Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Who?”

“Picasso.”

So I pulled up a chair, helped her onto it, and she leaned over the balcony railing and boomed in an unbelievably loud voice, “ Pee-kasso kahan hai, maderchod ?” The havaldar , who was arresting everyone below, looked up at this question, momentarily paralysed by the sheer power of the voice. “ Pee-kasso kahan hai,maderchod ?” Vasant took this opportunity to try and run, and the havaldar plunged after him, and meanwhile, above, “ Pee-kassokahanhai,maderchod ?” I tried for a minute to explain to Ma-ji that the question she was supposed to be asking was not exactly “Where’s Picasso, motherfucker?” but she was standing on the chair with such fierce exultation in her arms, having so much fun, and now the kids below were chanting with her, that it seemed beside the point, and maybe that was the question after all. “ Pee-kassokahanhai,maderchod ?”

Afterwards, as we tried to calm ourselves down, and Ma-ji moaned from a backache, Sandhya put down her cup of tea and said to me, a little teary still, “Why is everything so low , lqbal? Why is everything made of money?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe money is made of everything.” She looked at me, puzzled. I didn’t quite know what I meant, myself, so finally I had to admit, “I don’t know what that means.”

“Maybe you’re just trying to make a me-ta-phor,” she said, and we both burst out laughing.

*

Look, there are the lights of Surat station. Who can tell what will happen? But perhaps tomorrow you and I will pull into Bombay Central. Then, on the platform I will raise my hand in farewell, and we will not see each other again. I will go straight to Sandhya’s house to drop off these contracts, which are for a big project in Delhi. It turned out, once we got the system stabilized, and money no longer disappeared from the ledgers of Sridhar and Sons, that Das was quite a complicated fellow, with contacts here and there, so now we’ve expanded a little, and we have a new office, not very big really, two more people working for us, perhaps one more soon. I travel to Delhi often. We are not quite mega yet, but we are bigger.

What happened to Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji, you want to know, of course. When Das confronted them they first denied and denied and denied everything. When Das got angry and threatening, Raunak-ji broke down and confessed, and then they both begged forgiveness, and said they only wanted to serve the company He had them both out of there that afternoon, and a week later they both filed suit against the company, saying they had been framed, hoodwinked out of wages and pensions, discriminated against because they were trying to expose fraud and deception and embezzlement. It drags on.

Also Anubhav drags on. Yes, I wish I could tell you that Sandhya never saw him again, that he was exiled forever. But you know life never does the things it should. He had a big show at the Pushkara Gallery, and a grand opening. We hear Miss Viveka got a new haircut for the event. Mahatre gave Anubhav’s paintings a review that I can only call a rave. He said Anubhav had created a searing vision of the realities of rural India. On that first night alone, Ratnani bought five paintings. Since then, in the last month, Sandhya has had lunch with Anubhav twice. She says to talk things over. Both you and I know what’s really happening. The trouble with beauty is you can’t give it up, not ever. So I know tomorrow she’ll tell me about another lunch, trying not to look guilty. I’ll try to be nice, and we’ll take Lalit for a walk, and he’ll stroll between us, skipping, holding both our hands.

When I’ll get home it’ll be late. I won’t switch on the light, because my brother and his wife will be asleep on the drawing room floor. I’ll edge around them, holding my suitcase to the side. I’ll hear my father’s snores from the bedroom, perhaps my mother’s sleepless shiftings. I’ll find the two steps up to my room without effort, and once I’ve shut the door I’ll switch on the light. This used to be a balcony once, so it’s oddly shaped, long and narrow. I’ll take my clothes off and lie on the less-than-single bed, with the light on. I’ll think of Anubhav. A man named Vidyarthi told me that Anubhav got that good review from Mahatre because Anubhav even serviced Mrs. Mahatre. Vidyarthi used that word, “service.” I tell you this not because I believe it, but in the interests of showing you the world of art as I know it, a certain aesthetic completeness, you see, and to tell you what I do not believe. Anubhav Rajadhakshya is surely a whore, a leech, and a liar, but there is something I owe him. I owe him for his talent. I believe this. As I lie on my bed, I will look to the foot of the bed, and on the small table at the end I will see a painting in a frame. The frame is mine, the painting is Anubhav’s. After I had helped Ma-ji throw out his paintings and his materials, the next day, I helped her clean out the room. Behind a cupboard, rolled up and forgotten, I found a painting of a young man leaning on a wall, in front of a poster for Deewar. The painting had a swirl of yellow and red at the top, a pavement in pencil, but Anubhav had worked on the man a little since I had last seen the painting, on the swirl of smoke from his cigarette, on his face. I saw that it was Rajesh. So I took it. I took it, not paying the high prices that Ratnani gave, but I told myself I had given enough to Anubhav. Maybe not enough but something, a service here and there.

I will lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll wonder what it is on the canvas that is Rajesh. Yes, I wish I could tell you we found him, that we knew what had happened. But life never does what it should. After eight-and-a-half months we know that he worked with some bhai log. I now know the name of the moustached man at the gym, and that he is known to Ratnani. This we know. But only this. In this life, the sub-inspector said, some people just vanish. I said: I know. These facts, and the theories that I made up to explain it all to myself, those plots that gave me comfort and a comfortable kind of terror, they’ve been bleached white by the ferocity of my attention. They rattle around in my head with a dry clicking noise. But the painting is life itself. So I’ll lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll look at the curve of the hip, the shirt sleeves rolled up on the swell of the biceps. At the shadowed eyes in black, and the curl of hair on the brown forehead. I will lie in my long narrow room and look at the strong fingers holding the white cigarette and wonder what it is in the shapes that is Rajesh.

When I wake it’ll be dark in the room, the lights will be off, and I’ll know that my mother has come into the room, drawn a sheet to my chest, sat next to me with a hand on my forehead for a while. Alone, I’ll look for the painting in the dim shifting light. Now I’ll see only a glimmering in the dark, a white that comes out of the shadow. I’ll know that Rajesh is not in the lines, that the body is not in the colour. But there is that colour that moves through the body, rang ek sharir ka. There is that glow. I know what it is. It is the absence in my heart.

I HATE SUNDAY EVENINGS. It’s that slow descent into the dusk that oppresses me, that endless end with its under-taste of death. Not so long ago, one Sunday evening, I flipped the television off and on a dozen times, walked around my room three times, sat on the floor and tried to read a thriller, switched on the television again, and the relentless chatty joyousness finally drove me out of the house. I walked aimlessly through the streets, listening to the long echoes of children’s games, tormented by a nostalgia that settled lightly over me. I had not the slightest idea of what I was looking for, but only that I was suddenly aware of my age, and it seemed cruel that time should pass so gently and leave behind long swathes of unremembered years. I walked, then, along the long curve of the seawall at Haji Ali, and came along towards the white shape of the mosque floating on the waters.