Love and Longing in Bombay (27 page)

When I wake it’ll be dark in the room, the lights will be off, and I’ll know that my mother has come into the room, drawn a sheet to my chest, sat next to me with a hand on my forehead for a while. Alone, I’ll look for the painting in the dim shifting light. Now I’ll see only a glimmering in the dark, a white that comes out of the shadow. I’ll know that Rajesh is not in the lines, that the body is not in the colour. But there is that colour that moves through the body,
rang
ek
sharir
ka.
There is that glow. I know what it is. It is the absence in my heart.

I
HATE SUNDAY EVENINGS
. It’s that slow descent into the dusk that oppresses me, that endless end with its under-taste of death. Not so long ago, one Sunday evening, I flipped the television off and on a dozen times, walked around my room three times, sat on the floor and tried to read a thriller, switched on the television again, and the relentless chatty joyousness finally drove me out of the house. I walked aimlessly through the streets, listening to the long echoes of children’s games, tormented by a nostalgia that settled lightly over me. I had not the slightest idea of what I was looking for, but only that I was suddenly aware of my age, and it seemed cruel that time should pass so gently and leave behind long swathes of unremembered years. I walked, then, along the long curve of the seawall at Haji Ali, and came along towards the white shape of the mosque floating on the waters.

Then, at the intersection, I didn’t know what to do. I stood, too tired for another long journey and too restless still to go home, and I was swaying a little from side to side. Then I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. It was Subramaniam.

“Come along,” he said. “I’ll give you a drink.”

He was carrying a tattered
thela
,
and we stopped along the way to fill it with bread, marmalade, and bottles of soda. He lived in an old, shabby building near Tardeo, and we went up four flights of stone stairs worn thin in the centre. Inside the door marked “Subramaniam” in brass letters, I bent to take off my shoes, and I could see the space was cool and large. There were those old high ceilings, and walls hung with prints. I sat in the drawing room on a heavy teak couch, on worn cushions, and wriggled my toes on the cold marble. Subramaniam came in carrying a bowl of chips.

“New brand,” he said, smiling, and he put the bowl down on the table at my elbow. Then he poured me a drink. He sat in an armchair that creaked slightly, and raised his glass at me.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately my wife has been unwell.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

He raised his shoulders in that awkward little shrug of his. “At a certain age everything is serious, and nothing is serious.” He drank, and then put down his glass on the table with a crisp click. He looked keenly at me. “How is that Ayesha?”

“Yesterday, she was very bitter about a patriotic movie she saw,” I said. “She is in despair about the state of the country. What are we, she said. For a cynic she despairs a lot. She’s my friend, but I don’t understand her, not really.”

He nodded. “Listen,” he said. “I want to tell you a story.”

*

A train drifting across a field of yellow grass. This is what he saw first. A plume of black smoke turning slowly in the white glare. He had gone up the long slope in front of the station, across the three tracks, and then up the rise, to the ridge which had turned out to be much, much further than he had thought. When he had reached it, and gone across, he had found himself on an endless plateau, a plain dotted with scrubby bushes, an endless flatness that vanished into the sky. So he had turned around and come back. He had already forgotten what he had hoped to find on the other side of the ridge, but for two months he had looked at it curling in the distance, and finally he had taken a walk to see the other side of it. Now the sun burnt on his shoulders. Now he came back over the ridge and saw the train drifting across a field of yellow grass.

It was 1945 and he was twenty years old. His name was Shiv, and he had a twin who was dead, killed in Delhi the year before when a Hindu procession had gone the wrong way. The newspapers had regretted the continued communal violence in the city, but had reported with relief that on this day there were only six dead. One of the six was his, one body identical down to the strangely short fifth toe on the left foot. He had never known the bitterness of small statistics, but now he carried it everywhere in his mouth. He had it now, as he stumbled with aching calves, back from his walk of no purpose. The day yawned before him. He lived with his sister and her husband in a large bungalow a minute and a half’s walk from the station. In the house there were a dozen novels he had read already, his B.Sc. degree framed on a wall, and two small children he could not bear to play with. He had come to live with his sister and her station-master husband after his silences had frightened his parents. His sister had loved him most, had loved him and his brother best after their birth at her eight years, and even now, grief-stricken, she found happiness and generosity enough in the safety of her home to comfort him. But the day, and life itself, stretched on forever like a bleak plain of yellow grass, and he felt himself walking, and the train drifted with its fantastic uncurling of smoke.

