Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

I — after a while, a few moments, I don’t know how long — I put the plane back, slid it down behind the tower where I had found it. The magnets kissed the metal with a small sucking sound, and as I leaned close to the machine I could feel their pull, and I thought I felt it in my fingertips, the random destruction, the corruption of our files on the hard disk, particles moving on metal and twenty rupees and twenty paise gone. I stood up straight, swallowed. Then I started my backup, and went outside to the accounting office, and I sat in a chair. Then Raunak-ji came in with a glass of tea and a plate of bhajiyas , and I drank and ate. I made myself sick with eating.

“How long have you worked here?” I said.

“Twenty-nine years,” Manishi-ji said. “I have one year seniority.”

“Eight months,” Raunak-ji said. “Seven-and-a-half, actually.”

Manishi-ji laughed, shaking his head, and I laughed with him. “Are you married, Manishi-ji?” I said.

“Of course I’m married,” he said. “You young people are absurd. You’re not married, Iqbal?”

“No, I’m not,” I said, at which they both looked perturbed. “Children, Manishi-ji?”

I had never seen them before, not really. That evening, I learnt about Manishi-ji’s son, who had a shop at the airport in Dubai, and his daughter, who was married to an engineer in the PWD, and the death of Raunak-ji’s wife the year before of cardiovascular congestion. I ate with greasy fingers, and in that room stacked with ledgers I listened to their lives, and laughed with them, and found that I loved them. When I said, I must go, they said they would leave with me. I waited as they locked up the accounting office, and then waited again outside as they struggled with the lock on the raw material shed.

“Ooof,” Manishi-ji said. “Here, let me try.”

“Go ahead and try,” Raunak-ji said. “You after all are the lock expert.”

“Move, no, a little.”

They were standing shoulder to shoulder, peering at the huge lock, turning the key back and forth. I was standing behind them. Over us, on the wall, a tubelight flickered on and off. In that blue light I looked at their bent backs, their shoulders, and I saw how even their necks were the same, stubbled and slight, with greying hair above, and shiny pates. I saw how the human head is made, the little hollow at the top of the neck, where the skull rests on the body. Is that the place? Is that where the flesh is vulnerable? Is it so easy? Do you just raise the pistol, point it up into that hollow? Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

“There,” Manishi-ji said. “What’s so difficult about that?”

“If you’re so good at it,” Raunak-ji said, “you do it from tomorrow.”

They walked with me to the gate, each with a hand on one of my shoulders.

“Take some rest,” Raunak-ji said.

“Relax,” Manishi-ji said. “Everything will be okay.”

As I walked down the lane towards the highway they both waved. When I turned the corner their hands were still raised.

*

I could hear the party as the lift came up the shaft, the clink of glasses and that enticing hum of voices behind closed doors. I let myself in and squeezed my way through the crush in the corridor. There was a familiar face here and there, Anubhav’s arty friends, but many I hadn’t seen before. In the kitchen Ma-ji and Amba bai were standing in front of sizzling karhais, tossing bhajiyas onto plates.

“Did you see how they eat?” Ma-ji said. “Hungry as dogs.”

“Who are all these people?”

She shook her head and threw handfuls of vegetables slathered in besan into the burning oil. I turned, went to the office, where I left the tapes on a shelf, checked on Lalit, who was sleeping the uneasy stomach-clutching sleep of the greedy, and finally found Sandhya in the drawing room. She turned sideways to get through two painters, raising a tray high above her head, and whispered fiercely into my ear, “We’re going to run out of Scotch.” It was true: on the table where I had put out the drinks three bottles were empty. Even as I watched a documentary filmmaker emptied a fourth. I tried to get back to the door, but found myself working my way around the back wall, near Sandhya’s blue painting, where Anubhav was sitting on the sofa and talking to a man dressed in a white bush shirt.

“True, true, too true,” Anubhav was saying. “Mahatre-ji, that is just so much commodity fetishism.”

Mahatre took a mighty gulp of his drink and said, nodding, “Mere decoration.”

On Mahatre’s left there was a woman in a white sari talking to Miss Viveka. The ponytailed fellow was leaning on the back of Miss Viveka’s chair, talking to two men in long kurtas. The blue of the painting was reflected in all of Miss Viveka’s mirrors, and the colour seemed to stain the dim lamplight. I gave up trying to get back to the door, and went instead to the table, where I found a bottle and poured myself a double peg. My stomach was heaving from all the grease I had eaten, and I drank the Scotch with hope, feeling it burn down like an elixir. I took another sip, and saw Sandhya again, bringing more food to the table.

