Love and Longing in Bombay (6 page)

“If you married her to someone else,” he said hoarsely. “If you married her.” He moved in the doorway slightly and Ganga’s head reeled, her eyes dazzled. “If you married her I’ll kill you and her. And myself.”

He came in, closer to her, and now she could see him clearly. “Where is she?” he said. “Where?” But his head was moving from side to side and she understood that it was very dark in the
kholi
for him. He reached up and took off the glasses and she saw his eyes, red-rimmed. He was very young, and under the sleeve of his black shirt his wrist was thin and bony

She spoke: “Don’t you have a mother?”

A tear formed slowly and inexorably on his eyelid and rolled down his cheek, and she knew he could do exactly what he had said. She looked at him, into his eyes, and the seconds passed.

“Go home,” she said.

Another moment, and then he turned and stumbled out of the doorway. She stood still, holding her
jhadoo,
for a long time, looking towards the door, until the light changed outside and evening came.

*

On the hill, it was generally agreed that the Shanghai Club was Sheila’s masterstroke. There was a whole faction that insisted that Mr. Fong was only a front man, that the money behind Shanghai was actually some of the Bijlanis’ industrial lucre, that, having diversified from mixies into plastics and transportation and pharmaceuticals, they had resources to spare. Of course, there was no proof for any of this, but what was clear and needed no proof was that the whole thing started when the Bijlanis were blackballed at the Malabar Gym. Sheila and Dolly had conducted a ruthless but fiercely polite war for years, in which the victories were counted in receptions given and famous writers annexed and huge sums collected for causes, and the casualties were the bruised egos of the partisans of either side, who cut each other in Derby boxes and flicked razor-sharp looks over shoulders at openings. But there were some rules, a certain code of conduct that kept it all civilized until the incident of the blackball.

The Bijlanis had applied for membership to the Malabar Gymkhana, a little belatedly but they were busy people, this was understood, and their son was now old enough to want to play tennis and rugby at the Gym, and the passing of the application was a foregone conclusion. And then came the blackball, which was actually not a black ball but a little slip of blue paper at the quarterly meeting of the membership committee, and the blue paper had on it the single word “No.” Everyone looked at each other, astounded, but they all avoided looking at Freddie Boatwalla, because the process was of course anonymous but of course who could it be but him? There was nothing to be done about it, the rules were clear and ancient and unamendable, a blackball was a blackball, if you weren’t in you were out, there was no middle ground. The chairman burnt the slips according to rule, but those who saw it said the letters were blocked out and firm, and even before the meeting was over the members were talking about the indisputable fact that Freddie had after thirty years of membership suddenly put himself up for the committee—why now unless there was a plot, a plan—and that this was an unprecedented escalation. Freddie left the meeting without talking to anyone and afterwards he was seen drinking a stiff whisky-and-soda downstairs in the Jockey Bar. The bartender said he had come in and made a phone call first and then asked for his drink. Sitting outside on the long patio with the lazy ceiling fans and the field beyond, the commentators related this and said no more, the implications were clear.

Now everyone waited for the inevitable response from Sheila, and nothing happened. It was unbelievable that she had accepted defeat, and yet this was what some believed, and others insisted that it was merely a tactical feint, this doing nothing, watch and wait. The months passed, and in the fullness of time a Mr. Fong announced that he was going to start a place called the Shanghai Club, and nobody noticed. No one knew who Mr. Fong was, and there was no reason for anyone to ask, and nobody was interested in his club. Then it was known—nobody knew where this came from—that the Shanghai Club would admit only women as members, and furthermore only by invitation. That to do the inviting there was a committee of ten prominent women who were to remain anonymous—and suddenly the phones started ringing all over Bombay. Who was the committee? Nobody knew. Then the first invitation arrived, in a plain white envelope without a stamp, hand delivered at the house of Bubbles Kapadia, of the Ganesha Mills Kapadias. “We are pleased to offer you a charter subscription to the Shanghai Club,” it said. “We request the pleasure of your company at the opening on January 26th.” At about the same time, in what must have been a sublimely managed leak, it became known—seemingly in the exact same minute—from Nepean Sea Road to Bandra that Sheila Bijlani and Mani Mennon were one-fifth of the committee, and that only a hundred memberships were to be offered. Now there was wild conjecture, endless lists were drawn up and debated, memories were searched for histories of friendship and betrayal, and suddenly that plain white envelope was the most coveted thing in the city. Mr. Fong received so many calls that he changed his home number seven times, and still he was woken up in the middle of the night by desperate pleas from councilmen and captains of commerce. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about it” was his standard reply. “I don’t control the committee. They tell me what to do.” The Chief Minister himself made a resigned call to Mr. Fong on behalf of the Storrow toothpaste heiress, who sent a hundred and fourteen baskets of fruit to various houses in a scattershot attempt to flush out the committee. Nothing worked.

