he answered the phone at Saraswati Park. It was a voice he didn’t recognize.
‘Gautam?’
‘No, it’s Ashish. Mohan mama’s nephew,’ he said.
‘Is your aunt there?’
‘They’re both out, can I take a message?’
‘Tell her to call her nephew Chintan, in Nagpur. I’ll give you the number.’ After he had done so, he told Ashish that his father, Lakshmi’s elder brother’s son, was unwell. Ashish was slightly confused from trying to remember this relationship, but he recalled that Lakshmi had close relatives in Nagpur; his cousins used to spend summers at what his aunt called ‘my brother’s house’, though her eldest brother had died many years earlier. ‘It’s quite serious, she might want to come,’ the voice finally told Ashish.
‘I’ll tell her, as soon as she gets home.’
When his aunt and uncle returned in the evening – Mohan from work and Lakshmi from the market – Ashish delivered the news. His uncle, he noticed, looked immediately guilty and glanced at his wife. Lakshmi got on the phone and had a twenty-minute conversation, after which she decided to go to Nagpur the next day. Mohan went out to arrange her ticket – he’d do this through an acquaintance in the railways, who might be able to get a seat in the emergency quota. Lakshmi went to their room and started packing.
Chapter Thirteen
Mohan sat in the apartment at dusk, exercise book open, pencil in hand and the volume of Mark Twain with the wide margins next to him. Crows screeched; koyals interrogated, whee-ooo whee-ooo; a brainfever bird made its unsettling rattle and whoop. A car reversed: its klaxon played the undying patriotic hit ‘Saare Jahaan Se Achchha’. He tried not to grit his teeth.
Ashish was out; he’d gone for the second time this week to meet his tutor. The arrangement seemed to be working well, so that was one less thing to worry about: now the boy would have a reason to maintain interest in his studies.
The flat was quiet; the living-room gecko, which seemed to have grown much larger, chirruped from time to time, or moved about with a rustle. Mohan found himself looking at his wife’s chair, in front of the silent television. It was five days since she’d left for Nagpur; she’d forgotten to take her shawl. It was a large thing, flecked with grey and made of rough wool; a garment intended for a shepherd and cold nights in the desert, not for this temperate city. But she liked to wrap herself in it on cooler monsoon nights. At any given time a long thread dangled from it; he remembered her, the evening before they found out about her cousin’s illness, sitting in the chair, wearing the shawl and watching the latest episode of Daughters of the House. At an advertisement break, she’d got up for a glass of water and moved out of the patch of light thrown by the set; the loose thread trailed behind her, snagging on a chair arm as she passed, so that it had seemed to try to pull her back.
He got up now, opened the shawl, shook it out and folded it neatly, then hung it again over the back of the chair.
On Sunday evening, with dusk in the lane outside and the old sensation of emptiness and mild dread in his stomach, Mohan began to read the essay that harboured his notes: the woman in the green sari, the youngest boy in the ironing hut, and others besides. It was a review of a biography of Shelley, which blamed all the poet’s problems on his wife. Mohan read about Harriet and her letter to Shelley’s publisher when the young man disappeared for days to visit a woman he’d fallen in love with over Italian lessons. He was always falling in love, and his wife had little to do but sit at home and wait for him to return.
Crickets chirped outside and the lane became quite dormant; sounds came of Sunday evening television and the radio in the ironing boys’ hut; Mohan read on in the light of the hundred-watt bulb.
‘Mohan mama, it’s nine thirty. Should I make some instant noodles?’
He looked up, unmoored. Ashish.
‘I’m going to make some instant noodles, you haven’t eaten, have you?’
‘No, no.’ He got up and put the book to one side, hastened out of the circle of light and put on the passage lamp. The boy looked surprised; he must be starving.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Nine thirty,’ Ashish repeated.
‘Late, you must be hungry. Wait, I’ll go and –’ But the shop would be closed at this hour on a Sunday. It would have to be noodles.
In the kitchen, the tube light flickered and its noise joined the thrum of the refrigerator. Mohan found cheese slices, those magical things which, when the plastic wrapping was peeled away, shone as highly as before; tomatoes, a cucumber, and he knew there were onions and potatoes.
‘How about toasted sandwiches? And also noodles, if you like.’
‘Okay.’
Ashish sliced the tomato and cucumber while Mohan buttered the bread and boiled the potato and water for the noodles.
‘How’s the study going?’
‘Oh –’
But Ashish met his eyes more openly than usual, perhaps because the question was put more casually. He shrugged. ‘Oh, you know.’ He paused. ‘But did you know there are owls in the building opposite? White ones.’
‘Really? I haven’t seen them.’ Their bedroom faced the other way, towards the watchman’s hut.
‘Yeah, I see them at night – they come out to hunt and they sit in the windowsill of that empty flat.’
