From far away in the big room there was a small kerfuffle, then a crash and tinkle: the chai boy had dropped a glass. Immediately there was a cheer; the whole room broke into applause; some whooped, others stamped their feet. The thin chai boy crouched and began to pick up the pieces of glass. Yezdi’s face softened with amusement.
Eventually Yezdi had enough of introducing Mohan to people in the office: the chief sub-editor, the news editor, the city editor, all of whom looked harassed and smiled at Mohan before asking Yezdi, ‘Are you giving anything today?’ As though he’d been a cow dispensing wishes, Mohan thought. Yezdi said no. He winked at Mohan. ‘Come, will you walk to Crawford Market with me? I like to go once a day if I can. It’s exercise and I also get to buy an apple instead of eating all these greasy snacks.’ A uniformed waiter had just appeared, with plates of pohe that glistened with oil, and which he put down at certain seats only. ‘You’ll have?’ Yezdi offered his to Mohan, who said no, thanks.
They set off from the newsroom and waited for the lift. When it came, they descended two floors, and walked out of the grand porch and towards Crawford Market.
‘How is your health, anyway?’ Mohan felt obliged to ask. It was strange, to see Yezdi, and then to be polite to him, one wonder followed by another.
‘Oh, very well. That is, I have some BP and a slight heart murmur,’ Yezdi said cheerfully, ‘but obviously I’ll live to be ninety-four at least, because everyone in my family does.’
‘Mm,’ Mohan said and nodded.
‘And you?’
‘Oh, very well, very well. So far,’ he added, and his face darkened and then brightened again.
It had rarely taken Mohan longer to walk such a small distance. While Yezdi lumbered along, greeting all kinds of street vendors and other passers-by, Mohan, in the gaps, at Yezdi’s request, told Yezdi about his children. ‘My younger daughter is in the US, in Iowa, she works for a computer company,’ he was saying when they finally reached Crawford Market. Yezdi hailed the proprietor of one of the first fruit stalls, where every kind of fruit shone waxily under the porch; they left again after he’d bought his usual, a single, ruinously expensive imported apple.
‘I just don’t think our desi ones are as good, Mohan. The bite, the crunch, the sweetness,’ he said, and Mohan grinned, and said, ‘Hm.’
They walked back again, slowly, alongside the garden of the art school, and Mohan, his attention drifting, looked in at the dusty leaved trees and the old stone buildings and thought, Kipling, his father had worked there and he’d been born in Bombay. Somewhere he’d read a poem about those early days. But he hadn’t come back to the city after returning to England.
‘Mohan, I feel bad that we haven’t been in touch for all these years. It’s my fault, in part.’ Yezdi paused. They were near the Anjuman-i-Islam school; the front playground was empty – school had been over for some time. The last flare of sun from Mohan’s right squeezed through the railings and made him squint. Do you even remember what happened, you fat rascal, he wondered.
‘Let’s keep in touch now Mohan, it’s sad to lose contact with old friends.’
‘Yes yes,’ Mohan said gently.
‘You must come home some time, though my wife doesn’t keep very well – but my parents would like to see you, my mother still remembers you – otherwise, let’s have lunch together one day.’
Mohan smiled. They shook hands and Yezdi rolled into the porch of the Record building. Mohan thought he’d go home. At the station he realized the plastic visitor’s pass was still in his pocket; he surreptitiously left it on a corner seat in the train.
When he got home, both doors were shut: Ashish was still out. The phone began to ring, and he fumbled with the lock, hurrying, and pulled the inner door open. He ran and got to the instrument while it was still ringing.
‘Hello?’
‘Don’t shout,’ his sister’s precise voice said.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. I was expecting a call. How are things?’
‘Not bad, except that Indore is very hot, and the flat we’ve been allocated isn’t very convenient, and I don’t know anyone, and the shops near here aren’t good,’ she began. Eventually she broke off to ask to speak to her son.
