Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“So how much is it today?” I said.

“Twenty-two lakhs,” he said, and added hopelessly, “and sixty-five thousand.”

He checked Bombay prices every week, with a kind of grim pride as they climbed and spiralled away.

“The most expensive real estate in the world,” he said expansively. “Pricier than Tokyo and New York.”

So there might be a room in Tokyo or New York for a programmer and a postal clerk, or at least a better fantasy — this is what I wanted to say, but I reached for his hand and held it until we got to the bus stop with its quiet row of exhausted shopworkers and drivers and cooks. We sat there, hand in hand, looking just like two best friends, until the bus came, with its despairing midnight grinding of gears, and then I couldn’t stand anymore the look on his face and reached forward and crushed him as hard as I could into my arms, and found his stubbled kiss for a moment amidst the sudden jostle of the passengers on and off. He shook his head at me, but with a tiny bit of a smile. Then the bus pulled away and I was alone.

*

The painter was crouched on the floor of his room, clutching at the spread-out sheets of a newspaper, when I reached Sandhya’s house the next morning. Rajesh and I always called him the painter, mainly because neither of us had ever met a painter before, but his name was Anubhav Rajadhakshya, and he was tearing at The Times of India.

“Bastard,” he said, his face an inch away from the newsprint. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.”

“What’s wrong, Anu?” I said. I stepped over the scattered sheets, to the back of the room where he had a canvas tilted up on an old desk, in front of the big window that went across the whole length of the wall.

“What? Iqbal … Nothing, it’s nothing.”

The long canvas had colour in it at the top, a wash of red and yellows and black. In the painting, in the background, there was a poster for Deewar, that one, you know, Amitabh Bachchan with the coolie’s rope around his neck and legs wide apart. In front of it there was a man, a real young man with a cigarette, leaning against the wall, not coloured in yet.

“All balls, Anu,” I said. “Don’t try to be so cool and careless. You look like you want to kill somebody in the paper. What’s the deal?”

“Fuck you also, Iqbal,” he said, and settled back on his heels. “All right. Listen to this. ‘Mr. Vidyarthi’s installation is a succinct comment on the restricted imaginative life and the repressed, bubbling anger of the lumpen. He artfully uses elements of Bombay street kitsch to achieve a nearly absolute expression of spatial nullification and emotional withdrawal. A series of incisions on the rear wall leak sheets of water — a potent psycho-symbolic image of unconscious energy leaking into and through artistic expression, yet unnoticed by the installation’s absent inhabitants. His project is the crystallization of emptiness.’ Now look at this.” This was a grainy, shadowy picture of a room filled with pieces of wood, brass utensils, a sagging charpai , a torn mattress, torn movie posters, and framed pictures of gods and goddesses, and some other stuff hanging from the roof that I couldn’t quite make out. There was a wall with cracks running across it.

“And so?” Anubhav said. “Succinct comment, you think?”

“If it’s in The Times of India ‚” I said, “it must be true.”

“ Maderchod ‚” Anubhav burst out. “Why do I even try with people like you? It’s the most silly, the most facile, easy bullshit I’ve ever seen. It’s, it’s completely lacking in talent. That fucking Mahatre is so impressed by the simple fact that it’s an installation that he thinks it must be really mod and good. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” By now he was shredding The Times and tossing the pieces about as he walked back and forth, and I was trying to hide my smile as I edged carefully out of the room. Anu’s habit of thinking he was smarter and better than everybody else always made it easy to fuck with his trip. Or maybe it was that he thought that the rest of us were a little more stupid than him. Either way he was sexy when he was all angry and running about giving speeches about art and life.

In the long corridor outside Sandhya’s mother was shuffling her slippers along. I sang, “ Namaste , Ma-ji,” and she threw a glance over her shoulder and crept on, holding her sari carefully an inch above the gleaming stone. She didn’t like me very much, and I knew that not very behind my back she called me kalua and musalta and kattu , which was true enough, my skin was blacker than theirs, not by a little but much, and I was Muslim, and I was very definitely circumcised, and they were very exalted Brahmins of the green-eyed Maharashtrian variety and so very pure. I suppose I should have hated Ma-ji for thinking of me quite straightforwardly as low-caste in Muslim disguise, but then there was my father every evening going on about “kafirs” and “dirty Hindu buggers,” which last made Rajesh laugh always, because dear father knew not what he said.

Ma-ji turned the corner slowly, into the kitchen where she liked to harass Amba bai about her cooking. She went, whispering prayers under her breath, mixed, I could swear, with occasional curses directed at Anubhav. She looked at me usually with a kind of vague distaste, but she detested him truly, and I could see why, because I had said much the same things to Sandhya — he was a shifty painter with uncertain income and slippery intentions — but Sandhya thought he was Bohemian, and so now he used one of the rooms in her house as his studio. When she first used that word, “Bohemian,” she explained it to me, but pretty much as I could work it out it meant somebody who lived with his parents and didn’t have a place to hang his brushes and didn’t want to get married, which made me a Bohemian also, but she didn’t find that very funny. She told me I was ignorant and uncultured. She — under Anubhav’s supervision — had been buying art books at Crossword also, big glossy affairs, each of which cost more than a dozen management texts put together. This is the trouble with people who get their first good sex when they’re thirty. You tell them the truth and they talk about culture.

Now, though, she wasn’t thinking of culture. She was leaning into the bluish-white glow from a seventeen-inch monitor, motionless as a stalking crane and as acutely alive, fingers lightly on the keys. I shut the door to her office behind me, said her name once, then again, and it wasn’t the jet-like roar of the old air conditioner that kept her from hearing me.

“Sandhya,” I said again, a little louder. I had learnt not to tap her on the shoulder — it was like waking a sleepwalker, and scarier for me than for her, that sudden strangled sound she made, and the absence in her eyes. “Sandhya.”

She turned to me finally, slowly and reluctantly. When she hadn’t slept much, her skin became translucent somehow, so that you saw how small she really was, and how her will and velocity pushed always against the delicacy of her body, and also the cost.

“Trains ran late this morning,” I said. It was necessary to talk of exactly nothing for the first minute or two, until she had left the shimmering world where wisps of code slid noiselessly against each other, until she inhabited firmly the person in the chair in front of me. “Also there was an accident near the Pedder Road flyover.”

Her regard was square-on but dispassionate, cool and uninterested. “Budget will be presented tomorrow in Parliament,” I said, and finally her eyes narrowed and she saw me, saw me really, I mean.

“Iqbal,” she said. “ Kaisa hai ?”