‘Owls,’ Mohan mused. ‘They used to come to the other building, the one that got knocked down, near that big banyan tree. They like empty houses.’
‘Here.’ Ashish passed over the sliced tomato.
Mohan remembered now that he hadn’t kept his appointment with Yezdi; it had been for the day after Satish’s death, a phrase that still seeme
d wrong. He would ring up and explain, he thought.
Instead, after dinner, when Ashish went to his room, Mohan sharpened his pencils, got out a new notebook, and sat at the table, rearranging some pickle jars and rusted baby food tins to make room. He opened the notebook, laid it on a woven grass table mat, picked up the Mark Twain, rifled through his notes and quickly found the one he was looking for, about the boys in the ironing hut. He wrote a few sentences about the youngest, who’d recently arrived in the city. As he wrote, he looked less at the notes in the margin and thought less often of the real young man. Instead, he found he described a face that mingled the high forehead of a cousin of his with his brother’s small mouth; and the way the boy walked reminded him of nothing so much as the jaunty tread of the young kachrawala.
The objects around the letter writer seemed to look on with interest: the pickle jars with their stained and faded labels; the old table mats; the chairs, one of which had a broken seat. It always had to be removed when Satish came for lunch, in case he sat on it and thought, or decided to think, that he had been given it on purpose.
The next day Mohan went to the newspaper building to leave a note for Yezdi. In it, he explained rather stiffly that because of a death in the family he hadn’t been able to keep the earlier appointment; but he would be happy to meet Yezdi at another time, if it was convenient. He signed, Mohan; then added his last name and telephone number.
He worked on the stories every day. Ashish came back late, and there was no one at home, a thing he didn’t want to think about; he had spoken to Lakshmi once since she reached Nag-pur, and she had said that she planned to stay for some time. Her cousin’s condition was poor but stable. ‘It’ll be a help, if I’m here to nurse him. And it’s good to spend some time with my family after a long time,’ he heard her voice saying on the crackling line. He’d paused, waiting for her to ask him to come, or bring her anything she needed. She hadn’t.
‘But do you need anything? I could come, if you need more clothes or anything,’ he’d finally said.
‘No, why would I? I can borrow whatever I need.’
So he’d managed. She’d suggested he ask the maid from the Gogates’ to come and clean the floors and cook a little, and he did that. It was an expense, but it was fine, with the money that Megha insisted on sending every month and which had been accumulating pointlessly. It occurred to him only now that they should have done this earlier; then Lakshmi would have had more time to herself.
The maid, with a friendly contempt, would give him orders via Mrs Gogate, with whom he left the key: ‘She says buy whole-wheat flour’, or ‘She asked you to get phenyl for the floor’. Sometimes, in rudimentary handwriting and with poor spelling, she left short, direct notes: Milk is over, or Buy laundry soap.
If he felt abandoned then he also had the freedom to jettison his old life. So every evening, while waiting for Ashish to return, he’d sit under the lamp and write. He felt a lovely quiet come off the page. It was rich and held the shards of past experiences; a feeling here and there, the sight of a building that one passed every day and yet had never really noticed. Sometimes, he would rush home, thinking, I must write; but when he arrived and sat down, he would feel baffled and absent-minded, wondering what the urgency could have been. When he was unsure what to write and his mind shied from the activity, he’d find himself wandering away from the table, then looking back at it; he’d find something to do near the window, or at the armchair; go to the desk calendar that sat on the dining table, and turn a page.
Two days later, at about seven, the telephone rang. He hurried over to it.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Mohan?’
‘Yes?’
But it wasn’t anyone from Nagpur.
‘It’s Yezdi,’ Yezdi said grandly.
‘Oh. You got my note?’
‘Yes, you said something had happened in your family?’
‘My brother-in-law was taken ill. Actually he passed away,’ Mohan said.
‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry,’ Yezdi said without great interest. There was a pause. ‘So are we going to meet?’
Mohan hesitated. After all, their falling-out had been a long time earlier. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘Where do you work now, Mohan?’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘I’m a letter writer,’ he said. ‘At the GPO.’
‘A what?’
‘Letter writer. I write letters for other people.’
‘But how fascinating! Of course, I’d almost forgotten that profession still existed – well, anyway, that must be very interesting. So we’re almost neighbours? I can’t believe we haven’t met all this time. Will you come to the office for tea? How about tomorrow?’
Mohan agreed to meet Yezdi the next afternoon at five in the Indian Record office.
The next day was sluggish, without customers. Earlier, a day like this would have depressed him; he would have walked up and down the colonnade, talking to the clerks, visiting the philately section, or seeing if anyone in the crowded, confusing main hall of the GPO needed help. Now he just sat and watched the shadows of the banyan tree on the road and the passing faces.