The train slowed imperceptibly as he walked. It must have, because he became aware that it was paused, halted at the station. But even then it moved, shimmering in the heat haze, a long red blur. Then, again, it was stirring, drifting across the yellow. He had no sense of his own movement, only of the shuffling of his feet and the sweat trickling down his back, and somehow the train was drawing away from him. Then he was at the station. He crossed the tracks and climbed onto the main platform. He went past the sign that proclaimed “Leharia” and its elevation of seven hundred and eighteen feet, past the station master’s office and the second class waiting room, past the door to the ticketing office and the passengers sprawled on the green benches, and to the arched white entrance to the station. There he stopped, unsure. He looked out across the tracks and there was the slow slope and the faraway rim. He had gone to the edge of his world and come back and he didn’t know what was next. The train was now a single oblong to the west. He looked down along the tracks to the west and then back to the east and the thought occurred to him suddenly that he could wait for the next train, and it was a short step off the platform onto the black rails, a drop of three feet. The train would be moving very slowly but it had a great momentum. It could not be stopped. He recognized the melodrama of the thought, and was also surprised that he had not had it before. There was a certain relief in it. It seemed now inevitable, at least as an idea, and he determined that he would wait for the next train to see what happened. That would be the three-thirty from Lucknow.

Now that there was a plan he was released from lethargy. He was suddenly full of energy and very thirsty. There was a
matka
of water in the first class waiting room. He walked now with a snap, and he waved smartly at Frankie Furtado the assistant station master, who was looking, from a barred window, after the receding smudge on the western sky with an expression that was usually taken for commendable railway concentration and proper seriousness. He was actually—Shiv knew—dreaming of Bombay, and now Frankie returned the wave with but a slow raising of the fingers of one elegant hand that rested on an iron bar. There was an entire matinee’s worth of tragedy in the single motion, and Shiv smiled a little as he drank the lovely clayey water. It was crisp and cold and the ladle made a deep belling sound as it dipped under the dark surface.

He poured the water into his mouth. It splashed over his neck and chest, and he let it fall on his face, and when he heard the laugh he choked. When he stopped coughing he turned and saw the figure by the window. At first all he could see was hands held together, the furled drapery of a grey sari from knee to ground. Then in a moment or two he could see her. She was thin, very young. She wore no ornaments, not a bangle, no earrings. The eyes were large, there was a thick plait falling over a shoulder, and now she looked down and put a hand over her mouth. Shiv put the ladle back in the
matka
, and it dropped with a rattle into the water. He backed to the door, edged through it, blushing, and then stood on the platform wiping his face.

“Who is that in there?” he asked Frankie Furtado, whose face lit up at the question. Frankie was really a movie star trapped by his railway father and railway grandfathers and various railway uncles in Leharia, which he always called Zinderneuf. He had explained with shining eyes the sentimental possibilities of desert forts, marauding Bedouin, stolen jewels, and violent death. Now he was bright eyed about chance meetings while whistles echoed.

“Second class passenger,” Frankie said. “But I put her in first class because she is very beautiful.”

“Yes,” Shiv said. Actually she was rather plain, but Frankie was dedicated to romance.

Frankie ran his finger down a list on a board. “Mrs. Shanti Chauhan,” he said.

