The Two Krishnas (14 page)

He remembered the smell, of
bombil
fish drying on stilts in the open, the dank perfume of the Arabian Sea mingling with exhaust smoke and sewage and sandalwood, and he felt a dull ache of nostalgia. One day he would go back. Not to see his family or the friends he grew up with, but to course through the same spaces, eat the foods, take in the heady smell and pollution of the city. What it would be like to amble through the food stalls of Chowpatty beach again and eat
panipoori
and
sitafad
ice cream and sit on the gritty brown sand and watch the fiery red Bombay sun dip into the sea?

A man never forgets where he is born, the streets he played in, the foods he ate—both those forbidden and which he enjoyed, and the ones prescribed and which he still carries some disdain for. These things stay with him always, mental tattoos, glowing. At the end of his life, these are the visions that regale him as he prepares to say goodbye to the world of mortal senses: the sweet, milky flesh of custard apples, the heady fragrance of the attar of roses, the first time he looked into those eyes and fell in love.

Atif smoked some more, Abida continued to lull him and in time, he fell asleep in the chair, his thoughts skipping from one rail to another, like a train determined to move but uncertain of its destination.

* * *

Back in Bombay, when Atif had been about ten, they had lived in Byculla, once a prosperous and elegant suburb with grand British and Parsi houses, the home of the Bycalla Club, one of Mumbai’s first residential clubs. After the Byculla railway station was completed, and the first mills were already polluting its clear air, a plague finally drove the British and richer Parsis to the more fashionable Malabar Hill, and Byculla became the lower-middle class enclave mostly of Muslims, with its charming air of genteel decay, which Atif came to know as a young boy.

Their apartment was in one of two chipping five-story buildings slapped up against each other, drying laundry flapping from the balconies like sails in the wind. The rooms were dirty, unfinished and worn, but Atif’s mother had done her best to cover the unsightly parts with plants and tapestries, one of which was a gigantic depiction of the Ka’aba in Mecca. Their neighbors, the Vaids, had been a fairly traditional Hindu family and Atif went to school with their youngest son, Kamal.

Atif tried as hard as he could to spend as much time with Kamal, whether they were exuberantly flying kites from the rooftops or studying. Both families innocently joked it away by calling them brothers separated at birth in an ode to the formula frequently used in Bollywood cinema.
“Ek bana Musalman, doosra bana Hindu. Chalo, een dono par hi chod dete hai sab logo ka jagra mitana,”
joked Atif’s father. “Let’s leave it up to these two to solve the feud between Hindus and Muslims.”

Kamal’s mother, Mrs. Vaid, was a heavy-set, highly-strung housewife well versed in the mystical art of numerology. One late afternoon, Mrs. Vaid pulled out a freshly sharpened pencil and a tablet of graph paper. Planting herself on the floor between Kamal and Atif, she began her Pythagorean evaluation of Atif’s full name. If he was going to be spending so much time around her son and their family, she might as well decipher what kind of a destiny the numbers had in mind for him.

“Each letter,” she explained, deftly allocating numerical values, “has a vibration. See? “A” has a one, “T” has a four, “I” is a five…” and she went on this way until she had reduced his entire name to a single potent numeral.

Even then, Atif had known there was something forbidden about the “super science,” as she called it. Palmistry, graphology, physiognomy, numerology—all these were pagan to Islam and strictly forbidden in his household. He had seen his father get worked up and passionately decry them whenever someone had suggested this to find out if a financial crisis would come to pass or a new opportunity may be on the horizon.

“But…but,” Atif blubbered, “Papa says it’s a sin to do this—”

“O-pho! Trouble with you people is you just love making things overly-hard for yourselves! This is God’s way of letting you in on a little bit of inside information through sums. See, if he didn’t want you to know, then would it exist? Hunh?”

Atif knew better than to argue.

“
Arre, dekha?
See how accurate this is? You are a number one!” she proclaimed, circling the number on her pad with a flourish.

Kamal and Atif looked at each other and started laughing.

