One of Ashish’s blue rubber chappals protruded from under a chair – he left them here and there at strange, hasty angles as though abandoned in a moment of crisis. The boy’s arrival had made more work for Lakshmi; had it been something Mohan had forced on her? But she was so fond of Ashish, more than of his sister, and certainly more than of Vimla. Mohan kicked the slipper back under the chair.
She had left, but not, surely, in real anger. He found himself trailing along, picking up and putting down ornaments, some of which she’d begun to acquire soon after their marriage: a flat brass turtle that she’d bought outside the temple at Alandi; you were supposed to immerse it in the tank. She’d smiled, he remembered, and decided to keep the turtle. He replaced it and sat in an unfamiliar place on the divan; he felt odd, like a stranger in the house.
That trip – it had been after they married, and they’d gone first to a cousin of hers in Pune and then to nearby tourist spots – Saswad, Alandi, Karla. Lakshmi’s feet were still reddened from the mehendi; she wore jewellery and a new sari every day. Somewhere – he couldn’t remember if it had been Saswad or Alandi – in an alcove in a whitewashed wall near the temple, there had been a man with a yellow songbird that picked fortunes for an anna. Lakshmi, his new wife, was allowed to stroke the silky head of the bird. Its owner prompted it, ‘Come, choose a piece of paper.’ The small bird hopped on a tray of curled-up notes, looking cross; it eventually pecked at one. The man unrolled it and read, ‘When you want to have a child, if you go to a Shiv temple and light a lamp, you’ll get a son.’ A year later, returning from a Sunday visit to her parents’ house, they had remembered and gone into the next temple, which happened to be a Shiv temple, and lit a lamp. The first child had in fact been a son, Gautam; Mohan had secretly hoped for a girl.
That story now seemed to belong to another person. The early complicity and laughter of the marriage, where had it gone? He remembered other things from that time – they’d for some time lived at home with his mother, his sister, who wasn’t yet married, and Vivek and his wife. Lakshmi had been happy when the old house was sold and they could move here; for Mohan it had been a wrench to leave. When they were moving out there had been heavy rain for three days, then flooding at high tide, a few hours before the movers arrived. The sky was grey and lightless, frightening; the boxes were ready, crates nailed together, and he and Vivek wrote names and destinations on them with an indelible marker borrowed from the printing shop. The four small children, to their regret, had been sent away with Vimla and Lakshmi; they loved splashing about in the dirty water that came up to their chests, but no one had time to keep an eye on them.
It had been the storm water drains, as usual. The drains, down which everyone in the city throws things they wish to lose forever, from rubbish to the occasional unidentified body; the drains had clogged. When the rainfall and tide rose they could contain no more, and the detritus welled into the streets and gardens; people tutted and waded through the opaque, foul-smelling liquid.
Mohan had thought he would go upstairs one last time, alone, and look at the empty upper floor – the front room now stripped of everything but the patch of sunlight; the passage; the bedrooms. Vivek, though, called out to him, ‘Just check those guys have tied the boxes on the last cart properly!’ and Mohan ran down to shout after the movers, who waved and nodded to him and carried on.
Vivek came out of the door and locked it. He pocketed the key and looked at Mohan.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Let’s go now.’
Mohan was too embarrassed to ask for the key and return inside while his brother waited, so he followed him down the road, which now resembled nothing so much as a gutter. But a bird broke into song from a peepal tree as they passed the recreation ground, and the house like a person remained in his mind, hurt and still waiting for him to take his leave.
He walked around the room now, trying to remember what life had been like before he’d married. The period was vague; he remembered early childhood, and the painfully sensitive time before adolescence, but it was slightly absurd to think of himself as an adult before he had a family of his own. He glanced at Lakshmi’s chair. Had there arisen, in the interval between their wedding and now, demands that he hadn’t been able to fulfil? Had she changed? Was he supposed to have changed? Had it been, he wondered darkly, the television? Had their life failed to provide the kind of excitement that she might have enjoyed? He saw her calm face in his mind, and frowned.
