Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

And yet when he faced Kshitij, Sartaj had to force himself to pull out the chequebook and hand it over. “We will formally file charges tomorrow morning,” Sartaj said. “I came to tell you. It is a man named Ghorpade.”

When Kshitij had opened the grandiose door to the apartment, he was holding a dumbbell, and was dressed in a white banian and shorts which hung off his thin waist onto his angular hips. His chest heaved up and down as Sartaj told him about Ghorpade. His face was suffused and contorted, and when Sartaj was finished he nodded. He tried to speak and the breath came and went.

“I will get in touch shortly,” Sartaj said. They looked at each other and then Sartaj turned away. He paused, feeling as if he should say a word of comfort to this boy in his loneliness, and finally uttered with a smile that felt false, “Building the body, haan? ”

Kshitij nodded. “Good,” Sartaj said. “Good.”

As Sartaj shut the lift door he heard the boy’s voice. “ Vande mataram .”

Sartaj paused with his finger on the button marked “G.” Kshitij was standing with his hands by his sides, his back straight. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Sartaj came to attention, and Kshitij and he looked at each other through the metalwork of the door. It was an old-fashioned slogan Sartaj had heard all his life, mostly in movies, but he could never say it without a surge of belief. “ Vande mataram ‚” he said. Hail to the mother. And despite himself, unwillingly, he felt again, in his chest, a havoc of faith in the devious old mother he was saluting, and in the same moment, despair.

*

The sound of the rain was endless. It was still early afternoon but it was dark in the station house. Sartaj sat at his desk, loose limbed, and watched water stream down the panes of his window. Under the torrent, there was a strange quiet in the station house. It was as if everyone and everything were waiting.

Parulkar came in and walked over to the window. The collar of his shirt was bunched up around his neck, and he looked damp and uncomfortable.

“I had another call from Nayak this morning,” he said. “At home, this time.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Sartaj said.

Parulkar walked around the room, nodding gently to himself. Finally, from behind Sartaj, he said, “I don’t understand. Why don’t you just sign the papers and let it finish? What are you afraid of?”

And Sartaj, who was watching how the water on the window made the world outside a vague blur of brown and green, said without wanting or meaning to, “I’m afraid of dying.”

Parulkar put a hand on his shoulder, for a moment, with an awkward sort of fumbling movement. Sartaj twisted in the chair but already Parulkar was walking towards the door. His shoulders were hunched up as he pulled violently at his belt, and all the way out of the door his face was turned away.

There was a weariness in Sartaj’s arms and legs now, and his eyes, even after he closed them, felt hot and scratchy. Every breath was labour now, because he was afraid of the silence. He was too afraid even to feel contempt for himself.

*

Sartaj Singh lay flat on his back on the floor of his apartment, in a white banian and red pyjamas, arms wide to the sides, and contemplated death. He had these words in his head, “to contemplate,” and “death.” Between them there was a kind of light, a huge clear fearful sky in which he was suspended. When the shrill of the doorbell called, it took him a full minute to descend from this thin and deadly atmosphere, to lift his weightless body off the floor. Then there was a stagger to the door as he rubbed his eyes. In his blankness he found the rubbing pleasurable, and he felt keenly his knuckle on the eyelid, so that when the door swung open against his shoulder and he saw her, he had trouble recognizing the scene he had imagined a thousand times. “Hello, Megha,” he said finally, his hand still up to his face. She waited, until he understood the formalities now between them. “Come in, please,” he said, and hated the words.

She walked stiffly, her shoulders high, and with a large black purse held hard against her hip. She stood next to the furniture they had chosen together, in a black skirt and high heels, stylish as always and with the closed face of model on a runway. “Sit, Megha,” Sartaj said. He pointed at the green sofa, and she arranged herself with her hands held in front of her, the purse standing straight up on the coffee table in front of her like a bulwark. Sartaj sat on a chair across from her and held his hands tightly across his stomach. He opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

“Rahul told me he told you,” Megha said.

“Told me what?” Sartaj said, even though he knew. His voice was loud. He wanted her to say it, the word. So that his pain would hurt her, as it always had. But she said it easily, as if she had been practising.

“I’m getting married.”

“Is that why you came? For that?” With the jerk of his head he meant the papers on the dining table behind him, but in the sudden snap of the motion he had also the policeman’s brusqueness, the coiled promise of angry force. She shut her eyes.

“No, I didn’t come for that,” she said. When she looked at him now her eyes were wet, and he felt inside the unhitching of pieces of himself, things drawing apart and falling away. “I came because I thought I should tell you myself.” A tiny shrugging motion with her shoulder, and a hand drawing up and touching her mouth. “I didn’t want you to hear about it like that, from someone else.”

The sunlight in the room dappled the familiar sofa and made it unreal. Sartaj was aware now of the great distances to the surfaces of his body, the strangeness of the hand that lay like a knurled brown slab in his lap. He slumped in his chair, trembling.

“What are you smiling at?” Megha said hesitantly.

Sartaj thought about it. “How did we get so old?”

He laughed then, and after a moment she with him, and the sound sped around the room, over the photographs, the few knick-knacks on the shelf, the stained dining table. They both stopped suddenly, at exactly the same moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He struggled himself upright. “Do you want some tea?” he said.

In the kitchen he had to wash the pot, and then the teacups as the water burbled. Then he stood ready with the sugar, alert and concentrated, and the smell of the heating milk and the leaves, and the wisps of steam, sent him reeling into the first morning of their marriage, the first time they had woken together, the profound heat of her skin against him, and her confession that she did not know how to make tea. I told you I can’t cook, she giggled into his neck. But tea , Sartaj said, pretending to be angry, but after that he had always made tea in the morning. Now the heat from the stove spread across his knuckles, and he remembered the newspaper splayed across the table between them, and buttery kisses, and he felt his heart wrench, kick to the side like a living thing hurt, and he fell to his knees on the dirty floor, held his head between his hands, and wept. His sobs squeezed out against all the force of his arms, and the wooden doors on the cupboard under the washbasin rattled faintly as he bent and curled against them.

He felt Megha’s hands on his shoulders, and her breath on his forehead as she whispered, “Sartaj, Sartaj,” and he turned away from her, from his own embarrassment, but his strength was gone, and she pulled his head back, into the solid curve of her shoulder. He shook again and she held him tight, hard, and he felt with piercing awareness the pain of her forearm against the back of his neck. He was gone, then, vanished into the familiar fragrance of her perfume, unknown for so long, with its flowers and underlying tinge of salt. He was perfectly still. Her lips moved against his cheek, murmuring, something that he couldn’t quite hear, and then he felt the brush on his mouth, a gift of softness and then the shifting suppleness, what he always experienced as a question. He kissed her desperately, afraid to stop or pause because then she would stop. But she wasn’t stopping, she held his face in her hands, her long palms strongly on cheeks and chin, and sipped at him with little murmurs. Despite himself, Sartaj curved against her, an arm up and around, and he felt the weight of her breasts against his side, and she laughed into his mouth, not here, not here.