Love and Longing in Bombay (15 page)

The condom made a sad plop on the floor next to the bed. As he turned over Sartaj had the sensation of time starting to stir again. He lay on his side, put a hand on Megha’s stomach and watched his fingers move with her breathing. She had an arm over her eyes, and he blinked hard, trying to read the set of her chin. He could feel the throbbing of his own heart. She turned to him suddenly. “We must be mad,” she said, but there was no sadness in her. She smiled and touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “I have to go.” He watched her walk across the bedroom, past the white wall with its filigree of shadow, and he knew he would remember this image forever, this person, this shimmering body moving away from his life. From the bathroom he heard the sound of rushing water.

Sartaj was no longer angry, or despairing, but as he lay on the sheets he was possessed of a certain clarity, and he could hear the world ending. In the huge distances of the red sky, in the far echoes of the evening he could feel the melancholy of its inevitable death. He ran a hand over his chest, and the slow prickling of the hair was distinct and delicious. He got up, walked into the bathroom. Megha was standing under the shower, his blue shower cap on her head, and was lathering her stomach absently. He took the soap from her, led her by the hand into the bedroom, to the bed. He had her lie down on her back, and smoothed away the soap from her body with his fingers. He bent his head to her breasts, and found cool beads of water and underneath an evasive smoothness. He tongued the nubbly brown nipples and she stirred under him restlessly. As he trailed down her body she tugged at his
patka.
It came off finally and with her fingers in his hair he put a hand under one knee and lifted the leg up, away. He heard her breath, sharp, and as always the close curl of her labia against each other, under the soft slope of black hair, was once more strangely unknown to him, familiar and yet astonishing. He kissed her thigh, in the crease, and there was the lush smell of her, round and full and loamy in his nostrils. The flesh to the centre flushed and trembled and thickened under his tongue. In and into the sudden salty heat he lapped, hungrily, following the twisting trail of her shakes, losing sight of the secret and finding it again. She held his head and moved him and herself to the place she wanted and then away from it. His fingers dabbed and stroked through the folds and in the plump fluttering confusion there was time and its thousand and one tales,
first
flirtation,
vanilla
ice-cream
eaten
dripping
from
her
fingers
,
and
a
Congress
election
poster
outside
the
restaurant
window
while
they
quarrelled
and he clung to none of them, they drifted and vanished and he sometimes himself and then vanished, his tongue moved and his lips and his fingers under her bottom, and then he heard her rising cry, and he knew she had her right index finger in her mouth, biting. Finally she drew him up and kissed him, licking his mouth and fingers. This time he put the condom on himself. They moved together and the bed creaked under them. His body bent over her and he looked back over his shoulder at their tangled shadows, rising and falling, and then down at her and at their hair mingling. He bent down to kiss her, and when he came away she was crying. With a groan he touched her cheek but she put a hand on his wrist. “Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” And so he went on. In the twilight she raised a hand to his mouth and he could see her tears. And so then a moment when everything was lost, but her.

Afterwards it was dark and they said barely a word to each other. At the door she raised her cheek to his, and for a moment they stood like that. When she was gone he shut the door, and came back to the sofa, and sat on it, very still. He felt very empty, his mind like a hole, a black yawning in space, and he searched desperately for something to think about. He thought then of Kshitij, and his mother, and his father, and the boy’s anger, the resentful line of his shoulders, and Sartaj began as if from a great distance to see a shape, a form. He sat on the sofa and thought about it. Outside the night came.

*

“
Alacktaka
.”

The word hurt Sartaj’s ear. His heart was racing and he had no memory of picking up the phone.

“
Alacktaka
.”

“What?”

“We found out for you what it is.” It was Shaila, and she was whispering with great excitement.

“Who is we?”

“Me and my friend Gisela Middlecourt. We went to the library yesterday afternoon.” Then there was the sound of a struggle. “Gisela, stop it.”

Sartaj waited for the giggling to subside, and then said, “Why are you whispering?”

“Listen,” Shaila said. “We’re sort of interested in things to paint lips with.”

