Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“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?”

Sheila took a deep breath. One by one, she relaxed her fingers on the receiver and settled back into her big leather chair. She wriggled her shoulders a little. Then, completely calm, she slowly said the word she had been saving for so long: “No.”

“Ah.”

Mani Mennon began to laugh into a pillow, holding it to her chest and shaking violently.

“Well, it was nice talking to you,” Dolly said. “I hear the children coming in. I should go.”

“It was nice,” Sheila said. “ Namaste. ”

*

Mr. Fong stood at the door of the Shanghai Club in a dinner jacket and a bow tie, his hair solid black and with a sheen, looking dashing and mysterious and exactly right. Inside, if you looked closely, you could see that the club was really a little too small, that the tables were the same kind that Bhendi Bazaar furniture-makers copied from Danish catalogues, that the drinks were a little diminutive for so much money, that everything was quite ordinary. But it was all transformed that night by an extraordinary electricity, a current of excitement that made everyone beautiful, a kind of light that came not from the dim lamps but from the air itself. Ramani Ranjan Das wore all white, white mogra in her hair and a white garara suit and a silver nose ring, and she came with a film director twenty years younger. The Deputy Commissioner of Police wore slacks and turned out to be quite charmingly shy. Sheila wore a green sari and came a little late. She and T.T. sat in the middle of the crowded, smoky room and the air was filled with a pleasant chatter against the faint strains of music, and though it was photographed and written about, nothing ever really caught that feeling. It felt new, as if something was starting, and it was somehow oddly sexy, at least six new affairs and two engagements started that night, but that wasn’t all of it. It was the certainty of it, the feeling that for a few hours there was nowhere else in the world to be and nothing else to do, it was that cusping of time and place and history and power and effort that lifted the Shanghai Club that night into romance and made it unutterably golden.

*

We thought then that Sheila was invincible, but we had forgotten that even the strongest will in the world is easily defeated by its own progeny. Inevitably, Sheila’s son came back to Bombay a poet. Sanjeev had been gone a long time, first to school at Doon and then to the States — he went not to his father’s college but to Yale, where he took many classes in photography and art history, and broke many hearts with a dark curl of hair on his forehead that gave him a look of sad nostalgia. He had learned to ski, and had an easy physical grace that was quite different from his mother’s nervous energy, her focus, and his father’s thumping walk. He was indolent and he had a little smile just a little tinged with arrogance, but we all forgave him that because he wrote such lovely poetry. Mani Mennon was the first one outside the family to meet him that summer, and she watched him for a long time, and then she said to nobody in particular, in a tone of wonder, “You know he looks always like he’s just gotten off a horse.” When she said that, she had said everything. Bijlani said to Sheila, “I don’t know what to say to him, and he’s not quite what I expected, but he’s very wonderful.” Sheila nodded, overwhelmed by her love. She treated her son like a jewel, standing between him and the world, willing not only to give him anything but to take whatever he wanted to give, a poem if that was it. She already understood that getting what you wanted from the world meant that your own struggles became grubby and irrelevant to your children, which was as it should be, that was after all why you gave them what you didn’t have. But like all parents she never really believed he would fall in love.