“
Ey-yey!
This isn’t laughing matter. See, according to this,
beta
, you are a very, very headstrong boy. Number one, they are very strong people, very successful. But you are also very stubborn. Very selfish. You must think of others, not always what you want,” she scolded. Atif swallowed and looked at Kamal. He didn’t have the heart to tell Mrs. Vaid her analysis couldn’t be further from the truth. He was always being picked on at school, was confused about what he wanted, reflexively conceded to others, especially Kamal, and his mother always told him that he should be a little stronger, otherwise the world would gallop on his back.

“You must be more like my Kamal. He’s a number two. So sensitive, so selfless.” She swatted him on the head and he yelped. “Stupid thing’s always being taken advantage of by everyone!”

In his dreams, Atif sometimes went back to that afternoon. Mrs. Vaid looked the same as she had that torpid monsoon afternoon in August, nearly twenty years ago. Even Kamal was there, grinning mischievously, sprawled out on the floor in the white cotton shirt and khaki shorts that comprised the school uniform. Kamal dug his nose thoroughly and then, inspecting his find on his index finger, ingested it before Mrs. Vaid could catch him.

Atif pleaded with Mrs. Vaid to read the numbers again. He told her that although he’d spent a few years living it up, he had involved himself in all sorts of meaningless situations and relationships, and had ended up the classic underachiever, increasingly withdrawn and disillusioned. But Mrs. Vaid, prone to passionate outbursts when her beliefs, most of all her divination methods, were under attack, didn’t even turn around to look at him from the kitchen sink. Her hair was matted with sweat and tied in a bun around the nape of her neck. The dampness under her arms looked like large blots of ink on the blouse under her sari. She continued making
srikhand
to celebrate the birth of Krishna on Gokulshtami, whisking the sugar and saffron into the sour curds with concentration.

“Just you wait,” she said. “The numbers are never wrong.”

* * *

Indian cinema churns out close to a thousand films each year to whet the prodigious appetite of the masses wishing to escape their mundane lives. Much of this comes from Bollywood. Atif, like the
crores
of Indians, knew this magical realm well. They had all been steeped in it since birth, as if in strongly brewed chai, and would remain forever charged and drunk by its potent flavors.

Over time, he had seen the gods of the celluloid pantheon change roles and rank—from the tall and charismatic Amitabh Bachhan to the ultra-sensitive, dimpled and impishly mischievous Shah Rukh Khan—but the plot remained invariably loyal. Poor boy meets girl, they fall in love, endure family opposition, and in the end, struggle through with their love intact. There were other tried and true formulas as well—siblings separated at birth and ending up on opposite sides of the law, heartthrob sacrificing himself at the altar of incurable cancer and bequeathing his
mehbooba
to his best friend who has secretly loved her from the start—but they all found a convenient way to accommodate serenades on snowcapped mountains where the suffering lovers looked impossibly ethereal and big fight sequences ensued in which the ailing hero assumed Herculean powers and kicked a whole pack of villain asses. If you were especially lucky, there would be the wet sari sequence in which the heroine felt the irresistible urge to jump into waterfalls for a bath and burst out into song while still expecting privacy.

Atif’s earliest memories included his visits to the cinema and of reenacting the pivotal scenes and dance numbers of Bollywood. Sometimes Kamal and he would assume roles from the latest film Atif had seen, with Atif always playing the part of the damsel. On the rare occasion Kamal would object: “
Aiy! Aiy!
Why you are always Hema Malini?
Humko bhi dance karne ko ataa hai!
”

Atif would hook his hands on his hips,
tsk,
and say, “That part is more difficult,
yaar
, and you haven’t even seen the picture,
na?
And please! I’m playing Rekha not that Hema-Bema!”

Atif wasn’t interested in the suave choreography of the male leads, the comparatively reined-in emotions, the mysterious frowns, the stretch-your-arms-out-wide and then run-your-fingers-through-your-hair move. He rejoiced in the expansive, seductive moves of the actress—the undulating shoulders, hip thrusts, trance-like spins and then, after still managing to fall on the ground like a cat on its paws, the breathless over-the-shoulder glances.