The white envelopes came in a trickle through October and November, and nobody could tell where one would show up next, and the exact count was tabulated and maintained with increasing tension as the months passed. Those who got one let it slip casually: “Oh, guess what was under the door today!” And those who didn’t affected not to care: “I can’t believe everyone’s so crazy about this stupid Mr. Fong’s club.” Some pretended to sniff at the kind of people who were getting invitations: a policewoman—a deputy commissioner, but still; a documentary filmmaker; several journalists, some of them of the television variety. And when Ramani Ranjan Das, the erotic poetess, was invited, a whole faction of the Gym set, at the very north end of the patio, declared very dramatically and at great length that they were withdrawing from the Shanghai race, until Bubbles Kapadia asked how they knew they were in it. In the dead silence that followed, Bubbles flicked her ashes onto the table, drew long and at great leisure on her green cigarette holder, then got up and turned and disappeared in a great white cloud of triumphant smoke.

Of course Dolly behaved as if the Shanghai Club did not exist and never would. It was at the Gym, at lunch, that somebody first brought up the subject in front of her. The words dropped, and suddenly silence spread around the table like a ripple. Everyone waited, but Dolly was staring into the middle distance, her eyes calm and genial, absolutely imperturbable, as if she were suddenly a stone-deaf idol, elegantly dressed. She had not heard it, even though the softly spoken words were heard from one end of the oak table to the other. After a while she picked up her knife and fork and cut a tiny little piece of quiche and ate it slowly and with pleasure. As the weeks passed and the hysteria mounted and the rumours flew and everyone talked about nothing but the Shanghai Club, she continued not to hear anything. She was absolute and unshakable. The commentators argued: she must really be upset, some said, she must go home and cry in the bathroom. Nonsense, said the other, stronger, school of thought, it is all truly beneath her, she doesn’t care a whit. As January the twenty-six drew nearer, she grew more and more to resemble a kind of stately ship in sail, constant and beautiful, unmoved by choppy waters, and her supporters grew delirious with admiration. It was true: she was magnificent in her dignity. One of the north-patio commentators said, in a tone that mingled exactly equal amounts of envy and quiet pride, “After all, she is a Boatwalla.”

All this was true until the evening of January the fifteenth. Bijlani came home, drew Sheila into their bedroom, locked the door, and related a strange and wondrous tale. He had been sitting, as was his custom, on the balcony of the Napier Bar above the Dolphin Club swimming pool, sipping at his nightly martini. He did this every evening after his fifteen laps and massage, with the cane chair creaking gently under his bulk and the breeze in his hair. On this evening, he was startled out of his meditation by a man’s voice: “Hello, T.T.” Bijlani had acquired, over the years, with his increasing financial weight, with his famous and many-faceted magnitude, a name and a dense, magisterial composure. So his quick turn of the head, his spilling of his drink, was unprecedented but understandable—the man who stood uncomfortably over him, shifting from leg to leg, was Freddie Boatwalla.

Bijlani waved him into a chair, and when he sat Bijlani could see his face clearly in the light from the door. Freddie had always been thin, but now, in the single light against the darkness, he looked like a paper cutout, one of those black shadow figures from another century, nineteenth or maybe eighteenth or something. Bijlani knew the Boatwalla shipping company had been through some ups and downs, but who hadn’t, it was no cause for this kind of deterioration. Bijlani waved to a bearer. “Drink?” Bijlani said.

