Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Yes,” Shiv said. Actually she was rather plain, but Frankie was dedicated to romance.

Frankie ran his finger down a list on a board. “Mrs. Shanti Chauhan,” he said.

“Fine,” Shiv said, unaccountably irritated. He walked down the length of the platform, trying to find again his imperturbable velocity of a moment ago. At the end of the platform he waited, sitting on a green bench. He fanned himself with a folded Times of India and tried not to think. But as always the images skipped and skittered at the back of his head. He spread the newspaper across his knee but then was drowned by the vast turbulence of the world, its fires and refugees and ruined cities. A letter-writer called “Old Soldier” wrote, “Whether these men of the so-called Indian National Army were prompted by a version of patriotism, or gave in to fear of unspeakable persecutions by the Japanese, is scarcely to the point; that they took up arms against their former comrades is certain. They betrayed their vows to their units and their army and their king, and a soldier who is false to his namak can expect only two things: court-martial and the ultimate penalty.” Shiv saw them falling, their bodies riddled and holed. He shuddered. So he shut his eyes and with a slow twist of fear in his stomach gave himself up to the uncertain currents of memory. Then Shiv’s nostrils were full of Hari’s smell, the slightly pungent aroma of life itself, cotton and perspiration and flesh, springing muscle, the same hair oil he used himself but sweeter on Hari. Now Shiv opened his eyes and his face was covered with sweat. There was a whistle, softened by distance.

He stood up and waited. He felt very small now, and under the huge sky he waited for the two events to come together, the busily grinding three-thirty from Lucknow and himself. He could see them moving closer to each other, the loco on its tracks, and his life, brought to each other in a series of spirals. He took a step forward and now it was a matter of another one to the edge. He could see the train, a black circle, huffing smoke and getting bigger. He began to think of calculations, of the time it would take to put one foot in front of another, of velocity and braking distance. He noted the red fragments from a broken khullar next to the tracks and determined that he would jump when the shadow of the train fell on them. That was close enough. The train came faster than he had thought it would, and now the sound enveloped him. He felt his legs twitch. He watched the red clay and then at the last moment turned his head to look down the platform. He saw in the swirl of colours a grey figure, motionless. He jerked his head back, felt the huge weight of the engine, its heat, and began his step forward, seeing the black curve of the metal above him, slashed in half by the slanting sun, the rivets through the iron, and then he staggered back, pulled himself back, an arm over his head.

Shiv found himself sitting on the ground, knees splayed outward. The bone at the base of his spine throbbed. He picked himself up and hurried past the first class compartments as the train screeched mournfully. She was stooping to pick up a small brown attaché, and he was sure she saw him coming. But she turned her face away, an expression of anger on her face, and walked resolutely towards the door of a carriage, where Frankie Furtado stood with his clipboard. She went past his smile with her eyes downcast, into the carriage, and afterwards sat in a compartment with half-lowered shades. Shiv stood outside, wondering at himself. He could see her arm. Twelve minutes passed, and then Frankie waved a green flag, leaning suavely to one side, and quite suddenly the train was gone. Leaving only a black wisp fading, and Shiv with his questions.

*

Frankie had an alphabetical list of names: “Madhosh Kumar, Magan Kumar, Nand Kumar, Narendra Kumar …” He read from these every evening when Shiv visited him in his room behind the National Provision Store, in his desert lair, his lonely eyrie festooned with pictures of Ronald Colman. Frankie was the handsomest man Shiv had ever seen, with his gently wavy hair and his thin moustache and fair skin, and they were trying to find a screen name that would encompass and radiate all the mysterious glamour of his profile. Usually Shiv enjoyed the distraction of holding the name up to imaginary bright lights, of writing it into the magazines which Frankie collected and hoarded with incandescent seriousness. “Nitin Kumar Signs with MovieTone,” or “Om Kumar Dazzles in Mega-buster” were all tried, tested and classified and estimated and measured, and found wanting in the analysis. This discussion took place always on the little chabutra in front of Frankie’s room, with the spokes of Frankie’s bicycle glinting in the moonlight. There were a few bedraggled bushes at the bottom of a brick wall, and a chameli tree overhanging the wall from Lala Manohar Lal’s garden. The Lala’s two daughters were of course in love with Frankie, but tonight even the sight of them hovering on the rooftop across the way like two bottom-heavy nightingales took nothing from Shiv’s enormous yearning.

