India (7 page)

Mohammed Ali Road had a reputation. It was the main thoroughfare of the Muslim area of downtown Bombay. The area was spoken of as a ‘ghetto’, and it was so often in the news, in such worrying ways, that people tended to use newspaper language to describe it. It was ‘volatile’, a ‘flashpoint’; it was where communal riots could begin and, having begun, could spread like fire.

It was dreadfully crowded, with every kind of smell and noise. The brown-black smoke from cars using kerosene-adulterated fuel was like a hot fog in the sunlight. It burned the skin and felt jagged in the lungs. It was part of the general feeling of oppression; and the slogan about Islam, seen through this smoke, had the effect of a scream. The slogan was in letters as high as the wall on which it was painted, and it was in English. It wasn’t for the people of the ghetto; it was for people outside, people like the Shiv Sena, who might think of making trouble.

Nikhil knew a young man who lived in the Mohammed Ali Road area. The young man’s name was Anwar. Early one evening, after he had finished his work, Anwar took us to see where he lived. Anwar was very small and frail, with a suggestion of some inherited
debility. But he had a compensating passion about his Muslim faith, and he was full of fight.

The early evening traffic on Mohammed Ali Road was very slow. The shops and the pavements were as jammed as the road. The electric lights created the effect of a ceiling or canopy and appeared to press down on everything, adding, with the hot smoke, to the feeling of crowd and abrasion and life lived at an extremity. It was too noisy to talk in the taxi.

At a certain point we got out of the taxi, and then we followed Anwar away from the lights and the smoke to an area of sudden smallness. Narrow lanes opened into narrower, and they were lined with little low houses. Some way off, Mohammed Ali Road glowed and roared; but the lights here were dim, the lanes were full of shadows, and the near noises were domestic and subdued. We were not in unregulated slum. The lanes were straight and paved, and – though the scale was very small – there was a regularity of lay-out and building that suggested an official housing project. Anwar said that this was so; we were in a municipal settlement.

His house was a narrow section of a wire-netting and concrete row. For two or three feet from the ground the walls of the front room were concrete; above that they were wire netting. A white sheet stretched over the wire netting screened the front room of Anwar’s house from his neighbour’s on one side; the screen was on the neighbour’s side of the wire netting. Anwar’s house, his section of the row, was perhaps no more than nine feet wide. The wire netting and concrete were painted blue. The front room might have been six feet deep. It had a passageway on one side, with shoes and slippers on shelves built into the concrete wall. This passageway led to the main, middle room. Beyond that, Anwar said, was the kitchen.

Somewhere in the upper space of the middle room was a sleeping loft. The sleeping loft was important. Without it houses like this wouldn’t work, wouldn’t be able to provide space for whole families. This was the first I had heard of the Bombay sleeping loft. I heard a good deal more about it in the days that followed; and I began to understand how large families – not always slum-dwellers or pavement-sleepers – managed to live in one small room. At night all over Bombay sitting rooms changed their function; the various portions of a house like Anwar’s (essentially that main
middle room) became simply a place for sleeping in. A sleeping loft utilized to the full the space, the volume, of a room.

We had been talking in the lane outside Anwar’s house. We hadn’t yet gone inside the house. Our talk encouraged a young man from the adjoining house or section to come out to have a look at us. He was of medium height, with a good physique, and he was freshly dressed, as if for relaxation, in a singlet and khaki shorts. It was momentarily astonishing to me that someone of normal size and so reasonably turned out should have come out of such a restricted space. We fell silent when he came out and stood in the lane in the dim light, in his patch of territory, saying nothing; and, as though we felt we had been indiscreet or discourteous talking in the open about the houses of the settlement, we went then, almost as if for the privacy, into the wire-netted front room of Anwar’s house. The young man came back into the front room of his own house and stood about for a while. In the dim light there he or his pale shadow, changing size, could be seen against the white-sheet divider or screen – the sheet fixed to the wire netting on his side – like a figure in a puppet play.

