Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

I had been watching him for weeks, him in his corner, watching us and all the others, and so I filled his glass again. “Yes,” I said. “How?”

He laughed at me, his shoulders shaking. He picked up the glass and drank.

“All right,” he said. “Listen.”

*

A year or two ago (Subramaniam said) I travelled from Delhi to Bombay on the Rajdhani. This was a troubled time, we huddled in the half-empty train as it sped through the cities, watching for fires and crowds, and afraid of the rumours that flitted from one coach to the other. There was only one other person in my compartment, a thin young man in a white shirt and black pants. We had the lights off, so I saw his face illuminated in flashes by the lights that whipped by in the tearing wail of the wind. The angular shadows raced across his body, and I saw fragments of his face, tired eyes under thinning hair, unexpectedly rich lips, like a dark statue’s pout, and slim hands holding each other. All put together, there was a comforting everyday ordinariness in the person who sat across the aisle from me, knee to knee, as we yearned towards our homes through our country’s nocturnal madness. We were speaking — I admit it — of Beauty and Art. When I said that phrase, those words, “Beauty and Art,” he laughed shortly.

“I could tell you a thing or two about that,” he said.

“Do,” I said. “Please.” We went across a bridge then, with that sudden hollow mournful note to the train’s racheting, and he watched me.

“Because I’ll never see you again,” he said. “My name is changed, and also the others, slightly. But everything else is true.”

“Yes, I understand,” I said. “Please tell me.”

And so he told me a story. On that train, that night. This is what he told me.

*

Twenty rupees and twenty paise is not so much (the young man said), but it’s exactly worth a man’s job, and his career, and so his life. We knew this that afternoon when Das called and told us we had thirteen days to find the problem and fix it. “Then I have to tell my bosses,” he said, and left it at that, which was very polite of him, considering that he had taken our bid for their inventory and accounting software against bigger companies, and that too in an organization where they thought calculators were flashy and unreliable compared to a good abacus.

“They’ll throw him out, Iqbal,” Sandhya said.

There was no use saying no for the sake of comfort, because it was obvious. “Not if we find the bug,” I said. Das had pushed our bid through, against all the old men who owned the company, and now if they found out this program written by a woman was not only crashing but losing money here and there, just disappearing it into outer space, they would have him out on the street before the quarterly meeting was over. Not to forget our payment, which was only a third in our pockets yet.

“Shit, Iqbal,” Sandhya said. “Thirteen days.”

“Let’s find it then. Twenty rupees and twenty paise.”

“Right,” she said, straightening up in that torn and tattered chair she loved, and smiling at me. “Let’s find it.”

She was trying to be a leader, like those people in the management books she kept buying from Crossword, but I could see she was tired to the bone. Putting in a new software application will do that to you, because something always goes wrong on the site, what works at home never works there, and the damn users always have one idea after another, and they tell you to change this and that, as if you can wave a wand and it’s all done, and you can’t even tell the bastards they okayed this exact design three months ago. Plus this was our first solo project, our first very own thing for Mega Computers, Ltd., and let me tell you, looking at Sandhya I could see that running your own company sounds fine until you actually run it. And besides I wasn’t much help.

“What do you mean you aren’t any help?” Rajesh said later that night. He had been waiting for me as usual at the bus stop on the corner of Carter Road. “You’re there all day and most of the night, working for her.”

It was past eleven, and most of the shops were shut. I could feel a swelling from the sea against my face, a hint of coolness. I put an arm around his shoulder.

“But not all of the night,” I said, touching his hair with the tips of my fingers. He shrugged my arm off. We walked on, and I said, “I help with the kid, and the accounting, I pay the bills, I even keep the mother quiet, I make tea for the painter, but I can’t help her with what she does.”

“You’re a programmer,” he said sullenly. “You said so.”

Even our quarrels were familiar and shapely now. We fit each other snugly. I put my hand on the back of his hip, with a finger looped through a belt loop, and told him again that I coded high and she coded low, that when I cranked out my bread-and-butter xBase database rubbish I was shielded from the machine by layers and layers of metaphor, while she went down, down toward the hardware in hundreds of lines of C++ that made my head hurt just to look at them, and then there were the nuggets of assembly language strewn through the app, for speed when it was really important, she said, and in these critical sections it was all gone from me, away from any language I could even feel, into some cool place of razor-sharp instructions, “MOV BYTE PTR [BX],16.” But she skated in easy, like she had been born speaking a tongue one step away from binary.

“Me-ta-phor?” Rajesh said. “You’ve been speaking to the painter.”

We were on the rocks now, under the seawall, and I made a big show of finding my footfalls in the darkness, even though I knew each jagged outcrop a little better than the steps to my room in my house, my parents’ house. The rocks bulked up above us, and in the darkness there were the huddled shapes of bodies, couples in the niches and the shadows.

“Of course I’ve been speaking to the painter,” I said, facing out to the sea. “I can hardly help it if he’s in the flat all the time. Sandhya is madly in love with him.”

“He’s in all the time, is he? Talking about me-ta-phors?” He pulled me back so that I settled against him, as always with the lovely surprise of the taut muscles of his chest and thighs, shaped and solid. His eyelashes moved like feathers against the rim of my ear. “You like the painter when he talks about me-ta-phors?”

I laughed quietly, and turned my face for a kiss, for his lips a little bitter with the day but welcome and hungry and supple. “Not only then,” I said, still laughing, and then gasped from his hand scooping roughly under my belt. “Not only. But so do you like him.” Rajesh wasn’t talking then, but touching with careful tenderness the contour of my collarbone, and I was starting to move in a tight frenzy under the distant movement of the tide, with a sound caught in my throat, and as long as I could, a glance and another for the top of the seawall, where sometimes the policemen strolled.

Afterwards, Rajesh was depressed. He slouched down the road, and I walked behind, watching the shape of his back. Rajesh worked out at a bhaiyya gym near his house in Sion, in a pit of fine sand surrounded by gleaming wrestlers. I had gone there and watched him once, the dense chocolate length of his body under the buzzing tubelights, and the white langot pulled tightly between his buttocks. I watched the whirl of the weights and told the wrestlers he was my best friend.

“I’m sick of this,” Rajesh said.

“What?” I said, but I knew.

“Screwing on the rocks,” he said. “I’m thirty-two years old. I want to fuck in my flat.”

His flat wasn’t his flat, but a flat that he wanted, in a building off Yari Road. It was a rectangular yellow building, with a staircase that ran around the insides, and red doors every few yards along the long dim corridors. Rajesh’s flat was a narrow entrance passageway, a bathroom to the left, a kitchen ahead, and a single twelve-by-twelve-foot room to the right.