Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Yes,” he said, and sat back in the seat. The car crunched off in a swirl of dust, and I was sadder still. He had the look of a man going to his execution, a man who has accepted that this unbelievable thing is going to happen, and is now settling accounts in his mind. I think he was quite past fear.

*

On the second day I gave in to panic. I mean on the second day that Rajesh was gone I gave up all hope of indignation and frankly drowned in dread. At exactly ten-thirty I was unable to work anymore, and I turned in my chair and looked at the back of Sandhya’s head. She was writing code in quick little flurries of keytaps. I picked up the phone and dialled a number that Rajesh had told me never to call, and listened to thirty-four rings. Personal calls are not allowed, Rajesh had said, and anyway they’re a nosy lot, those fellows who work at the Post Office, they would ask too many questions. I listened to the shrill ringing and counted. Finally, a voice said, “Chembur Post Office.”

“Parcel Office,” I said, and waited. There was a longer ring now, insistent. I lost count but I held the receiver hard against my head and waited.

“Yes?” a woman said.

“Parcels?”

“Yes.”

“Is Rajesh Pawar there?”

“No.”

I knew I had another question, but I was silenced by stories that appeared abruptly in my head, complete tales of disaster and horror. She hung up.

I concentrated on my finger, the finger that tapped the bar on top of the phone, brown against black, the finger that pressed the keys. I made each movement deliberate and then again waited. This time I asked for the supervisor. “You are who?” the woman said.

“Supervisor, please,” I said.

I had to tell her my name, and also that it was about a missing registered letter, and the line was cut off once and I had to call back, but finally he came on and I asked about Rajesh.

“Your good name?” he said.

“Iqbal Akbar,” I said.

“And you are who?”

“I’m a friend.”

“A friend?”

“Of Rajesh.”

“A friend of Rajesh.”

He said that with some satisfaction, as if he understood everything. Whatever he did understand, it persuaded him. “But this is very strange, if you are a friend,” he said. “Rajesh Pawar hasn’t worked here in eight months. He just walked out one afternoon. He was sorting parcels and then he just got up and left. No resignation letter, nothing. Very improper. But how is it you do not know?”

I put the phone down. I pressed my temples with my knuckles as hard as I could and tried to squeeze it all away.

“Listen, Sandhya,” I said.

But she was away, deep into the machine. I put my hand on her shoulder and waited, my heart tightening like a fist.

“ Haan ?” she said, jerking out of her trance. “What? What?”

But suddenly I didn’t want to talk about Rajesh. A question about him, now, would give shape to my fear, put it in the world and make it real. “How did you meet Anubhav?” I said.

A moment passed, and another, I asked again, and then she said in a drugged voice, wrapped around silences like a call from the other side of the moon, “He helped me buy a book at Crossword.”

“What book?” I knew the answer, but I wanted something, a word, a story, a plank or two to prop against my collapse.

“Picasso book,” she said. “It was a book about Picasso.”

“But what did you like about him?” I think there was something in my voice, a sob, and she swivelled in her chair, bumping against my knees, and looked at me, blinking.

“What is it?” she said.

So I told her. She took charge then. She shut down her compiler, and sent me outside to put on my shoes and wait by the front door. I watched Anubhav paint. When Sandhya stuck her head in his door to say that we were going out for a while, he didn’t turn his head to say his “ Haan , okay, see you later.” He was painting rural scenes. In a canvas leaning against the wall, there was a mud hut and a pile of hay and a hard yellow sky. And a bony, elongated cow peered at me from an easel to the side. I thought, he’s been working hard. Sandhya waved at his back and I blinked at the cow and we left.

We caught the local from VT to Sion. In the train, which was mostly empty because of the hour, I turned my head and leaned my head against the bars on the window and cried. The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably. I had a plea in my throat, a half-formed call for mercy. A supplication, my mother would have called it. Then, filling my head, a roar as the train went through a station without stopping, faces only a few feet away dimmed by the ferocious speed.

At Sion station we got into an autorickshaw. I had Rajesh’s address written out in my diary, but I had never been to his house before, so we went slowly, stopping now and then to ask directions. “All the way around to the back of the Rupam Cinema Hall,” a man driving a DHL van told us. “Then you go straight, Dharavi side.” So we went around Rupam, which was crowded for a matinee of Zanjeer. A revival, I thought, Rajesh will be angry he missed it. We drove on, and the road became narrow, and finally we stopped. Sandhya paid off the autorickshaw and then we walked. The lane was actually a road, but the stalls had pushed out from the shops on either side, so that you could only walk in the very centre, brushing shoulders. They were selling suit pieces, baby clothes, kitchen utensils, plastic hair bands. After a while we left the bazaar behind and turned right, into a road lined with chawls , great greyish buildings continuing forever. Sandhya was wearing a black suit, and she began to walk faster as people turned to look at her. I stopped one of them, a thin grandfatherly man with white handlebar moustaches, and asked for the Saraswati Shinde Chawl. He looked at Sandhya, shading his eyes, and said to me, “Come, I’ll show you.” He turned and led us up the road, around a curve, and to it. “Here,” he said, gesturing with a tilt of his head. “Here.”

It was a four-storied building, enormous, built around a central courtyard, balconies running all the way around on the inside. There was a small tree in the centre of the courtyard, a patch of unexpected green. The sun came down hard into the land, and I was trembling.

*

Rajesh’s father was short, heavyset. He came eagerly to the open door of No. 312 when we knocked, tugging his banian down over his belly. He slumped into stillness while Sandhya told him that we were friends of Rajesh, and watching his stubbled, disappointed face, I thought he looked much smaller than I had imagined him from Rajesh’s stories. His wife came out through a narrow door behind him then, wrapping a blue pallu around her shoulders. She sent him away to put on a shirt, and seated us on a takath that almost filled the shallow breadth of the room.

“Dilip has gone to the police station,” she said in Marathi-accented Hindi. “We have reported this yesterday.”

I was looking at the calendar on the wall behind her, at a picture of the pristine arc of Marine Drive, hidden by her shoulder. She was looking at me, and I tried to speak but found that I could say nothing. There was a battered black table fan perched in a niche in the wall next to the takath, and I could feel the streaming air moving slowly across my back.

“I’m sure there will be some news soon,” Sandhya said.

“You, you know Rajesh for very long?” Rajesh’s father said to Sandhya. His shoulders filled the doorway as he buttoned a striped shirt. He looked uncomfortable asking the question, and I coughed and forced myself into speech.