Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Is going to hurt?”

“It doesn’t hurt now,” Katekar said. “But it will. Not this month perhaps, or the next. But then someday soon it will. It’ll start and get worse.”

“Is it the muscles? Or a disc?”

“The doctors say it’s nothing. They give me pills and tablets and it still hurts. Then my wife sends me on pilgrimage to Pandharpur. I walk with the palkhi of Dnyaneshwar. There are hundreds of pilgrims. I tell nobody I am a policeman. Nobody can tell one from another. We walk during the day and it is very hot. For the first day and the next and after that my legs hurt and squeeze and become tight. My feet swell and blister and it is difficult to get up the next morning to walk. The sun is very hot and it is all a plain, no trees and just a straight road. The walking is hard. We walk all together. The days pass and it seems like it will never end. Everything is forgotten but the walking. At night the pilgrims sing songs. There are discourses. But usually I fall asleep early on the hard ground and dream of walking. Then I wake up in the morning and walk. Of course I don’t believe in any of it. My wife sends me. But when it is over after fifteen days, I cannot remember when my back became better but always, it no longer hurts. I come back to the city, tired. But my back is all right. For a while. Then it starts to hurt again.”

Sartaj thought he should say something, but then the moment for speaking passed and they sat quietly next to each other. There were the distinct shapes of trees now, the walls, the top of a building across the way. Soon the colours would appear, the huge sweep of green, covering everything.

*

Samnagar was full of television aerials and pucca houses, and its share of modern amenities, Sartaj knew, was testimony towards the entrepreneurial and adventuresome spirit of its sons and daughters. Rupees and dollars and pounds sterling had updated everything except the old.303 Lee-Enfields his escort carried, which meant a certain reassuring traditionalism in the local crime. He couldn’t quite decide whether the enigma he carried in the case file inside his briefcase was old or new. Go yourself, Parulkar had said. We don’t have time to get her down here, we can hold the boy for only two days, three maybe, there is much political pressure. Already there are calls for your transfer.

So Sartaj had gone. “Bad road,” the driver said. “Water.” The house they were looking for was six miles away from the village, from the town it was becoming. The metalled road vanished after the first mile and a half, and between the fields of cotton a rutted path rose and dipped. Now, ahead, it vanished beneath a sheet of water.

“We walk,” Sartaj said. He stopped caring about his pants in the first three steps, and then splashed forward furiously. The clouds piled up ahead of him, black and dense. He had a sensation of feeling quite small, under this arching sky and long silence. They walked past a grove of trees and a ruin, a single wall with a door and a window in it. As he walked, Sartaj realized a bird had been calling, again and again.

The house, when they reached it in late afternoon, was set between hedges at the intersection of three fields. There was one young constable, dozing on a charpai in front of the house. He woke up scrambling for his cap, panicked by Sartaj’s high official presence, but managed finally to say, “She’s inside.”

She sat alone in a room inside, on the ground in a corner, in a widow’s white and also an attitude of despair so sharp that Sartaj stopped at the door, all his eager volition to get at the heart of it gone, vanquished completely. “She hasn’t said a word since she got here,” her brother whispered into Sartaj’s ear. “Not one.” It was obvious. Her hair hung around her face and to the floor. She was staring at a point on the ground a foot ahead of her, and she didn’t look up as Sartaj took off his shoes, or as he came and squatted next to her. He leaned close to her and spoke into her ear. He told her he knew everything. He told her what he knew and then conjecture as truth, the old policeman’s trick: yes, this is how it happened, Kshitij found out, he saw photographs, he quarrelled with his father, something happened, something was said, correct, do you remember, but now he saw the images as he told her and he was afraid she would say, yes, that story is how it happened, he was suddenly afraid. But she looked straight ahead at the floor and he wasn’t sure she heard him at all. Then he had nothing else to tell her. He stopped, and he could hear the bird calling outside. He came close to her, so that her hair tickled his nose, and he said, “I want to know how it happened. How you came to this. Kshitij said his father was not a good man.” She looked at him then, and her face was homely and common to any street. Sartaj put the Polaroid down on the ground in front of her. “This is you. Did he force you to do this? Did your husband force you to go to that room in Colaba?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be afraid now,” Sartaj said. “It’s all over. He forced you?”

Her gaze was level, and through her grief Sartaj could feel her pride. “No,” she said. “No. He didn’t force me. Nobody forced me.” She held him by the wrist and spoke to him, her breath hot against his cheek. She spoke fast in a Kutchi he didn’t completely understand, but he understood that there was no compulsion, no solution so simple as a bad man, only a series of fragments, dinner at the Khyber with her husband and her son, their honeymoon long ago in Khandala, a train ride and an upper berth together in a crowded compartment, at breakfast he must have a glass of cold milk, a movie in Bangalore and a quarrel during interval, and Sartaj knew that what Chetanbhai and Ashaben had done together was as complete and as inexplicable as what had happened between him and Megha, real and true and impossible to tell afterwards. Somehow it had happened. Not somehow but anyhow. Things happened, Sartaj thought, one after the other, and what we want from it is a kind of shape, a case report. Now Ashaben looked up at him, holding him still, with that confessional need, and he had seen it before and he knew what it required. “I understand,” Sartaj said, and understood nothing.

Before he left, he said, from the door, out of a sense of duty, “Will you testify? Would you sign a statement?” She began to weep.

*

As they began the trek back to the jeep it began to drizzle. They splashed on, and then the gusts began to spray the water from the puddles up into their faces. Finally they ran for the grove of trees, past the ruined wall, and at the centre of the grove it was possible even to sit on the ground. It was damp but it was comfortable. Sartaj could see, still, through half-open eyes, the wall, the angle of the doorway. The bricks were small and oddly shaped. Sartaj had taken history in college, but he had no idea if the wall was fifty years old and English, or from a Moghul serai. Or from the other Dwarka, Krishna’s ancient city, sunk now, the story said, below the waves somewhere to the south. As he sat on the ground, Sartaj could feel the earth against the back of his thighs, grainy against his calves.

“What kind of tree is this?” Sartaj said, leaning back against the trunk.

“Mango, janaab ‚” the seniormost of the constables said. “Rest, sahib. There is plenty of time.”

Sartaj was thinking of the plaster Apsara, bobbing in the water near the Narayan Housing Colony, west and north of Andheri West, Bombay. He thought of her sinking and then rising a thousand years later to confound some historian’s calculations, and he laughed. He thought of the curve of her shoulder and the drops fell through the leaves above him. His eyes closed. He thought of Megha, and he tried to answer the question, Rahul’s question, his own, and he said what happened to us was that we loved each other, and we were unkind to each other, and impatient, and unfaithful, and disappointed, and yet we wanted it for forever, but these are only words, and then came a flowing stream of images, dense with colour and the perfume of her hair, and it carried him. He felt himself floating and it felt easy, but then a moment of wild fear, he was sinking, he clutched and held on to himself, tightly, tightly, but then he felt his pride quicken, the word reverberated suddenly, alacktaka , and he made himself, he let himself go, and he was plummeting, down, into darkness.