Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Fifteen,” Meenu said.

“Yes,” Ganga said. “I don’t have it.”

“How will you manage?”

Ganga shrugged. She didn’t tell them what she planned, because she wasn’t sure she would get the money and she didn’t want to sound sure before she was. That afternoon it had occurred to her to ask Sheila for a loan. Sheila had said that the lunch had gone well, but the concentrated expression on her face, the set of her shoulders as she sat among her books was not that of a happy woman. Looking at her then, Ganga had realized that this was after all a woman of business, somebody who wanted things from the world, and had realized that she should ask Sheila for the money. She wanted to wait for a few days, let the thought sit in her stomach, because she had learnt from the world to be careful when one could, since often there was no time for care. Now she had a month from the owner of the plot to come up with the money, and so she waited for a week. It still made sense, so one day after lunch she asked Sheila, and Sheila said, “Of course,” went into the bedroom for a few minutes and came back with a stack of notes. It was no fuss. They talked terms, and it was decided that Ganga was to pay it back monthly over six years.

But leaving was a fuss. They had lived in that nameless lane for a long time, Asha since she was born, and Meenu organized the people up and down the street to give them a send-off. They rented a television set and a video player and they watched films all night long, and it was very very late when Asha finally fell asleep with her head in her mother’s lap. Ganga sat in the darkness, an arm over her daughter, and felt the loss as a tightness in the stomach, a kind of relentless wrenching, and the coloured light from the screen flickered on her face as she wept. But the next day, when they loaded up their belongings into a handcart, she was crisp and organized, and she led the way, holding Asha with one hand and a bundle with the other and tireless in her stride, until the men pushing the handcart leaned against it and begged for mercy.

*

Their new kholi was small, but during the rains it was dry, and Ganga kept it in good repair. There were some two-storied houses on their street, built very narrow on tiny plots, and at the end of the lane there was a grocery shop built like a cupboard into a gap between two walls. Also there was a paan seller who sold cigarettes and matches and played a radio from morning till night. Their years in this street were ordinary, and Ganga continued her work as before, coming and going with a regularity that her neighbours began to depend on.

Finally, what disturbed their life was Asha’s beauty. When she was fifteen a local bootlegging tapori fell in love with her. He was at least ten years older than she was, a grown man with some reputation in his chosen trade of gangsterism and with some style, he wore tailored black shirts always, and he fell in love with her ripeness. She was not tall, but there was a certain weight about her body, a youthful heaviness that she made a great show of hiding. She was a student of the movies, and always had flowers in her hair, white or yellow ones. His name was Girish, and he fell in love with a glance that she threw at him coming out of a morning show of Coolie. After that he spent his time sitting on the raised platform at the end of their lane, waiting for her to pass, polishing his dark glasses on his shirt. When she did, she never looked at him, but the force of his yearning caused her to duck her head down and blush darkly, amazed and a little frightened and feeling something that was not quite happiness.

Ganga knew nothing about this until the neighbours told her. She had seen him sitting on the platform, spreading out a handkerchief before he sat down, but she had paid no attention, because it had nothing to do with her. The evening when she found out, she sat in her doorway for a long time. When she shut the door, she came in and found Asha sitting on her charpai, reading a film magazine. As she watched, a wisp of hair fell across Asha’s cheek, and the girl pushed it back behind her ear, only to have it fall forward again. Idly, Asha flicked it away, the hair was heavy and thick and dark brown, and as Ganga watched her daughter’s fingers move across her cheek and linger, the danger of it all pressed her heart like a sudden weight. She knew instantly and completely the violent allure of the black glasses, the coiled stance that projected danger, the infinitely dark and attractive air of tragedy.

“Tomorrow I will take you to your grandfather’s,” Ganga said, louder than she had intended.

“What?” Asha said. “In the village?”

“Don’t argue,” Ganga said. “You’re going.”

But Asha wasn’t arguing, she was silent, caught somewhere between heartbreak and relief. Her sobs that night in her bed weren’t full of grief, or even of sorrow, but of the tension of weeks. She left quietly and obediently with her mother, and in the train she smiled at the mountains and the zigzagging ascent of the tracks and the birds floating in the valley below. But in the village — called Saswadi — she grew sulky at the endless quiet of the long afternoon. Ganga was in no mood for sulks, having spent an unexpected two hundred rupees on the tickets and travel, and she put Asha to work straightaway, in the kitchen and with the cows in the back. Ganga’s father was small and very lean, as if every last superfluity of flesh had been burnt away by season after season of a farmer’s sun. She had brought him two shirts from Bombay, which he would wear on very special occasions. She spent two days in the village, straightening out the house and seeing to the repair of a waterway that came down the hill into their land. When she left, she hugged Asha briefly, and she felt the youthful sigh more than she heard it. “Don’t be silly,” Ganga said. “What have you seen of suffering yet?”

It was afternoon when she opened her door in Bombay. She went in and put down her bundle, smoothed her hair once in a single movement, tucking back and tightening all at once, and then she reached forward for the jhadoo. She was sweeping under the bed with it when she heard the voice: “What have you done with her?”

When she turned he was looming in the doorway, tall and silhouetted. The sunlight was blinding behind him, and she could see the glint of the perpetual dark glasses at the sides of his face.

“What?” she began, and then her throat closed up from the fear. She stood holding the jhadoo in front of her with both hands, handle up, clutching it.

“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.