Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

in India, its habits had become Indian. Still,

it was a foreign car (the word “foreign” had,

for the urban upper middle class,

as much a shameless magic as it might have had

a malign resonance to a nationalist or to

a Little Englander); commensurate with my father’s

position. Years later, a Mercedes-Benz,

regal in those years of austerity, took us

everywhere. Wherever we went in it, we were

saluted. These cars — our cars — of varying

degrees of majesty, were not our own. (When my father

retired, he bought a secondhand Ambassador

at a concession from the company. The new

Managing Director’s son had practised on it

and perfected his driving skills, permanently

affecting its engine. The chauffeur who’d driven

the Mercedes-Benz, a fair, round-faced, moustached,

uxurious Hindi-speaking man, forever dropping

his wife’s name in his conversations, wept when he bid us

farewell. An age had ended for him.

He had a new employer now. A better job—

and yet these illogical tears.) That Austin

used to be parked outside the old building on

Cumballa Hill, near the Parsi General

Hospital. It was from here I went to school,

going down the road past the Allah Beli café

where drivers ate biryani for lunch — always plotting

how not to go to school, because I hated it,

hated the hymns in the morning, the P.E. classes,

physics and mathematics; plotting, feigning fever

and malingering in order to stay at home.

The fifteen or so minutes I had in the car

before I reached school near Mahatma Gandhi Road,

going past, every morning, Marine Drive, before turning

either into the road that ran past Parsi

Dairy Farm, and the Fire Temple, then right

again towards Metro Cinema, or farther on,

turning left at Churchgate, moving towards

the traffic lights before Flora Fountain — those fifteen

minutes I spent in apprehension and prayer.

It was Christ I prayed to, to save me from

the imminent danger of P.E. classes.

His power and efficacy had been impressed on me

by a series of Roman Catholic drivers,

one of whom took me to the church on Wodehouse

Road when I was seven or eight. I kept

the card-sized picture he’d given me, in which

Christ looked like a blond sixties flower child,

his face and blue eyes tilted slightly towards heaven.

It was this image I prayed to, going down Marine Lines,

or stuck in a traffic jam in Kemp’s Corner. I found

a good excuse not to do P.E. — the murmur

that the stethoscope had discovered when I was three years old.

My parents took me from doctor to doctor; at first

diagnosed as a hole in the heart, then an obstruction

to a valve. My blood whispered loudly

with my heartbeat. I watched as the others touched their toes,

or executed a somersault on the “horse”;

or hung, primate-like, from the Roman rings,

and thanked the Almighty I had the means to convince

my mother to write a note: “Please excuse my son

from P.E. today.” School, then, was a place

of lonely observances, where a role was already

created, of watching from the sidelines; meanwhile,

we’d moved to the apartment on Malabar Hill.

The solitary quest for the other had started

long ago; the first desire was for

myself. As a child, I’d often stare

at my body in the mirror, in the silence, appraising,

weighing, sometimes touch the mirror, feeling the pleasure

was mine, but that I was being pleasured as well;

that private feeling of separateness

and connection. Later, I began to compose the secret

object of my search from odds and ends, nipples

and navels; sometimes a woman in a bikini, alone

in an advertisement; sometimes, without knowing it, the gods

and goddesses in my father’s Outline of Art;

gods more than goddesses — as if I was still searching

for myself — the mirror, in this case,

was the picture of the gods. I flicked the pages. For a long

time the mirror stage lasted, and those Roman bodies

were touched by the hue of my skin, by my sweat,

by sameness and its odd allure. I saw a print

of a painting of Saint Sebastian, his arched torso

pierced by arrows. I couldn’t distinguish

between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual passion

from the carnal. These gods were among

the earliest pornographic pictures I beheld.

The hardbound books in my father’s library; besides

those on industrial growth, and development,

and fiscal policy, and the World Bank,

were the Grolier Classics — relics of his love

of prosody and line — the Divine Comedy,

and Paradise Lost, long unopened, but whose titles

spoke worlds. I thought Paradise Lost a tropical island;

the Divine Comedy a farce. Among the books

was a consumptively thin and freckled copy

of T. S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, bought

for a shilling and sixpence in London, and shipped

more than a decade ago with other Pelican books to India.

Looking into it when I was twelve or thirteen,

I remember the bemusement and distaste

I felt, more than if I’d come upon an obscenity,

on reading the lines “I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…”

and experiencing a great, if temporary, disillusionment,

as if some taboo had been breached. Thus, my childhood.

Never quite happy at school, never

doing as well as expected, but not

too badly either, frequently visiting

my father’s office at Nariman Point, where the blinds

kept the sun out of his room. Nariman Point

didn’t exist when I was very small, except as a strip

of land darkly petering out from Marine Drive

into the sea. The sea — the prisoner and attendant

god of this city, one of the points where its secular

locutions, its advertisement hoardings, its hotels,

are linked to the horizon; emptiness. Each year

we’d watch as the road congealed with people and cars,

and Ganesh was carried out to sea, the giant god

sinking, his trunk tranquil, with the Queen’s Necklace

behind him, and the Cream Centre; Malabar Hill

and Walkeshwar on one side as he drowned.

The promise that he’d return next year was made good

in the same emphatic way. These days, the traffic

from Haji Ali to Peddar Road to Marine Drive to Cuffe

Parade is so bad, with massed, uncertain files

of slowly moving cars, that it seems the Ganesh festival

is perpetually in progress. Sometimes it takes an hour

to get from Haji Ali to Nariman Point. When I was

a child, it took fifteen or twenty minutes from home

in Malabar Hill, past Churchgate, to school, which began

at half past eight sharp. There were four branches: infant,

junior, middle, senior. The day began with

“Almighty Father, who art in heaven” and hymns

like “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

And though things were largely beautiful and bright

for us, the pupils, perhaps they weren’t for the teachers,

who couldn’t be too well paid. As for us, we were princelings

or delinquents; however poor our report cards, whatever

the black marks against our names, the blot on the pages

of our exercise books, our almighty fathers, in the end,

would save us. I had my own school diary

with the school logo on the cover; its last pages

came to be thick with the teachers’ messages in the red

ink of their ballpoint pens. These admonitions