Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

When the car drew up outside the Vivekananda School, Ganga was waiting outside for them. She welcomed them in the midst of a jostling crowd. As they walked in, a pack of children in their shiny best raced around them, staring unabashedly. The hall had been done up with ribbons, and there was a mandap at the middle, with chairs arranged in untidy rows around it. “Sanjeev was busy,” Sheila was saying as they walked up to two ornate chairs, thrones of a sort, really, all gilt and huge armrests, that had been placed in front of the mandap. They sat down and Ganga took her place by her daughter, who was sitting cross-legged next to the man who was becoming her husband. The priests were chanting one by one and in chorus, and throwing handfuls of rice into the fire. Asha smiled up at them with her head down, looking somehow very pretty and plump and satisfied. Sheila nodded at her, thinking of Sanjeev. He was not at all busy, in fact he had been sitting on their roof with his feet up on a table, but he had said he was tired.

It was the first time that Sheila had ever seen Ganga sitting absolutely still. She seemed at rest, her knees drawn up and her hands held in front of her. The priests droned on. Meanwhile, nobody paid attention to the ceremony at all. Children ran about in all directions. Their parents sat in the chairs around the mandap and talked, nodding and laughing. Occasionally somebody would come and stand in front of the thrones and stare frankly at Sheila and T.T., whispering to friends. Sheila had her chin in one hand and she was lost in the fire and the chant. Then suddenly the ceremony was over and the couple were sitting on a dais at the end of the hall, on thrones of exactly the same magnificence as those provided for the Bijlanis. Sheila and T.T. were first to go through the reception line, and Sheila hugged Asha, and T.T. shook hands with her husband, whose name was Rakesh. Then Sheila and T.T. sat on their thrones, which had been moved to face the dais, and food was served. Everyone was eating around them. Sheila ate the puri bhaji and the biryani and the sticky jalebis , and watched as Ganga moved among her seated guests, serving them herself from trays carried by her relatives behind her. She gave Sheila and T.T. huge second helpings, and they ate it all.

After the food, Ganga gave gifts to the women at the wedding. She walked around again and gave saris to her nieces and aunts and other relatives. She came up to Sheila, who said without thinking, “Ganga, you don’t have to give me anything.”

Ganga looked at her, her face expressionless. “It is our custom,” she said. Sheila blushed and reached up quickly and took the sari. She held it on her lap with both hands, her throat tight. She felt perilously close to tears. But there were two girls, sisters, seven and eight, leaning on her knees, looking up at her. She talked to them and it passed, and finally she was sitting on one side of the room, away from the lights, not on a throne but on a folding chair, tired and pleasantly sleepy. T.T. was on the other side of the room, talking about the stock-market scandals with a circle of men. Ganga’s father sat beside him, quiet but listening intently. Sheila thought drowsily that T.T. looked animated for the first time in months.

Then Ganga walked up. She paused for a moment and then sat beside Sheila, on a brown chair. They looked at each other frankly. They had known each other for a long time and they liked each other well enough, but between them there was no question of love or hate.

“How did you manage this, Ganga?”

“I sold my kholi .”

“You sold it?”

“For thirty thousand rupees.”

Sheila looked around the hall. A song was ringing out, and a group of children were dancing, holding their arms up like Amitabh Bachchan in Muqaddar ka Sikandar.

“Thank you,” Sheila said in English, gesturing awkwardly at the sari that she held in her lap.

For a moment there was no reaction, and then Ganga smiled with a flash of very white teeth. “We got them at wholesale,” she said. “I know someone.” She pointed with her chin at a man Sheila had noticed earlier bustling about, herding people from here to there. “Him.”

“That’s good,” Sheila said.

“You speak English well,” Ganga said.

“I learned it as a child.”

Ganga settled herself in her chair with the motion of someone who is very tired. “I have heard that Boatwalla speak English.”

“You work for her, too?”

“For longer than for you.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“I didn’t tell you. I wash dishes and clean the kitchen. Their other people don’t do that. I never see her.”

“I see.”

“Except now and then, once or twice every year, when she comes into the kitchen for something.”

“Yes.”

“But she never sees me.”

“You mean you’re hiding?”

“No, I’m right there in front of her.’

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean that she doesn’t see me. If she’s talking to someone she keeps on talking. To such high people the rest of the world is invisible. People like me she cannot see. It’s not that she is being rude. It’s just that she cannot see me. So she keeps on talking about things that she would never talk about in front of you or somebody else. Once she saw me, but it was because she wanted to get water from the fridge and I was mopping the floor and she had to step over my hand.”

