Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

*

The Rolex slid easily between Sartaj’s fingers. There was pleasure, distinct and unmistakable and undiluted, in the silky fall of it against his skin, in its weight, substantial and unexpected. Under his hands there was Chetanbhai’s case file, closed. It was over, according to the file, and there was a murderer who had died in the hospital. Kshitij had left that morning, walking slowly to his friends at the front of the station, and they had watched Sartaj with careful regard as he watched them.

Sartaj picked up the phone and dialled. He swung around in the chair as he listened to the steady ringing, half a dozen rings, then ten. In the glass of the map case he could see the shape of his turban.

“Hello, Ma,” he said. “ Peri pauna .” She had walked painfully across the drawing room, holding her hip, he knew this.

“ Jite raho, beta. Where have you been?”

“Casework,” he said. As she spoke he reached back far in memory‚ trying to find the earliest fleeting fragment of her. He remembered her in Dalhousie, a cold mountain day, her white sari in a white chair on a patio in the sunlight, the rising mountains behind, the cold white peaks far ahead. He running up to her. How old had she been then? Young, younger than Megha.

“Ma,” he said.

“Yes?”

He wanted to say something to her about his father. Something about the two of them together, what they had said to each other as they walked behind him down a twisting mountain road, under the unfamiliar hill trees, leaning towards each other.

“What, Sartaj?”

He swallowed. “Nothing, Ma.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, not at all, Ma.”

After he put the receiver down, Sartaj turned back to his desk, gathered up the file. As he stood up, the watch warming in his fist, he remembered suddenly his mother getting up from the kitchen table, walking behind his father, who bent over a newspaper and a cup of tea, and her hand as it brushed over the heavy shoulder, touching for a moment her husband’s cheek. The small swing of the woman’s hair as she walked away. And the small smile that flickered on the man’s face.

*

There was a doorway in Sophia College Lane, across from Megha’s building, where he used to wait when they had first met each other. He was hiding in it again, now, in a new uniform, and that other long-ago self felt foreign somehow, another Sartaj, faintly puzzling. There was music drifting down from a window above, a ghazal ‚ ye dhuan sa kahaan se uthtahai ,and the swirling rush of cars below on Warden Road. He listened to the music, and when Megha first came out of the building he didn’t recognize her. Her hair was cut short, above the shoulders, and she was wearing dark glasses and she looked very stylish and young. She paused with her hand on the door of the Mercedes, raised her head up, looked about as if she had heard something. Sartaj stepped back into the shadows. Then she got in, the door shut, and the car moved off quickly, past Sartaj. He had a glimpse of her profile, and then it was gone.

He straightened up. He walked across the road, to the gate where the same gatemen waited. The first time he had visited her in her home, in what he thought were his best and dazzling jeans, they had stopped him and made him wait while they checked upstairs.

“ Sahib ‚” one said. “You haven’t come for a long time.”

“Yes,” Sartaj said. “Will you give this upstairs? In Memsahib ’ s house?” This was the divorce papers, each page initialled, the last signed and dated and witnessed.

“Of course.” As Sartaj walked away the gateman called, “Will you wait for a reply?”

“No need,” Sartaj said. He had Katekar and the jeep waiting below, at Breach Candy, but he wanted to walk for a while. A van passed with that ugly throbbing American music that Sartaj could feel in his chest. A school bus passed, and three girls in blue uniforms smiled toothily at him from the rear window. Sartaj laughed. He twirled his moustache. In the blaring evening rush he could feel the size of the city, its millions upon millions, its huge life and all its unsolved dead. A double-decker bus ground to a halt at the stop across the street, and people jostled in and out. On the side of the bus a poster for a new movie proclaimed: “Love, Love, Love.” Somewhere, also in the city, there was Kshitij and his partymen, with their building full of weapons and their dreams of the past, and Sartaj knew that nothing was finished, that they remembered him as much as he thought of them. A light changed just as Sartaj was about to cross the road, and the stream of cars jerked ahead madly, causing him to jump back, and the sidewalk vendors and their customers smiled at him. He smiled also, waiting his moment. Then he plunged in.

“NOW WHERE EXACTLY is it that you go?” said Ayesha one evening in April. Ayesha I’ve known since college, and she knows me well, and when I told her, she said, “A dingy bar that far away, a bunch of old guys, and one oldie telling stories? Stop phenko -ing, yaar .” She thought I had a woman hidden away somewhere, otherwise why would I leave her and the Crimson Cheetah and the overpriced beer for some ghati bar. She had been working for one of the new cable TV companies for almost a year, so her new friends were all models and account executives and what she called “personalities,” and sometimes they were so hip I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other.

“It’s true, a few old guys,” I said. “Really.” So she came with me. Ayesha, once she gets curious about something, telling her no just makes her believe you have something she needs to know about. And anyway it pissed her off, the idea that somewhere in the city there might be a club that didn’t want her, so I think she was actually a little disappointed when Subramaniam made a place for her at the table and lit her cigarette. By the end of the evening she was calling him Uncle Sub and teasing him about why he never brought Mrs. Subramaniam to the bar. I hadn’t even known that there was a Mrs. Subramaniam. Ayesha came back two days later, and she brought two of her friends with her, both television-types in very high heels. They said they were going to produce a men’s talk show on Zee TV.

So we had a sudden new crowd at the old bar. The balcony filled up with journos full of horrific election-time tales from the interior, and the younger Maruti 1000 kind of stockbrokers, and also a certain hotel-trainee group who always said, “ Hamara group has the most fun, man,” and Subramaniam still sat in his corner, and the rest of us grumbled, and I muttered about how they were going to sell the place to some fucking dairy farmer’s son who would give it some maha -groovy name like The Purple Ant Farm and drive us all out with beer prices only foreign-bank imperialist- choosoing scum could afford. But really we all enjoyed it quite a bit, the free papad suddenly got better, and one day we came in and the tables were covered with pink plasticky tablecloths that squeaked under our elbows. It was all quite dazzling.

Now, that evening, Subramaniam had been telling Ayesha that she must get married.

“But, Uncle,” she said, “suppose I do get married to somebody.” She said “somebody” as two separate, very long words and rolled her eyes up to the fan. “Suppose I do, where are we going to live? Outer Kandivli?” I knew for a fact she had never been to Kandivli. “As it is,” she said tragically, “the only half-decent PG one could get was in bloody Bandra.”

“People live,” Subramaniam said. “Somehow.”

“How?” Ayesha said. “How?”