Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“No, actually, I’m Rajesh’s friend. For the last two years. A little more, maybe. Mrs. Gore is my boss and has met him also. We saw him on Tuesday night.” I realized I didn’t know the Hindi for art opening. “He came to a painting show with us.”

“For what?” Rajesh’s father said.

“A show of paintings.”

“Iqbal is Rajesh’s best friend,” Sandhya said suddenly, her eyes moist. “They are, they are old friends.” She stopped abruptly.

They were puzzled by me, by their son’s unexpected Muslim friend who talked about paintings. But I knew about them. I knew that his name was Shivraj and hers Sharda, that they had an elder son named Dilip who worked as a clerk in a cooperative bank, and I knew that the young woman who emerged now with a rattle of cups and glasses was Dilip’s wife Mamta, that she was tiny in size and meek in appearance but had a tongue as sharp as a fish-knife, that Dilip and Mamta went every Saturday afternoon to Juhu beach, that she had a yearning for blazing spices.

“Please take,” Rajesh’s mother said hoarsely. She leaned forward, and still standing, handed the teacups to us. They were in fear, but they were certain about their hospitality, and so we drank the water out of little steel cups, and then the tea. There was a blue plate piled high with chiwda , and Rajesh’s mother held it out to us. “Please take,” she said. A group of children had followed us up the stairs, and I could hear their feet on the floor outside, their whispering. I put a palmful of chiwda into my mouth, and looked at the strip of wall between Rajesh’s mother and father. We sat in silence. I knew that Rajesh slept on the takath that we were sitting on, and that his father slept on a mattress on the floor next to him. Since their marriage, Dilip and Mamta had the one room inside, and Rajesh’s mother the passageway next to the kitchen. I had imagined the room and it was exactly as I had imagined it, but I hadn’t known about the calendar, or the steel cups.

Dilip came back from the police station an hour later, and to his mother’s eager questions he said, only, “Nothing.” And then he walked with us to the train station. I said goodbye to Rajesh’s parents, to the narrow length of the room and its muted light, to Mamta, and then we walked down the staircases, around and back on the balconies, past the dozens and scores of identical rooms, with the children following behind us. I stumbled after Dilip, staring at the blue check on his shirt collar, wondering how with his thick glasses and his retreating air of meekness he could be Rajesh’s brother. On the street Sandhya walked between us, and finally she looked up at him and asked, “Did you know Rajesh hasn’t been to the Post Office for work in many months?”

Dilip looked away, then back. “Yes. Only now we found out. I have not told my mother yet. Also …”

“Also?” Sandhya said.

“Today one sub-inspector said they had received information that he was involved with some bad people. Bhai log he worked with.”

“What?” I said.

“Yes, bhai log. ” He grimaced as he repeated the phrase. In my mouth I tasted the small cleverness of the words, the mean wit with which the city’s gangsters described themselves: the fraternity, the band of brothers.

“How much I didn’t know about my own brother,” Dilip said. “How much more don’t I know?”

Sandhya said nothing, and I stared straight ahead, and we walked on, through that road dense with other people and a thick haze of unreality. I stared at the gouts of red paan stain at the foot of a wall, and forgot how I had come to be there. Time passed, and I was paralysed by an ecstasy of wonder. I was filled with a glory of questions like a blinding blue light. I could not tell you how much of the day stumbled past us. Finally, outside the train station, Dilip and Sandhya and I stood near a long yellow wall, leaning towards each other against the ceaseless flow of faces. He held me by the elbow, and shouted over the afternoon rush. “How did you meet Rajesh?”

“I met him while we were exercising,” I said. The lie came easily. I had a certain fluency at lies.

“Of course. He was always building his body,” Dilip said with pride. “He was second in a competition last year, you know.”

I knew. We said goodbye to Dilip and bought tickets. On the platform, we waited, and I tried to remember the truth of meeting Rajesh. I had met him, as I remembered, on a New Year’s Eve when I had eight hundred and twenty rupees in my pocket from a birthday envelope from my grandmother. It was in a bar called the Ramanand behind the Taj, which during the day was crowded with office workers eating bheja curry and faluda , but by evening was taken over by men, only men. I had had one Hayward’s Ale, and when I noticed him standing in the crush, I gathered all my beery courage and motioned to the empty chair across the table. I had one more beer, and bought him one. When we told each other our full names we looked at each other for a moment and noted and dismissed the difference in our religions in one smile, that was all. Afterwards we walked outside on the waterfront, drifting happily with the holiday thousands. The charge at Vertigo was fifty rupees each, and the wait was half an hour, but inside there was the happiness of a beat that I could feel in my chest, choli ke peechay kya hai , and bodies and bodies, a mirrored ceiling in which danced the happy faces of men. We danced, and I bought another beer and leaned against the wall, and Rajesh stood in front of me and was pressed against me by the delirious jostle. He was very sure of himself. He held his beer with one hand and rested the other on my belt buckle. My stomach trembled, and he grinned, his eyes blue in the disco light, and he said, “ Dandi mein current hia ?”That was wrong, I stuttered, because you can’t have current in wood, it was a wrong manner of speech, it couldn’t be true, but he grinned even more widely and let his hand move, and I was wrong, and maybe there was current in the dandi after all. We passed the next year in meetings and quarrels and separations and phone calls. We argued about cricket and movies and broken promises and faithlessness and disease and death, but on the next New Year’s we were together again, against the same wall in Vertigo. I leaned my forehead against his shoulder, against the curving-in from the chest and the tight bulk of the biceps, and he whispered into my ear, “Bastard, you like me just for my Maharashtrian muscle.” I thought of what he had done a year ago, at his blunt roughness, and laughed at him. But what he said was true, and a little more than true, and much less than true. I pinched the tendon under his shoulder. “And you?” I said. “Why do you like me?” “For your beauty,” he said, and cupped my cheek in his hand. I wanted to believe it and couldn’t. “It’s true,” he said, and kissed me.

*

Things settle and sink. I spent the next two days buying and setting up an aquarium. I learnt about air, and the lack of it, and what there is to know about food for fish. I learnt about which fish eat each other. Lalit and I cleared a place in his room, near his bed, moved aside his toys. After I carried in the aquarium, we laid in the gravel, siphoned the water in while Ma-ji stood in the doorway and talked about doom. Then the fishes, and then Lalit and I sat on the ground and watched them, their sudden turns, their cool black eyes. There was a sunken boat at the bottom of the sea, a shattered green hulk through which they flitted, in and out. This especially delighted Lalit. He made up stories about how it sank, terrible tales of storms and sea-monsters. Me, I allowed myself one phone call every evening to Dilip, just before I left to go home. I waited every day as they sent someone up from the tea-shop, feeling a constant motion at the bottom of my heart, deep where it had gone while the world went on. Dilip came on always and said, “ Haan , Iqbal?” After he told me that there was no word of Rajesh, he talked often of other things. I think that, oddly, he was trying to comfort me. We spoke one day of cricket, and on another about a hit movie neither of us had seen. The next day Sandhya said we were to have a party on Saturday‚ two days away I said nothing, but I must have looked so poisonous that she began her defence immediately.