Maximum City (80 page)

He has also been going to Santacruz, to a shantytown where people live over an open sewer. He heard a group of people singing on the trains and took 3 rupees out of his pocket and asked one of them to sing “Zindagi ka Safar.” When they got off the train, he followed them home. Babbanji looked at the sewer; it was overflowing with all kinds of plastic—plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic odds and ends separated from their original entities—and Babbanji thought of his school science project, which could turn plastic into petrol. “And I thought, This is a treasury!”

Another place he recommends to me is a two-hundred-foot-long ditch between Bandra and Mahim, filled with sewage, totally black. He tells me how to get there: “There is a little jungle, some flats, and below it, for hundreds of meters on the banks, slums. For two to three hundred meters you have to cover your face because of the stench.” There is a colony of people living there, migrants like himself. It is empty from eight in the morning to seven-thirty in the evening; the migrants are not beggars. He wanted to see how people could live there in such conditions and wrote poetry about them. “The ditch water is used to grow spinach,” he tells me. He finds this remarkable. So do I.

A
FTER MONTHS OF LOOKING
, Babbanji is unable to find a proper job in Bombay. He has many reasons for avoiding steady employment. “I want to be free. If I take a job I will be bound. This poetry is something that can’t be done without seeing. If I can’t see Bombay how will I write?” So, forced by the demands of his craft, he has left the bookstall and is seeking a part-time job that will give him time to write. He drifts in and out of favor with the bookstall owner, who won’t let him sit there in the day. Babbanji now passes the day sitting on the steps outside the high court.

“Suketuji,” he begins, one day, “there is a need of some money.”

“How much?” I ask, suddenly wary.

“One hundred fifty.”

It is nothing, really—just $4—but by giving him money at this juncture, I am directly influencing the course of his life, the course of the story. Instead, I buy him 500 rupees’ worth of meals at the Samovar restaurant in the Jehangir Art Gallery. That entitles him to fifteen good lunches of rice and vegetable curry. I won’t give him cash. “I won’t take pity,” he had said to me. Babbanji often goes to the Jehangir Art Gallery and wanders about the paintings. He says he likes the Sabhavala exhibition, although I suspect he’s been taught to, by his illustrious friends in the poets’ salon. At the Samovar, I watch the way he eats his cheese sandwich. First he lets it lie on the plate in front of him. Then he eats one quarter at a time, slowly. As long as a little bit of the sandwich is left on the plate in front of him he won’t be hassled by the waiters to leave. So he balances his hunger with the need to stay in a shaded place in the afternoon. It is a precise calculation: how much of the sandwich will he allow himself to eat, at what pace.

Babbanji is torn between science and poetry and between Bihar and Bombay. He had researched the plastics-into-petrol phenomenon for three years and then presented it on the national level. He feels the burden of his discovery. “If I pursued this and brought it in front of the world, I would have to go again into the research line. But I want to be a poet. I will transfer this research to my father.” Science and poetry can coexist in his life, he thinks. “I will become a poet but somehow science will be in my poems.” He says he might have to travel back to Bihar to receive a science award. I suspect he’s ready to go back home, but he denies this, saying, “Bombay is my karmabhoomi. If I die it will be in Bombay. I have forgotten my previous life, in Sitamarhi.”

But his parents probably have not forgotten about him, I point out. At my urging, he writes a postcard to them:

“S
UKETUJI
!” Babbanji phones me early on a Sunday morning. “My papa has come!”

“Where is he?”

“He is here with me now. I have to go back to Bihar at eleven o’clock. Some important work has come up. Some very important work.”

At nine-thirty, we are at the Café Mondegar, a short walk from Babbanji’s home on the sidewalk. The Café Mondegar, open to the traffic of Colaba, is conducive to gaiety. The beer is cold and arrives in inventively shaped pitchers; one looks like a fishbowl. The tables are close together, and a sort of beery bonhomie links the young men, the backpackers, the dating couples in the bar. But the waiter is smarmy with the two Biharis; they don’t know what to order. The waiter insists on speaking to them in English. I order breakfast for them.

