Altaf Tyrewala - Mumbai Noir

Prashant: Can I pay you a compliment?

Kamakshi: Gosh. Well no one minds hearing nice things, so sure, why not?

Prashant: I’m not talking about anyone, I’m talking about you. You know what’s totally unique about you?

Kamakshi: Ha ha, okay, okay. Say.

Prashant: I think it’s amazing, the way you remember lines from like, the most amazing songs. You know, you’ll suddenly say “romance on the menu” or “sangria in the park” and I’m like, whoa, what a woman.

Kamakshi: Gosh, you’re making me blush. But come on, that’s not so unique.

Prashant: Trust me babe, it is.

Kamakshi: Ok, if you say so. But there’s lots of people like that, maybe you just don’t know any.

Prashant: You know that you are special. Why won’t you let me just tell you that babe?

Kamakshi: You’re just flirting with me.

Prashant: What if I am?

My mantra was Ctr+C, Ctr+V — to be read later in all those empty hours. There were lots of people like that jerk. I had no shortage of reading material.

“Why are the cybercafé booths orange? It’s like we’re seeds inside a pumpkin.” Wise words from Osama.

“I don’t know, Osama. Mrs. Haider must have liked it, she got it done up. If you don’t like it, go out, no, and do your work. I think the raid is over …”

“I hear Haider bhai is planning to shut down the café.”

“What crap,” I told him.

“Arrey, I’m telling you — Mrs. Haider is trying to persuade him to let her put in a costume jewelery counter in here.”

“As if he’ll let his wife work.”

“That’s also there. But times are changing. And our Haider bhai is not one to be left behind. He said it to me himself: Times are changing, Osama, and we must change with them. ”

Osama was one of those guys who threw words into the wind to see how far they’d fly. For instance, his mother had named him Sadiq Osama. So he went around telling the boys he had a danger name because his mother wanted him to be a revolutionary of Islam. Then he told one documentary filmmaker lady that his name was Obama and his mother had named him that before the black guy came around. So she interviewed him and he even made her pay him two grand for it. He also said various other sleazy things to her about undergarments and whatnot, but instead of being disgusted she was fascinated. That’s respectable people for you.

“Haider bhai will never shut down the cybercafé,” I said.

Osama laughed. “You think he loves you and won’t take your little kingdom away from you, even though all the customers have disappeared? Come on, Surya!”

I ignored him. Haider bhai would never shut down the cybercafé because it was the one thing he did which didn’t go counterfeit.

VCRs gave way to VCDs and then DVDs and then everything gave way to piracy — and Haider bhai may be bald and burly but he was light on his feet and he pranced nimbly like a fat fairy from one change to another. He still ran Starlight DVD library for the types who loved their country and wanted to rent legit copies of bastard Bollywood films for onefifty a pop. For other normal people, he put three guys along Mahakali Caves Road selling pirated DVDs — fifty rupees for five films on one disk.

But in between he opened the Hai Five Cybercafé. A technology requiring English and education was here to stay, he thought, and would mean a better class of customer too. Haider bhai’s son, Asif, was put in charge of Hai Five.

The technology may have stayed, but business began sliding in a couple of years. At that time I used to stand under the big tree in Sher-e-Punjab, where there was a lot of traffic of young Sikh boys in tight T-shirts wanting XXX DVDs. But we had to vacate that spot because the cops didn’t have a police station in the neighborhood, so they put up some chairs under the tree and said it didn’t look good if they shared the shade with a pirated DVD seller.

So I was moved to the cybercafé—which saved Asif’s face. It’s what I’d been waiting for. You had to get from outside to inside. Outside, there was no difference between you and the guy who sold dead fish or the guy who cleaned people’s ears. You all smelled alike, of Mumbai sweat. Inside you were you, or somebody.

That’s why I stuck it out with Haider bhai. The rule was simple— you had to have a maibaap in this city. This was the thing that stopped both of you from feeling all alone, the idea that you were there for each other although you may or may not be.

“I think I know Haider bhai better than you,” I said to Osama.

“Accha, forget it,” he whispered. “Your RC is here.”

RC stood for Royal Challenge whiskey. Earlier Osama worked in one of the many dance bars around here, before they were shut down. RC was also how he referred to a girl who came to the cybercafé. He thought I liked her, hence my Romantic Customer. I told him that was nonsense. But who can stop a talker from talking?

She was in her second year B. Com. at Tolani College. Her father was a friend of Haider bhai’s, so she was allowed to come to the cybercafé for her “studies.” She was very thin, with the sticking-out collarbones that made you feel protective. She wore those salwar kurtas with shiny flowers that glittered at you. You could see her bra straps through the kurtas and her nails were long and pink. She wore big hoops or long dangly earrings. You could hear her nails and earrings and bangles all going clink, tick, chink in the booth while she typed.

That day she walked in wearing a kurta of dusky pink with gold roses. The salwar was like bell-bottom pants. Her name was Shagufta Ahmed. It meant bouquet of flowers. I had made the mistake of telling Osama and he asked me how I knew.

“She told me,” I said.

“Huh? Just like that?”

“No, I asked her one day.”

After that he started calling her my Romantic Customer.

Okay, yes, I liked her. I just didn’t want to discuss it with that asshole Osama.

She usually came in the afternoons, when no one was around. Initially she used to stay for twenty minutes or so. After I asked her the meaning of her name, she began staying longer. Sometimes she would leave the door of the booth ajar and I could see her e-mails — cute dogs, pictures of giants that once walked the earth, religious e-mails about the ninety-nine names of Allah. It was obvious she left the booth open so I could see her and she could feel me seeing her. Because one day she glanced back when I was watching her and instead of closing the door, she smiled and said, “What are you looking at?”

I was embarrassed, so I just laughed and said, “Oh, I was just lost in thought, sorry.”

She said, “What thought is so deep, Suryaji, that you got lost in it?”

I swear, I almost said something, but just then Haider bhai parked his scooter outside the shop and I pretended to drop my phone and cursed. If he’d seen me talking to her, I didn’t think that would have worked somehow.

There was something about her presence in the cybercafé that made me feel peaceful. Dark afternoons, just the two of us and the sleepy sound of the fan whirring. We could be in a flat of our own almost.

I never opened or checked Shagufta’s windows. You could say I was a fool. But whatever I got from the door sometimes left ajar was enough. It’s not that the desire didn’t overcome me at times. But the waiting and imagining gave time a reason. I knew her e-mail address: Shaghufta_91@yahoo.com. I had written her a love letter. It sat in my Drafts folder. I had quoted couplets of Urdu poetry by some guy called Shakeel Badayuni. I was going to send it once it was properly done.