Someone in Anwar’s family had made preparations for our visit. A clean sheet had been spread on the string bed in the front room, as a courtesy to Nikhil and me. At Anwar’s invitation, we sat there. Anwar’s father then came out from somewhere in the middle room. He was our host now; and Anwar was sent to buy cold lemonade.

Anwar’s father, a small man, though not as small as Anwar, looked frail and unwell; and I thought that some of the son’s apparent debility would have come from the father. He was very dark, with a very thick, silver beard. That beard was like the old man’s only physical vanity: it was expertly trimmed and combed, and it rippled and shone. And more than physical vanity was therein India different groups wear different styles of beard, and Anwar’s father’s spade-shaped beard was a Muslim beard. That was the beard’s forthright message.

He said he was sixty-four. And before Nikhil and I could say anything, he said he knew he looked much older – and that was true: I had thought of him as close to eighty. Europeans didn’t look as old as Indians, he said. He knew; he had once worked in an Italian firm, and he had seen Europeans of seventy looking healthy and working hard. Indians aged as they did because of the conditions they lived in. Here, for instance, they didn’t just have
traffic fumes; they also had mill smoke, from a cloth mill. Still, he was sixty-four. That was something; his father had died at forty.

Anwar came back with some chilled bottles of lemonade. This was formally offered, bottle by bottle. We drank a little – the lemonade was very sweet, and seemed to have some chemical tincture – and we tried to make general conversation, though we were really too many in the space, and voices and sounds came to us from all directions, and that white screen (pinned to the other side of the wire-netting divider) began to seem ambiguous in its intention, not wholly friendly.

I asked the old man whether there were thieves in the settlement. It had occurred to me that the very openness of life there, and the communality of it (as of a commune), might have offered people a kind of protection.

The old man said there were thefts every day. And there were quarrels every day. The quarrels were worse. A lot of the quarrels came about because of the children. People hit other people’s children, and the parents became angry.

He had lived under every kind of pressure. So had Anwar. Perhaps – if, in circumstances like these, there could be said to be a scale in such matters – it had been harder for Anwar, who was more sensitive, better educated, and, in the outside world, had a harder fight in the technical field he had chosen.

Playing with the lemonade, considering the old-fashioned courtesies of father and son in that setting, the humanity that remained to them, the old man’s calm acknowledgement of the better health and strength of others, the better conditions of life of others, I began to feel an affection for them both. I felt that if I had been in their position, confined to Bombay, to that area, to that row, I too would have been a passionate Muslim. I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were.

With the old man as our host in the front space of his house, the wire-netted enclosure, and with Anwar being only his father’s son there, our talk could only be formal. I didn’t feel that difficult questions could be pressed. For the talk to go beyond the part-time job the old man had been lucky enough to find, for Anwar to
talk more freely, and without the worry about being overheard, we had to go somewhere else.

So, gently, trying to avoid accident, we laid our lemonade bottles down on the blue concrete wall against the wire netting; and the old man, who had been getting a little restless himself, read the sign well. He stopped talking, created a pause, and we said goodbye.

We went out again to the narrow lanes, where dim lights threw big shadows. Around the corner, a child was defecating in a patch of light. In somebody’s front room a big colour television set on a low stand flickered and flashed away, without anyone watching. Anwar said they had no television in their own house. His father said that television was against Islam.

We came to where the low-roofed settlement ended, and Bombay proper began again. Beyond a boundary lane or road was a tall block of flats. The enemy were there. That was a Shiv Sena building, Anwar said. When there was trouble the people who lived in those flats threw bottles at the people who lived below.

Past that building, we came to the roaring main road. We went to a small milk bar Anwar knew: fluorescent tubes, ceramic tiles, grey marble, a sink, tumblers of glass and stainless steel.

I said to Anwar, ‘So you live constantly on your nerves?’

Nikhil interpreted the reply. ‘It plays havoc with his nerves.’