“You are?”

“Of course we are,” Shaila said. “Be quiet and listen. So we wondered what
alacktaka
was. Gisela said we should look in the
Britannica.
It wasn’t there. Then we looked in the
Oxford.
No. Then we thought, all right, the Urdu-English dictionary, which is down the reference shelf, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Sartaj said, resting his head on his knees.

“Obviously you don’t. It wasn’t there. So then the Persian-English dictionary. Still no. Then we found the Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Ety, Ety-mologically and Phil-lolo-gically Arranged, by Sir Algernon Algernon-Williams, M.A., K.C.I.E., and Principal A. S. Bharve, published 1889.”

“Shaila, what’s the point?”

“You’re not grateful in the very least.”

“For what?”

“
Alacktaka.
Page 232 of the Sanskrit-English dictionary.
Alakta
,
rarely
Alacktaka.
Red juice or lac, obtained from the red resin of certain trees and from the cochineal’s red sap. Used by men and women to dye certain parts of their bodies, especially the soles of the feet and lips.” Now there was another bout of stifled laughter. “
R
. 7.7.
Mk.
4.15.
Km.
5.34.”

“What’s that?”

“
Rig
Veda
7.7. That’s a reference. Sister Carmina told us. Do you know what
Km.
is? No, I’ll tell you. Sister Carmina didn’t want to tell us. It’s the
Kama
Sutra
,
which she says isn’t in the library. But Gisela’s parents have a copy which they think is hidden away on top of their shelf. We looked it up. It’s there, Chapter 5. Advice to the young gentleman, man-about-town. After your morning bath you put on balms and
alakta
,
before you go out. I’ll read it to you.”

“Shaila?”

“What?”

“Don’t.” Sartaj was staring at the top of his own head, which he could see in the mirror on the wall. He was wondering what Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel put on in the morning. What was his aftershave? Sartaj rubbed the skin on his wrist, under his
kara
,
remembering again the heavy silkiness of the Rolex. Where was Chetanbhai’s copy of the
Kama
Sutra?

“Why are you quiet? Are you thinking? What are you thinking about?” Shaila chirped into Sartaj’s ear, very interested.

“Never mind what I’m thinking about,” Sartaj said. “You put that book back where you found it. And don’t read any more.” He could hear them laughing as he hung up.

*

Taking a deep breath, Sartaj plunged into the swamp. Above, the morning sky was low and dark, heavy with black clouds. The water came up fast to his thighs and then to his waist, and he clutched dizzily at the reeds to keep his balance. Things moved under his feet and the water lapped against his shirt, but finally he was able to take a step, and then another. The surface of the water was covered with a foamlike scum, and there were rags and drabbles of paper stuck to the reeds. After another step the thick green plants closed behind him and he could no longer see the buildings across the road. He was trying to make a circle but he could no longer tell where he was.

He pushed ahead, moving aside the matted stalks with his hands. His face was covered with moisture and the breath burned in his chest. Something buzzed against his cheek and then he saw a flash of white to his left. He tried to turn and something gave way under him and he fell full length into the water. As he came closer he saw that the white was a smooth form, like stone, that came out of the liquid, and as he struggled he tried to place it in his memory, he was sure that he had seen it before, and then it turned over in his vision and took on a new form, like a cloud, and he saw that it was the Apsara’s shoulder, and that she lay face down in the water, almost covered but held up by the criss-crossing reeds and the thrust of the swamp itself. He reached her and panted as he strained to turn her over. Her smile was eternal and untouched by what she had come to. He looked around for the buildings and the pathway, but could see nothing, and then he tried to imagine Chetanbhai’s wife bringing out the Apsara and throwing her into the muck. It was impossible and improbable, but he could see without any effort Kshitij dragging out the white form, like a corpse, in the darkness of the early morning, not looking at the Apsara’s eyes, her swollen lips, and tipping her into the water. What he couldn’t form within himself was a logic for it, a first cause, a reason why. Not yet, he said, yet, and then he began to look for a way out.