Ganga’s voice was steady, even. Sheila shifted the packet on her lap a little.

“Even then she kept on talking. Once, I heard her say bad things about her elder daughter, the London one.”

“Ganga, do you …” Sheila stopped.

“Understand English? A little, I think. I’ve worked for you for twenty years, haven’t I?”

“You have indeed.”

“Last week, she came in to shout at the cook about the bowls he used for the sweet after lunch. Her husband lagging behind her. These people, she said. She sent the cook to get all the bowls in the house. She said something about meetings, and her husband wrote down something on a piece of paper. How she talks in English, chutter-chutter-chutter, like she’s everybody’s grandmother in the world, she asked something about the American business, then she said something about a Hong Kong bank, all the time going here and there in the kitchen.”

“Bank?” said Sheila.

Ganga straightened up at the sound of Sheila’s voice.

“Yes. Bank.”

“In Hong Kong?” Ganga said nothing in the face of Sheila’s sudden needlesharp focus. “Ganga. Did she say the name of the bank?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Is it important?”

“Yes. Very.”

Ganga threw back her head and laughed, and two children running by stopped to gawk at her. “It was Fugai Bank. Foo Ga. Foo Quay.”

*

In the car, Sheila reached out and took T.T.’s hand. She said nothing and looked out of the window as they went down the length of the city. Gurinder was playing cassettes of old songs, he was humming along with the music, his mood lightened by the food and the amiable chaos of the wedding. Bombay’s night hadn’t yet quieted down, and everywhere there were people, and at some intersections the cars and scooters honked at each other madly. As the car came around a curve, Sheila saw a family sitting by the side of the road, father and mother and two children around a small fire. There was a pot on the fire, and the flames lit up their faces as they looked up at the car going by.

At home, Sheila walked ahead as T.T. gave Gurinder a couple of fifty-rupee notes. She could hear their voices murmuring behind her, a cricket chirping, and the rustle of the wind in leaves. She had said nothing to T.T., and the name of the bank balanced precariously in her stomach, not unpleasant but not quite welcome, there was something moving in her, something not fully born yet and still unknown. The anticipation kept her awake, and finally, much later, she left her bed and went up to the roof. Now everything was dark, it was a moonless night, and the scrape of her chappals against the cement was loud. She found a garden chair and sat in it, her hands held together in her lap. Sometimes a freshness billowed up against her face, barely a breeze but cool and moist. It came again, and she was remembering her father. She remembered him as a small, balding man with a potbelly, dressed always in chappals and black pants and a bush shirt in white or brown. He kept the shop open till late in the evening and opened it early, so that Sheila saw him usually at night, when he ate his dinner alone. When she was growing up she had always thought he was a simple man. But once a year he liked to take his family away from the city, to a resort or a hill station, for a week, two weeks. She remembered waking once while it was still dark. She was ten or eleven, they were in some place on the banks of a river, a small hotel, she couldn’t remember the name of the river. But she remembered the cold lifting off the water when she went outside and saw her father sitting in the sand on the river’s edge below. In the dark, she could see the white of his kurta and his head shining above. She walked through a garden with flowers and down the steps that led to the river, and sat beside him, her leg resting on his knee. He smiled at her, then looked away, across the river where the water melted into mist. She shivered a little. There was white speckled into his stubble, which she knew he would shave later with a Wilkinson razor. His name was Kishen Chand, and he was a small man. Later, after he was dead and she was older, she would remember his gaze over the water and think that nothing and nobody was simple. Later, she would remember the old story of schisms and horrors, how he had left half his family murdered in Lahore, two brothers, a sister, a father. They had a shop, which was burned. Partition threw him onto the streets of Bombay, but he still spoke of his Lahore, his beautiful Lahore. It was something of a family joke. She huddled beside him as the river emerged from the grey light. She remembered her geography lesson and whispered to her father, Is this a sacred river? It must be, he said. It is, he said. What is that smell? she said. He said, Wood smoke. She asked, Smoke? He said, Fire. What fire? she said. He said, Cooking fires, hearth fires, hay fires. Funeral fires. Ceremonial fires. Even the firing of refuse, of things that are thrown away. Home fires and factory fires. It’s starting to be day and there are fires everywhere. And she saw the white smoke drifting slowly across the surface of the water.