He paced in front of the bookshelf; he was, he decided, having some sort of afternoon nightmare, possibly connected with poor digestion or something of the sort. He gazed at the familiar spines but received no consolation. So would it be like this, one of those arrangements where two people live largely apart but continue to be married in name?
He sat down again, and began to wait.
This time it wasn’t like the other stories: he saw the whole thing at once. It began with an image of his father’s legs from the knee down, a part of his white dhoti visible and his thin calves, which were the colour of toasted bread. He was running down the wide wooden steps of the chawl he’d lived in since he was a young child. From this picture the rest of the story spun out: it was about the moment when everything in Vithal Karekar’s life changed. His mother had died when he was still a boy; his father died when he was in his late teens. The only son, he’d been left to arrange the last rites, then make his way in the world. He did that by working in the printing shop where he’d been taken on, and by educating himself, besides, as he could. It was a time of change for the country; at Dandi, in Gujarat, there was a protest against the salt laws, and a hint of this found its way into the story. It wasn’t an event Mohan had discussed with his father; he simply knew the cremation must have taken place; as the only son he would have had to carry out the rituals. But he saw it now: the cremation ground high on the promontory, the hot sun, the papery bits of flying ash, the few other grown men – his father’s friend Atul, and Atul’s father – who had come along from the chawl; even the priest, bare-chested, flabby, with a wily, experienced face, and the driver of the horse cart they must have taken to the cremation ground.
Who knew if the real scenes had been like that? But in Mohan’s head they lived this way; he found himself crying for his father, who had then been a young man alone in the world, not much older than Ashish. He’d had no way of knowing what would happen to him; even his dreams, perhaps, weren’t quite formed.
Mohan imagined his father raising a sardonic eyebrow – or saying something dismissive – on finding that his younger son was writing this story. Would he have been angry? Mohan had seen little of his writing other than a few pages rescued from the bottom of the tea chest. They were from a story about a water carrier who’d cheated a customer – a Victorian tale with a moral, a little stiff, like a garment rarely worn. When Mohan read it he’d felt vaguely apprehensive, and ashamed, in the same way that he’d worried, when his own children turned eighteen, that he, like his father, would suddenly die and leave them unsupported. There was no reason to suppose that would happen, yet you always expected the pattern of the earlier life to play out in the one that followed.
The crying had exhausted him; he wrote a few paragraphs, then sat in the chair and closed his eyes. Outside, crows were shouting; other birds joined them as evening settled.
When Ashish got back, they ate, then cleared up together. The boy retreated into his room; Mohan went to bed, where he failed to sleep. The street light outside the window glimmered orange through the night: it seemed to glow most brightly just as day was about to break. At this time the crows and other birds of Saraswati Park shouted, sang, and otherwise made their feelings raucously and joyously felt. Mohan got up, feeling insubstantial. The fan turned above him, like a dancer in trance; the sheets made a mocking map of a night spent in sleep. Morning had come but the street lamp was still on; it made him think of a lantern, and he remembered the holidays were about to start.
‘Baba.’
He smiled at the voice, high and innocently demanding: Megha. ‘Hm, how’s everything?’ he asked. He held the receiver close and turned into the corner.
‘Everything’s fine,’ she said lazily. ‘Work, you know. I don’t know when I’ll get leave now. I had asked for Diwali, but everyone wants to come back, and now it’s so near. I haven’t even heard, so that means I won’t get it. But they said people who don’t get it this year will get leave for Diwali next year. I might come before that, if the project finishes on time. Ba, I had a letter from Satish mama some time ago, I kept meaning to write to him but I didn’t get time. He wrote, I’m getting old now, something like that, he wasn’t sure if he’d see me again. And he said he met Ashish after a long time, “That boy seems to have a brain, let’s see if he ends up using it”, something like that.’ She laughed, then sighed.
‘Hm,’ said Mohan, thinking of the dusty room in Grant Road. There was a pause.
‘And how’s Ashish, Ba? Is he bored to death stuck there with just you?’