‘He isn’t here, I’ll tell him you called. He might be out having tuitions with the professor I mentioned to you. But he’s fine,’ he said, looking about the empty flat. ‘Everything is fine.’
There was an uncertain, slightly critical silence at the other end. He waited, but finally reminded himself that it was true: so far, nothing had gone wrong.
‘How’s Milind?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ his sister said. ‘Just goes to work and doesn’t notice anything much else.’
‘Good. I’ll tell Ashish,’ he said, and hung up.
There was a last stormy day or two, when grit blew half-heartedly through the house and in the air and people wiped their eyes and sighed; one squall, and that was it, the season had changed. It had been a bad monsoon, not in the sense of poor rainfall–there had in fact been more than usual, but oddly distributed in a few days of torrent and floods, and long dry spells.
When he opened the notebook again and began to read what he had written he sighed; the pictures in his head were so much more beautiful. Here the words were heavy and the rhythm staccato. It wasn’t what it could have been; it wasn’t what he had thought.
He put the notebook away.
But later, when he was walking through the lanes, and after that, at dinner time, and at night when he sat reading in the chair, his mind wandered into the world of the story. The boy from the ironing hut had become a new person, who had a whole life about which Mohan constantly reminded himself: the names of his cousins, his early childhood outside the city, his marriage, even what he thought about when the ironing boys closed the door of the tin hut in the afternoons to sleep. The story had no real shape but he continued to tell it to himself; before he went to bed, he sat at the table, elbows planted amid the different jars of jam and pickle, tins of drinking chocolate and baby milk, and smiled.
He went inside to clean his teeth and the familiar objects in the bathroom were transfigured, and somehow luminous: from his cake of alum in the old soap tin, to the squeezed, half-empty tube of his wife’s toothpaste, which was clove-flavoured; she had used it since she was a child and refused to try any other brand. The strange fluorescent light bounced off the white tiles; it seemed to taste metallic in his mouth. He held the toothpaste tube for some time, looking at the wrinkles and minute indentations where it had been crushed (everyone in his household, in response, probably, to the distress they knew it caused him, squeezed toothpaste tubes from the middle). The object appeared to be telling him something. But what? He was tired, he thought finally; he turned out the bathroom light and went into the darkened bedroom. Here there was an absorbed sense of quiet. A diffuse orange glow from the street lamp burnished corners of the well-known furniture: the bevelled edge of the steel cupboard’s door, and part of the mirror. The fan hummed, a soothing sound, and air moved impersonally about the room.
Chapter Fourteen
The credits rolled. Ashish stretched. ‘But what does it mean,’ he asked, ‘400 Blows?’
‘It’s an expression,’ Narayan said. ‘It can’t really be translated.’ He got up and watched the rest of the credits intently, ejected the DVD, and replaced it in its case. It was nearly dark; he walked to the window and pulled the half-drawn curtains quite closed. ‘But did you like the film?’
‘Yes, very much.’ Ashish tried to run through the images; the one that stayed with him was the young Antoine, chucked into his bedroom for bad behaviour and daydreaming his way into another world.
Narayan seemed to consider Ashish’s face. ‘So whom do you like better, Truffaut or Godard?’
Their meetings had found a pattern: when Ashish arrived, there’d be tea, then, shortly afterwards
, a discussion, or more often, a film screened in half-darkness. While the television flickered, Ashish was aware not just of the figures on the screen – Antoine, his rebellious face above his white collar and black sweater – but also of the audience, himself and the teacher, bodies silent and warm in the dark.
He thought of L’Argent de poche and the young boy taking out his money from a piggy bank to buy flowers for his friend’s mother, whom he was a little in love with. She’d assumed they were from his father, a tragedy so minute no one even realized it had taken place. ‘Truffaut,’ he said.
‘Oh no, Godard’s the one. Genius, the man’s a genius!’ Narayan declared. In his fierceness he seemed to stand straighter, his thin shoulders thrown back.
Ashish smiled and was silent. He listened to the train horns outside – the track passed not far from the building – and a murmur of voices in the lane below. It was nearly time to leave.
