Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

*

Sheila and T.T. sat together late that night, figuring the exact liquidity of their cash. That had always struck her as a strange phrase, because money was, if anything, hard, impersonal. But now she saw how it could be like a stream, unpredictable and underground, and she was going to turn it into a torrent that would flow up the hill instead of down, crumbling the bloody Boatwalla gate like paper. It was going to burst out of the hillside under the mansion like a fountain from the interior rock — surprise, surprise. It was two o’clock when they stared down at a figure at the bottom of a white pad, at the long string of zeros they had spent a lifetime accumulating.

“Is it enough?” T.T. said, rubbing his eyes. “Is it enough?”

“It’s enough,” Sheila said. “Let’s sleep.” They went up the stairs to the bedroom, and Sanjeev’s light was on under his door. She resisted the impulse to knock and went on, but when the lights were off she couldn’t sleep. She could see the shapes of the companies they owned, how they fit together, and she moved the segments against one another like the pieces on a chessboard, looking for the nuance that would give them the edge four moves down. She got up once to drink water and was shocked by the hour gleaming at her from the bedside table. Again she tried to sleep, but now it was only the zeros that spun before her, symmetrical and unchanging. Shunya shunya shunya , the words came to her in her father’s high voice teaching her some forgotten childhood lesson: shunya is zero and zero is shunya . She felt very tired.

The exhaustion passed, but something else remained. As they began their bid, which Sheila insisted was not hostile but necessary, as they began their slow and audacious assault on Boatwalla Shipping International & Co. (since 1757), she found that all the pleasure was gone. The takeover was the most complicated puzzle that she had ever faced, and she was perfection itself, her memory was prodigious, her stamina unquenchable, and her charm of course was gleaming and soft and unstoppable. But she felt the gears grinding inside her. She told herself to remember whom she was doing it for, after all; she looked at her son’s face and remembered the way he had learned to walk by clinging precariously to her sari and his jerky little steps, but still every morning she lay awake in bed gathering the vitality, a little from here a little from there, for the great effort to get up and war with the day. But the only true thing was that her taste for the game in itself was gone. Suddenly it felt like work, but even when it was over for the day she could only sit silently, staring sometimes at the television, feeling lost. She tried to hide it, and Sanjeev, who had begun to write page after page of poetry, never noticed, but T.T. was uneasy. He said nothing but he looked wary, as if he had smelled something dangerous in the shifting air but wasn’t quite sure what it was, where it came from, what it meant.

It was now, in this, Sheila’s time of ashes, that Ganga came to her one Sunday. She was wearing a new, bright blue sari, and with her was Asha, also in a sari, a green one. It was a formal call: they stood in Sheila’s study, the mother a little in front.

“How pretty you look, Asha,” Sheila said.

As the girl blushed, Ganga spoke. “She finished her nurse training last week.”

“Very good, Asha!” Sheila said, touching her on the shoulder.

“She’s getting married next month,” Ganga said. “We came to give you the card. He’s a schoolteacher.”

Sheila took the envelope, which was huge, a foot square. Inside, the card was red, with a gold vine that went around the borders. It invited the reader to a ceremony and reception at the Vivekananda School Hall, Andheri.

“Will you come?” Ganga said.

Sheila was looking at Asha. For some reason, she was thinking suddenly about her first flight on an Air France plane, the leap of her stomach when the machine had escaped the ground.

“Yes,” Sheila said. “Of course.”

“Bring Sanjeev Baba, too.”

“Yes, I will.” Sanjeev hadn’t left the house for days, even weeks now, and Sheila was sure she couldn’t get him to come out of the edifice of his grief, she had already stopped asking him, but she said, “We’ll all come.”

Ganga nodded. “Come,” she said to Asha, who smiled over her shoulder at Sheila. She ran down the hall to keep up with her mother, the silver payals at her ankles tinkling with every step. Sheila sat down slowly at her desk. The girl’s eagerness hurt her, the small musical sound pressed against her abdomen and gave her a feeling of discovering a new emptiness. She remembered — remembered driving in a bus with the other hostesses in the early morning, to the airport, the red lights far away in the cool blue dawn, a plane thundering overhead with its running lights twinkling, and the glad feeling that it was all an invitation, a promise. They used to sing together, sometimes, Hindi film songs, from Marine Drive to Bandra, and sometimes in Paris on the road to Orly, with the French drivers smiling at them.

Now Sheila waited, with her hand on the phone, collecting herself before the next call. There were a lot of calls to make. The takeover was not going as planned. The Boatwallas had conducted the sort of political manoeuvring that had been expected, and that was easily countered — in fact it was welcome, because it revealed their connections and their understanding of their own predicament. It had become clear as the weeks passed that Boatwalla International was even more overextended than T.T. and she had thought. The interest on their debt alone was barely within the Boatwallas’ means. But when it seemed that they must surrender or be reduced, there had come a sudden influx of cash. Like a transfusion, it had revitalized them, fleshed them out and made them capable of resistance: Freddie appeared on “Business Plus,” pink and ruddy under the studio lights, and declared that it was all over, they were safe. Sheila knew they had borrowed money, lots of it at unheard-of rates of interest, but when she tried to find out who had lent it there was no answer. Her intelligence sources all over Bombay and beyond dried up like the city reservoirs in May, there was no information to be had. She and T.T. called in their favours and doled out some more, but still, nothing. If they could get a name, everything would be possible: politics could be made to interfere with the vital flow of money, fine legal quibbles could bring down the whole ponderous sickly-white elephant. Once in a similar situation they had even purchased outright and cleanly the entire lending corporation. But without a name, without that vital secret, they could do nothing, everything was meaningless.

So now she picked up the phone and looked at it, at the numbers on the keypad. There was a time when she had handled it like a fine instrument, her fingers used to fly over the keys without her looking, it had been her delight, her sitar and her stiletto. Now she just stared at it. I can’t remember people’s numbers anymore, she noted with a kind of dull surprise. Then she opened her book and began dialing.

*

When they drove out to the Vivekananda School Hall a month later, the problem was still with them. Boatwalla International stayed perversely healthy, like a patient sprung from the deathbed and made up with rouge. And for Sheila and T.T. the outcome was not quite a draw. In the eyes of the market, the stalemate was their defeat. It was not only for this that Bijlani was silent and distraught; his uneasiness was the trouble of a man whose life has lost its accustomed centre. Sheila knew that her own doldrums becalmed him even more than her, but her best attempts at revitalization seemed false to her. She could feel the muscles of her mouth when she smiled. There seemed to be no way out, so she endured from day to day, and he with her. Now they sat, apart, in the back seat behind the driver, Gurinder Singh, who besides having been with them for a long time was also a friend of Ganga’s.