He smiled. ‘Well, he doesn’t go out much. Of course, he must be meeting his friends in the daytime at college, and he goes for some extra tuition. But at the weekend he’s mostly here. Studies a lot, I think, reads.’
‘Ouf. Let me speak to him.’
Mohan called Ashish, who came to the phone with unusual eagerness.
‘Hi Meghatai…yes, I’m very serious this year, didn’t you hear? No, no one but you calls me that any more, call me Ashish…so what did he say? When are you coming back with a husband from there, one who dresses like a cowboy and wears one of those hats?’
Ashish was suddenly laughing; his whole body was mobile, his face open. When he’d finished talking to Megha, Mohan took the phone back.
‘Your mother’s not here of course,’ he said. ‘It’s hot now, even at night – no breeze.’
‘October,’ his daughter said nostalgically. ‘Lucky you. There was a hailstorm here last weekend. They’re saying it’s going to be a cold winter. I’m sick of the cold now, I want it to get warm. But it’s hardly started.’
After Diwali, Satish’s lawyer called; he’d returned, and wanted to organize the reading of the will.
‘I’m not sure when my wife will be back – she’s gone to look after a relative,’ Mohan said.
‘Ideally she should be present,’ said the quiet, precise voice. ‘But it may be better to go ahead anyway. As executor, you’re the only person who’s required to be there. And your nephew will come?’
‘Ashish?’
‘Yes, he should be present.’
Three days later, after Ashish’s classes had ended for the day, he and Mohan met at the Central Bank building at Fountain. They stood in the paan-stained stairwell, where notices saying Do Not Spit were decorated with gay red spatters, and took the lift to the fifth floor. Here they walked down a dingy, wooden-panelled corridor; the lawyers’ office was behind a saloon door that made Mohan think of a John Wayne film. In the reception, they sat under a tiny, hectic fan; Mohan picked up an afternoon tabloid and began to read, passing over the speculation about the affairs of film actors and actresses, and onto the smaller items on the inner pages. One caught his eye: a competition for short stories run by the Asian Council.
The door of a cabin opened. A tall clerk disappeared down a short corridor lined with stacks of paper bound by ribbons; his wire-thin legs moved like a dance through his flapping trousers. He rummaged in one of the stacks and extracted a file.
Soon after, a small young man with a foolish, eager face appeared at the door of the cabin.
‘Mr Karekar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please come.’
They trooped into his cabin, where the air conditioning was fierce, and he sent the peon out for cold drinks and beamed at them.
‘My father was taught by Professor Chitale you know. At Sydenham.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, he was very fond of him.’ The round-faced young man, Dhananjay Pingale, smiled, looked abstracted, adjusted his spectacles and fiddled with a paperweight on his desk. ‘There, er, may be one or two surprises here,’ he said gently.
Mohan squared his shoulders. ‘We’re not expecting anything,’ he began, but the peon now returned with two glasses of pop, one orange, one black. Ashish took the orange one and began to drink thirstily.
‘Should we start?’ young Mr Pingale asked.
‘Hm.’
The quiet, unemphatic voice began to read. Satish had left his books to Mohan, some money and his personal effects to Lakshmi, and an insurance policy in favour of Megha, Uma, Gautam, and Ashok. His apartment was left to Ashish.
The lawyer looked at their astounded faces and said, ‘I have a note from him that he wrote when he amended the will in May. It says, ‘I am leaving my most financially significant asset to Ashish Datye, who is not a relative of mine but whom I think a promising young man. I encourage him to find and follow his own path in life and to fulfil his hopes as I have not been able to fulfil mine.’
Chapter Sixteen
In the second half of November, Bombay drifts into its most pleasant season, winter, when as many as three or four times, one shivers in the evening, declares the weather ‘really cold’ and puts on a light sweater. On such an evening, Narayan and Ashish met to go to the cinema. A newish film, The Leader, was still playing; it had opened for the Diwali holidays but neither of them had seen it. At the end of their last tutorial, Narayan had suggested they watch it together.