Once, his mother had caught him enacting Geeta Dutt’s “
Babuji Dheere Chalna
” on the portable record player which Atif was forbidden from touching when his father was at home. Although the song was from the 50’s film
Aar Paar
and he had never seen it, the seductive allure of the voice and melody had been enough to dictate his femme fatale moves. His mother, standing in the corridor, had covered her mouth and laughed. Embarrassed, Atif had jumped into bed and rolled himself up in the sheet that had served, at various points of the performance, as his long silken hair and the folds of a glamorous dress. But then suddenly, from between the folds of cotton, Atif saw the mirth drain from her face. It was replaced with nervousness and perturbation, as if a grave realization had dawned upon her. She had returned to making
parathas
in the kitchen. Even later that day, when his mother had massaged Atif’s scalp with dark and fragrant Amla hair oil, as was a daily ritual for them, she had said nothing other than, “You’ll thank me when you’re older and have a head full of hair!”

They had known instinctively that there was something taboo about what had happened and that his father had better not find out. It was the first time that he had sensed that there was something wrong with what had come naturally to him.

Because money was always a bit scarce in the Rahman household, going to the movies was not always a priority. As the owner of a clothing store in the bustling shopping district of Bandra, Abdul Rahman’s income was dependent on the vagaries of retail and his days filled with the stress of competing with neighboring boutiques with similar merchandise and street kiosks willing to sell for much less. Unless it was a guaranteed blockbuster with his favorite Dev Anand or Khadija’s favorite, Rajesh Khanna, most of the time an outing on Juhu chowpatty beach sufficed.

This is where “Chacha” became indispensable.

Mahmood Rahman or “Chacha,” as Atif called his paternal uncle, was a robust, well-built man inflicted with a pockmarked face from a near-fatal case of chickenpox as an infant. Having no children of his own and a failed marriage—his wife of two years, Zainab, had mysteriously run off—Chacha was much more indulgent with his film-crazed nephew and happy to take him to the theaters where they could enjoy the latest boon from the Bollywood gods.

“Why don’t you two spend some ‘honeymoon time’?” He would tell Atif’s parents. “
Arre, akhir hamara bhi beta hain
. He’s my son, too. Don’t I have the right to spoil him a little?”

Compared to his older brother, Chacha had done considerably well, selling refurbished refrigerators from a store in Fort. Whenever times got especially tough for Abdul, Chacha generously offered to help out, but Abdul was too proud to accept any kind of help even from his brother. As the elder of the two, Abdul felt that it should have been him that was assisting his brother and setting an example. Only twice had Abdul made an exception and approached his baby brother for money—for bills when Atif was born and owing to the difficult delivery, Khadija had been retained for a longer period, and another time when Abdul had gotten into an accident and his already ailing Bajaj had to be replaced with a new scooter.

Even then Chacha had generously insisted on a reliable used car, but Abdul had said, “Remember, Mahmood, in Mumbai there are only two kinds of people who have cars—those who sit in the back and have the money and those who drive them around and have none.” Abdul Rahman hadn’t been fortunate enough to belong to the first class and considered it beneath his dignity to serve in the second.

Sometimes Chacha let Atif bring Kamal along to the film and these outings became more special. Atif puffed up with immense pride for having such a well-to-do uncle.
Kasme Vaade, Trishul, Don
, Atif relished all these hits with his generous Chacha at the Nandi or Gaity in Bandra. It was a well-known fact that the hero in these films, Amitabh Bachchan, who was married to the actress Jaya Bhaduri, was having an extramarital affair with his leading lady, the southern siren Rekha. The public ravenously ate it all up, delighting in the scandals of their celluloid deities. Like the gods of the Hindu pantheon who indulged in all sorts of conduct that would be deemed inappropriate and even sinful in mortals, their headlining love affair was validation that real life indeed was and could be as bizarre and magical as the films they flocked to see when escaping their dull existence.

During the interval, Atif also got to choose between popcorn and masala chips and share a Coke with his Chacha. In the bustle of the canteen, where the ratchet of people talking, clanging trays and chomping away loudly reached a crescendo like that at Victoria Terminus, little Atif was given the freedom and some rupees to squeeze his way through the throng of people demanding service at the faux marble counter, and secure the tasty snacks.