“Fine,” Shiv said, unaccountably irritated. He walked down the length of the platform, trying to find again his imperturbable velocity of a moment ago. At the end of the platform he waited, sitting on a green bench. He fanned himself with a folded
Times
of
India
and tried not to think. But as always the images skipped and skittered at the back of his head. He spread the newspaper across his knee but then was drowned by the vast turbulence of the world, its fires and refugees and ruined cities. A letter-writer called “Old Soldier” wrote, “Whether these men of the so-called Indian National Army were prompted by a version of patriotism, or gave in to fear of unspeakable persecutions by the Japanese, is scarcely to the point; that they took up arms against their former comrades is certain. They betrayed their vows to their units and their army and their king, and a soldier who is false to his
namak
can expect only two things: court-martial and the ultimate penalty.” Shiv saw them falling, their bodies riddled and holed. He shuddered. So he shut his eyes and with a slow twist of fear in his stomach gave himself up to the uncertain currents of memory. Then Shiv’s nostrils were full of Hari’s smell, the slightly pungent aroma of life itself, cotton and perspiration and flesh, springing muscle, the same hair oil he used himself but sweeter on Hari. Now Shiv opened his eyes and his face was covered with sweat. There was a whistle, softened by distance.

He stood up and waited. He felt very small now, and under the huge sky he waited for the two events to come together, the busily grinding three-thirty from Lucknow and himself. He could see them moving closer to each other, the loco on its tracks, and his life, brought to each other in a series of spirals. He took a step forward and now it was a matter of another one to the edge. He could see the train, a black circle, huffing smoke and getting bigger. He began to think of calculations, of the time it would take to put one foot in front of another, of velocity and braking distance. He noted the red fragments from a broken
khullar
next to the tracks and determined that he would jump when the shadow of the train fell on them. That was close enough. The train came faster than he had thought it would, and now the sound enveloped him. He felt his legs twitch. He watched the red clay and then at the last moment turned his head to look down the platform. He saw in the swirl of colours a grey figure, motionless. He jerked his head back, felt the huge weight of the engine, its heat, and began his step forward, seeing the black curve of the metal above him, slashed in half by the slanting sun, the rivets through the iron, and then he staggered back, pulled himself back, an arm over his head.

Shiv found himself sitting on the ground, knees splayed outward. The bone at the base of his spine throbbed. He picked himself up and hurried past the first class compartments as the train screeched mournfully. She was stooping to pick up a small brown attaché, and he was sure she saw him coming. But she turned her face away, an expression of anger on her face, and walked resolutely towards the door of a carriage, where Frankie Furtado stood with his clipboard. She went past his smile with her eyes downcast, into the carriage, and afterwards sat in a compartment with half-lowered shades. Shiv stood outside, wondering at himself. He could see her arm. Twelve minutes passed, and then Frankie waved a green flag, leaning suavely to one side, and quite suddenly the train was gone. Leaving only a black wisp fading, and Shiv with his questions.

*

Frankie had an alphabetical list of names: “Madhosh Kumar, Magan Kumar, Nand Kumar, Narendra Kumar …” He read from these every evening when Shiv visited him in his room behind the National Provision Store, in his desert lair, his lonely eyrie festooned with pictures of Ronald Colman. Frankie was the handsomest man Shiv had ever seen, with his gently wavy hair and his thin moustache and fair skin, and they were trying to find a screen name that would encompass and radiate all the mysterious glamour of his profile. Usually Shiv enjoyed the distraction of holding the name up to imaginary bright lights, of writing it into the magazines which Frankie collected and hoarded with incandescent seriousness. “Nitin Kumar Signs with MovieTone,” or “Om Kumar Dazzles in Mega-buster” were all tried, tested and classified and estimated and measured, and found wanting in the analysis. This discussion took place always on the little
chabutra
in front of Frankie’s room, with the spokes of Frankie’s bicycle glinting in the moonlight. There were a few bedraggled bushes at the bottom of a brick wall, and a
chameli
tree overhanging the wall from Lala Manohar Lal’s garden. The Lala’s two daughters were of course in love with Frankie, but tonight even the sight of them hovering on the rooftop across the way like two bottom-heavy nightingales took nothing from Shiv’s enormous yearning.