Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

When Jago Antia stirred weakly on the roof, when he looked up, it was dawn. He held himself up and said, “Are you still here? Tell me what you want.” Then he saw at the parapet, very dim and shifting in the grey light, the shape of a small body, a boy looking down over the edge towards the ocean. As Jago Antia watched, the boy turned slowly, and in the weak light he saw that the boy was wearing a uniform of olive green, and he asked, “Where shall I go?” Jago Antia began to speak, but then his voice caught, because he was remembering his next and seventh birthday, the first party without Soli, and his parents holding him between them, soothing him, saying you must want something, and he looking up at their faces, at the lines in his father’s face, the exhaustion in his mother’s eyes. Burjor Mama sits on the carpet behind him with head down, and Amir Khan stands behind, and Jehangir shakes his head, nothing. His mother’s eyes fill with tears, and she kisses him on the forehead, “Baba, it’s all right, let us give you a present,” and his heart breaks beneath a surging weight, but he stands up straight, and looking at her and his father, he says, “I want a uniform.” So Jago Antia looked at the boy as he came closer, and he saw the small letters above the pocket, J. ANTIA, and the sun came up, and he saw the boy clearly, he saw the enormous dark eyes, and in the eyes he saw his vicious and ravenous strength, his courage and his devotion, his silence and his pain, his whole misshapen and magnificent life, and Jago Antia said, “Jehangir, Jehangir, you’re already at home.”

*

Thapa and Amir Khan came up the stairs slowly, and he called out to them, “Come, come. I’m all right.” He was sitting crosslegged, watching the sun move in and out of the clouds.

Thapa squatted beside him. “Was it here?”

“He’s gone. I saw him, and then he vanished.”

“Who?”

Jago Antia shook his head. “Someone I didn’t know before.”

“What was he doing here then?”

“He was lost.” He leaned on both their shoulders, one arm around each, for the descent down the stairs. Somehow, naked and hopping from stair to stair, he was smiling. He knew that nothing had changed. He knew he was still and forever Jago Antia, that for him it was too late for anything but a kind of solitude, that he would give his body to the fire, that in the implacable hills to the north, among the rocks, he and other men and women, each with histories of their own, would find each other for life and for death. And yet he felt free. He sat on the porch, strapping his leg on, and Amir Khan brought out three cups of tea. Thapa wrapped a sheet around Jago Antia, and looking at each other they both laughed. “Thank you,” Jago Antia said. Then they drank the tea together.

WE HAD BEEN TALKING about Bombay that evening. Somebody, I think it was Khanna, was telling us about Bahadur Shah, who gave the island to the Portuguese for their help against the Moghuls. “At the beginning of everything great and monstrous,” said Khanna, “is politics.”

“You’re forgetting the other half,” Subramaniam said. “Remember, the Portuguese gave the island to the British as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

“Meaning this,” said Subramaniam. “That the beginning and end of everything is a marriage.”

*

What you must understand about Sheila Bijlani is that she was always glamorous. Even nowadays, when in the corners of parties you hear the kind of jealous bitching that goes on and they say there was a day when she was nothing but the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper growing up amongst potions and medicines, you must never forget that the shop was just below Kemp’s Corner. What I mean is that she was a shopkeeper’s daughter, all right, but after all, she saw the glittering women who went in and out of the shop, sometimes for aspirin, sometimes for lipstick, and Sheila watched and learnt a thing or two. So even when you see those early photographs from the Walsingham School — where she was, yes, the poor girl — what you should notice is the artistic arrangement of the hair, which she did herself, and the shortness of the grey skirt, which she achieved every morning with safety pins when she reached school. Even in those days there was no argument that Sheila had the best legs at Walsingham, and so when she finished with college and next we heard that she was going to be a hostess with Air France, it all made sense, I mean who else would you imagine pouring champagne for a movie star in some Frenchly elegant first class cabin or running down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, holding her white stilettos in one tiny and graceful hand — it had to be Sheila.

Air hostessing in those times didn’t mean tossing dinners at drunks on the way back from Dubai or the smell of a Boeing bathroom after a sixteen-hour one-stop from New York. Remember, travelling abroad was rare then, and so all the air hostesses were killingly beautiful and St. Xavier’s graduates, and they all had this perfume of foreign airs which they wafted about wherever they went, and Sheila was the most chic of them all. It could break your heart, the way she smoked a True, placing it ever so delicately between her lips and leaving just a touch of deep deep red on the very tip. And the men came around, the princes and the Jamsahebs in their convertibles, promising adventure, the cricketing knights in their blue blazers of glory, the actors’ sons offering dreams of immortality. We used to see Sheila then in a flash as a car roared around the curve on Teen Batti, and we would sigh because somewhere there was a life that was perfect and wonderful.

So we were expecting a prince for Sheila — at least, a flashing star of some sort — but she disappointed us all when she married Bijlani. He was U.S.A.-returned and all, but from some place called Utah and what was electrical engineering anyway when you had Oxford cricketing royalty on the phone — but Sheila liked Bijlani and nobody knew why. He was square and, later, fat and mostly quiet and he told everyone he wanted to make appliances, which was all very well and good, but four-speed electric mixies weren’t exactly dashing, dammit. They met at a party at Cyrus Readymoney’s and Bijlani was sitting quiet in a corner looking uncomfortable, and Sheila watched him for a long time, and when she asked, Readymoney said, “That’s Bijlani, he used to be in school with us but nobody knows his first name. He wants to make mixies.” Then Readymoney, who was dressed in black, snapped his fingers and said, “Let’s boogie, baby,” but Sheila looked up her nose at him — what I mean is she was a foot shorter than him but she somehow managed to look him up and down like he was a worm — and she said, “Why don’t you go into a corner and squeeze your pimples, Cyrus?” and then she went and took charge of Bijlani. Now, you must understand that when nowadays you see old Bijlani looking hugely regal in a black silk jacket it all started that night when Sheila took him out of his corner and tucked in his shirt at the back and took him around, never mind his sweating, and kept him by her side the whole evening. I don’t think he ever tried to understand the whats and whys of what happened, I think Bijlani just took his blessings gratefully into his bosom and built mixies for Sheila. Everyone made fun of him at the start, but they went and got married, and people rolled their eyes, and a year passed and then another and another, and then they suddenly reappeared with an enormous flat on Malabar Hill, and there was a huge intake of breath clear down to Bandra, and now the story was that she had married him for his money. If you tried to tell someone that the first mixie was built with Sheila’s money from a thousand trips up and down an Air France aisle, the next thing you heard was that she was paying you in cash and kind, and more, to say nice things about her. Her success drew out the venom up and down the coast of Bombay, let me tell you, it’s a wonder the sea didn’t curdle and turn yellow.