Ashish got out of a rickshaw at Andheri, his heart racing for no obvious reason. The teacher was waiting outside the cinema. Narayan wore a black sweater; he looked thin and the lines on his boyish face showed under the orange street light. He thought I might not turn up, Ashish realized, and felt both powerful and embarrassed; the teacher appeared bent and pitiable, like a stage villain on the point of defeat. But his face brightened when Ashish approached.
‘Ah, you’ve come. I’ve got the tickets,’ he said.
The seats weren’t dirty, as such, but the darkened hall seemed to contain many suppressed stains. The velour upholstery was dusty and, here and there, a little stiff; the very air was stale – it had passed through a series of audiences: the 12.30, 2.30, 4.30 and now seven o’clock.
People were still coming in – groups of boys, snickering in recently acquired deep voices, and a few couples who looked for the quieter seats at the front. In the dark, Ashish felt self-conscious; he wondered whether Narayan was the sort of man who went to the cinema alone in the afternoons, the man who sat near the aisle and looked with hungry eyes at the people who passed.
The trailers started, and with them the campaign Ashish had been waiting for: an arm snaked its way casually around the back of his seat while an advertisement for an optician’s shop at Breach Candy began to play. ‘Christian Dior, Versace, Gucci!’ What was happening, Ashish wondered. Should he lean back? Or sit up? Where could this go? Was anyone looking? He turned, confronted Narayan’s cherubic yet oddly stubborn profile, smiled weakly, and proffered the popcorn.
The feature was about to start; the lights came on. Everyone stood for the national anthem, which was sung, droned, or merely listened to. A grainy film played of the flag, fluttering in a strong breeze. Ashish, his hands decorously at his sides, sneaked another look at Narayan. Would there be a complicit smile? But the professor was loose-limbed, at ease. He adjusted his spectacles and sat down calmly when the music ended. The censor board certificate appeared on the screen, blurred and ghostly, and Ashish noticed that Yezdi Sodawaterbottlewala had been on the panel that had rated the film an ‘A’. Then the opening scene began; for a while he didn’t think of anything else.
The movie was excellent – it was about a political don and his unruly family. Just as the semi-climactic pre-interval scene ended, the lights came on. Ashish sat up. He had a crazy urge to ensure no one he knew had seen him here.
‘I – uh – I’m going to go and –’
‘Sure. I’ll
go out for a smoke.’
Narayan’s manner towards him in public was reassuringly normal. They really could have been acquaintances, teacher and student who had decided to pop into a film together. But as Ashish hurried up the plush velvet hill that led to the exit, which was sunk into the bank of seats like a secret door leading out of a cave, he felt a pang of embarrassment. It was easy to find Narayan impressive when he was alone, in the charmed world of his flat. There, each part of his existence – the pictures, the French films, the handloom sofa covers – dovetailed with the others to appear both pleasing and original. Outside, in the world where Ashish ordinarily lived, he saw Narayan through his contemporaries’ eyes, and he cringed.
He took his time in the bathroom, washing his hands and fiddling with his hair so as not to appear in the hall while the lights were still on.
Two boys, a little younger than he, were splashing each other with water from the tap and talking loudly.
‘Hey man, Reena’s looking hot in that top,’ one said. They wore expensive, semi-sporting clothing and swaggered like much older men in front of the mirror.
‘Yeah, she’s okay. But she’s getting fat. I had to tell her not to eat ice cream today.’ They smirked, and then, catching Ashish staring, looked at him, then at each other, and snickered.
When Ashish came out of the bathroom the bell sounded. He hurried through the black-painted double doors. When he slipped into his seat Narayan said nothing, merely glanced at him with an easy movement of the head and then leaned back, as though satisfied. Ashish relaxed; he was at home here. In the blasting air conditioning, the stale scent of the velvet mingled with something synthetic and floral that had been sprayed on the carpet, and the faint odour of cigarette smoke on Narayan’s clothes. Ashish leaned back, and thought he felt the warmth of the other man’s arm, the smoothness of a cotton shirt sleeve; he closed his eyes.
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