As worn-away as his father, his dark face thin and tremulous, he sipped at the milk he had ordered.

He said, Nikhil translating directly for him now, ‘Those children. You have these clashes between children which turn into blood feuds with adults, and I feel helpless to do anything about it. Fights take place between neighbours all the time. When they are Hindus and Muslims – Hindus are in a minority here – it turns into a communal riot. It gets very bad during cricket matches. When there was the World Cup last year – the one-day cricket matches – people became nervous about the India-Pakistan matches. But then neither India nor Pakistan went into the finals. When Pakistan lost the first semi-final to Australia, the Hindus went wild, and they threw stones and broke the asbestos roofs of the huts.’

How those fights troubled him! Both he and his father had spoken with special dread of fights between neighbours, and I wondered whether they had been talking about themselves. I tried
to find out. I asked him about the blood feuds – was his family affected in some way?

His reply was unexpected. ‘My brothers have the reputation of being
goondas
, thugs. They’re not the right kind of people. Because of this reputation, neighbours think twice before starting anything.’

Tough brothers – they would, for some reason, have been physically quite different from Anwar and his father. Tough brothers, not the right kind of people – yet they enabled Anwar to talk tough himself. Did that little house contain them all?

I asked Anwar, ‘That man next door, the man who came out to look at us – how do you get on with him?’

‘He’s studying at a college outside Bombay. You can just imagine the kind of brothers I have – I have six brothers, and my father still has to work.’

Some family split here. Perhaps the brothers Anwar was talking about, the toughs, might have had a different mother.

He said, ‘I don’t think of them as my brothers.’ But then immediately he softened that. ‘The environment has made them what they are. They had to become thugs, to survive. I will tell you this story about the foolhardiness of my brothers. You’ve been reading in the papers recently about the don who’s become the new king of the Bombay underworld. Some time ago, when this don got a contract to kill someone in the locality, he came on a reconnaissance to our area. And – you wouldn’t believe – one of my brothers picked a fight with him.’

‘What sort of man did the don have to kill?’

‘The man the don had to kill was in the business of sending people to the Middle East – manpower export – and he must have cheated someone. But my brothers saw this don as someone intruding on their turf. They exchanged insults and abuse, my brothers and the don, and each side said they would see what the other did. My brother got an Ambassador car and they packed it with weapons. They were planning to attack the don’s area, but someone tipped the police off, and my brothers were caught. They were released in a couple of days. Someone here bailed them out.’

‘Your brothers have money, then?’

‘They make money and then they start gambling.’

‘You would say that they, too, are living on their nerves?’

‘They don’t have the mental make-up I have. If the occasion
arises, they will give their lives without a thought. It’s the environment.’

In that talk of his thuggish brothers ready to give their lives there was, now, a kind of inverted pride, as when he had spoken of the fear his brothers inspired in the neighbours.

I asked him about the riots of 1984. People spoke of them as a fearful Bombay event, historical, a marker.

He seemed to blow at his milk, as if to cool it. But the milk wasn’t warm. That constant parting of his lips, that seeming expulsion of breath, was only a trick of the muscles of his thin face, part of the tremulousness of his face.

He said, That was when the will to fight came to me. I was in the final year of the matriculation. There is a Muslim cemetery near Marine Drive, and there is a day near the Ramadan period when it is necessary to visit that cemetery. A group from this area went. At two o’clock in the morning we were walking back home. Some of us were wearing skullcaps, Muslim caps. We passed a Shiv Sena stronghold. We were pelted with stones. We complained to some policemen. They didn’t listen. In fact, they followed us for two miles. They thought we were the troublemakers. That was the first sign we had of the riot. Before that night there had been no sign of any trouble. Actually, the real trouble was very far away, about 25 kilometres from here.’

It became hard in the milk bar to hear what Anwar was saying. Above the noise of traffic in the road, there were now querulous voices in the bar itself, Indian voices, specially edged to cut through most sounds of man and machine – above all, the rising and falling cicada sound of motor-car hooters.