But Narayan sat down again. He sprawled in his armchair, regarding Ashish.
‘Do you believe in fate?’ he asked.
Ashish nearly giggled, it was a line from a Hindi film; but he wasn’t sure whether Narayan was joking.
‘Yes,’ he said, eyeing the teacher to work out which would be the answer that produced the right effect. ‘Maybe not completely – I don’t think everything happens without our being able to control it. Just most things.’ He sighed inwardly, thinking, Sunder, and my predicament in general.
Narayan smiled. He looked at Ashish from under half-closed eyes.
‘I’m not sure that’s quite the way to think about it,’ he said. His eyes, both soft and mercenary under the heavy lids, swept Ashish up and down. One eyebrow seemed to lift slightly. Ashish waited. Narayan finally exhaled, and rose. ‘I think we can leave it there for today,’ he said gently.
‘Oh, yes. Sure. Thanks.’ Ashish scrambled up.
‘See you on Monday?’
Ashish was already at the door, opening the catch. ‘Yes, Monday. Thanks,’ he repeated, managing to waggle his head at the same time as sliding out of the door.
On the way home, in the train, he sat near the window, leaned his head on the boards behind him and, as so often, replayed the evening that had just taken place, with a few tweaks here and there. What, for instance, had Narayan meant when he’d looked into Ashish’s eyes (and up and down the boy’s body, but he expunged that bit for now) and said, ‘You have a good mind, you think clearly about things’ ? He must have meant…Here the assistant director of Ashish’s imagination obligingly set up a scene. Narayan and Ashish sat side by side on the professor’s divan, hand in hand, and looked into each other’s eyes – or wait, should it be somewhere better by way of location? Goa? Sunset? Night-time? Anyway, looking into each other’s eyes – and Narayan rubbed the back of Ashish’s neck. He murmured, ‘You know, I knew as soon as I met you that this was going to be something special.’ Ashish, in this incarnation, was cool. He just smiled.
Fantasy, it appeared, had access only to a limited range of storylines, the point of which was a basic emotional satisfaction that rarely became boring; reality was more inventive, better shaped, he could acknowledge that. But was it better to get what you wanted or to appreciate the complexity of circumstances that continued to frustrate you? The bruised optimism of his uncle’s face floated in front of his mind’s eye, and that question was despatched for another day.
The train pulled into Parle station; Ashish watched the boy at the glass-fronted snack stall, a lighted oasis of grease and the marks left behind by ritual, repeated wiping with a dirty cloth. In a moment the train set itself into motion once more, and the orangey lit-up kiosk moved behind them to join the blur of lighted spaces that made islands against the night.
After dinner, his uncle descended into one of the infrequent bad moods dreaded by his entire family. Mohan mama’s good humour was an act of will for which he had the necessary discipline at least three hundred and fifty days in the year. The other days were not good days. He would get up and, in response to a simple remark at breakfast, snarl suddenly. It was as though dustcovers hung over any part of life that might have been fun. These moods weren’t just anger, Ashish recalled Megha telling him. ‘It’s like the death of everything, it’s so depressing.’ After a couple of days during which the rest of the family tiptoed around Mohan like silent shadows circling a storm cloud, the tension would usually ease. But this time the bad mood had only just begun; Ashish took cover. He went downstairs, to Madhavi’s house.
Hanging out with Madhavi had become a habit: he liked the loud cheerfulness of her house, where the television was usually on, spurting out the news or a comedy programme; Madhavi floated between the college books in her room, and the living room, where a conversation with her mother was always in some stage of unfolding. Ashish would never ordinarily have dreamt of being friends with a girl he wasn’t related to, much less one who was younger. But he liked Madhavi: she was practical, down-to-earth, and intelligent. Her house was always open and her mother welcoming – Ashish avoided her father who, distressingly, wore tiny shorts at home; he would smile benevolently at Ashish before returning to doing the crossword with a gold-plated fountain pen.
