Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Iqbal!” she said. “Another crash. It’s Das. Another crash, and this time the whole system’s frozen.”

She appeared in the door to the office, her face stricken. I gathered up my tools, and waited by the front door, by the orange statue of Ganesha, while she dressed for the outside world. From where I was leaning against the wall, I could see Anubhav working in his room. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he was squatting on his heels, holding a thick brush with a long grip, and it moved over the canvas with a whirring sound. The brush moved back and forth, and I could see the splatters of paint on his knees. He was working hard, had been all day, harder than I had ever seen.

“Eh, Anu,” I said. “Listen.” I said his name two more times, and then walked into the room and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What?” he said, still looking at the canvas.

“Last night. Did you send Rajesh out of the gallery? To get cigarettes or something?”

“What, me? No.” He turned his head and looked up at me. There were tiny dots of paint on his face.

“Did you see him leaving?”

“No. After that bullshit in the bathroom with Ratnani I don’t know where he went. Why?”

“It’s nothing. I just don’t know when he left.”

“He was high, man. Telling stupid stories like that. Must’ve fallen asleep somewhere on the way home.”

Anubhav turned back to his painting. Rajesh’s lies weren’t very interesting to him. I had believed Rajesh, and I was afraid.

“Come on,” Sandhya said, coming down the hall in a green suit. Outside, the sudden blaze of the sun hurt my eyes. The traffic ground past us in a solid stream, and all the taxis were full. We waited. I turned and looked up at the building, at the four stories of long curving balconies. It had been built in fifty-four, when they had built balconies everywhere, and those rounded corners, but now there were only chips of yellow paint left here and there, and most of Sea Vista was now black. The cars were dragging past us in starts and stops, inch by inch. Then it all stopped with a blare of horns, and we waited.

*

You can lose yourself in hardware. It takes only a twist or two, some pressure maybe, to break a coax cable, but tracing a cable break is long and careful hours with a crimping tool and terminal pings and NIC tests. When Sandhya and I got to the factory everything, each last terminal, was frozen solid, a cursor blinking hysterically from each screen. So she brought down the server and I got to work, walking each black cable length, looking for sharp bends, cuts in the casing, anything. The factory, which was called Sridhar and Sons, Ltd., was built on a big L-shaped plot in the Okhla Industrial Estates behind Nataraj Studios. I followed the cable through the executive cabins in the building at the front of the plot, under desks and over partitions (“a terminal on every manager’s desk and so instant information,” we had told them), around the production sheds where with great whines and clatters they made what they called custom high-heat high-performance parts for oil technology applications, which meant nothing to me except as data from which we missed twenty rupees and twenty paise and more, again and again and now and then, and probably now again, and I went then back out again into the sunlight, following the cable, which went outdoors in its protective plastic shell which snaked over the wall covered with red splatters of paan ‚ across the small yard littered with bidis , and into the raw materials shed at the back of the plot, where sheets of metal and coils and tubes were stacked to the ceiling, with the cable slung above, over the tubelights and back down to the little room, a cupboard, really, carved out of the wall between the storage area and the accountant’s office, and in this closet we had one terminal, and the server. Sandhya sat coiled in front of it.

“Seek errors,” she said, and I could hardly hear her above the rattling air conditioner which hung precariously above the door. “Seek errors, seek errors. And our tables are corrupted.”

“And twenty rupees and twenty paise?”

“Gone, this time thirty rupees and fourteen paise, gone again.”

“The cable looks all right. I’ll run terminal checks.”

I did, one by one by one all the way out to the executive cabins, and then I went back to raw materials and checked the power and the UPS, and then I opened up the server and pulled the hard disk controller. The machine was a big tower, which we had pushed up all the way against one side of the room, next to the terminal, both against a locked door which opened into the accounting offices, and even then I had to send Sandhya out into the passageway when I opened the case. I leaned my back against the wall and worked the board out, cleaned the gold contacts, settled it back in, checked for a firm seat, all gone home and snug in the slot, hooked in the cables, stared helplessly at the lovely design, at the exact fit of the components against each other, how can it not work, and then closed it up and went outside. We had already replaced the controller twice, and the hard disk once.

Sandhya was leaning against the door.

“It’s all working,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “It must be software. Has to be. Let’s go home.”

And then, suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. It came out of the endless azure sky and settled in my bones. I looked out at the yard, at its scattered pieces of paper, the two workers squatting against the wall with their bare knees shining, at the scattered bits of smoke around their heads, and I was hopeless.

“All right,” I said, but when I went in to pack up my screw-drivers, Manishi-ji came out of the accounting office and pulled us in for a cup of tea.

“A cup of tea only,” he said, waving us towards the two chairs in front of the foot-high platform that took up most of the room. He and the other accountant, Raunak-ji, had little inclined desks that they sat behind, on either side of the platform.

“O Raju,” Raunak-ji called, and when Raju came in, a boy of about fourteen in oversized khaki shorts, Raunak-ji said, “Two chai , ‘pecial, and biscuit.”

“No, really, nothing to eat,” Sandhya said.

“Nonsense, beta ,” Manishi-ji said. “You’ve been working hard. Must keep up the energy”

And Raunak-ji nodded. When I had first seen them, seated on their thrones behind the desks, I had thought they were twins, or at least brothers, with identical balding heads and pained expressions and thick round specs. They were both in their mid-fifties and wore white shirts and the same Bata sandals. They lived in their dank room lined with blue ledgers from floor to ceiling, balancing and balancing away, and I wondered if they knew about the twenty rupees and twenty paise. So I smiled, in spite of the sludgy bitterness in my veins, and Sandhya did, through her taut sheen of fatigue, and she talked to them about the stock market. They argued and laughed together, and I watched them. The only colour in the room came from the big safe against the wall behind them, an old Godrej painted a rusty red and covered with those little metal locket-type pictures of Ganesha and Lakshmi and Shiva with magnets on the back. There were so many gods and goddesses on the safe that you saw the red only in patches, and there was even an Air India Jumbo flying up the front of the safe, winging right through the holiness.

Then Raju brought the tea in, and we ate the biscuits as he poured. I found myself very hungry and took large bites. Raunak-ji dipped his biscuits in his tea and chomped with sturdy teeth. I ate and tried not to think of Rajesh.

Afterwards, we walked down the street to the corner, stepping through the pools of light under the streetlamps, turned left to the highway, and waved down a rickshaw amidst the headlong rush of trucks. As we got in, a black Ambassador pulled to a halt behind us. It was Das, on his way back to the factory after a day of meetings in the city Sandhya told him what had happened. “Sir,” she said. “We are working on it day and night. We will solve it, never fear.”