Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“It was the same ad every month,” Mr. Jankidas said.

“It must have had results,” Sartaj said.

Mr. Jankidas held up his hands. “We don’t know. We just forward the letters, for a small fee of course.”

“You see,” Mrs. Jankidas said. “Mutual communications.”

*

Sartaj drove his motorcycle to Colaba in a daze of wonder. He looked at the people passing by, at their faces, marvelling at their calm, their public banality. A woman in a red sari waited at a crossroad for a bus to pass, holding a netted bag full of potatoes. A taxi driver leaned on his cab, spilling tobacco into his palm. Noticing Sartaj’s stare, a girl in a green and white school uniform looked away. But Sartaj was asking merely if she, they, how many of them had colourful spans of sweet surprises. He knew he had finally heard Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel’s voice, and he felt revived and childlike, as if he knew nothing. “Melodious moments,” he said to himself. “Melodious moments.” After he parked he pulled the photograph of Chetanbhai and his family from the file, and sat looking at it, at Chetanbhai’s round face, the sweetness of the smile on his face, the pride in his wife’s eyes as she looked into the camera, secure in the thickness of her gold bangles and her family, confident of the future. And behind them Kshitij, unsmiling but earnest, and on the right of the picture, a flash of white just inside the frame, the curve of a soft hip.

Finding the parking lot that Chetanbhai had used was simple. Getting the two brothers who sat shifts in the wooden booth, handing out tickets and change, to remember the Patels was simple: they were excited by the thought of being part of an investigation, and the elder, who worked Saturday days, remembered, instantly, the red Contessa.

“That’s them,” he said, when Sartaj showed them the photograph. “Them two.”

“Which way did they go?” Sartaj said.

“Always there,” the man said, pointing with a rigid finger. “There.”

Sartaj had a general direction, and so he started. The shopkeepers were busy with tourists, and there was commerce everywhere, from the stacked statues of Krishna and the men leaning in doorways muttering prices for illegal substances barely out of Sartaj’s hearing. “Who has time to look nowadays, baba?” one stallkeeper said, wrapping a pair of chappals for a Japanese couple. “People come and go.” But then he looked at the photograph and remembered them. They had never bought anything but they had been walking by for years. They had become familiar to him because of their regularity.

Around the corner from the chappal -seller, from his rows of footwear, there was an alley’s length of beer bars. Sartaj went into the first, into the air-conditioned darkness, and found a patient line of women in shiny green and red churidars. They shook their heads at the photograph deliberately, back and forth and back again, and their lack of expression was complete and carefully maintained. Sartaj nodded, thanked them, and went on to the next bar. Finally, at the end of the road, near the seafront, there was a hotel used mainly by visiting Arabs. In the lobby, the men standing by the ceiling-high picture of an emir knew nothing, had seen nothing, weren’t interested. “We are guides, you see,” the oldest one said, as if that were a scientific explanation for not seeing anything. “Guides for the Arabs.” He straightened his red tie and looked very serious. Sartaj smiled at the gentle mockery, nodded, and went on to the desk clerk, who knew nothing, but the durban outside remembered the Patels. He had always thought they lived somewhere nearby.

By late afternoon Sartaj knew he was getting close to the destination. He overshot the trail only once, when they took a left, and it took him an hour to come back and find the direction again. Now he was striding briskly, along a back street lined with faded four-storied apartment buildings. Though the road was crowded with parked cars, it was quiet, shaded with trees, so that Sartaj could feel the lost elegance in the names of the buildings and in the circular balconies that must have been all the rage. To the left, in the shadow of a neem tree, behind a gate with a plaque—“Seaside Villa”—a man with white hair knelt among flowers. Sartaj walked by him, then turned and came back.

“You,” he said, crooking his finger.

The man pushed himself up and came to the gate, dusting his hands on old khaki shorts.

“Your good name, please,” Sartaj said.

“A. M. Khare, IFS retired.” Despite his torn banian there was the assurance of having travelled the world.

“Mr. Khare, have you seen these persons?”

“Not once but many times. He talked to me about my flowers.”

“What kind of flowers are those?”

“Orchids. They are very hard to grow.”

“Did he know anything about flowers?”

“No, but he complimented me particularly.”

“Did you observe where they went after they talked to you?”

Khare shrugged. He seemed embarrassed. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“To the building there”—pointing with his chin—“called Daman .”

*

On the second floor of Daman , Sartaj found a boarding house, which was really a large flat, with thin partitions making tiny rooms let out mostly to trainees at the Taj. But, Mrs. Khanna said, there was a deluxe suite, on the floor above, next to her own rooms, which she hired out very rarely and only to people known to her. Mrs. Khanna wore a green caftan and smoked rapidly, and spoke in a no-nonsense style designed to intimidate tenants. She nodded at the photograph.

“Known them for years,” she said. “Regulars. Nice people. Paid in cash, advance.”

“For what?” Sartaj said. “Who came to see them?”

“I don’t ask questions. Not my business.”

“But you notice things.”

She shook her head, deliberately. “Not my business.”

“Let’s see the room.”

There was a long passageway from Mrs. Khanna’s flat to the suite, with a locked door on either end. The inner door opened into a small room filled up by a coffee table and four old chairs. On the wall there was a painting, ruins on a cliff, over a river.

“See,” Mrs. Khanna said. “With attached bathroom. Very nice.”

Sartaj followed her into the bedroom. The green curtains were drawn and it was very dark, and Sartaj felt his head swim in the sudden quiet. Over the bed, a village belle flashed dark eyes at him over the edge of her stylized yellow dupatta. He reached down to the cassette player perched on the headboard and popped out the tape. There was no label. Sartaj put it back in the player and pressed a button. Mehdi Hassan sang: Ranjish hisahi …

“Is this his tape?” Sartaj said.

“Yes. Mr. Patel’s tape.”

“And the paintings?”

“Also his. He said the room was very sparse.” She looked around the room, gesturing with a cigarette. “He was, he was a very shaukeen type of person, you see.”

“Yes, a lover of the fabulous felicities.”

“What?”

But Sartaj was drawing back the curtains. Mrs. Khanna watched keenly as he went through the bedroom and into the small bathroom, which was sparkling clean. She was clearly amused as he bent over to look behind the commode.

“It’s cleaned every day. Or when it’s used,” she said. “Nothing left over. Nothing to find.”

“Very commendable,” Sartaj said. “Are you sure you never saw any visitors?”

“No. Separate door there, opens out in front of the lift. They come and they go.”

“And this boy in the picture? Mr. Patel’s son? Have you ever seen him? Did he ever come here?”