Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“I want to see what it’s made of,” I said, and I heard footsteps tapping away. I could feel myself swaying back and forth, towards and away from the intricate pattern of ridges and valleys snaking across the orange and the green. Then there was a hand on my shoulder. I shuffled myself around, and it was the mirrored woman. I leaned towards her chest, wanting to see myself, and she backed away, her nose wrinkling.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” I said. “Not like that. Just want to see.”

Sandhya appeared behind her, rolling her eyes. “All right, Iqbal,” Sandhya said. “Home. Come on.” She took my hand and towed me through the crush, and now they all stepped back to let us pass. I snarled, and laughed when they stepped on each other’s feet.

Outside, on the sidewalk, the ethnic woman caught up with us. “Talk to you tomorrow, Sandhya,” she said.

“Absolutely,” Sandhya said.

“Lovely meeting you, darling.” She fluttered her fingers and shut the door firmly behind her.

“Where’s Rajesh?” I said.

“I didn’t see him in there,” Sandhya said. “I think he’s gone.”

“I can’t go without him,” I said, but she cut me away from the glass door, nudged me to a Maruti parked under a poster for Droh Kaal.

“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Stay here. I’ll be back.”

It was dark now. The hood of the car was hot, and the air moved snugly against me, and I felt sweat running down my back. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, once and again, against the constriction, against the sopping weight of myself. But still I could feel my skin burning, heavy and inescapable, and I opened my eyes and I could see the bluish square of the door, like a crystal, and the faint golden and silver shapes floating within. And then the music, ethereal and distant, which must have been always there but only now in my ears. I listened to it carefully. As if it were trying to tell me something. I turned my head and saw another man leaning on a car, a driver, I thought. He lit his cigarette and in the sudden flare I saw his tired face, a thin moustache. We waited together.

Then the door opened and Sandhya came up quickly to me, shaking her head. “He’s not here. He’s gone.”

“He just left?”

“I’m going to put you in a taxi,” she said.

“I can take the train.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m going to put you in a taxi.” And she did, literally, holding on to my arm, and lowering my head into the seat. She folded a hundred-rupee note into my shirt pocket, and shut the door without a word.

“Where do you think Rajesh went?” I asked, but we were already halfway down the block, and the driver turned his head to look at me, but he had no answer, and neither did the city, my city which went by swiftly and gleaming in the dark. We swept over the long arc of Marine Drive, through Kemp’s Corner, down Pedder Road, Mahalaxmi, Worli, Mahim, and the concrete loomed above, white in the moonlight, higher than I ever remembered, and I lay helpless under its weight, crushed by its certain beauty.

*

“ Parameshwar, Parameshwar .” Ma-ji exhaled softly as she lowered herself onto the far end of the couch, next to me but far away. I was sitting in the long passageway, puffing viciously at a cigarette, against my pulsing headache and anger and desolation. I had given them up four years ago, but now I had decided that Rajesh had left me at the Pushkara Gallery, left me — and I knew this somehow even before I woke up — for some fancy prancing rich boy. In his anger and sulks, he had gone, gone, despite his workingman’s muscular solidarity and his accusations about me, me, telling me always to go back to my Malabar-Hill-Fair-and-Lovely-brand queens that I liked so much. So now I pulled on the foul taste, a tonic for the bitterness in my heart, and even the miracle of Ma-ji choosing to sit beside me, even if at arm’s and a leg’s length, it amused me worth nothing, less than nothing, and I sat blowing smoke.

“Twenty-two thousand for that‚” she said, and it was all clear. That was the painting the mirrored woman (whose name turned out to be Miss Viveka Gupta) had brought to the house that morning, wrapped in double and triple sheets of newspaper and carried by two men in shorts and bare feet, and twenty-two thousand was the price, in white only and all by cheque, and since I was the one who cut the drafts and quarrelled always with Sandhya about how she scattered and flung about her own money like pigeon-feed, I was now Ma-ji’s friend against waste and frippery. She had spent the morning watching from the door of the drawing room, as Miss Viveka supervised and her mistris took down the framed poster of the Eiffel Tower from the long wall, used a level to pencil-mark heights and angles, and as they hung up the twenty-two-thousand-rupee masterpiece. All the time Ma-ji had cursed under her breath.

“It’s art, Ma-ji,” I said.

She looked at me as if I were mad. “Art? And what, we are nawabs ?”

“I think you are, Ma-ji,” I said. “Definitely, at least rajas .”

She looked at me out of her watery grey eyes, the white pallu wrapped tightly about her head, not quite sure whether to be flattered or infuriated, and she glanced at the drawing room door, and I could see that the invisible and mighty presence of the twenty-two-thousand-act-of-genius was tilting her rapidly towards breaking our tiny truce, but then Lalit came running out of the kitchen and saved me.

“Iq-bal Uncle,” he said, flinging himself forward on his grandmother’s knee. “I want an aquarium.”

“A what?”

“An aqua-ri-um, Iq-bal ghonchu Uncle,” he said, as Ma-ji smoothened his hair down with both her hands. She worried always about the parting in his hair. “For fish, don’t you know?”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But where you got this crackpot idea from?”

“From the sea,” Lalit said. “In there.” He shrugged away his grandmother’s arms without looking at her, but easy and gentle, and pulled on my sleeve until I stood up and let myself be dragged to the drawing room door. He stood next to me, leaning on my leg, and pointed at the painting on the wall.

“The sea,” he announced, with the pride of someone who had created it.

It was a square canvas, about five feet each way, and with a wash of green and blue that seemed to seep off the painting, into the air, so the whole room seemed suddenly marine. There were dark shadows in it, that came and went as you looked. I suppose it was the sea if it was anything.

“The sea,” I said. “And so you want an aquarium?”

“Of course,” Lalit said, laughing at my backwardness. “For fishes.”

“Of course,” I said.

“It’s going to cost a lot, this aqua-ri-um,” Ma-ji said under my shoulder. She always took an age to go from here to there, but just when you stopped watching her she would turn up with startling suddenness, blowing curses over your skin. Now, again, as my pulse jangled, she boxed her hands over Lalit’s ears and whispered, “And this painting, so much money. Such bad habits she’s teaching him.”

Lalit was hanging on to my shirt, leaning forward towards all this, through the drawing room door, which he wasn’t allowed to enter. The drawing room contained Sandhya’s new Swedish-looking sofa and couches with white cushions, her glass-topped coffee table, her crystal imported from America, her new blue carpet with the Persian pattern on it, her flowers which looked so real you couldn’t tell. It was a perfect room, and none of us were allowed to enter it. Even Sandhya hardly went in there.

“Careful, Lalitya,” I said. “Don’t cross the line.”

Now the phone rang and my heart lifted. It rang again, and I wanted to go to it, but Lalit was still a weight against my leg, and Ma-ji was muttering behind me somewhere, and I was flooded with relief and trying to remember to be angry. The ringing cut off abruptly, and I started slowly down the corridor, carrying Lalit with me. Then I heard Sandhya down the hall.