Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

It must have been afternoon when I saw the blood. My body felt as light as air, and I floated now from shadow to shadow. All the time there was the harsh huffing of the dog, and his trotting pace next to me. I thought first that it, the blood, was a smear of oil on the ground. Then as I came closer the sun tilted and I saw the colour, going from red to black. It was quite large, a shape like something had exploded on the ground, and droplets leading away There were rivulets where it still ran shiny. I hung above it, feeling a sensation of dropping. The dog mewled uneasily behind me. I looked around and it was another nondescript street, the same buildings and the same shuttered shops. The huge shadows came towards me and I felt my heart turn in bitterness. I stepped away but now I could no longer see where I was going. I felt my way to a wall and keeping a hand on it I pushed myself forward. Finally I could walk no more and I crouched with my back against concrete. The dog stopped, then came forward and circled me, moving his head back and forth. Finally he dropped to his haunches and sat in front of me, close, facing away. I could hear the breath sliding in and out of his throat, and also my own, insistent and unstoppable. The fur on his back was dirty and matted, and underneath I could see the pinkish flesh. The sight of it filled me with disgust but I was finally able to raise a hand, to let it down slowly on his shoulder, and his ears pricked but he kept still, and we stayed like that, next to each other. Under my fingers I could feel his heart beating.

*

It was night when I awoke, and the dog was gone. I pushed myself up, and as I tried to calculate where I was, going a little way down this street and then that, I was picked up by a police van. I pointed at my head and told them I was staggering because I had been assaulted and injured by a stranger. They cursed me much, cuffed me about a little, but on the whole they were quite generous — they dropped me right at the head of my lane and told me to stay home and not get into trouble. The next day the newspapers said that the situation was normal, that absolutely nobody had been killed, only a few scattered injuries, and so I went to work.

“I asked him,” Sandhya said as soon as I came into the office. She looked at me, her eyes enormous in her face. “I asked him and he said yes, they had made love. He said it happened. Then he just went back to work.” When I had passed by the studio Anubhav had been leaning into a canvas, his brush busy, intent and focussed. Sandhya here, on the other hand, looked as if she were about to curl over and collapse.

“Listen,” I said. “I have something to tell you also.”

So I told her. I told her about Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji and the safe and the magnets and the Jumbo jet. She jumped up, sat down twice, walked around the room, and then she picked up the phone and called Das. He was already in his meeting, and she insisted and shouted on the phone, and then we waited.

“What assholes,” she said. Her face was flushed. “What did they think? We weren’t trying to get rid of them. It wasn’t as if they were to be cancelled. ”

“They’ve been there for thirty years, Sandhya,” I said.

“That’s no damn excuse. Things change. Everything changes.”

I shrugged. The receiver burbled into her ear, and she began to speak. She told Das. For some reason I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I went out into the corridor, into Lalit’s room, and I sat on his bed and watched the fishes circle in the water and dash through the wreck at the bottom. Half an hour later I heard the office door open, and Sandhya came in.

“He says he’ll look into it,” she said. “He was pretty angry.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I think he’s going to throw them out.”

“He’ll have to.”

“At least we got a better program out of it.”

“Better?”

“Come look.”

We went into the office, and she booted it up, and I sat at her desk and ran it through its paces. It was better, it was leaner, faster, more elegant looking. Where screens had scrolled, they now snapped, lookups happened in a flash, every process was twice or three times as fast. It was beautiful. She had gone close to the metal and come out with a kind of perfection.

“Beauty,” I said. “Really, beauty, man.”

“Shit, Iqbal,” she said, and I turned around. She was sitting in my chair, chewing on her collar, twisted with remorse. “I mean, they weren’t bad guys. They were probably just scared.”

“Yes,” I said. “Quite scared.”

“Maybe I can tell Das we’ll retrain them,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have to fire them.” She picked up the phone and dialled. “Maybe they just did us a service, you know, made us work harder. We don’t have to be like that …” As she was talking I watched her face. She spoke and she listened to herself speak. The words got slower and slower. “We don’t have to be like that …” Then she was absolutely still. I saw something happen in her, like a change in the light when the sun moves. She put down the receiver, carefully, deliberately. She looked at me straight. “Fuck them, yaar ” she said. “Let them burn.”

Then she got up, marched down the corridor, went into Anubhav’s studio, picked up the Rural Cow and threw it out of the window. Then she threw him out. I mean she told him to get the hell out of her house and not come back. He started to argue, but meanwhile the Rural Cow had landed on the bonnet of somebody’s car, and so people were shouting from underneath, and Anubhav went running down to save his cow. While he and the car owners were shouting at each other, Sandhya was pacing up and down the room, leaning out of the window now and then to tell him a thing or two, with Ma-ji egging her on. After a while she grabbed the Rural Mud Hut and threw it out of the window too, and then Anubhav began shouting at her from below. By now all the neighbours were out, leaning on their balconies, and from the ground floor the Khan twins came out in their identical red tracksuits, to tell Anubhav that they had known Sandhya didi since they were this high and they weren’t going to stand for any damn bastard shouting at her. So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha , with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other. Then, and I tell you I’m not making this up, Vasant suddenly came rumbling down the street on his motorcycle, and of course began taking the part of the injured ex-husband and scattering abuse this way and that, and soon enough he threw a punch at Anubhav, and then Sandhya ran down too and the confusion was general. I was watching the circles swirl below, and then Ma-ji appeared under my elbow. She was trembling all over, every part and limb of her, and her face was a furious blotchy pink, and she was smiling.

“Here,” she said. “Help me pick this up.”

It was an earlier painting, not one of the rural series. I helped her get it onto the windowsill. With a huge peal of laughter she heaved it over. So then I helped her throw out his Sennelier paper and Schmincke crayons and tubes of oil paint, and drawings and paintings and glossy art magazines, all of which I remembered well because I had written the cheques for every last thing, and the crowd below was clapping now each time some art came falling out of the sky. I saw a portly havaldar heaving his way down the street, his mouth wide open. I leaned out of the window and saw Anubhav looking up.

“Ma-ji,” I said, “ask Anubhav where the Picasso book is.”