It began to rain. People hurried under their umbrellas, flimsy portable domes, as though each passer-by was trying to carry his shelter along with him.
Mohan thought, A man goes on a journey…He had no idea what the rest of the sentence was, but a restlessness entered his soul along with the weather and he saw the open windows of a train travelling through the hills, when rain rolls in soft billows through the compartment and the passengers squeal in pleasure. The world outside is green and soft as though it had just appeared from a misty cocoon; even the thought of a state transport bus, doggedly continuing on the highway through the blowing rain, seemed full of mystery and meaning to him now.
The pavements became shamelessly wet, like the cheeks of a movie-goer who cries at a film and makes no attempt to hide it.
When Khan heard where Mohan was going he became quite excited. ‘You never said! You know him? But he’s famous.’
‘Well, not famous exactly,’ Mohan protested.
Khan became animated. ‘Who hasn’t heard of Yezdi Sodawaterbottlewala? In Bombay, at least. Who hasn’t seen him on television? Who hasn’t –’
‘Shh, shh,’ said Mohan hastily.
‘Hey, tell him to send someone to write about our building – it’s about to fall down and the landlord isn’t doing anything. Also about the drains in Bhendi Bazaar.’
‘Yes yes.’
At the Indian Record building Mohan insinuated himself into a lobby packed with aggrieved looking people: most seemed to be commercial travellers, men with polycotton shirts, briefcases, and several pens in their shirt pocket. After a few minutes of sweating and waiting for the half-second when the rotating standard fan would blow cool air his way, he went to the counter.
‘I’m here to see Yezdi Sodawaterbottlewala,’ he said.
‘Appointment?’ enquired the pert young woman.
‘Yes, he asked me to come.’
She flicked through her book and dialled an extension. ‘Sir, there’s someone to see you –’ she covered the receiver and enquired, ‘Name?’
‘Karekar.’
‘There’s a Mr Karekar to see you. Shall I – yes, I’ll give him a visitor’s pass and send him up.’ She hung up. ‘Editorial, second floor,’ she told Mohan.
He was issued with a nasty piece of plastic. ‘Clip this to yourself,’ the young woman, probably about his younger daughter’s age, told him. He smiled and nodded, wanting to kick Yezdi. At the lift another thin, pinched-looking woman checked his umbrella and demanded in a harsh voice, ‘Any electronic items? Camera? Video recorder? Laptop?’
Where, Mohan wondered silently, do you think they are? Down my trousers? ‘No,’ he said.
‘Please wear your visitor’s pass.’
He pretended to fumble with it while he waited for the lift. It came, and a jovial man in white uniform asked w
hich floor Mohan wanted.
‘Second. Editorial’.’
The liftman nodded majestically, as though he’d been a chauffeur told to drive to the Taj Mahal hotel. ‘Sir, editorial is to the left,’ he said when they reached the second floor. Mohan passed an old linotype machine, a more splendid version of the one they’d had at the printing shop, and entered a vast hall full of desks, computers and people. He wandered slowly, getting a few strange looks. Then he stopped a young man handing out glasses of tea that he carried in a plastic basin.
‘Do you know where Mr Sodawaterbottlewala sits?’ Mohan was asking him, just as a familiar voice let out an outraged bray.
‘Eh, Sudhir!’ The tea boy turned and grinned; he pointed Mohan towards a corner near the window. There was a small glass cabin from which the voice emerged. ‘Likes his tea,’ he confided. ‘Gets very angry if I miss him out. For you?’
‘No thanks. I’ll take it to him, though.’ He relieved the boy of a single glass and went towards the cabin. He pushed open the door.
‘Arre, Mohan!’ Yezdi, still enormous and now grizzled, thighs spreading across his chair, waved one hand in a gesture of excitement that reminded Mohan of a sea creature he’d seen on the National Geographic channel – one with long whiskers. Sea lion, perhaps, or walrus.
‘Ah, and tea’s come too! I thought that fellow was going to miss me out again, he’s very slack. Two blessings at once!’
Mohan handed him the glass. Yezdi took a large sip before placing it on a coaster atop one of the piles of paper that littered his desk. They shook hands. Yezdi wore a large emerald ring on his right paw. ‘Mohan, it’s so good to see you, how have you been?’
‘Not bad, you tell me,’ Mohan said. He sat on the other chair, his back straight.
Below the grand high ceilings in the newsroom, people seemed to be scurrying perpetually. But as he half listened to what Yezdi was saying, Mohan noticed also how the journalists smiled and paused to swing on the edges of the partitions separating desks; they joked and dithered, this was their daily circuit. Like overexcited hummingbirds, they made the rounds from flower to flower, stopping to refuel on gossip and the tea, which was so sweet he could smell the sugar.
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