The father hasn’t shaved during the three days it took the train to get here. He is a balding, bespectacled man of forty-five who looks older, in the way college lecturers do, and has a nice smile. Today he talks and talks, nothing can stop him. And it is a pleasure listening to him speak in Hindi, for he has a nice touch with a phrase. At least some of Babbanji’s poetry fire seems to be inherited.

Babbanji’s father had arrived at Victoria Terminus with his father-in-law at five-thirty this morning and had walked from V.T. to Churchgate, looking for bookstalls along the way. Near one of them, he saw a group of sleepers on the footpath; one of the figures stirred and lifted the thin cotton sheet over his head for a moment, and the professor exclaimed, “Son!” Babbanji was wearing the same shirt he saw him in last. “Father and son clasped each other and were weeping,” the professor tells me. He recalls that Babbanji was always a delicate child; he was born in great difficulty. At this point he almost breaks down. “He couldn’t drink mother’s milk—his jaw wouldn’t latch on. I’ve kept him since he was four. He has never asked anything from me.”

Babbanji’s eyes water.

“How did he treat his body,” the professor wonders, holding up his
son’s thin hand, “that his parents worked so hard to bring to this stage. Didn’t take a sweater, didn’t take money from home.” They noticed that he had taken a khadi sheet with him, not a more expensive woolen one. “I feel that my house was of glass and has shattered. He was the support of this old man, and he did a very bad thing.” But he’s also trying to explain his son’s behavior to me, as if apologizing, letting me know it’s not Babbanji’s fault. “The reason is that at an early age he got more knowledge than necessary. He should have told his father about his troubles, but he didn’t want to trouble his father. The students beat him because of me.”

When Babbanji disappeared, his mother started having dreams about her son, visions. In one, the boy was holding his head and was kneeling on the road. He had a fever, and some kind man was helping him. If she saw a boy with a headache, she would say, “That’s my son.” They thought about who they could call on for help in locating Babbanji. As is done in times of crisis, times of insufficient knowledge, they went to an astrologer. The astrologer consulted the stars and told them that he was living in Varanasi, with a man whose first name began with the syllable “Ra.” Further, the astrologer said, Babbanji was living in a house colored yellow and white.

So the father’s wanderings had begun, through the town and cities of North India, searching for his lost son. He had gone from house to house in Varanasi, looking at the walls to see if they were yellow and white, asking groups of students if they knew of a boy with such a name. He went to Deoband, Saharanpur, Aligarh. In the lanes his heart would quicken whenever he would see a group of boys, and he would scan each one’s face to see if it matched that of his boy. Nobody could tell him anything.

On the second of April the college lecturer had a dream. His son came to him in the college campus and walked across the campus toward him, in silence. No words were exchanged between them in the dream. On that same day Babbanji wrote to his father at last. “The peon gave his mummy a letter. Daily she waited for the peon. The address was in English. She ran to me. I was afraid that it might be a self-addressed letter for a competition.” The letter was signed
Babbanji of Flora Fountain.
He read it twice, thrice. Only two words in the letter made him angry. He pulls it out now and reads out what Babbanji wrote above his name: “Your worthless and vagabond son.”

“These two words hurt my heart. My beta is not worthless or vagabond.”

Babbanji says, “The world will call me a vagabond, no?” His eyes are full of tears.

“No son is a vagabond for his mother and father.”

The jukebox behind us is playing the Bee Gees song “It’s Only Words.”

After receiving the letter, the professor and Babbanji’s grandfather set out immediately for Bombay, to find the boy lying in front of a wall colored yellow and white. Later, Babbanji’s father found out that the first man to have given his son shelter was the bookseller Ram Babu Joshi.

Babbanji’s father is also angry that his son did not reveal his troubles in the college. “I won’t keep my son in Sitamarhi. I’ll try to get a transfer.”

His son objects. “I will stay in Sitamarhi. When I go back to Sitamarhi I won’t be a local man.” He will be Bombay-returned. The college bullies will look upon him differently now.