He was filled with a longing so bitter that he wanted all over again to die. He felt as if he was gone from himself. This was not the numb descent towards an inevitable stillness, no, not that at all. Now, in the darkness, Shiv felt a quickening in the night, a throb like a pulse that moved far away, and he was acutely aware of the smallness of the chabutra and how tiny Frankie’s room was, with its one sagging charpai and the chipped white plaster on the walls and the crudely shaped green windows that could never completely close. Even the moonlight didn’t hide the dirt, the dishevelled ugliness and cowpatties of a small mofussil town one step away from a village.

“Have you seen her before?” Shiv said. His voice was loud. He was angry, and he didn’t know quite why.

“Yes,” Frankie said. He stood up straight, alive with pleasure. “Twice before. She comes through every two or three months, I think. Looking so beautiful and so alone.”

“Going where?”

“I don’t know. She catches a tonga outside the station. I think to the cantonment. Her attaché has stencilling on it.”

Four miles from the station there was a brigade headquarters and, further away, an aerodrome.

“She’s married,” Shiv said. “Probably going to visit her army husband.”

“Air force,” Frankie said. “And why would she be visiting instead of staying in a lovely air force bungalow? And when she showed me her ticket I saw that she had others. Connections to all over the country, man. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Shiv snapped back. “I don’t know. And why would it matter to you and me anyway? She’s a married woman.”

Frankie raised an eyebrow. He put a hand on his hip and his shoulder rose and fell in a long exaggerated shrug. Shiv saw that it was a gesture too large for life, impossible in its elegance, but in the silver light it was entirely conceivable and exactly right, as if the world had suddenly changed, moved and become just a little larger, just enough to contain Frankie Furtado. Frankie, who swept his hair back now and turned majestically away, ridiculous and beautiful. Shiv shut his eyes, pressed on them until he felt pain.

Frankie sang: “ Kahan gaya ranchor? Duniya ke rahane valon bolo,chcheen ke dilmera,kahangayaranchor ?”His voice was good, light and yet full of intensity, and ample and rounded with its delight in its own skill. Shiv fled from it.

*

A cut on the palm of a right hand. Small, not too large, but ferocious in the straightness of its edges, in the geometry of its depth. Another on the left forearm, from the same straight edge. This is what Shiv remembered. As he walked home along a dusty lane he remembered the dark pearls of blood frozen on the pale skin. In the morgue he had found the cuts unbearable to look at, this damage, these rents in the surface and the lewd exposure of what lay underneath. Now he clung to the still shape as the only reality. It was the world stripped of all its fictions, this dead body on a grey stone slab, the smell. In only a minute or two, in a lane off Chandni Chowk, a whole life came to merely this, all of Hari’s idealisms, his Congress membership and his Nehru-worship, his belief in change and the careful asceticism of his three khadi kurtas and his blushing appetite for mangoes, all of it gone to an odour of rot. All of it ready for the fire. Shiv held out an arm in the darkness and took careful steps with his fingertips on a wall. In the memory of the dead body of his brother there was a certain safety. There was a certain logic there, a brilliant lesson about the nature of the world. This Shiv knew. In Frankie’s falsities, in his fantasies about the past and the future, there was certain disaster. To believe Frankie, to believe in him, that he could exist in Leharia, Shiv knew, was to risk an unfolding in his own chest, an expansion of emotion that would let in, once again, a certain hell of hope and remorse. He had left this behind.