This evening Ashish clattered and flapped down the stairs and waved to Madhavi’s mother through the grille of the inner door before letting himself in.
‘Ashish, you’ll have ice cream?’
‘No thanks aunty. Hello uncle, namaskaar aaji,’ Ashish rattled off to Madhavi’s father and grandmother, who were in the living room. He strode down the passage towards Madhavi’s room. The door was open, and she was lying on the bed, a textbook open in front of her while she yakked on the phone. ‘Haan, hahaha, no…not really.’ She looked up on Ashish’s entry and waved at the desk chair. ‘Haan, Shilpa, no, Ashish has come. Ha ha, don’t be stupid. No he’s not. Shaddup. Okay, call me later.’ She dropped the phone, and sat up. ‘Ashish, I spoke to the gardens officer today.’
He sighed. It was one of Madhavi’s habits, housewife-like, to talk to the people in front of her as though they too had been involved in the conversation in her head. ‘What?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘About the tree, Ashish.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
Madhavi’s current project was saving the banyan tree in the empty plot from the builders. She had called the ward office a few weeks earlier and found out that, as per the Maharashtra (Urban Areas) Preservation of Trees Act, 1975, it was illegal for anyone to prune, much less cut down, the tree without applying in writing for permission. But since then the rains had started, and it was more commonplace to see fallen branches on the road, or uprooted gulmohar trees that had toppled in a storm. Madhavi had done her research – she’d taken several photographs of the tree, hassled the gardens officer endlessly to come and visit it, and looked up every newspaper article she could find about tree-cutting.
She went to her desk and picked up a sheaf of printouts. ‘It says here that contractors will prune trees and cut much more than they’re supposed to and sell the extra wood!’
‘Hm,’ Ashish said. He was now regretting refusing the ice cream, and considered whether to tell Madhavi to ask for some. His eye skated over the pleasant, girly confusion of things in her room – CDs, books, hair clips, notes, magazines – and he wondered where her Calvin and Hobbes collection, a favourite of his, could have got to.
‘Also that they’ll cut the tree in the night and in the morning claim that it fell in a storm.’
‘Yes yes.’
‘And that –’
‘Look, are you just going to read things out to me now? Don’t you have homework to do?’
She put down the clippings and pushed her black-framed glasses up her nose. ‘I don’t trust the tree officer,’ she announced.
‘So what?’
‘So we’d better do something.’
‘Like?’
‘Like keep a watch on it, at least.’
‘What, you want to mount a vigil for the tree? What do you thin
k this is, Narmada?’ Ashish got up and started rifling through her CDs. ‘Where’s your Kishori Amonkar CD?’ He felt like listening to something beautiful and familiar.
‘Ashish! Gandhiji said that we have to be the change we want to see in the world.’
In that case, Ashish thought, I’d have to be a very good-looking boy who’d sleep with anyone and make no fuss about it.
‘Okay, okay,’ he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Mohan held the receiver awkwardly, bending his head as though to catch what a mumbling, irascible person was saying. He didn’t understand.
‘So when will you come back?’ he repeated.
There was an exhalation. Was she angry?
‘I can’t say,’ Lakshmi said.
‘All right, well, let me know when you know.’ He wished he could be more authoritative; things were getting out of hand. There had been no argument, he reminded himself, even as his stomach pulled away from him into an unending void. If there had been no argument it couldn’t be that bad. Therefore, in the course of things, she would come back.
‘All right,’ she said, while he was still reasoning this. ‘I’ll call again in a few days, or you have the number.’ She hung up.
Mohan sat in the living room in the bluing dusk. He looked at the familiar clutter and ran similar stories through his mind. It could be nothing. She had simply gone to look after a relative who was ill and stayed for a while; these things were normal. He wandered towards the tea chest and noticed that the old alarm clock told the wrong time: it said eleven forty-three. But when he lifted the heavy, rust-spotted thing to his ear he heard a low rumble; it hadn’t quite stopped.
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