Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“I’m alive,” I said. “But you’re looking a little hard-labour this morning, dear. When did you sleep?”

“Four,” she said, passing a hand over her face. “Don’t be mean.” This meant she had perhaps slept at four and woken up at six to get Lalit ready and off to school, or had maybe not slept at all, but tossed about on the double bed for a while, twisting some function or procedure inside out as the sky lightened outside.

“Go take a bath,” I said, and dragged her chair towards the door.

“Iq-bal,” she said.

“Tihar Jail is not a good look during the day, Sandhya. And think of what the worshipper-of-beauty would say.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not a beauty-worshipper, Iqbal,” she said wearily. “He’s a serious artist.” She slumped out of the door. I spun her chair back against her desk and began to clean, starting with her keyboard, which as always was muddy with tea stains. The room was jammed with hardware — we ran a Novell server with four terminals, all the way from an old XT to a Pentium 166, and we had two printers, one ancient wide-carriage Epson dot matrix, and a LaserJet that had recently started to vibrate violently every thirty pages or so. We had a reed chick over the window to keep out the heat, but in the afternoons the air conditioner roared alarmingly, and my toes near the grey computer chassis under my desk would start to get warm. Then there were the manuals stacked above the desks to the roof, and boxes of disks and tapes, and accordion-like thicknesses of printouts, and the chairs back to back. Even if we could have afforded two more coders for our free terminals we had nowhere to put them, because we understood completely that two in that room was already one too much, and four would lead to murder. I did my best with the manuals and the printouts, stacking them evenly against the wall, and put pens in cups and threw away crumpled pieces of paper. Then I straightened out our steno pads and cleaned the phones with an old towel. Finally I wiped off our screens. When I finished with the room I had something that wasn’t quite order, and far from beauty, but a place where you could live one more day. Then I got to work.

Sandhya came in with her hair in a towel, wearing a white kurta and jeans. She sat at her desk and the keys started clicking, and meanwhile I opened envelopes and wrote up invoices and typed out cheques. The minutes passed, and when I turned my head, I could see, over Sandhya’s shoulder, the lines of black letters moving up and down the white screen, too fast for me to read. She had a bad habit, when she was debugging, of also polishing up, snipping here and there to make everything tighter, and now she sat wrapped in the glorious mantle of her concentration, her cheekbones purified by her devotion. Elegance, elegance, she said to me always. My code was patchy and twisty and knotted together, like MTNL phone wiring, and if it worked I didn’t really care if it was creaky, but that was the difference between us, and one reason why I loved her so.

“All right, genius,” I said, rubbing her shoulders. “Time for a break.”

I kept rubbing, and finally she leaned back, away from the keyboard.

“Shit,” she said. “How long has it been?”

“Hour and fifteen minutes.”

“Went like a flash.”

It always did. We had an arrangement that I would stop her every hour for a ten-minute rest period, which she had agreed to only when she had started getting cramps in her arms and shoulders so bad that it would stop her working for half a day at a time. She was still peering at the monitor, though.

“Why’s this thing crashing, Iqbal?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and spun her chair around. She tilted her head back and drew her knees up to her chest and made a tight little smile.

“He came yesterday evening,” she said. “After you had left.”

I recognized the grimace and I knew who he was. He was her ex-husband, Vasant, who behaved as if he were even now not only her husband but still her all-holy Parameshwar , with the resulting godly duties of visiting suffering and pain upon her. “What the hell did he want?”

“He was angry about Anubhav again.”

I looked at her keenly, checking, and she turned her face away. Vasant had hit her only once after the divorce, but the Anubhav thing made him rage, and he was capable of anything. “And?”

“He said he would go to court to show that I was an immoral woman. Of loose character. Not fit to raise Lalit.”

“Please. He should be the last one to talk. If we went to court what-all we could show.”

“Yes. That’s what he said anyway. He was very abusive.”

“Bastard.”

“Yes. Anyway. Back to work.”

She spun her chair around and a moment passed and then slowly the keyboard began to click. I listened to it, waiting for the usual headlong swiftness. Parameshwar is a word I heard in real life for the first time from Ma-ji, when I first started to work for Sandhya. Until then I had heard it only in movies, but Ma-ji wanted Sandhya to stay with Vasant, in spite of everything, she really said it, because he was Parameshwar . You must learn to endure, Ma-ji had said to her own daughter, and although I was the new employee and everything, I had wanted to scream at her, endure how much, for what? I never did, though, all the way through the complications of the divorce, through Vasant’s threats, his attempts to snatch the flat from her, to drive her away from her own father’s property, her loneliness, her fear for her son being taken away from her. I had never asked my mother either, my mother who taught me eternal patience and sabr in the name of another saviour. Endure. How much, for what?

*

The next evening we all went to an arty party. The party was actually called an opening, for someone who was a friend of Anubhav’s whose name I didn’t recognize. This was on day two of our countdown, eleven days left and the bug still hiding somewhere, flitting elusively just beyond Sandhya’s grasp. Sandhya was wearing a black power suit and a new silk scarf, bright red, and her hair swept over her cheek and to her shoulder in a long elegant line. Rajesh and I clapped when she model-walked out into the drawing room and twirled for us. But she slept in the cab, despite the heat and the blaring traffic jam, her head swaying on the back of the seat. When her mouth lolled open, Rajesh reached over and gently nudged it shut. “Mad girl,” he said, grinning, and for the rest of the ride he held her by the shoulder and kept her steady. Despite all his grumbling about my hours and my late-coming, during her trouble he had offered to put out supari on Vasant. Five thousand rupees only, he had said, making a pistol barrel with his fingers, tap-tap, two in the back of the head and you won’t even hear of the maderchod ’s memory again. I’d laughed at him, and had told him he was cute when he was dangerous.

At the Pushkara Gallery we woke Sandhya, which was no easy task, because in the three kilometres and forty minutes of the ride she had fallen deep into sleep. She woke up with a start, paid the cabbie, checked herself in the rearview mirror, stepped out onto the pavement with her little black purse held in front of her, and then we followed as she marched in, past the gleaming glass door held open by a durban , her shoulders moving smartly in time with the clipping of her heels. Rajesh and I looked at each other as we trotted behind, because normally we would have been a little scared of going into a place like that, but with Sandhya leading we were afraid of nothing, not even the very little look a woman gave us as we came in, a woman dressed in a Rajasthani ghagra and choli with mirrors all over, and a black rural-type bindi on her forehead. It’s the little looks that rule the world. But we, despite our sweat-stained fifty-percent-rayon shirts, were in past the durban and his door, and so Rajesh and I, we found our usual place at these things, with our backs to a wall and not very far from the bar. Sandhya was off looking for Anubhav in the crowd, which was floating from here to there and laughing and trilling, and, I have to say, smelling really good. Soon we had glasses of champagne, which was our very new vice, with its thin little taste of foreign wickedness. We drank it fast.