“Do you think I would make a good killer, Sandhya?” I said to her.

“What?”

“Nothing. What’s wrong?” I said. Normally she enjoyed this rattle and roll, all this laughter and welcoming people into her house. Das’s deadline was on us and as far as she knew on Monday we were dead, unless a miracle happened on the Sunday, but there was no joy in her at all, nothing. She was putting plates from the tray on the table, slamming each one down. “Tell me,” I said.

She pulled me close to her, and whispered with astonished hatred, “He’s screwing her. He’s screwing her .” She jabbed with her head over her right shoulder towards the far corner of the room, through the crowd, and I knew exactly who she meant. I went back, holding my glass high up, and now Anubhav was standing near the wall, leaning back with his legs apart. To his left Miss Viveka was talking to Mahatre, smiling up at him. Anubhav and Miss Viveka weren’t facing each other, actually they were facing away from each other, not back to back but angled a little, outwards and away, but there it was, it was true. I knew it was because of the precise three inches between them, not touching but not exactly far, because of the laughter in their conversations and their occasional glances back at each other, their happiness and that feeling of safety in their now-and-then glancing shoulders. I knew it because they weren’t looking at each other. It was exactly how Rajesh and I used to stand.

So I stood in the blue light and emptied my glass. Then I had another. Afterwards I went out into the building compound below and vomited all over somebody’s Maruti Zen.

*

I woke up with a Jumbo jet roaring through my head. I sat on the edge of my bed, with my hands over my eyes, and decided I had to tell Sandhya about Raunak-ji and Manishi-ji, tell her now. But the phone was dead, so I pulled on some clothes and staggered out into the sun. As I went down the street each step went through my heels to the top of my head, and I was heavy with regret. I thought of their lives, and their children, their years and years of work, and I stopped in the middle of the road and turned back once, but then I went on. At the Grand Video Store I asked to use their phone, but Ahmed Raza, whom I had known all my life, said, “Iqbal, all the phones are dead. Go home.” I didn’t move. My legs ached. “There’s some trouble in the city. We’re going to close the shop.”

I watched as he slammed down the shutters. “Go home, Iqbal,” he said. But I thought of Sandhya spending another day, a Sunday, teary-eyed at her computer, and so I went on. Even that was an evasion. I went on mainly because I wanted to give what I knew to somebody else, get rid of it. Around me the city’s Sunday emptied. Have you ever been at the beginning of a riot? You feel it coming, gathering in silence. There was the bazaar hustle of a holiday morning, and then suddenly all the shops were closed. The street was blank and yawning, and a woman’s slipper lay at a crossroad. I looked up and all the windows were vacant. I walked on. The road dipped between plots covered with bricks and coils of steel cable which towered above my head. I could feel the fear, the terror in the empty lanes and the sky overhead. I was not afraid, but I was not brave. I felt that I had a question. I thought I would turn a corner, and I would see Rajesh swaggering down the road towards me, an iron rod in his hand. I wanted to ask: will you kill me, Rajesh? Will you kill my Muslim mother and my Muslim father? Will you take our land then, our needle-point of land in this wilderness? Will you live happily in it then? Could you? Tell me, tell me, I said. Tell me. Across a creek filled with black, sludgy water, a line of buildings extended a serrated edge across the horizon. Now there was a quick flurry of barks, a howling that echoed back and forth among the walls and the buildings and then vanished, sunk in the silence. I walked on. A sudden cluster of shacks spilled down from the road to an unseen precipice, twisted together like some memory of a village, obscenely tiny and squeezed against each other. The road was fearsome because I had never been able to look to its end as it stretched far away, endless and quiet. I had never seen how long it led. I walked. Over the rooftops a column of smoke stretched into the sky. In my heart I saw flames, and Guru-ji face down in the middle of his akhara , stretched across the fine sand. My mouth worked, open and shut, open and shut. I turned a corner and saw a dog. He turned in the middle of the road and looked at me over his shoulder. He was yellow in colour, ugly and lean, filthy, and I could hear his breathing. I went past him and then he began to walk next to me. I stopped, bent down as if to pick up a stone, raised my hand, and he cringed and lowered his head to the ground, but didn’t run. I turned, and stumbled away, and he came with me. The sun was overhead now, and I didn’t know where I was. I remembered my mother’s Allah and Ma-ji’s Parameshwar and thought, tell me, lord, tell me, master. The dog stopped short and looked over his shoulder again at me. I laughed. The city curved away from us, stretching like hills as I put a hand to my eyes, valley after valley, always higher.