“Thanks, old boy,” Freddie said. “Gin and tonic.” He crossed his legs, and Bijlani had a moment of hideous, bilelike envy: Freddie’s crease above the knee was absolutely straight, without needing a tuck or pull or even a pat. The white pants fell just so, like everything else. His name was actually Faredoon Rustam Jamshed Dara Boatwalla, but he had always been Freddie, son of Percy Boatwalla, grandson of Billy. There had been a great-grandfather, whose name Bijlani could never remember but who stood in full life-size glory in a niche near Crawford Market, haughtily ignoring the pigeons swarming around his feet.

“Nice evening, isn’t it?” Freddie said.

“Very.” Bijlani was remembering the story about Freddie that everyone told again and again, that he had in the golden days of his youth bowled out Tiger Pataudi twice in two consecutive innings during a match at Cambridge.

“Heard about your pharmaceutical deal with the French. Good show,” Freddie said.

“Thanks.”

“We’ve been thinking in that direction ourselves. International hookups. Collaborations.”

“Yes.”

“Negotiating with an American party, ourselves. Difficult.”

“Really?”

“Oh, very. Arrogant sods. Full of themselves. But really it’s the only way.”

“I’m sure.”

“Change, you know. Adaptation.”

“Absolutely.”

Freddie’s drink came and they sipped in a silence that was not exactly companionable but at least businesslike. Above them the lights of the tall buildings made a rising mosaic, and a swimmer’s slow splashing in the pool beat a sleepy rhythm to and fro. Freddie put his glass down.

“Thanks for the drink. Have to be getting along. Dinner, you know.” He stood up. “Can’t stay away. Family. You know how these women are.” He laughed.

Bijlani tilted his head back, but Freddie was against the door now and it was hard to make out his face. “Family,” Bijlani said. “Of course.”

“You know, old boy, you ought to resubmit.”

“What’s that?”

“Your application, I mean,” Freddie said. “At the Gym. I’m sure that whole business was a mistake. Error. Lapse. Awful. Happens. Resubmit. We’ll take care of it.” And with that he was gone.

When Bijlani told Sheila about this conversation, she sat very still for a moment, so immobile that she might have been frozen. Then only her eyes moved, and she looked up at Bijlani. “How interesting,” she said at last. “Let’s go down to dinner.”

That Freddie and T.T. had talked was known by everyone half an hour after it happened, and there was much speculation about what had actually been said. It was clear that some sort of deal had been made, that negotiations had happened, and now Dolly-watching took on a strange, fresh piquancy. When she received her white envelope, what would she do? Would she say something casually about the Shanghai Club at a lunch? Would she now hear the words that had rendered her deaf and blind? Everyone wanted to be there at the event itself, whatever and whenever it was, because it was completely unprecedented and sure to be delicious in many ways. But nothing happened. Dolly remained casually unaware and went about her business, and the days passed. It was now awfully close to the Shanghai opening and everybody was wound tight, what with fittings and appointments and plans. In those last few days you only had to say to someone, “Has anything happened?” and they’d know what you were talking about.

But of course nothing did happen. Sheila told no one anything either, she was infuriatingly and politely private and unrelenting. Only Mani Mennon knew, because she had been there on the afternoon of the twenty-third, in Sheila’s study, looking through a list as Sheila worked with a calculator and her endless files. “
Memsahib.
” Ganga came in, picked up her half-pay from the desk, and paused long enough to watch Sheila make a notation in a long list of her installments. As Ganga left, Sheila smiled at her. The phone rang, and Sheila picked it up and said, as she had many times that afternoon, “Sheila Bijlani.” Then there was a moment of silence, and Sheila stared at the receiver as the silence went on, from awkwardness into significance, and she looked at Mani Mennon and both of them knew instantly who it was.

“Hello,” the phone finally said, a little staticky and hissy. “This is Dolly Boatwalla.”

“How are you, Dolly?”

“Very well, thank you. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

There was another little moment there, and then Dolly cleared her throat. “I’ve been very busy, what with the children being at home. Trying to keep them amused is so trying. Freddie told me he saw T.T. at the pool.”

“Did he? Yes, he did.”

“Keeping fit, that’s good. I have to practically send Freddie out with his clubs. Listen”—now a little laugh—“have you heard anything about this Shanghai affair?”