Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

*

Sheila heard a footstep and lifted a hand to her face. It was wet with tears. She wiped it with her sleeve and when she looked up she saw that the sea, far below, was gold. She stood up and felt the light hot on her face. Sanjeev came up beside her and subsided lankily into the chair. She smiled down at him. He had a book in his hand and looked very handsome in a kind of tragic way.

“You were out late last night,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You went on to one of your parties?” His mouth was pouty with disdain.

Sheila laughed. As she looked down she could see on his T-shirt a blond, scruffy-looking man and the single word “Nirvana.” She said, “Sanju, you’re my son, but it would take a lifetime, two lifetimes, to tell you all the things you don’t know about the world.” As she walked away, she ruffled his hair.

In her bedroom, she laughed to see the mountainous bulk of her husband under the bedclothes. She pulled at his toe. “Come on. We have work to do.” He followed her down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, to the office. He sat in front of her as she leaned back in her chair and picked up the phone.

“What are we doing?” he said.

She put her feet in his lap. He rubbed them, smiling, because in her flowered nightgown and with her hair pulled back she looked like a child, and she looked at him sideways from lowered eyes, naughty and a little dangerous. Her fingers moved so quickly over the keys of the telephone that the beepings came out as a kind of music. She grinned. “Ah,” she said. “I thought we might make a few calls to Hong Kong.”

*

What we remembered from the wedding was not the scale of it and not the celebration, not even how beautiful the couple was or the speculations about their honeymoon in France. It wasn’t even the sight of Sheila and Dolly walking hand in hand into the reception. It wasn’t the sight of Tiger Pataudi and a very boozy Freddie re-creating their second innings so that T.T. and Mani Mennon could judge whether there had indeed been a flannelled Pataudi leg before the wicket. It wasn’t at all the news that Ganga had bought a large shed in Dharavi, where she was going to put in a cloth-reclamation factory. After it was all over, what stayed in the mind was a strange moment, before the double ceremony (one for each religion), when the two families had moved into the centre of the huge shamiana . On one side we could see Sheila’s aunts, large women in pink and red saris with bands of diamonds around their wrists and necks, and, on the other, Dolly’s relatives, in particular one frail, tall old lady in a white sari and a pair of pince-nez glasses, with pearls at her neck, and all these people looking at each other. Then all the talking died away, there was a curious moment of silence, it was absolute and total, even the birds stopped chirping in the trees. Then two of the children ran through the shamiana , it was Roxanne’s second cousin who was chasing Sheila’s niece, both squealing, and the moment was broken and everyone was talking. Yet there had been that strange silence, maybe it was just that nobody knew what to do with each other. But I think of that moment of silence whenever I realize how much changed because of that marriage. What I mean is the formation of the Bijlani-Boatwalla Bombay International Trading Group, then the Agarwal loan scandal, the successes of the B.B.B.I., the fall of the Yashwant Rao Ghatge government, and the meteoric rise of Gagganbhai Patel, and what happened after that we all know. But that’s another story. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another evening.

THAT SUMMER I was heartbroken. I was weary of myself, of the endless details like prickly heat, and the smell of hopelessness in my armpits. It was after all very boring, nothing but something that someone else and I had thought would go on forever, and it had come apart savagely and with finality. It seemed so ordinary, so average in its particulars that I found it sordid to think about, and yet I could do nothing but think about it. I knew I was supposed to drink it away, but liquor just made me even more tired and sleep eluded me anyway. I went slouching sullenly about the city and waited for the monsoon to break, without faith, without belief in its powers, waiting only for something to change.

One evening they were talking of a murder. I say “they” because lately I had been slumped over in my chair for weeks, silent but always nervous, shifting from one side to another incessantly. Subramaniam had been watching me all this time. Now I was very interested in the details of the murder. I wanted to know how they had been killed. It was a husband and wife and they had been found bloodied in their apartment in Colaba. The papers were full of it. The fact that there were no signs of a struggle gave me a particular satisfaction. I nodded rapidly. The others watched me, uneasy.

“No great mystery there,” I said. “It must have been love. Sex, you know.”

“Or gold,” Desai said. “Property. It says that the police are questioning the servants.”

“Something like that,” I said. “Simple and stupid.”

“Or the most complicated thing of all,” Subramaniam said suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know?”

He was smiling gently. I collapsed suddenly. I must have been insufferable, and they had been very patient and very kind.

“No, sir,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

He laughed, his shoulders shaking. Then his face became serious, and he looked at me for a long time. He nodded with that peculiar motion of his, from side to side.

“All right,” he said. “Listen.”

*

The body was almost submerged in the ditch, but what Sartaj noticed about it as he squatted beside it was its expression of pride. One arm was curved out of the water and rigid. The passerby who had found the body was a driver on his way to the milkstand for his memsaab ’s bottles, and he had seen through the rain a hand, reaching up out of the rushing stream as if for something. It had been raining for three days and three nights and through the morning now, and the water was actually roaring as it pushed below a culvert. The dead man was jammed in between the curving brick wall and the broken metal grill. The driver had stood next to the ditch and shouted until people in the nearby buildings had come out, and then he had stood guard until the police came. He seemed to think that somehow it was his responsibility since he had found it, but now he was trying not to look down at it. The skin on the palm of the hand that emerged from the water was a strange bluish grey.

Sartaj Singh, who was an inspector in Zone 13 and used to bodies, was squatting carefully next to the ditch, looking at the ground, but there was running water everywhere and it was likely that the body had drifted. He walked the few yards to the next culvert, feeling his boots sink into the mud. A gust of wind blew water into his face. The flashbulbs were freezing the drops in the air in their sudden glare. It was the first heavy rain of the monsoon, and he knew that the next few weeks would be miserable with mud, with clumsy raincoats and flooded streets, clothes that always seemed wet, and the impossibility of keeping a crease in one’s pants. Anyway there was nothing to be found. The photographers had finished.

“All right,” Sartaj said. “Get him out.”

They put a crowbar against the grill and pulled at the dead man’s arm, his shoulders. Finally one of the constables, whose name was Katekar, shrugged, took off his boots, and got into the water. It beat against his waist and chest as he strained and finally the body came free. The driver gasped as they dragged the body out and over because under the chest, on the right side of the belly, the flesh had been eaten away. The rats had been at him before the water took him and covered him over. But the face was unconcerned and smug.