*

“You smell,” Kshitij said when he opened the door to Sartaj’s urgent knocking.

“Of shit, yes,” Sartaj said, walking into the apartment, which was clean now, neatened and stripped of its gaudiness. The paintings were gone, and the books on the shelf were a different lot, thicker with gold writing on the spines.

“Did you fall into a gutter or something?” Kshitij said, looking at the puddles of water on his floor. “Hope you didn’t swallow anything. You need medical attention if you did.”

“Not quite. Not quite.” The swamp was used as a gutter by the labourers who built the apartment buildings, and some of the servants who worked in them, and Sartaj understood Kshitij’s pained look of distaste, but he was reading the titles on the shelf. “
A
History
of
the
Indian
People
,” Sartaj said. “Was your father a great reader?”

“Not really, no,” Kshitij said.

“Your mother?”

“No, she’s not.”

“I see. And you?”

“Yes, I read. But is something wrong?”

“I’d like to see that chequebook I gave to you. If I may.”

“What is this? I thought you had the man.”

“I have the man. Where is it?”

There was a moment then in which Sartaj saw the possibilities clicking in Kshitij’s eyes, and fear, and then Kshitij shrugged and laughed. “All right. No problem.”

When he had it, a minute later, Sartaj held the chequebook by his fingertips, away from his body, and flicked through the pages. “I’ll keep this,” he said.

“Sure. But why?”

Sartaj looked at him, considering. Then he leaned forward and said deliberately, “I’m very interested in your father’s reading habits.”

*

The Jankidas Publishing Company turned out to be a man, a woman, and two computers in a garage. The garage was at the rear of an old four-storied building in a lane near Bandra station. Lines of fresh clothes hung from every balcony above the garage, and as Sartaj, now dry and no longer fetid, unlaced his shoes he was aware that at least three women were watching him from different homes above, their laundry forgotten. He had called Katekar from home, while he was changing, and had him waiting outside Chetanbhai’s building in plain clothes, ready to shadow Kshitij. There was an excitement in his blood now, a hunter’s prickling on his forearms. As he tugged at the lace on his left shoe there was again that darkened stirring in his mind, something falling into shape, barely recognizable yet. But moving. The “Remove Shoes Please” sign had been done in a fancy curled typeface on red paper, and inside Mr. Jankidas was eating his lunch near his computer, under a purple sign that announced, “We Believe in God and Cash. No Credit Please.” Mrs. Jankidas, who wore steel-rimmed spectacles like her husband and looked very much like him except for her full head of hair, held a tiffin from which she occasionally served out
puris
and
bhaji.
Mr. Jankidas sat cross-legged in his chair, quite content, and it was as perfect a scene of domestic tranquillity as Sartaj had ever seen. He broke it with some satisfaction.

“I am aware of some transactions between you and a certain Mr. Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel,” he said. “Who is unfortunately in the position of being the deceased in a very serious case of murder.”

“It’s more serious than the average murder case?” Mr. Jankidas said. Sartaj liked him.

“It appears to be,” Sartaj said. “It may turn out to be very complicated. Which is why I must appeal to you. This Mr. Patel was in the habit of writing cheques to you. Monthly, that is, as far as I can tell.”

“He was our client,” Mr. Jankidas said.

“Satisfied, no doubt. What did he purchase from you?”

Mrs. Jankidas tilted her head slightly and Sartaj saw the look of command that passed between them.

“We promise our clients confidentiality,” Mr. Jankidas said. “It is, you understand, part of the terms.”

Sartaj leaned back in his chair. He was quite comfortable in the air conditioning. “Is this allowed, to operate a business in a garage in this building? According to the building society rules? What about municipal rules? I wonder.” He was addressing himself to Mrs. Jankidas. “I must remember to find out.” He turned his head to look at the other signs in the room. Mr. Jankidas was a believer in signs. Dust Is the Enemy of Efficiency. Customer Is our Joy. When Sartaj looked back Mr. Jankidas was ready to talk.