Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Ride?” Rahul said. Rahul practised a terseness which he had picked up from watching at least one American film a day on laser disc.

“I don’t know, Rahul,” Sartaj said.

“I’m ten minutes away.”

Sartaj took a breath and tried to recall the thin quiet from a moment ago, but already there was laughter, and tinny music, spilling in over the windowsill. He was dizzy suddenly from the pounding in his head. “All right,” he said. “But I have to dress. Give me twenty.”

After a quick shower, and with the crisp collar of a freshly starched white kurta against his neck he felt cool again: it was a simple Lucknowi kurta , but the very thin gold chain threaded through the tiny gold studs made all difference. The studs had belonged to his grandfather and he always stood a little straighter when he wore them. Rahul arrived with his customary honk downstairs, and he came up and they regarded each other acutely. This was a ritual of noticing each other’s style, but this time Sartaj was aware only of the boy’s long chin, of his nose which suggested his sister so strongly that Sartaj felt again that mixture of anger and longing. Finally he had to make a conscious effort to note the new haircut with sideburns, the loose red shirt, and the slightly flared black jeans.

“I have seen the look before,” Sartaj said. “A long time ago.”

“Yeah?” Rahul said, without interest. “I guess.”

“Yes,” Sartaj said. He thought, suddenly and apropos of nothing, that too young to know cycles is too young to know anything.

Rahul drove fast and well, with the assurance of the moneyed in a good car, or in this case a new red Mahindra jeep with a very good removable tape player. The music they listened to was completely foreign and remote to Sartaj, and as always it was played with a loudness that hovered on the edge of real pain.

“So how’re your girlfriends?” Rahul shouted above the music.

“My what?”

“You know. Women.”

“I don’t have any.”

“None? Such a big famous cop and all?”

Sartaj had been in the afternoon papers twice, both times for encounters with minor gangsters. The second confrontation had ended with gunfire, and a dead body on the floor in a dark corridor. Sartaj had fired six shots, and only one had hit. He had crouched, blinded and deafened and trembling, spilling shells onto the floor, but he had never told Rahul about that, or about the small spot of urine on the front of his pants. His picture, a formal studio portrait with retouched lips, had been in MidDay the same afternoon. “No, not even one woman. Slow down.” Rahul was speeding and then braking the jeep with a violence that was rattling the sleek little tape player in its housing.

“You’re a real sad case, you know,” Rahul said.

Rahul had girlfriends and broke up with them and then had others with a speed and complexity that dazzled Sartaj, and he was worldly in a way that had been impossible all those years ago when Sartaj and Megha had been the talk of the campus. They had twisted against each other in cinema halls, desperate and hungry, but now Rahul and his friends were too bored with sex to talk about it. It had all changed and he had never seen it change. “I’m just a poor old fogey, what to do, yaar? ” Sartaj said with a laugh, and Rahul looked at him quickly but then had to swerve around a green Maruti 1000.

“Let’s get a beer,” Rahul said.

“How old are you, sonny?” Sartaj said and Rahul laughed.

“Don’t do the tulla thing on me now, Inspector sahib ,” he said. “I need a beer. You do too.”

“I do?”

Rahul ignored the question and sped past a timber and wood merchant’s shop into a parking lot full of cars. A blue neon sign announced loudly that this was The Hideout, and inside the walls had been painted to look like the walls of a cave, and the floor was littered with barrels and crates. They were seated by a waiter in a black leather jacket, and above their table there was a large black-and-white print of Pran standing with legs wide apart, in black boots, flexing a whip. On the opposite wall a black-hatted foreign villain, one that Sartaj didn’t know, glared over his left shoulder, caped and sinister.

“I arrested somebody on this street once,” Sartaj said.

“Yeah? A bad guy?” Rahul said, waving to somebody over the heads of the sleek and the young.

“Bad?” Sartaj said slowly. He was staring down at the price of the beer. “Not really. He was greedy.” It was actually a quite dusty and unprepossessing commercial street, full of trucks and handcarts and the smell of rotting greens. The man Sartaj had arrested had been named Agha, and he had worked as a clerk for a company dealing in plastic goods. After they put the handcuffs on him he had looked at the owner of the company and said quietly, I have five children, and it was hard to tell whether that was an explanation for taking money or a cry for mercy, but it didn’t matter anyway. “I think he must still be in jail.”

“Everyone’s looking at you,” Rahul said sullenly. “Why do you dress like a Hindi movie?”

“This?” Sartaj said, running a finger over the collar of his kurta. “You’re the one who brought me here.”

The waiter brought their beer in what was obviously some designer’s idea of roughneck tin mugs that belonged in a low den, and Rahul bent over his beer. Sartaj took a long gulp and was shocked by the pleasure of the thick cold curling against the back of his throat, and he wondered if things tasted better when you paid more for them. He took another long drink and sat up, revived, to look around and to listen to the pleasant buzz of music and the hum of voices that sounded sophisticated even when it was impossible to tell one word from another. He was trying to pin what it was exactly, and after a while he decided it was that they sounded smooth, like there was a lubrication over it all, an oil that eased everything except that it was of course not greasy.

“She’s getting married,” Rahul said.

“Who?” But even before he spoke it the frightening pitch and yaw of his stomach told him who it was.

“Megha.”

“To?”

“She told me not to tell.”

“I’ll find out.”

Rahul looked up then. “Yes, you will.” His Adam’s apple ducked up and down and his face trembled, but then with a shake of his shoulders he said, “Raj Sanghi. You know.”

Sartaj knew. This was the son of a friend of Megha’s family, and Megha and Raj had known each other since childhood and the families had always thought that they were good together. He knew about all this. Now he sat with his hands on his thighs and found himself looking for a way to stop it, for a place where he could apply pressure until something snapped.

“Sorry,” Rahul said, and Sartaj saw that he looked frightened, terrified. He knew why: during one of their quarrels Megha had screamed at him that in his anger he had a face like a terrorist, looked as if the next thing he said or did would be complete and irrevocable, forever. He had looked at her then dumbly, made desolate and foreign by her choice of words. She had cried then and said she didn’t mean that at all. They had broken parts of each other like that all through the time at the end, and he tasted these strange victories that left him empty and wishing for nothing more than endless sleep, like the last man on a battlefield where even the blades of grass were dead. Finally it had seemed better never to say anything at all.

“No, no,” Sartaj said. “It’s all right.” He reached across the table and awkwardly patted Rahul’s wrist. He had to swallow before he could speak again. “I don’t think I should drink any more.”