His father, too, can see the positive side of Babbanji’s adventure in the huge city. “He has not been derailed. He got an education. Now you have to help him.” The lecturer appeals to me. “We are only his parents.”

“You tell me as a friend what I should do,” Babbanji asks. Should he go back or not?

I point out that Bihar is in pretty bad shape.

They forget their differences and both jump to the defense of their home state. “Bihar has many scientists. There is a ten-year-old boy who has a BSc degree. Each one is brilliant.”

“Our earth is very fertile,” says Babbanji. The best Hindi poets are Biharis, he says.

The father wants Babbanji to return to Bihar and to science. “A scientist is a very great litterateur,” he avers.

“I will do in Bombay; my karmabhoomi is in Bombay,” Babbanji repeats, trying to convince both his father and himself. “Look at how fate works. If I weren’t working at a bookstall I wouldn’t have met Adil.”

“But the way you lived?” I ask him.

“I have no fear of the footpath. Now that I’m on the road, I’m on the road.”

He reads out a poem he has just written, on a Bombay train “which carries thousands on its shoulders and brings them back.” No one understands the train’s pain, the poet feels.

“How did he learn all this?” his father asks in wonderment. “How did
he enter the world of literature? I find it strange, these additional qualities, how did they come? Maybe it has come down to him through my grandfather, who had many books of literature.” While searching for clues about why his son had run away, he had come across a notebook in which his son’s secret was revealed: a long poem he had written. “I was surprised—when did he start writing poetry? I couldn’t write like that. In Bihar’s present condition even an MA pass boy couldn’t write like that.” But he should get a degree. The professor had one great regret in his life; he had been unable to do his doctorate. “Last year I took a vow that I would get my PhD through my son. My son should be two degrees ahead of me, not less.”

Now he would like his son to be a teacher or doctor, “but not a doctor for money.” His father is trying to convince me to tell Babbanji to reenroll in college. “This work won’t stop,” he says of Babbanji’s poetry, gingerly stepping around the word. “If you get the inspiration you can write it immediately, half an hour a day. It can’t be stopped.” And besides, “When will the world recognize him? How many people will like his poetry? There are many poets, writers. The only ones who do well are in the film world. Who reads literature, who reads the truth?” He recites a shloka in Sanskrit: “You should say the truth, but not if it’s bitter.” All sound, practical arguments against the world of literature. I hear the voice of my father using almost these exact words in New York with me, many worlds away. Babbanji’s father isn’t directly prohibiting him from entering into a career as a writer. He’s using love and fear instead, projecting the anxiety of his middle forties onto the young man of seventeen. Babbanji conceives of himself as a poet; and as he walks the city that gives him rich layers of experience for his poetry, this idea of himself exalts him way above the billionaires on the twenty-third floor.

His father now wants to leave Bombay at once, a few hours after he stepped into the city. When he arrived this morning, he said to Babbanji, “Come, son, let’s leave at once. This is a maya ki nagri”—city of illusion. “All these big buildings, they aren’t made with truth; they have been built by snatching someone else’s wealth.” He tells me, “This is a town of money, and I don’t give much importance to money.” It is a hierarchical city; you are always comparing yourself to others. “There is someone on top of you, and someone on top of them.”

Babbanji suggests to his father that he go to his grandfather, whom
they have left waiting at the train station, while Babbanji gets his belongings. His father emphatically refuses. He won’t let his son out of his sight. That morning when Babbanji went to the public toilet, his father went with him and stood just outside the door. All the footpath people were very happy that the two were reunited, “but they didn’t want him to go,” recalls his father. His son had found a community among them. His father paid back all the debts his son had incurred and prayed God to bless the man who had sheltered him. Babbanji has also written down a precise accounting of the number of meals he’s had at the Samovar and the dates of each. There is still money left over from my 500 rupees.

So the three of us walk to the bookstall to get Babbanji’s belongings. What does a man take back to his village after living in the big city? For Babbanji, it is four books, an assortment of the treasures he found on the racks of the bookstalls: